Postmark Berlin

by Anne Emery

  Brennan couldn’t help himself. “They what?!” As if this confession wasn’t already overwhelming, what was he hearing now? The Americans detonated a bomb in Canada?

  “You heard me correctly, Father. It was in 1950. One of the B-50 bombers developed engine trouble while the American crew was flying one of the bombs from Goose Bay, Labrador, back to the States. Standard procedure in a case like that was to release the bomb having set it to air burst. So that’s what they did. Middle of the afternoon, the thing blew up in the air over the river, not far from the town of Rivière-du-Loup in Québec.”

  “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this.” Did Terry know, he wondered. But he couldn’t ask him, at least not in connection with this man’s confession.

  “There was no plutonium core in it, so it was not a nuclear explosion as such, but it scattered uranium all over the place. Here we are forty-six years later, and our government has never admitted it happened. That kind of thing stretched my loyalty to my country and to our closest ally, let me tell you. So, I provided bits of intelligence to my East German rescuer. And he of course would have passed the stuff along to his Soviet masters.” The man looked Brennan in the eye and said, “Doesn’t get any worse than that, does it, Father? Bet you never heard a confession like this one before, eh?”

  Passing nuclear secrets to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, one of two superpowers that had stockpiles of weapons nobody should ever have had. Brennan almost felt he should be groping beneath the park bench for listening devices.

  “But you know what would have been worse?” the man said, and Brennan shook his head. “Something on a much smaller, more human scale. Information about spies, agents in the field, individuals working on the ground to gather intelligence from the Warsaw Pact countries. I may strike you as a man who would do absolutely anything, but I would never have done that. In my view at the time, the more knowledge that could be shared about the kind of weapons that threatened life on this planet — the more they knew about us, and the more we knew about them — the safer we would be. I wasn’t in Japan when the U.S. unleashed the world’s first and so far only atomic strikes, setting those two cities ablaze. But I saw what our bombs and incendiary devices did to the people and the city of Hamburg. I knew all about the death and destruction we rained down upon Dresden, a city that was called the Florence of the Elbe for its beauty and culture.

  “All right, I’ve been sitting here justifying what I did, explaining why I did it. But of course it was wrong, immoral, illegal, and treacherous. I was a traitor to my service, to my country, the country I love. I am a traitor to some of the great airmen, the true heroes I served with or met during the war, all of whom risked their lives over and over for the Allied cause and ended up prisoners of war in Stalag Luft Three. The P.O.W. camp that was the scene of the Great Escape. I betrayed men of that calibre. I betrayed the men in my crew, Mackie and the five who died. But I felt that I owed my life to Dieter and I convinced myself that the decency he showed to me in 1943 might work to influence the regime he worked for, to become more humane and less totalitarian. And if receiving secret information might raise his profile, so to speak, well . . . You wouldn’t expect such naivety from a man who had seen what I had seen in the Second World War, would you?”

  “You’ve left me nearly speechless here . . . I don’t know who you are, but you do look familiar.”

  The man shook his head. That was not to be part of the confession. “Here I sit, the unnamed traitor. I could be shot for this!”

  “Shot? People don’t get shot in Canada,” Brennan protested. “There’s no death penalty there.”

  “It’s still on the books for military crimes, Father. You never hear about it. There hasn’t been a military execution since 1945, and I took some comfort from that when I hatched this plot in ’74. But the death penalty is still on the books in the National Defence Act. Even if they didn’t take me before a firing squad, I could spend the remaining years of my life in prison. I would not be able to bear that.”

  He looked utterly exhausted, as if he had lived the whole thing all over again and had begun a life sentence in prison. Brennan stayed quiet, letting him collect his thoughts.

  “And of course you’re wondering how all this brought me to Germany now. I came all the way over here to spy on you! Because, and I think you know where this is going —”

  Brennan thought back to what he had heard from Willy Horst Lehmann, and he knew exactly where his, Brennan’s, investigation and the park bench penitent’s story coincided: at a border crossing between East and West Berlin in 1974. He said to the man beside him, “The person who carried your secrets across the border . . .”

  “Edelgard Vogt-Becker, known to you as Meika Keller.” Edelgard, agent of the totalitarian regime in Germany. “The word was out in Halifax that there was a missed meeting or something between you and Meika Keller the night she died, and then I heard that you were coming here. I didn’t have to be a detective, or an intelligence officer, to figure out that you were here to find out what had led to her death. I was petrified that you might find out what I had done. Then I had my work cut out for me, calling hotels in the city asking for Father Burke! In the midst of all my terror and nerves, I also felt like a fool.” He pointed to his eyes. “I wear contact lenses — I’d never meet the vision requirement for the Air Force now! — so I went to a pharmacy here and purchased a cheap pair of reading glasses. I put those on and dragged a hat down over my head, trying to alter my appearance in case you had seen me around Halifax. But it soon became clear, as it should have been from the outset, that I wasn’t going to be able to find out anything you had discovered. Stupid plan, irrational. So I gave it up, checked out, and started for the airport. And here we are. Anyway, now you know. Last thing I expected to do was confess the very things I was terrified that you’d uncover!”

  “I . . .” It wasn’t often that Brennan was left without words, but he had no idea what to say. He looked across the way to Terry, whose eyes were fixed on him. He was out of earshot, but he wouldn’t have missed the fact that something extraordinary was happening.

  Brennan and the airman sat in silence for a few minutes, then Brennan asked, “How did you meet Edelgard in the first place?”

  The man shook his head. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? But, as you can imagine, I have been following the news about her death. I did not kill her! Considering what I just confessed, Father, you may be sure I would have confessed to that if I had done it.”

  Brennan had a gut feeling that the man was telling the truth. So, in spite of all that had happened, he was no further ahead with respect to the woman’s death. But given the life she had been leading here in Germany, there may have been more than one person who would have benefitted from her death. Or had her guilt driven her to suicide after all?

  The man beside him slumped down on the bench, as if depleted of all form and substance.

  Brennan had not scanned his mind for theology fitting the kinds of matters this man had confessed, for where his actions would fit, if at all, in the catalogue of sins recognized by the Church. But no matter. “Are you sorry for the things you did?” The question was banal, rhetorical; Brennan knew the man was filled with remorse.

  “Oh, yes. The guilt has been eating away at me. Not just the fear of being found out, but the immorality of it all.”

  Brennan made the sign of the cross over him then and pronounced the words of absolution. “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen.”

  It was obvious from the man’s haunted face that he had taken very little consolation from the sacrament.

  Chapter XXV

  Brennan

  Brennan landed back in Halifax on Sunday afternoon, and his only desire was to push from his mind all the disturbing information he had collected in Germany. He longed to collapse in bed and catch up on his sleep. But he had
reckoned without Sunday being the seventeenth of March. Saint Patrick’s Day.

  The calls came in from various devotees of the great saint, and Brennan’s half-hearted pleas that he was shattered after his travels met with “Sure you’re shattered, but you’ve the rest of the week to sleep. So, you’ll join us in lifting a glass or two to our patron saint.” What else could he do? He went out skulling pints with the lads. Again.

  It was another excruciating Monday morning, for the usual reason combined with the effects of jet lag and the fact that, in spite of all the unwelcome news he had received in Germany about Meika Keller and the unsettling confession in the park in Berlin, Brennan had not solved the question of Meika’s death.

  But he dragged himself out of bed, had a shower and a shave, and managed to have a quick breakfast downstairs without being annoyed by any other resident of the building. He felt as if he might be able to keep the breakfast down and not hurl it up twenty minutes later, as had so often happened in the past. He returned to his room and made an effort to concentrate on his choir school and his music. He sat listening to a recording of the magnificent eight-part Tulerunt Dominum meum by Josquin des Prez. “They have taken my Lord away.” He was making notations and trying to scope out how to get his choir of students to master the eight-part harmony. Well, the answer was obvious: bring in the choir of men and boys from the church, and combine forces. That decided, he let himself be subsumed by the music. Music of the starry heavens. If he lost everything else in life but was left the music of the Renaissance, he would be at peace. He could feel all his cares floating away on the tide of the ethereal harmonies.

  A knock at the door. Go away, whoever you are.

  “Father! Father! Are you in there?”

  Oh, Christ, that one pestering him. He got up and snapped off the music, lest it be compromised by her very presence. He opened the door.

  “Good. I thought you were in there, when I heard all that noise.”

  “Noise? You consider Renaissance polyphony noise, Mrs. Kelly?”

  “I may not know music, but I know what I like.”

  And I know what I don’t like. But Brennan, striving, however unsuccessfully, to imitate patience on a monument, remained silent and waited to learn the reason for this interruption. And it wasn’t long in coming.

  “His Grace is here! And he looks like he’s on the warpath!”

  “Oh, well, we’d best let him alone then. Don’t want to add to his troubles.”

  He made to shut the door, and he could see the panic in her eyes. She didn’t want to miss this. “No! Wait!”

  “Yes?” he said, all innocence.

  “He wants to see you!”

  “Ah. Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Should I send him up here?”

  “Why not? Why keep the poor man waiting downstairs?”

  “I just . . . I wanted to make sure . . .”

  “Yes, I’m sure you did.”

  She turned and flapped away down the hall, and Brennan waited for yet another visit from his bishop.

  And here he was. “Brennan.”

  “Come in, Bishop. Have a seat. Will you have a cup of tea?”

  “No.” When they were seated across from one another at the table, Bishop Cronin said, “You don’t look all that well, Brennan.”

  “I couldn’t be better, Your Grace.”

  “There is more than one way to interpret that statement.”

  “True.”

  Brennan waited for him to start giving out about Brennan being away from the parish for four days. But no, it was something else that had brought the bishop to his door.

  “I just had Vivian and Langston Soames running up one side of me and down the other.”

  “Yes, I suppose you did.”

  “Ranting and roaring that this church and this diocese would never see another cent of their money unless you apologize and readmit young Soames to the school. You know they gave us a donation of twenty-five thousand dollars this year?”

  “I don’t do the accounts here, Dennis.”

  “Obviously. But now that you know . . .”

  “Now that I know what?”

  “How generous the Soames family has been.”

  “And now they won’t be.”

  “Amn’t I just saying that?”

  “They could hand me a million dollars a year, and I still like to think I wouldn’t, to quote Yeats, ‘fumble in a greasy till, and add the halfpence to the pence.’ I wouldn’t take that little prick Soames back into the school.”

  “As you said, you don’t do the accounts here, Brennan.”

  “And I’m not amenable to bribes.”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “That remark wasn’t directed at you, Dennis. It was directed at the Soames family, if they think they can use their cash to buy their way into our good graces. As far as I’m concerned, Chadwick Soames is a product, like all of us, of his upbringing. Langston and Vivian Soames have a lot to answer for, having raised an arrogant, heartless bully like young Chadwick. And expecting the rest of us to put up with him. Or maybe he has a personality disorder that can’t be attributed to his upbringing. I don’t know what accounts for his behaviour, but I know this much: our other students should not have to put up with the likes of him.”

  “What is he supposed to have done?”

  “What he did was bully two of the other students in the school.”

  “Is this something the two students told you?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes. But if the two girls had told me about it, I would have taken their word for it without question.”

  “Who are the girls?

  “Kim Kennedy and Normie Collins.”

  The bishop nodded. He knew both families and was obviously satisfied that neither girl was a spinner of tales.

  “And I know that wasn’t the first instance. I think, looking back at Normie being upset on a number of occasions, that it had been going on for quite some time. And I don’t think Kim Kennedy dyeing her hair red was just a coincidence.”

  “I’m not following you there, Brennan.”

  “Wouldn’t expect you to. The way I see it, Chadwick Soames was fixated on Kim. He was, in his own awkward way, making a play for her. Sexually. And there was also an incidence of theft, articles of clothing stolen from Kim’s gym bag.” He gave the bishop what he hoped was a significant look.

  The bishop caught it and said, “Oh, God. Do I want to hear this?”

  “I’d say not. But I saw the personal items myself, in his locker. As for Kim, she is very attached to her friendship with Normie, and I have little doubt that Normie has made it clear exactly what she thinks of Chadwick Soames. And Normie outperforms Chadwick by a mile on all their schoolwork. She’s brilliant; the Soames kid isn’t. So, the whole thing works itself out with Soames trying to hurt and belittle Normie to make Kim look down on her. Of course part of the attraction of Kim is her lovely golden hair. And Chadwick mocks Normie about her red curls. And that’s why Kim coloured her hair red. To be in solidarity with her best friend. At least, that’s what I make of it.”

  “Any point in talking to the kid?”

  “No, though I’m sure there are some who would say that if he’s made to understand how hurtful his behaviour is, he’ll stop. He’ll stop, in your hole. A lecture, a sensitivity session, would only cause him to take revenge on the girls later on. I think he’s capable of much worse; that’s the feeling I get off him.”

  Brennan waited to see how quickly the bishop would dismiss his analysis, but Dennis Cronin surprised him. “Yes, unfortunately, I think you’re right. He’s a nasty piece of work. Even the few times I’ve seen him, I’ve had that impression. These two young girls probably aren’t his first or only victims. Let his parents take him off somewhere else, get him off
our turf.”

  “Them and their money.”

  “Feck ’em.”

  “You’re a mensch, Dennis. I’ve always known it.”

  * * *

  When Cronin had departed, Brennan sent up a prayer of thanks for the gift of a man the calibre of Dennis Cronin as archbishop of Halifax. He listened to the eight-part Renaissance masterpiece with even more reverence than before. A few minutes after the last exquisite note, the telephone rang.

  “Brennan, a belated Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig ort.” It was Terry on the line from his home in New York.

  “Same to you. Have you been taking lessons in the old tongue?”

  “Only what I heard from the lads at O’Malley’s.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “And now some news.”

  “Do I want to hear any more news?”

  “That remains to be seen, I suppose, depending on whatever the news was that you gathered in that park in Berlin!”

  Brennan had of course maintained the secret of the confessional; all he’d told Terry as they walked back to their hotel was that he had heard something that might be connected with Meika Keller’s death. And that Brennan was ninety-nine percent certain that the man in the park had not killed her. Brennan didn’t say that if in fact the man was the killer, the matter would likely never be resolved for the police, the public, or, most painfully, for Commodore Rendell and his family.

  Now Terry said, “I heard from Jäger in Berlin. I now know his first name is Erich. And he heard from his man in Leipzig.”

  “Steiff, I think was the name he gave us?”

  “Right. Apparently, he has some information about Edelgard’s family.”

  Brennan felt a stab of anxiety; none of the unwelcome information he had gathered so far had furthered his stated goal of finding out what happened to Edelgard Vogt-Becker, a.k.a. Meika Keller, let alone his shameful goal of relieving himself of guilt. Did he want to know whatever it was that this man had to say about the dead woman’s family? But of course he had to know.