Through Blood

Chapter 16: Truth

Kristian started his day as usual. Following his routine of waking up, getting ready, eating breakfast, supervising roll call and then ensuring that the guards' schedule was correct, that the guards were all following their assigned duties, supervising the addition of new prisoners and keeping accurate, up-to-date records of all prisoners. The latter was a particularly challenging task, as the prisoner records list was ever-changing. With new prisoners coming in all the time and existing ones occasionally dying off as well.

The only part of his daily routine that had changed lately, however, was waking up. Usually he woke up with a start. Usually nightmares awoke him before his alarm clock. But not lately. Lately he'd been sleeping well, his nightmares of Sara had slowly decreased over time to the point that they were rare.

He believed that was partly due to the fact that he thought about her a bit less now, but also due to the peace of mind that knowing Carver's end was near brought him. This investigation would for sure end his career, at the very least.

Schlessinger, the camp's commandant, had launched a full-blown investigation into the matter at hand. He was a man in his mid-fifties, with greying dark brown hair, brown eyes, square jaw, and an expressionless face.

He seemed disappointed by Kristian's claims, perhaps because Carver was such an exemplary officer. He was ruthless, cold, composed, and followed the rules strictly. In spite of that, Schlessinger could not ignore a claim like that one and face an even worse situation in the future.

If Carver and the other man were to be caught by someone else, and it was discovered by Himmler that two of Schlessinger's own officers were gay, that Schlessinger suspected it and did nothing about it, the consequences would be dire. Or worse yet, it could also become a public scandal. It isn't something that would make headlines, or even make it to a newspaper; but people would talk, they'd spread it like wildfire and it could never be ripped from people's mouths.

Schlessinger knew he had to act, and he had to act immediately. He went over the assigned schedule for the night of supposed incident, he went over which officers were stationed at which posts. He tried to figure out the identity of the other officer, and while he wasn't able to narrow his list down to one, he did have a list of eight suspected men. One of them was Jürgen Hoch.

A while before noon Kristian received a telephone call from his father. Shocked to hear the news of what had happened with Ivy and Dr. Schmidt, he assured Peter he would attend the dinner later that day if he received authorization from his commandant. Normally, permission from Carver would suffice, but at the moment that was not an option. He was waiting on the results of the investigation and the polygraph test.

Peter told him, "Reichsführer Himmler is coming to dinner as well, if Commandant Schlessinger denies you authorization, I should be able to persuade him."
"I would think being invited to the same dinner as Reichsführer Himmler is reason enough to be authorized," Kristian said.

"Son, there's one more thing I want to ask of you. Can you check if Schmidt's family is or has been there? Their names are Hannah, Julian, Leopold, Daniel, and Abigail. Let me know the results later."

"Yes, got it."

                                                                                ~

"Sir," Carver said, "With all due respect, polygraphs are highly unreliable... I mean the science behind them has been shown incapable of properly detecting-"

"Officer, I did not call you here today to hear about how you disapprove of the polygraph's validity," Schlessinger interrupted him. "You will remain quiet unless you are asked to speak."