James Benn: The Rest Is Silence

“There wasn’t much. It was all in shreds. Nothing as substantial as a belt or lifejacket. As you saw, the fish had been at him, and between being banged about on the rocks and exposure to salt water and sunlight, his clothing did not hold up well. What we took off was as decayed as he is.” The doctor took a flat box from the bottom of the gurney and set it on a table as he trundled off, the broken wheel clacking in protest.

There were shreds of cloth, the colors of which had been bleached and stained to a dull reddish-brown hue. A uniform? Perhaps. Or workingman’s garments. They had a rough feel, probably wool. Not a dressy kind of guy. No labels or telltale stitching where insignia might have been. Useless.

“I have been informed that I must list the cause of death as ‘killed in action,’ ” Dr. Verniquet said a few minutes later as we sat in his office. There was a fresh cigarette in his mouth and an open window, which helped, even though the fragrance of decay still hung on my uniform and cloyed my nostrils. “By the highest authority, or so they said.”

“If they were English, it must be MI5,” I said. Killed in action meant an end to questions, at least officially.

“They were. You’re the first Yank who’s shown up to take a look. At least now I can put the poor chap in the ground.”

“In an unmarked grave,” I said.

“Certainly,” Dr. Verniquet said. “I have no idea if he’s German, French, or one of ours.”

“How long was he in the water?” I asked.

“It’s hard to say precisely,” Dr. Verniquet said, grinding out his cigarette. “Minimum of a month, perhaps as long as three or four.”

“Have other bodies washed ashore since the start of the war?”

“We’ve had our share,” he said. “Especially in summer 1940, when Jerry attacked the Channel shipping. We had sailors and airmen alike. But then they focused on the London area, and we saw less of the war in the air this far west.”

“Did any of them look like our guy?”

“Not a one,” Dr. Verniquet said firmly. “None were badly decomposed, and all had their uniforms relatively intact. Some were still in life belts. And their wounds were horrible. When a few twenty-millimeter rounds or a machine-gun burst strikes the human body, the flesh rips apart. This man was shot at close range with a pistol of some sort, mark my words.”

I walked outside and breathed in the fresh air, happy for each cleansing lungful. The mortuary was on a side street near the police station, where Kaz waited for me in the jeep. His head was tilted back, his eyes closed as he made the most of the warm April weather and the low, slanting sun.

“I hope you haven’t worn yourself out talking to the constable,” I said, dropping myself into the driver’s seat. Kaz smiled, then wrinkled his nose as he opened one eye.

“Billy, you smell horrible!”

“You would too if you’d spent time poking a decayed corpse.” I filled Kaz in on what I’d learned-or had not learned from the police surgeon and asked what he’d come up with.

“Nothing, really,” Kaz said. “I had tea with Constable Miller, who had no idea where the corpse might have come from.”

“Tea? You had tea while I looked at a guy sloshing around in a rubber sack?”

“It wasn’t very good, Billy. Day-old teabags, I daresay.” For Kaz, that was roughing it. He was used to the finer and more expensive things in life. “Constable Miller is beyond retirement age and is staying on for the duration. He is a good man, and diligent in his own way, but he is not at the forefront of criminal investigation.”

“Great,” I said, noticing that Kaz was hanging half out of the jeep. “Is it that bad?”

“Perhaps we should drive. The wind may help,” Kaz said. “In any case, the body was found on Slapton Sands, which is not in the good constable’s jurisdiction. It is part of the army’s Assault Training Center, and the soldiers who found him brought the body here to the mortuary.”

“Constable Miller had no leads?”

“He said he took one whiff and decided it was an army matter. The military police declined, declaring that it was obviously not an American soldier, and that he’d been in the water long before they arrived in this area. The constable did refer me to Inspector Grange at the Dartmouth headquarters of the Devon Constabulary, who is in charge of the investigation, such as it is.”

“No one wants a smelly corpse,” I said, and started the jeep. I headed down Fore Street, the main thoroughfare in Kingsbridge. It was a narrow lane, hemmed in on each side by low, grey granite buildings, each one lower than the last as the road meandered down to the waterfront from the wooded heights above. We waited at an intersection as a long column of GIs marched by at a quick pace, heavy packs and rifles slung over their shoulders. Some were kids, maybe nineteen or twenty tops. I wondered how many of them would end up floating facedown in the Channel before too long. Youthful life could so easily be swallowed by the charnel house of war. I wanted to wash the stench of death away, but I knew it would return. It was all around us, waiting around each corner. Waiting for the invasion, across that cold English Channel.

The column passed, the tramp of boots on cobblestones echoing in the distance.

I drove on. Kingsbridge was at the head of a broad estuary that brought tidal waters up from the Channel a couple of miles to the south, providing a natural safe harbor for small boats. I’d noticed the fishing vessels when we drove in, all of them moored and resting on the muddy flats along the quayside. The smell of low tide and rotting fish guts wafted on the breeze.

“Ah, camouflage,” Kaz said, working to keep a straight face. Kaz enjoyed a good laugh at my expense. And I didn’t mind. Kaz was a good pal, the best. He’d been through hard times and lived through tremendous losses. The kind of losses that would have sent many tough guys to their knees. So anything that brought a smile to his face was okay by me.

Kaz, or rather Lieutenant-and sometimes Baron-Piotr Augustus Kazimierz, was Polish and had joined the Polish Army in exile when I was still in blue back in Boston. But he was a small, skinny guy, with a heart defect to boot, and the only work he could get was as a translator at the US Army headquarters in London. He spoke half a dozen European languages fluently, and was generally the smartest guy in the room, having won all sorts of honors at Oxford. But Kaz had always wanted to do more, and when I came along, he and I became a team. But that’s a long story. Suffice it to say he’s a Pole in a British uniform and I’m Boston Irish in Uncle Sam’s brown. Kaz’s uniform is tailor-made and mine needs to be ironed to look half as good.

Did I mention the scar?

I’ve gotten to where I don’t even think about it. But when someone first meets Kaz, their eyes either linger on the scar or look away quickly, as if they’d glimpsed the price of war and found it too painful to bear. It goes from his right eye down the side of his face, courtesy of a killer who tried to take him out of the picture. He almost succeeded, too, but that’s yet another long and complicated story. Kaz carries that jagged scar on his face, his wound visible to the world. A memory he will never shake loose.

Did I mention the Webley?

For a thin guy with glasses and a bum ticker, Kaz is a damn good shot. He wears a Webley break-top revolver and has used it to save my neck more than once. He’s easy to underestimate at first glance, but that would be a fatal mistake. Has been, for some.

Did I mention Kaz came close to killing himself?

No, I didn’t. Too much to get into right now.

“Let’s talk to the fishermen,” I said, pulling the jeep to the side of the road. Fishermen knew tides and currents, and we needed to know where this body had come from. I saw that Kaz understood. Like I said, Kaz is smart in six languages. He reached into the musette bag we kept in the jeep for emergencies. It was filled with chocolate bars, cigarettes, and other goodies from the PX. A little gentle bribery went a long way when all you wanted was information from guys suspicious of outsiders. We decided to deploy the Lucky Strikes.