Northumberland Manor occupied a large campus in West Hartford, a collection of white clapboard buildings containing various facilities for the elderly, everything from independent housing to hospice, and the several other stages in between as decline rolls downhill to death. Arriving early, I awaited Justice Barrington Leach, my father's long-ago lawyer, in the front room of the Manor's nursing home. With its wall-to-wall robin's-egg carpeting and nice Ethan Allen furnishings, the place presented itself as far superior to the usual holding tank for the barely living.
Given everything it had taken to get to Leach, including passing myself off as a lately orphaned only child, I sat there with high expectations. Leach, after all, was a longtime legal hotshot, whose skills had somehow allowed him to erase his trial loss and persuade General Teedle to revoke my father's conviction and prison sentence. Thus, I couldn't help being disappointed when a nurse's aide pushed the old man into the room. Overall, Justice Leach gave the physical impression of a fallen leaf crisped down to its veins. His spotty bald head listed, barely rising above the back of his wheelchair, and the hose from an oxygen tank was holstered in his nose. He had been so whittled by age that his sturdy Donegal tweed suit, perhaps older than I am, was puddled around him, and his skin had begun to acquire a whitish translucence which signaled that even the wrapper was giving out.
Yet none of that mattered once he started talking. Leach's voice wobbled, just like his long hands on which the fingers were knobbed from arthritis, but his mind moved along quickly. He remained fully connected to this world. To say Barrington Leach still took great joy in life would be not only hackneyed, but probably inaccurate. The Justice's wife and his only child, a daughter, were both dead of breast cancer. His three adult grandkids lived in California, where they had been raised, and he had resisted their heartsore efforts to move him from Hartford. As a result he was largely alone here, and he suffered from Parkinson's, among several other ailments. I doubt he found life either comfortable or amusing most of the time.
But none of this inhibited his intense curiosity about human beings. He was a gentle wit, and full of a generous acceptance for people's foibles as well as reverent wonder at our triumphs. I come easily to envy, but with Barrington Leach, when I mused, as I always did, about why I couldn't be more like him, it was with pure admiration. He was inspiring.
My first order of business with Leach was to set the record straight, not about my mother and sister, naturally, but rather about what to call me. He had written to me as "Mr. Dubin," but in 1970, I had reverted to the name my grandfather had brought from Russia and have been known as Stewart Dubinsky throughout my adult life. The story of that change, too involved to repeat here now, made a fairly poignant introduction to my relations with my father. Leach asked several searching questions before going on to inquiries about my work, my parents, and the course of my father's life. He was so precise, and cautious in a way, that I feared at first that he knew I'd lied about Mom, but it turned out he had something else in mind.
"You know, Stewart, I think you mean to honor your father's memory, but I would be remiss if I didn't issue a caveat. If you go forward, you could very well discover things that a loyal son might not enjoy finding out. I've always believed there is great wisdom in the saying that one must be careful what to wish for."
I assured him I had reflected about this. After hanging around courtrooms for a couple of decades, I knew that the odds were that my father had been convicted of a serious crime for a reason.
"Well, that's a good start," Leach said. "But the particulars are always worse than the general idea. And that assumes you even have a general idea. You may find, Stewart, you've been running headlong with blinders."
I told him I was resolute. Whatever happened, I wanted to know.
"Well, that's one problem," said Leach.
"What are the others, Justice?"
"Bear' is fine." I was never sure if the nickname had to do with his physique as a young man-he was anything but bearlike now-or, more likely, was merely a convenient shortening of his given name, adopted in an era when being 'Bare' would have been too risque. "I confess that I've spent quite a bit of time, Stewart, since you contacted me, wondering what call I have to tell you any of this. I feel a good deal of fondness for David, even today. He was a fine young man, articulate, thoughtful. And it was his wish not to speak about this with anyone, a wish he apparently maintained throughout his life.
Furthermore, wholly aside from personal loyalties, I was his attorney, bound by law to keep his secrets.
"On the other hand, I have things of your father's, Stewart, a document of his, as I've mentioned, that belongs to you as his heir. I have no right to withhold it from you, and therefore, as to the matters disclosed there, I believe I am free to speak. That, at any rate, will be my defense when the disbarment proceedings begin." He had a prominent cataract in one eye, large enough to be clearly visible, but it could not obscure the light that always arose there with a joke. "But you and I must reach an understanding to start. I can't go beyond the compass of what's written. You'll find me able to answer most of your questions, but not all. Understood?"
I readily agreed. We both took a breath then before I asked what seemed like the logical first question, how Leach had been assigned my father's case.
"It was roundabout," he answered. "Throughout the war, I had been in the sanctuary of Eisenhower's headquarters, first in Bushy Park outside London, and then later in 1944 at Versailles. These days, I'd be referred to as a 'policy maker.' I had been the District Attorney here in Hartford and certainly knew my way around a courtroom, but my exposure to court-martials was limited to reviewing a few trial records that came up to Eisenhower for final decision, hanging cases most of them. However, your father's commanding officer, Halley Maples, knew my older brother at Princeton, and Maples made a personal appeal to my superiors to appoint me as defense counsel. I had very little choice, not that I ever regretted it, although your father as a client came with his share of challenges." That remark was punctuated with a craggy laugh.
At ninety-six, Bear Leach had been what we call an old man for a long time, at least twenty years, and he had grown practiced with some of the privileges and demands of age. He had been asked about his memories of one thing or another so often that, as I sometimes joked with him, his memoirs were essentially composed in his head. He spoke in flowing paragraphs. As we grew friendlier over the next several months, I brought him a tape recorder in the hope he would use it to preserve prominent stories of his life. But he was too humble to think he'd been much more than a minor figure, and the project didn't interest him. He was, as he always said, a trial lawyer. He preferred a live audience, which I was only too happy to provide.
"It was late April 1945 when I first came to Regensburg, Germany, to meet your father. Officers facing court-martial were traditionally held under house arrest pending trial, and your father was in the Regensburg Castle, where the Third Army was now permanently headquartered. This was a massive Schloss occupied for centuries by the Thurn and Taxis family, a palace as Americans think of palaces, occupying several city blocks. Its interior was somewhat baroque, with pillars of colored marble, Roman arches with lovely inlaid mosaics, and classical statuary. I walked nearly twenty minutes through the castle before getting to your father, who was restricted to a suite the size of this sitting room, perhaps larger, and full of marvelous antiques. In this splendor your father was going to remain jailed until the Army got around to shooting him. If you have a taste for irony, you can't do better than the United States military, let me tell you that." Leach smiled then in his way, a gesture restricted by age and disease, so that his jaw slid to the side.
"Your father was an impeccable man, nearly six feet as I recall, and the very image of an officer and a gentleman. He had a perfectly trimmed line mustache above his lip, like the film star William Powell, whom he resembled. From my initial sight of him, the notion that David Dubin had actually engaged in any willful disobedience of his orders, as was charged, seemed preposterous. But establishing that proved one of the most difficult propositions of my career.
"Because?"
"Because the man insisted on pleading guilty. Nothing unusual in that, of course. There are persons charged with crimes who understand they've done wrong. But your father would not explain anything beyond that. Any questions about the events leading up to his apparent decision to release Major Martin were met only with his declaration that it served no point to elaborate. He was very courteous about it, but absolutely adamant. It was a bit like representing Bartleby the Scrivener, except your father said solely 'I am guilty,' rather than 'I would prefer not to,' in response to any request for more information. I was forced to investigate the matter entirely without his cooperation. I learned quite a bit about your father's wartime experiences, but next to nothing about what had gone on between Martin and him.
"Eventually, I had an inspiration and suggested to your father that if what had transpired was so difficult to speak about, he at least ought to make an effort to write it all down, while matters were fresh. If he chose not to show the resulting document to me, so be it, but in the event he changed his mind, I would have a convenient means of briefing myself. He did not warm to the proposal when I made it, but, of course, he had little to do with his days. He enjoyed reading-he soon had me bringing him novels by the armful-but I took it that he, like many other soldiers, had been an inveterate writer of letters and that that outlet was no longer very rewarding for him. As I recollect, he had disappointed his fiancee, and had then horrified his family with the news of his current predicament. Apparently, producing a written account of what had led to these charges provided an agreeable substitute, and after his initial reluctance, he took up the task with ardor. Whenever I visited him in quarters he was chopping away on a little Remington typewriting machine which sat on a Louis XIV desk, yet another priceless antique, that wobbled with his pounding. About a month along, during a visit, I pointed to the sheaf of pages stacked at his elbow. It was over an inch by now.
"That's getting to be quite a magnum opus,' I said. 'Are you considering showing any of it to me?' I had been waiting for him to reveal the material in his own time, but with the hearing coming closer, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to assimilate what clearly was turning into an imposing volume, especially if it opened up new avenues for investigation.
"Some days I think yes, Colonel,' he said to me, `and some days I think no.'
"And why "no"?'
"I don't believe it's going to help me.'
"Because I'd think poorly of you? Or accept your judgment of your guilt? You know well enough, Dubin, that nothing would prevent me from making a defense for you.'.
"I do. Reading this, Colonel, might satisfy your curiosity. And it will prove I'm right to plead guilty. But it won't change the result. Or make things any easier for you. More the opposite.'
"In weaker moments, I sometimes considered sneaking in and stealing the pages, but he was right that it was his ship to sink. But I kept after him about letting me see it. Each time he seemed to give full consideration to my points, and then, after due reflection, rejected them. And so we went to trial. David tendered a plea of guilty at the start. The trial judge advocate, the prosecutor, had agreed to drop the most serious charge in exchange, but he still went on to prove his case, which was commonplace in serious court-martials. This, of course, was a decided contrast to the usual criminal matter, where a guilty plea avoids a trial, and I couldn't quite accommodate myself to the difference. I cross-examined with a fury, because none of the accounts were consistent in any way with a soldier who would willfully abandon his duties. Very often, I retired for the night, thinking how well I had done, only to recall that my client had already conceded the validity of the charges.
"The Manual for Courts-Martial at that time-and now, for all I know-gave the accused the right to make an uncross-examined statement to the panel, immediately preceding closing arguments. The night before the hearing came to an end, I made my last effort to get your father to share his written account, urging him to consider submitting his memoir, or portions of it, to the court. My heart leaped when he came to the proceedings the next morning with what I judged to be the manuscript under his arm in two portfolios, but he kept them to himself. He made a brief statement to the court, saying simply that in releasing Martin he had meant no harm to the United States, whose service remained the greatest honor of his life. Only when the evidence was closed did he turn the folders over to me. It was meant as a generosity on his part, I think, to repay me for my efforts on his behalf, so that I could accept the result with peace of mind. He told me to read it all, if that was what I liked, and when I was done to return it to him. He said forthrightly that he was then going to set fire to the whole thing.
"Even at that stage, I remained hopeful that I'd find something recorded there that I might use to reopen the case. The court was recessed on Sunday. I spent the whole day reading, morning to night, and finished only instants before I arrived for court at eight a. M. on Monday,"
"And what did it say?" I was like a child listening to campfire tales, who wanted only to know what children always do: the end of the story.
Bear gave a dry laugh in response.
"Well, Stewart, there aren't many tales worth telling that can be boiled down to a sentence or two, are there?"
"But did you use it?"
Most assuredly not."
"Because?"
"Because your father was right. He was a good lawyer. A very good lawyer. And his judgment was correct. If the court-martial members knew the whole tale, it would only have made matters worse. Possibly far worse."
"How so?"
"There were many complications," he said, many concerns. As I say, I was fond of your father. That's not just prattle. But a trial lawyer learns to be cold-blooded about the facts. And I looked at this as trial lawyers do, the best case that could be made and the worst, and I realized that nothing good was going to come from revealing this to the court. Your father's cause, in fact, could have been gravely prejudiced."
"You're not being very specific, Justice. What was so bad?"
Bear Leach, not often short of words, took a second to fiddle with his vintage necktie, swinging like a pendant from the collar of his old shirt, which, these days, gapped a good two inches from his wattled neck.
"When I read your father's account, I realized he had been the beneficiary of an assumption that the trial judge advocate might well regard as ill founded, once the underlying facts were better known."
I tumbled my hand forward. "You're being delicate, Justice."
"Well, it requires delicacy, Stewart, no doubt of that. I'm speaking to a son about his father."
"So you warned me. I want to know."
Leach went through the extended effort it required to reposition the oxygen in his nose.
"Stewart, your father was charged with willfully suffering a prisoner to escape. The evidence, in sum, was that Robert Martin had last been seen by several troops of the 406th Armored Cavalry in your father's custody. Your father admitted he had allowed Martin to go, freed him from his manacles and leg irons and saw him out of the bivouac. The escape charge took it for granted that Martin had fled from there. But what your father had written suggested a far more disturbing possibility, one whose likelihood was enhanced, at least in my mind, by your father's rigorous silence."
"-What possibility?"
"Now, Stewart, let me caution that this was merely a thought."
"Please, Bear. What possibility?"
Leach finally brought himself to a small nod. "That your father," he said, "had murdered Robert Martin."
By the time Biddy and I had returned to the 18th from the Comtesse de Lemolland's, we found no one in General Teedle's tent. The MP outside said that both orderlies were off duty, and Teedle was surveying battalions. With time, I wandered down to the enlisted men's area again. The bombing at the Comtesse's had revived my curiosity about Billy Bonner's remark that I was investigating the wrong man.
The skies had closed in once more, leaving no chance for further air traffic. Freed from blackout restrictions, the men had built fires and were enjoying themselves amid the usual barroom atmosphere. Somebody had run Armed Forces Radio through a loudspeaker. Harry James was on Command Performance, and I stopped to listen as he blew his way majestically through "Cherry." It suddenly hit me how much I missed music, for which I'd once felt a yearning as keen as hunger. These days, that longing was dampened under piles of law books and by the frantic concentration required for seven-day weeks in court. Closing my eyes, for just one second, I caught the sure feel of Grace's waist beneath my hand while we were dancing.
I ran across Biddy unexpectedly. He was standing back with his camera, taking snaps of four men playing cards by lantern in a mess tent. They'd come inside to keep the invasion currency they were gambling with, French francs that had been printed in the U. S., from blowing off in the wind. Each man was straddling an empty cartridge case, while they used a crate emptied of bazooka rounds for a table.
"Jesus God almighty," one said. "Play a fucking card, won't you, Mickey. You're gonna be dead this time next month, and still wondering what you should have led for trump.), "Mortenson, don't talk like that."
"You think the Krauts are listenin?"
"No, but it's kind of like you're putting the evil, eye on me.
"Oh, shut your damn swill hole, Krautbait, will you, and play a card."
"Don't be a sorehead, Witkins."
"Yeah, take a bite of this."
"Several soldiers in line in front of me for that pleasure."
"Fuckin Mickey still ain't recovered from striking out with that Frenchy. Only because half the platoon had some ass with her and she still wouldn't come across for him."
"Half the platoon are doggone liars. That girl was a nice girl. I just wanted to buy her a Coke." "Coke ain't what you wanted her to swallow." "Geez, Mort, what kind of pervert are you?"
"Listen, kiddo, these French girls use their mouths.), "Not on me. That's strictly perverted."
"Would youse guys shut the fuck up. It's gonna be fuckin reveille by the time this slowpoke plays a card."
I enjoyed Tony Eisley, but there was none of this raw camaraderie among JAG Department officers. Not that I shared in it here. Twenty-nine was old to most of these boys, and the presence of an officer was unsettling, even resented. My visits to the enlisted men's quarters reminded me of coming home to DuSable from Easton, when neighbors asked about the "college man" in a tone that was not altogether admiring. I was going to make money, they thought. I was going to move away from there, and them. In the enlisted ranks these days, there were a fair number of college boys because early this year Congress had put an end to the Army Specialized Training Program that had sent recruits to college classes full-time. On the other end, a few enlisted men from the premobilization Army had been commissioned. For the most part, though, you might as well have put up signs over the enlisted men's and the officers' sides of camp that said POOR and RICH. I had not figured out yet why the Army thought discipline or any other military purpose was advanced by these disparities. Yet I knew, much as I had in basic, that here I was among the real soldiers. The generals' names might be remembered by historians, but it was these men who would fight the true war.
Emerging from the tent, I wandered for some time before I caught sight of Billy Bonner around a fire with several other soldiers, each of them holding a dark bottle of wine. Bonner clearly regarded me as the law and stopped with his arm in midair, causing two or three of his buddies to turn away, until I said, At ease."
We strolled off a few paces and I explained to Bonner that Teedle appeared to be gone.
"Oh, he'll be back. General likes his nights in his own tent." One of Bonner's smart-aleck looks accompanied the remark.
"Bonner, you don't seem to hold the General in high esteem."
"No, sir," he said. "He's as good a brass hat as this Army's got."
"But?"
Bonner shook his head and rolled his lips into his mouth, but I was persistent tonight. After quite a bit of cajoling, he finally motioned me farther from his companions.
"You didn't hear this here," said Bonner. He lifted the wine bottle again to stick his courage. "The bastard's a nelly."
"I'm sorry?"
"Teedle's a fruit, damn it.), "In what way?"
"In that way. Jesus, Lieutenant, don't you know what a queer is?"
"Good Lord, Bonner." I told him that if he wasn't potted, I'd have had the MPs take him off.
"Just remember you said that, Lieutenant. That's the reason no one does anything about him." "About what?"
"I already told you. The man's a homo. You know, the General, he's got his billet right there in his tent. Makes like it's so he can work around the clock. But that's not why. Damn bugger gets himself rip-roaring-worse than normal-and then sends Frank for this enlisted man or that. Always some boy who looks like he rolled out from under a hay bale, too, strapping kids from the country, blond-haired. I'm dismissed when they get there. Now and then, I come back in the morning, those poor boys are still around. Some, God save them, they're sleeping like lambs. But there must have been a few to put up a fight, 'cause the General, he's had some damage on him, a shiner once that wouldn't go away for a week. I'll tell you, Lieutenant, I've been there, and two or three of those boys come out-there isn't a thing those Krauts could do to them that would be worse. His own damn CO. You can just see how bewildered these kids are. They don't know nothin anymore.,, I wasn't sure I'd ever heard a more revolting story.
"Why, the bloody bastard," I said. "And haven't you brought this to the attention of an officer?"
"Well, I'm talking to you, Lieutenant. General Patton hasn't come by to chew the cud lately. But who's to say I didn't make this up? None of these boys care to discuss it, not the ones who like it, and especially not the ones who don't. I thought that the fellow who socked the General in the eye, soldier named Lang, I figured he might have a word to say, but his sergeant wouldn't even hear about it. Wasn't getting his private in a swearing match with that star, not about something like this, not in this man's Army. But maybe you fellas can loosen tongues. I don't know boo about Captain Martin," Bonner said. "But I'd say if Teedle wants a court-martial so bad, get started with him."
At 0730, when I came by, General Teedle was in his tent, speaking with his G-3 Major Michaels. As the operations officer, Michaels would not have had much to do lately, but today he had laid out several large battle maps on the General's desk. This was work, planning combat movements moment by moment, sequence by sequence, in which I'd excelled in infantry officer training at Fort Benning. At this stage, before the bullets flew, it was an exercise of pure intellect, a cross between chess and playing with tin soldiers, but the deadly reality of these decisions was manifest in the intensity of both men. Seeing them, it was obvious that new stores of fuel and ammo were finally on the way. The 18th's R & R was going to end shortly.
As I waited between the tent flaps, I found myself turning over Bonner's accusation while I scrutinized Teedle, with his cock-robin posture and his rosy drunkard's hue. The very notion of the General's conduct had wrenched me awake several times during the night. Eventually, I'd settled back to the practical problem of what to do. Because I liked Billy Bonner, I'd taken him at his word. But God only knew all the reasons he might be lying. Finally, near 4:00 in the morning, I resolved that I would simply wait for a private moment with Colonel Maples and pass the word to him. Sometimes the Army's long chain of command was not all bad. If a problem was big enough, you could hand it to somebody else.
Even so, I had no confidence that I wouldn't break into a visible sweat when Teedle was finally ready to see me. I was only grateful that Bonner was not yet on duty so I wasn't obliged to meet his eye.
"So how was Charming Bob?" Teedle asked me, when I saluted before his desk. "Charming, eh? Did he entertain you like visiting royalty?"
More or less."
"Have his girlfriend flirt with you, too? She's as clever as Martin, you know. She's batted her eyes at several folks I've sent down there. Anything that works, with those two." Bonner's remarks had been enough that my mind hadn't worked its way back very often to Gita Lodz. Nonetheless, Teedle had his intended effect of deflating me a bit, by revealing that I was not the first of his emissaries on whom Mademoiselle Lodz had 'settled her candid look and told them, one way or the other, how interesting they were. On the other hand, I was hardly surprised that a woman who'd raise her skirt for a debater's point wasn't shy around other men. For whatever reason, though, I felt some need to stick up for her.
"I wouldn't say she batted her eyes, General."
That surprises me, Dubin, handsome young fellow like you." He gave me a wry look, chin lowered. Under the circumstances, Teedle's assessment nearly -made me jump.
"I'm engaged, sir," I finally blurted.
"Good for you," he said, then asked what Martin had to say for himself. I had wondered how I was going to question General Teedle about Martin's claims-I had no right to demand answers from a general. But Teedle was far too voluble for that to prove a problem.
"That's horse hockey," he responded, when I explained that Martin said OSS had returned him from London late last month with directions to proceed into Germany. Showing Teedle Martin's papers stopped the General cold.
"I'll be a son of a bitch," he said, as he looked them over. "First I heard of this, I admit. All I know is that two weeks ago OSS told me I was finally free to send him packing. I'd asked several times before. I can't tell you why they changed their minds."
"General, the only way to resolve this is to get written confirmation from OSS about whether they have or haven't given Martin other orders."
"Written?" Teedle frumped around in his chair. "Christ, so that's the game! What an operator this prick is. The Army has never been any match for a good operator, Dubin, and Martin's one of the best. OSS isn't going to put anything on paper about Special Operations and send it near the front. Soldiers are taken prisoner, Dubin, but spies are shot. Martin knows all that. Messages from OSS are coded radio transmissions and 'DAR." Destroy after reading. The General thought for a moment. "All right. I'll take care of this."
He made a note. It would have been better practice for Colonel Maples or me to communicate with OSS, rather than Teedle, the complainant, but the General didn't seem in any mood to hear about further legal technicalities.
"What else?" said Teedle. "Let's hear all Martin's folderol now, so I can deal with it at once. I'm sure he had a few choice words for me."
I described the bombing. Teedle, to his credit, asked first about casualties.
"I'd heard something about that," Teedle said then. "General Roy from i9th TAC sent a signal yesterday evening. Says he had a squadron that lost its bearings and might have dropped on our troops. He was damn apologetic. If I'd known it was Martin, I'd have sent back a thank-you note."
"Yes, sir, well, I was there, too."
Teedle shot me a look riddled with irony. I could not have understood much about being a general, this look said, if I expected him to be concerned about that. He called out to Frank to have his staff JAG expedite the Comtesse's damage claims.
"So now what mud was Martin slinging? That I have control of the Army Air Corps and arranged to bomb him?"
"He allowed how it was possible."
Teedle answered with a crude laugh. "There are plenty at my rank, Dubin, who wouldn't bother with a Rule Thirty-five investigation when they had an insubordinate officer. They'd send Martin out personally to scout a hilltop guarded by a full German company and never lose a wink. But if that was my idea, I wouldn't have bothered going to HQ, would I?"
"Quite right, sir."
"Oh, don't give me that 'quite right' horseshit. If you don't believe me, say so."
"I think you're making sense, General." I did, too, but Teedle seemed far too complex to expect all his actions to line up with reason. Having a minute to think, I didn't understand why General Roy had apologized to Teedle. The 26th Infantry, not Teedle's unit, was under Roy's bombs. Unless Roy forgot they had changed positions. Which was possible, too.
"Any other calumnies Martin spread to which you'd like a response?"
"May I speak freely, sir?"
"You just accused me of trying to bomb one of my officers. I think you're doing a pretty fair job of it already, Dubin, but help yourself."
I knew better than to debate Teedle by pointing out what had been said previously and by whom. He was amusing himself with the verbal fencing, knowing he had rank on his side. For all his bluster, though, I didn't have the sense that Teedle was baiting me to be cruel, so much as test me. He was an unusual man. Forthright. Opinionated. Harsh. It did not stretch credulity, watching his mobile face, the way he veered between imperiousness and collegiality, and the frankness with which he dared you to dislike him, to think that Teedle's peculiarities extended to far darker realms, as Bonner maintained. But not necessarily to cruelty. Cruelty was a part of human nature, I suspect he would say. We were all mean. But he was no meaner than most.
"Sir, he says your desire to get rid of him is all about the fact that you think he's a Communist."
When he heard that, Teedle put his feet up on his footlocker beside him, while he smiled and stroked his chin. It was the first time I'd seen him pause to reflect, much as Martin had shied away from the same subject. All the while, he tossed his head and the little bit of red steel wool on top of it, with what appeared to be admiration. He could never anticipate Martin. That seemed to be the meaning.
"Well, first of all, Dubin, I don't think Martin's a Communist. I know he's a Communist. He was a party member in Paris when he went off to fight in Spain. That's one of the reasons OSS wanted him in the first place. Because of his influence with the Communist unions.
"But put that aside. I'm not charging the man with disagreeable politics. I'm charging him with insubordination and endangering other troops. Even in Russia, despite calling me Comrade General, if I told, him to get on his knees and kiss my ass, it's same as here, he'd have to do it."
Until that remark, I'd almost put Bonner out of my mind.
"Now whether his political background is the reason OSS agreed with me that it's time to send Martin elsewhere, nobody's said that, but frankly it's a pretty fair guess, and it makes sense. Stars and Stripes and the newsreels don't tell you everything our precious Russian allies are up to, Dubin. Do you know anything about what happened in Poland in August?"
I hadn't heard much and Teedle enjoyed filling me in. With the Soviet Army on their border, thousands of Polish patriots in Warsaw had risen up against the Nazis. Many on our side, Teedle said, believed that Stalin had encouraged the Home Army to think that the Soviets would storm into Poland and join them in expelling the Nazis. But the Russians held their ground. In fact, Stalin wouldn't even allow the Allies to assist the Poles by dropping arms and supplies. Instead the Home Army was crushed. Thousands were executed, shot on the spot or locked in buildings which were then set ablaze, while the Nazis leveled Warsaw's city center.
"And why, you might ask," said Teedle, "why would the Soviets do that? Why would the Russians not help the Polish resistance, since it could very well diminish their own losses in retaking Poland? Any ideas?"
Nothing came to me.
"Because, Dubin, a patriot who resists Nazi occupation is just as likely to resist the Soviets. Stalin got the Nazis to do his dirty work in Poland. At that point the Supreme Command, Roosevelt, Churchill, they all knew with absolute certainty what we are in for. Stalin might as well have let his air force put it in skywriting. They aim to conquer and occupy eastern Europe. They want to substitute Soviet rule for Nazi rule. And you're damn right, we don't need anybody operating in advance of our troops who might take the Soviets' side. Martin has many friends in the ranks of the Soviet Army: He fought for at least three different Soviet generals in Spain. And I'll wager a good sum that he'll give their orders a lot more heed than he's given mine. So yes, the fact that he's a Communist, that concerns me. It concerns me a good deal. Especially since he won't follow fucking orders. But if he weren't insubordinate, I wouldn't care if he went to sleep each night in red pajamas."
The General leaned forward with his fists on his desk. "Now, man to man, Dubin, tell me the truth, does that bother you? Because listening, I thought this asshole's complaint that I'm after him because of what he thinks about political matters-I had the impression that cut some ice with you."
I took my time, but I knew I wasn't going to back down from General Teedle. It wasn't required.
"General, there are a lot of Socialists who are loyal to the United States. And hate Stalin." Two of them happened to live in an apartment in Kindle County and had raised me. I didn't say that, as usual. Who I was and where I came from was my own secret. But Teedle was perspicacious enough to sense I spoke from experience.
"And are you one of them, Dubin? Is that what you're saying? Are you a loyal American Socialist?"
"I'm a loyal American, sir. I don't agree with the Socialists all the way. My problem with Socialists, sir, is that I've met quite a few who don't strike me as idealists. They hate the rich, because they envy them." Of course, socialism and how to react to it were topics of unending contemplation for me throughout high school and college. Easton had brought me into contact with many of the people my parents reviled, and Grace herself might belong in that category, even though she largely shunned her family's privileges. Between the two of us, one of our enduring discussions was about whether we were Socialists. There was so much that went wrong in the world that came down to being poor. But I never felt comfortable with the socialist morality of my parents, by which they were entitled to want more, while the rich were obliged to want less.
"Interesting, Dubin, very interesting." I had no doubt Teedle meant that. He flipped a pencil in the air and caught it. "You and I are polar opposites here. What I have against the Commies is what you seem to want more of. I dislike them, Dubin, because they're fools. Fools. Hapless idealists who want to believe that humans are inclined to share and think first about others, when that's never going to be the case. Never.
"And because they don't see us as we are, Dubin, don't see how brutal and selfish we are, because of that, Dubin, they think we can do without God. That's why I truly dislike them. Because they believe mankind can be good without His assistance. And once we go down that road, Dubin, we're lost. Utterly lost. Because we. need God, Dubin. Every man out here needs God. And not to save his soul or keep him safe, Dubin, none of that guff Do you know why we need God, why we must have Him, Dubin? Do you?"
"No, sir," I said. I was no surer of God than of socialism, but it was one of those moments when Teedle was on the boil again, full of a locomotive fury that forbade me to get in his way.
"Well, I'll tell you, Dubin. Why we need God. Why I need God. To forgive us," he said then, and with the words his anger almost instantly subsided to sadness. His tiny eyes were liquid and morose, and any doubts I'd had about Bonner vanished. "Because when this is over, this war, that's what we'll need, all of us who have done what war requires and, worse, what war permits, that's what we'll need, in order to be able to live the rest of our lives."
Teedle went for his canteen for the first time since I'd been there. When he lowered it, he dragged the back of his hand along his lips like a tough in a beer hall, but his little birdie eyes rimmed in pink remained on me, full of his sorry knowledge of the excesses of war and the bleak mystery of a God who, before forgiving, allowed those things to occur in the first place.
In the two weeks following our return to Nancy, it became clear that the pace of the war was again quickening. Stores of gasoline had finally been received. Other field supplies-tents, blankets, jackets, two-burner stoves-remained short, but the General staff had swapped ten thousand gallons of no. io motor oil with the Seventh Army for an equal amount of diesel fuel, and it was a good bet that Patton's push into Germany would start whenever it arrived.
Yet even with the changed atmosphere, life in Nancy still seemed as relaxed as a summer resort, compared to my three days near the front. As Colonel Maples had anticipated, I had relished the excitement, and even felt some awkward satisfaction about surviving a bombing, never mind that it had been inflicted by our own forces. On the whole, my encounters with Teedle and Martin and Gita Lodz were probably the first moments since I had enlisted that fulfilled some of my hopes.
On November 3 an orderly appeared in court to tell me that Colonel Maples wanted me when we finished for the day. As soon as Klike promised to dispense with justice, I went upstairs, where the Colonel showed me documents that had been pouched from the i8th Armored Division. Teedle had ordered me to deliver them to Robert Martin.
HEADQUARTERS, 18TH ARMORED DIVISION
APO 403, U. S. ARMY
EXTRACT
1. Major Robert P. Martin, 04264192, is relieved of duty with this Division at once and assigned to Central Base Station, London, England. WP w/o delay reporting upon arrival to CO thereat for duty. Govt. T is authorized.
EDCMR: 1 November 1944
BY ORDER OF BRIGADIER GENERAL
TEEDLE
Official:
James Camello
Major AC
Ass't Adjutant cc:
Colonel Bryant Winters U. S. Army
68 Brook Street
London
Except for the designation of a carbon copy to Colonel Winters, who I inferred was Martin's OSS commander, the order didn't differ noticeably from prior ones I'd seen. Attached, however, were travel documents identical to those Gita had produced on my visit to the Comtesse's. They, too, were issued by Central Base in London and directed Martin to return to England forthwith, even enclosing $20 in Army scrip for a per diem. Teedle had answered Martin in kind. Since OSS would not issue direct written orders to an operative, the travel authorization was the best proof that its commanders backed Teedle.
"Well, that explains it," Colonel Maples said, once I'd reminded him that I'd needed something from OSS to deal with Martin's claims that he had other orders. "When he rang, General Teedle passed a comment about you. I think he finds you a bit precise for his taste."
"I thought that's what lawyers are, Colonel. Precise."
"Teedle regards it as an impediment." Seated behind a large oak desk as substantial as a half-track, Maples was smiling, touching his mustache as he often did for comfort. "Not all that different, by the way, from my clients in private practice, who gritted their teeth before talking to their lawyer. For some it was akin to the discomfort of going off to Sunday prayers.
"I'm not trying to be difficult, Colonel, but when I think this over I still can't make top or bottom of it. Why would a decorated officer suddenly defy his commanders? The girl is rather emphatic that her romance with Martin is over."
"Perhaps Martin has had enough of war. He wouldn't be the first. But ours is not to reason why, David. I told you, Rollie Teedle is not an enemy you need. Get out there and finish this off. Teedle wants Martin packing and on to London before you leave."
"Yes, sir." Maples' renewed warning about Teedle banished any lingering thought of reporting Billy Bonner's accusations. I'd hesitated when I'd briefed the Colonel on my return, realizing once I was in his office that Maples would regard the charge as patent lunacy and be displeased with me for pulling the pin on this kind of hand grenade, then lobbing it on his desk. The truth was that in the presence of the Colonel, a person of gentle but unrelenting propriety, I had no idea even how to relate what Bonner had said.
With Teedle's order in hand, Biddy and I had no trouble securing a jeep and left not long after sunrise on November 4, headed again toward Bezange-laPetite. There was now heavy traffic on the small roads with lines of trucks and armor moving out. We made slow progress and finally came to a complete halt behind a tank battalion stalled on its way north. The 761st was all colored, except for some of the officers. They were the first Negroes I had seen in combat, and they looked as apprehensive as everybody else did making the journey to the front.
After half an hour, I took the jeep and went to see about the holdup, which proved to be three convoys crossing paths. Two MPs had arrived on motorcycles and stood at the crossroads directing traffic, just like cops at the busy hours on the streets of Center City back home.
When I returned, Biddy and a colored soldier were having words. Biddy was shaking a finger and telling the soldier, another sergeant, not to talk to him. The fellow threw a hand in Biddy's direction and walked away as I came up.
"What was that about?"
"Just some boy from Georgia causing a ruckus. Said he was from that town where I grooved up." Biddy was still following the man with his eyes.
"Was he?"
"Mighta been. But I didn't need no strolls down memory lane, Lieutenant." The brooding air that overtook Biddy when he was dealing with the colored was evident. Whatever my reluctance about pulling rank, or disturbing our increasing amity, I felt I had no choice about speaking up.
"A colored man's as good as anybody else, Gideon." This was my parents' perpetual lesson. Once the goyim got done with the Negroes, we all knew who'd be next. "I had several colored friends in high school, men I played music with and studied with, as fine and smart as anyone I know. I realize you come from Georgia, Biddy. I can't change the way you think, but I don't want to see it or hear it. Clear?"
Gideon's green eyes remained on me for some time, but he seemed more startled than defiant. "Yes, sir," he said eventually.
Ahead, the tanks were finally moving.
When we pulled into the courtyard in front of the little castle, Gita Lodz was there, just stepping out of the Comtesse's charcoal-burning Citroen, where Antonio was at the wheel. She was dressed like a city lady, in a plaid skirt, with her wavy bronze hair pulled straight in a bun.
"Doo-bean!" she cried, and greeted me in French. "So you return." She approached beaming and kissed me on each cheek. We were already old friends. I remarked that she did not appear to be dressed for combat. "For spying," she answered.
"We have been to look in on some people in Strasbourg. Martin will need them soon. Antonio has fetched us from the train."
Strasbourg was nearly seventy miles away, far behind the German lines.
"My Lord! You just went?"
"Pourquoi pas? Our documents say we are from Arracourt, going to see Robert's grandmere who is near death. The Nazis are oxen. A snake with proper papers could board the train. This has been our life for years, Dubin."
Behind her, the Comtesse's house was under repair in the wake of the bombing. Heavy tarpaulins hung over many of the broken windows, although in the few instances where the shutters remained they had simply been closed. Either way, it would make for a cold winter. There had been talk after the blast that by December the Comtesse would have to abandon the house for the servants' quarters across the courtyard, which were undamaged.
On the other side of the vehicle, Martin had arisen. Until now, I had been too intent on Gita to notice. He was dressed in a suit and a fedora, looking proper and bourgeois. I saluted, which drew a faint smile, as he wandered up with far less enthusiasm than Gita had shown.
"Back so soon, Dubin?"
I reminded him of my promise to return his documents. "And I've brought you a few new ones."
He read for a while, nodding. "Very good," he said. He handed the orders back, with a bright grin. "I guess I've won this round."
"Sir?"
"Proves the point, doesn't it? Teedle has given up his claim to be my commanding officer. I'm under OSS direction. And London has ordered me to proceed here. That's my duty. All cleared up, I'd say."
"Major, these documents require you to travel to London at once."
"Yes, and I've done so and London sent me back. You're holding the proof of that in your other hand. Am I to be court-martialed because I have already carried out my orders?"
Martin gave another glowing smile, as if this weren't flimflam. On the other hand, there wasn't much here to prove him wrong. Nothing showed OSS's involvement or that some obliging paymaster hadn't simply sent the travel papers at Teedle's request, a prospect I hadn't considered until now.
"Major, I mean no disrespect, but even if there's a mistake, had you asked OSS to contact Third Army G-1 or Colonel Maples, this could have been resolved instantly."
"Well, it is a mistake, Dubin, quite clearly, because I received the go-ahead by radio yesterday on an operation that's been planned for months. And inasmuch as the one thing Teedle and I now agree upon is that I take my commands from OSS, I will carry out those orders. I'll deal with your papers straightaway when we return."
I asked the nature of this new operation, but Martin gave a strict shake of his head.
"I'm hardly at liberty to discuss that, Dubin. The other members of Stemwinder don't even have the details yet. We work strictly on a need-to-know basis. Capture is always a risk in this line of work, Dubin. And what difference would that make?"
"I'm just looking for a way to confirm your position, Major."
Standing by and listening, Gita suddenly interjected, "Laisse-le venir."
Martin drew back. What Gita had said was, Let him come.
"Tres dangereux, non?" he responded. "Demand. E-lui." Ask him. Martin reflected, then took on a look of revelation.
"My God, she's right. What a marvel you are, Gita, you never cease to amaze." He swung an arm around her waist and planted a paternal kiss atop her head. "You want evidence of my orders from OSS? Come watch me follow them. You say I get to present any proof I wish to your investigation, don't I?"
"Yes, sir." Those were surely the rules.
"Then this is it. Patton's going to be on the move again momentarily, and this operation is an essential prelude. You're more than welcome to observe, Lieutenant, to see once and for all that I'm under OSS direction and not sitting out here on Roman holiday, or whatever else it is that Teedle imagines. It will put an end to all questions. If you choose not to come, there's no more I can do."
I had no idea, of course, what I was being asked to say yes to. Except that I'd heard the word 'dangerous.' It was a dare, actually, the man of action's challenge to the deskbound bureaucrat, and Martin was probably betting I would never accept. But his logic was impeccable. If I refused, I'd have denied him the opportunity to offer the only evidence he had. In fact, reading the rules, I might even have been derelict. I told him I would have to consult Maples.
"As you wish. But we start this afternoon, Dubin. You'll have to be there and back before three."
That was impossible, especially with the movements on the roadways that could sidetrack us for hours. Martin, still with his hand on Gita's back, turned away, and she gave me a quick private frown before heading off beside him. I was being just the man of small points she'd ridiculed last week. Worse, I felt like a coward.
"I'll go," I told Martin.
Martin didn't flinch when he revolved my way, even though I'd probably called his bluff.
"Bravo, Dubin. I'll brief you shortly. Glad to have you," he said, and continued toward the house with his arm still around Gita's waist.
I found Bidwell with the Gypsy, Antonio, and several of the farmworkers, showing off the photos he had taken during our last visit. They were little twoby-twos and he was complaining about the supplies he'd had to work with.
"Can't get no bigger film. Damn lucky for what I have. Wanted my folks to send some six-twenty but they-all is hoarding silver on the home front."
Small or not, the images were striking. After the bombing, Biddy had shot through a broken window into the darkness of the house. Within, you could detect the form of a tall chifforobe, while the glass reflected uprooted trees outside leaned together like a tepee and, farther in the background, Antonio, with his long hair and dark intense eyes aimed right at the camera. Biddy had taken another photo inside the bomb crater looking up at two of the dead animals. There were also several pictures he'd snapped on our way here last time of haystacks being gathered in the open fields.
"Put me in mind of those paintings in the Museum of Art," he said. "You seen them?" I had. Famous Impressionist works in vivid hues, but the artist's name eluded me. "Same idea," Biddy said, "but in black and white. You think that's okay?"
They were beautiful photos. I asked what could be wrong.
"I don't know," he said. "Seems like if you make a picture you oughta rightly be thinkin about life, not other pictures. But I got those paintings in my head."
"Did you study art, Biddy?"
"Aw, hell, Lieutenant, my daddy, he'd probably just keeled over dead if I'd'a tole him I was going to art school. I just liked them paintings, seein what happened to our world when it went flat. I was over there whenever I could. A lot of that, the stuff folks are doin these days especially, they really talk to me, you know?"
My mother was always hauling me down to the museum, hoping something would rub off, but the truth was I couldn't make heads or tails of the works that excited Biddy.
"I think I'm too practical-minded for modern art, Gideon. Art and opera. My mother loves that, too. But I like your photographs."
He shook his head. "You see things through that lens, Lieutenant, you can't catch with your eye. And I like how I feel when I'm lookin, with that contraption between me and everything else. Here in this mess and able to stand back like that, I'm a million miles away sometimes." He looked at me. "I don't know what the hell I'm talkin about, you know."
"You're making plenty of sense, Biddy. Don't sell yourself short. Maybe you should think about art school."
"Maybe I should. We-all gotta live through this first."
That was the reminder I needed. I told him about my conversation with Martin. As his expression darkened, I could see he was resisting the impulse to stab me.
"No disrespect, Lieutenant, but what the heck is it you call yourself doin?"
I tried to explain the logic of the rules that required me to follow where Martin led.
"This here," said Biddy, "is how the law sure enough don't make sense. Figures Martin'd use it against you. Ain't no tellin what kinda trouble a huckster like that is gonna get us into, Lieutenant."
"This is my frolic and detour, Biddy. You're not required."
"Hell, I'm not. You think they send an MP sergeant out here with you, Lieutenant, just to drive? Ain't no way I can let you go do this whatever on your lonesome. Only I'd think a grooved man would have the sense to ask what he was doin 'fore he said yes." Biddy had never been this direct with me, but after the scolding I'd given him on the way here, he apparently felt inclined to speak his mind. And there was no question of his loyalty. Still shaking his head, he walked beside me toward the little castle to see what was in store for us.
By 3:30, we had moved out. In a time of short provisions, Martin was remarkably well supplied. He may have been the scourge of General Teedle, but in these parts he was widely respected, and the Quartermaster with the Yankee Division had given the Major whatever he needed for this venture more than a month ago. Biddy and I had our choice of combat and cargo packs, cartridge belts and MIA' carbines. I hadn't fired a weapon since training camp, and I spent some time handling the rifle to bring back the feel of it. We had come with our own raincoats, which we folded behind us over our belts, following the example of the rest of our party, which consisted of Gita, Martin, Antonio, and two locals, Christian and Henri. They were frumpy-looking farmers, a father and son, both shaped like figs. They trudged along in silence at Martin's side, acting as guides, with American rifles over their shoulders. Beside me, Gita was in farm overalls, but wore a surplus Army helmet with the liner tightened to the maximum so it fit her.
"Do you like battle, Mademoiselle Lodz?"
"No one should like battle, Dubin. It is much too frightening. But Martin's style is most successful when not a gun is fired. You will see."
"But it remains strange to me to think of a woman in combat."
She laughed, but not in good humor. "ca, c'est le comble!" That's the last straw. "Men think only they can fight. With guns? With planes? With artillery. Who is not strong enough to pull a trigger, Dubin, or throw a grenade?"
"Yes, but a man who does not fight is called a coward. No one expects this of you. Quite the contrary. Do you think fighting is as much in a woman's nature as a man's?"
"Knowing what is right is in the nature of everyone. I allow, Dubin, that I do not enjoy killing. But many men feel as I do, and fight nonetheless."
Martin had turned back to us with a finger to his lips, inasmuch as we were leaving the Comtesse's lands. I still had little idea where we were headed. Martin would brief us only when we'd made camp for the night. For the time being, he wanted to use the weakening daylight to move ahead. We proceeded due north, across adjoining farms. Knowing the fence lines and the old paths, Henri led us along at a good pace. The rains held off while we hiked, but the ground everywhere was soft and in the lowlands we splashed through standing water, soaking my wool trousers and the socks inside my shoepacs.
As darkness encroached, I was certain we were behind Nazi lines. Martin, Biddy, and I were in uniform and stood at least a chance, if captured, of being taken prisoner, rather than executed. The Frenchmen with us were all but certain to be shot on the spot. But there was no sign of Germans. In these parts, the locals were firmly committed to the Free French, and Martin regarded his intelligence on enemy positions as virtually faultless. Nonetheless, whenever possible, we remained on the other side of the shallow hills, so we were not visible from the road, and ducked into the trees if we were near a wooded draw. When there was no choice but to cross an open field, we ambled along in pairs, as if we were hikers.
At one point, as we stopped briefly to refill our canteens in a spring, Martin came back to check on me. Gita and Antonio were on lookout at the perimeter, apparently enough security for a quiet conversation.
"Holding up?"
I was hardly laboring with a full pack. I had a bedroll, a canteen, a bayonet, and ammunition, but I hadn't been out on maneuvers since basic and Martin was right to suspect I was tired. I told him I was fine.
"Nothing like this in the past, I assume?" he asked.
"I was trained as an infantry officer, but aside from exercises, no."
"You'll have an exciting time. You'll be thanking Gita for suggesting this." He waited. "She seems to have taken a shine to you."
"Has she? I'm honored. She is very charming." Then as the only avenue to approach the lingering question, I added, You have a charming woman.
"Oh, yes," he said, "very charming. Only I doubt that Gita would agree.
"That she's charming?"
"That she is my woman. Candidly, I wonder if Gita would ever choose but one man. Besides," he said, "she is much too young for me." He had raised his eyes to her up on the hill, where the wind tossed around the kinks of dark gold hair that escaped her helmet. "I have only one thing I want for her, really. Most of all, Dubin, I would like to see her safe. That would be my last wish. Were I permitted one. I owe her that." Catching Martin's eye as we were looking her way, Gita knotted her small face in an open frown.
"There, you see. She is always displeased with me." His glance fell to the ground. "Does she speak ill of me?"
I didn't understand the crosscurrents here, only that they were treacherous.
"On the contrary," I answered. "She is your admirer.''
"Surely not always. She calls me a liar to my face."
"Does she?" I felt certain that Martin knew exactly what Gita had said to me the last time I was here. "It is the nature of this life, Dubin. Somewhere, buried in the recesses of memory, is the person I was before I was Robert Martin." He pronounced his full name as if it were French: Ro-bear Mar-tan. "But I was trained to tell every tale but his. And it suits me well, Dubin. No soul in war is the same as she or he was before. You'll learn that soon enough."
He took a tiny humpbacked metal cricket from his pocket and gave its twanging steel tongue two clicks, calling an end to our respite. Scampering down from the prominence, Gita fell in at the head of our column but shortly worked her way back to me, as we were weaving through a small woods. She had heard her name and wanted to know what Martin had said. I tried to satisfy her with the most neutral remark I remembered.
"He told me he hopes you are safe. When the war ends."
"He lies. As always. That is not what he hopes. He would much prefer we die side by side in battle. Tellement romantique."
Long ago I'd learned not to be the messenger in couples' disagreements, a lesson originally taken from childhood. The more I heard from both Gita and Martin, the less sure I was of the dimensions of their relationship. Nor did it seem that it was very clear to either of them. I was better off with another subject and asked her about Bettjer, the radioman, whose absence I had noticed.
"Peter? Peter is no good anymore. For some, bravery is like blood. There is only so much in your body. He was very courageous, very bold, but with a month to sit and think about all he has survived, every fear he did not feel before has rolled down on him like a boulder off a mountain. He will drink three bottles of cognac in the day we are gone. Ainsi va la guerre," she added in a tragic tone. So goes war.
This discussion of Bettjer and his anxieties somehow became a gateway to my own worries. I had felt my nervousness growing as we tromped along. Now, with the description of Bettjer as unmanned by fear, I was attacked full-on by shrieking doubts. Apparently, I did a poor job of concealing them.
"This is bad talk," said Gita. "I should have told you something else. Martin will watch out for you. He watches for all of us. And there is no need for you to be in the midst of things when the operation starts."
"If I can be helpful, I would like to take part. I'd feel as if I were a child, merely watching from safety."
"That is for Martin to say. But if so, you will do well, Dubin. You are a man of principles, no? Principles are the main ingredient of courage. A man with principles can get the better of fear."
"I thought you doubted the existence of principles."
"Touche," she answered, and gave me a fleet impish smile. "I do not doubt the power of principles, Dubin. I say only that it is an illusion that they are the first thing in life. It is an illusion we all crave-better principles than the abyss-but an illusion nevertheless. Therefore, one must be careful about what he deems issues of principle. I despise petty principles, obstinate principles that declare right and wrong on matters of little actual consequence. But there are large principles, grand principles most men share, Dubin, and you have them, as well." She showed a tidy smile, and actually patted my hand in reassurance.
Ahead, Martin had halted at the edge of another open field. He clicked the cricket again as a signal for silence, and Gita dispensed a quick wave before moving toward her assigned place at the head of the line. Antonio fell in behind me. We both watched her dash away, her legs tossed outward with unexpected girlishness, as she drew abreast of Martin. She was extraordinary. No doubt about that.
"What is she to him?" I asked Antonio suddenly.
He gave a rattling laugh and shook his long hair, as if I had asked an eternal question.
"I think she is his glory," he answered. "I think when he looks at her he remembers what he once believed."
November 5, 1944
Dearest Grace-
Tomorrow I will see my first action. It is too complicated to explain why (and the censors would black it out anyway). But please focus on the word "see." I am going only as an observer, for one day, and by the time you receive this, I will be back and safe and will have written you to say so. I'll mail both letters together, so you never have occasion for concern. I feel as I have always imagined I would in this circumstance, as if my skin might not contain me, and thus I doubt I'll sleep. But for better or worse, I remain eager.
We start very early in the morning, so I will close now. Just to let you know how much I love you and am always thinking of you.
David
November 7, 1944
Dear Grace-
Back at HQ and safe. I am much too disappointed in myself to say more. Will write further later in the week.
David
La Saline Royale, the royal saltworks, had been opened in 1779 to put an end to fractious competition between bishops and lords for control of what was then a precious commodity. The King declared himself the owner of all the salt in France and auctioned it to European merchants from open-air barns here in Marsal, where the prized granules were mined.
After invading France, the Nazis had commandeered the saltworks, whose long radiating shafts made it ideal as a munitions dump, eventually becoming the largest in the Lorraine. The works had been built like a fortress, surrounded by both twenty-foot walls of limestone and brick, meant to repel thieves, and the river Seille, which formed a virtual moat at the northern border. With the armaments, mostly large-caliber artillery shells, stored more than six hundred feet under the earth, they were invulnerable to air attack, and a German garrison was stationed in the former mine offices as further protection.
Martin and his OG had been dispatched to this vicinity in early September to destroy the dump, but the operation had been put on hold when the pace of combat slackened. Now, Martin said, London wanted the mission completed. The Germans had fortified their stores in the interval, making La Saline Royale an even more inviting target.
We were gathered probably a mile from the salt-works, inside a small shepherd's but in the field of a farmer who was a member of a local resisters' unit, or reseau. Sitting on the dirt floor, the six of us listened as Martin illustrated the operation's plan beside a Coleman lantern. From his field jacket, Martin had removed a pack of playing cards, peeling a backing off of each one and laying them out in rows, until they formed a map of the saltworks and the surrounding area. Biddy and I grinned at each other. The OSS's ingenuity was equal to its legend.
There were two breaches, Martin said, in the salt-works' fortifications. The only formal approach was from the north to the massive iron front gates, behind which the German troops waited. On the west, the walls parted a few meters where a railroad siding ran down into the mine. Laid for the shipment of salt, the tracks continued to be used to deliver and remove armaments, and emerged on an angled treitle over the Seille, meeting the railhead on the western bank.
A ground assault against the railroad gate also appeared unpromising. Fording the Seille without bridge work was nigh impossible. `Seille, means `pail,' the name drawn from the depth of the narrow gray river below its steep banks. Even in a season of record floods, the waters remained a good ten feet under the stone retaining walls, which were overgrown with moss and creepers. Worse, where the tracks passed through the mine wall, crews manned two MG42 high-caliber machine guns. Nonetheless, Martin laid his pencil tip there on the map and said this opening would be the point of attack for our party of seven.
"Merde," said Henri.
"Tu perds la tete," said Christian to Martin jovially. You've lost your mind.
"There is a way," said Martin, and in the sallow lantern light, looked about the circle like a schoolmarm to see if anyone who did not know the plan could guess.
"By train," I answered.
"Bravo, Dubin."
My clue was Martin's background. Members of his former union, the International Transport Workers, were so thoroughly committed to resistance that before D-Day the Germans had been required to take over the French railroads, importing nearly 50,000 rail men from Germany. As the Allies advanced, however, most of these civilian crews had been shipped home, or had simply deserted. While the rail yards remained heavily patrolled, the Nazis had had no choice but again to let Frenchmen run the trains in the corner of France the Germans controlled.
This evening, mechanics at the yard in Dieuze, a few miles farther east, would conclude that the arriving locomotive on a Nazi supply train needed repairs. It would be steered toward the mechanical facility at the distant side of the yard, and would slowly roll right through. A mile farther on, Antonio would board, replacing the engineer and the rest of the crew, and steam off toward the dump. In the morning, after the operation, the local reseau would tie up the crew members, leaving them in the bushes along the right-of-way, where, upon discovery, they would claim to have been set upon by dozens of saboteurs many hours before.
Martin expected no trouble with any of that. If there were to be problems, they were more likely to come at La Saline Royale. If the Germans here realized what was happening, they would blow or blockade the trestle leading to the mine, so stealth was essential. There were two guards at a switching point, set up roughly a mile and a half from where we were now, to keep unauthorized traffic off the spur. They had to be quietly subdued. After that, a distraction on the other side of the works would obscure the sounds of the approaching locomotive. That was Henri and Christian's task.
"Ever seen one of these?" Around the circle Martin handed an object about the size of an apple, Army green, with yellow stenciling that said M. From the ring on top, I could tell it was a hand grenade, but twice as big as any other I'd seen.
"It's called a Beano. I have damn few left, too. Like a grenade but with one great advantage. Blows on impact. No one kicks this out of the way or throws it in the river. And if you have to hold on to it after you pull the ring, you can. I wouldn't walk around with it in my pocket, mind you, but I've carried one along for several minutes."
The Beano-actually two of them-were for Christian and Henri. We would all initially approach from the south, ascending the hills behind the saltworks, with Christian and Henri then fanning off toward the front gates. They had grenade-launcher attachments for their Mrs, which, even firing something the size of the Beano, would have a range of one hundred yards. Their target was the gasoline tanks that serviced the garrison. If the fuel ignited, all troops would rush out there to extinguish the flames burning perilously close to the wooden entrance to the shafts and the tons of munitions below. But even if the father and son missed, the Germans could be expected to rouse off-duty troops to begin combing the overlooking hills. In the meantime, the locomotive would speed across the trestle, crash the railroad crossing gate, and hurtle down into the mine. There was a chance that the impact of the locomotive with the train cars loaded with shells might detonate them, but rather than count on that, Martin was packing a satchel charge whose fuse he would light before jumping from the train.
The explosion inside the mine would act more or less like a pipe bomb, with the shafts channeling the huge force of the blast from either end. If we made it back over and down the hill from which we'd come, we would escape unharmed. Martin didn't address his own safety, but I couldn't see how he'd get away, since he had to remain on the locomotive to steer it over the trestle. As for Biddy and me, Martin planned for us to wait on the hillside. We would have a clear view of his activities, but would need only a few seconds to get back over the top and down.
"But be alert for Krauts," Martin told us. "They may be out by then, looking for the saboteurs who fired the grenades.), We would start again at 5:00 a. M. That left about six hours to sleep, but I was much too excited to try.
Ready to turn in, Gita came to check on me. She remained concerned that she had told me too much with her stories about Bettjer.
"I am fine," I told her. "I am sure that before I sleep, I will think of those I have left at home and feel bad about that, as soldiers do. But I am pleased finally to know a little of what soldiers feel."
"I have that luck," she said. "No home." She dug a stick into the ground and pondered it. "Robert does not like talk of home," she said quietly. "He says it is not good for soldiers. But it would be unnatural to forget, no?"
"Of course," I said.
She did not look up, but smiled wistfully as she turned over clods.
"Did I tell you, Dubin, that my mother was killed for harboring Jews?"
"Certainly not. You have not mentioned she was a hero.,, "No," Gita answered decisively. "She was no heroine. She did it for money. She hated the Nazis, naturally. She worried constantly that they would send me to Germany to be made German as had been done with dozens of the Polish children in my town. But a man, Szymon Goldstein, came to her when the Nazis began rounding up the Jews and deporting them to Lublin. Goldstein ran a tannery and had been rich before the war. And was once my mother's lover, as well. Their affair had ended badly, as my mother's affairs tended to do. They were gruff with each other, but she was the only Pole he knew who might be daring enough to take his money. It was a huge sum. And even so, Dubin, I was very much against this. But my mother always refused to do what other people considered wise.
"So in the middle of the night, Goldstein and his wife and his four children stole into our tiny house and lived in our little root cellar. For the month it lasted, it made for a strange household-my mother under the same roof with Madame Goldstein, who despised her, these six people whose noises we always heard from below like mice in the walls. Then they were betrayed. The Nazis found another Jew who had been hiding in the woods. To save himself, he told them about Goldstein. The SS came into the house and found my mother and all the Goldsteins and shot them. I was out trying to find coal that day. When I came back the bodies were piled in front of the door, as a warning to anyone who might do the same.
"I have always thought, if only I had come back in time I could have saved them. But I have no idea how. Naturally enough, people say I am lucky not to have died with them, yet how can one remember such a thing with any feeling of good fortune?" She had been driving the stick into the ground all the time she told this story. "So what do you think, Dubin?"
"I think it is a terrible story. It makes me very sad for you."
"Yes." She said nothing for a moment, then finally cast her stick aside. "So tonight we both think of home before we are soldiers." She grasped my hand for a second, before moving off to her bedroll.
I was grateful to hear Gita's story, a powerful reminder of why we were fighting, but it had not brought me any closer to sleep. Instead, I watched Martin pack the satchel charges. He had a bottle of brandy, which he offered to me, and I took a long pull in the hope that it would make me weary. Martin was clearly going to finish off the rest himself. That did not strike me as wise, but his hands were still nimble assembling the charge. It was essentially dynamite, sixteen square blocks of TNT fixed in sawdust, each weighing more than a pound. Martin would strap them around a blasting cap, but first he had to prepare the fuse. He stood outside, lighting and relighting varying lengths, recording how fast they were consumed. He planned to hang the satchel charges in the windows of the locomotive cab, so that the explosions had the maximum effect, but timing was essential. If the charges went too quickly, they'd drop the locomotive into the Seille; too late and the Germans might have time to extinguish the flame. I held the ends of the lines for him, watching the flame sparkle toward me. Nine feet, six inches, is what he ultimately figured. It would give him about four minutes to escape. When he was done, at last, he carefully slid the charges into a green canvas sack.
"Time to turn in," he told me. He clapped me on the shoulder. "Exciting, eh?"
"Major," I said, "I'd like to do more than watch.), "You're here as an observer, Dubin."
"Frankly, sir, if something goes wrong, I don't think the Germans will care why we're here. We might as well take part."
"We'll see. Sleep now." He smiled. "You can carry the satchel in the morning. Damn heavy, too."
Biddy had brought a pup tent for the two of us. There was a strange domestic order in that. I thought of myself as tidy, but Bidwell was downright precise: boots, weapon, pack, in perfect rank. As a boy who'd grown up sleeping with my brother in the kitchen in my parents' small apartment, I sometimes thought I'd feel more at home in the closeness of enlisted quarters. Crossing the ocean, while the officers lived in style in our staterooms, the enlisted men below slept in shifts on rows of canvas bunks suspended between the posts every two feet like shelving. Their deck was tight as a hive, which made the perpetual good cheer of the troops there more remarkable-and enviable.
I crept in now and found paper and a pencil in my field jacket and stood outside to write quick letters to Grace and my parents by firelight. There was almost no chance the mail would be delivered if something went wrong, but it was a ritual I felt obliged to carry out. With that done, I crawled into the tent. Quiet as I'd been, I'd apparently roused Bidwell.
"Permission to speak, sir?" Biddy rarely invoked these formalities. "Lieutenant," he said, "you got me wrong today. And it's been weighin on my mind. About that Negro soldier I didn't talk to? I don't feel no better than him, Lieutenant. Not one bit. He knew my momma and daddy and there was some ruction at home I didn't want to hear tell about. But it wasn't 'cause I looked down at him for being colored. I swear."
There'd been too many incidents, but this was hardly the time for a debating society.
"I'm glad to hear that, Biddy."
"Yes, sir."
We said no more then.
I awoke from a dream of music. Biddy was up already, organizing his pack, and we took down the tent together. "I dreamed I was playing the clarinet, Biddy."
"Was that your thing, that old licorice stick?"
"It was. Not much of an embouchure left now. I thought I was Benny Goodman, Gideon. I just couldn't find anybody to agree."
He laughed and we talked about music. I asked which musicians he liked.
"Duke," he said. "Pretty niftic."
"I'll say."
"Did you have a group, Lieutenant?"
Here in the hills of Lorraine, about to take my first intentional risks since going to war, I felt the embrace of the summer nights when we played on Mo Freeman's front stoop. The neighbors had been less than enthusiastic when we were freshmen, but by the time we reached our senior year we used to draw a little crowd.
"Killer-diller," I said, repeating the compliment we once gave one another on our improvisations. "Haven't played like that in years."
"What happened to you-all?"
"Oh, the world began to get in the way. I went off to Easton College. Mo deserved the scholarship more than me, but he was colored. He ended up okay, though. I saw him before I left. You know, that little tour we all made of the folks we wanted to remember us if anything happened? He went to medical school at the U. Two coloreds in his class, but he was past the rough part. He's done by now He was laughing because the draft board didn't know what to do with him. They weren't going to take a colored doctor. If he's over here, it's as a damn private in the Negro troops. And that's not right, Biddy."
"No, sir, it ain't, it surely ain't." I had a hard time believing I'd made a convert overnight, but he sounded sincere.
Antonio had been gone for more than two hours now The remaining six of us moved out a little after 5:3o a. M., careful as we climbed into the first hills. At one point when we stopped, Henri pointed to a stork's nest, the size of a harvest basket, on the roof of a farmhouse beside a small lake.
Halfway up the hill behind the saltworks, we parted with Henri and Christian. Each of us took turns wishing them well.
"Merde," answered Henri. I don't believe I'd heard another word from him in twelve hours. In the dark, they would assume positions on an adjoining hill to the north. The Germans walked the walled perimeter of the works in daylight, but at night, they relied on sentries posted in towers. If Henri and Christian were quiet, they could pitch down their grenades and be gone almost instantly. The wall would end up protecting them from the German forces, who would be a long time getting outside.
To signal Henri and Christian to fire, Martin would blow the locomotive whistle once, indicating that the guards at the switch had been dispatched. The Germans were unlikely to make much of the sound coming from the main line, but one minute later, the grenades would explode among the salt barns.
Without his guides, Martin touched a button on the tunic he wore beneath his field jacket and a compass popped open on his chest, mounted upside down so he could read the phosphorescent dial. Until now I'd been so absorbed with my own apprehensions that I had largely forgotten why I'd come.
But witnessing the elaborateness of the plans, the ingenious OSS gizmos with which Martin had been supplied, and the extensive cooperation from local elements, it was beyond doubt that Martin was acting under OSS command. Whether it was political prejudice or egotism or simply miscommunication amid the smoke of war, Teedle was plainly wrong.
The separation from Henri and Christian had brought a new gravity to both Martin and Gita, who led us in heavy silence as we ascended. Every now and then Martin took a strip of cloth from his sack and tied it to the bough of a buckthorn or other small tree, marking the way back. I wasn't certain if the sky was brightening a trace, with perhaps an hour to dawn, or if my. eyes had adjusted to the dark, but smoky puffs of fog were visible beneath the cloud cover. When we made the crest, Martin reached out to take the satchel charge from Bidwell. I'd labored with it, and Biddy had grabbed it from me, toting it along as if it were no heavier than a lunch bucket.
"Gentlemen," said Martin, "here we part. I suggest you continue down perhaps a hundred yards. You'll be able to see our activities clearly. Again, eye out for Krauts."
"And if we wish to help?" I asked.
Martin shrugged, as if it were no matter to him. "I'm sure Gita could use a hand in Bettjer's place." I looked at Biddy. He had a straightforward analysis. "Seems to me we're a helluva lot better off, Lieutenant, stayin with folks who know what-all they're doin."
I could see Martin had anticipated these responses, not because there was anything special about Biddy, or me, but because there wasn't. It was a tribute to our soldiers, most of whom would have made the same choice.
Before saying goodbye, Martin loosened the chin-strap on my helmet.
"You don't want that around your neck when the dump goes, Dubin. It could garotte you. Follow Gita," he said. "She'll give you directions."
Our role was to cover Martin. We edged our way down the hill behind him. At the foot, we were on the plain beside the Seille, still a quarter mile south and east of the switching point. The train tracks lay before us, and we dashed across one at a time, plunging into the heavy growth on the riverbank. Gita followed Martin, and I followed her; Biddy was at my back. It was slow going. Martin pulled aside the branches as if parting a heavy curtain, but there were still thorns that grabbed my clothes and clawed my face, and I stumbled several times on the soft ground. We crept along this way for half an hour until Martin suddenly stopped, one hand aloft.
He had caught sight ahead of the two Germans guarding the switch. They were kids, of course. They sat on two ammunition crates, using a third as a table while they played cards, betting cigarettes and cursing fate with each hand. They were in full uniform, wearing their Dutch-boy helmets. Their rifles were slung across their backs and would be inaccessible just long enough to make it easy to overtake them, four soldiers on two. With hand signals, Martin drew a plan in the air. He was going to continue until he was behind the two sentries. When he erupted from the bushes, ordering them to surrender, the three of us would rush forward to surround them.
Martin had gone about ten paces, mincing through the underbrush, when he again stilled. The soldiers remained occupied with their game, but after another second, I heard what Martin had: the rising clatter of the locomotive.
The two Germans noticed the racket down the track at the same time, both standing and swinging their rifles into their hands. I would have thought they'd have an established drill with passing trains, but they had been taken by surprise and they shouted at each other while they tried to decide what to do. One galloped down the track, coming within a few feet of our hiding place in the brush as he raced toward the sound of the engine, which remained around the bend of the hill. The other watched over his shoulder as he wandered toward his radio. He was headed directly to the spot where Martin was hidden in the greenery along the bank.
Martin killed him quickly. He was as expert as his stories suggested. As soon as the soldier turned again to check on his comrade, Martin slipped from the bushes, loping in a peculiar side-to-side crouch, meant either to cushion his footfalls or to make him less visible if his sound was detected. When he neared the boy, he tossed a pebble to draw the soldier's attention forward. The German had raised his rifle in that direction when Martin caught him from behind, circling a length of wire around his windpipe. He snatched it taut, dumped the soldier on his seat, and braced his knee in the boy's back as he finished him. The only sound throughout was of the boy's heavy boots thumping on the ground, hardened by the native salt deposits.
I had watched the mangled, eviscerated, and limbless men who came off the Red Cross vehicles in Nancy, and I'd encountered corpses now and then, as on the day with Colonel Maples, but I'd seen a man die only once before, when I'd been sent as the departmental representative to a hanging. I had looked away immediately when I heard the trap sprung. But now the moment of death struck me as far more ordinary than I might have thought. Life was headed toward this instant and we all knew it, no matter how much we willed ourselves to forget. Wiping the wire on his gloves before returning it to the side pocket of his combat jacket, Robert Martin was the master of that knowledge. He appeared entirely unaltered by what he'd done.
Instead, he waved us forward, while he went flying down the track toward the locomotive. By the time we arrived, the other German soldier was on the ground with his face covered in blood. Antonio had stopped the engine on the young soldier's orders, then smashed the boy across the cheek with a wrench as soon as he tried to mount the ladder to the cab. He was moaning now, a low guttural sound from deep within his body. From the looks of it, I wasn't sure he was going to live, but Martin stuffed a handful of leaves into the long gash that was once the boy's mouth, and bound him with the laces of the low rawhide boots he'd worn under gaiters.
Then we stood in silence beside the enormous steam-driven machine that Antonio and the reseau had stolen. It was the height of at least four men and probably one hundred feet long, with six sets of steel wheels polished by the tracks, and a black boiler right behind its front light. Unlike American trains, the turbine was exposed. But there was little time to admire it. Martin's gesture set Gita running, and Biddy and I sprinted behind her. When I looked back, Antonio and Martin were leaning together to free the switch.
We retraced our path, running back along the riverbank as fast as the undergrowth would allow. A hundred yards on, behind a bend in the wall, we crossed the track again and headed up the hill, climbing on all fours to a path that rose steeply along the ridgeline.
Three or four minutes after leaving Martin, we heard the long lowing of the locomotive whistle. The train was on its way. I counted to sixty as we ran, and the detonations of Henri and Christian's grenades followed precisely. We were close enough to the saltworks to hear the cries of alarm go up in the German garrison-shouting and a siren pealing-and to see color against the low clouds. We continued upward until we could look down on the works and the trestle, two hundred yards from the railroad gate Martin was preparing to attack. Only one of the machine guns looked to be manned. Inside the high walls, the red flames were partially visible, and in that light, we could see the anthill swirl of soldiers pouring in that direction.
The locomotive lumbered around the bend then, moving at no more than ten miles an hour as it rocked on the old rail bed. The three machine-gun crewmen had turned to watch the fire, but the train sounds caught the attention of one of them. He stepped toward the trestle with his hands on his waist, an idle spectator for a lingering second, and then, with no transition, an image of urgent action waving wildly to his comrades, having suddenly recognized that the grenades and the locomotive bearing down on them were part of the same attack.
Watching from above, I briefly panicked when I realized what would happen if the gunners were smart enough to begin firing at the trestle. Delivering nine hundred rounds a minute, the MG42s probably could have damaged the ties enough to derail the train, maybe even to send it into the Seille. But they'd clearly given that alternative no forethought and prepared to take out their attackers more directly. One soldier steadied the MG42 on its tripod, while the gunner put on his helmet and the third crewman strung out the ammunition belt. Beside us, Gita raised her MI and whipped her chin to indicate Biddy and I should move apart. Before the Germans could fire, we began shooting down at them. We did not have the range at first, and the gunners suddenly swung the MG4z in our direction. As the long muzzle crossed my plane of vision my entire body squeezed in fear and I started firing frantically, until one of our bullets, maybe even mine, took down the gunner. With that, the other two retreated inside the walls, dragging the fallen man behind them.
When I lowered the carbine, I found my heart banging furiously and my lungs out of breath. I was at war. In war. The momentousness of it rang through me, but already, with just this instant to reflect, I felt the first whisper of disappointment. Below, the locomotive went down the trestle like a waddling hen, the burning fuse of the satchel charge now visible in the cab window.
I caught sight of Martin then, rolling along the right-of-way between the river and the high wall of the saltworks. As the engine rumbled past him, he sprang back to his feet and sprinted down the track, taking advantage of the cover provided by the huge iron machine. Once he was beyond the curve of the wall, he swung his rucksack around him and removed two lengths of rope, both secured to grappling hooks, which he dug into the crotches of two small trees. Bracing himself that way, he backed to the edge of the river, and then, without hesitation, skidded down the concrete retaining wall on the bank, disappearing into the water.
Suddenly, a gun barked on my left. I flinched before I heard Biddy crying out. He was shooting, and Gita immediately joined him. A gunner had returned to the other MG42. I fired, too, the jolting rifle once escaping my shoulder and recoiling painfully against my cheek, but in a moment the man was back inside the walls. One of the Germans had closed the low iron gate, but it was thin and presented no obstruction to the locomotive that crashed through it, headed for its descent into the mine. With a little shout, Gita signaled us to run.
Once we were beyond the crest, Gita dropped to her knees and threw herself down the hill in a ball. I fell where she had started but ended up spinning sideways into a tree stump. Biddy came somersaulting by, bumping along like a boulder. I dashed several feet, then tripped and accomplished what I had meant to, rolling on my side down the hill, landing painfully and bouncing forward.
In the midst of that, I heard an enormous echo of screaming metal piped out of the tunnel and knew the locomotive had barreled into the loaded flatcars. In the reality of physicists, there were actually two detonations, the satchel charges and then the ordnance, but my experience was of a single sensational roar that brought full daylight and fireside heat and bore me aloft. I was flying through the air for a full second, then landed hard. Looking up, I saw giant pillars of flame beyond the hilltop, and nearby a corkscrew of smoking black iron, a piece of the locomotive, that had knifed straight into the earth, as if it were an arrow. My knee, inexplicably, was throbbing.
"Cover up," Biddy yelled. My helmet had been blown off. I saw it back up the incline, but a fountain of dirt and stone and hot metal began showering around me. Debris fell for more than a minute, tree boughs and shell pieces that plummeted through the air with a sound like a wolf whistle, and a pelting downpour of river water and the heavy mud of the bank. At the end came a twinkling of sawdust and the tatters of leaves. I had crawled halfway to my helmet when there was a second explosion that blew me back down to where I had been at first. The concussion was less violent, but the flames reached higher into the sky and the hot remains of what had been destroyed rained down even longer.
I still had my hands over my head when Gita slapped my bottom. I jumped instantly and found her laughing. "Allons-y!" She took off down the hillside. Biddy was already in motion and I sprinted behind them. He moved well for a man his size, but lacked endurance. I had retained some of the lung strength of a swimmer and eventually pulled past him, but I was no match for Gita, who flew along like a fox past the strips of cloth Martin had tied, stopping only when we reached the edge of the last open farm field we'd crossed this morning. At the margin of a small woods, Gita scouted for signs of the Germans, but we all knew that the blast that had roared out of the tunnel, as from a dragon's mouth, had to have devastated the garrison. Biddy arrived and laid his hands on his thighs, panting.
"What about Martin?" I asked her, when she signaled we were secure.
"We never worry about Martin," she said. "Because he is safe?"
"Because it could drive one to lunacy. Regarde." Across the field, Henri and Christian were ambling toward us, both so thoroughly relieved of their prior grimness that I failed to recognize them at first. They had ditched their rifles to appear more innocuous, and approached in their muddy boots and soaked overalls, smiling broadly. Henri, it turned out, lacked most of his upper teeth. They hugged Gita first, then both embraced Biddy and me. Henri virtually wrested me from my feet, and isolated within his powerful grasp and his warm husky scent, I felt the first stirrings of pride at the magnitude of our achievement and my own small role in it.
"We showed them," Henri said in French. The way back to the shepherd's but was safe, he said. There they had built a fire and filled a cistern with water from a nearby spring, and we all sat on the ground, drinking and warming ourselves, while we waited for Antonio and Martin. As we recounted the operation in a jumble of conversation, every spark of shared memory seemed to make each of us hilarious, but there was truly only one joke: we were alive.
When I was warmer, I hiked up my woolen pants leg to see what I had done to my knee. There was a gash, only an inch wide but deep, a smile amid a large purple welt. I had no clue how it had happened. Prodding the edges of the wound, I could feel nothing inside.
"For this a Purple Heart?" Gita asked Biddy in English, when she saw me toying with the injury. I had found my first-aid kit in my field-jacket pocket and Gita helped me wash the cut with a little of the gauze in there. Across the cut, she dumped a dusting of sulfa powder out of a packet, then skillfully fashioned a bandage from the remaining gauze. Wrapping my knee, she told me that it would be a week or so before I danced in the Follies again.
Your nursing skills are impressive, Mademoiselle Lodz. How were you trained?"
"In Marseilles, in the hospital, I watched and learned."
"Is that what drew you to the hospital, a vocation for nursing?"
"Far from it. I wanted to steal opium." She smiled. regally. More than anything, Gita Lodz enjoyed being shocking, and in me, she had easy prey.
"You were a drug fiend?"
"A bit. To dull the pain. Principally, I sold to opium dens. War is very hard on those people, Dubin. I survived on their desperation-until I met Robert. But I am a good nurse. I have what is required, a strong stomach and a soft heart. Even someone whom I would despise were he in good health moves me as an invalid."
"A bit of a paradox, is it not? To be a soldier and a nurse?
Her small shoulders turned indifferently.
"I told you, Dubin, I do not fight to kill. Or conquer.
"So why, then?"
She pulled my pants leg down to my boot and smoothed it there. Then she sat back on her haunches.
"I will tell you how it has been with me, Dubin. I have fought because the Nazis are wrong and we are right and the Nazis must lose. But I also fight death. I see it in the barrel of every gun, in the figure of every Boche, and when they are defeated, I think each time: Today I may live. Tu comprends?" She finished off by giving her full brows a comic wiggle, but her coffee eyes had been lethally intent. I knew she thought she had told me something remarkable, but I did not really grasp it. Right now I felt the thrill of surviving in all my limbs, as if I'd acquired the strength of ten.
"I fear I am too dense to fully understand, Mademoiselle."
"No, Dubin, it does not mean you are slow-witted." She stood with a sealed smile. "It means you are lucky."
The plan called for us to remain in the shepherd's but until we had all reassembled and the local reseau could assure safe passage. Christian wandered down to the farmhouse to see if there had been any warnings.
"All quiet," he said. Word was that Patton's Army was advancing. The Germans had more pressing business than to hunt a few stray commandos on friendly ground.
Antonio arrived about half an hour later and the same circle of embraces was repeated, despite the fact that his face and uniform were pasted with mud.
"Nom de nom," he said. "What an explosion! I was more than a kilometer away and it drove me into the riverbank so deep I thought I would suffocate. When I looked up there was not a tree standing for five hundred meters from the tunnel."
His account of the blast made me more concerned about Martin, but Gita refused to worry. Just as she said, an hour and a half along, Martin appeared. His pack and helmet were gone and the knee was torn out of his trousers. He was entirely soaked, but cheerful. Whistling, he came sauntering across the field.
When OSS had originally planned the operation in the fall, their engineers had calculated that Martin would survive the explosion by jumping from the trestle into the Seille and swimming away in a sprint. Knowing the timing, he would dive for the bottom just in advance of the blast, where the waters' depths would protect him from the plummeting debris.
But that scheme had been drawn up before the record rains of the autumn. The Seille, normally a slow-moving canal, was ten feet over its usual level and now a rushing river. That was why Martin had secured the ropes, so that he could use them to keep the current from carrying him back toward the tunnel. The theory was no match for reality when the shafts blew.
"Damn stupid," he said. "Lucky I didn't rip my arms off." With the explosion, the ropes tore through his hands, burning both palms despite his gloves, and lifting Martin from the water. He plunged back down farther on, but he was too dazed to get a footing or a handhold and was driven by the current at least a hundred yards until he was stopped by a dam of mud and rock that the explosion had dropped into the Seille almost directly opposite the point of attack. Swimming to the west bank, he crawled in a rush up the hill, expecting to be fired on any second, but from the top, he saw no soldiers moving amid the lingering smoke. The garrison appeared to have been wiped out to a man.
"What a beautiful locomotive," said Martin as we went over the events yet again. "Hochdruck by Henschel." In the midst of his recollection, his gaiety and wonder swiftly passed. "It was bad business about those boys," he said abruptly. No one added more about those deaths.
After walking through another field, we arrived at the road, where an old farmer rolled up on a horse-drawn flatbed loaded with newly harvested grapes. With their dusty skins, they looked like high clouds in a darkening sky. Martin instructed us to wade in and work our way down to the wagon bed to hide. Biddy and I went first. I could feel the grapes burst under my weight and their juice soaking my uniform. I positioned myself on my side to protect my knee, then heard Gita's rasp as she swam down through the bunches. Suddenly she was on top of me, her leg over mine, her face and torso some short distance away, the crushed fruit leaking out between us, but she made no effort to move, nor did I, and we remained that way all the time it took the wagon to clop back to the Comtesse de Lemolland's.
At the Comtesse de Lemolland's there was a celebration. The explosion had resounded even here and the giant flames, phosphorescent orange, shot a mile into the sky. In the house, the sole question was whether we had survived. The Comtesse would not consider the possibility that we had not, and once the lighting fixtures had stopped rocking, she ordered preparations for une grande fete. By the time we arrived, several dozen local residents, all with resistance affiliations, had gathered in the courtyard. It was the liberation scenes all over again-embraces, shouting, bottles of wine and cognac for each hand. A whole lamb was being roasted over an outdoor pit beside the stables. The seven of us-Biddy, Henri, Christian, Antonio, Gita, Martin, and I-stood shoulder to shoulder amid the grapes, waving our fists, praising France and America, to unending laughter and applause. It was 3:00 p. M. and Biddy and I might have reached HQ by nightfall, but I gave no thought to that. With my arm around Gita's slim waist, the other hand mounted on Biddy's wide shoulder, I felt an exhilaration and freedom that were new in my life.
The smell of the cooking meat woke an enormous hunger, but I desired even more to shed my uniform, mud-slimed, grape-stained, bloodied in spots, not to mention sopped and chafing. Gita sent the drunken Bettjer to fetch dry fatigues for both Biddy and me, and we changed in a room in the farmhands' bunkhouse over the barn. My knee was growing stiff, but in my present mood even the discomfort seemed a pleasant souvenir.
"Oh, now look at this," said Bidwell. His pants stopped midway down his shin. I offered to swap, but mine were the same length and Biddy was just as happy to be silly. The Frenchmen were delighted when he appeared in his 'culottes.'
I had never been one to enjoy parties, but it seemed that I hadn't ever before had so much to celebrate. When the rain began again the crowd moved inside, where I drank and repeated the story of the attack for little knots of Frenchmen who gathered around. Almost all of them had assisted somehow over the months the operation had been planned, surveillance agents who fished the Seille to reconnoiter the dump, or silent sentries who'd kept watch once we'd slipped behind the German lines. The size of the explosion was remarked on again and again, tangible proof of the risk and of the triumph.
Eventually, the talk turned to other developments in the war. Patton's principal force was said to be moving against Metz. Many of the French were convinced that the fight would end soon, that in a matter of months la vie normale would resume and the Americans would be returning to the States. In response to questions about my home, I pulled my Kodaks from my wallet and set them on the long planked dining table where I had taken a seat, a bit woozy from the cognac I'd been sipping. The little snaps were all somewhat disfigured from the impression of my house key that I kept beside them, but that did not seem to deter my audience, who made laudatory remarks as they examined the photos of my parents, sister, and baby brother, and of Grace.
I became aware of Gita leaning over my shoulder. She was dressed again as a civilian, in a simple blouse and skirt. She lifted Grace's photo from the table with her customary boldness. Everyone else had treated the pictures as if they were sacred relics that could not even be touched.
"Ta soeur?" Your sister?
"Ma fiancee."
She gave me a direct look, finally a pursed grin. "Mes felicitations," she said and turned away.
A few minutes later, as I was about to replace the snapshots, Biddy plopped beside me, and asked to see them. Slowed by drink, he took a long time with each.
"Not your quality," I told him, "but it helps me remember their faces. You have Kodaks of your family, Biddy?"
He gave his head a solemn shake.
"Now, how could that be," I asked, "a picture-taker like you?"
"Just reckon it's better that way, Lieutenant. I got 'em here and here." He touched his heart, his head. Our exchange in English had isolated us from the Frenchmen. Gideon gathered the pictures up tenderly and handed them to me.
"You come from a big family, Biddy?"
"Not compared to some. Me, Momma, Daddy, two brothers.
"Brothers in the service?"
"No, sir. The older one, he's too old, and my middle brother, he just never got called."
"Volunteered for the Navy?" I knew several fellows who put in for the Navy and still hadn't gone in when I did.
"Nope. Just somethin 'bout him the draft board didn't never take to."
"Four-F?"
"Nothing wrong with his body, not so they ever said." He shrugged, as baffled as the rest of us over the Army's eternal unreason.
I asked if he heard from them.
"My momma. You know how moms are. I must get four letters from her every week. My middle brother, he ain't much for writing, same as my dad. But Daddy, he sends me stuff, you know, magazine clippings and whatnot. It's hard on all of 'em my bein here. My folks got into a big tussle before I went into the service, and they ain't quite set that right yet. You know how families go."
"That I do. My folks still haven't forgiven me about this girl I'm going to marry."
"Now how's that, Lieutenant? She looks like a million 'Ducks."
"And smarter and nicer than she looks. But Grace's family is Episcopalian and I'm Jewish, Biddy." I paused to wonder if I'd said that as frankly since I'd entered the service. That difference didn't sit well in either house."
At the news of my proposal, Horace Morton had exploded. Grace related only that he had denounced me as 'conniving,' but I'm sure 'Jew' had been the next word. Grace's mother, however, took my side, and in time the two women wore down Mr. Morton. Soon I was allowed to enter the great stone house to ask for his daughter's hand. Along the way, to help subdue the histrionics there, I had volunteered to become an Episcopalian so Grace could marry at her church.
Because of my parents' hostility to religious practice, I had convinced myself that this last detail would not greatly concern them. I knew that my mother did not favor my romance with someone so different, but I had dismissed that view as Old World. As I later learned, my father had persuaded Ma not to say more by pointing out that people as highly placed as the Mortons would never let their only daughter marry so far below her class. Now, when I told them about my proposal and my prospective conversion, my mother probably felt she'd been double-crossed. In any event, she stood straight up from the kitchen table, making no effort to contain herself.
"This is madness, Duvid," she said, pointedly using the Yiddish version of my name, as my parents sometimes did. "You think some priest can wave a magic wand and go poo, poo, poo so that instead of a chicken you are now a duck? To people like this, you will always be a shabby Jew and nothing else."
In answer, I described the church service Grace and her mother had envisioned, believing it evidenced their acceptance of me. My mother responded by sobbing.
"I don't go to a synagogue," she cried. "I should go kneel in a church so my son can forget where he comes from? Feh," she said. "Sooner dead. Not for all the gold in Fort Knox. If this is how you marry, you marry without me."
"She means it, Duvid," my father said, then added, "Me, too."
I hesitated even to tell Grace for days, because she would have no way to break this to her mother. Mrs. Morton had taken the side of love, but its culmination in her mind required an organ and afternoon light through the rose window in the nave. With little time to negotiate, we debated eloping, but I simply could not go off to war so deeply at odds with my family. Not quite knowing how it had happened, I shipped out for basic training with Grace still my fiancee, rather than my wife.
I told Biddy the story in shorter strokes, but drunk as he was, it seemed to move him.
"Ain't that terrible, Lieutenant, when folks get goin on like that? Someday people's just gonna be people." He looked pitiably confused and morose, his face contorted as he kept going "Mmm, mmm, mmm" in disapproval. I ended up putting my hand on his shoulder in consolation, and struck by that, Biddy smiled, eyeing me for some time.
"You are all right, Lieutenant. You gotta get outta your head and into the world, but you are definitely all right."
"Thank you, Biddy. You're okay yourself. And we were definitely in the world today."
"Yes, sir. We sure enough were. I ain't never gone see nothin like that again. This bird Martin, Lieutenant. Could be I had him wrong. I think he may be all right, too."
I knew the image of Martin dropping so gracefully into the quick waters of the Seille despite the many perils would retain a hallmarked spot in my memory.
Some of the Frenchmen were circulating now with dinner, which had been set out on a buffet in the kitchen, and I could not wait to eat. Even after the relative grandeur of my meals in Nancy, the lamb was a spectacular treat, even more so to the locals after years of wartime privations. The animal, I was told, had been hidden from the Germans. It had been slaughtered out of season, old enough to be closer to mutton, one farmer said, but still remarkably tasty as far as I was concerned.
Martin eventually arrived at the center of the kitchen by the huge iron stove and called for silence. He praised our success and the courage of everyone present and thanked the gallant Comtesse yet again for her bravery and magnificent hospitality throughout the weeks they had waited.
"I raise my glass last to those of you who were with me. To do what we do and live, one must be lucky. You were all my luck today."
There was applause, shouted congratulations, to which Gita's voice was eventually added from the back of the room.
"I am always your luck," she called. "It's boring. Every time, the same thing. Martin fights, I save him. Martin fights, I save him."
This was comedy, and her parody of the shrewish country wife evoked drunken laughter. Inspired by her audience's enthusiasm, Gita mounted a chair to continue, very much the girl who had seen herself as the new Bernhardt. Now she engaged in a dramatic retelling of the story of Martin's capture by the Gestapo early in 1943. The Nazis had not recognized him as an American. Suspecting instead that Martin was a Frenchman connected with the underground, they imprisoned * him in the local village hall, while they investigated. Knowing there was little time, Gita stuffed her skirt with straw and arrived in the receiving area of the hotel de ville, demanding to set the German commandant. At the sight of him, she dissolved in tears, decrying the son of a bitch who had left her with child and now was going to prison without marrying her. After twenty minutes of her ranting, the commandant was ready to teach Martin a lesson, and sent four storm troopers to bring him in chains to the local cathedral where the marriage could be performed. It never was, of course. The four soldiers escorting Martin and Gita were set upon by two dozen maquisards, resistance guerrillas, who quickly freed them both.
"I curse the fate that intervened," cried Martin in French, raising his glass to her. "I will marry you now.''
"Too late," she cried, and on her chair, turned away, her nose in the air, an arm extended to hold him at bay. "Your horse has eaten le bebe."
Their tableau was received with more resounding laughter and clapping. A moment later, as the first of the crowd began departing, Martin took the chair beside me. I had barely left my seat. The cognac had me whirling.
"You did well today, Dubin."
I told him sincerely that I hadn't done much more than fire my MI a few times, but he reminded me that we had all been in harm's way when the machine gun had swung toward us. He stopped then to ponder the circle of brandy in his glass.
"That was unfortunate with those young soldiers. I don't mind killing a man with a gun pointed at me, but I took no pleasure in that." I, on the other hand, had still given no thought to those deaths. I was aloft on the triumph and my reception as a hero. I was surely different, I thought, surely a different man.
"When I was their age," he said of the two Germans, "I'd have thought they had met a good end. Foolish, eh? But as a young man, I woke up many days feeling it would be my last. Gita and I have this in common, by the way. I recognized the same fatalism when I met her. The bargain that I struck with myself to forestall these thoughts was that I would die for glory. So that at the moment that the bullet entered my brain, I could tell myself I had made this a better world. I was looking for a valiant fight for years until I found it in Spain. But it turns out I'm a coward, Dubin. I am still alive, and now an old warhorse.
"You are the furthest thing from a coward I have ever met, Major."
He made a face. "I tell myself each time I will not fear death, but of course I do. And I wonder what all of this has been for."
"Surely, Major, you believe in this war."
"In its ends? Without question. But I have been making war now for a decade, Dubin, give or take a few years off. I have fought for good causes. Important causes. But I mourn every man I've killed, Dubin. And not merely for the best reason, because killing is so terrible, but because there really is no point to so many of these deaths. This boy today? I killed him to save all of us at the moment. But I don't fool myself that it was indispensable, let alone the dozens, probably hundreds, we left dead or maimed in that garrison. We make war on Hitler. As we must. But millions get in the way and die for the Fuehrer. What do you think? How many men do we truly need to kill to win this war? Ten? Surely no more than one hundred. And millions upon millions will die instead."
The tragedy of war, I said.
"Yes, but it's a tragedy for each of us, Dubin. Every moment of terror is a month of nightmares later in life. And every killing like today's is a mile farther from ever feeling joy again. You think when you start, 'I know who I am. At the core, I am inviolate. Permanent.' You are not. I did not know that war could be so terrible, that it would crowd out everything else in a life. But it does, I fear, Dubin."
I was startled by this speech, given my own buoyancy. But Martin was not the first man I'd met to find gloom in alcohol. To comfort him, I repeated the prediction I'd heard tonight that we were going to make short work of the Germans, and Martin answered with a philosophical shrug. I asked what he would do then.
"Wait for the next war, I suppose," he answered. "I don't think I'm good for much else, that's what I'm saying, unless I spare the world the trouble and put an end to myself. I really can't envision life in peacetime anymore. I talk about a good hotel room and a good woman, but what is that? And I am not so different, Dubin. Soon everyone will be driven into this lockstep. War and making more war."
"So you think we will fight the Russians, Major?"
"I think we will fight. Don't you see what's happening, Dubin? No one has choices any longer. Not here and not at home. I always thought that the march of history was forward, less suffering and greater freedom for mankind, the chains of need and tyranny breaking apart. But it's not what meets my eye when I look to the future. It's just one group of the damned making war on the other. And liberty suffering."
"You're in the Army, Major. This has never been freedom's Valhalla."
"Yes, that's the argument. But look at what's happened on the home front. I get letters, I read the papers. War has consumed every liberty. There's propaganda in the magazines and on the movie screens. Ration books and save your tin cans. Sing the songs and spout the line. There's no freedom left anywhere. With one more war, Dubin, civil society will never recover. The war profiteers, the militarists, the fearmongers-they'll be running things permanently. Mark my words. Mankind is falling into a long dark tunnel. It's the new Middle Ages, Dubin. That's the bit that breaks my heart. I thought fascism was the plague. But war is. War is." He looked into his glass again.
As he spoke, Teedle came to mind. I wondered if Martin and he had had this argument face-to-face. Or simply suspected as much of one another. They both saw the world headed to hell in a handbasket. I gave them credit for worrying, each of them. For most of the men out here, me included, the only real concern was going home.
"May I assume I am quit of your charges?" Martin asked then.
I told him I'd certainly recommend that, but that the safest course, given the orders he'd received, would be for him to return to Nancy with me in the morning to sort it out. He thought it through, but finally nodded.
"I'll spend a few hours," he said, "but I have to get on now to the next assignment." That would be the operation in Germany he'd mentioned when I first arrived here, the one for which he'd been called back to London. "I think it will be the most important work I've done, Dubin. There's no counting the lives we may save." He lifted his eyes toward the bright light of that prospect, then asked when I wanted to start in the morning. Dawn, I said, would be best, given how long we'd been away.
That reminded me that I needed to retrieve my uniform. I stood hesitantly, my knee quite stiff, to seek Gita. She had been outside saying adieu to the locals. I met her in the parlor, where Bidwell had crawled up on one of the Comtesse's elegant red velvet divans and was fast asleep beneath a lace shawl from the back of the couch.
"Leave him," she said.
"I shall, but I can't take him back to headquarters in culottes."
Gita consulted Sophie, the maid who had washed our uniforms and left them to dry over the same fire, now banked, where the lamb was roasted. As we headed out, Gita threw her arm through mine companionably as I limped along between the puddles etched in the candlelight from the house. The rain had been heavy for a while but had ceased, although the eaves and trees still dripped. The Comtesse's other guests had gone down the road in a pack and their drunken uproar carried back to us in the dank night.
I told her about my conversation with Martin. "Is he normally so dour?"
"Afterward? Afterward, always. Have you known gamblers, Dubin? I have often thought that if there were not war, Martin would probably be standing at a gaming table. Many gamblers have moods like this. They exult in the game, in betting everything, but their spirit flags once they win. Voila la raison. Martin speaks the truth when he says he is miserable without war. That was the case when I met him."
"In Marseilles?"
"Yes. I sold him opium, when he visited from Spain." I managed not to miss a step. I seemed to have prepared myself for anything from her. "He smoked too much of it, but he recovered a few months later once he agreed to go to the States to train as a commando."
"His new wager?" I thought of the way Martin had raised his eyes at the thought of his next assignment in Germany.
"Precisely," Gita answered.
The uniforms were by the barn entrance, now imbued with an intense smoky aroma, but dry. She helped me fold them and I placed them under the arm she had been holding.
"Martin says his remorse is over no longer being who he was," I told her.
"Does he?" She was struck by that. She squinted into the darkness. "Well, who is? Am I who I was when I ran to Marseilles at the age of seventeen? Still," she said, "it is true he suffers."
From what she'd told me, I said, it seemed as if Martin had suffered always.
"D'accord. But there are degrees, no? Now at night, he sleeps in torment. He sees the dead. But that is probably not the worst of it. There is no principle in war, Dubin. And Martin has been at war so long, there is no principle in him. I was not sure he recognized this."
"Ah, that word again," I said. We were standing in the open doorway of the barn, where the dust and animal smells breathed onto us in the wind. Her heavy brows narrowed as she sought my meaning.
"Principles," I said.
She grinned, delighted to have been caught again. And here we debated," she added.
"You most effectively," I answered.
"Yes, I showed you my principles." She laughed, we both did, but a silence fell between us, and with it came a lingering turning moment, while Gita's quick eyes, small and dark and sometimes greedy, searched me out. She spoke far more quietly. "Shall I show you my principles again, Doo-bean?"
The hunger I felt for this woman had been no secret from me. Amid the peak emotions of the day, the increasing physical contact between us had seemed natural, even needed, and the direction we were headed seemed plain. But I had been equally certain that reason would intervene and find a stopping point. Now, I realized there would be none. I felt a blink of terror, but I had learned today how to overcome that, and I also had the tide of alcohol to carry me. Yet drink was not the key. Gita was simply part of this, this place, these adventures. I answered her question with a single word.
"Please," I said. And with that she took her thin skirt in her fingertips and eased it upward bit by bit, until she stood as she had stood two weeks ago, delicately revealed. Then she was in my arms. With her presence came three fleeting impressions: of how small and light she was, of the stale odor of tobacco that penetrated her fingertips and hair, and of the almost infinite nature of my longing.
For a second, I thought it would happen there in the barn, among the animals, a literal roll in the hay, but she drew me to the narrow stairs and we crept up together to the tiny room where Biddy and I had changed. Her blouse was open, one shallow breast exposed. She stepped quickly out of her bloomers, and with no hesitation placed one hand on my belt and lowered my fly, taking hold of me with a nurse's proficiency. We staggered toward the bunk and then we were together, a sudden, jolting, desperate coupling, but that seemed to be the need for both of us, to arrive at once at that instant of possession and declaration. My knee throbbed throughout, which seemed appropriate somehow.
Afterward, she rested on my chest. I lay on the striped ticking of the unmade bunk, my pants still around my ankles, breathing in the odor of the mildewed mattress and the barnyard smells of manure and poultry feathers rising up from below while I assessed who I really was.
So, I thought. So. There had been something brutal in this act, not between Gita and me, but in the fact it had happened. The thought of Grace had arrived by now to grip me with despair. It was not merely that I had given no consideration to her. It was as if she had never existed. Was Gita right? No principle in war and thus no principle in those who fight it? It was the day, I thought, the day. I conveniently imagined that Grace would understand if she knew the entire tale, although I harbored no illusion I would ever tell her.
Gita brought her small face to mine and whispered. We could hear the snores of the farmhands sleeping on the other side of the thin wooden partitions that passed for walls.
"A quoi penses-tu, Doo-bean?" What are you thinking?
"Many things. Mostly of myself."
"Tell me some."
"You can imagine. There is a woman at home." "You are here, Dubin."
For the moment that would have to be answer enough.
"And I wonder, too, about you," I said.
"Vas-y. What do you wonder?"
"I wonder if I have met another woman like you." "Does that mean you have met such men?"
I laughed aloud and she clapped her small hand over my mouth.
"That is your only question?" she asked.
"Hardly."
"Continue."
"The truth?"
"Bien silts."
"I wonder if you sleep with all the men you fight with."
"Does this matter to you, Dubin?"
"I suppose it must, since I ask."
"I am not in love with you. Do not worry, Dubin. You have no responsibilities. Nor do I."
"And Martin? What truly goes on between Martin and you? You are like an old married couple."
"I have told you, Dubin. I owe much to Robert. But we are not a couple."
"Would he say the same thing?"
"Say? Who can ever tell what Martin might say? But he knows the truth. We each do as we please."
I did not quite understand, but made a face at what I took to be the meaning.
"You do not approve?" she asked.
"I have told you before. I am bourgeois." "Forgive me, but that cannot be my concern." "But Martin is mine. And you intend to stay with Martin."
"I am not with him now, Dubin. I am with you."
"But I will go and you will stay with Martin. Yes?"
"For now. For now, I stay with Martin. He says he dreads the day I go. But I stay with Martin to fight, Dubin. Will the Americans allow me to join their Army?"
"I doubt it."
She sat up and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see she was narrow and lovely. I ran my hand from her shoulder to her waist, which did nothing to diminish the intensity with which she watched me.
"How many women, Dubin. For you? Many?"
I was shy of this subject, not the doing, but the talking. At twenty-nine, my sexual history remained abbreviated. Some love for sale, some drunken grappling. It was best summarized by the phrase a college friend had applied to himself that fit me equally: I had never gotten laid with my shoes off. Tonight was another example.
"Not so many," I said.
"No? You forgive me, but I think not. Not from the act, Dubin, but from how you are now And how is it with this woman of yours at home?"
I recoiled at that, then realized the question was not all that different from the ones I'd been asking her.
"It has not occurred, as yet."
"Truly?"
"She is my fiancee, not my wife."
This was her choice?"
It was mutual, I supposed. Not that there had ever been much discussion. Grace and I had the same assumptions, that there was special meaning in the union of man and woman.
"I worship Grace," I said to Gita. That was the perfect word. 'Worship.' It had not dawned on me until this moment that I could not say in the same way that I craved her.
"She should have insisted, Dubin. She had no idea what she was sending you to."
I could see that much myself.
Gita went down to the barn to attend to herself.
A pump handle squealed. Most single men I knew talked a tough game about the women they slept with. But my experience had always been the opposite. In the wake of sex, I inevitably felt a bounty of tenderness, even when I paid a local lunatic called Mary Quick Legs $4 for my first encounter. Now that Gita had left my side, I longed to have her back there. I lay there wondering if I had ever known people like Martin and Gita who had so quickly altered my understanding of myself.
Her small tread squeaked up the stairs and she crept in, standing near the bunk. Seeing her dressed, I reached down and drew up my trousers.
"I must go, Dubin," she whispered. "They will be looking for me shortly. Au revoir." She peered at me, albeit with some softness. "Doo-bean, I believe we shall have other moments together."
"Do you?" I had no idea if I wanted that, but I told her that I would probably return one more time to give Martin the final papers on my investigation.
"Well, then," she answered. She hesitated but bent and pressed her lips to mine lightly. It was more of a concession than an embrace. She said au revoir again.
I had been so raddled by emotion all day that I would have thought my nerves would be too unsettled for sleep, but as with every other expectation of late, I was wrong. I had purposely not drawn the wooden shutters outside and woke at 7:30, as I intended, with the livid sunrise firing through the clouds. Coming to, I recognized my knee as the discomfort, which, like a leash, had seemed to drag me up from sleep periodically throughout the night. The leg was swollen and stiff and I eased myself up slowly, then put on my uniform, refastening the insignia. As I went back toward the house to rouse Bidwell and to see about Martin, I could hear mortars pounding. The 26th Infantry Division, as it turned out, was about to seize Bezange-la-Petite. I was standing there, trying to make out the direction of the booming guns, when Bettjer, still with a cognac bottle in his hand, stumbled into the courtyard.
I asked if he knew where Bidwell was. Peter answered in perfect English.
"Inside. Just now awake. The rest are gone for several hours."
who?"
"Martin. Antonio. The girl. Packed and gone for good. They have left me behind. After all of that, they have left me behind."
"Gone?"
"They went in darkness. Hours ago. They tried to creep away, but the Comtesse wept terribly. You must have slept soundly not to hear her."
"Gone?" I said again.
Bettjer, the very image of a sot, whiskered and disheveled in his brown Belgian uniform with half a shirttail out, lifted his bottle to me. He had fallen during the night and bloodied his nose and now when he smiled, I could see he had lost half a tooth as well, from that stumble or from one before. Still, he was having a fine time at my expense.
"I see," he said. "I see."
"What do you see, Peter?"
"Why, they have left you behind, too."