by Bill Mesce
“These Germans, Stahl and the rest, what do you know about them?”
Bertie began rooting through the folder again. “I had some background material on them in here when the announcement was made. Yes, here it is. Hm, I’d forgotten about that.”
“What?”
“Vogler was with Krupp, but the others worked for German subsidiaries of American companies. Stahl and Emmerich were managers at Adam Opel, which is a subsidiary of the American General Motors Corporation. Lindz was at Ford’s Cologne subsidiary.”
“How powerful were they? Senior management? Executive level?”
“Hardly”
“Then who were they to be dealing with the likes of Sir John Duff and Joe Kennedy?”
“Well, the material I got at the time positioned them as young talents on the rise in German industry.”
“Next generation of management. Managers of tomorrow.”
“Quite. If you want to be flowery about it.”
“Nazi?”
Bertie shook his head. “But not anti-Nazi either. When Ford-Germany offered Hitler a million marks on his birthday back in ’39, a lot of the management tried to be part of the giving to curry favor with The Chief. But Lindz stayed out of the fray, notably so considering he was being groomed for future advancement with Ford. None of these four men has ever openly supported the Nazis or openly criticized them, even early on, before the war.”
“Very careful of them.”
Bertie’s face twisted, unsure. “Perhaps, like Sir John, it’s a mix of the practical and the altruistic.”
“How so?”
“At the time the joint venture was announced, I spoke with Erik Stahl. Charming enough young man, not what one would expect. German factory manager, one tends to think of a human machine, all facts and figures, Teutonic efficiency and all that rot.”
“But he wasn’t.”
“I asked him what, if anything beyond simple profit, motivated him into this joint venture. He said he felt a certain empathy with Sir John. You see, Stahl lost his father in the first Great War.”
I sat back in my chair, musingly sucking on my apple-flavored fingertips. “Where are they now? The three who are still alive: Stahl, Emmerich, and Lindz?”
Bertie shrugged. “Building trucks and tanks for the Wehrmacht, I should imagine.”
“What was Vogler doing on that plane from Lisbon?” Another shrug. “He was traveling under a phony passport. The guess at the time was he must have been trying to get himself out of Germany.”
I rose and thanked Bertie for the apple and the information, then withdrew to my desk to type up our conversation as notes.
“Eddie?” Bertie called. “Whatever this is, be careful. Sir John has many friends. I doubt any of them are friends of yours.”
*
“Here now, are we burning the midnight oil?”
Cathryn could do more with a raised eyebrow than Leslie Howard in three hours of emotive simpering. That brow, raised barely a fraction, telegraphed surprise, annoyance, nostalgia, anger, and apprehension.
“Eddie. How did you get past the sentry?”
“Press pass, my sweet. Have you forgotten what it is I do for a living?”
“Ah, as it happens I do remember. You pester people. And here you are a-pestering.”
“So, these are the new digs?” The ante-office was very much her: organized clutter about her desk; a dainty vase containing a half-withered bloom; several little reproductions of Arles on the wall behind her.
“Ah, still fancy your van Gogh, I see,” I said, perusing the reproductions.
“I don’t know what worries me more,” she replied. “That you might be here on business… or not.”
“I can’t say I care for the defensive frame of mind government work has given you, love.”
The door to the inner office swung open. He was a middle-aged man, waspish, not too bad looking in a chinless, thinning-hair sort of way, just pulling on his coat. “I’m off, Cathryn. There’s no need for you —” He saw me and froze. “Oh! Pardon. I wasn’t aware you had a visitor.”
“No visitor, Mr. Berwyck. This is my —”
“Eddie Owen, Mr. Berwyck,” I said, shoving my hand into his and pumping like a fiend.
“Owen?” He looked to Cathryn.
“That’s me,” I said, now taking his hand in both of mine and continuing to pump. “That’s me, the old ball-and-chain.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m Mr. Owen. The husband.”
“Ex-husband,” Cathryn said.
“Husband, ex-husband, a rose by any other name, eh, Berwyck?”
He managed to extricate his hand, but there was nothing to do about his comprehensive state of puzzlement. “Yes, well…”
“Just here making Christmas greetings, Berwyck old man,” I said. “Didn’t mean to disrupt operations. Carry on, don’t mind me.”
“Oh, no, fine,” he said. “We’re closing up shop for the evening, anyway Ex-husband, was it?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
“In a civil-law manner of speaking,” Cathryn said.
“Yes, well…” He produced a polite smile, still unsure if he’d come into a situation where he’d rather not be. “Yes, well, as I say, I’m off. Cathryn, there’s no reason for you to stay, nothing that won’t wait until tomorrow. Mr. Owen, it was nice meeting you.” He tendered his hand reluctantly, but this time I let him off with a gentlemanly shake.
“The pleasure’s been all mine, Mr. Berwyck. Happy holiday, safe home, cheery-bye!”
He was still looking over his shoulder toward me as I hung in the office doorway, waving ta-ta to him as he passed down the corridor.
“You can be incredibly mean,” Cathryn said.
“I thought I was rather charming.”
“That’s when you’re meanest.”
“I noticed he doesn’t wear a wedding ring.”
“Neither did you.”
“Anything I should know about? A little late-night dictation, perhaps? Chasing you round the desk and all that?”
“Mr. Berwyck is — and has always been — a perfect gentleman. Besides, I believe he still lives home with his mum.”
“Oh,” I said. We both smiled.
But her smile became guarded. “Why are you here, Eddie? I hope it is not in some grand romantic gesture on the eve of the holidays.”
“Eddie Owen? Grand romantic gestures? Hardly.”
I looked for signs of disappointment in her eyes but saw none.
“Business, I’m afraid,” I told her. “Purely professional.”
She began closing her desk drawers with a protective firmness. “No.”
“You haven’t even let me —”
“No! Mr. Berwyck is a perfectly nice man. He’s been damnably decent to me, and I’ve no reason to suspect him of any of the kinds of things you’re always poking about —”
“Calm, love, calm. I’m not here about Mr. Berwyck. I’m certain he’s a perfect angel. Even on first meeting, my heart filled at the sight of him —”
“Stop.”
“I’m not even here about any misdoings at your lovely little ministry. Are there any misdoings I should know about?”
“Other than that the sentries seem terribly undiscriminating about whom they let in…” Her desk was now neat and tidy, her coat and purse on her desk waiting to be donned.
“All right, then,” I conceded. “As I recall, at our last meeting you mentioned, in passing, between the divorce decree and the forever-farewell, your employment here. By the way, did I mention that this is very nice? Your cubby? Delightful. Enjoying your job, are you?”
She remained stone-faced.
“You deal with land leases for the military. You must have some sort of background file on available lands, lands for purchase, all that sort of thing. I want to check on some land that was acquired up in the Orkneys a few years ago. I’m sure you must have some information on it.”
“Possibly.
Probably. But all that information is confidential.”
“As well it should be, and no one ever need know where I got it.”
She was uncommitted, but curious. “What is it you want to know?”
“This was on Orkney Mainland. Since that’s where Scapa Flow is, I’m sure that one or another of the military agencies would have vetted any significant land acquisition on the island.”
“Land acquired by who?”
“Sir John Duff.”
She sat expressionless for a full count of five before she laughed. “You’re after Sir John —”
“I’m merely trying to find out about a land purchase.”
She shook her head, still smiling. “First, you want me to violate this ministry’s confidentiality, and secondly, you want to pillory Sir John Duff. If you can manage to run over Winston Churchill’s favorite dog on your way home, you’ll have had a full day. What is it you think Sir John has done?”
“I don’t know that he’s done anything. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“You’re after some fair-sized game, Eddie.” She bowed her head contemplatively. “Maybe I have forgotten what it is you do for a living.” Facing me again, her eyes hard and fixed: “Mr. Berwyck is a nice man.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“I would not take it kindly if he were somehow dragged into your newspaper —”
I put a hand on my heart. “No reason that he should be.” It was still another minute before she sighed, as if disappointed in herself, then drew some keys from her desk and bade me follow her down the corridor. “We keep those records in the vault,” she explained.
I followed her first down one hallway, then another until we reached a cul-de-sac terminated by a large, metal door. When she said “vault” I had pictured one of those massive bank vault doors of black-painted steel. This was merely a heavy metal door painted the same lifeless beige as the corridor, and opened with one of the keys on her ring. She reached inside and flicked on a light. I saw a cramped compartment stocked with rows of locked file cabinets, and metal shelves laden with tied-shut portfolios and tall ledgers bound in green baize. I made to follow her inside but she turned and stopped me with a fingertip firmly applied to the tip of my nose.
“You stay out here,” she declared. She reached inside the vault and dragged out a wooden chair, which she placed outside the door by the corridor wall. Like a reprimanding schoolteacher she pointed me into the chair, then went inside. I heard her rattling about, unlocking his drawers, shuffling through folders. I lit a cigarette. “When was this?” she called out.
“Sometime around the beginning of the war, I should think.”
“Hm. Are you sure about the date?”
“No.”
“Is that a cigarette I smell?”
I noticed the NO SMOKING sign near the door and hastily stubbed the fag out on the floor. “Someone must have passed by,” I said.
I heard another hm. “There is an inquiry here from Sir John’s offices about the possibility of acquiring property on Orkney Mainland, but it’s dated December 1940.”
“That must be it.”
“And yes, there was a query raised by the Defense Ministry. There was some question about letting Sir John set up shop so near a major RN anchorage.” She leaned her head out. “I thought Sir John did a lot of work for the military.”
“He does. It’s a little complicated.”
She retreated back into her hole and I heard her continue to leaf through her papers. “Somebody vouched for him, though. Oh, Eddie…” Again she put her head out. This time the raised eyebrow conveyed the reproving pity one might display toward someone who had volunteered they were willingly about to leap into the gaping maw of a sizzling volcano.
“Let me guess,” I said. “The Duke of Windsor?”
“You knew?”
“Informed guess.”
“The Duke of Windsor, Eddie? Sir John? You don’t need to run over the PM’s dog. You’ve pretty well gone the limit.” I thought I detected a certain grudging admiration on her face, but that may have been a Christmas wish on my part.
“So Windsor writes to the military joes, tells them Sir Johnnie is all right in his book, and that’s the end of it.”
“Not quite,” she said, and there was more shuffling. “There’s another query from the Navy that following July. It seems Sir John never got round to building whatever it was he had originally told them he was going to build there. The Navy wanted to know what was going on. It looks like they were still concerned about the security reliability of Sir John. Let’s see, ah, this must be the response. A letter here going on about the unanticipated difficulty in building and maintaining some sort of manufacturing plant on Orkney. You would think that would’ve occurred to them beforehand.”
“One would think.”
“And then there’s some polite language that essentially tells them to leave Sir John alone.”
“Also from Windsor?”
“No. Odd. Again it’s somebody vouching for Sir John, but…”
“But?”
“It’s from the Foreign Office. It’s a security issue; I would’ve expected it to be addressed by one of the military or intelligence offices. I can’t imagine what interest the FO would have in this. Eddie, whatever are you getting yourself into?”
“I’m not quite sure I know.”
I could see it in her face, the old instinct to warn me off, to behave myself, to do anything to make my life a little safer and saner. But by this time she knew better. She went back into the vault to put things away, back safely under lock and key.
“Cathryn?”
“Yes?”
“When we were together… What did you think of what I do? I mean, you know: the job?”
Her movements ceased for a moment as she paused to think. “I assumed it was like this. You flitting here, flitting there, prying round —”
“No, no. You misunderstand. What did you think about my job?”
“You mean my opinion?”
“Aye.”
I heard a file drawer close, the key turn in the lock, then the vault compartment went dark and Cathryn was in the corridor, pushing the heavy door closed and locking it. “What does it matter now?”
“I’m curious.”
“All right, then. Sometimes I thought you were no better than one of those sex criminals who go peeping through people’s bedroom curtains. Most times I thought you were something akin to a ghoul.”
“Oh, well, I suppose that’s a step up from bedroom peeper.”
“Do you remember when you were gadding about in Mexico, back in the twenties?”
“Covering the Civil War.”
“On your way home your route took you through America. You stopped at some small speck of a place, in Texas, I think it was. They had lynched a Negro the day before. Men in white hoods, they’d beaten the boy and hung him by the road leading into town. No one knew why, at least no one would say. You wrote about that. Not a news item, really. I suppose you’d call it more of an essay. I still remember the headline: Rule of Fear in the Land of the Free?
“The headline wasn’t mine. A little much, I thought.”
“I was very proud of you then, Eddie. There were other times as well. Even now. I still read everything you write.”
I began to open my mouth but she seemed to know — or at least fear — what might come. She shook her head. “It was never what I thought about you and your job, Eddie. You could have been off to uncover the Great Truth of All Things. But I would have been home, just as lonely.”
*
I don’t know how many times I walked the span of Westminster Bridge before I finally stopped mid-river and lit a cigarette. London was lost out there in the night. Either end of the bridge disappeared into darkness. Below where I was leaning against the balustrade, I could hear the water lapping at the columns of the supporting arcade. I thought it odd how only now, in the middle of the second Great War, was it qui
et enough for me to hear those licks of water. In peacetime, the traffic would have been heavy enough that I’d never hear a drowning man cry out for help.
Bedroom peeper. Ghoul.
It was cold out there on the bridge. I flicked my cigarette away. The red tip dwindled until it was swallowed by the blackness. Even way up there on the bridge I could hear the quick little hiss of the cigarette’s dying.
Himself and his missus lived in a neighborhood of tidy little row houses out in Notting Hill; all small, white-trimmed, a square of garden in front, a slightly larger square in back for a yard, both winter-withered and flattened in the miserably cold rain that had been pouring down all day.
“I should sack our damn meteorologist, don’t you think?” he said as he admitted me. “Light snow was the prediction. Snow for Christmas, he said. By Christmas we’ll be needing a boat, not a sleigh.”
The rooms were as neatly kept as the outside of the house, except for a comer of the parlor where a small paper-strewn desk sat. He was alone.
“The Missus is off with her mum,” Himself explained. “Christmas tidings and all that.”
“The old dame is still alive?”
“Just to spite me. So, we’re bachelors for the night, eh?”
He cracked a half-dozen eggs and we supped at the kitchen table, the conversation remaining innocuous throughout; a few tales from the office, a nostalgic anecdote or two.
“I’ll tend to the washing up,” he said, “and you see to a fire, eh?”
I poked round the parlor fireplace until I got a comfortable blaze going, then settled into one of the well-worn chairs, watching him through the doorway as he puttered over the kitchen sink. He was still the same looming figure he was at the office: bulky and thick-waisted, the large head with those baleful eyes focusing on one over the top of his spectacles. Yet, bent over a sink of suds, clad in a tattered cardigan I’m sure his wife would have gladly consigned to the church jumble sale, he seemed almost pitiable. It was an air enhanced by a spate of coughing that doubled him over.
“All right in there?” I called, starting to climb out of my chair.