The Elegant Lie

…

It was late October 1944 when Nathan Carter, wearing a US Army uniform and with the provisional rank of lieutenant in the Military Police Special Task Force, climbed down the metal steps of a C-47 transport plane onto the matted grass of a runway near the city of Liège in eastern Belgium. At the edges of the airstrip he could see the wreckage of Luftwaffe fighter planes◦– ME 109s and FW 90s◦– which had been damaged on landing, bulldozed to the sides and abandoned when the Germans had retreated only a few months before. Outside of newsreels back home, this was the first sign Carter had seen of the enemy and, even though these machines had been left for junk, they still looked hostile in their black and green camouflage, rippled like the patterns on a mackerel’s back.

There had been moments in that long journey, which had taken him through Gander airfield in northern Canada to Iceland, then to England and finally on to the Continent, when Carter had imagined he might visit some of the great cities◦– London, Paris, Brussels. But most of what he saw when he looked down was a shredded blanket of clouds, laid out over a pewter grey sea. And as for the great cities, he never even caught a glimpse of those.

According to the briefing Carter had received from Captain Tate on the drive to Fort Dix, his task was to investigate the theft of a US Army truck transporting more than two thousand gallons of gasoline. It had been stolen right off the streets of a village called Rocherath in the Ardennes Forest, not far from the Belgian–German border. The robbers had been civilians, all of them heavily armed. They had waited until the American driver had stepped out of the truck and gone across the road to a cafe to buy some lunch. As the thieves attempted to start the vehicle, the driver emerged from the cafe and drew a pistol from the holster at his belt. Before he could fire, he was shot dead by one of the robbers. At this point, the robbers panicked. They managed to get the truck started but one of the thieves, who was clinging to the back of the truck as it began moving, fell and hurt his leg. The other thieves either did not know what had happened or abandoned him to his fate. He was arrested by the local Belgian police and taken into custody. The gasoline had been dyed red to indicate that it was designated for military use only, which should have made it easy to trace. However, in spite of dozens of checks by military policemen at roadblocks set up all over eastern Belgium, none of the red-dyed fuel had been located. The truck had also vanished.

There had, Tate said, been countless instances of fuel going missing from US Army depots all over the world, but they were mostly small amounts, and rarely more than twenty or thirty gallons at a time. Some of this could be chalked up to poor record keeping, and some to the fact that the depots were constantly being moved around as the Allies advanced across the battlefield.

The assignment of special fuel-theft investigators had often been proposed, but no action had been taken until now, when the murder of a US Army soldier and the loss of so much fuel in a single robbery◦– not to mention the truck◦– had swept aside the bureaucratic dithering that had previously held up assignments.

Carter was under pressure to move quickly with his investigation, before such thefts emboldened other thieves and the situation got out of control.

Within minutes of leaving the plane, Carter had been bundled into a Willys jeep with MP, for Military Police, painted in large white letters on the hood, and began his journey east towards the Ardennes Forest.

The driver, who held the rank of sergeant, was a round-faced man with a Clark Gable moustache and eyes raccooned with fatigue. He wore a short canvas coat with a drab olive scarf thickly wound about his neck and a wool beanie cap pulled down over his ears. The clothing had a grimy sheen of dirt and engine grease and had moulded itself to his body, as if he had not taken it off in days or even weeks, which might well have been the truth. Even though he could not have been more than twenty-five years old, with the beanie pulled down over his ears he reminded Carter of one of the old men he used to see lined up outside a soup kitchen back in his hometown of Dunellen. The sergeant spoke so little and seemed so much a part of the machine he was driving that Carter sometimes felt as if he were being propelled across Belgium by some giant clockwork toy.

It was just as well the sergeant kept to himself, since Carter was exhausted by the trip. It was the longest journey he had ever taken and, throughout it, he had never been able to do more than doze in the freezing cargo hold of a plane over the north Atlantic or stretch out on a borrowed cot in a draughty Quonset hut, surrounded by a sea of mud next to the airfield in Keflavík, Iceland. He had struggled to keep up with the rising and setting of suns that made no sense to the workings of his mind. Eventually, his body just gave up and he lapsed into a kind of numbness, which surrounded him now in a fog, so that everything perceived by his senses seemed untrustworthy, half in and half out of a dream.

They travelled down roads lined with long ranks of beech trees, passing through slate-roofed villages with reeking mountains of manure heaped outside stone-walled barns and pastureland spreading out beyond into the rolling countryside. From men in wooden clogs and patched, faded corduroys, he caught the scent of unfamiliar cigarettes and, here and there, the iron railings of their gates had been curled back like the crooked fingers of old hags where bullets had cut through the metal. He saw houses where snipers had been routed, the windows shot away and the stonework chipped and dimpled by machine gun fire.

His thoughts kept drifting back to a short conversation he’d had with his father, just before his plane left Fort Dix on the first leg of his transatlantic journey. He had persuaded Tate to pull over at a gas station just outside the base, where a phone booth stood by itself at the edge of the road. He had to call three times before his father even answered the phone and, when he finally did pick up, the connection was so bad that Carter had been forced to shout down the line.

‘You’re going where?’ his father had asked.

‘Belgium!’ Carter shouted, and he went on to explain what had happened, but his father didn’t seem to grasp what he was being told.

‘You’ve been drafted?’ asked the old man.

‘Not exactly, Pop,’ said Carter, and he tried to explain it again.

‘How long will you be gone?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Carter. ‘A couple of months, maybe.’

There was no mention of Palladino. His father would probably have denied it, anyway.

‘Pop,’ asked Carter, ‘are you going to be all right on your own?’

There was a pause on the line. Then finally his father spoke again. ‘What are you talking about? I’ll be fine. Why would you even have to ask?’

But that was only his pride talking. They both knew why he had to ask.

It had never been easy for Carter to say goodbye to his father, even on those short weekly visits when they sometimes just sat in the house and listened to the radio together. When the time came to leave, Carter would say, ‘I ought to get going,’ and his father would say, ‘Yup.’ There would be an awkward hug and then Carter would head out of the door, unable to escape the sensation that he had vanished from his father’s thoughts before he even made it to the street.

With the telephone, it was even worse.

‘Listen, Pop,’ he said, ‘I have to go.’

‘Yup.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, you take care,’ he said. And then the line went dead.

It had always troubled Carter that they lacked the words to go beyond the surface of things, and that everything beneath that veneer of emotions was simply understood◦– although even that they’d never talked about, so he never knew for sure. This time it troubled him especially. Carter had never been this far from home before, but he realised now, as he silently pronounced as best he could the names of the villages through which they passed◦– Aywaille, Stoumont, Trois-Ponts◦– that it was his father whom he thought of as home, more than the place itself had ever been.

Outside the town of St Christophe at a little crossroads called Baugnez, the driver pulled off the road onto the tall and winter-matted grass to consult his map.

Carter climbed out to stretch his legs. He studied the cryptic, hand-made signposts pointing to various military formations◦– CHAIN BAKER CP, D.A.O., DOMINO RC, QMSR◦– and one that just said ‘COYOTE’. In the valley below, rising from the misty air, the rooftops of St Christophe and the crooked spire of its church showed signs of damage so recent that none of it had been repaired. ‘That must once have been a pretty town,’ said Carter, as much to himself as the driver.

The sergeant looked up from his well-thumbed map. ‘Oh it was, sir,’ he said, ‘until our air corps bombed it by mistake. They were trying to hit some town across the border in Germany, but the navigator misread his map or something. People around here aren’t exactly feeling warm and fuzzy towards us these days, and who can blame them?’

Carter pulled out a crumpled, almost empty pack of Chesterfields and offered one to the driver.

The sergeant’s eyes lit up at the sight of American tobacco. ‘Those are stateside smokes!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you very much!’ With his black-nailed fingertips, he plucked one out.

Then the two of them sat smoking on the hood of the jeep, which was warm from the heat of the engine.

Carter was still unused to being called ‘sir’. The concept of being an officer had not yet sunk in and he felt like a fraud in this uniform with a rank he had not earned. ‘Did they tell you why I’m here?’ he asked.

‘I’m a sergeant, sir,’ said the driver. ‘They never tell me anything. But they didn’t need to. After that fuel truck got stolen in Rocherath and the driver got shot, everybody knew they’d be sending someone from Special Tasks to find out what happened. And since my orders are to take you wherever you need to go until you’re done with your work, I figured you must be the guy.’

‘Then I guess I ought to know your name,’ said Carter.

‘It’s Riveira, sir. Hector Riveira.’

Reflexively, Carter’s arm shifted, ready to shake the man’s hand. But then he stopped himself, embarrassed. ‘This time last week,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t even in the army.’

‘No, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘I figured that as well. You are what they call a “temporary gentleman”, no offence intended.’

‘I worked in New Jersey for the Office of Price Administration, chasing down people who stole government supplies which, these days, is mostly gasoline. I guess that’s why they picked me for the job.’

‘You could have told me you were a trash collector in Hoboken and I still would have been jealous,’ said Riveira. ‘Any stateside job sounds good to me right now.’

To find himself envied for his paranoid existence in the rust-cancered docklands of Elizabeth was something he had never thought possible. ‘What do you know about where we are going?’ asked Carter.

‘You mean Rocherath?’ Riveira nodded towards one of the roads that branched off from the junction and meandered into a dense pine forest on the horizon. ‘It’s way up on the German border. The 2nd Infantry Division and some of the 99th are bunkered down in the woods there, waiting out the winter. As soon as the snow melts, they’ll move on into Germany and finish the job. The High Command keeps telling us there aren’t enough German soldiers left to guard the border, and that the few they have left are ready to quit, but from everything I’ve seen of them so far, I kind of doubt it. Even though it’s pretty quiet up there on the line, Rocherath is still no place you want to be, so the sooner you get your investigation squared away, the sooner you and I can get our asses safely back to Liège.’

One hour later, they arrived at a cluster of thick-walled stone structures with barns attached to the main houses, gathered around a church at the centre of the village. Pine smoke drifted from the chimneys and the smell of it, mixing with the by now familiar reek of manure, hung in the narrow streets. Unlike American farms, which usually stood by themselves, sometimes at great distances from their neighbours, the Belgian farmers seemed to concentrate in villages like these, with the land they worked spreading out in all directions. Most of the buildings appeared to have been taken over by the military and the streets had been churned into ankle-deep mud by the coming and going of army jeeps and trucks. Tucked in an alleyway between two buildings, Carter spotted a Sherman tank, its barrel aimed across the open fields towards a line of woods in the distance.

Riveira dropped him off at the door to a large farmhouse. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning, sir. The major is expecting you.’

As the jeep rolled away down the muddy lane, Carter knocked upon the heavy wooden door of the farmhouse, which was answered almost immediately by a soldier wearing a tattered sheepskin vest. ‘You must be the man from Special Tasks,’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

The soldier stood aside to let him pass.

Carter had to duck as he stepped into the house. Inside, a narrow hallway branched off into small rooms with stone windowsills more than a foot thick.

In what had once been a dining area, a man stood staring at a map that he had laid out on a dining table so massive it must have been built inside the room.

‘Major Wharton,’ said the soldier, ‘here’s the guy.’

At the mention of his name, Major Wharton looked up from the map. He was a small, aggressive-looking man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, their colour hidden by a squint. He wore a double-breasted, hip-length coat made of faded pea green canvas with a shawl collar fashioned out of olive brown army-blanket wool. Strapped across his middle was a thick belt made of webbing, from which hung a brown leather holster and a pouch for extra magazines. His helmet lay upturned upon the table. Its surface, the colour of pine needles, was stippled with sand, which had been mixed into the paint to roughen up the texture. ‘They said they were sending me a cop. A cop from New Jersey, they said.’

‘That would be me,’ replied Carter.

‘Well, mister cop from New Jersey, welcome to the asshole of the world, where nobody cares about your fuel truck or the guys who stole it. We’re just a couple of hundred men living like trolls out here on the border who are trying not to starve or freeze to death. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just wasting your time. If whoever stole that fuel could have been caught, they would have been, and long ago, without your help.’

‘So why weren’t they?’

Wharton threw up his hands. ‘Due to all the people here who hate our guts.’

‘Why? Because that town got bombed?’

‘That’s part of it. But there’s others who hated us long before we got here and others who didn’t think about us one way or another until we arrived, and after what happened in St Christophe, some of them hate us even worse than they hated the Germans.’

‘You mean collaborators?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Wharton. ‘Anybody who seriously collaborated with the Germans during the occupation fled across the border when the German Army fell back into their own country.’

‘Then who are we talking about?’ demanded Carter.

‘Just regular people,’ said Wharton, ‘who are looking to get back to living whatever they have left of their lives, and they can’t do that while we’re living in their houses, driving our tanks all over their fields and sometimes blowing them to pieces, even if it is by mistake. But don’t take my word for it. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough that people aren’t going to like you snooping around here◦– and that goes for soldiers as well as civilians◦– any more than people back home in New Jersey like it when the police start knocking on their doors.’

‘I’ll keep that all in mind,’ said Carter.

Wharton stared at him for a moment longer. Then he went back to looking at the map. ‘Close the door on your way out,’ he said.