Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

He looked up and saw tears.

“It might be enough,” she said.

But it wouldn’t be enough. Docker knew. The warmth of impersonal flesh wasn’t enough, even though that was the kind of ersatz caring the war had taught them... His arms felt empty without the child, but war gave them all substitutes. His father had his dogs, Schmitzer an ache for the dead, Larkin oblivion in a bottle, and Gelnick the final kind... She hoped to exorcise the memory of rape with the therapy of flesh that was, at best, not angry or cruel or hateful. He knew his own needs weren’t quite that simple... the warmth of the child in his arms had been a rebuke to the loss of caring he regretted but had no defense against. It was the signature of their times perhaps, and it was Count Ciano, Mussolini’s own son-in-law, who had added a flourish to this cynical indifference by describing the children blown to death in an Ethiopian landscape as putting him in mind of flowers, providing improbable but brilliant colors in the smoke and flames of destruction.

But the plus was... if there was ever a plus to war... it could at least make you feel there was something worth risking yourself for. In some way the trust of it brought you closer to strangers than to people you’d spent a lifetime with. Here he could feel closer and more important to this sad young woman and her dead brother Edmond than to names and faces he could remember from a campus in America, and the broken stones of her church were somehow more significant to him now than the skyline of his native city.

“You’re a Catholic,” he said. “Isn’t that important?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure how much. Father Juneau wants to survive. In fairness, he wants us all to survive. He says we’re helpless, there’s no valor in fighting, only foolishness. Even if that’s true, I can’t say my brother was foolish. We’ll all be dead someday. If we don’t take the chance now, we never will. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes, I think it is.”

“Then this is true. I believe it can be different for me. If we have hope, it’s only logical to have faith. Margret fell asleep because you were holding her, and whether it was an illusion or not, whether you cared or not didn’t matter because she believed you did.”

“All right,” he said. “But don’t tell me anything about him. Not a word, not even his name—”

“It’s Etienne,” she said softly.

Docker waited in the dining room until she called him, then put out his cigarette and went into her small, cold bedroom, where a fragrance of dried flowers mingled on the air with the smoke from a snuffed-out candle.

Entering the church choir loft by a narrow, spiral staircase. Jocko and Corporal Trankic removed panels from the back of the organ and Trankic, on his hands and knees, with Jocko training a flashlight over his shoulder, worked almost two hours locating and repairing the transmitter’s malfunctions. After re-soldering the wires to their connections, he and Jocko spent another half hour fine-tuning the equipment. They sent signals in French and English from the La Chance transmitter, but as Trankic began to repeat the grid coordinates of the German plane’s position, he was interrupted by an incoming message.

Jocko held up his hand and leaned closer to the speaker, hearing over an eruption of static Paul Coutreau calling La Chance from Stavelot. Coutreau repeated his warning twice, telling them what his son Simon had seen in the woods near Lepont, his voice low and tense, a straining metallic whisper in the cold silence of the church.

December 21, 1944. Mont Reynard-Castle Rêve. Thursday, 2100 Hours.

“My shop’s in a street called Rue de Bas,” Henri Gervais said, examining a case of brandied cherries, the necks of the bottles gleaming with silver foil. “I haven’t seen this item since ’itler turned off the bloody lights in Paris. It’s right opposite the railway station, Yank, a bar and ’orehouse beside a packing plant.”

Larkin and Bonnard and the black-market dealer stood in the storeroom of Castle Rêve, Bonnard holding a lamp above his head, the light flaring across shelves stocked with foodstuffs and spirits. Gervais made an inventory on a note pad, occasionally stopping to admire the delicacies. He was small and compactly built, probably in his mid-forties, Larkin thought, wearing a black overcoat and a black fedora decorated with a spray of Alpine feathers. A smile flickered constantly below his narrow dark mustache.

Bonnard had explained that Gervais traveled with two sets of papers, one identifying him as a civilian employee of the German Army, the other as a technician assigned to a U.S. Army hospital unit. Gervais had come over from Liège on an ancient motorcycle, a thirty-odd-mile trip that took him more than four hours because, as he’d told them in his accented English, many stretches of road were under artillery fire.

Larkin tried to push away a morose conviction that he was getting in too deep, that his Irish ass would indeed be in a sling if Docker found out what he was up to. But he was as worried about this alley-smart Belgian prick as he was about his sergeant. He knew Gervais was out to shaft him, yet he still felt a need to please the man and earn his approval. And that confused and embittered him because in the cold storeroom surrounded by cases of foodstuffs whose names he couldn’t even pronounce, Larkin had gained an unwanted insight into the nature of class warfare, which wasn’t a war, he realized, wasn’t even a goddamn armistice, just a plain fucking surrender before a shot was fired by some slob scratching his poor man’s ass and hoping for a break from the shitty Gervaises of the world... He twisted the top off a bottle of Cutty Sark, and took a short pull from it, then said, “I haven’t heard any goddamn talk about money yet.”

“Wouldn’t be fair now, would it? I ask you, would it be fair, Yank, before I get the count on all these lovelies you’re selling?”

“Well, let’s snap a little shit.”

“Ah, there’s the soldier talking.” Gervais gave him an approving smile. “No wonder ’itler’s on the run with blokes like you nipping at his bloody heels.”

Larkin felt better then, warmed as much by Gervais’ conciliatory response as by the heat of the whiskey spreading through his body...

Bonnard went into the kitchens adjoining the storeroom to boil water for powdered coffee, and Gervais spent the next thirty minutes making a list of the merchandise. Then, after nodding thoughtfully at the totals, he squinted through cigarette smoke at Larkin.

“I might have missed the odd tin or two, but that could be in your favor as well as mine. Anyway, it’s the brandy and whiskey brings us home and dry.”

“Sure, in Paris a bottle of whiskey goes for thirty or forty dollars,” Larkin said.

“But we’re a long way from the Tour Eiffel and Pig Alley, aren’t we, Yank?” Gervais rubbed his fingertips together. “Payoffs every foot of the way. So, for the brandy and whiskey, for everything in the lot, I make it six thousand dollars. And that’s a fair price, take my word for it.”

“Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut?”

“I get your drift. Yes, I do, Yank. Shall we put it up to Bonnard?”

“No, I’m running this show.”

“But if the Heinies come back, who’ll be running it then? Dicey business, eh, Yank? I mean, who really owns this loot now? So I’ll tell you what. I’ll add a hundred to each of the three shares, makin’ it sixty-three hundred for the lot. Nothing could be fairer, Yank.”

It was probably a royal screwing, Larkin thought, but he said, “Then it’s half down now and half on delivery.”

“Sorry, Yank, I pay only on delivery. There’s a war on, don’t you see...”