Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  “Major Cushing?” Harkins stood over the bed. “Major Cushing?”

  A moment later Cushing started shivering, and Harkins thought of the first driver he’d had in North Africa, a kid named Thomas who’d been laid out by malaria.

  Harkins put his hand on Cushing’s arm, then his shoulder, shaking him gently. He was wondering what his next steps might be when a captain in olive-drab trousers and a white lab coat came up beside him.

  “Friend of yours?” he asked Harkins.

  “No, sir. I’m an investigator,” Harkins said.

  The captain looked at him, waiting for an explanation of some sort, but Harkins didn’t believe in sharing information unless it might help him make a case.

  “How’s he doing?” Harkins asked.

  “Not well,” the doctor said. He was young, twenty-four or -five tops, with a dark complexion and tired eyes.

  “I don’t know if he was a heavy drinker before the war, but he’s showing all the signs of being an alcoholic now. He’s been going through painful withdrawal for ten hours or so.”

  “I had an uncle who liked to pull a cork,” Harkins said. “He looked like this some days.”

  “Did it kill him?”

  “In a manner of speaking, I guess. He was drunk when he fell out a fifth-floor window.”

  Harkins’ uncle Jimmy was a brawler, all hot temper and fast fists. Harkins’ father and older brother sometimes called Harkins “Jimmy Junior” when his short fuse got him in trouble. He did not consider it a compliment, but he felt for people whose lives had fallen into a bottle, as Cushing’s apparently had.

  “Why is he handcuffed to the bed?”

  “Some air force lawyer brought him here. They actually had him in a regular cell for about six hours, but the jailer saw that he was pretty sick and needed to be hospitalized. I heard the lawyer put up a fuss, didn’t want him brought to the infirmary. Then the lawyer showed up here, making a stink, talking about bringing us all up on charges.”

  “So this was a Captain Gefner, right?” Harkins said.

  “Yeah. What a loudmouth. I finally had to kick him out of here. Right before he left he put the cuffs on this poor guy, which is kind of a pain in the ass for the orderlies. I’ve got a couple of our guys looking for bolt cutters.”

  Harkins fished in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He unlocked the handcuffs and Cushing immediately pulled his arms across his chest, hugging himself through another round of shivering.

  “So you’re an MP, huh?” the doctor said, nodding at the keys. “You with that lawyer?”

  “No,” Harkins said. “This man was my prisoner and that lawyer pulled him out of custody.”

  “He a suspect in something?” the doctor asked.

  “The lawyer?” Harkins asked. “Yeah, he’s a suspected asshole.”

  The doctor grinned. “Actually, I meant this guy. He do something got him into trouble?”

  Harkins looked at him. “Doc, you know what they say about curiosity and the cat, right?”

  “Okay, okay,” the doctor said. He put out his hand. “Name’s Cipriotti.”

  “Eddie Harkins.”

  Cushing settled for a moment. Cipriotti pulled his stethoscope from his coat pocket, stuck the ends in his ears, and listened to the pilot’s chest and back.

  When he stood, he said, “These air force guys, they drink like it’s their damned job. Like they can shorten the war by consuming all the liquor in Britain.”

  “Isn’t that every GI?” Harkins asked. As an MP he’d seen up close how many GIs turned to alcohol to cure homesickness, fear, loneliness, loss.

  “It’s worse with the air crews. Not so much the ground guys, the mechanics and bomb-handlers, but the guys who have to keep going up, keep going back over Germany. A lot of them are just psychological wrecks.”

  “It’s got to be pretty scary up there,” Harkins said.

  “I’m sure it is. Then you factor in the odds. I mean, there was a time when they were losing twenty percent of the bombers that went out on a mission.”

  “I heard twenty-five percent,” Harkins said.

  “Either way, you’re not going to read that in The Saturday Evening Post. But I hear it from the operations officers. So that means you’ve got a one-in-four, one-in-five chance of getting shot down. Then they kept raising the number of required missions before a guy can rotate out. It started at twenty-five, then it was thirty, now it’s thirty-five.”

  “That kind of thing might make a man cynical,” Harkins said. While the two men looked down at him, Cushing grabbed his stomach and rolled onto his side. Cipriotti grabbed a bedpan from under the bunk and gently slid it under the pilot’s cheek. Cushing promptly threw up. Cipriotti wiped the unconscious man’s chin with a small towel that had been hanging on the bed frame.

  “How long will he be like this?” Harkins asked.

  “Could come around today. Could be another forty-eight hours. I never treated alcoholics before I got here. I was training to be a pediatrician, if you can believe that.”

  “Okay, I guess I’ll come back later,” Harkins said. “Do you know what outfit he’s with? Or was with?”

  Cipriotti walked to a table by the door and picked up a clipboard.

  “Right now he’s assigned to headquarters of the Eighth, but there’s this note.” He held out the clipboard so that Harkins could read it. “I don’t recognize the handwriting. Might have been one of the nurses jotting down stuff he was saying when he was delirious.”

  “Why write that down?” Harkins asked.

  “Eventually all these guys are going to need lots of help. I figure if we can gather a bit of information about their stories, the head-shrinkers might have a better idea about what treatment will work. I asked the staff to write notes about their conversations, their comments.”

  “May I?” Harkins asked, holding out his hand for the clipboard.

  “Sure,” Cipriotti said, handing it over.

  There was a pitcher of water on a side table, a glass with a straw. Cipriotti tried to get Cushing to drink some water, but the aviator wasn’t interested.

  “I’ve got more rounds. If you can, try to get him to drink some water, okay? I’m worried about his fluid levels.”

  When Cipriotti left, Harkins studied the sheets on the clipboard, which were written in at least four different hands. The top page was a table with vital signs, the next a list of medications. Two of the sheets were notes about things Cushing had told his caretakers or mumbled while in some sort of painful daze.

  One line said, “Patient alert and responsive. B-24. 787 Sqdrn. 35 msns.”

  Harkins took out his notebook and jotted down the information. It looked like Major Cushing, or at least the 787th Squadron, had flown thirty-five missions. He knew that the B-24 was a bomber, a big four-engine model called “the Liberator.” He’d already seen scores of them from the window of his train.

  Down the page, there was another note in neat cursive handwriting, a feminine script. The underlined letters, “delir.”

  Could that mean “delirious”?

  There were a few lines about crew and weather. “Berlin” jumped out at him. Then, down in the corner of the page, squeezed in a space so small that he almost missed it, the tiny notation, “Russns.”

  Harkins looked at Cushing, who appeared to be sleeping fitfully.

  “Well, Major,” he said. “You certainly have a few things to say about our Soviet allies.”

  Harkins studied the pilot for another minute. The big man was sweating again. Harkins picked up the water glass and held the straw to Cushing’s lips. When he didn’t react, Harkins dipped the straw in the water, then closed the top end with a finger and used the straw to dribble water into Cushing’s open mouth, like feeding a baby bird with an eyedropper.

  “Don’t die on me before we can have a decent conversation, okay?” Harkins said.

  * * *

  Even the intrepid Pamela Lowell had trouble finding the 787th Squa
dron. There were no signs on the roads, nothing indicating which units occupied which of the fifteen or so airfields they passed once they turned onto the paved two-lane toward Great Yarmouth, on the North Sea coast.

  “No road signs out here, either,” Lowell said as they pulled away from yet another headquarters that did not belong to the 787th. “Maybe they’re still afraid the Germans will send a commando raid.”

  They passed a few farms that had not been paved over, and Harkins saw a group of military-age men knee-deep and swinging pickaxes in a roadside drainage ditch. They wore blue overalls with red circles painted on the back.

  “Who are those guys?” he asked Lowell.

  “Italian prisoners of war,” she said. “They’re given the option of working outdoors or sitting in a pen somewhere. A lot of them would rather be on a farm.”

  “The red circle looks like a target,” Harkins said. “Is that in case they decide to run away? Somebody shoots them?”

  “I don’t know about that, sir. We’re on an island, and it would be hard for a soldier who speaks Italian to fit in here in the countryside. Although,” she said, dropping her voice, “from what I hear, some of the Land Army girls stuck out here would be happy to hide them.”

  Harkins laughed. “In the hay, you mean.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” Lowell said.

  “In Sicily I spent a lot of time processing Italian POWs,” Harkins said. “Most of them, the conscripts anyway, were thrilled to be out of the war. They used to smile and yell at my MPs. ‘New York! Detroit! Chicago!’”

  They drove for about forty-five minutes, the sky turning slate gray as they approached the coast. A flight of three fighters ripped overhead, loud and close enough to make Lowell and Harkins jump.

  Eventually Lowell caught up to a convoy of American trucks and followed them onto an unmarked turn-off that gave way to an airfield. A Quonset hut sat close by the access road, smoke rising from a chimney made out of stacked ration cans. Harkins pointed to the building, and he and Lowell went in to find a lone sergeant sitting at a desk in a chilly orderly room, banging on a typewriter as if working out a grudge.

  “We’re looking for the 787th Squadron,” Harkins told the man.

  “I can take you there, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said. He smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Glad to get away from all this dang paperwork.”

  The three of them piled into the staff car, the sergeant—he’d introduced himself as Curry—sitting up front with Lowell. He directed her onto a side road and past a few of the temporary huts, one big enough to be a mess hall. The land here was flat, with long vistas where the Americans had removed fences and hedges that had probably marked farmers’ fields for centuries. They passed airmen on fat-tired bicycles.

  Out the side window Harkins could see a long stretch of concrete airstrip. A half-mile on they passed some four-engine planes parked inside protective U-shaped berms of piled earth. Eventually they came to a line of tarpaper shacks, small groups of airmen loitering here and there in the chill.

  “This is the 787th,” Curry said, pointing. “That’s the briefing room.”

  Lowell parked.

  “You two kids stay here,” Harkins said.

  Inside the unheated hut, Harkins found three officers, a captain and two first lieutenants, studying a large wall map of Germany. There were rings drawn around the cities, concentric circles that Harkins figured had to do with antiaircraft fire or Luftwaffe defenses. When they noticed him, Harkins said, “I’m looking for anyone who knows a Major Frederick Cushing.”

  “Who are you?” one of the lieutenants asked. He and the other lieutenant were tall, well over six foot and plenty lanky; one was built like an athlete, the other scarecrow skinny. The captain was about Harkins’ height, with a brushy, rust-colored mustache and an honest-to-God silk scarf around his neck.

  “Name’s Harkins. I’m doing an investigation that involves Major Cushing. Any of you guys know him?”

  One of the lieutenants—the skinny one—glanced at the captain. It was clear they knew Cushing.

  “Are you with that goddamn lawyer?” the captain asked. “What was his name?”

  “Gefner,” the athletic lieutenant said.

  “No, I’m not with Gefner. In fact, I think Gefner may be part of the problem.”

  “How?”

  “Is there any reason Gefner might be gunning for Cushing?” Harkins asked. “Anything between the two of them?”

  The three men looked at him. Gefner had already come through, stirred things up.

  “Look, there was a murder the night before last,” Harkins said. “Cushing was seen with the victim, but that doesn’t make him guilty. My job is to make sure we have all the facts and don’t go off half-cocked.”

  “Which is what Gefner is doing, sounds like,” the captain said. Then, after another three-beat delay, “Major Cushing is a good man and a cracker-jack pilot. I don’t want to see him get screwed over.”

  The four of them stood there in a kind of standoff as the aviators tried to determine if they could trust Harkins. After what was probably thirty seconds but felt like five minutes, just to break the tension Harkins said, “Is it always this goddamn cold in these buildings?”

  “The stoves aren’t worth shit,” the athletic lieutenant said. “And we only get the low-grade coal.”

  Finally, the captain said, “Come with me,” and led them all outside. There was a mist drifting across the airfield, not quite rain but not just fog, either. Harkins had read somewhere that Eskimos had twenty different words for snow; he wondered if the British had twenty different words for precipitation.

  “Should we ride?” Harkins asked. “I have a car.”

  “Nah,” the captain said. “Just a few doors down.”

  Harkins jogged to the driver’s side of his staff car and motioned for Lowell to roll down the window.

  “Wait here,” he said. Harkins was standing, so Curry, on the passenger side, couldn’t see his face.

  “See if you can learn anything,” Harkins said, nodding toward Curry.

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Harkins turned back around, the skinny lieutenant had mounted a beat-up bicycle that had been lying on its side in the wet gravel; he pedaled ahead. The captain and the other lieutenant led Harkins on a muddy path for about two hundred meters to a Quonset hut that looked exactly like scores of others. The captain went in, but the lieutenant held the flimsy door open for Harkins.

  “Welcome to the palace,” he said as Harkins went past.

  The building’s footprint was a rectangle, the ceiling the inverted half-moon shape of the roof. What looked like hundreds of pinups, Christmas and Valentine’s cards, a few state maps, and a smattering of family photographs were tacked to the curved ceiling. There were fifteen or twenty iron bed-stands, three with mounded blankets that might or might not cover sleeping airmen; the whole place smelled like wet wool, tobacco, and body odor. Uniforms hung on pegs, government-issue footlockers sat on the floor between the bunks.

  Some of the footlockers were set up like little shrines displaying framed pictures. There were some glamorous studio shots of young women; a sunlit candid of a man in uniform with his arm resting on the shoulders of a woman a head shorter. Another locker held a picture of a baby; next to it the same baby and a dark-haired mother.

  “Don’t touch anything,” one of the lieutenants told him.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Harkins said.

  A toy-sized stove in the center of the room was surrounded by a half-dozen chairs. Harkins thought it was colder inside than outside.

  “Have a seat,” the captain said, pulling out one of the chairs near the stove. When Harkins stepped up, the man held out his hand. “Jim Larson.”

  “Eddie Harkins.”

  “This is Strickland,” Larson, said, indicating the athletic lieutenant.

  “And that one over there is Holland. The navigator, not the country.”

  The four men
sat on the mismatched chairs. Holland used a tool fashioned from a wire hanger to open the door to the stove.

  “You bastards let this thing go out again,” he said, apparently to the sleeping forms. No one responded.

  “Is Major Cushing in trouble?” Larson asked.

  “I’m still investigating,” Harkins said. “But yeah, he’s in trouble.”

  “They broke that man,” Strickland said. He unzipped his coat, which was lined with sheepskin.

  Harkins pulled out his notebook, wrote down the men’s names.

  “Did you all fly with Cushing at some point?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he was our pilot,” Larson answered. “On track to be a command pilot.”

  “What’s that?” Harkins asked.

  “Command pilot is on the lead airplane,” Holland said. “He’s responsible for getting the whole formation to the target. Everyone else follows, kind of like geese flying south for the winter. The command pilot also makes the call if we have to scrub or switch to an alternate.”

  “Sounds like a lot of responsibility,” Harkins said. “He must have been good.”

  “One of the best,” Larson said. “I mean, these days—not so much last year—but these days we’re talking about formations of hundreds of bombers.”

  “Hundreds of planes on one raid?” Harkins asked.

  “Doolittle wants to make thousand-plane raids the norm.”

  Harkins wrote “Doolittle” in his book. Figured that was Major General Jimmy Doolittle, who had become famous for launching a raid from a U.S. Navy carrier—using heavy bombers not designed to fly from a ship—to hit Tokyo and other Japanese targets just six months after the humiliation of Pearl Harbor. The attack did little real damage but was a huge propaganda coup and a boost for American morale. Doolittle now commanded the bomber forces based in England.

  “Are there any targets in Germany still intact?” Harkins asked.

  The three aviators looked at one another.

  “Might as well be straight with him,” Holland said to the captain. “All we do is sit around here bitching about this stuff all the time.”