The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  The digging continued. After a time he had a mental image of himself as a giant mole, tunneling to nowhere, his reverie broken only when he felt someone tapping the heel of his boot with a hammer, and he shimmied back out to a wider opening to find the short Heavy Rescue man.

  “Someone’s after you, I think,” he said.

  Above them a voice called. “Any wardens about?”

  “Down the hole,” someone else said.

  Where had Herbert gone? Claus left off scraping mud from his thighs and looked up when a shadow darkened the opening.

  “A post was hit,” the man said.

  A piano board was holding up part of his tunnel; Claus rested his hand on it. “Which one?” he said.

  “Eight,” the man said.

  Claus’s hand started to tremble, as if he were plucking at the piano strings. The Heavy Rescue man watched him without saying anything, and Claus tucked his hand under his armpit to hide it.

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “One dead.”

  Myra would be around here somewhere, overseeing the incident, but it was possible Herbert had gone back. Lawford, Williams, Rosalyn. He hoped it wasn’t any of them, and he felt peculiar trying to decide who he’d sacrifice—the kind of game he might have played as a child, though now with real consequences—and decided to continue digging as a way to occupy himself.

  “Thanks,” he said, and turned and squatted and crawled ahead. The debris was cold when he lay down, and he wished he hadn’t taken off his shirt. When it was his turn to break, the man was just making his way to the head of the tunnel again.

  “Heard the gal’s name,” he said, “if you’re interested.”

  Rosalyn. Claus felt a pang of sadness. She’d always been a lascivious flirt, eighteen with the freckled innocent face of a thirteen-year-old, enormous feet, and the mouth of a Piccadilly Commando. Early on he’d discovered she liked to pepper her buttered toast and had kidded her about it often.

  “Myra Thornton,” the man said. “Stupid, too, the way it happened. Just coming out of the post and blown across the street into an open car. Sitting there as if waiting to go.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Claus said. Madge and Myra, perhaps Winifred. Who else were these damn bombs going to get, and why hadn’t he changed their landing coordinates? It was inexcusable that he hadn’t. Bertram could go to hell.

  “Sorry,” the man said. “Thought you’d want to know.”

  Claus turned away.

  “Maybe you should quit for a while,” the man said. “Have some tea.”

  “No. Not now. Later.” He didn’t want to stop. At least while he worked there was the chance that Winifred was alive.

  The man tugged at Claus’s sleeve and pointed at the sky. “Best wait,” he said. “Here comes another. If it hits close enough, the tunnel could collapse.”

  Claus pulled his arm free and went back to digging.

  Has she had any contact with American military?

  Of course. You can’t avoid it. They’ve swarmed the city, for God’s sake.

  Yes. But anything closer?

  He’d shrugged. One that I’m aware of. A major. A medical procedure.

  You were there for it?

  No. She told me.

  Ah, and we should trust that. And by any chance would he be in intelligence?

  How should I know?

  You didn’t notice his markings?

  They don’t put intelligence badges on their uniforms, and in any case, he approached her first.

  Yes. But think. Some of your contacts met you, not the other way around. And who has she met so far? This major, the German nurse, exactly the people she’d want to meet if she were a spy.

  The German nurse? What possible use could Greta be to the Germans?

  Not her, the family she was a nanny with. The man’s RAF general staff. She’s not supposed to have any contact with them now, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t. He intervened years ago to keep her from being interned. Who knows what she knows? And Mrs. Zweig herself. You said she was bitter at England.

  Understandably.

  Agreed. The blockade was not one of our finest hours. Given that, what would prevent her from acting on that bitterness?

  I haven’t acted on my bitterness toward America. Just the contrary.

  With some prompting.

  That had surprised Claus, the first time Bertram had acknowledged any level of coercion. But his surprise had been short-lived.

  And what’s to say she didn’t leave something behind that has allowed the Germans to prompt her? Bertram had said.

  Left what behind? Her husband’s dead.

  So she’s told us. But even if he is dead, who knows what else might still have a hold over her? All it would take is some relative she’s inordinately fond of. Emotions can lead one to disaster quite easily.

  It turned dark before they were done. Wardens kept saying, “Lights,” when they heard V-1s, which was infuriating; dousing their flashlights meant they had to stop digging, and for what? A full moon and the V-1s with no pilots. Claus didn’t have the strength to argue and had said “Lights” himself on too many jobs; now he ignored them.

  Beneath two crossed beams the digging grew suddenly easier, and Claus and a beefy, bearded Heavy Rescue man crouched side by side. The beams groaned above them, sprinkling them with dust, and Claus was conscious of the man’s worry, the overpowering smell of his sweat.

  “It’s all right,” he said, to calm him. “We’ll find her soon.”

  Just then those above them doused their lights, and in the dark the groaning of the beams seemed louder, the sprinkling dust heavier.

  “We can’t stay here, chum,” the man said.

  “Please,” Claus said. “It’s just a few minutes.”

  When flashlights came on again the man said, “I’m done for,” and turned away, tripping over a piece of wood sticking up from a nearby mound. He squatted and said, “Look at that,” as he pulled it up. It had pierced an arm, like a convenient handle. He dropped the arm and it raised a small cloud of dust as flies swarmed over it. He picked it up and dropped it again.

  “Stop that,” Claus said.

  “What are you going on about then?” the man said. “She was for a goner before ever you started digging, you knew that. It’s others we’ve been looking for, and if you ask me, no one, just the groaning wood.”

  “Hold this.” Claus handed the man his flashlight and cleared away rubble. The soft give beneath his hand nearly made him sick, the brown stain of dried blood clotted with flies, the apron with its blue parrots. Until the moment her limp arm sprang free and he recognized her apron he’d hoped that she was still alive, had managed, despite all indications to the contrary, to survive. It took minutes to uncover Winifred’s chalky face, her hair a mess of plaster and wood and strips of wallpaper, and he found himself crying and saying, “I’m sorry,” over and over as he combed her hair with his fingers.

  She hadn’t even tried to get under a table. Her Morrison shelter was nearby, but she’d never used it. With her radio on, she wouldn’t even have heard the bomb. He felt a sudden urge to know what was being broadcast when it fell.

  “What time did it hit again?” he asked the beefy man.

  “Don’t know. I’ll ask.” He shouted a question back up the tunnel, and the answer echoed back down the line to them. “Eight oh-seven,” he said. After a pause he asked, “Knew her, did you?”

  Claus nodded, but he was thinking of the radio. What would have been on then? Letters probably, from Canada and the various fronts. She would have been daydreaming about Harry.

  “Maybe you’d be better off going on,” the man said. “I’ll stay with her until the doc comes.”

  She wouldn’t be officially dead until the doctor said so, but Claus was irrationally angry, convinced that the man was a body rifler. “You go,” he said. “I’ll wait until they take her to the morgue.”

  “Suit yourself.” The other man gathered up his shov
el and flashlight. “Got the living to find.” He squatted, knelt, and crawled out of the hole, some of the tunnel wall crumbling behind his retreating boots, and Claus was alone with Winifred. His breathing caught in his chest again—the end of sobbing—then slowed. Waiting for the doctor, he occupied himself by keeping the flies away from her face and trying not to breathe in her smell along with the dusty air.

  HURRYING THROUGH THE DESERTED, moonlit streets toward Kate’s apartment, he checked his watch: 4:00 A.M. No wardens would be out looking for strangers, as it was always the hardest time for them; cards abandoned, awful tea gone, stories told, little to do but sit and stare. Kate would have a story too. He wanted to know what it was.

  Her neighborhood seemed dead: deserted flats, shuttered stores, not a single noise to disturb it aside from the occasional buzz bomb flying over and the crackle of ack-ack. Piccadilly Circus had been crowded—sleepy tarts huddled near the warm underground entrance in the chilly air—but even the usual dull rumble of the city was inaudible here.

  White Horse Street with its high dark apartment buildings sent his footsteps echoing back to him. He felt unsafe, as he always did in unfamiliar surroundings. In his own sector he knew the strong doorways, where the public and private shelters were, and that someone would start looking for him within the hour should he go missing. Not true here. But more powerful still was the old, unfounded, superstitious belief in the invulnerability of home.

  A buzz bomb sounded just above him—had he not been paying attention?—and he lay down in a mucky gutter outside Shepherd Market where the storefronts were still miraculously intact. It passed over, and he stood, less certain of what he’d intended. Perhaps he should turn back. Then he dismissed the thought. He had to reassure himself, to prove Bertram wrong, and he had to tell someone about Winifred and Myra. He stood looking at Kate’s windows for a long time, but he didn’t know the police routines here. Sooner or later one would be along and he had no explanation for what he was doing.

  The front door was open, Kate’s rooms unlocked. Breathing heavily, he pushed open the door and called her name. She didn’t answer, and he stepped in, shut the door behind him, and stood listening to low voices. Did she have a visitor? Music struck up and he thought of her radio. Had she been deceiving him about her husband and her loneliness, or had she not wanted him to touch the radio, afraid of what he might discover? But no, someone else was awake in the building, playing a Victrola; too late for the radio. He called Kate’s name again, louder, in case she was sleeping.

  Like a good citizen she’d cracked her windows against blasts, and the noises of the city drifted through them. He closed the kitchen blackout curtains, nearly knocking a glass off the windowsill, which he held to his nose and sniffed. Scotch. What was it doing there, aside from collecting plaster dust each time a bomb exploded nearby? He drank it in a single gulp and gasped. It must have been Herbert’s, not the major’s; only someone with Herbert’s connections could get something so good. He had to refill the glass twice with water before his breath came easily again.

  A silver bowl was stuffed with pinecones. Then she’d been to the cemetery again, to clean the graves. Had he missed something there? He hefted a pinecone, and black dust speckled his hand, spices, cinnamon and cloves. All of them were sprinkled with it. Scents mattered to Kate. Long years of going without them, she’d told him, yet spices were expensive. Where was she getting them? Contacts at the hospital, maybe; perhaps the American major was in the picture again.

  Her radio was English, but that was meaningless. He picked it up and turned it over, tapped its sides. None of the panels seemed fake or hollow. He removed all of the screws from the bottom and lifted the case, finding wires, tubes, and everything else where they should be, but there was a chance it was a new model, something he was unfamiliar with, so he broke two tubes in their sockets and loosened some of the wiring. At the very least it would take her a bit of effort to repair.

  A bowl was on the counter, filled with brown, coarse flour, stockings stretched over the bowl to be used as a sieve. Illegal, but he’d broken dozen of petty regulations himself, he couldn’t condemn her for that. On a chair was an outrageously large hat, the style in Paris, he’d heard, but certainly not in London. A gift? Beneath it was a rail ticket to Bristol for the following weekend. Bertram had commented on her occasional weekend trips.

  It’s where she’s from. But it’s also where American convoys arrive. Rather too convenient.

  He fingered the ticket, pricked by a troubling sliver of doubt, longing for certainty. Why should she inform him of every detail of her life? They hadn’t known each other that long. Still, it was suspicious. Bertram had mentioned her trip to Hamburg from Paris in 1943. On her passport had been stamped German Army Interpreter, a pass she claimed to have received from a German she’d treated in the hospital, and necessary if she was to go to Hamburg. Bertram maintained it proved she’d gone to receive instructions from the Germans. Claus had told him what she’d found there, all that Marie had endured.

  And does any of that prove her innocence? Or just that she’s a precise observer?

  Claus unwound a long cantaloupe-colored scarf from the hat brim and filled a bowl with water and dunked the scarf, looking for bleeding ink, but nothing came of it, nor of a box of rolled-up toothpaste tubes on her bureau, where she might have stored small tools. A good girl then, doing as she was bid, saving metal. But not with the stockings. She was like everyone, obeying as many rules as possible, breaking the ones that seemed absurd. Like he did.

  He took up one of her journals. Details of a busy surgical day in eastern Prussia—removing teeth from the legs of one man, an eyeball from the back of another; human shrapnel, she called it—then Hamburg in 1923, Kate and Horst, having almost recovered from the blockade, eating dinner in a café and ordering everything at once, including dessert, just so they’d know what they would be charged; otherwise, the prices might go up between the time they sat down and the time they paid.

  Beyond that, Claus wasn’t sure where to begin. What could he read that would prove Kate’s innocence? Dozens of postcards fell out as he riffled the pages, Belgian beaches, Parisian landmarks, Rouen’s enormous crumbling cathedral. Bertram had mentioned two that she’d had with her when she’d first arrived.

  Not that there was much to search, he’d said, given how quickly she was supposed to have left. A single handbag stuffed with clothes, pictures, a bit of silver. And two peculiar postcards. One of them seemed to be in some kind of code, but we couldn’t understand it. He’d shown Claus pictures. You’ll see they were never sent.

  Claus had studied them, both apparently from Berlin. Of one he’d said, Those are poetic meter markings.

  That’s what she claimed. But we doubted it. There’s no poem, for one thing.

  Puzzling but not alarming; certainly nothing the Germans had ever asked him to do. Anything else suspicious?

  Only a map of England in German, which she claimed came from a 1940 newspaper that she’d held on to in ironic protest; the Germans had told them the maps were “to keep track of future developments.” She said that when the Germans hadn’t invaded, she was glad.

  And you don’t believe her?

  It’s hard to tell. Such maps were printed in newspapers, and hers is of the proper time and typeface. Many other refugees have them. Still, we kept it.

  Impossible to decipher. Like any German refugee, Kate had been brought to Glasgow and underwent a routine examination at the Royal Victorian Patriotic School, ostensibly to see if she knew anything of German troop distributions. Evidently Kate had told them about a few Germans from a certain regiment that they hadn’t known about, and other, later immigrants and the French underground confirmed the information; those troops were indeed in northern France, which could be of great importance for the invasion.

  Still, they were suspicious, so she’d been sent to Camp 020, Latchmere House, in southwest London, used to turn spies. But she’d not revealed anything, b
ecause, she’d maintained, she wasn’t a spy, and because her interrogators, unusually, had nothing to use against her—no Abwehr intercepts about her, no information that a spy was coming. They’d let her go, to Bertram’s great dissatisfaction.

  So far she’s outsmarted us, but she can’t do it indefinitely, no woman could. He was entirely dismissive of women as spies. Even Edith Cavell was responsible for her own death. She gave her address to those she’d rescued, and the fools wrote to thank her when they reached England! The Germans intercepted the letters, and that was it. No man would ever be so sentimental as to give away his address.

  It was peculiar that he and Kate had also discussed Cavell, but Claus didn’t mention this. Defiantly, he’d said, It’s possible that Mrs. Zweig isn’t a spy.

  Possible, but unlikely. And I have to know.

  Bertram had gone on to reveal that they’d told Kate her Paris apartment had been searched by the Gestapo after she’d left—a routine event—and that her response had been what one would expect. Concern for the person, not the belongings. He’d consulted his notes again. She asked about her concierge, a woman named Madame Dufair.

  In other words, if she’s an actor, she’s the best yet? Claus had said.

  Yes. Which is why I don’t trust her. Sooner or later, they were bound to find someone who was good at it. Not every German can be a fool.

  She’s not German.

  But she might be a sympathizer.

  Yes. Of course. As I was during the last war.

  Your American accusers were amateurs. We’ve been doing this a bit longer.

  In her closet, a man’s faded flannel shirt had a German label, probably a memento of her husband. And of course there was the threadbare military overcoat. He stood looking at it for a long time—the music in the other apartment switched to another song—and thought about slicing open the lining, but knew he couldn’t. She’d link its destruction to him. Who else but he would know about it? He pinched the seam of the lining between finger and thumb and ran down one lapel. A few lumps—they might contain microdots, for all he knew—but he wasn’t going to find out. Before it made him too angry, he stopped.