That afternoon, the two Americans visited the Rathaus, where the police had charge of the records left by the local Gestapo office. There Macurdy learned that “Gerda Montag” and her grandparents had been arrested by the Gestapo on Wednesday, 10 May 1944, charged with spying and harboring a spy, and been executed on Sunday, 14 May, of the same year. Just as he’d feared.
That night Macurdy drove back to the ridge again, this time alone; ninety-nine percent was not sure enough. The pasture he’d jumped on, more than a year earlier, was flooded by a full moon. Cows, no doubt the same cows who’d been there a year earlier, grazed in the moonlight, a sight he somehow found ineffably beautiful.
Again he drove to the ridgetop, where he parked and waited for midnight. Waited and felt-what? For one thing, an old love, buried but not dead. But this was the wrong gate, and that marriage long past.
Local midnight came and went, and still nothing happened. He gave it an extra forty minutes, then feeling dry as old leaves, started the jeep, drove back down the ridge, and headed up the road to Kempten.
That night too, sleep did not come quickly. Too many memories, too many thoughts. Except for Mary, he told himself, you’ve had no luck with wives. Varia stolen and married to someone else, which had worked out well for her and Cyncaidh. And Melody, drowned with their unborn child. And Gerda Schwabe, who hadn’t really been married to him, though the marriage had been real enough to the Gestapo. A marriage never consummated, though she’d wanted to. All she got out of it was dead.
He tried to shake his mood. Macurdy he told himself, get your head out of your butt and look at the facts. Gerda had been living on borrowed time, and the loan had been foreclosed. She’d been a spy for the British in Lubeck, and was executed as a spy, a German who despised the Nazis. Like millions in the war, damned near including himself she’d died as a soldier, in her case without a uniform.
And what of Landgraf? He’d been no Nazi, despite being an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer. Decency and patriotism had been his central traits. And loyalty. A decent man supporting a monster! There was no understanding such things.
Rising up on an elbow, Macurdy looked at the watch on his bedside stand. The luminous hands told him it was past three, and the officers’ mess stopped serving breakfast at 0800. Tiredly he got up and sat on a metal folding chair, to still his mind through meditation.
In a few minutes he was nodding off, and lying back down, fell quickly asleep. To dream of Yuulith-of Vulkan and Varia and dwarves-and Kurqosz. Though he wouldn’t remember it when he awoke.
The next morning he flew to Munich with Von Lutzow, and by noon was on a pane to London. Within hours he was on another, to New York, via Reykjavik and Gander.
Beginning to feel eager. He was done with war, he told himself. There was still Japan, but he’d get around that. Something would intervene. Maybe he’d start limping again; he was good at that.
And he was done with gates. He and Mary would make a new life for themselves, in Nehtaka to start with, then elsewhere. The problems weren’t that great. If he looked at them right, they weren’t problems at all.