Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “Petit,” Sonny said, “I think you had better talk, and talk fast.”

  “But you are spions, all of you. You have no legitimacy. I will talk to General Eisenhower, only to him.”

  “Ah,” Sonny said, “I suspect the general will not take this scenic route. And I could deliver you to members of the maquis. They will not be so kind to you.”

  The fascist chieftain sneered. “I had them all shot long before you arrived. You will not find Resistance fighters in Rauville-la-Bigot. And why should I worry about de Gaulle? He wears diapers, I have been told.”

  “But he could strangle you with those same diapers, whether he wears them or not.”

  Jean-Marie kept sneering. “First he would have to come to France. And he is much too afraid, my little friend.”

  This boy gangster’s vanity was still the key to his uncovering. Sonny would have to peel him like an onion to find that first layer of raw skin.

  “What if we stood you near Le Chien Méchant? The villagers would toss stones at you.”

  “I’ll survive,” he said. “They wouldn’t dare touch my uniform.”

  Sonny smiled. “Get undressed.”

  Jean-Marie looked at him as if he were a lunatic. “What are you talking about? The colors I wear are sacred.”

  This chieftain, this murderer, began to twitch. “In Paris, people survive on rutabagas—everyone, rich and poor alike. Their teeth fall out. But here we have eggs.” His face lit with some eerie dreamlike color. “And it’s all on account of my armband…. I keep our baker in business. Our café would have shut down years ago.”

  “Bravo,” Sonny said. “Every housewife and widow must earn a bonus taking off her garter belt for some Gestapo officer with a wanderlust. What’s your cut?”

  Jean-Marie was indignant. “Cut? I have no cut. I live like a monk—in my uniform. I keep Rauville-la-Bigot alive.”

  “Then why did the washerwomen who work at the Hôtel de Ville break your hand and put you under house arrest?” Corporal Benson asked.

  “They’re ungrateful,” he said.

  “Get undressed,” Sonny insisted.

  “Wait, wait,” Jean-Marie said. “I am not unreasonable, Sergeant Salinger. I will tell you all I know and get to keep my armband.” He was very smug. “The fortress cannot be breached. It has eighty-eights and mortars at all five levels. You will not be able to penetrate its walls with your bombs and cannons. It is futile, this American assault. The commandant can move his men from tunnel to tunnel and mount his own attack at the fortress’s weakest point.”

  “How many soldiers are inside that castle?” Sonny asked.

  “Ninety thousand—a hundred, perhaps,” Jean-Marie muttered with a tentative smile.

  Sonny grabbed him by the shoulders. A hundred thousand soldiers could have held Normandy for another month. “You’ve never been inside Fortress Cherbourg, have you? Not even once.”

  Jean-Marie looked at the curled tongues of his shoes. He seemed bereft, half alive, despite the regalia of his Gestapo ornaments. “Why should they trust a boy from Rauville-la-Bigot? I could have been a counterspy, like you.”

  “Yet you killed for them. You wore their uniform.”

  “That means nothing to the boche,” he said, his chin withdrawn. He’d been a nuisance as a boy, the village pest. He never finished school, was reprimanded and beaten by his father, a farmer who could not even till his own soil. Jean-Marie was among the first to welcome the Krauts after they arrived in Rauville-la-Bigot. He was given his own revolver. He organized the milice. He executed the mayor and all the teachers who had mocked his delinquent manner and his mediocre knowledge of history and French folklore. He’d never heard of Charlemagne, Molière, or Montaigne. And yet his very ignorance appealed to Sonny. Still, he and the corporal undressed Jean-Marie and sent him naked out the door.

  They heard the clamor in a minute, as he was kicked and buffeted about, dragged across the dirt and stones by women in kerchiefs and men without molars in their sunken mouths. “Enough,” Sonny said, and retrieved the young assassin as villagers bowed to this tall American soldier with his sergeant’s stripes.

  “Sorry,” Sonny sang in French. “We need this piece of shit.”

  And that’s when Blunt arrived in a jeep with Oliver, who was a major now, in charge of his own battalion. The Krauts had barricaded themselves in the streets near the harbor, and the major had to uproot them house by house, liberating hostages trapped in the cellars—infants, women, and palsied old men with bulging eyes. The major fed these hostages K packs of peanuts and Hershey bars. The Twelfth had already lost half its boys since the landing on Uncle Red, and had to rely on raw recruits.

  “Well,” Blunt asked, “did you learn much from this fascist fuck?”

  “He’s never been near Fortress Cherbourg,” Sonny said. “Then give him back to the village. Everyone suffered under his rule.”

  “Can’t,” Sonny said. “They’ll tear him to shreds.”

  “He deserves it,” Blunt said.

  “I won’t have him executed by a mob.”

  “Fine,” Blunt said, tossing a blanket around the boy assassin and shoving him into the back of the jeep. “We’ll look after him, Salinger. I’ll be his guardian angel.”

  The boy’s petite amie, Mauricette, came toward the jeep with her swaggering hips, like the maiden queen of the village. She was the cashier at Le Chien Méchant. She wore burning red lipstick and a rose with wilted petals in her hair.

  “Chouchou,” the boy said, his back hunched under the blanket, “save me from these American gangsters.”

  Chouchou lunged forward with a dramatic sweep of her shoulders and spat in the boy’s face. The villagers saluted her and cheered. “Capitaine Mauricette.”

  Blunt started to drive off, and Sonny had to race after him. “Sir, what now?”

  “Salinger, you go on to the next village and do the same thing. You find the son of a bitch in charge and interrogate him.”

  “And after that?”

  “You go on to the next—until you get to Cherbourg.”

  And Sonny was left with Corporal Benson in a village that the Americans had just liberated. But the inhabitants of Rau-ville-la-Bigot couldn’t seem to look into his eyes, even with all the American flags draped against the windows and the treasure trove of Hershey bars he and the corporal had distributed from the back of their jeep. His uniform with its chevrons intimidated them. He could have been one more occupier with a few enticing gifts. Hadn’t the general staff of the Twelfth ripped off the Nazi banners from the Hôtel de Ville and arrived with all their maps? Senior officers seized the very best offices for themselves. Clerks had to huddle in the basement. All the other milice had fled, but Jean-Marie had remained, a king without his kingdom, until Blunt had spirited him into some dark void. Sonny doubted he would every see that boy with the beret again.

  2.

  EACH VILLAGE WAS A LITTLE CLOSER to the railroad line that led to Cherbourg. The rails buckled and the earth flew around them in the middle of the bombardment a few miles away. Sonny watched a squadron of P-47s fly above him like the body of a brazen bird that ripped apart and came together again with a groan. The Krauts had abandoned Montquebec, left their tanks and eighty-eight-mm guns behind. There were no fascists flitting about, no collaborators, no Krauts in civilian clothes. Villagers came out of their cellars to greet them. The corporal wondered how they had survived.

  “On rutabagas,” said the mayor’s wife, “and on whatever rations the boche provided.”

  “A bit of carrot stew,” said the village priest. His cassock was a little too fresh and shiny in a time of war and dissolution; there wasn’t a single stain on his black skirts.

  “And the French Gestapo?” Sonny asked.

  “They vanished the morning you appeared on the beaches,” said the mayor’s wife, without the slightest tremor in her voice.

  “But the boche much have been here in Montquebec,” Sonny had to insist. “They ran wi
thout their artillery.”

  “Because of your lightning attack,” she said.

  There were only a few pinches of lightning. The Twelfth was shoved back a little every time it pushed off. The regiment had to slug it out in the hedgerows and all along the railroad line, with its half-hidden Kraut machine-gun nests.

  Something seemed strange to Sonny, irregular. There was no rubble in the streets. And the clothes of these villagers were a little too neat. There was no sign of starvation, no jowls, not one gaunt neck. The women’s nails were polished. The men were fat.

  “Where’s the rest of the village?” Sonny asked.

  “They’re still in the cellars,” said the priest. “They’re frightened. But come, we’ve prepared a meal for you.”

  Sonny smiled to himself. He and the corporal entered a little red house that had escaped the Allied bombardment, like the rest of this enchanted village. A wicker table had been set for Sonny and the corporal with napkin rings, candles, and a marvelous crust of country bread. The priest served them carrot stew with a ladle. Sonny could sniff coriander. He got up from the table. He wasn’t in the mood to breathe arsenic in the coriander.

  “Père, you sit. We’ll serve you.”

  “But you are our guests, my child.”

  “Still,” Sonny said, “I insist.”

  The priest shrugged his shoulders and sat in Sonny’s place. His gray eyes twinkled as he wolfed down the stew. “What a pity,” he said. “You’re missing a delicious meal…. We saved and saved for a moment like this. We wanted to do our little part and protect our protectors. You must be famished.”

  It was like a bizarre cartoon: a village without a swirl of dust or a crooked steeple. Had the Twelfth overlooked Montquebec on its drive along the coast? And yet here were Sonny and the corporal as an interrogation team.

  “Something stinks,” the corporal whispered.

  “Agreed,” Sonny said. He put his .45 on the wicker table. “Père, qui êtes vous? You’re not from this village, and you’re no priest. You have a farmer’s hands, full of bumps.”

  This fraud in the shiny cassock began to shiver. “We’re not collabos,” he said. “We ran a small hotel near Rocheville. The boche took it over. We had little choice. We served them until they left.”

  “Then why didn’t you stay where you were?”

  “We were tainted—as Nazi-lovers. We fed whoever we could. We rescued a British aviator. But we’re not with the maquis. We have no status.”

  “And that coriander,” Sonny said, “came from your hotel.”

  “Yes,” said the fake priest. “It was in our pantry. The boche could requisition whatever they wanted. They demanded four-star meals at a seaside hotel. They wanted to take our entire équipe with them to Paris. So we ran away.”

  “And disguised yourself as a priest. But why Montquebec?”

  “Because it was deserted,” said the pastry chef, who had pretended to be the mayor’s wife.

  “But where are the real villagers of Montquebec?” asked Corporal Benson.

  “It’s a great mystery,” said this priest, who’d been the majordomo at the hotel. And Sonny’s mind took flight. He imagined all these dissemblers in some new short story. That was the gift of a CIC man. Sonny was a born dissembler.

  “And what happens if these villagers come back?”

  “Alor,” said the priest. “We will celebrate—and fight. Perhaps they will not forgive us for the little hotel we had. All the marmalade … and the butter we ate from a tub.”

  Sonny couldn’t leave this little tribe of mountebanks here, in the middle of so much war traffic. He had the MPs carry them off to an internment camp, while he went looking for other lost souls.

  3.

  THREE WEEKS INTO THE WAR, and they already had a nickname—le Gestapo Américain. They had to interrogate like wild dogs, since it was harder and harder to tell the difference between collabos, who hid behind the medals they had collected from some earlier war, and villagers who had suffered throughout the occupation. Sonny made more and more arrests the closer they got to Cherbourg. No one seemed willing to talk, not even the owners of bicycle shops. And because they had so little time, they would borrow the commandant’s office at local Gestapo headquarters, with the Führer’s picture removed from the wall. They avoided cellars and torture rooms in their interrogations. Yet this tall American still inspired a certain kind of dread.

  Once inside Gestapo headquarters, wives informed on their own husbands; the mayor, who’d been mum, plucked out a list of unreliables.

  “I cannot say with certainty, monsieur. But these are the ones you should watch.”

  It made Sonny ill. He had to sit in the Nazi commandant’s chair until the MPs arrived with their van. And then he vanished to yet another village. Suddenly, all the interrogations stopped. The commandant of Fortress Cherbourg had surrendered. But he could not control the little outposts on the hills overlooking Cherbourg, and pockets around the railroad tracks, or at the Hôtel de Ville, where a handful of Krauts were dug in.

  Sonny and the corporal entered Cherbourg in a bone-chilling calm. Weary of snipers as they were, they bounced across the rue de la Bretonnière, finding only a dead horse in the street, attached to a broken battle wagon. They arrived at the Hôtel de Ville, where Major Oliver strutted about with the riflemen of E Company. He had a tank with a flamethrower at his command. A fire roared within the Hôtel de Ville, with thick balls of black smoke billowing from every window. But Oliver was the chief of his own fire brigade. He positioned the nozzle of the flamethrower at the charred walls and windows of the Hôtel de Ville.

  “Sir,” Sonny whispered, “shouldn’t you wait? There are a few rebel soldiers inside. They can’t last forever.”

  Oliver stared him down. “Salinger, stay out of this. You’re strictly CIC. Did you see any white flags?”

  “No, sir.”

  There wasn’t any need of a white flag. The German soldiers leapt out the windows, one by one, wearing blankets that resembled fiery rags around their shoulders. They could have been creatures from another world. The medics arrived. Sonny stared at one of the soldiers, whose eye sockets were gone. All the flesh had been sucked from his face. Yet his blackened teeth revealed a jarring smile, like an angel soaring into the unknown.

  PART FOUR

  The Commandant of the Ritz

  August 1944

  1.

  NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED the velocity of the Allies—their breakout from Normandy and sweep across France. German panzer divisions were racing back across the Rhine like ragged columns of ants, and the Ninth Air Force had practically knocked the Luftwaffe out of the sky. Ike and his generals wanted to sidestep Paris. They would have had to deal with a whole German garrison—and supplying grub to over two million Parisians would have been a logistical nightmare. But Ike didn’t have much of a choice. The Froggies were peeling off from the Allied juggernaut and moving toward Paris on their own, under General Leclerc, who was in command of the Second Armored Division. And the Twelfth had been elected to liberate Paris alongside Leclerc.

  It was sort of an inconvenience for Sonny. He couldn’t stop beside a country road and peck away at his Holden Caulfield novel on an army-issue Corona. He had to accompany his regiment. Still, there was a great deal of confusion. Leclerc drove up the avenue d’Orléans in a Sherman tank, wearing both a kepi and an American blouse. His entire command must have seemed like a bunch of unicorns in foreign dress. Parisians blocked the avenue, grasping at some of these soldiers in their black berets, climbing onto the tanks, tearing buttons off a soldier’s blouse as magical souvenirs.

  But Sonny was given an unbearable burden. Captain Blunt sat in the back of Sonny’s jeep as they were entering Paris from the southwest, at the porte d’Italie.

  “You’ll have to arrest Hemingway,” he said. “Correspondents aren’t allowed to carry firearms. He’s collected a rogue’s regiment. ‘Papa’s Irregulars,’ he calls them.”

  Sonny
had heard a similar tale. Hem gathered a band of stragglers around him at Rambouillet—dogfaces who were stranded from their own outfits, other correspondents, a private cook, photographers, cameramen, military historians, and such, a motley crew of soldiers, civilians, and Resistance fighters, equipped with submachine guns and hand grenades.

  “A whole regiment? That’s unlikely.”

  “Does it really matter, Salinger?” the captain said. “He’s a menace, that old man. He ought to be in an insane asylum. He’s shot his way to the place Vendôme and liberated the Ritz. But there was nothing to liberate. The Luftwaffe left weeks ago with some of the Ritz’s treasure. That crazy has captured a haunted house.”

  Göring had occupied the Imperial Suite and filled half the hotel with his fellow officers. There was every sort of rumor about him, clandestine reports that Ike’s intelligence team had gotten from a chambermaid who risked her life for the Allies. He wore ermine nightgowns and one earring, she said, and danced with waiters in the dining room. He had a jar filled with precious stones in his suite, and jeweled slippers with high heels. He was a morphine addict who stayed up half the night, staring at his emeralds and rubies. But he disappeared from Paris and the Ritz with his high command, his emeralds, and works of “decadent” art he had robbed from rich collectors. There were no more Germans at the Ritz.

  “And suppose I find Hemingway? Do you really want me to arrest him? He’s an icon. We’ll be laughed at—worse. All the wire services will pick it up. We’ll be in the doghouse, not him.”

  “I don’t care,” Blunt said. “I want that rogue’s regiment to disband…. I’ve got to get to the avenue Foch. I’ll find my own way.”

  The CIC had usurped 84, avenue Foch, the posh headquarters of the SS and all its counterintelligence branches, in the luxurious sixteenth arrondissement. It was the most notorious “hotel” in Paris. It seems that whatever guest was invited to 84 seldom came out again. Sonny had to wonder why the CIC always occupied the former establishments of the Gestapo and the SS, no matter what town they were in. Perhaps it was convenience, or something a little more sinister than that. Secret agents clung to the territory of other secret agents.