'They are Russian hats, colonel.'
'Well,' MacNamara continued, 'I don't see why-' But Von Reiter coolly interrupted him.
'Eighty-four hats, colonel. Eighty-four Russian hats.'
The commandant fumed to Tommy Hart.
'Sixteen men went to the firing squad bareheaded. Lieutenant Then Von Reiter shrugged.
'This surprised me immensely,' he added.
'I thought that for the cold-blooded murder of a highly decorated
German officer, the Gestapo would shoot the entire work camp. Each and every Russian. But to my astonishment, they selected only one hundred men to kill in retaliation.'
Von Reiter walked back around the desk, and seated himself.
He allowed a moment of quiet to fill the room before he nodded and gestured to Fenelli, who held the morphine needle ready.
'Go with Herr Blucher, Mr. Hart. Leave here and take all your secrets with you. His car will take you to the train. The train will carry you to Switzerland, where your friend Wing Commander Pryce, a hospital, and surgeons all await your arrival.
Do not think about those one hundred men. Not for another moment.
Wipe' them from your memory. Instead, you should endeavor to survive.
Return home to Vermont. Live to be old and rich and happy. Lieutenant
Hart. And when your grandchildren come to your side one day to ask you about the war, you can say that you passed it most uneventfully, reading legal textbooks, inside a German prisoner-of-war camp named Stalag Luft Thirteen.'
Tommy had no words left to reply with. He was only peripherally aware of the needle penetrating his flesh. But the sweet dulling sensation of morphine sweeping through him was like drinking from the greatest and freshest clear, cold mountain stream of home.
Epilogue
Lydia Hart was in the bathroom, putting the finishing touches to her hair, when she called out, 'Tommy? Do you need help with your tie?'
She paused, waiting for a response, which came merely as a grunted negative, which was precisely what she'd expected and made her smile as she ran the brush through the silver cascade she still wore down around her shoulders. Then she added, 'How are we doing on time?'
'We have all the time in the world,' Tommy replied softly.
He was seated by the large window of their hotel suite, and from where he was positioned, he could see both his wife's reflection in the mirror and, when he pivoted and looked through the windowpane, all the way to Lake Michigan. It was a summer mid-morning and streaky sunlight flitted off the dark blue surface of the water. He had spent the past quarter hour studiously watching sailboats pirouette across the slight roll of the waves, cutting back and forth in seemingly aimless patterns. The grace and speed of each sleek hull, circling beneath a billowing white sail, was hypnotic.
He wondered a bit why he'd always gravitated to fishing boats and noisy motors, guessing this preference had something to do with his inclination for destinations, but then decided also that he would have had too much trouble handling both the tiller and the mainsheet of a sailboat driven fast before the wind.
Tommy looked down and stole a glance at his left hand. He was missing his index finger and half of the little finger. Purplish scar tissue had built up in the deep gouges ripped from his palm. But, he thought, the hand appeared to be far more crippled than it truly was. For more than fifty years his wife had been asking him if he needed help tying his tie, and for all that time he'd always replied that he did not. He had learned how to tie knots in both the ties he wore to his office and the fishing lines he used on his boat. And every month when the government had dutifully sent him a modest disability check, he'd just as dutifully signed it over to the general scholarship fund at Harvard.
Still, his war-damaged hand had lately developed a tendency to the stiffness of arthritis, and on more than one recent occasion had frozen painfully on him. He had not told his wife about these small betrayals.
'Do you think there will be anyone there we know?' his wife asked.
Tommy reluctantly turned away from the vision of sailboats, and fixed his eyes on his wife's reflection. For a single heady moment he thought she had not changed one bit since the day they were married in 1945.
'No,' he said.
'Probably just a lot of dignitaries. He was pretty famous. Maybe there will be some lawyers I met over the years. But not really anyone we know.'
'Not even someone from the prisoner-of-war camp?'
Tommy smiled and shook his head.
'No. I don't think so.'
Lydia put the hairbrush down, replacing it in her hand with an eyebrow pencil. She worked on her face for a moment, then said, 'I wish Hugh were still alive so he could keep you company.'
Tommy felt a sudden twinge of sadness.
'I do, too,' he said.
Hugh Renaday had died a decade earlier. A week after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and well before the inevitable progression of the disease could rob his limbs and heart of strength, the hulking hockey player had taken down a favorite hunting rifle, gathered up snowshoes, tent, sleeping bag, and a portable backpacker's stove, and after writing a series of unequivocal farewell notes to his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and one to Tommy, he had loaded everything into the back of his four-wheel-drive truck and driven deep into the cold wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. It was January, the dead of winter, and when his car would go no farther through the piled snow of an old, abandoned logging trail, Hugh Renaday had started to hike in.
When his legs tired of fighting through the northern Alberta drifts, he had stopped, made a modest camp, cooked himself one last meal, then patiently waited for nighttime's falling temperatures, plummeting far below the freezing point, to kill him.
Tommy understood later from one of Hugh's fellow Mounties that freezing to death was not considered a terrible way to die in the North country.
One shivered a few times, then eventually slipped into an unconsciousness that mimicked a deep and restful sleep, the years' memories sliding away slowly along with the final breaths of life. It was a sturdy and efficient way to die. Tommy had always thought, as organized and steady and dependable as the longtime policeman had been every second of his life.
He did not like to think of Hugh's death much, though once, when he and Lydia had taken a cruise ship to Alaska and he'd stayed up late into the night mesmerized by the aurora borealis, he'd hoped that the great sheet of colorful lights startling the black sky had been the last thing that Hugh Renaday had seen of this world.
Instead, when he remembered his friend, he preferred to think of a moment the two men had shared, fishing not far from Tommy's retirement home in the Florida Keys. Tommy had spotted a huge barracuda, a torpedolike brute, lurking on the edge of a flat, just hanging in a few clear feet of water waiting in ambush for some unsuspecting jack crevalle or needlefish to wander by. Tommy had rigged up a spinning rod with a fluorescent red tube lure and a wire leader. Hugh had thrown the lure just a few feet from the 'cuda's gaping mouth.
The fish had surged forward without hesitation, and then, once hooked, had cartwheeled and exploded, its long silver sides tearing free from the water's surface, blasting immense white sheets across the