Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  Adriana smiled at him as she whipped water into a bowl of reconstituted eggs. Harkins smiled back and said, “It’s true. You people can steal anything you want from right under our noses.”

  Since it was clear he was talking to himself, she did not respond, but worked fast at the ancient iron stove. Minutes later she handed him the eggs, even put a little green sprig on the plate as a garnish. He drank half the pitcher of water, wishing she had stolen some coffee. By the time he finished eating, she had disappeared. He leaned his head back to the wall behind him, and in seconds he was asleep.

  He woke to Adriana’s voice, but opened his eyes to see two of Colianno’s male cousins staring at him, their faces inches from his own. When he started, they laughed and one of them applauded. They’d thought he was dead.

  The three Sicilians started talking at once, their voices rising and falling like birdsong. Soon they were arguing, ignoring Harkins. When he stood, the older of the two men turned to him and unleashed a barrage of sentences, nodding as he spoke, as if this might help the Irish-American cop understand.

  It was the world’s most frustrating game of charades, with the two men using their hands to describe something that might have been a box. Then one of them mimed walking toward the box, looking over his shoulder as he approached, then entering a doorway on tiptoe, closing the door behind him.

  What the hell were they saying?

  It was Adriana who had the idea to draw the scene on paper. In a few seconds she sketched a building with four doors, two stick figures approaching it. She pointed at the second stick figure, then at the younger of the two men, who nodded vigorously.

  “Fausto,” she said, touching the man’s chest.

  “Nice to meet you, Fausto,” Harkins said.

  Adriana touched the older man’s chest. “Michelangelo.”

  “Eddie,” Harkins said, touching his own chest, then shaking hands all around. “Nice work on those statues.”

  Adriana then pointed at the lead stick figure in the drawing and said, very clearly, “Kraut.”

  “Holy shit,” Harkins said, standing. “It’s the apartment building, right? The one Lindner was headed to when he made you guys, right?”

  The three Sicilians looked at each other, shared a few sentences. Then Adriana turned to him, smiled, and said again, “Kraut.”

  Harkins sat back down. He and Colianno had asked them to find out who lived in the apartment building and then report back. But what had they found? He was as clueless as he had been ten minutes earlier.

  From the miming of the tiptoe approach, it seemed as if they’d gone into the apartment. Did they find someone or something? If they did, what did they do to that person? Were they asking for further instructions? Maybe they had a body to dump. And, by the way, had Colianno promised to pay them?

  “I am so goddamned lost here,” Harkins said.

  The older man pointed at himself, his cousin, and Harkins, then at the sketch of the building, and said, “Vieni. Vieni.”

  “Sure, great idea,” Harkins said. “Let me just tag along while we break into someone’s apartment. Just what I need to round out this whole fucked-up week.”

  Harkins walked to the corner, started gathering his collection of weapons, then decided to take just his own pistol belt.

  “Don’t sell this shit while I’m gone,” he said to Adriana, who smiled at him.

  He put on his equipment and considered his options. He was already so far out of bounds that he couldn’t count how many rules he’d broken. He’d conspired with locals who may have broken into a civilian’s apartment as part of an investigation he had been ordered to stay away from. He’d helped a U.S. Army nurse go AWOL, had accused a senior officer of murder. He was responsible for Colianno’s arrest, and without Colianno to translate for him, he wasn’t sure if the cousins had murdered someone in the apartment, or if they were holding a captive, or if they’d just engaged in a little B and E. And of course there was still the matter of the two murders, neither of them—officially at least—solved.

  “Yeah, let’s go and see how much more bizarre I can make this whole thing,” Harkins said.

  The four of them walked to the door, where Adriana stood on tiptoe to give him a sisterly kiss on the cheek.

  “Ni videmu,” she said.

  Harkins smiled at her. “OK, thanks,” he said.

  Michelangelo and Fausto followed him out and climbed into the back of his jeep, settling in like a couple of VIPs.

  Before he could put the vehicle in gear, a jeep with four MPs from Harkins’ old platoon rolled toward them on the narrow street.

  Sergeant Desmond, whose wife had stopped writing to him, was in the passenger seat, the ranking man. He saluted when he recognized Harkins.

  “Morning, Lieutenant. How’s it going?”

  All four of the MPs were eyeing Harkins’ passengers, every one of them wanting to ask what the hell was going on. Seventh Army headquarters let everyone know that no civilians were to ride around in U.S. Army jeeps. The rule became necessary when two drunk GIs and two civilian women were killed in a rollover a few days after the Americans reached Palermo.

  “Oh, pretty good. Pretty good. I’m on this murder investigation, you know.”

  “Yeah, we heard. You about finished?”

  “Oh, I’ll be finished soon, I guess. What are you up to this morning?”

  “Patrolling the waterfront.”

  The three junior soldiers were following Desmond’s lead. If he didn’t say anything about the civilians, they wouldn’t either.

  “Anything we can help you with?” Desmond asked, lifting his eyebrows.

  “I can’t think of anything at the moment, thanks. I should see you in a day or so.”

  “Good. That’ll be good, Lieutenant. They gave us a temporary guy, a lieutenant from another unit. He’s one of them salutin’ fiends, though. Makes the boys kind of miss you.”

  Two of the GIs behind Desmond nodded. The driver was still focused on Michelangelo and Fausto, as if they might jump out of Harkins’ jeep, tommy guns in hand.

  “Thanks,” Harkins said.

  Desmond touched the brim of his helmet. “Be careful out there, sir.”

  Harkins returned the casual salute. “Will do,” he said.

  When the MPs were gone, Harkins said to Fausto and Michelangelo, “If I don’t wind up in the stockade after this, it’ll be a miracle.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later they were parked near the apartment building Lindner had led them to. It looked nothing like Adriana’s sketch.

  Fausto and Michelangelo dismounted, looked around, then signaled to Harkins that he should follow. There was a gate on the street—unlocked—and a passageway leading to a small courtyard. Four doors, with an old-fashioned water pump in the center, a couple of cats lounging in the shade.

  Fausto walked to the first door on the right and walked in without knocking. Harkins followed, noticed the splintered wood where they had forced the lock, probably on their first visit.

  “I hope to hell there’s not a body in here,” he said to Michelangelo, who stayed outside. A lookout, Harkins figured.

  The apartment was spartan, the front room empty except for a skeletal wooden table and two mismatched chairs. There was an ancient cabinet, a couple of dirty dishes in a bucket, a flat tin plate piled with cigarette butts. Harkins looked: Lucky Strikes. Something else lifted, bought, or earned from the Americans.

  Fausto pushed back a dirty floral curtain, revealing another room. Harkins peeked inside, still sure he was going to see a body. Instead there was a large metal box, like a footlocker. The antique lock had been battered open and hung limply from the hasp. Fausto pointed, and, since the box was too small for a corpse, Harkins lifted the lid.

  The bottom of the box was lined with the other half of the floral curtain, and arranged on top of it were five golden chalices, a few patens like the one Harkins found in Stephenson’s bag, and a small pile of other gold trinkets.
You didn’t have to be a Vatican scholar to see that all of this had been taken from a church, or from several churches.

  Harkins lifted one of the heavy cups, turned it over to look for marks on the bottom, a priest’s name, perhaps. On the bottom of the third one he examined, he saw that some lettering had been crudely scratched out. He held it out to Fausto to see if the Sicilian could make sense of the marks that were left.

  Fausto held up his hands as if Harkins had offered him a disease.

  “No, no, no!”

  “A little superstitious, huh?” Harkins said. “I don’t blame you. Stuff looted from a church. Probably explains why you guys didn’t help yourselves before bringing me here.”

  Harkins closed the lid on the box, and Fausto motioned for him to come to the last room, which had a stone floor and hearth. In the hearth was a gas bottle that fed into a wire stove of some sort. On the floor were two long pairs of tongs, a thick leather glove, and some small cups. Harkins picked up one of the cups, which turned out to be made of clay. There was a short metal rack that looked like it could be used for cooling, and a rectangle made of ceramic with three indentations in it, like one of the loaf pans his mother used to make small cakes.

  Someone had been melting the gold here, shaping it into tiny ingots.

  “Did you find any of these bricks?” Harkins asked.

  Fausto shrugged.

  “Maybe you guys aren’t so superstitious if the gold has been melted.”

  Harkins still didn’t know how Stephenson and Lindner were tied to this, or even if there had been another person in the apartment. But it was clear that there was gold around, and money and murder often went together.

  Harkins decided to do a thorough search. He took off his helmet and pistol belt and went back to the front door, where he started by examining the floor, worked his way up the walls and doorjambs, and even climbed onto a chair to look at the ceiling, which was planks laid over rough-cut beams. He took his time, and after a few minutes Fausto sat in one of the chairs. Minutes later, Michelangelo poked his head in and asked Fausto a question. Another shrug, some more questions. Michelangelo smiled at Harkins, who wondered if they were talking about gold.

  It was hot in the apartment, but when Fausto went to open the shutters, Harkins stopped him. Anyone walking by would be able to see them.

  He spent thirty minutes on the front room, down on his hands and knees and knocking each floorboard with his knuckles. By the time he got to the middle room, sweat was dripping off his nose, marking the boards he’d already checked with dark circles.

  At the threshold between the middle room and the room with the stone floor, Harkins heard something. He knocked, knocked again. This floorboard sounded different. He had Colianno’s switchblade in his pocket. He pulled it out, flicked the double safety, and cut his palm.

  “Goddamn, that’s sharp.”

  Colianno had told him that most paratroopers carried a small knife tucked into the placket of their jump blouse. It had to be sharp enough to free a man from his chute if things went badly; if he landed in deep water, for instance.

  Harkins used the thin blade the pry up the edge of the floorboard, which did not want to come loose. When he got one end up, Fausto, who’d been watching intently, slipped one of the tongs underneath. Harkins pulled, and eventually the board gave way.

  The space below the floorboard was dark, but even so Harkins knew it was shallow, that it did not reach all the way to the dirt in a crawlspace. He stuck his hand down, his fingers touching the top edge of a smooth metal box. He pulled it, but it caught on something. Using his other hand, he reached down to clear the box and found a long, coiled wire.

  It was part of a wireless set, a transmitter.

  “Holy shit,” Harkins said to Fausto.

  Harkins pulled the wireless free. It turned out that he had only the key, which the operator could use to send coded messages, tap, tap, tap. Harkins figured the larger part of the set was under the floor.

  He held up the key, showed it to Fausto, whose first, confused look gave way to understanding.

  “Ohhhhh,” he said. Then he looked into Harkins’ eyes, smiled, and said, “Kraut.”

  “Our Kraut might just be a goddamn spy.”

  38

  5 August 1943

  1300 hours

  Harkins found Sergeant Desmond and his crew patrolling near the waterfront cemetery Santa Maria dei Rotoli, which the summer sun had beaten to a flat brown. He asked Desmond to find Kathleen Donnelly and bring her to Adriana’s café. As he hoped, Desmond asked no questions. The sergeant touched the brim of his helmet in salute and told his driver, “Let’s go.”

  Harkins then drove to the cantonment of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division near Trapani, at the far western tip of the island. The paratroopers had scored a nice rest area on a hill above the sea, but no one was taking in the view. The men were packing for the move back to North Africa, where they would train for the next invasion, and the place was all business. Harkins found Patrick talking with two other chaplains, the three men looking at something on a clipboard, when he rolled up and said, “I could use your help.”

  As far as he could remember, no one in Harkins’ family who had ever straight-up asked for help went without. Good or bad, dangerous or fun, legal or illegal, the Harkins siblings stuck together, a fierce tribe.

  Smaller by one, now, Harkins remembered.

  Patrick stood up, put on his helmet, and headed for the jeep.

  “Thanks,” Harkins said.

  “This better be good,” Patrick said.

  Donnelly was already at the café when the Harkins brothers arrived. Eddie Harkins thanked Sergeant Desmond for bringing her.

  “Anything you need, Lieutenant.”

  “What the heck happened to your face?” Patrick asked Kathleen.

  “I fell,” she said. Then, to Harkins, “I thought you went to get Moira. Aren’t you supposed to be bringing her back?”

  “I’m working on it,” Harkins said.

  He led Donnelly and his brother to a storeroom off the kitchen, where he showed them the trunk, the stolen chalices, the wireless key that he and the cousins had brought back from the apartment. Told them about the paten—another piece of church property—that Stephenson had tried to use to pay a gambling debt.

  “So you think Lindner is a spy?” Patrick asked.

  “Looks that way. He was headed to the apartment where we found this stuff.”

  “Can’t you take all this to Boone?” Donnelly asked. “Let him worry about Lindner?”

  “No. I was taken off the case, thanks to Boone and the provost marshal. I’m supposed to go back to my unit; hell, I’ll probably be AWOL by the end of the day. Besides, I think there’s some sort of three-way connection here: Stephenson, Boone, and Lindner.”

  “You think Boone is a spy?” Patrick asked.

  “No. I doubt it. I don’t know. But there’s more going on with Boone than we suspected, and it’s connected to Stephenson, somehow.”

  “You better move fast,” Donnelly said. “Boone told Lindner to move the POWs out of our hospital to a troopship. Sometime today, I think. Told Lindner to go with them.”

  Harkins looked at his watch. He had a bit more than six hours until he became an AWOL military police officer.

  “You brought us here to help,” Patrick said.

  “Yes. I want to find out whose apartment that is, the one where we found the wireless. And for that I need Colianno and his cousins.”

  “Where’s Colianno?” Patrick asked.

  Donnelly, who’d heard hospital scuttlebutt about the arrest, shook her head. “He’s in the stockade,” she said. “And—let me guess—you want to bust him out of there.”

  Now it was Patrick’s turn to shake his head.

  “Eddie, for Pete’s sake. You’re just digging yourself a deeper hole. Pulling one stunt after another that can get you court-martialed. Now you want to bust a guy out of confinement so he can help you wit
h an investigation you’ve been ordered to drop?”

  “I’m not going to stop, Pat.”

  The big priest raised his voice, angry now. “Until what? Until you wind up in the stockade? If you get court-martialed, you can forget about being a cop again after the war.”

  “Boone is a murderer. I can’t let him get away with it.”

  “Why can’t this deputy provost, Captain Adams, take care of this?” Donnelly asked. “He came by for your notes, said he’d been put in charge of the investigation.”

  “He’s got a lot of catching up to do. Meanwhile, Boone isn’t standing still; he’s covering his tracks. I’m the one closest to putting the cuffs on him.”

  Harkins looked at Donnelly, back at his brother. Things were moving quickly now. Soon Lindner would be gone, most likely beyond reach; Harkins would be back on patrol with his MP platoon; and there was no telling what would happen to Colianno.

  “Please,” Harkins said.

  The three of them were silent for a moment. In the kitchen a few feet away, Adriana sang as she chopped vegetables on an ancient cutting board.

  “Boone’s a menace. A fucking train wreck,” Donnelly said. She chewed her lip. “I’m in.”

  Harkins looked at Patrick. Strangely enough for a priest, Pat was not one to worry about breaking a few rules. He did worry about his little brother’s reckless streak.

  “I appreciate that you’re worried about me, Pat,” Harkins said. “I’m going to do this; it would be easier with you along.”

  Patrick was quiet for a long moment, and Harkins wondered if his brother was praying for guidance.

  “Can you see what you’re doing? How self-destructive this is? I get that you’re heartbroken about what happened to Michael. But trashing your career, risking prison, none of that is going to help you feel better, not really. It’s not going to bring Michael back, but it might kill Ma if you throw everything away.”

  “The guy who jumps out of airplanes behind enemy lines wants to lecture me about risk?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”