"As much as possible, as fast as possible."
He rolled Tommy's sleeve up and cleared a spot near the shoulder. He plunged the needle in, whispering, "Fight hard, Tommy Hart. Now you got a real chance."
Tommy leaned his head back. For the barest of moments, he started to allow himself to believe he might live.
Fenelli continued to talk, seemingly to himself, but to all the others in the room, as well. "… Now some morphine for the trip. Kill that pain for a bit. That sounds pretty good, huh, Von Reiter held up his hand again.
"Ah, lieutenant, before you administer the morphine, please, one more moment."
Fenelli stopped in the midst of filling the syringe.
Von Reiter looked over toward Fritz Number One, who had come through the door and was carrying a makeshift box.
The German commandant smiled one more time. But it was the coldest of smiles, one that spoke of many hard years spent in the harsh service of war.
"I have two gifts for you, Mr. Hart," he said quietly.
"So that you may remember these days."
He reached inside his tunic pocket and carefully removed a handkerchief. It was the bloodstained silk handkerchief with which Tommy had first bound his hand in the moments after his battle with Visser.
"This is yours, I believe, Mr. Hart. Undoubtedly an important gift from a woman friend back in the States, and I suspect of some sentimental value…"
The German smoothed the brilliant white handkerchief out flat on the desktop in front of him. The crimson stains had dried into deep maroon colors.
"And so, I return what is yours, lieutenant. But I do note the odd coincidence that your lady friend back home seems to possess the precise identical initials as my former second-in-command, Hauptmann Heinrich Albert Visser, who died so bravely in service of his country."
Tommy could see the HAVE embossed in flowing script in a corner of the handkerchief. He looked up at Von Reiter, who shook his head.
"War, of course, is a series of the most perplexing coincidences."
Von Reiter sighed and picked up the silk square, folding it carefully three times, and handing it across the desktop to Tommy Hart.
"I have one other gift for you, Mr. Hart, and then Mr.
Fenelli can feel free to administer the morphia, which I know will provide you with great relief on your journey to Switzerland."
Von Reiter gestured sharply toward Fritz Number One, who stepped forward and placed the box he held at his waist at Tommy's feet.
"What the hell are those?" Colonel MacNamara burst out.
"Looks like a bunch of damn hats!"
Von Reiter let his awful smile curl around the corners of his mouth before replying.
"You are indeed correct, colonel.
They are hats. Some wool caps, some fur hats, some are mere cloth head coverings. There are many different shapes and sizes and styles. They have but one detail in common. Like the handkerchief that I have already returned, they are marked with blood, and thus will need to be cleaned before they can ever hope to be used again."
"Hats?" the Senior American Officer asked.
"What is Hart to do with a bunch of hats? Especially bloody ones."
"They are Russian hats, colonel."
"Well," MacNamara continued, "I don't see why-" But Von Reiter coolly interrupted him.
"Eighty-four hats, colonel. Eighty-four Russian hats."
The commandant fumed to Tommy Hart.
"Sixteen men went to the firing squad bareheaded. Lieutenant Then Von Reiter shrugged.
"This surprised me immensely," he added.
"I thought that for the cold-blooded murder of a highly decorated
German officer, the Gestapo would shoot the entire work camp. Each and every Russian. But to my astonishment, they selected only one hundred men to kill in retaliation."
Von Reiter walked back around the desk, and seated himself.
He allowed a moment of quiet to fill the room before he nodded and gestured to Fenelli, who held the morphine needle ready.
"Go with Herr Blucher, Mr. Hart. Leave here and take all your secrets with you. His car will take you to the train. The train will carry you to Switzerland, where your friend Wing Commander Pryce, a hospital, and surgeons all await your arrival.
Do not think about those one hundred men. Not for another moment.
Wipe' them from your memory. Instead, you should endeavor to survive.
Return home to Vermont. Live to be old and rich and happy. Lieutenant
Hart. And when your grandchildren come to your side one day to ask you about the war, you can say that you passed it most uneventfully, reading legal textbooks, inside a German prisoner-of-war camp named Stalag Luft Thirteen."
Tommy had no words left to reply with. He was only peripherally aware of the needle penetrating his flesh. But the sweet dulling sensation of morphine sweeping through him was like drinking from the greatest and freshest clear, cold mountain stream of home.
Epilogue
Lydia Hart was in the bathroom, putting the finishing touches to her hair, when she called out, "Tommy? Do you need help with your tie?"
She paused, waiting for a response, which came merely as a grunted negative, which was precisely what she'd expected and made her smile as she ran the brush through the silver cascade she still wore down around her shoulders. Then she added, "How are we doing on time?"
"We have all the time in the world," Tommy replied softly.
He was seated by the large window of their hotel suite, and from where he was positioned, he could see both his wife's reflection in the mirror and, when he pivoted and looked through the windowpane, all the way to Lake Michigan. It was a summer mid-morning and streaky sunlight flitted off the dark blue surface of the water. He had spent the past quarter hour studiously watching sailboats pirouette across the slight roll of the waves, cutting back and forth in seemingly aimless patterns. The grace and speed of each sleek hull, circling beneath a billowing white sail, was hypnotic.
He wondered a bit why he'd always gravitated to fishing boats and noisy motors, guessing this preference had something to do with his inclination for destinations, but then decided also that he would have had too much trouble handling both the tiller and the mainsheet of a sailboat driven fast before the wind.
Tommy looked down and stole a glance at his left hand. He was missing his index finger and half of the little finger. Purplish scar tissue had built up in the deep gouges ripped from his palm. But, he thought, the hand appeared to be far more crippled than it truly was. For more than fifty years his wife had been asking him if he needed help tying his tie, and for all that time he'd always replied that he did not. He had learned how to tie knots in both the ties he wore to his office and the fishing lines he used on his boat. And every month when the government had dutifully sent him a modest disability check, he'd just as dutifully signed it over to the general scholarship fund at Harvard.