Liberated

by Steve Anderson

  No one spoke.

  I said: “His name might be Abraham. He spoke the name, in any case.”

  “What?” Membre barked.

  “It’s the victim’s name, sir.” I repeated it in German.

  “Yes, fine.” Membre added: “At any rate, the corpses are gone. Vanished. Who knows where they went?”

  They waited for me to interpret. Still no one spoke. I felt Winkl’s eyes on me.

  The major snarled: “So you know nothing, is that it? Any of you? You do nothing. All of you? Any of you?” He was snarling at me too. Even still, no one spoke. Membre stood. “No? None of you? Then you know what I should do? I should fire every one of you right now.”

  I didn’t translate it. I wouldn’t.

  Winkl glared at his peers. He said in German: “We must protest this treatment.”

  Membre bounded over to Winkl and shouted like a drill instructor: “What’s that, you say? Something about protest? You have no right to protest now, not after what you’ve done to this decadent, diseased, decaying continent. I assure you, all of you here, that you are far too unworthy, as a town, county, state, country, a nation, a race. Now get out of here. All of you!” He pointed toward the door, stabbing at the air.

  The men filed out and down the hall, mute, slouching.

  Winkl stayed behind, standing firm in the middle of the room.

  I said to the major, “You mention a formal investigation. This is a criminal matter, sir. Do you want the police chief here, or not?”

  “No. He’s to leave. Gehen heraus!”

  Winkl shot out the doorway, his eyes wide with rage and fear.

  Membre went back to his chair and slumped with exhaustion as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs. His mouth stayed open for the extra breathing, which posed a clear hazard with his nose still running. Otherwise, I would have wanted to slap his mouth shut.

  “And me, sir?” I said.

  “Stay. Please—there, I said it. All right? You can tell me what you do know.”

  “Know? I know about as much as you. And I guess that’s not too very much.”

  The GIs had a saying: Sooner or later a Joe’s gonna get shit on from a great height. So Major Membre was flexing some muscles. I knew it had to come. This way no one could dare touch the major. He could even clear his name with this if he was guilty in any way. But what was the major’s game? Was he fishing for information? Seeking favor again? Or was it simply a direct threat? Maybe he even wanted to implicate me somehow, turn the tables on things gone foul. I couldn’t rule that out. At least the major didn’t seem to know much about Katarina. That seemed one good sign.

  And as it turned out, my good major was just getting started. The next morning he had me lead him through every nook and cranny of Old Town. The major already had all the villas. Now he wanted to know which houses and apartments were confiscated, where the Displaced Persons lived, what refugees lived where. Along the way the major scowled at the locals, his blond eyebrows twitching, sweating. June was really heating up, into the high eighties, and the hot afternoon turned into one hell of a humid evening. It went on into the next day. When I wasn’t stuck with the major I searched the town for Katarina, forgetting meals and sleep. Locals were now asking me where she’d gone, even the seedier black market types who stayed clear of me. The baron kept a low profile too, but we did pass each other once on a square. I wanted to stomp on by. He grabbed at my elbow. “I tried to talk to him, tried to talk the major out of it, captain, I really tried,” he said.

  “All right, all right, let it go for now,” I said and shook his arm free.

  The next morning I had to draft the major’s other new directives, which included the order to have every dwelling posted with a list of the occupants—Germans, refugees, Displaced Persons or otherwise. “For the purpose,” Membre dictated to me in his office, “that occupants may only overnight away from their posted homes with permission of Military Government. Current curfew remains in effect also. Any violators will be punished by eviction or military jail.” The major snickered at that. “This is the way to keep track of these Neanderthals. You never know when they’re going to pull a fast one on you.”

  “Yes, you never know.” I left without being dismissed.

  Major Membre really had me locked out cold. If only it had stopped there.

  Two days later, a Thursday. Out on the Stefansplatz I found myself standing deep within the biggest crowd I’d seen in Heimgau. Heimgauers, refugees and Displaced Persons swarmed, pressing at my shoulders and ribs, emitting odors of sweat and smoky stale wool. Before us, in front of City Hall, a long, low cart was set up as a stage. On its railing hung American flags and German ones of various origin—black-white-red with Prussian eagle and cross, the black-red-gold of the Weimar Republic, the simple black-white-red of the Imperial German Reich. A Yugoslav guarded each corner of the cart stage, before which an oompa band of locals, German Czechs and POWs played “Rosamunde” (“The Beer Barrel Polka,” to us Americans). At the front of the crowd stood hordes of children, all the Kinder of the county, it seemed, many dressed in newer jackets, caps, and short pants that the major had somehow procured for them.

  Uli Winkl was working his way through the crowd to me. “Largest rally I’ve seen since, well, you know when,” he said. “And this band is shit.”

  Major Membre was up on stage throwing the children candy. He wore his dress tunic, with jodhpurs and tall and shiny brown boots. Ellis, Koch, Wilks, and Carlson from the detachment were up there chatting and smoking. Baron Mayor von Maulendorff stood behind them in a simple gray suit cut Loden-style with stand-up collar, wood buttons and Tyrolean hat to match. He kept his head lowered as if praying. “You better pray,” I grumbled to myself. I kept my dark green flyboy sunglasses on, as if that alone was going to protect me or even hide me.

  “Why don’t you go up?” Winkl said.

  “Can’t. I’m spying. Yeah, that’s it—surveillance. Wouldn’t want anyone to get out of hand.”

  “Ah. So you know why the major calls us here?”

  “Me? Of course not. Why would I know a damn thing?”

  Membre whacked his riding crop on the tuba and the band stopped in fits and starts, bursts of air. The major moved to the edge of the stage, his pink face glowing pale in the sun. No one clapped. Someone near me said, “Are we allowed to clap? Do they want us to clap?”

  Membre began talking, but no one could hear. They’d forgotten the microphone, the fools. The baron mayor had to shout a translation: “Citizens, I hold this public meeting today in the interests of policy—of ours, and yours … The Military Government’s new Denazification program enters its first phase. All German citizens will be required to fill out a background questionnaire, called a Fragebogen, from which we will classify each individual into groupings that describe their level of support for the Nazi regime …”

  Membre kept speaking, but the baron waved for him to stop and leaned on the railing to catch his breath. Membre glared at him. Chuckles rolled through the crowd.

  Membre spoke again; the baron shouted: “Make no mistake, you could lose your job, be tried by a tribunal, or jailed, or hanged. Do not fear this process. We offer sane and rational American planning. A technocrat’s justice, you say? Hogwash. Fiddlesticks! You Germans out there deserve to be punished, and you will be.”

  The refugees and Displaced Persons snickered, whispered. Heimgauers glared, tight-lipped. “They deserve it for all they’ve done!” one DP shouted. Another shouted: “Bastards are lucky to get off so lightly!”

  Then, hushes. Whispers and hisses shot through the crowd, passed and shared by Heimgauers and outsiders alike. The Yugoslavs were escorting four men in Bavarian-style suits like the baron’s onto the stage and they positioned the four men at the front. The four stood awkwardly still, mouths tight, their hands flat like marionettes at the ready.

  Winkl gasped, “No, it can’t be.”

  “What is it?”

  “You don’t know?�
�

  “You see a memo in my hand?”

  “The baron mayor knows these men. He had the Yugoslav guards round them up from the refugee camps. It was on the major’s orders, you see.” Winkl shook his head, his thick fingers pressed to his forehead. “I thought they were to be kicked out. Purged.”

  Up on stage, Membre stood next to the first of the four, a wiry little man with narrow face, waist, and shiny mustache. The man gave a terse bow. The baron waved hands for quiet but the hisses thickened. Membre slapped at the tuba and the player let out a high burst, then another until the crowd silenced. The major shouted and the baron: “This is the Doctor Hammerstein! Doctor Hammerstein is your new deputy mayor!”

  Winkl glared at me. “You really didn’t see their dossiers?” I only glared back, to show him I’d been kept in the dark too. “That whiny pig Hammerstein was a Hitler Youth leader, in Saxony,” Winkl added.

  Membre stood behind the two men in the center. Both were pudgy and red in the face with four chins between them. The baron shouted, his voice straining now: “Kappel and Verbitska! Expert innkeepers! They’ve been licensed to run the Heimgauer Hof inn.”

  Boos here and there. “German Czechs, those two, ran a casino in Karlsbad. Hid our baron mayor from the Red Army.” Winkl’s voice had turned hard and gravely.

  The boos and hisses grew louder, killing the chatter.

  The last man had a square jaw, shiny hair shaved high and parted down the middle, and that square and infamous Schickelgruber mustache that had all but disappeared from the rest of the earth by about 1942. Winkl said: “Jenke. Convict turned SA thug, then a bootlicking party man.” He spat. “Choice Golden Pheasant, that one.”

  “Mister Jenke will become the new police chief, for both town and county …” Baron von Maulendorff stopped interpreting, his mouth stuck wide open. Even he looked surprised at this one. He moved to the front of the stage and stared at the major, daring him to say it again.

  “Gestapo pig, MG pig!” yelled a man and people near the front rushed forward, shaking fists and elbowing children out of the way and scattering the band and the cart rolled and pitched, forcing all aboard to grasp at the railing. The crowd rocked the cart. The Yugoslavs pointed their carbines. The crowd pulled back.

  I had frozen up. How could I dare look at Winkl? I had promised him it wouldn’t happen again. I turned and began to say, “I’m sorry—”

  “No!” he shouted. “The two go hand in hand, do they not? Democracy and incompetence. And all that comes with it. The corruption. The cronyism. This is how so many felt before, they’d had it up to here. Up to here! And in their rage, you know what they did? They voted Nazi Party. Even I felt that way then, so much that it got me wanting to vote Nazi. Did you know that? So not even I will pass your Denazification. But my brother? He never bought it. He fought harder. Abandoned the Socialists for the extreme Reds.”

  People had started hearing Winkl despite the tumult around us. They stepped back, giving us room, a local scolding a victor at a mandated public event—who’d ever seen such a thing?

  “Go on, get it all out,” I said.

  He spat on the cobblestones, a yellow gob of it. “The pursuit of personal gain over everything? It’s every man for himself? Well, then your democracy is nothing new, is it? You think it’s special? It’s just as doomed as the rest.”

  I stood there, and I took it. But Winkl would see. I was going to fix this like I should have in the beginning. Yet, right now? I had nothing but a joke.

  “Well, at least you get to be janitor again,” I said.

  Winkl had always liked dark jokes. Not this time. He threw his police chief cap into the crowd, where the grinding throng sucked it down and their stomping feet were sure to mash it to shreds. “You want my opinion, I give it to you. I’m not the janitor any more. You are.” Then he pushed his way free and was gone.

  That evening I stayed late in my office, in the near dark with only a desk lamp on. I was sucking on Luckies and entangling my lamp’s light within coils and gnarls of smoke. I sipped on whiskey. I recalled a proverb I had seen chiseled on the main gateway of Heimgau’s medieval city wall, from the days of the plague:

  When a Curse Comes Due,

  The Symptoms Swell Faster

  Than a Mountain’s Stream

  So Major Membre, the Dopehead Plunder King, was locking us all out with his ironclad new regime. Improvise when the situation required? Get creative? The man could write a book on it: Oligarchy for Covetous Blowhards.

  I had overheard the impromptu jokes bursting from the crowd as I stormed off from the square in shame that afternoon: “Major Membre wakes, shits, eats, sleeps, and threatens arrest, not necessarily in that order.” Or this gem: “Every night before bed, the pious major never forgets to demand that God show his Denazification certificate.” It shouldn’t have been too hard to come up with them. They were rehashing the same quips once reserved for Nazis hacks and Gestapo goons.

  For his part, the baron had closed the gala with a little cheerleading, a short happy speech in which he called his new officials “The Old Bavarians,” though none were too old or born Bavarian. The man was one heck of a hokum artist. For a bargain the baron was putting up men he owed favors, men who’d support his cherished separatist Catholic politics and grateful enough to help protect his and the major’s trading business. It had to happen now or never, before the Denazification kicked in.

  Maybe one of these cronies had even killed those three, in concert with Major Membre even.

  Of course, this was where my investigation had been heading all along—right to the major.

  I smoked and stared into the hot white of the lamp, letting my eyes blur and muddy up from the smoke-light muck. I couldn’t know who Major Membre knew in Frankfurt. He might even have friends in Washington. After all, the man had nabbed a CO posting right from under me. Meanwhile, the major’s so-called investigation would help cover him and his big brass balls, even puff him up with friends he surely had in CID to boot. Who did I know? Me, a German-American. I had nix. I had ended up supervisor of a one-man rural police department now staffed by an ex-con ex-Nazi.

  Craftier means were needed here. The trick was in isolating Membre first, then removing him. Like a cancer. Colonel Spanner was the only field surgeon I knew. Contact me at the Four Seasons in Munich, the colonel had said, and he was sure to respond. You can always come to me, he’d promised.

  I didn’t need to prove the major had tortured and murdered three civilians. I only had to blow the golden whistle that had been given to me.

  Major Membre had really given me no choice. And I had waited too long as it was. So I sat up straight at my desk and wrote a letter addressed to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, Munich:

  Lt. Col. Spanner: Greetings from Kreisstadt Heimgau.

  I am still a man you can rely on, so I’d like to report on how dire the situation has become here under Major Robertson Membre.

  It appears certain that the major’s unfortunate command style and forceful behavior toward the civilian population will adversely affect the high standing MG enjoys and in doing so will severely threaten the proper conduct of our plans here.

  The major has lacked judgment, and intelligence, and practicality. In point of fact, he rewards gift giving, flattery, and empty promises. He thrives on reciprocity. The MG officer who’s lulled into confidence by surface obsequiousness from unscrupulous local operators is forgetting an essential fact: no occupied people trusts or wishes to help the power that occupies it.

  Colonel, you said I deserved your help. May I now collect my due? Perhaps you could tug on a few strings? After all, as you once said: Appearance is key.

  I appreciate our partnership and I look forward to working with you.

  With utmost respect,

  H. Kaspar

  Captain, Det. E-166, LK Heimgau

  Twelve

  AT 7:30 P.M. THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, the sun was setting over high-peaked Old Town rooftops. Jeeps and sta
ff cars clogged the small plaza before the Heimgauer Hof. The hotel had been made up like an Alpine villa, with flower troughs at the windows and Bavarian flag waving on the roof. Boy GIs and teen lieutenants from who knew where huddled at the main steps, joking and smoking while locals waited at a darkened side door hoping for a night’s work.

  I leaned against a lamppost across the way, eyeing the scene. Major Membre had set up a special officers’ club in the hotel and was about to break it in with a Bavaria-wide to-do. The major, ever the glad-hander, had seen it fit to invite even me. I had vowed to avoid it. Yet the night before I had that nightmare again, with those corpses piling up at every turn, and without Katarina there next to me when I woke, it was tough to take. Saturday afternoon I had cracked open a pint of Johnnie Walker. The whiskey was smooth. I could get used to it. I’d taken it out back under the shade of a linden tree. Deliberating. Dissecting. Grasping things.

  So, Major Membre had taken over the investigation. Fine. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t pursue it. I’d be my own private dick now, sure, that was me—a shamus doing a pro bono. And then Mister Johnnie Walker helped me realize that calling on Colonel Spanner and solving this case belonged to the exact same fight. Two sides of a gold coin. Of course, I was going to that party. I should be watching Major Membre’s racket much closer, see if it led me back to those corpses. CIC would want to know. The vice and the violence went hand in hand. What was blatant plundering without a little blood? After all, wasn’t the term called “pillage, rape, and murder”? My Heimgau had two out of the three at the least.

  Right up those main steps and into the Heimgauer Hof I went. Like some frontline GI on the assault I had to keep moving, keep probing, never make myself the target. I made my way through the lobby, past the front desk, past the black GI porters and bored guards. I heard laughs, hollers, singing, and babbling and the droning on of a hundred drunks. A dance hall. A band was playing “Flyin’ Home.” I peeked in and saw slick heads of hair and elbows swinging. I smelled fresh Virginia tobacco and the bouquet of real peacetime beer. They even had a few USO girls helping couples dance. Not a bad canteen here, I had to admit.