The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “Pardon me, Herr Ambassador. It was just a question.”

  “We live in an age of answers, Kolbe.”

  Fritz worked until von Günther had left for the day. Then he opened the safe, stuffed into his briefcase as many files intended for incineration as possible, and rode his bicycle through Berlin’s battleship-colored streets of rubble.

  At home he checked the cardboard and curtains on the windows, sat down at the table, and began looking over the files. It was a thick stack. He searched for clues that pointed to Walter’s trip but found nothing.

  He began to write: about rail networks to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other camps; about secret munitions depots in the East; about infiltrating the Vatican; about a secret transmitter near Dublin used to support Irish Nazi sympathizers against the British and to notify U-boats; about ship sections being manufactured in the Ruhr region; the restructuring of combat divisions in France; spies in Italy; ongoing diplomatic efforts in Franco’s Spain; advisors in Japan; and insights straight from General Gehlen himself about Stalin’s secret service. It went on and on. He wrote the whole night through, until a pumpkin-tinged sun rose above the ruins and undamaged buildings that made up the chaos of Berlin.

  9

  SECRET MARLENE

  The people were standing and crouching, shoulder to shoulder, head to hip, clinging to one another, as if they could protect each other from the thing intent on devouring the city and its inhabitants. They were staring at the concrete ceiling of the air-raid shelter under the Adlon Hotel as if their gazes alone could keep it from collapsing. Fritz could practically touch the fear that permeated the commotion in the bunker. An old man was ranting and pointing: he had told them all! And now when the phosphorus bombs came, the air itself would burn.

  In the flickering light Fritz saw Marlene standing a few yards away, her back pressed against the wall. She was holding her hands to her cheeks, her elbows pinned to her sides as if lashed down. Von Günther was kneeling with his wife and two daughters, who had been visiting him at his office, von Günther being one of the few who permitted himself such visits. He was stroking his girls’ flat, dull hair, looking to his wife now and then, fear filling every corner of his broad face. Fritz smelled urine and rotten apples. Some soldiers were smoking cigarettes, the glow of burning tobacco the only color down here among the dusty shapes. He pushed through to Marlene. She was as pale as the cement powder fluttering down around them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to counter the force of the hammering bombs. A brutally near miss rocked the bunker, scoring the old masonry with glowing-hot embers that floated down from some crack or crevice above. Screams rang out. Someone wailed that they’d all be buried alive. Fritz placed his hands against the quaking cement to either side of Marlene’s face. The bridge of her nose was shiny, her lips dry and chapped. The tears from her eyes were gray and bleary with grime.

  “They just need to stop.” Her voice trembled.

  He bent down close to her face. “You want the Nazis to win this war?” he whispered.

  The bunker swayed like a ship in a storm, throwing Fritz against her. He felt her body, damp with sweat, beneath his and her hair against his cheek. He lowered his head onto her shoulder. If he died on one of these air-raid nights, it would have all been for nothing. No one would ever know what he’d done, and Katrin would remain in the dark about his absence for the rest of her life. He had to survive. His story had to survive. Marlene had to survive.

  A great crack sounded from farther back in the bunker. In seconds, all went dark around them. Thin voices shouted for help, then matches flickered and, after that, the timid flames of candles. Fritz felt Marlene wrap her arms around his back and he pressed himself to her. Why hadn’t they all been holding each other this whole time? He put one hand on the back of her neck, feeling the muscles below her hairline.

  “I have to tell you something, Marlene. It’s important. It’s dangerous.”

  Her arms squeezed tighter. He’d made yet another mistake. He could not tell Marlene a thing. Nothing.

  The bombing strikes ended. Things grew calmer in the bunker. The stench of feces mingled with the dust, sweat, and breath, and voices somewhere were arguing over a bucket. The old man’s gravelly words penetrated the dark chaos: “We’ve all been betrayed . . .” Fritz heard an odd sound, like a sack collapsing. He couldn’t quite make out what had happened but thought he’d seen someone punch the man in the stomach.

  They would have to stay down in the bunker awhile, so that the fires up above didn’t consume them as soon as they unbolted the steel door. Every one of them knew what awaited them outside.

  Von Günther stepped next to them, wiping grime from his forehead sticky with sweat. “Yes, I always say this job does have its good side. You’re that professor’s assistant, aren’t you? Well played, Kolbe—in an air-raid shelter.”

  Both of von Günther’s girls were clutching at his legs, so Fritz squatted down to ask them their names and told them this would all be over one day.

  “But there aren’t any playgrounds left,” one of the girls said.

  “We’ll build plenty of new ones,” Fritz said.

  “Heil Hitler,” said the girls.

  Von Günther rubbed the fear from his face. “It’s always tough on the kids,” he whispered into Fritz’s ear—Fritz should be glad he didn’t have kids.

  Eventually, the fearful, stinking throng slowly made its way toward the bunker exits, to climb the stairs up to the unknown. Marlene took Fritz’s hand. They didn’t take the underground tunnel back to the Office like von Günther and the other officials and staffers did.

  Above ground, Fritz glanced only briefly at the corpses, the shreds of clothing, the final embraces between mother and child. Marlene’s eyes reflected the churning, fiery glow. Fire trucks tried to make their way through the smoking rubble of crushed pots and chairs and all the usual nonsense that got hurled from smoking homes. The Brandenburg Gate stood dark and shattered, while farther north flames soared between earth and sky, the air itself burning. A soot-black man with singed hair came up to them. He carried a dead child, her arms and legs swinging. “Good evening, name’s Jaschke, this is my daughter.” He moved on, speaking to the next person he saw. “Jaschke, good evening. Pardon me. This is my daughter.” An invisible cord tightened around Fritz’s neck, and his heart felt too dry to perform its bloody chore. The man walked on through the fiery glow and the stinking refuse of war, and disappeared into the darkness.

  “For the love of God . . .” Marlene began.

  Fritz grabbed her upper arm.

  “I’m smuggling secret files from the Office for American intelligence in Bern.”

  “What?”

  “I’m spying for the Americans.”

  Marlene pushed him away. The crackling fires exhaled, a hot wind battering the blackened square before the Adlon.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Marlene looked to the sky burning in the north and in the east, at this turbulent panorama of war with its muck and filth and ended lives. She struck Fritz in the chest with her fist.

  “I know,” he said.

  About a hundred yards away, a building welled up golden with a fiery glow and then gave way, sending a cloud of dust flowing down the canyon of streets already buried alive. Flames raged in the skeleton of the building next door, rolling out of windows and doors. More fire trucks and ambulances rumbled up and stopped at angles among the craters and debris, soldiers laden with rattling gear running and disappearing into the smoke.

  “I’m taking you home,” Fritz said. One side of Marlene’s face flashed brighter whenever the flames welled up and set the grimy sky on fire. The sun was about to rise beyond all the smoke but it remained stubbornly pale, as if trying to stay hidden and not have to come out.

  “Don’t touch me,” Marlene said. “You are completely out of your mind! How could you tell me that? They’ll kill the both of us.”

  She walked off and Fritz knew
better than to follow her. On she went into the night sizzling from the fires, inhaling all. After only a few yards she blended in with the murky, thick air. The last thing he saw of Marlene was the flickering outline of the handkerchief she held pressed to her face, and then she vanished into a city that was devouring its people.

  Fritz trudged home. He squeezed his eyes shut when passing streets where the asphalt had melted and rehardened over human extremities. He covered his ears when he encountered people trying to clear piles of rubble many feet high with their bare hands while screaming for those crushed somewhere underneath. He passed trees that had become torches and were now thin as arms and dry as stone. He did not look at the parts of corpses he stumbled over, or at the evidence of what a hellish blaze did to a body. He tried to hum the chorus from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Joy, lovely divine spark, daughter from Elysium . . .

  How can we do these things to one another? he wondered.

  He didn’t see Marlene for nearly a week. Some of his colleagues hadn’t turned up at the office again, making everyone wonder exactly how the latest air raid had devoured them. Müller said the Luftwaffe would inflict retribution and it would be fearsome, Heil Hitler.

  In Fritz’s office, von Günther touched his fingers to his forehead and mused out loud whether such an attack wasn’t in the end something “great” after all. “You must abstract,” he said. “Understand, yes? Abstraction is the root of a true people’s movement. The individual as a concrete object does not hold top priority. It’s complicated . . . a complicated yet fascinating subject.”

  You have gone truly and completely nuts, Fritz thought, but didn’t say a thing.

  When he saw Marlene in the Office again she passed by him without a word, giving only a curt nod and walking around a ladder that was leaning against the corridor wall. A staffer was standing on it, hammering a new nail into the wall to rehang the portrait of Hitler that had fallen. Everything within Fritz told him to follow Marlene, urged him to embrace her. He waited outside Frau Hansen’s office until she came out.

  “Can I talk to you? Please.”

  She pushed by him, her shoulder brushing the wall. Fritz followed and grabbed at her arm.

  “Please, Marlene.”

  “Do you want to kill me?” she spluttered. Two men in uniform were watching them.

  “This evening, Marlene. In that café where we sat for the first time. At eight. Please.”

  “And if they’re already after you? I’ll be arrested right along with you.”

  Fritz looked down the corridor, waved to a colleague from the Jewish Department, and tried to look Marlene in the eyes. He couldn’t do it.

  “This evening. Please, Marlene.”

  Not caring whether anyone was watching, she hit him in the chest with her fist and left.

  “Herr Kolbe, could you please hand me that picture of the Führer?” Fritz looked up at the man on the ladder. He had turned in Fritz’s direction and was holding a hand out. “Herr Kolbe?”

  Fritz went back into his office.

  The front façade of the café on Mommsenstrasse was gone, but a sign hanging from a scorched beam read “Still Serving Drinks.” Fritz sat at a table, the debris grit on the floor crunching underfoot, and ordered a bottle of red wine. “Provided you still have any,” he said. The one-armed waiter served the bottle with two mismatched glasses. Fritz was a half hour early. He hoped that this was why she was not yet there.

  Marlene came down the street, now only wide enough for a handcart, making her way between the slopes of rubble, and sat down across from him without a word. Fritz poured the wine, its bright red astounding to him in this city that had been robbed of all color.

  “The head of American intelligence in Bern is named Allen Dulles. He has two colleagues working closely with him: William Priest and Greta Stone. The cover address is Herrengasse 23 in Bern.”

  Marlene lit a cigarette and turned her face to the side without taking her eyes off him. “You know what they do to people like you?”

  “I had to tell someone—you. Who else could I tell?”

  “Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, the SS, the Gestapo. These are ruthless mass murderers. Have you gone crazy?”

  “I’m not the one who’s crazy.”

  Marlene laughed bitterly. She looked for the waiter, who was paging through a newspaper at the bar.

  “You are. You’re stealing documents from the Office. You know people in American intelligence? Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God, Fritz.” Marlene placed a hand over her eyes and shook her head. Fritz wanted to stroke her hair, or touch the tip of her nose. He clutched his wineglass.

  “He agreed,” she said.

  “Who agreed to what?”

  “The professor. They’re doing experiments—on Jews, in the camps. They’re using them as human research subjects. He told me about it. He’s not taking part, but he did sign his name to a paper. It’s for science.”

  “The documents I’m compiling have to do with criminal acts. They all must stand trial one day. When they do, there will be firm evidence against them.”

  “Isn’t this weird? Here we sit, no one listening in on us—we can say what we want, having a glass of wine. One little bit of happiness. My God, Fritz. It’s all so unreal.”

  “You have such a lovely nose.”

  She laughed. It sounded just like that first laugh he’d heard from her: clear and resounding and completely honest. Laughing like that made her lips all smooth.

  “Fritz Kolbe, just what am I supposed to do with you?”

  “Whatever you want?”

  She raised her eyebrows, staring at him. “I have to give this some thought—about you, about us. Thank you for inviting me.” She looked out over the street. “Berlin can still be nice sometimes, I have to say.”

  “It will be again,” Fritz said.

  “We met amid such misery.”

  “But we did meet.”

  Marlene dropped her head to one side and watched him from the corner of her eye. “Yes, that’s the one nice thing about it. Wait till I tell Gisela about—”

  “Who’s Gisela?”

  “A girlfriend. When I tell her about us—”

  “You’re telling her about us?”

  “Hey, when did you start interrupting? When I tell her about us, I’ll . . . It’s just so odd—meeting amid the rubble, having a quarrel in the ruins. Romance really is something else.”

  “Is she a Nazi?”

  “She works in a munitions factory. She always came in second in swimming, behind me. Yet she could joke about it, even slapped my butt in the shower after. Gisela understands me.”

  “Don’t talk to anyone about us, Marlene.”

  “This is coming from little blabbermouth you?”

  “I’ve been so damn secretive, it’s practically a sickness.”

  “That’s what you think, Fritz.”

  He didn’t get to see her for a couple more days. It was another air raid of all things that sent her to him. The knock on his door came at that very moment of the morning when the air was cooling down, when the filth and dust had settled on the downtrodden city and the fires had burned themselves out. At the sound of the knock, he gathered the files into a pile and hid them under the mattress. Fatigue had dulled the fear he felt every time someone showed up at his place unannounced.

  He opened the door.

  “And there she stood,” Fritz says. “In that strange light—for some reason, it was always dim in those days. On the ground at her feet was an old bedsheet tied into a sack. In it was everything she had left after the air raid.”

  “We didn’t come to hear a love story,” Wegner says.

  “Herr Wegner, tell me one story that doesn’t include love. Such a story wouldn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Touché,” Veronika says.

  “I want to write about Fritz Kolbe the spy,” Wegner says.

  “Reducing people down like that just doesn’t
work,” Fritz says. “It never works. No person is just one thing, certainly not me. Maybe some dreary religious guru sitting around out in the desert, but a real human being? A complete human being? My name is Legion, for we are many—isn’t that how it goes?”

  “That’s it,” Veronika says. “I like that one.”

  “The facts, Herr Kolbe,” Wegner says.

  “The fact was and is that we were in love, that we wanted each other. Desire isn’t a privilege limited to youth. We went right at each other. We were opposing the war and the destruction and the fear through our acts of love.” Fritz hesitates. He’s all for granting erotic latitude but is not so interested in publicizing the details. Scrutiny takes the magic away. His story of espionage should not be filled with magic, yet his story of Marlene must.

  Fritz says he’s going to throw those schnitzels he promised in the pan. On his way to the kitchen, he hears Wegner mutter, “Typical.” After a few minutes, Veronika leans in the doorway and asks if she can help.

  “Keep me company,” Fritz says. “I rarely get visitors up here. It’s probably going to stay that way awhile.”

  “Except for Marlene, right?”

  “Except for Marlene, of course.”

  “It was nice hearing what you said about love still being so exciting, even when . . . um, I’m not sure how to put it.”

  “When a person already has a few years under their belt?”

  “That, yes. Pardon.”

  “It’s completely all right,” Fritz says.

  He holds a wooden spoon in the fat drippings, and little bubbles form; the fat is hot enough. He coats the pinkish schnitzels in the breadcrumbs he’s made and places them carefully in the pan. They sizzle, and the schnitzels’ flavorful aroma fills the air immediately.

  “Herr Kolbe? What are you not telling us?”

  “Why are you here exactly, Fräulein Hügel?”

  “Me? Oh. Well, I want to make something of myself. Hardly any women are working journalists—not in Switzerland, and not in your Germany. I’m one of the very, very few. I won’t deny I’ve had good support. My father might have had a hand in opening doors. After Martin—Herr Wegner—started speaking with Herr Sacher, he talked to our main editor, then to me. He told me everything he knew about you, from Herr Sacher and from that early article that came out about you, as well as from his own intense research. I don’t know how to put it, Herr Kolbe, but I was quite excited. A spy, opposing the Nazis. That impressed me. I come from a small village. All I remember from my childhood is the smell of cows and tight confines. I hope to meet interesting people and . . .” She forms a camera with her fingers and says, “Click.”