Under False Flags

by Steve Anderson

  The whole world around him had fooled itself into thinking that war was over. It made things easy at the moment. He walked into town, listening to the revels and music along the way. Waving and smiling. He passed the rail station, and his heart thumped. Two British MPs stood around a jeep, shooting the shit but not quite grinning like the rest. Good thing he wasn’t taking the train.

  He had eyeballed his route on their various trips into town and farther up the road into Dover. It was a few hours’ walk there, half a day if he had to play it safe, but who was looking to hassle a chap on VE-Day? The Dover Strait was the narrowest passage across the English Channel to France, no more than thirty miles. Requisitioned ferries were running troops and certified civilians across, as were LSTs. He remembered that Holger Frings himself had helped sink one or two of these ships. Frings had told Lett he knew the Dover Strait as well as St. Martin’s Quarter in Cologne, the way it used to be.

  The narrow inland roads ran little wider than one large sedan. Lett walked to one side and felt naked not to have a dogface tramping along the other edge. Hedges lined his route for long stretches, so close the tendrils and twigs brushed his hips and grazed his cheeks.

  It all looked a little too much like Normandy hedgerow country. Every few minutes his lungs pressed together so bad he had to hunch down and peek around shrub lines and scan the next hedge coming. He walked on. He passed junctions and heard more singing, music, laughing. The road opened up again. A delivery truck slowed to pass. A couple girls on bicycles rode by, ringing their bells at him, who to them might have been just another birdwatcher or farmer. He started to breathe easier, loosen his step. He passed a farm.

  A crack-pop rang out. He dove between skinny trees along the road, hit the deck and scrambled over to hug a tree trunk, his heart thumping, his vision blurring, going dim.

  His eyes sprung open. He had blacked out. He didn’t know for how long. Minutes maybe? He was crouched inside a small wood. He looked out. Across the road, a woman in a work smock was chopping firewood behind the farmhouse. This was all it had taken to knock him down—one piece split.

  He let out a sigh, brushed off dirt, and strolled onward. He let his arms flap along and he smiled at a little bird following him, hovering and darting, teasing him. Sidewalks and houses of red and brown brick and timbered white stucco, then two-story buildings began to line the way on the back road leading into Dover. A man approached on the sidewalk. He wore a regular British uniform with gaitered ankle boots and short jacket, but gray hair showed from under his sidecap and he had an old rifle slung. A civilian overcoat was draped over his shoulders, and a whistle hung from his neck. He was one of the Home Guard, nicknamed “Dad’s Army.” Walking beside him, doing her happy best to stay in step, was a girl of about eight in a flowered dress, a granddaughter surely. She smiled at Lett, and the old man smiled, but Lett could only glare. His face had scrunched up, and filled with heat. He hustled around them and off behind a brick building. He hugged the brick wall there. He cried. He wailed. His fingers dug into the gaps between the bricks, the mortar creeping up under his fingernails, his fingertips scraping until bleeding.

  ***

  In Stromville’s only park, a simple open green behind the battle-scarred church, the trees and flowers had bloomed and the sunlight bathed all in its glow. All the village and surrounding district had gathered. Jaunty music played, Belgian in spirit but sounding like a Dixieland tune. The people danced and kissed, and US, British and Belgian flags waved. It was May 8, 1945. Many of the people had left the area during the last years of the war, some as early as when the Germans first invaded in 1940, and were now returning to celebrate the end of all they had missed.

  Heloise sat on a bench with the man once known as Holger Frings. Frings held her purse and a basket while Heloise rested her hands upon her pregnant stomach. When Frings had come with the news of her Wendell, she had expected the worst. The trauma contributed to a “false miscarriage,” as Doctor Servais called it—a bit of bleeding but nothing to worry about. She was lucky this time, he said. She still wanted to despise Frings for the news he brought, even though it contained hope, and yet the man had offered to stay near her and help her recover. She and her father needed the help. Frings stayed in the cellar of their destroyed building, guarding the remains while she and her father moved in down the street. He vowed to watch over her stash of passports, ID papers, and forging supplies, and he would take the fall. He told her more about his time with Wendell, about how Wendell had talked Frings out of destroying himself. He told her that if her Wendell turned up alive anywhere, anytime, he was prepared to help bring her man back to her. Even if Wendell was in a prison. Frings demanded the duty. He had nothing else. He still didn’t know if his daughters were alive. A part of him didn’t want to know the truth. He doubted if he could ever get to them inside the cursed rat cage that was now defeated and occupied Germany. He was the orphan now.

  A car slid to a halt and released four young men wearing armbands of the Belgian colors. More patriots. There were those who served Belgium, and those who served themselves. The latter now roamed the countryside fingering wartime traitors according to a criteria they only seemed to know, and had the full support of those citizens who had just returned. Heloise knew better, and recognized most. Many had only just joined the Secret Army when a winner was assured. A few had been in the leftist Front of Independence, and some the fascist Légion Belge. Some were just independent operators. No matter their current team, all the new boys had been scrambling to report any tip-offs and catches to the British and American authorities before their MPs and intelligence corps decamped for Germany.

  “Harvest time,” Heloise said to Frings. “Took them long enough.”

  Frings knew what to do by this point. He slipped another stick of Wrigley’s in his mouth and leaned back, legs spread—the casual Yank.

  Two of the patriots marched over to the bench. The lead one was tall with long arms, like a goalkeeper. He stood over Frings. “Who are you? A goddamn German maybe?” he said in French.

  His apparent deputy stood with fat little hands pressed into his plump hips. “Speak!” he shouted in French.

  Frings grinned, and held up his hands as if he didn’t understand.

  Heloise stood, got in their faces. “He’s American,” she whispered in French. “He was, in any case. The gendarmes checked him out.”

  The patriots backed up a step. The goalkeeper crossed his arms at his chest, and plump deputy jammed his cigarette back in his mouth.

  “He’s more than clean,” Heloise said and stepped forward. “The Resistance cleared him too. The Resistance who risked it all for you. Were any of you in the Secret Army when it meant something? No? No?”

  “Very well . . .” The two patriots backed off further, making for the crowd. They argued and pushed at each other, and once inside the crowd began looking for others to harass.

  “They won’t do a thing about you,” Heloise whispered out of a side of her mouth.

  “For now.” Frings still leaned back, but she saw his fingertips had pressed to the bench planks as he eyed the men puffing themselves up in the crowd. He cased the periphery and horizon, as if still aboard his old fighting boat.

  ***

  Wendell Lett sighed in relief, the fresh air filling his lungs, and his chest just about exploded from the force of it. Stromville was still there, he saw. He stood on the ridge, crouched between tree trunks, sizing up the final stretch to the village through the little valley. It was green again.

  He had walked the same route as he and Frings before—up a high road, cut through forest, and his steps had lightened in the underbrush, his GI instincts taking over. He wore his civvie sweater, corduroy pants and workers cap but hung the peacoat on the daypack. Dust and road dirt had worked into his clothes, and they smelled like exhaust from all the cars and trucks that had passed him as he walked. It was May 11, 1945. Crossing over from England had been the easy part, thanks to Thatch. In Dover he
had recovered from seeing the old man and girl and pressed on, into town. The British and American MPs had a presence there as always, but they were celebrating V-E too. The pops of champagne and howling, the parading, lurching vehicles’ engines whizzing like 88s—it all threatened to make him cower and on the street they must have thought him the old man the way he hobbled along. At one point he sat in a dark corner of a pub and could only drag himself back out into the world when the publican closed for the afternoon. He had changed into the ODs in a back alley, and stuffed the ID and papers in his pockets. Thatch had indeed led a platoon, as a field commission looie. Lett had looked at his ID card and realized Thatch was smiling in the photo. Like this he looked more like Lett, or at least like Lett before the war. It would do. The travel papers were for tomorrow so Lett booked a cheap hotel, partly as a way to test his papers, and the front desk didn’t even ask. He stayed in his damp room the whole night, ignoring the parties roaring on and memorizing what he could from Thatch’s documents in case an MP or clerk went asking. The man was married, with children. Not even such a thing as them could keep the man going.

  The next morning Lett strode down into Dover harbor wearing the ODs with looie bars and a pair of flyboy sunglasses Thatch had thrown in, the duffel hanging off his shoulder stuffed with the daypack inside. Checking in was a breeze, the surely hung-over clerk hardly looking up. Lett had simply walked onto the requisitioned military ferry as directed. Along the way he had been ready to show his papers, holding them out, but the guards only kept everyone moving. On the trip over he had sat by himself on the open deck, pretending to be seasick if anyone got too friendly. The boat tossed and rolled enough as it was, and it made Lett think of Holger Frings again, what a guy like that must have gone through out here on the open sea.

  The ferry delivered him to Ostende, Belgium where, Frings once told him, the seaman had hunkered down in bomb-battered S-boat pens. Lett took a crowded train to Brussels that afternoon and switched for Namur, and the sight of so many lights coming on for another evening of peace jolted him. GIs from the repple-depple roamed the glowing streets probing for any fresh action, the poules and hustlers luring them in, the MPs tracking them. In his looie getup he might as well have been a baby snug in a buggy. He found a shitty pension above a shitty cafe, the type where they water down the booze for drunk GIs on leave. In the morning he changed back into his civvies, rode a tram till it ended and walked out of the city. He headed southeast, sticking to the side roads and small towns. Sometimes he mixed in with columns of refugees, but never too long, and other times just went it alone and no one bothered him. It could have taken him only one long day if he pushed it but he didn’t push it. He had found an abandoned bicycle and rode that until the chain busted, at which point he had handed it off to a passing refugee boy who was overjoyed to have it. Lett, in his wandering daydreams, had imagined the kid growing up to become a designer of sleek motorcycles as long as the next war didn’t claim him. That night he had slept in an abandoned farmhouse. He ate country eggs and pears right from trees. In the morning he had started recognizing the countryside and the roads. He had passed through British troops milling along the road once, and a good number of their jeeps had passed him, but still no one had bothered him. This peace business was a damn fine thing, he had told himself. People should work for it as hard as they went to war.

  His dogface nose kept him up on the ridge above Stromville a good while, casing the valley until he knew every bird, every flower. He had to talk himself into pressing on, tricking and charming and promising himself. Finally he walked down the ridge, finding the same way he had run down before. He walked through the valley. His heart pinched and his veins pulsed, his neck swelling with emotion. He heard a droning sound like a spotter plane and it was all he could do not to dive along the side of the road. Mine signs still stood here, and he saw craters that he might have caused himself. Up ahead in the village, billows of dust rose into the air where, he could only hope, the people were rebuilding. He kept going, step after step, his legs and joints as if detached, like a puppet’s wooden legs he had to keep moving and bending with his hands and it wore him out.

  He entered Stromville. He flanked the main street and his feet found the cobblestone of a village lane, his hands as fists, packed with anticipation. A couple people passed. He thought he recognized one elderly lady from his days around here but he kept going, and he felt her watching his back as he continued on.

  He neared Heloise’s building. He came around a corner and thought maybe he had the wrong lane. It took him a moment to understand that the pile of rubble standing there had been her house.

  His lungs emptied out. His legs wanted to give way. He picked them up, onward. He rushed inside the remains of the house and squatted down, the piles of debris and bricks surrounding him. He peered around on his haunches, panting. The door to the cellar still stood, and some of the frame. Not much was scorched, a good sign. But he couldn’t go down in that cellar. He peered out down the main street, squinting at the light sparkling on the cobblestones and dancing in the dust, just like a Joe looking for snipers.

  So where to now? Did he even want to know what had happened to her?

  All energy had left him, like it did a Joe after making it back from another hairy patrol. He lowered himself to his butt and his fists opened, palms up on his lap. He might have passed out.

  Someone was hugging him. At first he thought it was a child, because he heard a mix of sobbing and giggling and he felt what seemed like a play ball.

  She hugged him. Heloise was hugging him. She looked up at him with the same expression he had, somewhere between utter horror and outright laughter. The play ball was her stomach. She was pregnant. He saw it. She nodded.

  They held each other. She cried. He had not stopped.

  Her face went hard. She shot up and grabbed his hand with the strength of a BAR gunner. “We can’t stay here,” she said, and led him away.

  “So very good to see you, old boy,” her father Jean said using one of his stock English phrases, as if he’d just seen Lett a couple days ago. Heloise had led Lett down the main street and into a newer building with few shrapnel pocks. They had a second story apartment, with two small bedrooms and a view onto a back courtyard, but its sparseness revealed it was borrowed. It had a narrow balcony. Jean left Lett and Heloise out there. They sat on little metal chairs, facing each other so close their knees interlocked, cradling each other’s warm hands. She hadn’t spoken the whole way over.

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” Lett said. “I can’t believe you survived that bombing back there. I can’t believe we’re expecting. Me and you.” He held her by the shoulders, his gaze fixed on her bump of a pregnant stomach. “You’re going to have to start calling me a new name, chérie, whatever you got for me, and I can’t wait to learn French the way you Belgies speak it, and . . .”

  Her head had slumped to one side. She stared at the balcony railing, at the rusting metal bars.

  “What is it?” He leaned toward her, resting his forehead on hers. “Listen, I know, we’ve both been through so much, the town’s taken a big hit, but it’s like a funeral around here.”

  Her chin quivered.

  He perked up. “Wait. Where is he? Is he here?”

  She started to speak, three times. The third time, she said, “He was here.”

  His eyes welled up hot and searched the sky. He glared through the glass at Jean inside. Jean sat forward on a sofa, hands hanging between his knees. He shook his head at Lett.

  “Holger came here,” she said. “He made it. He tells me everything you two experience. He tells me about poor Tom. Wendell—do you know, I almost lost our baby?”

  “But you have it. Look. Feel it. You have it.”

  She nodded. She perked up now. Her eyes widened, wild. She felt at his back and ribs, fingers probing, as if searching for a wasp gone down his shirt. “What about you? Your wounds, my god, are you all right?”

  “Yes. Don�
�t worry about that.” Lett had stood. He grasped at the railing, looking out, but all he got was the courtyard and more walls like theirs. “Where is he? Do we know? What do we know?”

  She sat up straight. “We do not know. He is just gone. Allé. He lived in our bombed house. In the cellar. He wants to guard it. We don’t know what happened to him. He is here before a couple days ago. All was normal. He was happy. Always he talked about the day he finds you again.”

  “But he would have told you if he left.”

  “Yes, of course. His things are still there. It is as if someone steals him—like a person steals a baby. Soudainement.”

  “So suddenly. Just like that.”

  “Yes,” she said, shaking her head again. “But I should not get upset. The doctor says it. It upsets my stomach.”

  ***

  Holger Frings knew: He had been a fool to let himself believe, for one moment, that peace might save him. This peace was only war by other means. Until they could figure out what the next war would be exactly, a sorry bastard like he remained a seditious menace and a firestorm to be snuffed out at all costs, if only to rally the war-weary.

  He was back in an American uniform, but this time it was OD prisoner fatigues. The Amis called his prison a “stockade,” which sounded like something out of the Old West. As the US Army moved him farther into Germany wearing handcuffs and heavy iron leg shackles, first in a jeep, then in a prisoner train car, then in the back of a heavy truck surrounded by four thick-shouldered MPs, he knew, with a sick smile creeping across his face, that they were taking him right back to good old Grafenwöhr. They had followed the route of the US advance. The few times Frings got to see out he wished he hadn’t. Germany looked worse than he heard, all rubble and black smoke high into the sky, sometimes blocking out the sun, the elderly begging for food with heads down, children wandering with no one to wipe their dirty faces. The familiar stench of rotting dead and a gritty dust kept scratching at his nostrils.