The Hellfire Club(14)

“You bet,” said MacLachlan.

“I got one from the OSS before I dropped into Germany,” said Strongfellow.

Charlie held a card up to the light, then examined its ridge.

“One of the cards has been opened if you want to see.” Strongfellow reached into the deck box and slid out a joker. He handed it to Charlie, who peeled it open to reveal an escape route through the German village of Dallgow-D?beritz. “Mac loves puzzles and hidden clues and such.”

Charlie whistled. “Amazing.”

“I had to soak it first,” said Strongfellow.

“Ante up,” said MacLachlan. “Nickels in.”

Charlie reached into his pocket, withdrew a dozen or so coins, and dropped them on the table. He steered a nickel into the pot.

“Speaking of anteing up, that was quite a move you made in Appropriations,” MacLachlan said. “Not sitting out any hands, I see.” He smiled.

As much as he hated to relive the event that had led him to speak up at the previous week’s meeting, Charlie knew this was his moment. Looking at his cards, he began: “Ten days after we landed on Omaha Beach, on June seventeenth, our orders were to seize Isigny, the bridge over the Vire River, then recapture Saint-L?, La Madeleine, Pont Renard, La Heresneserie, on and on. Basically nonstop combat until we met up with the Soviets at the Elbe.”

The two men were listening intently as Charlie paused to sip his drink.

“Cards?” MacLachlan asked.

Charlie looked at his hand and threw down the two he didn’t want. MacLachlan tossed replacements in front of him. An eight of hearts and a nine of spades. A straight, almost a straight flush.

MacLachlan gave Strongfellow three cards and gave one to himself. They assessed their hands as Charlie continued.

“So we were in the midst of recapturing Le Meaune. We had Easy Company with us too. There were Jerries everywhere, and Vichy French. It was a mess. You could hardly tell who was on whose side.”

“Open with a dime,” said MacLachlan. Charlie moved a dime from his pile to the center of the table.

“I see you,” he said.

“See you and raise,” Strongfellow said, putting fifteen cents into the pot. He slid a cigar from his inside suit-jacket pocket and began lighting it, swirling the cigar, sucking in, and waving the lighter beneath it. Charlie was momentarily confused, since he’d thought Mormons didn’t smoke, but he let it pass. None of his business.

“We were in a farmhouse outside of town, me and my platoon,” Charlie continued. “Mortars were going off in the distance but nothing near us. This French family was being friendly. Mom, dad, four kids, a grandma. We were just talking, trying to communicate—none of us spoke French—trying to figure out which Germans were around. And suddenly, the older son, maybe sixteen, took out a knife and tried to stab me. He was scared sloppy, and the blade hit my helmet, which I was holding.”

Strongfellow leaned back on the couch. MacLachlan took a sip from his glass.

“So we restrained the kid and got concerned that something was going on, you know? We looked around the house, found nothing, then told the dad to show us the barn. He was nervous. He insisted on taking two of his kids with him, a boy and girl. Young. Under ten. I guess his thinking was that if they were with him, we’d be less inclined to kill him.

“It was me, Rodriguez, Hillman…” Charlie could name all his men in his sleep, but he realized it didn’t much matter to the other congressmen. “Anyway, most of my platoon went with me, and a couple stayed back in the house.” He vividly recalled the faces of the men in his platoon, a motley gang of teenagers and guys in their thirties, some educated and others street-smart.

“So we’re in the barn,” Charlie went on, “and Rodriguez, this skinny private first class from Spanish Harlem, he notices some crates in a stall. They don’t look like they belong there, so he goes to check it out, and right at that moment a mortar explodes outside. Parts of the barn are blown away, a support beam falls right on top of the French family, and some sort of gas starts seeping out of one of the crates.”

“Gas?” said Strongfellow. “Krauts didn’t use gas.”

“Not on soldiers, they didn’t,” MacLachlan corrected. “Jews were another story.”

“I don’t know that it was German gas. It might have been left over from the First World War. Who knows where it came from. Anyway, Hillman, our platoon sergeant, shouted for us to put on our gas masks, so we all fastened these cheap rubber things around our heads. Mortars are still going off outside the barn so no one runs out, but we all sprint to the other end of the barn. Except the family. And Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s pinned down under the beam too. And he can’t even reach his mask.

“Hillman had always thought the masks were pieces of garbage, so when he looked at me through the cheap plastic, I knew what he was thinking. I was the captain, though, and we had a man in trouble. I grabbed Corporal Miller’s mask, told the platoon sergeant to follow me, and we ran to Rodriguez. I put the mask over Rodriguez’s face while Hillman tried to move the beam off Rodriguez and the French family. More of my guys came over, with their masks on, and they all tried to move the beam. But then they started choking. With the masks on. Rodriguez, too, was choking. With his mask on. The French kids and the dad were choking without masks.”