Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “OK,” Harkins said. “I’ll be more careful. Right after we do this.”

  “Destroying yourself isn’t going to change what happened.”

  Harkins scoffed. “I know that.”

  “You know it intellectually,” Patrick said.

  Donnelly took a quiet step out of the room.

  “Shit. Since when does a Catholic priest tell somebody to stop with the guilt?”

  “Ma forgives you for what you did with Michael,” Patrick said. He reached up and squeezed his brother’s arm.

  Harkins felt a tense band behind his eyes as he tried not to choke up. His mother rarely wrote to him, angry as she was about the forged birth certificate.

  “I miss her,” he said.

  “She misses you and worries about you. She made me promise to hear your confession.”

  “If I confess, will you help me?”

  “Let’s not bargain over a sacrament, OK?” Patrick said, but it looked to Harkins like his brother would pitch in.

  “You know, you and Ma put more stock in the sacraments than I do,” Harkins said, trying to make it sound like a joke, failing.

  “I know, brother,” the priest said. “That’s why we keep praying for you.”

  Patrick reached into the cargo pocket of his trousers and pulled out a narrow purple stole, much more his badge of office than the uniform, the captain’s bars. He draped it around his neck, put his big hands on his brother’s shoulders.

  Eddie Harkins crossed himself, licked a salty tear from the corner of his mouth, recited the litany he’d learned as a child.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said. Then, right to the center of his heartbreak. “I lied when I helped Michael get a fake birth certificate, and I lied to Mom and Dad about what I’d done, and for this I am sorry.”

  Patrick held Harkins’ face in two hands, leaned his forehead to his brother’s. “I absolve you, in the name of Christ.”

  * * *

  Donnelly was waiting in the shade outside when Harkins and his brother came out of the café. The men climbed into the MP’s jeep.

  “You’re going to the stockade, right?” Donnelly asked, walking up to them. “Take me with you.”

  “I really only needed an update on what’s happening at the hospital,” Harkins said. “I didn’t mean to take you away from there.”

  “Maybe I can help,” she said.

  Harkins looked at his brother; the priest shrugged.

  “Glad for the company,” Patrick said. “Hop in.”

  Donnelly climbed into the back and Harkins headed toward the airfield, which was west of the city and tucked against the edge of the sea. Harkins spoke over his shoulder so Donnelly could hear the conversation as he and Patrick considered ways they might talk their way into the stockade and leave with Colianno in tow.

  “I could say I’m there to provide spiritual counseling. That he asked to see a chaplain. Or that my regimental commander sent me.”

  “I wonder how tight security is. We might be able to walk out the gate with him. That happened at our stockade in North Africa. Guy just pretended he was supposed to be leaving.”

  “Fake paperwork,” Patrick said. “We could gin something up.”

  They went on like that for the twenty-five minutes it took them to clear Palermo, tossing half-baked ideas back and forth, not settling on anything that sounded plausible. Harkins, who had been embarrassed by his dressing down in front of Meigs, felt more anxious as they drew close. He needed Colianno, but was not sure he was going to succeed in getting him out of custody.

  On the north coast road they encountered more traffic, most of it headed to or from the Palermo airfield, which had been taken over by the Army Air Corps. The Seventh Army stockade was on the flat top of a hill just a few yards from the main road. The constant parade of vehicles dusted the whole place with a thick layer of pale dirt, and Harkins wondered if some sadist had positioned the camp beside the road for just that reason.

  There was a tiny parking area near the front gate, which was guarded by two bored-looking MPs. The soldiers stood close to each other, trying to stay in the doubtful shade thrown by a slapped-together guard shack—four slender posts with a scrap of corrugated metal on top.

  “Well?” Patrick asked.

  “We could shoot our way in,” Harkins said.

  He was surprised when Donnelly got out of the jeep and, without explaining what she was doing, walked up to the guards. After a few seconds of conversation, one of the guards motioned for her to follow, and he led her into the compound.

  “What do you suppose that’s about?” Patrick asked.

  Harkins and his brother dismounted and squeezed in between the jeep and a rock wall that offered a bit of shade. Harkins sat down and promptly fell asleep. When Patrick woke him by kicking his foot, Harkins looked at his watch. He’d been asleep for thirty minutes. He blinked, rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, blinked again.

  “Is that Kathleen and Colianno walking out?” Harkins asked.

  “Sure is,” Patrick said. “What the heck happened to his face? Has everyone been in a fight?”

  “That’s a story for another time,” Harkins said.

  The nurse and the paratrooper were side by side. Donnelly waved at the guards, said something in a pleasant tone. Harkins and his brother got to their feet. Colianno saluted as he approached and said, “Chaplain. Lieutenant.”

  “Kathleen,” Harkins said. “How’d you do that?”

  “I got to know the stockade commander when a couple of his guys wound up in our hospital after a truck accident. His name’s Riley. He used to come down to visit them every day, so we became … friends, I guess.” She winked at Harkins. “I told them that Colianno still had some shrapnel in him and that the surgeon wanted to get it out before it got infected.”

  “First part of that is true, by the way,” Colianno said. “I’m carrying some junk around.”

  “And he just let you take his prisoner?” Harkins asked.

  “I promised to bring him back,” Donnelly said, smiling. “What can I say? I’m persuasive.”

  The four of them got into the jeep, Donnelly sitting behind Harkins, who was driving. As he started the engine she leaned closer, whispered into his left ear so the others couldn’t hear.

  “Riley never saw the supply tent,” she said. “Wanted to, but didn’t.”

  39

  5 August 1943

  1430 hours

  Back out on the coastal road, the sign for the airfield gave Harkins an idea. He dropped Donnelly and Patrick off at Patrick’s bivouac; the chaplain said he’d have a driver take her back to the hospital. Colianno got into the driver’s seat and said, “Where to, Lieutenant?”

  “The airfield.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, Harkins filled Colianno in on what had happened, what his cousins had found in the apartment.

  “I never did like that Nazi doctor,” he said.

  “I keep getting stuck on the money,” Harkins said. “Whitman told Ronan that Boone was making money. But let’s suppose it wasn’t cash. What if Lindner was giving gold to Boone in exchange for letting him stay at the hospital, close to his sources for information.”

  “That general in supply. One with the weepy dick.”

  “Right. Anyway, what the hell would Boone do with gold? Even if someone melted it into little bars, little ingots, it’s still heavy, hard to hide, and there’s no place you could put it here in the war zone where it would be safe.”

  “OK, I give up. What did he do with it?”

  “I don’t know, but I have a theory,” Harkins said. “Remember that Stephenson was in charge of evacuations by air?”

  “Yeah. VIP casualties and tough cases, right?”

  “Well, what if his part in this was shipping stuff back to the States?”

  They rolled onto the airfield, which sat on a flat section of landfill hard up against the blue water. The sun reflected off the sea, stage-lighting eve
rything. There was a single ambulance parked next to a large tent on the water side of the strip.

  “Check that out,” Harkins said, and Colianno aimed the jeep in that direction.

  “By the way, Lieutenant. Where’s all my hardware?”

  “Back at your cousin’s place. I told her not to sell it.”

  “I hate riding around without a weapon.”

  “You afraid some German paratroopers are going to land on us while we’re here?”

  “No, but I might have to shoot a Kraut doctor. You never know.”

  There were two medical orderlies leaning against the shady side of the ambulance. Colianno recognized one of the men, so Harkins let him take the lead.

  “You guys waiting on an evac flight?” Colianno asked.

  The two GIs pulled themselves to a semblance of attention and saluted when they saw Harkins, then the taller one said, “Supposed to have been here an hour ago. No word on when it’ll get here. Or if.”

  Harkins got out of the jeep, leaned on the hood, and said, “At ease, men,” so the orderlies could lean back into the shade.

  The tall man reminded Harkins of Ichabod Crane in an illustrated version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Narrow face. Long, bony hands. His Adam’s apple jumped up and down when he talked. He held a lit cigarette between his fingers.

  “What’s your name?” Harkins asked Adam’s Apple.

  “Pryzbylkowski, sir. But everyone calls me Priz.”

  Harkins looked at the other soldier, who said, “Cook, sir.”

  “Doc Trennely is inside,” Priz said.

  The surgeon who’d stitched Harkins after Ronan had split his eyebrow.

  “He’s figuring out if our patients can stand the wait or if we should haul them back to the hospital and try again tomorrow.”

  “Who’s in charge of loading the plane when it lands?”

  “Well, we put the patients in, and the pilot likes to check, make sure everything’s OK. But the guy who’s really in charge is an Air Corps staff sergeant. Name’s Trunk.”

  “Trunk?” Harkins asked.

  “Yeah. Like a footlocker; like a steamer trunk.”

  “He around?”

  The two orderlies looked at each other, then the taller one scanned the area. “If he was, you’d hear him, Lieutenant. Biggest goddamn loudmouth I ever met. He’ll start yelling at Cook and me when he’s still a hundred yards away.”

  Cook muttered, “Asshole.”

  “You guys ever work with Captain Stephenson, when he was in charge of air evac?”

  “Sure,” Priz said.

  “Anything … I don’t know … unusual about working with him?”

  “He wasn’t my favorite doc,” Priz said. “But I guess he took good care of the patients.”

  Cook said something under his breath, directed at Priz, like it pained him to speak out loud. He was about twenty, dimpled chin, dark hair, and straight white teeth. Harkins thought Cook could be a movie star if he learned how to talk.

  “What’s that?” Colianno asked.

  Cook struggled to find the words, like he was practicing a foreign language. “The crates.”

  Harkins looked at Priz, raised his eyebrows. “That’s right!” the orderly said. “He used to ship medical equipment back to the States to get repaired. Microscopes and stuff like that. Heavy as hell.”

  Harkins and Colianno exchanged looks, Harkins suppressing a smile.

  “Any other docs ship medical equipment back?” Harkins asked.

  “So far we’ve only worked with Captain Stephenson and Captain Trennely, and this is only our first time with Trennely. No boxes.”

  “Did you ever see inside the boxes?”

  “No, they was sealed up real good. I mean, they were made real nice, like little cabinets. Trunk signed for them and told us how to stow them on the airplane.”

  “When was that? Do you remember dates?”

  “I remember the last time was the day before Stephenson got killed. He got shot in the morning. The morning before that, we were right here. Two boxes.”

  “You mentioned that they were heavy. Heavier than you expected?”

  “We never opened them, but I’ve moved microscopes at the hospital. It would take a lot of microscopes to be that heavy.”

  A jeep passed them, trailing dust, and stopped at the door to the nearby tent. The GI who got out of the passenger seat yelled at the driver, then went inside.

  “Sergeant Trunk, I presume,” Harkins said.

  “That’s him.”

  Harkins and Colianno turned toward the tent entrance.

  “Say, Lieutenant?” Priz said.

  Harkins turned back.

  “You don’t mind my asking, aren’t you the guy who was investigating Doc Stephenson’s murder?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Oh, good. ’Cause we heard you got fired. The nurses were pretty upset. Glad to see you’re still on it. I didn’t like that guy, but he didn’t deserve to get shot down like that.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Harkins said. “But don’t mention our little talk here, OK?”

  Priz saluted sloppily, his cigarette still pinched between the fingers of his right hand. “You got it, sir.”

  Harkins and Colianno walked to the tent entrance. The walls were rolled up because of the heat, the open sides protected by mosquito netting.

  Harkins went inside first, spotted Trennely, the doctor, leaning over a patient. Trunk, at the other end of the tent, saw them come in and said, “Who the fuck are you fuckers? What the fuck are you doing in my tent?”

  Trunk walked up to Colianno and Harkins, lifted his clipboard as if to order them out. When he saw that Harkins was a lieutenant, he said, “Sorry, Lieutenant,” though he clearly didn’t mean it.

  “Doctor,” Harkins said to Trennely, keeping the sergeant waiting.

  “Oh, hello,” Trennely said. “It’s Harkins, right?”

  “You getting ready to send a patient back to the States?”

  The soldier on the cot was unconscious, his head and neck bandaged, his right arm held across his chest by a cast and some sort of wire contraption that wrapped around his midsection.

  “If the plane gets here soon,” Trennely said. “No one seems to know where it is at the moment, and I don’t want to leave our patient overnight here.”

  “Shipping any other materials back? Any crates?”

  Trennely shook his head. “No.” Then the doctor noticed Colianno’s banged-up face. “You want me to take a look at that eye, soldier?”

  “No, thanks, sir,” Colianno said. “Not my first black eye. It’ll be OK soon enough.”

  Harkins turned to Trunk. “You’re the loadmaster, is that right, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. And who are you?”

  “Lieutenant Harkins, military police. I’m investigating the death of Captain Stephenson. Doctor Stephenson. I understand you two worked together.”

  Trunk pulled up short, glanced at Trennely, then back at Harkins. “Not exactly; no, sir. He brought the evac cases here and I made sure they got loaded safely. That’s all. I’m Air Corps, not Medical Corps.”

  “So he never asked you to ship anything back for him? Some medical equipment to be repaired?”

  “Oh, I guess so, yeah. A couple of times he showed up with a few crates. He said they were microscopes and stuff, but of course I never saw inside them.”

  Trennely squeezed past Harkins, moved to the other side of the patient, checked the tension on the little trapeze holding the man’s arm.

  “Let’s take him back to the hospital,” the doctor said to an orderly.

  “I should help,” Trunk said.

  “You should stay exactly where you are, Sergeant,” Harkins said. “Who was receiving the boxes Stephenson shipped?”

  “I don’t know,” Trunk said. “I don’t remember any names.”

  “There must have been a name and address on the crate, though, right? Somebody had to know what to do with them on th
e other end. Was it an Air Corps soldier who would have picked them up, or someone from the medical department?”

  “I guess it was someone from the medical department,” Trunk said, no confidence in his voice.

  “You must have manifests, right? Names of passengers, inventories of equipment that went on board?”

  “Sure, sure. I run a tight operation here.”

  “I’d like to see all your paperwork from the flights on August first.”

  “Well, that could take a while, to find it, I mean. I, uh, I don’t keep everything out here on the flight line.”

  Normally Harkins would have said he’d wait, would have given Trunk more time to get worried, make a mistake. But he’d been days without any decent sleep. He was due back at MP headquarters in a few hours. Trunk was a bully, but a minor figure in this drama. Meanwhile, Boone was slipping away, Ronan was God knew where, and someone was going to start looking for Colianno very soon.

  Harkins stepped close to Trunk, close enough to smell fear and tobacco. Without being asked, Colianno stepped close to the man’s side.

  “Sergeant, you just don’t have the time.”

  Harkins wiped his face with his sleeve. Trunk was sweating much more heavily, but did not move. Harkins spoke very slowly, almost gently. “It’s all coming unraveled now. Maybe you didn’t know what Stephenson had in those crates, maybe you did. But he paid you for special handling.”

  Harkins was guessing, but he kept his eyes locked on Trunk’s.

  “Stephenson wound up dead because of what was in those boxes. Ended up wrapped in a mattress cover in that temporary cemetery they got down by Gela. Is that in your plan, too, Sergeant Trunk? Or were you maybe hoping to make it back to the States someday?”

  Five minutes later, Harkins and Colianno were in their jeep, headed back toward Palermo. Harkins looked at his watch for the third time in fifteen minutes. He had a few hours until he was AWOL.

  “So Lindner paid Boone to let him stay at the hospital instead of getting shipped back,” Colianno said.

  “Presumably so he could nose around headquarters while treating that general,” Harkins said. “Though I’m not sure Boone knew about that part.”

  “And then Boone partnered up with Stephenson to get the gold shipped back to the States. That explains why Stephenson said Boone would never do anything about the shit going on with the nurses. Stephenson knew how dirty Boone is.”