Lost Kin Page 3

  He heard his housekeeper out in the hallway. “Gerlinde? Come in here, please.”

  Gerlinde planted herself in the doorway, her gray hair pulled back severely. It was her attempt to tame the frizz, he guessed. She shook her head at him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Fräulein Irina is roaming the upstairs looking out windows and rubbing her hands together. She will not rest anymore. I told her.”

  “She’s up? Why didn’t you …”

  Gerlinde held out her hands in confusion—he’d never instructed her to inform him.

  “It’s okay. Tell you what, why don’t you bring her down here to me?”

  Gerlinde padded off, shaking her head again.

  She ushered Irina into the main living room. Irina’s skin had more color, her hair was up in a loose bun, and Gerlinde had lent her a simple blue smock that, owing to Irina’s emaciation, was so baggy that Irina kept pulling it back onto a shoulder and so short she kept tugging down the hem. Harry had on civvies—brown trousers and gray wool sweater. They sat in broad tapestry armchairs grouped at the base of a column, and in another world might have been two travelers chatting in a hotel lobby. Harry tried small talk in German. Irina confirmed she had slept well, yes. Gerlinde was washing her clothes. Another tug and pull at the dress. Was she hungry? No, Gerlinde had fed her well.

  Then Irina sat up straight. “Thank you, Herr Kapitän Kaspar. For the nice sleep. I want to say this to you.”

  “Call me Harry.”

  She stared at him.

  “So who was he?” he said. “A Pole? A Yugo? German?”

  Irina hugged herself, with apparent worry, and seemed to lose a third of her size. Her feet even came up off the floor.

  “Go on, you’re safe here. Not with dead man. Not with police. Remember?”

  “Max know English,” she blurted in English. “He know it well. To me, he sounds as you. American man.”

  So she did know Max’s name. She had hit Harry so fast with it that he just glared at her to go on, to give him more. He needed details, confirmation. Was Max alive? Her eyes, avoiding him, found another window. As she gazed out, she reported instead on what she had heard about Harry. It was only the basics—Harry had hijacked a train of plunder and he gave it to good people. Waving her arms, her voice rising. Harry kept his blank face. Even hearing this, her simple and relatively harmless version of the tale, it shot through him as if he’d touched an electrified fence. His Heimgau posting was like the Wild West and seemed about as long ago sometimes. Yet the farther he got from it, the stronger he knew it would return to haunt him.

  “You risked your life, yes? Yes?” she said, stabbing a finger at him. “For others you do this.”

  Some Americans had heard rumors of it, but none knew the names involved as far as Harry could tell. One thing he had learned about those under foreign control: They often had more information than the occupier did—the occupied, the refugees, and the down-and-out were the real experts in the know. It amazed him how they were able to spread news, as if they shared access to some secret wireless television apparatus. There were days when he wished some fellow Americans knew just what he was capable of. They might even appreciate it. His girlfriend Maddy Barton might know the rumor, but she certainly didn’t know it was he. And why tell her? She wouldn’t believe it, and that wasn’t her fault. What clues had he given any of them? None. Handmade horn rims and a mansion do not a rebel make.

  “I’m asking the questions here,” he said.

  Irina smiled. “You know what you are? You are Kudeyar,” she said, what sounded to Harry like “cool-jar” and obviously from her native language. Then her eyes widened and she waved hands. “I mean to say, you are like hero of legend your people call Robin Hood—”

  “Says you,” Harry said, his voice rising. “Robin Hood? Someone told you that word. Someone from the West. The same person who told you about me. Was it Max?”

  “Please? I can’t …”

  They heard footsteps, from down the hall. Harry kept at it. He leaned forward. “Who told you to find me?” he barked. “Was it Max? Well, was it or was it not my brother?”

  She said nothing. She bowed her head.

  Harry stood over her. “We don’t have a lot of time here, get me? Sure, the body’s on ice. But ice melts, honey, and the water it runs fast.”

  “Please. I promised him.”

  “That right? He promised me some things. Promised my parents. Tell me, or you can tell it to the MPs. You understand? Militärpolizei. Oh, we’re not done. There’s the CIC—that’s the Counter Intelligence Corps to you, and the US Constabulary too. You really don’t want the likes of them. They wear yellow scarves, think they’re God’s own cavalry.” He’d grabbed her wrist, squeezing it. He didn’t want to play it this way but here it was.

  “He’s in danger,” Irina muttered.

  “What?”

  “They are all. They can’t escape …”

  The footsteps neared—and came faster, more clipped than Gerlinde’s.

  “Who’s they? Escape what?” Harry said.

  Irina started to choke up.

  “Oh, no, don’t start with the tears, sister. I’m no soft touch. I took you in, but you want me to help? You got to come clean.”

  Irina glared at him, and for a moment Harry figured he was going to get a spitball between the eyes. He let go of her wrist, she shook her hands as if she had icy water on them.

  The footsteps had stopped. Maddy Barton was standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. Her bright blood red, Chinese-style silk dress was such a contrast to the brown and gray room it was as if a spotlight had been turned on her. Her lipstick was even redder, which the fresh powder on her cheeks only emphasized. Irina sat up and gazed, more in awe than in fright. Irina probably hadn’t seen a striking dame all dolled up like this for years, if ever. Harry had seen a lot of them ever since the occupation began to require more Girl Fridays than GI Joes, and he had managed to stay clear of them until Maddy Barton came along. You could call her his girlfriend, but he wasn’t too sure anymore. Yesterday Maddy had wanted to go to another of those parties Harry couldn’t stand, all visiting committee congressman pressing the flesh and hinting at buxom Fräuleins for hire, the sycophantic adjutants there to keep the correspondents drunk, most officers risen three ranks or more in the time Harry had remained a captain. Maddy went anyway. Harry stayed in, and for his trouble got a plain clothes named Hartmut Dietz knocking on his door.

  A long thin Pall Mall hung from Maddy’s red nails. She was only now coming home from the big shindig.

  “Have a nice time?” Harry said.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.” Maddy’s eyes narrowed and upped and downed Irina. She left a pause where in kinder times she might have introduced herself. “More house staff?” she said. Not a bad jab, if only Irina could understand it. “We could use a good laundry girl,” she added.

  “She’s a refugee,” Harry said, adding, “she’s a DP,” since a DP or Displaced Person by definition was someone who suffered from the Nazi regime and needed care according to policy and regulations and common goddamn decency. DPs were likely just one step above a local German in Maddy’s eyes, but every bit helped. Harry had put up DPs before. “It’s a liaison issue of mine. She’s got nowhere else to go. Yet. Only be a couple days.”

  “That so? Shame. Might want to keep one around next time,” Maddy said, her eyes fixed on Harry, “’cause you could use the house help,” and with that she pivoted and continued on down the hallway, the clip of her heels then rising up the stairs.

  Leaving Irina to stare at the doorway. She had slumped again. Harry thought about saying something about her long black hair, how it could be styled to look like Maddy’s. He didn’t know if that was what a woman wanted to hear in such a situation. Harry did know that Maddy’s cold-shoulder barely hid the keen curiosity of a muckraker. She could have worked for Hearst.

  He waited for Maddy’s footsteps to fade upstair
s and said, “The way I see it? You’re not able—out of coercion, fear, what have you—to talk about this. So I’m going to have to report it.”

  Irina’s chin dropped. “Report?”

  “Uh-huh.” It was another bluff, but all that Harry had.

  Meanwhile, aromas of real coffee and bread wafted into the room. Out in the hallway, Gerlinde hurried past bearing clothes on one arm and a tray piled with food on the other. Maddy was putting his housekeeper through her paces again—standard operating procedure after lasting the whole night through.

  Sweat beads had formed on Irina’s forehead.

  “Unless you can tell me more,” Harry said. “See? We help each other.”

  Irina looked up, her face green. She tried to stand but whirled around wobbling, as if to vomit. Harry bolted for her, caught her going down.

  “Gerlinde!” he shouted, “I need help here.”

  Nothing came out but a dry heave. Crouching, Harry held Irina in his arms, cradling her. “You better not be playing me for a fool,” he muttered.

  Irina groaned. Her heavy breathing hinted at what had had almost come up—Gerlinde had fed her precious liverwurst and radishes.

  “Oh, that’s a tough break. Not used to eating like that, are you?” he said.

  Irina stared with glassy eyes, her eyelids heavy. A wan smile spread across her face. “You do look like him, as a man. And he said this about you too.”

  She moaned. She passed out.

  Gerlinde and Harry carried her back to her room. Noon passed. They let her sleep. Harry returned to his den, pacing around the furniture. He would have had things under control if Maddy hadn’t made her big entrance. Maybe he shouldn’t have put the screws on Irina like he had.

  Then he remembered what Irina had said: Max told her that his little brother looked more like him now.

  Which, Harry realized, meant Max must have seen him at some point. With his own eyes.

  He bolted over to a window. Was that why Irina was looking out? Max was watching them?

  Peering out, his forehead to the cold glass, Harry only saw a lead gray sky and woods gone dim.

  “Herr Kaspar!” Gerlinde rushed in, her shawl trailing off a shoulder and she didn’t care, such was the pale shock on her face. Harry knew what was coming.

  “The girl—she’s gone,” Gerlinde said. “Not one trace of her anywhere.”

  Three

  HARRY CONSIDERED THE TIGHT SPOT he was in and decided that the neighborhood where Detective Dietz of the Munich Police had led him to Irina and a corpse was not the ideal spot to search for her. Returning to the scene, as it were. He went anyway, on foot. He could have headed out to a bar or a show instead to get his mind off things, but then he’d only rub shoulders with the usual Americans complaining about conditions. And Harry would choke back his anger again. You want conditions? Step out of your clubby clubs and staff cars for one moment and look around you. Smell it, if you dare. And try to remember why you are here in the first place. Besides, he didn’t feel much like running into Maddy.

  This neighborhood, he knew from his backgrounders, was once a stronghold of Munich’s working-class Socialists until the Nazis purged it. Then the Americans and Brits bombed it. Tough block, tough luck. At least last night’s wet snow had ceased. He manned a street corner and stepped in place to keep warm and plied passersby with Lucky Strikes and Hershey’s, nothing shady here, just a curious Ami with a few questions, but none of the locals knew a thing about a Russian girl lying low. He only got shrugs and more shrugs. And he kept seeing the same refugees shuffle past as if they, having nowhere else to go, simply traveled concentric circles around the center of Munich.

  He was starting to feel like one of them, the way he was running around for nothing. It was pushing four p.m. on Saturday—a good three hours since Irina made a break for it. Harry and Gerlinde had searched the mansion. Irina had taken only her clothes, a sandwich Gerlinde had set out for her, and all three of the sabers—Harry had left them leaning against his bedroom dresser. And she somehow snuck out of that creaky old mansion quieter than the mice Harry could hear from two floors away.

  Daylight would be dimming soon. Harry found the block with the blast hole in the building and crept through the rubble tunnel back to the cellar. He could hear it well before he entered—a young German woman had moved in with a mob of children who, instead of tugging at Harry’s pant legs, huddled shrunken in the shadows with their big drooping eyes on him like old owls. Harry took a good look around. The place was picked clean, of course, right down to the board that served as the dead man’s final resting place—busted up for firewood no doubt. The woman knew nothing except the one indisputable fact that her husband would return from the Eastern Front, where he was a POW, he’d return any day. Sure, sure, Harry told her.

  “You know a Detective Dietz?” he asked her. “From the neighborhood here? Yes, you do?” He gave her a can of spam. “Don’t save it for when your man comes back. Give it to the kids. Promise me.” She promised.

  Dietz’s block was only two over, the woman told Harry, but to reach it, he had to backtrack around a giant rubble pile that led him in yet another circle until he discovered a detour through a courtyard. Dietz’s building looked lucky. It had shrapnel scars and smoke-damaged sandstone but compared to the surroundings looked like a Residenz instead of the dull tenement it was before the bar lowered to such deep depths. As Harry neared Dietz’s corner, he spotted the police detective waiting on the curb. Harry almost expected it. The cellar woman’s eyes had lit up at Dietz’s mention, which meant Dietz had a reputation. Word would pass fast to him while Harry circled.

  Dietz was slapping his hands together as if he’d just come out for the fresh air that wasn’t so much fresh as refrigerated grit. “Herr Kaspar?” he said. “Surprised to see you passing by.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “Just heading out.”

  “Of course you are. Trading? Or is it work?”

  “Are they not the same thing?” Dietz said, adding a laugh. He was scanning the surrounding rubble and its various openings, trying to hold the smile.

  “Don’t worry, I’m alone.”

  “Are you sure?” Dietz’s eyes fell back on Harry.

  “Herr Dietz—Hartmut, I’m Military Government, remember? I’m here to look after you.”

  “And this is why you leave me with a corpse my colleagues are itching to ask me about.” Dietz was speaking lower now.

  “I told you it’ll be worth your while.”

  “That is not what I mean,” Dietz snapped. “I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “You won’t. No one will.”

  Dietz stole a glance back at his building. “I did not tell you my address.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Waltz right into police headquarters? So calm yourself.”

  “All right, all right,” Dietz said. He touched Harry on the shoulder, which was very un-German and un-conquered of him, but then a year and a half into an occupation was a strange, neutralizing time. He flashed a smile. “So. Should we take a walk?”

  Dietz and Harry strode around a corner and into a better-off neighborhood, passing shops with actual windows and signs (most reading Closed or Out of Stock, but who was counting?). They had ridden a short stretch on a packed streetcar, Dietz hanging on the outside with the rest of the sorry German men, Harry warm inside as befitting an American although the local riders’ shortage of soap didn’t mix so well. Now Harry and Dietz kept big smiles on their faces as if just a happy Ami and German out on a stroll. It could have been a photo in LIFE.

  “How’s the Fräulein?” Dietz said through his teeth.

  “She’s okay,” Harry said. “She needed rest. Been through the grinder, that girl.”

  “She tell you about it?”

  “Not yet. She needs time. So I need time.”

  They crossed a small square before a bombed-out church, the only blemish on the neighborhood. Groups of men, huddled with their backs
facing out, halted their black market food trading to watch Dietz and the American captain pass. Dietz raised a hand to reassure them but didn’t look their way.

  “The body?” Harry said.

  “In a drawer. Safe for now. I had to remove the uniform, for discretion’s sake. Please do not ask me to destroy it.”

  “Of course not, it’s evidence. Are you crazy?”

  Dietz snorted. “No, but everyone else is.”

  They reached the Isar River, just south of Old Town. Harry led them to a bench along the bank, lit up two Chesterfields, handed one to Dietz, and told him just to smoke the damn thing for once. They puffed and looked out. The Isar rushed by as brown and frigid as ever, but that didn’t stop people from hauling water out of the river in buckets and cans and rusting helmets while others attempted to wash clothes. Women lunged for the scraps of wood that drifted by—such valuable firewood. Amazing they weren’t all dead from hypothermia, Harry thought. Just looking at that water seemed to make the temperature drop ten degrees.

  Dietz shook his head. “The blood is all over that corpse of ours. A mess.”

  “I know. Look, thanks for this. I know it’s not easy.”

  “Ach. What is?” Dietz spat a loose shred of tobacco. “I couldn’t wash him, mind you, because blood is evidence, and who would want to waste the cleanser in any case? I fingered around as best as I could with a bright light and a good lens.” He sighed at the memory. “Well, in the end it was the uniform that gave us a clue.”

  “What sort of clue?”

  “I thought, is it not odd this man has no dog tags, paybook, papers, nothing private on him? Not even a photo of loving mother or one of your ‘Dear John’ letters. Quite suspicious.” Dietz picked another tobacco shred from his teeth. He stared at Harry doing it. “There was a name, on the trousers: Earvin Posey.”

  “Funny last name. So?”

  “So, your Mister Posey is no flower. He’s on our list of known Ami deserters in the region, a list that your Military Police gives us.”