him in honor of Frank Sinatra, who happened to be my hero at the time. When I walked along De Keyserlei, with my greatcoat collar turned up, I liked to think that I looked as cool and edgy as Frank Sinatra did.
“How’s it going, Frank?” I asked him. “Hope you’ve been conducting yourself with decorum.”
Frank was a pretty obedient dog but now and again he had a fit of the loonies, which Roger Du Croix said was brought on by him picking up the smell of dead rats.
Corporal Little said, “He’s been fine, sir. I fed him those marrowbones and then he took a dump around the corner.”
“Well, thanks so much for the update,” I said. “Listen — we’ll be going out tonight, soon as it gets dark.”
Corporal Little looked up at the flat, narrow front of No. 5 Markgravestraat and said, “Screechers?”
“No question about it. They split her open like a herring.”
“Holy Christ. Did you find out who she was?”
“Ann De Wouters, aged twenty-eight or thereabouts. I don’t know why they specifically came looking for
Corporal Little looked around, his eyes narrowed against the bright gray October light. “Think they’ve gotten far?”
“I don’t think so. By the time they finished with her it must have been nearly daylight, and this whole area was heaving with Canucks by oh-four-thirty. My guess is that they’ve gone to ground someplace close by.”
Corporal Little reached down and tugged Frank’s ears. “Hear that, boy? We’re going to go Screecher- hunting!”
Corporal Henry Little was an amiable, wide-shouldered young man with a red crew cut and a face covered in mustard-colored freckles. He had a snub nose and bright blue eyes that looked permanently surprised, although I had never yet known him to be surprised by anything. Even when it was first explained to him what his duties would be, he did nothing but nod and say, “OK, sure,” as if hunting vampires through the shattered cities of France and Belgium was no more unusual than chasing rabbits through the underbrush. Corporal Little’s family had bred pedigree tracking dogs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was why the detachment had enlisted him to help me. If Bloodhoundese had been a language, Corporal Little would have been word-perfect. Frank had only to lift up his head and stare at Corporal Little with those mournful, hung-over eyes, and Corporal Little would know exactly what he wanted. “Cookie, Frank?” Frank had a thing for
We climbed into my Jeep and Corporal Little drove us back through the narrow sewage-smelling streets, jolting over the cobbles until I felt that my teeth were going to shatter. We passed a dead horse lying on the sidewalk. A German shell had landed in the square two days ago and torn open a big triangular flap in its stomach, so a passerby had killed it with a hammer.
Somewhere off to the northwest, from the direction of the Walcheren peninsula, I could hear artillery fire, like somebody banging encyclopedias shut.
We turned into Keizerstraat and stopped outside De Witte Lelie Hotel. It was a small, old-style building with a sixteenth-century facade. The lobby had oak-paneled walls and a brown marble floor and it was milling with officers from the British 11th Armored Division, as well as an argumentative crowd of Belgian politicians, waving their arms and pushing each other and shouting in French. The British officers looked too tired to care. One of them was sleeping in an armchair with his mouth wide open.
I went to the desk where the deputy manager was trying to rub soup from the front of his shirt with spit.
“I need to talk to Leo Coopman.”
He stopped rubbing his shirt and looked at me with bulging brown eyes.
“It’s important,” I said. “I need to talk to him about Ann De Wouters. Do you think you can get in touch with him?”
The deputy manager pulled a face that could have meant “yes” or “possibly” or “why on earth are you asking me?”
“I’ll be in my room until eight,” I told him. I tapped my wristwatch and said, “
Corporal Little and I went up in the rickety elevator to the fourth floor. Frank sat staring up at us and panting.
“Ann De Wouter’s children were in the room when they killed her,” I said. “Lucky for the boy he didn’t wake up, but the girl did.” I could see myself in the mirror. I hadn’t realized I looked so haggard. My hair was greasy and flopping over my forehead, and the mottled glass made it appear as if I had some kind of skin disease.
“She give you any idea what they looked like?”
“No. Too dark. But she was pretty sure that there were three of them, and she saw that one of them was wearing the wheel.”
We walked along the long blue-carpeted corridor until we reached 413. Considering there was a war on, my room was surprisingly sumptuous, with a huge four-poster bed covered in a gold-and-cream bedspread, and gilded armchairs upholstered to match. On the walls hung several somber landscapes of Ghent and Louvain, with clouds and canals. A pair of gray riding britches hung from the hook on the back of the door, with dangling suspenders still attached. These had belonged to the German officer who had occupied this room only days before we had arrived. Corporal Little unclipped Frank’s leash and let him trot into the bathroom to lap water out of the toilet.
I went to the windows and closed them. The maid had opened them every morning since we had arrived here last week, even though there was no heat. I opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, lit one and blew smoke out of my nose. Then I unfolded my street map of Antwerp and spread it out over the glass-topped table.
“Here’s Markgravestraat, where Ann De Wouters was killed, and this is the way the Canadian division was coming in, so it’s pretty unlikely that the Screechers would have tried to escape along Martenstraat. I reckon they left the building by the back entrance, which would have taken them out
Corporal Little studied the map carefully. “I don’t reckon they would have headed for the river, sir. Where would they go from there?”
I agreed with him. They couldn’t have escaped north because the Germans had blown all the bridges over the Albert Canal. Besides, the Brits were holding the waterfront area and most of the Brits were untrained conscripts — waiters and bank clerks and greengrocers — and they were even more trigger-happy than the Poles. They would let loose a wild fusillade of poorly aimed rifle-fire and then shout “ ’Oo goes there?” afterward.
I circled a five-block area with my pencil. “We’ll start in this streets around Kipdorp and work our way eastward along Sant Jacobs Markt.”
Corporal Little massaged the back of his prickly neck. “That’s going to be one hell of a job, sir, with respect. Think of all them hundreds of cellars they could be lying low in. Think of all of them hundreds of attics, and all of them hundreds of closets and linen chests and steamer-trunks. It could easy take us
“We’ll find them, Henry, I promise you. I have a hunch about these particular Screechers.”
“With respect, sir, you had a hunch about those Screechers in Rouen; and you had another hunch about those Screechers in Brionne.”
“I know. But those Screechers we caught in France, they were like cornered rats, weren’t they? They were running and hiding and it took everything we could do to catch up with them.”
“Well, sure. But what makes these guys any different?”
“Think about it. They must have been keeping themselves holed up someplace in the city center for the past five weeks. Either that, or they’ve had the brass cojones to make their way back in. They wanted to have their revenge on Ann De Wouters, and they obviously didn’t care what chances they took. They were German-speaking, right? But they walked through a city crowded with British and Canadian troops, and they cut a woman open in front of her children, and they stayed there long enough to drink ninety percent of her blood.”
Corporal Little looked impressed but still slightly mystified. “So what does this specifically lead you to
