“I know,” he says.
“I spoke with the reporter,” Wegner says. “He served in a volunteer brigade during the war. He fought against the Nazis and lost his left arm. He was still filled with blind rage over it. He’s the one you told your story to, Herr Kolbe?”
“When I was leaving the Americans’ office and heard someone call me a traitor . . . I already told you earlier that I thought my story needed to be written down. Anyway, this reporter had agreed to sit on the story and keep my name a secret. It felt good to finally tell someone. Not everything, of course—never all of it. Nothing personal, nothing about the Braunweins or von Lützow, nothing about Marlene. I gave him a broad outline of my espionage activities, though. I needed to get it out, goddamn it.”
“I can understand, Herr Kolbe,” Veronika says.
“Where is Marlene?” Wegner asks. Fritz looks at him. In the lamp’s glow the young man’s face looks sallow, his eyes like dark marbles.
“Eugen Sacher did tell you about it, am I right? He told you what happened. He’s still worried about me, isn’t he?”
Veronika and Wegner light cigarettes at the same time and fog themselves in. Fritz sorts the papers, intending to put them all back in the cabinet. Then he pauses, snaps the cabinet door shut again, and opens the woodstove’s blazing mouth wide.
“Did you get everything you need?” he asks.
“Did you, Herr Kolbe?” Veronika asks.
Fritz does not understand why these two are so fond of him. But they are, each in their own way. He can see that they like him and have sympathy for him, for whatever reason.
“Not yet. But I’ll keep trying,” Fritz says.
“Why did she leave you?” Veronika asks.
Fritz sits, the papers on his lap, the memories deep inside him. There is silence.
“General Gehlen,” he says at last, “turned himself in to the Americans in Southern Germany. He demanded to speak to a top-ranking officer. When Dulles got word of it, he left Bern at once. Gehlen was brought to the States, along with several others. He claimed he’d stashed in the Alps hundreds of crates full of secret files about the Russians. He was interrogated for months. Dulles told me about it later. He said Gehlen was actually a good man and no Nazi. In fact, Dulles said, he was rather surprisingly apolitical, if you didn’t count seeing communism as an enemy. The rest of it didn’t really matter to him. Gehlen was a man of service and great intelligence, highly professional, clever, virtually indispensable.
“It was just as Musorksky predicted. I told Dulles that Gehlen was a committed Nazi. No, Dulles said, he was committed only to his work, and from now on the Americans would be the ones to set his agenda.
“After that, I worked awhile for the OSS in Berlin, gathering material against Nazis, even running a small department. But they got rid of me before long. Priest figured Berlin was too dangerous for me because of the Russians. Marlene and I took a ship to America, where we were supposedly Dulles’s guests. Mind you, he barely had time for me. Marlene and I had too much time on our hands, and she wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing in the States. I ended up taking her back to Germany, of my own initiative. Around that time, that reporter’s article was published. As you can imagine, it wasn’t too hard for some people to figure out just who had been smuggling documents out of the Foreign Office. The name Fritz Kolbe became notorious. Priest was in Berlin at the time. All he said was Goddamn it, Fritz, what have you done? Have you lost your mind?”
“And Marlene?” Veronika asks. “What did Marlene have to say about it?”
Marlene threw the newspaper onto the table. The paper struck an open pack of American cigarettes, causing the individual white sticks to roll across the tabletop. Through a glued-shut window, the sun shone onto the mismatched furniture, paper-thin carpet, and their few surviving books. Marlene planted her hands on her hips. She stammered, unable to find the right words. She picked the paper back up and threw it into Fritz’s lap.
“Page three,” she said.
Fritz skimmed the article. Two more installments were promised to follow. “The Spy Who Betrayed Hitler.” A black-and-white drawing showed a bald man with a hook nose bent over a dimly lit desk. An older man in a suit sat at the desk, and another man stood in a corner behind him. The bald man was pressing a finger on a map rolled out to its edges. “Bomb this,” the caption read.
“I’m not bald,” Fritz said.
Marlene stamped her foot and screamed at him. Fritz had never seen her do that before. He tried to make eye contact with her from his shabby armchair.
“I thought you didn’t want to play the hero!” She slapped at the paper. “What are you doing with your life, Fritz? What?” She yanked her nurse smock from its hook. “I’m finally working again. I have been for a few months now.”
“No one’s giving me work. Certainly not the Germans.”
She lit a cigarette and pointed at his face with the hand holding it. “We found this apartment. Here in Berlin, in broken-down Charlottenburg, all because I’m a nurse. Two rooms, even if the dividing wall’s just a curtain. When we want, we can stroll through the palace gardens, even though they’re just as bad. We finally have a little peace and quiet, some small prospects for the future. And what do you go and do?” She cursed and slammed the door shut behind her.
Fritz stared at the newspaper. He hadn’t wanted to upset Marlene; that was the last thing in the world he’d wanted to do. “I want justice,” he said, as if the goddess herself were standing right before him.
He called William Priest at the OSS office near Memorial Church. Priest turned surly upon hearing his voice. “Greta was here,” he informed Fritz. “You know what she said?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“That stupid Fritz Kolbe.”
“I thought Fritz Kolbe was dead.”
“He’s alive again now.”
“You can all kiss my ass,” Fritz said and slammed down the phone.
“I testified at the Nuremberg Trials. Whenever Priest came near me he’d make a face and say that something just didn’t smell right. I tried to get work—I reached out to the newly formed government agencies and to what would become the new Foreign Office, but I kept coming up empty.
“Since then, von Lützow has been portrayed as an anti-Nazi who was driven to suicide by peculiar circumstances in Bern. Former members of the Foreign Office have had their pretrial detention credited to their sentences and are now finding new positions. They’re all taking a stand against me. It didn’t take long for me to get labeled a traitor to the Fatherland and a murderer. Meanwhile, hostility between the Russians on one side and the Western Allies on the other was growing by the day, and Berlin was becoming more dangerous for me.”
“Do you know what von Günther said, Herr Kolbe?” Wegner says. “Get this: von Günther was one of the few to admit to a degree of guilt, but he got a very mild sentence since it couldn’t be proved he took part in any crimes. Then when the topic of Fritz Kolbe came up, he made you out to be a hero. He said that he wouldn’t have dared try taking action the way you did. However . . . Hold on, I have the quote here somewhere. Ah yes, here it is:
I knew very early on what Herr Kolbe was doing. He must have known he couldn’t take top-secret files from the Office and hand them over to the Americans without me knowing about it. I would never claim that what I did was on the same level as Herr Kolbe’s actions—I didn’t have the strength this man had to resist Hitler. However, I must mention that it was I who watched Herr Kolbe’s back for him. He didn’t know I was doing it; I never told him everything that I did so that he could carry on. So if you’ll permit me to say it, and I hope I won’t be misunderstood: you could say that I was Fritz Kolbe’s right-hand man—his unseen helper.
The tragedy of his story comes down to the fact that from where he sat in the Foreign Office, he lacked the greater perspective I had. So what happened in Bern, when Herr Kolbe pressured Consul von Lützow, can be attribut
ed to Fritz Kolbe gravely misjudging the situation. He is a great man, but he drew the wrong conclusions in the wrong game. Now, regarding Herr Kolbe’s recent efforts to find a position in the newly formed German government . . . It’s a sensitive subject, upon which, in all modesty, I wouldn’t wish to pass judgment. I’ve made amends for my deeds. I assure you, we men in the Foreign Office were the very ones who served as a bulwark against the spread of National Socialism. I can’t help but wonder whether Fritz Kolbe had sought out the right friends within this system.
Fritz stares at Wegner. His heart thumps in his chest. He leaps from the chair, looking for something to smash. “Von Günther said that?”
Wegner holds up the page containing the statement. Fritz rips it from his hand and tears it up. He kicks the stove’s hatch open and tosses the shreds into the blaze. “That cowardly fucking pig!” he screams.
“He’s a lawyer in Mannheim now. His wife and daughters still live with him.”
Fritz slaps his hands to his face. From out of the past he hears that voice calling, Kolbe? Kolbe!
“So he was watching my back, was he?” Fritz stammers. “Watching mine? That goddamn bastard.” He sits down again, shaking his head.
“Is it true that no one ever found out who was behind the attack?” Veronika asks.
“Will Priest tried everything,” Fritz says, hanging his head. “He’s convinced that the Germans had a hand in it, but he never found any proof. You know, he did play a part in setting up Gehlen in his new role working for the Americans. By 1946 the US was already fully funding the Gehlen Organization, an intelligence agency run by Gehlen and his Nazi comrades for the purpose of delivering valuable information on the Russians.
“Was it someone who was afraid of what I knew—Gehlen’s people, the Russians, the old-boy network? Priest said I should get out of Berlin for a few weeks, told me there were elements in play that were making him real uneasy. Marlene and I had just gotten our apartment looking nice, there in the rubble of Berlin, probably the largest and most unlikely construction site the world’s ever seen. We were getting used to a life in which there were no bombs falling, no corpses in the street. It felt strange, the way life was returning to that devastated city: people sitting out in front of cafés, surrounded by mountains of rubble and watching carts on rails get loaded up all around them. We couldn’t quite believe it, but we were living. Hitler was dead, none of us had ever been a Nazi—and we were living. We were loving one another in peace for the first time. The hoped-for end to the war had become a reality. Marlene was so happy. We lived modestly, but that didn’t matter to us. I remember that my globe, the one Marlene glued together, was standing in the middle of our little living-room table. This same one, here in the cabin.
“Good old Will Priest urged me to leave Berlin for a while, along with Marlene. She didn’t want to go. She was extremely angry with me about that article. And my God, was she right. We should have stayed. But I convinced her. If I hadn’t, she would have stayed in Berlin and everything would have turned out differently.”
Fritz goes in the kitchen, runs water into the kettle, and sets it on the gas flame. He gets the teapot ready and leans on the table for support.
After it happened, he distanced himself from it all. He hadn’t known about the quote Wegner read him. So, von Günther says he watched Fritz’s back for him? The kitchen utensils clank as he pulls open the silverware drawer and looks at the revolver.
It had all gone so wrong. It had taken him a long time to grasp that all the lies and the masquerading had created a split personality. His espionage work had developed in him an ability to bury things more deeply than he might want to admit, or was capable of seeing. When he told Veronika and Wegner that Marlene had gone shopping in Bern, he had in that moment believed the words, and he’d put his faith in the truth of them. They had come out so clear, with such an utter lack of hesitation, he might simply have been saying the sky is blue. An irrefutable claim. Everything flowed together now: von Günther’s statement, the incident in Southern Germany, his memories of the prosthetics in Marlene’s hospital office.
Steam shoots from the kettle. Fritz pours the tea and then grabs cups from the cabinet and an antique porcelain sugar bowl. He was such a wreck, for heaven’s sake. He probably couldn’t blame Eugen Sacher for wanting to send him to a psychiatrist.
He carries the tray back into the main room, now warm from the fire fed by paper documents from his past.
“Will Priest had me temporarily assigned to a unit in Kempten that was identifying Nazis and assessing less crucial intelligence provided by Gehlen before sending it on to Dulles in Berlin. Will figured two or three weeks would be enough for the dust to settle.”
Fritz remembers things more clearly now, the walls within him having crumbled like the buildings of Berlin. He remembers Kempten, Southern Germany, the Allgäu.
“Marlene and I were forced off the road by another car,” he says. “We tumbled down a hillside, over and over, everything spinning. I heard Marlene screaming. It went on and on, everything twisting and bending around me. There was light and then darkness; sky above, then down below. Glass like diamonds showered all over us. The car crashed against a boulder, tottered some, and then lay still, something hissing as if someone were letting out a long sigh. I was wedged in one spot and couldn’t turn to Marlene. But I kept hearing her, you know? I felt her misery, her pain. She was whispering my name, but I couldn’t turn her way. I heard shots. Soon I heard someone approaching. It was a voice that was familiar to me. Will. I screamed at him to first get Marlene out, Marlene first.”
Fritz screams, “Marlene! Marlene!” He leaps up, knocking over the chair. “It’s all right there. All of it.”
Fritz stares at the images and writings he’d pinned to the lime-washed beam of the cabin, at his life—at his two lives, maybe more than that. Time both stands still and overlaps, chaos and calm fighting for the upper hand within him.
“I must apologize. This whole time, I’ve been talking about someone I never wanted to be,” he says.
“That you mostly didn’t want to be,” Veronika says.
“Sure, mostly, perhaps—but that’s bad enough. I thought I was doing something unforgettable. But it turns out the only one who hasn’t forgotten is me.”
“No, Herr Kolbe. You’re not the only one,” Veronika says.
Wegner lifts a pen. “This?” he says. “It never forgets a thing.”
“I don’t know what happened after that,” Fritz tells them. “I lost consciousness when Will was pulling me from the car. I only woke up later, in the hospital.”
After the accident, Fritz wore a turban-like bandage around his head; his left leg was in splints, and his hands were wrapped in thick bandages. It was hard to hold a cup with both hands. Yet every morning Fritz walked down the hospital corridor to the other ward and brought Marlene that cup of coffee.
He looked out the windows at Southern Germany—at the rolling meadows of the Allgäu, green waves under a blue sky. His heart was racing the way it had during his most dangerous moments in Bern and Berlin. Marlene’s bed was positioned so she could see outside. Whenever he entered her room she would turn her head to the window and the morning sun would find her face. He would put her coffee down and try talking to her. She never said a word. Those times when she did try turning to him after a few minutes, her eyes welled with tears. Fritz had known about her condition for days but felt stuck in his feelings of complete bewilderment.
“I’m so sorry, Marlene,” he said.
She turned her head back to the window and looked out, her skin stretched over her cheekbones. Fritz could see she longed for peace.
“Speak to me, darling. Please. Say something. Anything. Scream at me. Curse me. But please just say something.”
She was wearing gray hospital pajamas, buttoned to the top. The blanket was white. There in the place where Marlene’s left leg should have been, the blanket lay flat.
“Marlene, it was .
. . it was just a stupid impulse. When that American officer called me a traitor, I . . .” His bandaged hands trembled. “I didn’t mean to do it, Marlene. You know I love you.”
She wiped at her eyes.
“I love you,” he said, “I love you.”
“I know, Fritz.”
“It was just that split second,” he cried. “I was only thinking of myself that one time, just that once.” He tried wiping his eyes with his bound hands. “Katrin will be so fond of you, Marlene.”
She gazed at him and smiled. He knelt before her bed and she stroked his sparse hair. “I love you too, Fritz.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I love you.” She withdrew her hand from his head and pointed at him. “I want to live, Fritz. Live.” She reached for the back of his neck, pulled him to her, and kissed him. “You betrayed us.”
The next day, she was gone. A nurse gave Fritz the letter that had been left for him—by a very amusing lady:
Dear Fritz,
I’m not one to go around assigning blame. I don’t believe in it, at least not when it comes to people like you, or Marlene, or me—or even Jimmy, the American GI I’ve been hitting the town with in this funny old Berlin of ours. He’s adorable. Anyway, after all that’s happened, I wanted you to know: I’m looking after your Marlene, and if you tell me how and where I can reach you, I’ll keep writing you to tell you how she’s doing. And of course, I’ll write you if I think the moment’s arrived when you can try things with Marlene again. She really does love you, believe me. It was just all too much. That’s not too hard to understand, is it? Man, Fritz. Marlene and you—it’s so amazing what you two dared to do!
Try not to worry too much, my dear Fritz.
Best wishes,
Gisela
“This is what happens when people get close to me.”
“Herr Kolbe, don’t say that,” Veronika says.
Wegner has written everything down. He looks at Fritz and sips from his teacup. It’s clear that he wants to say something but can’t find a way. Fritz drinks his tea. “Better than beer actually,” he says of it.
The Honest Spy Page 34