Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

“Over here, over here!” Harry shouted as he rushed over bouncing off thin trunks and sagging branches as he found the bank. “Over here!” He stomped into the bitterly cold water, splashing it, waving his arms.

  The flashlights shot his way, the beams not near long enough to reach him. Yet they had heard him.

  Thirty-Two

  MAX WOKE. HE LAY ON HIS SIDE. Daylight in the room made him squint. He faced black shelves on burgundy wallpaper. On the shelves stood dark little statuettes of gargoyles, winged serpents, warriors with horse bodies, African warrior heads. Max felt a twinge of pain in his shoulder. He felt for his wound. It was bandaged. He was wearing an olive green wool shirt, US Army issue. He turned onto his back, craning his head to face the room. He saw a chaise lounge exactly like his—purple with black fringe—but this one was empty with a pillow and folded blanket stacked neatly atop it. The burgundy wall across had more black shelves with more of the arcane statuettes. It seemed like a psychoanalyst’s salon but for twins. He wondered if it was Freudian, or was it Jungian? Either way it was far too odd. This room could use a piano or a bar, something with pep, he thought.

  Then he remembered. Irina. Dietz. The Šumava. Young Alex was still there.

  His eyes burned and he wiped at them, but no more hot tears would come out.

  He remembered a predawn work detail had appeared on the opposite bank of the lake—GIs with German POWs. The GIs made the POWs rustle up a boat. Harry had the GIs take them straight to a Major Warren Joyner with the US Military Police.

  Max was lying in Major Joyner’s billet.

  An American medic had sewn him up and dressed his wound. After that, Max woke once to see Harry sleeping across from him as the dawn streamed in blue-gray from the bay window, a Wilhelmine behemoth with vast panes, ornate framework and enough lace curtains for a window double its size.

  It was Wednesday. November 7.

  Hartmut Dietz was long gone.

  They had to get the Cossacks out and now.

  Blinking, letting the full daylight shock him awake, Max heaved himself up to sit and scanned the room for his clothes. He rotated his arm and stretched it out, the pain beating his heart faster but not adding much more pain. He could keep going like this.

  He heard voices behind the shut door. “Harry?” he said.

  The door swung open. A man strode in wearing the same olive green shirt as Max but with the sleeves rolled up. Max remembered—this was Major Joyner. With his red face and bull-legged stance, the major did look like a sheriff. Max could see him guarding a log cabin with a rifle like on the cover of a Karl May novel. This must be a good thing, Max told himself.

  “What time is it, sir? Still morning?” he said.

  “The corpsman told me it’s only a graze, but a close one just the same,” Major Joyner replied, his voice booming but hoarse. “You’re one lucky man.”

  “Thank you, Major. Me, lucky? I doubt this very much. I do appreciate the medical attention, but what time is it? Where’s Harry? We must get moving—”

  Harry entered holding a mug of coffee. Max could smell it. Harry’s other hand carried Dietz’s shabby briefcase with the prints and negatives of St. Stephanus. Harry patted Max on the leg and sat on the chaise lounge opposite. “How you doing? Take some coffee? It’s real.”

  Max shook his head. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven in the morning.”

  The room had a writing desk of what looked like black marble with a matching chair. Joyner picked up the chair as if it were made of cardboard and set it between the ends of the two chaises. “This is one nasty room,” the major said. “I never go in here. It’s the way I found it when they billeted me here.”

  “We’re just happy for your help,” Harry said, not looking at Max.

  Harry was acting different, Max saw. He wore his uniform even neater than usual. He spoke with a deference Max had never heard. Max realized he’d never seen his brother among his fellow American superiors. Was Harry always like this, or was it because Harry had pinned all of their plans on this man?

  To push the issue, Max added, “I’m indebted as well, Major, but we must get moving.”

  Joyner looked to Harry, who said to Max, “I’ve told Major Joyner everything.”

  “Everything?”

  Harry nodded, slower than usual. “I told him about our stranded refugees.”

  “It appears you showed the major the photos as well.” Max looked to Joyner, who nodded. “And, did you tell the major who they are—”

  “He told me,” Joyner cut in. “Cossacks. Ukrainian Cossacks. The white kind—as in the kind who don’t like Soviets. The kind who fought with the Germans. Your brother didn’t want to tell me that. I made your brother tell me that.”

  “Ah. I see. But we must go. The Soviet Army could be combing the Šumava by now,” Max continued and moved to stand.

  Joyner only stared back at Max. His hands were planted on his knees like a commando ready to leap from a plane. The major reminded Max of those wartime Americans who knew exactly why they were over here and what they were doing. Sergeant Smitty, rest his soul. Aubrey Slaipe. Harry was probably like that too back in May of ’45. And yet, something about Joyner was knocking even Harry for a loop, Max could see. Harry gazed at Joyner and then at Max as if the major were a stranger who’d just burst into the room.

  “You want something first,” Max said to Joyner. “Is that it?”

  Joyner’s lower lip protruded, and it was all the confirmation Max needed.

  “I will tell you all about me,” Max said. “If that’s what you require.”

  “Tell me what exactly?” Joyner said.

  Harry stood up and cut in, cracking a nervous smile, “Maxie here, he was just a German grunt private. That’s what happened to actors in Germany. What happens to them everywhere. They’re disposable. Right, Max?”

  “It was not just actors that it happened to,” Max said.

  Harry turned to Major Joyner. “You know about the Cossacks. I told you about that Felix Menning character, how he found Max with the Cossacks, but this Felix was one nasty type—”

  Max grabbed at Harry’s elbow to shut him up. He had used his bad arm and it stung, but what was a little more ache? “You mustn’t protect me, brother,” Max said. “This man here needs to know, and I want him to know.”

  Max told Warren Joyner everything. About Operation Greif, about their false flag operation in the Ardennes, about Felix Menning and Kattner killing the MP GIs. Max wanted to flee all along but couldn’t. Yes, they had hastily inducted him into the SS, but he killed no one and didn’t even fire his gun and he certainly had nothing to do with the Malmedy massacre that was transpiring at the same time—with Max’s sort of luck, those SS would’ve shot him as an American prisoner.

  As Max spoke, Harry slumped, staring at his fingers clenched with nothing to grasp. But Joyner wanted it all, and Max gave it to the man.

  Max finally did run, he told them, but this only led to the snowbound, cursed DeTrave villa. Then he told the part that not even Harry knew. Cruel fate left Max, posing as an American lieutenant, stuck together in that villa with an American CIC captain named Aubrey Slaipe and a sergeant named Smitty. The DeTrave woman, a Belgian fascist, deceived Max and attacked the Americans. Because of that, and of Max’s own failure to act, he caused the death of Sergeant Smitty and conceivably Captain Slaipe. Max ran. Slaipe could have died. He lost an arm instead. Max could have saved it by sticking with Slaipe instead of fleeing underground, back into Germany.

  Harry had turned to Max and he stared, unblinking. One tear had leaked out, down along Harry’s nose. Harry had to be thinking of their parents and what they would think of this.

  “Thank you for your candor, Herr Kaspar,” Joyner said.

  Max and Harry watched the major leave his chair. Joyner stood over at the window. Joyner sighed. He cleared his throat.

  “Sir?” Harry said. “I talked to Sabine Lieser. She’s ready to move on her end, just like we t
alked about. Sir?”

  Joyner said nothing. He touched the lace curtain, feeling it with fingertips. Staring out at the wind that was stripping the trees of last leaves.

  “Major, I will turn myself in,” Max said. “Tell your men anything you wish, just as soon as we get them out.”

  “I checked with the Munich police,” Harry added. “Hartmut Dietz hasn’t shown up this morning, no one’s heard from him. We have to assume he’s already fled east, made contact possibly …”

  Joyner turned to them, filling much of the large window with his frame.

  “No,” Joyner said.

  “No?” Harry said.

  “You see, I’m rotating back, Captain.”

  “Stateside?”

  “In two days. An early release.” Joyner flashed a smile, but it looked more like a wince. “Truth be told, I’m not in the best of health.” The boom had left his voice, leaving only a wheeze.

  “I don’t understand,” Harry muttered. “Wait, you mentioned a nurse once.”

  “Yes. They’re saying it’s something to do with my blood. Getting weaker, and fast.”

  Harry opened his mouth to speak again. Joyner held up a hand to stop him and he gave Max a hard look. “So, here is what I’m prepared to do,” the major said. “I won’t do anything. I won’t run you in. I will simply go home.”

  “But sir—”

  “Shut up, Kaspar. Just so that we are clear—it’s not because I’m sick. Do you know that those Ukrainian Cossacks fought for the Germans in Italy? That is exactly where my son bought it. And this man here, your own brother …”

  Max felt weak in his gut, his stomach rife with a consuming nausea. He closed his eyes to this, what was happening, what he heard. “You can’t do this,” he blurted.

  “I can,” Joyner said. “I refuse. I came here to fight Germans, not Soviets.”

  “Who’s fighting?” Harry said.

  “So stand me against a wall for it!” Max shouted. “I’m yours. Just go help them.”

  Joyner shrugged.

  “So that’s it?” Harry said. “You just leave those people in the lurch like this?”

  “Let fate have them,” Joyner said. “The same fate that took my son.”

  Harry stood and lunged, waving at the air, shouting spittle: “Those people didn’t kill your son, Max here didn’t kill him—”

  “Didn’t they? Didn’t he?” Joyner stood with his chest out, daring Harry to keep coming at him. “I am helping, in my way. I could do a lot worse—to you even, Captain. All right? So that’s it. You two are on your own,” the major said calmly, as if concluding a meeting about clerk assignments.

  He left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Max and Harry, mouths open, heard the major walk down the hallway to his foyer, leave his own billet, and slam the front door shut.

  Fifteen minutes later, Max rode with Harry in the rear seat of a staff car that cruised the broad avenues west of Old Town past neoclassical ministries and museums and onetime Nazi party temples and manors of nobility, many of these fine sandstone frontages and granite columns largely untouched from the bombs, bullets, carnage. Joyner had called for the staff car and instructed the driver to take Max and Harry anywhere the men said. It was his final act. Max and Harry sat in silence. Max glared at their young driver’s big ears. He felt an unnatural urge to tear at the fine leather of the seats. Harry had a Chesterfield hanging from his lips, but he hadn’t bothered to light it. The briefcase of prints and negatives stood between them.

  “You picked a hell of a time,” Harry said.

  “I had to tell the major. I should have told you sooner—much sooner.”

  “No, you did the right thing,” Harry said after a pause.

  Max could tell something was lodged in his brother’s brain, nagging at him. He kept touching the briefcase and jerking his hand away as if the thing were a pan too hot to handle.

  “We’re still doing this, correct?” Max said.

  “I should be the one asking you. I fucked it all up, Max. First, I misjudge Dietz. Then Joyner. ‘You’re on your own,’ the man says—some sheriff he is. Every man for himself? Is that what we came over here for?”

  “I can’t blame the man,” Max said. “Pain, fear, they can destroy any old dream.”

  Harry yanked his cigarette. “Look: You did what you could at that villa in the Ardennes. What could you do? That Belgian woman was determined, and she saw no way out. War brings it out in a person.”

  Max threw up his hands. He’d gone over it so many times. He should have given himself up sooner. He should have informed on Justine earlier. He should have done a mess of things differently. Stayed in America and given up his acting passion. Come to Germany but joined the Nazi party for better acting gigs. Later, once he’d recognized the evil, he should have joined the anti-Nazis. And so many variables in-between. He too had his steel track, only it wasn’t gilded and neither was Harry’s now, it seemed.

  They sat through a long pause in which one of them might have shouted: So what in the hell are we going to do now? It didn’t need to be said.

  Harry was staring out the window, still deep in thought. “I picked the wrong goddamn horse,” he muttered.

  The staff car turned north at the Königsplatz, slowing for the narrower street that would skirt them around Old Town and deliver them to Harry’s mansion. On the horizon, the broken spires and towers loomed above the scraggly trees.

  “The major’s right, in his way. He’s still helping by not helping,” Max said.

  Harry wasn’t listening. He was sitting bolt upright. The sun blazed through a break in the clouds and was streaming into the car, lighting up Harry’s whiskers as he peered out, checking the street signs. He was clutching the briefcase to his chest with both hands.

  “Harry? What is it?”

  “Give me one hour,” Harry said. “I’ll have the driver drop you off at my billet. I’ll meet you back there. All right? And get Sabine there and quick.”

  Thirty-Three

  HARRY STOOD BEFORE THE DOOR at the far end of his office hallway—the plaque reading, US TRADE COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE. Waiting, clutching his briefcase like the sorriest door-to-door salesman there ever was. He had knocked. No one answered. He’d turned the door handle. Locked. He took a deep breath and let it out, telling himself to stay calm. He had made his decision. He was going to cut a deal, whatever it took. On the ride over from Joyner’s in that staff car, he saw that Max was brooding, again, about the many things he should have done differently but he couldn’t have. There were mistakes in life. There was inescapable fate. Harry wasn’t going to let error and sorry luck crush him any more than Max had. He came here to do what he should have done before he let Max talk him out of it.

  The door had a peephole. Harry glared into it. He thought he saw light in there. He knocked again. He waited, tapping his foot then grinding it into the floor so hard he could start a campfire from all the friction. He felt someone watching him. He whipped around, but the hallway was still deserted. When he had entered the vacant foyer downstairs, a lone secretary rushed out of the elevator giving him the old up-and-down as if he was just coming off a bender judging from his disheveled state. Harry told himself he wasn’t going cuckoo, wasn’t letting the old fury get up on top of him. It was the noon hour, sure, but not everyone could be out to lunch. He had never seen or heard it so empty here. He pressed his ear to the door. He swore he heard something inside. He took another deep breath, preparing for action. He knocked hard, rattling the hinges. Nothing. He shouldered the door, harder, then with all he had. Bang, bang. It gave, creaked. He stood back a step. Still no one answered.

  Slaipe was forcing him into this. He was forcing himself into it. Only action mattered now. Keep moving was the rule. Slaipe was practically begging him to do it.

  He took a few steps back, launched off his toes, and hurtled his shoulder at the door with his knees up. The crash clanged down the hall behind him. The frame had cra
cked, split. He backed up and lunged again. The door gave all the way and sent him scurrying into the room.

  It was pitch black inside. He could hear his own scream echoing out in the hallway—he’d shrieked throwing himself at the door without realizing it. His shoulder throbbed. He squinted. The dim beam of hallway light coming in caught no corners of furniture, windows, nothing. He felt at the walls for a light switch. He found one, pressed it. Pressed again. No light came on.

  He shuffled backward out into the hallway, shaking his head.

  “You there, what’s this all about?” a voice said in German.

  Harry whipped around. A man in faded worker’s overalls stood facing him.

  “Herr Kapitän Kaspar?”

  “Where is he?” Harry barked.

  “Who?”

  Then Harry realized that it was old Peching the Hausmeister, his building’s fully vetted janitor and super, depending on the need. Peching held a toolbox in one hand and a brown bag in the other, looking like each was heavier than a cannonball but might explode if he dropped one.

  “Oh, it’s you, Peching,” Harry muttered, pushing sweaty stray hairs off his forehead.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, I …”

  “Should I call the police, the MPs?” Peching stammered, and his thin tone made it clear the real question was, should he be calling them on Harry? He glanced at Harry’s briefcase like it was the loaded cannonball.

  Harry rubbed at his face and formed a smile with it somehow. “I was looking for him, you know, the, uh—” He cut himself off, realizing he shouldn’t be giving out names. He nodded at the plaque on the door.

  “Ah, that,” Peching said.

  “That what?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Please, be clear, Herr Peching. It’s very important.”

  Peching set down his toolbox and paper bag. He produced a flashlight from his vast pockets, stepped into the room, and shined it around. Harry followed, peering in.

  The room was small, smaller than his office, and completely empty. With his senses adjusting back to normal, Harry now smelled the musty odor of an attic long unopened. It had parquet flooring sorely in need of refurbishing, wires hanging from the ceiling where there once was a light fixture, only one window covered with tarp, and another door.