by Bill Mesce
“Useless, hm?” Harry suggested.
“I’d ask him to work up a duty roster for me. He looks at me like I’m speaking in Yiddish. ‘A what? How’s that work?’ It took me an hour to explain to him what a duty roster was. Take care of these manpower reports, Grassi.’ ‘Where’s that readiness report?’ ‘I need a rotation watch schedule for the radio shack.’ ‘A what? What’s a rotation? How does that work?’ I think half the work I got from that guy — maybe all the work — came from poor Olinsky there. You want to hear something funny? On top of everything else Grassi did to annoy the hell out of people, he was an outrageous slob.” To Harry: “You know chozzer?”
“Pig?”
Blume nodded. “But go into his office —”
“Neat as a pin,” Harry said. “Clear desk.”
Blume nodded, still marveling over the discrepancy. “You know why?”
“Because he didn’t do anything.”
“At least nothing I gave him to do. Then, when his mouth got working really well again…” Blume put his hands to his head, reliving the headache. “‘Oy gevalt,’ as my Nana would say. Every time I turned around, Grassi’s in my ear nudzhing about how he’s an Army lawyer, not some clerk, and he wants to do Army lawyer stuff.”
“Noodging?” Kneece asked.
“A nudzh is like a pest,” Harry translated.
“Noodge.” Kneece grinned, enjoying the word. “Noodge!”
“Every time he got into that jazz,’ Blume groused on, “I’d point out the obvious to him. I’d say, ‘Lieutenant, I appreciate you want to use all that law school training; I’m sure your mother’s so proud you’re a lawyer. But maybe you should notice we don’t have a great demand for a JAG bureau here.’” He sighed gustily. “I got two guys, one gets a little cabin fever, the other says the wrong thing, somebody throws a punch, the next thing I know Grassi’s squawking about a full-blown court-martial. A couple of the guys sneak into town one night and steal some local yokel’s sheep, Grassi wants to turn it into a major JAG investigation. One time — I swear, this is the truth — we got a bad can of spinach, Grassi’s hot to trace it all the way back to the Quartermaster General. I told him, ‘Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘if one of these guys even threw a punch at me I wouldn’t bust him; I’d give him a medal for breaking up the boredom.’”
“Sounds like he was after anything that could get him back to the States,” Kneece concluded.
“That’s what I thought in the beginning. But after having this guy in my ear for a couple months, I started thinking it was something else. He didn’t just want to get out of here; he wanted to —”
“Get back in the game,” Harry offered.
Blume brightened. “Yeah. For him, getting sent here was like getting benched.”
“I already know the answer,” Kneece said, “but I’m gonna ask: Did he have any friends on the post?”
“Look around. Do you see anybody beating their chests in grief over his death? Olinsky was his clerk. He spent as much time with Grassi as anybody. If there’s something personal you want to know about the lieutenant’s stay with us, ask him.”
“What about any of the locals? Maybe a girl —”
“The civilians didn’t find him any less a nudzh than we did. Besides, once the thermometer started dipping, he didn’t go far. Not a hardy type.”
“How long was he gone before you noticed he was missing?”
“I didn’t know he was missing until I got the message they’d found him dead in England.”
“The Orkneys.”
Blume shrugged. “The Orkneys. Is he more dead because it’s the Orkneys?”
“Captain,” Harry interposed, “nobody has to tell me how off-putting Armando Grassi could be. And I understand you’d probably avoid him day-to-day as much as you could. God knows, I would’ve. But I’d think you’d notice — especially in a small post like this — if any one of your men, and especially a nudzh like Grassi, had dropped out of sight.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? Except Grassi didn’t drop out of sight.”
“I’m getting confused,” Kneece said.
“We’re both getting confused,” Harry said.
“About a week before Grassi turned up in the Orkneys, we got a signal from the Cape. Some C-47 pilot crashed on takeoff, and there was some kind of jurisdictional squabble. See, the Cape is Navy, but the transport, the crew, they were Army. And it looked like something wasn’t kosher about the crash. Scuttlebutt had it the pilot was boozed up or something like that. So the Cape signaled us, and they wanted us to buck the word up to our senior at Bluie-West-One. He was the one with the authority, the one who had to make the decision about what to do with this pilot. Well, Grassi got wind of this; next thing I know, he’s all around my head like a bunch of gnats.”
“Noodging,” Kneece said.
“Noodging.”
“He wanted the case,” Harry said.
“He says this is what he does, this is what he’s trained to do — on and on, you know.”
“I know,” Harry said sympathetically.
“He was after me all the time on this. You know how he could get. You wanted to smack him.”
“I know!’ Harry said.
“Only this time, maybe he had a point, I was thinking. We have misconduct maybe, maybe drunk on duty, something not nice with this pilot. And here we have a bonafide JAG officer on hand. Why not?”
“It also got Grassi out of your hair,” Kneece pointed out.
“Hey, the Navy shouldn’t suffer, too? Comrades-in-arms? Let him be somebody else’s headache for a couple days. I get the OK from Bluie-West-One, I give the word to Grassi, and for him this was Hanukkah gelt.” To Kneece: “A gift. Not that he’d say thank you or anything, it would kill him to express some gratitude, then he’s off. He wasn’t gone an hour, this pain in my head I’ve had for three months mysteriously disappears. Go figure.”
Kneece flipped back to an earlier note he’d made in his pad. “You said he was gone a week?”
“Something like that. I can check the date with my office files.”
“And he never checked in with you? Not the whole time he was down at the Cape? No report of his findings? Or the progress of his investigation?”
Blume shook his head.
“He didn’t send a signal about leaving the country?”
“Nope.”
“And you never checked in with him?”
“Nope.”
“Even when the couple of days turned into a week?”
“He could’ve been down there a month, I would’ve let it be. Does the phrase ‘Don’t look a gift horse’ and so on mean anything to you? The last I saw of him, the last anybody here heard from him, was the day he left. Amen.”
“So you don’t have any idea of why Grassi left Greenland? Why he wound up a thousand miles away? What he was on to?”
“Not a clue.”
“You said before you didn’t think he was just aiming to find himself a way out of here. So you don’t think maybe this was just him going AWOL? Somebody like Grassi, ants in his pants, stuck in a place like this —”
“He could’ve hopped any transport any time. Stopping him is not something people on this end would’ve thought of. ‘Please, Captain, sir, can I go down to the Cape?’ That’s not how you slip out unnoticed. Look: I’m the last guy to give that pain-in-the-arse credit for anything, but I don’t think Grassi was going over the hill; I don’t think he’d do that. What I do think is he got his beak into something and got slapped, which would be like him.”
Kneece propped an elbow on the table and rubbed his chin meditatively. “It looks like a visit to the Cape is gonna be our next stop.” He nodded at the window. “How long does that usually last?”
“A day Couple of days. A week. I’ll check in with my crack weather team and let you know. Anything else?”
“We’ve been traveling all day,” Harry said. “Where can we bunk?”
“Grassi’s quart
ers are the only spare accommodations I’ve got. Nobody’s been in his room since he left.” To Kneece: “That’s how cops like it, right? Don’t touch anything? If he left anything useful to you, it’s still there. Olinsky’ll take you over. I’ll assign him to you. When you’re ready, he’ll take you over to Grassi’s office and show you whatever you need. If you need to talk to anybody else on the post, Olinsky’ll set it up.” They said their good nights. As Harry pulled himself into his parka he nodded at Blume’s plate. “Would your rabbi approve?”
Blume smiled. “It gets harder to keep kosher the further north of the forty-ninth parallel you get. God should understand. I hear He’s on our side.”
“Your captain told us nobody’s been in here since the lieutenant left.”
“Nobody has, sir.”
Kneece stood fixed in the doorway; unable to force himself through. “Are you telling me this is how he left it?”
Olinsky chuckled and slid past Kneece to deposit their baggage inside. “Captain, sir, this is how he lived in it. Lieutenant Engstrom — that was Lieutenant Grassi’s roomie — he moved out a month ago. He said he’d rather sleep on the floor squeezed in with some of the other officers than put up with this. The latrine’s down that end of the hall, sirs, coal’s at the other. Damn, it’s freezin’ in here! Let me get the fire goin’ for you, sirs.” Olinsky trotted off toward the coal bin with a bucket from the room.
The junior officers’ billet was a Quonset with a corridor along one side, and the other side divided into small rooms, each just big enough for two bunks, a pair of upright lockers, and a chair and small table serving as a shared desk. One of the bunks in Grassi’s quarters — presumably that of the vacated Lieutenant Engstrom — was bare with a stack of fresh sheets and blankets neatly folded at the foot. On the bunk opposite, bedclothes were a tangle. Across both bunks and the floor was strewn a soldier’s full issue of clothing, from fatigues to underthings, ties to socks. The room was chill enough to elicit vapor when they spoke, yet even in that cold their noses wrinkled at an odor indicating it had been some time since any of the litter had been through the post laundry. At the base of Grassi’s bunk sat an open footlocker, its interior a jumble of toilet articles, more clothing, footwear, and personal items. The upright locker also overflowed with more jumble, including an insanely crimson dressing gown more suitable for wear in a Hong Kong brothel than a remote subarctic military outpost.
“Was he like this back in London?” Kneece spoke in the hushed voice of a witness to a great disaster.
“He was legendary,” Harry said. He cleared the empty bunk of stray Grassi items, flicking them away with his gloved fingertips. “For the artwork, too.” He nodded at the display over Grassi’s bunk: a collage of girlie photographs clipped from magazines and newspapers. Some were extracted from clothing advertisements, while others were familiar Hollywood-produced images: publicity photos for Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, et al.
“A rawther ec-lectic collection, I must say.” Kneeces eyes were appreciative as they ranged across the display.
“Yeah, eclectic,” Harry said, tucking fresh sheets round the bunk’s mattress. “If she breathed, she was eligible. That’s what Grassi meant by eclectic.”
“I see he rawther fancied the expressionists, rawther. And, pray tell, good fellow, perchance how did you come into possession of the clean bunk?”
“Privilege of rank.”
Kneece frowned at the other bunk. “I think these sheets out-rank us both. Why don’t you let the corporal fix that bunk up for you?”
“This is keeping me warm.”
Kneece picked about the linens of his own bunk. “Damn. I wonder when the last time was he changed these sheets?”
“You’ll be OK. I remember reading somewhere that germs can’t survive extreme cold.”
Kneece moved to the upright locker and shook his head over the crimson dressing gown. The locker’s top shelf was jammed with colored bottles and jars: a noxious assembly of lotions, creams, scents, toilet waters, balms, elixirs, and every other potion intended to enhance the appeal of the human male. Kneece sniffed at one of the bottles and recoiled as if he’d been struck. “Good Christ! Who was he trying to impress with all this? The Eskimos? Don’t light any matches around this stuff, Major. You’ll take out a wall. I guess these died of loneliness.” He held up a few wrapped prophylactics.
Olinsky returned, his bucket filled with coal, and began to stoke the room’s brazier.
“Captain Blume says you were Lieutenant Grassi’s clerk,” Kneece put to him.
Olinsky grunted an assent.
“Not a big fan of the lieutenant?”
Another grunt.
“Do you know why we’re here, Corporal?” Harry asked. “Everybody knows what happened to the lieutenant. So everybody figgers —”
“‘Everybody’?”
“Well, Cap’n, this is kind of a small place. Word goes around.”
“Everybody figures it’s something about Lieutenant Grassi,” Harry supplied, and Olinsky nodded. “It’s been my experience, Corporal, that people get a little shy about speaking ill of the dead. Even if they know the dead was a total son of a bitch.”
Olinsky laughed. “I guess that’s so, sir, yeah.”
Harry finished making his bunk and started fishing through his travel bag for his notepad. “What I’m saying, Corporal, is don’t be shy.”
“OK, yessir.”
“Captain Blume thought if Lieutenant Grassi had any friends you’d know who they were,” Kneece said.
“I suppose that’s true, if he had any. The lieutenant didn’t have that kind of knack, makin’ friends.”
“You worked for him. The two of you must’ve talked. You know, just… chatted.”
The word amused Olinsky. “Well, yeah, you’d think that, but I tried to avoid having ‘chats’ with the lieutenant if I could. He wasn’t much for conversation.”
“I can’t believe that,” Harry said.
“Oh, not that he wasn’t gabby.”
“OK, that I can believe.”
“He was always — I mean always — goin on and on about what a crummy place this is. Well, tell me somethin’ nobody here don’t already know! You know, sirs, maybe you gotta be here a while to understand, but after a bit, you don’t really want to hear it no more. So, instead of him bendin’ my ear all the time ’bout how bad we got it ’n’ how bad everything is, I tried to stay out of range as much as I could. Sometimes he’d buttonhole me, try to pump me about women in town, or if there was someplace he could get his hands on some good hooch.”
“And what would you tell him?” Kneece asked.
“I wouldn’t tell him nothin’. Anybody else I’d put on to somethin’, you know, just to be polite, but him, I’d just say, ‘Lieutenant, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that kind of thing, sir.’ To me, it’s not like I could see this guy sayin’, Thanks for the tip, Corp.’ More like he’d come back pissin’ ’n’ moanin’ ’bout maybe how not-too-pretty the local dames were, or how he’d had better booze in his time. Like I said, who needs to hear it?”
“Captain Blume says Grassi didn’t seem to understand most of his duties.”
Olinsky’s face wrinkled. “I think he just put on like that to get out of it. The cap’n ’d come in ’n’ maybe say, ‘Hey, Lieutenant, do this or do that,’ ’n’ Lieutenant Grassi, he’d get all dumb, then the cap’n ’d leave ’n’ there it is on my desk, ’n’ the lieutenant sayin’, ‘Hey, Olinsky, take care of that.’ If it was you, how hard’d you work for a guy keeps doin’ that to ya? Even if he is your boss? There, that brazier’s goin’ good now. Oughta keep you warm for a bit. You’re gonna have to keep feedin’ this thing. I told you where the coal bin was?”
“Yes, Corporal, thanks,” Kneece said. “What about these cases Grassi was always trying to make?”
“Cases?”
“Captain Blume says the lieutenant was always trying to turn certain incidents into legal issues —”
“Not really, no.”
“Oh. Well, anyway, like the time with those guys stole the sheep. The cap’n tell you ’bout that?”
“A little.”
“No big deal, really. These two guys — I don’t got to give you no names, do I? — they bought some torpedo juice off some Navy guys at the Cape, they got a little tight one night, they were a little bored — well, hell, everybody’s always bored. Anyway, all it was was this joke. They snuck down into town, got into this guy’s pens, ’n’ stole one of his sheep.”
“I got the impression from Captain Blume that there was no shortage of lamb chops at the mess.”
“Oh, this wasn’t for eatin’, sir. It was just a joke! They took the sheep, dressed it up in fatigues — how they got that thing in them clothes, I guess they had to be real drunk ’n’ real bored — they got it all dressed up ’n’ left it sittin’ in the cap’n’s jeep in the momin’. Even the cap’n thought it was funny. But Lieutenant Grassi, he starts goin’ on that this is some kind of stealin’, ‘mistreatin’ the civilian populace,’ I think he said. I mean, this guy, he got his sheep back, I don’t know what the big deal was. I don’t think it was a big deal. And the lieutenant, I figgered him a guy to be just as likely as any other joker to pull a stunt like that if he wasn’t tryin’ so hard to work his way outta this place. So then the lieutenant, he’s grabbin’ people, sayin’, ‘Do you know anythin’’bout this?’”
“He asked you.”
“Yeah, sure. Do I know these guys? he asked me.”
“But you didn’t tell him.”
Olinsky nodded.
“You were thinking, to hell with him, right?”
Olinsky shrugged, a little red-faced.
“It’s OK,” Harry put in. “I worked with the guy I would’ve done the same thing.”
Olinsky looked relieved. “The way I worked it with the lieutenant was whenever he got on his horse ’bout somethin’ like this, like with the sheep, if it was somebody I knew ’n’ he didn’t, I’d just say I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout it. If it was somebody I knew ’n’ he knew I knew ’em, then I’d say, ‘Well, that’s funny, sir, he always seemed a right guy to me.’”
