CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Map-WW2 Europe
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY- EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
EPILOGUE
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AUTHOR'S NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cate M. Ruane
Copyright © 2018 by Cate M. Ruane
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at www.catemruane.com
Foxford Press, Asheville, NC
First American Edition, June 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-948907-01-9
To my brother, Kevin.
PROLOGUE
Somewhere in Belgium
WHEN THE CALL COMES to Gestapo headquarters, Otto Ulbricht sits at a roll-top desk eating a lunch of cold chicken with a side of over cooked red-cabbage slaw.
On the first ring, he’s thinking about his wife back in Dresden—the meals she makes: pork chops braised with brown sugar, dumplings as light as clouds. He sighs. The phone rings again as he wipes grease from his hands. On the third ring he lifts the receiver, while he throws the remains of his lunch into a trashcan.
“Ja,” he says, nodding his head as he folds back a pad of paper, ready to take notes. “Das Flugzeug Spitfeuer.” The airplane is a Spitfire. He continues to make notations. The repeat of “Ja,” and the forceful pressure of his mechanical pencil, punctuate each period mark. He says in German, “I understand—yes—somewhere north of the tracks.”
Returning the receiver to its cradle, he looks at the clock that hangs above a portrait of the Führer. It will be at least an hour before the others return—longer if the beer is good. If the Royal Air Force pilot survived the crash, an hour will give him a good start at an escape. “Verdammt,” he says, cursing under his breath.
It’s like a race: the Belgian Resistance will try to get to the crash site first. He looks again at the clock and then lowers his eyes, looking into those of Adolf Hitler. Rising from his seat, he approaches the portrait, which always gives him strength.
He scribbles a note and leaves it on his officer’s desk.
Walking to a coat rack, he grabs a long black leather trench coat, even though it’s a sweltering day. He’ll be on a motorcycle; and, besides, when approaching an enemy officer it’s always best to be properly attired. Before buttoning the coat he pats the Luger that fits into a leather harness strapped to his torso. He takes a fedora from the shelf above the rack, pushing it snugly onto his head.
Before he turns the ignition key on his BMW motorcycle, he scans the road that leads to the timber and lath city center—the opposite direction of the crash site. For a moment he hesitates, thinking he should pull one of the others away from his lunch. They might be in any number of cafés or pubs...there’s the problem. A waste of time.
Then he thinks about the glory that will be all his. When finding the RAF pilot, he puts the Luger to his head and pulls the trigger. He’s never gotten a shot at a British officer—only at a few Jews, and Belgians who won’t get in line.
He kick starts the motorcycle. It backfires as he pulls the bike onto the road—tar sticky in the merciless sun.
I will bring honor to the Fatherland.
Thinking this, he gives the bike full throttle, feeling the power of the engine pulsating between his legs.
CHAPTER ONE
Long Island, New York
WHEN THE BOY ROLLED UP TO OUR GATE, I was up in the O’Leary’s oak tree, playing hooky and hiding out from my ma. I seen him lean the bike against our picket fence, reach into his saddlebag, and open the gate latch—which always gives trouble. Next, he swooped up the brick path to our front stoop and knocked three times. I seen it all from above, like a bird sees it, or like an airplane.
The boy called out, “Telegram!” My ma called back that she was coming.
From my brother Jack, I figured.
He’s famous—bold letters in The New York Times: same exact paper President Roosevelt, a New Yorker too, gets delivered to the White House every morning. The president is proud of my brother, I bettya. Edward R. Murrow interviewed Jack on the radio. His voice came through the air and hit the antenna on our roof. Everybody on the block heard it. He was in a movie with Jimmy Cagney, Captains of the Clouds. On top of all that: he shaked hands with the King of England.
His letters came all the way across the Atlantic Ocean—in the belly of ocean liners—the stamps engraved with a portrait of the king, which my ma let me keep if I was careful steaming them off the envelopes. He sent us a black and white of the house he was living in—a hoity-toity place near the sea, once an earl’s.
I’d get the news from Jack at 4 o’clock, when everybody expected me home from school. I was supposed to be in sixth grade grammar class reading Fun With John and Jean, the Catholic school version of Dick and Jane—like the original wasn’t mind-numbing enough. Sister Bridget at Saint Brendan’s I’d handle with an absentee note typed up on my sister’s Underwood, Da’s signature traced using his fountain pen. That wouldn’t work with Ma and I needed to stay out of her path, and how.
Hanging from a branch was my lunch pail—baloney and liverwurst sandwich, an apple, and a nickel for milk. I wouldn’t go hungry and could wait it out. The nickel was better spent on an ice-cold bottle of soda anyways.
“Jack’s faster than a speeding bullet,” I said out loud. Opening my arms wide I became an airplane, buzzing low over the house and the corn fields beyond—flying over to Manhattan, circling the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, then buzzing Ellis Island before cruising all the way to Southend-on-Sea, England, and Jack. Then I put my head back in my book: Treasure Island.
By the time I climbed out of the tree, hours later, my head was filled with pirates and treasure and I’d plum forgot about the telegram.
When I entered the
house, the first thing I noticed was that the radio was turned off, and the place was as quiet as a church on Monday. A yellow jacket buzzed against a screen window in the parlor. My ma wasn’t in the kitchen, where she should’ve been fixing my after school snack and winding up to quiz me about the day’s learning. And another thing was that somebody left the icebox door open and water was spilt all over the linoleum floor.
I called out for my ma but got no answer. Then I seen that her bedroom door was shut closed, which was just plain abnormal. Wondering if my ma was down with something, I tapped.
“Ma? Are you in there?” I asked in a whisper, so as not to wake her if she was taking a lay down, which she hardly ever did in broad daylight.
Had to put my ear flat to the door to catch her words: “Not now Tommy,” she said, fast and sharp.
Sitting on the parlor sofa, I tried to think what could be the matter. I didn’t make the connection to the telegram, not even then.
I looked around the bare room for a clue. We didn’t have fancy things, because my da was laid-off and we was stone-broke. That’s when I seen the telegram put next to the photograph of Jack in his Royal Air Force pilot’s uniform. It took a brave man to fly a Spitfire. The Nazis were always chasing after Jack and trying to shoot him down.
I’d read it in the paper. My brother chased a Messerschmitt AG and got within 10 yards of it before letting loose his guns. He looked the Luftwaffe pilot in the eyes right before the German plane went into a tailspin and then hit the ground in a blaze of fire. He had another German plane on his tail—a Focke-Wulf 190. Jack did an aerial flip, coming up behind it. Two kills in less than five minutes.
The memory gived me a jolt. I stepped to the side table where the telegram was. Very slowly, like it was a booby trap. I read it over a few times before my heart started beating regular again.
Turned out my brother was missing, was all. It didn’t make sense to me that somebody went to all this trouble to tell us. I went missing all the time—like today, missing from Saint Brendan’s. One time I went missing for two days to practice survival skills for a Boy Scout badge. Nobody sent a telegram.
Only once or twice do I remember getting lost for real. There was the day I got a new Schwinn Camelback and was testing it out on long distances. One wrong turn and I ended up in Oyster Bay at Sagamore Hill—that place of President Teddy Roosevelt’s where he kept that taxidermy collection. All I done was ask one of those gardeners to help me make a phone call to my ma. In no time Jack came in his pick-up. While I waited, I examined a few moose heads. The bear and tiger rugs was terrifying to step on. I didn’t get in trouble with Ma, because it was an honest mistake.
My brother was always the one to find me—when I was lost by accident, or hiding out on purpose. He knew all the hiding places, because he’d used them before me. When I was holed up with a good book in the hayloft and late for dinner, Jack came to get me.
Once I got lost in the woods. In the middle of escaping wild Indians, I ducked behind an oak tree. Changing parts, I became an Apache scout and climbed up a dogwood. Somewheres in the switch, I lost north. Starving to death, now just a plain ol’ Irish-American, I was miles from home near a muddy creek when Jack found me. It was astonishing how he’d drive up alongside me in that old Ford pick-up of his whenever I got more than ten blocks from home. The reason I was able to play hooky now, was because my brother was off fighting Hitler.
Every once in a while, Jack showed me a new place to hide. There was an abandoned house he took me to—a creepy place where an old widow once lived. Her husband was killed by a Confederate cannonball in the Battle of Gettysburg, which made it so the house was never painted again. The front porch was rotten and fallen in and there was snake nests up around the dowel trim. We entered through a back window and found ourselves in what used to be the kitchen pantry. Cans of food from before the Great War were still stacked on them shelves. Jack said you could get botulism if you ate from them. Once a bunch of folks died eating olives out of old rusty cans. I didn’t like olives myself but got the point and didn’t touch them cans except to check and see if there was money socked in one of them.
People don’t trust banks anymore. That’s good news for people like Jack and me who like to hunt for treasure. The obvious hiding place is a cookie-jar or under a mattress. Problem is, thieves know this, so people have to be cleverer these days. Cans and jars left on shelves and in iceboxes are good options. And cornflake boxes.
Some fools will ruin a perfectly good book by cutting a hole out of the center of the pages. They’ll find a thick one, like the “S” volume of an encyclopedia. They put treasures inside—small things like diamonds, rare coins, and postage stamps. Or Babe Ruth baseball cards which will be going up in value now he’s retired. Then they put the book back on the bookshelf, thinking no one will notice. It’s one of the first places any halfway decent thief or treasure hunter will look. And what happens later when that same fool needs to learn about the Spanish Inquisition?
One good hiding place is inside of walls. A person good at carpentry can make a hole, put treasures inside where the insulation goes and then patch it up with plaster. People forget to attach a treasure map to their Last Will and Testament, and in that case, it’s fair game. Jack and me tapped around the walls in that abandoned house listening for a change in tone. A couple times we used Da’s hammer to bust a hole.
In this way we stumbled on hidden newspapers dating from March 15, 1889. We looked them over cover-to-cover, hoping for clues to a real treasure but never could find nothing. The funny thing was that on that day in ‘89, the German Navy tried to take over an island called Samoa. That was the first time I learned that we Americans owned an island in the Pacific Ocean. Most people didn’t find out until last year when the Japanese tried to steal Oahu, Hawaii. Back in 1889, it took three American warships to scare the Germans off. Made you wonder—all these years later and my brother fighting the Germans off again.
People are always asking me how it is my brother became a fighter pilot. Well, he learned to fly while working for the A&P. He started out with the supermarket chain when he was not much older than me—mopping floors at night when the store was closed. We live around the corner from Mitchell Field and he worked his way up to a position as a driver—ferrying goods from the airfield to a warehouse.
Jack got in tight with the pilots who worked for the A&P. Before long, he’d learned how to fly and was hired on as a pilot. You could say Jack was a self-made man.
His job was to bring fresh fish to markets around Long Island—fish stinking to high heaven if delivered in the back of a truck. Once he came home with fish-eggs, which he said rich people called caviar and ate on crackers. I left some of them eggs on my sister Mary’s pillow that night. Another time he bringed home a live lobster, which he flew with all the way from Maine. My ma refused to let it in the house. She said she’d be satisfied with a fresh flounder on Fridays.
At the cinema one Saturday night, Jack seen a newsreel featuring the First American Eagle Squadron—a squadron of American pilots flying for Great Britain. The squadron was sort of like the famous Lafayette Escadrilles of the Great War. The Eagles were American pilots who enlisted in The Royal Canadian Air Force and later joined forces with The Royal Air Force—The RAF. Already they’d seen action against the Germans and were heroes in the Battle of Britain. All Jack planned on that night was seeing a good Western but he left a changed man. For my brother Jack, being a fighter pilot was just the sort of life he wanted.
In the summer of 1940, he hitched up to Montreal. America wasn’t in the war yet. Funny thing is, he’d enlisted the same day France fell to the Jerries. At the time I don’t think my brother had anything against the Germans. Jack had a kind word for everybody, even for my sister Mary, the thorn in my side. He wanted to dogfight and who could blame him?
My ma wasn’t happy about him joining the RAF and fighting on the side of Britain. She and my da were born and raised in Ireland—before independe
nce, when the Irish sent all the good potatoes to England and were left with the crummy ones. My da, in his heart, wanted Jack fighting against the British and not for them. Not for the Nazis, mind you, but for the Irish Republican Army. Problem was, the IRA didn’t have Spitfires.
Then Pearl Harbor was attacked, America jumped into the war, and my ma was looking forward to Jack’s transfer to the U.S. Army Air Force. He’d fight for America—that was the main thing. Ma was hoping he’d be sent somewheres like Texas to train new pilots. Jack mentioned that as one possibility. I knew better. My brother would volunteer to go to the Pacific and fight against Japan. That was more his style.
Ma still hadn’t come out of her room. I was back sitting on the parlor sofa, with the telegram in my hand still baffled why we got it. Jack was a grown-up and was allowed to go missing if he wanted. So why’d somebody rat on him to Ma? He was old enough to drive a car, a motorcycle, and an airplane even. Ma teared her hair out when he joined up with England but there was nothing she could do to stop him. He was getting married in two weeks, for Pete’s sake, even though my ma wanted him to marry a girl from the old country, not an English girl. It didn’t make sense, none of it. If Jack was lost for real, the RAF needed to go find him, was all. Maybe they was too busy fighting off the Nazis and couldn’t spare anybody for search and rescue. Maybe they’d telegrammed us hoping my ma and da would find him, so he’d keep fighting.
That’s when an idea began formulating in my mind. I was the best qualified to find Jack, what with all my treasure hunting experience. If he was hiding out from the Gestapo, I’d know the sort of hideouts he’d pick.
Jack was always the one to find me. It seemed only right I should help him out when he was in a tough spot. Besides, my da needed to find a job and be the breadwinner. That left me the only man in the family to take on the responsibility of finding Jack. I wasn’t even able to find ten-cent lawn mowing jobs. What with the depression and all, people was either mowing their own grass or just letting it grow tall. And I was afraid of dogs, so being a paperboy was out of the question. I was no use to the family staying here in East Hempstead.
Telegram For Mrs. Mooney Page 1
