The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “And the column was born,” Mullier supplied.

  “All we needed was a Nazi willing to sell himself.” Tarcovich smiled.

  Wolff nodded. “Except that there was no Nazi traitor, was there? He is a fiction.”

  Spiegelman spoke up. “He was a literary invention, a tool for the editors of Colère to control what people believed.” His voice was high and gentle. “When the Front de l’Indépendance was having a bad week, the turncoat’s column assured everyone that the Nazis were frightened, that the Resistance Front was doing its job. When the people grew afraid and began cutting off their support to the rebels, the turncoat wrote about how the Nazis would march across any village that did not do its part to help the cause.”

  “He was a brilliant invention,” said Wolff, “and the column was one of the greatest tools of propaganda I have ever seen.”

  Tarcovich said, “So it was beautiful, and you burned it. All of Nazi history written in a single sentence.” Her cigarette had gone out. Spiegelman leaned over to relight it.

  “Yes, what more is there to be said?” asked Mullier.

  Wolff folded his arms on the table. “A great deal, as it turns out. I have studied the column, and I mean to use it as a template. We’ve made great strides in controlling public opinion, to be sure, but we could do better. The people of Belgium, and all of Europe, really—they are not fond of us, let’s say.”

  Aubrion snorted. “That is what happens when you kill them and take their things.”

  “Everyone knows the Allies are beginning a concentrated military push into German-held territory,” said Wolff. “We cannot turn them back now, nor do we need to.”

  “What we do need is to make it so that Europe does not want them here,” said Spiegelman, “so by the time the first American boot tramples through Brussels—”

  “—Brussels will be ready to hamstring the soldier who owns it.” Wolff nodded at Aubrion. “You four have done much for the Front de l’Indépendance. You represent everything one needs to run a successful publication—”

  “Drunks, layabouts and whores?” laughed Tarcovich.

  “Writers, journalists, distributors,” said Wolff. “Herr Spiegelman, if you please.”

  Spiegelman picked up a paperweight and placed a copy of a different newspaper, La Libre Belgique, on the table. The paperweight slipped from his hands and fell to the floor with a rambunctious clatter.

  Victor jumped, a thin cry breaking from his lips. Aubrion and the others did what we always did around Victor, pretending not to notice his shame. In truth, Aubrion did not know Victor before his mission to Auschwitz, where he was among the first Allied researchers to gather intelligence on what happened there. He had only seen photographs of a much taller-looking man. Victor’s notebooks weathered the encounter with the camp better than he did; many emerged from the experience intact. Aubrion sometimes imagined the professor holding the leather to his chest against the gaunt barbed-wire smells of the place.

  “You mentioned the power of numbers earlier, Professor,” said Wolff. Victor’s hunted animal eyes would not leave the table. “Do you know how many people read this paper each week?”

  “Forty thousand,” the professor monotoned.

  “You are wrong. Seventy thousand people, Professor Victor—and that is only counting the Belgian readership. This paper is a weapon to rival any missile. That is why we are recruiting you to create and distribute a copy of La Libre Belgique that looks like all the other copies, that sounds like all the other copies, but that portrays the Allies unkindly. Do you understand?”

  “You want us to help you build a propaganda bomb,” said Mullier, bluntly.

  “The largest propaganda bomb that has ever been dropped,” Wolff confirmed.

  Tarcovich gave a curt nod. “It makes sense. Belgians read La Libre Belgique, learn about how the Americans and the English are defiling churches and raping young girls, and they tell their friends and families throughout the continent—”

  “Then a foundation is laid.” Victor shook his head. Sweat had plastered the remains of the professor’s hair to his skin. “It would be easy, after that. You could infiltrate other publications in a similar way. Turn all of Europe against the Allies.”

  “Your connections to La Libre Belgique du Peter Pan, as the Belgians insist on calling it, will prove crucial here,” said Wolff. “Monsieurs Aubrion and Victor, you already know how to write in the style of this paper. Madame Tarcovich, you are familiar with the myriad channels your kind uses to distribute the paper. Monsieur Mullier harbors a great many talents. And we have reason to believe that one of you is—or was at one time, we aren’t entirely sure—that one of you is the editor of the paper, ‘Peter Pan’ himself.”

  “How impressive,” said Tarcovich, and she was not being facetious, at least not entirely. To preserve our anonymity and spread our risk, the Front de l’Indépendance rotated editors-in-chief. Through procedures that remain cryptic to me, the FI selected a new editor to manage the production of La Libre Belgique each year. The year’s procedures and the editor’s identity were guarded so closely that even I did not know who had been appointed Peter Pan that year. And if I had known, I might not have lived to see my thirteenth year; this is neither paranoia nor exaggeration.

  “However, I will not flatter you,” Wolff continued. “None of you represents the best the FI has to offer. But that is to our benefit.”

  “I am so relieved you could benefit from our mediocrity,” said Aubrion.

  Wolff took Aubrion’s joke at face value—always an error, in my experience. “You should feel relieved. Because of your standing within the organization, your activities are more likely to go unnoticed. You know better than I how the FI monitors the activities of its ‘heroes.’” He snapped the word in half like a shattered bone. “But of course, that is not the sole reason I chose you—”

  “Oh, you clever bastard,” interrupted Tarcovich. “We’re all odd ones, in some way or another.”

  The Gruppenführer smiled thinly. “That is one way of phrasing it. You all have something to hide, as it were.”

  “How is it going to be done?” asked Aubrion.

  “Aubrion, stop this,” hissed Mullier. “Are you turning your back on our cause so easily?”

  “Don’t be a dolt. We have no choice but to listen,” said Tarcovich.

  Spiegelman said, “I am somewhat of an expert, I suppose, in linguistic ventriloquy. I will offer training and guidance throughout this endeavor.”

  “And I will coordinate,” said the Gruppenführer. “You can, of course, refuse this assignment, but you will have to be terminated, and we will seek out someone else to play your part. I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that. It would be a lot of unnecessary trouble.”

  Aubrion leaned back in his chair. “All right, let’s say we agree to help build your bomb. If it works, and the FI finds out what we did, we’ll be useless to them and to you. What will become of us then?”

  Wolff produced a folder. “This contains documents signed by the Führer assuring you that, after you’ve done your service to the Reich, you will be granted safety and immunity in a country of your choice.”

  “What laws are in place to ensure that your government keeps its word?” asked Victor.

  “If you’d like,” said Wolff, “I can walk you through them.”

  “Is there a precedent for such things?” asked Tarcovich.

  “For the legal protection of defectors? Of course.”

  It was here the idea came to Aubrion. All this talk of documents and legalities had infected his mind with a fog, until he happened to think of a joke. This was nothing new for Aubrion; his brain was a receptacle for countless jokes. But this joke was different from all others. Unlike all others, this joke had not yet been told.

  “I suppose we don’t have a choice,” said Aubrion.

&nbs
p; The others stared at him, trying to detect insanity or drunkenness, and probably seeing both. He stared back, willing them to play along.

  “No, we don’t,” said Mullier, looking squarely at Aubrion.

  “You have my support, Gruppenführer,” said Victor, avoiding Aubrion’s gaze.

  “And mine,” said Mullier.

  Tarcovich shrugged, adjusting her scarf. “Mine, as well.” Spiegelman passed her an ashtray. She stubbed out her cigarette, smiling at Aubrion through the tail of smoke.

  19 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY MORNING

  The Pyromaniac

  JUST OUTSIDE THE ALLEY, shops and carts and newsstands were waking up. Shopkeepers stretched sheets of tattered, yawning burlap across the tops of their carts. Men with aprons and tousled hair came outside to put signs in their windows: fresh sausages, beautiful glassware; the longer the adjectives, the more likely that they were false. Whores wandered home, their eyes red from the night’s labors. A breeze picked up the smell of roasting meat, perfumers’ wares, wet dogs, sick men sleeping and dying in the gutters. The night had deposited an uneasy layer of snow on the rooftops and streets. When morning began to feud with night, the snow turned into rain. It was then that the city froze over, trapping the cobblestones and windows under panes of milky glass.

  I watched Aubrion and his companions walking toward me, ducking into an alley bordered by chapped brick buildings. Just inside the alley, I stood arranging stacks of papers on a newsstand. I was around twelve when I sold papers in Enghien—a part of Hainaut that Aubrion described as “storybook” at his kindest and “dull” at his least. This was two years after my first contact with Aubrion and the Front de l’Indépendance.

  “Hello, Gamin,” Aubrion said, calling me an urchin, a stray. And so I was Gamin in those days, a child whose birth name had been penciled over by Marc Aubrion.

  “Monsieur Aubrion!” I said, waving. “What are you doing in Enghien?”

  “I’m wondering that myself,” he said. I recognized his companions from wanted posters and Aubrion’s stories—the saboteur Theo Mullier, the smuggler Lada Tarcovich, and Professor Martin Victor. As they looked on, perhaps a bit irritated with Aubrion, my dear Aubrion told me the most extraordinary story of his capture. When the tale was done, Aubrion gestured toward me. “Everyone, meet Gamin—Gamin, meet everyone. Gamin is the only newspaperman in the country with a conscience.”

  “Oh, but Monsieur Aubrion, how would you know?” Tarcovich said, smiling.

  Mullier leaned against a wall to take some weight off his clubfoot. “Isn’t he the lad who burns things for money?” he asked, nodding at me.

  “So does every waffle-maker in the city,” said Aubrion, stepping between me and his companions.

  I clutched at a newspaper, taking sudden interest in the appearance of my shoes. Though Mullier was wrong—I never burned things for money, and no one at the FI had ever requested that I do so—I was not about to correct him. My reputation was widely known by that time, a fact that filled me with equal parts shame and pride. When one of my fires spread to a Nazi supply outpost, the FI became far more tolerant of my presence around Aubrion and their official business. I told the FI that I’d burned the supply outpost intentionally. Only Aubrion knew the truth: although the fires did not make me feel whole again, they eased the pain of what I had mislaid.

  But Aubrion did not know the truth of my identity. Like Mullier, like everyone, he believed I was a boy; I had never told him otherwise. I had donned my new identity after my parents died in Toulouse, cloaking myself in the anonymity of the streets: just another lamplighter, another urchin, another messenger, another newspaper boy. And in the two years I’d known Marc Aubrion, my identity mostly had not mattered. I was his soldier regardless of what lay beneath the armor; he was my hero regardless of what he knew.

  “Gamin,” said Aubrion, “how much for a copy of Le Soir?”

  “Forty-eight centimes, monsieur. But, if you please, why waste time on that rubbish?”

  “I’m a writer, aren’t I? I should read what my competition has to say every now and again.”

  Aubrion tossed me a few coins. I unbundled a stack of Le Soir from the pile at my feet, handing him a copy. Handling fresh newspapers, still warm and wet from the mouth of the presses, is a holy thing. I felt this as I passed the papers to Aubrion, and I could see that he felt it too: he unfolded Le Soir with a hunger that bordered on indecency.

  “Marc?” said Tarcovich.

  “Hmm?”

  “Marc, what are you doing?”

  “I am reading.” Aubrion snapped the newspaper shut. “Gamin, how many copies of Le Soir will you sell today?”

  “I don’t know, monsieur. I never counted.”

  “Guess.”

  I calculated, embarrassed at how long the multiplication took me. I was educated until I was about nine, but then the war started. And so, while I have learned to handle words, I still find numbers slippery. But Aubrion showed no impatience. “Maybe a thousand.”

  “Did you all hear that? Maybe a thousand, at this one newsstand in an alley in Enghien.”

  Groaning, Victor leaned against a brick wall. “We know, Aubrion. Many, many people read collaborationist papers.”

  “But how many read Le Soir?” asked Aubrion.

  “About three hundred thousand.” Victor nudged my stack of papers with the toe of his shoe. “That is our best guess. It was, after all, the country’s most popular paper, before the war. By some estimates, it is even more popular now that the Nazis have their hands on it.”

  “Three hundred thousand traitors,” said Aubrion, not quite seriously.

  “Don’t joke that way,” said Tarcovich. “Why wouldn’t they read Le Soir, the only source of news for people too scared to buy papers from the underground? And besides, they have the likes of Hergé writing about—about Tintin’s adventures, and that nonsense, every week. Cartoons during wartime.” Tarcovich shook her head. “We can’t compete with that sort of thing. It makes the people feel like nothing is wrong, Marc, that Belgium can breathe easy. Who can blame them for wanting normalcy, even if it’s a lie?”

  “Soir Vole,” spat Mullier.

  “Stolen indeed,” said Victor.

  “Gamin, let me ask you. How would you like to help me with something?” said Aubrion.

  “I’d love to!” I said. Anyone at my age would have said the same. Marc Aubrion was dark-haired, always a little unshaven, with eyes that were wide with the entire world’s secrets—even the unexplored parts of it. When he started giving me errands for the FI, and then jobs, and then assignments, I found eager lads at the workhouses to help me with my tasks. Aubrion soon discovered my little army, how we used to gather to dream about his next caper. By God, he loved us. There were secret messages to deliver, or politicians to spy on, or books to smuggle—and afterwards, Aubrion weighed down our pockets with food, candy, pastries and comic books. I’d heard about the others, too, as had the workhouse boys: about the saboteur Theo Mullier, the smuggler Lada Tarcovich, the professor Martin Victor. And now they were here, standing around me, these men and women from the underground newspapers and back-alley rumors. I was bewitched.

  Aubrion gave me a playful whack with his copy of Le Soir. “I knew I could count on you. Tell me, what day is it?”

  “The twenty-second of October, monsieur.”

  “Damn, we haven’t much time. I need to see René.”

  “René Noël?” said Tarcovich. “Marc, I love you—which is why you must believe me when I tell you that René Noël doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Oh, yes he does. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  * * *

  “I do not want to see you,” said René Noël. The director of the Front de l’Indépendance press department looked Aubrion up and down, as though Noël could not believe the man was still alive, and started to
close the door on him. Aubrion put out a hand to stop him. I’d walked Aubrion and the others through the city, leading them through neighborhoods and passages the Nazis did not know. Confident no one was tailing us, we’d finally approached the headquarters of the Front de l’Indépendance; the building was disguised as a small meatpacking factory and had thus far evaded German notice. Noël, who seemed able to sense when Aubrion was dangerously near, had accosted us at the door.

  “René,” tried Aubrion. “I have—”

  “—to leave.” Noël tried once again to close the door, but Aubrion blocked him. The director’s sigh was akin to a curse. “Fine, come inside—but do it quickly. People will hear.”

  The director barred the door after us. He wiped his hands on his trousers, smearing ink across the green; Noël insisted on wearing a contrived uniform with oversized trousers and the Front de l’Indépendance crest on his shoulder. The director was a stocky tree stump of a man, bearded and gray, with spectacles and a thicket of hair streaked through with ink. He looked as though he could handle himself in a fight, which was a lie that saved him a fair amount of trouble. “And you brought a child?” said Noël. “What the devil is the matter with you?”

  “Gamin is hardly a child,” said Aubrion.

  Noël scoffed. “That means little, coming from you,” he said, hurrying past skinny oak tables where men and women sat with typewriters and notebooks, clicking and scratching words into existence. We followed Noël down a staircase and into the basement.

  Though narrower than the room upstairs, the basement was equally frantic. People bustled about, some in uniforms and others in filthy aprons, doing the work of the resistance. Words like death and hope decorated blackboards and papers. With a thrill in my heart, I glanced over at Aubrion. He winked at me. An exchange of feelings passed between us, far grander than any words I could use to describe them. Aubrion had previously told me the location of the base in case I needed a quick place to hide, but I had never stepped inside. And now this “errand boy,” this nameless urchin who sold papers and went to bed hungry, this child of the streets—I was standing in the FI headquarters with the likes of Theo Mullier and Martin Victor and Lada Tarcovich, names I had read on wanted posters and in newspapers, characters from my most fanciful make-believe games.