Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  The rattlesnake and I were acquainted. I had met it on a USAAF base in England where its guardian, a Red Indian, used to let it roam free. I went to the farewell party they threw for their squadron’s Major. His name was Peter Wynn, and I had counted him a friend of mine. The Indian was killed over Lübeck, and Wynn got it in the arse from his snake when he went to clear the Indian’s kit out. I wished the snake dead, but Wynn hadn’t blamed it, and made everyone promise to keep it going. It was going to be a particularly well-travelled reptile. The snake recognized me. It raised its head about an inch off the sand in its big Plexiglas box, and gave me a lazy rattle with its tail. Its eyes twinkled at me. In a human being you would have taken that for good humour: with the snake I wasn’t so sure.

  Tommo shared the table with Les. When the snake spotted me Tommo said, ‘She likes you. Siddown why don’t yuh?’

  I put the words back together the right way round, pulled out a chair, and sat between them. I asked Tommo, ‘Wynn’s snake; does it have a name yet?’

  Tommo leaned forward, and put his finger against a row of small white matchstick men painted on the glass at the top of her box. There were five of them, just under a neatly painted Restaurant sign. He said, ‘They call her Ace, now. She made five kills.’ He tapped the little men as if he was counting them off. At his third tap Ace struck savagely. Poison ran down the inside of the glass screen. I was surprised to see that it was clear. ‘I guess she don’t like me so much,’ he told me.

  We shook hands. I was pleased to see him. The loose strands of my recent life were being drawn together on a muddy hillside in Holland. All I needed now was Grace walking in through the door, looking a million dollars and turning all the heads. She had that effect when she turned it on. There was a stack of black and white six-by-three girlie pictures on the table between Tommo and Les. They seemed to be all of the same girl. She had wavy, dark lustrous hair, and was putting her naked body through startling contortions on what looked like a dark velvet bed cover. She was stunning; somewhere between sixteen and twenty, I thought. I couldn’t tell. I asked, ‘Who is she?’

  Les said, ‘Dunno. They’re American. I took them off that bloke who fell under the tank a few days ago. What do you think?’

  I turned a few of them this way and that, as if I knew what I was doing. She looked as if she could be your next-door neighbour’s daughter. I said, ‘Nah: not my type. Sugar and spice. She won’t amount to much, will she? She’s too skinny, and her tits are too small.’

  ‘Charlie’s wrong,’ Tommo said simply, and, ‘I’ll buy. How many you got?’

  ‘Just these, and he never had the negs. There’s eighteen of them.’

  ‘A dollar each?’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Les. ‘Can I have that in coffee and fags?’

  ‘Sure thing; only I take my cut then.’

  ‘When didn’t you?’ I asked Tommo. ‘I still haven’t forgot what you were asking for bog paper during the bog-paper famine.’

  ‘Business,’ Tommo told me, ‘is business, even between friends.’

  ‘As one friend to another, how d’you get back over here? Weren’t you retiring and leaving the war? The Pink Pole just told me you could get in and out of Germany, even though we’re not there officially yet.’

  I noticed he didn’t answer the first bit. He said, ‘You seen him, then? Cute, ain’t he?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call Pete cute. His eyes glitter like that bloody snake’s. So do yours come to that. The three of you were made for one another. What are you doing over there?’

  ‘Buying Germany before anyone else gets it. There are thousands of people ready to sell where they live, for protection, food and dollars. We got all three. You still got any of that money I changed for you last year? Money you can invest?’

  ‘About a thousand, say thirteen hundred quid. Why?’

  ‘Before I answer that, Charlie, let me point out a significant cultural difference in our backgrounds. To an American a quid is a hard piece of tobacco that you chew, and then spit out. It makes everything in your mouth the same colour as your shit.’

  ‘Pounds, then. Thirteen hundred pounds. Why did you ask me?’

  ‘I can get you a small hunting estate in the Odenwald for that.’ He pronounced it Urdenvald. ‘Lovely bloody country.’

  ‘What about the legal stuff? Deeds of ownership.’

  ‘Piece of piss. The Krauts are very good at that. They might be running out of bread and cheese and bullets, but they’re up to their ears in lawyers, and still keeping the paperwork going. I own a piece of Germany as big as New York State already. Perfectly legal.’

  ‘I bought a large town house from him,’ Les told me. ‘In Stuttgart. Eight bedrooms.’

  ‘Is it still standing?’

  ‘Yep,’ Tommo told us. ‘And what’s more, it’s insured against war damage now.’

  ‘What insurance company would be mad enough to insure houses in Germany against war damage?’

  ‘Mine would.’

  ‘Mine as in mine?’ I asked Tommo. ‘You have an insurance company?’

  ‘That’s right. Me and Lucky.’ I didn’t think that I really wanted to know who Lucky was. ‘It’s a reputable old Washington company. You don’t have to give me the money now. Just give me the nod.’

  I laughed, and said, ‘Why not?’ We shook hands on the deal.

  Tommo said, ‘Congratulations, Charlie. You now own an ill-used, but largely intact mansion – more of a large farm, really – in Morsberg, and about four hundred and twenty acres. Schloss Felgensee something or other; it’s all on the deed. There are two foresters’ cottages and a keeper’s lodge.’

  ‘How do you know all this is for true, Tommo?’

  ‘It’s what me and my officer are over here doing: acquiring property for the US Army.’

  ‘And you just help yourself at the same time?’

  ‘American tradition, son. It’s in our entrepreneurial nature.’

  ‘They don’t call it theft?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Glad I met you again, Tommo.’ I raised my glass to him. I noticed that it was nearly empty. Ace rattled at me warningly. I decided that Ace was too masculine a name for something as bad-tempered as that. Inside my head I added an ‘l’ and an ‘i’, and found myself with Alice.

  A few drinks later Tommo gave me a worried look. We were on our own. Les had wandered off. Tommo said, ‘I left you two kitbags to store for me. They safe?’

  ‘Locked in my car, locked in a garage, behind a safe house in London. It’s owned by the Major’s mob, whatever that is, and run by Les and his brothers: there are bloody hundreds of those. If they were Masons they’d have their own lodge.’

  ‘Like the K. It’s safe then?’

  ‘Absolutely. What’s in them?’

  ‘About two million bucks. Working capital . . .’

  I blew alcohol all over Alice’s Restaurant. She rattled at me again, but it was a friendly sort of rattle.

  ‘You told me it wasn’t illegal, you bastard.’

  Tommo looked uncomfortable.

  ‘It isn’t. Not strictly. It’s deals like this. I own property in England too. It was a steal. Prices started to fall as soon as the Kraut started to bomb shit out of you. So I bought something.’

  ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘I think it’s called Buckinghamshire. Then my government made me an offer for all the produce coming off my land there, and began to send me money for it. I cashed their cheques because the bank would have become fiddly, and pushed the cash into a couple of kitbags. Then it sort of accumulated without me noticing, and then my posting back to the US caught me on the hop. Sorry.’

  It was a funny bloody story. I moved my hand, slowly moving my glass across the table. Alice’s eyes moved with it. Her tongue flicked in and out.

  ‘How are you going to get it out? Isn’t there something called Exchange Control?’

  ‘How easy would it be to get our hands on it: say, if I sent
someone?’

  ‘Ask Les. They’re his brothers. I dare say he could arrange access.’

  ‘For a percentage, you’re saying?’ There was a wince in his voice.

  ‘I should imagine so. You said it yourself: business is business.’

  ‘So I did,’ Tommo said. ‘But I don’t always have to like it.’

  The next morning saw us back in Kate. She had new Perspex windows riveted in place; at the back and in Les’s door. The Major and Les had taken their own advice, and made a night of it. James looked ill, and Les tired. Two girls I’d never seen before turned out to wave us off.

  The lane outside went to Germany. I had expected Dad or James Oliver, or someone to be there to see me off. Not a fucking chance. England groaned and asked, ‘Where did you get to last night, Charlie? I didn’t see you.’

  ‘I was overcome by the emotion of the investiture. I sloped off early to bed.’

  ‘On yer own?’ That was Les.

  ‘Yes; more or less.’

  ‘You can’t do more or less. Either you were on your own, or you weren’t.’

  ‘There was a nurse in the next bed but one from mine. The one between was empty. She was changing when I came into the tent. She didn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘Pretty?’

  ‘OK. Someone who would be nice to know for a long time.’

  ‘Shag her?’

  ‘No. We lay on our beds, and talked until about two. Then she went to sleep.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Dunno. I forgot to ask. She was gone by the time I woke up. Back on duty I expect.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask her for a shag?’

  ‘I don’t know. But there must have been a reason.’ I was being truthful, but I don’t think either of them believed me.

  I busied myself filling and lighting my pipe. Shortly after that the car was full of its thin blue aroma, and Les was whistling ‘Lili Marleen’. James had fallen asleep, his head to one side, and his mouth drooped open. He was snoring. I thought about the girl from last night, and must have smiled. Les stopped whistling ‘Lili Marleen’, and grinned slyly at me. Then he started to whistle ‘I Fall in Love too Easily’, which was a song that that fellow Sinatra had started to trouble us with.

  Eventually he yawned and said, ‘Roman road. Spot ’em a mile off, can’t you?’

  I told him, ‘Probably not. Grace said that most of the straight roads had already been here for a couple of thousand years before the Romans arrived. All they did was lay stone surfaces on top of the old straight tracks they already found.’

  ‘Then what did the Romans do for anyone?’

  ‘Baths. I suppose. They built a wall to keep the Jocks out. That wasn’t bad.’

  ‘Didn’t they wear dresses with purple stripes most of the time, and bugger little boys?’

  ‘Sounds like my old school,’ James told us. I hadn’t realized that he was awake.

  ‘They weren’t terribly good with women.’ I remembered the stories about Boudicca and her daughters.

  Les could be very persistent.

  ‘So they did bugger-all for us, really?’

  James said, ‘Every type of fruit you eat graced a Roman tongue before yours; every building built has got a little bit of Rome in it; every road leads to Rome, and every European army since the Romans marches in the Roman step.’

  ‘Like I said, Major,’ that was Les again, ‘they did bugger-all for us. Why don’t you write that down in your little book?’

  PART FIVE

  Germany: April 1945

  Seventeen

  There was no border post. Just two pork-chopped tanks which had been shoved hurriedly to one side, one in each ditch on either side of the road. One was a British Cromwell, in an elegant overall charcoal black: its turret lay upside down in a field fifty yards away. The other was a Jerry; a Mark 4 Panzer. Les stopped between them. When I wound down my window I smelt the dirty, sweet scent of the monster I had met along the Bois de Boulogne.

  Les said, ‘Close it up again, Charlie, it pongs out there. I think that I should be saying Welcome to Germany, but the Boss has been insisting on demonstrating his navigation skills for the last half-hour, so we could be effing anywhere. Back in France, for all I know.’

  An hour later we rolled into a small German town. That was just a day after the French gave me a Croix de Guerre I hardly deserved. What I remember of that first Jerry town is that the men were too old or too young to be soldiers, and that they looked at me with loathing when Les and I surprised them. They scuttled around heaps of rubble making less sound than the rats. Some of the women we saw walked with hands on their backs, as if massaging away pain. I tried not to notice that. There was a small girl of about twelve with a ripped dress. She froze, and began to tremble as soon as she saw us; tears started to roll down her face. We found a boy with wire-rimmed specs who took us to his father’s house. The local Bürgermeister.

  I sat away in a corner. The Bürgermeister’s wife must have been pretty not so long ago. She brought Les and me substantial glasses of a heavy, white wine each. She had a tight, worried smile. I listened to James questioning her husband, a thin, nervous old man who wrung his hands as if he was washing them. I needed time to think. I needed to think because I realized that at least a quarter of the conversation I overheard was in German, and that I quickly began to understand it. I also realized that the same had been happening to me in France and Holland. Maybe some people are just good at that sort of thing and don’t know it until it happens to them. Perhaps it’s like having an ear for music. I think that Les had realized it was happening to me too, because he raised his glass, and grinned a silent toast. The boy tugged at Les’s sleeve, and asked, ‘Can I have a cigarette, Tommy?’

  I spent the night in the Bürgermeister’s daughter’s bed. She didn’t need it any more. A couple of days earlier some soldiers had murdered her with a flamethrower, after they’d finished with her. Turned her into a carbonized statue, kneeling in a burnt-out room like a black Madonna. James said that it happened that they were French, but they could have been in anybody’s army. The family buried her in the evening, in a shallow grave in a small cemetery. She was wrapped in a quilted bed cover, which stank of kerosene before she was halfway there. Half a dozen old folk turned out to help. One old lady, in particular, wept a mountain, although she made no noise. The boy told me later that she was the school-mistress. James had us go with them. After they laid her in the hole the Bürgermeister looked at me. He and his wife didn’t ask anything: they just looked at me. I saw that Les was also looking keenly at me. I murmured the Lord’s Prayer, and the group followed me in German, the cadence of the lines moving up and down like music heard over water. Finally I bent to take a little soil, but the girl’s mother took it from me and did the honours. Either that was the German way, or she knew that I wasn’t quite what I was cracked up to be.

  James put his hand on my shoulder as we walked back down to the house; sometimes our boots scraped on the cobbles. He spoke two sentences, which were, ‘Nicely done, Charlie.’ And, ‘Thank you.’

  I just hoped that I’d done the right thing. It must have been all right, because I didn’t dream that night. I slept with my hand on my pistol, remembering the last conversation I had had in the Quonset bar the evening before.

  Albie had lurched up with a smaller man who he leaned against. He was all tact, Albie. He said, ‘This is Gumshield. Gumshield is a fast featherweight. He wins us lots of money, so don’t shoot him.’

  Gumshield started, and gave me a worried look. He had a Douglas Fairbanks moustache and sticky-up salt-and-pepper hair. And an interesting variety of facial scars. I guessed maybe he wasn’t so fast after all. I asked, ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Gumshield’s the guy I told you about. He was Grace’s regular poke over here.’

  It didn’t feel as bad as I thought. He had a voice five registers too deep for his size, which made him sound vaguely ridiculous. He said, ‘Sorry, bud. I thought she
was unoccupied. Never took a Padre’s girl before.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You were probably right the first time. What Grace never is, is occupied, that is . . . and I’m not used to being a Padre yet, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t mind then?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I don’t mind as much as I thought I would.’

  ‘That’s good.’ That was Albie. ‘We can all get another drink in then.’

  I OK’d that. I asked Gumshield short questions, and listened as he gave me long answers. He had a tendency to ramble. Albie looked bored, and scratched his hand a lot around the space of his missing finger. The back of his hand looked red and angry. What it had amounted to was that Grace had shared Gumshield’s field bag for a few days, while she waited to hitch up with a group of renegade Red Cross doctors and nurses. They had already tried to cross into Germany a couple of times, and had been sent back with fleas in their Gallic ears. After Grace had hooked up with them Gumshield had a feeling that they’d made it. Albie bellowed a long rolling thunder of a belch that could have stunned a cat, and agreed with him. They were mainly Frogs, they told me, but there were a couple of long-haired Eye-tie drivers from somewhere, and a beautiful blonde German nurse they were bound to have trouble with. They were travelling in a couple of well-stocked US White-type armoured ambulances. They were headed north-east, Gumshield told me, to a place called Löningen. What was in my mind was the map I had studied earlier. It was one of Les’s maps. In my mind’s eye I could see that Löningen. It was on the road to Bremen.

  When we turned out of the gate Les had asked me, ‘Where to, Guv?’

  ‘Isn’t that up to the Major?’

  James told us, ‘Not really. As long as we’re not far behind the front there’s work for us anywhere.’

  So I said, ‘Let’s go to Bremen.’

  I grinned at Les, and he turned and grinned at me and the Major, who told us, ‘Don’t take us anywhere we’re likely to get bombed. That would be irritating.’