The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  The next four years proved both of us correct. Kay was right in that college did keep our son out of jail and out of the army. I was right in that he used the time to disrupt, mock, protest, and even destroy. When he finally left campus, he wasn’t even close to a degree in anything.

  I’d like to think that despite Todd’s transgressions, I was sympathetic and caring, but in truth, I was simply disappointed. He had rejected me and everything I valued, and I couldn’t figure out why. What was so wrong with being responsible? Why was it a disgrace to fit in with your generation? What had I gotten wrong when I climbed aboard a B-17 again and again? What was my crime when I married the girl next door and carried on the traditions that our families were handing down to us?

  I didn’t know, and I joined my friends in a blanket condemnation of everything we didn’t understand. But even as I was agreeing that they were all irresponsible, immoral, selfish, lazy, and greedy, I was beginning to suspect that at least some of the fault was mine.

  My war was a good war, universally approved and constantly reinforced. It was the holy mission of our generation and the approved passage into manhood. To be left behind was to be left out. His war was never so euphorically embraced.

  My war was middle class. Many of the poor were excluded because of their color. Joining the army meant marching shoulder to shoulder with your peers. His war was lower class. America’s poor impoverished blacks and marginalized whites were fighting Asian peasants in a rain forest. The contest wasn’t his. My mistake was assuming Vietnam was like the war I had fought. In truth, they couldn’t have been more different.

  Another mistake was my assumption that all men longed for security. My generation, having been reared in the Depression and tested in horrible warfare, had every right to yearn for a few years of peace and quiet, but Todd had been raised in the bosom of security. Every conceivable test had been banished from his life. He, and many like him, had to find their own test in combat, so they chose to fight the racism, the prejudice, and the moral poverty that were the horrors of their generation.

  I think if we had only listened, we might have bridged the chasm that grew between our children and us. If I had paid more attention to what my son was saying, it would have been obvious that he couldn’t simply roll up in my security blanket. He didn’t want to be just like me. He wanted to be himself. It took me a lifetime to realize that that wasn’t too much to ask.

  Now

  In the morning I check with the airline and use my open return ticket to book tomorrow’s noontime flight back to New York. I need to go to Todd, wherever he’s been sent, and admit my guilt. I want him to know that I forgive him for everything, and hope that he’ll be able to forgive me.

  But today there’s another failure that I have to deal with. I have to make peace with Sergeant Browning and his unwavering sense of justice. I knew who had killed Mary Brock before I left England. It’s all in the letter that I found in my footlocker when I was cleaning out the house. I’m going to add it to his case file.

  Arthur Lyons is pacing in the lobby when I come down for breakfast. I remind him that he should still be home in bed. “You can’t keep up with the night shift if you’re going back on the job at breakfast.” He responds with his usual excuse about coming in early to catch up on his bar records, but the way he drums his fingers as I’m waiting for my coffee tells me that he has something important to discuss.

  “Herbert tracked down Angela Priest,” he blurts out as soon as I’ve had my first sip. Something jumps inside me, but there’s no reaction in my eyes. At least none that Arthur can see. “He was very excited. Absolutely assumed that you’d want to see her.”

  I work carefully, spreading the jam on my toast.

  “I told him that things had changed…somewhat. You’d had some bad news…”

  “I’ll want to thank Herbert. It was very kind of him to go to so much effort.”

  Lyons waves away the thought. “Herbert loves running things down.”

  “Would he be embarrassed if I offered him some money for his time?”

  Arthur slaps his hand on the table and turns away in frustration. “It isn’t about time or money; it’s about you, Yank. You came here to find the girl, didn’t you?”

  I set down the cup. It’s a direct question, deserving a direct answer. “Yes, I did. I haven’t admitted it to myself in so many words, but I certainly wouldn’t have come back to see the housing project they built on top of the old base. And I probably wouldn’t have come back just to put the final touch on John Browning’s memoirs. So I suppose Angela Priest was the real reason.”

  “Well, she’s living in London.”

  “Herbert hasn’t contacted her, has he?”

  “No, of course not. Not without your agreement.”

  “Then I’d like to tell him not to.”

  “Even though it’s obvious you want to see her?”

  “I did want to see her. I wanted to apologize. But now I think that she’d be the one feeling guilty, and the last thing I want is to cause her pain once again.”

  Lyons is almost contorted in frustration. “Jesus, Yank! How do you know? How do you know she hasn’t been wanting to see you again for the last fifty years? How do you know that she doesn’t need to say she’s sorry?”

  “Maybe another day,” I say casually.

  “Like there’s always going to be another day,” he challenges.

  “Arthur, you don’t know what it was like, and you can’t know how I feel. So please, just help me set the Mary Brock record straight. That’s what I want to do with my last day in East Anglia.”

  He stares at me in disbelief, shakes his head, then lets his mouth relax into a smile. “Okay, Yank. I suppose we all owe you that much.”

  Then

  The mysterious Rog, whom Angela had seen on a date with Mary Brock, turned out to be Roger McTiernan, a cherub-faced navigator from my unit. He had flown seventeen missions in 1943, including three raids where our plane losses were over 30 percent. He had every right to be dead, and Mary Brock was an odds-on favorite to collect on his insurance. But that wasn’t the way it worked out. Mary Brock was dead, and Roger had returned home to the States without ever cashing in on his policy.

  It was in March, 1944, that I began to close in on him. Angela and I had become lovers, abandoning all pretenses and leaving discretion behind. We were sharing beds in hotels outside of London and right in the center of Norwich, areas in the general commerce of her neighbors and relatives. We knew it would only be a matter of time before we were discovered, but then again it was likely that anyone who mattered already knew. Certainly her parents must have figured us out. We went weeks without accepting a dinner invitation, and the sun was generally up when I brought their daughter home. Angela’s mother beamed at our happy expressions, as if she were already mother of the bride. Her father, on the other hand, adapted a perpetual scowl, his teeth pressed together to keep accusations from escaping his lips. I guessed he would have throttled me if it weren’t for the pleas of his wife.

  “I’m hurting him terribly,” Angela confessed when we were alone together. “A Yank’s whore,” she had heard him mumble. What was he going to say when his brother found out? Or, God help us, the vicar? And what about your mother, he had challenged his wife? This will put her in her grave.

  “I’m sorry,” I started, but she pressed a finger to my lips.

  “My problem, not yours. I know it’s hard for them. But if I wasn’t with you, it would be terrifying for me.”

  Angela was like a drug to me. I was so badly addicted that my body ached when I wasn’t with her. I couldn’t believe that her father’s pain could be greater than my own.

  But to be with her, I had to make myself more and more valuable to Sergeant Browning. Keeping him quiet was my excuse for being off base every week, and to keep him quiet I had to deliver more and more information.

  He knew exactly what he was doing. “Dead end, I’m afraid, Lieutenant Marron,” he migh
t say when I told him I had come up with nothing new. He would peel off his spectacles, pinch the bridge of his nose, and sigh wearily. “Not much point in going on with the deck stacked against us.”

  “I’ll keep trying,” I would beg.

  “Oh no, lad. God knows you’ve gone well over the line.”

  “I was thinking that I might be able to get one of the clerks to do some digging for me.”

  “Wonderful, but I really couldn’t allow it. You’d have to compromise yourself. I mean, what could you possibly offer him?”

  “A car.”

  “A car? That ugly little Austin?”

  “It’s not an ugly little Austin. It’s freedom. A chance to run things for a few hours instead of just being run over. For use of a car on a day’s leave, any one of our guys would volunteer to parachute into Hitler’s bunker.”

  Browning bit on a leg of his spectacles. “Well, if it wouldn’t be demeaning for you…”

  “Not at all. Give me a few days and then put in a call. I’ll bring what I have.”

  It went on and on. I had riffled through most of our files and found a way to copy any personnel record where the name of the beneficiary wasn’t the same as the name of the insured. I had correlated the leave records with men who had changed their insurance, showing which of the men might have been in town around the time of the murder. I had checked health records to see if any of them were under psychiatric care. I had run every ruse I could think of.

  Twice I had been called on the carpet. The legal officer reminded me that anything Browning wanted had to go through channels. “Yes, sir,” I agreed easily, “but you know, Captain, you’ll be farmed out to gunnery school if any of those channels ever run past Colonel Mast.”

  He knew I was right. Mast hated staff officers worse than Germans. He busted their asses routinely. The ones who let him down found themselves transferred to Mermansk or one of the other thousand posts that wasn’t nearly as entertaining as London.

  “Well, we’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen, won’t we, Marron?”

  “That’s all I’m doing, Captain. I’m giving this guy every bit of trivia I can find to keep him away from the good stuff. I’m pandering to him so he doesn’t call in an even bigger pain in the ass from Whitehall.”

  He thought about the chaos that an English civil servant could cause, and about the bleak turn that Colonel Mast could put into his career path. “Well, I can certainly appreciate what you’re doing, but I do have to be kept informed.”

  “Yes, sir, but I don’t see why you want to be in on this one. Sooner or later I’m going down. There’s no reason why anyone has to go down with me.”

  From then on, the captain simply tipped his chin toward me when he found me in the personnel records. The gesture acknowledged that we were coconspirators, but reminded me that there was nothing in writing.

  Colonel Mast wasn’t as easily turned. “Marron, you dumb son of a bitch, don’t you know who the enemy is?”

  “The Germans…” I offered.

  He nodded generously. “Okay, the Germans. But who do you think is fighting us every step of the way to keep us from fighting the Germans?”

  “The English?”

  “Right!” He shouted, his fist crashing down on his desk, “and you’re collaborating with the enemy.”

  “Sir, you told me that my job was to keep the English out of your face.”

  He nodded. “Go on.”

  “Well, sir, I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping Detective Sergeant Browning from ever crossing your line of sight.”

  “True, but at what price, Marron? You’re turning in your own men. You’re betraying the unit.” The humor left him and he leaned in toward me. “If you think I’ll ever turn in one of my men to satisfy some English whore, you need a stint in sick bay. I’ll keep you in pajamas until the war is over and we’ve all gone home.”

  “Sir, I haven’t ever given Sergeant Browning anything that would point to one of us. So far I’ve been leading him in circles, and keeping all the circles away from your office. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”

  “Just so we understand each other, Marron, I don’t work for Sergeant Browning.”

  “Understood, sir. I’m on your side.”

  But Browning wasn’t easily fooled. I couldn’t get away with giving him nothing but trash. There had to be some diamonds in with all the junk. I had to find new sources of evidence. And that was when it struck me.

  We were looking for people who had changed the beneficiary of their insurance. Logical, because that was what the scheme was all about, but the killer would have a different profile. First, he would have changed his insurance to Mary Brock. Then, when he learned that she was cheating him, he would have it changed back, and the chances were that he would have changed it back when Mary was killed. He wouldn’t have waited until her body was discovered and identified. He alone would have known that she was dead from the moment of the murder.

  “Of course,” Browning said when I explained my thinking. “It’s so obvious. The murderer, in all likelihood, changed his insurance back before the body was discovered.”

  “All I have to do is go back through the older files,” I said like a panting puppy.

  “Will that take long?”

  I hedged my answer. I had to squeeze as many meetings as I could out of perhaps a hundred records. “I’m not sure. Probably a few weeks, depending on how much help I can get from the clerks, and our mission schedule has been accelerated…”

  “But we’re talking about a relatively short period of time,” he objected.

  “I’ll do my best, but let’s get together every few days. As I get into it, I’ll be able to bring you whatever I find.”

  He agreed, which meant that I could count on seeing Angela for at least a few more weeks.

  I had found Roger McTiernan after less than an hour of research. He had come to the base fresh from type training, a second lieutenant with navigator’s wings. The day after his arrival, he flew a mission as Colonel Mast’s navigator, and by the end of the week he was assigned as replacement for a navigator who had been killed in action. A German fighter had shot out the nose glass on a B-17, killing both the bombardier and navigator. When McTiernan went aboard, the navigator’s desk was still pocked with bullet holes.

  He flew ten missions in his first month, and then did a week in the infirmary with minor burns. Tracer bullets had set his compartment on fire, and he had been burned while putting the flames out with an extinguisher. It was while he was officially on injury leave that he made Mary Brock his beneficiary. Why not? She was probably his only comfort, and the odds were that he wouldn’t be around much longer anyway. He had replaced a dead man and then nearly been killed himself.

  After he returned to combat, McTiernan had taken three leave passes in the two weeks before Mary’s most probable time of death. Then, on the same day when Browning had calculated that the murder had occurred, Roger had switched his beneficiary back to a married sister in Cleveland. Not proof positive, by any means. It was certainly possible that he had found out she was cheating and stormed back to the base in a rage. Someone else she had been cheating on might have been killing her at the exact moment when McTiernan was correcting his policy. But there was more…

  Three days later, Roger had been relieved of flight duty. Colonel Mast had ordered him to the infirmary with combat fatigue. Two weeks after that, Roger McTiernan had been shipped back to a desk job in the States.

  Combat fatigue was a very subjective illness. Falling-down tired, with trembling hands and glazed eyes, didn’t qualify. That description could have been applied to most of us during mid-1943. Catatonic was probably the low end of the definition—the minimum threshold for the diagnosis. The high end would have been screaming, murderous rage that required restraints. In between were the men who came to believe that they were Jesus Christ. McTiernan’s medical record showed none of the above. He was simply ordered to stand down and
remain in his quarters.

  What it all added up to was that Roger wasn’t dangerously ill. Rather, Colonel Mast had manufactured the excuse to get him out of England. As he had told me, he wasn’t going to turn over one of his men just to satisfy an English whore, and that was why he wanted to be damn sure that I wasn’t giving Browning anything of value. He wasn’t going to have Roger returned to England for trial.

  It all fit together. Sergeant Browning could close his case and end his troublesome investigation. That was, of course, the last thing I could allow to happen. I had to keep feeding the sergeant promising information, without ever even mentioning the name of Roger McTiernan.

  My next two scheduled visits at Whittingbridge police station had to be canceled. The weather had suddenly become springlike and we were flying two or three times a week. Our planes were suffering far less damage because the Mustangs were keeping the fighters off our backs. The air war was beginning to work exactly the way the officers always said it would. We were getting to targets, and then, if need be, getting back to them. Our new problem was supply shortages on the ground. We were in danger of losing missions because we were short of gasoline or out of bombs. Three weeks after my discovery of Roger, I was able to leave the base for still another meeting with irate farmers, and scheduled a visit to Sergeant Browning. I also wangled an overnight pass so I could take Angela to our Norwich rendezvous.

  After the farmers were placated and Browning satisfied, I met her at the garage, where she watched me pour a two-gallon can of stolen gasoline into the tank. Then we drove the short distance up to Norwich on roads deserted of civilian traffic. The medieval city had been spared most of the ravages of war. There were leveled lots between boarded-up buildings and a few rows of houses where street-side windows opened on devastation, but except for the sandbagged checkpoints and shelter entrances, Norwich appeared to have grown indifferent.