Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"Dubin, please. Please. This is my life, too. You are precious to me. Dubin. Please, Dubin." Slowly she reached for my hand. My entire body surged at her touch and even so, I thought: Once more, she will engineer his escape. But I loved her. As Biddy had said, it was pointless to try to reason about that.

With my hand in hers, she wept. "Please, Dubin," she said. "Please."

"You have the personality of a tyrant, Gita. You wish to turn me into a supplicant so you will think better of yourself."

Despite the tears, she managed a smile. "So now you know my secret, Dubin."

You will mock me for being bourgeois."

"I shall," she said. "I promise to. But I will be thrilled, in spite of myself." She lifted her face to me. "Take me to America, Dubin. Make me your wife. Let Martin go. Let Martin be the past. Let me be the future. Please." She kissed my hand now, a hundred times, clutching it between hers and embracing every knuckle. What she proposed was mad, of course. But no madder than what I had watched men do routinely for months now. No madder than parachuting into a town under siege. No madder than combat, where soldiers gave up their lives for inches of ground and the grudges of generals and dictators. In this place, love, even the remotest chance of it, was the only sane choice. I pulled her hands to my mouth and kissed them once. Then I stood, looking down on her.

"When you betray me, Gita, as I know you will, I will have nothing. I will have turned my back on my country, and you will be gone. I will have no honor. I will believe in nothing. I will be nothing."

"You will have me, Dubin. I swear. You will have love. I swear, Dubin. You will not be betrayed. I swear. I swear."

Gita Lodz is my mother.

When I first read Dad's account, the end had seemed disappointingly abrupt. Not only did I think there was no mention of my mother, there was also no recounting of what had happened with Martin. Supposedly writing to explain things to his lawyer, Dad was silent about whether Martin fled, as Dad claimed, or had been murdered, as Bear feared.

According to the testimony at the court-martial, late on April 12, 1945, Martin had been loaded at gunpoint into the armored vehicle Dad had awaited. In convoy with the MPs, they traveled only a mile or two beyond the perimeter of Balingen toward Hechingen, to the bivouac of the 406th Armored Cavalry. There Martin was chained to a fence post before a tent was erected around him. At roughly 3:00 a. M., my father appeared and told the two MPs guarding the Major that Dad could not sleep and would spell them for two hours. When they returned Dad was there and Martin was gone. My father told the guards, without further explanation, he had let Martin go. A day later he was back in Frankfurt to admit the same thing to Teedle.

The first time I came back to visit Leach in Hartford, in November 2003, I got right to the point.

"What Dad wrote doesn't answer your question." "My 'question'?"

"Whether my father murdered Martin once he freed him."

"Oh, that." Bear gave his dry, gasping laugh. "Well, what do you think, Stewart?"

Before I'd read the pages Bear gave me, his suspicions were astonishing, but once I understood that Dad had abandoned everything for Gita Lodz, I comprehended Leach's logic. As my father had told her, if she betrayed him again, he would have had nothing. With Martin dead, on the other hand, she could never rejoin him. Certainly, Dad had no need to fear discovery if he murdered Martin. There was virtually no chance one more body would ever be identified among the thousands decomposing in the massive pit at the edge of Balingen. Dad was armed, of course. And after combat, he was sadly experienced in killing.

In other words, Dad had motive and opportunity, which I'd listened to prosecutors for years label as the calling cards of a strong circumstantial murder case. But my faith in my father's decency, which even now seemed as tangible to me as his body, remained unchanged. Realizing everything I hadn't known about his life, murder still seemed beyond him, and I told Leach that. Bear was very pleased to hear it, favoring me with his funny sideways smile.

"Good for you, Stewart."

"But am I right?"

"Of course. It became critical for me to determine the answer to my own question, especially after the verdict and sentence. Quite frankly, Stewart, if there was a worse crime to be discovered, I might have thought twice about pressing ahead with appeals. Five years for the murder of another officer, even a wanted one, was not a disappointing result, if that's what had actually occurred."

But it turned out Martin was alive?"

"When your father last saw him? Without doubt. Where are my papers?" The Redweld folder, Bear's treasure chest, as I thought of it, rested against the chrome spokes of his wheelchair, and I handed it up. Leach's bent fingers stumbled through the pages. He would touch a paper several times before he could grab it and then bring it almost to his nose to read. "No," he'd say, and the process would begin again, with his apologies to me for the agonizing pace. "Here!" he said at last.

LABORATORY

60TH EVACUATION HOSPITAL

APO #758, U. S. ARMY

APO

May 16, 1945

REPORT OF AUTOPSY

C-1145

NAME: (Name, Rank, Unit & Organization Unknown)

AGE: Approx. 42 RACE: White SEX: Male NATIVITY: Unknown

ADMITTED: Not admitted to this hospital DIED: Approx. May 9, 1945

AUTOPSY: 1230, May 13, 1945

CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS

1. Malnutrition, dehydration, severe

PATHOLOGICAL DIAGNOSES

MISCELLANEOUS: Malnutrition, dehydration, severe burns, third degree, partially healed

PRESENT ILLNESS: This patient was found dead sitting on a divan in the Hochshaus Hotel in Berlin, Germany (Grid Q-333690), upon the arrival of U. S. troops in that sector on or about May 11, 1945. He was dressed in the uniform of a United States Army Officer, with oak leaf cluster on his right shirt collar, but otherwise without insignia or identity tags. He evidently had been held as a prisoner for a period of time and had starved to death.

PHYSICAL EXAMINATION: Examination at the cemetery revealed no fresh external wounds. Patient appeared to be recovering from third-degree burns several months old; his left hand is missing.

AUTOPSY FINDINGS

The body is that of a well-developed but markedly emaciated male, about 40 years of age, measuring 70 inches long and weighing approximately 105 pounds. Rigor and liver are absent. The head is covered with long black hair, except for an area of scarring above the left ear, upon which most of the helix has been lost, apparently due to burning. The anterior portion of his deeply sunken eyes is below the lateral portion of the orbital margin. A beard, several weeks' growth, covers his face and contains some gray hairs in front of each ear. All of his teeth are present. The rib markings are very prominent and the thin anterior abdominal wall rests only slightly above his spine.

Evidence of recent third-degree burns also appears on the distal portion of the leg and thorax; scar tissue remains livid and taut, and appears abraded in several places. The left hand is absent below the wrist. The uneven stump reveals similar burn scarring, suggesting the hand may have been lost in an explosion or amputated thereafter. Suture scars indicate recent surgical reparation.

PRIMARY INCISION: The usual incision reveals one millimeter of subcutaneous adipose tissues, thinning muscles, normally placed organs in the smooth abdominal cavity, and normal pericardial and pleural cavities.

GASTROINTESTINAL TRACT: The stomach contains only a slight amount of light mucus, the bowel is empty, and a minimal amount of fecal material is in the colon. All the mesenteric vessels are prominent on the colon.