The Captains Page 11

  “Then make it out of what preserves you do have,” Lowell said, icily. “And if you don’t have any preserves, Sergeant, then go steal some.”

  The acting company commander returned, in a clean, unpressed fatigue uniform. His face was bleeding from his shave. He walked up to Lowell and saluted, holding the salute as he recited, “Sir, Lieutenant Sully, Thomas J. I’ve been acting company commander.”

  Lowell returned the salute, very casually.

  “My name is Lowell, Lieutenant,” he said. “I herewith assume command. Please see that a general order so stating is prepared for my signature.”

  “Captain, we was never even issued a typewriter,” Lieutenant Sully said.

  “In that case, Lieutenant,” Lowell said, “find someone who prints very neatly. Where is the first sergeant?”

  “Captain, we’ve been taking turns, twelve hours on and twelve off. He’s sleeping.”

  “Where?”

  “In the bunker, sir.”

  “Have we got a field first?”

  “Staff Sergeant Williams, sir. The man who picked you up at battalion.”

  “Oh, yes,” Lowell said. He looked around and located Staff Sergeant Williams, and made the “form on me” signal to him by pumping his fist over his head.

  “Yes, sir?” Sergeant Williams said.

  “You’ve heard what I want done with the squad tents?”

  “Yes, sir. Ripped up into sunshades.”

  “Colonel Jiggs will be here either later today or in the morning,” Lowell said. “By the time he gets here, I want the tents gone, and I want those latrine holes somebody dug where the tents are, filled up. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m now going to see the first sergeant,” Lowell said. “I want to see him privately. I’m curious to see if he’s as fucked up as everybody else I’ve seen around here.”

  He walked to the sandbag bunker and disappeared inside.

  “Jesus Christ!” Lieutenant Sully said. “Who the fuck does he think he is? Patton?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant,” Staff Sergeant Williams replied thoughtfully. “I got the feeling he knows what he’s doing. Maybe a little inspired chickenshit is just what this outfit needs.” Then he realized what he had said. “No offense, Lieutenant.”

  The mess sergeant reappeared.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. “The only preserves we got is little bitty cans, one to each case of 10-in-1’s. You really want me to open all them cases like he said?”

  “What I want, Sergeant Feeny,” Lieutenant Sully said, “is beside the point. What’s important is that the company commander told you to boil water and make drinks out of preserves. If I were you, from what I’ve seen of our new company commander, I’d get the lead out of my ass and do what he told you to do.”

  At first light the next morning, Lt. Col. Paul T. Jiggs got in a jeep and drove to Baker Company.

  Baker Company’s troops were shaving, using their helmets as wash basins. They were all wearing their fatigue jackets, and they were all wearing their .45 pistols in their shoulder holsters. Canvas flys protected all the tanks on the line from the sun.

  When he saw Captain Lowell, the Bloody Bucket of the Pennsylvania National Guard was gone from his fatigues. Captain Lowell was standing in the mess fly, watching the mess sergeant (significantly, the mess sergeant himself, not one of the cooks or one of the troopers in KP) scramble powdered eggs. Lowell was bareheaded. He had a German Luger stuck in the waistband of his trousers. He was puffing on a large, black cigar.

  When he saw Colonel Jiggs, Lowell took the cigar from his mouth and, smiling broadly, threw him a salute that was cocky to the point of insolence.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Would the colonel care for some breakfast?”

  “I’ve eaten, thank you,” Jiggs said.

  “Then how about a cool glass of GI strawberry soda? I regret we have no orange juice, but the sergeant’s working on that.”

  “I think that would be very nice,” Colonel Jiggs said.

  I’ll be damned, he thought, if this kid doesn’t seem to know exactly what he’s doing.

  V

  (One)

  Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  30 August 1950

  The black Buick Roadmaster (carefully waxed and polished from the day, six months before, it had been delivered at the European Exchange Service Automobile Center) signaled for a right turn, slowed, and turned off the northbound lane of the autobahn and into the EES service station at the Frankfurt am Main turnoff.

  It rolled slowly up to the pumps. The driver, already balding though still a young man, operated the electrically powered windows and told the attendant to fill it up with high test and to please check under the hood. He operated the hood release latch, and then put his uniform cap on, opened his door, and got out. There were captain’s bars on the epaulets of his green tunic and the crossed rifles of infantry on the lapels. There was the flaming sword on a blue background shoulder patch, the insignia of the European Command. But there was no fruit salad on his breast, nor parachutist’s wings, nor other qualification badges. He was a small man, short and small-boned, obviously Jewish.

  There was fruit salad in a drawer in his dresser in his quarters. There was a Bronze Star for his performance as a POW interrogation officer, and a second Bronze Star for his participation in Task Force Parker, which had liberated several hundred officer prisoners in the closing days of World War II. There was a set of silver parachutist’s wings, and a small strip of cloth with the word “Ranger” embroidered on it. There was even a ring, a ring-knocker’s ring, with USMA 1946 cast in gold around an amethyst.

  But the captain was in the intelligence business, and a balding little Jew wearing a Ranger patch and jump wings and a West Point ring and a couple of Bronze Stars would stand out in a crowd. Intelligence officers try very hard not to stand out in a crowd.

  A woman, smaller even than the captain, opened the right rear door of the Roadmaster and emerged with an infant in her arms. She wore black pumps, a small black hat, and a simple black dress. There was a brooch on her breast, and a gold Star of David hung from a thin gold chain around her neck.

  The captain opened the right front door of the Roadmaster and plucked a male child from a steel-and-plastic seat hooked over the automobile seat. He sniffed.

  “He didn’t wait,” he said.

  “He’s still a baby, Sandy,” the woman said. “And it was a long ride.”

  She took the boy from him and with a child in each arm walked to the ladies’ rest room. The captain went around to the trunk and took out a rubber and canvas bag used to store soiled diapers. Sharon did not believe in the new disposable diapers. Not only were they criminally expensive, she believed they irritated the baby’s skin. She would flush the diapers in the toilet, then put them in the rubber bag to take home. After the bag had been removed from the trunk, the captain would leave the trunk open for at least an hour, and then spray the interior with an odor killer.

  The captain carried the diaper bag to the door of the ladies’ rest room. He set it outside the door, knocked at the door to let Sharon know he’d brought her the bag, and then went into the men’s rest room. When he came out, he went out to the service island, watched the attendant check the oil, the water in the window washer reservoir and the radiator, and the hydraulic fluid in the transmission, power brakes, and power steering. He took a notebook with an attached pencil from the glove compartment and made precise entries regarding the servicing of the Buick, including a computation (to two decimal places) of miles per gallon.

  Except for his uniform and the fact that they were on the autobahn outside Frankfurt, Germany, they could have been a typical American couple out with the children for a ride, and stopping for gasoline on the highway.

  Sharon finished the necessary business with the children in the rest room. As she put the older child in the front seat, and then got in the back seat with the baby, the captain paid
for the gasoline with both U.S. Forces of Occupation scrip (used in lieu of “green dollars”) and gasoline ration coupons. Then he got behind the wheel, and they drove into Frankfurt am Main.

  The parking lot behind the Frankfurt Military Post chapel was half full of cars, many of them (like the Buick Roadmaster, which carried a MUNICH MILITARY POST tag) with tags from outside Frankfurt: Nuremberg, Heidelberg, Bad Tolz, Berlin, Stuttgart, even Salzburg and Vienna.

  It was a gathering of American Army Jews, a regular, every other month affair, held in rotation by every group of Jews large enough to be entitled to the services of their own rabbi, and functioning as a sort of unofficial congregation.

  There were services, of course, and tours of the areas where they met, but the real purpose was fellowship, to be with their own kind. The captain had told his wife that actually the real purpose was gluttony. She had pretended shock, but giggled, for the captain was close to the truth. Each “congregation” tried valiantly to outdo the other in the kind and variety and, of course, quality of the food served during the two-and-a-half-day “get-togethers.” Stuttgart, at the moment, was the undisputed victor. At the Stuttgart get-together, in addition to the roast chicken and the chopped liver and the gefilte fish and all the rest, there had been fresh orange juice and a fruit salad and two kinds of wine…all imported, who knew how, from Israel.

  As the captain parked the Buick, three GI buses, former six-by-six trucks with buslike bodies fixed on them, pulled into the parking lot. That was for the cultural tour of Frankfurt, scheduled for this afternoon. After sundown the services would begin.

  As soon as they were out of the car, women from the Frankfurt congregation converged on them to take the children and turn them over to the care of the goyim, more formally known as the Frankfurt Military Post Protestant Women’s Fellowship, who ran an around-the-clock nursery for the Jews when they got together, in exchange for similar services from the Jewish women.

  Sharon went off with the women and the suitcases full of clothes and diapers. The captain stood by the Buick, not quite knowing what to do. The Chaplain (Major) Rabbi of Frankfurt Military Post, a large and jovial redheaded man, went to rescue him.

  “Welcome, welcome,” he said. “I’m Rabbi Felter.”

  The captain looked at him and laughed.

  “I’m Captain Felter,” the captain said. “How have you been, Cousin?”

  The rabbi laughed. “I wondered what you would look like,” he said. “I saw your name on the roster. Munich, right?”

  “Right,” Felter said.

  “Mrs. Felter get taken care of all right?” the rabbi asked. Captain Felter nodded. “Well, come on, we’ll get you your name tag, and then I’ll get you, kinsman, a special treat. Some bona fide Hungo-Israeli Slibbovitz. One up on Stuttgart.”

  The rabbi, a demonstrative man, put his hand on the small of Captain Felter’s back. And then he withdrew it as if he had been burned. The smile on his face changed from happy to strained. He looked down at Captain Felter.

  “You really think you need that here, today?” he asked. Felter met his eyes.

  “You said something about Slibbovitz, Rabbi?” he replied.

  “Right, just as soon as we get you your name tag.”

  A large-breasted woman sat behind a folding table.

  “Who do we have here, Rabbi?” she asked.

  “This is Captain Felter,” the rabbi said. The woman flipped through a box and came up with two neatly lettered name cards, with safety pins on their backs.

  “Captain Sanford?” she said. “And Mrs. Sharon?”

  “Right,” Captain Felter said. “Thank you.”

  Rabbi Felter took the captain’s name plate and pinned it on the flap of his breast pocket. He examined it to see it was straight, and he read it:

  CAPT Sanford T. ‘Sandy’ Felter

  (Sharon)

  Office of Agricultural Evaluation (Bavaria)

  Hq, EUCOM

  Bullshit, the rabbi thought. Office of Agricultural Evaluation, my ass. Not with a .45 automatic under his tunic; not with that icy look he gave me when he knew I had felt it. The rabbi smiled.

  “On to the first authentic bona fide Hungo-Israeli Slibbovitz ever exported from Israel. Stuttgart, eat your heart out!”

  (Two)

  Two hours later, after an enormous lunch that he knew would give him indigestion for the rest of the week, Captain Felter detached himself from the group being given a tour of the just reconstructed Temple Beth-Sholem. Before Hitler (and now, again) it was the most beautiful synagogue in Frankfurt.

  He walked down the wide steps and started toward the corner. And then a taxi appeared, a Mercedes sedan with a checkered border running around its middle. He flagged it, and it pulled to the curb. The driver rolled down the window.

  “Will you take me to the Farben Building?” Felter asked, in English.

  “Get in,” the driver said, and reached over the seat back and opened the door. The cab headed for the I.G. Farben Building, but when it reached Erschenheimerlandstrasse, it turned left rather than right.

  “How have you been, my friend?” the driver asked, in German.

  “Until I had lunch, I was doing fine,” Felter replied, in accentless German. “And you, Helmut?”

  “We just came back from holiday,” the driver said. “Went to a little country hotel outside Salzburg. Got some clean air.”

  The taxi drove to a recently refurbished office building overlooking the Main River. There was an underground garage. The taxi drove to the door of an elevator and stopped, and Felter quickly got out and entered the elevator. He pushed the 8th floor button, and when the elevator began to rise, said, rather loudly: “The Baker’s Boy just got on.”

  A female voice came over a hidden speaker: “Good afternoon. Isn’t it lovely out?”

  The elevator stopped, and the door opened. Felter saw a pleasant-faced, gray-haired woman sitting behind a receptionist’s desk. A sign hung on the wall behind her, the legend engraved in either glass or lucite: “The West German Association for Agronomy”.

  “Go right in,” the woman said. “He’s been waiting for you.”

  She pushed a button beneath her desk, and there was the sound of a solenoid receiving an electrical impulse. When Felter pushed on a steel door covered with a wooden veneer, it moved effortlessly inward, permitting him to pass, and then closed with a clunk like a bank vault after him. Inside were two other doors, again sheathed in wood veneer. As he approached one, there came again the sound of a solenoid being activated. Beyond the second door was a large, sunlit room furnished in light oak.

  A bald, stout, benign-looking man in his shirt-sleeves crossed the room to shake Felter’s hand, and to offer him a drink or coffee.

  “I’ve just had some of the first Hungo-Israeli Slibbovitz ever exported,” Felter said. “What I need is an Alka-Seltzer.”

  “How about some peppermint schnapps?”

  “God, no. That would make it worse.”

  “Try the schnapps, Sandy,” the bald man said. “The peppermint is good for you.”

  He went to a bar, concealed in a cabinet, and poured a long-stemmed glass three-quarters full of peppermint schnapps and handed it to Felter.

  “This is going to take some time,” the bald man said. “You want to take off your coat?”

  Felter unbuckled his tunic belt, and then unbuttoned the tunic and took it off and hung it up. The bald man waved him into a chair, and handed him a two-button switch.

  “Left stops the projector,” the bald man said. “Right operates the dictating machine.”

  “I remember,” Felter said. He sat down in the chair and then sat up and reached behind him and laid the .45 automatic on the table beside the dictating machine.

  “Der kleine Kaptain und die grosse Kanone,” the bald man chuckled. “Do you really need something that large, Sandy?”

  “I can’t hit the broadside of a barn with a snub-nose,” Felter replied, “and if you hit something wi
th a .45, that’s it.”

  The bald man went to his desk and pushed several buttons. Heavy curtains closed over the windows, and a beam of light from a motion picture projector flashed on the wall. The frozen image of a railroad station appeared on the wall.

  “It’s all yours, Sandy,” the bald man said. Felter pushed one of the buttons on his control. The frozen images began to move. The camera focused on a man coming out of the station. Felter froze the image, stared at it for a moment.

  “That’s him,” he said. “No question about it.” He said the man’s name and then pushed the button which sent the images into motion again. It took half an hour for all the film, generally in segments no longer than sixty or ninety seconds, to be shown.

  “Very interesting,” he said, when the projector died, and the curtains whooshed open again. “What the hell do you think it is?”

  “Obviously,” the bald man said, “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Off the top of my head,” Felter said, “what it looks like to me is that somebody needs to be convinced he’s playing with the big boys. Step Two is that if they are willing to send him in to convince that somebody, then that somebody is somebody worth convincing. I don’t like that.”

  “What do you think of Karl Neimayer?” the bald man asked.

  “I was afraid to bring his name up to you,” Felter said.

  “Have you got somebody on him?”

  “That would violate the solemn agreement between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany,” Felter said.

  “Have you got somebody on him, Sandy?”

  “Next question, Gunther?”

  “I have been reluctant to really watch him, Sandy,” the bald man said. “Especially since I know other people are watching him, too. I can’t afford to have a parade following him around. And, I submit, neither can you. We have a certain commonality of interest here, Sandy.”

  “Not admitting, of course, that I have anybody on Neimayer, what do you propose?”

  “Simply that it would make a lot more sense to have one of yours on Neimayer alternating with one of mine, than to have both of ours on him at the same time.”