“You knew my gun section was in an exposed and vulnerable position, didn’t you?”
“I’m no mindreader, Docker. But if I did, you’re forgetting one little thing.” Whitter’s smile, embracing Sergeant Corey and the officers at the table, had become more confident. “There was a shootin’ war goin’ on, and lots of line troops were in exposed and vulnerable situations—”
“But you’re too smart a soldier not to know what we were up against. Plain common sense would tell you how many German troops would be needed to evacuate a town like that, every man, woman and child pulled out only a half hour or so before we got there. But you’ve testified not that you didn’t take any action, but that you didn’t have to take any action. Why, lieutenant? Why didn’t you have to take any action?”
“Because you already had your orders. Docker, and you damn well know it.”
“Whose orders? Yours — or Longworth’s?”
“It don’t make no never-no-mind. You had all the damn orders you needed—”
“I’m going to suggest why you didn’t have to take any action, lieutenant. Isn’t it because you knew that Lieutenant Longworth had already given my gun section new orders?”
“Now hold on, you’re goin’ just a mite too fast” — Whitter uncrossed his legs, squirmed around in the chair — “thing is. Docker, there’s an understanding between officers. When I said Longworth didn’t talk to me about you pulling back that was another way of saying we didn’t have to spell everything out in so many words. You got to trust each other, trust the men under you to figure out a situation and take care of it, so I know Longworth was doing what’s right even if he doesn’t tell me every little thing because he was gone from the battery a lot with those V-4 sightings anyway and I...”
Whitter lost the thread of his thought, but in searching for a connecting pattern he blundered onto another tangent, saying, “...But you never believed we were any good, did you. Docker? Thought we were all layin’ around the battery in our fart sacks, ninety-day wonders...” He frowned at his hands. “It ain’t easy, which is something people always forgot.” Whitter’s tone had become almost conversational, and the conversation could have been as much with himself as with Docker or anybody else in the room.
Major Karsh shifted his papers about, pausing now and then to make penciled notes on his legal pad. Finally he cleared his throat, looked at Weiffel and Captain Walton. “You gentlemen have any questions?”
Lieutenant Weiffel shook his head. “I have no questions,” Walton said.
Whitter seemed puzzled by the silence in the room. He smiled at the officers and Sergeant Corey, rubbed his hands together and looked at Docker.
Karsh said, “Lieutenant Whitter, you’re excused now. But before you leave, I’d like to express my thanks to you for appearing before this board.”
“I appreciate that, major, but I don’t expect any commendation for doing my plain duty. I learned that at my daddy’s knee, and sometimes over it.”
Whitter, Docker realized, wasn’t aware of the dismissal in Karsh’s tone and eyes; in fact, he seemed to have accepted the major’s cool words as a generous tribute. His mood was once again expansive as he relaxed and presented the officers at the table with a friendly, conspiratorial smile.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to mention one other little incident I guess hasn’t come to the attention of you gentlemen.”
“Is it relevant to these hearings?” Karsh said.
“Well, sir, I think it is.”
“Then let’s have it, lieutenant.”
“We had a mighty fine top kick in Battery D, major. Korbick, Miles Korbick. I’d like to tell you why he’s no longer with the battery and who’s responsible for it...”
As Whitter began to talk about that particular night at Battery headquarters, to tell it as he saw it, Docker remembered it as he saw it... the clerk from Graves Registration (was his name Nessel?) fretting over Spinelli’s missing poncho and hood, and Corporal Haskell backing away and raising the empty hands he had bloodied on Larkin, and Kohler dumping a helmetful of waste over Korbick’s head while the first sergeant sat in his sudsy metal bath... and as Docker listened to Whitter’s voice rising with his conviction and indignation, it occurred to him again that one of war’s most upsetting — most dangerous — legacies was the confusion forced on even tolerant men about where the truth, where the reality of it was...
“Korbick worked his ankle off,” Whitter was saying, “trying to make a soldier out of a New York character, a boy name of Sam Gelnick. But Docker always stood up for Gelnick. Did his level best, level worst would be more like it, to keep Korbick from making a man out of him.”
“If there’s a point to all this,” Karsh said, “I’d appreciate it if the lieutenant would—”
“There’s a point to it, sir,” Whitter said. “Naturally, Docker’s men took their cue from him. They made jokes about Korbick, not to his face but behind his back. And one night, sir, they took out their spite against him in a way you wouldn’t think white men were capable of.” He fixed a righteous stare on Docker. “While he was sitting in the tin barrel he took baths in, I hate to say this in front of the lady here, they dumped a helmetful of latrine dirt over Sergeant Korbick’s head. Ruined a fine man’s army career, turned him into the kind of person you see and laugh at in some nuthouse. And all that because he was putting the blocks to that Jew-boy, Gelnick, trying to make it plain to him that the things he got away with where he came from just didn’t sit right with the people running this man’s army...”
There was a mindless anger in Whitter’s voice now, a gleam of sweat like oil on his forehead. He paused to take a deep breath but before he could say another word Major Karsh removed his glasses and looked evenly at him, the rictus smile back. And as Whitter opened and closed his mouth soundlessly, once again glancing nervously toward Docker, Karsh sighed, dropped his pencil on the table and said, “The board has expressed its appreciation for your earlier testimony, lieutenant.”
He rapped gently on the table with his knuckles. “We’ll recess now, gentlemen, and reconvene at fourteen hundred hours.”
The weather had turned colder. A feathery snow was dissolving on the surface of the river. Docker sat on an iron bench under bare poplar trees and looked through the tracery of a bridge toward buildings that had been battered into rubble by bombs and rockets.
He smoked a cigarette and thought of Gelnick, the Hogman, with his squinting, suspicious eyes (and what good reasons he had to be suspicious) and the flecks and crumbs of food that frequently ringed his mustache, and he thought of Gelnick’s wife, Doris, whom he had never met or even seen a picture of, and remembered the way Larkin had described her, and the ache (intended or not, you couldn’t tell with Larkin) there had been in the words he had used. Not your all-American cheerleader type, Larkin had said, little, almost thin, but great legs and great black hair and brown eyes that made you think she could be Spanish or something... When he looked away from the river he saw Elspeth Corey walking through a park on the opposite side of the boulevard. He had an impulse to join her but hesitated because he felt it probably wouldn’t be proper under the circumstances... A military convoy pulling 75-millimeter cannons rolled past, and when it was gone, the big tires grinding solidly through the grime of sleet and ice in the street. Docker saw no one in the park, except two old women in black coats gathering fallen twigs under the trees.
When Docker returned to the Hotel Empire an hour later, the double doors to the ballroom were open and the MP corporal was not at his post. Karsh was seated alone at the conference table, glancing through a sheaf of typewritten pages. There were no other papers on the table or on the desk that Sergeant Corey had been using. Everything else was gone, too — note pads, files, coffee cups and even the mason jars that had held sharpened pencils.