The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “Anyway,” said Tarcovich, coming up beside Aubrion. He lifted his head, the expression in his eyes unreadable. “Grandjean thinks we should have some important people there, at the fund-raiser, and that we should make it—not just desirable, really, but vital that they attend.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Theo Mullier.”

  “Oh, yes.” Aubrion laughed. “If their reputations are shot to pieces—”

  “—they’ll want to be seen at a fund-raiser promoting the moral fiber of the Reich.”

  The pair stopped in front of a fabric shop. Wind carried the heavy scent of wool out the door and into the streets. Lada knew the seamstress: a girl who used to work in her brothel and had learned a trade and saved up for a shop. The plan was to ask the girl to sew textbook covers for the erotic novels.

  “This is tremendous,” said Aubrion. Then he added, as though he’d rehearsed the line: “Thank you, Lada.”

  Tarcovich waved a hand, batting away his gratitude. The plan was tremendous—a ridiculous word, one of Aubrion’s favorites—and yet it looked small and wretched to her. Each tremendous task was another sin against Andree Grandjean. At Andree’s invitation, Lada had made a home inside of her: a tiny, vulnerable place against the world. Only Lada knew the home would crumble on top of them as they slept. The hours they spent together were built of lies and false hopes. Lada despised herself for it.

  “What’s the matter?” said Aubrion.

  “Nothing,” said Lada. “We should go in. It will take the seamstresses a while, I think.”

  “Why,” said Marc, “you don’t think they get orders for two hundred Nazi book covers every day?”

  Tarcovich was not sure whether he was joking. She and Aubrion had that in common.

  13 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY EVENING

  The Professor

  THE BASE ATE TOGETHER, an early dinner of stew and watered-down beer, and then Mullier joined Victor and the businessman Ferdinand Wellens in the basement of the FI headquarters. Wellens was pacing, smoothing out his trench coat after every fourth step, while Victor looked over a document with a pen between his teeth.

  Noticing Mullier, Victor removed the pen and said, “Ah, good. Shall we get started?”

  Mullier nodded, craning his neck to see what the professor was reading. It had long been clear to Victor that Mullier did not trust him. The professor’s expedition to Auschwitz, his subsequent missions to camps and excavation sites and capitols and trenches (each of which was funded by a Nazi ministry, for they all believed he was doing research for the Reich)—all of that was considered evidence of Victor’s loyalties to the resistance. He had ventured to Auschwitz on the FI’s orders, on assignment for La Libre Belgique du Peter Pan: to find out where the trains were taking the Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, the bodies. Everyone in the underground knew him after that. But the FI was too quick, Mullier often said, to trust a man who lied for a living.

  “I believe I have made considerable progress on my sales pitch,” said Wellens.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Victor.

  “Gentlemen of the Ministry, welcome to Schule für die Erziehung von Kindern mit ewige Liebe.” Wellens paused, clearly pleased with himself. “Our mission is to—”

  “Don’t stop like that,” interrupted Mullier.

  Victor adjusted his glasses, which kept slipping off his nose; one of the greatest inconveniences of war, he’d found, was the persistent lack of eyeglasses shops. “Mullier is right,” said the professor. “If you pause after you say the name, they’ll know you’ve only said it three times.”

  “Four now.”

  “Well, make it five, and stop pausing.”

  Wellens cleared his throat. “Gentlemen of the Ministry, welcome to Schule für die Erziehung von Kindern mit ewige Liebe. Our mission is to enlighten a generation—”

  “You can’t do that, either.” Mullier sat on a stool near a chalkboard, removing an ever-present apple from his pocket so his hands would have something to do. Victor understood the impulse. The saboteur shared Victor’s fondness for odd sleeping habits, so they often encountered each other in the softest hours of night and morning, while the rest of the base slept. Victor had caught Mullier nearly weeping over the pain in his clubfoot; Mullier knew of Victor’s affliction, having found him pale and shaking in the privacy of midnight. The professor believed there to be a silent understanding between them, a tacit agreement to ignore each other’s vulnerabilities. Aubrion, devil take him, wasn’t the only one who played games of make-believe.

  “What is it this time?” groaned Wellens.

  “You rushed into the next sentence, after you said the name of the school.” Victor pointed at Wellens as though calling on a student. “Can’t you deliver your pitch the way you’re speaking to us? Does it have to be so contrived?”

  “Fine, fine, I’ll try it again, then.” Wellens took a breath. “Gentlemen of the Ministry, welcome to Schule für die Erziehung von Kindern—what’s the rest again?”

  Victor jerked his head at Wellens. “Are you sure he’s the man we want?”

  “We don’t have much of a choice,” said Mullier. “He’s got connections. And most businessmen don’t like the FI.”

  “Why not?” asked Wellens.

  “We are not,” said Victor, eyeing Wellens with purpose, “a profitable enterprise.”

  12 DAYS TO PRINT

  MORNING

  The Jester

  THE NEWSPAPER COULD hardly contain its excitement. For sale! it said to Marc Aubrion. The text of the column was shaky—it was clear the printer had produced this copy of Le Soir only minutes before running out of ink—but that only made it seem more desperate, more eager for Aubrion’s attention. Three pairs of boots, lightly worn. Fine, dark leather! Inquire at the address below. For sale! the adjoining column said, shoving its neighbor aside in its eagerness to be heard. A wool hat. This was a scuffle for Aubrion’s attention, and this hat would not be beaten. One hole (very smaaaall, it promised); the typesetting device had gotten stuck on the letter A halfway through the word small, so the word contained four As instead of one and looked as though it were screaming for help.

  Disgusted, Aubrion cast the paper aside. He rubbed his eyes, resting his aching head on the desk between two typewriters. The devices were alive with the smell of ink and grease. Lifting his head, Aubrion ran his loving fingertips across the keys, misshapen with age. The K key was missing. He wondered where it had gone. Did someone pocket it? Was it on the floor somewhere, had they been kicking it around the Front de l’Indépendance headquarters since the day it fell? Aubrion poked the spidery grave where the letter had been.

  He got up, absently grabbing a piece of chalk. Aubrion remembered when these “for sale” ads began appearing in Le Soir. It was a few weeks after the occupation.

  “Have you seen these?” he’d asked René Noël.

  Noël had been fixing something, his arms buried in a printing press. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves, ink staining his arms up to his elbows. The director had fancied himself a surgeon with printing presses, for a while. Now the FI could hardly afford the repairs.

  “What is it?” he’d asked.

  Aubrion had held up a paper. “These ads in Le Soir.”

  “For shoes, coats—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course I’ve seen them. Hand me a mallet.”

  Aubrion did so. “Have we been running them in La Libre Belgique, as well?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “My God, you really don’t know, do you?” Noël had extracted his arms from the press and wiped his hands on his trousers. “They’re not selling their clothes. The Nazis are sponsoring those ads. Look, it’s simple. What do you do when you’ve conquered a country and killed ten percent of its population, but the other ninety p
ercent needs clothes to get through the winter? You sell the clothes.”

  “The dead people’s clothes?”

  “Now you’re getting it. The average reader sees that and thinks, ‘Well, now, the people must be fairly content if they’re putting up their things for sale. So cheap, too!’ And then the average reader buys a hat from the Nazis, thinking they’re actually tossing their pennies to Peter the Happy Citizen.”

  In the shadow of this memory, Aubrion looked down at his copy of Le Soir. Three pairs of boots, lightly worn, he read. He wrote Peter the Happy Citizen on a chalkboard, underlined it three times. That was his audience, the sort of man willing to be fooled by a Nazi ad. This man was going to buy a copy of Faux Soir—to laugh at it or not, to toss it in a trash bin or bring it to a pub. Good writing is a conversation, and everything else is pretentious shit; that’s what Aubrion always said. But what conversation could he have with Peter the Happy Citizen? What should Aubrion say to make him realize that those were Nazi ads, that he’d been fooled, to make Peter angry and confused and hurt, but also to make him laugh?

  “A fake ad!” Aubrion exclaimed as I crept down the stairs to the basement to see him pounding the chalkboard. I’d seen him get that excited before; it was frightening. Given my upbringing among the writers of the FI, I don’t use analogies lightly—but Aubrion was a force of nature, a natural disaster. Leaping from his chair, tripping over himself, he reached for a scrap of paper and pen. The words were conspiring; they wanted to escape. Aubrion let them go:

  For sale! Two dozen shirts, lightly worn. Belgian cotton! Bullet holes in each (but only if you look hard enough). Inquire at the address below, which is in no way affiliated with the Third Reich and which, in fact, denies all connection thereto, and frankly, resents any implications otherwise.

  Aubrion realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled. Gripping the paper, Aubrion read his ad over and again, until the words became music, and the music lost meaning. Only then was he satisfied. “How about that, Peter?” he whispered.

  The Smuggler

  It was a skinny little thing, the book in Lada’s hands, with a mantle of dust around the edges. She held it up so Andree could read the title.

  “She Romances the Reich?” Andree Grandjean’s face twisted. “And people read that?”

  “I don’t think people read this, actually.” Tarcovich blew dust at Andree. “It was sitting on a shelf at the whorehouse.”

  “Did it belong to a—customer?”

  Lada tried to ignore the way Andree stumbled over the word. “No, I smuggled it into the country a few years ago. You might be surprised to learn that erotic romances featuring an American woman and her queer English friend who end up fucking Hitler’s toupee off his head are illegal in German-occupied territories.” Lada tossed Andree the book. She missed, and the book landed on the floor. Grandjean picked it up. “You might also be surprised to learn that we’re in a German-occupied territory.”

  “Careful, I might faint,” said the judge, turning the book over in her hands. The cover featured Hitler’s bare buttocks with a swastika tattooed on the left cheek. “I can’t believe someone wrote this. Do you know who it was?”

  “Oh, God, I wish.”

  “Are there many of these?”

  “Erotic Hitler books? I have a whole collection. It’s my favorite sort of protest.”

  Andree laughed. “I never thought of it as protest.”

  “How is this anything other than a—” here Lada Tarcovich lifted her middle finger “—to the Reich?”

  “That is true, no doubt. I’ve never thought of protest as anything more than...”

  “Men in the streets.”

  Andree turned over the book to find even more colorful illustrations on the back. “Does anyone wank off to it, do you think?”

  “I’ve never heard you say wank.”

  “You’ve known me three days.”

  “In which you had a wealth of opportunity to say it.”

  “Well?” said Andree. “Do you think they do it?”

  “Do what?”

  Andree smacked Lada with the paperback, punctuating the slap with: “Wank.”

  “Of course not. That would be ridiculous.”

  With a guilty smile, Lada took the book from Andree and walked over to the judge’s bookshelves. As Lada scanned the shelves, Andree Grandjean switched on a light. It was barely morning, and still dark: clouds, furious with rain, smothered the sun.

  “What are you doing?” asked Grandjean.

  Lada slid She Romances the Reich between a copy of Legal Statutes and its leathered friend Tortes for the District Judge: Third Edition. The two books glared at their new companion. Smiling, Lada stepped back—but as Grandjean laughed, Lada recalled the first time she left a book and then a shirt and then a painting at her previous lover’s flat, the slow, quiet blending of lives. Time had permitted their two lives to pool and harden into one; time would never give her and Andree such a chance. It infuriated Lada. In her desperate wish to be with someone, to feel a woman’s body against her own, she had wasted her years. Lada buried her face in Andree’s neck.

  “What is it?” Andree murmured. “Why are your eyes so sad?”

  Though Andree had spoken quietly, the question felt sharp. “My eyes are sad?” said Tarcovich, laughing faintly. “Well—” Lada kissed her and broke away “—someone should have a talk with them about that.”

  “Lada—”

  “Oh, I nearly forgot.” Eager to distract Andree, Lada rummaged through the satchel she’d brought with her. She emerged with a sheet of paper. “This is the poster they’re printing for the fund-raiser.”

  Andree Grandjean took it. The poster was a somber grayish-brown. Printed in polite, roundish letters were the words: The Society for the Prevention of Moral Degradation has saved nearly eight thousand children and mothers since its humble beginning. And then, on the next line, in larger letters: WE NEED YOUR HELP TO SAVE MORE. The last line simply read: Join us on THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER at 7pm, followed by the address of the auction house-turned-fund-raiser venue. In a word, the poster was brilliant: pointed yet drab, evocative yet unspecific.

  “I can’t believe something so perfect came out of the FI,” she said.

  Tarcovich snorted. “We do have our moments. I’m sending some of my people over to the auction house you bought to start fixing it up for the event. Later today. This afternoon, probably.”

  “My God, I’d love to join. What do you have in mind?”

  “I could tell you, but where’s the fun in that?”

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  HELENE GOT UP abruptly and left the room. She returned with a wrinkled newspaper, which she placed on the table. Eliza’s breath shuddered in her throat. The paper was yellow, the color of sickness and ancient tombs. A sepia, bookish smell curled through the room. The top of the page read Le Soir.

  Holding her breath, Eliza rested her hands on the table. They lay just above the newspaper. She hesitated as if frightened to hold a new lover’s hand—terrified of what might come next, of what might not.

  “Is that it?” whispered Eliza, even though it was a ridiculous question.

  Helene nodded, her eyes smiling.

  Eliza asked her, “How many copies survived?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Many?”

  “It could be.” Helene licked her fingertips as though preparing to turn the page, but hesitated. “I read the fake ad later, the one Aubrion wrote. It frightened me, I confess. But I do not find Aubrion’s mockery of death so terrible any longer. To take death seriously when it surrounded us—that would have been terrible. To meet it as an equal—that would have been profane. Laughter was the noblest, most honest answer to death we had.”

  Eliza reached out to touch the newspaper again, but once more, she could
not. “Why are you showing it to me now?”

  “The time is right,” said Helene.

  12 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY MORNING

  The Gastromancer

  IT WAS LATE at night—early in the morning, however you wanted to think of it—and David Spiegelman was writing. The trappings of his quarters and his body felt like props from a play: hands, office, pen, pulse. Spiegelman spread a copy of Le Soir on his desk—sweat-stained, limp with misuse—the issue from last Wednesday. Newsies sold more copies on Wednesday than any other day, for Wednesday was the day Maurice-George Olivier came out with “Effective Strategy.” Indeed, “Effective Strategy” sat in its usual spot on the first page, bulging across three columns. Spiegelman read:

  There is no doubt in my mind, in anyone’s mind, in the minds of any person across Belgium—indeed, across Europe, even in Russia—that the army of the Germans is reaching the apex of its movements, and that we will soon see, all of us, together, a greater, more momentous effort culminating in the most important victory of the war. The great warriors of Germany are now mounting—or have already mounted, depending on how you view the situation, whether from above or within—a campaign the likes of which has never been seen before now, and might never be seen again.

  Most of it was made up, of course, but the people didn’t know that. How could they? The Nazis had eliminated almost every newspaper in the country, executing the editors who didn’t cooperate, burning their factories with the workers trapped inside. To amplify their propaganda, the Germans relied on collaborators like Olivier—who, not twenty-four hours after the Germans occupied Belgium, turned up on the doorstep of the newly-established Nazi headquarters in Brussels, offering his pen in exchange for asylum. That was all David Spiegelman knew of Maurice-George Olivier. Everything else was speculation: where he came from, who told him what to write, and, most importantly, why he needed asylum in the first place.