Lost Kin Read online

  Well, it looks like we’re through, Madd. I hesitate to be so hard about it but there it is. You know it’s run its course and I know it, too. It seems we’re on two different paths here, you and I. That’s not a judgment on you. It’s just the score.

  You know I’m doing you a favor. It was a good ride while it lasted, and I’ll cherish having ridden it with you.

  Love always,

  Harry

  He included a postscript about her belongings in the garage. He was trying to make it easier on both of them. He was really doing her a favor. If her things were still in the house, only more drama would have ensued because neither could have helped themselves from having one last go, whether it was a shouting match or another roll in the sack.

  If pressed, he might have told Maddy a bitter truth—he didn’t have time for her now. His search for Irina and Max had sparked something in him. Life was too short. Lives had to be saved. And winter was coming. How many more would suffer then? He wanted to be the man catching the fish and not the one eating it. The last time he felt the spark, that fire, he had solved the torture-murder of three decent civilians—and then avenged the murders of two men he’d urged to help him in his fight. That the sick bastard behind it all ended up to be an American was a small shock to an immigrant like Harry. He had chosen America and expected more from it. These days, he knew better. A country didn’t matter. The cold fact was that all over, in every damned country, too many suffered at the mercy of a few bullies who presumed they ran the rest.

  Dietz was right. This was no time to hold back. With the corpse off his hands, Harry realized he had nothing to lose. Friday afternoon he had a full schedule of appointments. He canceled them all.

  He hit the black markets, plazas, and known hangouts of DPs, always with the same message. “You know a young woman named Irina?” He described her in detail. “She’s in real trouble but I—the US Military Government—have good news for her. We are granting her an amnesty.” He flashed papers from his fancy attaché and added a big Ami smile. “It’s official! Amnesty—Straferlass! But that’s not all. There’s a huge reward for finding her.”

  On Saturday he was at it again—brandishing that attaché with both hands as if it held gold bars. He was like one of those mothers of German soldiers still traipsing through train stations in droves, never giving up asking if someone, anyone had seen their sons who’d gone missing on the Eastern Front circa 1943. If he had a photo of Max, he would hold it up just as they did. Then he started asking about Max by name.

  “Anyone know Maximilian Kaspar? He was an actor. He lived in America. Surely someone’s heard of the man?”

  If any Americans saw him or heard him attracting attention like this? Let them wonder. Let them report him. This was all or nothing.

  He got nothing.

  That afternoon, he ended up at the Standkaserne. He’d parked his jeep and was walking down the main avenue when Sabine Lieser stepped out from one of the linden trees lining the way, as if the two of them were playing hide and seek among the trunks. It made Harry smile. But Sabine had her hands on her hips, and she hurried him along. She sat him in a nicer office tucked away in a first-rate Quonset hut. The metal blinds were half closed, creating strips of light that made the chromed steel table between them glimmer and dressed Sabine with their gleaming. But she wasn’t exactly glowing.

  “What in the devil do you think you’re doing?” she said. “Don’t act like you don’t know. You run around offering rewards? Calling out her name, Irina’s name? You could bring real trouble.”

  “I wasn’t calling out her name—”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  Harry leaned forward, letting the light flash in his eyes. “Well, I don’t have too many options, do I? If you haven’t noticed.”

  Sabine stared a moment, her body rigid as if those strips of light had strapped her in place. She broke free and stood. She went to the window, separated the blinds with two slim fingers, and peeked out. She turned the blinds closed a little more, almost shut. She sat back down in her chair, crossed her legs, and clasped her hands around her knee.

  “I have decided,” she said, “that I want you to know something. The Nazis imprisoned me.”

  A slight gasp escaped from Harry, and he hoped it didn’t sound like laughter. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do not be. The Nazis didn’t like Socialists and they were always striving, so incessantly, to show us just how tough they were. The Gestapo kept tabs on me. They never held me too long—a few weeks at a time, and about a year once.”

  “A whole year?”

  “But then the war turned for the worse and they had bigger fish to fry—literally—and German ‘undesirables’ such as I were not a priority.”

  “That’s where you were a nurse? In a prison hospital.”

  Sabine nodded. “I did what I could. I had been in nursing school. They made me drop out.” She crossed her legs the other way. “In any case. I wanted you to know.”

  “I appreciate it,” Harry said.

  He wasn’t sure what to say, where this was going. Their eyes darted around but kept finding each other.

  Sabine planted her feet to the floor, slapped her thighs. “So. All that running around? You must be hungry. You can eat here, in the mess. The food’s quite good.”

  “I’m fine. But thanks.” Harry’s appetite was boring a hole in his stomach, but he wanted to show her he wasn’t just another pampered Ami needing platefuls of good chow around the clock.

  “You’ve been among Slavic DPs,” he said. “Do you know what Kudeyar means?”

  Sabine’s head raised up. “I do, actually.”

  “What?”

  “Kudeyar was a folk hero. An ataman. I mean to say, Kudeyar was a Cossack—a Cossack type of Robin Hood. But one who can lop off heads while he’s at it.”

  “With, say, a saber?”

  Sabine squinted at him. “How do you know this?”

  “About Kudeyar? Irina told me. Silly girl, she said I was like that.” Harry added a chuckle. He hoped it wasn’t too cocksure. He wasn’t used to strutting like this, but Sabine seemed to be drawing it out of him.

  “What are we talking about here?” Sabine said. “Sabers? A saber’s an object. I’m not interested in objects, especially ones that kill.”

  “What are you interested in?”

  “People,” Sabine said.

  “So am I,” Harry said.

  “You’re not going to give up, are you? Tell me that.”

  “No. I’m not. I won’t.”

  Their eyes had found each other’s and refused to dart now. His followed the lines of her face, her mouth, and returned to meet her gaze.

  “Irina was here,” she said.

  “She what?”

  “I told her she could not stay.”

  “When?”

  “When it was too dangerous for her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Could I trust you? I was not so sure.” Sabine threw up a hand.

  “It’s tough to trust. I understand. But is she still here, in Munich?”

  “I believe so, yes,” Sabine said. She looked away, consulting the blinds.

  “Give me a clue. Anything,” Harry said.

  Sabine was biting at her lip. She glanced at him. Harry glared back. She lifted a cigarette pack from the tabletop between them. Harry placed his hand over hers, keeping the pack down. She stared at his hand a while as if reading his veins like a fortune-teller. His hand warmed with anticipation. She pulled her hand away.

  “Go to the English Garden,” she said. “Wait there. They will find you. Go now.”

  Harry’s mouth was dry. His knees ached. He sat on a bench in the English Garden, the bench biting into his back. He should have taken up Sabine on her offer of food, he understood now, because he’d been planted here over an hour and no one had come to him. He had the bench to himself, looking out on a meadow. He paced around the bench to keep warm, for the tenth time.
He sat again, but the bench bit again and he was all out of sitting positions.

  The last of the day’s sun broke through, warming his face. A dusting of new snow sparkled, in patches. It was bright, and it made him close his eyes.

  He woke, sometime later. How long had he been asleep? The sun was sinking, the scattered clouds dimming to a dark purple like bruises on the sky.

  A slip of paper lay on the bench next to his right hand, anchored by a rock. It was a note:

  Nationaltheater. 17:30 hours.

  —Irina

  Harry checked his watch. He had fifteen minutes.

  He jogged out the south end of the English Garden and navigated the remains of the Residenz, that demolished palace of former Bavarian monarchs, the classical garden’s paths lined with scrubby grass, blackened statues, and fountains. He kicked clear loose cobblestones as he found his way through the shadowy piles of rubble and considered the piles his friends for once because the Residenz stood between Major Warren Joyner’s MP building and the Nationaltheater, and rubble like this provided good cover. The Nationaltheater was a carcass, a blackened maze of columns and busted half-columns like some junkyard Stonehenge, the remnants of floors above left hanging like the last leaves on a November tree, the roof all but gone. A statue was lodged upside down in debris, the head submerged. Harry headed deeper inside, using the columns as cover. As darkness came, light flashed from all sides, from passing cars, surviving streetlights, a stray spotlight or bonfire, a collage of rays and shadows monstrous and looming, the beams so sharp they looked like they could slice a torso in two. Harry tiptoed along, one foot and then the other, having to feel each step so that it wouldn’t give away.

  He only stopped at what he took to be the center of the place. He waited. He sat on a block of marble—he’d get soot on his butt but that would be the worst of it if he were lucky. He heard a siren in the distance, the clip-clop of a horse cart out on the Maximilianstrasse, and then voices, but far outside. Feet were shuffling out on some sidewalk. A distant crunch of glass. He heard nothing inside here. The stone and marble made it colder, just like inside a real building, and he got a chill. He turned up his collar.

  “Heinrich,” he heard.

  It sounded like it came from his right, but it was hard to tell with all the dark angles, hollows, echoes. He stood but kept to a crouch. “Who you calling Heinrich?” he said in English.

  A little laugh, with a strained high note like a worn bell. “Why, you, of course.”

  “The girl—where’s Irina?”

  “She’s safe. I do appreciate your concern.”

  It was decent American English, but Harry heard the rough edges. The voice seemed to have moved, though Harry heard no footsteps. Tricky fellow, this one.

  “Says you,” Harry said stalling, peering into the darkness, hoping for more stray light.

  “But, that is your real name, isn’t it, Heinrich?” the voice said in German.

  A white shock shot through Harry’s chest, sucking his stomach so tight he wanted to gag. He knew this voice, this laugh.

  “The name’s Harry,” he snapped.

  That laugh came again. A hacking cough came next, like marbles on metal, but the laugh would not give in.

  “Max?” Harry blurted. The coughing continued. Harry moved toward the laugh-cough, tottering, his heels wobbling on rubble.

  A convoy of trucks passed outside, sending in beams of headlamps.

  And Harry saw the long shadow of his brother, stretching out from behind a column, the distorted shape flickering and quaking from the wild barrage of light.

  Ten

  HARRY STOOD DEAD CENTER INSIDE the ruins of the Nationaltheater and peered into the darkness, searching the columns for the source of the shadow. It had vanished after the convoy of trucks passed outside. The laugh and the coughing had stopped.

  Then a head showed from behind a column, obscured by more shadow, an eclipsed half face. “It’s all right. I’m alone. Let me see you,” Harry said.

  “Sure, sure.”

  Max stepped out into the dim evening. One shoulder looked higher than the other did. He had a stoop?

  Max took two steps forward, Harry took three.

  Harry clanked open his Zippo, held up the flame. Max’s face had creases. Those once soft and happy cheeks and brows were heavier, which made his eyes look sunken. His brother now looked like their handsome grandfather when they were children. Yet it was all Max. He wore a scarf checked with purple and gold and tied like an ascot. It compensated for his jacket, which had a mix of old buttons and various color threads mending the buttonholes. Hanging off his shoulders, like a cloak, was an old German Army greatcoat dyed black to look civilian.

  “That’s quite enough,” Max said.

  Harry clanked shut the Zippo.

  “Tell me I look good and I will box your ears,” Max continued, adding a smile, and it was still Max’s smile, the way it stretched wide open and curled up at the same time, bringing those wide eyes back out of their deep sockets. He came closer, dragging a wooden stick that tapped at the debris. A cane?

  “Your leg hurt?” Harry said.

  Max looked at the cane as if someone had just thrust it in his hand. “Oh, this? Why, it’s just for effect. A prop.” He threw the cane, it clattered away, and he held out his arms for a hug.

  Harry held out a hand instead and Max didn’t flinch, ever the smooth actor. He grasped at Harry’s forearm with one hand and gave Harry a firm handshake with the other. Their eyes were almost level. Max’s eyes used to be higher, Harry recalled.

  “I had you a little spooked,” Max said. “Admit it.”

  That was Max—always with the taunts and gags. Harry couldn’t help thinking that it was good to see Maxie still had it. “Not a chance,” he said and added a smile.

  Max smiled and held out his hands as if to say, I gotta be me.

  “You’re alive,” Harry said.

  “You say it like it’s such a bad thing.”

  “I don’t know what it is. It’s been, what—eight years at least? All the same: It’s good to see you, Maximilian.”

  “Please, do not call me that or Maxie for that matter, and I will not call you Heinrich or even Heino like it used to be.” Max stood back a step and gave Harry the full once-over. “You’re a real Ami. Looking well.”

  “Thanks. Where’s Irina?”

  Max nodded, a half smile on his face. “Still the same Heinrich though, aren’t you?”

  “Harry. It’s Harry now.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, you’ll be glad to know: She’s safe. So, come on.” Max patted Harry’s shoulder and led him out another way, passing beyond more busted columns. Full darkness had found them but Max navigated no problem, forcing Harry to feel at the back of his brother’s cloak-coat as they moved along.

  “See that ironwork over there?” Max said.

  Harry peered. “No.”

  “That’s because it’s all melted clumps. That used to be the stage. The firebombing was so hot here that it melted metal.” Max was shaking his head. “Demolished just like my career.”

  Harry said nothing. What was he supposed to say—that it wasn’t Max’s fault?

  “Funny, here we are, on an October Friday evening in the State Theater,” Max continued. “It might have been an opening night.”

  “Only problem with that is, the year is 1946,” Harry said.

  “And don’t I know it, Heinrich? Sorry—Harry.”

  Out on the street, Max kept them close to the walls and doorways. Harry wasn’t sure what dangers Max wanted them to heed, but he told himself not to ask too many questions or deduce too much—for once. Not yet. Harry wasn’t sure what he would feel. For so long he never expected to see his brother again. He guessed he’d feel bitterness and certainly not the warmth he was feeling. Was it Maxie’s old flair doing that? That had always been the biggest shock to Harry—that a gent with so much pizzazz chose a one-tune playhouse called Nazi Germany. Max had seemed tailo
r-made for New York City, or at least for what Harry imagined of NYC.

  They were talking in a mix of English and German, and it was as awkward as when they were young immigrants in America—Harry always going for the English and Max the German.

  “Your English is really something,” Harry said.

  “Thanks. Have lots more practice since you Amis stole the show.”

  “I’m sure. Ma and pop will be glad to hear it—that you’re okay.”

  “They already know, Harry. Come on, around this corner here—”

  “They know? How? And where we going?”

  “Due time, kid, due time. I know you must have questions. A man is murdered and then suddenly I show up. Come on, this way. I have something for you, to show you. It will mean spending some time together, making up for lost time to be sure. You mustn’t be home tonight, right? Good. There’s a good brother.”

  The way Max had proposed it, Harry half expected Max to kick things off by taking him to a nightclub he was headlining or even owned. They would celebrate with champagne and girls who felt like dancing all night. It was nothing like that. Max asked Harry if he could get a dependable but inconspicuous car (a German make, if possible) with lots of gas in the tank.

  “Please don’t get a jeep,” Max added. “I really do not like riding in your jeeps, not at all.”

  Then Max asked him if he could spare a couple days. Harry said he had the whole weekend. Then they finally shared a clumsy hug, Max all forced smiles and Harry’s face feeling numb from the shock of it all, as if he’d spent too long at the barracks dentist.