He gazed down at the stroke victim. One eye was half closed and drooped, but the other followed him like he was in her gunsight.
“You want to speak to me, Frau Snider? You want it recorded?”
Clare nodded, moving the side of her mouth that wasn’t paralyzed and dribbling with saliva. He bent down close to her face to listen. Her voice was scratchy but incredibly strong.
“My confession. My story, Agent Bernstein. I want you to record it,” the elderly woman muttered in German. “On one condition.”
Jake raised his gaze again to the old woman’s ravaged face. He nodded, then lowered his ear to her mouth.
“Meg mustn’t hear it. Ever. It’s a terrible story—war is terrible.”
“Why me, Frau Snider? Why now?”
“Because my Meggie trusts you.” One side of her mouth curled up into a grotesque, defiant sneer. “Because I will never go to trial.”
****
Two hours later, Jake turned off the miniature digital recorder. The size of a small matchbox, the recorder had an extra sensitive microphone and could carry up to eight hours of sound. Clare’s confession took only two. All in German. Exactly the way she remembered it.
When he got up to leave, there was a sheen of defiance in the old woman’s eyes. She’d told her story and remained proud of the role she’d played in the war. As she weakly muttered at the end of her confession, they’d all sacrificed for a dream.
“The dream wasn’t rotten…” Clare rasped, “only the men who betrayed it.”
He said nothing. No, the dream was rotten.
A rotten dream of lies, Jake wanted to add. Lies that nearly destroyed all of Europe. That duped and killed millions of young men serving their countries. A rotten dream that produced the Holocaust: Six-million Jewish men, women, and children snuffed out in the most horrible ways.
He said nothing. What was the point? It was futile trying to reason with a fanatic. Something Clare had said toward the end of her confession haunted him. The words were whispered without a shred of malice, uttered in a tone of tired resignation.
“You’re a Jew. You know what dreams become. Desert sand.”
He looked down at her shriveled, gnarled hand clutching the blanket. Wondering whether he should touch her. She didn’t want his pity. Nor his forgiveness. Which he never could give, anyway. He could never understand how she could’ve become a part of such evil.
The mangled hand turned over, palm upwards, crooked fingers splayed.
Without thinking, Jake laid his hand upon hers. Lightly. One flawed human touching another.
“Frau Snider, I’m in love with Meg.”
For a second, one of the old woman’s eyes flared. Then one side of her mouth curved down to match the drooping side. She was beckoning with one crooked finger. He bent down again.
“Liebe.” Love. “Nothing else matters…nothing. Be good to her.”
She closed her good hand into a slack fist and turned her head away. Jake withdrew his hand and left her bedside.
Early the next morning, the nurses found Clare Hillenbrand Eberhard Snider dead, the hummingbird pin clutched in her good hand. As one of the German nurses told Jake on the phone, sometime during the night she’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills, which she’d hoarded and hidden, evidently, in a secret compartment underneath the jeweled hummingbird pin. They were amazed at how she’d accomplished it, for only one hand and arm were capable of moving.
At the hotel, Jake heard the news but wasn’t surprised. It was an act of honor for high-ranking Nazis to commit suicide when facing arrest or capture. Like the Roman legionnaires of Imperial Rome, only the Nazis preferred cyanide pills or bullets from their Lugers. He just wondered how long Clare had been planning it. And testifying to the elderly woman’s occasional clarity of mind, she’d even made a backup plan—the hummingbird pin and its deadly contents.
Clare had warned him. She would never go to trial. Even then, she’d already made her fateful decision.
Meg and her family would be upset, though, and that pained him. According to the nurse who’d called him, the family members had just been informed and they were rushing back to the hospital. Clare must’ve timed her suicide when she knew her family would be back at their hotel for the night.
A part of him yearned to console Meg. For most of her life, her grandmother had mothered her, loved her, treated her well. She’d be devastated by the turn of events. She might link Jake’s private taping session to her grandmother’s despair. Maybe she’d even think Jake had driven her grandmother to taking her life. Had spurred her on to that fateful decision.
It wasn’t a lack of courage that made him decide not to return to the hospital. This was a time for family to come together to grieve in private. It would be hypocritical of him to join the small group of mourners. Instead, he sent cards of condolences to Meg’s and Admiral Snider’s hotel rooms and hoped they would understand. Then Jake left for Hannover’s Langenhagen Airport.
The only work left for him to do in this case was for his final FBI report: Translate Clare’s confession and send audio and transcribed copies to MI5. Lady Sarah’s diary was apparently in the possession of the Le Blancs, or rather, Brommers. If the couple was located and the diary found, then MI5 would finally have their proof that Lady Sarah, grandmother to the young woman engaged to marry the English prince, third in line to the crown of England, was once a Nazi spy. And a traitor to her country.
Until then, all MI5 would have was Clare’s deathbed testimony. And the buried wireless, if it was still there under sixty years of dirt and rocks. Jake wondered what the Brits would do with such evidence. Would they make it public or keep it hidden, just as the Pentagon and DOJ would keep classified Admiral Snider’s relationship to another Nazi spy?
He wondered if Major Temple would feel cheated of a public trial. No doubt.
In a way, Jake did, too.
For Meg’s sake and Admiral Snider’s, though, he was glad.
A word about the author…
Donna Del Oro lives in Northern California with her husband and three cats. She taught high school and community college English classes for 30+ years and is now happily retired. She has won two book awards, in 2012 from Latino Literacy Now and the 2015 ILBA. When not writing novels or reading voraciously, she travels and sings with the Sacramento Valley Chorus.
Donna is also a member of the Sacramento chapter of Sisters in Crime, Capitol Crimes. She has judged RITA entries for the RWA, and does developmental editing on the side.
http://www.donnadeloro.com
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