Follow the Dotted Line by Nancy Hersage Page B

anyone. This certainly seems like a good omen.
    “Over time, several weeks, she manages to locate where in the camp the Allied officers are being held. Next, she smuggles a message to the Baron. Something innocuous and vague, indicating only that help has arrived. They rendezvous on a day when she makes a food delivery.
    “The man Emma meets is gaunt and fearful. His hair is gray; his eyes are yellow. And yet she knows him instantly—
    ‘Can you get me out?’ he asks, anxiously.
    She nods. But that doesn’t satisfy him.
    Again he asks, ‘Can you get me out?’
    She thinks for a moment his desperation must be blinding him.
    ‘I can,’ she says, hoping he will recognize her voice.
    For the first time he really looks at her.
    ‘I am putting my life in your hands,’ he says.
    She is looking at him now, too. ‘I know.’
    And then he asks the question they have all asked, everyone she has ever helped escape, ‘How do I know I can trust you?’
    “She waits, wanting to believe he will see the answer. But, of course, he can’t. He’s staring at a stranger.”
    Sam walked back to the podium for the denouement. Her mother could not have been prouder.
    “We can only speculate about how Emma feels at this moment. And there are no eyewitness accounts of what she does next, of course, except we know she does her job. With the same expertise and iron resolve that helped her smuggle hundreds of refugees out of Germany, she gets the Baron out, too. He is free and in one piece. It is a remarkable accomplishment by any measure. And it is the last time Emma works as an agent.
    “Records indicate that after the escape, the couple travels together to Egypt to be debriefed by intelligence officials. By her own admission, Emma does not tell the Baron that she is his wife until they are safely on the train to Cairo. When she does, he is not so much surprised or shocked, as he is incredulous. He simply doesn’t believe her. Given her appearance, perhaps he doesn’t want to. Whatever his motives, he will not be convinced until he meets with the men who have made her transformation possible. And when the truth finally hits him, he announces that what they have done is ‘appalling’ and leaves the room without saying another word.”
    The young listeners stirred in their seats, as people often do during that moment before the final moment in any narrative, the moment where you hope for a happy ending but aren’t sure how the story will get there. And Andy knew from Sam that history rarely provides the destination you desire.
    “The war ends, of course,” the teacher told her students. “But both Emma and the Baron live on. According to friends, they eventually return home to the Austrian castle where the Baron first brought his bride to live after their marriage. However, the war profoundly changes things, as wars always do. And love—an often-fragile emotion—is no match for its destruction.
    “Emma has sacrificed her beauty to save the Baron’s life, and in the end, he finds it nearly impossible to look at her again. And that makes it impossible for him to love her again. He knows this, and no doubt, so does she.
    “The local gossip, still remembered by friends of the family, is that the Baron begins having a series of affairs. He drinks. He rages. He fails in business.
    “Of Emma, however, we know almost nothing.” Sam held up a plastic folder with what looked like a paper clipping inside. “Except this: a short news article that appears in the local Austrian paper on December 1, 1948. The reporter describes how the Baron’s car, despite good weather and driving conditions, bursts through a guardrail on the edge of an Alpine road at incredible speed one morning and plunges headlong into the abyss beyond. According to police, two bodies are eventually pulled from the wreckage: the Baron and his wife.”
    Sam ran her fingers over the folder in her hand. “I know this article is just an artifact,” she said.