But he couldn’t drag himself away. Not yet. The little piece of paper held him there, and he wished he could take back what he’d written. If only this wasn’t so complicated, as she’d said. But it was, and no one could change that. Everything was different now. He had to leave because he had to protect her. Love did that to a man.
His intent had never been to hurt her. In truth, he’d never meant to love her, either. But this morning, when they’d stood together before the sunrise, he’d cradled her face in his hands and he’d known. He’d made mistakes, and they’d both paid for them. She’d given him so many opportunities to prove himself worthy of her, and if he wasn’t who he was, he might have succeeded. This letter would hurt her again, but it was the only way to keep her safe. Just like before, he had no choice. At least this would be the last time he would cause her any pain.
He turned and left the note behind, heading into the woods towards Borgles Island. Well fed and without any fresh snow to battle, he found the journey much quicker than his initial one had been. That night he moved by the light of a nearly full moon and stopped only once to catch a few hours’ sleep in the broken-down camp he’d discovered the first time. He arrived at the island late the next night, having crossed the thick ice in complete darkness. Once he was on land he saw no lights, smelled no smoke.
But that didn’t mean he was alone. A fairly recent, silver-grey outline of boot prints met him by the shore. From what he could tell there was only one pair, and they appeared to be about the same size as his own. He squatted by the dents in the snow, his heart hammering. Could they belong to one of the crew? Despite the odds, he began to believe it might be possible. Could any of them have survived out here in the middle of nowhere? Or were these prints from one of the other people Tommy had mentioned? He followed a meandering, well-tracked trail, ducking under snow-laden branches and avoiding fallen trees. The boot prints led him to a cabin hunched under a sagging roof piled high with heavy snow. Icicles hung like teeth from its edge.
Someone lived here; the frozen, recently cut hindquarters of a deer hung in a nearby tree. Rudi paused at the entrance to the cabin, listening, but still heard nothing. He gave the door a tentative shove and found it wasn’t locked—who would think of locking anything out here?—and he poked his head into the dark room.
“Anyone here?”
An arm wrapped around his neck so quickly he hadn’t felt it coming. A blade pressed against his throat, and a foul, unwashed odour rose from the sleeve’s rough fibres.
“Nicht bewegen.” The voice was unfamiliar; the language was not.
“I’m not moving,” Rudi calmly assured the man in German.
“Who are you?” the stranger demanded, still speaking German.
Something wasn’t right. This man was definitely not from the crew, but he didn’t sound old enough to be one of the two Tommy had told him about.
“I’m Rudi. I’m not here to fight.”
“Why are you here?” the man yelled into Rudi’s ear. “Why are you in my house? My house! My house! Why?”
His shouts were furious, but the syllables were laboured, as if the man’s tongue was too big for his mouth. Was he drunk? Rudi couldn’t smell alcohol.
“No one comes to my home! Mine, mine, mine!” The yelling dropped from a near howl to an urgent whisper. “This is my home. Adam’s home. You are not welcome here!”
Rudi knew better than to antagonize an unstable attacker. “I am not here to cause any harm, Adam.”
The pressure on his neck eased slightly. It was gone entirely when Adam stepped away, knife still clutched in one hand. Rudi turned towards him, tried to read the scruffy man, but couldn’t. Adam was a couple of inches shorter than Rudi, and a long, matted beard reached halfway down his chest. He wore nothing besides a set of long johns that might once have been white, and he lifted up and down, up and down on his toes.
With the back of his knife hand Adam pushed a tangled fall of hair off his brow. His bulging eyes darted all over the room, never directly meeting Rudi’s. “I . . . I want— Go away!”
Rudi scanned the room and noticed a small table with three rickety chairs standing by the old stove. Why three? “Are you alone out here?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
Tommy had specifically said two people had come to the island about ten years before: a husband and wife. It was difficult to determine Adam’s age through the grime on his face, but he was definitely not that old. Ten years ago this man would have been a child.
“Come, come,” Rudi said cordially. “We do not have to be strangers. I am alone myself.”
The man shook his head and held his hands towards the open door. The knife blade glowed dully in the moonlight. “No, no, no. You . . . you . . . you must go.”
Rudi wanted very much to do exactly that, but Adam was too unpredictable to trust. The knife might just plunge between Rudi’s shoulder blades if he turned to leave.
“Mother said never let people in here. Adam never goes off the island, and nobody ever comes here. Mother would be angry. You can’t be in here.”
He spoke like a child with a man’s voice, and Rudi realized he was most likely verzögert—mad or simple, whether from an injury or from birth. That might explain why he’d never been seen by Tommy or anyone else. Maybe his parents had hidden him on the island to keep him safe from any danger. But this place was not dangerous. Why would they have been afraid?
“How long have you lived here?”
“Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Adam is always here. Always on Adam’s island.” He shook his head, muttering to himself. “I was a boy, then I was a man. Adam the boy, Adam the man.”
“Is your mother here?”
“No.” The man’s cheeks inflated beneath his beard, as if he were holding his breath. “It is my island, not yours. You cannot have it.”
Rudi had grown accustomed to the darkness. He followed the lines of the room, noting the sparse, primitive furnishings. The place was in a terrible state, but strangely, it was homey. A single plate and cup sat on the table near the stove, and the man’s disheveled bed was piled high with worn blankets. From the lived-in condition of the cabin, he had been there a while. And he was most definitely alone.
“I don’t want the island, Adam,” Rudi said.
Adam didn’t believe him. His head started shaking again, as did the hand holding the knife. “People always want to take the island. But they can’t stay here. Mother says no. Mother says they can’t. Make them go away.”
Them? “Who? Did someone come here?”
Adam turned towards the only window, gaped up at the moon. “Mother says no,” he whispered, then he moaned, a sound of terrible grief, and his hands flapped wildly beside his head. “Go away, I told them. Go away! You can’t have my home!” He spun back and stared straight at Rudi. “They tried to blow up my island!”
There it was. Rudi needed to know more, but he had to be careful with his questions. “Who tried to do that, Adam?”
“The boat under the water! They came with guns and uniforms. Father said no guns. No uniforms. No war. No soldiers. Mother said never let anyone in! Only bad boys talk to strangers!” He spun away again, then lunged for a framed photograph at his bedside and held it to his chest. “Mother and Father say, ‘Who is in that boat?’ Mother says run, Adam, run! So I run but . . . but . . . but I saw what happened. Mother and Father went to the boat, then—” He flung his hands into the air. “Boom! The plane came and the boat was on fire, the ice was on fire, and Mother and Father . . .” His voice dwindled. “They fell under the ice, and they never came back!”
Rudi could imagine the scene, the confusion, but most of his memories of the event were lost to him. He remembered the first plane, the one strafing the ice with bullets, but not the second plane. He had been right there, but the explosion had thrown him so far he’d never seen anything beyond the aftermath.
“What happened next?”
Adam replaced the
photograph, handling it as if it were a precious, fragile thing instead of a rough wood frame.
“Two soldiers went in my house.”
They had made it! Which ones? he wondered. And where were they now? “Yes, and then?”
“I waited and waited until it was dark, then I came back,” Adam said. “Two soldiers were sleeping in my parents’ bed, snoring and being loud. Too loud.” He stalked over to the table and slammed his hands flat on its surface. “They put a machine on the table and it made too much noise.”
The radio. It had survived. But where—
“So I threw it in the sea when they were sleeping. And then I put the soldiers there, too.”
Rudi stared at him, his jaw hanging open. “You killed them?”
Laughter bubbled up Adam’s chest, rising quickly to a hysterical giggle. “The boat killed Mother and Father, so I killed the machine and I killed the soldiers. I did that all by myself. It was just like killing a deer only the soldiers were slower.” His face fell. “But then I was really all alone.”
Rudi’s stomach rolled. The only survivors of his crew were dead, killed by the man standing before him. “I think it’s time for me to go,” he said.
Adam watched him warily as he moved towards the door, then he leaped in front and stood face to face with Rudi. His eyes were too bright. “Maybe we can play cards. I can’t play by myself.”
“You can play solitaire,” Rudi suggested, sidestepping him.
“I don’t know how. Stay with me.”
“I’ll come back another time. I can teach you solitaire then.”
Adam’s fury returned in a rush. With both hands he shoved Rudi’s chest, slamming him hard into the wall behind him. “No, now! Stay here right now or never come back.”
“Whoa,” Rudi said, holding up his hands. He needed to catch his breath after the impact. Adam was stronger than he appeared. “I will come tomorrow, maybe.” He headed for the door, careful to give Adam space.
“No!”
Adam’s knife appeared out of nowhere, cold and brutally sharp as it sliced through Rudi’s right sleeve and arm. He spun out of the way, clutching his injury, but Adam was in a full tantrum now. He ran straight at Rudi, knife in front, and Rudi responded automatically by shoving his arm away. His roundhouse punch smashed into the side of Adam’s face, knocking him off balance, but it wouldn’t be enough to stop him. Ignoring the agony shooting up his wounded arm, Rudi put his weight into a solid left, launching Adam off his feet.
But the cabin was much smaller than the boxing ring had been. The blow carried Adam too far, and the back of his skull smashed against the solid cast iron stove. Rudi watched helplessly as Adam’s body crumpled to the floor and lay perfectly still.
THIRTY-TWO
Adam had no pulse. When Rudi drew his hand away from his neck, it was wet with blood. More pooled at the base of the stove, seeped into the uneven cracks of the floor.
Sliding off his knee and shaking with adrenaline, Rudi sat beside Adam’s body. None of this felt real. How could he have just . . . How could it be possible that he had come to this empty place with no intent other than to disappear, and he’d ended up killing a man? He went over the fight a million times in his head, trying to think if he could have done anything differently. Could there have been another outcome if he’d thrown a gentler punch?
It didn’t matter now. Adam was dead.
He became aware that his back ached, and his injured arm throbbed. When he got to his feet, he left a dark, speckled trail of blood on the floor. He dug around the cabin until he found an apron, its flowered pattern long faded, then ripped off one of the ties and knotted it around his arm, hoping to stop the blood flow. It was the best he could do.
But what about Adam?
His instinct was to flee. No one in the world knew either one of them was there, and now, even more than before, Rudi needed to escape detection. Not only was he a German, he had officially become a killer. Fighting panic, he forced his breathing to slow; he needed to think clearly. As long as Adam had useful tools or weapons hidden away in the cabin, he might at least be better equipped for running this time. He scanned the cabin, not sure what he was looking for, then paused on the picture frame Adam had been holding minutes before. From what he could tell, the photograph was similar to one he’d seen of his own parents, taken about thirty years earlier, just before the start of the first war. He picked up the frame, wondering at the couple staring blankly back at him, their faces shadowed in black and white.
His boat had killed the parents, then he’d killed the son. “I’m sorry.”
The corners of the old frame were loose and appeared to have been repaired more than once; a number of tiny nail holes punctured the wood. Curious, he unlatched the small door in the back of the frame, wondering if other photos might be tucked inside. Instead he found a yellowed paper—a birth certificate—and things became clearer. The son of Wendel and Isolde Neumann, Adam had been born in Berlin in June 1918, two years before Rudi’s own birth. That meant Adam had been brought to Canada as a child.
A terrible thought occurred. If, as Tommy had said, Adam and his parents had left Germany a decade before, that would have been somewhere around 1933. Rudi had been only fourteen in 1934, but he clearly remembered the new subject they were taught that year. He recalled feeling more disturbed with every word the teacher said, but he hadn’t seen the same kind of doubt on his classmates’ faces. Still, he was sure he couldn’t have been the only one to see the new “Sterilization Law” as barbaric. Under this law, the German government had begun to forcibly sterilize handicapped people to prevent them from ever having children. Yet another horrific path taken towards Hitler’s dream of the perfect Germany.
In 1934, Adam would have been sixteen, almost of the age at which the sterilizations were enforced. Had his parents brought him to Canada to protect him?
He studied Adam’s body, this time with pity. He’d never left the island, he’d said, and no one ever came. Knowing what he now knew, Rudi realized it was possible—no, it was probable—that Rudi was the only person Adam had ever met, other than his parents and any long-lost childhood contacts. No wonder he’d been afraid when strangers invaded his home.
With Adam’s parents gone, no one had any idea the boy existed. How remarkable, to live twenty-five years and leave no sign behind to mark your life. Where was Rudi’s own birth certificate? His mother had kept all their important documents in a jewellery box, he recalled, along with ancient silver baubles she’d inherited along the way. Where were they now?
He doubted very much that he’d ever see any of those things again, just as he doubted he’d ever see his parents. For so long he’d avoided thinking about them; it had almost been a blessing that out of necessity he’d been too concerned with his own survival to dwell on his loss. But now, holding the birth certificate of the man he’d just killed, Rudi gave in to his grief.
Months ago, when he was still on U-69, he’d been informed that his parents had been reported to the Gestapo for criticizing the government. He knew the story was most likely true, and the worst of it was he was fairly sure he knew how it had happened. There was nothing he could do, so Rudi had filed the information away in a dark corner of his mind where he hoped to forget about it. But it was always there.
As a boy, he’d been trained to listen in and report, and he was proud of how quiet he could be. Like a cat creeping into a room. No one even knew he was there. One night, in the quiet of his parents’ house, he had overheard his mother and father whispering about Rudi’s education. He wasn’t overly surprised that his mother had concerns—after all, the Hitler Youth regularly barged in on church meetings and Bible studies, looking sharp and intimidating in their brown shirts and swastika armbands. But his father’s objections were unexpected. Hearing them, Rudi had stormed into the sitting room without a second thought, his head held high, and it struck him that, upon seeing him, his parents seemed . . . afraid, and a whole different kind of power
filled him.
“You should not talk about the Hitlerjugend like this,” he declared brashly, bolstered by years of lessons. “We are learning very important things that you do not understand. We are the future of Germany, not you. I can report you for speaking like this, you know.”
His mother’s eyes were glassy with tears. “Rudi,” she said, then she covered her mouth with a trembling hand.
Why should she cry? Rudi was the model soldier-in-training, the first in the group to salute, the first to complete the assigned push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups. His teachers said only good things about him, and he had been accepted into the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy. His mother should celebrate his successes, not be sad.
His father cleared his throat. “Rudi, you are a good soldier, and you are a strong, brave young man. But son, you are also intelligent. We want you to use common sense as well as the lessons.”
“I always use common sense,” he blustered. “What do you mean?”
His father rubbed his forehead hard, something he did when he was troubled. “I mean that they teach you many things nowadays, and a great deal of it is new, created by the Third Reich. And some is . . .”
Rudi’s mother put her hand over her husband’s, worry plain in her expression. “What your father is trying to say is that it is all right for you to question what you are being taught. Yes, you are the future of Germany, because when we are gone, you will grow up and take our place. But some of the things you are being told are simply not true. Listen to your heart, son. Do what is right.”
Werde der du bist. Become who you are.
He knew what was expected of him by his superiors, but how could he turn in his parents for loving him? They had given him everything—them and the Hitler Youth, of course. If he did his duty, he would be lauded by his leaders for making such a bold move. He would be an inspiration to all the other boys. But Rudi did not have the heart for it. Angry at himself and his parents, he turned away and almost bumped into his sisters, who he discovered were even quieter than he.
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