Now Jody was taking a crash course in the chaos that had engulfed the world. She hated to read; TV Guide articles lost her halfway through. Yet she'd been mesmerized by the script of the American/German coproduction. It wasn't just ships and guns, as she'd feared. It was about people. From it, she learned about the hundreds of thousands of sailors who'd served on the icy waters of the Arctic, and the tens of thousands of sailors who'd drowned there. She learned about Tirpitz's sister ship the Bismarck, "the terror of the seas." She learned that factories, based on Long Island, had played a large, proud role in building warplanes for the Allies. She learned that many soldiers had been people no older than her boyfriend, and they'd been just as scared as Dennis would have been.

And since she'd come to the set, Jody had seen that powerful script come to life.

Today, by a cottage in Garbsen, outside Hanover, she had watched the cast film scenes in which a disgraced former SA officer leaves his family to exonerate himself on the German battleship. She had seen the gripping special effects footage of the attack by RAF Lancasters that had capsized the battleship in Tromsofjord, Norway, in 1944, entombing one thousand crew members. And here, in the prop trailer, she had touched actual pieces of the war.

Jody still found it difficult to believe that such madness had taken place, even though the evidence was spread on the tables before her. It was an unprecedented array of vintage medals, lanyards, gorgets, cuff-titles, weapons, and memorabilia on loan from private collectors in Europe and the United States. On the shelves were carefully preserved, leather-bound maps, military books, and fountain pens from the library of General-feldmarschall von Harbou, on loan from his son. In a file box in the closet were photographs of the Tirpitz taken by reconnaissance aircraft and midget submarines. And in a Plexiglass case was a fragment of one of the twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs that had hit the ship. The rusted, six-inch shard was going to be used as a background image for the closing credits crawl.

Oil could stain the relics, so the tall, slender brunette wiped her hands on her School of Visual Arts sweatshirt before picking up the authentic Sturmabteilung dagger she'd come for. Her large, dark eyes shifted from the silver-tipped brown metal sheath to the brown hilt. In a circle near the top were the silver letters SA. Below them were a German eagle and a swastika. Because of the tight fit, she slowly withdrew the nine-inch weapon and examined it.

It was heavy and horrible. Jody wondered how many lives it had ended. How many wives it had widowed. How many mothers had cried because of it.