And then Spruance breathed out. He nodded, a movement so slight it could have easily been missed.

“This is going to be a hell a thing to sort out,” he said quietly.

Kolhammer put out his hand.

“It’ll go a lot easier if we work together.”

They shook on it. Warily.

Chapter 17

17

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0612 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

Later, as the survivors of the combined task forces steamed back toward Hawaii, Kolhammer sat alone, in silence, staring at the flatscreen on his stateroom wall. It displayed an image of his home in Santa Monica, with his wife, Marie, in gardening gloves, attacking a dense wall of agapanthus. Lucy, their black Labrador, lay under a eucalyptus, sheltering from the sun.

As Kolhammer gazed at the scene his throat grew tight and two tears squeezed out like hard little bullets of grief, tracked down his freckled face.

“I’m sorry Marie,” he whispered to her. “I promised to come home and now . . . I just don’t know.”

He stared a while longer, then reached for the control stick and thumbed through a series of flawlessly reproduced images. More garden shots. A picture of Marie and Lucy on the old couch in the sunroom. A few pictures of their son, Jed, killed off Taiwan. No grandchildren, sadly. But a few much-loved great-nephews and -nieces. And other family portraits, becoming stiffer and more formal as they moved back through the years, tracing the Kolhammer family journey from the German city of Magdeburg in 1934 to the New World, and then west across the continent. Following a trail laid down by generations of the damned.

Kolhammer froze the slide show on a sepia-toned studio image of his great-uncle Hans and great-aunt Hilda. The photograph had been torn before being digitized long ago, and Kolhammer had asked the image bureau to leave the imperfection as it was. He liked it that way. Family photographs, he firmly believed, should be weathered and a little damaged by age and handling. It was proof of one generation handing on history to the next.

He stared at the portrait of Hans and Hilda, peering into the hollow space around their eyes. Knowing and yet not really understanding what misery and horror danced slowly in there. The photo had been taken in New York in 1952, but both were still draped in heavy European clothes. Kolhammer accepted that the long sleeves weren’t simply an expression of émigré formality. He remembered spending many hours with his great-uncle as a boy. And he knew that under the heavy serge suit was a tattoo of which Hans was unspeakably ashamed. It had been burned there by a minor functionary of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and it marked him as a survivor of the Final Solution.