Black Cross

  “Well, damn it, you’ve got to tell me now. What did he do that was so terrible? And when did he do it? He told me that he spent the war in England.”

  Leibovitz’s eyes settled on some neutral point in space. “He spent most of the war in England, that’s true—doing research at Oxford. But for two short weeks, your grandfather traveled quite a bit. And his travels ultimately led him to a place that must have been very close to hell on earth.”

  “Where was that?”

  Leibovitz’s face hardened. “A place called Totenhausen, on the Recknitz River in northern Germany. As to when Mac was there, if you turn over the cross it will tell you.”

  I turned the cross over. Engraved on its back were the words:

  Mark Cameron McConnell, M.D.

  15 February 1944

  “That’s the date that the act of valor took place,” Leibovitz murmured. “Fifty years ago, your grandfather did something so strategically important, so singularly heroic that he was awarded an honor only one other non-British subject has ever received. That other recipient was also an American.”

  “Who was it?”

  The rabbi straightened up with difficulty, his spine stiff as a ramrod. “The Unknown Soldier.”

  I felt a lump in my throat. “I can’t believe this,” I said hoarsely. “This is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard. Or seen,” I added, holding up the ribbon and cross. It seemed somehow heavier in my hands.

  “You’re about to see something still more extraordinary,” Leibovitz said. “Something unique.”

  I swallowed in anticipation.

  “Look under the padding in the box. It should still be there.”

  I handed the cross to Rabbi Leibovitz, then gingerly lifted the linen cloth that lined the bottom of the pine box. Beneath it I found a frayed swatch of woolen cloth, a Scottish tartan pattern. I looked up questioningly.

  “Keep going,” Leibovitz said.

  Beneath the tartan I found a photograph. It was black-and-white, with contrasts so stark it looked like one of the old Dust Bowl photographs from Life magazine. It showed a young woman from the waist up. She wore a simple cotton dress, her slender body posed rather formally against a background of dark wooden planks. Her shoulder-length hair was blond and straight, and seemed to glow against the unfinished wood. Her face, though worn by care lines around the mouth, was set off by eyes as dark as the wood behind her. I guessed her age at thirty.

  “Who is this?” I asked. “She’s . . . I don’t know. Not beautiful exactly, but . . . alive. Is it my grandmother? When she was younger, I mean?”

  Rabbi Leibovitz waved his hand impatiently. “All in good time. Look beneath the photograph.”

  I did. A meticulously folded piece of notepaper lay there, wrinkled and yellowed with age. I lifted it out and started to unfold it.

  “Careful,” he warned.

  “Is this the citation for the award?” I asked, working delicately at the paper.

  “Something else altogether.”

  I had it open now. The handwritten blue letters had almost completely faded, as if the note had been put through a washing machine by mistake, but the few words were still legible. I read them with a strange sense of puzzlement.

  On my head be these deaths.

  W

  “I can barely read it. What does it mean? Who is ‘W’?”

  “You can barely read the writing, Mark, because it was nearly washed away by the freezing waters of the Recknitz River in 1944. What the note means can only be explained by telling you a rather involved and shocking story. And ‘W’—as the author of that note so cryptically described himself—was Winston Churchill.”

  “Churchill!”

  “Yes.” The old rabbi smiled mischievously. “And thereby hangs a tale.”

  “My God,” I said.

  “Would you have any brandy about?” asked Leibovitz.

  I went to fetch a bottle.

  “I lay it all at Churchill’s door.”

  The old rabbi had ensconced himself in a leather wing chair with a crocheted comforter around his knees and the brandy glass in his hand. “You know, of course, that Mac first went to England as a Rhodes scholar. That was 1930, the year after the Crash. He stayed two years, then was asked to stay a third and matriculate. Quite an honor. When he graduated and returned to the U.S., I’m sure he thought his ‘English period’ was finished. But it wasn’t.

  “He graduated medical school in thirty-eight, somehow squeezing in a masters in chemical engineering during his internship. By then it was 1940. He entered general practice with a friend of his father’s, but he’d hardly settled in when a phone call came from Oxford. His old tutor told him that one of Churchill’s scientific advisors had been impressed by some monographs he’d done on chemical warfare in World War One. They wanted him to join a British team working on poison gases. America wasn’t in the war yet, but Mac understood what was at stake. England was hanging by a thread.”

  “I do remember that much,” I said. “He agreed to go on the condition that he would only work in a defensive capacity. Right?”

  “Yes. Rather naively, if I may say so. Anyway, he took your grandmother with him to England, just in time for the Battle of Britain. It took some doing, but he talked Susan into going back to the States. Hitler never did invade England, but by then it was too late. They were separated for the duration.

  “Fifty years,” Leibovitz said softly. He paused as though he had lost his train of thought. “I suppose that seems an age to you, but try to picture the time. Dead of winter, January, 1944. The whole world—including the Germans—knew the Allies would invade Europe in the spring. The only question was where the blow would fall. Eisenhower had just been named Supreme Commander of OVERLORD. Churchill—”

  “Excuse me, Rabbi,” I interrupted. “No disrespect intended, but I get the feeling you’re giving me the long version of this story.”

  He smiled with a forbearance learned at the sides of impatient children. “You have somewhere to go?”

  “No. But I’m curious about my grandfather, not Churchill and Eisenhower.”

  “Mark, if I simply told you the end of this story, you would not believe me. I mean that. You cannot absorb what I am going to say unless you know what led to it. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, trying to mask my impatience.

  “No,” Leibovitz said forcefully. “You don’t. The worst thing you have ever seen in your life, all the worst things put together—child abuse, rape, even murder—these are as nothing compared to what I am about to tell you. It is a tale of cruelty beyond imagining, of men and women whose heroism has never been equaled.” He raised a crooked finger and his voice went very low. “After hearing this story, your life will never be the same.”

  “That’s a lot of buildup, Rabbi.”

  He took a gulp of brandy. “I have no children, Doctor. Do you know why?”

  “Well . . . I assume you never wanted any. Or that you or your wife were sterile.”

  “I am sterile,” Leibovitz confirmed. “When I was sixteen, I was invited by some German doctors to sit in a booth and fill out a form that would take fifteen minutes to complete. During those fifteen minutes, high-intensity X-rays were passed through my testicles from three sides. Two weeks later, a Jewish surgeon and his wife saved my life by castrating me in their kitchen.”

  My hands felt suddenly cold. “Were you . . . in the camps?”

  “No. I escaped to Sweden, along with the surgeon and his wife. But you see, I left my unborn children behind.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever told that to a Christian,” Leibovitz said.

  “I’m not a Christian, Rabbi.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Do you know something I don’t? You’re not Jewish.”

  “I’m not anything. An agnostic, I guess. A professional doubter.”

  Leibovitz studied me for a long time, his face lined by emotions I could not i
nterpret. “You say that so easily for one who has lived through so little.”

  “I’ve seen my share of suffering. And alleviated some, too.”

  He waved his hand in a European gesture that seemed to say many things at once. “Doctor, you have not even peered over the edge of the abyss.”

  Laying his hand across his eyes, Leibovitz sat motionless for nearly a minute. He seemed to be deciding if he had the strength to tell his story after all. Just as I was about to speak, he removed his hand and said, “Now are you ready to listen, Mark? Or would you prefer to leave things as they are?”

  I looked down at the Victoria Cross, the faded note, the Scottish tartan and the photograph of the woman. “You’ve hooked me,” I said. “But wait here a minute.”

  I went back to my grandfather’s bedroom and got the small tape recorder he had used for dictating medical charts, and a thin box of Sony microcassettes. “Do you mind if I tape this?” I asked, setting up the recorder. “If the story is that important, perhaps it should be documented.”

  “It should have been told years ago,” Leibovitz said. “But Mac would have none of it. He said knowing or not knowing about it wouldn’t change human history by one whit. I disagreed with him. It’s long past time to bring this story into the light.”

  I glanced at the window. “The light’s almost gone, Rabbi.”

  He sighed indifferently. “Then we’ll make a night of it.”

  “Can I give you a bit of advice? Editorially speaking?”

  “Ah. You’re an editor now?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve written a few journal articles. Actually, I’ve been toying with writing a novel on my off weekends. A medical thriller. But perhaps I’ve found a new story to tell. Anyway, here’s my advice—you can take it or leave it. That ‘picture the scene’ and ‘I suppose’ business? Drop all that. Just tell the story like you think it happened. Like you were a fly on the wall.”

  After a few moments, Leibovitz nodded. “I think I can do that,” he said. He poured himself another brandy, then settled back into the leather wing chair and held up his glass in a toast.

  “To the bravest man I ever knew.”

  2

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY, ENGLAND, 1944

  Mark McConnell quietly lifted the long steering pole out of the Cherwell River and slapped it back down. A spray of water and ice drenched the leatherjacketed back of his brother, who perched on the forward seat of the narrow wooden punt.

  “You goddamn shitbird!” David whirled around, almost upsetting the boat in the process. He dug his gloved right hand into the river and shot back a volley of water and ice.

  “Hold it!” Mark cried. “You’ll sink us!”

  “You surrendering?” David dipped his hand into the water again.

  “Declaring a temporary cease-fire. For medical reasons.”

  “Chickenshit.”

  Mark wiggled the pole. “I’ve got the firepower.”

  “Okay, truce.” David lifted his hand and turned back to the prow of the flat-bottomed punt as it crunched slowly around the next bend in the icy river. He was the shorter of the two brothers and built like a halfback, with sprinter’s legs, a narrow waist, and thickly muscled shoulders. His sandy blond hair, strong jaw, and clear blue eyes completed the picture of Norman Rockwell charm. While Mark watched warily, he slid down onto the cross slats of the punt, leaned back, cradled his head in his hands and shut his eyes.

  Mark scanned the river ahead. The bare trees on both banks hung so heavily with icicles that some branches nearly touched the snow carpeting the meadows beneath them. “This is insane,” he said, flicking a final salvo of drops onto David’s face. But he didn’t mean it. If his younger brother hadn’t driven down from the 8th Air Force base at Deenethorpe, this winter day would have been like any other at Oxford: a bleak fourteen-hour newsreel watched through foggy laboratory windows. Rain changing into sleet and then back into rain, falling in great gray sheets that spattered the cobbled quads of the colleges, shrouded the Bodelian Library, and swelled the lazy Cherwell and Thames into torrents.

  “This is the life,” David murmured. “This is exactly how we picture you eggheads when we’re on the flight line. Living the life of Riley, canoeing around a goddamn college campus. We risk our asses every day while you bums sit up here, supposedly winning the war with your little gray cells.”

  “You mean punting around a goddamn college campus.”

  David opened one eye, looked back and snorted. “Jeez, you sound more like a limey every year. If you called Mom on a telephone, she wouldn’t even know you.”

  Mark studied his younger brother’s face. It was good to see him again, and not merely because it provided an excuse to get out of the lab for an afternoon. Mark needed the human contact. In this place that offered so much comradeship, he had become a virtual outcast. Lately, he’d had to fight a wild impulse to simply turn to a sympathetic face on a bus and begin talking. Yet looking at his brother now—an Air Force captain who spent most days on white-knuckle bombing runs over Germany—he wondered if he had the right to add his own pressures to those already on David’s shoulders.

  “I think my hands are frostbitten,” Mark grumbled, as the punt pushed on through the black water. “I’d give a hundred pounds for an outboard motor.”

  Once already he had resolved to talk to David about his problem—three weeks ago, on Christmas Day—but a last-minute bombing assignment had scotched their plans to get together. Now another month had almost slipped by. It had been that way for the last four years. Time rushing past like a river in flood. Now another Christmas was gone, and another New Year. 1944. Mark could scarcely believe it. Four years in this sandstone haven of cloisters and spires while the world outside tore itself to pieces with unrelenting fury.

  “Hey,” David called, his eyes still closed. “How are the girls down here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  David opened both eyes and craned his neck to stare back at his brother. “What do I mean? Has four years away from Susan pickled your pecker as well as your brain? I’m talking about English dames. We’ve got to live up to our billing, you know.”

  “Our billing?”

  “Overpaid, oversexed, and over here, remember? Hell, I know you love Susan. I know plenty of guys who are crazy about their wives. But four years. You can’t spend every waking moment holed up in that Frankenstein lab of yours.”

  Mark shrugged. “I have, though.”

  “Christ, I’d tell you about some of my adventures, only you wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.”

  Mark jabbed the pole into the river bottom. It had been a mistake to send Susan home, but any sane man would have done the same at the time, considering the danger of German invasion. He was getting tired of paying for that particular misjudgment, though. He’d been on the wrong side of the Atlantic longer than any American he knew.

  “To hell with this,” he said. As they rounded the bend at St. Hilda’s College, he levered the punt into a sharp embankment near Christ Church Meadow. The impact of the bow against the shore practically catapulted David out of the boat, but he landed with an athlete’s natural grace.

  “Let’s get a beer!” David said. “Don’t you eggheads ever drink around here? Whose dumbass idea was this, anyway?”

  Mark found himself laughing as he climbed out of the punt. “As a matter of fact, I know a few chaps who’d be glad to take you on in the drinking contest of your choice.”

  “Chaps?” David gaped at his brother. “Did I hear you say chaps, Mac? We gotta get you back to the States, old sport. Back to Georgia. You sound like the Great Gatsby.”

  “I’m only playing to your Tom Buchanan.”

  David groaned. “We’d better go straight to whiskey. A little Kentucky bourbon’ll wash that limey accent right out of your throat.”

  “I’m afraid they don’t stock Kentucky’s finest here in Oxford, Slick.”

  David grinned. “That’s why I brought a fifth in my muzette bag
. Cost me thirty bucks on the black market, but I wouldn’t drink that high-toned limey swill if I was dying of thirst.”

  They crossed Christ Church Meadow mostly in silence. David took several long pulls from the bottle stowed in his flight bag. Mark declined repeated offers to share the whiskey. He wanted his mind clear when he spoke about his dilemma. He would have preferred to have David’s mind clear as well, but there was nothing he could do about that.

  Walking side by side, the differences between the brothers were more marked. Where David was compact and almost brawny, Mark was tall and lean, with the body of a distance runner. He moved with long, easy strides and a surefootedness acquired through years of running cross-country races. His hands were large, his fingers long and narrow. Surgeon’s hands, his father had boasted when he was only a boy. David had inherited their mother’s flashing blue eyes, but Mark’s were deep brown, another legacy from his father. And where David was quick to smile or throw a punch, Mark wore the contemplative gaze of a man who carefully weighed all sides of any issue before acting.

  He chose the Welsh Pony, in George Street. The pub did a brisk evening trade, but privacy could be had if desired. Mark went up to one of the two central bars and ordered a beer to justify the use of the table, then led David to the rear of the pub. By the time he was halfway to the bottom of his mug, he realized that David had drunk quite a lot of bourbon, with English stout to chase it down. Yet David remained surprisingly lucid. He was like their father in that way, if in no other. The analogy was not comforting.

  “What the hell’s eating you, Mac?” David asked sharply. “All day I’ve had the feeling you wanted to say something, but you keep backing off. You’re like an old possum circling a garbage can. You’re driving me nuts. Get it out in the open.”

  Mark leaned back against the oak chair and took his first long swallow of the night. “David, what does it feel like to bomb a German city?”

  “What do you mean?” David straightened up, looking puzzled. “You mean am I scared?”