I walked inside the light kitchen with immaculately clean countertops, walked around the living room touching the furniture, looking at the books on the book shelves – mostly German classics, several history books, dictionaries and American law encyclopedia; found the door next to the living room locked (probably his study, I thought), and stopped in front of the stairs leading to the second floor. After a moment of indecisively shifting from one foot to another, I made a first step on the carpeted stairs and soon found myself in front of the bedroom door. I hesitated a little before turning the door knob but following my natural curiosity, pushed the door open.
The very ordinary look of the room surprised me a little: it was a very light gray, with a twin bed in the middle, neatly covered with a grey comforter and several pillows in its head, a night table with an alarm clock, a lamp, a picture of me feeding Ernie – the one that I sent him to Nuremberg – and a book near it, that’s how simple the bedroom was. I walked over to the closet built in the opposite wall, and almost blushing at the thought that I was so insolently invading his privacy, opened the doors.
I don’t know what I expected to find there, but the contents of the closet were as simple as everything else inside the house: several dark suits, a lot of white shirts, several sweaters, cardigans, ties, shoes and hats, a typical man’s closet. I touched one of the suits and smelled it, looking for a familiar residue of cigarette smoke that would stay on his uniform even after it would be thoroughly cleaned by his housekeeper. This suit smelled of wool and slightly of cologne, nothing else. I seriously started to doubt that it was Ernst’s house. He couldn’t live without smoking, and the first thing he would do as a free man is probably have a cigarette, I thought. But I had nothing else to do but go downstairs and wait for him. I was praying that it was him.
Epilogue
They say that time is a very relative notion: when you want it to stop, it rushes forward, but when you’ve been waiting for something to happen for years, the last minutes would drag like hours. I was tired from staring at the watch on the wall, which was moving its hands with irritating unhurriedness; my muscles were tense from nervously clenching my hands on my knees and from tapping my foot on the carpet. I thought that the time had stopped like in some surreal story about Alice in Wonderland, and the evening would never come. And then I finally heard the sound of the gravel on the driveway and the car motor coming to a stop.
I sat there, on the couch, not able to see the man who opened the front door with his keys and threw them onto the little stand in the hallway. I heard the slight rustle of the paper as he was going through the mail Olivia laid out on the same hallway table, and, not able to wait anymore jumped to my feet, in my anxiety slightly hitting the coffee table with my knee. The coffee cup and the creamer made a distinctive cling, and I froze again, together with the man in the hallway.
I straightened out my dress nervously and started walking over to the corner, hearing his approaching steps as well. We almost bumped into each other, him and I, and I froze again, not believing my eyes, not able to wrap my mind around the fact that I was standing inches away from my Erni, alive and very real. And then he grinned at me, like he used to do so many times before in some past life I’d almost forgotten, and grabbed me in the tightest embrace with such an unhuman force that I was laughing, bathing in delight, feeling how my bones were almost breaking in his deadly grip.
We didn’t say anything to each other, he just took my face in his hands and kissed me deeply and with force, just the way I expected him to after all those years of being apart. I wasn’t able to pull away from him even for a second, and for several minutes we were just kissing right in the hallway like mad, until he easily picked me up by my thighs, making me wrap my legs around him, and carried me upstairs hardly looking where he was going.
We completely messed up the neatly made up bed as soon as we fell on it, Ernst pressing me down with the heavy weight of his strong body. He had gained back all his former powerful build that used to intimidate every single person in the Reich, I noticed with satisfaction after he hastily got rid of his jacket and a shirt, and I dug my fingers into the muscle on his back, pulling him as close as I could.
In less than a minute my dress and underwear together with the rest of his clothes were thrown onto the floor as well, as we were making love like it was the last day of our lives. Pressing my legs by the sides of his body and wrapping my arms around his neck, I gave myself to him so selflessly, knowing that from now on I would never let him go, and I would stay with him till the end, as his mistress or his Washington wife, whichever he’d prefer. He was resting his weight on his elbows, holding the back of my head in his hands, still kissing me impatiently as he was moving inside, such long forgotten sweet sensations feeding my body with euphoria with every new thrust, stronger than the previous.
“Never going to let you go,” he was whispering to me, for a second pulling away from my lips, just to cover them with his mouth again. “Never, you hear me? I’ll lock you up here if I have to, I’ll tie you up to this bed and will keep you captive for the rest of my life.”
“Good,” I laughed quietly into his neck, ready to agree to whatever he wanted to do with me.
Later that evening, when we lay in his bed, Ernst finally told me his story, how the OSS got him out at the last moment when he wasn’t hoping for anything anymore, how he was working together with agent Foster (I was ready to kill the American the next time I saw him for keeping this secret from me!) and about the secret intelligence war they were playing against the Soviets.
“Someday I will tell you everything in detail,” he promised, giving me one of his famous grins, and kissed me once again. “But not tonight. Tonight I don’t want to talk. Tonight I just want to be with you.”
_______________
I couldn’t keep Ernst a secret from Heinrich for too long. After my fifth trip to Washington in one month, he point blank asked me what was going on, and I confessed to everything. This time there wasn’t any teary begging from my side or promises to end it all. We both knew the truth: I loved Ernst too much to ever be away from him. So, we sat down and had a calm, and very normal conversation, for such an unusual situation. Heinrich was in fact very glad that Ernst was alive, and wished us all the best together.
“I’ve been telling you from the very beginning that you should have stayed with him,” he reprimanded me kind-heartedly. “But you wouldn’t listen, stubborn girl.”
We signed the divorce papers just two weeks later. I left the house together with everything else to my former husband, and took only my personal and children’s belongings with me to Washington. We agreed that Heinrich could visit them as often as he wanted, and that summers they would spend with him in New York.
Luckily we only had to separate them for a year, after which Ernst received a long awaited transfer to the New York office and we moved into a house on the opposite side of the park. Heinrich got married to a very pretty and extremely intelligent librarian Katie; he met her somewhere in Midtown, after the girl’s paper bag got ripped and she would certainly have trouble carrying her fruit home if it wasn’t for a handsome gentleman with a slight German accent offering her a ride.
He and Katie soon became parents to two beautiful boys, and no matter how strange it would look to somebody, somebody who was not familiar with our story, all of us remained good friends, one very big and extraordinary family, always gathering for holidays, birthdays, and just babysitting each other’s children whenever the other couple would ask. To keep the score even Ernst made me two more kids as well, a boy and a girl, but after my fourth pregnancy I declared in a tone needing no discussion that if he wanted any more kids, he might as well start having them himself. He promised that we were done, but for some reason I didn’t believe my mischievous husband.
To any outsider our story would seem hard to believe and maybe even hard to understand, but that’s why we keep it to ourselves and pretend to be normal New Yorkers, with no mor
e than a plain and uninteresting past. After all, who would think that two happy families they met in Central Park, with a bunch of children running around and screaming sometimes in German, consisted of the highest ranking ‘executed’ war criminal, always hiding from the prying looks under a hat; his former secretary and an SS member, at some point wanted by the Gestapo for espionage and concealing her Jewish identity; and her former husband, the executive of the most sophisticated intelligence games right under the nose of the Nazi Party? Right, nobody. So we smile at them politely as they pass us by, and keep walking, invisible for others, the former SS leader, a counterintelligence spy and the girl from Berlin.
The End.
Thank you for reading Book Three from the series “The Girl from Berlin.” I hope you enjoyed it! If you liked the story, the author and all the people who worked on the book will really appreciate it if you leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. And if you’re curious about how Ernst could escape his death sentence, he’ll be back very soon to tell his very interesting story… “The Austrian” is coming soon.
The Girl from Berlin: War Criminal's Widow Page 27
