The Gilded Madonna by Garrick Jones (ebook reader for comics TXT) 📕

crush on in Africa, not Billy Tancred. I distinctly remembered the last time I saw him—sitting on a jerrycan, rolling a smoke. He hadn’t brushed his hair in a few days and it had spread in a ragged fringe over his forehead. “Smile,” I’d said to him, and he’d looked up at me from under his knotted eyebrows and given me a quick flash of his drop-your-pants grin. He and his squad of four were being sent to Al Qubah to sort out some locals who we’d heard were working hand in hand with our enemies, the Italians.

“Do you remember the last time we saw Johnny, Billy?” I stabbed my finger at the drawing of an oblong with one corner missing, in its place a flat lozenge shape with rounded corners unmistakeably attached the body of the oblong with a thin chain. “He was sitting on a jerrycan, just like this drawing, joking about farting into the C.O.’s drinking water.”

“This next drawing’s of a flower pot,” Billy said in amazement. “But this?”

“It’s a marble of some sort,” I said. “Or a round glass sphere with a star in its centre.”

“You never wanted to know, Clyde,” Billy said after an inordinate amount of time. The pages in his hand were shaking gently. I could tell what he’d seen on the page had affected him greatly. “And then you were gone, two days after we heard Johnny was killed.”

“Know what? He was blown to bits by homemade shrapnel bombs made of plastique packed into terracotta strawberry pots and clay pomade jars.”

“Filled with glass marbles.”

“What?”

“The five of them were shredded by shrapnel, Clyde. Not killed by the explosion. The jars were stored at the side of the road, next to the factory that made artificial star sapphires for the jewellery trade in Algeria. Glass with impurities, fashioned in such a way they made a six-pointed star inside when the light hit them the right way.”

It was all I could do not to cry out in anguish. Catseyes, by any other name.

“But this, Clyde. Cuba?” he said, slapping the drawing angrily with his hand. “What’s a country in the Caribbean got to do with Johnny, if you’re thinking all of this is linked to him.”

“Look again, Billy. Read it carefully and think about it.”

“Al Cuba? Sorry, I didn’t see the first word. It sounds like a man’s name, a movie gangster, but I don’t know anyone by that name, do you?”

“Say it out slow and loud, Billy. For Christ’s sake.”

“Al Cuba … Al Cuba … Holy Mary, Mother of God! It’s Al Qubah, not a person.”

Al Qubah, the town in which Johnny and our friends had been turned into mincemeat by collaborators. Locals fighting alongside the Italians and against us, men that stashed homemade grenades at the side of the street in the market and then exploded them when our friends got close enough to be sure to take a direct hit and be killed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

In the end, I was glad I’d gone to see Billy. After asking his secretary to cancel his next meeting, he’d sat on the floor with his arm around me.

The one thing about Billy few other men had was his ability to store fear, or panic, or sorrow, or anger away in a small compartment somewhere inside him until he had time to deal with it. It was what had made him one of the best soldiers I’d ever met, and a lieutenant colonel before the age of thirty. The chain of command always had to be strictly enforced when someone with a rank went down. The gaps had to be filled, and there was nothing like the battlefield during a war to promote a capable soldier or officer without the rigmarole that went on during peacetime. Billy was a captain while I was still a lieutenant, based solely on his extremely cool head and capability to take command while under fire and under duress.

He’d calmly talked through the facts as I’d presented them to him. Luka had described himself as a person who never forgot anything. He could easily have leafed through the magazines “Green Eyes” had purchased without taking real notice of what was on the page—even just checking the periodical was all there, that no pages had been ripped out. The Australian War Digests were photographic magazines, thrown together like news bulletins, carrying contemporary accounts of what our soldiers were up to during the war—an Australian version of the American magazines, Life and Time.

I remembered the young man and his assistant from the Australian War Digest who’d been assigned to our battalion and our company in particular, and who’d been told to evacuate when we’d come under heavy shelling. Both had refused to leave and their dugout had taken a direct hit. Despite being injured, the photographer had continued to take snaps all the way through the heavy Italian gunfire and the accompanying waves of German Stuka bombings.

Until we got our hands on copies, Billy had suggested that it would not be unlikely the magazine had reported on the “terror attack” and the tragic deaths of my friends. They were infrequent enough to be of interest, and in the early days of the war there hadn’t been the strict censorship that was enforced during and after the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. In fact, I’d learned there had been a page two column in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days after the incident, reporting the deaths of the five local boys.

“Every picture of every soldier taken in the North African campaign shows jerrycans everywhere, Clyde,” Billy had said. “You remember, surely? If they weren’t for water, they were for petrol, or kerosene, or heavy vehicle fuel.”

Billy had left me for a moment and then had returned to the room with the volume of his Geography of the World, in which he’d found the reference to Al Qubah, the town was listed as being one of the centres for production of moonstones and other