It was the identity he had been given by the Underground group that had adopted him not long after his parents were arrested. He had lived scavenging and stealing for about a month, celebrating his thirteenth birthday on the run, when a fellow had simply walked up to him, put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Come with me.” The cell had noticed him in the neighborhood, had watched him for a while, and had then decided to adopt him into their ranks. He was given a name, a place to live, and a purpose.
When he reached the age of sixteen, he was supposed to report for the draft, and for the next six years, his life was complicated by this fact. He was given a new identity that changed his name and background and reduced his age by two years. When he reached eighteen, he was given another identity that was excused from service for a year, then his name was changed again and his age was increased by three years so that his records could show that he had completed his service as specified by the law. After that, with each passing year his name was changed and his age reduced until, at the age of twenty-two, his papers and birth year agreed again.
It was a simple albeit disconcerting process that did not end. From then on, for reasons of security and to avoid leaving too long a trail if he were ever taken in, his name and history were changed with some regularity. He got used to it— got used to dropping one persona and adopting another each time he changed assignments or associates. Only the very first time had it bothered him. He was told that the name he had used for three years, a name that he associated with his rescue from the streets and his adoption into the Resistance, was to be discarded. He felt hurt and bothered by their cavalier attitude toward his identity, and he disobeyed orders and hid his papers, feigning their destruction.
And so they had sat, hidden high up in the loose bricks of the foundation of the bridge he had used for refuge and a home. There it was, a name he had not used since he was sixteen, a name that neither his parents nor his boyhood friends would know. A name that anyone who knew him currently would not recognize. Yet, he would have to believe that it was his name and think of himself with that name until . . . until he did not know when.
A desolate feeling of loneliness invaded him; he gasped with the realization of how devastating a loss he had suffered. He reeled with pain as a vision of Allie’s destroyed face crossed his mind. Her hair had been damp with blood, the flesh hung in shreds. What the hell had happened?
With an effort, he opened his eyes against the pain. The murky waters of the Temms shifted and swirled into the hallway wallpaper. Stunned, he glanced up and down the hall, wondering how long he had stood there. He could still hear the rise and fall of voices as Elspeth and Karl continued talking in the sitting room. He remembered her order and decided to comply and then get something to eat.
After eating, he went up to clean the kitchen. It was a mess—everything had been left to accumulate, but he did not mind the work. His thoughts wandered back through time as his hands worked mechanically. He stared ahead withoutseeing; in his mind’s eye he was walking the dark streets of east London, breathing his last taste of freedom. It had recently rained, had been raining for some time, and the air smelt of damp bricks. Keeping to back alleys, he made his way out of the old district and into Workers’ District #9. It was harder to pass unnoticed here; there were no alleys, just large expanses of muddy open ground between the monstrous concrete housing blocks. A few weeds struggled to survive, but it was a losing battle on this poisoned ground. The air was damp and cold, and the mist glowed ominously under the bright orange lights. He shoved his hand into his pocket, closed his fingers around the day’s takings: four hundred Neue Reichsmark and a gold watch. Not very good, but better than nothing. The money would pay off the desk clerk for another day. Maybe the watch would help toward the acquisition of good papers. Groceries, acquired at ludicrous black-market prices, would have to wait: he simply had to acquire those papers.
He passed out of the district, reached the slums of East Göbbels. At the bottom of a narrow, dirty alley, he climbed the steps of an anonymous, dilapidated building, a converted warehouse. He had taken a room here because it was the sort of place where, for a price, no questions were asked. The blackmail he had to pay cut into his earnings quite heavily, but he could not get a proper residence, not to mention a food ration card or a job, until he had a proper set of papers.
His thoughts were interrupted by Horst’s dropping a pair of muddy army boots on the floor and grunting, “Before tomorrow morning.” Horst stomped out, leaving him staring at the boots in confusion. It was unlike the boy to pass on a chance to harass him. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and went back to scouring the pans.
The patterns on the tiling behind the sink dissolved into the dusty shadows of the hallway of his rooming house. A single bulb hung from a cord, accentuating the darkness with its incongruent brightness. Behind one of the doors he heard a radio droning on about the latest Berlin rally. He felt disgusted with himself. Once again he had been obliged to rob his own people. The watch and more than half the money had belonged to a German who had carelessly wandered alone down an unpatrolled alley. Who would have thought that a German wearing a gold watch would only be carrying 250 marks! As the evening wore on without any success, he had become desperate and resorted to burglary. The German residential districts were too difficult to penetrate, and the rest of his night’s earnings had come from three separate break-ins in WD8. It was pathetic how poor his fellow countrymen were.
He turned his key in the rusty lock and entered the room. Without turning on the light, he went to the loose floorboard he had prepared long before and secreted the watch with the other valuables that might one day purchase an identity for him. He hid his knife under the same board, but farther out of reach, deep in a crevice. Carefully replacing the board and the furniture, he then turned on the lights. After paying the desk clerk for her lack of interest and paying thenight’s rent, he had thirty marks left. Enough for a loaf of bread in a government store or about two slices on the open market. Damn! He surveyed his kitchen shelf, located just over his bed, and determined that he had enough for a good meal tonight if he did not worry about tomorrow. There was also half a bottle of gin, and he decided to drink that as well.
When he poured the last shot of gin into the glass, he was feeling well fed and comfortably numb. Tomorrow would be better. He would only rob Germans, and he would get enough to make a difference. He would find another resistance cell, teach them to trust him, get new papers, maybe even find another woman like Allison. . . . He surveyed the clear fluid, savored hope. Maybe he could rebuild his life, he had thought, even as he heard the heavy footsteps in the hallway.
Something told him to panic, but he did not. If they were for him, there was nothing to do but wait—there was no escape from his fourth-floor room. He had noticed and accepted that as an unavoidable risk when he had first taken the room. So he waited, hoping it would be for someone else.
There was a pounding on his door. He finished the last of the gin. The door splintered under an assault of heavy bodies. Three Gestapo burst into the room waving their guns. Strictly speaking, they weren’t really from the Geheime Staatspolizei; they were, in fact, English. Just local police. Whatever their association, he knew what to do next. He put down his glass and stood to greet them by raising his hands above his head. The game was up: seventeen days and twentytwo hours without an identity, and the game was up.
They made him kneel with his hands clasped together on his head as they searched his room. He mused about who might have betrayed him. Probably someone in the building—maybe even the desk clerk. He felt too numbed by the gin and bereft by his losses to really resent the betrayal. The lure of easy money was hard to beat. Maybe he had been selected at random: it was a good bet that if he lived here, he was guilty of something, and now the guards tore the room apart to determine what that was.
They found only forty-seven marks in total and nothing else. They were rank amateurs: the loose floorboard sho
uld never have escaped their notice. Not believing his luck, he stood when ordered. Then they told him to produce his papers. He let his hands down and showed them his identity card. They wanted to know why it was not updated—where were his labor service stamps? He had no answer. They wanted to see his work documents. He shrugged and, knowing he would not be believed, said, “I lost them. Just today.” Without even bothering to ask anything else, they threw him against a wall, bound his hands behind him, and led him away.
He spent the time in Green Park prison—it wasn’t called that, but that’s how everyone referred to it, due to its location—and listened daily to the sound of shots as various prisoners were executed on the grounds outside his cell. He whiled away the time trying to determine what his defense against the as-yet-unstated charges might be, but nothing brilliant suggested itself. Weeks later, when his case finally came to trial, it was determined that the person he claimed to be did indeed exist in the files and matched his description and fingerprints, but there was no record of him ever having fulfilled his national-service labor contract. In fact, it appeared that he had not held a job, accepted ration coupons, or registered his residence since he was sixteen. By a minor bureaucratic miracle his fingerprints were never cross-referenced. That the papers in his possession matched his face and prints was sufficient; nobody bothered to check to see that his prints were also those of a wanted man of a different name. Doubtless his file had crossed some heavily laden desk without even being opened.
It meant that in the end, with the painful lack of evidence, even a Reich court could manage to convict him of nothing more than draft-dodging and lack of proper registration. He was sentenced to fifteen years of labor to compensate for the six he had not done and another five for the insufficient documentation. He remembered looking down at the floor and swallowing in dismay. Twenty years: it was more than twice what he had expected.
“Peter!”
He looked up, shocked back to reality by Elspeth’s voice. From the tone, he guessed she must have called more than once.
“Are you asleep?” she snapped. “Hurry up here, there’s more to be done. Let me know when you’re finished. It’s almost time for supper. Hurry up!”
52
“I’MSORRY, the congressman is very busy,” the polite young staffer said. “Appointments for his time must be made months in advance!”
“If I knew where I would be ‘months in advance,’ I would happily oblige the congressman,” Alex replied with a forced little smile, “but the nature of my business prevents that. Nevertheless, the information I have is very important to the defense of this country, and I should think it would be the patriotic duty of the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee to make time to hear me.”
“We have no proof that your information is important,” the staffer replied.
“I’m offering proof!”
“You have no idea how many cranks—”
Alex drew himself up.
“—not to say, sir, that you are one, I’m just explaining that we have such an influx of people with very important information—”
“Psia krew cholera,” Alex muttered.
“Sir?”
“Nothing. Never mind. I’ll go to the press. I think they’ll not only be interested in our evidence, they’ll wonder why the congressman wasn’t.”
“Sir. Please. I wouldn’t advise that. If, as you said, this is a very sensitive issue, you could be violating our security laws—and that would land you in prison.”
“So what I have to offer is not important enough for the committee to hear, but too important for the press? That in and of itself will make for an interesting headline.”
“You’d be risking breaking the law!”
Alex leaned forward and pressed his face close to the staffer’s. “Young man, I live in Gestapoland! You can’t scare me with your puny threats! Get me a hearing with the committee or I will go to your press!”
The staffer raised his hands. “All right. Look, give me a couple of days to arrange something. It will be behind closed doors, you understand?”
“Fair enough. Two days,” Alex harrumphed, and left.
Three days later Alex and Adam were ushered into a small conference room. Along one wall was a table with fourteen chairs, all facing the same way. Opposite the table was a smaller table with three chairs. Adam and Alex were seated at the small table.
“There’s no one here,” Alex commented to the young woman who had shown them in.
“Oh, the committee will be here soon,” she soothed, and left quickly.
“Fuckers,” Adam muttered. “They’re letting us cool our heels a bit.”
“This is ridiculous,” Alex concurred, but short of walking out, he could think of nothing to do.
Adam began pacing the room, studying the portraits on the wall. “The setup looks like we’re on trial, facing all those judges,” Adam commented sourly.
“Oh, that’s typical.” Alex watched as his son-in-law paced the room, then said, “So what do you think about it?”
“About America? I’ve seen it before.”
“No, about government. You could get elected, move your family to the NAU. Raise Joanna here.”
“I’m not averse to it.”
“You’d have to give up your, er”—Alex glanced around at the walls—“um, activities.”
“I know. I wouldn’t mind. I’d miss teaching, but as for the rest of it . . . Well, it’s moot.”
“Why?”
“Zosia would never agree to it.”
“I should have brought her.”
“Yes, if your goal was to convince us to leave field work, you should have brought her, not me. Besides, she would have done a better job charming the committee.”
“I don’t want you to charm them. I just want to give them a sense of authenticity. You were there, you saw it all. Personal testimony is best.”
“It’s expensive,” Adam said. “The money could have been better spent on guns.”
“Think of it as educational. There’s no point fighting in a vacuum—all of us need experience dealing with the Free World, otherwise we’ll lose track of what we’re aiming for and how we’re going to get there.”
“It’s still expensive.”
“There’s a cost to everything we do,” Alex conceded.
Within a few minutes two committee members entered the room. Both apologized for being late, made appropriate excuses, then noting that their colleagues had not arrived, one departed, promising to return in a few minutes, and the other opened a file and pored over its contents.
A few more committee members arrived and seated themselves. Adam finally sat down again, tapping his fingers impatiently on the table. When a cameraman entered the room, Adam lowered his head onto a hand and muttered to Alex, “Get that out of here.”
Alex was also perturbed and jumped up and, keeping his back to the camera, demanded, “That has to go!”
Two of the committee members looked up. “All proceedings must be recorded,” one said in surprise.
Adam, still shielding his face behind his hand, sang quietly, “Get that out of here.”
“It’s only for the record,” the other member explained helpfully.
“A public record!” Alex snapped.“Now get that thing out of here!”
As he made his demands, the chair of the committee walked in. “What’s the problem?”
“We can’t be filmed,” Alex explained patiently. “Our lives depend on anonymity!”
“Anonymity? How can we take a statement from anonymous individuals? This is for the public record!”
Alex squeezed his eyes shut in exasperation. He breathed deeply, opened his eyes, and releasing his words carefully, explained, “You have proof of our credentials from our government in exile. If you peruse the file, you will see that, though you may use our names, it is necessary for us to maintain our security, and therefore we cannot be photographed or filmed.”
“What about you
r voices?” a committee member asked.
Alex glanced at Adam. Adam nodded subtly. “All right,” Alex answered for them both.
The camera was ordered into a corner, facing only the committee members, and as the rest of the committee had filed in and taken their places, the proceedings began.
“Great start,” Adam muttered to Alex.
“Typical,” Alex assured him. “Don’t worry, once they hear what we have to say, they’ll forget their procedures.”
That, of course, was not true. Nevertheless, they managed to work their way through the meeting and inform the committee of their discovery of at least one chemical weapons factory on the outskirts of Berlin. Alex referred them to the maps that had been distributed, he pointed out the documents verifying the chemical analysis of the samples taken, he verified the translations of the smuggled security-service documents that they had acquired.
“Quite an impressive collection of material here,” one member of the committee commented. “Almost too impressive.”
“What? What do you mean?” Alex asked.
“We’re not saying that you’re lying, but—”
“Lying?” Adam leapt in. “I was there. I scraped this muck off the ground, riskingmy life, the life of my colleague, and even the life of a hapless worker! Countless people risked everything to get you this evidence and you say—”
“Calm down, young man, it’s not that we don’t believe you . . .”
Two hours later it had reached a complete equilibrium and everyone admitted-that there was nothing more to be said. Ignoring Alex’s weary protests that the “appropriate people” had already seen the evidence he was presenting, the committee assured Alex that his evidence would be forwarded for further study. The committee then reminded their witnesses of the sensitive nature of the material and that it had been classified as secret and warned them not to publicly release any of the information that they had presented. After that, the witnesses were politely dismissed from the room.
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