Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

4.

Berlin, 1991.

“You have a Russian name also,” Berna said looking through the photographs that Madame Didier had taken from her purse.

Outside, on the high black slate rooftops, snow created stipples and filigrees in an intricate pattern under a lovely ink-blue night sky with a quarter moon that looked like a gold sword out of the Arabian Nights.

“Yes, several. My Auntie Dora always just called me Umnitsa, which means Good Girl,” Madame Didier said self-consciously. “I was born in Siberia after the war, in 1946.”

“Look,” Berna said handing Seidlitz a little cellophane book of color photos, “these are the Countess’s three boys.”

He accepted the photos, put on his reading glasses, and admired three fine young men looking out on the world with happiness and self-confidence. “Handsome young men,” he said, handing the photos back.

“Thank you.” She put the photos back in her purse. She changed topics as she did so. “Did you have any idea that there was a survivor?”

He shook his head. The thought upset him very much. “I had no idea until many years after the war. I feel I have lost a great opportunity in not meeting him. And you think he is your father?”

She looked pained. “Yes, I am sure of it now, at last, after many years of searching. His name was kept secret for many years, but I believe is a man named Tim Nordhall. I need to find him now, if he is still alive somewhere.”

“You are traveling all over the world in search of one clue or another,” Seidlitz said sympathetically and thoughtfully. “I wish I knew more. I only heard about Nordhall from Fehler, who went with me to a meeting of Sturmer next of kin in Canterbury—that would have been, oh, probably 1955 or 57, I forget—and Fehler had been talking with a man named Holiday or Halliday, one of those English names, whom he met over a beer at that reunion, and who also may have been a double agent. Yes, it is all quite confusing, and still swallowed up in official secrecy even now, half a century after the war. Even now that East Germany has ceased to exist, and now even the Soviet Union is history, you would think that they would all give up their ghosts and secrets.” The old captain looked around, lost in his memories, and suddenly finding himself in this place now. “Very gemütlich here,” he said, looking around at the dark restaurant, its silent tables, its windows bright with a sea of city lights and neon dusted with faint traces of white that outlined the edges of black slate roof tiles. As always, a sea of traffic flowed underneath with an apparent total lack of concern—for every life was in crisis, and no stranger had time to wonder about someone else’s puzzle from another time.

Berna had a silver and turquoise barrette between her lips and was in the process of using both hands to fold her long blonde hair back in a ponytail.

Madame Didier pushed a crumb around on the linen. “I have been to San Francisco, London, Berlin, Brussels, anywhere I can think of. Each time I think I'm closing in on my real father, he slips away again, like a ghost.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” Seidlitz said.

Berna said: “You are so wealthy and beautiful, yet unhappy. How sad.”

“I have a lot to be thankful for; you are right.”

Berna had finished tying her hair back and sat drumming rock rhythms on her jeans. “We can be happy, sitting here, warm and dry, having coffee.”

“At least we are alive, those of us who made it,” Seidlitz said. He rubbed his granddaughter’s back affectionately.

“Recently,” Madame Didier said, “I came into possession of some papers including some diaries kept by my father. The papers were recovered from my Auntie’s family in Siberia, and originally belonged to my mother. It seems she was in love with Tim Nordhall to her dying day, and wrote a stack of love letters to him that she never sent.” She felt flustered. “It seems Nordhall fell in love with not one but two women, or is that just more myth like so much about him?”

“Nothing was unusual in wartime,” the captain said, shrugging lightly. “Not even a man with two women.”

Berna giggled. “Or two women with one husband.”

Madame Didier shrugged, feeling as always the fatalistic weight of the unchangeable past. “There are still so many puzzling details, but I know for certain that the NKVD or the GRU kidnapped my mother right out of her residence on Nob Hill in San Francisco when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how I ended up in the Soviet Union.”

“A dreadful fate,” the old man said, pursing his lips as he no doubt reviewed a thousand painful memories of his own.

“Yes. My poor mother. She ended up marrying a man in Siberia who drank heavily and was mean to her, but he brought home a small paycheck and that kept us from starving to death. Those were hard years. I’m told he fell off a fishing boat in the North Pacific in 1947 and drowned. My mother never married again—not that she had much time. She died the next year.”

There was a silence as they all digested this information from the chaotic aftermath of the world war.

“Where do you go next?” Berna said.

Outside, the wind blew a long veil of snow across the slate rooftops.

Madame Didier raised and lowered her hands in a gesture of not knowing. “Where the wind blows me to, Herr Kapitän-Leutnant.”