The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “Have you crossed the border before, Herr Kolbe?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The inspector pointed at Fritz’s briefcase. Fritz set it on the table and pulled out the documents. The inspector raised one of the official stamps close to his eyes, shuffled through the other files, and again read the memo about the document box being transported on to Bern. Fritz felt his left knee trembling and hoped it wasn’t visible through his wide trousers. He began to sweat despite the cold wind blowing through the station hall, and he could smell the oily smoke from the locomotive on his clothes. If he were led off into that customs hut now, it would all be over. On that safari he’d taken with Walter a hunting guide had told him never to look a wild animal in the eyes. How did it work with wild humans? Defend yourself, he thought. If it happens, defend yourself. That’s the one final thing that you can do.

  “All right.” The inspector held up Fritz’s papers but moved them just out of reach when Fritz reached for them. “Don’t let all this go to your head, Herr Kolbe.”

  This ate away at Fritz. It nauseated him to have to constantly swallow such comments. I could vomit, he thought. Having to keep silent was going to kill him.

  On the platform in Bern, Weygand stood leaning against a steel girder. He was in uniform, his boots polished to a high gloss. Close behind him, two men in rigid leather overcoats were looking around intently. When Weygand saw Fritz stepping down from the train, he rushed over to him and held out his hand.

  “Give me the files!”

  Fritz handed Weygand the sealed papers from General Gehlen and von Günther. This seemed to satisfy Weygand—their encounter was brief, but he left looking considerably more self-assured.

  “Not a word about this,” Weygand said and waved for the two others to follow. After walking a few yards, he turned back to Fritz. “Not about anything, Herr Kolbe.”

  Fritz didn’t answer—he just shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and recalled the way Frau von Lützow had pinched Weygand’s chest. He bet it pleased madam that Weygand was now wearing a uniform.

  Fritz arranged with the diplomatic mission driver to have the document box brought to Willading Lane, then had the driver drop him off at the Hotel Justicia on Bubenbergplatz. He got the same room as on his last stay. He locked the door and shut the curtains to the windows that overlooked the square and statue monument—he’d been so nervous his first time in Bern, he hadn’t even noticed that armed man of stone in the middle of the square.

  He sat on the bed, pulled up his trouser leg, and untied the string. Going back through all his notes, he found nothing that could connect Walter to any of it. He gathered the thin pages into a neat stack, folded them twice, and stuck them in the inside pocket of his jacket. He then shoved his map of the Wolf’s Lair site into his outside pocket. Thick raindrops burst against the window, and the Bubenbergplatz with its monument gleamed gray and wet as if poured from lead.

  He ate meatloaf in the hotel restaurant. It came with croquettes, sauce, and salad. My God, Marlene, he thought and imagined her sitting next to him here, imagined watching her as she ate a meal just like this. When was the last time she had smelled a piece of meat, let alone ate one, or felt a knife travel through it?

  From a telephone booth he called a number Dulles had given him.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t smoke cigarettes.”

  “I wouldn’t have a light for you either.”

  “In Rome there were eternal flames burning.”

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s Wood here. I must speak to Dulles.”

  “One moment . . . Tonight, nine p.m., the same entrance as last time.”

  Fritz hung up. He went back to the hotel, took a bath, and then had the diplomatic mission car called over. He’d sure like to know what was going on there, and why the powers that be were bypassing von Lützow.

  Fritz sat with von Lützow and Weygand in the vast office, glaring at yet another portrait of Hitler, right in the eyes. I got you, he thought and felt at his sketch of the Wolf’s Lair in his jacket.

  Weygand was talking about the extermination of International Jewry and Bolshevism, and again Fritz thought about how these fellows were always saying the same thing, again and again and again, each one just like the next. They repeated whatever Hitler told them to repeat. The very thing that made a human being human—individual thought—was dead and cremated.

  Fritz wasn’t that smart of a man; he was moderately educated, but attentive and curious, and he had a phenomenal memory. Whenever he’d chatted about literature or music with Consul Biermann, he’d left impressed by how much the man knew, and had listened intently to him and learned things. One time in a Madrid café, Biermann had talked about Greek drama with him, specifically Antigone, the very play Fritz’s father had enjoyed having read out loud to him. Biermann had mentioned catharsis, and Fritz had felt ashamed he didn’t know the word. That evening he’d looked it up in his one-volume dictionary: a cleansing and purification of the soul after or despite suffering and abject adversity—like martyrdom, a moral victory that you sometimes pay for with your life. Catharsis—do what is right and have no fear.

  To Fritz, it appeared that Weygand’s offensive behavior and constant talk annoyed von Lützow. Von Lützow smiled at Weygand pleasantly and said, “A lasting peace suits the Führer. That’s what he actually wants. He was still stating that clearly in March of ’42, in his speech for Heroes’ Memorial Day.”

  “It’s not to that point yet, not by a long shot,” Weygand said.

  Late in the afternoon Fritz returned to the hotel, pulled on his overcoat, and asked the hotel staff to set a chair out by the door to Bubenbergplatz. It had stopped raining, a cold wind was sweeping across the cobblestones, and Fritz didn’t see a single Nazi flag hanging anywhere he looked. He thought about smoking a cigarette and had to laugh. Marlene said smoking was enjoyable, and that anything enjoyable couldn’t be that bad—and didn’t always have to be so healthy. So he got a cigarette from reception and puffed on it a little and enjoyed the taste of the tobacco, which was a little like coffee. Katrin would definitely scold him if she knew.

  He saw a man on the other side of the square glancing over at him. When Fritz stared back, the man moved to the right along the square and disappeared into the nearest alley. At the same time another man in a hat with his overcoat collar pulled high appeared at the corner of the building to the left of Fritz. He was making an effort to conceal himself. Dulles’s men? Men checking to see if he was being shadowed by still others? Fritz stubbed out the cigarette. What was it Priest had said? There are always two teams, Herr Kolbe: one that you notice and a second that someone like you never will.

  A black sedan rolled onto the square from Laupenstrasse, its rear windows rolled down. From inside the car, Weygand made eye contact with Fritz, and then the two men who’d been with him at the station stepped out. They each went in a different direction across the cobblestones, looking around. They turned down side alleys and came back out others, then got back into the car and drove away.

  Fritz left the hotel in darkness and headed north toward the Aare. The river rushed loudly and ran higher than it had during the summer. He walked along the bank until reaching the rise where City Hall stood and then turned toward the city center, stopping repeatedly and looking around. Sometimes he changed direction and holed up for a few minutes inside a building’s doorway. The Herrengasse was dimly lit, yellowish and shadowy. He turned for the rear door of the OSS’s secret main office, stood near the garden gate a couple of minutes, and entered the yard when he was certain he wasn’t being watched.

  Priest was standing at the door.

  Dulles and Greta Stone were sitting in Dulles’s office. Low purplish flames were burning in the fireplace, the remains of incinerated papers lying beneath them like shadows on stone. Just like last time, Dulles was wearing a gray suit and smoking a pipe. Greta’s blouse was the color of fresh snow, and she looked immensely self-co
nfident. Skipping the small talk, Fritz pulled his map of the Wolf’s Lair from his pocket, unfolded it, and set it on Dulles’s desk.

  “This is Hitler’s headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. Go bomb it, Mr. Dulles. Kill him. Call for the raid at once.” Fritz wrote the coordinates on a piece of paper and pushed it across the table.

  Dulles looked up at Greta, Greta looked at the map, and Priest stepped behind the desk and bent over the squiggles, arrows, and names Fritz had jotted down on the map.

  “The latest from Berlin,” Fritz added. He was feeling good.

  “It’s difficult, Wood,” Dulles said.

  “There are very, very few men in Washington who know about you,” Greta told Fritz. “Your information is classified, codename Kappa—it’s more secret than secret. That’s already saying something.”

  They circled around him. He knew full well they were cunning and committed to their cause; did they still harbor a mistrust of him too?

  “You had the V2 site bombed, a mission that succeeded. And you scored a direct hit on the Messerschmitt factory too, using my information.”

  “How do you know it succeeded?” Priest asked.

  “Got it straight from the Office.”

  “Is that so?” Priest said.

  “Listen to me. You’re dropping tons of bombs on Germany anyway. Why not there—now?” Fritz stabbed at the map. “I saw that pig there. Blow him away, goddamn it.”

  Dulles rubbed at his mustache. Greta poured four whiskies.

  “What would it take to convince you of my sincerity?” Fritz asked.

  “Pretty absurd, isn’t it, someone like you trying to convince anyone of anything?” Priest asked.

  “You bastard.”

  “You’d better watch yourself,” Priest said.

  “Says who? Some American sitting in Bern picking a fight with me? If I’m caught, I’m a dead man, Mr. Priest. If your cover’s blown, it’s off to America. Just what do you want from me?”

  Dulles placed a hand on Priest’s forearm.

  “This whisky would love to be killed,” Greta said.

  This wasn’t how Fritz had imagined it would go. He tipped the whisky back and held out the glass to Greta. She laughed, shrugged, and poured another.

  “I want to have a pistol,” Fritz said.

  “What for?” Priest asked.

  “William,” Dulles said calmly.

  Priest left the office and came right back. He laid a snub-nosed revolver on the desk and set out three little gray boxes of ammo. “You know your way around a gun?”

  “Don’t worry,” Fritz said. “I went on safari with Walter Braunwein a few years before the war. I shot a buffalo and a lion.” It was easy to tell a made-up story, and by this point he could come up with one real quick. For a few seconds he even believed what he’d just said. He could smell the bullet hole in the animal’s skull.

  “A lion, sure you did,” Priest said.

  “That’s enough now, gentlemen,” Dulles said. “What else do you have for us, Wood?”

  Fritz pulled out the papers from his inside pocket.

  “The Leuna Works factory in Berlin. Plans from a man named Eichmann for murdering even more Jews. A secret transmitter near Dublin. And here are estimates concerning American naval forces in the Pacific, from the Japanese.”

  “That’s interesting,” Dulles said. “Washington has been asking if you could deliver more intelligence about the Pacific Theater.”

  “Sounds like they aren’t prepared to believe me when I do.”

  Dulles smiled and stuffed his pipe. “Believe, disbelieve—both work. Before Pearl Harbor, MI6 smuggled a team into the US to spread false information. They wanted to get America to join the war faster. An ally was working against its own partner—that’s what this was. Was it betrayal, or just another form of sincerity?”

  “These things are complicated,” Greta said.

  For nearly two hours, they went through the notes Fritz had smuggled into Bern. Priest and Greta wrote things down. Now and then one of them left the office and made a call. They discussed what resulted from Fritz’s previous notes: breaking the radio code, the agent in Ankara.

  “What happened to the man?” Fritz asked.

  “We took care of it,” Priest said without looking up from the notes.

  “How?” Fritz asked.

  “No idea,” Priest said.

  “If I wanted to get someone out of Berlin, can that person hide out here?”

  “No,” Priest said.

  “We don’t have the resources for that. Not at the moment,” Dulles said. “How are things at the Foreign Office?”

  Fritz told them about Havermann’s arrest and the interrogation.

  “If you’re questioned,” Dulles said, “look your interrogators in the eye or look at the floor, but not to the left or right—that’s like trying to escape. Looking them in the eyes is bold and inspires trust, while looking down can indicate you’re trying to think. But never to the sides.”

  “What’s Berlin like?” Greta asked.

  Fritz saw the smoldering soot-gray man with his dead daughter coming at him. Name’s Jaschke, this is my daughter.

  “Are the air raids breaking the people’s will?” Priest added.

  “People have had enough. They want this all to be over. But the Germans are a long way from any mass uprising against the regime. They have too many other things to worry about. Destroying Hitler will have to come from outside. Militarily.”

  “Would you shoot Hitler if you could get close enough?” Priest asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’d be dead right afterward.”

  “You won’t go so far as that then, huh?”

  “Tell you what: you go and shoot him.”

  Fritz and Priest stared at each other. Fritz had pleasantly surprised himself with his quick answer—and he’d made an impression on Priest. Priest gave a hint of a nod.

  “Can you two drop your little boy games?” Greta said. “I’m going to make coffee and find some chocolate. You take milk and sugar in your coffee, right, Mr. Wood?”

  Before Fritz could answer, Dulles dispensed with Priest and Greta with a nod.

  “We’ve got the same problem as last time,” Dulles told Fritz. “Your intelligence is so good, so secret, that a bizarre sort of mistrust prevails. I’ve seen to it that only a tiny circle has access to your case. President Roosevelt knows about you.”

  “The president?”

  “He is skeptical—not in the same way William is, but skeptical still. On top of that, MI6 keeps trying to foul up the works for us. Something about their outfit doesn’t add up. You remember Wooldridge? The Brits’ head man here locally, the one who called the first time you visited us and was so angry that his men let you go? Well, Wooldridge is a pro and one experienced and prudent fellow. We’ve been meeting off and on for months. He thinks a double agent has infiltrated the London office. Not from the Germans—he suspects someone is working for the Russians.

  “He suspects that this agent, provided that he does exist, wants you all to himself—for the Bolsheviks. For Germany the war is lost, Wood. Hitler is beaten. But afterward? For a source such as yourself, it becomes tricky. You have to understand that rumors are going around about you and at the highest levels. That’s not good. If there is a leak anywhere, God forbid. Now, do you know anything, even just a hint, about German agents in London or even Washington?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Our psychological assessments of Hitler lead us to believe he would never consider surrendering. How do you see things?”

  “Bomb the Wolf’s Lair, Mr. Dulles.”

  Dulles leaned back and gazed at the shut curtains. “This person you wish to get out of Berlin—who is it?”

  “Her name is Marlene.”

  Dulles smiled and raised his cement-colored eyebrows. Marlene—her name alone was enough to rise above issues of war and mistrust. Marlene—if only Fritz c
ould have her here, whatever the conditions; if only she were in Bern, in the pleasant air, under bomb-free skies. And Katrin too. Fritz choked back his longing and blinked away the strain in his eyes.

  “There must be a way to get her out of there,” he said.

  “Let’s wait and see, shall we?”

  “I’ve never demanded anything in return.”

  “Patience. Wait and see. You remain undercover.”

  “Weygand, from the diplomatic mission, is watching me.”

  “The weakest link there is von Lützow. Weygand is more dangerous, or at least that’s what we’re guessing. You’ll have to tread very carefully.”

  It gradually dawned on Fritz what Dulles was implying: the American president knew about him, and possibly so did a British double agent; rumors about the name George Wood were spreading down the carpet-soft corridors of the White House and through Whitehall in London.

  “The flow of information cannot be impeded,” Dulles said. “We’ve set up a second cover address at Brückenstrasse, in Marzili here in Bern. The story is, you got to know one Elenor Pfäffli, and you write to her now and then. Tomorrow night we’ll brief you on cipher writing, letter and number codes, invisible inks, and other tricks.”

  “I can only do so much by mail,” Fritz said.

  “What else can you tell us about the Russians?”

  Fritz recalled from his notes: “The Wehrmacht is committing huge numbers of crimes on the Eastern Front. There are several references to that, from a man named Reinhard Gehlen.”

  “You mean the general with Foreign Armies East?” Dulles asked. “He’s with German military intelligence.”

  “I’ve met Gehlen personally,” Fritz told him.

  “What’s your take on him?”

  “Cold. Intelligent. Completely devoted to his cause.”

  “Nazi?”

  “Through and through.”

  “Recently became a general, right?”

  “Why are you so interested in Gehlen?”

  Dulles waved away the question, sucked on his pipe, and, looking annoyed when he realized it had gone out, put it aside.