Descendant Page 5

  “Hilda,” she whispered.

  “Well, Hilda, maybe you could open the drapes for me so that I can see what kind of a day it is.”

  “It’s raining, sir. It’s a bad-luck day.”

  “A bad-luck day? What makes you say that?”

  “It’s Friday the thirteenth.”

  “You’re not superstitious, are you?”

  She shook her head, but then she said, “One of the girls downstairs thinks that you’re a tovenaar.”

  Tovenaar is Flemish for a black magician. The girl must have seen my Bibles and my crucifixes and all the paraphernalia of Screecher-hunting.

  “No, I’m not a tovenaar. Tell her I’m a goochelaar.” A goochelaar is a conjuror, the kind who pulls rabbits out of opera hats and strings of colored bunting out of his ears.

  “Yes, sir.” She tugged back the heavy velvet curtains and she was right. The sky was gloomy and the window was speckled with raindrops. “You should be careful today, sir.”

  “I’m always careful. Here.” I reached over to the ashtray on my night-table and fished out a couple of francs to give her a tip.

  I met up with Corporal Little and Frank in the lobby downstairs. The hotel was bustling with activity because some of the British were leaving. Outside, Keizerstraat was crowded with Jeeps and trucks and British Tommies wearing rain-capes.

  “You had something to eat, Henry?” I asked Corporal Little.

  “Sure thing. Frank and I shared some sausage.”

  “You know what the Belgians put in those sausages?”

  “Hate to think, sir.”

  “Reconstituted Nazis, with additional cereal.”

  Corporal Little had parked around the corner. We climbed into the Jeep and maneuvered our way toward Schildersstraat. Frank took the rain as a personal insult and kept shaking himself impatiently.

  No. 71 was a tall gray building right on the corner of Karel Rogierstraat. The downstairs windows were covered with grimy lace curtains and all of the upstairs windows were shuttered. Corporal Little parked halfway up the curb and we went to the brown-painted front door and knocked. The knocker was cast in bronze, in the shape of a snarling wolf. A knocker like that was supposed to keep demons out of the house, but if Ernst Hauser had been telling us the truth, it certainly hadn’t worked here.

  We knocked three times before the door was opened. A plain young woman in a white muslin cap and a plain brown dress stood in front of us, holding a mop. From inside the house, I could smell bleach and fish boiling.

  “We’re looking for three men,” I told her, holding out my identity card. “Do you have anybody staying here?”

  “Nobody now. Only my grandfather.”

  “How about before?”

  “Before? Yes. We had five Germans here before the Allies came, and another man, but they’re all gone now.”

  “Another man?”

  “I don’t know what he was. He didn’t speak German. I don’t know what language it was. He used to talk to us sometimes and I think he was asking us questions but we didn’t understand.”

  “Maybe he said something like buna dimineatza? Or noapte buna? Or multzumesc?”

  “Yes, that word multzumesc. He was always saying that.”

  “Can you tell me what he looked like, this man?”

  The girl looked embarrassed. “He was tall, taller than you. With dark hair combed straight back.”

  “What else you can tell me about him? I mean, if I were to see him in the street, how would I recognize him?”

  She lowered her eyes. “He was very handsome. My mother’s friends used to come round for tea in the hope that he would be here.”

  “Really?”

  “If he passed them in the hallway they would start to giggle.”

  “What kind of handsome, would you say? Did he remind you of anybody? A movie star, maybe?”

  “Well, I know it sounds funny, but if you can imagine Marlene Dietrich as a man instead of a woman. High cheeks, very proud-looking. Also, he spoke very warm, if you understand me, always looking you right in your eyes, so you didn’t mind if you didn’t know what he was saying. His eyes were green like the sea and he had a scar on the side of his forehead . . . like a V-shape.”

  I gave Corporal Little a brief translation of what the girl had said, and the corporal grinned and shook his head. “Sounds like this young lady didn’t exactly fail to be swept off her feet, either. She didn’t happen to notice his sock size, by any chance?”

  I turned back to the girl. “Did this man ever tell you his name?”

  “No. But I heard one of the Germans call him Herr Doktor.”

  “What were the Germans like?”

  “Horrible. I hated both of them. They kept coughing, as if they were ill, and they always smelled bad.”

  “Frank picking up anything?” I asked Corporal Little.

  “Not so far, sir. But it’s been raining all night.”

  “Do you think there’s any possibility that these men may still be here?” I asked the girl.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Could they still be hiding in the house? In the attic, maybe?”

  “Their rooms are empty. I had to clean them after they left.”

  “Do you think we could possibly take a look around?”

  “I don’t know. My mother isn’t here. She won’t be back for an hour.”

  “We wouldn’t disturb anything, I promise you.”

  “She doesn’t even like me to answer the door. It was only because you wouldn’t stop knocking.”

  “OK, then . . . we wouldn’t like to get you into any trouble. We’ll go find ourselves a cup of coffee and come back later.”

  She smiled, and said, “Dank U.” And I can still see that smile now, and her white linen cap, and her hand holding the mop.

  We drove to a café at the far end of Karel Rogierstraat. There were chairs and tables set out on the sidewalk but because it was raining there was nobody sitting there except for one old man. He was sheltering under the dark green awning, smoking a meerschaum pipe.

  Corporal Little tied Frank to the cast-iron umbrella stand and we went inside. The interior was very gloomy, even though there were decorative mirrors on every wall. Behind the bar an old Marconi wireless was playing “I’ll Be Seeing You.” We sat down in the corner, lit up cigarettes, and asked for two filter coffees. The proprietor was a fat middle-aged man in a floor-length apron. Every time he turned toward the window the gray morning light reflected from his glasses, so that he looked as if he had pennies on his eyes.

  “Do you know what today is?” I asked Corporal Little, breathing smoke.

  At that instant there was a deafening bang, louder than a thunderclap, instantly followed by another one. The café windows cracked diagonally from side to side, and everything in the whole place rattled and shook. We both stood up, just as a huge billow of brown smoke came rolling along Karel Rogierstraat, immediately followed by a shower of bricks, chairs, torn fragments of sheet metal, window frames, curtains, roof tiles, and even more bricks.

  We hurried to the doorway. Frank was cowering behind a plant pot, his eyes wide, trembling. Debris was still falling from the sky, including a huge metal cylinder that looked like an old-fashioned kitchen stove. It bounced and bounded over the cobbles and slammed into an office doorway across the street.

  “Jesus,” said Corporal Little, who never blasphemed. “What the hell was that?”

  I looked down toward Schildersstraat. Through the gradually clearing smoke, I could see that No. 71 had been completely demolished, along with three or four houses on other side. The whole intersection had been reduced to mountains of rubble, and bodies were lying everywhere—a young woman in a black coat, with an overturned baby carriage—an elderly couple whose heads had both been blown off—six or seven nuns who must have been walking on the opposite side of the street, lying on top of each other like dead pigeons. The cobbles were strewn with body parts and blown-apart sofas and a black Citr
oën taxi that looked like some surrealistic panther standing on its hind legs. All of the windows within a hundred-yard radius had been blown out, and in some houses, fires were blazing.

  I walked slowly down the street and stood on the edge of the crater that had been No. 71. The crater was almost twenty feet deep, as if the house had been hit by a meteor. I was still deaf from the double-blast, so it was like walking through a silent movie, with the rain falling, and people running in all directions.

  I turned around. Corporal Little had been following me, with Frank. He said something, but I couldn’t hear what it was, and then he shrugged. I knew what he was trying to tell me, though. If there had been Screechers hiding in the attic, they had been obliterated, along with the rest of the house, and the young girl’s grandfather, and the young girl herself, with her white linen cap and her mop.

  For the first time since we had landed in Normandy, I felt that I wasn’t the sole representative of the Angel of Death.

  I’ll Be Seeing You

  “So what’s the plan now, sir?” asked Corporal Little.

  “God knows,” I told him. I was still half-deaf.

  We were sitting in one of the dank stone alcoves in De Cluyse cafe on Oude Koornmarkt, eating chicken waterzooi and potatoes. The café was converted from a thirteenth-century cellar, and it was lit only by candles in small glass jelly-jars. It was so cold that we were both wearing our overcoats and mittens, and our breath was smoking. Frank was lying under the table, making disgusting noises with a pork knuckle.

  “I mean, supposing those other two Screechers weren’t hiding in that building at all? We only have that Hauser guy’s word for it, after all.”

  “Well, you’re absolutely right, Henry, but it’s going to take days to clear all that rubble, and even then we may not know for sure.”

  “What do you reckon it was? Gas main?”

  I shrugged and said nothing. But I had guessed what it was, the instant I had heard that distinctive double-bang. The house in Schildersstraat had been hit by the first German V-2 to strike the center of Antwerp. The first bang was a sonic boom, as the rocket came out of the sky at over three times the speed of sound. The second was over a ton of high explosive.

  Six days before a V-2 had hit the village of Brasschaat, about eight kilometers to the northeast of Antwerp, and all of us officers in 101 Counterintelligence Detachment had been briefed that this was probably a “range-finding” shot, with more V-2s to follow.

  The stovelike object that had bounced along the street had confirmed it for me. It was the rocket’s combustion chamber, which weighed over six hundred kilos and almost always survived the explosion.

  I lifted up a scraggy piece of chicken leg on the end of my fork, with a shred of wet leek hanging off it. “What do you think they fed this on? Newspaper?”

  A second V-2 landed on the city in the middle of the afternoon, when Corporal Little and I were walking along Keizerstraat. Frank did a four-legged jump and cowered against the nearest wall.

  “It’s OK, boy,” Corporal Little reassured him, but Frank never did get used to the seismic shock of V-2 explosions, which made the cobblestones knock together like pebbles on the beach. If bloodhounds are capable of having nervous breakdowns, poor old Frank got pretty close to it.

  That Sunday, October 15, a rocket destroyed twenty-five houses on Kroonstraat at Borgerhout, killing four people and injuring a hundred more. Over the next few days, more and more V-2s hit the city center. There was a total news blackout—nothing on the wireless, and nothing in the newspapers except vague warnings about “flying bombs”—so nobody knew what was really happening. The city authorities were desperate to avoid any panic, and, just as importantly, they didn’t want the Germans to find out whether their rockets were hitting their targets or not.

  After the Schildersstraat attack, Corporal Little and Frank and I spent three more weeks in Antwerp, searching for any trace of the Romanian Screecher and his German companion, just in case Ernst Hauser had been lying to us, or they had been hiding in some other house when the V-2 struck. But after we had dragged Frank up and down every rubble-strewn street and every smelly alley between Prinsstraat and Lange Nieuwstraat, and talked to more than two hundred people, including police officers and hospital orderlies and priests, we finally had to conclude that they had either left Antwerp and returned to Germany, or else that first V-2 had simply atomized them.

  As the winter grew colder and colder, and the Germans retreated, we were sent into Holland. We visited houses in Eindhoven and Breda and Tilburg, and found the grisly evidence that Screechers had been there—men, women and children, with their hearts cut out and all of the blood drained out of them. But the Screechers themselves had long gone, and they had left no trail that Frank could usefully follow.

  Whenever I think of that winter, I think of finger-numbing cold, and skies as dark as lead. I think of desperate tiredness, and boredom—driving miles and miles between avenues of poplar trees, and seeing nobody for hours. It felt as if the war had passed us by and we were completely alone in the world.

  On the morning of January 16, 1945, a message came through Brussels that my mother had died, and that I should return home immediately. Operation Screecher was over—as far as I was concerned, anyway—because I was never sent back to Europe. Corporal Little was ordered to take Frank back to Antwerp, where he could help the Belgian rescue services to locate buried bodies. The city was still under daily attack from V-2 rockets, and already more than three and a half thousand people had been killed.

  The last time I saw Corporal Little and Frank was on the long stone mole at Zeebrugge harbor, where I was due to board a British troopship. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was snowing hard. The lighthouse on the end of the mole was back in action, and every now and then the snow was illuminated by a bright sweeping light.

  “Well, Henry, it’s been an experience.”

  “Yes, sir, it has.” He hesitated for a moment, and then he said, “Think we did any good, sir?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we never will. I can’t see us going into the history books, can you?”

  “No, sir. But we’ll remember it. You and me, and Frank.”

  Frank made that whining noise in his throat and irritably shook the snowflakes from his back.

  I shook Corporal Little’s hand and walked back along the mole to the dockside. Somewhere, in some alternative existence, I think that I’m still walking along it now, with the lighthouse flashing on and off, and the snow falling all around me, and the bang and clatter of cranes still echoes in my ears.

  I didn’t yet know how my mother had died, but I was already feeling a devastating loneliness, as if I had lost not only the woman who had given birth to me, but part of my ancestry, too.

  Mill Valley, 1943

  I was swinging in the hammock in my parents’ backyard when my father came walking through the overgrown grass and said, “There’s two military guys want to talk to you.”

  I sat up a little and shaded my eyes with my hand. Two middle-aged men in sharply pressed army uniforms were standing by the kitchen steps with their hats tucked under their arms. One had a silvery-gray crewcut and the other had horn-rim glasses and a heavy black mustache.

  “They wouldn’t tell me what they wanted,” said my father. “If you’d prefer me to say that you’re not at home, well, I’m more than happy to. You know my views on the military.”

  My father was what you might call a professional nonconformist. He always reminded me of Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers when he sang “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He looked a little like Groucho Marx, too, in his slopy-shouldered cardigans and his baggy corduroy pants, with his pipe always sticking out of the side of his mouth. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, but he was also a writer and a fly-fisherman and when he played the piano on summer evenings with the parlor windows open his music was so sentimental that he could make you choke up.

  The offi
cer with the silvery-gray crew cut raised one hand and called out, “James Falcon Junior? Need to talk to you, sir!”

  I looked at my father and my father shrugged. I clambered out of the hammock, catching my foot so that I staggered on one leg for the first couple of paces, but I managed to hold on to the apple I’d been eating.

  The officers approached me. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bulsover and this is Major Leonard Harvey.”

  They stood with their backs like ramrods and they almost had me standing up straight. Not long ago, I found some photographs of myself that my brother took around that time, and you’ve never seen such a skinny, lanky, twenty-five-year-old streak in your life, in a baggy pair of jeans and a striped shirt that was five times too big for me.

  “We need to talk in private,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover. He didn’t look at my father and at first my father didn’t understand what he was saying.

  “This is just about as private as you can get,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “There isn’t another house for half a mile. Hey—we could beat a pig to death with baseball bats and nobody would hear us.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover looked at him as if were mentally deficient. “When I say private, sir, I mean that I need to talk to your son confidentially. On his own.”

  “Oh? Oh. What for? This family doesn’t have secrets.”

  “That’s as may be, sir. But this is wartime, and this country has secrets.”

  “Oh.”

  My father hesitated for a moment and then he put his pipe back in his mouth and walked away across the grass, jerkily turning around now and again as if half expecting us to call him back. Eventually he climbed the steps and disappeared into the kitchen. The screen door banged.

  Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover placed his hand in the small of my back and gently steered me down toward the far end of the yard, where the tangled raspberry canes grew. It was very hot and still that day, and I remember that everything looked magnified, as I were seeing it through a lens.