A Game of Spies

by John Altman

  “Feh,” he said.

  “It’s dangerous to say things like that.”

  “Feh.”

  “You’re drunk. You should go home. To your wife.”

  He sat in silence, glowering. Emotions played across his face transparently, as they do on the faces of drunks and children. Then he murmured something, seemingly to himself. It sounded like “Schlieffen.”

  She leaned closer. “Did you … say something?”

  His eyes closed again, squeezed tight, then opened.

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re right. I’m drunk.” He looked at her searchingly, and stood. “Forgive me, Eva. I’m sorry.”

  “Go home, Otto. Go to bed.”

  She had the sense he was on the verge of adding something else; but then he turned away. “Good night,” he said simply, and moved to the door.

  He began to try to work the bolts there. Astoundingly, he got them open. Then he turned again, and said, without meeting her eyes, “They will know.”

  As quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

  She looked after him for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, she stood, moved to the door herself, and shot the bolts. She hugged herself tightly, leaning against the thin wood and shivering.

  A traitor and a spy.

  Had she betrayed herself?

  She ran back over the conversation in her mind. No, she decided, she had not betrayed herself. He had been testing her, perhaps—and she had not betrayed herself. But nor had she taken advantage of the opportunity. He had confessed about his wife, even about his father. It would have been a fine chance to suggest something, to make some inroads toward her ultimate goal. But she had let the chance pass.

  She let out a long, shuddering sigh. The temptation to burrow into bed returned. In bed nothing could get to her. Ridiculous, of course; but a soothing thought nevertheless.

  She peeled off her robe, trailing it across the floor, and crawled into bed without even brushing her teeth. She felt suddenly exhausted.

  She was not cut out for this. It had started as a game—years before, miles away. But now it was no game.

  A traitor and a spy.

  They will know.

  Who would know? The Nazis? Did they suspect him? Were they watching her?

  The old temptation returned, to blame Hobbs. If Hobbs had been a more honorable man—if Hobbs had not misrepresented himself to her from the very beginning—she would not have found herself in this position. Then the old rejoinder: she had made the choice herself; she had followed a higher purpose. She was doing the right thing, for the right reasons.

  But she had been so young when she had agreed to it—only twenty. Was it fair for a girl of twenty to make decisions that would affect the rest of her life?

  She doused the lamp. One came to important junctures without even realizing at the time, she thought, just how important they were. If she had stayed on her parents’ farm in Saxony, she would be living a simple life today. Riding horses, cooking, and probably married by now. She would have her own family; simple pleasures. But she had been anxious to leave the farm, to study in England—to do something more with her life.

  She only wished she’d realized at the time what she was getting herself into.

  She closed her eyes. Were all spies so confused? It seemed unlikely.

  Schlieffen.

  They will know.

  Her eyes opened.

  Not the Nazis, she thought. The British, Klinger had meant. The British would know. Schlieffen. He had told her something. But what?

  She would have to find out. She would have to see him again.

  A traitor and a spy.

  Sleep, that night, was a long time coming.

  PRINZ ALBRECHT STRASSE

  “Herr Kriminal Inspektor,” Hauptmann said. “Have you got a moment?”

  Frick glanced up. Hauptmann was standing in the doorway, holding a thin sheaf of papers under one arm. He hoped, no doubt, to add the papers to the already formidable pile sitting on Frick’s desk.

  “Not if those are for me,” Frick said.

  Hauptmann smiled, and came farther into the office. He was a stocky man with coarse chestnut hair and an offbeat sense of humor that was well known around Gestapo headquarters. “Too much paperwork, Herr Inspektor?”

  “Far too much, Hauptmann. Far too much.”

  “I seem to remember that you used to be fond of paperwork—before your time spent in the field.”

  Frick frowned. To the best of his recollection, he had never been particularly fond of paperwork. But then, he always had been fond of organization. And his powers of recollection had faltered since his return from the front. He had more and more trouble, these days, keeping his mind focused.

  Or perhaps it was just Hauptmann’s idea of a joke.

  Hauptmann waved the papers in his hand. “You’ll want to take a look at this,” he said. “It might cheer you up.”

  “What is it?”

  “A report, Herr Inspektor, from a Blockwart in Wilmersdorf. I’d be glad to follow it up myself, if you like, this very evening.”

  Hauptmann was glowing with barely contained self-satisfaction. The workday was already finished; the man’s offer to follow up himself seemed strange. Frick held out his hand.

  “If I need you, Herr Kriminal Assistant, I’ll find you.”

  Hauptmann looked pained. It must have been a promising report indeed, Frick thought, if the man was so eager to track it down. Hauptmann relinquished the papers, turned, and then paused at the door and turned back. “Got a joke for you,” he said. “Two Luftwaffe pilots walk into a bar. And who do they see sitting there but Field Marshall Goering himself? Goering has a plate in front of him. Pork schnitzel, smoked salmon, pheasant, venison. One pilot turns to the other—”

  “Herr Kriminal Assistant,” Frick said.

  “Yes?”

  “My schedule is very full today.”

  Hauptmann straightened.

  “Of course, Herr Inspektor,” he said, and let himself out.

  Frick looked after the man for a moment, then turned his attention to the papers on his desk.

  He soon realized that the Kriminal Assistant’s eagerness had not been misplaced. Hauptmann had been lending a hand with the search for William Hobbs, and it seemed that he had struck gold. The papers described a family named Gehl, residents of the suburb of Wilmersdorf. Three days before, a mysterious visitor had appeared on the Gehls’ doorstep. Several neighbors had immediately reported the man’s appearance to the block supervisor. He was a tall man, they said, with an athlete’s build, who moved with a slight limp. Since his arrival, he had been seen slipping out several times, always under cover of darkness, only to return within an hour.

  The Gehl family—wife Ursula, husband Ernst—worked in the import-export business, and thanks to the nature of their transactions they had maintained ties with the British until fairly recently. It was not beyond the realm of possibility, the Blockwart suggested in his report, that the Gehl family might be British sympathizers. It was therefore not beyond the realm of possibility that this strange visitor might actually be somebody of considerable interest, a refugee or a spy. The report ended with a proposal that the Gestapo pay a visit to the Gehl family and demand to see the visitor’s papers.

  Frick read the report twice, then set it aside. Over the past few days, his men had chased down a half-dozen leads concerning Hobbs, and had found nothing except dead ends. But none of the other leads had seemed half so promising.

  The desk work was suffocating him. He decided to follow up on this one personally.

  He was just preparing to stand when he caught the odor of fresh bread, wafting through the air of the office like a half-remembered melody.

  Frick paused. It was his mother’s bread, he realized; the kind she had made on Sunday afternoons, the kind that filled the house with hearty good smells promising heavy dinners and early bedtimes. His mother’s bread—here in the offices of the Gestapo. />
  Very strange, he thought.

  As he sat, smelling the ghost scent of his mother’s fresh bread, his mind began to wander. It wandered back to the front. The sky was cemetery gray, with twin columns of dun-colored smoke rising from the scarred ground. A young Jewess was touching her heart, almost tenderly, looking him straight in the eye. “Eighteen,” she said. It was her age, he understood. She wanted him to know how old she was before he shot her. “Eighteen,” she said again, with her hand on her chest, as if that might somehow save her life.

  Then his finger had tightened on the trigger …

  A telephone was ringing.

  Frick snapped back to the present, reaching for the phone on his desk. He had it to his ear before he realized that it had been some other telephone ringing, in some other office. He set it down again.

  For a moment, his mind was perfectly blank.

  Then his thoughts turned slowly, inexorably, back to the girl.

  She had been a beautiful girl: dark-eyed, raven-haired. “Eighteen,” she had said. Half-plaintive, half-accusatory. “Eighteen.”

  When he came back to reality again, the office was dark. Light from the hallway leaked stealthily under the door.

  He sat up straighter. The smell of bread was dissipating now.

  What had he been thinking, before his mind had wandered? He couldn’t recall.

  His eyes ticked over the contents of the desk: the file, the telephone, the framed photograph of his mother, the blotter, the pencil. Ordinary things. Nothing of importance there. But he had the nagging feeling that he had been thinking of something important, before his mind had taken him back to the front. Hadn’t he?

  He licked his lips, then shook his head. He needed a good night’s sleep. That was all.

  He would remember in the morning.

  He let himself out, leaving the file untouched on the edge of his desk.

  4

  HOHENZOLLERNDAMM, WILMERSDORF

  Once Wilmersdorf had been a bourgeois district.

  Then, at the turn of the century, the immigrants had come. The old Junker mansions had been split into apartments to accommodate the influx; the neighborhood had turned plainly residential. Now the few opulent manors in the area were separated by tenements, with a profusion of bulbous blue church domes—the architecture of the Russian Orthodoxy—rising above the rooftops.

  William Hobbs looked out at the neighborhood for a moment, then let the curtain fall closed. When he turned from the window, he was surprised to see Ernst Gehl standing by the grandfather clock, watching him.

  “Herr Gehl,” he said. “You startled me.”

  Gehl gave a listless smile. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man in his late sixties. Something about him reminded Hobbs of Arturo Toscanini, the legendary conductor: a resemblance through the nose and the eyes, in the high forehead and the saturnine demeanor.

  Gehl turned to the towering grandfather clock, opened it, and began to adjust the weights inside. “Going out again?” he asked.

  “For the last time,” Hobbs said.

  Gehl did not turn to face him, but Hobbs could read the man’s thoughts as clearly as if he’d spoken them aloud. Every time Hobbs left the modest brick house, he risked bringing attention to the Gehls. In one way, Herr Gehl would have preferred that he stayed locked in the attic, out of sight and out of mind. On the other hand, Herr Gehl knew that Hobbs could not move on—to the extraction site, away from the Gehl house for good—until he had successfully contacted the agent for whom he had come here.

  “I won’t be coming back,” Hobbs said.

  Gehl, still occupied with the clock, gave a negligent wave. Hobbs, of course, had already left the house three times hoping to make contact. Gehl did not have any reason to believe that this time would be different.

  Hobbs looked at the man’s back for another moment. He felt a slow, rising surge of sympathy. Ernst Gehl and his wife, Ursula, Hobbs knew, were reluctant associates of the British. They had promised their help in the days when it had been easy to promise such help, when noble virtues had seemed most important, when the specter of war had been something on the distant horizon. Now war had come and eyes were everywhere. Gehl and his wife were already guilty of treason, so they could hardly turn back; but they plainly regretted the position in which they found themselves.

  After watching Gehl adjust the clock for a few moments, he turned to the staircase and climbed to the house’s second floor. Apologies and thanks would be worthless. The best thing he could do for them would be to get on with his mission, and out of their lives.

  A heavy chain hung from a trapdoor in the second-story ceiling. When he pulled on it, a ladder folded open like an oversized accordion. He moved up the rungs, into the close confines of the attic. He had spent the past few days living in this attic—but it had come, in that short span of time, to feel something like home.

  Which was, he thought now, really rather sad.

  He came off the top rung and turned to the small crate that he had been using as a desk. He lit the paraffin lamp atop the crate and then picked up the envelope sitting beside it. He held the envelope for a moment, fighting the temptation to open it, to make certain he had gotten the words right. He had already been over the letter countless times; the words were as right as he could make them.

  He replaced the envelope on the crate, then turned to his small collection of supplies and began to organize them for his departure.

  The supplies, for the most part, had come from the Gehls. Hobbs fastened the leather holster to his ankle and then slipped the silenced 9mm Beretta inside. He checked his papers—identity card, ration card, work permit—and found them satisfactory. He located the keys to the Talta—the Gehls’ car, which they had offered for his use. They must have been desperate to get rid of him indeed, he thought, to give up a car in such difficult times. But what else was new? Everywhere he had ever gone in his life, he had brought unpleasantness along with him. Everywhere he had ever been, they had been anxious for him to leave.

  After pocketing the keys, he shrugged on his trench coat. He put the letter in one pocket and then reached into the other, his fingers brushing past his last pack of cigarettes, to the mustache. He had made the mustache himself, from cotton balls in the Gehls’ medicine cabinet. He removed it, licked the back—the adhesive had come from an envelope—and then patted it onto his upper lip, over his own slim mustache.

  He stood for a moment, in the flickering light of the paraffin lamp, feeling faintly ridiculous.

  Too many disguises, he thought. Too many years of playing roles. The lines blurred when one played a role for too many years.

  Perhaps, beneath all the various disguises, the real William Hobbs no longer existed. Or perhaps the real William Hobbs had never truly existed at all. Before becoming a patriot, after all, he had played a variety of roles: pacifist, nonconformist, socialist, Fascist; anything that would give him access to a warm meeting hall, a sense of community and purpose. For all his life he had been trying on different masks, one after another. Who was to say if there was any face at all, below the masquerades?

  Then he thought of Eva.

  When he had been with Eva, he had not been playing a role. When he had been with Eva, he had only been himself.

  And he had let her slip through his fingers, like so many grains of sand.

  After thinking for a moment, he began to move again. His hands took inventory, checking the letter, the keys, the papers, the gun. They were all in order. He was ready. He had discovered during his excursions that most nights after dinner, Eva went for a walk. He planned to orchestrate a meeting during her evening stroll. He would press the letter into her hands and hope that the men watching her didn’t catch on. It was not the most brilliant plan in the world, but then, he was not the most brilliant man in the world. Besides, simplicity was effective.

  He paused, cocking his head. Simplicity is effective.

  Had that been Oldfield’s?

  Or had
it come from further back? From childhood? Perhaps from his father?

  He couldn’t remember.

  From Oldfield, he thought. His father had never taught him anything worth remembering. He had been too busy drinking himself to death.

  His hat was resting on the bare mattress. He picked it up, put it on his head, and took a moment to say farewell to his temporary home. Then he found the cane leaning against one wall, doused the lamp, and went downstairs again.

  He parked the Talta three blocks from Eva’s flat.

  As he walked, he felt the gun pressing against his ankle. It was a reassuring pressure, giving him a feeling of security. He had not forgotten the sensation of slitting Borg’s throat. It was not a sensation he was eager to repeat. The gun, however, was impersonal. He could use it, if he had to, without hesitation. Even better would be a rifle. He had spent many a day during his youth duck hunting in the fens outside of Surrey. With a rifle in his hands, he would feel almost invincible.…

  But for now he was satisfied with the Beretta. It was a silenced version of the standard Italian service pistol used by OVRA, the Italian secret police; the holster had been modified to accept both gun and silencer as a single unit.

  When he was within a block of Eva’s apartment, he leaned against a wall, situating himself so that he was invisible to both watchers. They could not see him, and he could not see them. But he would see Eva, if she followed the route she had followed before—when she reached the corner, before turning to continue around the block.

  He waited, smoking. A light drizzle picked up, sprinkled cool rain, and dissipated.

  Fifteen minutes passed. He began to feel anxious. Perhaps she would not take her walk at all tonight. Then where would he be? He would need to return to the Gehls’ house, to wait for another chance. But he had told the Gehls he was not coming back.

  He lit another cigarette, and held his ground.

  A few minutes later, he saw a Gestapo agent moving down the street. He reached for his cane and prepared to move. He would take a stroll around the block himself, and would take the chance, therefore, of missing Eva. But if there was a better option, he couldn’t see it.