The Reckoning

The Reckoning`

by

James Whitesell

Copyright@2015 by JamesWhitesell

Smashwords Edition

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List of Main Characters

Minnesota:

Lake City

Mike Berg. Editor of the Lake Minnetonka Spectator and Viet Nam veteran.

Ernst Schuster. Immigrant German WWII veteran from the Sudetenland.

Angela Two Bulls. Detective in Lake City PD.

Bill Sando. Carver County and later Minnesota State Police officer.

New Ulm

Rainer Vogel. German immigrant, former POW and WWII veteran.

Fritz Kressler. A detective with the New Ulm PD.

Kurt Alois. German AfrikaKorps veteran and former POW.

Manitoba:

Connie Lame Deer. Investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police--the RCMP--and in her second career a theft control specialist with an international corporation.

Wilbur MacTavish. RCMP Constable in southern Manitoba.

Bennie Khan. Computer whizkid and Winnipeg contract IT employee with the RCMP

Jerzy Kozlak. Red River Valley farmer who immigrated from Poland.

Zoran Marić. Serbian immigrant living in southern Manitoba.

Germany:

Willi von Stegnitz. German co-worker of Connie Lame Deer and WWII survivor

Hanno Klein. Waffen SS veteran, originally from the Sudetenland.

Witbold Bachmann. Former German POW and official in the East German government Benno Lang. German infantryman in WWII and former Russian POW

Franz Bidermann. German infantry officer in WWII and former Russian POW

Lotte. WWII widow.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Mike Berg The 21st Century

Chapter 2 Southern Manitoba 1985

Chapter 3 Soldiers

Chapter 4 The Crime Scene

Chapter 5 Connie Lame Deer

Chapter 6 Germany

Chapter 7 Lotte

Chapter 8 Ox Bow Inn

Chapter 9 About the Author and Sample Chapter

Introduction

This book is fiction. The specifics are fictional. The characters are fictional. The theme is fictional. Not so the 20th Century realities that are the bedrock of this book. The biological clock has now run out for most of those who knew those realities first hand. The knowledge is not gone, though. Passed on in hushed voices to younger ears whose reactions are muted. Most would prefer these dark memories be left buried permanently deep in the past. But not all. No.

Not all.

Prelude

Some of the soldiers paused, for the briefest of moments, to peer anxiously over their shoulders at the town, trying not to think of what was about to happen. Only some. Most were consumed with survival, a handful close to panicking, with getting away as fast as they could. Only the rear guard, scrunched apprehensively behind whatever improvised cover they could find, faced the town. There would be no mere speculation for them. They could see. And they could hear.

The backs of the main body of the hastily retreating troops had not yet disappeared into the distance before it began. In the town, helpless, the soldiers’ ethnic cousins, civilians left behind, cowered before a fate most knew was even then coming over the horizon. They had all heard the stories. They knew. Some hoped it would be different. It would not. They were already coming. At first, the partisans, blood in their eyes, rape in their loins and execution lists in their hands. Following them, cautiously, came the others. Men, women, a curious child or two. By ones and twos and threes. Later, in larger numbers. Still later, soldiers in uniform.

Their motives were many. A few, just adventurous and curious. But only a few. The rest came to execute, rob, murder, plunder, rape, to dispossess and appropriate. Overarching the approaching menace was a single bitter caliginous imperative. Revenge! That was the ugly cloak enveloping them. Drenched in cancerous incendiary government propaganda and boiling with racist chauvinism, most, if not all, were propelled by an ethnic hatred about to metastasize into carnage. The rearguard, the shaky bulwark behind the retreating soldiers, heard the first of the shots. And the screams. The shots and the screams. The few soldiers who survived would never forget. The shots. And the screams. Yes. Especially those....

The screams.

The history books would later simply say that the town was ‘liberated.’

The Reckoning

Chapter 1

Mike Berg

The 21st Century

The aging Winnebago RV hit a patch of black ice and fishtailed. The gray-haired driver hardly noticed as he caught the fishtail and corrected the slide. No sweat. He was a snow and ice veteran. A lifelong Minnesnowtan, as he liked to put it. But that didn’t mean he was about to fritter away the long winters in Icicle Land after he and his wife retired.

Blizzard coming, Krissy Berg said, grinning, poking at her husband’s shoulder, hardly even noticing their fishtailing RV, looks like we got out just in time. Her mischievous expression collided with her words. Long time Minnesotans like Krissy either took the weather in stride or hit the emigrant road to the Sun Belt. The grin still holding court over a face strikingly attractive despite her corporeal journey into Social Security territory, she shot a look at her husband. Mike. Who, she was thinking, didn’t look much like the impish Swedish-Norwegian towhead she’d married close to a half century ago. Mike jokingly called himself a ‘Swedgian’ or, doing a national reverse move, a Nordish. He was no tow-headed imp anymore. Not even close. He was an old man, wrinkled and gray, with some extra poundage around his middle. Old. On the outside. But on the inside? He was still the same good natured, humorous and bright-minded curious guy. Kind of like a wine that has aged well. With, maybe, she had to admit, going a little over the edge to have a touch of the vinegary to him. Some. OK. Maybe a bit more than some. Anyhow, she still loved him. Touch of vinegar or not. And, she had absolutely no doubt, it was mutual.

They were listening to the early season blizzard warnings for their Minnesota home. A home that was receding farther away with every highway mile headed south on I-35 through the rolling lake flecked cornfield country of southern Minnesota. Mike bounced a smile back at Krissy, he was after all a Minnesota weather veteran, but a seriousness lurked behind the smile. Way back when he was still a farm kid in high school he was coming home from his part time job at the grocery store in the nearby little town of Svensholm. A town that had in later years, like so many others in the dwindling farm world, withered away into oblivion. Back when Svensholm was still a thriving small town teenaged Mike’s old clunker of a post war Plymouth, with it’s bulging rear that reminded him of a humungous turtle, ran smack into a wind driven six foot snowdrift the raging wind had piled up on County Road 6. He was stuck. No cell phones in those days. No traffic on the road. No nearby farmhouses. At least none he could see in the blizzard whiteout. The radio stations were warning people all day long that a deadly storm was barreling in from the Dakotas and to stay indoors. But teenagers are just that. Teenagers. They don’t listen and they think they are invulnerable. So Mike set out for home despite the warnings. The county snow plow found him the next morning huddled in his car. He was lucky. No serious hypothermia. No frostbite. And no more dumbass blowing off of blizzard warnings. Being stranded in a whiteout and hovering close to hypothermia was the first time Mike had felt genuine, churn-your-guts, fear. Teenage Mike from that day on had a healthy perspective on Minnesota’s winters.

My blizzard card is full, Mike said to his wife and, though chuckling, damn well meant it.

Arizona here we come! Krissy said gleefully as they crossed the state line into Iowa. Mike gave his own vigorous affirmative nod and slapped the steering wheel, uttering the penultimate Minnesota-ism.

You betcha!

Mike’s degree, he rarely mentioned it was magna cum laude, was in journalism from the well respected J School at the University of Minnesota. He’d spent his entire working life as the managing editor of a group of small town newspapers clustered around the western end of huge, sprawling Lake Minnetonka twenty miles on the afternoon side of Minneapolis. When Mike first started out as a bright-eyed and, looking back, impossibly naive, small town newspaperman in the Minnetonka town of Lake City, Minneapolis was still twenty miles away. When he retired more than forty years later the Minneapolis metropolitan area had spread--country-raised Mike dyspeptically preferred to use the word metastasized--out in all directions and gobbled up a whole bunch of small towns, Lake City included. Just as well that he had retired when he did, Mike thought with a soiled nostalgia. The eccentric old town was fast sliding into a kissing cousin of just another cookie cutter community. Kind of like the lead-in tune to the TV series, Weeds. A pair of thoughts slipped into his mind. The first was of the full frontal nude shot of the voluptuous blond who was the series lead’s BFF, which set Krissy’s somewhat conservative moral pot to simmering. The second thought took a ride to his tongue as he softly mouthed the lyrics to Weeds’ sarcastic lead-in tune written way back even before Viet Nam by cultural gadfly and social precognitive Malvina Reynolds.

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes all the same.

There’s a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

Krissy looked curiously at him as Mike’s expression went quietly sardonic. Ticky Tacky? That was a monumental world class understatement. Just like the TV series Weeds, there was a whole lot going on behind closed doors in Lake City. Ticky Tacky Lake City had its dark side. Sweet Jesus, did it ever have a dark side! And not just Lake City....

.....not by one hell of a goddamned long shot.

Chapter 2

Southern Manitoba

November 1985

Sergeant Wilbur MacTavish of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police wasn’t at his battered ancient desk in the CRMC substation. A desk, he joked to the station’s office manager, Angie, was so old the Europeans brought it with them when first popped up in the neighborhood. To which Angie, who was 1/4 Ojibwe, retorted in (probably) mock disgust. Is that the desk they used to sign away our lands to you white devils? To which Mac wisely chose to make no reply, jokingly or otherwise.

It was no worn old desk in the substation for Sergeant MacTavish on this day. He was sitting, rigidly, in the hearing room in an overheated small Provincial Court building south of Winnipeg, the fingers of his right hand drumming an unconscious impatient rhythm on the arm of a timeworn straight backed hard maple chair, waiting to testify on a burglary case, when the call came in to the CRMP substation. The ruddy, redheaded MacTavish--everyone called him Mac no matter how much he protested--was the only officer assigned to the small rural substation. The other two slots at the station were temporarily unfilled since Buzz Jakes retired and Manwell Horsten was on a temporary duty assignment in Winnipeg, The short staffed regional CRMP hadn’t so far been able to scrape up any help. MacTavish’s quiet station in the fecund farmland of southern Manitoba took last place on the list of the department’s priorities. Mac was stuck. They were cutting budgets again in Ottawa and even the CRMP wasn’t exempt.

Angie Depeux, the station’s sassy trilingual office manager--English, French and a reasonable grasp of the local dialect of Ojibwe--who herself had been knocked down from full time to part time yet nevertheless kept the understaffed place from descending into muddled disorganization--left a note about the call on MacTavish’s desk. When the sergeant got back to the station a slight smile slid onto his face as he remembered Angie’s accusatory finger waggling in his face the last time he’d lumbered absent mindedly into the station without first cleaning off his boots. He prudently stopped at the door to stomp the chunks of half frozen mud off his boots before going into the substation. The smile revisited his ruddy face when he saw Angie’s unsubtle hint. Vintage Angie. She’d taped the note onto the phone on his desk with READ! written in large block letters on the outside of the folded note. He laughed out loud. A laugh Mac needed after testifying in Provincial Court for the third time against Maggie Stensvold’s oldest boy, Adam. The cash strapped widow was struggling to make ends meet and here was her jerkoff oldest boy, who should have been helping out the family, instead being caught red handed in a burglary for the third time in less than a year. Dumbass kid was a dud at everything he did, including burglary. As the recently retired Buzz Jakes put it in his profane and colorful language the numb nuts brat would fuck up a wet dream. An observation that Mac could find zero fault with. Mac missed Buzz Jakes’ irreverent sense of humor. RCMP officers weren’t any different from any other cops. They needed humor to give them balance. Especially in the middle of the long Manitoba winters.

MacTavish pushed the feckless kid out of his mind and smiled again at Angie’s note, pulling it loose from his phone and opening it up. Trey Kozlak called, the note began, he wants you to check on his dad. Trey, the Vancouver BC dwelling son of an elderly local farmer, Jerzy Kozlak, told Angie that he was worried. Trey’s dad hadn’t answered his phone or returned his calls for the last three days. They didn’t talk often and it was very unlike his father not to return his calls. Trey left unsaid that he and his father had never been close. Trey always called his father on his birthday and fulfilled his filial duties with a brief and superficial chat. Which was more than enough for his distant and not very fatherly dad. Jerzy was a hell of a lot more interested in ice hockey than his kids, being locally famous for his passion for Canadian hockey, from local peewees on up to the pros and, especially, the Olympics.

It isn’t like him not to return my calls on his birthday. Trey had said to Angie over the phone from his home in Vancouver. It’s kind of like a tradition. I call him on his birthday. He calls me on mine. He’s never missed it before. A touch more urgency visited his voice. I think something’s wrong. Could you check it out?

Consider it done, Trey, Angie said in a calm voice, knowing from past experience not to excite an already worried family member. And we’ll let you know what we find out. Immediately. And she meant it, though she knew enough about Trey Kozlak to suspect his mind might be as much on his inheritance from the fertile--and valuable--farmland Jerzy owned as from any deeply felt filial concern, To say the Kozlak family was close knit was like saying Manitoba didn’t have badass winters. Besides which Angie’s son Jacques went to school with Trey and early on concluded that he was a ...first class asshole.

There was no missing Angie’s implicit admonition. He was on the phone to Jerzy Kozlak’s place within a couple of minutes. He tried several times. No answer. Mac sighed, knowing he would have to drive out to Kozlak’s farm and check up on him. Memories of grim past experience with similar situations settled over him. He might have an unpleasant day ahead of him.

It wouldn’t be the first time he went on a health and welfare call on a solitary senior citizen and found an age wizened body finally gone to eternal rest. Must have been six or eight of them over the years. If it was in the heat of midsummer, and the person had been dead a few days, it was Mac’s absolutely least favorite part of his crazy quilt puzzle of an occupation. One that already had more than its share of unpleasant pieces. He was hoping Kozlak wasn’t one of newly departed. He wasn’t fond of the old man, Jerzy was a dour and distant personality, but like almost every single person in the CRMP and a whole lot of other Canadians, Mac deeply respected those rugged star crossed souls who had survived the Biblical scale Armageddon of WWII Europe, started over again in distant, alien Canada and built a successful life in the new world.

Sergeant MacTavish went outside, stopping to zipper up his jacket against the beads of icy snow the brisk wind was flicking at him, and climbed into his Canadian Ford CRMP squad car. He drove the fifteen miles to Kozlak’s three hundred acre wheat and potato farm plunked on top of the rich flood plain soils of ancient glacial Lake Agassiz. The pancake flat countryside’s flood plain history wasn’t just ancient. It was also the contemporary flood plain of the Red River of the North, a sluggish little north flowing river that had the nasty habit of engorging itself on spring runoff from the south, blocking the runoff with winter ice and regularly flooding the open countryside between the border and Winnipeg. Mac’s father, who was a CRMP officer himself back then, often talked about the catastrophic flooding in Winnipeg during the great flood of 1950. The flood waters had hardly receded before the political wheels were set in motion that resulted in the massive Red River flood control project that was at the time the largest public earth moving project in the entire world.

Go figure, Mac muttered, unconsciously talking to himself as he drove. The goddamn largest earth moving project in the entire world at that time. Right here on the muddy little Red River in boondocks Manitoba. Strange or not, the project proved its worth. Over and over. Then, as often happened with subjects with a musical connection, the ruminations about the Red River set the musical side of Mac--his mother was always singing folk songs when he was a kid--into humming and singing the old song about the Red River. Never mind that it was about the Red River of Texas, not Manitoba.

From this valley they say you are going, Mac sang softly. Then he caught himself. Mac was in no mood to finish singing the tune. He just might be heading into an all too real situation where someone had left the Red River Valley. That someone being Jerzy Kozlak. And a move that was as permanent as it gets.

Mac was chewing over that not so pleasant idea as he pulled into the packed dirt driveway leading into the Kozlak farm. The driveway entrance was easy to spot, even from a mile away. Kozlak planted a double line of poplars along his driveway years earlier and the trees had grown to well over thirty feet tall. The November frosts had hardened the wet dirt of the driveway after the autumn rains fizzled out. There were no other tire marks in the driveway as MacTavish’s Ford crunched noisily over a light snowfall that had melted and refrozen into chunks of ice as he drove towards Jerzy Kozlak’s house. It was a sturdily built late 1800’s gabled brick Victorian era house that was on the farm when Kozlak managed to scrape up enough money to make the down payment. Jerzy liked the patina of time and place to the house. Though very different in style, it reminded him of the ancient buildings in the Polish village of his distant youth. Rather than tear the old house down, as so many native Canadians and Americans to the south might have done to build more efficient living machines, he fixed it up, planted bushes, pruned and nourished the old farm’s orchard of fruit and nut trees. North of the house Kozlak also planted windbreaks of sturdy evergreen jack pines to break the winter gales and nagging persistent winds of the late autumn and early spring as the competing gods of nature crossed their climactic swords warring over seasonal dominance. Kozlak might have been a distant and dour human being, Mac thought as he drove towards the house, but he had to admit the guy had a knack for green growing things and wildlife. Which Mac had, too--when he had the time.

Because of all the trees and other ground cover that Kozlak nurtured, the place was a haven for wildlife. As a synchronous natural punctuation to that fact, a pair of ringneck pheasants scampered across the driveway in front of Mac’s government Ford and disappeared into the stubble of a field. There were always birds fluttering about the Kozlak farm, no matter what the season. For Kozlak--the kids all left as soon as they finished high school and rarely if ever came back--it was a comfortable place to live and he remained in it after the kids were long gone. His wife, Myrna, was gone, too. Not to death. She left him soon after the kids were gone, moved to Winnipeg and filed for divorce. She never told anyone why, and it was long a subject of local whispered conjecturing. The most common conclusion was that Jerzy was an autocratic jerk and Myrna only stuck around until the kids were raised. Mac thought that opinion a pretty good bet. Anyhow, Jerzy was still in the house. Even in retirement, with most of his land leased to younger--or at least more energetic and/or desperately struggling--neighboring farmers, he stayed in the old house. It was home for what was left of his life. He cherished it as though it were his family. And maybe, when Mac thought about, it was.

And that is what struck MacTavish when he drove up to the house. The three inch snowfall three days ago hadn’t been shoveled off the steps. The warming sun had softened it, then the slush froze into glistening irregular clumps of ice when the temperature dropped again. MacTavish’s heart sank. This was not like Jerzy Kozlak. This was not good. No. Not good at all. Dreading what he was thinking he was likely going to find, but still trying to hope for the best, Mac unlimbered his powerful six foot frame out of the Ford and gingerly climbed up the icy stoop and knocked on the door. Nothing. He knocked again. Still no answer. He called out Kozlak’s name. Still nothing. He tried the door. Locked. He tried knocking again, harder, harder still, then grown anxious and a touch incautious, with increasingly heavy blows on the solid door, losing his footing on the icy stoop and having to grab onto the wrought iron railing to keep from falling. There was no noise, no sign of movement, from inside the house. Nothing.

He retraced his steps and headed around the house to the rear door, his boots making a crunching sound on the melted snow refrozen into chunks of ice much as the Ford’s tires had on the driveway. He knocked and yelled again. No answer. He tried the rear door. Also locked. Mac circled the house, peering into all the windows on the ground floor and saw only his own reflection staring back at him. A face much older, and more melancholy, than the youthful one that had found his first dead senior citizen back in his rookie year in the CRMP. No sign of Jerzy Kozlak. Sighing with a veteran weariness at the mental picture of what he was now almost certain he was going to find, Mac took a chunk of oak from a woodpile stacked against the side of the house and broke a window pane in the back door. Easy enough to replace if Kozlak turned out to be OK after all.

Mac reached inside, unlocked the door and pushed it open, stepping inside over the shards of broken glass into the kitchen. This was a long way from being a favorite part of his job. One hell of a long way. The part he disliked most was having to break the news to the dead person’s family. Some took it hard. Others, far too many in Mac’s mind, didn’t seem to really give a damn one way or the other. Modern Canada, he thought as an unconscious grimace marched across his face.

The sergeant glanced around him. An old fashioned kitchen. Antique scarred oak table and well worn chairs in the center of the room. No tablecloth. Probably hadn’t been one since his wife left. Four burner propane gas stove at least thirty years old. Ancient refrigerator. Rows of age darkened but sturdily built pine cabinets. The place was warm. Almost hot. Kozlak liked it that way, remarking one winter day years ago at the nearby town’s Voyageur Inn to Mac that as a kid in Poland he was always freezing his ass off in their drafty impoverished home and wasn’t about to revisit those miserable times in his Canadian home. So he kept the house as warm as he could stand and to hell with the propane bill.

Mac continued to scan the kitchen. There were clean dishes in a draining rack next to the sink. Kozlak was not one to leave dirty dishes lying around. The kitchen was tidy. Well ordered. No clues as to what had happened. MacTavish walked through a kitchen door into the living room. The sergeant knew that Kozlak usually had a fire in the fireplace even though he heated the house with a gas furnace. In his retirement he liked to sit by the fire and read, often while he listened to hockey games on the radio. No fire. He bent closer to the fireplace. Not even any ashes. Kozlak must have cleaned out the ashes. But how long ago?

Mr. Kozlak! He yelled out. "Jerzy!