shot to hell. Nobody expected them to fight to the end. Why would they? You don’t expect a whole country to commit suicide.“
“They had a little help from bomber command.”
Muller nodded. “I don’t say they didn’t ask for it. But now it’s flat and we’ve got it. No food, nothing running-Berlin HQ has got its hands full just fixing the water mains.” He took a breath and looked directly at Jake. “We’ve got twenty million people to feed in our zone alone. The ones who aren’t starving are stealing bicycles just to get around. We’ve got a winter coming with no coal. Epidemics, if we’re not lucky, which we probably won’t be. DPs—” He waved his hand as if, overwhelmed, he’d run out of words. “We didn’t sign on for any of this,” he said, his voice as tired as his eyes, “but we’ve got it anyway. So there’s a lot to do.” He glanced at the room. “Seen enough?”
Jake nodded. “Thanks for the look. And the speech,” he added easily. “You wouldn’t be trying to tell me something, by any chance.”
Muller smiled patiently, Judge Hardy again. “Maybe just a little. I’ve been regular army all my life-we’re used to protecting our flanks. People who write about MG, maybe they should have some idea what we’re up against. A little perspective. We’re not all-well, come on, I’ll give you what you came for.”
“How did you end up here, anyway?” Jake said, following him out into the long hall.
“Like everyone else-they don’t need us in the field now, so we’ve got to serve our time out somewhere. I didn’t volunteer, if that’s what you mean. Tactical units don’t have much use for MG, think we’re just office boys. I wasn’t any different. Nobody’s going to get a promotion for fixing sewer lines. But nobody’s getting promoted in the field now either-the war’s over, they tell me-and I have a while to go before they pension me off. So. We’re long on old farts here. The civilians, that’s something else. Most of the time it’s some lawyer who sat out the war in Omaha and now wants a commission so he can call himself captain-they won’t sign on for the lower ranks. They get it too, the rank. What the rest of us had to work years for. It rubs a little, if you let it.”
“But you don’t.”
“I did. But it’s like anything else-the work takes over. You serve your country,” he said flatly, without a hint of irony. “I didn’t ask for it, but you know what? I think we’re doing one helluva job here, given everything. Or does that sound like another speech to you?“
“No.” Jake smiled. “It sounds like they ought to promote you.” “They won’t,” Muller said evenly, then stopped and faced him. “You know, this is probably my last post. I wouldn’t want to see-any mess. If you’re going to start flinging mud around, I’d appreciate a little early warning.”
“I’m not—”
“I know, you’re just curious. So are we. A man’s been killed. And the truth is, we have no way of finding out what happened. We don’t have Scotland Yard here, just some MPs arresting drunks. So we may never know. But if there’s anything that might, well, be a problem for us, that we do need to know.”
“What makes you think there is?”
“I don’t. But that’s what you’re fishing for, isn’t it?” He started walking again. “Look, all I’m asking is you meet me halfway on this. I don’t have to release any information. If you hadn’t been there at Potsdam-but you were, and you knew him. So now I’ve got a situation. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. But I don’t have to open this up to a lot of speculation either. I’m releasing it to you, not anybody else. If you do turn up something, okay, you’ve got yourself a story.”
“But if I don’t—”
“Then you don’t guess out loud. No mystery body. No unsolved anything. You might get some mileage out of that in the papers. But all we’d get is a lot of questions we can’t answer. That just eats time. We can’t afford that. There’s too much to do. All I’m asking is a little discretion.”
“And tell you in advance what I’m going to say.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t say it. Just tell me if it’s coming.”
“So you can deny it?”
“No,” Muller said, deadpan. “So I can duck.” He stopped at a door paned with translucent glass. “Here we are. Jeanie should have the copies by now.”
Jeanie was a pretty WAC whose red fingernails seemed too long for serious typing. She was putting carbon sheets into two beige folders and threw Muller a smile that Jake, amused, guessed was more than secretarial. Muller, however, was all business.
“Got those reports?”
She handed him one of the folders, then a message slip. “The general wants you at ten.”
“Come on, then,” he said to Jake, leading him into a plain office with an American flag in the corner. Muller belonged to the clean desk school-the only things on the empty surface were a pen set and a framed picture of a young soldier.
“Your boy?” Jake asked.
Muller nodded. “He was hit on Guadalcanal.”
“I‘ m sorry.
“No, not killed. Wounded. At least he’s out of it now.” Then, avoiding any more intimacy, he opened the folder, took out two carbon flimsies, and pushed them across the desk to Jake. “Service record. Casualty report.”
“You’re calling it a casualty?”
“It’s what we call the report,” Muller said, slightly annoyed. “It’s just a form. Anyway, now you know what we know.”
Jake skimmed the first sheet, a spare listing of dates and assignments. Patrick Tully. Natick, Mass. A little older than the boy in the picture on the desk. The casualty report Jake could have written himself. “Not much, is it?” he said.
“No.”
“What isn’t here? Any trouble before that didn’t make it into the record?”
“Not that I know of. Service record’s clean, no flags. A distinguished member of the United States Armed Forces. That’s what we’re going to write to his mother, anyway.”
“Yes,” Jake said. A person, not a number, a kid with a family, not as lucky as young Muller. “What about the money?”
“She’ll get that too, with his effects. APO money order. It was his, as far as we know. Let’s hope she thinks he saved his back pay.”
“How much was there? It doesn’t say.”
Muller looked at him, then nodded. “Fifty-six thousand marks. They convert at ten to one. So roughly five thousand dollars. That’s what the Russians gave us, anyway. They say some of it blew away.”
“So figure twice that. That’s a lot of back pay.”
“Maybe he was good at cards,” Muller said.
“What brings in that kind of money? On the black market.”
“Watches, mostly. If it ticks, the Russians’ll buy it. A Mickey Mouse can go for five hundred bucks.”
“That’s still a lot of watches.”
“That depends how long he was doing it. If he was doing it. Look, on the record? There is no black market. Sometimes supply depots come up a little short. Things disappear. One of the facts of wartime. The Germans are hungry. They’ll buy food any way they can. It’s about food. Naturally, we’re doing what we can to stop it.”
“And off the record?”
“Off the record, everybody does it. How do you stop a kid in a candy store? Want to do some quick arithmetic? A GFs allowed a carton of cigarettes a week at the PX. A nickel a pack, fifty cents a carton. On the street, it’s worth a hundred dollars-that’s five thousand dollars a year. Add in some chocolate, four bottles of liquor a month, another five thousand dollars. A package of food from home? Maybe some tuna fish, a can of soup? More. Lots more. It adds up. A guy can make a year’s salary just from his rations. You try stopping that. Officially, there’s no fraternization either. So how do we explain all the VD?”
Jake glanced down at the sheet. “He’d only been in Germany since May.”
“What do you want me to say? Some of our boys are more enterprising than others. You don’t have to be a big operator to make money in Germany. Last month our troops were paid about a million dollars. They sent three million home.” He paused. “Off the record.”
