The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  My wife, he thought. She’s my wife. Marlene.

  “Nothing happened to me,” Fritz says. “Unbelievably, I didn’t receive so much as a scratch throughout the whole war. Physically, that is.”

  “You really ran right into all that?” Veronika asks.

  “It was over by the time we got there. The city was so hot I could hardly breathe. I was stumbling over corpses. I don’t know how I ever got through. I don’t know how long it took me either. I had to take massive detours because of the fires. That raid was a particularly bad one for the city center. I started in the place where I best knew my way around: the Foreign Office, on Wilhelmstrasse. I climbed through a melted window and took one of those tunnels I told you about that ran from the Office to the air-raid shelter under the Adlon.

  “And then? My God. There she stood. Marlene. We were reunited down there. We laughed and we cried. You know what else? My apartment was still standing. The neighboring building was badly hit. But my place, our wartime love nest, was left unscathed. We were able to go back there, around four in the morning. The dead were everywhere. Everything was burning. It was an indescribable scene. Ghastly. But Marlene and I? We were hand in hand, in love, beside ourselves with excitement—all because we’d soon be alone together again.”

  Berlin burned and collapsed, her streets blotted with smoldering corpses, the sirens wailing, heavy smoke stinging people’s eyes and clogging their lungs. A scorched person leaned against a black streetlight, its lipless mouth with stumps for teeth open wide for one last scream at the foul skies above.

  In the apartment, Marlene and Fritz clawed at each other, their kisses like bites, their bare bodies on the floor those of mere creatures wringing out a savage love. They joined together more deeply and fervidly than ever before, writhing around together before at last becoming one sweating body stammering out their love.

  Over the next few chaotic days at the Office, Fritz tried to locate von Günther but couldn’t reach him anywhere. No one seemed to know where he’d gone. Work slowed to a trickle in those few offices that were still operating, and some departments had moved out completely, their phone lines disconnected, communication now impossible. Only two receptionists remained, and they sat in neglected rooms, knitting. The rasping sound of People’s Receivers still blasted from some rooms, Goebbels screaming about retribution and bombs upon bombs, and about the German Volk’s fanatical will to persevere in this great hour.

  Some mail did still come for von Günther, as did messages delivered by bewildered men from the telegraph and radio desks. Fritz sifted through it all immediately, determined what information would have relevance for the Americans, and then summarized it.

  Motorcycle couriers covered in grime brought communiqués from Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop informing them of internal decrees. Fritz could hardly believe the topics—mundane matters like carpools, new letterheads, shortened vacations, washrooms closing on account of Berlin’s diminishing water supply. He would thank the courier, sign for the document, and chuckle.

  Whenever he got the chance, he navigated his way through the debris-constricted streets and paths to Charité Hospital, hoping to at least put his arms around Marlene. The Charité was now little more than a frontline hospital tent. He didn’t know how Marlene could stand it. The constant screaming, groaning, and crying disturbed him so deeply, he left feeling as though he himself had been wounded. The Marlene he held tight in his arms wore a gown damp with blood and had no words left to speak.

  “As soon as I track down von Günther, we’re getting out of here,” he whispered. Marlene shook her head. She smelled of sweat, cigarettes, and disinfectant. She pointed at the back of a tall doctor farther down the hallway who was passing between the wounded into an operating area shielded by a tattered tarp. “The professor,” she murmured. “He’s staying until the very end.”

  “We’re not,” Fritz said. He placed his hands on Marlene’s cheeks, but she avoided his eyes. She was caught up completely in the world of the screaming wounded, and Fritz admired her work ethic and her dedication. Soon, he thought, soon. He watched as a soldier passed, carrying a rifle on his shoulder and a machine gun in his hands. The man was covered in the same gray grit that coated the concrete floor, where trails of dried blood were marked by shoe prints.

  Out in the courtyard of the Charité, a sea of stretchers held the wounded, their bloody bandages oozing red or dried brown, interrupting the drabness of war with their color. Fritz was picking a path through the chaos to the street when he heard a long-forgotten sound from his past.

  “Uncle Fritz!”

  The voice sounded exhausted. Fritz looked into the grimy faces beneath the bandages and the shot-up helmets. He saw a hand waving and stepped over the corpses, making his way through the wispy cigarette smoke and dull moans.

  “Horst!”

  The man on the stretcher propped himself up on his elbows. His face had aged, and his hair was graying. Fritz crouched down. Horst smelled like stale urine and earth. “This sure is something,” Horst said.

  “Horst. My God . . .” Fritz wanted to put a hand on his friend’s son’s shoulder or cradle his head against his chest, but he restrained himself. “How are you doing?”

  “Got it twice in the upper thigh. I’ll be all right. So you’re still in Berlin?”

  “The Office hasn’t fallen down completely yet. God. Imagine us seeing each other like this.”

  “Cape Town sounds pretty good now, doesn’t it?”

  Horst lowered himself back down, rested his head on his bent arm, and patted at his uniform pockets. Fritz said he still had cigarettes and lit him one.

  “Did my mother really kill herself, Uncle Fritz?”

  “You don’t have to call me uncle anymore.”

  “Did she?”

  Fritz sat on the cold ground next to Horst’s stretcher, pulled up one leg, and found room among the misery around them to stretch out the other.

  “She wasn’t well, Horst.”

  “No one is well here.”

  “You must get out of Berlin.”

  Horst gazed at him with eyes much too old for his face. Fritz was just grateful not to hear the boy raving about heroism or one last battle.

  “You know how it looks to me? Like my father was betrayed by someone,” Horst said.

  The boy’s words stung Fritz and turned his stomach.

  Horst shook a fist. “Can you imagine, Fritz? Someone betraying the fact that Papa went to Ireland?”

  “Who could have done it?”

  Orderlies and nurses were lifting several stretchers and hauling them through the splintered double doors, into the hospital’s maws. Why had he run into the boy here? Fritz couldn’t look him in the face.

  “He was a good man, my father. A good man.”

  Something was surging up inside Fritz, fluid and watery. His fingers cramped around his bent knee.

  “When I catch this traitor I’m going to take him out, Fritz.”

  “Horst, just make sure that you can get to the West.”

  “Do you know something? About Dublin?”

  Fritz laid a hand over his eyes. “He always wanted . . . to live with you and Käthe in Ireland.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Horst flicked his cigarette stub carelessly toward the gray expanse of bodies. He waved Fritz closer to him. Fritz could smell his stale breath.

  “The war has brought out the very worst in us.”

  “I’ll try and get you out of here, Horst.”

  Horst grabbed on to Fritz’s forearm, his grip weak. “Don’t worry about it, truly. I didn’t get it so bad. I’ll be fine. What are you going to do next?”

  “Whatever I’m assigned. I’m not quite sure yet.”

  “Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime. Good luck.”

  “Same to you.”

  As Fritz tried to stand, his muscles nearly gave out. He fought to straighten up, buckled a moment,
and caught himself.

  “Someday, after the war, it’ll come out who it was,” Horst said. “I’ve killed so many people. One more won’t matter.”

  Fritz looked back around at Horst. On the beach at Camps Bay, the sea washed in bright blue and turquoise. The boy had been a towhead then.

  “Every goddamn corpse is one too many,” Fritz said.

  “You’re not serious?”

  “I am, Horst. Completely.”

  “Would it have changed anything if I had been here? With my mother?”

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “You have another cigarette?”

  “Sure I do.” Fritz drew the pack from his jacket with trembling fingers. As he lit Horst’s cigarette, their hands brushed each other.

  “I’m going to put a bullet in that bastard’s head,” Horst said without taking the wagging cigarette from his mouth.

  Fritz bent down and grabbed him by the collar. “The fucking Nazis are to blame for all this. The fucking Nazis. Filthy depraved vermin. If anyone betrayed your father, it’s them.”

  “You might want to be more careful, Fritz Kolbe.”

  He pushed Horst down and walked away. Once Fritz got to the battered front gate, he heard Horst’s voice cut through the moaning that blanketed the ground like fog.

  “It didn’t really matter,” Horst said.

  Fritz turned. Horst was up on his elbows, his face white.

  “That we didn’t catch any fish. It didn’t matter.”

  Fritz left, and among the countless people wandering the city, so desperate and worn out, those who happened to see him all saw a man crying. But there was nothing special about that.

  A man in a leather jacket stood at the window in Fritz’s office. Another in a stained suit sat at his desk, flipping through documents.

  “Fritz Kolbe? Gestapo.”

  Why was he not scared? He’d nearly wet himself at that first border crossing in Basel, and when the Russians had kidnapped him, he’d gone completely weak from fright. Now, he felt nothing. Perhaps the war and his document smuggling had used up all his apprehension or buried it so deep that it couldn’t find a way back out. He wondered if it was the same guy who questioned Marlene. Had he laid a hand on her?

  “Where were you during the attempt on the Führer’s life?” the man at his desk said.

  “Paris,” he said.

  “You oversee top-secret material here.”

  “Nothing ever goes missing.”

  “You were recently in Switzerland.”

  “That’s right. Let me get to my desk,” Fritz said.

  The man sucked in his cheeks and scrunched up his forehead, trying to look dangerous. He slowly pushed the chair back to give Fritz room. Fritz handed him a memo about Paris, tapping on von Günther’s signature. He then pulled his travel papers from the drawer and added his diplomatic ID with its visa stamps.

  “You are not a member of the Nazi Party.”

  “What the Führer requires now above all are those who can maintain order, absolute order. Take a look around this place. I’m the one keeping this office running.”

  “We’re going to your apartment now.”

  “I can’t leave yet. I’m one of the few who remain that Ambassador von Günther can still rely on.”

  “Shut your mouth and get moving,” the man at the window said.

  “And you’ll take responsibility? What if the Herr Ambassador—”

  “Get going!”

  Fritz stood still. He silently counted . . . Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.

  “Fine,” he said, “I’ll take you to my apartment.”

  At the apartment, they heaved his furniture away from the walls, broke dishes, ripped the mattress from the bed, and busted open picture frames. The safari photo sailed onto the kitchen floor.

  “What’s with all the blank paper lying around here?”

  “I write.”

  “You what?”

  Fritz showed them a pencil.

  “Heil Hitler,” they said. And then they were gone. Their malice hung in the air like the stench of spoiled food.

  It took three more days for Fritz to reach von Günther by phone, in Salzburg. He told Fritz he was traveling to naval headquarters next and then would be returning to Berlin. Fritz should attempt to keep things running as well as he could. The connection was poor, but Fritz sensed von Günther’s nervousness.

  Back at home, Fritz spun the globe Marlene had repaired and drank cognac. Despite the water shortage, he’d scrubbed the sheets after the Gestapo men touched them. They were not yet dry, so he and Marlene placed an old wool blanket beneath the covers.

  From the West, the Allied armies under Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Patton were advancing ever closer to the heart of Germany; in the East, there was no stopping the oncoming storm of the Russian army. The Luftwaffe barely existed anymore, and Hitler had become a ghost for good. Many were whispering that he wasn’t even alive anymore.

  The closer combat operations got, the more Fritz began to grasp the truth of Will Priest’s and Musorksky’s words: the war would continue. Differently, maybe, yet it would continue, especially for Fritz. He hadn’t been able to see it before, but now he was beginning to realize what they’d meant. The obscure, inexplicable espionage campaign he’d waged with such resolve would not end simply because Hitler was dead and the weapons were cooling off. He tried to think of ways to safeguard Marlene and himself and to secure a future for Katrin. But what could he do without help? People like Dulles, Will, and Greta Stone knew tricks a man like Fritz knew nothing about. And how many people had he made enemies of along the way?

  When Marlene came home to him late that night, he told her everything he’d been thinking. He said nothing about running into Braunwein’s son.

  “People will understand in the end, won’t they, Marlene?”

  “Who could understand any of what’s happened here?” She kissed him. “You’re always quoting your father’s adage about doing what is right and so on. But in this place and time? Even the right thing comes out looking dirty, degenerate. There’s no way around it. In the end, though, we will go on living. Understand? We will live.”

  The next day, von Günther quietly showed up at the Foreign Office. He looked agitated, his broad face covered with red splotches. He was on the phone for over an hour, and then he packed up a bunch of files, took them to the bombed-out rear courtyard, and dumped them into the burn barrels, now distended from all the heat. When he came back he shut the door to Fritz’s office and stood before him at the desk. He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Still no chair?”

  “I haven’t had time, Herr Ambassador.”

  “I’m arranging a car for you, Kolbe. A full tank, with two more gas cans in the trunk. Yes? Ration coupons, travel permits, all of it. I need you to drive to Bavaria and, and . . .”

  Fritz waited. “And what?” he said finally.

  “Have you heard what’s happened in Bern?”

  Fritz lit a cigarette and pushed the pack across to von Günther. What could have happened in Bern? At this point, there wasn’t anything left that could go wrong.

  “It’s von Lützow. All these characters are losing their nerve, looking for a way out. And there he sits in Switzerland, with no idea of the challenges we face here. Disgusting.”

  He talked, Fritz thought. Von Lützow couldn’t take the pressure and he talked. He felt at the revolver in his jacket pocket, then paused. Think it through, he told himself. If von Lützow had spilled anything, von Günther wouldn’t be speaking like this with him right now. Fritz’s name could not have come up, not yet. Maybe von Lützow hadn’t turned himself in, but rather Weygand had had him arrested because he’d aroused suspicion. Fritz clenched his teeth.

  “It’s that same question of greatness,” von Günther said. “Not everyone can achieve it. Imagine if the Führer had surrounded himself only with people who possessed greatness. You get my meaning? Not his degree of greatness, no, that
is a rare thing. But a certain caliber of greatness, yes? My point being that greatness cannot be transferred, nor can it be predicted.”

  What was the man talking about? It seemed to Fritz that Nazis just spat out a bunch of nouns, clumsily strung together. Fritz felt certain that verbs were important too. They conveyed movement and life. This was precisely the reason why those Nazi speeches always sounded so dull to him—nothing moved in them. The words were all just stones.

  “So what’s happened, Herr von Günther?”

  “The man put a bullet through his head. At home. The children were in the house. Can you even imagine such a thing? What an asshole.”

  “Von Lützow couldn’t do it,” Fritz says. “Another one dead.”

  “And the gold transfers?” Wegner asks.

  “After examining the documents I gave them, the Americans were able to poke their noses into even more matters—and after the war too. Von Lützow had met with the man whose card I’d given him. Later on, I kept hearing how von Lützow had been so well liked. Among the diplomats abroad he was considered serious and not fanatical, an agreeable sort one could easily talk to. Almost a tragic figure, torn between his loyalty to the Fatherland and his scruples.”

  “Do you know what became of Weygand?” Wegner asks.

  “I have no idea, as usual,” Fritz says.

  Wegner flips through his notes. He scratches his head, not sure whether he should laugh or curse. “Living well in Austria. He married von Lützow’s widow.”

  “Oh God,” Fritz says. “So, let’s sum up the results of my last wartime trip to Bern . . . A man, likely German, was shadowing me and then disappears without a trace, and no one speaks of him again. There is a failed attempt to recruit me that surely ends badly for Musorksky. Von Lützow puts a bullet in his head while his daughters are playing. And me, I go turn my pistol on some harmless, fed-up engine driver.”

  Fritz smooths out the papers, sliding them around on the table.

  “Musorksky was right about Gehlen,” he says. “He was a vicious Nazi, through and through. And the Americans? They hand him a brand-new life on a silver platter. I ran into him one more time. He asked me if I wanted to work for him. For him, any hostility he felt toward me was beside the point. And no one would have stood up against his decision if I’d agreed. One snap of his fingers and my reputation would have been permanently rehabilitated. It’s insane.”