Under a War-Torn Sky (22 page)

Henry fell to his knees. He gagged and vomited and collapsed face-down beside the mess, convulsed with trembling. He'd never escape. He'd never see home. He'd die, terrorized, broken, a slobbering joke. He heaved sickening, retching sobs.

It was a tiny thing that stopped his crying. Something wet and warm touched his fingertips. Startled, Henry tried to focus his eyes along the floor. The dog's blood was oozing across the stones towards him. Pretty soon it would trickle to his face.

Henry looked at the dog. Its eyes were open, staring at Henry. It was still alive.

Henry sat up. The dog whimpered piteously. The Gestapo officer had hit it in the shoulder. It was going to die a slow, awful death, its life seeping out in thimblefuls.

The sight of a dog in such pain knocked Henry into delirium. In the dark, the Doberman became Henry's childhood pet, Skippy – the dog hit by a truck that Clayton had made Henry put down when he was eleven years old.

“Skippy?” Henry whispered. “You hurt bad, fella?” He crawled towards the dog.

Thump, thump, thump.
The Doberman's tail wagged weakly at the kind voice.

Gently, Henry picked up the dog and cradled it in his arms.

“Dad!” he cried out. “Dad, help me! He's hurt.”

Clayton's voice came out of the blackness.
He's your dog, boy. You gotta stop his misery.

“I can't, Dad. I can't shoot Skippy. I love him.”

What am I going to do with you, boy? Love's got responsibilities. Things you gotta do even if you don't want to. That's the kind of love a real man is capable of.

Is that why his father did the things he did? Is that why he was so harsh with Henry?

“Do you love me, Dad?” Henry sobbed.

Silence.

“Dad? Dad? Do you love me?”

Clayton's voice was distant, fading:
Shoot the dog, boy. Shoot the dog now…

“Dad?”

The dog whimpered and Henry kept calling until sometime in the night they both fell silent.

A sinister laugh woke Henry the next day. He still clutched the dog's body. It was cold and stiff. Henry was covered in its blood and his own vomit.

“Not a very presentable sight, American,” the Gestapo officer mocked him. He pulled up the chair and sat down, inches from Henry. “Certainly not the way you'd like to present yourself to a lady, especially one with elegant taste.” As he spoke, he slowly pulled a silk scarf out of his uniform's breast pocket. It was long, rose coloured, festooned with flowers.

Henry knew he had seen that scarf somewhere before. But he was muddled from the horrors of the previous night. He pulled the dead dog up against his heart, the way a child hugs a teddy bear.

The Nazi pressed the scarf to his face, breathing in deeply. “Aaaaahhh. It still carries the scent of expensive perfume.” He passed it under Henry's nose. “Anything you recognize?”

Slowly, Henry's mind began to clear. The scent was familiar somehow. But it wasn't Ma's. It wasn't Patsy's. It was… Henry snapped his eyes to the ground so the Nazi couldn't read them. He knew whose perfume and whose scarf it was. It was Madame Gaulloise's.

The Gestapo officer leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs, seemingly satisfied with Henry's reaction. “This was sent to me by the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Hauptsturmführer Barbie. He is having some diplomatic trouble because of a prisoner who has Swiss citizenship. He is certain that she has been smuggling Americans, who should have been interned, out of Switzerland into France. But the Swiss are protesting her arrest. If he can find one American whom she transported across the line, he can hang her. So far, despite all his efforts, she has eluded his questions. You are going to help him with that.”

The Nazi leaned over and hissed: “You see, you have betrayed her, without even knowing it. You told me your name, your serial number, thinking as a coward to protect yourself from questioning. You never appeared on any of our POW lists. So I checked with Swiss authorities. There is a record of you in a Bern hospital, plus the fact you disappeared on route to Adelboden. Now how did that happen, Second Lieutenant Henry Wiley Forester?”

Henry's heart sank. The Army had repeatedly told them to respond with name, rank, and serial number if caught. He had hoped it would save him from interrogation. The Nazi was right about that. But he should have known better. Oh, God. What had these monsters done to Madame?

Henry clung to double-talk. “I flew here, sir.”

One painful slap knocked the defiant look off Henry's face. “We're driving to Lyon, American,” the Nazi snarled. “You will find me gentle compared to Klaus Barbie.”

An hour later, Henry had been fed some bread, hosed with cold water, and dressed in black-and-grey-striped prison clothes. His hands were shackled in front of him. He was thrown into the back seat of a plush German staff car, next to the Gestapo officer. A soldier drove.

It would take a long, long day of driving across the rugged plateaus of France's Massif Central to reach Lyon. Strangely, the Gestapo officer described the history of the region and its volcanic origins to Henry as if they were travelling companions. The dialogue unnerved him. What was the sadist after now? Henry refused to look at the passing countryside to which the Nazi pointed.

Instead he focused on the two little red flags with swastikas on the front of the car, flapping in the wind. They were banners of the devil, Henry told himself. No matter how nice this jerk is now, he's evil. Remember that, Forester. The Luftwaffe had been terrifying in their flying accuracy. But Henry bet most of them were just soldiers, doing what they'd been told, fighting to protect their homeland from Allied bombs. This man, though, this man enjoyed causing pain. Henry had to find a way out of the car so that he didn't endanger Madame. He had to.

Once he reached for the door to hurl himself out, but the Nazi only laughed and held onto Henry's chains.

Eventually, Henry realized that the officer's monologue was a way of bragging about new possessions, claiming an appreciation of something to justify stealing it. In all his descriptions of the chateaux, the statues, the churches, there was no mention of the French citizens who had created them.

Only once did the Nazi mention people. He pointed west and said, “Along that road, about two hundred kilometres away, you would come to Limoges. They make excellent porcelain there. I have sent some dishes, very fine, to my wife. They cost me nothing. She was extremely pleased.”

He turned to Henry with his familiar sneer. “You would have liked that region, American. Many French terrorists are there. But we have eradicated them – the SS – not regular army, they are such idiots, very squeamish. I believe Oradour-sur-Glane was the name of the village. One of our officers had been killed by the local
maquis
and we suspected the populace of committing other treasons against the Reich. So we rounded up all six hundred inhabitants – men into barns; women and children into a church. We locked them in and torched the buildings. They burned to death. That should stop these French curs from thinking they can resist the Reich.”

Henry froze with horror. How could human beings light a fire around six hundred people – children, women, and the elderly included – and then watch them burn alive? He gaped at the Gestapo officer.

The Nazi leered triumphantly. “We will have the world, Lieutenant. Including your precious United States of America. Then we will purge it, as we are purging Europe. It is only a matter of time.”

Late in the afternoon, the driver turned and spoke to the officer. He nodded and informed Henry: “About thirty more minutes. Looking forward to seeing your old friend?” He took out Madame's silk scarf, twisted the ends in his fists, and snapped the scarf several times as he continued, “Klaus informed me she was beautiful, very stylish when they picked her up. Of course, she probably doesn't look quite the same these days. I promise to end it quickly for her, Lieutenant Henry Wiley Forester, if you cooperate. If not…” He shrugged.

Henry sent a blood prayer, rejecting all of his Sunday school teachings.
Just give me an opening, Lord, so I can get this guy.

They had descended out of the mountains by now, but the road was still windy and narrow. Fences made of great piles of fieldstones edged the road, blocking the view around curves.

On a wicked twist in the road, Henry's prayer was answered.

The driver swerved to miss a herd of white cows that loitered in the lane, bells tinkling. The sudden lurch threw the Gestapo officer into Henry. They whacked heads and fell into a heap against the door. Henry could feel the Nazi's Luger pistol jammed against his hands.

Grab the gun, boy!

Adrenaline and hatred charged Henry. He grabbed at the Nazi's belt and managed to pull the Luger out. Instantly the Nazi gripped Henry's hands.

It was a life-or-death tug-of-war that Henry would have lost, as beaten down and weak as he was, except for the fact that the car was spinning out of control. The wild swerving and rolling tossed Henry and the Nazi back and forth on top of one another. In all the pitching confusion, Henry somehow managed to hang on to the pistol. The car's spin threw Henry atop the Gestapo agent one last time, pressing the gun against the Nazi's heart as Henry fell on him. The Nazi grabbed at Henry's throat and squeezed hard. Choking, beginning to black out, Henry squeezed the trigger.

BANG!

The Nazi seemed to explode, drenching Henry with his blood.

Henry heard the driver curse, heard him grabbing at something, and struggling to turn around.

Shoot him, boy. Shoot him.

In desperation, Henry fought against the jolting of the car to push himself off the dead Nazi and turn towards the driver. His hands were so bloody the pistol kept slipping. But just as the barrel of the driver's gun came up and aimed at Henry's face, he managed to hold up the Luger. Both guns fired. Henry felt something whizz and scream along his skull.

He clutched his ear.

The driver fell onto the steering wheel.

HHHONNNNNK!
The horn blasted as the car careened into a ditch and finally stopped.

Henry slammed his head on the window as he reeled around inside the rolling car. But he remained conscious. Dazed, he dropped the gun and pulled the driver off the horn to stop the telltale noise. Then he fumbled in the officer's pockets, found the keys, and undid his manacles.

Hurry, boy, hurry.

Henry fell out of the car and ran, ran with all he had, ran for twenty minutes.

Finally, he threw himself down in a ravine, beside a small brook. Gasping to catch his breath, Henry reached into the stream to try to wash himself clean of blood. It was everywhere – his hands, his face, his hair, his clothes, his soul. How would he ever be clean of all that blood? He had killed two men – not from the anonymity of the sky – but face to face, with his own hands. Besides that, he'd wanted to kill them, was glad that he killed them so that he could live. He'd had murder in his heart. He couldn't wash that out.

Henry knew that he was changed for ever, and not for the better.

For two weeks, Henry scuttled into shadows at the sound of humans. He couldn't be seen. His face was battered and swollen. There was a scorch mark along his temple and ear where the driver's bullet had grazed his head. There'd be no mistaking the fact that he was an escaped prisoner, especially if the Nazis had searched for him and alerted residents to his existence.

He'd ditched his prison clothes that first night. He found pants drying on a clothesline. They were too short and soaking wet, but he pulled them on, shivering with the damp. The only top he could find was a woman's red sweater. He knew he must look ridiculous in it, but he wasn't about to chance getting that close to a house again. Dogs had howled and lights had come on inside when he grabbed that sweater. Besides, the sweater was better than the black-and-grey striped shirt that clearly marked him as a wanted man. He buried the prison garb deep in mud under a pig's sty. Then he changed the direction he was walking in case they were found.

Before that moment he'd headed what felt like west. It would be logical for him to push in that direction, to the coast, or south again to the Pyrenees. If the Nazis were bothering to look for him – and surely they were since he'd murdered two of their men – they'd expect him to run that way. So Henry now headed north, following the North Star, the final light in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation. But he had no purpose other than to feed himself and to avoid detection. He had no idea where or how to find the Resistance in this region. He wasn't even sure where he was.

He tried not to think about the two corpses, the men he'd robbed of life. He could dismiss his Gestapo tormentor more easily, but the driver haunted Henry. He was just a driver. Did he have children somewhere who'd now grow up fatherless? A wife who'd become destitute without his pay cheques?

Even though it was summer, the nights were cold. Heavy dew settled on everything, including Henry. He tried to keep moving through the night, from farm to farm, looking for something to snatch – dried apples, a bit of milk from a cooperative cow, a jar of honey, grain. He salivated over the fat black hens but knew that he should not light a fire to cook them. He ate the few eggs of theirs he found, slurping them down raw. He counted himself lucky if he found one handful of edible food a day. He refused to acknowledge the fact that he'd become a thief, stealing from people who verged on starvation themselves.

During daylight hours Henry shunned the sunlight, creeping into dark hiding places. He huddled in hollow trees or the four-foot-high ferns that lined the roadside. He tried to sleep, but worry kept him from all rest beyond catnaps. Would the Swiss be able to pressure the Gestapo to release Madame now that he couldn't be used to identify her? Henry tried to imagine her in her elegant suits and scarves, using her wit to befuddle the Gestapo as he had witnessed her outfox other men – not beaten down, filthy, starved. He couldn't stand the idea that this remarkable lady would be destroyed because of him.