Dry Bones (6 page)

When Brother Andre called the attention of the other altar servers to Dunne’s mastery of the prayers—“Listen to Fintan,
mes garçons
, he has it down
parfaitement
”—how proud he felt.

“
Totiusque.
” A word you could taste. Like licorice. Who cared what it meant? You could make it mean anything you want: “Good luck,” for example.

Dunne went to Mass occasionally, to confession when he felt the need, ditto for praying. Hail Marys and Our Fathers mostly. Prayers he didn’t remember learning, with words he didn’t think about, just repeated. The one prayer that he carefully articulated, that made him feel as though he was actually praying, was the one whose words he didn’t understand: Suscipiat.

It was a smooth landing. As they exited the plane, sun-warmed, flower-scented Italian air jolted Dunne with an instantaneous, involuntary reverie of Cuba, eve of war, honeymoon with Roberta in the Hotel Barcelona, melancholy reminder of a distance greater than miles measured; a distance felt in the heart, the kind
he’d experienced the week before, on his final leave in London before leaving for Bari, when he’d gone to see
Cover Girl
at a USO movie night. Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth crooned the lyrics of “Long Ago (and Far Away).”

A lone soldier started to cry. Before long, muffled sobs filled the hall. Old-timers and newly arrived joined in. Technicolor beauty almost too much to bear, Rita could reduce any GI to tears. This case, the blame belonged to the contagion rampant among pining, lonely men (mostly) and boys (many), civilians at heart (almost all): Not just lust—susceptible to instant relief (self-administered or purchased)—but homesickness, the only permanent cure out of reach and unavailable.

When the lights came up, tears had dried. Men skulked out, avoiding each other’s eyes, like college boys leaving a Times Square peep show.

The others from the plane piled on the truck waiting to take them to the base. There was no room left for Dunne and Van Hull. A jeep was ordered. They rode into the green-brown foothills until they reached two landing strips lined with B-17s and their Mustang escorts and a sprawling village of Quonset huts. Unpleasant, pervasive odor of gasoline, latrines, and disinfectant hung in the air.

They were quartered in small rooms in a hut on the far side of the airstrips. Van Hull excused himself and went off to take a nap. Dunne unlocked the door to his room. Atop the dented, chipped olive-green metal desk directly ahead was a manila envelope. Typed on the label was his name, and beneath—in all caps—
CONFIDENTIAL: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
. Inside was the familiar spiral-bound briefing book. He flipped it open to the title page:
OPERATION MAXWELL
.

Van Hull’s snoring wafted through the paper-thin walls. After his sleep on the plane, Dunne didn’t feel tired. He stuck the briefing book in the top drawer. On his initial missions, he’d
devoured the contents. Experience taught that the briefer would do his best to give a crash course in the complexities they’d encounter, making it easier to sift important stuff from fluff conjured up by an overzealous former academic eager to duplicate his Ph.D. dissertation.

He opened the desk drawer to look for stationery on which to write a letter to Roberta. There were several sheets as well as a well-thumbed book he mistook for the Bible until he picked it up:
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, by Dale Carnegie.

The pages were heavily underlined. The section heads were Carnegie’s play on the Ten Commandments—Moses as salesman instead of prophet—“Six Ways to Make People Like You” or “Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking.” It must have been left behind by a previous occupant who wisely concluded, whatever its postwar applications, it wasn’t going to be of much use behind enemy lines.

He started a letter to Roberta. By now she understood that though it mentioned nothing explicit, a multipage letter meant he was about to leave on a mission. (It would be flown back to London and postmarked from there.) He decided to finish it later, tucked the unfinished pages in the top drawer. He lay down—pillow’s soft, clean, scent closer to feminine than anything else on the base. Rita Hayworth came back, chemistry with Gene Kelly, lyrics so resonant of that night at Ben Marden’s when he’d fallen in love.
Just one look and then I knew
, so true,
that all I longed for long ago
(how did songwriters get it so right?)
was you! Just you!
His snoring soon joined Van Hull’s.

They met up with the other operatives in the officers’ mess. There was a well-stocked bar. Dunne had scotch; Van Hull stuck to water. Gathered around a radio, they listened to the nightly news on the BBC. Trademark tone of the announcer—upper class, educated, serious but not somber, crisp yet unhurried—had an authority American broadcasters imitated but only Edward R. Murrow attained.

The news was all good. Soviet offensive under way in western Poland, and Prussia was advancing along a broad front. Warsaw and Kraków had been taken. “With the Allies advancing toward the Rhine and the Soviets storming across the Vistula,” the announcer intoned, “it’s only a matter of time before Berlin will fall.”

Their plates were loaded with mounds of potatoes and overcooked beef. Positive as it was, the news had dampened rather than lightened the mood.

Only a matter of time:
Time enough for Hitler’s hard-core fanatics to drag down as many opponents as possible; time enough to meet the unmet bullet, the one with your name on it, fatal acquaintance, all the worse coming at the war’s finale.

They went outside. Thick purple twilight poured over the gently sloping hills. Van Hull walked away, stopped, and came back. “You have a cigarette?” Dunne handed him the pack. Van Hull took one and lit it. There was a tiny tremble in his hand. “I’m sorry. I should have taken your advice.”

Dunne lit a cigarette for himself. It wasn’t unusual to get a case of the jitters on the eve of a drop. Everybody did, especially those who’d been dropped before and knew firsthand how easy it was for a mission to go wrong. Van Hull was usually better than anyone else at not letting it show. “What advice?”

“‘Never mix personal with professional.’”

“Lieutenant Michael Jahn?”

Van Hull nodded.

“We’ve crossed that bridge, Dick.”

“I’m lucky you volunteered to come along.”

“Glad I did.” A lie, but a white one. Given a choice—which admittedly he hadn’t been—Dunne was more certain than ever he preferred serving with a seasoned operative like Van Hull than a crew of rookies.

“I’m packing it in.” Van Hull strolled away. Dunne thought about joining him but wasn’t tired and didn’t feel in the mood to
dive into the briefing book or lie on the bed and stare at the water stains in the corkboard ceiling. He went back inside for a nightcap with the men who remained behind. They smoked, swapped stories about the missions they’d survived, and heaped dead butts and ashes on the tin tray.

Peter Bunde, the third member of their party, a newly minted, sandy-haired lieutenant from Buffalo, New York, and graduate of Canisius College, arrived from Tripoli that morning. First time out of the States, only son of Slovak immigrants, fluent in their language as well as German, he’d act as radio operator and liaise with the partisans. “I was afraid I’d miss the big show,” he said. “That would’ve killed me.”

They moseyed together to a Quonset hut set on the northern fringe of the base where the briefing was scheduled. Bunde walked a step or two ahead, barely able to contain his impatience with their laid-back pace. Without looking up from his comic book, the orderly at the entrance tossed his head toward the rear of the hut.

They sat at a square conference table. Above, a fan rotated in leisurely, feckless circles. A brittle, yellow-brown shade softened the inrush of sunlight through the single window. Turlough Bassante, a tall, thin, balding major with pointed nose, entered. “It might get a little warm, but war is hell, and it won’t get that hot.”

He pulled a map from his briefing book and pinned it to the cork-lined wall behind. He tapped the pink, peanut-shaped space at the center, which closely resembled the outline Van Hull had drawn on a cocktail napkin, with a rubber-tip pointer. “If you haven’t already guessed, this is Slovakia.” He sat and slid long, bony fingers into a tight clasp. “Before we start, I ask you not to smoke. I’m allergic.”

“I don’t smoke. Or drink,” Bunde said.

“A regular Boy Scout.”

“I was.”

“Comes in handy in the field,” Van Hull said.

“I suppose. But I’m a briefer, not a trainer, and we have business to attend to.” Bassante’s mouth was fixed in a disapproving pout. “Weather permitting, you’ll fly out two nights from now. You won’t be able to see much of Bari. Someday, if you’ve the time, come back for a tour of the old city, Barivecchia, dirty and dangerous but charming in its own way. Don’t miss the Castello Svevo, the twelfth-century fortress of Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor. ‘Frederick Barbarossa,’ the Italians dubbed him for his red beard. According to German folklore, he didn’t drown on the Third Crusade but fell into a trance beneath the Kyffhäuser Mountains, in Thuringia, there to wait the hour of the Reich’s greatest need, when he’ll wake and come to the rescue.”

Bunde raised his hand, tentatively, like a pupil in a classroom. “Barbarossa, that’s the name Hitler gave the attack on Russia.”

“Congratulations. Submit that as a question to
Information Please
. You might win a war bond. As for Frederick, the slumbering emperor of the First Reich apparently either hasn’t heard or has decided to ignore the summons from the tottering führer of the Third. A wise emperor, Frederick.”

Bassante opened his folder. “I presume you’ve read the briefing materials, so I’m not going to waste time revisiting the intricacies of the situation. Any questions?”

Dunne thumbed through thirty pages of dense, single-spaced text. This was the first time he’d encountered a briefing officer who didn’t begin with a review of the printed materials. But he wasn’t about to fess up to not doing his homework.

“I take your silence to mean you’ve familiarized yourselves with the materials.”

“How about putting it in a nutshell?” Van Hull said.

Head jutting forward, nose like the needle of a compass,
Bassante turned to him. “Nutshells are the purview of arborists. I’ll clarify what—if anything—is unclear.”

Bunde raised his hand. “I think I can help.”

“That’s quite all right, Lieutenant.” Bassante aimed the needle nose at Bunde. “Though I was never a Boy Scout, I’ve functioned sans assistance for over a year.”

Bunde’s reddened face registered embarrassment, ire—unhappy fusion of both.

“You were saying, Major …”

“Saying what?” The compass point swiveled again toward Van Hull.

“The situation in Slovakia.” Van Hull tossed a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook on the table. “The big picture.”

“Light that and the briefing is over. That’s a promise, not a threat.”

“I’m just going to play with it.” He plucked a match from the book and worked the tight creases between his teeth. “Helps kill the craving.”

Bassante rested his elbows on the table, refolded his hands, putting them together as if to pray, tips of index fingers touching tip of nose. After a moment of silence, he stood, paced, head down, needle pointing south. The problem with a briefing about a drop outside the perimeter of the war in the west, he said, was that the
ordinary
ignorance of most Americans about European affairs instantly turned
extraordinary
.

“In cases like yours”—he nodded toward Lieutenant Bunde—“those with ethnic connections have some idea of the subtleties involved. Yet, more often than not, those connections encourage rather than constrain a paralyzing parochialism that makes it impossible to make an unbiased analysis.”

The flush returned to Bunde’s face. He squirmed in his seat but stayed silent.

Bassante looked directly at him. “Though I might disagree
with some of your interpretations, Lieutenant, I’m sure you’ve a grip on the players in Slovakia. Most Americans, on the other hand, are devoid of any historical perspective or nuanced understanding of the complexities outside their borders. It’s part of our national profile and extends to the highest reaches.”

Van Hull made no effort to hide his boredom, chewing the paper end of the match and doodling in his briefing book a tight, elaborate weave of spirals and curlicues.

“The Slovaks are Slavs,” Bassante said. “Hitler loathes them as a human subspecies. His goal is to annex the lands of the east for settlement by the Aryan race. The fittest among the Slavs will serve as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The unfit will be eliminated. But for strategic reasons, he made an exception of Slovakia, using it as a wedge to pry apart what he called ‘the wall of Pan-Slavic solidarity.’”

Oblivious to his insistence a few minutes before that he wouldn’t “waste time revisiting the intricacies of the situation in Czechoslovakia,” Bassante launched into a monologue about the country’s creation after World War I, tensions between Czechs and Slovaks, dubious wisdom of incorporating the heavily German Sudetenland, and formation of a proto-Fascist Slovak independence movement under Father Andrej Hlinka, a Catholic priest, and his successor, Monsignor Jozef Tiso.

Bunde raised his hand. Bassante ignored him and went on with his summary. Bunde blurted out, “Just so it’s clear the majority of Slovaks have never been Fascists. The uprising against the Germans has confirmed that.”

Van Hull pointed at the desultory spin of the ceiling fan. “Can’t that go faster?”

“That’s as fast as it goes,” Bassante said.

“That’s
fast
?”

“In Bari, yes.” Bassante continued the lecture where he left off before Bunde interrupted, reviewing the Munich Crisis
of ’38 and Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment.

Dunne struggled to keep his eyes open until another vociferous objection from Bunde jolted him to attention: “You’ve got the facts twisted. While I’m no fan of Tiso, the truth is, Hitler gave him an ultimatum, not a ‘nudge.’ Either Slovakia declare independence and ask German protection, or Germany would seize Bohemia and Moravia and let Poland and Hungary divide Slovakia among themselves.”