Fifth Column

by Christopher Remy

  Fifth Column

  Christopher Remy

  Copyright © 2011 Christopher Remy

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1449985602

  ISBN-13: 978-1449985608

  Fifth Column, n. – a group of sympathizers or supporters of an enemy engaged in espionage or sabotage within defense lines or national borders

  PROLOGUE

  Sofia, Bulgaria - March 1941

  Bill Donovan bounded up the steps of his private car on the Orient Express. Although in his fifties, he had the build and vitality of a younger man, and his traveling companions struggled to keep up. Waiting passengers gawked at the sight: a silver-haired civilian in his Savile Row suit leading a gaggle of British Army officers. Donovan, his blue eyes sparkling with energy, was clearly in charge.

  What motivated his haste this time was a chance to relax. His Bulgarian hosts had arranged for Donovan and his entourage to have their exit visas processed while they boarded the train, avoiding a wait in line. With a loud sigh, he sat down in one of the plush, wing-backed chairs in the car and dropped his leather briefcase on the floor beside him. Calling this my private car is nothing but a cruel joke, Donovan thought as his escort of Army and Intelligence officers, almost twenty of them, pushed their way in.

  Commodore Cooke, his MI6 liaison, took the chair across the aisle. Cooke, with his stringy brown hair and sunken cheeks, had the gaunt, ill-fed appearance that Donovan was beginning to think was a requirement for a commission in the British Army. Cooke produced a battered pewter flask out of his equally battered briefcase and took a swig.

  "I'd say we've earned this bit of luxury, eh, Bill?" he said, looking around at the first class accommodations of the famous train. Two mahogany dining tables filled the forward half of the car. The rear half, where Donovan and Cooke sat, was set up like the parlor of an English manor house, with thick blue carpeting and red velvet curtains. A steward came through the car offering ersatz coffee and weak tea – the war's intrusion into the carefully maintained atmosphere of refinement.

  Donovan grunted in agreement and opened his briefcase, pulling out his diary. He wanted to record the day's events lest he forget any details to report back to Washington. On his second trip to Europe as President Roosevelt's special representative, he was in the middle of a frenetic trip around the Balkans. His mission was to gather intelligence where he could and exhort each nation to resist the Nazis, promising American support and arms. Today he had met with King Boris, an affable man who had taken four hours to tell Donovan everything he wanted to hear, promising nothing. Now they were on to Belgrade where Donovan hoped for more concrete results.

  "Mr. Donovan?" Cooke's aide stuck his head inside the car. "Sorry to bother you, sir, but it appears the customs chaps have lost your passport."

  Donovan frowned. "How the hell did that happen? I handed it right to them."

  "Don't know, sir, but they insist it's not a problem. They've called over to the American embassy and a duplicate is being worked up as we speak. Shouldn't take long." He touched the brim of his cap and withdrew. Donovan and Cooke shared a look and shook their heads in disbelief. Donovan was about to return to his diary when a civilian he didn't recognize entered the car.

  One of the Army officers from his security detail got up to challenge the man.

  "May I help you, sir?" the stout Scotsman said with his hand barring the way. Everyone in the car looked over at the intruder. He was tall and had blonde hair that was almost white, with a thick lock of it falling across his forehead. Built like a lumberjack, he was dressed in an expensive blue suit with a brightly colored tie.

  "I'd like to have a word with Mr. Donovan if I might," he said, smiling. He spoke American English with a slight accent.

  "It's all right, Leftenant," Donovan said.

  The young officer, motioning to the man to raise his arms, patted him down and nodded. "He's unarmed," he announced.

  The man walked down the aisle and bent over close to Donovan's ear. "I'd like to speak with you alone," he whispered.

  Donovan looked him over for a moment and said, "I'm sorry to say I don't have much time, we're set to leave any moment, Mr--?"

  "Priester will do. And it should take about twenty minutes before they're able to produce your duplicate passport and get customs to process it. I will only ask for half that time."

  How the hell does he know about my passport?

  Donovan, the retired Army colonel and veteran of the trenches in France, noted that there was something more of the soldier than the businessman in the way Priester carried himself.

  "All right, Mr. Priester," he said, standing up. The two men walked to the door and stepped down onto the platform. Though the wartime crowd was smaller than in the train's heyday of the Thirties, it was still enough to jam the platform with passengers, well-wishers and porters. The noise from the throng echoed in the station.

  Donovan led the man past the last three cars of the train and beyond the edge of the crowd. He folded his arms, nodded and said, "You have my attention, sir."

  Priester spoke for exactly the ten minutes he had promised. Donovan listened and did not interrupt, even though a torrent of questions was running through his mind. When he finished, "Priester" took his leave and walked toward the crowd on the platform. Donovan watched him disappear into the mass of people and then stayed for a few minutes more, lost in thought. Cooke's aide spotted him and caught his attention, holding the duplicate passport aloft and gave him the thumbs-up.

  Donovan got back on the train and stared out the window, feeling Cooke staring at him, waiting for an explanation. He didn't say a word to anyone until they reached Belgrade.

  1

  Ann Arbor, Michigan - April 1941

  Angell Hall was one of the oldest buildings on campus at the University of Michigan. According to cynical doctoral candidates this was precisely why it was selected as the location for nearly every dissertation defense. The Parthenon-like exterior and steep steps were surely meant to intimidate the weak.

  Johanna Falck was not feeling intimidated. Nor did she have any tolerance for her fellow students who seemed to do nothing but fret about defending their thesis. Why bother? Either you are confident in your work or you aren't. If you weren't after all these years, Johanna thought, you had bigger problems than what building you're in and who doesn't like you. Johanna didn't have many friends among her fellow students, and that suited her just fine.

  She sat in a chair in front of a basement classroom, with her dissertation committee lined up in a row directly opposite, gathering their papers and making final preparations. She looked around the room, anxious to get started. The classroom, with its cracked plaster and yellow paint, was small and oppressively hot, even with the row of casement windows wide open. The old radiators hissed and she could hear pipes clanging in the wall. She just wanted to get it over with so she could get out of this miserable little room.

  Sitting at the end of the row on the committee was her mentor and thesis advisor, Professor Charles Daly. His flyaway silver hair clashed as always with his impeccable suit, complete with carnation in the lapel. He gave her a lopsided grin and a conspiratorial wink. She was glad that she had taken his advice and arrived early so she could relax before they got started. Let them be the ones struggling to get their things together on time. She was not glad that she had taken the advice of his wife, Eve.

  This past Sunday, as usual, Johanna had dinner at the Daly house. As she was putting her coat on and getting ready to leave, Eve had handed her a paper shopping bag.

  "What's this?" Johanna had asked.

  "It's a new dress, curlers and some makeup," Eve had said, putting Johanna's arm through the handles. She had held her hand up as Johanna began to obje
ct. "I can see right through you young lady. You think that if you wear those awful schoolmarm dresses and wear your hair like a shrinking violet, you won't get attention for your looks. Well, it's failed. Men still notice, trust me. If Charlie weren't so old and if I weren't such a catch myself, I'd never let you in my house."

  When Eve struck a model's pose with her roly-poly body, Johanna had rolled her eyes.

  "Now, they don't let observers into dissertation defenses, but I'll be getting a full report from Charlie. I expect to hear how stunning you looked, and how those old curmudgeons were too flustered to give you a hard time."

  As Johanna now sat waiting for the History Department Chair to begin, she was feeling conspicuous and ridiculous in her yellow dress and bright red lipstick. Standing nearly six feet tall with thick blonde hair that came halfway down her back, she was used to standing out. Rather than feeling a sense of pride as most women would, she considered it a burden and preferred to be noticed for other things. Nonetheless, she had agreed to humor Eve. She had needed help from one of the girls in her boarding house to help her with the curlers. After a couple of hours, they were able to get a stylish wave in her blonde hair and now she couldn't keep it out of her face. Yet another reason to get this over with, she thought.

  "Shall we begin?" Professor Lowe asked.

  Lowe, Department Chair, was notorious for the glee with which he carried out his interrogations, especially when he had actually taken the time to read the student's work. In direct contrast to Charlie Daly, he was the classic rumpled professor. His tweed jacket was frayed at the cuffs and his pants were too short, revealing sagging socks. The fringe of white hair running around his head grew over the tops of his ears and spilled over his collar. His horn-rimmed glasses had the splayed look of being sat upon one too many times.

  Lowe went through the formalities. "Doctoral candidate: Johanna Falck. Thesis: 'Putting National Socialism in Context: An Examination of German Social and Intellectual History.' Gentlemen, who would like to start?"

  Following tradition, Daly went first. He asked her to state the central thesis of her work and talk about the research she had done, letting her get warmed up before his colleagues started in on her. After Daly finished, the rest of the committee members began to ask their questions.

  The other three men on the committee were polite but asked probing questions about her research, her conclusions and what other historians had to say on the subject. Lowe, however, kept silent. He waited until it seemed the others were winding down, and then straightened in his chair.

  "Miss Falck," he said, flipping through the pages of her paper, "perhaps you may have heard that I was opposed to your selection of thesis?" He looked up at her over the top of his glasses.

  "Yes," she replied.

  "Of course, I was overruled, but I'm still not convinced that your paper is a valid course of study for a doctorate in History," he said, with eyebrows raised, waiting to see her reaction.

  "Yes. What's your point?"

  "My point is that you have selected a subject that can not rightly be called history, but rather current events. How can you, or we, judge the value of your research and your conclusions without the perspective that time and reflection offer? Don't you feel that the currency of the events in Germany prevent just the sort of analysis that can only be done through the lens of the past?"

  Johanna suppressed her desire to roll her eyes. How many times is he going to bring this up? She and Daly had spent her entire first semester at Michigan arguing this very issue with Lowe.

  "No," she replied.

  Charlie raised his hands, giving her the stay calm sign. She ignored him.

  Lowe shifted in his seat. "No?"

  "No. As I have said before, many times I might add, it was just that challenge that brought me to this subject. Placing current events in their proper historical context is not easy, but that's exactly why I chose this topic. My study of German intellectual history and social trends gave me the background to study National Socialism and the so-called New Germany."

  She paused to see Lowe's reaction. He gave none.

  "As I stated in my paper, when I traveled to Germany – Berlin during the Olympics and Heidelberg in Thirty-eight – I made a point of analyzing what I saw in the context of my previous study."

  "Yes, I think everyone here is aware of what happened to you in Germany."

  Johanna bristled. That's none of your goddamned business.

  "That's neither here nor there," she replied.

  Lowe cleared his throat and made no sign that he had heard.

  "Let's move on to the substance of your thesis. You state repeatedly that the general opinion of current scholarship is that there is something innate in the German people making them susceptible to authoritarianism and dictatorship, and that this opinion is wrong. I find your argument against this to be wholly unpersuasive."

  "OK." Johanna shrugged.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Your criticism is vague. I don't know how to respond to it. What specifically are you taking issue with?"

  Johanna tried not to look at Charlie Daly, but she saw him grimace out of the corner of her eye.

  Lowe had a perplexed look on his face.

  Bad acting, Professor, Johanna thought. You'll have to do better than that.

  Daly cleared his throat.

  "I think the point Miss Falck is making is that there is nothing innate in their German-ness, speaking of them as an ethnic group, that makes Germans susceptible to men like Hitler, but rather something in their culture."

  Lowe raised his pen in the air and said, "That's exactly my point! You are German, are you not, Miss Falck?"

  "I was born in Germany, yes. My family immigrated to the US when I was six years old."

  "Yes, yes," he replied with a dismissive wave. "So, as I said, you are German. But you do not find yourself drawn to Hitlerism. To the contrary, your vitriol for the man and the Nazis in your dissertation is quite fierce. Doesn't that contradict your argument?"

  Johanna shook her head. He can't be serious.

  "No, in fact I think it proves my argument. You are missing the distinction between German ethnicity, or race, if you will, and German culture. I am ethnically German, but I grew up in and absorbed American culture, not German.

  "People who know Germany say they can't understand how a nation that gave the world Beethoven and Geothe could surrender to totalitarianism. They should be looking at what else the Germans gave the world.

  "In my dissertation I give the examples of Hegel, Herder and Nietzsche, who theorized about the supremacy of the Volk and the Will over the individual. Hegel was a well-known admirer of Prussian authoritarianism. I have included several examples from contemporary Germany that I believe show just how much those ideas have been absorbed by German culture, specifically in the Nazi view that the individual is nothing and the state and the race are everything."

  One of the other committee members, a youngish man who had the habit of smiling while he talked, regardless of what he was saying, held up a finger and asked, "While I think you've done an excellent job here, really quite impressive, I do share the concern of the slipperiness of current events. Since we are talking about a totalitarian society here, how can you be sure that the overwhelming support for the Nazis that you write about is not the result of cleverly staged rallies and the like?"

  "That was an issue I planned for before I made my trips. How to separate pageant from reality? The truth is that it was not difficult at all. I traveled quite extensively throughout Germany in '36 and saw no evidence of any opposition to the Nazis. Quite the opposite. And of course, when I spent a semester at the University of Heidelberg before the war started, students and professors were united in their enthusiastic parroting of Nazi racial pseudo-science and Jew-hating nonsense.

  "Let me put it to you as plainly as I can. If there was any opposition to Hitler, it was small and is now gone. Germany voted in the Nazis, handed total control over to Hit
ler, and is now fervently behind his wars of conquest. While I left shortly before the attack on Poland, I saw the gleeful demonstrations in the streets after the Austrian Anschluss in ’37 and after Munich in ‘38. They are all guilty, all sixty million of them."

  The questioning continued for another hour. At the end, Professor Lowe asked her to leave the room for fifteen minutes to allow them to speak privately. She went to the door at the end of the hallway and opened it, getting a breath of fresh air. She closed her eyes and felt the strengthening sun on her face, glad to be out of that stuffy room. The dissertation defense was a stupid ritual and she was happy to be done with it.

  Professor Lowe called her in. She walked back down the hall and into the classroom, hating the contrived suspense. All of the committee members were standing near the door. Professor Lowe took her hand and said, "Congratulations, Doctor." They all came over to congratulate her, except for Daly who waited until they were all gone.