Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy Page 2

  In longer time than it should have taken, Corporal Nagel would duly return and hover over Harry with a cardboard tray of coffee and doughnuts wobbling in his anamorphic hands.

  Harry had a plodding way about him. I can see him pushing himself slowly away from his typewriter table and sighing (he was a sighing sort) at Nagel’s return. He would pluck at his khaki shirt where it stuck in little damp spots to his sweaty paunch, and look sadly over the tops of his half-moon reading glasses at the tall pimply-faced corporal, gangly and stooped like a broken umbrella arm. Harry told me that the simple act of removing a coffee and a powdered doughnut from the tray and setting them down on the desk was, for Nagel, the kind of operation that required the fierce and painful concentration of a bomb-disposal expert. Doing his best not to make any sudden moves that might startle the lad, Harry would delicately slide his legs as far as he could from where the sloshing cup of coffee was coming in for a bumpy landing.

  Corporal Nagel could be relied on for at least one annoyance per day and this particular day he was in proper form. “What’s that you have in your mouth?” Harry asked.

  “Sir?”

  Harry pushed his glasses back up on the damp bulb of his nose and tugged at where his shirt was sticking under his arms. It was quite close in the small office. Harry’s one window was permanently wedged open at a height of twenty-one centimeters, and no amount of banging or threats could move it farther up or down. The room, an awkward conversion of what Harry described as “some old biddy’s boo-dwah,” still boasted very civilian floral wallpaper, which only added to a sense of hothouse suffocation. To remedy the stuffiness, Harry had been provided with a small desk fan whose scimitar blades adamantly refused to turn. This, Maintenance explained without offering any solutions, was due to the warm humidity and/or cold damp — depending on the current state of the fickle English weather.

  Harry took a deep breath and began again: “I said, what’s that you have in your mouth? What are you chewing?”

  The corporal’s jaws froze. His eyes took on the fixed, wide-look that cows must have in that first moment after the butcher’s mallet falls on their heads. “Chewing?”

  “Corporal, would you like me to pry your mouth open and see what’s in there?”

  “Bubba gum, sir. Fleers.”

  Harry reached for the Lucky Strike smoldering in his ashtray and took a long, tranquilizing draught. “Bubble gum.”

  “Yessir. My mama sent it. She — ”

  “Nagel, I don’t care where you got the bubble gum. Just don’t chew it in my office.” Harry harrumphed and drew himself up in his chair. One hand unconsciously moved to fiddle with what there was of his hair. “Appearances to the contrary, Corporal, this is a law office. You do not chew gum in a law office. You can chew gum in the hall, you can chew gum in the latrine, in the street, or in bed, but you do not chew gum in my law office. Clear?”

  “Yessir. May I request permission to go out in the hall, sir?”

  “No, you may not request permission to go out in the hall. You may request permission to go to work. You may request permission to work on this!” Harry nodded at the sheet of erasable bond wilting in his Underwood. “Do you see what this is?”

  Nagel craned his head round for a look and Harry noticed how appetizingly exposed that left the corporal’s jugular. Harry’s stubby fingers had produced a page spurtled with smudges, erasures, and type-overs.

  “What is it?” Nagel asked.

  “This is what you were supposed to be typing yesterday afternoon while I was over at the Provost’s.”

  “That’s not what I typed yesterday.”

  “I know!” From his desk, Harry grabbed a fistful of foolscap covered with notes and shoved it at Nagel. “This is what you were supposed to be typing yesterday! This is what you are going to type now!”

  Nagel studied the notes, trying to camouflage a slow chew of his gum as musing. “Hmph,” he said. He started to reach for the page in Harry’s typewriter. “I guess — ”

  “I guess this is garbage!” Harry tore the page out of the carriage, crushed it in his sweaty palm, and dropped it in his wastebasket. “And Nagel?”

  “Sir?”

  “Get rid of the gum!”

  Having shooed Corporal Nagel back to his own outer office, Harry took another draught of his cigarette, then picked up his doughnut and kicked his wheeled chair over to the narrow window. He propped his heels on the sill among the piles of overstuffed folders and bound briefs, laid the back of his chair against the desk, and regarded the grim view of chimney pots and barrage balloons through the little panes, each crisscrossed with adhesive tape to minimize flying glass in the event of a nearby bomb blast. He took a bite of the doughnut, then reached back to his desk for his coffee. He leaned forward slightly to take a cautious sip.

  “Ahhh!” Harry’s head shot back from the hot coffee and some spilled on his trouser leg. “Ohhh!”

  “Watch that coffee, Major,” Nagel called helpfully. “It’s hot.”

  Harry was still stomping round his office trying to keep the hot stain on his trousers off his skin when the telephone rang. “I’ve got it!” he barked and scooped up the receiver. “Major Voss.”

  “Hello, Harry-boy.”

  The purring, mocking voice was instantly familiar. “What do you want?”

  “That’s no way to talk to your betters, Harry.”

  “Arf.”

  “What’s on your desk?”

  “Today? Or for a while?”

  “Maybe a little while.”

  “Besides eighteen tons of paperwork?”

  “Yes, Harry, besides eighteen tons of paperwork.”

  “Mostly flyweights. I’ve got a half-dozen D and D’s, that statutory — ”

  “But if you had to, you could dump everything on somebody else?”

  “Well, most of it. If I had to. They’re pretty routine. But I’d prefer — ”

  “I may have something for you, Harry-boy. Meet me in the yard in five minutes.”

  Harry looked down at his stained trousers. “Five minutes?”

  “Plan to spend the day, Harry.”

  “The day? I thought there was a case management — ”

  “Five minutes, Harry.” The caller rang off.

  Harry slipped his glasses into his shirt pocket and brushed the crumbs from his shirtfront. “Nagel? Nagel!”

  “Yessir!”

  Frowning into the little mirror he kept in his desk drawer, Harry used a pocket comb to drag his meager ration of hair into a more strategic pattern. “I’m going to be with Colonel Ryan for the rest of the day, so if anyone calls, take a message. Get their number! OK? Corporal?”

  “Yessir.”

  Harry rolled down his sleeves, tightened his tie, and took his jacket from the hanger on the door. He stood in the doorway to the outer office and scowled at Nagel, who was wrestling with a fistful of jammed typewriter keys. “Nagel? Nagel!”

  The corporal looked up, his skeletal hands fiddling with the logjammed keys. “Sir?”

  “Those notes better be transcribed by noon, Corporal. Captain Brez-whatever the hell his name is — ”

  “Brezinzki.”

  “ — is coming by for them at noon. They’d better be ready.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Or when you thank your mother for the gum, you can write to her from the Aleutians.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “That’ll be a first.” Harry headed for the door. “After Captain — ”

  “Brezinzki.”

  “ — picks up that better-be-finished transcription, you go out.”

  “To lunch, sir?”

  “To lunch, to dinner, to have tea with the Queen, I don’t care. I don’t want you in this office without a chaperone. Take the rest of the day off. Go out and assimilate the local culture. Go stand in a queue at Covent Garden.”

  “What’s a queue, sir?”

  “A Chinaman’s hair.” Harry sighed and left.
/>   *

  Outwardly, Rosewood Court hadn’t changed much since the arrival of the Americans, but then the Victorian architects who had designed the clustered block of town houses and pieds-a-terre a century earlier had had the distinctly Empire view that the world outside its gates was more or less irrelevant to those inside. Consequently, brick-and-granite buildings of the square had been built with their bland backsides to the street while their gargoyled cornices and balustraded verandas faced each other round a cobbled square, so the trashmen and postmen and deliverymen could discreetly carry on their dealings with house servants at the rear entrances, while the ladies and gentlemen of Rosewood Court had only to face one another.

  Those self-same ladies and gents were gone now, withdrawn to their country estates within the previous year or two while their Court residences had been “donated” to the Allied war effort, and a great deal of the yard’s antiquarian charm seemed to have departed along with them. The ornate, two-tiered fountain bubbling in the Court’s center was the first thing to go, along with the prize-winning roses and their trellises, all to make room for the jeeps, staff cars, and 4x4’s that soon clotted the yard and left the venerable cobbles stained with rainbows of motor oil. The gatepost ormolu lions were no longer considered sentinel enough; they were joined by rotating shifts of iron-faced Military Policemen.

  And then there were the signs: “Maintenance,” “Paymaster,” “Personnel,” and so forth, each accompanied by smaller signs listing various departments subdivided into listings of individual personnel. The grand pater of them all was a monstrous thing two meters square set by the gate that announced Rosewood Court had been rechristened:

  UNITED STATES ARMY GENERAL HEADQUARTERS

  ADMINISTRATION ANNEX

  (Air Corps Inclusive)

  London

  Harry, still plucking at the coffee stain on his trousers, stood on the veranda of a row house branded “Judge Advocate General — Building B.” (Building A was, with the peculiar logic of the American military, located clear across the Court.) Pulled up before the steps was a Chevrolet saloon decked in U.S. Army olive drab with Colonel Joseph P. Ryan sitting in the open rear door pinwheeling one hand to wave Harry on. “C’mon, Harry-boy!” Ryan bellowed. “Move that fat ass!”

  Harry jounced down the steps, a sight that provoked a horselaugh from Joe Ryan. Harry hurried to slide in beside Ryan before the young buck sergeant at the wheel could go through the door-holding rigmarole that embarrassed Harry so.

  Ryan momentarily put on a serious face to salute the MP’s as the car sped out the gate, then immediately switched to a smirk focused at the blot on Harry’s trousers. “Accident, Harry-boy? That’s the first thing that goes at your age, bucko; the kidneys.” He said it with a hideous Irish brogue he reserved for such sporting occasions.

  “My age?” Harry said. “As I recall, you are the one who’s older by — ”

  “I can get you an office closer to the latrine if you’d like, laddie. ’Tis no tribble at all.”

  “I’ll settle for a new clerk. Get Nagel assigned to Goering’s staff and you’ll shorten the war by six months. At least.”

  “Oh, at least.”

  They tilted their heads in salute to each other’s wit and shared a chuckle.

  “Now,” Harry said, “do you mind cutting the blarney and telling me what’s going on?”

  “Oooh, look at those eyes flash!” Ryan’s mock gravity played as badly as his brogue. “Such an evil, suspicious mind! Evil! Perfect ingredients for a good lawyer.”

  Harry leaned back, folded his hands neatly in his lap, and blandly looked out the window. This was his way of telling Ryan he’d wait as long as he had to for whatever Ryan had to say.

  The saloon wove slowly through Home Defence roadblocks. Old men in white helmets and HD armbands were directing traffic. The saloon’s tires hissed through water streaming from a broken main. Harry saw where a stick of the previous night’s bombs had crashed among a row of flats. One explosion had blown a round walk-to-roof hole like a Chinese door in the façades.

  Ryan craned across him for a better look. “Hear that one last night?” he asked boyishly. “I thought only sex made the earth move like that!” His tanned face puckered up in an appreciative whistle.

  Now, Harry saw rubble behind the exploded facade: bricks, broken furniture, painted fragments of wall. A piece of cloth — a sheet, or maybe a woman’s dress — hung high on a point of jagged timber. A squad of men followed an eagerly sniffing collie about the heaped debris until the dog stopped and began pawing at the toppled bricks, then the men went to work with picks and shovels. An ambulance crew emerged from the wreckage of a basement carrying a shrouded stretcher. A slim, gray arm dangled from under the stretcher blanket. Harry looked away.

  Ryan nodded at the stretcher bearers. “How’d you like that job?”

  “I assumed you asked me along for this little jaunt because there’s some business you want to discuss?”

  Ryan immediately switched into a business-like demeanor. “This rape thing; that the heaviest thing you have on the boards? How’s the rape shape?”

  “I told you: statutory.”

  “How statutory?”

  “Completely.”

  Ryan permitted himself a thoroughly unbusiness-like smile. “Boys will be boys.”

  “Well, this time it looks like girls will be girls, too.” Ryan laughed. “I hope these kids of ours liberate Europe with the same energy they’re liberating the chastity of the locals. You won’t have trouble passing this off to someone?” Harry fidgeted in his seat. “I’d prefer to keep — ”

  “Don’t want to lose that one, huh, Harry-boy? Be a nice big deal, hm? Look good on the old curriculum vitae, hm?”

  Harry fidgeted some more and Ryan chuckled. “ — get your name in the Newark Evening News, everybody running over to your wife’s house going on and on about reading how her husband defended the virtue — ”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “ — of some poor British maiden who succumbed — succumbed, I say — ”

  Harry had gone back to staring out the window, ignoring Ryan.

  Ryan laughed again. He tugged at Harry’s sleeve. “Who’s your best friend, Harry?” and flashed his charming, gratingly ingratiating smile.

  Having suffered through Colonel Joseph Patrick Ryan and his bonhomie at several press and social functions, I must say the man set my teeth on edge. He was much too assured of his own charm, of his frightful good looks, of his ability to succeed on a polished flair for knowing the right thing to say and the correct gesture to make. The square, handsome face was always nicely tanned, lined as if for the express intent of emphasizing a wide smile incorporating annoyingly even white teeth and sparkling green eyes. He carried a full, coiffed head of red hair ever-so-gently gray-flecked at the temples, and had the trim figure of a Wimbledon senior, which he emphasized with uniforms tailored by a deft Savile Row hand. Watching him stroll along next to the squat, slogging form of Harry Voss only heightened Ryan’s physical attributes, and made his habit of finding the most irritating approach to a situation to inflict on Harry seem all the more like a form of bullying. But then he would flash Harry his you-can’t-possibly-stay-angry-with-me little-boy smile, pour on a double dosage of Joe Ryan charm, and toss Harry some little plum to turn sour to sweet. Harry would fuss, fume, but always ultimately forgive.

  “Who’s your best friend, Harry?” Ryan asked again.

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “Me, of course!”

  “I’ve got to start making more friends.”

  Ryan laughed. The teasing went on, interspersed with occasional bits of diligence as he grilled Harry on the disposition of his various cases. Then, they were out of London and the staff car was crackling to a stop in a graveled car park.

  Harry followed Ryan out of the saloon and across the stones. Beyond the scruffy orchard lining the square Harry could see a wind sock bobbing listlessly from a pole.


  “Oh-oh.”

  “It’s two hours by car,” Ryan said.

  “I’m in no rush.”

  “A sense of adventure was never your strong suit, Harry-boy.”

  The ad hoc aerodrome on the other side of the trees was nothing more than a redressed cow pasture. At one end of the field, lean-looking cattle grazed in the shade of the flimsy wooden control tower, thoroughly unimpressed by the statuesque blue shadows of London a few miles beyond. At the other end of the field, pallets of fuel drums were heaped under camouflage netting, and there was a scattering of non-military-looking aircraft with military markings.

  “Morning, Lieutenant,” Ryan greeted the young man coming up from beneath the wind of an olive drab Piper Cub.

  “Mornin’, sir, sirs. All ready for ya.” He was a blond, smiling youth with a gold second lieutenant’s bar on his collar and a cap on his head emblazoned with the insignia of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Harry didn’t think the young man looked old enough to drive a motor car, let alone an aeroplane.

  The young lieutenant held open the cabin door and Ryan climbed into the backseat. Harry stood frozen under the wing, his white-knuckled hand clamped on one of the wing struts. He gave the strut a little tug: The whole aircraft quivered like a box kite.

  “Major, sir? I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t do that to my airplane, sir.”

  Harry lifted a leg into the doorway but then his eyes locked on patches along the fuselage that suggested a pattern of bullet holes.

  “Krauts,” the lieutenant explained blandly. “But that was a while ago. They don’t get through so much anymore.”

  “See, Harry-boy?” Ryan cackled. “Hardly a t’in’ to worry your wee head about.”

  Harry cleared his throat and climbed up, jamming himself in beside Ryan.

  The young pilot bounced into the front seat. He pulled on a set of headphones and aviator sunglasses, flipped some switches on the control panel, and the engine coughed, the propeller swung. A moment later the plane was rocking across a field dotted with cow manure.