“Augie,” Captain James D. Cronley Jr. inquired of Chief Warrant Officer August Ziegler as the Ford staff car entered the gates of the cemetery, “is this the right place? Comrade Serov said ‘the Giesinger Friedhof cemetery.’ That plaque—brass sign, whatever—read MÜNCHEN-OSTFRIEDHOF.”
“I can only surmise,” Ziegler replied, “that no one elected to tell Comrade Serov that the establishment—opened in 1821 as the Giesinger-Friedhof cemetery and designed to provide approximately thirty-five thousand burial plots within its nearly forty hectares—which is just shy of a hundred acres—was renamed München-Ostfriedhof, or Eastern Cemetery of Munich, in September 1929, when the crematorium was opened. Rest assured, Captain Cronley, sir, that I would never take you to the wrong boneyard.”
“Did anyone ever tell you, Mr. Ziegler, that you’re a smart-ass?”
“Often, sir. How about you?”
“Where’d you get all that historical data? And how did you remember it all?”
“In a previous life, you will recall, I was a CID agent. And before that I was a cop who wanted to be a detective. I learned to memorize things so I could write them down later. Sometimes stuff like that sticks in my mind for a while. I got it while praying the 98th General Hospital didn’t send the corpses right to the crematorium.”
“What?” Cronley asked.
“I was afraid that might happen, considering the Kraut rule of After Twenty-five Years, Pay Up or Into the Crematorium.”
“The what?” PFC Karl-Christoph Wagner inquired from the backseat.
“It’s sort of a Rent-a-Grave system,” Ziegler explained. “After a quarter century, unless the family pays for another twenty-five years, they exhume the bodies, cremate what’s left, and then rent the grave to somebody new.”
“Jesus Christ!”
Cronley said, “If they’d cremated those bastards, we’d be fucked with Serov. Are you sure they didn’t?”
“We’re about to find out,” Ziegler said as he pulled up before a large building with a round roof. “The crematorium also houses the grave-locating office.”
“What the hell does that sign mean?” Cronley asked.
“For the captain’s edification, ‘Det 7, AGRC’ means ‘Detachment 7, American Graves Registration Command.’ I can only surmise we’re burning our dead. That would be cheaper than buying them a coffin and then flying them home.”
“Or they’re looking for the bodies of still-missing American POWs,” Cronley said.
“I didn’t think of that,” Ziegler admitted.
—
When they were halfway up the steps to the door of the building, an American voice called out, “Mr. Ziegler?”
A short, muscular first lieutenant trotted up to them, saluted Cronley, and said, “Lieutenant McGrory, sir. Munich Post Engineers. Colonel Bristol sent me to do whatever Mr. Ziegler requires.”
He pointed to the side of the building where an Army backhoe sat on a trailer attached to a three-quarter-ton truck. Half a dozen GIs sat on the fenders and running boards of the truck and on a jeep next to it. “Is that you, sir?”
“Guilty,” Ziegler said. “Welcome.”
“What can we do for you, sir?” Lieutenant McGrory asked.
“Presuming we can find their graves,” Cronley said, “we are going to exhume the bodies—which may or may not be in caskets—of three recently buried men . . .”
McGrory’s face showed he didn’t like this information at all. But he said nothing.
“. . . and then we’re going to take them to the morgue at the 98th General Hospital.”
“Sir, I can’t get three bodies, with or without caskets, on that three-quarter-ton.”
“Four bodies,” Cronley said, as if to himself.
“Sir?” Ziegler and McGrory asked.
Before Cronley could reply, a Chevrolet staff car drove up beside them. Three men, all in ODs with triangles, got out. One of them carried a Speed Graphic press camera and had a Leica 35mm camera hanging from his neck. Another had an Eyemo motion picture camera.