jeep-mounted. 30 caliber machine gun pointed at us. Harry let the carbine drop to the ground.
'That's me,' I said, standing with my arms raised high. I didn't want to give him a chance to shoot first and ask no questions later. 'These two aren't with me, I just met them here.'
Elliott vaulted from his jeep and walked straight up to me, holstering his automatic as he did so.
'Lieutenant Boyle, you are one dumb son-of-a-bitch flatfoot, I'll tell you that right now.' His mustache twitched in what was almost a smile. I didn't like being caught much, and I liked being caught and insulted even less.
'Listen, Elliott, I'm sick of you and your Mafia pals. Do what you have to do and be glad you didn't end up like your flunkies in there.'
'Who are you talking about?'
'Legs and Box Hook.
Elliott stood there, looking at me, Harry, and Kaz for a long time, shaking his head sadly.
'Major,' he yelled, not taking his eyes off me. 'Major Harding! Come over here and take charge of these three.'
All the guns moved off us. An MP came running from the print shop and reported to Elliott, who listened and did that mustache twitch again. I saw a figure in the far jeep remove his helmet.
'Gentleman,' Harding said, 'I'm glad to see you are all right, but not happy at being shot at by you.'
'We thought… who…?' That was about all I could get out.
'This is Major John Elliott, Criminal Investigation Division. He's been working undercover as an AMGOT officer to track down a series of supply thefts and rumors of a counterfeit ring.'
'You're not one of them?' Kaz said, pointing to the print shop.
'Hell no, and I'm glad of it, from what I just learned. I've been on their trail since North Africa.'
'Rocko and Andrews,' I said, remembering what Howard had said about Rocko suckering Andrews in. I figured that part was true enough.
'Right. First radios, then more equipment went missing. We had some good leads, but when Rocko turned up dead and I lost Hutton, the trail ran out.'
'Lost Hutton? What do you mean?'
'Hutton was CID too. He worked in our communications center. We needed someone in the Signals outfit, and he volunteered.'
'That's why he had the number of the headquarters in Algiers written down. He was reporting to you.'
'Yep. He had several numbers in Algiers and at Forward Headquarters in Tunisia.'
'But how did you glom onto me?'
'I tracked down a couple of boys from the Eighty-second, Joe and Clancy. They told me about Hutton buying it up there, and once I convinced them I wasn't on a chickenshit detail, they told me that you'd given them his name as yours.'
'And that's when you started looking for me.'
'Right. Turned out Major Harding and I were both looking for you. CID had no idea about the operation you were involved with. The major filled me in.'
'Well, at the time, Major, neither did I. When I tried to put the pieces together, your name kept coming up. Then when I heard you had the MPs at the Signals Company looking for me-'
'You figured I was gunning for you. I was trying to help you, but you are one slippery customer.'
'I can vouch for that,' Harding said. 'Do you need us for anything now, Major?'
'Not unless you want to watch a fortune in scrip go up in smoke.'
'I'll be happy never to see another lira again,' I said.
'Come on, boys,' Harding said, leading us over to his jeep. In the passenger seat sat Sciafani, dressed in GI fatigues with a medic's bag in his lap.
'Enrico! What are you doing here?'
'I told Major Harding you would probably have been hit in the head again. Was I right?'
'And the arm,' Kaz added helpfully.
'I think I reinjured my leg,' Harry said, like a kid who didn't want to be left out.
'Patch 'em up,' Harding said. Sciafani grinned and dug into his medical kit. 'How about you, Lieutenant Kazimierz, any wounds?'
'I almost had my hand cut off, but I am quite fine, thank you.'
I hadn't often seen Harding at a loss for words, but he looked at Kaz with a stunned expression, then regrouped.
'Glad to hear it. Boyle, any loose ends here?'
'We let Vito Genovese go,' Kaz said flatly, as if he already regretted it.
'It's for the best, in the long run,' Harding said, in a hesitant whisper. He didn't like it much himself.
'As long as these MPs don't stick too many thousand-lira notes up their sleeves, that should do it. Frank Howard, otherwise known as Box Hook back in the New York dockyards, must have been the primary contact with Vito. He could run everything out of the Signals Company.'
'Who killed Rocko?' Harding asked.
'Don't know for sure. Probably not Vito, although he came to see Rocko that night. For that sort of dirty work, I'd bet it was Legs. Anyway, the whole song and dance about stealing the division payroll was a red herring. This was the real thing all along. Running off thousand-lira notes that no one knew about and laundering them through Mafia operations.'
'Smart. Made us focus on the payroll and all the time they were planning on printing their own money,' Harding said.
'Who is Charlotte?' Harry said, rubbing his chin.
'Had Howard been at the military government school at Charlottesville?' I asked.
'He had,' Elliott said. 'He took a course on civilian communications- maybe that was where he got the idea to link into the civilian phone lines. Since he didn't actually work for AMGOT, using Charlotte as a code name worked. Besides hinting at a female, if anyone overheard they might draw the conclusion it was someone from AMGOT, like me.'
'It had us wondering, all right. Ow!'
I winced as Sciafani checked the lump on my head and cleaned the dried blood from my hair. Harding passed a canteen around and we all took thirsty gulps. I felt the water wash away the grit in my throat and ran my tongue over my teeth. Everything was so hot and dry here that the air was always filled with the fine dust kicked up from the ground. The simple act of walking stirred up the ground and sent tiny bits of Sicily into your body, coating your lungs, staying with you, no matter how hard you tried to wash it away.
A sharp pain pulled at my arm, and Sciafani smiled apologetically as he drew another stitch across the wound. The pain reminded me how lucky I was to be alive.
'There are a couple of loose ends, Major,' I said. 'There's a third body in that building, a Sicilian carabiniere. Renzo Giannini. He was with us, and Howard shot him. I don't want anybody thinking he was part of the Mob. He volunteered to help us out.'
'I'll tell the local authorities,' Harding said.
'And I probably got an MP in a lot of hot water. He was detailed to hold me back at the Signals Company. Corporal Mike Miecznikowski. Turned out he was a cop too, and we got to talking, and pretty soon he looked the other way. We didn't know about Elliott being with CID. Anything you can do?'
'Jesus Christ on a crutch, Boyle! Did you enlist your own police force today? MPs, Sicilian cops. What 's next?'
'Sorry, Major. But I do owe the guy.'
'Well, I already let Nick go back to ONI without telling them about the blackmail attempt. Springing one more pal of yours who doesn't follow orders shouldn't set back the war effort too much.'
The heat must have gotten to Sam Harding. Bending the rules twice in one day?
'There, you should be fine,' Sciafani said. 'Stitches out in a week, keep it clean. You are lucky you did not get hit on the head in the same spot as before.'
'If I was really lucky, I wouldn't have gotten hit at all. My kind of luck seems to be limited to getting hit on the head in two different locations.'
