A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She was wearing her usual “uniform” of white blouse and dark skirt, this time summer-weight blue. The jacket of the suit was draped neatly over the chair next to her desk.

  “Do you think anyone woule fire you if you didn’t show up today? Hell, Brigie, no one would know the difference. Who, besides me, could report whether you were here or not here?”

  She stopped typing. “I am supposed to work on Saturday morning,” she said stubbornly.

  fawohl, I thought.

  “Tell you what: next Friday afternoon ask Captain Polly if she needs you on Saturday. She’ll seem surprised but will tell you no. Then ask her the next Saturday and she’ll say, if you’re needed on any Saturday morning, she’ll let you know. Do you want to bet against that scenario?”

  Brigitta looked up at me, a faint smile on her lovely face. “I am so grateful that I do not want to take advantage of you Americans. But you are right of course. I should have figured it out for myself.”

  “Yeah, well, you can always ask me.”

  “I know, Chucky, I know.”

  I thought she was going to weep and wondered what the hell I would do in response to that.

  “So, did you find out anything about new papers?”

  “Yes, there is someone who will do it. But he is strange. You will bring him the pictures and the money—five hundred American dollars. He will make the papers for you. When they are finished, he will tell me and I will tell you. He will not tell you his name and he does not want to know yours. Is that too much money?”

  “No.” If need be, I could always borrow some money from my family for college. I didn’t want to, but I could.

  “The arrangements are all right?”

  “I’ll live with them. . . . How long will it take?”

  “He would not tell me. He is a fine artist with etchings. He had a good reputation before the war, but then no one wanted etchings. He made reichsmarks. Some say he had been making them long before the war. The Nazis always suspected him, but they could prove nothing. It is also said he made reichsmarks for them too.”

  “I presume he is making American dollars now.”

  “I would be surprised if he wasn’t. The challenge would be too much to resist. Probably he makes only a few, enough to provide him with money.”

  “And his friends?”

  “He has no friends. . . . You are to knock on his door, then go in. It is always open. You tell him Brigitta sent you and give him the pictures. Then you leave. No joking, Chucky, and no buying anything like the picture you bought from Max Albrecht. This is a very serious business.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You will ask him how long. He will exaggerate, but do not push him or question him. He knows it’s urgent. Maybe towards the end of next week.”

  I glanced at her calendar. Thursday was the fourteenth, Friday, the fifteenth—Mary’s Day in Harvest time. The old Celtic feast of Lugnasad.

  “Where can I find him?”

  “You know where the Evangelical church is?”

  “Sure, down the street from your parish church.”

  “You walk past it and turn right. There is tiny lane leading into a square of very old buildings. In the far corner of the square on the left, right at the corner, there is basement apartment. You can recognize it because there are always black shades on the window.”

  “All right, when is this eccentric genius at home?”

  “He’s home all the time. You will not interfere with his, ah, minting American dollars?”

  “None of my business—not till too many of his products turn up. And I don’t know his name, do I?”

  She smiled thinly. “No, you don’t.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you show me the place when you go home?”

  “I have much work to do.”

  “Did Captain Nettleton say she wanted it first thing Monday morning?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then she doesn’t. She’d be horrified if she knew you were working on a lovely Saturday like this and with your two kids at home wanting to go on a picnic.”

  She hesitated. “Are you sure it will be all right?”

  “Positive.” I picked up her jacket and put it on her. She reached for her purse, jammed a number of things into it—lipstick, tissues, pen, and suchlike, slipped the papers into a desk drawer, and admired for a moment her empty desktop.

  “Very neat, Frau Doktor Doktor,” I said, dragging her toward the stairs. “Now let’s go. Connie and Hank are expecting a picnic.”

  “They bothered me all last night about a picnic,” she admitted.

  We strolled across the Domplatz and down the narrow streets to the parish church. I stopped at a small toy shop to buy a couple of things for her kids.

  “You should not do that,” she insisted. “You will spoil them.”

  “I should bring them back?”

  She smiled. “No, of course not.”

  “You certainly know your way around this town. I ask for someone who might forge papers for me and you think of two almost at once.”

  “It is my neighborhood.” She shrugged. “I should know it well.”

  “Well enough to have any leads on the black market?”

  “I could not tell you if I did know. I cannot betray my friends.”

  “And if they were not your friends and they were hurting innocent children by stealing penicillin and charging prices their parents could not afford?”

  “Then I might. But actually I know nothing. I try not to listen. My position is a difficult one.”

  “All we would expect from you at Constabulary HQ is that you tell us when Germans are being hurt.”

  “I will always do that.”

  The trouble with being a person with her kind of conscience, especially if you’re Catholic, is that you end up having a lot of tough moral choices to make—and afraid to follow your instincts when they’re all you have, which is most of the time.

  We went beyond the Pfarrkirche and worked our way through the narrow lanes that created a maze of medieval streets, almost a labyrinth. In trying to explore during my early days in Bamberg, I became thoroughly lost and wandered by the same buildings several times till I asked one of the locals how to get to the Domplatz. I made it on the second try.

  This area had once been the clerical quarters for the staff of the parish church and their aides. There must have been a lot of both. Then we passed the Evangelical (Lutheran) church and entered an even smaller, tighter web of old buildings. The area was the dingiest and most run-down part of the Bishop’s City, the closest thing to a slum that Bamberg possessed.

  As we walked, Brig chatted happily about her childhood and her family and her children. Then she fell silent.

  “It will get better, Brig. This is just a transition. In a year or two at the most the American, British, and French zones will merge into a new country.”

  “It will be fine when Kurt comes home,” she replied, her jaw set in grim determination.

  What if anything would shake that faith?

  Finally we turned a couple of corners, walked down a few lanes, and emerged into a tiny, dirty square with benches on which some elderly people sat. Despite the warm weather, no one else was in the square. The only occupants were pieces of paper floating occasionally in the summer breeze, like minor lost souls.

  “Over there in the corner.” She pointed. “You can just barely see the stairs going to his shop.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’m going to walk you back home.”

  “That will not be necessary. It is safe here in the neighborhood.”

  “Regardless. I can find my way back.”

  During our half-hour stroll from the Domplatz, I had been on the watch for gumshoes. No one in sight—unless they were a lot better than the agents who worked for Sam Houston Carpenter. I found my way out of the maze with only one correction from Brig.

  When we arrived at her apartment, I gave her the
bag of toys.

  “You must come in for tea.”

  “Thanks but no thanks. The kids want to get out into the country and so do you. Besides, I have work to do.”

  “Be very careful.”

  “Always; you know me.”

  “That’s why I worry.”

  She looked as if she might kiss me, but then, good, prudent frau that she was, she decided not to do it in public.

  “You really have quite a harem, don’t you, sport? That one is a really classy babe.”

  “Agent Clarke,” I said. “Good morning, sir.”

  He was standing at the head of Brigitta’s street, just in front of the Pfarrkirche. Where had he come from and what was he doing here? I had paid little attention to possible tails since we left the square where the engraver’s shop was.

  “Yeah, how come you’re so lucky?”

  He was wearing a white shirt, without a tie, trousers with suspenders, and a Panama straw hat. He looked exactly like what he was, an American detective who had drunk too much for a long time, a character from a Raymond Chandler novel.

  “She’s a colleague at the Residenz, sir. I accompanied her home because I had some toys to give her children.”

  “Well, you weren’t all over her, like you were that kid last night.”

  He smelled of gin already.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Figured I should get a view of this city before I leave. Pretty sloppy, dirty old place, huh? Too bad we didn’t bomb out all this mess like we did in Frankfurt, isn’t it?”

  I let that go.

  “How’s the search coming?”

  “My team continues its investigation, sir, but . . .”

  “I know, I know, you need the documents I got. Take it easy. I promised them sometime Monday and I’m a man of my word.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be shoving off. I’m getting thirsty and that bar at the hotel isn’t all bad. Cool too.”

  “Yes, sir. Enjoy your excursion.”

  “That’ll be pretty hard in this dump of a town. See you, sport. Keep on enjoying your women while you’re young enough to have fun.”

  What the hell!

  Was Rednose Clarke much smarter than he appeared to be? Was he wearing a mask to fool me? What kind of game was he playing? Why did he keep turning up at places where I was? He couldn’t possibly be the stupid drunk that he pretended to be, could he?

  Or maybe he was a good agent gone sour. In that case he was dangerous only because he had remnants of intelligence and instinct that could start to work at almost any time.

  That was the best interpretation. The worst was that he was part of some massive plot involving Sam Houston Carpenter to do me in. But why me? Why use a sixteen-inch gun to swat a fly, albeit a pesky fly?

  If they knew where the Wülfes were, why not sweep in and arrest them? Why dangle all of us on a string for a week or so? What more could they possibly hope to learn?

  Maybe they were all just dumb. I had learned even then that the American government was permeated by incompetent people—as I would later learn so were all other governments. In fact, we were better than most.

  So, hoping that the “stupid” explanation was the right one, I ambled back to the tiny, dingy square where the great counterfeiter lived. I made only a couple of bad turns and found the square on the second, well, the third, try. Before entering the square I checked out the lane behind me. No one. Then the square. Only paper, noisy pigeons, and a few old folks sitting on the benches under the sun.

  I looked around cautiously when I arrived at the far right corner of the square. Still no one watching. I hoped I wasn’t being trailed by real pros. But then, where would the Army of Occupation find any pros?

  I hesitated before descending the dark and filthy steps to the foreboding shop. Somewhere I had read a story, I think by Charles Williams, about someone entering a shop like that and ending up in another world. I didn’t want to go to another world just yet, not until I had cleared some of the decks in this world.

  So I squared my shoulders, strode down the creepy stairs, and pounded on the decaying oak door.

  “Ja?” said a strange, musical voice.

  I pushed the door open and went into the strangest room I have ever seen in all my life. It was filled with a kind of misty blue light, though it was not clear whence the light came. A sweet, not unpleasant smell permeated the place, a lot like the smell of the model-airplane glue I had used when I was a kid, only more appealing. The room was filled with presses, plates, bottles, retorts, discarded copper squares, and piled everywhere, stacks of paper. A smiling, bald, little man, looking like one of Santa’s elves and wearing a huge white apron, stood in the center of the room behind a large, white table that might have been a surgical operating table.

  Where, I wondered, were Dante and Beatrice?

  “Ja, ja?” the elf said, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically.

  A closer look suggested that he was not a merry old elf at all. His eyes were stone cold, like hard, polished sapphires. I had better follow Brigie’s suggestions to the letter.

  “Guten Tag.”

  “Ja.” He nodded, a brisk seemingly amiable nod, and rubbed his hands together.

  I put the three pictures together on the operating table.

  “Ja.” He picked them up. “Ja, ja!”

  I waited.

  “Four hundred dollars.”

  Another discount.

  I counted out four hundred-dollar bills—I had been carrying five hundred around for the last couple of days, in case I would need it suddenly to buy papers. I’d have to get more from the bank on Monday. So I’d get a part-time job when I went to Notre Dame.

  “Ja,” he said, examining my pictures, like a kid with new toys.

  He shrugged. “Week, maybe.”

  No choice. I hoped Brig was right about his delivering ahead of schedule.

  “Danke schön,” I said.

  “Ja.” He nodded again, continuing to study the pictures.

  I left the room and climbed up the stairs back to the planet Earth. I glanced around the square. No one, save the pigeons and the old-timers on the bench. Carefully watching the people behind me, I walked back across the Regens to my room at the Vinehaus Messerschmitt.

  On the way back I thought about my friends the Nettletons. They were the only ones I knew smart enough to carry out the black-market caper. Apparently he had a lot of money and was already a member of the family law firm back in Boston. They were charming and gracious and generous to me. But, truly clever criminals would also know how to be nice people. John could organize an extensive black-market ring with the same skill with which he would organize a political campaign at home in the Bay State. And you couldn’t have a better intelligence operative than your wife in the Constabulary commanding general’s office. They entertained tastefully but lavishly. Where did all the money come from?

  Moreover John was smart enough, if he set his mind to it, to ferret out the black-market operation. It was not his job, of course. But it was his wife’s job more or less. Why didn’t he help her?

  Perhaps because he truly believed that another ring would follow this one and found my argument for going against this one naive and innocent. However, he had nodded grimly at my oration the other night. Still that didn’t prove anything.

  Or the general. He was a gifted and able man who could have earned a lot more money in private industry. Yet he chose to stay in the military and accept two more years of separation from his wife and family. Could not such a man persuade himself in the moral atmosphere of the time that a little extra money was the equivalent of what my father would have called “honest graft”?

  My father spoke ironically when he said those words, implying that all graft could become honest when someone was willing to cut corners—as even devout and virtuous and upright men might do on occasion.

  I remembered the case of Old Fitz and wondered.

  Brigie was right. Th
e black market was becoming an obsession. Well, it would have to wait till I got back from Stuttgart, hopefully on Friday.

  I felt a little guilty about my suspicions. After all, these people were my friends. Would I really turn them in if I found them out? Then I thought of Trudi being assaulted in a dark alley on a cold winter night by some of the black-market people. Yeah, I’d turn them in.

  I struggled to find solid proof that my friends were not involved. I couldn’t think of any. All my evidence was circumstantial. Mere speculation. But I had to be sure there was nothing more than circumstances.

  In my room at the Vinehaus, I outlined my plan in full detail as I now saw it. Hopefully next Thursday night, the eve of Mary’s Day in Harvest, we would make the run to Nürnberg. I considered the plan carefully. A few twists and turns might not be necessary. Too cute by half, maybe. But each of them had a good reason behind it.

  I still had a few days to think through the plan. I tore up notes. Nothing to do. I turned to American fiction and that obnoxious snob Sinclair Lewis. Then I went over to the Residenz and down into the basement darkroom next to the PX. Naturally Dr. Berman was already there.

  “Who’s worse morally,” I began, “a German child who was born in 1940 or an American GI who trades in medicine on the black market?”

  He chuckled as he carefully removed a roll of film from the developing tank. “You become more Jewish every day, Chuck. Now you charge in with your Talmudic questions. If you were still Irish, you would waste a half hour in preliminaries.”

  “Fair play to you. But when with the Talmudists, do what they do.”

  He laughed again. “You’re still Irish after all. The German is more guilty but the American more morally reprehensible.”

  So we argued and had a grand time arguing. Only in the middle of the argument did I realize there was little difference between trading in medicine or Old Fitz and in trading in forged identity documents.

  “Would you trade on the black market?” I asked him.

  “Not usually, of course. Yet in a good cause, I might and indeed I have.”

  “Everyone thinks his own cause is good.”

  “Naturally.”