Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  “You want me to walk the alley?”

  “Yes, but if you find anything, don’t touch it, okay?”

  “Certainly, Lieutenant.”

  Lowell stood and walked slowly toward the next street, head down, taking her time.

  Harkins walked in the opposite direction. The MP—GIs called them snowdrops because of the white helmets—was asleep on his feet. He flinched when he heard Harkins.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “It’s okay. I’m only awake because I’m walking.”

  Lowell called when the detail from the hospital showed up to retrieve the body. When they met by the corpse, Harkins asked, “Find the shoe?”

  “No, sir. Can’t imagine where it could be, unless she came here in a car and left it behind.”

  Harkins thought about a guy he’d helped apprehend in Philadelphia, a serial rapist. When they searched his room they found a stash of women’s personal items: shoes, underwear, a few dime-store necklaces. The detective on the case called them trophies, something the bad guy had kept to help him remember—and probably fantasize about—his crimes. Harkins did not share this memory with young Lowell.

  There were two GIs with a stretcher, a bored staff sergeant overseeing the detail.

  “You seen anybody from CID?” Harkins asked the sergeant.

  “What’s that?”

  “Investigators,” Harkins said. “Like detectives.”

  “No, sir. Nobody here but us chickens.”

  Harkins scanned both ends of the alley, wondered if anyone had notified CID, wondered how Sinnott had learned about the murder seemingly ahead of everyone else.

  “Ask a doc to take a look at the victim for me,” Harkins said to the sergeant. He lowered his voice, trying to make it harder for Lowell to hear. “I want to know if she’s been raped, assaulted.”

  The sergeant looked at Harkins, then at the body. He walked over to where the stretcher lay on the ground and unceremoniously hiked up Helen Batcheller’s bloody skirt.

  “It ain’t brain surgery, Lieutenant. Look, her knickers are intact, still pulled up to her waist.”

  Lowell stepped closer, looked at the corpse, then at Harkins. She nodded her head slightly.

  Helen Batcheller was beyond caring about her dignity, of course, but the open-air exam bothered Harkins.

  “Okay,” he said. He motioned with one hand and the sergeant pulled the skirt back down. One of the GIs produced a wool blanket and covered the body.

  After Batcheller had been carried away, Harkins thanked and dismissed the MPs after writing their names in his notebook, then he and Lowell started back to the staff car a half block away. The vehicle, olive drab with a white star on each of the front doors, was the same shade as every other piece of equipment shipped from factories in the States, all of which were running two or three shifts.

  “Here we are, sir,” she said, looking at him over the roof. “Where to next?”

  “Why don’t we walk around the neighborhood and see what’s nearby, see where she might have been coming from. Pubs, hotels, restaurants, that kind of thing.”

  “Right,” Lowell said. She reached into the car and pulled out a folded map.

  “One moment, sir,” she said. She crossed the street to where a man in shirtsleeves was sweeping glass off the sidewalk below a faded sign that said GREENGROCER.

  The businesses on either side were boarded up. A few doors down Harkins saw a shop where the front door had been torn off. A paper sign fluttering in its place read More open than usual.

  “They got you last night, I see,” Lowell said to the man. He stopped sweeping and leaned on his broom.

  “It was the only shop window left on the whole block,” the man said, surveying the street. “Don’t know how it lasted, but it did. I thought about breaking it meself, just to end the suspense, but the Jerries took me worries away last night.”

  “Was there a bomb?” Lowell asked.

  Although he was no expert, Harkins thought her accent had changed. She sounded more like the shop owner and less like the BBC.

  “Couple of blocks over. Six or seven of them, I think. Must have been a lone plane who missed the docks and just dumped his load wherever he could.” The Brits were calling these latest indignities the “Baby Blitz,” which was smaller than the Luftwaffe’s attacks in 1940 and ’41, but just as deadly if you happened to be where one of the bombs fell.

  A woman came out of the shop wearing an apron, a kerchief covering salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Good morning,” Lowell said politely.

  “We’re not open yet,” the woman said, none too friendly. “And you need your ration coupons.”

  She glanced at Harkins, who leaned on the staff car a few yards away.

  “I’m sure your Yank could get you a lot more than we have in here.”

  “Now, Margaret,” the man with the broom said. He sounded a little apologetic, although Harkins wasn’t sure if he was apologizing to Lowell or his wife.

  “I just wanted to ask a few questions about the area,” Lowell said. “I’m helping the investigator here and we haven’t the petrol to be driving around in circles.”

  Margaret folded her arms across her chest and gave Lowell the once over, as if inspecting her uniform. Then she turned on her heel and went back into the shop, muttering something about petrol rationing.

  “What do you need to know, my dear?” the shopkeeper asked Lowell.

  “I’m afraid there’s been a woman murdered not too far from here. An American woman. We’re trying to figure out where she was coming from, or perhaps where she was going to. Public places, most likely.”

  Lowell spread out her map on an empty fruit stand and offered the greengrocer a pencil. He ticked off some public places that Batcheller might have visited on her last night: two pubs, a hotel, a concert hall, and a church, all within a half-mile radius.

  “Thank you, sir, thank you very much. This has been most helpful,” Lowell said.

  Lowell showed Harkins the map, and they spent the next hour walking to the various points. Only the church and hotel were open at this hour of the day. The rector hadn’t seen anyone fitting Batcheller’s description, and the hotel turned out to be a tiny place, a dozen rooms with a sleepy desk clerk.

  “I’ve been on all night,” the clerk said when Harkins asked. “Quite a few Yanks coming and going, but all with British girls.”

  The clerk gave Lowell an oily smile.

  “You two need a room?” the clerk asked. “Rates by the hour.”

  “No,” Harkins said. “So you didn’t see any American women?”

  “Like I said, Yank. All British girls. War-bride candidates, I’m sure.”

  Harkins looked at Lowell, whose poker-face expression hadn’t changed.

  “Come on,” he said.

  They stepped outside into the gray dawn. It wasn’t raining, but it wasn’t dry, either. The air was filled with mist, a fog shot through with the smell of pulverized masonry.

  “Let’s come back later when the other places are open,” Harkins said. “Maybe we’ll find more people out and about, too.”

  They walked back toward the car.

  “So what was that back there, with Margaret? At the greengrocer,” Harkins asked.

  “Not everyone thinks that women should be in uniform. My mother told me that back in the Great War they had the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. Some of the men called it ‘the Army’s groundcloth.’”

  “Oh,” Harkins said. Soldiers stretched out atop a waterproof groundcloth when they slept outdoors.

  “You’ve been on a crime scene before?” Harkins asked when they were in the car.

  “You could say that, sir. My father was an air raid warden in the Blitz. I helped him pull neighbors from the rubble.” She reported this matter-of-factly.

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen when it started, autumn of 1940, turned seventeen on Boxing Day.”

  When Harkins didn’t respond, she added,
“That’s what we call the day after Christmas.”

  Harkins thought about his three sisters, whose adolescent years were about dances and boys and schoolwork.

  “We used to listen to Edward R. Murrow’s reports from London. During the Blitz, I mean,” Harkins said.

  Lowell kept her eyes on the road, her hands at ten and two on the wheel. She hadn’t flinched at the sight of Batcheller’s slaughtered corpse, hadn’t complained when the greengrocer’s wife insulted her, or when the hotel clerk made suggestive comments.

  “Must have been bad over here,” Harkins said.

  Lowell looked at him in the mirror. “Nothing to do but soldier on, I suppose.”

  Harkins, who’d been feeling a bit sorry for himself for catching this investigation, for his exhaustion, for the basic fact that he wanted to be at home instead of driving around London’s gray, battered streets, had to agree.

  “I suppose,” he said.

  2

  20 April 1944

  0845 hours

  Lowell maneuvered the Dodge onto a narrow street, stopping in front of an unremarkable building: brick front, four stories, rows of identical windows. Some of the glass was taped—to reduce the prospects of dangerous shards—and some windows were covered with planks. The boards were streaked with rust where the nails holding them had been exposed to the rain, maybe for years.

  “Your new home,” Lowell said.

  There was nothing on the front of the building, of course, to identify it as the headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services, the center for American espionage and counterespionage. There were, however, scores, if not hundreds of Americans in uniform crowding the sidewalks and pouring in and out of buildings up and down the street. Dawn had brought no bright sunlight, and everyone walked head down into the mist that wasn’t quite rain.

  “I bet I’m the foreigner on this street,” Lowell said. “With my accent, I mean.”

  “Are you on duty the rest of the day?” Harkins asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I’ll want you to go back to that neighborhood with me, ask some questions at the pubs the greengrocer identified.”

  “Well, that’s fine with me, Lieutenant, but it’s possible I’ll get pulled onto other duties. If I’m sitting around and they need a driver for something else, I mean.”

  “Tell the dispatcher that Major Richard Sinnott of the OSS detailed you for a special investigation, that you’re just waiting for me to finish here before our next trip to the crime scene.”

  “Did he?” Lowell asked. “Detail me, I mean?”

  “I just did,” Harkins said. “Easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”

  “That’s an Americanism I haven’t heard before,” Lowell said.

  “I got a million of ’em.”

  Harkins got out of the car on the curb side and stepped around the front of the vehicle to cross the street. Like most Americans, he looked to his left for oncoming traffic and nearly stepped out in front of a speeding jeep. The GI at the wheel yelled at him.

  “Watch out, ya dumb bastard!”

  Lowell rolled down the driver-side window.

  “We drive on the left here, sir.”

  “Right,” Harkins said. When Lowell smiled, he corrected himself. “I mean, okay.”

  Harkins entered the lobby, duffel bag on his shoulder, and presented himself to the duty sergeant, who sat at an ornate wooden desk. The man who’d dispatched him to the murder scene that morning had gone off shift.

  “I’m looking for Major Sinnott or Captain Wickman,” he said.

  “Upstairs, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said. “Third floor. Number three-twenty.”

  Harkins found the room, knocked twice, opened the door. Wickman’s office would have made a roomy telephone booth.

  “Come on in,” Wickman said.

  Harkins dropped his bag in the hallway, then squeezed into the space in front of the desk, which was clean except for a stack of ledgers and an adding machine dangling a long roll of paper tape.

  “That was a joke, actually,” Wickman said. “No one can come into this ridiculous excuse for an office. Let’s go to the conference room.”

  Wickman sat on the desk and swung his long legs around to the front—there was no room to walk around the one piece of furniture—forcing Harkins back into the hallway.

  Two doors down they entered a bigger room with a long table and eight or so chairs. The room reeked of cigarettes and sweat, the windows were painted black, the chairs did not match.

  Harkins handed over his orders; Wickman read them while Harkins studied his new colleague. He took the captain for late twenties, though his blond hair was already pulling back from an unlined forehead. Wickman had removed his dress coat, and his shirtsleeves came only within three inches of his wrists. He seemed made entirely of elbows and knees.

  “Well, you’re in the right place, but I’m not sure you’re what Major Sinnott requested from personnel.” He looked up. “No offense.”

  “None taken. What did he ask for?”

  “An experienced counterintelligence officer, someone who’ll be able to track down German agents.”

  “Is that what I’m going to do?” Harkins asked.

  “That’s the plan, for now, anyway. You’ll train here in England, then go over to the continent at some point. They expect the Abwehr will leave behind spies, locals or people who can pass for locals, to watch our troop movements. Section X-2’s job is to catch them.”

  “Section X-2?”

  “Spy-catchers,” Wickman said. “But you said you were just a beat cop.”

  “Pretty sure I didn’t say ‘just.’”

  “Right. Sorry,” Wickman said, smiling. “I was a beat cop for a while, too. In L.A. Working toward a gold shield, but got sidetracked.”

  “The war, huh?” Harkins said.

  Wickman shrugged, made a face that Harkins took to mean he didn’t want to answer.

  “So, any experience with counterintelligence?” Wickman asked.

  “I did run across a spy in Sicily. A German spy.”

  “How do you ‘run across’ a spy?”

  “Almost by accident, to tell you the truth. And he wasn’t a very clever spy, either.”

  “And you think that qualifies you for this job?”

  “Absolutely not,” Harkins said.

  Wickman laughed, showing a gap between his front teeth. “So why did they send you here? Seems like you’d be a better fit for this new Criminal Division.”

  “Criminal Investigation Division,” Harkins said. “CID. Anyway, you heard Major Sinnott say that the Seventh Army provost, Colonel Meigs, recommended me. I guess Meigs thinks an investigation is an investigation, whether you’re chasing a spy or a murderer.”

  Wickman handed Harkins his orders. He shook his head, another GI marveling at the mysterious ways of the United States Army.

  “I cannot figure this place out,” Wickman said.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Not quite two months. I’ve been promoted, which was good. Just pinned on captain’s bars last week, but I’ll tell you, this outfit’s got me stumped. Nobody seems to know what anyone else is doing. Everyone is just making stuff up as they go along. SNAFU.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, Captain, I didn’t want this job. Never volunteered for it. Would be happy to go back to an MP company.”

  Harkins was just about telling the truth. The months he’d spent with his military police platoon were a little dull after the murder investigation in Sicily, after he tangled with the German spy. He’d been at least open to the idea of a new job, but Wickman was hardly painting a rosy picture.

  “Well, I did volunteer, so I’ve got no one to blame but myself,” Wickman said. He leaned back in his chair, crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, exposing a good six inches of calf that was pale as snowfall. “Anyway, Major Sinnott thinks you’re just the right guy for this murder investigation.”

&nb
sp; “Sorry if I rained on your parade there. Sounds like you wanted to take the lead.”

  “I did, but it’s not your fault. I volunteered for OSS because I thought the work would be interesting, but so far, it’s pretty much like what I did at home.”

  “You were on patrol?”

  “Started out on patrol, but they switched me over to administration after I got hurt.”

  “Line of duty?”

  Wickman smiled. “Nothing quite so dashing. I was cleaning the gutters at my mother’s house and fell off the ladder. Broke my ankle. Anyway, one of the assistant chiefs found out I’d studied accounting. Turns out I was pretty good with budgets.”

  “Will you go to the continent to chase spies?”

  Wickman started to speak, but before he could say anything the door opened and a colonel walked in. Harkins and Wickman stood.

  “Men,” the colonel said in greeting. “You going to be in here long?”

  “We can clear out if you need the room, sir,” Wickman said.

  The man was young to be a full colonel. Maybe early thirties, with a long, handsome face and dark hair, uncombed. The circles under the colonel’s eyes made Harkins think he wasn’t the only one short on sleep.

  “Who are you?” the colonel asked.

  “First Lieutenant Eddie Harkins, sir.”

  “You new here?”

  “Lieutenant Harkins just arrived, sir,” Wickman said. “He’s headed for X-2.”

  “Oh, you’re the guy Major Sinnott picked for this murder investigation, right?” the colonel asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Harkins said.

  “I’m Haskell, head of this circus. For now, at least, until I get fired or drop over from a heart attack. What do you know about Batcheller?”

  “Not much, sir,” Wickman said. “I thought we’d start by talking to her boss.”

  Haskell looked at Wickman, then back at Harkins, then raised his eyebrows in a “Well?” gesture.

  “Looks like there was no struggle,” Harkins said. “The killer was quick, knew what he was doing.”

  Haskell nodded. “Go on.”

  “I got a list of pubs and other public places in the area and am going back this afternoon, when everything is open again, to see if anyone remembers seeing her. And it doesn’t look like she was assaulted. Sexually, I mean.”