The Elegant Lie

…

When Carter walked out of the farmhouse and into the mud-plastered streets of Rocherath, Riveira was already waiting with the jeep. It was the morning of his second day. The sky had cleared and it was cold. Fangs of ice hung down from leaf-clogged gutters.

‘Where to, Lieutenant?’ asked Riveira.

‘I thought I’d take another crack at that civilian they’ve got locked up in Bütgenbach.’

‘So he’s not out of his mind, after all?’

‘He probably is,’ answered Carter, ‘but right now he’s the only lead I’ve got.’

‘Before we go,’ said Riveira, ‘I learned something last night which I think you ought to know about.’

Carter settled into the stiff-backed seat of the jeep, waiting to hear what Riveira had to tell him.

‘I was over at the field kitchen,’ continued Riveira, ‘talking with some of the guys who’ve been rotating in and out of the forest for the past bunch of weeks. They all take three-day shifts living in foxholes and bunkers before they get to come back into Rocherath for hot food and a bath. This place may not look like much to us, but it’s practically a resort to those soldiers.’

‘What did they tell you?’ asked Carter.

‘Well, it didn’t take long for word to spread that someone from Special Tasks was here in town, looking into the theft of that truck, and when they figured out that I was the one driving you around, they said it was about time somebody investigated why that fuel got hauled across the border.’

Carter sat forward. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered. ‘It went across the border?’

‘They said that truck drove right through town and out along the road which goes direct to Germany.’

‘Nobody said anything about this to me when they were giving me the job.’

‘Maybe they didn’t know.’

‘But didn’t anyone try to stop the truck?’

‘I guess they didn’t.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘You’d have to ask them that yourself, Lieutenant.’

‘Where are these guys?’ asked Carter. ‘The ones you talked to last night.’

‘They were rotating back into the woods. They should be on their way right now.’

‘Get me to them,’ said Carter. ‘Please. And quickly.’

‘What about the prisoner you wanted to see?’

‘He’s not going anywhere for now,’ replied Carter, ‘and he won’t be any less crazy tomorrow than he was yesterday.’

As Riveira and Carter drove out of Rocherath and under the dense canopy of pines that seemed to stretch on endlessly towards the east, Carter spotted no trace of any of the Americans who were bunkered down in the woods. Instead, he saw only the ranks of trees, which seemed to rush dizzyingly into the half-light. It was only as his eyes became accustomed to the perpetual twilight of the forest that Carter began to make out shelters the soldiers had made◦– low-lying bunkers fashioned out of logs and roofed with pine boughs. Now and then he glimpsed a soldier, the olive green of their combat jackets and the darker brown of their wool trousers blending so perfectly with their surroundings that they looked to him less like men than like trees which had been conjured into life.

‘There they are,’ said Riveira, pointing to a squad of six soldiers walking along the side of the road, equipped with an assortment of Garand rifles, Thompson submachine guns and a Browning automatic rifle. ‘Those are the guys I talked to last night.’

‘Pull over,’ said Carter.

Riveira braked hard and the jeep swerved onto the muddy shoulder of the road.

Carter had, by now, grown used to Riveira’s jerky handling of the vehicle, as well as the potential at every corner that he would be pitched out into the road. He gripped the side of the fold-down windshield until the jeep had come to a stop. Then he climbed out. As he walked towards the soldiers, he could see them glancing at the white letters MP on the hood of the jeep.

The men shambled to a halt. They had no discernable signs of rank, so Carter just spoke to the soldier who was first in line. ‘I’m looking into a report that a US Army truck passed through here, headed for the border.’

‘That was a while back,’ said the man.

‘But it happened?’ asked Carter.

‘Hell, yes,’ said the man. ‘It almost ran me over.’

‘Why didn’t anybody stop it?’ asked Carter.

The man sighed. ‘We have orders to stop, search and turn back any traffic that comes along this road, whether it’s motorised, on foot or being pulled by a horse. But until that truck came along, nobody had been crazy enough to do it. By the time we realised what was happening, the truck was already gone.’

‘Did you see who was driving it?’

‘No. Sun was reflecting off the windshield.’

‘And did you have any idea what it contained?’

‘It was sitting low on its shocks. I saw that after it had passed. But the canopy was battened down and I didn’t get a look inside it.’

‘You didn’t wonder what it might have been hauling?’

‘Of course I did,’ said the soldier.’

‘What did you think?’

The man looked at him suspiciously, as if afraid that he was being tricked into saying something that would recoil upon his head. ‘I know what I heard afterwards,’ he said. ‘That it was stolen gasoline.’

‘Did you report it?’

He nodded. ‘To my platoon commander, and he took it directly to the major.’

‘That’s Major Wharton?’

‘Right.’

‘And that truck never came back?’

‘Not this way it didn’t, but these woods are full of trails. It could have come around some other way. I never said it went all the way to Wahlerscheid.’

‘What’s at Wahlerscheid?’ asked Carter. ‘Is that across the border?’

‘It is the border,’ said the man. ‘It’s a little customs house stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’

‘And do you hold it?’

The soldier shook his head. ‘That place is no man’s land. We send patrols out there and so do they. Most of the time, we just avoid each other. But you go a mile or two down that road and you’ll see them sure enough. These woods are crawling with Krauts.’

‘I thought there weren’t supposed to be any.’

One of the other men in line breathed out sharply through his nose. ‘Where’d you hear that?’ he asked. ‘Back in Paris?’

At that moment they heard a clattering roar, far away among the trees.

The men in the line flinched.

For a while, nobody spoke as the sound rose and fell and then died away, swept up in a wind which came hissing through the tops of the trees.

‘What the hell was that?’ asked Carter.

The man smiled faintly. ‘That depends on who you talk to. If you’re listening to the same generals who are saying there’s no German army at the other end of this forest, then that noise is from some kind of giant record player, broadcasting the sound of a German tank engine.’

‘That didn’t sound like any damned record to me,’ said Carter.

‘I would be inclined to agree with you, sir,’ said the soldier, ‘if given the opportunity to do so.’

After the soldiers had gone, Carter climbed back into the jeep. ‘Did you hear all that?’ he asked Riveira.

‘Yes, sir, unless you’d prefer that I hadn’t, in which case I have no idea what you were talking about.’

‘Major Wharton didn’t say anything to me about a truck heading into these woods.’

‘I can’t say I blame him, sir, seeing as this whole mess could come down upon his head if those rumours turn out to be true.’