Goldengirl

‘They were extremely helpful. Some of the records had been destroyed by the SS in the last hours before the Allied occupation, but I was able to consult a catalogue of the names of officers, and compare them with my list of pentathletes. Eventually, I had eliminated every name but two: a Manfred Schmidt and a Wolfgang Meyer. Either or both could have been pure coincidence; the names are really quite common in Germany, and the SS catalogue was like a telephone directory. Schmidt was listed as a captain, Meyer a colonel. I was permitted to examine the dossiers for both, including the RuSHA R-card, on which assessments of physique, racial origin and personality are recorded. Schmidt’s I put aside after scanning it quickly; if I can recollect it now, he was born in 1918, whereas my Manfred Schmidt had competed for Germany against Sweden in 1934, which would have made him only sixteen at the time — practically impossible in an event requiring such versatility. But as soon as I opened Meyer’s file I noticed that he was born in 1910 and had died before the war’s end, on a date of considerable significance: February 14, 1945.’ Serafin stopped, raising his eyebrows for some reaction from his listeners.

‘St. Valentine’s day?’ Valenti thoughtfully suggested.

‘True — a fact that had not occurred to me,’ said Serafin, without enthusiasm. ‘It lends a certain irony to the story, if that is what you had in mind. No, gentlemen, February 14, 1945, was the date of the British RAF bombing which devastated the city of Dresden, killing at least 35,000 people, among them, if what Gretchen had heard was true, her SS captain. Wolfgang Meyer had attained the rank of colonel, but it was quite possible that in the five years since that weekend in Bavaria he had been promoted to colonel. So I studied the document with gathering excitement, and there, below his personal data and photograph, was the detail that confirmed the story I had heard: Gretchen’s name, and beside it the date: November 12, 1939. In different writing someone had added another date, August 10, 1940, and the letter ‘W,’ for Weib, the German word for female.

‘I looked at Colonel Meyer’s picture with interest. He was very close to the Aryan ideal — fair-haired, with a high forehead, light eye-brows and strong features, a sufficiently handsome face to impress any girl meeting him for the first time. I could almost have understood Gretchen’s hero worship of the man if I had not also noticed the names of five other women on the R-card, with dates beside them. It seems the colonel sired three female children and two males to the glory of the Third Reich. One copulation had been unproductive; even the SS could not guarantee total success in such activities. I felt only revulsion when I looked at the photograph again.

‘After my thesis was accepted by the university in the spring of 1964, I returned to the States. There was a tremendous backlog to attend to in my work, as you will appreciate, quite apart from the claims of my wife, who was a doctor and had been busy enough in my absence, but had a right to some of my time now I was home. One way and another, it wasn’t until midsummer that I got around to thinking about Gretchen and her daughter again. The story still intrigued me, though, and one afternoon in August, I drove to Santa Barbara and tried to trace them. I began by looking for the name in the phone book. It wasn’t there, so I tried the Chamber of Commerce in East Carrillo Street, where they produced a directory of the kind used for mailing sales literature. Again I drew a blank. I went to the City Library, where they got out an electoral roll for me to look at, but still no luck. That night as I drove home along the Cuyama Valley, I resolved to forget the whole thing.’

‘But you didn’t, eh, Doc?’ said Valenti with a knowing dip of the head.

‘It was pure chance that brought the issue to life again,’ said Serafin. ‘Two months went by, and one Sunday evening in October, while my wife was watching something that didn’t interest me on TV, I was thumbing absently through an old copy of Time. A feature about the safety standards of bathing beaches caught my attention. I don’t know why — the subject wouldn’t interest me nine times out of ten. Well, this piece drew attention to the havoc a freak wave can sometimes cause on an apparently safe beach. In particular, it mentioned an incident the previous May on Huntington State Beach, Los Angeles. On a placid Saturday afternoon when the surfers were complaining that the sea was too calm to ride, a huge breaker rose up from the sea in seconds and ripped along the beach, carrying numerous bathers, including children, out of their depth in its undertow. The lifeguards did their best, but five people lost their lives, including a young airline stewardess who had gone to the rescue of her two-year-old daughter. The lifeguards picked the child up, but the mother was drowned.’

‘Trudi?’ said Dryden.