PART VII

Chapter 28.

VISITING

For several years when Sarah and I were little, my mother would dress us up once each summer and put us in our Chevy with my father. There was a touch of foreboding about these trips, probably because Dad didn't take us many places without Mom, except for baseball games, which she regarded as permanently incomprehensible. It was summer, and Sarah and I were not in school, and this little automobile trip was the last thing either my sister or I wanted to do. Before getting very far, Sarah or I would claim to be carsick. But Dad continued, driving about twenty minutes into the heart of the black belt, proceeding through the most blighted streets until reaching a tidy block of three-flats. There he extracted my sister and me from the auto, notwithstanding our complaints.

Inside, we visited briefly with a soft-spoken light-toned black lady named Mrs. Bidwell. These meetings were palpably painful to everyone. After we'd come all that way, neither my dad nor Mrs. Bidwell seemed to have a clue what to say. In fact, even as a child, I realized that my sister and I had been hauled along principally as conversation pieces, so that the old woman could exclaim over how we had grown and Dad could agree. Race was not the issue. My parents lived in University Park, one of the earliest and most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the U. S., and they were comfortable socializing with black neighbors.

In Mrs. Bidwell's living room, we drank one glass of excellent lemonade, then went on our way. When I asked each time why we had to stop, my father said that Mrs. Bidwell was the mother of a boy he used to know. Period. I didn't even think of her when I started reading Dad's account because she was black, unlike Gideon Bidwell--yet another boat I missed.

Years ago, I broke a story about one of the supervising lawyers in the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, whose gambling habit left him indebted to local loan sharks. My source was an FBI agent who was understandably concerned about the perils of having an Assistant P. A. in the pocket of hoodlums, and the Bureau guy even showed me the federal grand jury transcripts so I could reassure my editors before we went to press.

It was a great coup for me. The only problem was that the prosecutor involved, Rudy Patel, was a pretty good friend of mine. Both serious baseball fans, Rudy and I were part of a group that shared season tickets to the Trappers' games. We'd often sit side by side, cursing the Trappers' perpetual misfortunes, high-fiving homers as if we'd hit the balls, and berating the players for strikeouts and errors. Bleeding for the Trappers is a Kindle County ritual and it became a bond between Rudy and me. I gave him good coverage on his trials. And then cost him his job.

Fortunately for Rudy, he got into an impaired lawyers program, enrolled in Gamblers Anonymous, and avoided getting disbarred or prosecuted. Naturally, though, he had to be fired, and was required to live with the ignominy of being outed by me. He ended up as a professor at a pretty good local law school and has gone on with his life, albeit with none of the promise that radiated around him earlier. I took care of that.

Rudy and I still live on the same bus line to Nearing and every now and then in the station we'll see each other. Every time I do, I can feel myself light up instinctively with the affection of our old friendship, and even see him begin to brighten, until his memory returns and he retreats into loathing. Over the years, his look of pure hatred has abated a little. He must know I was doing my job. But the fact is that there's nowhere to go. Even if he forgave me wholeheartedly, our friendship would be part of a past that he's both set aside and overcome.

I mention this because it reminds me a little of my father's visits with Mrs. Bidwell. These brief meetings clearly upset Dad. Driving home, he had a look of quick-eyed distraction, gripping and regripping the steering wheel. I don't know what illusion had brought him to the North End. That he was obliged to keep faith and memory? That by showing us off he could restore just a shred of the stake in the future Mrs. Bidwell had lost with the death of her son? But after the last of these trips, when I was about ten, Dad looked at my mother as soon as we returned home and said, "I can't do that again." My mother's expression was soft and commiserating.

I'm sure Dad kept his vow and didn't go back. As I have said, there was never a living place for the war in my father's life. It was not life. It was war. Loyalty could not overcome that.

Nor, frankly, do I imagine that Mrs. Bidwell ever tried to contact him again. Looking back, I'm struck that neither Mr. Bidwell nor Biddy's brothers were ever there. For them, there was probably never any accommodating themselves to the intolerable irony of losing a son and a brother whose only equal opportunity involved dying.

In the end, Mrs. Bidwell and Dad were a lot like Rudy and me. There was a shared history, but it was a history they were impotent to change. Fate, inexplicably, had favored one and not the other. There was no erasing that inequity, or any other. And because they were powerless in these ways, they could only regard what the past had dished up with great sadness and then move on to the very separate lives that remained.

Chapter 29.

WINNING

From Don't Be a Sucker in Germany!, a pamphlet published by the 12th Army Group, found among my father's things:

The facts in this booklet were compiled by the Provost Marshal of the Ninth U. S. Army as a guide for troops in Germany. Nothing here was "dreamed up" by someone behind a desk. This booklet is a summary of the experiences of the French, Dutch, and Belgian underground workers now serving with the American armies. They know the tricks and the answers. That's why they are alive to pass this information on to you.

DON'T BELIEVE IT

Don't believe there are any "good" Germans in Germany. Of course you know good Germans back home. They had guts enough and sense enough to break from Germany long ago.

Don't believe it was only the Nazi government that brought on this war. Any people have the kind of government they want and deserve. Only a few people bucked the Nazis. You won't meet them; the Nazis purged them long ago.

One Belgian major, wounded twice in two wars with Germany, was stationed in Germany from 1918 to 1929. He says:

"A German is by nature a liar. Individually he is peaceful enough, but collectively, Germans become cruel."

If a German underground movement breaks out, it will be merciless. It will be conducted by SS and Gestapo agents who don't flinch at murder. They will have operatives everywhere. Every German, man, woman, and child, must be suspected. Punishment must be quick and severe. This is not the same thing as brutality. Allied forces must show their strength but must use it only when necessary.

***

We won the war. In February and March, the Allies ground forward. The Germans finally seemed to realize they were overwhelmed--depleted by the Battle of the Bulge (as people were now calling what had happened in the Ardennes), outmanned in the skies, and facing massive Russian forces attacking on their eastern front. "Bald schiessen wir nicht mehr."

For the Third Army, the principal problems were weather and terrain. The worst winter in fifty years abated with an early thaw, swelling the rivers and streams in the mountainous landscape on which the Siegfried line had been erected. Waterways that our forces once could have forded on foot now required bridging by the engineers while the troops waited. But Patton, as always, advanced. Nineteenth Tactical Air Command provided comprehensive support for the forward columns. On March 22, Patton defied Supreme Headquarters and secretly mounted a massive assault across the Rhine, thereby depriving Montgomery of the intended honor of being the first general into the German heartland. The fur was flying around HQ for weeks afterward, and I have no doubt that Patton's little mutiny provided much of the impetus that led to him being relieved of command as general of the Third Army by May.

Even with the end in sight, our progress brought none of the jubilation that had accompanied the liberation of France. Our men had been at war too long to celebrate combat, and, far more important, there was the daily evidence of what our victory meant to the local populations. A relentless parade of Germans driven from their homes by the fighting flowed back into our path, marching along with their most valued possessions on their backs. They lived in the open in unhappy packs that were soon breeding grounds for typhus. Some waved the Stars and Stripes as we passed, but we had killed their sons and fathers, and exploded or plundered their houses. For the most part, there was a miserable sulking suspicion between them and us, especially since we knew that many German soldiers had ditched their uniforms to hide among the throngs of the displaced.

Despite mass German desertions, the Third Army alone took 300,000 German POWs in those weeks. They were trucked to the rear, dirty, hungry, defeated men, herded into barbed-wire cages, many of whom, when addressed, prayed for the end of the fighting, which, under the Geneva Conventions, would allow them to go home.

As for me, I remained desolate and occasionally temperamental. I never carried through on my threat to myself to volunteer for combat. Instead, I went through the routines of a military lawyer with proficiency and disinterest. Reports describing thefts, rapes, and murders of Germans arrived on our desks in a tide and were generally ignored. We proceeded only with investigations of serious crimes against our own troops. It was not simply that the Germans were our enemies. Many military commanders, including General Maples--he was promoted April 1--expressed the view that a nasty occupation in Germany was justified, not so much in the name of revenge, but so that the Germans saw firsthand what they had unleashed on the rest of the world. I never contested that point of view.

But I contested little. For me, the war was over. Like the cities and towns of western Europe, my steeples lay in ruins. I wanted only to go home and find time to pick through the rubble. It was the downcast civilians, as much as our own troops, with whom I often felt a bond.

From home, I continued to receive heartsore entreaties from Grace Morton, who refused to accept my judgment that our marriage would never occur. My darling, she wrote, I know how awful this time has been for you and the tragedies you have witnessed. Soon, we will again be together, this madness will be forgotten, and we will be one.

I wrote back with as much kindness as I could muster, telling her she would save us both continued anguish by abiding by my decision. In response, her letters grew more openly pleading. When they went unanswered, her magnificent dignity wore away. One day I would receive a diatribe about my disloyalty, the next a rueful and lascivious contemplation of how wrong we had been not to sleep together before my departure. I forced myself to read each note, always with pain. I was stunned by the extraordinary contagion bred by war, which had somehow conveyed my madness across the ocean to infect her.

The Third Army moved its forward HQ twice within a week, ending up in early April in Frankfurt am Main, which had been bombed unceasingly before our arrival. Blocks of the city were nothing but hillocks of stone and brick above which a little aura of dust lingered whenever the wind stirred. In the area close to the main train station, a number of the older buildings remained standing and the Staff Judge Advocate set up in a former commercial building on Poststrasse. I was given a spacious office that had belonged to an important executive, and was still unpacking there on April 6 when a chubby young officer came in, twirling his cap in his hands. He was Herbert Diller, an aide to the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Third Army, who wished to see me. I was rushing down the block with him toward the General staff headquarters before he mentioned the name Teedle.

I had not seen the General in person since the day I had slunk back from the Comtesse de Lemolland's to report Martin's initial disappearance. As far as I knew, Teedle had received my written reports, although I'd gotten no response. Now, from Diller, I learned that on April 1, General Teedle had been relieved of command of the 18th Armored, which was being cycled into a reserve position for the balance of the war. With that, Roland Teedle had become Patton's Assistant Chief of Staff. As Diller and I hurried down the broad halls of this former government ministry, I could hear Teedle yelling. His target turned out to be his corporal Frank, who'd been transferred with him.

General Teedle looked smaller and older in the office where I found him, a somber room with high ceilings and long windows. He was on his feet, facing, with evident bewilderment, a desk on which the papers looked as if they'd simply been dumped. I was surprised to feel some warmth for the General at the first sight of him, but I suppose after my visit to OSS in London, I'd come to recognize that he had been right about most things. Whatever else, Robert Martin was both disingenuous and a subversive force in the military. Not that I'd completely forgotten Bonner's accusation. It occurred to me for a second that Teedle might have been moved to HQ so someone could keep an eye on him. But I'd never know for sure, not whether Bonner spoke the truth, or had misperceived other conduct, or, even if correct, where Teedle's misbehavior should rank among the war's many other travesties.

I congratulated the General on his new posting. Another star had come with it. As usual, he had no interest in flattery.

"They're already replacing the warhorses, Dubin. They think diplomats should be in charge. The next phase of the war will be political. I'd rather be feeding cattle than sitting behind a desk, but at least there's some work left to do. Patton wants to be in Berlin before the end of the month, and I believe we will be. So how did you like war, Dubin? A bitch, isn't it?"

I must have betrayed something in response to his scoffing, because Teedle focused on me with concern.

"I know you had a bad time, Dubin. I don't mean to make light of it."

"I don't think I'm the only one with sad stories to tell."

"There are three million men here with nightmares to take home with them, and a million or so more half a world away. Makes you wonder what kind of country we can ever be. So much of civilization, Dubin, is merely the recovery periods between wars. We build things up and then tear them down again. Look at poor Europe. Some moments I find myself thinking about all the fighting that's gone on here and expect blood to come welling out of the ground."

"You sound like Martin, General." As ever, I was surprised by my forwardness with Teedle. But he seemed to expect it.

"Oh, hardly, Dubin. I'm sure Martin wants to put an end to war. I take it as part of the human condition."

My expression, in response, was undoubtedly pained, but in retrospect I am unsure whether that was because I resisted Teedle's view, or regarded it as a harrowing truth. Observing me, Teedle leaned back and drummed a pencil on the thigh of his wool trousers.

"Do you know what this war is about, Dubin?"

Teedle had made Diller wait outside and I could hear voices gathering, meaning another meeting was about to take place, most likely involving officers superior to me. But I wasn't surprised that the General wanted to take time for this discussion. There had never been any question that Teedle found something essential in his contest with Martin. He opposed everything Martin stood for--the solitary adventurer who thought he could outwit the machines of war; a spy who favored deception over hand-to-hand assault; and, of course, a Communist who would give to each man according to his need, as opposed to the fathomless will of God.

I asked if he was referring to the Treaty of Versailles.

"Fuck treaties," he said. "I mean what's at stake. In the largest terms."

I knew Teedle valued my seriousness, and I tried not to be flippant, but the fact was that I had no idea anymore and I said so. Teedle, naturally, had a view.

"I think we're fighting about what will unite people. I think that all of these machines we've fallen in love with in this epoch--the railroad, the telegraph and telephone, the automobile, the radio, the moving-picture camera, the airplane, God knows what else--they've changed the compass of life. A shepherd who tended his flock or a smith at his forge, folks who knew only their fellow townsmen, now contend with people a thousand miles away as an immediate presence in their lives. And they don't know exactly what they have in common with all those distant companions.

"Now, along come the Communists, who tell the shepherd the common interest is the good of man, and maybe he should give up a few sheep to the poor fellow a few towns over. And then we have Mr. Hitler, who tells his citizens that they should be united by the desire to kill or conquer anyone who doesn't resemble them. And then there's us--the Allies. What's our vision to compete with Mr. Stalin and Mr. Hitler? What are we offering?"

"Well, Roosevelt and Churchill would say 'freedom.

"Which means?"

"Personal liberty. The Bill of Rights. The vote. Freedom and equality."

"For what end?"

"General, I have to say I feel as if I'm back in law school."

"All right, Dubin. I hear you. I think we're fighting for God, Dubin. Not Christ or Yahweh or wood elves, no God in particular. But the right to believe. To say that there is a limit to this big collective society, there's something more important for every human, and he will find it on his own. But we're trying to have it two ways, Dubin, to be collective and individual at the same time, and it's going to get us in trouble. We can't tolerate Fascists or Communists, who want the same answer for every person. Or the capitalists either, if you want to know the truth. They want everyone to stand up for materialism. And that's a collectivism of its own and we have to recognize it as such."

"There's quite a bit of collectivism in religion, General, people who want you or me to do exactly as they believe."

"That's the nature of man, Dubin. And very much, I think, as God expects. But it's the human mission to welcome all reasonable contenders."

I wasn't following and said so. Teedle circled around his desk, coming closer in a way that felt strangely unguarded for him.

"I believe in democracy," he said, "for exactly the same reason Jefferson did. Because God made each of us, different though we may be. Human variety expresses His infiniteness. But His world still belongs to those who will struggle to do the mission He has chosen for them, whether it's the Trappist contemplating His will in silence, or the titan astride the globe. If God made a world with a billion different human plans, He must have expected struggle. But He couldn't have intended a world where one vision prevails, because that would mean only a single vision of Him, Dubin."

"Is war what God wants then, General?"

"We all think about that one, Dubin. I can't tell you the answer. All I know is He wants us to persevere." He picked up a paper off his desk. "I've been getting reports for a. day now from a place called Ohrdruf. Heard anything about that?"

"No, sir."

"Three thousand political prisoners of one kind or another lying in shallow graves, starved to death by the Nazis. The few who remain alive survive in unimaginable squalor. The communiques keep repeating that words can't describe it. God must want us to fight against that, Dubin."

I shrugged, unwilling to venture onto that ground, while the General continued to scrutinize me. I understood only then what my attraction had been to Teedle from the start. He cared about my soul.

"All right, Dubin. So much for the bright chatter. I have an assignment for you, but I thought we should have a few words first. I heard about your visit to London, checking up on me."

"I did what I always told you I had to, General. Confirm the details."

"You were checking up on me. I don't mind, Dubin. I suspect at this stage you hate Robert Martin more than I do."

"I've come to feel rather neutral, to tell you the truth, sir. I can't really make out what his game is. He might just be mad in his own way."

"He's a spy, Dubin. Nothing more complicated than that. He's on the other side."

There was no question that Martin and the General were on different sides. But so were Teedle and I. Not that I could name any of these camps.

"As you wish, General, but I wasn't trying to be insubordinate. I simply wanted to see matters to a logical end."

"Well, you haven't done that, have you, Dubin? The son of a bitch is still cavorting around."

"He could be dead for all I know, sir."

"That, unfortunately, he is not." Teedle thumbed through the papers on his desk, finally giving up in exasperation and yelling for Frank, who was apparently away. "To hell with it," Teedle announced. "About forty-eight hours ago, a reserve battalion of the moth Infantry Division encountered a man with one hand who claimed to be an OSS officer. This was down near the town of Pforzheim. He said he was on a special operation and in need of supplies. An officer there with good sense contacted OSS, but by the time they'd alerted the MPs, Martin was with the four winds.

"So he's gone yet again. Amazing. Any idea how the hell the girl found out he was in that hospital last time? I've been wondering for months."

"I told her. It was rather stupid."

He made a face. "I thought that was possible. That's more than stupid, Dubin. Get into your pants, did she?"

I didn't answer.

"You should have known better than that, too, Dubin." But his pinched eyes contained a trace of amusement at my folly. Whatever his complex morality, Teedle was good to his word. Sex, like war, was something God expected humans to succumb to.

"I didn't do very well, General. I'm aware of that. It cost a very good man his life. I'll rue that to the end of my days.

He gave me a kinder look than I expected and said, "If you had the pleasure of being a general, Dubin, you'd be able to say that ten thousand times. It's not much of a job that requires other men to die for your mistakes, is it?"

"No, sir."

"But that's what it entails."

"-Yes, He took a moment. "Here's where we stand. I've been doing the Dance of the Seven Veils with OSS for a couple of months now Donovan hasn't wanted any Army-wide acknowledgment that one of their own has gone astray. They say that's so they can save a chance to use Martin against the Russians, but it's all politics, if you ask me, and I've put my foot down now. A bulletin is going to all MPs, Third Army, Seventh Army, the Brits, everybody in Europe. And I'd like you in charge, Dubin. You have experience that can't be spared. You know what Martin looks like. More important, you've seen his tricks. I could never tell somebody else to be wary enough. Besides, it will give you a chance to clean up whatever mess you made. That's a fair deal, isn't it?"

I didn't answer. Fair wasn't the point and we both knew it.

"I know you've had enough of this assignment, Dubin. And given what you've said--or haven't said--I can understand why. You did the right thing stepping out. But it's a war and we need you. I've discussed it with Maples. And we agree. Those are your orders, Dubin. Get Martin." The General delivered his edict with his head lowered, enhancing the warning glare from his light eyes. There was no doubt the General meant to teach me a lesson. Running Martin to ground was going to convert me entirely to his point of view. And in that, I suspected he might even have been right. "I assume I don't have to add any cautions here about keeping your other gun in its holster, do I. Once burned, twice wise, correct?"

I nodded.

"Dismissed," he said.

Chapter 30.

BALINGEN

I drove south to interview the infantry officer who'd detained Martin at Pforzheim. The little towns I passed through brought to mind cuckoo clocks, with small narrow buildings set tight as teeth on the hillsides, all with painted wooden decorations along the steep rooflines. The officer who'd detained Martin, Major Farell Beasley, described him as robust in spite of his visible injuries and insisting that in Special Operations he could still be useful with only one hand. Beasley, like so many others before him, had been quite taken with Martin's sparkle and seemed puzzled to think such a fine soldier could have done anything wrong. In fact, Martin had provided excellent intelligence about the German units a mile ahead who were attempting to keep the moth from crossing the Neckar River. As for his own objectives, Martin had declined to discuss them, except to say that he would be launching a small operation in the vicinity. I did not ask if there was any sign Martin was traveling with a woman.

I remained near Pforzheim for twenty-four hours to coordinate the MPs' search. The local Germans were only marginally cooperative and Martin was presumed to have melted into the surrounding hills, moving on behind the fighting.

On my return to Frankfurt, I found for the next several days that the teletype Teedle had initiated to MPs throughout the European theater brought numerous reported sightings of one-handed men. None of them, however, had the extensive burns on his left side Major Beasley had seen on Martin. Then late on April ii, I received a telegram from Colonel Winters at OSS in London, with whom I'd visited.

Our man captured STOP Will communicate 0600 tomorrow by secure channels.

He phoned on the dot. For the last three or four days, he said, Seventh Army forces outside Balingen in southwest Germany had been negotiating with the commandant of a German camp holding political prisoners. The Nazis had hoped to exchange them for their own POWs, but the Americans had simply waited out the Krauts and they had finally surrendered control yesterday. Entering the camp, the Americans found an infernal scene of sickness and starvation.

"They say it's quite awful. Most of the SS escaped, of course. But when the intelligence officers went nosing around, inmates pointed out a fellow with one hand who'd appeared in their midst only a few days ago. They all assumed he was a German guard who couldn't get away because of his injury. He claimed to be another internee, a Spanish Jew, who'd been working in Germany when he was deported to another slave camp, but that was plainly a lie. He was too well nourished, for one thing, and spoke terrible German. And when they made him lower his drawers, it was clear he wasn't Jewish. He told several more stories, the last of which was that he was an American OSS officer named Robert Martin. That one was wrung from him only when his interrogators threatened to turn him over to the inmates, who've torn several guards apart with their bare hands. Literally, Dubin. Literally. I can't even imagine what the hell is going on down there. But I guarantee you one thing: Martin won't be getting away. They have him chained to the wall. He will be surrendered only to you.

I asked if Winters had any clue what had brought Martin there.

"I would say, Dubin, that the people around here who took Martin for a traitor are the ones smiling a little more broadly. Once you have him back in Frankfurt, we'd like to send our people to interrogate him at length." He ended the conversation with the familiar apologies for not being able to say more.

I ordered up an armed convoy to transport the prisoner, and immediately headed south in advance to take custody of Robert Martin.

And so, driven by a new MP sergeant to whom I barely had the heart to speak, I traveled to Balingen. It was April 12, 1945, a sweet morning with a spotless sky and a swelling, vital aroma in the air. There had been many reports about the German concentration camps, including one or two published accounts by escapees. But the authors had gotten away months ago, before matters turned dire for Hitler's regime. And even the claims made by the few survivors of the slave camp at Natzweiler in France, which several of us had heard of, tended to be dismissed as propaganda or yet another of the improbable, ultimately baseless rumors of disaster that circulated routinely among U. S. troops: The Russians had given up and Stalin had killed himself. Two hundred kamikaze pilots had flattened large stretches of L. A. Montgomery and Bradley had engaged in a fistfight in front of the troops. The Nazis were exterminating political prisoners by the thousands. The last of these stories had cropped up after the Soviets in Poland captured a supposed Nazi death camp called Auschwitz at the end of January, but these days nobody put much stock in what the Russians were saying.

From outside, the camp at Balingen was unremarkable, a sizable former military post at the margin of town, set on a high knoll amid the larches and pines of the Black Forest. The entire site was encompassed by a tall barbed-wire fence topped by brown electrification nodes, with the yellow-brick administration buildings standing in sight of the entrance. There the swinging gate was open and a lone apple tree was in bloom beside a young soldier, probably an SS guard, who lay dead, facedown, beneath a wooden sign reading ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work makes freedom. Our troops had simply driven around the corpse--we could see the tanks and half-tracks within--and we followed.

We had not traveled far when my driver tromped on the brake, suddenly overpowered by the stench--excrement, quicklime, decaying flesh. It was crippling, and only grew worse when we finally drove on. That smell still revisits me without warning, usually propelled by a shock of some kind. At those instants, I imagine that the odor was so potent it somehow burned itself permanently into my olfactory nerves.

The first soldiers to enter the camp yesterday had come from the moth Infantry Division, the same outfit whose reserve regiments had briefly seized Martin at Pforzheim. There were a few officers from divisional G-3 present now, but most of the troops I saw were with associated armored cavalry units and, a day later, still seemed at a loss over the scene. They stood beside their vehicles while perhaps a dozen of the former inmates in their threadbare striped uniforms teetered around near them, frightful otherworldly creatures. Many were more emaciated than I'd believed human beings could become, veritable skeletons with skin, whose wrists and knuckles bulged hugely within their hands, and whose eyes were sunk so far into their skulls they looked sightless. Several were barefoot, and a number had large spots of feces and urine on their clothing. All of them moved with almost inanimate slowness, staggering inches at a time, with no apparent destination. One of them, a man with arms like mop handles, turned to me as soon as I alighted from the jeep and lifted both hands in a shameless plea.

I still do not know what he wanted, food or just understanding, but I froze there, shocked again to my battered core, and gripped by revulsion. This man, and those around like him, frightened me more fundamentally than the dead on the battlefield, because I recognized them instantly as unmistakable tokens of the limitless degradation a human would endure in order to live.

It was some time before I noticed a lieutenant who'd ventured forward to greet me. A tall, sandy-haired young man from divisional G-3, he gave his name as Grove and told me he had received a signal I was on the way. He motioned where I was looking.

"These are the lucky ones," he said. "Still on their feet."

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Jews," he answered. "Most of them. There are some Polish and French slave workers in one sub-camp. And a few of the Germans Hitler hated in another, mostly Gypsies and queers. But the greatest number of the folks here seem to be Jews. We've hardly sorted them all out. There's so much typhus here, we're afraid to do much."

I gasped then, choked almost, because I'd suddenly recognized the nature of a pearly mound a hundred yards behind the Lieutenant. It was made up of corpses, a nest of naked starved bodies, wracked and twisted in death. Instinctively, I moved a few steps that way. Grove caught my sleeve.

"You'll see a lot of that, if you care to."

Did I?

"I'd take a look," Grove said. "You'll want to tell people about this."

We began walking. Grove said there were probably 20,000 people held here now, many of them having arrived in the last few days. Some had been marched on foot from other concentration camps, with thousands dying along the way. Others, especially the sick, had been dumped here by the trainload. All had been crowded into makeshift wooden barracks, each about 150 feet long, in which there were only empty holes where the doors and windows were intended to be. I could not imagine what the savage winter had been like for the people already here, most of whom had had no more than their thin uniforms to protect them from the cold.

Outside the huts, there were open latrines, all overflowing with human waste because they were plugged intermittently by corpses. American bombing of a pumping station a few weeks ago had put an end to running water, and the prisoners had not been fed with any regularity since early March, when the German commandant had cut off most meals as a cruel means of controlling the plagues of dysentery and typhus that had broken out. For the last week, while the camp was surrounded, those interned here had received nothing at all. Some of those we passed, with their scraps of clothing and impossibly vacant looks, begged for crumbs. Grove warned me not to oblige them. The troops who arrived yesterday had given candy and tinned rations to the first inmates they saw. Rioting had broken out and then several of the prisoners who'd won the grim struggle that ensued had died when their intestinal systems revolted as a result of their gorging.

The huts that had housed these people were miserable, dark and reeking. Piles of feces stood here and there on the straw-covered floors, and in the wood bunks, stacked like shelving, the sick and starving lay side by side with the dead. You could tell the living only by their occasional moans and because the lice were so numerous on the deceased that the bugs appeared to be a moving wave. Hundreds of inmates had died since yesterday, Grove said. The division's docs had arrived this morning but were at a loss for a treatment plan that had any chance of success for those already so sick or that would afford a sanitary means to avoid spreading the typhus, especially to American troops.

As a result, Grove said, we really had only marginal control of the situation. As a case in point, we came upon the remains of a female guard Grove had seen killed earlier this morning. A group of female internees had found her hiding under one of the buildings and had pulled her out by the hair. The guard had screamed and called the prisoners filthy names, while they stomped and spat upon her. Ultimately, several men arrived with discarded pieces of wood to beat her to death. The killings of the kapos--most of them thugs sent here from German penitentiaries--and the Wehrmacht guards the SS had deserted had been going on for a day now, Grove said. A water tower had been converted to a makeshift gallows yesterday, and several of our troops had volunteered and helped with the hangings.

Back near the yellow-brick administrative cluster, out of sight of the huts, was a square building that contained an enormous brick furnace at its center. Using two hands, Grove pried open the giant cast-iron doors, revealing two half-burned bodies. The eyeholes in one skull faced straight my way, and I flinched at the sight. In front of the oven was a huge butcher block, which some of the interrogated guards had admitted was used to crush the gold fillings from the teeth of the dead.

But death had come too swiftly of late for far too many in Balingen to dispose of them in one furnace. Everywhere--between the huts, along the camp's roads, around every corner we turned--were the bodies, ghastly grayish-white mounds of dead human beings in various states of decomposition, every body stripped naked and pitted by the appetites of vermin. The piles here were nothing, Grove said. At the edge of the camp, there was a giant pit full of human remains that the inmates still standing had been forced to drag there in the last few days. Someone from G-3, trying to find a way to communicate the scene to superiors, had begun counting the corpses heaped about the camp and had quit after reaching 8,000. For me, again and again, as I stared at these hills of human beings, so pathetic in their nudity, with their stick-figure limbs and exposed genitalia, I experienced the same panic, because I could not tell where one person began and ended in the pile.

Several times I noticed that the uppermost bodies in these mounds were marked with bloody gashes in their abdomens.

"Why?" I asked Grove. "What was in their stomachs that anyone wanted?"

The Lieutenant looked at me. "Food," he said.

My war without tears ended at Balingen. A moment after entering the only but I visited, I rushed behind the building and vomited. Afterward, I found I was weeping. I tried for several minutes to gain control and eventually gave up and continued walking beside the Lieutenant, crying silently, which made my eyes ache in the strong sun. "Cried like a babe myself," he said at one point. "And I don't know if it's worse that I've stopped."

But it was not simply the suffering that had brought me to tears, or the staggering magnitude of the cruelty. It was a single thought that came to me after my first few minutes in the camp, another of those phrases that cycled maddeningly in my brain. The words were "There was no choice."

I had been on the Continent now for six months, half a year, not much longer than a semester in school, but it was impossible to recall the person I had been before. I had fought in terror, and I had learned to despise war. There was no glory in the savagery I saw. No reason. And surely no law. It was only brutality, scientifically perfected on both sides, in which great ingenuity had been deployed in the creation of giant killing machines. There was nothing to be loyal to in any of this and surely no cause for pride. But there in Balingen I cried for mankind. Because there had been no choice. Because knowing everything now, I saw this terrible war had to happen, with all its gore and witless destruction, and might well happen again. If human beings could do this, it seemed unfathomable how we could ever save ourselves. In Balingen, it was incontestable that cruelty was the law of the universe.

Amid all of this, I had lost any recollection of why I was there. When Grove walked into one of the yellow buildings near the gate, I expected him to expose another horror. Instead he led me down a cool stone stairway, into a rock cellar where an MP guarded an iron door. I could not imagine what the Germans had needed with a jail in a place like this, until I remembered that the camp had originally been a military post. This, apparently, was the stockade. There were eight cells here, each with stone walls and a barred front. Josef Kandel, the former camp commandant, today known as the Beast of Balingen, sat in one, erect in a spotless uniform but wearing no shoes, his legs chained. There were two SS officers in adjoining cells who'd been through rough questioning. One was in a heap on the floor; the other was largely toothless, with fresh blood still running down his chin. And in the farthermost cell, on a small stool sat United States Army Major Robert Martin of the Office of Strategic Services. The lousy clothes which he'd stripped from one of the corpses as a disguise had been burned following his capture and replaced with a fresh officer's uniform, a russet shirt, under a sleeveless wool sweater, his oak leaves still on the right point of his collar.

Confronting him, I knew my features were swollen by weeping, but he was surely more changed than I. On the left side of his face, the skin shone, pink as sunrise, and his ear was a gnarly remnant melted to the side of his head, above which no hair grew for several inches. The end of his left sleeve was empty.

"Major," I said, "by the order of General Roland Teedle, you are arrested and will appear before a general court-martial as soon as it may be convened."

He smiled in response and waved the one good hand he had.

"Oh, come off it, Dubin. Get in here and talk to me.''

His power of attraction was durable enough that I nearly did it before thinking. Even with one hand, Martin probably could subdue me and engineer yet another escape.

"I think not."

He laughed, shaking his head at length. "Then pull up a chair out there, if you must. But we should have a word."

I looked at Lieutenant Grove, who asked to brief me. As we walked down the dim hall, he whispered about what had transpired with the detail that had locked up Martin yesterday. While they were escorting him to the cell, he had informed his jailers about a mountain two hundred miles from here, where he claimed the Germans had stored all the stolen treasures of Europe. Thousands of gold bars and jewels were hoarded in the caverns, including American ten-and twenty-dollar gold pieces. A U. S. Army detachment, he said, could fake its way in and out just by saying they had come to take custody of the American tender and head home with every man a millionaire. Martin had offered to lead the way. Informed of this story, Grove had regarded it as preposterous. Instead, when he'd contacted OSS, Winters had confirmed that only a few days ago the 358th Infantry Regiment had taken a salt mine at Kaiseroda in the Harz Mountains, where they discovered a vast booty stored in the underground channels. Paintings, gems, rooms full of currency and coins. Billions' worth. Grove's theory was that Kaiseroda had been Martin's objective all along.

"What does OSS think?"

"Those fellows never say what they think."

I weighed the possibility. It remained appealing to believe that Martin hadn't ever been intent on spying. Rather, he would resign from war and make himself rich forever. Perhaps. But I'd become reconciled to the fact that I'd never really understand Martin's motives. Only he could explain them, and no one could accept a word he said.

A few minutes later, at Grove's order, an MP lugged a heavy oak chair down the stone hail for me. I sat outside Martin's cell, and he brought his small stool close to the bars. He still appeared chipper, even though his steps were mincing in his leg irons.

"So," said Martin. "As you've long wanted. You have me in chains. I knew that was poppycock about house arrest."

"You are far better off than any other prisoner here, Major."

He accepted my rebuke with a buttoned-up smile. "Even down here, there's the smell." He was right, although it was remote enough that I could also detect the familiar rot bred by cellar moisture. "I had no idea what I was headed to. But your dogs were on my heels, Dubin. And with the camp about to be surrendered, I thought I'd mingle and depart. Once I was here, of course, it was plain that I'd have trouble passing as an inmate, even with my injuries. But I couldn't stand to leave. In three nights, Dubin, I killed four SS. They were easy pickings, trying to skulk out the back gate in the middle of the night. I just laid a trip wire." He gave a kind of disbelieving snort. "There won't be any killings that lie easier on my conscience."

As ever, I had no idea whether to believe him. "And what about your plan to make yourself the new Croesus?" I asked. "Were you going to abandon that?"

"You don't believe that, do you, Dubin? It was a ploy, I admit. I was happy to make those boys think I could make them each into a Rockefeller. But we're two hundred miles away. If I was heading for Kaiseroda, I'd have been there by now."

"So where were you heading, Martin?"

You want to know my plan? Is that why you're sitting here? Well, I shall tell you, Dubin. Gita knows, she'll tell you anyway when you find her. You do want to find her, don't you?" His hostility about Gita got the better of him, and he showed a quick vulpine grin. I was surprised and somewhat relieved by Martin's pettiness--it was a crack in his perfect edifice--but I felt little other reaction when he mentioned her name. Not today. "You can tell my friends in OSS what I was up to and save them some time. I'd rather talk to you anyway.

I gave him nothing by way of response.

"You know, Dubin, you needn't be so peeved with me. I'd have kept my word to you in Savy. About surrendering? I had every intention. You don't think I prefer this, do you?" He lifted his handless arm, so that the bright red stump, a distorted knobby shape, crept out of the sleeve. I could have debated with him about dropping me off when he knew I wouldn't find Algar at his headquarters, or the last two and a half months that Martin had spent on the run since Gita helped him flee from Oflag XII-D. But I discovered that I had one enduring gripe with Robert Martin over and above all the others.

"You took advantage of my regard for you, Major. You made me think you were a bright shining hero and used my admiration as the means to escape.

"All for the right reasons, Dubin."

"Which are?"

"I was doing a good thing, Dubin. You'll understand that. The Nazis, Dubin, have been working on a secret weapon that can destroy the world--"

I erupted in laughter. It was a starkly inappropriate sound given where we were and the noise ripped along the rock corridor.

"Laugh if you like, Dubin. But it's the truth. It's the one way the Germans could have won the war, even now may still hope to. The Allies have long known this. The Germans have had their best physicists laboring feverishly. Gerlach. Diebner. Heisenberg. In the last several months, their principal workplace has been at a town called Hechingen, only a few miles down the road. Their efforts are rooted in the theorems of Einstein and others. They want to build a weapon, Dubin, that will break apart an atom. There's enough power there to blow an entire city off the map."

As usual, Martin seemed in complete thrall of his own entertaining nonsense. I was not much of a scientist, but I knew what an atom was and understood its infinitesimal size. Nothing of such minute dimension could conceivably be the killer force Martin was pretending.

"There is a race taking place now, Dubin. Between American intelligence and the Soviets. They each want to find the German scientists, their papers, and their materiel. Because whoever holds this weapon, Dubin, will rule the world. Ask your chums at OSS. Ask if this isn't true. Ask if there is not a group of physicists in Germany right now, working hand in glove with OSS. The code name is Alsos. Ask. They'll tell you they're going after these physicists even while we speak."

"This is where you were headed? Hechingen?" "Yes. Yes."

I leaned back against the hard chair. Martin's dark hair was tousled over his brow and he had an eager boyish look, despite the relative immobility of the features on the florid side of his face. I was amazed at the magnitude of what he was confessing, probably unwittingly.

"If what you're saying is so, if all this Buck Rogers talk about a secret weapon bears any speck of truth, they'll hang you, Major. And well they should."

"Hang me?"

"Surely, you aren't working for OSS. Of that I'm certain. So it's quite obvious you were going to Hechingen to capture these scientists for the Soviets and spirit them off to the Russians."

"That's false, Dubin. Entirely false! I want neither side to prevail. I want neither Communists nor capitalists to stand astride the globe."

"And how then is it that you know all this, Major? The plans of the Americans? And the Soviets? If you are not at work for the Russians, how do you know their intentions?"

"Please, Dubin. I was informed of all of these matters by OSS last September. When I returned to London. But certainly not by the Soviets. I've told you, Dubin. I belong now to neither side."

"Would the Soviets say that?"

"I have no idea what they'd say. But listen to me. Listen. I was going to Hechingen, Dubin. But not for any country. My goal was destruction. Of the whole lot. The materiel. The papers. And the men. Let their dreadful secret die with them. Don't you see? This is a second chance to contain all the grief in Pandora's box. If this weapon survives, no matter who has it, there will be constant struggle, the victor will lord it over the vanquished, the vanquished will plot to obtain it, and in the end it is no matter which side has it, because if it exists, it will be used.

There has never been a weapon yet invented that hasn't been deployed. Men can call that whatever they care to, even curiosity, but this device will be released on the globe. Let the world be safe, Dubin."

He was clever. But I'd long known that. No one--not Teedle, not me--would ever be able to prove he was working for the Soviets rather than for the sake of world peace. He and Wendell Willkie. It was, as I would have predicted, a perfect cover story.

"Dubin, find Gita. Find Gita. She will tell you that what I am saying is true. These are my plans. And there is still time to carry them out. No more than a few days. American forces will reach Hechinger shortly, depending on how the fighting goes. It's only a few miles up the road. Find Gita, Dubin."

How artful it was. How inevitable. Find Gita. She will persuade you to join my cause. And open the door to yet one more escape.

"She is here, Dubin. In the Polish sub-camp. There are Jews there from her town. She is nursing them. Go to the Polish camp. You'll find her. She will tell you this is true."

"No." I stood. "No more lies. No more fantasies. No more running away. We're going to Frankfurt. As soon as the armored vehicle arrives.

Tell your story there, Martin. You must think I'm a child."

"I speak the truth to you, Dubin. Every word. Every word. Ask Gita. Please."

I turned my back on him while he was still assailing me with her name.

Chapter 31.

GITA LODZ, OF COURSE

This woman, Gita Lodz, is, of course, my mother. I have no slick excuse for the months it took me to catch on, or for the elaborate tales I told myself during that period to hold the truth at bay. I guess people will inevitably cling to the world they know. Bear Leach's eventual explanation was more generous: "We are always our parents' children."

But sitting in the Tri-Cities Airport, reading the last of what my father had written, I had understood the conclusion of his account this way: Deceived yet again by Gita Lodz, Dad had proceeded to his final ruin and let Martin go. And then somehow, even while my father was absorbing the desolation of his most catastrophic mistake, he must have met this other woman at Balingen, Gella Rosner, and been transformed. It was love on the rebound, a lifeline to the man drowning.

In retrospect, all of that seems laughable. But for months I accepted it, and was frustrated and confused by only one omission: Dad never mentioned the courageous young Polish Jewess I'd been brought up to believe he instantly fell in love with in the camp.

As for Barrington Leach, from the time I asked him what had become of Gita Lodz, he had realized how misled I was. Yet he made no effort to correct me, although I often visited with him, trying to glean every detail he recalled about my father's story. Bear was a person of gentleness and wisdom, and, given all his caveats at the start, clearly had promised himself that he would tell me only as much as I seemed willing to know. He presented me with the recorded facts. It was up to me to reach the obvious conclusions. Bear kept his mouth shut, not so much for my parents' sake as for mine.

One day in April 2004, my sister phoned me at home to discuss our mother's health, which was declining. Sarah wanted my views on whether she should accelerate her plans to visit in June around the time of my parents' anniversary, which had been an especially hard period for Mom in 2003 in the wake of Dad's death. I knew my parents' marriage had lasted almost fifty-eight years. They'd made no secret of their wedding date, June 16, 1945. Yet until that moment, I'd never connected the dots. I stood with the telephone in my hand, jaw agape, while Sarah shouted my name and asked if I was still there.

By then, it had become my habit to see Barrington Leach once a month. I went mostly for the pleasure of his company, but my excuse to write off the expenses was that Bear was helping me edit Dad's typescript for publication. (Because of the scam I'd run on my mother and sister, my plan, at that point, was to tell them Dad's account was actually my work, based on my lengthy research.) When I saw Bear, I'd hand over the most recent pages and receive his comments about what I'd done the previous month. Not long after he was wheeled into the front room for our visit in late April, I told him what had occurred to me while I was on the phone with my sister the week before.

"I just realized a few days ago that my parents got married right before Dad's court-martial. Did you know that?"

"I should say so," answered Bear. "I'm the one who arranged it."

"Arranged the wedding?"

"Not their meeting," said Bear. "But getting the military authorities to allow them to wed, yes, that was my doing. Your father was concerned, quite rightly, that when he was convicted, as was inevitable, he would be transferred immediately to a military prison in the U. S. He was therefore desperate to marry before the proceedings, so that your mother, as a war bride, would have the right to immigrate to the States. She had remained an inmate in a displaced persons camp that had been erected after burning down the Balingen huts. The conditions were far better, of course, but she was anything but free. It required countless petitions to the Army and the Occupation Authorities, but eventually your mother and a rabbi, also held at Balingen, were allowed to visit your father for half an hour at Regensburg Castle for their wedding. I was the best man. In spite of the circumstances, it was quite touching. They appeared very much in love."

Bear said only that and glanced down to the pages I'd handed him, allowing me to work my way through this information in relative privacy. Despite the horrors of the camp, or Mom's unfamiliarity with the military, or even her limited English at the time, someone as innately canny as she was couldn't possibly have failed to grasp the essentials of Dad's situation. She knew he was under arrest, and as such, had to be gravely concerned for her new husband. Clearly, then, Mom recalled a great deal more about Dad's court-martial than she'd been willing to acknowledge to me. Yet even at that moment, my first impulse was to accept her reluctance as a way of honoring Dad's desire for silence.

But somehow my mind wandered back to the question that had perplexed me for half a year now. Why did Dad say he desperately hoped his children would never hear his story? Out the paned windows of Northumberland Manor's sitting room, there was perfect light on the red maple buds just showing the first sign of ripening, and beholding them with the intense museum attention Dad wrote of, a moment of concentrated sight, I found the truth hanging out there, too. It was simple. My father's remark about keeping this from his children was not philosophical. It was practical. Dad had not wanted the truth to emerge at his trial, or to survive it, because it would have imperiled his wife and the lie she was to be obliged to live. That is why it would have been a disaster to call Gita Lodz as a witness. That is why he hoped we never heard the story--because that silence would have meant they had made a life as husband and wife.

Bear's head was wilted in his wheelchair while he read, and I reached out to softly clutch his spotted hand and the fingers crooked with disease.

"She's my mother. Right? Gita Lodz?"

Bear started, as if I'd woken him. His cloudy eyes that still reflected the depth of the ages settled on me, and his lower jaw slid sideways in his odd lopsided smile. Then he deliberated, an instant of lawyerly cool.

"As I have said, Stewart, I was not there when you were born.

"But the woman you saw my father marry--that was Gita Lodz?"

"Your father never said that to me," he answered. "Anything but. It would have compromised me severely to know that, inasmuch as I had spent months begging the military authorities for permission to allow David to marry a concentration camp survivor of another name. I would have been obliged to correct the fraud being perpetrated. I believe that was why he never contacted me once we were back in the U. S. A.--so that I didn't have to deal with any second thoughts about that."

Despite failing on the uptake for months, I now bounced rapidly along the path of obvious conclusions. I instantly comprehended why Gita Lodz, hero of the French underground, came here pretending to be the former Gella Rosner (whose name was Americanized as Gilda), David Dubin's war bride, allegedly saved from the Nazi hell called Balingen. In the spring of 1945, my parents had every reason to believe that OSS would never have permitted the sidekick of Robert Martin, suspected Soviet spy, to enter the United States. Indeed, as someone who had repeatedly abetted Martin's escapes, Gita stood a good chance of being prosecuted if OSS and Teedle had gotten their hands on her. A new identity was the only safe course. One that could never be disproved amid that ocean of corpses. One more role to add to the many the would-be Bernhardt had already played flawlessly. And one that guaranteed that Gilda would be welcome in David's family. A Jewish bride. As his parents wished. And as Gita herself, when she was younger, had once wanted to be.

And, probably not insignificantly, it was also a weighty declaration for my father. When I had changed my last name in 1970, Dad had never really responded to my implication that I was reversing an act of renunciation from decades before. There was only one thing he cared to be clear about.

"Do not doubt, Stewart," he said to me once, "that Balingen made me a Jew." Since I knew he would never describe what he'd witnessed there, I did not pursue the remark. On reflection, I took it as one more way of telling me how devoted he was to my mother. And even now I'm not completely certain of the precise nature of the transformation he was alluding to. I don't know if he meant that he had realized, as had been true for so many in Germany, that there was no escape from that identity, or, rather, as I tend to suspect, that he owed the thousands annihilated there the reverence of not shirking the heritage that had condemned them. Certainly, there was a touching homage in Gita's new persona, which allowed one of the millions who perished to be not only remembered, but revived. But I see that Dad was also making an emphatic statement about himself, about what an individual could stand for, or hope for, against the forces of history.

I, on the other hand, who had proudly reclaimed Dubinsky, who sent my daughters to Hebrew school and insisted we have shabbas dinner every Friday night, I now reposed in the nouveau-Federal sitting room of a Connecticut nursing home realizing that by the strict traditions of a religion that has always determined a child's faith by that of his mother, I am not really Jewish.

These are the last pages of my father's account:

I emerged again from the dungeon darkness into the brilliant day and terrible reek of Balingen. I suppose that humans recoil on instinct from the rankness of decaying flesh and I had to spend a moment fighting down my sickness again.

Grove was waiting for me. I thought he wanted to know how it had gone with Martin, but he had other news.

"Roosevelt is dead," he said. "Truman is President."

"Don't be a card."

"It's just on Armed Services Radio. They say FDR had a stroke. I kid you not." I had been raised to worship Roosevelt. My mother, who regarded the President as if he were a close relation, would be devastated. And then I looked to the nearest mound of broken corpses. At every one of these instants of paradox, I reflexively expected my understanding of life to become deeper, only to find myself more confused.

I asked the MP who'd accompanied me if we had an estimated arrival time on the half-track that would carry Martin back, but the news about Roosevelt's death seemed to have brought everything to a halt for a while. Nonetheless, I wouldn't countenance the idea of spending the night within Balingen. Whatever hour the convoy arrived, I said, I wanted Martin transferred. We could bivouac with the 406th Armored Cavalry a mile or two away, nearer Hechingen.

An hour or so later, vehicles reached the camp, but not the ones I awaited. They carried the first Red Cross workers. I watched with a certain veteran distance as these men and women, accustomed to working tirelessly to save lives, began to absorb the enormity of what they were confronting. A young French doctor passed out when he saw the first hill of bodies. Inexplicably, one of the wraiths moving vacantly through the camp, an elderly man who had somehow lived to liberation, fell dead only a few feet from the unconscious doctor. As with everything else, we all seemed bereft of the power to react. If the sky fell, as Henny Penny feared, we might have had more to say.

Many of the American infantrymen were standing in little groups, speculating about what the President's death might mean with regard to the Nazis' final surrender and the war in the Pacific. I could see that the shock of the news was welcome in its way, a chance to put where they were out of their minds for a while.

The half-track I awaited, a captured German 251 that had been repainted, finally appeared at 2:3o in the afternoon. Only a minute or so after that, Grove came to find me. We were preparing to load Martin. He would be in leg irons with at least two guns trained on him at all times.

"There's an inmate looking for you," Grove said. "She asked for you by name."

I knew who it was. A shamed and exhausted fantasy that Gita might appear had circulated through my mind, in just the way it had for months, even as I'd tried to banish it.

"Polish?" I asked.

"Yes, from the Polish camp. She looks quite well," he added, "but there are several young women here who look all right." He made no further comment on how these girls might have managed.

She was in the regimental office that had been established in the largest of the yellow buildings the SS had abandoned earlier in the week. The room was empty, paneled to half height in shellacked tongueand-groove, with a broken schoolhouse fixture hanging overhead from a frayed wire. Beneath it, Gita Lodz sat on a single wooden chair, the only furnishing in the room. She sprang to her feet as soon as she saw me. She was still in the gray uniform the nuns had given her in Bastogne, although it was frayed at both sleeves and soiled, and bore a yellow star pinned above the breast.

"Doo-bean," she said, and with the name, more than the sight of her, my poor heart felt as if it might explode. I had no need to ask how she knew I was here. She would have maintained her own surveillance on the building where Martin was jailed.

I dragged another wooden chair in from the hall, taking a seat at least a dozen feet from her. We faced each other like that, with no barrier between us but distance, both of us with our feet flat on the worn floor. I was too proud to lose my composure, and waited with my face trembling, until I could drag out a few words.

"So we meet again in hell," I said to her in French. I felt my heart and mind pirouetting again with the unaccountable extremes in life. Here I was with this gallant, deceitful woman, full of wrath and anguish, while I was still reeling from the reek of atrocity, sitting where some of history's greatest monsters had been in charge only a week ago. Roosevelt was dead. I was alive.

Although I did not ask, she told me about the last several days. Martin and she had snuck in through the same breach in the rear fence the SS guards were using to slip away. After only a matter of hours, she recognized four people she had known in Pilzkoba and last seen on the trucks the Nazis had loaded for deportation to Lublin. One of them was a girl a year younger than Gita, a playmate, who was the last of a family of six. Two younger siblings, a brother and a sister, had been snatched from her parents' arms and promptly gassed when they arrived at a camp called Buchenwald. There the next year her father had been beaten to death by a kapo right in front of her, only a few weeks after her mother had succumbed to pneumonia. But still this girl from Pilzkoba had survived. She had marched here hundreds of miles with no food, her feet wrapped in rags, a journey on which another of her brothers had perished. Yet she had arrived at Balingen in relative health. And then yesterday she had died of one of the plagues raging through the camp.

"In Normandy, Dubin, when we helped to direct the Allied troops through the hedgerows, I saw battlefields so thick with corpses that one could not cross without walking on the bodies. I told myself I would never see anything worse, and now I see this. And there are souls here, Dubin, who say the Germans have created places worse yet. Is that possible? N'y at-il jamais un fond, meme dans les oceans les plus profonds?" Is there no bottom even to the darkest ocean?

With that, she cried, and her tears, of course, unleashed my own. Seated a dozen feet apart, we both wept, I with my face in my hands.

"There is so much I do not understand," I finally said, and will never understand. Here looking at you, I ask myself how it can seem possible, amid this suffering, that the worst pain of all is heartbreak?"

"Do you criticize me, Dubin?"

"Need I?" I answered with one of those French sayings she loved to quote. "Conscience coupable n'a pas besoin d'accusateur." A guilty conscience needs no accuser. "But I am sure you feel no shame."

She tossed her bronze curls. She was thin and sallow. Yet unimaginably, she remained beautiful. How was that possible either?

"You are bitter with me," she said.

You decimated me with your lies."

"I never lied to you, Dubin."

"Call it what you like. I told you secrets and you used them against me, against my country. All for Martin."

"Entre l'arbre et l'ecorce it faut ne pas mettre le doigt." One shouldn't put a finger between the bark and the tree. In our parlance, she was caught between a rock and a hard place. "This is not justice. What you were about to do--what you will do now Martin placed in chains by his nation? He has risked his life for America, for the Allies, for freedom, a thousand times. He is the bravest man in Europe."

"The Americans believe he is a spy for the Soviets."

She wrenched her eyes shut in anguish.

"The things they have asked you to accept," she murmured. "C'est impossible. Martin despises Stalin. He was never a Stalinist, and after Stalin's pact with Hitler, Martin regarded him as the worse of the two. He calls Stalin and Hitler the spawn of the same devil."

"And what then is it he has been doing all these months, defying his orders, running from OSS, from Teedle, and from me? Has he told you his goal?"

"Now? Lately, he has, yes. Up to the time of the Ardennes, I believed what he told you--that he was on assignment for OSS, as he has always been. He would not say where he was to go, but that was not unusual."

"And do you believe him now?"

"I think what he says is what he believes."

When I asked her to say what that was, she looked down to her small hands folded in her lap, clearly reluctant even now to disclose Martin's secrets. And still, I cautioned myself that the reaction I saw might be another pose.

"Since I took him from the hospital at SaintVith," she finally said, "he has maintained the same thing. Martin says that the Nazis are making a machine that can destroy the world. He wants to kill all who understand its workings and bury their secret with them forever. It is madness, but it is madness in Martin's style. It is glorious. He claims this is his destiny. For the most part, I have felt like, what is his name, the little one who walks beside Don Quixote?"

"Sancho Panza."

"Yes, I am Sancho Panza. There is no telling Martin this is lunacy. And I have stopped trying, Dubin. The scientists are at Hechinger. Martin has established that much. But a single device that could reduce London to cinders? It is fantasy, like so much that Martin tells himself. But it will surely be the last.

"Because?"

"Because he will die trying to do this. A man with one hand? His left leg is still barely of any use. The pain is so severe at night from the nerves that were burned that he sheds tears in his sleep. And he has no one to help him."

"Except you."

"Not I. I will have no part of this, Dubin. He does not ask it. And I would not go. I have been a member of the resistance, not a vigilante. He has no allies in this, no organization. But it is paramount to him nonetheless."

"But not because of the Soviets?"

"Dubin, it is how he wishes to die. Whether or not he admits as much to himself, death is clearly his goal. He is maimed and in unending pain. But now when he dies, as he surely will, he will believe he was doing no less than assuring the safety of the world. It is a glory as great as the one he has always wished for. That is what you would deny him. He says that the Americans will hang him instead, if he is caught. True?"

I had told Martin as much a few hours earlier, and with time to calculate, I had decided it was no exaggeration. The story Martin had told me would be enough to send him to the gallows. Whether he was working for the Soviets, as most of his superiors would believe, or as the new Flash Gordon, he had admitted that he was an American soldier trying to undermine American forces and deny them a weapon regarded as essential to the security of the United States. That would, at a minimum, make him a traitor and a mutineer. The law would need to sift no finer.

"And is that just, Dubin?" she asked, once I'd nodded.

"Just? Compared to anything that has happened in this place, it is just. Martin disobeyed orders. He brought this on himself."

"But is that what you wish to see, Dubin? Martin trembling at the end of a rope?"

"That is not my choice, Gita. I must do my duty." "So the guards are claiming here. They did as ordered."

"Please."

"I ask again if that is what you would choose for him."

"I dare not choose a destiny for Martin, Gita. The law does not allow it. It would say I am hopelessly biased by jealousy. And in that, the law is surely wise.''

"Jealousy?" She looked at me blankly until my meaning reached her. "Dubin, I have told you many times, you have no need to be jealous of Martin."

"And that proved to be another lie. You slept with me to learn what I would find out about Martin and then deserted me to rescue him. Jealousy is the least of it."

She had drawn herself straight. The black eyes were a doll's now, hard as glass.

"You think that is why I slept with you?" "I do."

She looked askance and made as if to spit on the floor. "I misjudged you, Dubin."

"Because you thought I was more gullible?"

She actually lifted a hand toward her heart, not far from where the star was pinned.

"What do you believe, Dubin? That I am a statue and cannot be hurt? I value your esteem, Dubin. More, apparently, than you can understand. I cannot tolerate your scorn."

"I admire your strength, Gita. I still admire that." She closed her eyes for a time.

"Be angry, Dubin. Be hurt. Think I was too casual with your feelings. But please do not believe I would make love to you with such ugly intentions. Do you see me as a harlot? Because I am a harlot's daughter?"

"I see you as you are, Gita. As someone who knows how to do what she has to." I repeated Winters' story about the German officer in Marseilles to whom she'd succumbed in order to win details of the London bombing. And even as I recounted the OSS's sniggering about her sleeping with the enemy, I realized I had awaited this moment for months so that she would tell me it was untrue. She did not.

"Qui n'entend qu'une cloche n'entend qu'un son." He who hears one bell hears only one sound. There were, she meant, two sides of the story. "Something like that, Dubin, is so easy to judge from a distance."

I mocked her with another proverb. "Qui veut la fin veut les moyens?" He who wants the ends wants the means.

"Is that not true? In this place, Dubin, there are thousands who have done far worse to save just their own lives, let alone hundreds of others. Thousands probably were spared because of what I did. There are many mistakes I have made, Dubin, for which I forgive myself less freely. I was young. It was a poor idea only because I did not understand that even when the soul wears armor, it remains fragile. I thought, a cock is just another thing, Dubin. And Martin, by the way, knew nothing of this in advance and begged me never to consider such an act again, for my own sake as much as for his. But let me tell you, Dubin, what was the most confounding part. This man, this Nazi, this officer, he was kind to me. He was a man with some goodness in him. And to learn that about him on false pretenses--that was the most difficult part."

"As I am sure you have said the same of me."

"It is not the same, Dubin! I will not leave this place with you believing that." She continued to sit tall, her face folded in fury. "I care for you, Dubin. Greatly. You know that. Look at me here. You cannot tell me that even four meters away from me, you cannot feel that? I know you can."

"And that is why you crushed my heart. Because you cared for me?"

"My only excuse is one you must acknowledge as true. I left you before you left me."

"As you say. That is an excuse. I believed I loved you.

"You never spoke to me of love."

"You were gone before I could. But please do not pretend that would have made any difference. What I felt and what I showed could not have been clearer with a name applied. You rewarded my love with lies. Until I came here, I thought that was the cruelest thing in life."

"Yes," she said. "Such a thing is unkind. But understand, Dubin, please understand. Could I have stayed and loved you and watched as you took Martin off in chains to be hanged? He gave me back my life, Dubin. Should I have quietly condemned him for the sake of my own happiness?"

"I do not believe that is how you thought of it."

"How I thought of it, Dubin, is that a man like you, a proper bourgeois gentleman, would never make your life with a Polish peasant with no schooling. That is how I thought of it. You would return to your America, to your law books, to your intended. That is how I thought of it. I dream of children, as you dream. I dream of being as far from war as a happy home is. For me that is a dream that will probably never come true."

"These are excuses."

"This is the truth, Dubin!" She shook her small hands at me in rage, again in tears. "You say I would not forsake Martin for you. But you surely have your own idols. If I had stayed and begged you not to do your duty with Martin, would you have refused?"

"I would like to believe that my answer is 'Yes.' But I doubt it. I am afraid, Gita, I would have done anything for you."

"And who would you be after that, Dubin, without your precious principles?"

"I do not know. But it would be who I had chosen to become. I could tell myself that. I could tell myself I had chosen love and that in a life as harsh as ours, it must come first."

She was motionless, staring at me in that way she had, a look so intense I thought it might turn me to flame. Then she asked if I had a cloth, meaning a handkerchief. She took it from me and returned to her chair to clear her nose. Finally, she sat forward and clasped her hands.

"Do you mean this? What you have just said? Do you speak from the heart, Dubin, or is this merely a lawyer's argument?"

"It is the truth, Gita. Or was. It is in the past."

"Must it be? We have our moment, Dubin. Here. Now. It can all be as you would like. As I would like. We will have love. We will have each other. But let him go, Dubin. Let Martin go and I will stay with you. I will tend your hearth and cook your meals and bear your brats, Dubin. I will. I want to. But let him go.

"'Let him go' ?"

"Let him go."

"I cannot even imagine how I could do that."

"Oh, Dubin, you are far too clever to say that. You would not need an hour's reflection to concoct a scheme that would work. Dubin, please. Please." She walked to my chair and then put one knee on the floor. "Please, Dubin. Dubin, choose this. Choose love. Choose me. If you send Robert to the hangman, it will stand between us forever. Here in hell, Dubin, you can choose this one good thing. Let Quixote fight his windmill. Do not make him die in disgrace. He has lived to be a hero. It would be worse than torture for him to die known as a traitor."

"You would do anything for him, wouldn't you?"

"He saved my life, Dubin. He has shown me the way to every good thing I believe in. Even my love for you, Dubin."

"Would you pledge your love to me, give up your life, just to see him die one way rather than another?"

"Dubin, please. Please. This is my life, too. You are precious to me. Dubin. Please, Dubin." Slowly she reached for my hand. My entire body surged at her touch and even so, I thought: Once more, she will engineer his escape. But I loved her. As Biddy had said, it was pointless to try to reason about that.

With my hand in hers, she wept. "Please, Dubin," she said. "Please."

"You have the personality of a tyrant, Gita. You wish to turn me into a supplicant so you will think better of yourself."

Despite the tears, she managed a smile. "So now you know my secret, Dubin."

You will mock me for being bourgeois."

"I shall," she said. "I promise to. But I will be thrilled, in spite of myself." She lifted her face to me. "Take me to America, Dubin. Make me your wife. Let Martin go. Let Martin be the past. Let me be the future. Please." She kissed my hand now, a hundred times, clutching it between hers and embracing every knuckle. What she proposed was mad, of course. But no madder than what I had watched men do routinely for months now. No madder than parachuting into a town under siege. No madder than combat, where soldiers gave up their lives for inches of ground and the grudges of generals and dictators. In this place, love, even the remotest chance of it, was the only sane choice. I pulled her hands to my mouth and kissed them once. Then I stood, looking down on her.

"When you betray me, Gita, as I know you will, I will have nothing. I will have turned my back on my country, and you will be gone. I will have no honor. I will believe in nothing. I will be nothing."

"You will have me, Dubin. I swear. You will have love. I swear, Dubin. You will not be betrayed. I swear. I swear."

Gita Lodz is my mother.

Chapter 32.

BEAR: END

When I first read Dad's account, the end had seemed disappointingly abrupt. Not only did I think there was no mention of my mother, there was also no recounting of what had happened with Martin. Supposedly writing to explain things to his lawyer, Dad was silent about whether Martin fled, as Dad claimed, or had been murdered, as Bear feared.

According to the testimony at the court-martial, late on April 12, 1945, Martin had been loaded at gunpoint into the armored vehicle Dad had awaited. In convoy with the MPs, they traveled only a mile or two beyond the perimeter of Balingen toward Hechingen, to the bivouac of the 406th Armored Cavalry. There Martin was chained to a fence post before a tent was erected around him. At roughly 3:00 a. M., my father appeared and told the two MPs guarding the Major that Dad could not sleep and would spell them for two hours. When they returned Dad was there and Martin was gone. My father told the guards, without further explanation, he had let Martin go. A day later he was back in Frankfurt to admit the same thing to Teedle.

The first time I came back to visit Leach in Hartford, in November 2003, I got right to the point.

"What Dad wrote doesn't answer your question." "My 'question'?"

"Whether my father murdered Martin once he freed him."

"Oh, that." Bear gave his dry, gasping laugh. "Well, what do you think, Stewart?"

Before I'd read the pages Bear gave me, his suspicions were astonishing, but once I understood that Dad had abandoned everything for Gita Lodz, I comprehended Leach's logic. As my father had told her, if she betrayed him again, he would have had nothing. With Martin dead, on the other hand, she could never rejoin him. Certainly, Dad had no need to fear discovery if he murdered Martin. There was virtually no chance one more body would ever be identified among the thousands decomposing in the massive pit at the edge of Balingen. Dad was armed, of course. And after combat, he was sadly experienced in killing.

In other words, Dad had motive and opportunity, which I'd listened to prosecutors for years label as the calling cards of a strong circumstantial murder case. But my faith in my father's decency, which even now seemed as tangible to me as his body, remained unchanged. Realizing everything I hadn't known about his life, murder still seemed beyond him, and I told Leach that. Bear was very pleased to hear it, favoring me with his funny sideways smile.

"Good for you, Stewart."

"But am I right?"

"Of course. It became critical for me to determine the answer to my own question, especially after the verdict and sentence. Quite frankly, Stewart, if there was a worse crime to be discovered, I might have thought twice about pressing ahead with appeals. Five years for the murder of another officer, even a wanted one, was not a disappointing result, if that's what had actually occurred."

But it turned out Martin was alive?"

"When your father last saw him? Without doubt. Where are my papers?" The Redweld folder, Bear's treasure chest, as I thought of it, rested against the chrome spokes of his wheelchair, and I handed it up. Leach's bent fingers stumbled through the pages. He would touch a paper several times before he could grab it and then bring it almost to his nose to read. "No," he'd say, and the process would begin again, with his apologies to me for the agonizing pace. "Here!" he said at last.

LABORATORY