by Richard Wake
23
Emil Fassbender came into town once a year from Salzburg to meet with the head of the bank that employed him as a branch manager. We’d all fought together in the war, and it gave us an excuse to get together and tell all of the old stories, which I hated. Especially the story where I was the big hero who saved 10 of us singlehandedly.
We decided to keep it simple and meet up at Fessler's. There was a small private dining room where we could be loud assholes without disturbing the regular customers, and the loud assholes part was pretty much a given whenever Emil was around. It was as if he had to bottle up his personality for 51 weeks a year and hide it behind the sober propriety required of a bank manager, and then he just let it all loose on the 52nd week, like somebody shook a bottle of beer and it exploded all over us.
Through drinks and dinner and more drinks, all of the old stories were retold. Leon and his various female conquests took up half of the night, as always—and he never disappointed, always adding a new detail with each yearly retelling, of a birthmark or a squeal or a sister in the next room. Then there was the one about the time Emil had to order a flanking maneuver at Udine because the captain was too drunk to function, and the time we raided the wine cellar in a mansion in Pordenone, and the time when the cook nearly killed us all with a version of sauerbraten that left us throwing up for days outside of Villach. It was getting late, and I thought I might escape this year, but then Emil banged on the table and nearly knocked over the seven empty wine bottles and said, "Alex! Hero!"
"Nah, I'm bored with that one."
"Then I'll tell it," Emil said, and thus began a slurring, semi-incoherent recitation of a story that had become an established truth for all of us, but which was much more fiction than I had ever been able to admit.
The setup was accurate enough. We were in Gorizia. There were 10 of us trying to hold on to our position at an abandoned farm. We had been led to believe that reinforcements were coming, but that we were on the extreme right flank of our army's position, and that it was vital we not be turned. I had no idea if this was true, but that's what they told us. And if the 10 of us were the army's right flank, the barn where I was positioned alone was the right flank of our right flank. We had all just scrambled for cover when the shooting started, and I was a hundred yards away from a large henhouse, where two others were stationed, and 300 yards from the main house, which occupied some higher ground and where the other seven were located, including Henry, Leon, and Emil.
So that was the setup. It was a hellish hour as we fought and waited. Two guys in the main house were shot, but not that bad, one in the arm, one in the thigh. One guy in the henhouse got it worse, in the shoulder. I can still hear him screaming. I had the sense that there were a lot more of them than there were of us, but I wasn't sure, because they had the advantage of cover from the woods that encircled the farm, and then the cloud of dust that was beginning to be kicked up.
So that's all true. And we did manage to hold the position. And when our reinforcements showed up, the shooting stopped. And when we began to advance, there were eight dead Italians at the tree line across from the barn, on my side.
"Eight!" Emil yelled, again banging the table, again nearly toppling the empty wine bottles. It was quickly established that the dead were in a position to the right of the barn and that the only person in our group of 10 with a clear shot at them was me.
"Eight! If they get through, we're all dead! Dead! Every one of us is dead—they would have got us from two sides!"
That is the way the story has always been told, and that is what it says on the commendation. And the truth was, I was a good shot, and they all knew it. But the truth also was, I didn't shoot any of those Italians, not one. The fact was that I fired randomly out the window of the barn a couple of times, but that I spent nearly the entire hour crawled up in a ball in the corner of the barn, sobbing, literally shaking. Only when the shooting stopped, and our reinforcements arrived did I manage to pull myself together.
Nobody scrutinized the bodies, other than to count them. If they had, they probably would have seen they had all been shot in the back, or maybe from the side, by friendly fire. I wasn't sure, but I just knew it wasn't me. And I remembered saying at the time, "Guys, I don't know. I mean, eight?" But everyone's adrenaline was up, and the bodies were there, and it was almost as if everyone needed this to be true. And so it was.
I had never retold the story, not once. It was about the only reason I could live with myself. But I never denied the story, either, and never admitted the truth, not to anyone. I came close once with Uncle Otto, but couldn't quite get it out. He knew something wasn't right, though, and he offered this blanket absolution: "The shit of war deserves to stay where you left it. Whatever it was, it has no place here."
I didn’t know if that made any sense, but it was all I had. It was the only way I was able to deal with the notion that a fundamental lie was a part of the foundation of the friendship I had with Leon and Henry. A lot had happened since then, obviously, and we were friends for a hundred reasons that occurred after the war, but in the back of their minds, somewhere, their friend Alex was still the hero who killed those eight Italians and probably saved everyone that day at Gorizia.
It was why I hated when Emil came to town every year. And as I was walking home from Fessler's, for some reason, all I could hear in my head was the guy in the brown overcoat from the Prater:
"Because there is no drinking like the drinking you do to live with the fact that you're a coward."
AUGUST 1937
24
Nothing happened on the trip to Berlin, Leipzig, and Hannover in March. Or on the trip to Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck in April. Or on the trip to Bamberg and Mannheim in May. Or Munich, Linz, and Salzburg in June. Or Dresden, Koblenz, and Stuttgart in July—although it was noteworthy, in Koblenz, that the Gnome was back to preferring one six-footer at a time.
With each trip, the anxiety eased. Maybe it really had been a one-off, and Czech intelligence wouldn't need me anymore. It wasn’t as if anything had changed. Whatever information I had carried back from Cologne in February must not have been very important.
My last trip of the summer, though, did include Cologne. It was the same as in February—Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne, which did have me a bit nervous. But I was actually hopeful. This trip was always the same time every year—in the first week of August, no later, because with temperatures rising and the lakes beckoning, no self-respecting titan of industry wanted to do any meaningful business for the rest of the month.
It was also essential to get the Nuremberg part of the trip out of the way before the first week of September, which was when they held the Nazi Party rally every year. Part of that was practical—the town was completely paralyzed for a full week, with no place to eat or stay—but most of it was just the sheer horror of hundreds of thousands of fawning Nazis assembled to pay homage to the great sociopath. I used to try to dismiss it all as a seven-day drunk for the Brownshirts, an excuse to get away from the missus, and nothing more meaningful than that, but it became impossible. The unavoidable newsreels, even if they were polished up by the Goebbels boys, told the most disturbing story—not because of the sheer size of the rallies, or the banners and the torches and the salutes, but because of the looks on the faces, the fervor, the devotion that bled into adoration. Those faces were what always made me feel the most helpless.
The client in Nuremberg was Herr Josef Steinbach of the Steinbach Works. We did what we always did, touring the plant, meeting with his engineering staff, then getting down to business in his office. With minimal prodding, he upped his order by 12 percent. In fact, I’d only suggested 11 percent when he insisted on 12—such was the level of rearmament going on in Germany. Iron ore became steel in a blast furnace, which became toys for the Wehrmacht and Deutschmarks for people like Herr Steinbach. And, well, me.
After the meeting, I took Steinbach to dinner. He wasn't a player, so it was always jus
t dinner and one bottle of wine that we split. He sometimes brought along his wife or his oldest son. But we were alone this night, and it was all pleasant enough. The truth was, I liked Steinbach. He was a funny guy, he wasn't an obvious Nazi—we never did the Heil Hitler thing when we met at the plant—and he apparently was very content with himself and his life. That last part was what I admired most.
So we were sitting there, pushing the last bit of strudel around our plates, talking about nothing, winding down the night, when a man in uniform suddenly appeared at the table. "Josef!" he said. "It's been too long!"
Steinbach stood, and I expected a Heil. Instead, they hugged. Steinbach turned and said, "Alex, I'd like you to meet General Fritz Ritter, an old friend. Fritz, this is Alex Kovacs, a business associate. Sit, sit."
The coffee and dessert were cleared away, and a bottle of cognac was produced. Ritter and Steinbach had served together in Verdun for a short time but mostly in the east. As it turned out, they were at Tannenberg, Ritter a colonel and Steinbach a captain. They hadn't seen each other in about five years, and caught up on their lives and families. Ritter was in the Abwehr now, military intelligence. "Spies, spooks, whatever," he said. "When you get to my level, it's just pushing paper. This is just a different kind of paper."
Through the first drink, and into the second, Ritter kept looking at me to the point where it was becoming uncomfortable. The whole Abwehr thing went right up my colon, and I thought I hid it okay, but the paranoia that had ruled me for months, and that had finally started to recede, was now back. Had he seen my name on some list from the Gestapo? Did Captain Vogl send some kind of report in triplicate about our meeting, and whatever suspicions he might have held, and did one of the copies end up in some Abwehr file that Ritter had seen? Did the Gestapo even talk to the Abwehr? Should I just make my excuses as quickly as possible, check out of the hotel early, and get the night train to Frankfurt?
I didn’t know how much of this worry was showing on my face. Steinbach was telling a story about a corporal on an overnight transport train who’d proposed a wager for the men in his car that he would be able to drink a pretty big bottle of Tabasco sauce in one gulp without throwing up. As it turned out, he drank it down and won 20 marks.
We were all laughing when Ritter suddenly appeared to be struck by a moment of clarity. He pointed at me and said, "Your name is Kovacs, right?"
This was it. Should I run?
"Did you know Otto Kovacs? Was he related?"
My panic turned to, well, I don't know what. "Otto was my uncle, almost a second father."
"Are you in that same business? Mining or something, wasn't it?"
"He trained me. I took over his clients when he died. You knew him?"
"My condolences. Let me tell you a story, another example of what a small world it is," Ritter said. And with that, he began a fantastic tale that started on a November night in Munich in 1923.
Otto was in town to see a client but had a free night. Ritter was on a temporary assignment to the Abwehr unit in Munich. They both were staying at the same hotel, the Torbräu. They ended up sitting on adjoining stools at the hotel bar. Both mid-forties, both unattached, both properly fortified, they decided to find out what a Thursday night in November might have to offer in terms of female companionship. With a few suggestions from the hotel bartender, they headed out. Passing the Bürgerbräukeller, they saw a big crowd for some kind of political meeting and decided to head in a different direction. They were jostled by several groups of men in brown uniforms who filled the sidewalks, and kept turning away from them until they came to one of the dance halls on the bartender's list, the Daisy. There, they met two moderately attractive sisters, the Freys. Once the sisters were adequately fortified—it's all about fortification in such circumstances—the four of them went back to the girls' flat, wending their way through an ever-growing number of Brownshirts who were gathering for some purpose. In a city and at a time when political parades were a daily occurrence, it didn't seem all that odd.
And it was in the flat, which happened to be on the same block as the Bürgerbräukeller, where an amorous evening that was about to turn into something more was interrupted by gunfire. And it was from their knees, half-unbuttoned, that Ritter, Otto, and the moderately attractive Frey sisters peeked out of the window and watched the start of what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Soon, Ritter and Otto sneaked out through a back door of the apartment building and made their way back to the safety of the hotel, avoiding the shooting that left 20 dead, and Hitler arrested. The subsequent trial would essentially be the start of his political career. Mein Kampf would be written during his short prison stay.
Ritter could tell a story, which I admired. So after recounting the hurried re-buttoning and race back to the hotel, there was his last line, obviously well-practiced: "So if anyone ever asks me what I have sacrificed for my Führer . . ."
Steinbach and I were roaring. I was also wide-eyed. I couldn't believe Otto had never told me this story.
25
Thomas Scherer had turned into my most exhausting client. Not the business part—that was easy. An 11 percent increase was agreed upon without anything beyond my initial ask. There were no delivery issues, no quality control issues, nothing. All Herr Scherer wanted was a night out away from his wife, and the nights were getting longer with each visit, and the drinks more plentiful. I swore I could press into my side and feel my liver growing.
He wanted to meet at the hotel bar, where two Manhattans began the process of lubrication. Then dinner, accompanied by two bottles of Spätburgunder and brandy after that. Then through the nondescript door on Bruckenstrasse, his favorite, all dim lighting and red furnishings and illicit possibilities, where the two who joined us in our booth were named Karin and Jana.
Manhattans for us, champagne cocktails for them. Inane conversation above the table, active hands below. Pretty quickly, Scherer began to eye the doorway guarded by the ape in the tuxedo. I was not above joining one of my clients in the journey down one of these hallways, but I hadn't done it in a while and had made a half of a pledge to myself that, given my growing feelings for Johanna, I would stay out of said hallways. The problem, of course, was the alcohol, which tended to render most of my promises moot. Which was how I ended up walking down the hallway with Karin (or was it Jana?) and then into one of the little rooms, where my pants were soon around my ankles.
The regrets, which generally came in the morning, hit me immediately this time. I said my goodbyes, financial and otherwise, to Karin, or Jana, and headed to the bathroom down the hall to get cleaned up and wallow in what a miserable human being I was. As I was re-buttoning myself, the door to the restroom opened.
"Be out in a minute, pal," I said, without turning away from the mirror over the sink.
The intruder was silent in reply, so I turned and looked. It was Major Peiper—at least that was the name I knew him by. He locked the door behind him. My miserable feelings about myself were transformed instantly to fear. I had been to about 10 cities over six months, and I really thought I might be out of the spy business. Now, with my shirt half tucked-in and my pants only half re-buttoned, it was starting again.
"Fuck me," is what I said, evidently out loud, because Peiper smiled and made a comment about a room down the hall where that request could be accommodated. But the smile just as quickly disappeared. This was a business meeting, after all, regardless of the absurdity of the location.
"Before you get started, I'm just not sure—" was how I began. Peiper interrupted me immediately.
"Look, you have no choice but to listen—I'm blocking the door, after all, and it won't take long. We don't have long."
He began by telling a story from the previous year, when the Germans marched in and remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. It was always German territory—that was never an issue—but the Frenchies had insisted that there be no military presence permitted along the Rhine, as one further def
ensive measure against the time when the Germans inevitably resumed playing their national sport. And, well, one fine day in March of 1936, Hitler decided to march the Wehrmacht into the Rhineland and see what happened.
"You have to realize how unprepared we were," Peiper said. "Our army was a joke. We didn't have significant numbers. We didn't have much equipment. Our training was laughable—we could barely march straight. There was no way we could shoot straight. The people at my level, the staff officers, knew this was crazy. If the French had come at us with a hundred Boy Scouts on bicycles, we would have had to turn and run. And I'm not kidding—and we told this to our generals, and our generals told Hitler, and Hitler told them they were weak, and defeatists, and that they all worried too much.
"We were shitting ourselves that morning as the operation began. I can't tell you how nervous we were. We knew the people would welcome us, and they did. But what if the French came at us? I literally didn't sleep for the three days after—none of us did. It became a kind of no-win for people like me. If the French retaliated, the army would have been humiliated and there is no telling how Hitler would have reacted—we all probably would have been sacked. But if the French didn't retaliate, Hitler would have been rewarded for his boldness, and the generals would have been mocked for their caution. Which is where we are now."