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2 August 1943Near Palermo, Sicily0600 hours
“We got a waver,” Lieutenant Eddie Harkins said when he spotted the GI up ahead. A soldier was flagging them with both arms, right near a dirt-road turnoff marked with a hand-lettered sign saying 11TH FIELD HOSP.
“Two hands. Must be more than one bedpan missing.”
Harkins directed these comments at his driver, Bobby Ray Thomas, who sat shivering in the passenger seat of their jeep. Malaria. Sweating and shaky, too sick to drive but not wanting to let Harkins down. Harkins had been behind the wheel all night and now, just after dawn and coming off twenty-four hours straight duty, he and Thomas were exhausted bone deep.
Since the invasion began on July 10, over a hundred thousand GIs and British Tommies had poured ashore, engulfing first the southern and then the western end of the island, overwhelming the roads until nothing could move, drinking the wells dry, looting stores of wine, driving up prices of everything from whores to fresh food, leaving the detritus of battle covering the sun-scorched landscape. Every roadside was littered with discarded ration cans and cigarette packs, fire-blackened German and Italian war equipment, bloody bandages, used condoms, splintered furniture, filthy clothing, dead burros, and the occasional unburied enemy soldier, bloated and black and stripped of his shoes.
“We’ve turned this place into a shithole,” Harkins said to Thomas that morning, when first light revealed that they’d parked in a field alongside a dozen dead cows.
“We liberated them from the Germans,” Thomas had offered, mock-serious. “And from the Fascists.”
“I bet they’re overcome with gratitude,” Harkins countered. He got his red hair and light blue eyes from his mother, but he’d inherited from his father a mistrust of all landlords and liberators.
For the past six days, Harkins and his platoon of twenty-five military police soldiers, riding in eight jeeps, had been shepherding columns of American war machines—tanks, trucks and wreckers, jeeps and trailers hauling bulldozers, ambulances and big Dodge staff cars, all of it crammed onto the patchwork of dirt trails that passed for roads in western Sicily, all of it headed to Palermo, where Harkins had promised his men a dip in the sea. In the meantime, everyone was struck dumb by the heat.
Harkins’ neck was sunburned, raw. There were salt stains on his trousers where the sweat had dried repeatedly; his socks were damp as dishrags inside his GI shoes.
Thomas opened his eyes; his voice was cracked and just loud enough to be heard over the jeep engine.
“We should have invaded Ireland,” he said. “I read it’s always green and cool there.”
“You should write to General Eisenhower,” Harkins said.
Thomas dreamed of someplace cool. Harkins, who’d been running on little sleep for what seemed like months, craved rest. Now it looked like they’d be sidetracked; Harkins hoped it wouldn’t be for long.
The soldier up ahead had spotted the military police brassards they wore, big armbands with “MP” in white letters. This happened more than Harkins would have expected—GIs coming to them—but it was usually for help with some small, impossible-to-solve crime: someone took my pocketknife, somebody stole my poker winnings, some jackass pissed on my bedroll.
Harkins let the jeep roll to a stop. “Big crime spree here?”
The soldier, whose helmet had the red cross on white circle of a medic, saluted then jumped into the back. He looked shaken, a little bug-eyed.
“Glad you guys were driving by,” the medic said. “Straight ahead. You’ll see everybody. Look for First Sergeant Drake.”
The dirt track into the hospital compound was lined with dozens of U.S. Army tents of various sizes, all of them sun-blasted and coated with dust. Harkins had seen medical units positioned throughout the battle zone, chains of care starting with small aid stations just behind the front. There, medics and perhaps a single doctor treated minor wounds and injuries and, for more serious cases, stabilized a wounded soldier for evacuation to the rear.
Here—Harkins estimated they were some twenty-five to thirty miles behind the front—field hospitals did major surgery. Soldiers who required long-term care were moved to more permanent station hospitals even farther from the fighting. A GI in Harkins’ platoon, a Californian named Maretsky, talked endlessly about the “million-dollar wound,” one that didn’t hurt too much and wouldn’t mean permanent disability, but was serious enough to warrant evacuation all the way back along the chain to some cushy stateside hospital, with “fresh orange juice and fresher nurses.”
A hundred yards along, Harkins found a small crowd of fifteen or twenty soldiers standing in the wide alley between two large tents. Some of them had their heads pressed together, whispering. A few stood with arms folded, looking worried. The crowd parted a bit and Harkins saw the body, felt the adrenaline jolt he knew from his days as a street cop in Philadelphia. Beside the corpse was a big man wearing the stripes of a first sergeant and a slouch campaign hat that was twenty years old if it was a day. He looked at Harkins, checked the MP brassard, and tipped his chin down in silent greeting.
The dead man lay on his stomach in the dust, left leg straight behind, right leg cocked, arms shoulder high and bent at ninety degrees, like he was demonstrating how to crawl beneath barbed wire. His helmet was a few feet away; his hair on the right side was dark and curly. The top left side of his skull was a tangle of blood and brains. Exit wound.
In his six years as a patrolman, Harkins had worked a couple dozen murder scenes, and five or six times he’d been the first cop to arrive. The exhaustion he’d felt a moment ago faded as his training and the adrenaline kicked in, like someone had flipped his own personal power switch to “on.”
Secure the crime scene.
He looked around. Didn’t seem much chance the killer was lurking in the crowd, waiting to shoot someone else.
A second man was beside the first sergeant, close to the victim’s head, bent over, hands on knees.
“I’m going to ask you to move away from him,” Harkins said. “Just move back a few yards. Please.”
The man straightened up but didn’t move. He had a stethoscope in his front pants pocket, two silver bars of a captain on his collar. A doctor.
“He was right behind me,” the doc said. “Running for the shelter right behind me. He said something and I kept going. But he never made it.”
Harkins looked in the direction the dead man had been running. About twenty yards along, three rows of sandbags marked the top of a slit-trench air-raid shelter.
The first sergeant put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder, gently nudging him back.
“What did he say?” Harkins asked.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear because of the yelling and the sirens and ack-ack.”
There’d been a German air raid at first light, one of those surprise last-ditch sorties by whatever shattered remains of the Luftwaffe wanted to test Allied air control of Sicily.
When the first American and British troops came ashore on July 10, most of the Italian units collapsed immediately, surrendering rather than risking death for their cartoonish dictator, Mussolini. But the Germans were proving as formidable here as they had in North Africa, as they no doubt would prove formidable as they backed up all the way to Berlin, if that day ever came.
“Maybe it was—what do you call it, a strafing run.” This from a nurse in the crowd.
Harkins looked around for evidence that the German plane had machine-gunned the area, but there was no other damage. The staff just didn’t want it to be a shooting at close range. A murder.
“I’m First Sergeant Drake,” the big man said. He did not salute or offer a handshake, just gave Harkins a once-over.
“Lieutenant Harkins, military police.”
Drake’s eyes flicked to the MP brassard.
“I guess you figured that part out,” Harkins said. “Anyone touch the body?”
“You mean besides the murderer?” Drake said, a bit smart-ass.
Conscious of the twenty sets of eyes on him, Harkins knelt beside the corpse for a closer look. There was some stippling below the wound, a tattoo of small black dots from the powder, no contact burn from a barrel. The shooter had been behind the man, holding the gun at an upward angle. The entrance wound was large; Harkins guessed a government-issue .45 caliber pistol. Only about fifty thousand of those on the island. The exit wound, left side, top of his head, was massive, pieces of skull mixed with blood-soaked hair.
Harkins saw, from the corner of his eye, someone step into the clearing Drake had created around the body.
“I came as soon as I heard, First Sergeant.”
Harkins turned to see a tall full-bird colonel with a narrow face and sharp widow’s peak. He wore a clean uniform with a silver eagle on his right lapel point and the caduceus of the Army Medical Corps on the other. Another doctor, probably the hospital commander. Behind him, a nurse wearing captain’s bars. She put her hand to her mouth when she saw the body up close.
“Oh, my God,” the colonel said. “It’s Stephenson, right? Can’t we get him moved?”
“I’d rather we didn’t move him just yet, sir,” Harkins said.
“Who are you?”
Harkins thought about saluting, skipped it since Drake kept his thumbs hooked into his belt, like he was waiting for a bus.
“Lieutenant Harkins, military police.”
Harkins wanted to pass this mess off to the provost marshal, the command section that had jurisdiction for crimes committed in the war zone.
“I think we should wait for the provost, sir. And we might want to get some photos.”
A couple of spectators sucked in their breath.
“Crime scene photos,” Harkins explained, eyes still on the commander. “For the investigators. It’ll be helpful in the long run.”
The colonel studied Harkins for a moment, then looked at Drake and tilted his head to the crowd.
“You people go back to work now, hear?” Drake said to the circle of onlookers.
The enlisted men moved smartly; the officers—doctors and nurses—either scattered or made a pretense of moving. Clearly the first sergeant was a not a man to trifle with.
“Probably a good idea to wait a bit, Colonel,” Drake said, low, so no one else would hear.
“It’s just that poor Stephenson is there, with his head blown open,” the colonel said. “And it’s upsetting the rest of the staff.” It was a polite dismissal. “I’d like to see him taken to the morgue, First Sergeant, if you don’t mind.”
After a beat, Drake managed an unenthusiastic, “Right away, sir.”
The colonel walked away without introducing himself to Harkins.
The first sergeant stepped back and pointed at two orderlies, who had appeared with a canvas litter. When the privates moved toward the body, Harkins nodded to Bobby Ray Thomas, who blocked them. The stretcher-bearers stopped, unsure.
“Sorry, First Sergeant,” Harkins said. “All due respect, we should wait for the provost, for the investigators. They’re going to want to see the scene.”
Drake looked a little sad, like he was about to get into something he’d tried to avoid. He was older than most noncoms Harkins knew; in his late thirties, at least, with crow’s-feet framing small brown eyes. Probably Regular Army before the war.
“You heard the colonel, Lieutenant,” Drake said, stepping closer. He had five inches on Harkins, who was five ten. Thick across the chest and shoulders, with a slight paunch. Big arms and hands. Harkins imagined the enlisted men in the unit avoided pissing him off. Also not a bad strategy for lieutenants.
“This is my hospital, and that’s one of our docs,” Drake said, calm, maybe a bit menacing. “Go find a traffic jam that needs unscrewing.”
Harkins had been chewed out by lots of sergeants when he was a trainee back in the States, but here in the combat zone most noncommissioned officers at least made a show of military courtesy, even for junior officers. Harkins felt his hands tense into fists, forced them to relax. No margin in arguing with the ranking noncom in front of his people.
“It may be your hospital, First Sergeant, but for the moment it’s my crime scene,” Harkins said, his voice even, almost a whisper. “I’m sure you and the colonel are going to want a thorough investigation. We’re not talking about some dumbass being late for formation. Pretty sure we’re looking at a murder here.”
Behind the first sergeant, the orderlies fidgeted with their stretcher.
“Are you even a real cop?” Drake asked.
“I was a cop in Philadelphia before the war.”
“A detective?”
“A patrolman.”
The whole truth was that Harkins felt like an accidental solider. He’d enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, only partly because of what everyone called, as if it were one word, the-dirty-Jap-sneak-attack. He’d also joined to get away from a brewing scandal at home: a woman who was someone else’s wife, and a husband who was both suspicious and a detective in the same precinct as Harkins.
The army made him a military policeman because he’d been a Philadelphia cop, and he got sent to Officer Candidate School because of good scores on some aptitude tests, and now here he was, battling the Hun, or at least battling sunstroke. He was determined to keep his head down, do what he was told and whatever good work he could, and not get killed.
“Look, I’ve secured dozens of murder scenes,” Harkins continued. “Waiting for detectives. I know what they want to see.”
The first sergeant shook his head. “Whole goddamn army full of amateurs. Did you at least send for the provost?”
“Just about to do that. And when he gets here, he’s going to make better progress if the crime scene isn’t compromised.”
“Make it quick,” Drake said. “Then let’s get him out of here. We got a hospital to run.”
It was just at that moment, when Harkins was savoring his little victory, that Bobby Ray Thomas fainted. Passed out cold. Didn’t crumple at the knees, but fell like a tree onto his face. A couple of the nurses reached him first.
“He’s got malaria,” Harkins said. “Fevers, then chills.”
Drake pointed at the orderlies with the litter. They rolled the driver, who was barely conscious, onto his side and got him loaded.
“We’ll get some fluids in him, see if he should be admitted,” one of the nurses said.
When Harkins turned around again, Drake wore an unfriendly smile.
“Crackerjack operation you’re running, Lieutenant. The investigation is obviously in good hands.”
Then the first sergeant turned on his heel. “OK, back to work,” he said to the few people remaining. “This shitshow is over.”
This day keeps getting better and better, Harkins thought.
Copyright © 2020 by Ed Ruggero
