Collected Fiction (Jerry eBooks) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch [Rusch, Kristine Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2015-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

SHOW TRIAL

Later he poured over old newspapers, Life and Time magazines, and the newsreel footage kept by the War Department, looking for her, even though someone told him she couldn’t be photographed. Still, he thought he saw her in at least two of the attempted Hitler assassination sites—as part of the 1939 crowd in the Munich Burgerbraukeller, and bringing coffee to the men at the 1944 Wolf’s Lair meeting. Sometimes he saw a swirl of light, and thought he caught a glimpse of her inside it—just a bit of black hair, a touch of skirt.

He told them to watch out for her in Nuremberg for the remaining trials, but of course, she never appeared there again.

She should never have appeared there at all.

***

He first met her in Paris, August, 1945. He had no way to describe how he felt then. “World-weary” was too weak a term, “depressed” too passive, and “defeated” put him on the wrong side. From the outside, he looked the same as he always had: Lieutenant Robert Parker in full dress uniform, square shoulders, square jawed, handsome in an All-American sort of way.

When he enlisted, his mother had brushed off those shoulders, tears in her eyes, saying, You look so grown-up, forgetting that he had already grown-up—a full-fledged college professor with a newly minted PhD. Twenty-seven years old, unmarried to his mother’s chagrin, oldest of seven children—five of them boys. He looked so grown-up then, and he had felt so grown-up, but he hadn’t known grown-up.

Some people never knew grown-up. They went through life doing what they were supposed to, getting married, raising children, contributing to their communities. They never shot at anyone at close range, had a friend bleed out beneath their helpless hands, or march into hell to save hundreds of skeletons standing next to piles of stinking corpses.

Some people never understood the dark side of life, and he wasn’t going to teach them. But he wasn’t sure how he would return to the lighter side or if he even could. Laughing surprised him and, oddly, Paris offended him.

It was so perfect—still the city he had seen in college. Sure, some windows were shattered, stoops broken, signs missing or torn down. The population was thinner, the clothing styles similar to the ones he’d seen nearly a decade before. But the city itself had no rubble, no stray dogs digging up rotted limbs from bomb craters, no children playing in the remains of houses. Even the food seemed good compared with the rest of Europe, although he really wasn’t one to judge. He’d been in Germany since January, and Germany was one gigantic bomb crater.

As it should be.

He didn’t want Paris to be destroyed. He had loved the city, back when he had been the kind of man who could love something. But he felt that Paris should have paid a price for her collaboration, for all the people it had sent to the camps, people whom he had seen either standing listlessly near a gate or stacked like cordwood outside so-called barracks.

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