The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  Moments later, Fritz heard her swearing at someone on the telephone.

  “German and Japanese U-boats meeting near the Cape of Good Hope, and plans for the Wehrmacht’s retreat in Russia, and here—the exact position of the Telefunken factory in Berlin. They make targeting devices for the Luftwaffe.”

  “Good man,” Priest said.

  Dulles, not even glancing at the rest of the papers, removed his glasses and eyeballed Fritz again. It was the first time Fritz thought he saw the man look perplexed.

  Someone knocked. Priest went to the door in the adjoining room, spoke with someone on the other side, and came back. He said it had been one of the Brits, coming to have a word about Wood.

  “Don’t tell me, Will. We shouldn’t trust him, right?” Dulles said. He bumped his pipe and tiny dim particles rained onto the files like ashes onto Berlin after an air raid. “Quite the drama going on over there, I imagine. Wooldridge from MI6 called me; he was downright furious. Now they want to bad-mouth our Mr. Wood here.”

  “It’s a home run,” Priest said.

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “Is Eugen Sacher in any danger?” Fritz asked.

  “What kind of question is that?” Priest said. Dulles gave him a disapproving glance and Priest shrugged. “Tell us something about your life,” he said. “And tell us about the mood in the Foreign Office as well as here at the German diplomatic mission.”

  As Fritz talked, Berlin seemed far off. He talked about his father’s workshop and quoted him: Do what is right and have no fear. Nearly forgetting where he was, he lost himself in the soft clouds of reminiscence until Priest interrupted him.

  “What’s your greatest secret, Wood?”

  “What’s yours, Mr. Priest?”

  “Not your concern. Well?”

  Fritz stared at Priest standing to the right of Dulles. Greta had come back in and stood to the left of her boss, who was puffing on his pipe.

  “My daughter, Katrin, is with Werner and Hiltrud Lichtwang in Swakopmund. I left her behind in 1939. Ever since . . . I haven’t spoke to her once. I haven’t written her a single letter.”

  Greta and Priest wrote everything down as he spoke. They looked at him from over their notepads as if wanting to snap up his words before he got them out.

  “Katrin cannot be dragged into this,” Fritz said.

  “Of course,” Dulles said.

  “What about von Ribbentrop—is he really as dense as you’ve described?” Greta asked.

  “He just parrots everything Hitler tells him, from what I hear. Horrible. The man is completely vacant. When he was posted in England, he greeted the king with a Heil Hitler. It doesn’t get much ruder than that.”

  “You appreciate that, don’t you? Politeness,” Priest said.

  “I don’t know any other way to be, Mr. Priest. Do you?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Okay,” Dulles said.

  Okay—this little expression was ingrained in all of their speech, it seemed to Fritz.

  “Now, let’s discuss ways you can make contact with us,” Dulles continued. “I assume you can’t be taking trips to Bern at will, whenever the situation demands.”

  “One more thing,” Greta said. “It might be best, if the British do approach you now—”

  “Don’t tell them a single word,” Priest cut in.

  “Don’t give me orders.” Fritz managed to keep his voice clear and firm. He was feeling more assured during this second meeting. He knew his smuggled documents were explosive in content, and it was increasingly apparent just how crucial Dulles considered the files to be.

  “I think I like you, Mr. Wood,” Greta said.

  Fritz felt a warmth creep over his cheeks.

  “All I meant,” Priest added, “is that it’s highly advisable you have nothing to do with the British. Nothing at all. You’re our man.”

  Fritz had to admit, he did admire the man’s tenacity. These people were not to be toyed with—and neither was he, not anymore. Not ever again.

  That same night he called Eugen and told him he shouldn’t attempt to get in touch with him, nor should he come to the hotel or the train station to see him off. Fritz said he might still use him as a contact, maybe even for sending things in the mail. Could he agree to that?

  “But no one’s in danger, are they, Fritz?”

  “I told Weygand I know you, but we haven’t met up and I don’t know where you live. I had to, just in case. Listen, Eugen, there are dangers. I won’t try and convince you, let alone force you.”

  “I know, Fritz. It’s fine. After the war, they will celebrate you as a hero.”

  “They can keep their celebrations.”

  “You can count on me.”

  “Does your wife know?”

  “I haven’t told her.”

  “But she’s noticed something’s up.”

  “Of course she’s noticed.”

  “Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her a thing. Only once this is over.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I don’t know.” Fritz pressed a fist against the phone-booth glass. “I provided them with intelligence, Eugen. These documents will shorten the war. We did it.”

  The next morning Fritz packed his suitcase, walked through Old Town, and turned at the Theaterplatz, heading north for the Aare. The river below coursed around the columns of Kornhaus Bridge, the water dim in the shadow of the bridge and rippling with gold in the sunshine. The mountains were sending down a clean, fresh breeze, and for a moment Fritz felt content and calm. Langmauer Lane ran along the bank; he stepped off and gathered some earth and a few pebbles for the tin he always carried. He pushed its lid down tight and wrote Bern on the tin. “For you, Katrin,” he muttered.

  But now, he had to return to the hell that was Berlin.

  8

  MARLENE AND HEADQUARTERS

  Berlin and Rastenburg, 1943

  At home, within the safety of his blacked-out apartment, Fritz danced. He was alone. He hopped and swung his arms. Joy filled his kitchen. He held his globe up to his face, spun it, and raised it high into the air.

  Marlene, Katrin—your Fritz will finish them off!

  Over the next few days at the Office, many of his colleagues asked what was going on with him—he’d always been polite and obliging but why was he now in such a remarkably fine mood as well?

  “Well, when you’re doing what’s right . . .” he said and waved files at them. He did not add that these were going directly to the Americans.

  Von Günther notified Fritz that he’d be sent to the Wolf’s Lair next—von Günther was going there himself and needed Fritz’s assistance. They would be in close proximity to the Führer, he said, and would get to experience the man’s aura. It would be an honor, Fritz said.

  That same day he got himself a map of Rastenburg and its vicinity from the Office’s archives. The Wolf’s Lair was Hitler’s headquarters. After the trip, he would hand over the precise coordinates, down to a hair. Dulles would have it bombed! He was doing this; he really was. The war would end. Katrin would arrive back in Germany. And Marlene Wiese?

  At the lunch break he walked down Wilhelmstrasse and crossed the Spree. Flak guns threatened the skies at the ramps to the bridge. At the doors to Charité Hospital, cool gusts of wind made the red swastika flags swell, collapse, and swell again as if they were having trouble swallowing something. He approached Marlene’s office as a rather tall man was just leaving, his doctor’s coat all broad shoulders. Fritz saw him only from behind. He went inside. He was a spy bringing Marlene Wiese her chocolate.

  “This is so wonderful,” she said. “And so much of it.” It was nice seeing her laugh, her cheeks forming creases like little crescents.

  “Who was that man just now?”

  “The professor.” She smiled. “Jealous?”

  “Me? No. What did he want?”

  “To chat a moment, Fritz. With me.”

  Fritz moved some prosthetic legs t
o the side; they rattled in his hands. He sat down and tried to force himself to look at more than just Marlene.

  “So how was Bern? No war going on?”

  “There really wasn’t, no.”

  “Really?”

  Fritz ran a hand over his bare forehead and thinning hair. In Africa he’d never left the house without a hat, and he rarely did here either. They glanced at each other, stalling.

  “Did all go well in Bern?”

  Fritz coughed. “Of course, yes,” he said. “I did what I was supposed to.” He looked at the clock and said he had to get going, but kept sitting there. Marlene offered him some of her chocolate, saying he looked like he could use some.

  “It’s all for you.”

  “Do it for me,” Marlene said. She pushed the chocolate across the desk and broke off a piece, leaving little brown splinters on the silver wrapper. “I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to do some proper cooking,” she said. “And afterward, to get all snazzied up for dinner and drink a schnapps and smoke a cigarette. To live. Go swimming. Be happy. Read a good novel, see a pretty landscape—it’s really not all that much to ask.”

  “In Spain,” Fritz said, “we always had fresh tomatoes and eggplant. That was marvelous.”

  “Don’t they have a really good oil there?”

  “Olive oil. It’s wonderful. Smells completely different than ours.”

  “I’ve never been abroad. But I do have a large atlas.” She held up her index finger. “Along with this here.”

  “Does it get around much?”

  “All around the whole lovely world. When your husband’s a cartographer you . . .” She let the words trail off, lifting her feet and staring at her shoes.

  She’s married, Fritz thought. I have enough problems. Someone else’s wife—that’s the last thing I need right now.

  “I’d like to see you more often,” he heard himself saying.

  Marlene pulled a handkerchief from her jacket and polished the toes of her shoes.

  “Me too,” she said.

  He wanted to say we only live once—but the saying was too silly, too corny and feeble, and it gave too much homage to war.

  “We only live once,” Marlene said.

  It didn’t sound silly or corny coming from her mouth. It sounded good and simple and right. She laughed her resounding bell of a laugh, the first thing about her that had sucked him right in. He wanted to make a playful remark, but then he pictured those secret files on the desk of Allen Dulles in Bern, and Greta Stone with her arms crossed, and he heard William Priest saying a man like Fritz would never notice someone actually tailing him. He could not get Marlene involved in this. He forced himself to remember that he hardly knew this woman. Marlene said nothing, watching him as she slid a piece of chocolate into her mouth.

  He leaned back. “Tell me something about your life,” he said. “What do you love to do?”

  “Cook. I mean, cook well. To do it right. Apart from that—”

  “What dishes do you like?”

  “I don’t know. In times like these, anything you eat can remind you of the past. Though sometimes not.” She gazed at him. “This is all so insane.”

  “Well, I’m off to a good start. I’m traveling to the Wolf’s Lair.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know you’re such an important man.”

  A laugh burst from his mouth. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it seems that I am.”

  The heat was oppressive out in the country near Rastenburg, the forest air thick with amber light. Fritz tried in vain to shoo the mosquitos from his face. He was billeted in a hunting cottage outside the outer security zone of the Wolf’s Lair. Tasked with keeping an eye on von Günther’s documents, he had plenty of time on his hands. He’d been told he could be called at any moment and should always stay near a telephone. Nonetheless, he roamed the nearby fields and birch groves, liking the feel of his feet sinking into soft natural ground. He frequently ran into soldiers on patrol; one always aimed a rifle at him while another checked his papers. The notion that only a couple hundred yards away, Hitler was expounding on his ideas about the world to his generals and subordinates left Fritz feeling strangely empty, a feeling that seemed to lift only out amid the heat and scent of the woods. He spread out his handkerchief at the foot of a birch tree, sat with his back against the white trunk, and lifted his face to the sun. He felt at the bark’s rough crevices. “Sit down, Marlene,” he muttered. It was so hard to imagine her free of the war, even for a moment. He could barely grasp this moment of peace and calm. He felt as if he were totally alone on earth and his heart seemed almost to laugh with glee. He dug up a little dirt and pressed it into his tin. He wrote Wolf’s Lair on the lid.

  When he returned to the cottage, the other lodger, a man from the Security Service of the SS, clicked his heels and told him the world hadn’t experienced anything like this since Alexander and Napoleon.

  “Alexander was a drunkard,” Fritz said. “And Napoleon failed miserably in Russia.”

  “Neither of which have anything to do with the Führer,” the SS man replied. “We’re doing our part too.”

  “That we are,” Fritz said.

  The SS man switched on the radio. Zarah Leander was singing, “This Is Not the End of the World.”

  “That song came out during the Battle of Stalingrad,” Fritz said.

  “So heroic,” the SS man said. “Such a sacred honor, giving up one’s life for the cause. It must be a great feeling. Men getting to experience such hatred and fanaticism till the very end. Faces of doom. People will still be singing about it a thousand years from now.”

  “Sure they will,” Fritz said. “You bet.”

  The SS man sat on the veranda’s wooden railing and stared resolutely out into the woods. Fritz didn’t know anything about the young man, but something made him think of Marlene Wiese’s dead son.

  “It’s rumored they resorted to cannibalism,” Fritz said. “At Stalingrad.”

  The SS man glared with his mouth open, his face filled with horror and rage. “Soldiers of the Wehrmacht? You believe such a thing?”

  “Me? What do you believe?”

  “If certain elements of our Volk are spreading such ideas? Eradicate them, I say. Get rid of them.”

  Fritz had brought along several books. He went into his corner of the cottage now and lay in bed reading Sophocles’s Antigone. He liked to imagine all this as a Greek tragedy or one of William Shakespeare’s tales. It truly did help, and he didn’t consider the practice outlandish or silly. Why shouldn’t he reach for a crutch in times like this, to help him find his bearings?

  When he was growing up his parents didn’t have much money for books. They never had much schooling either, yet one of his most cherished memories was of his mother reading out loud to his father in the evenings. The story had to be something with adventure in it, so she read Schiller’s The Robbers and William Tell, and at one point his mother mentioned someone called “Suffucles” because she thought that was the correct pronunciation in Greek. His father said he’d have to hear some of that fellow before deciding whether he was worth reading, but once he did, he liked Antigone a lot. Brave woman, he said. Most women are silently braver than men, Fritz’s mother replied, the men always needing to bluster so much.

  Antigone stood all on her own against the powers that be, against her king. “Say, wilt thou aid me and abet? Decide.” Fritz knew Antigone ended up paying bitterly for her deeds, yet it was still comforting to read the play. He often wondered how dramatists figured out how to leave the reader feeling better, despite all the horrors in a story. Antigone, he thought as he closed the book. She did what is right.

  When Fritz came back out, the SS man was sitting on the veranda thumbing through documents, smoking a cigar. “Keeps away mosquitos,” he said.

  Fritz handed him his book. The SS man told him he didn’t read, and when he did he read German books.

  “Like Heinrich Mann?”

  The SS man
put on a sullen face that he likely imagined was that of the doomed men in Stalingrad. “They should’ve burnt Heinrich Mann along with his books.” He stood up and towered over Fritz, the corners of his mouth turned down severely. “I’m going to remember your name, Herr Kolbe.”

  Fritz heard a car engine and tires crunching on the forest road. A sedan pulled up, the sun reflecting on the long hood and the woods in the windows, like in a movie.

  “I’m leaving to meet with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop and the Führer,” Fritz said.

  “The Führer? Personally?”

  “Should I tell him anything for you?”

  “I, I didn’t know . . .” The SS man stretched his right arm in the Hitler salute. “Heil Hitler.”

  “Hi Hitler.” Fritz took his book back into his room, locked the door on his way back out, and climbed into the too-hot car next to the driver. The young man turned the car around, leaving the SS man standing there with his arm still raised.

  Fritz acted excited to be at the Wolf’s Lair, asking all about the place and inquiring just whose billet was where. The young driver, surely prohibited from giving out such information, was nevertheless infected by Fritz’s cheerful enthusiasm. He told Fritz where the barbed wire and the power lines ran, and talked about the sentry units and guardhouses and which particular luxury car was used by Himmler, Göring, and others. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop resided in Lehndorff Mansion on the east side of the compound, he said.

  In his mind, Fritz made little marks on a map, taking note of every fork and turn-off, the flak positions with camo netting, the gray tops of the bunkers and the dark-green rail coaches parked on short stretches of tracks that led nowhere. He saw the future blowing up before him—relentless, blazing, and vital explosions in all their beauty, the rail coaches springing into the air, bursting apart. The clean-shaven kid driving him would probably end up lying in his own blood. It wasn’t the first time such a thought had hounded Fritz. He let it lie. He did not pursue it.

  Fritz sat in a compartment of the rail car, looking out at the compound through a crack in the curtains. Von Günther had told him he couldn’t appear at the Wolf’s Lair in civvies, so he was dressed in his uniform, which was too tight under the arms and made the sweat in his armpits burn. Somewhere a dog was barking. Two truckloads of military passed by the rail car, and then farther off, through a gap in the trees, he thought he briefly saw Goebbels, the Nazis’ mouthpiece, in his brown uniform.