Liberated

by Steve Anderson

  Or were they dead? I switched off the jeep, stepped out and bent over them, one hand ready to cover my nose. I felt neck pulses. The old man had long gone cold, as had the young one. His neck lay twisted at an angle and had to be busted.

  I moved over to the leaner man, on my haunches. I felt his neck, just under the ragged bottom edge of his hood. The pulse was faint, the skin lukewarm.

  “You,” I heard a groan. It came from under the man’s hood. It was in English. I could see a spot of the damp fabric suck in and push out, in, out. Then German: “Sie da …”

  I pinched two fingers around the bottom of the hood, to pull it back.

  “No,” the man wheezed. Keep the hood on, he was saying.

  “You need help,” I muttered. “I can get you help.”

  “No.”

  “Who are you? Who did this?” As I spoke my eyes searched his bruised and dented body. I saw a line of numbers tattooed on his inner forearm, at an uneven angle. I had heard about such ID numbers from the concentration camps our troops were discovering. Those SS bastards hadn’t even bothered to line the numbers up straight, I saw. Blood rushed to my head, hot with anger.

  He had said something else but I’d missed it. I leaned in close, my ear to the spot on his hood. “Can you try saying that again?”

  “Abraham,” he said.

  “Your name?” I said.

  I felt him nod, though his head hadn’t moved.

  “We got to get you help, get you in my jeep.”

  “No.”

  “Who did this to you?” I thought I had an idea. The proof was on the man’s arm.

  He didn’t answer me. I touched the numbers.

  “No!” he shrieked, his head lifting up, then striking the street with a thud.

  “Okay, okay …”

  He gurgled. The fabric sucked in. It stayed there. He rattled, from deep inside.

  “Wait, no. Who did this? To all of you?”

  He rattled again. Spittle shot through the fabric, making foam. But between the rasps, I thought I heard a morbid chuckle.

  “Who did it!?” I shouted. I held his arm. I probably shook it too hard. It didn’t fight back. “Just tell me,” I whispered.

  “They.”

  “Who’s they? Stay with me, man.”

  “They are you …”

  He went still, stiff. A couple gasps escaped, but they weren’t his, not anymore. It was simply biology, trapped air.

  I sat on the street, stunned. Features and colors blurred around me, like I was on a tilt-a-whirl at the carnival, but the whole goddamn earth was the ride. I might have been there a while.

  They are you. Me? What the hell could that mean?

  I peered into the dense forest, all around me. All those lean, pale and mottled birch trunks revealed nothing between them but dim shade and underbrush.

  And then I heard it. A rumble.

  Was it artillery? An earthquake? The rumble rolled, its pumping rhythm humming in my toes. My nostrils felt a gritty sting. I stood and could see barrels of black smoke surging from the treetops, off to my right.

  It was a locomotive. The loco was climbing a ridge, heading for a steep hill.

  We didn’t have trains this far south. The Army Air Corps had bombed every German train and station, Munich MG had assured me. The rail lines were supposed to be clear and stay that way. I flipped open my briefcase, laid my area map across the wheel and studied the grids, routes, and symbols. The map told me: The train had run parallel to this road before turning for that hill.

  Could it have anything to do with these poor stiffs? These corpses would have to wait. I’d have to remove Abraham’s hood later. I climbed back in the jeep, started it up, gave it gas, and steered clear of the bodies while keeping one eye on those barrels of smoke. They were rising higher, pumping farther apart. The loco was losing speed up that hill. I could catch up. As I drove I pulled on my helmet and slung binoculars around my neck.

  A sign read: “Dollendorf-Traktorwerk, 1 Km” in fading script. A turnoff. I heaved the wheel right and raced up the ridge on a dirt road, shifting down for speed, rattling across ruts, hugging the wheel.

  I was no combat Joe. I didn’t even have backup. But I drove higher. Fir trees crowded out the birches and cast long, saw-toothed shadows. Then sunlight struck my windshield and the trees receded to reveal a large clearing. I slowed to a stop, taking it all in. Traktorwerk meant this Dollendorf was once a tractor factory, but it looked like a ransacked junkyard now. A garage had shattered windows and a machine shop no doors, its machines long gone. Metal shacks rusted. Wildflowers and heather grew in clumps among the cracking tarmac, rail ballast, stains of oil.

  On my map, the rail line passed through this compound. I unclasped my Colt holster and had to use both hands, I was shaking so bad. I lifted the binocs. At the far end of the compound, bordering more trees and a steep rocky hill beyond, stood a wooden rail shelter.

  Inside stood freight cars. I counted them. Four.

  Crows bolted for the sky. I heard a whoosh-whoosh, boom-boom coming up through the woods, and the earth pounded in rhythm, trembling the trunks and shaking leaves loose. Brakes squealed and white steam hissed, flooding underbrush with its fog. The locomotive had stopped at the trees’ edge. It was only the loco, no cars attached. I could see that iron beast, all right. She had to be twice my height. Her boiler, cab, and tender bore thick black sheets of armor plate.

  I wheeled the jeep around and bumped up onto the tracks. I was going to block its path. I could jump out if I had to. Yet the loco only waited, the boiler clanging like pots and pans.

  I heard shouts, laughs. At the other end of the clearing, a team of five American GIs emerged from the woods with their guns slung low and their shoulders slouching, the look of men reaching the end of a long hike. They saw me, they had to, but they took no notice. They were looking to the trees closest to me.

  A man stood there. He was leaning against a birch trunk. He was dressed in plain GI green shirt and trousers and could’ve been mistaken for a corporal if it wasn’t for the silver oak leaf on his lapel, his only insignia. The lieutenant colonel wore no holster or helmet, and he was smiling. He strode on out.

  I climbed out the jeep and marched over and the colonel to me. He looked young for that silver leaf. Could he be only 30? I stopped to salute, but the colonel kept coming, still smiling. Was he smirking at my shiny new helmet? I removed it, but had nowhere to stuff it, so I held it at my hip. The colonel came close, within a foot. I said: “Sir, I’m the MG man for Heimgau Town down the road.”

  “Detachment?” the colonel said with a Southern twang.

  “E-166. I’m CO—well, Public Safety now.”

  “That right?” The colonel grinned. I could smell licorice. He was chewing Blackjack gum. “Looks like we’re cousins, son. I’m the CIC agent around here.”

  CIC meant Counter Intelligence Corps. CIC agents were one of the advance guard. Sure, they were secretive and they got in some units’ hair, but the CIC provided plenty of good info. Munich had told me: Until things were up and running, the area CIC agent should be relied upon and given free reign. CIC trumps all. “Good to see you here, sir,” I said. “I think we got a problem. I saw corpses down on the main road …”

  The colonel looked over to my jeep. A big GI with a thick, wide face was sitting at the wheel. “Off those tracks. Now!” the colonel shouted at him.

  The GI sped my jeep off the tracks and slammed to a halt.

  “Stay with me,” the colonel said and strolled off. I followed. What else could I do? The colonel smacked gum and waved at the GIs now sitting under the trees as he walked me down the tracks to the rail shelter. I carried my helmet by a strap and it knocked at my thigh. The sun had reached high sky, and my wool shirt itched under my Ike jacket.

  “Wait here,” the colonel said and headed into the shelter where it was darker. I stood out in the sun, itching, watching. The four freight cars were a mix of types and sizes—gray-green, rusty r
ed, camouflage, yet all were stenciled with Nazi eagles and the words Deutsche Reichsbahn. The colonel heaved open the door of each, checked inside, and then shoved each door shut. I craned my neck but could make out little but the corners of crates and trunks.

  GI thick-face was slogging his big wrestler’s body up the tracks to us, his gear jangling. He was a sergeant. He and the colonel met where I stood, the sergeant eyeing me like I was Hitler’s own brother.

  “Ease up, Sergeant,” the colonel said. “Our man here is the local MG. Captain, Sergeant Horton.”

  Sergeant Horton only nodded, no salute. I could overlook it, assuming he’d been a frontline Joe. I faced the colonel. “Sir, about those corpses.”

  “You’re jumping the gun, son. First rule of investigation: verify. They have name tags on them? You don’t know who the hell they are, what they are.”

  “True, sir. I was just about to get on that when I heard your locomotive here.”

  The colonel had stopped listening. He’d turned to Sergeant Horton. They whispered, Horton nodding along, and I studied the colonel’s ruddy skin and sunken cheeks, his bulky jaw with a mouth of thick teeth. Only the strong nose and alert blue-gray eyes could save a mug like that from a life of increasing ugliness, I thought. The man had poise. Yet he wasn’t swaggering around like some MG officers did. I knew enough not to get an old hand like this on my bad side. And he was right. Those corpses could have been Bavaria’s worst Nazis, for all I knew—except for one, that was. I wouldn’t be able to get them in the jeep on my own. I could come back with locals, haul in the bodies, follow up. Improvise when required was the drill.

  The locomotive’s clang had risen to a hard clatter. “Hear that?” the colonel said to me. “Do that when they’re just dying to go. She really is a fine lady. Borsig BR 52, best German engine running.”

  “And those freight cars?” I pulled out my notepad, flipping it open with a flourish. I couldn’t help myself. I had to show CIC that Heimgau MG was no lamb.

  “You taking notes. That’s what you’re doing? For a report or some such?”

  “Just doing the job they give me, sir.”

  The colonel had dropped the smile. He stared down at my brown, non regulation wingtip brogues. “College boy?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re curious. You anticipate. That’s good,” the colonel said.

  “Ready!” someone yelled, and the colonel turned and pumped a fist in the air. A grimy glove waved from the locomotive cab. Black smoke flowed out the stacks, and the three of us stood back to watch the loco pass through the compound, a rolling black wall that shaded us from the sun, its giant black wheels and pistons pounding, punching automatons. It backed onto one sidetrack, and then it went into the rail shelter for coupling to the four freight cars.

  Sergeant Horton stood like the colonel, his arms folded and feet wide. He belched and said to the colonel, “What’s next move, reckon?”

  The colonel spat out his gum and worked it into the dirt with his heel. He turned to me. “Here’s the way I see it. You’re dying to work all the angles, that right? Despite all this by-the-book? Want to know what can-do really means.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “And you know German? Like a native.”

  I nodded again.

  “You said CO. But you’re not, not anymore. You’re nodding like you got a sour deal,” the colonel said.

  “No. I do the job they give me.”

  “And you make the most of it. The lowly immigrant makes it into a college, first one in his family line going back to some peasant hut in Old Prussia. That about right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Listen. In this war I did my time unraveling the German character. It’s no different than anyone else’s, just a little more tragic, and far more unlucky.”

  “You can say that for them.”

  “That country road down below?” the colonel said. “You were almost in the next county, then it’s on to Munich. You’re not decamping so soon, are you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your first day here then? I never saw you before.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Fine. Now listen here, that major of yours will need some GIs to keep an eye. I’m loaning you Horton’s team.” The colonel offered a hand. “Name’s Spanner. Eugene.”

  We shook hands. “Kaspar. Harry. Thank you. Use all the help we can get, I’m sure.”

  The colonel named Spanner laughed. “It’s damn unreal, isn’t it, Kaspar? Americans taking control in every cursed corner of this fubar snake pit that used to be Germany. A paradox, I say. Here we fight and kill enemy, and we lose plenty friends along the way. Go to a hell of a place that no one’s ever been. Then you MG swoop on in and you go and help the enemy.”

  “It’s not like that, sir. We’re here to help the refugees, the victims. Children. Germans, they do what we tell them.”

  “That true? Then be sure to remember that, son.” Spanner said this lightly, as if he should be smiling. He was not. His mouth had curled down like he needed to spit. He paused a moment, but it wasn’t the type of pause I could wedge a word into.

  I might have put it all in my next weekly report, and I could have, but I was no dope. Those freight cars were CIC’s domain. They well could have held important documents and plans useful for the war effort, or secret weapons’ parts to be studied, or anything that could prevent more of the sick misadventures men had unleashed in these last few years. As for the corpses, this colonel didn’t need to hear it, not with that grave stare he was giving me—a stare that was saying, whose side are you on exactly? This is no way to make a name, son.

  So, I smiled for the colonel. I stuffed my notebook back in my back pocket. His eyes followed my hand until it returned to my side, and I showed him a thumbs-up, ready for take off. “Will do, sir,” I said.

  “Good. Well done. Then goodbye for now,” Colonel Spanner said and strolled off, adding, “Swell shoes, kid.”

  I fired up my Zippo with a clank, lit up a Lucky and strolled back to the jeep. Telling myself, I’ll have to be more like that colonel when I get back to Heimgau. “Can do,” he called it and I’m the same. Always take the straightest line. That was how the frontline types handled it. If I didn’t, someone else will make me compromise, set rules for me. Funny thing though—I was thinking all this in German even though these were such American thoughts to me.

  The GIs were slinging their guns back on and, led by Sergeant Horton, heading back into the woods the way they had come. I wheeled the jeep around and, as I hit the road back downhill, glanced over my shoulder to see Colonel Spanner climbing up and into that juggernaut of a loco.

  I drove fast and hard, the wind blurring my eyes, the ruts knocking the chassis and tossing my briefcase, thermos and helmet around like so much popcorn in the pot.

  Down on the main road I turned back the way I had come, heading back for the corpses and on back toward Heimgau. As I neared the bend I slowed, and then I had to squint, just to make myself believe what I now saw.

  Three

  THE THREE CORPSES WERE GONE. Dark blood stains glistened on the pavement and gravel, coagulating like smashed black cherries. But that was it. For a moment I suspected Abraham himself, as if the lifeless hooded man had been able to recover somehow and haul his dead friends off into the woods. What a frantic notion. I had witnessed the man dying. So I parked on the shoulder and stood in the road, hands on my hips, checking things out. The road was clear either way, and I smelled no exhaust. I paused to listen and heard only the pings and trickles of my overworked jeep. The woods around me were all shadow and murk, a permanent dusk inside there for who knew how far. I entered the woods and stomped around in the underbrush but found nothing, not one clue. I didn’t go far though. I’d already lost the corpses and didn’t want to leave the jeep, since I had no chain to lock up the steering wheel.

  I drove back to Heimgau, making myself chuckle at the insanity this war bro
ught and would bring. MG Joes like me were supposed to cure the slow-acting poisons of madmen, but who’d ever clinched such a deal? I wanted to go back and tell that Colonel Spanner the corpses had disappeared, but the man had his own concerns. I had given him a thumbs-up as if he were the gladiator to be spared, but the truth was he was the Roman tribune with the final say. As far as his operation went, I really had no recourse back there even if I did think the colonel was crossing some sort of line. As our CIC agent, he would see any report I could file. I had to assume that. It was his job to know everything. He could have dossiers on any MG officer.

  You know German like a native, he had said to me. Yet he didn’t sneer when he said it, or call me Heini or kraut while slapping me on the back. That’s what most of them did and I’d grown accustomed to it, sure I did, in the same way a fellow gets used to a case of the pox.

  Then I got to thinking about my sudden new post. I was now playing John Law. As horrific as those corpses were, my find did keep me close to the action. I could show the Germans how their new liberators delivered Justice compared to the thugs and racketeers who’d been conning them the last twelve years. I definitely needed a leg up. This could be it.

  I was back up in Major Membre’s new office within a half hour.

  “Find anyone?” the major said from his desk as if I’d only popped out to check the mail.

  “I came across three corpses. Out where the Heimgauer Strasse hits the woods. Fresh, sir.”

  I might as well have told him no mail had come. He appeared to be reading, but his eyes had not moved. He turned the page, his mouth formed that O again, and he muttered, “Oh?”

  “One passed away right when I got there. I think he’d been in one of the concentration camps.”

  “Passed away? Oh dear, that’s grim. Could he say anything?”