Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  They removed the wounded first, the men from the ground crews threading stretchers into the torn body of the aircraft, then passing them out gingerly, trying not to jostle the casualties. Harkins stood at a distance and watched, a little bit embarrassed. In comparison with these men, he had risked little in the war except discomfort, loneliness, and boredom.

  The pilot checked on the wounded and said a few words to each man, grasping their hands before they were loaded onto ambulances.

  Once the wounded were gone, they pulled out the dead, wrapping the bodies in blankets, several for each man, tucked in tightly around the feet, around the head. The dead went on the back of a cargo truck, headed for Graves Registration.

  It took over an hour to get the remains of the ball turret gunner free of the mangled belly of the aircraft. All that time the pilot stood by, arms folded, occasionally looking into the wreckage, which was crawling with mechanics and noncoms. From inside the wounded machine, Harkins heard hammering and the back-and-forth singing of a hacksaw on metal.

  Larson sent an enlisted man to the mess tent to get a thermos of coffee and a blanket for the pilot, who accepted both with a nod. Meanwhile, Larson and Strickland stood in silence, smoking and shifting their weight back and forth, one foot to the other. Harkins kept his hands in his pockets. He had nothing to add here and lots of other things he could be doing to further his investigation, but he didn’t want to interrupt what was so clearly a mourning ritual.

  When it started drizzling, the pilot pulled the blanket over his head and shoulders. Finally, the last stretcher cleared the airplane, passed through one of the giant holes in the fuselage. The pilot stepped up, lifted the blanket and, after a few seconds, leaned close to his crewman. Harkins was at least fifty yards away, but it looked to him like the officer said something to the dead man. Then they loaded the stretcher into another truck while the pilot climbed into the cab. He still had the wet blanket covering his head when the truck rolled past Harkins, who wondered if Major Cushing had ever stood by as wounded and dead were pulled from his airplane. No wonder the guy drank.

  Larson got back into the jeep.

  “Seen enough?” he asked Harkins.

  “Yeah,” Harkins said. “More than enough.”

  11

  21 April 1944

  1800 hours

  The trip back to London went faster than the trip to East Anglia, but the train was packed tightly with horny, giddy air force GIs going on liberty. Harkins and Lowell found a seat in the relative quiet of a second-class compartment. An elderly couple sat across from them, the woman with a death grip on her handbag, neither of them saying anything past “hello.”

  The compartment door did not latch and so squeaked open and closed, open and closed as the train made its multiple stops. Every time it opened, some already-drunk airman stumbled in from the noisy passageway and tried to chat up Lowell. When the older couple left, Lowell asked Harkins for his kerchief, which she used to tie the door closed. Harkins moved to the seat opposite.

  “Now I feel like we’re missing the party,” he said.

  Lowell pulled out the “Massacre by Bombing” essay by Vera Brittain and bent over it, making small check marks next to some passages with the stub of a pencil. A few lines got her muttering.

  “Glutton for punishment, aren’t you?” Harkins said.

  Lowell looked up at him.

  “Listen to this,” she said, holding the paper up to the dim light from the window and reading. “According to the German Government Statistics Office in Berlin, one-point-two million German civilians were killed or reported missing and believed killed in air raids from the beginning of the war up to the first of October, 1943.”

  Lowell sat up and looked at Harkins. “Why would I believe anything the German government puts out?”

  “If the Germans were going to lie about it,” Harkins said, “don’t you think they’d lowball the numbers for the sake of propaganda?”

  “What are low balls?”

  “Lowball. Deliberately under-report.”

  “What does that have to do with, you know, bollocks?”

  Harkins laughed. “Not that kind of ball,” he told her. “It’s a baseball term.”

  Lowell shook her head. “It’s like we’re from different planets,” she said, looking back down at the dog-eared paper. “Anyway, she also quotes British and American sources that corroborate that information.”

  “That’s a big number,” Harkins said.

  Lowell shook out the paper and continued reading. “The number killed by German air raids on Britain from the beginning of the war to the thirty-first of October, 1943, is just over fifty thousand.”

  She looked up again. “A million-two versus fifty thousand.”

  She sat quietly for a moment. “It’s just hard to buy the argument that they have to pay for what they did during the Blitz when the balance is tipped so far,” she said. Harkins could feel the agitation coming off her like a fever.

  “And listen to this,” she said, flipping to an earlier page. “During the year from late 1940 to early 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped approximately thirty-five thousand tons of bombs on British cities.”

  She looked out the window. When she turned back to Harkins, he said, “Go on.”

  “On the eighteenth of November of last year,” she read, “a force described by the Daily Herald as the greatest number of four-engine bombers ever to raid Germany dropped more than two thousand tons of bombs on Berlin. In that one week we dropped a total of five thousand tons of incendiaries and explosives on Berlin.”

  Lowell reminded Harkins so strongly of his little sister that he felt a wave of homesickness roll over him, as if someone had sat on his chest. Lowell eventually tucked the paper under her leg, folded her arms, and looked out the window. Outside, dusk settled over the farmlands and airfields. Harkins pulled the blackout curtain shut, blotting out their reflections in the windows.

  “The incendiaries create a firestorm,” Lowell said after a few minutes of silence. “The fire so big it pulls in all the air. The streets act like wind tunnels. Typhoon strength winds make it impossible for anyone to leave the shelter, impossible for the firefighters to do anything.”

  She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Eventually all the oxygen is pulled from the shelters and people who aren’t cooked to death just suffocate.”

  She sat up again, looked right into Harkins. “I used to take my little brother and sister into the shelter near our home. That could have been us.”

  “Something happen to you out there?” Harkins asked. “On the airfield, I mean.”

  “A couple of the men encouraged me to write on a bomb. A message for the Germans.”

  “Did you?”

  Lowell nodded, looking, Harkins thought, like the saddest woman in Britain.

  * * *

  By the time Harkins made it back to OSS headquarters most of the lights in the building were out, but Tom Wickman was still in his office. Harkins filled him in on what he’d learned in East Anglia, and Wickman recounted his conversation with Detective Sergeant Hoyle.

  “He said they didn’t find anything in their canvass, but he was glad you did,” Wickman said. “Then he said his boss was probably going to pull them off the case, since an American has been arrested.”

  “What the hell?” Harkins said. “Did you tell him we have very little evidence on Cushing?”

  Wickman shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, but it wasn’t Hoyle’s call. His boss made the decision.”

  “Shit.”

  “You think Sinnott asked the Brits to back off?”

  “Him or that lawyer,” Harkins said. “Let’s see if we can find Sinnott.”

  The two men were walking down the stairs to the ground floor when Harkins saw his landlady, Beverly Ludington, in the lobby with two other women.

  “Oh, hello,” Harkins said. His first thought was that she had come to see him, which made him happy.

  “Lieutenant Harkins,” sh
e said, looking not at all flustered. She smiled at him but did not stop, and the three women kept up their pace across the lobby, finally disappearing into a ground floor conference room.

  “Who was that?” Wickman asked.

  “My landlady, if you can believe that.”

  “She works here, too?”

  “She told me she was a librarian.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Wickman said as they walked outside to the blacked-out streets.

  * * *

  The two men tracked Sinnott down just before midnight at a party in the crowded back room of a pub off Leicester Square. Everyone was in civilian clothes, talking too loudly and laughing too hard and drinking too fast, as if this might be the last party before the war snuffed out all the fun. Sinnott was perched on a stool in a corner of the room talking to two young women, one of whom held a pint glass, the other a tumbler that might have been a whiskey and water. Sinnott had a large glass sitting on a shelf at his elbow.

  “Well, if it isn’t Laurel and Hardy,” Sinnott said when Harkins and Wickman walked up. “How’s the weather up there, Wickman?”

  One of the women snorted. Sinnott looked pleased with himself. Harkins resisted the temptation to look at Wickman and mouth the word “drunk.”

  “Would you ladies give me a few minutes here?” Sinnott said to the two.

  One woman put her hand on Sinnott’s thigh to steady herself as she slid off her stool.

  “How was your visit to Norwich?” Sinnott asked.

  “I got a very different picture of our Major Cushing,” Harkins said. “Turns out he was a good pilot who took care of his guys. Had their respect.”

  “Gefner said he’s an eight ball,” Sinnott said.

  “Gefner was looking in the mirror when he came up with that,” Harkins said. “Besides, I think Gefner is trying to railroad Cushing. Might be because Cushing has been critical of the bombing campaign. He’s got a cousin works at the Chicago Tribune, and some people think Cushing has been talking out of school.”

  “Cushing’s a drunk,” Sinnott said. “Probably shoots his mouth off when he’s had a few.”

  Harkins resisted, but just barely, saying something about the pot calling the kettle black.

  “I think the stress got to Cushing,” Harkins said, “and he fell apart. But he wasn’t always like that.”

  “Did you talk to Cushing?”

  “Not really,” Harkins said. “Oh, and that asshole Gefner had him handcuffed to the bed.”

  “I heard about that kinky stuff,” Sinnott said, smiling a lopsided grin at his own joke. Harkins wanted to punch him.

  “I want to see that report Cushing was carrying when I picked him up,” Harkins said.

  “Why?”

  “Because we have no motive for Cushing to kill Batcheller. It’s all just circumstantial. I want to know if that report was why they were together.”

  “Do a man and a woman need a reason to get together?” Sinnott asked, leering again.

  “They weren’t a couple,” Harkins said. “So there might have been another reason.”

  “You don’t have a need-to-know what Batcheller was working on,” Sinnott said.

  “That report is evidence, so it will have to be introduced if this comes to trial,” Harkins said.

  Sinnott closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “You forget that we’re not back in Philadelphia,” he said. “Different rules here, especially about classified materials. I doubt you’ll ever see that report again, and there’s certainly no guarantee that it will be produced for the trial.

  “In fact, that’s how I got CID off the case completely. I convinced some colonel at the provost that the investigation touched on too much classified stuff, too much secret OSS shit, for their guys to handle. So you’re the lead, Harkins.”

  Sinnott stood, wobbled a bit, put his hand on the shelf holding his drink. He wore a suit, double-breasted, and he jammed a hand into one jacket pocket, then the other. “Where are my cigarettes?” he asked of no one in particular. “Either of you have a smoke?”

  Both Harkins and Wickman shook their heads.

  “By the way, Harkins,” Sinnott said, still patting his jacket and pants. “It’s not ‘if’ Cushing comes to trial. We have our man—you caught him. Why do you want to make this so hard?”

  “I want to make sure we got the right guy,” Harkins said. “Basic police work.”

  “Okay, okay,” Sinnott said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I get it. You want to be thorough. But from where I sit it looks pretty clear.”

  “From where you sit in this pub, you mean?” Harkins said.

  Sinnott narrowed his eyes. “Watch yourself, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’ll ruin my party mood.”

  “Did you contact the Brits, the detectives who were working on this? Tell them to stop looking for a suspect?”

  “We don’t need them, either,” Sinnott said. “British detectives have an inferiority complex; did you know that? I learned that on my first visit, when I came for the Rhodes. It’s all because they didn’t catch Jack the Ripper, back in 1888.”

  Sinnott leaned toward Harkins, poked him in the chest with a forefinger.

  “That makes you our ace detective.”

  He picked up his glass from the shelf, smoothed his necktie with one hand.

  “Now run along, you two. Have a drink. Talk to a girl, relax a little bit.”

  Sinnott waded into the crowd, headed to the bar on the other side of the room.

  Harkins turned to face Wickman. “Well?”

  Wickman hesitated. “Well, he doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. But you have to admit that antagonizing him with comments like, ‘from where you sit in a pub’ isn’t a good idea, either.”

  Wickman went to the bar. Harkins sat on the stool vacated by Sinnott and was looking at his notes when Annie Stowe came up to him.

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite burglar,” she said. “Come to rub elbows with the forgotten and powerless?”

  “I doubt that describes you, Miss Stowe.”

  Harkins stood, offered her a stool. “I’m surprised to see you.”

  “I couldn’t sit in my room alone,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I told you to call me Annie, or is it too informal?”

  “I think I can swing it,” Harkins said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “I think my friend is bringing me one,” she said, glancing toward the bar. Her face looked drawn.

  “So what have you been up to today? Go through any more underwear drawers?”

  “I was out in East Anglia,” Harkins said.

  “Oh, where all the airfields are, right? I also heard you made an arrest. That was very quick.”

  “I made an arrest, but I’m still investigating,” Harkins said.

  “Why? Did you get the wrong person?” she asked. “You asked me earlier about a Major Cushing. Is that the guy you arrested?”

  “You have a good memory,” Harkins said. “I just like to tie up loose ends, and the case against this guy isn’t very strong, so I need to do more digging.”

  “Very conscientious of you,” she said.

  Wickman appeared carrying two cocktail glasses. “Hello,” he said, smiling at Stowe. “Would you like a whiskey and water?”

  “Thanks,” she said, taking one of the drinks. Wickman offered the other to Harkins, who waved him off.

  Stowe took a sip. “Everything here is so watered down. I believe when I get back home and have my first real drink in years it will knock me on my bottom.”

  Wickman laughed, though it hadn’t been much of a joke.

  A tall man in a tailored suit stepped into their little circle. He also held two glasses.

  “I see you already have a drink, Annie,” he said.

  “These gentlemen have been taking good care of me,” Stowe said. She lifted her glass toward Wickman and said to her friend, “This is Captain Wickman.” She pointed her glass at Harkins next. “An
d this is Lieutenant Harkins. Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Lionel Kerr of the embassy staff.”

  Kerr put one of his drinks down and shook hands with Wickman, then Harkins. He looked a healthy thirty or so, a bit over six feet, with the wide shoulders of a swimmer and thick brown hair that he wore in an elaborate wave. He had soft hands and a clipped, not-quite-American accent that made Harkins wonder how long he’d been in Britain.

  “Lieutenant Harkins is investigating Helen’s … case,” Stowe said.

  “Such an awful thing,” Kerr said, shaking his head. “Just unbelievable. You survive all that bombing and then someone turns on you.”

  “So you knew her?” Harkins asked.

  “Just socially. I work in the embassy and she did whatever it is they do over there.” He lifted his hand as if the OSS was on a foreign continent. Another man, who seemed to be tagging along with Kerr, laughed.

  “Did you get along with her?” Harkins asked.

  Kerr smiled, looked directly at Harkins. “We mostly got along,” he said, nothing hesitant in his tone.

  “But not always.”

  “Look, Lieutenant. I’m sure you’ve heard that Helen and I disagreed on some things.” Kerr avoided looking at Stowe; he probably knew that Stowe had given this tidbit to the investigators.

  “Anything in particular?”

  Kerr took a dainty sip of his drink, thought about what he wanted to say. “In my opinion, Helen did not understand the importance of the alliance, that this war is being won alongside our allies. Because of our allies, in fact.”

  “The British?” Harkins asked.

  “Don’t be coy,” Kerr said. “The Soviets are doing most of the heavy lifting. They’ve been keeping a few million Germans tied up along an enormous front for three years while we, the British and Americans, have been dithering around the periphery.”

  Harkins thought of the temporary American cemetery near Gela in Sicily. A field of wooden crosses rolling over a grassy hillside, a parade of dead men.

  “Is that what we’ve been doing?” Harkins asked. “Dithering?”