Randazzo cleared his throat and took a deep, shuddering breath. “Dave had got us away from the flak batteries, thank God, or they’d have shot us while we fell. We landed about a quarter mile apart. I stayed put. My leg was broken. I didn’t know that then, but I knew it hurt like a son of a bitch. Dave got unharnessed and started working his way toward me.”
“Were you in a forest? Fields? What?”
“I was at the edge of a tree line, in a big bunch of bushes.” Randazzo looked at the floor. “But Dave was exposed for the whole walk. Open field.”
McConnell looked at the floor.
Randazzo’s voice was barely a whisper. “We didn’t know it, but we’d landed fairly close to a village. An SS unit saw us coming down. They sent out a patrol to follow the chutes. A
Kubelwagen
— that’s a German jeep — came over the top of a little rise while Dave was still walking. He dropped to the ground when he heard the motor, but they’d seen him. Drove straight to him.”
Randazzo scratched violently in his hair. “They started interrogating him on the spot. There was a lieutenant there, and four other guys. All SS. One sergeant, I think. They were asking Dave where I was. He wouldn’t tell ’em. Name, rank, and serial number, just like in the movies. John fucking Wayne.” Randazzo buried his face in his hands, sobbed once, then fell silent.
Mark struggled to find his own voice. “Then what happened, Captain?”
“Well . . . three of the SS guys stood Dave up in front of the lieutenant. Lieutenant pulls out his SS dagger. Ever seen one? Like some kind of miniature sword. This Kraut holds the dagger up to Dave’s chest and starts asking questions.”
“In German or English?” McConnell asked, not knowing why except that David understood no German.
Randazzo looked temporarily at a loss. “German,” he said finally. “Yeah. Didn’t matter, though, ’cause Dave wasn’t having any. After about the third question, the lieutenant slaps him. Hard. Right then, Dave spits in the guy’s face.”
Mark closed his eyes.
“The Kraut lieutenant stabbed him. The guy just exploded, went crazy.”
“No.”
Randazzo’s face worked strangely as he spoke. “The other guys let go of Dave. He fell. He laid there on the ground a minute, then rolled over onto his back. Then they . . . uh—”
Mark held up his hand. “Don’t tell me the rest, Captain. I don’t think I want to know.”
“I gotta tell you,” said Randazzo. “It was
my fucking fault
!”
McConnell realized then that the young copilot was wounded far more extensively than in the leg. “All right,” he said softly. “What happened?”
“I never seen nothin’ like it. Dave was still alive, but they started puttin’ dirt in his mouth.
Dirt
. Then the sergeant finds a stick and starts shoving the dirt down Dave’s throat.” Randazzo was crying now. Mark couldn’t stop himself either. “He died like that, Doc. Those Kraut lowlifes choked him with dirt, and . . . and I just laid there and watched it happen!”
McConnell could scarcely move. He forced himself to reach out and squeeze Randazzo’s shoulder. “There was nothing you could have done, Captain. Not without sacrificing your own life.”
The Italian looked up with tear-filled eyes. “Dave would have done something.”
McConnell wanted to deny this, but he knew it was true.
“That redneck son of a bitch would have come screamin’ out of those bushes like a whole goddamn division, armed or not.” Randazzo was sobbing and laughing at the same time. “Not the Wop though.” He shook his head pathetically. “I just laid there like a goddamn yellow coward and pissed my pants.”
McConnell waited until the man had regained his composure. “Captain?”
“Goddamn it—”
“Captain, I’d like to know the rest. How did you get out?”
“Well . . . the SS kind of seemed to lose interest after Dave was dead. They poked around the field awhile, but by the time they got to the woods it was getting dark and I’d been crawling for all I was worth. I was damn lucky. The next morning some Resistance guys from the village walked right over me. They were half crazy, arguing all the time like a bunch of senators, but they got me to some people who’d taken flyers out before.” Randazzo shook his head. “So here I am. And Dave is still back there in France. I don’t know, Doc. HQ doesn’t like these kinds of stories to get out, but . . . I just had to make sure you knew the truth. Your brother was the bravest son of a bitch I ever met. He was a goddamn hero.”
“You’re probably right, Captain,” McConnell said, absurdly trying to maintain some semblance of professional distance. “But you’re no coward.” He let his gaze wander to the window. “What will you do now?”
Randazzo leaned over and picked up his crutches, then struggled to his feet. “If this leg heals up right, I’m goin’ straight back to the flight line.”
McConnell looked back at him. “You must be joking.”
Randazzo’s face was set in stone. “I ain’t joking, Doc. I’m gonna drop bombs on those bastards until Germany ain’t nothing but a crappy footnote in some dusty old book in a broken down college like this one.”
McConnell felt suddenly lightheaded, as if he might simply float up to the ceiling.
I’m in shock
, he thought.
“Thank you for coming tonight, Captain. It means a lot to me to . . . to know the truth. I wish you well.”
Randazzo worked his way over to the door. He saluted Mark, then turned without a word and hobbled from the room. McConnell heard him
thump-bumping
his way slowly down the stairs. The three flights took him nearly three minutes.
After the echoes faded, McConnell went to the window, pushed it open, and sucked in great gulps of cold air. His skin was tingling. Just as he had finally begun to accept the idea that his brother had perished bravely in an air battle, Pascal Randazzo had appeared like a specter to shatter even this grim comfort. David had not died in battle. He had been brutally murdered in cold blood. Murdered by Hitler’s infamous Black Corps. The
Schutzstaffeln
. The SS.
One of McConnell’s clearest childhood memories was of the day his younger brother was born. Their father had delivered David himself. His medical practice had long been moribund, but he insisted upon bringing his own son into the world. Mark remembered the look of pride on his father’s scarred face, one of the only times the pride was in himself and not his sons.
He braced his hands on the stone window casement and leaned out. The air here was so different from the sweltering nights of his youth. The dark parapets and spires rising from the icy English cobbles
did
look like something out of
Robin Hood
. A great castle. A fortress. And wasn’t that what he had used it for? A place of refuge from the war? For five years he had worked here in safety while braver men had given their lives to fight the Nazis. They had watched friends die, just as Randazzo had, yet they fought on in spite of their fear.
I know you, Doctor,
the young Jew with Brigadier Smith had told him.
You’re no coward. You’re a fool. You believe in reason, in the essential goodness of man. You believe that if you refuse to commit evil yourself, someday you will conquer evil. You have yet to taste even a sip of the pain so many have drunk to the dregs in the last ten years
. . .
“I’ve had my sip of pain,” McConnell said softly.
The feeling churning in his belly was like nothing he had ever known. Bitter, burning, volatile. It was fury, he realized, an inchoate anger so profound he could not give shape to it.
He tried to fight it, to remember the words thoughtful men had spoken about the futility of violence as a means to a better world. But compared to the images flashing behind his eyes, those words meant nothing. They were merely aggregates of letters, symbols of the futility of language in the face of deeds.
He turned away from the window and went to his small, cluttered desk. He rummaged in the top drawer for a few moments, then pulled out a small white card. He lifted the telephone and placed a call to London, to the number on the card. Despite the late hour, the phone was answered on the third ring.
“Smith here,” said a gruff voice.
“Brigadier, this is Doctor Mark McConnell.”
There was a pause. “What can I do for you, Doctor?”
“That trip you mentioned. Germany.”
Smith grunted. “What about it?”
“Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
The brigadier said nothing for some time. “Get some sleep,” he said finally. “Don’t say any goodbyes. We’ll take care of all that. I’ll send a driver to your house at 0600 sharp.”
McConnell set the phone in its cradle and walked out of the laboratory without looking back.
At ten before midnight, the telephone rang in a London police station. The duty officer listened to the gruff voice on the line for a few moments, then hung up and grumbled, “Thinks he’s the bloody First Sea Lord, that one.”
“Who the ’ell was it, Bill?” asked the night jailer.
The duty officer squared his shoulders with exaggerated crispness. “Briga
dier
Duff bloody Smith, that’s who.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“I’m not sure. Curses like a Regimental Sergeant-Major, though.”
“What did he want?”
“The Jewboy. Told me to have him washed and ready by six in the morning or he’d have my balls for breakfast.”
“You going to oblige?”
The duty officer scowled. “Aye, I reckon. Smith’s got connections with the Commissioner. That’s how the Jewboy’s been here all week without being charged.”
The night jailer raised a bushy eyebrow. “I’d hop to it, Bill. It’ll take a while to clean him up.”
The duty officer hiked his belt over a bulging belly. “I’m glad to be rid of that bastard, to be honest. Makes me nervous. Hardly said a word since his first day in. It’s his eyes. I think he’d cut both our throats for a shilling.”
“That’s a flippin’ Jew for you, Bill.”
McConnell rolled over and read the clock hanging on his bedroom wall. It was after three A.M., but he could not find sleep. He had gone to bed at midnight, dozed for an hour, then sat bolt upright in a fit of compulsion. One facet of the proposed mission had not been discussed — anti-nerve agent protection — and he did not intend to rely on any gear Duff Smith might supply. He dressed quietly and bicycled back to the university, let himself into his lab, and quietly removed two prototype anti-gas suits he had been secretly experimenting with for the last month. The ride home with the heavy gear strapped to the bike had nearly exhausted him, but the suits and tanks now lay packed in two suitcases at the foot of his bed.
Yet something else had kept him twisting in the bedclothes long after that. Brigadier Smith had ordered him not to say any goodbyes, and he had tried to obey. But the sense of something important left undone, of words left unsaid, was too powerful to ignore. With a soft curse he climbed out of bed, lit a candle at the small desk in his room, and picked up his fountain pen.
The letter to Susan came fairly easily. It was probably not much different than the millions of letters written by other husbands during the war. He apologized for sending her home during the Battle of Britain, and told her he had been faithful during the years since, which was true. There had been no children yet, and he regretted that, but in the end it would make it easier for her to build a new life, should the worst happen.
The second letter took more time. When he thought of his mother, he felt a terrible guilt, a sense that he had no right to risk his own life no matter what the cause, no right to risk taking away her only surviving son. Yet it was his life, and in the end she would understand that. He lifted the pen and wrote:
Dear Mother,
If you have received this letter, I am no longer in this world. You have taken hard blows in your life, and do not deserve this one, but what I went to do, I had to do. Dad would say that I threw my life away in a useless attempt to revenge David’s death, but you know me better than that. I have learned that there is truly an infinite capacity for evil in the human heart, and because of my abilities I have an opportunity, and probably an obligation, to do what I can to stop it. There just comes a time when a man says, Enough.
There are some practical matters to be attended to. Back during the Blitz, I wrote a will and mailed it to old Mr. Ward in town. As you know, the monthly payments he disburses to you and Susan come from my six industrial patents. It is a strange irony, but with the war expansion, the proceeds from those patents have grown to a substantial amount of money. In the will, I assigned three of those patents to Susan and three to you. It gives me great comfort to know that you will never have to worry about getting by again, or work so hard as you did during the Depression.
In my letter to Susan, I wrote that she should remarry and try to make a new life with the children she deserves. I hope you will encourage her in that, but she is not the only one who needs encouragement. It may not be a son’s place to speak of these things to his mother, but I am. After Dad passed, I think you sealed away a part of yourself in the belief that David and I would never understand if you ever loved another man. That is a noble sentiment, but it is wrong. David and I, and yes, Dad too, wanted nothing so much in life as your happiness. You always said you were a tough old girl, but you are not so old, and no one should have to spend their life with only memories.
Not one day of my life passed without you in my thoughts. I know the same was true for David. God bless you and keep you.
Your son,
Mark
He sealed each letter in a separate envelope, then wrote a short covering letter asking the don he billeted with to forward the letters to Georgia if he had not heard from Mark in ninety days. He laid both envelopes on top of the letter, blew out the candle and went back to bed. This time sleep did not elude him. It came without warning and without dreams — a sleep so deep it was almost like death.
At one-twenty a.m. Brigadier Duff Smith’s telephone rang for the last time that night.