Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  He put a hand on the tent’s center pole to steady himself as she washed his feet. Then it was her turn.

  This was not the body he’d fantasized about endlessly when they were teenagers hanging out on Howard Avenue. That body was as mysterious as a sacrament, and it had moved on to wherever beautiful things are taken by time. The body before him had borne pain. She was thin; he had seen that through her clothes. Her neck and hands, her forearms and face were sunburned. She looked up as he washed her throat, smiled as he washed her small breasts, let the soap run down into the patch of hair below the points of her hips.

  He rinsed her using one of the jerrycans, the water and suds sliding off her in a glistening wave. It was the most erotic experience of his life or even his dreams, surpassed immediately when she pulled him, not to the hard folding cot behind her, but to a stack of clean laundry, over which she’d thrown a single white sheet.

  * * *

  “So that’s a sponge bath,” Harkins said when they’d finished.

  “That’s the deluxe sponge bath. Only for special GIs.”

  Harkins propped up on an elbow, looked at his watch, and calculated they had four hours until dawn.

  “Should we be worried about somebody seeing us?” Harkins asked.

  “Nah. The nurses have a system worked out. We protect one another’s private moments.”

  “So this happens a lot?”

  “Not a lot, but we’re adults. And this may surprise you, your not being a medical professional and all, but women have needs, too.”

  “You can’t just say a couple of Hail Marys and get over it, like the priests told us boys?”

  “I’ve been saying Hail Marys for months.”

  Harkin knew it wasn’t the right question to ask, but he asked anyway. “So you…?”

  “Use the supply tent? No. This is too small a community. It would be very uncomfortable, I think, to sleep with a colleague. But you’re different. I know you, and you’re … safe.”

  “Wow, safe, huh? I’ll bet that puts me in the running for world’s greatest lover.”

  11

  3 August 1943

  0530 hours

  Donnelly was already fully dressed when she shook him awake before dawn.

  “Let’s go, sleepyhead, there’s a war to be won.”

  Twenty minutes later they were in the mess tent. Thirty or forty people moved in and out, some of them coming off shift, some on break, some, like Kathleen, getting ready for her day.

  On a collapsible table near the door was a bowl full of yellow Atabrine tablets, a malaria preventative that every soldier was supposed to take once a day. A corporal handed a tablet to each person coming in. Donnelly popped hers in her mouth; Harkins stuck his in his shirt pocket.

  “No wonder your driver got malaria,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll take my chances, too. First week on that stuff I threw up for a couple of hours a day until my sides hurt, and that’s when I wasn’t squatting beside a road somewhere. Hard to say which is worse, malaria or the side effects of the cure.”

  “First Sergeant Drake looks for GIs who have yellow stains on their shirts. The guys put them in their shirt pocket, like you just did, and the tablets melt in the heat. Stains the shirt yellow. Now the enlisted guys have to take their dose in front of a noncom.”

  “Like having another mother,” Harkins said. “One the army picked out for you.”

  “A hairy, smelly mother,” Donnelly said.

  They got in line with their mess kits as sweating cooks ladled out reconstituted eggs, strips of bacon. Two big aluminum pots held boiling coffee.

  “It’s not a bad idea for some of our guys, though,” Donnelly said. “Some of them need a lot of coaching. Before anyone was allowed to go on pass, Drake had a formation with the junior enlisted guys, showed them how to put on a condom.”

  Harkins wondered if all nurses talked this openly about sex. Or maybe it was all adult women. Not for the first time it occurred to him how little he knew about what the polite writers at The Saturday Evening Post called “the fairer sex.”

  “He showed them, showed them?”

  Donnelly laughed. “Not like that. He used the end of a broomstick. The guys were all laughing, but it was nervous laughter, you know? You could tell that the younger ones were paying attention.”

  “The nurses have to go through that?”

  “We got a pass. I guess he figured we knew enough about anatomy.”

  When they got to the front of the line, Harkins put two thick slices of bread on his plate, then had the cook ladle a spoonful of eggs onto one slice so he could make a sandwich. He had his canteen cup hooked to one finger, and he held it out for a ladle full of coffee. The coffee grounds, floating on top, formed a little island.

  There were half a dozen wooden tables with benches, banged together by someone who was definitely not a carpenter. Harkins and Donnelly found a space, but before they could sit, Captain Adams, the deputy provost, touched Harkins’ sleeve.

  “Can I get a minute?” Adams said.

  Harkins put his breakfast down next to where Kathleen sat, then the two men stepped to the side.

  “Glad I found you,” Adams said. “Colonel Boone has already talked to my boss, the provost, complaining about you.”

  “He’s been busy, then,” Harkins said. “He’s already shipped out one of the nurses who talked to me yesterday. Looks like he doesn’t want me to dig very deeply.”

  “Well, this whole mess certainly looks bad for the kind of command he’s running here. Maybe he’s starting to clean house—a little late, you ask me.”

  “Maybe,” Harkins said.

  “The provost wants to make sure you share everything with Boone. He’s to be part of this investigation.”

  “What if Boone is a suspect?”

  “Is he?”

  “Not yet, but he could become one.”

  “Based on what?”

  “So far? Boone looked the other way when his docs, some of his docs, acted like assholes with the nurses.”

  “Like how?”

  “Grabbing them, groping them,” Harkins said. “Kind of stuff, you did it in my neighborhood, to somebody’s sister, you’d get your ass beat. Or worse.”

  Harkins looked over at Kathleen, who watched him over the rim of her canteen cup. He wondered if Stephenson had tried to force himself on her. And that’s when he felt something turn for him. He would not leave Kathleen in this mess any more than he would leave one of his sisters.

  “That’s not much. Hardly seems enough to kill somebody over.”

  “I don’t know,” Harkins said. “Look at Stephenson from the nurses’ point of view. How would you feel if some guy—bigger than you, stronger than you, some important job, maybe with a commander willing to look the other way—how would you feel if that guy told you every day that he wanted to stick his dick up your ass?”

  “Whoa,” Adams said, looking around to see who’d heard.

  “Exactly. You wouldn’t say dumb shit like ‘That’s not much.’”

  “OK,” Adams said. “How about, short of rape, short of penetration, it does not rise to the level of a prosecutable crime.”

  “Maybe it should.”

  “We’ll leave that to the lawmakers,” Adams said. “Anyway, are you saying that Boone murdered Stephenson to make this problem go away?”

  “There were easier ways to deal with Stephenson, I think. But he let it go on until maybe it all threatened to blow up in his face. I’m saying it’s a theory.”

  “That’s a pretty far-fetched theory: that the commander—who could have transferred Stephenson—killed him instead. Anything else make you think he should be a suspect?”

  “I’ve heard that Boone is a gambler, a bad one. And judging by the cash I found in Stephenson’s musette bag, our dead doctor was a better gambler.”

  “So Boone owed Stephenson money?”

  “I plan to find that out,” Harkins said.

  Ad
ams sat at an empty table. “OK, try this theory on for size,” he said. “Let’s say Boone has been a bad commander and let Stephenson get away with stuff. Now things have reached a low point—somebody murdered one of his docs. It serves Boone’s best interests and certainly the interests of the command to get this solved, right? So it could be that you and Boone are after the same thing.”

  “But you said he’s complaining about me to the provost marshal.”

  “Maybe he wants an experienced investigator.”

  “You find one yet?” Harkins asked. That was all he wanted yesterday; now, he wasn’t so sure.

  “No,” Adams said. “You’re doing fine. You’ll do fine. It’s only been twenty-four hours. But I want you to keep Colonel Boone apprised of what’s going on. Any big developments in the case, I want you to brief him as soon as possible. I think, and my boss thinks, that he can help. That he wants to help.”

  “Chain of command, all that stuff, right?”

  “Right. I’ll bet we can make it work for us,” Adams said. He actually looked hopeful. Probably because he’d gotten more sleep than Harkins.

  “OK, Captain,” Harkins said. “We’ll do it your way. For now.”

  Adams left, and Harkins walked to where Kathleen was sitting. As he squeezed onto the bench, they were joined by Alice Haus, the nurse he’d met the previous afternoon. When she sat she put her hand on Harkins’ arm.

  “Kathleen told me about your brother,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  Harkins kept his eyes on his plate, muttered, “Thanks.”

  After a moment Haus said, “You kids get some rest? Ready for your day?”

  “Ready for anything,” Donnelly said.

  “How about you, crimefighter?” Haus asked Harkins. She smiled, maybe out of sympathy for his loss, maybe because she knew what had happened in the supply tent. No secrets here.

  “I’m good, thanks,” Harkins said. Besides the unexpected intimacy, Harkins had gotten five hours of sleep; he felt like he’d been resurrected.

  “I figured out who you look like,” Harkins said to Haus. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Eleanor Holm, that swimmer who won a gold medal at the ’32 Olympics in Los Angeles. You know who I mean?”

  Haus nodded. “Yeah? I used to swim, too.”

  Harkins continued. “She was on her way to the ’36 games in Berlin but got yanked from the team at the last minute.”

  “Why?” Donnelly asked.

  “Depends on whose story you believe. The head of the Olympic committee said she got drunk at a shipboard party. Holm said that the old guy made a pass at her and was pissed when she turned him down.”

  “Sounds like a U.S. Army field hospital,” Donnelly said.

  “Holm was on track to make the ’40 Olympics,” Harkins said. “Except that Uncle Adolf had other ideas as to what we’d be doing in 1940.”

  “Yeah,” Haus said. “We’re all a little off the course we’d planned, right?”

  They were all three quiet for a moment amid the clatter of mess tins and multiple conversations. Harkins took a bite of his sandwich, used his fingers to push dripping eggs back into the bread.

  “A whole generation of us not living the lives we’d planned,” Donnelly said.

  Harkins looked around for Colianno. Three doctors settled at a table nearby.

  “I’m assisting Herr Doktor Lindner today,” Haus said, nodding at the men nearby.

  “Lucky you,” Donnelly said. Then, to Harkins, “That guy over there. Blond hair. He’s a German POW.”

  “The future Mr. Alice Haus,” Haus said.

  “He’s a Kraut doctor?” Harkins asked.

  “Keep your voice down. He’s kind of a big deal around here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Haus said, “besides the movie-star looks, he’s a urologist and surgeon. An excellent surgeon.”

  “A urologist? Meaning what?” Harkins asked.

  “You know all those movies the medics showed you in basic training?” Donnelly asked.

  It took Harkins a few seconds to connect the root of the word “urology” with the frightening photos and films the Medical Department inflicted on all recruits, but when he got it, he unconsciously pressed his thighs together. Haus noticed.

  “Yep, those are the ones.”

  “So he treats the clap?”

  “He’s also a surgeon,” Donnelly said. “One of the best I’ve seen, to tell you the truth. You get shot in the dick, he’s the man you want to see.”

  “Plus, he speaks perfect English,” Haus added. “Trained in the U.S., knows about baseball, and an actual nice guy, to boot.”

  “And those blue eyes,” Donnelly said.

  “Staring at you over the top of a scrub mask,” Haus said.

  “So how did he wind up here?” Harkins asked.

  “He volunteered to stay behind with the patients at a German field hospital when the Krauts pulled out of Palermo. That happens more than you might think. Usually captured doctors are only allowed to work on other prisoners, and they’re not allowed to do surgery at all,” Donnelly said.

  “Then we had two GIs come in, one with blast injuries. Urotrauma. The other had been shot a couple of times, including a round that nicked the family jewels. Turns out Boone had read a couple of papers Lindner had published before the war, so Boone asked Lindner if he’d operate. Apparently, he did a great job. Saved both those guys from singing in the boys’ choir.”

  Donnelly took her eyes off the German, looked at Harkins. “It’s the wound every guy worries about, but no one talks about; plus, not too many surgeons want to spend their time sewing up penises.”

  “It’s just not sexy,” Haus said.

  “Wow,” Donnelly said, looking at her watch. “Not even seven and we already have a contender for worst joke of the day.”

  “I do what I can,” Haus said.

  “Boone has been pulling strings to keep him here,” Donnelly said to Harkins. “We don’t have a urologist on staff, and the guy became everyone’s hero when he helped those two GIs.”

  “Why is he wearing an American uniform?” Harkins asked. “POWs, even doctors, are supposed to wear their own uniforms.”

  As an MP, Harkins spent a lot of time taking care of prisoners. His platoon spent three days guarding giant wire compounds near the coast where thousands of Italian prisoners awaited transport to the States. Many of them, the conscripts, had surrendered already wearing civilian clothes, carrying luggage, and calling out to the newsreel cameras, “Detroit! New York!” The latest wave of immigrants.

  “Yeah, First Sergeant Drake was no fan of that either. I don’t know the real reason, but it’s probably easier going around in a GI uniform. He can pass for an American officer with a slight accent. Plus he’s a lieutenant colonel and Boone likes him.”

  “He paw the nurses, too?”

  “No,” Donnelly said. “He comes across as a gentleman, a little straitlaced, even.”

  “More likely a couple of the nurses want to paw him,” Haus said.

  After they’d finished eating, the three doctors, Lindner among them, stood and walked past the table where Harkins sat with Donnelly and Haus. They greeted the nurses, Lindner nodding and smiling. He looked like an Aryan propaganda poster, with his blond hair and Superman chin. Harkins disliked him immediately, and it must have been obvious to Kathleen, who leaned over and whispered to him. “I like your blue eyes,” she said.

  12

  3 August 1943

  0615 hours

  Oberstleutnant Matthias Lindner overheard the nurses use his name, was glad to see, when he stood to leave, that it was Haus and Donnelly, sitting with a lieutenant Lindner did not recognize. The women were great nurses, very competent, and he enjoyed working with them, chatting with them. Haus was an outrageous flirt, of course, but he knew it would be a terrible mistake to act on his urges or hers. Many of the Americans were suspicious of him, waiting for an excuse to complain. And First Sergeant Dra
ke was nearly apoplectic whenever he saw Lindner in his GI uniform, so it was best not to stir up any jealousies among the American doctors who pursued Haus vigorously and fruitlessly. Lindner was not ready to get shipped out with the other prisoners, especially because of a spat over a woman. He had a job to do that went far beyond taking care of patients.

  The doctors he’d been sitting with stopped outside the mess tent to talk about Stephenson’s murder and their theories; Lindner withdrew with a polite comment: “Such terrible news, such an awful thing.”

  He picked up a discarded newspaper from a table outside the tent and tucked it under his arm, kept it there while he walked to the prisoners’ compound on the edge of the hospital grounds. There were two ward tents and a kind of headquarters, which the Americans called an orderly room. Beyond that, a sleeping tent for the medical orderlies—also German POWs—who worked under his supervision, taking care of wounded prisoners. The ranking German noncom had put up a canvas wall at one end of the sleeping tent to create a small room for Lindner. It was only what he rated as a lieutenant colonel and a doctor, but it was also a kind gesture and not anything he would have demanded.

  He stepped into his end of the stifling tent, sat down on his cot, then stood and paced while removing his shirt.

  Stephenson’s murder—he’d heard about it in between operations that morning—had jolted him, maybe even more than it had shocked the Americans. One of his colleagues suggested that Stephenson was murdered by a jilted nurse, but the rest dismissed that theory.

  A surgeon named Souther even got a laugh when he asked, “How could a broad get that angry over getting her ass pinched?”

  Lindner knew the story was more complicated than that. He sat on the cot and opened the newspaper, forced himself to concentrate.

  It was not Stars and Stripes, the GI newspaper printed in theater and handed out for free; it was a two-month-old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which some soldier had gotten in the mail. Judging by its condition, it had been thumbed by scores of homesick men. Lindner scanned the front page, a mix of outdated war news—very short on details—and stories about sports, local politics, the sharp growth in steel production and the need for workers. Some factories had even put women on the shop floor. On page three he found a map showing northwestern Europe, England in the upper corner, Germany and the occupied Low Countries shaded in black. Below the map the headline read: “Allied Bombing Campaign Targets German Industry.”