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“And that’s in Sicily?” John Craig asked.
“On a smaller scale than Poland, but yes, it’s there,” Canidy said, then added, “You haven’t heard any of this?”
“Read, yes,” John Craig said. “As I sent and received the messages about what the SS did to those Mafia prisoners, I tried reading between the lines . . . and wondered. But heard? Not directly from you.”
Canidy raised his eyebrows as he took a sip of coffee, then nodded.
“The inside of that old villa they were using for the yellow fever experiment was a cesspool,” he began. “The rancid smell of rotting flesh made you sick to your stomach. The men, their bodies bruised and disfigured, were on wooden gurneys. Leather straps secured their wrists and ankles. Dirty gray sweat- and bloodstained gowns more or less covered their torsos. Their arms and legs—with festering wounds oozing dark fluids—were exposed. The bodies all had rashes. The dead ones were bloated.”
Canidy looked over the lip of his cup at Fine, and added, “It really was hellish—something out of Dante’s Inferno. Knowing that the SS does this, I don’t know how Francisco and Mordechaj control their rage as much as they do—”
“Who is Mordechaj?” John Craig asked.
“—because if that were happening in my country,” Canidy finished, ignoring the interruption, “and I had a family, nothing could hold me back from getting my pound of flesh out of the bastards.”
Fine—who was Jewish and did have a wife and three children waiting for him in Santa Monica, California—drained his coffee, then nodded appreciatively as he put the empty cup on the table.
“Trust me,” Fine said, an edge to his voice, “that thought has crossed my mind more than a time or two.” He paused, then in a more pleasant tone said: “And speaking of family, how is Ann?”
Canidy shrugged. “If she had her way we would be a family right now. I told her that this was not the time to get married. She kept a stiff upper lip, as our Brit cousins would say, but she’s not overly happy with me right now.”
Twenty-year-old Ann Chambers—a highly intelligent gorgeous blond southerner whose father’s empire included nine major newspapers and more than twice that many radio stations—and her girlfriend had been injured in March when Luftwaffe bombs leveled Ann’s London neighborhood. The friend had died from head trauma. Ann had suffered amnesia, and she and Canidy had only recently been reunited after Ann was found sixty miles north of London, in a barn that had been converted into a makeshift infirmary.
“I actually meant her health,” Fine said.
“She seems fully recover
ed,” Canidy said. “Operative word seems. The doctors have told her to take it easy for now. With her flat destroyed and housing tight, we’re grateful to you that she could sublet the studio’s apartment. She is very comfortable there, and starting to write again for her old man’s news service.”
Continental Motion Picture Studios quietly maintained a luxurious penthouse apartment in Westminster Tower, which overlooked Hyde Park, and was two blocks from the Dorchester Hotel. When Brandon Chambers heard that doctors said his daughter needed time to recover, cost for her room and board was not a consideration.
“It must have been hell wondering about her,” Fine said. “I’m glad you know she’s now comfortable.”
Canidy clearly remembered the gut-wrenching feeling he’d had when he first saw Ann’s flat leveled, and then the overwhelming emotions in Sicily when Tubes Fuller had handed him the message from Stan Fine announcing that Ann had been found—and was safe at OSS Whitbey House Station.
The helplessness I felt at Ann gone missing because of those goddamn German bombs came close to a simmering rage.
The thought of losing someone you deeply love triggers emotions more powerful than I ever imagined.
And then to think how the Nazis so savagely treat prisoners . . .
“Getting back to the goddamn Krauts,” Canidy then added, “I saw more compassion, more respect for life and death when they took all of us in Saint Paul’s lower school to the slaughterhouse to show us where hamburgers really came from.”
Fine knew all about Saint Paul’s. It was there that he had first crossed paths with Dick Canidy.
* * *
Stanley S. Fine had been a very young Hollywood lawyer—the vice president, legal, of Continental Motion Picture Studios, Inc. His responsibilities included keeping secret from the general public that “America’s Sweetheart”—Continental’s virginal movie star Monica Carlisle, born Mary Elizabeth Chernick—had not only been married to a German aristocrat and soon thereafter divorced, but that the union had produced a son by the name of Eric Fulmar.
After Eric’s father returned to Germany, his mother had decided that Eric was the last thing she needed in her Hollywood lifestyle. She ordered Fine to ship her son to boarding school.
The headmaster of Saint Paul’s School, Cedar Springs, Iowa, was one George Crater Canidy, Ph.D, D.D. It was said of the Reverend Canidy, a widower, that he wasn’t simply devoted to the Episcopal school—he and Saint Paul’s essentially were one and indivisible.
Reverend Canidy had a son about the age of Eric. Dick Canidy and Eric Fulmar quickly became buddies—and almost immediately seemed to be in constant mischief. Or worse.
Once, on the annual fall nature walk, Dick and Eric were horsing around, shooting wooden kitchen matches from toy pistols that were supposed to shoot suction-cup darts. The matches set a leaf pile on fire—and the Studebaker parked next to it went up in roaring flames.
Fine had had to rush to Cedar Rapids. He bought the owner of the destroyed automobile a new one. That calmed everyone, and freed the boys from the clutches of a fat lady at the Juvenile Authority. Even more important, it kept the whole escapade out of the newspapers.
