by Bill Mesce
“The difficulties of providing resources,” Fordyce put in. “Enlisting personnel, providing electrical power —”
“I tend to think those kinds of things would’ve been obvious from the beginning,” Harry said.
“It was a frantic decision made in frantic times.” Fordyce said it coldly.
“Understand, Major Voss,” interjected Sommer, “Europe was falling. You cannot understand how it was to look at things in those days.”
“So you bought the land to build a factory, you didn’t build the factory, but you kept the property?” Harry persisted.
Gordon Fordyce’s lips flicked in what I assumed was a smile — pinched, brief, and superior. “The market for real estate is hardly booming at the moment. The British agencies that investigated this matter saw no need to raise any of these issues, Major.”
“I am confused as well.” Erik Sommer was frowning. “I do not see how this is something to do with the poor dead man.”
“I imagine they’re just being thorough, Gordie,” Sir John said.
Harry looked up from his notes. “You said you haven’t been to this Orkney site in how long?”
“You keep asking that,” Fordyce said peevishly.
“With the war it must be three, four years,” Sir John replied. “Eh, Gordie? Three to four years? Autumn ’39, isn’t that what you said?”
“Something like that.”
“No need to visit, really,” Sir John explained.
Harry put his notebook away and began to fold up his glasses. “You have a boat, don’t you, Sir John?”
“You named it after your sons,” Woody Kneece said.
Sir John smiled. “How did you know?”
Kneece smiled back. “Ray-mond. Cal-vin. Ras-cal.”
Sir John nodded. “They never saw that boat. I bought it after the war, the first war. In answer to your question, Major, yes, I have a boat.”
“Where do you keep it?”
Sir John’s thick white brows closed ranks, and he rubbed his jaw with his knuckles again. “Oh, well, let’s see. We keep slips for it at Brighton and Cardiff, and even one up the Thames at Richmond Landing for when we’re in the London office.”
“What about your place in Scotland?”
“Yes, of course,” Sir John said after a moment. “I’d forgotten about the lodge. It’s been some time since I’ve used it.”
“Where’s the boat now?” Harry asked.
“Oddly enough, I don’t know.”
“That is odd,” Harry commented.
“The boat hasn’t been out since the war,” Fordyce explained. “What with the petrol rationing, and there’s hardly a safe stretch of water outside the Irish Sea —”
“We can check on that for the gentlemen, can’t we, Gordie?” Sir John said. “The whereabouts of Rascal, I mean.”
“Yes, we can check on that, Sir John. There might not be an answer until late tomorrow or the next day.”
“And, as Gordon said, we’ll be sending some of my people to sniff about up to Orkney, see what we can find out for you chaps. Even if everything with Teddy Bowles is aboveboard — and I’m sure it is — with all respect, gentlemen, Teddy might be more willing to say something of note to one of his own.” Erik Sommer leaned forward. “Major Voss, do you have any idea about this American’s death? You have all different questions. I don’t see what it is you are trying to learn. Do you have any answers?”
“A few,” Harry said. “But nothing we can talk about. You understand.”
Sommer nodded, his eyes calculating.
“If that’s all, gentlemen,” Gordon Fordyce announced, “Sir John has been more than generous with his time, I think you’ll agree. Now he needs to spend more of it with his guests. Mr. Owen, I think you know enough at this point to see that any mention of Sir John in connection with this story would be gratuitous.”
“I would agree, Gordie, based on what I know at this point.” What I left hanging unsaid, and what Gordon Fordyce seemed to understand behind his narrowed eyes, was that perhaps I simply didn’t know enough yet.
Fordyce summoned Alden and called for our coats. As we waited for the butler to return, Sir John turned to the tall windows behind him. Woody Kneece joined him, and for that short while they discussed horses. Alden returned, and as we pulled on our coats —
“By the way,” Sir John called to Kneece. “If you don’t mind — this dead chap. What was his name?”
“Sir John,” advised Fordyce, “there’s no reason you —”
“I would like to know the boy’s name, Gordon,” Sir John said firmly
“Grassi,” Harry said. “Lieutenant Armando Grassi.”
“Did the lieutenant have a family? Was he married —”
“Sir John!” Fordyce admonished.
“A mother,” Harry answered. “A father.”
Sir John nodded a deep nod. “Family enough. Safe home, gentlemen.”
*
“Maybe you missed it, Mr. Owen,” Woody Kneece said dryly, “but we’ve just been talking to the real guy. In the flesh.”
He was referring to my endless sifting through the file on John Duff. “Ach, there I was thinking American wit had died with Will Rogers.”
“You still think you know that Sommer fella?”
“I know I know him, and I know it had something to do with Sir Johnnie Duff.” I remembered Erik Sommer’s look, his ice-blue eyes fixing me through the window of Sir John’s library as we had climbed back into the Army sedan. “And Erik Sommer knows I know him, too.”
“But you can’t remember how it is you know him?”
“Laddie, come see me in twenty years and we’ll compare memories.” I closed the folder with an unsatisfied finality. “You’re quiet back there, Lieutenant,” I said.
Peter Ricks was slumped against the rear door, his unbandaged eye blind to the Canterbury scenery slipping by, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “I’m contemplating.”
“Were you contemplating at Sir Johnnie’s as well? You didn’t seem to have much to say there either.”
He held up his little finger. On it sat a cigar band.
“Oh, indeed, I quite enjoyed his cigars.”
“Cohibas, weren’t they?” Kneece asked. “They cost a pretty penny. I know; my daddy gets them. So?”
“Lieutenant,” I said, “you are in a country where people get in line for a tin of Spam. What we were presented with this afternoon represented more rations than most families see in a week.”
“And top-of-the-line smokes to boot,” Ricks added. “The hard life seems to end at Sir Johnnies front door.”
“Aye.” I turned back to Woody Kneece. “You didn’t just happen to find that piano, did you?”
Kneece grinned. “Spinet.”
“With those enormous front windows, you must have seen Sir Johnnie’s car coming up the drive. You staged that whole scene, didn’t you? This is quite the showman you’ve brought along, Harry.”
From the moment we had climbed in the car, Harry had either been scribbling notes in his little book, or flipping through its pages, oblivious to the presence of his traveling companions.
“I say, Harry —”
“Yes, he is,” Harry said without looking up from his notations. “He sings, he dances. I’ll bet he even does magic tricks.”
I turned back to Kneece. “How’d you know about that ‘Minstrel Boy’ business?”
Kneece continued to revel in his aura of mystery, but an answer came from Peter Ricks: “He saw the statue.”
“You’d already been to the library?” I asked.
“Back in that room like a fishbowl —”
“Solarium,” I said. “Or, if you must, sunroom.”
“— that’s what I went up to the major about. I wanted him to keep that Sommer fella talking while I poked around.”
“So you never made it to the loo?”
“The what? Oh, the can, well, yeah, I did. Hey, Major, if you think the rest of the house w
as impressive, you should’ve seen this guy’s crapper.”
“Spare us those details,” Harry said.
“I get to the door, I tell the butler I’m probably going to be a while, and after he toddles off —”
“You begin snooping.”
“Mr. Owen, you may be an ally and a friend of the major’s, but need I remind you that I am an officer with the Criminal Investigating Corps of the United States Army I do not snoop. I —”
“Investigate,” Harry proclaimed.
I turned back round to Harry. “You’ve been awfully studious since we left.”
He slid his pen into his jacket pocket with a sigh. The car turned a bend in the road, and for a moment the low sun flashed in the lenses of his reading spectacles. “They’re all lying. I’m just trying to figure out who’s lying how much about what. And why. ‘I want to know the boy’s name’ — isn’t that what he said? He didn’t know Grassi was an American, but he knew he was young?”
“Figure of speech?” I offered.
“Hell,” Kneece said, “he’s got his own man up there. I’ll bet Old Bowles told him everything there was to know, down to the size of Grassi’s boxer shorts.”
“And there’s what he didn’t say,” Harry persisted stubbornly. “He didn’t say ‘What in hell is an American doing in Orkney?’”
“You figure they’re all in on it?” Kneece asked, then began to provide his own answer: “Well, darling Gordie, that makes sense, he’s the big mucky-muck’s right-hand man. But Yon Yonson there, the Swedish guy —”
“He’s dirty,” Peter Ricks said.
“You sound pretty sure,” Kneece said.
“For a guy with nice manners, he seemed tactlessly interested in what we were digging up on his friend Sir Johnnie, didn’t you think, Mr. Owen? He even invited himself into the Q and A with Duff.”
“Tripped up by good manners,” Kneece said. “There’s one for Sherlock Holmes.”
“That thing Sommer said to me about being sorry for the war,” Ricks mused.
“It did seem right queer,” I said. “Why should he be sorry?”
Ricks nodded, satisfied to discover he was not alone in his suspicions. He sat back and extracted his silver flask.
“Sir John’s brandy wasn’t enough?” Harry meant it to sound casual, but I could hear the touch of remonstrance.
Ricks smiled in my direction, and there passed between us some sad sort of kinship as he held the flask up in salute. “There’s never enough, is there, Mr. Owen?”
“Never quite, Lieutenant. Never quite.”
*
Joe Ryan sat behind his desk, his eyes lost in the warming fire in the hearth behind him, his hands cupped round a brandy snifter.
Sitting across from him, Harry reread the text of the memorandum. It was addressed to Colonel McCutcheon from the military liaison’s office of the U.S. Embassy at Princes Gate, with copies to SHAEF and several British governmental and military offices in Whitehall. The body of the missive read:
We have conferred with the relevant UK authorities as well as with the appropriate liaison offices at SHAEF and in Washington. All are in agreement on the following points:
1. As the incident in question evidently occurred on British soil within proximity to British military installations, the investigation should properly fall to British jurisdiction;
2. We accept the assurances of our British ally that as far as is ascertainable neither British nor American military security has been breached or threatened, nor is there any indication at this time that this is a security matter of any sort.
The pertinent British authorities have informed us they will continue to investigate the incident as a criminal matter and will keep interested U.S. and British offices apprised of their progress. We feel that this constitutes an appropriate and satisfactory disposition of the matter.
Formal orders from the involved agencies will be forthcoming, including those from Washington CIC discontinuing their avenue of investigation.
Harry removed his reading spectacles. He looked up to see Ryan sitting on the front edge of his desk holding out a second snifter of brandy toward him.
“Your young pal is sitting over in McCutcheon’s office reading his copy right now,” Ryan told Harry.
“This stinks.”
“Don’t look at me. I agree with you.”
“You have no idea what a great comfort that is,” Harry said. He stood, letting the memorandum slide to the floor, and moved toward the windows overlooking the Court. He heard a rustle of paper as Ryan picked up the page and set it on his desk, then the colonel followed him to the window still holding out the second snifter. When Harry continued to refuse it, Ryan poured its contents into his own glass.
“They’re stepping away from this and dumping it on the Brits,” Harry said. “And the Brits aren’t pushing it.”
“Let it go. Harry, I don’t know what you think you’ve gotten hold of, and I don’t know what it is you’re doing that’s getting everybody’s nose out of joint —”
“And you don’t want to know.”
“You’re goddamned right I don’t want to know. All I know is Armando Grassi isn’t worth it.”
“You mean worth risking this!” Harry swept his arm at the posh accoutrements of Joe Ryan’s salon-cum-office. “Just what is it you do here, Colonel Ryan? What’s your job? It sure as hell isn’t the law”
Ryan’s face colored. “Simple tactics, Major. I don’t see the good in burning myself up fighting a fight I can’t win. I tried to explain that to you back in August —”
Harry turned his back and headed for the door.
“Wait a minute! Harry, I said wait!” Ryan put himself between Harry and the door.
“I’m leaving.”
“Sit down, Harry.”
“Is that an order?”
Ryan could have made it so, but said nothing.
“All right,” Harry said and dropped into the nearest chair. “Harry, I didn’t blame you for the way you felt back in August. If I’d been in your shoes I probably would’ve felt the same way.”
“How understanding of you.”
“Jesus, you and I practically go back to the womb together. You don’t think I felt bad about it? It’s eaten me up every day since then. Do you remember that time I came home from Fort Dix after Pearl Harbor?”
For the first time in Ryan’s office, Harry began to feel defensive. “Is this about old debts? If I’ve forgotten to thank you for everything you’ve done for me —”
“Knock it off, Harry. You wanted to go your route, try to milk something out of that lousy little private practice of yours, that was your business, fine. I respected that. No, seriously, I really did. With Cyn and then the kids, it took more guts than I had. I thought you were nuts trying to go it that way, but I respected it. I know you thought I was just taking the easy out, going in the Army. It wasn’t about hard and easy, Harry. It was about eating.”
“You seem to be eating pretty well these days.”
“You’re goddamned right I am. Back to the original question. You remember when I came home that time?”
“In your big, brand-new, shiny Buick.”
“When did you ever see a car like that in our neighborhood? Maybe Richie the Boot had one, and the other neighborhood wise guys, but one of us? I was a major then, remember? With the Army picking up the room and board, that’s good money. I’d socked a lot away since I first went in. Buick started running those ads that with all the factories retooling for a possible war, the bet was the ’42 Buick Super would probably be the last new car anybody saw for a long while. The minute that baby hit the showroom floor in November I was there. I plunked down twelve hundred bucks cash — cash, Harry. Then, after Pearl Harbor, my first leave I came home. I was thinking if I got sent overseas, well, who knows what’s going to happen? This might be the only time the Ryans get to have things nice.
“So, I threw Ma and Da in the backseat and took them to lunch at Vitt
orio Castle. The Castle! Joe DiMaggio eats at the Castle, Frank Sinatra eats at the Castle, the local mob guys hang out there, but nobody from our block. Except that day.
“Then I took them downtown to Macy’s. I bought my father six two-dollar shirts. He didn’t believe there were shirts that cost that much money You know that poor dumb mick was afraid to wear them? My mother says they’re still in his drawer with the original pins in them. I put five bucks down on a brand-new Coldspot refrigerator.” Ryan shook his head at the memory. “‘Where does the iceman put the ice?’ Ma kept asking me. I had to explain three times it wasn’t an icebox. Six cubic feet in that thing, Harry, she didn’t know how she was going to fill it. I gave her twenty bucks and said, ‘Go to the A and P. Pack that thing full, Ma. Meat. Buy beef. Get Da a steak!’”
It had come out in a rush, Ryan leaning forward, hammering Harry into the back of his chair with his vehemence. Now he took a breath, and leveled a finger in Harry’s direction. “I don’t apologize for that and I don’t apologize for this.” He nodded at his office. “And then what happened while I was home, Harry? Do you remember? You came by and practically begged — begged — me to help get you in. And that wasn’t because you were all gung ho about going off to war. You weren’t asking me to get you into combat. You were looking for that fat allotment check going home every month.”
“Are we done?”
“You want to be pissed at me for what happened in August? OK, fine! You want to trot around on your moral high horse? Have a nice ride! But goddammit, Harry, I earned at least a little appreciation.”
“I’ll tell you what: I owe you for getting me in, but August makes us even, OK? Everybody goes home with a clear conscience.”
“Oh, you do love to play the martyr! You don’t see it, do you? You’re that blind? Jesus, Harry, you owe me more for August than for anything else!”
“Owe you for what?”
“You, Grassi, and Ricks made a lot of brass hats mad back then. Real mad! When it was over, Peter Ricks wanted to put in for combat duty in Italy? ‘Get this guy expedited out there!’ they told me. They’re figuring with luck some kraut’ll put a bullet in his brain and that’ll be that as far as he’s concerned. Grassi? They buried him in the deep freeze. But what happened to you, Harry? You were the guy who started all the trouble. To them, you were the mastermind, the ringleader who was the real pain in the ass. Where did you get to go?”
