The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  “Yes. Shouldn’t I have?”

  “Did you know he had a radio?”

  “Many of us do.”

  “Not one for broadcasting, I presume.”

  “Broadcasting?”

  “To Germany. He was shot while doing so.”

  “Shot?”

  Swales had already moved on. “Did he give you anything?”

  “No.” Her voice was barely a croak but she looked directly at him.

  “And this, is this familiar?”

  “Certainly.” It was the wax rubbing Claus had made of the gravestone on their visit to clean her family’s grave. Had they taken it from her rooms? It was horrible to think of this man pawing through her things, through Claus’s. She read the Latin aloud. “‘Est unusquisque faber ipsae suae fortunae,’” then translated it. “‘Every man is the artisan of his own fortune.’”

  “You know Latin?”

  “Claus did.”

  “Really?” Bertram studied it.

  “Did he get it wrong?” she asked.

  “No. That’s a fine translation. It’s just that he wasn’t known to understand Latin. No matter.” He rolled it up and turned to go, then abruptly faced her again and held out a scrap of paper. “Do you know what this is?”

  She did. It was torn from the dog-track betting sheet, Cursed Woman’s line. She decided swiftly that she wouldn’t tell him. He wouldn’t sully that day too.

  “No,” she said, turning it over as if checking for clues before handing it back. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he said, and lifted his hat. “You’ve been far more helpful than you can imagine.” He made to go.

  “Please,” she said, stopping him. “Will there be a funeral?”

  “No.”

  “Nor a service? But there must be.”

  “Who would come?”

  “I would. Coworkers, perhaps, from the MOI. I should think they’d want to.”

  “Not if he was a spy.”

  “I’ve told you he wasn’t.”

  Swales smiled at her, indulgently. She wanted to slap him.

  “And my things?” she said. “May I have them back?”

  “I’m afraid we must hold on to them for now.”

  Hours later she emerged from the hospital to thin clouds and crisp air. Swales and his assistant Taylor were sitting in a screened gazebo in Green Park, where Swales had guessed she’d walk. She tracked down the elderly park attendant and rented a chair, settled against its cool wooden slats and closed her eyes, breathed in the smell of the crushed grass. She might have dozed, but across the gravel path some American servicemen were playing a game of catch and their shouts echoed, their easy laughter, the smack of the ball in their leather gloves. They had patches sewn onto their shoulders, red number ones. She hadn’t seen that before; they were a new unit, though she’d heard of them. Weren’t they already in Normandy? Replacements, then; the death tolls were appalling, though still nothing compared to the last war.

  She shuddered, thinking of Swales molding that baby-faced orange boy. He was an odious man, the kind of man who traded in doubt, leaving bits of it behind like weeds because it pleased him. She wouldn’t believe a single thing he said, even if he told her the world was at war.

  He would have been the one Claus reported to, the higher-up Claus had referred to. He’d have had a hold on Claus from the start. She could imagine the story’s outlines, Claus with vague nationality at a time when borders were supposed to be impermeable, the pressure points obvious to all, but what had caused Claus to ransack her apartment? The moment Swales held out the journals to her, she suspected him. Had it been Claus? If so, why had he doubted her? And what had driven him to such fury? She was at least certain that her face had shown none of that, to Swales’s great displeasure. He’d wanted to see her doubt Claus.

  Claus. Charles. Claus within, Charles without, and behind both apparently someone else, someone secret. Peel, pith, and some inner, unknown fruit. Which was seed, which soil? Immaterial, really. The soil had worn out, the seed rotted. Though he had seemed different, calmer, sitting in that car. Hadn’t he been about to tell her something?

  The pale disk of the sun through the clouds wasn’t warming, and she sat upright and pulled her cloak more tightly around herself. A matron passed with a line of dozens of children, all about two years old, their left wrists tied together with string, as if she were a kite and they her long ragged tail. Not a school, as school was out of session, and no one family would have so many. Orphans, she decided. She’d been pregnant once and lost the baby, far along. The lingering effects of malnutrition from the blockade, the doctor had told her, confirming her suspicions. Horst must have known too but said nothing. Then regular miscarriages for several years, black years. Life gives you a message and eventually you come to accept it. Though she was able now to take joy in the presence of boisterous children, the old bruises began to ache, and she stood and walked toward the tube.

  “Should we have her followed?” Taylor said.

  “The German woman?” Bertram said.

  “Yes. She could disappear, blend in. She’s English, after all.”

  “Not thoroughly,” Bertram said.

  It had been the same with Murphy, the Irish in him made him impossible to trust. He’d understood Latin, for God’s sake. And if the tapes from the car had revealed nothing about the German woman, aside from the unpleasant surprise that she’d visited Murphy’s apartment, they’d told plenty about Murphy. Along with the broadcasts they’d been monitoring, on which he’d begun to alter the times and coordinates of V-1 strikes, they showed that he was utterly compromised. He’d been about to tell the German woman of his double role, Bertram was sure of it, which would have been disastrous. He’d already told her much that he shouldn’t have—there was the comment about the “higher-ups” for one thing—but something had changed on that outing. Murphy’s tone was different on the ride back, the doubts he’d expressed on the way out gone. At some point he was going to have to ask the Zweig woman about that. Luckily they’d stopped him in time, but she’d not have been able to work her insidious magic if Murphy hadn’t been bent from the start.

  “Facilis est descensus Averni,” he said to Taylor. “‘Easy is the descent to Hell,’ for the Murphys and the Zweigs of the world. No,” he added. “No reason to stop her. After all, where would she go?”

  “Bristol.”

  “Where her people are from? We’d find her soon enough.”

  “Before she could do any damage?”

  “The breakout from Caen is accomplished. Even if the Germans move the mechanized units now, they’ll be too late.”

  “Then we don’t have to watch her at all?”

  “Of course we do. Simply none too closely. She’ll stay here, try to find out what she can.”

  It was evident the boy wanted to go on. “Yes?” Bertram said.

  “It’s just, well.” Taylor breathed in, gathering his courage. “Won’t she be even more cautious, now that she thinks we believed Murphy a spy?”

  “That’s what we want. She’d have been vigilant, but now she’ll pass on to them our certainty, which will increase the Germans’. In their minds, we wouldn’t have killed him if he weren’t a spy. We planted a few surprises through him near the end, and those will flower in due time. Events on the Continent will unfold quickly, and they’ll be desperate. Sooner or later she’ll reveal herself. She hasn’t a transmitter, we know that. But she might have been given the name of someone who has. All we need is for her to lead us to him.”

  “I suppose it’s better that Murphy died, then.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. He may save thousands by his death, something he was no longer able to do for us alive. I suspected something like this would happen once the Germans sent Einschuffen. He was meant to provide cover for the German woman, and it indicated they wanted to bypass Murphy, that they no longer trusted him. And now that he’s gone, the German woman becomes eve
n more valuable to them, more necessary.”

  “And you don’t think we should bring her in then? She seems awfully competent.”

  “Yes. Appeared to shrink within her skin when we told her Murphy was dead. But did you notice? Pulled herself together very quickly. A cool customer. Not a surprise, really. She must have known it meant Murphy had destroyed her rooms, but she didn’t react at all. And she certainly recognized this.” He smoothed the dog-track line flat on the gazebo railing. “Did you see her eyes widen?” He ran his fingers over the numbers slowly from one end to the other, as if reading Braille. “We’ll have to hold on to it until we figure out exactly what it is.”

  Cursed Woman. How apt. Further proof that Murphy had been a fool. Not that Swales had needed it. He’d never seen a woman more in control of herself. She was almost to the subway entrance. He didn’t have to watch her, not yet. He had the journals. There might be clues in them, or in the script that Murphy had been writing. Max had given it to him. Though incomplete, it was good, Max said. Very. He seemed pained at having misled Murphy, had absolutely refused to continue the charade once Murphy had been wounded by the V-1, which Bertram hadn’t anticipated. His truculence would have to be watched. He hadn’t anticipated Murphy falling for the German woman either, though he couldn’t blame him for that. She was quite striking, and obviously very smart, as manipulative women often were; he would have to look through the script to see if she might have influenced him. Something might have slipped through that she hadn’t intended.

  Taylor was leaning forward. He seemed as eager as a hound to spring after her. Bertram rested a hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll make a mistake, they always do. Murphy did. Then she’ll be ours.” He took his pipe and pouch from a jacket pocket and began stuffing the bowl full of tobacco with his thumb.

  Near the subway entrance she passed long ornamental grasses that lay limp and bent, like seaweed after a retreating tide, like the starbursts of fireworks made palpable and frozen. The warm air rushed up past her as she entered the tube. Halfway down the stairs she stopped, contemplated doubling back to see if anyone was following her, then decided against it and continued her descent. There had been the accusation of spying at the end of the last war too. It would never end.

  On the platform she passed the pale souls waiting for a train and kept moving, past others, paler still, who’d come to live here. The smells of urine and unwashed skin. Bunk beds, chests, blankets. They had bothered Claus for some reason; she wished she’d asked why. She stood near a small three-legged dog and watched an extremely short man shave himself in a kind of mirror he’d rigged up. It wasn’t one mirror, really, but dozens, made from the shards of others fitted into a warped frame. They returned to her gaze a nearly infinite number of her own reflections.

  Swales. The war was almost over. Peace would come. Perhaps it was better that Claus hadn’t survived. If under Swales’s influence the war had made Claus into the man that could distrust her, what would the peace have done to him?

  In a way it didn’t matter. Though his death was another unbearable loss, it wasn’t just the past Swales had been holding out to her when he’d produced the journals. That gesture had trapped her like an insect in amber, had swung shut her future too, the past not only prologue but epilogue. He’d known she’d reach for the journals, but really, what would she want them for? To write in them again?

  She didn’t need to. Innocent communion with the familiar was no longer possible. What would she write that she hadn’t before? Desolation and disaster? She knew all that; she’d simply forgotten. She wouldn’t again. It scared her how easily she could slip back into that line of thinking. She needed only to scrape off a bit of rust in order to reveal the long-established life beneath.

  The train would be coming soon, and she found herself leaning down the tracks, waiting for it to clatter into the station, trying to spy out its lone headlamp far down the dark sloping tunnel as the train bawled toward her. She could almost feel her skin hardening as she waited, the carapace forming. It wasn’t there yet. It would come. She leaned forward farther still, waiting, eyes closed, expecting a warm wind to push her back. Horst, Claus. Twice men had lured her into the light and twice the light had not been strong enough to keep her. She would not be lured out again, not by hope, not by Swales, not by the rumble of the subway train whose speeding approach she felt now, about to envelop her entire trembling body.

  About the Author

  PAUL GRINER is the author of the acclaimed novel Collectors and the story collection Follow Me. He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Louisville.