Way the Crow Flies (92 page)

O
NE MORNING,
Madeleine saw their pictures in the paper. Under the headline “Supreme Court Turns Down Bid for Appeal.” She was seventeen at the time. But Ricky was still fifteen, and Claire of course was nine.

She glimpsed the pictures when her father turned the page at the breakfast table, then they disappeared when he folded the paper. He took it to work with him. She knew he hadn’t wanted to leave it lying around. She got up from the table.

“You leaving already,
ma p’tite?”

“Yeah, I want to get to school early. I’m meeting Jocelyn.” Unnecessary lie, but harmless. Her first class that morning was a spare.

“Qu’est-ce que tu as
, Madeleine?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“You’re flushed, come till I feel your forehead.”

“I’m fine.”

She left, forgetting her lunch. She needed to go outside, where it was cool and normal. She didn’t need to read the article, the headline said it all. She didn’t want to read the fine print, to see again the words
child witnesses
. When her Man In Society teacher, Mr. Eagan, asked the class how many of them were familiar with the Richard Froelich case, Madeleine and two other students—one from Pakistan and one from Uganda—were the only ones who didn’t raise their hands. She drew cartoons in the back of her scribbler while the class discussed the possible miscarriage of justice.

After supper she asked her father, “Dad, do you think it really was an air force man Ricky saw in the car?” They were in the family room, watching the new colour TV. A nature show. He didn’t seem surprised by the question.

“If it was, you have to ask yourself why he didn’t come forward.”

“Why do you think?”

“Well, assuming Ricky wasn’t mistaken, I’d have to say that this air force type, whoever he was, must’ve been up to something fairly confidential.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged, eyes on the screen. “Government business?”

She stared at the lurid greens and shifting blues of the television.

“Do you think there really was a war criminal?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, getting up to adjust the colour.

“So you think Mr. Froelich was telling the truth?”

“Knowing Henry Froelich,” said Jack, “there’s no doubt in my mind.”

She started to ask another question, but they heard Mimi coming in through the garage door and Jack warned her with a look. They stopped talking and concentrated on the screen: an unspoiled tropical paradise—white sand, azure sea.

In the kitchen, Mimi began rattling around. Emptying the dishwasher, putting away groceries.

“He was in a camp,” said Madeleine quietly. On the screen, a sea turtle glided under water. “I saw his tattoo once.”

“Did you?” His profile was impassive.

“He must’ve been at Auschwitz.” She had studied the Holocaust in History. She never used the term “holocaust” at home, however, because her father objected to it:
the Second World War was about a whole lot more than that
. She watched the turtle sleeping on the ocean floor and heard her father say, “At first.” She looked at him, perplexed, but his gaze was on the TV and he kept it there as he spoke. “He was at a different place later.”

“Another camp?”

“This was no ordinary concentration camp.”

She waited.
You mean there’s such a thing as an “ordinary” concentration camp, doc?

“Dora,” he said.

“Who?”

On the TV, hundreds of baby turtles flailed across the beach toward the sea. Birds dropped down, leisurely, picking them off one by one as the narrator, in measured manly tones, asserted that “only a handful” would make it.

“Dora. Where the rockets were built.”

“What rockets?”

“Ever hear of guided missiles? Ever hear of Apollo?”

She heard the note of grim sarcasm, the one usually reserved for politicians, the school system and—before he left home—Mike. She wondered if her father was about to get angry again, the way he had at the moon landing last summer. His anger never frightened her, however. It gave her a pang in the pit of her stomach. Something was wrong. Someone should fix it for him.

In the kitchen, Mimi turned on the Cuisinart. It sounded like a jet engine.

Jack said, “Dora is where it all started.” Eyes fixed on the South Pacific. “Henry Froelich was there.”

She pictured Mr. Froelich in his white shirt, skinny tie and thick glasses, bearded and conspicuous in a row of clean-shaven scientists and engineers hunched over their computers at Mission Control, Texas.

“It was a concentration camp,” said Jack.

In Houston? Madeleine was beginning to feel as though she were a little stoned. A mother sea turtle began the near-futile task of digging a hole in the sand with her flippers. “Where was Dora?”

“It was in a mountain cave.” His voice changed again. It took on the dreamy quality she recognized from childhood, his once-upon-a-time tone. “During the war,”
a long time ago
, “in what would later become East Germany,”
in a country that no longer exists
, “Hitler’s secret weapon,”
there was a treasure
, “built by slave labour”
they toiled out of sight of sun or moon…
.

The sea turtle excreted her eggs into the sandpit, hundreds of them. Buried them. And split.

“The V-2 rocket,” said Jack. “V for Vengeance.”

“… and the cycle of nature continues,” said the narrator. She recognized the voice. Lorne Greene. Pa from
Bonanza
. She turned to her father again, but he was focused on the screen, features etched in concentration, he could have been watching the President,
Good evening my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba…
. The surface of the sandy nest stirred. Cut to predators
wheeling above. Cut back to sand, where a tiny ancient leather face breached its shell.

Mimi called from the kitchen, “Madeleine, I need your help.”

“I don’t suppose they’ve taught you who Wernher von Braun is at that high school of yours,” said her father, his shoulder twitching.

“The NASA guy.”

“That’s right. Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, father of the Saturn rockets that went to the moon.” Model for Donald Duck’s uncle, Professor Von Drake—but Madeleine kept mum. “Von Braun and his colleagues ran Dora during the war. Before it went underground, it was called Peenemünde.”

Pain Amunda
. “Uncle Simon was there—I mean he bombed it.”

Jack looked at her. “That’s right.”

“Whatever happened to him?”

“Haven’t a clue.” He turned back to the screen. “Here’s something I don’t expect you to have learned about in school: there was a government program a few years back, in the States. The British were involved as well. So were the Canadians … to a degree. Still happening, for all we know.”

“What was it?”

“Project Paperclip.”

She waited but he was silent. A commercial came on. “What did they do?” she asked.

“They got us to the moon.”

On TV, the Man from Glad bagged a housewife’s leaky garbage.

“How?”

“By importing German scientists after the war. Nazis, some of them.”

“Was von Braun a Nazi?”

“Darn tootin’. So was Rudolph.”

“Who?”

Rudolph, Donald Duck, Apollo … like something out of
Mad Magazine
. But he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t even using his man-to-man voice, he sounded different. Constricted. The aural equivalent of looking through a telescope from the wrong end. “That must’ve been illegal.” She knew that much from school, despite what her father liked to call the Mickey Mouse curriculum.

“It sure was, and it’s still classified,” he said. “So not a word.”

“Madeleine.” Maman was in the doorway with her yellow rubber gloves on.

“How do you know about it?” she asked her father.

He winked, and sounded like himself again. “You better go help your mother.”

Madeleine was graduating high school in three weeks. In three weeks her life would begin. She slouched into the kitchen. Behind her she heard the TV switch off and the patio doors slide open. A short time later, she and her mother heard the roar of the old lawn-mower, and as they chopped rhubarb and peeled apples for the church bazaar they saw him through the window, crossing at intervals back and forth, closing in on a shrinking border of longer green around the swimming pool.

She felt sorry for her father. Trapped in a suburb. With a wife incapable of discussing the subject that fascinated him most. She looked at her mother, pricking the pie crust with a fork before sliding it into the oven. Mimi could not tolerate even the mention of the name Froelich.

“My mother’s way of dealing with difficult subjects was to bury them.”

Nina asks, “How did your father react when you came out?”

“Oh, he was—he wasn’t nearly as bad as Maman—my mother. He always asks how Christine is—unless my mother’s in the room, because she’ll throw a fit—”

“What does that look like?”

“Oh, oh it’s all pointy and shrill and hysterical. My dad, on the other hand, takes us for lunch when he comes to Toronto.”

“How does your mother feel about that?”

“We don’t tell her.”

“You keep it secret?”

“Not a secret, we just don’t … well, yes, okay.”

“Whose idea is that?”

“It’s not an idea, we just don’t want to deal with her freak-out.”

Madeleine recalls strolling back to her father’s hotel with him after that first visit: “How do you think Maman might feel if she knew the three of us had had lunch?” he asked.

“She’d freak.”

He smiled. “You know, when I met your mother she wasn’t much younger than you are now. Full of beans. Real little spitfire, like you. She’s never been afraid of anything. I’ve been afraid of plenty, but she … would’ve made a good officer. She’s been through a lot, your mother.” Eyes on the sky, compressing his lips. “She’s a real lady.”

She felt suddenly ashamed—sad and full of guilty love for Maman.

“Her feelings might be hurt,” she said.

Dad nodded and made his mild wincing expression. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I won’t mention it if you don’t.”

He smiled and winked at her. Pilot to co-pilot.

“So it was your father’s idea,” says Nina.

“He’s the one who has to live with her. At least he supports my relationship.”

Nina is silent.

“What?”

“So you knew Richard Froelich.”

Madeleine nods.

“Did you know the child who was murdered?”

Madeleine shrugs. “Kind of.”

Nina waits.

Madeleine is silent.

Nina asks, “Did your father do intelligence work?”

Madeleine almost laughs. “He’s a management consultant.”

“How did he know about Project Paperclip?”

“I don’t know, he … reads a lot. Well, he reads newspapers. And
Time
. And
The Economist…
.” She can almost feel the lightbulb over her head when she says, “Uncle Simon.”

“His brother?”

She shakes her head. “His old flying instructor. This glamorous David Niven kind of guy, you know? British—the ascot, moustache, the whole bit. He offered to train me as a spy.” She hits the arm of the swivel chair in delight. “Any bets he was an intelligence type!”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead.”

They sit silent for a few moments. Then Madeleine asks, “Have you ever heard of Dora?”

“No.”

“What were you thinking just now?”

“Oh, just that it’s an odd name.”

“The Nazis liked to give pretty names to horrible places.”

“Yes, but Dora was also the name of a patient of Freud’s.”

Christine has told Madeleine this story. Dora was a famous “hysteric.” She told Freud that her father had interfered with her sexually, and Freud believed her at first. Then he started hearing so many rape and abuse stories from so many women that he decided they were all deluded.

“Your father believed Henry Froelich.”

“Yeah. He was about the only one who did.” Madeleine looks at the ceiling, compressing her lips. “My dad is like that. Loyal.”

W
HAT HAPPENED
in a cave long ago. What happened in a classroom. What happened at a crossroads, in a meadow, on a bridge.

When the Piper was not paid, he treated the children as he had the rats. Led them away. They disappeared into a mountain. All but one who was lame. What was in the mountain?

They never found Henry Froelich’s body. Jack never heard from Simon again. He never heard of Oskar Fried again. All the children disappeared into adults, all but one who returned to the earth and remained there. Forever young.

The cave called Dora remained part of East Germany, borders shifting around it. The Berlin Wall began to crumble from within. One side could no longer afford the arms race and, like a homeowner taking the precaution of opening windows before a hurricane, parted the Iron Curtain and called it glasnost. The wind reawakened a babel of nations, and they wanted borders that followed bloodlines.

Oil crises, hijackings and environmental disasters. “Terrorism” arose to rival “Cold War,” and “covert action” entered common parlance. Security required secrecy, and so did its crimes, but all was worth it if we managed to avoid “the big one.” As it turned out, the small ones were very profitable, waged by “freedom fighters” or “terrorists,” depending on who had last sold them arms. The trick was to spread the weapons and the cash around in such a way as to keep the Third World, the Arab world, all the “other” worlds, at each others’ throats. The West was winning.

Rockets bred anti-ballistic missiles and spawned dreams of Star Wars—safety nets in the sky, life imitating entertainment to lull the prosperous into forgetting about the danger lurking in human hearts; the same anger that triggered a holocaust in 1914 with a
simple assassin’s bullet, its trajectory traceable through a century. Fanaticizing anger. Anger that requires no bullets. Anger that consumes empires.

Still the cave waited. Gaping, sore and empty. As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People’s dads.

These were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they roll like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave.

It takes a village to kill a child.