by Ed Ruggero
“Boone told her he’d be all set once he got back to the States. She thought he was talking about money.”
“The black market?” Harkins asked.
“That’s what I asked, but she didn’t think so. She didn’t say why.”
“Was he the father of her baby?”
Ronan shrugged. “Could have been, I guess. They spent some time together; off duty, I mean. But they would have been an odd couple.”
“How so?”
“Whitman was vivacious, always cheerful, and cute as a button. Boone is a sourpuss, looks like a scarecrow, and acts like he’s seventy years old. Not sure it matters, anyway, because once Stephenson started paying attention to her, I don’t think she talked to any other doc.”
“OK, thanks,” Harkins said. He left Colianno and Ronan alone and went back outside to the jeep.
Maybe Boone had been a jilted lover. Maybe Whitman had tossed him out in favor of Stephenson. It was possible, but probably not provable without testimony from the dead Whitman or a confession by Boone.
But money. Now, that could be a reason to kill someone.
33
4 August 1943
2130 hours
Harkins and Colianno spent the better part of the day at the crime scene and driving around Palermo making sure Ronan was safe. It was dark by the time the nurse was settled enough to stay on her own again. Colianno finally persuaded Giovanna to come back and keep the nurse company, although she left her son with friends. As the GIs left, Giovanna brought out an ancient lupara and laid it on the kitchen table. Colianno asked her about it.
“What did she say?” Harkins asked.
“Any more Americans show up and I’m not with them, she’s going to shoot first.”
They drove south on the Via Oreto, the dark hills south of the city still visible above the rooftops. A column of three U.S. Army deuce-and-a-half trucks pulled out in front of them before they cleared the city proper, forcing them to slow down. When the trucks stopped on the narrow road to let vehicles traveling in the opposite direction go by, Colianno leaned on the tinny horn.
“Come on, for chrissakes.”
Harkins, sitting in the passenger seat, had a good look at the man in the passenger seat of the last jeep to pass them. It was the sergeant who’d come looking for Colianno.
“You see that?” Colianno asked. He’d seen the man, too.
“Your friend from last night,” Harkins said.
When the traffic ahead of them cleared and they drove out of the city, the road went from paved to unpaved, although it was a bit wider. Harkins turned in his seat and saw the blackout lights of a vehicle following them.
“Can you see who it is?” Colianno asked. He didn’t seem excited, and certainly not worried.
“No,” Harkins said. “You ready to tell me what that was about last night?”
Colianno remained silent.
“Stubborn, aren’t you?” Harkins said, then turned in his seat again. Behind him, he could hear the other vehicle’s engine straining to close the gap, and he could tell by the sound that it was a jeep, not a truck.
“The bastard’s trying to catch us,” Harkins said. He turned front again and told Colianno, “Just keep driving. If that’s the gang from last night, we don’t have time for this shit.”
When Harkins turned around again, the other jeep was gaining on them. They were doing maybe twenty miles an hour through the dark.
“Goddamn it, can’t you drive faster?”
“Might be better to get this over with, Lieutenant.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We have to find Kathleen and figure out where Boone is. I’ll decide when we stop and for what.”
And that’s when the jeep behind clipped them, the driver using his right front bumper to bang Harkins’ jeep on the left rear. It was a tactic Harkins had seen used in a police chase in Philadelphia, and it worked the same way here. Colianno turned the steering wheel against the spin, but the jeep skidded sideways into a shallow roadside ditch just deep enough to stop the tires and make the engine stall.
“What the fuck, Colianno?” Harkins yelled. “Get us the hell out of here!”
Colianno, still silent, pressed the starter. Harkins got out of the jeep and stepped from the ditch into the road just as three men approached.
One of them said, “Looks like you’re having problems, there, Lieutenant.”
There was enough moonlight for Harkins to see them clearly now. The short man, the one who’d done all the talking last night, was a buck sergeant, about Colianno’s height but at least thirty pounds heavier.
“What the hell was that about, Sergeant?”
The two soldiers who’d been in the sergeant’s jeep stepped up, one on each side of Harkins.
“Your boy there knows.”
Colianno was out of the jeep, standing beside and a bit behind Harkins.
“This ain’t got nothing to do with you, Lieutenant,” the sergeant added.
He looked like a circus strongman, all arms and chest, skinny legs. The two guys with him were both big; the one to Harkins’ left easily went two hundred pounds. The man to his right was close to that. They projected confidence, a little swagger, but moved flat-footed.
“We come for this piece of shit,” the sergeant said, indicating Colianno.
“He’s not leaving here with you,” Harkins said.
“Says who?” the big man on Harkins’ right said. Up close, Harkins could see that his face was scarred by acne. He had thick lips and breathed through his mouth.
Harkins reached down to his hip.
“You going to shoot us, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said. “’Cause we’re unarmed.” The three held their hands up. “Our weapons are in our jeep back there.”
“It’s always an option,” Harkins said.
“How about you just step out of the way. Then nobody gets hurt.”
Harkins looked at Colianno. Normally the skinny paratrooper was bristling for a fight, any fight, but now he just looked sad.
“It’s OK, Lieutenant,” Colianno said, unbuckling his pistol belt and lowering his weapon to the ground. “This won’t take long.”
“Who asked you?” Harkins shot back at him.
Then, to the other three, Harkins said, “I’ve got work to do, and this man is helping me. So you three clowns get the hell out of here and, if you’re lucky, I’ll forget that you ran us off the road.”
“Or what?” the private on Harkins’ left said.
Harkins stepped closer to the soldier. He did not want to throw the first punch, but he was ready.
The big man couldn’t resist the temptation of Harkins being so close. He threw a clumsy roundhouse that Harkins easily ducked. Straightening up, he threw a quick jab, caught the GI square on his nose, which made a wet, crackling sound, an egg hitting a sidewalk. The kid went down to his knees, both hands pressed to his face, moaning.
“I got to fight this other guy, Lieutenant,” Colianno said, tilting his head to the sergeant.
Harkins still had no idea what was going on, but Colianno was clear on what he wanted.
“Jesus Christ,” Harkins said. “OK, then. One on one.” Looked like Boone would have to wait.
The bleeding man stayed down. His partner, the other big private, was glued in place, had not even moved his feet, had not said a word.
The sergeant approached Colianno with his fists up. Colianno raised his arms in a defensive posture, like a boxer pressed back to the ropes. The sergeant hit him in the face, jabbing right through the paratrooper’s hands.
Harkins had seen Colianno fight. When his blood was up, he was like a man possessed. Now he was something opposite. He did not seem afraid, just resigned.
The sergeant hit him again, and Colianno made no move to block it.
On the ground, the bleeding soldier found his voice. “Hit him, Sarge! Kill him!”
The sergeant threw two quick jabs, both of which connected.
“Don’t
do that,” the sergeant yelled at Colianno. “Don’t just stand there!”
The sergeant swung again, catching Colianno on the side of the head, then followed with a right to the body. The paratrooper doubled over and Harkins heard the wind go out of him. Still, Colianno had not thrown a punch.
Now the sergeant seemed furious, angry that Colianno would not fight back. He began hammering the paratrooper as if hitting a heavy bag. Left, right, left, right. They were not jackhammer blows, nothing meant to put Colianno down. The sergeant was punishing him, and Colianno was taking it. Willingly, even. The soldier who’d been egging on the sergeant fell silent.
The sergeant’s arms were getting tired. Harkins, who’d spent years in Philadelphia gyms, knew how exhausting it was to throw punch after punch, even at an unresisting opponent.
“Fight me, you little wop bastard!” the sergeant said, on the edge of screaming, maybe crying.
Finally, Colianno, his face bloody, wrapped the sergeant with both arms in a clinch.
The sergeant freed one fist and hammered the back of Colianno’s head, then his back. Colianno managed to pull his attacker to the ground. The two men rolled in the dirt, the sergeant crying, Colianno saying something to him in a low voice.
Finally they stopped, entwined, like men who had pulled each other from a shipwreck. Colianno spoke in the same low tone. Harkins looked around. Both soldiers who had come with the sergeant were staring at their feet.
“Did he?” the sergeant asked Colianno, his voice strangled with grief. “Did he?”
Colianno let go of the other man and sat back on his haunches. The sergeant got to all fours, then stood up, wiping snot from his face with the back of a sleeve. He looked at Harkins, then at his two comrades, then at Colianno.
“Fuck it,” he said. He turned and walked away, the other two men following behind.
Harkins had no idea what he had just witnessed.
He helped Colianno to his feet, then led him to the jeep, where he found a first-aid kit and started dressing the cuts on the paratrooper’s face.
Colianno, his head tilted back, stared at Harkins with one eye that had not swollen shut.
“Well?” Harkins said.
Colianno waited, and to Harkins it looked as if he were weighing whether he wanted to explain anything.
“You might have heard from your brother that our drop was all screwed up.”
“He said guys were scattered all over the place,” Harkins said. “Just linked up with the first Americans they found.”
“Yeah, that happened to me. Wandering around in the dark, every little noise making me want to piss my pants. Finally I caught on with a group. Couldn’t see anybody—it was still dark—but we got in some kind of order and moved out cross-country, looking for more of our guys, I guess, and our objectives.
“We ran smack into an Italian patrol, everybody shooting at everybody. Can’t see dick. No plan, no idea what we’re dealing with. Finally, they pulled back, left one of their guys, a kid. He was wounded in the leg and couldn’t stand. I wrapped the wound and talked to him, you know, just to calm him down. He was scared shitless.
“And when the sun came up, our guys—there were ten of us who had found each other—our guys came over one by one to look at him. He wasn’t very scary when you saw him in daylight. I’d be surprised if he weighed a hundred pounds. Had this pathetic little mustache, skinny arms.
“Anyway, he finally got up the nerve to ask for a cigarette. So I gave him one and he thanked me. He was just sitting there, smoking.
“There was a sergeant in the group, name of White; he was from some other company in the regiment. I didn’t know him, but he was the only noncom, so he was in command, you know? And a couple of the guys started asking him what we were going to do, when we were going to move, how we were going to find our units. We were from different companies, different battalions, even. White told me to stop talking wop gibberish to the prisoner, and I said something like, ‘He ain’t hurting anybody. He’s just a kid, and happy the war is over for him.’
“And White said that General Patton had warned everyone not to trust the Germans and Italians, even when we took them prisoner, because they could turn on you. Shoot you in the back when you weren’t paying attention, some bullshit like that. I said, ‘What’s he gonna shoot you with? His fucking finger?’
“And one of the other troopers, some goofy kid from Oregon or some goddamned place, said, ‘Well, geez, Sarge. He don’t seem so dangerous to me.’
“And White was just staring at the prisoner. Not saying anything, just watching. And finally he said, ‘OK, saddle up. We’re moving out.’
“And I stood up and said, ‘Well, this kid can’t walk. Maybe we leave him here and the guys coming over the beach will find him.’
“‘We could do that,’ White says. Then he walks over to the prisoner—I’m standing right next to where this kid is sitting on the ground. And White shoots him in the forehead with his rifle. Bam. No warning. Didn’t even change the expression on his face. ‘Now you don’t have to worry so much about your little dago friend,’ he says to me.”
Colianno locked eyes with Harkins.
“Kid looked like one of my cousins,” he said. “Shit, could easily have been a cousin.”
Harkins moved slowly, poured some water from his canteen onto a bandage and handed it to Colianno, who used it to wipe blood from a split lip. They sat quietly for a few minutes. A jeep stopped; two GIs inside asked Harkins if he needed help getting out of the ditch.
“I think we got it,” he told them. “Thanks anyway.”
When they’d driven away, Harkins turned back to Colianno. “What’d you do?”
“Everybody was moving out, so I just started walking. I didn’t really know what was happening. I mean, I had seen it with my own eyes; hell, the kid’s blood splashed all over my boots. But I still had a hard time believing it, you know?”
“Yeah,” Harkins said, leaning against the jeep. He had already figured out the rest of the story and wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.
“That sergeant you fought, he a friend of White’s?”
“His brother,” Colianno said. “He’s in the Forty-Fifth Division.”
Harkins looked down at his shoes. “What happened to White?”
“We took some fire from a pillbox later in the day; this is still D-Day. Not effective fire. Didn’t come near hitting any of us. We crawled up on the box to throw grenades in. I was on point, and I called out in Italian for them to surrender.
“And the guys inside said they wanted to give up. Said there’d been a German noncom with them, you know, to make them fight. But they’d killed the Kraut and just wanted to surrender. There were three of them, and they were really scared.
“So I say, ‘I’m taking these men prisoner,’ and White comes up behind me—he’s not even crawling, he’s just walking up to the pillbox. He’s got, maybe, four grenades in his hands, and he says, ‘The hell you are.’
“He tosses one at the aperture, but it bounces off and explodes on the ground, outside the pillbox. And now the guys inside are screaming and pleading with me to save them.”
Colianno had a faraway look. He was back at that pillbox on D-Day, a place, Harkins thought, he’d visit in years of nightmares.
“So you did,” Harkins said. “You saved them.”
Colianno nodded. “Yeah. I shot White. He kind of sat down, looking at me. Then just fell back.”
Harkins looked at his driver, his face lit by a distant streetlight. Justified or not, he had just confessed to a murder, probably expected Harkins to arrest him.
I’m a lawman, Harkins had told Patrick.
Colianno had been taught to kill in the name of some cause: God, country, patriotism, good versus evil, us versus them, all of it abstract. He had killed, probably, men who’d been trying to kill him. He’d risked his life for a squad-mate he detested; had killed again to stop a further crime.
“The other guys out the
re, they all saw what happened, and somebody said something, I guess, because White’s brother found out. Your brother, Father Pat, has been asking around. Only a matter of time before he finds out everything, too.”
Harkins wondered what his brother would do when he learned that Colianno had killed another paratrooper. Patrick was far from the typical priest, had never been one to think the world was black-and-white, damned-or-saved.
Thinking about Patrick made Harkins consider his own reaction. As a cop, he’d seen life in too many shades of gray to think there was always an easy answer.
“So, you gonna turn me in?”
“I don’t think so,” Harkins said. “Maybe we’ll wind up in adjoining cells in the stockade.”
34
4 August 1943
2300 hours
Harkins and Colianno drove back up the hill to the hospital area. From a sharp turn in the road above Palermo, Harkins could see flashes on the eastern horizon.
“Artillery,” Colianno said, braking, slowing to negotiate a narrow spot in the road.
Harkins looked to the east, where yellow light bounced off the underside of a few clouds, the sound reaching them later. The horizon was a tableau of backlit hills, the rugged central plateau of the island.
“Something going on,” the paratrooper said above the noise of the jeep’s engine. “Sustained fire like that means we’re getting ready to move forward, or the Krauts are coming this way and we’re trying to stop them.”
“Kathleen said Patton wants to beat the Brits to Messina,” Harkins said.
“That man scares me.”
The jeep’s blackout drive did not shine forward. The narrow strips of dim light were barely enough to warn oncoming drivers that another vehicle was approaching. The best they could do on the narrow road was a few miles an hour, and there were places where a man walking might have outpaced them.
“What’s the plan when we get to the hospital?” Colianno asked.
“Check on Kathleen,” Harkins said.
“That’ll make her happy all over again, us hanging around.”
“I’m going to arrest Boone,” Harkins said, leaning forward in his seat, willing the jeep to go faster. “I wish I had my handcuffs. Nothing as satisfying as slapping the bracelets on somebody who thinks he can’t be touched.”
