Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  “Evidence, you say. What sort of evidence?”

  Tommy hesitated, and the SAO quickly added, “There’s no one from the other side here, Mr. Hart. And I will keep whatever information you provide me in strictest confidence.”

  “I’m certain you will, sir,” Tommy said, but did not believe it for an instant. He didn’t dare to throw a glance at Lincoln Scott.

  “Good.” MacNamara’s voice had a firmness to it that could have concealed irritation, but Tommy was unsure. “I ask again: What sort of evidence?”

  “It was a wooden board, sir. Ripped from the side of a building. There were clear traces of Trader Vic’s blood marking it. Spatter traces, I believe they’re called by professionals.”

  MacNamara started to open his mouth, then stopped. He swung his feet off the bed, staring down for a second at his wriggling toes concealed by threadbare socks. Then he sat up more sharply, as if paying closer attention.

  “A wooden board, you say? A bloodstained wooden board?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “How can you be certain it was Captain Bedford’s blood?”

  “I can arrive at no other reasonable conclusion, sir. Nobody else has bled that substantially.”

  “True enough. And this board proved what? In your own estimation?”

  Tommy hesitated, before replying: “A key element of the defense, sir. It relates to where Trader Vic was actually murdered and attacks the prosecution’s perception of the crime.”

  “It came from the Abort?”

  “I didn’t say that, sir.”

  “It came from some other location?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And you believe this shows what?”

  “Sir, if we can show that the crime took place in some different spot, then it calls into serious question the entirety of the prosecution’s case. They claim that Mr. Scott followed Captain Bedford out of Hut 101 and that the subsequent confrontation and fight took place between the buildings, by the Abort. Evidence that suggests a different scenario supports Lieutenant Scott’s denials, sir.”

  MacNamara again paused, measuring his words carefully. “What you contend is accurate, lieutenant. And now this item is gone?”

  Before Tommy could reply, Scott burst out: “Yes sir! Stolen from my room. Lifted, robbed, filched, pilfered, poached, or purloined! Whatever word you want, sir. Right when my back was ever so goddamn conveniently turned!”

  “Watch your language, lieutenant.”

  Scott stared hard at the Senior American Officer. Then he slowly spat out his next words. “All right, colonel. I’ll watch my language. I would certainly hate to go to a firing squad with an excess goddamn on my lips. It might offend someone’s delicate sensibilities.”

  MacNamara did not so much glare at Scott as he did shrug with a sort of acceptance of the black flier’s fury, as if Scott’s outrage was oddly unimportant. Tommy took note of this silently, and then stepped slightly forward, emphasizing his words with sharp hand gestures.

  “Sir, you will recall that in some regards it was Trader Vic’s accusation that Lieutenant Scott stole something from him that triggered all this. Certainly much of the animosity stemmed from that incident. And now, it is Lieutenant Scott who has been victimized, and what has disappeared is far more critical than any wartime souvenir, pack of smokes, or chocolate bar!”

  MacNamara held up his hand. He nodded his head slowly.

  “I am aware. What is it you want me to do?”

  Tommy smiled. “At a minimum, sir, I would think we should question every member of the prosecution under oath. They are, after all, the ones who benefit from this illegal action. I would think that we should further question every witness for the prosecution, because many of those men seem to carry the same animosity toward Lieutenant Scott that Captain Bedford did. We should also question some of the men who have been most overt in their threats toward Lieutenant Scott. And I would think that we should delay tomorrow’s proceedings substantially. Furthermore, I would think that this theft of key evidence would underscore Scott’s presumption of innocence. In many regards, the theft is de facto evidence of his total innocence! It is certainly equally likely that the board was stolen by the actual murderer! I would argue that you should immediately dismiss the accusation against Lieutenant Scott.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Sir! The defense has been crippled by the illegal and immoral actions of others, right here inside the camp! That suggests—”

  “I can see what it suggests, lieutenant! But it proves nothing. And there is no proof that this evidence actually existed or would have achieved the dramatic results you claim.”

  “Sir! You have the word of honor of two officers!”

  “Yes, but beyond that—”

  “What?” Scott interrupted. “Is our word less substantial? Less important? Less truthful? It somehow doesn’t count for the same? Maybe you think mine is less valuable. But Hart’s word of honor is the same color as yours or Major Clark’s or anyone else’s in Stalag Luft Thirteen!”

  “I didn’t say that, lieutenant. It is none of those things. But it does lack corroboration.” MacNamara spoke softly. Almost as if he were trying to be conciliatory.

  “Other officers saw me obtain the board,” Tommy interjected.

  “Who? Why are they not with you, now?”

  Tommy instantly envisioned Trader Vic’s roommates and the members of the jazz band that had confronted him in the corridor of Hut 101. He thought they were probably the men who had stolen the board. And he knew they would lie about the theft. But he knew who couldn’t lie.

  “I am unsure who they were.”

  “Do you think you can find them?”

  “No. Except for one.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Captain Walker Townsend, sir. The chief prosecutor. He saw me with the item in question.”

  This name made the SAO stiffen, and rise to his feet. For several seconds, he seemed to be thinking deeply. He turned away from the two men, walked to one side of the small room, then turned, and took several strides back, so that he was once again facing the two lieutenants. Tommy could see the SAO calculating, almost as if he were inspecting the damage done by combat to an aircraft, trying to determine whether it would fly. Again, Tommy took note of MacNamara’s reaction as much as he did anything the SAO had said. He hoped that Lincoln Scott was equally alert.

  Abruptly, MacNamara waved his hand in the air, as if he’d finished the equation in his mind, and written a result. “All right, gentlemen. We will deal with this matter before the tribunal in court tomorrow. You can raise your questions then, and perhaps Captain Townsend and the prosecution will have some answers for you at that point.”

  MacNamara looked over toward the two younger men. He both frowned and smiled and in the same gesture, shook his head slightly.

  “You may have struck a blow, Lieutenant Hart. A well-placed and accurate blow. Whether it does great injury to the prosecution remains to be seen. But I will keep an open mind on the issue.”

  Tommy nodded, although he wasn’t sure he believed this and doubted that Scott would consider it anything but a blatant lie. He saluted. He started to pivot toward the exit, but Scott, at his side, hesitated. Tommy had a sudden surge of nervousness over what Scott was about to say, but he saw the black flier point down at the novel that had been left open on MacNamara’s bunk.

  “Do you enjoy Dickens, sir?” he suddenly asked.

  Colonel MacNamara let a small look of surprise cross his face before he replied, “Actually, this is the first I’ve had time to read. I never was one for fiction, when I was younger. History and mathematics, mainly. That was the stuff that helped you into West Point and the reading that kept you there. I don’t even believe they offered a class at the Point that read Dickens. Of course, I never had all the free time growing up and going to school that I’ve now got right here, thanks to the damn Krauts. But so far, this seems quite interesting.”

/>   Scott nodded. “My own schoolwork was dominated by technical literature and textbooks, too,” he said, a small smile filtering across his face. “But I still made time for the classics, sir. Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Shakespeare. Need to read Homer and some of the Greek tragedies, as well. Hard to consider oneself properly educated without a fundamental grounding in the classics, sir. My mother taught me that. She’s a teacher.”

  “That may very well be true, lieutenant,” MacNamara responded. “I hadn’t considered it in precisely those terms.”

  “Really? I’m surprised. Well, regardless, Dickens was an interesting writer, sir,” Scott continued. “There’s one important thing to remember, when reading any of his best works.”

  “What’s that, lieutenant?” MacNamara asked.

  “Nothing is exactly as it seems at first,” Scott answered. “That was Dickens’s genius.” Then he added, “Good night, sir. Enjoy your reading.”

  The two young airmen then exited the SAO’s bunk room.

  By the time they walked out of Hut 114, darkness had crept into the air around them, turning the world into the weak and faded, indistinct gray of dusk. The barbed-wire walls around the camp perimeter seemed like so many twisting lines of black penciled against the leftover daylight. Most of the kriegies were already in their bunk rooms, preparing for the night, anticipating the evening chill that slipped inexorably over the camp. The two men could see an occasional airman hurrying through the start of the evening, his pace dictated less by the encroaching cold than by the night that threatened him. Darkness could always mean death, especially at the hands of some nervous, poorly trained teenage guard carrying a machine pistol. Tommy looked up, through the first moments of gloom, toward a nearby guard tower, and saw that there were two goons resting there, their arms on the edge, like men at a bar. But both goons were watching them closely, expecting them to hurry their stride.

  “Not bad, Hart,” Scott said. His own eyes had followed Tommy’s, up to the guard tower and the two German soldiers watching them. “I especially liked that part about tossing the charges. Won’t work, of course, but it made him a bit nervous, and gave him something nasty to think about tonight when the Krauts shut off the lights, and I liked that.”

  “Worth a try.”

  “Anything’s worth a try at this point. And you know who would have liked it? The old limey, the one they shipped out. Pryce would have admired the maneuver, even if it didn’t work.”

  “Probably right about that,” Tommy replied.

  “But there aren’t a lot of tricks lurking at the bottom of this barrel, are there, Hart?”

  “No. We still have Fenelli, the medic. His testimony should shed some doubt on things. And when he shoots his mouth off it will mess up Captain Townsend’s neat little package. But I wish we had something else. Something concrete. The real murder weapon, maybe. Some other witness. Something. Something convincing. That’s why that damn board was so critical.”

  Scott nodded. “It would be nice.”

  They took a few steps through the start of the evening, and then Tommy asked the black flier, “Tell me, Scott, what’s your take on MacNamara?”

  Scott hesitated, then asked his own question. “How so? Do you mean as an officer? Or as a judge? Or, maybe, as a human being? Which?”

  “All. Or whichever you want to answer. Come on, Scott, what’s your impression?”

  Tommy could see a small grin creep across the black airman’s lips. “As an officer, he’s a by-the-book professional military man. A career officer looking for advancement and probably being eaten alive every second he has to sit here, completely forgotten, while his classmates from West Point go and do what West Pointers do, which is generally to send men out to get killed and then get to pin medals on their own chests and enjoy their promotions up the military ladder. As a judge, well, I suspect he’ll be more or less the same, though he will bend over backwards at odd moments to appear that he’s being fair.”

  “I agree,” Tommy said. “But there’s a difference between actually being fair and appearing to be fair.”

  “Bingo,” Scott said quietly. “Now, as a person, well . . . Do you have any idea, Hart, just how many Lewis MacNamaras I’ve met in my life?”

  “No.”

  “Dozens. Hundreds. Too many to count.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Scott sighed and nodded. “MacNamara is the difficult type that vociferously and publicly denies being even a tiny bit prejudiced, then automatically raises the bar just a little farther whenever a Negro threatens to reach up and leap over. He’ll talk about fairness and equality and meeting established standards, but the truth is that the standard I have to surpass is far different from the one that you do, Hart. And mine always gets a little tougher the closer I get to success. I’ve seen MacNamara in the schools I’ve attended, from elementary school on the South Side of Chicago right through the university. MacNamara was the Irish policeman who walked my block taking payoffs and keeping everyone in line, and the grade school principal who made us share every book three ways in each class and prevented anyone from taking the book home at night and really studying what was in it. MacNamara was there when I enlisted and went through basic training. He was the officer who looked down at my academic record, including a Ph.D., and then suggested I become a cook. Or maybe a hospital orderly. But something menial and unimportant. And then, when I scored the highest grade on the entrance exam for flight school, it was a MacNamara who demanded I retake the test. Because of some irregularity. The only irregularity was that I outperformed all the white boys. And when I finally qualified, MacNamara was down there in Alabama, waiting for me. I told you before: cross-burnings outside the camp and almost impossible standards inside. The MacNamaras down there would flunk you out of the program for a single mistake on a written exam. You’d wash out for any error, no matter how minor, in the air. You want to know why the boys from Tuskegee are the best damn fighter pilots in the army air corps? Because we had to be! Like I say, one set of rules for you, Hart, a different set of rules for me. You want to know the funny thing?”

  “The funny thing?”

  “Well,” Scott said, smiling, “it’s not precisely funny. But ironic, okay?”

  “Well, what’s that?”

  “That when all is said and done, it’s a whole lot easier for me to deal with the Vincent Bedfords of the world than it is the Lewis MacNamaras. At least Trader Vic never tried to hide who he was and how he felt. And he never claimed to be fair when he wasn’t.”

  Tommy nodded. The two men were walking through the brisk air. There was a freshness to the evening breeze, one that evoked memories of Vermont in him.

  “It must be difficult for you, Scott. Difficult and frustrating,” Tommy said quietly.

  “What?”

  “To always immediately see hatred in everyone you meet and to always be so damn suspicious about everything that happens.”

  Scott started to reply, his right hand raised in a small dismissive wave that stopped midway in the air in front of them. Then he smiled again. “It is,” he said. He coughed briefly. “It is indeed a difficult chore.” He shook his head, still grinning. “One that, as you can tell, seems to occupy my every waking minute.” He tossed his head back, a quick burst of laughter escaping from his lips. “You caught me on that, Hart. I seem to keep underestimating you.”

  Tommy shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first,” he said.

  “But don’t you underestimate me,” Scott said.

  Tommy shook his head. “That would be the one thing I doubt I would ever do, Scott. I might not understand you, and I might not like you. I might not even completely believe you. But I’ll be damned if I’ll ever underestimate you.”

  Scott smiled and laughed again. “You know something, Hart?” he said briskly. “I must admit you keep surprising me.”

  “The world is filled with surprises. It’s never quite the way it seems. Isn’t that precisely what you told Mac
Namara about Dickens’s world?”

  Scott kept smiling and nodded.

  “Vermont, huh? You know, I’ve never been there. Visited Boston once, but that was as close as I got. Do you miss it?” He paused, shook his head, then added, “That’s a stupid question, because the answer is so obvious. But I’ll ask it anyway.”

  “I miss everything,” Tommy replied. “I miss my home. My girl. My folks. My little sister. The damn dog. I miss Harvard, for Christ’s sake, which is something I never thought I’d say out loud. Do you know what I miss? The smells. I never thought being free had a distinct odor to it, but it does. You could taste it in the air, every time the wind picked up. Fresh. It was in my girl’s perfume when I took her out on our first date. In my mother’s cooking on Sunday morning. Sometimes I walk out of the huts and all I see is the wire, and I think I’ll never get beyond it and never smell any of those things ever again. Not for even a minute. Not ever again.”

  The two men took a few more steps forward, right to the entrance to Hut 101. There Scott stopped. He turned his head about for a moment, checking to see if anyone was watching them. It seemed as if they were alone right there in the final moments of day’s light, before the crush of darkness fell over the camp. Scott reached down into his breast pocket and removed a frayed and cracked photograph. He took a slow, lingering look at the picture, then handed it over to Tommy.

  “I was lucky,” Scott said quietly. “The morning of my last mission, I just grabbed their picture and stuck it in my flight suit, right next to my heart. I don’t know why. Never did it on any other mission excepting that last one. But I’m real glad I have it.”

  There was a little light coming from the edge of the doorway, and he twisted so that it fell across the photograph. It was a simple snapshot of a young, delicate, cocoa-colored woman sitting in a rocking chair in the living room of a trim, well-furnished house, cradling a small baby in her arms. Tommy stared at the picture. He saw the woman’s eyes were alert and filled with a soft joy. The baby’s right hand was outstretched, reaching up toward its mother’s cheek.