Ross Thomas - The Eighth Dwarf

The path that she had taken was no more than a meter wide. It went right, left, and right again almost at ninety-degree angles. Von Staden had lost sight of the woman now, so he picked up his pace. He made the final turn and stopped, because the path ended abruptly at a small shrine that marked the site of someone for whom the rubble was both grave and crypt. The shrine was nothing more than a small, painted wooden figure of Christ. Some soggy, faded flowers lay before it. The woman was nowhere in sight.

Von Staden swore and quickly retraced his steps. At the second turning he stopped. Coming from this direction, he could see it — a space no larger than a large crate. It was somebody’s hovel, fashioned out of the rubble and a piece of old sheet iron that shielded its entrance from view unless approached from this angle. He realized that she could have closed her umbrella, ducked into the hovel, waited for him to pass, and then doubled back. It would have taken no more than a few seconds.

Walking slowly back along the path to the street, making sure that there were no other holes in which she could be hiding, Von Staden admired her cleverness. This little rabbit knows her warren well, he thought. Now he would have to go back to the Golden Rose. The other one, the man, would be gone by now, of course. But a little chat with the proprietor might be useful to find out how much he knows about his patrons. He will know nothing, but if pressed hard enough, he might produce the bottle of Schnapps — the good stuff that he keeps under the counter. With luck, even some Steinhager. And with the Schnapps perhaps will also come some inspiration, which Von Staden knew was going to have to serve as the principal ingredient of his essentially negative report to Major Baker-Bates.

From 1917 until 1935, Brigadier General Frank “Knocker” Grubbs had been a first lieutenant in the United States Army. In 1935, despite the fact that everyone regarded Knocker Grubbs as just a trifle dim-witted, he had been promoted to captain, the rank he had held until Pearl Harbor. Only a national emergency, or, some said, a disaster, could have created the confusion that permitted General Grubbs to rise to his present rank; but rise to it he did, pinning on his single silver star in late 1944.

Some said that Knocker got to be a general because he knew all the right people. But others, and these were his detractors, and there were a legion or two of them, claimed that it was not only because he knew all the right people, but also because he knew all their dirty little secrets. And perhaps that was the real reason that Knocker, although not really very bright, had wound up in intelligence.

Whatever the reason, Knocker Grubbs was determined to retire as a general. He had only one year to go until his thirty were up, and after that, as he often told his wife, “Fuck ’em. We’ll go back to Santone and drink Pearl beer at the Gunther and raise quarter horses.” Knocker Grubbs, like all men, had his dreams — and his nightmares. His recurring nightmare was that he would be recalled to Washington and reduced to his permanent rank of major. The difference between the retirement pay of a major and that of a one-star general was considerable, and when Knocker had nothing better to do, which was often, he would calculate the difference on the back of an envelope with a kind of morbid fascination. He always burned those envelopes, of course. Knocker Grubbs wasn’t a total fool.

Now fifty-three and in what, as he always told his disbelieving wife, was his prime, Knocker, from his pleasant sixth-story office in the Farben building, directed half of the Army counterintelligence efforts in the U.S. Zone of Occupation. The other half was directed down in Munich by some pantywaist colonel with fancy notions who, before the war, had done postgraduate work at Heidelberg — at the fucking Army’s fucking expense, Knocker often told his cronies.

The Colonel in Munich might be a pantywaist, but he was also smart, and this had worried Knocker until he remembered that generals could chew out colonels. And one thing Knocker Grubbs had learned and learned well during his twenty-nine years in the Army, and that was how to chew ass.

He had once spent two hours upbraiding the Munich Colonel with vivid epithets culled from Cavalry days, and the results had been delightful. So now that was what Knocker did most of the time. He chewed ass. He was good at it, he enjoyed it, and he dimly perceived that it was the one perfect disguise for his own shortcomings, of which, he was just smart enough to realize, there might be a few.

The ass that Knocker was chewing that afternoon wasn’t a colonel’s, but it was almost as good because it belonged to a Limey major. To add to the Major’s discomfort, an American lieutenant was serving as witness — a Yid lieutenant at that.

“Now, let me just get this straight, Major,” General Grubbs said as he rubbed his bald head — a gesture that for some reason he thought might make him look harmlessly puzzled. “You were at the bar at the Casino, having a drink, minding your own business, and this guy comes up, this American major, just promoted, he said — except that he wasn’t no American major, he was this shit Oppenheimer, and you mean to sit there and tell me you actually bought the cocksucker a drink? ”

Baker-Bates sighed. “In point of fact, General, he bought me one.”

“He bought you one,” the General said, packing his tone with incredulity.

“A Scotch and soda.”

Knocker Grubbs nodded slowly several times. He had a big chunk of a head, still vaguely handsome, with small, very pale blue eyes that looked stupid, the way some very pale blue eyes do. His best features were his strong nose and chin, which rescued his profile from not enough forehead and a wet, weak mouth. What was left of his hair was a smoky gray.

Grubbs stopped nodding, but kept his voice full of amazement. “And so you just stood there, bellied up to the bar with this Kraut killer that half the Army is looking for, and you and him just bullshitted each other: have I got it right, Major?”

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid that you do.”

“And you couldn’t tell from his accent that he wasn’t American?”

“He had no German accent.”

“None at all?”

“None that I could detect, General. But he had two American accents. One was what I suppose could be called American standard, and the other was Texan.”

“How the fuck would you know what a Texan talks like?”

“Are you from Texas, General?”

“Amarillo.”

“Actually, sir, he spoke very much the way you do.”

“Like I do?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re not trying to be cute, are you, Major?”

“Only accurate, General.”

“I’d hate to think that you were trying to be cute. I don’t know what they do with majors with funny little cocksucker mustaches who turn cute in your army, mister, but I know what they do with them in mine. And I’ll tell you one more thing, fella; you’re goddamned lucky you’re not under my command.”

“Yes, sir, I would think that I am. Lucky, that is,” Baker-Bates said, and decided that Knocker Grubbs wasn’t quite real.

“So you two, you and this Kraut killer, parted the best of pals, right? And then you sat down all by yourself in the American officer’s club and had a nice, hot American meal, and maybe smoked a couple of American cigarettes and then when all that was done, you wandered over to see Lieutenant Meyer here, maybe an hour later, and that’s when you found out you’d been boozing it up with the Kraut killer that everybody’s looking for. And that’s when you told the Lieutenant here that maybe it might be a good idea to seal off the complex on account of this crazy Kraut killer you’d just had a friendly drink with might still be killing an hour or two hanging around the PX or the Class Six Store, right? Except that he’d long skipped, and we’ve got fuck-all ideas about where he skipped to. Are those the facts, Major? I wanta be good and goddamned sure I got the facts right for the report I’m gonna have to send your CO.”