Free The German by Lee Thomas

produce an ironclad solution, she had been there to laugh at his bad jokes and whisper encouragement in his ear. He wondered what she’d make of a case like this one.
    The whole thing left a heavy rotten lump in his stomach. He’d seen his share of death, both accidental and planned down to the second – gunshot wounds, knife wounds, poisonings, even a young woman who’d met the angry side of an axe – but this business with Harold Ashton was unlike anything he’d witnessed. Doc Randolph had gone a good ways towards undermining Tom’s confidence by spouting off about that Fish character, acting like some small city Sherlock Holmes and treating Tom with no more respect than he’d show a dense ward. And what good did the information do him? Was he supposed to strip every German down to the skin and see if he’d been jabbing his privates with pins?
    Gazing through the window, Tom shook his head. Where did monsters like that come from? Was it really just a sickness or something more sinister?
    Over the years, he’d watched the power lines go up all over Barnard and as a boy he’d marveled at the endless, steady light the electric bulbs cast through living-room windows. He’d seen the dirt tracks leading in and out of town fall beneath smooth bands of concrete as great veins of road began to spread through the state, and soon after he’d witnessed the laying of the sidewalks which kept his pant cuffs from getting muddy, but scuffed his shoes if he wasn’t careful with the curb, and cars replaced horses, and refrigerators replaced iceboxes. Telephones in every home. Radios sending him the beautiful voice of a woman in New York, singing with an orchestra. He’d seen so many things change, and he couldn’t help but wonder if man was changing, too.
    A board creaked behind him and Tom turned away from the window. Estella stood in the doorway, chin against her chest, peering at Tom through her eyelashes. He waved her into the room and turned out the lamp.
     
     

Six: Tim Randall
     
    All I knew of the war came from newsreels, movies and radio broadcasts, but the scope of the conflict never really struck me. I knew my daddy was in Europe. All spring, letters had been coming in, and Ma let me keep the stamps along with the small notes Daddy sent along, specifically for me. If he wrote about the war, he did so in the letters Ma kept, and she almost never read me passages from those notes. She’d tell me where Daddy was currently stationed and that he was just fine. His notes to me were always the same. I kept them in a metal box on my dresser. In late June Ma received a letter, the longest one yet, but the scrap of paper – Daddy’s note to me – like a piece of fat ticker tape, was no different than a dozen others:
    We’re giving them a good run, Timmy. Be sure to behave yourself and mind your mother. Your father, Fred Randall.
    I imagined when he returned he’d have a thousand stories to tell, and he’d share them while we fished in the lake or went hunting for wild pigs up north. Before his leaving, these had been quiet excursions with little said between father and son, but he wouldn’t keep the war to himself. I felt certain of that.
     
     

Seven: The German
     
    July 1, 1944 – Translated from the German
    The anniversary.
    My face looks no older, but perhaps the fault lies in the mirror. Age is a slow infection working on skin and muscle imperceptibly until one is irrevocably stricken, and the mirror is an easily misread instrument. If I had a photograph of myself from all of those years ago, then perhaps I could refute this strange conviction, but I have no such picture and no one familiar to whom I might pose such a bizarre question. All I have is the mirror and it shows me the same face another did in Bad Wiessee, only the day before the passing.
    I have nothing of my previous life but the scars and memories: not entirely trustworthy.
    Once the coffee is on the boil, I walk to the front door and pull it