The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  And so I left Aubrion there and walked to the Flemming Workhouse. The boys were waiting for me. One of them, a kid with a mangled hand, passed me a stuffed pipe. I inhaled the smoke, stamping down my urge to cough.

  “So, what’s the job?” the kid wanted to know.

  “Remember that business we talked about before?” I took another drag on the pipe, inhaling too forcefully. As the boys cackled at me, I doubled over in a fit of sputtering coughs. After this had gone on a minute or two too long for my dignity, I held my breath and forced a lopsided grin. “With the bombs?”

  “Wait a tick.” A smaller boy stood on tiptoe. “What bombs?”

  “He needs bombs,” said another. “Loads of them.”

  “Marc Aubrion needs bombs,” I amended. “He’s planning something big. He’ll need about a dozen of ’em.”

  “How’re we supposed to make a dozen bombs?” the smaller boy piped up.

  “I got the stuff we need.” Though I was not being completely truthful, I did know where to get it. I figured that was close enough.

  A boy in a cap with no brim came up to me and took the pipe from my hands. “And what’re we gonna do with these bombs, once we made ’em?” He stuffed the pipe stem in his mouth.

  “That,” I said, “is the easy part.”

  7 DAYS TO PRINT

  MID-AFTERNOON

  The Professor

  VICTOR SLIPPED OUT of the FI base and hurried to the Nazi headquarters in the wan, snowy quiet. Two little girls were building a snowman just outside. Their shrieks of delight made a strange contrast with the swastika flags; the world felt unbalanced. The professor had loved the snow as a boy, but he despised it now. Snow muffled the world, turning benign sights and sounds into phantasms. He jumped as a man came up beside him.

  The professor brushed off his tweed coat, hoping, perhaps, to extinguish the smell of drink. In his boyhood days, Victor’s father used to say, “The Lord never begrudged a man a bit of the bottle.” Victor learned that well; Victor learned everything well. He had quit the bottle at his wife Sofia’s insistence; he’d taken it up again the day she died. Victor still felt Sofia’s admonishing eyes every time he took a sip from the thing, which he did, at least three times, while August Wolff led him deeper into the Nazi headquarters.

  “I was intrigued by your letter,” said Wolff, when they arrived at his office.

  Victor tucked the flask into his coat pocket, opposing his pistol. Wolff’s soldiers had confiscated the weapon when he entered the Nazi headquarters, but Wolff insisted they return it.

  “What did you find intriguing?” asked Victor.

  “That a man of your loyalties would write it in the first place.”

  The two men sat. Wolff nodded at the decanter of sherry on his desk, which Victor politely declined.

  “That sounds more like disapproval than intrigue, in my view,” said the professor, for although he hadn’t the right to be haughty, Victor could not stop himself.

  “You must admit that it’s rather strange, isn’t it? Your record is nothing short of impressive. Why would you tarnish it?”

  “Though I am an academic, I’m also a practical man, Gruppenführer. Things change. Times change.”

  “Men change.”

  “Indeed.” Victor glanced at his watch. “Gruppenführer, I must ask that this conversation be short. I have a meeting in thirty minutes, on the other side of town.”

  Wolff nodded. “What was Mullier doing at the fund-raiser?”

  Victor weighed his response, a chemist pausing before tipping a beaker. It would be unwise to give Wolff everything, he reasoned. “We needed a way to quickly raise the funds necessary to complete our operation,” said the professor. “With all due respect, Gruppenführer, the five thousand francs you gave us were not enough to execute something of this scale.”

  “Ingenious. Aubrion’s design?”

  “Naturally.” Victor paused. Though it was probably unwise to ask, he felt he could not avoid it. “He is in Fort Breendonk, isn’t he?”

  “Herr Mullier? We had him transferred yesterday.”

  “God save him.”

  Wolff poured himself a glass of sherry. His wristwatch was too loose, Victor noted. Aubrion might have wondered whether it meant anything.

  “What else can you tell me?” asked Wolff.

  “Do you know of a Judge Grandjean?”

  “Andree Grandjean?”

  “The same. She is sympathetic to the Allies.”

  “We have long suspected her, but we never had any evidence.” The Gruppenführer drained his glass. “Do you?”

  “Grandjean agreed to help us raise funds for our project,” Victor replied.

  “A shame. She has a good record.”

  “But she’s taken on no political cases.”

  “As I said, we had our suspicions.”

  “Andree Grandjean has become quite close to the FI. She is with Lada Tarcovich now.”

  Wolff’s head tilted. “With her?”

  The professor reddened. “I thought that information might be useful to you.”

  “It is. Thank you, Professor. Anything more to report?”

  Victor shook his head. The more he handed over, the less he had to work with; the way things stood, Wolff did not know the entirety of Aubrion’s plans, and Aubrion did not know Victor was feeding information to Wolff. Only Victor held the whole story.

  “Not at this time,” Victor said. “But I trust we will meet again.”

  “Surely. I won’t keep you any longer.” Wolff stood, lifting his glass of sherry. “Are you sure I can’t interest you in a bit of something before you go? You are a guest here.”

  “I am quite sure, Gruppenführer,” said Martin Victor, “but you are a gracious host.” He took August Wolff’s hand in his own, surprising them both with the strength of his grip.

  7 DAYS TO PRINT

  EVENING

  The Jester

  THE TYPEWRITERS HAD gone to sleep for the evening, taking their needful melodies to bed with them. Aubrion hated the silence. Silence reminded him of everything that was frightening in the world: night and death and audiences that didn’t applaud. At the beginning, when the war was still new, people would gather around the graves of the freshly dead and sing songs or recite poems, or just watch with their raw eyes; after we lost Theo Mullier, Aubrion looked like one of those men, the ones who stood in the back and did not say anything. He took careful steps through the basement and stopped at a printing press. René Noël lay asleep at its feet.

  “René.” Aubrion shook the fellow, whose eyes spasmed open. “Wake up.”

  “I have already done that,” muttered Noël, rubbing his eyes. “For the love of God, what are you about, Marc? Christ, you smell. Where have you been?”

  Aubrion spoke softly, so as not to disturb the quiet. “Have you heard Gamin call this place his home? He does it, you know. He sleeps here. This basement. I did not realize I do it too, not until recently.” At the sound of my name, I stirred from my cot under Aubrion’s favorite blackboard. I kept still so they would not know I was listening.

  Noël sighed, infinitely weary. The night passed, lonely and strange, and the two men did not look at each other. I thought Aubrion might have left the room, so I opened my eyes a tad. He was still sitting there, his head against the wall. Behind the concrete, a drainpipe wept.

  “Do you know,” said René Noël, “the identity of our last Peter Pan?”

  “La Libre Belgique du Peter Pan? The editor-in-chief of La Libre Belgique?”

  “Theo Mullier.”

  Quiet Theo, Theo with his half smile and his monosyllabic abuse, his apples—it was inconceivable to Aubrion, and it is still inconceivable to me, that Theo could have orchestrated, at least for some duration, the writing of the greatest underground paper of our time.

&n
bsp; “I never liked him, not really,” said Aubrion. “But I loved him.”

  Noël nodded. “I know you did.”

  Aubrion whispered something, joining hands with Noël in the silence. They were ships in a grand ocean, these two men. Time alone has made them extraordinary. They were small ships, and only the brightest lighthouses could find them.

  YESTERDAY

  The Scrivener

  AFTER SPEAKING THESE WORDS, Helene went quiet. Dread clung shivering to the air. Eliza felt like she was standing in an empty art gallery, dank and timeless after closing. She kept her eyes on her notebook to give the old woman the illusion of privacy. This was no simple history lesson to Helene, Eliza knew. This was a memory, a nightmare, a confession, a hallucination.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened to Theo Mullier during his time at Fort Breendonk,” said Helene finally, startling Eliza. “But I have tried to piece it together, based on what I’ve read of the place. Do you know it?”

  “Fort Breendonk?” asked Eliza.

  “It still stands.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “I have seen it, yes. As far as I know, this is what happened.”

  6 DAYS TO PRINT

  The Saboteur

  ON THE ROAD to Fort Breendonk, a whisper interrupted the choir of jangling chains. “What are those things?” someone asked. “Those obelisks?” One of the soldiers in leather coats—the pale man walking alongside the line of prisoners—tugged on the manacles with a “Quiet, you,” and that was the end of that. Theo Mullier lifted his head—probably the first time he had done so since the Gestapo shoved him out of the car with orders to walk on, to walk until they said he should stop. It was Mullier and four other men; I tried for years, but I was never able to uncover their identities. They were chained together at the wrists and ankles. Their chains sang as they walked.

  Ahead, just beyond the wire fences surrounding the fort, a gang of obelisks stood with their wooden backs to the sky. The prisoners were half a kilometer away from Fort Breendonk, and the distance must have given Mullier a clear view of the whole thing. As I told you, I once went to the fortress, with a tour guide and a walking stick and a dozen or so children with cameras. It was an old, historic-looking structure at first glance. The sky there, in Flanders, is perpetually mute-gray, and the buildings themselves are gray, and the grass is gray with coal-streaked frost; and so the fortress does not feel like it is there, but somewhere else, sometime else, living in the 1800s when they still built such things and were proud of them. That was what Mullier must have seen. But as he and the others drew closer, the grass-painted domes, black-gray walls, watchtowers dotted with men and their guns, the barbed-wire fences—the historic, painted quality of the place became viscerally immediate. Only the obelisks did not belong.

  At the mouth of the fortress, where the lips of the barbed wire parted, Mullier might have felt the others slow. Grumbling in German, the men in their uniforms and trench coats would have pulled on Mullier’s chains. He would’ve walked faster, along with the others.

  I cannot know the content of Mullier’s thoughts. Was he thinking about his youth, people he loved and would never see again? Friends from his childhood? Aubrion and the resistance? I don’t know what people think about on the way to their deaths. David Spiegelman told me years ago that his parents thought only of death—theirs, anyone’s—in the days leading up to their own. He believed the Germans killed his parents twice: first their souls, then their bodies. Was it the same for Theo Mullier, I wonder? Was he alive when he went into Fort Breendonk to die?

  The men in trench coats ordered Mullier and the others to stop. They murmured among themselves for a minute. Mullier might have watched; he saw everything. Then one guard stepped forward with his pistol drawn, a shorter, curly-haired man. He unshackled Mullier from the others, tucked a key into his coat, and snapped handcuffs around Mullier’s wrists.

  “You will report to the business room.” That’s what they said to prisoners, in those days. “You will not fall behind. You will not speak. If you do either of those things, you will be shot without delay.” Many prisoners did not speak German. Mullier probably surmised that would get them killed before the week was out. Someone would order them to do something, and they’d do something else, and they would be shot without delay. To Mullier, the guard said: “You will report to the business room. You, too, will not speak. You will not resist. If you do either of those things, you will be shot without delay.”

  The guard tugged on Theo Mullier’s handcuffs, leading him down a brick road and into the main administrative building: the wide, concrete forehead of Fort Breendonk.

  One of the things that has surprised me most since the days of Faux Soir is how the caricature of the Nazi has taken root in our consciousness. I have no doubt you are thinking about this picture now, as I tell you about Theo Mullier: the trench coats, the hooded faces, the Nazi’s use of the words “you will do this” rather than “you must,” to indicate that the object of these orders no longer has any choices—all of this is familiar. It’s in our stories. And it is familiar because it is true. What is not in our stories, and what Mullier must have noticed as the German led him into the large building at the center of the fort, are the faces of these men. Mullier must have noticed that the men in their leather coats, the men with lightning bolts on their lapels, did not have Gestapo faces. There were no twisted noses to be found, no distended brows, no pockmarks or scars. They had ordinary faces, the faces of neighbors. That man over there could have been a shopkeeper, if not for his uniform. That woman could have been a file clerk.

  A scream penetrated the hallway. Mullier tried to look out a window, to see into the courtyard, solemn with obelisks, but he was stopped by the guard’s hold on his handcuffs. Thinking better of it, the guard pulled—“You’d like to see, then?” he snickered—turning Mullier toward the window.

  Two Germans stood before a thin fellow with a beard. They had lashed the man to one of those strange obelisks. Mullier realized, with a start, that he recognized the man: he was the prisoner who’d spoken, the one who’d whispered a question as they approached the fort. “What are those things?” the man had asked. “Those obelisks?” The Nazis leveled their rifles at him, and the prisoner got his answer.

  When I visited years ago, the keepers of Fort Breendonk had left the business room more or less how it looked in the days of Faux Soir. The room lay behind four or five barred gates, through a series of cellar-like corridors. Inside, a portrait of Heinrich Himmler oversaw everything: the swastika flag spread out across a long table, the naked wooden chairs, concrete floors, concrete walls. Below dim, reddish bulbs, the men and women of the Gestapo entered and exited the room. They were dependable-looking people. They did not speak to Mullier; they never spoke to anyone. In lieu of their voices, all he heard was the slamming of doors, the prison cells he’d passed on the way into the room.

  The man from the Gestapo, the one who’d led Mullier into the business room, flagged down a passing clerk. He stopped, producing a clipboard. Although I can’t know the precise nature of their conversation, I imagine it went something like this.

  “Name?” the clerk said in German.

  Mullier said nothing.

  The curly-haired fellow from the Gestapo nudged him. “He’s talking to you.”

  Mullier licked his chapped lips. “Theo Mullier.”

  The clerk made a note. He paused, tapping his chin with a pen. “Nullier or Mullier?”

  “With an M.”

  “Mullier,” he said, exaggerating each dip and twist of Theo’s name. “Is he new, or a transfer?” the clerk asked the man in the trench coat.

  “Transfer from headquarters in Brussels.”

  “Crime?”

  “Just put down ‘political.’”

  “But there is so much room on this page. See? They expect details.”

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nbsp; “I can give you a full list later.”

  “Fine, fine.” The clerk scribbled away. Mullier’s bad foot had gone numb from standing so long. “Did he have any possessions on him at the time of his capture?”

  “Two false identification cards, a wallet, not much else of consequence.”

  “And the name of the commander who signed off on his capture?”

  “August Wolff.”

  “Wolff?” Mullier gasped. “That son of a bitch—”

  Pain erupted across Mullier’s face. He doubled over, tasting iron. When his vision cleared, he saw the curly-haired soldier wiping blood off the butt of his pistol.

  Taking obvious care not to look at Mullier, the clerk said, “I’ll just require a signature, right here,” and handed his clipboard to the soldier.

  “Is that all?” the soldier asked.

  “That is all.” The clerk took the clipboard with a nod. “Good day, sir.”

  Under Father Himmler’s supervision, the curly-haired man led Mullier out of the business room. The trade was brisk, and he had no time to waste on pleasantries.

  Mullier had suffered worse blows in his day, far worse than the taste of the soldier’s pistol. Such things were unavoidable in our line of work. But this blow had been different, for it contained in its character the flavor of what was to come. Think of it: when a man punched Mullier on the street (which happened, more than once), he could punch back, for Mullier was free. Not so in Fort Breendonk. There, this blow communicated to Mullier—as it did to all prisoners, for they all got a first blow sometime, and there was no getting around that—that torture and death were no longer vague concepts: rather, they were tactile inevitabilities. The Germans could punch him in the face; they were permitted to punch him in the face. They would do with him what they pleased.