Armageddon

The man did not budge. Blessing climbed up the brick pile with a deftness that belied his size. The man was not as old as he first appeared. An empty wine bottle lay at his feet. Blessing puffed to a halt before him.

“Now where in the hell do you live?”

“In Berlin, you idiot”

“Don’t you go getting me riled up. Where do you live in Rombaden!”

“Nowhere!”

“You drunk?”

“Of course I’m drunk. Are you stupid?”

The policeman grabbed the man’s collar with a fast reflexive move, jerked him to his feet, and had him in an arm lock. The man offered no resistance, in fact dangled loosely. In this closeness Blessing smelled the unwashed body. He knew the smell. He shoved back the sleeve on the man’s left arm. The arm was engraved with the tattoo number of a prisoner of Schwabenwald. Blessing released his grip.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were from the concentration camp?”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” the man said, sitting down again. And then he began to babble. “I didn’t drink very much. Haven’t drunk in long time. It has made me drunk.”

He helped the man up, but he sat down again.

“You can’t sit here all night.”

“I used to have friends in this place. Once this was the district headquarters of the Social Democrats. No one is here ... they are all gone ... everyone is gone.”

“Wait a minute. You’re not a Pole.”

“I sir, am German.”

“Are you Ulrich Falkenstein?”

“That is correct.”

The jail buzzed with excitement over the old man who lay passed out on a cot in Blessing’s office. Ulrich Falkenstein! A major find. A man who had withstood Hitler persecution.

The team had all known he was a prisoner at Schwabenwald. When they broke into the camp, Bolinski and Arosa were able to determine that Falkenstein was alive up until a few days before the surrender. In the confusion, he had wandered off to find old comrades in Rombaden.

Ulrich Falkenstein and his brother were war horses of the Social Democratic Party. He had dared to stand up to Hitler even when the end had come. In the party paper and in fighting speeches he denounced the Nazis at a time when most of his comrades were either escaping Germany or frightened into silence.

In the beginning the Nazis tried to buy off the Falkenstein brothers with offers of high positions. It was rumored that Ulrich was enticed with an important post. He could neither be bought nor silenced, even though he almost signed his own death warrant by resisting.

At the epic trial in 1935, Ulrich Falkenstein made his last public statement. He predicted that this new era of tyranny would lead Germany to total destruction and universal damnation. His voice was the last of the thin cries of indignation drowned out by the thumping of jackboots and the choruses of “sieg heils.” Yet, not even in 1935 did Hitler feel strong enough to order the execution of “a foremost enemy of the Third Reich.”

Falkenstein joined a legion which swelled to a half-million Germans thrown into concentration camps for real or imagined opposition to the regime. When the night of terror was done, Hitler’s surviving opposition was a pitiful handful like Falkenstein and a few priests, a few writers, and a few thinkers. For practical purposes, there was no German opposition to the Nazis.

Somehow or another Ulrich Falkenstein managed to stay alive. At one time he possessed a powerful body, which resisted the beatings and kickings, the weeks and months in solitary. When it became known that no torture unto death could break his spirit he became the object of calculated degradation. The SS delighted in such humiliations before the entire prison. He bore the indignity with a dignity that increased his stature and enraged his tormentors. There could be no victory in his death unless he begged for life. And this he refused to do.

Falkenstein apologized for his drunken scene to Blessing the next morning and thanked him for his understanding.

For the first time in Rombaden, Sean O’Sullivan stood up in the presence of a German and greeted him warmly.

“I am overwhelmed,” Falkenstein said, “to be remembered.” He reveled in the luxury of a cigarette. The tobacco made him heady. And the coffee! A long time ago he had forgotten how to cry, but now the taste of coffee brought him nearly to tears.

As they chatted, Sean wondered what kind of man sat before him. The history of concentration camps showed it only took a year or two to completely break a normal man ... to debase him ... to drain his will ... to lower him to an animal instinct for sheer survival. Those whom Hitler released from the camps never dared speak of it.

What was the thing that kept Ulrich Falkenstein defiant? What was the thing that made him refuse the exchange of freedom for the promise of silence?

Except for a tiny scar at the edge of a horseshoe of white hair on a bald head, he showed little outward signs of the punishment. He seemed a little tired. His eyes were an amazing blue, like the Danube, and he radiated a look of tenderness that sometimes one obtains only through long and difficult suffering. His eyelids gave him a drowsy look—deceptive, and concealing the thoughts that were hidden behind them.

“How does the war go?” he asked.

“The Western Front is in a state of collapse. It will only be a matter of days,” Sean answered.

“And Berlin?”

“We have stopped at the Elbe River. The Russians are assaulting Berlin from the Oder-Neisse Line.”

Falkenstein meditated for a long time, lit another cigarette. “I am a Berliner,” he said at last. “I have a family there, a wife, two brothers, Bruno and Wolfgang, and Bruno’s family of course. I suppose it is impossible to obtain information about them?”

“I’m afraid it can’t be done now.”

“You know, it is a pity you are letting the Russians capture Berlin.”

“But the Russians are our allies. They’ve suffered terribly at the hands of the Germans.”

“Haven’t we all? It is a pity, none the less. Berliners are different. They were never truly Nazis.”

Sean could not cover his shock at what seemed to be a strange pronouncement.

“You look amazed, Major.”

“I am, in the light of what has happened to you, Herr Falkenstein. Not a German in Rombaden thinks of himself as anything but an innocent bystander. You left Berlin in 1935. Perhaps it was too early to realize that the Nazis truly carried out the will of the German people.”

“But, Major ... I also am a German.”

“A unique German.”

Falkenstein shrugged. “But, no matter how you dissect me, I am a German. Perhaps I am one of those ‘good’ Germans, but that does not make me English or French. Furthermore, my dear Major, I believe I know more from firsthand experience about German weakness and German sickness than you do. It still does not make me less of a German.”

“It sounds incongruous coming from Ulrich Falkenstein after nine years in Schwabenwald.”

“Let us say I have had ample opportunities and forceful persuasion to give up hope on the German people. What you say is true, in part. Most of the so-called ‘good’ Germans died in places like Schwabenwald. But now, what happens if those of us who are left turn our backs on the German people?”

The revelation of Ulrich Falkenstein’s stubborn beliefs was annoying and frightening. Yet, Sean could not help but admire this man who had suffered so brutally, yet retained his identity.

“So you see, I must get back to Berlin.”

Was this better or worse than those Germans who had fled the Nazis and now worked with military government? Those Germans who hated their country and their own people, who turned on all things German with savagery ... sought revenge ... detested their Germanness? How easy it would be now for Falkenstein to join that now fashionable anti-German clique. He was instead choosing the way of a missionary among the lepers. Sean knew the Nazis could not beat Falkenstein’s love of the people from him. Yet, in Falkenstein he had an adversary, not a puppet. Still, he made their choice.

“It will be a long time before you are able to return to Berlin. Meanwhile, your services here with us are sorely needed.”

“I will work with you, Major, if you will remember that I am German and my first duty is not to Allied victory but to the redemption of the people.”

Chapter Twenty-one

SEAN WAS DISTURBED BY the worsening scene that played below his office in the square. A dozen or more wildly drunken Poles were howling, hurling bottles against buildings, urinating in the streets, scuffling.

“We’ve got to put a stop to this before it gets out of hand,” Sean said, turning into his office and facing Blessing, Maurice Duquesne, and Bolinski.

“Shucks now, Major,” Blessing soothed, “we’ve got to use us a little Kentucky windage in our thinking. Some of them poor fellers have been locked up for four or five years.”

“We have more complaints than we can keep track of.”

“Why hell, they’re just celebrating a little. Don’t take very much to liquor them up. We’ll sweep them off the streets at curfew.”

“And what do you intend to do about the looting and the beatings?”

“Well, so they broke into some German shops and homes. They’ve got a lot to get out of their systems,” Blessing pleaded.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The celebration had been particularly rowdy today. A large, untapped wine cellar had been stumbled upon. A monumental binge followed. The streets were empty of terrified Germans.

“It’s not that I have any desire to protect Germans,” Sean said, “but our own authority will break down if we let the Poles go unchallenged.”

“They’re good people,” Bolinski said. “They are what is left out of maybe a hundred thousand who passed through Schwabenwald. Less than a thousand of them left, Major. Every morning they were awakened at five o’clock, given a bowl of watery broth, and marched from the camp to the Machine Works. Six miles, two hundred and thirty yards, sixteen feet and nine inches. Anyone who fell down was jumped on by the dogs. The last men pulled carts to pick up the dead piled up along the roadside. They worked fourteen hours, chained to their benches in those underground hell holes, and they were marched back, six miles, two hundred and thirty yards, sixteen feet and nine inches. They were given the fine reward of fifteen hundred calories a day ...”

“I’ve read all your reports,” Sean interrupted.

“I say to hell with it. Let them celebrate! Let them knock in a few faces!”

Sean blew a long breath and slumped into his chair. “Bolinski ... you and Blessing get these Poles to work. Get them signed up for guard duty. Give them any choice jobs open. How about their leaders? Can we trust them?”

“They carry authority,” Bolinski answered.

“Here’s the deal. We’re not going to be too technical on loot or roughing up a few Germans. We draw the line at rape and murder. I won’t be crossed on it.”

Bolinski and Blessing left to sweep up the streets.

Maurice Duquesne, who had followed the conversation with detached boredom, finally spoke up. “Putting them to work is an unrealistic solution. For these first few days they are content to drink their freedom under, but soon they will want to find out if they are still men.”

“I’ve already thought about that. We’re going to use some of Blessing’s Kentucky windage.”

A few moments later Baron Sigmund Von Romstein, still acting mayor, answered a summons to Sean’s office. The sight of Duquesne made him doubly nervous. Each time he came he was certain it would be for his head to roll.

“One of the streets running off the square, Princess Allee, had a reputation for gaiety, did it not, Baron?”

“Oh yes! Many beer halls. Many night clubs. During the festivals it was one of the most raucous streets in all of Schwaben ... and Bavaria, too, for that matter.”

“I’m talking specifically about whorehouses.”

The baron threw up his hands in innocence. “The Nazis closed down all the brothels. You know how Hitler was.”

“According to our information Princess Allee was never entirely or really closed. Is it not a fact that you always had women working as prostitutes for the overnight stops of the river-barge pilots? Their numbers could be augmented from Munich on paydays and during festival times.”

“Well, you know how these things are. Not even Hitler could stop prostitution entirely.”

“What is more,” Sean said, “you were mayor and your brother Nazi Gauleiter. Weren’t there a number of unwritten agreements, a number of things overlooked for sake of the economy of the district?”

Sean was correct. The American was always correct. He and that abominable Dante Arosa knew everything.

“Is it not further correct,” Sean pressed, “that you secretly have a registration of all the women who worked as prostitutes in Rombaden?”

The baron stalled.

“Well?”

“You must understand,” Sigmund whined, “there was never graft connected with this. Of course, some consideration to the police now and then. However, the registration was only to keep the situation under control. To keep out undesirable elements ... what I mean ... to keep the girls protected ...”

“Strictly nonpolitical,” Sean said to Duquesne, who was forced to crack a smile. “How many of them are still around?”

“Perhaps thirty or forty.”

“Jolly place,” Sean said. “They’re going to be needed.”

“For your troops?” the baron asked, hoping that the nonfraternization ruling had been rescinded.

“For the Poles.”

“Oh ...”

“Nonpolitical, Baron. I don’t want to know who these women are. Furthermore, they are not to know this is coming from the Allied authority. You may be their benefactor. Beginning tomorrow the Poles will be paid in occupation currency. Any girl voluntarily going back to her chosen profession will be given triple ration.”

The deflated baron mumbled that it would not be too difficult to find women, even for Poles, with triple ration.

“The alternative may be the rape of your women in the streets.”

“I understand, Herr Major.”

The baron was dismissed.

Maurice Duquesne laughed at the poetic justice in making Baron Von Romstein pimp for the Poles he and his brothers had used as slaves. “A clever solution, Sean, but one which will lower you in the eyes of the Germans. They will say ... look what the American does to protect us.”

“I am doing it for the sake of law and order.”

“Ah, but Sean, a conqueror is not expected to be benevolent. Don’t you think the women here are expecting to get raped? Don’t you think the German soldiers raped the women of my province and the Polish women and the Russian women?”

“More of your centuries-old traditions, Maurice?”

“More of your American naiveté, Sean. We Europeans are not dreamers, but realists. The husbands, sons, and lovers will take their women back, tainted or not.”

“I don’t understand you people!” Sean snapped in anger.

“And I don’t understand you. How long do you think you Americans are going to be able to keep up with this idiotic nonfraternization? How long will it be before your clean-living American boys go frantic for the touch of a woman?” And then, Duquesne laughed heartily. “By God, you are missing out on one of the true rewards for winning the war.”

Chapter Twenty-two

ROMBADEN GASPED FOR LIFE amidst its devastation. The full impact of defeat drove deeper with each passing day. No water, no food ... ashes. Frightened movement stirred behind the charred walls as the armed Poles patrolled the streets.

The coming of Ulrich Falkenstein disturbed them deeply. The tyrannical but paternal rule of the Von Romstein dynasty was over for the first time in history. Although Count Ludwig and his brothers had governed with an iron fist, they had worked for the solid status quo of traditional life. The Von Romsteins were the father. The Von Romsteins would take care of them.

Now, Falkenstein, enemy of the Reich, scorned for two decades, sat at the right hand of the Allied governor.

Sean’s first doubts about the meaning of Falkenstein’s Germanness faded. Falkenstein would have no truck with the Nazis. Moreover, he could smell them. A few people from the whitelist and a few political survivors of Schwabenwald were placed in key civic positions. The Nazis were routed.

It became clear that every person in Rombaden and the Landkreis was going to have to account for his past activities. Rumor had it that the military government was preparing a questionnaire with hundreds of questions which every man and woman had to answer. Imprisonments grew daily.

Dante Arosa and Shenandoah Blessing played upon the shocked condition of the people to build a system of informers. The safest way for one to clear one’s name was to implicate someone else. Inform. Tell on your neighbor. Informing had become a fine art during the Nazi days; no one had been safe from prying eyes. Informers had been glorified by the Nazis ... children were rewarded for telling on their parents and parents on their children and brother on sister and cousin on cousin.

Werner Hoffman, a deputy of Falkenstein, became the unofficial liaison between the informers and the Allied authorities. Hoffman had been a minor Socialist official in pre-Nazi days and somehow survived five years at Schwabenwald. He walked bent from his back which had been broken by a guard’s rifle butt. He had been made a freak whose constant pain had amused the SS, so they let him live. Hoffman was not a particularly efficient official, but he was a rare being ... a trusted anti-Nazi.

Hoffman made the rendezvous on Princess Allee. Hoffman made the deals with the informers for extra rations and extra consideration.

This disintegration of morality added to Sean’s disgust of the Germans. And it brought the usual snide and knowing observations of Maurice Duquesne. “Why are you so shocked? They are defeated and they wish to survive. You Americans have never had to live under the conditions of defeat. You have never had to account for the actions of your life. If a German army was occupying New York you would be amazed how many Americans tongues would waggle.”

There began a wild scramble to exonerate one’s guilt

“You must make the Americans understand I joined the party because my job was at stake.”

“My job was nonpolitical, strictly nonpolitical, but I was in a position to see what was going on.”

“Holstein turned over four Jewish children who were being hidden.”

“No matter what Herr Dunkel tells you, he was a Brown Shirt.”

“When you question Bargel, remind him of how it was when he was a block warden.”

“It is known that the child turned his own mother in.”

“Yes, stole the entire business and house of the Jewish family when they disappeared.”

The overloaded garbage can spilled and the overflow vomited and the stench mingled in Rombaden’s ashes.

Ulrich Falkenstein slept in a mansion confiscated from the brewery owner. It was a twenty-two-room affair on the south bank shared with a half-dozen former Schwabenwald inmates working with the Allied Government.

At five o’clock in the morning of the beginning of the second week of occupation, his phone rang. It was Werner Hoffman.

“What in God’s name do you want at this hour!” Falkenstein demanded.

Hoffman answered with a single name. “Klaus Stoll.”

He spoke the name of the commandant of Schwabenwald, who had disappeared at the end of the fighting.

“Stoll!” Falkenstein repeated in a chilled whisper.

“And his dear wife, Emma. We have them both.”

“Where? How?”

“The information came to us from someone who has a lot to answer for. Stoll has been hiding in the basement of a bombed-out rubble on Friedrichstrasse. He placed his trust in one of our most reliable informers.”

“The Allied authorities! Do they know?”

“As a matter of fact it was Lieutenant Blessing who captured Stoll an hour ago. He said that for the sake of certain identification it would be a good idea if a dozen or so former inmates from Schwabenwald interviewed Stoll right in the basement before he is taken into custody.”

“God in heaven! Major O’Sullivan will be furious!”

“Major O’Sullivan knows. He said that he will be touring the Landkreis all day. And he added something quite strange. He said, ‘What I don’t know won’t hurt me.’ What did he mean by that, Ulrich?”

Falkenstein threw his blankets off. The blood rushed through his heart so quickly and heavily he thought his chest would break. He fought into his clothing, called for his chauffeur, and soon crossed the pontoon bridge into Rombaden. He was met by Hoffman in the square in the first light of day.

They stopped before a rubble pile of what had once been Kaufmann’s Department Store. No one seemed about. Hoffman, grimacing from the pain of his warped body, and Falkenstein, puffing from age, stumbled through the wreckage and down into a foul-smelling basement.

A flashlight beam hit them. “In here!” someone called.

They made their way into a cleverly concealed cell all but blocked by twisted steel and burned-out timbers. They gasped for breath and adjusted their eyes to the lantern light. A dozen German inmates of Schwabenwald had been assembled.

On a bed of rags in the corner, Obersturmfuehrer Klaus Stoll and his wife, Emma, cringed.

One of his former prisoners kicked him in the stomach. The blow made more noise than damage. “Stand in the presence of Ulrich Falkenstein,” the man demanded.

Klaus Stoll slid his back up the wall, holding his arms across his face to ward off any blows.

Another of them grabbed Emma Stoll by her hair and jerked her to her feet.

Ulrich pushed through the ring and stood face to face with the Nazi. Stoll was a great brute of a man, as large in frame as Falkenstein had once been before the flesh had been beaten from his body. He looked from Klaus to Emma and back again. He tried to renew the nine years in Schwabenwald in his mind. There she stood as she was. A dull, stupid, low-class, foul-mouthed slut. Emma, who wore her sweaters and skirts tight to taunt the inmates. Emma, who called for naked men and women to perform for her. Emma, who collapsed in sweaty exhaustion from lashing inmates.

And Klaus Stoll, brewery-wagon driver saved from anonymity by his depraved Nazis. Klaus the braggart, who taunted Ulrich by descriptions of the gassings and how he liked to watch the castrations at the medical experiment center; how he made a half-dozen prisoners kneel head to head and bet he could put a single pistol bullet through their heads.

And Klaus Stall’s killer dog, Messer. The dog strained on the leash waiting for the command, “Kill! ... Go for the throat, Messer!”

Klaus Stoll’s dark face was stubbled, dirty, and sweat-drenched. His black Nazi uniform was torn and caked with dried blood. The swastika was gone. “I am glad you are here, Herr Falkenstein,” he said in his semiliterate speech. “You are understanding. I have explained to them that I only followed orders. The Nazis would have killed me if I hadn’t obeyed. They held my family as hostage to see that I carried out orders.”

“Step back, Ulrich, and let us deal with them.”

“Herr Falkenstein! You are a civilized man! You cannot put me at their mercy!”

“Perhaps you are right, Stoll. Perhaps we should call in the Poles.”

“God no!” Emma screamed.

Stoll turned to the crippled Hoffman. “Didn’t I spare you even against orders?”

“Because it was amusing to see me scream in pain with my back.” Hoffman snatched up a brick. “Let us see how you will bear the pain of a broken back!”

The Nazi fell to his knees and clasped his hands. “God! God be my merciful judge! I hated every minute of it! They made me do it!”

The ring closed in.

“Wait!” ordered Ulrich Falkenstein with such power and authority they halted. “Let us not be so quick. In places like Schwabenwald human beings were turned into animals so that whores and bums like Klaus and Emma Stoll would become supermen in their own eyes by comparison. Let us see if the superman is made of our stuff. Stand up Klaus Stoll,” Falkenstein said in an almost paternal tone. “We shall not lay a hand on you.”

Ulrich quieted the others’ protests and continued. “Now, Klaus Stoll. Face your wife. Spit in her face as you made us spit on our comrades. Spit I say!”

He spat upon his wife.

“Now, Emma Stoll. Do not wipe the spit. Let it run down your face and into your mouth. Spit on your husband!”

She spat twice.

He ordered them to spit again and again and again until their mouths ran dry, and they were given water and made to spit again.

“Now, Klaus Stoll, slap your wife until her face bleeds.”

“Here, Emma Stoll. Take this stick and beat the face of your husband.”

And they beat on each other with sickening thuds. The prisoners of Schwabenwald shrunk back from the scene in revulsion. They beat upon each other until Emma Stoll slumped, semiconscious. The Nazi stood over her gasping and weeping and babbling to God for understanding.

“Klaus Stoll!” Falkenstein roared. “Call for your dog!”

“Mercy!”

“Call for your dog, I say!”

“Messer,” the Nazi voice whimpered, “Messer.”

“Tell Messer to kill! Tell him to go for the throat!”

“Kill ...” Klaus Stoll choked.

“Aha! Messer does not answer his master’s call. Get on your hands and knees and bark like Messer. Bark at your wife.”

Klaus Stoll grotesquely groveled about on all fours and barked and snapped at his wife.

Ulrich Falkenstein faced the others, and they knew that he had deliberately made them disgusted with themselves.

“It is enough!” Hoffman cried, dropping his weapon. “Make him stop!”

Klaus Stoll fell exhausted and Ulrich Falkenstein stood over him. “Why didn’t you have the decency to kill yourself? ... Hoffman ... call the Americans.”

Chapter Twenty-three

THE SHEETS WERE SOGGY with sweat. Dante pushed off the bed on rubbery legs, groped for matches, lit the kerosene lamp, turned the wick up. It flickered shadows about the war-battered room.

The shadows played over Marla’s glistening body. She lay on her side, her face buried in the pillow, her hair in disarray on the shambled bed. She was motionless except for the exhaling of deep sensuous groans.

Dante’s fuzzy mind tried to work. He washed himself as best he could in the single bucket of water, and then he dressed.

The numbness caused by her bites began to wear off and hurt. Crazy! It’s all plain crazy!

The rendezvous had been kept in a bombed-out apartment that her father once used for a mistress in the old days. When Dante arrived, Marla had been waiting in the darkness for well over an hour. They had both reached a kind of madness.

Marla had once been a passive lover. With Wilhelm Frick love-making was an accommodation incidentally enjoyed when times in between were long. With her lovers she asserted a sophisticated superiority which “took care of them.”

When her father told her what she must do with Dante Arosa there began an excited anticipation which she had known but once, with the boy in the medical school. For that she had been beaten. And now, she avenged that beating.

The game of bringing Dante Arosa to this moment reminded her how long she had been without a man. Dante’s body was hard. He was strong, terribly strong.

From the instant they felt for each other in the blackness of that shabby place Marla burst out with a sweet, brutal, surging power that wouldn’t let her stop making love. It happened over and over and over again to her in a quickening succession that drove her beyond control, and it kept happening until she collapsed.

For Dante it was a wildness he had never known, draining him to exhaustion; and then Marla revived and returned to a calm and deadly sophistication. Dante had never known a woman to make love this way. Her calculated calm drew the strength of resistance from his body and his mind with each touch and stroke. These were the victorious moments for Marla, when she had a man helpless.... It was the kill!

Dante stood over the bed and lit a cigar. “You’ll have to stay till morning. It’s past curfew.”

Marla rolled over on her back slowly revealing her magnificent body. “Kiss me good night, Dante.”

“I’d like to break your goddamned neck,” Dante said.

She rolled back again and did not move when his hand traced the line of her hips and thighs. She did not move when the door closed or at the sound of the jeep motor starting.

Dante wove through the rubble-strewn, quiet streets in a stupor. An occasional Polish or American guard stopped him, let him pass.

Oh God! What have I done! Fool! Goddamned stupid fool, Dante! Stupid son of a bitch, Dante!

All the traps she had set blurred: the sweet smell, the brushing past, the half-revealed bosom.

Keep your mind on your interrogation. Be careful of her eyes. She plays the eyes like a virtuoso. Be careful ... careful ...

A long halting silence between questions; he had never met nobility before.

The third and fourth time she was called to his office ... questions ... more questions. The time of day stood still until she was brought in ...

Why don’t I continue this at your home, tomorrow ...

As you wish, Lieutenant ...

Touching of hands ... a kiss ...

Marla, I’ve got to see you alone ...

We could both get into serious trouble...

To hell with it. ...

Dante reached the square. The light was on in Sean’s office. The light always seemed to be on there. He was filled with an impulse to drive to the City Hall and tell Sean about it there and then. Sean would understand, cover for him, help him. He drove to the place where the statue of Berwin and Helga stood before the entrance and stopped the jeep. They are all killers ... all of them ... love and death.

Dante started the motor and sped toward the pontoon bridge and his quarters on the south bank. Go back, Dante! Damned fool, go back! Now! Now! See Sean, now!

In the three tormented days that passed Dante Arosa relived the orgy minute by minute, again and again. Neither rationalization nor self-pity nor mortification helped any longer.

On the fourth day he called in one of his MP’s. “Sergeant, drive over to Marla Frick and bring her back here for questioning.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marla and Dante’s eyes met. There was mutual hatred in both, and mutual desire. Wordlessly they both said, “Yes, tonight and every night.”

Chapter Twenty-four

EXCEPT FOR A SINGLE mansion occupied by Ulrich Falkenstein and his deputies the balance of the south-bank estates had been requisitioned for American personnel. However, many members of Pilot Team G-5 rarely saw their luxurious accommodations for their working hours in those first days were as staggering as the task.

One home, formerly belonging to the owner of the riverboat and barge yard, was named the “old people’s home,” a dubious honor to its occupants, the senior members of the team: Tidings, the banker, Trueblood, the curator, Hickman, the agricultural economist, Sam Alterman, the communications expert, Maurice Duquesne, and Dr. Geoffrey Grimwood.

No one worked, or was expected to, the hours of the commander, except for Geoffrey Grimwood, who never saw his suite or, for that matter, bothered to move into it.

Grimwood took a room in the hospital so that he might have constant command of the hourless struggle to save the lives of the Schwabenwald inmates. Most of the 3000 patients in the hospital and cathedral were on the brink of death, with few resources to combat the effects of starvation and a half-dozen other death-bearing diseases.

Grimwood waged tireless battle for every life. With but marginal knowledge of starvation and its side effects he had kept the death rate under 10 per cent There was a direct line open to a camp called Bergen-Belsen, where the British Army had run into another and larger situation much like Schwabenwald.

It was long past midnight when Sean called it quits in his office. He drove down the square to the hospital and found Grimwood bleary-eyed at his desk. They revived themselves with a transfusion of coffee.

The Englishman wiped his eyes and focused them on a pocket watch. “Oh, good Lord. I’ve missed the staff meeting.”

“The board of directors of Rombaden Ltd. reports that the situation is still crapped up.”

“How is the plumbing?”

Sean searched his weary mind. “Hank Greenberg gave me a figure in cubic meters. I can’t remember it. He says he can get the distillation plant in partial operation in about a week and triple the water ration.”

“Sewage?”

Sean shook his head. “The main generator was hit. We have no replacement parts. How goes the war here?”

Grimwood held up two crossed fingers. “We’re giving it a go.”

Sean walked to the glass separation, which looked out to a ward. “I can’t believe it yet. Death factories. Murder on an assembly-line basis.”

“It’s the children out there who break one’s heart. Poor little tykes. Most remember no life other than Schwabenwald. Just about their only contact with humanity is the fierce loyalty they have for one another ... but love is a new experience to them. Can you imagine a child of ten who doesn’t know how to smile? We may be able to mend their bodies ... but their minds? Lord knows I’ve seen enough famine in India. But this! The hand of fellow man.”

“Haven’t you heard, Doc. There was no Schwabenwald. It never really happened.”

Grimwood grunted with irony. “I should be able to deliver a memorable paper to the Royal Academy on starvation.”

Sean looked slyly at the Englishman. “How about delivering a paper on hijacking medical supplies while you’re at it?”

Grimwood nearly choked on his coffee. “What the devil ...”

“If prohibition ever comes back to the States I’m nominating you to lead a gang of bootleggers.”

“Damn it all, Major. We have three thousand desperately ill people. I can’t wait for forms in triplicate to be acted upon.”

Sean held up his hand. “Hold it. We’re on the same team. I’ve got nothing against using Kentucky windage. Only let me know what you’re doing. The surgeon general nailed me on the phone this morning.”

Grimwood huffed a laugh through his moustache. “Here I thought I was being devilishly clever.” He reached across his desk and touched Sean’s sleeve. “Major ... I’ve got grandchildren the age of some of those little tykes out there. We can’t stand on formalities.”

Sean nodded that he understood.

“And what the devil do I do about personnel? I can’t use the Germans ... even those you didn’t imprison. Doctors, indeed! So we have six doctors for three thousand dying.”

“I’m trying like hell to get you more.”

“I’ve been thinking it over,” Grimwood said coyly. “Castle Romstein is sitting empty except for that old spook Trueblood rambling about evaluating the art pieces. A hundred and twenty-two rooms. It would make a lovely rehabilitation camp.”

Sean’s eyes narrowed. Grimwood was a lousy poker player. He had not only been thinking it over, but had obviously devised a plan. “Go on.”

Grimwood cleared his throat guiltily. “Well now, there are a half-dozen American field and base hospitals simply roving around this area. American casualties haven’t been heavy enough to justify the number of medical personnel. Well now ... one of these units would adore setting up a base in Castle Romstein.”

Sean had the drift of it. “And in exchange for giving them Castle Romstein we would reach an understanding with them to press their personnel, equipment, and supplies into our situation.”

“Precisely.”

“The idea has merit, Doc. Let me sleep on it and give you an answer tomorrow.” Sean arose and stretched heartily, shook hands, and made for the door.

“Oh, Major ...”

“Yes.”

“Bye the bye. I did just happen to run into Dr. Pobirs from the Sixty-Second Field Hospital at Stuttgart. I was up there er ... to requisition for supplies ... and so forth and so forth. One thing led to another and we drove down to look over Castle Romstein ... “When are they moving in?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Grimwood. You’re a limey son of a bitch.”

“Thanks, old chap. I knew you’d agree.”

Sean threw up his hands in a gesture of “defeat.”

“Major! With their forty doctors and nurses I’ll save every man, woman, and child out there and in the cathedral.”

“You don’t have to explain, Doc.”

Chapter Twenty-five

SEAN KEPT THE CAPTURE of Klaus and Emma Stoll quiet until he had received instructions from headquarters and had prepared for a flood of journalists.

Bertrand Collier, his press and information officer, had reacted quickly to the revelations of Schwabenwald. He set up tours of the concentration camp and prepared fact sheets and south-bank living quarters for the newspapermen.

The capture was announced and they poured into Rombaden. They were allowed to see Stoll and his wife from a distance in their overly guarded cells, but no one was permitted an interview.

One of the journalists to arrive in Rombaden was Cornelia Hollingshead, a phenomenon because of her sex. She was a war correspondent for Whittsett Press and its syndicate, Global Alliance. She had built a world legion of readers.

Even beneath dungarees and battle jacket, Corney was not without obvious feminine charm—long soft hair, a well-endowed bust, and sensuous lips. Femininity notwithstanding, Corney was more than a match for her male colleagues. Her ethics were under question more than once. Moreover, Whittsett Press and Global Alliance had a well-earned reputation of sensationalism over accuracy.

The Whittsett Press and their twenty-six newspapers backed Lieutenant General Arnold Cleveland for the position of Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. General Cleveland was a top man as generals went but by the time Whittsett Press and Corney Hollingshead finished glorifying him they had jacked him up to a notch over the Almighty Himself. To make matters worse, Corney was shacked up with him and trying to get him to leave his wife.

When Eisenhower was selected over Cleveland, the Whittsett Press and Corney went off like a pair of time bombs. They went so far as to call the President and General George Marshall traitors. Had the Whittsett Press published in any other country in the middle of a war, it is doubtful that they would have survived their own venom.

Corney Hollingshead romped all over England and France and Germany, a colossal pain to the authorities who were afraid to touch the sacred cow, Whittsett Press and Global Alliance.

She arrived in Rombaden determined to do a little “creative” writing to beef up the already ghastly concentration-camp stories. Bertrand Collier personally met her, gave her a beautiful suite of apartments, and a VIP tour.

She was not satisfied. She looked over officers of the Pilot Team to see who could do her the most good. Maurice Duquesne was her candidate to get her entry where other newsmen could not tread.

Duquesne accepted Corney’s advances without particular personal pride. He knew what she was up to, and besides, he had not had a woman since France. Why not?

The Frenchman fenced brilliantly in her apartment without giving direct promises. The lure of sharing the bed made Duquesne intimate to her that she might have access to special information.

And so, they had an affair. The entire thing was annoying to Duquesne. He felt as though he had been raped. Corney was a very bad lover, aggressive and with about as much finesse as a bulldozer. It was sad for Maurice, for he had felt certain that a woman who depended on those particular talents as much as she would have done a better job developing them.

By morning their affair was done and through. She did not seem to mind much, she had been rebuffed before. What made her furious was that Duquesne left without a concession.

Later she drove to Schwabenwald and began to nose around the cottages of the SS officers now under Polish guard. This did not pose much of a problem. The nice lady bribed them with cigarettes with ridiculous ease and was soon inside the cottage of Klaus and Emma Stoll poking through everything—closets, drawers, desks, under beds.

In the dining room she was attracted to a rough-hewn old Bavarian china closet containing Emma Stoll’s Rosenthal set and a set of silverware with intricately carved bone handles. She had found her key!

Later she went to the cathedral to interview former Schwabenwald inmates. She primed them to speak of the thousands of rumors one hears in such a place. Cornelia Hollingshead got some facts, some half truths told by sick, impassioned, hate-filled people, added rumors, and concocted a story that was the topper to the whole sordid concentration-camp chapter. Cornelia Hollingshead indeed, was not outdone by anyone! She wrote:

Frau Emma Stoll gave special orders to the SS guards in the extermination center to be on the lookout for particular types of Slavic and Jewish skulls.

It has been substantiated by irrefutable sources that Emma Stoll personally went to the bone-crushing machines to inspect new batches of skulls daily. She hand-picked the most suitable samples.

These skulls were used to carve the handles on her silverware ...

Before Cornelia Hollingshead’s story could be confirmed, denied, or investigated it was accepted by a world now ready to believe anything coming out of Germany’s horror camps.

Dull, stupid Emma Stoll had gained eternal infamy as the queen of ghouls. Emma Stoll’s name would become symbolic of the universal monster. Indeed! Human skulls for silverware handles! Belatedly, the world cried for her head to roll!

The big American was passed by the guards to the south-bank mansion occupied by the commander of Pilot Team G-5. He used the front door knocker. Alfred Oberdorfer opened it in behalf of his new master.

“Sir?” inquired the servant

“Spraechen sie English?”

“Nein, bitte.”

The big American grunted and continued the conversation in a sort of German. “Tell Major O’Sullivan that Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury has arrived from places beyond the horizon with a duffel bag filled with scotch, dirty laundry, and cigarettes for the black market.”

Good butler Oberdorfer was puzzled. “A moment, please,” he said, bowed, and then walked to Sean’s study and knocked. “There is an American outside, sir, speaking of dirty laundry and whiskey. His name is Goodfellow.”

“Big Nellie!”

Alfred Oberdorfer watched the two men embrace and pound each other’s backs. “You ugly son of a bitch!”

Alfred was disgusted. The Americans were strange people. In the old days such displays never took place in these halls. Things were proper when Herr Schoof was the master. God be hopeful Herr Schoof will return someday.

“Some layout you’ve got here lad.”

“Joint belonged to the publisher of the newspaper. One of Von Romstein’s relatives. Heidi!”

Alfred’s wife answered the call in a trot, tying on her maid’s apron as she ran. She bowed.

“Get these bags up to one of the guest rooms. See to it Herr Bradbury’s clothes are all in order by tomorrow ... and make us some dinner.”

The husband and wife reacted to the terse commands, struggling with Big Nellie’s bottle-loaded officer’s bags.

During the dinner he related to Sean his adventures with Patton’s Third Army when it broke into Czechoslovakia. “Patton almost broke down and cried when they ordered him back. He was dying to take Prague. When he finished crying he started cursing. He went on for an hour without repeating himself. I think we should have let him take Prague ...”

As he spoke he saw signs of fatigue in Sean. Sean’s mind seemed to react slowly, spending words as though he had to think them over three or four times before they took hold.

Something else seemed to be missing from Sean too. Tim had been the wild one, Sean was even keeled, had a quality of gentleness. He watched the near brutal harshness with which he ordered his servants about; the phone calls were taken with crackling anger; his expression of hatred of Germans was barely disguised. And, the whiskey hit Sean too fast.

“Been rough?” Big Nellie asked.

“Only on my soul,” Sean answered. “I’m sorry. After sixteen hours in the boiler factory I’ve got to drink it under. The commander drinks alone and spills his guts to no one.”

“Hi ho the dairio, the commander drinks alone.”

“How in the hell could they do it!”

“Schwabenwald, Dachau, Buchenwald? I hear they’ve found some in Poland that make these look like resorts.”

“So I get potted at night. General Hansen told me once about the beauty of military government. To most soldiers the enemy is an abstract thing, unseen, unheard. Neither Tim nor Liam ever saw him face to face or knew the hand of the man who killed them. Maybe the general was right. Maybe it is too much for me to live among my brothers’ murderers. I swear I’ve tried to be fair!”

“Sean, I saw General Hansen before I came here. He’s got it clear up to his eyeballs. Without his pilot team ...”

“I know. Thank God I’ve got Ulrich Falkenstein. Trouble is, there aren’t many Falkensteins in Germany.”

“And your team?”

“When we were in England looking at maps, talking in abstract problems, planning like a bunch of advertising executives, Rombaden was a kind of game. In France it was a blast. We came as liberators. Maurice Duquesne spoke the language. No problem. But now ... I’m forced to fight my own people ... and to live alone ... and defend Germans. And what’s more I miss Nan Milford. I’m sick for missing her. I’ve been at the point of begging back a dozen times.”

“You’ll get turned down, Sean. Spare yourself that.”

Sean nodded and croaked, “I know.” He drank long and hard from his glass, and made another drink as his servants cleared the table. Sean looked at them with anger.

“Look at these two krauts, Nellie. Steady folks. Been here for years. Wie lange haben sie hier gearbitet?”

“Zwei und zwangig jahre.”

“Twenty-two years, Nellie. Hasn’t got a mean bone in his body. These two got a dachshund. They treat that little dog like it was a baby. Alfred and Heidi wouldn’t think of eating until they go through the left-overs and pick out the best for their dog. And man, you ought to see them with their grandchildren. Sentimental, loving. Germans wouldn’t go hurting little kids, would they Alfred?”

The butler, not understanding, merely bowed.

“Schwabenwald war schlecht, nicht wahr?”

Alfred clasped his hands together and wrung them in horror in agreement that the concentration camp was a terrible place. The wife became uneasy at Sean’s whiskey-inspired prodding.

Nellie watched the scene with fascination.

“Their cottage out back got a hit. Busted down the wall on one side. You should see these two on their off hours. He drags rubble from across the river to patch up the wall and momma here is getting all the window boxes painted and planted and neat. Petunias and pansies.”

The table was cleared. The servants stood at attention.

“Yes sir, a kindly folk. Love their dogs, love their kids and gardens. Love their forests and poetry and music. They told me so, themselves. Lost one of their sons on the Russian front. They told me something else too. They told me people shouldn’t kill each other. How about it, Alfred. People shouldn’t kill people’s brothers, should they?”

The bewildered man shrugged.

“Whiskey, ice, soda and raus,” Sean snapped. “The former occupant, Herr Schoof, published the newspaper. Nazi ... but a special sort of Nazi. The party was full of thugs and bums so they liked to get rich elite boys like Schoof. He’s locked up in Schwabenwald, indignant as hell. He was truly anti-Nazi. He told me so. Nobody knows nothing. I’ve got two hundred SS guards from Schwabenwald who didn’t even know there was an extermination center there. How about that? Tomorrow,” Sean continued, filling Nellie’s glass, “I’ll give you the commander’s personal tour of Schwabenwald.”

“Thanks anyhow. I got my baptism at a guest home for political prisoners on the ancestral estates of the Count of Dachau. Any truth about Corney Hollingshead’s story?”

“I dunno. I’ve sent samples to Switzerland, the States, and Sweden for analysis. I wish I could send Corney there too. She’s planning to give us the pleasure of her company for fifteen more articles and she’s getting nasty about an interview with Emma Stoll.”

“To Corney. A credit to my noble profession. O’Sullivan, I am about to give you the antidote to Hollingshead poison. Try this on her tomorrow ...”

Cornelia Hollingshead was outraged!

“I am not accustomed,” she said in a husky voice, “to being kept waiting in the anteroom of junior officers. I demand to know why I was locked out of my apartment and why my press credentials were revoked.”

“Despite my lowly rank, I am at liberty to determine and act upon undesirable elements in my district.”

“Dammit, I said I want to know why!”

“You filed an unauthorized and unconfirmed story having grave consequences.”

“Don’t go pulling that Little Lord Fauntleroy crap on me, buster. People want atrocity stories and that’s what they’re going to get.”

“In this district freedom of the press is not extended to pathological liars. If you aren’t out of Romstein Landkreis in two hours, you’re going to get jailed.”

Corney leaned over his desk and began to laugh and snarl at the same time. “Major, you’re begging for it. I use little boys like you to wash my panties. Maybe you don’t know who I am and what I’m going to do to you. You’re going to get run right out of this Army, buster.”

“I’m snowed under with work, Miss Hollingshead. I would appreciate your departure without further rhetoric.”

“All right, but make sure you read the Whittsett Press tomorrow. America is going to be reading about the Black Major.”

“Really? What about the Black Major?”

Corney’s yellow journalistic imagination came into play.

“Did the Black Major experiment with the Schwabenwald gas chambers, using German prisoners of war as guinea pigs?

How’s that for a starter? Why did the Black Major desecrate the Marienkirche Cathedral and jail an anti-Nazi priest? Does the Black Major have brothels in Rombaden so his troops can bypass the nonfraternization laws? Has the Black Major opened Swiss bank accounts? Are you getting the idea, buster? Now you hear this! You arrange that interview with Emma Stoll!”

Sean could not believe the venom coming from this wrathful creature. “It has just occurred to me,” he said, “that you are the first American I have ever met with pure Nazi mentality.”

Cornelia Hollingshead’s lips thinned and her teeth gnashed as she stomped for the door.

“Miss Hollingshead! Would you care to venture a guess as to what well-known lady war correspondent gave a dose of clap to what well-known major general in Paris ...”

She stopped in her tracks and spun around. “You son of a bitch!”

“Shame on you. Gonorrhea at your age. Let’s understand each other. The account of your ... er ... indiscretion in Paris has been written by a correspondent who has an audience as large as yours and twice as discriminating. I have it in my desk and am free to file it at will. Questions?”

The blackmailer had been blackmailed. She became amused ... beaten badly at her own game. There was but one weapon left in her arsenal. Smiling, she walked toward him. ...

“Have a nice trip, Corney. Besides, I hear you’re a lousy lay.”

Chapter Twenty-six

TO: COMMANDING OFFICER, G-5, FRANKFURT

FROM: MILITARY COMMANDER, PILOT TEAM G-5. ROMBADEN/ROMSTEIN

SUBJECT: Hollingshead, Cornelia. Correspondent accredited to Whittsett Press/Global Alliance News Syndicate.

The presence of the above named journalist is, in my opinion, detrimental to the best interests of the function of military government in this district.

I have, therefore, in accordance with my authority, suspended press credentials and ordered same from my district.

Sean O’Sullivan, Major

Commander, Pilot Team G-5

Andrew Jackson Hansen damned near had apoplexy when he read the terse report. One did not give the shaft to Corney without dire consequences.

Headquarters in Frankfurt stood by for the cyclone to blow in from Rombaden. To their chagrin, Corney came in meekly and filed a story that “her” war was over in Europe and she was off to the Pacific and battlefields yet unconquered.

Although there was a simultaneous sigh of relief, no one felt that even the Marines deserved Corney.

A few days later, when Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury arrived, Hansen sniffed a rat and tried to pump him.

“General,” Big Nellie purred, “one of these days ask General Borof Roth why he couldn’t attend the liberation ceremonies in Paris.”

And that’s about all he would say.

Hansen watched the reports flow in from Rombaden with obvious pride. O’Sullivan’s performance vindicated his judgment. Rombaden was weeks, even months ahead of most cities.

May 1. Enough rubble has been cleared so we have one-way traffic, at least, on all major thoroughfares.

May 2. 60% of all known former Nazis have been purged from civic positions and are on rubble-cleaning details.

May 3. We have restored enough power for Allied use, hospitals, and certain emergencies.

May 4. Captain Greenberg has located a generator in Munich similar to the main generator for the sewage-processing plant. He horse-traded for enough parts to improvise the rebuilding of the Rombaden generator.

May 5. All liberated Poles, Jews, and other displaced persons in the area are registered, housed, and those capable have been assigned to useful employment.

May 5. The eastern bridge over the Landau has been restored to operation.

May 6. The water-distillation plant is 20% in operation. We are therefore able to raise the water ration to six buckets per day per family.

May 7. Barge works partly reopened.

May 8. Three small factories partly reopened. All factories will use rubble as their basic raw material.

a.

Hümpelmeyer Plant formerly making steel helmets now converted to pots, pans, kitchen utensils, etc.

b.

Struger Factory formerly making hand grenades now returned to traditional toy and puppet making.

c.

Landau Works, formerly making stock handles for rifles now returned to furniture refinishing.

May 11. Leather factory reopened.

May 13. We now have seven full labor battalions on rubble clearance, demolition, and public works. Two battalions consist of ex-Nazis, two of prisoners of war; the rest, civilians.

May 14. We are happy to report that the entire population has received multiple shots for typhus and typhoid and has been vaccinated. We have completed 70% of the delousing procedures as an antityphus precaution.

May 18. Telephone and telegraph service for Allied use has been restored.

May 25. Three banks in full operation.

May 27. A makeshift public transportation system has begun using horse-drawn vehicles and carts pulled by bicycles.

June 1. The sewage plant is now in partial operation.

And so it went. Rombaden/Romstein became a pilot light. From all over the American and British sectors the urgent call was sent to Frankfurt, “What does Rombaden say about this?”

“What do the Rombaden people do in case of ...?”

“How are they handling this problem in Rombaden ...?”

“Clear it with Rombaden.”

That was the new password ... clear it with Rombaden, as men struggled to find the wisdom of Solomon and the strength of Atlas in this obliterated land. Germany’s cities were as bleak as the face of the moon and there was no railroad or barges or bridges ... no mail, no communications, no schools, no courts of law ... no radio, no press, and damned little food.

Three million angered liberated slaves raped and looted and destroyed the western sectors; three million Allied soldiers from the West walked her land; and seven million of her men were prisoners of the West.

Ration was cut back to a thousand calories, about two thirds the minimum needed to sustain human life.

It was not only the broken body of Germany, it was the degradation they had imposed upon humanity. It was the terrible German sickness shown naked.

There was but a handful of Ulrich Falkensteins. The Nazi era had stripped the nation of government, of police, of intellectuals. Germany’s jewel, her manhood, was dead, maimed, imprisoned. And a strange thing happened. For the first time, the second-class citizen, the German woman, was asked to take over the government as well as clean the mess from the streets.

June 5. I am happy to report we are beginning a master plan for the reconstruction of Rombaden.

June 7. Today, Lieutenant Shenandoah Blessing accepted and began the training of seven Germans as a nucleus for a new Rombaden police force.

June 10. Today Ulrich Falkenstein became the first German publisher of a German newspaper. In a week we are hopeful of operating a 25-watt, hand-powered radio station for the area.

June 12. Under Ulrich Falkenstein’s Educational Committee, the task of rewriting the elementary textbooks has begun.

One by one General Hansen tested new laws, new ideas on Rombaden to learn if it would work out for the rest of the zone. Feeling Sean O’Sullivan had complete control of the area Hansen issued the edict there that no former Nazi could be employed at anything but common labor. This sweeping ruling was quickly followed up by the Questionnaire, the Fragebogen, which every adult had to fill out, accounting in full for every action during the Nazi era. In 131 soul-searching questions nothing was omitted ... nothing left to chance. As the Fragebogen stripped every facade in Rombaden, pried behind blank eyes and sealed lips, Hansen made plans to use it in the entire American zone.

June 15. I am personally convinced that Ulrich Falkenstein has succeeded in purging the government of this district of all former Nazis. They have been replaced by people with undisputable anti-Nazi records. Unfortunately, most of them are totally inexperienced in government. However, the purging of all Nazis from official positions has brought Rombaden to an important plateau.

Henceforth, I shall turn over the responsibility and function of government to them, bit by bit, as they prove they can handle it. In due course I will allow divergent political parties to begin to operate.

I am personally hopeful we will be able to have a free election within a year.

Chapter Twenty-seven

THE MOST UNOBTRUSIVE MEMBER of Pilot Team G-5 was H. W. Trueblood, an ex-curator of the British Museum. The old fellow was more than content, he was ecstatic spending his days in the cellars below the Rombaden Kuntshalle uncrating and cataloguing the museum’s works. Each evening he emerged looking like a pale gopher, but thoroughly enraptured by the stimulation of being surrounded by the work of the masters.

When Sean learned that Geoffrey Grimwood had “loaned” Castle Romstein to a field hospital, he sent Trueblood to the castle immediately to take down, catalogue, and store the art works against theft.

Trueblood chose the immense castle library as his workroom. Room by room, precious paintings, urns, statues and statuettes, armor and tapestries were removed to the library until it took on the appearance of a multimillion-dollar junk yard. A day and night guard was put on the library as Trueblood began the painstaking work of identifying and recording each single item.

On his third day at the castle, he phoned Sean O’Sullivan.

“I say, could you spare a bit of time, Major, and dash over here. I’ve struck the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And bye the bye, bring the fat policeman with you.”

“Gawddamn,” Blessing said when he arrived with Sean, “looks like old Mr. Hawkins’ antique store.”

Trueblood led them to a corner holding a separate stack of paintings.

“I suppose you want to know why I called you over. It appears that Count Ludwig had a passion for the French post-impressionist period. Mind you, that is not my forte, but these works here have achieved such a measure of renown that they are commonly known.” He lifted the first in the line. “Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘Portrait of Suzanne Valadon,’ vintage 1885.” Setting the painting aside he held the next two up, one by one. “These are Gauguins ... ‘Vahine no de Taire’ and, of course, ‘Seashore at Martinique.’ This one here we know is a Van Gogh ... ‘Field at Saint-Remy.’ Quite a foursome, would you not say? I took them out of Count Ludwig’s personal quarters.”

Blessing didn’t understand what was so hot about the paintings but was impressed that the Englishman called them off like names of his children.

Sean was already ahead of it. “Where are they from?”

“The Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.”

Sean let out a long whistle.

“Let’s carry on, shall we? Van de Velde, seventeenth century, ‘Woman at a Window’... Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp. Lemmen, ‘Harbor View’ ... Giroux Gallery in Brussels, and so forth and so forth. These last three are Renoirs from private collections in France.”

“You mean he stole these?” Blessing asked. “But, hell, we’ve got better painters than this in the Hook County Fair.”

“Certainly not. This lot represents in excess of a million dollars.”

“Gawd.”

“We have suspected all along that many high Nazi officials in occupied countries developed a sudden penchant for collecting art, other people’s art, that is. We think Goering alone has stolen millions from France.”

“Do you think there’s more of them here?” Sean asked.

“I’d wager on it.

Sean thought quickly. “Come back to Rombaden with me, Trueblood. We’ll try to get a line through to this museum in Copenhagen as a starter and find out under what conditions these were taken and what other pieces are missing. Blessing, round up everyone who worked in the castle or on the grounds. Grill their asses off. Promise them cigarettes, double rations, anything. We want to know every cellar, cave, secret passage ... any possible place a cache could be hidden ...

“What about the count?”

“Put a twenty-four-hour tail on him.”

Sean went immediately to Dante Arosa’s office.

“I’m going to need everything you have on Count Ludwig right away. Matter of fact, give me the records on the entire family.”

Dante was startled. “What the hell’s up?”

“I’ll know for sure in a few hours. Run the files into my office.”

Dante laughed weakly. “Hell, there’s nothing you can find out by breaking your head on the records. What is it you are after?”

In that instant, Sean sensed Dante’s uneasiness. An iota of suspicion had fallen on him. “I’m not quite sure what I’m after,” he said carefully.

Dante shrugged. “Well ... they’re really not up to date ...”

Sean was disturbed. “Let’s have them ... now.”

“Sure ... sure ...”

The voluminous files of the interrogation of Ludwig Von Romstein was studied for hours. Dates of his visits to Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and France could certainly concur with the thefts, but as Sean read on past midnight the finding of the art treasures began to take on a secondary meaning.

Dante Arosa’s files began to make an ugly revelation. “Oh God, no,” Sean whispered to himself. But he read on. He lifted the phone. “Operator, see if Lieutenant Arosa is in his quarters,” Sean asked.

Sean dropped his head on his hands, rubbed his temples, beat his fist slowly on the desk, counting each ring of the unanswered phone.

“Sorry, sir, Lieutenant Arosa doesn’t answer. Shall I try the jail. Sometimes he’s there late on interrogations.”

Sean looked at his watch. Almost one o’clock in the morning. “Try the jail.”

“No, sir, no one has seen Lieutenant Arosa ... shall I ...”

“Get Lieutenant Bolinski. Tell him to report here to me at once. Then call Castle Romstein, locate Blessing ... he’s either in the castle or on the grounds. Tell him to report here.”

Sean slumped back in his chair. His eyes welled with tears. Why in the name of God did Dante do it? Sean continued to read more deeply into the documents.

Bolinski was still drowsy from his rude awakening, but having worked under O’Sullivan he was used to having his sleep interrupted. Sean apologized to his legal officer for the hour; through a yawn Bolinski said it was okay.

Sean questioned him carefully. “Bo, you’ve been drawing up the recommendations for the indictments against the Von Romstein family. How far have you gotten on it?”

Bolinski scratched his jaw. “I’ve been going through the interrogations and recommendations. Matter of fact, I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“How do you feel about our case?”

“Dante Arosa seems to think the count is pretty clean.”

“Are we going to be able to link him with Schwabenwald?”

“Not according to Dante.”

“How about crimes against humanity for use of slave labor?”

Bolinski shook his head.

“Any known collusion between Ludwig and the Nazi brother?”

“According to the interrogations the count looks as pure as driven snow. If we go on Dante’s stuff we couldn’t get a conviction for jay walking.”

Sean nodded. “Thanks. Sorry I woke you up, Bo. Keep it quiet.”

“Sure.”

Sean watched from his south window, looking toward the bridge, waiting for Blessing’s headlights to come into view. He watched the jeep cross the bridge, park, and the fat man make his way out.

“Lord almighty,” Blessing said to Sean’s back, “I got twenty men digging around in passageways inside passageways. They’re turning the castle inside out.” Then the weariness of the hours fell on him. “Well, one thing good about nonfraternization—been working so hard I haven’t seen the end of my pecker for a month.”

Sean spun about. “Where’s Dante Arosa?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“If you’re my police chief, you damned well better know.”

“Hell’s afire. You call me over here just to ...”

“Don’t get folksy with me, Blessing!”

“Can’t talk to you when you’re riled up like this ...”

“You’ve been covering up for him, haven’t you?”

Blessing turned beet red.

Sean’s arm and shoulder muscles bulged with anger. “I ought to bust you in your fat stomach!”

Blessing fell into a chair. “I only knew about it for a week. I swear to you, Major, I just found out about it. I’ve been going through plain hell, Major ... just plain hell. I know Dante’s been doing something wrong but I swear ... I just couldn’t bring myself to telling you. I just hope to God he ain’t hurt you.”

Slowly Sean’s anger ebbed from him. Now there were two of them in the predicament

“In my work,” Blessing said, “I have to use informers. You hate the goddamned little wart who squeals, but you’ve got to use him. Informers are the lowest polecats in the world. I just didn’t want to become one myself. I was going to talk to Dante ... try to set him straight ...”

“Too late now.”

“What’s he gone and done?”

“Whitewashed the whole Von Romstein family. He’s doctored up every report, every interrogation.”

“How’d he figure he’d get away with it?”

“With so many tens of thousands of legal processes being drawn up he figured we’d be long gone from Rombaden before Von Romstein got into court. I suppose there’s a woman involved?”

Blessing nodded.

“Who? Von Romstein’s daughter?”

“Yeh. I followed him last week and waited until he left. I stayed until dawn and saw her come out and tailed her home.”

“Where are they?”

“Bombed-out apartment down near the factory.”

“Let’s go.”

They parked two blocks away from the apartment. They tiptoed the rest of the way through the silent streets. Blessing pointed to the second floor of a badly shattered house; then they retreated around the corner to where Dante’s jeep was hidden inside an archway of a courtyard.

“We can rush it.”

“No,” Sean whispered, “at least let him have the dignity of being caught with his pants on. I’ll stay here by his jeep. You watch the apartment and pick up the woman when she shows up later.”

One o’clock.

Sean sat in Dante’s jeep. Starving alley cats screamed in protest, for there was no garbage to scavenge. The rancid smell and the stillness of a death-haunted street enveloped him.

Two o’clock: Sean dozed for an instant and awoke, heart pounding with remembering where he was and what was happening. There might have been a tinge of envy, but it was drowned in anger and sorrow for Dante. What was it like to steal love in a slimy pit? ... burning with fear ... with guilt. What kind of love was it? Would not the urge to choke the German woman in her bed be too tempting?

Two-thirty: soft, quick footsteps. A shadow over the rubble. A trot. A long, deep and uneven sigh. Dante Arosa lit a cigar.

He felt someone alongside him. Bum joke in the darkness ... no ... he lit another match. Sean was there, beside him ... no dream! Dante gripped the steering wheel and emitted only a single pathetic groan of despair.

“Drive to my office,” Sean said coldly.

When they were there Sean slammed the door behind them. Dante began to cry and Sean slapped his face.

“You stupid son of a bitch!”

“Oh God! What will my mother and father say?”

“You stupid son of a bitch!”

“She loves me!” Dante cried in desperation.

“She loves her father! You’ve been had! You’re a stupid son of a bitch! “

“Oh God! I’ve brought shame to my family ... oh God ...”

“Thanks for remembering them.”

Dante began to shake and sweat at the same instant. “What are you going to do to me, Sean?”

Chapter Twenty-eight

COUNT LUDWIG VON ROMSTEIN could feel any shift in the wind. Already, he could detect a softening attitude on the part of the Americans. New American troops, who had not been in the battle for Germany, were coming in; they were not nearly so filled with righteous anger. Chinks were showing in the nonfraternization armor. It was a ridiculous rule, particularly for Americans. Americans wanted to be loved, even by their enemy. This was an exploitable weakness.

Weakness? The Americans were full of them. Another conqueror would have left the German people to shift for themselves in the ashes. They would have taken what they wanted as booty ... as the Russians were doing; but the noble American seemed inflamed by the desire to restore city, state, and country to its inhabitants and return the rule to them. The Americans showed little physical brutality ... they were childish in their de-Nazification procedures with their silly questionnaire.

There was one sure way to de-Nazify Rombaden that Ludwig knew of. That was, line them up against a wall and shoot them down. If, indeed, the first month had passed without an execution, the Nazis would worm their way back into power. To be sure they would keep in hiding until the climate was more receptive, but they would return, nonetheless. Germany boasted of sixteen million Nazis. Germany had no other trained people capable of running the country ... the Nazis would return.

“Good morning, my dear Major O’Sullivan,” Ludwig said with contempt when Blessing brought him in. I am informed by your police that I am to be arrested.”

Sean was haggard from the ordeal of the affair with Dante Arosa and grunted hoarsely at the German.

“And for what horrendous crime am I to be charged?”

“Don’t glorify yourself. You’re being locked up as a common thief.”

Ludwig Von Romstein smarted. “I beg your ...”

“Your passion for post-impressionist art ran away with you.”

“You refer of course to the Van Goghs, Gauguins, and so forth in my apartment in Castle Romstein.”

Sean nodded.

“Well, that can be easily explained. If I had any guilt, I would have hidden them. They were gifts.”

“The Glyptotek in Copenhagen begs to differ.”

Lout! Ludwig thought Had he again underestimated the American? How the devil did he find out so quickly? “I ... I am astonished to hear they belong to a museum.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

“On my word, they were presents to me from various high officials in occupied countries. You see, I had occasion to visit Denmark, the Low Countries, and France as a member of the armaments board ...”

“Stop the horse crap. I’m tired. We have located the entire cache in the basement of your hunting lodge and the caves near the Roman antiquities.”

Good Lord! The German cleared his throat and thought with great rapidity. “Those ... were ... sent to me by Goering from France for safekeeping.”

“Safekeeping from whom? The rightful owners?”

“I demand the right to prove my innocence. I should like to go before an American court immediately.”

“First things first. You’re going to be reinterrogated by the new CIC officer.”

These words crashed in on him; his immaculate composure became threadbare. Von Romstein looked away from Sean’s hard, disgust-filled eyes. Now he felt entirely boxed, trapped. He tried to ask about Marla ... he couldn’t.

“In case you are wondering, your daughter was put in prison this morning.”

Beads of sweat popped out on the German’s brow. They fell down his face, into his dueling scar. “If Marla committed any indiscretion, you certainly cannot blame me.”

“Sure. You’re just an innocent victim of a lot of uncouth people. Your brother the Nazi, Goering, and now your daughter. They were all out to get you, weren’t they?”

“My innocence will be proved in court.”

“You’re not going before an American court, Von Romstein. I make that my personal mission. When we find enough anti-Nazis in Rombaden, we are going to license a German court.”

“A German court!”

“Certainly you want justice from your own people.”

The implications were clear. The first German courts would be on a binge of vengeance to show the world they were going to purge the Nazi era without mercy. Ludwig Von Romstein became faint with fright at the idea. All the calculations, all the carefully built plans crumbled. Why the hell hadn’t he made the dash for Switzerland? Oh Lord, the German courts would be bloodthirsty for revenge. Twenty years ... thirty ... forty ... Oh Lord ... what has this mad fool Hitler brought me to?

“What are you going to do with Arosa,” Maurice Duquesne demanded of Sean.

“I know what I’d like to do.”

“You’ve got to protect that boy.”

“Like hell I do.”

“If he is court-martialed under this idiotic nonfraternization law ...”

“He happens to be a counter-intelligence officer in the United States Army!”

“You know what that means, Major. Dishonorable discharge. He will be disbarred as a lawyer. What was his crime? Being human? Taking a woman to bed?”

“He picked the wrong woman.”

“The army of saints!”

“Don’t be so goddamned sanctimonious, Duquesne. When we entered your precious France your proud, proud citizens shaved the hair from the heads of the women who slept with Germans and sent them packing down the road, naked.”

“And so? When the Americans leave and the German prisoners return, they will shave the heads of their women who slept with Americans. How fortunate! How utterly fortunate your lovely American womanhood is spared these indignities!”

“This mingling of sweat with the enemy is no justification.”

“Ah, my dear Sean O’Sullivan. You have such a conveniently short memory. Have you forgotten about yourself and the English woman?”

“That’s different.”

“Certainly it is different You got away with it.”

Dante Arosa was gaunt and distraught when Sean went to his room. He looked up at Sean, then lowered his head. The black curly hair was in disarray ... the swashbuckle, the vitality was flat, lifeless. Outside the long green lawn dipped into the Landau, muddy from a fresh rain.

“Say something,” Dante croaked at last, “tell me what a prick I am. Tell me what I’ve done to my family. Tell me ... how everyone on the team would like to spit in my face.”

Sean told him nothing.

“I can’t explain,” Dante whispered. “It was as though ... as though Marla was trying to kill both of us in that bed ... like she was a messenger of death and was luring me with something wonderful ... death and danger was in the room with us every time and it taunted me. And she pulled me closer and closer to it ... and I couldn’t break away.... It was hard to breathe ... to think ...”

Sean gripped him by the collar and jerked him to his feet. “A German woman! How could you do it with a German woman?”

And then, upset by his own violence, he opened his hands and let Dante free.

“We’re just men,” Sean said futilely, “just men. They made the rules too tough for some of us ... you are confined to quarters until a new CIC man is brought in. You will acquaint him with the operations here. After that, you will be transferred to a service unit. At the soonest possible moment you will tender your resignation from the Army. I’ve ... seen to it that you will receive a fully honorable discharge.”

Drained of the venom of fear, Dante began to sob. “You’re too decent. I don’t deserve that kind of a break, Sean. I don’t deserve it.”

“Maybe there’s some punishment in it for you, Dante. You have to go on living and knowing that if this ever leaks out, I’ll have to stand the court-martial in your place.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

DELIVER BY PERSONAL COURIER TO MAJOR SEAN O’SULLIVAN

Dear Sean,

I am using this unusual method of communicating with you for reasons you’ll quickly understand.

World opinion is creating a furor over the revelations of the extermination camps. The pressure on us for “action” is becoming unbearable.

Acting on instructions directly from Washington, Supreme Headquarters here will issue a proclamation within twenty-four hours: namely, PROCLAMATION #22. The proclamation will say, in effect, that a local military governor may request an extraordinary military tribunal for the trial of extraordinary cases. We refer, of course, to SS atrocities. The tribunal will be empowered to impose the death sentence.

Well, Sean, I’m handing the ball to you again. As my Pilot Team Commander we’ve tried quite a few new wrinkles out in your territory so I’m going with you again on PROCLAMATION #22. By happy coincidence you have the mother and daddy of them all in the persons of Klaus and Emma Stoll. We at Supreme Headquarters feel they’re perfect for the first trial under PROCLAMATION #22.

We’ve got to get moving on this to let a little steam out of the vent and to show both the world and the German people we’re going to be tough. We are particularly interested in banging Emma Stoll. The fact that she is a woman will make a heavy impact.

Have your legal officer draw up indictments (recommending death sentences) and a simple paper for your signature requesting an extraordinary tribunal under #22. We’ll have the court in session in Rombaden within seventy-two hours.

Destroy this document after you’ve studied it.

Kindest regards,

A. J. Hansen

Lieutenant Bolinski frowned and shook his head as he read Hansen’s secret letter. “Well, there is obviously a lot of pressure on Washington to put up a showcase trial.”

“What do you think about the legality of Proclamation 22?”

“Hell, Major, we won the war. We can do anything we want without splitting legal hairs. Now, Klaus Stoll could be hanged before any court in the world off the evidence.”

“Emma?”

Bolinski frowned again, picking those little legal threads upon which a lawyer can build a mountain. “I’d say that with the interrogations and evidence I could spring her from a death sentence in any fair court.”

“Go on.”

“She’s guilty of beating prisoners ... none of whom suffered either death or serious injury, and she’s guilty of sexual perversion. Her main crime is grand theft in the collection of Winter Relief Funds from the German people. That’s enough to stash her away for life. On the other hand, if the story of the silverware handles being carved from human skulls holds up in truth ...”

Sean opened a file, slid a report across the desk to Bolinski. He lit a cigarette and read the letterhead. It was from a Swedish silvermaker with an attachment from a laboratory. “This came in last night,” Sean said. “I sent samples of the handles to Stockholm, the States, and to Switzerland.”

Bolinski drew hard on his cigarette.

IN CONCLUSION, WE HAVE ANALYZED THESE SAMPLES BY EVERY KNOWN METHOD. IN OUR OPINION THEY ARE NOTHING MORE OR LESS THAN CARVINGS ON COMMON ELEPHANT TUSKS OF AN EAST AFRICAN VARIETY.

“Christ!”

“I phoned the Swiss firm in Zurich this morning. They haven’t written up their findings yet, but they told me essentially the same thing—elephant tusks.”

“Thank you, Cornelia Hollingshead.”

“The whole thing starts to take on the aspect of a legalized lynching.”

“But what the hell are you going to do about it, Major? You can’t stand up against this kind of brass.”

Sean put Hansen’s letter into the big crystal ashtray, lit a match to it, and watched it burst, flicker, and crumple into a hundred charred bits.

A few moments later he entered the prison cell of Emma Stoll and dismissed the guard. She knew nothing of the stories raging around the world that had made her symbolic of the evil of Nazism. He had met her before, many times. Emma, sloppy and dowdy, glowered at him with a return of some of her former arrogance.

The Americans had not killed her or Klaus and therefore they revealed their weakness. The SS had known how to rid itself of Germany’s enemies. The Americans were weak ... weak.

“You are about to be brought to trial, Emma. The only chance you have of living is by answering my questions.’’

“You are trying to trap me.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“You lie!”

“Emma, you’re not being logical. I said that you were as good as dead. What do you have to lose by telling the truth?”

It was a puzzling proposition, indeed, to the shopgirl. Lie or truth ... what difference did it make now? They’d get her if they wanted to ... but, “Why are you going out of your way to protect me? Why?”

“Not to protect you, Emma. To protect the name of my country.”

The slow-witted girl was baffled. This Major O’Sullivan was a baffling man. Was he really as soft as she suspected? What meanings were there that she could not comprehend? “What is it you want to know?” she asked cautiously.

“I have only a few questions. None of them are tricks. Just give me straight answers. First, did you know what was going on inside Schwabenwald?”

Emma was about to make an automatic plea of innocence. She stopped herself short. She had planned to scream out her ignorance of Schwabenwald to the end ... but ... now ... he did say she was good as dead. She sulked, and slumped to her cot. All the jacked-up, painted-on, manufactured attempts to be sexy had split apart in the dank cell. Her hands held a head of uncombed dirty hair. “I lived outside the actual camp,” she said slowly. “You must remember that I am a German woman, a German wife. In Germany, the men run things. My husband never spoke to me about business inside the camp and I never asked him. I am a German wife.”

“Did you suspect?”

“Suspect what?”

“The exterminations.”

She looked up at him pitifully, wrung her hands, dropped her head again. “We all suspected.”

Sean was excited by the knowledge that he had either baffled her or gained her immediate confidence or ... that she was playing a wild gamble to hang onto life. “How much did you see of the camp?”

“Only ... only the outer camp. My husband’s office, the area around the SS barracks ...”

“How about the medical experiment center?”

Emma sealed her lips.

“The center was in that immediate area, Emma. Did you ever go inside the experimentation center?”

“Yes,” she said almost inaudibly.

“And the Gestapo Interrogation Headquarters?”

“I answered these questions a hundred times for Lieutenant Arosa.”

“The Gestapo Interrogation Headquarters?”

“I don’t want to speak any more! Get out!”

“Last time, Emma. It’s the end of the line for you. Were you ever in Gestapo Interrogation Headquarters!”

“Get out!”

“Okay, Emma. No more questions.” Sean walked toward the solid iron door to thump for the jailer.

“I was in Gestapo,” she said.

Sean turned back to her. “How many times?”

“I don’t know.”

“Forty?”

“Maybe.”

“Fifty?”

“Yes ... fifty ...”

“And you beat prisoners and forced them to perform sex acts.”

“Only Jews and Slavs!”

“And you went to the inner camp and you watched the exterminations!”

“No! No! Never! I swear! Never! I was never in there! I swear I was never in there!”

Sean knelt quickly alongside the cot, where she was weeping, mumbling prayers to God, proclaiming her innocence.

“I have one last question, Emma. Answer it carefully. Your life depends on it. Where did you get your silverware set?”

The sudden shift in questioning threw her. “My ... my ... what?”

“Your silverware set?”

“But I have two sets of silver.”

No actress could fake it. Emma Stoll was innocent of the charge. Sean knew that now beyond question. “Well, where did you get them?”

“The good silver, I purchased in Switzerland.”

“With funds stolen from German Winter Relief?”

She buried her face in her hands and wept again, sobbing now. The world would look upon her as a thief. This was more than she could bear. Sean waited until her crying spell ebbed. “And the other set. The one with the fancy carvings?”

“The old silver with the ivory handles was given to me by my father from his father. My grandfather was a soldier in German East Africa before the first war. He brought it back with him. It has become a family heirloom. It was ugly, but a German wife is taught to treasure family heirlooms ... so I kept it.”

Sean sighed deeply. His rugged, black Irish face was as perplexed as Emma Stoll’s. “For reasons best known to the Lord above alone ... I am going to try to save your life.”

The next morning there was a press conference called at Supreme Headquarters in Frankfurt Proclamation #22 was announced. The press officer intimated that a speedy trial would follow.

Those journalists who had become authorities in the American Zone quickly pieced two and two together. Within minutes of the announcement, as it was flashed around the world, there was open speculation that Klaus and Emma Stoll would be the first tried under the proclamation.

DELIVER BY PERSONAL COURIER TO BRIGADIER GENERAL A. J. HANSEN, G-5, SUPREME HEADQUARTERS: I. G. FARBEN BUILDING: FRANKFURT

Dear General Hansen,

I am not certain whether your communication constituted an order or a request. At any rate, I am hereby notifying you that I reject it in either event.

In the opinion of my legal officer and in my own lay opinion, Klaus Stoll is guilty and deserving of the death penalty. However, it will take weeks to prepare proper legal documents and conclude a case ... tried in American tradition.

Emma Stoll has done nothing to deserve a death sentence.

PROCLAMATION #22 is against my conscience, my morality, and, in my opinion, contrary to the best interests of my country.

Sincerely,

Sean O’Sullivan

Chapter Thirty

ANDREW JACKSON HANSEN’S STAFF car and motorcycle escort wiped everything out of its path like a hurricane blowing down from Frankfurt.

Eric the Red bounced out of his car before it was brought to a full halt at the Rombaden City Hall, churned up the marble steps, down the statue-lined corridor, and burst into Sean’s office, slamming the door behind him.

Sean arose. “Good afternoon, General. I was expecting you’d be down here.”

“You snot-nose bastard! Are you trying to make us look like idiots!”

“No, sir. I’m trying to save you from looking like idiots.”

“What the hell are you protecting that goddamned ghoul Emma Stoll for!”

“I am attempting,” Sean said slowly, “to protect the good name of my country. She happens to come with the bargain. You’ve read the report, sir. Those bone handles are not human skulls.”

Hansen leaned on his knuckles, bent forward over the desk, and aped Sean’s soft, smooth speech. “But the world doesn’t know. And, Major, that story will never be set straight. Corney has done her job well. And if by some miracle the story is corrected the world isn’t going to give a good rat’s ass. The world wants Emma Stoll’s neck.”

“I won’t sign my name to a lynch order.”

Hansen’s fist crashed two, three, four times atop the desk, making it bounce under his fury. “Now you hear this, boy. Emma Stoll is going to die! The Germans will laugh in our faces if we spring her and the whole goddamned world is going to scream that we’re coddling Nazis!”

“And I don’t give a big rat’s ass what the world screams!” Sean bellowed right back in Hansen’s face. “And furthermore, I refuse to talk to the General while he is in such a rage that he has no control of his senses.”

Hansen stood upright with the astonishment of a child in the middle of a tantrum who has been doused in the face with a glass of water. Sean’s voice quivered for control. “What are we proving by Proclamation 22? Why bother with a sham of a kangaroo court? Let’s just take them out and shoot them. Adolf Hitler proclaimed the same kind of courts to get rid of undesirable elements. They were called People’s Courts. We call them Proclamation 22. Don’t you think I know the German people want Emma Stoll dead even more than we do. Sure, let her die for their crimes. Let Emma Stoll die for every one of them who screamed sieg heil. I’m sorry I lost my temper, sir. I have strong feelings on the matter.”

“Sometimes, Sean,” the general said quietly, “we see our country make an obvious mistake. We go along with it without protest because we believe in the ultimate right of what we are doing. Those times are the most difficult when a man is asked to believe so deeply that he will follow blindly and without question. What we have asked you to do is not your decision ... or mine. It is the decision of our superiors. Nor will the ultimate responsibility rest upon you. What can I say, Sean? This creature is not worth saving. And the world will never condemn you. Allow us this human mistake and go on believing.”

The pressure was intensifying now. Yes, Sean thought, it would be so damned easy to just sign the request for the tribunal. To resist was stupid and ridiculous. And when Emma Stoll was hanged there would be much cheering around the world and no one to grieve except a pet dog and a grandmother. In a decade or two some obscure professor of law might point out that Emma Stoll was denied a due process of law. But even America could make a mistake in the backwash and confusion of the war’s ending. And who would remember the name of the major who signed the order for the tribunal?

But to refuse was to invite calamity ... no one would understand or want to understand his position. He could never set the truth straight in people’s minds about the ivory handles. Why in God’s name stand up in the face of world wrath to defend a slut who hardly deserved to live.

“General Hansen, I have sat here, day in, day out, week after week listening to one German after another repeat the same story like broken records. They say, ‘We were only following orders.’ You see ...that is their justification for murder, castration, barbarism, degradation. They were just following orders. And I go to my billet and I get a little bit crocked every night and I think ...what if a few million Germans, or a few hundred thousand, had had the guts to stand up and refuse to commit crimes in the name of their country. I’m sorry, General Hansen. America doesn’t stand for Proclamation 22. I’m not going to commit murder in the name of my country for you or anyone else just because orders are orders.”

Hansen knew now what he had to do. “This is all beyond our hands and our scope, Sean. That is reality. You will report to Frankfurt in seventy-two hours with a request either for the tribunal or your resignation from the Army. I regret a willful and stubborn decision that will bring you much unhappiness.”

“I’ll take full responsibility for my decision, General.”

Hansen put on his cap and walked toward the door. “I’m sorry you came here, General. I’m sorry because I believed in you ... I believed in you when you told me ‘We are not Nazis....’”

It rained and the Landau became muddy again and the cobblestones of the great square were slick. It rained into the leaking hovels of the bomb ruins, and the wet misery added to the gloom inside City Hall.

No one spoke of it openly but General Hansen’s visit was a well-known secret. Sean gathered his people in one at a time to bring them up to date, for the obvious purpose of smoothly turning Pilot Team G-5 over to a new commander.

Pilot Team G-5 had been a grand experiment. All of them wondered if, with Sean gone, its conscience would not also leave. Maurice Duquesne would, most likely, be made commander if he would sign a request for the tribunal under Proclamation 22. The new beginning would be based upon a lie.

Maurice was perplexed by the predicament Sean had put him in. He did not wish to be confronted with such a decision. Duquesne knew that in the beginning all men are pure and driven by pure motivations. The men they believe in are also pure, in the beginning. But somewhere early in the journey all men come to that first moment of compromise. Maurice Duquesne compromised when he ran for his first office two decades before; he had gone on, hardly looking back for a moment’s remorse.

He had been a good servant of his people within a framework established before him. He knew that to compromise, to overlook truth at times, to be expedient at other times, to back down instead of making a fatal stand ... all these were practical tools of his profession. He loathed the incorruptibility in Sean that would force him into a corrupt decision; Sean’s idealism was stubborn and had little to do with reality. And, in the end, he was reluctantly filled with admiration for the man he wished he might have been.

For Sean O’Sullivan the moment of sadness came with the betrayal of Andrew Jackson Hansen. At one time Sean believed that Hansen would strike back at the stars and the moon. But now he was merely a weak man bowing quietly to an unjust decision.

Could Sean believe in Hansen’s reason, that ultimate American goals justified and knowingly permitted mistakes like this?

Now the doors of doubt were thrown wide open. Perhaps Hansen was merely a clever politician. Did Hansen in reality make all of his famous fights knowing and calculating in advance just how much the traffic would bear? How many other times in his career had he knuckled under like this? Had he carefully and deliberately built himself into a “colorful character,” merely paying lip service to his imagined strength?

In the end Sean would be completely alone with Frau Stoll’s dog and grandmother. He would be thrown into a pit of journalistic wolves to be devoured live. No, not even Emma would understand why Sean felt her life was worth fighting for. Perhaps Big Nellie would try to defend Sean or at least try to give his reasons. But to do that might mean Big Nellie would go down with him, by a world calling for blood.

In the end, there would be but a single friend, his father. Sean longed desperately to see him and he prayed that when the news reached his father, from strangers, it would not harm his heart. But no matter what ... his father would go on believing in him ... in the face of it all ... his father would be there ...and understand.

Chapter Thirty-one

ELEVEN O’CLOCK. IT WAS time for the daily meeting with Ulrich Falkenstein and the German Council. The big conference room resembled the dining room of a medieval castle; a long wooden table; high, straight-back, rough-hewn chairs partly covered with polished, worn leather; an enormous tapestry depicting a battle of the Legend of Rombaden. Those councilmen who owned pinstripes dressed in them. There were twenty Germans, with Ulrich Falkenstein at one end of the table.

As the Marienkirche bell bonged the hour, Sean entered the room and the Germans arose crisply, bowed slightly. Today Sean was without his usual contingent of American officers. “Be seated,” he said. “I have excused the other officers from today’s session for other business. You will examine your files and agenda to see if there is any business that cannot be held over for two or three days. I wish to consider only matters needing an immediate answer.”

It was a chilling pronouncement to them. The Germans began to fish through their files nervously. They all knew what it was about, they had spoken of it in whispers. Things had gone well with O’Sullivan in Rombaden. He gave his commands with sureness and took responsibility for every decision; he was stern, but fair. They knew that other cities in the Schwaben and Württemberg and Bavaria were in chaos. With him gone ... God knows. What if they had to deal with the Frenchman?

One by one each uttered that he had nothing urgent.

“There is one matter,” Ulrich Falkenstein said. “The day after tomorrow is the twenty-second of June. For a century and a half it has traditionally been Hinterseer Day, in honor of the Rombaden poet. In the old days there was much ado and pageantry ... in lean years the people have merely gathered in the square to hear the reading of his most famous work, the Legend of Rombaden. Although it must be necessarily austere this year I have been asked by all facets of the citizenry to petition you to allow the reading to take place. It would be a matter of a half dozen or so actors, a platform behind Hinterseer’s statue, and some loudspeaking equipment.”

On the surface of it, Sean saw no harm. So far he had forbidden large gatherings, but it could easily be controlled by the forces he had at hand. Blessing’s authority was respected by them all. A reunion with traditional life would be good for morale ... but ... one thing annoyed Sean. The Legend of Rombaden was read and the pageantry had continued during the Nazi era.

“I’ll read the poem tonight and give you an answer tomorrow,” he said.

That was what the German Council liked—a quick final answer. “There being no further business ...” he said, standing. They came to their feet and waited until he left the room.

Sean left his office assured that everything was as ready as possible for the new commander. A quick briefing could be made and that would be that. The command could be turned over even quicker if Duquesne were selected.

He ordered a light dinner to be brought to his study and asked that no one disturb him. He opened the book of poetry by Hinterseer and began to read with great care the German text of some forty pages. Of course, Sean knew something of the Legend of Rombaden. He had studied it as a segment of German mythology in college and in summations in military government texts.

To Sean, German poetry was truly one of the most magnificent forms of man’s self-expression. Furthermore, he had flirted with German literature and poked about for the answers to the German riddle since he left high school.

The Legend of Rombaden was from the mythology of the Black Forest Trilogy. Sean was soon drawn in by verse of Goethe-like perfection.

Wolfram, King of the Gods, reigned over a mythical kingdom deep within the Black Forest. Although Wolfram had a powerful human body, most of his other attributes were those of animals: the rage of a boar; the speed and beauty of the buck; the strength of the bear; the whiteness of the swan; the instincts and cunning of the fox. He was all that was great and beautiful of each animal in the body of a man.

His only son, Berwin, was a warrior of incredible bravery, as befitted the Son of the King of the Gods. Wolfram ordered his son to find the purest people upon earth, with which he would populate his kingdom. Berwin wandered from land to land until he came upon the Aryans of Rombaden; and they became the chosen ones.

In Rombaden dwelled Helga, Goddess of Fertility, with whom Berwin fell in love. Before Berwin and Helga could consummate their love, the God of Snow and Mountains, Ernald, swept down from his mythical kingdom in the Alps and kidnaped Helga.

Berwin realized that the pure race would be contaminated if Helga was violated by Ernald. He gathered about him the warriors of Rombaden. In a fiery speech he exhorted them to die in battle, for only by giving their lives in the fray would they know a moment of ecstasy beyond earthly dimensions. Those who die in battle, promised Berwin, would go to Wolfram’s Kingdom in the Black Forest, and live as the purest of all people.

In the final battle, Wolfram transmits to his son all of his own animal strength and cunning to help him destroy his adversary. But, in the victory, Berwin is slain.

He and all the fallen warriors of Rombaden are placed aboard flaming rafts to be drifted upstream on the Landau and into the Black Forest and the promised kingdom.

Helga, watching them float away from the shore, plunges Berwin’s dagger into her breast and is then carried to Berwin’s raft by a great bridge of lightning. She lies beside her dead hero on the flaming pyre and as the fire and wound end her life she extols this moment of exaltation that only death can bring. She cries out that she is being transformed into a superior form of being through death. And, in death, she consummates the relationship with Berwin, denied them in life.

And so, the daughters and sons of Rombaden who came from that union of Berwin and Helga became the purest on earth.

Sean O’Sullivan closed the book. For so many years he had probed and prodded for answers ...and now ...strangely ... on the eve of his departure from Germany some of these answers were coming to him.

Was not the Legend of Rombaden in fact the story of the German people?

He began to thumb through the thin book for clues, passages to clarify a hundred hazy thoughts. And then, nagging unanswered questions began to be answered with a strange clarity.

When he had been in college and was chosen for military government, there had been endless arguments and discussions about the German mind. Scholars and practical men argued logic and theory, and then, at a certain point in every discussion, all logic about the German people dissipated into confusion. The German always ended in a cloud of mystery ...the eternal enigma.

But here, in Hinterseer’s pages, the German showed himself. Here was Siegfried! Here in the Legend of Rombaden was that longing to be the super race! Here was that strange elation at the moment of death so prevalent in the German culture! Here was the hero’s reward for death in battle!

In the legend they looked upon themselves as the “chosen” people of God. But, what kind of a god? This was not the God of Jesus Christ! The god that they longed to identify themselves with was a pagan god! Wolfram was a god who lived in the forest and was more animal than human!

Did not the Germans, indeed, identify themselves more with the pagan than with monotheism, the Western concept of one God? Sean pondered. Once he had written what was termed a brilliant paper, on the “Origins of Anti-Semitism in the German Mind.” By chance, General Hansen, in his search to find German experts, read the paper. It was this paper by an obscure political-science instructor at the University of California which brought Sean O’Sullivan into military government before the age of thirty.

Sean now tried to link his paper to the Legend of Rombaden. He had written:

No people in all of the Western world live closer to their mythology than the German people. Siegfried and other legendary figures, particularly warriors, are deep within the soul of the German people.

The German people have identified themselves indelibly with the forest, with nature, and with animals. This powerful lure of the forest has given vent to the mysticism that always follows “forest people” and a relationship to animals peculiar to them.

Take, for example, the German hunting rituals. After an animal has been slain, the German hunter cuts the throat with a special knife. The “Forest Master” dips a stick into the animal’s blood and anoints the hunter’s forehead. The stick is a pure phallic symbol and the purpose of the ceremony is to endow the hunter with the potency and power of the animal he has just slain ...just as Siegfried bathed in the blood of the dragon he had killed.

The Jews gave to the Western world a formal conception of one God. The Jews handed down from Sinai the basic “laws” or rules of Western morality, the Ten Commandments.

The German hates both the one-God concept and the stringency of the “laws” in his subconscious mind. On the surface and to the world at large he is both a Christian and a product of Western culture.

However, he is a split personality. Another part of him, a vital part of his soul, remains in the forest. The German is, therefore, civilized in much the same way as a domesticated animal, for part of the German is always animal.

Despite his trappings, part of the German is pure pagan. In order for the German to become the pagan his unconscious desires he must throw off the formal concept of one God, and God’s laws. Therefore, the German must destroy the Jew, who stands between him and his pagan desires.

Sean always felt that Germans hated Jews because they wanted to return to the forest. He felt the Germans loved their warrior gods; the Berwins and the Siegfrieds and identified with them more than they loved Christ and more than they identified themselves as Christians. Sean knew the old thesis that to be truly anti-Jewish, one must be anti-Christ. When you destroy the Jew, you also must destroy Christ. Therefore, the German protests Christianity by destroying the Jew.

A doctor of the mind would call the German a schizophrenic. He is, in truth, two distinct people.

One part of this two people gave man its highest and most enriching contributions to civilization through the Beethovens and Bachs and Kants and Schillers and Freuds and Mozarts and Goethes.

But the other! The hate-filled and muddled ramblings of Nietzsche and of Schopenhauer and of Hegel, of Treitschke and Fichte. And the staggering genius of Richard Wagner whose magnificent sounds extolled the glory of death, the fatherland, the chosen people ... chosen of pagan gods. And who is to say that Wagner is not part and parcel of the soul of the German people?

Adolf Hitler understood this desire for paganism in the German people and exploited it. The uniforms, the blood ceremonies, the rallies were nothing more or less than pagan rituals. Hitler deliberately played to the German people’s desire to identify themselves with paganism by the destruction of the Jews.

Hitler was indeed another pagan god, calling for the German people to destroy themselves in a death orgy and they answered with “sieg heil.”

Sean began to recall the ramblings of the sick philosophers. Schopenhauer ... the only honest wish man could have was that of total annihilation. Hegel, a personal beloved idol of Adolf Hitler who wrote ... the spirit dies in order to live and that he who yields himself in death is merely yielding one’s self to his other self for life is death; and Hegel wrote further that ... every state must accept the divine right of oppression that belongs to it as a necessary state in the evolution of government; Nietzsche ... I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud; Fichte, who named the Latins and French and Jews as subhumans, and Treitschke, who put the final amen on the German character ... it does not matter what you think as long as you obey.

So, it all fit together, Sean thought. The Legend of Rombaden had produced a magic key he had sought for years that explained the anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Jewish perversion as a drive to return to paganism.

This, then, was the answer to Count Ludwig Von Romstein and the others who argued that the Nazi era was a unique phenomenon that resulted from the First World War and a set of following crises. This was a lie, for the roots of Nazism were deep within the hearts and minds of the German people, and all of it, Aryanism, paganism, love of death, the forest, superhumanism, had been part of them for centuries and centuries!

The Nazi era then was a combined will of most of the German people over hundreds of years of cultivation and growth. The drive toward self-destruction was inevitable!

To Sean, Hinterseer and the Legend of Rombaden even spelled out more. The startling discovery that the Germans worshiped death! The German approached death in a different manner than any other Western people, who either feared it or looked upon it as an end of mortal suffering. To the German, death alone was a state of existence more wonderful than life, and the moment of death was to be worshiped as the moment of supreme exaltation!

Did this not begin to give answers, that such a people were capable of running death factories in Dachau and Schwabenwald? If death is a desirable superstate in their mystic and pagan subconscious, then it is not a mortal “Christian” sin to commit murder.

Assembly-line death could only be accomplished by an astute Western mind. It could be “justified” when the pagan overwhelms the Christian morality. The split personality in the German character made it possible.

Hinterseer and Richard Wagner told a puzzled world about the perplexing contradictions in the German. And what is more, no one is more perplexed, searches more for his own identity, is more of an enigma than the German is to himself.

Chapter Thirty-two

ELEVEN O’CLOCK. THE GERMAN Council assembled. Sloe-eyed Ulrich Falkenstein appeared deceptively serene as he sat at the opposite end of the long table from the commander.

The council sat on both sides of the table, a half dozen of them former inmates of Schwabenwald whose years in the concentration camp had earned them a badge of respectability. The others had somehow kept themselves clear of all Nazi entanglements, remnants of the old Social Democratic Party for the most part. Almost all of them were without previous government experience; five of the council were women, something new in German politics.

“I would like to poll you,” Sean said, “to see if any of you have objection to the reading of the Legend of Rombaden.”

They looked at one another a bit puzzled, each shrugged in turn, then shook his head. No, there were no objections. Ulrich Falkenstein was not taken in; he studied Sean closely knowing the major was up to something. Sean’s eyes were sharper this morning, the brow furrowed more deeply as he scanned their faces. Falkenstein knew how to read this expression.

“Frau Meissner,” Sean said, “you are a native of Rombaden. Just how significant is this event to you?”

“Ach, what a question, Major. Hinterseer Day is our most important holiday. And the Legend of Rombaden is very close to all of us.”

“You grew up with it?”

“You don’t know. Among the actors at the Rombaden Theater the competition for roles in the reading was very great. It was discussed in every home, in the Ratskeller ...even in Princess Allee. For the children, the legend was performed in the puppet theater. As a schoolgirl, the mark of my accomplishments was the memorizing of new passages.”

And then, one by one, they attested to the integral part of their lives that the legend played and they praised the stature of Hinterseer and their pride in him.

Professor Hans Moltke was the intellectual of the council. He had been a teacher of German Literature until the Nazis drove him from the schools. Moltke kept himself and his family alive by losing his former identity and becoming a bank clerk during the Nazi era. “The poem,” he said, “certainly must be considered among a few dozen of the world’s masterpieces from the standpoint of pure literature, pure verse. Secondarily, it has attained extraordinary meaning to the people of this district. Hinterseer is Rombaden’s greatest son ... the link with immortality ... this means provincial pride. Moreover, the reading of the legend signifies the coming of summer. The people know they will again take trips to the forest and commune with nature. The legend brings them close to nature. As you know, Major O’Sullivan, we Germans have an uncommon love of the forest.”

“I am aware of that,” Sean said. Then he turned to Hoffman, the deputy with the broken back who now arranged the rendezvous with the informers. “Herr Hoffman. You are not from Rombaden. What does the legend mean to you?”

“Why,” he wheezed with enthusiasm at being singled out for a testimony, “every German schoolboy knows the legend. It stands with the masterpieces of Schiller, Goethe, and ...Heine.” Although a concentration-camp inmate, Hoffman stumbled on the last name ... a Jew.

“And you, Herr Maas. Why do you suppose the Nazis allowed the legend to be read?”

“Why not, Major? It is not a political poem and it is highly Germanic in nature.”

Ulrich Falkenstein listened with utter fascination as one by one they committed themselves without the slightest idea of what O’Sullivan was driving at. Sean opened his marked copy of the Legend of Rombaden.

“Frau Meissner. Would you care to venture what Hinterseer had in mind with the following passage ... ‘citizens of Rombaden, Aryans, shall we allow the sperm of Ernald to mongrelize our race?’”

Frau Meissner was puzzled.

“Well, Frau Meissner ... do you in Rombaden feel yourself Aryans?”

“I ... don’t ... understand ...”

Sean thumbed through a few more pages. “Would any of you ladies or gentlemen care to make an interpretation of the following passage ... ‘You of Rombaden are the chosen children of Wolfram, King of the Gods.’”

Herr Maas began to understand. He dismissed Sean’s question with a wave of his hand. “It is merely a way of saying that Rombaden is a fine city. All cities think of themselves as the best. Even in the United States there is that competition between cities.”

“Fine, Herr Maas ... then, how about this. ‘I promise you a death, a moment of divine exaltation ... this is the warrior’s death ... this is the moment of fulfillment ... the instant your life passes from his body for the fatherland he will know ecstasy beyond ecstasy.’”

Brows wrinkled.

Sean read on. “Or this one, Herr Maas ... ‘I bathe myself in the blood of a wild pig, I castrate him, I become a superman among the peoples of the world with his strength and his virility ... forgive me wild pig for I have a mission to rule the sub-humans which infest us.’”

Sean closed the book. He flipped it contemptuously on the table. Everyone had been frightened into silence except for Professor Moltke. He picked up their flagging banner. “But, Major, you find the same type of writing in Greek mythology ... in Norse mythology.”

“I challenge you. The Greek Gods were subtle and had delightful senses of humor and mocked their mortal failings.”

“And the Norwegians and Danes. We base the Ring on their mythology.”

“Yes, but neither the Norwegians nor the Danes take their gods seriously ... you Germans do. In fact, you live out your mythology.”

“I do not bend to your point, Major O’Sullivan. You can write in any meaning you wish to write in ... any meaning you seek.”

“And that is my point, Professor Moltke. The Nazis gave meaning to these legends. This poem was Nazi in conception. Adolf Hitler found it and others like it and said ... this is what we are and the German people believed it.”

“But ...” Hoffman protested weakly. “Hinterseer has been dead for nearly two centuries.”

“However, Hoffman, Nazi ideas have been alive in the German people for twenty centuries.”

It was as though they had all been doused with cold water. For many moments a stunned silence prevailed until Herr Bach, the most innocuous member of the council, spoke up mousily. “I always thought there was something wrong with that poem,” he said.

“Then why in the hell didn’t you speak up?” Sean demanded.

“But, Major, one does not speak up against tradition.”

“That is precisely the point. Your tradition demands blind obedience. So long as you are willing to be led like sheep your minds will be captured by another madman. Perhaps in a year or five or twenty some priest will deliver a sermon from the pulpit denouncing the legend or some teacher lead a group of students to protest it ... only then will it be safe to read Hinterseer.”

Falkenstein, who had remained completely out of it now spoke. “You do have tradition in America, do you not, Major?”

“If the President of the United States were to read the Declaration of Independence before the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July there would be someone in America to protest and to question.”

Falkenstein nodded his head, as if to say “touché.” A slight smile crossed his lips as he saw the utter confusion among the council. Here they had believed themselves to be the “good” Germans. The failing then was partly theirs too; there was an iota of Nazi in them all.

“There being no further business before this council I am advising you that I will be at Supreme Headquarters in Frankfurt for the next several days. Captain Duquesne will be in command during my absence. You are dismissed,” he said, eyeing Falkenstein to remain.

Sean stuffed his notes and papers into his briefcase. The two men were alone in the great hall. The legend blared down at them from the faded tapestry. Sean snapped his case shut. The coldness between him and Falkenstein was like that of the stone fireplace. “They hate me, don’t they, Falkenstein?” Sean found himself saying.

“On the contrary, Major O’Sullivan. You have earned the position as their father and their leader. Those are two things a German understands. You see for yourself how well they obey you. Once the German is defeated he is quite manageable.”

“But they don’t even know what the hell I was talking about.”

“I think you are far too impatient, Major. We may be ancient in our traditions but we are infants in the democratic experience. Our first venture with a republic, the Weimar, ended in disaster. The subtleties of democratic process are beyond their comprehension.”

“But they do understand father and obedience. So we’re in for another cycle of it when another father leads them to destruction.”

Falkenstein straightened up a bit. “You conveniently forget the great things the German people have given the world. These are the Germans I love and believe in. This is the Germany I fight for.”

Sean was tempted to argue the point. Yes, there were great contributions in literature and music and science. However, there had never been a lasting German ideal of freedom and damned few of the dignity of man. Even their greatest reformer, Martin Luther, was a dogmatic tyrant. And here, Ulrich Falkenstein, who had suffered untold brutality at the hands of this society, stubbornly refused to give up his identity or his faith. It was admirable nonsense to Sean. To believe so strongly was good; but it was beyond any man’s vision to feel the German people would change. They both sensed the conversation had hit an impasse.

“We all fear,” Falkenstein broke the ice, “that you have committed your last official act in Rombaden?”

“That may be so,” Sean said.

“That would be a shame. You have been hard but you have never been unfair. You see, Major O’Sullivan, there are subtleties of democracy that even I cannot comprehend. For example, why does a man of your stature throw away a brilliant career in the protection of an Emma Stoll?”

“It seems to me, Heir Falkenstein, that is a strangely put question from one who was convicted by a Hitler court.”

“Surely you do not intend to compare me to Emma Stoll.”

“Of course not. But I do challenge a Hitler court to exist in the name of my country.”

“It is a pity you won’t be going to Berlin with me when I am able to. Frankly, we both have a lot to learn. On the other hand, I have a feeling that you don’t really want to know that there are good Germans.”

Sean shot him an angry glance, then stifled his anger. “You said yourself, I have been fair.”

“Fair, yes. Like a dog trainer. But even an animal can smell when he is hated.”

“Herr Falkenstein,” he said, “I have written a full report for the incoming commander in case someone other than Captain Duquesne is selected. I have strongly recommended that he place full trust in you in all matters.”

They shook hands with great reservation and completely without affection. Yet, an undeniable mutual admiration existed between the two men.

“Good luck, Major,” Falkenstein said, and left the great hall.

And then, Sean was alone.

Sean found himself wandering through a maze of narrow streets. He had arranged that there would be no farewells, no sentimentality. In the morning he would leave, supposedly on a routine trip to Supreme Headquarters ... no more, no less.

A battalion of laborers, prisoners of war, with Polish guards hacked into the endless rubble piles at one of the intersections. As they saw the commander the Germans stopped their work for an instant, stared, doffed their caps, and bowed as he passed. The Poles greeted him with formal salutes and smiles, but Sean was oblivious to them.

Now was the time to make one’s balance sheet. There could be a balance sheet for Liam and Timothy O’Sullivan. There was one for Nan Milford ... losses, gains, happiness, sadness. But there would be no balance for either Rombaden or Sean O’Sullivan.

A few dim, hopeful signs rose curiously in the sunlight in the sea of ruin. The people of Rombaden were working with amazing energy. They had used great ingenuity in the creation of jobs and in using rubble for raw material for a dozen enterprises.

But the digging out would continue for months, perhaps years. A single classroom had been opened without Nazi teachers or Nazi textbooks. A single four-page newspaper and a twenty-five-watt hand-generated radio station represented the press. Half the population had filled out the dreaded Fragebogen. Many of the Nazis were reduced to common labor. Now there was an application to form several trade unions and even a request to begin a political party ... these were signs, however small.

On the other side, the scales weighed heavily. Sean knew now that de-Nazification, in reality, would never work. One does not kill two hundred thousand forming the heart of the Nazi cancer and punish sixteen million others without oneself becoming a Nazi. In the British Zone it was becoming apparent that only the top Nazis would be tried, these trials for showcasing. The French, who realistically had to continue to live next to the Germans, could only pay later for vengeance now.

Nonfraternization was starting to break down. The new troops who had not seen combat were not so hostile toward the Germans, and the good old generous Yankee hearts began to show. American soldiers could not resist giving chocolate to children. And why not, Sean wondered? Were we ever taught to let children starve? Is it our way?

Also, soldiers are men and men needed women—and they would find them, nonfraternization notwithstanding. Certainly, as commander, Sean could make it dangerous, but never dangerous enough to stop it.

Only yesterday he saw something at his own residence that set him thinking. Two of his guards were helping his old servants, Alfred and Heidi Oberdorfer, repair their shattered cottage.

“Goddamn,” Sean whispered aloud, “we are lousy conquerors.”

The scales had dropped even lower—another cut in food ration had been ordered. How long would the energy of the people last? And when winter comes their bodies will demand hundreds more calories for heat. Sean had a foreboding that God would make this winter a severe one.

The food crisis was hastening the black market and bringing on massive prostitution. Crime and venereal disease would follow in natural course.

Sean turned into Princess Allee. Behind the half-smashed facades there were sounds of laughing men and women. It was a strange sound in Rombaden—at least the Poles and the whores had full bellies and bootleg rotgut. The competition to become an “official” Princess Allee whore was intense.

As they saw Sean O’Sullivan walking down the middle of their street they ducked into doorways. The incongruous sound of a woman singing reached his ears; it came from a makeshift cabaret in a cellar. Sean leaned against the doorframe, looked down into the rancid-smelling den. Her husky voice sang:

Du, Du liegst mir im Herzen,

Du, Du liegst mir im Sinn;

Du, Du machst mir viel Schmerzen,

Weisst nicht, wie gut ich dir bin.

A bit of sentimental tripe from another age:

You, you live in my heart,

You, you live in my soul,

You, you cause me great sorrow,

You don’t know how good I am for you.

A resounding chorus of men and women’s voices picked up the song and they thumped mugs on the heavy oaken tables and sang Ja! Ja! Ja! Ja! Everything came to a terrified halt as they saw Sean. He shook his head and walked out quickly.

Sean stood musing in the great square ... from the Romans to the jackboots. He glanced up to his office and to the statue of Berwin and Helga, and across the square to the cathedral. The statue of Mary had been repaired. Tomorrow the cathedral would be returned to the people as a place of worship as the last of the Schwabenwald inmates had been moved to the field hospital in Castle Romstein.

The bell tolled the hour. Berwin and Helga ... Christ and Mary. Would Christ, the Son of God, ever emerge over Berwin, Son of the King of the Gods, in the souls of the people?

Chapter Thirty-three

ANDREW JACKSON HANSEN TOSSED and turned. Sean’s words pounded through his drowsy brain. He snapped the night lamp on. “Goddamned stubborn Irish son of a bitch!”

He fished for his specs, focused on the clock. Three in the morning. Sean’s time was up. He would be reporting in by noon. No sir, that hardheaded Irish son of a bitch wouldn’t change his mind. He’d march in, walk the thirteen steps, lay his neck on the chopping block, and wham!

Hansen turned off the lamp and tried to settle down, grumbling at the overheated discomfort caused by the heavy German down comforter. He made a mental note to get a couple of army blankets issued.

“General Hansen. I have sat here, day in, day out, week after week listening to one German after another repeat the same story like broken records. They say ... we were only following orders ...just following orders ... just following orders. I’m not going to commit murder in the name of my country for you or anyone else just because orders are orders ... I’ll take full responsibility for my decision ...I’m sorry, I believed in you ...”

The light went on again. Hansen kicked off the comforter and stared sullenly at his knobby big toes. In a moment a chaw of tobacco was tucked deeply into his jaw and he sighted in on the spittoon at bedside.

Sean was a rare officer. He had emerged from personal tragedy, assumed a vital command, performed with near brilliance. In this Army ... no, in this whole goddam world ...there are so few men who have the courage of their convictions ...it’s so easy to pass the buck, as he, Hansen, knew he was trying to do. That one rare man in ten thousand who says with quiet simplicity, I’ll take the responsibility ... that’s it! Smack on the button. No buck passing, no wishy-washy whining.

What had happened when Sean fired Dante Arosa? General Hansen never knew. Sean merely said, once again ... I’ll take the responsibility. Those two were close friends. What made Arosa resign from the Army? It takes guts to punish a friend ... and even more guts to defend an enemy.

What the hell ... didn’t Sean know there are times when every man must bend a little?

And what the hell was the use of trying to rationalize? Hansen knew, in his heart, that Sean O’Sullivan had made a great decision. It was that type of decision a man makes alone when all well-meaning advice is to the contrary. It is a decision in which the maker leaves himself knowingly open to scorn and danger. There were so precious few men capable of making a great decision that it was an awesome thing to know such a man.

“Okay, you son of a bitch,” he grumbled, “we go down together.” Hansen snatched the phone. A half-dozing operator answered. “Find Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury and have him report to my quarters immediately.”

With that he dressed, went to his writing desk, and began the first of many drafts of Proclamation 26.

It was two full hours before Big Nellie could be located in Wiesbaden at the tail end of a serious drinking bout with the Air Corps. He had to be pried loose and sobered enough to comply with the unusual summons. When he arrived he was in a suspended state of silliness.

“Got here as soon’s I could, General. What’s up?”

“This,” Hansen snapped, handing him a paper.

Nellie’s great paws lined the paper up for reading.

PROCLAMATION #26 MILITARY GOVERNMENT HEADQUARTERS, FRANKFURT A/M

Upon complete re-examination and reconsideration it is deemed that PROCLAMATION #22 (calling for special tribunals) is inconsistent with democratic ideals, the vision of our founding fathers, and the meaning of the American Republic. Even suspected Nazi war criminals are entitled to due process of law as we understand it. Therefore, PROCLAMATION #22 is hereby null, void, and rescinded.

A. J. Hansen, Major Gen. United States Army

“Jesus H. Christ! When did you people decide all this?”

“We people didn’t decide nothing. I decided. Frankly, I don’t even know if I have the authority. However, lad, you are going to see to it that this is on the front page of every AP newspaper in America by their morning editions simultaneous with its being sent through channels here. So, if it isn’t official, you make it official.”

Big Nellie knew what he had to do. There was not much time. He folded the proclamation and put it into his breast pocket. “You’re an ace, General Hansen,” he said, and left.

It was about noontime of the following day, two hours after Proclamation 22 was nailed dead, that Sean maneuvered his jeep through the streets of another German rubble pile. This one was called Frankfurt. Supreme Headquarters for Germany had been established in the I. G. Farben building, formerly the heart of the world chemical cartel. The fact that the building stood intact while nearly everything around it had been leveled was an irony of war. The building was a gargantuan affair comparable in miles of halls and millions of square feet and numbers of elevators to the Pentagon and the Chicago Merchandise Mart

Sean O’Sullivan, a mere major, was lost in the flood of silver oak leaves, eagles, and stars. Everyone here walked with a chipper air. None of that tired drag of the combat man. Each man felt that he carried in his briefcase the most important problem in Germany ... if not the world.

After much ado, Sean was able to ascertain where General Hansen’s office was located.

He stepped into one of those odd, open-faced, one-man elevators that move continually on a vertical conveyor belt so that stepping in and out through the open shafts on each floor called for correct timing, particularly when one was juggling one’s briefcase.

“Major O’Sullivan is here, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Sean stepped before his desk, and accepted the extended hand. “I heard the news sir. I heard about it when I was driving through Mainz an hour ago. What will they do to you, sir?”

“What the hell do you think? They’ll pin a goddam medal on me!” Hansen waved Sean into a chair. “Well, so far my ass has been chewed out by Ike and four of his deputies and three people from the State Department. At the present moment, my future is being discussed by the Pentagon and the White House. We might as well have a game of checkers while we’re waiting ... you do play checkers?”

“How about blackjack?”

Sean lost forty-two consecutive games of checkers while they waited. It was evening when the statement was released from the White House. A single sentence summed up the entire affair: THE RESCINDING OF PROCLAMATION #22 WAS CORRECT.

“You know,” Hansen said, “we Americans have the damnedest luck. The Lord has granted us a rare thing ... that chance to take a second look at things. And on that second time around, we usually come out all right.”

Hansen looked at his watch. “Well, now that we know we are in the Army for a while longer, I’d like you to stay over. There is something very, very important I was saving to discuss with you.”

From the tone of Hansen’s voice, Sean knew that another fateful decision was looming up ahead of him.

Chapter Thirty-four

DURING AND AFTER DINNER the two men spoke of the matters of the day. General Hansen had completed a tour of the British, French, and American zones. The statistics on Germany’s demise, now pouring into Frankfurt, staggered the imagination. Frankfurt itself had 150,000 dwellings before the war; 40,000 of these now stood. Never in the history of modern civilization had a country been so thoroughly demolished.

To add to the misery, tens of millions of displaced persons swelled the roads of Europe, and Germany was being forced to take in millions of her ethnics from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary; expelled from these lands for betrayal to Hitler.

All of those things which make man civilized did not function within Germany. Now came revelations from Poland about places named Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno that made the death factories of Dachau and Schwabenwald mild by comparison.

Hansen saw the problem in three phases: short range, intermediate, and final. The short-range problem revolved around a single word, food.

“We can get by on all our other problems. If the Germans get cold enough this winter they can cut down their precious forests ... but food ...”

In the transition period the rebuilding would begin. The Ruhr coal mines had to work again; people had to be put on jobs; and the economy had to switch from things of war to things of peace. Parts of Europe ruined by German arms deserved the first help, and to further complicate German recovery Russia had put in a multibillion-dollar-reparations claim in the form of taking out any workable machinery.

The culmination, to allow Germany to govern itself again, seemed so far away as to be impossible. “We haven’t got enough trustworthy or trained Germans to run a good garbage dump.”

Slowly General Hansen worked up a direct comment to his young officer. “We have a fourth problem, Sean. That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Yes, sir?”

The general hedged. “How do you figure things stand in Rombaden?”

“It’s going to be painful and slow just like the rest of Germany. My outlook is parallel to yours. Of course, I do have Ulrich Falkenstein. He’s invaluable.”

“And Falkenstein has O’Sullivan. Don’t be modest. What about you, yourself?”

Hansen had been working a long way around to the question; Sean countered with a question. “What about me, sir?”

The general’s poker face was gone. “Well ... what is your own estimation of how long you figure on staying in the

Army.”

“I realized when I joined military government that I would be expected to stay on for some time after the end of the war. I haven’t refined those thoughts down in terms of weeks or months.”

“What’s your personal attitude about it?”

“Shall I level?”

“Shoot.”

“I’m sick of Germans. I’m sick of Germany. I promised you I’d remain fair. I’ve tried like hell to keep that promise.”

“Emma Stoll would testify to your fairness. How badly is it getting you down, Sean?”

“It’s bad at night. At least during the day I’m busy. I’m learning that the lonesomeness of being commander is quite a penalty. Sure, I could impose my comradery on my officers, but there always has to be an aloofness ... what the hell am I telling you about it for ... like it’s something you don’t know. So, I button up in my study and around midnight I get to thinking about my brothers and I have to get a little smashed to drown my hatred ...”

“What are you going to do when all this is over?”

“Hell, that’s easy. If you were a genii and could grant me three wishes I’ll tell you what they would be.”

“Wish number one?”

“I want to be near my mother and father for the rest of their lives. They deserve that much. Wish number two ... I need a woman, General ... I want a wife. I’m not a kid any more and I’m tired as hell. I’ll probably marry the first woman who treats me with tenderness. Maybe wish number one is all mixed up with wish number two. I want my mother and father to live and see their grandchildren. I want them to know that another generation of O’Sullivans will follow.” And then Sean became silent.

“You still have another wish coming.”

There was an expression of nostalgia in Sean’s eyes. He dared allow himself to remember now that which he had shoved into a dark corner of his mind, and he said, “A campus. A green, green campus. Big lawns, old buildings like castles, and trees. Watching the campus from my class, and those cute little things walking by swishing their cute little asses. I want that beautiful quiet before the carillons play in the tower. I want to look into the faces of students filled with hope and energy and inquisitiveness.”

“And how will you get wish number three?”

“Well, I was a political science instructor, you know. I continued my own studies at night I’ve got a semester for my masters and in two or three years I think I’ll be ready for a doctorate.”

“And in between classes you’ll fight four-round preliminaries again?”

“No ... not this time. My brothers have paid me back with their lives. Two lives ... ten thousand dollars a life. Ironic, isn’t it? Anyhow, the GI insurance will keep my parents comfortable until I finish. And then, with this new GI Bill ...”

“Well, when you are ready for your doctorate you should be able to do a hell of a paper on military government.”

Sean laughed. “Probably not enough theory ... scholars are practical only when it doesn’t disturb theory.”

“Your three wishes are very simple. Have you ever thought about staying on in the Army? You’ve got a big rank for a young man.”

“I’ll stay on long enough to get my job done.”

“Done? But that may take twenty years.”

“I mean ...”

“You mean, complete the first phase in Rombaden.”

“Yes, sir, that’s what I mean.”

Hansen went through the business of finding and lighting a pipe. He longed for a chaw, but never chawed in the presence of a second party ... except his wife. “General,” Sean said, “you’re a lousy poker player. What is it that you really want to ask me?”

He put out a fourth match, waved away the billow of smoke. “I’m going to Berlin. I want you to come with me.”

“Berlin?”

“That’s right, Berlin.”

Sean collected his wits and asked shakily, “Is the General implying he wishes me to remain in the Army?”

“I am implying that his country needs him more than his mother and father or his own personal desires to find peace of mind.”

The blood drained from Sean’s lips. He tried to envision it. Berlin! A monstrous prison. The piles of rubble and the pall of gray devoured his beautiful green campus and the haunting lonely eyes of his father.

Sean shook his head slowly. “No, sir. I don’t want to go to Berlin.”

“Neither do I, Sean,” Hansen said with deliberate slowness. “I’ve been looking for peace of mind for thirty years. I don’t want to go to Berlin, either.”

“But my father!”

“Ask your father!” The general got to his feet and began to pace. “Oh Christ, yes. The campus is cozy and warm. A handsome Irish buck like you will go right to the top. Pat the ass of the president’s wife and smile with those big brown eyes and the world is yours by the nuts on a downhill pull. And think of the nice young stuff you can sort, stud, and train to your exact liking. Hell yes, Sean, anybody give up that green campus for a friggin’ rock pile like Berlin would have to be nuts. None of the ugly things like Schwabenwald and sick Germans and rubble to contend with. Just discuss them in a scholarly manner. No decisions to make there, lad.”

“Lay off, General. I don’t know why the hell I’ve suddenly become the indispensable man in the Army.”

“I’ll tell you why! America is committed to the world, only America doesn’t know it or believe it yet. We would all like to make a retreat to the campus, but the comforts of home and hearth are henceforth to be denied unborn generations if our country is to survive.”

“You are obviously speaking about the Russians.”

“You’re reading me loud and clear.”

“I’m not one of these automatic liberals who takes a fixed position, but let’s lay it on the line, General. You’re a Red baiter from the year one.”

“Hear me out and see if I’m a Red baiter.”

Sean had stepped into Hansen’s trap! What if Hansen proved his case? The general knew all along there were senses of duty and points of logic that Sean would respond to.

“I don’t want to hear it, General.”

“They have men of fanatical devotion beyond our comprehension of dedication. They have them by the hundreds of thousands who perform like robots. I lay awake nights in fear of a mortal weakness in us. I fear our sons are too fat, too lazy, too complacent to sacrifice and to serve in silence. It takes no genius to figure out what is going to happen in Berlin and there are too damned few of us willing to believe it or face up to the facts. Our country is asleep. Until it wakes up I need every Sean O’Sullivan I can get in Berlin if we are to survive.”

Sean was dumbstruck by the urgency of the outburst. Could he walk from this room now without even listening to the man’s case?

He nodded slowly for General Hansen to begin....

Chapter Thirty-five

GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON HANSEN first came into contact with the Russians at the close of the First World War in the year 1920. After the Russian Revolution and counterrevolution there was an acute famine condition. As a young officer, he became part of the Hoover Commission, which fed ten million Russians a day.

Hansen contended that the Russian Revolution was not much of a revolution. The Czar’s house was rotten from within from centuries of feudalism, corruption, class rule, church abuse, failure to industrialize, failure to humanize. The rotten house needed but a hearty shove to collapse. History has been conveniently rewritten by the Communists for the world to believe that the revolution was a Communist-led people’s uprising. That is not true.

The Russian people, Hansen said, both by nature and by historical precedent, have proven that they are neither politically inquisitive nor revolutionary in spirit. They have tolerated a police state in one form or another from the origins of their history, for some twelve solid centuries. They have lived out their entire history in complete adjustment to police-state terror with little or no protest.

Hansen liked to point to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. The great Russian scientist experimented to show how completely an animal could be conditioned. Such an animal could be trained to perform certain feats to ward off hunger, cold, and privation. Hansen believed that in a sense, Pavlov was experimenting with the Russian people themselves. Human history has given few examples of a people who can be so thoroughly conditioned as the Russians. When the pressures reach a critical stage, another bone is thrown them and they will remain quiet. Indeed, with pitifully few exceptions the Russians are magnificently trained animals who will not permit an alien, creative, free, or contradictory idea to function within their minds. They adjust within that framework of what they are allowed to think by their peers.

In recalling the history of the ending of the first war, Russia was weary, bloody, beaten, and hungry. The moment was ripe for a gathering of divergent political parties to unite and push in the Czar’s rotten house. This was the so-called revolution.

Among those divergent groups was the Communist Party. When the new government was formed the Communists were not a majority. However, they were the most tightly knit, the most ruthlessly led, the most dynamic, and the most deliberate in their ultimate goals.

In the confusion that followed the flight of the Czar, the Communists made a naked seizure of power. This was not a popular movement of the people, which they later claimed, nor was it particularly understood in most reaches of that vast land.

After a time, scattered remnants of the Czarist regime got their second wind, and along with Ukrainian and White Russian Nationalists, who hated “Mother Russia,” staged the counterrevolution against the Communists.

These were the “Whites.” The White Counter-Revolution was doomed from its inception. As the Whites reconquered parts of Russia, they reinstated the nobility and the corrupt system that had led to the collapse of the Czar in the first place. They tried to beat a dead horse to life.

The Reds, therefore, fell heir to the people by the default of the Whites. It was the lesser of the evils at the time. The Communists, moreover, did not sell the war-weary people on any lofty idealisms of Marx. The Red slogan was simple and understandable ... Bread! ... Peace! ... Land!

The Communists made a separate peace with Germany, withdrawing Russia from the war, and deserting their former allies. France, Britain, and the United States had both troops and equipment on Russian soil, including an Allied-trained Czechoslovakian division. Angered at Russia’s separate peace and committed to guard their hordes of supplies, the Allies loosely supported the ill-fated White

Counter-Revolution. For this alleged Allied treachery, the Western world earned the everlasting hatred of the Russians.

Poland, which had been partitioned into oblivion before the First World War re-emerged once more as a nation. Poland made an ill-advised move, leaping on the back of the shaky Russians in 1920, the latest in a series of wars between old enemies. However, the Red Army had gained the people’s support and defeated the Poles. Poland fell into the same circle of hatred, being lumped with the West.

One of the first things Hansen learned when he came to starving Russia in 1920 was that the Russians were Asians. Western culture had been imported into only a few of the larger cities. Most of Russia and the other captive states that comprised the Soviet Union simply did not think or act like the West.

From the beginning of the Communist regime the Russians made it clear that they would take Western food, Western long-term loans, Western credits, Western trade, Western recognition. There was never so much as a small thank-you for any of it. For, the Communists made it clear from the first that they intended to remake the world in their own image.

Hansen felt that this, in essence, was more dangerous than the Nazis, who wanted to conquer only in the name of Germany. The Russian aim was more awesome. The Communist believes he has an answer for the entire world. The German arises violently and is beaten down the same way. But the Russians have oriental patience. They waited a decade for political recognition and they will wait a century to achieve the ultimate aim. A stalemate for a decade does not matter, for the machinery is always at work, always plodding on. They are convinced that their final victory is inevitable.

The Russian people knew that all invasions from Napoleon to Hitler had come from the West. Any pact they made for a temporary convenience was for their own benefit. Being allies with the West against the Nazis in no way impeded their other goals against the rest of mankind.

Narrowing the immediate Russian objectives was simple. The first goal was the German working class, the true birthplace of Marxism. Control of the German working class was tantamount to control of Europe ... an old and true axiom. Hansen felt that Russia intended to capture and communize Germany as their first step against all of Europe.

But ... in order to capture Germany ... first, Poland, which sits between them, must go. It was in the maneuverings about Poland during the war that led Hansen to his fears.

Austria, Spain, and Czechoslovakia had been sold out to Hitler by Western ineptness. When Hitler applied the pressure to Poland, Stalin was convinced that the West would also sell out the Poles. To complicate matters, Poland refused Russian help.

So, assured of Western timidity again, knowing Polish hatred of Russia, Stalin thought it foolish to gamble further with the West.

Instead, he made a pact with Hitler. Hitler wanted the pact because Poland was next on his timetable. In the event France and Britain should honor their commitment to defend Poland Hitler did not want to risk the possibility of a two-front war. So, he set out to “neutralize” Russia. Stalin, with a clear understanding, made himself a shrewd bargain. He got half of Poland, the Baltic States, and a clear field to clean up some defensive positions in Finland, and what is more, purchased precious time to build for the attack he knew would come, sooner or later, from Germany.

In 1939 Poland was attacked. By agreement, Russia knifed Poland in the back and took the eastern half of the country. Many Poles escaped. Some got to England, where they formed the Polish Government-in-Exile. This was the universally recognized body speaking for a sovereign Poland.

A year and a half after Poland’s demise, Russia was attacked by Germany and thereby became the “official” ally of England. From the outset it was a strange alliance. An alliance by default ... a shotgun wedding ... and a temporary arrangement of mutual convenience.

From the very start the Russians showed the coldness and aloofness they held for their allies. There was never a thank-you for the convoys of Allied material which poured into Russia through the suicide Murmansk run. The death of ships and men in the icy waters of the Barents Sea became a legend of horror. Those who survived and landed in Murmansk and Archangel were greeted by a further coldness to match the waters.

But, the Allies kept their silence, for Russia was drawing hundreds of thousands of casualties which might have been their own.

As part of the inside diplomatic maneuverings, Russia recognized the Polish Government-in-Exile in London known as the London Poles. This took place in 1941. Russia made this recognition in order to begin pressure on the West for promises of postwar border changes in Poland.

For the sake of window dressing, the Russians went so far as to “officially” dissolve the Comintern, the instrument of international Communism. This was done to pacify the Allies. Hansen was certain, from intelligence reports, that the Comintern in reality never ceased to exist for a moment. He was positive that an intense training of foreign agents to seize a number of countries was always active and now ready to move, particularly in Germany, Poland, and the Slavic countries.

Roosevelt and Churchill retained a certain timidity about shoving Stalin because of the fact that Russia bore the brunt of the war. Stalin, however, had no such inhibitions. He continued unceasing pressure for the West to agree to postwar settlements. These he could now get “legally.” The other type “settlements” would be obtained later.

The London Poles protested Stalin’s proposed postwar border changes. In one of the great paradoxes of the war, the British and Americans kept the London Poles from becoming too boisterous out of fear of offending Stalin.

This “bothersome” Polish question exploded in 1943.

When Poland was attacked by Germany in 1939 many Polish officers and men chose to flee to Russia as the lesser of evils and throw themselves on the tender mercy of the Soviet Union. Many thousands of Polish officers were interned with the hopes of fighting another day.

Fifteen thousand of these Polish officers were put into camps in a place called the Katyn Forest. From the moment the Russians interned them, they were never heard from again. Hansen, who worked very closely with the British, knew the London Poles had made innumerable demands to know what became of these officers. The Russians never gave them an answer.

In 1943 the German armies advanced into Russia and came upon the Katyn Forest. They claimed to have found the bones of these 15,000 “missing” Polish officers in common graves, the victims of a massacre. The Germans invited the International Red Cross to investigate and the London Poles joined that demand for an investigation.

The Russians became indignant and broke off recognition of the London Poles. Again, Britain and America tried to calm the pesky Poles and the charge was never allowed to be investigated.

Hansen reckoned that 15,000 human pawns were slaughtered because these Polish officers stood as a potential force against Russian aspirations in postwar Poland.

Later, when the Russians recaptured Katyn, they conducted their own closed investigation and said it was really the Germans who had murdered the Polish officers.

There were, of course, two sides and two stories in the Katyn massacres, but Hansen believed that history had proved the Russians capable of just such a slaughter. They had already made it clear they were going to have a Poland they could dominate on their border as a buffer against future invasion from the West.

There were precedents to show they would murder for political gain. Hansen reckoned the Russians had killed in excess of ten million of their own citizens in twenty-five years under Communism. Despite the frostings of peace and brotherhood coming from joint conferences he felt them neither peace-loving, kind, gentle, nor caring much for the brotherhood of man.

After the Russian Revolution the Communists first liquidated the upper class, from the Czar on down, and the nationalists of Ukrainia and White Russia, with the dispatch of the guillotine days after the French Revolution. Hansen knew of this from firsthand observation.

At the end of the 1920s Stalin initiated his collectivization of the farmlands. There were millions of prosperous or semiprosperous peasants in a class known as the Kulaks. Terror squads from Moscow swooped into the farmlands with orders to “liquidate the Kulaks as a class.” History will never record the true number of Kulak families murdered on the spot or shipped to Siberia as slaves. Certainly it was no less than five million men, women, and children. Losses in crops ran in millions of bushels, millions of acres. Losses of cattle, goats, sheep, pigs ran into tens of millions. The animal losses seemed to annoy Stalin and his planners far more than the human losses.

Hansen estimated from all his sources of information that some thirteen million Russian or Soviet citizens had been forced into slave labor during the two and a half decades of Communism.

The most notable slaughter, however, was to come later during the purge trials between 1936 and 1939. A reign of terror paralleled only by the Spanish Inquisition, by the Nazis, or by the Mongol hordes was clamped on the Soviet Union. One half to three quarters of the teachers, lawyers, doctors, writers, scientists, military men, intellectuals were hauled before “People’s Courts” after confessions for alleged crimes had been brutally beaten from them. They were then taken out and shot or hanged. No one was safe from the mania of Stalin. Crimes had such alluring names as “deviationism,” “cosmopolitanism,” “Trotskyism,” “adventurism,” “speculationism.”

In the beginning of the war many Ukrainians, White Russians, and even Russians themselves had looked upon the German as a liberator. When the Russians reconquered these lands the carnage of vengeance was epic. Hansen believed Stalin to be the supreme monster of all ages.

The final chapter of the Polish tragedy was played out in 1944, just before the Allied landing in Normandy. Russia rolled back the German lines, moved into the Balkans, and in the north came to the Vistula River directly across from Warsaw.

As the Russians advanced on Warsaw they urged the Polish Underground Home Army to stage a rebellion. The Home Army was the official military arm of the London Poles ... fairly large in numbers and fairly well armed with light weapons. In Warsaw, some 40,000 of the Home Army seized the strong points and controlled the city as the Russian “liberators” approached.

Then followed the epitome of treachery. The Russians halted their offensive on the Vistula, opposite Warsaw, and did nothing to help the Home Army, which they had urged to rebel. The Germans returned to Warsaw with a pair of SS Panzer Divisions and commenced to butcher the city, the Home Army, and the citizenry as the Russians watched.

London and Washington demanded that Moscow help the Poles. At first Stalin stalled by claiming the Poles had exaggerated their strength and doubted if they controlled Warsaw.

The next stall was to claim the Russian armies were exhausted from their offense and needed to regroup and resupply.

Churchill continued to press the issue. Stalin at last showed his bloody hand. In the end Stalin let it be known he had no intention of helping the embattled Poles on the grounds that the Home Army were “military adventurers.” Stalin obviously wanted the Home Army destroyed because it was attached to the London Poles and might stand in the way of his postwar plans for Poland.

In final desperation Churchill asked for permission to airdrop supplies into Warsaw. Because the distances were great it would necessitate Allied planes landing on Russian airfields after they made their drops.

The Russians refused to allow either American or British aircraft to land on their soil.

And so, Warsaw was destroyed and nearly 200,000 of her people killed.

Hansen had continually sided with the British in their demands to be tough with Stalin and to plan Allied campaigns with a political objective also in mind. At the time of the finale in Warsaw, Roosevelt was a very sick man and the State Department, held in low esteem by Hansen, floundered aimlessly.

Earlier, the British wanted the Southern France landing canceled and instead have a landing made in the Balkans. Hansen backed this idea. It took no fool to realize that France, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, and Luxembourg were going to remain in the West. However, the entire Balkans were in doubt.

Hansen contended that if the Allies had landed in the Balkans and placed an army between Russia and Germany we would be in a position to stop future seizures like Poland. As it stood, the West might default Roumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and perhaps even Czechoslovakia. Moreover, eastern Germany and Austria were in danger.

Russian agents had stirred up revolutions in Greece and Italy, but fortunately, Hansen thought, the British commanded that area of the war and weren’t going to let them get by with it.

The final card of Poland was played. After full refusal to even deal with the London Poles, the Russians installed their own “Liberation Committee” out of Moscow to rule the country.

Having thrown Sean into a quandary with stories he had never known before, Hansen pressed his case home recalling an experience with which Sean was intimate.

When the Allies landed in France, in many towns the French Underground staged an uprising to coincide with the Allied attack. As soon as the town was liberated the Frenchmen were too busy celebrating in accepted French fashions and too relieved with the war ending for them to keep a Gallic eye on their city hall.

In fact, some French troops advanced into towns with women in their tanks and fought the last battle with one hand around a bottle or a woman. And while the Allies and the Underground were getting buried in wine and flowers and bosoms the Communists inside the French Underground quietly seized the mayoralities and police machinery of dozens of French cities. It was Hansen who issued the order to disarm the Communists, however French they claimed to be, and eject them from office.

Hansen poo-pooed the asinine “brotherhood” proclamations that followed the “big three” conferences, particularly from Yalta. The Russians subscribed to glowing statements about democracy which they did not understand and free elections which they had never held. At the same moment they paid this lip service to freedom, their hand-picked henchmen closed the book on Poland as a clear and bright signal of things to come.

Hansen decried the fact that the American General Staff had little mentality for the political situation. While the Russians and British knew enough to plan their battles in line with political advantages, the Americans walked a path of purity and innocence. This stemmed from the fact that America never was threatened by strong neighbors on her borders or even needed to keep a balance of power in her hemisphere.

Consistent with American shortsightedness, the British had to plead for permission to move across northern Germany to block it off and keep the Russians from “liberating” Denmark.

In the end American forces concentrated on an envelopment of the German Army in the Ruhr instead of choosing a rapid advance to Berlin, and Patton was called back out of Czechoslovakia. When Churchill made the last desperate plea for the Americans to dash for Berlin he was answered that Berlin had ceased to have strategic value!

When American forces pulled in back of the Elbe River, their Russian allies of the day before had begun the erection of barbed-wire barriers.

Both Russia and America had been isolationist by nature but the war changed that. Russia had become powerful. The long-smoldering giant began his move to the West. America alone could block him now.

In order to gain a right to be in Berlin, America surrendered two German provinces in another of Stalin’s typical, shrewd moves.

Hansen felt that it took no genius to figure out what would happen in Berlin when the giants met head-on. Yet, an America tired of war, unready to believe their ally of yesterday was the enemy of today, unready to accept their new status of world power would call Hansen an alarmist, a man who cried “wolf.”

And until their countrymen understood what was happening a few Hansens and a few O’Sullivans would have to step into the breach ... and halt a tide in an arena named Berlin.

Chapter Thirty-six

THE MOMENT OF DECISION is the loneliest in human life. It must be come upon in stillness and darkness and brooding thoughts and doubts torn out from the deep reaches of the soul.

Sean O’Sullivan was a political scientist. He knew that if Hansen had spoken the truth on the Polish affair then his fears about Berlin were not only reasonable but valid. Now he labored over stacks of supporting documents, weeding truth from fiction.

We have ordered that Berlin’s main radio transmitter, namely the Funkturm, be spared from bombing. Allied liaison with the Russians is so poor that we often times have to find out where the front lines are in the East from the transmission of German newscasts.

Legendary Russian secrecy and suspicion.... Only Churchill seemed to understand it all. In the very beginning he understood Hitler, but his warnings fell on the ears of the appeasers. And, in the end, he understood Stalin. America was suddenly without leadership. Churchill wanted us to make a physical presence in the Balkans and he wanted us to hold fast in Czechoslovakia. Churchill understood the meaning of having our forces reach Berlin first. We, in a sense, had committed the same blunder Hitler committed when he failed to recognize the importance of Moscow in the beginning of the war and turned his armies on the oil fields in southern Russia. One could now speculate seriously if Russia could have recovered from the capture of Moscow.

In our case we turned to the southern German provinces and to hacking up an already beaten German Army in the Ruhr with the fateful pronouncement that “Berlin ceases to have strategic value.”

Yes, human beings make human errors. However, other human sweat and human blood must pay for those errors. As yet, no one would admit an error had been committed; and few, unlike Hansen, understood the dimensions of the error or the gravity of the situation.

In the classroom Sean would have argued that the Russian is a decent human being, peaceful by nature, gifted with scientific genius, driven by normal desires. Sean, in a classroom, might have questioned the Purge Trial statistics or whether the Kulaks were truly liquidated or deserved to be broken up. Such things as Katyn massacres, the deliberate butchery of Warsaw simply did not exist in a civilized world. Yes, a teacher would question and he would theorize.

But Sean’s ability to theorize had been impaired by the months of study in Queen Mother’s Gate. He learned not to hold CIC reports as fantasy. For the most part they were cold-blooded, nonpolitical in viewpoint, nontheoretical, and filled with facts which had to be accurate by the very nature and function of CIC.

Any former ideas or ideals of humanism among peoples had been destroyed the moment Sean O’Sullivan walked through the gates of the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp.

The death of Poland and the fears about Russia were truth:

Warsaw is eighty-five per cent destroyed. A quarter of a million people, mostly civilians were killed. It is positive beyond doubt that a Russian crossing of the Vistula River could have been made and prevented the entire carnage. The destruction of Warsaw and particularly the Home Army was a deliberate, calculated political move on the part of the Russians.

Was General Andrew Jackson Hansen a ranting Red baiter? For ten solid years Hansen had pleaded with the Army to form a large and effective Russian study section. He wanted to train men to speak Russian, to understand the people and the motives and the methods of dealing with them. But, like so many of Hansen’s ideas, this one also hit a brass wall. The time was not fashionable. An American Army with such a department in the days before World War II would have brought the instant wrath of the liberals on their heads. Well, A. J. Hansen would have his Russian study section now, in the flesh, in Berlin.

Sean found himself hypnotized by the summations on Russian characteristics and behavior during the war.

“In the beginning,” Sean read, “the Red Army had been demoralized by the loss of more than half of their entire officer corps by the Purge Trials of 1936–38. A staggering total of 90 per cent of the colonels and generals had been liquidated by Stalin.

“In 1940, the Russian expedition against Finland bared the state of disaster facing the Red Army. The Russians fought in Finland with little heart or stamina. They were mauled and outfought by the Finns. This shocking revelation and the sudden realization by the Russian people that their “Red Army” was far from invincible brought about a frantic reorganization.

“Soviet Political Commissars are attached to each unit of size. In addition, any officer and soldier who is also a member of the Communist Party oftentimes holds the power over the actual military commander. In essence, the Red Army has a dual command; the officers on one side and the commissars and members of the party on the other. The commissars, whose existence depends upon ultimate performance, used every known fear tactic to whip the Army into a fighting mood.

“The Red Army is essentially a peasant army. The soldiers of the Red Army understand one basic plea ... save the soil ... and save the motherland. When Germany attacked and the Red Army reeled back the commissars were clever enough not to appeal to save Communism or the Soviet ‘way of life.’ As in the old days of Bread, Land, Peace ... the commissars cried, ‘Save the motherland!’ Commissars, officers, and party members within the Army literally stood behind their troops with machine guns pointed at their backs to keep them from further retreat.

“The soldier from the West is fairly predictable. One can surmise what a German or a French or Italian group of men will do under certain circumstances. However, the Russian soldier is an Asian, an oriental of sorts and he is completely unpredictable by Western standards. He will fight like a wild man on a given day. On another day, under the same circumstances, he will break and run.

“In the beginning of the war, victory was within German grasp. Hitler, however, balked at ordering a frontal assault and street fight to take Leningrad, setting siege instead. The second great error was the decision not to press for the capture of Moscow but instead to drive for the oil fields in the south. Capture of Leningrad and Moscow, it is believed, would have collapsed Russian morale beyond redemption.

“Furthermore, the Ukrainians, White Russians, Georgians, and other captive states within the Soviet Union have always breathed a fire of nationalism and desire for independence of Moscow and Russia. At first, these, along with thousands of Russian intellectuals, embraced the Germans as liberators. Free from the mental prison of Communism the reception toward the Germans was a startling revelation.

“However, the honeymoon was short. The basic Nazi stock in trade was to consider the Russians and other Slavs as “subhumans.” This Nazi (and German) behavior played right into the desperate Russian propaganda mills. Now, for the first time, the Russian understood fully that the Germans meant to liquidate them as a people or reduce them to serfdom. Out of sheer fear for survival the Russians rallied.

“The third German blunder therefore was the playing out of their Aryan/superman myth. A partly sympathetic White Russian, Ukrainian, and Russian public awaited them. The Germans drove them back into Stalin’s arms.

“The Russian soldier may be the best in the entire world. This is because he is the most expendable. The famous steamroller tactic of World War I was renewed in World War II. This system, basically, uses humans in hordes. Chop down one line and another comes at you. Chop down a third line and face a fourth. Chop down the thirtieth and you face the thirty-first.

“Russians are like a pack of animals on the attack and otherwise. The pack strikes best in numbers. And ... like the animal ... he is most vicious when he is cornered.

“Like the animal, the Russian blends into the natural backgrounds of the landscape and he knows how to use terrain for protection. Like the animal, the Russian is able to endure cold and hunger ... better than any soldier in the world. No Russian soldier would think of surrendering to the enemy merely because he is starving. He can disappear into the land like a fawn. He can survive from roots and herbs. For a Russian soldier to get frostbite is considered a crime by his superiors. And ... like the animal ... his instincts are sharper and his courage greater under the cover of night. He is a superb night fighter.

“Although this Russian soldier is a resourceful animal he does not exist as an individual for he is a conditioned and controlled animal. All the thinking is done for him from above. He is never asked or expected to make a decision on his own.

“The top commanders of the Red Army are excellent soldiers of sound military judgment.

“However, the captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and those in the middle ‘field rank’ can think only as far as the staff over them orders. These ‘field’ rank commanders carry out their orders to the fraction of a letter. They carry them out on fear of liquidation from their own superiors or the political commissars. There have been thousands of individual instances where a field commander has failed to exploit a sudden breakthrough because he simply will not assume personal responsibility.

“Most Russian tactics are based on using masses of men to overwhelm the enemy. They have good armor, equal for the most part to the German armor, but their tank tactics are crude. If the Germans knock out a dozen Russian tanks, they face another dozen.

“Their legendary artillery is also based on using mammoth numbers to saturate the target.

“In bedrock, the formula is waves and waves of men in a frontal assault. This is the bread and butter power play of the Red Army. Many a time the German would stack up Russian attackers like cord wood but they came on endlessly. The Russian Staff thinks little of expending regiments or entire divisions to spearhead a drive or clear a field of land mines. Human fodder, the disregard of the individual, makes the Red Army go.

“Interviews with German prisoners state how demoralizing a Russian assault can be. Even if the attack is beaten back, the memory of it becomes unforgettable.

“This ruthless use of the human as soldier is paralleled by the ruthless use of the Russian civilian population. The Soviet commanders will never hesitate to use a village, a town, or a city as a defensive position. As they retreat they will destroy the crops, machinery, homes in order to deny these to the Germans, but at the same time deny their own citizens the means to exist. Many’s the time the Red Army has pulled back leaving such deliberate destruction that the civilian population has no alternative but to starve to death. Thousands of towns were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and millions more were moved to the interior of Russia as slave labor for suspicion of collaboration with the Germans.

“Russian defensive stubbornness is legend. The Russian will not be moved from a fixed position unless overwhelmed by the enemy. However, once a position is overrun, the Russian does not retreat in an orderly manner, he plunges back. The Russian has thousands of miles of land in which to fall back.

“Leningrad, even more than Stalingrad, is the prime example of Russian defense and ruthless disregard of a civilian population. Hitler shied away from a frontal assault on Leningrad and the bloody street fighting which would have to follow. Instead, he ordered a siege with the aid of Finnish troops in order to starve the city into submission. In the first six months an estimated half-million Russians died of cold and hunger. For the balance of the thirty-month siege, another half million met death. Yet, at no time did Leningrad intend to quit, and as the siege wore on, the city actually became stronger and stronger until they broke out.

“A line of credit must go to the women fighters who appear in every phase of the service including infantry, air corps, and tank corps.

“As the war progressed, the Red Army became stronger after the initial shocks. Top Russian commanders used superlative night movements and imaginative tactics. To compensate for the lack of motor transport, infantry was often moved on the back of tanks. In the winter when the poor Russian road system broke down and literally swamped German transport, the Russians used horses and sleighs to move men and equipment.

“One of the brilliant Russian improvisations was the building of bridges across lakes a foot under the water level. All work was done by night and when a breakout or attack was ordered, the Germans were confronted with the sight of tanks and infantry moving at them, apparently riding and running on the water.

“The Russian fights best at night. The partisan units wrought havoc. Using German uniforms and the cover of the land, these units could travel for days on a few slices of bread. They had a devastating effect on the overextended German supply lines.

“This has been a ghastly war; in fact, the most brutal ever fought between two civilized nations. German rape, loot, murder of prisoners, hatred of the people was everything Stalin promised the German would be. The Russians, however, matched atrocity with atrocity.

“Damage to cities, farms, livestock, industry is of astronomical proportion. The loss of Russian life, which both sides held so cheaply, is a likewise staggering total, perhaps ten million.

“German defeat grew inevitable. In the beginning there was tactical blundering by Hitler. Then Russian space and time and weather overcame them. Russian resources grew as German resources shrunk. New Russian armies trained far back of the lines were thrown at the Germans, who didn’t even know they existed.

“The new Red Army is superb. It is well-trained, -equipped and -generated. It continues its success on the basic tactic of the human battering ram. As German casualties mounted and equipment was permanently lost, Germany began to lose initiative. Germany had no way of shrinking the multithousand-mile front line, but instead had to thin it out.

“The winters had a crushing effect on the German. Of this, much has already been written from Napoleon’s time on.

“The Red Army is a powerhouse much changed from the early days. ITS PRESENCE IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE POST WAR PERIOD WILL HAVE A PROMINENT IF NOT DECIDING FACTOR IN CARRYING OUT MOSCOW POLICY.”

“Did you get through the documents last night?” Hansen asked Sean the next morning.

“As much as I needed to see.”

“And did you reach a decision?”

“Hell yes. I reached it fifty times and changed my mind fifty times. What I really want, General Hansen, is to go home. I hate Germany and Germans. The prospect of the mission in Berlin fills me with despair ... utter despair.”

“What is the greater force, Sean? Love for your country or hatred of Germany and fear of Russia?”

Sean shook his head that he did not know.

“You are asking yourself, why me? Hell, I can’t explain the inequities of this. The captains and the kings depart and leave to you and me a mess to clean up. Bright young majors like you will go home and become bright young executives. We’ll be out here beating our heads against a wall ... and for it we will receive no understanding and no gratitude. But, some of us are going to have to do it anyhow. It is the miracle of the survival of our republic. Always, at the right moment, the right men seem to step forward.”

“I have no aspirations to being a martyr.”

“Then say no, and be on your way.”

“You know goddamned well I can’t say no, General. General Hansen, once in London you asked me if I would abide by my father’s decision in peace. I did and neither of us is sorry. Let me ask you the same thing now. Will you abide by his decision? Yesterday you challenged me to ask my father. All right, I’ll ask him.”

Hansen took off his specs and cleared his throat. The man before him was not happy, did not pretend to be. He had intentionally trapped him into a situation of honor. Yet, he was asking everything of Sean ... everything.

“As you know they are transferring dozens of squadrons to the Pacific Theater every day. I’ll call the Rhein/Main base and find out if you can hitch a ride. What’s the nearest Army airfield to your home?”

“Hamilton, in Marin County.”

“Go and see your parents. Our first contingent will be entering Berlin on the Fourth of July. When you return to Germany it will be either to go back to Rombaden and finish your command or it will be to come to Berlin with us for as long as we need you.”

“The Fourth of July? But, sir, even with good connections I won’t have much more than forty-eight hours at home ... I’ve been gone almost four years ...”

“That’s it, Sean. Forty-eight hours.”

Chapter Thirty-seven

“HEY, MAJOR O’SULLIVAN, TAKE a look.” Sean responded to the prodding of the navigator of the “Vigilant Virgin,” a combat-weary B-24. He unraveled himself from a makeshift bunk in the bomb bay and slipped into the flight deck between the pilots. The aircraft commander pointed out of his window.

Below, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge poked up through a pall of grayish clouds. Beyond the bridge, the gleaming plaster and hills of San Francisco searched for the ever-elusive sun.

“The Golden Gate in ’48, the broad line in ’49,” someone said over the intercom.

And then, there was no more talk. For this crew it was good-by Europe, hello Pacific, but the Vigilant Virgin would be gone forever. The proud possessor of seventy-five raids, including survival of the Ploesti air massacre, she would meet an untimely end and her crew would be retrained for the more powerful B-29s.

“Strap in for landing.”

The “follow me” jeep led the Vigilant Virgin into a hardstand. The alert crew signaled her to cut her engines and wheel chocks were set. Her men tumbled out of the open bomb bay, and Sean and three other hitchers thanked each of the crew for the ride. The ceremony was halted by a jeep pulling under the plane’s wings. A corporal from Base Operations emerged.

“Excuse me. Is Major Sean O’Sullivan here?”

“I’m O’Sullivan.”

The corporal came to a sloppy salute, which an Army man tolerated from the Air Corps. “Would you come with me, sir. Sergeant Schlosberg has some poop for you at the message center.”

The jeep U-turned and drove down the side of the runway as the rest of the bomber squadron was making long glides to the landing strip.

“Afternoon, sir,” Sergeant Schlosberg said. “How was the flight?”

“Good as any ride in an airplane can be.”

Schlosberg tolerated the nonflying mentality of a landlocked Army officer. “We’ve got a TWX on you about your return flight, sir. You can catch a Staff B-17 out of Mather to Washington, then ATC on the VIP flight to Orly. If you’ll check Base Operations in Paris they’ll get you in to Frankfurt or Wiesbaden with Theater Aircraft. Should put you back by July 3.”

“Mather, that’s up by Sacramento, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. We have a staff car to take you into Frisco now. If you’ll leave your address at the motor pool we’ll arrange to have you picked up and transported to Mather.”

“I appreciate that.”

The sergeant said it was nothing at all, having been fully awed by Sean’s Priority One status in his orders.

“Could I use your phone?”

“Help yourself.”

Sean indicated the call was private. The sergeant excused himself. Sean lifted the receiver.

“Hamilton operator.”

“This is Major O’Sullivan. I’ve just arrived with the 23d Bomber Squadron. I’m calling from Base Operations. Could you reach a number in San Francisco?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get me Mission 0430.”

“One moment, sir.”

He heard the feedback of the dialing. The phone rang. Sean’s hand tightened on the receiver ... ring ... ring ... ring ... click!

“Hello.”

“Hello ... Momma ...”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Momma ...”

“Oh God!”

“Momma, it’s Sean.”

“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”

“Momma ... don’t cry ... don’t cry ...”

“It’s Sean!”

“Son ... is it you, son!”

“Hello, Poppa.”

“Is it really you!”

“Yes ... yes ... it’s me. I’m sorry I couldn’t reach you sooner and let you know. I’ve just landed at Hamilton Field. I’ll be home in about an hour.”

“Are you all right, son?”

“I’m fine ... I’ll be right home.”

The road through Marin ran through brown hills. At the foot of the Waldo grade stood a new city of shacks near the frantic activity of the shipyards. Then up the hill and down into the tunnel and onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Over the bay, the city showed itself flirting through wisps of clouds streaming up the gate and the wind jarred the car about.

Now, past the toll gate into the city, they turned into Van Ness, which had been a gaudy auto row in peacetime ... on past the great brick structure of the New Saint Mary’s Church.

How small, how quiet everything looked. Houses, streets, all shrunk. But is not memory always larger than life?

Sean looked down the length of Market Street to the Ferry Building. A living sea of white-capped sailors told him there was still a war being fought. The rival Market Street and Municipal Street car lines staged one of their impromptu races on the four sets of tracks.

The light changed and they crossed into Mission Street, past the armory where Sean had held his first rifle.

“Drive down to Twenty-third Street, then make a right. My house is just before Guerrero.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver was given with a sudden feeling of equality. The major, obviously a VIP, lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t half as nice as his own in Cleveland.

Momma and Poppa stood on the rickety porch. Poppa was supported by a cane, which trembled in his palsied hand. The driver stopped, opened the door, saluted, and stood awkwardly as Sean’s mother ran to meet him and the old man hobbled down the three steps one at a time to join the circle of silent embracers.

At last when the tears were under control, Sean nodded to the driver that he was dismissed, and the three of them walked quietly toward the house.

In the grandeur of his office and quarters in Rombaden and Queen Mother’s Gate he had all but forgotten how very small and very tired the old house was. Large, overstuffed, mohair-covered furniture of a bygone age, the airless, lightless living room, drooping lace curtains, cracked window blinds. The ornate light fixture with crystal tear drops hung low in the center of the room over the round oak table, and Momma’s doilies covered every chair back and arm. The petit-point footstool before Poppa’s rocker ... all of it was the same, only more weary.

On the mantel, a bit removed from the cheap plaster statuette of the Virgin Mother, were photographs of the O’Sullivan brothers in uniform ... Private Liam ... Lieutenant Timothy ... and himself.

He saw the decay wrought from suffering borne by his parents. The last three years had aged them twenty. That big, raw-boned, broad-backed Irishman, Pat O’Sullivan, was a withered old shell.

“You look so tired,” Momma said.

“Just the plane ride, Momma. They don’t build those bombers for comfort.”

But it was more than that, Momma knew. All the youth had fled him.

“Now, before we get involved in Mother’s nonsense about how many meals you can eat and how many socks she can mend, tell us exactly how long you are able to stay?”

Poppa had intuition ... he knew. “I’m afraid only two days.”

“So soon!”

“I’m sorry, Momma. There will be a staff car picking me up day after tomorrow at ten in the morning.”

“But ... Sean ...”

“Now, Mother. We promised. None of that. This is an unexpected treat. We are grateful to have Sean for even this much.”

Pretty soon, Eileen O’Sullivan had assumed the role of a mother whose son had returned from the wars and she was in her kitchen cooking with vengeance. Sean and Patrick sat at the kitchen table, sipping tea and trying to speak of all those things that had gone by in three years of his absence.

In his own home and with his parents Sean realized the cruelty and finality of Hansen’s wish. His parents had become ancient and weak from tragedy. It would put them in their graves to tell them he was leaving for perhaps the last time. And where was the justice of it? Oh, heavenly Christ! Where is the justice? Momma kept talking about how wonderful it was going to be to have Sean home to stay. Momma talked of little else.