Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

In retrospect, I suppose I had crossed the Channel with the unspoken thought of again being whoever I was before I'd set foot on the Continent. But the war followed me. I'd barely slept longer than two or three hours in a row since Biddy and I had first been dispatched to arrest Martin. Now I was startled to find that I could not sleep at all. I had not spent a night entirely alone within solid walls for months, and I had the feeling they were encroaching. Often I couldn't even stand to close my eyes. The second night I bought a bottle of scotch. But several belts did not make things any better. The ghouls of war took control. Each time I drifted off some panicked sensory recollection raced at me-the keening of incoming artillery, the sight of Collison with his intestines in his bloody hands, the three holes in Biddy's stomach, the earthquake and thunder of the 88s, or the unbearable cold of Champs. And always there were the dead and, worse, the dying, screaming to be saved.

In the aftermath of all that, I guess I expected to feel some gratitude for being alive. But life had been a far sweeter affair without being confronted by the dread of extinction. I had become so accustomed to being afraid that fear was now a second skin, even in the relative safety of London. I awaited artillery blasts in the parks, snipers in every tree. I was ashamed of my fear, and frequently angry. I wanted to be alone, because I was not sure I could treat anyone else decently.

The letters I expected to write came hard. So much seemed beyond words. I wrote to Biddy's family for more than two days, draft after draft, and ended up with something barely longer than a note. I found it impossible to describe the bathos of his death, hoping to comfort a dog, after summoning such valor on so many prior occasions. The only solace I could offer was to enclose hundreds of his photographs which I'd gathered from his belongings. I promised to visit the Bidwells, if I was lucky enough to return alive. In the days that I had composed and recomposed this letter, I had envisioned putting the pen down at the end and, in utter privacy, finally sobbing. But I had never been a weeper, even in the later years of childhood, and tears still would not come, leaving me in a state of constipated agitation.

Then there was Grace. In my two days of German captivity, when the combination of Biddy's death and Gita's desertion had left me feeling certain that I was going to die of heartbreak, I'd had second thoughts about Grace. She was beautiful and brilliant and steady. The one thing I could say with utmost sincerity was that I wished that I could see her, because I had learned that presence meant everything. But without a photo in my hand I could barely bring her to mind. If we were together, if Grace were in my arms, then I might have had some chance of retrieving our life. "Here, here, here," I kept repeating to myself whenever I thought of her, feeling largely enraged that something so dignifying and eternal as love could be defeated by distance. Yet the memory of Gita, of her bare skin and the moments when we'd seemed to fuse souls, easily withstood whatever had been left behind for thousands of miles and many months. By now, I was willing to say only to my most private self that I did not fully regret Gita. I had told Biddy that I was in love with her. That seemed ludicrous. I had been the kind of fool men often were for sex. But even so, I found certain images of her recurrent and fabulously arousing. Again and again I saw her looming over me naked, stimulating me with unashamed intensity. Fantasies of how I might come to find her again in the burning ruins of Europe revolved through me, even as I sometimes begged myself not to abandon the decent life I knew I could make with Grace. But it was not a time for logic. I desired Gita against all reason, and my inability to control my passions seemed part and parcel of the harsh season I was experiencing within the narrow cold confines of my room.

I made it a point to walk as much as I could, but even on the London streets I found my thinking little more than a procession of spotlighted theater scenes, in which various figures, the dear and the dead and the dreaded, made unpredictable leaps onto center stage. Often I saw Robert Martin and Roland Teedle there. In most moods, I hated both of them for letting loose the torrent of events in which I was now drowning. In better moments, I realized that one of the barriers to righting myself was the fact that I still did not know which of them to believe. I despised Martin for his deceptions, but I remained unconvinced at the deepest level that the man I had seen swing down into the Seille like a real-life Jack Armstrong would stoop to spying. Even at this late date, some part of what I'd been told seemed untrue, and that in turn seemed to emanate somehow from the core of uncontrolled excess I'd always sensed in Teedle. Amid all the disgraces I'd suffered, my doubts about the bona fides of the commands that had led me to peril and ruin seemed intolerable.

My tours around the West End took me several times down Brook Street. I recalled the address from Teedle's order to Martin to return to London. What I found at number 68, a block from the U. S. Embassy and across the street from Claridge's, was an ordinary West End row house, with a dormered fourth floor, a limestone exterior on the ground level, and a roofed entryway. This presumably was the OSS, or at least one arm of it. There was no plate identifying the building's occupants, but after passing by a few times I noticed enough foot traffic in and out to convince me that an organization of one kind or another was housed there, and on my fifth or sixth morning in London, I unlatched the iron gate and walked up to the door. Inside, I asked the tidy middle-aged receptionist if I could speak to Colonel Bryant Winters. I gave her my name.

"Regarding?"

"Major Robert Martin." The faintest lick of reaction trickled into her bland face. I was directed to a straight-backed chair across the way. She had other business to occupy her, but eventually spoke into her phone.

I'd had very little notion of the OSS before I'd been assigned to Martin's case, but its mythology had grown in my mind and those of most other soldiers in the European theater. The stories of derring-do in France, Italy, and Africa were, even if untrue, greatly entertaining, and had become staples in the constant gossip and apocrypha that provided important diversions in a soldier's day-to-day life: OSS had wiped out a battalion of German artillery to the man by poisoning their rations. Special Services agents had dropped from the sky, surrounded Rommel's tent, and spirited him back to Rome, where he was being questioned.

Within the inner sanctum, however, the atmosphere was anything but swashbuckling. It was, rather, very much like the Yale Club, which I'd once visited in Manhattan, where everyone seemed to speak with his jaw tightened and where I sensed that Jews or Catholics would always be treated with a courtesy that would never embrace complete welcome. NOK, as some of the more genteel fraternity boys at Easton were apt to put it-not our kind. The men here had good American names and many had eschewed military attire in favor of tweed jackets. Something about the milieu appalled me, especially the degree to which I knew I had once hungered after this like a hound perched beside a table. Whatever had happened to me, I was well beyond that now I was absorbed with these reflections when a tall man in a uniform presented himself. I jumped up to salute. This was Colonel Winters. He smiled like a graceful host.

"Captain, we had no word you were coming. My aide is back there thumbing through the cables, but I recognized your name. Judge Advocate, right? I take it it's the usual signal foul-up?"

I shrugged, the familiar gesture of eternal helplessness that was part of life in the Army.