Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “I’d like to,” Harkins said. “They already jumped, someplace closer to the front.”

  “Maybe you can catch up with her when they reach Messina.”

  “As a special investigator for the provost you’d have a lot more leeway to roam around,” Adams said. “Almost as much as a chaplain.”

  Patrick smiled. “Just out there saving souls,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Adams continued. “You’d certainly be more likely to see her again than if you stayed with an MP platoon.”

  “You bribing me, Counselor?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Colianno said it was bad luck, thinking too much about what happens after the war,” Harkins said. “Thinking about how fast we might get home.”

  “Shoot,” Adams said. “If I didn’t think about going home, it’d free up about eight hours a day of my time.”

  “You and Kathleen really made a connection, huh?” Patrick asked his brother.

  “I’d like to think so, but everything happens so fast, you know, with the war and all. People get married after knowing each other a few weeks, that kind of stuff.”

  “People having sex the first time they lay eyes on each other,” Patrick said, smiling.

  “You knew about that?” Harkins asked.

  “Brother, everybody knew about that. Besides, I’m not blind. You had little hearts shooting out of your eyes.”

  “Do I have to go to confession again?”

  “Absolutely,” Patrick said. “But listen, you’ve known her a long time. And just because a relationship develops fast doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  Adams chuckled.

  “What’s funny?” Harkins asked.

  “No disrespect, Father,” Adams said. “But I always thought it a little strange that Catholics get marriage advice from unmarried priests.”

  “Unmarried and presumably celibate,” Harkins said.

  Patrick held his hands up in mock surrender. “Let’s not go there, shall we? Anyway, it’s nice to think I might see you guys at the altar someday, back in our own church.”

  “This whole country is full of churches,” Harkins said. “Why wait?”

  “Does she know you’re talking like this?” Adams asked.

  “No. And let’s not scare her off, either, or I’ll clobber you on the other side of your bald head. Sir.”

  Adams sat back on his cot. “Did you talk to Ronan?” he asked.

  “Five times in the last three days,” Harkins said. “She’s not budging off her story.”

  “OK,” Adams said. “Think about coming to work with me.”

  Harkins shook his hand. “I will.”

  “And let me know if anything changes today.”

  Harkins and Patrick left the hospital, walking down wide stone steps. Off to their left they could see Palermo harbor, full of Allied ships. Engineers had cleared several of the long piers of the wreckage the Germans left behind. Two new cranes were picking cargo nets from ship holds, and another crane turned slowly, a jeep suspended from its sling. A GI sat in the driver’s seat of the vehicle as it swung through its arc, sixty feet in the air.

  “I’m glad I got to see so much of you,” Harkins said to Patrick.

  “I think it helped me,” Patrick said. “You know, us being together when we learned about Michael.”

  “I’m a little afraid to slow down, to tell you the truth. Have time to think about it.”

  “I’ve had nightmares,” Patrick said. “About drowning. I can never see who it is, but I know.”

  They reached the parking lot, where Patrick had a jeep and driver waiting to take him to the airfield. Harkins was back to driving himself.

  “Can you find another driver on your own?” Patrick asked.

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  They turned to face each other, the priest taller, black-haired, conspicuous in his paratrooper boots.

  “Will the next operation for you be a jump, also?”

  “That’s how we arrive,” Patrick said. “So, yeah, I imagine it will. Though Ike hasn’t consulted me yet.”

  “And the family worries about me.”

  “They don’t know half of the stunts you pulled just in the last week.”

  “You planning to tell them?” Harkins asked.

  “Nobody’s going to hear it from me,” Patrick said. “Can I at least get you to agree to not take any unnecessary risks?”

  “Probably not. But Adams wants me to work for him and Meigs, the oldest colonel in the army. That guy couldn’t stay up much past eight o’clock on a school night, so I’ll probably be safe.”

  Patrick’s driver got out of the jeep and saluted as the officers approached.

  “Listen, Eddie. I want you to know—I want you to hear it from me—that I’m doing something I love. I’m serving where I’m needed. If anything were to happen to me…”

  “Stop right there,” Harkins said. “You know I’m superstitious.”

  “OK, OK.”

  Harkins held out his hand. Patrick took it and pulled him into an embrace. The jeep driver looked at his shoes, embarrassed.

  “I love you, Eddie.”

  “I love you, too, Pat.”

  Patrick stepped back, squeezed his brother’s shoulders. When he let go, Harkins saluted.

  “Safe travels, Captain,” he said.

  “God bless you, Eddie.”

  Patrick got into the passenger seat and nodded to the driver. As the jeep pulled away, the priest did not look back, but raised his hand good-bye.

  * * *

  Harkins picked up Colianno at the provost marshal’s, where Harkins had installed him while he wrapped up the investigation. The paratrooper, eager to get back to his unit, stood outside, tapping his foot like a man waiting for a late train.

  Harkins moved to the passenger seat when Colianno approached. He tossed a musette bag in the back, saluted, then climbed into the driver’s seat. He wore a pistol belt with a canteen and a .45.

  “So you’re down to just a pistol,” Harkins said.

  “I figured my first sergeant wouldn’t like it if I showed up with a bunch of weapons I’d stolen. I’m going to have enough to explain as it is.”

  They drove in silence, Harkins watching the city roll by as they headed north toward the airfield.

  “How did you swing this?” Colianno asked. “Me going back to my unit.”

  “I told Colonel Meigs that you’d been a valuable part of the investigation. That I thought you deserved another chance. He talked to your commander, Ridgway. I guess they knew each other before the war.

  “And I saw Patrick just a little while ago,” Harkins said. “He said he stopped asking questions about that patrol on D-Day. He found six guys who were with you that day, but none would talk about what happened. So he stopped asking.”

  Colianno kept his eyes on the road. If he felt any relief, it wasn’t obvious to Harkins.

  Thirty minutes later they pulled into the gate of the airfield. Like every other point of entry at this end of the island, it was jammed with American vehicles and GIs. Off to one side was a vast field of supplies, crates stacked under tarps, pallets lined up dress-right-dress in columns and rows. Tons of food, spare parts, ammunition.

  “Look at all that stuff,” Colianno said. “I’ll bet everybody back home who wants a job can get one in some factory.”

  “Yeah, and look at us learning all kinds of skills that’ll be useful when we’re civilians again.”

  “Watch out, Lieutenant. Remember what I said: bad luck to talk too much about getting home.”

  “Right. Pull over here,” Harkins said as they approached the flight line. At least a dozen C-47s were either parked or maneuvering around the dirt field. Engineers had covered the area with perforated steel mats, but the flying dust was wicked.

  “Wonder if any of these are the same planes, the same pilots who dropped us on D-Day,” Colianno said.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause our pilot
was going too fast, was too high, and dropped us miles from our drop zone. I’d love to have a chat with him about how he screwed us over.”

  Harkins was about to warn Colianno against looking for another fight, but it was probably a waste of time. Instead, he pulled a canvas satchel from the back of the jeep, reached in, and extracted a sheaf of typed pages. He pulled the top two free and handed them to Colianno.

  “What’s this?”

  “The charge sheet. This is what I drew up with Captain Adams that will go up to the court-martial authority.”

  Harkins looked over Colianno’s shoulder as he read. The top left of the page had a single name in capital letters: BOONE, WALTER (NMI), COLONEL, MEDICAL CORPS, AUS.

  Colianno ran his finger down the densely typed right-hand column, which listed the charges against Boone. The ones that stood out were the murders of Oberstleutnant Matthias Lindner, Prisoner of War; Irwin M. Drake, First Sergeant, Eleventh Field Hospital; Second Lieutenant Marilyn Whitman, Eleventh Field Hospital.

  “Whitman? That nurse that choked?”

  “Boone confessed,” Harkins said. “I told him that someone had done an autopsy, found out she didn’t choke on her own vomit. I suggested that he used morphine—I didn’t have any proof—because she knew about the gold.”

  “She was pregnant, right?”

  Harkins nodded.

  “And he was the father?” Colianno asked.

  “He thought so, yeah.”

  “So he killed her and his own baby? What a piece of shit.”

  The paratrooper flipped the pages to the charge sheet, where there was no mention of Captain Meyers Stephenson. Colianno did not ask why.

  He finished reading, then looked out at the flight line as an inbound C-47 touched down, bounced once, taxied to a stop near the medical holding tent.

  “Boone didn’t confess to Stephenson,” Harkins said. “And I started to wonder why that might be. What’s one more murder, right?”

  Colianno kept his face forward.

  “Here’s what I think happened,” Harkins said. “Stephenson saw Ronan running for the nurses’ tent when the air-raid warning sounded. Since everyone else was headed for the shelters, he thought he’d catch her alone. He followed her.”

  Harkins tucked the charge sheets back inside the satchel, set it on his lap.

  “But she knew he was behind her. She’d crossed paths with him on purpose; the air raid just got things moving faster. She went in the door of the tent, and Stephenson thought he had her cornered.

  “But she slipped out that hole the nurses cut in the wall. He was probably surprised, certainly disappointed to find the nurses’ tent empty. He followed her out the same way.”

  Harkins studied the paratrooper.

  “And you were waiting for him.”

  Colianno watched the ballet of taxiing planes on the cramped flight line, his eyes squinting against the glare from the sea just beyond.

  “She’s been through too much already,” he said.

  “So what’s that mean? You’re offering to take the fall?”

  Colianno pressed both hands against the steering wheel, then dropped them to his lap. “Every day, a hundred men—a hundred good men—die up on the line. Why do you care so much about a scumbag rapist who was working with a fucking Nazi spy, and only got what he deserved?”

  Harkins didn’t answer, let the silence hang for a long moment.

  “Adams and I talked about this a long time, about you. And we don’t think we could make the case.”

  Colianno looked at him, maybe searching for something like understanding, even forgiveness.

  “But if I thought we could…”

  Colianno seemed disappointed. Looked away.

  “I’m a cop,” Harkins said. “You want forgiveness, talk to Father Pat. That’s his business.”

  “And me shooting Sergeant White?” Colianno said. “You were ready to let that go?”

  “Yeah, not very consistent, I admit. But I can live with it.”

  They sat like that for several minutes. Harkins felt the sweat bleeding through the back of his blouse.

  “You talked to Moira? Tried to get her to buy that story?”

  “Sure did. Bunch of times in the last few days.” Harkins twisted in his seat and put the satchel in the back of the jeep. “She wasn’t going for it, either.”

  “What makes you think you’ve got it all figured out?”

  Harkins pointed to the tent, a few dozen yards from where they sat, where he’d bullied Staff Sergeant Trunk.

  “I told Trunk that Stephenson wound up in the cemetery because of the gold. And when we got back to the jeep you said something like, ‘That was quite a story you told him.’ But I didn’t know it was a story. Could have been true, for all I knew at the time. But you knew it was just a story, because you knew what really happened. You and Ronan knew that his getting killed wasn’t about gold.”

  “That’s a theory, I guess,” Colianno said.

  Across the flight line, Harkins saw his brother emerge from a tent. “Looks like that’s your flight back to North Africa. Right there, with my brother.”

  “That’s it?” Colianno asked. “I just get on the plane?”

  “Like I said, unless you want to tell me the story as you see it.”

  “Confess?”

  “Yeah.”

  Colianno got out of the vehicle, pulled his bag from the rear seat. “I confessed to your brother.”

  “What?”

  “I mean he heard my confession. He told me he’d never violate the sanctity of the confessional, unless it was to stop some future crime, something really serious.”

  “Like murder,” Harkins said. Colianno shrugged.

  Harkins got out of the jeep. The paratrooper pulled himself to attention, saluted. Harkins returned the salute, but did not offer his hand.

  “I’m glad to be going back,” Colianno said, nodding toward the waiting plane.

  “To be with your boys?” Harkins asked.

  “Yeah,” Colianno said, unsmiling. “And they need killers, right?”

  Harkins watched the paratrooper walk into the swirling dust toward the waiting plane, watched him salute Patrick, then join a detail of enlisted men loading packages. Patrick glanced over and saw his brother. Harkins saluted, then watched the priest climb up the aluminum ladder into the side door of the aircraft.

  As he got behind the wheel of the jeep he thought about the last time he, Patrick, and Michael had been together, all of them on leave in the autumn of 1942. Not even a year ago. He wondered where he’d be a year from now, and what else the war might take from him, from his family, from his grieving parents.

  He put the jeep in gear and rolled away from the airfield, passing a line of four ambulances headed in the opposite direction, their closed doors hiding who knew what horrors.

  Ten days earlier he’d been complaining about boredom, about being a traffic cop in an army uniform. Over the past few days he’d brought one murderer to light and, just maybe, made the hospital a little bit better place for the nurses and the soldiers who worked there. Another killer, he was sure, had escaped justice, though there was no telling what the war had in store for Dominic Colianno.

  He thought about Kathleen Donnelly, her tired eyes and blood-splattered uniform, her dazzling competence and the way her mouth tasted. In his waking hours he refused to think he might not see her again, but when he slept, when his defenses were down, there was a tightness in his chest—not fear, exactly, but a recognition of just how powerless he was, how subject they both were to things they could not control. But there were ways to make a minuscule contribution to—what? Order? The law? Some idea of what was right and what was still, even amid all the hatred and destruction, wrong?

  Just outside the city he stopped to let another ambulance pass. He followed it to the hospital where he’d left Captain Adams. Together they would go see the provost and learn what might be in store for him.

  HAPPINESS
/>   by Carl Sandburg

  I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.

  And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.

  They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them

  And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river

  And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  An online search I did a few years ago led me to the manifest from a ship that reached Ellis Island in September 1905. There among the dense columns and handwritten names of newcomers I found a bit of elegant script announcing the arrival of an unmarried twenty-two-year-old Giovanna Colonna, whose odyssey had begun in the hilltop village of Ali in eastern Sicily.

  I am intrigued by the scene, though I have no facts about her day. I wonder if she stood at the rail as the ship cruised by Lady Liberty, who’d been at her post in New York Harbor for a mere nineteen years. Did she know that Liberty was there to welcome her? What did she think as she entered the immigration center’s great hall, with its Tower of Babel mix of languages? Maybe she’d found friends during the passage who spoke her Sicilian dialect. Maybe she prayed to get past the uniformed officials. Maybe she hid her own fears in order to inspire some other hopeful.

  Whatever else she did that day, when the customs officer called my grandmother up to present her papers, she stepped forward, propelling her as-yet-unborn family into the New World. I and my American life are the product of her bravery.

  Giovanna and her future husband, Domenick Benjamin Ruggero, left their homes and families at the dawn of the last century to find something new. I am in awe of their courage—and by extension, the courage of all migrants—for picking up and leaving everything familiar to make a better life for successive generations.

  It is to pay homage to these people that the principal characters of this book are the children and grandchildren of immigrants, as were millions of young Americans of the World War II generation who fought and bled and in too many cases died to defeat Fascism. I created this story in the hopes of paying some small tribute to the sacrifices of those men and women.