A novel
“and their sons in turn shall have another war to fight”
- Howard Ambruster
One
Chatham, New York
Of course she was beautiful, even in mourning: the bottom of her dark hair barely brushing the collar of her black dress; her cheeks with just a touch of natural rose.
The wife.
The second wife. Lisa, a woman about his age. She was standing next to him, the son, but half a step forward. The grave lay open before them.
He had first met her thirteen years before, six months after the marriage. He’d been speechless when his father, hand in hand with his new wife, his young and beautiful wife, stepped out of the house to greet him.
Six months, because his father didn’t invite him to the wedding.
“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,” his father told him afterwards.
And he lived twenty-two hundred miles away.
Six months, because once you’ve missed the day what difference does another week matter, or a month. And his wife, Cathy, happened to be pregnant at the time, nearly due.
He brought the family with him when he came. He made the trip so he could meet his father’s new wife, and so he could show off his new son. His father never mentioned he’d married a younger woman.
*
His son was fourteen now and wasn’t talking to him. His twelve-year-old wasn’t talking to him, either. And the eight-year-old, following his brothers’ lead, was just as angry, sort of a contact ill humor, because his youngest son didn’t really understand what was going on, only that his mom was mad and his dad gone. The divorce was nearly a year old.
Another cop with a screwed up family life. A cliché. But with half the people in the country getting divorced, maybe his family life wasn’t a cliché at all, just the statistical norm.
He took another glance at Lisa. She was staring at the ground: slate-blue eyes set deeply in a pale face, with just that touch of rose about her cheeks. He didn’t think she’d been crying; her eyes weren’t puffy or red, maybe because she was still in shock. Who expects an accident?
Her call had woken him. He’d known immediately it was bad news.
“Your father was out jogging. The driver didn’t even stop.”
Her words had echoed hollowly, almost impossible to grasp, like an announcement at an airport.
He’d spoken with his father only a couple of weeks before. His father, at sixty-eight, was as vigorous as he’d ever been. His father should have been able to get out of the way of a car. But somehow that didn’t happen.
A hit-and-run. The sort of case that might land on his desk, if things were slow.
He slowly checked the faces of the people around him, looking for someone who appeared vindicated, or pleased, or smug.
But the people standing around the excavated grave simply seemed depressed.
When he was working a homicide, he almost always went to the funeral of the victim—a professional mourner—because sometimes the killer went, too. But not today.
Sixty-seven people attended the service at the funeral home. Twenty-seven followed the hearse to the cemetery for the interring, a more intimate ritual. The final farewell, in congregation with those spirits who had passed before: his mother and his brother.
He took a breath.
Forty feet away his brother lay in the ground. They’d waited for the reverend to gather himself that day, too. A chilly spring day, with the threat of rain.
Michael Calvert
May 7, 1950
April 11, 1971
His older brother, dead almost twenty-five years. Not his older brother anymore. Rest in Peace.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
He liked to think his brother was still there, just beneath the surface of the earth, close, if unreachable, like a reflection in a pool of water; maybe, in the dark, still staring up at the wheel of stars.
Perseus. Taurus. Auriga. His brother listing the stars of the constellations for him, like a ship captain pointing out for his passengers the highlights of a familiar coast.
On winter nights, when the sky was clear, he and his brother sometimes dragged their sleeping bags out behind the house so they could watch the stars, the air in January so cold the moisture in their breaths turned to ice as they spoke, the clouds of frost hanging for a moment, before settling on their cheeks.
His brother spent a week at home before going off to war. The two of them spent the time hunting rabbits, and talking about girls. His brother had been more concerned about getting VD, than dying.
He shifted to his other foot, and took another look around.
Some of the neighbors had brought their children—boys in sport jackets with sleeves that were too short; girls in dresses.
His kids had refused to come. Summer vacation was almost over and they had plans; and New York was too far. And maybe he didn’t insist because it would have cost too much.
He wasn’t supposed to insist on anything anymore. That was what the therapist advised. He was their father. Eventually, his sons would come around.
Like for a loan.
*
“My friends,” the Reverend Paul Davis intoned, sweeping his eyes across the mourners, before turning at last to Lisa and himself. “Lisa. Peter. We are here today not only to grieve the passing of Joseph Henry Calvert but also to celebrate his life and accomplishments, and, most importantly, his friendship.”
The Reverend Davis was in his late fifties, had thinning gray hair and kindly blue eyes. A tall man, like Peter. A man physically close to God. But unlike Peter, the Reverend Davis was river-reed thin. The reverend and Joseph Calvert had been friends for years.
“I first met Joseph in the stacks of the State University library,” the Reverend Davis stated. “He was thumbing through a book on World War II, research for a history he planned to write. Joseph was a veteran. He fought in France and Germany, and was a member of the Army of Occupation after the war.” The reverend let his eyes drift among the mourners, maybe looking for those who’d also served. “A hard thing for a young man: to see all that destruction, to have been a part of it. The sort of thing that stays with a man for life.”
Peter shifted back to his other foot. The sort of thing that marked a man for life.
His father’s preoccupation with the history of that era was nothing short of an obsession. Hundreds of books lined the walls of his father’s study. Two file cabinets were crammed with notes and correspondence, the product of forty years of research. A project his father had worked on every evening. Twice during Peter’s childhood, the family went to Germany on vacation, but not to tour the castles and medieval cities. Libraries, bookstores, and even a graveyard, comprised his father’s itinerary.
“The people that we love don’t irrevocably pass from this earth,” the reverend asserted. “They live on in us. Joseph might be gone, but the moments we shared with him remain.”
A eulogy like every other eulogy Peter had ever heard, and he’d heard enough for anyone.
Lisa didn’t even look like she was listening.
Peter couldn’t read anything on her face—the face of a person in shock. Was she thinking of those moments she and his father shared? Was she contemplating the days ahead? The house would seem too large now, too quiet. After a month, or two months, she would move.
A tear rolled down her cheek.
Peter pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her.
“It’s hard to suffer such a loss,” the Reverend Davis acknowledged. “An accident always catches us unprepared. But let the tears we shed also represent our joy, for one day we will be reunited with Joseph in the presence of our Lord. We will bow our heads and pray.”
The twenty-eight people who were there let their heads dip a little lower.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me before still waters; He restoreth my soul. Let the Lord restore us all after this loss. Amen.”
The reverend nodded, and the graveyard attendants moved forward from where they’d been waiting and lowered the casket into the ground.
The reverend bent and scooped up a handful of soil. “Out of the earth were you taken, and to the earth shall you return.” The reverend cast the soil onto the casket.
Lisa stooped and did the same.
Peter followed. He would have liked to have picked up one of the shovels standing to the side and filled in the grave. He wanted to tuck in his father, as he wished he could recall his father tucking him in. But his mother was the one who’d always kissed him and his brother good night.
Lisa started toward the limousine.
Peter pulled out a cigarette and headed for the Camaro he’d rented. It was over. The book on his father had been closed.
Two
Berlin, Germany
The queue was at a standstill, the postal clerk, as thorough as an auditor, inspecting each letter, box and form for correctness and completeness.
Dieter fidgeted uneasily.
Max stood unmoving.
Max was outside the post office, in the shadow of a tree, watching. Dieter was inside, near the end of the line.
But why was Dieter there? Max wondered. The man would be late getting back to work; he would receive a reprimand. Did Dieter need a stamp for the envelope he was holding? Was that a bill that simply had to go out?
Dieter looked up at the clock on the wall, then took a step forward with the line.
Max glanced at the clock too, as if it were a parent who could forgive him for what he was about to do: 1:37, the same as his watch.
Max checked the street. But police cars weren’t hurrying down the avenue. No one was watching him.
Halfway up the block, a man was sitting in a van: Klaus. Klaus was waiting for Dieter, too. In another minute, Dieter would be in that van.
*
“A catastrophe, Max!”
Max was standing in his father’s office, on the far side of the broad desk. Max was trying to understand. The tearing down of the Berlin wall hadn’t struck him as a catastrophe, just the opposite: a rebirth, a reclamation of what had been lost. Germany united again. The past, if not expunged, at least plastered over, like the face of a desecrated wall.
Max had walked there that day, the smell of shattered masonry hanging on the air.
The Wall was coming down! Who lived to see such a fundamental change, as if a basic law of physics had been proved wrong, as if the axis of the Earth had shifted.
People were hammering at the stones. A tidal wave of people.
Max started to hammer, too. He didn’t think. The emotion was too great. Joy? Astonishment? Such a thing, to be astonished, like falling in love as an adult. Germany reunited. A nation again! The German nation rising up and throwing off the last shackles of its enemies, ready to move on. But in what direction?
His father had an idea.
“We miscalculated, Max. Who could have anticipated that the East would collapse so suddenly, without warning. We didn’t have a plan in place.”
Along the walls of his father’s office, photographs stood in rows, like soldiers at attention: the family triumphant. Max’s grandfather: an I.G. Farben director. Max’s great-grandfather, the same. His great-great-grandfather, one of Farben’s original chemists.
A photograph of the company’s original factory had the place of honor between the windows. Max’s great-great-grandfather was the man who’d fabricated the chemicals used to make that print. Now that Max was working for the company, five generations of Dreszers had served I.G. Farben, or its successor company: Merkantil AG. Max’s father, Hermann Dreszer, was next in line to be CEO. That promotion was suddenly at risk.
“To just run,” his father said. His father’s sense of duty was offended.
With the collapse of the East German government, the officers of the Stasi, the East German secret police, simply fled their posts, leaving hundreds of thousands of files undestroyed. Hermann Dreszer’s illicit exploits were the subject of one of those files, a file Dieter Kolb had come across.
“When one is under attack, Max, when all that one has worked for—a lifetime of effort!—is suddenly at risk, one doesn’t wait for the blow to fall. One acts! We did what we had to.”
His father expected the same of him.
It hadn’t occurred to Max before that circumstances, and one’s own ethic, could, at certain junctures, deprive one of a choice. The revelation stunned him, as his father’s revelation of what he and Merkantil’s other directors had done had stunned him.
His father, acting on behalf of the company, had engaged Russian agents to destroy half a dozen oil fields, by contaminating those fields with oil-eating bacteria. The company’s plan was to leak word of this economic catastrophe at the same moment it announced the release of a super-efficient solar cell. With panic spreading in the market, and with the price of oil sky-rocketing, every person and business on the planet would be lining up to buy these cells.
“People have been waiting for this breakthrough, Max. Everyone understands that fossil fuels have a limited future, that if we continue to burn fossil fuels, a habitable earth will have a limited future.”
The use of oil-eating bacteria in this sabotage was a particular satisfaction for his father because the bacteria, a failure as a remedy for oil spills, was a product his father had championed.
His father was studying him, his father’s left hand absolutely still on the desk. The right hand, the hand that had been injured in the accident, was resting on the arm of his father’s chair.
They’d been working on a chemistry experiment. His father had been reading off the steps. Max had been mixing the chemicals. But his father was so slow, so precise in his instructions; and the process was so obvious. Before his father could stop him, Max poured the contents of the beaker he was holding into the flask on the table. His father didn’t even hesitate; he just swept the flask to the side. It exploded before it cleared the table.
Max. The younger son. The son with all the questions. Who was a little taller, and a little stronger, and much much quicker. The son the father couldn’t control. His father never once blamed him for that accident.
“Really, Max, I wonder at your reluctance. Look at our forests! A landscape your grandfather wouldn’t recognize.”
One of the photographs on his father’s wall was a sepia print of the Black Forest. The woods, from the photographer’s vantage, ran on and on, the distant hills folding in on one another like clasped hands.
Growing up, Max spent every summer in the Black Forest: three weeks in July, and every weekend in August. He was five, the first time his father took him mushrooming. They filled the basket they’d brought in minutes. Then his father sat him down with a chocolate bar at the base of a hunter’s stand, a tiny cabin tucked high in the branches of a tree. His father had a woman waiting there. Afterwards, his father gave him a five-mark piece, and a lecture on the virtues of discretion.
“Hansel and Gretel, Max. Snow White. The wellspring of our myths. How can we simply accept defeat?”
Max didn’t have an answer, not one his father would be able to comprehend.
“A car powered by the sun! Independent power arrays for each home and factory!” His father’s eyes were as bright as a blast furnace coming up to heat.
A dreamer, Max thought, like himself.
For a hundred years, the oil, gas and coal companies had polluted the planet. If word of Merkantil’s sabotage leaked, the company’s stock price would collapse and the energy companies would swallow them whole. These solar cells would never make it to market.
“Do you understand the scale of this thing, Max?”
With this single product, Merkantil would remake the world’s economy—a democratization of energy! Developing nations would be freed from the burden of a yearly fuel bill, a hemorrhage that assured their continued poverty. Industrial nations would become pollution free. But most significantly, the release of these solar cells would finally create, in the world’s eyes, a benevolent national image. When people thought of Germany, world-wide prosperity would spring to mind, and a saved planet. What German could turn his back on that? And if, in order to achieve this goal, a minor regression was necessary, well, where was the person who’d never compromised? That was what his father was asking—a sacrifice!—so that the nation and world might benefit.
*
Max turned back toward the post office.
Dieter was second in line, now.
What bad luck for this man that he was the one to discover Merkantil’s misdeed, that he then showed what he found to his supervisor, a man who was also looking for things.
*
“We are like bricks within an arch, Max. One does not refuse one’s duty, because then the arch collapses.”
Obedience! The national imperative!
The irony, Max thought, was not that he was about to follow in his father’s footsteps, but that he’d imagined he would be able to avoid that fate.
His father was looking at him with disappointment. It was a look that was familiar.
“This has to be done, Max. And you’re the one with this particular set of skills.”
An Army counterintelligence officer. He’d pulled men off the street a dozen times. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do, if the target wasn’t suspicious.
For a moment the room went dark, as with the suggestion of a crowd—the collected presence of all the people Max would meet over the rest of his life, everyone he would have to lie to. That wasn’t the life he wanted. He saw himself part of a new generation—changed—taking control of a new Germany, guiding it in a different direction. With this act, he would be left behind.
“You would make me a murderer.”
But whether he spoke these words to his father, or only imagined speaking them, this thought one of many suddenly rushing through his mind, Max didn’t know. If he didn’t kill Dieter Kolb, someone else would be ordered to. Where was the justice in that?
A moral dilemma his grandfather would have appreciated.
His grandfather, because he was a child of the German elite, was drafted into the SS at the war’s end. His grandfather’s orders were to shoot anyone who tried to surrender.
A madness. Another thing to be ashamed of.
Max was twelve when his grandfather confided this bit of family history to him. The two of them were on a rock face on a mountain outside Mittenwald. His grandfather was teaching him how to handle a climbing rope.
“You find yourself on a path,” his grandfather stated, staring up at the narrow cracks above them, “and have to see it through to the end. It sometimes takes courage.”
Hermann Dreszer had scoffed at the notion his father was courageous. “Your grandfather murdered his own countrymen, Max!”
A crime Franz Dreszer was never punished for. Nor was the man punished for destroying company files that documented war crimes.
Max had loved his grandfather, right up to the moment he received a full accounting of his grandfather’s crimes.
God punished his grandfather. His grandfather, a lifelong mountaineer, slipped on icy stairs outside his front door, and broke his neck.
*
Dieter Kolb stepped up to the counter and handed the clerk his letter. “Luftpost, bitte.”
The clerk set the envelope on the scale, glanced at the destination, and told Dieter the cost.
Dieter paid the man.
The clerk gave change, slapped on a stamp, and dropped the envelope in the bag headed for the United States. Ninety minutes later, Dieter’s letter was at the airport.
Dieter mumbled a danke and turned for the door. It was like reaching the finish line. He was safe now. No one would ever know what he’d done.
Danke. Danke. Danke.
He should have never agreed to help Joseph Calvert. He didn’t owe the man anything; it was his father’s life Joseph Calvert saved.
Danke. Danke.
Dieter pushed open the door and turned right. He didn’t notice the tall man approaching from behind, or the van already on its way.