Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  The ferret instantly snapped his cigarette from his lips and came to attention. Hugh and Tommy swung toward the sound of the voice. As they pivoted they saw an adjutant in shirtsleeves half-running down the steps from the administration building and crossing the dusty road toward them. This was unusual. German officers did not like to be seen by the kriegies in anything less than full uniform, nor did they ever like to appear rushed, unless someone higher up on the chain of command had issued an order.

  The adjutant hurried up to them. His English was fractured, but he was able to make himself clear: “Hart, pliss vit me. You, Renaday, back to home . . .”

  He pointed at the British compound ahead.

  “What’s this about?” Tommy demanded.

  “Vit me, pliss,” the adjutant said. He waved his arms to add some urgency to his words. “Not to want to keep waiting, pliss. . . .”

  “I still want to know what this is all about,” Tommy replied. The German officer’s face seemed to contract, and he stamped his foot once, raising a dusty puff of dirt.

  “Is ordered. See Commandant Von Reiter.”

  Renaday’s right eyebrow shot up.

  “Now, isn’t that interesting,” he said quietly. He turned to the ferret, who had not moved a muscle. “Okay, Adolf, let’s go. Tommy, I’ll be waiting with Phillip. Very curious summons, this,” he added.

  The German officer seemed immensely relieved that Tommy was willing to accompany him, and he held the door open for the American as they stepped inside the administration building. Several of the clerks sitting behind desks looked up curiously as he entered, but then when the officer followed, they dutifully returned their eyes to whatever documents they had in front of them. German military bureaucracy was steady and thorough; more than anything, it sometimes seemed, they hated the ingenuity and creativity of their prisoners. Tommy was pushed once in the direction of the commandant’s office, which made him stop, pivot, stare at the adjutant with a narrow gaze. When the officer stepped back, dropping his hands, Tommy turned again and walked sharply across the floor and pulled open the door to Von Reiter’s room.

  The commandant was behind his desk, waiting. A single, uncomfortable chair was arranged in front of the desk, for Hart to sit in, which he did, as Von Reiter gestured toward it. But as soon as he sat, the German immediately rose to his feet so that he towered above Tommy. Von Reiter, too, was in shirtsleeves, his tailored white shirt glistening in the light pouring through a wide window that overlooked the two compounds. The starched collar pushed at the officer’s ruddy throat. The jet black Iron Cross he wore around his neck gleamed against the immaculate shirtfront. His dress jacket hung from a hook on the wall, a polished black leather gun belt with a Luger in a holster hanging next to it. The commandant walked over to his jacket and brushed a piece of imaginary lint from the lapel. Then he turned to Tommy.

  “Lieutenant Hart,” he said slowly, “your work goes well?”

  “We are only in the beginning stages, Herr commandant,” Tommy answered carefully. “And certainly Hauptmann Visser can fill you in with whatever details you require.”

  Von Reiter nodded, and returned to his seat.

  “Hauptmann Visser is, how do you put it? Staying in touch?”

  “He takes his job seriously. He seems most attentive.”

  Von Reiter moved his head in a half-nod.

  “You are here many months, lieutenant. An old-timer, as Americans say. Tell me, Mr. Hart, you find life at Stalag Luft Thirteen to be . . . acceptable?”

  This question surprised Tommy, but he tried to withhold any sign of this sensation. He shrugged, in an exaggerated fashion.

  “I’d rather be home, Herr commandant. But I am also glad to be alive.”

  Von Reiter nodded and smiled. “This is the one quality all soldiers share, true, Hart? No matter how harsh life is, it is still better to enjoy it, because death is so easy to acquire in war, do you not think?”

  “Yes, Herr commandant.”

  “Do you believe you will live through the war, Hart?”

  Tommy inhaled sharply. This was the one question, bluntly put, no kriegie ever asked or answered, never gave voice to, not even in a joke, because it immediately opened the door to all their deep and uncontrollable fears. The wake-up-choking-in-the-middle-of-the-night fears. The staring-at-the-barbed-wire-in-the-middle-of-the-day fears. It invoked the names and faces of all the men who had died in the air around them and all the men still breathing, but destined to die in the seconds, minutes, hours, and days to come. He slowly released his breath and answered obliquely, forcing himself not to truly dwell on this, the worst of all questions.

  “I am alive today, Herr commandant. I hope to be alive tomorrow.”

  Von Reiter’s eyes seemed piercing. His stiffness, Tommy thought, masked a man of considerable intellectual intensity and rigid formality. This was always a dangerous combination.

  “Captain Bedford, he undoubtedly felt the same on the final day of his life.”

  “I wouldn’t know what he felt,” Tommy replied, but of course, this was a lie, for he did know.

  Von Reiter continued to fix Tommy with an unwavering gaze. After a momentary silence, he continued his queries:

  “Tell me, Hart, why do Americans hate the blacks?”

  “Not all Americans do.”

  “But many, yes?”

  Tommy nodded. “Yes. It seems so.”

  “And why is that?”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “Complicated. I’m not sure I really could say.”

  “You do not hate Lieutenant Scott?”

  “No.”

  “He is inferior to you, no?”

  “Doesn’t seem that way.”

  “And also you believe in his innocence?”

  “I do.”

  “If he has been falsely accused, as you say, then we have many problems. Many problems. Both for your commander, and myself.”

  “I haven’t really considered that question, Herr commandant. Perhaps.”

  “Yes, this will be true. It might be wise for you to examine this question, lieutenant. But perhaps, on the other hand, he is truly guilty and you are merely doing what you have been ordered. Americans are fond of showing the world how just and fair they are. They speak of rights and laws and their beloved founding fathers and their documents. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the Bill of Rights. But I think they forget about order and discipline, too. Here, in Germany, we have order. . . .”

  “Yes. I’ve seen it.”

  “And here in Stalag Luft Thirteen, we have order, as well.”

  “I suppose.”

  Von Reiter paused again. Tommy shifted about in his seat, eager to leave. He did not know what the commandant was searching for, and in the absence of this knowledge, he was uncomfortable about what information he might impart unwittingly.

  The German laughed briefly. “And sometimes, I think this is correct, lieutenant, justice for Americans, the show is more important than the truth. Do you not agree?”

  “I haven’t thought of it.”

  “Truly?” Von Reiter looked at him quizzically. “And you a student of your own laws?”

  Tommy did not reply. Von Reiter smiled again.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant Hart, for I am eager to know: Which is more dangerous, if Scott is guilty or if he is innocent?”

  Tommy remained silent, not answering the question. He could feel sweat trickling down beneath his armpits, and the room seemed to increase in heat. He wanted to leave, yet was rooted to his seat. Von Reiter’s voice was rough-edged, but penetrating. He thought in that second the commandant was a man who saw secrets within secrets, and he told himself that the commandant’s creased uniform and stiff-backed bearing were every bit as deceptive as Hauptmann Visser’s cryptic, questioning glances.

  “Dangerous for whom?” Tommy answered cautiously.

  “Which result will cost men their lives. Guilt or innocence, lieutenant?”

  “I don�
��t know. It is not my job to know.”

  Von Reiter allowed himself a small, unfriendly laugh, nodded, and idly picked up a sheet of paper from his desk, staring at it for a moment before continuing.

  “Vermont is your home, no?”

  “It is.”

  “It is a state not unlike here. Thick woods and harsh winters, I believe?”

  “It has many quite beautiful forests and a long, hard winter season, yes,” he said slowly. “But it is not like here.”

  Von Reiter sighed. “I myself have only been to New York. And just once. But London and Paris many times. Before the war, of course.”

  “I never traveled all that much.”

  The commandant took a long look out the window.

  “If Lieutenant Scott is declared to be guilty, will your colonel truly demand I provide a firing squad?”

  “You should ask him.”

  The commandant frowned.

  “No one has escaped from Stalag Luft Thirteen,” he said slowly. “Only the dead, like the unfortunate men in the tunnel. And now, such as Captain Bedford. It will remain that way, do you not think, lieutenant?”

  “I never try to guess what the future holds,” Tommy replied.

  “It will remain that way!” Von Reiter said forcefully. Then he swung away from the window.

  “Do you have a family, Lieutenant Hart?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “A wife? Children?”

  “No. Not yet.” He hesitated as he spoke.

  “But there is a woman, no?”

  “Yes. Waiting back home.”

  “I hope that you will live to see her again,” Von Reiter said briskly. He waved his hand at Tommy, signaling the end of the meeting. Tommy rose, and started toward the door, but Von Reiter added one other question, almost as an afterthought. “Do you sing, Lieutenant Hart?”

  “Sing?”

  “Like the British.”

  “No, Herr commandant.”

  Von Reiter shrugged again, grinning. “You should perhaps learn. As I have. Perhaps after the war I will write a book containing all the music and words to the filthy British songs and thus I will make some money to welcome my old age.” The commandant laughed out loud. “Sometimes we must learn to accommodate that which we also hate,” he said. Then he turned his back on Tommy and stared out of his window at the two compounds. Tommy moved swiftly through the office door, unsure whether he had just been threatened or warned, and thinking that there was probably much the same menace contained within each.

  Tommy passed a game of mouse roulette going on in one of the bunk rooms as he hurried to Renaday and Pryce’s quarters. A half-dozen British officers were seated around a table, each with a modest stack of cigarettes, chocolate, or some other foodstuffs in front of them. Betting materials. In the center was a small carton, with airholes punched in the sides. The men were shouting, joking, mercilessly insulting and teasing each other, back and forth. American pilots’ obscenities tended toward the short and brutal. The British, however, seemed to take some delight in the exaggerations and florid language of their verbal assaults. The air was filled with these.

  But at a sudden signal from the croupier, a lanky, thickly bearded pilot wearing an old gray blanket tied around his waist as a sort of half-kilt, half-dress, the men grew instantly silent. Then, once the quiet was complete, the croupier lifted the lid of the box and a captured mouse timidly peeked out over the edge.

  Mouse roulette was simple. With a little prodding and encouragement from the croupier, the mouse would tumble onto the tabletop, and look about himself at the waiting but absolutely stock-still, hardly breathing, rigid and perfectly silent men. The only rule was that no one could do anything to attract the mouse in the slightest; the terrified kriegie mouse would eventually break out in one direction, scurrying toward what it so fervently believed was the least threatening presence and safety. Whichever man was closest to the breakout was declared the winner. The problem with mouse roulette, of course, was that more often than not, the fleeing mouse would try to escape into the space between two of the men, which led to great mock disputes trying to assess what the mouse’s true intentions had been, other than freedom, which was always its single-minded and greatest hope and desire.

  Tommy watched the game for a moment, up until the point the mouse made its futile break, then he hurried on as the game dissolved into loud laughter and counterfeit arguments.

  When he arrived at the door to the bunk room, he saw there was a third man sitting in the room alongside Pryce and Renaday, who looked up quickly as Tommy entered. The stranger was a dark-haired but fair-complected young man, very thin, like Pryce, with narrow wrists and a sunken chest, which gave him an oddly birdlike appearance behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. His smile was cocked slightly to the left, almost as if his entire body were leaning in that direction. All three men rose, as Tommy stepped forward.

  “Tommy, this is a friend of mine,” Hugh said briskly. “Colin Sullivan. From the Emerald Isle.”

  Tommy shook hands. “Irish?” he asked.

  “I am, indeed,” Sullivan replied. “Irish and Spitfires,” he added. Tommy had difficulty imagining the slight young man wrestling with the controls of a fighter plane, but did not say this out loud.

  “Colin most generously has offered to help out,” Phillip Pryce said. “Show him, my boy.”

  The Irishman reached down and Tommy saw that he had a large sketch pad half-stuck under the bed. “Actually,” Sullivan said to Tommy, “Irish, Spitfires, and three boring years at the London School of Design before getting involved in all the patriotic foolishness that seems to have landed me here.”

  Sullivan opened the sketch pad, and handed Tommy the first drawing. It was a dark vision of Trader Vic’s body, stuffed into the Abort stall, rendered mainly in the gradations of gray created by a charcoal pencil. “I had to work with Hugh’s recollections,” Sullivan said, smiling. “And surely you know that the Canadians, being a hairy and rough-hewn people as wild as Indians and with the imaginations of buffalo, have no natural gifts for the poetry of description, like my countrymen and myself,” he said, tossing a quick smile at a grimacing, but obviously pleased, Hugh Renaday. “So it’s the very best I could do, allowing for my limited resources. . . .”

  Tommy thought the sketch caught the murdered man’s figure perfectly. It was both nightmarish and brutal, in the same space. Sullivan had used some precious paints to display the modest blood streaks on the American’s body. They stood out sharply, in dramatic contrast to the darker, somber tones of the pencil’s shadings. “This is fantastic,” Tommy said. “That’s exactly what Vic looked like. Are there more?”

  “Aye, absolutely,” Sullivan said, with a quick grin. “Not precisely what my old life-drawing professor probably had in mind back in my school days, but he did always rather tediously lecture us to employ that which is at hand, and though I might prefer some naked fraulein posing provocatively with a thank-you-very-much smile . . .”

  He handed a second drawing to Tommy. This showed the critical neck wound on Trader Vic’s body.

  “I worked with him on that one,” Hugh said. “Now what we’ll need to do is take it and show it to the Yank who examined the body, just to make certain it’s accurate.”

  Tommy flipped to another sketch, this a drawing of the interior of the Abort displaying distances and locations. An ornate, feathered arrow pointed toward the bloody footprint on the floor. A final sketch was a redoing of the tracing of the bootprint that Hugh had done on the scene.

  “A damn sight better than my clumsy efforts,” Renaday said, grinning. “Like usual, all this was Phillip’s idea. He knew Colin was my friend, but of course, I hadn’t thought of putting him on the case.”

  “It was fun,” Colin Sullivan said. “Far more intriguing than yet another bloody drawing of the northeast guard tower. That’s the one that gets the best afternoon light, you know, and the one we in the camp art classes all dutifully troop out and dra
w every day that it’s not raining.”

  “I’m impressed,” Tommy said. “These will help. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Sullivan shrugged.

  “Back home in Belfast,” he said, now speaking slowly, “well, let me put it to you this way, Mr. Hart: I’m Irish and I’m a Catholic, and that fact alone should tell you that I’ve been treated like a nigger probably every bit as often as your Lincoln Scott has been in the States. So, there you have it. I’m more than pleased to help out.”

  Tommy was slightly taken aback by the forcefulness of the slight Irishman’s sudden vehemence. “These are excellent,” he said again. He was about to continue with praise, when he was interrupted by a cold and quiet voice from behind him.

  “But there is an error,” the voice said.

  The Allied fliers pivoted, and saw Hauptmann Heinrich Visser standing in the doorway, staring across the room directly at the drawing in Tommy’s hands.

  None of the three men responded, letting silence swirl through the small space, filling the room like a bad scent on a weak wind. Visser stepped forward, still regarding the drawing with a studious and intent look. In his only hand, he carried a small, brown leather portfolio, which he set down on the floor at his feet, as he leaned forward and jabbed an index finger at the drawing that mapped the scene.

  “Right here,” he said, turning to Renaday and Sullivan. “This is mistaken. The bootprint was another few feet over, closer to the Abort stall. I measured this distance myself.”

  Sullivan nodded. “I can make that change,” he said in an even voice.

  “Yes, make that change, flying officer,” Visser said, lifting his eyes from the drawing, and staring narrow and hard at Sullivan. “A Spitfire pilot, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  Visser coughed once. “A Spitfire is an excellent machine. Quite a match even for a 109.”

  “That is true,” Sullivan said. “The Hauptmann has personal experience with Spitfires, I would imagine.” The Irishman then pointed directly at the German officer’s missing arm. “Not the best of experiences, too, I’ll wager,” Sullivan added coldly.

  Visser nodded. He did not reply, but his face had paled slightly and Tommy saw his upper lip quiver.