The Last Innocent Hour

by Margot Abbott

  Turning onto her back, she stretched. Yesterday, Saturday, she had spent the day puttering around, doing chores, writing letters, and then, last night, Tim had called. They had chatted for a few minutes about nothing in particular. He had just called to say hello and to tell her that he would be busy all day Sunday at the American hospital, where he continued his work with GIs.

  Trying not to think about how much she had looked forward to seeing him, Sally quickly got out of bed, pulled on her robe, and went to the window to open the shutters. That’s what happens when you care for someone, she thought. She spent all her time missing him. Damn.

  She leaned out to secure the outer shutters, latching them to the hook on the wall. It was a chilly day, bright and sunny. It felt like fall at last. Sally closed the window and looked over at the travel clock on her nightstand. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. She sighed. It would be a long day, and she sat on the foot of her bed thinking about how she could spend the time.

  What she really wanted was to see Tim. She fell back on the bed. The thought frightened her, but she also knew it was true.

  She wanted to find out about how his heart had been broken and she wanted to ask him about the marines who didn’t want to live and she wanted to hear about his children. And—let’s be honest, she told herself—she wanted to kiss him again. Her fear made her laugh at herself, at her predictability. She would telephone him; maybe he hadn’t left for the hospital yet. Maybe they could meet that evening. Try to see if they could have a normal time together. And wouldn’t he be surprised to hear from her?

  She showered and dressed, putting on navy wool slacks and a red-and-navy sweater over a white shirt. The thought occurred to her that Tim had never seen her out of uniform; nor she, him. She remembered his back and shoulders under his shirt, moving away from her down the hall. And she smiled.

  Then she went into the hall to telephone, but swerved instead into the dining room for coffee. She lingered, eating a hard roll, before she ventured back to the phone. Two times she picked up the receiver and replaced it again. She gave herself a mental slap, put the receiver to her ear and dialed. It rang. And rang. And rang.

  He wasn’t there. She had waited too long. Sally looked at the receiver as though she could see down the line to Tim’s apartment. How dare he, after all the nerve it had taken her. Shaking her head, amused and frustrated, she decided to walk over to the office.

  In her office, she shed her coat and bag, then walked to the corner and looked down the hall toward Tim’s office, knowing he wouldn’t be there. He wasn’t, but there was light spilling from the open door of Colonel Eiger’s office. Curious, she walked down the hall and looked in.

  “Hello?” she called.

  “Who’s that?” the colonel called from the conference room.

  “Sally,” she replied, and walked in.

  “Say, Sally, do you know anybody at Life magazine?”

  “Life? As a matter of fact, I do. An old pal,” she said, slowly. “At least I think he’s still there. Why?”

  The colonel was standing, his back to her, at the table on which lay a black-and-white picture. Several more were in his hand, and as he turned, he thrust them at her.

  “Look at these. What do you think of them? Are they good enough for Life?” he asked. Sally cringed: the pictures were still damp from the developer and the colonel’s fingerprints were all over them. Carefully she took them from the colonel and laid them out separately on the table.

  Later, thinking about that moment, she recalled how innocently she had begun to move the photographs about, relating them to each other, making conclusions in her mind about them.

  Those photographs were the reason she had come to Berlin, although she wouldn’t realize it for several days.

  The photographs were of a German action, and unlike most of the material she had seen, the focus was on the perpetrators, not the victims. SS officers, noncoms, and soldiers were portrayed; their rank and unit markings clear, sharp, most of their faces identifiable. Sally turned, her head toward Colonel Eiger, who stood next to her, his arms crossed.

  “Where. . . ?” she started to ask, trying to control her excitement.

  “Czech refugee. Evidently she was in a camp in the east. A girl named Mala something. She’s in very bad shape, malnourished, bad lungs, and an infected wound on her leg. Medics can’t figure out how she’s managed to stay alive.

  “She hitched her way here on a DP train and collapsed at the station. Couple of MPs brought her to the hospital. She wouldn’t go with them without making sure they were Americans. Wouldn’t take their word for it. Had to see their ID cards before she’d allow herself to pass out.

  “So, when the docs undressed her, they found three rolls of film in a pouch around her waist. She tried to explain the stuff, but she doesn’t speak English, of course, and it took a while to rustle up someone who could speak Czech. They found a patient who talked to her, got her name and where she was from, that she’d shot the film, and some rigmarole about Life magazine.”

  The colonel held up his hand to ward off Sally’s question. “Wait until you hear. So, we finally got an interpreter and Finkelstein talked to her this morning and her story’s a beaut. After the Germans leveled her town, she hid the film, then took off for Prague.”

  “Where’d she hide it?”

  “Wouldn’t say. Evidently somewhere no one ever looked because the film was still there after the war. Meanwhile, she was caught in a roundup and wound up at Auschwitz.”

  “She went from Poland back to Czechoslovakia to get this film?” Sally asked, incredulous.

  “Guess so, because here she is with it. Finkelstein says she told him that after the camp was liberated in ’45, when she could walk, she went back to Czechoslovakia. To get the film and bring it to us. And you wanna know why she wanted Americans to get the film?”

  “Does it have something to do with Life magazine?” Sally said, touching an edge of a photograph.

  “She wants Life to publish them.”

  “Why?”

  “Pictures, Sally. All those great Life pictures. You know, war pictures, the baby in the ruins of Peking, that Spanish Civil War stuff they published.”

  “Where’d she see a Life?”

  “She told Finkelstein that during her hike back to Czechoslovakia, she spent a couple of cold nights in someone’s ruined house, up in the attic, along with a pile of old Life magazines. Not only did they give her something to sit on but a reason for going on. Or something like that. Anyway, those are from the first roll.” He pointed at the pictures on the table.

  Sally’s eyes followed his gesture to the photographs. One showed two soldiers and a noncom standing over a line of bodies. In the background, a lone bare tree loomed stark against the horizon. In another, a group of women and children as herded down a street by men carrying rifles. There were bayonets on some of the guns. They were beautiful photographs, well composed, the light throwing the buildings and people into sharp relief. They had to be good enough for Life.

  “Look,” she said, picking up two of the pictures carefully by their edges, “these look as though they are consecutive. Did Doug get the name of the town?”

  “Some small place—Layzaky?” Colonel Eiger grimaced. “They’re sending over a report with the particulars and the correct spelling.”

  “There are two more rolls?”

  “Yes,” said the colonel, “Sergeant Dolan’s bringing them up as soon as they’re ready. Ah, this may be him,” he said in response to footsteps in the outer office, and left the conference room.

  “What year was this?” said Sally. “And how in God’s name did she manage to evade capture? Do you realize what these guys would have done to her if they had caught her? I wonder where she got the camera—hey!” She called to the colonel, then went to the door between the two offices. “Can I go talk to her? I’d like to meet her. Is she well enough for visitors?”

  “You can’t,” said Colonel Eiger.
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  “Here you are, sir,” said Sergeant Dolan, handing over a big manila envelope.

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” replied the colonel.

  “Why, Colonel?” asked Sally.

  “She’s being operated on. I think they have to take her leg off. Here,” he said, handing her the envelope.

  “What happened?” she asked softly.

  “The wound. Gangrene. It was too far along.”

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Don’t know, Sally. Don’t know.”

  Sally nodded and turned back to the table. She gathered all of the photographs into a stack and sat in front of it. She would look at each one individually before she began trying to make a story out of them. She was excited. Rarely had she ever had more than two or three photographs of the same event, and certainly she had never had so many pieces of destructive evidence in her hands.

  “So, you think you know somebody to send them to?”

  “Yes. One of their war correspondents, David Wohl.”

  “Hey, I know him. Met him in Italy. New Yorker. Funny guy. Real nuts. Never saw a guy drink so much. You know him? Small world isn’t it.”

  “Sure is, Colonel,” she said, happy to hear about David, even at such a remove. She got up to go get her loupe from her office.

  “Sally,” the colonel said. “What are you doing here on a Sunday, anyway?”

  “Oh,” she said, “nothing. Just bored. Wandering around.”

  “Good, good,” he said, not really listening to her.

  SALLY STOOD BACK and studied the wall of photographs she had just finished creating on the corkboard in the conference room. It was late Tuesday afternoon, and she had been working since Sunday morning on Mala’s film, trying to re-create the sequence, and she thought, looking at them critically, that she had.

  It began with a shot of the village’s main street, its only street, in the late afternoon light, peaceful and nearly deserted. There was a tiny church and one or two other buildings. Lezaky, which was the name of the village, was small, more a hamlet, really. It had had less than ninety inhabitants, all miners, but now it had none. The town did not exist anymore. It would never glow in the sunset again.

  In the last pictures, near the window, was the end of Lezaky. Taken from some distance away in early-morning light, the few buildings were disappearing in flame and smoke. Again Sally marveled at the bravery of the Czech girl who had relentlessly recorded the death of her village—and of her family.

  Mala had been only sixteen when she took the pictures. She had, the patient who had talked to her reported, learned to take pictures from her elder brother, who had a studio in Prague. Max Tobin was trying to track him down or his business.

  On the evening the Germans came to Lezaky, Mala had, evidently, been wandering around with her camera, looking for likely subjects.

  Lezaky had been an old village, and it had never grown, like its neighbor, Lidice, fifty miles to the west. There the people were also miners, but in Lezaky the young people tended to leave the town for Prague and wider horizons.

  Mala had the instincts of all great photographers, and when she saw disaster driving up the road from Prague that June of 1942, she had turned her camera to face it. She also realized her danger well enough to hide while she took her pictures, many of which seemed to have been shot from above the action.

  Sally lit a cigarette and leaned against the long table, studying the photographs. Heydrich again. Lezaky had been destroyed as part of the brutal retribution wrought by the Gestapo after Heydrich’s assassination.

  Someone whistled long and low behind her. Sally turned; it was Nelson Armbrewster. She nodded at the expression on his face.

  “Something else, aren’t they?” she said.

  “Indeed,” he answered. He moved closer to the wall, his hands behind his back, and began looking in earnest. “Jesus,” he exclaimed, “if we can only identify a quarter of these bastards . . .”

  But Sally was only half-listening to him. Something in one of the photographs near the window had caught her eye. She walked to it, studied it, then turned and grabbed her loupe from the table. She placed it on the photograph and looked. More light, she needed more light.

  “Sally?” said Nelson, but she ignored him, unpinning the particular picture from the wall and bringing it to the window.

  “Need a blowup,” she muttered, feeling dread growing in her, icy cold, and returned to the wall, bending to look at the photographs that surrounded the empty space. She peered closely at them, forcing her mind to stay blank, ignoring the coldness in her stomach.

  “Recognize someone?” Nelson asked facetiously.

  Sally raised her head and looked at him, hating him. He must have read it in her face, for he was silent. Sally picked up her grease pencil and made a set of brackets on the photograph, indicating the area she wanted enlarged, then she walked out of the room, leaving behind a perplexed and curious Nelson Armbrewster.

  Sometime later, the enlargement in her hand, Sally stood in the cement corridor outside the darkroom in the basement. She held the photograph up in the glaring, uncovered light bulb. She could not be absolutely sure and it was driving her crazy. But more than anything, she wanted very, very much not to be able to recognize him. Her arms dropped to her side and she stood, feeling helpless, sick to her stomach, in the middle of the bleak hall. The darkroom door opened.

  “You all right, Lieutenant?” asked the young soldier who had developed all of Mala’s pictures and had just made the enlargement for her. “Did I get what you wanted?”

  “Yes, Henry,” she said, “they’re fine.” She looked at him and tried to smile. “So am I,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Upstairs in her office, she placed the enlargement and the original next to each other on her desk and lit a cigarette. She sat heavily in her chair, then, as though pulled by a magnet, her eyes were drawn across the room to the box of Auschwitz pictures she had shoved into the corner. All those photographs that she had looked at, those of the victims and others of the perpetrators, all of them recording countless acts of stupidity and evil. And with all those thousands of pictures, it now came down to one single picture and whether she could see Christian in this picture of a man committing a murder.

  She could identify the man’s rank: Obersturmbannfuhrer, lieutenant colonel. The face was thin, the mouth tight and Prussian-grim, and resembled other Germans, Wehrmacht and SS. The Czech girl had caught him as he was wiping his forehead with the back of a gloved hand shading his upper face, his cap pushed back. It could be Christian but Sally couldn’t be absolutely sure.

  But she was sure she must tell her suspicions to her commanding officer. She snubbed out her cigarette, then reached for the phone and asked to be connected to the colonel. After speaking to him, she reached for her bag and headed back to her quarters. It was time to bring her own photographs out of hiding.

  CHESTER DOLAN WAS typing as she entered his office. He looked up at her and smiled. He cocked his head.

  “You feeling all right?” he asked softly.

  Sally nodded, then shook her head. “I think the roofs about to fall in on me, Chester.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Pick up the pieces?”

  “Can do, Lieutenant,” he said. Then he reached out and, after the briefest hesitation, patted her arm.

  “He’s expecting me,” Sally said. She went into the conference room to take a couple of pictures from the wall. Then she knocked on the door to the colonel’s office and went in. Timothy Hastings sat in the battered armchair in front of Colonel Eiger’s desk, one ankle on the other knee.

  “Oh,” Sally said, surprised to see him. “I thought—”

  “That’s okay, Sally,” Colonel Eiger interrupted her, “Hastings was on his way out.”

  Tim came up out of the chair easily. “Just dropped by. See you.” He walked past Sally to the door. She held a hand out.

  “Wait,” she said quietly, “maybe . . .”
She looked at Eiger. “I wouldn’t mind if he stayed, if that’s all right? He knows about some of this.”

  “Fine with me,” the colonel said. “Do you want to stay, Hastings?”

  “Sure,” said Tim without hesitation, and went back to his chair.

  Sally sat on the hard chair at the other corner of the colonel’s desk, the photographs on her lap. She could hear Sergeant Dolan typing in the outer office; it was a comforting, normal sound. She looked at her colonel. He was silhouetted by the late-afternoon light behind him as it shone in through the half-closed wooden blinds. The fall weather was beautiful, although Sally hadn’t noticed until now.

  “This might take a while,” she said and he nodded. “First,” Sally started, taking the 8-by-10 original of Mala’s picture and handing it to Eiger, “you should see this.” He looked at it, grunted and handed it on to Tim. “That man is a Lieutenant Colonel, an Obersturmbannfuhrer and the commander of this action group. I say that because there is no one of higher rank in any of the photographs. Because they are SS, their insignia is easy to see, even in their gray field uniforms—the silver on black on their collar tabs stands out.”

  Tim, holding the photograph by the edges, looked from it to Sally and back again. “This was one of the Czech girl’s?”

  Sally nodded. “Although Lidice was the most famous of all the towns destroyed by the SS, there were many others. Well, you know that. This little place—barely a village—was supposed to have harbored a radio used by the commandos who killed Heydrich. So while one group of SS and Gestapo was destroying Lidice, another, smaller team went over to take care of Lezaky in the same way. They shot all males over twelve, took the women and children to camps, and blew up the buildings.

  “The difference here was Mala and her camera. You’ve been in to see her work?” Both men nodded. “I know you’ve read Doug’s interview with her and Max’s reports . . .” Sally trailed off, looking down at the file on her lap. She took the enlargement out and handed it to Eiger. “I think I can identify the commander, this man.” Tim looked at her, she could feel his eyes and his sharp interest on her, but she kept hers on the photograph in the colonel’s hand.