by Susan Isaacs
The assassination of Alfred Eckert was almost as much a disaster for Horst as it had been for the OSS. Now there wasn’t anyone who could rally Hedwig for a night out with the Nazis and in the next few weeks, past Christmas and into the new year, 1943, I could see his pasty face getting crimson every time he came home from work, passed the parlor and saw Hedwig curled up on a chaise, squeezing a hot-water bottle against her stomach.
Not that I saw too much. I shopped in the mornings, chopped and mixed all afternoon, and cooked into the night. After that, I climbed the back stairs to my room, a cubicle not much bigger than what I’d had at Konrad Friedrichs’s. (Although at least the former owners had furnished it cheerfully: a bed with an old headboard that had a bouquet of roses painted on it, a wide strip of what—probably a hundred years before—had been a nice flowered rug, and a wood chest.)
I kept away from the Dreschers as much as possible. Once, Horst barged into the kitchen. He was giving his guest, von Ribbentrop’s personal assistant, the grand tour of the house. I was juicing a lemon and stared at Horst, and then at the guest, a man so bucktoothed it looked as if he was eating his own lip. “Carry on, cook,” Horst said, with a grand wave of his hand. The two of them inspected the stove and the icebox as if they knew what they were looking at. As they swept out, Horst called: “And don’t forget! More of those potato croquettes!”
Other than that, I managed to avoid anything more than a chance “Good evening, sir” meeting in a hallway. But I couldn’t stay away from Hedwig, because she was always around, clutching hot water bottles or ice packs, reclining in a series of robes that I bet were Alfred-designed: long, belt-less, all in shades of blue—aquamarine, sapphire, royal blue—with V necks, created to hide her formlessness and to bring out her small but decidedly blue eyes.
Her suffering room, the parlor, was right opposite Horst’s study. Even if he went out at night and I was positive Else and Dagmar were asleep, I couldn’t try to jimmy the lock when she was lying on the chaise—giving off occasional moans—with a full view of the study door.
How long, I worried, could I visit Rolf and stick messages into fishes’ mouths saying, Sorry. Can’t get into study. Wife always lying in parlor opposite. Will try again.
I got embarrassed thinking about what Norman Weekes must be saying, as he and his Harvard crew rolled their eyes in hopelessness and honked. Well, what can one expect when one recruits such a relentless plebian. But I got genuinely upset at the thought of Edward. On one hand, I knew my sneaking past him, collaborating with his adversary the minute he left the country, going against everything we both knew he believed in, would make him hate me. On the other hand, I still hoped for his admiration. For some reason, I wanted him to think—even if it was way in the back of his mind—that Linda was doing a decent job. She’d even picked up a few tricks from him, the champion spy.
So one night when Hedwig was sprawled out on the chaise in a turquoise robe and impenetrable makeup, having missed a Wagnerian opera because she wept and said she had the flu, I stood at the open parlor door and said, “Madam, it would please me if you would allow me to make you some tea with honey. It would help your throat.”
“No. I don’t like tea.” Nasty. Pouty. Unable to get her mouth to form a “thank you.” And she had an awful whine. She was really worse than a cow. I had increased admiration for Alfred, that he hadn’t lost control and plunged his pinking shears into her heart.
“Milk with honey, then?” I suggested. She hesitated. “And perhaps a biscuit?”
“I’ll try,” she sighed.
Two minutes later, I came rushing back with a tray. “Madam, if I may suggest…”
“What?”
“It might help your chest if I put a bit of brandy in the milk.” If I’d taken even an eyedropperful of his beloved schnapps, Horst would have known in a minute. But there was a dust-covered case of brandy in the basement, and my guess was he’d forgotten it was there. “Just a touch.”
“Whatever,” she murmured.
“Would you like to have it down here?” And then I tossed off what I hoped sounded like a casual suggestion. “Or up in your room?”
“Well…” she said, gazing out of the room, probably overwhelmed by the thought of the stairs.
“I could help you upstairs, Madam, and then come down and reheat the milk to the proper temperature.”
She held out her hand for me to help her, like Greta Garbo dying in Camille.
Twenty minutes later, Hedwig had enough brandy in her to make her sleep until the following afternoon. And I went down and knelt before the locked study door.
Horst guarded his key to the study as if it would open up the gates to heaven. Still, I solved the locked-door problem easily enough, even though jiggling the handle, a hairpin and a larding needle didn’t work. I figured there had to be an extra key. In any well-run house, the wife isn’t going to let the husband walk off with the only key in his pocket and not be able to let the maid get into his study to wax and dust and vacuum. I leaned against the locked door and asked myself, Where would a good housewife, where would my Grandma Olga, put the extra key?
It wasn’t in the silver chest, my first choice, and it wasn’t underneath the record player in the parlor. But finally I found it upstairs in the linen closet, under a pile of heavy damask tablecloths. Big ones, for when the table was opened to seat twenty. For their holidays. I touched the tablecloths; they were so rich. And I couldn’t help thinking how little in common that nameless family of Jews had with my family of Jews. It was like comparing apples and oranges…or me and—I almost laughed thinking about it—somebody like Edward Leland. I closed the closet door slowly, and I was easing my way down the hall—a weird, ice-skating motion they taught us in Training School, which was less apt to make a board squeak than tiptoeing—I thought about apples and oranges. Both fruit. So maybe Edward Leland and I…the tablecloth family and my family…In a world of barbarians, the light of simple human decency is so overwhelming, so blinding, that you no longer see things like old silver and Yale and fancy accents.
I stopped thinking and went down the stairs. They taught us stairs too: Sit on the top step, brace yourself with your hands and then gently, slowly, lower your backside. If someone catches you, the instructor had said, grunt with pain and hold on to your ankle and accept any offer of help. Don’t forget to limp.
Recalling it now, it all sounds easy, almost mechanical. But finding the key, getting in the study, was the easy part. That first night, I just stood beside the desk and examined the heavy cardboard envelope of papers, not daring to touch it.
I had to be careful. I didn’t know if Horst’s suspicions had been aroused by Alfred Eckert’s death. Did he know—did anyone—that Alfred was spying on him? Deep down, I was almost positive that the traitor in the resistance had found out only that Alfred was a spy—but not where he was spying—and had passed the word on. Because if the traitor had known, if the Gestapo had known, that Horst was the subject of Alfred’s snooping, that he had been bringing home top-secret papers and leaving them while he went to hear Brun-hilde hit a high note, he wouldn’t be in the foreign office, or in Berlin; he’d probably be dead or, as everybody liked to say, “East.” But I had to be certain.
I switched on the flashlight that I’d taken from the kitchen and held it over the envelope, looking for telltale hairs, dustings of powder—any of the tricks Horst might employ to make sure his papers weren’t being tampered with. Nothing.
It was lying face-down, the flap unsealed. Then I studied his briefcase. Ordinary black leather. No special locks, no small explosive devices set to blow off a busybody’s hands. It looked safe. All I had to do was put on a pair of thin cotton gloves, skim through the files and copy down anything that looked important: names, addresses, statistics or lists of any sort. Get whatever you can, Norman Weekes had told me the last time I saw him. This fellow brings home prime information at least once a week. Alfred had been given a miniature camera to photograph the do
cuments, but since I was going to be living in the house, they’d decided not to risk it.
I switched off the flashlight. Now came the part that would always be the most dangerous: getting out. What if Hedwig was a secret drinker, and after all my cleverness, the triple slug of brandy I’d poured into her milk hadn’t knocked her out but perked her up? What if she had toddled downstairs and resumed her place on the chaise? And what if Dagmar had sneaked down to grab the last cherry tart, or Else, to steal a lemon to lighten her hair?
I waited as I had been taught to wait, counting, so I would be forced to remain in place for five minutes. A slow, agonizing count to three hundred, all the while listening for a hiccup or a footstep—any sound at all. Linda Voss Berringer, secret agent.
I got that old familiar pain in my gut, sudden, stabbing, but worse than it had ever been. Still, I kept counting. When I got up to ninety-seven, the pain became so excruciating that I had to clutch my arms around myself, hold myself tight, as I doubled over.
And then it was time. Inch by inch, I forced myself to straighten up. Slowly, I opened the door. No one was there. I took a long, shaky, deep breath and thought: Two months in Berlin, and I haven’t been able to get even the tiniest, most consequential fact.
But then I thought: Look at the bright side. I wasn’t dead. And the key would always be in the linen closet.
I missed seeing Margarete. My day off was every other Sunday, and sometimes we managed to see each other for an hour or two, but we had to keep out of each other’s lives. Even if she’d been allowed to know where I was staying, she couldn’t have gone knocking at Horst’s front door, wrapped in cashmere and fur, tied up with gold jewelry, and demanded, in her elite voice, Where is my good friend Lina?
And what was I going to do? Drop in when she was visiting her cousin Countess von Dorzeck or her old pal Prince Wolfgang zu Sayn-Graetz, wave my apron over my head and holler, Hiya! I’m Margarete’s buddy. Or better yet, join her at her apartment for a midnight dinner with her lover, the gross, bloated Nazi. Just for the fun of it, to see if a member of Hitler’s inner circle could spot an American spy.
So we met at odd places: at a workmen’s café for a beer, in a bookstore not far from Alexanderplatz that was always filled with the bohemian types the Nazis hadn’t gotten to yet. In late March, when it was getting warmer, we’d go to the zoo, or the Spandau Citadel—a beautiful old fortress, complete with a tower that Rapunzel could have let down her hair from. Spandau was just far enough away from the center of Berlin that it seemed like another country. A fairy-tale country. We sat near a lake and watched people paddling around in rowboats.
Then we walked into the woods. It was so quiet. Peaceful. Safe. Still, Margarete whispered. “You know, there was terrible fighting right there during the Napoleonic Wars.” She pointed through the trees at the high brick walls of the fortress.
I grinned. “Of course I know that.”
She didn’t grin. “I worry about you all the time. You’re so naturally…lighthearted. You don’t comprehend the danger, the bestiality of these people.”
I leaned against a tree. It was covered with tight, pale green buds. “I may not know too much about what Napoleon did, but believe me, I know just how evil these people are. Why else would I be doing what I’m doing? Because I don’t like their uniforms?” Margarete put her spring coat on the ground; it looked new, a light yellow, the color of pineapple. She sat on it and motioned for me to join her. “You are really crazy,” I said. “It must cost a fortune, and you’re going to get grass stains all over it.”
“I like grass stains. Now, please, tell me how it is going with you.” She smiled; she had faint dimples. “Just generalities, as usual. No details.” She slipped off a shoe and massaged her arch. “You know, this is all so dreadful, this having to protect each other from…from knowledge. Here we are, friends, but we can’t even discuss the most boring, ordinary occurrences in our daily lives. I mean, instead of just saying ‘the colonel’ whenever I talk about the pig, I would like to be able to say his name. And I know when you tell me about what you’re doing, about where you are, you’d like to tell me…well, not their names, but what they are like and the degree of danger you are in and just…the feeling of what it’s like for you.”
“The feeling is, this great man I’m working for still hasn’t gotten over his acne and—”
“No!” She held up her hand, like a traffic policeman. “No descriptions! Don’t trust me, Lina. Don’t trust anyone.” She took my hand for a minute. “I’m really being selfish, you see. If you relax with me, I will relax with you. And that sort of comfort is a terrible menace. Don’t you see, if I, if you, if any of us gets into trouble, we can’t be in a position where we know too much, because we might be forced to reveal it.” She let go of my hand, picked up a stone and brushed the dirt off it with her thumb. “I think we all have an inflated idea about our own valor. ‘I can stand up to torture. I would never break down.’ That’s the worst kind of arrogance, because when we think that, we’re not only committing the sin of pride, we are putting our friends’ lives in peril.” She looked over at me. “Am I babbling on too much?”
“No. Of course not.”
“If there can be any benefit from Nazism for me, it has been discovering friendship. Those of us who…who oppose have learned to cherish—almost worship—our friends and colleagues. Especially someone like me. I’d led such a pampered life, and my so-called friends were just as spoiled and narrow as I was. One of the things I value about my friendship with you, Lina, is that we’re so different—and we’re so much alike. Women who play a man’s game. But you come from a part of Berlin I may have passed through, but I never really saw. Now, in the middle of all this inhumanity, you—and all the others”—she threw the rock hard and it ricocheted off a small tree—“have taught me what it really means to be a human being.”
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“I mean, you always seem so calm. But you threw that rock like it was a weapon. Who were you trying to kill?”
“Them,” she said, with more feeling than she’d ever shown. “I’m so angry because…it has become personal. Oh, yes, you know that eventually one of your friends in the movement—usually the most courageous—is going to be discovered. But when it’s a dear friend, it’s more than just an inevitable sadness. It’s more than an acceptable risk of war. It’s losing part of your life.”
“They got some of your friends?”
Margarete nodded. “Yes. And among them, my dearest friend. Oh, you should have known him. What a joyous man he was!” And I thought: Oh, God, I know exactly who you’re talking about. “His name was Alfred, and he was a couturier. Not a particularly brilliant one, just all right. His success had little to do with his gowns and a great deal to do with his being extraordinary company. Lina, he was so witty, so full of silly gossip and great compassion. And energy! He went everywhere, all over the city, and people adored him, trusted him. And he was brilliantly successful because no one suspected. No one would have believed that this homosexual who’d managed to escape the pink triangle because of his connections, this faggot who put his hair in pin curls every night and wore a hairnet, could possibly really be a traitor.”
“Do you have any idea how he was found out?”
“Yes! He loved everyone in the movement. And he trusted too many of us. ‘Oh, I’m going here tonight, with that big-mouth fool So-and-so.’ Or: ‘Our friends sent me a new camera! So tiny!’ I took him aside so many times and begged him to be discreet. I said, ‘Darling, stupid Alfred, don’t you understand they are always trying to infiltrate the movement? What if they succeed? Do you think a traitor will give you a gold swastika for Christmas?’”
Margarete’s voice cracked as she added, “He was my trusting and beloved friend.” Once again she took my hand; she held it very tight. “Listen to me. Alfred had a talent for spying—and a genius for living. But he belie
ved so much in the righteousness of his cause that he couldn’t comprehend that anything—or anyone—bad could be attached to it. And so look what happened to him. He prattled away once too often. He was given up, betrayed…by one of his own, one of his friends. Because—and this I will tell you—we know it has to have been a betrayal. So please, don’t become too comfortable. Because either one of us could die in just the blink of an eye…or very slowly and horribly. Be my friend, but don’t trust me. Don’t trust anyone.”
Don’t trust Rolf? Fine. I stayed cautious until the end of April. I’d visit the store, trek across the sawdust-covered floor and examine the fish like Field Marshal Rommel inspecting his troops. Finally I’d say: This one, and the one above it. No, wait. Give me that one instead.
Rolf would take the fish to a counter in the back, clean it, scale it, and somehow, with his one hand, take the paper I’d hidden and slip it away somewhere. I watched him once or twice; I never spotted a thing.
I wasn’t sure how much all the intelligence I was giving him was worth. Well, I did know the OSS would get somebody hopping on security when I copied down a list, sent to the German foreign office by the army high command, of all the American aircraft on a base near Weymouth in England. And I knew they would be delirious with joy when one time the Gestapo stapled a handwritten note to their report from one of their agents, code name Elefant, a high official in the British Home Office. In the note, Elefant wrote: “If you have any questions, do not call me at office. It is an intolerable and dangerous intrusion! Call me at home.” And then the dope gave his home phone number!
But most of the documents Horst brought home were obviously catalogs of British or American troop movements, page after page of statistics, directories of names and what I guessed were either triumphs of cryptographic genius or expense accounting by German agents in Great Britain. Shepherd’s pie: 3 shillings.