it scares the hell out of me. So, I think I have to go where I’m needed. Besides,” he said with a wry smile, “unlike you, I don’t have a family to raise. I can afford to be altruistic.”
The log Rory had been poking suddenly collapsed in a crash of sparks and crackling. “The fire’s dying and I suppose it’s time to go to bed; my plane’ll be back first thing tomorrow.”
Rory was up long before the others. He made himself a mug of tea and went outside. The wind was rising and low clouds were driving in from the north. He put his mug on a rock, stretched his arms above his head, and twisted to the left and to the right, slowly stretching the muscles in his back as he looked out over the lake. He was surprised that the socket of his right eye felt so good. Normally, the lingering effects of a short night’s sleep and the smoke from last evening’s fire would have left his eye feeling irritated. His glass eye and the missing fingers on his left hand had been a constant reminder that he was a survivor of the cauldron that was the Western Front. Now, with the passage of time, his disfigurement served more as a reminder to be grateful for each day instead of a stimulus for the intermittent anger he had endured for so many years after the war.
Far off, out in the middle of the lake, whitecaps were forming. Rory walked down to the community’s small dock, made from rough planks and a log-and-rock crib. The wind was cold. As the sky in the east brightened and the waves lapped along the shoreline, he watched a large flock of geese rise and circle and then shake into their V formation before flying low out from the reeds at the end of the bay. There must have been a hundred of them. They were honking and calling out to each other as they winged their way southward. Staying far out from the settlement, they passed the cabins at the lake’s narrows – well beyond shotgun range. They were smart birds, no doubt about it. And their calls, whatever it was they said to each other, made for a lonely song. Nothing epitomized the sound of the north woods in autumn like the distant call of Canada geese on the wing. At the same time, Rory thought, they were an odd sort of bird. They lived in flocks, but it wasn’t unusual for several to join another flock if they couldn’t keep up, or if in their perpetual honking at one another they had some kind of falling out. In flight, they regularly rotated their leaders throughout their journey of thousands of miles in their aerodynamically efficient wedge. And unlike most birds, the big grey, brown, and tan geese mated for life. If one mate was killed on the migration, the other stayed in the vicinity until the days grew so short and the wind so cold that it absolutely had to go. Up here amongst these lakes, Rory had often seen grief-stricken Canada geese lingering around for weeks after their mates had been killed. The survivor would be there, out on the water or strutting up and down a rocky headland, day after day, alone, and always out of shooting distance; and then one day it would be gone. Rory didn’t need the food and had stopped hunting geese a long time ago.
Above the wind and the cries of the geese, Rory thought he could hear the faint drone of a floatplane. It was time to get his things and say his goodbyes.
2
“REINHOLD, HURRY UP or you’ll be late. Everyone has to be seated at least forty-five minutes before the Führer arrives and we can’t leave the taxi waiting.”
Reinhold Neumann smiled. Maida, always such a worrying little hen. Hadn’t he managed to become Austria’s youngest Major in the Schutzpolizei? Now he was well on his way to becoming the youngest Oberstleutnant in Greater Germany’s newly integrated Geheime Staatspolizei – more fearsomely known by their acronym, the Gestapo. Not to worry, he’d get them to the investiture on time. That wasn’t anything to fret about. His rise in the Reich’s police ranks wasn’t going to be slowed down by something as stupid as being late for the most important ceremony in the history of the Austrian police. Neumann thought that Maida, as pretty as she was, should stick to her three primary worries: their boy, Klaus; their baby daughter, Monika; and of course, anything to do with fashion.
Neumann adjusted the swastika on his pocket and smoothed his grey tunic in the mirror. He looked good: wavy, thick brown hair, a healthy complexion, and an aggressively downturned mouth. At twenty-six years old, he was eagle-eyed, fit, and ruthlessly efficient looking. He turned his head to catch the light. Not bad. Today he conveyed the precise sense of authority and vigour that such an occasion demanded.
In the last three years his situation had improved more than he could have imagined. Who would have thought? But then, his career path hadn’t happened by accident. He had made the right moves. Marrying Maida, the daughter of one of Vienna’s deputy chiefs of police, had given him legitimacy and status in some people’s eyes. He was well aware that a poor boy from a small walk-up flat on the seventh floor of a tenement in Vienna’s Simmering District would ordinarily have taken decades, and a lot of good luck, to attain that kind of social position. He never let on to anyone that Maida’s family didn’t like him; and although he never told Maida, the sense of hauteur her family exuded when he was around left him resentful and angry.
A year after marrying Maida, he’d boosted his career once again by joining the Austrian National Socialist Party, even though at the time it wasn’t something most people would have described as a clever move likely to result in promotion. Most of Maida’s family were quite cool with him after he became a National Socialist; and while he didn’t know it then, there were a few senior officers who tried to have him and his fellow Nazis run out of the police force. Happily, those days – and those officers – were long gone. Three years ago he had been a struggling police cadet walking a beat in a Viennese slum. His good judgment was paying off faster than he could have imagined. In 1936 he’d joined the party, a frustrated young man looking for a means of venting both his energy and his anger at the world. It had been the right thing to do. He’d shown courage and insight. He certainly had a knack for predicting how things would work out, and he knew it.
Neumann had always been inspired by the Nazi talk of a “Greater Germany.” For him, it was inevitable; anyone could see that. If you believed in the survival of the fittest and the strengthening of species, then it was quite obvious that the German race, led by the Nazi Party, was destined to dominate inferior races. Sure, the party had more than its share of windbags, and it carried a certain amount of dead weight; but Neumann was certain that would change in a few years.
In a curious way, Reinhold Neumann had always felt at home in the party. It gave him a sense of solidarity and purpose; more than that, there was something about the concept of national destiny and racial hierarchy that appealed to him in a strange way. He thought it was the same sense of direction some people found in their faith, although even as far back as his first year in secondary school he had regarded the religiously devout as psychological weaklings. Religion was for those who needed something external to prop them up. National Socialism was for those unafraid to take responsibility for the future into their own hands. But there was more to it than that. The party, under the Führer’s leadership, brought a sense of order; it stood for things you could understand and see. The party knew what had to be done. In a few years it had returned Germany and the German people to a position of strength and respect. It had united Germany and Austria, and was in the process of bringing back all German peoples into a single and mightier Greater Germany. Who could argue with that?
In forging a new national consciousness, the party had unequivocally identified the nation’s enemies, the people who sucked the life blood out of the nation: Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, capitalists, and farther down the scale, weak-kneed church leaders, the pseudo-intellectuals, and the liberal artists. It was a good, comprehensive list; it explained what was wrong with society and it provided an indication as to where action was required to fix things.
Now, this afternoon, he was off to attend Austrian Chancellor Seys Inquart’s reception for the Führer. Only a very few other police officers, and no others of his rank, had been accorded that honour; but then, none of the others had been in the party as long as he had.
Downstairs, Maida cast an appraising eye over him and coquettishly brushed imaginary fluff
