Сэм Истлэнд - The Elegant Lie

With the help of two other soldiers, Carter lifted Major Wharton into the back of the vehicle. Then Carter got behind the wheel. Riveira climbed into the passenger seat.

Carter put the jeep in gear and drove and, as they ploughed on through the darkness, the vivid arcs of red and green flares rising from the forest behind them reflected on the mud-splashed windshield.

By dawn, they were west of St Christophe and on the main highway to Liège. The roads were heavy with traffic going in both directions.

Riveira removed his left boot and his ankle had swollen so grotesquely that it was now the same thickness as his calf. Grimly, he chain-smoked his way through a pack of cigarettes, his boot clutched against his chest.

Outside the town of Stavelot, they followed nailed-up signs to a field hospital, where a doctor pronounced Major Wharton dead.

The news did not catch Carter or Riveira by surprise. Several times, Carter had pulled off the road, climbed from the jeep and peered down at the major. Beyond confirming that the man was still breathing, and even this he was not sure about, there was little to be done for him.

The body was taken away on a stretcher, covered with a blanket and laid beside several other bodies outside an operating tent. A light snow was falling now and it collected in the folds of the blanket, forming ghostly outlines of the corpse.

While Riveira went to get his foot bandaged, Carter stood with the doctor, who was wearing a white apron over a heavy civilian sweater. He was in his fifties, slightly overweight, with a round and honest-looking face and a pair of spectacles propped up on his forehead. ‘I am curious,’ he said.

But he didn’t go on to ask the question Carter had been expecting◦– why the major had committed suicide. Instead, the doctor wondered aloud at the method Wharton had chosen. ‘Usually, they just shoot themselves,’ he said.

‘How often does that happen?’ asked Carter.

The doctor shrugged. ‘It depends on what’s taking place at the front,’ he replied. ‘When everything is getting blown to hell like it is now, I see very few self-inflicted wounds. It’s when things settle down, and people have time to think, that they persuade themselves it’s not worth going on.’ He pointed at the still form of the major, lying under his blanket outside the tent. ‘This is the first time I’ve seen it done like that. It’s slow. It’s unreliable. It’s also very cruel, even as an act of suicide.’

Carter stared at him and said nothing.

‘You think I am callous,’ asked the doctor, ‘to speak of your friend in this way?’

‘I wouldn’t have called him my friend.’

‘Well, whoever he was,’ said the doctor, ‘I have no time to pity the dead, or to wonder at the reasons for their passing.’

Within the hour, Carter and Riveira were back on the road, heading for the Military Police headquarters in Liège where Carter would write up his report on the theft of the fuel truck, submit it for review and, with luck, be on the next plane home.

The doctor in Stavelot had said that Riveira’s tibia was probably broken and had given him a quarter syrette of morphine for the pain. He then wrote a large red letter M on Riveira’s forehead in wax pencil, to guard against the possibility the doctors in Liège might also administer morphine and accidentally overdose the patient. Knowing that the Military Police in Liège had their own medical facility, the doctor had recommended that Riveira wait until he got there for treatment rather than stay behind in Stavelot, which was likely to become inundated with wounded soldiers from the front within the next few hours.

Riveira blinked slowly at the dirt-splashed windshield. His left leg was bandaged with olive drab wrapping almost up to the knee, and he was still carrying his boot.

Just as Carter began to worry that Riveira would doze off and fall out of the jeep, the sergeant turned to him and asked, ‘Why did Major Wharton do that to himself?’

There seemed no point in keeping quiet about it anymore and Carter told him what the major had done.

Riveira showed no reaction as he listened. He just lit himself another cigarette.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ said Carter when he had finished with his explanation.

Riveira was quiet for a while. Then, finally, he spoke. ‘And you’re going to write all that in your report?’

‘Of course. It’s what happened.’

‘Maybe this is just the morphine talking,’ said Riveira, ‘but did you think about maybe blaming it on someone else?’

‘Like who?’

Riveira shrugged. ‘That crazy Belgian in the jail at Bütgenbach. He was part of it, after all.’

‘Why would I do a thing like that?’ asked Carter. ‘They sent me here to find the truth. That’s my job, the same as it is back in New Jersey.’

‘But this isn’t New Jersey, sir, and those guys you track down on the docks back in Elizabeth are just regular thieves. They aren’t soldiers, out here in the middle of a war.’

‘And you think that makes it all right, the fact that Major Wharton is a soldier? As far as I’m concerned, that makes it worse. The Germans are using that fuel to drive their tanks across the border now. Right now! And a man got killed because of it.’

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ he replied. ‘I’ve seen so much thieving since I came ashore in France that I don’t even think about it anymore as something no good man would do. A guy like me, maybe he walks into a house and steals himself some candles to take back to his bunker in the forest, so he can see well enough to write a letter home to his wife. Or he steals a jar of cherries from a shelf down in somebody’s basement when he’s taking cover from an artillery bombardment.’

‘Those things are not the same as what the major did.’

‘I understand, sir,’ said Riveira, ‘but I think you are missing the point.’

‘Which is what?’

‘That I am a sergeant and Wharton was a major. The bigger the fish, the bigger the food they go after. I once drove a colonel halfway across France, stopping at one hotel and then another, and carrying the heaviest duffel bags I’ve ever had to lift. Right when we were almost at our destination, one of those bags just tore open from the strain and out poured silver plates and cups and candlesticks and cutlery, and that man didn’t even flinch. He just ordered me to go and find another duffel bag to pack it all back in again. You see, all I took was a candle, but that officer stole the candlestick and everything else he could find. And like it or not, Lieutenant, rank had everything to do with that.’

‘The major is dead,’ said Carter. ‘We’re never going to know for sure what was going through his mind when he did this. Maybe he thought he’d been sticking his neck out so long it was time he did something for himself. Maybe he was in debt and couldn’t find another way to pay it off. But the fact that he took matters into his own hands tells us he knew exactly how much of a mistake he had made.’

‘I’m not talking about what he thought of himself,’ said Riveira. ‘I’m talking about what other people are going to think. People back home, for example. They want to go to sleep each night believing what they read in the papers, which is that American soldiers do not shoot women and children, or soldiers with their hands in the air, or that we don’t bomb towns by accident, and they sure as hell don’t want to know that our officers are selling gasoline to the Nazis.’

‘You think they really believe that?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe they have doubts. But I’m guessing they would rather live in the dream that has been made for them where all of those things are true. That’s what you are going up against, Lieutenant, and I don’t know if you realise how strong those dreams can be. But maybe the Germans will break through and none of it will matter. It’s like I said’◦– he leaned out of the jeep and spat◦– ‘maybe this is just the morphine talking.’