‘You’ve been drafted?’ asked the old man.
‘Not exactly, Pop,’ said Carter, and he tried to explain it again.
‘How long will you be gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Carter. ‘A couple of months, maybe.’
There was no mention of Palladino. His father would probably have denied it, anyway.
‘Pop,’ asked Carter, ‘are you going to be all right on your own?’
There was a pause on the line. Then finally his father spoke again. ‘What are you talking about? I’ll be fine. Why would you even have to ask?’
But that was only his pride talking. They both knew why he had to ask.
It had never been easy for Carter to say goodbye to his father, even on those short weekly visits when they sometimes just sat in the house and listened to the radio together. When the time came to leave, Carter would say, ‘I ought to get going,’ and his father would say, ‘Yup.’ There would be an awkward hug and then Carter would head out of the door, unable to escape the sensation that he had vanished from his father’s thoughts before he even made it to the street.
With the telephone, it was even worse.
‘Listen, Pop,’ he said, ‘I have to go.’
‘Yup.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, you take care,’ he said. And then the line went dead.
It had always troubled Carter that they lacked the words to go beyond the surface of things, and that everything beneath that veneer of emotions was simply understood◦– although even that they’d never talked about, so he never knew for sure. This time it troubled him especially. Carter had never been this far from home before, but he realised now, as he silently pronounced as best he could the names of the villages through which they passed◦– Aywaille, Stoumont, Trois-Ponts◦– that it was his father whom he thought of as home, more than the place itself had ever been.
Outside the town of St Christophe at a little crossroads called Baugnez, the driver pulled off the road onto the tall and winter-matted grass to consult his map.
Carter climbed out to stretch his legs. He studied the cryptic, hand-made signposts pointing to various military formations◦– CHAIN BAKER CP, D.A.O., DOMINO RC, QMSR◦– and one that just said ‘COYOTE’. In the valley below, rising from the misty air, the rooftops of St Christophe and the crooked spire of its church showed signs of damage so recent that none of it had been repaired. ‘That must once have been a pretty town,’ said Carter, as much to himself as the driver.
The sergeant looked up from his well-thumbed map. ‘Oh it was, sir,’ he said, ‘until our air corps bombed it by mistake. They were trying to hit some town across the border in Germany, but the navigator misread his map or something. People around here aren’t exactly feeling warm and fuzzy towards us these days, and who can blame them?’
Carter pulled out a crumpled, almost empty pack of Chesterfields and offered one to the driver.
The sergeant’s eyes lit up at the sight of American tobacco. ‘Those are stateside smokes!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you very much!’ With his black-nailed fingertips, he plucked one out.
Then the two of them sat smoking on the hood of the jeep, which was warm from the heat of the engine.
Carter was still unused to being called ‘sir’. The concept of being an officer had not yet sunk in and he felt like a fraud in this uniform with a rank he had not earned. ‘Did they tell you why I’m here?’ he asked.
‘I’m a sergeant, sir,’ said the driver. ‘They never tell me anything. But they didn’t need to. After that fuel truck got stolen in Rocherath and the driver got shot, everybody knew they’d be sending someone from Special Tasks to find out what happened. And since my orders are to take you wherever you need to go until you’re done with your work, I figured you must be the guy.’
‘Then I guess I ought to know your name,’ said Carter.
‘It’s Riveira, sir. Hector Riveira.’
Reflexively, Carter’s arm shifted, ready to shake the man’s hand. But then he stopped himself, embarrassed. ‘This time last week,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t even in the army.’
‘No, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘I figured that as well. You are what they call a “temporary gentleman”, no offence intended.’
‘I worked in New Jersey for the Office of Price Administration, chasing down people who stole government supplies which, these days, is mostly gasoline. I guess that’s why they picked me for the job.’
‘You could have told me you were a trash collector in Hoboken and I still would have been jealous,’ said Riveira. ‘Any stateside job sounds good to me right now.’
To find himself envied for his paranoid existence in the rust-cancered docklands of Elizabeth was something he had never thought possible. ‘What do you know about where we are going?’ asked Carter.
‘You mean Rocherath?’ Riveira nodded towards one of the roads that branched off from the junction and meandered into a dense pine forest on the horizon. ‘It’s way up on the German border. The 2nd Infantry Division and some of the 99th are bunkered down in the woods there, waiting out the winter. As soon as the snow melts, they’ll move on into Germany and finish the job. The High Command keeps telling us there aren’t enough German soldiers left to guard the border, and that the few they have left are ready to quit, but from everything I’ve seen of them so far, I kind of doubt it. Even though it’s pretty quiet up there on the line, Rocherath is still no place you want to be, so the sooner you get your investigation squared away, the sooner you and I can get our asses safely back to Liège.’
One hour later, they arrived at a cluster of thick-walled stone structures with barns attached to the main houses, gathered around a church at the centre of the village. Pine smoke drifted from the chimneys and the smell of it, mixing with the by now familiar reek of manure, hung in the narrow streets. Unlike American farms, which usually stood by themselves, sometimes at great distances from their neighbours, the Belgian farmers seemed to concentrate in villages like these, with the land they worked spreading out in all directions. Most of the buildings appeared to have been taken over by the military and the streets had been churned into ankle-deep mud by the coming and going of army jeeps and trucks. Tucked in an alleyway between two buildings, Carter spotted a Sherman tank, its barrel aimed across the open fields towards a line of woods in the distance.
Riveira dropped him off at the door to a large farmhouse. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning, sir. The major is expecting you.’
As the jeep rolled away down the muddy lane, Carter knocked upon the heavy wooden door of the farmhouse, which was answered almost immediately by a soldier wearing a tattered sheepskin vest. ‘You must be the man from Special Tasks,’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
The soldier stood aside to let him pass.
Carter had to duck as he stepped into the house. Inside, a narrow hallway branched off into small rooms with stone windowsills more than a foot thick.
In what had once been a dining area, a man stood staring at a map that he had laid out on a dining table so massive it must have been built inside the room.
‘Major Wharton,’ said the soldier, ‘here’s the guy.’
At the mention of his name, Major Wharton looked up from the map. He was a small, aggressive-looking man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, their colour hidden by a squint. He wore a double-breasted, hip-length coat made of faded pea green canvas with a shawl collar fashioned out of olive brown army-blanket wool. Strapped across his middle was a thick belt made of webbing, from which hung a brown leather holster and a pouch for extra magazines. His helmet lay upturned upon the table. Its surface, the colour of pine needles, was stippled with sand, which had been mixed into the paint to roughen up the texture. ‘They said they were sending me a cop. A cop from New Jersey, they said.’