by Ulla Lenze
13
New York, March 1939
MAX WAS VERY TALL. AS HE STEPPED INSIDE JOSEF’S APARTMENT he stooped a little, shoulders slumped, as if ever since he’d gotten his first growth spurt he’d also been bowing apologetically to others. Princess started barking.
“Does he bite?”
“She doesn’t bite. She doesn’t usually bark either.”
Max tossed his wet hat and wet coat on the couch. Rain had been falling in Harlem for hours, blurred light outside the window. “Rough neighborhood. I was afraid I’d wind up with a knife in my back. Before I went back to Germany I lived in Bushwick. It was better there.”
He thought about how to respond. “Here we’ve got the best jazz in the world,” he finally countered.
“In Germany that’ll land you in jail.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Jazzhounds go to jail.” Max smiled, and it wasn’t clear whether he approved of this rule or was making fun of it.
“Should we start?” asked Josef.
“Easy does it, now. Calm down. The appointment is in half an hour. Can you make some coffee?”
Easy does it, now. Calm down. No one ever said that who was actually calm.
Max used one finger to transmit instead of placing three fingers on the Morse key and using his index finger to press the knob. His code didn’t have any rhythm, was downright unmusical. He had a long line of numbers in front of him. Encryption was prohibited for amateurs. Josef didn’t know what problem he should point out to Max first. He was sitting there with his mouth all twisted up and sending nonsense out into the ether.
“They’re going to send you back a question mark.”
“Really?”
“You’re not leaving a clear space between signals, no one can understand you. How long have you been sending Morse code?”
“During training in Hamburg they convinced me to use my right hand. I’m left-handed. It’s hard with my right hand.”
“Was there a test?”
The look on Max’s face turned into a sneer; there was no answer. Again the question mark came through to them: dit-dit-dah-dah-dit-dit.
“You have to relax your arm more. Look, this is how you do it.” Josef pulled the key closer and demonstrated.
“I can’t learn it that quickly.”
“Then use the microphone.”
“They only want Morse code. Can’t you take over for today?”
“Encryption is prohibited. If somebody recognizes my handwriting, I’ll be in for it.”
Max pulled out two ten-dollar bills. Josef rubbed his neck, then he nodded and took the money. “For today. But I’ll have to think about whether I can keep doing it in the future.”
“You go ahead and think about it.”
Again the scornful look. Josef hesitated, then he pulled the row of numbers closer and started transmitting. After ten minutes he received a confirmation. Max sat down on the couch and lit himself a cigarette—Bremaria, from Germany—but only when Josef looked over did he offer him one. Josef took a drag. The taste filled his senses, took him back to Düsseldorf, back to the fields by the Rhine, the sight of ships, back to being young at that time, a youth without a future.
“At one o’clock they’re expecting the next transmission, this time on another frequency,” Max told him.
“Why are you sending in code?”
“Should just anybody be able to find out who our customers are and what we’re selling them?”
“And why aren’t we sending everything at once?”
“Security measures. This way they can’t track our coordinates.”
Max swirled his cold coffee. Next door Mrs. Meeropol was yelling at her kids.
“What is it we’re sending?”
“Orders, claims, customer information, new locations. Dr. Ritter has left for Chicago by now.”
“How does the encryption work?”
“You use a book. Sometime soon I’ll bring somebody with me. He’s the one who does it.” Max’s foot jittered.
“Does the company have that much business?”
“Yes.”
Max was tense in a way that seemed to carry over to Josef. He put on Ella Fitzgerald, “Goodnight, My Love,” and smoked, trying to fight off the feeling that something wasn’t right.
At one o’clock the signal was too weak. Josef went up on the roof, checked the antenna; just as he’d thought, the wire had come loose from its housing. Josef put it back in place. He looked across the roofs, the swaying clotheslines, the forgotten bedsheets blowing in the wind. He thought about Max. Tall people had it easy. By plain virtue of their height they radiated authority and superiority. But in Max’s case something seemed to have gone wrong—something about that slightly hunched back of his, like he’d rather be short than tall.
When he came back down, he could hear a howling, buzzing, and crackling coming from the apartment, as if from a large insect. Max was turning the tuning knob aimlessly.
“Turn that thing off for a second.”
Max looked up at him and, to his surprise, did as he asked.
“What’s this really about?”
“Business. We told you already.”
A cold glare, eyes moving restlessly left and right.
He hesitated. “Tell me about Germany. What did you witness there?”
“What did I witness?” Max did an imitation of someone who was meant to sound flustered and hysterical.
“You said jazzhounds are getting arrested.”
“Yeah, they’d probably arrest you too.” Max laughed, then, seeing that Josef was serious, looked at the clock. “Almost two. Back to work, Herr Klein. Or else I’ll have to take the money back.”
Josef sent everything in ten minutes and received a confirmation. Max again parked himself on the couch, scratching the panting German shepherd behind the ears.
“These days they hate Germans here,” Max complained.
“There are good reasons for that, don’t you think?”
“I was gone for two years. And now they look at you like you’re the scum of the earth.”
“So?” Josef caught sight of Max’s hands: wide, frog-like fingertips and soft white skin.
“The problem is,” Max went on, “the Germans here are doing it all wrong. I was at the rally at Madison Square Garden myself. And I saw you there.”
“I was there for our customers’ sake. Not my own.”
Max rubbed his chin. “I’m going to let you in on something. Fritz Kuhn isn’t authorized.”
“What do I care?”
“The party distanced itself from Kuhn years ago. That meant no more parades and rallies in America, no swastikas, no Kuhn. But Kuhn is still at it. He actually thinks Hitler is going to name him top Nazi in charge of all of America someday.”
“What about the photo that shows Kuhn and Hitler together?” he asked in spite of himself.
“The photo is from the Olympics in Berlin. That day Hitler was taking photos with anybody who asked.”
Josef looked at him, thinking. They shared a sense of outrage about Kuhn, but for completely different reasons. Josef waited till Max had lit his next cigarette and taken a drag.
“Why did you go back to Germany two years ago?”
“Oh, I’d seen the ads. The Reich pays for your passage. Very enticing.”
Josef had seen the ads too. Everyone saw them. Including Mrs. Dollings. Somehow he didn’t feel like it was him the ads were trying to reach.
“So why are you back, then?”
“I’ll tell you some other time.”
That night he took the dog for a walk in the darkness on 125th Street. The rain had stopped, but the power had gone out. A woman was holding on to a streetlamp. She bent over and spit blood.
He walked past the auto repair shops, the scrap heap, and the collection facilities for bottles and paper. A cold wind blew in from the river. A man stood motionless, looking at the dark sky and talking to himself. Josef was seeing people like
him, disturbed people, more and more often. They seemed like a foretaste or an aftereffect of the street orators, who had taken the idea of talking quietly to oneself a step further, gathering other people around them and shouting the words “world domination” and “injustice” into their faces.
Max had told him that he spent the worst years of the Depression as a window washer. He came in the twenties, with the last big wave of immigrants, and he only ever found bad jobs. Delivery driver, elevator boy, dishwasher. And even these jobs he ended up losing.
Window washer was a job you could always get—nobody wanted it. They would let him out the window twenty floors up with some ropes around him, while the office workers at their desks tried hard not to notice him. He’d dip the window brush in soapy water and wipe it across the glass, and the whole time he felt like he was fighting for his life. A dollar a day. They were the same windows, on Wall Street, that the stockbrokers had jumped out of. He, on the other hand, had survived the big crisis. “If you don’t have much, you can’t lose much either.”
It was the only moment that fit the slumped shoulders, and Josef had felt sorry for him. It was a better feeling than the uneasiness Max made him feel every time he said something about Germany and looked at Josef with that cold gaze of his.
14
New York, March 1939
AS PROMISED, THE NEXT TIME HE CAME, MAX BROUGHT someone with him. The man slunk past him with his eyes lowered, mumbled, “Ludwig,” and vanished into a corner.
Poorly shaven, a bright bald spot, wrinkled suit, somewhere around fifty. He seemed determined to act as if he wasn’t there at all, but in so doing he drew even more attention to himself. Josef asked if he wouldn’t rather come sit with them; the man said no. Josef brought him a chair. The man took a seat, brought out a book wrapped in brown paper, and ran his left index finger down the lines, taking notes with his right hand. This was the guy who did the encryption? When Josef got closer, Ludwig quickly slammed the book shut and smiled. He had the glassy-eyed look of a drunk.
“Where’d you dig him up?” asked Josef as Max followed him into the kitchen.
“Ritter has total confidence in him. Go ahead and ask him yourself.”
Ludwig spoke very little, and when he did it was so garbled that Josef soon got tired of having to ask him to repeat himself. After several attempts he was reasonably sure that Ludwig had worked as a bookseller at the Germania bookstore in Yorkville, had lived in America for a few years, and was now glad to have a new job. What had he done when he lived in Germany? Ludwig mumbled something that sounded like “a little of this, a little of that.” Leaning back in his chair, Ludwig sometimes closed his eyes. It wasn’t clear if this was from sleepiness or concentration. And it was just as easy to imagine that he didn’t shut his eyes completely but rather was secretly looking around the room.
Again Josef needed only ten minutes to transmit the columns of numbers. Again he had no idea what he was sending.
When it was time for a break he put on Billie Holiday.
“More jungle music today, huh?” sneered Max and threw two ten-dollar bills onto the table. Josef put the bills in his pocket. The next scheduled transmission was in half an hour. The men had made themselves comfortable on the couch, petting Princess and blowing smoke into the air.
“You got anything to eat? We’ll pay extra.”
“Why don’t we go out?”
Ludwig and Max exchanged glances.
“How about you go pick something up for us?”
“What am I, your nanny?”
“We don’t have enough time. Here, two dollars, now go and pick something up for us. Please, please, dear Josef.”
He walked with the sun in his eyes and saw only silhouettes. There were strangers in his apartment. He walked quickly to Idrie’s and bought four slices of bean pie, then two bagels at the grocery store.
When he was back, he first looked around the room suspiciously, then he threw the bags onto the table. Max took out a bean pie.
“What’s this?”
“It’s Italian,” Josef said.
“They really know what they’re doing, those Italians,” Max said, chewing, and Josef fought back a smile.
Ludwig pulled apart the rubberlike bagel. “And this here? This Italian too?”
Josef nodded.
“That’s a bagel, you idiot,” said Max. “Josef here is putting us on.”
At night, when he was alone again, he thought of Lauren. Ten days had passed since they’d met, and he hadn’t heard anything from her. He wasn’t sure what Lauren was looking for, whether it was just a friend in the global ham radio community or a man. And he didn’t know which he wanted either. Unlike most women, she didn’t seem to have her mind set on anything in particular, or to be inspecting him for positive and negative qualities. This inspection was usually driven by the suspicion that there had to be something wrong with him if he was still unmarried.
Nevertheless there seemed to be something about him that women liked. Arthur called it the James Cagney factor: that crooked grin of his, sloping down toward the right side of his face, a movie-star bad-guy grin. The fact that on top of the dangerous smile he was also short—some women found it downright irresistible.
He mostly hung out by the bar, half standing, half sitting. That way he was always free to make a quick exit. There was a kind of woman who acted like she was just trying to order something but was glad to be pulled into a conversation. He would buy her a drink; the barstool made him look as tall as any other guy. Then he would pay her compliments, one after another, like dropping coins into a jukebox so the music wouldn’t stop.
He hadn’t paid Lauren a single compliment. He wouldn’t even have been able to come up with one. She wasn’t pretty, after all. And what it was that actually excited him—how could he put that into words? It had to do with who she was inside. You’ve got character. You’re smart.
A man couldn’t say something like that to a woman.
He dialed in the frequency he had spoken to Lauren on. He did it in much the same way that he sometimes looked at souvenirs he’d kept from other women: a forgotten pair of sunglasses, a pencil, a candy wrapper. He didn’t really expect to hear from her again. But he also wasn’t sure if it would be such a good thing if he did, given his unusual work situation. She hadn’t called him, though he’d given her his number. She was probably too busy finding a room and a job in New York. Then suddenly he heard her voice.
“W2!” he cried.
She’d been at home with her parents for the past two days, explaining her decision to go to New York. Her parents wouldn’t let her leave. She wasn’t exactly locked up, it wasn’t house arrest, no, but tears and yelling, her mother hysterical, her father calm and sensible as usual, but on her mother’s side. It was horrible. Her mother had called her irresponsible, inconsiderate, ungrateful, she had everything here, she could just as easily go to college in Poughkeepsie if she absolutely insisted on going to college, what in heaven’s name did she hope to find in New York, that godless city, nothing but noise and violence.
She didn’t know, was all she could ever say to her mother. She just knew that she wanted to live in New York.
Tomorrow she was hopping a bus to Manhattan. Next week she was starting a job as a night nurse at Manhattan General—just a training position at first. Definitely not an easy job, but she had to make money somehow, her own money. She talked as if they were alone, but the whole world was listening in. It was against radio etiquette to talk about personal matters, and of course she knew this and kept stammering out apologies—“Sorry, sorry”—which only made her sob even louder.
“Can we see each other?”
He was alarmed. He thought of the men turning up regularly at his apartment of late, and how unpleasant it would be to have to lie to Lauren when she asked about his work, to tell her everything was great. “I have to be out of town for a while, traveling,” he said. “I’ve got this new job.”
“Oh.”
He heard her sniffle. “How long?”
“Two months,” he was pained to answer. Emptiness. Static.
“I’ll call you in two months, Joe.” He heard voices in the background. Someone knocked on the door, then Lauren broke the connection.
He had asked Arthur for a week off. His hopes of being able to quit his job with Arthur as a way of escaping the political tumult of the print shop hadn’t really worked out. The new job was no alternative, which, really, he could have guessed. He was mad at himself. He had wanted to prove his abilities as a radio operator and had ignored everything that didn’t add up.
He found Arthur in his office, hazy with cigarette smoke, poring over magazines and flyers. It was just nine o’clock in the morning, the shop floor was still quiet. Arthur smoothed out his Chaplin mustache.
“Have a good break?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got two strange characters in my apartment who have commandeered my radio to use for a Hamburg textile company—and pressed me into service too since they can’t do anything themselves, not even get their own food, and in exchange for all of it I’m making a pile of money.”
Arthur put his cigarette out very slowly.
“Did the job come through Schmuederrich?”
He nodded.
“You know you can go to jail for this, don’t you?”
He could see through the frosted-glass door that the ceiling lamps in the shop had come on. Something tightened in his throat. He heard Arthur saying, “I’m not going to claim that my activities with the black Hitler fans aren’t without risk. But working for the Germans is extremely reckless.”
“I’m not working for the Germans,” said Josef quietly.
“Oh yes you are.”
Now it had been said aloud. He could barely breathe by this point. The oxygen seemed not to reach his lungs.
Arthur said quietly, “Whatever you do, just don’t make a big scene in front of them. If at some point they mention it themselves, act like it had been obvious from the get-go. Which if you ask me, it was. How can you be so naïve?”