He waited, begging the star and whatever force had made it for an answer.
But by now every security officer in Potsdam had descended onto the terrace. The FBI men and their machine guns were pushing their way through ranks of uniformed NKVD regulars. British agents had surrounded a wholly unperturbed Winston Churchill, who Judge heard call for” a whisky, a bloody great big one, and make it snappy”. Stalin stood nearby, huddled with his top commanders.
Peering through a forest of milling legs, Judge fought for a sign of Ingrid. Then he saw her; she lay prone, her legs crossed at the ankle, her form unmoving. Clenching his stomach, he called her name through gritted teeth. “Ingrid!”
Abruptly, his view was blocked by a familiar figure kneeling at his side.
“Are you alright, young man?”
President Harry S. Truman folded his jacket into a square and placed it under Judge’s head.
Judge touched a hand to his hip and it came away warm and wet. The other slug had taken him in the shoulder. Curiously, his entire body was numb. The pain, he realized, would come later. He pulled himself forward an inch or two to regain sight of Ingrid Bach.
“Keep still, son,” Truman said, his earnest features were etched with concern. “We’ll get a doctor here in a jif.”
Suddenly Ingrid’s legs twitched. General Vlassik was kneeling at her side, speaking to her. Applying a compress to her shoulder, he helped her sit up. Her face was pale, her blouse soaked through with blood, but she was alert. She was alive.
Judge closed his eyes for an instant, sure it was his Francis Xavier who had answered his prayer. “Yessir,” he said.
Truman brushed his hand against Seyss’s uniform. “Jesus. One of theirs. And I thought Stalin had security wrapped up damned tight.”
“No,” Judge protested, fighting to raise himself to an elbow. “He’s not a Rus—”
A firm hand pressed him to the ground, cutting short his words. Crouching alongside the President, Darren Honey gave a discreet but unmistakable shake of the head.
“Not what?” Truman asked.
Judge looked at Honey a moment longer, then he knew. They had wanted this to happen: Honey, Vlassik, the OSS and whoever was behind it.
“Nothing,” said Judge. “I wasn’t sure if he was dead.”
“He’s dead alright, damned communist.” Harry Truman glanced over his shoulder. Seeing Stalin, his jaw hardened. His eyes shot back to Judge, but he was looking right through him. “Maybe I can’t trust that sonuvabitch after all.”
Judge turned his head, losing himself among the tall pines that bordered the rolling lawn. No, he thought to himself,you probably can’t. And maybe it’s better that way. Maybe mistrust was the best form of vigilance. He remembered something he’d learned long ago in school, something about equal and opposite forces keeping the other at bay. And then he was too tired to remember much of anything.
And closing his eyes, he saw himself standing on the docks of the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Francis: two brothers with their hands locked together in farewell. Curiously, he was unable to speak, unable to offer any warning about the future, even to say goodbye, and after a moment, Francis turned and disappeared into the busy crowd, leaving him only the question in his eyes and the weight of his expectations.
But just as quickly the image faded, and Judge found himself drifting off, thinking of Ingrid and the scent of her neck and the touch of her hand on his cheek.
Epilogue
“Dammit, Woodring,” bellowed George Patton, “have you got this fine example of American engineering gassed up and ready to go, yet? We have ourselves a few dozen pheasants to nab for Sunday dinner. They won’t wait all day, you know.”
Private First Class Horace C. Woodring snapped open the rear door of the custom-made Cadillac model 75 and fired off his crispest salute. “Yessir, General. She’s all set. Guns and dog will ride up ahead with Sergeant Spruce in the Jeep. If you’ll just climb in, I promise I’ll have you in the woods bagging those birdies inside of two hours.”
Patton roared with laughter and slid into the roomy back seat. “Get in, Hap,” he called to his long time adjutant, General Hobart Gay. “I told you Woodring was the best. He’s the fastest there is. Better than a Piper Cub to get you there ahead of time. Isn’t that right, Woodring?”
“A private never disagrees with a general.”
The cheerful driver waited for Gay to settle in next to Patton, then shut the door behind him. Sliding behind the wheel, he spent a moment adjusting the rearview mirror so that he could keep sight of Patton at all times. It was rare to see the general in such high spirits. His mood had been almost unremittingly grim since his transfer to the Fifteenth Army in early October. Losing command of his beloved Third Army had dealt him a crushing blow, though everyone agreed afterwards that he’d never been cut out to be military governor of Bavaria, or any other place for that matter. Not withhis mouth, not old “Blood and Guts”.
The last straw had come at a press conference in September. Before an assembly of some fifty reporters, Patton had publicly voiced his sentiments about the Nazis being no different from Republicans or Democrats, while admitting that he’d made use of many former Nazi officials to run the Bavarian government.
There was more to Eisenhower’s decision to relieve Patton of his command than that. Much more. But Woodring kept those facts to himself. After all, he reminded himself, he was only a driver and not privy to such sensitive information.
Making a sweeping left turn, he powered the Cadillac onto the autobahn, his keen blue eyes searching the asphalt for signs of ice. Sunday, 9 December, had dawned raw and cold. At seven a.m. the thermometer hanging outside the motor pool had read thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Two hours later, a timid sun had broken through the cloud cover. Expanses of newly fallen snow hugged both sides of the highway, sparkling like twin fields of diamonds.
Their route took them south from Bad Nauheim along the Kassel-Frankfurt-Mannheim autobahn toward the wild, game-rich forests of the Rhine-Palatinate. Approaching the town of Bad Homburg, Patton insisted they exit the autobahn and visit the ruins of a restored Roman outpost in the foothills of the Taunus Mountains. Woodring obliged. In his few weeks driving for the general, he’d learned to expect detours — Patton always wanted to visit this hospital or that cemetery — and had factored in a little extra time into that morning’s timetable.
For ten minutes, Patton slogged through the muddy ruins in his knee high leather boots, crowing about “his friend, Caesar” and “conquering Gaul” and “the glory of battle”. Woodring smiled inwardly. The crazy old goat truly believed he’d fought at Julius Caesar’s side.
Just before ten, the two-vehicle convoy left Bad Homburg, continuing on its southward trek. Patton sat forward in his seat, a rapt expression illuminating his dour features. They were driving over territory the Third Army had taken eight months before. Past Frankfurt. Past Darmstadt. Past Wiesbaden. Patton didn’t stop talking for a moment’s time, pointing out bridges his men had captured, beaming with undisguised pride at his soldiers’ derring-do, and of course, his own. Near eleven, Woodring left the autobahn for a second time, transferring to National Route 38. In another quarter of an hour, he spotted a sign indicating they were nearing the city of Mannheim. Soon he began to recognize familiar landmarks. A kiosk. A hotel. A police station. He’d traveled this part of the route a dozen times in the dead of night. Flashing past on their right was a marker showing they’d entered the village of Kaefertal. The road was littered with debris: half-tracks lying upside down, charred Tiger tanks, horsecarts splintered and upended. The town looked as if the war had ended yesterday.