Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  “Christ, I just swallowed Victor.”

  “You bite it?”

  “No.”

  “You should be all right.”

  “I’ll lie here till I’m sure.”

  “Then it’ll be the SS, not Victor, gets you.”

  Van Hull lifted Dunne to his feet. He lost track of how long they walked. It felt as if Van Hull was carrying him. Sky grew light. The brutal ache in his ankle and the discomfort of the crude T-bar against his armpit made him halt. “I’m done.”

  Van Hull eased him onto a tree stump. In the east, dull tapestry of morning sky had a rust-colored hem. Directly ahead, beyond the trees, was a two-lane asphalt road.

  “You said it was only a little farther.”

  “We got here, didn’t we?”

  “Where?”

  “Where we need to be.”

  “Nowhere?”

  “The road to Banská Bystrica. It’s the only way left.” Van Hull opened his coat, pulled out his .45, and passed it to Dunne. “We can’t keep moving like this. Your ankle can’t take much more.” He looked around. “I’m going to stop the first civilian vehicle comes by. Cover me.”

  “Odds are the only vehicles on the road are full of Germans hunting for us.”

  Submachine gun over shoulder, Van Hull had already started walking toward the road. He turned. “Victor should exit soon. If you want to use it again, be sure to …”

  The mechanical rhythm of a fast-approaching, well-tuned engine came from where the road curved south. Silver and streamlined, the car that came into view had no military markings.

  Van Hull walked into the middle of the road.

  Dunne dropped behind the stump and took aim.

  Perhaps the driver was cruising along, not paying attention, or maybe he was testing Van Hull’s resolve, but he braked at the last moment, two or three yards in front of Van Hull, who acted as unperturbed as a cop directing traffic at 57th and Fifth. He walked around the car, opened the door on the passenger’s side, and leaned in. The driver, in brown fedora and brown woolen overcoat, hands firmly on the wheel, turned toward him.

  Right eye sighted on the driver’s head, Dunne did his best to ignore the distracting throb in his ankle bone and keep the gun steady. He weighed the necessity to act quickly—take out the driver if he reached for a weapon, or hit the gas in an effort to escape, or made a move toward Van Hull—against the need not to mistake an innocent gesture for a threatening one and, above all, to make sure Van Hull was out of the line of fire.

  Smoke poured from the tailpipe as the car idled in place. “Get a move on, Dick,” Dunne whispered to himself. Listening half expectantly for the sound of another approaching vehicle, he was startled by a growl. After a second or two, he realized it was his own stomach. He felt a loosening in his bowels.

  Victor and he were preparing to part company.

  Stout and smiling, the driver got out. Dunne couldn’t see Van Hull. They’d killed two SS troopers and stripped one of his uniform. If captured, their captors would have their revenge before finishing them off.

  The driver started to walk toward him. Dunne gripped right wrist with left hand, aimed, and kept Mulholland’s rule in mind: Be sure to kill the right people, but don’t be afraid of making a mistake. Van Hull’s head popped up on the other side of the car. He hurried around its front and trotted toward Dunne, leaving the driver slightly behind.

  Dunne raised his head. Perspiration slid down his face, onto neck, into collar. Shoot the fucker before he shoots you.

  “We’re in luck!” Van Hull shouted.

  Dunne removed his finger from the trigger and lowered the gun.

  Van Hull took off coat and helmet and dumped them behind the stump. “Give me a hand,” he said to the man in the brown fedora. They reached down, lifted Dunne to his feet, carried him to the car, and lowered him in the back seat. Van Hull tossed in the impromptu crutch and his submachine gun.

  Dunne stretched his legs. The driver took hold of his ankle, gently probed and palpated, the way a doctor would. “The splint is well done. But the ankle must be properly seen to. We must hurry.” He climbed in behind the wheel.

  Van Hull stood back, admiring the car. When he tapped on the window, Dunne rolled it down. “Can you believe it, Fin? A Tatra 77, a true classic.”

  “Tell me about it when we get to the auto show.” Dunne rolled the window up.

  “Only carmaker in America produced anything comparable was the Auburn Automobile Company. My father is an aficionado. Their Cord 810 sedan …”

  The driver pleaded, “Please, I implore you, let’s go.” He revved the motor.

  After another admiring once-over, Van Hull hopped in the front. Dunne sank into the softly yielding seat. Gray velour upholstery. The slightly overheated interior was like a warm, muscle-relaxing bath. The car quickly picked up speed. Framed in the car window, the white-dusted trees and snow-covered landscape seemed rustic and serene, a Christmas card scene, Season’s Greetings from Slovakia.

  The driver glanced at Dunne in the rearview mirror. “This is a miracle.” His eyes were a neutral blue, unperturbed, unreadable.

  “He guessed who we are,” Van Hull said. “And I guessed who he is: Gerhard Schaefer.”

  The smile in the mirror seemed unrehearsed. “After a night of nothing but bad luck, this is almost too good to be true.” His English was flawless, accent slight.

  “Like stumbling on the Abominable Snowman.” Dunne cracked open the window.

  The smile in the mirror widened. “We’ve nothing so exotic in Slovakia.”

  Dunne breathed the cold air that rushed in. “Where we headed?”

  “About six kilometers outside Banská Bystrica is a house in the woods, secluded, secure, where I’ve been staying.”

  “Mind if I smoke?” Van Hull asked.

  “Not at all.” Schaefer pushed in the cylindrical lighter.

  “We were told we’d be met by a partisan group led by ‘Anton’ and taken to a safe house about ten miles outside town.”

  Schaefer slowed the car, swung right, then left onto a dirt road. “Best to stay off the main roads as much as we can. I wish my vehicle was less conspicuous, but it’s all I have.” He drove the rutted, uneven road at a slow pace. “It takes longer but is safer.” He pulled to the side of the road and parked. He extracted the lighter.

  Van Hull leaned down, touched the tip of the cigarette in his lips to the red-hot coil, and puffed; handed the cigarette back to Dunne and lit another for himself.

  Schaefer plugged the cylinder back in. He laid his hat beside him. “Yesterday everything went wrong. The SS knew something was up, but wasn’t quite sure when or where. They carried out a roundup in Banská Bystrica. Anton and several of his men were caught. By this morning, they knew. Anton has been shot. The others were made to talk.” He bowed his head. The bald patch atop was visible in the rearview mirror. “I learned of all this only a few hours ago. I didn’t know of your mission. When I found out, I decided to see if by some miracle I could make contact.”

  “Miracle accomplished.”

  “So far.” Schaefer steered back onto the dirt road, which soon ended. They returned to the highway.

  Dunne’s cigarette tasted tired and dry, less the fault of the cigarette, more of his own exhaustion. After a puff or two, he flung it out the window; it rose, fell, spun wildly, ricocheted off the asphalt, spraying sparks like one of those German rockets whose guidance mechanisms went kerflooey.

  Off to the right were a church and a small cluster of houses and shops, some intact, others wrecked and burned, roofs caved in. Directly across the market square was a train station, four engine-less boxcars parked in front. No one was in sight.

  Dunne remembered shelled and empty villages he’d seen in the first war and the endless procession of half-wrecked and ruined places featured in the newspapers and newsreels of this one. Another winter scene: Season’s Greetings from Wartime Wherever. Be glad you’re where you are and not here. An
onymous victims. Anonymous village. People and places the world had never heard of and never would. The unwritten history of all wars. He took a deep breath and closed the window. “There’s the church, and there’s the steeple. What about the people?”

  Schaefer shrugged. “Winter and war have a way of driving them indoors.”

  “What’s its name?” Van Hull asked.

  “I’m not sure. Does it matter?”

  Van Hull turned to watch the houses go by. “‘Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; / Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen / And Desolation saddens all thy green …’”

  “You sound like an Englishman, Major. They love their tea and poetry, at least the cultured ones.”

  “Did you like the States?” Dunne sank deeper into the plush upholstery.

  “‘Like’ would be an understatement. I love your country for its bluntness and originality. I was there all too briefly yet felt at home. In a different time, I might have stayed. Been easier than returning to the nightmare here. But I had to come back.”

  Van Hull stubbed out his cigarette in the tray beneath the dashboard “‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land! / Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned / As home his footsteps he hath turned / From wandering on a foreign strand!’”

  “You are a walking anthology!”

  “The peril of traveling with a teacher,” Dunne said. “Lots of quotes.”

  “It’s standard stuff, but it gets students interested so they’ll tackle the moderns, Auden, Eliot, Yeats, and the like.”

  Yeats. Dunne put his hand on the leather fold in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Why remember one thing and not another?

  “But the sentiment is so true. What kind of man deserts his homeland when its very soul is in danger? I’ve been able to compile important records—a formidable body of evidence—that will help set the record straight about the enormity of the crimes that have been committed. I don’t regret it.”

  “You talked your way out of an SS interrogation.” Van Hull glanced back at the deserted village, but it had vanished behind a phalanx of trees.

  “Once they had me, I couldn’t vouch for what I’d tell them or not. I had no idea of how much ‘treatment’ of theirs I could take before I broke. Fortunately, they were convinced by my story. I thought the account of what happened reached Bari.”

  “No small feat to bluff the SS.”

  “Perhaps you think I should have gone with Lieutenant Jahn and his men, no? They wanted me to. But I knew I’d slow them down and add to their chances of being captured. I had my detention by the partisans faked. They gave me a good pounding to make it look real. It wasn’t just my performance, however, that carried the day. The Soviets were on the move and the partisans growing stronger. The SS was distracted. They let me go for the time being. The partisans secured me a hiding place.”

  “They’ve been very concerned in Bari about losing contact with you.”

  “The messages weren’t delivered. The partisans blocked them.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure how exhaustive your briefing was, but those in favor of the government-in-exile in London—and return of independent, democratic Czechoslovakia—they want a strong force landed in support of an immediate rescue of Jahn and his men.”

  “You’ve seen them since their capture?” Van Hull didn’t hide his excitement.

  “Not in person. But I know as fact the Hlinka Guards are holding them in Banská Bystrica. Anton confirmed it. He was hopeful that, with Allied help, he could free them. But the partisans who take their orders from Moscow were against it. Their wish is for the Red Army to take charge as soon as possible, and it’s they who hold the stronger hand. They control communications with Bari.”

  “Do they know about the information you’ve collected?”

  “Yes, they know I have it.” Schaefer shook his head. “But not where. That is my secret. I’m not idly boasting when I say I’ve risked my life to gather it, to get it all down, writing furiously at night while it was still fresh, dates, locations, names, ranks, branches of the service, doctors, assistants, advisers. I allowed nothing to escape me.

  “Many will think me a traitor when the truth comes out, but it is they who in their complicity have betrayed the fatherland, our noble, decent Germany, which was once the bulwark of European civilization. To all of them, I was a reliable ally, eager to help, always ready with a gift for wives and girlfriends. They confided in me their most intimate and important secrets. Once, as I was just coming to a full appreciation of what was underway, an operative at IG Farben shared his car with me on an inspection of industrial operations at Auschwitz. The car bore the insignia of the Red Cross.

  “After we’d driven a while, he added in a bragging way that he’d been entrusted with a ‘special mission of a sanitary nature.’ He jerked his thumb toward the trunk. ‘Back there,’ he said, ‘I’m carrying Passover presents for the Jews.’

  “‘What kind of presents?’ I asked.

  “‘Gas canisters—a crate full.’

  “‘Disinfectant?’

  “He winked. ‘This gas exterminates vermin and rodents of all types—two-legged as well as four-.’

  “I soon learned firsthand what he was hinting at, and believe me, the partisans would love nothing more than to acquire what I’ve amassed so they can pass it to the Soviets. Think how useful it would be to Moscow to have a detailed list of the major criminals and their accomplices in the treatment of the Jews, and then to decide who to prosecute and liquidate, and who to intimidate and turn to their purposes. As long as I’m in their reach, they are content to wait for me to hand it over.”

  “Are you holed up alone?” Van Hull asked.

  “‘Held up alone’? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Holed up. Are you living by yourself?”

  “Yes, but as soon as we get to my quarters, I’ll alert the underground, and we’ll move fast to get this operation under way.” Schaefer veered back onto the highway. He drove at an inconspicuous speed, almost as if they were out for a Sunday drive.

  An exhaust-spewing civilian truck whooshed past in the opposite direction. Dunne sighed loudly and opened his eyes. “How much longer?”

  “I thought we’d lost you to the arms of Morpheus.” Schaefer peered at Dunne in the mirror with a concerned expression. “No wonder with all you’ve been through. We’re ten minutes away at most. I’ve plenty of painkillers. I’ll see to that ankle myself.”

  “Afraid I can’t wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Victor. He’s got to leave and won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Victor?” Schaefer’s concern gave way to confusion. “Victor who?”

  “You certain you can’t wait, Fin?” Van Hull asked.

  “Victor is even more certain.”

  Van Hull pointed at the roadside. “Pull over far as you can.”

  Schaefer did as told. “Who is this Victor?”

  “The LP. Tödlich pille. He swallowed one a few hours ago but didn’t bite it.”

  “Ach, that. I’ll get him another. If he tries to reuse the one he took, he could die whether he bites it or not. Most of the covering is probably worn away.”

  Dunne opened the car door. “Do it in here or out there, that’s the choice.”

  “We’ll be quick.” Van Hull got out, lifted Dunne’s makeshift crutch from the back seat and helped him stand. Van Hull at his side, Dunne hobbled into the woods. “Is there anything in the Boy Scout Handbook about taking a dump on one leg?”

  “Whatever works best is the Boy Scout way.”

  Dunne undid his belt and dropped his pants and underwear. “That’s what I most remember about basic training in the last war.”

  “What?”

  “The instructors never got around to teaching how to take a shit in a rifle pit two feet deep with German snipers ready to blow y
our head off. Turned out to be among the most valuable lessons there was.” Dunne squatted on a large log, rear extending past, and gripped the sapling in front. “Which way with Schaefer?”

  Van Hull looked into the distance. “That’s the reason you had him stop, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “To decide whether we go any farther or not.”

  “If this is a trap, we’re only getting in deeper.”

  “Maybe it’s not.”

  “Maybe I’m Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “You think he’s an SS plant?”

  “He’s as phony as a chocolate cigar.”

  “Then why’d he tell us where Jahn is?”

  “Because he knows desperate men will latch on to anything that gives them hope. Who knows that better than the SS? The whole way he shows up in the one car we’ve probably heard him connected with. ‘This is almost too good to be true’—that’s the one truthful thing he said.” Dunne grunted. “Here it comes.”

  “Shit.”

  “What’d you expect?”

  “No, I mean where’s that leave us?”

  “Don’t suppose you brought along any toilet paper?”

  “I’ll buy you a roll when we get home. That’s a promise.”

  “No need. I’ve something as good.” Dunne lifted the leather fold from the breast pocket of his jump jacket. He extracted the operational map they’d each been given. “I knew it would come in handy.”

  “For Chrissake, you still might need that.”

  “This is the best use it’s had so far. Besides, you’ve got a copy, and if I lose you, all I need is Victor.” As he unfolded the map, a piece of newspaper fluttered to the ground. “Give me that, will you? That’s what I was looking for.”

  Van Hull picked it up and handed it to Dunne, who began to read. He glanced over Dunne’s shoulder at the Pharmaceutical News piece Bassante had included in the briefing books. “Come on, Fin, it’s a little late to catch up on your homework.”

  Dunne shrugged. “Maybe not.”

  “You asked for toilet paper, not reading material.”

  “Sometimes they’re the same thing.” Dunne focused on the paper, almost as if he were trying to commit it to memory, then threw it away. He used the map to wipe himself. Van Hull helped him to stand and pull up his pants.