Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  Harry wasn’t so sure. Tank deaths were ghastly. He’d seen one charred body protruding from a tank hatch and that was all he ever needed to know about it.

  “You like me to order us something stronger?” Harry said.

  “No. No …” Joyner began to say something but stopped. He shook his head. “Do you know I volunteered for this? At my age. I had to. I wanted in because my boys had gone.”

  “You have more?”

  “One left. In the Pacific. Martin. He’s rotating out soon.” Joyner looked away, glaring at a waiter who hurried along. “Mary, my wife, she wasn’t much for me coming over.”

  Joyner asked about Harry’s family. Harry mentioned Max but said he was still MIA—besides Max was dead to him for hurting the parents and shaming the family, he added. It was close enough to the truth. He had no choice but to play it like this. He didn’t know enough about Max yet.

  They sipped coffee. Joyner pushed away his plate, his breakfast half eaten. “I thought you wanted chow,” he said.

  “I wanted you to chow. Looked like you could use it.”

  “I’ll survive,” Joyner said.

  “I have no doubt of that.”

  “You sound like my nurse.”

  “I was the Public Safety man in my previous posting,” Harry said. “A burg south of here. Then I was the detachment commander. Skeleton crew, small town … had its challenges.”

  “You know what you’re doing. That what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “I’m telling you that I once knew a man who hated Germans. He was a major too. You would’ve hated the bastard to no end.”

  Harry was ready for Joyner to burst. He even grasped onto the table frame. But Joyner only broke into a grin so big that Harry imagined him pushing back a cowboy hat. “What, you my preacher now too, Kaspar? That why you here? Asking me to forgive?”

  “No. That part, it’s up to you.”

  Harry left it at that. He couldn’t involve Joyner until he had something more concrete. Joyner said he’d be waiting. Harry was his nurse and his padre, so why not his savior?

  That afternoon Harry was crossing the Luitpoldbrücke, the usual chilling river gale whipping into him, when the erstwhile CIC man in the overcoat and wide-brimmed came right at him. Harry stiffened—he couldn’t help it. The man held out his one arm as if to say, fancy meeting you here, what a coincidence. They stood eye to eye in the middle of the bridge, all alone, not one jeep or a bike clattering by. If Harry didn’t know better, he would have sworn the man had requisitioned the whole stretch.

  “Well, well,” the man said.

  “Am I supposed to acknowledge you?” Harry said. “I never even asked your name.”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Can’t you? I thought you always knew the play.”

  “No. I predict an outcome. The rest, it’s up to you …”

  The wind fluttered the wide brim of the man’s hat. The hat jumped, Harry lunged and caught it coming off. He pressed it to the man’s chest, and the man held it there like a door-to-door man paying a visit.

  “This is your chance, Kaspar,” he said. “Yours alone this time.”

  Harry sighed. He looked up at the low gray clouds. He turned and ended up stepping in a full circle, weighing the gloomy sky pressing down on them, the bombarded spires of Old Town so grotesquely jagged, and the brown-green river hurtling past underneath them.

  “I’ll take my chances,” he said.

  Harry had expected the man to pull out a top-secret order reigning him in, or signal for a constabulary jeep to roar onto the bridge and cuff him, or at least to shake his head at him in disappointment. The man was just smiling. It was a nice smile. It almost made Harry ask him if he had children back home.

  “Bravo,” was all the man said. He patted Harry on the shoulder, set his hat back on his head, and strolled onward.

  On Friday morning, October 26, Harry met Sabine again in the Konditorei to talk strategy. She had come up with a solid plan of her own to help them. Afterward, as he was rounding the next corner, he ran right into Hartmut Dietz.

  “Why, Herr Kaspar,” Dietz said. The detective grabbed Harry’s shoulders in an improvised hug, since Harry had an unlit Chesterfield in one hand and a two-day-old Käsestange in the other. “Of all the people.”

  “I should say the same.”

  Dietz had a grubby briefcase under one arm and wore a different overcoat that was ragged even for a German.

  Harry held up his meager cheese breadstick to share.

  “Thanks, no,” Dietz said. “That’s not real cheese, I’d guess. Take powdered milk and color it, bulk it up with grease, margarine if they can get it.”

  Harry slid the thing into a pocket. “I’m hoping this one’s better than that.”

  “Certainly. I’m sure that shop does a fine job …”

  They stopped talking, stuck on the corner, the building’s sandstone blocks pressing into their shoulders. Harry moved to light his cigarette. Dietz offered his lighter, eyeing the sidewalks as he did so. A couple people passed. They were alone again.

  “How goes your investigation? Is she still worth the trouble?” Dietz said.

  “Possibly,” Harry said.

  Dietz placed a hand on Harry’s arm. “Say no more, Harry. I know you’re still at it—you’re not the type to quit. But please know that I am at your service, should you need me. I know you trust me. I certainly trust you.”

  “I appreciate that.” Dietz wouldn’t be offering his help if he didn’t mean it, Harry knew. The detective could likely help as well as two Sabines or even a Joyner but going local, as Harry also knew all too well, had its own set of complications. “Let’s just say, it’s become an internal matter—for now,” he added.

  Dietz pulled his hand from Harry’s arm. “Very well.”

  “How are the Kinder? Wife? Need anything?”

  “No, but thank you.” Dietz slid his hands deep into his pockets, and his eyes lost a little gleam.

  “Look,” Harry said, “I’ve given you enough grief. This mess is mine now.”

  “I understand. I do.”

  “Good.” Harry held out his Käsestange. “Here, take it. Maybe you won’t eat it but one of your kids might. So don’t go trading it.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind.” Dietz lifted it to his nose. “You know, this one might just be real cheese at that.”

  And there they left it, Harry heading on back to his mansion, his stomach creaking not so much from the hunger of losing his cheese bread but from the absurdity and longing in that moment. It had been like running into an old girlfriend or an estranged buddy—an awkward reminder that whatever they’d shared had never been completed. Dietz might as well have been Maddy, Harry thought and sucked on his cigarette and marched across the cobblestones searching for a notion that might comfort him. Then he found it. He imagined Dietz retreating to a nearby doorway and devouring the pastry himself, an act that Harry should have found despicable but in these times was just about right.

  Back at the mansion, Gerlinde met Harry in the foyer, happy to report that his Herr Bruder had decided to stay. Max had eaten soup and sausage and even drank a beer at lunch. Harry didn’t need to tell her Max was a Kaspar; she had figured it out with one glance. He found Max holed up on the sofa. The sofa was pushed closer to the fireplace so that no one could see him from the windows—and he had the drapes shut as well. He had on the mansion’s requisite velvet smoking jacket and, using hair tonic (Harry could smell it), had combed his hair back neatly. He had a Shakespeare anthology open on his lap. He sat up straight for Harry.

  “What, you have an audition?” Harry said.

  “Of a sort, yes.”

  Gerlinde had a good fire going. It crackled and hummed. Harry sat on the ottoman before Max, his hands hanging off his knees, letting the flames tingle his veins. A couple other books stood at the sofa leg. Next to them lay Max’s Soldbuch, his army paybook.

  Max had pursed his lips tog
ether as if holding his breath. “How can you help me—help us—if you don’t know who I am? It’s not fair.”

  “No. I guess it’s not.”

  “The man who called me to that stage? His name is Aubrey Slaipe.”

  “I told you I didn’t want to know.”

  “He knew me as Julian Price—one US Army Lieutenant Julian Price.”

  “Oh, boy,” Harry muttered. He stood and backed up into the nearest chair.

  “You need the full confession,” Max said. “So if I’m going to sing it, then it might as well be from the top.”

  Eighteen

  MAX TOLD HIS BROTHER MUCH of the worst of it. He had been a flameout in New York and a would-be comer in Nazi Germany. These were only the first two acts. He lost his love, the opera singer Liselotte Auermann, in a Hamburg air raid of 1941. He lost faith. He lost roles. The final act came in the fall of 1944, when the Wehrmacht called up English speakers for an assignment with unknowable prospects. As a drafted foot soldier, he was already under contract. He fit the part perfectly. He had no idea it involved a secret mission as part of the surprise Ardennes Offensive in which American-speaking German soldiers were to infiltrate the American lines. Worse yet, the Armed SS recruited him for the job. Max had no choice. So he would rewrite the role. Once behind the American lines, he would desert and go on the lam in France or end up a POW playing the forlorn, clueless Soldat. That would be his way out. He might even get back to America this way. He was that naive then.

  He confessed all that he dared. The curtain was up and it was break-a-leg time. Harry had listened with his usual patience, his usual poker face. Harry was still his little brother, make no mistake, with the same broad, freckly cheekbones and those bangs wanting to curl, same neat dress and now those horn-rimmed glasses when it suited him. Max thought he’d seen hints of silver-gray in Harry’s sideburns. Overall, Harry had the look of the boyish yet competent officer who was too capable for the great career rise. Max knew a few of Harry’s breed in Nazi Germany. Shocked by the sticky, downright greasy ways the world really worked, they fought the corruption and cronyism, greed and incompetence at first and then, once grasping the overwhelming superiority of decadence and cynicism in sheer power and numbers and policies, found small but effective ways to undermine the dark machine. Leak a scandal to the press. Approve an exit visa. Divert funds to hospitals, rationing efforts. And yet Harry’s deeds revealed there was something more to him. He had hijacked a train like Robin Hood, it was said, and now here he was breaking steadfast MG regulations for a refugee girl’s word and a hunch of his own. Working together, he and his brother were about to give a wayward tribe a chance at salvation. This was the stuff of epics! Harry had the reasoning and deduction, confidence and bravado of men Max had only played on stage—had only seen on stage.

  The sad part was that all men stumbled on the stage of real life. The world may offer epic stuff, but it rarely results in epic men. Life was tragedy without the plot.

  Max didn’t tell Harry he saw him like this. He confessed to Harry about that first morning of the Ardennes Offensive, what Amis were calling the Battle of the Bulge. He, a fellow soldier named Felix Menning, and the two other amateur impostor-spies in their team, Kattner and Zoock, were crammed in an American jeep. Then Felix Menning and Kattner killed two American MPs at a checkpoint. Max had only wanted out, away, beyond the war.

  “But you were there,” Harry stated, as if confirming the price of a hat.

  And Max nodded, his head hanging low as if he’d just admitted to personally murdering hundreds. Thinking, his brother was always so much more matter-of-fact, so much more Prussian. Max had expected this would doom young Harry when he was older. But look who was doomed now?

  He told Harry: He thought he had freed himself from Felix Menning. Yet Felix was relentless. Felix returned. Felix found him.

  “The murdered man—whom Irina was with. He was this Felix Menning,” Harry said.

  Showing that damned smart analysis once again. Not that Max wasn’t expecting it.

  “Yes,” Max confirmed.

  Friday afternoon had dimmed for evening. Harry had moved to sit on the floor, on the area rug. Max had done the same after throwing off his blanket and pacing the room to tell his story. He was sweating a little from reliving it, from the warmth of the fire, his back against the sofa, facing Harry. They might have been two brothers on a sublime skiing trip. Sipping mulled wine? That would be something.

  “Was that how this Aubrey Slaipe tracked you down? Through this Felix Menning.”

  “I believe so, yes. The CIC wanted our scalps, Harry. They had our names. Slaipe was hunting Felix. He was the big prize. Felix was supposed to have been caught, during the war. It was said he faced a firing squad like the others who were apprehended. Felix had not been caught, however—Felix had escaped. He became a one-man show. He left a trail of destruction behind the American lines, raiding US depots and offices all over. After the war, this had Slaipe thinking Felix could lead to me as well eventually. As if all of us two-bit secret agents had holed up in a ridiculous underground redoubt or some such notion. Because I had disappeared too, you see. For Slaipe, Felix’s trail ended southeast of Munich. Meanwhile, Slaipe knew that my American little brother Harry was in Munich and, through the grapevine, that Harry was seeing a climber by the name of Maddy Barton.”

  “Wait. How do you know all this?”

  “I ran into Aubrey Slaipe, Harry. On a dark side street, just he and I. He set it up that way, I should think. The street was all his.”

  “I did too,” Harry said. “He might as well have slapped an off-limits sign on Luitpold Bridge. It was so nice and cozy, just the two of us.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, I’m not surprised.”

  They shook their heads. They eyed each other.

  “I told him I’d take my chances,” Harry said. “On our own.”

  “He told me not to botch things up. He also told me not to disappear, because he would find me.” Max held up a finger. “But he did not threaten me.”

  “Hold on,” Harry said. “You think he had Maddy keep an eye on me?”

  “It is possible. He likely figured following you would lead to me, somehow, and then to Felix.”

  “Jesus.”

  Max said, “But Felix is dead. And now here comes his hunter. I’m his booby prize.”

  “No. That’s not what he wants—he doesn’t want to hand you over. Not anymore.”

  “No. Because there’s a new war coming.” Max shook his head and he told Harry more: “I thought I’d lost that trickster goblin Felix. I fled my supposed secret mission. I just walked away. I found some farmers’ clothes and I headed back into Germany like any other refugee, pushing old folks’ carts, riding on fenders, but mostly just hoofing it, and then further on I went, fleeing your troops. Spring came. On into Austria I went, and why not? I could hole up in some Alpine village, make cheese the rest of my days with some happy gamey farm girl. Problem was, old Austria didn’t turn out so idyllic, Harry. Sorry fact was, in those last days, thousands got crammed in down there, a giant traffic jam car wreck of broken armies, refugees, and stragglers—and absconders—and from all points, that rare tiny pocket of Central Europe not overrun with US or Soviet troops.”

  “This would have been … what? About May of ’45?” Harry said.

  “Yes. This was when Felix found me. It was less coincidence than sick fate, considering the traffic jam.” They wound up in the same small valley along with hundreds of others, waiting, huddling. The British Army was one valley away. Felix persuaded Max to keep running. They did and they found the Cossacks who’d massed along the River Drave. Max stayed, but Felix would leave and keep coming back with food and other items. So he was a blessing and a curse.

  “Problem was, you owed him your life,” Harry said.

  “Yes. That was the tough bit.”

  Felix was up in the hills when the British trapped the Cossacks, watching, sizing up his options. He followed
Max when Max escaped with his Cossacks. He helped them on their trek, warning them of checkpoints and double-dealing smugglers. He rejoined them in the Šumava. The war was over by then. Summer. Felix had various aliases. He’d even scored the fatigues of a deserter GI, passing himself off as a GI Joe with his Ami English—

  “Earvin Posey,” Harry said, getting right to the point. So like Harry. Probably good at carving meat, Max thought.

  “Posey died months ago, and it wasn’t from old age,” Harry added.

  “There you have it. Felix surely offed Posey before Posey could Felix.” Max gave a sigh, for Harry. His brother liked the doom and gloom, and one had to serve one’s audience. “So there I was, stuck with Felix. My ghost found me and taunted me and hounded me like a devil’s dog.”

  “Then comes Munich,” Harry said. “Felix Menning gets a saber in his gut.”

  Max told it straight. He and Irina had been venturing into Munich to do black market trading for the Cossacks. Increasingly, Felix had insisted on coming along. This time they would sell Cossack sabers—a desperate measure, but winter was coming and sabers were their only fine wares left. Felix insisted on impersonating the GI, which was a huge gamble in Munich. He would help them move their goods but wanted a straight cut off the top. By then, Max trusted Felix less and Irina didn’t trust him at all. Max and Irina argued about it. She was scared that Felix might use her boy Alex as leverage. It was only a matter of time before Felix would sell them out, and the man had options—either the Americans or Soviet Repatriation agents could reward Felix for handing over enemy combatants in hiding.

  “You and Felix had a fight?” Harry said.

  “Another one, yes. Felix was talking to someone we didn’t know—he wouldn’t tell us who it was.”

  “Did you find out who?”

  Max shook his head. “Irina and I were tracking Felix. The person was a shadow. They’d meet at night in doorways, under bridges.”

  “A male tryst?”

  “No. Conversations. Small packages passed between them.”