XPD

40

Colonel Pitman drove the car after he left Madame Mauring’s cake shop with Stein. Colonel Pitman no longer enjoyed driving, which was why he employed a chauffeur. Driving made him tense, and long journeys affected his bad back. A young man in a red Audi came weaving through the fast traffic carelessly enough to make Pitman brake sharply. He felt the bile rise to his throat, and winced with the pain of indigestion. The anxieties of the last few days had played havoc with his regulated working hours and disrupted his mealtimes. Now there was nothing he would like better than an Alka-Seltzer and a long doze in his favourite armchair. He rubbed his chest, hoping to alleviate the discomfort. He saw Stein looking at him; he smiled, but he couldn’t help wondering why he was chauffeuring his ex-corporal. He should have told Stein to drive the car. Instead, Stein had got into the passenger seat and told him to get going. It had always been like this: Stein giving the orders and Pitman being carried along by his energy and determination. It had been like that the first day he had met Stein, the day Pitman had arrived at the battalion headquarters-a bone-rattling, dusty truck ride from Casablanca. Lieutenant Pitman was straight from the USA, newly assigned to the tank destroyer units that everyone was promising would knock hell out of the Panzers of the Deutsche Afrika Korps.

Pitman was greeted by a snappy salute from the sentry at the gate. He felt important as he carried his kit up the hill to the tent marked ‘Report here’. It was a warm day. The tent smelt of new canvas and the waxy resin used to preserve it. The sun made the light inside the tent bright yellow, and there was the loud buzzing of flies. A middle-aged master sergeant sat at a table with a field telephone and a stateside newspaper. He was reading the sports results aloud, very slowly. Private Stein-plump, red faced and perspiring-sat on an upturned box and punctuated the sports results with sneers, jeers and snorts. Lieutenant Pitman gave them a moment or two to acknowledge his presence but when they did not do so he said, ‘Sergeant, I’m Lieutenant Pitman. I’m looking for the battalion commander.’

Master Sergeant Vanelli looked up and nodded. He folded his stateside newspaper and laid it on the table with the sort of reverence that such rare documents were given at that time, but he did not get to his feet. Stein, without moving from his position on the upended box, looked the officer up and down from the factory-fresh steel helmet, and the pale skin unused to African sunshine, to the newly issued brown boots. ‘Take my advice, Lieutenant,’ said Stein. ‘You get your leggings and your pistol strapped on and paint your bar on the front of your helmet before you see the CO.’

‘Is that your advice?’ said Pitman coldly.

‘This is General Patton’s command: twenty-five-dollar fine for officers without their pistols; and officers without leggings pay fifteen bucks.’ Stein smiled and aimed a smack at a fly which had settled on his arm, but it flew away unharmed.

‘Which is the colonel’s tent?’ Pitman asked, pointedly addressing the sergeant instead of Stein.

‘The one with the rolled tent-sides,’ said Stein. ‘The colonel likes a draught, and don’t mind the sand.’

‘Is this man your mouthpiece, Sergeant?’ Pitman asked him.

‘I guess he is,’ said the sergeant, as though he hadn’t considered it before. ‘Charlie Stein kind of runs things for us up here.’

Lieutenant Pitman looked at the two men, wondering whether to complain about their unsoldierly manner, but decided that it would be an unwise move for a newly assigned officer. He ducked his head to go out of the tent just as Stein called, ‘And ten bucks if you are not wearing a tie.’

Pitman ignored him.

‘Cut the speed a little,’ said Stein. ‘This is no time to get a ticket for speeding.’ Pitman glanced at the fat, balding man sitting beside him. Who would have guessed that their lives and fortunes could have become so interdependent? Stein was twisted round awkwardly as he pushed his brown shoulder bag on to the rear seat. The documents he placed on the floor behind him, and from time to time he reached back to touch them and reassure himself that they were still there.

‘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 post-war 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 machine-gun. 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?’

‘You were absolved, Colonel. I gave evidence to the little curly-haired captain from the judge advocate’s staff who flew down from Algiers. Delaney told him the same. You remember.’

‘Goddamn it, Corporal,’ said Pitman in an uncharacteristic display of bad temper. ‘I’m not asking you whether you got me off the hook. Answer my question: did you hear Major Carson or didn’t you? I need to know.’ He was shouting by now.

Stein looked out of the window. It was all a long time ago. What the hell difference did it make? In Stein’s world, trouble arrived, was dealt with and then forgotten as soon as possible. Why travel back into the past to rake over old worries, when there were so many right here and now, just screaming for attention? Stein looked at his colonel-his bald head made ridiculous by the curly hair around his ears-and then looked back at the wide, graceless streets of the city. No one had heard Carson talking with Pitman. The two officers had deliberately walked far enough away in order to avoid being overheard. Pitman knew that. Stein said, ‘Sure I heard him, Colonel. You didn’t want to pull back but he insisted.’

‘That’s right,’ said Pitman triumphantly. ‘That’s exactly what happened. I was obeying orders.’

Stein nodded. He had other more pressing things on his mind than the colonel’s battle with his conscience. ‘Maybe we both should scram,’ said Stein. ‘We’ll both go to Mexico or Canada. You wait there while I go to New Jersey using my Brazilian passport. I’ll take passport photos of you with me, see Petrucci and bring passport and papers for you.’

‘Shall I keep on the airport road?’ said Pitman. He bit his lip. Why did he always ask Stein what to do?

Stein took his time in replying. Every damned road out of Geneva, except the north lakeside road and the autoroute alongside it, led into France. Stein wondered whether the French CRS men who policed the border crossings would have received orders to detain them. Did the French work that closely with the British? And what would they charge them with? Perhaps the French would simply confiscate the Hitler Minutes as contraband and then deport them; he had heard of such things happening to people time and time again. The Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité were a law unto themselves. ‘The autoroute,’ said Stein.

‘I think we are being followed,’ said Colonel Pitman eyeing the mirror. ‘The same car has been behind us ever since we left Rollins. It’s a white Mini.’

‘Put your foot down. It’s fast, this Jaguar, isn’t it?’

‘I doubt we could pull far away from him,’ said Pitman. ‘I’m not any kind of ace driver. I suppose he must have seen us.’ He flicked the right indicator and watched anxiously until the indicator of the car behind them was also flashing. ‘He’s following us,’ said Pitman. ‘There’s no doubt now.’ He felt another twinge of pain and rubbed his chest. If only he could belch as readily as Stein could.

‘Stop on the autoroute,’ said Stein. ‘I’ll take care of him. Then we’ll come back to the airport afterwards.’

‘We’ll see if we can pull away a little,’ said Pitman. He slowed for the Lausanne autoroute turn-off and swung the wheel over. There was a soft squeal of brakes and the car behind followed closely. Once on the big highway, Pitman put his foot down; all thoughts of indigestion pains vanished. His Jaguar was a new and powerful model with only 3000 miles on the clock. Kept in perfect mechanical order, the car responded to the open throttle and leapt forward like a racehorse. The car following them was equally new but it had been ill used by nearly one hundred drivers with little in common except a careless indifference about things borrowed. The Mini spluttered and objected as the driver brought the speedometer needle past sixty. Only with difficulty could he keep behind the Jaguar.

The cars were touching eighty miles an hour when Colonel John Elroy Pitman the Third suffered his third, and terminal, heart attack.