1945 (22 page)

"I'll need logistical staff support."

"You've worked with General Eisenhower before. Right now he's my adjutant. I'll assign him to you. Nobody better for this kind of work."

"Ike's a good man. How's he doing?"

"General Eisenhower is doing very well. He is still unhappy that he didn't have a command last time, of course."

MacArthur chuckled. Too skilled a paper pusher for his own good."

Marshall unbent enough to make a wry face of sympathy for his adjutant, then turned to look at Halsey.

"Admiral, from you I would like a complete and detailed review of our fleet situation on the East Coast. I also want you to see to it that our active carriers on the East Coast are made ready for action immediately. And we can at least get started on the ones in mothballs—concentrate on the ones that can be made seaworthy relatively soon. But do it quietly. Cover it as 'training exercises' and so forth."

Halsey nodded. 'Til see what we can do."

"Fine. Now let's think about our Pacific resources. Task Force 43 is currendy off the China coast, scheduled to head back for Pearl on May 15th."

Halsey nodded.

Marshall paused to look at the calendar on his desk.

"You're giving them early leave for Easter. Pull them out and move them back to Pearl at top speed. Now. If we keep Task Force 56 at Pearl —you could say something's wrong again with the engines on
Yorktown
—that will give us eight carriers at Pearl ready to steam for the Canal at a moment's notice."

"Chiang will throw a fit," MacArthur said. "He was counting on that air support for the spring offensive in the north."

Marshall shrugged indifferently.

"What about Mountbatten in Indochina?" MacArthur added. "I promised him a carrier for air support against the Viet Minh."

"Thanks for informing me of that," Halsey snapped angrily, forgetting his earlier resolve.

MacArthur merely looked contemplative as Marshall glared at them.

"Let him complain to Churchill," Marshall finally said. "Why, in this day and age, the British are attempting to snatch a former French colony is beyond me. It is also beyond me why you want to help them."

MacArthur maintained his studious silence.

Marshall leaned back in his chair. "Let us hope that all this is a smoke screen for action to the east. In that case, who knows? Maybe they've put enough of a scare into us that when it is our turn, we'll be ready."

MacArthur smiled as he puffed on his corncob. "Bill, we'd best get to work."

April 14

OSS Headquarters Washington, D.C.

Bill Donovan smiled as he contemplated how Hoover would howl were he to discover the conduit from the Bureau to OSS. Actually there were several, all of them reporting directly to Donovan. Official channels were just fine for all the usual routine, but they weren't nearly as much fun and not nearly so reliable.

Take the report in front of him right now. It would never have wended its way to him via normal channels —yet something about it touched a nerve, even though the Bureau didn't think it worth pursuing.

Who to send down on it? After a moment's thought, the answer was obvious. He picked up the phone, drummed his desk impatiently while waiting for the Pentagon switchboard to route his call through.

"Martel? Time to get to work."

April 15

Charleston, South Carolina

Though it was still early spring, Charleston was already so hot that James Martel actually breathed a sigh of relief as the cool, formaldehyde-laden air swirled around him. The room he was in appeared empty, but he knew that the wall to his right was lined with roll-out trays on which lay the customers of this establishment.

"Mr. Martel—over here."

Martel followed the voice to a side alcove. When he turned the corner he was confronted by the body of an obese elderly man split from sternum to groin. The way the thick flaps of skin were pulled back brought to his mind the image of a butterfly pinned to a wall. The top of the skull was gone. The cranial cavity gaped empty.

Though embarrassed at his own weakness, Martelfound himself turning away. He'd thought himself inured to death, but he realized now that his exposure had been a limited one, nicely packaged in metal or from a distance, and none of his affair. Facing what he had just turned from required a different sort of nerve. After a short pause to find it, he summoned it forth.

"Care for some coffee?"

Martel looked back and saw the coroner step over to a side table where a pot was kept hot by a barely lit Bunsen burner. The heavyset medico pulled off his heavy rubber gloves, which glistened with half-congealed blood, and threw them into the sink. Taking off his rubber apron, the coroner draped it over the sink as well, and then poured out a cup of coffee. He came over to Martel, extending his hand

"Harry Weiss, and I assume you're Martel."

Jim took the doctor's hand, knowing that the offer to shake it was more a test of nerve than a friendly gesture.

Weiss looked into Martel's eyes and smiled.

"Ever seen a dead man before?"

Jim nodded.

"Just not up close?"

Again the sudden image of the Japanese pilot falling in flames ... "Something like that."

Weiss nodded and walked over to the line of steel locker doors. "Number eleven, this is him." The coroner pulled the door open and the steel tray, body atop it, rolled out. Martel had seen swollen, drowned bodies during the Pacific War, but he was not prepared for the stink. He choked back a gag.

Weiss smiled.

"Can I get a full copy of your report before I leave today?" Martel asked, after a moment.

"Can't you just get the copy the FBI took?"

"No. That would take too much time."

Weiss laughed softly. "And obviously this is troubling somebody to the point that they can't wait. Is that it?"

"You certainly enjoy asking questions in response to my questions," Martel snarled. "Look, pal, I don't know or care what your story is, but either you start answering me straight up, or let's go get your boss, so he can talk to
my
boss, which I promise you your boss will not enjoy one little bit. You get me?"

"Hey, no need to get testy. That's my job, asking questions." Weiss nodded placatingly down at the body. "He doesn't talk, but he's got plenty of answers if you know where to look."

That's better. Keep going."

"Six foot two, Caucasian, blond hair, gray eyes," Weiss began. "Cause of death, drowning. He'd have died of his injuries within minutes, but he never got the chance." Weiss traced his finger down the man's side. "Ruptured

spleen, four broken ribs—one punctured the left lung— ruptured kidneys, crushed pelvis, broken back: he was a mess, but the proximate cause of death was drowning."

"Was he beaten?"

"Nobody hits hard enough to do what was done to this man. It could have been a boom falling, or cargo shifting." He paused thoughtfully. "Whatever happened, he was in the ocean within a couple of seconds, a minute at most, following the event. He washed up off Morris Island, and from the way the tide was running at the time I suspect he floated in from the main channel. So it happened on a ship off the coast."

"Murder?"

Weiss shrugged. "Maybe. But no reason to think so. Much easier to simply club him and throw him overboard. Same result for less effort."

"Who found him?"

"A local ship, of course. But he's been dead two and a half days now. If it was local, like a fishing boat, we'd have had a 'missing' report. Nothing's come in."

"If it wasn't murder, why hasn't someone reported him lost?"

"Maybe the ship was from a distant port. Maybe they didn't notice him gone for a while. In that case there would be no good reason to report immediately, and plenty of reason not to. Reporting a man missing means tying up the ship for a day or two and answering a lot of questions. Believe me, there's more than one ship coming in here that can do without that, even the legit ones—and every day a ship sits doing nothing costs the owners a great deal of money. So they keep on going and when they get back home, or wherever it is they're heading, they report him lost then. But I still can't figure what could have done all that to him,
and
knocked him overboard without somebody noticing. It's almost as if he was caught between 
two hulls, But what would two boats be doing that close 
to each other?"

While Weiss was holding forth, intent on showing off his deductive skills now that he had finished with being a general pain in the butt, Martel looked down at the body, examining the face. The eyelids, lips, and part of the nose were gone, as if he had been attacked by rats.

Weiss followed Jim's gaze.

"Ever since I got into this job I can't eat fish anymore. I always find myself wondering about their last meal."

There was something about the face that Martel found vaguely familiar. It was like a memory that tickled at the back of his mind that he somehow should know this man but simply couldn't place him.

"You've given me the general information. Now give me your gut feeling, your hunches, the kind of thing that doesn't wind up in a typed report."

Weiss looked down at the body and smiled. "Well, for one thing, he's not a manual laborer."

"How can you tell that?"

"Even after days in the water you can still see that every muscle on this man's body is toned. Manual laborers tend to develop some muscles more than others. Sometimes I can look at a dead man and tell you just what he did for a living, but not this one. I can tell you a lot of things he doesn't do—things like construction work and even fishing leave lifelong marks on your hands—but not what he does. And he's no mere gymnasium habitue; he's had a couple of injuries. Look: his right leg was broken several years back, a compound fracture." Weiss pointed to the scar. "And whoever patched him up did a hurried job of it." As he spoke he traced out the long white scar. "My guess is it's from a gunshot wound."

"How can you tell that?" Martel asked quietly. He pulled out a small notepad, started to write.

"This man isn't somebody from the backwoods. He's a sleek, well-oiled machine who must have received first-rate medical treatment. The stitch job was either done by an amateur or by a doctor who had fifty or a hundred other 
cases to deal with. That usually means a battlefield."

The coroner moved back to the other end of the table, tapped the body's front teeth. "He's also had three teeth knocked out, and his nose was broken several times. Plus he has a deviated septum of the type typically seen on prize fighters."

Martel, nodding, continued to write, and then paused for a second.

"Something I say. hit you?"

"I'm not sure."

"Anyhow, he's European, not American."

"From his clothes?"

"All his clothes were made in the USA, and that in itself is interesting. They were brand new, not even any lint in his pockets. For that matter, he had nothing in his pockets, no cigarettes, wallet, matches, even loose change. He was totally clean. You usually find that with someone who doesn't want anyone to know who he is."

"So why European?"

Weiss casually pointed down to the dead man's privates. "Most Americans are circumcised. In Europe, only the Jews, those who are still alive. Obviously, our dearly departed here never had the experience." Weiss paused for a moment, as if remembering. "It's one of the ways the SS does a quick check: forces a suspected Jew to lower his pants. Nothing definitive, of course. But this one's pristine condition does increase the odds he started life in Europe." Weiss returned his attention to the corpse's mouth, which was open in a death-grimace, and pointed inside it.

"His dental work seems European, too: three fillings, all of them gold."

"I have a gold filling myself," Martel commented.

"And probably one or two that are not. But there are other little pointers. Even though he's well built, some bone structuring indicates that for a couple of years in early childhood he didn't eat well. In fact, he barely ate at all, say around 1918 and 1919." Weiss paused to assess the effect

he was having. "I could go on but I think you want th punch line."

"Something like that."

Weiss gestured at the cadaver with a slight flourish: "The specimen was a German soldier from an elite unit. He was up to no good."

"Did you tell that to the FBI?"

"Of course I did."

"And?"

"They said they'd get back to me, but I could tell they thought I was crazy."

Without otherwise responding, Martel looked back down at the body.

"So why German?"

"Because his last meal, what little there was of it — I think he may have been seasick not long before his end— was sausages and sauerkraut."

- "What the hell does that mean? He could be a Pole for that matter," Martel snapped, suddenly remembering his own childhood and the taunting he had endured at school over the "foreign" smells coming from his house.