Ordinary Heroes (11 page)

I had long recognized that the hardest part of life in a war zone was that there was so often no routine, no order, nothing to count on. Every moment was a novelty. But this display exceeded even the limite
d b
oundaries that remained. I was literally struck dumb.

"Touche," I finally said, the only word I could think of, which brought another outburst of laughter while she smothered down her skirt. By pure chance, I had come off as a wit.

"We are primitive, Dubin. If we are not to be, then we require one another's assistance. But first know who we are.

I gave a simple nod. Satisfied she had made a potent demonstration, Mademoiselle Lodz strolled from the cowshed, looking back from the sunlight with a clever smile. I waited in the shadows. She would treat this as a prank, but free to watch from the darkness, I had a sudden vision of Gita Lodz and the riot of feeling that underlay her boldness. Her upbringing in scorn had left her with no choice but to defy convention, yet despite her confident airs and the stories she wished to believe, I sensed, almost palpably, that her personality was erected on a foundation of anger, and beneath that, pain. When I stepped back into the sun, some sadness must have clung to the way I looked at her, which I could tell was entirely unexpected. As we considered each other something fell away, and she turned heel immediately, headed toward the house.

I caught up, but we trudged back in silence. It wa
s s
he who spoke finally, as we approached the little castle.

"Have I offended you, Dubin?"

"Of course not. I challenged you. You responded. Convincingly."

"But you are shocked."

"Pay no attention. I am easily shocked, Mademoiselle Lodz."

"Good for you," she said. "In France, no one will admit to being bourgeois."

I laughed. "In America, it is the universal aspiration. But I still must respect proprieties. I am sent to inquire of a man. The law might question my impartiality if I was interested instead in looking at his woman in her dainties."

"Not his woman. I am not with Martin in that way, Dubin. That is done between us. Long ago."

I thought of Martin embracing her in the kitchen.

"I have heard many refer to you as his woman."

"That is convenient for both of us. There are soldiers everywhere, Dubin. It is better to be known as spoken for. Do not be repelled for Martin's sake. Only your own." She gave me that sly smile. "A la prochaine," she said--Until next time-
-
and breezed through the door, restored to her former self.

Biddy was waiting there. We needed to be back at the 18th before dark, but I was still reverberating like a struck bell. It had been months since I'd had anything to do with a woman, except with the clinical neutrality of a lawyer interviewing witnesses, and I had forgotten the pull that seemed to emanate from every cell. I had been resolutely faithful to Grace, even in the brothel atmosphere of London, where the joke went that every girl's knickers had the same flaw: one Yank and they were off. There I had known what to expect. Sex was everywhere--you could hear the moans when you passed a supposedly unoccupied air raid shelter, or walked in the dark through Hyde Park. The U
. S
. soldiers, with their Arrid and Odo*Ro*No, seemed rich and well-groomed compared to the poor beaten-down Brits, who had a single uniform and their noisy hobnailed boots. Now both Biddy and I were looking at the doorway through which Gita had gone.

"You have a girl at home, Biddy?" I asked.

"Hope. Had one, but let her get away. Joyce Washington. Courted with her all through high school. Was het up to marry, too. She got herself a job typing at the First National Bank. And there was some fella there, Lieutenant, I guess he just swept her off her feet. And her with my ring on her finger. She come to tell me and I said to her, 'How can you do this, go off with another man when you promised yourself to me?' And you know what she says? She says, 'Gideon, he's got a Hudson.' Can you imagine? I honestly got to say, Lieutenant, I really don't think it was the letdown that bothered me s
o m
uch as wondering how in all get-out I could have been fool enough to love a woman like that." He fixed on the distance while the pain swamped him again, then shook it off.

"I done all right with those English girls," he said, "but I can't make head or tail of these Frenchies. All that ooh-la-la junk may go in Paris, but out this way, these are just country gals, Lieutenant, and it ain't no different than in Georgia, mamas tell them all their lives to keep their legs crossed till the day they say 'I do,' war or no war. What about you, Lieutenant? You been makin any time?" Unconsciously perhaps, his eyes diverted toward the doorway.

"I have a fiancee back home, Biddy." We both knew this was not a direct response. Eisley, with a wife in Ohio, could explain in utter seriousness how all formalities, especially marriage vows, were suspended during times of war. But I left it at that.

Martin had stepped out of the house, still flushed from the wine and smiling hugely. I took it that he'd had a word with Gita and had come outside to say goodbye to us.

"So I hear we actually found your precious papers. I could tell you came here with the wrong impression. Mark my words, Dubin, Teedle is trying to stir things up. He's giving orders where he has no call to."

"Mademoiselle Lodz says he has a grudge against you.

"That would be one way to put it." His blue eyes went for a moment to the horizon, the first occasion when I had seen him measure his words. "Look, Dubin, sooner or later you're going to figure out what this is all about. You don't need my faccuse.

If you'd rather I not share your response with General Teedle--"

"Oh, I don't care a fig about Teedle. Look, Dubin, it's this simple. He thinks I'm a Communist. Because I fought in Spain. After the Axis, the Soviets are next. I'm the new enemy. Or so he believes."

Are you?"

"An enemy of the United States? I should say not.

"A Communist, sir."

"I've been fighting too long, Dubin, to call myself anything. I believe in power for the powerless, food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless. Does that make me a revolutionary? Here, Dubin, it all comes down to this. The man is wasting your time and he knows it. I intend to fulfill my mission. And I won't allow Teedle to get in my way, or bog me down with Army folderol. I can melt into this landscape, or that of any other place from here to Berlin, if I choose."

He gave me a pointed look. I was startled by th
e o
penness with which he discussed insubordination, but there was no chance for rejoinder, because both of us were drawn to the buzz of planes overhead. Martin was immediately on alert, like a pointer in the field, squinting to search the sky. But the aircraft were ours.

"B-z6s, I reckon," he said then. "They're going to take advantage of the break in the weather to bomb."

Just as he predicted, the heavy sounds echoed a few minutes later. At first, the distant bombardment was like oil popping in a skillet, but as the squadrons kept passing overhead, the noise came closer. A barrier of smoke and dust arose and drifted back to us, damming the light and ghosting over the Comtesse's fields, carrying along the odor of gunpowder. We could hear German antiaircraft fire. No more than a mile ahead, we saw a plane burst into flame and parachutes bloom in the sky.

A number of the farmworkers as well as Antonio had joined us on the cobbles as spectators. Martin asked the Gypsy about the position of the 26th Infantry to be certain they would be able to reach the downed fliers. While this discussion was under way, another squadron passed, flying lower. We had been trading around a pair of field glasses that someone had brought from the house and when I took my turn, I could see the bomb bays open beneat
h t
he planes. I had just remarked on this to Martin, when an explosion shook the air around us, and a column of fire rose on the next hill.

"Lord," said Martin. "We'll be lucky if they don't drop on us as well." He looked up one more time, then dashed into the little castle, yelling first to Gita, then everyone else. He emerged in seconds behind the Comtesse and her servants. In both English and French, he commanded everyone into the old stone cellar beneath the house. He stood at the door, shooing all of us down, ordering us to be quick. The workers came running out of the fields, some still in waders they had been wearing in the flooded lower grounds. I was already in the earthen-floored cellar when another detonation reverberated, closer than the first. I looked to the entrance to see about Martin, but he appeared in a moment, slamming the door behind him and thumping down the stairs. The cellar was no more than six feet high and there was now no light. I'd seen Biddy hunched in the corner, next to the shelves of jarred fruits and an adjoining wall racked with dusty bottles of wine. There must have been twenty people huddled in the dark. The air quickly grew close. There were the usual jokes. One of the women said, "Keep your hands to yourself," and a man responded, "You, as well." In a far corner, a cat was meowing.

"D'ici peu, on va se sentir tous comme de
s c
ons," someone remarked across the room. In a moment we will feel like fools. He had barely spoken, when the atmosphere was rent by the fabulous concussion of an explosion directly overhead.

The Germans still had 28omm railway artillery pieces in the Vosges elevated over Nancy, and once or twice a day the cry of incoming fire would ring out and everyone in the court-martial session would scramble into the cellar of the Lycee, waiting for the big boom of the shells. But that was no preparation for being bombed. The air seemed to slam shut on me, then opened briefly only to pound me again, while the earth literally jostled beneath our feet. I felt the shock across my entire body--even my cheeks and eyeballs were compressed. And the sound was worse. I had never understood until that moment that noise alone, even when you knew its source, could be loud enough to inspire panic. My ears went numb, then revived, throbbing.

In the instant afterward, I assumed the house had been struck and would collapse on us, but there was no sign of that. Instead there was light now. Eventually I realized that the wooden door of the cellar had been blown off. Martin went out first and in time called down that it was safe to emerge. Coming up into the daylight, I noticed that my boots were soaked with wine.

The crater of the bomb, the depth and the size of a small pond, had disturbed earth all the way to th
e h
ouse, but the actual point of impact seemed to have been about 15o yards away in the pasture. Everyone who had been in the cellar radiated off to inspect the damage. It was quickly determined there were no human casualties, although a number of those who had been near the cellar walls had been struck by falling bottles and several had been cut, including Biddy, who had pulled a shard the size of an arrowhead out of his arm.

Around the farm, the Comtesse's chicks and her one cow were nowhere to be found, and a horse was dead, keeled over like a life-size toy with his lips raveled back fearfully over his huge teeth. The family dog had literally been blown to bits. His leather collar was about a hundred yards from the house. I suspected that the blast that blew off the cellar door had been the end of the hound, who had probably been cowering there.

As for the little castle, the damage was moderate. All the rear windows had been blown out, and their shutters were gone. A piece of the roof had been ripped off like the corner of a sheet of paper. Inside, I saw that much of the crockery had shattered. For the Comtesse de Lemolland, this proved too much. She had withstood the death of a spouse and a son with dignity, and the destruction of her husband's chateau, but the loss of an old delft plate that her mother had hung on the wall sixty years ago somehow exceeded her meager abilities to carry on. Sh
e w
as on the wooden floor of the kitchen, her skirt billowed about her, while she gathered the chalky pieces in her hands and wailed in complete abandon. Gita held one shoulder to comfort her.

I fled outside, where Martin still searched the sky with the field glasses to be sure we were safe.

"Did they lose their coordinates?" I asked.

"Perhaps," said Martin, then erupted in a sharp laugh. "Perhaps not." He lowered the binoculars to look at me. "I rather suspect, Dubin, we've all had a greeting card from General Teedle."

Chapter
7.

STEWART: BEAR LEACH

Northumberland Manor occupied a large campus in West Hartford, a collection of white clapboard buildings containing various facilities for the elderly, everything from independent housing to hospice, and the several other stages in between as decline rolls downhill to death. Arriving early, I awaited Justice Barrington Leach, my father's long-ago lawyer, in the front room of the Manor's nursing home. With its wall-to-wall robin's-egg carpeting and nice Ethan Allen furnishings, the place presented itself as far superior to the usual holding tank for the barely living.

Given everything it had taken to get to Leach, including passing myself off as a lately orphaned only child, I sat there with high expectations. Leach, afte
r a
ll, was a longtime legal hotshot, whose skills had somehow allowed him to erase his trial loss and persuade General Teedle to revoke my father's conviction and prison sentence. Thus, I couldn't help being disappointed when a nurse's aide pushed the old man into the room. Overall, Justice Leach gave the physical impression of a fallen leaf crisped down to its veins. His spotty bald head listed, barely rising above the back of his wheelchair, and the hose from an oxygen tank was holstered in his nose. He had been so whittled by age that his sturdy Donegal tweed suit, perhaps older than I am, was puddled around him, and his skin had begun to acquire a whitish translucence which signaled that even the wrapper was giving out.