Descendant (2 page)

I went downstairs again and knocked on the old widow’s door. The two children were kneeling on the window seat looking down at the street below. A ray of sunlight was shining through the boy’s ears, so that they glowed scarlet.

The old widow lifted her head to see me through the lower half of her bifocals, and made a kind of silent snarl as she did so.

“Did you see anything?” I asked her, in Flemish.

“No. But I heard it. Bumping, and loud talking, and footsteps. They were Germans.”

“The Germans aren’t here any more. The Germans have been driven back to the other side of the Albert Canal.”

“These were Germans. No question.”

I looked at the children. I guessed that the girl was about six and the boy wasn’t much older than four. In those days, though, European children were much smaller and thinner than American children, after years of rationing.

“Do you think they saw anything?”

“I pray to God that they didn’t. It was three o’clock in the morning and it was very dark.”

“You want a cigarette?” I asked her.

She sniffed and nodded. I shook out a Camel for her, and lit it. She breathed in so deeply that I thought that she was never going to breathe out again. While I waited, I lit a cigarette for myself, too.

“You mentioned the night people,” I told her.
Mensen van de nacht
. I hadn’t told Captain Kosherick about that.

“That’s what they were, weren’t they? You know that. That’s why you’re here.”

I blew out smoke and pointed to the ceiling. “What was her name? Had she been living here long?”

“Ann. Ann De Wouters. She came here last April, I think it was. She was very quiet, and her children were very quiet, too. But I saw her once talking to Leo Coopman and I know they weren’t discussing the price of sausages.”

“Leo Coopman?”

“From the White Brigade.”

The White Brigade were the Belgian resistance. Even now they were helping the British and the Canadians to keep their hold on the Antwerp docks. Antwerp was a weird place in the fall of ’44. The whole city was filled with liberation fever, almost a hysteria, even though the Germans were still occupying many of the northern suburbs. Some Belgians were even cycling from the Allied part of the city into the German part of the city to go to work, and then cycling back again in the evening.

I gave the old woman my last five cigarettes. “Do you mind if I talk to the children?”

“Do what you like. You can’t make things any worse for them than they already are.”

I went over to the window seat. The boy was peering
down at three Canadian Jeeps in the street below, while the girl was picking the thread from one of the old brown seat cushions. The boy glanced at me, but said nothing, while the girl didn’t look up at all.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl. My cigarette smoke drifted across the window and the boy furiously waved it away.

“Agnes,” the girl told me, in a whisper.

“And your brother?”

“Martin.”

“Mrs. Toeput says that Mommy was sick so she’s gone to Hummel,” Martin announced, brightly. The Flemish word for “heaven” is “hemel” so he must have misunderstood what the old woman had told him. The girl looked up at me then, and the appeal in her eyes was almost physically painful. He doesn’t know his mommy’s been killed. Don’t tell him, please.

“Our uncle Pieter lives in Hummel,” she whispered.

I nodded, and turned my head so that I wouldn’t blow smoke in her face.

“Did you see anything?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “It was dark. But they came into the room and pulled Mommy out of bed. I heard her say, ‘Please don’t—what’s going to happen to my children?’ Then I heard lots of horrible noises and Mommy was kicking on the floor.”

Her eyes filled up with tears. “I was too frightened to help her.”

“It’s good for you that you didn’t try. They would have done the same to you. How many of them were there?”

“I think three.”

Three. That would figure. They always came in threes.

The little girl wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her frayed red cardigan. “I saw something shining. It was like a necklace thing.”

“A necklace?”

“Like a cross only it wasn’t a cross.”

“Those are the
good
men,” interrupted the little boy, pointing down at the Canadians. “They came and chased all the Germans away.”

“You’re right, hombre,” I told him. Then I turned back to the little girl and said, “This cross thing. Do you think you could draw it?”

She thought for a moment and then she nodded. I took a pencil out of my jacket pocket and handed her my notebook. Very carefully, she drew a symbol that looked like a wheel with four spokes. She gave it back to me with a very serious look on her face. “It was shining, like silver.”

I gave her a roll of fruit-flavored Life Savers, and touched the top of her dry, unwashed hair. Not much compensation for losing her mother, but there was nothing else I could offer her. I still think about them, even now, those two little children, and wonder what happened to them. They’d be in their sixties now.

The old widow said, “You see? I was right, wasn’t I? It was the night people.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody what my specific duties were, not even my fellow officers in the 101 Counterintelligence Detachment.

Captain Kosherick came back in. “You done here?” he asked me. “I got two corpsmen downstairs ready to take the body away.”

The little boy frowned at him. You don’t know how glad I was that he couldn’t understand English.

Frank was sitting on the cobbles when I came out of the house, his purple tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

Frank was a four-year-old black-and-tan bloodhound who had been specially trained for me in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, by the man-trailing expert Roger Du Croix. Actually Frank’s saddle spread so far over his body that he was almost entirely black, but Roger had explained to me that he was still officially a black-and-tan.

In Belgium, they called him a “St. Hubert hound,” after the monk who had first trained bloodhounds in the seventh century, the patron saint of hunters. Frank’s real name was Pride of Ponchatoula but I had re-christened him in honor of Frank Sinatra, who happened to be my hero at the time. When I walked along De Keyserlei, with my greatcoat collar turned up, I liked to think that I looked as cool and edgy as Frank Sinatra did.

“How’s it going, Frank?” I asked him. “Hope you’ve been conducting yourself with decorum.”

Frank was a pretty obedient dog but now and again he had a fit of the loonies, which Roger Du Croix said was brought on by him picking up the smell of dead rats.

Corporal Little said, “He’s been fine, sir. I fed him those marrowbones and then he took a dump around the corner.”

“Well, thanks so much for the update,” I said. “Listen—we’ll be going out tonight, soon as it gets dark.”

Corporal Little looked up at the flat, narrow front of No. 5 Markgravestraat and said, “Screechers?”

“No question about it. They split her open like a herring.”

“Holy Christ. Did you find out who she was?”

“Ann De Wouters, aged twenty-eight or thereabouts. I don’t know why they specifically came looking for
her
, but her landlady seemed to think that she might have had some connection to the White Brigade. Could have been a revenge killing, who knows? Maybe they were just thirsty.”

Corporal Little looked around, his eyes narrowed against the bright gray October light. “Think they’ve gotten far?”

“I don’t think so. By the time they finished with her it must have been nearly daylight, and this whole area was heaving with Canucks by oh-four-thirty. My guess is that they’ve gone to ground someplace close by.”

Corporal Little reached down and tugged Frank’s ears. “Hear that, boy? We’re going to go Screecher-hunting!”

Corporal Henry Little was an amiable, wide-shouldered young man with a red crew cut and a face covered in mustard-colored freckles. He had a snub nose and bright blue eyes that looked permanently surprised, although I had never yet known him to be surprised by anything. Even when it was first explained to him what
his duties would be, he did nothing but nod and say, “OK, sure,” as if hunting vampires through the shattered cities of France and Belgium was no more unusual than chasing rabbits through the underbrush. Corporal Little’s family had bred pedigree tracking dogs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was why the detachment had enlisted him to help me. If Bloodhoundese had been a language, Corporal Little would have been word-perfect. Frank had only to lift up his head and stare at Corporal Little with those mournful, hung-over eyes, and Corporal Little would know exactly what he wanted. “Cookie, Frank?” Frank had a thing for
speculoos
, those ginger-and-spice cookies they bake in Belgium, preferably dipped into Corporal Little’s coffee to make them soft.

We climbed into my Jeep and Corporal Little drove us back through the narrow sewage-smelling streets, jolting over the cobbles until I felt that my teeth were going to shatter. We passed a dead horse lying on the sidewalk. A German shell had landed in the square two days ago and torn open a big triangular flap in its stomach, so a passerby had killed it with a hammer.

Somewhere off to the northwest, from the direction of the Walcheren peninsula, I could hear artillery fire, like somebody banging encyclopedias shut.

We turned into Keizerstraat and stopped outside De Witte Lelie Hotel. It was a small, old-style building with a sixteenth-century facade. The lobby had oak-paneled walls and a brown marble floor and it was milling with officers from the British 11th Armored Division, as well as an argumentative crowd of Belgian politicians, waving their arms and pushing each other and shouting in
French. The British officers looked too tired to care. One of them was sleeping in an armchair with his mouth wide open.

I went to the desk where the deputy manager was trying to rub soup from the front of his shirt with spit.

“I need to talk to Leo Coopman.”

He stopped rubbing his shirt and looked at me with bulging brown eyes.

“It’s important,” I said. “I need to talk to him about Ann De Wouters. Do you think you can get in touch with him?”

The deputy manager pulled a face that could have meant “yes” or “possibly” or “why on earth are you asking me?”

“I’ll be in my room until eight,” I told him. I tapped my wristwatch and said, “
Acht uur
, understand?”

Corporal Little and I went up in the rickety elevator to the fourth floor. Frank sat staring up at us and panting.

“Ann De Wouter’s children were in the room when they killed her,” I said. “Lucky for the boy he didn’t wake up, but the girl did.” I could see myself in the mirror. I hadn’t realized I looked so haggard. My hair was greasy and flopping over my forehead, and the mottled glass made it appear as if I had some kind of skin disease.

“She give you any idea what they looked like?”

“No. Too dark. But she was pretty sure that there were three of them, and she saw that one of them was wearing the wheel.”

We walked along the long blue-carpeted corridor until we reached 413. Considering there was a war on, my room was surprisingly sumptuous, with a huge four-poster
bed covered in a gold-and-cream bedspread, and gilded armchairs upholstered to match. On the walls hung several somber landscapes of Ghent and Louvain, with clouds and canals. A pair of gray riding britches hung from the hook on the back of the door, with dangling suspenders still attached. These had belonged to the German officer who had occupied this room only days before we had arrived. Corporal Little unclipped Frank’s leash and let him trot into the bathroom to lap water out of the toilet.

I went to the windows and closed them. The maid had opened them every morning since we had arrived here last week, even though there was no heat. I opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, lit one and blew smoke out of my nose. Then I unfolded my street map of Antwerp and spread it out over the glass-topped table.

“Here’s Markgravestraat, where Ann De Wouters was killed, and this is the way the Canadian division was coming in, so it’s pretty unlikely that the Screechers would have tried to escape along Martenstraat. I reckon they left the building by the back entrance, which would have taken them out
here
, onto Kipdorp. That means they had only two options. Either turn left, and head northwest toward the Scheldt; or turn right, and make their way across Kipdorpbrug toward the Centraal Station.”

Corporal Little studied the map carefully. “I don’t reckon they would have headed for the river, sir. Where would they go from there?”

I agreed with him. They couldn’t have escaped north because the Germans had blown all the bridges over the Albert Canal. Besides, the Brits were holding the waterfront area and most of the Brits were untrained
conscripts—waiters and bank clerks and greengrocers—and they were even more trigger-happy than the Poles. They would let loose a wild fusillade of poorly aimed rifle-fire and then shout “ ’Oo goes there?” afterward.

I circled a five-block area with my pencil. “We’ll start in this streets around Kipdorp and work our way eastward along Sant Jacobs Markt.”

Corporal Little massaged the back of his prickly neck. “That’s going to be one hell of a job, sir, with respect. Think of all them hundreds of cellars they could be lying low in. Think of all of them hundreds of attics, and all of them hundreds of closets and linen chests and steamer-trunks. It could easy take us
days
before Frank picks up a sniff of them, and by that time they could be halfway back to wherever they’re headed.”

“We’ll find them, Henry, I promise you. I have a hunch about these particular Screechers.”

“With respect, sir, you had a hunch about those Screechers in Rouen; and you had another hunch about those Screechers in Brionne.”

“I know. But those Screechers we caught in France, they were like cornered rats, weren’t they? They were running and hiding and it took everything we could do to catch up with them.”