The Last Innocent Hour

by Margot Abbott

  “Christian, you can still give yourself up.”

  “Stop, Sally. It is too late.” He pointed the gun at her. She didn’t move.

  “No. No. It’s not. Please, Christian. Don’t do it. No more. It’s time to stop. No more.” She ignored the men calling her name.

  “Please, Christian.” She took a step toward him, toward the gun. It hovered just a yard away. She didn’t care. She reached her hand for him, to stop him from using the gun this time. “It has to stop.”

  “I loved you, Sally,” he said, his voice infinitely weary, infinitely sad. “And,” he continued, “I will not die at the end of a rope.”

  Without another word, he put the barrel of the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER 6

  BLOOD SPLATTERED ON the wall, the floor, and arced up to hit the ceiling. She saw the blood. On his boots. On the wall behind the stakes. In the shower room. The long gashes in the plains where the bodies toppled into the graves, spilling blood in the dirt. An explosion of blood and bodies and steel and water and death in the plains and oceans and jungles. Like the salle’s shower room. The shower rooms filled with blood.

  “No!” she screamed, her arms stretching toward him. There was blood on her sleeves, on her hands.

  Christian’s body stood, swayed, supporting the thing that his head had turned into, then, slowly, almost gracefully, he crumpled to the floor, folding up as he fell. Sally followed his progress down, landing hard on her knees, falling forward onto her bloody hands.

  Why couldn’t she save him? She had loved him enough, hadn’t she? Why couldn’t she save him from the blood?

  Someone was at the door, calling her name, but it sounded miles away. Her world had narrowed to the space between herself and the bloody ruin only feet away from her. Her friend. Once upon a time, he had been her friend.

  People burst into the room, but she ignored them.

  Christian. She had to concentrate on him. Dead. He was dead.

  “It’s so cold,” she said.

  She became aware that someone was touching her, trying to get her to stand. Christian’s arm had fallen across his chest, blocking her view of his shattered head. She looked at his left hand, flung aside, palm up, as though he were sleeping. He slept on his side, she remembered.

  She shook away the person touching her and crawled the short distance to Christian’s hand. Reaching out very carefully, she covered his fingers with her own. His hand was still warm, but it was dead and unresponsive.

  “Oh, Christian,” she said softly. She laid her cheek against his hand, her tears falling onto his long, thin fingers. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. When she raised her head, the tears had stopped.

  She sat back on her heels and looked up into Tim’s face. He put his hand out to help her up, not minding the blood. “Thank you,” she said, taking his hand. She walked out of the room with him, not looking again at the body.

  SERGEANT DOLAN’S BODY was gone. Colonel Eiger was on the phone at the sergeant’s desk. He turned to watch her walk by. At the door, Doug Finkelstein was talking to an NCO.

  Sally stopped. “Doug? Where is Chester?”

  “They took him away, Sally,” Doug said gently.

  “Someone should call his family. Where are they?”

  “Atlanta, I think. Max is taking care of it. How are you?” he asked, touching her arm.

  She frowned. “I’m okay, Doug,” she said, looking around distractedly. Where was . . .? What was she looking for? Tim put out his hand. She gratefully took it, holding on tightly. “I want to go outside.”

  “Of course,” he nodded and walked with her down the hall, past her office.

  On the top step outside, they came to an abrupt stop.

  “Would you look at that?” Tim said, his voice full of wonder.

  It had snowed. The rain and wind had turned into snow, which lay quiet and clean, covering the black ruins of the city. The night was clear and crisp and cold, and above, the stars shone as brightly as the lights on the Unter den Linden of Sally’s memory.

  “It’s too cold, sweetheart,” said Tim, his arm around her, steering her back inside.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to go inside there.”

  “Well, then, I’ll go get your coat. You wait here, all right?” He waited until she nodded, then moved away. Sally turned back to look at the city, all white and glistening in the moonlight and starlight, no longer, or at least not until the snow melted, a haphazard jumble of rubble.

  All the ugliness was covered up for a moment. And, seeing it Sally realized that she didn’t want to leave. She would, but she didn’t want to leave Berlin. Not now, when it was in ruins, when children still lived in the hospitals and camps and needed so much help.

  It didn’t make a lot of sense, but this city was home to her more than any other had ever been and she did not want to leave it. Or perhaps because of it. Berlin was where she had been the happiest and the most miserable, where she had learned and lost the most. There it was, a truth, ugly or not. And the Berliners, the enemy, who had done these terrible things, were they so different from her? She had known. She had seen, but she had closed her eyes and refused to acknowledge the evil. That was a truth too.

  The truth. She’d never know exactly what happened and maybe Christian was right. It had all happened a long time ago. And hadn’t they both paid the price? As for Mala’s pictures: they were a version of truth that needed interpretation.

  All right. That was her job and she was good at it.

  She believed Christian had killed that child, and commanded the action group that destroyed the village. He had told her the officer was dead. That was true too. Christian, even before he pulled the trigger of his gun, had been dead inside, dead all through because of the things he had done. And now he was out of the reach of any retribution.

  It was over.

  He had become a monster. She was there and saw it start, but she still couldn’t explain why. He was a monster she recognized, a monster whose death moved her. A monster she had once loved and wanted to have children with.

  Death solved the problem of his guilt. But she, Sally, was not dead. She raised her head to the winter sky, glad to feel the cold air against her face, cooling her flushed cheeks.

  She was alive.

  She thought of his family, his mother, whom she had loved, and his father. How terrible for Christian to have lived all those years with that awful crime. There had been so much death: his brothers and sisters, their unborn child, Eddie’s family.

  Sally looked at the stars. Once, somewhere, she’d heard a folktale that said that the stars were the souls of babies, twinkling clear and bright and pure up in heaven. She had held their child in her heart all these years, the child she had never held in reality. It was time to let them both go. It was time to look to the future.

  Sally lowered her eyes and hugged her arms across her chest. So, here she was, thirty-three years old, childless, parentless, but not as lonely as she had been. Christian was gone for good now, and she would mourn the loss of him, but . . . she swallowed hard.

  How tired she was; she couldn’t think about it any longer. She stood up straight, fighting the exhaustion.

  Eddie.

  She had to go find her brother and take him home and do whatever she could to help him. Thank God, there was money and the promise of quiet days in San Francisco. She would take Eddie there. And then? What would she do then?

  Years ago she had stood in her pretty, lacy negligee, looking down onto the bustling, twinkling lights of Unter den Linden. The lights, the bustle, had covered a deep, destructive evil, but evil doesn’t last forever. Surely, the fire and destruction had cleansed the soul of the city. Surely, with all the deaths, both of the guilty and the many more innocent, some of the debt had been paid.

  And her own debt? Gone, she hoped, taking a deep breath. She had been blind, but now she saw. That had been her greatest sin. That she had loved him. That was no sin.
Never. Because it was all there against death. The blood. The monsters. Even against the lies. Love was all there was, fragile and rare and incomprehensible.

  Someone put a coat around her shoulders and she turned. “Timmy,” she said.

  “Here, put your coat on. You must be freezing.”

  She nodded and slipped her arms into the sleeves of her coat.

  “You ready to go?” he asked, still behind her, his hands on her shoulders.

  She nodded.

  “I like it before it gets muddy,” he said, gesturing toward the snowy street.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Sally. She stuck her hands deep in the pockets of the coat, her fingers closing around the little gold locket.

  “What about?” Tim asked.

  “How much I loved, love, this city.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket and looked down at the little necklace.

  Tim was silent, standing next to her, his hands in his pockets.

  “It’s such a waste, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes, a waste,” she said, looking at the beautiful white, ruined streets, thinking of her childhood friend, the slender boy with the golden hair and clear blue eyes, eyes as blue as the sky above the deep, cold lake. He was receding from her mind already, sinking down into the lake. He’d be safe there and she let him go. She’d remember him as he was then, when they were fourteen, all those years ago. And she pulled her arm back and threw the locket as far as she could. She couldn’t see or hear where it landed.

  Tim watched her, but said nothing. She had never shown him the necklace. It didn’t matter now. It was over.

  “Well,” Tim said after a moment, “do you want me to take you home?”

  “Yes,” she said in a soft voice. She held out her hand, he took it, folding it between both of his.

  “Do you want to come home with me? We do have a date tonight.”

  “Is that tonight?”

  “Yeah.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it, his moustache soft against her cold fingers. She sighed and turned her face into his shoulder. It would be the easiest thing in the world just to stay there in his arms.

  “I think you like me,” he said softly, his arms tightening around her. “Just a little bit.”

  “Just a little bit,” she murmured. How could she leave him?

  “I don’t know, Sal.”

  “What?” she asked, leaning back so that she could look into his face. How could she leave him? His eyes met hers. “What?” she repeated.

  “Your going. How can I let you go?”

  “I have to go,” she said. She could hear the pain under his words.

  “I know. But, maybe . . .”

  “Timmy,” she said abruptly. She figured she should be the one to speak since she was leaving, since she had always been so frightened. It was hard and she touched his lapel, fussing with it. “I don’t really cook at all. Well, I guess you know that. There are a lot of things we would have to decide. I mean . . .”

  “Sally . . .”

  “Work and Wichita and I have to take care of Eddie too. And you know how slowly the army moves. It could take months. But I could meet you or wait somewhere. I just can’t lose you . . .”

  “Sally,” Tim said, breaking in on the flow of words. He put his warm hands on either side of her chilled face. “Sally Jackson, are you asking me to marry you?” And when she nodded, he began to laugh, wrapping his arms around her, rocking the two of them back and forth, his laughter echoing off the silent buildings on the snowy moonscape of the block.

  EPILOGUE

  SALLY WATCHED THE seam of the nurse’s white stockings flash under the hem of her uniform, above her crepe soled shoes. Her own civilian shoes tapped noisily on the linoleum as she followed the nurse down the long ward to the lone patient at the far end. The beds they passed were all empty, the white covers tight on the white mattresses, the white mosquito netting draped neatly above. There were long windows the length of the room, open to the outside, their wooded shutters propped open, and at intervals, doors, that opened out on to the veranda.

  “He’s in the last bed,” the nurse, said quietly. From behind them, they could barely hear the radio that sat on the desk at the nurses’ station.

  Eddie lay on his side, his hips and shoulders making sharp mountains in the white sheet that covered him. Sally gasped when she saw him; he was so thin, so fragile. They had shaved his head and the shadow of his hair accentuated his skull, his gaunt cheeks.

  “He’s asleep,” said the nurse. “We’d better leave.”

  “No,” whispered Sally. “I want to stay. We’ve come a long way.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Tim said, moving forward, putting his arm lightly around Sally. “We won’t disturb him.”

  “Well, all right. But let him sleep as long as he needs. He is very weak. He doesn’t sleep well at night,” the nurse whispered and then went away.

  “I’ll get you a chair,” Tim said.

  She sat for a long time, watching her brother. Tim left her for a while, touching her shoulder as he went out the door at the end of the room to smoke a cigarette on the veranda.

  The doctor had told them that Eddie was suffering from malnutrition and dysentery and a few other more exotic infections. He had appeared out of the jungle, six months ago, carried by two Filipino commandos. Evidently, he had spent most of the war with the commandos. He had been delirious when he was admitted to the hospital. The two men who had brought him in had only known him by his first name and praised his bravery. He had been in a Japanese prison camp and he’d escaped. Beyond that, they could tell the doctor little. It wasn’t until recently that Eddie had become lucid enough to identify himself.

  At first, the doctor, a young Navy man, didn’t know if Eddie would live.

  Sally studied her brother’s thin face. He looked like the POWs liberated from the camps in Europe and she prayed that his experiences hadn’t been as harrowing.

  There were so many things to ask, so many things to say. Eddie didn’t know about his family, or their father. He didn’t know about Tim. She looked out the door at her husband. He was leaning easily against the narrow railing around the veranda and, sensing her gaze, turned his head and smiled at her.

  Eddie moved restlessly, his arm twitching on the sheet. He began to perspire heavily. Sally leaned forward, alarmed. “Tim,” she called, quietly. Tim came quickly to the other side of the bed and reached down to pick up one of Eddie’s bone-thin arms and feel for a pulse.

  “His pulse is racing,” Tim said. “I’d better call the nurse to get his doc.”

  Just as Tim put Eddie’s arm down, Eddie opened his eyes and saw Sally. He looked at her for a long time and she began to fear that he didn’t recognize her. His expression was so strange. He didn’t look at all like himself, he was so terribly fragile. And his eyes—those dear, familiar eyes—were shadowed with the memory of experiences she could only imagine.

  Then he smiled.

  “Hello, Sally,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Long time no see. Who’s the guy?”

  Without a word, she left her chair, kneeling on the floor, her head close to his, covering his thin hand with her own.

  “No, c’mon, Sal. Don’t do that.” He touched her face. “It’s all over now, Sally. It’s all over. It’s all over.”

  “I’m not crying, Eddie,” she said as she raised her face to show him. Sally knew as she smiled at her brother, and then looked across him at her new husband that Eddie was wrong. It wasn’t all over. She looked into Tim’s green eyes and knew it was just beginning.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  In placing my story against the tumultuous years between 1933 and 1946, I have tried to be consistent and faithful to the historical background. My sources? Well, I started reading about the Third Reich nearly twenty years ago, long before I ever thought about writing a book. I’ve read scores of books: histories, biographies, picture books, novels, and memoirs. I also watched documentaries and other f
ilms, and have actually seen Reinhard Heydrich move across my television screen and shake hands with an official of the Vichy government in footage shot in 1941. Heydrich was real, an elusive figure in the Third Reich hierarchy who was, by the time of his assassination in 1942, seriously considered to be the natural heir to Hitler.

  Sally Jackson is a fictional character, but her existence is based on the fact that the U.S. Ambassador, William E. Dodd, did indeed have a young, pretty daughter named Martha. She wrote a memoir of her family’s experience in Berlin and after her father’s death, she and her brother edited his very dry diaries.

  It was one scene in Martha’s memoirs that I read, years ago, that caught and persisted in my imagination. During the weekend of the Night of the Long Knives, as the Röhm Putsch came to be called, an SS officer, an acquaintance of the Dodd family, wound up crying on their sitting room sofa. How he came to be there and what else happened I can’t remember. All I can remember is how incongruous the idea of an SS man crying on the American ambassador’s sofa, and I started making up a story to explain his behavior.

  Margot Abbott