Edited for Death (21 page)

Turning from the window, I scan the rooms. Mostly boxes, mostly cardboard, interspersed with a few trunks and three wooden chests. Aging sports equipment—three pair of wooden cross-country skis from the 1930s are tall against a wall—wooden tennis racquets, moldering track shoes; baseball bats and cracked mitts, flat basketballs and a cobwebbed croquet set. Tucked between a blanket chest and a stack of boxes labeled “Baby Clothes” is a duffle bag. A U.S Army duffle bag. To my not-quite professional eye, a duffle bag from World War II.

I race across the attic and tug it out from the space, raising a cloud of dust and what looks like a black widow spider as I do. The spider brings me up short and I stop as a cold rush of reason swamps me. Of course there are spiders, and certainly black widows, hidden away in the dark places and under the undisturbed things in the attic. I’d better do this search a little more systematically and a lot more carefully or I’ll spend the weekend with hospital staff instead of with Phil.

Grabbing the duffle bag by its strap, I hold it at arm’s length and swing it against the blanket chest, hoping that any residual spiders get knocked senseless, or at least scared off, then drag the bag closer to a window. The bag had been locked but somewhere over the past half-century the lock, still in the hasp, had rusted open. I wiggle the lock out and gingerly pull the bag open hoping to find...what?

What I find are hotel guest registers and accordion files of invoices and paid receipts dating from 1945 to 1962. Well, damn. The floor at that spot is too filthy to sit on so I haul out a guest register—January 1948 to September 1954, apparently not a lot of people visited the Mother Lode or stayed at the hotel after the war—spread it open and sit down on the chest. What can all this tell me? Not a lot, unless I’m going to piece together a financial history of the Claverts.

I remember that Ben Nevell is in the photo taken when Robert Calvert ran for office. I pick up the last two guest ledgers and begin leafing through. I’m a little surprised when I find Nevell registered as a guest eleven different times in late 1961 through 1962. Almost once a month. If he was a close friend of Robert’s, and he must have been to be included in that family picture, was it really unusual that he visited a lot?

I spend a quarter of an hour riffling through a few other registers and find Nevell’s scrawling signature only once or twice a year prior to 1961, when Robert actively began to seek statewide offices. Maybe Nevell was acting as a campaign adviser to his old war buddy. Maybe he was working with the family to plan strategy or develop ways to raise funds. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the city. I mentally note to ask Phil about Nevell in the early 1960s.

Disappointed, I stuff the ledgers and files back into the duffle bag, stick the lock back through the hasp and wrestle the bag back to its resting place.

I don’t want to bother with the “Baby Clothes” or “Photos, 1938 – 1942” or “Pauli’s Things” boxes. I open the blanket chest and find stacks of yellowing sheets, pillowcases and blankets, probably used by the hotel. The Calverts had surely been savers. Maybe if Royce ever has the time, I think, he can come up here with an antiques evaluator, maybe like that “Cash in the Attic” show. I try to envision a TV crew trailing cable and lights through all the dust and clutter, looking for some valuable things. I fail. This looks like the average suburban garage, a catchall of stuff that’s going to be thrown away “someday” but in the Calverts’ case, the “someday” is more than 100 years too late. The attics may not be the treasure trove I’d hoped, but there are still document boxes to finish in Stewart’s room.

I use his bathroom to scrub my hands before I put gloves on and begin the dairies and letters again. I’d left off reading the one leading up to D-Day. I pick up the first diary in the box and read that Robert joined the Army in the fall of 1943. He went through boot camp at Fort Ord, like his brother, but wasn’t tapped for OCS. He was assigned to the infantry and shipped to the East Coast to wait for further orders. With the January 1944 Allied landing on the beaches of Anzio and invasion of Italy, Robert’s unit was held as one of the many in reserve for the push up through Italy.

His diaries and letters during this period mostly revealed teenage boredom with military life and an itching to prove himself in action. He wrote that he and his buddies played cards, told jokes and tried to keep busy by playing catch. The tenor of his diaries changed when the full Allied forces landed at Anzio on May 22, 1944.

As the Americans made their way up the Italian peninsula, Robert began to see the action he was looking forward to, and the action scared him. He never showed his fear in his letters home, writing about the food, the marching and, occasionally, about the beauty of the Italian countryside.

“It’s really beat up,” he said in a letter from late July, “but still it’s summer and the Italians are trying to harvest what they can. They have grapes and tomatoes and we can sometimes get a couple of eggs. Once, we even caught a chicken. I felt kind of bad, but it wasn’t near a farm or anything so we didn’t know where it belonged. Sure do miss the fried chicken and gravy on the Sunday menu at home. Nobody here can cook like that.”

The troops in Italy had been ecstatic when they learned about the D-Day landings in France. Robert even got a letter from William, now a major and a participant in the landings, and wrote about both his pride in his brother’s accomplishments and his overriding terror that they both might be killed.

Williams’ diaries were more harrowing, and contained more sadness and anger than fear. He wrote about seeing the cliffs of Normandy loom up above the landing ships and how gut-wrenching it was to order his troops ashore, knowing that many, most of them, would be killed. By the third week in June, he was able to begin a letter to his parents, “From an apple orchard somewhere in France...” and he, too, talked about how the local farmers were trying to bring some sense of normality back into their lives.

He told his parents that he’d written to Robert and urged them not to worry, the troops in Italy were safer than the ones headed through France and into Germany. In his diaries during the fall, however, he privately worried about Robert. He hadn’t had any letters, but had surreptitiously put the word out and heard back that Robert was safe, slogging his way north.

By late fall, Robert was in Germany and now complaining to his diary about being tired, cold and fed up with the action. He was hoping for a rotation and some R and R—maybe in Paris? It had been liberated during the summer—but somewhere, anywhere where there weren’t guns firing and Germans trying to kill him.

I reach the end of that box and come to with a little shake. These are odd diaries. Robert was a decorated war hero. How could the scared young man writing in these diaries, barely more than a boy, have become the brave soldier? I carefully replace the last diary in the box and pull the one labeled “1944-1945” toward me.

December 1944 and January 1945 were bone-chillingly cold in Germany. Robert now added freezing to his list of complaints, but the diary entries were getting shorter and shorter. There were days when he wrote nothing and days when the highlight was “Got some warm water. Able to wash a little and shave.”

By the middle of February he was in the heart of Germany, just south of the old university city of Heidelberg. There was one diary entry describing the city climbing up steep hills beside the River Nekar and how the ruined castle stood over the city, but nothing else until the first week of April, when the litany of complaints about the weather took up again.

These ended with a spate of entries in early May after Robert was assigned to a unit, ironically led by William, which helped liberate Dachau, outside of Munich. Both brothers wrote of the overwhelming horror of what they’d seen, heard and smelled, and suddenly Robert was knocked out of his personal despair. Anger at the inhumanity perpetrated there rolled off the pages when he talked about “walking skeletons” and “piles of corpses” and “bodies frozen where they’d been shot”. And he vowed then that he would find some way of making sure this would never, could never, happen again.

I continue through the papers and it isn’t until the end of the box that I run across the commendation letters to the elder Calverts.

They tell an amazing story of bravery. During the last week of February, in Heidelberg, Robert single-handedly entered a house where a fire-fight was in progress and took out an entire German sniper’s nest, saving the lives of more than a dozen U.S. soldiers.

What happened to the frightened boy? There are almost two months when Robert wrote nothing in his diary. And he certainly hadn’t written anything about the incident in Heidelberg. Killing snipers? Robert seldom even mentioned firing his gun.

I dig backward until I come to the diary covering February and March and pick it up again. It comes open at the entry describing Heidelberg and I look more closely at it. It’s a small bound notebook, maybe four inches by six inches, small enough to stick into a pocket or duffle bag. Where it opens, I can see the stubs of pages. Maybe Robert decided that he didn’t want to keep what he’d written. Or, maybe someone had found the entries before me and removed them.

I take the diary over to Stewart’s desk, lay it flat in the sunlight and use the magnifying glass to examine the spine of the notebook. About 20 pages have been neatly cut from the book; pages that cover from the last week of February and Robert’s medal-winning action to the first week of April.

“Well, well,” I say.

CHAPTER THIRTY

It’s clear someone has been at the diaries. I’m so stunned I forget for a minute there are diaries, journals and letters from other Calvert family members in this box.

I put Robert’s mutilated diary aside and start pawing through the box. I pull out some letters dated early 1945 and a diary by William. The letters aren’t much. One from Robert to his parents at the end of January saying he’s in Germany, complaining about the bitter cold and the cold food and ending, “I just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.”

Another one from William in March is about the same but he adds that he’s had word that Robert’s unit is also in Germany. He’s hoping to link up with his younger brother.

The letters to the boys from the elder Calverts are filled with local news and wishes for a quick end to the war. Now that American troops are in Germany—and many headed east toward Berlin—the home folks are anticipating a spring victory. One letter to Robert has the news that his high school girlfriend is engaged and is making plans for a June wedding.

After Clarice’s conversation with the old girlfriend,
I wonder how this news hit the teenage boy freezing in Germany. He wasn’t the only one to get a “Dear John” letter but since this was from his folks, it probably wasn’t a shock.

William’s diary isn’t here. I’m stumped. Did whoever cut the pages from Robert’s journal take William’s? I put the box down and go back to the earlier one. No, nothing here. This box has stayed in fair order and it’s easy to follow the chronology.

I pick up the box labeled 1946-1948 and find the answer.

William didn’t have any daily entries until April 1945 so this diary went into 1946. I hope that being misfiled means it’s intact and start reading. The first few entries are cryptic. As an officer, William was careful to leave out anything that might have given the Germans information, but his confidence that the war is almost over comes through. He writes about the beauty of the countryside and the poverty they find rolling through.

All of this changes in the April 29, 1945 entry. William is assigned to the Thunderbird unit, the American unit that came across and liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp on the outskirts of Munich.

I’ve been sitting on the floor to sort through things. This diary, though. This I have to take to Stewart’s desk and lay it down. I can’t hold it.

I have to share this with someone. Where’s Phil when I need him? His cell goes directly to voicemail. I just leave a message to call me. I call Clarice.

I can hear Clarice stifling a sigh. “OK, we’ve ascertained that the Calvert boys did no-no stuff during the war. You called me out of the pool to tell me that?”

“No, I called because I want to read this stuff out loud to somebody. William was one of the Americans who liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp.”

“Holy shit.” Clarice whistles. “We knew about Robert being a war hero. I guess both of them had amazing stories. What’s it say?”

I begin reading the faded writing. William was using a pencil and some letters and whole words have disappeared over the last half-century. “We are on the outskirts of Munich and today came upon the most horrific sight I’ve ever seen. We heard rumors that the Germans had work camps but this is not a work camp, it’s a camp of death. I can’t begin to estimate how many people are—or were—here. There are piles of bodies. There are people who are so starved they’re skeletons. There are people who look hunted and are too weak to speak. And the German guards are healthy. I’m ashamed to say this, but our boys lined some of those German SS troops against a wall and shot them. The commander had surrendered under a white flag but I know that some of us were too angry and sick to even care. I think we shot more than 100 and maybe 30 or 40 others were beaten to death by the prisoners we freed.”