Black Cross

Randazzo worked his way over to the door. He saluted Mark, then turned without a word and hobbled from the room. McConnell heard him thump-bumping his way slowly down the stairs. The three flights took him nearly three minutes.

After the echoes faded, McConnell went to the window, pushed it open, and sucked in great gulps of cold air. His skin was tingling. Just as he had finally begun to accept the idea that his brother had perished bravely in an air battle, Pascal Randazzo had appeared like a specter to shatter even this grim comfort. David had not died in battle. He had been brutally murdered in cold blood. Murdered by Hitler’s infamous Black Corps. The Schutzstaffeln. The SS.

One of McConnell’s clearest childhood memories was of the day his younger brother was born. Their father had delivered David himself. His medical practice had long been moribund, but he insisted upon bringing his own son into the world. Mark remembered the look of pride on his father’s scarred face, one of the only times the pride was in himself and not his sons.

He braced his hands on the stone window casement and leaned out. The air here was so different from the sweltering nights of his youth. The dark parapets and spires rising from the icy English cobbles did look like something out of Robin Hood. A great castle. A fortress. And wasn’t that what he had used it for? A place of refuge from the war? For five years he had worked here in safety while braver men had given their lives to fight the Nazis. They had watched friends die, just as Randazzo had, yet they fought on in spite of their fear.

I know you, Doctor, the young Jew with Brigadier Smith had told him. You’re no coward. You’re a fool. You believe in reason, in the essential goodness of man. You believe that if you refuse to commit evil yourself, someday you will conquer evil. You have yet to taste even a sip of the pain so many have drunk to the dregs in the last ten years . . .

“I’ve had my sip of pain,” McConnell said softly.

The feeling churning in his belly was like nothing he had ever known. Bitter, burning, volatile. It was fury, he realized, an inchoate anger so profound he could not give shape to it.

He tried to fight it, to remember the words thoughtful men had spoken about the futility of violence as a means to a better world. But compared to the images flashing behind his eyes, those words meant nothing. They were merely aggregates of letters, symbols of the futility of language in the face of deeds.

He turned away from the window and went to his small, cluttered desk. He rummaged in the top drawer for a few moments, then pulled out a small white card. He lifted the telephone and placed a call to London, to the number on the card. Despite the late hour, the phone was answered on the third ring.

“Smith here,” said a gruff voice.

“Brigadier, this is Doctor Mark McConnell.”

There was a pause. “What can I do for you, Doctor?”

“That trip you mentioned. Germany.”

Smith grunted. “What about it?”

“Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

The brigadier said nothing for some time. “Get some sleep,” he said finally. “Don’t say any goodbyes. We’ll take care of all that. I’ll send a driver to your house at 0600 sharp.”

McConnell set the phone in its cradle and walked out of the laboratory without looking back.

At ten before midnight, the telephone rang in a London police station. The duty officer listened to the gruff voice on the line for a few moments, then hung up and grumbled, “Thinks he’s the bloody First Sea Lord, that one.”

“Who the ’ell was it, Bill?” asked the night jailer.

The duty officer squared his shoulders with exaggerated crispness. “Brigadier Duff bloody Smith, that’s who.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?”

“I’m not sure. Curses like a Regimental Sergeant-Major, though.”

“What did he want?”

“The Jewboy. Told me to have him washed and ready by six in the morning or he’d have my balls for breakfast.”

“You going to oblige?”

The duty officer scowled. “Aye, I reckon. Smith’s got connections with the Commissioner. That’s how the Jewboy’s been here all week without being charged.”

The night jailer raised a bushy eyebrow. “I’d hop to it, Bill. It’ll take a while to clean him up.”

The duty officer hiked his belt over a bulging belly. “I’m glad to be rid of that bastard, to be honest. Makes me nervous. Hardly said a word since his first day in. It’s his eyes. I think he’d cut both our throats for a shilling.”

“That’s a flippin’ Jew for you, Bill.”

McConnell rolled over and read the clock hanging on his bedroom wall. It was after three A.M., but he could not find sleep. He had gone to bed at midnight, dozed for an hour, then sat bolt upright in a fit of compulsion. One facet of the proposed mission had not been discussed — anti-nerve agent protection — and he did not intend to rely on any gear Duff Smith might supply. He dressed quietly and bicycled back to the university, let himself into his lab, and quietly removed two prototype anti-gas suits he had been secretly experimenting with for the last month. The ride home with the heavy gear strapped to the bike had nearly exhausted him, but the suits and tanks now lay packed in two suitcases at the foot of his bed.

Yet something else had kept him twisting in the bedclothes long after that. Brigadier Smith had ordered him not to say any goodbyes, and he had tried to obey. But the sense of something important left undone, of words left unsaid, was too powerful to ignore. With a soft curse he climbed out of bed, lit a candle at the small desk in his room, and picked up his fountain pen.

The letter to Susan came fairly easily. It was probably not much different than the millions of letters written by other husbands during the war. He apologized for sending her home during the Battle of Britain, and told her he had been faithful during the years since, which was true. There had been no children yet, and he regretted that, but in the end it would make it easier for her to build a new life, should the worst happen.

The second letter took more time. When he thought of his mother, he felt a terrible guilt, a sense that he had no right to risk his own life no matter what the cause, no right to risk taking away her only surviving son. Yet it was his life, and in the end she would understand that. He lifted the pen and wrote:

Dear Mother,

If you have received this letter, I am no longer in this world. You have taken hard blows in your life, and do not deserve this one, but what I went to do, I had to do. Dad would say that I threw my life away in a useless attempt to revenge David’s death, but you know me better than that. I have learned that there is truly an infinite capacity for evil in the human heart, and because of my abilities I have an opportunity, and probably an obligation, to do what I can to stop it. There just comes a time when a man says, Enough.

There are some practical matters to be attended to. Back during the Blitz, I wrote a will and mailed it to old Mr. Ward in town. As you know, the monthly payments he disburses to you and Susan come from my six industrial patents. It is a strange irony, but with the war expansion, the proceeds from those patents have grown to a substantial amount of money. In the will, I assigned three of those patents to Susan and three to you. It gives me great comfort to know that you will never have to worry about getting by again, or work so hard as you did during the Depression.

In my letter to Susan, I wrote that she should remarry and try to make a new life with the children she deserves. I hope you will encourage her in that, but she is not the only one who needs encouragement. It may not be a son’s place to speak of these things to his mother, but I am. After Dad passed, I think you sealed away a part of yourself in the belief that David and I would never understand if you ever loved another man. That is a noble sentiment, but it is wrong. David and I, and yes, Dad too, wanted nothing so much in life as your happiness. You