Dry Bones Read online

  As if hearing a sudden summons, Van Hull snapped to. He retrieved their possessions and presented Dunne the still-intact hawthorn cane. Neither spoke. It began to sleet. They found shelter in a culvert and burrowed beneath their blankets.

  Dunne slept fitfully. He woke in the dark. His head throbbed. When day broke, they left the culvert. The morning was bright and dry. The sunlight made his eyes ache. He went back inside, lay down, and draped his forearm over his face.

  Van Hull felt his head. “You have a fever.” He rolled Dunne on his back and lifted his shirt, exposing the dull red rash that covered his chest.

  “It’s typhus, isn’t it?”

  Van Hull wrapped him in both blankets. “Get some sleep.”

  Dunne didn’t bother in indulging in the useless exercise of telling him to go on by himself. “I did something stupid. I let Dr. Niskolczi have Victor, yours and mine.”

  “You won’t need it. We got this far, and we’re going to get the rest of the way.”

  “Unless you get sick, too.”

  “I won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I won’t let myself. Now close your eyes and get some rest.”

  Voices drone in his ear, Bassante’s, Roberta’s, General Donovan’s, jabbering together, cacophony of competing words, tones, disjointed syllables. Brother Andre wants to know: Why is the tailbone shaped like a cuckoo? Or is it the cuckoo that’s shaped like the tailbone? A steeple clock strikes three. They join together in chorus and sing: Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. He shouts, shakes his fist, hears himself spout a Latin phrase (“ad utilitatem quoque nostrum”), asks in a loud voice, “Providence? Are we near Providence?”

  Van Hull’s hand rested on his shoulder, reassuring. “Fin, it’s all right. You need to eat something.” It was dark again. There was a small fire at the mouth of the culvert. Using a tin can as a pot, Van Hull boiled eggs that he had foraged.

  Night twitched into day. Figures flitted past, vague shapes filtered through a stop-and-go reel of shadow and light. Dunne lay, sat, stood, aware of Van Hull’s voice, reassuring thread that ran through feverish jumble, knock and rock of boxcar wheels on rails, baritone of tires over concrete, bump and creak of horse-drawn cart, tones plaintive, insistent, wheedling—Czech? Polish? Russian?—Van Hull’s fluent and consistent German.

  He watched through feverish, red-rimmed eyes: Sodden wooden roof. Cracked plaster ceiling. Single electric bulb dangling lonely and bright. Night sky and its vast spool of stars. Figures in and out of focus. He burned with inner, furnace-like heat; throat so parched dry, he couldn’t speak. Van Hull raised his head, poured water in his mouth. He trembled with arctic cold. Van Hull covered him with a woolen blanket.

  Van Hull varied their movements, often traveling by day when anyone clearly ill was likely to go unbothered by soldiers or the police. At night, they slipped into the shadowy ring around a bonfire. The ragged circle of several dozen people—civilians, soldiers, women, children—was silent. There was no interaction beyond the sporadic hurling of logs and broken furniture on the blaze. When dawn came and the fire was expired, everyone dispersed.

  They stumbled into a half-derelict farmhouse that they thought was deserted but discovered an aged couple living in a back room. Their faces, parched and trenched with wrinkles, reflected their fear. Van Hull did his best to calm them. Although it turned out they were deaf mutes, somehow he got through.

  The couple hid them in a potato cellar. Each day, the old woman brought them watery soup made from cabbage and potatoes. When she stopped coming, Van Hull went to the farmhouse. The couple lay in the backyard. The woman had been raped, the old man stripped of his boots. They’d both been shot in the back of the head.

  How long did they travel? And where? Dunne had no idea.

  The chaos that swelled across the fast-disintegrating eastern frontier of the Third Reich was the fog shrouding them by day, cloud sheltering them by night. On they went through gray-brown, wind-ridden, barren interval between blur of snow and sprout of spring. Gray roads. Gray sky. Gray faces. Gray uniforms. Brown earth. Brown coats, dresses, caps, teeth, boots. Same tired, resigned expression stamped on every face, no matter age or sex or nationality.

  Long columns of prisoners from the east straggled along the roadside. SS guards in black greatcoats hovered around them like crows, pushed and kicked them, shot the ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t get up. People scattered at their approach, frightened as much by the contagion of fever and typhus that traveled with the prisoners as by the SS.

  German settlers—some recent, others descendants of volksdeutsch rooted in the same spot for hundreds of years—fled west. Their carts were top-heavy with cradles and clocks and bedding. Foreign laborers and POWs, some of the millions conscripted into the Nazi war effort, deserted camps and factories, hiding by day, scrounging by night, doing their best to stay alive until the Germans were gone.

  A woman lay propped against a fence post. Her blouse was open to suckle the child in her lap. They were both dead. The stench of putrefaction hovered around them.

  Military units shuffled by, heads down, seemingly indifferent to direction or destination. Their worn, ragged uniforms and cloth caps sometimes made it hard to tell what force or faction they represented. Deserters and partisans hung limp and lifeless from freshly blossomed branches, placards around their necks headlined: ACHTUNG! Staff cars roared by. Corpses littered the roadside.

  Newly risen blades of grass turned the brown earth green. Heavy rains churned roads into swamps. They took refuge in an abandoned hayloft. In the late afternoon, a column of sodden, slump-shouldered troopers trudged on the road beneath. When they’d passed, Van Hull left without a word.

  Dawn sun woke him. Van Hull hadn’t returned. Maybe he’d finally decided to go it alone—a thought Dunne entertained, though he knew it wasn’t true. Van Hull had either been captured, in which case there was nothing left for Dunne to do but await whatever came, or he’d be back, prodding and coaxing, perhaps attempting another Boy Scout trick, insisting they stay on the move another day.

  Head resting on a pillow of hay, Dunne rehearsed his answer. He’d been exhausted before. But this went deeper than muscle or bone, beyond the physical toll required to endure and survive a siege of typhus. This weariness was in his soul. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—get up. He’d had enough, endured enough. Heroes like Van Hull always seemed to have more to give. But sometimes, instead of death or surrender, the old guard simply wanted to be left alone, to lie undisturbed, to sink unnoticed into abiding sleep.

  Victor or no Victor, he was through. Enough. For good. Once and for all. Au revoir, la guerre.

  Two figures in civilian clothes zigzagged across the yard, rusted hinges groaning a metal complaint as the door was pushed open. They scampered up the ladder, one behind the other, skittish teenagers who couldn’t hide their fear. They rushed Dunne to his feet, down the ladder, to a horse-drawn wagon half filled with empty crates. They indicated to Dunne to crawl between the crates. They covered the pile with a tarp and tied it to the sides of the wagon.

  The wagon jostled over cobblestones and made several sharp turns before speeding along a smooth road. It came to a halt. The boys who’d put Dunne in the wagon carried him out. The wagon was parked in a capacious brick hall with vaulted ceilings. Barrels were stacked high on either side. The odor of sour hops—similar to stale beer—filled the space. They put him down on a cot hidden behind the barrels.

  “Where am I?” He smiled at the boys. Though he wasn’t sure by whom, he knew he’d been rescued.

  The younger of the two smiled back. “Nemluvím anglicky.” He held up one finger. “Jedna minuta.” They hurried off. The damp, chilly hall was obviously part of a brewery.

  A tall, haggard, gray-haired man with a goatee came from around the stack of barrels. “Please, stay seated.” Left hand behind his back, as if hiding something, he offered Dunne a weak handshake with his right. “Forgive me, we’ve no time for niceties. I spent s
everal years in your country, in Pittsburgh, but there’s no need for you to know my name or where you are. If you fell into German hands, they’d get it out of you one way or another. You’ve already had quite an ordeal. You must have a strong constitution to have pulled through.”

  “It’s been mostly thanks to my buddy.”

  “Yes, your ‘buddy,’ Major Van Hull, he’s the one who told us where to find you.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Nearby—in surgery.”

  “Surgery?”

  “A shoulder wound, painful but not fatal, it must be attended to. He’s a brave man, or foolish, or reckless. Perhaps all three. None of us in the resistance had any idea you were in the area until a German sentry stopped your comrade. The major struck him with a cane and tried to grab his rifle. The German got off a shot and hit him, but the major beat him well beyond what was necessary to kill. He was fortunate our men were nearby when it happened. They had to pry this from his grip.” He brought his left hand forward. In it was the broken half of the hawthorn cane.

  “The war is almost over. But the Germans still threaten to drown any resistance ‘in a sea of blood.’ Our people will pay the price for the murder of that soldier. That’s the way it’s been from the start—since the British and French sold us out at Munich. I was with the Czech Brigade in the Red Army until I was sent back to help organize the resistance. You’ve had your play-by-the-rules war in the west, but in the east, there’ve been no rules. The Germans sowed the wind, and now they reap the whirlwind.”

  “Can I see Major Van Hull?” Dunne got to his feet.

  “Tomorrow. We’re sending you both to Prague. It will be easier to hide you there, and we have word fellow agents of yours are working there.” He handed Dunne the remnant of the cane. “The major told me a little of your—how shall I put it?—your ‘adventures.’ I thought you might like this as a souvenir of Czechoslovakia.”

  “Thanks. It might be a nice place to live, but it’s been a tough place to visit.”

  “Soon it will be once again a good place to live and visit, free and independent, rid of Germans. Perhaps you’ll return as tourist instead of soldier. Meantime, we’ll see to it you’re fed and get some rest. You’ll also be able to have a hot bath and get cleaned up. Pardon me, I don’t mean to be insulting, but you don’t look like the Americans we remember from the movies—groomed, well-fed, confident. You look as if you’ve spent the war in Poland or the Ukraine. As they say in Pittsburgh, you look like shit.”

  Dunne fingered the piece of hawthorn: more shillelagh than wedding bough, as it turned out. “A bath would help change that.”

  When it was dark, Dunne was loaded aboard an ingeniously designed transport. The bottom layer of hollow, permanently attached barrels formed a compartment able to hide several men. Atop were layers of barrels filled with beer. He was driven to a windowless basement. Behind a false wall was an apartment that contained a small sleeping area and a spotless tiled bathroom with porcelain sink, toilet, and tub.

  A shy girl with blonde braids provided him a Swedish hollow-ground safety razor and Sheffield scissors. Dunne stood before the sink. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Thin, bearded, wary, worn-down visage stared back, distant descendant of the face he’d last seen in a mirror in Bari, twin to the myriad faces he’d passed on the road.

  He lathered cheeks and neck, reaped his beard with the razor, cropped his hair with the scissors, and shaved what remained. He filled the tub with water so hot he had to gradually lower himself in. He fell asleep. The water was tepid when he woke. He emptied the tub and refilled it.

  Clean clothes and underwear were laid out on the bed. The girl returned and hurriedly delivered a plate of sausage and potatoes and a tin container filled with beer. He wolfed the food and drink, lay down on soft, yielding mattress, pulled the down coverlet over his head, last conscious thought before sleep a memory: Niskolczi weeping. I wasn’t sure a place like this still existed.

  The same transport came for him in the morning. He climbed behind the faux barrels. Van Hull was already inside. He was obviously groggy from the painkillers he’d been given. He stared blankly at Dunne for several seconds. “Fin, is that you?”

  “The new and improved me.”

  “You look like death.”

  “Yesterday, I looked like shit. I’m not sure death is an improvement.”

  “It’s the shaved head.”

  “You don’t look so hot yourself, Dick.”

  “I guess we’re the sad-ass version of the Bobbsey Twins, Rack and Ruin instead of Flossie and Fred.”

  The driver slammed the panel behind them. They lay in the darkness. Van Hull gently snored. Dunne slept fitfully, unsure how long they had traveled before the transport stopped and the motor was turned off.

  A single escort in mechanic’s overalls led them out of their hiding place. It was night. He whisked them into the side entrance of a sprawling, multitiered structure with an imposing steeple-like dome. He used a flashlight to lead them through a series of marble hallways that echoed with their footsteps and down several flights of stairs. He extinguished the beam. A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling illumined a windowless basement room packed with empty desks and display cases.

  Van Hull, weak and unsteady on his feet, sat on a desk. He gazed at the floor.

  “You speak English?” Dunne asked.

  Their short, muscular, expressionless escort didn’t answer.

  Van Hull lifted his head. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”

  “Ja, ich spreche Deutsch.”

  “Gut.” Van Hull nodded appreciatively. “Wie heissen Sie?”

  “Jan Horak.” His stoic mien gave way to a torrent of words accompanied by animated hand gestures.

  Van Hull stopped him to translate. “Jan Horak welcomes us to the National Museum. We’re in the heart of Prague, just off Wenceslas Square. The building is mostly empty for now. The collections were moved to storage to ensure they survive the war. It’s the very last place the Germans would look. But the situation outside is volatile. The Russians are closing in, and the resistance is preparing to take on the Germans and liberate the city on their own. We are to remain here until our American comrades make contact.”

  “Which American comrades?” Dunne sat beside Van Hull.

  Without waiting for Van Hull to translate, Horak fished in the pocket of his overalls. “Dies ist von der kameraden.” He tossed a pack of cigarettes to Dunne.

  Dunne studied the virgin cellophane. American smokes. God shed his grace on thee: Lucky Strikes. Horak handed Van Hull what looked like a calling card. “Und so.”

  Carefully peeling away cellophane and tinfoil top, Dunne extracted three Luckies; handed one to Van Hull, one to Horak. They lit their cigarettes in the flame of Horak’s brass lighter. Van Hull examined both sides of the card Horak had given him. “It’s from the ‘kameraden’ who sent the Luckies.” On the front, beneath the gold embossed seal of the United States, was printed:

  LT. COL. CARLTON BAXTER BARTLETT

  DIRECTOR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION,

  COMMUNICATION & POLICY ANALYSIS

  OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES

  On the back was a brief handwritten message: The age of miracles has not passed! We’d given you two up for dead! Will make contact soon. Stay where you are for now.

  “How did Bartlett get to Prague? I figured the Pear would fight the entire war from the bar at the Ritz, in Paris.”

  Dunne returned the card. “Where the hell does he think we’re going to go?”

  “Maybe I should ask Jan if we could borrow golf clubs and play a round at the local country club. But orders are orders. We’ll do as the Pear directs and stay here.”

  Van Hull had another extended conversation with Horak that he summarized for Dunne as soon as the Czech had left. Berlin had fallen. Hitler was dead. The Red Army was at the gates of Prague, and coming from the west, General Patton was in striking distance. The Czech resistance was poised to take matters
into its own hands and pay the Germans back for seven years of occupation and humiliation.

  An hour later, Horak reappeared with a crew in tow. They brought two cots, bedding, and a supply of dried foodstuffs. He left them his flashlight and told them to stay where they were. When it was safe, he would come and get them.

  They lay down on the cots. The silence had the morbid pervasiveness of a mausoleum. It was impossible to tell if it was day or night. They sat up with a start when the building shook as if hit by a bomb. Dunne used the flashlight. Dust from the ceiling circled in its beam like a flurry of snow. They made their way upstairs to an office on the first floor. Gunfire rang out. A tank rumbled by, rattling the window. There was a radio on the stand next to it. Van Hull turned it on and fiddled with the dial. The announcer spoke in rapid-fire style.

  “What’s he saying?” Dunne asked.

  “He’s speaking in Czech. ‘It’s over’—I think that’s what he’s saying.

  “What’s over?”

  “Wait. Now it’s in German” Van Hull translated: “‘The nightmare is over. Today, May sixth, Prague strikes for her liberation. Let freedom and justice prevail!’”

  Part IV

  Hidden Heroes

  File 6704-A: Document Declassified and Released by Central Intelligence Agency, Sources/Methods Exemption 3B2B, Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, Date: 12/06/2000

  ***CLASSIFIED: SECRET. Folder 6704-A: DR. KARSTEN HEINZ IS HEREBY SEVERED FROM U.S. v. DR. KARL BRANDT et al. Custody is transferred to Central Intelligence Group, Division Headquarters, Berlin. Information herein not to be shared with unauthorized persons. 2/4/46.

  Military Tribunal, Case 1, United States v. Dr. Karl Brandt et al., Folder 6704-A: Document No. 6, Background Notes and Preliminary Interrogation: SS-Hauptsturmführer Karsten Heinz (KH). Submitted by Col. Winfield Scott Thomas, M.D., U.S. Army, Medical Corps, Dept. of Psychiatry. Also present, Maj. Turlough Bassante, Special Agent, Counter Intelligence Corps. Nuremberg. 12/27/45.

  COMMENTS: I have been directed to undertake a preliminary interrogation and psychological assessment of Karsten Heinz, in preparation for his formal indictment as a defendant in the trial of German medical personnel, civilian as well as military, for crimes committed in the name of “scientific research” and “medical advancement.”