For the first time since we had landed in Normandy, I felt that I wasn’t the sole representative of the Angel of Death.
I’ll Be Seeing You
“So what’s the plan now, sir?” asked Corporal Little.
“God knows,” I told him. I was still half-deaf.
We were sitting in one of the dank stone alcoves in De Cluyse cafe on Oude Koornmarkt, eating chicken waterzooi and potatoes. The café was converted from a thirteenth-century cellar, and it was lit only by candles in small glass jelly-jars. It was so cold that we were both wearing our overcoats and mittens, and our breath was smoking. Frank was lying under the table, making disgusting noises with a pork knuckle.
“I mean, supposing those other two Screechers weren’t hiding in that building at all? We only have that Hauser guy’s word for it, after all.”
“Well, you’re absolutely right, Henry, but it’s going to take days to clear all that rubble, and even then we may not know for sure.”
“What do you reckon it was? Gas main?”
I shrugged and said nothing. But I had guessed what it was, the instant I had heard that distinctive double-bang. The house in Schildersstraat had been hit by the first German V-2 to strike the center of Antwerp. The first bang was a sonic boom, as the rocket came out of the sky at over three times the speed of sound. The second was over a ton of high explosive.
Six days before a V-2 had hit the village of Brasschaat, about eight kilometers to the northeast of Antwerp, and all of us officers in 101 Counterintelligence Detachment had been briefed that this was probably a “range-finding” shot, with more V-2s to follow.
The stovelike object that had bounced along the street had confirmed it for me. It was the rocket’s combustion chamber, which weighed over six hundred kilos and almost always survived the explosion.
I lifted up a scraggy piece of chicken leg on the end of my fork, with a shred of wet leek hanging off it. “What do you think they fed this on? Newspaper?”
A second V-2 landed on the city in the middle of the afternoon, when Corporal Little and I were walking along Keizerstraat. Frank did a four-legged jump and cowered against the nearest wall.
“It’s OK, boy,” Corporal Little reassured him, but Frank never did get used to the seismic shock of V-2 explosions, which made the cobblestones knock together like pebbles on the beach. If bloodhounds are capable of having nervous breakdowns, poor old Frank got pretty close to it.
That Sunday, October 15, a rocket destroyed twenty-five houses on Kroonstraat at Borgerhout, killing four people and injuring a hundred more. Over the next few days, more and more V-2s hit the city center. There was a total news blackout — nothing on the wireless, and nothing in the newspapers except vague warnings about “flying bombs” — so nobody knew what was really happening. The city authorities were desperate to avoid any panic, and, just as importantly, they didn’t want the Germans to find out whether their rockets were hitting their targets or not.
After the Schildersstraat attack, Corporal Little and Frank and I spent three more weeks in Antwerp, searching for any trace of the Romanian Screecher and his German companion, just in case Ernst Hauser had been lying to us, or they had been hiding in some other house when the V-2 struck. But after we had dragged Frank up and down every rubble-strewn street and every smelly alley between Prinsstraat and Lange Nieuwstraat, and talked to more than two hundred people, including police officers and hospital orderlies and priests, we finally had to conclude that they had either left Antwerp and returned to Germany, or else that first V-2 had simply atomized them.
As the winter grew colder and colder, and the Germans retreated, we were sent into Holland. We visited houses in Eindhoven and Breda and Tilburg, and found the grisly evidence that Screechers had been there — men, women and children, with their hearts cut out and all of the blood drained out of them. But the Screechers themselves had long gone, and they had left no trail that Frank could usefully follow.
Whenever I think of that winter, I think of finger-numbing cold, and skies as dark as lead. I think of desperate tiredness, and boredom — driving miles and miles between avenues of poplar trees, and seeing nobody for hours. It felt as if the war had passed us by and we were completely alone in the world.
On the morning of January 16, 1945, a message came through Brussels that my mother had died, and that I should return home immediately. Operation Screecher was over — as far as I was concerned, anyway — because I was never sent back to Europe. Corporal Little was ordered to take Frank back to Antwerp, where he could help the Belgian rescue services to locate buried bodies. The city was still under daily attack from V-2 rockets, and already more than three and a half thousand people had been killed.
The last time I saw Corporal Little and Frank was on the long stone mole at Zeebrugge harbor, where I was due to board a British troopship. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was snowing hard. The lighthouse on the end of the mole was back in action, and every now and then the snow was illuminated by a bright sweeping light.
“Well, Henry, it’s been an experience.”
“Yes, sir, it has.” He hesitated for a moment, and then he said, “Think we did any good, sir?”
“I don’t know. I guess we never will. I can’t see us going into the history books, can you?”
“No, sir. But we’ll remember it. You and me, and Frank.”
Frank made that whining noise in his throat and irritably shook the snowflakes from his back.
I shook Corporal Little’s hand and walked back along the mole to the dockside. Somewhere, in some alternative existence, I think that I’m still walking along it now, with the lighthouse flashing on and off, and the snow falling all around me, and the bang and clatter of cranes still echoes in my ears.
I didn’t yet know how my mother had died, but I was already feeling a devastating loneliness, as if I had lost not only the woman who had given birth to me, but part of my ancestry, too.
Mill Valley, 1943
I was swinging in the hammock in my parents’ backyard when my father came walking through the overgrown grass and said, “There’s two military guys want to talk to you.”
I sat up a little and shaded my eyes with my hand. Two middle-aged men in sharply pressed army uniforms were standing by the kitchen steps with their hats tucked under their arms. One had a silvery-gray crewcut and the other had horn-rim glasses and a heavy black mustache.
“They wouldn’t tell me what they wanted,” said my father. “If you’d prefer me to say that you’re not at home, well, I’m more than happy to. You know my views on the military.”
My father was what you might call a professional nonconformist. He always reminded me of Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers when he sang “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He looked a little like Groucho Marx, too, in his slopy-shouldered cardigans and his baggy corduroy pants, with his pipe always sticking out of the side of his mouth. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, but he was also a writer and a fly-fisherman and when he played the piano on summer evenings with the parlor windows open his music was so sentimental that he could make you choke up.
The officer with the silvery-gray crew cut raised one hand and called out, “James Falcon Junior? Need to talk to you, sir!”
I looked at my father and my father shrugged. I clambered out of the hammock, catching my foot so that I staggered on one leg for the first couple of paces, but I managed to hold on to the apple I’d been eating.
The officers approached me. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bulsover and this is Major Leonard Harvey.”