The Radio Operator

by Ulla Lenze

  “So Communism isn’t authoritarian?”

  She sighed, and when no answer came he said, “The danger is just as real, Lauren. There’s a Communist threat. Surely you don’t deny it, do you? The Jew Trotsky is sitting there in Mexico and planning an attack on America. Just to mention one example.”

  “He’s there in exile, Joe. His being Jewish caused big problems for him in Russia.” She emphasized every word, like she was talking to a deaf person. Then she turned and looked out the window and seemed not to want to continue the conversation. Her profile was sharply defined. He saw her pointed chin, there was something touching about it, and even though he was furious at Lauren, he would have liked to take her in his arms and press her to him. What in God’s name were they talking about anyway? They passed by a large cemetery and he had no idea where they were. He knew Brooklyn only from his trips to Coney Island. Every now and then they’d made deliveries to a politically engaged women’s group in Bushwick that called itself Women Against Communism.

  The taxi stopped. Josef could see the lights of a freighter down a side street, which meant they were on a street running parallel to the shore.

  Lauren got out. Standing in the rain, she knocked on his window. He rolled it down. “I think you’ve gotten Thoreau all wrong. Thoreau’s individualism isn’t a license to reshape the world as you see fit.”

  He watched her walk up to a two-story house with a small front yard. When the light went on inside, he told the driver to take him to the nearest subway.

  “You shouldn’t talk to women about politics,” said the driver as he paid.

  He turned up his collar and ran off. The rain beat against his face, each drop a little fist.

  23

  Neuss, July 1949

  THE LINHOF’S LENS BOARD SCREWS OFF EASILY, THE RING nut gives way, the locking nut rolls into his hand. The lens is easy to pop out as well. He runs his finger over the glass—Zeiss, good quality. The leather bellows that the lens was attached to is quite long. He moves it this way and that, testing it, then stretches it out as far as it will go; there doesn’t seem to be any anchoring. Next up before he takes apart the housing is the flashbulb. The screws clatter as they drop out, one by one—that was easy.

  It’s been a long time since he last got to work on some piece of gadgetry. On Ellis Island there were no machines or electrical devices, no tools, and no work either. Only books, board games, a few soccer balls (mostly for the younger inmates), newspapers. Every day he waited for the paper. It would be a week old, and sometimes there were pages missing. This made him suspicious, and he would use the article previews on the first page to try to reconstruct whatever it was they were hiding from him this time.

  The first time it happened was at Sandstone. Reading the newspaper and being staggered and horrified. Later it became a sign to him that he was onto something. Something that possibly no one else knew about.

  The first article that gave him pause appeared in the summer of 1942. He had been in prison for just over half a year. Eight Germans had landed on the beach at Amagansett. A German U-boat had dropped them just off the coast of Long Island; they paddled toward the shore in rubber boats in the gray of dawn. They were just able to bury their waterproof crates of explosives and timed fuses before they were seen by a shore guard. They offered him money and hurried off, then the guard contacted the police. The wet sand showed where the crates were hidden; cigarette butts of German origin were scattered everywhere. Not hard to guess who they were dealing with: German spies. On top of that, they accidentally left important documents on the train to New York. Look at that, he thought. More dopes working behind enemy lines for the German Reich.

  Their objectives: blow up industrial facilities and infrastructure like aluminum plants, bridges, and train tracks; plunge America into chaos. Operation Pastorius.

  The bellows isn’t quite as easy to dismount. Josef spends a while trying to jimmy it loose with the screwdriver from an awkward angle until finally something gives way. He finds clumps of dust on the inside and blows them away. Carl’s photos in the city park were slightly overexposed, so he checks the folds but can’t find any tears anywhere—though they might just be too tiny.

  He can hear Carl in the kitchen. Must have just gotten home. Carl is yelling at his son. Actually it’s more of a nagging, like the women on the Lower East Side, as if the voice had a life of its own and was seizing hold of Carl’s body. It made Josef feel sorry for him.

  At first he had wanted to go up to his brother and tell him to calm down, tell him everything’s fine. But at this point he just wants to belt him one.

  But at least Carl’s story has been a smooth one. Not his. His is crooked and warped.

  In prison he sometimes thought of Gandhi. For Gandhi things had moved forward, toward something, despite his being in prison, whereas in his case things moved backward, his life got smaller and smaller, contained less and less.

  He has cleaned the bellows, and now he takes a little oil to grease the joints. Then he turns the pivot plate. Screw after screw comes out, the mounts come loose.

  Normally he makes himself scarce right before Carl comes back in the early afternoon, exhausted from his delivery route. He takes his lonely walks through town, through streets with caved-in roofs and charred walls, and on his way back he prepares a few harmless topics that make for easy conversation: Did you see that Maikelowski is selling beer now?

  Not today. Taking the camera apart is too much fun. By now there’s a pile of metal spread out on the table in front of him. He looks at the handle of the cable release. There are a few cracks in the rubber coating. Carl has taken a lot of photos with the shutter release, starting with his honeymoon, and relatively few of his surroundings—no buildings, hardly any other people, always just himself, himself alone and himself with Edith, then later with the kids.

  Ever since their gnocchi lunch, Edith has stopped tidying up in his room. Carl mustn’t know this. Josef makes his bed every morning, and whatever he uses he puts away immediately. When Carl or the children are around, Edith acts friendly toward him. If they’re alone, she’s distant.

  He inspects the baseboard and focus cam. What brilliant precision workmanship! He touches the screwdriver to the casing, takes off the mount for the tripod. Screw after screw, they roll toward him. Carl stomps around the bedroom. He can hear him speaking with Edith but can’t understand a word.

  A few weeks after the first article on Pastorius, he read that a few of the agents on the beach in Amagansett had gotten drunk in a bar in Brittany the night before the U-boat was set to depart and blabbered out their whole plan. At a much later date, he read that one of the agents had gone to the FBI after their arrival and ratted out all the others. He was in the middle of reading about this when suddenly there stood Schmuederrich behind him. He was sitting upstairs in the gallery with a view of the Statue of Liberty.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Newspaper.” A sigh. Fidgeting behind him. Then Schmuederrich ripped the paper out of his hands. “Ugh, this Lahousen. A traitor! A swine! Just wants to save his own ass. Now that the war’s over anybody can claim whatever he wants!”

  Ellis Island. The windowpanes foggy and opaque. But in there the Third Reich still hadn’t fallen.

  When time started to drag, he tried to be a monk, tried to be someone who could focus all his attention and become fascinated by the smallest things—it was all God’s creation, after all: the honeycomb-shaped white floor tiles, the water pitcher on the table, the two columns in the room, the tiles on the walls, veined with tiny cracks and missing in a few places, the “Heil Hitler” that echoed through the hallways like a ghost.

  Stay on the margins till it’s all over. It could happen any day.

  When they had to leave they called out, “Till next time in Buenos Aires.”

  And now Buenos Aires seems like the only option for him too.

  “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

  “I’ll put it rig
ht back together again, Carl. I just wanted to get a look at the mechanics of it.”

  “You’ll put it back together now, immediately! For God’s sake! Do you know what that thing cost?”

  He knows. He gets right to work. Even though he would have liked to have a bit more time to check out the inner workings. But Carl stands behind him and waits, stern and silent, until eventually he says, “Right, you have to concentrate, maybe I’m in your way,” and leaves.

  Piece by piece, screw by screw. In an hour the Linhof is back in one piece. Except for one screw. It’s leftover.

  Should he hide it? No. He decides to come clean. To his amazement Carl just laughs. “That one’s yours, kid. There’s no doubt you’ve got a screw loose!”

  Four weeks later the eight agents went before a military tribunal, and then that same day to the electric chair. Except for two: the ones who had turned themselves in to the FBI and betrayed their comrades only got prison sentences. But that too Josef only read about years later. Back then it was supposed to look like Hoover and his clever men at the FBI had done it all on their own, without the help of any defecting agents.

  Another article. He’d felt a bit sick after reading this one. Three American sailors and one British sailor offered to shoot the condemned agents to spare the US government the cost of the electricity needed for the execution. But the government wasn’t about to let this opportunity get away.

  24

  New York, July 1939

  HE STOOD IN FOLEY SQUARE, AND LIKE A SHIP IN A ROUGH sea he was buffeted by the people surging past him, while the stock-still buildings seemed to accept him as one of their own. Before him stood the white, broad courthouse building with columns and stairs leading up it—a grand majestic temple. The FBI had its offices here. He tried to seem like a tourist, opened up a map, looked at the small park just north of the square, folded the map up again.

  His life too could be folded up like a piece of paper and tucked into someone’s pocket, some officer, some agent. He had decided he would come down here, but this time it was only to look, no pressure. As a result he was very calm. He took breaths, felt the sun on his nose. He would start working for Arthur again next week, would get to print things like AMERICA FOR WHITE PEOPLE again. He did, after all, need a job that the IRS considered legit—manning a radio terminal for German intelligence didn’t fit that bill.

  He turned his gaze toward the entrance. Imagined himself climbing the wide front steps, being intercepted by a doorman.

  How can I help you?

  I’d like to report something to the FBI.

  He didn’t want to think any further than that. He turned away from the building. No, he thought. Not today.

  He started walking south through flickering sunlight. Extravagant summer hats floated past, the smell of perfume and suntan lotion. He walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, feeling its heavy vibrations, while below him a sailboat plowed through the water. Arthur had spoken once of secret offices just north of Red Hook. He had mentioned names, but Josef couldn’t remember them. They could set you up with new papers. A new name and everything. He left the bridge and turned down Old Fulton Street, past rows of identical brownstones.

  He walked along the shore, gazing at the Manhattan skyline under a blue sky. When he reached wide Atlantic Avenue he realized he was hungry. At a diner he ordered roasted potatoes and herring, drank a soda and then a coffee. It was already evening, though still bright out. He kept trying to remember the address as he walked. He went through several intersections: Pacific Street, Baltic Street, Degraw Street. In a park he sat on a bench and a short while later was lying on his back, asleep. When he opened his eyes there was a policeman staring down at him; in his dream he had felt him grab hold of his arm and start shaking him. Josef walked to the park entrance. It was almost dark now.

  He made it to Red Hook, a waterfront neighborhood of squat redbrick houses that reminded him of Düsseldorf. Past the houses were piers and seedy red warehouses that opened up to the boat landings. Large, crooked cranes like dying insects. He was greeted by the smell of oil, the palpable sense of frenzied activity, of men running this way and that. They were stacking wooden crates, brief, throaty shouts and orders flying back and forth. Workers stood under the awning of a loading platform, their shoes stained with the juice of crushed red berries. One stuck a cigarette in his mouth, then a strawberry. He looked at him, and Josef promptly stumbled over a few iron rods.

  In a loud sailors’ bar he treated himself to a drink, and another soon after the first. All around him were faces reddened by salt, wind, and drink. A drunk chatter filled the air. He knew the contacts hung around here. He just wanted to have a look, he told himself. A life that wasn’t meant for him anyway and that he would soon leave behind—but after his third drink, that was his steadfast conviction: yes, he wanted a new life. The bartender had gotten into an argument with two sailors. One hand resting on his hip, the other on the beer tap, he claimed that America wouldn’t take part in the coming war, no way, not this time. Europe would have to work things out on its own. The sailors disagreed. Outside, men were shouting at each other. A line of ants crawled across the wooden bar. He paid.

  The street was now bathed in yellow light, and the smell of decay drifted in from the harbor. He stumbled over the iron bars again. He caught himself and realized now that he was drunk. The realization made him feel sorry for himself, and for the first time in days he thought of Lauren, now with tearful affection. He hadn’t heard anything from her since the movie, and he hadn’t dared contact her. At first he had tried to tell himself that it wouldn’t bother him one bit if he never heard from Lauren again. But all the time he was waiting for her call. He even, in case she wrote him—he saw her addressing a few earnest and forbearing lines to him, apologizing for her caustic remarks and at the same time politely questioning his understanding of politics—he even checked the mailbox several times a day, reaching his hand in to make sure no letters had gotten stuck. The reach had become a habit, a familiar pain. He stuck his hand into the mailbox and pulled it out empty every time, or at most with a handful of bills. Even his walk to the FBI office was a secret way of visiting Lauren: he did things that she would approve of if she knew who he really was. But instead of turning himself in, he was now going about trying to prepare his escape.

  He walked north on Columbia Street, saw offices with greasy windows, saw a sign that read JABLINSKI, ATTORNEY AT LAW. Suddenly he was convinced that this was the name that Arthur had told him. He stepped into a dark rear courtyard, walked up an iron spiral staircase to the rear building, illuminated only by the dim glow of a bare lightbulb. Behind the doors the sound of footsteps and children coughing, the smell of burnt milk pudding. The door upstairs opened very quickly, as if he was on the right track. A heavyset man, his suspenders off and hanging from his waist, seated in front of an overstuffed filing cabinet, asked what he could do for him. It was as if he were in a dream and, realizing that he was dreaming, suddenly couldn’t speak. He ran into the tough, rubberlike walls of his dream cocoon, and even though he was awake he couldn’t find his way out.

  “Can’t you talk?”

  “I was sent here,” he said very slowly, “though it could also be a mistake.”

  “You’ll have to tell me what you want!”

  Was that a sign? “I heard you help people.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” the man snapped. “That’s my job.”

  “Do you also help people out with papers?” Josef asked.

  “Get lost.” The man closed the door.

  “Where do I have to go? Tell me!” But his voice was drowned out by music coming suddenly from a radio.

  He felt completely sober now, and a horrible anxiousness took hold of him. When, after walking a few hundred feet, he saw the flickering green light of a bar, he went inside, joined the few patrons sitting at the bar, and ordered an Old Musket, which shone golden and soothing in his glass. Let it all be blotted out, the whole day and, if possible, the
days to come—but the drink had hardly any effect, as if his state of wakefulness were now permanent. The bartender read the newspaper. When Josef asked, he shared a few pages with him, and Josef looked, as he often had of late, for furnished rooms outside the city, where nobody wanted to live. ASBURY, LIGHT, SUNNY, WELL-HEATED ROOM, $5 WEEKLY, GENTLEMEN 0244. He just had to call, go out there, put down money—but what was he supposed to live off of in these backwaters? Was he supposed to tend cows like he did back when he was a boy?

  Only now did Josef notice him. He might have been there the whole time. He’d kept his hat on and pulled it low over his forehead. But Josef recognized him. It was Duquesne. No doubt about it. He had a face that had seen everything: wars, prisons, presidents, African steppe. And something else too: a stately, dignified quality. Josef tried to make eye contact; the man seemed to turn away a little. Carefully, very gingerly, Josef reached for his glass, lifted it up, and drank.

  Then he went off toward the bathroom, but took a few steps back into the room.

  “Mr. Duquesne?” he spoke to the man’s back. “I’m Josef Klein, Joe. We met at the Old Heidelberg a few months ago. Do you mind?”

  “You must be mistaken.” The man didn’t even turn around. But Josef had recognized the peculiar accent. When he came back from the bathroom, he saw that the man was already on the other side of the street. He threw a dollar on the bar, grabbed his hat, and followed him at a distance of about a hundred feet. The street was empty, his pursuit was obvious, and the thought occurred to him that it might make more sense to just run and catch up with him. But something held him back. He watched with interest as Duquesne varied his speed, one minute strolling along and staring into the windows of parked cars, the next walking with great haste. Sometimes the street was so dark that Duquesne was swallowed up completely until he resurfaced in the light of the next streetlamp. But then he vanished for good. In the doorway where he’d lost Duquesne a few bodies lay sleeping, buried under a pile of blankets, a few bare feet poking out. It was one o’clock in the morning. Too late for the subway. He would have to make it back to Manhattan on foot and then look for a taxi.