Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  She was doing that damn pout, again.

  “I can’t, Madd. Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Though I would love to see him someday—see how the big brother measures up.”

  “Sure, sure,” Harry said, knowing better than to antagonize her after she’d backed off. “I’m happy about your colonel. Are you happy?”

  “Yes, Harry, if you can believe it. I think I am. But remember—if you need anything at all, you do know where to find me. And I you, too …” Maddy patted him on the chest, kissed the air, snapped her fingers for old square-jaw, who removed himself from the soft clutches of the two Gretchens, and she was off.

  Harry met Dietz at his local pub. As Harry strode in, he sensed something and turned around to find Dietz behind him. Dietz could see Harry’s bandage from there. “What happened? What is it?” the detective said.

  “It’s no bother.”

  Dietz grimaced inspecting the damage.

  “I’m fine, it’s fine,” Harry said, waving a hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Quatsch.” Dietz gave the bartender a stern look and the man disappeared in back. The failing front door swung back open and Dietz pushed it shut, which oddly made the place draftier than it already was. It gave Harry a shiver. Dietz moved to fetch them a drink.

  Harry grabbed him by the arm. “No time,” he said. He handed over the film cartridge from the Riga Minox.

  Dietz, nodding, dropped the cartridge into his overcoat pocket. He patted Harry on the shoulder. “I understand.”

  “Thanks.” Harry shoved occupation dollars into Dietz’s pocket, but Dietz pressed them back into Harry’s hand.

  “I told you: I understand.”

  Twenty-Four

  MAX SAT IN A CELL. He was in jail. He almost wanted to laugh and find a song he could belt aloud to mock this bind he was in, it was so surreal. He’d been avoiding it for so long. He should have been sitting in a Nazi prison two years ago. After that, the US Army should have had him before a firing squad. And when his time came, it was the feeble Munich police who collared him? It did make him chuckle a little. But there was no song for this.

  His cell was not so bad. It had a bunk, a sink, a toilet, and even a window that looked out onto a courtyard. He didn’t know where he was, but the paddy wagon drive had been only a few minutes. He guessed it was the Polizeipräsidium or the justice buildings.

  He squeezed his eyes shut in frustration. The problem was, he was losing time. They had to get back to the Šumava and get those people out.

  Harry said he must recover, but he had enough convalescing and had hit the black markets early for anything they could take, if only a stuffed bear for Alex. Someone must have fingered him. Because the Munich bulls were working damn hard for a Sunday morning. The raid came right after he and Irina reached the square at Sendlinger Tor, their very first stop. He’d seen his share of black market raids. Usually one heard the cars and vans coming, if not the shouting, and any wise fellow was gone. The ones who stayed either had no goods or were too dumb to notice. But this roundup was a small raid aimed at only one corner of the square. They snuck in, parked blocks away, and held their tongues. Max was across the street by then yet they—at least six of those bulls—came right for him. As if looking for him. He hadn’t fought it. He held up his hands. He didn’t have any goods on him. They ran him in anyway. They were gentle with him, these new German police with their blue American-style tunics and silver badges that had them looking like Hollywood extras in a hold-up picture rather than bloodthirsty cavalry. His ribs made him howl with pain when they carried him along by his arms, and he pleaded with them to let him walk on his own. And so they did! So congenial, these new bulls. They even let him light up a nail for his troubles.

  About a half hour after they locked him up, a German official came in—a weary-looking paper-pusher in an ill-fitting suit, but those types could be the worst kind. Max had been contemplating, over and over, the usual offenses they could pin on him. He did not have a residence. He had no ID. He also had not, they’d discover if they went looking, filled out a Fragebogen, that damning questionnaire all suspected Nazi sympathizers and party members and former SS still had to complete. They would want to know what he had done during the war. Max had already taken his deep breaths, looked in the mirror, and paced the room as if waiting for a stagehand to call him backstage. The official had a clipboard under an arm like a stagehand. Max was sitting bolt upright on the bed, his chin high. He stated, “My name is Max Kaspar. I used to be an actor. I was conscripted in the last year of the war, nothing fancy, replacement foot soldier on the Eastern Front, me and my scared-tight asshole retreating with all the rest of Germany’s finest cannon fodder.”

  “And then what happened to you?” The official’s voice sounded thin, dry.

  Max held out his hands. “Look at me, friend. I simply walked away from it, didn’t I? Been wandering ever since.”

  It was that easy. This was the first time he had told anyone—besides Irina and his brother Harry—his real name and identity since the fall of 1944. Max’s name didn’t seem to register with the official. The man went on to state that the new regulations required him to tell Max he was an investigator with the Justice Department. Again, so congenial. He asked Max about his ribs, why they hurt him so.

  “I appreciate your concern,” Max said. He made a big monologue out of it. He told him that he was riding on the outside fender of a crowded Old Town streetcar—without a ticket he had to confess—when at the next turn an American MP was lying in wait for them, like they did, and the Ami gangster chopped at them with his long billy club and sent them tumbling off like dominoes. Max went head over heels right into a kiosk. Autsch! Just his tough luck.

  “You seem to be a constant target,” the official said.

  Max shrugged. “Now, if I may ask you, good sir—why come nab me today? Your bulls were aiming right for me.”

  “It was on a tip,” the justice official said, and he left.

  That was three hours ago. That first hour, Max had kept it together. Then he started pacing the cell again. He realized, with horror, that the walls in here were taller than they were wide. He began to shiver even though the cell was warmer than most hovels. This could get much worse, he was realizing. They could hand him over to the Americans, who might prosecute him for war crimes if they found out who he was. Other Germans who’d taken part in code name Operation Greif had been shot, some within days, others after pacing cells for months. He’d seen it in a LIFE magazine dated June 11, 1945 that a GI left lying in the street. “Firing Squad: Army Executes German Spies Caught in US Uniforms,” read the headline with before and after photos of three of his fellow commandos tied to posts for the big show. That was closer to the war then, but they still needed sad sacks like Max for the papers these days. Wrong place, wrong time, right command of American English. Talk about tough luck. Max was perfect. He’d participated in an easily identifiable, notorious act. Not only that, he was an actor, and you know what they said about thespians. Degenerates, all of them.

  He was losing time. They had to get back to the Šumava, get those people out. Four hours now. How long were they going to keep him? This could go on for months. Did Irina even know where he was? Would Harry?

  He thought about asking for an American named Aubrey Slaipe. He drove the notion from his head by slapping at his forehead repeatedly.

  He went over it again in his head. That was no black market raid. They had come straight for him. A tip, the justice official said—yet who could have tipped them off? Was it someone who knew Harry? Someone had to be watching Harry’s mansion, to know who was coming and going and how Max tiptoed out the back way off into the English Garden and then through to Old Town. Another possibility was, one of those black market scoundrels had tipped them off, filling some quota, hoping for a handout. No great coin in that, but there were new reputations to be cemented, what with the New Germany coming. Lives were being reinvented. Some concentr
ation camp inmates who’d survived were common criminals but were now passing themselves off as diehard anti-Nazis or even Jews. They were giving the poor victims a bad name and fast. Probably was a Nazi himself who sold me out, Max supposed.

  It was too dark a notion. The black moods will kill a man. Quit pacing, Max. He lay on his back, upside down on his bunk and stood his legs up against the wall, wiggling his socked feet. Think of the good things. At least Irina had gotten away—his brief sprint across the street had given him just enough time to see her make a break for it. She was trading in a different crowd. When the raid came she started for him, but he gave the signal—two slaps to his upper arm that meant run on your own, we’ll meet back at that spot along the Isar River. She wouldn’t have fled right away—she would’ve stayed long enough to watch him get nabbed, he was sure of that. She was a smart young lady, his dear Irina. This was why he loved her. She was going to raise Alex into such a smart boy.

  His ribs ached so he sat up on the bunk and rocked back and forth, carefully, trying to stretch away the pain. The only thing he could do now was wait. But who would open that door next? Another German in a nicer suit, or in the new police uniform? A so-called liaison from the Soviet Repatriation Mission on a ruthless mission for SMERSH? Or, an American officer who would ask him: Did you once encounter a man named Aubrey Slaipe? Back in 1944, in Belgium, middle of winter? Sure you did. You remember. The man was a captain in the CIC.

  Max could still feel that Ardennes Forest chill clawing at his joints, could see the grime worked into his every pore, could smell the bitter aroma of that cellar on Christmas Day, 1944. He had ended up stranded in a snowstorm together with Slaipe in a villa owned by the woman named DeTrave. Justine. Max was done for. Slaipe had figured out Max was a secret agent—the worst spy ever known to the world—but one nevertheless. Yet Slaipe was going to give Max a chance. He said he wouldn’t turn Max over outright; Max would have to spy for the Americans instead. Max was unsure. He’d been fooled so many times. Then Justine fooled them all. She shot Slaipe. Max was engorged with rage, the first time in his life he wanted to strike someone. He hit Justine’s jaw with the butt of a submachine gun, surely broke her jaw. He could have helped Slaipe at that point. He ran instead. He could not conjure up the faith in Slaipe.

  He wandered south into Germany that spring disguised as a refugee and ended up in shattered old Nuremberg, a jagged gray wasteland of rubble and hollowed spires and craggy facades barely standing. He lived in doorways and cellars, wherever, sharing his dark and dirty hovels with crippled ex-soldiers, the elderly, and many who’d lost their minds, anyone who needed him.

  One afternoon he thought he heard a symphony. Beethoven’s Fifth. The sound led him to a scorched gothic chapel without a roof. Inside, at the altar, surrounded by blackened stonework and shattered stained glass, a small orchestra was playing for ladies in minks, the wounded of all stripes, pale old men, laborers. Max sat on a pew in back. The Beethoven ended to respectful applause. A blond woman stood at the altar and sang opera—von Weber’s Der Freischütz, but her voice wavered. The crowd applauded nonetheless. Men shouted “Bravo, bravo!” There was a time, and not so long ago, when Max would have snickered at such bourgeois hokum. He cried openly, his face in his hands.

  The US Army took Nuremberg. They distributed newspapers that told the horrid story of the concentration camps, with photos to prove it. On the battered Frauenkirche, someone painted in huge white letters: “I’m Ashamed to be a German.”

  American soldiers filled the city. Counterintelligence officers roamed the streets in open staff cars. Every time Max saw one, he feared it would hold Captain Aubrey Slaipe—or fellow Americans out to avenge his death.

  One humid morning, he was searching for a new hovel in the rubble hills of Old Town, pressing his unwashed hanky to his mouth to block the grit-filled wind. He had a nasty cough now—they all had it—and it left him shaking and shivering. Narrow lanes wound through the ruins.

  He heard shrieks, and short gasps, what had to be a woman. He started toward the sound. Then he stopped. What could he do about it? Freed forced laborers and GIs were known to rape Fräuleins. Screams were heard day and night. It was considered to be part of the price to pay. He turned and crept away.

  The shrieks grew louder, making dogs bark and crows shoot into the sky. Max turned back. Grasping at stones and protruding beams, he climbed to the top of a giant heap and peered around. Below him, he could see into the exposed first story of a house.

  A woman lay on her back, atop a vast slab of fallen wall. She wriggled about with her knees up high. Max yelled down to her: “Was that you? What’s wrong?”

  The woman’s face jerked his way. She was a teenage girl with chubby cheeks and braided pigtails. “My cat died,” she shouted back, “what do you think?”

  Her stomach was huge, a medicine ball. “You’re having a baby? What can I do?”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  Max sputtered a laugh. “An actor.”

  “You’re no help. Go away!”

  The girl let out a shriek that made Max jump.

  “Hold on, girl, hold on …” He scrambled down the pile, knocking his ankles on busted stone. He sprinted down the narrow lanes for two blocks, then three streets over.

  Out on the Königsstrasse, two MPs were surveying the endless traffic of American trucks and jeeps and staff cars. Max ran up and, catching his breath, shouted in crisp American English: “Gentlemen, you must help! I need a nurse, a doctor. A poor girl’s life is at stake—her baby’s life. She’s all alone.”

  It was the first English he’d spoken in months. It shocked the MPs into action despite his appearance. One yanked on white traffic gloves and dashed out into the busy street. An ambulance came, the MP directed the driver to the curb, and an American doctor jumped out of the passenger side, a captain with graying sideburns—a neat Cary Grant type.

  The cough hit Max, and he screeched and spat but was able to explain the situation.

  “Where?” the captain said as the driver handed him his doctor bag.

  Max and the doctor climbed the rubble and scrambled down to the girl. Max translated between her gasps and moans.

  “You’ll have to find clean linen,” the doctor said. “Go!”

  Clean? In this hell? “I’ll be right back,” Max muttered and headed off. Two streets over, he kicked in the window of a tailor’s shop and grabbed the first white fabric he saw—a wedding dress with veil and flowing train.

  The doctor was hunched over the girl’s knees and stomach, his sleeves rolled up. Max passed him the dress, and the doctor gave it a double take and kept working. Max wanted to look, but the smell was thick and earthy like a sick man’s saliva, buckets of it. Eventually he looked. The baby’s head protruded, its skin gray and the veins blue and bright red, and the liquid flowed out in sloppy drops that gelled on the stones and shined in the sun.

  Max turned away, his stomach rolling, and he vomited.

  The baby screamed and squealed as Max wiped his beard clean with his sleeve. The doctor passed the baby to him in the veil, kicking and slippery. It was a boy. Max showed it to the girl. She grinned and tears ran down her face and into her ponytails matted with sweat.

  Max handed the girl her baby boy. She hugged it to her breast and laughed so loud that the doctor chuckled and shook his head. She was not beautiful by a long shot, but at this moment she was one hell of a beautiful wonder to behold.

  The doctor sat on a chunk of sandstone. He wiped sweat from his nose. “You the father?” he said to Max.

  “Oh, god no. I don’t even know the girl.”

  The doctor looked to the girl. She seemed to understand. She shook her head, no.

  The doctor stared at Max, long and hard. It reminded Max a little too much of Captain Slaipe’s stare.

  “She needed me,” the doctor added. “Her baby, it wasn’t coming out.”

  Max smiled. “And why would it want to? Just take a look around, Doc.”
>
  The doctor was not smiling, but he wasn’t frowning either. His lower lip stuck out as if he was concentrating on a medical chart, Max imagined—an interesting new case only a new medicine could cure.

  “Why did you do such a thing?” the doctor said. “Go out of your way? Here. In this place. Where everyone is looking the other way—including us.”

  “Why would I not?”

  They sat staring at each other, listening to the girl babble to her boy and kiss him.

  “What I’m getting at is, what’s your story? Your English is stellar, it seems, and your ability to take action, well that goes without saying …” The doctor gave Max’s tired refugee getup a once-over. “Look, maybe I can help you. At least do something for that cough of yours. I have a fair amount of pull.”

  No doubt this victorious doctor had pull. Max could use something for his cough, certainly. Pressed new clothes would be a fine thing, too, and he really would like to shed his awful beard. Perhaps it truly was time for a new role.

  He stood, and he gave the doctor a little bow, from the waist. He wanted to thank the doctor for showing him that, now that the Nazis were out, maybe a new way of living was possible for him.

  But he did not. He only backed up and scrambled away, then climbed over the next pile of rubble. All it took for him to lose his role was one American who knew a fellow who knew Aubrey Slaipe from the CIC.

  He walked out of Nuremberg. He ran again, kept running. On a country road, a farmer smoking a curved pipe told him the news—the Führer was dead, and good riddance.

  Summer came. He wandered south, on into Austria, where he found Irina.