Comfort to the Enemy and Other Carl Webster Stories Read online

  Or he'll beat the snot out of me. Is that a serious threat, Carl? He'll hit me until der Schleim comes out of my nose? We're all curious about where you go, Carl said, so I looked into it. I find out you spend your time with Miss Shemane Morrissey, former Kansas City call girl they say charged two hundred dollars to spend the night with her. Tell me how you first got together.

  You've talked to her?

  Yes, I have.

  Well, I was walking along the road, she stopped her car. What difference does it make? I'm seeing her, Jurgen said, and you know I am, so there is no mystery. You want to shock me, say she was a prostitute -I know that. She told me everything, how a white slaver by the name of Teddy Ritz put her to work before he even saw her. Then when he did- she's sixteen, very attractive- she became hi s m istress. Jurgen seemed to smile saying, Teddy Ritz, the white slaver who must be a Jew. It's good, isn't it, the story of her life? She told me she could make a thousand dollars a week without breathing hard.

  Carl saw her making fifty thousand a year with two weeks off. If she took a month off she'd still make forty-eight thousand.

  What I want to know, Jurgen said, is why you call me a Kraut?

  We call all of you Krauts. It caught on and it's how you're known. Short for sauerkraut.

  Yes...?

  Isn't it your national dish?

  I'm not sure, Jurgen said, and asked Carl, Do you like sauerkraut?

  I'll eat it if it's what we're having?

  I eat it, I'm a Kraut, Jurgen said. You eat it, you remain who you are.

  It doesn't have to make sense, Carl said. The Tulsa World and my dad call you Huns most of the time. You mind 'Huns'?

  No, it's Kraut I don't care for.

  Don't worry about it, Carl said. What I want you to tell me is how the hard-nosed Nazis have come to run the camps. Because they're mean buggers but disciplined, they do what they're told? That's why the guards prefer Nazis. Tell me why they intimidate the less Nazified ones, beat them up, go so far as to lynch them, the ones you call suicides? I want to hear what you have to say about Nazis, an d t ell me what they did with a million and a half Jews in Poland.

  A million and a half, Jurgen said. I thought it was more like three million have gone missing. The Russians have accounted for half of them.

  Chapter Five

  Carl and Louly in Love

  You see us, Jurgen said to Carl Webster in the solitary confinement room, we are either Nazis or we're against them. You don't see degrees of belief between the two extremes?

  You know how to sound like a Nazi, Carl said, to get by in the camp, you and your friend Otto Penzler, going back to when you were Hitler Jugend and learned the spiel. Otto makes sure you know he's SS, an elite group of thugs as Nazified as you can get. But I can't see either of you guys wanting to live in a police state. People telling on each other. Kids telling on their mom and dad. People hearing the truck coming and know it's the SS on a roundup. And you think, Oh, my God, in the beerhall last night you sai d i f that fat slob G/ring and that gimp Goebbels and that humorless twit Himmler, if those guys represent the master race... You don't remember what else you said but that would be enough. How many people are tried and hanged for making remarks like that? They torture you, pull out your fingernails... You go along with that? You look up to Hitler as an inspiring leader?

  As leaders go, Jurgen said, smoking one of Carl's Chesterfields, he hasn't done too badly. He made himself Fnhrer in Thirty-four. He restored the German Reich. By 1942 he owned Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia- I forget Holland -also Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland and a big chunk of Russia and the Ukraine. Jurgen paused to draw on his cigarette. Still, Erwin Rommel, after North Africa when he was appointed to the Fnhrer's staff, and personally witnessed the Fnhrer's outbursts and irrational behavior, he told people close to him the Fnhrer was over the edge, far from normal. I was with Rommel most of two years, Jurgen said, and believe every word he ever said to me and continued to believe him, his predictions, his assessments of the war, even when they failed to happen. He is the only man I have ever known I would step in front of to take a bullet meant for him.

  For Rommel, Carl said, but not your Fnhrer? I would be happy to see someone kill him, Jurgen said, if he doesn't do it himself.

  *

  The YMCA gives you radios, Carl said, and you modify them to receive shortwave broadcasts from Germany. You need parts, you order them from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. The camp commander says they find shortwave radios that were meant to be found, but you have other transmitters and receivers hidden away.

  You want me to tell you, Jurgen said, if I know where they are?

  I want to know, Carl said, if you believe what the broadcasts from home tell you. We listen to them. They get finished playing a big military number, they report that your guys are bravely holding the line 'with heroic efforts.' You believe that's true?

  I believe we're resisting bravely, yes. What else can we do?

  Shemane said you've stopped talking about winning the war. What about most of your guys? Are they still optimistic?

  Many of them, yes. Or they would have to believe in Anglo-American victories, what they read in your newspapers. I'll tell you something, Jurgen said, coming here, crossing this country that can take days, seeing all the lights in the cities we pass, seeing no evidence of destruction from bombing raids, it gives us doubts about what we were told, that industrial cities were bombed, and of course New York City. But our comrades who came through New York saw little or no damage from bombs.

  They didn't see any, Carl said. You have bombers that can fly across the Atlantic Ocean, drop their loads, turn around and fly back to Europe?

  They would have to refuel.

  Where? Where do you stop for gas over here? Jurgen didn't answer. He took his time to say, You want to know about the Jewish Question.

  *

  The first thing he did when he took power, Jurgen said, was dismiss all Jews working in civil service. He also began to reduce their numbers in the various professions. The Fnhrer saw no Jews as workers in factories or the trades like carpenters. He saw them as a race of merchants and money lenders, and called them our deadliest enemy.

  German people, Carl said, who happened to be Jews.

  Blaming them for whatever was wrong with Germany, Jurgen said. The Fnhrer passed the Nuremburg Laws, the idea, to unite all Germans and exclude the Jews as citizens. For a German to marry a Jew was forbidden. Jews were no longer permitted to practice law or medicine except among themselves, but IF you were part Jewish you could be a pharmacist. Are you following this? Jews were prohibited from attending German theaters, concerts, film houses. They could no longer attend German schools. They were forbidden to own firearms. In fact, the day before Kristallnacht in November, 1938, the SS went into Jewish homes and removed anything that could be used as a weapon. You know about Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass?

  When they started wrecking Jewish stores, places of business, Carl said. I remember seeing it on the newsreel. The cops watching the brown shirts smashing shop windows.

  They burned synagogues, Jurgen said, all over Germany. They destroyed thousands of shops, businesses. Some of the Jews were killed and as many as thirty thousand arrested and sent to labor camps. This was the beginning of violence against the Jews, 1938. I asked my father if he believed this kind of persecution made was going on. I said, 'Can you believe our government is systematically killing people it doesn't like?' I asked him this while we were in Detroit and were reading about it in the paper. My father said, 'Give the impression you accept National Socialism, since you have no other choice, and never in a public place criticize our Fnhrer or any of the lunatics working for him.' My father was a production engineer with Ford of Germany, or Ford Werke, as it was called. A year after we left Detroit and came home, the Fnhrer awarded Henry Ford on his seventy-fifth birthday, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor we give someone who isn't German.

 
; I did read that Hitler had a portrait of Ford on his office wall in Munich. Your dad said to give the impression that you accept National Socialism?

  He didn't mean act like a Nazi. Act like you believe in the future of the Third Reich ands you don't mind being a member of the master race. He said it isn't something we have to deal with directly.

  Don't think about it, Carl said, it might go away.

  You have the same kind of problem, Jurgen said, in the way you treat Negroes, American citizens, but black. I'm in the cafT waiting to be picked up. Let's say two Negro GIs come in pointing carbines at me, playing, pretending I'm a desperate character.

  Carl listened, knowing what Jurgen was going to say.

  I sit at the counter, the enemy, the kraut, having my coffee, having whatever I want. But the two guys in uniform can't sit at the counter with me. They aren't allowed to because of their race.

  I think they could sit at that counter if they wanted, Carl said.

  But not at every counter in America, or use the drinking fountain and toilets reserved for whites. Jurgen said. You know what I'm talking about.

  Nazis and redneck racists were not the same in Carl's mind and he could argue the difference with Jurgen. But not today.

  I have to leave you, Carl said, get back to Tulsa to pick up my wife.

  I don't think you ever said you were married. You have children?

  Not yet, Carl said. We're waiting till she gets out of the Marines.

  Jurgen gave him a funny look.

  Carl said, Yeah, what?

  *

  He was so glad to see Louly coming along the station platform in her uniform he ran up, got his arms around her and they started kissing, both of them holding on to each other until Carl's hat came off and he let it go. When they parted for a breath, Louly said, you remember the time in Kansas City, we were in the car kissing away and I knocked your hat off? Not all the way off but cockeyed, and right away you had to take it off, knowing you didn't look like a cool customer the way it sat on your head? You remember that?

  Carl said, I wasn't gonna take it off this time till we got out of bed.

  You know how long from now that'll be if we're going to your dad's house? He'll ask me about the Woman Marines, but I don't get to answer. It reminds him of women insurrectionists who fought along side the Mambis in Cuba, and there were some he knew and had camped with, while I'm trying to look interested.

  We're staying here, Carl said. I used my influence and got us a suite at the Mayo for as long as we want.

  *

  She said, You really love me, don't you? The two of them lying around the hotel suite in their underwear, drinking bourbon highballs, ordering club sandwiches and potato chips from room service, smoking cigarettes, taking baths together worn out from making love, Louly lying back between his legs in the bubblebath, her head resting on his chest, telling Carl about teaching flexible gunnery to Marine radiomen who would sit behind the pilot in an SBD Dauntless dive bomber, ready to shoot down Zekes that got after them without shooting off their own tail.

  Carl said, If I was in your class, I'd see you as that redheaded big-ass Marine who looks lonely.

  Anybody tries to get close I tell him I've shot two men with two different revolvers. One, to save the life of the man I knew I would marry. For the other I was given five hundred dollars by a bankers association for shooting a bank robber in a tourist court where he was holding me against my will. Deputy Marshal Carlos Webster said stay with that and you won't go to jail. Remember?

  I remember your big brown eyes looking up at me.

  But it wasn't till you came to Kansas City I knew for sure you loved me. When I was going by Kitty.

  Working for Teddy, Carl said. I spoke to him on the phone yesterday about Shemane. You don't remember her?

  I told you, Louly said, I'd only heard about her. How Teddy had her kidnapped and put in a whorehouse 'cause her dad got one of Teddy's girls to move to Tulsa. Louly stopped and said, This could be the same suite they were in, when Teddy's guy shot them.

  They were up on nine, Carl said. Teddy liked Shemane a lot, didn't he?

  He liked girls, Louly said. I wouldn't mind seeing him again.

  What for?

  In my uniform. Ask him what he's doing for the war effort these days, besides getting GIs drunk.

  Carl said, I thought he knew about Shemane entertaining her German POW, but she hadn't told him. I said to Teddy he ought to let her know what they're doing to the Jews. She thinks they're all nice guys from good homes.

  Louly said, That's right, Teddy's Jewish.

  And he's got relatives over in Poland who've disappeared. He hears from a cousin named Zigmund he calls Ziggy. Ziggy used to smuggle food into the Warsaw ghetto. All the Jews were kept inside the walls ten to twenty feet high. Ziggy said the Germans'd go inside the ghetto and do what ever they want. One time they brought out sixty prominent Jews everyone knew and respected and shot them in the street. Pretty soon, they're bringing out five or six thousand at a time and sending them to a concentration camp only forty miles away, called Treblinka. They arrive, some are put to work and the rest are sent to a gas chamber. In a few minutes they're dead and the bodies are burned in a crematorium.

  Louly said, a crematorium? She got around sideways between Carl's legs in the bubblebath to stare at his face. You believe that?

  Ziggy told Teddy it's been going on for a few years. Some are put to work digging pits, long ones like ditches, only much deeper. Men, women and children are brought out and machine-gunned. They fall in the pit and the bodies are covered with lime.

  Louly was facing Carl now, sitting back on her hands holding on to the sides of the tub.

  Thousands of people are murdered and we don't hear anything about it?

  Ziggy told Teddy almost all the Jews who were living in Poland have disappeared.

  They're dead?

  Shot or gassed, those that haven't starved to death.

  Ziggy saw it happen?

  Or heard about it from people who did.

  Louly was shaking her head. I don't believe it.

  Jurgen admits it. He says the POWs that hear about it don't want to believe it either. They can't see soldiers like themselves killing woman and children. Jurgen said it's the SS doing it, not soldiers. The boss, Bob McMahon said they know about it in Washington, the Nazis bent on exterminating an entire people. That's the word Washington uses, exterminate. You can read about Nazi atrocities in the paper, but they aren't played up because they're too hard to believe. So the papers focus on how we're beating up on of the Japanese.

  How about the one that shot you, Louly said, who wasn't supposed to be there?

  I told you, I was hit right here, Carl said, turning in the bubblebath to pinch the slight bulg e a bove his left hip, and in the leg. Broke the bone. What happened to the guy?

  The Nip? There were two of them. Listen, I'm going to make us highballs, order up some mixed nuts. You want anything?

  You won't talk about it, Louly said. Why?

  Are you kidding? I tell everybody, Carl said. Come on, let's have a drink.

  You don't want to admit some guy got the drop on you.

  Honey, this is different, it's a war story. Get dry and I'll tell you what happened.

  Chapter Six

  Gary Marion, Ex-Bull Rider

  Carl and Jurgen were discussing what the Nazis have been doing to Jews. Then Carl goes to pick up Louly, who is home for a war-bond rally, an d t hey spend a night in a hotel room, with Carl recounting what he's heard from Jurgen.

  Carl was shaving in his white undershorts in the bathroom, the door open, his highball on the counter; he'd come out to the bedroom to stand over Louly at the vanity in a peach teddy brushing snags out of her red hair, Carl stooping to shave in the vanity mirror while he told Louly his war story: How they lived in Quonset huts on Momote Plantation among rows of coconut palms, the 5,000- foot airstrip cutting a wide swath of packed coral through the trees. He to
ld her fighter planes took off every day -- Australians in Hurricanes and Spitfires, the Navy sending F4U's and Hellcats -- to drop bombs o n b ypassed Japanese bases like Rabaul, keeping a good 100,000 Nips out of the war.

  ''Did you eat much coconut?''

  ''Hardly any.''

  ''Why not?''

  ''Too much trouble, and the milk gives you the runs. We hung mosquito netting over our bunks and took Atabrine tablets every day. It could turn your skin yellow.''

  ''So you didn't take any.''

  ''Once in a while I did.''

  ''How was the chow?'' The marine soundin interested.

  ''Poor to not too bad, but I ate it. Most of the time, we wore greens, the shirts and pants,'' Carl said, stepping into the bathroom to hold his razor under the faucet and drink some of his highball, ''and green baseball caps, or you could wear your white cover. You could wear dungarees or just about anything you wanted, Seabees weren't that military. We'd cut the pants down to shorts and the sleeves off the shirts, cut our combat boots into sandals.''

  ''It must've been hot,'' Louly said, making a face, her brush caught in a snag.

  Carl took the brush, worked it free and put i back in her hand saying: ''Two degrees from the Equator, that's hot. Nobody cared -- we always had a breeze off the Bismarck Sea. I can't tell you where the sea ends and it becomes the Pacific Ocean again. I asked Jurgen -- he's the one told me why it's the Bismarck Sea, Germany taking over the Admiralties in 1884 and owned them up to the end of World War I. I said to Jurgen I was surprised you didn't put up any statues, Bismarck or any of your Kraut heroes like the Kaiser. I think Australia owns the islands now. Manus , the big one, has a huge harbor, so they made it Seventh Fleet headquarters. Los Negros is only 10 miles long, but curves around close to Manus and forms one side of the harbor. We were issued a carbine and three magazines of ammo, 45 rounds. And I had my .38 along."

  "You brought it with you?" Louly surprised.

  "I wore it every day for 15 years. It felt good the time I packed it." Louly paused, holding the hairbrush in the air. "You never told me what your job was." "The lieutenant would tell me to get in the jee p a nd go check on something. We had a lot of heav y e quipment working, bulldozers and graders." Car l s miled at himself in the vanity mirror, half-turned an d m ade a muscle for Louly. "You like my tattoo?" "I love it." She said, "It's Palmer Method, huh?" looking at "Carlos" on his shoulder in perfect penmanship.