Сэм Истлэнд - The Elegant Lie

When the droning of the plane’s engines had faded at last into the night, Ritter and Carter slid the hangar doors shut and returned to the car, where Dasch was already waiting.

For a while, as the car slipped along the muddy track, nobody spoke. Only when they turned again onto the main road back to Cologne, mud from the wheels spattering against the cowlings, did somebody finally talk.

‘Well, Mr Carter,’ said Dasch, ‘what do you think of my new toy?’

‘You were right about needing a bigger map,’ replied Carter.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ replied Dasch, and he lit up another cigar.

Back at the compound, Teresa was there to meet them. She did not ask where they had gone or what they had seen.

Dasch stepped inside his office to collect a briefcase full of paperwork. Ritter followed him in, leaving Carter alone with Teresa.

Teresa fidgeted awkwardly, stuffing her hands in her pockets and tapping a foot in the dirt as she kept time to some rhythm that was pounding in her head. Suddenly she turned to him and pointed out into the dark, down the long, twisting dirt road that led back towards the city. ‘Leave,’ she murmured to him. ‘Go, before it is too late.’

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ said Carter. ‘Is it personal, or do you treat everyone like this?’

She stepped closer to him.

Even in the dark, Carter could see the anger on her face.

‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I have watched people gather around my father, like hyenas around a lion when it has made a kill. They wait for the scraps he leaves behind and my father mistakes this for friendship, when the truth is that those hyenas would vanish in an instant if the food ever ran out. So the answer is no, Mr Carter. It is not personal. But I know your kind, and that is usually enough.’

‘You’re forgetting something,’ said Carter.

‘And what is that?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t come to him. He came to me.’

At that moment, Ritter and Dasch emerged from the office.

‘Climb in, Mr Carter,’ ordered Dasch.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘To your new luxury accommodation! And by luxury, I mean it has a roof that does not leak.’

‘To have any roof at all,’ said Ritter, ‘is luxury enough in this town.’

As they drove along the moonlit roads, streetlamps, neglected since the war, cast hurdles of shadow across their path.

Carter thought about Teresa’s warning to get out while there was time. It seemed to him now like less of a threat, and more of a warning by which he might still save himself. He wished he could have told Teresa it was already too late, not only for him but for her as well.

Carter’s luxury accommodation turned out to be a one-room attic apartment on Bertricherstrasse, overlooking Vorgebirgs Park. It was located above an electrical appliance repair shop which did not even seem to have a name although, judging from the number of vacuum cleaners, lamps and toasters in the front window, all of them tagged with the names of their owners and ready to be collected, the shopkeeper and his customers were already well acquainted.

‘And here is your luxury transport,’ said Ritter, pointing to a rusted bicycle with a sagging leather seat which was leaning up against the wall of the building.

As soon as they had gone, Carter made his way up to the apartment, which was reached by climbing a narrow staircase attached to the side of the building. It had two windows: one at the front, which looked out over the street, and one at the back, which had a view of a brick wall and an alleyway below. Under any normal circumstances, it was too small to be comfortable, but the prison cell in which he had spent the best part of the previous year had altered his sense of surroundings. Open spaces made him nervous now and Carter had begun to doubt if that was ever going to change. Besides, it had a roof and, more importantly, it didn’t have bars on the windows.

When Carter walked out of the farmhouse and into the mud-plastered streets of Rocherath, Riveira was already waiting with the jeep. It was the morning of his second day. The sky had cleared and it was cold. Fangs of ice hung down from leaf-clogged gutters.

‘Where to, Lieutenant?’ asked Riveira.

‘I thought I’d take another crack at that civilian they’ve got locked up in Bütgenbach.’

‘So he’s not out of his mind, after all?’

‘He probably is,’ answered Carter, ‘but right now he’s the only lead I’ve got.’

‘Before we go,’ said Riveira, ‘I learned something last night which I think you ought to know about.’

Carter settled into the stiff-backed seat of the jeep, waiting to hear what Riveira had to tell him.

‘I was over at the field kitchen,’ continued Riveira, ‘talking with some of the guys who’ve been rotating in and out of the forest for the past bunch of weeks. They all take three-day shifts living in foxholes and bunkers before they get to come back into Rocherath for hot food and a bath. This place may not look like much to us, but it’s practically a resort to those soldiers.’

‘What did they tell you?’ asked Carter.

‘Well, it didn’t take long for word to spread that someone from Special Tasks was here in town, looking into the theft of that truck, and when they figured out that I was the one driving you around, they said it was about time somebody investigated why that fuel got hauled across the border.’

Carter sat forward. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered. ‘It went across the border?’

‘They said that truck drove right through town and out along the road which goes direct to Germany.’

‘Nobody said anything about this to me when they were giving me the job.’

‘Maybe they didn’t know.’

‘But didn’t anyone try to stop the truck?’

‘I guess they didn’t.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘You’d have to ask them that yourself, Lieutenant.’

‘Where are these guys?’ asked Carter. ‘The ones you talked to last night.’

‘They were rotating back into the woods. They should be on their way right now.’

‘Get me to them,’ said Carter. ‘Please. And quickly.’

‘What about the prisoner you wanted to see?’

‘He’s not going anywhere for now,’ replied Carter, ‘and he won’t be any less crazy tomorrow than he was yesterday.’

As Riveira and Carter drove out of Rocherath and under the dense canopy of pines that seemed to stretch on endlessly towards the east, Carter spotted no trace of any of the Americans who were bunkered down in the woods. Instead, he saw only the ranks of trees, which seemed to rush dizzyingly into the half-light. It was only as his eyes became accustomed to the perpetual twilight of the forest that Carter began to make out shelters the soldiers had made◦– low-lying bunkers fashioned out of logs and roofed with pine boughs. Now and then he glimpsed a soldier, the olive green of their combat jackets and the darker brown of their wool trousers blending so perfectly with their surroundings that they looked to him less like men than like trees which had been conjured into life.

‘There they are,’ said Riveira, pointing to a squad of six soldiers walking along the side of the road, equipped with an assortment of Garand rifles, Thompson submachine guns and a Browning automatic rifle. ‘Those are the guys I talked to last night.’

‘Pull over,’ said Carter.

Riveira braked hard and the jeep swerved onto the muddy shoulder of the road.

Carter had, by now, grown used to Riveira’s jerky handling of the vehicle, as well as the potential at every corner that he would be pitched out into the road. He gripped the side of the fold-down windshield until the jeep had come to a stop. Then he climbed out. As he walked towards the soldiers, he could see them glancing at the white letters MP on the hood of the jeep.