Dry Bones (3 page)

“I’ll have you where you’re supposed to be in a few minutes or so.”

“Sure thing,” Dunne said. The truck was gone.

Except where he was supposed to be was Prague. A simple mission, at least that’s the way Bassante had made it seem. Collect the microfiche that contained Dr. Schaefer’s archive. Bring it back to London, and Bassante would take it from there. Now this delay in Nuremberg. Nothing was ever simple, was it?
The best-laid plans gang aft agley.

Time to go home. File this war with the one before, best you could. Yet he couldn’t say no to this final piece of business. An acknowledgment of the debt he owed Dick Van Hull. A way to honor Dr. Niskolczi and those others. A farewell to the now-defunct Office of Strategic Services and its founder and chief, General Donovan, whom President Truman had summarily dismissed when he disbanded the OSS barely a month after Japan’s surrender.

On hearing the news, Dunne had felt bad for Donovan. He deserved better than an unceremonious shove out the door. But he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. That was how the game would always be played. “You want a true friend in Washington,” the new president was reported as saying, “buy a dog.”

Mundy talked enthusiastically about his postwar plans. Theresa wanted six kids. Four would be fine by him. And a house, maybe on Long Island, near those leafy, easily traveled parkways where land was cheap. Get one of the new-model cars that would soon be rolling off the assembly lines and filling the showrooms. No more jalopies for Harry.

They entered a narrow street. A heavy truck barreled toward them. “Hey, watch it!” Dunne exclaimed.

“Don’t worry, Captain.” Mundy hit the accelerator. The two vehicles raced past each other, barely an inch of space between them. “Takes a real asshole to think he’s gonna win a game of chicken with Harry Mundy.”

Dunne asked: “Are we getting close?” Left unasked:
Who’s the asshole when a jeep plays chicken with a truck?

“Not to worry, Captain. Once we’re outta here, it’s a straight shot.” Mundy went on about the weather, brutally cold until the temperature shot up and the rains came, but it was all temporary. Next week it would be Siberia all over, wind and snow, mercury at zero. “No doubt about it,” he said. “Can’t have a war like we just had and throw all that crap into the atmosphere and not affect the
weather. Simple as two plus two.” He turned onto a better-lit but even narrower street. A battered white-on-black sign hung askew on the side of the corner building:
Einbahnstrasse.

A German phrase Dunne was familiar with:
One-way street.

What followed was a slow-motion mix of sights (inexorable approach of headlamps, nearer, brighter, larger, blurring into single spotlight), repeated cries (
Oh shit!
Was that Mundy’s solo? More likely a spontaneous, desperate duet), sounds (anguished
s-s-s-p-putter
of rubber tires’ reluctant slide across wet cobblestones, shatter of glass,
clonk
of metal, hollow
womph
of steering column entering Mundy’s chest, his explosive guttural gasp,
gahhh
).

Are you dead?

Only way to know for sure, push upward, out of thoughtless sleep toward wavering, uncertain light.

Look. Listen. Above all, heed Bassante’s advice: Pay attention.

Sight: Shadows, Blaue Engel? Blaue Teufel? Smell: Whiff of bay rum? Thought: A single one—
tailbone connected to the ankle bone
—comes and goes.

Is someone there?

Face wavers above, mirage-like, slowly comes into focus, lovely face, hair swept up beneath a white cap shaped like a dove.

Angel or nurse?

“Where am I?”
Hears his own voice: cracked, moistureless croak.

“In hospital.”

Murmured directly in his ear, so close it tickles.

“Captain Dunne, whoever had you hold that duffel bag in your lap did you the biggest favor of your life.”

Others did favors of equal magnitude. Dick Van Hull for one.
“How’s Mundy?”

“Who?”

“The driver.”

The dove-shaped cap wiggles side to side. “Oh, I’m sorry …”

Poor Harry.

Darkness again. Victrola-voiced Western Union messenger clears his throat and sings (chants, really, as if intoning the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor) a telegram for Miss Theresa Kelly:

The War Department and the President

regret to inform ye

Corporal Mundy won’t be sitting

under the apple tree with anyone else or thee.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord
,

and let perpetual light shine upon Harry.

FILE COPY: FOR OFFICE USE ONLY

FORM A-T 3127. OSS
               
DATE:
September 15, 1944

NAME:
Bassante, Turlough A.

RANK:
Major (R&A)

SERIAL NUMBER:
067812647

REQUEST
: Transfer (SO)             
DETERMINATION
: Denied (11/3/44)

BACKGROUND INFORMATION (150 words or less)
: My mother was an O’Donnell, an Ulster Catholic, from Belfast; my father, a Waldensian—an Italian Protestant from Turin. It was an interesting if not an irenic marriage. (They met in that center of cosmopolitan sophistication, Hoboken, New Jersey.) My father worked as a steward on the old Lloyd Sabaudo shipping line. My mother was a laundress. They had nine children. Six lived into adulthood. One Jesuit and one policeman (the same profession, really, just different uniforms). Two of the daughters are married, with a dozen or so progeny between them. The third, married to a Jew, is a childless school principal in Brooklyn. And then there’s
moi
. A conundrum to my parents. Child agnostic. Rejected a scholarship to St. Peter’s Prep. Insisted on attending public high school.

EDUCATION
: Scholarship to Yale. Majored in German. Minored in history. Tutored in Slavic languages. (Why Slavic languages? I wish I knew. But other than a taste for the exotic, I’m unsure why.) Encouraged by the Depression to seek government work, successfully sought admission to the Foreign Service School.

CAREER
: The Foreign Service. Posted at various times to Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow. Recalled to London in June 1941, when the
Germans launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Asked for a transfer to the OSS in the summer of 1942. My superiors were unhappy with the request, regarding the OSS as an upstart outlier intent on poaching upon the traditional prerogatives of the Department of State. Their objections were overridden at the insistence of General Donovan, to whom I’d addressed a personal appeal. He insisted the State Department enjoyed a surfeit of linguists (in fact, the opposite was true—the Department’s lack of truly capable linguists was shocking) while the OSS was sorely lacking (which was true), especially in the field. With the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Donovan got his way, and I set off in the expectation of leaving desk work behind to take personal part in assaulting and subverting the Nazi sway over Europe. Instead, I was assigned to the Research & Analysis (R&A) in Bari, here to toil over briefing materials for presentation to operatives leaving for the field. The frustrations of this work are legion. Greatest of all is the direct contravention of the promise made me upon joining the OSS—i.e., that I would participate in the penetration of Occupied Europe, serving on missions to be undertaken behind enemy lines. I request to be assigned to Special Operations (SO), a position I was assured of upon enlistment into the OSS.

H
ÔTEL
R
ITZ
, P
ARIS

T
HE SUMMONS TO
G
ENERAL
D
ONOVAN’S HEADQUARTERS WAS UNEX
pected. Dunne had suspected—or, more accurately, hoped—that the younger, more gung ho OSS agents were at the head of the list for what were clearly the last clandestine assignments before the war’s end. Yet the brevity and bluntness of Donovan’s summons conveyed a sense of urgency.

The exuberance engendered by the city’s liberation the previous summer was absent from the gloomy, wintry streets. As he passed through the lobby of the Hôtel Ritz, Dunne noticed Donovan’s head of press relations, Lieutenant Colonel Carlton Baxter Bartlett, in the bar off to the right. He was holding court amid a semicircle of officers.

A trim, taciturn sergeant escorted Dunne down the heavily carpeted hallway to Donovan’s office. He pointed to an elegant, gold-leafed, bowlegged chair pushed against the wall. “Have a seat. The general will see you when he’s ready.” The sergeant planted himself behind his desk and pecked away with two fingers at an ancient-looking typewriter.

The last time Dunne had seen Donovan was the previous spring in London, several weeks before the invasion. The general had sent a note asking to see him. It turned out to be a casual meeting. Instead of sitting inside, they took a walk and enjoyed the spring weather. Donovan did most of the talking—not about what
was ahead but the last war, boys of the 69th, especially those who didn’t make it back. “I’m sure we’ll be successful,” he said, without specifying at what. “The question is what price we’ll pay.”

Near the Houses of Parliament, he had a car waiting. He had the driver take their picture. It all seemed planned. A few days later, a print was delivered to Dunne, signed, with an inscription:
To Fintan Dunne, My highest regards to a soldier’s soldier.

No doubt intended as a gesture of respect and—even more—encouragement to a brother-in-arms under no illusions about the mayhem and gore ahead, but the effect was to leave Dunne rattled and unsure. He fantasized about sending it back with an inscription of his own:
Thanks, but no thanks. This sounds like an epitaph.
Instead, he stuck it in an envelope and mailed it home to Roberta.

The sergeant kept pecking at the typewriter. Pinned on the wall above his desk was a large Mercator map. The borders of the world’s nations, Dunne noticed, didn’t register any of the changes imposed since 1938.

The casual observer might find it hard to believe this was the antechamber of the U.S. spymaster in chief. But underselling himself had always been one of Donovan’s strengths. Those lulled into thinking him a lightweight who’d be quickly KO’d by the bare-knuckle heavyweights prowling the capital’s corridors soon learned otherwise.

Without losing his temper or indulging in verbal fisticuffs, Donovan transformed an innocuous-sounding fact-gathering bureau, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, into the Office of Strategic Services, an audacious, all-purpose agency for intelligence gathering, special operations, psychological warfare, sabotage, espionage, and counterespionage. As well as self-effacing master of the internecine struggle among government departments and military services, he became the first man to wrangle a burgeoning multimillion budget from Congress and not have to account for a single dime.

The red button on the phone beside the typewriter silently pulsed. The sergeant grabbed the receiver. “Yes, sir,” he snapped, “right away.” He nodded at the door. “The general will see you now.” He went back to his tap-tap-tapping.

Dunne knocked and opened the door. The blinds were drawn. A single gooseneck lamp provided the only light. Donovan sat in the darkness beyond, dim but recognizable. Dunne took the seat in front of the desk—a twin to the one he’d sat on in the hallway—and waited to see who was in charge: Wild Bill or Black Will.

With those he wanted to impress or manipulate—celebrities, senators, cabinet secretaries, the president—affable, outgoing Wild Bill never failed to appear. But at one time or another, whether it meant crossing a corridor or continent, his associates scurried to answer the summons from Black Will. They’d wait as he studied a lone paper stranded on his uncluttered desk, or stared out the window, or gazed at the ceiling. Sunk in his own emotional trough, he said nothing. After fifteen or twenty minutes (what felt like an hour to the person sitting there), he’d look across, wide-eyed, to find he had company, fumble with a pen or paperweight, and issue a quick dismissal.

Dunne’s fear that this might be a Black Will occasion quickly evaporated. After an awkward silence, Donovan thanked him for coming, as if he’d sent a request rather than an order, and got down to business. A mission was coming up involving the rescue of several OSS teams that had fallen into German hands in a failed attempt to bring downed fliers out of Slovakia.

Given the war’s imminent end—Germany’s failed offensive in the Ardennes, its cities pulverized from the air, the Russians closing in from the east—it might have seemed unnecessary from a short-term strategic perspective. But in terms of the honor of the OSS and the country’s long-term interests, it was vital.

“Slovakia?” Unable to hide his surprise, Dunne blurted out the word. Except for its status as part of the Czechoslovak state
Hitler dismembered in ’38 and ’39, he thought of Slovakia (when he thought of it at all) as thread in the tapestry of empires unraveled at the end of the last war. In peacetime, it was hard to distinguish between Baltic and Balkans: Slovenia, Serbia, Ruthenia, Estonia, Lusatia, Bukovina, Latvia, Bosnia, all indistinct patches on the shifting fabric of central and eastern Europe, ethnic enclaves and nationalities stitched, unstitched, and restitched, now enmeshed in the titanic struggle between the USSR and Nazi Germany. “The Russians are already in there, aren’t they?”

Donovan twisted the lamp toward himself. Dark crescents underlined his eyes. He’d put on weight. “In the eastern part, yes. But the Soviets have had a hell of a time getting across the Carpathians. Up until now, the British have controlled most clandestine operations in the western part. They managed the assassination of SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in ’42, the governor of the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. But the altered balance of power in the east means we need to take a more direct role.”