Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  “All right. Come back,” Harry said. “Listen: I might need you. I just don’t know yet.”

  Dietz strode back around the pile to face Harry. “The film developing, for example? I could do that. So let me know. ‘On the QT,’ as you say.”

  “Of course. I will. And I appreciate it.”

  “Excellent,” Dietz said and, in his excitement, clicked his heels.

  His lips tightened from embarrassment, but Harry ignored it as if Dietz had only passed gas.

  He offered a handshake. “Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome. Yes, yes. So, you know where to find me—anytime,” Dietz said, and turned to leave, bouncing as he stepped, his toes dancing a path through the debris.

  “Wait,” Harry said.

  He was still holding the sack. The detective had forgotten his payment altogether.

  Twenty

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 31. Harry and Max, hunkered down on a hillside, cursed the bitter cold and the thick birches and pines that shaded them from the bright autumn sun rising at their backs. Yet the trees hid them well, and their high perch offered a prime view. Opposite them stood a squatty, rockier hill. Down below ran a rail line between the two hills, like a river through a gully. A small valley held a station house that was little more than a half-timbered box and a cobbled road that led through a short pass in the hills to the village of St. Stephanus. Beyond the station stood a large wooden barn and a valley meadow that was muddy as if trampled by cows or feet, but Harry saw no cattle there. The meadow stopped dead before another squat rocky mount to the north—a steep wall of granite. A modest sign along the tracks read ST. STEPHANUS. Atop that, dwarfing it, stood another sign:

  SOVIET ZONE OF AUSTRIA

  In four languages. Atop that, from a tall pole, fluttered two red Soviet flags.

  The leaves were tawny and rust and amber and they floated down, coating the near frozen earth with the thinnest layer of crunch. Harry and Max wore a mix of threadbare clothes and gear, all with enough holes and tears and stains to remind that unexpected and horrid incidents always threatened. Harry in a German greatcoat from two wars ago, Max in a fur-collared cloak of unknown militia. Max had given them their role—they were harmless vagabonds. Central Europe was full of them, those who’d refused to participate any longer in a world that only dumped war and death and sorrow on them. Most local troops let such outlanders be, and Harry could only hope it was the same here.

  Sabine Lieser gave Harry the tip when they last met in that Schwabing cafe. She had gotten word that a couple hundred other Cossacks were being repatriated back to the Soviet Union from a detention camp in the British zone of Austria. The train would make its first stop in the Soviet zone at St. Stephanus. The setup had McNarney-Clark written all over it, Harry recognized. Sabine only wanted to observe the train from its last stop in the West, see how the Cossacks and their dependents were coping. Were there suicides? Attempted escapes? It might be enough proof, she said. It wasn’t good enough, Harry knew after hearing what Warren Joyner had revealed to him. A Military Policeman like Joyner knew the score, how this worked.

  They needed concrete evidence. And Harry needed to see it for himself.

  Harry and Max had entered Austria’s Soviet zone through Bavarian forest, paying off a smuggler to show them the way. The smuggler got them into Austria before sunup. Once they were in the village, a couple Soviet Army officers walked right past them; Harry and Max kept their heads down and mumbled in Austrian-accented German. Then they asked a passing local man if camping in the nearby hills would bother the Soviet Army, to which the local grumbled in dialect, “Wherever you likes it. All these brigands care about are drinking, fucking—any Nazi they find goes on a meat hook and all our machinery sent off to Mother Russia.”

  They had spread out their bedrolls on the dry leaves. They rested against their rucksacks, stuffed with the usual vagabond chattels—tarnished silverware, jam tins, hats, stockings, anything wool, dried sausage, cigarettes and butts, a couple broken watches for trading. Harry didn’t dare bring his top-grade paratrooper knife, and certainly not his immaculate Mauser pistol—these would surely give him away if caught. They had an antique one-cylinder opera glass but tried not to use it. So far, they could see a lot from their roost with their naked eyes.

  A truck of Soviet Army soldiers had arrived along with two staff cars. The soldiers hoisted more red flags, large placards of Stalin (peering down, with one fist at his stomach like a priest clutching a rosary), and more signs in Cyrillic script. They unrolled barbed wire, so new it glimmered in the sun, and strung it high to seal off the only open end of the meadow. A couple local morning trains passed through, but the troops took little notice of them. A village shuttle Pendelzug of five rickety cars pulled in, and locals passed through unchecked. Many looked like Harry and Max. This boosted Max’s spirits, Harry noticed. His brother opened a prewar can of beans and they ate the cold slop right out of the tin, sharing the spoon, and Max, smiling, wiped the spoon with a clean hanky until glossy.

  Max nudged Harry’s shoulder. “Hey, brother, today’s the thirty-first.”

  Harry smiled. “Halloween? In America. You remember it.”

  “I always loved that holiday of theirs. Yours. And look—we have our costumes on.”

  Harry kept smiling, but he couldn’t help thinking that Hallows Eve meant ghosts, and specters, and calamities that haunt to no end.

  Afternoon now, about 12:15. The train from the West was to arrive at roughly 1:00 p.m. The scene below was set—red flags and giant Joe Stalin, Soviet soldiers and so much barbed wire.

  Harry smoked a Russian cigarette. It made him wheeze but he liked its warmth. He smoked it down to the butt, daydreaming. He hadn’t told Sabine he was taking things this far. He wondered whether she would slap him or love him. He was betting on the latter. In the café that morning, it was all he could do not to caress her face and kiss her. Now, as he thought about her, tracing the mechanics of how he came to meet her, he realized what should have smacked him across the forehead that very first day.

  Of course! He was no genius, but he could paint by numbers.

  He looked to Max, who was reaching for the cigarette. “Sabine Lieser,” he said.

  “Come again?” Max said, though he pulled back his hand.

  “You know her!” Harry jabbed his index finger into Max’s arm.

  “Aua!” Max slapped Harry’s finger away. “Oh, she’s the one who runs that DP camp, right?” he tried, playing it coy.

  Harry formed a fist, showing it off.

  “Okay, yes, of course I do,” Max said.

  Harry lowered the fist. “I wasn’t going to hit you. I’m not even offended. I think I even understand.”

  “We were never involved, brother—if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s not. Let’s see if I can get this straight … back before Felix’s murder, you went to her, searching for me. You’d heard she was sympathetic, a maverick, what have you. So you two were in on this from the start. She’s known about your Cossacks all along.”

  “Yes, she knows.”

  “She wanted to help, but she can’t go through normal channels.”

  “Harry, I want you to know one thing. Please. She was not using you. Deceiving you. She simply had to feel you out first.”

  “Like I said, I got no problem with it,” Harry muttered, fighting a smile.

  Max wagged a finger. “Look at you, how you blush—”

  “Am not, it’s these damn cigarettes. But, I guess I should thank you.”

  “Nothing to thank. You did all the work.”

  It was 12:30 now. Half an hour to go. Harry parceled out hard grainy bread and dried sausage, sawing away at their ration with an old butter knife. They would need their stomachs full for whatever was coming.

  “First, I had to find her though,” Harry said, flipping open the ceramic cap of a tall beer bottle they used for water. “That’s where the bearded man came in, the one wh
o followed me home that night … who told me he’d seen Irina at Sabine’s DP camp. You paid him to do that, didn’t you? So that Sabine and I, two people with common sentiment, could discover each other.”

  Max had tilted his head, smiling. He wagged the finger again.

  “No! That was you? The bearded man?”

  “Most certainly, Mein Herr.” Max affected a little bow.

  “How?”

  “The beard, glasses, the teeth gap wax, these are simply props. I scored them cheap on the black market. Who needs stage costume these days?”

  “Actors,” Harry said, feigning disgust. “Some outfit.”

  “Me? What about you? A bowler and sable collar? You looked like a butler out there, pining away for his lost lord. I’ll bet you raided your mansion’s closets for it. Ha—you did, didn’t you?”

  “You got me. I confess.” Harry laughed.

  Max, smiling, pressed a hand to his heart.

  They heard loud music down below—stirring, pounding military music.

  They squinted and scanned the area. “Don’t see a band,” Harry said. “No, it’s loudspeakers,” Max said. A jeep pulled up towing a trailer of speakers. Staccato drums and shrill horns filled the glen and sent echoes up the hill, so loud that Harry couldn’t hear the rustle and crunch of the leaves. Birds had scattered from the trees, off beyond the hills they flew. The few civilians near the station scurried for the village, hands pressed to their ears. Then the music stopped.

  “They’re checking the sound,” Max said. He had the opera glass out, scanning the valley. “Officers, look, gathered around the speakers.”

  Harry opened his rucksack and felt around for the Riga Minox. He set the camera between his legs. A part of him wished for a belt of whiskey now, but he knew better; when he drank at dire moments, he got an acute need to defend someone’s honor and too fast.

  It was 12:50 p.m.: Max scanned the opposing hills with the opera glass, to make sure no one was staking them out. He reported only bare rocks and more trees.

  Down below, the Soviet Army soldiers split into two rough groups—one lining either side of the tracks and the other forming a gauntlet before the doors of the warehouse. Any locals who were nearby had vacated the station and valley.

  Harry and Max heard the thumping and clacking of a train coming in from their left—from the West. A small locomotive towed five freight cars and one passenger car, the cars decorated with Soviet flags and banners. “Welcome banners,” Max grunted, the opera glass pressed to his eye. The train pulled up to the platform, the station house obstructing the locomotive, but they had a good view of the rest. Harry held up the Riga Minox. He could get a wide shot from here, but it wouldn’t detail much. The locomotive hissed and clanged, then petered out. The freight cars had vertical wood slats and narrow windows up high. Faces showed in the windows, but there were no waves or smiles. Two Soviet officers stepped down from the passenger car, followed by what looked like a British officer and an American officer. Liaison officers. The American there because the train had passed through the US zone of Austria on its way. Seeing the liaison officers, the faces up in the windows began shouting then screaming in Russian and broken English and German—amazing what Harry could hear after those speakers and the locomotive were done—piercing shouts that sounded more like shrieks of birds, carrying through the valley and upward.

  Two polished staff cars were waiting at the rear of the station house. The Soviet officers were trying to direct the American and British liaison officers that way, but the two had stopped well before the staff cars. What followed could only be described as a heated argument, a flurry of puffed chests and arms flailing. Harry snapped photos, hoping he was close enough.

  The Soviet Army soldiers along the tracks had hoisted their guns at the ready, a fence of rifle and machine gun barrels directed at the freight cars. The American and British liaisons marched back toward the train and passed through the line of soldiers and moved along the freight cars, stopping at windows, shouting back at the faces inside the cars.

  “Not a lot they can do,” Max said.

  The music started up again, drowning all sound. The Allied liaisons cupped hands at their mouths to shout louder, and then they threw up their hands. They couldn’t hear a damn thing. The American wandered off with his head in his hands, his fellow British officer moving him along by an elbow like a nurse with an elderly patient. The Soviet officers rejoined them, escorting them to the staff cars. The cars sped off.

  “It’s back to the West for those four,” Harry muttered. “Mission accomplished.”

  “Some gig,” Max grumbled.

  The Soviet Army soldiers fanned out to form cordons at each freight car door. The Cossack refugees climbed out, the Soviet soldiers pulling them down and herding them along the tracks. The Cossacks included woman and children. There were boys and girls as young as Irina’s Alex. Most of the refugees were men wearing new British fatigues, a bon voyage gift from the Brits. Surrounded by the troops, the people stood in throngs, facing inward, facing outward, what to do now? Well inside the throngs stood old officers in antiquated dress uniforms and Cossack style hats.

  “I count about two hundred men—like Sabine said. About another hundred women and children, elderly,” Harry said as if under oath, trying to stay matter-of-fact. Information was everything now.

  “They need to run, do something,” Max said.

  An elderly Cossack man stepped out to approach a Soviet officer, supplicating, hands clasped together. The officer pushed him back. The music droned on. The soldiers were herding the refugees down toward the warehouse. Three heavy troop trucks had backed into the gap between the station and the warehouse. The soldiers charged the throngs and began separating the women, children, and elderly from the men. A woman fell to her knees before a soldier, another soldier kicked her in the face, and she tumbled back into the crowd. The music droned on. A man charged a soldier trying to grab his rifle. The soldier swung the rifle butt into his face and the man collapsed, blood streaming out.

  “You capturing this?” Max said.

  “Yes.”

  The Cossack throngs lost whatever fight was left in them. Now separated, the woman, children, and elderly climbed into the trucks, shoulders sagging. The men watched the trucks roll away, faces slack, some people on their knees, hands pressed to their heads.

  “Where they going? Another train? To the East, far East? A labor camp? Shit, shit.” Harry knew the answer. Gulags, Irina had called them.

  “Never see them again,” Max muttered, “never, ever again.”

  The speaker music droned on. Soldiers prodded the men toward the warehouse, the Soviet officers following at a casual pace, smoking and gesturing. Harry and Max had to crane their necks for a full view of the warehouse and the meadow beyond. They were standing now, their toes digging into the leaves and hard earth so they wouldn’t go tumbling down the hill. The Cossack men shuffled along, heads down, into the warehouse.

  Harry moved closer, advancing along the trees, propelling himself by pushing off the trunks. “Keep going,” Max said as he followed. A ridge led to the end of their hill. Harry took the opera glass, Max the camera. They each hugged a tree trunk and peered down, drawn ever closer by the details now coming into view. The old wood warehouse lacked a roof in many spots. There they could see through the gray timbers.

  Inside the warehouse, the Cossack men stood naked and huddled in groups, stomping at the cold, grimy hay. Their clothes—their new British fatigues—lay in piles. Soldiers had followed them in and shut the doors after them. The Soviet officers stood out in the meadow along with another team of their soldiers. Facing the warehouse, the Soviet officers shouted commands.

  The old Cossack officers shuffled back out naked, hands over their genitals, their pale skin bright white in the sun. Five stood out in the open meadow, peering around for any way out, hopping frantically now like shaved monkeys inside a cage. The soldiers stood in a rough line, about fifteen yards
from the bare old men. The Soviet officers shouted. Their soldiers raised barrels, fired.

  Cracks, pops, echoes of it combined with the marching music. Harry gasped. His throat clenched up and he tried to breathe slow, deep breaths, fighting hyperventilation, a panic attack. Max had grabbed at Harry’s sleeve, a fistful of it to keep Harry steady, and Max was snapping photos with his other hand. Harry watched without the opera glass. His eyesight seemed to gain power from the intensity of it all, the shock, the madness. Back inside the warehouse, the soldiers had fixed bayonets to their rifles. They charged and stabbed the naked men, who tumbled, climbing over each other, scrambling, more blood than flesh now, and some men charged, clawing at the soldiers, their last acts, while others ran out into the meadow. Barbed wire, a wall of granite loomed. Corpses of their leaders, mentors, fathers. They plowed through the mud, trudging on in circles, grasping at each other for support and screaming. The soldiers fired at will. A Soviet officer grabbed a machine gun and joined in. The music droned on.

  They heard clear voices, shouting. How could they from up here? Harry looked to Max, who turned. Behind them, three Soviet Army soldiers stood over them, their barrels trained. They were kids no more than twenty. Harry and Max’s hands went up. The soldiers lunged.

  Something burst, a bomb in Harry’s head.

  Twenty-One

  I SHOULD FEEL LUCKY, MAX TOLD HIMSELF. Lucky I’m not dead. He tried to sit up, wheezing from the tender pain—tender like someone had shoved a grand piano between my ribs, he thought. He had his back against a crate, his lungs tight from the pain, the trauma.

  Harry sat across from him, his shoulders slumped against the pocked concrete wall. “We’re alive,” he muttered.

  “You’re awake. Welcome back.”

  Feeling themselves for blood, bruises, and holes, Max and Harry pieced together what had happened. Harry had taken a good blow to the back of the head—a rifle butt, and Max confirmed he’d been out a good few minutes. Max got a butt to the ribs and a boot to the face. The boot only grazed him, leaving a scrape on his temple, but the butt was dead on—thus the grand piano. He might have a cracked rib, but he didn’t tell Harry that. Harry didn’t need more worry.