‘It’s your savings, Charles. No, I couldn’t.’
‘What do I want with savings?’ said Stein. ‘How long have I got ahead of me? Ten years… Or, if I lose fifty pounds and stick with the nuts and natural yoghurt-twenty. So how much do we need? I got over two million bucks here, Colonel. Stop thinking about the dog faces from the battalion. They’re all OK, and they’d want you to say yes.’ But Pitman was lost in his own memories.
‘I’m not sorry,’ answered the colonel at last. ‘If I could go back to that night round the stove when we first talked about it… I’d do the same thing all over again.’
‘ Germany? You mean 1945? The night you came back from that blonde who worked in the mayor’s office?’
Pitman nodded, ‘Remember the rain? I thought it would never stop. I had the worst jeep in the battalion that night and I had to nurse it halfway across Germany.’
‘You said you were in her apartment,’ said Stein. ‘That was only three blocks from the town hall. What are you talking about, halfway across Germany?’
Pitman continued to drive in silence as he remembered that night in the final days of the war in Europe. There was no blonde; there was just the general. He would never tell Stein the truth; he would never tell anyone.
‘I know it’s a big disappointment for you, Pitman,’ the general had said, ‘but it’s the way the goddamn war is.’ The one-star general had modelled his appearance and behaviour upon General Patton, his commander. He did not have a pair of pearl-handled pistols at his waist-that would have been too obviously an imitation of his mentor-but he did keep his Colt.45 strapped on tight at all times and even here, miles away from the fighting, he kept his helmet on his head and a grenade clipped to his shoulder strap.
Outside it was raining, the sky streaked with pink and mauve, the last daylight almost gone. The endless convoys of supply trucks splashed through the mud in the dark pockmarked streets and crawled round piles of bricks and rubble, the result of a twenty-four-hour bombardment that had entombed half the German inhabitants in their cellars. ‘The war’s nearly over,’ said Pitman. ‘Ever since the Rhine you’ve been promising me a chance to fight.’
‘See those trucks out there?’ said the general, pointing with his cigar. ‘I’m trying to push half a million tons of material into position with quartermaster units that are nearly asleep on their feet. Some of those truck drivers have had no shut-eye for fifty-six hours, Pitman.’ Urgently, the general pushed some papers across his desk. ‘I’ve got medical officers yelling down the phone at me, I’m cannibalizing trucks so fast that I’m losing whole companies. My clerks are trying to sort “Dangerous Cargo” from “Valuable Cargo” and “Immediately Vital Cargo” from “Essential Cargo”… will you look at all this crap! Now you’re telling me I’ve got to let you go play soldiers in the front line. Well, I’m telling you no, Pitman. Have you got that?’
‘I’m a career officer, General. I need battle experience if I’m going to get any kind of promotion in the post-war army. We discussed it and you promised to help.’
‘You did all right, Pitman,’ said the general puffing on his cigar. ‘I made you a colonel and now you’ve got a battalion. That’s not bad.’
‘I want to fight, General. You said you’d make sure I had my chance.’
The general looked at him and blew smoke. Quietly he said, ‘You had your chance, Colonel. You had your chance at Kasserine, long before I was lucky enough to get over here. It was a big snafu, the way I read it; your guys took a powder and the Krauts just came rolling over our support areas. It’s not the kind of lousy performance that makes me want to send you forward.’
The bulbs in the desk lights flickered and went yellow and dim as the army engineers nursed the wrecked German power utilities. In the gloom the general’s cigar glowed very bright before he added, ‘Do you know, I still have to take a ribbing from some of these crummy Brits? “Remember Kasserine?” some Limey major says to me the other day. “They put us into the line when you Yanks folded.” He says it like it was a joke, of course. That’s the way the Brits always let you have the poison. It’s a joke… so I have to laugh with that bastard. But I don’t like it, Pitman, and when I hear about Kasserine I don’t like you.’
Pitman said nothing. There was nothing to say.
‘Now you get back to your battalion HQ and keep your trucks moving. I’m due at army for a conference in two hours’ time, and by then I’m going to have every last lousy truck in this man’s army loaded and rolling.’
Colonel Pitman got back to his battalion HQ at midnight. The heavy rain found its way through the canvas roof and ill-fitting side-flaps of his jeep, so that his short overcoat was soaking wet as he leant over the pot-bellied stove and warmed himself. ‘Am I supposed to be the commanding officer of this lousy battalion?’ he complained rhetorically to his orderly room corporal. ‘So why do I get the worst jeep in the battalion?’
‘You have trouble, Colonel?’ Stein asked.
‘That’s one of the jeeps from that detached company we took over,’ said Pitman. ‘All those vehicles are unreliable. Make sure you don’t give me one of those again. Got it?’
‘You been with the general, sir?’
‘I’ve been in bed with that blonde chick we saw this morning in the mayor’s office. Why do you think I asked you for a bottle of scotch?’
‘For the general maybe,’ said Stein. He was pouring boiling water on to coffee grounds and the aroma emerged suddenly. ‘You took a bottle for the general last week when you went to see him, I thought maybe you were trying to get detached for a spell with those armoured division guys we fixed up with extra gas and rations.’
‘Do you read all my private correspondence, Corporal Stein?’
‘I sure do, Colonel. I figure that’s what you need me for. You want some of this coffee?’
‘Yes, I do… with sugar and cream.’
Stein put the steaming coffee before his colonel. It was in an antique porcelain cup discovered in the wreckage. Colonel Pitman sniffed at the coffee and drank some.
Stein watched him with close interest. ‘So you weren’t with the general tonight?’
‘I was laying that little blonde number in a top back room in one of those apartment houses near the delousing centre.’
‘It’s not like you, Colonel,’ said Stein with polite interest
‘Well, from now on it’s going to be like me,’ said Colonel Pitman. ‘From now on I’m going to keep the army in perspective, and I’m going to start counting off the days, like you do, Corporal.’
‘You’re not going to stay in the army, Colonel?’
‘You show me a way to get out of the army tonight, Corporal, and I’d take it.’
‘I might be able to do something like that,’ said Stein, ‘And I might be able to show you how to take enough dough to retire with.’
‘What are you talking about, Stein?’
‘Not Uncle Sam’s money, Colonel; Nazi gold stashed not far from here. Looks like we are going to get the job of hauling it to Frankfurt.’
‘Gold?’
‘Millions and millions of bucks, Colonel. This lousy war is just about over. I was sitting here on my own tonight, and I was thinking about Aram and the old days back in North Africa… and I began to wonder about something. Could I just run over this idea with you, Colonel? In strictest confidence… ’
Colonel Pitman sat down on a packing case near the stove. His coat was steaming as the heat penetrated his damp uniform, ‘You sure could, Corporal. I’ve never been in a better mood to listen to any proposition that comes my way.’
‘The boys always trusted you, Colonel,’ said Stein.
Pitman’s memories faded as he reminded himself that this was 1979 and half a lifetime had passed since the day they made that fateful decision. ‘No one ever wanted to vote you out of office.’