While World War II walled off Germany, it also proved a psychological salvation for Hart. Suddenly he was not alone in his inability to control events; millions were being swept along a great dark river. And he found refuge in work. The American became a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force, throwing himself into the task with grim purpose. The pilots were so young! Many confided they hoped a glamorous skill might keep them out of the trenches of this new war. Their escape became his own. He lost himself in the air.
The training field's RAF flight captain slowly befriended the quiet, remote American, once expressing curiosity at Hart's reluctance to take advantage of wartime opportunities with women. The pilot confided his despair over Greta. "In love with a Jerry!" the man marveled. "Best to keep a lid on that little secret, old chap. And better to give her up and get on with your life. If she's alive, she's entombed in a bloody madhouse."
"She's the only reason I want a life," Owen responded. "She's the one who let me come back to life."
"Don't let her rob you of it now."
Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa, Russia. A drumbeat of defeat. If Greta was still alive she was caught in a web of monstrous dimension, a new empire that stretched from Normandy to the Caucasus and from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara. Then came Pearl Harbor. With America's entry into the war, Hart joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in England and was tapped for reconnaissance and intelligence because of his fluency in German. Hart's superiors did not appreciate his opinion that the Germans were no more likely to crack under strategic bombing than the British had, but they acknowledged his skill at interrogating captured enemy pilots.
On a few occasions Hart volunteered for reconnaissance flights over Europe. His planes were pounded by flak and hounded by fighter planes and yet he found the experience oddly dispassionate. His emotional shell— his spore coat, he thought wryly— had grown so necessarily thick that it was like watching his own peril from a distance. Even if he could still fear the long agonizing minutes it would take to plunge from twenty thousand feet, death itself promised a certain peace. His emotions were further confused by the realization that in an indirect way he could be helping to kill Greta; he sometimes looked at the great fires raging below and imagined her trapped within them. And yet when he was honest with himself he did not think she was dead, or likely to die. He felt he would know instantly if that happened— that the whole fabric of the universe would seem to come undone— and moreover, that destiny had more in store for them.
For Owen Hart, then, most of World War II was a period of endless waiting, waiting so prolonged and dreadful that time itself seemed to have been repealed. Yet finally it was the fall of 1944, the Allied forces had liberated most of France, and the pilot experienced one of those encounters that suggest fate rules life: a meeting that replaced five years of despair with a thread of hope, enough hope to fuel desperation. A prisoner was asking for Owen Hart and his name was Otto Kohl.
American military policemen saluted smartly as Major Hart strode down the gloomy corridor of a former mental hospital, his boots echoing on hardwood floors that neglect had robbed of any sheen. The pilot's face was a mask, struggling to hide rising excitement. Kohl! Owen had occasionally searched the ballooning lists of German prisoners for some connection to the past but had known it was as futile as elbowing the crowds of London train stations. And yet here was Otto, popping up out of nowhere, asking for him! One of countless Germans who'd been swept up after the fall of Paris, his fleeing Mercedes reportedly found overheated and sprung out from the weight of wine cases, gilt picture frames, a hoard of jewelry, and a Gallic mistress thirty years his junior. The French woman had been seized by nearby villagers and shaved bald. The German, however, was whisked away for an interrogation in which he boasted of high-ranking connections. The self-importance had won him temporary confinement in a political prison established at the abandoned mental institution. During the Occupation its regular inmates had mysteriously disappeared.
The war had left its dreary mark. The steel bars were past-due for painting. The elevator cage was grounded, heavy with dust. The green of the walls had darkened from restful to sick. A gurney had been abandoned in one corner, its gray sheet stained with gray blood. The small office used for interrogation was barren except for a table and two chairs. Late-autumn sun made a geometric pattern on the walls from the wire mesh on the windows; the temperature was cold. And there at the table was Otto Kohl, dressed in prison fatigues with his ankles manacled. The German blinked and tentatively smiled as Hart came in, looking almost shy. He stood awkwardly.
"Owen!" Kohl greeted hoarsely. "Back from the dead!" Hart sat down and Kohl hesitantly followed. The German looked older, his hair grayer, and yet the war seemed not to have treated him badly. Well fed. "Just back from Antarctica, Otto. The ship didn't wait."
Kohl bobbed his head anxiously. "Yes. Obviously not. But then the report was that you'd died in a heroic aerial rescue attempt. It's a miracle— my finding you alive like this. Fortune is curious, no?"
"Not half as curious as I am." So, the ship had definitely survived. He stared at Kohl, remembering the dinner at Karinhall, Greta in the firelight. "What in hell are you doing here?"
Kohl nodded excitedly. "Exactly! Exactly the right question! I've been telling my captors for weeks that I have no military connections, that I'm simply a businessman, a government facilitator, a minor functionary! I don't belong in a cage. I should be employed in reconstruction, in reconciliation, where I can help people. It's a tragic waste, my being here."
Hart appeared to consider this. Then he opened his folder. "It says here you looted half the Loire Valley."
"That's an outrageous interpretation! I simply served as an import-export link to Germany."
"That you had a château there and a town house in Paris. That you cut a social swath in Occupation and Vichy circles. That you wore a swastika in your lapel by day and haunted the cabarets at night. That you were a black market profiteer. A womanizer. That you arranged the transshipment of slave labor."
"No!" Kohl shook his head vigorously, anxiously. "No, no, no. Reports spread by the jealous, by my enemies, by captives anxious to save their own skin by spreading false stories— all with no basis in fact. I was simply directed to help with the economic integration of Germany and France. When my presence in Washington became impossible."
Hart said nothing.
"I've tried to explain to your supervisors that I'm a man of business, Owen. A man of vision. A man of science. I cited the Antarctica expedition. That was the true Otto Kohl! Organizing expeditions to explore the natural world! I'd even included an American, I said. An international effort! And then one of your interrogators, a Colonel Cathcart, mentioned you. He said that you'd referred to such an expedition and that you were here, alive, in France. And it was electric, revelatory! A bolt of lightning! I couldn't believe it! And so of course I asked for you: Owen Hart, my old friend, the man who could identify me for what I really am!"
Hart studied the German dubiously. "I could learn nothing about the expedition after its return."
"Yes, it was kept confidential."
"Not even word of my own fate. It was as if I'd vanished. No mention. No credit. No reward."
"Do you think that didn't trouble me? To have recruited you and then such a cruel illness: it was a tragedy. And we wanted, of course, to send your back pay but there were no relatives, no address— "