Both Ends

By Mark Moorstein

Jim Beide served in Vietnam as an intelligence officer despite his dislike of the war. Compelled to shoot a Viet Cong prisoner, he carries his guilt through an international law practice, a difficult marriage, and his love for a Polish woman who shares her own difficulties.

Beide takes a land-grabbing case in Keasia on behalf of villagers and in the resolution of the case, entwines himself with the leader of a revolution against the dictator of Keasia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667871608

Book preview

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To Beau, my handsome Airedale, who is chasing something up in the sky

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Moorstein

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed Attention: Permissions at [e-mail].

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Print ISBN: 978-1-66787-159-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66787-160-8

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First Edition

Acknowledgments

Writers, among others, spend their lives examining the human condition. After devising many manuscripts, some successfully and some not, this effort called, Both Ends has engaged me for a number of years. It began with the encouragement of a few friends who suggested that I write about the two difficult ends of the human condition – i.e. the randomness of life, and the randomness of death. War and disease remain prolific killers of humans, and both pervade human existence. The metaphor of Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War, and the consequences they imposed on the lives and deaths of Americans, as well as those we Americans fought, remain constant narratives for my generation. I didn’t serve in Vietnam, although many of my close friends did, and through them, I learned how grueling war and the aftermath were, especially for those soldiers who faced combat. It was equally as difficult for the local people of Southeast Asia, who not only had to heal but had to establish new systems of order. Democracy was never easy for anyone. For Southeast Asians, American-style democracy is unnatural, especially after experiencing a hundred different varieties of government imposed by any number of invaders. But as Jim Beide learned, the struggle for freedom is worth the burden. The issue for him, and for all of us, is who must push the rock up the mountain.

I spent a great deal of time working on land-grabbing issues affecting Cambodia, and through those efforts, I developed some small understanding of the conflicts villagers faced when attempting to recover their land after the Khmer Rouge displaced them. In learning about them, I also uncovered the complex efforts of various entities, public and private, who tried to make sense of land use policies for farming and development. The fictitious country of Keasia isn’t Cambodia, but it represents some of the conflicts and dynamics of Cambodia.

Because of the insights the Khmer people provided, I express my admiration for their unceasing and uncomplaining efforts to improve their lives, particularly in the face of oppression, past genocide, and the current dictatorial government. I specifically thank transplanted Cambodians here in the US, especially Sarada Taing and Hassan (Ted) Kasem of Cambodia Daily who provide truth to Southeast Asia through their broadcasts, and who personally have honed and re-honed my comprehension of Southeast Asia – and who have taken an interest in my other books, including, War Jazz, that specifically did cover events in Cambodia.

With regard to assisting me in the writing process, I want to thank Canadian writer Kim Tait, who read through my manuscript and provided great comments and encouragement. Also, I appreciate the wit of Karen Knab, who has written extensively about Eleanor of Aquitaine, and who inspired some of the repartee in the book. Of course, I have to thank my wife, Susy, a theater artist, who listened to my passages and critiqued and improved the pacing, the relevance, and the descriptions. In addition, Nadia Rendak, close friend, international lawyer, and an incredibly insightful interpreter of international politics, read through my drafts, and helped me edit and cut the story to its essence.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the writers of the various fair use quotes, including the rock group Kansas for Dust in the Wind, the Rolling Stones for Honkey Tonk Women, and C.P. Cavafy for his poem, Itaka.

In addition, I need to acknowledge the many people in my life whose souls I have appropriated to construct my characters, including my friends, relatives, colleagues, and former neighbors. There are no real characters in the book, save for a few historical ones, but all of the imaginary ones came alive in my head as I wrote and rewrote their actions and thoughts. So I want to thank them as well.

Finally, I must thank my last Airedale, Beauregard, who inspired the dog Stonewall in the book. Susy and I have had four Airedales, and a collection of rescues. All were great dogs – but Beau was special, the most perfect dog ever. He only spent one life on earth, but he deserved nineteen, and wherever he’s roaming in the great beyond, I send him my eternal love and gratitude.

Also by Mark Moorstein

Red Reflections

Frameworks: Conflict in Balance

The Perfect President

Super Aging: The Moral Dangers of Seeking Immortality

War Jazz

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 1

Keasia, Southeast Asia, 2014

Beide surveyed the ground as he surveyed his life. Perched on the right seat of the Cessna 172, he viewed each section a thousand feet below as distinct, yet tied by lines and intersections, rivers and bridges, roads and fields. Beide was dying. He feared death, especially with Krysta so close. Death was innate and intimate — he felt the terror for Krysta, everyone he loved, and then himself. But life went on and he had to suppress his dread.

As he flew, Teng fidgeted like a caged animal in the back seat next to Krysta. Beide was amazed that Teng nearly had pulled off his revolution. He smiled ever so slightly. Revolutions, Teng often said, are bonfires that begin with a spark.

Mr. Dinh, the pilot, expected hostile forces, but the evening sky with its softening light remained peaceful. When they reached the confluence of streams and borders near Cua Khau Bo Y the sun hovered above the silhouetted horizon like a big auburn ball. Mr. Dinh shut off his nav lights while he combed the jungle. Beide located the old strip, barely a thousand feet long, with tangled shrubs blocking any reasonable landing. We can’t set down there, Beide declared. If we don’t kill ourselves, you’ll never take off again. Mr. Dinh circled in search of suitable spots — but the low-flying bird attracted attention. The nearby villagers — the very inhabitants of Dong Setay Beide represented in his land-grabbing negotiations — cleared a stretch of dirt road. Can you land there? Beide recognized features near the settlement. He studied the fields overtaken by Maxoprene, and the villagers who now worked them.

We are too far from the meeting site, and too close to the border police, Mr. Dinh replied. If they find us, Gaelic will not. The road is too hilly and crooked. I can cross the border, but the Vietnamese will arrest us — and our work to stop Atla will halt. Each choice is bad.

As they orbited over the jungle, a metallic clink echoed through the cabin and Mr. Dinh slumped, pulling the controls into a sharp right turn toward the ground. Beide grabbed the yoke as Teng reached for Mr. Dinh from behind. Blood! Krysta shouted. Beide turned the plane from the road and headed toward the old strip. Mr. Dinh didn’t flicker a dark eye as Teng shook him and spoke in Keasian.

I’ll put down this thing, Beide promised. I’ve landed under worse conditions.

Chapter 2

Virginia, 2013

Dr. Tabib diagnosed lymphocytic leukemia. It’s probably indolent, he explained, meaning it could fester for years. Beide’s white blood count had risen from 12 to 14 and then to 16. Buck up, Jim, the doctor told him, at least no one’s shooting at you.

Before Beide drove the few miles from his Tysons Corner law office, he guessed at his disease through a jumble of numbers posted online. He remained calm when the doctor delivered the details — he had faced death before. He learned the poker of terror in Vietnam better than he thought: only his steel-blue eyes registered any reaction. A decade younger than Beide, Dr. Tabib reviewed the blood counts like a lab scientist. How do you handle this so coolly? Beide asked him.

I don’t. Death is part of life. How will you handle it?

I don’t know. I’m not good with emotions.

I’ll text you the name of a grief counselor. She’ll help you.

Beide left Dr. Tabib’s office beholding his body as a bank of deposited and withdrawn chemicals — a wrinkled receipt wrapped in a white folder more akin to a charcoaled hot dog. Shelf life was all anyone had. His body had unraveled sensations — jazz, skiing and biking, flights into the sunrise and sundown, gut-juggling laughter, crazy family, animals, memories — that would scatter like dust.

As he returned to his Tysons office, Beide conjured Boris Pasternak’s words that we are the guests of existence, travelers between two stations. Both ends, he thought. Life spawned his deepest awe. But so did death, which he believed, despite his trepidation, had strengthened the species. Death was a power God granted to every creature except himself, but it was no friend. What meaning was an existence that drained away like water after a storm?

Beide felt well — ill-health agitated him more than the Ds on his daughter’s report cards ever had. But he didn’t expect the big C. When he gaped at his pate while shaving, his dark hair erased a good bit of age — and Dak, his ex-wife, claimed he gave gray hair rather than got it. At six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with eyes that saw clearly, he still possessed some of what his childhood nanny called his pretty self. Dak also had been fetching — a tall, dark-haired half-Sioux, half-Irish, half-neurotic. She compared people to his old pickup truck: they ran well for the first fifty or sixty thousand miles and then broke down part by part. His nanny, who soon would turn a century, intuited Pasternak’s advice: Boy, live forever even if you can’t — what’s life but the time between landing on this good earth and leaving it? The ominous boulders he strained to hoist on his journey struck him more forcefully than the come-on he once deflected from a three-hundred-pound Reeperbahn queen.

Beide considered his roost in the rich post-World War II period, the Cold War, beyond the end of history into terrorism, the explosion of cyber-technology. As Dak repeated in praise and jest, he had shaken everyone’s hands and some still were shaking. He had survived Vietnam; the pity embedded in the self-destruction of Artus; the gut-wrenching sorrow of sister Reggie’s early death; the inconsolable loss to Krysta and him of their unborn son; and violence and accidents that caused premature exits. Death set off grief and suffering; but yes, life still went on.

Beide stole through the hallways at his law firm, ignoring staff and colleagues. On the internet portal Dr. Tabib set up, Beide focused on an algorithm that marked his stage of leukemia. He would die — in the end, he was just flesh and blood like everyone else. He briefly gazed at Jerzy Kosinski’s book, The Painted Bird, about a winged creature in search of its flock, only to suffer alienation from its own kind. Stonewall, his faithful and kind forty-year-old dog with nineteen lives, never searched for such validation — by birthright, he possessed an identity. Beide’s senses flickered to the rhythm of his errant desk light as he recalled soldiers in Vietnam facing an implacable enemy, imagined stoic prisoners nearing execution, diffident Jews marching to Nazi burial pits. They too comprehended the obdurate pull of fate. He had killed in war, furthered the demise of others, and felt the weight of surviving at their expense. In the face of proximate death, every event, movement, plan, and thought presumed existence — a continuum. Even bodies revealed a soul to the living. But to the dead, nothing mattered. Life and death were locked in a dance of light and shadows — specular, staccato, often quiet, sometimes outlined in fire.

Chapter 3

The morning brought warm autumn weather and a free day. Beide drove to Manassas Airport with Stonewall who wagged his tail and stuck his furry brownish head out of the roll-down window of the pick-up truck. Beide followed a circuitous route through the Manassas Battlefield as Stonewall barked and sniffed the odors that mutated near streams, fields, and farms. The mechanics had finished their annual inspection of Beide’s 1970 Bonanza, a young Nickie had named P-Bird after picking out a Picasso paint scheme. But Beide still thought of Kosinski’s Painted Bird .

With Stonewall, Beide taxied to Runway 16R, took off, cruised southeastward over flaming reds and yellows, tan fields, and silver streams. The azure sky penciled silky clouds and wispy flows as P-Bird reached the Potomac curve near Fredericksburg. No matter how often Beide flew, he never wearied of the vistas and the clouds, and the vastness of heaven and earth and the horizon that beckoned. The roar of the engine and the pressure of the yoke soothed him as the plane responded like another friendly animal. At Brooke VOR, a navigation fix thirty miles from Manassas, he climbed above random clouds and pointed P-Bird over a small airport near Fredericksburg.

The sight of it invoked a savage cumulonimbus he once encountered over it — a roller coaster ride through an opaque car wash that nearly tore the wings off P-Bird. In desperation to land, Beide had spotted the runway and descended, encountering a black hole of turbulence and rain that blocked sky and earth. His head collided with an imperturbable thanatos, seducing him to continue down to his death; and with another panic-stricken eros, screaming at him to fly away. The latter prevailed as he leveled off above shrouded treetops, tracked away from the airport, and then returned stupefied on instruments. The elderly airport manager offered him coffee, and they gravitated into conversation about his near-death experience. You made the right decision in cutting off the approach, the man declared. There’s no percentage in killing yourself. Not only will you get no work done today, but you’ll make the news — and not in a good way.

Inside the terminal, Beide glanced at a framed picture of a young man in uniform. That’s my son. Killed in Iraq. He would have taken over the airport. Beide expressed his sympathy, recognizing how close he had come to becoming a similar picture forty years earlier. When the weather improved, he breathed deeply, then took off back to Manassas. As he returned to his colonial-style home in rural Fairfax County, the radio reported a young man who argued with his girlfriend, jumped into a rented plane, buzzed the field, and then nosed into the runway. The suicide made the news, but not in a good way.

Beide’s flight instructor after law school, Rachel Sung, a refugee from North Korea, proved wrong the pilots’ adage There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots. During the Korean War, she jumped into a MiG fighter with a purloined flight manual and raced to South Korea. She tried to inject Beide with the same outrageous confidence she possessed. Why you not fly in the military? she asked. You be fighter pilot. His cousin Paul owned planes and nearly killed himself when he crash-landed on a Navajo reservation after running out of fuel and clipping a mountain — each time shattering the facade of a hardnosed family. ­­Before that, their common grandfather Calvin, a cigar mogul gone bust, expired violently at Idlewild Airport in New York fog. More people die in car crashes, Rachel said.

That’s optimistic, Beide commented. Beide had survived four decades of incidents. His plane hydroplaned on a short runway, skidded off, and had to be towed. He flew through blind turbulence that evoked Rachel’s words to keep the wings level. He lost power in a cylinder and limped over the ocean to an airport; nearly collided with another plane in clear air; was chased by a military plane for straying into a restricted zone after 911; landed with oil covering the windscreen; and provisionally put down on a beach. With Dak and their kids, Alex and Nickie, Beide toured North America and the Caribbean — landing in too many strange places to remember without his logbook.

Beide and Dak, now divorced, lived a few miles from one another — but tonight they babysat their granddaughter until son Alex and his wife returned from dinner. I just lost a friend to leukemia, Alex said when he and Sophia found him asleep in front of the TV. He died weeks after his diagnosis.

Mine may be indolent, Beide replied.

And maybe not. I want you to get a second opinion. Alex’s advice tracked Krysta’s. Dak was coming to the same conclusion, but Beide would know more after a bone marrow scan. He hadn’t told daughter Nickie in Denver anything about the leukemia.

Chapter 4

While estimating the weight and height of Damocles’ sword during his sluggish drive into work, Beide set up an appointment with Lydia Schwartz, Dr. Tabib’s grief counselor. Beide sputtered his situation, then met at her Tysons office in the afternoon. In her fifties, gray-haired, thin, and nimble, clad in a vibrant blouse, she ushered Beide toward a threadbare, but comfortable chair. Beide scanned her artwork and psychedelic posters from the 1960s, Talmudic verses distributed in frames on the tables, and a box of tissues next to him. Beide tried to relax. Why are you here? Lydia began.

He rendered his hectic and eclectic life — words she appropriated to sum up his disquiet: he would die without his house in order. What would you do with only a month?

Beide knew less than his plans for the next week. At times, I’ve thought I only had a few days or even seconds. Still, you have to live, don’t you?

Lydia barely reacted. Too glib. Whom do you love?

A lot of people: Krysta, my kids and grandkids, Marcy — and in some ways, my ex-wife Dak. And my dog Stonewall.

"So let’s start at the beginning. Who are you?"

I often wonder. I grew up Ohio, the son of an officer who returned from the war and worked as a polymer chemist for Tripp Rubber Company. I had an older sister who died. I didn’t have a happy family.

And your mother?

"Cass was a comely finishing school brat and Memphis debutante. Her parents, Calvin and Delilah, were beneficiaries of the roaring twenties. He started Grande y Larga Cigars — mega-rich."

Is money important to you?

"Not as much as it dominated my mother and her family. Calvin bought an antebellum estate on the Mississippi River, hired bootleggers, philandered, and slapped everyone’s back — sometimes too hard. Delilah was a venus flytrap in a bed of roses: she put a spell on my father to suck him into the family.

Colorful characters. And your other grandparents?

Hermann and Irma Beide grew up in Breslau, Germany, a tectonic piece of Silesia beneath the ebb and flow of human migrations. Hermann fought in the Kaiser’s army, earned an Iron Cross, had enough of war, and deserted. Irma’s father hated him, but Irma married him anyway, boarded a ship with him, and stepped off in Galveston. They moved to Ohio, where Oma gave birth to my father. Opa worked at Tripp Rubber Company, but during the Depression, he lost his job and their house and moved to Michigan.

How did your parents ever meet?

Tripp Rubber hired my father, Bernie, after he finished his master’s degree in carbon chemistry. The Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia spelled the end of French latex, so he studied a synthetic polymer called Buna S the Germans developed with Standard Oil. He and his colleagues turned it into inner tubes, fuel bladders, and inflatable rafts. Tripp sent him to Memphis to develop the products.

And that’s where he met your mother?

In a honky-tonk saloon on Poplar Street. Bernie developed a taste for Memphis beer, jazz, my mother — and I suspect, Delilah. According to family legend, he asked Cass if she dated, and she asked him, ‘Do I look like a queer?’ My fox-clever grandmother recognized his promise in taming her shrew.

Lydia strolled about her office as if nothing caught her attention. Shrew? If they clashed at such an early stage, why did they marry?

Money and mom would be my guess. He wanted it; she had it. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Bernie enlisted, and in 1944, the army sent him to Europe to examine German synthetic rubber. Before he left, he proposed to Cass. The wedding lit up Memphis. Delilah hired Duke Ellington. Calvin invited weighty guests of size and influence, and slapped a hundred more backs.

Lydia sat down in her large chair and opened up her notebook. What did Cass do while your father served in Europe?

Slept with the remaining Memphis men — so I heard.

Lydia rolled her dark deep-set eyes, then focused on Beide’s. All unhappy families are a little weird. That’s what Tolstoy wrote. Did you love your parents?

Beide grimaced. I respected my father. I loved his parents even though I didn’t learn about Opa’s desertion until just before he died. Then I also discovered he was a Jew — and part of me was, too.

Did it matter? I’m Jewish.

"Bernie disliked Jews, although he defended them. To him, all life was a reaction of carbon atoms — and war technology, nothing more than tools to slice and dice kids into compounds. Hermann had faced a more existential question: could a Jew be something other than a Jew? In Breslau, he was quintessentially German: he earned a German degree and enlisted in the German infantry. That wasn’t enough for Irma’s anti-Semitic father, who professed faith in Deutschland über Alles. To him, blood meant everything. When Irma left for America with Hermann in 1915, her father’s head launched into the first orbit of the earth. ‘You ran away with a Jew!’ Opa seemed Teutonic enough to me: he spoke German; insisted on a Saxon household; and demanded Prussian discipline with my sister and me. Only when my grandfather lay dying and revealed his saving a Russian Jew during World War I, did I learn for sure, with his Iron Cross for bravery, that he was a sincere Jew."

Tell me about your sister who died.

Reggie? She developed polio but was a hell of a tennis player — and gay.

Chapter 5

Beide read Teng’s email. A survivor of the Keasian Reds whom Beide had met two years earlier in Keasia, the man reported the deteriorating situation in his country. Like Beide, Teng understood the need for government to protect property which the no-nonsense Napoleonic Lingdo of Keasia, Atla, didn’t. Nat Kilos, a stocky Greek-American, with scrambled dark curly hair and a ready smile, met Beide in late 2010 for lunch near their respective Tysons offices. The non-governmental organization that Kilos ran asked Beide to travel to Keasia to analyze land grabbing and the revolutionary unrest it was instigating. "The EU has granted customs waivers, known as EBA, everything but arms , on Keasian textiles and natural resources of sugar cane and rubber to encourage the country to develop. Foreign companies have corrupted EBA."

How so?

We know, Kilos explained, that at the urging of a finance minister named Duanphen Bhambriyut, Atla has granted land concessions to foreigners to grow, harvest, and export natural resources. This has encouraged rapacious land-grabbing of farms. One major French concern, Maxoprene Internationale, has been evicting farmers to reap their rubber production.

Did Bhambriyut ever work in the Washington area? Beide asked.

"No idea. The Keasian Reds, whom Atla defeated after the Vietnam War, destroyed land titles, so ownership defaulted to the government. When the Melbourne Peace Treaty of 1983 ended the conflict, Atla committed Keasia to human rights. The government passed squatter land laws but fell behind in issuing titles to protect insider deals. Conflicting claims of former owners, relatives of people killed in the war, and the squatters, led NGOs to facilitate registration and adjudicate disputes. Maxoprene claimed a concession of a hundred thousand hectares on the border of Vietnam to harvest rubber. Its thugs undertook extra-judicial evictions and killings in the village of Dong Setay. Kilos’ dark eyes sized up Beide. Can you devise a solution to Maxoprene and travel to Keasia to meet with the local groups?"

Maybe, Beide replied. But you should frame the land-grabbing not as a human rights violation — which it is — but as a property violation. It’s easier to litigate. If someone illegally takes land, the land and the rubber still belong to the farmer. Where the rubber goes, so do the rights of the farmer. If to France, the farmer can sue Maxoprene there.

Not a bad idea — the Keasian courts are corrupt. Our prime American contact in Keasia City is an oddball American ex-pat ex-mercenary named Flute, who works with our attorney Madame Sopar. He possesses zero charm, but some intelligence as a writer and disbarred ambulance chaser, and plenty of guts — especially if paid. He can detonate. Kilos laughed. He drags people into twenty-foot bamboo weeds he hacks into mush with the machetes he carries. Kilos scrolled through a sheaf of Flute’s crypto-emails. These make sense only with his codebook — a rare manuscript indeed.

Beide spent the night with Krysta in Vienna, near his Tysons office. He helped nine-year-old Katya construct a Halloween costume: a box of McDonald’s french fries. Beide bought her boards, foam padding, and paint, then together built the box, cut the french fries from the foam, spray-painted the box red and the fries yellow, and assembled them into a convincing costume. You know how much I love you, don’t you Katya? When he gazed at her, he saw the future.

I’m pretty smart, don’t you think, Jimmy?

Very smart. The world will appreciate you someday — it’s karma. You know what karma is?

Karma says if you do good for the world, the world will do good for you. If you do bad, Santa Claus will leave you a lump of coal.

Before bed, Beide phoned his father to wish him a happy 95th birthday. He hadn’t seen Bernie in a year. Last summer, Alex drove to Ohio to visit his grandfather, but Bernie was harsh — and Beide wondered whether his father just couldn’t control himself.

Beide exhaled as Dr. Tabib listened. We’ll do another blood test before your bone marrow scan. You retired yet, Jim?

Some in my firm think so.

The doctor laughed. Yeah, I’m in the same boat. Dr. Tabib didn’t appear well — he had fallen last winter. The recovery aged me ten years.

And I’ve got CLL, Beide blurted out. Age isn’t our friend.

The doctor shook his head as he checked Beide’s groin for lymph nodes. You still look better than I do. Although not from this angle.

Beide’s leukemia upset Nickie. I’m okay, he announced when he phoned her, but I have to confront mortality. His repose may have overpowered the death sentence, but his divorce from Dak still infuriated Nickie: she loved her mother and defended her against Krysta. Beide had tried to convince Nickie that loving one person didn’t diminish another, but Nickie blamed him for Dak’s pain. I’m doing my best, Beide told his daughter. He carried enough guilt from Vietnam, the suicide of Artus, and Reggie’s preventable death. The relationship between Dak and Krysta had evolved into one more uncomfortable juggling act. He pressed Nickie. If all of this were easy to resolve, I would have done it.

Beide’s assistant, Marcy, whose lustrous and powerful face revealed only half the cards she held, understood his conflicts — even when she added to them. Beide critiqued himself to her as balancing families and trying to do good so no one kills them or me. Here it’s endless cases, complaining clients, and nasty attorneys: get the job done perfectly, immediately, and for nothing.

Marcy choked on his sarcasm. Come on, Jimmy, you enjoy the law — it relieves the tedium.

We’ll see about the Keasia matter, Beide noted.

At the end of the day, Beide found his beloved Stonewall outside his Fairfax house in the rain. His tail rotated like the prop of P-Bird despite the neglect. Beide brought Stonewall inside, dried him with a thick bath towel, apologized, and fed him biscuits. He slept on the floor of Beide’s study as the lawyer worked into the night.

Chapter 6

O ur last conversation reminded me of the good German who saved my father, Beide stated to Lydia when they next met for counseling. Manfried Jundler.

Really? Go on.

Bernie was at the Battle of the Bulge. A German officer appeared in the Belgian building where Bernie worked on enemy synthetic oil production, and informed my father he was a prisoner. Major Jundler chose not to move him but instead ordered him to assist his scientists. The officer enjoyed photography more than war and claimed he’d heard the Beide name before. In return for his forced labor, Bernie slept in the same facility, enjoyed the luxury of showers, and ate good food. Bernie admired Jundler’s skills as a scientist and even more his classic Leica camera. This collegiality almost ended when a preening Gestapo agent appeared. Your German language is practically native, the Nazi stated. "You are the son of Hermann Beide? Do you know the irony of your name, Major Beide? It means ‘both.’ Your father, Hauptmann Hermann Beide, was both a deserter from the German army during the Great War, and a Jew."

My father won the Iron Cross in that ‘great’ war, Bernie said. My mother’s father in Breslau probably possesses more Nazi blood than even you.

Under German law, you are a Jew!

I’m an American officer under the Geneva Convention.

German law now applies. Life here is good — too good for the son of a Jew traitor.

Jundler had enough. "In your research, did you learn, Herr Kriminalassistentanwärter, that Major Beide’s father and my father served together in that war? My father spoke of the elder Hauptmann Beide as a hero. Perhaps you will become a hero, but today you are irritating. Major Beide will remain in place to help me." Before the Gestapo agent could react, the Americans recaptured the terrain, turned the captors into captives, and