“I didn’t, sir,” Docker said.
“General Baird taught a review course in math and artillery.” The colonel continued to assess Docker. “I knew the general’s older son, the one who’s in Italy now. But I never met his youngest boy, Jackson. They’re a fine family.”
General Adamson turned from Karsh and looked with interest at Docker’s campaign ribbons. “You’ve been around a bit. Were you with my division in North Africa?”
“No, sir, I was with the First.”
“Terry Allen, eh?” The general smiled. “Another damn good bunch. George, let’s let these people get back to work.”
The MP corporal presented arms, and when the senior officers were gone, the doors swinging shut on them, Karsh looked through the windows, where a fresh snowfall streaked the gloomy afternoon shadows.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I think everyone could use a cup of coffee. Shall we take a break for ten minutes?”
When the hearings resumed. Major Karsh settled himself in his chair and turned to Sergeant Corey. “Sergeant, would you please read the last exchanges between me and Lieutenant Docker?”
“Yes, sir.” Using the tip of her eraser, the sergeant flipped back a page of the notebook and began reading. “Lieutenant Docker: ‘Larkin was dead and that was the end of it, I thought.’ Major Karsh: ‘I can see how you might think so, but as things stand we have only your word that you were not an active and willing partner in Corporal Larkin’s black market plans. Isn’t that about the face of it, lieutenant?’ ”
“Thank you, sergeant.” Karsh looked at Docker. “Well, lieutenant?”
“As you say, sir, you have only my word for it.”
“I don’t think it’s quite that simple.” Karsh took another folder from his briefcase and opened it. “There are, unfortunately, these gray areas that tend to blur perspective. Here, for example, is another. In your deposition and Corporal Trankic’s there’s mention of a child—”
Adjusting his glasses, the major ran his pencil down a typewritten page. “Yes. Margret Gautier. Lieutenant, you took that child from her aunt’s home in Lepont and delivered her to nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.” Karsh looked over his glasses at Docker. “Why, lieutenant?”
“We had learned that a German tank was heading toward the village. The child is Jewish. It made sense to get her out of there.”
“The child’s aunt” — Karsh checked his notes again — “Denise Francoeur, she agreed with that decision?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s see if I’ve got the sequence right. Corporal Trankic learned from the Lepont transmitter that a German tank was coming your way. And told you that?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“And you in turn told the child’s aunt?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, this is important. Whose decision was it to take that child away from the village?”
“It was mine, sir.”
“Not her aunt’s, lieutenant?”
“No, sir.”
“You were that convinced that the mission of this eighty-ton German tank was to track down and execute one nine-year-old child?”
Docker thought of the slight weight of the little girl in his arms, an angel’s head in a gutter and the jagged streak of cracks in the stone walls of the church.
“I’m not sure what I was convinced of, sir. I knew her father had been shot as a hostage and that her mother was Jewish.”
“I’m sorry, lieutenant. I didn’t get that,” Sergeant Corey said.
Docker was surprised by the intensity in her expression, her eyes dark in her pale face.
“I said that the girl’s father had been shot by the Germans and that her mother was Jewish.”
“Well, I grant you had reason for concern,” Karsh said, “but then you turned the child over to Corporal Larkin, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why, lieutenant? That is to say — why Corporal Larkin?”
“Because I thought he could handle the job, sir. He was the best driver we had.”
Karsh underlined several words on his legal pad. “Lieutenant, what was it you told us Larkin wanted from you?”
Docker could see what was coming now as clearly as the events of a nightmare in slow motion. “He wanted the use of a truck, sir.”
“More precisely, he wanted your permission to use a truck, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant, you may have acted in accordance with your best instincts, but it’s also true that you did provide Corporal Larkin with the one thing he needed to make his scheme work, the one thing he was prepared to pay dearly for, namely, your permission to use one of your section’s trucks.”
It seemed to Docker that there would be no point in adding futile words to the silence that stretched away through the cold ballroom, and isolated him in his memories.
“And the Convent of the Sacred Heart is situated on a road to Liège. Is that correct, lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir, that’s correct.”
Turning up his collar against the wind and snow flurries, Docker walked through the dark flower markets, where old men and women in shawls and bulky jackets stood beside counters that were stocked with assortments of pine boughs and small heaps of wizened tulip and hyacinth bulbs.
The blackout curtains had been pulled into place on the frosted windows of the shops, and the sidewalks were empty except for occasional British and American soldiers. He caught snatches of their talk as they went by him and heard the impatient horns of military trucks clogging the streets.
The hazy darkness of the city and the pinched look of the markets matched Docker’s mood perfectly — he couldn’t keep his thoughts away from Matt Larkin, nor stop examining the doubts Karsh had raised in his mind. There had been no time to sort them out at the hearings, with the questions coming more and more rapidly and Karsh abruptly turning the thrust of the investigation to his and Trankic’s second interrogation (“interrogation” was now the major’s word) of Baird, when they’d questioned him about the town of Peekskill and its landmarks and about West Point — where Karsh had interrupted him in mid-sentence saying, “Lieutenant, since you have testified that Baird’s first account of himself was reasonable and straightforward, why did you decide a second interrogation was necessary?” Docker had almost lost the slippery grip on his temper then, trying to explain the fear and chaos created by Operation Greif. It wasn’t helped when Walton added to the transcript, “for the record, that recent information indicates that Operation Greif did not exceed the normal scope of a ruse de guerre, and that its effect has probably been exaggerated by troops in the field...”
“Larkin and Lieutenant Longworth will be very pleased to hear about that, sir,” Docker had said, at which point Major Karsh, with a pained expression, had recessed the hearings with the comment that the board, on reconvening, would examine what he considered to be “the grayest area in the entire spectrum of these inquiries...”
Gray. Docker was beginning to buy that color, at least as it applied to the after-the-fact issues of right and wrong, of “morality,” and thinking of the winds on the castle hill, he remembered the German officer demanding his surrender who had said, “Most history is shaped by the communiques of victorious generals.”
Still, Docker believed there were “facts” that couldn’t be dismissed by cynical distortion or by claiming that all truths were merely relative, and he needed those facts now as an anchor in the turbulence the hearings had stirred up in him.
Fact: thousands of American soldiers had died in the Ardennes campaign. Another fact: on December 26th at 1700 hours, the siege of Bastogne had been broken by General Patton’s Fourth Armored Division. And Sonny Laurel and Jackson Baird and Sam Gelnick had died on Mont Reynard. Their deaths weren’t a matter of opinion, they didn’t make up one of the major’s euphemistic little gray areas. And only hours after their deaths gale-force winds swept the fogs and snows from the Ardennes and Allied planes were flying from bases in England and France to fill the skies above Germany like tiny silver crosses...