Silver Bullets

by Douglas Greene et al.

  A ghost of a smile. “I know. I figured the guys in the front of the alphabet would get all the business. So I started at the rear. The guy named Yellen never answered his phone. A guy named Tucker was out of business. And so I came up to you.”

  My turn to smile. “Glad it worked out.” I scribbled his name on the top of the paper pad, and said, “All right, then. What can I do for you, Mister Silver?”

  He rubbed the palms of his hands on top of his pant legs. “I’m looking for someone. I want you to find him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Craig Ledder. He was a war correspondent with the Chicago Tribune. He was attached to my company and rode with us during the last couple of months of the war… A good guy.”

  “Okay. A good guy. Do you know where he might be?”

  “Somewhere around here,” Ray said. “I… saw him getting off

  a train at South Station. He walked right past me. I called out his name… but he moved into a crowd of folks, and that’s the last I saw of him.”

  “Do you know what train he was on?”

  “No.”

  “Could it have been one of the Boston Elevated trolleys? “I… I don’t know.”

  I wrote some more. “When did this happen?”

  “Last Wednesday.” Today was Monday, so that was five days ago. “Do you remember the time?”

  “Yes… it sounds funny but I was at South Station and I was checking my watch. It always runs fast. The big clock there said it was 8:05 in the morning.”

  “Why do you want to find him? Does he owe you money? Did he steal your socks or Hershey bars while out on the front?”

  A quick shake of the head. “No, no, nothing like that. You see, he stuck with us, for weeks on end. Other times, we had newsies drop in for a couple of days, to get a feel or taste of what was going on, and then they’d go back to the rear, get drunk and laid in Paris, and leave us be. But not Craig. He stayed with us through the shelling, the snow, the rains. He ate our rations, he got the shits and trench foot like we did… he was practically one of us.”

  “I see.”

  “He also took a lot of photos. He had this small camera… pretty pricey piece of equipment, I’m sure… and he told us, ‘Boys, when this is all over, I’ll make sure I send you copies of all these pix.’ He even wrote down our names and addresses in his notebook.”

  I scribbled some more. “But you never got the photos, am I right? Is that why you’re looking for him?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know it sounds crazy and all that, but it’s been a year now. My memories… I still got memories. Bad and good. But I want to remember the good… the guys in my squad, my platoon,and a lot who didn’t make it back. Their bodies are still over there… and I’m starting to forget what their faces looked like. You know? I don’t want to forget them, not ever… and those photos…”

  He paused, swallowed. “Crazy, hunh?”

  “Not on your life,” I said. “Look, can I get you a drink? Coffee?

  Tea?”

  Ronny’s voice was hopeful. “Anything stronger?” I got up from my chair. “No, nothing stronger.”

  “Oh.” The disappointment in his voice was real. “Coffee, I guess.”

  “Be right back,” I said, ducking through a curtain off to the side of my office. Beyond the curtain was a small room with a bed, radio, easy chair, table lamp, and icebox. A closed door led to a small bathroom that most days had plenty of hot water. I filled up a kettle with water from the bathroom, set it on a hotplate, and switched it on. I rummaged around a crowded shelf and came down with some sugar packets and Nescafe instant coffee. I made two trips back to my desk, remember to bring along a small bottle of cream from my icebox.

  He took the cup in both hands and gingerly sipped at it. “Thanks. Always thought the height of luxury was drinking your coffee from a cup made of china, instead of a steel mess kit, and sitting in a real chair, and not with your ass in mud.”

  “Sounds right to me,” I said.

  With the open window I heard a loud bellow of laughter, followed by some young women laughing as well. Hands shaking, Ronny put his coffee cup back down on my desk.

  “Are you listening to that?” he asked. “Hard not to,” I said.

  Ronny blinked his eyes, looked again at the open window. “Not even a year later, and they’re forgetting, every day. All they care about is the end of rationing, getting raises at their jobs, and putting that war in their rearview mirror. All the sacrifices, all the blood, all the tortures… forgotten.”

  I sipped from my cup. “I don’t think so, Ronny.” A brief, painful thought of my older brother Paul, dead at Bastogne. “A lot of us still remember.”

  “But not enough,” he said. “It’s about the A-bomb, new electric appliances, and those V-2 rocket tests in New Mexico. The future, the future, all hail the glorious future, built on the corpses of millions.”

  It was starting to make sense. “That’s why getting those photos are important to you, right?”

  He raised his cup. “That’s right. I… every month, every year that will come up, more and more folks will forget. I won’t let that happen, Mister Sullivan. I won’t. Can you help me?”

  My first instinct was to say yes, but I wanted to know more. “You said this Craig Ledder wrote for the Chicago Tribune. Did you try to get in contact with him after the war?”

  “Oh, yes, I certainly did,” he said. “I wrote a few letters that were never answered, and once I even made a phone call. Some guy in a hurry said that Craig had quit the newspaper in the summer of 1945, and that’s all he could tell me. Then he hung up.”

  “Unh-hunh.” I put my coffee cup down, picked up my fountain pen. “Ronny, you said you’re not from Boston. Where are you from, then?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Long way from home.”

  He stiffened up and I knew I had struck him somehow. “That’s right,” he said, after several seconds.

  “What brings you to Boston?”

  A few more seconds passed. “Does that matter?” I was quick. “You bet it does.”

  He wiped his hands again on the legs of his trousers. “I… I had a hospital appointment.”

  “Where?” I asked. “Peter Bent Brigham? Mass General? Beth Israel? New England Deaconess?”

  No reply. I stared at him for just a moment, and then it came to me.

  “McLean Hospital?” I asked. “In Belmont, right?”

  A quick nod, like even saying a word would push him over the edge.

  “I see.”

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah. The looney bin, am I right?”

  I spoke carefully. “A psychiatric hospital,” I said. “Nothing to be ashamed about.”

  “Ashamed?” he said sharply. “You think I’m ashamed?”

  Oops. “No, it’s just that, well, there’s a stigma, and if you need help…”

  He leaned forward, clasping his hands together. “During the day I can get along, you know? Though I don’t like loud noises, and I really, really don’t like trains. But it’s night…. That’s the worst. The nightmares. You’re not just dreaming, you’re actually back there again, like you’re using a damn time machine. You can feel the cold. Hear the gunfire, the shellfire. The blows hitting you, over and over again… the sheer… hopelessness, knowing you were doomed, would never get out alive. Those damn dreams… do you get dreams, Mister Sullivan, do you?”

  My pen hesitated. I remember a young American soldier, brown

  hair, caught during the Battle of the Bulge. I had been called away from my regular duties to help empty ambulances as they growled in from the front lines, and he was on a canvas stretcher that me and three other MPs took out to bring him into a large tent marking a field hospital. The ground was a mush of snow and mud, tore up by the jeeps and ambulances, and a heavy sleet was falling. He had a bloody bandage wrapped around the top of his head, and he kept on repeating a street address in Spokane, over and over again, asking us to contact hi
s grandmother. The first nurse to see him lifted up the bandage and said, “Sweet Mother of God, I can see his goddamn brain.”

  But the boy hadn’t heard her. Over and over again, over and over again, he repeated the Spokane address of his grandmother…

  I resumed scribbling. “No,” I said. “I’ve been lucky. No dreams.” I looked up at him and he had a look of anticipating disappointment, and I said, “Ronny, I’ll take your case. I’ll find this Craig Ledder, see what he’s up to, and if we’re very lucky, maybe he still has the negatives of the photos he promised you.”

  He grinned. On his skinny and scared face, it looked pathetic. “That’s great, Mister Sullivan, that’s great.”

  “Not great until I find him,” I said. “What does he look like?”

  I took careful notes as Ronny went on: nearly six feet, bulky, short blond hair, blue eyes, small ears, with a short scar on his left cheek.

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  Ronny said, “How much do I owe you?”

  I waved a hand. “Vet discount. We’ll settle up when we’re done, all right?”

  “Sure, sure,” he said.

  “Oh… and how can I get a hold of you?”

  “At the McLean. You see… we’re allowed off the campus if the doctor thinks we won’t harm ourselves.”

  “Good,” I said. “Tell me, are they helping you?” A shy smile. “Not a goddamn bit.”

  About fifteen minutes after my client left, I opened my eyes, leaned forward and picked up my phone, and got the long-distance operator. The call would be pricey but would be a good start to what I hoped would be a quick and simple case.

  I looked over my notes when the phone rang. The operator said, “Your call is going through, sir.”

  “Thank you, operator.”

  There was static on the line and the sound of the phone ringing was faint. Nearly a thousand miles away. It was picked up on the first ring.

  “Chicago Tribune, where can I direct your call?”

  “Newsroom, please.”

  “Which part?”

  Damn good question. “Ah, your foreign desk. Or overseas. Whichever fits.”

  “Hold, please,” she said, and there was another, louder hiss of static, and I tried not to think of the long-distance bill I would pay next month with each pricey second slipping away.

  “Overseas, Cynewski,” came a gravelly voice.

  “Hello,” I said. “This is William Sullivan, calling long distance from Boston.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m trying to locate a foreign correspondent of yours, name of Craig Ledder.”

  “He doesn’t work here no more.”

  “I know that, but I was hoping I could locate a family member of

  –“

  “Christ, pal, we’ve got a newspaper to run.”

  Click, which considerably cut my long-distance bill but which otherwise didn’t help me.

  The next day I moved around a lot, starting with the Boston Public Library, located on Copley Square and built in 1895 in a supposedly great Italian Renaissance Style. Since the closest I’ve ever been to Italy was the towns and battlefields of France, Belgium, and Germany, I’d have to take their word on it.

  In a reference room at the library, I spent a few minutes thumbing through a thick Chicago phone book published by Illinois Bell. The room was cool, dusty, and filled with phone books and directories from cities in all forty-eight states. In the ‘L’ section, I noted only six Ledders in the Chicago area. Doable. I checked the Philadelphia phone book from Bell Pennsylvania. The number of Silvers exceeded six pages. Not doable.

  After putting the Chicago and Philadelphia phone books back in their places, I looked around. I was still alone. I went over to the New England Telephone book for Boston, and took down the volume for 1943. A waste of time and effort, shouldn’t look at old ghosts, but my hand seemed to act by itself as I pulled down the thick and battered volume, and flipped through the thin pages, stopping at the Sullivan page. Like in Philadelphia, pages and pages of Sullivans.

  My finger stopped at the tiny print marking SULLIVAN, Paul X., 52 L Street, S. Boston.

  My older brother. My finger rubbed at the small print. Dead in Bastogne at about the same time I was helping bring in stretcher cases during that bitterly cold December 1944.

  I closed the book, tossed it back in its place.

  Armed with rows of nickels, I grab a payphone on Copley Square and start making long distance phone calls to Chicago, and strike out like last year’s Red Sox pitching staff. Made call after call to Chicago, and none paid off. No one on the phone nearly a thousand miles away had ever heard of a Craig Ledder.

  With my last roll of nickels gone, I flagged down a Yellow Cab. “Newspaper Row,” I said, and with a grunt, he flipped down the meter flag.

  A few minutes later I exited the hackney on a crowded stretch of Washington Street, also known in this town as Newspaper Row. Within one block were the offices of the Boston Post, the Boston American, and my destination for today, The Boston Globe. After passing through the lobby I found my way to the newsroom, crowded with desks and chairs on a wooden slat floor. There was a low steady roar of men talking, phones ringing and the chatter of teletype machines in one corner, spewing out copies from the Associated Press, United Press, and INS. There was a haze of blue smoke up by the ceiling from cigars and cigarettes, and I weaved my way through the desks, stopping at a familiar place.

  Don Burnett glanced up at me, gestured to a battered, empty chair. “Hey, look who’s here,” he said. “My favorite private dick, Billy from Southie. How’s it hanging?”

  “It does, here and there,” I said, sitting down. Don was my age, but skinny with brown hair, thin Clark Gable-style moustache and thick round-rimmed glasses. Those glasses and a bad ticker kept him out of the war, and when he had been drinking some, would always bitterly complain that his 4-F status had kept him out of the greatest story of our generation.

  I’d always change the subject, thinking about a lot of things, including that hospital tent that December, and the cleared area at the side of the tent where bodies of American soldiers were being stacked up like logs, wondering at the time if my older brother Paul might be there in that bloody pile.

  He had on a faded white shirt, black slacks and a black necktie. “I’m looking for some information, was hoping you could help,” I said.

  From his messy desk, from city directories to competing newspapers and stacks of tan-colored reporter’s notebooks, Don managed to pull out a slip of paper, fold it over, and said, “Okay, shoot.”

  “You don’t want to know what it is first?” I asked.

  He frowned slightly. “The beach off L Street, summer of 1940. I don’t have to say any more, am I right?”

  Yeah, he was right. He had been swimming when a stitch cut into his side —dummy hadn’t waited a half-hour after eating to go into the water —and I had dragged him in before he had drowned.

  So I said, “No, you don’t, and I appreciate it. Okay. This one should be pretty easy, should just take a phone call or two.”

  “Unh-hunh,” he said. “Go on.”

  “I’m looking for a guy named Craig Ledder,” I said. “He was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune during the war. Looks like he quit work sometime after VE Day. I got a client who was a buddy of his overseas. This Ledder character promised him some photos that were taken during those last months.”

  Don wrote a few notes. “Some promise. Your client should know better than to trust reporters or photographers. Is your client in Boston?”

  “Yep.”

  “And this Craig Ledder?”

  “My guy saw him at South Station. My client tried to get his attention, but the station was crowded and he faded away.”

  “Unh-hunh,” Don said. “Any one of you two bright boys think of calling the Trib and see what’s up?”

  “Gee, what a suggestion,” I said. “No wonder you’re a reporter, a real nose for news.
Yeah, my client called and I’ve called as well. Pretty much got hung up on.”

  Don rubbed the end of his fountain pen against his brown moustache. “You want me to work some phone magic? That’s going to be a bit pricey. Long distance, of course.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll make you whole. Or get you lunch at Locke Ober’s, whichever one is cheaper.”

  “Yeah.” He picked up his phone, dialed a single number. “Shirley, sweetie, it’s Don up in the newsroom. Will you set up a person-to-person call to… Dave Wendell, Chicago Tribune newspaper, Chicago. Yeah, Dave Wendell. Thanks, sweetie….”

  He hung up the phone with a clatter, tossed his pen on the crowded desk. “Dave Wendell used to work here until he got a hankering to see Lake Michigan. Setting up the call will take about ten minutes or so. You got anything you want to talk about?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  On his desk he pulled out a copy of that day’s Globe. “Here. Go find a corner and educate yourself, and then come back in ten minutes, I’ll see what I have to share.”

  I took the newspaper, glanced at the headlines —about an A-bomb test in the Pacific called “Operation Crossroads”, a threatened national railway strike, and some mess involving Acting Mayor John Kerrigan. I put the paper down on an unoccupied desk and wandered around, noting some framed front pages hanging from the walls and pillars holding up the ceiling, including the ones marking VE Day and VJ Day. I stopped in front of one noting the Battle of the Bulge, the tens of thousands of American casualties.

  Another memory popped up, like a fishing bob coming up in the harbor water. I was back at that tent, later moving bodies along, and an Army surgeon, smoking a Camel with shaking hands, wearing a bloody white smock over his fatigues, noted two infantrymen, as me and a guy named Cooke struggled to put them into canvas body bags. “See where those fellas were shot? Right in the back of the head. Close-range. Meant those goddamn Nazis took ‘em as prisoners and executed them.”

  I went back to Don’s desk and sat down. “You’re early,” he said. “Got a lousy track of time.”