The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  He looked at the two of them wearily.

  After they’d put on their coats and hats and were headed out the door, Ludwig turned back to look at him. He was completely plastered. “Sorry, Josef. You’re a good guy.”

  He opened Thoreau and encountered lines that made him angry, that all of a sudden seemed to him as lofty as skyscrapers:

  Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

  Because he didn’t know what else to do, he went to see Schmuederrich. He walked right past the secretary and her shout of “Stop!” with an assertiveness that he possessed only when he was furious.

  Schmuederrich got up from behind his desk.

  “Figured you’d be coming. Max called me before you got here.”

  “You could have just asked me.”

  “Be glad you’re getting paid. We could also offer you an autograph from Hitler. No joke. There’s a few true patriots here who want nothing else.”

  Josef didn’t return Schmuederrich’s smile.

  “What?” asked Schmuederrich. “What else do you want?”

  “To quit. I’m not working for Germany.”

  And then Schmuederrich said things that merged with a sudden droning in Josef’s ears, a droning as if through gauze, and later, back on 86th Street, he remembered some of them, things like Now, pull yourself together, you chump, you idiot, you pipsqueak, or else I’ll send a few guys round to see you and remind you who calls the shots around here.

  When Max and Ludwig rang the doorbell the next day at the appointed time, he just didn’t open the door. They knocked. “It’s us, Josef. Open up.” He heard them talking to each other. Princess barked.

  He left the apartment that night feeling triumphant, his mind on Thoreau. The next thing he knew, Princess’s damp breath was above him, her panting and her tongue, and there were faces all around him, lined up against the sky. Two men helped him to his feet and accompanied him up the stairs to his door.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled and tried to close the door behind him. Then one of them pushed past him into the living room and checked over his equipment, whistling appreciatively. The other came in after him, jumped up on the coffee table, and checked the ceiling lamp. The first checked the wall sockets, the other started pulling out drawers, then they both got down on their knees and checked under the rug. Finally the second man said, “From now on no more funny business.” He said it in German. The dog whimpered, and when they were gone she jumped into the chair where Ludwig always sat, working on the encryption and nurturing his buzz.

  He slept for a long time. He dreamed he had spiders on his hands, and he woke up when his hands started trying to shake the spiders off.

  He dragged himself out of bed, his body leaden. He fed the dog and cooled his chin with a wet shirt. He put some coffee on, took the milk out of the refrigerator, and could tell from the way it moved around inside the carton—more shifting than sloshing—that it had gone bad. He poured it down the drain and washed the clotted white clumps away with water from the faucet.

  His chin was mildly swollen. He felt the skin—no, it didn’t seem like anything was broken. He knew what a broken bone felt like. He knew it from having had a father who beat him enough to make it last. Every time, when it was over, his mother had said cheerily, “Now, that’ll be good for a week at least.”

  No one had ever beaten him up since then. Not for twenty-five years—a quarter century. On the street, whenever he saw a fight brewing, he immediately turned around and walked away; if someone started getting smart with him at a bar and put his fists up, he apologized at once and got out of there.

  He pushed the chest of drawers in front of the apartment door. But over the next few days he didn’t hear anything more from them.

  Had they given up on him? Could they have realized that he was the wrong man for the job? On the other hand, if they didn’t need him anymore, wouldn’t that mean he was in real danger now?

  He didn’t leave the apartment. He called the grocer’s, and the boy brought him bread, beer, sandwiches. He wrapped himself in a blanket, pulled it tight, and felt a pain coming on in the darkness of the apartment that was old, much older than what he was dealing with now. Outside, the train rattled by, voices from the street drifted past. He wrapped himself tighter in the feeling that he was falling; he had only to close his eyes and something pulled him out of this world.

  When they turned up again a week later he was almost relieved, but he made a point of acting standoffish. “So here you are again, you assholes.”

  This time Max strutted pompously around the room. He also fiddled with the lampshade and the sockets and ordered Josef to turn Duke Ellington up louder, saying that was the only reason he put up with this jungle music—if someone was listening in on them this music would drown everything out.

  Josef kept something in his mouth at all times—a cigarette, a toothpick, gum, later pork dumplings from the Chinese take-out place. He didn’t want to talk. Over in the chair, Ludwig took a drink from his flask every few minutes. He sat there and scribbled numbers onto his notepad, on his knees the open book.

  Josef went into the kitchen, put water on to boil, and peeled an orange. The acid hurt the nail of his index finger, which he bit sometimes. He ran some water over his hands in the sink, and suddenly Max was standing next to him. “They pulled Ludwig out of a Berlin prison. A pickpocket and crook. He’s stolen from me too.”

  “This keeps getting better and better.” Hands still wet, he opened the cabinet door with his pinky to grab himself a cup. “Why would America let a criminal into the country?”

  “They made him out to be a refugee. They like signing up people like him. They can do what they want with them and nobody’s going to miss them, you understand? They gave him a bit of training, how to use encryption, how to tap somebody’s phone, but once he got here he just started hitting the bottle.”

  “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

  “Duquesne was against bringing you on, by the way.”

  Now he was paying attention. “Who?”

  “Fritz Joubert Duquesne. The elegant gentleman at the Old Heidelberg. You don’t have any training as an agent and aren’t working voluntarily. But we don’t have enough people here who can work a radio. That’s why we’re taking this risk in dealing with you.”

  “Risk.”

  “Sure. Maybe you’ll get nervous and run to the FBI.”

  Josef was silent.

  “Duquesne is an old, experienced spymaster,” said Max and he took a seat at the kitchen table with a sigh. “He was working for the Germans as far back as the Great War. He’s been around.”

  “Sounds like a great boss.”

  “He’s already past sixty. He’s not as gung ho as he used to be, but he needs money. He has a demanding young mistress, and she lives on Central Park.”

  “I saw her at the Old Heidelberg.”

  “No, you saw Lily. Lily Stein. She’s one of us too. She came here from Germany not long ago. A Jew from Vienna.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We don’t either, to be honest.”

  Max pulled out a box of matches and a magnifying glass. Spoke quietly: “Rubber-lined, self-sealing fuel tanks for aircraft.”

  Josef hesitated. “That’s what we’re about to send?”

  “Fresh from the docks.” He flashed Josef a confident smile. “At least you’ll have enough money soon to move to a better neighborhood.”

  “Not at all interested.”

  “Don’t you want to make something of yourself? Or do you want to be a nobody, is that it?”

  “That’s exactly right. I want to be a nobody,” Josef replied.

  17

  New York, April 1939

  HE RECOGNIZED THE UNEMPLOYED FROM THE FACT THAT they did everything slowly, as if to prolong the few activities that made up their day.

  He was sitting in a café not far from the print shop. A glance at the clock—he was meeting Arth
ur. He picked up the little metal canister and very slowly poured milk into his coffee. He sprinkled some sugar in, stirred thoroughly, and watched the swirling liquid till it grew still. Then he paused.

  He was doing everything slowly too. Someone could look at him and think he didn’t have a job either.

  But ever since he’d taken time off from the print shop, he had plenty of days off, and almost always had afternoons off, since by then it was already nighttime in Germany. He was drinking strong Italian coffee. Everything he did, he did with a feeling of timelessness. Maybe this was what other people did on vacation. He wasn’t sure—he had never taken a vacation.

  He had so much time that he did things he felt would meet with Lauren’s approval. He went to the New York Historical Society. There he learned a lot about Harlem. About the Dutch settlers in the last century. And on a map of Manhattan he saw that the island was already completely developed by the nineteenth century. But the churches didn’t yet have other buildings towering over them like they did today.

  He had also gone to Macy’s and had his measurements taken in the men’s department. He stayed over an hour, indulged in seeking advice and being attended to like a prince. Whenever some question of detail came up, he always chose the most expensive option. In no respect should his suit be inferior to Herr Dr. Ritter’s. The suit would be ready next week.

  He paged through the New York Times and looked for news about Germany.

  Arthur took a seat across the table from him.

  “Hitler is now having his own beer brewed in Bavaria, with just one percent alcohol,” Josef read aloud to him. “And Berlin is flirting with Moscow.”

  “For purely economic reasons. The Bolsheviks are still the enemy, don’t you worry. My business is safe!”

  “Good for you,” said Josef.

  “And how’s your work going?” asked Arthur.

  “I’m afraid you were right. They don’t let a guy off the hook so easily. Plus on top of that these people have zero technical talent.”

  Arthur slowly shook his head. “Who knows, maybe that’s not entirely by accident.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. But I can tell when something’s fishy. Do you really think they don’t have any better people?”

  Josef was silent. He glanced at the faces of the people around them. No one was looking at them.

  “What is it you’re up to, anyway?”

  “Operation Sonnenstaub. Solar dust. That’s all I know.”

  “Operation Sonnenstaub.”

  “I heard it in Max’s headphones once. They usually just confirm receipt of the transmission. But once they sent back a demand from Hamburg: ‘More Sonnenstaub.’”

  Which probably meant Put a little more effort into it, boys.

  They usually stayed for three or four hours. They filled his apartment with smoke. Ella Fitzgerald sang. April came, then May. The treetops swayed outside his window, their leaves fanned out like divas.

  He didn’t know what to watch out for. All he knew was that Max was a blowhard. Big things were in the works behind the scenes, he whispered, only unfortunately he wasn’t allowed to say anything just yet. The boasting didn’t suit him. Sometimes he looked at Max’s hands with pity, the wide fingertips and light skin. At these times he felt like he understood something about him, saw him dangling outside the twentieth story of some building washing windows.

  “How did you get roped into this thing, anyway?”

  “Roped into it?” Max balked. “It’s an honor to be permitted to serve the fatherland!”

  And then Max told him the real version. In response to the German Reich’s advertising campaign intended to bring back German emigrants, he had set out for Germany in 1937. When he got off the ship, two men took him aside and suggested he go through training in Germany so he could travel back to the US as an agent. He was excited by the idea, he said, because actually he really liked it in America, it was just that he was barely able to make any money here.

  When traveling back to the US two years later, he cited disappointment with the new Germany as his reason for returning, which the American authorities were happy to hear. He had been trained on an estate in Brandenburg, all very secretive. From the outside no one could tell what was going on there. He even saw the head of military intelligence once, Canaris. It was only briefly, Max said. He had come from Berlin with General Lahousen, the head of the sabotage division. And then he stopped in mid-sentence. He couldn’t say anything more. “By the way, though, Canaris is as short as you, Josef.”

  On another occasion Max made a point of saying how much more colossal everything was in Germany, and how in comparison the German American Bund was just a parody. He made fun of Camp Siegfried on Long Island, where young German Americans imitated the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, the girls getting pregnant one after the other. His scorn was often directed at Schmuederrich, who kept up a whole string of love affairs, even though he was a fat ass and was also married to a woman named Else, who was an American by birth—but there were probably women who felt sorry for soft men like him and couldn’t bring themselves to turn him down. Still, he said, it was good for espionage. Schmuederrich had already provided valuable information he’d picked up in hotel bars that served an international clientele.

  Josef wondered if it was the same for him in his dealings with Schmuederrich. It wasn’t a love affair in his case, but he was too willing to indulge him. He thought of their meetings in the Rotesandbar, the alcohol and Schmuederrich’s way of talking to you like he’d known you forever. Schmuederrich’s body exuded something both intimate and overwhelming that you instinctively wanted to steer clear of, like the odor from inside an apartment that had drifted out onto the landing—and yet, just as instinctively, you admonished yourself to stay and put up with it.

  When he was alone again he opened the window and leaned his forehead against the wooden casing. Max had hinted at horrible things: he shouldn’t be surprised if he noticed in the coming days that he was being followed. It was for his own good, a kind of protection. They were making sure he wasn’t being followed by the wrong people.

  In his head he kept track of the other people on the street. He was on the lookout for men until it became clear to him that the people watching him could also be women. But then again, white women didn’t come to Harlem. And so he only watched for white men. Would they stop, would they actually look up at him, standing in the window, would they be waiting somewhere, would they wait in a car? Would particular men start popping up again and again, maybe even faces he knew from somewhere else? If they actually wanted to stay on his heels, they would have to keep watch outside, otherwise it wouldn’t work. He never noticed anything.

  He waited. He smoked. Then he took the dog for a walk across the glass- and tin-can-strewn field by the river, headed for the bridge abutment, which he hid himself behind for a while; he could no longer take a single normal step. He watched for movement in the area around the river—they must have given up by now. He took sudden detours. He avoided his usual routes, walked over the bridge straight into the Bronx. He stuck close to the brownstones, and once, when a Negro couple stepped out of a building and the door stayed open a crack, he slipped inside. Music playing on the radio behind every apartment door, and still his heartbeat was louder. He went all the way up to the roof, the strange building under his feet like an animal he’d bagged on a hunt.

  He had to do something. It wouldn’t take much to express his defiance, his resistance, but it was just a fly knocking against a windowpane—vain effort. He felt exhausted after these wanderings, which had no other purpose than to throw off the people following him. They mustn’t get to know his habits, mustn’t find out anything about him, mustn’t think they understood him. For the first time he felt a sense of protectiveness where his life was concerned—no one had the right to cheat their way to gaining knowledge of him. He had lived invisibly, and it should stay that way.

 
One rainy day a delivery truck drove up in front of the building. A man jumped out of the cab and helped the driver park. The rain fell down his shirt and ran off his flat cap, but the man didn’t seem to mind.

  It was Ludwig. And the man now climbing out of the delivery truck was Max.

  Max had gotten his old job back making beverage deliveries. As a cover, he told him when he got upstairs. From then on there was always a white delivery truck parked outside the building, with the words THIRST QUENCHER written on the side.

  Max drove the truck to Red Hook and chatted up the dockworkers. Who would suspect a cigarette-smoking delivery truck driver hauling lemonade and soda? Sometimes he sold them a few bottles under the table for cheap. Then they got even more talkative.

  “You could easily do it yourself and make some extra cash,” said Max. “You’ve got kind of a Heinz Rühmann look—the likable regular guy, the working stiff.”

  “Heinz Rühmann?”

  “He’s an actor. About your age. Also short. You look a bit like him.”

  Seemed as though there were a lot of people he was supposed to look like.

  But Josef had other plans. He didn’t want to take on more work under any circumstances. Instead he was thinking about how he could do less and, above all, how he could rid himself of Max and Ludwig. He missed the quiet and the vital sense of being able to disappear. To disappear and, at the same time, summon voices into his apartment, whenever he felt like it.

  He felt as if the war between the nations had broken out within reach of his couch, where he usually just dozed, thought about things, and scratched Princess behind the ears.

  They always had to limit each transmission to just a few minutes; after fifteen minutes someone could locate their signal. And even still they were in no way secure. Josef thought about it a lot, talking quietly to himself, and the dog pricked up her ears, hearing his conversations with himself.

  Now when he left the house with the dog he didn’t look at the river or the sky anymore but rather at something inside himself: his fear. Sometimes the fear made his throat tighten. Sometimes it filled his chest with what felt like liquid ice. Sometimes it sat in his stomach. He became aware of how, depending on what form it took that day, the fear could exercise total control over his thoughts.