Armageddon

“For Christ’s sake, sir,” Hazzard added, “do you really believe they’re not going to try to elbow us out of Berlin?”

“That’s academic,” Hansen answered. “The facts are that we have to do business with them.”

“How do we do business, Chip? I’m for the young major’s way.”

“This is 1945. The American people wouldn’t give a lusty crap if we handed over all of Germany or even all of Europe to the Russians. They want to finish the war against Japan and forget the whole goddamned thing. We will receive no public support for a strong stand against the Russians.”

These were, indeed, the ugly facts of life.

“Fine,” Stonebraker said, “we’re in Berlin. Maybe someday we’ll know why. We’ve seen what happens to our convoys. You’d better prepare for an alternate route.”

“Where?”

“In the air. Define air corridors from our zone to Berlin, put it on paper, make it part of the Potsdam Agreement.”

“How can we justify it without getting them heated up?”

Crusty Stonebraker gave a craggy smile. “Tell the Russians it’s for their own good. We all need an air-safety setup because of the volume of traffic. They’ll buy it now. They won’t in a year.”

Hansen didn’t like it Air lanes were foolish. It was a part of Crusty Stonebraker’s vanity.

A knock on the door brought Hansen’s orderly. A sealed envelope was delivered from Russian Marshal Alexei Popov. As Hansen read, the others detected the urgency. He looked from Hazzard to Stonebraker, read aloud. “This is to advise you that the Americans will not be permitted to take possession of the six boroughs of Berlin tomorrow, as previously discussed. It is felt by the Soviet High Command that there must be a formal written agreement and the establishment of a four-power council first. Signed, Marshal Alexei Popov.”

“All right Crusty. Draw up a plan for air lanes. Neal, bring O’Sullivan up here. He’s going to get an opportunity to find out if the comrades are bluffing or not.”

Chapter Two

ANDREW JACKSON HANSEN, HIRAM Stonebraker, and Neal Hazzard all looked down to the Kaserne courtyard. They saw Sean O’Sullivan and Blessing get into the touring car with two enlisted men.

Hansen looked at his watch. It was seven in the morning. This hour was picked because he knew the Russian command didn’t come to life and function until around noon.

The motor chugged, fought the brisk cold, roared into life. The car was stopped at the gate by a drowsy Russian guard. Sean showed him an order signed by Hansen directing Sean to Tempelhof Airdrome to pick up an incoming VIP. The Russian was impressed by the big car and passed it through.

In a few moments three jeeploads of men passed through the gate, ostensibly on routine missions to Berlin.

During the two weeks of his semiconfinement in the Babelsberg Kaserne, Colonel Hazzard kept as many vehicles as possible moving in and out of Berlin for as many reasons as he could invent without rousing Russian suspicion. The vehicles were dispatched along a variety of routes and, whenever possible, photographed the streets until Hazzard’s master map became studded with information. Ordinary Russian troops seldom challenged them for they seemed to hold an equal fear of cameras and maps.

Sean sped along the southern rim of the Wannsee Lake into the Grunewald, whose enormous acreage comprised a great part of the land in the western districts of Berlin.

The forest had not suffered too much war damage and in the morning mist the greenery shielded the sight of the horror of Berlin. He ran parallel to the smaller chain of lakes that bordered the forest and at the crossing waited. In a few moments the other three jeeps arrived from different directions at the rendezvous.

They bisected the forest on Onkel Tom Strasse, turned into Argentine Allee, coming out directly before a magnificent complex of administrative buildings. It had been part of the Hitler Barracks and served as Luftwaffe Headquarters for the Central Germany Command. The Luft Gau buildings and barracks fringed the woods, showed little damage for it had been selected as the future American Headquarters.

Blessing pointed to a central building in the complex with a convenient flag pole on the lawn before it. The area was void of life. Sean waved the convoy in, raised the American flag to the top of the mast, and posted a large hand-painted sign on the front door in English, German, and Russian.

ATTENTION: THIS IS THE PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND HEREBY DESIGNATED AS HEADQUARTERS FOR THE AMERICAN SECTOR OF BERLIN COMPRISING THE BOROUGHS OF STEGLITZ, ZEHLENDORF, SCHÖNEBERG, NEUKÖLLN, TEMPELHOF, AND KREUZBERG.

SIGNED:

Colonel Neal Hazzard, Commandant American Sector by authority of Major General Andrew Jackson Hansen, First Deputy Military Governor.

Marshal Alexei Popov was awakened from a deep, vodka-induced slumber by a phone call at his Potsdam mansion at the unlikely hour of eight o’clock.

“What do you mean, American troops are at the Hitler Barracks?” he yawned.

“They have proclaimed it as American Headquarters, Comrade Marshal.”

How could they invade, he thought, they don’t have enough troops? “How many?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen! Fifteen Americans declaring a headquarters! Fifteen!”

“Yes, Comrade Marshal. Fifteen. What shall we do?”

Popov stretched, scratched his head, and squinted at the clock. What an uncouth hour to start trouble. “Send up a battalion of tanks and stand opposite them. Have a battalion of infantry see that there is no further movement in or out of the area.”

Popov slammed the receiver down, wrestled out of his pajamas, wended his way to the bathroom. His soldierly figure belied sixty years of age. He shaved, doused his face, combed his great full head of soft silver hair, of which he was quite proud, dressed, and called for breakfast in his room, calculating the true meaning of the problem.

The simplest thing to do would be to lift the phone and ask Commissar V. V. Azov for instructions. That would, however, be a sign of weakness. Popov had worked his way through every rank in the Red Army, was among its founders, had survived the purges. He had not come this far just to prove to a political commissar that he was unable to deal with fifteen Americans. Obviously, the Americans had something up their sleeves. What was it?

An aide came in with word that Russian troops had the Americans completely cut off and a field phone was in operation. He put in a call to his commander at Hitler Barracks.

“Marshal Popov speaks here.”

“Good morning, Comrade Marshal, Colonel Vanyev here.”

“What is your situation?”

“I have ten tanks and a hundred men deployed opposite the Americans. The streets are blocked off. They merely stand before the door of the building.”

“Send someone across the street and rip down their proclamation.”

“And what if they open fire?” Vanyev asked.

“Call back for instructions.”

He finished his coffee, stood before the mirror, struck a small pose. The Americans called him the Silver Fox. Not bad at all, he admitted to himself. The phone rang, Vanyev reporting.

“Did you rip their proclamation down?”

“It was attempted. One American opened fire, wounding our soldier. Fortunately, we have a good photograph of him. Do you have further instructions, Comrade Marshal?”

“Stand by!” he said as he set down the phone, now frowning with worry, “Call my car! Reach the Americans and tell them I am on my way to speak to General Hansen,” he snapped at his aide.

He was driven under siren-shrieking escort into the Babelsberg Kaserne, marched with a trail of aides up to Hansen’s suite, ordered them to wait in the hall, and entered. Neal Hazzard was in the outer office.

“Good morning, Marshal Popov,” he said. “What brings you out so early?”

“My business is not your business. I demand to see General Hansen.”

“Sorry, sir. General Hansen is not available.”

Popov blanched. “It is advisable that he becomes available.”

“Yes, sir. If you will have a seat I will attempt to get the message to him.”

Hazzard left the room. For the next thirty minutes the Russian cooled his heels. The instant he saw General Stonebraker return in Hazzard’s place he realized he was being fleeced at his own game of musical chairs. Popov’s voice lowered ominously. “I demand to see General Hansen without further delay.”

“He is not available.”

“General Stonebraker. Please believe me that my patience is at an end. If I do not see General Hansen in exactly two minutes I will order my troops to open fire.”

Hiram Stonebraker sat behind a desk, opened a file of papers, began to read through them as though he were alone in the room.

“The minute I leave this office you will have condemned your soldiers to oblivion!”

Crusty Stonebraker looked up slowly. “Marshal,” he said, “we are going to have to live with each other for a long time. You’ve got to start learning to say please.”

Popov’s anger grew, but he knew how to conceal it. “For the sake of the lives of your innocent soldiers, I request an interview with General Hansen.”

“In that case, sir, come right in.”

“Morning, Marshal Popov,” Hansen said. “What brings you out so early?”

He looked from Stonebraker to Hansen, regained his threadbare temper, and tried to understand the situation. His confidence had wavered. The Americans were bluffing, he knew ... yet, they were not the kind to risk lives on such a gambit. What was behind it?

“Why do you push me to force my hand,” he said.

“We are only asserting our rights in Berlin,” Hansen answered.

“There is no formal agreement!”

“How about the Brandenburg Agreement?”

“The what?”

“The same crap you have been using to harass our convoys and to keep us locked up here,” Hansen said. “The game works two ways, Marshal Popov.”

“I assure you I am not bluffing.”

Hansen looked at his watch deliberately. “In a half hour, American troops are scheduled to begin evacuation of Saxony and Thuringia. If you are advising me we are not entitled to take physical control of our six boroughs of Berlin, I am advising you that American forces will remain in those provinces.”

Popov’s physical and strategic advantage was leveled. His decision held implications too vast. He was faced with a fait accompli. He smiled warmly, and became amazingly friendly as he picked up the phone and ordered his troops out of western Berlin.

When Popov had left and confirmation of the Russian withdrawal phoned in and the guards in the Kaserne lifted, Hansen allowed the luxury of a sigh of relief.

“O’Sullivan is a smart young man,” Stonebraker said.

“I guess we all learned something today, Crusty.”

The phone rang and Hansen answered. It was Lieutenant General Hartly Fitz-Roy, the British Military Governor of Germany who called from the other wing of the Kaserne.

“I say, Hansen. What the devil are you chaps up to. You can’t take unilateral action like that, you know. Here, we have already set up negotiation meetings with the Russians.”

“Negotiations are finished. You can occupy your boroughs at once.”

“Can’t do that. We need all our troops to welcome the Prime Minister for the conference.” He continued to protest American rashness.

Hansen shook his head when the conversation ended. “Sometimes I think I understand the Russians, but I’ll be goddamned if I’ll ever understand the British.”

Chapter Three

ERNESTINE ANSWERED THE KNOCK. She pushed against the makeshift board that served as a door until it gave enough to see an older-appearing man. He was large, a bit stooped, and seemed tired. She studied him curiously. “Yes? What is it you wish?”

“Falkenstein?”

“Yes.”

“May I come in?”

The voice drew on her memory. She pushed the board open wider. “Are you ... my uncle? Are you Ulrich?”

“I am.”

“I am Ernestine.”

“You? Little Ernestine?”

“I am very happy to know you are alive. Please come in.” Bruno’s eyes widened at the sight of his brother, he arose slowly, backed up. “You! he whispered harshly. “You!” Ulrich! Alive!”

“Quite.”

“But ... but ... but .. .”

“You need not fear, brother. I am thoroughly decontaminated.”

Bruno was distraught with confusion. “You! In Berlin!”

Herta Falkenstein kept her wits. She knew that he must be among the clean Germans and must have come in with the Amis. “You have never been out of our thoughts,” she said quickly. “Please forgive us, but you come as quite a shock.”

“Humpf.” He looked past the candlelight to where Hildegaard sat near her cot, puzzled. “You must be Hilde.”

Hilde did not know how to greet the man whose name had been spoken in curses from childhood memory. After long spells of silence her father raged that both of his brothers were traitors and their record limited his advancement in his bureau. She was only ten years old when Uncle Ulrich was sent away. She hardly remembered him.

“Stand up, Hilde!” Frau Falkenstein commanded. “Let your Uncle Ulrich see how you have grown.” She stood awkwardly, bowed stiffly.

“Gerd?”

“He is in a prison camp in America.”

Bruno began to recover his composure, and caught his wife’s eyes to leave them alone. “I am sorry there is nothing to offer you to eat,” she said.

“I am not hungry.”

“This is a great occasion. We all wish to be with you but I know you and Bruno want to speak.” She herded the girls from the room.

The brothers Falkenstein were alone. Ulrich looked at the shambles, the gaunt, stubble-bearded man. “There is so much to say, one does not know where to begin,” Bruno said.

“With general rejoicing to a glorious homecoming,” he answered bitterly. “What have you heard of my wife, Hannelore?”

“You did not know of the divorce?”

“Rumors reached me.”

“She divorced you when the war began, moved to Vienna. It was difficult for her because of your ... opposition. She passed away last year.”

Hannelore, dead without the steel to see it through. It must have been dreadful for her.

“Where is Wolfgang? I have searched high and low.”

Bruno shook his head, his voice broke. “Our brother is dead.”

Ulrich let out one long deep pitiful groan of resignation. “Everything is dead.”

“You must have heard of the July plot to kill Hitler. Wolfgang was involved. There was a terrible revenge.”

“How did he die?”

“He was hanged.”

Ulrich dragged himself to his feet wearily, flopped his arms to his sides. “I shall not wear out my welcome.”

“Ulrich! We are still brothers. Nothing can change that.”

“No, nothing can change it.”

“You don’t know what it has been like,” Bruno sobbed. “You can’t imagine how we have suffered.”

Ulrich’s deceptively drowsy eyes did not conceal his disdain.

“Of course you have suffered too,” Bruno bumbled on. “We all have. I’ve seen my wife and daughter raped before my eyes. Look at me. We are half starved. I am ruined ... I have nothing left.”

“We must get together sometimes and trade horror stories.”

“For God’s sake, all I want to do is forget it happened.”

“You mean the same way you forgot that Wolfgang and I existed?”

“So, we were taken in by Hitler. Just because I held a minor post with the Nazis, am I to go to jail and leave Herta and those poor girls alone? I tell you, we have paid.”

“Not enough, Bruno, not enough.”

How bitter came the destruction of the long dream. Ulrich Falkenstein had come from the blackness of Schwabenwald to an even greater blackness of Berlin.

Wolfgang and Hannelore were dead and the old friends gone.

Berlin was worse than dead. A great, beautiful goddess hacked up, prostrate, gasping for breath ... the last of life’s blood oozing from her body.

The old man was stooped with sorrow as he trudged down the Unter Den Linden, that mammoth boulevard that rumbled under the wheels of Prussian cannons, clicked under the heels of genteel ladies, heard the shouts of protesting workers, the gunfire of insurrection, the boots of pagan rallies, the circumstance of glory.

At Friedrichstrasse he stood and looked down the flattened street.

So long as the old trees bloom Unter Den Linden,

Nothing can befall us,

Berlin remains Berlin ...

The voices that once came from the cabarets of Friedrichstrasse were stilled forever. Sentimental voices, bawdy voices, angry voices ... still... so still. Now a man hacks away at the carcass of a dead horse.

You are my old love,

Berlin remains Berlin ...

Ghastly, ragged men stagger and fall into the streets from hunger. Urchins beg, women barter ...

So long as the old trees bloom Unter Den Linden,

Nothing can befall us,

Berlin remains Berlin.

He stood now near the Brandenburg Gate at the Pariser-Platz at what was the heartstone of his beloved city. The reigning royalty of the thriving culture lived here on the square and watched from their windows as the pageantry of history flowed beneath the Brandenburg Gate.

The Berlin theater songs, the bitter satire of the political cabarets, the exciting theater, the grandness of the opera ... all the voices were still.

Atop the Brandenburg Gate the Quadriga of Victory once had her chariot drawn by four lusty steeds. The chariot had no wheels, the horses no legs; they lay in a heap and a limp red flag hung over the prostrate shambles. The gate itself remained up only from memory. Great chunks of the massive columns had been bashed away.

He looked back down the Unter Den Linden to the gutted shells of the massive buildings of the opera and the university, the museums and the cathedral, and he walked through and toward other gutted shells of the Reichstag.

The magnificent floral wonders of the Tiergarten were ravaged. The Column to Victory of other wars dismantled and Victory Alee a lane of strewn rocks.

For three days he picked his way across that expanse of three hundred and fifty square miles that once constituted Berlin. Only an ugly scar on the landscape was left in this place of beauty and pomp, ideas and energy. The great forests were in ruin; the hunting lodges of the electors of Brandenburg and the castles were battered beyond comprehension; the workers’ houses were in ashes, and the lakes and rivers putrid.

You are my old love,

Berlin remains Berlin ...

After a number of days, Ulrich was able to locate the first of his old comrades, Berthold Hollweg, who existed in a clapboard hovel on the Teltow Canal below Tempelhof Airdrome. It was a single room, earthen floor, windowless, toiletless. There was a futile attempt to grow a few scrubby vegetables among the rocks and weeds.

In the old days, Hollweg had held a number of high posts in the Democratic Party. He had been chairman of Brandenburg Province and held a seat in the Reichstag until the last free election.

Time and tide had reduced him to the meagerest level of existence. He had aged as Ulrich had aged. The first moments of seeing each other were filled with disbelief, and then Hollweg recounted the past.

“When your trial was over and you were sent away, that signaled our end. Some fled, some disappeared, others blended into the scenery to make themselves anonymous.”

“What about our Jews? Ginsberg, Jacobs, Adler, Davids? They were among the heart and brains of the labor movement.”

Hollweg shook his head. “They are all dead. For a time we made an attempt to hide Adler and his children, but they had to leave.”

“You turned them out?”

“It was next to impossible to hide a Jew in Berlin. Adler understood ...”

Frau Louise Hollweg began to weep at her husband’s recollections.

Tell me about Wolfgang,” Ulrich whispered harshly.

Hollweg lowered his eyes, spoke blankly. “From the moment you were sent away the Gestapo watched him day and night. We knew he was being used as bait. We had to split up. It was impossible to hold a meeting. Spies were everywhere. Things got so bad we couldn’t even recognize each other when we passed on the street. Wolfgang was a contact. Finally ... we had to tell him to stop trying to see us. It was the only way to survive. Ulrich ... spare yourself the rest of this ...”

“Go on.”

“When the plot was made against Hitler, Wolfgang became involved and he got many of the old comrades involved. His job was to print the proclamations that Hitler was dead and to get them posted around Berlin with the announcement of the new government. The plot failed. Hitler went insane with vengeance. Wolfgang was among the first dragged into a People’s Court. You know the procedure.”

“Was there no one who spoke for him? Not a single German voice!”

“In many ways, Ulrich, it was better you were in Schwabenwald. You will never know how totally crushed we were.”

There was no use to berate Hollweg, only pity him. “And what of you, Berthold?”

“We lost our son on the Russian front. Me? I went from one job to another, each time hounded by spies and the Gestapo. I was forced to reduce my existence. In the end I was a doorman at the Adlon Hotel, but even there the Gestapo thought I saw too many important people come and go. I found my true niche in life as guardian of the men’s toilet at the Am Zoo Hotel.”

Ulrich wondered if there was anyone left who could say he was a German who fought Hitler. There were too few to really be counted in the first place. “Maybe it would have been better if I died in Schwabenwald than return to this.”

“No, Ulrich, one by one the Berliners will begin to climb out of the ashes. They will need you if we are to put the pieces together again.”

Ulrich grunted.

“We did the best we could, Ulrich ... the best we could ...”

At last, Ulrich Falkenstein made the last stop of his bitter homecoming. As the light of day faded, he had found his way to the Plötzensee Prison, which bordered on another ravaged woods and stood opposite the destroyed inland harbor. He got out of the military jeep which had brought him and walked alongside the high brick wall. The main gate was guarded by a post of British soldiers. He showed them his papers.

“Do you speak English, sir?” an officer asked.

He nodded.

‘We have received a call from the Americans that you were coming. If you will follow me, sir.”

The gate clanged open. The officer’s hard boots cracked on the stones. They crossed out of the main compound into a dirt courtyard just beyond the main wall and came to a small brick building of twenty by twenty feet.

The officer pushed the door open. Ulrich entered. The room was concrete and bare. A single iron beam bridged the room. From the beam dangled a half-dozen meat hooks. Six thousand men and women were hung by Hitler in revenge for the bomb plot. They had dangled from piano wires in slow strangulation. His brother, Wolfgang Falkenstein, was among their number.

Ulrich stared out of the narrow, barred window. The red wall of the prison and a high chimney hovered over them. That was the last thing that Wolfgang saw.

He walked from the place. The door slammed behind him.

Chapter Four

“JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE mother!”

sang Shenandoah Blessing,

“I am thinking most of you!

While upon the field we’re watching,

With the enomeee in view!”

“Slob! Quiet!” Sean demanded. “You’re gonna wake up Bo.”

“Filled with thoughts of home and Gawd!

For well they know that on the morrow ...

Some will sleep beneath the sod!”

“Friggin’ blubber!” Sean puffed as he lugged the massive, enormously drunk policeman up the steps. They stopped on a landing, Sean propped the big man against the rail and caught his breath. Blessing threw his arms apart and bellowed ...

“Farewell mother you may ne-ver, Prrrrrreessss me to your heart agin!

But oh, you’ll not forget me mo-ther, If I’m numbered with the slain!”

“You’ll be numbered with the slain all right if you don’t shut up!” Sean draped Blessing’s limp arm over his shoulder and continued the tortured climb. “Bo!”

Bolinski’s door opened.

“Help me with this fat son of a bitch!”

“You woke up Bo.” Blessing emoted, switching suddenly from latent musical aspirations to a crying jag. “Goddam, Major, they don’t write songs like that no more ...

“Hark! I hear a bugle sounding,

Tis the signal for the fight,

Now may Gawd protect us, moooother...”

“This bastard must weigh a ton,” Bo said.

“How about it, Major, baby? Did yore little ole’ fat boy here clean the Russkies? Did we win a pile or did we win a pile? Huh, Major, baby?”

“You’re a sweet old fat bastard,” Sean admitted.

The strangeness between the Russians and their former allies ended explosively. Throughout the ruins of Berlin parties at all levels of command erupted. There were enlisted men’s brawls in makeshift cellar night clubs, and plush vodka and caviar affairs of the top echelon ... brotherhood flowed freely.

General Hartly Fitz-Roy, the British governor, gave a boar hunt from a lodge, still intact, once belonging to an elector of Brandenburg. The Englishman was aghast when Marshal Popov showed up with a submachine gun. It was damned unsporting, but as host he could say nothing except for a mumble under his breath.

The French arrived in Berlin and threw a great feast in their own honor. General Yves de Lys grimaced in horror at the way the Russians belted down their superb wine.

Russians wept out songs of the motherland, Cossacks made great leaps, Mickey Mouse watches became a gift of the proof of lasting friendship.

Sean and Blessing had helped launch a new Russian junior officers’ club. Halfway through uncountable litres of vodka and gallons of beer, past innumerable songs and toasts, the light heavyweight champion of a Russian division issued a challenge to any man in the room regardless of weight or nationality. The offer proved irresistible to Sean.

A British lieutenant gave them both lengthy discourses on fair play, and in a makeshift ring Sean dazzled everyone with his dancing-master tactics—until his vodka-rubbered legs left him open for a wild hook that knocked him flat on his back.

Sean decided upon arising, no more fancy work. He cold-cocked the Russian in forty-six seconds, collecting for his backers numerous watches and great denominations of occupation currency.

Shortly thereafter it came to light that Shenandoah Blessing had once been a wrestler, working his way through college under the nom de plume of the “Mad Russian.”

The frivolity continued as he threw six Russians, an Englishman, two Americans, and a Frenchman in succession. Finally motorcycle escorts brought in a 300-pound Siberian with a handlebar moustache. Blessing was rather tired and he was dethroned. But, by this time, the Russian officers were cleaned of a month’s pay and their new club a shambles.

The party broke up at six in the morning with the Russians serenading their guests farewell and declaring them the salt of the earth.

Sean and Bolinski unloaded their burden on a bed never meant to absorb the shock of so large a falling body. Bed and occupant crashed to the floor and there they let him lie.

“Come on into my room,” Bo said. “I’ve got some coffee warmed up.”

Sean flopped into a big chair and began laughing. “Haven’t done that since I was a kid at a couple of Irish wakes.” He pulled out large wads of occupation currency from every pocket. “Got to send some of this crap back to the Russkies tomorrow to help pay to repair their club.”

Bo Bolinski watched the major with a bit of fascination. Sean was always proper, at times somewhat pompous. Bo counted a black eye, ten scraped knuckles, buttons off his shirt, saw a mellow drunk with a cigar stub entrenched in his jaw.

“What the hell you doing up this time of the morning?” Sean asked as he sipped the coffee.

“Colonel Hazzard asked me to study these regulations for the four-power occupation. He wants an opinion on them today.”

“They stink,” Sean said.

“Looks like you’ve made a private peace tonight with the Russians, anyhow,” Bo said.

“We’re under orders to play up this brotherhood crap and con each other for information. Once the Russkies loosen up, they’re not too hard to take. Anyhow, they’re not Germans.”

Sean stood up, dispensed with the cigar, walked into Bo’s bathroom, and rinsed his mouth out. There was coldness between the men. In all the time they worked together Sean knew little of Bo except the statistics; lawyer, Notre Dame, married and two children, Chicago. Not that Bo hadn’t been loyal and efficient.

“Bo, you pissed at me because I pulled you out of Rombaden and brought you to Berlin?”

“No one forced me into G-5, Major.”

“What’s wrong?” Sean said abruptly.

“I can’t hate Germans like you do, Major. I get sick when I see kids digging through our garbage cans. I get sick every time I drive into Berlin.”

Sean did not answer.

“Morning, O’Sullivan,” Hansen smirked at his hungover officer. “I understand you and your fat friend tried to annihilate the Russian officer corps last night.”

“All in the spirit of brotherhood, sir.”

“Were you able to get any information on this V.V. Azov?”

“They clam up the minute his name is mentioned. It’s my guess that he’s the signal caller.”

“It’s starting to add up that way.”

“Sir, I want to bring up these rules governing the Berlin occupation.”

“Shoot.”

“We’re in trouble if we accept them.”

“Neal Hazzard put you up to this?”

“We’ve discussed it.”

“For a so-called fighting soldier, Hazzard does a monumental amount of bellyaching.”

“He’s got a right to if he’s expected to be commandant by these rules. However, we reached the same opinion independently. So did Lieutenant Bolinski. The whole document is written by Russians, in Russian, and for Russians.”

“No matter what the rules are,” Hansen answered, “the success of the four-power occupation depends solely upon the desire of the Russians to cooperate.”

“Why do we have to bend over backward to let them know we’re not going to hurt their feelings? They’re not bashful. Pretty damned soon they’re going to have us believing that they won the war single-handed.”

“It’s about all we can do to prevent them from giving the Yugoslavs a sector of Berlin. The Russians say they’re entitled to it more than the French. How do you answer that?”

“Colonel Hazzard has his work cut out for him.”

“We all have.”

“All four licensed political parties, headquarters, Russian Sector. Police Headquarters, Russian Sector. Radio Station, Russian Sector. City Hall Assembly and Magistrate, Russian Sector. University, Russian Sector.”

“Sit down, Sean. I hate to make that headache of yours worse this morning, but you’d better read this.”

TOP SECRET. RECOMMENDATIONS, POTSDAM CONFERENCE

Sean had worked on some parts of this himself.

RECOMMENDATION:

We must make the Russians spell out their reparations demands or they can stretch them for infinity. The Russians must be made to account for what they have already taken out of their zone of Germany and apply it against the total bill.

We must establish four-power control to govern the flow of reparations to the Soviet Union. Inasmuch as Russians demand great deliveries from the Western Zones of Germany we should not agree to make such deliveries until they agree to an accounting and controls.

REJECTED:

The spirit of mutual trust which we hope to establish will be damaged if we offend the Soviet Union in this manner. Sean flipped the page.

RECOMMENDATION:

We must force the Soviet Union to adhere to the principle of running Germany as a single economic unit. This is being made impossible because the Soviet Union has already physically cut off their zone of occupation from the rest of Germany. We must insist on open borders, open commerce, and free interzone travel.

REJECTED:

This would make the Soviet Union feel that we are against their moving the Polish borders west to the Oder/Neisse line. Although we have not agreed to these border changes, the Soviet argument of setting up a buffer has merit.

“They didn’t ask us about any goddamned border changes,” Sean said. “They just did it”

“Read on, Major.”

RECOMMENDATION:

There is grave concern over allowing the Soviet Union to use our currency engravings and plates to print occupation currency with no method of accounting. The Soviet Union could flood our zones with paper money, buy out Western Zone resources and create inflation.

REJECTED:

Fiscal and monetary experts agree these arguments are possible. However, the Soviet Union would greet the demand to return engravings as a direct question of their honesty.

RECOMMENDATION:

The declaration of the Potsdam Conference guaranteeing freedoms to the German (and Slavic) people and further guaranteeing free elections is a farce.

The Soviet Union cannot guarantee something for other people they dare not give their own people. The Russian people have lived under a police state in one form or another for the entire 1200 years of their recorded history.

We must insist on a definition of freedom, free elections, and democratic institutions.

REJECTED:

A proclamation at the end of the conference is necessary. It would take two decades to negotiate the exact meanings.

There was more, much more. Sean handed the file back to General Hansen quietly. “It was all I could do to push through things like the air corridors. So, we’ve got to sit still and wait for them to push us too far.”

“Will we know it when they do?”

“Not today,” Hansen said. “The war against Japan ended a week ago. Today we see American boys in the uniform of their country parading through the streets of enemy capitals demanding to be sent home. It is going to take time for our countrymen to realize that Americans can never go home again.”

Chapter Five

ERNESTINE AWAKENED SHARPLY FROM her nightly funk, sweaty, terrified. For hours she fought off sleep, for the darkness brought horror. Then a complete exhaustion drugged her into a semiconscious state far into the night, and she wandered into that torment of blood and ghosts and hollow voices.

She dressed in a half daze, walked pasty-faced into the kitchen, where the family was taking breakfast of a sort of gruel.

None of them had gotten over the shock of the Amis requisitioning their house, forcing them into a bomb-battered set of rooms in Friedenaüof the Steglitz Borough. Bruno and his wife slept in the kitchen, the girls in an oversized alcove with half a wall shorn away.

Bruno bemoaned the latest cruelty of fate, the loss of his house; he, a government official of status; he, who had a chauffeur-driven automobile until late in the war. Now he was reduced to waiting on tables in a French soldiers’ beer hall.

Thanks to Ulrich they were not all in labor gangs and had a few extra grams of ration. However, hatred between the brothers did not waver. Bruno felt his brother could do more. The family was barely staying alive. Hilde could not hold a job. She had always been pampered and her head was filled with illusions of becoming an actress.

Bruno’s pride was damaged at the idea that his wife had to work as a chambermaid in an American officers’ billet. She had never held a job in her life and one could hardly consider her a common hausfrau. Ulrich got her the job. The Americans were generous with the bones they tossed out for her doing their laundry.

In the beer hall Bruno decided the indignities of rowdy Frenchmen had to be borne in order to survive. Soldiers left half-smoked cigarettes, wanted girls, and had access to food; neighbors needed to barter, so he served as an intermediary in small dealings. In spite of the degradation Bruno and his family subsisted better than the starving neighbors around them.

Ernestine sat at the table. Her mother looked from her to Hilde. By contrast, Hilde seemed to show no effects of the times. “You look bad this morning,” Herta said.

“Who looks well in Berlin these days,” Bruno mumbled. “Everyone is a walking ghost.”

“I am just a little tired,” Ernestine answered.

“Your Uncle Ulrich offered you a job at Democratic Party Headquarters. I want an explanation of why you refused,” her father said.

“I would rather not talk about it,” she answered.

“It will be talked about. I cannot bear more drunken Frenchmen—and I don’t like the idea of your mother cleaning floors for Amis.”

“I won’t work for Uncle Ulrich,” Ernestine protested.

“I demand to know why. You are trained as a legal secretary. You worked for one of the finest law firms in Berlin.”

“There is no German law, any more.”

“But you know that your training makes it possible to do a number of things. So long as Ulrich is throwing us a few bones you could think of your family.”

“I have decided against it, Father,” she said shakily.

“Ernestine,” her mother said, “what is disturbing you about Ulrich?”

She tried to eat. It was impossible.

“Can’t you talk at all?” her father demanded.

“It’s those places,” she blurted impulsively.

“Places? What places?”

“The things they are saying about us at Nuremberg.”

A terrible silence followed. At last, Herta took her daughter’s hand. “It is all over. We must forget.”

“But, if what they say is true ...”

“Truth?” Bruno said. “What is truth? Do you believe you can get truth from a Russian radio? You are a German, girl. Do you think your people could have done these things?”

“The pictures ...”

“Ernestine,” her father said testily, “you should be able to recognize propaganda. Our faces are being rubbed in the mud. We have no way to answer back. Even if there was a shred of truth, how can you feel that you and I are to blame?”

“Your father is right, Ernestine. Close your ears, forget the lies. They are trying to turn the world against us.”

Yes, Ernestine thought, Father is always right ... always. Father is never wrong. “Did you know about slaves in your Labor Bureau?”

He smashed his fist on the table. “How dare you!”

“Apologize to your father,” Herta demanded.

“I am sorry, Father. Forgive me.”

Her sister, Hilde, pushed away from the table and walked away. Arguments! Always damned arguments!

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Where?”

“Just out of here.”

“When will you be back?”

Hilde shrugged and left.

“All day she is gone,” Bruno said. “Where does she spend her time? Where does she get that stuff to paint her face?”

“Uncle Ulrich gave it to her,” Ernestine said quickly. “I must go to work.”

“Think about Ulrich’s offer. Think about us,” her father said as she left.

When in the devil will she learn to leave the past alone, Bruno thought when she left. Life is hard enough. The future looks hollow. Fate has been cruel.

Herta packed a small sack containing a tin with five ounces of tobacco strained out of cigarette butts that Bruno had gathered at the beer garden and she put in a number of bars of soap made from laundry scrapings that she had remelted. Herta was clever in the ways of the open barter market in the Tiergarten, where trading was permitted.

She learned to stay clear of the Russian soldiers who had been paid in occupation currency which was near worthless

in Berlin and which they could not send home. They were forced to work the barter market themselves, and bullied merciless bargains.

“Try to get a camera,” Bruno said. “I have a line with some Ami soldiers. I will be able to get up to a dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes for a decent one.”

A dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes! A dozen bags of gold!

The underground took Ernestine out of Steglitz to the center of the city. She had to take a round-about way to get to the hospital where she worked in Neukölln as a nurse’s aide. In the last-ditch fighting many parts of the subway system had been flooded, forcing innumerable detours.

The car was filled with sallow, ragged people. She was a bit lightheaded, now remorseful about the question she had asked her father. Of course he would not know about slave labor. It was the times. One had to remember father was a respected official and had given them all a good life. It was a pity to see so proud a man reduced to poverty.

How could she really tell him why she worked for Dr. Hahn and could not take Uncle Ulrich’s offer?

Hospital? It was a sorry excuse for a hospital. Half bombed out, boarded windows, stripped down to the bedding by the Russians. It was filled with patients, even in the corridors, and there was a shortage of everything. So many old people died these days in a state of confusion, and the newborn screamed into a world of hunger and fear.

Only yesterday the gas was turned on in a section of Neukölln and the hospital received nearly a hundred suicides and attempted suicides. Ten yesterday had died of dysentery, typhus, and diphtheria. Half were little children.

Ernestine followed the lethargic line of trudgers to Potsdamer Platz, close to what was once the heart of Berlin. It was too horrible to walk in Berlin any more. The city was a grotesque, surrealist graveyard palled in a gray mist. The half lifeless who staggered about were damned and tormented.

Dietrich Rascher was dead. When she grew fuzzy-minded she thought of him. At first she would not accept that he would never return, even after the last letter from Stalingrad. But there would be no miracle.

In the last years, through the agony of Berlin, it was Ernestine who was the one of calm strength in the Falkenstein family. They all looked to her, even her father. She held them together during the bombings, the news of Gerd’s capture, the rape by the Russians. But now, Ernestine was unable to keep from plunging into deep smoky pits and mazes.

She came to the Tiergarten; barter market and black market were in full swing.

She stared at ravaged trees and gardens and for a moment in her haze she was once again strolling with father and Dietrich down flower-lined paths and the band was playing Strauss waltzes and the people drank strawberry beer ... Berlin! Paris on the Spree, the Athens of the East!

She was carried with the moving river of human misery into the subway again. The melancholy that had been running days and nights together closed in on her. She put her face in her hands. The train wheels sang out ... Dachau ... Dachau ... Dachau....

The visions came to her as they came in her terrible dreams: a clear recollection of sullen silences in her law office before the war; there were questions that were not asked; a clear recollection of those long moments of searching her father’s eyes when he did not want to look at her; a faint recollection of the names of Jewish playmates; a blurred remembrance of Uncle Ulrich’s strange disappearance and of the whispers after the hanging of Uncle Wolfgang.

More than any of it, Ernestine vividly relived those moments when Dietrich Rascher was on leave from the Eastern Front and of his drunken babblings. She remembered the little music box he had given her and a rain-streaked hotel window where they loved... she remembered him blurting out the name of Blobel ... Colonel Blobel ... Kiev ... Commandos 4A Special Action Group C.

“Auschwitz station!”

She looked up horrified.

“Grenzalle station,” the trainman repeated.

It was a mile to the hospital. The surface transportation was either by ricksha bicycle or horse-drawn street car. The street car was filled beyond capacity, no rickshas around. She walked on foot down Rudower Allee. It was dangerous because it was close to the Russian Sector and oftentimes they crossed over and accosted Germans on the streets, and other Germans were powerless to stop them.

“Hey, fraulein,” an American soldier said, blocking her way.

She looked at him. He was young, like Gerd, and he was nervous about trying to pick her up. “Ich have cigaretten .. . and ... uh ... chockolade ...”

“Bitte,” she pleaded, and brushed past him quickly.

She was alone on the dead street. Walls of shorn buildings like large fingers hovered above her. With each step, Dietrich Rascher’s mumblings beat into her brain.

Then, yesterday she heard it! “This is the People’s Radio. We announce a massacre outside Kiev at the pits of Babi Yar. It is now confirmed that 33,000 Jews were gunned down in open pits. It was the work of Colonel Blobel, Special Action Group C!”

Dietrich Rascher! Ernestine struggled up the last three steps to the hospital door. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she toppled to the ground.

No one got excited. This sort of thing happened every few seconds in Berlin these days.

Chapter Six

EVEN AT THIS MOMENT of self-criticism there was an undeniable air of satisfaction as Heinrich Hirsch reviewed the accomplishments of the German People’s Liberation Committee.

Rudi Wöhlman closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips together, and nodded in rhythm to Hirsch’s monologue as though he were beating time to music.

The other two Germans present formed the inner circle. There was Adolph Schatz, appointed president of police, and Heinz Eck, appointed deputy mayor of the city.

V. V. Azov sat dull-eyed at the end of the table, in his usual posture of no commitment of pleasure or displeasure.

Heinrich flipped a page. The final tally was that 85 per cent of the Western Sectors were stripped of “war-making” potential before arrival of the British and Americans.

Before the arrival of the West:

A banking monopoly had been established in the Soviet Sector, controlling the finances of the city;

A food ration system was established in five categories. The highest ration was twenty-five hundred calories a day and the lowest twelve hundred. Control of the ration system was in Soviet hands. Use of the ration system was proving an effective way to gain converts. Top rations went to those who cooperated best with the Soviet Union.

Hirsch reviewed the positions of each of the two dozen members of the German People’s Liberation Committee, how they moved into pre-selected positions, each holding a key to life.

Hirsch reported that hundreds of other Germans who had been Russian prisoners of war and converted into an “anti-Fascist league” were placed in the school system, the union, the police force.

Adolph Schatz, nominally a German like Rudi Wöhlman, had been with Azov as an officer in the NKVD; now he was president of police with headquarters in the Soviet Sector.

Rudi Wöhlman led the Communist Party, licensed under a thin guise as the People’s Proletariat Party. He moved into the city’s civic machinery, grabbed the abandoned judiciary, filled the courts with judges from the party. The Berlin Magistrat, the city’s executive branch, had some two-dozen departments covering education, welfare, transportation, public works, police. Wöhlman loaded them with Communists. The personnel director of the Magistrat was a member of the German People’s Liberation Committee and personnel directors of eighteen of Berlin’s twenty boroughs were either Communists or in tune with Wöhlman’s directives.

Hirsch reported that a single labor union had been licensed and was under absolute control of the Communists. The union formed “Action Squads” for use in demonstrations and to persuade other workers to stay in line.

Wöhlman’s most clever move, however, came in the digging up of the old Democrat, Berthold Hollweg. He was found in a shack on the Teltow Canal, adjudged harmless, and appointed as Oberburgermeister. Hollweg suited an excellent purpose. He still had a name from the old days and could be used as window dressing and “prove” how democratic the Communists were in appointing a non-Communist as lord mayor. Hollweg made a fine figurehead to be controlled by Deputy Mayor Heinz Eck of the German People’s Liberation Committee.

Young Hirsch took the post on the Magistrat as secretary of education and a second post as secretary of culture and information. From here he could control the texts and the teachers. At the university he formed and controlled a student organization on the lines of an Action Squad.

The single radio transmitter in the city was under Hirsch’s supervision.

While the Communists set their roots deeply, entwined their tentacles tightly, the other political parties were in no position to protest. Even after the arrival of the West, they were not permitted a rebuttal in their newspapers for the source of all newsprint was controlled by the Communists.

The German People’s Liberation Committee moved in from Moscow with an awesome speed and efficiency. Before the West could get bearings they were faced with the accomplished feat of the police, Magistrat, courts, union, banking, ration, education, information, mayor’s office, all under Russian control.

Heinrich Hirsch concluded his report. The West would not be able to get out of the hole. The rules governing the four-power occupation Kommandatura saw to that.

When the report was concluded, each of the four discussed the next moves.

They had begun the classic maneuver of infiltrating the other three political parties using both police pressure and the Action Squads.

V. V. Azov was rather pleased. All the planning during the war had paid off. The West had done no planning. The instruments to shove the West out of Berlin were established.

Heinrich Hirsch was told to remain after the others left.

“You sent a note that there was a matter you wished to discuss with me privately, Comrade Hirsch?” Azov asked.

“Comrade,” he began with caution, “I must express concern regarding the use of former Nazis, particularly in educational and police posts.”

“You are, perhaps, speaking for a group?”

“Only for myself. And only because I feel this is harmful to our aims. Even if we are able to hide the facts from the West, the German people will recognize it. They may tend to doubt our sincerity.”

Azov had to be careful not to be drawn into an argument with Hirsch, for he was certainly the most articulate of the Germans. “Tell me,” he said, resorting to standard trickery, which Hirsch recognized from years of schooling, “do you know why we are in Berlin?”

“Of course,” Hirsch said. ‘To Sovietize the German people in accordance with Lenin’s words that he who controls the German working class controls Europe.”

“Now, Comrade Hirsch, why are the Americans and British here?”

“As a symbolic token.”

“Ask ten Americans what they are doing in Berlin and you will get ten different answers. Most don’t know. However, we do know.”

Hirsch became irritated as the dialogue of justification continued.

“If Berlin is not evacuated by the West it will turn into an outpost of spying against us,” Azov said. “And the longer they remain the greater the risk of building Germany for a war of revenge.”

“How do we serve our purpose by stocking our own bins with Nazis?”

Azov smiled, and kept walking around a trap. “This question has been pondered by the Politburo of the Communist Party, by Comrade Stalin, by our great dialecticians. We realize that the Nazis are so deep in every phase of German life that we cannot carry on normal functions without using them. At the moment, the West is our greatest enemy. You yourself worked at persuading German prisoners over to the anti-Fascist bloc.”

“Using common soldiers and officers is one thing. Using SS men and hiding wanted Nazi war criminals is another.”

Hirsch was neither to be convinced nor bullied. He was adamant.

“Many Nazis,” Azov said, “are truly repentant about their past. They have seen the light through Communism.”

They have saved their asses through Communism! Anger began to gnaw at Hirsch. He knew now he had to keep his tongue from wagging further. The whole sordid business was becoming a windfall for hundreds of Nazis all over the Soviet Zone. If the Nazi could be of use, there was a simple formality to purge him of his past. The Russians knew they would be willing workers for the Communists for their past records were held over their heads as blackmail.

Azov saw the young man was backing off, and applied the final wisdoms. “We who believe in world Communism must overlook a few injustices in the light of the over-all aspirations.”

Heinrich’s eyes flashed black. Those were Hitler’s words and the Nazis’ excuse to justify criminal behavior and genocide. But what was so different? Hadn’t the Soviet Union always found an excuse for purges, deportations, privations? Hadn’t the excuse always been that it was justified for the great goal? Hirsch packed his notes quickly and left.

The exchange continued to annoy the commissar. He knew that Heinrich Hirsch was disciplined to realize the consequences of challenging a Moscow decision. But Hirsch had done the same thing earlier in protesting the removal of war reparations and he knew Hirsch had gone to Marshal Popov regarding the behavior of the Red Army upon entering Berlin.

Azov wondered what this strange blind spot was in the man that gave him the effrontery to break party discipline.

For a long time he had sensed this flaw in Hirsch’s character, felt he gave too much loyalty to being a German. He smelled that Hirsch was groping for independent German thought and action. This touched upon the two cardinal sins of nationalism and deviationism.

Yet, Azov was reluctant to take measures against him. He was the most brilliant member of the German Liberation Committee—Adolph Schatz was a clod and a bully, Heinz Eck a pawn. Rudi Wöhlman was clever and a good organizer but never added new ideas for he was determined only to please and to stay out of controversy.

But Hirsch had ingenuity, was sharp in analyzing the West, was brilliant. Yet, the damned blind spot was there, a flaw in his strain. He is half Jew, Azov thought, all Jew by character. Stalin had an uncommon suspicion of Jews. Azov recalled many a night he was summoned to Stalin’s villa and handed a list of Jews to purge. Stalin had an intuition about Jews. But, for the time, Hirsch was needed.

Heinrich Hirsch ordered his chauffeur to drive him to People’s Proletariat Party Headquarters.

He damned himself for not holding his mouth. The entire discussion was an invitation to receive a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Yet, he was unable to contain himself, even with party discipline drilled into him for a decade.... They were pardoning the men who had murdered his beloved father.

Chapter Seven

ERNESTINE BLINKED OPEN HER EYES. A wind blew at the canvas patch over the broken wall. Hilde sat on a wooden crate before a small mirror. Ernestine watched her sister pull on a silk stocking, holding out her slender leg to admire its shapeliness.

Hilde spotted Ernestine watching her through the mirror, turned, and said, “Good morning. How do you feel? Any better?”

“I’m fine,” Ernestine said.

“You don’t look so fine. You screamed again in the middle of the night.”

“I am sorry I disturbed you.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Hilde snapped. “Why don’t you put on a little makeup. The circles under your eyes would not show so much.”

“It does not matter.”

Hilde sighed, tossed down her lipstick, regretted her sharpness. She sat alongside the bed she shared now with Ernestine, ran her fingers through her sister’s hair. “It’s this living on top of each other. Erna, you’re your own worst enemy. Dr. Hahn has said so. You take life too grimly.”

“There is nothing to be joyful about in Berlin.”

“Fine, so make the best of it.” Hilde returned to the mirror.

“Hilde,” Ernestine said. “I want to talk to you about the things in your trunk.”

The younger girl was startled.

“It was by accident,” Ernestine said. “I was looking for your red sweater to borrow. The lock was open. Besides, where does one hide a trunk, or anything, in this place? Where did you get cigarettes, chocolates ... those stockings?”

“I made contact with some old friends.”

“I am your sister, Hilde. I will not be set aside.”

“All right.”

“We have been taught right from wrong.”

Hilde laughed bitterly. “There is no right and wrong in this place. There is only survival.”

“No matter what has happened, we still have our decency.”

“Decent? Are we decent? Have we ever been?”

“Hilde, you are getting yourself into serious trouble. There is no justice today, not even from the Amis.”

Hilde shrugged, and flipped the powder box shut “Your baby sister gets around. You could also make life easier for yourself.”

“Easy? It only looks easy.”

“Have it your way, Ernestine. I’ll leave something to eat for you on the table. Dr. Hahn should be here soon.”

“Hilde! You are only twenty years old. It is too soon to give up on life.”

“It seems that you are the one who has given up. I’m just trying to get along with a bad situation. Erna, you will promise me you won’t say anything to father about the trunk.”

“I promise,” her sister whispered in defeat.

“You’re a dear.” Hilde leaned over, kissed Ernestine’s cheek, and went out of the alcove.

In a few moments old Dr. Hahn arrived. “Well, how is the patient today?”

“I am afraid I am causing everyone a lot of trouble.”

He creaked to her bedside, pinched her drawn cheek. “If I could only put a little color back into that pretty face. Are the sleeping powders helping you?”

“For part of the night.”

The drugs had been obtained on the black market at great cost. He would find more, somehow. “I don’t want to keep you using it. It is bad to start at your age.”

Ernestine looked up to the same old grizzly face she remembered from earliest childhood. It seemed to her that Dr. Hahn was born old. She knew the touch of his hand as he examined her and she knew the familiar grunts of his meditation. He pulled the covers back over her shoulders, slipped the stethoscope from his ears.

“I am not going to lecture you, young lady. But you cannot get better until you help yourself.”

He packed his instruments into a battered bag, rummaged through for his almost diminished supply of drugs, and refilled a bottle at her bedside.

“Ernestine, someone came with me today. I want you to see him.”

“Who?”

“Your Uncle Ulrich.”

She rolled away, turning her back. “No,” she said shakily.

He went out into the hallway where Ulrich Falkenstein had waited. The two men had known each other for nearly three decades. Hahn shook his head. “Physically, she is in weak condition. Not enough to eat, overwork. It is the same as everyone in Berlin. Yet, I do not believe she is ill enough to be in bed.”

“I am told by her mother that she lies there day after day and that she screams in her sleep.”

“My dear Herr Falkenstein. Yesterday, the Amis released the information that they, along with the British, dropped seventy-five thousand tons of bombs on Berlin in forty days of continuous air raids at the end. She has been brutally raped by Russian soldiers. Her fiancé is dead and her brother is in a prison camp. Anything she has ever known of a normal life is gone. The illness that afflicts her is mental exhaustion.”

“Is that a reason for her to refuse to see me?”

“Have you not noticed, Ulrich, when someone speaks to you they do as I. They look into the shadows on your right or left, but never into your eyes. To some of us you are the mirror of German conscience, the living reminder of what we have done.”

“I have had a long time to wonder, Dr. Hahn, who are the guilty? I cannot blame her for the Nazis.”

“Nor can you keep her from blaming herself. The true guilty draw a curtain on the past. The most innocent assume the guilt. Unfortunately there are too few Germans like that girl.”

“I must go to her,” Ulrich said.

“Be careful.”

Ernestine heard him come in and cringed into the folds of the bedding.

“Ernestine,” he said.

“Please go, Uncle.”

“Ernestine.” He reached out and touched the girl and she began to sob softly. “You must turn around and look at me now.” His hands were firm. He dried her tears. There were large black circles beneath her eyes.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“It is true.”

She slumped back. “I am so ashamed,” she whispered. “Dietrich ... shot them down in cold blood. I loved him. He shot them down in cold blood.”

“You did not know, child.”

“Because I did not want to know. No one could have lived in Berlin in these years and not know.” It was not so hard as she believed to look at her uncle. At the moment it seemed a burden was lifting.

“Every German must face the past before he can face the future. Otherwise, there can be no redemption. You have taken the first cruel step, my child, and tomorrow you must start all over again.”

She reached for his hand and pressed it to her cheek,

“You can sleep now,” he said.

Chapter Eight

NEAL HAZZARD, AMERICAN COMMANDANT, was the most gregarious of the brass and the best-known occupation officer in the city. The Berliners loved his gruff bravado, his showing up at rubble-clearing sites, in beer halls, schools, union meetings, churches. Mostly he traveled alone and unarmed, a distinction in Berlin.

From the start the rules of the four-power Berlin Kommandatura were stacked against the West by the presence of a veto. He was compelled to accept all the Russian entrenchments before American arrival.

Even though Hazzard operated in a deep hole, he took a personal liking to the Russian Sector commandant, Colonel Nikolai Trepovitch, who, like himself, was from the ranks and had held fighting commands. Trepovitch was the most outgoing of the Russians, having a sparkling pixyish sense of humor.

However, the meetings of the Kommandatura often as not turned into a nightmare, with translations and conversations going in senseless circles for hours. What would, on the surface, appear to be a routine matter could suddenly turn a session into hairsplitting, bickering, and endless dialogue. Trepovitch and his deputies could haggle for hours and neither Hazzard nor the other Western commandants knew from one time to the next what the Russians had in store.

Hazzard realized that Trepovitch was allowed little room for flexible thinking, having to carry out his directions to the letter. He never pressed the Russian when he knew he could not give; Trepovitch appreciated it.

Hazzard was unable to achieve this silent rapport with the British colleague, Colonel T. E. Blatty, who would argue for hours for no other purpose than to keep the game by the rules. The Englishman, a classical officer, would never anger, never raise his voice, never become vexed. His endurance was the antidote to Trepovitch’s ponderous attacks.

The fourth member of the Kommandatura was Colonel Jacques Belfort. Trepovitch made the Frenchman aware that his country’s presence in Berlin was more of a gesture than a reality. The friction between these two was the most obvious. Belfort made up in sheer pride what he lacked in actual power, and it was his intent to make himself conspicuous for the sake of French prestige.

On certain issues the Russian would not budge. Attempts to regulate the currency with closer four-power control, attempts to liberalize the courts, quit the use of rations for political control, all met with filibuster and evasion.

On other matters the four worked together rather well. Housing was the worst of any civilized city in modern history, and worsened by the occupation powers requisitioning the best of what remained.

There was universal cooperation in the field of public health where mass inoculations tried to stem a rampage of typhus, typhoid, and diphtheria. The mushrooming incidence of tuberculosis, the terrible dysentery, and venereal disease taxed the medical facilities of all four powers.

The number of hospital beds was a third of prewar level and much equipment had been carted off by the Russians as reparations. The four powers set up joint garbage removal, sewage treatment, and other crash programs to head off epidemic.

Transportation was crippled in the broken city. There were no private German automobiles, buses, or taxis. Many chunks of the elevated were down and sections of the underground flooded in the last days of the fighting. Hundreds of rail cars had been shipped off to the Soviet Union. Traffic was perilous because of collapsing walls and half the streets were blocked by debris. Ricksha bikes and a few trams drawn by horses were a poor supplement in the gigantic area of nearly four hundred square miles. Berlin had an extensive canal system and an inland harbor and more bridges than Venice. Half of them were twisted into the Spree and Havel rivers, blocking the barges. The West Harbor was a shambles.

The phone system and the telegraph system collapsed. The Russians had carted off what was left of the switchboards, telephone instruments, generators. They had to be built from the ground up.

Before the war the power plant near the West Harbor was used only to augment during peak hours. The plant had been stripped of generators by the Russians and only part of the shell of the building remained. Neal Hazzard was faced with another accomplished fact ... the power for the city was entirely supplied by the Soviet Union. Ironically, much of the power came through lines from Saxony and Thuringia, the provinces surrendered by the Americans.

A subcommittee of the Kommandatura began the arduous task of de-Nazifying 30,000 postal employees to restore some kind of mail service.

Most of the other utilities were gone. Some gas was being restored.

The city was patrolled by squad cars usually holding one soldier from each of the occupation countries. It was an outward show of unity for the Berliners.

Dozens upon dozens of orders were signed by the Kommandatura and passed along to the Berlin Magistrat for action.

While cooperation existed on many matters, Neal Hazzard slowly, with great determination, chipped away at the Russian entrenchment in other directions. Colonel Trepovitch, alone among the Russians, realized how enormously persistent the American was.

Hazzard put top priority on the selection of a deputy police president who would be more cooperative to the West; Adolph Schatz was owned by the Russians. Nothing could change this since all appointments before Western arrival had to be accepted.

Hazzard was not without recourse. New appointments had to be approved by all four powers. He was in a position to hold up Trepovitch’s appointments until they gave him his deputy police president.

The finding of the German to fill the job went to Sean O’Sullivan’s trouble-shooting unit, a little group of a dozen men without portfolio or official designation. They filtered intelligence reports, watched straws in the wind, prepared data for Hansen on the Supreme German Council and for Hazzard in the Kommandatura, made predictions, acted as liaison between Berlin and the rest of Germany, and performed innumerable special details. Sean and his unit were in and out of Berlin daily, apt to show up anywhere on unique missions.

Neal Hazzard read the report pulled by the unit recommending Hans Kronbach for the position as deputy police president. His record seemed immaculate. Kronbach had been chief of detectives for the city of Berlin. He resigned in protest after Hitler came into power and went into private business, buying out a small-parts factory. He had no known involvement with the Nazis. At the end of the war three former slave laborers in his plant came forward to volunteer testimony to the treatment they received. Further, Kronbach had saved a number of lives and hidden a number of Jews. The war bombed his factory out in the last days.

Currently he worked as a plainclothesman on a black-market squad in Prenzlauer Berg Borough.

Hazzard set the report down, looked at Sean and Blessing. “What kind of a cop did you make him out to be in your interview, Bless?”

“Nothing he doesn’t know about police work. Knows how to supervise men, do administrative work, the whole business. I’d take him on my force in Hook County in two minutes.”

“How did he impress you, Sean?”

“He’s pro-West, no doubt about that. A Democrat by affiliation. I don’t think we can own him. He’s got a mind of his own. German first.”

“A good one,” Blessing said.

“We’re not looking for a stooge like Schatz,” Hazzard said. “One thing bothers me about Kronbach. Until the last two months, he hasn’t done any police work for a decade. The Russkies will lean on him, hard.”

Blessing smiled. “Took a hell of a lot more guts to stay out of the Nazi police than it did to collaborate.”

“Good enough,” Hazzard said. “I’ll get ahold of Blatty to put his nomination on the agenda tomorrow. Bless, find him, tell him what we’re up to.”

“Yes, sir. You going to be able to push his nomination through?”

“May take ten hours. I’ll just have to wear Trepovitch down.”

“Damned if I see how you can stand them meetings, Colonel.”

“I can’t,” Hazzard answered.

Chapter Nine

BLESSING LEFT THE MEETING with full instructions to find Hans Kronbach and get him moved into the American Sector that night.

He called for his patrol jeep, stood on the steps of the Headquarters building, and paused for a moment as the sun set. The flag hung limply; greenery had been renewed about the building; it was a nice time of day.

Across the boulevard two young German girls walked in slow, dull unison, their heels sounding on the pavement. He took off his hat, wiped the inside of the band, and squinted at them.

Eveningtime brought the girls out on the streets. They prowled the American Headquarters, the woods behind and the barrack area was a good place for a quick trick. Blessing thought most of them had little choice but to hustle. They had real hunger in their stomachs and many had kids and old people to keep alive. Bad business to whore to stay alive.

Nonfraternization was still on paper, but it had never really worked. It was dragged out once in a while to pacify a visiting congressman or clergyman. Sometimes, women’s clubs in the States put up a stink. Colonel Hazzard was ordered to make an “example” awhile back. The first two he got his hands on were a pair of respected judges working in his legal section. Hazzard made them go off hard liquor for a month as punishment. They got so stoned on bad wine he relented at the end of the week.

Bless remembered how he handled it in Hook County. He warned the roadhouses to keep their noses clean and police themselves. Whoring was all right as long as the girls didn’t cadge drinks, clip, and kept being examined for VD. Hell, a miner on payday has to have a woman ... so does a soldier. So does a cop, for that matter, be thought. Bless had been without a woman for a long time. No one thought a fat jolly cop needed a woman like everyone else.

Police work had taught him to mask fear, act impassive to tragedy. The dark side of the world, its hardness, and its misery was just part of a day’s work.

Bless knew there was a souring point that came to a lot of cops. When a man gets too callous he can turn into a cynic or a brute.

The two German girls reached the corner, turned, and retraced their steps.

Damn, I’d like to see Lil! He smiled at the thought of his wife. She is a good ole’ gal. And she still cuts a fine picture of a woman.

Lil had come out of the hill country, knew nothing but hard times all her life. When she was sixteen she married a bastard just to escape. Used to beat hell out of her. Lil ran away.

Bless knew a woman like her, with all she’d been through, wasn’t going to go playing around, because she had a good man who treated her square. He and Lil had something wonderful going for them and two of their own ... cutest kids in Hook County.

Such a long time. He wondered how many times Lil needed to have a man in the past two and a half years. She was human and a lot of woman. Bless knew she would go about it in the right way. She’d go off to Memphis for a week, where nobody knew her, and she’d be damned careful. He would never ask her about it because it wouldn’t mean a damned thing.

A radio jeep with constabulary markings was driven up by one of Blessing’s squad, Corporal Danny Sterling. The kid was going to make a good cop, Bless thought, switching his mind back to duty and piling into the jeep.

“Where to, Lieutenant?”

Blessing pondered. Contacting Hans Kronbach was not a simple matter. He was in the Russian Sector so Bless would have to dig up a German informer and send him out as a liaison to set up a secret rendezvous.

“Let’s go over to the provost marshal at Tempelhof and find us a kraut fink.”

Danny gunned the jeep away. The two German girls watched cautiously as the police jeep passed them. Blessing whistled softly “Just Before the Battle, Mother.”

The pressure of Berlin was reaching him. He wanted out of the rat hole before he went sour. There was suspicion in the Germans ... there was hatred, fear, and tension. He knew by long experience the face and the actions of desperation, for he had read it in the sallow, pinched faces of the farmers when their crops were wiped out and their kids went hungry. He had seen it at the mines in the mass hysteria of the strikers as they cursed the scabs, and he had seen it at the mines in the eyes of the women waiting for the news of a cave-in.

He had seen it in the eyes of lynch mobs; he knew it in the faces of the Negroes of Hook County. All of this was the face of Berlin.

Bless picked up the microphone, switched on the transmitter. “Rebel two-eight reporting, over.”

“This is Baltimore calling Rebel two-eight. Who’s that man making big gains for Green Bay?”

“Don Hutson,” Blessing answered, assuring the authenticity of his call. “We are leaving Baltimore en route to Atlanta Provo, over.”

“Roger, and out.”

As they passed out of slightly damaged Dahlem, heavy with American Headquarters and barracks, the horror of Berlin was worsened by block after block, mile after mile of gutted shells. They were slowed to a halt by demolition work near the canal.

As they cleared they saw a German policeman running down the middle of the street waving and calling frantically. They halted. He stopped beside them, gasping, jabbering too quickly for them to understand.

“Was gibt’s?”

The German pointed, tried to make himself understood, then remembered the cards he carried in his pockets. He brought out a stack, each holding a single word: RAPE, ASSAULT, AACCIDENT. He stopped at the card reading ARMED ROBBERY, and kept pointing to it

“Russkies?”

“Ya, ya, Russkies.”

“Now what the hell they doing all the way over here,” Bless grunted, shoving the German into the jeep and picking up the mike. “This is Rebel two-eight calling, over.”

“This is Baltimore. Go ahead Rebel two-eight.”

“We are proceeding to investigate a sixty-four now taking place vicinity Südende. We think there are Ivans involved. Will report exact location when I have it, over.”

“Roger, we’ll move in your direction.”

Baltimore sent out a call for a half-dozen other cars to converge on the general area.

The German policeman stopped them before the Südende S-Bahn elevated station. He pointed up to the platform. Blessing told the German to stay put. It was a situation with occupation troops and he was not permitted to interfere. Moreover, he was unarmed. “Danny, call in our exact location, then back me up.”

Blessing took the steps two at a time, stopped at the far end of the platform. Twenty-five yards away, three Russian soldiers had herded a dozen Germans against the cashier’s window and were stripping wallets, taking wrist watches, rummaging through handbags.

He understood the situation instantly—two did the looting, the third held the Germans at bay with a submachine gun. He heard Danny run up the steps behind him, turned, and motioned him to freeze.

Bless walked toward the Russian with the submachine gun. “Tovarich!” The Russians saw him for the first time, like startled deer. “Nyet, nyet, American Sector.”

The Russian with the submachine gun recovered his senses, waved Blessing back. The big cop kept moving forward, pointed his thumb east. “Russian Sector ... go.”

A spray of bullets erupted at his feet!

Blessing smiled, held his arms apart in friendly greeting, and as though he were a defenseless cub, walked toward the amazed Russian. The soldier shoved the barrel into Blessing’s stomach. In a lightning move he disarmed the Russian, knocking him flat on his back.

The other two reached for their pistols.

“Nyet!” Bless cried.

They continued to draw. Two shots barked from Blessing’s .45. Two Russians toppled over. The third had jumped up and fled down the railroad track as Danny tore up the stairs firing.

The Germans screamed and scuttled away from the pools of blood forming on the deck.

Bless heaved a great sigh, wiped the sweat from his face, and replaced his pistol. “Let him go,” he said to Danny. “All right, calm down, calm down, it’s all over. Any of you people speak English?”

“Ya, I do.”

“There is a German officer at the foot of the steps. Get him up here. I want him to record everyone’s name and address and the story of what happened. Tell these people they will be informed where they can claim their possessions.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Calm down now. It’s all over.”

Bless knelt and turned one of the Russians over. The shot had been true, through the heart. The other one was a grotesque sight, a bullet through his face.

They could hear the sirens of support cars.

“Ambulance?” Danny said, fighting off sickness.

“They’re both dead,” Blessing answered. “And the damned fool thing about it is I know they were bluffing. They got to learn if they go for their guns to use them.”

Bless leaned against the building, and bit his lip hard. “You okay, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah ... I’m okay.”

Chapter Ten

NEAL HAZZARD ARRIVED AT the two-story Kommandatura building in Dahlem fifteen minutes before the general session was due to begin for a special meeting with T. E. Blatty, the chairman for the month.

T. E. Blatty, always the perfect gentleman, tall, sandy, well-groomed, arrived a moment later, and as he passed into the confines the Union Jack was raised on the second of four masts, and a British sentry took a post next to the American already posted there.

The two commandants met in Blatty’s office.

“I want to take the nomination of Hans Kronbach off today’s agenda,” Hazzard said.

“You seemed quite keen on the chap when you telephoned me and I think he would be good for us.”

“It has nothing to do with Kronbach. Two Russian soldiers were killed by us last evening. They were caught in the middle of an armed robbery.”

“I heard rumors of it.”

“It’s a lead-pipe cinch Trepovitch is going to blow his top. Today is not the day to push for the nomination of a deputy police president.”

“Speaking quite frankly,” the Englishman answered, “you’re making it a bit awkward, are you not? We can never expect to establish order if we jigger the agenda around every ten minutes.”

Neal Hazzard stifled an impulse to wring Blatty’s neck. “Hans Kronbach is too important for us to lose. Just don’t make a federal case out of this and let things cool down before I put his name up.”

“See here, Hazzard, I’m only trying to run the show properly. Once we impress the Russians that we play the game by the rules through thick and thin they’re not so apt to bugger us around.”

“For Christ’s sake. We’re not on the goddam sporting fields of Eton.”

“Well!”

“I mean, close your eyes this once.”

“If you insist, Colonel Hazzard, but I act under duress.”

Hazzard sighed with relief. “I’ll return the favor.”

The tricolor of France was raised on the third flag pole as Colonel Jacques Belfort arrived. They all met on the first floor in the main conference room around a square table, with seats behind theirs for advisors and translators.

At precisely nine o’clock Colonel Nikolai Trepovitch arrived with a bevy of staff following him. Hazzard watched the Russian carefully. His face was frozen in a cold glare, he was sullen, and there was an absence of greeting. Hazzard knew it was going to be a long, hard day.

Trepovitch nodded curtly to the chairman, Blatty, sat, adjusted his glasses, unloaded his briefcase, and picked up the agenda.

“This session is called to order,” the Englishman said. “We have a request to remove from the agenda the nomination of a deputy police president.” He looked at Hazzard. “This is a unilateral action of the Americans. Do I hear an objection?”

Trepovitch’s interpreter buzzed into his ear and pointed to the agenda. To Hazzard this was another bad sign, for Trepovitch’s English was better than passable when he so desired. He had a knack of forgetting English in order to force slow, tortuous translations.

Blatty continued. “The first order of business will be to continue discussion on a subcommittee report regarding the removal of Berlin’s dairy herd by the Soviet Union before our arrival in the city. The vote stands three to one that we should not be compelled to replace the herd, that being the duty of the Soviet Union. Whereas,” Blatty droned on, “we have agreed to feed our sectors, an original source of food has been deliberately removed in the Soviet act of spiriting 7000 cows away. Speaking for His Majesty’s Government as well as the American and French governments, it is our position that the Soviet Union owes us 5000 cows ...”

“Last night,” Nikolai Trepovitch began as though he had not heard a word the Englishman said, “two soldiers of the Soviet Union were murdered.”

“I say, Colonel Trepovitch, you are most out of order.”

“They were shot down in cold blood by American aggressors.”

“We are discussing the dairy herd, sir.”

“The guilty murderers are to be found, full restitution made to their grieving families, and a public apology is to be rendered to the Soviet Union.”

“There is a proper place allotted on the agenda for the discussion of emergency contingencies. In due course we shall examine your charges.”

“This was an arrogant murder of two soldiers of the Soviet Union who fought the Nazis with valor only to be slaughtered in the streets by American police brutality.”

Thus far, Neal Hazzard had kept a slight smile on his lips, and had otherwise remained expressionless.

“See here, now,” Blatty answered, “you simply cannot twist the agenda about because you are in a fit of pique. It is not done.”

The Russian brought his fist on the table. “There is no other order of business until this is settled!”

“Sir, is it the position of the Soviet Union that you refuse to allow the business of this body to proceed?”

The fist fell again.

“As chairman of the Kommandatura, I shall not submit to threats or highhanded methods. Now then, if you are finished pounding on the table, we will continue to examine the question of the dairy herd.”

“Is it your position then to protect paid murderers?” Trepovitch broke into an impassioned speech filled with such names as warmongers, fascist bullies, gangsters, lynchers. Within moments the translators were unable to keep up and the translation broke down. Trepovitch didn’t mind. He ranted on, alone.

Blatty waited until he had spent his passion. “Inasmuch as Colonel Trepovitch refuses to recognize the orderly procedures and is attempting to submit us to anarchy, I adjourn this council.”

The Russian jumped to his feet, pointed a finger at Blatty, and further accused him of covering the American crime. He snapped out orders to subordinates, and began to stuff his briefcase. The obvious threat of a walkout existed.

“Gentlemen,” Neal Hazzard said, uttering his first words, “I am completely willing to waive the other order of business to take up the Soviet Union’s charges.”

“That is commendable,” the French commandant said quickly, “and in keeping with the spirit of working together.”

“Sporting gesture,” Blatty said, “but if we permit this we would be endorsing chaos.”

Son of a bitch, Hazzard thought. Between the two of them, you could go nuts. Blatty was so adamant he would even allow a disastrous Soviet walkout.

“I’d like a vote,” Hazzard said.

“I will veto if I am outvoted,” Blatty warned.

Hazzard had guessed that part of Trepovitch’s tirade was pure play acting, but the Englishman was genuine in his stodginess.

“Yes or no?” Trepovitch demanded.

“Sir! Does His Majesty’s Government take that to be an ultimatum!”

The Russian continued with the business of preparing to walk out.

“I propose a ten-minute recess,” Jacques Belfort said.

It was stiffly agreed to by all parties.

When the session reconvened, T. E. Blatty made a final stubborn retreat. “Inasmuch as I am rotating the chairmanship to my French colleague tomorrow and inasmuch as Colonel Hazzard voices no objections, I will recognize a change in the agenda provided that Colonel Trepovitch places his proposition in the form of a request rather than a demand.”

Face had been saved.

“It is a request,” Trepovitch agreed. He replaced his glasses, sat, unloaded his briefcase.

“You heard the charges, Colonel Hazzard. Are you prepared to answer?”

Hazzard nodded, looked over his shoulder to Lieutenant Bolinski, who had the crash job of investigating the case and preparing the report overnight. Bo sat beside Hazzard and read slowly.

“Three soldiers of the Soviet occupation forces were intercepted in the act of committing armed robbery against a dozen German civilians at the Südende elevated station at approximately 1630 yesterday evening. An American peace officer arrived on the scene and attempted to dissuade the Soviet soldiers and to have them return to their sector. One of the Soviet soldiers fired several shots at the feet of the American peace officer from a submachine gun, and further menaced him to a point where the American peace officer had no choice but to disarm him and otherwise defend himself. The other two Soviet soldiers reached for their side arms against the advice of the American peace officer, and when they refused to comply were shot dead.”

“A fabric of lies!”

Bolinski placed a sheaf of papers on the desk. “These are the supporting statements of the twelve German civilians and a German police officer.”

“The Soviet Union will never accept the testimony of fascist liars. I demand to interrogate the aggressor you are hiding.”

“Colonel Trepovitch,” Hazzard said, “one of your people escaped. He should be easy enough to find. He’s most likely in the same unit as the two men who were killed. If you will produce him, we will produce our peace officer.”

Trepovitch changed the subject. “Do we kill your soldiers? Are they not all welcome in the Soviet Sector? What about your black marketeers with their cigarettes? Do we send them back in coffins?”

Hazzard knew now that Trepovitch really did not want an investigation but satisfaction. He answered deliberately. “According to rules adopted by this body we categorized major and minor crimes of our occupation forces. Petty black-marketeering and the breaking of nonfraternization are in a misdemeanor category. However, rape, murder, armed robbery, and assault are considered by this Kommandatura as major crimes.” He nodded to Bolinski, who was now proving to be a walking fact sheet.

“In the last sixty days,” Bolinski said, “we have arrested or apprehended six hundred Soviet soldiers in the American Sector. Over five hundred of these arrests resulted with us taking back your soldiers to your sector for drunk or disorderly conduct. However, we have made a hundred arrests in the major crime category and have, in addition, another hundred German complaints of unsolved cases. To date no American soldier has been arrested in the Russian Sector for rape, armed robbery, or murder.”

Trepovitch turned hot under the collar. “We’ve been damned patient,” Neal Hazzard said. “It is a miracle that more of your people haven’t been killed. This homicide was in self-defense and entirely justified. Your people are going to have to learn that six boroughs of Berlin are under protection of the American flag.”

The Frenchman sensed that Trepovitch had been paid back double. “I suggest that a neutral committee of ourselves and the British investigate the charges.”

“Neutral! You are both hirelings of the Americans!”

This brought the expected outburst from both Blatty and the Frenchman.

Hazzard knew the Russian was being pressed too far. The points had been won and a face-saving settlement was all that was needed. “Gentlemen,” he shouted over the oratory, “inasmuch as this matter concerns ourselves and the Soviet Union, I suggest that we be allowed to work it out ourselves.”

These were the right words at the right moment.

The Kommandatura returned to the business of Berlin’s missing dairy herd, and, after four hours of argument, ended in a deadlock.

Later that evening they all met with their staffs at the French Headquarters, the Napoleon Quarters, for the banquet traditionally given by the outgoing chairman. This month, however, the French were to take their first turn as chairman and Colonel Belfort was allowed the honors.

The Americans gave the most austere of the receptions, the Russians the most lavish. British liquor was excellent although the food poorly prepared.

Now, Jacques Belfort was determined to give Trepovitch a run for his money. The spread was lavish and flanked with the finest French wines and champagnes. All was harmony again. There were toasts to Allied unity and brotherhood.

Colonel Trepovitch, whose English had deserted him earlier, found it again. He cornered Neal Hazzard as the entertainment got under way.

“Confidentially,” the Russian said, “we are not so concerned with the shootings. There are some ruffled feathers in our command.”

Hazzard nodded. It was an opening gambit for some down to earth horse trading. A platter of paté de fois gras, France’s answer to Trepovitch’s pounds of caviar, passed between them.

The Russian continued. “A note from the Americans would smooth a lot of things out, particularly to the Germans.”

“A note might be possible.”

“In exchange for approval of the nomination of Hans Kronbach?” Trepovitch said.

“Quite likely.”

What Hazzard did not know was that a quick line was drawn on Kronbach by the Russians. Hirsch, Wöhlman, Eck, and Schatz all struck an attitude that anyone who was as anti-Nazi as Kronbach was automatically sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In their basic philosophy, the West and the Nazis were similar inasmuch as both were enemies of the Soviet Union. Kronbach was anti-Nazi and, therefore, pro-Soviet

Trepovitch passed on Hans Kronbach’s appointment to deputy police president. Neal Hazzard read a note regretting the death of the Russian soldiers.

A new attitude of respect was visible by the behavior of Russian soldiers visiting the American Sector. Russian crime halted.

The surprise at the next meeting of the Kommandatura was not the quick agreement, but that Nikolai Trepovitch returned promoted to the rank of brigadier general, a notch higher than his Western counterparts. The meaning was obvious.

Chapter Eleven

ON THE HIGHWAYS, THE RAIL lines, the canal ways into Berlin the warning was posted: keep OUT OF BERLIN! BERLIN IS FORBIDDEN!

The hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring east to west and west to east in search of homes and loved ones were steered wide of the prostrate city. It was said that a crow flying over Berlin would have to carry his own provisions.

Winter chilled the air. The cold brought new terrors as the great forests of the city dropped their leaves and the waters of her seventeen lakes danced under wind-whipped whitecaps. It was that time of year when heavy gray clouds looked eternal and sleet and snow poured from their misery.

Schools and factories closed, transportation froze to an agonized trickle. The old died in bed of freezing and the young lay under piles of rags and papers in numbed confusion.

Berlin was a spawning ground for those who lived best in slime and who moved best in shadows... . Hildegaard Falkenstein was drawn to them.

It began, innocently enough, with an accidental meeting of an old schoolmate, Elke Handfest, who had also been in her troop of Hitler Youth.

Before the war Elke was remembered by Hildegaard as plump, acned, and homely. Elke covered her physical misfortunes with a riotous sense of humor with which she played out the part of a buffoon. Her humor was a defense created out of sorrow, but proved of great value later.

Elke’s search for love taught her that, as a woman, there were things men wanted from her and many would overlook her appearance if she supplied the commodity liberally.

In the wild years of the war, Elke Handfest plunged from one affair to another. Although she looked quite presentable now, her humor had deepened to a morbid and scathing kind of self-damnation. She had been forced into sex for recognition; she had never received happiness from it. The more she tried to find its pleasure, the more it eluded her, the more it all became distasteful. And she drifted powerfully toward her own sex and began to find it fulfilling.

When the Amis dispossessed the Falkenstein family from their Dahlem home, chance placed them near where Elke lived with her aged and helpless parents.

At first meeting Elke was excited by Hilde’s beauty and encouraged a renewal of their friendship. Little by little, Elke revealed tangible evidences of good fortune.

“Elke! Where did you get this Ami cigarette?”

“Just enjoy it.”

“I insist on knowing.”

“Where does anyone get anything these days?”

The black market?”

“No. More of an exchange market.”

“Elke, stop teasing me. I’ve smelled your perfume and I’ve drunk real coffee and tasted real butter.”

“I have good friends. Perhaps some day I will introduce you to them.”

“Today.”

“You were always jealous of anyone having anyone or anything you didn’t.”

“It’s been so long, Elke.”

Maybe long enough, Elke thought. Maybe she is hungry enough to want these things. “I must think about it, Hilde. Why don’t we visit in a few days and I’ll let you know.”

Hildegaard thought of it too; she thought of little else ... cigarettes, coffee, silk underwear. Elke’s luxuries gnawed at her innards.

Elke, too, thought of little else. She appraised her own situation with murderous objectivity. She was neither as beautiful as Hilde nor even very pretty. The competition among women in Berlin was growing unbelievable. The first harbingers of winter pushed more and more out on the streets. Elke wondered how long she could last under the competition.

The physical beauty of Hilde thrilled her, but she knew she had to approach that with care. First, she had to let Hilde’s greed trap her. Then she would train Hilde carefully.

With a partner like Hildegaard Falkenstein and her own connections she could make her life last much longer. Her fulfillment with Hilde would come later.

“So, you are still interested in knowing my friends? “

“Yes.”

“It is a matter of taking dates with occupation soldiers.”

“You mean, sleep with them.”

Elke shrugged. “It is better than working on a rubble pile. Besides, I have my parents to keep alive.”

“Do you ... walk the streets?”

“Of course not. That is for the old hens. I have one of the best connections in Berlin to arrange my dates.”

Hildegaard pondered it for days. Elke Handfest lived well under the circumstances, better than her own struggling family, even with Uncle Ulrich’s help. A few times Hilde tried to work but found it dreary and impossible.

Elke’s proposition presented moral aspects against her teaching, but morality in such times was a flexible item. Almost everyone was doing something to live that they would not do in normal times. Hilde rationalized that having dates arranged with occupation soldiers was not the same as being a common whore. It even had a ring of respectability. And, if Elke did well, she could do better.

Hilde remembered her own experiences before the Mongol soldiers raped her. The first time she had sex, she was just fifteen. It was encouraged in Hitler Youth as not only honorable but a highly patriotic duty to bear a baby. Illegitimacy did not exist in the Third Reich. In this intense nationalistic atmosphere she and a boy, whose name and face she could hardly recall, decided to try it out with each other.

There was a week-long encampment of Hitler Youth in the Berlin State Forest on the Müggel Lake. They arranged a rendezvous in the woods in much the same way as dozens of other couples.

The boy was awkward and fumbling and caused her pain. He cried afterward because he had done so badly. All she got from it was disgust and anger. He was a stupid clod, like most men.

There was a second experience during the war when Hildegaard realized true womanhood. Berlin, before the big bombings, was a place of gaiety and excitement and a bit of madness. A young submarine officer on leave, named Sigi, pursued her with wild, heady abandon and made her forget the other unpleasant experience.

Hilde cared for him ... well, for a while, anyhow. When his leave was over and he returned to his submarine she forgot him almost completely ... at once. His whining letters annoyed her. Although she had enjoyed Sigi, the affair revealed to her many things. What Hilde craved from him most in those fifteen crazy days were those moments he was unable to restrain himself at the sight of her loveliness, when he lost control simply by touching her. The supreme thrill came when he was in a state of utter exhaustion and unable to function.

When Sigi left, Hilde decided that falling in love so intensely again was a bother and took too much out of her. She saw the example of her sister immersed in misery and pity with Dietrich Rascher, saw her tear herself to bits. No man was worth what Ernestine went through.

Hilde decided that the next affair would be approached with cold calculation with someone who could help her with her ambition to gain lazy comfort. Hilde was self-centered enough to deny herself the giving of love. She pampered her beauty for the right moment, and as a woman of twenty she was an enormously handsome woman in a classical German sense.

The horrors of Berlin told her that the old life was gone. The chances to fill her ambitions were also gone. In this tomb she could not understand how they could not be gone forever. Yet, her craving for things that Elke Handfest had attained began to overpower her.

When she saw Elke again, she said, straight-out, “I would like to try a date with you.”

Elke was pleased that Hildegaard had taken the first step. “I will see what can be arranged.”

“Of course, I would prefer an Ami officer.”

Elke laughed. “You will have to take what is arranged.”

“Do you mean ... I might have to accept a Russian?”

“Some of them are quite nice, Hilde. Being a beautiful creature does not mean everything. You must please the men you are with. If you don’t, you’ll wash out quickly.”

Elke tutored her on the rest of it Never tell a soldier your troubles. He doesn’t give a damn about your crippled mother or the hole you live in. Too many girls spend their evenings boring a man. A man wants a stupid, happy girl who can make love like an animal, laugh at his jokes, allow herself to be possessed. Don’t drink, Elke warned. A girl needs her wits; stupid girls drink. Forget modesty.

“And don’t fall in love, Hilde. But of course, you will never fall in love. You love yourself too much for that.”

“You need not worry about me, Elke,” she answered, both terrified and excited by it all.

The Paris Cabaret now stood in a cellar near Alexander Platz in Mitte Borough, Russian Sector, in the bashed-down heart of Berlin. Fritz Stumpf remained proprietor on a Russian license. Stumpf was wounded badly in the first days of the war. A crippled left arm returned him to Berlin for the duration.

In the good old days before and after the First World War, the Paris Cabaret belonged to his late, lamented father. It stood on the Friedrichstrasse in the middle of pulsating night life and was a meeting place for theater people and writers.

Berlin was a wonderful, wicked, wild city in those days. A bawdy bohemia of artists, free love, and sex. It was a pompous and proper place with the highest order of opera and concerts.

From here sprang the weird charm of a Mac the Knife and the husky voice of Marlene Dietrich told the world for the first time that she was, from head to toe, consumed with love. It was a Berlin of the immortal Elisabeth Bergner and Tilla Durieux. Negro bands and shimmy dancers and ponderous Wagnerian sopranos all made the magic blends of Berlin.

It was Käthe Gold and the miracle plays of Reinhardt. Fritz Stumpf remembered his father lamenting the departure of the Jews from the Berlin scene. All those magnificent impresarios and virtuosos and fiery journalists had gone. His father said the Jews gave Berlin much of its charm just as they had given Vienna its charm.

Nonetheless, one had to live with the times. By the time Fritz took over from his father the Paris Cabaret had changed to a rendezvous for Nazis who tried to elbow in on the old culture hoping some of it would rub off on them. They came from the ministries that lined the nearby Wilhelmstrasse ... and the old days died.

When he returned early in the war with his wound, Berlin, for the moment, caught the restless sensation-seeking beat of the twenties. Then the Paris Cabaret was bombed out as indeed all of Mitte Borough was, and Stumpf moved into the safer cellar location. The end of the war left the Paris Cabaret in a shambles, but Fritz Stumpf was a clever man and quickly adapted once more to the new masters.

He quickly contacted high-ranking Russian officers, obtained a license, and set his house in order. Three Russians of the rank of colonel were cut in in exchange for protection, an arrangement that worked well for everyone. In the Nazi era, he took care of the needs of Nazi officers. In these days, he took care of his Russian friends.

Fritz Stumpf’s girls were young and pleasing, for the competition to work in the Paris Cabaret was keen. It was cold outside and the Paris Cabaret was as warm as the beds and mansions of the occupation officers.

Elke Handfest retained a popularity for the fun she was, the experience she had, and the fact that she would go along with any party. When she approached Stumpf on the matter of Hildegaard, insisting she was extraordinary, he agreed to look her over.

The front door of the Paris Cabaret was flanked by a pair of American military police. A sign read: OFF LIMITS FOR AMERICAN MILITARY PERSONNEL. This was all part of a show for visiting dignitaries. In a day or so they would be gone, the sign would come down, and the MPs would go away. Colonel Hazzard would, once again, drop by for a late beer on the way home from the Russian parties.

Hildegaard walked down the ten steps into the depths of the cafe and was watched from all over the room as the new girl. The place was smoky and noisy and put together out of odd chairs and tables. The bar girls were tightly corseted to enhance their bosoms and the girls lined up on the other side of the bar jealously watched and feared this unpainted, angelic-looking competitor in their midst.

A musically uncoordinated band played a theater song of the twenties, adding to the discordance by the presence of a badly out-of-tune piano, and girls danced together waiting for dates.

Fritz Stumpf kept a private booth on a balcony a few steps over the main floor. They were ushered to the booth by Hippold, Stumpf s bodyguard and an ex-middleweight champion of Germany.

Stumpf arose, took Hildegaard’s hand, kissed it, and asked her to be seated. She saw in traditional pinstripe a maitre d’ of the old school. He was monocled and wore a pearl stickpin. His withered left arm was permanently held against his body, the hand covered by a black leather glove and on its second finger an outlandish diamond ring, a mark of either great vanity or great hurt.

He spoke softly, questioned her carefully, and Hilde answered well. She was obviously from a good family, was well groomed, well mannered, well schooled. Her body appeared to be as lovely as her face. The only question was her ability to handle men. Elke assured him that, if they worked as a team, she would train Hilde.

As they spoke, Hippold, the bodyguard, palmed Stumpf several notes. There were already a half-dozen requests around the room to meet Hilde.

A drum rolled, an excited master of ceremonies introduced Renate, an immaculately groomed chanteuse who looked with moony eyes over the tarnished place and sobbed:

“Berlin, Berlin, I hardly recognize you,

Where is your reckless light heart? Where are the good old songs

You seem sad and lost ...”

Elke nodded to Hilde and they excused themselves and retreated to the temporary sanctity of the women’s room, sat side by side and repaired their makeup.

Hilde was baffled. She fully expected Stumpf, as “master,” to try out the new girl first.

“He is a fascinating man,” Hilde said cautiously.

“The old-school charm.”

“Is he involved with a woman?”

“He has many.”

“I have a feeling he does not like me.”

“Part of his arm was not all that was shot away during the war.”

Hilde changed the subject. “I take it we have dates.”

“Yes.”

“What about our pay?”

“Don’t get greedy, Hilde. You have been accepted on Herr Stumpf’s payroll as a hostess. He takes care of his girls. Remember, he does not deal with money and it is just as well we don’t get involved in the transactions. Besides, if you are a good girl, the soldiers will be generous with their tips.”

The thought disgusted Hilde. She was thankful Elke was with her to ease things. Elke bussed her, with a bit too much affection. “Come on.”

They were led to a table toward two British officers.

“Berlin, Berlin I could cry for you,

The most beautiful city in the world you once were.”

The sentiment struck deep. Renate continued with another verse on the demise of the beloved city.

The two British officers stood. Elke was impressed by Hilde’s quick adaptation. The British major made a sweeping gesture in offering Hilde a seat. She smiled as though she were a very little girl and someone had given her a big, beautiful doll.

“How nice to ask us over,” she said in English. “My name is Hilde ... Hilde Diehl.”

Fritz Stumpf watched the scene with a never-ending fascination. It was the endless game he and his father had watched played a thousand times. A new queen bee was in the hive to start a short and fruitless reign. In a small time she will be in such demand she will be heady with success. She will be a favorite of colonels and generals. But, in these days, there were no mistresses in the grand style, only prostitutes. She will become greedy and start making arrangements for herself. They always try.

Stumpf desired her for himself, but in a new girl there is always a certain amount of pride and temper. She could not be degraded immediately. That was a way to ruin a good race horse. Sooner or later she would degenerate by herself. He would be patient until the facts of life softened her up.

Such were things! In the old days, girls like her loved for love and adventure. The Paris Cabaret rocked with laughter and not this dirge-like sentimentality. Beautiful women could not swim the treacherous channel today ... they had to crash into the rocks.

But ... without me, he rationalized, they would be prowling the streets and making love in rubble piles for worthless occupation currency.

A note was handed him. It was a lucky night. A case of excellent champagne was being offered for five women to come to the French officers’ billet.

After the first week Hildegaard seemed most annoyed by her lack of guilt. Moreover, she had an insatiable desire to return. She enjoyed the game, enjoyed withholding, hated the lust of the men.

They all fell into one of several categories, which Elke had defined, but there was a basic reaction by all of them. Appeal to his vanity, feign interest in his babbling, let him act possessive, laugh at his idiotic jokes, touch him, watch the evening grow, watch his anticipation rise. The drive through darkened streets to billets they had requisitioned. In the final act, Hilde played out a role of demure innocence that brought them to a passionate pitch.

She had never loved a man in her life and what she was forced to do came out in a hatred in the dark. She was drawn to make them plead for her body, and when she submitted she went berserk until the man collapsed. As he lay moaning, she was always awake with the twinge of victory. She was the ultimate whore that every man craves in woman, one who could run the gamut from innocence to savage lover.

At the Paris Cabaret they said here was one girl who made love and loved it. Fritz Stumpf alone seemed to realize that she was, in truth, committing murder through the sex act. He saw that she stuck close to Elke, enjoyed Elke’s morbid humor, which condemned their lives.

Stumpf became suspicious when Hilde curtly told him one day she would accept only two dates a week. This could only mean one of two things. Either she had a steady lover or was making her own arrangements. He had Hippold watch her and was puzzled to learn that she rarely left her room on the days she did not come to the Paris Cabaret.

Hilde’s motives were simple. On those nights she worked, she wore herself into exhaustion. She cared too much for her beauty to use it up. In addition, she was earning more in two nights than most of the others in an entire week.

She was determined to come out of the experience whole. Yet, exposure brought risks. She realized that Elke was a Lesbian with designs on her; the cool patience and mystery of Fritz Stumpf frightened her... she could run into roughness and ugliness. One had to fight against slipping and staying out of serious trouble.

One night, as it comes to all in that ancient trade, Hilde found herself in a desperate situation. Her date, an Ami officer, grew quite drunk. As he did, his remarks about Germans became more vicious. He was a Jewish boy, and in bed his hatred of himself and of her erupted and he beat her up.

Her father and mother apparently accepted the story that she was accosted by Russian soldiers on the street, but Ernestine knew otherwise.

She tended Hilde day and night and watched her sister sink into a deep wordless depression on the realization that there was no coming out whole.

Ernestine was awakened by Hilde’s sobbing. “The scar on my breast won’t ever go away.”

Ernestine was glad to hear Hilde’s first words since the incident. “Those are not the only scars. You cannot see the others, Hilde, but they are there and they may not go away either.”

“Don’t!”

“We must talk, Hilde. We used to talk to each other. We were so close.”

“My breast used to be perfect ... those Russian beasts!”

“I know all about Hilde Diehl and the Paris Cabaret,” Ernestine said abruptly.

Hilde buried her face in the pillow. “You spied on me!”

“I am your sister.”

She forced Hilde to turn over and dried her tears and stroked her hair. “Oh, Erna! I am so terribly confused. What has happened to us?”

“It is hard to realize but there will be a tomorrow someday without this nightmare.”

“There is not tomorrow here in Berlin,” Hilde said.

“We have to live to believe there is. But every time you enter that place you destroy your tomorrow. I have sat here night after night waiting for you to come home and I say to myself ... how have I failed Hilde? How can I make her understand?”

“You have always been too good, Erna. You have always suffered for others. When we were little ... you would take the blame when Gerd and I were naughty. I used to think ... I can be a bad girl, Ernestine will pay for me being bad.”

“Shhh.”

“You are too good for all of us. But all your goodness cannot help here. Look at this place. I walk there at night and I see that street ... and I know ... the linden trees will never bloom again.”

“Oh no. In a little time Gerd and our boys will come home. You must not be tainted then, Hilde.”

Hildegaard laughed bitterly. “A German boy? Exist in this rat hole? I will find an Ami officer who will marry me and take me to America.”

“Hilde, Hilde, when will you stop dreaming?”

“It is you who is the dreamer, Erna. What else is there in this rotten world our dear father made for us?”

“Don’t speak against father.”

“No ... don’t speak against father,” Hilde mumbled. “But who made them hate us? Don’t you know their hatred of our German souls? Don’t you know I feel that hatred from all of them? Our beloved father and our beloved fatherland brought us to this.”

Chapter Twelve

A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE Kommandatura worked with the Germans to update the 1920 Constitution of the city. The Berlin Assembly, the lawmakers, would consist of 130 members voted from the twenty boroughs.

The Assembly, in turn, would select an Oberburgermeister and two deputy mayors to be approved by the Kommandatura.

The Magistrat, the executive branch, held eighteen civic departments running the functions of police, transportation, welfare, education, and the like.

As the Constitution neared completion it would signal a city-wide election for a new Assembly.

This election was pondered broadly by the commissars, for the Communist Party in Austria had been soundly beaten in an open election and they were not looking forward to a repetition in Berlin.

Rudi Wöhlman felt that, with his control of the labor union and the propaganda apparatus, and with Communists already imbedded in the government, a victory was sure. Furthermore, the People’s Proletariat Party were the true anti-Fascists and would be accepted as the way to redemption by choice of the German people.

Heinrich Hirsch was not so certain. The opposition Democrats had come out of the war the strongest and by sheer weight of numbers had the most people working in the Magistrat and could control the new Assembly. Some of the Democrats could be frightened, bought, bent, terrorized ... but not Ulrich Falkenstein. How deeply did Falkenstein’s influence run with the people?

As both Constitution and election grew imminent, V. V. Azov received instructions from the planners in Moscow: UNIFY ALL POLITICAL PARTIES IN BERLIN INTO A SINGLE ANTI-FASCIST FRONT WITHOUT DELAY.

They were calling for a textbook maneuver to swallow the other parties.

There were three free parties in Berlin. The Christian Party was a religious front, Catholic-dominated. Its main strength was in western Germany along the Rhine, and in Bavaria.

The smallest of the parties was the Conservatives, who represented right-of-center businessmen’s ideology.

Ulrich Falkenstein’s Democrats were the plum and the target. Berlin was traditionally a labor city and the Democrats their political arm; Berlin, furthermore, was the Democratic stronghold of Germany.

Wöhlman decided to lop off the Democrats first, leaving the other opposition stripped. A meeting between the two executive committees was arranged in the office of Berthold Hollweg, the appointed Democratic Oberburgermeister who was also on the Democrat’s Executive. Hollweg was weak, but still earned a good name and the Democratic tag. It was widely known that the Communists who flanked him—Heinz Eck, first deputy, and Adolph Schatz, president of police—held the true power of his office.

The third member of the Democratic Executive was Hanna Kirchner, a grandmother and the leading woman politician in all of Germany. She had fled to Sweden early in the Nazi era, kept a liaison with the first cousins of the German Democrats, the British Labor Party, and the Social Democrats around Europe. During the war she worked for the International Red Cross.

The Communist/People’s Proletariat Executive consisted of Rudi Wöhlman, Heinrich Hirsch, Deputy Mayor Heinz Eck. The fourth man was there for no other purpose than a naked display of police terror. He was Adolph Schatz.

“Comrades,” Rudi Wöhlman said, smiling his toothy smile to all sides of the conference table, “we have requested this meeting to put forth a proposal which we know will benefit Berlin and help clarify the political confusion. We are now pulling in separate directions. Soon, a new Constitution will be granted. It is time for us Berliners to work together to put this city on its feet.”

Berliners, indeed, Falkenstein thought. None of the four Communists remembered Berlin, they had been in Russia so long.

“It is our proposal that we form a single political group ... one great anti-Fascist front. With such solidarity and strength, the Nazi elements will never again be able to rise and destroy the German people.”

So that was it! It was so transparent, Ulrich had all he could do to keep a straight face as Hirsch and Eck added their voices. When they were done, Ulrich quickly averted an open discussion. “We will talk about it and reach you,” he said.

The three remained after the Communists left.

“It is an outrageous attempt to swallow us up,” Hanna Kirchner said, “under a guise of unity. Oh, certainly, they’ll put us in a few posts as window dressing.”

“Why must we suspect the worst,” Hollweg said.

“Because this is the worst,” Ulrich answered.

“But what can we do to stop it?” Hollweg retorted. “You know the pressure we are going to come under. We are not strong enough to stand against the Russians and the Americans are not going to lift a finger in our behalf.”

Berthold Hollweg had come out of a shack on the Teltow Canal to assume an important role in the rebirth of the Democratic Party. Much of his old iron had been taken by the humiliations of the Nazi years, but still Ulrich knew that he spoke truth.

When Ulrich and Hanna left, Heinz Eck, the deputy mayor, came to his office.

“It was a good meeting,” Eck said. “I have a feeling you see the merit of the plan.”

The gambit had begun. Hollweg knew they were to be singled out now and brought under pressure. Heinz Eck was an automatic functionary, a robot—a man with neither mind nor soul.

“It would be comforting for us to know you intend to support the anti-Fascist front,” he pressed.

“I must think it over carefully.”

“By all means, examine all aspects. Only then can you realize it is the only way for Berlin. How else are we to build? How else can we stop the rebirth of Nazism which the West fosters in our midst. May I say more? We in the People’s Proletariat Party have long recognized you as the true strength of the Democrats.”

A detestable lie, Hollweg thought. I am a relic of the past, living on past glory.

“Speaking with frankness, Comrade Hollweg, we would support your candidacy as Oberburgermeister again in the election.”

No doubt with you as my first deputy, Hollweg thought. “A fair price for services,” he mumbled.

“Can we say that we can depend on you?”

“I said, I would think it over.”

Immediately following the meeting the Action Squads, supported by the political section of Schatz’s police, began to single out Democrats to “convince” them of the merit of the unity plan. Those who were “convinced” set up a demand for an open meeting of delegates to vote in the form of a referendum.

Ulrich and Hanna knew that such an open meeting staged in the Russian Sector of the city would put a rubber stamp on the anti-Fascist front and be the death warrant of the Democrats.

Neither the Christian nor Conservative parties were in a position to do anything but follow the Democrats. They were too weak by themselves and Wöhlman had maneuvered to lop them off one at a time.

When Berthold Hollweg announced he supported the open meeting, Ulrich knew he was being brought under heavy, heavy pressure. He also knew he was out of maneuvering room.

Sean greeted Falkenstein at American Headquarters. Each made half-hearted apologies for not seeing more of the other since they had been in Berlin.

“We have followed your work with great interest. You’ve done a hell of a job of putting the Democratic Party together.”

“Which may all prove in vain,” Ulrich answered. “We always spoke to each other straight-out in Rombaden, Major O’Sullivan.”

“Shoot.”

“The Communists are trying to force us into a political union. It is an old trick.”

“We know all about it,” Sean said.

“Good. Now, what do you intend to do?”

“Nothing.”

“I have always known the Americans are naive.” He held up his hand to stop a retort. “How long do you expect the free parties to survive?”

“Officially, we have to consider this a German family affair.”

“Nonsense. The Communists are no more German than you are. They are men with German names being backed up by Russians guns. How do you conclude it is a German affair?”

“Herr Falkenstein, freedom is not something that can be presented to you, compliments of America, in a neatly wrapped package.”

“Your country has never been exposed to the ugly facts of life we face.”

“I challenge that, Herr Falkenstein. We won our spurs in a bloody Civil War and we have fought the German people twice in a lifetime because of ideas.”

“Do you really think then that you can stay here and keep from getting your hands dirty? I am telling you how this works. I have seen the terror before and it is all coming back. The Action Squads used to be called Brownshirts and there is no difference, sir, between the NKVD and the Gestapo. They will single out weak men, break their spirit, convert them. The slogans and speeches are all the same. You Americans have to know there are Germans here who speak for the West and you cannot conveniently turn your backs on us.”

Sean knew what was taking place. But how many were there like Falkenstein, ready to stand up and be counted?

“The fact of life is this, Herr Falkenstein. I could not convince a single man in authority to trust a German politician no matter what label. We do not believe in your people.”

A dull throb pained Falkenstein’s chest. His voice grew harsh. “You are making a grave, grave mistake.”

“Are we? If you truly believed in the courage of your people, you would not come running for help at the first threat. You know they are weak, but your freedom is not something to be handed you at the end of an American bayonet. If we are ever to be convinced, it will be because you earn it with the blood of men willing to die.”

Falkenstein was sallow. “Seeing all this happen again is like being an observer at your own funeral. I plead with you, make a gesture so I can rally my party.”

“You told me the first day we met in Rombaden that Berliners are different.”

“They are! This is the birthplace of free thought!”

“It is also the birthplace of Prussian militarism. Sure, Berliners are different They just happen to like a parade.”

Ulrich Falkenstein pulled himself to his feet heavily. Tears welled in his eyes. “You will see!”

Chapter Thirteen

A MEETING OF THE Democratic Party was licensed by the Soviet Union to be held deep inside the Russian Sector for the purpose of voting on the anti-Fascist front referendum.

The site selected was the Lichtenberg Workman’s Hall, suitable because of only minor bomb damage.

Sean O’Sullivan arrived as a curious observer along with Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury, the sole Americans. They drove with a German named Lenz who worked in American Headquarters. As they neared the Workman’s Hall they were all quick to spot police from the SND, designation for Special Nazi Detachment. The SND was, in fact, Adolph Schatz’s hand-picked political police, the new Gestapo. The SND was augmented by Russian NKVD observing every route to the Workman’s Hall.

Sean was there early as the first of over a thousand delegates filtered in from all parts of Berlin. Ulrich Falkenstein was engulfed by old friends, most of whom he had not seen in a decade. His drowsy eyes found Sean and he nodded coolly; Sean returned the nod.

Lenz pointed out that among the early arrivals were members of Communist Action Squads who scattered through the hall in prearranged locations.

The hall buzzed with excitement as reunion after reunion took place. More “observers” from People’s Proletariat Party drifted in. The stage was being set for a stampede. Sean felt sorry for Falkenstein.

“They’re not leaving anything to chance,” Big Nellie said, pointing to the different colored “yes” and “no” ballots to be cast in case of a voice deadlock.

A murmur arose as the grande dame of the Democrats, Hanna Kirchner, made her entrance down the center aisle. She was swamped with well-wishers.

In the meanwhile, Berthold Hollweg had arrived almost unnoticed by a side entrance and slipped quietly onto the stage.

For two weeks smaller meetings all over Berlin argued the referendum. They met in bomb shelters, hovels, and factories to select delegates, give instructions. Whenever a meeting was known either the SND or Action Squad people hovered nearby.

At last the hall was filled and Hanna Kirchner and Ulrich Falkenstein took their places on the stage behind a long table covered with a green cloth.

The Burgermeister of Lichtenberg Borough, himself a Democrat, gave a formal welcome to this, the first free assembly of a decade. A few more speeches followed and the chair revolved to the district chairman.

“We are to accept or reject a proposition to join the anti-Fascist front ...”

Both catcalls and applause greeted him. He demanded order and continued. “Inasmuch as our Executive Committee is not unanimous we cannot provide you with a recommendation. Before floor discussion and a vote we will call on individual members of the Executive to give their personal views.”

The full-blown Executive Committee of seven argued the issue back and forth. Ulrich realized that some good people had been cowed by Schatz. He also knew that it boiled down to the last three speakers—himself, Hanna Kirchner, and Berthold Hollweg. Throughout the speeches he searched Hollweg for a sign. The old pro played out a bored detachment.

“Frau Hanna Kirchner!”

Half the room rose in respect. She stood to her full height of five feet and four inches. A funny hat was precariously perched on a knotting of silver gray hair. As she approached the rostrum a bevy of catcalls erupted from the Action Squad members who attempted to push her supporters down and drown them out. Schatz’s SND was busy writing down the names of her friends. Fist fights broke out and the chairman threatened, then begged for order.

Hanna rode the storm with calm. She was a wily politician whom Hitler could never cow.

“Those of you gentlemen sent here by Comrade Wöhlman will kindly finish your performance.”

Quiet soon followed.

“Now,” she said, “that is better. I will get in my two words if it takes all day so kindly refrain from further spontaneous celebrations until I am finished.”

A ripple of laughter. Even the American major smiled.

“What a broad,” Big Nellie said.

“Where does this great anti-Fascist idea originate? From no less a beloved Berliner than Rudi Wöhlman.”

Laughter.

“His belated interest in his native city is very touching.”

More laughter of the kind that destroys opposition.

“We see the faces of old friends in this hall today, but we also see the faces of new friends, our guests. We did not invite them, but they came to see that we carried out an orderly, democratic meeting and then voted with different-colored ballots.”

The crowd was warming.

“Who are these beloved Berliners? Adolph Schatz, whose Gestapo is so very busy writing down our names for future social calls ... at night, of course. The kindly Russian NKVD, who have us surrounded so that peace will prevail. Deputy Mayor Heinz Eck, who was thrown out of college as a panderer at the age of eighteen and fled to the Soviet Union and has now returned to give us the benefits of his good advice. And we cannot help but feel the presence of Rudi Wöhlman, whose unseen hand guides us on the path of right. Berlin is fortunate to have so many who love her.

“Comrade Wöhlman wants clean and pretty store windows, but inside he is peddling the same old rotten tomatoes.”

When Hanna Kirchner finished her slashing attack there was sustained cheering. When order was restored, the chairman called upon Oberburgermeister Berthold Hollweg. He was yet one of the grand old men of the party. Time and terror might have taken something from him, but his power was still there.

His eyes were red from sleeplessness and his voice so soft it forced an ethereal silence on the assemblage.

“I stand,” he said slowly, “in favor of the anti-Fascist front. We in the Magistrat have worked well together, all four parties. In these days cooperation among us is urgent and this can be attained only by pulling together. And ... we must be strong enough through such unity that never again will a Nazi madness take us over.”

The rest of what Berthold Hollweg said was hardly important. When a figure so great made an acceptance so spiritless, it brought them all back to reality.

Hollweg continued, in effect, to say: Where are the Americans with their great democracy? Why do they leave us naked? Where are the British? Where are the French? Why fool ourselves into believing we can do something about all this? Why invite the terror again. We are alone, abandoned, and weak, and the alternative is the midnight summons, the beatings, the kidnapings.

Tears welled in many eyes. Truth was bitter, but truth was truth.

When Hollweg returned to his seat the Action Squad people stomped and whistled, but the rest of the hall was stunned.

“I call upon Ulrich Falkenstein.”

He walked alongside the long, green-covered table, stopped for a second behind Hanna Kirchner, his hand squeezing her shoulder, and she could feel the tremor boiling within him. He stood at the rostrum for several moments, looking down on them like an angry Moses whose children had betrayed God. The face of Ulrich Falkenstein, a mirror of German conscience, penetrated every soul in the room and they became transfixed.

In that instant Sean O’Sullivan realized a giant was among them, and Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury knew a moment of magic was happening.

“Berliners!” Ulrich Falkenstein said in a way that hypnotized them.

“Berliners! Are we to hand over our freedom twice in our lifetime without raising a finger!”

“No!” someone shouted from the rear.

“No!” another voice cried.

“Does any man or woman in this room doubt what this referendum means?”

“No!”

“No!”

“Berliners, if we do not stand, we deserve another Hitler!”

Men began standing around the room.

“We will not bend! We will not kneel! We will meet this test and the next and the next and the next! We will be free!”

The hall was on its feet. The roar became deafening!

“Freedom!” he cried from the depths of his being.

“Freedom!” responded the delegates.

“Those of you who stand for freedom will cast your vote now by following me from this hall!”

Hanna Kirchner was at his side. The two of them walked from the stage into a sea of aroused humanity. The SND and the Action Squads were dumbstruck at the sudden massive uprising.

A chant began as row after row emptied behind Ulrich and Hanna. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

And in a moment there was a handful of them left in the hall and the two colored sets of ballots remained on the stage. Berthold Hollweg sat ashen faced.

Sean O’Sullivan shook his head. He looked out into the streets where the chant rose to a new height.

“Freiheit! Freiheit! Freiheit!”

Chapter Fourteen

YOUR BELOVED FATHER PASSED AWAY QUIETLY IN HIS SLEEP LAST NIGHT. YOUR MOTHER IS HOLDING UP WELL UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES.

The emergency telegram, sent through the Red Cross, was signed by Fr. Dominick Fragozze, a priest Sean had known all his life.

It was not the same as losing Tim and Liam. This was a decision he and his father had made together and knew would happen. He was now given to wondering if he should have stayed home and done more. It was the hour of guilt every man knows after losing a parent.

His friends came by to express their sorrow, and realized he wished to grieve quietly, to remember his father and relive words and scenes of earliest childhood.

And General Hansen came by and asked him how he was holding up. “Here are all your emergency leave papers. Transportation is working out the best route home. We have you on an ATC flight out of Tempelhof in three hours.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“Sean, I wish I knew how to help you. Words can really never ease your pain and particularly with a man as fine as your father.”

“I appreciate the General’s concern,” Sean answered.

Andrew Jackson Hansen’s face drew tight with memory of his own. “I remember my father in his last days. He told me something very wonderful when he realized he was going. He said, ‘You have done us proud, Andrew. Your family and your country. You have brought food to starving people and more ... you have given them hope. What a good thing it is to be an American ... God bless America.’ ”

Sean lifted his eyes.

“My father told me something else. He said, ‘Andrew, the way you have lived your life has made it possible for me to sleep in peace.’ Your father would have said the same words to you, Sean. The way you have lived your life has given him the gift of being able to sleep in peace.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

When the burden of the funeral was done, Sean closed the old house forever. His mother and a widowed sister would share their days in a small cottage in the sun.

Chapter Fifteen

IGOR WAS NEVER ENTIRELY certain about his arrangement with Lotte Böhm. Circumstance brought them together for mutual convenience. From any point of view, the girl had a good thing in a Russian colonel, yet an attachment of great warmth developed.

Lotte seemed to adore him, stopped at nothing to please him, catered to his whims, moods, instinctively knew how to comfort him. Igor was pleased, but determined not to be deceived. He knew the girl had an overpowering fear of the realities of life in Berlin without his protection. As in all women, except his unlamented wife, Lotte was part actress. There was an outside chance she loved him, but he would not be fooled.

Families of high-ranking Russian officers began to arrive in Berlin. Igor held his breath until he received a letter from Olga that the importance of her work would keep them parted. He silently thanked the party.

For months he traveled through the Russian Zone of Germany stripping one factory after another as part of the reparations program. As that program was ending he was assigned to study reparations claims in the Western Zones.

Millions of German ethnics had been expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. They moved west in search of new homes. It was a simple matter to plant hundreds, then thousands of Soviet agents in their number to infiltrate everywhere.

Prime assignment of these agents was to gain information to be used to mount Soviet reparations claims. They photographed every factory, piece of machinery, rail yard, harbor, airport, and canal in the West. They drew mountains of data on mineral deposits.

Igor sifted this intelligence so that the Soviet Union could handpick the things it wanted. He noted at his weekly meeting with V. V. Azov that the arrival of Madam Azov did nothing to mellow the commissar.

“Comrade Colonel. The British are now ten thousand tons of coal behind schedule in deliveries to us. What have you to report on your negotiations?”

“I can report that the British are stubborn,” Igor answered.

“They owe us the coal. It must be demanded.”

“It is not quite so simple. The Ruhr mines are capable of only one third of their prewar capacity.”

Azov assumed it was for a lack of miners and offered to send “volunteers” from the Silesian districts of Poland.

“It is not a question of either miners or techniques. The English know the mining business. The machinery is obsolete. The miners do not receive sufficient ration for such difficult work. Transportation is broken down. These are technical problems that would only bore the commissar. Our own mines in the Soviet Union are suffering from the same problems.”

Azov hated engineers. They hid behind a foreign language. He insisted the pressure must be increased.

Igor insisted you cannot pressure an Englishman. “Besides, the British argue they don’t owe us the coal.”

“What kind of nonsense is that?”

“For one thing, we have not returned fifteen thousand freight cars in which previous shipments were made.”

“A legitimate reparation.”

“Yes, of course. However, the British also claim we are behind in our shipments of brown coal to Berlin by some thirty thousand tons.”

Azov mulled it over. There was an agreement to exchange the industrial coal of the Ruhr for the brown coal from Silesia to heat the city. This was part of the general plan to exchange the natural assets of the four zones to keep Germany operating as a single economic unit. This was what the Potsdam Agreement said. The Soviets took the hard industrial coal for their own use in Russia and never delivered the soft coal from Silesia. Fortunately for Berliners the winter of 1945 was mild.

“The Silesian mines,” Azov said, “are no longer a part of Germany and therefore do not come under the economic exchange regulations. They are the property of the People’s Democratic Republic of Poland. We cannot force the Poles to send coal to Germany.”

Igor digested the commissar’s words. He had offered quickly enough to send in Polish miners, then in the same conversation defended the “autonomy” of Poland against delivering Silesian coal. Igor was on tricky ground.

“The British do not recognize the border changes ceding Silesia to Poland until a peace treaty is signed.”

Azov changed the subject.

“The West has agreed to an on-site inspection of the industrial complex preparatory to a reparations conference. You are assigned as a member of the inspection group.”

Igor nodded.

“You will begin next week in the American Zone. After inspections of the zones you will be assigned as a technical advisor to our delegation at the conference. The conference will be held in Copenhagen.”

Igor realized that Azov was watching carefully for a reaction to the name of a Western city.

Once, during the war, as the Soviet Union swept west along the Baltic he had seen plans to send three Soviet divisions into Denmark and occupy it. Unfortunately, the British got there first. He had not believed he would see a Western city outside of Germany in his life.

“Traveling in the West is a great responsibility. There will be a session tomorrow to discuss your behavior. Captain Ivan Orlov will accompany you as an assistant.”

Igor was not annoyed. He had lived with commissars and NKVD too long.

“One last thing. Your friend, Lotte Böhm.”

Igor started.

“She has relatives in Dresden,” Azov continued. “We have issued travel papers for her to visit them and remain there until you return.”

Lotte would be a hostage. They had decided that he was deeply attached to the girl.

“Fraulein Böhm will be delighted to learn of her trip,” Igor said sadly.

Chapter Sixteen

WHEN SEAN RETURNED FROM his emergency leave he was assigned to escort the Russian inspection group. Later, in Copenhagen, General Hansen would lead the American delegation in the reparations claims conference.

The Russians sent twenty-two officers and civilian experts. American intelligence revealed that the group leader, General Lipski, and half the delegation were from political security and the balance technical experts.

Most of the Russians had been exposed to the Americans in Berlin but nevertheless arrived at Tempelhof Airdrome to board General Hansen’s personal plane filled with suspicion.

The first stop was American Headquarters, I. G. Farben Building, Frankfurt, where they were given a two-day briefing on what to look for in the way of reparations and what to expect in the way of bomb damage.

The Russians, to a man, were impressed, for the Americans briefed them with a depth of technical knowledge and in an open manner of discussion that was unknown to them. Each member of the Russian group was quietly aware of the vast amounts of American motorized and mechanical equipment, the efficiency, the facilities for common soldiers which would be luxurious even for Russian officers and were caught in an over-all spell of the wealth of the great power.

When the briefings were done, General Lipski reckoned Russian suspicions were based on good reason. The Americans told them, in effect, that Western Germany’s industrial complex was all but destroyed. Their own agents did not report such ruination. Obviously the Americans were trying to cheat them out of usable machinery.

They conferred in General Lipski’s quarters after the NKVD members turned the place inside out looking for hidden microphones and were exceedingly nervous when they were unable to locate any.

“The Americans are trying to trick us,” Lipski said. That was the end of his knowledge. He was in NKVD and had no understanding of technical affairs. There was general agreement that the Americans were up to something, but the question was how to prove it

Igor Karlovy confined himself to studying the documents listing the factories, rail centers, refineries. He took no part in the accusations, but suggested that the American liaison, Major O’Sullivan, be contacted and more facts provided.

Sean came later that night to Igor Karlovy’s quarters in the Officers’ Club at the I. G. Farben Building.

“Major O’Sullivan,” Igor said bluntly. “We demand to see a more comprehensive report to back your claims.”

Sean understood it as Russian mistrust. He said he would begin to gather data immediately.

Igor reported this to General Lipski. Knowing his own operation, Lipski said they were in for days of American evasions. He began to draft a sharply worded protest and planned to dispatch it to Marshal Popov the next day.

The protest was never sent. Within twenty-four hours Colonel Karlovy was handed the organizational charts and missions of the Eighth and Fifteenth American Air Forces listing every plane, every installation, every mission, every bomb load, and supporting reports on the results. He promised the same data from the Royal Air Force within forty-eight hours.

Igor Karlovy was chagrined.

“General Hansen believes that if we are to work together in the next weeks, it might be well if you understood America’s global war effort. This document will acquaint you with the nature of our forces and our conflict in every corner of the world.”

Igor eyed the thick record out of the corner of his eye. The cover read: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ARMED FORCES AND SUPPORT IN WORLD WAR II. PRELIMINARY SURVEY. He was most eager to read it but thought better of it. “It has nothing to do with the work of this inspection mission.”

“We believe it has, Colonel Karlovy. Your propaganda that you won the war single-handed is incorrect. Once familiar with the extent of our effort you are apt to approach the work here with a little less suspicion and hostility. I’d like to call your particular attention to pages eighty-four through ninety-nine listing war material shipped from the United States to the Soviet Union.”

He handed the document back to Sean. “It has nothing to do with this mission,” he repeated.

“Nothing you care or dare to see?”

“Major O’Sullivan, I think we had better rule politics out of our discussions,” Igor said. “You deal in theory. We deal in reality. Invasion of your borders, destruction of your homeland changes one’s point of view. We have lived with war inside our country for centuries.”

Igor Karlovy, the most knowledgeable of the group in air matters, studied the reports on the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces with a rising disbelief! If the Americans had what they claimed, then the Red Air Force was a pigmy alongside it.

Igor had seen with his own eyes the bomb damage in Berlin, but that had been attributed mostly to Soviet Artillery. He had seen damage in the Russian Zone of Germany and believed that the West concentrated their air power against East Germany while they preserved the industry and cartels in the Western Zones for a war of revenge.

In the ensuing days they inspected Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart with American Air Force experts and engineers. The precision destruction of transportation centers and manufacturing capability tallied in close detail with the American claims.

A confusion grew within the Soviet group.

And then they came to Rombaden, where the plum was to be the Romstein Machine Works.

They arrived in a convoy of cars late in the afternoon and before receiving billets went to the Rathaus to the offices of the military governor and the Oberburgermeister for the official welcome. At first a few curious people gathered at sight of the Russians. Then the word spread that Major O’Sullivan had returned.

Within minutes hundreds of people had poured from the buildings on the square and the city band was hastily assembled. When they all left the mayor’s office they were greeted by a rendition of “God Bless America”—in waltz time.

Igor and his Russian companions were stunned by what was happening. They knew by now that O’Sullivan disliked Germans intensely and had been a stern master. What a strange welcome for a conqueror!

The spontaneous outpouring continued. School children paraded before him on the Rathaus steps, bowed, and curtsied, and the portico became filled with bouquets of flowers. Everyone wanted to shake Major O’Sullivan’s hand.

Then beer barrels rolled in on horse-drawn brew wagons and an impromptu festival took place right on the spot.

General Lipski allowed his group to mellow a bit. As Igor watched the folk dancing he remembered his dozens of trips to East German cities, where all that ever greeted him was fear. And as the Germans nodded and bowed and smiled to O’Sullivan he remembered the look of hatred in the eyes of the Polish people in Warsaw.

O’Sullivan was intimate with the destruction of the Machine Works. Russian agents had sent back false reports.

The tour went on. Knowing now that the original briefings in Frankfurt would be borne out, the Russians began to relax.

Darmstadt: September 11, 1944. RAF raid. 300 planes dropped multi-thousand incendiaries in 45 minutes gutting 72% of the city and turning it into an inferno. It took a week for the place to cool off.

Mainz: Rail center and arteries destroyed. Center of city a mass of brooding stone.

Offenbach: 60% destroyed. 93% of war-effort factories destroyed.

Kassel: Wartime armaments factories made it a priority for Allied bombers. Not even Berlin took such a pounding for its size. Inner city entirely leveled.

And so it went in one city after another. The political section of the group spoke among themselves about the efficiency of American Military Government, the de-Nazifying procedures, the new legal codes and the speed of open elections.

Wiesbaden. The inspection of the American Zone was coming to an end. Now they saw an undamaged German city. And this, too, made a mark on Igor Karlovy. It was a great, plush old spa of sumptuous beauty, the likes of which he had never seen, something he had believed existed only for czars. The Taunus Mountains looked down on lush forests and the people had bathed in spas from the times of the Romans. Seeing this unspoiled place enabled Igor to put together bits of the ancient German culture that he had seen in the jigsaw of rubble.

At the Schierstein Harbor they boarded the yacht City of Cologne, which once belonged to Adolf Hitler, and sailed down the Rhine to the little sporting town of Rüdesheim and docked. Here the full splendor of that fabled river revealed itself. The Watch on the Rhine, the statue of Germania, stood high above the magnificent terraced vineyards.

German school children gathered to sing a welcome in their high-pitched voices. They sang the traditional “Lorelei” and the village dancers and band and singers added their odes to the ethereal beauty of the Rhine.

This was a side of Germany Igor Karlovy had never known. In the warmth and sentimentality of their songs, so like his own, he realized there was something in the German character other than brutality and militarism. How puzzling! But after all, did he not love a German woman? Had he not seen these things in her?

After an elegant banquet at the centuries-old mansion of Krone they tasted the wines at Castle Crass. As ancient wine-tasting ceremonies ensued, the party loosened up, and then ... brotherhood came about. Even NKVD General Lipski enjoyed himself and those limber ones among the Russians were soon showing off a few dance steps of their own to the delight of the American hosts and the German entertainers.

They boarded the City of Cologne at dawn with bombing hangovers. As the boat pulled away the children were there again, singing the “Lorelei.”

The boat moved down the river. Major O’Sullivan walked among the group shaking hands with each of them. In two short weeks he had gained their respect after the passing of the initial hostility. He seemed to be an unusually open and honest man as well as extremely pleasant.

Sean sat at the rail, caught up for a moment with the overwhelming beauty of the river. Igor Karlovy sat alongside him.

“Well, Major O’Sullivan, what will we do without you?”

“The British will take good care of you.”

“Will we be seeing you in Copenhagen?”

“Probably.”

There was general excitement as the yacht came around a treacherous bend and they could see the great basalt rock that rises out of the river and hovers in a large cliff over the water. The voices of the children singing the haunting “Lorelei” still reached their ears.

“So that is the ‘Lorelei,’ ” Igor said.

“Don’t listen too closely to the voices of the sirens, Colonel, or you may crash on the rocks.”

Igor smiled. “You would make an excellent dialectician.”

They rounded the bend passing those long low river barges and the outlines of the Mäuseturm showed itself against a gray sky over the terracing.

“I was told only last night that you returned from America from an unhappy event. Your father, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Thank you, Colonel. He was quite old and quite tired.”

“And you have family left?”

“There is only my mother and myself. I lost two brothers in the war.”

This shattered Igor into a long silence.

“And you, Colonel?”

“I lost ... a childhood sweetheart ... and my son.”

“Then we really should be friends, shouldn’t we,” Sean said.

“I guess so. What part of America do you come from?”

“San Francisco.”

“Oh yes. California was once settled by Russians.”

“We stole California from the Spanish in a war of aggression ... however, we did purchase Alaska from the Russians, legally.”

Igor laughed. “From the Czars. We would not have made such a bad bargain.” Igor lit a cigarette. “Tell me, what did your family do?”

“We had all more or less just graduated from the university. I was teaching. My younger brother aspired to be a writer. He was a student of literature. The middle brother ... a follower of causes.”

“Three sons in the university. Your family must have had great wealth.”

“My father was an immigrant from Ireland. He was never more than a laborer.”

“Very interesting.”

Ivan Orlov, as always, hovered nearby. The NKVD had made a small error in assigning him to watch Colonel Karlovy ... he spoke no English. He made his presence so annoying that Sean asked to excuse himself. When he left, Ivan Orlov said, “Beware of Major O’Sullivan. He is a spy for American political security.”

At Cologne the American escort was joined by the British escorts. It was the same story. Cologne, Hanover, and the ports of Hamburg and the American enclave of Bremerhaven utterly mangled.

But the very worst they saw in all of Germany was the devastation of the Ruhr industrial complex. Düsseldorf, Essen, and Dortmund were all but wiped out.

The Soviet inspection group proceeded to the Copenhagen conference sobered. Neither the British nor Americans had hidden a thing.

Igor Karlovy had to admit to himself that Germany was more thoroughly destroyed than the Soviet Union.

What was horribly clear now was that the Soviet Government had deliberately lied to keep the Russian people from knowing the strength and participation of the West. Indeed, Western Germany had not been spared for a war of revenge.

Chapter Seventeen

THE CLOCK IN THE tower of the Copenhagen City Hall tolled the hour of seven. Igor Karlovy paced his room. Most of the staff would be asleep for another two or three hours. He opened the curtain, stepped out onto the balcony of his room at the Palace Hotel.

In the center of the street arose a column, and on it a pair of vikings blowing long trumpets. The Danes joked that the trumpets would sound when a virgin passed.

Raadhus Plaza stretched below. Copenhagen was starting a new day with wonderful briskness. Tens of thousands of Danes pedaled their bicycles, weaving around automobiles, and the square was alive with the sounds of cooing pigeons, sharp heels on stone, voices of the rapid, indistinguishable language.

How different from the movement of the troubled grim masses in Moscow, Igor thought.

Colonel Igor Karlovy was a man deeply disturbed. The five-week inspection tour of the Western Zones and the conference in Copenhagen were drawing to a close. He had felt uneasy about the safety of Lotte Böhm. No communication between them had been possible. The separation had made him realize that he loved her ... and he had committed a cardinal sin in losing his hatred for Americans.... Questions gnawed at him. They could never be asked.

One could watch Copenhageners for hours, Igor thought. The Soviet delegation was housed in a wing of the Palace Hotel in the heart of the city. The Americans were a mile and a half away at the D’Angleterre. Between them ran Frederiksborg Way, a narrow street lined with exclusive shops and department stores.

The Russians always tried to hold meetings and luncheons at the American hotel so they could walk Frederiksborg Way. The shops were filled with goods they had never seen ... watches, silver, porcelain, furs. The people were handsome, they smiled, and they were well dressed; and all this was in an austere period at the end of a war. Was this capitalistic decadence?

If Major O’Sullivan and the other Americans and British he had dealt intimately with were proof of Western imperialism, then the proof was wrong. Most of them came from humble backgrounds with at least one parent from another land. They were hard-working, intelligent, and friendly.

Why did Azov send me on this mission?

Igor remembered his complaint to a British major about the fact that the coal miners in the Ruhr were striking and holding up Russian reparations shipments.

“But these chaps have every right to strike, you know,” the Englishman answered.

They have no rights. They are Germans and you are an occupying power,” Igor had insisted.

“Poor devils have been fainting from hunger. A miner can’t do a decent day’s work on two thousand calories. Damned healthy sign when they got enough dander up and had the cheek to strike.”

In the Saar, German students were protesting French occupation regulations. A French captain shrugged. “Students always demonstrate. It is a student’s prerogative to demonstrate. Works off energy.”

Damned if students demonstrated in Moscow! How could it be a healthy sign to disobey authority! In all his life Igor had accepted orders without question.

How could the Americans, British, and French permit freedoms to the Germans which he, as a Russian, did not have?

The Americans and British were at ease. They were so sure of themselves. Perhaps they were so sure of their way of life! Or perhaps the Russians were unsure of theirs. Was that it? The Russians feared themselves, feared each other?

Igor hungered to know truth and he walked on dangerous ground. Major O’Sullivan had become his friend. If there was only a way to speak to him....

That evening Captain Ivan Orlov, NKVD, sat at his desk at the Palace Hotel finishing a report to his superiors giving his findings on those members of the Soviet delegation he was assigned to watch.

Colonel Karlovy would come in for bad days, at last. All through the end of the war, Karlovy had belittled him, ignored him; till now there was nothing to accuse him of.

Now there were solid suspicions that Colonel Karlovy was getting a soft attitude toward the West and had even engaged in a friendship with Major O’Sullivan, an American spy!

Ivan Orlov was fulfilled! After all, one is assigned to watch someone and there can be no accomplishment unless you catch him at something. Ivan dreamed of a promotion when the report was rendered.

A knock on the door. A short square man in black chauffeur’s uniform introduced himself as the driver for the Soviet Ambassador to Denmark.

“The ambassador demands your presence,” the chauffeur said.

Ivan was elated! The ambassador himself! Perhaps General Lipski discussed his work and the ambassador wanted him to remain in Copenhagen. What an idea!

A somber Mercedes with a pair of Red flags attached to each fender waited. In a few moments the car was moving north out of Copenhagen speeding toward the Danish Riviera in the direction of Elsinore.

“The Comrade Ambassador wanted to hold the meeting with you in private,” the chauffeur said. “There are too many Western spies in Copenhagen. We are driving to his summer residence.”

Ivan nodded that he understood. The chauffeur was undoubtedly NKVD also. He was too well disciplined in the secret ways of political security to question an ambassador.

An hour later the last of the farewell parties unfolded at the great velvet and mirrored Wivex restaurant, the largest in Europe, which was on the edge of the Tivoli. Although it was too early for the Tivoli’s season, the million lights were turned on in honor of the occasion to set up a fairyland of color and magic.

Participants of the conference arrived: ambassadors bedecked in sashed elegance; generals and admirals bogged under decorations; elegant ladies. The room was filled with tables, each holding small flags of the various nations, and a formally dressed Danish orchestra played Russian laments, French love songs, American jazz, and British airs.

Long tables of smörgasbord, aquavit, Carlsberg beer, open-faced sandwiches of tiny shrimps, ham, and cheese, buckets of iced champagne—all attributed to the fact that this was a banquet of the victors.

Colonel Igor Karlovy, one of the most popular of the Soviet delegation worked his way around the room, shaking hands, saying good-bys to Belgians and Poles, Dutch and Danes. Igor felt something was wrong. He had been in the place for nearly a half hour without seeing Ivan Orlov ... he began to feel naked.

Igor’s face lit up as he spotted Major O’Sullivan on the balcony facing the Tivoli and speaking to a Danish girl he had seen several times during the conference. Igor cleared his throat.

O’Sullivan introduced him to Miss Rasmussen, a Danish translator. She excused herself, knowing there was to be some men’s talk.

“We have arranged a private party as soon as we can gracefully get out of here. Would you come, Colonel Karlovy?”

“Who will be present?”

“Some of the boys from the Marine Embassy Guard have a house just a little out of town.”

“I am afraid that would be impossible.”

“I seemed to have overheard that Captain Orlov took ill or something,” Sean said. He looked directly into Igor’s eyes. “Orlov won’t be around tonight.”

On an impulse Igor said, “Hell, why not?”

Master Gunnery Sergeant Michael J. Flynn, USMC, of the American Embassy Guard was assigned as an assistant to Major O’Sullivan for the conference. They discovered they had much in common besides Irish parents. Both were Mission District San Franciscans out of the same high school. Flynn took to the major right off the bat, remembering having seen him fight at the old Bucket of Blood arena. The sergeant and four other staff NCOs pooled resources and were able to rent a lovely place on the sea in Taarnby, a suburb of Copenhagen.

Igor’s apprehension about accepting the invitation faded. The Americans were almost like children in their desire to be friendly. They showered little gifts on him and were consumed with curiosity about his war record.

The Marines all had lovely Danish girls as dates. Sean was with Miss Rasmussen; Igor insisted he did not want a girl.

It was a nice gathering. They could look over the water to Sweden from the porch; the sky held a billion stars, and there was a gentle pounding of the surf.

They all had their tunics off and drank as comrades without rank. The Marines made a number of jokes about the inferiority of the American Army at Major O’Sullivan’s expense, but he had the right answers. Igor had once been warned by Russian intelligence that the American Marines were an elite corps like the Nazi SS. It did not seem possible meeting them like this. They were plain boys from many places and three of the four had wounds from the war in the Pacific.

The living room was dark except for the light from the fireplace. The Marines and their girls sat about on the floor and sang. One, from Wyoming, had a guitar and they sang British songs about the jolly sixpence and “Bless Them All” and they sang about the Heart of Texas.

The pace of the evening slowed and the Wyoming Marine sang a spiritual of the American Negro—that he was a wayfaring stranger alone in a far land. Igor thought it was beautiful.

He took the guitar from the Wyoming Marine and sang to them about Russia and they thought ... what a hell of a nice guy.

The hour became late and they drifted away, two by two.

Only Sean and Miss Rasmussen were left as the fire dimmed to its coals. Igor saw that Miss Rasmussen was looking at Sean with loving eyes and that his farewell should be made.

“I must go back to Copenhagen but first you must tell me what happened to Captain Orlov?”

“One of the boys in the Marine detachment has Russian-born parents. They spoke it at his home all the time. We got him a chauffeur’s uniform, borrowed a car from the embassy motor pool, and stuck a pair of Red flags on the fenders. Captain Orlov was driven to Elsinore to see the Soviet ambassador.”

“But ... but ... the ambassador was at the Wivex tonight.”

“You don’t say.”

“But ... but ...”

“He was driven to Hamlet’s castle and told to knock on the gate. The car drove off. Well, Orlov speaks only Russian and we figured he’d have a hell of a time finding a Russian-speaking Dane. He should get back to Copenhagen tomorrow sometime ... if he’s lucky.”

Igor Karlovy laughed until his stomach ached and tears rolled down his cheeks. “That stupid bastard!” Orlov was probably making out a report on him. Now, he could never turn it in because he would have to admit being tricked by the Americans. When he gained control of himself he thought the time for a farewell had come.

“It was a nice journey, Major O’Sullivan.”

“See you around, Colonel.”

Sean thundered out of a deep sleep, fished around for the night-stand lamp, and switched it on.

Igor Karlovy hovered over him, roaring drunk. Miss Rasmussen screamed and threw the blankets over her head.

“You son of a bitch! It’s four o’clock in the morning!”

“I intend to go,” Igor said, “but first I demand to know why you want to destroy us!”

“Because, you simple bastard, we crave the latest Moscow fashions!”

Chapter Eighteen

THE AMERICAN ARMY BAND marched beneath the reviewing stand striking up “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The honor guard, a crack drill team of Negroes, followed the band in double cadence, executing an intricate close-order drill.

Marshal Alexei Popov waved his hand in appreciation. The Russian was in a jovial mood. Great medals adorned his tunic from armpit to armpit, chest to navel. Elements of the mighty Second American Armored Divisions followed with their tank treads setting up a rumbling din.

Standing next to Popov was Lieutenant General Andrew Jackson Hansen, First Deputy Military Governor. Hansen remembered a year back. The President was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference and drove between two solid lines of tanks of an entire division. American might was then on display. Soon parts of the division would be pulling out of Berlin, once again reducing the garrison.

A year ago, at the end of the war, there were three million American troops in Europe; now less than a third of the number and shrinking fast. The stampede was on to bring the boys home and to hell with European involvements. Hansen had pleaded in council after council that twenty divisions had to be left in Europe. The Congress led the parade of deaf ears.

That was why Marshal Popov was in a genial mood. All along, Soviet experts had predicted the American withdrawal. Soon the Americans would be too weak to withstand concerted pressure.

The parade honoring the first anniversary of the occupation of Berlin made a public show of unity. In the beginning the Berliners looked upon the Americans as liberators and were shocked. During the first year in the Berlin Kommandatura and the Supreme German Council the Americans seemed to be doing everything possible to please the Russians.

Colonel Neal Hazzard stood in the row behind Hansen, beside his adversary, Brigadier Trepovitch. The latest tirade from the Russians was over the American formation of a sports program for German children with GI’s acting as instructors and coaches.

Trepovitch harangued that it was an attempt to encourage the rebirth of German militarism. When the Russian saw how the children flocked to the American soldiers, he attempted to institute a duplicate program in the Russian Sector.

Neal Hazzard said he knew why the Russians used the knight as their favorite chess piece. “It’s like a Russian. It can move in eight different ways ... all of them crooked.”

As Scotch pipers of a tradition-rich regiment set up a wail in the streets, Neal Hazzard wondered how far the Russians were going to push before we began to push back.

“Neal,” General Hansen said, “we are pleased with the way free elections have gone in Hesse, Bavaria, and Württemberg-Baden. I’d like to press for them in Berlin.”

“There’s a difference, sir. We don’t have Russians to contend with in the zone.”

“The Constitution is ready to be handed down. Take a crack at it in the Kommandatura.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hazzard brought the matter up, expecting a stalling act from Trepovitch.

The Russian returned at the next meeting with instructions, and, to everyone’s surprise, suggested elections at an early date in October.

Neal Hazzard was baffled. He went to O’Sullivan for advice.

“Sure the Russians want elections,” Sean said. “We both do for different reasons. We want them to dispose of our responsibility. They want them to entrench themselves.”

“How do they figure they can win?”

“They’re dealing to us with a stacked deck.”

“They can’t win after what they’ve done to this city,” Hazzard insisted.

“They’ve made a calculation, Colonel, that we won’t lift a finger to help the free parties. They’ll have them demoralized to a pulp.”

Sean’s estimation was based on the way the Communists had squeezed the life out of the political opposition in the Russian Zone of Germany. In city after city the Democratic Party leadership along with the other free parties were coerced into the anti-Fascist front. The pattern was the same. For window dressing a Democrat or member of the Christian Party sometimes held the post of mayor. But always he was flanked with deputies like Heinz Eck and the police, education, propaganda, and food control was in Communist hands.

After smarting from Ulrich Falkenstein’s rebellion, the Communists went to work on the Democrats in the Russian Sector of Berlin where the West could not operate. Systematic terror lopped off Democratic and Christian leadership.

Despite Falkenstein’s earlier pleas, his party was being splintered away.

Feeling no Western opposition, Trepovitch then presented the petition to license the anti-Fascist front as an operating group in Berlin “because it was in existence in the Soviet Zone.”

In England, the Labor Party, first cousins of the German Democrats, brought pressure on their occupation officials to stiffen British opposition. It was Colonel T. E. Blatty who answered in the negative to the anti-Fascist front.

Then a strong French stand by Jacques Belfort said that France would recognize the anti-Fascist front, but only as a continuation of the Communist Party. This was the first feeble beginning of resistance.

At American Headquarters individual officers such as Sean O’Sullivan acted on their own initiative to help the free parties in dozens of “unofficial” ways.

For the most part, the West remained ineffective as Rudi Wöhlman and Heinrich Hirsch engineered an election campaign to put the most uncouth ward heeler to shame, by comparison.

Russia, controlling Berlin’s only radio, refused to give the free parties a single minute of air time.

Mitte Borough, the center of the city, began to look like Moscow on May Day. Banners in defiant red and white hung from nearly every wall.

THE SOVIET UNION IS THE FRIEND OF THE GERMAN WORKING PEOPLE!

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY THROUGH THE PEOPLE’S PROLETARIAT PARTY!

TURN BACK THE WARMONGERS!

NEW GERMANY MARCHES TO PEACE WITH OUR SOVIET BROTHERS!

REBUILD GERMANY THROUGH THE PROGRESS OF THE PEOPLE’S PROLETARIAT PARTY!

WE STAND WITH THE WORKERS!

Sound trucks flooded the Russian boroughs and their newspapers and broadsheets inundated the city.

Sixty days before the election People’s Radio announced that all fruit and vegetables for Berlin would be supplied by the benevolent Soviet Union.

Under the auspices of the People’s Proletariat Party there was a display of free food such as had not been seen in years.

Free People’s Proletariat cigarettes were distributed at the factories.

The school system under the management of Heinrich Hirsch passed out free pencils stamped with the initials of the party and free notebooks carrying pictures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, with suitable quotations. The children were lectured on how to instruct their parents to vote.

“Spontaneous” parades and demonstrations were apt to erupt by the well-groomed Action Squads.

The specter grew ugly. Schatz’s SND brazenly kidnaped and beat free party candidates. The Action Squads grew bolder stampeding free party rallies right inside the Western Sectors.

Democratic, Christian, and Conservatives who wished to speak in the Russian Sector were forced to submit their speeches in advance and put their lives in jeopardy when they crossed over. As often as not free party rallies in the Russian Sector were canceled at the last moment for an imaginary infraction.

Hansen watched it grow to a point where the Americans were looking like damned fools. He did not trust either Falkenstein or the Democrats, but he could not justify American continuation in the city if they allowed a Communist takeover. His own staff quarreled over the intention of the mission. One group, largely from his State Department advisors, felt they had to get along with the Russians at any price. Neal Hazzard led the opposition, demanding American involvement in behalf of the free parties.

Hansen went to both the Pentagon and the State Department for policy instructions. There was no clear policy on the Berlin election!

Five weeks before the election a candidate of the Democratic Party from the Soviet Sector in Köpenick Borough disappeared. His body washed up on the Müggel Lake, days later.

On the fifth day of September, a month before the elections, a new sound was heard by three million Berliners.

“This is RIAS calling. This is Radio in the American Sector. This is the voice of freedom.”

The microphone was turned over to Ulrich Falkenstein, who began with his rally cry, “Berliners!”

Operation Back Talk had begun.

Chapter Nineteen

BERLIN WAS FULL OF homecoming soldiers and others in transit from the Soviet Union. They were emaciated and scraggly, mostly shoeless, with large rags wrapped around their feet. Once proud uniforms were tattered and stinking. Hollow eyes and bony faces told stories of horror.

Most of the Berliners ignored them. Once they had marched away as a symbol of German superiority. They crawled back now. The Prussian military tradition gave no glory to the bearers of defeat.

Other prisoners of war came from the West. These were more fortunate. Among their number was Gerd Falkenstein.

“Gerd! Gerd is home!”

Ernestine fell into his arms; Herta wrung her hands and wept, and Bruno pulled a hand free and pumped it.

“Oh God, oh God!”

“Son! How did you find us?”

“The Ami Red Cross. They are very efficient. Look at you Hilde! You are a woman!”

“Come in! Come in. Don’t stand in the hall.”

Gerd put down his worldly possessions, a single knapsack. They pulled him into the room and stood around him. He looked rather well: he was lean and a bit tan; his uniform was shabby but neat and he wore new shoes.

“You look wonderful,” his mother wept.

Gerd smiled. “If you must be a prisoner, by all means be a prisoner of the Amis. What has happened to our home? Was it bombed?”

“The Amis took it, but let’s not talk of that now.”

The meal was edible, enough to fill Gerd’s stomach. They listened to his adventures.

He admitted he was lucky. His antiaircraft bunker on the coast of Normandy received a near hit by the British naval bombardment.

“I was unconscious for three days. When I woke up I was on an American hospital ship in the prisoners’ ward.”

The rest of the story was internment in a camp in Maryland, the most decent food he had eaten since he left home, work on a road gang, schooling, and good entertainment.

“It is a small miracle, but here we are all together again.”

Well, not quite all. Gerd inquired after old friends. They were dead, badly butchered, or missing in Russia. “I am sorry to hear about Dietrich Rascher. He was a fine fellow.”

Ernestine paled. Gerd was pleased that she still mourned Dietrich. That was good after all the things he heard about German girls these days.

“You might as well know,” his father said, “your Uncle Wolfgang was involved in the plot against Hitler and hanged.”

Gerd took the news with no show of emotion. “Sooner or later he had to go that way.”

And then they settled and Gerd recounted it all from the beginning. He told of the battles in North Africa when they were winning and the collapse of the Low Countries and France before that. His hands drew images of the brilliant strategy, the hordes of panzers, the fury of the Luftwaffe. Ernestine watched her father’s eyes light as he talked of the parade through the Arch of Triumph in Paris. It was a way he had not looked since before Stalingrad.

She felt herself sinking. After the first warmth of greeting, Gerd seemed distant, and his voice was filled with cynicism and arrogance.

“Your Uncle Ulrich is here in Berlin.”

“So, he is still alive. I hardly remember him.”

“He has been very good to us,” Ernestine said quickly.

“And why not? He made us live with his shame for years.”

“Things are different now. Uncle Ulrich is an important man.”

“Strange,” Gerd said, “we decent Germans end up living like this, or worse, like those poor devils down on the street. And the traitors are given our country.”

Bruno listened to his son with a warm glow. It was music he had not heard for so long.

The next day was Sunday, but father and mother had to work. Hilde excused herself on the pretense that she had an unbreakable date with a girl friend.

Ernestine and Gerd walked. The air was nippy. There was a terrifying feeling that the winter might be severe. Autumn’s eternal gray brought the sky down to the tops of the dilapidated buildings. They walked until they found their old street in Dahlem and stood before their former home.

“Who lives there?”

“Four American officers.”

“Well, it is better than Russians. We will get it back sooner than you think.”

“Don’t torture yourself, Gerd. Let’s get out of here.”

They were swallowed by the Grunewald, where the paths were filled with bright, shedding leaves. For a moment the misery of Berlin was hidden.

They turned toward the Kummer See, one of the smaller lakes. Gerd whistled, “Raise the Banner,” the SA marching song, known as “Horst Wessel.”

“You must not whistle that song,” Ernestine said shakily. “It is forbidden.”

“Forbidden? Your own music, forbidden?”

“Please, Gerd, they are very strict.”

They came to the edge of the lake and sat on a boulder. “Remember the encampments, Erna? Hitler Youth. The air was filled with such music then.”

“All during the bombings I came here and sat by the lake,” she said. “Dietrich and I sailed here. Gerd ... those days are gone.”

“Hail the conquering hero,” he said with acid in his voice. “What a damned mess this place is. But don’t fret, Erna. We will have those days again and the next time we won’t make the same errors.”

“There won’t be any next time, Gerd.”

“Of course there will.”

“Do you know what happened to us at Stalingrad?”

“A strategic blunder.”

“Do you know what happened to Berlin in the last hundred days?”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Gerd! Hilde and mother and I were violated by Russian soldiers. We have all had enough.”

Gerd’s lips narrowed. “That is why there will be a next time. Only we will choose better allies than those sniveling Italian bastards. The Amis will be on our side. They are strong but they are also naive. We will control the alliance.”

“Gerd! Germans have to change their ways!”

“How, Erna? Do you believe a doddering old fool like Uncle Ulrich can lead the German people? Do you believe the German people will be kept down? We have energy and brains. We are not nigger slaves or wailing Jews.” He laughed with irony. “Even this destruction will have its compensations. Homes and factories have to be built and we need machinery and guns. This will bring Germany jobs and prosperity. Total destruction means total reconstruction.”

“For God’s sake! Don’t you know about Auschwitz?”

“Of course. In the prison camp the Amis held classes called reorientation to democracy. We were told at great length about our wicked ways. It was a joke among the prisoners.”

“You feel no shame?”

“Why should I? What did I do? Besides, let us not pretend we suddenly love the Jews because we lost the war. I think it’s a pity we didn’t kill all of them.”

Ernestine jumped off the boulder. Gerd reached for her. She stiffened at his touch. “Dietrich Rascher always told me you took things too seriously.”

Hilde was getting more nervous around Elke Handfest. Elke’s hand was constantly touching her, squeezing her leg, brushing her bosom. One night she asked Fritz Stumpf not to give her any more dates with Elke.

But she was no longer in a position to make demands. Her day as queen bee was over. Berlin swarmed with beehives and queen bees. Women came in too many varieties and men were too fickle. It was an echo of the orgy running wild all over Germany.

Hilde began to suspect that Fritz Stumpf was deliberately withholding dates from her. Evening after evening now she sat alone in a booth at the Paris Cabaret. She looked bitterly at the new girls, listened to the same tired songs, heard the same complaints. Her dates were with lower-ranking officers and enlisted men, fewer Amis, more Russians. She became fearful that she was losing her beauty. She needed a drink to keep her composure.

When a good date came it always was double with Elke. That made her nervous and she needed a few drinks before leaving the Cabaret.

Hilde toyed with the idea of leaving the Paris. But she knew that all similar places with good connections cooperated with each other. And what if she went out on her own and contracted gonorrhea again. Only someone like Stumpf would be able to supply penicillin.

Trying to leave could bring the risk of blackmail against Uncle Ulrich, or worse, physical harm to herself. Fritz Stumpf had a few more around like the ex-pug, Hippold. There was talk that Hippold had a specialty of using a knife to scar a girl’s face and body. The thought of mutilation of her beautiful body began to bring her to nightmares like Ernestine used to have. In these dreams glass cut her and animals’ teeth ripped her.

She knew now about the velvet room in Stumpf s apartment. The war wound had left him impotent. His pleasure was watching women with each other in the velvet room while a trio played Bach and an ancient actor read the poetry of Schiller and Heine. She cringed with fear now, as Stumpf would often summon a half-dozen girls without dates to come to his apartment.

Gerd’s homecoming set off problems. She remembered Ernestine’s warnings that she was killing a chance for a normal life with a German boy. Chances were slipping that an Ami would have her.

In the days after Gerd’s arrival Hilde began drinking heavily. Sometimes her date found her angry and other times found her remorseful and complaining about her terrible situation. She had started along the path that Elke had warned her against in the very beginning.

“Herr Stumpf wants to see you,” Hippold said.

Fritz Stumpf was no longer gentle or elegant to her. “Hilde,” he said, “your bar bill is growing too large. Last week you drank more than you earned.”

The girl was still beautiful, but the childish charm had hardened and she no longer played at innocence.

“You do not get enough dates for me.”

“There are over a quarter of a million lovely girls in Berlin. Thousands of them would change places with you in a moment. Do you need a drink now, Hilde?”

“Yes.”

She used both hands to steady her glass.

The chanteuse sang the old Kurt Weill Berlin theater song:

“Oh, the shark’s teeth,

How they bite....”

“We are having a little party at my apartment later,” Fritz Stumpf said. “Some of your friends will be there. Elke asked me particularly to invite you. You might be surprised. Things could become better for you again. Shall you be there, Hilde?”

She closed her eyes and nodded ... yes.

Chapter Twenty

A WEEK BEFORE THE elections the weather began to be cold.

In the Potsdam palace of Commissar V. V. Azov, Rudi Wöhlman and Heinrich Hirsch went over final campaign plans.

“It is time for the American radio,” Azov said. He turned the power on and dialed RIAS, paced in a slow gait, hands clasped behind him, eyes on the floor.

“This is the Voice of Freedom.”

Rudi Wöhlman laughed. A slight twitch developed on the right side of the commissar’s face. Heinrich Hirsch prepared to scribble notes.

This is RIAS, Radio in the American Sector. The next voice you hear will be Colonel Neal Hazzard, commandant of the American Sector.”

Azov stopped his pacing and hovered over the radio.

“My friends. In keeping with American policy of bringing the truth to the people of Berlin, I will debunk the latest lie written in the Soviet newspaper, Täglische Rundschau, yesterday. The article by Heinrich Hirsch gave false figures on the contributions of the four occupation powers in the feeding of Berlin. Soviet contributions have amounted to 10 per cent of the total although a third of the population is in the Soviet Sector. Furthermore, this food has been taken entirely from the economy of the Russian Zone of Germany. The United States has spent sixty million dollars of the American people’s money to bring food to this city in the first year of occupation ...”

Azov snapped the radio off, returned to his desk, drummed his fingers. The portrait of Comrade Stalin seemed to glower at him.

Wöhlman wiped his glasses, replaced them. “RIAS has some nuisance value. It will have no effect on the election.”

Wöhlman had reasons to be cocksure. He had engineered a classical campaign mixing inducements with threats. Feed them with the right hand, hold a club with the left.

“Let us continue,” Azov said testily.

Heinrich Hirsch had plotted a whirlwind campaign finish. The usual demonstrations, speeches, and inundation of literature. “In addition, we have the special events. Four days before elections a fifteen-car trainload of wheat and potatoes will arrive and be distributed with extraordinary news coverage.”

There was more. Ten thousand tons of Polish Silesian coal would arrive for the winter.

The final coup would take place two days before the election. Five Democratic candidates for assemblyman had been “persuaded” by Schatz’s SND to join the anti-Fascist front, legal only in the Russian Sector. They would make their announcements at almost poll time.

It all looked well on paper. Yet Azov was not entirely certain. Brigadier Trepovitch had reported a stiffening Western attitude at the Kommandatura. Moreover, the Western military government personnel had too much experience in open elections to fall for trickery. The Russian attempt to have different-colored ballots for each party failed.

The West insisted Trepovitch submit the list of eligible voters and that he use the stamping of ration books to assure a single ballot to a single voter.

British, French, and American officials would be on hand at every polling station in the Russian Sector.... It would be damned hard to rig.