'Like the British.'
'No, Herr commandant.'
Von Reiter shrugged again, grinning.
'You should perhaps learn. As I have. Perhaps after the war I will write a book containing all the music and words to the filthy British songs and thus I will make some money to welcome my old age.' The commandant laughed out loud.
'Sometimes we must learn to accommodate that which we also hate,' he said. Then he turned his back on Tommy and stared out of his window at the two compounds. Tommy moved swiftly through the office door, unsure whether he had just been threatened or warned, and thinking that there was probably much the same menace contained within each.
Tommy passed a game of mouse roulette going on in one of the bunk rooms as he hurried to Renaday and Pryce's quarters.
A half-dozen British officers were seated around a table, each with a modest stack of cigarettes, chocolate, or some other foodstuffs in front of them. Betting materials. In the center was a small carton, with air holes punched in the sides.
The men were shouting, joking, mercilessly insulting and teasing each other, back and forth. American pilots' obscenities tended toward the short and brutal. The British, however, seemed to take some delight in the exaggerations and florid language of their verbal assaults. The air was filled with these.
But at a sudden signal from the croupier, a lanky, thickly bearded pilot wearing an old gray blanket tied around his waist as a sort of half-kilt, half-dress, the men grew instantly silent. Then, once the quiet was complete, the croupier lifted the lid of the box and a captured mouse timidly peeked out over the edge.
Mouse roulette was simple. With a little prodding and encouragement from the croupier, the mouse would tumble onto the tabletop, and look about himself at the waiting but absolutely stock-still, hardly breathing, rigid and perfectly silent men. The only rule was that no one could do anything to attract the mouse in the slightest; the terrified kriegie mouse would eventually break out in one direction, scurrying toward what it so fervently believed was the least threatening presence and safety. Whichever man was closest to the breakout was declared the winner. The problem with mouse roulette, of course, was that more often than not, the fleeing mouse would try to escape into the space between two of the men, which led to great mock disputes trying to assess what the mouse's true intentions had been, other than freedom, which was always its single-minded and greatest hope and desire.
Tommy watched the game for a moment, up until the point the mouse made its futile break, then he hurried on as the game dissolved into loud laughter and counterfeit arguments.
When he arrived at the door to the bunk room, he saw there was a third man sitting in the room alongside Pryce and Renaday, who looked up quickly as Tommy entered. The stranger was a dark-haired but fair-complected young man, very thin, like Pryce, with narrow wrists and a sunken chest, which gave him an oddly birdlike appearance behind a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. His smile was cocked slightly to the left, almost as if his entire body were leaning in that direction.
All three men rose, as Tommy stepped forward.
'Tommy, this is a friend of mine,' Hugh said briskly.
'Colin Sullivan. From the Emerald Isle.'
Tommy shook hands.
'Irish?' he asked.
'I am, indeed,' Sullivan replied.
'Irish and Spitfires,' he added. Tommy had difficulty imagining the slight young man wrestling with the controls of a fighter plane, but did not say this out loud.
'Colin most generously has offered to help out,' Phillip Pryce said.
'Show him, my boy.'
The Irishman reached down and Tommy saw that he had a large sketch pad half-stuck under the bed.
'Actually,' Sullivan said to Tommy, 'Irish, Spitfires, and three boring years at the London School of Design before getting involved in all the patriotic foolishness that seems to have landed me here.'
Sullivan opened the sketch pad, and handed Tommy the first drawing. It was a dark vision of Trader Vic's body, stuffed into the Abort stall, rendered mainly in the gradations of gray created by a charcoal pencil.
'I had to work with Hugh's recollections,' Sullivan said, smiling.
'And surely you know that the Canadians, being a hairy and rough-hewn people as wild as Indians and with the imaginations of buffalo, have no natural gifts for the poetry of description, like my countrymen and myself,' he said, tossing a quick smile at a grimacing, but obviously pleased, Hugh Renaday.
'So it's the very best I could do, allowing for my limited resources…'
Tommy thought the sketch caught the murdered man's figure perfectly. It was both nightmarish and brutal, in the same space. Sullivan had used some precious paints to display the modest blood streaks on the American's body. They stood out sharply, in dramatic contrast to the darker, somber tones of the pencil's shadings.
'This is fantastic,' Tommy said.
'That's exactly what Vic looked like. Are there more?'
'Aye, absolutely,' Sullivan said, with a quick grin.
'Not precisely what my old life-drawing professor probably had in mind back in my school days, but he did always rather tediously lecture us to employ that which is at hand, and though I might prefer some naked fraulein posing provocatively with a thank-you-very-much smile…'
He handed a second drawing to Tommy. This showed the critical neck wound on Trader Vic's body.
'I worked with him on that one,' Hugh said.
'Now what we'll need to do is take it and show it to the Yank who examined the body, just to make certain it's accurate.'
Tommy flipped to another sketch, this a drawing of the interior of the Abort displaying distances and locations. An ornate, feathered arrow pointed toward the bloody footprint on the floor. A final sketch was a redoing of the tracing of the boot print that Hugh had done on the scene.
'A damn sight better than my clumsy efforts,' Renaday said, grinning.
'Like usual, all this was Phillip's idea. He knew Colin was my friend, but of course, I hadn't thought of putting him on the case.'
'It was fun,' Colin Sullivan said.
'Far more intriguing than yet another bloody drawing of the northeast guard tower.
That's the one that gets the best afternoon light, you know, and the one we in the camp art classes all dutifully troop out and draw every day that it's not raining.'
'I'm impressed,' Tommy said.
'These will help. I can't thank you enough.'
Sullivan shrugged.
'Back home in Belfast,' he said, now speaking slowly, 'well, let me put it to you this way, Mr. Hart: I'm Irish and I'm a Catholic, and that fact alone should tell you that I've been treated like a nigger probably every bit as often as your Lincoln Scott has been in the
States. So, there you have it. I'm more than pleased to help out.'
Tommy was slightly taken aback by the forcefulness of the slight
Irishman's sudden vehemence.
'These are excellent,' he said again. He was about to continue with praise, when he was interrupted by a cold and quiet voice from behind him.
'But there is an error,' the voice said.
The Allied fliers pivoted, and saw Hauptmann Heinrich Visser standing in the doorway, staring across the room directly at the drawing in
Tommy's hands.
