Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s just that he’s been trying to make it as hard as possible for me to talk to nurses and doctors. I’m wondering if collapsing the whole hospital into a circus train is part of that.”

  “Nah,” Kathleen said. “The rumor mill says that the Brits are stalled over on the east coast of the island, and that Georgie Patton is pushing everybody hard so that he can beat them to Messina.”

  Messina, the island’s third-largest city, sat at the apex of a triangle pointed at the toe of the Italian boot and was the main objective of Montgomery’s British forces. The Americans were supposed to guard Monty’s left as he pushed the Germans and Italians back. But George S. Patton, commander of the newly minted Seventh Army, wanted to be no man’s second. He was racing to outstrip the British advance, driving his American units along the rugged northern coast and fighting through successive German defensive lines. The hospitals were full of wounded men who’d made down payments on the stateside headlines Patton envisioned for himself as he beat the British.

  “Anyway, moving is just part of what we do, you know, depending on how the fighting is going,” Donnelly said. “But I see your point about all the confusion, the nurses being shipped out and such, everything making it harder for you, too.”

  Harkins looked out at the water, where U.S. and Royal Navy ships lay at anchor while smaller craft dodged back and forth to the port. The Germans had blown up most of the port infrastructure to make things as difficult as possible for the Allies. Still, tons of materiel made it to shore every hour, everything from flashlight batteries and cotton swabs to locomotives and rail cars. Harkins had heard that as much as twenty-five percent of it disappeared into the black market, stolen by Sicilians, who were, in some cases, helped by GIs.

  “Can you stay and have something to eat with us?” Harkins asked Donnelly.

  She stood up, waved at the ambulance driver who was parked waiting for her. “No, thanks. I’ve got to make sure all the admin stuff and patient records get packed up. And I’m backup surgical nurse tonight, too.”

  “You know,” Harkins said, “before I came to the hospital I would have guessed that you guys have it pretty easy. Tents with cots. A mess tent and cooks. But you must be exhausted all the time.”

  The ambulance pulled up next to the café. Donnelly opened the door and stood on the running board, in her men’s shoes and outsized trousers, with road dust in her hair and in the tiny wrinkles beside her eyes. She looked ten years older than her age, but Harkins saw something else, too. She was fully engaged, completely alive, thoroughly dedicated to her patients.

  “You know what we say in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, right?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  32

  4 August 1943

  1230 hours

  There was nothing on the menu board at the café, and the owner told Colianno there was a shortage of everything. Trade with the eastern end of the island was impossible because of the battle lines, and the roadways on the Allied, or western end, were clogged with military traffic. The American navy kept most fishermen bottled up in Porto Palermo, and two hundred thousand GIs—all sick of army food—ate anything they could buy, steal, or otherwise get their hands on.

  Colianno haggled with the café owner and finally came to a compromise.

  “He’s charging us four times as much as he usually does.”

  “Maybe it’s a tax for invading his country,” Harkins said. “What’d we get?”

  “Polpo bollito. Probably fresh out of the sea this morning, or so he says.”

  Harkins looked out at the harbor, large sections of which were streaked with the silver and blue of fuel oil leaked from sunken ships.

  “Hope it doesn’t come with any of that shit that’s spread all over the water.”

  The café owner brought out a ceramic pitcher of wine and two mismatched glasses. Colianno poured them each a few fingers.

  “My brother told me that your regimental commander put you in for a Silver Star. Something about you pulling a wounded guy out of a foxhole while a tank was trying to run over him.”

  Colianno did not respond, but called to the owner, who appeared with a pitcher of water.

  “Is that what happened?”

  The paratrooper sipped his wine, took a big swallow of water. “The tank was trying to run over a bunch of us. Did run over a few foxholes. The guys who’d dug deep enough were OK.”

  Harkins figured that meant that some had not dug deep enough.

  “And the guy you pulled back?”

  “Name’s Quint. He took a bunch of shrapnel in his back, legs, and ass from mortar rounds the Krauts were dropping on us. He couldn’t get out of the hole,” Colianno said. “The tank was headed for him—I’m pretty sure the Kraut driver spotted Quint’s foxhole and mine, which was right next to his. Anyway, the tank stopped to shoot at something behind us, so I jumped up, ran over there, and yanked him out by his feet. Pulled him back about thirty yards. Must have hurt, because he screamed the whole time. I guess I kind of dragged him on his face. It’d be an improvement.”

  “He make it?”

  “Last I heard, yeah. He was complaining about eating dirt while I was pulling him. Ungrateful shit.”

  Harkins laughed, thinking Colianno meant it as a joke, but the private was not smiling. “He’s your buddy, though, right?”

  “Fuck, no. I hated that bastard. He and I tussled all the time in North Africa. He was always bellyaching about something. Easily the biggest eight ball in our squad.”

  “But you risked your life to save him.”

  Colianno looked at Harkins as if the lieutenant had missed something obvious. “So?”

  “So doesn’t that strike you as—I don’t know—strange? Surprising? Unexpected?”

  “No.”

  Harkins waited.

  “Look, Lieutenant. I don’t know what it’s like in the MPs, but in an infantry squad, you have to depend on the guy next to you, and he’s gotta know he can depend on you.” Colianno shrugged, as if the thought were just occurring to him. “I’d take a bullet before I’d let one of my guys down. Even a bastard like Quint.”

  The food arrived, modest portions of something white and boiled. Harkins looked at his plate and thought about what Colianno had said. The response—I’d take a bullet—sounded like something Hollywood would come up with. But Colianno had actually been shot at, had risked taking a real, not a movie, bullet.

  “What is this?” Harkins asked.

  Colianno stuffed a forkful into his mouth, breathed around it because it was hot, said something that sounded like ball piss.

  “What?”

  Colianno swallowed and said, “Boiled octopus. And if you’re going to be a pantywaist and not eat yours, I will.” Colianno shoved another, smaller bite into his face. “You Irish don’t know a thing about what good food is,” he said.

  “You know,” Harkins said, “a Silver Star might get you home faster when this is all over. I hear they’re going to award points for campaigns, decorations, wounds; and guys with the most points will go home first.”

  “Bad luck to talk about that kind of stuff. You stop paying attention to what’s going on in front of you, you’re liable to get killed.”

  Harkins poked at the octopus with his fork. “I got an uncle,” he said. “Actually my ma’s uncle, who was in the Great War. Only reason we knew he had any medals was because us kids used to go through his old duffle bag when he slept on our couch.”

  “He lived with you?”

  “In between jobs or girlfriends,” Harkins said. “My ma told me that when he came home from the war he just sat on his mother’s back stoop every day, all day, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. For eight months. Anyway, when I joined up I went to see him. He’s in pretty bad shape now, but I thought he could give me some pointers about the army, you know? About the war.”

  “So what did he sa
y?”

  “Said it was all bullshit, all of it. Said those guys you hear down at the American Legion talking about the war weren’t anywhere near the real thing.”

  “That part sounds about right,” Colianno said. “I can already see that with guys in my unit. The guys doing the most talking are the most full of shit.”

  “I asked my uncle about combat. He said, ‘I went where I was told to go, I did what I was told to do, and I was scared shitless all the time.’”

  Colianno laughed and said, “Your uncle’s a friggin’ genius.”

  Harkins was about to agree, when they were interrupted by a small boy who ran up to their table. He panted a few sentences to Colianno, who asked two questions.

  “Let’s go,” Colianno said, standing and pushing the table away. “There’s been a shooting at my aunt’s place.”

  * * *

  The military police had the street blocked by the time Colianno and Harkins pulled up. Their vehicle wasn’t yet stopped when Colianno jumped out and ran to a ground-floor door, where an MP sergeant stood. Harkins followed and could see inside, where a body too big to be Ronan lay covered with some sort of cloth.

  Colianno asked the sergeant, “Any others?”

  “Ain’t one enough?” the sergeant said.

  Harkins took Colianno by the elbow, pulled him out of earshot of the MP.

  “OK, so that’s not Ronan,” Harkins said. Colianno looked like he might throw up.

  “Let’s figure out how we want to play this. We don’t want to lead the MPs to Ronan, right?”

  “I showed her a second house, another place to hide if somebody found out about this one. She’s supposed to go there if things go south.”

  Harkins, impressed, said, “Good. That’s great. So if she’s not around here somewhere, we’ll go look for her there. If she is here, let me do the talking and I’ll see if I can’t bullshit our way out of this situation. What I don’t want is for us to be ordered to sit around waiting to be questioned. Let’s play ignorant.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” Colianno said. “Let’s make it quick, OK?”

  Harkins reached into the pocket on the back of his seat and fished out his MP brassard, the armband that identified him as a military police officer.

  There were four MPs in the courtyard. A tall PFC had one of the English-Italian phrasebooks issued to the invasion force and was trying to question an old woman in the entryway of an apartment. She could not have been five feet tall, and when she spoke, Harkins noticed that she had only a few teeth clinging to her gums, lonely sentinels manning an abandoned outpost.

  Colianno saw this little farce, walked up and offered to translate.

  Harkins approached the unhappy-looking sergeant in the doorway. He did not recognize any of the men, who were from another military police unit.

  “I’m Lieutenant Harkins.”

  The sergeant saluted, stepped out of the doorway. Behind him, Harkins saw a body covered in what he now saw was a tablecloth, GI shoes sticking out from below. Blood had soaked a large circle in the center of the cloth, had leaked out onto the floor in a small, dark river.

  “I’m Sergeant Sutherland, and I’m glad you showed up, Lieutenant. We got flagged down while on patrol, and I’m not really sure what to do here.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Harkins said. “Unfortunately, I’m not here to take over the investigation. You should send for the provost, if you haven’t already.”

  Harkins stepped through the door, and Sutherland stepped back to make room for him to pass. The body lay in the middle of a small front room; a tiny table and chair had been knocked over, perhaps in a struggle. The rest of the apartment appeared to run straight back, shotgun style.

  “No sign of anyone else?”

  “No other bodies; other than that I haven’t had a chance to look around much.”

  Closer to the body now, Harkins saw that the dead man had to be over six feet tall.

  “Shit,” he said. Then, to Sutherland, who was, however reluctantly, in charge of the crime scene, “Mind if I have a look?”

  The sergeant shook his head, and Harkins squatted beside the corpse, pulled the tablecloth back from First Sergeant Drake’s face.

  “You know who that is?” Sutherland asked.

  “First Sergeant Irwin Drake, Eleventh Field Hospital, just up the hill south of the city.”

  Harkins looked at Sutherland, who stood with his thumbs tucked into his pistol belt, looking worried and clueless.

  Probably what I looked like standing over Stephenson.

  “You’ll want to write this down, Sergeant.”

  The noncom pulled out a pencil and pocket notebook. Harkins was repeating the information when Colianno walked in. The paratrooper looked at the body, then at Harkins, made a come outside gesture with his head.

  When the two men were out of earshot of Sutherland, Colianno said, “It was another GI. The old woman across the courtyard told me she heard someone pounding on my aunt’s door. Tall, skinny guy in an American uniform. He went in, there was some loud talk in English, then a gunshot, and the tall guy ran out.”

  “Did you share all this with the MPs?”

  “Not yet. I told them that she heard a gunshot and saw a man running. I left out the fact that he was a GI, left out the description. Thought I’d see what you wanted to do first.”

  “Did the neighbor see what happened to Ronan and your aunt?”

  “No. I figure they must be at the other safe house.”

  “We’ll check there, then head back to the hospital to see where Boone is,” Harkins said.

  “You think it was Boone?”

  “Tall, skinny American,” Harkins said. “Maybe Drake came looking for Moira, and Boone followed him.”

  “How did Drake find this place?”

  The two men looked around, and Harkins spotted the jeep at a nearby intersection, the driver looking dejected as he spoke to an MP. He pointed. “Drake used the same driver Kathleen used, I’ll bet.”

  “Goddamn it,” Colianno said.

  “Still doesn’t explain why Boone would shoot Drake, if that’s what happened.”

  “He’s on a goddamned Bonnie and Clyde shooting spree, you ask me,” Colianno said. “At least Stephenson got what he deserved.”

  “Drake didn’t,” Harkins said. “Didn’t deserve this.”

  * * *

  The second safe house belonged to another of Colianno’s family members, a cousin named Giovanna. On the short ride over, the paratrooper explained that Giovanna’s husband had been drafted into the Italian Army and had died of dysentery in North Africa in 1941.

  Colianno parked the jeep on the sidewalk next to an old woman who was sitting on a low stool, selling fruit from a basket at her feet. Colianno killed the engine and greeted her, but the woman yelled something unfriendly back. She kept up an angry patter as the Americans walked away.

  “She upset you almost ran over her toes?” Harkins asked. When Colianno didn’t answer, Harkins asked, “What’d she say? Infamia? What’s that?”

  Colianno stopped, looked back at the old woman, then at Harkins. “It means something bad somebody does. There’s a word in English. Infamy, like FDR used in his speech.”

  “’Cause you parked on the sidewalk?”

  “No, Lieutenant. It’s because I’m Italian—I have a Palermo accent, like my parents. But I’m here as an invader.”

  The woman, seeing that they’d stopped, struggled to her feet, still complaining. Harkins watched her.

  “What’s she saying now?”

  “She asked if I killed any Palermo boys.”

  Colianno turned and trotted ahead, leaving Harkins thinking about the position the paratrooper was in, here in his parents’ country.

  Jesus, Harkins thought.

  Harkins followed his driver into a courtyard, where Colianno was already knocking on a door. Ronan answered, threw herself into Colianno’s arms, and sobbed into his neck for nearly a minute.


  I guess the charade is over, Harkins thought as he stood by awkwardly.

  When Ronan pulled herself away, she looked at Harkins and said, “Sorry.” He wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for the tears; for the fact that she was AWOL; or for her relationship with Colianno, a private.

  They walked inside and Harkins said, “First Sergeant Drake is dead.”

  “Jesus,” Ronan said. She sank into a kitchen chair, put her head in her hands.

  “Do you know who shot him?”

  “Had to be Boone. He came to the door while I was talking to Drake. The first sergeant came to talk me into going back.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I hadn’t decided yet. He asked me if I knew what Stephenson had on Boone.”

  “And?” Harkins asked, hoping she’d remembered something.

  “I never got a chance to answer. That’s when Boone started knocking on the door, hollering ‘Let me in.’ Drake told me to go out the back. I came here, and Giovanna left with her son.”

  Harkins looked around. There was a flimsy shelf affixed to one wall. On it, a photo of a small boy in a cardboard frame. The boy looked to be about six, with big, dark eyes and straight black hair. Another photo showed a young man in an Italian Army uniform, a baby in a white christening gown, and a young woman, presumably Giovanna. The husband looked serious; Giovanna had allowed a tiny smile at the corners of her mouth.

  “There’s no way I’m going back now,” Ronan said. “Not until Boone is arrested.”

  “We’ll need your testimony to put Boone at the scene,” Harkins said.

  “Can’t you arrest Boone based on what Moira already told you?” Colianno wanted to know.

  “Yeah, although it’s going to be tricky, arresting a senior officer, a commander, right in his own backyard,” Harkins said.

  “I’ve been thinking about Boone and Stephenson,” Ronan said.

  “You recall something?”

  “Remember Whitman, the nurse who choked to death right after we got to Sicily? She said something once about Boone. At the time I didn’t think it meant much, now I don’t know.”

  “OK,” Harkins said.