No Dawn for Men by James Lepore

the code for urgent.”
    “Yes.”
    “Go on.”
    “Professor Shroeder has told me what he’s working on.”
    Fleming smiled. “It’s simple, this spying business, no?”
    “In this case, yes. And no.”
    * * *
    “Professor Tolkien, I’m not often at a loss for words.”
    “But you are now.”
    “Not quite.” Nevertheless, Fleming said nothing. The facts of the matter had taken Tolkien only a few minutes to narrate. The sinking in was the hard part.
    “You are skeptical,” the professor said.
    Fleming did not reply.
    “A cynic.”
    “I’m both,” Fleming said. “Do you believe Shroeder? When he says he raised the dead cat?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Bloody hell.”
    “I haven’t told you everything. Billie Shroeder will be killed if Franz does not perform the ritual on Monday. Franz has asked me to help get her out of Germany.”
    “What did you say?”
    “I said I would.”
    “What do you have in mind? A boat ride down the Rhine? They’ll never let her out.”
    “I thought I’d ask you.”
    “Bloody hell.”
    “My sentiments.”
    “You’ll all have to leave.”
    “All?”
    “You, Shroeder, and Billie.”
    “Before Monday, you mean?”
    “Yes.”
    “But I can leave on Monday by myself. I have my plane ticket.”
    “I can’t leave you behind. You’ll be arrested once they realize that Shroeder and Billie are missing. You are in Nazi Germany, professor, the epicenter of evil on Earth. They will crucify you.”
    “And where do you think this evil comes from?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Where does this evil come from?”
    “Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, the lot of them.”
    “Who put it in them?”
    “My dear chap . . .”
    “I’m not your dear chap, Fleming. I’m your elder by sixteen years. I fought the Hun in France. I have asked myself since, how did that war happen, how and why does evil exist?”
    “Did you come up with an answer?”
    “No. But I will tell you this, after all the thought I’ve given it: the raising of the dead does not seem so farfetched given the evil spell that seems to have been cast on mankind from its very beginnings.”
    Fleming smiled and leaned back in his chair. Leaning forward again, he lifted the pitcher and topped off their glasses. “I apologize,” he said.
    “For what?”
    “For condescending to you. You are far above me in all ways.”
    “You are mistaken. You are upper crust. I am low born. I’ve meant to ask you, was your father Valentine Fleming?”
    “Yes.”
    “I met him once. He gave me a letter to send to your mother, which I did when I read Churchill’s eulogy in the Times .”
    Fleming was almost instantly taken back to June of 1917, to the scene in the “large” drawing room (as opposed to the many smaller ones) at Joyce Grove, his grandfather’s sprawling, rather brutal-looking manor house in Oxfordshire that was his second home growing up. His mother, in black from head to toe, bereft of her usual brilliant jewelry, her face white but composed, had stood in front of the room’s cavernous fireplace and read the letter to him and his three brothers, whose nannies had been told to dress them for the occasion. He was nine at the time. If she had mentioned the name of the soldier who had sent it, Fleming had long forgotten it. But he did remember one line: remind the children that if another war comes, they must do their duty.
      First metaphysics and now this, Fleming thought. Who is this fellow Tolkien? “You met my father?” he said.
    “Yes. In the war.”
    “But . . . How? When?”
    “I’ll tell you another time. There is other, more pressing business now.”
    Fleming did not respond. He had few solid memories of his father, the great, heroic Val Fleming, made immortal by Churchill, but those he did have he had enshrined in a compartment in his mind that was like a church, so sacred were its precincts. He longed to add to this small trove. Instinctively, he put his hand inside his jacket and ran his fingers along the