Last Orders

CHAPTER 22

Major Keller looked earnestly, even urgently, into Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s face. “We need you,” the National Socialist Loyalty Officer said. “The State needs you. The Party needs you. The Grossdeutsches Reich needs you.”

“Needs me to do what, sir?” Hans-Ulrich knew the loyalty officer thought he was very loyal to the Führer. Keller wasn’t wrong, either. He had been loyal to Adolf Hitler. That kind of feeling was harder to come by, though, when you tried to attach it to Rudolf Hess or Reinhard Heydrich or the other top-ranking National Socialists who headed the fight against the Salvation Committee’s forces.

Keller had no doubts about where his own loyalty lay. “To bomb a column of traitors and rebels moving from Münster toward the Ruhr,” he answered.

“Sir, that’s a mighty long flight. All the way across Holland, into the Reich … And how much company would I have?” Hans-Ulrich didn’t flat-out refuse the order. He just pointed out the difficulties.

“You will not fly alone. I promise you that. And you would be able to land in the Ruhr. Loyal forces there hold several airfields. Remember, Rudel, you swore a sacred oath of loyalty to the Führer. Are you a man of honor, or some other kind of man?”

“Major, the Führer is dead,” Hans-Ulrich reminded Keller.

The loyalty officer turned red. “Yes, he is. But Reichsmarschall Göring is his legitimate successor, or the deputy Führer or the Reichsführer-SS if the Reichsmarschall cannot take up his duties.” No one knew what had happened to Göring, not for sure. No one knew if he was alive or dead. If he was dead, no one was sure which side had killed him, or precisely why.

Rudolf Hess, the deputy Führer, wasn’t exactly a nonentity, but he wasn’t a charismatic leader, either. And Reichsführer-SS had been Himmler’s title. Himmler pretty definitely was dead; the title belonged to Heydrich now. The other title that stuck to Heydrich was Hitler’s Hangman. Such people were useful-what state didn’t need a security chief? — but he also wasn’t a leader for whom men would charge, singing, into battle.

“Sir, before all this really got started, Colonel Steinbrenner asked me if I was ready to bomb other Germans,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I told him I didn’t think I could do that. I’m telling you the same thing.”

“Colonel Steinbrenner’s loyalty is not above suspicion-far from it,” Keller said darkly. “And you wouldn’t be bombing Germans here. Traitors do not deserve to be called by that glorious name.”

“You are not in my chain of command, sir.” Rudel kept grasping at straws, grabbing for time. “If someone who is tries to give me that order, well, I’d have to think about it, anyway. In the meantime, it’s been good talking with you.” He ducked out of the National Socialist Loyalty Officer’s tent before Keller could do anything but stare.

None of the flyers or groundcrew men now at the Belgian airstrip had opened fire on men who disagreed with them … yet. No one here had even tried to arrest anyone else, which might have started the shooting. Nor had England or France attacked the base. If they had, they might well have smashed it. But they would have united all the surviving Luftwaffe men against them.

They were smart enough to see that. By all the signs, they were smarter politically than anybody playing the game on the German side.

Hans-Ulrich hadn’t gone far before Sergeant Dieselhorst appeared at his side out of nowhere. “Well? What’s the latest from the major?” Dieselhorst asked.

“He wanted me to start bombing the Committee’s forces inside Germany,” Rudel answered baldly.

“What did you tell him?”

“Basically, that I might do it if Colonel Steinbrenner told me to, but that he wasn’t my commanding officer and didn’t have the authority to send me out.”

“That’s pretty good, sir!” Dieselhorst gave him a thumbs-up. “The colonel won’t give you that order in a million years. He’s behind the Salvation Committee all the way, Steinbrenner is.”

“Is he?” Now Rudel’s voice held no expression whatever. The news wasn’t a surprise, but it hurt just the same, the way finding out the girlfriend you suspected really was unfaithful would.

Dieselhorst heard that emptiness. “Ja, sir, he is. If we’d stuck with what we had, what would’ve happened? We’d’ve gone down the shitter, that’s what, ground to powder between the Ivans and the Americans.”

“Or we might have won in spite of everything. We still might.” Hans-Ulrich had believed in the Party and the Führer as long as he could, and then a little longer besides. Mein Ehre heisst Treue, the SS motto said. My honor is loyalty. He was no blackshirt. He didn’t even like them. But that idea resonated with something deep down inside him.

“I am, too, you know,” Dieselhorst said. “You can turn me in to the major if you want.”

Wearily, Rudel shook his head. “Give me a break, Albert. I wouldn’t do that.” Hearing that the sergeant had no use for the Nazis surprised him not a bit. “You know I lean the other way. If your side wins, turn me in to whatever takes the Gestapo’s place if you want to.”

“Something will, sure as houses. Can’t hardly run a country these days without something like that. And if that’s not a judgment on us, screw me if I know what would be.” Dieselhorst sighed, then brightened. “I am glad you didn’t get the plane bombed up and take off for Germany with somebody else in the back seat.”

“I have no stomach for killing Germans, even in the middle of a civil war,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I told that to Steinbrenner. I told Keller the same thing.”

“Your father raised you the right way.” Had Dieselhorst said it mockingly, Hans-Ulrich would have tried to deck him. But he sounded as if he meant it.

“Thank you,” Hans-Ulrich said, acknowledging that. “Thank you very much. Plenty of other Germans don’t seem to have any trouble with it at all. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be where we are.”

“No, we wouldn’t. We’d be gurgling down that stinking shitter instead. Everybody would goose-step after the Führer till he led us right over the cliff. And that’s where we would have gone. This way, maybe, just maybe, we get another chance.”

“A chance to do what? We’re supposed to be the masters of Europe-”

“Says who?” Sergeant Dieselhorst broke in.

Hans-Ulrich gaped at him. He’d taken the idea for granted for so long, he had no idea where he’d got it. It was all over Mein Kampf, of course, but that wouldn’t impress Dieselhorst.

And the sergeant repeated, “Says who? We’ve tried to conquer the damn thing twice now in my lifetime, and look what it’s got us. If we snag a peace without reparations and without sanctions, we can make like an ordinary country for a change. I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll be damned if I can get a hard-on about being part of the Herrenvolk. I’d sooner go to a tavern and drink beer.”

“But what about the Bolsheviks?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

“Christ, what about ’em? They’re in Russia, and they’re welcome to the goddamn place, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to go back there again-I’ll tell you that,” Dieselhorst said. “The Bolsheviks in Germany and the ones in Hungary and the ones everywhere else but Russia got stomped after the last war, and just what they deserved, too.”

“There’s Spain. Spain’s turned as red as a baboon’s behind.”

“And it’s fucked up the same way Russia was: a few rich people on top and a big old swarm of hungry ones on the bottom.” Dieselhorst paused a moment before adding, “You ask me, the Nazis were taking Germany down that road.”

Rudel automatically looked around to see who might have heard the dangerous crack. He shook his head in wonder. If the Salvation Committee won, you wouldn’t have to worry about speaking your mind … for a while, anyhow. That might make the change worthwhile.

Or, of course, it might not. But he was sure of one thing. He didn’t need to worry about standing in a bread line. Even if peace broke out, whoever ran the Reich would need bomber pilots. Like security men, bomber pilots were a vital part of the modern state.

Arno Baatz peered out a second-story window in Münster’s Rathaus. Just the quickest of glances, and then he pulled away. The soldiers out there wanted to kill him-and the rest of the Wehrmacht men and Waffen-SS soldiers and prison guards and secret policemen still holding this part of town against the traitors and bandits who’d murdered the Führer.

Somewhere out there was Adam Pfaff, with his goddamn gray-painted Mauser. The stinking son of a bitch sneaked away even before everybody knew for sure Hitler had died. So did two other men from Baatz’s squad. He wanted to kill them, and he didn’t want them to kill him.

He glanced down at the swastika armband he wore. Part of him wished he could take it off and slip away himself. Things didn’t look good for National Socialist supporters in Münster. The perimeter kept shrinking. Arno had always backed authority. Now, though, he looked to have guessed wrong about who authority was going to be.

A 105 fired not far away. The shell slammed into a building his side still held. Part of the stonework front fell in. But an MG-42 kept snarling from the ruins. A lot of the people who still wore the swastika were stubborn indeed.

Which looked to mean they would wind up stubborn and dead. No reinforcements had come in; the other side held all the territory around Münster. Arno glanced down at the armband again. If he took it off so he looked as if he could belong to either side …

If he did that and the SS caught him, they would shoot him out of hand. One redheaded bastard with a Schmeisser specialized in executing anyone suspected of halfheartedness. The way he shot people, they took a long time to die.

So if you were going to do a bunk, you had to make sure you made it. Otherwise, you were better off sticking tight. The traitors were out to kill the people still loyal to the Party, yes, but they weren’t especially out to kill them slowly.

That 105 blasted the nearby building again. More of it collapsed. A fire sent black smoke into the sky. The MG-42 barked more defiance at the men who’d chosen the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation.

An SS top sergeant stomped into the room where Arno sheltered. “Come on with me,” he said. “We’re going to counterattack. We’ve got to take out that 105. It’s slaughtering us.”

Arno gulped. If the traitors had two brain cells to rub together, they’d protect their artillery with machine guns and machine pistols. Any try at taking it out would be suicidal. He couldn’t say that, not unless he wanted to meet his own side’s redheaded executioner. He did ask, “How good do you think our chances are?”

The SS man just looked at him. With those gray eyes and rocky cheekbones, the fellow might have stepped straight off one of Mjölnir’s recruiting posters. “We’ve got to try,” he said, which told Baatz everything he needed to know. “They’ll kill us for sure if we don’t get rid of it. If we do, we can hold out a while longer.”

Worst of it was, he was right. Arno fell in behind him. They went through the Rathaus, combing out men who could join in the assault. When they had a couple of squads’ worth, the SS noncom seemed satisfied. Arno still didn’t think the force was big enough. He kept his mouth shut. He had no more idea than the soldier from the Waffen-SS about where they could scrape up more fighters.

They were about to move out when two shells from the 105 slammed into the Rathaus’ upper floors, one after the other. Debris thundered down in front of the doorway through which they’d go. A great cloud of dust and grit rose. Arno coughed and rubbed at his eyes. He suddenly felt grateful to the SS man. He was pretty sure one of those rounds had burst on or in the room where he’d sheltered. If he hadn’t vacated, he’d probably be chopped meat right now.

“Come on! Follow me!” Himmler’s superman charged out through the dust. The others poured after him. No matter how solid the Rathaus was, it seemed more a trap than a shelter now.

Bullets sparked off paving stones and cracked by as the Germans on the other side spotted them on the move. One man from the strike force went down with a horrible screech. The rest kept running for the nearest pile of rubble behind which they could throw themselves.

Arno belly-flopped down in back of some bricks that had belonged to a chimney. The explosion that knocked them off their building hadn’t blasted them all apart. They might even keep gunfire off of him … till he had to move again, anyhow.

He glanced over his shoulder. Yes, that was fresh smoke he smelled. The Rathaus was burning. Whatever happened to him out here, it wouldn’t be so bad as roasting back there.

All the same, he felt as naked as a de-shelled snail in a Frenchman’s garden. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw motion ahead. That had to be an enemy. He snapped off a couple of quick shots. The other guy went down, either hit or diving for cover.

Schmeissers and a couple of captured Russian PPDs chattered. While the men with them made the traitors keep their heads down, the others, Arno among them, scurried ahead. He’d just found new rubbish to shelter him when the 105 started smashing up some more of the Rathaus. Whichever side won this fight, Münster would have some rebuilding to do when it ended.

“Forward!” No one seemed to have issued the Waffen-SS man any doubts. Forward they went, and then forward again. Downtown Münster had plenty of ruins and wreckage to hide inside and behind. They lost a couple of men. They shot a few men fighting for the Salvation Committee.

That worried Arno. The guys on the other side had to know they were attacking. If those guys weren’t dopes-and not all of them would be-they had to have a pretty fair notion of where the loyalists were heading. If they knew that, they could shift troops to stop them.

Baatz was about halfway to the 105 when he stopped caring. He couldn’t have said why, but he did. He wanted to make it to the gun. He wanted to take out the crew. Whatever happened next … would happen. He might get back. He might not. Why borrow trouble?

He shot a traitor, then quickly ducked down behind some shattered stonework. The enemy soldier’s buddy rattled the wreckage with a burst from his submachine gun, but he didn’t hit Arno. The 105 boomed again. More of the Rathaus fell in on itself. More of it fell into the flames, too. Sure as hell, coming out here was better than staying back there would have been.

The attackers were taking flanking fire now. No other loyalist bands seemed to be in the neighborhood. They soaked up more losses, but they kept advancing. Arno had no idea whether the other side’s medics patched up wounded loyalists or cut their throats.

Blam! Now Arno knew exactly where that goddamn 105 sat. When he slithered around the next corner, he was almost sure he could fire at the artillerymen who served it.

Before he could, a Panzer IV clanked around that corner, heading straight at him. “Fuck you!” he shouted-it wasn’t fair that the stinking thing should be flying an Imperial German flag on its radio aerial.

Its cupola was open, the commander looking out. Arno fired at him. The panzer man tumbled inside, whether hit or not Arno didn’t know. The SS sergeant flung a grenade, hoping it would follow the traitor in the black coveralls down through the cupola. But it bounced off the glacis plate and burst harmlessly on the paving. The bow machine gun sparked to life. Arno dove for cover.

“Come on, Adi! Step on it!” Hermann Witt shouted.

“I’m doing the best I can, Sergeant,” Adi Stoss answered. “Some of these streets are narrower than the panzer, dammit.”

From everything Theo could see, Adi was right. Like so many medieval towns, Münster hadn’t been built with motor vehicles in mind. And it really hadn’t been built with panzers in mind. Every time Adi had to make a tight turn, he bit out chunks of buildings that fronted the street too closely.

None of which cut any ice with the panzer commander. “Never mind the best you can. Just get there!” he said. “That’s the best-sited gun we’ve got. It’s knocking the shit out of them. We can’t let the goddamn Nazis kill the crew or smash the breech block.”

The same message dinned in Theo’s earphones. He hoped it was genuine, and not leading them into a trap. Both men who backed the Salvation Committee and their foes used the same radio sets, the same frequencies, the same communications doctrine. Each side did its best to confuse the other, and each side’s best seemed plenty good.

He’d used the panzer’s bow gun more than he ever had in Russia. Fighting in a city turned out to be like that. He’d used the firing port in the side of the hull, too, keeping troublemakers at a distance with his Schmeisser.

He worried that somebody would toss a Molotov cocktail out a third-story window, say, and into the fighting compartment through the open hatch atop the cupola. That was one more thing you didn’t need to fret about so much in Russia. Steppes and farm villages didn’t grow three-story buildings.

One more corner. “There they are!” Witt yelled from the cupola. He yelled again a moment later, this time in pain. He fell back into the panzer like a red squirrel diving into a hole in a spruce. Then he gave another yell: “Canister! Blow the shitheads away!”

Theo was already working them over with the bow machine gun as the round slammed into the breech. He knocked down a rather plump fellow with a swastika armband just before the enemy soldier could jump behind a stone wall. Then he swept the machine gun to the left and hit the guy who’d thrown a grenade. That fellow was close enough for Theo to make out the SS runes on his collar patches. Theo’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a savage smile. He’d always wanted the chance to shoot some SS men. Now he had it.

And then the canister round swept away everything in the first hundred meters of its path that might have been alive. He’d already seen the horrible things canister did to mere flesh and blood. That the flesh and blood out there wanted to kill him made him feel a little better about using it so, but only a little.

That some of the flesh and blood out there had hurt one of the rare men he counted a friend made him feel much better about using it so. He turned to look back over his shoulder and asked, “How the hell are you, Hermann?” Anxiety made his voice break like a fourteen-year-old’s.

Witt gave back a grin almost as much a death’s head as his panzer man’s emblem. “My God! It talks!” he said, and Theo decided he wasn’t going to parley with the Grim Reaper right this minute. But his left hand was clenched around his right upper arm, and bright red blood dribbled out between his fingers. “Flesh wound,” he went on. “I’m pretty sure it missed the bone. I can wiggle my fingers and all.” As if to prove it, he shaped a filthy gesture with his right hand.

Adi spoke in tones of professional interest: “Will they award you a wound badge for stopping one when you’re fighting other Germans?”

“Now you can ask me if I give a fuck,” Witt answered. “Lothar, help me get a wound bandage on this thing. Maybe you’d better stick me, too. It hurts pretty good. If the morphine leaves me too dopey to run the panzer, I figure you jerks can probably cope for a while. In the meantime, keep going till we can shoot at the Rathaus. We’ll help that 105 blow up the rats in it.”

“You probably aren’t right at death’s door,” Adi said, which perfectly echoed Theo’s thought. “And blowing up the Rathaus here will be a pleasure. Oh, you bet it will.”

He’d grown up around Münster, or maybe in it. Theo knew that much about his tight-lipped crewmate. Adi’d had to do something, well, far out of the ordinary to need to make it into the Wehrmacht, too. After all this time together, Theo still wasn’t sure what that might have been. Whatever it was, did records of it linger in the Rathaus?

If they did, no wonder Adi wanted to help knock the place flat. When the panzer edged up behind a heap of smashed junk that let its gun bear on the Rathaus, the driver whooped: “Hey-hey! It’s already on fire!”

“We’ll help it along,” Witt said, and then, “Hurry up with that shot, Lothar. This business of stopping a bullet isn’t a whole lot of fun.”

Theo looked down at his left hand. He was missing a finger there. He had but didn’t particularly rejoice in a wound badge. He’d caught a French bullet, not a German one. As far as what they did, the difference in nationality didn’t seem to matter.

Lothar Eckhart got Witt bandaged and injected. Then the panzer’s big gun started pouring HE shells into the Rathaus. Each burst turned more of the fine old building into fine modern junk. Several of the bursts started fresh fires, too. With hot metal fragments tearing through what probably amounted to cubic kilometers of paper, that was anything but surprising.

As the fires grew and spread, men in Feldgrau and others in black started scrambling out of the Rathaus. The panzer crew fired more HE rounds at the doorways: the range was too long for canister. Theo added bursts from the bow gun every now and again. Eckhardt chimed in with some from the coaxial machine gun in the turret, too. Neither one of them felt any great warmth for the diehard National Socialists.

Diehards they might be, but they did die. Some of them lay very still after they got shot. Others thrashed like a cat hit by a car. Theo concentrated on turning thrashers into still ones. He was putting them out of their misery-and he was making sure they wouldn’t get up and start shooting at the panzer again.

Some of the Nazis made it to piles of brick and stone and God knew what in front of the Rathaus or off to the side. They did shoot back. Every once in a while, a rifle round would ring off the hardened steel of the Panzer IV’s front plates. If no one was standing up in the cupola, though, you could fire rifles at a panzer from now till doomsday without doing worse than chipping the paint.

Theo glanced back at Hermann Witt again. “How are you, Sergeant?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve been better, but the morphine’s working, so I’ve been worse, too-a few minutes ago, say.” Witt’s voice seemed to come from far away, but he didn’t just close his eyes and go to sleep, the way a lot of people who got stuck did. He might not be thinking any too fast, but he was still thinking straight. After a longish pause to work things through, he went on, “I’ll be laid up for a while. Till you clowns get a new commander, Adi, I’m putting you in charge.”

“Me? That’s got to be the dope talking, Sergeant.” Adi sounded amazed and horrified at the same time.

Witt shook his head as if in slow motion or underwater. But he sounded very sure as he answered, “Nah. Theo doesn’t want it”-which was an understatement, as he had to know-“and you’re both senior to Lothar and Kurt. So tag-you’re it.”

“But-” Adi protested helplessly.

“I know what you mean. That won’t matter, either, not under the Salvation Committee. Or it better not. So do what he tells you, you lugs,” Witt said. Theo nodded. He didn’t think the Salvation Committee would act stupid in the same ways the Nazis had. If it did, well, the country would need a revolution against the revolution.

When you were a civilian in a town where they were fighting a civil war, what could you do but hunker down and hope you didn’t get killed? Sarah Bruck and her parents did exactly that. They got hungry. The power didn’t always stay on. But they lived far enough away from the Rathaus and the cathedral that only a few stray artillery shells came down anywhere close by.

Sarah looked at the hole one of them made in the street with amazement. Her father eyed it with something more like amusement. “Believe me, dear, you put that next to the crater a five hundred-kilo bomb makes and you’d never even notice it,” Samuel Goldman said.

“I believe you. I’ve seen those, too,” Sarah answered. “But this isn’t a little hole in the ground even if it doesn’t have a bigger one next to it.”

He considered that with professional deliberation before nodding. “Mm, you’re not wrong,” he said, as if giving her the accolade.

He went out later that afternoon. He wouldn’t say where he was going. He came back carrying a cloth sack. When he opened it, he took out tinned meat, tinned cabbage, tinned potatoes, even tinned bread. “Where did you get this stuff?” Sarah gasped.

Father shrugged. “I have a few things saved for a rainy day. This looked rainy enough to use one or two.”

“But-” Sarah said.

“But-” her mother echoed. Hanna Goldman found words to add to that: “How could you have kept them, Samuel? How many times did the Gestapo search the house? Four or five, at least.”

Samuel Goldman looked professorial again: professorially scornful. “What do blackshirts know about black-figure potsherds? Not much! Not even enough to steal them. But there are still a few people here in town who know a little more.”

Sarah thought she remembered that black-figure pots were older than their red-figure counterparts. She wasn’t even sure of that; it might have been the other away around. So she knew very little, if at all, more than the Gestapo men did. What looked like a broken chunk of a vase hadn’t even seemed worth lifting to them. Evidently, that was their mistake.

“Did you get anything close to what they’re really worth?” Mother asked.

He shrugged. “I got enough to keep us eating for a few days-maybe till the fighting dies down and we can spend money instead. The way things are right now, that’s good value for what they’re worth, especially when the other choices are nothing, nettle soup, and dandelion salad.”

Hanna Goldman had no answer for that. Neither did Sarah. Her clothes hung looser on her every day. Her belly growled all the time. At bottom, you were an animal. When the animal started starving, it wanted to eat, and it didn’t care how it got fed.

The animal inside Sarah was much happier after they opened some of those tins. Her father still seemed discontented. “I should have got some tobacco, too,” he muttered. His pouch was empty, and he couldn’t go hunting cigarette butts unless he wanted someone to shoot him.

Not long after dark came a sharp knock on the door. Sarah and her mother and father stared at one another in horror. Not now! she thought. Not when they’re throwing the Nazis out! It isn’t fair!

The knock came again, and a deep voice with it: “Open up! I know you’re in there!”

What would he do if they didn’t? Start shooting through the door? That seemed most likely to Sarah. It must have to her father, too, because he gestured helplessly toward the doorway. All at once, he seemed very old.

Legs numb with fear and despair, Sarah walked to the door and opened it. A tall man dressed all in black strode in. He carried a Schmeisser. A metal death’s-head badge gleamed on his cap. He quickly closed the door behind him to keep light from leaking out.

He looked Sarah up and down. That arrogant stare made her want to hit him. So did the grin that stretched across his strong-cheekboned face. Then he said, “Hi, Sis. Haven’t seen you in a hell of a long time.”

Those numb legs didn’t want to hold Sarah up. She had to lock her knees to keep from falling on the floor. More slowly than she might have, she realized he was wearing black coveralls, not a tunic and trousers. The glittering death’s head was a panzer crewman’s insigne, not the SS’s.

“Saul?” she whispered.

“Guilty,” he said. “Guilty of all kinds of things these past few years, I’m afraid.” He nodded to Samuel Goldman. “Hey, Pop. Well, now I’ve been through the mill, too. Some fun, huh?” Only after that did he tack on, “Hi, Mom. Made it this far, anyhow.”

Little by little, they all began to believe the prodigal son had returned. The story came from the wrong Testament, but none of them was inclined to be fussy. They crowded round Saul and hugged him and kissed him and pounded him on the back. The one thing they didn’t do was make a whole lot of noise. They didn’t want the neighbors to know they had anything to celebrate.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah asked after they dragged her older brother to the sofa.

“Well, we got pulled out of Russia to help sit on all the wicked rebels in Münster,” he answered. “I thought that was pretty damn funny all by itself. Then when the generals staged the Putsch against the Führer, most of the crews in the regiment sided with the Salvation Committee.” His face clouded. “I don’t think my panzer gang killed anybody I was friends with. I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

Quietly, Samuel Goldman said, “I never had to wonder about that, thank God. The last time around, the civil war didn’t start till after the regular fighting ended, and I managed to stay out of it.”

“We got your letter,” Sarah said. “We knew you got into the Wehrmacht. After that, all we could do was hope.”

“And pray,” her mother added. People were rarely as secular as they thought they were before hard times hit.

“You got it? That’s good. I figured writing the Breisachs across the street was a better bet than sending it straight to you-as long as they didn’t turn me in,” Saul said. “And a lot of Aryans just went with the Jew-baiting because the Nazis told ’em to. They didn’t all enjoy it.”

“We’ve seen the same thing,” Sarah agreed.

“How did you get to be Adalbert the panzer man?” Father asked. “How did you get papers that said you were?”

“I owe one of the guys I played football with for that-owe him more than I can ever pay back, I guess. He knew people who took care of it for me,” Saul said. “These days, I think of myself as Adi more than I do by my real name. Unless you called me Moses, you couldn’t have stuck me with a more Jewish handle.”

“It wasn’t a problem at the time,” Father said stiffly.

“I suppose not,” Saul allowed. “And it may not be a problem any more. The Rathaus and all the paperwork in it are up in smoke. I ought to know-my panzer helped blast it.”

“My marriage certificate.” Sarah sounded sadder than she’d dreamt she would.

Her brother stared at her. “Your what?” He shook his head. “I guess I’m not the only one who had a life while I was in the Wehrmacht. Who is he? Where is he? What’s he do?”

“He’s dead.” Even now, Sarah started to puddle up when she said that. “He was Isidor Bruck, from the baking family.”

“I know him. Uh, I knew him. I played football against him. Uh, I’m sorry,” Saul said. “Too much, too quick. And now I’ve got to get out of here. I’m not supposed to be here at all, which is putting it mildly.” He hugged and kissed Sarah and her mother and father once more in turn. Then he slipped out the door and vanished into blacked-out night. Sarah stared after him. Only the remembered feel of his arms around her made her doubt she’d dreamt the whole thing.