The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  She pads to the top of the stairs. There is a light downstairs, coming from the kitchen. She descends, one cautious step at a time, until she sees her mother alone at the kitchen table. She is still dressed, a cup of tea in front of her and the cards laid out. She is playing solitaire. Madeleine watches as her mother places one card on top of another. The kitchen is neat and clean. Her red nails stand out against the silver flecks of the tabletop. Smoke drifts up from a crystal ashtray.

  “Maman?”

  Her mother looks up and smiles. “Eh, ma p’tite fille, qu’est-ce que tu as, viens à maman.” And opens her arms.

  Madeleine walks to her, aware that her back is arched a bit, stomach sticking out the way it used to when she was little, twining her hair around her finger. She climbs onto her mother’s lap. Her mother has also forgotten that Madeleine is nine. She puts her arms around her and rocks her. Madeleine rests her head against her mother’s shoulder and resists the desire to suck her thumb. “Maman, are you going to have another baby?”

  Mimi smiles. “Maybe, if God sends one.”

  “What are you going to call it? If it’s a girl.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, what do you think? We could call her Domithilde.”

  “No!”

  Her mother laughs. “Why not? After your Tante Domithilde, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Can we call her Holly?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause it’s kind of like Hayley, for Hayley Mills.”

  “Holly is nice, but there’s no Saint Holly.”

  “Was there a Saint Claire?”

  Mimi strokes her forehead. “Hush, ma p’tite. There is a Saint Claire and she is looking after our little friend. Claire is with God now.”

  Then why is everyone so upset? Madeleine pictures a trio walking away from her. Claire in between Saint Claire and God, holding their hands and looking up at them. Grown-ups in robes and a kerchief, solemnly taking her away, talking to one another over her head. Where were they when someone killed her? Watching?

  “Say a little prayer now,” says Maman, folding her hands. And they pray, “‘Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here….’”

  As soon as the prayer is done, Madeleine says, “I have to ask Dad something.”

  “Ask him in the morning, okay?”

  Madeleine closes her eyes as her mother rocks her to sleep. She puts her thumb in her mouth and ponders God and Saint Claire. Holy grown-ups who wait to meet murdered children at the airport in Heaven.

  “Simon, I’ve just been talking to Froelich—my neighbour—he’s told me about Fried, about what he did at Dora. He had people hanged, Simon, he ordered executions … Simon?”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, if it’s true—and I think it is—we are harbouring a war criminal. He’ll have to be deported.”

  A click at the other end of the line—not electronic, the sound of a lighter. Then an intake of breath. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question, Jack. Fried’s war record is neither here nor there.”

  Jack thought he was prepared for this. He isn’t. “Are you telling me that you knew?”

  No reply.

  “I can’t be part of this, Simon.”

  “I knew he was no Boy Scout. Not unlike several of the others.”

  Simon’s tone—unconcerned, the same one Jack has always admired so much—repels him now. He isn’t ready for what he feels—not anger but a sagging disappointment. It’s as though he were seeing the world transform around Simon, bodies piling up. But Simon remains the same—the same half-smile, relaxed stance—knee-deep in blood. Jack says quietly, “I’m going to tell the police that I saw the boy on the road. I’m going to tell them I was in that car and I’m going to direct their inquiries to you.”

  “Do you know what Project Paperclip is?”

  “Did you hear me, Simon?”

  “Ever hear of Operation Matchbox?”

  Jack doesn’t answer.

  “They’re related programs—classified, of course. The first is American. The second, Canadian. The Brits come and go as needed. Like Donald Maclean. You were right, Jack, I do have his old job. It involves liaising with the Americans, and targeting foreign scientists for recruitment by them. Although, in Maclean’s case, he was serving the wrong master.”

  “And if these scientists happen to be war criminals, you turn a blind eye.”

  “It’s true, a few required a little dusting off before they came stateside”—Jack hears him take a long drag off his cigarette, then exhale—“von Braun for one.”

  The night has turned cold. Jack can see his breath. “What about von Braun?”

  “Well he was rarely photographed in his SS uniform, but he was a Hauptsturmführer. A captain.”

  “… A lot of them were forced to join.”

  “I can’t picture anyone forcing von Braun to do anything.”

  “Did he commit an actual crime?”

  “I’ve seen minutes of a meeting that took place at Dora, attended by senior scientific, management and SS staff, including von Braun.” Simon speaks quickly but unhurriedly, a routine briefing. “They discuss bringing in additional French civilians to use as slaves, and they note the requirement that workers wear the striped concentration-camp uniform. No one is on record objecting. And if you look at the transcripts of the Dora war crimes trial, you’ll find the general manager on trial for mass murder. He mentions that von Braun was a frequent visitor to the factory and knew all about its operations, including executions.”

  “The press should get hold of this.”

  “They can’t. It’s been classified.”

  Jack sees condensation from his breath on the black dial face of the phone. “But von Braun didn’t order executions—” he hears a foolish, plaintive note in his voice.

  “Well that’s what they all said, but in von Braun’s case no doubt it’s true. Rudolph, however, is another story.”

  “Arthur Rudolph?”

  “Project director of NASA’s Saturn rocket program. He was head of production at Mittelwerk—”

  “Mittelwerk?”

  “Mittelbau. Sometimes referred to as Nordhausen, after the nearby town.”

  “What are you talking about, Simon?”

  “Dora. It was called anything but. Still is. What better way to confuse the enemy than by layers of ever-shifting bureaucratic nomenclature?”

  “You knew all this.”

  “It’s my job to know.”

  Jack watches the fog gathering outside. Dimly visible beyond the aircraft hangars, the red light of the control tower blinks at regular slow intervals.

  “The purpose of Paperclip is threefold,” Simon continues. “To deprive the Soviets of scientific expertise. To provide the West—usually via America—with scientific expertise. And three: to reward individuals who have enriched Western intelligence.”

  “Reward Nazis.”

  “In some cases,” says Simon. “Former Nazis. A number of them got to come to Canada. Lead quiet lives. You very discreetly welcomed them at the request of Britain or the U.S.”

  “War criminals.”

  “The fact is, most are completely harmless now. Pruning their roses, paying taxes. And they have no sympathy for Communists.”

  “It doesn’t change what they did.”

  “I quite agree. In a perfect world, they’d have hanged. Or gone to prison.”

  Jack says nothing, annoyed by Simon’s exercise in relativism, and conscious that this imparting of classified information is a form of flattery aimed at co-opting him.

  “It’s also different from the rat line,” says Simon. “The CIA ran that operation with the Vatican, funnelled a lot of these chaps, mainly to South America—genuine bastards. People like Barbie and Mengele. Their usefulness was purely intelligence, and I have my doubts about that, but there’s a big military-industrial complex here in the U.S. with a vested interest in keeping the military on tenterhooks; jockeying among the generals
for bigger slices of the budget, a lot of competition among security agencies to see who can bring in the scariest bit of intelligence, the best defector, cock-and-bull about who has the most missiles, and a lot of them believe it too, all grist for the mill, good for business. It’s called threat inflation. But they damn well know who the enemy is and they do get things done, the Yanks.”

  “Who runs Paperclip?”

  “The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. JIOA. Courtesy of the Pentagon.”

  “An American operation designed to thwart American immigration laws, operating illegally in Canada. You’re subverting democracy.”

  “We’re fighting to preserve it. At worst, we’re skeletons in the democratic closet.”

  “You’re treating the public like the enemy, that’s what Communists do. And Fascists.”

  “A number of senior American officers feel as you do. I heard one say he’d trade the whole pack of these former Nazis to the Soviets for a dish of caviar. And American scientists resent the plum jobs going to foreigners. There are even a few at your National Research Council in Ottawa.”

  “Okay, Simon, I get it, but I’m not going to let that kid go to jail for a Nazi, I don’t give a damn how many of them we’ve got on our side now.”

  “There’s a Soviet spy at the Marshall Space Flight Center.”

  NASA. Jack waits.

  “Fried has identified him. Fried will take up employment in the USAF missile program, then be seconded to Marshall. He’ll make contact with this individual and pose as a Soviet agent himself. He’ll feed the man false information to pass on to his handler.”

  If Jack had heard this a week ago, he’d have been thrilled. Now he says, “You’re willing to let a boy go to jail so that we can confuse the Soviets?” Outside the booth an impenetrable fog has descended. Jack has lost sight of the red pulse of the control tower—he will be hard-pressed to find his way home.

  “Our operation may involve American intelligence,” says Simon, “but at least they’re air force types. If the CIA get wind, they’ll move in on the Soviet mole, bag him, and it’ll be a notch on their belt, unless they decide to run him themselves as a means to get their foot more firmly in the door of the space program. No one wants that.”

  “Forgive me if I can’t muster a whole lot of sympathy for your turf war, Simon. And even if I did keep quiet, I can’t control what Henry Froelich does.”

  “If the cover is blown from our little mission, the Soviets won’t be the only ones to sit up and take notice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’ll be out of my hands.”

  “Who are you talking about? The CIA?”

  “I’m simply saying that I can’t predict the outcome.”

  What might the CIA do? Froelich is an immigrant. A Jew with leftist leanings. The McCarthy era is not so long in the past. Would they smear him? Get him deported? “The CIA isn’t authorized to operate in this country.”

  No answer.

  “Simon. It’s murder. The boy could hang.”

  A hard silence at the other end of the line. The kind that takes a piece out of your fuselage in the night. Finally Jack adds, “That’s the worst-case scenario.”

  “I’ll tell you what the worst-case scenario is, Jack,” and Simon’s tone is still reasonable. “A number of our people—brave people, agents-in-place—begin dying in the Soviet Union, far from your precious conscience. Fried’s information about Soviet intentions and capabilities vis-à-vis their strategic missile program—test results, blueprints, organizational structure—becomes worthless; the press has a field day with the story of Nazis at NASA and government funding is cut, crippling our bid for the moon, to say nothing of the implications for Western intelligence, and the fight for supremacy in certain technologies that keep you safely at your fucking barbecue.”

  “Yeah, well Simon, I’m here and you’re not, and so is Fried. I just have to make one call and he’ll be picked up so fast—”

  “Fried is long gone, mate.”

  Of course. Jack takes the humiliation. “When?” he asks, adding, “I know you won’t tell me that, just tell me, was he already gone the other day when I offered to look in on him?”

  “Afraid so.” Simon’s tone is almost apologetic.

  Jack reaches up and leans his hand against the cold glass.

  After a moment, Simon says quietly, “Jack, the reason I came to you with this mission is that I’ve learned to trust very few people,” and it’s the voice of a friend again. “I don’t care what their security clearance is or where they’re from. Some of the worst offenders are among my own countrymen. I wouldn’t ask you to cross the street for Oskar fucking Fried. We’re not doing this for him.” He sighs. “This war—the one we’re engaged in now—makes me pine for the last one. Any fool can die for his country, Jack.”

  “I don’t happen to think forty thousand Canadians were fools.”

  “I’m not belittling the sacrifice made by my friends and yours—by my younger brother, for Christ sake. I’m pointing out that you and I don’t have the privilege of fighting and dying. We have to live, and we have to make decisions—we had to make decisions in the last war too but they weren’t all secret. The guilt and the bullshit and the triumph were shared and we called it duty….” Jack can’t talk about the last war. He was and was not there. I don’t have the right to talk about it. And those who do have the right almost never talk about it at all. “Then one day the shooting stopped and we called it victory. We demobbed and went back to work, got married, had children and we called it peace. But it isn’t quite. And you’re right in the middle of it.”

  “Simon, I manage an organization that teaches people how to manage organizations. I drive a station wagon, I love my wife, I’m not in the middle of a damn thing.”

  “You’re in it, lad. You’re on ops now, whether you like it or not.” Simon’s tone brightens. “You know we bombed the shit out of the German war industry. The Ruhr night after night—you should’ve been there, mate, you were robbed.” Is he being sarcastic now? “You know I went to Peenemünde.” I went to Peenemünde. Jack knows enough to translate: I beat the odds and survived a bombing mission. Target: Peenemünde. “We bombed the hell out of Hitler’s V-2 rockets—”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “So they moved underground, got a lot of slaves, worked them to death at Dora, starved them, hanged them, bloody good show.”

  “That wasn’t our fault.”

  Simon continues, his voice calm—Jack realizes he is furious. “When we bombed Hamburg, thousands of people died. I was in on that one, we dropped incendiaries, fluorescent bombs along with the old blockbusters, and what was down there? Civilians. We killed them just as surely as if we’d lined them up and shot them into a pit, and we won the war either because of it or in spite of it, I suspect in spite because I know who rebuilt their cities, the bloody women did, brick by brick, and how are you going to defeat that? But we got rid of Hitler, didn’t we, and what’s bothering me, Jack, is that Stalin killed more civilians than Hitler did, but Germany is a different place now and Russia is not. And I’m asking you—your country, your goddamn civilization, is asking you to maybe, perhaps, sacrifice the life of one boy—and very probably not his life, merely his freedom—in the interests of peace, in the interests of a number of scientific advances that could make the difference between survival and annihilation, in the interests of your daughter. You bloody fool.” Simon falls silent. When he speaks again, he no longer sounds angry. Merely sad. “I killed hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. But I didn’t do it secretly and I never saw a single victim. You don’t at that height, it’s called the morality of altitude. And I got a medal for it. You are being asked to jeopardize one person. The difference is, you know him. I didn’t know the women rushing to the shelters when the sirens went, I didn’t know their children, who died under buildings or stuck to the roads when the tar melted, I didn’t know the people in the hospitals and churc
hes, or the ones who ended up in the canal, I don’t delude myself that they deserved what they got and I don’t indulge in a lot of pointless guilt and virtuous hindsight. I did my fucking duty, Jack. It’s time you did yours.”

  The fog has obliterated time and place. Jack could be anywhere—ten thousand feet above the earth, trust your instruments….

  Simon says, “There’s an old Chinese proverb: once you’ve saved a man’s life, you’re responsible for him.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, Simon.”

  “My colleagues know there is a senior Canadian officer involved, they know he is stationed at Centralia, and although I haven’t mentioned your name, they could track you quite easily, I should think. But here’s the crux of it, Jack. So far, they’ve no inkling you intend to break silence.”

  If Simon thinks Jack is worried about his career right now, he’s sorely mistaken.

  “Are you threatening me, Simon?”

  “No.” He sounds genuinely surprised. When he speaks again, his tone is intimate, almost aggrieved. “I’m giving you my word that they’ll not hear it from me.”

  Jack swallows and says, “Simon. I won’t let that boy hang. He’s innocent.”

  “Then he has nothing to worry about.”

  I don’t know what to do. Jack has not said it aloud. But Simon has heard him. Simon is just across the table, a Scotch away. He leans toward Jack now and says, “Do the right thing.”

  The phrase stirs something in Jack’s memory, just behind his left eye…. What Simon said when Jack awoke in the MRI to learn his war was over: You did the right thing, mate.

  “Goodbye, Jack.”

  Jack takes his hand from the opaque glass and his print remains, black and transparent. He looks up and through it. Outside, the night is clear. The moon glistens through his palm. The fog was inside the booth all along, made of nothing but his own breath. He opens the door and feels the chill through the wool of his uniform. It has started snowing. Flakes graze his eyelashes, melt against his lower lip. He puts on his hat. His legs carry him over the silent white. Halfway across the parade square, he becomes aware of a set of muffled footsteps behind him. He quickens his pace but so does the follower—he can hear the catch of the stranger’s breath, almost feel the clap on his shoulder: You got rid of the car, Jack. Even if you did come forward, the police wouldn’t believe you any more than they believed Henry Froelich. There never was an Oskar Fried. He stops. Who would believe him? His wife. The Soviets. And the CIA.