by Robert Adams
“So you say.” The priest sneered. “But I wonder what Barstow will say when I tell him … if I tell him.”
“Probably,” said Milo in a tightly controlled voice, “to keep your sewer mouth shut and your gutter thoughts to yourself, and to mind your own fucking business, knowing him.
“Now, what / am telling you is this. You entered my room without leave, Lieutenant Metz. You have just slandered me and cast aspersions upon the virtue of Lieutenant O’Daley here, and the bald fact that if you stir shit it stinks worse than if you don’t is the one and only reason that I don’t take all this to the general and see if he won’t have you court-martialed. I think I should, but I won’t.
“However, ranks and insubordination aside”—he stood up, and Padre flinched and took a step backward —“if you are not out of this room and into your own by the time I reach that door …“ He took but one step forward, glowering, his fists clenched at his sides. And the priest turned and scuttled out of the room and down the length of the corridor like a frightened rat. Milo waited until he saw and heard the priest’s door close and lock, then he closed his own and leaned against it, mopping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.
“I’m glad as hell that bastard skedaddled like that. Mad as I was, I might’ve killed the little fucker.”
She shook out another cigarette and lit it with his Zippo. “Well, no one ever would’ve known it, Milo. You gave every appearance of being completely cool, calm and collected, so far as I could see. But you know that Padre’s not going to keep his mouth shut, don’t you? By noon tomorrow, if not before, all of the rest will have had a chance to hear his version of our public orgy in here tonight. Do you have anything to drink, by chance?”
He nodded. “Sure I do, Betty. Sorry, I should’ve offered before all of this.” He delved into the depths of his B-bag and drew out a bottle. “Cognac okay?”
She smiled. “Cognac will be marvelous, Milo—anything but that godawful so-called schnapps we used to get in Miinchen. I had to stop drinking jt, you know.”
Straightening up with the only cup he had been able to find, a canteen cup, he inquired, “Oh, really? Why? Did it really make you that sick?”
Betty laughed throatily. “No, not at all-—it was just that I was starting to grow hair on my chest.”
He drew the cork, splashed a generous measure into the cup and passed it to her. After a long draft, she lowered the cup, her blue eyes tearing a little.
“Milo,” she said huskily, “lock the door and wedge the chairback under the knob, huh?” To his look of astonishment, she added, “If we’re going to have the name—and we are when that Padre gets done lying and exaggerating—we might as well have the game. So please lock the door and cut out the light and then please, please make love to me.”
Chapter III
“How long ago did all of this happen, Milo, my love?” asked Djoolya aloud.
Closing off his memories for the moment, Milo thought, wrinkling up his forehead in concentration. “Above two hundred winters. Why?”
She chuckled and squeezed his thigh where he sat cross-legged beside her. “You’ve not changed a bit, that’s why. I can empathize with that woman, Beti, though I wonder too why she waited so long to have you. I wanted you the first time I ever saw you, wanted you on me, in me, your hands kneading my flesh. And it’s never changed over our years together, I still want you. She showed good taste, that Beti. But I’m sorry, let us back into your memories.”
Milo awakened to the insistent rattling of the doorknob, followed immediately by a soft, subdued knocking on the door itself. Cursing under his breath, he found the Zippo by feel, flicked it open, spun the wheel and looked at his watch by the light. It was 0545, a dark and unholy hour. Betty lay snuggled beside him, pressed closely on the narrow bunk; both were nude under the muslin sheets and GI blankets.
He shook her awake and whispered into her ear, “There’s someone at the door. When I turn on the light you grab your things and hotfoot it into the bathroom and close the door … but quietly. Hear me?”
He felt her nod in the darkness, then swung his legs out of bed with a somewhat louder curse as his bare soles came into contact with the ice-cold linoleum. Passing his extended arm back and forth in the stygian room, he finally found the chain, pulled it, and the bare bulb set in the ceiling blazed into life.
While Betty bundled her clothing and shoes into her arms and scurried into the private bath, Milo said just loudly enough for a person on the other side of the door to hear, “Hang on, let me get into my skivvies, at least. Who is it, anyway?”
An equally low-pitched voice came from the corridor. “It’s Barstow, Milo. Take your time, get decent, but I’ve got to speak to you before oh six hundred.”
When the bathroom door was shut, he padded over to the door, removed the chair from under the knob as quietly as possible, then unlocked and opened it to face a fully dressed General Barstow, who came in and said, “Shut it and lock it again, please.”
Spying the bottle and the canteen cup on the floor beside the bunk, he strode over, picked up them both and helped himself to a measure of the pale liquor. “Whew! Thank you, Milo. I needed that. Sam Jonas and I worked until after midnight trying to get the office and umpteen cases of files and records in some semblance of order. And no sooner did I get into my room here and start to unpack enough to go to bed than Padre came knocking on my door with some yarn about how you were a wanted felon from Chicago and he had caught you petting with Betty.”
Milo sighed, then said, “General, I was accused of fornication—which is a felony, they said, in Chicago —back well before the war. There was no trial; I left town. Yes, I had coupled with a woman who was well above the age of consent and knew exactly what she was doing. No, Betty and I were not petting when Padre came in here. We were sitting, sharing cigarettes and talking. That man has a very dirty mind, not to mention a big mouth.”
Barstow dragged over the chair and straddled it, resting his arms on its back, the canteen cup still in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other. Dipping the mouth end of the cigar into the contents of the cup, he swirled it around for a moment, then jammed it between his big teeth.
“Look, Milo, I don’t give a damn what my people do during their off-duty hours—drink, screw, read dirty books, write them, smoke hashish or opium, bugger little boys or pull the wings off flies—just so long as a good job of work is done for me and Uncle Sam during duty hours, see. I don’t like Padre, I never have and I doubt I ever will. I only keep the pinko faggot around to keep an eye on him, make certain he doesn’t get a promotion or any real power over normal people and because I enjoy verbally abusing him whenever I’m bored.
“I know that you and Betty spent the night together, so don’t bother trying to tell me a gentlemanly lie, huh? She’s not in her room and she’s not in the main latrine, either, she’s in your bath, Milo. I’m very glad that you thought enough of her to try to protect her, but there’s no need, never was, I approve. You both have had a damned hard war these last few years, and you’ll probably be good for each other for a while, even if this relationship never goes any farther than the occasional boff.
“But just thank your lucky stars, the both of you, that this has happened when and where it has—on a very small post, with a post commander who thinks a majority of the Army regs were drawn up by morons for cretins. You’ll likely get more flak from Padre and some measure of ribbing from the others, too; how you handle that is up to you, unless physical violence arises out of it, and then I’ll have to come down on you, so be warned. You and Betty are welcome to terrify Padre all you wish—and it won’t be hard, he scares easily— you can even hurt him a little, just so long as what you do to him leaves no marks and you don’t do it before witnesses.”
Removing the cigar from his mouth, he drained the cup and tossed it onto the rumpled bunk. After replacing the cigar, he stood up and stepped over to the door. He unlocked it and then, with his hand on the knob, said,
“One last thing, Milo. For Pete’s sake, don’t either of you make the cardinal error of screwing up a good love affair by getting married. I made that mistake once and I’ve regretted it ever since. If you don’t marry, you’ll both have good, warm memories of each other as long as you live; if you do, you’ll spend the rest of your lives trying to get the bad taste out of your mouths.”
Within the succeeding two weeks, a few more personnel were added to their thin ranks. The first three were clearly real civilians, all older men, who kept mostly to themselves, chatting in German in a way that suggested practice of a language for long unused. Then came a man that Milo had not seen since his days at Benning. Emil Schrader looked far older than Milo recalled him. He had a silver bar on each shoulder, a slight limp, and some very impressive ribbons and badges on his chest—Combat Infantryman Badge, Airborne Wings, Purple Heart with no less than three oak-leaf clusters, Bronze Star, Silver Star and a Presidential Unit Citation.
As soon as the two were done pumping each other’s hands and back-slapping, Milo stood back and pointed at the collection. “What the hell, Emil, did you try to win the fucking war single-handed or something? No wonder they were so long giving me anything for a fucking souvenir of my fun-filled tour of Europe Beautiful—the bastards had given all of the available supply to you!
“But how in God’s name did you wind up here, Emil? Or am I allowed to know?”
It was not until Schrader smiled that Milo realized that one of the younger man’s eyes was not his—a very good color match for the real, remaining one, but a prosthetic, nonetheless—and when he noticed that, he then noticed the faint, well-sanded facial scars, too. The poor little fucker had really had the course, it would seem.
“You’re one of the principal reasons I’m here, you know, Milo. After I was released from the hospital three months back, I was given orders to report to Fort Holabird immediately, not even given time for a convalescent leave to go back home to Kansas. When I got there, who should be waiting but that same son of a bitch tried to have me railroaded at Benning, Jay Jarvis. The fucker got me into his office and told me he was going to put me into a tedious, boring, dead-end job there and keep me at it forever, that I’d stay there until I had a long white beard unless I gave him, in writing, a confession that I’d been a Nazi sympathizer before the war and a Nazi agent during the war. He said that he could keep me from getting anything worse than a dishonorable discharge, but that he had to have that statement and that I wouldn’t get a discharge of any kind until I’d given him what he wanted.
“Well, hell, Milo, you know damned good and well that I’m just as stubborn as any other fucker and I would’ve seen hell freeze over solid before I’d’ve knuckled under to that peckerhead cocksucker. So I’ve just been sitting up there, marking time, counting paperclips and suchlike with Jarvis harassing me till he was blue in the face, and then you came along.
“So, after they’d shipped Jarvis off to the funny farm to do his OJT in paper-doll production, somebody went through his office files, found out I was there on post doing little or nothing and started looking for a slot for me to fill. They must’ve looked in my 201 and decided to make a translator or something like that of me, ‘cause I was questioned at some length in German—Hochdeutsch, Plattdeutsch, Schweizer-deutsch, the works. A couple days later, they cut orders on me to come to something called Operation Newhaven. And I guess this hash up must be it, huh?”
Milo could but wonder at just why and how the Army had for so long retained Jarvis in a position of some power despite his long-proven lunacy. The arrogance of taking a highly decorated combat officer, fresh out of hospital, still showing the scars and cripplings of hard, faithful service, and employing mental torture on him in order to try to force him to confess to untruths about himself smacked more of the Axis countries or Russia than it did of the United States of America. Jay Jarvis’ friends must be very highly placed and powerful indeed to have managed to keep their boy out of a booby hatch for so long a time.
“So,” asked Schrader, “if this is Operation Newhaven, what does it do that’s so hush-hush they won’t even let you know where the hell it and you are, Milo?”
“You reported to the general?” Milo answered the question with questions. “What did he have to say to you about your duties here, Emil?”
Schrader shook his head. “That was the quickest I ever got to see any general officer—or any field-grade officer, for that matter, outside of actual combat—in my life. General Barstow was very nice, very friendly, he seemed honestly glad to have me here … and he did not say one fucking thing that told me anything about this Operation Newhaven at all, just warned me that I’d get fried on the wire or my ass shot off by the guards if I tried to get out without somebody’s say-so, said I’d learn more in due time, then he turned me over to a Captain Jonas. Sam chatted with me for a while, then turned me over to a Sergeant Quales, who took me to the back of the building, issued me an armload of civilian clothes and shoes, dumped them all in a brand-spanking-new foot locker and told me it would be brought to my quarters later. Then a Lieutenant Obrenovich took over and took me over to the BOQ and told me which rooms were already taken and which building to come to after I’d gotten my gear more or less squared away. And I repeat, what the hell is this Operation Newhaven, anyhow, Milo?”
Milo chuckled. “You have been told exactly as much as Barstow has told any of the rest of us, Emil, and we’ve been here two-three weeks, most of us, too. How did they get you down here from Holabird, car?”
Schrader shook his head once more. “Naw, Milo. They drove me to some little bitsy airfield and put me and my gear on a Piper Cub—you know, like they use to spot targets for the artillery—a two-seater and flown by an enlisted pilot who had about as much to say as a stuffed owl. We landed at an Air Corps place called Langley and me and my gear got put into the back of a half-ton GI panel truck with the back windows painted over—both sides of the fucking glass, too, for shit’s sake!—and a fucking plywood partition between the back and the front. When it finally stopped and they opened the back door, it was clear we was on an Army post, but don’t ask me where or which one, ‘cause they stuck me and my stuff into the back of a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, tied the back curtain down and took off. Felt like the fuckers were driving cross-country, part of the time, and when they stopped and told me I could get out, it was here, wherever here is.”
Four more of the Munich bunch filtered in—Hugo, Ned, Judy and Annemarie—in the same traveling party with a short section of WAAC’s under the command of a six-foot-tall Wagnerian blond sergeant named Hilda Stupsnasig. With his well-honed sense of humor, General Barstow immediately dubbed the WAAC sergeant “Brunhild,” but simply as an in-joke, since all the WAAGs were clerical personnel and as such would work in uniform in various capacities and offices.
At last, Barstow called a meeting of ten of his people —Milo, Buck, Betty, Hugo, Ned, Judy, Vasili and the three older civilian men—in the small conference room behind his office.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Our work, what we all came here for, will be starting day after tomorrow. It’s going to be, in many ways, very much like what most of us here were doing in Munich, earlier this year. The difference is going to be that very few if any of the people we are going to be interviewing are DPs. On the contrary, almost all of them are going to be Germans, many of them having had ties of some sort to one of the armed services and/or to various Staatsbilroen of the Third Reich, and even those few who will not be Germans will have worked closely with certain German projects which employed the others, the actual Germans.
“These three distinguished gentlemen”—he indicated the three civilians, seated side by side as always since their arrival, all puffing away at their pipes— “will be called Smith, Jones and Doe, and one of them will be a member of each of the three interrogation teams. Buck, you and Judy will be teamed with Doe. Hugo, you and Ned with Jones. You two teams will be dealing o
nly with Germans.
“Milo, you and Betty and Vasili will, with Smith, handle all of the non-Germanic subjects. You, Milo, will also be in charge of all three teams, the facility and so forth. You’ll probably need an exec to take some of the load off. You can have any officer not presently in this room. Who do you want?”
“How about Emil Schrader, general?” replied Milo quickly. “He and I worked together years ago. I was a first sergeant and he was my field first; he’s a good man.”
Barstow nodded. “So be it. You’ve got him as of now. It’ll be up to you to brief him, though. He’s a good choice for this, too, come to think of it, Milo. He speaks excellent German and can be used to fill in on either Team One or Team Two in a pinch.
“You ten and Schrader had better go back to the BOQ and pack up. You’ll all be moving this afternoon to the small compound on the other side of the post; it’s that facility of which you will have charge, Milo. You’ll have our own Brunhild and four of her WAACs for your headquarters staff, plus Schrader, of course. There’s a small mess hall and hot food will be trucked in to you three times each day, but keeping the place and the trays clean will be up to you and your WAACs.
“This all is being done this way solely for the purpose of isolating you and your interviewees, of making damned certain that as few people here ever see them as possible. They’ll be brought into your compound in sealed transport and they’ll leave in exactly the same way. Under no circumstances are any of them to leave that compound at any time until you have finished with them.”
“Uhh, sir …“ said Betty hesitantly. “What about a medical emergency? What happens then?”
Barstow nodded once. “A very good point, Betty. In such a case, whatever the hour, you will ring me up and I will send or bring personnel appropriate to the situation you describe from the dispensary, out here.”
