Advance Praise for
Of Another Time and Place
“Schaeffer’s Of Another Time and Place brilliantly weaves a modern-
day mystery with stirring depictions of aerial combat in World War II, while deftly addressing the moral issues raised by that war. This first novel clearly vaults Schaeffer into the ranks of accomplished storytellers whose next novels are anxiously awaited by his legion of fans, of which I am now one.”
—Eric L. Harry, author of the series Pandora: Outbreak
“I love Brad Schaeffer's writing, and Of Another Time and Place is no exception. Buy it and read it. You won't be disappointed.”
—Ben Shapiro, bestselling author, editor-in-chief of
The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show”
A POST HILL PRESS BOOK
Of Another Time and Place
© 2018 by Brad Schaeffer
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-68261-663-5
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-664-2
Cover art by Christian Bentulan and Cody Corcoran
Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
New York • Nashville
posthillpress.com
Published in the United States of America
Contents
PART 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
PART 2
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
PART 3
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
PART 4
34
35
36
37
38
PART 5
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
PART 6
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
EPILOGUE
This book is dedicated to my wife, children,
and the scattered-but-still-close Schaeffer clan
whose unbending encouragement and faith in my writing
gave me enough fuel to see the mission through.
Acknowledgments
A work of historical fiction requires the writer to immerse himself or herself in an ocean of archives, books, articles, films, and technical data. I am no exception. But without a literary agent who believes in you, and a publishing house willing to take your story beyond a stack of papers on a desk and bring it to the public, not much can come from writing a book beyond personal satisfaction.
As such, I would especially like to thank my tireless agent Bob Thixton at Pinder Lane & Garon-Brooke for taking a chance on an unknown, and Anthony Ziccardi and all the staff at Post Hill, especially Billie Brownell and Madeline Sturgeon and their diligent editing, for making this book a reality. I would also like to thank those who encouraged my writing along the way. They include: Rich Hull, David Frum, Dominic Magnabosco, Jason Hanna, J.D. Griffin, Linda Habgood, Jason Wolfe (now climbing with angels), Ben Shapiro, Hank Berrien, Mark Lasswell, formerly at The Wall Street Journal, and Josh Greenman at The New York Daily News.
Author’s Note
Many years ago I discovered that my next-door-neighbor served in World War II with the USAAF 8th Air Force as a navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress; he was shot down over Bremen and spent a year as a POW in Stalag Luft 1. I had the honor of helping him craft his memoirs. A veteran of several missions, his tales of brutal combat in the skies over Germany prompted me to wonder in particular, who were those men flying the Luftwaffe fighter planes, about whom he spoke with grudging respect? How did these young pilots muster the intestinal fortitude to climb into their cramped cockpits and rise up and meet the ever more powerful Allied bomber armadas and their accompanying buzz saw of fighter escorts day after day until the very end? What was their story?
And so I began researching Luftwaffe archives, letters, testimonials, and even gun camera footage. What I discovered was that perhaps the most dangerous place to fight in Western Europe in the last two years of World War II was in the cockpit of a Luftwaffe fighter during “Defense of the Reich” missions.
Oddly, the German fighter pilots’ story of waging a defensive war against hopeless odds—with some squadrons facing no less hazardous conditions than those of their oft-celebrated U-boat compatriots—has largely been ignored. Sources vary, but according to the Gemeinschaft der Jagdflieger, from 1939 to 1945, out of 28,000 day fighter pilots, a total of 8,500 were killed in action, 2,700 went missing or were POWs, and 9,100 were wounded or injured. This is a stunning casualty rate of 72 percent. And the vast accumulation of these losses occurred in 1943–1945. Such a story demanded a voice as a subject among the pantheon of war novels. I hope I have in my small way brought their tragic tale to life…even as they died fighting for a wretched cause that had to be obliterated. Still, their suffering was real, and they paid a severe price to be the spear point of a nation led astray by a madman who was, in the end, a dark mirror held up to us all.
“I would say that if we were not all guilty of crimes, then we were at least accomplices.”
—Roland Kiemig, Ostheer soldier, 1991
“We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war.”
—Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth,
in a letter to his wife after the execution
of ninety orphaned Jewish children, 1941
“How much longer can it continue? Every day seems an eternity. There is nothing for us now. Only our operations, which are hell. And then more waiting for the blow which inevitably must fall, sooner or later. Every time I close the canopy before taking off, I feel that I am closing the lid to my coffin.”
—Luftwaffe Captain Heinz Knoke,
from his diary, August 1944
1
Whenever I find it difficult to sleep, I try to count the number of men I have killed. By the time I approach one hundred, I have usually slipped off to a netherworld of agitated dreams of fire and swirling ash, mixed with the cries of children in the dust. But for my last victim, they were souls I never knew. I see their machines breaking apart into shards of flaming metal, tumbling end over end and disappearing through the clouds below me. Sometimes I follow their death spiral all the way down until they slam into the eart
h, atomized in churning fireballs. Like me, I must believe they were young and full of hope and promise. Unlike me, they are bright-eyed ghosts now. Rumors. So many years later they still fill my windscreen during the interminable nights. Memories follow a man like a vapor.
The mornings are especially difficult. That’s when I’m alone with thoughts so clear, staring wide-eyed yet unseeing into the deep blue shades of the pre-dawn darkness. In the past, whenever the images would take hold and torment me until I jackknifed upright in bed, a sheen of sweat gluing my nightshirt to my pasty skin, a gentle hand would touch my shoulder and bring me back home. A soothing voice assuring me that all is okay. That she is here. But she is no longer with me. And once my eyes open, I find retreating back into sleep impossible.
Today’s date is circled on my calendar, reminding me that I’m to receive a curious visitor. I have no idea what a journalist from the States wants with me, other than to pick at the scabs of my old wounds. Americans are a forceful lot. The mystery of her insistent calling intrigues me. Yet, I’m uneasy all the same. My roiling stomach warns me this could be a painful encounter.
So, with my nerves now charged, I struggle out of bed with a groan. When you’ve lived eighty-two years, as I have, you learn not to get up too swiftly; one misplaced step could mean a shattered hip…a death sentence at my age. Would that be so terrible? I shoo the thought away like a pesky fly.
Once steady on my feet, however, I move with the purpose of a man who’s held command in the past. Shuffling to the hall, I pause at the bedroom doorway and glance back through shadows at the sheets that lie in a tussled, frustrated bundle. My bed is empty. Amelia has been gone for one month, yet I still expect to see her. She should be lying on her side, the mound of her hips gently rising and falling with her breathing as if bobbing in a current. A phantom visage.
In my robe and slippers, I feel my way through the narrow corridor and down the stairway to the second floor. As delicate as I try to be, one of the steps creaks under me. I pause and grit my teeth as if a grimace will muffle the sound. Dora, my fifty-year-old daughter and only child, stirs in the guest bedroom. She’s temporarily abandoned her family in Dover to stay with me since her mother was buried. She knows I’m lonely.
She calls to me: “Papa? Are you okay?”
“Fine, Daughter,” I assure her from the bottom of the stairwell. “Go back to sleep.”
“I’m already up. If you wait a moment I’ll come down and brew you some tea.” Dora’s mother and I grew up in Stauffenberg, Germany, a village tucked away among the rolling hills of the Oberfranken on the Main River. Thus we never lost the telltale “zis” and “zat” that afforded us so many looks of suspicion immediately after the war. But Dora’s a product of London and, as such, developed a curious continental brogue.
“That would be kind,” I say. “If it’s no bother.”
“Of course it’s no bother,” she calls from her closet. I hear her fumbling through a rack of clothes, searching the armoire for her robe.
In the dimness I creep away from the banister to a pair of French doors. A surly November wind howls through the streets of Westminster. This place leaks like an old vessel, and drafts push through the hall.
I nudge open the doors and lazily move into the conservatory, gently closing them behind me. Two leather couches sandwich a mahogany table, which in turn pins a Persian rug to weathered oak floorboards. Bookshelves line the far wall. On the other wall hang photographs from my life. Frozen snippets of my past. I have to turn away from them before the memories build…and I come to face a richly stained grand piano that waits for me in the recess of my bay window. The Steinway’s been my constant companion this past month.
I see from my window that it promises to be a crisp, clear autumn day. And as I take in the first hint of pink ribbon peeking over the eastern London sky, I sit down to play. Closing my eyes, I strain to hear in my mind the sonata before my fingertips touch the ivory. Then I lay them gently on the keys and step into the musical world that has sustained me throughout my life. And I whisper to myself a question implanted in my bleeding head by a French priest who was witness to my complicity in the slaughter of innocents. One I have repeated every morning for the past sixty years: “Will God forgive me for what I have done?”
2
Rachael Azerad sits quietly in the back seat of the taxi and views the whitewashed stone and auburn brick facades as they whiz past her window. A New York Times reporter, she instinctively caresses the portable tape recorder, no bigger than a cigarette box, in the pocket of her raincoat. She leans her forehead against the car window and, catching her reflection, she studies herself as if viewing a painting.
At thirty-five, the shapely brunette Queens native with her full lips and athletic build can pass for ten years younger. This despite the rugged nature of her demanding career, which often exposes her to harsh conditions. She attributes her youthful appearance to her olive skin, a gift from her Sephardic father. In an alluring contrast, her eyes are light blue, almost gray—a contribution from her German mother. Rachael turns heads wherever she goes, and deflects heated advances from men and women at press club dinners. But her foreign-correspondent life is a lonely one that allows for only the rare, torrid affair. More often it’s a life of holidays spent isolated in strange, sometimes hostile, places few have heard of and fewer would care to ever see. But this is her choice. It’s a course that suits her. The pay is good, and her learning about the world never ceases. And sometimes it even offers her that rare glimpse into the nobility of the human heart. Today, she hopes, will be one such occasion.
And yet, she finds her mission distasteful. If he is not the man, then she’s flown three thousand miles to sit down with a war criminal. A brute who marched with the barbarian horde that almost drove her people to extinction. She finds her stomach churning in aggrieved protest, but knows it’s not car sickness despite the cab driver’s treating the London streets like his own personal Le Mans course.
“A bit fatigued are you, madam?” inquires the cheerful taxi driver from the front seat. Glancing up, Rachael reminds herself to shift her gaze to the right, as she’s now in a country where they drive on the left side of the road through these ancient and impossibly narrow streets.
She forces a smile at the jolly fellow, whose bushy orange mustache completes the image that could have been ripped right out of a tourism brochure. “A little jet-lagged, yeah,” she manages in reply. “Just touched down from the States about two hours ago.”
“I see. Well, it is early to you, no matter where you are then.” The car executes a series of screeching twists and turns through roadways that in Manhattan would have passed for alleys. “Business or pleasure?” The driver’s benign eyes, studying her in the mirror, are framed by cherry-red puffs of thick brows.
She shrugs. “I’m not sure.”
Rachael glances up at the ornately crafted buildings jutting up from the sidewalks. Each is remarkably elaborate, yet one follows the other so that their exquisite architecture becomes commonplace. Offices and apartments, occasionally adorned with “To Let” signs, with their heavy stone construction and chunky wooden frames surrounding thick panes of narrow glass. She muses to herself how much older is London than even the most historic colonial sections of lower Manhattan. The taxi follows the bumpy curves of Lancaster Terrace and whips around Westbourne Street, where it pours onto one of the tributary roadways emptying into the greenery of Hyde Park.
“That’s the Lido on your right across the water,” says her driver, who doesn’t quite understand how New Yorkers value silence because they get so little of it. “The Diana memorial walk over there. Holocaust memorial to your right.” At that, Rachael takes notice. It’s a reminder of why she’s made this journey across “the pond” in the first place. It took her a week just to convince her editor it was a potential story. A month more to convince her family that it was worth the investment of tim
e and money.
A silent prayer passes over her lips as they bank around the obelisk of the equestrian Wellington monument and eventually join the noisy bustle of jammed cars, black taxicabs, and iconic red double-decker buses that flow along the Piccadilly. Please let me be right about this man. Otherwise, she knows, her trip to see me this bright morning will have served no purpose but forcing her to spend time with a man who, in another time and place, she might have wanted to kill.
3
“Come in.” My daughter ushers Rachael into the first-floor parlor. Rachael’s surprised at the relative quiet of this tiny back street lined by ancient brick pubs and booksellers just two blocks off the hectic Strand. The journalist pauses at the threshold. The music hits her like a blast of air. Dora perceives the appreciation on her guest’s face and smiles. “Papa plays more than usual these days.”
“It’s beautiful. Is it Mendelssohn?”
Dora nods. “From Songs Without Words. Come and meet him.”
Rachael follows Dora from the entranceway up the stairs to the main flat. She studies her hostess. My daughter wears her graying hair in a tight bun. Streaks of her original sandy blonde reveal themselves in the light.
The reporter poses a hypothetical question in her mind to the broad-backed woman who smiles over her shoulder as they climb the stairs. What would you have done? Sixty years ago? Would you, Dora, have helped me?
At the head of the steps are the French doors. Dora halts there. Rachael peers around her and catches the shadows of the piano and the music maker weaving back and forth like a human metronome.
The doors gently swing open, and Rachel follows Dora into the conservatory. Her hostess offers a comforting remark: “Don’t be intimidated by Papa. He’s more songbird than raptor now.”
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