The First Wave (21 page)
“I was so confused, Billy,” she said, tears streaking her face. “I didn’t know if I was dreaming or if what happened to me was real. I’m not even sure if
this
is real.”
She began to back away from me. As the gap between us widened, fear flooded me. I could feel the blood pumping in my head. I took one step closer and she retreated a step.
“Diana . . .” I implored her.
“He kept giving me drugs and everything seemed so pleasant and peaceful and then it didn’t. I dreamed awful things. I think I dreamed you were walking through fire. Or did that really happen? It couldn’t have, could it? I mean, here you are.”
I held out my hand, trying to keep it from shaking.
“Stop, Diana, just stop. We’ll find the others, and free them, I promise.”
“Yes. Find them, Billy. Save them.”
Her hand holding the pistol rose, slowly. I could only watch it, carried upward by that strong and graceful arm, in an arc I knew would end in oblivion. I tried to move, to launch myself across the distance separating us, but I knew there wasn’t enough time to reach her. I kept my eyes on hers, willing her to stay with me. But there was nothing to lock onto. Her eyes looked right through me to some other place, somewhere else she wanted to go to.
I didn’t see Harry dash toward her until he tackled her and they both fell onto the sand. There was a melee as they struggled for possession of the gun. He pushed it away from her, down onto the ground. Diana was thrashing and kicking and screaming. I ran and picked up the pistol before she could seize it again.
“Get him off me! Get him off!” she screamed.
Harry rolled to the side, holding his wounded leg with both hands.
“Get off!” she screamed again, pushing at the air with her hands. I flung the pistol away and knelt at her side, trying to take one of her flailing hands in mine.
“Get him off me, please,” she cried. She drew her knees up to her chest, went limp and covered her face with her hands. I cradled her so her face wouldn’t rest on the sand.
“It’s okay, it’s okay now. I’m really here. And I will find them. It’ll be all right, everything will be okay,” I said, lying over and over again, in my gentlest voice.
DIANA WAS QUIET AS we got her into the jeep. Rodney knew shock when he saw it and covered her with a thick woolen blanket from the rear of the vehicle.
“There you go, miss,” he cooed to her. “You sit tight.We’re here now.”
He sat with her in the back seat, tucking the blanket in around her and urging her to sip from his canteen. She still had a faraway look in her eyes, but at least she was quiet. I stood at the side of the jeep.When I put my hand on her shoulder she didn’t flinch.
“I’ll be right back, Diana,” I said. “Rodney and Harry will take good care of you. I won’t be long.” I waited until she met my eyes.
“Billy?”
“I’ll be right back,” I repeated. “Okay? Rodney’s right here, he’ll stay with you.”
She nodded.
“We’ll be all right, Lieutenant,” Rodney said with a cheerful voice that didn’t match his expression. “You go on and . . . take care of things.”
Harry limped up to the Jeep and leaned against it. The bandage around his leg was soaked with blood.
“Thank you, Harry.” It seemed so little to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He placed his hand over mine. I thought he intended to push mine away, but he kept it there.
“I guessed what she intended to do,” he said.
“How? I didn’t, until too late.”
He shrugged, and looked down at the ground. “I realized as soon as she stepped into the daylight. It was the way she held the gun, pacing back and forth, like an animal in a cage, realizing there was no way out.”
“Except . . .”
“Yes,” Harry said, “except for that. The quick way out.” A flush of shame reddened his face. I realized why he’d been able to interpret the signs so easily, but this wasn’t the time or place.
“I’ll just be a few minutes. You all right?”
“I’ll be fine. It’s just a through and through, right?”
“Sure, pal.”
On my way back to the barracks I picked up Mathenet’s revolver from the ground, blew the sand from it, and wiped it on my pants leg as entered the barracks. It was a relief to have the sun off my back as I hit the shade. I stood in the corridor, catching my breath and letting the sweat drip off my face. It wasn’t exactly cool inside, but it was cooler. I looked at the gun in my hand and waited. When I was calm I strolled into the room where I had left Mathenet. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, fear and hope flickering in his eyes, as he watched me and then Duxbury.
“Corporal Duxbury,” I said, “did the Commandos bring along a medical unit and a doctor?”
“Medics, we did, Lieutenant, but no doctor.You Yanks landed a parachute battalion on the airfield east of town this morning, and it was unopposed as well. They told us transports would be coming in to set up a field ’ospital and evacuate the wounded. Does the young lady need a doctor?”
“Yes, it would be good for her to see a doctor, I think.”
I faced Mathenet and lifted the revolver just a few inches, pulled back on the hammer, and heard the cylinder click with a nice, well-oiled sound. I pulled the trigger and the sound reverberated in the small room. Mathenet jumped in surprise and then stared at his left foot. There was a round hole dead center right through his shoe, where the laces ended. Blood bubbled up as he lifted his foot to hold it by the ankle. There was a bullet hole in the floor, too.
“I think he’s going to need one as well,” I said.
“A through and through, just like the captain,” said Duxbury, viewing the shot with professional interest. “Lucky chap.”
Mathenet was moaning, mumbling in French, and trying to untie his shoe. As he managed to get it off he started screaming as the blood poured out of it.
“Help me, please, I will bleed to death.Why did you shoot me?”
I let that pass. “Here, put your foot up on the pillow,” I said as I helped him to lie down on the bed. “Corporal, get something to tie around his foot, please.”
Duxbury grabbed a sheet and started ripping it into long pieces. Mathenet looked at me with wide eyes, confused.
“What are you doing . . . ?”
“Shhhh,” I said. “Take it easy.”
Duxbury wrapped the strips around Mathenet’s foot and tied it off tightly. The blood flow eased.
I stood over him. “Just so you know, that was for nothing. Nothing at all. Do you understand?”
He shook his head no, and tried to form the word with his mouth but nothing emerged. “That’s all right. You need to understand that if you lie to me, if you even hesitate to tell me the whole truth, the next one will be for something. Something permanent.”
I raised the revolver again and let the barrel rest on his kneecap. The hammer wasn’t back and my finger wasn’t even on the trigger, but he didn’t seem comforted.
“Non, non, non. . . .” Now he got the word out.
“Okay, tell me the truth.”
“Oui, oui, I will.” Now his head bobbed up and down, eagerly.
“Where is Villard going with the prisoners?”
“Oh, no, I do not know, really, please . . .”
I put my finger on the trigger.
“He did not tell me everything, he kept secrets from everyone!”
I pulled the hammer back, and that quiet metallic sound—the click of a bullet arriving at just the right spot for its date with the firing pin—seemed to echo.
“The crossroads,” he sobbed. “That is all I know, really. The crossroads.”
“Carrefour? Isn’t that a password?”
“No, no. It is a place. You found the paper? From the notebook?” There was a touch of hope in his voice. We were having a conversation, which appealed to him more than picking pieces of his kneecap out of a dirty mattress.
“Yeah, I found it.What do you mean, a place?”
“The bar, that was the first place, the first place to meet. Then, if that didn’t work, the crossroads. But I swear, he never told me where it was. He said if we needed to go there, then I would know.”
I released the hammer and took my finger off the trigger. That same sound again, but reversed, like time going backward.
“Who were you going to meet there?”
“Customers, Arab traders, whoever would pay the most.”
This time I just had to move my finger only a quarter of an inch.
“The Germans, he was in touch with the Germans. They wanted all the penicillin he could deliver. They were going to pay in gold, as soon as he got the next shipment.” He spoke in a rush, hurrying to get the words out that would move my finger back. But I didn’t shift it. Next shipment? No one had said a word about
another
shipment. I had to think it through.
“When and where will the next shipment arrive?”
“In two nights, but I do not know where. I would tell you, I owe that pig nothing!”
Yeah, now we were pals. No one liked Villard.
“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.
“No, Villard did not trust me with any information. He always told me things right before they were about to happen.”
“So that’s it?” I asked.
“Yes, truly. Please take me to the doctor now.”
I patted down his uniform jacket pocket, the pocket I saw him put something in when he’d taken the briefcase. I felt a notebook inside and reached in for it. A black leather notebook, full of pages just like the sheet I found on Casselli.
“You missed a page when you killed Casselli, by the way. It was folded inside the matchbook,” I offered, just being helpful. I flipped through the pages, seeing nothing but a lot of letters that didn’t make sense. Code again. “Smart move palming the notebook. A nice insurance package in case your boss turned against you,” I said. “But it was not smart to lie to me.”
He started to shake again, his whole body trembling, waiting for my hand to raise the gun and make that sound again. I wanted to, I wanted to empty his goddamn pistol into his chest and watch him die. Then I wanted him to come back, so I could do it all over again.
“Ain’t worth it, Lieutenant,”Duxbury said quietly. “Not even a rotten piece of garbage like that one.”
I had to agree. “Let’s go,” I said. But I knew someone else who was well worth it.
CAPTAIN GAUTHIER WAS happy to take Mathenet into custody, and I was happy he didn’t ask about the hole in Mathenet’s foot. Duxbury had given it a good bandaging, and the last I saw of Mathenet, a grinning French sergeant was opening the trap door to that hole Villard had kept Gauthier and his men in for two days. Mathenet had tried to protest, but I told him he didn’t have a leg to stand on. Duxbury thought it was funny, but I guess it lost something in translation since Mathenet didn’t laugh.
Duxbury and Rodney dropped us off at Harry’s boat. They said it had been fun, and I don’t think they were kidding. We traded handshakes and cigarettes, and I pretended to be glad to fork over a couple of packs of Lucky Strikes for English cigarettes, which tended to taste more like straw than tobacco.
Harry’s crewmen helped him aboard and then promptly ignored him while they made Diana comfortable. Banville got on the radio and contacted base. They relayed our situation to HQ in Algiers, and we were told that Harding had issued orders for an RAF Catalina flying boat to pick us up just outside the harbor. Harry, Diana, and I were to be taken to the 21st General Hospital in Algiers. Back to square one. But now I had Diana with me.
Aboard the giant seaplane, watching Banville turn the MTB out to sea for the long ride back, I observed Diana as the Catalina took off. Its two engines revved high and the hull bounced hard each time it sliced through a wave until it finally lifted off, leaving the heavy seas behind. The Catalina was outfitted for Air-Sea rescue; Diana lay on a stretcher, covered in blankets. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she wasn’t sleeping because I could see her brace herself every time the Catalina hit one of those waves. I reached over to place my hand on her shoulder, and she stiffened. I took it away and I made believe she was sleeping too.
Harry had his leg propped up on a case of ammo. Just beyond him were the waist gunners, who had great views from the observation blisters that jutted out from the narrow fuselage. Great, except when what you saw were German or Italian fighters diving toward you. The waist gunners ignored us as they swiveled their guns around and scanned the sky, which was fine with me.
“How’s the leg?” I asked, settling down on the metal seat next to Harry.
“Hurts like the devil, not that I dare complain about a little through and through, as our Commando friends kept reminding me.”
“Shot is shot,” I said. “The human body wasn’t built to have red hot lead smash through it. You have a right to complain.”
He didn’t say anything. After a minute or so he pointed with his thumb to Diana.
“How is she?”
“Asleep. I think, or hope. You saved her life, and I owe you for that.”
“Trick is, Billy, will she think I did her a favor? And did I? She’s obviously suffering, and I’ve just given her the chance to face more sleepless nights, more anguish, more memories . . .”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to your last boat?”
More silence. His eyes stayed glued to the floor.
“You knew what she was going to do before I did,” I said. “Maybe even before she did. You knew what she was feeling by the way she moved. Like a caged animal, looking for a way out, you said.”
“Only there is no way out,” he finished.
“Except— ”
“Yes, except that. By your own hand, or someone else’s, what does it matter? This is war, people die all the time!” Harry bit off those last words with anger, his face turning red.
“Before I ran into you, back in England, I was questioning a woman about a murder. Her husband had gone down with his bomber and she didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Know what she said to me?”
“What?”
“She said, thousands die every day, and they send no one. One old man dies, and they send you.”
“The difference being?”
“That old man didn’t have to die. Diana didn’t either. It wasn’t her time. You don’t, at least not by your own hand.”
Harry laughed at that, more of a grunt, really, with a lazy smile tacked onto the end of it.
“I couldn’t, anyway. Too much of a bloody coward. But it did seem like the only way out, when the walls were closing in and nothing made any sense at all.”
“So what happened?”
“Deuce of it is, I don’t really know. Or remember. We were on patrol, nothing special really. Last thing I remember is coming up on deck.Then, being in the drink. I woke up with blood in my eyes, floating in the water, my boat capsized and burning. I couldn’t remember how I got there, or what had happened. I looked around for the others, and there was no one. I saw one body, yards away, badly burned and obviously dead. That was it. Everybody gone, just me with a gash on my head bobbing around in my life jacket, watching my boat burn and go under. Maybe we hit a mine and it happened all in a second, or maybe we were jumped by S-Boats or Messerschmitts. I have no idea. I found a piece of wreckage and floated on it, and one of our own boats finally found me. Just by chance, too. How lucky is that, Billy, to be spared death in an explosion and then to be picked up before I could die of exposure?”
“If you were really lucky, you would’ve been ordered to stay in port that day.”
Harry grunted again, his slight grin offering the hope there might be something to really smile about someday. He looked out the small round window behind his head. The sea was choppy and there were small white plumes riding the crests of a thousand waves below. I thought about Harry floating in a sea like that, all alone, and remembered something.What had been just a story now seemed very real and terrifying.
“My Uncle Dan had something like that happen to him,” I said.
“Yes . . . ?”
“He fought in the First World War, in France. His squad had crawled out on a night patrol in No Man’s Land to cut wire. That night it was his turn as rear guard, to make sure a German patrol hadn’t spotted them, to stay put in a shell hole while the rest of the squad crawled back to their trench.”
I could see Uncle Dan out there now in a way I never could before, all alone and listening for any tell-tale sound in the darkness.
“He said the Germans sent up a flare, so he buried his head in the mud and didn’t move a muscle. Then he heard the artillery start up.He heard the shells whistling overhead and felt the ground shake as they hit behind him. He couldn’t tell how long it lasted, but it seemed to go on forever.When it stopped, he waited and waited, not moving a muscle. Then he started crawling back, heading the same way his squad had. He never found them, not a trace. They could have been blown to pieces, or been buried in the mud; he never knew. They were gone, and he was fine. Just gone.”
Harry didn’t look at me, or speak.We were quiet for a while.
“So it made sense to you, did it?” Harry said, not taking his gaze off the water below.
“What?”
“Being sent because one old man died.”
“It’s about the only thing that does.”
“Why? The pursuit of justice and all that rot?”
“Justice? What the hell do I know about justice? I’m not a lawyer or politician, thank God. I don’t know a damn thing about justice. Injustice, that’s easier. You know injustice when you see it. That old man’s dead body. Sergeant Casselli with his throat slit. And . . .”
I pointed to Diana.
“Look how easy it is to spot,” I said. “Everything looks wrong, like some terrible hand from hell reached up and turned people’s lives upside down, broke their hearts, ruined their dreams.”
I realized my voice had risen; I was almost yelling. The waist gunners both were looking at me as if I was crazy, and maybe they had a point. I made a gesture with one hand that said, Never mind, I’m okay, just a little worked up. They went back to craning their necks.
“So you’re here to set things right,” Harry said.
“I know there’s damn few dreams left in this war, Harry. The thing is, that’s what makes murder so hard to take.War’s going to take lives, we know that. So why let some bastard get away with murdering somebody who might otherwise have a chance?”
“It must be the pain, but I think you’re actually making sense,” Harry said, bracing his bad leg with both hands.
I shrugged. I was done explaining myself. But it bothered me, like when you walk by a picture hung crooked on the wall. It can bug you until you have to turn around and fix it. In my line of work, it just requires a little more effort to get things back in order.
I felt the Catalina start to lose altitude. Through the window across from me I could see the coast with Algiers harbor ahead.
“Almost there,” I said to Harry. “How’s the leg?”
“Starting to throb like the dickens. I almost wish I’d taken that dose of morphine Rodney offered.”
“Why didn’t you? It would have made the ride a lot more comfortable.”
“I can’t abide needles of any sort. I really am a coward at heart, you know. The thought of being stuck with one of those gives me nightmares. And I don’t think much of hospitals, either.”
“You’ll love this one, then. This is the place the drugs were stolen from, where that supply sergeant was murdered and the kid overdosed on morphine.”
“Thank you very much for that information,” Harry said. “Now I have to worry about idiot doctors as well as needles. Don’t they know how to measure doses?”
“I’m not really sure how that happened. But the good news is they do have some pretty nurses there,” I said, trying to make up for worrying him.
“I’m all for pretty nurses, but I prefer to see them off duty and outside of a hospital. As far as I’m concerned, if you can walk into a hospital under your own power, don’t. There are more chances of getting sick inside than outside.”
“Well, you could probably
hop
into a hospital under your own power. Does that count?”
“Go ahead and have your laugh, Billy. But this is almost like a religion in my family. My grandmother had nothing to do with doctors all her life, after her mother went to hospital for an ache in her side and never set foot out of it. Alive anyway. And Grandmamma lived to be ninety-six, and was in good health until a few weeks before she died. I plan to do the same, if this war doesn’t interfere.”
“All right, I give up,” I said. “I suppose she didn’t like needles either.”
“Not one bit,” Harry said, and then smiled. “Actually, I think she’s the one who instilled that fear in me when I was a child, always going on about doctors and their long needles. She was a very nice woman, but just a trifle touchy on the subject of medicine. She finally came down with some kind of cancer just after her ninety-fifth birthday. She allowed a doctor to come to the house, but after he diagnosed her she refused to go to hospital. She carried on just as she always had, until the pain and weakness were too much for her.”
“So no needles, even at the end?”
“She wouldn’t allow it. The doctor did give her morphine, mixed in with liquor, which helped.We stayed with her,Mother and I, until the end. I have to say it was a lot better than being in a sterile hospital.”
“You won’t have to worry about that in Algiers. Nothing is sterile there.” I smiled and patted his shoulder. “I’m going to check on Diana.”
“Billy, I’m sorry I punched you. You didn’t deserve it. I . . . I mean I keep thinking, maybe there was something I could have done that would have changed things, that would have kept my crew alive. But I don’t know. Sometimes it gets to be too much and then I explode. You were convenient, and I thought I could at least blame you for those deaths in Norway.”
“I blame myself, Harry.”
“But don’t you see, they were all dead men already,” he said, gripping my arm. “It was just a fortnight later that it happened, whatever it was. It didn’t matter what you did, where you took us. They already had a date with death.We were already headed for that mine, or whatever it was, we just didn’t know it. So what does it matter? I might as well blame the chap who wrote the orders for that patrol. Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. I wish I never got you involved in that mission, but I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You had to put things right. That makes some sense, more sense than waking up in the water wondering where all your chaps went. Now, go tend to that young lady before I do. She’s quite beautiful, you know. I may hop over there any second.”
He let go of my arm. It was strange that they each had a boat sink from under them. And then I thought that hanging around survivors like them wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe their luck would rub off, although from the shape they were both in, that kind of luck carried a steep price tag.
I knelt beside Diana, started to take her hand, then thought better of it.
“Diana, it’s Billy,” I whispered. “You’re safe, and the plane is about to land in Algiers. Then we’re going to a hospital. There will be privacy, clean sheets, and doctors and nurses to take care of you. And I’ll be there. Major Harding and Kaz too. We’ll be together and you’ll be safe.”
Her eyes stayed closed but I could see her hands grip the blankets more tightly. She squeezed her eyelids shut, but tears leaked out. Her hands let go of the blankets and searched the air for mine. She grasped my hand in hers and pulled it to her face. She didn’t say a thing as she held my hand against her tears.
I felt in that moment how much I loved her, and how even that small gesture meant everything in the world to me: The feel of her palms surrounding my hand, the softness of her moist cheek, brought back the past. After everything she had been through, she still trusted me.
I had only one thought, aside from Diana. I would have to kill Villard, to keep him from haunting us. I felt ashamed that it was his leering face I saw when I closed my eyes.
The plane hit the water and bounced on the waves three of four times before it settled and taxied into the harbor toward a pier where another Catalina was tied up. The jolt had almost knocked me over, and in so doing it knocked Villard’s image from my mind, but I knew it would be back.
Diana still had her eyes closed and I wondered what she’d see written on my face when she opened them.
