Dry Bones Read Online Free

Union messenger clears his throat and sings (chants, really, as if intoning the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor) a telegram for Miss Theresa Kelly:
    The War Department and the President
    regret to inform ye
    Corporal Mundy won’t be sitting
    under the apple tree with anyone else or thee.
    Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord
,
    and let perpetual light shine upon Harry.

FILE COPY: FOR OFFICE USE ONLY
    FORM A-T 3127. OSS                 DATE: September 15, 1944
    NAME: Bassante, Turlough A.
    RANK: Major (R&A)
    SERIAL NUMBER: 067812647
    REQUEST : Transfer (SO)              DETERMINATION : Denied (11/3/44)
    BACKGROUND INFORMATION (150 words or less) : My mother was an O’Donnell, an Ulster Catholic, from Belfast; my father, a Waldensian—an Italian Protestant from Turin. It was an interesting if not an irenic marriage. (They met in that center of cosmopolitan sophistication, Hoboken, New Jersey.) My father worked as a steward on the old Lloyd Sabaudo shipping line. My mother was a laundress. They had nine children. Six lived into adulthood. One Jesuit and one policeman (the same profession, really, just different uniforms). Two of the daughters are married, with a dozen or so progeny between them. The third, married to a Jew, is a childless school principal in Brooklyn. And then there’s
moi
. A conundrum to my parents. Child agnostic. Rejected a scholarship to St. Peter’s Prep. Insisted on attending public high school.
    EDUCATION : Scholarship to Yale. Majored in German. Minored in history. Tutored in Slavic languages. (Why Slavic languages? I wish I knew. But other than a taste for the exotic, I’m unsure why.) Encouraged by the Depression to seek government work, successfully sought admission to the Foreign Service School.
    CAREER : The Foreign Service. Posted at various times to Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow. Recalled to London in June 1941, when theGermans launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Asked for a transfer to the OSS in the summer of 1942. My superiors were unhappy with the request, regarding the OSS as an upstart outlier intent on poaching upon the traditional prerogatives of the Department of State. Their objections were overridden at the insistence of General Donovan, to whom I’d addressed a personal appeal. He insisted the State Department enjoyed a surfeit of linguists (in fact, the opposite was true—the Department’s lack of truly capable linguists was shocking) while the OSS was sorely lacking (which was true), especially in the field. With the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Donovan got his way, and I set off in the expectation of leaving desk work behind to take personal part in assaulting and subverting the Nazi sway over Europe. Instead, I was assigned to the Research & Analysis (R&A) in Bari, here to toil over briefing materials for presentation to operatives leaving for the field. The frustrations of this work are legion. Greatest of all is the direct contravention of the promise made me upon joining the OSS—i.e., that I would participate in the penetration of Occupied Europe, serving on missions to be undertaken behind enemy lines. I request to be assigned to Special Operations (SO), a position I was assured of upon enlistment into the OSS.

January 1945
    H ÔTEL R ITZ , P ARIS
    T HE SUMMONS TO G ENERAL D ONOVAN’S HEADQUARTERS WAS UNEX pected. Dunne had suspected—or, more accurately, hoped—that the younger, more gung ho OSS agents were at the head of the list for what were clearly the last clandestine assignments before the war’s end. Yet the brevity and bluntness of Donovan’s summons conveyed a sense of urgency.
    The exuberance engendered by the city’s liberation the previous summer was absent from the gloomy, wintry streets. As he passed through the lobby of the Hôtel Ritz, Dunne noticed Donovan’s head of press relations, Lieutenant Colonel Carlton Baxter Bartlett, in the bar off to the