by Robert Elmer
“I was hungry,” Erich blurted out. What did they have to lose by telling the truth? The pilot raised his eyebrows as he went on. “And my oma, she is not well. She has not a good ration card, so we must bring her extra food. She has to eat, or she’ll die.”
“Her and a million other Berliners,” the pilot snapped. “So you thought you could just push your way to the front of the chow line, huh?”
“Easy, Lieutenant.” The co-pilot acted like a referee in a soccer match. “He’s just a kid. Don’t you have a son back home?”
Erich was still trying to figure out what “chow line” meant. But finally the pilot’s scowl eased up a bit.
“Yeah, about their age.” He glanced over at Erich. “What are you, kid, fourteen?”
“Dreizehn.” Erich knew the English number; he just wanted to be sure. “Sirteen.”
Or “thirteen,” if you stuck your tongue out at the “th” sound the way the Americans did. They studied each other for a long moment, the pilot and the stowaway. And still Erich wondered how they would get out of this one.
“By the way, I’m Sergeant Fletcher.” The smaller, round-faced man in the right seat nodded at the long-faced pilot. “Lieutenant Anderson’s the serious guy in the pilot’s seat, and Wilson there is in charge of the maps.”
The other men barely nodded as Erich and Katarina introduced themselves.
“Did you fly bombers also?” Erich had to know. Maybe his chin stuck out a bit at the question, maybe it didn’t. But the co-pilot whistled.
“Whoa, Lieutenant. I think I know where he’s going with this.”
The pilot nodded and checked the sky ahead, and Erich noticed the muscles on the back of the man’s neck tighten.
“What are you trying to do, Erich?” Katarina whispered to him in German, obviously so the men wouldn’t understand. “Have them throw us out of the plane without a parachute?”
Erich stood his ground.
“Er, he likes airplanes.” Katarina gulped and tried to explain. “I think maybe he just meant — ”
“I know what he meant,” the pilot interrupted. His eyes narrowed as he turned back to the challenge. “And yeah, kid. If you really want to know, I flew sixteen missions over Europe. Don’t think anybody likes the way it turned out, and I’m sorry about that. Is that what you were thinking? You think I liked dropping bombs?”
When Erich bit his lip and nodded, the pilot turned back to his instruments, mumbling something about Krauts and their lousy war that wouldn’t end.
“Gotta admit, I like this duty a lot better,” the copilot put in, sounding much more cheery than he probably needed to. “Not as many people shooting at us, and the natives are a little friendlier . . . well, most of the time.”
“Yeah.” The pilot kept his gaze steady. “Piece of cake. All we have to do is stay right in the middle of a twenty-mile corridor between Rhein-Main base and Tempelhof, hold at exactly 170 miles an hour, exactly six thousand feet, exactly three minutes behind the last bird and three minutes in front of the next one. And all to feed a bunch of Krauts.”
“He’s a real nice guy,” said the co-pilot with a wink, “once you get to know him. But you two. Anybody back home that’s going to be worried about you?”
Erich crossed his arms and said nothing as Sergeant Fletcher asked them question after question, the way a policeman would. Where they lived. Their mothers’ names. Where they went to school.
“Stop answering his questions,” Erich told Katarina, but she wouldn’t listen. The co-pilot wrote it all down on his clipboard.
“I have a feeling your mothers aren’t going to be too pleased to hear you stowed away on an Air Force plane,” Fletcher told them, scribbling yet another note. “And by the way, you know what the U.S. government does to stowaways?”
Erich stiffened. But they didn’t have a chance to ask before the pilot broke in.
“Hold on, Rhein-Main. How close?” The lieutenant pressed the earphone against his head a little tighter and leaned to check out the front windshield.
“What’s up?” asked the co-pilot, snapping to attention and pulling up his own earphones.
“Rhein-Main tower says there’s an unidentified aircraft coming right at us, four o’clock.”
The words had hardly left the pilot’s mouth when a gray streak fell out of the sky, cutting right across their nose. Katarina shrieked and Erich gasped, but the two men hardly flinched.
“Yeah, we see him,” the lieutenant spoke into his microphone. “Saw him, I mean. Russki fighter shaved a few of our wing feathers off, is all. Thanks for the warning.”
Erich was still trying to catch his breath. Kill him now, or kill him later, what difference did it make? Sergeant Fletcher hadn’t finished what he’d started to say about what they did to stowaways.
“Oh, and by the way, tower,” the pilot added, “we have a couple of visitors with us that you’re going to want to know about — ” Erich looked at Katarina and wished she hadn’t followed him to the airport, wished she hadn’t said anything to the Americans. Now they knew everything. What kind of trouble waited for them on the ground?
“I’m Sergeant Fred DeWitt.” A fresh-faced man in a sharply pressed brown uniform greeted them as they climbed down from the Skymaster to the wet pavement below. “Hold it right there.”
Erich grabbed his cousin’s arm and braced himself. So this was it. But instead —
“No, no,” said the man, whose toothy grin was slightly crooked. “Relax. Here, look at the camera, and don’t grit your teeth like that. Smile.”
Smile? Is this what they did to all their condemned prisoners? Shoot their pictures before they carted them off to prison?
Pop! The dark-haired man’s camera caught them with its flash as they huddled next to the plane, trying to stay dry in the drizzle. But smile, he would not. Nein.
“Furchtbares Wetter heute, nicht?” the man with the camera asked them in flawless German. Well, that got Erich’s attention in a hurry, and yes, it was horrible weather today, as the man said. Even Katarina stopped shivering to take a closer look.
Some kind of trick?
“Das tut mir leid,” he told them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought they told you everything.”
“There’s no telling him nothing, DeWitt.” Sergeant Fletcher landed on the pavement beside them. “He’s a hard one. And I get the impression he’s not all that keen on Americans.”
“Thanks for the tip, Sergeant.” DeWitt gave the other man a friendly half-salute. “I think I’ll be able to handle it.”
“Good luck.” The co-pilot glanced up at the darkening sky and wiped a sudden splatter of cold rain from his face. “Lieutenant Anderson and I didn’t get very far with him. But hey, come to think of it, you speak the lingo pretty good, don’t you?”
Their host shrugged as a truck approached to load them back up. The co-pilot stepped aside.
“Well, so long, kids. Hope you find your way back to where you belong.”
Katarina nodded politely, but Erich couldn’t bring himself to wave at Sergeant Fletcher as he trotted off. Okay, he’d acted friendly. But that meant nothing. And Erich still couldn’t just forget who these people were, or what they had done. Katarina looked at him out of the corner of her eye but said nothing. By this time, though, Sergeant DeWitt looked ready to go too.
“Will we be able to go back to Berlin?” Katarina asked, looking back up at the plane. DeWitt laughed, though the question didn’t seem funny at all.
“Sure we’ll get you back. I’ve just been assigned to take care of you while you’re here in Frankfurt. We haven’t been able to contact your families yet, but we’re sending a messenger to your homes in Berlin. And we have a plan to get you home.”
So that was what all the questions on the plane were about, Erich thought.
“By the way, you ought to be thanking me for getting you out of hot water. Brass was going to send MPs to get you when word got out. I talked them into letti
ng me handle this for a PR project.”
Hot water? Brass? MPs? PR? Up to now, Erich thought he’d understood most of what the Americans were saying.
“You are a soldier?” Katarina looked at him with a questioning expression.
“Oh, right.” He looked down at the bulky box camera hanging from a strap around his neck. “Guess I’d be wondering too. I’m a reporter with the Stars and Stripes newspaper. So yeah, I’m a soldier. Maybe not like some of these other fellows. Came in through the reserves, never saw combat. They found out I had a bad back. So they gave me this camera and told me to go out and write news stories, if you can believe that. I studied history at college, so I guess they thought, Here’s a college boy — ”
He paused for a moment and gave them a sheepish grin, as if he’d suddenly realized he’d been talking too much.
“Das tut mir leid,” he told them once more. “I’m sorry. That’s probably a whole lot more than you want to know.”
Erich still said nothing. What else could they do but follow this man through the drizzle to his car? He seemed about the same age as their mothers.
“Anyway,” he told them, “long story short, I’ve been looking all over for a great human-interest angle for this whole airlift thing, a way to put some real faces on the operation. A good PR angle. Public relations. You know, making sure everybody out there understands what we’re doing. So when I got the call from Ops tonight, I knew we had something. You’re perfect.”
They both looked at him with a blank “huh?” expression.
“Unless you wanted to spend some time with the MPs? You know, military police?”
“Oh, no.” Katarina raised her hand.
“I don’t think so,” Erich agreed.
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” DeWitt grinned as he reached for the door handle of a gray military sedan. Katarina took the backseat; Erich the front, though he kept his arms crossed. “So I’ll take you back to Berlin myself, but we’re going to be taking a lot of pictures and asking a lot of questions. Fair trade?”
No trade. Erich knew he couldn’t trust this man. But he had to know —
“How did you learn German so well?” he asked. Because this was way more than just “Guten Morgen, Frau Schmidt” (Good morning, Mrs. Schmidt) or “Wie geht es Ihnen?” (How are you?). The man’s accent didn’t make him sound like a Berliner, but he could have passed for a Bavarian, easy.
“Oh, right.” DeWitt started up the car and put it in gear. “I was raised by my grandparents in Cleveland, Ohio. Thing is, they both came from Munich, so they never spoke a word of English to me.”
This was getting a little more interesting.
“So I guess you could say I was raised German,” continued DeWitt, “which sure comes in handy over here, but it caused me all kinds of grief back home in the States.”
“What kind of grief?” Katarina wanted to know, then brought a hand to her mouth, as if she’d asked too much.
“Hey, wait a minute.” DeWitt’s easy smile spread across his face once more. “I thought I was the reporter around here. Why don’t you let me ask you a few questions this time?”
So as they drove through the dark streets of Frankfurt, he asked them about their home and about their life in Berlin. And Katarina gave him the happy version, the one without the hunger pains and the war, without the nightmares and the bombing, without the ugly things they somehow survived but wished every day they’d never known. Erich knew it was much better to tell those kinds of stories — rather than the gritty, real ones — like it was better not to pull off a scab before the wound had healed.
A few minutes later they pulled up to a three-story apartment building, windshield wipers still keeping time.
“You’ll be staying here tonight,” DeWitt told them. “In my apartment.”
“Not an army prison?” Erich wondered, but of course not. DeWitt didn’t even carry a gun.
“No, the base doesn’t have enough beds right now. Barracks are all full. Although if you’d prefer, I could probably find you a small German jail to sleep in.”
Erich shook his head, but the soldier with the camera wasn’t finished.
“Listen, I know it’s been hard,” he told them. “I have relatives over here too, you know. Pretty distant, but my grandparents told me all about them. So if you ever want to tell me your real story, I’d be glad to listen. But I understand why you told me what you did.”
So he knows what really happened. Without another word, Erich followed his cousin out of the car, back into the rain. And he wondered what else this man might know, this American who was also a German.
7
KAPITEL SIEBEN
THE STORY
Erich stopped at the door to the apartment. It had once been very nice, with fine wood trim and fancy stained-glass windows. The apartment even shared a bathroom down the hall with four or five other tenants. Imagine that, indoor plumbing! Now the gray and the dust had taken over, just as it had back in Berlin. Someone had tried to sweep the stairs, but even so the plaster ceiling still rained war dust on everything.
“You are not married?” Katarina asked when they’d climbed the stairs to the sergeant’s apartment. One look could have given her the answer. Not messy, exactly, just a little like . . . a bachelor’s apartment.
“Nein.” He folded his hat carefully and set it down on the front table. “No.”
At least he was neat. But his apartment held only a typewriter on a rickety card table, several piles of papers, an empty kitchen, a small bedroom filled by a single bed, and a lumpy faded couch in the front room. The only decoration he seemed to own was a small framed photo of two stern-looking older people, hanging crooked just above the couch. Erich guessed it might be the Bavarian grandparents. Oh, and on the couch lay a German Bible, dog-eared and obviously well read. Erich figured this was another trick to make them think the American could be trusted.
“So here’s the deal,” DeWitt told them, opening a tiny coat closet and pulling down clean towels for them. “The fräulein will sleep in the bedroom. I have a clean sheet for you. The men will sleep out here. Breakfast is at oh-seven-thirty tomorrow on the base, so make sure you’re ready to go by seven fifteen. We’ll take a few more PR photos there after breakfast, maybe of you guys standing next to the airplanes, and then catch a flight into Berlin by oh-nine-hundred. That means we land at Tempelhof by eleven thirty. A few more pictures that afternoon around the city, and we’ll have you back home safe and sound in plenty of time for dinner. Any questions?”
They both shook their heads no as he grabbed a toothbrush from a glass on a shelf and started for the door. The bathroom, Erich remembered, was shared by the entire floor.
“Sorry I don’t have any extra toothbrushes for you. Wasn’t expecting this kind of company.” He paused and pointed at the couch. “You’re welcome to read my Bible while you’re waiting, though.”
With that he popped into the hallway, leaving them in the strange room in a strange city, wondering how this had happened to them.
“This is all my fault.” Erich paced the floor just in front of the closed door. “I shouldn’t have let you come.”
“It wasn’t your decision.” Katarina ran her hand across the German Bible. “And besides, I couldn’t leave you to fly here by yourself, could I?”
“No, but it was kind of — ” He didn’t dare use the word fun. “Well, I mean, did you ever think you were going to get to ride in one of those planes, ever in your life?”
“Never. But I wonder what our moms are thinking right now.”
Erich had been wondering the same thing. “I hope they get the message soon.”
“That’s not going to keep us from being in huge trouble.”
“You’re right about that,” said their host as he reappeared at the door. “But we’d all better get to bed now. Tomorrow’s going to be interesting.”
Or crazy, perhaps, like this entire adventure was crazy. Wahnsinn, insane, like the chase d
ream Erich had later that night, after everyone had fallen asleep. The men chasing him had no faces, only guns and parachutes, and it was just like the dreams he’d had ever since the war that never seemed to end had started, only in this dream the soldier who finally landed on his head was an American, like —
“Wake up!”
Someone grabbed his shoulder and shook him awake. Erich could only cry out and punch at his attacker. He connected with something hard: a cheekbone, maybe. But the enemy only grabbed him by the wrists and held him. So this is how the torture would begin, but not without a fight.
“Erich!” the man’s voice hissed at him in the dark. “Settle down, kid. Ruhig!”
Erich couldn’t think of too many reasons to settle down, but finally he realized where he was. It was still pitch dark, and a door creaked open behind him.
“Erich?” Katarina asked in a small, sleepy voice. “What’s going on out there?”
The neighbors must have heard everything too.
“Herr DeWitt?” An older woman’s voice came through the hallway door. “Mr. DeWitt? Is everything all right in there? I heard screaming.”
“Everything’s fine, Frau von Kostka. I apologize for my guest. He’s just having a bad dream.”
“Ah, ja. It sounded like a battle, and your guest, he was losing.”
“I’ll bring you a couple of extra potatoes tomorrow, Frau von Kostka. Gute nacht. Good night.”
“Knowing that will help me sleep better — as long as there are no more battles.”
They heard Frau von Kostka shuffling back down the hall as she returned to her apartment. Katarina closed her door again too. And Erich sank his head back into the arm of the couch as DeWitt returned to his pile of blankets on the floor.
“Do we have a truce, kid?”
No truce. Erich pressed his lips together. But —
“I’m sorry I hit you,” he finally managed. “You’re not going to write about this in your newspaper, are you?”
“That depends on how much you pay me.”
Erich wasn’t quite sure if the guy was kidding, not at this hour. Midnight? Three a.m.? Outside he heard a plane take off in the distance. They weren’t very far from the air base.
