Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “It’s my passion,” he said. “The boys love my sketches.”

  Sonny stepped on Whittle’s hand again, ground it into the stone floor. “You shared this passion of yours with members of the division?”

  “Yes,” Whittle cried.

  “Salinger,” Byron muttered, “ye think the pair of ’em have been raising carrier pigeons? I mean, lovebirds with malignant information about all our moves.”

  “I doubt it, Colonel. Your own team would have stumbled upon their pigeon coops. And the Abwehr agents they met are all out of commission. We’ll impound the sketchbooks, sir. That’s punishment enough.”

  “And give them another licking.”

  “The moment you leave.”

  Byron saluted Sonny. “Very well, Agent Salinger.” And he bolted from the tower before Sonny could return his salute. Sonny had to shout after him, “The key, sir, to the handcuffs.”

  “Salinger,” Byron called as he continued down the winding stairs, “use your initiative, man. Didn’t Derbyshire teach you a bundle of tricks?”

  Sonny leaned over the captives and unlocked their handcuffs with two twists of his pocketknife. Then he helped the commandant and Nurse Hamm to their feet.

  “That was beastly,” the commandant snarled. “You shouldn’t have stepped on my hand.”

  “Next time I’ll step on your face,” Sonny told him.

  “Norbert, leave the Yank alone,” Nurse Hamm said, wiping her nose with a stitch of toilet paper that was as precious as sugar and lard. “The Yank saved your life. There was nothing but deviltry in that colonel’s eyes.”

  “I’d still like my sketchbooks back.”

  “Captain,” Sonny said, “you can reclaim them after the war.”

  “That’s reassuring. Half of Europe is one big fort. Jerry has his own damn seawall, impregnable at every point. And we’ll come across the Channel like ducks at a carnival. Every single duck will fall.”

  Nurse Hamm slapped the commandant’s face. “Stuff it, Norbert.”

  The commandant raised his bruised hand to strike her, let it glide in midair for a moment, and vanished without his sketchbooks. Sonny stood there alone in the CIC interrogation room with the Limeys’ own Veronica Lake. She was no femme fatale, just a nurse in wartime, who happened to look like an American movie star.

  Her body began to pulsate like some bewitched thing. “That awful man from your spy school,” she murmured, “that awful man.” Sonny clutched her in his arms until the pulsations stopped. She had the bittersweet aroma in her hair of shampoo from the Fourth Division’s shelves.

  “That maniac didn’t have to humiliate us like that,” she said.

  “He could have made a very long run to headquarters with those sketchbooks and had your fiancé dismissed.”

  “Norbert’s not my fiancé,” she said, and left Sonny in the tower with that toppled chair.

  4.

  THEY AVOIDED HIM AFTER THAT ENCOUNTER, whispered in his presence. He was Sergeant Salinger, the secret agent in their midst. An electrician arrived from headquarters and had the telephone at the castle repaired, while Sonny wandered the cobblestone streets in his GI windbreaker, pecked away with two fingers on his army-issue Corona in his tower room, or else sat at the Blue Mermaid. The Limeys didn’t like him any better than the general staff’s own intelligence team. Members of the CIC were like the Comanche of the Fourth Division—outcasts and intruders they didn’t quite understand. Sonny and his fellow agents served as scouts in Tiverton, ever watchful. He had the authority to arrest a general. He also had the best digs in town.

  His regiment touted him as an author published in The Saturday Evening Post, but he didn’t have a single friend. His superiors knew how valuable Sonny would be once the invasion force landed. Sonny could speak with the locals. Soldiers of the CIC would be the first to enter a captured French village. They would root out collaborators, chat with the mayor and chief of police, determine who could be relied on and who had to be shot. They would find quarters for the general staff and for themselves. But their methods remained a mystery. And that’s why they were so mistrusted.

  Suddenly, the entire coastal area near Slapton Sands was evacuated—tiny villages became ghost towns overnight—many of the evacuees found shelter further inland at farms and hotels. The Admiralty put their belongings in storage, but local farmers had to sell their cows and pigs to slaughterhouses at a savage price and sacrifice their own crops. Other evacuees, who couldn’t seem to find quarters, were bused to a hastily built compound of Quonset huts near Tiverton Castle, on the banks of the river Exe. The compound was run by the Red Cross and policed by Sonny and his driver, Corporal Benson. The evacuees were farmers and fishermen mostly, with their own little clans, plus some pensioners and widows who’d never seen much of the world beyond the red slate of the Sands. The buses they’d arrived in had blackout curtains. Not one of them knew why they were here—a wartime emergency, they’d been told by a marine corporal who visited their cottages one afternoon and presented them with a small pile of military scrip like a sinister Santa Claus.

  They couldn’t leave the compound unless they fell ill and were carried off on a stretcher to one of the division’s own hospitals, also a series of Quonset huts, with an armed guard right beside their bed. Their only sin, it seems, was having lived near the Sands—a wild, lonely beach in South Devon.

  And now Sonny and his fellow CIC agents were summoned to Slapton Sands. A few stragglers had been spotted in the vicinity, beachcombers perhaps, farmers who wanted to have a last look at their cabbage fields, or villagers who never left and had managed to slip through the fingers of evacuation officers. Sonny and Corporal Benson sat in one of the same grim buses with blackout curtains that had brought the evacuees to their compound in Tiverton. All the agents carried .45s in a suede holster. Some of them had trained together at Fort Holabird, outside Baltimore, and in Derbyshire, but there was very little camaraderie on that bus—their training had left them with a core of suspicion, even among themselves. And that bus ride, without a morsel of sunlight, made them twice as somber. Not one of these merry men looked into another lad’s eyes. They stared off into the distance, as if those around them weren’t quite real.

  The ride was interminable in that gray bus with its flickering lightbulbs. The CIC commander assigned to the Fourth was with them, a man Sonny had never seen before and might never see again; these commanders were constantly shifted about, since the Fourth itself feared them and their agents, and they were often promoted and demoted in the same instant sweep. He called himself Captain Blunt, but that could have been one of his many aliases. He was a tall skeleton of a man with long fingers. He had a swagger stick, like a British colonial officer; it was a curious baton in his bony hands. He would poke some agent in the ribs with the stick if that agent veered from the path Blunt had chosen for him. He claimed to have been a mathematics professor at Cornell—if so, he was sort of a prodigy, since he didn’t seem much older than many of his agents. He also had one lazy, wandering eye. “Salinger, I’ve read your stuff in the Post. Command might want you to keep a daybook, a diary, of our fishing expedition at the Sands.”

  “I’m not much of a diarist, sir. And are we really on a fishing expedition?”

  “Yes, we’re trolling for recreants. And it’s of vital importance. The Sands have to be swept clean of any human debris.”

  Beachcombers had become human debris at Slapton Sands. That was the jargon of counterintel.

  The captain remained quiet for the rest of the trip. Even in that curtained-off amphibious tomb, Sonny could hear the constant racket of seagulls and taste the pungent salt of the sea. The bus stopped in the middle of the Sands at low tide, and while the captain’s Comanche climbed down in their combat boots, one of the agents asked, “Sir, what happens after we find this debris?”

  “Arrest them,” the captain said.

  “And should they resist arrest, sir?”

  “Simple. Shoot the shit out o
f every last son of a bitch.”

  “But they’re civilians, sir, caught up in our sweep.”

  “They’re clandestines,” the captain said, “who have no business being here. We’ll bury them in the shrub.”

  “Is that official, sir?”

  “Nothing’s official, Agent Sullivan. You’re CIC.”

  Sonny stared at Captain Blunt with a mordant smile. “Does that go into the Slapton Sands diary, sir?”

  “Of course. No one has clearance to read that book—it will sit on a shelf until doomsday.”

  “Like the rest of my writing,” Sonny said.

  “Nonsense. I’m one of your biggest fans. We’re all expecting great things from you.” Then the captain used his swagger stick to cut an imaginary X across Sonny’s heart. “But if you ever write a novel about us, Salinger, we’ll fix you—and have the pages burned, one by one.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Sonny said, with the first scattered pages of a novel in his kit. “But I’d rather not be buried with all the debris.”

  “A wise choice,” the captain said, poking Sonny’s arm with the same swagger stick.

  It was a curious beach, cluttered with barbed wire and batteries of antiaircraft guns, as if waiting for an invisible German armada to arrive from across the Channel. There was a paucity of sand on Slapton Sands. Sonny found spent shells among the pebbles and sheets of red slate. They passed one tiny village after another, every one with a church that had somehow lost its steeple. The Admiralty presided over a little kingdom of ruins, with rats running along the cobbles.

  Blunt sent various agents into the different corners of Slapton Sands. The agents worked in little teams. The captain himself tagged along with Sonny and Corporal Benson, who, as Sonny’s driver, was somehow attached to CIC; he had an armband but not a gold badge. He was nineteen and grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, near Amish country. He idolized Sonny and had volunteered to be his driver. Like the others, he had a .45 in a suede holster.

  Sonny could hear that numbing slosh of the sea, but they went inland, into the bramble, away from the Sands. The scrub seemed endless, like a maze of stalks and twisted leaves. Blunt kept whacking at the leaves with his swagger stick and created a tiny storm around him. Within ten minutes of maneuvering, their faces were all scratched. Corporal Benson found a hut hidden in the bramble.

  They all ducked into the low, narrow doorway.

  There was a boy with matted hair inside the hut, squatting on the earthen floor, hugging his knees and shivering.

  “Ah, our first specimen,” the captain said, wavering close to the boy with his swagger stick.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Sonny said. “Can’t you see? The boy’s starving.”

  Sonny took a Hershey bar out of his kit and gave it to the wild boy, who gobbled it up, wrapper and all.

  “That’s not in the regulations,” Blunt said. “He’s hiding in an evacuated area. He belongs to the Fourth Division, dead or alive. And we can’t dawdle here. We have to cover the entire perimeter.”

  “He might be a mute, sir,” Sonny said. “Some kind of outcast.”

  “That still doesn’t give him the privilege of staying here.”

  Sonny motioned to the boy, gave him his own windbreaker to wear, and the boy followed the three soldiers out of the hut.

  “He’s your responsibility, Sergeant,” Blunt said.

  They went deeper into this land of hedgerows, marched along a lagoon sodden with red clay. There were no other huts. The captain’s compass didn’t seem to work. It was the wild boy who led them out of the bramble.

  Sonny heard the report of a pistol—it sounded like a muffled crack of thunder.

  God help us and this crazy mission.

  Blunt blew his whistle. All the other teams of agents suddenly appeared on Slapton Sands. Several of them had their own cargo of human debris—a crippled fisherman who had hidden in his boat, a deranged woman who had pranced out of a tiny cottage on the shore, a gaggle of beachcombers who had decided to claim this evacuated area for themselves, a farmer who was captured near his prize cabbages.

  The teams assembled in front of the bus with their prey.

  “Any casualties?” Blunt asked. “We heard a shot.”

  “It was nothing, sir,” said Special Agent Sullivan, the senior member of the crew. “I fired into the air and stopped one of these buffoons in his tracks.”

  “And you covered every inch of the perimeter? Another crew will be here tomorrow, and if they find any human debris, we’ll spend the rest of the war scrubbing the toilets at Collipriest House.”

  They climbed aboard that bus of black windows and drove from Slapton Sands, with the water churning in the Channel like layers of molten lead.

  5.

  THE BOYS OF SONNY’S REGIMENT were encamped behind a fence near headquarters. They had their own hospital, their own canteen, and movie palace in one of the Quonset huts. They weren’t supposed to mingle with the population of Tiverton, but the generals couldn’t keep them cooped up forever. They were given an occasional pass to wander into town, but there was always a very strict curfew, enforced by Sonny himself. They flocked to the Tivoli, a movie theater on Forte Street, in the heart of Tiverton. The Tivoli wasn’t much more than a storefront near a lingerie shop and a pub that served Bass ale. It was often a soldier’s prime destination in the middle of the afternoon, at half a crown a ticket. These boys couldn’t have a sweetheart in Devon, or they might have landed in the brig. So Sonny had to shine his flashlight in the Tivoli’s darkened shell. And if he did happen upon a corporal smooching with a salesclerk from the lingerie shop, he wrote out a chit, and sent the corporal back to Collipriest House. That chit remained in Sonny’s pocket. He wouldn’t ruin a corporal’s career. But he did warn the salesclerk.

  “You’ll have to keep away from the Yanks, miss.”

  She’d dressed up for her date in the dark. She wore her finest velveteen blouse, and she was fuming. “Oh, you’re a smart one, dearie. You’re a duck. What will ye do—arrest me?”

  He admired her dander. “No, but I might have to arrest your Yank if it ever happens again.”

  And Sonny never had much trouble after a warning like that. Still, the townsfolk were curious about soldiers who seemed to be hiding in plain sight. Half of Tiverton would wander over to Collipriest House and watch the boys play baseball from their side of the fence. It had become an elaborate ritual, with the boys wearing ragtag uniforms, with bats, balls, gloves, and cleats delivered from the Brooklyn Dodgers or the Boston Braves. There were constant battles among the players of “Yankee cricket,” as it was known in Tiverton, as if this strife on a dusty field could relieve a little bit of restlessness about the uncertainty of their fate.

  Meanwhile, Sonny patrolled the perimeters in a jeep, with Corporal Benson at the wheel. It was strange to see a staff sergeant with his own driver, but there he was in his windbreaker. He had gifts to deliver from the base commander—a gigantic tin of genuine army-issue coffee beans to the café on Gold Street that served ersatz coffee made of ground acorns and dandelion leaves until Sergeant Salinger came along.

  The owner of the Blue Mermaid was delirious. “Sergeant, why me?”

  “Ah, Mr. Ralph, would I snub my favorite café in town? The Fourth would like to show its appreciation to the citizens of Tiverton for welcoming us. But you can’t charge tuppence extra for a cup of the real thing, or it’s the last can you’ll ever get from the division.”

  And off they went to a row of tin huts on the Bolham Road that looked like a random chicken coop and served as a camp for Italian prisoners of war; it was guarded by a couple of retired British marines, and Sonny brought a bundle of loot from Collipriest House—ham sandwiches, Hershey bars, and V packs of Camels, with four cigarettes in each tiny cardboard container. The V packs were quite valuable and had become a kind of blackmarket currency on and off the base. But Sonny never hoarded his V packs. He dispensed whatever loot he had to the marine guards and prisoners of
war. He sensed the rampant boredom at the camp, and using his pull with the CIC, he connived to have Army engineers at the base build a bocce court for the prisoners. Their leader, Sub Lt. Lorenzo Tropea, knew enough English to converse with Sonny.

  “Cavaliere Salinger, we are much, much grateful.”

  This sublieutenant was an unusual sort of soldier. He’d never carried a gun in his life. A rare-book dealer in Milan, he was plucked out of his shop one morning by a fascist gang and sent to serve as a bookkeeper in Mussolini’s section of the Afrika Korps. Captured at El Alemein, he sat out the rest of the war inside a chicken coop in Devon. Lorenzo had one irresistible passion—the life and art of Ernesto Hemingway. And no matter how hard Sonny tried, he couldn’t keep Lorenzo off that subject. The sublieutenant would close his eyes and wail like a lovesick boy, “Sergente, please, please tell me again.”

  “I’ll never bring you another V-pack, Sottotenente.”

  “What do I care about Hershey bars and cigarettes? Tell me again,” Lorenzo begged, his eyes still shut.

  “I told you a hundred times. I met the maestro once—at the Stork Club.”

  It pained Sonny to summon up his moment at Table 50 with Oona, like a riveting claw in his back that wouldn’t heal.

  “Was he dolorous?” “Dolorous about what?” Sonny asked.

  “After the Pulitzer Prize was ripped from his hands. That’s what it said in the papers. Doloroso. He cried like a baby.”

  Sonny couldn’t bear that repeated repertoire. “Hem didn’t cry at Table Fifty.”

  He saluted Lorenzo and ran from that little land of chicken wire. He drove up Castle Street to the compound of Quonset huts where the evacuees from Slapton Sands were housed. The Red Cross looked after their wants. He saw Lieutenant Hamm bandaging a fisherman’s arm and feeding him barley soup. Sonny had come to visit that wild boy he’d found in the scrub. The boy was wandering about in army fatigues—he seemed lost in this compound. He wasn’t mute after all.