Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  Ordinary life—a boring husband, the common vexations of a half-lived domestic existence, the absence of passion and guilt and the drama of suffering. The absence of happiness, of even the appetite for it. That seemed an unreachable happiness in itself. To live in a world that wasn’t populated with men like Erich Lautner. To have had the sense never to have entered it.

  “It’s so cold out, please, you must allow me to help you with those as far as your car,” he had said, all those weeks ago, when a gust of November wind had nearly blown her and her packages out into the street. Erich had been passing—he was the faintly familiar face she remembered from here and there up on the mesa, the man who had sat behind them at the Betty Grable movie perhaps—and he had scooped her up just as she was about to fall under the wheels of the Santa Fe traffic. “Well then, if you haven’t a car you must allow me to wait with you until your friends come. Here, we can go across the street and have something warming to drink.” The play had been so obvious, but she had gone along with it out of embarrassment as much as anything else. And, after all, what had she to be afraid of in a public place?

  “This is so pleasant—we ought to do it again. Next week, perhaps. When you come back to town with your friends.”

  She had said no, more than once, but he had insisted. He would wait for her, right there, in case she changed her mind. They both knew just exactly what he meant, and she had left never intending to see him again. What had prompted her even to let him buy her a drink was something she would wonder about until she died.

  All the following week, every day, she had thought that there was no way she would go back. No way. It was a settled thing.

  And then, Friday night while they were having dinner in the kitchen, Hal had gone on and on about the war: how it would be over by the end of the year and how afterward everyone would see what suckers they had been to go rushing off to fight. How it would probably end up making no difference to anybody. And she should be glad that he wasn’t overseas because this way she didn’t have to worry that he’d come home with the clap. It was a big joke.

  And in the cold fury of her heart, she thought about Erich Lautner.

  “I am a German, you know,” he had said. “So I know what Hitler is like. I fight him with science, which is the only weapon I have.”

  This hadn’t been the sort of person she had wanted to become, but still she had gone ahead with it. Erich Lautner and the call of the wild—musty hotel rooms and a feeling of violation—and all with her eyes open. Perhaps she could plead temporary insanity.

  “But you will come in tomorrow, won’t you?” His voice was insinuating, somewhere between an entreaty and a sneer, and he cocked an eyebrow as if he already knew the answer. “We may never see each other again—I can’t let you go that easily.”

  He reached over toward her. The commissary door opened and three women emerged into the harsh cold, their hands going up automatically to protect their hairdos from the wind. Jenny pulled back from him in a perfectly spontaneous convulsion of dislike.

  “Yes,” she said quickly, her attention on the door handle behind her. Yes—she was surrounded by familiar faces. Yes, there was no more courage left in her. “Yes, tomorrow. Tomorrow is Saturday, isn’t it? Yes—yes, I’ll come.”

  She backed out through the door and closed it with both hands. The click sounded loud enough to command the attention of the whole parking lot. And Erich Lautner’s hand slid down to the gear lever, and the car jumped forward with a little start. In a moment she was watching it turn back into the main road.

  There were tears in her eyes as they followed the little trail of dust disappearing through the perimeter gates.

  19

  It was well after dark before von Niehauser made his way back to his rented truck and, since he had no clear idea of how extensively the area might be patrolled and had even less inclination to attract attention by using his headlamps, he wrapped a blanket around himself and spent the night in the cab. As soon as the sun was up, he shook the stiffness out of his joints and drove back to Santa Fe.

  At that hour of the morning New Mexico seemed the most desolate spot on earth. There was no sound except the hum of the truck tires. Nothing was stirring except the wind, and the cold gray sunlight seemed to wash the color out of everything.

  He didn’t know whether it was the lack of sleep or the excitement at being so near the end of his mission, but von Niehauser felt an uncomfortably pronounced giddiness, the sort of thing one associates with the sensation of falling.

  It wasn’t a new experience; he had had it before. He had felt much the same dozens of times, two or three weeks into one of those interminable battles on the Russian front, after the boom of their field artillery had penetrated so deep into his nervous system that he simply assumed that he would be blown to atoms sometime within the next several hours and so he stopped thinking about it. The sensation was common enough; a colonel of his, a brave enough soldier who had finally been killed during the retreat from Morozovsk, had called it the last stage of courage, the willingness to lay down one’s life on the most trifling pretext. When that was played out there was nothing beyond it—all a man’s resources were gone and he had nothing left with which to defend his self-respect.

  Having never crossed over that final threshold, von Niehauser could perhaps regard himself as having still a few illusions to treasure.

  Still, he was glad this business was nearly finished. In the space of a few days, if he wasn’t dead, he would be safely over the border into Mexico. And then the world would have to come to terms with everything that that would bring.

  He would be glad to get back to his hotel room to shave and treat himself to the luxury of a hot shower. There would be no time for any sleep—he would be meeting Lautner shortly before noon—and there was no telling if they might not leave immediately. Fortunately, it would not be the first time that he had had to carry on without his beauty rest, and in Mexico he could sleep for a week if he felt like it. In Mexico Lautner would be someone else’s problem.

  About a mile outside of town he was startled by a jackrabbit that ran across the road, directly under the wheels of his truck. Had the thing come out of it alive? Von Niehauser searched in his rear view mirror but could see nothing. What could make a creature do something as inexplicably dangerous as that? Was it part of some sort of game? The whole episode struck him as intensely disagreeable—it didn’t bear thinking on.

  “You took y’r time—get any?”

  Von Niehauser smiled and shook his head as, per prior arrangement, he returned the keys to the truck to the man at the hardware store, who didn’t seem very glad to see him.

  “No. I saw one, but the distance was too great to allow for a shot. Perhaps another day.”

  There would never be another day.

  “It should be a relatively simple matter,” Schellenberg had said. “We have many sympathizers in Mexico—the Fascist movement is strong in that part of the world. I’ll provide you with a list.”

  Everything was a relatively simple matter to Schellenberg. Probably, like so many others, he had plans for escaping to South America when Germany lost the war. Just catch a submarine out of Bremerhaven and turn up a few months later in Paraguay. Perhaps he already had money deposited outside the country against precisely that emergency.

  “You can contact them and they’ll make arrangements for receiving you and Lautner. I should think, with all the practice they must have had over the years, they shouldn’t find it too difficult to smuggle the pair of you over the border.”

  And he smiled his boyish, faintly effeminate smile and used the tip of his riding crop to brush a speck of dirt from his trouser leg. (Why did so many in the SS affect such things? Schellenberg had probably never been on a horse in his life.)

  “And of course, Herr Brigadier, it is quite impossible that the Americans might have penetrated the ranks of these ‘sympathizers’? I should hate to be arrested because of something so obvious as that.�
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  “My dear Major, you worry too much,” Schellenberg answered, clasping his hands behind his back.” American counterintelligence tends to be something of a hole-in-corner affair. They have rather adolescent minds in some respects.”

  “Yes? I’m delighted to hear it. And just how many agents does the Sicherheitsdienst have in that country?”

  The head of RSHA VI looked slightly uncomfortable for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders under his heavy black greatcoat, as if the matter were of no importance.

  “America is very far away,” he answered finally. “And the Führer has never been convinced of its significance for events here in Europe. Believe me, their successes have been no greater than our own.”

  Nevertheless, von Niehauser decided to be rather cautious in his approaches to the Mexicans.

  “There is one man down there in whom we repose perfect confidence—probably you’ll want to make your initial contact through him. He seems to be motivated by the purest sentiments: aristocratic prejudice and hatred of the Americans. He’s been working for us since 1938 and has never consented to accept a pfennig.”

  That fact seemed to stand as conclusive with Schellenberg. He gazed about him, surveying the hospital lawns with the air of a proprietor. A man who acts from conviction is always a fool, he seemed to imply, and one can always feel safe trusting a fool.

  “Who is this knight of chivalry?”

  The Herr Brigadier turned around slightly and looked at von Niehauser as if he were about to say something—to admonish the Herr Major, perhaps, against irony. But then, apparently, he thought better of it.

  “We will notify him to expect you,” he said, having decided, it would seem, to ignore the question. “He will be told to await a summons from Joachim, Baron von Niehauser, holder of the Ritterkreuz and hero of the war in the East. He will be impressed by that—he made his fortune in the leather business, but his wife is from one of the leading families. As you might have gathered, he is something of a snob.”

  “Really.”

  That had been one item of business in Chicago, to send the Mexican leather peddler a coded telegram to the effect that he had better make his preparations. By then, of course, von Niehauser had discovered his name.

  The late General Rolf, Baron von Niehauser, as was fitting for one whose name had filled a place in German history since the days of Albert of Brandenburg, had had clearly defined ideas about such men.

  “Never place your confidence in a parvenu,” he used to say. “I make no judgment—were the von Niehausers anything else five hundred years ago?—but those who have come forward only recently are too obsessed with their positions to be reliable. They think too much of the privileges of rank and not enough of its responsibilities; they have no selflessness.”

  And, one had to admit, there was a certain weight of logic to his point of view. To have been born to a position was like life before Original Sin—there was no fear of falling back into obscurity because obscurity was as unimaginable as death; it was something of which one simply had no experience. But these new men must exist in a constant state of apprehension. They must see the gulf between what they were and what they have become yawning behind them like a chasm.

  No, his father had been wise. He would place no confidence in Señor Agustin Gomá.

  He had read the dossier in Berlin, and seen the photographs—the best was one taken at the wedding of the leather peddler’s eldest daughter to the grandson of the former Minister of the Interior. Gomá was a short, broad man, a tough little peasant in white tie and tails, smiling arrogantly from behind a glass of champagne, his arm linked through the former minister’s, who did not look as if he relished the contact.

  The rest was rather what one would expect: born January 26, 1890, in a tiny village outside of someplace called Teotihuacan—a note described it as a suburb of Mexico City, but von Niehauser harbored a suspicion that Teotihuacan was probably little comparable to, say, Potsdam. Almost nothing was known about him until he appeared in the capital around 1912 to purchase a shoe factory; no one seemed to have an inkling where he could have gotten the money. By the mid-1920s he was already a millionaire—in pesos, one presumed—and within another decade he was rich enough to begin dabbling in politics. He owned a large ranch near Guadalajara and seemed to fancy himself very much as el Jefe, the grand señor. An affinity with Fascist dictatorships was perhaps inevitable.

  Beyond the mere mention of their marriage in 1916, there was no information at all concerning the señora. Presumably she was still alive, and presumably she did not figure very prominently in her husband’s view of the world, but it was a curious omission for the SS. Generally they were much concerned with things of that sort.

  “The new regime, with these jumped up little men.”

  Von Niehauser could remember his father on one of their walks through the woods at Garlitz—the old baron liked to sweep the tops of the bushes with his cane in hopes of starting a rabbit. Since he had decided he was too old to continue hunting, it amused him to watch them dart out into his path and then disappear again into the undergrowth.

  They had driven home from Berlin together the night before, and the baron took advantage of their weekend alone together to unburden himself. His youngest son, the civilian academic, had become, since the baroness’s death, increasingly the one person he felt able to take into his full confidence. During that period they had grown extremely close.

  “These capitalists, whose grandfathers made their livings out of pushcarts, they crowd around Hitler like dogs waiting for the table scraps. They smell money to be made in the rearmament—I think they would be prepared to sell the government anything. It appalls me that the destiny of the Reich should be delivered into the hands of such men.”

  “Yes, but surely the Army remains untouched by all this.”

  “You think so?” He turned his head slightly, glancing at his youngest child with a curious, pitying expression. “Yes, perhaps, for the moment. But the Party is filled with these jealous nonentities. This fellow Himmler, I shouldn’t be surprised if he had ambitions for co-opting us one of these days, turning the Army into merely another subdivision of that hooligan police force of his. Have you ever met Herr Himmler? My God, what a bumpkin!”

  No, von Niehauser had never met Himmler. But he had met Schellenberg, the son of a piano manufacturer in Saarbrücken, so we were told, and Schellenberg hadn’t struck him as anything like a bumpkin. Von Niehauser found it difficult to share his father’s view of the SS as opéra bouffe.

  And Señor Gomá seemed to be very much the SS’s dog.

  “I met him briefly in ’41,” Schellenberg had said. “He came to Spain, and I had him smuggled into France. That sort of personal contact can sometimes make all the difference.”

  “What was your impression?”

  “Do you actually care?”

  Schellenberg smiled. The brigadier was two or three years von Niehauser’s junior and seemed to have figured out that the major wasn’t frightfully impressed by their disparity of rank. Perhaps he too felt the pressure of that aristocratic self-confidence which the late baron had so highly prized as the salvation of the state. Or perhaps that was simply the way the SS fared in its contacts with the regular Army.

  After all, in such times, who could feel much deference for a desk soldier?

  “Pretend I do—what was your impression?”

  “I think he is blinded by his contempt for the democracies,” Schellenberg answered quietly, speaking as one might of the moral failings of a friend. His eyes searched the ground in front of him as he walked along, as if worried that it might not bear his weight. “That is a weakness, but from our point of view a useful one. I doubt if he can imagine Germany losing the war, and he seems to think we might make him President of Mexico after the Americans have been humiliated. I didn’t like him, but I think he is a man we can trust. One is not required to like one’s instruments.”

  No, that was very true. It was p
robably better if one did not.

  Von Niehauser decided he would go to the post office first, even before returning to his hotel room. Possibly it was bad technique—he was certainly more conspicuous with a day’s growth of beard and his face unwashed—but he simply couldn’t tolerate the suspense any longer.

  The post office was an ugly cinder-block building, painted to look like adobe. An American flag flapped gamely at the end of a short flagpole set in what would have been a flowerbed in a more hospitable climate but here was filled with sharp little mica-flecked stones. The interior was dark and empty. The loudest sound was the clicking of the coil steam heater. Von Niehauser went up to the window marked GENERAL DELIVERY.

  “Do you have anything for a Paul Bayle?” He spelled the last name.

  The man inside the cage, who was immensely fat and possessed quantities of kinky salt and pepper hair, looked rather stupidly at von Niehauser for a moment, blinked, frowned, blinked again, and stepped wordlessly off his stool to go have a look. A moment later he returned with an envelope, which he slid across the counter as if he were using it to clean off the wood.

  “Thank you.”

  As he walked back toward the La Ventana, von Niehauser hardly did more than glance at the stamp. It was a Mexican stamp. He folded the letter and put it into his jacket pocket; he wouldn’t read it yet, not until he was quite alone—not for any practical reason but because he felt the need of the self-imposed discipline. He was just a little ashamed of himself for having yielded to the temptation. His hotel room would be soon enough.

  Dear Sir,

  The arrangements for your fishing trip are well in hand. If it is convenient, your guests may like to assemble at a lodge we reserve for such purposes. Take Highway 81 twenty-two miles south of Hachita, and you will see a dirt road to your left, marked “private.” Five miles on that will bring you to the lodge. We can have everything prepared for your arrival on five hours’ notice—simply telegraph our office. We look forward to serving you.