Dragonfly, page 48
“Mr. Drechsler?” he said softly.
“Ah, is that you, Christoph?” Ernst asked without looking around.
“Yes sir. Mind if I sit with you?”
“Be a pleasure,” he said and reached into his pocket. “There’s an extra chair in the car trunk,” he said, handing a key over his shoulder. Chris took it and said he wouldn’t be a minute. At the car parked under the same trees as always, he paused at taking out the extra foldup chair. For Dirk? he wondered.
“Not much action today,” the older man said when Chris joined him.
“I can see that,” Chris said. “How have you been getting on, Mr. Drechsler?”
“Oh, about the same as always since Dirk has been gone. Just waiting for the war to be over and my boy to come home. I imagine he’s ready now and has been for a long time. I’m sure he’s realized he made a mistake, but we’ll just put it behind us and go on like nothing ever happened. We’ll be moving once he’s home and that will help.”
“Oh? Where to?” Chris asked, his heart holding.
“We visited Oregon a while back, my wife and I, and we really like it. It reminded us of Germany—lots of forests and mountains and lakes, pretty farms. Good fishing there. A change of scene where nobody knows us will do us all good.”
“Have you…done anything about it? Bought some property there?” Chris asked.
“No. We’ll have to see what Dirk thinks about it.”
“That’s good,” Chris said. “Very wise.”
“I think so.” Ernst cast the line farther upstream. “Of course, if he doesn’t come home, we’ll stay here where the memories are…where you are, Christoph.”
Chris swallowed down the balloon of emotion in his throat. Dirk was never coming home. That had been verified by Lodestar, but Chris would never—could never—reveal that reality to Dirk’s mother and father. It was one of the many wounds of war he’d have to live with—the conflict between destroying a father and mother’s hope for their son’s return or preserving their faith that someday he would walk through the door.
“Tell you what, Mr. Drechsler,” he said. “Let’s you and me set a time to meet on the first Saturday of every month at this exact spot to do a little fishing during the season. What do you say?”
“I would say that would be most generous of your time, Christoph. I’d like that very much.”
“All right then, it’s a deal.” They shook hands. “Now let’s get you home. There’s nothing biting today, and your wife told me she’s got brownies coming out of the oven.”
“No fish biting today, but there’s always a chance they’ll run tomorrow, right, Christoph?”
“Right, Mr. Drechsler.”
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
Nineteen forty-five began for Americans with the prediction that the war would be over by spring. In their far-apart locales, the team of Dragonfly marked September 23 on their new calendars with eager anticipation and prepared for their reunion in nine months’ time. By February, Bridgette had reserved a hotel room near Bryant Park, close to the New York Public Library, and Victoria had made arrangements with a caterer to provide food and drinks for the group in her uncle’s Fifth Avenue apartment the evening of the reunion. In March, Bucky booked his airline flight to New York City, and Brad asked Jared for time off. Both requests resulted in a surprise for Bucky and a shock for Brad.
“Tell me again why you are going to New York City,” Horace asked Bucky.
“To visit friends, Dad,” Bucky said, not for the first time. When he had first informed his parents that he’d be away the weekend of September 23, his American father had assumed that his trip to New York City pertained to business. Further persistent questioning revealed that no, he was going to meet some people for personal pleasure.
“Personal, huh? Have your mother and me ever met these friends you are meeting for personal pleasure?”
“No, Dad.”
“Would we recognize their names?”
“No sir.”
“Then…how do you know them?”
A look from his wife cut off the inquisition. It was another one of those times when his wife’s eye and his son’s tone warned him not to ask too many questions. Horace felt left out. They knew something that they’d chosen not to share with him, but he took no offense. The bottom line was that they had excluded him to protect him. He felt it down deep, just as he’d become convinced that his boy had been involved in something more dangerous during the war than sitting it out for two years behind an engineering drafting board in a secret government facility. His mother had intuitively known it when he left for Washington in 1942, supported by the fact that they didn’t hear from him but once in all the time he was away. What kind of peacetime job would keep a man from his family that long? But now, his wife was working out of more than her intuition. She knew something that her husband was not privileged to know.
But he didn’t need to know. He’d served in war, by God, and he knew that the bravest men didn’t always wear uniforms. The look he sometimes glimpsed in his son’s eyes was the same hollow gaze of war veterans everywhere, so it was time to let Bucky—Sam, his son—know that he knew.
From his reading armchair, he glanced at his wife embroidering in hers. “Monique, honey,” he said, “could you excuse us men for a while?”
Monique cast a startled look at her husband. Never had he asked her to leave the room for a private conversation with her son, and he had not said please. She was expected to go. “Of course,” she said.
When she’d gone, Horace looked at Bucky staring back at him, puzzled. “Sir?” he said.
“I don’t know what this trip is all about, son. All I know is that you have my blessing and that you go knowing how very, very proud I am of you. I ask your forgiveness if I’ve given you reason to think otherwise. No father in the world could be more proud of his son. You understand what I am saying?”
“Yes, Dad, I do.”
“Well now, that all ironed out, let’s call your mother back in.”
*
Joanna said to Brad, “You must have some new clothes for your trip to New York City, Sohn. We can’t have you looking like a ragamuffin among these people you’re going to meet.”
Brad had been unable to come up with a plausible excuse for going to New York City. When he asked Jared for time off, he’d said that he couldn’t give him a specific reason but to trust him that it was important. His mother’s concern about his clothes was just another way of worming the information out of him. “It’s okay, Mutter. The guys I’m going to meet don’t dress well.”
Joanna’s eyebrow shot up. “Then one of them must be Alistair Renault.”
His eyes betrayed him. He was never good at evading the truth. “I thought so,” Joanna said, turning away. “As if it wasn’t enough what that man stole from me, he had to take my son from me for two years of my life. Now what does he want? You must tell me.”
Surprised, Brad said, “What…did he steal from you?”
“My heart. He stole my heart, Sohn, and I never got it entirely back. He never knew.”
“What? But I thought that you and Vater…”
Joanna turned to him. “No, your father was my second love…and choice. Again, Alistair never knew, and neither did your father.”
Brad didn’t know that he wanted to hear these revelations this late. Was his mother telling him that… His face must have flamed with his shocking thought, for she patted his cheek. “No, Sohn, it is not what you are thinking. Look at your father’s picture. You two could have been bookends.”
“Then why are you telling me this?” Brad demanded.
“So that you will understand why I do not want him back in my life, my home, my family. My life is…content, and I don’t want him—” she struggled for an American word “—messing it up. He is not to come here anymore while I am here, understood?”
Brad stared into her eyes. He couldn’t believe it. My God, after all these years and two men that she loved and who loved her, the flame still burned in the heart of Joanna Bukowski Hudson Cramer for the man in brown, and Alistair Renault, still carrying the torch for his mother, never knew.
*
Many frustrating attempts and jumps through numerous bureaucratic hoops had failed to put Bridgette in contact with Major Alistair Renault at OSS headquarters in Washington before it was abolished in October 1945. The telephone number on the organization’s initial recruitment letter had become invalid. Desk clerks she spoke to referred her to other departments who referred her back to the desk of her original inquiry. She thought that if she heard the excuses classified and on behalf of the national interest to deny her access to her former case officer one more time, she would leap through the telephone line and strangle the person at the other end. She was now convinced that Major Renault had never been informed of her release from Drancy. He would have gotten in touch with her otherwise. Her telephone number in Traverse City had been disconnected after her house was put up for sale and sold within a week, but she’d left forwarding information to her new address in Los Angeles, and the major had access to the OSS’s endless resources to track down missing persons.
She would never forgive the case officer in Bern for failing to notify the major that she was still alive. Before being airlifted to Milton Hall, protocol demanded that Bridgette meet for an informal and unnecessary debriefing with the major’s replacement, only to find that he’d been called out on an emergency. His fill-in did not recognize the name Labrador or Dragonfly. The station was in a state of high anxiety and turmoil over incoming intel of the betrayal of a legendary and important Maquis leader to the Gestapo by a member of his own guerilla band. The case officer had had little time for her, but he thanked her for her work and sacrifice and said he would let his chief know that she’d stopped by. Before being pushed out the door, Bridgette had managed to stress the point that Major Renault would want to know that she’d survived Drancy, but apparently it had fallen on deaf ears.
Victoria likewise experienced the same sense of urgency to inform her case officer that she was alive and well, at least in body if not in spirit, but she presumed he was still in France and she would have to wait until the reunion to present herself in the walking flesh. After Labrador failed to appear for the meeting with Derrick, there had been no way for Victoria to inform the major of the ruse of the firing squad. As far as he and the boys knew, she was buried somewhere in France. Victoria hoped that none of them had weak hearts when she strolled into the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, alive and well.
Alistair, too, marked his calendar. By his calculation of the Allies’ progress in Europe and the Pacific, the September date Dragonfly had set aside for their reunion would occur this year. He planned to keep it whether the surviving members did or not. Men who were tighter than knitting balls in the thick of battle, once they were out of it and the smoke cleared, their most ardent intentions could unravel in the peace and quiet of home. He didn’t expect it with the three remaining men of Dragonfly, but it might happen. He would see.
Meanwhile, in his new job he was engaged in contending with the challenges the Soviet Union was expected to present to America and its democratic allies after the war was won in Europe. He currently occupied a different desk in a different office under a different title—all very secret stuff, since his boss was virtually alone in anticipating the threat that the pathologically suspicious-minded Joseph Stalin posed to the free world.
But the war in Europe still lingered tenaciously on, and in early spring, Alistair received a report that made him blanch. In the early hours of April 9, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, sentenced to death for masterminding a failed 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, along with his protégé, Major General Konrad March, who allegedly participated, were marched naked to the gallows at Flossenbürg concentration camp. The brutal details of their hanging by piano wire were sure to be reported by the press, and before Brad could read them, Alistair called him at Cramer’s Lumber Yard in Meeker, Colorado, hoping to find him there rather than at home. He was in luck. Alistair had not wanted to risk hearing Joanna’s voice.
That evening, Brad invited Wilhelm for a walk after supper. They returned an hour later, Wilhelm with swollen red eyes. After Brad had seen the boy to bed, the family gathered around. “What happened?” Joanna asked.
“The Nazis hanged his father.”
After their expected reactions to the news, Bobby, home from college for the weekend, asked, “Does that mean we get to keep him?”
Brad looked at him with a tenderness so great that he could hardly speak. “Yes,” he said. “We get to keep him.”
Two weeks later, on April 23, the Flossenbürg concentration camp was liberated by American troops, and on May 8, 1945, the Second World War ended in Europe.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
September 23, 1945, fell on Sunday. At two o’clock that afternoon, quiet tears streaming down her face, Victoria sat by her mother’s hospital bed and held her hand as her life slowly ebbed away. Her father and brother stood behind her, each with a consoling hand on her shoulders, surprised at the emotional intensity of her grief. The death was not unexpected, and her family had said their good-byes to wife and mother some time ago. Elizabeth Grayson had suffered from heart problems for years, coupled by a quick and devastating onset of Alzheimer’s disease detected shortly after Victoria went away. By the time she came home, the mother she knew and loved was gone. Her final heart attack had occurred at four o’clock that morning.
Her brother bent to her ear. “There are times you just have to release and let go, sis. It’s for the best.”
Victoria shook her head. “No, not this time,” his sister said, her tears shed for those she could not release and let go.
Victoria had been summoned home from her uncle’s New York City apartment where she had arrived the day before to finalize plans with the caterer. On the way to the municipal airport, she had the taxi drive her to the New York Public Library before it opened to drop an envelope through the mail chute. It was addressed to Major Alistair Renault with instructions to the librarian that he would be meeting with three male associates at two o’clock in the Rose Main Reading Room. The enclosed letter included her full name, address, and phone number and explained the circumstances of her survival. The taxi driver saw his fare pause with her hand on the mail chute after releasing the letter and bow her head in dejection, or maybe in prayer that it would reach its destination.
The librarian to whom it was handed diligently followed instructions but she saw no man enter the library in a military uniform wearing the rank of major—no serviceman, period. A number of meetings were going on, one a study group of college students, another a congregation of three men she took to be researchers, another a gathering of old codgers who used the library as a hangout, and in a far corner some sort of gleeful reunion consisting of four men, one much older and shabbier dressed than the others, looking nothing like a military officer, and a woman, a very pretty young lady sporting the latest in fashion.
That afternoon before she left for the day, the librarian debated what she should do with the envelope. If it were her, she would want to know that it had not been delivered. She decided to open the envelope with the hope it contained a return address. By the time she finished reading the contents she had lost her breath. What a tragedy that the letter had not been delivered, but at least the sender would know that the New York Public Library had done its duty. She wrote a note expressing as much and enclosed it and the letter into another envelope addressed to the sender and dropped it in the mailbox on her way out.
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
September 1962
Alistair sat doodling, his thoughts pulled away from the manuscript he’d been working on since reopening Dragonfly’s files. He’d decided to write that book after all, as of yet missing a title, but it would come to him. It was a time for deep thinking. In less than two days, he would return to France, his first trip back since leaving for Washington, D.C., in July 1944. He was going into Paris early, staying at a small hotel he’d favored before the occupation when he’d gone to the city to arrange for safe houses and assets and facilitators in preparation for the war to come. On Saturday, September 22, he would join the others in the hotel Bridgette had managed on such short notice to arrange for them in the Latin Quarter. “A quiet, non-touristy place removed from the maddening crowds,” she’d told them. They’d have dinner together Saturday night, visit what remained of the mural as a group on Sunday, September 23, and from there go on to La Petite Madeleine to arrive by four o’clock that afternoon. The book and tea shop was still there, open on Sundays and apparently thriving, she reported. She had checked. Whether the original owner was still around, she couldn’t say, since the team had never learned his name and Alistair had not given it.
To go to Paris or not to go to Paris had been the topic of conversation a couple of years ago as the date of the twentieth reunion drew closer. Without Liverwort, what was the point? Nobody but the wives of the male members of Dragonfly wanted to go to the restored City of Light, and there were other places closer to home and less expensive where they could include their teenaged children. They’d tabled the decision until the first of the year, when Bridgette suggested they go to a beach resort on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina over Labor Day weekend in lieu of the twenty-third—what did the date matter now, anyway? So plans were formed and reservations made.
