Covering one side of the card, he read the names again. This time he made no mistakes. He ate a piece of chocolate that he’d stolen from the Office, then brushed his teeth. He loosened the tongue and laces of his shoes so he’d be able to quickly slip into them should the air-raid sirens start howling in the night. He got his emergency bag ready for the bunker, and tossed the flash cards into the blazing oven. He lay down and stared at the ceiling. It would again be a long while before he could fall asleep.
The telephone rang. It could be von Günther, wanting to call him into the Office after receiving some important dispatch. Should he ignore the call? No—his cover as a particularly diligent and loyal servant had to be maintained.
It was Walter Braunwein. Walter gushed about all the good his diplomatic identity could still achieve. “To hell with curfew, Fritz. I was just in Paris, man. Listen, are you sitting down? I brought back Champagne. Genuine, real Champagne! I’ll be at your place in ten minutes, old buddy. Hey-ho!”
Fritz polished two glasses, cleaned up the kitchen a little, and got dressed again. He felt his way along the dark hallway, down to the building’s front door, and stepped out onto the quiet street, which smelled of grit and fires gone out. He saw a car with dimmed headlights coming up the Kurfürstendamm. Walter. He’d been on some sort of special mission again. For the Nazis, Fritz thought. My friend, my good old friend. The car stopped, and Walter climbed out waving two Champagne bottles. “Is this great or what?”
Fritz hugged him, feeling the bottles against his back.
As they climbed the steps back up, Fritz decided not to talk about the war or the Nazis. His friend was here, each day could be their last, and they had Champagne.
Walter popped the first cork at the ceiling before he’d even shed his overcoat and hat. He filled the glasses to the rim and the two of them toasted. As if reading Fritz’s thoughts, Walter started talking about their safari in South-West Africa and their time together in Cape Town. They let themselves be carried away to bygone sights and aromas, revisited the safari photo, then moved on to Madrid, where Walter had become acquainted with his lovely Käthe. Fritz said he was a little worried about her. When he’d last seen her, she’d seemed nervous and a little pale.
Walter poured, sighing. He blurted out, “Oh!” and told Fritz all about Paris, about the grand boulevards and how peaceful it was there. France wasn’t exactly Ireland, Walter said, but still. One barely noticed a war was on.
“In an occupied country?” Fritz said. “Filled with Wehrmacht soldiers?”
“Ah, come on, Fritz.”
“Could you get Käthe out of here if you wanted?”
“Käthe?” Walter leaned back, the chair creaking. “You mean my wife. Tell me, old buddy, were you ever in love with her?”
“She is all yours.”
“You introduced her to me, at the consulate in Madrid. And now here you are in Berlin, probably seeing her more than I do. But you know something? Even if you had been head-over-heels in love with Käthe, I know you never would’ve done that to me. You’re a true-blue soul—that’s what I appreciate so much about you. You’re exactly the kind of man people mean when they say they can blindly depend on someone. And men like that are extremely rare in this Germany. So, to your health.”
Walter set the empty bottle on the floor, paused a moment, and pulled something white out of the stove.
“Oh,” Fritz said. “Give it here.” He thrust out a hand for the piece of paper. It must have been from the flash cards he’d tossed into the flames.
Walter smoothed out the crumpled-up paper. “A bunch of names. Your headings are fictional names and aliases? Just the sort of neatness one expects from you. What’s this about?”
“It’s nothing. Give it here.”
Walter looked at the list, then at Fritz.
“Just forget it,” Fritz said. “Give it here.”
“Why so annoyed?”
“Walter, Jesus, let’s just have another drink.”
“Are you doing memorization exercises? Is that it?”
Fritz didn’t answer.
Walter handed him the paper, then slowly pulled the cork from the second bottle. “Don’t bullshit me, Fritz.”
His words receded into the corners of the kitchen. Luckily, in just that moment Fritz got the hiccups. By Fritz’s third spasm, Walter started grinning. Soon they’d loosened up again, two men sitting in a tiny kitchen while a war was going on, each one trying to guess what the other was thinking. They slapped at their thighs and laughed, and the war was far, far away.
Late that night, Walter said he needed to head home to Käthe. He stared at Fritz from the doorway.
“Watch out for yourself, Fritz Kolbe.”
With one hand feeling along the wall, Walter staggered down the stairs, cursing loudly when he missed a step and stumbled. “Fucking steps!” he shouted, then, “Hey-ho!”
“Be sure to tell Käthe hello,” Fritz called after him down the dark hallway.
Back in the kitchen, Fritz dropped the newspaper onto the table. On the front page was a portrait of Hitler, in profile as it appeared so often. He stabbed a fork into the picture, right in the face. The fork robbed Hitler of his eyesight.
“Take that, you pig. This man is my friend.”
6
MARLENE AND THE SECRET FILES
Fritz had not yet dared to speak to her.
Thinking back to that time, he realized that the tiny Visa Department he always hated did have one good thing going for it: it was where he had first heard her laughter.
He had been out in the corridor. The laughter, a woman’s, was coming through a closed door loud and clear. As he passed by he turned his head, hoping this unknown woman would open the door and come out before he reached his own. To him that resounding bell of a laugh represented evidence of genuine joy, in contrast to the men at the Office, whose harsh laughter carried such malice, such pomposity.
This laughter moved Fritz deeply. That a person in this world was still capable of laughing like that both appealed to him and unnerved him. It made him happy. But he couldn’t just wait around to identify the source of the laughter; too many colleagues, who knew he never stood around idly, were on their way into the Office. Later, as he prepared travel visas for art experts who were being sent to requisition Göring’s treasures in France, he considered asking Frau Hansen about the unknown woman, since that laugh had come from her office. Yet he also wanted to have as little contact as possible with other people at work.
As he was exiting his little office a few weeks later, he saw her: a tall woman in a dark-blue suit was just closing the door to Frau Hansen’s office. He was sure this was the woman he’d heard laughing. She didn’t work in the Office, or he’d have noticed her before. She wore a hat on her lush brown hair, her heels clacked against the floor, and the fabric of her suit shimmied at her hips and her shoulders. The woman had an energetic step. He followed her but realized he would need to hurry if he were to catch up. Two SS officers greeted her and watched her go by. She turned to the right, passed through rectangles of light in the main front lobby of the Foreign Office, and pushed open the heavy door to the Wilhelmstrasse. Fritz was about to follow after her when Ambassador with Special Duty von Günther and young Müller approached. Fritz had heard Müller was now working in the Transmitting and Deciphering Department. “Heil Hitler,” Müller said and marched on down the corridor.
Von Günther waved Fritz into his office. “Kolbe, Kolbe! Did I see you staring at that woman just now?” He laughed. “You only live once, yes?”
“I don’t have time for such things,” Fritz said.
“Well, in my opinion you should find some, yes? So, next on the agenda . . .”
And the horror went on. Such horror. It was so dehumanizing. Moments came when Fritz felt like he was clawing at his face, frozen in bewilderment, or screaming like a man buried alive in a collapsed mine. One such moment happened again on the day he saw the woman and, for the firs
t time in so long, experienced feelings he thought he’d buried. As the strange woman turned toward the street door, Fritz briefly saw her profile. Her nose, straight as an arrow, gleamed in the light as if loving life with all its sensations. She was simply gorgeous.
Why now, just as he’s telling them how he first met Marlene, does he have to remember the boy?
“I was riding my bike to see Consul Biermann and his wife in Charlottenburg,” Fritz says. “I looked up to see men in uniform throwing a man out of a window from the third or fourth floor. At the next window, two more are forcing a little boy to watch. You hear what I’m telling you? Can you even imagine? And the boy’s screaming, Papa! Papa! ”
Fritz feels sick even now, remembering the man’s frantic arm motions, as if he were yanking on cables in the air. The nausea squeezes his throat and his mouth tastes sour as he recalls the face of that little boy. No experience could’ve been more horrible for that child. Fritz has to blink away tears. Remembering events can hit him pretty hard, especially when they involve children.
“Did that incident make you decide to take things further?” asks Wegner.
“For God’s sake, Wegner! Such decisive incidents came at us by the minute, constantly. Shit and more shit. They were laughing, those men.”
He hears the screams from across time and space: “Papa!” He lights a cigarette, asks if anyone would like a schnapps. Veronika and Wegner nod, keeping silent. Maybe he’s shocked them. It’s tough to speak of something so horrific, and it must also be tough to write it all down. But it has to be done. He pours them his homemade stuff.
“Can’t you just hear that boy?” he asks, feeling disgusted, angry, and bewildered. “What can a person say? What? I was also there when they were transporting Jews out of the city—women, children, men, old people, hit with clubs, spit on, and beaten to death out on the street. Decisive incidents? Goddamn right.”
“So you couldn’t do anything?” Veronika asks.
“What could I have done? Picked the man up? A hundred and seventy pounds, fallen from the fourth floor? Told the boy it’ll be all right? Here’s what I did: I puked. Then I rode to the Biermanns. Don’t ask me what we talked about because I have no idea.”
He drinks the schnapps. It is bitter and sweet in his mouth, burning at first, then he tastes the fruitiness come through.
“The people who are responsible for all this crap are now resuming their positions in the new administration, even in the newly formed Foreign Office. Do you understand what I’m saying? I ought to be sitting there! Me. Not them. But what am I doing? I’m looking out my window, never sure if the next car driving up the mountain is carrying men who’ve come to silence me for good.”
Veronika and Wegner turn their heads and look out the window. Fritz grins. Don’t you two worry yourselves.
“You’re overstating things a bit, Herr Kolbe,” Wegner says.
“Oh yeah? Do I know who tried to kill me? Has it ever come out? Gehlen’s intelligence people? Russians? The old-boy network from the Office? Angry Swiss? Henchmen for that British double agent—who surely existed, even if to this day no one knows who it was?”
“Maybe we should get outside for a while?” Veronika asks.
Fritz switches to his hiking boots and laces them up firm around his ankles. The sun is high—a sky like over Africa, he thinks. Wegner taps his pen against his hand while Veronika gets her camera from the car.
“A few shots for scenery,” she says. “It’s tougher to get than people think. In the outdoors nature always looks so great, but in a photo it often comes across as terribly boring. You need specific objects as markers, trees or cliffs, to give it a certain structure.”
“Like in my story?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Where is Marlene Wiese now?” Wegner asks.
“She’s with Eugen Sacher in Bern,” Fritz tells him, “doing a little shopping, having a nice coffee.”
He leads his young visitors to a trail near the cabin that goes in a circle. They head uphill, the trail crunching under their feet, clumps of grass encroaching on both sides. Fritz loves the sound of hiking shoes on various natural soils. He’s surprised at how close to the real story he’s getting now that he’s telling it to Veronika and Wegner. Staying sharp is vital now. He still isn’t sure if he’ll tell them all of it.
He plants his hands on his hips and looks toward the pointy white tips of the mountains. He plans to hike those too, to climb with a mountain guide to one of the summits and gaze down over the whole world. Maybe, up there, everything will look more insignificant somehow, and coming to terms with his past will come easier to him.
“Can I take a photo of you out here, Herr Kolbe?”
Fritz turns around to face Veronika. She smiles.
“I’d rather not, Fräulein Hügel. I’m not sure how to look into the camera.”
“Do it the way you look in the mirror.”
Again Fritz is amazed at how perceptive this woman is.
“That’s one way of doing it, Fräulein Hügel. Let’s wait on the photo, though.”
“I’ll be sure not to forget, Herr Kolbe.”
They continue to follow the trail, which slopes down through a grove of blue firs. Around them, the branches creak and lizards scurry away into crevices seemingly too small for them. Once they’re in the shadows of the firs, Fritz places a hand on Wegner’s shoulder, though he’s not sure exactly why.
“The closer I got to the files, and the clearer my decision became, the closer I got to Marlene.”
“That’s women for you.” Veronika laughs.
“She was down in the air-raid shelter under the Adlon Hotel, where we always went when the bombers came. She was standing about ten yards away from me, and good old Frau Hansen from the Visa Department was right next to me. So I seized the opportunity. Frau Hansen told me the woman was the assistant for a surgeon at Charité Hospital, a professor. He traveled a lot, sometimes with her, sometimes without her. Frau Hansen thought she considered herself a little bit special. I liked that.” Fritz looks up to the mountains. “But I didn’t like the fact that she was married,” he adds.
“But that didn’t keep you away,” Veronika says.
“Is that bad?” Fritz says.
“When it’s love, it’s never bad.”
Fritz looks at her. She returns his glance, eyebrow raised. Fritz turns and continues down the path.
“When we get back I’ll throw a few schnitzels in the pan,” he says.
Fritz thinks about what he just told Wegner—how the closer he got to the files, the closer he got to Marlene Wiese. Wegner might think this was a fatal error. Fritz doesn’t want that. Though he should want it, considering . . . No! No, he’s had enough of should.
The trail leads them out of the fir grove and through a green meadow speckled white with stones, then swings up and around toward the cabin.
“And yet,” Wegner says to Fritz’s back, “couldn’t you somehow have kept things from reaching the point they did?”
“No,” he says, “I couldn’t have. It was thousands of files, to be honest, thousands of them. It was impossible for me to pay attention to each and every detail. We always know better in retrospect. But hindsight—that’s just armchair nostalgia.”
“We’re using hindsight right now,” Wegner says.
Fritz hears the bombers over Berlin, sees Marlene’s eyes. He feels the files in his hands, sees blood seeping out.
Right at that moment Veronika takes her first actual photo of him.
“Mad?” she asks.
“Yes,” Fritz says.
“I don’t mean at me,” she says. “I mean your facial expression.”
“I’d be mad,” Wegner says. “I know I wouldn’t be able to live with it—not with all the consequences.”
Fritz jerks around and steps up close to him. He smells Wegner’s aftershave. This is one of those moments where it annoys him he’s not taller. Luckily Wegner isn’t much tal
ler, and Fritz is standing on higher ground.
“It could never have been avoided,” Fritz says.
Käthe Braunwein was biting at her thumbnail, a tiny crescent moon splitting apart. Fritz didn’t want to watch. He was sitting with the Braunweins in their living room. Before them was a dry cake crumbling on a porcelain platter. Käthe was pasty white, and with her red-painted lips her face looked clown-like.
“So, you’re here because you don’t know what to say to this woman?” Walter asked Fritz.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that at this point. I’m really wondering what Katrin would think of her.”
“What could Katrin say about a woman you haven’t exchanged a single word with?”
“Yeah, I know. I don’t know her at all, it’s true.” Fritz rubbed his forehead, then pounded his thighs. “But good gracious, that laugh of hers is so incredibly lovely. You have to hear it. And she looks so good.”
He knew he was coming off like a schoolboy. Käthe chuckled. Fritz guessed she’d wanted to laugh outright but hadn’t succeeded. She held her coffee cup with both hands and kept glancing over at the blackout curtains.
“There’s so much that we cannot know,” she said.
Walter’s familiar face hardened as he looked at his wife. Käthe reached for Fritz’s hand and looked him in the eyes. She suddenly looked quite lucid and calm.
“Speak to her, Fritz. Do it. Who knows how long any of this will be here?” She stood up and left the room.
“It’s horrible to say it,” Walter told Fritz, “but I don’t know this woman anymore. The war and the air raids have changed her so much. Where did my Käthe go?”
“Do you even know yourself these days?” Fritz said.
“What’s that supposed to mean? All I really want is to get my family to Ireland. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
The Honest Spy Page 8