Hart's War Read online

  Tommy shook his head as he answered.

  “The problem is that right now everything seemingly points to him. Even his denials are more suggestive of his being the killer than not. It wasn’t hard for you to turn him inside out, either. Makes me wonder what sort of a witness on his own behalf Lieutenant Scott can be.” Tommy was struck by a thought: When the truth seems to support a lie, wouldn’t the reverse be accurate as well? He did not say this out loud.

  “We still haven’t considered the blood on his shoes and jacket. Now, Tommy, how the hell did that get there?”

  Tommy walked a few more paces, himself, considering this. Then he answered swiftly, “Well, Hugh, Scott told us that he sneaks out to use the toilet at night. No one sneaks anywhere wearing a pair of clomping flight boots on old creaking wooden flooring, do they? Wake up the world that way. And no one wears their flight jacket to bed, even if it is cold. I’ll bet he hung his from a nail on the wall, just the same as everyone else in that room. Same as you and same as I. How hard would it have been to borrow these items?”

  Hugh grunted. Then he said, “I’ll jolly well wager my next chocolate bar that this is precisely what Phillip was driving at earlier. A frame-up.”

  “Fine, but why?”

  Hugh shrugged. “That one eludes me, Tommy. I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  The two men continued walking quickly, until Hugh asked, “I say, Tommy, we seem to be in a hurry, but where are we heading?”

  “To the funeral, Hugh. And then I want you to go find someone and interview him.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “The doctor who examined Trader Vic’s body.”

  “I didn’t know a doctor had examined the body.”

  Tommy nodded his head. “Someone has. In addition to Hauptmann Visser. We just need to find that person. And in this camp there are only two or three logical candidates. They’re all over in Hut 111, where the medical services are located. That’s where you’re heading. I’ll do the escort job for Lieutenant Scott. Not going to make him walk across the camp alone . . .”

  “I’ll join you for that. It’s not likely to be pleasant.”

  “No,” Tommy replied with more bravado than he thought necessary. “I’ll do it alone. I want your participation to be concealed, at least until we get our first hearing. And even more critically, let’s make certain that no one knows how Phillip is guiding our hands. If there is some sort of frame-up and conspiracy and whatever, it’s better that whoever it is doesn’t know that one of the Old Bailey’s best is aligned against him.”

  Hugh nodded.

  “Tommy,” he said, grinning slightly, “there is some slyness to you, as well.” He laughed sharply, but not with a great deal of amusement. “Which is probably a right good thing,” he muttered, as they walked faster, “given what we’re up against. Whatever the bloody hell that is.”

  The hulking Canadian took another few strides forward, and then asked, “Of course, Tommy, one question does leap fairly swiftly to mind: What the hell sort of conspiracy could we be talking about?” Hugh came to an abrupt stop. He looked up, across the exercise yard, past the deadline, past the towers, the machine-gun crews, the wire, and the long cleared space beyond. “Here? I wonder, whatever could we be talking about?”

  Tommy followed his friend’s eyes, staring out past the wire. He wondered for an instant whether the air would taste sweeter on the day he was freed. That was what poets always wrote, he thought: The sweet taste of freedom. He fought off the urge to think of home. Images of Manchester and his mother and father sitting down to a summertime dinner, or Lydia standing beside an old bicycle on the dusty sidewalk outside his house on an early fall afternoon, when only the smallest insistence of winter is in the early evening breezes. She had blond hair that dropped in burnished sheets to her shoulders and he found himself reaching up, almost as if he could touch it. These pictures rushed at him, and for a single instant the harsh, grimy world of the camp started to fade from his eyes. But then, just as swiftly as they came, they fled. He looked back at Hugh, who seemed to be waiting for an answer to his question, and so he replied, with only the smallest hesitation and doubt in his voice:

  “I don’t know. Not yet. I don’t know.”

  Kriegies did not die, they merely suffered.

  Inadequate diet, the obsessive-compulsive manner in which they threw themselves into sports, or the makeshift theater or whatever activity with which they decided to while away time, the oddity of their anxieties about whether they would ever return home coupled with the ill-adjustment to the routines of prison life, the seemingly constant cold and damp and dirt, poor hygiene, susceptibility to disease, boredom contradicted by hope, which was in turn contradicted by the ubiquitous wire—all these things made for a curious tenuousness and fragility to life. Like Phillip Pryce’s lingering cough, they were constantly being intimidated by death, but rarely did it come knocking with its harsh demands and fearsome requirements.

  In his two years in confinement, Tommy had only seen a dozen deaths, and half of these were men who went wire-crazy and tried to blitz out in the middle of the night, dying in the fences with homemade metal cutters in their hands, chopped apart by a sudden burst from a Hundführer’s machine pistol or a tower machine-gun crew. And over the years, there were a few men who had arrived at Stalag Luft Thirteen after suffering terrible injuries falling from the air and then inadequate care in German hospitals. The day and night constancy of the Allied bombing raids had limited the precious medicines and antibiotics available to the Germans, and many of their better surgeons had already died in forward hospitals treating men on the Russian front. But Luftwaffe policy toward the occasional Allied airmen seemingly at risk from wounds or disease was to arrange repatriation through the Swiss Red Cross. This was usually accomplished before the unlucky flier succumbed. The Luftwaffe preferred terminally sick or injured kriegies to die in the care of the Swiss; then they appeared less culpable.

  He could not recall an instance where a kriegie was buried with military honors. Usually deaths were handled quietly, or with some sort of informal moment, like the jazz band’s honoring one of their own. He thought it surprising that Von Reiter would permit a military funeral; the Germans wanted kriegies to think like kriegies, not like soldiers. It is far easier to guard a man who thinks of himself as a prisoner than it is to guard a man who thinks of himself as a warrior.

  At the dusty juncture formed by two huts and converging alleys, Tommy pointed Hugh in the direction of the medical services hut, and hurried down the narrow walkway between 119 and 120, which would take him to the burial ground. He could hear a voice coming from around the corner, but could not make out the words being spoken.

  He slowed as he rounded the corner of Hut 119.

  Some three hundred kriegies stood in formation beside the hastily prepared gravesite. Tommy immediately recognized almost all the men from Hut 101, and a smattering of other fliers, probably someone representing each of the remaining buildings. Six German soldiers carrying bolt-action rifles stood at parade rest just slightly to the side of the squares of men.

  Trader Vic’s coffin had been predictably nailed together from the light-colored wooden crates that delivered the Red Cross parcels. The flimsy balsa wood was the preferred building material for virtually every bit of furniture in the American camp, but Tommy thought with some irony that no one expected it to form the walls of their own casket. Three officers stood at the head of the coffin: MacNamara, Clark, and a priest, who was reading the twenty-third psalm. The priest had been shot down over Italy the previous summer, when he’d taken his charge of administering to the flock of airmen in a light bomber group perhaps a bit too seriously, and had elected to fly on one of their runs over Salerno at a time when German antiaircraft troops on the ground were still active, and German fighters still plied their deadly trade in the air.

  He had a flat, reedy voice that managed to dull even the famous words of the psalm. When he said, “The Lord
is my shepherd . . .” he made it sound like God was actually tending sheep, not watching over those at risk.

  Tommy hesitated, not knowing whether he should join the formations or merely keep watch from the periphery. In that momentary pause, he heard a voice from his side, which took him by surprise.

  “And what is it, Lieutenant Hart, that you expect to see?”

  He turned sharply toward the questioner.

  Hauptmann Heinrich Visser was standing a few feet away, smoking a dark brown cigarette, leaning back against Hut 119. The German held the smoke like a dart, lifting it languidly to his lips, but relishing each long pull.

  Tommy took a deep breath.

  “I expect to see nothing,” he replied slowly. “People who go somewhere with expectations are generally rewarded by seeing what they anticipated. I’m merely here to observe, and whatever I do see will be what I need to see.”

  Visser smiled. “Ah,” he said, “a clever man’s response. But not very military.”

  Tommy shrugged. “Well, then I guess I’m not a perfect soldier.”

  Visser shook his head. “We shall see about that, I suppose. In the days to come.”

  “And you, Hauptmann? Are you a perfect soldier?”

  The German shook his head. “Alas, no, Lieutenant Hart. But I have been an efficient soldier. Remarkably efficient. But not perfect. These things, I think, are not precisely the same.”

  “Your English is quite good.”

  “Thank you. I lived for many years in Milwaukee, growing up with my aunt and uncle. Perhaps had I stayed another year or two, I would have considered myself to be more American than German. Can you imagine, lieutenant, that I was actually quite accomplished at the game of baseball?” The German glanced down at his missing arm. “No longer, I suppose. Regardless. I could have stayed. But I did not. I elected to return to the fatherland for my education. And thus did I get caught up in the great things that took place in my country.”

  Visser swung his eyes toward the funeral. “Your Colonel MacNamara,” the German said slowly, his eyes measuring the SAO carefully. “My first impression is that he is a man who believes his imprisonment at Stalag Luft Thirteen is a black mark on his career. A failure of command. I cannot tell, sometimes, when he looks at me, whether he hates me and all Germans because that is what he has been taught, or whether he hates me because I am preventing him from killing more of my countrymen. And I think, in all these hatreds, he perhaps hates himself, as well. What do you think, Lieutenant Hart? Is he a commanding officer you respect? Is he the sort of leader who gives a command and men follow instantly, without question, without regard to their own lives and safety?”

  “He is the Senior American Officer, and he is respected.”

  The German did not look at Tommy, but he laughed.

  “Ah, lieutenant, already you have the makings of a diplomat.”

  He took a single, long puff on the cigarette, then dropped it to the dirt, grinding it under the toe of his boot.

  “Have you the makings of an advocate? I wonder.”

  Visser smiled, then continued, “And is that what is truly required of you? I wonder about this, too.”

  The Hauptmann turned to Tommy. “A funeral is so rarely about finality, isn’t this true, lieutenant? Are they not really much more the beginning of something?”

  Visser’s smile bent around the corner of his mouth, twisting with the scars. Then he turned away, once again watching the proceedings. The pastor’s voice had moved on to a reading from the New Testament, the story of the loaves and fishes, a poor choice because it would probably make all the assembled kriegies hungry. Tommy saw that there was no flag draping the coffin, but that Vic’s leather flight jacket, with the American flag sewn onto the sleeve, had been carefully folded and placed in the center of the box.

  The pastor finished reading and the formations came to attention. A trumpeter stepped from the ranks and blew the soulful notes of taps. As these faded into the midday air, the squad of German soldiers stepped to the front, lifted their weapons to their shoulders, and fired a single volley into the clearing sky, almost as if they were blasting away the remaining gray clouds and carving a hole of blue.

  The noise of the shots echoed briefly. It was not lost on Tommy that the sound was the same as it would be if the same six soldiers were gathered into a firing squad.

  Four men stepped from the formation and, using ropes, lowered Trader Vic’s coffin into the ground. Then Major Clark gave the order to dismiss, and the men turned away, walking in groups back into the middle of the compound. More than a few stared at Tommy Hart as they moved past him. But no one said a word.

  He, in turn, met many pairs of eyes, his own gaze narrowed and hard. He guessed that the men who’d threatened him were in the knots of passing airmen. But who they might be he had no idea. No single pair of eyes spoke to him with a threat.

  Visser lit another cigarette and started humming the French tune “Aupres de ma Blonde,” which had a lilt to it that seemed to insult the ragged solemnity of the funeral.

  Tommy abruptly saw Major Clark striding toward him. Clark’s face was rigid, his jaw thrust forward.

  “Hart,” he said briskly. “You are not welcome here.”

  Tommy came to attention. “Captain Bedford was my friend, as well, major,” he replied, although he wasn’t sure this was completely true.

  Clark did not reply to this, but turned instead to the Hauptmann, saluting. “Hauptmann Visser, will you please see to the release of Lieutenant Scott, the accused, into Lieutenant Hart’s custody. Now is certainly a reasonable time.”

  Visser saluted in return, smiling.

  “As you wish, major. I will see to it immediately.”

  Clark nodded. He glanced again at Tommy. “Not welcome,” he said again, as he turned and strode away. Behind him, Tommy could hear the first thudding sound of a clod of dirt being shoveled onto the lid of Trader Vic’s coffin.

  Hauptmann Visser escorted Tommy Hart back to the cooler to release Lincoln Scott. Along the way, the German officer signaled to a pair of helmeted guards and to Fritz Number One to accompany them. He continued to hum brisk, lively cabaret tunes. The sky above them had finally completely cleared, the last wisps of gray clouds fleeing toward the east. Tommy looked up and spotted the white contrails of a flight of B-17s crossing the plate of watery blue. It would not be long before they were attacked, he thought. But they were still high, maybe five miles up, and still relatively safe. When they dropped through the sky toward the lower altitudes for the bombing run, then they were in the greatest danger.

  He looked across at the squat, ugly cooler and thought the same was true for Lincoln Scott. For a moment he thought that it might be safer to leave him in confinement, but then, almost as quickly, the thought fled. He squared his shoulders and realized that what he faced was no different from the airmen in the sky above him. A mission, an objective, their passage threatened the entire route. He stole one more glance skyward, and thought that he could do no less than those men above him.

  Scott was on his feet instantly as Tommy entered the cell.

  “Damn, Hart, I am ready to get out of here,” he said. “What a hellhole.”

  “I’m not sure what to expect,” Tommy replied. “We’ll just have to take it as it comes.”

  “I’m ready,” Scott insisted. “I just want out of here. Whatever happens, happens.” The black man seemed knotted, coiled, and ready to burst.

  Tommy nodded. “All right. We will walk across the compound directly to Hut 101. You will go straight to your bunk room. When we get there, we’ll consider our next step.”

  Scott nodded.

  The black flier blinked hard when they emerged into the daylight. For a moment, he rubbed his eyes, as if to clear the darkness of the cooler cell away from them. He was clutching his clothing and his blanket beneath his left arm, leaving the right free. His fist was clenched tight, as if he was ready to throw the same roundhouse that he’d sent whistling
at Hugh Renaday earlier that morning. As his eyes adjusted, Scott seemed to stand more upright, regaining his athleticism, so that by the time the group reached the gate, he was striding with a military purposefulness, almost as if he were marching on the edge of a West Point parade ground, readying himself to pass in review of a group of dignitaries. Tommy stayed at his side, in turn flanked by the two guards, a step behind Fritz Number One and Hauptmann Visser.

  At the barbed-wire and wood-framed gate to the southern camp, the German officer stopped. He spoke a quick few words to Fritz Number One, who saluted, then another few words to the guards.

  “Do you wish for an escort back to your hut?” he asked Lincoln Scott.

  “No,” Scott replied.

  Visser smiled. “Perhaps Lieutenant Hart will see the value in an escort?”

  Tommy took a quick look through the wire at the compound. A few groups of men were out; things looked normal. There was a baseball being tossed about, other men were walking the perimeter track. He could see men lying back up against the buildings, some reading, some talking. A few men were sunbathing, their shirts off in the warming air. There was nothing that indicated that a funeral had taken place less than an hour earlier. Nothing that suggested anger, or rage. Stalag Luft Thirteen looked as it had every day for years.

  And this troubled Tommy. He took a deep, slow breath.

  “No,” he said. “We’ll be fine by ourselves.”

  Visser sighed deeply, an almost mocking sound.

  “As you wish,” he said. He half-snorted, looking over at Tommy. “This is ironic, no? Me offering you protection from your own comrades. Most unusual, do you not think, Lieutenant Hart?” Visser didn’t really seem to expect a reply to his questions, and Tommy wasn’t willing to give him one, anyway. Visser then spoke a few words in German and the armed guards stepped aside. Fritz Number One also moved out of their path. He was frowning, and seemed nervous. “Until later, then,” Visser said. He hummed a few short bars of some unrecognizable tune, his now-familiar small, cruel smile sliding around his face. The officer then stopped, turned to the soldiers manning the gate, and with a wide swing of his only arm, gestured for the gate to open.