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  “Still, it’s all reported.”

  “Of course. I report what I have to UNRRA, and to the central office, and they relay our informations to your Military Government. Captain Kaspar, please, now I am very busy—”

  “Name’s Harry.”

  She nodded but only to disguise her eyes rolling, he noticed.

  “Those boxes behind me,” he continued. “What are they for?”

  “They are, how do you say? ‘Dead letter’ boxes.”

  “So the recipients are dead, or they only missing? What about repatriated? Or the ones gone their own way?”

  “All of those.”

  “I didn’t get your name,” Harry said.

  “Lieser.”

  “First name?”

  She let in a pause where she might have sighed. “Sabine.”

  Footsteps, voices. A group marched in bearing clipboards and files, a mix of men and woman. They stood at the desk smiling and chatting in English of various accents, waiting their turn to ask questions of their Miss Sabine Lieser, all bearing the chatty warmth of an office gang fresh from eating a special lunch. They ignored Harry. One woman raised her eyebrows at him in that way that said, Sorry to disturb, but you clearly had no appointment. This was a tight crew, Harry saw. Sabine Lieser had probably asked them to show up in case she needed backup.

  Within minutes, they had filed back out. Sabine could handle this alone, was surely the consensus. She lifted another memo from the inbox and read as if Harry had left too.

  Harry sat back down. “So, you’re the one in charge?”

  A single nod. “The boss is at a conference.”

  Harry cleared his throat. “Listen, Miss Lieser, I’m looking for someone.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “That’s good. You practice that?”

  “Practice?”

  “Never mind. She’s Russian, I think, possibly from Ukraine or something similar. Might have just come in. I was going to check the hospital but thought I should respect your authority.”

  Sabine stared. Not even a flinch.

  “No? Probably about nineteen. Peasant clothes, definitely. A looker but malnourished.”

  “This could be anyone. Sorry.”

  “Anyone a year ago. Before the mass repatriations. But not in the last week. She reportedly was here yesterday. You would’ve definitely noticed her, seeing how this place is like a ghost town.”

  “Well, I don’t know her.”

  “She might have been with a man.”

  “Ah, now we make such progress.” Sabine’s grimace made the sarcasm sting more. “And what does this man look like? You have his name?”

  “A little taller than me. Darker hair but similar features.” Harry sighed. “A name, I don’t have.”

  Sabine waved at the air, dismissing his inquiry.

  “Do you know what a shashka is?” Harry said.

  “No.”

  “It’s a type of saber. She’d been seen trying to hawk a few on the black market.”

  “That does not concern me. Who told you she was here?”

  She would laugh if he told her it was a bearded man on a dark street. “The girl’s name is Irina,” he said instead.

  She laughed anyway. “Captain, do you know how many young women from the East are named Irina?”

  A tough thought hit Harry: This Sabine probably thinks he’s just looking for a refugee wife. It was the latest fashion for GIs and brass alike. He sat up and said, “She might be in some trouble, this Irina.”

  It got another laugh from Sabine. “Then she would not come here. It only attracts attention. Here you get labeled, and when you get labeled … others take over. Policies. Directives. Out of my hands, you see. One hopes this young woman is smart enough to know that.”

  Harry sighed again. He studied the board again and the maps that had been re-colored. “You have other records, surely. Files and dossiers. Ledgers. Any of those identify individuals by name, sex, and so on? A photo even.”

  “Some do, some do not. Most are many months old now since the large repatriations are well over. It’s as I told you. No one new has arrived. So, please, if you would be so kind …”

  She stood—her desk before her like the armor on an antitank gun. Go back to your Military Government, the stance meant.

  Harry crossed his legs. He produced a Chesterfield and set it on his lips. He offered her one.

  “I do not smoke.”

  Of course you don’t—you accept it, and you barter it. Even prim UNRRA officials did that. She really was an odd duck, this one.

  “Ever heard of an American named Earvin Posey?” he said.

  “No. I would remember such a name.”

  “Let’s try another angle. Know of any specific DP groups that are in trouble? Any, say, gangs, or rackets that might be competing?”

  “Sure, I know of many. But I don’t know of any who are here.”

  Harry leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. “Listen. Miss Lieser. I came here because you’re one of the last camps in Munich that’s had a large number of non-Jewish DPs. Slavic DPs, specifically. But, apparently, I’m all on my own here.”

  Eyeing him, Sabine sighed. She sat down. “Captain Kaspar, you must understand, I do not mean to be uncooperative. We have a good camp here. I would not ruin it by letting in elements that disrupt. We, I, owe it to these people who survived. Who keep surviving.”

  She had held up her hands and kept them there. And, then, oddly, she was smiling at him. It was a nice and wide smile and it flushed her cheeks. It made Harry look at her neck, too, and she noticed that and turned away to face her board, to the arrows of peoples displaced.

  “You understand?” she added.

  “I think so. But, mind if I have a look around your camp? Since you have nothing to hide.”

  “Of course I do not. Shall I provide, how do you say, galoshes?”

  “Funny. That’s a joke, right? No, I’ll just try and be more careful.”

  The day seemed brighter as Harry walked out, the cold draft more refreshing. He replaced his horn rims with aviator sunglasses and headed off into the depths of the camp. He passed what had to be a school building with children playing on the front steps. Another building was a performance hall of some sort—from inside he heard violins tuning and pianos jangling. On a wide-open area once used for military drills, men and boys played soccer while girls marched in formation singing. A hospital was half-empty, and Harry counted more nurses than patients. The smell of fresh cooked cabbage and aromas of spiced meat wafted from a kitchen house. He studied all the faces. He peeked in, walked through every building. He heard Slavic languages but saw no one like Irina. He talked to children, old ones, even the sick. All looked to be in decent shape, many recovering here since the end of the war. Almost all seemed to be Jews. More signs were in Hebrew here—or was it Yiddish, in Hebrew script? He really should know that.

  He had been at it for at least an hour by the time he rounded the back road of the camp where the garbage dumps and a grimy workshop stood, stomping along now to make up time, the sweat itching under his hair and beading on his forehead even though it was barely fifty degrees out. He was wasting his time here. It was inefficient, ineffective. Irina could hide anywhere—could be hid anywhere. But then again, he recalled, the Slavic man had offered the info and refused payment. Why would he do that if this place had no meaning?

  At the farthest corner of the camp, Harry found a secluded courtyard flanked by two identical old yet pristine warehouses. A large black Mercedes was parked there. A uniformed man and a woman stood at the rear fender. Sabine Lieser. The officer’s uniform was so unfamiliar it took Harry a moment to realize it was Soviet Army—olive tunic with those stiff shoulder boards and standup collar, high peaked cap with red band and star, flared-at-the-thigh jodhpurs and riding boots. Two junior officers with plain caps and no riding pants stood before the car’s hood smoking and drinking from a flask.

  Harry kept back at the c
orner of one warehouse, the scene tinted green from his sunglasses. Then the two junior officers strode off to the shade of the opposite warehouse and began urinating on its wall with their backs to him. He marched across the cobblestones.

  Sabine and the Soviet officer were gesturing, pointing at each other. Sabine pushed at the man’s shoulder.

  “Hey, hold up there,” Harry said.

  Sabine turned on her heels. She was smiling, laughing. Harry had expected arguing. He forced out a grin. The Soviet officer faced Harry smiling. Harry gave the Soviet a relaxed salute, which the Soviet returned with a larger smile and a broad and childlike sweep of his open palm, what he must have thought was an American-style wave. The junior officers had closed up their flies but kept their distance.

  “I was just, uh, finishing up here, Miss Lieser,” Harry said.

  Sabine spoke in Russian to the Soviet, shook his hand, and marched over to Harry.

  “Busy morning,” Harry said.

  “When is it not?”

  “They just show up like this unannounced?”

  “What, like you?” Sabine said. Her smile had dropped away. She kept on going past Harry.

  He followed, fighting the urge to take another look at the Soviets behind him. Sabine turned at the first warehouse and found the main path back. He caught up to her. “Maybe I was hoping to meet them. You don’t see too many Soviet Army visiting.”

  “You don’t want to meet them,” Sabine said, her voice hard.

  Only now did Harry realize that she was speaking native German. He switched to German. “And here I took you for a Scandinavian,” he said, adding a chuckle.

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “I’m not sure. A lot of officials are Scandinavian, is all. And your English, well, it fooled me—”

  “I’m Bavarian—a Municher in fact.” Sabine spat out the words, glaring at the path ahead.

  Harry could understand. Her English sounding too good to be a German’s. His German sounding too good to be a real American’s. In another age, these would’ve been compliments. But when a war just ended, and the two languages were enemies?

  “Try being an Ami but born over here,” he said. “Everyone thinks you’re either a spy or a moron.”

  Sabine walked on, deep in thought and hugging herself from the wind blowing through the trees lining the path. Harry endured the silence wanting to comment on the weather, always trying to fill all calm with blather just like an American. He held out for a good minute.

  “You must be damn good at what you do,” he said. “UNRRA hasn’t let many Germans work for them let alone run the show.”

  “I had the English. My background checked out.”

  “You must have been squeaky clean, or … So what were you, before?”

  “A nurse.”

  “Oh, yeah, which hospital?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not there anymore.”

  He suspected air raids—American B-17s by day, British Lancasters by night. “Right. Tough break,” he muttered.

  Sabine led him onward down a side path to a table under a fat birch tree. She sat and blew air out her cheeks, running her fingers through her short hair.

  Harry had a Chesterfield in his mouth, unlit.

  “Got another?” she said.

  “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “I don’t, well, not indoors anyway.”

  Harry shook one out and lit her with his Zippo. “How do you know Russian?”

  Sabine sputtered a bitter laugh and a billow of smoke. “How could I not, this job? This war.”

  “That war, more like. It’s been over a while.”

  “So it has. After a fashion.”

  She pulled a soft blue scarf around her neck. The sun had broken through, sending shafts of light on through the trees. It seemed to Harry that her blouse had opened a little more. The sun hit her skin there, just so.

  “Tell me something,” Harry said. “This Irina girl I mentioned. She’s afraid of Americans, or at least of our authorities. And how. Like certain Germans were when we Americans first came. Any German with something to hide.”

  “It depends on who she was. Her past. Whom she knows even.”

  “Of course, but why?” As he said the words, he felt a chill run up his armpits. He wondered why Max would be scared. What would he have to hide?

  “Well, I can think of one reason,” Sabine said.

  “What? For her, you mean?”

  “Of course I mean her. Is something wrong?”

  “No. Go on, please.”

  Sabine nodded behind her, toward the way they’d come. “Those men back there.”

  “The Sovs?”

  “Yes. They’re Soviet Repatriation Mission.”

  “I didn’t think they were the Salvation Army.”

  “They are not that. Surely you’ve heard of this unit? They have one overriding aim—to take back all those from the Soviet Union who ended up in the West because of the war.”

  Harry nodded. A year ago, there had been millions of Displaced Persons, but the Americans and British had worked hard to ship them home under the policy of Repatriation. Only the Jews were allowed to stay owing to their special status as Holocaust survivors. Harry knew the official line—the Western Allies were helping out a valued ally who, through its great sacrifice and grim persistence, had made all the difference to hasten the defeat of Germany.

  “You Americans and British, you cut a deal with Joe Stalin at the Yalta Conference,” Sabine added. “Doesn’t matter whose side they were on before, during, after. Stalin wants them all back except the surviving Jews and the so-called ‘ethnic Germans,’ whom he’s now evicting to the West in droves.” Her voice had hardened again. A soft vein bulged on a temple. “So many—too many—were sent back against their wishes.”

  Harry had seen numbers in reports. He had heard stories. But he wanted to talk about a missing girl. “In my previous posting, we had refugees but we didn’t do much repatriation and it wasn’t my watch in any case, so let’s get back to—”

  “Who knows what it was like for those who were forced back?” Sabine continued, stabbing at air with her cigarette. “Off they went on convoy trucks and freight trains, back to their home territories, to their new Russian and Soviet masters. You must understand. Stalin’s henchmen collect people like children gather ants. We know what happens to the ants. The Soviet doesn’t just want major so-called traitors to the state. They want everyone. From all over Russia and White Russia and the Balkans, Poland, what have you. And you gave them to the Soviet because you cut a deal, and Americans honor deals.”

  “That may be. Still, as far as I understand it, the worst really is over. Regular Soviet citizens don’t have to return against their wishes now.”

  “Ah, but there are still, how do you say, policy exceptions? You must give up a few bones so you can keep the whole stew.”

  So that the Americans and British could consolidate their holds over their own zones of occupation, she meant. “Well, you know more than I do,” he said.

  “One must in my position. So, no, they are not your Salvation Army, Captain Kaspar.”

  “Still, for bird dogs on the sly those Russians kind of stuck out.”

  “You should’ve seen them a year ago. They had bullhorns, red flags, even a band. Pied pipers, yes? So that all would follow them into the trains. Back then, they were a big show. The circus.” Sabine shook her head. “The people didn’t want to go back. They sensed … something. But they got caught up in it. We did all we could—”

  “You were there then? Here?”

  Sabine nodded. No words followed.

  Something about that made Harry want to hold her tight in his arms. “The summer and fall of ’45 was no picnic anywhere,” he offered.

  “No. But we mustn’t forget today. And now? They are sly vultures.” Sabine added, in a discreet voice that sounded like it was coming over a wireless on low volume, “I think that they are SMERSH.
”

  “SMERSH?”

  “Soviet Intelligence. NKVD, GRU, whatever they call it now. In any case. I give them nothing. I only smile, make a joke. I’m just trying to keep them at bay.”

  “I noticed. And you didn’t need your army of office colleagues this time,” Harry said.

  “Please?”

  “Never mind.” Harry was used to Germans not getting his Americanized humor, but with Sabine it was different. He felt self-conscious about it as if he was visiting a professor in his office. No, it was more than that. It was as if he was being assessed, as in a job interview.

  Sabine held up her Chesterfield, inspecting the butt. “So, your camp search—are you satisfied?”

  “Not really. I could be back.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Good. You okay now?” Harry said.

  “Better, yes. Thank you. Truly, Captain—Harry, is it?”

  “Right.”

  They shared a pause. Sabine stretched her legs and leaned back and her bangs had just enough length to fall away, off her face, and again Harry imagined that blonde hair long, and longer, flowing down her shoulders.

  “You know, you could always go over my head,” she said. “Go straight to UNRRA HQ, or to your Military Government.”

  “And what would that gain? I mean, why come all the way out here just to muck things up?”

  “Yes. It was my hope you might say something like that.”

  Six

  TWO DAYS LATER, HARRY WORKED through his office inbox and took the usual questions from his secretary but his mind was combing through his trip to the DP Camp at Standkaserne. He couldn’t have admitted to Sabine Lieser that he was looking for a girl involved in a murder, especially when he himself was sitting on the evidence. On top of that, it was a girl who might know his own brother. It wasn’t a chance he could take, not with a dame who showed fewer tells than the Army poker champion of the European Theater. Besides, Sabine Lieser was right about Irina. A woman like Irina would never show up at a DP camp and risk revealing full identification—and a woman like Sabine would probably never let her. Of course, Sabine Lieser had wanted him to understand that. She probably did know something about Irina, however, even if she didn’t know her by name. He’d have to keep an eye on this Frau Lieser, and not only to watch that lovely neck of hers glow in the sun.