Lost Kin Page 4

  Harry wasn’t surprised. A good number of GIs in Germany had deserted full time to commit rapes, attack the locals, extort, plunder, and smuggle, among other vices. It had started during the war, when some probably had their reasons. Spanner had reasons that almost got Harry killed. But nowadays it was just one more symptom of their complacent yet unsettled occupation of endless duration. Idle hands, working away. “What else you got on him?”

  “He was listed as violent and dangerous.” Dietz shrugged at that.

  A craft was coming down the river—a log raft laden with women and children hugging their bags and a man standing, somehow, pushing the raft along with a wooden post. It was like something out of Mark Twain, if only … The sight hit Harry low in the gut, and he clasped his hands together and waved them to wish the raft refugees luck. As they passed they just stared back, exhausted, wet, freezing.

  Dietz glared at the raft as if simply annoyed it distracted Harry. “It makes me want to know more about this girl of yours. Does she belong to the Poseys of our fine world or to a pathetic journey like that raft there?”

  “I’m working on it, I told you. Getting to the bottom of it. It’s my responsibility.”

  “I understand. I do believe you.”

  They stomped their feet and smoked, not so much for the relaxation but for the warmth that was in the smoke.

  “Shashka,” Dietz said.

  “Come again?”

  “It’s what that type of sword is called. They’re from Russia and White Russia, Ukraine, The Steppes. Take your pick.”

  “Thanks, I’ll check it out.”

  “Good, because our corpse cannot stay frozen long.”

  Dusk fell as Dietz led Harry on a different route back through Old Town. A crew of men was clearing rubble in the dim purple-gray light. All were stooped, their shoulders sagging, the thick, oversized white letters PW on the backs of their dark coveralls seeming to weigh on them as much as the debris they heaved. Bored GI guards watched over them. These prisoners were hard cases and possibly SS, since most German POWs in the West had been released long ago. Harry made a mental note to look up whether Dietz had been in the Wehrmacht. Asking him about it now wasn’t exactly going to cement the man’s loyalty. As if reading Harry’s mind, Dietz walked with his head down, his hands deep in his pockets.

  And Harry thought of his brother again. He reminded himself to keep a clear head. Invoking Max’s name could still be some kind of swindle—Irina hearing somehow that this flush Ami had a lost brother and she’d tried to exploit the info. Everyone had an angle, if only to survive. Around here lost relatives were used like gold bars or more valuable currency such as a rare fresh potato or the promise of one. Harry had considered everything. Deduced. He was no fantasist. But, lacking hard proof, he simply had to go on instinct. And then his gut kept reminding him that Irina had recognized him in the same way a distant relative recognizes family. He could tell from her eyes. Hell, he almost saw Max’s twinkle in her eyes.

  It hadn’t escaped him that Dietz appeared to be admirably discreet himself about mentioning his brother. The detective had not even brought it up today.

  Dietz had strode ahead. He entered a side street and faced Harry catching up. “Should we split up here?” he said.

  “Sure. Probably best we don’t stay together too long. But, I have a question: You ever hear of a German named Max Kaspar?”

  Dietz’s head cocked to one side. “Spelled like your name? With K?”

  Harry nodded.

  Dietz’s head cocked the other way.

  “Okay, you can cut the act now. He’s my brother,” Harry said.

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “I appreciate your keeping things quiet—‘on the QT,’ we say. I just … I only have so much time over here, so I supposed maybe it was time I started looking.”

  “The girl did not know where to find him?”

  “No.”

  “He look like you?”

  “As kids, sure, but now?” Harry shrugged.

  “Kaspar … Max Kaspar,” Dietz muttered. He shook his head, deep in thought.

  “He is—or was—an actor.” It was hard to imagine his brother doing anything else. Max was Maxie. Maxie played. Harry remembered that Max worked hard but never let you see it. He wasn’t political and hardly an opportunist, except when it came to champagne for breakfast, rich sauces, and dames that purred. Harry added, “Max had come back over here from New York. He had some success in Germany, I heard, before …”

  “Before” meant before 1942, before Stalingrad, after which the promise of Hitler’s Greater Germany descended down a black pit faster than people could claw and climb. Harry couldn’t imagine Max in a soldier’s uniform even on stage. But the times had turned the most unthinkable notions into Technicolor gems. By the spring of ’45, Hitler was demanding that children and old men take up arms for the Final Victory.

  Dietz was still shaking his head, probably less at his failure to recognize the name Max Kaspar as much as at the sad choices that people make. “No. I don’t know the name. I wish I knew of him. For you. I am sorry.”

  Four

  HARRY WALKED SOUTH FROM HIS MANSION, edging along the English Garden. He wore his uniform and kept his head up, his shoulders squared. Cap under an arm. Let them see his face, anyone and all of them, whoever might be watching. Irina herself could even be tracking him from behind statues, pillars. Max could be. If Harry didn’t spot them first.

  It was now Monday morning, October 16, 1946. Harry had spent all day Sunday looking for Irina, in the train stations, on the big and small squares, and along the main avenues where hordes of refugees trudged in and out of Munich. He asked at checkpoints and in crowds. Nothing. Nichts. Irina still had to be in Munich. She was his responsibility. He had taken the risk. Others might have thrown up their hands, Harry told himself. He could have turned the corpse in, confessed to bungling it, and taken his lumps. Taken his chances. Since he only had a month or so left, a dishonorable discharge would hardly have been worth the carbon quadruplicates, he reckoned, and he overcame his late night fears this way. Or, he could have paid Detective Dietz to find Irina. Dietz knew people an Ami never could. But Harry didn’t work that way. He wasn’t the sort to sit and wait for answers. Maybe that was why they had never promoted him after Heimgau, he thought. He didn’t delegate enough. Didn’t make others do the dirty work. They could stuff their powers of delegation, he thought.

  He hurried along, turning onto the broad Ludwigstrasse, daydreaming about what he would say to Irina once he found her. He would be understanding, yet firm. He would demand to be taken to Max but any way she wanted it. In the meantime, he had to be careful. He stopped before a plate-glass window to observe the street in its reflection. This was what spies did in pictures, but he wasn’t exactly sure what to look for. Would someone trailing him be across the avenue, or on down the sidewalk? And what about shadows?

  After Sunday’s washout, Harry had come up with a new angle. Military Police headquarters had a prime location where Ludwig’s grand avenue funneled into the Odeonsplatz, the opera house, and Old Town. His uniform was pressed for his visit and he would’ve pinned on more fruit salad if he had any—anything shiny helped with the MPs. The marble and iron lobby resembled a post office or bank. A sergeant sitting erect behind a polished oak desk the size of a jeep took Harry’s name, asked his business, sir, and directed him up a staircase. Harry never cared for these MPs hard cases, but they were all right, he reassured himself, just a little rule-bound and tightly wound up. Then they made Harry wait longer than the Germans who passed in and out. Harry watched the sergeant talk on the phone about him. And Harry’s skin started to heat up. Then they sent him on to another clerk behind another jeep-sized desk, this one a stone-faced sergeant major who sent Harry on through a back courtyard to an adjoining building.

  They were sending Harry to a major who might help, stone-face had told him.

  Outside, Harry lit a Chesterfield and exhaled
some of his heat. He wondered why they were giving him the runaround. Maybe it was because he was German-born and from Military Government—all eggheads, Commies, and silver spoon do-gooder types making nice with the conquered krauts, to name just three of the wholly untrue assumptions. Maybe, like dogs, they had even smelled poor detective Dietz on him. What he wanted to do was tell them about his seizing a certain train and taking out one of worst perpetrators in the US Zone of Occupation on his own when it seemed no one else would lift a finger.

  He pinched his smoke out and set the butt between cobblestones for some lucky German employee. The adjoining building was a squatter replica of the first, two stories instead of four, and had no guards or jeeps for desks. Harry wandered the lobby and found a staircase.

  At the top, Major Warren Joyner stood waiting. Harry saluted and Major Joyner waved Harry along, practically shoving Harry into his office with a hand so thick it felt like a baseball mitt.

  “Sit down,” Joyner said. Harry pulled over a worn metal chair. The room looked like file storage more or less, all mismatched file cabinets and tables piled high with folders and ring binders. The desk was pushed up to the window, facing it. Joyner grabbed his wheeled desk chair and swung it around to face Harry, grunting as he sat down, and the chair back knocked at the desk, which in turn banged the window. Joyner was an actual cop back home, Harry had heard, a former town sheriff from Oregon. He looked the part with his paunch and large ruddy face. Harry could practically see the star badge and ten gallon hat. He could also figure out what was happening to him. The Military Police didn’t want to hear from Captain Harry Kaspar of MG with another of his pressing inquiries so the desk sergeants had called the adjoining building to tell Major Joyner that Captain Kaspar was coming to see him. Because Joyner was too hardline even for the MPs. Harry knew the jokes about Joyner. He was Sheriff Joyner, gunning down black hat krauts at high noon. He didn’t care whether a man was in the Party or not. Some of the worst Nazis in temperament weren’t even party members, so denazification was never going to touch them. The Americans’ denazification policy was being de-emphasized, but Joyner refused to get on board. He was obsessed with rooting out Nazis whether a big shot brownshirt or the corner grocer and would just assume take one down an alley and snap a neck than waste the paper for a report. Joyner’s hate for the enemy remained strong and steady in a time when GI Joe and one-star general alike were warming up quite nicely to the fresh Bier, the curvy Fräuleins and especially the locals’ eagerness to please and work their fingers to the bone. The fact was, they’d say, your average German’s spic-and-span was closer to apple pie than any other dish in Old Europe. These were the hypocrites, Harry recalled, who two years ago wanted to pave over the whole country with Portland cement. Now they wanted to live in its fairy-tale castles, buy its factories, ship home the finest glass, china, and silver. But a man like Joyner wasn’t fooled. He was still looking for that big score of SS malefactors who were all too often getting away and blending back in. Some even had the brazen balls to pass themselves off as DPs, concentration camp inmates, anti-Nazis even. The game was far from over, the pickings still ripe. All Joyner had to do was nab one of the bastards. But he wasn’t getting much help these days. The Military Police had new challenges. The Black Market. Refugee smuggling. Communist agitators. Deserted GIs. GIs making more dough than the one-star generals. Harry, swallowing hard in Joyner’s metal chair, reminded himself he was lucky they hadn’t tossed him to the CIC or the US Constabulary. He had stayed clear of the major mostly because the man hated Germans, even ones in American uniform. He wasn’t surprised to get Joyner now. Joyner wanted to make Germans pay. Harry, the born kraut, helped Germans find their way. Enjoy yourselves, boys.

  Major Joyner held out his big hands. “Well?”

  “Well, I’m not sure you can help me, sir.”

  “Why not? I’m the new contact for Military Government,” Joyner said, spitting out the name as if he’d just swallowed a horse fly.

  That nasty fly was telling one sick joke. Whether Joyner’s new duty was true or not on quadruplicate somewhere, Harry could not know. Not in the little time he had. Not if he didn’t want half of the bigger building to know what he was up to. He and Joyner were stuck together like two schoolboys on recess who hadn’t been picked for the big ball game.

  “In that case: I’m trying to track down a name.” Harry volunteered details: The German police were hearing this name was behind some recent stickups and worse. Harry was trying to help the cops out. It wasn’t lying as much as feeding what needed to be fed.

  Joyner had listened with his lips pressed together. “I have my own lists,” he said. “Some big Nazis, sure, but mostly two-bit SS who might be slithering around. Who you lookin’ for?”

  “That’s just it, sir. I’m afraid it’s not a German.”

  Joyner’s face reddened and Harry expected a blast of hot air to follow, Joyner detesting that not even a sorry German-American liaison from MG wanted at his special lists.

  “It’s a deserter, a repeat offender,” Harry added.

  Joyner belted out a mighty laugh. The air hit Harry now, but it was warm and sweet from whiskey. The major punched at the air one way, then the other.

  “Sir?”

  Joyner leaned forward, hands pressed to his knees. “Those damn fools in that other building, they went and matched us up because they figured you’re angling for some tin-pot Nazi—probably even figured you’d want to get one off easy, so they’d play a little joke on me.”

  “That’s not my game.”

  “And they got no clue.” Joyner slapped his knees. “So. It’s a sad sack you’re on to, and a deserter to boot? Well then, they’re missing out. Hell, I’ll help you.” The major kicked away his chair and moved around the table. He heaved over a couple binders.

  “Major, look. I can understand your position. But just because I’m German, it doesn’t mean I’m swinging the other way like everyone else.”

  “Say no more …”

  “You have to finish the job we came over here for. You’re honest about it. And the SS? They still have it coming, way I see it.”

  Joyner faced Harry. “What do you know about it?” he said slowly, like a record player running down.

  “I wish I had something better for you, is all. If it leads to that, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “All right. Fair enough.”

  Joyner flung open a binder. As he flipped pages, he told Harry what he’d learned about most deserters. There were thousands—tens of thousands of them across Europe. The smart ones who had skipped the front line during the war settled down with a Gretchen and learned the local language, usually in France or Belgium or Italy where the situation was less heated. But a deserter looking for trouble? They ran many scams but the hustle offered no sure goal, no safe harbor, and to keep pulling it off they scored uniforms and identities they often discarded after a few jobs. Harry knew a thing or two about that, but he wasn’t about to tell it to Joyner. He focused on how Posey fit. The man Harry saw had died in worn fatigues—even for a deserter, it would be the last thing he’d want to be found in. He must have been really down on his luck.

  “Want to give me a name there, Captain?” Joyner said.

  “Posey, Earvin.” Harry began to spell out the name—

  “Earvin Posey?”

  “I believe that’s it.”

  Joyner slammed the binder shut. He turned to Harry. He grinned, his teeth big and square. “Your Earvin Posey was a deserter, and he was at it a long time, too. Since before V-E. He made it on our lists all the time way back when. Real wild one.”

  “Was, sir?”

  “The hoodlum was found dead months ago, down south in Austria. In the British zone they got there. Faithless scum like that, serves him right.”

  Maddy was hollering for Gerlinde. Harry heard her as he entered his foyer. He followed the droning whine upstairs to his master bathroom and opened the door. A wave of hot steamy air fogged his
glasses.

  “Just pour it right on in, Linda honey,” Maddy said from the bathtub. Calling Gerlinde Linda was Maddy’s way of being thankful. The city’s shattered water lines rarely delivered enough hot water, so whenever Maddy felt like a bath she commandeered his and had Gerlinde boil and lug hot water up the stairs. Maddy was full of real American can-do—the only problem was, it was often someone else’s can and not much of Maddy’s do. “Linda dear?” Maddy repeated.

  Harry yanked off his glasses but still couldn’t see where the steam haze ended and the bathroom’s white marble began. “It’s me,” he said from his fog.

  “Oh. But she was bringing me more hot. It’s getting cold.” Maddy had switched to her pouty voice, the one she’d used the first night they met to tell him how much she missed home. Later she used the same voice to tell him how much she hated it back home.

  “You’re going to wear her out,” Harry said, his hair itching from the sudden sweat.

  “Aw, she can take it. Tough fraus like her, they’re out rebuilding this whole city—this whole stinking brick pile of a city.” Maddy splashed water to drive her point home.

  “That’s exactly what I mean.” Harry moved closer. Maddy’s contours appeared among the white marble blur, a bloom of rosy flesh like the flower frosting on a cake. He passed her and cracked open the window.

  “Hey bub, what’s the big idea?”

  “Cold air. You ever take a real steam? Mixing it up, hot and cold, that’s the real tonic. Too much of one thing is bad for you.” Harry had made his voice softer. The last thing Maddy liked was a lecture.

  Gerlinde came bursting through the door panting and grunting but somehow the steaming water didn’t slosh out the pail. She squinted at Harry through stray strands of thick gray hair.

  “That’s enough,” Harry told her. “Set that down here and I’ll take care of it.”

  “What about your lunch?” Gerlinde said. “You must eat.”

  “No. Not now. Get some rest. You can go if there’s nothing pressing to do. Clear?”