Lost Kin by Steve Anderson

Author:Steve Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Max told his brother much of the worst of it. He had been a flameout in New York and a would-be comer in Nazi Germany. These were only the first two acts. He lost his love, the opera singer Liselotte Auermann, in a Hamburg air raid of 1941. He lost faith. He lost roles. The final act came in the fall of 1944, when the Wehrmacht called up English speakers for an assignment with unknowable prospects. As a drafted foot soldier, he was already under contract. He fit the part perfectly. He had no idea it involved a secret mission as part of the surprise Ardennes Offensive in which American-speaking German soldiers were to infiltrate the American lines. Worse yet, the Armed SS recruited him for the job. Max had no choice. So he would rewrite the role. Once behind the American lines, he would desert and go on the lam in France or end up a POW playing the forlorn, clueless Soldat. That would be his way out. He might even get back to America this way. He was that naive then.

He confessed all that he dared. The curtain was up and it was break-a-leg time. Harry had listened with his usual patience, his usual poker face. Harry was still his little brother, make no mistake, with the same broad, freckly cheekbones and those bangs wanting to curl, same neat dress and now those horn-rimmed glasses when it suited him. Max thought he’d seen hints of silver-gray in Harry’s sideburns. Overall, Harry had the look of the boyish yet competent officer who was too capable for the great career rise. Max knew a few of Harry’s breed in Nazi Germany. Shocked by the sticky, downright greasy ways the world really worked, they fought the corruption and cronyism, greed and incompetence at first and then, once grasping the overwhelming superiority of decadence and cynicism in sheer power and numbers and policies, found small but effective ways to undermine the dark machine. Leak a scandal to the press. Approve an exit visa. Divert funds to hospitals, rationing efforts. And yet Harry’s deeds revealed there was something more to him. He had hijacked a train like Robin Hood, it was said, and now here he was breaking steadfast MG regulations for a refugee girl’s word and a hunch of his own. Working together, he and his brother were about to give a wayward tribe a chance at salvation. This was the stuff of epics! Harry had the reasoning and deduction, confidence and bravado of men Max had only played on stage—had only seen on stage.

The sad part was that all men stumbled on the stage of real life. The world may offer epic stuff, but it rarely results in epic men. Life was tragedy without the plot.

Max didn’t tell Harry he saw him like this. He confessed to Harry about that first morning of the Ardennes Offensive, what Amis were calling the Battle of the Bulge. He, a fellow soldier named Felix

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