The Hess Cross (21 page)

"What caliber?" asked von Stihl.

"Are you testing me, or don't you know?" countered Lange.

The major shrugged his shoulders in a poor imitation of the corporal.

"It's a nine-millimeter Parabellum, a blowback model, which uses a thirty-two-round detachable staggered-row box magazine."

"Firing capabilities?"

"Five hundred rounds a minute, with a muzzle velocity of thirteen hundred feet per second."

"Herr Schmeisser must be proud of his invention."

"Hugo Schmeisser designed the MP181 in 1918. He had nothing to do with designing this piece. It's just a popular name."

"Is there anything you don't know about your weapon, Corporal?"

Lange held the gun away from his stomach and looked at it as if for the first time. With a cramped, limited smile, the smile of one who has had little practice smiling, Lange replied, "No, Major, nothing."

On von Stihl's strong recommendation, Lange received the Iron Cross First Class for his actions at the Athens airport. The major also began searching for excuses to
promote Lange to sergeant, looking for the slightest traces of the desire to lead a platoon. He found none. During their occupation of Athens, when von Stihl asked him why he avoided responsibility, Lange replied absently, "I'm not a leader."

"You're better than a follower, Lange."

"I'm not a follower, either."

"Then what the hell are you?"

Lange shrugged in his inimitable way. "I don't know, Major. You'll be the first to know when I find out, though." Lange came as close to laughing as he ever did.

"Then I'll tell you," von Stihl said angrily. "You're a floater, and you'll never attach to anything. Like a goddamn French intellectual. And if you ever find any meaning in your life, it'll be fleeting, because you'll float away from it."

Lange thought for a moment, then said, "That's not really true, Major. I have a goal, and that's to be proficient at something, anything. I've tried a lot of things, and they didn't work out. So here I am in your army, and I've found it."

"The Schmeisser?"

"I can't say I'm particularly proud of the fact. It's just the way it happened. I found myself the best there is with this weapon. It's the proficiency I'm proud of. The feeling would have been the same had I been the best cobbler or the best bricklayer or the best teacher. No difference."

Several times across Greece, and later in the Western campaign, Lange had proved he was the best. The corporal developed a dependency on the Schmeisser. It was never more than an arm's length from him. He carried almost an entire second submachine gun in spare parts in his pack. And the constant cleaning. Von Stihl knew it was immaculate as it lay in the rolled oilcloth at Lange's feet.

"Little one, why'd you never try out for the SS?" Graf
asked, knowing the minimum-height requirement was five feet, ten inches, and Lange was considerably shorter than that.

Lange eyed the big German and then looked past him out the boxcar door.

"Colonel, you should instruct your men on basic politeness. Here I ask a question, trying to lift the Schwachheit's spirits, him suffering from tuberculosis and all, and I don't even get an answer."

Von Stihl ignored Graf, hoping he would let the moment pass without increasing the tension.

"Answer me, Corporal," Graf demanded in his concentration-camp growl.

Graf's derisive prodding had gone far enough. Before Graf could push further, von Stihl asked, "Corporal, do you want to win that stein of beer we wagered?"

"What's that, Colonel?" Lange asked, thankful for the interruption.

"I've got a stein of beer waiting for you back in Germany if you can put your Schmeisser together in under fifteen seconds. You said you could do it once, and I called horseshit. I'm calling horseshit again."

"Colonel," Graf said forcefully, "let's finish one conversation before we get into another. I asked the corporal a question."

Von Stihl looked at Graf menacingly and said, "I'm speaking, Graf, shut up."

"Fifteen seconds?" asked Lange as he carefully unrolled his cloth.

"That's right. I'll give you the signal to start. Nod when you're ready."

Lange spread the oilcloth out and smoothed the corners. A field-stripped Schmeisser is in five parts. Lange's weapon had been broken down even further, to allow it to be rolled inconspicuously in his pack. Thirteen metal parts lay on the cloth.

Lange sat opposite Graf and the open doorway. He spread his hands out over the parts and rubbed his index fingers against his thumbs like a burglar about to crack a safe's combination.

Von Stihl waited until he was sure Graf was watching Lange.

"Go."

The corporal's hands whirred with the parts with astonishing, blinding speed. Metal snapped into metal with a woodpecker staccato. The hands were a blur. Graf's face went slack with disbelief.

Three seconds after the signal, Willi Lange bounced into a crouch and fired a half-second burst out the boxcar door. The stream of bullets tugged at Graf's sleeve, then ripped through a signpost as the boxcar rumbled past it. With an open mouth, Graf turned to see the upper half of the signpost spin away, tumble through the air, and land hard on the gravel bank.

His eyes wide and devoid of their evil glint, Graf turned to face Lange. The Schmeisser was already fully disassembled and lay in position on the cloth. White smoke drifted from the barrel. A hard smile crossed Lange's face as he stared at the giant German. SS Obersturmführer Graf knew he would never ride the corporal again.

XI

W
RENCHING HEADACHES
were the worst part of Paddy Flannery's new job. His foreman had told him they were caused by his inhalation of nitroglycerin fumes. Something to do with dilation of his blood vessels. The headaches would disappear in a couple of weeks. Until then, the foreman had advised, drink gallons of black coffee provided by the company. For some reason no one understood, massive doses of coffee lessened the pain.

So not only did Flannery have nitro headaches all day, he also was irritable and hyperactive from the coffee. On his long list of complaints about the job, though, headaches and caffeine were not at the top. The possibility of instant vaporization was.

Flannery was a nitro hauler at the Guy Fawkes Powder Company on Chicago's Northwest Side. Several times an hour he rolled a cart from the main plant to the nitroglycerin shed an eighth of a mile away, filled the cart with bottles of nitro, and pushed it back to the plant. If a bottle is
bumped or dropped or comes in contact with a spark, it explodes with furious vengeance.

The powder company's safety measures did not assuage Flannery's fear. To reduce the chance of a spark, nitro haulers' work clothes had no metal parts. Rather than belts with brass buckles, they used strands of rope tied around their waists. The tiny metal rings on their boots had been plucked out. Boots thus prepared did not last long, but the company had a closet of them free for the taking. Shirts with metal buttons were not allowed. Nor were pants with metal rivets. Nitro haulers could not wear wristwatches, rings, or keychains while working. They wore white cotton tunics to prevent forgotten bits of metal from scraping against anything.

The nitroglycerin was stored in a concrete-block hut 220 yards from the plant. It was hoped this was sufficient distance to prevent damage to the plant if the hut blew. On this cool November morning, Paddy Flannery tightened the sash around his tunic, gripped the handles of the cart, and began the trek to the block house. Unlike an unstable wheelbarrow, the cart had four wheels, to prevent spills. The path to the nitro hut was made of wood planks, so no part of the cart or the hauler would contact pebbles or rusty nails that may have littered the ground. To keep the cart from veering off the track, the edges of the wood path were raised several inches.

The trip to the nitro hut was at once monotonous and terrifying. The pathway was dull, and the cart was light. The monotony left room for daydreaming. Pushing a cart was not conducive to exciting fantasies. Flannery flailed his imagination, but all it produced was a peanut vendor. He couldn't accept that, so he was forced to confront the reality of his task.

The reality was bloodcurdling. As he approached the small hut, it assumed a menacing personality, like a
marine drill instructor looking for his recruit's slightest mistake. To avoid antagonizing the hut, Flannery tried to exactly duplicate the motions that had been successful on the prior trip. He found the hut accepted a three-quarter pace, not too fast and not too slow. One hundred feet from the door, he paused and gazed at the hut in homage. Before he began again, he crossed himself in the best Catholic fashion. He had been raised a Roman Catholic but had left the religion years ago. The Irishman had strong recurrences of pious zeal each time he approached the nitro hut. He paused fifty feet from the hut door and crossed himself again. By this time, he was so frightened he forgot his headache. He traversed the last fifty feet on tiptoes while he intoned Hail Marys. Anyone displaying such fright on any other job would have been ridiculed by fellow workers. At the Guy Fawkes Powder Company, no one ever derided the superstitious or religious machinations performed by the nitro haulers as they approached the hut. To do so would have invited the suggestion, "Well, why don't you take the next run?"

Flannery stopped the cart in front of the hut and lifted the wood latch. The hut was not locked during the day, because having the hauler fool with a padlock and key was too risky. The door swung open, and he held his breath as he looked intently for any red vapor drifting through the door. Red vapor meant the nitro had leaked from its bottles and had become unstable. His instructions in that event were clear: get the hell away from the building as fast as possible.

There was no vapor. Flannery cautiously wheeled the cart into the hut and punched on the light switch. Rows of sinister bottles sat on heavy wood shelves. They were spaced far enough apart so the hauler would not bump into one while handling another. The only other notable feature in the hut's interior was the refrigeration coils along the
walls. Nitroglycerin is much more stable when cooled. The refrigeration unit was checked twice daily, because during any transition of temperature, nitro is highly unstable. Flannery glanced at the wall thermometer, which was normal.

He was so frightened his stomach was turning over and he could feel an onslaught of diarrhea. Aware of the haulers' problem, the management had installed an outhouse to one side of the hut for those whose terror caught them in the bowels. Flannery had used it frequently.

He removed the rail from one side of his cart, then picked up a board leaning against a wall and placed it across the one-foot expanse between the cart and the shelf. The board was used as a ramp. It was highly polished to prevent the bottles from catching on it as they slid along its surface.

Rarely in his life did Paddy Flannery find the mental energy to fix on one subject for any length of time, but now he concentrated with a fierce mental burn that beat back his headache. One finger went through the glass loop at the top of the bottle. The other hand went around the base of the bottle and slowly moved it across the shelf. Flannery did not breathe and his taut neck muscles pulled at his scalp. Carefully, gingerly, he pushed a bottle onto the ramp, along it, and into the cart. At no time did the bottle leave a surface. When it was in the corner of the cart bed, he repeated the motion with the second bottle. Six bottles later, he removed the ramp and reinstalled the cart's sideboard. He turned the cart around and exited the hut.

Much as a man whose automobile is nearly out of gas so he speeds to the gas station, Flannery was tempted to run with the cart. The first time he broke into a run two weeks ago, the foreman had sternly warned him that several years before, a running nitro hauler had tripped over his own feet and had toppled the cart. After the explosion, there hadn't been enough left of the hauler to scrape off the
ground with a spatula. Flannery compromised by heel-and-toeing it as fast as he could down the boardwalk to the plant. As he approached the main building, his anxiety lessened and the headache swarmed back. At the gate, one of the mixers took the cart, and Flannery headed for the coffeepot.

The Guy Fawkes Powder Company was a dynamite-manufacturing plant, where Flannery's nitroglycerin was mixed with sodium nitrate, sulfur, and wood pulp. These ingredients stabilized the nitro so it could be hauled safely. The mixing occurred in large iron vats suspended over ponds of water, called drowning pools. If red vapor developed, the mixture was immediately dropped into the water. After mixing and drying, the powder was sealed in paraffin wrappers to be shipped to munitions manufacturers.

Flannery poured scalding coffee into his cup and sat on the bench to wait for the next nitro call. He scowled into the cup, hating everything about his new job: the headaches, the chronic fright, the coffee, the dumb secretary, and having to get up at six in the morning. Paddy Flannery was not a common laborer.

He was a gangster, and he was proud of it. It was one of the few alternatives open to a boy born in Chicago's Little Hell, a cesspool neighborhood of filth and violence officially called Kilgubbin and given its popular name from the flames of the gas-works chimneys that turned the night sky orange. Flannery's early memories were of rats, ghetto dogs, garbage cans, littered gutters, and violent asthma attacks that seized him daily. His was a cold, dirty childhood.

His life was transformed on his eleventh birthday when he was inducted into the Irish Bulls, a street gang with its hangout near the intersection of Oak and Milton streets. The Bulls dabbled in burglary, mugging, arson, and extortion, but their specialty was warfare with the "dark people," the Sicilians who had been moving into Little Hell
since the turn of the century. Flannery's early teen years were spent organizing and participating in street fights between Irish and Sicilian gangs, in which often four hundred youths would engage in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Flannery became skilled with saps, chains, and homemade brass knuckles. He made his first zip gun at age thirteen and killed a Sicilian with it a week later.