A Midwinter’s Tale - Excerpt

A Midwinter’s Tale

It was always cold the two years I was in Germany, even during the hot August of 1947. The bitter winter of my first year had permeated my body like a permanent infection. I shivered even in the bright summer sunlight. Germany after the war was like that.

One morning in August with the searing sun shining through the tall windows of the Renaissance palace which was the Constabulary HQ, a tall, skinny, grinning civilian, with an unnaturally red nose, came up to my desk.

"You O’Malley, Sport?"

"And if I am?" I felt the cold seep in after him

His eyes were close together, his nose that of a battered hawk, his receding hair line an arrow pointed at my face.

"Clarke, FBI, Sport," he flipped a card at me. "You’re general said you were to work with me."

I picked up the phone and asked for General Meade.

"He’s on some special search someone in Washington wants," the general informed me. "It’s important to help him, but keep me informed every day. I don’t like him."

"Yes, SIR."

"See, Sport?" He lounged casually against my desk.

"What can I do for you, sir?"

"Well, Sport, I got here a special request which the State Department has passed on to my boss. The Russians urgently want some Nazis that are wandering around loose, have a special case on them. And, you Sport, are supposed to find them for me."

"I see," I tried desperately to keep my voice neutral. "What’s the charge?"

"The Ruskies say they’re war criminals, whatever that means. I don’t care. And you don’t either. Just get them for me."

"I’ll need some details."

The whole trouble with me, my sister Peggy once informed me, is that my mouth ran ahead of my brain. Her friend Rosie Clancy said that she had it wrong: my instincts ran ahead of my mouth and that’s why I would make a good precinct captain.

She was right on the last point. I have never failed to deliver my precinct for the organization.

"All I have is names and the report that they live above a bakery somewhere in the old section of town."

"Names?" I reached for a pencil with an icy hand.

"Gunther Wülfe, Sport, and his wife Magda and two kids, girls it looks like," He flashed two square sheets of paper at me, pictures and fingerprints. All four of them in Nazi uniforms, the girls in Hitler Jugend garb. A very much younger and quite unrecognizable Magda. "I want them, Sport, and I want them real bad, understand?"

"What will the Ruskies do to them?" I asked.

"Shoot the guy probably," he shrugged his shoulders indifferently, "rape the three women to death. Kids are probably old enough now to provide some fun for their troops."

"Oh," I said.

"They’re Nazis, Sport, "he shrugged again. "You seen Belsen?

"Yeah," I tried to control my shaking body.

"Anything they get serves them right. You got it, Sport?"

"Yeah," I said with no enthusiasm. "I got it."

I felt the pencil slip from my fingers as soon as the FBI agent sauntered away from my desk. I was shivering again, despite the bright sunlight. I had to save them, that I knew. But how—without ending up in Fort Leavenworth myself? Whoever in Washington wanted to turn the Wülfe’s over to the Russians must want them pretty badly to have sent the FBI drip all the way to Germany.

I had come along way from Menard Avenue, had I not? Indeed had I ever lived there?

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