Reaching Verona late into the night, he drove along the streets, scouring the addresses of those messengers who had been to see him, who had been paid for work by the Germans as informers. They had not only been reliable but had offered other services, too. He stopped at a house, knocked, and waited outside. Two men appeared, and he told them what he wanted and negotiated a price. He didn’t haggle. There was no time. In less than a month, they would be his enemy. The men left on foot, and Erich killed some time by driving around the streets. By then Monique would have received the message. She would feel safe, relieved. He eventually stopped the car.
He walked up the stairs casually and unlocked the door to his apartment. Monique was there, face flushed. She wore a dusky pink satin dress, as if she were about to go to dinner, and forced apart the lines between her eyes to smile. She was not pleased to see him. He knew that immediately.
“Erich!”
“You are surprised.”
“Of course! I just received a strange message that you had gone.”
“I had to come here first before I left Verona. I had to see Genevieve.” But it was not the only reason.
The curtains were closed at the back of the room. He walked through and opened them. The room had not changed, though there were medicines on the sides and washed bandages. There was also a smell of disinfectant and blood, but there was also something else: a faint leathered, earthy odor of men returned from battle. He had lived with that smell for years.
“Have you been hurt? Was Genevieve?”
She had followed him into the room. “Oh no, Frau Russo called by, and as she left she tripped and cut her foot on the edge of the radiator. I treated her, and she rested for a while.”
“It is a lot of medicine.”
She looked at him, put her hand to her throat, and shrugged. He left the room and surveyed the kitchen and dining area, the plates and cups. There was nothing remarkable to note, except for her dress and the fact she was wearing perfume.
“Is anything the matter?” she asked, the frown reappearing.
He took a deep breath. “Of course not. I just haven’t been here in a while.” He did not say that he had no plans to see it again. “Where is Genevieve?”
“In her room. I will get her.”
“No, I will go to her.”
He walked in and saw that she was sitting in the corner of her cot. She crawled across toward him, her tiny face exploding into a grin as she pulled herself up to stand. He felt the back of his throat thicken, and his heart beat unsteadily at the sight of her. He must not weaken, he told himself in order to do what he was about to.
“She has been walking,” Monique called out. “I have to watch her all the time now when she is out of her cot. It is a shame you weren’t here to see her first steps.”
He bent down and kissed her downy hair, while breathing in the sweetness of her. It wasn’t just Genevieve he was absorbing but the memories of his siblings. It was one reason to be away from her. He marched from the room.
“Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you.”
She fidgeted with her fingers and watched him uneasily, unable to meet his eye when he turned to stare.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked.
“Monique, it is becoming dangerous. I’m not sure if . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, to say that Germany was losing. “I will send word when I reach Germany, if I think you should leave here. It might be wise to take Genevieve to your grandmother’s soon. It might be safer there.”
He looked behind him as if there were something he hadn’t done, something that was still not right about the place. Had he missed anything? His senses said that he had. He looked at her, at her shoulders, at her crimson-colored lips. His beautiful wife, as she was referred to. But he could never see what others could. Her mouth was open slightly. She was breathing rapidly, perhaps a mixture of fear, of the unpredictability, and all he could do was feel relief that he was on the threshold of leaving.
“Goodbye, Monique,” he said, but he was thinking of the name Noelle that she had called herself. It suited her. He could have called her by that name to let her know she was exposed, but it would be a clear warning. She was intuitive and quick thinking and likely to find a way to protect herself from what he had planned.
At the bottom of the stairs he stopped to look up and down the empty street. Two men, the ones he had met with on his way here an hour earlier, waited just inside the entrance to the building.
He did not make eye contact with the men. He put on gloves to walk outside in the cold.
“Kill her,” he said, “but leave the child.” He did not know what would happen to Genevieve. It was a small regret that he wouldn’t see her again, that he was leaving her care to chance.
He had hired local men rather than ask members of the SS to arrest and then kill her. It was better not to have an official order or interrogation record that would link him to the embarrassment that was his wife. Better to eradicate the problem swiftly to make it look like a senseless murder of a lonely woman, who perhaps brought men into her apartment. The dress she was wearing would suggest it. Perhaps a jealous lover, some might say.
He did not think about how they would do it. He had hated the sight of blood since he was a child, but he had hidden this fact from the soldiers and SS that he worked alongside. It would be seen as a weakness. Perhaps it was a variation of the same weakness he had inherited from his father. Horst had not thought his son to be a soldier, as someone fit for battle. He hated his father for this, and for leaving him, for failing to fight also. And yet he loved him, too, for being right, for knowing his eldest son better than anyone.
He would eventually go to his mother and siblings. He was looking forward to speaking with his mother, who balanced the world around him. Who kept the floor beneath him solid.
Erich drove all night and most of the following day past broken train tracks, and houses and empty fields braced for devastation, guided by road maps and flashes of light in distant skies. He arrived the next day at a military base in Germany and requested a transfer to one of the units. The captains didn’t ask for his reasons, too haggard and uncaring to query his motives and desperate for reinforcement; any recruitment protocol had been forfeited by their heavy losses.
Erich slept briefly the second night on a cot alongside other men who had lost the desire to speak, who no longer noticed his badges of superiority, and he was woken early to climb on the next truck that would ferry him to the front. He was given a military pack recovered from someone dead, since no new ones had been issued recently, then was squashed between used and weary soldiers. As he neared the battalion’s base camp, the sky above him grew dark with battle dust, and streaks of fire lit up the horizon.
He was led to an area where officers rested between battles. He was so close he could feel the vibrations of heavy vehicles and ground fire, in smoke that smelled like melting iron and burning fat.
He asked after Georg and found him in a tent alone, frazzled, thin, and sunburned. He did not have the skin for the sun, but under the redness, the cuts, and the dirt, he was still dazzling. He had always been so unlike anyone else, so capable, and someone who looked to no one else for support. It was perhaps these qualities that Erich drew strength from, which he was attracted to. But there was a hardness about him then that Erich had not seen before. He was distant and seemingly indifferent to Erich’s sudden appearance.
Beside him on the floor were Georg’s medals for bravery, for valor. Erich felt a small resentment then; these were medals he did not have.
“Congratulations on your latest medal! I hear you have done extraordinary things . . . saved many of your men on the field.”
Georg said nothing. He was lying back on the bed with a cigarette in his mouth. There was a new confidence about him, or an old confidence like in the early days before that one time, in the river hut, when things changed for them forever. That one time Erich had tried to forget but couldn’t.
“I wanted to see you, make sure you are all right.”
“As you can see, I am,” he said, and drew back on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling, finding an anchor there that might hold him away from Erich’s gaze.
“Georg—”