XPD (42 page)

‘Sounds like it’s all over for the bank,’ said Stein, hoping to be contradicted. But Colonel Pitman didn’t argue the matter. ‘Sounds like they want us to be skinned alive,’ Stein added despondently. ‘You don’t want to spend the next ten years arguing your way through law courts, do you?’ He pressed the lighter button in the dashboard, just to check if it worked. ‘It’s a good car this,’ said Stein approvingly, stroking the leather.

‘I tried to get inter-bank loans,’ said Pitman. ‘But none of the big banks are willing to cover us. Maybe they are scared of Creditanstalt. Maybe they are sore because we didn’t syndicate the deal with them.’

‘And maybe they’ve been warned off by that bastard who set us up. Or Friedman or Dr Böttger or one of those other people in on the swindle.’

‘Going away will not help me,’ said Pitman sadly. He stopped at the intersection from which a road led to the French border and the south side of the lake. Instead he turned the other way.

‘Remember Petrucci? A little Sicilian kid … a machine-gunner from one of the B-column vehicles which was knocked out ahead of us?’

Colonel Pitman rubbed his face reflectively. He could not remember.

‘Delaney still sees him. He fixed me up with fake papers: Brazilian passport, driving licence, the whole works. He’d do the same for you, and we’ve got enough money here for both of us, Colonel. We’ll split it down the middle, you and me.’

‘It’s your savings, Charles. No, I couldn’t.’

‘What do I want with savings?’ said Stein. ‘How long have I got ahead of me? Ten years … Or, if I lose fifty pounds and stick with the nuts and natural yoghurt – twenty. So how much do we need? I got over two million bucks here, Colonel. Stop thinking about the dog faces from the battalion. They’re all OK, and they’d want you to say yes.’ But Pitman was lost in his own memories.

‘I’m not sorry,’ answered the colonel at last. ‘If I could go back to that night round the stove when we first talked about it … I’d do the same thing all over again.’

‘Germany? You mean 1945? The night you came back from that blonde who worked in the mayor’s office?’

Pitman nodded. ‘Remember the rain? I thought it would never stop. I had the worst jeep in the battalion that night and I had to nurse it halfway across Germany.’

‘You said you were in her apartment,’ said Stein. ‘That was only three blocks from the town hall. What are you talking about, halfway across Germany?’

Pitman continued to drive in silence as he remembered that night in the final days of the war in Europe. There was no blonde; there was just the general. He would never tell Stein the truth; he would never tell anyone.

‘I know it’s a big disappointment for you, Pitman,’ the general had said, ‘but it’s the way the goddamn war is.’ The one-star general had modelled his appearance and behaviour upon General Patton, his commander. He did not have a pair of pearl-handled pistols at his waist – that would have been too obviously an imitation of his mentor – but he did keep his Colt .45 strapped on tight at all times and even here, miles away from the fighting, he kept his helmet on his head and a grenade clipped to his shoulder strap.

Outside it was raining, the sky streaked with pink and mauve, the last daylight almost gone. The endless convoys of supply trucks splashed through the mud in the dark pockmarked streets and crawled round piles of bricks and rubble, the result of a twenty-four-hour bombardment that had entombed half the German inhabitants in their cellars. ‘The war’s nearly over,’ said Pitman. ‘Ever since the Rhine you’ve been promising me a chance to fight.’

‘See those trucks out there?’ said the general, pointing with his cigar. ‘I’m trying to push half a million tons of material into position with quartermaster units that are nearly asleep on their feet. Some of those truck drivers have had no shut-eye for fifty-six hours, Pitman.’ Urgently, the general pushed some papers across his desk. ‘I’ve got medical officers yelling down the phone at me, I’m cannibalizing trucks so fast that I’m losing whole companies. My clerks are trying to sort “Dangerous Cargo” from “Valuable Cargo” and “Immediately Vital Cargo” from “Essential Cargo” … will you look at all this crap! Now you’re telling me I’ve got to let you go play soldiers in the front line. Well, I’m telling you no, Pitman. Have you got that?’

‘I’m a career officer, General. I need battle experience if I’m going to get any kind of promotion in the postwar army. We discussed it and you promised to help.’

‘You did all right, Pitman,’ said the general puffing on his cigar. ‘I made you a colonel and now you’ve got a battalion. That’s not bad.’

‘I want to fight, General. You said you’d make sure I had my chance.’

The general looked at him and blew smoke. Quietly he said, ‘You had your chance, Colonel. You had your chance at Kasserine, long before I was lucky enough to get over here. It was a big snafu, the way I read it; your guys took a powder and the Krauts just came rolling over our support areas. It’s not the kind of lousy performance that makes me want to send you forward.’

The bulbs in the desk lights flickered and went yellow and dim as the army engineers nursed the wrecked German power utilities. In the gloom the general’s cigar glowed very bright before he added, ‘Do you know, I still have to take a ribbing from some of these crummy Brits? “Remember Kasserine?” some Limey major says to me the other day. “They put us into the line when you Yanks folded.” He says it like it was a joke, of course. That’s the way the Brits always let you have the poison. It’s a joke … so I have to laugh with that bastard. But I don’t like it, Pitman, and when I hear about Kasserine I don’t like you.’

Pitman said nothing. There was nothing to say.

‘Now you get back to your battalion HQ and keep your trucks moving. I’m due at army for a conference in two hours’ time, and by then I’m going to have every last lousy truck in this man’s army loaded and rolling.’

Colonel Pitman got back to his battalion HQ at midnight. The heavy rain found its way through the canvas roof and ill-fitting side-flaps of his jeep, so that his short overcoat was soaking wet as he leant over the pot-bellied stove and warmed himself. ‘Am I supposed to be the commanding officer of this lousy battalion?’ he complained rhetorically to his orderly room corporal. ‘So why do I get the worst jeep in the battalion?’

‘You have trouble, Colonel?’ Stein asked.

‘That’s one of the jeeps from that detached company we took over,’ said Pitman. ‘All those vehicles are unreliable. Make sure you don’t give me one of those again. Got it?’

‘You been with the general, sir?’

‘I’ve been in bed with that blonde chick we saw this morning in the mayor’s office. Why do you think I asked you for a bottle of scotch?’

‘For the general maybe,’ said Stein. He was pouring boiling water on to coffee grounds and the aroma emerged suddenly. ‘You took a bottle for the general last week when you went to see him. I thought maybe you were trying to get detached for a spell with those armoured division guys we fixed up with extra gas and rations.’

‘Do you read all my private correspondence, Corporal Stein?’

‘I sure do, Colonel. I figure that’s what you need me for. You want some of this coffee?’

‘Yes, I do … with sugar and cream.’

Stein put the steaming coffee before his colonel. It was in an antique porcelain cup discovered in the wreckage. Colonel Pitman sniffed at the coffee and drank some.

Stein watched him with close interest. ‘So you weren’t with the general tonight?’

‘I was laying that little blonde number in a top back room in one of those apartment houses near the delousing centre.’

‘It’s not like you, Colonel,’ said Stein with polite interest.

‘Well, from now on it’s going to be like me,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘From now on I’m going to keep the army in perspective, and I’m going to start counting off the days, like you do, Corporal.’

‘You’re not going to stay in the army, Colonel?’

‘You show me a way to get out of the army tonight, Corporal, and I’d take it.’

‘I might be able to do something like that,’ said Stein. ‘And I might be able to show you how to take enough dough to retire with.’

‘What are you talking about, Stein?’

‘Not Uncle Sam’s money, Colonel; Nazi gold stashed not far from here. Looks like we are going to get the job of hauling it to Frankfurt.’

‘Gold?’

‘Millions and millions of bucks, Colonel. This lousy war is just about over. I was sitting here on my own tonight, and I was thinking about Aram and the old days back in North Africa … and I began to wonder about something. Could I just run over this idea with you, Colonel? In strictest confidence …’

Colonel Pitman sat down on a packing case near the stove. His coat was steaming as the heat penetrated his damp uniform. ‘You sure could, Corporal. I’ve never been in a better mood to listen to any proposition that comes my way.’

‘The boys always trusted you, Colonel,’ said Stein.

Pitman’s memories faded as he reminded himself that this was 1979 and half a lifetime had passed since the day they made that fateful decision. ‘No one ever wanted to vote you out of office.’

‘I’m proud of that,’ admitted Pitman. ‘1952 was the toughest year … three of the boys died in as many months.’

‘Tricky Richards, Corporal Arbenz who had the car accident and Moose Menzies. Yes, I remember,’ said Stein. ‘Yeah, that was a real bad year.’

‘I paid out the families without having any proper authority from the syndicate,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘It was complicated. We were deeply committed to fixed-interest investments.’

‘You did wonders, Colonel.’

‘I’ve always tried to be fair,’ said Pitman. He stopped at a traffic light. ‘I was never a great financial brain, or very good at administration. You know that I was never much of a soldier …’

‘Come on, Colonel! You …’

‘No. We’re getting too old to go on deceiving ourselves. I was not much of an officer. It was you and Master Sergeant Vanelli who kept us going. Did I tell you that Vanelli died?’

‘Yes, Colonel, you did.’

‘You kept us going. You understood the men better than I ever did.’

‘We were all too gung-ho,’ said Stein.

‘I was a hot-head trying to get the Congressional Medal of Honour in my first hour of combat. Major Carson realized that, he warned me against myself.’

‘You nearly made it, Colonel.’

Pitman allowed himself a faint smile. ‘Yep, I nearly did, Chuck. The trouble was, I wiped out half the company in the attempt.’

‘It’s time you forgot all that, Colonel. You did what seemed best at the time.’

‘Some fine men died that day, Corporal.’ Colonel Pitman’s eyes half closed as he relived the worst and the best moments of his life. ‘Your brother and Major Carson. Arias, who tried to get back to the machinegun. Kaplan and Klein – next-door neighbours who signed on together and stayed together right until the end. Sergeant Scott, who didn’t know how to drive that damned truck but wouldn’t get out of the driver’s seat. Sergeant Packer, who said he’d shoot the last man to go forward …’

‘And then trod on the S mine,’ said Stein.

‘Heroes,’ said Pitman.

‘Not heroes,’ said Stein calmly. ‘Not cowards, Colonel. Not cowards the way that the newspapers and the Limeys and the brass wanted to pretend they were. But not heroes either. It’s time to face up to that, Colonel.’

‘We were raw troops. Even during our combat training we didn’t have more than half a dozen men on the training staff who’d ever heard a shot fired in anger. What chance did we stand against those German veterans?’

‘We ran,’ said Stein softly. ‘We ran, Colonel.’

‘It was politics. Washington wanted Americans in action and wanted them commanded by Eisenhower. It was all part of the political plan to put Eisenhower into the job of Supreme Commander Europe in time for D-day. Without some American blood spilt the Limeys would have got Montgomery into that Supreme Commander slot.’

‘Ike did a good job,’ said Stein. He could not share the colonel’s bitterness. ‘With that son of a bitch Monty in command we’d still be there, waiting to start the invasion.’

‘Why did they wait so long before bringing Georgie Patton in to command the corps?’ said the colonel. ‘The shame of that damned week still remains with me. I remember it every day. Can you understand that, Corporal?’ It was Corporal now, and Pitman’s voice had that shrill ring to it that Stein had not heard for nearly four decades.

‘The top brass were right,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘I cursed them every day for years, but they were right. We would never have had the guts to go into battle again. We were write-offs …’

‘Retreads,’ Stein corrected him. ‘OK, so we were humiliated – tankers dumped into a redeployment depot, then relegated to the quartermaster corps – but we did what had to be done. We gave a few years of our lives, and fought the war that put the Nazis out of business.’

‘It was all I ever wanted,’ said Pitman softly. ‘That commission in a first-class unit with men I liked and respected. It broke my heart to see them driving those damned trucks.’

‘And what about after the war?’ Stein said consolingly. ‘We wouldn’t have got a few million bucks in bullion if we’d stayed with those tank destroyers.’

‘I had nothing to lose, that’s why,’ said Pitman, as if an explanation was being forced from him. ‘Could I have gone to lunch at the University Club and returned those stares I would have got after my friends read about Kasserine?’

‘I feel no guilt,’ said Stein stoically. ‘We faced the best the Krauts could throw at us, and we ran. But we slowed them up a little, Colonel, don’t ever forget that.’

‘Don’t fool yourself, Charles. They brushed us aside like bed bugs in a whore house.’ Pitman reached up to adjust the driving mirror.

For a while the two men sat in silence, Pitman driving with exaggerated care, while Stein stared out at the suburbs of Geneva with unseeing eyes. On that warm Saturday evening in August everyone who could afford it was spending the weekend in the countryside or along the lake. These suburban streets were silent and empty.

‘You heard Major Carson order me to turn back,’ said Pitman suddenly. ‘You heard him, didn’t you?’