The Deadly Embrace (2 page)

Still using her left hand to compress the wound, Liza saw something she thought deeply poignant. Using an eye-shadow pencil, the young woman had meticulously drawn an intricate mesh pattern of tiny intersecting lines on her shaved legs to simulate stockings. The pattern ran from her thighs down to her ankles, and it must have taken her hours to do it. As Liza watched, the lines were slowly dissolving in the rain.

The red-haired girl continued to stare up at Liza, her big luminous eyes seemingly studying the American’s face. At one point she raised her head a few inches and actually smiled up at her. By then, Liza’s fingers and right hand were warm from her seeping blood.

“It’s going to be all right,” said Liza, using her free hand to shield the girl’s eyes from the merciless rain.

A minute later, someone knelt beside them on the sidewalk. It was Boynton, the elderly cardiologist who was supposedly treating General Eisenhower’s heart condition. Like Liza, he was coated in plaster dust and looked like a snow-frosted version of Father Time.

Boynton unzipped his bag and removed a stethoscope and a small flashlight. Leaning over the girl, he focused the light into her open eyes and pressed his fingers to her neck at the carotid. In the small cone of light, Liza saw that the girl’s eyes were bright blue.

“She’s gone, I’m afraid,” Boynton said apologetically.

Staring down at her, Liza saw that the young woman’s face still held the same enigmatic smile with which she had greeted Liza’s pathetic attempt to save her life. As an all-clear siren began to wail, Liza could hear the bombers’ deafening roar begin to fade into the distance. Several more officers had cautiously ventured out of the building onto the sidewalk.

“I know that girl … Slattery’s latest conquest,” said one of them. “She was a scullery maid in that big brick mansion down the road.”

Liza headed back inside the hotel. Two more staff officers were standing in the wrecked foyer when she came in.

“What’s the score out there?” demanded the first one with a nervous laugh. A colonel in the Supply Corps, he was wearing a yellow silk smoking jacket over matching pajamas. Liza brushed past without acknowledging him.

“Did you see that? A goddamn female officer,” said the other one. “That’s what’s wrong with this war.”

The remainder of the ceiling had come down in Liza’s room, and her bed was covered with wood lathing and horsehair plaster. Dropping onto the narrow cushioned bench under the bay window, she stared out at the burning city, finally falling asleep as a greasy dawn crept over the eastern horizon.

CHAPTER 2

L
iza awoke with a blinding headache to the sound of rain dripping on the sills of the shattered window. Wind whistled through the cracks in the broken glass. Rubbing her temples, she closed her eyes and tried to forget the face of the young woman on the sidewalk.

She found a clean towel in the closet, and headed down the hall to the cold, drafty bathroom that she shared with the three other officers on her floor. Thankfully it wasn’t occupied. When she turned on the hot-water tap, the pipes began clanking and groaning in their usual manner. Glancing into the mirror, she saw that her eyes were rimmed in red.

A few minutes later, the tap had produced five inches of lukewarm water in the base of the chipped enamel tub. She lowered herself into the bath, carefully washing the dried blood and plaster dust from her hair and body as best she could.

The telephone began to ring in the hallway one flight down. She heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and then the grumbling voice of Pete Meadows, a former P-47 ace who had been grounded for recklessness and was waiting for a staff assignment.

“Everyone still alive up here?” he called out.

“As far as I know,” another voice replied.

Liza had left the door to her bedroom open. From the sound of his footsteps, Meadows headed first in that direction. Then, she heard him arrive at the bathroom door.

“You in there, Lieutenant Marantz?”

“Yes,” she said.

“A major named Samuel Taggart wants you at his office in SHAEF at 0900. He is sending a staff car for you.”

“Thank you,” she said through the closed door.

Liza climbed out of the tub, toweled herself off, and went back to her room to assemble a presentable uniform. The rain had finally stopped when she came out on the street again, through the wrecked front entrance of the hotel. Streamers of black clouds scudded low across the still-smoking city.

The bodies of Slattery and the young red-headed woman had long since been removed from the sidewalk, and an elderly charwoman was making an attempt to wash away their blood with a bucket of water and a long-handled brush.

A black Humber was waiting at the sidewalk with the engine running. She gave her name to the young driver, and he came around to open the rear door for her. Sinking back into plush leather upholstery, she wondered who Major Taggart was, and why he wanted to see her.

At Aldford Street, a long convoy of military trucks was passing by in an unbroken stream. On the next corner, a team of laborers was clearing a gigantic pile of rubble from the roadway where an office building had collapsed.

“When do you think the balloon will go up, Lieutenant?” asked the young driver as they sat waiting in the car. “I hear we’re going to invade at Calais.”

He pronounced it “Ka-LACE.” No more than eighteen, he spoke with the flat nasal cadence of the Great Plains.

“If you know that, you must be driving General Eisenhower,” she said.

“No sir, he’s got himself an Irish girl driving him,” he said, turning around with an innocent smile. “She’s prettier than Dorothy Lamour.”

Everyone knew that the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe was coming. The island was practically sinking under the weight of millions of combat soldiers, most of them Americans. Liza had read in Stars
and
Stripes that a new infantry division was arriving in a fast convoy from the United States every week. Outside the car window, the sidewalks thronged with uniforms of every color and design—Czechs, Free French, Americans, Poles, Dutch, and English.

Ten minutes later, she got out of the Humber in front of a massive brick building on Saint James Square. An imposing sign above the main entrance read,

SUPREME HEADQUARTERS — ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

A squad of armed British sentries stood guard along the sidewalk in front of the building. Double walls of ten-foot-high sandbags flanked the doors. Men in a variety of colorful Allied uniforms were waiting in line to gain entry past a sergeant who was checking their identification from inside a small kiosk next to the wall of sandbags.

“I’m here to see Major Taggart,” she said, presenting her identity card when she arrived at the head of the line.

The sergeant matched her card against a list of names on his clipboard.

“Military Security Command,” he said. “Fourth floor.”

Once inside, she saw that the place was a madhouse of nervous energy. Through the open doorways in the dark-paneled corridors, she saw tired-looking secretaries clattering away on typewriters while clouds of cigarette smoke billowed above their heads. Officers and enlisted men surged up and down the halls as if victory over the Germans hinged on their every step.

Reaching the fourth floor, she encountered another sign at the top of the staircase: “Military Security Command—No Unauthorized Personnel. Two uniformed American soldiers guarded the entrance to the hallway. Liza presented her identity card again to the first one. He took it over to the logbook lying on a small table and found her name on another list.

“Major Taggart is in the last office on the right,” he said in a slow Texas drawl.

The big walnut door at the end of the hallway stood open. When she stepped inside, Liza thought for a moment that she had to be in the wrong place. The room was barely larger than a freight elevator. Aside from a small desk and two side chairs, an old leather couch occupied most of the remaining space.

Her first thought was that the man lying on the couch looked like an incredibly seedy version of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Unshaven and smoking a cigarette, he was wearing a ratty bathrobe, red flannel pajamas, and carpet slippers. Looking up from the report on his chest, the man said, “I assume you’re Lieutenant Marantz.”

“Yes … sir,” she said, as he pushed himself up from the couch and tossed the report over to the desk.

He looked like a football player, all solid mass, slab chest and powerful legs—an aging fullback with a full head of slate-gray hair and morose brown eyes. His nose looked like it had been broken more than once.

“We’re a little pressed for space around here,” he said, pointing at the chair in front of the desk. “Want some coffee?”

“No sir,” said Liza, sitting down in one of the side chairs while he poured himself a cup and carried it over. She wondered whether he was living in his office.

A thick stack of reports and documents rose from the blotter on his desk. Lying next to it was a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, a box of kitchen matches, and a bar of Hershey’s chocolate.

“If you want to know the truth, coffee and cigarettes are fueling the war effort right now, not tanks and gasoline,” he said, sifting through the papers.

He found another folder and began to scan the first page. When the right sleeve of his pajama shirt slid back to the elbow, she saw a white gauze bandage on his wrist and discarded the notion that he was living there.

“I was wearing these clothes when my billet took a direct hit last night,” he said, as if divining her thoughts. “But this is nothing compared with what the Brits went through in ’41. The little man in Berlin had a temper tantrum after we firebombed Hamburg. This is his personal retaliation.”

Her eyes dropped to the folder again. Even upside down, she recognized the capitalized letters of her last name at the top of each page inside the standard personnel jacket.

“I’m thinking of offering you a job,” he said, glancing up at her again.

She waited for him to continue.

“Let’s see…. Twenty-five years old … Enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps a week after Pearl Harbor … Eighteen months of training at a military pathology unit in Philadelphia before assignment to Valley Forge Army Hospital … Applied three times for overseas duty,” he muttered before flipping back to the first page. “It also says here that you studied forensic medicine at New York Medical College.”

“Yes sir, although I left school to enlist when the war began.”

“According to this professor—Dr. Brubaker—you have superior, even remarkable powers of scientific deduction.”

“He … exaggerates.”

“Yeah, well, he claims that while your anatomy class was dissecting an anonymous cadaver, you concluded after a twenty-minute examination that the woman had been poisoned.”

“That would have been discovered by any competent pathologist if there had been an autopsy,” she said.

“It also says that the case was reopened, the corpse was identified, and a man was actually charged with the crime.”

He took a last deep drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out.

“And convicted,” she added as he partially unwrapped the chocolate bar and extended the open half toward her.

“No thank you,” she said.

“What can you deduce about me?” he asked with a caustic grin.

The question took her aback. Was he playing some kind of game with her?

“Come on—go ahead,” he said gruffly.

His hands seemed to be in constant, nervous motion. As he lit the tip of another cigarette, her eyes roved to the broken knuckles holding his nickel-plated lighter, then up to the lumpy bridge of his nose.

“I grew up in a place called Sheepshead Bay…. In those days it was a good thing if you learned how to fight. And you can see how good I was,” he said, pointing at his damaged nose. “Aside from that.”

She stared back into the well-lined poker face.

“You’re … you were a police officer,” she said.

“Well, that’s a stunning piece of deduction…. Yeah, I was a New York City homicide cop—fourteen years. Then I got fired and went private. What else?” he demanded, seemingly all male life force and toughness.

“Why were you fired?” she blurted out.

“What do you think?” he came right back.

She thought for a moment and said, “You were too docile and mild-mannered.”

He smiled again.

“She has a sense of humor. Deduce again.”

“Insubordination,” she said.

“Close enough. What else?”

“You went to college,” she said.

“Yeah … City College.”

“The first in your family,” she went on.

He nodded.

“Why do you try to mask it?”

“What?”

“Your intelligence,” she said.

“What else?” he demanded again.

She was still trying to process the jumble of confusing images he presented to her. The magnificent ruin of a face, the restless mind, the heavy pouches under his seemingly disillusioned eyes, the weariness, the strain. All of it could simply be the pressure of his job, or what had just happened to him in the bombing raid.

“This is silly,” she said.

“No, it isn’t. Say what you think,” he said.

“I think,” she began, “I think you’ve recently suffered a serious emotional blow, the loss of someone very dear to you.”

For a moment, his brooding eyes dropped their guard. She saw a spark of anger followed by a momentary look of desolation. He shook his head disdainfully and said, “After three years of war, who hasn’t? I could probably say the same thing about you.”

He saw the sudden distress in her face. His eyes softened as she stared down at her lap.

“Have you ever heard of the code name Overlord, Lieutenant Marantz?”

“I doubt if I was supposed to, but I’ve been staying at a hotel full of army staff officers since my arrival in London. It’s the code name for the campaign to open the second front in France.”

He nodded and said, “I work for General Ernest Manigault, the head of the Military Security Command here at SHAEF. My job is helping to provide security protection for Overlord. I’ve been asking for a forensic pathologist for months now to complete our investigative unit. You are the closest thing the paper pushers could come up with. You’ll start work here tomorrow morning.”