The First Wave (11 page)

“Crossroads,” Kaz translated for us.

“Go on,” said Harding. I took a deep breath. It was just a hunch, and I had been wrong before, but there was something about that matchbook, and all those bills in Bessette’s desk drawer.

“A contact for the smuggling operation can be made in a bar, Le Bar Bleu, in Bône, near the supply depot. There’s a link between Villard, the prisoners, and the smuggling operation.”

I didn’t know that there was such a link. Maybe Bessette just collected matchbooks. But I had to keep this thing going in the same direction that Diana was headed, or I’d never see her again.

“Interesting,” said Harding, giving me a once-over that said he believed me about as much as he believed we’d be home by Christmas. “What was the name of this contact?”

I looked at Kaz, who simply shrugged. “We were not given a name, Major.”

“Man or woman?” he asked.We both hesitated for a heartbeat, but it was long enough for Harding.

“Never mind,” Harding said, “I don’t want to undermine the enthusiasm of my junior officers, even if they use unorthodox and illegal means.”

“You know!” I exclaimed.

“All I know is that you have about fifty feet of rope stowed under your cot, and there was a dark rust-colored stain on the floor in Bessette’s office when I met him there this morning. Some Arabs delivered a new rug and rolled it out while I was there. Even a regular army guy can figure stuff out sometimes, Boyle.”

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Regular appointments are nice but this one didn’t yield as much information as your unannounced visit. I told him we were concerned about the fate of civilian prisoners taken after the attempted coup. He told me it was none of his business since it was a police matter, and none of mine since it was a French police matter.”

“Major, I saw him bash in the head of a French Army captain who was yelling at him about drugs, smuggling, Americans—I couldn’t understand most of it. Bessette grabbed a candlestick and killed him with it. His guards reacted like it was business as usual.”

“Americans? What do you think he meant by that?”

“I don’t know, sir. I couldn’t make it out. It sounded like the captain—Pierre was the only name I heard—was threatening Bessette. Bessette pretended to give in, then picked up the candlestick and beaned Pierre. It was all over in a second.”

“Then what happened?”

“They left with the body wrapped in the rug he fell on. I went through Bessette’s desk and files as best I could. I found the password written on a copy of the same travel orders we found at police headquarters. I figure this place may have something to do with it.” I handed Harding the blue matchbook for Le Bar Bleu.

“And when do we get to the murder you’re investigating?”

“Oh, yeah. Noncom named Joe Casselli got his throat slit this afternoon. He was the supply sergeant, in charge of this penicillin as well as all the other medical drugs. Do you know about this stuff, sir?”

“I do, but you shouldn’t.These medical people should learn to keep their mouths shut. This is a top-secret test. If everything works like the eggheads say it should, penicillin is going to save thousands of lives. And only we have it.”

“Do the Germans know that?” Kaz asked.

“They know all about penicillin. The trick isn’t making it, it’s producing enough of it to be useful. This hospital’s supply is the first batch from a new production process. That’s why we want to keep it a secret.”

“So this stuff is valuable?” I asked.

“Billy,” Kaz said, “I would be dead without it. I think it’s very valuable.”

“Exactly,” said Harding. “There’s no telling what it would be worth on the black market. Is any of it missing?”

“They’re doing an inventory now. We can go check over at the depot. As far as the murder goes, I’m pretty sure who did it.”

“Who?” Kaz and Harding asked at the same time.

“Villard. I saw him driving out of here in a truck, wearing an American uniform, just before they found Casselli’s body. I’ll bet that truck was full of medical supplies, including penicillin.”

“Goddamn,” Harding said. Kaz said something in Polish that was probably along the same lines.

“I do have some good news, though. Remember Georgie— Lieutenant Dupree? He had a younger brother, Jerome, who was with the rebels? Well, he’s here, in the hospital. He was all worked up about a notebook that the rebels had managed to lift from Bessette at some point. He had it when they brought him in, but now it’s gone. I found this sheet of paper, from a notebook, inside a matchbook on Casselli’s body.” I handed the slip of paper with the code on it to Harding.

“Pretty good work so far, Boyle. Let’s go check on the inventory and interview Jerome. Lieutenant Kazimierz, if you’re up to it, will you work on this?”

“I am, Major,” Kaz said as he took the paper. “I quite enjoy deciphering codes.” Puzzling out that jumble of letters, Kaz looked happy as we left. I wasn’t. I needed sleep, I had a headache, and my eyes felt like they were full of grit. I started out last night climbing rooftops and since then Kaz had almost died, I had been bombed by the Germans, and then I’d been shanghaied for a murder investigation. I was used to long hours, but the army didn’t pay overtime.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a corpse to put things into perspective. I was tired, but Jerome was dead. I could tell by the hospital sheet over his head. We had come into the room to find Dr. Dunbar standing next to the bed, making notes on Jerome’s chart.

“I just found him a minute ago,” Dunbar said after he gave Harding a salute as an afterthought. “He must’ve died very recently.”

“I was in here with him about an hour ago,” I said. “He was tired and going to sleep.”

“Could have been a complication from his head injury. He had a severe concussion when he came in. Happens sometimes.” He hung the chart back up and walked out. I went up to the bed and pulled back the sheet. A lock of his long dark brown hair hung down over Jerome’s forehead. He looked relaxed, and I would have thought he was asleep except for his eyes. They were still open. I tried to avoid looking at them, but couldn’t. They seemed to seek me out, as if Jerome had a last message to pass on. All I got was a shiver up my spine as I reached down and closed them. They were hazel green, just like Georgie’s, the contracted pupils showing off their full color as if they had blossomed in death. Two brothers dead for what they believed in when they both could have sat it out and played it safe. Like I’d expected I’d be doing back in D.C., where I should have been, in a cushy staff job. Yet I was glad I had gotten into the war, because otherwise I wouldn’t have met Diana. But in this hospital room, with a young kid lying dead under a coarse, dingy sheet, I couldn’t feel glad about anything.

“Let’s go, Boyle,” Harding said, his hand on my shoulder. “He can’t talk to us now.”

If only the dead could speak. I had looked into those eyes, and couldn’t escape the feeling they were trying to tell me something, something important but just out of my reach. I followed Harding out of the room, then led the way to the Supply Depot. We found Willoughby leaning up against the brickwork wall outside the supply room where Casselli had been killed. He was adding up columns on the inventory sheet on his clipboard. He came to attention and saluted like a soldier when he saw Harding. There were brand new corporal’s stripes sewn onto his sleeves. I returned the salute and pointed at the stripes.

“That was fast. From Private First Class to Corporal already,” I said.

“Colonel Walton put me in charge, Lieutenant. I told you I did most of the real work around here anyway. The colonel said I deserved it,” he added as an afterthought.

“Didn’t say you don’t,Willoughby,” I said, watching his eyes. They darted between Harding and me.

“Tell us what you’ve got, Corporal,” Harding said.

“Yes sir. I did the best I could, Lieutenant,” he said. He gave a nervous glance back at the major. “Graves Registration hasn’t shown up yet, so I had to work around Joe. I mean, Joe’s body.” He shuffled his feet, rubbing his face with one hand. He worked in a hospital in the middle of a war, but this might have been the first dead body he’d ever seen. I gave him an encouraging nod to continue.

“They got the penicillin, two full cases. All that’s left in the hospital is less than a case. Plus they got about half our supply of morphine, including all the spare syrettes for the medics. Five cases of sulfa, a box of ten 1cc vials of nalorphine, and two bottles of chloral hydrate.”

“What’s chloral hydrate, Corporal?” Harding asked. Willoughby shrugged.

“Sleeping pills. Your basic ingredient for a Mickey Finn,” I answered.

“How do you know that?” Harding asked.

“You can buy knockout drops, or chloral hydrate, back in Boston for the right price if you know the right gangster. Drop ’em in a drink and you have a Mickey Finn. Guaranteed to put anyone out, temporary or permanent, depending on how many drops.”

“Now you can buy them in Algiers,” Harding said, “courtesy of the U.S. Army.” He went into the supply room, shaking his head in disgust.

“If you’re all done here, Corporal, go see what’s taking Graves Registration so long. It’s too hot to keep a dead body lying around,” I told him.

“Yes, sir.” He handed me the inventory report and took off. People are always glad to leave when there are dead bodies around. I went inside. Casselli was starting to smell. He didn’t look peaceful, like Jerome. He looked like a corpse with a slit throat decomposing in the heat of North Africa.

“Professional job,” Harding said. “The killer could have been trained by the Commandos. Or me.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the Mob,” I said.

“Sicilians?”

“There’s lots of organized crime out of Marseilles. Maybe there’s some connection between them and smuggling here. Or maybe it was an Arab, using one of those curved knives.”

“It was a sharp knife, I can tell you that much,” Harding said.

“Major,” I asked. “How would you train somebody to slit a throat?”

“Hopefully you won’t need to, Boyle.”

“No, really, show me how you’d do it, sir.”

Harding pulled me away from Casselli’s body and stood behind me.With his left hand he grabbed my chin. “First, you pull up the chin so you can get at the throat.” He pulled his right hand across my bare neck. This must have been the last thing Casselli felt. I thrust my right hand up, protecting my neck.

“Would that work?” I asked. Harding drew his hand across my wrist.We both looked at Casselli’s right arm. He had a slice across the cuff, at exactly the same spot.

“It only delayed the inevitable,” Harding said. “If someone had him from behind, and knew what they were doing, his arm wouldn’t protect him for long.”

“Try it again,” I said, giving Harding a pencil. “Use that as the knife.”

He grabbed my chin and brought his right arm around with the pencil. I grabbed it with my right hand and pushed it away and then to the left, dragging the pencil across his left hand as it held my chin. He broke my grip and went at my neck again. I protected it with my right hand. Harding let go.

“Do you know someone with slash marks on his left arm?” he asked.

“Lieutenant Phillip Mathenet. A Vichy cop who said he got hit by shrapnel in the left arm. His sleeve was in shreds.”

“You said earlier that you knew Villard had killed Casselli.”

“That was before we worked this out. Mathenet’s sleeve bothered me. It seemed too coincidental. But Villard was here at the same time he was, and he had to be in on it.”

“Why?”

“Who else held Casselli’s right arm so Mathenet could make a clean cut? One on one, Casselli was holding him off.”

Harding thought for a minute, then lit a cigarette, the blue smoke helping to cover up the coppery smell of dried blood and the fouler odors of the shit and piss Casselli had let go when his lights went out. I looked down at Casselli, the supply sergeant, and wondered at the struggle he had put up. The dead eyes looked up at me, pupils wide in amazement, as if the thought of death had never occurred to him before. Probably hadn’t.

We walked outside, leaving the smell of decay and dried blood behind. Harding stood in the sun and drew on his cigarette. My head was spinning. It was way past chow time and I needed some. And some coffee, or sleep. Food and sleep. That sounded great. Then I’d worry about these dead bodies, and getting out of here to find Diana, and . . . I couldn’t even think about what else. I rubbed my eyes. My eyes. Something about my eyes nibbled at the back of my mind.What? My eyes or someone else’s? I had no clue. Literally.

“I need some chow and a cup of joe, Major, before I fall asleep in my tracks.”

“Let’s check on Lieutenant Kazimierz first. I’d like to know when they’re going to release him.”

I trudged after Harding, wondering who was going to release me, and what was it about eyes? Damn his eyes? The ayes have it? The eye of the beholder? I want to go home? I gave up and shuffled along to Kaz’s room.

Kaz held up a slip of paper as we walked in with “Carrefour” and “Le Bar Bleu” written on it.

“I already told you the password and about the bar,” I said. I wasn’t thinking quickly.

“You cracked the code,” Harding said.

“It’s hardly a code at all,” said Kaz, sounding disappointed. “It’s more like an improvised shorthand. In a proper code, one doesn’t leave spaces between the words. This is nothing more than a single letter displacement. B for A, C for B, and so on. DBSSFGPVS is Carrefour if you shift each letter one place.”

“Simple,” I said, now that I understood.

“Simple enough to be able to write and read it quickly if you know the secret, but still enough to keep prying eyes from understanding it right away,” said Harding.

Prying eyes. Eyes again. I almost had it . . . then Rita the nurse walked in, a ray of cheery sunshine, visiting her prince.

“Baron, time for your medicine! Excuse me, gentleman.” She set down her tray and gave Kaz four pills as she poured a glass of water. She did have very pretty green eyes. Green eyes like Jerome. Kaz beamed at the attention and scooped up the pills. His eyes were blue. Different eyes. That was it!

“What are all those for?” I asked.

“That’s for his blood pressure, it’s a little high,” she said chattily, pointing out different pills, “and this is something to help him sleep.” The elevated blood pressure was probably due to his heart condition but I didn’t want to say anything about that. Kaz was having an adventure, and would hate being sent back to a real hospital in England. I had to humor him.

“Chloral hydrate?”

“Why, yes, Lieutenant. You certainly know something about drugs. Were you a medical student before the war?”

“No, a student of human nature. How much longer is he going to be taking that penicillin?”

“I’ll have to ask Doctor Dunbar.”

“Please do that. Now.”

“I have to finish—”

“Now!” Sometimes I surprise myself. I can actually sound like a tight-ass officer when I need to. Nothing to be proud of, but it got her out of the room.

“Jerome didn’t die of complications. He was murdered, and we’ve got to get Kaz out of here.”

Harding and Kaz just looked at me like I was a blithering idiot.

“Now!”Why not try it on them?

“Explain yourself, Boyle!” Harding yelled without raising his voice.

“It’s the eyes! I’m not a hundred percent certain, but one thing I do know is that a morphine overdose makes your pupils shrink down to a pinpoint. I’ve seen the look on the faces of addicts who checked out plenty of times. Jerome’s eyes were just like that.”

“But Boyle, maybe it was just the light in the room,” said Harding patiently.

“No, it couldn’t be. Listen, sir, I know you’ve seen plenty of dead men in the Great War. Probably a lot more than me, but my job is to study them when we find them murdered. One thing my Dad told me when he took me to my first crime scene was about the Dead Man’s Stare.”

“The dead do look as if they’re seeing something beyond us,” Kaz said quietly.

I took a breath before going on. I knew he was thinking about Daphne now and I hated to get clinical, but I had to.

“Yeah, and a lot of rookies get spooked by that. But he taught me that the pupils in your eyes widen right after death. It’s the muscles relaxing or something like that.He said knowing why made it easier to look at them. It did.”

“Didn’t Jerome’s eyes look like that?” Harding asked, sitting down on one of the empty beds and folding his arms.

“They probably will soon. But the effects of the morphine trumped the natural process.”

“So he overdosed on morphine?” asked Kaz.

“No. Somebody gave him an overdose. Bit of a difference. That makes two people murdered in this hospital, both of whom knew about this missing notebook. And anyone can walk in here and give Kaz whatever kind of pills or injections they want, night or day!” I tried to slow down. I knew I sounded hysterical, but things were beginning to fall into place.

I tried to be calm and rational. “The notebook that Jerome and his pals lifted from Bessette must contain information about the smuggling operation. It points to the same place in Bône—Le Bar Bleu— as the matches and receipts I found in Bessette’s office. And the same password shows up on Villard’s travel orders to the supply depot at Bône. Don’t you get it? Le Carrefour, the crossroads!”

“Bône is the crossroads of the smuggling operation,” Kaz said, “and the contact is at this bar.”

“Could be,” said Harding. “But how is Villard involved?”

“Remember, right after Villard shot Georgie, Jerome’s brother? That German officer, Remke, was telling us that Villard had connections to the local underworld here. He’s probably the connection between them and Bessette. That’s why Bessette killed that French Army captain last night. He must have been protesting the smuggling of drugs taken from the Americans.”

“Hold on a minute,” Harding said, as he rubbed his chin, and paced up and down the little room. “You’re saying that this whole operation to raid American drug supplies, including our top secret drug, penicillin, was organized within two or three days of the invasion? The Vichy French didn’t know we were coming. Even if they did, how did they learn about our medical supplies? Or that we’d store them here? It doesn’t make sense.”

I realized he had a point. How could they have known about any of this?

“There’s always a black market when supplies are short. Maybe they guessed a lot of military supplies, German or Allied, were going to land here someday. In the meantime, they ran what they could through Bône. I’m sure supplies came in from Marseille all the time. Maybe they took a cut at the docks and sent heroin to France in return.

Villard or Bessette had to have some angle.”

“It’s a stretch, Boyle,” Harding said.

“It is a lot to assume, Billy,” added Kaz. I wasn’t getting any support for my theory.

“If Dunbar is willing to release Kaz, can we at least get him out of here?” I asked Harding.

“Colonel Walton wants you to investigate Caselli’s murder,” he answered. “You’d do more good here.”

“But if the killing is linked to the smuggling operation, I ought to go to Bône.”

“Boyle, the fact that Villard has probably taken Diana Seaton to Bône wouldn’t be influencing your judgment, would it?”

“I gotta be honest, sir. It has absolutely nothing to do with it. I think Kaz is in danger here and that Villard is behind the killings and theft. I say Bône is our best bet.”