Dry Bones
Authors: Peter Quinn
Tags: #FIC000000; FIC031020; FIC031050; FIC031060; FIC022000
The Man Who Never Returned
Hour of the Cat
Banished Children of Eve
Looking for Jimmy:
A Search for Irish America
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2013 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
N
EW
Y
ORK
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ONDON
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Copyright © 2013 by Peter Quinn
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-0844-0
Part VI: Amid a Crowd of Stars
Part VIII: Only Then Can the Dead Rest in Peace
For Margaret and Bill
In memory of Michael Hanlon
Under the Apple Tree
D
EM
D
RY
B
ONES
Ezekiel cried, “Dem dry bones!”
Oh hear the word of the Lord.
Oh those bones, oh those bones
,
Oh those skeleton bones!
With the toe bone connected
To the foot bone
,
And the foot bone connected
To the anklebone
,
And the anklebone connected
To the leg bone!
Ezekiel cried, “Dem dry bones!”
Oh those bones, oh those bones
,
Oh those skeleton bones.
Oh those bones, oh those bones
,
Oh mercy how they scare!
Ezekiel cried, “Dem dry bones!”
With the leg bone connected
To the knee bone
,
And the knee bone connected
To the thigh bone
,
And the thigh bone connected
To the hip bone.
Oh mercy how they scare!
Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk aroun’
Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk aroun’
Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk aroun’
Oh hear the word of the Lord!
N
UREMBERG
, G
ERMANY
T
HE PLANE IDLED ON THE RUNWAY OUTSIDE
L
ONDON, CO-PILOT IN HIS
seat but no pilot. Rain splattered intermittently against the window, droplets sliding into one another, plump, plumper, streaming down the glass, vanishing. They had their own momentum. So did time. Days dragged, drip, drip, gathered speed. Years hurtled past, going, gone.
A year since the first meeting with Dick Van Hull in the Drummond Hotel.
Ten months since V-E Day.
Time, gentlemen. Time
.
Two months since Turlough Bassante’s call.
Pieces of the puzzle put together. Revelations and connections. The way they fit:
Toe bone connected to the foot bone, Oh those bones, Oh those bones, Oh mercy how they scare.
Dry bones everywhere. Call it Niskolczi’s Law: “This world of ours, seemingly so vast, often turns out to be quite small.”
The pilot arrived a few minutes later. Red-white-and-blue eyeballs and a phony grin punctuated his puffy, hungover face. Fintan Dunne thought he recognized him as one of the late arrivals at Bud Mulholland’s recent Christmas party. But if the pilot recognized Dunne, his sole passenger, he gave no sign. He slouched into the cockpit. “War’s over,” he muttered, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. “In case you haven’t heard.”
By the time they took off for Prague, the weather had gone from threatening to distressing. Pilot and copilot bantered about their latest sexual escapades and the enthusiastic acrobatics of the limey nurses they’d bedded the last several days. “Rule, Britannia, I love, love ya always,” crooned the younger one, the copilot, who sounded New York Italian and looked all of about nineteen. “Britannia is a great, great lay.”
The wind tossed and rocked the stripped-down, reconfigured Lockheed Electra. Relegated to taxi flights ordered up on short notice by the military brass, it looked ready to join the military aircraft spewed out by the arsenal of democracy and now destined to be discarded on the waste pile of peacetime, sold for scrap, or resold and reincarnated as a workhorse for some small-time, short-hop, five-and-dime airline.
The pilot laughed. Older than his copilot by at least a decade, he seemed to enjoy the buffeting they’d taken since leaving London, potential payback for the annoying assignment of being roused from bed to ferry a single ground-hugger who, with any luck, would soon be puking his guts out.
“They sent us up with half a tank, and battling these headwinds has eaten up what we had,” he shouted. He pointed amid a crescent of fluorescent dials at a red arrow resting on
E
. “No way in hell we’re going to make it to Prague. This is as far as we go tonight.”
Dunne tapped him on the shoulder. He lifted the radio headset from one ear, turned once more. Dunne put his mouth close to uncovered ear. “Where are we?”
“Nuremberg. Down there somewhere.” His face was bathed in the instrument panel’s weird emerald glow. “Airport’s too crowded. We’re being directed to the parade grounds, where Hitler hosted those Nazi shindigs. We’ll land on the military road. Been doubling as a runway, what with all the air traffic in and out of Nuremberg. Make sure you’re strapped in.”
Gray-black clouds churned and swarmed through the shaft of light the plane threw ahead. The interior had the claustrophobic feel of a tank or submarine. It was impossible to see any ground lights or trace of the devastation more than half a decade of war had unloaded on cities and towns, visiting a special fury on the ambitions and inhabitants of the once-invincible Reich.
The copilot eyed the red arrow, now nestled on
E
. “I don’t see the road.” The jovial edge was gone from his voice.
The plane began its descent. A moment later, the pilot pointed at parallel lines of lights visible on the ground. “I told you we were near.”
The plane banked right, nose down, descent steepened. Familiar, unwelcome sinking sensation filled Dunne’s stomach. The plane hit the runway hard,
bang
, bounced up, came down,
bang
, skidded side to side, almost out of control, until, an instant later, it steadied itself, rolled ahead, wheels rumbling and thumping over the spaces between the giant granite paving blocks the Nazi architects had intended as a permanent parade route for the Wehrmacht to strut in annual celebration of the Third Reich’s final triumph. It slowly taxied to a stop.
Dunne reached down and swiped his sweaty palms on the canvas seat covering.
The pilot switched off the motors and turned unsoured puss to Dunne. “Welcome to Nuremberg, Captain. Or what’s left of it. The RAF gave it a proper pasting back in March.” He took pipe and tobacco pouch from the pocket of his flight jacket. “Three hundred planes, mostly Lancasters, and an escort of Mosquitos. Leveled it in a night. I’ve radioed ahead to have a jeep pick you up. Quarters are tight. But they’ll find you something. We’ll see how things are in the morning.”
He scooped tobacco from the pouch with the bowl of the pipe, pressed it with his thumb. “Be careful,” he said
when the door was opened. “It’s wet and slippery out there.” Tight, artificial, up-yours grin reiterated the contempt he’d spit into his radio when the flight controller in London had tried to cancel their departure because of the weather.
It was an attitude Dunne found irritating as well as inane, as if mortality itself stopped with the German surrender and death could only be delivered by bombs, bullets, and flak from AA guns. But the pilot’s confidence hadn’t been misplaced—at least not entirely, they’d made it well more than halfway—and he obviously enjoyed reiterating his disdain for the flight controller’s timorous warning.
Dunne ignored the wise-guy intonation. Lesson of two wars: Though death was disquietingly random, unpredictable, unfair, it nursed a special predilection for those who thought themselves immune. Night sky over Germany: Vortex of wind and rain rather than flak. But the flyboys might soon find themselves face-to-face with the infinite incarnations in which death greets and embraces victor and vanquished alike.
“Don’t worry about me.” Dunne took hold of the railing on the roll-away steps. A lesson learned the hard way. Night. Ice. Tumble down a hillside, not knowing where it would end. He tapped his toe to make sure there was no ice on the stairs. “I’m always careful.”
A jeep pulled up at the bottom of the stairs. One hand on the wheel, the driver stretched across the seat. The passenger door swung open.
“Colonel Dunne?”
“Captain.”
“Good enough, sir. Get in.” Pudgy, just south of fat, the driver had broad shoulders that strained against an overcoat a size too small. There were two stripes on the sleeve. “Captains need to get out of the rain same as colonels. I’m Corporal Mundy. Harry Mundy. My orders are to get you to your quarters.”
Dunne got in, removed his cap, shook the water from it.
“Be right back,” Corporal Mundy said. “Got to get your gear aboard.”
“Just a duffel bag.” A droplet struck Dunne’s cheek. He put his hat back on, reached up, fingered a small rip in the canvas roof. The jeep’s interior reeked with musty mix of wet canvas, tobacco, and motor oil; acrid trace of spent ammunition and explosives. Rear seat was stuffed to the roof with cardboard cartons.
Corporal Mundy pulled open Dunne’s door. The lashing, sideways rain was unremitting. Mundy was hunched over. He hugged the duffel bag. “Mind keeping this on your lap, Captain? Only a short ride.” He gestured with his head at the rear seat. “Afraid there’s no room back there.”
“Give it here.” Dunne stacked the bag on his lap. His mission to Prague was scheduled to be short. The bag was full but not overstuffed.
Mundy scooted around, hopped in the driver’s seat, flipped down the collar of his coat, and sprayed water in every direction. “Sorry about the squeeze.” He stepped on the gas pedal. Tires slipped and squealed before getting traction. Dunne was jolted back into his seat. Mundy made a hard right. From the inner pocket of his coat, he plucked a pack of cigarettes, jiggled it so that several stuck out, clasped one in his lips, and extended the pack to Dunne. “Smoke?”
“Thanks.” Dunne lifted out a cigarette.
“Daytime, I’d offer a grand tour of the grounds. Krauts laid it out like a regular World’s Fair. Over there, when the war started, they built a POW stalag on the grounds of the storm troopers’ camp.” At the end of the granite road, Mundy made a left. “This you got to see.” The headlights played across an empty field. “The Zeppelin Field.”
He put the gear in reverse and backed up so the beams fell on an immense stone wall. Craning his neck over the steering wheel, Mundy almost touched the windshield with his face. “That’s the marble soapbox where Hitler did his spouting.” The wipers barely kept up with the incessant rain. “In daylight you can still see the outline of where the swastika was.”
Dunne leaned over the duffel bag, glanced up. The podium loomed above. Behind, two massive flanking colonnades were dimly visible.