The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “He’s nice,” Marlene told Fritz. “The professor, I mean. A pleasant person, polite, educated, humane to his staff. It’s almost as if—I can hardly believe it myself, but I actually . . . Oh, I don’t know what I want to say.”

  “It’s as if you like him?”

  She raised her hands, perplexed, skeptical of her own feelings. “I have to think about it first in order to detest him. When I’m not thinking otherwise, I like him.”

  “I don’t understand it either, all that makes up a person. It’s not easy to see.”

  “He’s been secretly drinking. He pours cognac into his coffee cup.”

  That night Gisela came by. Marlene had told her that Fritz recently stole more wine from the Foreign Office, a practice that was becoming his specialty. Gisela laughed after almost everything she said. Her way of remaining so unaffected by life’s troubles both irritated and amused Fritz. He didn’t have the slightest idea where this plump, robust woman found reasons to laugh. It just comes naturally to some people, he thought. Maybe she was dumb—but she was good at remaining upbeat, so good that she always brightened things up with her presence.

  “Now that the invasion’s over—I for one am excited about these American boys,” Gisela said. Fritz still felt a tinge of self-consciousness around her.

  “It has to be a good thing,” Gisela continued, “when a country has so many nationalities mixed together, right? What do you two think? All these borders led to all this crap in the first place.”

  “We’re going to put an end to the crap,” Fritz said.

  “Ya don’t say? Well, sure would be nice. Leni, cutie, you reckon it’s true what they say about those Negroes having such big penises?”

  Marlene laughed. She looked at Fritz. He slapped a hand over his eyes in resignation.

  Fritz wanted to travel to Bern at the earliest opportunity, but the courier trips were being cut back and carefully watched. When he learned that a colleague would soon be traveling to Switzerland for the first time, Fritz tried to talk the man into letting him make the trip instead. The man laughed, saying, “The hell you will.” Fritz couldn’t insist too strongly. He considered shooting the man at night, or pushing him down stairs at the Office, but he couldn’t bear to stoop even lower than he had already. The OSS could pull off deeds like that. He couldn’t.

  Von Günther, looking nervous and pale, sent Fritz to Paris. This trip is semiofficial, he said, adding that he knew he could always depend on Fritz. The assignment could do Fritz no harm. He was supposed to personally hand over a document to a man in the consulate there, have the man sign off on the delivery, and then return.

  “If abstract greatness comes up against concrete reality . . .” von Günther started to say, but didn’t go on. Out in the corridor some men were standing around and laughing hard, something about bleeding the Americans and British to death. Fritz could see the fear, worry, and insecurity on each of their faces when they sauntered down the hall. Now and then he heard people whispering, and then someone would pass by and call out, “Heil Hitler.”

  In Paris, Fritz was sitting at a street café on the Champs-Élysées when he heard about Count von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. Again Hitler had escaped death. Fritz pounded on the little round tabletop, the tableware clanking and catching the light. Soldiers and officers looked his way. “Those pigs,” Fritz said. “Heil Hitler,” said one of the officers.

  Stauffenberg. It was all over the news. Someone had stood a radio on one of the café tables, and everyone listened in suspense, sunlit ears turned toward the speaker, eyebrows stern. The announcer spoke of a small clique of arrogant officers and of a leadership taking fervent revenge. In Berlin, it seemed, confusion had reigned for several hours until Hitler called the city’s military commander and reported himself safe. “Our Führer cannot be killed,” an officer said.

  His fists buried in his trouser pockets, Fritz wandered off into the sunshine as military boots hammered the asphalt of Paris’s broad avenues. He had always thought the Reich would collapse immediately if Hitler died. Comradeship, unity, solidarity—these were words only. The Nazis would tear each other to shreds once Hitler was finally dead and gone.

  At the Eiffel Tower, he peered at the sun through the steel beams. He had summarized as concisely as possible everything he could learn about troop movements in the West and sent the information on to Bern by courier mail. Perhaps this intelligence had helped. It must have helped.

  He stood at the foot of the tower looking up. A column of military trucks rumbled by, and he heard the clattering of heavy panzer tracks, felt the earth vibrating beneath him, but he didn’t look around. Why had the Nazis still not given up? This was sheer madness. There was nothing but destruction left. Was it a love of death, the hero’s death as a great event—as if dying under tank tracks or in a burning airplane gave death some special quality? How had Stauffenberg and his people managed to place a bomb next to Hitler and yet not kill the man? Things were only going to get worse. There were rumors that people were being arrested all over Berlin, that the first executions already happened. The brutality had reached the Foreign Office as well. All Office employees who were abroad during the assassination attempt would be investigated thoroughly. He had to get back. Back to murderous Berlin, back to that stinking hell. To Marlene.

  Fritz rode the Metro to Jardin du Luxembourg, hoping to steal an hour of peace and feel the sun on him a little before it was time to leave. To some, on the surface, Paris might have looked virtually unchanged. But Fritz saw armed Wehrmacht soldiers patrolling among the civilians, and Nazi flags hung at the entrance to Boulevard Saint-Michel. A woman in a dark suit and hat was sitting on a park bench, smoking a cigarette and watching two German soldiers pass. Once the men were a few yards past, she spat in their direction. Fritz grinned at the incongruence of seeing such an elegant woman spit. He turned toward the soldiers and spat onto the path too. The woman smiled. She said she’d thought he was a German, that he looked like one.

  “I am a German.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “You should be ashamed,” she said. Then she stood and passed through the shadows of trees at the park’s ornate iron gate.

  No matter what you do, Fritz thought, it’s always wrong. He scooped a little soil from a flowerbed, dumped it in one of his tins, wrote Paris on the lid, and pocketed it.

  At the train station, soldiers swarmed under the tall vaulted ceiling. Out along the tracks, where the sun softened the edges, Fritz noticed smoke, then a Nazi flag ablaze, the flames advancing up it in a zigzag pattern. Soldiers carrying rifles ran out into the light, chasing a man.

  “Good luck to you,” Fritz muttered.

  The last air raid had hit the Office. When he got back from Paris, Fritz asked around anxiously to find out if Minister von Ribbentrop had been in the building.

  “No, fortunately not,” Müller said. “Come to think of it, where have you been this whole time, Herr Kolbe?”

  “What’s it to you, Müller?”

  The young man stepped up close to Fritz. “I’ll get you yet, Herr Kolbe.” He straightened his body inside his baggy uniform and stretched out his right arm in the Hitler salute. The more disastrous things looked for Germany, the greater Müller’s confidence seemed to grow. For a fraction of a second, Fritz nearly felt sorry for the boy.

  The upper floors of the Office were no longer usable. Debris from the bombing got dumped into the inside courtyard. Most windows had been blown out from the blast, and the glass had been replaced with cumbersome plywood sheets, making it dark in the corridors even during the day. The radio transmitters were moved into various basement areas, communication lines were regularly disrupted, and officials were constantly seen running down the damp hallways, seeking the recipients of various telegrams. Müller, trying in vain to make his office the collection point for all incoming messages, kept shouting at grit-dusted motorcycle couriers out in the corridor. Von Günther was away somewhere again. />
  Fritz saw to it that the office ran smoothly. On his desk, more dispatches were stacking up than ever before. Von Günther congratulated him over the phone after hearing reports that Fritz had the situation under control and was handling things with a typical German official’s diligence.

  “You bet I have things under control, Herr Ambassador.”

  With Marlene’s help, Fritz transcribed documents about the satellite states of Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, where attempts to topple the governments were continuing—intelligence that would be quite crucial to the Americans. He wrote in code the names of Japanese divisional commanders and sent that information by courier mail to Bern. A majority of department heads had removed themselves to Salzburg, one had disappeared without a trace, and three or four were arrested after the attempt on Hitler’s life and never seen again. Müller reported that many colleagues had been interrogated. “You’re still due, Herr Kolbe.”

  “Müller, I have nothing to hide. Nothing at all. I’m loyal.”

  “To the death, Herr Kolbe?”

  “No. You?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “What kind of question, indeed.”

  12

  WEAKENING COVER

  Berlin and Bern, early 1945

  Von Ribbentrop released dozens of decrees concerning the Foreign Office. One that was of particular significance, and that he said was wholly in keeping with the Führer’s wishes, involved recruiting more able-bodied men into the Wehrmacht.

  “Naturally, this doesn’t affect you,” von Günther said, and personally saw to it that Fritz remained exempt. Other men packed up their belongings with heads hanging and disappeared from their offices. Von Günther was only seldom in his office, and during one of the rare times that he was there, Fritz saw him chewing at his thumbnail. He smelled like sweat now, despite the great emphasis he put on personal hygiene. He rambled on and on about the power of fanaticism to succeed in seemingly hopeless situations, about the power of the will and recent tragedies that cried out to be celebrated in song, now and a thousand years from now.

  “Perhaps, Kolbe, fanaticism is a form of—”

  “Greatness?” Fritz interrupted.

  Von Günther stared at him, the corners of his mouth turning up with appreciation. “Yes, Kolbe, yes. You have indeed learned something.” He raised a finger. “The subject is quite interesting, yes?”

  After a while, Von Günther had all his private things removed from his office. In the inner courtyard the barrels blazed constantly now, flickering orange under the gray winter sky. The only thing Fritz heard about Hitler was that he was having one attack of rage after another up at the Berghof, his home in the Alps. Fritz figured his monologues were undoubtedly growing longer and longer. One thing Fritz knew about Churchill was that he’d regularly joined the people out in the rubble of London after the German air raids. Hitler had shown up only during the early days of his victories.

  When von Günther wasn’t in the office, Fritz often locked the door and shadowboxed until he felt queasy. He punched out as much as he could of what was inside him.

  As he boxed, he pondered. He had to get Marlene out of Berlin. Just as strongly as he wanted Hitler dead, he wanted Marlene Wiese to live—at any cost. At home he stabbed at Hitler’s picture in the newspaper with a meat fork until the fork bent, then he scraped at the black-and-white face with its stupid mustache until only thin curling strips of paper were left. Time was getting short, the Nazi regime’s stranglehold tighter and tighter. The number of executions was rising quickly. This capital had once had streetlights that glowed; he now saw men, their heads limp, hanging dead from those lamps, often with a sign on their necks reading, “I am a coward.” Some had their pants pulled down and there they hung, their faces blue and aghast, their bodies robbed of all dignity.

  At some point word leaked out that Hitler had come to Berlin and retreated into the bunker under the bombed-out Reich Chancellery.

  Fritz was now very close to him.

  Von Günther called him into his office. The doors to the file cabinets stood open, and the rug was gone.

  “I had my wife and children taken out of the city, Kolbe,” he said. He was biting on his thumbnail. His eyes darted around as if he were watching some absurd tennis game. “The Führer says the new weapons for overcoming this crisis will be finished soon enough. I think we should be prepared for unpleasant times nonetheless, yes? It would be nice if Ribbentrop could be here.” Von Günther’s eyelids twitched. It must be clear to him, Fritz thought. He must know that the end is coming.

  “Listen to me, Kolbe. You’ll have to go to Bern again. I have certain documents ready for Weygand. Only Weygand, understand?”

  “Yes sir, Herr Ambassador.”

  “Come back as fast as you can afterward. I’m going to ask a favor of you, one that can’t do you any harm. You are to get out of this city. That’s all I can tell you now.”

  “Where will you be, Herr Ambassador? What if the enemy makes it to Berlin?”

  “He won’t make it. But assuming, purely hypothetically, that he does, then we’d have to look to the West. To the West and the future. Have you ever met an American personally?”

  “An American? Me? No, Herr Ambassador.”

  “They’re not so evil. And they’re essentially enemies of Bolshevism too. You and I, Kolbe, we are diplomats. Always have been. Always will be, yes?”

  Von Günther handed Fritz a brown envelope, a Foreign Office stamp smeared on it. Frau Hansen wasn’t with the Office anymore, von Günther said, so he’d issued Fritz’s visa himself.

  “It won’t be easy getting to Bern. The special compartments and other privileges have been dropped. Trains must roll to the front, Kolbe. But one train is still running, and it leaves at eleven thirty tomorrow from Anhalter station. By the way, according to the new decrees, you aren’t allowed to travel alone anymore. Müller will escort you to Bern.”

  “Müller?”

  “You have a problem with that?”

  The windowpanes began to vibrate, and dust floated down from the room’s battered ceiling. Von Günther stepped over to the window. Three worn-out panzers, tracks wobbling, rolled down Wilhelmstrasse. A ragged crowd of refugees had gathered outside the U-Bahn entrance, their eyes searching the skies in all directions. Across the way at the Propaganda Ministry, faded Nazi flags hung heavy with grit on bent poles, the only flags left out now. He pulled his cigarette case from his jacket and offered it to von Günther. They smoked at the window while looking out over the bombed-out square.

  “This favor you’re to do for me . . . Well, Frau Wiese, that’s her name, right? She can benefit from this too. Trust me. Just like I always and unfailingly have trusted you. And I”—he raised his cigarette high—“I’ve always had your back, yes? Don’t forget it. You never became a Nazi Party member. You’re the only one here who didn’t. You have me to thank for things, Kolbe. You have me to thank for plenty.”

  “I could take Marlene along. Tomorrow.”

  Von Günther’s eyes narrowed to slits. Fritz wondered if he’d gone too far. He read mistrust in his eyes, but didn’t feel ill at ease.

  “Have you gone mad, Kolbe?”

  They had crossed over some kind of line. Maybe it had to do with the end of the war approaching, but Fritz couldn’t hold back anymore, not completely. They were no longer the subordinate facing the ambassador, nor the actor and the liar facing the ambassador—this was Fritz Kolbe the man facing Ernst von Günther the man. Fritz tried with all his might to put on his “Yes sir” face, but he couldn’t do it. Von Günther said nothing, holding a fist to his lips. Did he finally see through him now? Then something in von Günther’s eyes drew back.

  “Off you go!” he said.

  I’ll see you again, Fritz thought, after the war.

  As he placed his hand on the door handle, von Günther called after him, his words echoing in the empty office.

  “Weygand is one sharp attack dog
, Kolbe. We have plenty of people in Switzerland. Certain people are getting strange ideas.”

  “Yes sir, Herr Ambassador.”

  “It would be a shame to lose our good little civil servant, yes?” Von Günther showed how much of a shame it would be by holding the tips of his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.

  “This good little civil servant will survive this war, Herr Ambassador. Marlene Wiese will too.” Fritz tapped the envelope to his forehead.

  “Go to Bern. Don’t worry, I’ll see to Frau Wiese. Off you go.”

  Fritz walked back into his office, closed the door behind him, took the Allgäu picture off the wall, and opened the safe. After he’d stuffed secret files into the inside pockets of his jacket and overcoat, he left his office. He ran into no one in the corridor and heard nothing but two people screaming at each other inside one office and the pounding of a typewriter in another.

  He stepped out onto gritty gray Wilhelmstrasse and pushed through the refugees at the U-Bahn entrance to his bicycle. He looked into all the pale faces around him, smelled the people’s filthy clothes and their weak and hungry breath. He ran back to the office, grabbed the rest of the chocolate, and handed it out to some of the children. It was cool outside, the sun shining on the dusty rubble and the children’s pitiful wool caps. Farther to the east a black pillar of smoke billowed sideways into the sky. Passing ragtag troops, he followed the street until he reached the bank of the Spree. The bridge was destroyed, and he pedaled along the water to the nearest temporary crossing. The Spree was brown from floating debris and earth that had been churned up by bombs, and on the opposite bank was a row of corpses.

  Trucks with Red Cross tarps were parked around Charité Hospital, and hundreds of people with crude bandages lay on stretchers out in the courtyard. The dark building had become an orchestra of moaning and pleading. Fritz pushed his way down the halls to Marlene’s office. She was not there. Cases of bandages were stacked up in her office, and prosthetics were piled on her cot. He asked a sobbing nurse where Marlene was, and he was told she was in the operating room, helping the professor.