Comes the War

by Ed Ruggero

  “You examined her?” Haskell asked.

  “Her drawers were in place, sir,” Harkins said. “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t sexual, though, in some way.”

  Haskell leaned against the conference room table and crossed his arms. Harkins noticed a ring on his left hand. West Point.

  “What makes you say that?” Haskell asked.

  “She was missing a shoe. We couldn’t find it anywhere around. It could be that she came in a car and it fell off there.”

  “Or?”

  “Sometimes perverts like to keep souvenirs of their victims. Jewelry, pieces of clothing. A shoe would do the trick.”

  Haskell shook his head.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “The things people do.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wickman said.

  “You’ve learned a lot in a short time,” Haskell said to Harkins.

  The comment didn’t seem to need an answer, so Harkins kept quiet.

  “Seems like Major Sinnott made the right choice for an investigator.”

  “The CID will get involved at some point, sir,” Harkins said. “They’re supposed to be trained and they have jurisdiction.”

  “I guess Major Sinnott wants you to conduct a parallel investigation,” Haskell said. “Keep our best interests in mind. Tell him to keep me posted.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harkins said.

  Haskell looked around the meeting room.

  “Smells like a goddamn locker room in here.” Then, turning to Wickman, “Be out in fifteen minutes.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Wickman chirped.

  When the colonel left, Wickman said, “You’re already making pretty impressive progress.”

  “I don’t know how impressive it is, but I’m asking questions. By the way, I’m keeping that driver I had this morning,” Harkins said. “She’s sharp.”

  “She’s a motor pool asset, so I think that’ll be up to the dispatcher.”

  “Nah, I already told her to use Major Sinnott’s name, tell the dispatcher she’s on special duty.”

  “I just mean that they probably have procedures we should follow,” Wickman said. “I mean, if we want cooperation from other agencies.”

  “Didn’t you just say that this is a seat-of-the-pants operation?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So maybe the best way to get things done is to be even more seat-of-the-pants than everyone else,” Harkins said.

  “Hmmm,” Wickman said, unconvinced.

  “In the meantime, how about you help me get a picture of who Helen Batcheller is. Was.”

  Wickman stood. Harkins had to lean back to keep eye contact.

  “You play basketball?” Harkins asked.

  “No. I was a jockey.”

  Harkins almost said, “Really?” before he saw Wickman’s smile.

  “Come with me. Leave your duffel bag; we’ll get you a place to stay later.”

  Harkins put his bag in Wickman’s tiny office, then they took the stairs down to a second-floor corridor. Harkins could see inside another big conference room, where some long tables held what looked to be various small pieces of machinery or office equipment, everything marked with little cards, like a museum display.

  “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Oh, stuff the elves make. Bunch of brass coming through today to see a display.”

  “Elves?”

  “That’s what we call the guys who work in the basement,” Wickman said. “Research and development. Like Santa’s workshop, always hammering away at something new. Things we use in the field. I’ll show you.”

  Wickman stepped into the room, where two women in civilian clothes were tidying the displays.

  “Okay if we have a quick look, ladies?” Wickman asked, flashing them a big grin.

  “Just don’t move anything,” one of the women said. “We’ve finally got the labels straight.”

  Harkins looked down at a large pile of animal feces on one table. The hand-written card next to it said, “Camel dung.”

  “Strange, huh?” Wickman said. “It’s an explosive. Supposedly, you could scatter a bunch on the road, even from the air, and it would look natural. Then a heavy vehicle rolls over it, like an enemy tank, and it blows the wheels off.”

  “Interesting,” Harkins said.

  “Major Sinnott loves all this stuff. He always drops in when they’re training new people, tells them war stories. Here’s another explosive.”

  He held something that looked like a large piece of high-quality coal.

  “You put it in the coal bunker of a train and when it goes into the fire—boom!”

  There were tiny radios, palm-sized cameras, a lamp to signal aircraft. Another table held a line of glass vials in racks, like in a high-school chemistry lab. Wickman walked alongside, sweeping his hand over the collection.

  “You’ve got your invisible inks, your various kinds of makeup, your poisons that kill people, other stuff to just make ’em sick. Stuff to dump into a vehicle’s fuel tank so the engine seizes up.”

  “It’s like a toy store for spies,” Harkins said.

  “Exactly. Hence—Santa’s elves.”

  When he reached the door, Wickman stepped out into the hallway, where the same two women stood as if waiting for someone else to arrive.

  “Thank you, ladies,” Wickman said, same big smile. Neither woman smiled back.

  “They can’t keep their hands off me,” Wickman whispered from the corner of his mouth as the two men made their way to the stairs. When they were outside, Wickman turned toward Grosvenor Square. The big captain was not only long-legged, he also walked fast. Harkins had to step it out to keep up as they waded into the sea of American uniforms.

  “Looks like every GI in England is right here,” Harkins said.

  “Yeah. It’ll be better for all of us when we finally do jump across to the continent,” Wickman said. “Too many Americans jammed onto this island. About a million, million and a half GIs crowded into a space about the size of Georgia that already had a sizable population. I think we’re wearing out our welcome.”

  Harkins’ brother Patrick was a chaplain and paratrooper with the U.S. Eighty-Second Airborne Division and would probably jump into France in the first hours of the invasion that everyone knew was coming. Right now, he was at a training site somewhere in England. Harkins hoped to track him down if he got a few hours to himself.

  “So what’s the story on that colonel?” Harkins asked.

  “Haskell is a West Point Class guy. His dad was a general, and he has a brother who also works for Donovan. He’s a good guy, and he has connections that can get us air assets, so we can parachute agents into France. He’s sharp. Can’t say that about everybody I’ve run across here.”

  Harkins had heard stories about the original OSS being a social club for Ivy League dilettantes.

  “The first boss was right out of the society pages,” Wickman said. “Millionaire banker, Hollywood wife, champagne tastes. He was great at throwing cocktail parties for the toffs in British intelligence. Now, with the rationing, anytime a few Brits get together, seems like all they talk about is food.”

  “Speaking of food, I haven’t had anything to eat since lunch yesterday,” Harkins said. “Is there a canteen or officers’ mess?”

  “Headed there now,” Wickman said.

  Wickman led Harkins along Grosvenor Street, dodging foot traffic on sidewalks packed with GIs.

  “Looks like Market Street two days before Christmas,” Harkins said. He’d spent the Christmas of 1943 dreaming of his Philadelphia home while transporting German and Italian prisoners of war from Sicily to North Africa for shipment to the States. On Christmas Eve the dispirited Germans had sung “Stille Nacht” until some blowhard American captain yelled at Harkins to “tell those goddamned Krauts to shut the fuck up.”

  They were leaving Grosvenor Square at the southwest corner when Harkins remembered something he’d read in Stars and Stripes, the GI newspaper.

&nb
sp; “Which one of these houses is where John Adams lived?”

  “John Adams the president?” Wickman asked. “Why would he have lived here?”

  “He was the first American ambassador to England. After the Revolution.”

  Wickman didn’t slow down, but he gave Harkins a sideways glance.

  “You and Sinnott will get along great,” Wickman said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s always dropping little facts like that. You watch; I’ll bet it takes him less than five minutes in your first conversation before he mentions that he was a Rhodes scholar.”

  Just short of a bigger park—Harkins thought it might be Hyde Park—they came to an elegant building wrapped in a ten-foot stack of sandbags layered three deep. Inside, Wickman joined a queue; Harkins joined him and got a glimpse of the largest dining room he had ever seen. The floor, which might have been a dance floor at one time, was swept but badly scuffed. Where there had once been table service, there were now hundreds of tables and four lines of American officers holding cafeteria trays.

  In the serving line a civilian woman in a hairnet and stained apron spooned out reconstituted eggs, orange with streaks of green. Harkins followed Wickman down a narrow aisle between tables until they found two chairs. Harkins sat down and immediately started shoveling eggs into his mouth. He hadn’t realized how hungry he’d been until they stepped inside the mess, which smelled of bacon and cigarette smoke.

  They ate in silence for a while, then Harkins asked, “So what’s Sinnott’s story?”

  “He was on the continent already. France,” Wickman said.

  Harkins had heard stories of Allied agents parachuting into occupied France to help organize the Resistance.

  “So he came back here to do what? Train other people to do the same?”

  “Yeah,” Wickman said. “But there are rumors, you know? That he got sent back.”

  “Demoted?”

  Wickman shrugged. “I heard he was working with the Resistance down in southwestern France. Moving downed fliers into neutral Spain. He found out that two of his people were feeding information to the Gestapo, exposing other cells.”

  “That’s pretty low,” Harkins said.

  “Story is, Sinnott killed them both,” Wickman said. “Completely unauthorized. People in the OSS love that story.”

  “Is that what got him pulled out of the field?”

  “I don’t know,” Wickman said. “I figured that working for him would put me in line for something exciting, but it’s not panning out so far.”

  “What does he have you doing?”

  “Budgeting. He was pretty happy when I managed to get some money set aside for a special project he’s cooking up. In fact, that’s what got me promoted. But he won’t tell me—or he doesn’t know—what will happen to me after the invasion.”

  “I always ask for the jobs I want,” Harkins said. “You don’t know until you try.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Hasn’t worked at all,” Harkins said, smiling. “Not even one time.”

  Harkins downed his coffee, and when Wickman finished, the two men carried their trays to a window. A GI, sweating through his white T-shirt and apron, took the dirty dishes. Harkins wondered what stories the kid would share if he made it home to some American Legion bar. Most of war, at least as Harkins had experienced it, was a colossal waste of time interspersed with a few minutes of sheer terror.

  Harkins followed Wickman out of Grosvenor House, then south and east, away from Hyde Park and generally back in the direction of OSS headquarters.

  “How long were you a cop in Philadelphia?” Wickman asked.

  “Just over three years.”

  “You join right after Pearl Harbor?”

  “Yeah, but don’t make me out as too big a patriot. It was a good time for me to do something different. How about you?”

  “I wasn’t sure they were ever going to put me back on patrol, so I joined the California National Guard in the summer of ’41,” Wickman said. “Pearl Harbor comes along and we all went into federal service. My family was dead set against me joining, especially my mother. Pretty sure she was counting on me getting a draft exemption since I was with the PD.”

  Harkins had a complicated relationship with his own parents—especially with his mother, once she found out that Harkins had helped his sixteen-year-old brother forge a birth certificate, making him old enough to join the navy. Michael was lost at sea when his ship was torpedoed in the spring of 1943. He had just turned eighteen.

  Harkins got mail regularly from his three sisters, occasionally from his father and from Patrick, the paratrooper. His mother did not write.

  Wickman stopped in front of a two-story building that was, like Grosvenor House, wrapped in a triple wall of sandbags. “This is it.”

  “This is what?” Harkins asked.

  “Where Batcheller worked.”

  “So I can get background here?”

  “You can try,” Wickman said. “Maybe talk to her boss.”

  “Who was her boss?”

  “I don’t know,” Wickman said.

  “I thought you were going to tell me about her.”

  “I just shared everything I know,” Wickman said. “This is where she worked.”

  “You ever been inside?”

  “No, but I’m happy to come in with you.”

  Harkins thought the captain looked hopeful, like teaming up with Harkins might be more interesting than going back to his adding machine. But Wickman’s boredom wasn’t Harkins’ problem.

  “Thanks,” Harkins said. “But I think I’ll go at this alone for now.”

  “Sure, sure,” Wickman said, forcing a smile. “I’ll head back to my spacious digs. If I have to go out on some important mission, like escorting some USO showgirls around, I’ll leave word with the duty sergeant about how to find your lodgings.”

  Harkins saluted and Wickman returned the gesture.

  “They going to cooperate with the investigation?” Harkins asked as he faced the building.

  “My experience?” Wickman said. “You’re more likely to get Helen Batcheller to talk—from the other side—than you are to learn anything from the people in there.”

  “Well,” Harkins said. “Nobody said winning the war was going to be easy.”

  3

  20 April 1944

  1045 hours

  Harkins found a reception desk just inside the cramped foyer of what had once been an office building. There were two stairways behind the duty officer’s station, one of which was closed off with a hammered-together wooden barrier. That staircase was partially collapsed, the walls above it scorched by a fire that had licked upward to the second floor.

  “Bomb came right through the roof,” someone said.

  Harkins turned to where an American staff sergeant stood, hands on his hips.

  “The bomb guys couldn’t tell us why it didn’t explode completely. Just enough to start a fire and drop the staircase. I heard it sat there for a whole day while they waited to see if it was going to blow up. Then somebody had to defuse it.”

  “Glad that’s not my job,” Harkins said.

  “You and me both, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m doing an investigation and need some information about a woman, an analyst,” Harkins said. “I believe she worked here.”

  The sergeant was taller than Harkins, and when he tilted his head back just a fraction of an inch, he was looking down his nose.

  “Are you with the provost or something?”

  “No. Actually, I just got here today, this morning. Assigned to OSS. My timing was poor, I guess.”

  “How’s that?”

  Harkins was supposed to be asking, not answering, questions.

  “There was an incident last night, and I arrived just in time to be assigned to look into it for my boss.”

  “What kind of incident?” the sergeant asked.

  “Look
, Sergeant—what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  Harkins ran his fingers through his hair; he wanted a shower, not a witty back-and-forth.

  “There’s a woman named Helen Batcheller,” Harkins said. “I heard she worked here. I’d like to speak to her boss.”

  “You have some identification, Lieutenant?”

  Harkins handed over his identification book, along with a single copy of the orders assigning him to OSS.

  “Who’s your boss?”

  “Major Sinnott.”

  “Sorry, sir, I don’t know him.” The sergeant handed Harkins’ papers back to him.

  Harkins looked at his watch. It was approaching eleven. He’d slept fitfully on the train from Scotland and hadn’t been out of his clothes in three days. His brother Patrick, the priest-paratrooper–Army chaplain, suggested he say a Hail Mary whenever he felt he was losing his temper. Harkins told his brother that the prayer he was most likely to come up with in a tense moment was more along the lines of “Dear Jesus, don’t let me kill this guy.” Patrick had not laughed.

  “Look, Sergeant Whatever-Your-Name-Is, I didn’t just wander in off the street to amuse myself. You afraid confirming that Helen Batcheller worked here is going to lose the war for the Allies?”

  The sergeant smiled at him, a little power move that pushed Harkins a bit closer to doing something he knew he’d regret, though the sergeant would regret it more.

  “What’s going on here?”

  A man in a shiny but well-tailored suit came down the remaining staircase and approached the security station.

  “The lieutenant here says he’s assigned to OSS,” the sergeant said. “He wants information on someone he thinks works here.”

  “Helen Batcheller,” the civilian said to Harkins. He was about forty, an American with a flat Midwest accent. The cuffs of his shirt were clean but frayed, his mustache neatly trimmed.

  “I’m Lieutenant Harkins. Major Sinnott asked me to find out what I could about Batcheller.”

  “Major Sinnott your new boss?” the civilian asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Harkins said. “I think so. I’ve only been here a few hours.”

  “Sounds like you’re having a helluva day.” The man put out his hand. “I’m Doctor Reed. Come with me.”