Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy Page 6

  And it was an old, dear friendship, for all the jibes and teasing. You could hear it in the reflective pause before every “Joe Ryan” part of the story Harry told me.

  It went back to boyhood. Harry, son of Russian immigrants unhappy with the czar, and Joe Ryan, son of Dubliners equally unhappy over Victoria’s handling of the Irish Question, found each other as fellow outsiders in a Newark, New Jersey slum dominated by Italian immigrants. I surmise it was a chumship founded on complementary parts — the convivial, glad-handing, easily athletic Ryan who glided through his forms with a minimum of effort, and Harry, the plumpish, well-meaning tagalong swot.

  I never found what drew them each to the law, but it made sense to me that Ryan would opt for a military practice, providing him with security and prestige without the difficulties of attaining both in private practice. In Ryan, one sensed a man who always opted for the path of least resistance.

  Harry the plow horse, on the other hand, set up his little office, asked his wife, Cynthia, to come in on occasion to play secretary and make a good impression on new clients, and worked long hours uncomplainingly, assuming that these were the rough early years that would eventually pass. But then came ’29 and the Crash, and the rough years were there to stay.

  Then there came the war. By then Harry no longer had only himself and his wife to consider, but two young boys. The service, as illustrated by his friend Joe Ryan, could provide his family a comfort — and a security — his little practice couldn’t.

  One of those evenings in The Old Eagle, with too much ale in him, Ryan had confessed: “I knew you’d be along, then, after Pearl Harbor. I knew you’d be the first one down at the enlistment center once they pushed the age limit up to forty-five. You know, Cynthia came to me when you went to sign up. You know why, Harry? ’Cause no matter what the age limit was, no matter how badly the Army needed bodies, you weren’t going to be able to get in without someone pulling a few strings.”

  Harry didn’t have to tell me how much he must have reddened on hearing that. “I didn’t ask her to talk to you.”

  Ryan would have given out an irritating chortle when he said, “Harry, she came to ask me to keep you out!” But Ryan, so Ryan said, was Harry’s friend. He would have held Cynthia by her shoulders and said, open-faced and sincerely, “I’ll do what I can,” then turned round and done what his friend needed without being asked: Pull the strings he could pull and put a word where a word was needed. Then he would have turned back to Cynthia, again with great sincerity, and said, “I did what I could.”

  What gnawed at Harry after that confession of Ryan’s was not that he’d helped without being asked, but knowing that with an entire world at war, Harry Voss still could not have passed military muster without a kind word spoken in high places.

  So, they came to sit together, Harry and Joe Ryan, in corner booths in far-off places to talk the way they would have talked at home, in this way bringing a little of home across the sea to themselves and, for a brief while, being just that less lonely for it. The ale gone, they would walk slowly and, in Ryan’s case, perhaps with a slight waver and an arm draped round Harry’s shoulder, as they headed back to the Annex.

  There was a narrow building pinched into a perpetually shadowed corner of the Court, not a home as most of the other Rosewood buildings had been, but apartments for short city visits by landed gentry. The apartments lent themselves more easily to individual quarters than the town houses, so the American QM had descended on the building and duly carved it up into an officers’ billet.

  Harry and Ryan had rooms on the top floor, two of the better apartments whose comforts were somewhat offset by the four flights of stairs it took to reach them, an even harder climb when dragging along a friend sodden with a pitcher of warm ale. Harry put Ryan to bed in his quarters at the front of the building, a room with a delightful view down the tree-shaded lane that fronted the Court. After that, he retired to his room at the rear with, as one would expect of poor old Harry, a less than stellar view of the vehicle parking area in the yard below.

  In the early months of their London posting, Ryan and Harry had done the expected, hurrying here and there to see the sights, clicking off photos of one or the other smiling dumbly while standing in front of postcard icons like Buckingham, Parliament, the Tower of London, Westminster, et cetera, each under their respective umbrellas of barrage balloons. The photos went home to Cynthia and the boys, usually with Ryan having scrawled something clever across the back. But Harry soon grew self-conscious over these jaunts, guilty over acting as if he were on holiday while the world was blowing itself apart, and every letter from Cynthia told of some new item gone from store shelves, and each photograph showed her growing rounder with the carbohydrate-rich wartime diet.

  The atmosphere of the Officers’ Quarters at Rosewood Court did little to break a mood of homesick reflection. Dark and gloomy, even during the height of the day, having only narrow windows front and rear, the exotic woods of the carved ceilings, paneling, and staircases seemed to soak up what little light seeped into that corner of the Court. Nights were worse. Sealed inside blackout curtains, air quickly grew stale and warm, and the electric lights gave off a feeble and flickering glow as electricity was drawn off for higher priorities. A murk rose from the corners like a tide. With it came whispering sounds that might be quiet conversation behind closed doors, a low-tuned wireless, maybe — as Maintenance alleged — mice, or — according to a slightly woozy Ryan — the ghosts of generations of Rosewoodarians gone by.

  With a last look out at the dark buildings of the Court, Harry drew his blackout curtains, disregarded cautions about conserving electricity, and turned on every one of his few lights. He fiddled with the knobs of the regal cathedral wireless on his dresser. “Bwono Sayrah,” came the voice of “Colonel Stevens,” one of the BBC’s beacons to the conquered countries to the east. In Italian maimed by a House of Lords accent, Stevens gave the Italians the Allies’ adulterated version of the supposedly unadulterated news. What Stevens said and how well he said it was irrelevant to Harry. He just needed a human voice to cover the sourceless murmurings and scratchings out in the corridor.

  Harry stripped to his undergarments, pulled back the hand-stitched duvet on his four-poster, and lay on his bed with a copy of The Dain Curse propped in front of him. He read until the letters danced, then turned out the lights and opened the curtains. He lay back down to sleep, left the wireless on, now softly playing music. Soon, he was asleep.

  *

  Peter Ricks found his way quite easily to the motor pool garage by following the sound of whoops and hollers. The garage was a long, low shed just a block from the Annex, shadowy despite the tall windows that admitted the bright summer morning. Ricks walked past lend-leased Royal Army trucks and jeeps parked in neat rows on the oil-stained concrete. The smell of gas and grease gave way to one of sweat.

  Ricks took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the gloom of the garage before advancing toward an ad hoc gymnasium that had been flung together at the far end of the shed. Someone had nicked some Indian clubs from somewhere, and barbells had been improvised out of pipes and wheel rims. A few sea bags filled with sand hung from the rafters and served as punching bags. A corner of the garage had been roped off and the floor covered with sheets of canvas. The echoing shouts Ricks heard were coming from a crowd of cheering British junior officers crowded along the perimeter of this makeshift ring, the object of their attentions being an enormous fellow with the bulk and coloring of a side of raw beef.

  His opponent had skeletal limbs and an ashen pallor that would have looked quite natural on a coroner’s slab. The only fleshy part of his body was a roll of beer fat that sat on his hips like a life preserver. But as obviously outgunned as Armando Grassi was, the little man did not back off from his towering assailant. He would wait for the beefy man to swing and — providing the big man missed, which was not always the case — Grassi would use that opening to close and deliver a flurry of blows. Unfo
rtunately, Grassi’s small hands, lost in their gloves, did nothing but irritate the big man much like an annoying gnat in need of squashing.

  “Armando has this wild, curly hair, jet-black, and it was shooting up in all directions,” Ricks told me when he remembered that meeting. “He looked positively rabid. You didn’t have to know much about boxing to know Armando didn’t know what the hell he was doing. You just had to look at his face.” By the time Ricks appeared after just three rounds, Grassi was sporting a massive welt across one cheek, a split lip, and an impressively blackening eye.

  Ricks seemed to be the only man in the garage disturbed at Grassi’s condition. Even the one other American in the garage — a young PFC Ricks recognized from the orderly room acting as Grassi’s cornerman — seemed to be rooting for the big Englishman.

  The PFC began to snap to attention at the sight of Ricks; Ricks waved at him to relax. There had been too little time between Stanford Law School and his Army captaincy for Ricks to adjust to the weight of the captain’s bars on his shoulders.

  “How’s he doing?” Ricks asked the PFC.

  The PFC was setting out iodine and great wads of cotton. “Primo Camera he ain’t, sir.”

  One of the British officers had an eye on his watch. He signaled the end of the round by clanging a wrench against a wheel rim.

  Grassi shuffled back to his corner. He spotted Ricks and smiled through a bloodstained mouthpiece. “Mornin’,” he grunted, holding out one of his gloves for a welcoming handshake. “Ca’n Rick’, i’n’ it?”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Ricks asked.

  Grassi dropped heavily onto the stool the PFC had set down in his ring corner. “Wha’ i’ loo’ li’?”

  “Suicide,” the PFC supplied. He caught the mouthpiece as Grassi spat it out, then started dabbing stinging iodine at Grassi’s wounds while Grassi rinsed his mouth from a water bottle. The water he spat out had a pinkish hue.

  Grassi wiped at the sweat on his forehead with a gloved hand. “I’m trying to prove Might doesn’t make Right.”

  Ricks looked over at the other boxer. The big Englishman and his cornerman seemed to be doing quite a bit of laughing. “You’re not presenting a very good case.”

  “Oh, wait’ll you get a load of my summation.”

  Ricks started to point to his watch and say something urgent; the timekeeper clanged his wheel rim again.

  “Excuse me, Cap’n, this shouldn’t take long,” Grassi said with groundless optimism. The PFC slipped Grassi’s mouthpiece back into place and scrambled out of the ring, pulling the stool after him. Grassi, grunting ferociously through his mouthpiece, charged the big boxer.

  The bout lasted a single punch more, delivered quite tellingly by the Englishman. “Poor Armando,” Ricks told me later in earnest sympathy. “He saw so many stars they must’ve been forming constellations.”

  *

  At a glance, the wide, blocky figure of Peter Ricks would seem more at home in the ring than that of his junior colleague. The square face looked capable of withstanding a blow from a mallet, let alone a fist. But to talk to him even for a few minutes would leave one wondering if, in fact, he wouldn’t’ve been carried out of the ring in even worse shape. Soft-spoken, reflective, unfailingly polite, from a proper, well-to-do, unfailingly polite San Franciscan family of lawyers, Ricks seemed too courteous to punch, and too trusting to defend, never believing someone could be so mean-spirited or so pointlessly brutal as to want to beat him bloody.

  Armando Grassi was not soft-spoken, reflective, or polite, nor was he from a family of distinguished lawyers. His upbringing in the woollier parts of the Chicago slums had left him tough enough to climb out of the streets and put himself through law school. It had also left him daring, quick, a trifle tactless, and with a taste for the jugular that even the proprieties of law school never tempered. Perhaps it was the inequities he’d seen between the world of tenements and those who owned them that had ingrained in Grassi a nearly psychopathic compulsion to take the role of David against any Goliath he could find — or imagine he’d found. Or — another perhaps — being saddled with a name like “Armando” had gotten him into enough scrapes to develop a combative attitude. The trait had gotten him into kickabouts with senior officers over junior officer housing, treatment of the mess boys, military court procedure, and a host of other causes. And he was not above taking his crusading stances against America’s allies with equal abrasiveness, assailing British military personnel with beer-fueled critiques over the moral bankruptcy of the monarchy and The Empire, aristocratic effetism, English social castes, and the like. These debates frequently resulted in an escalation of tempers, a rashly thrown punch here and there, and — as on this occasion — a duel or two.

  Following Grassi’s disastrous defense of his principles in the motor pool gym, his cornerman helped him back to his room in the junior officers’ BOQ. Ricks followed after detouring by the canteen for a basin of ice. While Grassi sat on the cold tile floor of the shower room letting the fitfully hot spray wash away blood and massage bruises, Ricks waited in Grassi’s room, wrapping ice in a towel.

  Ricks stayed to the side of the room belonging to Grassi’s absent bunkmate, where everything was squared away as stipulated in the Army manual. Grassi’s side looked as if a grenade had gone off inside a bin of dirty laundry. His desk was hidden under a pile of files and papers. His locker top clattered with an outrageous collection of scents, lotions, and toilet waters, most of them uncapped, their aromas mixing in a noxious perfume. Over the unmade bunk was a mural of girlie photographs from the obligatory Betty Grable to a surprising Penny Singleton. All looked down at the debris on Grassi’s half of the room with delighted smiles.

  Ricks shook his head over the sight and kicked a toeless sock. He heard the shower spray die and the slap of Grassi’s wet feet coming down the hall. Grassi appeared in the doorway. He had not bothered to wrap a bath towel round himself. His eyes, both the swollen and unswollen one, were half closed. He lowered himself gingerly onto the dirty clothes littering his bunk.

  “Does anyone ever inspect this place?” Ricks asked.

  “I think someone came down last week. He’s probably still in here somewhere. If you see him, let me know.” Ricks did not want to cross into the infected areas of the room, so he tossed his impromptu ice bag over and it bounced once on Grassi’s belly before coming to rest. Grassi slid the towel up to the bruises on his face.

  “Thanks,” Grassi said. “Now, Cap’n, was there something I could do for you? Or are you just a fight fan?”

  “I was on my way over to Major Voss’s office. It was my impression that we were both supposed to go over there this morning. On assignment.” Ricks looked at his watch and his face became pained. “We were supposed to be in the major’s office six minutes ago.”

  “I guess we’re late for that, Cap’n. Why don’t you go on ahead — ”

  “Would you just hurry, Lieutenant? Please?”

  “Is that an order? Sir?”

  Exercising his rank ran so counter to Ricks’s genteel upbringing that his response was merely to redden and shuffle his feet.

  Grassi was in a merciful mood. He pulled himself painfully off his cot. “Since you asked nice...He opened his locker, drew his bony white body up to its full, stunted height, and regarded it admiringly in the full-length mirror mounted inside the door. He wiggled his hips, swaying his genitalia round, then grinned and jerked a thumb at the beaming pin-ups on the wall. “Now you know what keeps ’em smiling!”

  The red-faced Ricks was already halfway out the door. “I’ll wait upstairs.”

  Grassi laughed.

  *

  Poor old Harry swung the door of his outer office open that morning to find that, once again, Corporal Nagel had defied Harry’s prayers and presented himself for duty. This particular morning, young Nagel, screwdriver in hand, was brazenly stabbing at the bowels of his intercom through its exposed back.

  Nagel, intent on th
e operation, was oblivious to the appalled look on Harry’s face. “You’re late,” Nagel announced.

  “Yes, Nagel, I’m late, thank you. Mind if I ask what you’re doing?”

  “Busted, sir. I’m fixing it.”

  Like Canute stopped the tide, Harry thought. “Colonel Ryan was supposed to send some staff over to me today. I don’t see them.”

  “Nobody’s showed up here, sir. Except me. They must be late, too.”

  It was a typically Nagelesque belaboring of the obvious and it sent Harry to his office shaking his head. “Get me Colonel Ryan on the phone.”

  “Yessir,” Nagel said and went back to stabbing at the entrails of the intercom box.

  “Now would be a good time, Nagel.”

  Harry found six manila folders on his desk with an accompanying note from Captain Bennett, and a pair of phone messages covered with Nagel’s squiggly handwriting taped to his chair.

  “Nagel!”

  “Oh, sir, a messenger came by yesterday with those files from — ”

  “What the hell are these messages?”

  “Phone messages.”

  “I don’t read Sanskrit, Nagel.”

  “Sir?”

  “I can’t make these out!”

  “One’s from Colonel Ryan.”

  “Colonel Ryan? When did he call?”

  “This morning, just after I got — ”

  “What’s this other one? Something Bill? From S-2? G-2?” Harry turned the paper on its side and squinted. “E-2?”

  “Captain Dell. From G-2. He called this morning, too.”

  “You’re supposed to put the date and time — Forget it. Did this Captain Dell say what he wanted?”

  “No, sir, just that he’d call back.”