Voices of the dead

Harry went to the gun range on Grand River. Took the.357 Mag out of his pocket and pushed in his earplugs. He held the revolver with two hands. Fired six rounds at a paper target from thirty feet, putting all of the shots, perfect cylindrical holes, where he wanted them, mid-chest on the black outline of a man. Reloaded and did it again.

After, he went to his office where he hadn’t been for almost two weeks, sat at his desk, shuffled through the mail, opened a letter from the IRS. According to their audit findings, S amp;H Recycling Metals underpaid on its 1970 Federal Tax return and owed $17,500, payment due by September 15, 1971. Harry paid all the bills and signed a dozen blank checks. Picked up the phone and told Phyllis to come in.

She knocked on his door and opened it. “Need something, Harry?”

“Sit down,” Harry said.

She sat in a chair across from his desk.

“I’m going to take some time off.”

“Harry, you just got back.”

“I’ll be gone for a while, couple weeks, a month.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Phyllis said, “where’re you going?”

“I’ll call you when I get there,” Harry said. He handed her the checks he’d just signed. “Keep these in the safe till you need them. There’s also plenty of cash, sixty grand. Don’t take it and run off to South America.”

Phyllis gave him a dirty look. “Harry, I wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m kidding.”

Harry called Pan Am and booked a flight to Munich with a stopover in London. He called the Free Press and told them not to deliver the paper till further notice. Called his niece, Franny, and asked her to bring in the mail and water the plants while he was away. He’d left two hundred dollars and a key to the house for her in an envelope in the garage.

Upstairs, Harry put his American Tourister suitcase on the bed, the one that had been tested by a four-hundred-pound gorilla in a TV ad. He folded clothes and fit them in. Grabbed his shaving kit from the bathroom. When he was finished he went to the desk, opened a drawer and took out a dog-eared, sepia-tone photograph of him posing with his parents in front of their house on Sendlinger Strasse. Harry in a wool cap, standing between his parents in stylish hats and overcoats. He’d turned thirteen a few weeks before, on October 7, 1941.

He slipped the photo in his passport and put it in the inside pocket of his sport coat. He closed the suitcase and took it downstairs. Turned on a light in the foyer, walked into the den and stood at the window. An airport shuttle pulled up in front and drove him to Metro.

He picked up his boarding pass at the gate in the international terminal. Flew first class to London on a 747, had a couple drinks upstairs in the bar, and a filet and baked potato at his seat. He slept for a couple hours, arriving at Heathrow at 8:36 in the morning. He had a two-hour layover, and took a Lufthansa flight from London to Munich, arriving at 12:17.

Harry took a taxi from the airport to the Bayerischer Hof hotel on Promenadeplatz, seeing Munich for the first time in thirty years, the snow-capped peaks of the Bavarian Alps on the horizon, perfect blue-sky fall day. Stomach knotted up, feeling strange, a lot of memories. Half expected to see Nazis on the streets. The city looked different, bigger and more modern on the outskirts but when he got to Altstadt it was much the same as he remembered it.

He checked in and went to his room and stood at the window, looking out at the twin onion-domed spires of the Frauenkirche cathedral and the Neues Rathaus in Marienplatz, and he felt like he was home.

At 1:45 Harry walked out of the hotel toward the Frauenkirche, crossed Frauenplatz to Kaufingerstrasse, saw the Renaissance tower of Peterkirche and the red tile roof of the Alter Hof, and there gliding over the rooftops was a silver Zeppelin that said HESS AG in black letters on the side. It was as if Hess knew he’d arrived and was following him, watching him.

Harry went left to Marienplatz and stood in front of the Glockenspiel, looking up at the mechanical figures, thinking about coming here on weekends with his father, standing in the same place, watching the figures doing the Coopers’ Dance.

He stopped at a cafe and had bratwurst and a beer. Then he walked down Sendlinger Strasse, past the Asamkirche to his old neighborhood, the silver Zeppelin hovering over him, moving southwest.

He found his house and took out the photo. By rights Harry now owned the building, not that he was going to try to get it back. The ground-floor space that had been a pharmacy thirty years ago was now an antique shop. He thought about the last time he’d been here, getting his fake ID, and leaving his parents under the floor in the bedroom closet, assumed they were still there.