Gabriel had semi-conscious memories of nurses singing carols. Little choirs of them, like angels, singing ‘Silent Night’ at the end of his bed. They had their cloaks reversed, displaying the more seasonal red of the lining. Then Christmas was over and Gabriel returned to the land of shadows and uneasy dreams.
As, gradually, the hospital became real once more around him, he learned that Operation Watch on the Rhine had failed, and the Allies were calling it the Battle of the Bulge. The ward around him was crammed with casualties, the nurses no longer sang and the nights were no longer silent. Sudden screams, groans and desperate prayers were now the midnight music.
Gabriel, incapable of movement, lay there and listened as the wounded talked. They had nearly pulled it off, nearly driven a line between the Yanks and the British, nearly reached Antwerp and the North Sea. Nearly, but not quite. An American parachute brigade had dug in and fought like demons in the woods at Bastogne. They had halted the advance long enough for the fogs to clear and the tank-busting fighters of the Allies to return to the skies. A massacre had followed. Then the fuel promised by the Führer dried up and the adventure was over, all bar the pain of the wounded and the grief of the widows.
As he lay and listened, Gabriel felt confusion. The British knew of this attack through the Ardennes, so why were the Americans unprepared? Why hadn’t the Foxley intelligence been acted on? He lay there in confusion and grief. And as he listened to the misery of the wounded around him, he was weighed down by a heavy blanket of guilt. He felt the shame of wearing a false uniform among men who knew their duty.
He’d close his eyes but Lorelei was waiting for him on the other side of his lids. Her eyes looking into his, honestly, openly, lovingly, but all the time using him. Stroking his scar and calling him soldier. Perhaps, he thought, the only time she’d looked at him truthfully was the moment before she shot him.
The nurses gossiped to him, even when he was too weak to respond. It was medicine of course, part of the treatment to bring him back to the land of the living. He was told how the Japanese ambassador and her husband had distanced themselves from Lorelei’s action. How they had prostrated themselves at the Führer’s feet and apologised. Hitler had accepted their contrition, and the gift of the short sword that Toshikyo had used to nearly sever his wife’s head. Hitler apparently kept the blade on his desk. Everyone now knew she’d been a rogue agent, someone who had reverted to her mother’s race and become British.
Then, as he swam slowly towards the surface of life again, up to where the light was, he had a visitor. Toshikyo Amori came and stood by his bed in his dark naval uniform, bowed his head sharply and then stared into the distance. Gabriel was at a loss. His head was clearer than it had been for a month – he knew this apparition was no dream – but what the man wanted, and why he stood by the bed silently, Gabriel had no idea.
Toshikyo made a small grunt, as if he’d made a decision, or had arranged the jumble of words in his head into some sort of order. ‘Hauptsturmführer Zobel, I wish to speak to you as the husband.’
The husband. Just the husband. Not as a naval officer or a diplomat but as the partner in marriage of Lorelei.
‘Alright,’ said Gabriel, wondering how it would play out. Was Toshikyo aggrieved, angry, bitter over his wife’s adultery?
Suddenly his eyes swung to Gabriel’s. They were dark but very readable and Gabriel saw in them a sort of desperation that confused him. ‘Well?’ he prompted.
‘I want to thank you for looking after her when I couldn’t.’
He bowed again, but this time it was far lower and he took longer to stand again.
‘I didn’t know she was married,’ Gabriel said. It sounded weak.
Toshikyo gave him a look that was almost European in its spontaneity. ‘Would it have made a difference?’
Gabriel shook his head slowly.
‘Of course not,’ said Toshikyo. ‘Men are men.’
‘We were on a mission, we grew close.’ Gabriel realised he wanted to talk about her, wanted to remember her in words, even with the husband. But perhaps Toshikyo felt the same, the need to keep her alive just a little longer, even if it meant sharing her in memory, as he had in life, with his wife’s lover.
‘I think you must have a poor opinion of me,’ Toshikyo said. ‘A man who prostitutes his own wife.’
‘She wasn’t a prostitute.’
Toshikyo considered this. ‘No. I was a student in San Francisco and I would say the principal difference between the occidental and the oriental is the position of honour. The American young people owned their honour; it came from within and no government could order them to do something which they felt compromised this belief in their own values. In Japan, honour flows from above, and no action, however distasteful, taints the doer if they are doing their duty. In fact the reverse is true; paradoxically the woman who prostitutes herself for the nation is revered above the virgin.’
Hard duty, Gabriel understood. It was the same for soldiers. The good soldier obeyed the difficult orders and shot the wounded, or the prisoners, or the women. And officers patted them and gave them whisky and cigarettes. But at the front, the soldier who remembered his peacetime code of ethics was resented, seen as a liability; a bad soldier.
‘Shooting you didn’t mean that she didn’t – care for you. You just came between her and her duty. She had a difficult decision to make. A hard choice.’
‘Lorelei knew she was going to die, didn’t she? She must have; she couldn’t expect to shoot Hitler and walk out of his house to a life of love with you.’
Toshikyo looked around the ward at the beds with their cargoes of wounded and dying. ‘How many miles and miles and miles of hospital beds are there in the world right now, all bearing men and women bleeding for their leaders?’
He turned back. ‘When you returned to her apartment, we were discussing the nature of Lorelei’s death, how to end her story. Should she put two bullets into the Führer and the third into her own head? She wished for something different. She desired the honour of what men call seppuku. For a woman, it’s jigai; not the male ritual of slicing the stomach, but a cut to the neck that can be administered by a kaishakunn, a helper. You entered just after she had offered me the honour of being her kaishakunn. I accepted. She died as she had lived, a great woman.’
Gabriel saw the moment, her head down not in defeat but to offer her neck to her husband, for a clean stroke. Her death sacred, something in which he had no role to play, the angel on the outside.
‘But why did she need to kill Hitler? We’d just saved him.’
‘Policy,’ said Toshikyo. ‘Is there anything more redundant in a war than a diplomat? And yet they are men of energy, of enterprise – so they circle the fighting dogs, seeking some way to influence the outcome.’
Gabriel looked at him. The man hidden behind the uniform. ‘What are you? A naval officer, or a spy, or a diplomat?’
‘I have been all three. But now I am an aide to Ambassador Oshima, so currently my weapon is diplomacy. In this capacity I have met both Mr Hitler and Mr Stalin, and in undiplomatic terms I can tell you the difference between them: the Führer is a fantasist and the Marshal is a paranoid–realist. As you know, Japan is not at war with Soviet Russia and an initiative was floated with them; that the Soviets consider making peace with Germany. We were open about our interests: the Americans and the British taking on Germany, without the help of Russia, would absorb all their forces, so relieving pressure in the Pacific.’
Gabriel was confused. ‘Why would Stalin want to let the Nazis off the hook now?’
‘Stalin no longer fears Germany, but he does the Western Allies. He suspects they are letting Russia take the brunt of beating Germany so that when finally East and West come face to face over the body of the Reich, the democracies will launch their true offensive against an exhausted Russia. Having Germany as a buffer state has its attractions for the Marshal. They had a pact before.’
‘But Hitler?’ said Gabriel, meaning why did Lorelei haveto die?
‘We approached Herr Goebbels, knowing him to have the ear of the Führer and to be someone intelligent enough to see the advantages of this peace proposal. He grasped it immediately, as a starving man snatches at food. He himself said Germany has never won a war on two fronts. He wrote a carefully worded memorandum for the Führer.’
‘And?’
‘Mr Hitler read it, put it in a drawer apparently. He never referred to it again. He was wedded to the ridiculous nonsense of his offensive in the Ardennes – the result of which you can see about you. It was decided to remove him from the game. Without Hitler, the remaining Nazis, or the generals, would jump at the opportunity for peace in the East. The war in the Pacific would wind down. Space could be found to bring things to an end there, by diplomatic and not military actions.’
‘Do you believe that? You killed Lorelei because of a plan? Some failed diplomacy?’
Toshikyo closed his eyes. He seemed to be speaking to himself. ‘We don’t know what’s ahead. It’s impossible to know what fate awaits Japan. What retribution the Americans will wreak upon us. What the blood price will be. My wife thought her death mattered little in the scheme of things. I disagreed. But Lorelei was always her own woman.’
‘She’s dead and Hitler’s still alive.’
For the first time, Toshikyo’s shoulders seemed to bend, as if the weight of the thoughts in his head had become too much. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Had I been able to see Lorelei before the festival, I could have told her. We could have let the German major kill Adolf Hitler – and my wife would still be alive. I’m taking her ashes home. Our son should see them.’
Once again, Gabriel struggled with a world that attacked him with its secrets. ‘She was too young to have a baby when she left Japan?’
‘Our girls marry early. Lorelei was fourteen when I took her as my bride. Akihiro was born within the year; what we call a honeymoon baby.’
Around him, the hospital rattled and clattered. A voice called out for a nurse, another voice asked for permission to die. Gabriel was a pillar of silence. He wondered if he would ever speak again. There was to be no ending to this pain. She had a child. Another secret. More acid on his heart.