Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  Behind the beer hall, Mundy explained, was a warren of windowless bedrooms with Oriental rugs, canopied beds, gilt-framed paintings. Impromptu liaisons of occupied and occupiers. Place ran twenty-four hours a day. The same scratched records played over and over on the Victrola, nonpartisan mix of “Lili Marlene” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” Sometimes, if you were there long enough, it was easy to lose track whether it was night or day.

  Before they landed in Germany, they got strict orders about nonfraternization. Most of the Heinies, they were told, were still in the grip of Nazi indoctrination. “But you know what, Captain? That’s all malarkey, least as far as the girls go. They got one thing on their mind.” Mundy cupped his crotch with one hand, tapped the horn on the steering wheel with the heel of the other. Honk, honk. “At one point, the brass got it in their heads the Commies were recruiting a regiment of whores to pump military secrets out of GIs. They made it so you want to bring a girl into a GI club, which is where they all want to go, the local police got to certify she’s a regular Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. That’s great for whoever’s doing the certifying. Means they get laid all they want. It also means the illegal joints doing more business than ever.”

  Two young women, sharing a single umbrella, stood Lili Marlene–like in the piss-yellow light pooled beneath a surviving street lamp. They waved vigorously. “See, what’d I tell you?” Honk. “When it comes to the fräuleins, it’s Deutschland über alles. As the Brits are fond of saying, ‘It’s only fraternization if you stay for breakfast.’”

  The rain stopped. Dunne was glad for the enthusiasm and boyish innocence of Mundy’s monologue. If this war was like the last, those who’d puked their guts, or pissed their pants at that last minute before they went into action, or turned away from the pulverized carnage a single artillery round left behind, they’d treat their memories like tattered photo albums in attic recesses; throw them out once and for all, if they could.

  But they couldn’t.

  After a few drinks in a crowded, happy bar, the sudden flash of a charred corpse, top of its head blown off, motionless hand protecting absent eyes. Or on a calm summer’s afternoon, face of approaching stranger turns into Quentin Osbourne’s, Billy Coughlin’s, a kaleidoscope of the dead and missing. Or in the middle of the night, palm protecting against the flashlight’s beam, the barrel of an MP 40 submachine gun—the German Schmeisser—knocks your hand away. Nozzle to nose. Smell of expended rounds still fresh.

  Fin, wake up, you’re having a bad dream.

  Not really dreaming. Remembering, mostly.

  Those who lost all control and ended up with haunted faces were secluded in mental wards of veterans’ hospitals, some a short time, a few permanently. Most carried on, did the best they could, moved in sync with the unwounded, unscarred, uninitiated.

  Mundy began to hum a tune that Dunne recognized immediately. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho. He’d seen the cartoon movie the year before he met Roberta. The woman he was dating at the time dragged him to see it.

  First name he remembered: Maria.

  Her last: … ?

  Irish-Italian from the Bronx, she worked at the phone company and was taking courses at Hunter College at night. She brought along a bag of a half-dozen licorice wheels from Krum’s, on the Grand Concourse. “Walt Disney isn’t just a cartoonist,” she said. “He’s an artist.” When he finished his share of the licorice, he fell asleep and began to snore. She poked her bony elbow hard into his ribs.

  Snow White’s gaggle of midgets was in midsong.

  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.

  The next time she jabbed him awake, the wicked witch or spiteful stepmother or evil queen—whoever she was—was asking, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” He managed to keep his eyes open for the rest of the movie, which didn’t placate her. Standing outside the theater, she was awash in the lights from the marquee. Olive skin aglow. A face he’d never forget. He kissed her on the cheek.

  She shook his hand, hailed a cab, and was gone. Heigh-ho.

  He never saw her again. Things worked out better for Snow White and her pint-size fan club. And they lived happily ever after.

  Corporal Harry Mundy and his fortunate cohort seemed destined to enjoy the same fate: Honor of having gone overseas, good luck of having arrived as the guns went dumb. A lamb in wolf’s clothing, civilian disguised as soldier, willing to share with an officer he’d never met the details of trafficking in contraband and German girls—Mundy’s war was over, for sure.

  Heil Harry Mundy, harbinger of peacetime and its pleasures.

  Heil Corporal Mundy, messenger of a world on the mend, stirring beneath dirt, dust, ashes, like first blades of grass in early spring.

  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from war we go.

  “Where are you from in the States, Corporal?” Dunne asked.

  “Hastings, just above Yonkers. You’re from New York, too, sir, aren’t you?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Easy. Been around a lot of Southern crackers. You hear somebody talk normal, you zero in right away. And you got none of that snooty attitude like the college types. Picked that up right away, too. You live in the city?”

  “With the exception of two all-expenses-paid trips to Europe, compliments of Uncle Sam, lived there all my life.”

  Mundy chuckled. “‘All expenses paid,’ that’s a good one, Captain. I got to remember it.” He drove fast but confidently, speeding through ink-dark streets with apparent certainty about where they were headed. “You were in the first war, too? You must’ve been a kid when you joined up.”

  “Close.” Sixteen. Lied and said he was eighteen. Didn’t know what he was signing up for. What kid did? Thought he was tough, fearless, all grown up, nothing left to learn. Like all those other kids—the ones who survived—he learned differently. All grown up when it was over. And glad to be alive.

  The jeep braked to a stop. Chest pressed against the duffel bag, Dunne sat back, cracked the door, dropped cigarette on wet pavement. “What’s the problem?”

  “Damn streets all look alike. The RAF blew up the signs along with the streets. Hard to know where you are. Sorry, but I think I took a wrong turn back there.” He shifted into reverse, made a quick three-point turn, and headed back in the direction they’d come. “Between that war and this, you pretty much seen it all, I guess.”

  “Enough.”

  “Wish I could say the same.” Mundy steered in a tight half-circle around the ruins of what looked to have been a fountain or a monument. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had my jollies here in Nuremberg. Still, I’ll be glad to get home. Not to brag, but I got a girl and a job waiting for me. Don’t know a lot of GIs who can claim that, do you, Major?” He stopped again.

  Dunne ignored the promotion Mundy conferred. Another sure sign the war was over when enlisted men were so inattentive to an officer’s rank. “Are we lost?”

  “No, sir. Should’ve gone right instead of left.” He continued talking as he completed the circle. Theresa, his girl, worked same place he did, Anaconda Wire and Cable. Supplied most of the wire for the Northeast’s telephones. Two years ago, the plant won an Army-Navy E pennant for excellence in supplying the military. Steady work, good pay, and as long as civilians and the military needed telephones and communications equipment, there was no need to worry about a job.

  “Theresa’s last name is Kelly.” Mundy glanced over. “Don’t get me wrong, I know plenty of Irish who are regular as cornflakes. Theresa’s family ain’t among them. They know Mundy used to be Mundowski. They go to St. Matthew’s. Don’t want their daughter marrying a Polack from St. Stanislaus who didn’t graduate high school. But she’s as stuck on me as me on her. Soon as I get home, I’ll go after that diploma, and we’ll get hitched.”

  Mundy hit the gas, then slowed down. A bent but still standing street lamp glistened on rain-glossed cobblestones. “This is the old part of the city. Or was.” A truck followed closely behin
d.

  Both sides of the street were lined with ugly heaps of broken, blackened masonry and debris piled atop furniture, lamps, china plates, toys, mementos, souvenirs, porcelain figurines—a graveyard for the thirty thousand people entombed beneath, the innocent with the guilty. Ancient or new, eloquent medieval Gothic or plainspoken military modern, one mute testament to the consequences of the war their führer had insisted on: Deutschland unter alles.

  “I’ll have you where you’re supposed to be in a few minutes or so.”

  “Sure thing,” Dunne said. The truck was gone.

  Except where he was supposed to be was Prague. A simple mission, at least that’s the way Bassante had made it seem. Collect the microfiche that contained Dr. Schaefer’s archive. Bring it back to London, and Bassante would take it from there. Now this delay in Nuremberg. Nothing was ever simple, was it? The best-laid plans gang aft agley.

  Time to go home. File this war with the one before, best you could. Yet he couldn’t say no to this final piece of business. An acknowledgment of the debt he owed Dick Van Hull. A way to honor Dr. Niskolczi and those others. A farewell to the now-defunct Office of Strategic Services and its founder and chief, General Donovan, whom President Truman had summarily dismissed when he disbanded the OSS barely a month after Japan’s surrender.

  On hearing the news, Dunne had felt bad for Donovan. He deserved better than an unceremonious shove out the door. But he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. That was how the game would always be played. “You want a true friend in Washington,” the new president was reported as saying, “buy a dog.”

  Mundy talked enthusiastically about his postwar plans. Theresa wanted six kids. Four would be fine by him. And a house, maybe on Long Island, near those leafy, easily traveled parkways where land was cheap. Get one of the new-model cars that would soon be rolling off the assembly lines and filling the showrooms. No more jalopies for Harry.

  They entered a narrow street. A heavy truck barreled toward them. “Hey, watch it!” Dunne exclaimed.

  “Don’t worry, Captain.” Mundy hit the accelerator. The two vehicles raced past each other, barely an inch of space between them. “Takes a real asshole to think he’s gonna win a game of chicken with Harry Mundy.”

  Dunne asked: “Are we getting close?” Left unasked: Who’s the asshole when a jeep plays chicken with a truck?

  “Not to worry, Captain. Once we’re outta here, it’s a straight shot.” Mundy went on about the weather, brutally cold until the temperature shot up and the rains came, but it was all temporary. Next week it would be Siberia all over, wind and snow, mercury at zero. “No doubt about it,” he said. “Can’t have a war like we just had and throw all that crap into the atmosphere and not affect the weather. Simple as two plus two.” He turned onto a better-lit but even narrower street. A battered white-on-black sign hung askew on the side of the corner building: Einbahnstrasse.

  A German phrase Dunne was familiar with: One-way street.

  What followed was a slow-motion mix of sights (inexorable approach of headlamps, nearer, brighter, larger, blurring into single spotlight), repeated cries (Oh shit! Was that Mundy’s solo? More likely a spontaneous, desperate duet), sounds (anguished s-s-s-p-putter of rubber tires’ reluctant slide across wet cobblestones, shatter of glass, clonk of metal, hollow womph of steering column entering Mundy’s chest, his explosive guttural gasp, gahhh).

  Are you dead?

  Only way to know for sure, push upward, out of thoughtless sleep toward wavering, uncertain light.

  Look. Listen. Above all, heed Bassante’s advice: Pay attention.

  Sight: Shadows, Blaue Engel? Blaue Teufel? Smell: Whiff of bay rum? Thought: A single one—tailbone connected to the ankle bone—comes and goes.

  Is someone there?

  Face wavers above, mirage-like, slowly comes into focus, lovely face, hair swept up beneath a white cap shaped like a dove.

  Angel or nurse?

  “Where am I?” Hears his own voice: cracked, moistureless croak.

  “In hospital.”

  Murmured directly in his ear, so close it tickles.

  “Captain Dunne, whoever had you hold that duffel bag in your lap did you the biggest favor of your life.”

  Others did favors of equal magnitude. Dick Van Hull for one. “How’s Mundy?”

  “Who?”

  “The driver.”

  The dove-shaped cap wiggles side to side. “Oh, I’m sorry …”

  Poor Harry.

  Darkness again. Victrola-voiced Western Union messenger clears his throat and sings (chants, really, as if intoning the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor) a telegram for Miss Theresa Kelly:

  The War Department and the President

  regret to inform ye

  Corporal Mundy won’t be sitting

  under the apple tree with anyone else or thee.

  Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,

  and let perpetual light shine upon Harry.

  Part II

  Operation Maxwell

  FILE COPY: FOR OFFICE USE ONLY

  FORM A-T 3127. OSS DATE: September 15, 1944

  NAME: Bassante, Turlough A.

  RANK: Major (R&A)

  SERIAL NUMBER: 067812647

  REQUEST: Transfer (SO) DETERMINATION: Denied (11/3/44)

  BACKGROUND INFORMATION (150 words or less): My mother was an O’Donnell, an Ulster Catholic, from Belfast; my father, a Waldensian—an Italian Protestant from Turin. It was an interesting if not an irenic marriage. (They met in that center of cosmopolitan sophistication, Hoboken, New Jersey.) My father worked as a steward on the old Lloyd Sabaudo shipping line. My mother was a laundress. They had nine children. Six lived into adulthood. One Jesuit and one policeman (the same profession, really, just different uniforms). Two of the daughters are married, with a dozen or so progeny between them. The third, married to a Jew, is a childless school principal in Brooklyn. And then there’s moi. A conundrum to my parents. Child agnostic. Rejected a scholarship to St. Peter’s Prep. Insisted on attending public high school.

  EDUCATION: Scholarship to Yale. Majored in German. Minored in history. Tutored in Slavic languages. (Why Slavic languages? I wish I knew. But other than a taste for the exotic, I’m unsure why.) Encouraged by the Depression to seek government work, successfully sought admission to the Foreign Service School.

  CAREER: The Foreign Service. Posted at various times to Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow. Recalled to London in June 1941, when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Asked for a transfer to the OSS in the summer of 1942. My superiors were unhappy with the request, regarding the OSS as an upstart outlier intent on poaching upon the traditional prerogatives of the Department of State. Their objections were overridden at the insistence of General Donovan, to whom I’d addressed a personal appeal. He insisted the State Department enjoyed a surfeit of linguists (in fact, the opposite was true—the Department’s lack of truly capable linguists was shocking) while the OSS was sorely lacking (which was true), especially in the field. With the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Donovan got his way, and I set off in the expectation of leaving desk work behind to take personal part in assaulting and subverting the Nazi sway over Europe. Instead, I was assigned to the Research & Analysis (R&A) in Bari, here to toil over briefing materials for presentation to operatives leaving for the field. The frustrations of this work are legion. Greatest of all is the direct contravention of the promise made me upon joining the OSS—i.e., that I would participate in the penetration of Occupied Europe, serving on missions to be undertaken behind enemy lines. I request to be assigned to Special Operations (SO), a position I was assured of upon enlistment into the OSS.

  January 1945

  HÔTEL RITZ, PARIS

  THE SUMMONS TO GENERAL DONOVAN’S HEADQUARTERS WAS UNEXpected. Dunne had suspected—or, more accurately, hoped—that the younger, more gung ho OSS agents were at the head of the list for what were clearly th
e last clandestine assignments before the war’s end. Yet the brevity and bluntness of Donovan’s summons conveyed a sense of urgency.

  The exuberance engendered by the city’s liberation the previous summer was absent from the gloomy, wintry streets. As he passed through the lobby of the Hôtel Ritz, Dunne noticed Donovan’s head of press relations, Lieutenant Colonel Carlton Baxter Bartlett, in the bar off to the right. He was holding court amid a semicircle of officers.

  A trim, taciturn sergeant escorted Dunne down the heavily carpeted hallway to Donovan’s office. He pointed to an elegant, gold-leafed, bowlegged chair pushed against the wall. “Have a seat. The general will see you when he’s ready.” The sergeant planted himself behind his desk and pecked away with two fingers at an ancient-looking typewriter.

  The last time Dunne had seen Donovan was the previous spring in London, several weeks before the invasion. The general had sent a note asking to see him. It turned out to be a casual meeting. Instead of sitting inside, they took a walk and enjoyed the spring weather. Donovan did most of the talking—not about what was ahead but the last war, boys of the 69th, especially those who didn’t make it back. “I’m sure we’ll be successful,” he said, without specifying at what. “The question is what price we’ll pay.”

  Near the Houses of Parliament, he had a car waiting. He had the driver take their picture. It all seemed planned. A few days later, a print was delivered to Dunne, signed, with an inscription: To Fintan Dunne, My highest regards to a soldier’s soldier.

  No doubt intended as a gesture of respect and—even more—encouragement to a brother-in-arms under no illusions about the mayhem and gore ahead, but the effect was to leave Dunne rattled and unsure. He fantasized about sending it back with an inscription of his own: Thanks, but no thanks. This sounds like an epitaph. Instead, he stuck it in an envelope and mailed it home to Roberta.