“A pass?” Jess asked, brow furrowed. “Can you show me?” No such pass existed, as far as she knew.

The woman, who was pretty—blonde, blue-eyed, shapely, about sixteen—went off to get her pass. She held it out to Jess.

As Jess read the words, she wanted to be sick. To whom it may concern, you are now looking at the best piece in Germany.

The girl didn’t have a word of English and she obviously had no idea what it said or that any American soldier she showed it to might well do…what?

“Did the man who gave you this…” Jess faltered. “Was he kind? Or did he hurt you?”

“The Americans saved us,” the girl said simply.

They can take anything they want. The unsaid words sparked like a flashbulb providing an illumination neither Jess nor the girl desired.

What to do except photograph both the girl and the note, to write it all down, to save it for the piece Jess still hadn’t written. The piece that taunted Jess for her cowardice. The piece that made her as craven as any Nazi.

She drove furiously back into Munich, stopping at headquarters on Prinzregentenplatz, where Jennings let her have a desk and didn’t ask her why she wanted to write the story there instead of at the press camp. Dan found her just as she’d finished. She showed him what she’d written.

Dan sighed as he read her words. “A woman came to headquarters this morning and asked me if she had the right to refuse a soldier who wanted her daughters.”

Jess’s mouth fell open.

“I told her that of course she had the right,” Dan continued. “So she asked to have her complaint recorded: two soldiers entered her apartment last night and told her they were going to amuse themselves with her daughters. She wanted to throw them out but they had guns and she didn’t know if it was perhaps a new rule, that the soldiers could do what they wanted. I took down what she said and passed the complaint on to Major Thompson, CO of the company I thought the men were from.”

“And?” Jess whispered, fearing what he would say next.

“Major Thompson handed it back to me. He’s not in my battalion and therefore not my subordinate, so there was nothing more I could do. Of course I told his CO as well but I expect Thompson has picked up his habits from his commanding officer.”

They stared at one another, words having become meaningless in this exchange of horrors about which nothing could be done. Dan stroked her cheek. “Let’s get something to eat,” he said.

On the way into town, Jess had to slow down for a group of British Auxiliary Territorial Service girls, most likely newly arrived given the way they were standing on the street, pointing at the Frauenkirche as if they were tourists on a holiday. Jess envied their laughter; that Munich had an air of spectacle about it, that they did not understand what lay beneath the smoking ruins.