The Marble Mask (24 page)

“The Wild Bunch,” I commented, “only magnified.”

“It was that,” he agreed. “We blew stuff up, destroyed bars and hotels, roughed up a few locals—almost got thrown in jail a few times—over the top.” He pointed at Paul and added, “Which was probably part of Old Man Frederick’s plan, too. He knew it all, he did—what it would take to go to Hell and come back.”

“You were at la Difensa?” Paul asked quietly.

“And Sammucro and Majo and Anzio later on. I was with them all the way to Rome before this pulled me out.” He held up the blunted, scarred hand. “When Frederick was told to clear out the German rear guard so General Clark could get his picture taken in Rome, we did it, even though we hated the son of a bitch, knew goddamn well the whole capture-Rome thing was a pile of crap, and that the whole Italian campaign should’ve stopped after they grabbed the airfields near Naples.” He paused and added, “I gave this hand for a brass hat photo-op.”

I followed Paul’s lead, keeping the older man reminiscing, hoping it might lead us somewhere useful. “I heard you took a pounding.”

“Always. I heard it said we had a six-hundred-percent turnover. But that’s what we were designed for. We did what couldn’t be done, and we did it fast ’cause we worked on the run. We knew if you stayed put for too long, they’d pin you down and squash you flat. That’s what happened at Anzio, and that’s why we broke out of there.”

He’d undergone a total metamorphosis through this, from being the hostile, suspicious man we’d met at the door to the animated figure before us now, his eyes bright and his voice almost pleading, as if trying to make us believe that what he was saying wasn’t just bravado. On the drive here, Spraiger had educated me further on the exploits of the Special Service Force and on how their leader, Colonel Robert Frederick, had made it a point to turn them into the best fighters in the Italian campaign. The frustration of also being considered a quasi-secret weapon, and thus denied the publicity Mark Clark and others were garnering, must have been intense, especially after such sacrifice.

As if reading my thoughts, Dick Kearley suddenly rose to his feet and gestured to us to follow him down the hallway to the back of the house. Just shy of the kitchen, he cut through a door to his right and led us into a room with a leather armchair, a few bookshelves, and along all four walls row upon row of photographs, sketches, military insignia and memorabilia, including a red flag with a black dagger on a white shield. It was a shrine to a searing, brilliant, inescapable moment in a man’s life, whose journey forever after had obviously suffered in comparison.

The nervous energy that had propelled him here seemed to quiet almost as soon as he turned on the overhead light. He stood in the midst of his recorded past history and gazed about himself in peaceful contemplation.

“This is Antoine right here,” he said quietly, pointing to a shot of two men standing side by side, their uniform shirts open, their faces grimy, their bodies spare and muscular. They were laughing and holding bottles by their sides.

Paul and I studied the photo carefully.

“This was taken in Burlington,” Paul finally said in surprise. “I recognize the buildings behind them.”

“Yup. Summer of ’43. We were dying for something to do by then. We’d been trained to an ant’s eyelash, and we weren’t doing the neighborhood any good. Good thing they got us going when they did.”

“This Italy?” I asked, pointing out a scene of snow-covered rocks with mountains in the background. It was barren and hostile, like a picture of the moon.

“The doorway to Cassino,” he said darkly. “Highway 6 down the middle, mountains on both sides. The Germans had it all so well covered they could bring down artillery on three and four men at a time.”

He moved to a map. “Looks easy enough on paper. Highway 6 cuts between the western coastal mountains and the spine of Italy, up the Liri valley and straight to Rome. The Anzio landing just below Rome was supposed to draw the Krauts away from the mountains and give us a link-up force to aim for before taking the city. Didn’t work worth a damn. The Germans didn’t follow the plan. As it turned out,
we
were the ones applying pressure to save the Anzio bunch from being pushed back into the sea. And we had to do it mountain by mountain, sometimes boulder by boulder, and defend it against the Krauts who wanted it back.”

He tapped another spot on the map. “That’s where I sat in a foxhole all night being hammered by every explosive they had—airburst, armor-piercing, phosphorus, you name it. They used mortars like nobody I know. And it was cold. So cold your sweat turned to ice and your feet to frozen blocks. By the time dawn came around, I was the only one alive in that hole. The other five had been killed by shards of steel or rock. One poor bastard had just plain frozen to death. And that was only one night. There were dozens more like it.”

“This Colonel Frederick?” Paul asked, standing before another picture.

Kearley looked at it with the fondness of a doting son. “Yeah. I was part of his personal guard for a while. So was Antoine. Almost the worst duty we ever had. The Old Man acted like he was bulletproof—always at the front, always moving from place to place. We came under mortar attack once and dove for cover. When we got back to him, he was still sitting on the same rock like nothing had happened. Roger Scott caught it standing right next to him—a dud mortar round in the head. Felled him like an ox and the Old Man just worried about whether we could save him. He never even looked at the shell, which I thought would go off any second. More than once he carried wounded men on his back to the aid station. He was one of those guys you only meet once in your life—if you’re lucky. He was wounded nine times before we were disbanded, and half the unit cried when he was transferred after Rome.”

“Did Antoine think as highly of him?” I asked, now hoping to gently turn the conversation to our advantage.

“Everyone did. Antoine told me once Frederick reminded him of his own father, which I didn’t believe for a second.”

“Antoine talk about his father a lot?” I’d already been struck by how this man, like Lucien Pelletier, referred to the dominant male figure in his life as the Old Man.

“Yeah, he did. Really proud of him. That was interesting to me, ’cause most of us thought our fathers were a waste of time, assuming we knew who they were. Forcemen generally didn’t come from real solid families.”

“He ever say what his father did for a living?”

“He was a businessman, if I remember right. I didn’t think much of that. I thought businessmen mostly got rich from blood money—still do. But I kept that to myself. Antoine wasn’t a man to piss off.”

“Short-tempered?”

Kearley had been wandering around the room, speaking less to us than to the walls that held his most cherished memories. He now paused before a group shot of black-faced combatants clustered before a hay bale and listening intently to an officer whose back was to the camera.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “During the four months we were stuck in Anzio, we decided right from the get-go we weren’t going to sit in holes and wait for a counterattack. That first night we sent out a bunch of patrols, infiltrated the Kraut lines, raised a little hell, and collected a few prisoners for the intel boys. It was the first time since we’d seen combat we were able to try out some of our training—guerrilla warfare, search-and-destroy, sabotage. We got a reputation for wandering around at night, never making a sound, popping up where they least expected us, and cutting a few throats. That’s where we got the Black Devils name, and later the Devil’s Brigade. We drove the SOBs half out of their minds, and Antoine was one of the best at it. Not too pretty when he was working, but you couldn’t knock his results.

One time we caught a German lieutenant who told us they thought we were division level—maybe sixteen thousand strong. I doubt we even had sixteen hundred then. You couldn’t blame him, though—there were almost a hundred thousand Allies on that beach, and our piss-ant unit was assigned one quarter of the line.”

I tried phrasing my next question delicately. “Mr. Kearley, I know you were all skilled in unarmed combat, silent killing, and the rest, so I don’t mean any disrespect, but sometimes in those situations—given the backgrounds of some of the men—the opportunity must’ve popped up to be a little more thorough than was necessary.”

He was totally unfazed. “Nut cases, you mean? We had a few. Almost none of them survived, though. Things had a way of catching up to them. Antoine wasn’t one of those, anyway. He was just really good at his job.”

“Actually,” I continued, “I was thinking more about non-combat situations. You know—competitive, violent men, literally under the gun for days on end. I was wondering if any of them took it out on their fellows—like Antoine.”

Dick Kearley thought a moment. “Charlie Webber and he had it out one night. It started normally enough—guys were always razzing each other—but I guess it got personal. Anyhow, we had to break them up, which we usually didn’t bother doing—we’d take bets instead.” Then he shook his head. “But it didn’t last. Couple of weeks later, they were on patrol together, pulled off a good one, and that seemed to do the trick. If anything, it brought them closer together ’cause they were thick as thieves after that. That kind of thing occurred pretty often.”

He rubbed his chin, thinking back. “It’s really hard to say, though. There were so many people who would’ve been in jail if they hadn’t joined the Force, and a few who ended up there anyway, for rape or murder or whatever. In fact, in every place we were stationed, including Burlington, at least one local business had its safe blown. They never pinned it on anyone, but we knew it had to be one of us. We weren’t all that way, of course. We had college professors, too. But there was a rough element.”

He looked up at me as if I’d just appeared. “’Course, you were asking about Antoine. He wheeled and dealed with the best of them—made money stealing stuff and selling it to the troops, pimping for girls he conned to keep us company, especially at Anzio where we had time on our hands. But he wasn’t one of the vicious ones.”

“He might have pissed one of them off, though,” I suggested.

Kearley didn’t deny it. “Could be.”

“When was the last time you saw Antoine?”

“The outskirts of Rome. We were the advance element, like always, ordered to secure all the bridges across the Tiber. The Krauts had declared it an open city, but I guess either word hadn’t reached everybody or they were jerking us around. Even after we’d cleared the bridges and had actually entered the town, there were enough snipers around that you had to watch your step. From what I heard, that’s how Antoine bought it—probably chasing some skirt.”

“But you didn’t see it happen.”

“No. We were in different parts of town.” He paused and looked at the picture of Deschamps again. “I was sorry to lose him. There weren’t many of us left by then—not who went all the way back to Helena.”

“Do you know who might’ve been with him?” Paul asked.

“No idea. Things could get pretty fluid, ’specially if you combined something like the Forcemen with a city like Rome, ready for the plucking.”

“How about the officer who signed off on the death papers?”

Kearley shook his head. “I doubt it. We had more active front line officers than any outfit I knew, so don’t get me wrong—Frederick himself was a general by then, and still doing recon patrols behind the lines. But generally that kind of paperwork wasn’t done with a whole lot of care. Someone would hand over a set of dog tags and tell the officer what happened and that would be it. And sometimes that ‘what happened’ part wouldn’t be much more than, ‘got hit by a sniper’ or whatever. It could get a little vague, especially the way we were always way out front.”

“What about Webber?” I asked. “You said they were close. Would he know?”

“He might’ve known,” came the answer, “but he’s dead, too. I think he caught one in France. The Champagne Campaign, they called it, except for the dumb turkeys that got killed in it. Anyway, I was home-bound by then, so I don’t really know.” He paused and scratched his head, looking around at the bookcases. “But I might have it here somewhere. After it was all over, I went around collecting everything having to do with the Force—documents, books, articles, pictures. Kind of gave me something to do after all the excitement. It was a little hard adjusting…”

His voice trailed off as he began scrounging through the shelves, finally straightening up with what looked like a thick old log book.

“This might have it—a roster listing guys in, out, KIA, all the rest.”

He spread it open on top of one of the bookcases and flipped through its contents—page after page of names in columns.

“Here we go,” he finally said. “Webber, Charles.” He ran his finger along the line and then grunted softly. “KIA—body not recovered. Might mean he went over the hill.”

“Deserted?” Paul asked, sounding shocked.

Kearley looked up at him, obviously insulted. “Not that way. We never had a man run under fire—never. But you’ve got to understand the way we were. The Force wasn’t standard military. It was all volunteer, and it was made crystal clear from the start that no one expected us to survive. And that’s how we were treated. Got an impossible job? Send in the Forcemen. Even if they get wiped out, it’s no big loss—bunch of dumb crooks anyway. That was the attitude. We were there because we wanted to be, not because someone ordered us. And when it was all over, some of us left the same way—under our own steam. The assholes who kept trying to get us killed called that desertion, but to us, it was just leaving after a job well done, no muss, no fuss. I read an article by an old Force officer who went back to the battlefields after the war, and he said he met dozens of supposed MIA Forcemen or KIAs ‘without bodies’ who were living in France and Italy, married with kids, who’d just decided to set down roots where they were. Made more sense than going back home to jail or poverty or a life they’d run out on in the first place.”

He closed the book. “I don’t know what happened to Charlie Webber. He was probably blown to bits and never found. But he might be living over there right now, happy as a clam. I think he’s dead, though, ’cause if he’d made it, he’d be living where you come from—Vermont.”