The Matchmaker of Kenmare (36 page)

Back he came, straight at us. I saw him, face masked with goggles. He was so low that we ducked. Miss Begley’s hair flew up and back. She looked at me, said nothing. I didn’t look behind. She said, “He’s gone.”

Once again, she was mistaken. I heard him whine and snarl in a circle. Around the trees he went, over the hilltop and down the valley, a long way down the valley. And then he climbed, high, high, into the clear frosty sky—and turned.

I watched him. Down he came. His steep trajectory aimed him straight at us. And then I saw the puffs. Little fast-rising pouts of dust, a chain of them on the road. A line of white puffs was racing up the hill toward us.

Déjà vu. Of course we knew what they were. For once, Kate did the right thing—she flung her arms out like a crucifix and threw her head back. Her entire posture cried, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” So did her voice. She didn’t scream the words, she didn’t shriek them, she called them out.

“Shoot me,” she cried a third time.

The little road explosions veered away because the pilot did. A few yards into the no-man’s-land open roadside the machine-gun stuttering stopped. Miss Begley stood there in open air, head back, arms out, lepidopterized like a pinned butterfly.

And once more the pilot flew away down the valley and once more he came back, only this time his trajectory was not angled down, it was level
and would take him a hundred feet above our heads, and as we looked up, he waggled his wings three or four times, and, as jaunty as a schoolboy, he flew away across the hills to his Fatherland.

“Some joke,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Ben, don’t you understand? We’re under some kind of protection. And I know who’s providing it.” Her face shone with the zeal of an evangelist.

“We must walk on,” I said.

I see it so often in my mind—that road, that wide woodland corridor. The climb had required all our breath; the descent was a slow and pleasant relief. Near the bottom of that long hill, a village began to slope up toward us. The houses had been built by somebody who painted Christmas cards. We walked in, along the only street we could see—but there was an intersection.

Not a soul appeared as we walked past the first few doors. We reached a small bar and café on the corner of the junction. Neither of us saw the vehicles down the side street—nobody can see around corners.

“Tea or coffee?” I joked, and Kate smiled. Not a trace of nerves or reaction did she show to the fighter plane experience; she might have been going to visit an aunt. In fact I thought of Little Red Riding Hood and the woods, and that brought back thoughts of wolves, and as we walked into the café, there they stood, the wolves, all gray coats and danger.

Kate might have thought that they smiled when they saw her; I knew better—they were baring their fangs. In a pack, too—six of them, and their shiny black paws, and their fierce eyes, and the end of my life, as I thought.

From that moment on, in that little Belgian café, my view of the word
neutral
, and the emotional and intellectual condition it describes, began to change. How could it not? In aura, in attitude, in the capacity to strike terror into human hearts, I was confronted by a hunting pack of wolves—six officers of the Waffen SS, the worst of the worst, who had come for a briefing in the village. We never got to Saint-Vith.

When, long after the war, I went back on that journey I’ve mentioned, to trace what had happened to us, to attempt a clearer recollection in tranquillity, I found my expectations disturbed. Have you ever had the experience of visiting a house you’d lived in as a child? And did you observe how much smaller it was than you’d remembered?

I still hold as one of my biggest surprises how tiny was that little theater of the war. Those towns, those villages, those places of battle, Baugnez, Elsenborn, Malmédy—they stand no more than a few miles from each other; they’re local places, not epic plains over which mighty wars should be fought. That morning, we’d crossed the border east of a hamlet whose name, the border guard told us, was Andler; the wolves took us northeast to Losheim.

I didn’t know, because I hadn’t been told, that Miss Begley carried in her possessions a letter from the American embassy in Dublin, saying that she was the “wife of the American Officer, Captain Charles Miller,” and she was to be “shown every courtesy.” Presumably the embassy official wrote it in order to get rid of Kate, but no wonder the wolves howled—with laughter—when one of them found this, and handed it to another, who translated it into German.

They took me in the leading car, and I couldn’t turn my head to see Kate in the car behind. I can still feel my panic. They didn’t manhandle us. In fact, their behavior to her came straight from an officers’ manual on good manners—slight bow, clicked heels, courtesy. No doubt, though, as to their firmness; their black leather gloves touched neither of us—not an arm grip or a clutch on the shoulder; when they walked, we walked.

I saw her face one last time as she climbed into the rear of the car behind. She looked at me in such a stricken way. I had identified the English speaker among them. He was in my trio of captors, and I asked if I might travel with her. He didn’t bother to answer.

And in that car on that morning, I first heard the name Peiper. The wolves mentioned it several times; he was their alpha.

Tanks, armored carriers, guns, lines of soldiers; some moved in the direction whence we had come, some the way we were going, some never moved, merely hung around as though awaiting orders. No longer were we behind the German lines, we were in them.

I have to confess my fascination. Although the events in France had appalled me, and had forever annihilated any notion of war’s “romance,” I still stared with great visual hunger at the troops. And then, past a signpost that read
MANDERFELD 2
, I stared with greater appetite—and shock.

Now I found myself looking at American troops, in tanks and other vehicles with American markings. The officers, in our Mercedes with its German livery, laughed, smiled, and waved at them as our cars inched between them on the narrow roads. Active troops, these Americans were, full of vigor, alert, sharp, and without question on active duty—and respectful as could be to the SS officers in the two cars.

Speculations came at me like arrows. That the German army along here had surrendered? And the Americans hadn’t yet caught up with the ones whom we had driven past earlier? No, that couldn’t be, because we’d been taken by German officers, who were still in some sort of command. That these Americans had been captured? No; they didn’t look like defeated men. That the Germans and the Allies had joined forces? But who could have been the common enemy? A horrid thought struck me:
Could the American troops have surrendered—or worse, deserted?
They seemed on such friendly terms with our wolves.

Not even thinkable. My speculation went nowhere.

When the wolves saw my intense interest, they muttered amused remarks to one another. Addressing the English speaker, I said, “Has there been a surrender?”

How they laughed—long and out loud.

“No,” said my co-linguist, “no, no, no.” And as he ran out of breath from laughing, the other wolves in the front said in a chorus,
“Nein, nein, nein.”

I can still recapture the perturbation that I felt: disoriented, puzzled, confused. Sitting in the backseat of that plush car, with its black leather shiny as fear itself, I ran it through my mind:
Yes, these are Americans. Look at the military insignia, the star inside a circle; look at the stenciling, the numbers. Look at the uniforms. Those are American tanks
.

It took us several minutes to get through these American lines, and nobody shot at us, or halted us, or took any hostile action. What was going on? In fact, the Americans cleared the roads for us, and waved us through, and the wolves waved back with their gloved paws. And I reflected, “This is a very gentlemanly war that’s being fought here. Or is it?”

I also contemplated what might be taking place in the car behind us. Soon, I would learn that, as they drove past the American tanks and uniforms, they encouraged Miss Begley to take heart. They told her that her husband had been here, and that in fact he’d left some of his clothes behind, and they would soon give them to her.

Alas! Once again she said, “I knew it. Nobody would listen to me, but I knew it.”

And how they laughed.

The American troops gave way to more German soldiery, and I confirmed their identity with my own eyes: the black cross, the different lettering in the stencils. I could have no doubt in my mind—I had just seen hundreds if not thousands of American troops between two similarly large contingents of the German army.

Our car swung down a side road. In the wing mirror I glimpsed the following car do the same. Do they mean to keep us together? Are they going to hand us over to the Americans? If so, why didn’t we stop earlier?

In a field by a farmhouse, rows and rows of tents had been erected. Troops kept up constant movement—repairing vehicles, hauling crates, pushing handcarts in this mud-deep anthill of gray uniforms. Two armed and unsmiling soldiers sentried the farmhouse from the steps of the porch. Neither flinched as our cars drove almost to their toe caps.

Directed by the wolves, I climbed out. Nobody moved from the car behind. I could see only the two men in the front—not even the silhouette of Miss Begley’s head. The light was leaving the sky, and thick rain had begun to fall. Escorted by the wolves, I trotted up the steps.

One of the sentries opened the door—he moved like a robot. The leading wolf strode into the house. I followed, with the other two behind me, their leather coats creaking. Ahead, as I waited in the hall, I heard the “stand-to-attention” stamp of feet. The wolf pack leader yapped out something respectful in German.

From inside came an excited little shout, and a noise of boots scrabbling on a wooden floor. Heavy steps came toward me and through the doorway into the hall stepped two men. One became famous, not least by his manner of dying long after the war—Joachim or Jochen Peiper. Short of height, he had smart blond hair and the crispest uniform I had yet seen—impeccable. As I look back at him now, down the tunnel of my memory, I can best describe him by saying that he should have been playing German officers in Hollywood—that’s how perfect he was.

He looked up at me. For a second or two I thought he had stood on tiptoe to do so. He turned to the wolf who had led me in and said something in German. The man nodded. Peiper asked some questions—he looked, I felt, many years older than I, instead of a year younger, as I would discover.

The wolf provided answers; I didn’t catch a word. Peiper directed him to bring me into the room from which he had come. They maneuvered me to stand to one side of the fireplace, where logs burned. So far, the man beside Peiper, who was almost exactly the same height, said not a word; he took up a position on the other side of the fire, looking at me as though at a curio.

Through the window of the house, I could see the cars parked outside. Now the rear doors of the second car opened, and its trio of wolves escorted Kate to the porch as they had accompanied me—firm and brisk, not touching shoulders, arms, anything.

Before she reached the house, Peiper sat down behind the dining table that he had commandeered as a desk.
He’s nervous
, I thought.
He’s an efficient man, and he’s tough. And who is the fellow on the other side of the fireplace?

This one hadn’t yet spoken, had a mark on his right temple, a blue star, an unserious bruise. If Peiper did indeed have the vanity that his personal appearance suggested, he must have felt rivalrous with this fellow—who also wore an impeccable uniform; at his neck he had a cream scarf of a silk so dense it must have been brought back to Europe by Marco Polo.

On his right hand he wore a ring whose dial, a perfect circle, was studded with tiny turquoises and diamonds—capped, so to speak, by a larger diamond in the center. From his left cuff hung the edges of a silk handkerchief in black and cream polka dots.

This fellow had a humorous face; he’d been half-smiling since they’d walked me into this house. As Peiper indicated that I step forward and stand in front of his desk, the other man stood aside to make room for me and gestured in a gentlemanly way. I stood in the space provided, like a clerk in front of his boss.

Peiper looked down at his desk, searching for something. He found it—a photograph of Kate, Charles Miller, and myself taken on a day of winter sunshine in London. I hadn’t known that such a picture existed. He held it up to me and smiled, with his head cocked slightly to one side, in the manner of a wordless question.

I bent forward to peer a little closer, then I nodded and said, “Yes, that’s me,” and straightened up again. The man with the polka-dot handkerchief, the impeccable man, with the head of an aristocrat and a profile from an ancient coin, stepped over, reached up, grabbed my nose between thumb and forefinger, and tweaked harder than a man turning a key in a heavy lock.

And now you know—that man was Sebastian Volunder.

Volunder?
Volunder?
It wasn’t that the name was familiar—but the word was. Even so, it wouldn’t come. When somebody opened the door to the room, Volunder walked across. He limped.

Watchful as a predator, he stood there while they brought in Kate. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Furious, my mind racing to ask,
What’s this?
I began to move toward her when Peiper said, “
Nein
. No.”

He barked something at one of the wolves, who came over and forced me aside, to a point behind Kate.

She stood before Peiper’s desk. He looked her up and down as candidly as if buying her. By now, I knew every move she had. I knew when she was stubborn or malleable, when she was in full command or merely hopeful, when she was trying to take over or just going along with things. The squaring back of her shoulders, the quick settling of the feet on the floor told me that she had composed herself and was returning Peiper’s direct look.