This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © Kolbe 2015 Andreas Kollender
Translation copyright © 2017 Steve Anderson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Kolbe by Pendragon Verlag in Germany in 2015. Translated from German by Steve Anderson. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542045001
ISBN-10: 1542045002
Cover design by David Drummond
For Heidi
CONTENTS
START READING
PROLOGUE HIT ME IN THE HEART
1 THE HIDEOUT
2 “I WILL COME BACK”
3 VOYAGE TO HELL
4 MORE TO THE STORY
5 THE DILIGENT COURT JESTER
6 MARLENE AND THE SECRET FILES
7 THE FIRST TRIP
8 MARLENE AND HEADQUARTERS
9 SECRET MARLENE
10 THE PRICE OF SECRETS
11 INVASION AND ASSASSINATION
12 WEAKENING COVER
13 A SILENT SHOT IN BERN
14 ON TOWARD THE SUN
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
“You realize that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is.”
—Edward Snowden
PROLOGUE
HIT ME IN THE HEART
Berlin, 1944
“They should hold hands,” Marlene said. “That would be nice.”
She was sitting with Fritz in the kitchen, the last of the coals crackling in the oven, the yellowish glow of the lamp reflecting in the glass of the cabinet. On the table lay a stack of top-secret files from Hitler’s Foreign Office, which Fritz had smuggled home. Dull red stripes marked the cardboard covers, along with Reich eagles bearing swastikas printed in black, the various department stamps overlapping. He and Marlene would transcribe the most significant information onto thin paper, and tomorrow Fritz would take the files back to his office at the ministry and deliver them to the burn barrels as ordered.
Marlene drew up a little sketch. “Take a look,” she said.
“Like someone’s watching us from above,” Fritz said.
Marlene’s two stick figures were sitting at opposite corners of a table. One of her figures had a hint of breasts. The figures each had paper and held a pencil in their right hand so that they could interlace the fingers of their left hands as they wrote.
“Nice,” Fritz said. “Let’s do it that way.”
He moved his globe off the table and onto the sideboard, then they lifted the table and carried it into the middle of the kitchen. They pushed the chairs over just as Marlene had drawn them, sat down, reached out their left hands, and formed a tiny mountain range of fingers.
They wrote together for a while. “Keep going?” Fritz asked, and Marlene nodded. They kept writing until Fritz went to make a pot of tea, warming his hands over the steam. He let a spoonful of sugar trickle into Marlene’s cup, stirred it, and set her cup down for her. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and whispered for a kiss. Marlene turned her head, her neck muscles flexing, and Fritz saw the blue in her eyes.
She tapped on Heinrich Himmler’s signature. “Bastard,” she said. She touched the signatures of von Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, and Göring. “Let’s keep going for another half hour.”
“You’re quite fired up about getting this done, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Marlene said. “We’re going to finish them off.”
“Sometimes I still regret it—telling you what I’m doing.”
Marlene smiled, shaking her head. “My beloved spy,” she said, “and adulterer, and liquor thief.”
She stood and turned to him. As they put their arms around each other, Fritz caught sight of their silhouettes in the glass of the kitchen cabinet, Marlene’s taller than his.
“My Marlene,” he said. “You’re so beautiful.”
She kissed him with her lips all puckered. Fritz still didn’t know why she did that sometimes—kissing him like a schoolgirl who’d never kissed anyone before.
Someone banged at the front door.
An electric shock seemed to shoot through them, severing their embrace. Marlene knocked over her cup. Tea ran over the stolen secret documents and blurred a Himmler signature.
A hoarse voice roared, “Herr Kolbe! Herr Kolbe!”
The door shook from the banging. The sound of the hard raps echoed down the hallway.
“Herr Kolbe!”
Marlene placed her hand on his. He savored her grip, one final grasp. Her eyes glistened. Fritz kissed her, staggered into the bedroom, ripped his jacket off the coat hook, and pulled the revolver from a pocket. He went back, positioned himself in the middle of the kitchen, and aimed down the hall at the front door.
They’ve got us now, he thought.
Sweat ran down his armpits to his ribs. How many people had they sent? Gestapo? SS? They’d kick in the door any second and storm into his apartment with their noise and shouting.
“Fritz . . .” Marlene stood nearby but sounded far away, as if she were in the next room. God, he loved that face so much—her straight nose, that broad jaw.
“Please, Fritz.”
They banged on the door three more times. Again they called his name. Marlene unbuttoned her dark-blue blouse and pulled it open a bit. The skin of her breast shimmered in the white-wine glow of the lamp. He turned the revolver on her. His muscles weakened, the revolver weighing a ton now, dragging his arm down.
“Here,” Marlene said. She placed a hand on her heart.
“Herr Kolbe! Open up! Right this second!”
He turned to the door, holding the gun with both hands. The hall seemed to grow shorter and shorter, the door practically touching the revolver barrel.
“It was right,” he said. “What we did.”
He felt Marlene’s body behind his. She put her arms around him, turned him to face her, and pressed his hand with the gun to her breast. When she felt for the trigger, he pushed her shoulders back against the wobbly kitchen cabinet.
“You want to live,” he said. “You said you did.”
He grabbed the files off the table and unlatched the oven door. A blast of heat shot out at him, painting the floorboards red-orange. He threw the tea-soaked pages into the blaze. Flames licked at swastikas, curled the edges of the pages, and devoured it all. In his haste he’d dropped a couple of pages onto the floor and he stuffed these in, burning the side of his hand, little hairs sizzling. He kicked the door shut, the oven sucking back in the orange and the heat.
Marlene was begging him to do it. This shouldn’t happen when two people loved one another—one of them having to beg. What would these men do with her if he left her alive? What would they do to her body? Fritz aimed the revolver at Marlene’s breast and felt the trigger against his finger. Again his resolve left him.
Another bang on the door, just one.
“You don’t know anything about this, Marlene. You know nothing . . .”
He wanted to disappear. He wanted to dissolve into thin air, with Mar
lene.
“Play the good Nazi woman for them. Nothing will happen to you.”
Fritz could hear her heart, her beating red heart. The tortured look on her face brought back a torrent of memories: alleyways in Bern; his daughter, Katrin, in Africa; Hitler; maps of the Wolf’s Lair; a forest cottage; voices; smuggled secret files; his heart pounding; corpses . . . The memories spun so fast that he couldn’t think clearly.
“You need to live,” he said, and for some reason his voice sounded clear and strong. Doubt flashed in her eyes—and a sliver of hope.
“Herr Kolbe!”
Fritz turned to the door. “Marlene, send my daughter all my love. Tell Katrin what I did. Tell her what you did.”
He looked back. Marlene had bowed her head, her chestnut hair hanging in her face. His knees weakened, and he had to lean against the framed map of the world that hung on his wall. Marlene pulled open a drawer, the silverware clanking. Her jittery hands drew out two knives, the blades flashing. It was so crazy and senseless that he should be proud of her even now.
“I love you so much,” Fritz said. Then he moved toward the door, holding the revolver out in front of him. I betrayed you, you Nazi pigs! He bumped into a stack of books on the floor. The tower of pages collapsed with a dull thud. He was close to the door now and could feel the murderers’ presence out in the hallway. He stared down at the books. Someone must tell Katrin what we have done. My daughter. For God’s sake, someone has to tell her our story.
He felt Marlene’s eyes on his back.
1
THE HIDEOUT
Somewhere in Switzerland, a few years after the end of World War II
When he attempts to write down all that happened, he begins with a name. Marlene. His tongue moves around his mouth when he utters the word. Marlene. Mar-lay-nah.
It’s the same in every draft he writes. He didn’t even know her in 1939, when he returned to the hell that was Germany back then. That was years before he heard her voice for the first time. He can still remember clearly the day he heard her clear and joyful laughter as it passed through a closed door in the Berlin Foreign Office. At that point in the story, he was already facing much danger. He had wanted to keep Marlene out of all of it. He wasn’t able to.
I had only gotten her involved much later, he writes, because it had to be, it had to. She is where this story begins. Lies, swastikas, betrayal, pretending, death, and love. He is scared of the grand words—love and war, decency in barbaric times. He heard enough grand words during his time in Hitler’s Foreign Office. He still struggles with this. It was a time of war, a time of love. He’d tried to be a good person. And where had that gotten him?
He looks out at the green valley from the window set deep in one of the cabin’s wooden walls. It doesn’t matter which slope the cabin stands on or which stream snakes through the valley meadows below in a rush of silvery lead—no one needs to know any of that.
He goes into the kitchen and fills a cup with coffee from a thermos. He adds fresh milk and a spoonful of sugar, and stirs while gazing out the window at the valley downhill from here. A gravel road runs along the river and continues over a small bridge with planks that clunk as a car crosses it. He often watches that road from the kitchen window, and has done so ever since he began hiding out in this cabin. He can’t be sure they still won’t come to silence him.
The car driving up today is supposed to bring a journalist. Fritz’s friend and confidant Eugen Sacher has been speaking with the man for months and reports back to Fritz about it. This man is supposed to be reliable and has been researching what happened for some time. “You can trust him, Fritz,” Eugen told him. “He wants the same thing as you—justice. Finally.”
“There’s far more to it than that,” Fritz said.
After hesitating a moment, Eugen tried to bring up the dark patches in Fritz’s story, but Fritz, evasive as always, congratulated Eugen on his new suit and said he looked as stylish as ever.
Eugen Sacher is the only person who knows things about Fritz that Fritz would rather keep to himself. For so long he’s wondered, What must finally come out, and what do I keep to myself? Doesn’t everyone ask such questions? He’s becoming insecure, thin-skinned. Yet giving in to his fate is the last thing he’d do. When a person gives in they might as well call it quits. Whole streets in the new Berlin have been named after men and women who’d acted as he had. Yet hardly anyone knows who he is. No one does, really. He was given the codename Kappa and was more secret than secret, a mere whisper in the hallways of the White House over four thousand miles away in Washington, DC. President Roosevelt knew about him.
Fritz goes outside. A broad strip of well-trod earth encircles the cabin. He sits on the bench in front of the kitchen window, looks to the road, and lights up a cigarette. He got used to smoking during the war, yet he doesn’t smoke a lot, just enjoys it at times. Marlene smoked. He’d always loved how she held a wineglass and a cigarette between the fingers of the same hand. He’d then ask her to open one more button of her blouse, and sometimes she did—her long fingers finding that little button, her thumb tugging on it while her index finger kept it in place, until the button parted from its hole. Fritz would place a hand on her cheek and behold her. She wouldn’t always do it, though.
If he doesn’t like this newspaperman, he told Eugen, he’ll send him away at once. Did the man really swear not to reveal Fritz’s whereabouts? And is he not just some psychiatrist in disguise? His friend pulled that one before.
“No, no, he knows how to treat his sources,” Eugen replied.
“Others claimed that too,” Fritz told him.
In the distance, where the road comes in from the left and runs between two slopes, he sees something flash, catching sunlight and then discarding it. The car approaches at a steady speed, travels over the bridge, and halts at the fork where one road leads to the cabin. The driver’s door opens and someone climbs out and looks around. It could be that he’s staring up at the cabin, though it’s hard to tell. Fritz doesn’t move. He feels the wooden beams against his back. The figure bends down next to the passenger door—there’s someone else in the car. This was not agreed upon.
Fritz could simply shoulder his already packed rucksack, lock up the cabin, and disappear into the mountains, where he knew every cow path, every cave, every bolt-hole shrouded by tree roots. Whoever was coming would try shaking the door, maybe circle around the cabin, peer into windows with a hand to their eyes, then just drive off again.
The car reverses a bit, takes the turnoff, and drives on up the road. It disappears behind a green hilltop and then comes around it, heading toward the cabin. Fritz hears the engine and the pebbles crunching under the tires. The car halts at the cabin’s rotting and hardly adequate fence. A man of medium height, wearing a hat, climbs out and leans an arm on the open driver’s door.
“Fritz Kolbe? Are you Fritz Kolbe?”
“Who wants to know?”
Fritz hates rudeness, but he has to protect himself.
“Eugen Sacher told me about you. I’m Martin Wegner.” He names the newspaper he works for. A well-known paper. “I will make sure your reputation is restored, Herr Kolbe. You are a great man.”
“Sure you will. Who’s in the car with you?”
“A photographer. A woman.”
“Send her away. And she shouldn’t try taking any photos. With all due respect.”
“I guarantee she’ll only take photos if you allow it. I give you my word of honor.”
Fritz can’t see the woman through the reflections on the windshield, yet thinks he notices a head moving. Wegner bends down and talks into the car.
A woman with brown hair tied back climbs out. She’s wearing a khaki blouse, olive-green trousers, and sturdy footwear. A person he could go hiking with. Smart of her to leave the camera in the car.
“Veronika Hügel,” she says. “I’m sorry you didn’t know I was coming. Herr Sacher said he was going to keep you updated about everything. Maybe
he forgot?”
Unlike Wegner, she doesn’t stay by the car. She pushes open the slanting gate, comes right up to Fritz, and shakes his hand. Her grip is firm and she keeps her hand in his.
“That goddamn Eugen,” he swears. “Nothing against you, Frau Hügel.”
“The man is a true friend, Herr Kolbe,” Veronika Hügel says. “Also, it’s Fräulein, not Frau.”
Fritz notices that Wegner is looking at the woman’s back. His mind always records things like that. In the corridors of the Foreign Office, he used to gaze at Marlene’s tall back, draped ever so gently with the fabric of her clothing. Should he ask these young journalists inside? Should he let them cross the threshold of his story? If he does, he knows there’s no turning back. Yet he can’t bear remaining silent like this. He squints at the sun, feeling its warmth on his cheeks, and slaps at his thighs.
“You like coffee?” he asks. “Two young guests, here in my modest abode. Well, come on in. Consider yourselves welcome.”
He leads the way into the cabin, which greets them with an arid aroma that is both summery and woodsy.
“Huh,” Veronika says. “This cabin’s nearly all white on the inside. Pretty neat.”
“Whitewashed, not painted,” Fritz says. “It’s better for the wood. My apartment in Berlin that we shared was always blacked out during the war. Darkness can be nice for a love affair, but it does wear on a person.”
“So when you smuggled Nazi documents to Bern that first time,” Wegner asks, “did it surprise you to find windows in Switzerland were blacked out as well?”
“You’re well prepared, young man.”
“Always, Herr Kolbe. With clear and solid facts.”
“Ah yes, the facts. How would you like your coffee?”
“Black with sugar,” Veronika says. “Wegner takes milk and sugar.”
Fritz pours the coffee. “Factually, this is black coffee, right, Herr Wegner? Now, watch”—he lets sugar flow into the cup from a spoon—“as I add sugar to it. So what does your objective eye see now? Black coffee.”
Wegner doesn’t respond. Veronika stirs her coffee, then drags the spoon along the edge of her cup. Perhaps what he said was a little too dramatic, Fritz thinks, a little too simplistic. But, in the end, is his story not a simple one?
The Honest Spy Page 1