Wolf's Mouth

by John Smolens

  “You said this Vogel’s in America?”

  “A lot of them are in South America, and they have good lines of communication between there and here.” Giannopoulos considered his coffee but then thought better of it. “We have learned that Vogel is in Detroit.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Remember a guard named Shepherd? I believe the prisoners at Au Train called him the Shepherd. He lives down here now. Has for years. Out of the blue he comes to us and says that he’s seen one of the officers who had been imprisoned at Au Train, one of the hard cases that was supposed to be sent back to Germany to be tried: Vogel. But Vogel never got to Germany. Somehow they lost him. These people run through your fingers like water. Nobody had seen or heard of Vogel for years, and then the Shepherd says he saw him not two weeks ago. Frank, I know you know what I’m saying here. Vogel’s been given his orders and he’ll come after you. Like I said, you’re going to need help.”

  I looked down at my empty beer glass.

  “We think he’s been given orders regarding you and another one here in Detroit.”

  “What ‘other one’?”

  “Escaped POW. An Austrian named Klaus Stemple. He now goes by the name of Carl Simmons. Lives up off Gratiot.”

  “Have you told him all about this, too?”

  Giannopoulos shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  He seemed undecided, but then said, “My new boss, they sent him out from D.C. Named Taggart. It was his position that we tell both of you. But I said, ‘Let’s just go with Frank Green first. See what happens.’”

  “Why?”

  “All I can say is Simmons is different—he’s Austrian, and I don’t think he’d be as receptive as you.” Giannopoulos leaned forward and said, “If we’re going to find Vogel, we’re going to need your help.”

  “You’re looking for bait.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And you have two kinds out in the water now, me and this Simmons: one knows, the other doesn’t.”

  “You could look at it that way. Would you rather I had told Simmons and not you?” Giannopoulos pushed the coffee aside, making the slightest face. “I know this is not what you want to hear, but there it is, Frank. You help us out and we get Vogel, then we’ll let you stay. Legit. For good.” Giannopoulos took a billfold out of the pocket of his suit coat and put two dollars on the table. “You sleep on it, Frank. Think it over.” He began to slide out of the booth.

  “If I am who you say I am, Claire and I could just disappear tonight.”

  Giannopoulos paused at the edge of the seat. “You could. But I think you’ll realize it would not be in your best interests. It was one thing back during the war to run off and become Frank and Claire Green. But now it’s not so easy. You’re older. You got something to lose. You walk away from the shop, you go empty-handed. Besides, I think you like who you are—am I right?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The shoes. The good Italian shoes. You can afford them here.” Giannopoulos slid out of the booth and stood up. “I’ll be in touch.” He walked toward the front door, a silhouette against the failing light coming though the plate-glass window.

  16.

  It was twilight when I took the trolley home. I usually read the paper or sometimes dozed during the trip, but that night I simply stared at my reflection in the window, thinking about a man named Phillip Brick. Since the end of the war there had been numerous articles in newspapers and magazines about escaped POWs in the United States. Over twenty-two hundred prisoners had escaped, and by the early fifties all but a handful had been captured. They were usually caught by the police, but there were also instances where they had been turned in by private citizens, Forest Rangers, and even Boy Scouts. One man’s mother-in-law dropped the dime on him. Some men, when things got too close, surrendered voluntarily.

  Three years earlier, in May 1953, Reinhold Pabel had become a national sensation. During the war, Pabel, a former German infantry sergeant, had escaped from a camp in Washington, Illinois. He had only fifteen dollars, a road map, and an article by J. Edgar Hoover on the government’s procedures for tracking down escaped POWs. Pabel hitchhiked to Peoria, where he took a train to Chicago. Using the name Phillip Brick, he found work—the usual thing, dishwashing, shipping clerk—but soon he managed to find work in the circulation department of the Chicago Tribune, and eventually he opened his own book store. He married an American.

  One day FBI agents walked into his shop and arrested him, a story that made the news across the nation. An interview with him appeared in Time magazine, and he wrote an account of his escape for Collier’s magazine, which was entitled “It’s Easy to Bluff Americans.” Claire and I followed all of this closely, and for months I expected that I too would soon be caught. But nothing happened. For months, the press covered Pabel’s bureaucratic odyssey, which, if possible, was more bizarre than his actual escape: legally, he was not a criminal, because he had been brought to the United States involuntarily, and as a soldier it was his duty to escape. There was no law designed to deal with a prisoner of war who escapes and remains in the country after the war has ended. The court finally issued a verdict of “voluntary departure,” which would require Pabel to return to Germany, while at the same time his name was placed on a priority reentry list, so that six months later he was allowed to return to the United States and rejoin his American wife. The Collier’s article ran photographs of several other German POWs. Somehow, fortunately, an escaped Italian POW didn’t warrant the same attention. During these months, Claire and I often discussed what we should do. I considered turning myself in, but we were in the process of establishing the business, which had taken all of our money. That would be lost. And we didn’t want to give up who we had become, so we continued to be Mr. and Mrs. Frank Green.

  It was later than usual when I got back to our third-floor apartment. Claire had set the table with our good wine glasses, and the kitchen smelled of pesto. I knew what this meant. She was past thirty now, and putting her arms around my neck, she hugged me tightly. Her face was perhaps fuller, but her features were more delicate, even fragile, than when she was nineteen. Her hair was shorter, cut at the shoulders, soft as black silk.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  She kissed me. “This is one meal I’d rather not start by myself.”

  “Do we still have time for dinner?”

  “Not sure. I think I’m still ovulating, so we may have to skip dessert.”

  “Do I have time to open the wine?”

  “Yes, but we shouldn’t let it breathe too long.”

  We ate fettuccine with pesto and took the second half of the bottle of Chianti to bed. That winter Claire had said she wanted to try once more to have a child. After her second miscarriage, the doctor had cautioned us about another pregnancy and the possible complications that might result. But once Claire had made up her mind, she refused to discuss the dangers involved. Since then we had made love according to her cycle, and each month when her period began there followed days of silent disappointment.

  “We could pretend we’re in the cabin at Henry’s Roadside Oasis,” she said as she lay down beside me.

  As I had done many times over the years, I first kissed the scar on her right thigh. After the bullet wound had healed, there was a small, puckered scar, which I had tended to avoid. I was afraid of it. I was afraid that to touch it would hurt her, but I was also afraid to touch it because of what it meant to her—it was because of me, because she ran away with me that she had become disfigured. But then one night she pressed the scar against my mouth, and my tongue came to know its every fissure and crevice.

  After a while, I got up off the bed.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I opened the window. The air was cool against my skin.

  “Come back here and talk to me.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re having second thoughts about this, because of what the
doctor said?” There was the faintest light coming from the window, and I could see the side of her face and one large, inquisitive eye. “Maybe you don’t want to have a child?” she said.

  “That’s not it,” I said. “The risk—it is a concern, yes.” I took hold of her hand. “Listen, I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay in Detroit.” She sat up, her back against the headboard. “I’m afraid my past has finally caught up with us.” I wanted to leave it at that, but I knew I couldn’t. We had been in this together for years. I told her about how I had been followed from the shop to Tony’s. She knew I often suspected that I was being followed, but as I told her about my conversation with Giannopoulos she never spoke, but only watched me in the near dark. When I explained about Vogel being in Detroit she became still, stone still. Our fear—rarely mentioned all these years, but always present—had been that the government would find me one day, that some agent would tell me they had a file on everything that had happened since I ran away from the work detail in the woods in Au Train, and I would be taken away from Claire, suddenly, without warning. But this was worse than that fear. This was not just a tidy man in a dark suit who represented the United States government; this was Vogel and what he had represented at Camp Au Train, and what he continued to represent now, more than a decade after the war had ended. It was no surprise to me that when I was finished, we sat together on our bed in silence, until she whispered, “It never ends.”

  “I want you to leave the city for a while. Couldn’t you go back up north?”

  “Me? Just me?”

  “Just you.”

  “I haven’t been up there since Momma died.”

  “But she had good friends in Sault Ste. Marie.”

  “The Zampas, yes. They’re like family.”

  “Go there. Until I sort this out.”

  “Will you?”

  “I don’t have any choice, do I?”

  I leaned over and kissed her mouth, and her arms came up around my neck.

  The next morning I called the shop right at nine, when we opened, and my assistant Leon Cune answered. I told him I’d be in late. Then Claire called Carmen and Louisa Zampa in Sault Ste. Marie; they had been her mother’s neighbors and closest friends for years. As she suspected, they were more than willing to have her come and stay with them. Then I helped her pack and we took the trolley down to the Greyhound terminal. We said little until she was about to board the bus.

  “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “I don’t either, but you look nice in that outfit.” It was her green dress with wide shoulders and broad lapels.

  “Why don’t you come with me? No one would find us up there.”

  I reached inside my suit coat and took out my billfold. I counted out two hundred dollars and gave it to her. “I’ll send more soon.”

  She looked away. “I’m not going to cry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  I held her in my arms and her shoulders trembled slightly, but when she pushed me away she was all right. She climbed the steps into the bus, and I handed up her suitcase. When the bus began to move slowly, I walked alongside. Staring down at me, Claire’s eyes were somber and frightened. And angry.

  I got to my shop a little before noon. It had been an appliance repair shop, owned and operated by George Sturges for over thirty years. I’d been working for him since early in ’49. He frequently talked about retiring to Arizona, and I told him that somehow I would buy the business from him. When I returned from Italy after my mother’s death and my sister’s wedding, I had the cash to buy Sturges out. He took his asthma to the desert and I changed the name of George’s Electrical Repairs to Made in the Shade.

  Leon Cune had worked for Sturges for years; he could fix anything and I kept him on to handle repair jobs. I sold lampshades. The showroom behind the new plate-glass window was stocked with every conceivable style, color, and size lampshade, and within weeks my walk-in business was brisk. What really took off, though, was the commercial work. The Big Three plants were turning out millions of cars a year, and Detroit was a boomtown. I took orders from restaurants, hotels, businesses that needed dozens of identical lampshades, which I sold wholesale.

  Leon was in his high swivel chair at the workbench. The shelves behind him were filled with radios, toasters, blenders, sewing machines, and televisions, each tagged and awaiting his attention. “Another year or so and I’m going to stop with the small appliances,” he said. “Do nothing but TVs. It’s like an invasion.” Leon was in his fifties, and his voice seemed to burble up out of his throat as a result of decades of smoking Pall Malls. He wore a Tigers ball cap and thick, heavy-framed glasses. His tiny hands, the backs darker than the palms, were perfectly suited to working in and around wires and coils. “Ja’ever read this book by George Orwell, 1984?” he asked as he wiggled a tube free from the back of a Zenith TV. “Thirty years from now these things are going to be everywhere.”

  I picked up his pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, and lit it with his Zippo. I had been trying to quit for several years. Claire wouldn’t allow smoking in the apartment, and I could go for several days now without giving in—but not today. “I keep smoking these, I won’t ever see 1984.”

  “We’re talking twenty-eight years from now. I’m not betting on making it myself,” Leon said. “You were really smart, Frank, you’d go into TVs instead of shades.”

  “Maybe. But pretty soon everybody’ll be selling TVs. The competition’ll kill you.”

  “Never be as much in lampshades.”

  “But there are millions of lamps in Detroit, and every one of them needs a shade.”

  Leon slid down off his stool, walked over to the parts bin, sorted through some cartons, and brought one back; he removed the new tube from the carton, put it on the workbench, and then climbed back up in his seat. Once, when a customer’s boy had come into the shop he screamed when he saw this black man who was four feet tall. Leon was unfazed, and he began talking to the kid like Donald Duck. “Mommy, Mommy,” Donald said, “Look at the cute little man. Can’t we take him home with us?” The boy began to laugh, though his mother, when she stepped into the workshop, was flustered to find her son standing eye to eye with a dwarf, a Negro dwarf. Then Leon’s voice changed to something you would hear on a radio (or now a television) commercial, a deep, suave voice that said, “That’s right, kids! You’ve got to do what Mommy tells you and drink your milk at every meal if you want to grow up big and strong.” And then in yet another voice, something that sounded desperate and squeezed, he said, “Milk! Yuk! I always hated milk! And look what happened to me! But it’s not too late for you, kiddo—go home, do what your mother tells you, and drink your milk!” The boy went into hysterics, and his mother, now apologizing desperately, tugged him back out into the showroom.

  Leon fit the new tube in place and gently pushed down until it was snug. “The thing about all these TVs is that by 1984 you not only see people in them, they can see you. All the time. It’s a government thing, of course. It’s called Big Brother.”

  “Maybe you read too much, Leon.”

  “Yeah. I ought to take in a movie more often?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “There’s some good ones out there now. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla, and It Conquered the World.”

  “This country is so full of choices.”

  “I’m kinda interested in the one called The Black Sheep,” Leon said. “About a mad scientist who kidnaps people so he can open up their brains in search of a cure for his wife’s brain tumor.”

  “Sounds like a winner.” I took one more drag on the cigarette and crushed it out in the tin ashtray. “Any calls?”

  “One.”

  I waited. Leon loved to do this. “And?”

  “Eventually, they hung up.”

  “They leave a message before hanging up?”

  He picked up the notepad next to the phone and made a production of flipping through the pages. “Nope, gue
ss not.”

  “I’m not in the mood today, Leon. What was the message?”

  “I told you, they hung up.”

  “Didn’t say anything?”

  He shook his head. “I was expecting some heavy breathing, but zilch.”

  I went across the hall to my office and sat at Sturges’s old roll-top desk, which was littered with paperwork. I dug out the phonebook and looked up a number for C. Simmons on Sarnia Avenue. When I called, there was no answer.

  I left the office and paused in the hall, where I could see out into the showroom. The light from the plate-glass window gave the shades a soft glow—pastels and burgundies and at least a dozen variations on white. “Leon, I’m going to be away from the shop for a stretch.”

  “I should start taking long lunches, too.” For years, he brought a lunch box to work.

  “I’m talking a few days, Leon. I’ll check in now and then.”

  He finished setting a screw in the chassis of the television and then turned his thick glasses on me. “If Mrs. Buzzbee comes in looking for that perfect shade to match her peek-a-boo negligee, can I run my hand up her skirt?” With Leon, every customer was named Buzzbee, and every woman’s secret desire was to be seduced by a dark-skinned dwarf.

  “Long as you don’t blow the sale, Leon.”

  I walked out into the showroom, pausing once to straighten a shade, and then went out the front door. When I heard a tapping on the glass behind me, I stopped on the sidewalk and turned around: Leo stood behind the plate-glass window. There was a sign in the shape of a television screen, which read “Expert TV Repairs.” Leon pressed his face up against the glass inside the screen, flattening his nose and lips, and then Donald Duck quacked, “Little Brother is watching you! Little Brother is watching you!”