Blood Alone (22 page)
REMKE WAS LEAVING. We watched as he shook hands with Don Calo and then opened the door of the Kübelwagen that had pulled up in front of the house behind two German motorcycles. We eyed the German riders as they spoke to each other and laughed as they glanced in our direction, their exchange barely audible above the rumbling machines. One of them revved his engine and took off, the thin slit of light from his taped headlamp casting a slash of brightness into the night.
“I hope to see you again, Lieutenant Boyle,” Remke said as he pulled on his officer’s cap.
“Each time a little closer to Berlin,” I said, throwing him a lazy salute. He ignored that and drove off, the noise of the motors echoing harshly around the piazza.
This was the second time I’d encountered Remke, and like the first, there was a layer of repressed hostility between us. We were enemies, but he seemed to be having as much trouble with his allies as with us. First the Vichy French, now the Italians. I wondered how long it would be before the Germans stood alone, and if our next meeting would be somewhat less subdued.
In a minute, the sound of their vehicles was gone. It was quiet— that dark, late-night, small-town quiet that can send a shiver down the back of a city boy. Don Calo walked a few steps into the square and looked up at the night sky. It was a silky black, the stars sparkling through the clean mountain air.
“We will talk in the morning,” he said, sighing and waving his hand dismissively. “It is late.”
“What did Major Remke have to say?” I asked.
“That the Germans and the Italians will drive you into the sea. That they almost did so and most certainly will. That you were foolish to come here, so far from your bases. That I would also be foolish to make cause with you.” He looked at me, an eyebrow raised, daring me to say otherwise.
“I was there when they tried to push us into the sea.”
“It is true that they almost did?”
“Almost, yes. But we killed many of them, and in the end, they ran.”
“You are a solider then, not simply a messenger?”
I wondered about that. I’d done some fighting, but I wasn’t at the front full-time, like the GIs who lived and died together. Clancy and Joe. It didn’t seem right to lump myself in with them. And I didn’t like the idea of admitting I really was a messenger boy, a general’s nephew who had nearly screwed up his assignment.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” I said, and went inside. Don Calo followed, and I heard the iron gate clang shut and a key turn heavily in the lock.
“Wait—,” Nick gasped as I grabbed him by the neck. Harry had signaled me to follow them into the room they shared. He wanted to talk but what I wanted to do was give Nick a thrashing and then find out what the hell he’d been up to at the Valley of the Temples.
“You son of a bitch,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “Why did you draw a gun on me at the temple? Whose side are you on anyway?”
“Quiet,” pleaded Harry. “Let him go, Billy, I’ll explain.” He pushed us apart, keeping the flat of his palm on my chest to make sure I didn’t go for Nick again.
“It’s not what you think,” Nick said, rubbing his throat.
“Do you still have the handkerchief?” Harry asked me as he guided Nick to a chair. I looked around the room and noticed their windows had iron bars like mine. The whole house was a prison. I nodded, thinking there might be someone listening outside.
I asked Nick in a whisper, “Are you working for Vito Genovese? He wants this handkerchief too. Pulled a gun on me like you did. Didn’t get it like you won’t.”
“Then my family is dead,” Nick replied in a whisper.
I backed away. There was sadness and resignation in Nick’s voice. “Sit down, Billy,” Harry said. His was the only calm voice in the room. “I’ll explain.”
There were a couple of chairs around the small table where Nick sat. Harry pulled up one and I took another, wondering what could possibly come next. He pulled the cork from a bottle and poured three glasses.
“Grappa,” Nick said, tossing his back and pouring himself another. “Made from the residue of grapes after they’ve been pressed. A bit like the war, isn’t it? Just when you think the life has been drained out of you, someone else puts another squeeze on.”
“Billy,” Harry began, watching Nick warily, as if he’d been hitting the grappa too hard lately. “We can still salvage what’s left of this mission, but Nick has a problem.”
“Don’t we all,” I said, but decided to shut up until I knew more.
“They threatened Nick’s family unless he cooperated with them,” Harry said. “They said they’d kill all the men—his grandfather, uncles, cousins—unless he went along.”
“They? Who are you talking about? And go along with what?”
“The heist,” Nick said, looking into his empty glass.
“What heist, and who the hell are you talking about?”
“Someone in AMGOT, but we don’t know who,” Harry said. “And this Vito Genovese character you just mentioned, along with another gangster, Joseph Laspada.”
“And their pal Muschetto, a local guy,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Harry asked.
“They came looking for me. Or you, actually,” I said, pointing to Nick. “You’re their yegg.”
He ignored my assertion and poured another drink for himself.
“What’s a yegg?” Harry asked, moving the bottle out of Nick’s reach. “A safecracker. All you Naval Intelligence guys were taught the fine art of safecracking, weren’t you, Nick?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m pretty good at it too.”
“Are you talking about a threat to your relatives here in Sicily?” I asked.
“My family name comes from the village of Cammarata. It’s east of here, on the road to Palermo. They’re holding my people there, every one. If I don’t come through, they’ll start killing the men.”
“Come through with what?” I asked.
“I was supposed to eliminate both of you, take the handkerchief, and carry out your mission to Don Calo, with one little addition.”
“What’s that?”
“ I have to steal two million dollars from the U. S . Army.”
I drank down the grappa, felt it burn my throat and warm my stomach.
“Tell me everything from the very beginning,” I said to Nick. I shoved my glass toward Harry and he poured. Nick talked, I drank.
“When I was a kid, I used to run errands for Luciano’s gang in New York. Nothing illegal—getting coffee and sandwiches, delivering messages, stuff like that. I became a numbers runner for a while. Then I got serious about school and wanted to go to college, so I gave it up. I stayed in touch with my pals, and they knew I’d joined the navy right after Pearl Harbor. I was an ensign, and all of a sudden I get pulled from a cruiser and sent to the Office of Naval Intelligence. I took some tests, was promoted to lieutenant, and then they told me I’d been recommended by Lucky Luciano to work for them and infiltrate Sicily, since I spoke the language like a native.”
“Most of that I knew,” I said, getting impatient. “Who asked you to steal two million bucks? When? And whose money is it?”
“That’s the funny part. I don’t know. They had drummed security into us, so I never tried to find out. One day in Algiers, I got a memo on ONI stationery. No name or signature, just a notification that I’d be getting top-secret communications in the near future that I was not to discuss with anyone. And to burn each message, starting with that one. So I did.”
Nick pushed his glass toward Harry, who shook his head.
“At first they were about the mission, the same stuff I was hearing every day. Then they mentioned the handkerchief, how I had to get it and present it to Don Calo. I thought it was just an ONI-versus-the-army thing, that maybe ONI thought it would be better to use a Sicilian-American to approach Don Calogero. Then, when we moved to the advance base in Tunisia, they hit me with the real reason. Someone was going to arrange for the Thirty-fourth Division payroll to come ashore with the first wave of the invasion. Six field safes, two million dollars in occupation lire. All I had to do was tell Don Calo that this had been arranged by Lucky Luciano as a gift to him. He’d get half. Don Calo would supply the men to take me there, and in the confusion I was supposed to hit the paymaster and open the safes.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “No one would ever send a division payroll in with the first wave. Paymasters arrive days later, when the area is secure.”
“Whoever sent me the messages made it happen.”
“You didn’t . . . ?”
“No,” Nick said, shaking his head. “First of all, Don Calo wouldn’t bite, not without that damn handkerchief. Harry and I tried to convince him to use his influence to get the Sicilian troops to desert too. He wouldn’t listen, not until he knew either or both plans had the blessing of Luciano.”
“He puts a lot of store in a piece of cloth,” Harry said.
“He’s used them himself, it’s a custom here. It means the owner trusts the person carrying it with his life, and that person will die rather than give it up, so that when the messenger delivers it, he can be vouched for.”
“Lucky Luciano doesn’t know me,” I said.
“That’s why it made sense to me at first. The army knew what they were doing when they gave you the handkerchief, they understood the tradition.”
“How did you get these messages?”
“Each one was in a plain envelope. They’d show up under my door, stuck in my gear, on my pillow. Any number of people could have left them. Along with the note about the payroll, there was a threat. If I told anyone or didn’t steal it, they’d kill my relations in Cammarata.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How could someone in Tunisia get to these thugs in Sicily to make all this happen? There had to be somebody already here to carry out the threat to your relatives.” I stood then paced back and forth, trying to think things through.
“I guess someone high up enough could arrange phony orders to have the payroll go ashore early. The army issues enough screwy orders to make that plausible. But what happened when you didn’t steal the money? You didn’t, did you? That should’ve happened by now, right?”
“Fortunes of war, Billy,” Harry said. “The surf was rough, and the landing craft carrying the safes capsized. They went in the drink, about a thousand yards offshore of Gela. We heard about it yesterday.”
“So you’re off the hook?”
“Oh no,” Harry said. “Now we have to steal the money soaking wet, after it’s salvaged.”
“Are you still getting messages here?”
“Here I get instructions direct from Legs Laspada,” Nick said.
“Does Don Calo know about the threat to your family?”
“No, he’s supposed to think it’s Luciano’s plan, and that I’m in on it. He doesn’t know I told Harry about the scheme. I had to, it was eating me up.”
“I have a feeling that if you managed to pull this off, Don Calo would never see his cut,” I said. If Vito Genovese was in on this, what was Rocko’s part? Evidently he’d no longer been important to Vito. It was probably Legs who’d murdered Rocko. What had Rocko offered that Genovese no longer needed? Supplies? Something was starting to make sense, but I couldn’t quite put it into words yet. I kept pacing, tapping my finger on my lips.
“Billy?” Harry asked.
“I haven’t had a chance to tell you yet, but I woke up in a field hospital with no memory at all. No idea who I was, or why I was here.”
“From that knock on the head?” Harry asked, pointing to my bandage.
“Yeah,” I said quickly, not wanting to talk about rolling that grenade and thinking I had killed him. Time enough for that later. “I woke up and this supply sergeant, Rocko Walters, was there. He was looking out for me, helping me, but he was after the handkerchief too. He tried not to tip his hand, since he was also trying to find out what had happened to their yegg.”
“He was waiting for your memory to return,” Nick said.
“Yes. But he waited too long. Someone killed him. That night at the Valley of the Temples, an Italian soldier led me back to the American lines. He only wanted to give up and get to America. I must’ve told him I’d help him. By the time I found him among the POWs, his throat had been slit.”
“So there’s someone back at HQ who both knew about the payroll and could manage to get orders changed so that the paymaster went ashore early. And a supply sergeant was in on it and a couple of mobsters who were already on the island,” Harry said, summing up.
“Whoever is behind this had to be working with Vito and Legs from the outset. He’d have to, to get information to them,” I added.
“How?” Nick asked. “I mean, how could he get all this dope to either of them? Who would have that kind of pull?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Rocko was a classic wheeler-dealer, but he wasn’t a headquarters guy. He ran the show at divisional supply. He’s the one who could requisition the field safes. Maybe they recruited him then, or he smelled something fishy and cut himself in. He could get most anything, and knew how to work around officers. I heard him give a Signals lieutenant holy hell for not finding Roberto fast enough.”
“Who’s Roberto?” Nick asked.
“The Italian kid who saved my neck after the fight at the temple. He was bringing me back to our lines.”
“Why would a Signals officer be looking for a POW?” Harry asked.
“I guess because he was in on the . . . wait a minute,” I said, stopping in midsentence. My memory still felt as if rusty gears were grinding against each other. “Rocko had a corporal working for him. He was a technician fifth class, assigned to Rocko from the Signals Company. When he was killed at Biazza Ridge, Rocko was real shook up about it, which wasn’t his style. He wasn’t the sentimental kind.”
“Billy, you may have gotten hit on the head harder than you realize. You’re not making any sense,” Harry said.
I tried to slow myself down, to lay it out step by step, but I was worried that if I didn’t get it all out now it wouldn’t make sense to me either. “Rocko didn’t give a hoot about anyone but himself, but he took it hard when I told him Corporal Hutton was dead. That’s because Hutton was a communications specialist. I overheard Rocko tell Vito that they had to get some sort of German piece of equipment working. A dialer of some sort, I can’t remember its designation.”