The Elegant Lie

…

While a freezing wind blew through the streets of Rocherath, snatching away thin streams of smoke escaping from the chimney pots, Lieutenant Carter lay on the floor of the attic, wrapped in his dirty army blanket. As long as he stayed on his back, the hard wooden boards were bearable. It was only when he rolled onto his side that his hip bones began to complain.

People came and went throughout the night. Half conscious, Carter listened to the slam of doors and the sounds of men’s voices, oblivious the others who were trying to sleep. He had grown so used to the noises in that Belgian farmhouse, at any time of day or night, that even the loudest of them did not stir him from his rest. But shortly before 5 a.m., a strange shudder jarred him out of sleep. The whole house seemed to tremble, as if a train had rumbled past outside. But there were no trains anywhere near. Carter’s eyes snapped open and, for a moment, he just lay there staring at the ceiling while he waited for the sound to reappear.

Another shudder came, and then another, rolling together until he lost track of where one sound ended and another one began. It must be thunder, thought Carter, but he had never heard thunder in the middle of the winter before. The idea passed through his head that maybe they were having an earthquake.

Then he heard a metallic shriek that caused all his muscles to tense, followed by an explosion somewhere on the edge of town. He saw the glass in the window of his room appear to ripple, as if it had transformed into liquid.

Another explosion roared out of the darkness, and then more. In between the din of the explosions, he could hear trucks racing past outside.

‘Out! Out! Out!’ somebody was shouting downstairs.

It was only now that Carter realised they were under attack. He thought of the Belgian prisoner, Grandhenri, raging in his cell in Bütgenbach that death was on its way, and the warning of ther German soldier, which Wharton had refused to believe.

Carter rolled out of his blanket and was halfway to his feet when a dusty red flash lit up the room from outside and he toppled backwards. Struggling to his feet again, Carter glanced through the window and saw the whole horizon towards the German border illuminated with a flickering glare.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor again. The window of his room was gone and flakes of ash were flitting like moths around the room. He sat up and put his hands to his face, certain that he must be hurt even if there was no pain, but the skin was still intact. Hurriedly, he moved his trembling hands along his arms and legs, searching for a wound that was not there. He did not know how long he had been unconscious. It seemed like it might only have been a few seconds, but there was no more shouting in the hallway and the house felt empty now.

Once more Carter got up, weaving and uncertain on his feet, and clattered down the stairs, hand skimming along the greasy banister, not even sure where he was going. Arriving at the ground floor, he remembered that he had left behind the olive green satchel in which he kept his cigarettes, a notebook for his case work and a can of tinned peaches, which Riveira had tossed to him the night before when they parted company out by the field kitchen. Instinctively he spun around, ready to run back up the stairs. In that instant another blast, which seemed to come from right outside the house, knocked open the front door, nearly carrying it off its hinges, and the shockwave dropped Carter to his knees. A wave of smoke rolled in, filling his lungs with the metallic burn of high explosives.

Carter staggered upright and, as he turned to leave, he noticed that he wasn’t alone. Someone was sitting at the table in the room where he and Wharton had interrogated the German soldier the night before.

Carter stuck his head into the room. It was dark, but he realised immediately from the silhouette that the person was Wharton himself. ‘Major?’ he asked.

The silhouette turned slowly, seeming more mechanical than human. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Carter thought he sounded drunk. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we need to leave. This town is getting blown to bits.’

Wharton did not move. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

Carter stepped into the room, his hand held out to help the major up. The floor trembled beneath his feet as another shockwave washed over the house. More roof tiles clattered into the street, smashing with a sound like broken crockery. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘I didn’t know they were taking the fuel across the border,’ muttered Wharton. ‘They told me it was for their farm equipment.’

It took a moment for Carter to understand exactly what Wharton was saying. ‘You knew about the theft before it happened?’

‘Of course I knew,’ said Wharton. ‘I’m the one who sold it to them.’

Carter felt his body go numb, stunned by what the major was admitting. Even though Wharton had not been exactly helpful to him, the major’s perpetually exasperated explanations had made sense to Carter. He had proved entirely convincing. And Carter, who had made a life’s work from the tools of deception, had believed that he could always spot when those same tools were being used against him. Until now. In spite of the fact that German shells were arcing down upon the village, Carter just stood there feeling stupid and amazed.

‘I told them where the truck would be and when,’ said Wharton. ‘All they had to do was wait until the drivers went inside the cafe to buy their lunch, which I knew they would do because the soldiers always stop there if they can. And when the truck showed up in some field a few days later, minus the fuel of course, I would have launched a small investigation. It would have led nowhere and the matter would have been forgotten. Instead of that, an American soldier was killed and the thieves left behind one of their own. If it hadn’t been for that, they would never have sent you here. They would simply have filed it away with all the other unsolved crimes, too many to investigate. Too many even to count.’

A set of headlights, narrowed into cat’s eyes by the special blinkers used by vehicles in the front line, streamed into the room as a jeep pulled up outside.

Only now did Carter get a good look at Wharton. In the glaring light, which carved out monstrous shadows in the room, it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.

The major’s arms were resting on the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps, and he appeared to be staring at his own reflection in the highly polished wood. But the wood was not polished. Carter could see that now. It was slick and heavy and so dark it seemed like motor oil. And then Carter realised it was blood. He saw the deep-carved gashes running from the wrist towards the elbow of each arm. The blood had seeped across the table and poured down the other side and it had pooled by his feet and sunk into the brown wool of his trousers. Carter had never seen so much blood in his life, not even in the men whose bullet-constellationed corpses he had pulled from the trunks of abandoned cars or the low-tide Hudson mud, criminals dispatched by other criminals before the law could ever track them down.

Somebody stepped into the front hall and then a voice called out for Carter.

It was Riveira. ‘Lieutenant!’ he shouted above the deafening sound of detonations, which seemed to be coming from all around the house. ‘We’re leaving! Now!’

‘I’m in here!’ answered Carter.

Riveira stepped into the room and gasped at the sight of Major Wharton. ‘Holy crap,’ he said. With fumbling hands, Riveira took the metal first aid packet from its canvas pouch on his belt, opened it and tore the bandage in half.

He and Carter laid Major Wharton on the floor, sprinkled the wounds with the packet of white sulfanilamide powder that came in the medical packets, then bandaged them as tightly as they could. By now, Wharton had lost consciousness.

‘Where is the nearest hospital?’ asked Carter. ‘If we don’t get him to one soon, he isn’t going to make it.’

‘There’s a medical aid post in a farmhouse just outside of town,’ said Riveira, ‘although God knows what it’s like there now.’

The two men carried him outside and laid him in the back of the jeep.

Riveira got behind the wheel. ‘Why the hell did he do it?’ he asked.

‘Just drive,’ Carter told him.

They had cleared the last cluster of houses in the centre of town and were travelling between two open fields with shallow ditches and barbed wire fences on either side, when a flickering Morse code of light raced out of the woods at the edge of one of the fields. At the same moment, Carter heard a rapid clattering sound, as if someone had thrown a handful of small stones against the side of the jeep. Riveira shouted something and the next thing Carter knew, the jeep had skidded off the road and slammed into the ditch. The impact threw Carter sideways out of the jeep and he ended up on the other side of the road from the vehicle, lying up against the fence, tangled in the claws of barbed wire. In the same moment as Carter realised that they had just been shot at, a deafening roar erupted from only a few paces away. In the shuddering light of muzzle flashes, he caught sight of several American helmets hunched down behind a Browning machine gun. In the woods across the field, he saw more flashes, pulsing manically, and then blue sparks showered down on him as bullets tore through the wire just above his head. As Carter rolled down into the ditch, tearing his sleeve which had become tangled in the barbs, he spotted the rear of the jeep silhouetted against the night sky, one wheel off the ground and its front out of sight in the ditch across the road. There was no sign of Riveira.

Carter lay face down in the gruel of water and half-frozen mud. Bullets snapped past above him and he felt the thudding impacts as they slammed into the dirt all along the edge of the ditch. The next sound he heard was a metallic thump and then a hollow whistle, like someone blowing sharply into the mouth of a bottle. A dusty red flash burst in the forest and someone in the distance shrieked in pain. Carter raised his head, his face cast in mud, in time to see an American soldier dropping a mortar shell down a tube, then twist away, hands covering his ears. The same hard thump filled his ears and a wall of concussion swept past. Once more, the woods beyond exploded into fire.

How long the mortaring continued, Carter had no idea. Time seemed to be expanding and contracting all around him, moving sideways through his brain so that he noticed tiny details, like the way the light of the machine gun fire reflected off his fingernails, and then nothing at all for what seemed like minutes on end.

The firing from the woods died away. Trails of smoke rose from among the trees.

A voice nearby shouted, ‘Cease fire!’

Then Carter heard the slap of running footsteps in the mud. He looked up to see a soldier crouching over him. ‘Are you all right?’ asked the man.

It was only as Carter lifted himself up that he felt the cold in his soaked clothes. He looked around blearily. ‘My driver,’ he mumbled.

‘Are you all right?’ the soldier asked again. He reached out and shook him by the arm. ‘Are you hit?’

‘No,’ Carter managed to say.

Two more soldiers darted across the road towards the jeep. A moment later they lifted a man to his feet, one on each side, his arms around their shoulders. They carried him, limping, out of the ditch.

One of the soldiers got behind the wheel of the jeep, restarted the engine and slowly backed it up onto the road.

‘There’s another guy here!’ shouted one of the soldiers. ‘He’s hurt. It looks like he’s hurt pretty bad. Jesus, it’s Major Wharton!’

‘We were taking him to the field hospital just outside of town,’ said Carter.

‘Too late for that,’ said the soldier who crouched beside him. He pointed to a glow in the distance, capped by shreds of flame. ‘The hospital got taken out almost as soon as the Germans started shelling us.’

‘Record players my ass!’ said another soldier.

Now Carter became aware again of the gunfire over by the Wahlerscheid road, an almost constant roar and crackle, and the skyline shuddering light into darkness and back into light, as if a lightning storm were passing through the woods. Mixed in with the coughing rumble of artillery was the rapid snap of Garand rifle fire and the zipper-like noise of German machine guns, firing so fast that the sound of the bullets merged, one indistinguishable from another. Ever since he had caught sight of the German tracer fire streaming out of the woods, the scope of his senses had shrunk to the tiny space he occupied in the ditch. Now, slowly◦– too slowly◦– they were reaching out again.

‘They’re gone for now,’ said the soldier, ‘but they’ll counter attack as soon as they can get some reinforcements. That’s one damned thing you can always count on. They’ll be coming back, even if it costs them every man they’ve got.’

Carter could not see the man’s face or any details of the man’s clothing. It was as if the darkness itself were speaking to him.

The major was lying in the road.

Another soldier was kneeling over him. ‘He’s still alive,’ said the man, ‘but he doesn’t look too good.’

Riveira hobbled over to Carter. ‘I twisted my ankle,’ he said. ‘I think you’re going to have to drive.’

‘Is there another hospital?’ he asked.

‘There’s a big one over in Stavelot,’ said the man who had become the darkness, ‘but you had better get out of here now, or you won’t be getting out of here at all.’

‘How’s the jeep?’ asked Carter.

‘I think you’re fine,’ said the man. ‘They didn’t hit the engine.’

With the help of two other soldiers, Carter lifted Major Wharton into the back of the vehicle. Then Carter got behind the wheel. Riveira climbed into the passenger seat.

Carter put the jeep in gear and drove and, as they ploughed on through the darkness, the vivid arcs of red and green flares rising from the forest behind them reflected on the mud-splashed windshield.

By dawn, they were west of St Christophe and on the main highway to Liège. The roads were heavy with traffic going in both directions.

Riveira removed his left boot and his ankle had swollen so grotesquely that it was now the same thickness as his calf. Grimly, he chain-smoked his way through a pack of cigarettes, his boot clutched against his chest.

Outside the town of Stavelot, they followed nailed-up signs to a field hospital, where a doctor pronounced Major Wharton dead.

The news did not catch Carter or Riveira by surprise. Several times, Carter had pulled off the road, climbed from the jeep and peered down at the major. Beyond confirming that the man was still breathing, and even this he was not sure about, there was little to be done for him.

The body was taken away on a stretcher, covered with a blanket and laid beside several other bodies outside an operating tent. A light snow was falling now and it collected in the folds of the blanket, forming ghostly outlines of the corpse.

While Riveira went to get his foot bandaged, Carter stood with the doctor, who was wearing a white apron over a heavy civilian sweater. He was in his fifties, slightly overweight, with a round and honest-looking face and a pair of spectacles propped up on his forehead. ‘I am curious,’ he said.

But he didn’t go on to ask the question Carter had been expecting◦– why the major had committed suicide. Instead, the doctor wondered aloud at the method Wharton had chosen. ‘Usually, they just shoot themselves,’ he said.

‘How often does that happen?’ asked Carter.

The doctor shrugged. ‘It depends on what’s taking place at the front,’ he replied. ‘When everything is getting blown to hell like it is now, I see very few self-inflicted wounds. It’s when things settle down, and people have time to think, that they persuade themselves it’s not worth going on.’ He pointed at the still form of the major, lying under his blanket outside the tent. ‘This is the first time I’ve seen it done like that. It’s slow. It’s unreliable. It’s also very cruel, even as an act of suicide.’

Carter stared at him and said nothing.

‘You think I am callous,’ asked the doctor, ‘to speak of your friend in this way?’

‘I wouldn’t have called him my friend.’

‘Well, whoever he was,’ said the doctor, ‘I have no time to pity the dead, or to wonder at the reasons for their passing.’

Within the hour, Carter and Riveira were back on the road, heading for the Military Police headquarters in Liège where Carter would write up his report on the theft of the fuel truck, submit it for review and, with luck, be on the next plane home.

The doctor in Stavelot had said that Riveira’s tibia was probably broken and had given him a quarter syrette of morphine for the pain. He then wrote a large red letter M on Riveira’s forehead in wax pencil, to guard against the possibility the doctors in Liège might also administer morphine and accidentally overdose the patient. Knowing that the Military Police in Liège had their own medical facility, the doctor had recommended that Riveira wait until he got there for treatment rather than stay behind in Stavelot, which was likely to become inundated with wounded soldiers from the front within the next few hours.

Riveira blinked slowly at the dirt-splashed windshield. His left leg was bandaged with olive drab wrapping almost up to the knee, and he was still carrying his boot.

Just as Carter began to worry that Riveira would doze off and fall out of the jeep, the sergeant turned to him and asked, ‘Why did Major Wharton do that to himself?’

There seemed no point in keeping quiet about it anymore and Carter told him what the major had done.

Riveira showed no reaction as he listened. He just lit himself another cigarette.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ said Carter when he had finished with his explanation.

Riveira was quiet for a while. Then, finally, he spoke. ‘And you’re going to write all that in your report?’

‘Of course. It’s what happened.’

‘Maybe this is just the morphine talking,’ said Riveira, ‘but did you think about maybe blaming it on someone else?’

‘Like who?’

Riveira shrugged. ‘That crazy Belgian in the jail at Bütgenbach. He was part of it, after all.’

‘Why would I do a thing like that?’ asked Carter. ‘They sent me here to find the truth. That’s my job, the same as it is back in New Jersey.’

‘But this isn’t New Jersey, sir, and those guys you track down on the docks back in Elizabeth are just regular thieves. They aren’t soldiers, out here in the middle of a war.’

‘And you think that makes it all right, the fact that Major Wharton is a soldier? As far as I’m concerned, that makes it worse. The Germans are using that fuel to drive their tanks across the border now. Right now! And a man got killed because of it.’

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ he replied. ‘I’ve seen so much thieving since I came ashore in France that I don’t even think about it anymore as something no good man would do. A guy like me, maybe he walks into a house and steals himself some candles to take back to his bunker in the forest, so he can see well enough to write a letter home to his wife. Or he steals a jar of cherries from a shelf down in somebody’s basement when he’s taking cover from an artillery bombardment.’

‘Those things are not the same as what the major did.’

‘I understand, sir,’ said Riveira, ‘but I think you are missing the point.’

‘Which is what?’

‘That I am a sergeant and Wharton was a major. The bigger the fish, the bigger the food they go after. I once drove a colonel halfway across France, stopping at one hotel and then another, and carrying the heaviest duffel bags I’ve ever had to lift. Right when we were almost at our destination, one of those bags just tore open from the strain and out poured silver plates and cups and candlesticks and cutlery, and that man didn’t even flinch. He just ordered me to go and find another duffel bag to pack it all back in again. You see, all I took was a candle, but that officer stole the candlestick and everything else he could find. And like it or not, Lieutenant, rank had everything to do with that.’

‘The major is dead,’ said Carter. ‘We’re never going to know for sure what was going through his mind when he did this. Maybe he thought he’d been sticking his neck out so long it was time he did something for himself. Maybe he was in debt and couldn’t find another way to pay it off. But the fact that he took matters into his own hands tells us he knew exactly how much of a mistake he had made.’

‘I’m not talking about what he thought of himself,’ said Riveira. ‘I’m talking about what other people are going to think. People back home, for example. They want to go to sleep each night believing what they read in the papers, which is that American soldiers do not shoot women and children, or soldiers with their hands in the air, or that we don’t bomb towns by accident, and they sure as hell don’t want to know that our officers are selling gasoline to the Nazis.’

‘You think they really believe that?’

‘Maybe not. Maybe they have doubts. But I’m guessing they would rather live in the dream that has been made for them where all of those things are true. That’s what you are going up against, Lieutenant, and I don’t know if you realise how strong those dreams can be. But maybe the Germans will break through and none of it will matter. It’s like I said’◦– he leaned out of the jeep and spat◦– ‘maybe this is just the morphine talking.’