James Benn - A Mortal Terror

“Is there something about the major you’re not telling us?” Kaz asked. “Some place he might go? A woman, perhaps?”

“No, he wouldn’t disappear for a dame. The only thing I can think of is that he’s a real souvenir hound. He’s always trading with the dogfaces. Nazi knives, pistols, flags, all that junk. He’s a teetotaler, so he has his officer’s liquor ration to swap with. The boys love that.”

“So he’s off hunting souvenirs?”

“No need to, the guys come to him. But he might be packing them up and shipping them home. Check the field post office. It’s a busy place, he might have gotten held up.”

“You didn’t mention this possibility to Colonel Schleck?”

“The major and I get along. I’m no snitch.”

“Okay, just tell me this. Who might get a pass today to go into Acerra? Or have business there?”

“All passes were cancelled last night, and I don’t know of any official reason for anyone under the rank of general to go to Acerra. That’s AMGOT territory. We got guys going to Caserta all the time, but that’s usually for headquarters errands. No one minds a quick stop once business is taken care of, since it’s so close, but for Acerra you’d need a pass, and there ain’t none.”

The corporal gave us a description of Major Arnold and we headed to the field post office, looking for a short, wiry officer with curly brown hair and parcels tucked under each arm. He wasn’t there, and no one remembered him coming in. We decided to check his tent, and if we didn’t find him there we’d move on. Where to, exactly, I wasn’t sure.

Officers’ tents were pitched in a field behind headquarters. It was high ground, free of mud, a good deal for guys who didn’t rate a real roof over their heads. There were four rows, each marked with the occupant’s names and a wood-slat walkway.

I opened the flap and called the major’s name, but no one was home. He kept the place neat, his cot made, books and papers stacked on a small folding table. His gear was all there. Footlocker, carbine, field pack. The insert tray from the footlocker was on the cot, shirts precisely folded. In one corner sat two wooden boxes, a hammer and nails and a roll of twine perched on top of them.

“Souvenirs?” Kaz asked, testing one of the lids. It came up, and revealed Nazi daggers, belt buckles, a black SS officer’s cap, iron crosses, and other medals.

“Check the other,” I said, studying the rest of the area. There had to be some clue as to where Arnold was. It looked like he had stepped out in the midst of packing and never returned.

“It says fragile,” Kaz said. Arnold had marked the contents as china. Kaz opened it, and there were four plates, wrapped in newspaper. Beneath them was a Nazi flag, the black swastika on a field of blood red. “What’s this?” He unfolded the flag and a Walther P38 pistol fell out.

“Major Arnold could get himself in trouble. It’s against regulations to mail weapons home.”

“There are two magazines as well,” Kaz said. “But at least the pistol isn’t loaded.”

“He was probably banking on the post office being too busy to ask questions, with everyone pulling out. I don’t even know how much attention they pay anyway. I heard a story about a sergeant shipping a jeep home, one part at a time.”

“Impressive,” Kaz said. “Should we look further for the major, or is this a dead end?”

A dead end. A missing major. I looked again at the footlocker, and pushed it with my boot. It was heavy, and I had that real bad feeling again. I’d been sidetracked by the fire, and hadn’t thought about the next victim since then. There was a padlock in the latch.

“Why is this locked, if he hadn’t finished packing?” The tray, its compartments filled with shirts, sat on the cot.

“Perhaps he has his valuables inside?” Kaz sounded hopeful, but it was that false hope, the hope you feel when you go for an inside straight. Brief, insubstantial, useless. I took the dagger from Arnold’s souvenir box and began working the latch. The footlocker was plywood, not built to withstand a steel blade. I dug around the top latch, loosening the screws until I could pull the latch free. I hoped that all I’d end up with was a chewing out from a superior officer for destroying his footlocker, but that was inside-straight thinking. I lifted the top, and the only card I saw was the queen of hearts, stuck between the dead fingers of Major Matthew Arnold.

He was short, which was a good thing. He was on his side, knees to his chest, hands up to his face, as if at prayer. The card stuck out from between two fingers, the red heart at odds with the pale face of the dead major.

“Strangled,” I said. “Strangled and stuffed in a box. Why?” His neck was bruised and the blood vessels in his eyes had burst.

“It had to be a major,” Kaz said. “The odds were it would be one from the Third Division, since the first two victims had been.”

“No, I mean why stuffed in a box? The killer didn’t hide either of the first two bodies. Galante was tucked against a wall, but he was in plain sight. Why hide the third victim? It’s not the same pattern.”

“To delay his being discovered?”

“Has to be. In order to give the killer time to get away. Which means he was seen by someone, and he needed to put time between that and the discovery of the body.”

“We should go back to division headquarters,” Kaz said. “Report and contact CID.”

“Not yet,” I said, shutting the footlocker. “Let’s go.”

“It’s more important that we find out where the GIs in Landry’s platoon have been today,” I said as I gunned the jeep down the muddy road to the bivouac area. “It all started with him and it has to go back to him. Galante, Cole, Inzerillo, they all connect to Landry and his men. If we reported the body now, we’d be tied up for hours with CID and filling out reports. We’ll go back as soon as we talk to Sergeant Gates and get an accounting of where his men have been.”

“I suppose Major Arnold is in no hurry,” Kaz said. Traffic was light, and I was glad we hadn’t stumbled straight into the entire Third Division pulling out. I turned into the churned-up, muddy field and drove to the same small rise I had before, claiming what dry ground I could. Before us was the bivouac, rows of olive-drab tents of all sizes, with vehicles loading and unloading supplies around the perimeter, just as before. But there was something different.

“Those are British trucks,” I said. The men unloading them were British. Not a Yank in sight. As we drew closer, I noticed a pile of white-painted signs at the end of each row of tents. Signs for units of the 3rd Division, no longer needed.

“Has the Third Division pulled out?” I asked a British sergeant leading a work detail of Italian civilians. Brooms, shovels, garbage cans, wheelbarrows. I guess more than ten thousand GIs can leave a fair-sized mess.

“Whoever the Yanks were, they’ve gone,” he said. “Got to clean up for our lot to move in tomorrow. Can I help you, Lieutenant?”

“No,” I said. “I doubt it.”

I walked along the perimeter until I saw the signpost, lying on the muddy ground. 2nd Battalion, Easy Company. Soon I found the tent where the poker game had been in session. Third Platoon territory. Everything was cleared out, nothing but folded cots and the debris of a departing unit. Empty wine bottles, mostly. Crumpled paper, odds and ends that men had accumulated when in camp but tossed out as unnecessary when they were on the move, back to the sharp end.

Garbage cans had been placed along the wooden walkway, but not enough to handle the last-minute discards. The one in front of the poker tent was overflowing with bottles, broken crates, and other indefinable rubbish. On top was a single tan leather glove, holes worn through the fingertips, the kind the wire crews had been wearing when I first came here.