John Birmingham: Final impact

The crowd roared as Mike plucked out the first notes of “Louie Louie.”

Eddie Mohr charged his glass and shouted, “To the future.”

Karen Halabi sloshed beer over her arm and his shirt as they clinked glasses, but she figured What the hell?

“To the past,” she cried back.

7 AUGUST 1944.

SANDRINGHAM HOUSE, NORFOLK, ENGLAND.

It had taken quite some time for Harry to get used to his being so much older than his grandmother. Princess Elizabeth had been a very young sixteen when he’d arrived, and if anything Harry had been more nervous about their first meeting than she. After all, he had loved her all his life, but he had known her as the aged monarch of another era. Here she was a smooth-faced teenager and he was the increasingly aged one. At least it felt like that some mornings. He really was getting too fucking old to be jumping out of planes and into punch-ups with the likes of Otto Skorzeny.

He rolled the shoulder where the SS colonel had plunged in a bayonet as Harry strangled him to death in a cellar in Magdeburg. They were walking through the southern reaches of the estate, and it was unseasonably chilly.

“It’s a lovely day, don’t you think, Harry?”

“It is, Granny. It’s good to be alive.”

The princess had dissolved into giggles the first time he’d called her that, and Harry had blushed beet red, but as Elizabeth had laughed and laughed, until tears began to stream from her eyes, an embarrassed chuckle had escaped her grandson. It turned into a genuine full-bellied laugh, and soon they were both rolling around on the floor of the great hall at Sandringham, under the unblinking gaze of a stuffed baboon that Harry remembered fondly from his own childhood.

Now, strolling the grounds, Harry called her Granny without a second thought. It had become his pet name for her, and she had settled into a close, comfortable relationship with him that was more akin to that between siblings than anything else.

They walked a little behind the rest of the shooting party of about thirty, including the king and queen mother. Elizabeth was unarmed, but Harry cradled a beautifully handcrafted shotgun. They were after a pheasant for the dinner table that evening.

“He’s a bit scared of you, you know,” she said.

“Who?”

“Philip, silly. My husband.”

Harry smiled. “You haven’t married him yet, you know, Granny. You haven’t even had a real date.”

She may have blushed then, or perhaps it was simply her skin’s response to the chill of the morning.

“Oh you. You’re awful.”

Harry sucked in a draft of stinging-cold air. “Am not,” he replied.

7 AUGUST 1944.

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA.

“Thanks, but not for me, Vern.”

“Your loss, Phil. From what I hear, these things are gonna be banned one day.”

Phillip Kolhammer leaned back in the rocker on the porch of the slumping old homestead and shook his head.

“No. I don’t think you’re going to see a revolution in Cuba now, Vern. Without Castro or Guevara to lead it, it might have happened. But all that aid money flowing in there now is tied up mighty tightly with all sorts of strings. Things are gonna be different there at least. But don’t let that stop you enjoying your stogie.”

“It surely won’t.”

“No. Nothing ever stops Vernon enjoying himself,” said Louisa Cuttler as she stirred a tall glass of iced tea. “I’ve been clipping him stories about how those things are going to kill him, and do you think he’ll listen? No. Not for a million dollars will he listen…”

The lilt of her voice reminded Kolhammer of Marie so much, it hurt. But it was a sweet pain, and much softer than it had been when he’d first sought out her maternal grandparents. There was so much of Marie in Louisa’s eyes and voice that he could close his own eyes, rocking gently back and forth on the tired gray boards of the porch, and it was almost as if his wife were with him again. Like Einstein had said, she was this close.

He’d never met Vernon and Louise Cuttler back up in his own day. They had both passed on by the time he’d met Marie. But they’d raised her after her own parents died in a car crash, and his wife had loved them with a childlike devotion, even as a grown woman.

“That was a wonderful dinner,” said Kolhammer. “I can’t thank you folks enough for taking me into your home and…”

“Now, Phil,” Louisa insisted. “Don’t you go getting yourself all choked up. You’re family and that’s the end of it. I know things are…well, a little strange…And our granddaughter as you knew her will never be born in this world. But the good Lord knows her soul, and I know He will send that soul to us in some form at some time of His own choosing. That may be of no ease to your suffering, but you should never doubt that you have a home here with us, and with all our family. You’ll always be welcome.”

Kolhammer rocked forward and picked another beer out of the icebox lying on the floor between Vern and him. An owl hooted somewhere in the dark beyond the mosquito netting, and cicadas began to screech.

“I really want you to know how much I appreciate it,” he said. “I cannot imagine I’ll ever get back to see Marie again, but I know she’s out there somewhere and I know she remains the only woman for me in this or any other world.”

Vernon nodded, his lips turned down at the corners. Louisa smiled, but it was the sort of sad, encouraging smile you offered to someone trying to bear up under great pain.

“We would understand it if you met someone else,” she said. “You’re a good man, Phillip. Any woman would be lucky to have you.”

“Well, there won’t be any other women,” said Kolhammer. “But it’s good of you to say that. And it’s good of you to have me here. Not everyone would have been so welcoming. I’m not…uhm. Well, not everyone likes me. And that’s only going to get worse in the future.”

“Oh, you can’t listen to them know-nothin’ peckerheads,” said Vern.

“Vernon!” his wife scolded.

“Well, that’s what they are,” said Vernon. He leaned forward to grab himself another drink. “Listen, Phil, you gotta do what you think is right. That’s all God ever asks of a man. Not everyone’s gonna agree with you. Hell, sometimes even I won’t agree with you.” Vern winked at him over the foaming neck of the beer bottle. “That’s when you’ll know you’re wrong, by the way.”

Kolhammer snorted. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Do you think you’re going to run for office soon?” asked Louisa.

Kolhammer took a long draw on the icy-cold beer. Moths batted up against the porch netting, and a dog began to bark in the distance.

“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “I really don’t know.”

7 AUGUST 1944

NEW YORK CITY.

It took the concierge three trips to haul up all of the mail Julia had accumulated while she was away. It sat in a big pile on the massive table in the center of the kitchen in her open-plan apartment. Constructed of wooden beams salvaged from a warehouse slated for demolition, it was at least ten meters long, and inset every two meters with sunken ice buckets for holding bottles of wine and champagne. Two of these had filled up with letters and parcels, and a great mound of mail lay between them. Julia simply couldn’t face the idea of sorting through it all. It was late, coming up on midnight, and she had been to a war correspondents’ dinner in the Oak Room at the Algonquin.

She was almost fully recovered from her injuries but found herself getting tired easily. That had started when Dan had died and had been getting worse ever since. She missed him and Rosie and even geeky little Curtis more than she could have imagined. Some days the pain was like a hole where her heart should have been. She took a jug of ice water from the fridge, a new model Kelvinator that aped the looks, if not the performance, of the double-door Jenn-Air back in her apartment in 21C New York. It seemed that no matter how much money and energy she invested in trying to create a fortress of uptime solitude in here-and she had invested shitloads-the contemporary world always had some way of sneaking back in.