The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

‘‘And Sarah can’t take care of herself?’’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘‘Or else you may be aware—even as virginal as you are—that these things have now and again been handled successfully with the help of what has come to be called marriage.’’

‘‘Don’t be sarcastic, Daddy.’’ She was crying. So he softened and let up on her.

‘‘I’m sorry, sweetheart; but I’m upset too. I just don’t want the kid I love to throw away her education so she can mother a knocked-up little girl. And besides, what about the father?’’

‘‘He’s in China,’’ she said, holding in her sobs.

‘‘China? Who does little Sarah know in China?’?

? Then he remembered. ‘‘Oh my God! My God, do you mean it happened at The Lodge when you were all down there in the spring?’’ Ann nodded. ‘‘Canidy!’’ he blared. ‘‘Christ!’’

‘‘Wrong,’’ Ann said. ‘‘It was Cousin Eddie.’’

‘‘Ed? You’re kidding.’’

‘‘It was Cousin Eddie, Dad, but if you tell anyone, I’ll never forgive you. I gave her my word, and you’re the only other person who knows.’’

Brandon Chambers shook his massive head and exhaled audibly. She was going to win this one, he knew. He might as well accept the inevitability of it. Ann was going to Memphis to take care of the little girl. So that was that.

‘‘And what has Ed got to say?’’

‘‘Eddie doesn’t know,’’ Ann said. ‘‘She won’t tell him, and she made me give my word that I wouldn’t tell him either.’’

‘‘Why not?’’

‘‘She said because she believes what happened is her fault, not his—’’

‘‘It takes two,’’ he flared up, but only halfheartedly.

‘‘But what I think it is is that she’s a Jew.’’

‘‘That wouldn’t make a difference to Ed,’’ her father said.

‘‘Wouldn’t it?’’ Ann asked her father. ‘‘Would you bet big money on that, Daddy? What would Aunt Helen think?’’

‘‘What are we going to tell your mother?’’ he asked.

‘‘That Sarah’s pregnant, and that’s all,’’ Ann said.

Berlin, Germany November 10, 1941

Helmut Maximilian Ernst von Heurten-Mitnitz liked America. He’d graduated from Harvard in 1927 and, in the footsteps of four generations of Heurten-Mitnitz younger sons, had joined the Foreign Service to end up at the German embassy in Washington. Two years later he served as consul general in New Orleans and he remembered that city with particular fondness. He thought often of Kolb’s, a German restaurant just off Canal Street, where he was treated with exceptional warmth and good food. And in two Mardi Gras parades, dressed in a fantastic costume, he’d ridden a float and thrown candy and glass beads at the hordes of people jamming the narrow streets of the French Quarter.

On his return to Berlin in 1938, Max discovered that his older brother, Karl-Friedrich, had lent the National Socialist German Workers’ party the prestige of the von Heurten-Mitnitz name and a great deal of money. Privately both Max and Karl-Friedrich detested most of the upper-echelon Nazis, but there was no question that the Nazi party had saved Germany from the fate of Russia. And it was inarguable that life was better under Nazi rule than it had been before.

But Max did not want to fight the Nazis’ wars. He had his foreign-service exemption, but his brother’s loans had made their family highly visible. Someone was only too likely to see in him a fine officer with a bright destiny on the eastern front. He needed some important assignment in which he could further his career and at the same time remove himself from the doom that would befall him if he stayed where he was. He needed to get out of Berlin.

Johann Müller was one of the original hundred thousand members of the National Socialist German Workers’ party, and he was thus entitled to wear the golden party pin. He had joined the infant Nazi party because he had realized very early on how useful membership was going to be to a policeman. Müller never believed for an instant that the party, or for that matter Adolf Hitler, was the salvation of Germany. There had been policemen under the Kaiser and under the Weimar Republic, and there would be policemen under whatever replaced the Thousand Year Reich.

Müller had been a Kreis Marburg Wachtmann for two years when he learned that Hermann Göring, as police president of Prussia, was quietly building a secret police force. Müller applied and was appointed to the Prussian state police as a Kriminalinspektor, grade three. He arrived in Berlin immediately after Hitler, as boss of what would soon be the Gestapo, had Göring out and replaced him with the rather more trustworthy Heinrich Himmler.

Although Himmler immediately retired most of the people Göring had brought in, Müller stayed. He hadn’t been with the state police long enough to be corrupted. Besides, a policeman who wore a gold party pin and who had risen from the ranks in rural Hesse was really the sort of man they were looking for. Himmler needed ordinary policemen to handle ordinary crimes.

When the war came, though he remained a policeman, Müller was ordered into uniform. Some of his duties, however, still required ordinary clothes. Without any particular plan, Johann Müller had come to be a specialist in crimes— from embezzlement to currency violations to vice—committed by military officers, senior and influential government employees, and party officials. Müller became the man in Berlin who decided whether or not a case was made. Sometimes he ordered detention or arrest; other times, he merely threatened these—to see what would happen. Other times he decided the charges ‘‘had no basis in fact.’’

And still other times, of course, he kept people under his thumb, either for use as informers, or in positions where they might do him some good, while he made up his mind what to do with them.

His own specialty was the investigation of payoffs and kickbacks, which meant digging up money people had spent considerable time and imagination burying. He was good at it.