A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  We drove back to the left bank in silence, each of us with our own thoughts of tomorrow and the many tomorrows after that.

  “What do you think about their reaction to my black-market sermon?” I asked suddenly.

  “You spoke very well, Chuck,” she said cautiously, as if weighing her words. “I think you were the only one in the room who worries about it. To use the economic model you advanced about me earlier in the evening, there is a demand from Germans who are making money one way or another and a supply which Americans possess.”

  “By stealing it from the government of the United States of America.”

  “You Americans have so much. You waste so much. I think most of the black-market material would be wasted anyway.”

  “Penicillin?”

  “Does anyone suffer?”

  “The people who don’t have the money to buy it from the black market.”

  “They would not be able to buy it anyway, Chuck—unless like me they work for the Americans. . . . Don’t misunderstand me. I think it is wrong, but you seem almost, forgive me, obsessed by it.”

  “Maybe you’re right. . . . I wonder whether I’m the only one in the Residenz who is not involved.”

  “I am not either and would not be. But why do you worry what others might do?”

  “Our friends?”

  “Can you not let them follow their own consciences? Are you their parish priest?”

  Silence from the parish priest.

  “I guess not.”

  What did it matter if my friends and colleagues and superior officers were making a few extra dollars? No one was getting hurt, was he?

  Besides, I should have as guilty a conscience as any of them. I did sometimes, but that would not prevent me from making love with Trudi before the night was over.

  “Nonetheless, everything you said tonight was true, but I think none of them could admit it. Not even the general.”

  We were silent for the rest of the ride. Did she know who was connected and who was not? She wouldn’t miss much. But neither was she likely to report any of those who had saved her. I better drop the whole conversation.

  “Thank you, Chuck,” she said as I helped her down from the jeep. “It was a wonderful night. I’ll never forget it.”

  This time I glimpsed not only her breasts but the deep-cut, pink bra that ingeniously held them in place.

  “I don’t think I ever will either,” I agreed.

  “And thank you for being a father to me when I needed one.”

  I had nothing to say to that. Then she kissed me on the lips as Polly had, somewhat more vigorously but still safely on the side of modesty.

  Six in one evening.

  “Good night, Chuck.”

  “I’m not sure I’m capable of reply.”

  “His name is Albrecht.”

  “Who?”

  “The man in the photo store on the Grünerstrasse.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I murmured. “Thanks.”

  “And do be careful.”

  “Sure . . . good night, Brigitta.”

  I watched her slim hips as she walked to her apartment and entered.

  I should go home and get a good night’s sleep to prepare for the risks of the next day. But as I sat there in the jeep, on fire from the sensual delights of the night, I thought of Trudi. A perfect end to the evening. And she was expecting me, wasn’t she?

  I pounded the jeep’s front wheel. Had I not warned Brig about the dangers of compartmentalization?

  Why had I not brought Trudi to the party? All right, it would be risky with Rednose Clarke looking for her. But why not previous parties?

  Was I ashamed of her? She would not have fit in. She was too young, too intense, too inexperienced. She might be intelligent—I thought she was—but she was not as quick and articulate as the others at Polly’s parties. She would have been embarrassed if I had thrust her into that environment. Did I really think she could fit into my world back home?

  Yet soon I would lose Trudi, if only for a while. And she was expecting me, was she not?

  I remembered again that bitter-cold night in the jeep and the warmth that would later come from that encounter, more warmth than I had ever known.

  Trudi was wearing a thin nightgown, but this time she was wide-awake.

  “I so hoped you would come.” She hugged me. “I knew you would come. Was it a nice party?”

  I brusquely pushed off the nightgown, and our play began. I had learned a few of the arts of love from her, how to be hungry and gentle at the same time.

  “Oh, Karl,” she groaned, “you are such a wonderful lover! You’re magic!”

  Although I was rapidly climbing the mountain of sexual arousal, I was enough of an O’Malley to note that this was the fourth time in twenty-four hours that this charge had been made against me. And I wasn’t a wonderful lover, but perhaps I was better than anyone else in her life.

  “You are especially passionate tonight,” she sighed when our first romp was over.

  I was a horny young man who had been aroused by the sexual atmosphere at Polly’s party and whose bloodstream was drenched with hormones. I wanted, needed, a woman. This one was more than available. Was that all there was to it?

  When I left her, sleeping peacefully, after several more romps, feeling guilty as I always did when I walked under the crowned Madonna and her kid, I told myself that I really did love her. I would save her and her family from the Russkies. I would bring her home to America with me, no matter what the obstacles might be.

  Back at the Vinehaus Messerschmitt, there was no sign of my roommates—there usually wasn’t—but I was too keyed up by the events of the night and especially my interlude with Trudi to sleep. I sat at the small table that served as my desk, filled in a few notes of my journal like “Kissed by three women and called magic by four. What the hell!”

  Then I tried to outline my plan to get the Wülfes to Stuttgart, but the caviar-and-chocolate combination was creating unrest in my stomach and I was bemused from the sexual delights of the evening. I scrawled meaningless notes, and then eventually, just as the first streak of dawn appeared through my tiny window, I rested my head on my arms and slept with the sense of Trudi’s body on top of mine. In my dreams, however, I remembered another girl’s body. The dream became a lascivious reenactment of my performance at the St. Ursula May crowning in 1945.

  I woke up from my lewd dream about the May crowning with Trudi and Rosemarie still confused in my mind. I felt terrible guilt and shame about what I had done in the dream to Rosemarie in church. To make it more difficult for me to distinguish between dream and reality, I was desperately ill: the caviar was having its revenge. I dashed madly for the jakes down the hall from my room and barely made it in time. As my poor stomach violently revolted against the indignities I had heaped upon it, my mind played punning games about Shakespeare’s line about caviar to the general.

  When I had contributed all I could to the Bamberg sanitation system, I staggered back to my room. The sense of health and wellbeing that follows such attacks cleared my head, and as I dressed, I saw the entire plan for saving the Wülfes, which had been forming itself in my mind. I considered it in detail. Yes, it should work. Unless some things went terribly wrong and unless I made some stupid mistakes.

  Alas, Murphy’s Law, as we have come to call it, was working overtime. Things would go wrong, even on that day; and I would make stupid mistakes, beginning on that day—including one that was monumentally stupid. For all of that, however, I can at least say today that my plan was an ingenious fantasy.

  The first thing I had to do was to hunt up Agent Clarke and establish some facts about him to pass on to General Meade. Then I would have to stop by Albrecht’s place in the Grünerstrasse and negotiate for the kind of papers that would get the Wülfes into the French zone and provide them with safe identities once they got to Stuttgart.

  19

  That morning I was late for work, not that anyone punched clocks
when they went to work in the Army of Occupation. Captain Nettleton would notice—she noticed everything—but wouldn’t mention it. If she did, I would claim that I was poisoned at her party.

  I had sifted through pictures of Trudi, Erika, and Magda, searching for excellent likenesses so no one could question that the women bearing the papers were indeed the same ones depicted on them. I guessed at height and weight numbers and chose a name for them. I did not put on my Constabulary Ike jacket with all its opéra comique decorations because I did not want to alarm the good Albrecht.

  I crossed the street and entered the Bambergerhof. Unless I missed by guess, Rednose would already be drinking. Sure enough, I found him in the bar of the Bambergerhof, a glass of gin in his hand.

  “No point working all day, is there, sport?” he drawled. “Have one?”

  “I don’t drink, sir.”

  “No kidding? Can’t really be Irish then, can we? What can I do for you?” He emptied the gin glass and signaled for another.

  “I need those documents, sir, to pursue our search.”

  “What documents?” He smiled blissfully over his revitalized drink.

  “The fingerprints and the descriptions, sir. And the photographs you showed me. My team needs to know for whom we are pursuing our search.”

  “For whom, huh? An educated cop, eh, sport?”

  “The Constabulary is not a police unit, sir. Our role is to maintain order, not necessarily to prosecute. Would it be possible for me to copy those documents?”

  “Don’t carry them around with me, sport. Up in my room. I’ll bring copies for you tomorrow morning, okeydokey?”

  “Yes, sir. What time tomorrow morning, sir?”

  “You are an eager one, aren’t you? I’m not planning on working real hard in this operation. Let’s say two-thirty, huh, sport?”

  “Fourteen hundred thirty hours, sir?”

  “Have it your way, sport.”

  I slipped out of the bar, hoping I would encounter none of the Wülfes in the lobby. It would not be safe for me to be seen with them in the Bambergerhof.

  The documents in his room, limited working hours—both fit my emerging strategy neatly.

  The next stop was the Grünerstrasse. In the shadow of Martinkirche there was a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop with a few dusty film cartons in the front window. I thought it would not hurt to renew negotiations with the One who purportedly lurked in the Martinkirche, so I sneaked in for a quick prayer.

  I often argue that all European Jesuit churches look alike—cavernous, baroque, rococo; they are, I would say, beautiful if overwhelming art and generate as much sense of the sacred as did Hansen Park or the late, lamented Chicago Stadium. In fact, they are all different from one another, each striving to be more baroque than the others. Despite my complaint that they produced awe and amusement instead of prayer, I have to admit that they are impressive. Inside the Martinkirche that day I didn’t need a sacred setting for prayer. I fervently prayed that the One in Charge would bless and protect my plan. While there was no explicit answer, I walked out into the August sunlight feeling that Himself was not uninterested in helping us.

  I pushed open the door of the photo shop; a bell tinkled in the rear. The shop was musty and dusty and its merchandise was pathetic, a few secondhand Leicas and accessories, a couple of old Kodaks, and four piles of film, Agfachrome and Kodak.

  Albrecht emerged from the back, a cup of coffee in one hand and the stub of a sausage in the other. He was almost a stereotype of the Nazi pilot we saw in movies during the war—blond, tall, lean, handsome, with smoldering eyes and a hard face. You expected him to be wearing the Iron Cross. In fact he was wearing an apron, suggesting he had been working in a lab in the back.

  In the old Rockne theater, I used to cheer when the likes of him were killed. Now in Bamberg I realized many of the wives and sweethearts of men like Albrecht were mourning their deaths.

  “Morgen,” he said with a smile that wiped out the Luftwaffe stereotype.

  He finished off the sausage.

  “Morgen,” I said. “I’d like to buy four rolls of Agfachrome.”

  He rolled his eyes and pursed his lips, an expression I would see several more times that morning. “It can’t be better than the Kodak you can buy in your PX. And it costs more.”

  “It has much richer and warmer colors. Shots in a beautiful city like this deserve as warm colors as possible.”

  “Ja . . . so perhaps we Germans make some things better than you Yankees?” It was said humorously with a second rolling of the eyes and pursing of the lips as he drained his coffee cup.

  “I am not a Yankee. I am an Irish Catholic from Chicago. And, yeah, a few things better like the Tiger tank and the eighty-eight-millimeter artillery piece and the Me 262.”

  “So”—he repeated his favorite facial expression—“you know about that?”

  “There’s nothing much to do here so I read books and the New York Times.”

  “So you know something about us?”

  “I’m living in Messerschmitt’s house. . . . It’s a good thing you folks didn’t have more 262s at the end of the war. The outcome might have been different.”

  “Nein, we would have lost anyhow and the Russians might still be here instead of you. Much worse.”

  He reached behind the counter and pulled out a print, carefully mounted on a frame, of the first jet to be used in combat, one that had scared the living daylights out of the bomber crews in our Eighth Air Force. It was a marvelous color shot, taken against a background of clear blue sky, from the side and below the plane and displaying its sleek elegance. The Me 262 was a strange cross between the prop fighter aircraft of the past and the jet fighters of the future. Its fuselage was much like that of the Focke-Wulf fighters that the Luftwaffe had introduced during the war. Slung beneath its swept-back wings, however, there were two powerful-looking jet engines. It was not much different in appearance from the jets we were developing, but it would be another year before we had anything to match it (four years after the krauts had put the 262 in the sky)—the F-86 Saber, one of the most successful planes in the history of military aviation.

  I examined the print carefully, noting the details of the plane and the skill of the photographer.

  “Agfachrome?”

  “Of course.”

  “Brilliant! . . . Your work?”

  “Ja.”

  “Wonderful. Is it for sale?”

  “Of course, ten American dollars.”

  “It’s worth more.”

  “Twenty?” He really rolled his eyes this time.

  “Done.”

  “Good.”

  “You were in JG-7?” It was the name of the group that developed and flew the 262.

  “Ja, for a time.”

  “Ever go up in the two-seat version?”

  He nodded. “Real fast. Scary.”

  “Our 47s and 51s finally devised tactics to deal with them.”

  “Ja, they stacked up in the skies and caught them before they could fly through the stacks. Shot down twenty in one day. Then raided our airfields.” He held up his hand in a gesture of surrender. “That was the end.”

  “Another thing, Albrecht. I need some papers for three women . . . Brigitta sent me.”

  “Ja, ja,” he said cautiously. “You have brought pictures and other information?”

  I reached in my shirt pocket and produced the three snaps, which I placed on his decrepit counter.

  “Ja, ja, lovely, lovely.”

  “They are indeed.”

  “Your work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have talent.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Germans, nein?”

  “Yes.”

  “In trouble?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Why do you help them?”

  “I’m impressed by the guy on the horse over in the Dom.”

  “Der Reiter?” He frowned, not quite getting the allusion at first. T
hen, he threw back his head and laughed. “Sehr gut, Irish, sehr gut. . . . You know Brigitta, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  His facial expression almost became a caricature of itself at the name of the fabled Brig. “Wonderful woman. Her husband was a great man. Too bad.”

  “She believes he’s still alive.”

  “Better perhaps that he be dead than starving in a Russian camp.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Ja, for these three, two hundred dollars. Three days. You pay when I give them to you.”

  It was a bargain.

  “Fine.”

  The bell tinkled.

  Suddenly, with an incredibly swift movement, he swept the three pictures into his apron. “It costs twenty-five dollars,” he said smoothly, “for the Agfachrome and the print.”

  I was about to grab for the photos when I noted out of the corner of my eyes that two GIs had entered the shop, two of Carpenter’s gumshoes. Damn, why had I not been watching for someone?

  I gave him a twenty and a five; he had given me a discount on the film. At that point I wasn’t about to argue. He wrapped the print carefully in old newspapers. I thought he might slip my snaps inside, but he did not. The two goofs were pretending to pay no attention.

  Albrecht handed me the print. I put the film in my pocket.

  “Danke,” he said easily.

  “Bitte,” I responded, trying to keep my voice from cracking.

  I walked out of the shop leisurely, as if I had every reason in the world to be confident. But my stomach was tight as a knot, I was afraid I’d be sick again, and my legs were shuddering.

  First mistake.

  But what were the CID gumshoes doing in the store? If they thought I was up to something, why didn’t they arrest the two of us and seize the evidence? And why were they tailing me? Were they working with Special Agent Clarke? And what if Albrecht was in league with them? What if he had grabbed the snapshots with the intent of turning them over to the gumshoes?

  But if that was his plan, why not just leave the snaps on his counter?

  All the way back across the Regens to the Domplatz and the Residenz, I reviewed scenarios that might explain what had happened and how I might respond. Nothing made sense. I would have to make spur-of-the-moment decisions. Or what if nothing happened? Might it be that they—whoever they were—would wait till we were on our way to Nürnberg and Stuttgart and then capture me in the act of fleeing with wanted Nazis?