Gretchen and John sat on the wall of the footbridge, their feet dangling over the Charles River. It was late, and the night was quiet, with only the distant hum of the city breaking the silence. Gretchen wasn’t worried about crime or perverts, but she shivered slightly in the cold. They’d walked for a while, searching for a place to talk privately, and this deserted spot offered the fresh air she craved, after being cooped up inside—and the breather he did, after another day with Moritz.
“Mom made me become a strudel, the afternoon we discovered Constance.” Gretchen wrinkled her nose, recalling the stench that’d permeated the air, coating the insides of her nostrils like oil. It’d been hot. “I’m glad I made Fritz come, although I hate strudel even more now.”
“Become?” John knit his brows together, confused. “I think you mean bring.”
She scowled, her frustration mounting. “What?”
“Become means to turn into something,” he explained gently.
“Oh.” It sounded just like bekommen, to bring. English made no sense, and she hated how it always tripped her up.
Touching her nose, John grinned. “You’d make a cute strudel.”
Gretchen managed a tight smile, though her thoughts were far from cute. She could still see Constance’s lifeless form, skin bloated and mottled, her eyes sunken and crawling with flies. The sight had seared itself into her memory, a grotesque tableau of death. “You are mocking me,” she accused, crossing her arms tightly across her chest. She also hated feeling vulnerable, especially in front of this soldier who could do anything—including master German with ease, while she still struggled to share even basic thoughts in English.
“Only a little.” Producing some cigarettes, he stuck one casually into his mouth. “Your English is getting pretty good,” he assured her, flicking his lighter open with a practiced motion and cupping the flame against the wind. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Smoking is forbidden on the street!” Gretchen hissed, glancing around nervously.
“And in the barracks,” John agreed affably, taking a drag. “But rules are made to be broken, right?”
He shouldn’t be so calm, but then again he always was. “Don’t let an officer catch you,” she advised. “Especially Moritz.” She’d heard stories about how he punished his men, none of them good.
Exhaling a cloud of smoke, John’s expression turned thoughtful. “Smoking’s not the worst of it. Saying grace, man, that’s a bad idea. Moritz doesn’t really care, rumor is he’s some kind of Christian himself, but Dassel? As far as he’s concerned, you might as well whip it out in front of your grandmother and start tugging. I’m a Methodist, so whatever, but it’s worse for the Mormons and Catholics and everyone else who takes this stuff seriously.”
“Mein Gott im Himmel!” she exclaimed, eyes widening in shock.
And what was a Mormon?
John flicked ash over the balustrade, his chuckle carrying more resignation than amusement. “Dassel’s got a real hard-on for Catholics.”
“No one cared,” she queried, tilting her head, “when you were American?”
He grunted, his shoulders tensing slightly. “No one cared about a goddamn thing. Then again, why would they? It’s not like we were allowed to do anything. We were glorified Boy Scouts, with worse tents.” His fingers drummed a restless rhythm on the stone wall.
Gretchen didn’t know what a Boy Scout was, either. “Why did you do it?”
He turned to her, his expression difficult to interpret. “Put on the enemy’s uniform, you mean?”
It wasn’t exactly a suave question to ask, but she nodded.
She liked John, she did—even with his clothes on. He was different, intriguing, and undeniably brave. But this was a mystery she couldn’t wrap her head around: how could John have joined the Dark Side? He’d abandoned more than his politics; he’d turned his back on his family, his country, and on the values both had raised him to cherish. Was it disillusionment, desperation, or something else entirely? Her curiosity burned, needing to know what could drive a person to make such a monumental decision, no matter how badly she offended him.
But he didn’t clench his fists or flare his nostrils like a horse, or do any of the things her mother did when someone tapped her hard shell. Instead, he rubbed the back of his neck and contemplated the night. “I can’t think of an answer, darling, that wouldn’t sound stupid.”
“The truth is never stupid,” she replied quietly.
“Sure it is,” he remarked, with a hint of humor. “I can tell you a story, though.”
She liked when he talked about himself. “Alright.”
“I was in North Dakota,” he began slowly. “This was over the winter, last winter. I’d gotten separated from the rest of my squad and I was freezing. By which, I mean I was about to die. This was right before I got captured and, if I hadn’t, I’d be dead.” He flicked the butt of his cigarette out into space. “Anyway, I saw this bus. Thank God, I thought, the cavalry has arrived!”
“More Americans?” she prompted, wondering where this was going.
“I thought so.” His tone was detached, almost hollow. He left the statement hanging in the air, then came back to himself with a start. “Well, I’m slogging through this snow toward them, and I realize something: there’s no exhaust coming from the tailpipe, and no movement inside. So now I’m getting worried.” Taking out his Zippo again, he turned it over in his hands. “I finally reach the door and force it open, and what do I see? Two dozen of my fellow Americans, upright in their seats and frozen solid with their eyes still staring straight ahead.”
She gaped at him. “They—all dead?”
He turned his head, his eyes meeting hers, a haunted look in his gaze. “You don’t understand what it’s like until you’re in it. The cold. I thought I did. I mean, I’m from Minnesota and our idea of spring is unzipping your parka. But this was no hunting trip, where you could take a break if you needed to, and our gear was crap. I don’t know what idiot designed it, but everything conducted the cold and I mean everything. Guys were losing their hands, their feet, but nothing was as bad as the helmets.” He lit another cigarette, his hands trembling slightly. “I had two guys drop dead on me because their cerebral fluids froze.”
“Their brains?” Gretchen whispered.
“Their brains,” he confirmed. He returned his gaze to the river, his expression distant. “Us mountain boys were miserable but the southerners, oh man. They might as well have worn their skivvies.”
Skivvies, Gretchen knew, meant underpants.
“Then, the next minute, they’d be on top of us. The Heer,” John clarified. “We’d exchange fire, and the heat from the guns got so bad that guys were tearing off their coats and sometimes more.” He fell silent for a beat, lost somewhere in America’s arctic north. “It sounds crazy, and it was, but we felt like we were drowning in our own sweat.”
Gretchen had overheard Klaus talking about how battle was hot, but she hadn’t pictured what he meant. “Then they froze, too?”
John’s nod was oddly nonchalant. “Into popsicles.”
She clutched at her scarf. “That’s terrible!”
Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his thighs, staring at the black ribbon moving sluggishly below. “The morning of the bus incident,” he continued eventually, “I’d called a retreat. We’d been trudging along down the I-35, when these maniacs just fell on us. Sticking around in that, I might as well have fed the whole platoon into a meat grinder.” He shook his head slowly, his voice tinged with a mixture of bitterness and awe. “Then it started snowing again, and the next thing I knew, I was lost in a world of white. I couldn’t see or hear a damned thing out there.”
Gretchen touched his shoulder gently, a silent offer of comfort.
“Captain Abbot told me, told all of us, that they’d shoot us if we surrendered. This was right before he vamoosed.” John’s lips curled into a cynical smile. “By the time I found the other survivors, it was getting dark. We were deciding what to do when these shadows emerged from the woods. I recognized their uniforms, we’d found the SS. Or, I guess, they’d found us. I figured I was done for, but….” He shrugged, as though bewildered by his own survival.
Gretchen had heard the stories about the SS, although she suspected that most were exaggerations. Her father, after all, had been the same rank as Klaus and also in the SD, and he was as intimidating as a coconut. “You were treated well,” she questioned, her voice soft, “after being captured?”
John made a noncommittal noise. “They weren’t pleasant, but they weren’t cruel. They marched us to some camp near Minot and, after that, some smiling jackass interrogated me. He didn’t get physical, though, just lied a lot.”
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“Lied?” Gretchen repeated. “About what?”
“They give you these official-looking forms,” he shared, waving his hand dismissively. “With the Red Cross seal on them and everything, only their version requests more information than you’re required to give. About your CO, where you’re from, things like that.” He pressed his lips together, forming a flat line. “I just wrote my name, rank, and serial number.”
Unlike some other people, John was smart.
“A few days later,” he concluded, “they moved me on to Oregon.”
“Oregon is….” She tried to remember. “In the South?”
“The Pacific Northwest,” He corrected her absently. “They told us to settle in when we arrived, that we’d be enjoying the Luftwaffe’s hospitality through the end of the war. I expected it to be a nightmare, but the worst thing we faced was boredom. There’s only so much poker a guy can play, you know?” He leaned back, running his hand through his hair. “So I’d find myself watching, not the guards but an SS detachment that was stationed nearby. These were the same guys who’d dogged us across the plains, riding around on their motorcycles and using a lot of other equipment that actually worked. I’d think to myself, this is the future.”
Gretchen listened intently. She thought she understood most of what John was saying but, even if she didn’t, the sound of his voice was soothing. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him, enjoying the warmth and comfort. “We can’t compete,” he added after a long minute, his voice heavy with despondency. “Mostly because we don’t really want to. Moreover, at this point, how could we? We’d need decades to catch up. While I was hip-deep in snow, under the command of a man who thought that getting a four-year degree in English literature made him a tactical genius, the Reich was threatening to nuke the White House.”
Gretchen didn’t know what nuke meant, but didn’t want to interrupt.
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we dislike.” John plucked at his uniform, a rueful smile twisting his lips. “Oscar Wilde said that, speaking of useless knowledge. But anyway, the SS was in and out of the camp all the time. Not one man so much as acknowledged our existence, however, until some officer came around and gave us a speech about how great it’d be to join up. He focused on the pay and benefits, like this was a normal job. And you know what? I hadn’t been paid in months and I guess….” He trailed off, his gaze contemplative. “We adapt to survive, don’t we? You start appreciating things differently when your stomach’s empty and home’s a place you know in your heart you’ll never see again.”
“The SS stopped being the enemy,” Gretchen summarized.
“He told us we’d get better training, too.” A sigh escaped him, a soft echo of despair at how the world had changed—or maybe at how he’d grasped it, at long last, for what it truly was. “We wouldn’t start out at our own current ranks, our training was too crap, but we could make them back.”
Gretchen arched an eyebrow. “Soldiers are well taken care of, even in the Heer.”
“We weren’t,” John countered, his tone grim. “Uncle Sam forgot about us, right around Labor Day.”
Who, she wondered, was Uncle Sam?
“Advancement was purely merit-based, and our origins wouldn’t be an issue. Which also sounded good,” John admitted. Then his jaw tightened, his expression hardening. His voice remained quiet, but an undercurrent of suppressed rage simmered beneath the surface. “I wanted the fact that I wasn’t an idiot to mean something, you know? And I was sick of watching my friends die for a country that didn’t care about any of us.”
“I don’t blame you,” she murmured softly.
He scoffed, the sound bleak and raw. “The other guys sure did.”
“Other people aren’t your problem.” Advice that she herself should take. She hesitated a beat. “Where are they now?”
“Probably still playing poker in Oregon.” He looked down at her, his eyes dark with lingering resentment. “The camp wasn’t so bad, really. Unless the guards found out you were a Jew, or some kind of communist. Then you went somewhere else. I didn’t love that,” he confessed, “but I’d learned to keep my head down already and not make waves.”
“I’ve heard the….” She searched for the word.
“Rumors, about what happens in those places?” His voice caught in his throat, and he averted his gaze. “They’re true.”
She squeezed his hand, feeling the roughness of his skin, a tangible reminder of everything he’d endured. His hands told a story of their own—calloused from years of farm work, scarred from battles fought in frozen wastelands. They were hands that’d known hardship, resilience, and survival. Her own hands were soft, came the unbidden thought, not seamed with paint like Charlotte’s or bearing the scars of sewing accidents like Zelda’s…or powder burns, like Constance’s.
Even so, John squeezed hers back, his grip firm yet gentle. They sat in silence, the weight of their shared understanding hanging between them. Then he took a deep breath, the tension in his shoulders easing just the tiniest bit. “That training, though, sweet Lord Jesus!” His voice regained its usual nonchalant tone, but his eyes still held a hint of the storm within. “I thought I was tough before, and I was wrong. First of all, the NCOs and officers are all German and they don’t care if you speak one goddamn word. Not that it was so hard, figuring out what they wanted, it was always some variation on shut up and bleed.”
Gretchen giggled, her mirth lightening the heavy atmosphere.
John’s eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. “You think I’m joking! I was what my new sergeant called veal.”
“Veal?” She blinked, genuinely puzzled. “As in a…cow infant?”
“As in soft, tender, and just right for the slaughterhouse.” He winked, but there was a hardness in his eyes that betrayed the humor in his words.
Gretchen stroked her fingertips suggestively down his arm. “Not all of you is soft.”
He grunted. “Yeah, well. After the first day of training, I couldn’t have gotten it up for Venus herself. Not after the first week, either, or the second.” He sounded somewhere between embarrassed and impressed with himself. “I didn’t sleep at night so much as throw myself at my cot and hibernate.”
“You made it, though!” she enthused, proud of him.
“I did!” John exclaimed. “By some miracle, I did.”
Her smile deepened, eyes softening as she looked at him. “I am happy.”
He turned thoughtful again, his gaze drifting back to the river. “These guys, they turned out to be not so bad.” His tone held a mix of warmth, admiration, and…regret, she supposed, for something he’d wished he’d had before. “They took this loyalty stuff seriously, always talking about battle brothers and other stuff that, honestly, kind of creeped me out. But, considering my last sergeant had turned tail and run, minutes after my so-called captain, it was a refreshing change.”
“Do you wonder what happened to them?” Gretchen asked, watching his profile.
“Sergeant Peterson and Captain Abbot?” John stiffened. “No.”
Which, she supposed, was lucky for them—assuming either man had survived. Cowards usually did, in her experience, but she sensed that it was time to change the subject. “Then you swore an oath of obedience unto death,” she finished lightly, “and came here. Congratulations! The incomprehensible locals and even more incomprehensible slang, the coffee that tastes like something excavated from a tarpit, truly a promotion in its own right!”
He tapped his arm. “First, I got my blood group tattoo.”
She thought he’d look cute with a few more tattoos, her mind wandering for a brief moment.
“I’ve sworn a lot of oaths in my life, Gretch, but this was the first time I got the feeling it meant anything. Not to me, it’d always meant something to me.” He studied her face in the low light, searching for understanding. “To the people I was swearing those oaths to.”
“Why the SS?” she probed. “It showed up to recruit you first?”
“The Wehrmacht didn’t want us,” he stated flatly. “Not a bunch of, to their mind, criminals.”
“The Wehrmacht and the SS have….” She bit her lip, frustrated that she didn’t know more words. “Differing ideas.”
“They think we’re crazy,” he supplied, “and we think they’re elitist. We’re both right.” He emitted a sharp snort. “Even if the Wehrmacht did want me, I didn’t want it. I’d had enough of guys bragging about their glorious ancestors. I didn’t need the constant reminders that I was just a turkey farmer, and no amount of teasing was going to make me ashamed of it—or of the fact that I’d graduated from the University of Minnesota instead of West Point.”
Neither of those names meant anything to Gretchen—or, indeed, to his current command. “How does Klau—I mean, Hauptsturmführer Dassel compare to Captain Abbot?”
John let out a low whistle. “Dassel’s evil, man. He puts everyone I trained under out west to shame. Moritz, though….” He let out another low whistle. “He’s worse, so much worse. Cross him and you will pray to every god in the universe for the sweet release of death.”
“You admire him,” she observed, detecting the undercurrent in his tone.
“What I admire,” John emphasized, “is that under his command—and Dassel’s—I stay alive.”
Moritz was a hot topic of gossip, both among his men and in the mailroom, almost as hot as Klaus. His flat rejection had been galling; she’d tried to tell herself that he must be homosexual, but he’d slept with several of the girls in the typing pool at work, including Elsa. His only requirement seemed to be that none of them wanted anything other than sex; he’d ended things with Elsa when she’d suggested that he could also bring her out for coffee. Moritz didn’t really get close to men either, though, other than Klaus. Reserved and stoic, he kept to himself.
Fritz practically worshipped the ground Moritz walked on, but even he could only guess at what hid behind that stare. Moritz, like Klaus, had a reputation as an excellent officer but a truly terrifying enemy. John’s willingness to challenge him didn’t strike her as particularly wise, but she wasn’t about to point that out—or divulge that when she’d tried to kiss the man, he’d picked her up and put her into a supply closet. Even so, she was glad he’d turned her down in the end, and not just because she liked John better. John was laughter and sunshine; Moritz’s mere presence seemed to lower the temperature in the room.
The twinkling lights of Boston stretched out before them, casting a serene glow over the river. They shimmered like a blanket of fairy dust, creating an illusion of magic in the night. Gretchen glanced at John, admiring it, and wondered what he was really thinking. He was so good at acting calm and serene, so much of the time, and so was she—but his revelations had shaken her. He was right: this war had changed everything. She liked him, maybe more than she was willing to confess, even to herself. But liking him meant accepting a reality she wasn’t sure she was ready for…and as much as he was changing, she was changing, too.
She took a deep breath, feeling the chill air fill her lungs. For now, she’d hold on to these moments of connection, the fleeting solace they provided. The water murmured that it was okay to pretend, just for tonight, that the world was simpler, kinder. Tomorrow could bring a new reality, but tonight, she’d let herself feel, without judgment, without fear.
Just for tonight.