by Bill Mesce
Harry continued reading:
cCASUALTY LIST SHOWS YOUR WESTBOUND E-6 NONCOMBAT DEATH PRESQUE ISLE INFIRMARY 12-4 STOP NO LEAD ON REST OF FLIGHT CREW STOP
“That’d be Bell, the flight mechanic,” Kneece explained. “I told my buddy not to use any names in his communications. Going by what you’ve been saying, I didn’t know whose eyes this’d get in front of.”
“Zagottis was right,” Harry said bleakly.
“About what?”
“Bell couldn’t take the trip.” Harry returned to the message.
EDGHILL ASSIGNED G-4 TRANSPORT SECTION 12-40 SPECIFICALLY AIR SUPPORT US DIPLOMATS BRITISH ISLES STOP RUMOR POLITICAL CONNECTIONS STOP STILL HUNTING HOPE MORE TO FOLLOW STOP YOU OWE ME VERY BIG END MESSAGE
The young captain wiped his fingers clean on a napkin, took the message from Harry, gave it a last glance, then tucked it inside his jacket. “What do you make of that? ‘Political connections.’”
“Edghill’s in Washington. All connections are political there.”
“When I wired ahead to let CID here know I was coming, I included a query on the whereabouts of that copilot that survived the crash. Coster. I asked Colonel McCutcheon how that was going —”
“Unavailable.”
Kneece nodded. I’m starting to think ‘unavailable’ means ‘Whatever we know, we’re not telling.’ You going to eat the rest of that?”
Harry pushed his plate across.
“I’ve got some other not-so-good news,” Kneece said through a mouthful of Harry’s sandwich. “Remember how Major hoity-toity Moncrief said he was going to rrrring up the chaps at the Yahd and have all that rrrrahther dull paperwork forwarded to your lads for your perrrrusal, eh? Well, it ain’t here. When I asked McCutcheon about it, he says he don’t know nothing nohow no way about it. He says he’ll put in a call to Scotland Yard about it, but I’m getting the bad suspicion it’s going to be ‘unavailable.’ You ever run over a skunk, Major? Well, things are smelling like we ran over a big, fat one. Anyway, that’s how my meeting went. How did yours go?”
“I said hi. He said hi.”
“Somebody you remember from when you —”
“Yeah.”
“Can he help us?”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“With how high a lot of the boys around here seem to be living, I want to go on record as taking umbrage at our egregious accommodations! Which brings up a matter in which I don’t want to be too indelicate. You are going to take a shower some time, aren’t you? Sir?”
“Is that a question, Woody? Or a plea?”
“Well, see, sir, factually, I didn’t notice before because it’d been just as long between soapsuds for me, but, well, we’re going to be sharing a pretty small room…”
“Woody, are you saying I stink?”
“Not as a person, mind you, sir, but speaking in a strictly hygienic sense…”
Harry bowed his head and sniffed at his own person. His nose wrinkled. “First thing after lunch,” he promised.
*
Woody Kneece sat cross-legged on his bunk, dressed in long underwear. He poked at the keyboard of a typewriter set on a pillow in front of him, the letters coming with the slowness of a midnight drip of a leaky faucet. Despite his painstaking technique, he was still capable of a misplaced digit, accompanied by a whispered “Damn…” followed by the rasp of eraser on paper.
“What’s all that?” Harry pointed at the balls of crumpled paper on the floor round Kneece’s bunk. He was fresh and still dripping from the shower stalls of the junior officers’ quarters.
“McCutcheon had a wire from my CO back in D.C. He wants a full written report bringing him up to date. McCutcheon wants to send it out on a courier plane tonight.”
“I take it one thing Uncle Ray didn’t teach you was typing.”
“Damn…” Kneece reached for his eraser.
Harry rubbed his neck, still tingling from a shave. “You were right. That hot shower felt nice, right up until the time I stepped out and my feet hit that cold concrete floor.” Kneece grunted. “That do make one’s balls jump. Damn!” He looked at his wristwatch and moaned. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to see the sights, maybe grab some chow somewhere off-campus. You know: see how the natives live. I’m never going to get this thing done in time for that flight.” Harry tried to adjust his few strands of hair to cover the maximum area with the aid of the paltry view offered by the pocket mirror mounted inside the door of one of the room’s two small lockers. “McCutcheon couldn’t find you a typist?” “He couldn’t even get me an empty office. He says I’m lucky I got the typewriter. Well, there’s no sense you being stuck here, Major. You go see the sights.”
“I’ve seen them,” Harry said.
“So how will you while away all these hours you’re going to have to your lonesome while I slave away here?”
“I was thinking of looking up an old friend.”s
“Another old friend? Can he type?”
There came three solemn knocks on the door. Before either Harry or Kneece could respond, the door swung open, nudged by a toe. There stood a young officer, hands buried in the pockets of his greatcoat, a stub of cigarette hanging from his lips, his garrison cap pulled low on his brow in exaggerated jauntiness. “Who the Sam fucking Hill did you piss off to get sent to this dungeon?”
Even with his face partially obscured by his upturned collar and the lowered cap, as well as a large square of gauze taped over his left eye, it took Harry only a heartbeat to recognize him. His face exploded in a smile, he shot across the room and gripped the officer’s hand in his. “Dammit, Pete! Pete!”
“Hello, Major.”
“Come in, come in!”
“Do you think you can fit another body in this phone booth?”
“Well shoehorn you in. What’re you doing here? I thought you put in for —”
“Italy, yeah. Up until two weeks ago, that’s where I was.”
Harry’s smile wilted as he nodded at the gauze. “Is it… Is it serious?”
Ricks dismissed Harry’s concern with a shrug and a smile. He reached into one of those deep coat pockets and withdrew a fifth of Black &r White. “I remember you didn’t have much taste for this, but as Mater taught me, ‘Good guests always bring a gift.’” He tossed the bottle to Kneece. “If you’re not up for it, Major, I’ll just have to force myself to imbibe your share.” He shrugged off his coat and the crossed muskets of the infantry glinted on his collar tab. He pushed past Harry to study his bandaged visage in the small locker mirror. “Dramatic, isn’t it? My own damned fault. I had my head up where it wasn’t supposed to be and a slug kicked up some crap into my eye. The best ophthalmic guys were here in London, but once they got a good look at it, it turned out not to be such a big deal; just a little scratch on the eyeball. This thing’s actually going to come off soon.” Ricks took a last drag on his cigarette, drawing the red glow so near Harry feared he’d burn his lip, stubbed the cigarette out on the locker door, drew the last of a pack of Lucky Strikes, crumpled the pack, and let it fall among Kneece’s typing discards. “Anyway, 1 was over visiting some of the old JAG gang yesterday and heard you were coming in today. You guys look a little worse for wear yourselves. You get that shaving, Junior?” He pointed at the bandage on Kneece’s forehead.
“I got it being a dumb-ass.”
“Join the club. Hey, anybody got a match?” To Harry: “Going to introduce me to your bunkie?”
“Captain Woody Kneece,” Kneece said, climbing off his bunk and striking a match. “CIC-Washington. You’re Peter Ricks. You used to work with the major.”
“My fame precedes me.”
Kneece indicated the silver first lieutenant’s bars on Ricks’s shoulders. “Wasn’t it Captain Ricks?”
Ricks leaned forward to light his cigarette, though his eyes remained on Kneece’s face. His cigarette lit, he flopped onto Harry’s bunk. “The Army doesn’t consider a year in the JAG suitable preparation for com
bat command. After three months in Italy — and this particular stupidity” — he pointed to his bandage —”I’m disinclined to take issue. So, they bumped me down to second looie.”
“You got some of it back,” Harry observed.
Ricks smiled ruefully. “The krauts are extremely conscientious about providing regular room for the advancement of junior officers.”
“Captain Kneece here came to see me about Grassi,” Harry told him.
“I heard about Grassi.” Ricks said it flatly. “I’m told when they got the news, several of his neighbors from these very rooms knelt out in the courtyard and offered up thanks.” “Woody thought maybe I could help since I knew him.”
“You’re a better man than me, Major. I knew the little prick better than you and I wouldn’t’ve wanted to help. Because I knew him better than you.”
“That’s a little hard,” Kneece said.
“Did you know Grassi?” Ricks demanded.
“Just what I’ve heard from folks who did.”
“Then it shouldn’t surprise you that with half the world shooting at the other half, somebody would take advantage of the crossfire to put a pill in Armando Grassi’s head or stuff a pineapple up his arse. Didn’t he get shipped to the North Pole or something? You cracked his jaw a good one, Major, and he was still wired up when they ran him out of town. You should’ve seen it, Captain — what is it?”
“Kneece.”
“The major here may seem like a big teddy bear, but when Harry laid it on Grassi the little son of a bitch’s feet left the ground.”
“Greenland,” Harry said, reddening. “They sent him to Greenland.”
“Who the hell shot him? Santa Claus? I believe Grassi could move Santa to homicide. All those frigging elves, too.”
“It’s what we’re trying to find out,” Harry said.
What little interest Peter Ricks displayed in Armando Grassi’s fatal misfortune evaporated abruptly. “Did I hear right, Major? You were sent home?”
Harry nodded and turned to fiddle with something in his locker.
“How’re things back in the States?”
At that point, Harry deferred to Woody Kneece, the ready raconteur. The captain regaled Peter Ricks with tales of rising hemlines, sports standings, and rationing tales. “My daddy’s got six good running horses in his stables,” Kneece prattled on, fueled by some of the Black & White. “But the horses know how much my daddy likes his meat, and with all the beef rationing, those nags are starting to get nervous. They’re so twitchy that all Daddy’s got to do to get a winning run out of them is stand at the starting gate with a spit and a bag of barbecue charcoal.”
Ricks, with his own cup of whisky, laughed so hard — too hard, Harry thought — he began to choke.
Harry stood in a corner of the tiny room, nursing his cup through the second and third doses the younger men downed. He provided Ricks with a fresh cigarette, which the lieutenant lit from the stub of his previous smoke. He offered little to the conversation; in fact, he barely heard most of it.
*
I had actually had the pleasure of sitting with Peter Ricks during those closing August days. Where Armando Grassi was short, spidery, unable to sit still, erect, or silent, providing an uninvited and incessant mix of opinion, argot, and King’s English, Ricks was tall and square, with the good looks a mother always wishes for in the husband of her daughter. Grassi splashed across a chair; Ricks set himself at such sharp angles one would have thought him positioned by level and T-square. This was not military discipline, but the product of his patrician Nob Hill upbringing, as was his manner of speech: soft, proper, civil.
And thus Harry’s great interest this December eve in the young man on his bunk, for he could not envision the Peter Ricks of the previous summer introducing himself with the statement, “Who the Sam fucking Hill did you piss off to get sent to this dungeon?” Nor could he see that same Peter Ricks slouched across his bunk, chain-smoking cigarettes, swilling down whisky, and trading raspy laughs with the likes of Woody Kneece.
In the shadows beneath Peter Ricks’s green eyes was a deep exhaustion that no amount of rest would heal. And like most profoundly weary men, what had seemed of great concern to him before now seemed so obscenely pointless.
“It was getting claustrophobic in there,” Ricks muttered around his cigarette.
“Yes,” Harry said.
It was an early twilight, and the cobbles and Georgian homes and even the air in the streets of the blacked-out city had the blue of old stone. Kneece had finally shooed them out with a pained look at his watch and the pile of handwritten notes yet to find their way onto a typed page.
Ricks shivered. “Aren’t you cold?”
“You’ve been spoiled by your time in sunny Italy.”
Ricks laughed. “It is winter in sunny Italy. When it is winter in sunny Italy it does not snow. It rains. And rains. And rains. Guys in my outfit do not worry about getting killed. They worry about getting wounded and going down in the mud where they will suffocate and remain undiscovered until some other poor doughfoot trips over them.” Ricks grinned at Harry’s doubtful look. “No joke. You have any more butts, Major?”
Harry pulled a pack out of his jacket pocket and handed it over.
“It’s your last one.”
“It’s OK.” They stopped and bent together to shelter the flame as Harry struck a match. Ricks reached inside his coat and brought out a flat silver flask. He held it up so that Harry could see the ornately engraved PR on the side. “A gift from Pater before I shipped over. I found it at the bottom of my duffel bag. It’d been sitting there for over a year; never used.” Ricks unscrewed the top and held it up to Harry. “Want a belt? Take the chill off?”
Harry shook his head.
Ricks took a swig, recapped the flask, and slipped it into his coat pocket. “I know. I’m drinking too much. I’m smoking too much.”
Harry wanted to ask why.
Ricks saw this and smiled grimly. “Sunny Italy is one hill after another. On top of each hill is a kraut machine-gun nest, or a kraut field piece, or a kraut tank, or some other goddamned kraut thingamabob. You and your guys fight your way to the top of the hill, and when you get there you find that the krauts have scrammed and dug in on the next hill. There is always a next hill. The word ‘Sisyphean’ comes to mind. I was the third acting CO my company’s had since we landed at Salerno in September. I only lasted three days before I got this.” He gestured at his bandaged eye. Ricks halted, looked up and down the sidewalk, and sighed. “Major, I’m in the infantry, which means I walk for a living. I’m off the clock now; could we find a place to sit?”
They were not far from Hyde Park. Harry led them through Curzon Gate and toward the Serpentine. There was a small cafe on the bank of the pond, closed for the evening. They sat at one of the wrought-iron tables on a terrace by the water. Ricks treated himself to another sip from his flask. This time, he did not return it to his pocket, but set it carefully on the table before him. “Hey, whatever happened to that girl?”
“What girl?”
“What was her name? That pilot’s girlfriend.”
“Elisabeth McAnn. I don’t know what happened to her.”
“It’s a shame she doesn’t know about Armando. She might feel that evened up the scales. Does that sound a little cold on my part?” He shrugged. “I’ve buried too many good kids in the last three months to shed a tear over a weaselly shit like Grassi.” He sighed. “I feel like I’ve been over here a million years. Did it matter to you so much to come all this way? About Grassi?”
“I’m here.”
“Did you stop by to see Ryan? I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall for that. How’d it go?”
“There wasn’t any hitting.”
Ricks chuckled. “Feel like getting something to eat?”
“I was on my way out when you showed up. Come around tomorrow. We’ll have breakfast.”
“I’d like that.”
; “I’m really glad to see you, Pete. I followed the news about Italy when I was home, I knew you were there… I’m just glad…” Harry shrugged apologetically.
Ricks nodded. He reached for his flask to pocket it.
“Pete…” Without having planned it, without even knowing why, Harry told him everything, the entire tale from Kneece’s arriving at his home to the telegram that had been waiting for the CIC captain when they’d arrived in London. It felt good to be able to share the burden with someone he felt he could trust; someone he knew. When he was done he looked to Ricks for his opinion, his insight, his verdict.
But Peter Ricks sat blank-faced, perhaps — and in the growing darkness, Harry wasn’t sure — even somewhat annoyed. “Major, I’m not in the JAG anymore. None of this is my business.”
“Last summer, when you told me you were putting in for combat duty, you told me you were looking for ‘clarity.’ Is this your way of telling me you found it?”
Ricks’s hand had been fingering the silver flask. The polished sides caught light from the rising moon, and Harry saw it flash briefly in the one sad, tired eye of the young man across from him. “The poop is that Mark Clark wants to be the first American army commander to liberate a European capital, and it looks like he’ll spend every man in the Fifth Army to do it. We’ve had fifteen thousand casualties since September, we’re hung up on the Gustav Line fifty miles from Rome, and we’re all going to die for a headline. So, moral clarity? But life is simpler out there. You don’t think about much, you don’t think about anything but what you need to do to get through the day, the next hour. The next two minutes. Everything else is just so much crap you can’t fit in your pack.” He rose from the table, slowly, wearily, leaving the flask on the table. “I’ll bet this place is beautiful when the lights are on. Be careful with this Kneece kid, Major,” he warned, without turning.
“Why?”
“What do you know about him?”
“He likes to pretend he’s this wide-eyed yokel, but there’s more to him. He’s playing a lot of cards very close.”
“You’re goddamned right he is. They give him a plane and carte blanche to nose around in this stuff… this guy must have a power line from his hip pocket straight to Washington, and that’s not standard for your typical CIC dick. The brass aren’t jumping through hoops because of Armando Grassi.”
