by Peter Quinn
“The Czechs won’t let him get away with his bullying and bluster.” Franz Ignatz thumped his fist into his palm. “They’ll stand up to him, just watch.”
They sat in silence. A thin, lonesome breeze fluttered the window shades. The room’s shadows seemed to protect it from the ovenlike temperatures that had the rest of the city on broil. In the kitchen, a cuckoo left his clock and called out the hour.
“My God, look at the time!” Franz Ignatz went over and switched on the radio. He moved the dial around. “Listen! CBS is carrying it live. Hitler’s speech at the Party Congress in Nuremberg.” A high-pitched voice screamed in German. There was a thunderous roar of approval. Franz Ignatz translated. “Hitler is warning the French and British not to support the Czechs. He says Germany isn’t afraid of war!”
Mathilde Ignatz dropped the stub of another cigarette in her coffee cup. “I can’t bear any more of that man’s ravings. Excuse me, gentlemen, I’m going to lie down.”
Anderson and Dunne left Franz Ignatz alone, sitting next to the radio, head bowed beneath a transatlantic uproar of Sieg Heils! In the lobby, before they stepped into the street, Anderson said, “I should like to hire you to help find Sparks.”
“No need. I’ve hired myself. But if we’re going to work together, you better tell me who you work for.”
“Myself.”
“And you’ve never met Sparks?”
“Not face to face, not yet. But I’ve watched what he represents grow and grow while decent, intelligent men fail to recognize it for what it is. I’ve witnessed terror take over an entire government. If Sparks is exposed, it will become harder for America to keep its eyes closed.”
“Tall order.”
“Then let me add a short one. Mathilde Ignatz is the most brilliant person I’ve ever encountered. Her research, which might have advanced our knowledge of the human brain several decades, was confiscated and destroyed. Her job was given to a certified quack. She’s been hounded out of her own country. People she thought were her friends have turned their backs. And now she’s been diagnosed with stomach cancer. If I can do anything that gives her hope that one day the man and movement that have taken away her home, family, country, and livelihood will be overthrown, I will do so.”
“Come by my office in the a.m.”
Dunne walked up 86th Street. The Yorkville Casino was shut tight. Not a Bundist in sight. The sidewalks were filled with people out for a drink, a stroll, a breath of air. He found himself searching their faces the same way he had when he’d first learned that his sister Maura had been discharged from the state hospital in Buffalo. She must have come back to the city, he thought. It was the only place she knew. Unable to find any paper record of her, he sometimes walked aimlessly, on the distant possibility he might encounter her. It didn’t happen, not then, not now.
He kept looking at the faces. Few took notice of his stare. Those who did ignored it. A typical mix—delivery boy, mechanic heading home, swarthy sailor with a plump blonde on his arm, Jew at his newsstand, traffic cop with the red, scoured face, woman with the shapely gams—they passed in anonymous pursuit of ordinary ambitions, sex, food, sleep, fun, the need to make a buck.
Life in the ceaseless hustle of a New York evening.
Busy. Noisy. Horny. Unequal. Unfair. Unfinished.
Life worthy of life.
9
“The world is made of iron, you can’t do anything about it, it comes rushing up at you like a steamroller, nothing to be done about it, there it comes, it rushes on . . . and nobody can escape.”
—ALFRED DÖBLIN, Berlin Alexanderplatz
ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN
“COLONEL OSTER IS INSIDE waiting for you.” Corporal Gresser stood at attention by his desk. Canaris handed him the notes he’d taken in his meeting with General Wilhelm Adam, commander of Germany’s western defenses. Canaris had transcribed in outline the facts that General Adam had laid before the Führer during his inspection tour of the so-called West Wall. He omitted Adam’s summation of the Führer’s character: I saw this man’s lack of education, his inability to face reality, his lack of knowledge of foreigners, his fanatic mentality and his mendacity.
Oster sat behind the desk, smoking.
“I see I’ve already been replaced,” Canaris said.
“It’s not you who’s about to lose his place, but him.” Oster nodded at the requisite picture of the Führer on the opposite wall. He put out his cigarette and stood.
“Stay where you are.” Canaris went over to the window. A breeze rippled across the tree tops along the canal. Below, an elderly gent with a soldier’s bearing consulted his watch and scanned the street for a tram.
“It’s on,” Oster said as he sat once more. Canaris could see that Oster was acting out of exhaustion, not impertinence. Pale and slightly rumpled, an uncommon sight, he had the look of someone who hadn’t slept in several days.
“Another strike?”
“A coup.”
Canaris said nothing. He thought for a moment he recognized the old timer waiting for the tram. But when the man removed his homberg to wipe his bald pate with a handkerchief, Canaris realized he was mistaken. The man consulted his watch once again and tapped his walking stick against the curb, impatiently.
“You’re skeptical.”
Oster’s tone was that of a schoolboy wounded by a teacher’s cutting remark. It annoyed Canaris, the way Oster looked for his approval. He kept his gaze out the window.
This morning’s summary of the foreign press contained a recent editorial from the Times of London raising the possibility that Czechoslovakia might be made more homogeneous “by the cessation of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation to which they are united by race.” If the Times was reflecting the thinking of His Majesty’s Government, which it often did, it seemed British resolve was rubbery, at best. Canaris guessed that Oster had been too preoccupied to read the summary.
“You are right to be so, I suppose, but the pieces are falling into place this time.” Oster reported that General Erwin von Witzleben, commander of the Berlin military district, had signed on. He would guarantee that the Führer’s special bodyguard, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, was neutralized, and he would order the Potsdam Division to take control of the city’s police stations, radio transmitters, and telephone installations. Halder, Beck’s successor, was also on board and would see to it that the government quarter was sealed off. Göbbels, Himmler, and Heydrich would be arrested, and the offices of the SD and Gestapo occupied.
“I believe you’ve omitted one person,” Canaris said.
“An elite force under Captain Friedrich Heinz will secure the Reichschancellery and take the Führer into protective custody.”
“Heinz is a thug.”
“He’s bitter over the murder of Ernst Röhm and the purge of the SA. He’s hungry for revenge.”
“He’ll kill his prey.”
“Perhaps.”
“And then you’ll have to kill him.”
“When it’s done, and Germany is rescued from war and the corruption of the regime exposed, the nation will be grateful.”
The papers on the desk were almost scattered by a wayward gust from outside, but Oster caught them in time. He used Canaris’s lighter as a paperweight.
“What if the rat decides it’s not the right time to fly?” Canaris asked.
“What?”
“Remember the fable you told me? The cats rebel at the last hour, when the rat tries to lead them over the cliff. Suppose there is no war. Suppose the Allies offer him what he wants. What then?”
“He will give the French and British no way out. He intends to march into Prague and nothing will stop him.”
Oster continued to catalog the details of the planned coup. Canaris was impressed by its thoroughness. The precise timetables for deployment and execution had been carefully worked out, nothing left to chance, except of course the yet-to-occur mistakes, misinterpreted instruction
s, muffed signals, missed schedules, which, along with the immeasurable, inevitable human elements of fear, stupidity, and betrayal, couldn’t be factored in. If it went badly, they would all share the same fate, no matter the degree of involvement. The lucky ones would be able to take their own lives. The rest would face interrogation, torture, and a death sufficiently gruesome and humiliating to discourage other would-be conspirators.
Down in the street, the old man stopped a policeman. He shook his walking stick in the direction from which the tram should be approaching. Canaris sensed his frustration, even surprise. How was it possible that the inviolable timetable should suddenly be violated? Such irregularities were not supposed to happen, not in Berlin. The policeman watched with the old man for a moment, then shrugged, as if to say, Nothing is for certain, not even in Berlin. He resumed his patrol.
As soon as Oster was gone, Canaris stuffed his briefcase with papers, knowing all the time that he’d never get around to reading them at home. At best, they’d help put him to sleep, distracting him from the showdown Oster had described. He felt a wild rush of fear. Taking a deep breath, he struggled to control it. Most times he succeeded. His subordinates on the U-boat he commanded in the last year of the war were impressed by his icy calm as they were almost blown apart by British depth charges. So too, during his service on the Dresden. The surface never cracked. No nervous twitches. No hint of the panic tearing at his stomach or the scream held in by the practiced compression of his lips.
Only very rarely did it ever show: That once, years before, an age ago it seemed now, in the summer after the inflation had been tamed, when the Republic seemed to have found its balance, he ran into Paula, an old girlfriend, at an official reception. He didn’t recognize her at first. She was bereft of her former mane of curls. Her hair was cut short and straight, in keeping with the new style of the Weimar Republic. The romantic idealism of the German merchant’s daughter he’d met as a cadet at the naval academy was also gone; in its place, the sardonic sophistication of a woman whose wits had been sharpened by the financial ruin her family had undergone in the post-war inflation. She had nothing left but a talent to charm and seduce. They began an affair.
On a sweltering July day, Paula talked him into a visit to Luna Park, the sprawling amusement grounds on Halensee Lake, at the edge of the Grunewald. They swam in the great pool, with its artificially produced waves and hordes of squealing, splashing children. They drove a miniature electric car around a small oval, rode in a gondola that was propelled by their own pedaling and listened to a jazz band composed entirely of American Negroes. He enjoyed himself more than he thought he would.
Just before they left, Paula saw the House of Terror. She begged him to go with her, kissed him on the lips when he said no, and promised a larger reward if he changed his mind. They had to wait in a long line that stretched beneath a billboard painted with the face of a hideous green-faced ghoul. Inside, they stumbled through crooked hallways and dark rooms, across wildly pitched floors that sent them crashing into walls. Luminescent skeletons popped out and mechanical bats swooped close to their heads. She clung to him, alternately screaming and laughing. At the final turn, they were confronted by two doors, each marked EXIT. A sonorous, disembodied voice informed them that behind one was the park, the world they left behind, lights, noise, happy crowds—behind the other, the ghoul pictured on the front of the building, face half rotted away, one eyeball hanging down on his cheek.
Choose, the voice said.
Paula squeezed his arm. Willi, go ahead!
The mild claustrophobia he sometimes felt deepened into something else. He tried to move but couldn’t.
Paula bent close. Her breath touched his cheek. Willi? There was surprise and playfulness in her voice, and a slight but unmistakable intimation of mockery: Don’t tell me my brave soldier boy is scared!
He left the office early and waited beneath the building’s portico for his driver to arrive. Though Berlin was in the last days of summer, the light was already autumnal, a suffusion of faded gold, weak and pallid as it filtered through leaves edged in red and yellow. Motes swirled amid sunbeams like tiny snowflakes. The sun dipped lower in the west, caught fire in the windows of the buildings on the east side of the canal, and filled them with an incendiary glow. Summer was retreating and winter closing in. Soon enough, reinforced by relentless battalions of gray Baltic clouds, the cold he despised would overtake the city. Into the eternal darkness, into fire and ice. Ciano was right. Latin blood still ran in his veins.
Perhaps Oster and his fellow putschists would succeed. Perhaps they’d bring the cats to their senses and drive the rats away. Or perhaps they’d fail and be disgraced and shot. Or perhaps there would be no war and no putsch. The snag in the conspirators’ plan was that it depended on what others did. On the French. On the British. On the Czechs. Fate had to be on their side. But fate seemed to be with the Führer. My destiny is out of human hands. It is written in the stars. It had yet to be revealed where that destiny would take them. The only certainty was that spring would arrive. Nature depended on no one, required no conspirators to carry out its designs. Seasons changed whatever men and nations might decide. Winter would have its turn, then April. His driver arrived. Canaris got into the car buoyed by that thought.
THE HACKETT BUILDING, NEW YORK
Dunne stopped at the furniture store around the corner from the Hackett Building and purchased a Philco Deluxe Table Radio, a floor model on sale that fit on top of the filing cabinet as though built to. He turned the dial away from the bulletins about Prime Minister Chamberlain’s imminent address to the House of Commons on the Czech situation, until he found a station content to interrupt the music only for the occasional commercial. Most of the tunes were from movies and Broadway shows.
A duet sang about what drives lovers apart, the petty particulars of a couple’s incompatibility, the small stuff that so often overwhelms the grandest of love affairs, you say ‘either’ and I say ‘eyether,’ until the unthinkable becomes the inevitable, and Let’s call the whole thing off.
The phone rang. He picked it up. Her voice at last: “Fin?”
His voice, as casual as he could make it: “Let me turn the radio down.”
‘Either’ ‘eyether,’ ‘neither’ ‘nyether.’ The radio couple no sooner repeated their argument and decision to call the whole thing off, then faced with the terrible finality, they instantly realized that if ever we part, that would break my heart.
He turned the volume to a notch above a whisper. “I guess you didn’t hear. The D.A. is reopening Wilfredo’s case.”
“The whole city’s heard. I didn’t call sooner because I was busy.”
“Back in business?”
Her silence: That hurt, Fin.
His: Like it was intended to.
“Is that what you really think?”
He thinks: The time waiting for you to call. The resentment when you don’t.
“What else am I supposed to think?” he said.
“I’ve been with Elba. I told her everything. She knows who Wilfredo and I are to her. She’s having a tough time dealing with all this at once.”
“Hard to believe that a smart girl like that never figured it out for herself.”
“Even smart people do stupid things.” She paused.
The diminished voices from the radio filled the void:
Sugar, what the problem?
Oh, for we need each other so . . .
“Elba and I want you to know, whatever you charge, no amount can repay you.”
“Try my per diem plus expenses, minus the retainer. Stick it in the mail.”
“That’s why I called, Fin. I need your help.”
“Another case of the good and the true?”
“Lina Linnet.”
“She’s got nothing to worry about. Brannigan and his crew are locked up.”
“She’s afraid his friends will do what they can to see she never testifies.”
“The
D.A. will make sure she’s safe.”
“She’s fearful he can’t.”
“Tom Dewey might not be Mr. Ball O’Fun, but he’s one person she can trust.”
“She needs to get away for a while. Her nerves are shot.”
“Send her on a trip.”
“I’ll take her on one, but I need a few days with Elba first.”
“Put her in a hotel till you’re ready. That’s the best advice I can give, Roberta.”
“She thinks they might find her there.”
“Are you asking what I think you’re asking?”
“Just for a few days. You can stay at Cassidy’s. You’re accustomed to that.”
“Seems like you already have it all arranged.”
“You promised her, remember?”
“I said I’d make sure she’d get away from here, not live in my apartment.”
“Not live, just stay a few days. That’s all, Fin. I promise.”
The song on the radio came to its conclusion:
We’d better call the calling off off
so let’s call it off, oh let’s call it off
Oh, let’s call it off, baby let’s call it off
Let’s call the whole thing off.
He told her he’d leave his apartment key with the lobby attendant and went down the hall to the men’s room, relieved himself, and washed his hands. He sang to the mug in the mirror:
“If ever we part, that would break my heart
So, I say ‘ursta’ you say ‘oyster’
Oh, let’s call the whole thing off . . .”
ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN
Canaris invited Oster to lunch. Gresser fetched it for them, and they ate in Canaris’s office. Canaris expected Oster to be crestfallen that the next day British Prime Minister Chamberlain would take his maiden plane trip to meet with Hitler at his mountain retreat, Berchtesgarten. But, though saturnine, Oster wasn’t ready to admit defeat.