by Susan Isaacs
20
“This isn’t foolish!” Edward’s fist crashed down on a table. “This is insane! What’s gotten into you?”
Two days after I’d suggested going into Germany, Edward had directed Pete, his driver, to forget his instructions to take us to a meeting at the Research and Analysis unit. Drop us at my place, he directed, and wait. I slid out of the car, not even bothering to take my pad and pencil, and strolled up the walk to his house.
I knew Edward; he was going to play gracious host, offer me a drink, and then, with great subtlety, try to talk me out of the idea. But the minute he closed the door, he’d yelled, “You idiot!” That’s when I realized that the only reason he’d brought me to his peaceful Georgetown home was that he needed a place where he could scream his head off.
“If it’s all so insane, then how come Norman’s whole espionage unit’s for it?”
“Are you some kind of imbecile?” I had no idea such a low voice could be so terrifyingly loud. “What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you know by now that all he wants is another player for his game?”
I was stunned—and frightened—by his outburst. But I knew if I started quaking in front of Edward, the closest I’d get to Berlin was a map. So I banged my fist, hard, against his living room wall. “You have no damn right to shout at me like this,” I yelled back.
Besides, I’d had it with him. He’d sat in that meeting two days earlier letting Norman and his men and even John debate my going into Berlin. Well, John had said, her berlinerisch is not flawless. Not an American accent, but it’s not…quite on the mark. But close enough? one of Norman’s men had queried. And John had admitted he couldn’t be sure. Edward had sat rigid and wordless, and no one except me had noticed how spooky his silence was.
“The thing that’s really getting you is that you know I can do it,” I went on, “and you don’t want me to because of your dumb feud with Norman Weekes. And because it would be too much trouble to find a new secretary.”
“I have no patience for asinine remarks!”
“Would you please listen to me! I know the network, the codes, the whole operation. And I’m not some Tufts College professor with a crazy grudge. I’m an ordinary person. And give me three days with one of your refugees who speaks the berlinerisch dialect, and no one will ever know I’m not Frau Schmidt from around the corner.”
Edward stalked away from me, across the room toward the mantel. Suddenly he spun around, took three fast steps and was beside me. Before I even realized what was happening, I saw he had a fireplace poker in his hand. He drew it up fast, like a fencer; it was an inch from my throat. “Are you crazy?” I breathed, staring down at it.
“Come on. This is Berlin,” he said. “You can manage anything.” I turned my back on him, walked away and sat down in a big blue club chair. “Now do you understand that you can’t begin to manage something like this?”
I looked up at him. “I just managed it. You didn’t poke out my jugular with that thing.”
“For God’s sake!” he said, and hurled the poker to the floor. It bounced from the fancy old rug and clanged onto the dark wood floor. Then Edward began to pace. His hands were stuffed deep in his pockets. He wouldn’t look at me.
“I know what’s going to come next,” I said. “You’re going to take your hands out of your pockets and come over here, sit down, and try to talk me out of it. You’re going to be very understanding and patient.”
Edward pulled his hands out of his pockets and took a seat not far away, in a club chair that matched mine. “Linda,” he said understandingly, patiently. “You haven’t thought this through.”
“I have.”
“No, you haven’t. Don’t you realize that your life means nothing to a man like Norman Weekes? He’s just using you for his own purposes.”
“Let me clue you in on what I’ve learned in the last couple of years. People like Norman Weekes—people like you—always use people like me. Why else bother having lower classes? You use us to work for you, to clean up your messes, to fight your wars. You use us to listen to your secrets, so you can say: ‘What? Me a tough, unfeeling bastard? No! I’m a deep, fine, compassionate human being. If you don’t believe me, just ask my secretary.’”
He rubbed his watch chain between his thumb and index finger. “Is that what you think of me, Linda?”
“Pretty close.”
“It’s a shame you didn’t say anything. I wouldn’t have wasted your time. It would have been easier just giving you a five-dollar raise in exchange for your promise to vouch for my compassion.”
We sat there, half facing each other, not speaking. It was a terrible, long time. Finally I said, “There’s really no point in sitting around here.” I started to get up, but then Edward stopped me.
His voice, subdued, almost hypnotic, was what got to me. “There’s a beautiful simplicity in all this. What you’re looking for is precisely what Norman is offering: a suicide mission.” I sat back in the chair. “You feel your life is…is unrewarding.” Edward paused. “You’ve lost your mother. And your husband…” His voice trailed off.
“My husband has been having a flaming affair with your daughter.”
“Yes.”
“So you think I want to go into Berlin, go undercover, because I really want to kill myself, but I’m too chicken to do it, so I’ll get some pig in the Gestapo to do it for me? Why when you do it is it heroic, and when I want to do the same thing it’s suicidal?”
“You’re distraught.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” But all he did was give me one of his kindly looks, his hard eyes softening, his head tilted a little to the side: the kind of look he gave all the sad victims of the war. And the lousy part of it was, it wasn’t a phony look. His pity for me was real. “I walked in on them,” I told him. He stiffened. “No, not like that. It was when I got back from New York, from my mother’s funeral. Oh, they were in each other’s arms, but they were dressed to the nines and listening to classical music.” He reached over and tried to take my hand, but I jerked it away, into my lap. “You really must be proud of her.”
“You know I’m not.”
“I don’t know anything. All I know are the stories you decide to tell me.” He drew his watch from his pocket and stared at the case, but didn’t open it. “It’s getting late,” I said. “I really want to get out of here.”
Edward spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “Nan’s my child. I love her. That doesn’t mean I approve of what she’s doing. It doesn’t mean I understand her.” He slipped his watch back into its little pocket and looked at me. “That’s a sad admission for a father to have to make, but even so, I have an obligation—”
“You know, you’re all sensational at throwing around words like ‘obligation,’ ‘honor,’ ‘moral imperative.’ Go ahead, if it makes you happy. You can carry on about your integrity, your profound humanity, until you’re blue in the face. I just don’t want any part of it. I want out of your world.” I got up and stood in front of his chair. “Send me to Berlin.”
Edward rose. He wasn’t all that much taller than I was, so we were almost eye to eye. His voice was very calm. “Don’t throw away your life on John Berringer. He’s not worth it. He has good looks and a good mind. But that’s all he has. His character isn’t worth two cents.”
“You know what the problem is? I’ve seen you at work too often. You’re shocking me back to my senses with a brutal dose of honesty; you always have pretty good results with that technique.”
Edward broke away then and walked over to a cart that had whiskey and glasses on it. “Would you like a drink?” I shook my head, and he poured himself one. “I’ve been drinking too damn much lately. I wake up nearly every morning feeling…not right.”
I thought: What does he want—another heart-to-heart? “So don’t drink so much,” I said.
“Thank you. I’m touched by your concern.”
“You want my concern? Maybe you should drop the brutal-hones
ty business. John could wind up being your son-in-law.”
“I would hope not.”
“You ought to thank me for taking him off your hands. Well, temporarily. I don’t have what it takes for a long run, for chitchat in the drawing room. But for the short run, I’m great upstairs.”
“Don’t denigrate yourself.”
“Hey, I’m not. I’ll give you my other credentials. I’m smart. Imaginative. And you were the one who said I have guts. If you’ll just listen to me, I’ll tell you exactly how I can get into Berlin. I figured the whole thing out.”
“You’re not going. You’re not going to destroy yourself—and possibly put into jeopardy what few shreds of resistance are left.”
“I’m better than any name on that list, and you damn well know it!”
“You’re staying here.”
“Please. Don’t you understand? This is my war. I want to fight it. I belong there.”
Edward took a long drink. “You don’t belong there.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, you’re a Jew.”
I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Please. I saw your FBI report two years ago. Why do you think you were cleared so damned fast?”
“I’m not a Jew,” I said. He gave me one of those cool, neutral upper-class glances that still say, Yeah, sure. So I added, “My father was, but he never did anything Jewish in his life…whatever it is they do.”
“If you were to go into Berlin, if they were to find you out—and believe me, they inevitably would—do you know what they would do to you?”
“Yes. And they’d do it to me, anyway—Jew, half Jew, no Jew at all.”
“They’d do it worse to you.”
“Come on! You think I’m going to walk into Germany with a big yellow star on an armband?”
“If they captured you, do you think it would take them more than ten minutes to find out everything they could possibly want to know?”
Without thinking, I reached out and took his drink. It was only after the whiskey radiated through me that I realized what I’d done. “Excuse me,” I said, handing him back the glass. I took a minute to collect myself. “To answer your question, if I saw myself sitting under a naked light bulb in an interrogation cell, I wouldn’t be making this pitch. Okay? And if you’d let me tell you what I have in mind—”
“Sit down, please.” Edward motioned to the couch. We sat on opposite ends; his drink sat between us on the table. He cleared his throat. “If you read the editorials, listen to Buy Bonds speeches, it’s very fashionable these days to call Hitler’s regime hellish. ‘The hell that is Nazi Germany,’ and so forth.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Listen to me, Linda. It is hell. More than you can comprehend. It is absolute evil.” He held out the glass to me. I didn’t take it, so he did. “I’m going to tell you something only about ten people in the government know. Some…shocking news has come out of Switzerland, through Sunflower; he learned it from that disgusting little Nazi who’s treasurer of his company, Himmler’s friend.” He fell silent, as if he didn’t want to continue.
“What? What’s going on?”
“They’re killing the Jews.”
“I know they are.”
“No. You don’t know. They’ve started something new. Gas chambers. They expect to exterminate three to four million—did you hear that number?—three to four million European Jews in the next two years. More, if they can build fast enough and maintain their supply of prussic acid. Men, women, children. They want to annihilate the Jews completely.” He hesitated, and then added quietly, “Your family, Linda. Your people.”
How do you react to something like that? I sat on that sumptuous couch in that rich, civilized house in Georgetown and I was numb. Not feeling numb, but as if everything inside me had frozen. My only sensation was thousands…millions of tiny prickles of horror along my skin and scalp. “Why?”
“There is no answer.”
I thought about the two old ladies, Liesl and Hannah. “I have to go there,” I said.
“You can’t stop them.”
“But I can do something. I can help. I can be one bullet, maybe one bomb. I can make a difference.”
“You can’t. You’d be one more dead Jew.”
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
“Linda, my dear, I am going over to the telephone. I am calling Norman Weekes and telling him to scrap immediately any plans he has involving you. I am going to stop this preposterous scheme now. If you don’t have the brains or the desire to stay alive, I’ll have to see to it for you.”
I don’t know how I got through the rest of that day. Edward made his phone call, finished his drink in silence and poured another. I walked out and waited in the car, staring straight ahead, at the back of Pete’s baseball cap. Edward came out a half hour later and acted as though nothing the least unusual had happened.
At five o’clock, he went off to a meeting at the White House, saying, “I should be back by seven-thirty or eight.” Just like that. At six, I put a flawlessly typed note on his desk.
Dear Mr. Leland:
This is to inform you that I am hereby submitting my resignation from the position of your secretary; the resignation is effective as of the close of business today.
Thank you for your consideration and courtesy.
Very truly yours,
Linda V. Berringer
Then I walked out of Edward Leland’s office for good.
When I thought about it—and I now had plenty of time to think—the idea of my going underground and surfacing in Berlin seemed right.
Sure, when I thought: Hey, I want to be a spy, the actual word would make me feel all fluttery. Worse than that: agitated. I’d pace from room to room, grab a sponge and wipe around the faucets for the twenty-seventh time, open the refrigerator and check if the peaches were too soft since I’d last looked, fifteen minutes before. Spy. Inspecting the bathroom to make sure we hadn’t run out of toilet paper. I could almost hear the creepy music they play in movies when the secret agent walks down a cobblestone street and fog swirls around his feet.
But when I’d said to Edward, This is my war, I’d meant it. Okay, it was just something I’d blurted out because I was so unhappy, so frustrated, but there’s value in misery. It’s a test. When you’re so oppressed and depressed by your life, you can cave in and show the world you’re the sucker they’ve always thought you were, or you can finally come out fighting and say: Listen, you bastards, this is unfair; I won’t put up with it. I’m entitled to…And whammo! Out pops what you really want. Out pops the truth. And the truth was I wanted to fight just as much as every eighteen-year-old boy who’d up and enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor.
Why not? I was as American as apple pie. Okay, the way I talked, no one would say, Wow, you must be from Nebraska! But there’s apple pie in New York too. A little more mushed up, a little spicier, but still apple pie.
There can be more than one truth, though. I was all-American, but not all American. I’d grown up in a house with two women, where English was the language of dopiness and German the tongue of whatever intelligent thought there was. It was my mother’s “Linda, angel, what would you call this nail polish—coral or salmon?” versus Olga’s “Do you think the Dawes Plan will really help the German economy?”
Okay, there was my father too. He was almost like me in that he spoke English and German with almost equal ease, but although he was smart, the fact that he was fluent in a foreign tongue meant zero to him. He could have been speaking Pig Latin for all he cared about Germany. He could talk about the Dodgers or Herbert Hoover or his chance of getting a raise down at the sausage plant in either language, but his life was purely American.
But maybe because my parents were so busy with each other, they didn’t have a lot of time for me. So I’d listened a lot to my Grandma Olga, who’d reminisce when she was waxing the floor or stuffing cabbage leaves or cutting out a c
orn plaster. The old country was her life, and I guess in a way it became mine; I’d always been fascinated with Germany—and especially Berlin—because she made it sound like a fairy-tale place, the Enchanted Kingdom. The longer she stayed in America, the greener the German countryside became, the more graceful the boulevards of Berlin, the more glamorous and cultivated and merry its inhabitants. Maybe that’s why when Hitler rose to power, she thought of him as a disagreeable quirk of history; he was a blot on her dream of perfection, and she figured it was only a matter of time before the neatest people in the world cleaned up their blot.
But as far back as 1923, when I first heard about him and his NSDAP party, I knew he was dangerous. I was a girl raised on fairy tales—not Cowboys and Indians—and so I’d learned there was more to life than good guys and bad guys. In every enchanted kingdom, there are monsters. When I heard Hitler’s speeches, his combination of hysteria, hatred, pride and vengeance all tied up into a package with the gaudy ribbon of Germanic myth, I knew that here was one doozy of a monster.
And just as Cinderella and the fairy godmother had always struck a chord in me, I knew Hitler and his gods would strike a chord in the German people. Oh, they would snicker at his accent and maybe cringe at his rantings, but deep down they’d say, Ach! He know just what I feel!
I guess I was too true-blue American to ever really have confidence in the basic goodness of foreigners.
And so Hitler’s rise didn’t stun me. Actually, neither did Pearl Harbor. Did it surprise me? Sure. I never thought the Japanese could fool us so bad.
But although I followed the fighting in the Pacific conscientiously, it wasn’t my war. My war wasn’t the good guys against the bad guys. My war was against the monsters.
And damn it, I was finally ready to fight.
Edward left Washington the last week of August for, as usual, places unknown. I knew he’d been planning a trip, but just to make sure, I called his new secretary and made up a story about his promising to leave me a letter of recommendation before he went away. She said, Oh, dear, he must have forgotten. And I snuck in, And he won’t be back for what—two, three weeks? More like four, I’m sorry to say, was her answer. Boy, did she have a big, dangerous mouth, giving out information like that. But I knew the coast was clear.