Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

Near big towns, Larkin knew, the traffic would be too heavy for the MPs to check everything on wheels, so he swung the truck into a downgrade and started back toward the valley and the river, figuring it was safe now for the final run into Liège. But when he came off the hill he saw a group of American soldiers standing near a recon car at the junction of the Salm River road. He told himself he didn’t have anything to worry about, the stuff he and Bonnard had packed into the truck was concealed by tarpaulins lashed from the top of the truck right down to the tailgate. Still, he felt a coldness in his stomach when one of the soldiers, an officer, stepped into the road and waved him down with a flashlight. He was sixty or seventy yards from them, so he braked the truck to a crawl to give himself time to think... Play it nice and easy now, real businesslike. On a tight schedule, hooking up with an outfit in Liège. Meeting a supply train. Something like that was always good. Or say they told me to pick up a general. General who? How the fuck do I know? They just said he’s wearing two stars, waiting at the railroad station, move your ass, corporal...

Larkin rolled the window down and saluted an American captain.

“What’s your name and outfit, soldier?”

“Corporal Matt Larkin, sir. The Two hundred sixty-ninth Automatic Weapons Battalion.”

“Where you heading?”

“Liège, sir.”

“Let’s have a look at your orders.”

“Well, I don’t have any, captain. Not written ones, anyway. We been out of touch for a week. This morning one of our officers told me to get over to Liège and pick up some other guys from the battery.”

“What the hell they doing in Liège?”

“It’s mostly the Headquarters clerks.” The inventions flowed easily and smoothly. “They got knocked out of their position the first day of the attack and hitched a ride with some medics over there.”

“What’re your officers’ names, corporal?”

“Lieutenant Bart Whitter and Lieutenant Longworth, sir. The B.C. is Captain Joe Grant.”

Several of the other soldiers came and stood behind the captain. One of them walked to the rear of the truck, inspecting the stake and lashings with his flashlight. They all wore MP brassards and VIII Corps shoulder patches on their overcoats and field jackets.

“We’re checking out everybody, corporal. The Germans have dropped troops around here in GI uniforms.”

“Yeah, we heard about that, sir.”

“Where you from in the States?”

“Lower East Side of Manhattan, sir.”

“Which way is Wall Street? Uptown or downtown?”

“About as far downtown as you can get, sir.”

“What’s the tallest building?”

“Empire State, sir.”

“What do they plant in Madison Square Garden?”

Larkin grinned and said, “Cauliflowers, sir.”

The captain looked a bit puzzled and his men shifted their weight and stared at Larkin. “I’m not sure I understand,” the captain said slowly.

Larkin felt a dryness in his throat. Stop the dumb jokes. Stop being a wise guy... play it straight...

“Cauliflowers, like in cauliflower ears, sir. The way the fighters get banged up, their ears get lumpy.”

“Yes, sure.”

And then, because Larkin felt he was practically home free, he grinned and said, “Maybe I better check you out, too, captain. Where you from in the States?”

“That’s smart, corporal. No point taking chances. I’m from Chicago.”

“What’re the names of your baseball clubs?”

“Cubs and White Sox. Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, Hack Wilson, Kiki Cuyler, Ted Lyons. Want some batting averages?”

“Frankly, I’d just like to haul ass, sir.”

“Well, if you’re ever in Chicago, stop and give a big hello to the little lady.”

While Larkin was wondering what that meant, the captain pulled back the sleeve of his overcoat and showed Larkin the blue and gold figure of a fan dancer tattooed on his wrist. “Sally Rand brings you greetings, and hopes her memory will send you speeding off to the whorehouses in Liège.”

Larkin smiled appreciatively, and he and the captain exchanged salutes.

One of the MPs waved him on, shouting, “Okay, buddy, move it, move it! Get the lead in!”

“An Italian salute to your mother, too,” Larkin yelled back at him, and cranked up the window, accelerating rapidly as he turned onto the empty road flanking the river.

He was still grinning and could see the flash of his teeth in the windshield, gleaming against his dark unshaven face. His spirits were exuberant. That business had gone off pretty damn good, and Larkin decided he’d earned himself a drink. So it’s not who you know but whom, was it? Fuck him, fuck everybody, he thought, and took a short sip of whiskey...

And then he remembered what the MP had shouted at him, and suddenly he felt the blood draining from his face. The whiskey couldn’t touch a dreadful coldness spreading down his legs and paralyzing his loins. The muscles in his stomach contracted abruptly and violently, the pain so agonizing it made his eyes water. He began coughing, his body wracked by convulsive spasms.

“Get the lead in! ” Not out . Jesus, the guy had said get the lead in . And the captain didn’t know about cauliflower ears...

Corporal Matthew Larkin thought of the twenty-one hundred dollars and Agnes and a bartender named Tony at a steak house he liked in the Bronx, a place called Jackson’s on Fordham Road with sawdust on the floor, or maybe it was Dolbey’s where the Yankee ballplayers liked to eat after the games. Docker would probably know... but there was no time to think of anything else, because the dynamite charges on the frozen road exploded under the truck then and hurled the motor into his chest and a thousand fragments of glass into his already sightless eyes.

December 22, 1944. Mont Reynard-sur-Lepont. Friday, 1800 Hours.

Winds swept the dark Salm Valley, making keening sounds as they battered the mountainside. In the thickening dusk, Docker could no longer see the Tiger Mark II but he knew it was still there in the stand of fir trees; if it had changed positions, they would have heard the noise of its engine and tracks. However, he wasn’t sure whether the officer had returned; the wind at times had been strong enough to muffle the sound of any motorcar.

The men of the section were deployed in defensive positions on the perimeter of the hill, Kohler, Linari and Dormund with grenades and bazookas while the others manned the cannon and machine guns. Docker had nothing in reserve and no way to relieve the soldiers who had been at their posts for hours. With Baird under technical arrest and Farrel detailed to guard him, the section’s already slender strength was cut by almost twenty percent. In addition, Docker decided as he patrolled the cliff’s edge, Larkin had probably stopped somewhere, curled up with a bottle for the night, so they couldn’t expect any help from him until the morning.

Trankic joined him to report they were still out of radio contact with Battery and Battalion. “But I got a couple of signals from First Army and some Kraut outfits at St. Vith and Bastogne. Christ, Bull, the whole fucking front’s falling apart. Bastogne ain’t gonna last the night, they’re throwing heavy stuff in there from three hundred and sixty degrees. So we got the Fifth, the Tenth Armored and the Twenty-sixth on the way, and up north the First and Second and Ninth are on the line, but what about now...?”

Farrel came around the revetment and said, “Sarge, maybe you better take a look at Baird, okay?”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Farrel shrugged. “I tried talking to him but he’s kind of mixed up, like he’s got a fever or something.”