The Longest Echo: A Novel by Eoin Dempsey

Author:Eoin Dempsey [Dempsey, Eoin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2021-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

CHAPTER 12

September 1956—New York City

James let his fingers dance across the keys, paying attention not so much to the words he was typing but to the feelings. This wasn’t poetry, but without any emotional resonance, what was his writing worth? He wasn’t in the business of laying out technical manuals. He scanned his desk, his eyes falling on the framed picture of him and the chief on the fishing trip in ’40, holding up the trout. He stood, letting his fingers fall away. He glanced at the page, his eyes falling on the words “Nazi” and “conditioning”—and “Monte Sole.”

The setting sun cast swathes of gold over the city like some great loom. It reminded him of Mexico City; memories of Susana tumbled into his mind. He wondered what she was doing. It was five thirty there. She was probably shopping with her friends, or having cocktails with her new husband, or tending to their new baby. The sound of Harry Bailey’s typewriter jarred him back into the moment, and he returned to his seat.

History is not past, but merely an extension of the present, to which all people are tied.

He took a deep breath and began to type again.

How? That is the question that we all should be asking. How could the most civilized, modern, culturally advanced society in Europe do what Germany did? We all consider ourselves civilized. We eat with knives and forks and walk upright. We might go to the theater or listen to the works of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, or Bach. We might read what are known as the “great” novels or perhaps just the newspaper. We teach our children good manners, not to hit, to share their toys. Is this what makes us civilized?

Werner Brack was ostensibly the picture of civility. The son of a composer, he was taught music from an early age—by the age of six he could read music and play the violin and the piano. He was known as a bright, talented, and cultured boy, and he flourished in the Vienna preparatory school his parents enrolled him in. He went to the University of Vienna, studying business, unsullied by the horrors of the Great War due to his age. Werner left university in 1932, graduating top of his class. He took a job in a local bank and was set to join the upper echelons of Vienna society, a business leader and patron of the arts. But then something happened. A change. Werner Brack joined the Nazi party in 1934 and, after Nazi Germany gobbled up Austria, moved to Munich to join the SS. He met and married Ingrid, the daughter of a local grocer who wore shiny Nazi pins on his coat as he served his customers. When the war that Hitler had set his state up to wage inevitably came to pass, Brack was among those who swept aside the Allied forces in Belgium and France. He was sent to the Russian front and took control of a new elite unit.

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