In War Times (27 page)

Sam was too tired to look at the papers. “What is it?”

“Don’t know. A crate. Needs to go to the American army in Muchengladbach.”

Sam leaned out the window. “Set it sideways, then. Somebody can sit on it.”

The man took the papers back. “These stay with the crate.”

In the second town they passed through they picked up two women who climbed into the cab. Both looked as ragged and destitute as the other refugees, except that one carried a new red alligator purse and the other wore shiny, new black boots. Both were trying to return to Holland. They’d been desperately hungry for three years.

Many of their passengers were prisoners from camps further east who had survived a forced march during midwinter to Belsen. Many more died along the way than had survived. Some were Russians who, like Leonid, were afraid to go home.

Refugees jumped off when they thought they saw a prospect of food or shelter along the way. Two died and were thrown off the truck. Others crowded aboard and Sam was forced to limit these. Some chose to enter a displaced person’s camp they passed in Hagan.

Once they reached Wuppertal, they were on familiar ground, having ranged here with Perler to scrounge for telephone equipment. Perler had proudly pointed out the world’s first elevated train system, fifty years old.

The Dutch women didn’t speak much; mostly they dozed. Sam and Wink managed to get fifty loaves of bread from a food transport truck while the vehicles stopped next to each other in Mettman.

“What are we going to do with all these people?” asked Wink.

One of the Dutch women opened her eyes. “Can you take us to Maastricht?”

Sam and Wink looked at each other. “Sure,” said Sam. “We know the way.”

“I wonder if my mother is still alive.” She began to cry.

When they got back to Muchengladbach, they got blind drunk in their own backyard. By common consent, without speaking, they stumbled into the house and returned to the garden with their instruments. Earl T. and Grease eyed them warily.

They had not spoken of what they had seen, even to one another. Jazz took them to that unspeakable abyss. Seemingly discordant, it still had a theme: darkness, despair, and
Weltschmerz
, a good old German literary term that Howie had taught Sam, meaning the sorrow of the world. He thought that he saw Hadntz there, sitting at the bar, her mind a portal that could take them through and beyond, a mind that knew all this, and more.

Their audience had fled long before they were finished. Leonid put them to bed at about five in the morning, saying, “I understand.”

The next morning, some thoughtful person or persons saw to it that the crate they’d carried was taken to the warehouse and left inside. When Sam and Wink showed up, much the worse for wear, Sunny waved them over.

“They said this came off the truck you were driving.”

Wink said, “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, this paper was stuck in the slats.” The crate had been crowbarred open. Inside was a small, black barrel upon which was stenciled, with white paint,
SARIN
, beneath which was a skull and crossbones.

Sam stood on the periphery of the commotion, which soon included several officers. They took turns looking over the information. Finally, Sunny said, “I just can’t read it. It looks like this bunch of papers fell into the river. We’ve got to get this out of here, though, and to a safe place.”

At that point, Perler walked in. When he spotted the barrel, his footsteps faltered, then he continued to the storeroom to hang up his jacket.

Sam left the group to follow him. Inside the storeroom, he asked, “Do you know anything about this?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Perler said. “It is of no use to us now.” When he turned, his face was grim in the low light. He looked beaten. “Evidently someone leaked the plot. The ventilation shaft was extended so that it is very high. It would require a ladder to get the gas in, and is now under constant guard.” He looked Sam in the eye. “Remember this. Once someone takes power and controls the military, it is impossible to change things. I was hoping that we could, somehow. A fairy tale. But…perhaps some of our plans did work. I certainly never expected to actually see the sarin.” Then he left, passing Wink, who stood in the doorway.

“Who put that on the truck?” Wink asked.

“Some Brit.”

“So—something did work.”

“If that’s so,” said Sam, “I don’t like it very much.”

“You and me both,” said Wink.

“The only answer is to make our own device,” said Sam, as they climbed the stairs to the lab.

“That’s the only way we can be in charge. But in charge of what?”

“Tell me when you figure it out,” said Sam.

I
T WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT
, the first of May. Wink had long since collapsed, having been under various onerous orders all day; all orders grated and wore on him as they did on most of the self-starting men of Company C. The others, except for Sam, were inside with Leonid, enjoying some post-dinner schnapps. A bare bulb cast black shadows across the ragged garden. Work was progressing on their device, but just as slowly as it had in England. More slowly, perhaps, because they were comparing Perler’s device to the one they were making, and it was a complicated, meticulous process.

Sam whirled at a rustling sound behind him, almost drawing his pistol.

“
Ami
?” It was Lise, wearing the same clean, pressed jumper with white blouse underneath. Her shoes were cracked and worn.

“Yes. I’m an American. Sam.”

She looked at him for a moment, seeming confused, then patted her stomach. “Eat?”

“Wait.” He climbed the stairs, got a packet of soda crackers and two slices of baloney, and wrapped them in a scrap of
Stars and Stripes
. When he went back outside, she was gone, so he set them on the bar and went back to work. He looked up at a sound, and the food was gone.

The next morning, as Sam enjoyed a smoke in the garden and gently reveled, once again, in his on-call status for phone maintenance, cheers erupted through the open windows of the townhouse.

Sam climbed the stairs and stood in the open doorway. A celebratory bottle of sparkling Moselle wine was making the rounds. “What’s up?”

“Radio report—Hitler’s committed suicide in Berlin. He was in a bunker there,” said Kocab. “Shot himself in the head. The Soviets found him, a woman, and a dog, in a courtyard above the bunker. They’d been doused with gasoline, but didn’t burn completely.”

“And Eisenhower was so convinced that he’d left Berlin for Bavaria,” said Earl T. “I’ve been saying we should have tried to take Berlin.”

Wink said, “How many times have we heard the bastard was dead? I’ll drink to it anyway. Pass me that bottle.” He took a swig and handed it to Sam.

The Moselle, cold from the cellar, was beaded with condensation. Sam took his drink with a concurrent dose of realization.

“He was right,” he said to Wink, quietly.

“Perler.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Right. What does it mean, anyway?” asked Grease, picking up on what Sam said, but referring to Hitler’s death rather than Perler’s prescience, about which he did not know. “Aren’t there plenty of Nazis to take his place?”

“I doubt it,” said Kocab. “Remember when Roosevelt died?”

“Yeah,” said Earl T. “They were kind of amazed here in town when the war kept going.”

“I’d say that it’s true for the Germans, though. Leader gone, war over.”

The Perham Downs were reborn at that moment. Everyone got out their instruments, tuned up, and played all kinds of pieces, badly at first, but they rapidly improved. Sam caught Wink’s eye, said, “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and they were off. After playing the theme rapidly for two bars, they launched into a modern jazz rendition. For once, the guys just sat and listened.

Sam sailed through the changes, modulating the time, blending with Wink’s key changes with initial dissonance and resolving briefly before heading to new heights.

The sheer act of playing filled him with joy. He played for Keenan,
to
Keenan, a Keenan alive, somewhere, celebrating in a bar, buying everyone a round.

Then Sam sobered. Even if the war here was over—still doubtful—the war was not over in the Pacific. Thousands of men might still die.

They ended in an unmodern minor key, and the last few bars were a question phrased with a few bare notes.

Later that afternoon, as Sam and Wink washed steins, Lise reappeared with her cousin Karl. They stood at the edge of the garden, poised as if ready to flee. Sam motioned them inside and they advanced hesitantly, holding hands.

“Here, have some peanuts,” he said, and gave them some to shell. They picked up the shells and stuffed them in their pockets after gobbling down the peanuts.

Armed Forces Radio was having a musical interlude. Suddenly Karl, who looked about ten years old, smiled.

“Ben-ny Good-man!” He grabbed Lise by the waist and hand and danced her around awkwardly for a few steps.

“No!” She backed away from him and spoke to him low, and in German, for a minute, before Wink interrupted, nodding at the children.

“It is all right. Okay.”

Lise stared at him with suspicion.

To Sam, Wink said, “Evidently her uncle—Karl’s dad—listened to American jazz, which was a huge family secret and great embarrassment.”

“Dangerous too.”

“Definitely.” Wink turned to the kids. “Hitler
kaput
.”

Lise’s blue eyes widened. She shook her head violently. Karl said, with great certainty in his reedy voice, something in German, which Wink translated: “Hitler can
not
die.”

The summerhouse, as if charged with regenerative powers, became a local haven. American forces were strictly prohibited from speaking to any Germans or giving them food or help of any kind. However, being in the British sector isolated Company C from the rest of the Army and kept enforcement of this draconian ruling quite lax.

The kids showed up every day. Sam gave them small jobs while Zee, Earl T., and Grease hauled picnic tables and benches from the
volkspark
. The kids, using buckets, brushes, and rags, quickly made them usable.

Konrad, a serious boy with short blond hair and wide blue eyes, fed Wink the wires of fairy lights which he strung from a linden tree and along the top of the brick wall. Karl and Konrad handed speakers to Wink who, on his ladder, attached them in a configuration which, after some rearrangement, he declared acoustically satisfying, and created metal connectors so they could be removed every night.

The first day, as they rested from their exertions, Sam offered the band of kids cold Coca-Colas, freshly pulled from a barrel of ice.

“Here, I’ll open it for you,” he said to Lise, getting a bottle-cap opener from his pocket.

She didn’t speak English, but she knew what the opener was for. A tiny frown; she shook her head vigorously, grabbed the Coke, and sat down on the sun-warmed flagstones. The other children joined her.

They rolled the bottles between their hands for ten minutes while Sam washed and dried glasses and checked the ice, which came from the newly repaired ice plant. Finally, Lise offered the Coke to Sam to open. Still, she didn’t drink it. With her thumb over the top, she shook it and then let out a geyser of Coke. After they had all warmed their sodas and taken the sting out of them, the German children sat in spring sunlight, drinking warm, flat Cokes.

Under the bar, open coolers held Coke, Rhine wine, pink Moselle champagne, Krefeld cognac, and schnapps, all on ice. The beer cooler on the bar was connected; the
biergarten
was ready for business.

Each day, after they gathered all the cigarette butts to take home to trade for food, the kids loaded the coolers, swept the courtyard, and straightened the tables and chairs. Their landlady, Emma Tillman, spoke passable English and stopped by for a beer and a chat every evening. According to her, life during wartime had not been all that difficult, despite rationing of food and clothing. For the most part, they had not felt the sting until the war neared its end.

One night while bartending, Sam heard a familiar voice: “Any wee heavies here, my man?”

“Rafferty!” They shook hands over the bar. “Your drink is Teacher’s.”

“Oh, I’m not so particular.”

The USO accordion player Sam had met in Glasgow still wore a beard, now mostly gray. His creased face was tanned; his eyes clear and smiling as he took a seat. Some weight had been lifted. “Nice place.”

“Thanks.” Now that the
biergarten
had come together, it provided an oasis of peace each night, when the smashed desolation of Germany was blanketed in darkness, and the floods of desperate refugees collapsed for another night of hunger-shot sleep. “So where have you been?”

“Italy, mostly. Playing for soldiers in foxholes. Found a stick of paratroopers to hook up with and made seventeen jumps. I’ve been playing for the past month over on the front lines. Up near Xanec.” He leaned back in satisfaction, both hands on the bar. He looked even more satisfied when Sam came up with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and set it on the bar next to a shot glass.

“Next best thing to Teacher’s. On the house.”

“Hey,” said Wink, overhearing.

“We could use some entertainment, don’t you think? Rafferty plays the accordion.”

That night, Rafferty donated an astonishing 78 to the cause. “Koko” was the roller-coaster tune by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker that had enlightened them at Minton’s. He said, “These guys are amazing. Never heard them before this. On account of the musician’s strike, I guess. But if this is any proof, jazz is gonna be a whole lot different after the war.”