PART II

Chapter 4.

STEWART: MY FATHER'S LAWYER

Ac cording to the Record of Proceedings of my father's court-martial, a high-ranking JAG epartment lawyer from Eisenhower's headquarters, Barrington Leach, had been Dad's attorney. His name rang a bell, and a search online reminded me why. In 1950, Leach took a leave from the prominent Hartford law firm in which he was a partner to become Chief Counsel to Senator Estes Kefauver in his investigation of organized crime. The televised Kefauver Hearings introduced many Americans to the Mafia and, not coincidentally, to the privilege against self-incrimination. From then on "taking the Fifth" inevitably brought to mind the line of dark gentlemen in expensive suits who answered every question by reciting their rights from index cards adhering to their palms. It was Leach, most often, who was up there making them sweat.

After returning to Connecticut, Leach in time became a judge, eventually rising to the Connecticut Supreme Court. His name actually turns up in a few news accounts in the Johnson era as a potential candidate for the U. S. Supreme Court.

I had started researching Leach during the months I was stalemated by the government in my efforts to pry loose the court-martial file. (I finally got it in June 2004, but only because I could demonstrate by then that I knew virtually all the information contained there.) I had assumed that Leach, an experienced trial lawyer in 1945 and thus quite a bit older than Dad, had to be dead, and I only hoped that his family had kept his papers. In late October 2003, I called the Connecticut Supreme Court to locate Leach's next of kin.

"Did he die?" the clerk asked me. He turned from the phone, inquiring of a colleague with alarm, "Did Justice Leach die?" I could hear the question pingponging across the room, until the clerk came back on the line. "No, sir. Happy to say Justice Leach is still with us." He declined to provide an address or phone, but promised to forward any mail. Within a week, I had received a response, with a return address at the Northumberland Manor Assisted-Care Facility in West Hartford, written in a craggy hand that brought to mind that enduring children's toy, the Etch A Sketch.

I surely recall representing your father. David Dubin's court-martial remains one of the most perplexing matters of my life as a lawyer, and I am willing to discuss it with you. In answer to your inquiry, I have retained some materials relating to the case that you would probably wish to have. As you can see, writing letters is a particular burden at this stage of my life. We could converse by telephone, if need be, but, if I may be so bold, I suggest that, if possible, you pay me a visit.

While I am happy to provide you with my recollections and these papers, doing so is a bit sticky legally, inasmuch as your father was my client. You would set an old man's mind at ease if, when you came, you brought a letter from all your father's legal heirs--your mother, if she remains alive, and any siblings you have--stating that each of you relinquishes any objections related to what I share. I'd suggest you contact the lawyer who is handling the estate to help you. I will be happy to speak with him, if he likes.

Without being alarmist, I call your attention to the fact that I am ninety-six years old and that I no longer purchase green bananas. I look forward to meeting you soon.

With all good wishes, Barrington V. S. Leach

Watching me dash around the country, passing hours in dank library basements and talking about opposition from the CIA, the members of my family were convinced that my elevator had stopped between floors. Nona regarded it as conclusive proof that she'd gotten out at the right time, while my daughters offered a succinct explanation to anyone who asked: "Dad's on crack."

My mother said the least, but might have been the most unhappy. Mom remained as fiercely possessive of Dad in death as she had always been. She had picked his suit and tie each day and had remained his principal counselor on the wary maneuverings of the commercial world, where he was often led astray by his native inclination to see almost every issue as a question of principle. But in my house, each of us depended on Mom's vitality and shrewdness, regarding it as a fact-established that my mother, as a camp survivor, had an extra measure of whatever living required. She took it as my single greatest fault that I had not been smart enough to marry someone like her.

In light of all of that, it was predictable that she wouldn't like me claiming a piece of my father on my own. There were no tirades, just occasional remarks indicating that she found it distasteful that I was making Dad's Army secrets a professional project. To her it was as if I were beating drums with bones I'd uncovered in the graveyard. And it was worse than cruel irony that I was digging into a period whose anguish they'd spent a lifetime trying to inter.

Which made Leach's letter a problem. My sister would do what Mom said. But it would take some talking to get my mother to sign off. I strategized for at least a week. Then one morning when I stopped in, as I did most days, I sat her down at the kitchen table, where important family discussions always have occurred, and made my pitch. She listened avidly, her small black eyes intent, and asked for a day or two to think. I left with hope.

But walking in a week later, I knew from my first breath that I was doomed. She'd baked. Rugelach, an all-time favorite, sat on the kitchen table. She might as well have used the pastries as blocks to spell out COMFORT FOOD. Being who I am, I ate, and being who she is, she waited until I was in the initial stage of near delirium before she started.

"Stewart," she said, "about this lawyer and his papers. Stewart, I have thought very hard. I tell you, with all my heart, I believe your father alav hashalom, would be moved to tears to know that you have made this effort to understand his life. And the one question I have asked myself for the last few days is whether that might have made him reconsider. Because I agree with what you said when Daddy died, Stewart, that he must have made a choice not to discuss this with his family. But in the end, you are asking me to set aside my loyalty to him. It is not for me to imagine new decisions for your father now, Stewart. He is entitled to my support in his judgments about what he wanted to say about his own life."

I whined, of course. I was his kid, I said. I was entitled to know. That remark provoked her.

"Stewart, where is it written that a parent is required to become your journalistic subject? Is giving life to a child, Stewart, like running for public office, where every piece of dirty linen is open to inspection? Is it not a parent's right to be understood on his own terms? Do you pretend that your daughters know every seamy detail of your youth?"

That was a low blow, but effective. I took a second.

"Mom, don't you want to know the story?"

"Stewart, I know the only story that matters, and I knew it from the moment I fell in love with your father in the concentration camp. David Dubin was kind. He was intelligent, educated. Jewish. I could tell at once he was a loyal person, a person of values.

What more could matter to me, or to you? Then. Or now?"

Naturally, I phoned my sister. Mom could dress this up however she liked, I said, claiming she was bound by Dad's wishes, but it was really about her. And being in control.

"God, Stewie, why do you always make her the bad guy? So what if it's about her? She lived with the man for fifty-eight years. Now you come along to tell her that her husband was a convict? Of course she doesn't care to hear the details. Leave her alone. If you have to do this, do it when she's gone.

I reminded Sarah that Leach was ninety-six. "Look," I offered, "I swear I won't tell her anything I find out."

"Oh, Stew," my sister said, tart as always, "when was the last time you kept a secret? Haven't you figured out yet what you liked about being a reporter? I'll sign whatever you like after she's gone. But I don't want to hear another word about this now. Maybe you should spend some time asking yourself why you're hyperventilating to learn all this."

I already had. Every day and every night. But the simplest answer to Sarah was probably the best: he was my father. We can all dream up the hero we want to be when we're adolescents and spend our adult years trying to live out the ideal, but sooner or later we each realize that our options are limited by the raw materials, that dose of DNA we get and the imprinting of early childhood. As a young man, I did not see myself in Dad. Now when I go through the many photos I have assembled from his youth, there are moments when I cannot tell whether the fellow standing there is he or I. That body, which years ago stopped belonging to either of us, was fundamentally one: the same corrupted posture, sagging somehow from a point between the shoulder blades, the same dark-complected look like a warm tan, the same uncertain approach to the camera, unsure how much to surrender. I have his nose, they say, and at moments, his haunted eyes. From Dad I got my taste for salty things, and my acceptance of the Trappers' losses as a piece of fate.

In my research, I discovered many unacknowledged debts I owed my father. Scouring his letters, and later, what he had written for Leach, I was struck that my old man could turn a phrase. My father spent two hours every night reading any novel he could get his hands on, a habit so unvarying that he actually wore two rawhide stripes into the leather ottoman where he perched his feet. Yet it had never clicked that Dad was probably the source of my own interest in writing, even though I'd always been heartened by his quiet pride in my bylines. Now, looking back, I realized that he must have intervened to get my mother to quit her pestering about law school.

Yet it was not the things I liked about myself that fed my hunger to find out what he'd done wrong. In the end, I fear it was probably more of the affliction that had made me a happy observer in criminal courtrooms for decades: I wanted to know Dad's failings, so I'd feel better about my own.

And given what happened next, you might say that self-acceptance is not all that it's cracked up to be. But I have always been a slave to impulse, and slow to face the fact. When I look in the mirror, I see a trim guy, inconveniently burdened with a few dozen pounds that belong to someone else. That's because the thinner fellow, with his good intentions, generally holds the rudder on my soul. On a perpetual diet, I'm the guy at the restaurant who orders the little salad that comes topped with a tiny pellet of poached salmon--before I eat the French fries off everybody else's plates. My eternal undoing arrives in these instants when my appetites are more than I can handle. My saddest turn as a courthouse reporter came in the early '90s as I was walking past the jury room and, with no planning whatsoever, pressed my ear to the door, hoping for a scoop on an important verdict. When a bailiff caught me, I was suspended from the paper for thirty days and, far worse, showered doubt on every honest success before and after. It's a lifetime pattern. I resist. I struggle. But I also succumb.

Which in this case means that when I wrote back to Barrington Leach, I not only set a date to visit, but formally released him from any legal responsibility for what he might reveal. How? I simply stated that my mother had died a few years ago and that I was an only child. Just like the crooks I covered for twenty years, I told myself that nobody would ever know.

DAVID: MAJOR ROBERT MARTIN

October 22, 1944

With the Third Army in France

Dearest Grace, I have been sent to the front (where all remains quiet, so please don't worry) to do a little investigation, involving Army politics among the brass. Since I have been able to borrow a typewriter, I wanted to say hello and tell you I think of you always.

Yesterday was really a banner day, as I received four airmails and a V-mail from you. I've brought all of them with me to read a second (and third!) time. In your V-mail, dearest, you tell me of your cold--please take care of yourself. If you don't feel well, stay home from school. I don't want anything happening to you--you mean too much to me, and we have too much living together in the near future for you to take any chances.

Tonight, my bed will be a cot in a tent, a reminder of how embarrassingly good life is in Nancy. Eisley and I have found new quarters with Madame Vaillot, whose husband has been carted off by the Germans to God knows where. She greets us each morning at 6:30 a. M. with strong coffee and our laundry, for which she refuses to take any money. She says in cultivated French, "We are repaid enough by your keeping the Germans out and protecting us." So what can we say? Our room is nice, but cold with the constant rains, and fuel is in short enough supply that we start a fire only if we are going to be awake in the room for a while, which we seldom are.

I've been thinking about the nest egg I'll have when the day comes that I get back. With allowances, I should be making around $350 per month when my promotion comes through (November 1, they swear). I'm going to send $300 a month to Mom, by way of a Class E allotment, to put into my savings account. (Please tell my dad to make sure Mom uses a few bucks to buy a new frock or something as a birthday gift from me.

They won't do it unless you insist on my behalf.) There will be $300 mustering-out pay plus the insurance policy of $250 I have, and fifteen or twenty war bonds. All in all, I'm thinking you're right and that I should open my own law office. There may even be enough left over to buy a jalopy. I wouldn't mind getting a little joy out of this money. Other boys have done more to earn it, but it's not a picnic being away from all of you. I still keep my house key in my wallet. Call it loony if you like, but several times a day, I'll reach to my back pocket and feel its impression against the leather, and know that I have a place to return to.

Well, I'm getting maudlin, so I'll stop. Love forever, David

Lieutenant Colonel Brunson, General Teedle's personnel officer, had said that Martin and the remainder of his Operational Group were quartered at the country estate of the Comtesse de Lemolland, west and south of Bezange-la-Petite, near the skirmishing edge of the front. Brunson couldn't explain how Martin had arranged such a scenic billet, but it was clear that many of Teedle's officers, camped in tents on wet ground, had taken notice.

It was nearly noon the next day before the i8th Division's motor pool surrendered a jeep to us, and I thought for a second that Bidwell was going to get into a fistfight with the private filling the tank, who might as well have been using an eyedropper.

"That ain't but a third of the gas we come with," Biddy told him.

"Sarge," the boy said, "this here's my orders. And you'd do better to look close at that map than keep your eye on me. Krauts are two miles from where you're headed. One wrong turn, Sarge, and your war might end early."

As we drove north into the hills, the sun arrived like a blast of horns, lighting up the isolated groves of trees in full fall color. This was rolling country, principally open fields, resembling southern Wisconsin, where my parents sometimes took us for long Sunday drives in my Uncle Manny's borrowed Model A when I was a boy. After a day together, Bidwell had become more approachable and we laughed about the private who'd parceled out gasoline as if he expected us not to come back. Half an hour later, when we heard the echo of mortars and the pecking of rifle fire from the east, we grew a trifle more serious.

I asked Biddy if this was the closest he'd been to the front. A sardonic snort escaped him.

"D-Day," he said. "That count, Lieutenant? D plus one, actually. Landed my whole MP company on Omaha. Needed us to take custody of the POWs, but we had to scrap our way up that beach like everybody else.

"D-Day! My God, I bet this duty seems boring after that.

He found the idea amusing.

"Hell no, Lieutenant. That was the like of some-thin I don't never wanna see again. Truth to tell, I didn't care much for it when they made me an MP. Basic, I put in for an engineering company, truck mechanic. I been fixing cars at home a couple years since I left high school, figured it'd only make sense. But this here is the Army. My orders come through sayin 'Provost Marshal Section,' I had to ask what all that was, and cussed when they told me. I don't hold nothin 'gainst po-licemen,-Lieutenant, but it ain't what I ever had a mind to do. Turns out, though, it got its good side. Generally speaking, MPs don't get there till the shooting's over and Mama's little boy here, he promised her he's gonna do his best not to get hisself killed. You can keep combat, Lieutenant. All I care for is take a few pictures and go home."

Like half the soldiers I knew, who remained part tourist, Bidwell always had a camera in his hand. Given his size, he looked almost dainty when he put it to his eye. Most troops took photos of the wreckage of war and of their buddies, but Biddy seemed more studious about it and, typical of his solitary ways, would go off at moments and fix on particular objects and scenes that didn't appear to hold much. interest. Driving yesterday, we fell in with the convoy from the 134th and came to a halt when they did, so we could empty our bladders in a roadside ditch. The drivers were Negro troops, as was often the case, and six or seven of them had gathered for a little society, since the white boys as a rule would have nothing to do with them. From behind one of the trucks, Biddy snapped several photos of the colored men carrying on with one another over their cigarettes. It had disturbed me that he hadn't bothered to get their permission.

Recollected, the incident brought Biddy's Georgia roots to mind and I asked when his people had left there and where they'd ended up. He seemed to have no interest in answering. That was this man's army. From boot camp on there were guys who showed you photos of their ma and pa and sweethearts and told you every imaginable detail about them, right down to dress size, and others who wanted to keep home as far from this mess as possible. I was in the latter group anyway, but I prodded a bit now, because I wanted to be sure before criticizing Bidwell's manner with the coloreds that he'd actually had the chance to learn the difference between North and South.

"Daddy, he was a tenant farmer down there. His people been workin that patch, only God Hisself knows how long, hundred years, two hundred years, but it just didn't make no sense to him, when times got so bad. In 1935 he picked us all up and moved us North. He was thinkin to find somethin in a factory, I guess."

"Yes, but where did you settle, Bidwell?"

He smiled for a second while he looked over the road.

"Ever hear of Kindle County?"

I actually cried out. "Dear God, Biddy! You must have heard me talk to Eisley a dozen times about home. Why didn't you say anything? I'm half a world away and it turns out I'm touring around with a neighbor."

"'Cause of just that, Lieutenant. Wasn't much way you and me was neighbors."

"Don't be so sure, Biddy. I don't come from the high and mighty. My father's a shoemaker." I rarely shared this detail, fearing it might undermine me, both among fellow officers and the troops, and as I'd anticipated, I could see I'd caught Bidwell by surprise. "Pop's been at that trade since he was a boy, right after he landed in the U. S. An uncle took him in and taught him. I grew up in a three-flat on Deering Road. The folks are still there. What about you?"

Biddy shook his head as if he didn't know.

"We was all over," he said. "You know how that goes when a man's scratchin for work. Come the end of the month, sometimes Dad and the landlord wudn't seein eye to eye. I must have been near to eighteen 'fore I stopped in askin why we didn't move in daytime like other folks." He smiled at the memory, but his green eyes drifted over to see what I made of that. As the son of a cobbler, though, I knew a lot about hard times. In the Depression, Pa had plenty of work because people wanted to make their shoes last. But many of them couldn't come up with the six bits once their footwear was mended. Some pairs left on credit, if Pa knew who he was talking to, even when it was all but certain he'd never get paid. But he'd let a man walk out barefoot rather than get cheated.

After hearing the gunfire, we stopped several times to check directions with the locals. In the end, a farmer on a horse trotted ahead of us and pointed out the Comtesse's narrow drive, which we might well have missed amid the heavy brush. The Lemolland property was bounded by an old stone fence, topped in the French way in red roofing tiles, but the gate was open and we headed up an incline beside the vineyards, where several workers were tilling among the stubby twists of the grapevines. The plants, hanging on long wire supports, looked to have been recently harvested.

At the top, we found a square formation of joined sand-colored buildings. I thought of a fort, but I suppose the arrangement was a small replica of a feudal manor. Each wing was several stories high, sporting long red jalousies folded back beside the deep windows and topped with a steep mansard roof. Huge wooden doors were thrown open on an arch that passed through the building facing us, and we drove into a vast cobblestone courtyard. At the far end stood the house. It incorporated a round tower that had to date from the Middle Ages, giving the residence the look of a little castle.

An unshaved worker with a hoe watched us warily as we stopped. Visible behind a corner of the Comtesse's chateau were a ramshackle chicken coop and a pasture, where two cows swished their tails.

At the house, I pulled several times on a bell rope until the door was parted by a large dark man, with the stub of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and one eye closed to the smoke. He was a Gypsy, with a potato face and women's-length hair tied behind him. In French, I asked for Major Martin. The Gypsy took a second surveying our uniforms, then motioned us in and bellowed up a staircase at his right.

"Ro-bert," he called, giving the name the French pronunciation, without a 't.' "Un moment," he told us, then disappeared out the door we'd entered.

Biddy and I remained in the entry for several minutes. The old house had stone walls of monumental thickness. It was dark and still, except for the bright kitchen which lay ahead of us at the end of a hall. From there, I could hear voices and a pump handle squealing, and smell pleasant aromas--burning wood and something cooking. Standing here, I was reminded of waiting in the foyer of Grace's great stone house, when I would pick her up for the evening. They were excruciating moments for me, especially when her father was around, since he was convinced I was a fortune hunter. For my part, the distaste was mutual. Privately, I realized that Horace Morton would never accept my good intentions regarding his daughter, because he himself wouldn't have pursued any girl without first knowing all about her bank account.

With great pounding, a middle-sized man in a khaki Army officer's shirt bounded down the heavy stairs. He wore no tie or insignia but there was a trench knife on his belt, in addition to a bayonet in its scabbard. This, without question, was Major Martin.

Biddy and I saluted. Smiling, he tapped his forehead, but only to be polite.

"We don't do that around here," he said. The Operational Groups, as I was to learn, proceeded with a minimum of military formalities. There was a "leader" from whom all took direction, but the OGs included not only members of the armed forces of several nations, but civilians in the underground who had no duty to adhere to Army rules.

"Where from?" Martin asked, when I gave him my name. I repeated that I was with Staff Judge Advocate, Third Army, which brought a laugh. "No, I can see that wreath on your lapel, son. Where in the States? Where's the home this war has taken you away from?"

When I told him Kindle County, he brightened. "Oh, that's a swell place. I've had some swell times there." He shared a few memories of a Negro speakeasy in the North End, then asked about my education and my family. These were not the kind of questions a superior officer usually bothered with on first meeting, and I enjoyed his attention. He made similar inquiries of Biddy, who predictably retreated rather than offer much of a-response.

Martin was no more than five foot ten, but remarkable to behold, dark haired, strong jawed, and vibrating with physical energy. Much like Grace, he had the all-American looks, with tidy, balanced features, that I, with my long nose and eyes shadowed in their sallow orbits, always envied. A single black curl fell across the center of Robert Martin's forehead, and even racing down the stairs he made an impression of unusual agility. Despite addressing me as "son," he did not look to be much more than forty.

He interrupted when I tried to explain my mission here.

"Oh, I've heard about that," he said with a brief smile, waving us behind him down the hall. When we entered the kitchen, a young woman was over the sink washing her hair beneath the cast-iron pump. She was small and striking, dressed in surplus camouflage fatigues far too large for her, and she glanced my way immediately to size me up. She had a tiny, almost childlike face, but it held an older, ruthlessly cool aspect. I could see at once that this was the woman who was the problem.

Finding herself unimpressed, she went back to wringing out her short wavy tresses over the copper basin. At the same time, she spoke to Martin.

"Qui sont-ils?" Who are they?

Martin answered her in French. "The Lieutenant is sent by Teedle."

"Merde," she replied. "Tell them to go away." She reached beside her and lit a cigarette.

"By and by," he answered. He waited until she was done frisking a towel through her hair, then made introductions in English. She was Gita Lodz, a member of OG Stemwinder and the FTP, FrancsTireurs et Partisans, one of the largest resistance organizations, union-oriented and supposedly red. When Martin gave Mademoiselle Lodz our names, she offered a smile as purely formal as a curtsy.

"Enchante," I answered, thinking that this might clue them that I had understood their conversation, but I saw no sign that either took it as more than a tourist courtesy.

"Excuse, pliss," Gita Lodz said in English, "I go." She had a heavy Slavic accent, undetectable to my ear when she had spoken French. Hastily she recovered her cigarette from the sink edge as she left.

A meal of some kind was under way and a servant in an apron was stirring a huge iron pot on the black stove. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was rustic but the room was large and light. Copper pans with burned bottoms were suspended from the exposed timbers of the ceiling, and blue delft plates decorated the walls, a sure sign that this place had so far escaped the war.

"You've arranged charming quarters, Major," I said.

"Quite," he said. "Stemwinder is on R and R with the war at a standstill. Here it seems far away." He swept his arm grandly. The Comtesse de Lemolland is a magnificent patriot and a great friend to our OG."

The house, he said, had been the country home of the Comtesse's family, bankers from Nancy, since the time of Napoleon. She had maintained it even after marrying the Comte de Lemolland after the First War, when her principal residence became a chateau in the Cotes-du-Nord. This property had not suffered as badly under the Germans as many others. Periodically, SS would take over the house as a resort for officers, and a German garrison would come each fall to confiscate crops and wine.

Nonetheless, with the Comtesse's return, the vineyard and farm were already returning to life. The Comtesse herself, Martin confided, was not doing as well. Her son, Gilles, a member of another resistance group, Forces Francaises de l'Interieur, FFI, had been confirmed captured and burned alive by the Nazis earlier this month. The old woman had largely kept to herself since then.

"Nonetheless," said Martin, "she would never forgive me if an American officer visited her home and I did not allow her to say a word of welcome. You will enjoy meeting her. She is a remarkable and gallant woman." Preparing to summon the Comtesse, Martin caught sight of Mademoiselle Lodz peeking into the kitchen, probably to see if we had yet been dispatched. She was now in country attire, a blouse with ruffled sleeves and a flowered dress with a bib and flouncy skirt.

"Va leur parler"--Talk to them--he told her, gesturing her in. To us he said, "If you chaps will excuse me just one minute, Gita will keep you company." He admonished her in a low voice as he breezed out, "Bois plaisante."

Biddy had retreated to a corner, leaving me to face Gita Lodz in silence. She was narrow as a deer, and in that fashion, pleasingly formed, but with a second chance to observe her, I had decided it would be a stretch to call her beautiful. Dry, her hair proved to be a brass-colored blonde. Her nose was broad and her teeth were small and crooked. Given the darkness of her eyes, her complexion was oddly pale. But she had what the Hollywood tattlers liked to call "it," an undefined magnetism which began with a defiant confidence about herself, palpable even from across the room.

I attempted small talk.

"May I be so bold as to ask about your name, Mademoiselle Lodz? Do you hail from that Polish city? From Lodz?" I said this in very correct French, which drew a pulled-down mouth from her, a seeming acknowledgment that she had not given me that much credit. But she replied in the same language, clearly delighted not to struggle with English.

"I am Polish, yes, but not from Lodz. It is no one's name really. I am a bastard." She made that declaration with utter equanimity, but her small black eyes never left me. I always thought I'd learned a good poker face watching Westerns, but I feared at once that I'd reacted to her frankness, and I was grateful she went on. "My mother was Lodzka," she saidWodjka,' as she pronounced it--"from her first husband. She had not seen him in years, but it was convenient, naturally, for me to share her name. The French, of course, can only speak French. So it is easier here to be simply Lodz. And your name?" she asked. "How would it be spelled?"

"Doo-ban?" she said once I had recited the letters. I said it again, and she tried a second time. "Doobean?"

I shrugged, accepting that as close enough.

"But what kind of name is that? Not French, no?" I answered simply, "American."

"Yes, but Americans, all of them come from Europe. Where in Europe was Doo-bean?"

I told her Russia, but she took my answer with mild suspicion.

"In what part?" she asked.

I named the village where both my parents had been born.

"Near Pinsk?" she said. "But your name does not sound Russian."

"It was Dubinsky, back then," I said after a second, still not acknowledging everything I might have. However, I had won a brief smile.

"Like lodzka," " she said. A second passed then, as we both seemed to ponder how to go forward, having found an inch of common ground. I finally asked where she was from in Poland, if not Lodz.

"Eh," she said. "Pilzkoba. A town. You put a thumbtack in a map and it is gone. Que des cretins," she added bitterly. All idiots. "I ran from there in 1940. After the Germans killed my mother."

I offered my condolences, but she shrugged them off.

"In Europe now we all have these stories. But I could not stay. I hated the Germans, naturally. And also the Poles, because they hated me. Bastards are not favorites in small Polish towns, Doo-bean. So I left. You see?"

"Yes," I said. In English, I quoted Exodus. " have been a stranger in a strange land.' "

She lit up. The phrase delighted her. "Parfait!" she declared and haltingly repeated as much as she could.

Martin reappeared just then and swept behind her.

"Ah, but no stranger to me," he said, and with his arms around her waist swung her off the floor. Once she was down she pried his hands apart to escape.

"I am enjoying this conversation," she told him in French.

"So you like this American?" Martin asked her.

"I like Americans," she answered. "That must be what interested me in you. Pas mar she added--Not bad--a reference to my looks, then winked at me with Martin behind her. She clearly had no wish to let him know I understood.

"You think he has silk stockings and chocolate bars?" asked Martin.

"Merde. You are always jealous."

Not without reason," he answered.

"Yes, but without right."

"Eh," he responded. It was banter. Both were grinning. He faced me and said that the Comtesse would be down momentarily.

With Martin's reappearance, I had taken a notebook from my fatigues and asked the Major if we might use the interval before the Comtesse's arrival to discuss my mission here. I presented him with an order from Patton's adjutant authorizing the Rule 35 investigation, but Martin did not read more than the first lines.

"Teedle," he said then, as if it were the most tiresome word in any language. "What does he say? No, don't bother. Mark it as true, whatever he says. All true. 'Insubordinate.' 'Mutinous.' Whatever the hell he wants to call it. Write down in your little book: Guilty as hell. The Army still doesn't know what to do with me." He laughed, just as he had when he recollected the Negro speakeasy.

I followed him across the kitchen. "I wouldn't make light of this, Major. Teedle has laid serious charges, sir." I explained his rights to Martin--he could give a statement himself or direct me to other witnesses. If he preferred to speak to a superior officer, he was entitled to do so. And certainly he could hear a specification of what had been said against him.

"If you must," he answered. He picked at a plate of grapes.

"General Teedle alleges that you've been ordered to disband your Operational Group and return to London. He says you've refused."

"Refused'? What rubbish. I'm here under the command of OSS London, and London has directed me to continue as before. Gita and I and the others are going to finish our business in France, then continue on to Germany. I have built networks there, too, Dubin. We will see this to an end. Teedle can be damned with his nonsense about refusing orders."

This is a misunderstanding, then?"

If you wish to call it that."

I was somewhat relieved to find the matter could be settled quickly. I asked Martin to see his orders from OSS, which brought an indulgent smile.

"You don't know much about OSS, do you, Dubin?" In fact, I had tried to learn as much as I could, but except for an old propaganda piece in Stars and Stripes and what I gleaned at the i8th Division from Martin's sanitized zoI file, I was largely in the dark. "An OSS officer carries no written orders," he told me. "The Nazis have said forthrightly that they'll shoot any OSS member they capture. Teedle knows this. But mine are orders nonetheless."

"Well, if I may, sir, who gave those orders?"

"My operational officer in London. I was ordered back to see him the last week in September, as a matter of fact."

"And his name, if you please?"

Again, Martin smiled as he would with a boy.

"Dubin, OSS has strict rules of secrecy. It is not a normal military organization. Only London can reveal the information you're asking for. But feel free to check with them. They will confirm everything."

I frowned.

"Oh, pshaw, Dubin. You doubt me? Look around here. We live in the open in the French countryside, fed and housed by a noted French resister. If London didn't want this, don't you think they could inform the local networks, the Free French, with whom they've worked hand in glove for years now? Do you think the Comtesse would defy them? I am here only with the leave of OSS."

He was making some sense, but I knew I could not conclude this investigation merely by inference. However, I had lost Martin's attention. On the threshold was an older woman, very erect, very slim, very drawn. Her graying hair was swept back smoothly and she wore a simple dress, sashed at the waist, and no jewelry besides a cameo that hung between her collarbones. Biddy and I were introduced to the Comtesse de Lemolland. I bowed briefly, accepting her hand.

She addressed us in English.

"I owe to all Americans my deepest gratitude for your courage in behalf of my country."

"I am only a lawyer, Comtesse. Your thanks go to the likes of Major Martin, not to me."

Martin interjected, "The Comtesse herself is a great heroine."

Not at all true," she answered.

"May I tell the story then, Comtesse, and allow Lieutenant Dubin to judge for himself?"

Leaning against a large cutting block in the center of the kitchen, Martin played raconteur, a role that clearly pleased him. He explained that when the Nazis arrived in 194o, they had commandeered the Comte de Lemolland's ancestral house in the Cotesdu-Nord, where the Comtesse, a widow of three years, had been residing. The Germans turned the chateau into a communications node. The Comtesse was forced to live as a guest in her own home, confined to an apartment of several rooms. Because the Germans adored rank, they accorded her some dignity, but they partied with prostitutes and nailed maps to the wainscoting in the parlor and abused her servants. Twice maids were raped.

One of the Comtesse's house staff was a member of the underground, and it was she who secretly introduced Agnes de Lemolland to Martin. The Comtesse agreed to the installation in her salon of a listening device, an induction microphone no larger than a button, which was attached by a filament to a tiny earphone that ran to her sitting room. There the Comtesse listened to the daily flow of information through the communications center downstairs, reporting what she'd overheard. When the plans were laid for D-Day, the Comtesse understood that it was from this very center that German reinforcements would be routed to Normandy. With no request from Martin, she designated her own house for bombing once the invasion began, fleeing with her servants only minutes before the first strike.

"Major Martin is quite correct in his assessment," I told the Comtesse. I bowed again, but felt pained to realize that this frail old woman had done far more to win the war than I ever would.

"I am no one," she said simply, "but if you insist that I am as important as all that, Lieutenant, I must take advantage and insist that you and your companion honor me by joining us at supper." Without awaiting a reply, she instructed Sophie, the servant who was at the stove, to set two more plates.

I went looking for Bidwell, whom I found outside, leaning on the jeep and shooting pictures. In the bright daylight, looking back at the Comtesse's little castle, I felt as if I'd just left an amusement park.

"Quite a bunch, aren't they?" I asked. They were all captivating, the gallant Comtesse, and fierce little Mademoiselle Lodz, and of course Martin. "I think the Major is the first actual war hero I've met," I said.

From Biddy I received one of his sour looks, a step from insubordination.

"No disrespect, Lieutenant, but ain't no way rightly to tell where all the malarkey ends in there, sir. Only it's plenty of it, this country boy knows that." He closed the snaps on the leather camera case. "Food smells just fine, though," he said and headed inside.

Chapter 6.

PRINCIPLES

Supper at the Comtesse de Lemolland's was an idyll. In an alcove beside the kitchen, we ate at a long table of heavily varnished wood, enjoying a savory stew. It might have been veal, although there was not much meat among the root vegetables that were the main ingredients. Nevertheless, the usual French hand with food prevailed and the victuals were far tastier, if less plentiful, than even the very good rations we had at HQ. Some of my appreciation for the meal might have been due to the Comtesse's wine, newly pressed, which was poured freely. But in time I realized that the principal charm was that at the Comtesse de Lemolland's I had left the military. A civil--and civilian--atmosphere prevailed. I sat next to the old woman while she shared reflections in English on the history of the region. When we started, Biddy lingered, uncertain if he was invading the officers' mess, but Martin waved him to a chair. Sophie, who had cooked, joined us, too. The Gypsy I had seen, called Antonio, was at the far end of the table speaking in French with Peter Bettjer, a ruddy blond Belgian, who was the Operational Group's communications expert.

Last to sit was Mademoiselle Lodz, who took the empty chair on my right. Midway through the meal, I felt the weight of her gaze. She was studying me unapologetically.

"I am reflecting about you, Doo-bean," she told me in French. It was clear already that she was never going to pronounce my name any other way.

"I am delighted to know I concern you at all. What exactly is it you are thinking, Mademoiselle?"

"If you are indeed Dubinsky from Pinsk"--she puckered her lips, then stared straight at me--"vous etes juif."

So that was it. In the little fantasia of the Comtesse's home, I felt especially scalded, which my face apparently betrayed.

"This is nothing to be ashamed of," she said in French. "In my town there were many Jews. I knew them well."

"I am hardly ashamed," I said quickly.

"There are many Jewish soldiers in the American Army?"

"Some.), "And they stay among the other troops?"

"Of course. We are one nation."

"But the dark ones I see--they drive and move the equipment. The Jews do not have separate battalions like the Negroes?"

"No. It is entirely different. The blacks were slaves to some of the Americans' grandfathers, who, regrettably, have not allowed the past to die."

"And these Jew soldiers. They look like you? You have no sidelocks. Are there tsitsis beneath your garments?"

"I am not a Jew in that way."

"In my town they had only one way, Dubin. Red Yiddish?" she asked. That made the third language in which she had addressed me, and her smile revealed a dark space between her front teeth.

"Ayn bisel. Yich red besser am franzosich." My grandparents who had followed my father to the United States spoke Yiddish, but my mother and father used only English in the presence of their children, unwilling to risk hindering our development as Americans. My Yiddish was not even close to my French, as I had just told her.

"Ach mir," she answered, "ayn bisel." With me, too, a little bit.

Martin, across the table, asked her in French, "What language is that?"

"We are speaking Jewish, Robert."

"Jewish? I thought you disliked the Jews.,, She looked at him sharply. "Wrong. Stupidly wrong. This is because you will never listen to anything I say about my home. My only friends as a child were Jewish. They alone would allow me in their houses. Why would I dislike them?"

"But they spurned you."

"For a bride, Robert. It is their way."

He turned away to ask Sophie for the bread, while Mademoiselle Lodz was left to explain.

"C'est une histoire compliquee," she told me. It's a long story. "My mother, Dubin, wanted me to find a Jew to be my husband. She said, 'They are seldom drunks and rarely beat their wives.' '' Mademoiselle Lodz's mother had clearly never met Julius Klein, who lived on the third floor above us when I was a child and whose wife and children often ran for their lives while his drunken rages shook the entire building. But no Jew, of course, would marry me.

"You are a Catholic?"

"Only to a Jew. I have never set foot inside a church."

"So you felt, as the Major put it, spurned?"

She wagged her head from side to side, as if weighing the idea for the first time only now.

"The Poles were far worse. Those who regarded themselves as respectable would not even speak to my mother--including her own family. So we lived happily among the Jews. And if I'd had a Jewish husband, I would have been on the trucks beside him.

For me, in the end, it was a piece of good fortune.), "The trucks?"

"Vous m'etonnez! You do not know of this? In my town, every Jew is gone. The Nazis took them away. They are in the ghetto in Lublin, held like livestock inside fences. This has happened everywhere. France, too. In Vichy, Petain rounded up the Jews even before the Germans asked. As a Jewish soldier, you, especially, should be here fighting Hitler."

When I enlisted, my first choice was to battle Tojo and the sinister Japanese who had launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. As for Hitler, I knew about his ruthless war against the Jews in Germany, smashing Jewish businesses and confiscating Jewish homes, and felt a stake in bringing him down, but it was not the same as the sense of direct attack I'd experienced from the Japanese bombs on American soil.

I was disinclined to try to explain any of this to Mademoiselle Lodz. Instead, I gave my attention to Martin, who was across the table regaling Bidwell with tales of the Operational Group during the years before the invasion. To introduce Antonio and Bettjer, Martin was detailing their most entertaining success against the Nazis, which had come in a small town to the west. There vintners sold yin ordinaire by hauling it through the streets in a hogshead mounted on two wheels, from which the villagers would fill their carafes through a bunghole in the bottom. Together Antonio and Bettjer had inserted a wooden partition in one of these casks, leaving wine in the lower portion. In the upper half, Bettjer had crawled between the staves. Looking out a tiny spy hole, he radioed information to Martin on the whereabouts of a German Panzer division moving through the town, while Antonio rolled the barrel down the street so their wireless was immune to the German direction-finding trucks that crawled around the area in search of resistance transmitters.

"It was all brilliant," said Martin, "except that poor Peter literally got drunk on the fumes. When we opened the cask, he had passed out cold."

Around the table, there was a hail of laughter and several jokes about Bettjer and alcohol, to which he'd clearly become more accustomed. Right now he was bright red with drink. I had been more careful with the wine, but the same could not be said of most of the others and the level of hilarity had increased as Martin went on recounting their adventures.

"You appear, Major, to have been destined for this life," I said to him eventually.

"Oh, hardly," he answered. "I was organizing for the International Transport Workers around Paris, when the Nazis decided to go marching. I had no desire to return to war, Dubin. I'd had more than enough of it in Spain. I'd led other Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, then became a commando when the foreign troops were sent home. It was all quite dismal, to be frank. I had no desire to see more friends and comrades tortured and killed by Fascists. After Paris fell, I moved back to Madrid, where I was a transportation official with an oil company. Spain was a neutral country, and with a Spanish passport I could go anywhere, even Germany, which is why the OSS approached me. Originally, I thought I was to be a mere conduit for information. But one thing led to another. I had no interest in joining the Army, yet I could not refuse when they asked me to lead the OG."

Yesterday, at the i8th, I had reviewed a clip from Stars and Stripes in Martin's file, detailing how the Operational Groups had been formed. Colonel Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, had corralled swashbucklers from everywhere, Russian emigres, Spanish Civil War veterans like Martin, and a number of Italian speakers from New York, Boston, and Chicago. All of them had been trained at the Congressional Country Club outside D. C., where they had done conditioning runs on the famous golf course and received instruction in the black arts of silent assassination, demolition, secret radio broadcast, judo, cryptography, lock picking, safecracking, and installing listening devices. Martin's efficiency reports from that period were often marked out, but made clear he had been a star, except with Morse code, where he never succeeded in getting above twelve words a minute.

Following his training, according to Lieutenant Colonel Brunson, Teedle's G-1 who'd briefed me, Martin and two comrades, as well as eight supply chutes carrying radios, weapons, and necessities like currency, were dropped over France by a low-flying bomber in October 1942. Each man had a fake ID, a work card, and a cyanide capsule. Somehow, the Nazis had seen the drop. The Englishman with them was shot, while Martin and a French sergeant, who I believed was the Gypsy Antonio now at the end of the table, spent two days in the woods barely avoiding the Germans.

Over time, however, the OG was established. Because of his union activities before the war, Martin was able to build an active network among the rail workers, many of whom he had known for years. Together they sabotaged 37o trains in the succeeding months, destroying railheads and tracks, setting locomotives afire, igniting fuel dumps, and attacking German convoys on the run. After D-Day, as the Third Army advanced north, Stemwinder monitored German troop movements and brought down bridges along the Loire. In the file, there were several laudatory communications from grateful commanders. Leaving aside Teedle.

"And before Spain?" I said to him. "May I ask what you asked me, Major? Where is the home war has taken you from?"

He laughed, but the wine gave him a wistful look.

"Good for you, Dubin. That's the sixty-four-dollar question. But I left all that behind long ago." His smile had faded, when he added, "The answer is as lost to history as the ruins of ancient Greece."

After coffee--Nescafe, about which the Comtesse permitted herself one rueful remark over the lost pleasures of former days--I asked Martin to help me find evidence that would show that OSS had directed him to remain here. Very drunk now, he took a second to marshal himself, and in his confused expression I could see he was peeved by my determination. But in the end he laughed and patted my back.

"What a serious fellow you are, Dubin. Yes, of course.''

The first thought was to show me the shortwave radio through which they received London's orders, but I needed something better than that. Martin frowned again at my doggedness but put the question in French to his Stemwinder colleagues who remained at the table.

"Londres?" asked Bettjer. "Les documents des cons, non?"

Martin laughed. "How wonderful. Yes." 'The papers of the idiots' referred to the Finance Officers in OSS, who were the same relentless penny-pinchers in that outfit they were everywhere else, demanding that Martin keep exact accounts of the funds advanced for the Operational Group. If I had not been in the Army, I might not have believed that Martin's orders to mount commando attacks were never reduced to writing, but that nickels and dimes required precise records. Mademoiselle Lodz said she kept the papers with the radio, and I followed her outside to find them. At 3:00 p. M. the daylight was still bright, and leaving the dim house, especially after the wine, I needed to shield my eyes.

"Cela vous derange si je fume?" she asked. Does it bother you if I smoke? It was a meaningless courtesy since she already had the flame of her lighter, an American Zippo, to the tip. She had not lit up at the table in deference to the Comtesse, who did not approve of women with cigarettes. Otherwise, Mademoiselle Lodz had barely been without a Lucky Strike between her fingers. I took smoking as the source of her appealing cough-drop voice, like June Allyson's. I declined when she offered me one, telling her I'd never picked up the habit.

"The C rations are terrible," she said. "But the cigarettes? This is the best thing the American Army brought with them." She actually hugged her green pack of Luckys to her breast. "In Vichy, the women were banned from buying cigarettes altogether. Martin says that is why I had no choice but to join the resistance." She laughed at herself.

At supper, Martin had recounted several of Gita's adventures. On D-Day, for example, she had calmly turned the road signs at an intersection ninety degrees and stood there long enough to direct an entire Nazi tank battalion south rather than west. Later that afternoon, according to Martin, they had destroyed a large part of the same unit, when Gita and he herded dozens of sheep onto a bridgehead the Nazis were hoping to cross. While the German soldiers were shooing the livestock, Antonio slipped beneath the bridge and set detonators and dynamite, which they blew when the tanks moved forward.

"Martin's stories of your exploits are remarkable."

She smiled. "And even better if they were true."

I lost a step, which evoked another spirited laugh from her.

"Those of us with Martin," she told me, "have watched our lives grow larger when he describes our activities. But he is so good at it, we all believe him. That is Martin's way. At times, there's not a person here who knows whether he's speaking the truth. I am not even certain that his name is Martin. With the OSS, they all take noms de guerre. But it does not matter. Who are we, Dubin, but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them? My mother said that always."

I had never heard anyone declare such a notion aloud, that we somehow had the power to make ourselves up on the go. Yet it was an idea that attracted me, and I reflected a moment, trying to determine whether life allowed that kind of latitude and how far it might extend.

"Without disrespect to your mother, Mademoiselle, it is better, is it not, if those stories are also true?"

"But who is to tell the truth, Doo-bean? In my town, they said my mother was a tramp. She was a seamstress, but she had lovers among the well-to-do, and took their money. In her view, she was a nonconformist, an artiste at heart. She chose to believe that, and I did as well."

"I am sure that is so," I said, deferring to the reflective softness that had come over Mademoiselle Lodz as she spoke about her mother. "Her loss must have been terrible for you," I said quietly.

"Quite terrible. She remains with me every moment. If not for those assassins, she would have lived to be one hundred. In my family, all the women do. My mother said that was our problem, she and I.

There is too much life in us. It makes us wild in youth. And for her that made enduring burdens." She smiled sadly as she touched her own blouse.

"And when she died and you ran from Poland, where did you go first?"

"I landed in Marseilles. I was seventeen. I envisioned myself as the new Bernhardt. Bold, eh? I could barely speak a word of French. I did what needed doing. My mother had taught me to sew, and I found a job mending sheets in a hospital laundry. Soon I was promoted and allowed to empty bedpans." Again, she permitted a husky laugh about herself. "I found my way. Come," she said, "I will show you the items you wish to see."

Walking briskly, she reached the cowshed at the far end of the courtyard, which, like all the connected buildings, had been built of thick stones clad in a coating of cement and sand. On the second floor were quarters for a staff. Judging from the line of curtained windows that surrounded us, the Comtesse once must have employed dozens more workers than now.

Inside the old barn, the air was dense with the ripe smells of animals and moldy hay. Entering a cow stall, Mademoiselle Lodz took hold of a weathered milking stool. With a screwdriver, she removed a metal plate from the bottom of the seat, revealing the radio and its battery.

"Peter says only a few years ago the radios were enormous. Ten, twelve kilos. But now." She withdrew the sleek transmitter and placed it in my hand. It was about six inches long and did not weigh even a pound. Before D-Day, she said, their orders came over the BBC in code with the 9:00 p. M. news. These days, messages were relayed back and forth once a week, when an OSS plane carrying a radio relay to London passed overhead. I nodded, but it was the papers that interested me and I mentioned them again.

"Voila." Mademoiselle Lodz drew a wad from inside the stool. Included was the yellow duplicate of Standard Form limn, Martin's travel voucher, signed and stamped by the paymaster at Central Base Station in London, and containing the details of Martin's trip there and back between September 26 and 30. There were also receipts for two meals Martin had consumed on the way, and French war scrip. Martin's itinerary was exactly as he claimed: OSS had redispatched him here a little more than three weeks ago. When I asked to take the papers, Mademoiselle Lodz was reluctant, but I promised to have them back within a week. In return, she wanted to know what this was all about. I gave her the bare details of Teedle's complaint.

"London just sent Martin back," she said. "You can see yourself." The records didn't seem to leave much doubt of that. All in all, it had the look of a typical Army SNAFU. "Teedle would be eager to believe the worst," she said. "Bon sang. Teedle, Martin--that is a bad match. They have been unpleasant with each other from the start."

"Teedle is the superior."

"II a une dent contre lui." He has a grudge against him. "It is true Martin does not like to receive orders in the field," she said. "He prefers to reach concord with his commanders. Teedle wants only to be obeyed."

"There must be order in war. A chain of command."

"In war, order is no more than a good intention. Order is for generals. Not soldiers. Tu to mets le doigt dans l'oeil." You are putting your finger in your eye, meaning I was fooling myself.

"I am a lawyer, nonetheless. I must defend the rules.

"Lawyers are functionaries. Little men. Are you a little man, Dubin? It does not seem so."

"I don't regard the law as little rules. I regard it as an attempt to impart reason and dignity to life."

"Justice imparts reason and dignity, Dubin. Not rules. Little rules and large wrongs are a bad mix. I don't know your rules. But I know what is wrong. As does Martin. The Nazis are wrong. Fight them. That is the only rule that should matter. Not whether Martin does Teedle's bidding."

"You argue well," I said to her. "If Martin has need of a lawyer, he should 0 you."

At the idea, she laughed loudly, until giving way to a hacking smoker's cough. I was impressed by Mademoiselle Lodz's raucousness, which seemed bold compared to Grace, who literally raised her hand to her mouth when she was amused. We had reached the sun again. Mademoiselle Lodz flattened her small hand above her eyes as she regarded me.

You interest me, Doo-bean."

"I am flattered, Mademoiselle. Is that because I am a lawyer, or an American, or a Jew?"

"ca ne rime a rien." That doesn't rhyme with anything, meaning there was no point. "Who you are, you are, no?"

"I suppose. And who, Mademoiselle Lodz, may I ask, are you?"

"Who do you take me for, Dubin?"

You seem to be a soldier and a philosopher."

She laughed robustly again. "No," she said, "I am too young to be a philosopher. I spout, but you should pay no attention. Besides, I don't trust intellectuals. They place too much faith in ideas."

"I am probably guilty of that."

It seems so."

"But principles matter, do they not?"

"Mais oui. But do they come before anything else?"

"I hope so. Certainly that is desirable, is it not, to care first about principles?"

"C'est impossible," she said.

I expressed my doubts, and she told me I was being naive.

"Perhaps," I said, "but if I was being a lawyer--or a philosopher--I would tell you that a convincing argument requires proof."

" 'Proof' ?" She smirked. "Proving is too easy." "How so?"

"Eh, Doo-bean. You are an innocent at heart. I will show you, if I must. Un moment." She disappeared into the barn again, but promptly called out, "Come.

I stepped back into the humid scents and darkness. At first, I saw no one.

"Here," she said behind me. When I turned, Gita Lodz had lifted her skirt to her waist, revealing her slim legs and her undergarment, a kind of cotton bloomer. It fit snugly, revealing her narrow shape and, with another instant's attention, the indentation of her female cleft and the shadow of the dark i triangle around it.

"Is it principle you feel first, Dubin?"

I had long recognized that the hardest part of life in a war zone was that there was so often no routine, no order, nothing to count on. Every moment was a novelty. But this display exceeded even the limited boundaries that remained. I was literally struck dumb.

"Touche," I finally said, the only word I could think of, which brought another outburst of laughter while she smothered down her skirt. By pure chance, I had come off as a wit.

"We are primitive, Dubin. If we are not to be, then we require one another's assistance. But first know who we are.

I gave a simple nod. Satisfied she had made a potent demonstration, Mademoiselle Lodz strolled from the cowshed, looking back from the sunlight with a clever smile. I waited in the shadows. She would treat this as a prank, but free to watch from the darkness, I had a sudden vision of Gita Lodz and the riot of feeling that underlay her boldness. Her upbringing in scorn had left her with no choice but to defy convention, yet despite her confident airs and the stories she wished to believe, I sensed, almost palpably, that her personality was erected on a foundation of anger, and beneath that, pain. When I stepped back into the sun, some sadness must have clung to the way I looked at her, which I could tell was entirely unexpected. As we considered each other something fell away, and she turned heel immediately, headed toward the house.

I caught up, but we trudged back in silence. It was she who spoke finally, as we approached the little castle.

"Have I offended you, Dubin?"

"Of course not. I challenged you. You responded. Convincingly."

"But you are shocked."

"Pay no attention. I am easily shocked, Mademoiselle Lodz."

"Good for you," she said. "In France, no one will admit to being bourgeois."

I laughed. "In America, it is the universal aspiration. But I still must respect proprieties. I am sent to inquire of a man. The law might question my impartiality if I was interested instead in looking at his woman in her dainties."

"Not his woman. I am not with Martin in that way, Dubin. That is done between us. Long ago."

I thought of Martin embracing her in the kitchen.

"I have heard many refer to you as his woman."

"That is convenient for both of us. There are soldiers everywhere, Dubin. It is better to be known as spoken for. Do not be repelled for Martin's sake. Only your own." She gave me that sly smile. "A la prochaine," she said--Until next time--and breezed through the door, restored to her former self.

Biddy was waiting there. We needed to be back at the 18th before dark, but I was still reverberating like a struck bell. It had been months since I'd had anything to do with a woman, except with the clinical neutrality of a lawyer interviewing witnesses, and I had forgotten the pull that seemed to emanate from every cell. I had been resolutely faithful to Grace, even in the brothel atmosphere of London, where the joke went that every girl's knickers had the same flaw: one Yank and they were off. There I had known what to expect. Sex was everywhere--you could hear the moans when you passed a supposedly unoccupied air raid shelter, or walked in the dark through Hyde Park. The U. S. soldiers, with their Arrid and Odo*Ro*No, seemed rich and well-groomed compared to the poor beaten-down Brits, who had a single uniform and their noisy hobnailed boots. Now both Biddy and I were looking at the doorway through which Gita had gone.

"You have a girl at home, Biddy?" I asked.

"Hope. Had one, but let her get away. Joyce Washington. Courted with her all through high school. Was het up to marry, too. She got herself a job typing at the First National Bank. And there was some fella there, Lieutenant, I guess he just swept her off her feet. And her with my ring on her finger. She come to tell me and I said to her, 'How can you do this, go off with another man when you promised yourself to me?' And you know what she says? She says, 'Gideon, he's got a Hudson.' Can you imagine? I honestly got to say, Lieutenant, I really don't think it was the letdown that bothered me so much as wondering how in all get-out I could have been fool enough to love a woman like that." He fixed on the distance while the pain swamped him again, then shook it off.

"I done all right with those English girls," he said, "but I can't make head or tail of these Frenchies. All that ooh-la-la junk may go in Paris, but out this way, these are just country gals, Lieutenant, and it ain't no different than in Georgia, mamas tell them all their lives to keep their legs crossed till the day they say 'I do,' war or no war. What about you, Lieutenant? You been makin any time?" Unconsciously perhaps, his eyes diverted toward the doorway.

"I have a fiancee back home, Biddy." We both knew this was not a direct response. Eisley, with a wife in Ohio, could explain in utter seriousness how all formalities, especially marriage vows, were suspended during times of war. But I left it at that.

Martin had stepped out of the house, still flushed from the wine and smiling hugely. I took it that he'd had a word with Gita and had come outside to say goodbye to us.

"So I hear we actually found your precious papers. I could tell you came here with the wrong impression. Mark my words, Dubin, Teedle is trying to stir things up. He's giving orders where he has no call to."

"Mademoiselle Lodz says he has a grudge against you.

"That would be one way to put it." His blue eyes went for a moment to the horizon, the first occasion when I had seen him measure his words. "Look, Dubin, sooner or later you're going to figure out what this is all about. You don't need my faccuse.

If you'd rather I not share your response with General Teedle--"

"Oh, I don't care a fig about Teedle. Look, Dubin, it's this simple. He thinks I'm a Communist. Because I fought in Spain. After the Axis, the Soviets are next. I'm the new enemy. Or so he believes."

Are you?"

"An enemy of the United States? I should say not.

"A Communist, sir."

"I've been fighting too long, Dubin, to call myself anything. I believe in power for the powerless, food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless. Does that make me a revolutionary? Here, Dubin, it all comes down to this. The man is wasting your time and he knows it. I intend to fulfill my mission. And I won't allow Teedle to get in my way, or bog me down with Army folderol. I can melt into this landscape, or that of any other place from here to Berlin, if I choose."

He gave me a pointed look. I was startled by the openness with which he discussed insubordination, but there was no chance for rejoinder, because both of us were drawn to the buzz of planes overhead. Martin was immediately on alert, like a pointer in the field, squinting to search the sky. But the aircraft were ours.

"B-z6s, I reckon," he said then. "They're going to take advantage of the break in the weather to bomb."

Just as he predicted, the heavy sounds echoed a few minutes later. At first, the distant bombardment was like oil popping in a skillet, but as the squadrons kept passing overhead, the noise came closer. A barrier of smoke and dust arose and drifted back to us, damming the light and ghosting over the Comtesse's fields, carrying along the odor of gunpowder. We could hear German antiaircraft fire. No more than a mile ahead, we saw a plane burst into flame and parachutes bloom in the sky.

A number of the farmworkers as well as Antonio had joined us on the cobbles as spectators. Martin asked the Gypsy about the position of the 26th Infantry to be certain they would be able to reach the downed fliers. While this discussion was under way, another squadron passed, flying lower. We had been trading around a pair of field glasses that someone had brought from the house and when I took my turn, I could see the bomb bays open beneath the planes. I had just remarked on this to Martin, when an explosion shook the air around us, and a column of fire rose on the next hill.

"Lord," said Martin. "We'll be lucky if they don't drop on us as well." He looked up one more time, then dashed into the little castle, yelling first to Gita, then everyone else. He emerged in seconds behind the Comtesse and her servants. In both English and French, he commanded everyone into the old stone cellar beneath the house. He stood at the door, shooing all of us down, ordering us to be quick. The workers came running out of the fields, some still in waders they had been wearing in the flooded lower grounds. I was already in the earthen-floored cellar when another detonation reverberated, closer than the first. I looked to the entrance to see about Martin, but he appeared in a moment, slamming the door behind him and thumping down the stairs. The cellar was no more than six feet high and there was now no light. I'd seen Biddy hunched in the corner, next to the shelves of jarred fruits and an adjoining wall racked with dusty bottles of wine. There must have been twenty people huddled in the dark. The air quickly grew close. There were the usual jokes. One of the women said, "Keep your hands to yourself," and a man responded, "You, as well." In a far corner, a cat was meowing.

"D'ici peu, on va se sentir tous comme des cons," someone remarked across the room. In a moment we will feel like fools. He had barely spoken, when the atmosphere was rent by the fabulous concussion of an explosion directly overhead.

The Germans still had 28omm railway artillery pieces in the Vosges elevated over Nancy, and once or twice a day the cry of incoming fire would ring out and everyone in the court-martial session would scramble into the cellar of the Lycee, waiting for the big boom of the shells. But that was no preparation for being bombed. The air seemed to slam shut on me, then opened briefly only to pound me again, while the earth literally jostled beneath our feet. I felt the shock across my entire body--even my cheeks and eyeballs were compressed. And the sound was worse. I had never understood until that moment that noise alone, even when you knew its source, could be loud enough to inspire panic. My ears went numb, then revived, throbbing.

In the instant afterward, I assumed the house had been struck and would collapse on us, but there was no sign of that. Instead there was light now. Eventually I realized that the wooden door of the cellar had been blown off. Martin went out first and in time called down that it was safe to emerge. Coming up into the daylight, I noticed that my boots were soaked with wine.

The crater of the bomb, the depth and the size of a small pond, had disturbed earth all the way to the house, but the actual point of impact seemed to have been about 15o yards away in the pasture. Everyone who had been in the cellar radiated off to inspect the damage. It was quickly determined there were no human casualties, although a number of those who had been near the cellar walls had been struck by falling bottles and several had been cut, including Biddy, who had pulled a shard the size of an arrowhead out of his arm.

Around the farm, the Comtesse's chicks and her one cow were nowhere to be found, and a horse was dead, keeled over like a life-size toy with his lips raveled back fearfully over his huge teeth. The family dog had literally been blown to bits. His leather collar was about a hundred yards from the house. I suspected that the blast that blew off the cellar door had been the end of the hound, who had probably been cowering there.

As for the little castle, the damage was moderate. All the rear windows had been blown out, and their shutters were gone. A piece of the roof had been ripped off like the corner of a sheet of paper. Inside, I saw that much of the crockery had shattered. For the Comtesse de Lemolland, this proved too much. She had withstood the death of a spouse and a son with dignity, and the destruction of her husband's chateau, but the loss of an old delft plate that her mother had hung on the wall sixty years ago somehow exceeded her meager abilities to carry on. She was on the wooden floor of the kitchen, her skirt billowed about her, while she gathered the chalky pieces in her hands and wailed in complete abandon. Gita held one shoulder to comfort her.

I fled outside, where Martin still searched the sky with the field glasses to be sure we were safe.

"Did they lose their coordinates?" I asked.

"Perhaps," said Martin, then erupted in a sharp laugh. "Perhaps not." He lowered the binoculars to look at me. "I rather suspect, Dubin, we've all had a greeting card from General Teedle."