“I doubt your job is ever easy,” said Leo, trying to understand what it would be like to be so far removed from Nazi Germany. Agatha had spent most of her life in China. Perhaps that’s why she went so easily with Pohl, he mused. Or perhaps it was just different if you weren’t a Jew.
“What I do at Liwei’s—and after—it’s shameful. I know it is,” said Agatha quietly. “But it pays, and I’ve been on my own for eleven years now. I’ve told you before—I first came to Shanghai when I was ten years old, after my father died. My mother followed a British missionary here. It was a terrible idea, but she was a woman who was always enticed by terrible ideas. When she died in ’33, and I was a teenager alone in Shanghai, I lived with the help of the church for a few years, but they could only do so much.”
“So, Liwei,” said Leo, who understood well the choices for women like Agatha in their city.
She nodded and he watched her rub the edge of the dirty sheet with her painted fingernails, like a security blanket. “I never went to high school. Instead I just learned English working in the church that the British ran. As for Chinese, I guess I learned that in the street. Speaking both languages helped me at Liwei’s, far more than a high school diploma would have.”
“Shanghai is an education in itself,” said Leo.
“To say the least.” Agatha closed her eyes and put her hand over Leo’s bad one, as had become a habit for her. “I turned twenty-five this year, but this city makes you feel much older.”
Perhaps a romance of some sort was inevitable, thought Leo, his fingers running down Agatha’s bare leg. He hadn’t been with another woman since Emi and night after night Agatha had been there, right in front of him, in her low-cut dresses, embodying male desire. But in the privacy of the Hartmanns’ dark, charmless apartment, without her hair done or her lips painted, Leo liked her even more. He liked the control she had on her life, how hardship of any kind didn’t seem to diminish her. By April, he realized, she had become a whole person for him—and, he hoped, he had become more than the boy who ran after her.
“I have to go to work,” Agatha said sadly, standing up and putting on her clothes.
“Don’t dance with anyone,” Leo protested, propping himself up on his elbows to watch her. His field of vision was cut off, but no one needed two eyes to see how beautiful Agatha was in a state of undress.
“I could lie and tell you I won’t, but what choice do I have?” said Agatha, stepping into her pants.
“None,” said Leo, remembering Jin’s words to not judge Agatha too harshly. “But I have to say it.”
“Fine. Let’s pretend that I won’t,” she said, bending to kiss his forehead. “And in two weeks, you’ll be back,” she added, as Leo had announced that he would return to Liwei’s on the first day of May.
Agatha walked to the door and turned to look at Leo one more time before she left. She leaned her head against the door frame, nicked and worm eaten, and said, “Luchik, do you think I’m in love with you?”
Leo sat up quickly, his head light, and asked, “Should I think that?”
“I think you should,” Agatha replied, pulling the door closed behind her.
CHAPTER 28
CHRISTIAN LANGE
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1944
Christian moved his feet through the mire, weighed down by anxiety and illness. His lungs felt blackened and his skin irritated and burning, his thick Army uniform abrasive in the heat. But somehow, he was walking fast, low branches full of long thorns tearing at his arms as he protected his face.
In training in Texas and Hawaii, his commanders had said that combat skills would all become second nature. That a soldier’s instincts to kill or be killed was honed in the Army training grounds. “You’ll learn everything you need to know during your training,” Christian’s sergeant had said. “It will all become mechanical. Then, when you are fighting on the ground against the enemy, your adrenaline will just push go and you’ll find yourself brawling like the devil.”
But as far as Christian was concerned, those assurances failed to address two problems: he had no real desire to kill anyone, for freedom or country, and he was in love with Emi Kato, an enemy citizen.
The Seventh Infantry Division had gone through amphibious assault training on Maui for weeks and then been assigned to V Amphibious Corps under the Marines. Christian had gone to Maui only near the end of the training, and Jack Walter even later. But at the end of January, because of the size of the force needed for an offensive on Japanese territory, the two found themselves on one of the massive ships heading deep into the Pacific toward Kwajalein Atoll for the U.S. military’s long-planned Operation Flintlock.
The soldiers spent eight days on the boat, the ship moving swiftly into the South Pacific. The enlisted men were made to go over their operation with their superiors, from beginning to end, day after day, making sure they were as prepared as could be. Sitting on that boat, smoking and cursing with the others, Christian was ready. He wasn’t exactly what the Army wanted, but he felt he could do his job and survive. Even Jack had slapped him on the back—then, as was more his style, on the side of the head—and said, “You’re tough enough to do this, kraut—believe!”
But what he was about to engage in had not become clear to Christian until they reached Carlson Island, one of the smaller islands in the Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Pacific’s Marshall Islands under Japanese rule.
The landing went smoothly, but as soon as Christian’s boots were in the water, then on land on Carlson—the humid, soggy, foreign land—he knew something was wrong. He wasn’t driven by anger and adrenaline, as the boys around him seemed to be, but instead with a terrible sense of wrongdoing.
With his feet on enemy territory, the reality of war hit him like a fist to the jaw. He’d been dropped into the wrong place and given the wrong job—worse, it was one he’d willingly signed up for.
As the soldiers ahead of him gunned down the few enemy troops they came upon, Christian and his unit were tasked with hauling ammunition and weapons onto land. Setting out to cross the island in the dark, Christian tried to keep his eyes and his thoughts fixed on the man ahead of him, but all he could think was that he should have gone to Germany. He shouldn’t have been so quick to abandon his family. “I might have died, but I wouldn’t have had to kill anyone else,” he said to Jack as he carried artillery across the wet soil. “Now I’ll die here, with blood on my hands. Why did I think I could do this?”
“Shut up with the introspective crap,” said Jack, grunting under the weight of the machinery he was shouldering. “You’d better shoot any bastard who is about to shoot me, kraut. If you can’t be trusted, I’m leaving you to be speared by the Japanese. You like them so much now, but I bet you’ll sing a different tune when you’re in their POW camps. You’ll see what mean bastards they can be.”