Seven Lies South

14

Flying over the ring of trees in the early morning light, Beecher had judged the entrance to the bowl-shaped depression to be ten or fifteen yards wide; but fortunately his estimate was quite a bit off. There was enough room to clear the wings of his plane and beyond this opening a smooth stretch of ground sloped gradually to a small green lake.

Beecher had bellied the plane in, with metal shrieking ominously against sand and shale; it was all he could do, for the seemingly flat area in front of the depression was pitted with rocks which would have slashed his tires into ribbons. As the plane came to a giddy, swaying stop, Beecher knew it had made its last flight; a wingtip was ground into the rocky earth, and the metal ribbing of the fuselage had been torn and twisted by the pressure of the straining wing. The underside of the ship smoked with the friction of the landing, but the metal cooled finally, and now the sprung and blackened plane rested a hundred yards or so from the pond, its outlines camouflaged by a canopy of gently swaying palms.

Beecher and Ilse sat on a ledge of rock beside the pond. They had said little since scrambling from the ship.

The clearing was about the size of a football field, Beecher estimated, covered with tough weeds and cactus, and enclosed on three sides by uneven rows of date palms. Yellow and mauve flowers splashed color through the deep shade around the base of the trees. The pond was about five yards wide, and seemed to be fed from a stream running slowly down a shoal of rock at the highest ground in the clearing.

“I’ve read something somewhere about these springs,” Beecher said, mopping his face and neck. “They pop without rhyme or reason, and disappear at the slightest change in hydrostatic pressure. A storm blows a few thousand tons of sand over them, and they’re gone like nomads. They might bubble up a hundred miles away the next day. Trees grow, even flowers.” He looked around the clearing. “But it can all change overnight.” Beecher didn’t know if Ilse was listening to him; she was staring into the pond with no expression at all on her face.

Finally she said, “Will anybody look for us here?”

“With luck, sure.” But Beecher knew they’d need more than luck; the rescue operations would be based on the assumption that the missing C-47 had gone down in the sea, or had crashed somewhere along its flight route to Rabat. There was no reason for anyone to suspect that the plane had been flown nearly a thousand miles off course.

The wind and sand had made a tangle of Ilse’s thick black hair. Occasionally she raised a hand to push a strand of it from her eyes. She had removed the jacket of her dark suit, and rolled her nylons down about her ankles. In the streaked sunlight her bare arms and legs seemed transparently white.

She looked like a moody, rebellious child to Beecher, with slight breasts rising under an immaculate halter, and neat loops of nylon about her fragile ankles.

“Have we got any chance?” she asked without looking at him.

“They’ll find us. Don’t worry.” Beecher got to his feet. “We’ll rest until the sun cools off. Then we’ll lay out distress markers. Are you tired?”

“No.”

“Hungry?”

“A little,” she said reluctantly, as if the admission were distasteful to her.

“Now listen to me; you’ve got to eat and you’ve got to rest, because we’ve got a lot of damn hard work to do later.” Beecher took her arm and pulled her to her feet. “We’re not in a candle-lit restaurant trying to make up our minds between the pheasant and the beef Stroganoff. You’re going to eat so you can work. So let’s go.”

Beecher helped her across the uneven ground to the plane. She had to pick her way cautiously in high heels and though he saved her from twisting her ankle or falling on several occasions, he knew she didn’t want or appreciate his help; the thin muscles of her bare upper arm were tight with resentment under his hand.

“Would you rather break a leg?” he said irritably.

“Almost, I think. Except that I’d be helpless, and you’d have to feed me with a spoon and bring me anything I needed. Wouldn’t you enjoy that? Making me say thank you fifty times an hour?”

“Why should I?”

“I don’t know. I only know how I feel.”

She climbed into the ship ahead of Beecher, and he sighed as he looked at the roll of her round hips, and the play of muscles in the backs of her shapely bare legs. It seemed to him like bad planning on somebody’s part, that these assets should be linked up with such a moody and prickly disposition.

The quart thermos of coffee was nearly full, and there were seven sandwiches left, serrano ham on buttered slices of thick white bread. They ate one sandwich each, and finished the thermos of coffee, and then, while Ilse put the food away, Beecher made a double bed on the floor with blankets and pillows he found in the luggage racks above the seats.

He decided to look through the mail sacks on the chance they might contain packages of food or candy, but as he was pulling them from the luggage compartment, he saw a square wooden box, which was sealed and wrapped like those Lynch and Don Willie had transferred from the plane to the landrover. It was pushed up against the back wall of the compartment, partially hidden by a mail bag. Beecher carried it into the body of the plane.

“They forgot something,” he said to Ilse.

“I moved a box to sit on while we were flying,” Ilse said. “They didn’t see it when they took the others.”

“I see. You were hiding behind the mail bags, sitting on this box. Is that it?”

She nodded slowly, studying his face and eyes for a reaction.

“Judas Priest!” he said, and began to laugh softly. He took a hammer from the tool chest and clawed the metal straps from the wooden box. Raising the lid he picked up a sheaf of yellowing documents, some covered with the chicken tracks of Arabic calligraphy, others with writing in Spanish and German. There were blueprints, topographical maps, surveys; the paper was dry with dust and age, corners curling in pointless symmetry.

Beecher dropped the hammer and shook his head. “German know-how,” he said. “The master race at work and play.”

“What is it?” Ilse asked.

“It’s what all the shooting’s about, that’s all. The gimmick, the loot, the ten-pound ruby in the forehead of the stone god — here it is!” Beecher began to laugh again; he couldn’t help it. “Don Willie forgot it. Do you understand? He almost did everything right. But that ‘almost’ is going to hang him. Even if you and I die here. Somebody will find it. Somebody’s got to.”

“Why are you laughing about it?”

Beecher dropped the documents back into the box. A puff of dust rose in the air. He looked at her and said, “You don’t think it’s funny?”

“It means more pain, nothing else.”

“I guess that’s the joke,” Beecher said dryly. The whole episode was so gorgeously German, he thought, so tragic and solemn and silly. Don Willie had caused three men to die to save the honor of his house; in the name of the fatherland he had destroyed anything that might disclose his stale and dreary corruptions in Morocco; and he had justified all this carnage on the highest of ethical planes, the profoundest of philosophical levels. And then, armed and righteous, with a crash of booted feet sounding in his soul, Don Willie had committed the sort of mistake that would have cost a grocery clerk his job. He had sent the chickens to Mrs. Muller and the ham hocks to Schloss Manteufel. Instead of the other way around...

Beecher pushed the box back into the luggage compartment. Someday, somehow, it would get back to Spain. He smiled. Don Willie would hear from Mrs. Muller then. And Schloss Manteufel.

“You get some rest,” he said to Ilse.

“I’m not tired.”

Beecher stretched out on the blankets and punched a pillow into a comfortable support for his head. “Suit yourself,” he said. The weather had changed, he realized; a wind was rising, and sand blew against the sides of the plane with a dry gritty noise. But through a window he saw that the sky was still clear and white. For a few moments he luxuriated in the softness of the blankets; his body felt as if it were caught in a webbing of glue, and his weariness was a thick pleasant weight pressing him helplessly against the floor of the plane.

Before he fell asleep he heard Ilse lowering herself beside him on the blankets. She composed her slight body on the far edge of their makeshift bed. There would be no contact between them, he thought sleepily and indifferently; no accidental brush of exhausted limbs, no impersonal exchange of animal warmth and reassurance... It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but sleep...

Beecher was awakened by a soft, choking noise which penetrated the rushing sound of the wind outside the ship. He turned on his back and rubbed his eyes. The light was gloomy and gray. For an instant, blinking and half-conscious, he couldn’t remember where he was; his mind seemed packed in wool. The sky was darker. Against the narrow window he saw dirty clouds, and a thick webbing of sand which shimmered like beige curtains behind the glass.

Ilse was sitting cross-legged on the blankets. She was crying. This was what had waked him, the sound of her smothered sobs. Beecher pushed the door open against the force of the wind. Sand stung his face. The date palms were twisting wildly, and waves scurried across the surface of the little pond. Beecher slammed the door quickly and sat down on the blankets.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” She had stopped crying, but tremors shook her thin bare shoulders.

“We’ve got a pretty fair chance of getting out of this,” he said. “What are you crying about?”

She brushed tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, an awkward, childish gesture. “If we are found, it will destroy him. Isn’t that true?”

“Don Willie? You’re damn right it will.” He felt a sudden anger at her tears. “He’s responsible for killing three men. Why don’t you cry for them?”

“You see just one thing. But he can be gentle and good. I can’t bear for him to be hurt.”

“What you can’t bear hasn’t anything to do with it. He’s a thief and a murderer. That’s all that counts.”

She began to cry again, hugging her body with thin bare arms.

“Lie down,” he said. In spite of his anger, he was touched by her misery. He pushed her back against the blankets, tucked them about her chin and around her cold bare legs. She didn’t resist; all of her energies seemed drained by the sobs shaking her body.

Beecher lit a cigarette and stretched out on his side. “Tell me about Don Willie,” he said.

“You don’t care,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t care about anything.”

“I’ll listen.”

She shook her head again, and he saw the brilliant flash of tears on her cheeks. “Nobody understands him.”

“I’m still listening,” he said.

“He lived with my family during the war,” she said at last, in a voice so low that he had to lean forward to hear her. “In Austria many families had German soldiers living with them. Don Willie was an officer, and he lived alone with us. Officers lived privately — in privacy, I mean. He was strong and young then, and his face was hard and red, and his hair was very fair, like a wheat field in the summertime. Sometimes I thought he would burst out of his uniform with his health and strength. He was like a mountain or a raging stream, too powerful to need help from anyone.” She was no longer crying, but her voice was as weary and emotionless as the ticking of a metronome. “He ate alone in our dining room. Sometimes I peeked in the door at him. He ate like a giant. He would laugh and call to my mother in the kitchen, saying jokes about the food. His voice made the dishes jump around on the table. I was afraid but I had to watch him. Do you understand?”

“You were a small child, he was an enemy soldier. Naturally you were afraid. And naturally you were fascinated.”

“Sometimes he became angry,” she said with a little sigh. “We would hear him shouting at my father. His shirts were not right, his boots hadn’t been cleaned, the house was too noisy when he worked. When he was angry, my sister and I ran and hid in the closet behind my mother’s dresses. She used to brush the collars of her dresses with a spice that was like ginger, only lighter and sweeter, and even now the smell of that spice makes me sick and cold in my whole body.”

“You were a child then,” Beecher said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head. “Sometimes he was kind to us. On Sundays he dressed in leather shorts and a hat with a feather and took hikes in the country. When he came back we had coffee and cakes with him in the Sunday parlor. He would sit by the fire, very jolly and pink, with the muscles of his legs swelling against the leather pants. When he was in this spirit, he would put my sister and me on his knees and give us bites of his cakes. He told us that we were his little family.”

“Your father must have wanted to strangle him,” Beecher said.

“No, no,” she said, and shook her head quickly, as if trying to evade the sting of thoughts swarming in her mind. “He saved my father’s life. Many times.”

“How was that?”

Outside the noise of the storm seemed to be growing; the wind roaring at the sides of the plane was like the frantic sniffing of great, stalking animals.

“My grandmother was Jewish, you see,” Ilse said, as if she were explaining something simple and apparent; and that fact — the lack of bitterness and anger at the need to explain — seemed to weigh her soft voice with all the sadness and shame of the world. “She was my father’s mother. She died when I was very young, three or four. All I remember was that she was short and fat and used to sit with me in the garden under a pear tree. And she taught us a game to play with her darning eggs. That’s all I knew about her, all I remembered. But during the war she began to come alive. And we were so afraid of her. We hated and feared her memory more than we did the Germans. We were ashamed of that fat little woman, as if she was something hideous we must all be punished for. We tried to pretend she had never sat under the pear tree in the garden and played with me and my sister.” Ilse shook her head slowly, and tears started again in her eyes. “Everyone was sick with fear. My father owned a small business. He sold coal and wood. Our home was near the church, with a driveway and a garden. All our lives we lived there. The church, the school, the park with a pond for sailing boats in the summer and skating in the winter, it was all we knew, our whole life. Everyone was our friend. But when the Germans came they brought sickness and fear. People envied my father, they were bitter because they owed him money. They began to whisper about his Jewish mother. Sometimes it helped families if they went to the Germans with such stories.” Ilse pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. “You could only pity them. Hostages were shot. Men were taken away to work as slaves in Germany. No one knew what things would happen next.

“Only Don Willie stood between my father and the German commandant. When he learned about my grandmother he was furious at first. How would it look that he lived in a Jewish home? Was friendly with us? He shouted at my father half the night. But then, the next day, he promised to see what he could do. Not for my father. But for my mother and my sister and I.”

Beecher pulled her hand away from her mouth. “And you’re sorry for him now? You ought to be thanking God he’s going to get paid off at last.”

“Every day was cold and heavy with fear,” she said, barely whispering the words. “The Germans made lists of people who would be taken away. Don Willie tried to keep my father’s name from the lists. Sometimes he would say it was hopeless. My father must go. Nothing more could be done. We ate together the last year at the big table in the dining room, and Don Willie would weep when he told us it was impossible, that my father must be taken away. The tears would run down his cheeks into his food, and my father became smaller and thinner before our eyes. Only his eyes seemed to get bigger, until that was all you could see when you looked at him, the big eyes staring at Don Willie like a drowning man stares at a far-away shore. But there were nights when it was better. When Don Willie had persuaded the commandant to take my father’s name from a list. Then we were all happy, and Don Willie would laugh and pat my mother’s shoulders and tease her about the food like the old days.”

Beecher was swept with weary disgust. “Don’t you understand what he was doing? He tortured you until you were half-crazy, then relieved the pain a little so you’d thank him for it.”

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head frantically. “It took strength to do what he did. He loved us in some way.”

“He was dripping with guilt, and he needed your gratitude to keep him sane. Can’t you see that? For God’s sake, you’re a woman now, not a scared little child. Where’s your common sense?”

“He got in trouble helping us. We destroyed him.”

“Sure,” Beecher said, but his sarcasm seemed a waste of time and energy. “It wasn’t the Allied armies. You’ll seldom find any of the Herrenvolk who got beat in the field. They were betrayed, or lied to, or double-crossed — never beaten.”

“But we begged him to help us. I sat on his lap and hugged him. I pleaded with him to save my father. And he was gentle with me and swore he would never let them take him away. He was my only strength and comfort. I can’t cut this feeling out of me with a knife.”

“Maybe you don’t want to be free,” Beecher said. “Have you thought of that?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I could stamp him to death under my feet, but if I did I know I would take his bleeding head in my arms and beg God to kill me.”

“What happened to your father?”

“He died five years ago. Sitting before the fire with a pipe and newspaper in his hands.” She sighed gently. “Very quiet. But his eyes were never quiet again. They were always afraid.”

“When did you meet Don Willie again?”

“He wrote me from Spain. I was in school. He said he was sick, with no money or friends. He wrote every week. I couldn’t help myself. I wrote back to him. When my father died, Don Willie wrote and told me to come to him.”

“Told you? Didn’t he just whistle and crack the whip?”

“Yes, of course,” she said weakly. “I’m like his dogs. Crawling to lick his boots after a beating. It’s an illness I wouldn’t wish for anyone.”

She was silent then, breathing slowly, a hand covering her eyes. Beecher lit a cigarette and threw the match aside with a gesture of pointless anger. The pathetic scenes she had relived were blazing in his mind. He could imagine those nights at the dinner table, panic leaping from eye to eye, and Don Willie reveling in this orgy of naked pain and fear. And the tears, he thought. Dear God, Don Willie’s tears. There was the final stroke. The exquisitely decadent sentimentality, the tremulous Prussian anguish. Purging guilt in effeminate frenzies...

Beecher reached out his hand and smoothed a lock of hair back from Ilse’s forehead. She had watched her father dying by inches, he thought, and her childhood playmates had been panic and terror and fear. A nice start in life...

The wind seemed calmer and the stillness was a blessed relief after the tantrums of the storm.

Ilse was asleep. The tears had dried on her cheeks, but there was an occasional catch in her breathing, like a child’s adjustment to the deceleration of grief.

Beecher turned on his back and arranged the blankets to give both of them as much comfort as possible. He drifted in and out of sleep for the next hour or so, rising from the darkness like a swimmer fighting sluggishly toward the surface and then sinking again into sleep, settling like a weighted body into soft oblivion.

Once, half-awake, he imagined he heard her calling to him; but he turned and saw that Ilse was sleeping like someone drugged, her breathing slow and rhythmic, her hands lying open and limp at her sides. Beecher closed his eyes and drifted down into sleep as thick and soft as cotton. When he woke again he glanced at his watch; it was four o’clock. They had been asleep since before noon. Then, reaching for a cigarette, he heard a voice calling again from somewhere outside the plane. For an instant he was too stunned to move; then he shook Ilse’s shoulder urgently.

She sat up quickly. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Someone’s found us. They’re outside.”

The voice sounded again as Beecher pushed open the door. Only the first rung of the emergency ladder was visible; the wind had blown three feet of sand against the sides of the plane. But the sun was brilliant now, and waves of heat and light shimmered in the clear air. Beecher jumped down from the ship and waded through the bank of fine sand; it was like churning through a warm snowdrift. When he came to clear ground, he broke into a stumbling run, the stroke of his heart pounding blood exultantly through his body.

Beecher shouted when he saw them, not words of meaning or coherence, but simply a great yell of relief and excitement. They were about twenty yards from the tail assembly of the plane, kneeling together in the sand; but when he recognized them the shouts died in his throat, and a shock like an electric charge streaked through his body. He came to an abrupt stop, and watched them with narrowing eyes.

They couldn’t hurt him now, he saw; their bodies were pitiful and helpless, their eyes bright with fear and pain, but he stood motionless, making no move to help them; all his senses were alert for deception and betrayal.

“Please!” she cried, gasping out the word. “Please help us.”

Laura’s blonde hair was a gritty tangle of sand and sweat, and her face was swollen and flushed from the sun and heat. The knees of her coveralls were stained and crusted with blood. Lynch sagged against her, holding himself up with an arm about her shoulders. He was barely conscious; one of his eyes glittered wildly but blankly, like that of a stallion trapped in a fire. And his long, bony frame looked as if it had been drained of its blood.

Beecher heard Ilse’s footsteps behind him and felt the sudden pressure of her fingers on his arm.

“Please!” Laura said, staring desperately at him.

“What happened?” Beecher said.

“The truck went over a bank. It fell twenty feet.” Tears started from her swollen eyes and streaked the dirt and sand on her cheeks. “Jimmy’s hurt.”

“Where are the others?”

“Bruno is dead,” Laura cried hysterically. “So is Don Willie.”

Beecher felt Ilse sway against him, felt the convulsive grip of her fingers on his hand. He put an arm tightly about her shoulder.

“For God’s sake, help us,” Laura said, screaming the words at them. “Please!”

Lynch had slipped to his knees. He swayed there an instant, and then pitched slowly forward, and when he fell and rolled to his side, Beecher saw the hideous burns that flamed against his face and throat.