“Tell the nice man what you told us about Wissembourg, Casey,” the colonel ordered.
Wagner said, “Yes, sir.” Then he stood up and visibly collected his thoughts before going on.
“We have Americans all over France. In Paris, for example, on an island called—I forget what—and in places like Carentan, which is near Cherbourg—”
“I know it well,” Ziegler offered. “I was there for a month. It’s where we’re building a permanent cemetery for our guys who bought it on the invasion beaches and as we broke out of the beachhead.”
“I just have to know,” Cronley said. “What the hell were you doing in a cemetery for a month?”
“You really want to know?”
“I really want to know,” Colonel McMullen said.
“And curiosity seems to have overwhelmed me, too,” Major Wallace said.
“Okay. Two days after the invasion on D-Day, Graves Registration started burying the people who had bought it on the beaches. Among whom, incidentally, was President Roosevelt’s son—President Teddy Roosevelt’s son—who was a buck general who bought it on the beach.”
“Mr. Ziegler is,” Cronley said, “in case anyone is wondering, the DCI’s unquestionable expert on cemeteries.”
“Carry on, Mr. Ziegler,” McMullen said. “You’ve caught everyone’s attention.”
“Okay,” Ziegler said. “As I was saying, right after the invasion, Graves Registration started burying bodies—most often in ponchos, but sometimes without anything. There was a lot of bodies. And then after the breakout, they opened another cemetery, this one overlooking Omaha Beach, near a little dorf called Colleville-sur-Mer.
“After the war the families of the guys buried there were offered the choice of having their dead returned to the States, or having them reburied in what was to be the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. Nine thousand three hundred and eighty-seven families said bury them where they got killed. About that many, a little more, said, ‘Send him home.’
“This started one hell of an operation. The guys to be returned not only had to be dug up, but embalmed, and then put in caskets. Freighters loaded with nothing but caskets began to arrive in Cherbourg, and the Military Air Transport Command began flying in planeloads of licensed embalmers. They put these people up in another little dorf, Carentan.”
“Why did they need embalmers?” Major Wallace asked.
“Because in some places in the States, you can’t be buried unless you’ve been embalmed,” Ziegler clarified. “So they had to embalm all the bodies going home before they put them in caskets. And then somebody decided that it was only fair that the guys not going home get the same treatment. Before they could be buried in the permanent cemetery, they had to be embalmed and put in caskets. Which came, by the way, with silk linings, silk pillows for their heads, and silk sheets to wrap the bodies in. Which is why I spent a month in Carentan.”
“Embalming bodies?” Cronley asked.
Ziegler shook his head. “Making a case against the Frogs who broke into the warehouses where the caskets were stored and stole the silk and sold it to dressmakers and brassiere makers in Paris. We got one hundred and two of them put in the Frog slam, some for stealing the silk and some for receiving stolen property.”
“I have to confess that I never heard anything about this before,” Colonel McMullen said.
“The ambassador—our ambassador to France—got the whole investigation classified Secret. He said it ‘would impair Franco-American relations unnecessarily,’ and the French government kept it out of the French newspapers. I got a Green Hornet for ‘good work in a classified investigation.’”
“A Green Hornet?” Janice asked.
“The Army Commendation Medal. The ribbon is green with white stripes. Anyway, that’s what I was doing in Carentan. Casey, what’s with you and Carentan?”
“The way they deliver Stripes in France is to send a truckload of them to Paris, to that island in Paris I can’t remember the name of—it’s some sort of depot—where they unload. The Stripes is then taken by the depot’s trucks to the American bases all over France, like Carentan, for example, when they make their regular daily runs carrying supplies or whatever.
“When I was looking at the maps, I started wondering why the Stripes trucks went that way to Paris. It’s not the direct route, and it’s not a major highway. There is a Constabulary checkpoint at Wissembourg, because it’s an international border. But then I started thinking, since Stripes trucks go by them every day, the Constab guys aren’t going to take a real close look at them.
“And then when I kept looking at the maps, I saw that there’s nothing much on both sides of the border around Wissembourg. It’s in the middle of nowhere. And there’s not much traffic on the road. So no one would see the truck stopping, and a couple of guys coming out of the woods and getting on the trucks, and then getting off, with nobody seeing them, on the other side of the border.”
“And,” McMullen said, “Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin has followed Cousin Luther—what’s his name, Cronley?”
“Stauffer, Luther Stauffer. My mother’s maiden name is Stauffer.”
“So Commandant Fortin of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire has followed Herr—or is it Monsieur?—Stauffer to Wissembourg,” McMullen said. “Does anyone else find that fascinating?”
Before anyone could answer, the telephone on Florence Miller’s desk rang.
Cronley looked at her impatiently as she answered, and then curiously as she gestured to Tom Winters that it was for him.