The Eleventh Man (47 page)

"Fine," Ben said tiredly. "You can test your faith when the general calls you in, first thing tomorrow. Maurice set it up." He started his bottle to his lips, then thought to check on Moxie's facial tic. It was active.
Good, that'll help.
"By the way, I had to make you out to be the next thing to a nutcase. So if people look at you a certain way, that's why."

Moxie laughed, short and sharp. "Rhine King, you never did think I threw you the ball enough."

***

They had to kill seven days waiting for the USO show, every one of those a blank-walled twenty-four hours of tedium with a concrete lid on it. It did not help that they both thought their underground quarters smelled like Montana earthen cellars where potatoes and rutabagas were stored. Moxie, restless as a sidewinder even in the best of times, had a particularly hard time with enforced leisure. "If I wanted to be caged up, I'd have been born a goddamn canary." Growly and still ticcing, he devoted himself to reading Philo Vance mysteries during the day and romancing Inez in the Wonder Bar at night.

For his part, Ben prowled the bunker maze of the base with a simmering case of deadline fever, searching for some way to write about Antwerp's deluges of death from the sky without ever mentioning buzz bombs. "What if," he tried out on Maurice Overby, "I just say it's a mystery weapon the Germans call a
Vergeltungswaffe?
"

"Rather a nice try, Ben, but I'm afraid not," came the prim response. "There are without doubt some among your American readership familiar enough with the German language to connect
'waffe'
to
'Luftwaffe'
and draw the pertinent conclusion, wouldn't you say? No, I realize it's a hard go, but HQ requires that you keep whatever you write about Antwerp"—the squarely-planted censor gestured off generally—general."

Great, Maurice. I can just say Antwerp has an unusual share of funerals, can I? You should work for Tepee Weepy.

When he grew tired of beating his head against a story he was not allowed to tell, he holed up in the windowless concrete room with the scent of root cellar and made tiny editing changes in the
Ghost Runner
screenplay, aware all the while how geographically ridiculous it was to be conjuring the Letter Hill in waffle-flat Belgium. All in all, distance maybe lent something, but it did not smell like enchantment. And when he ran out of things to fuss at in the script, he emulated Moxie and read, napped, brooded some more about the piece that couldn't say anything. All the while, the clock slowed to eternal Old World time. Another day in the war. What was the count up to by now?

He was marking the fourth day of the wait by reading a much-passed-around news magazine that grandly speculated the war could be over by Christmas—
Yeah, right, has anybody told the Germans?—when
Maurice rapped on the doorway in a grand announcing fashion. "A communiqué for you, in the priority packet." He held up the envelope by the tip of one corner. "Inasmuch as it's addressed in a feminine hand, I thought it wise to deliver it forthwith."

Eyes widening, Ben reached out for the letter. Maurice coughed discreetly. "I shall leave you to it. See you in the dining hall."

Dear Ben, wherever you are, Scar—

Already Cass's words had him aching for her. Quickly he turned the letter to take in a line written sideways along the margin near the top:

Your Holy Joe corporal looked like I was about to set his Bible on fire, but he took pity and said he could sneak this to you somehow.

Bedazzled as a kid with a kaleidoscope, he spun the full page of inked lines back into reading position.

This set of scribbles may surprise you as much as it does me. But I can't hold back—I've been writing this in my head for days on end and the only cure is to put it on paper. So here goes. Remember we used to talk about the milliondollar wound?

He remembered in all ways. The heart never forgets anything; the flesh remembers indiscriminately.

There were all those times I caught myself wishing you'd get a tiny one—just another scar—and be out of the war for good. But if Dan's is any indication, the price is awful damn high. I take him over to Fort Hairy once a week for the bone doc to test how his leg is coming along, and he hates that routine. He's on crutches in between—he hates that, too. Sometime after the first of the year, they'll ship him to the specialist who'll patch that tendon in and then all the time in rehab, as they call it.

We go around and around about whether I stay with him in California for all that. I say of course I will. He says like hell I will, he can be a cripple just the same without me around, go do something useful with myself. In some odd way I think he wants to be with other Montaneer guys—you know what a bloody mess Leyte has turned out to be, bunches of the worst wounded from his regiment are ending up there in San Diego—more than with me. I'm not crying on your shoulder, Ben, I just needed to tell somebody who knows up from down when it comes to a man and a woman.

Enough of that. This is the last time you'll ever hear from Capt. Standish—

His eyes misted instantly at that.

—in WASP uniform. They're inactivating us the middle of the month—happy holidays, P-39 birdwomen, huh?—and the squadron will scatter to the winds. Mary Cat is going into schoolteaching. Della has her hooks into a major in ops, and he's gaga enough she'll probably get him to marry her. I have my hands full with Dan, but I've been wondering whether to try to get on with the Forest Service after a while, flying smoke patrol. It'll be the same old thing, though, will they hire a woman pilot?

Maybe it'll all sort out okay after the war. But that's too far away to think about.

He pinched the bridge of skin between his eyes waiting for the worst of the thought to pass: if there is an
after.
Then he blinked back into reading the last of the letter.

I suppose I could tell you I miss you something awful. But too much truth is maybe not a good idea, given the situation. You are always going to be a part of me, despite the gold string on my finger that ties me to Dan. I couldn't Dear John him while he was out in the Pacific, and I can't do it to you while you're over there. I think of you more than is healthy, and I just want you to know I regret not one damn thing of our time together.

It is getting late, and it's snowing like sixty—the O Club windowsills look like igloo territory—and I have to get back to the apartment. Now all this is off my chest—no wisecrack about that sort of thing, you—and on its way to wherever you've ended up. Take care, Ben—I don't need another hole in my life.

Hugs and tickles,

Cass

Back and forth, he walked the narrow confines of bunker room, holding the letter as if memorizing it. For all his skills at what was said between the lines, supposition resisted him here as he read the sentences over and over.

In her feisty Cass way she wished him well, and maybe cast a major wish beyond that, but nothing under the ink had really changed, had it?

There still was Dan Standish.

There still was the war.

And the creeping shadow of fear, always there, that oblivion was not through with the Supreme Team yet.

Even so, he felt distinctly better about life with lines from Cass in his hand even if they led to nowhere.

He figured he must be misunderstanding something.

In the dining bunker he found Maurice poking a fork at chipped beef on overtoasted toast. By a grave misjudgment of joint command, the British had been put in charge of the food and the Americans in charge of the beer. "Saved you a spot," Maurice indicated across the table, "although you may not thank me when you taste this. No bad news from home, I hope, arriving in the fashion it did?"

"Good enough. No news would have been bad news." With the ghost of a grin Ben let the allusion hang in the direction of his host and censor.

"Ah, well, spoken like a journalist. Other than that," Maurice took a sip of tea or coffee, whichever it was, "still passing the time working on the hemstitch of your straitjacket?"

"You nailed it, Maurice," Ben responded with his first outright laugh in days. He couldn't help it, he liked the company of this man who talked as some people sing.

"I do have some allowable news, just between thee and me and the cocotte clock," Maurice brought out. "Intelligence estimates, to flatter them with that, indicate the Huns may be giving up on buzz bombs. It has been most of a week since that last batch. And no matter how many they've sent, they haven't managed to cripple the port at all. Hitler's rocket men may be out of business for lack of results—the German high command putting all that fuel into keeping the rest of its military machine alive, the thinking is."

"The lights aren't blinking and the ground isn't shaking," Ben said gratefully, "so I hoped something like that was happening."

"Absence of anything in the air at the moment may be the intelligence wizards' full evidence too," Maurice offered his own airy speculation. "We shall have to see." Furrowing his brow and on up into the bald outskirts, he stated: "I have been thinking. As things now stand, it might be possible to get out and about a bit, if that would help with your TPWP matter?"

Ben tossed his fork into the gluey meal, ready to go that minute. "Christ, yes. It'd put legs under the piece."

"We need to be quite cautious," came the voice of prudence across the table. "But the Antwerp outskirts have been less dangerous than the city proper. If there's an all clear in the morning, we might judiciously explore some area of interest to you." Maurice sent him an inquiring look. "Ben, I have forgotten to ask—which are you, bars-and-brothels or castles-and-cathedrals?"

On the spot, he thought it over. "Somewhere between."

"Wise choice. All horizons kept open, that way," the man from Nowhere spelled backwards declaimed, bouncing it word by word. "I should leave to you any excursions in the direction of sin, however, personal taste and all that. What would please you in the other direction?"

"What I really want," Ben was somewhat surprised to hear himself say, "is to go to Waterloo."

The next day the two of them set off as soon as there was light enough to see by, before the fog was up. The stonework of Antwerp receded behind them in the thin winter dawn as the jeep passed through the successive belts of anti-aircraft gun pits, the ack-ack suburbs, and then out onto the main road in company with the around-the-clock line of trucks from the port. Squeezed in between the big six-wheeled cargo carriers, Maurice steered with the patience of a man whose reward was coming. "There are farm roads once we're out a ways—those will swing us around Brussels and this clot of lorries." He patted the plasticine map case atop his briefcase. "You're the navigator."

Before long Ben spotted the first of the rural roads and they turned off into a landscape white and quiet. Low ruined houses and sheds stood skeletal every little distance, and even the few farms that the war had not ravaged sat empty in a spectral way. Wrapped in his horse-blanket overcoat and glad of it, Ben blew on his writing hand whenever he jotted in his notepad. As the stark farmyards went by, he noticed there were no animals in the fields and then caught up with why—all had been eaten during Belgium's starving years of Nazi occupation, including the horses.

The graying snow on the farmyards and fields like a tablecloth on an abandoned empty table, they drove on into the flat midland of Belgium. In that world with all the noise smothered out of it, he and Maurice could talk comfortably. Moxie had told him they were goofy for going out on this. "You haven't seen enough battlefields to last you for one lifetime, Rhine King?" Not enough ones gone quiet. "I don't know if these are the same roads Wellington and Napoleon had," Ben remarked as he pointed out the next turnoff, "but you're sure as hell making better time than they did." Maurice handled the jeep as if captaining a yacht, swinging wide on the curves and making up for it with unfurled speed on the straight stretches.

"Ah, well," the figure presiding at the wheel said loftily, "one likes to get there in timely fashion, forth and back."

Not for the first time in honor of the New Zealander's locutions, Ben chuckled. "Is that a Southern Hemisphere way of looking at things, like the bathtub draining the opposite direction?"

"Hmm? Not at all, it's simple logic. One cannot, Ben, go
back
before one goes
forth,
therefore—"

Ben pursed a smile. "Spoken like a professor of argumentation."

"We shall see how I am as a battlefield muse." Maurice patted the attaché case between them. "
The Trekker's Guidebook to the Historic Battle at Waterloo.
Gift from my father, right off, when he learned I'd been posted to Belgium."

"He sounds about like mine," Ben mused. "Spends his nights in history up to his ears."

"Up to his rifle shoulder, in my father's case," came the response to that. Ben glanced over, sensing why it was put that way.

Maurice stayed staring straight ahead over the steering wheel as he spoke, the words suddenly less clipped. "Reads all the military history he can, the old fellow, says he's going to keep on until he finds the one that gets it right. He was at Gallipoli, in the first big go. Caught fragments from a Turk grenade in that shoulder, invalided home by Christmas of 1915. He never afterward could lift that arm enough to comb his hair. Mum has combed it for him for thirty years." A light of remembering, distant and wintry, had come into his eyes. "Even so, he counted himself one of the lucky ones. Some ten thousand New Zealanders and Australians did not make it home from that beachhead, ever." He paused. "My British colleagues can cite chapter and verse about their 'lost generation' in the trenches here, but they shrug off Gallipoli. As though there were a different set of numbers for those of us in the colonies." Breaking his spell of recital, Maurice sent a considerate look to Ben. "But why am I carrying on to you about unjust numbers? Sorry about that."