I folded the phony bill and walked the long way back around the tent to my jeep, in the opposite direction from the mess tent. I figured there was only so much Spam a guy could eat before he realized he should have asked me my name. I stepped around guy-wires supporting the radio antenna as a wrecked truck caught my attention. It had been dumped in back, in an open area where olive trees had been cut down. It was a charred hulk, bullet holes visible in the cab and frame, showing it had been shot up and then burned. Could this have been the truck Andrews had been caught in? Lots of vehicles had been shot up and burned, but this was the road to Vittoria, so it would make sense. I looked at my jeep, then back at the wreck. Another few minutes couldn't hurt.
I trotted over and looked inside the cab. The windows were gone, shot out or broken in the crash. Inside, it smelled like death and burned rubber. Bullet holes in the door left jagged edges that tore at my pants. My hands came away black with soot, and I headed for the back of the truck. The metal supports for the canvas covering were bent and broken. I hoisted myself up on what was left of the truck bed and tried to comprehend what I was looking at. A pile of charred cans could have been anything. Spam, peaches, who knows what. A faint dark outline showed on the charred floor. About the size of a body. Bodily fluids and burning fat always left their mark. It made it more likely that this had been Andrews's truck. I scuffed through the debris, wondering what a clue would look like after all this.
A flicker of white caught my eye. I pushed aside a blackened pile of something and saw more white. I kneeled and picked it up. Paper. Charred paper. Small pieces fluttered from my hand, none larger than my thumb. It had been a roll of paper, far larger than what I saw here now. The innermost layer of a roll of blank paper, protected from the fire, crumbled at my touch.
Paper. I took the folded fake ten-dollar bill and placed two of the larger pieces inside it, then carefully put it in my shirt pocket and buttoned it. This had been Andrews's truck, I was sure of it. Big rolls of paper could mean only one thing. For Andrews, though, all it had meant was that his luck had run out. Legs or the Luftwaffe? It didn't matter. Dead was dead, and I had to move.
I decided to walk straight to the jeep. There was no unusual activity in the motor pool, and I needed to put some miles between me and this place. Sooner or later someone would figure out it had been Boyle who'd stopped by. And maybe sooner, if anyone had been monitoring Harding's frequency. If they had been, then they knew Vittoria was my destination and might be waiting for me there. But I had to have a next move. That was easy to figure. Get things out in the open, in a place where the odds were in my favor. I thought about Kaz, great in spirit and small in stature, and Harry with his leg still hurting from the bullet he took in Algiers and I had to amend that. Not in my favor exactly, just not stacked against me.
I hopped in and started the jeep. I tried not to make any unusual moves, but I couldn't stop myself from looking at the radio. I could see the sergeant, standing at the set, holding an earphone to his head, looking straight at me and nodding. I gunned it, but not before I heard a "Hey, stop!" and other shouts, which I left behind in a cloud of churning dust.
Damn! Now they knew where I was and could guess where I was going. Elliott could pull anyone he had between here and the coast into the search: MPs, mobsters, renegade GIs, you name it. All I had was a. 45 and a nagging thought at the back of my head that I'd been led on a wild goose chase ever since I'd awakened in that field hospital.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
When my little brother Danny was in junior high school, he got a Mysto Magic Kit for his birthday. Practicing and reading up on magic and magicians, he quickly became a junior Houdini. He did magic shows for neighborhood kids, charging two cents apiece, and he'd usually end up with enough copper in his pocket to stock up on penny candy-when I could talk him into it. Otherwise, he preferred to save to buy more magic tricks. Or illusions, as he called them.
He got pretty good. He could pull off card tricks using the dovetail shuffle, pull a coin out of your ear, all that stuff. Once he got serious about magic, he refused to tell me what the secret was to each trick. The simple ones I could figure out, after insisting, in a big brotherly sort of way, on a hint or two. But otherwise, all he'd say was that it was based on distraction. What you saw was not the illusion; how he distracted you was the real trick.
I hit the brakes as I came to the main road and looked behind me. No sign of pursuit, but I was pretty sure a confirmed sighting of an AWOL lieutenant was being radioed back to Elliott, who would have concocted some sort of cover story-maybe the black market or simply desertion. Or could he have alleged something far more serious, a crime that would allow the MPs to shoot on sight? Yeah, that sounded right. Rocko's murder, maybe.
I had to hide in plain sight while getting to the coast road. I couldn't risk being spotted, but traffic was light. Solitary jeeps, ambulances, heavy trucks, and motorcycles passed by, and I slammed my fist against the steering wheel in frustration. Then the rumble of engines and a low, rolling cloud of dust came to my rescue. A convoy of trucks, big GMCs, some towing artillery pieces. Slow moving, tightly packed. I let the first four go by, then pulled out and accelerated, nosing the jeep between the snout of a 150mm gun and the cab of the next truck. The driver yelled something about my mother and I waved back, like a happy idiot who wanted to eat dust and grit in the noonday heat. I buttoned my collar and pulled on a pair of goggles. This wasn't going to be fun.
But it was safe. Thirty minutes later, a jeep with three MPs, traveling at top speed, passed the column. They didn't give me as much as a glance as they sped by, holding onto their helmets and shielding their eyes, eager to get ahead of the dust cloud.
I was keeping my lips tightly shut so the grit wouldn't work its way between my teeth, otherwise I would have cheered. Not at temporarily outwitting a few MPs, but at finally seeing what was so obvious. Nick had said it back in Villalba, but we were so focused on the payroll heist that it hadn't registered.
Say Elliott and his crew pulled off the theft. It was like I'd said to Don Calo-every GI and Sicilian who heard about it would be on the lookout for it. What could they do with it? As soon as anyone flashed a wad of occupation scrip, they'd be immediate suspects.
No, tempting as it was, the 45th Division payroll was not the real target. It was the distraction. While we were worrying about Nick's relatives and protecting the payroll, someone was pulling off the real theft. The German phony ten-dollar bills had got me thinking about it. When I found the remnants of paper in the burned-out truck things had finally clicked.
It was like Nick had said. AMGOT would need lots of occupation scrip to replace all the lire in Sicily. So much that they'd be printing most of it here, once they were established ashore and could get the printing presses rolling. Andrews had been heading to Vittoria with a supply of printing paper. I'd bet my Boston PD pension it was the same paper they used for the scrip back in North Africa. Supplied by Rocko, of course, before he flapped his lips too much for his own good.
If you had the right paper, running off extra scrip from AMGOT plates would be the opportunity of a lifetime. Especially doing it as soon as possible after the invasion, before things got too organized. He'd have the plates and all he'd need would be enough paper to run off sufficient high-denomination notes. He'd need to find printing presses and supplies, of course, but that would be normal procedure. AMGOT would take over the first print shop they came across. No one would ever be the wiser. A guy like Vito could launder the cash through enough banks and businesses that no one would ever guess the scrip was crooked. And it wouldn't be, that was the beauty of the whole deal. It would be official currency, not actually counterfeit.