The Last Innocent Hour Read online

  Praise for Margot Abbott’s The Last Innocent Hour

  This is a good yarn set against a historical background that continues to galvanize the imagination.

  Washington Post

  Margot Abbott’s skillfully written first novel manages to capture the essence of pre- and postwar Berlin while detailing a love affair that turns into a nightmare.

  Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  With the élan of a born story-teller the author paints vivid pictures of a decadent Berlin before the war and a desolate Berlin afterward. Sally Jackson is an admirable, multilayered heroine, but Christian Mayr is even more fascinating. Ms. Abbott explores the very nature of evil and the implications of loving a perpetrator of evil. The Last Innocent Hour humanizes stereotypes while telling a magnificent love story.

  Atlanta Journal Constitution & Chicago Tribune

  Abbott does a superb job recreating the climate of pre-war Germany…all of Abbott’s diverse cast of characters are believable and, more important, engaging.

  San Jose Mercury

  …absorbing first novel, which skillfully evokes life in the ’30s and ’40s is the story of a woman who loses her ideals and her love to the ravages of World War II in Nazi Germany…fascinating psychological drama.

  Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch

  With “Innocent Hour’s” characters we are reminded of the Chinese curse “May you live interesting times”…the book is brilliant in its evocation of time, place and character.

  Star-News Pasadena, CA

  Margot Abbott has spun a tingling story replete with the elements of a thriller: a heroine with a mysterious past, an impassioned but doomed love, and an adversary who embodies power and evil.

  Oakland Tribune

  To be young in Hitler’s Third Reich was a ghastly accident of birth. And to be in love was to risk losing all that you most valued to the Nazi nightmare. So Margot Abbott perceives in The Last Innocent Hour, a huge, emotive and vividly researched novel of wartime Germany…the novel deepens into a disturbing psychological drama about soul-destroying shame – the legacy of Sally’s all-too-human fascination for decadence and for a golden boy wearing a Haupstumfurhrer’s uniform. This sweeping tale of innocence, evil and hard-won redemption contrives to charm, repel and rivet you by turns. It leaves you wondering if, given the misfortune to have lived through those horrific times, you would yourself have found the strength to resist evil with courage, or give way to fear.

  She Magazine, U.K

  The Last Innocent Hour

  Margot Abbott

  The Last Innocent Hour was originally published by St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY 1991; by Century, Great Britain, 1991; by Rowan, 1992; and by Gainsborough Press, 1996. Sand Hill Press, LLC, is proud to reintroduce The Last Innocent Hour to new audiences.

  This edition published by Sand Hill Review Press, LLC, 2017.

  P.O. Box 1275, San Mateo, CA 94401

  www.SHRPress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-937818-49-4 paperback

  ISBN: 978-1-937818-56-2 case laminate

  ISBN: 978-1-937818-50-0 ebook

  Library of Congress number: 20169621663

  Cover Graphics by Backspace Ink

  Photo from Getty Images

  Printed in the United States of America

  Names: Abbott, Margot.

  Title: The last innocent hour / Margot Abbott.

  Description: San Mateo, CA : Sand Hill Review Press, LLC, [2017] | Originally released by St. Martin's Press, 1991.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016962663 | ISBN 978-1-937818-49-4 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-937818-50-0 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women intelligence officers--United States--History--20th century--Fiction. | Germany. Heer--Officers--Fiction. | Man-woman relationships--Germany--History--20th century--Fiction. | Americans--Germany--History--20th century--Fiction. | Berlin (Germany)--History--1918-1945--Fiction. | Berlin (Germany)--History--1945-1990--Fiction. | LCGFT: Historical fiction. | Romance fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3551.B263 L37 2017 (print) | LCC PS3551.B263 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  The Last Innocent Hour. Copyright © 1991 and © 2017 by Margot Abbott. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  To the friends, old and new, in California, New York, and places in between, who encouraged, listened, read, criticized, inputted, badgered, joked, and otherwise got me through this incredible marathon.

  Margot Abbott, 1991

  Thanks to Ana for our two-woman writing group and Tory for seeing it through.

  Margot Abbott, 2017

  The Last Innocent Hour

  Margot Abbott

  The truth,of course,was that the Nazi backdrop was always there,a dark shimmer behind the eyes,and this was the root of the attraction.

  The Six by Laura Thompson

  BOOK ONE

  BERLIN, 1946

  CHAPTER 1

  WITH A START, Lieutenant Sally Jackson awoke, as the vibrating transport plane fought its way across the Atlantic through the April storm. Disoriented, she had to think for a moment to remember where she was. Then she pushed up the window shade and quickly pulled it down again when she saw the gray, roiling clouds, the heavy rain beating against the little porthole.

  The clouds, the rain, the darkness, especially the darkness, had been part of her nightmare. She remembered the dream-rain, filling her mouth and eyes, and she rubbed her hands across her face. She had been having the dream for a year, ever since Frank Singleton had talked her into returning to Berlin with the special military intelligence unit, D-6. She could blame it all on her boss with his fatherly advice and honest fondness of her. And his manila envelope of obscene photographs. The photographs that had fueled her nightmare were photographs the Nazis themselves had made of their brutal advance through the Soviet Union, with the “special action groups” of the SS following the Wehrmacht.

  The airplane took another dip, the interior fixtures rattled and creaked with the strain and the cabin lights flickered. Sally hadn’t eaten for—what was it? —days, hours, at least, but her stomach rolled and dipped with the aircraft and she felt that if she had to inhale one more mouthful of stale, tobacco-scented air, she would throw up.

  She tried tucking one foot underneath her, but all she managed was to jar her sleeping seatmate, a restless Army Air Force major whose elbow jabbed into her ribs. Sally shoved him back, hating the idea that his might be the hand she would grab if the plane went down. Wiggling around, she found a position that she could convince her body was comfortable, and closed her eyes.

  The images of her dream were there, waiting for her, the walls of dirt rising up to the gunmetal sky, her white flesh glowing against the rich Ukrainian soil; the man in the black-and-silver uniform leaning over her. She opened her eyes. Better to be about to die in a rickety C-54 than already dead in a Russian ditch.

  Her seatmate breathed, snuffled. He sounded as though he had a cold. She glanced at him. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, her age, thirtyish, maybe younger, and as rumpled as she was. AAF officers, the fly-boys, tended to be younger than those in the other branches. She wondered if he had nightmares. She could decipher enough from his battle ribbons and insignia to know that he had been in the Pacific. He was a major and his outfit was . . . oh, forget it.

  Uniforms and military men.

  As far as she could see, everyone on the plane was in the military, including her, and the array of uniforms, ranks, battle ribbons, patches and other insignia was vast. They seemed to be all Americans and primarily army men in their brown-on-brown uniforms. She compared
them to German uniforms, which were beautifully tailored, carefully designed costumes for the master race. Brutality called for ugliness of dress, not all that black-and-silver flash. She approved of the practicality of American uniforms. No flash there.

  A naval officer in his winter blues came down the aisle toward her, steadying himself on the backs of the seats. His tunic was open, his tie loosened, a tired, middle-aged man. He smiled at her when he saw her watching him and quietly walked past. Naval uniforms were nice, those heavy wool coats and the whites. Sally remembered her brother in his dress whites. How handsome and old-fashioned he had looked in them, as though he were on his way with Commodore Perry to Japan to woo Madame Butterfly.

  Sally squirmed in the narrow seat, trying to find a comfortable spot. Give up, there wasn’t one. She closed her eyes, her thoughts still of Eddie.

  Her brother, a naval officer, an Annapolis graduate, a father and husband, had been bayoneted by a Japanese soldier after the surrender of Corregidor in May of 1942. Sally had learned of his death months later when one of his pals, who had escaped into a rice field during the confusion caused by too many prisoners and too few guards, had telephoned her from San Diego.

  By that time, she had already seen pictures of the Americans as they surrendered after the terrible siege. Classified photographs, stolen from the Japanese, and not for public consumption because of their demoralizing content. She could understand why. She had gone back to look at the pictures, searching among the thin, haggard men for her brother, wondering if she would recognize him if she found him.

  Still, they weren’t the worst photographs Sally’s job at the State Department had required her to look at and study in the past five years. Frank Singleton had shown her the worst as a kind of emotional blackmail that day in April 1945 when he had asked her to join D-6.

  The unit, part of army intelligence, was to return to Berlin within a year of the armistice to gather information about the SS. Sally’s German, her knowledge of Berlin, and her experience there would all be useful, but it was her newly honed interpretative skills that were most needed. She was, Frank told her, very good at looking at pictures.

  “You’ll have to join the army, Sally,” he had told her. “But they’ll make you an officer.”

  She had refused. Yes, her German was fine. But she didn’t want to join the army, not as an officer or anything else. She didn’t want to leave Washington. She was all right at the State Department, safe in her little cubicle, with her daily routine and her nice, dull life. She remembered nothing of Berlin and she knew nothing about the SS, never had. But most especially she did not want to return to Berlin.

  Frank should know why. He’d been her father’s friend and knew everything there was to know about her, she said, almost sarcastically. But his big, ugly Charles Laughton face remained expressionless, and Sally immediately felt guilty for her nastiness.

  Frank didn’t answer. Instead he handed her the manila envelope and walked away, to stare out the window, his back to her.

  Opening the envelope, Sally drew out about a dozen black-and- white photographs, all eight-by-tens. She couldn’t really tell what the first one was and she picked it up and turned it so that she was looking at it lengthwise. She quickly put it back down on the pile.

  She stared at the painting on the wall behind Singleton’s desk: flowers, lavender and green, in a glass vase. Strange choice for a man’s office, but perhaps Elizabeth had picked it out.

  “Sally,” Singleton said gently, startling her. She looked up at his kind, heavily lined face. “I’m sorry for the shock tactics, but I didn’t know how else to show you.”

  “No.” She touched the stack of pictures. “Are they all like this? Those are . . .” She stopped short. In the almost five years she had worked for Frank Singleton, she had seen terrible pictures from the war, photographs of soldiers and civilians burned and hanged and blown to bits, but nothing, not even the pictures of charred tank crews in North Africa, shocked her as much as this photograph had.

  “Bodies,” Frank said, just as Sally managed to speak again.

  “Dead,” she said, at the same time. She looked at the next picture. “Who are these people? Where is this place?”

  “That photograph was taken at a camp outside Weimar. The living are citizens of that city, who claim not to have known what was going on. The dead, well, the dead are mostly Jews. Left unburied when the German army fled.”

  Frank and Sally both studied the photographs as she went through the pile. When she had finished, she looked up at him, feeling she had aged a hundred years since she opened the envelope.

  “Well, these certainly are effective. I kind of wish you hadn’t shown them to me, I will admit.” She tried to smile. “A person could go her whole life without needing to see these. Did this really happen?”

  “Yes, Sally, it did,” said Frank.

  “I’ve heard the rumors.”

  “If you are the person of conscience I know you are, I simply don’t see how you can refuse to do whatever can be done to bring the men who did this to justice.”

  Sally didn’t want to listen to Frank. The photographs made her slightly nauseous. “Think of the smell,” she said, looking at the first photograph again. Frank was silent and finally she asked him, “Who did this?”

  “The SS ran the camps, Sally. The SS. And General Heydrich seems to have designed the system. We’re not entirely clear about the details of his involvement yet.”

  “I see,” she said, nodding, as though she did. “Did we know this was going on? Did anybody?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did we do?”

  “We’re winning the war.”

  Sally didn’t reply, nodding again as though she understood.

  Just then the telephone rang and Frank picked it up. Sally sat for a moment, trying not to listen, then took the stack of horrible pictures and shuffled through them again, dividing and sorting them, applying some of the methods she had devised to study photographs. She thought it would help her regain her detachment. It didn’t.

  The dead continued to stare up at her, out of cavernous eye sockets, their shaved heads making their bony faces bizarre and robbing them of their individuality. Their bodies were frail bones with stretched-over worn skin, and Sally had to fight not to push the photographs away.

  Who had known about this?

  A stack of bodies with a foot sticking out here, a hand there, a stack four feet high, leaned against the wall of a barracks.

  “Oh, God,” said Sally softly.

  She hadn’t been listening to Frank’s telephone conversation and she didn’t immediately notice when he hung up the phone. His silence finally made Sally look up. His head was turned toward the window and tears were running down his baggy face.

  “Frank, what was it? Is it Elizabeth?” Sally asked, getting quickly to her feet.

  “No,” he smiled sadly. “Thank God, it’s not Elizabeth.” He faced Sally. “It’s FDR, Sally. He died this afternoon, down in Georgia.”

  Sally, unable to think of anything to say, stood for a time, still clutching the photographs, then very carefully she replaced them in the envelope. “I’ll go to Berlin, Frank,” she said, as gently as she could. “Whenever you want me to.”

  She felt absolutely inadequate, against both his grief and the magnitude of the crime represented by the photographs. And never had her guilt over her past so consumed her,

  “What? Oh, yes, thank you, my dear, thank you. I’m sorry. I loved that old son of a . . .” And Frank had covered his face.

  “I’ll go,” said Sally, backing away from his desk. “I’ll . . . we can talk about it later.” She reached the door and opened it to escape into the corridor. But all the way back to her office, people were stopping to talk and cry and comfort one another. Sally hurried past them, her head down.

  Roosevelt was the President who had sent her father to Berlin, she remembered, thinking about how long he had been in office. She was sorry, espe
cially that he hadn’t lived to see the end of the war, which would surely happen any day now, but she didn’t feel any sorrow for him personally and the grief of the people around her irritated her.

  Later, during dinner at Mrs. Wallace’s boardinghouse that evening, her friend Denise Brothers said in her broad Texas accent that she thought people were so upset because they were frightened. FDR had led them through so much; perhaps they thought they wouldn’t be able to carry on without him. That Sally could understand and she nodded at Denise.

  “You really are a wise woman,” she told her.

  “Oh, silly,” Denise said, her fair freckled skin flushing. “I only went through eleventh grade.” But Sally could see that she was pleased at the compliment.

  Watching the newsreels of FDR’s funeral train and the people crying in the streets, Denise had cried, along with most of the other people in the movie theater. Only Sally had stared stony-eyed at the screen and later, while they were drinking Cokes at the neighborhood drugstore, Denise had asked her why.

  “Don’t you feel sorry?”

  “Sure I do,” Sally said, stirring the crushed ice with her straw. “But I just don’t cry easily, I guess. I don’t feel as much.”

  “You cover everything up, Sal.”

  “No. I just don’t feel things like other people do.”

  Denise didn’t say any more, sipping her soda, her cherry-red lips like a flower around her straw, her big brown eyes on Sally. When she finished her Coke, she reached for Sally’s wrist.

  “You cover it all up, like these old scars.” And without waiting for an answer, Denise stood up, smoothing her yellow-and-white summer dress over her hips. She was a tiny thing, born and bred on the windy plains of the Texas panhandle, and the first friend Sally had had in years.