The Deadly Embrace

Synopsis:

A razor-sharp thriller, rich with crackling dialogue and pulse-pounding suspense, that ingeniously interweaves fiction and history.

Robert J. Mrazek is a natural-born storyteller, whose previous novels have been described as “gripping,” “magically rendered,” and “compelling” by the national press — words of praise that would equally apply to
The Deadly Embrace
. From bomb-ravaged London to elegant English country estates, Lieutenant Elizabeth “Liza” Marantz and her partner, Major Sam Taggart, a troubled former New York City homicide detective, investigate the suspicious deaths of two female colleagues who were involved in sexual relationships with powerful Allied commanders. Occurring on the eve of D-Day, Liza’s investigations uncover more than one conspiracy, and the very success of the war may rest in her hands.

The Deadly Embrace

Robert J. Mrazek

Copyright © 2006 by Robert J. Mrazek

To Carolyn, with Love

And, after all, what is a lie?
‘Tis but the truth in masquerade.

Lord Byron

I regret to say that I learned too late that
it was not what a person did, but what he got
the credit of doing that gave him a reputation.

Major General George Crook (1864)

CHAPTER 1

I
t was snowing hard as the blacked-out coach carrying Lieutenant Elizabeth Marantz arrived at Victoria Station shortly before dawn. The sixty-mile trip from Southampton had become a nine-hour ordeal as the unheated troop train was forced to wait in darkness while successive waves of Luftwaffe bombers attacked London.

Above the strident wail of air-raid sirens, she could hear the rhythmic staccato bark of anti-aircraft cannons and the thunderous roar of the German armada passing overhead. Inside the dark car, a match would flare at the end of a cigarette, momentarily illuminating a restless young American face.

Two days earlier, she had arrived at Southampton aboard the
Empress of Scotland,
a converted British passenger liner transporting a fully equipped battalion of the American Third Infantry Division to its new base of operations in England.

Lieutenant Marantz shared the railroad coach with more than a hundred officers and enlisted men. Most of them were only boys, just eighteen and nineteen years old. They packed every compartment as well as the floor space along the connecting corridors.

All the windows had been screwed shut, and cigarette smoke soon turned the confined space into a choking yellow haze. A number of soldiers had managed to buy liquor before boarding the train, and they became raucously drunk.

As the train came to a grinding halt at Victoria Station, Lieutenant Marantz pulled a haversack from under the seat bench and wearily followed the line of men out onto the open platform. Although the air was stingingly cold and invigorating, it reeked from the fires caused by the Luftwaffe incendiaries. A biting wind sent grit and ashes swirling into their exhausted eyes.

Shoulders hunched low under the weight of their overseas bags, the new arrivals were greeted by a gigantic white canvas banner that hung askew from the stanchions of the rusty iron roof that soared a hundred feet above their heads. It read,

WELCOME ALLIED ARMED FORCES — HAPPY CHRISTMAS 1943

After two nights without sleep, the young Women’s Army Corps officer longed for nothing more than a long, hot bath. As the line of soldiers snaked its way slowly toward the station, another snow-clad train arrived in a cloud of coal smoke and began disgorging its passengers. The crush of people made it almost impossible to move.

“Do you have a place to stay Lieutenant?” came a low voice over the distant shriek of a train whistle.

Marantz turned to see a tall British officer standing near the open door of the newly arrived train. He was no more than thirty, his clean-shaven face deeply tanned. Just above the white silk scarf that circled his throat, livid burn scars puckered the skin up to his jawline and across the right cheek. Colonel’s tabs adorned the epaulets of his greatcoat. The empty sleeve where his right arm should have been was pinned to his side.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I have orders to report to the Officers’ Replacement Depot to receive my billet.”

“Well, I could do better than that, Lieutenant,” he said. “I would be happy to share my suite with you at the Dorchester.”

Speechless, Lieutenant Marantz stared up at him as the line began to move slowly forward. The young colonel’s face softened into an apologetic grin and he said, “Please forgive me for being so bloody obvious. I’ve spent the last two years in the Burmese jungle with the Chindits. Forgot my manners, I’m afraid.”

Lieutenant Marantz nodded tentatively.

With a casual bow of his head, the Englishman said, “Colonel Henry Livingston, known to one and all as Hal … formerly of Cambridge by way of the Fourth Armoured Division of the Royal Tank Corps, and more recently a brigade commander under the somewhat legendary Orde Wingate.”

She couldn’t help smiling.

“Second Lieutenant Elizabeth Marantz,” she replied, “known to one and all as Liza, formerly of Barnard by way of New York Medical College, and more recently the Women’s Army Corps. I once met the somewhat legendary Artie Shaw in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel.”

“You have the best of me, I’m afraid,” he said, suddenly coughing into a white handkerchief. As Liza watched the edge of it turn crimson, he added, “I assume you know that you are a stunningly beautiful girl.”

He had obviously just been released from a hospital. The last thing she wanted him to think was that his battle scars were somehow hideous to her.

“I’m confident you’ll have no trouble making new conquests, Colonel Livingston,” she said with a sympathetic smile, “but, regretfully, I won’t be one of them.”

“Pity,” he replied as she disappeared through the entrance door into the station.

Dawn had paled the gray, snow-filled sky when she joined several other American officers waiting for transportation to the same temporary housing billet on Grosvenor Road in Pimlico. A few minutes later, a dilapidated bus pulled up with a loud, clattering growl. Its only heating source was a small, sputtering coal stove in the back, and Liza shivered as the damp chill penetrated her coat and uniform skirt.

“The Jerries are coming almost every night, like in ‘41,” the red-faced driver shouted back at them as soon as they were under way. “And just like the last time those posh bastards in Whitehall have moved their families out into the country again … leavin the rest of us here to take it in the throat.”

The window was coated with a grimy mixture of snow and fire ash. Trying to see through it reminded her of swimming underwater. She fell asleep to the throb of the engine as they waited for a long caravan of military vehicles to pass by. Later, she awoke to the noisy downshifting of gears as the ancient vehicle came to a halt outside a small hotel.

While unpacking in her room, her mind drifted back to the maimed British officer who had propositioned her at the train station. In truth, she had never considered herself beautiful and saw no reason to change her mind now. Glancing into the mirror, she saw no more than the essential features so many other women shared. Slim figure, dark complexion, green eyes, black hair. Perhaps it’s the hair, Liza concluded: it still flowed thickly down her back.

It struck her that wartime England was not the place to be worrying about her hair or its possible effect on men. After borrowing a pair of scissors from the clerk at the front desk, Liza went back up to her room and cut her hair off to collar length. Without ceremony, she picked up the soft black heap at her feet and deposited it in the wastebasket.

“To my new life,” she said into the mirror.

Early the next morning, she checked in at the crowded Officers’ Replacement Depot to see if her new orders had been cut. Like the others who hadn’t received their assignments, she was told simply to wait.

She occupied her first days in London walking the crowded streets and gazing at the sandbagged monuments and buildings. Aside from the meals she ate in the hotel dining room, her evenings were spent alone in her room. It faced onto the Thames, and she enjoyed watching the river traffic of transport ships gliding silently toward the East End docks, which were the principal target of the nightly bombing raids. Late at night, she would lie awake listening to the comings and goings of the other officers.

One evening, she was sitting in her darkened room listening to the radio when the BBC broadcast a live speech of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. He was addressing a screaming crowd of Nazis at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

“ROOSFELT,” he raved in German. “The paralytic Roosfelt and his Jew bankers will be punished for their crimes.”

With her childhood knowledge of Yiddish, Liza could understand many of the demagogue’s words and phrases, punctuated by the fawning audience’s screams of “SIEG HEIL … SIEG HEIL!”

As Goebbels’s braying voice ranted on in the darkness about the evils of international Jewry, the faint orange glow of the radio dial cast a yellowish tint on her trembling hands.

That night, she dreamed of her family for the first time since she had left home. In the dream, she was a child again in the big mahogany bed at their summer cottage in the Catskill Mountains. Her older brother, Nate, was asleep beside her, a contented smile on his boyishly handsome face.

A peal of thunder rattled the bedroom window. She dreamed that the storm was moving fast, roaring toward them from across the Allegheny Mountains. A jagged shaft of lightning erased the darkness. In the blinding glare, Nate sought to calm her with a reassuring grin as the room suddenly shuddered under a brutal concussion.

She bolted awake to the agonizing truth that Nate was dead, killed in action while fighting with the Fifth Marines at Guadalcanal a year earlier. Someone was screaming in the street below her room.

Liza stumbled to the blackout curtain and swept it away from the half-open casement window. Looking up into the rain-filled sky, she saw column after column of Luftwaffe bombers flying in disciplined formation up the river.

They came in low under the clouds, lit up by the blue-white searchlights from the hundreds of artillery batteries deployed across the city. With an earsplitting roar, the planes began to drop their payloads. The bombs fell to earth in a long, shrieking chorus.

As Liza watched from the window, one stick of incendiaries exploded in the neighborhood directly across the river from her. A few seconds later, the house shook under her feet as a bomb landed less than a block away down Grosvenor Road.

A massive chunk of ceiling plaster collapsed onto her bed, and she could smell the acidic stench of cordite. As the piercing human screams below her receded to a moaning wail, she felt an intense wave of heat blow past her face through the window. A cloud of black, greasy smoke wafted across the opening, blocking her view.

Her uniform coat still lay on the small end table where she had tossed it before falling into bed. Draping it over her shoulders, she ran down the carpeted stairs. An officer was slowly backing out of his room on the ground floor. Its front windows were blown in, and his hands were bleeding.

The entrance door to the hotel lay flat on the floor in the hallway of the foyer. She walked over it and outside into the pelting rain. Fires were raging out of control in the mansions directly across the river. Twenty yards down Grosvenor Road, a military lorry and an ambulance had collided head-on in the middle of the street. The driver of the lorry was trying to crawl through the shattered windscreen.

Liza heard what sounded like the groan of a wounded animal. In the glare of the fires, she could see two dark figures on the broad sidewalk in front of the hotel. She didn’t linger at the first one. The corpse was wearing the uniform of a U.S. Army Air Corps officer. It was headless, and lay spread-eagled on its back in a small lake of blood. Farther on, a young woman was down on her knees at the edge of the paving stones.

The girl’s pale-white hands covered her face as Liza knelt beside her. A chain of quick impressions raced through her brain as she tried to determine if the young woman was seriously injured or had simply become hysterical at the sight of her friend’s gruesome death. After gently pulling the girl’s hands away from her face, Liza unbuttoned her woolen overcoat and slipped it off her shoulders.

The girl was wearing a tight-fitting pink satin dress, mended carefully at the collar and shoulders. Around nineteen, she wore no wedding ring or other jewelry. Liza’s eyes took in Cupid’s-bow lips and an apple-cheeked face crowned with curly red hair.

A prostitute? Liza wondered, as she began her examination. Definitely not a streetwalker, she decided. Aside from lipstick, the young woman wore no makeup, and her skin tone was unspoiled. She smelled fresh and clean. The slightly scalloped fingers of her hands, however, bore the roughness of hard physical work.

Liza found the first wound, a deep, slashing cut below the right elbow. Not life-threatening. She continued searching, pulling away the lower half of the girl’s overcoat.

“My God,” said a trembling voice behind them at the entrance staircase. It was one of the American staff officers from the hotel.

“It’s Major Slattery,” said Liza without turning away from the girl.

She had immediately recognized the headless corpse from the handmade alligator-skin boots he had been wearing when he had tried to pick her up that morning at breakfast.

He had obviously been bringing the young woman back to his room. It was right above Liza’s, and she was already familiar with Slattery’s nightly routine. The strains of Tommy Dorsey’s “Embraceable You” on the Victrola, followed by slow-moving dance steps across the groaning floor, leading finally to the unholy chorus of his shrieking bedsprings.

The young woman began falling over to one side as Liza’s fingers found a second wound. A piece of shrapnel had sliced through the coat into her abdomen. Blood was pulsing out of the narrow slit, and flowing down the side of her dress. She gently lowered the girl’s head to the paving stones.

Without instruments, it was impossible to tell if the metal fragment had torn through a vital organ. Liza pulled a clean handkerchief from her coat pocket and pressed it firmly against the girl’s stomach. Staring up at Liza with shock-deadened eyes, the girl moaned again, and Liza smelled the aroma of scotch on her breath.

A kitchen maid, she concluded, probably from one of the nearby mansions, lonely and anxious to meet a dashing American flyer.

“Doctor Boynton is coming,” the staff officer said as he folded the girl’s coat and placed it under her head. “He’s bringing his medical kit.”

A blaze of light lit the sky above them. Liza looked up to see one of the German bombers hurtling earthward like a flaming meteor. A few seconds later, she heard an explosion when it plunged into the neighborhood across the river.