Saul made sure he had the score safely stowed, then they made their way through the forest to a small clearing. As promised, a twin-engined was waiting for them, and a few minutes later a medic helped get Imogen onboard and settled.
"Next stop, Hamburg!" the medic said brightly as the plane rumbled across the meadow and took to the air, then, he spoke to Saul: "I can't find an entrance wound. Any chance she was pregnant?"
__________________________
Harry held Sara's hand as he walked with her to the clinic, and as an evening snow fell quietly all around them he realized there was so much he wanted to say to her...yet she seemed to have been reading his mind when she pulled him close...
"You go to your Uncle Avi now, get cleaned up and talk awhile. I'm not going anywhere, and when you're ready we can talk and talk until we find the answers for us."
He held her for a long time, soaking in her radiance like a flower turning to the sun...then he turned and faced the mountain, holding her close even so...
"What is it about this place, Sara?"
She sighed, a long, hopeful sigh: "I think we found each other here. This will always be our special place."
He nodded as he turned to meet her eyes. "I love you."
"And I love you. Now...be off with you!"
He kissed her gently and he watched as she walked into the shadows, then he turned and began the short walk to the house Avi had rented for the winter.
But Harry did not see the four men who fell in behind him, and so preoccupied was he that the men followed him with ease.
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No bombs had fallen around the University, and the Schwarzwald house looked, at first glance, relatively unscathed...but a deeper examination revealed troubling damage everywhere Imogen looked.
And the first thing she noticed was the absence of her family's belongings - aside from a few paintings on walls here and there. All her possessions were gone, her parent's too: clothing, personal effects...everything. And there were uniforms hanging in her father's closet, Nazi uniforms. A high ranking officer, if she read the insignia correctly - but Saul wasn't with her now and there was no one to ask.
She walked up the stairs to her room and walked to the window that had framed so much of her life, and the view she found waiting for her wasn't really so different now. The same red tile roofs, and as there ever was...a few large ships tied up along the wharves loading and unloading the needs of the moment.
But these were ships-of-war flying the Union Jack, and all around the harbor there was evidence that real war had indeed visited Copenhagen, and more than once. She spied a warehouse with its roof a splintered jumble of charred timbers, and out beyond the middle of the harbor a small German patrol boat lay drunkenly on its side, aground on a sandbar and with black smoke still faintly streaming from yesterday's aerial attack on German positions.
The last thing her father had told her was that he would not abandon the city of his birth, and now it looked as if that was the fact of the matter. Still, she wanted...no, she needed to know the truth of his story, and - even as she stood there, framed in the light of truth - she could feel the tortured vibrations of his end throughout the house. Now completely unbidden, music began taking shape in the air all around her and, as she closed her eyes, she surrendered to the insistent force, grabbing chaos from the sky and imposing order through the chromatic notes and chords the Old Man in his Cape had taught her once upon a time.
__________________________
Harry bounced in the doorway and found Avi waiting for him by the fireplace. A small fire was burning, but not a single lamp was one - so the effect on the space was almost primitive...like he had entered a cave.
And when he saw Avi's flickering face, even standing in the dim evening gloom, he knew something was wrong.
Because, just then Avi turned to face him.
"You are an imbecile!" Avi screamed. "An impotent, self-absorbed imbecile!"
And then he saw another man sitting across the room. A hard man, twisted into windblown form by brutal experience. "I simply don't understand," this man began saying, "unless you are so truly addled you are no longer capable of thinking like a man."
"And fuck you, too," Callahan hissed.
And on hearing those words the hard man stood and walked over to Harry, and then - in a flash of hands he tossed Harry across the room.
"Fuck you?" the hard man said, his voice now a ragged, coarse whisper. "You couldn't fuck your own hand if it was all you had left in the world, you simple, stupid oaf."
Harry pulled himself up and looked at the old man, then at Avi...
And then the front door opened and in walked four men surrounded by swirling snow...
"What the hell?" Harry whispered as he looked at Frank Bullitt, then to Sam Bennett and Al Bressler, and there behind them all - was that Stacy Bennett?
© 2020 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse...[and now, a brief note on sources: I typically don't post all a story's acknowledgments until I've finished, if only because I'm not sure how many I'll need until work is finalized. Yet with current circumstances (a certain virus, not to mention a madman in the White House springing first to mind, and let's just agree right here and now to not talk about age...) so that might not be the best way to proceed; and with my thinking along these lines first in mind I'd hate to have this story stop 'unexpectedly' without some mention of sources relied on here. Of course, the primary source material in this case - so far, at least - derives from two seminal Hollywood 'cop' films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman's brilliant screenplay. Steve McQueen's grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the 'Briggs'/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay. The Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson. The Samantha Walker character derives from the Patricia Clarkson portrayal of the pivotal television reporter found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician's tour of duty in Vietnam - and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I've ever read (think Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but keep in mind that, as always, this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing historical fabric. Using the established characters referenced above, as well as a few new characters I've managed to come up with here and there, I hoped to create something new - perhaps a running commentary on the times we've shared? And the standard disclaimer also here applies: no one mentioned in this tale should be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred, though I'd be remiss to not mention Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan. Talk about the role of a lifetime...given life by an actor for the ages.]
