The Last Innocent Hour

by Margot Abbott

  “The camp in Poland, isn’t it? The big one,” replied Sally.

  “That’s it. A Russian friend of mine was part of the gang that liberated it and he found the photos. He took some with him. Why, he couldn’t say, but then, when he had them, he didn’t know what to do with them, so I told him about your work with photographs, and there they are.”

  Sally dropped the photograph back into the box. Suddenly, the photographs frightened her; there were so many of them and they were so silent, so mute.

  “I’m not sure what I could do with them, Mavis,” she said.

  “Well, I know you have a lot to do, but I thought you might take a look at them. Maybe later. You know the whole problem of DP identification is immense. Certainly photographs could be a source of information to help people track down relatives or, in this case, find out what happened to them.”

  “What happened to these people; who are they?”

  “Oh, I thought you realized—they died. They’re probably primarily Jews who went to the gas chambers,” Mavis said calmly. “The Germans sorted and stored all their possessions.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Sally ran into Mavis in the entry hall, where the doctor was on her way out. Tomorrow, she told Sally, she’d finally be leaving for the States for her often-postponed R and R.

  “Mavis, were you just going to sneak away like this, without saying good-bye?”

  “Too busy,” replied the doctor, then patted Sally’s cheek. “I’ll be thinking of you, my dear.”

  Sally said good-bye and was all the way back into the building before she remembered the pictures. She turned and ran out the door, down the steps.

  “Mavis!” she called, stopping the older woman as she was climbing into the car. “Those pictures you dumped on me . . .”

  “I remember, Sally,” said the doctor.

  “Well, they sat there for a while and then Sergeant Dolan and I counted them. There were over two thousand of them. Two thousand, Mavis!”

  “And you want to know the thing that really was horrible?”

  “What?” said Sally, not really wanting to know any such thing.

  “My Russian friend, the one who handed them on to me? He said the pile he got them from was the size of a large room.”

  Sally stared at her in silence, her mind conjuring up a room filled to the ceiling with photographs. “Where did they all come from?”

  “From the camp, I told you that.” Mavis sounded irritated.

  “I know that, but. . .”

  “The people that the Germans sent to the camp had them.”

  “Obviously, but what I don’t understand is: Why were the pictures collected? Why weren’t they destroyed? It doesn’t make sense, Mavis. Why did the Germans keep them?”

  “Millions of people, millions, Sally, went up the chimneys at that camp, and you want sense. Oh, my dear . . .” Her voice petered out. Then she looked back up at Sally. “I’ve got to go now. Goodbye.” Mavis got into the backseat of the olive-green sedan, leaving Sally standing on the sidewalk. Sally watched the car pull away, then turned and walked slowly into the building and up the stairs.

  In her office, Sally found messages from the colonel, Tim Hastings, and Annaliese. She picked up the phone and asked to be connected to the number Annaliese had left for her. Annaliese and her daughter may have been through horrors, but they were alive. One little girl. Sally thought of the children represented by the photographs she had handled—one little girl left.

  Annaliese answered on the first ring, as though she had been waiting for the call. She and Sally arranged to meet near the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday and then drive into the Tiergarten and see if they could find a spot for a picnic, Sally supplying the food and the car.

  Next, Sally called Tim, who wasn’t in, and finally, she called her boss, who was. He wanted to know what the content of the box was. The box of pictures was beginning to figure quite prominently in her life. Sally explained its history to Colonel Eiger.

  He was more interested in the doctor’s Russian source. “Who do you suppose her Russian pal was?”

  “Don’t know, sir,” said Sally, wondering the same thing. “Mavis did say ‘he’ when speaking of him.”

  “That’s interesting,” said the colonel, musing. “Well, she gets around. We’re going to be the worse for her absence. The people she knew.”

  Then, getting down to business, Colonel Eiger told Sally that he was sending her to Munich the next week for the Tiechmann trial. It was to be her first public appearance as a member of D-6 and only the second in which a member of the team had been instrumental in the evidence presented. The colonel again asked Sally to be sure about her material and her judgment. Reiterating what she had told him before, she said she was sure there could be no question that the man in the photograph found in the tank was Tiechmann. And because the picture was of a group of Waffen-SS men whose insignia was identified as being that of the unit accused of the massacre, Sally believed his connection with them could not be denied.

  She finished her report to the colonel, adding that Captain Tobin had also come up with the paper proof that the panzer unit had been present in the Ardennes Forest. They had even found a company clerk’s list of names of the men. Heading that list was SS- Obersturmfuhrer Klaus Tiechmann, Iron Cross First Class.

  “Sounds good, Sally,” the colonel said, and she knew he meant it because he had used her first name.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. Hearing a knock on her door, she turned around to find Tim Hastings, hands in pockets, leaning against the doorjamb. She smiled at him. The colonel, after telling her a few more details about her trip, hung up abruptly, and Sally replaced her receiver.

  “Nice seeing you, Jackson,” said Tim.

  “It has been a while,” Sally replied. “Just tried calling you, but you weren’t there.”

  “Nope,” he said, not volunteering any information. “You miss me?”

  “Barely noticed you were gone,” she said. He -grinned at her, letting her know he saw through her wisecrack. “So, where have you been?” She stood, tidying up the papers on her desk, placing the Tiechmann file in the center. “Scuttlebutt says Nuremberg.”

  “Yep,” said Tim, walking and taking a chair. “Got back this morning.”

  Sally perched on one corner of her desk, folding her arms across her chest. “What was it like?”

  Tim put one leg up, propping the ankle on his other knee. He studied his light-brown sock for a moment before answering. Then he looked up at Sally and she saw that his eyes had become dark, almost gray, reflecting his mood. She also noticed that they were not focusing on her, but on his memories of the trials. She imagined herself leaning forward and kissing him. That would regain his attention quickly enough. But she didn’t, of course, although the image stayed in her mind.

  “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he was saying. “It’s a mess like you’ve never seen.”

  “A mess?”

  “The amount of material those guys are trying to go through—it’s staggering. I figure that what they ought to do is just throw all of it at the defendants. Don’t bother hanging any of the bastards, just bury ’em in the paper they created.”

  “Do you think any of them will get off?”

  “Fritsch, maybe. He’s just small potatoes.” Then Tim laughed. “Von Papen probably. In honor of his survival.” He stood up, uncoiling his long body from the chair. He was very close to her, although he still seemed not to be aware of her.

  “Did you see them? Speer and Goring and the lot?”

  “As big as life,” he said and turned to look at her. There. Now she had his attention. She shifted her body slightly away from him. “Listen, you doing anything for dinner?” he asked.

  “Eating it, probably.”

  “Sassy, aren’t you?” He touched her cheek. “One of the things I like about you, Jackson,” he said, his eyes warm on her.

  “What? My being rude?” Her heart was pounding, which irritated her. Why
was she acting like a sixteen-year-old? She walked behind her desk.

  “Yeah, so what about dinner? I’ll buy.”

  “Oh, dinner. I don’t think I’d better. I’m going to Munich Monday. My first appearance, you know. The colonel wants my finished report tonight.”

  “Sure, okay,” he said, retreating to the door. He pulled it open, then stopped. “Sal, you know, I was thinking about you—”

  “Tim, please, don’t.”

  “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter. Don’t say anything. Tim, please. Not now.”

  “You gonna tell me when you’re ready?” He smiled as he asked the question, but she could hear the irritation in his voice underneath the geniality.

  “Probably never. Not because of you,” she added quickly. “You’re great. It’s just that. . . well, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “Right. Got it.” And with that he was gone.

  Damn. She’d made him mad. Sally slumped into her chair and absently kicked her shoes off. She was a clumsy fool. She liked him and he was obviously interested in her and she had just refused to go to dinner with him. Why?

  She just wasn’t interested in starting anything. That was it. She was here to work, and besides. . . She opened one of the files on her desk. The report was virtually finished; it just needed a little polishing, and she could do that tomorrow before the picnic. After all, Tim had only asked her to dinner.

  I’m so afraid, she thought and paused, her hand still on the report, her eyes gazing unseeing at the two chairs at the end of the room as she argued with herself. It wasn’t the dinner, of course; it wasn’t even the possibility of bed, which, frankly, she would welcome. It was the possibility of feelings, of feeling for another person, for Tim.

  She didn’t want to feel. Not yet.

  THE SATURDAY WITH Annaliese and Klara was a treat. As Annaliese had said, her daughter was delightful.

  “She has your mother’s nose,” Sally said, then leaned down to the little girl. “Did you know that? That you have the same nose as your grandmother?”

  Klara, who was shy with Sally, merely shook her head, her blue eyes wide in her little face. She would not speak to Sally, but studied her intently.

  Sally drove Annaliese and Klara into the ruined Tiergarten, happy to see signs of regrowth, although it would take years for the trees to regain their former beauty. She found a small patch of grass underneath a statue of some forgotten Hohenzollern prince who was missing his head and right elbow. The July day was bright and clear and warm as the two women spread out the blue-flowered cloth Annaliese had brought and set out Sally’s lunch, which included two huge oranges.

  Klara happily ate the sandwiches and potato salad from the cafeteria in the basement of Sally’s office building. When she had finished, Sally handed her an orange. The little girl took it slowly, obviously unfamiliar with it, causing Sally to remember a similar occasion with Christian. She leaned over and broke the peel. And, like her uncle, on the lawn in front of the lake so many years ago, Klara smelled the orange’s pungent fragrance and smiled up at Sally.

  Annaliese, too, enjoyed the treat, exclaiming how long it had been since she had tasted one. Sally sat watching Annaliese wiping the last of the orange juice from Klara’s thin little face and she felt unaccountably happy—and sad. She might have been Klara’s aunt. She might have lived all of her life here in this city. If the Nazis hadn’t taken over; if they hadn’t started the war; if, if, if.

  She said none of that to Annaliese, who talked to Sally of her time in Vienna before the war, describing in loving detail the parties and balls she had attended and the dresses she had worn.

  As the three of them were walking back to the car, Klara rewarded Sally for the picnic by taking her hand for a moment. The little girl, blinking in the sun, looked up at Sally, smiled shyly, then darted around to her mother.

  “She’s a great kid,” Sally said in English.

  “What did she say?” Klara asked her mother.

  “I said you were a wonderful child,” Sally repeated in German.

  Klara looked around her mother’s skirt at Sally. Sally nodded and Klara rewarded her again with a smile.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Sally said when they reached the car. “About the coat. I asked someone who has gone back to the States to send me one, so you ought to have it by the fall. Is that all right?”

  “Of course it is,” Annaliese said, her hand curving across the back of her daughter’s head. “Did you hear that, sweetheart?” She bent her head. “Aunt Sally is having a coat sent to you all the way from America.”

  Sally watched them, the mother, elegant in gray sweater and slacks, her blond hair shining in the sunshine, and the little girl in her hand-knit jacket and navy skirt, her hair fluffy and unsubstantial as golden smoke; and her heart ached with her own proud isolation. Then the two blond heads lifted and smiled at her, including her in their delight in the news of a new coat, and she laughed.

  “That’s right,” she said, opening the car door, ushering her passengers into the vehicle. “And you know what it’s going to look like?”

  Klara, seated between the two women on the front seat, shook her head, and the three of them conjured up the perfect winter coat.

  STANDING NEXT TO the car on Pariser Platz, Sally said good-bye to Annaliese and Klara. She and Annaliese shook hands, and when Sally turned to leave, she thought she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a familiar figure. She turned quickly to look, but the man had gone. She stared after him, frowning.

  “What is it, Sally?” said Annaliese.

  Sally looked at her. Annaliese was watching her intently. “Nothing,” she said, “nothing.” She didn’t like the feeling that crept over her, a feeling that she could not trust the German woman. Then she shook her head. She was being paranoid. She laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I just saw a ghost.”

  Annaliese smiled. “It happens often these days,” she said.

  THAT WAS WHEN the feeling that someone was watching her began, someone with very blond hair, someone tall, someone, in fact, very much like Christian. Sally began to see him, or men who looked like him, everywhere. Even in Munich, in court, the next week, she looked up into the gallery of the small, crowded courtroom and saw, or thought she saw, someone. She became, alternately, angry with herself and frightened, and then angry again. But she spoke to no one about her fears, her imaginings. How could she? What could she say? She would have to tell everything, and she couldn’t do that. The men knew she had been in Berlin. They did not know about, Christian; no one but Colonel Eiger did.

  “I’M GOING CRAZY,” she said out loud into her empty dim room. “I’m really going crazy.”

  She lay rigid on her narrow bed, still dressed except for her shoes. Reading on her bed after dinner she had fallen asleep, and had had a disturbing dream, full of menacing images that faded as she awoke. She reached for her cigarettes on the little nightstand and knocked a glass off with her fumbling. She heard it break on the hardwood floor and quickly sat up, jerking her legs around to the floor on the other side of her bed. Her heart was pounding. It was the dream. She leaned back and tried to turn on the wall sconce above the nightstand, but nothing happened. No comforting light came on.

  Sally padded over to the door in her stocking feet. Pulling it open, she saw that the hall was dark as well. Then from around the corner, where the stairs were, came a bobbing light, followed by a person carrying a flashlight. It was Margie Allen, the nurse who worked for the Red Cross.

  “Lights are out all over the neighborhood,” she said when she came up to Sally, handing her two candles. “They ought to be on soon.”

  In her room, Sally found a saucer on her table and some matches and lit the candle, sticking it into the saucer with its own wax. She watched the fat, stubby candle burn steadily. Well, she couldn’t clear up the glass in the gloom. She would just have to wait until the lights went on, or morning arr
ived.

  It was stuffy in the darkness. She was still in her uniform, so she undressed down to her slip. Crawling across her bed, she found her cigarettes and lit one, then went to the window.

  She pushed open the heavy shutters and, leaning on the sill like an Italian housewife, looked out. The night was very still, the air heavy and warm, threatening a storm. The gutted building across the way, with its almost delicate walls, no longer looked forbidding; she had seen it so often. The other buildings on the block retained all or most of their walls and the resulting stone corridor magnified sound so that when the occasional car passed slowly along the street, it could be heard long before it came into sight and long after it turned. One came along as Sally watched.

  She finished the cigarette and flicked it into the darkness, watching the tiny light fall. Then, from below in the street, Sally heard a sound that she immediately recognized as a shoe scraping on cement.

  Someone was in the street.

  She backed away from the window, frightened, trying to see between the shutter hinges and the wall. She could see the figure of a man down at the corner, under the useless, bent street lamp. Was it her imagination, or did he seem to be looking in her direction?

  Just then, the lights came on in the building, startling her and causing her to bump her elbow. She swore and rubbed the injured spot. When she looked back at the corner, now illuminated by light from the windows at that end of the building, the dark figure was gone. But in the moment as the lights came on, before she hit her elbow, she had seen his hair. It had shone in the light—yellow.

  She retreated, leaving the window and its mystery, went to the sink and splashed cool water on her face and arms, then she remembered the broken glass.

  Getting her little wastebasket, she crouched over the glass and picked up the larger pieces. Then, slowly, she stopped, her hand carefully holding a shard. She looked at it. There was a memory—that was what had frightened her when she broke the glass—a memory.

  A hand, her hand, carelessly knocking a glass off a bedside table. She could remember that. The memory-glass fell, as if through water, and shattered on the floor, a hardwood floor as well, like the one in her room. That floor, the one in her memory, was—where? She remembered that the glass shattered because it was crystal.