Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"As you wish, General, but I wasn't trying to be insubordinate. I simply wanted to see matters to a logical end."

"Well, you haven't done that, have you, Dubin? The son of a bitch is still cavorting around."

"He could be dead for all I know, sir."

"That, unfortunately, he is not." Teedle thumbed through the papers on his desk, finally giving up in exasperation and yelling for Frank, who was apparently away. "To hell with it," Teedle announced. "About forty-eight hours ago, a reserve battalion of the moth Infantry Division encountered a man with one hand who claimed to be an OSS officer. This was down near the town of Pforzheim. He said he was on a special operation and in need of supplies. An officer there with good sense contacted OSS, but by the time they'd alerted the MPs, Martin was with the four winds.

"So he's gone yet again. Amazing. Any idea how the hell the girl found out he was in that hospital last time? I've been wondering for months."

"I told her. It was rather stupid."

He made a face. "I thought that was possible. That's more than stupid, Dubin. Get into your pants, did she?"

I didn't answer.

"You should have known better than that, too, Dubin." But his pinched eyes contained a trace of amusement at my folly. Whatever his complex morality, Teedle was good to his word. Sex, like war, was something God expected humans to succumb to.

"I didn't do very well, General. I'm aware of that. It cost a very good man his life. I'll rue that to the end of my days.

He gave me a kinder look than I expected and said, "If you had the pleasure of being a general, Dubin, you'd be able to say that ten thousand times. It's not much of a job that requires other men to die for your mistakes, is it?"

"No, sir."

"But that's what it entails."

"-Yes, He took a moment. "Here's where we stand. I've been doing the Dance of the Seven Veils with OSS for a couple of months now Donovan hasn't wanted any Army-wide acknowledgment that one of their own has gone astray. They say that's so they can save a chance to use Martin against the Russians, but it's all politics, if you ask me, and I've put my foot down now. A bulletin is going to all MPs, Third Army, Seventh Army, the Brits, everybody in Europe. And I'd like you in charge, Dubin. You have experience that can't be spared. You know what Martin looks like. More important, you've seen his tricks. I could never tell somebody else to be wary enough. Besides, it will give you a chance to clean up whatever mess you made. That's a fair deal, isn't it?"

I didn't answer. Fair wasn't the point and we both knew it.

"I know you've had enough of this assignment, Dubin. And given what you've said-or haven't said-I can understand why. You did the right thing stepping out. But it's a war and we need you. I've discussed it with Maples. And we agree. Those are your orders, Dubin. Get Martin." The General delivered his edict with his head lowered, enhancing the warning glare from his light eyes. There was no doubt the General meant to teach me a lesson. Running Martin to ground was going to convert me entirely to his point of view. And in that, I suspected he might even have been right. "I assume I don't have to add any cautions here about keeping your other gun in its holster, do I. Once burned, twice wise, correct?"

I nodded.

"Dismissed," he said.

I drove south to interview the infantry officer who'd detained Martin at Pforzheim. The little towns I passed through brought to mind cuckoo clocks, with small narrow buildings set tight as teeth on the hillsides, all with painted wooden decorations along the steep rooflines. The officer who'd detained Martin, Major Farell Beasley, described him as robust in spite of his visible injuries and insisting that in Special Operations he could still be useful with only one hand. Beasley, like so many others before him, had been quite taken with Martin's sparkle and seemed puzzled to think such a fine soldier could have done anything wrong. In fact, Martin had provided excellent intelligence about the German units a mile ahead who were attempting to keep the moth from crossing the Neckar River. As for his own objectives, Martin had declined to discuss them, except to say that he would be launching a small operation in the vicinity. I did not ask if there was any sign Martin was traveling with a woman.

I remained near Pforzheim for twenty-four hours to coordinate the MPs' search. The local Germans were only marginally cooperative and Martin was presumed to have melted into the surrounding hills, moving on behind the fighting.

On my return to Frankfurt, I found for the next several days that the teletype Teedle had initiated to MPs throughout the European theater brought numerous reported sightings of one-handed men. None of them, however, had the extensive burns on his left side Major Beasley had seen on Martin. Then late on April ii, I received a telegram from Colonel Winters at OSS in London, with whom I'd visited.

Our man captured STOP Will communicate 0600 tomorrow by secure channels.

He phoned on the dot. For the last three or four days, he said, Seventh Army forces outside Balingen in southwest Germany had been negotiating with the commandant of a German camp holding political prisoners. The Nazis had hoped to exchange them for their own POWs, but the Americans had simply waited out the Krauts and they had finally surrendered control yesterday. Entering the camp, the Americans found an infernal scene of sickness and starvation.

"They say it's quite awful. Most of the SS escaped, of course. But when the intelligence officers went nosing around, inmates pointed out a fellow with one hand who'd appeared in their midst only a few days ago. They all assumed he was a German guard who couldn't get away because of his injury. He claimed to be another internee, a Spanish Jew, who'd been working in Germany when he was deported to another slave camp, but that was plainly a lie. He was too well nourished, for one thing, and spoke terrible German. And when they made him lower his drawers, it was clear he wasn't Jewish. He told several more stories, the last of which was that he was an American OSS officer named Robert Martin. That one was wrung from him only when his interrogators threatened to turn him over to the inmates, who've torn several guards apart with their bare hands. Literally, Dubin. Literally. I can't even imagine what the hell is going on down there. But I guarantee you one thing: Martin won't be getting away. They have him chained to the wall. He will be surrendered only to you.

I asked if Winters had any clue what had brought Martin there.

"I would say, Dubin, that the people around here who took Martin for a traitor are the ones smiling a little more broadly. Once you have him back in Frankfurt, we'd like to send our people to interrogate him at length." He ended the conversation with the familiar apologies for not being able to say more.

I ordered up an armed convoy to transport the prisoner, and immediately headed south in advance to take custody of Robert Martin.

And so, driven by a new MP sergeant to whom I barely had the heart to speak, I traveled to Balingen. It was April 12, 1945, a sweet morning with a spotless sky and a swelling, vital aroma in the air. There had been many reports about the German concentration camps, including one or two published accounts by escapees. But the authors had gotten away months ago, before matters turned dire for Hitler's regime. And even the claims made by the few survivors of the slave camp at Natzweiler in France, which several of us had heard of, tended to be dismissed as propaganda or yet another of the improbable, ultimately baseless rumors of disaster that circulated routinely among U. S. troops: The Russians had given up and Stalin had killed himself. Two hundred kamikaze pilots had flattened large stretches of L. A. Montgomery and Bradley had engaged in a fistfight in front of the troops. The Nazis were exterminating political prisoners by the thousands. The last of these stories had cropped up after the Soviets in Poland captured a supposed Nazi death camp called Auschwitz at the end of January, but these days nobody put much stock in what the Russians were saying.