Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

Around the table, there was a hail of laughter and several jokes about Bettjer and alcohol, to which he'd clearly become more accustomed. Right now he was bright red with drink. I had been more careful with the wine, but the same could not be said of most of the others and the level of hilarity had increased as Martin went on recounting their adventures.

"You appear, Major, to have been destined for this life," I said to him eventually.

"Oh, hardly," he answered. "I was organizing for the International Transport Workers around Paris, when the Nazis decided to go marching. I had no desire to return to war, Dubin. I'd had more than enough of it in Spain. I'd led other Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, then became a commando when the foreign troops were sent home. It was all quite dismal, to be frank. I had no desire to see more friends and comrades tortured and killed by Fascists. After Paris fell, I moved back to Madrid, where I was a transportation official with an oil company. Spain was a neutral country, and with a Spanish passport I could go anywhere, even Germany, which is why the OSS approached me. Originally, I thought I was to be a mere conduit for information. But one thing led to another. I had no interest in joining the Army, yet I could not refuse when they asked me to lead the OG."

Yesterday, at the i8th, I had reviewed a clip from Stars and Stripes in Martin's file, detailing how the Operational Groups had been formed. Colonel Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, had corralled swashbucklers from everywhere, Russian emigres, Spanish Civil War veterans like Martin, and a number of Italian speakers from New York, Boston, and Chicago. All of them had been trained at the Congressional Country Club outside D. C., where they had done conditioning runs on the famous golf course and received instruction in the black arts of silent assassination, demolition, secret radio broadcast, judo, cryptography, lock picking, safecracking, and installing listening devices. Martin's efficiency reports from that period were often marked out, but made clear he had been a star, except with Morse code, where he never succeeded in getting above twelve words a minute.

Following his training, according to Lieutenant Colonel Brunson, Teedle's G-1 who'd briefed me, Martin and two comrades, as well as eight supply chutes carrying radios, weapons, and necessities like currency, were dropped over France by a low-flying bomber in October 1942. Each man had a fake ID, a work card, and a cyanide capsule. Somehow, the Nazis had seen the drop. The Englishman with them was shot, while Martin and a French sergeant, who I believed was the Gypsy Antonio now at the end of the table, spent two days in the woods barely avoiding the Germans.

Over time, however, the OG was established. Because of his union activities before the war, Martin was able to build an active network among the rail workers, many of whom he had known for years. Together they sabotaged 37o trains in the succeeding months, destroying railheads and tracks, setting locomotives afire, igniting fuel dumps, and attacking German convoys on the run. After D-Day, as the Third Army advanced north, Stemwinder monitored German troop movements and brought down bridges along the Loire. In the file, there were several laudatory communications from grateful commanders. Leaving aside Teedle.

"And before Spain?" I said to him. "May I ask what you asked me, Major? Where is the home war has taken you from?"

He laughed, but the wine gave him a wistful look.

"Good for you, Dubin. That's the sixty-four-dollar question. But I left all that behind long ago." His smile had faded, when he added, "The answer is as lost to history as the ruins of ancient Greece."

After coffee-Nescafe, about which the Comtesse permitted herself one rueful remark over the lost pleasures of former days-I asked Martin to help me find evidence that would show that OSS had directed him to remain here. Very drunk now, he took a second to marshal himself, and in his confused expression I could see he was peeved by my determination. But in the end he laughed and patted my back.

"What a serious fellow you are, Dubin. Yes, of course.''

The first thought was to show me the shortwave radio through which they received London's orders, but I needed something better than that. Martin frowned again at my doggedness but put the question in French to his Stemwinder colleagues who remained at the table.

"Londres?" asked Bettjer. "Les documents des cons, non?"

Martin laughed. "How wonderful. Yes." 'The papers of the idiots' referred to the Finance Officers in OSS, who were the same relentless penny-pinchers in that outfit they were everywhere else, demanding that Martin keep exact accounts of the funds advanced for the Operational Group. If I had not been in the Army, I might not have believed that Martin's orders to mount commando attacks were never reduced to writing, but that nickels and dimes required precise records. Mademoiselle Lodz said she kept the papers with the radio, and I followed her outside to find them. At 3:00 p. M. the daylight was still bright, and leaving the dim house, especially after the wine, I needed to shield my eyes.

"Cela vous derange si je fume?" she asked. Does it bother you if I smoke? It was a meaningless courtesy since she already had the flame of her lighter, an American Zippo, to the tip. She had not lit up at the table in deference to the Comtesse, who did not approve of women with cigarettes. Otherwise, Mademoiselle Lodz had barely been without a Lucky Strike between her fingers. I took smoking as the source of her appealing cough-drop voice, like June Allyson's. I declined when she offered me one, telling her I'd never picked up the habit.

"The C rations are terrible," she said. "But the cigarettes? This is the best thing the American Army brought with them." She actually hugged her green pack of Luckys to her breast. "In Vichy, the women were banned from buying cigarettes altogether. Martin says that is why I had no choice but to join the resistance." She laughed at herself.

At supper, Martin had recounted several of Gita's adventures. On D-Day, for example, she had calmly turned the road signs at an intersection ninety degrees and stood there long enough to direct an entire Nazi tank battalion south rather than west. Later that afternoon, according to Martin, they had destroyed a large part of the same unit, when Gita and he herded dozens of sheep onto a bridgehead the Nazis were hoping to cross. While the German soldiers were shooing the livestock, Antonio slipped beneath the bridge and set detonators and dynamite, which they blew when the tanks moved forward.

"Martin's stories of your exploits are remarkable."

She smiled. "And even better if they were true."

I lost a step, which evoked another spirited laugh from her.

"Those of us with Martin," she told me, "have watched our lives grow larger when he describes our activities. But he is so good at it, we all believe him. That is Martin's way. At times, there's not a person here who knows whether he's speaking the truth. I am not even certain that his name is Martin. With the OSS, they all take noms de guerre. But it does not matter. Who are we, Dubin, but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them? My mother said that always."

I had never heard anyone declare such a notion aloud, that we somehow had the power to make ourselves up on the go. Yet it was an idea that attracted me, and I reflected a moment, trying to determine whether life allowed that kind of latitude and how far it might extend.

"Without disrespect to your mother, Mademoiselle, it is better, is it not, if those stories are also true?"

"But who is to tell the truth, Doo-bean? In my town, they said my mother was a tramp. She was a seamstress, but she had lovers among the well-to-do, and took their money. In her view, she was a nonconformist, an artiste at heart. She chose to believe that, and I did as well."