I pulled the minty brown stuff down from the cupboard and set it on the table. We stood over it. Two glasses appeared, from the baron. I nodded for him, good work, baby steps are what you take. I poured. We lifted the glasses, touched them. Sipped.
“Now, how easy would it be to mock up a little stencil?” I asked him. “Have it say, oh, I don’t know, the words ‘Top Secret’—in German. Or ‘Melmer?’ ‘On Strict Orders of the SS-Reichsführer,’ stuff like that, making it look real official-like. Theoretically, that is.”
The baron’s eyes had been looking a little bloodshot. Now, as he thought this out, they lost most of the red and gained a lot of sparkle. “Theoretically? A stencil? Ach, well, that ruse there by itself, that would be child’s play—a ‘piece a cake,’ as you Amis say.”
And we laughed, just the two of us, for as long as we dared.
Twenty-Two
TWO DAYS LATER, THE JULY sun was back. Through the Munich checkpoints and into Schwabing I drove my Harley. Little Marta rode in my rear spring saddle, bouncing on it and grasping the loop handlebar and grinning at me in the rear view mirror. On down the Schellingstrasse to number 35 we drove, and I steered into Katarina’s courtyard. I tooted the horn.
Katarina appeared in the doorway wearing a floral apron over a simple blue dress. Seeing Little Marta, she rushed over and lifted the girl off, kissing her on each cheek. “It’s good to see you,” Katarina said to her in German, “so good to see you well.”
Little Marta laughed. “Likewise, Frau Buchholz.”
“My, but you are so big now.” Katarina stood Little Marta up straight, smoothed the girl’s pageboy bangs and Peter Pan collar. They freed Sally the teddy bear from my saddlebag. The bear was heavier than I’d thought; carrying Sally across Central Europe had only made Little Marta stronger. “So, go inside now, Katarina told her. “Ask for a Herr Wiesenberg. He might have half a treat or two, but you must remember to be polite.”
Little Marta curtsied. I tossed her a Lucky for Emil and she ran off. Katarina and I watched Little Marta push through the double doors clutching Sally. Kat’s hands found her hips, clamping down. “Well. Here you are. How long is your leave?”
“Two days. Self-appointed. Nice to see you, too.”
“Much has happened. I do not see you. I have not heard from you.”
“They kept me cooped up. It was nasty, Kat. I don’t have words for it. Major Membre … he didn’t deserve it.”
“I don’t mean that. You, I mean. You take your good time coming here.”
“Maybe I needed the time.”
“To sulk, yes? You are brooding. Is that what you’re doing?”
“No. Not anymore I’m not.” I touched her cheek, and she let me. She kissed me hard on the lips. I said: “Let’s go for a stroll, take Little Marta. Our little gal’s good cover.”
I pulled on my civvies and we headed out with Little Marta between us, grasping our hands, Sally the bear riding along in a little rucksack Kat had for Marta. A few blocks away, a small carnival had found a home on a lot cleared of rubble. Little Marta jumped up and down and we let her run ahead, taking it all in. They had wooden pee wee rides powered by hand and foot—paddlewheel canoes on strings and pedal-cars on cables, a carousel propelled by a donkey. No electricity needed here. “Floh-Zirkus,” read a sign, a Flea Circus, and another read “Wild Treasures,” but it was only used stuffed animals I saw, all nappy-furred bears and one-eyed monkeys. They had none of those good old carnival smells either (hot sugared almonds, cotton candy, sweetened popcorn), but Little Marta didn’t seem to know or care. She made straight for the carousel. I caught up and sat her on a giraffe. A man with no teeth slapped the donkey, the carousel took off and ole no-teeth played an accordion.
A row of stray sandstone blocks served as adult seating. I sat Katarina down, her eyes searching me and her face tight, a mask of itself. “Emil has found out some things,” she said. “Abraham Beckstein was searching for a train. That was why he came back. And, I must tell you about your Colonel Spanner. He is not who he says he is, in no way.”
“I know. I know all about it.” I told her what I had learned about the man calling himself Lieutenant Colonel Spanner, CIC agent. Major Membre had proved a sort of hero in the end. In his way. I told her about the train, told her everything, exactly what was in it and why, and what I was supposed to do with it. I had set myself up for the rawest of deals. It didn’t make me look good. I could be implicated, framed even. Going over his head was one vast teeming minefield, because I couldn’t know who he had in his pocket. The sadistic deserter had become a sadistic, double-dealing operator of unknowable means. I told her about the baron’s role. I didn’t have to tell her what it all meant. “I had it wrong from the beginning,” I told her. “I shouldn’t just have been asking about corpses, torture. About Abraham. I should’ve been asking about Colonel Spanner. That train. Follow the money, not the victims. I’m sorry, Kat.”
As I spoke she stared straight ahead, not blinking, her knuckles white on her knees. Every time Little Marta passed on the peewee giraffe, Katarina forced out a smile. “Don’t say that, I could’ve done this or that,” she said. “You would’ve gotten nowhere. No Heimgauer—no German—was just going to offer you that information. Germans have learned to know nothing at all, even when the evidence is right in front of them.”
“It was right in front of me. Me, an Ami. So what does that make me?”
Her look softened. “You haven’t heard the rumors about you. No, of course, you haven’t. And how could you? Who was going to tell you to your face? You’re their conqueror—”
“To hell with that. You tell me. To my face.”
Little Marta passed again, waving. We waved.
Katarina said: “Some were saying you were an enforcer planted and run by this Colonel Spanner. To keep an eye on what he’d reaped. You could launch a putsch, if necessary.”
So even the hapless natives knew me better than I did myself? I spat out a grim laugh. A Lucky butt hung from my fingers. I let it drop and ground it into the ashen dirt with my boot.
“You mustn’t take it the wrong way. None of this surprises or even upsets Heimgauers, you see. So many factions vied for primacy during the Nazi regime, over these last twelve years. This was the daily rule. And now, you Americans come and you are All-Powerful. But we are smarter than you think in our looking-the-other-way manner. We are cautious for good reason. We know the Major Membres of this world are never, ever acting alone. Others operate them.”
“He’s not just a bad apple. That’s what you’re saying.”
“The bad apple is only a scapegoat covering for the real criminals high above. You can’t have bad apples without that tree. You Amis, you don’t think your trees can get rotten because you’re the victor here, but maybe you are not so much the liberator as you think.”
“And you? What did you think?”
“I told you, I knew you were different. Not at first, but I learned that you were.”
Little Marta passed. We broke into smiles for her.
“You stayed clear of me long enough,” I said. “God, and here I was thinking it was only because I was in the same unit as Major Membre.”
“You showed me what you are. What you can be. You wanted truth.”
I was shaking my head. “Truth, sure, but I wasn’t listening. All I heard was Major Membre and his jawing on. I couldn’t get past that. Back of my mind, he had to have done it all. And to think—I’m supposed to be the one teaching you.”
“I showed you,” Katarina said.
Our hands had found each other’s. Little Marta saw it as she passed around.
Katarina dropped my hand. She jerked up and marched toward the carousel. She froze halfway there, her back to me. Clenching at the folds of her dress. She kicked at the dirt. And she stalked on back, spat at my feet and kept on going by me.
“Hey. Wait …”
She swung at the air as if swinging a club. I grabbed her by the arm and
pulled her back. “I’ll pretend that wasn’t a left hook. What? What is it?”
“You. Here! I thought it was impossible to take revenge. A lost cause. And now you give me the chance? Now, of all times. You, of all people. Like this?”
“Hey. Better late than never, sister.”
“But do you know what you get yourself into? Do you?”
“Yes. I do.”
She pushed at my chest, but I held her there, squeezing her shoulders to me. Little Marta passed again, frowning now as she saw us. We couldn’t help but frown back.
“How could you?” Katarina said. “You never fought in the war.”
On the way back Katarina was still steaming so I sat her down on the edge of a shrapnel-scarred fountain among the ruins of the university. She sat with legs far apart and hands hanging off her knees, like a dogface after a long firefight. Little Marta sat the same way and giggled about it. That made Kat come around, and she dipped her fingers in the water and stirred back and forth to make little waves. Little Marta did the same. They did it ‘til Kat was ready for more of me.
“Colonel Spanner, a heartless man like that, he figures I would not do a thing,” she said in English so Little Marta wouldn’t understand. “Even if I found out. This is the kind of man he is.”
Little Marta had gone back to stirring the fountain water. I spoke in English: “I can’t let Colonel Spanner have that train. We can’t. You know that, right?”
Katarina nodded.
Little Marta had stopped stirring, her head perked up. Katarina stirred again to keep her busy.
“I have a plan,” I said, “the makings of one, anyhow.”
Little Marta nudged Katarina. A couple professors were strolling by, eyeing us as if we were students they should know. We lowered our heads until the profs passed.
I told her my plan, how it could work. She nodded along, pursing her lips, and she didn’t laugh at it or even speak the whole time I told her.
When I was done, she led me and Little Marta onward, across the broad Ludwigstrasse and past the rubble of the State Library. She walked ahead a while with hands clasped behind her back, now like some field marshal on the eve of a great battle. She turned to me. “This will not work without Emil’s help,” she said as we caught up. “I can help here. But what about the baron?”
“He’s in. If he balks, I’ll make him.”
We walked faster, squeezing Little Marta’s hands and lifting her over curbs. Rounding a corner, we found a tree line punctuated by trailheads. Beyond lay Munich’s famed English Garden. Little Marta ran ahead and picked a trail. Inside the wood, the air was cooler.
“I’ve seen inside those freight cars,” I told Katarina in English. “It was only about a week ago, and I got a good look. The baron got a better look, plus the man has an eye. There’s a mishmash of crates, trunks, suitcases. Mostly crates. I think I can get the crates, but you’ll have to score plenty of trunks and suitcases.”
“Emil can. In Dachau he can.”
Little Marta waited for us against a tree trunk, her heavy one-eared Sally staring from her rucksack. Woods surrounded us now, a sky of green leaves with sparkles of golden light. Katarina was glowing from it. Despite our plotting, or maybe because of it, I wanted to kiss her here.
“It requires precise timing and dependable manpower,” Katarina said. “Nothing a little Kompensation wouldn’t fix there. But the key is Colonel Spanner suspecting nothing. He must believe nothing has changed.”
“Don’t call him a colonel. He’s not one. But nothing has changed, as far as he can tell. I’m acting CO. Just how he wants it. His new crony boy.”
The next morning, Katarina and I met Emil Wiesenberg at the Jewish Displaced Persons camp on the grounds of the Deutsches Museum. The museum occupied a narrow island on the Isar River, just skirting Old Town, and Emil met us in the middle of the bridge. He led me and Katarina on over and along a path that snaked along the river island’s shore. Through the trees we could make out the museum’s red sandstone buildings that resembled a parliament or a university and once in a while, when the path veered inland, we got a closer look at the camp itself, at the crowds trading, boys playing chess, women hanging washing, old men painting. Gaunt faces staring from windows. We sat on a low stone wall at a far end of the island where the muddy Isar River rushed by. Behind us, among the trees, a woman in a white dress wandered barefoot playing a saxophone. She was trying to, in any case—her high notes warbled and her lows sputtered.
“That is Lucy,” Emil said. “I know what you’re thinking: Lucy’s nuts. She’s really not. She says, ‘I play every day, simply because I can.’ And so she does.”
Katarina nudged me. “Tell him.”
I cleared my throat. “That’s not nuts. Want nuts? I’ve got nuts for you.”
I told Emil about the train, about my plan, about everything except where the train was. As Emil listened, he stared into the Isar’s stream, at the brown water churning and shifting and surging. His temples pulsed. He coughed once. He stubbed out his cigarette and started another.
“This is the other stash,” Katarina added, “the one you never hear about.”
“Yes, yes,” Emil said. “These are our relics, one could say. Our reminders. I’m not surprised by what’s in your train, Mister. I have wondered where the family treasures and heirlooms would turn up, there were so many. I’ve imagined the exclusive antique shops fifty, sixty years from now, filled with these items, but you cannot tell them from the general estate pieces—from pieces of those who died old and warm in their beds.” He fell silent, his hands clenched in his lap. He coughed again. Stubbed out his new cigarette and started another. I let him. A man like that wants to stub out a new butt, let him. I picked it up for him.
Lucy’s saxophone honked and shrilled on, in and out of the rush of the river.
“I am honored by your coming to me. So, yes. We will help. We will do it. The plan must run through my ring.”
Emil turned and faced us. We stood, in a triangle. Eyeballing each other, as if holding up glasses to toast.
“You’ll be pretty active setting this up. What if word gets out?” I said.
“About my gang? It won’t, Mister. We’re always up to one job or another. Everyone knows that, so no one will be the wiser. And the wiser? They don’t stay so wise for long.”
Twenty-Three
FOR THE NEXT DAY AND A HALF, Emil met people. Katarina, Emil, and I met too, at locations intended to throw off Spanner in case he was getting smart to our ways. As we watched a soccer game in a stadium south of Old Town (1860 Munich vs. Bayern Munich, 4-1), Emil told us he was putting together just the right mix of brains and skill, lugs, and lumpers. As we huddled in a pub inside the sprawling Hirschgarten Park, choking back Einfachbier, that thin ersatz beer caused by shortages of hops and barley, Emil reported he had the trucks and paid off the decoys. Afterward, we strolled the Hirschgarten arguing details, and Katarina pointed out that we were only a few trees and a fence removed from Spanner’s new home in the Nymphenburg Palace, which bordered the park. How the man had pulled off that one, I didn’t want to know.
“We better get back,” I said. “I should be in Heimgau to wait for the call.”
That evening, Little Marta and I bundled up and mounted my motorcycle. We kissed Katarina goodbye. I held Kat close, her face in my neck and chest. The ride back was cool and windy and Marta held on tight the whole way. I didn’t stop once.
Back in Heimgau I sat on my hands as Acting CO, as best as I could. I did negotiate, quietly with neighboring county detachments to score more food and medicine for my hurting burg. Yet for the most part? Lived like a lord. Polished my brass. And those few days brought the grimmest interlude I could imagine. Toe the line and do nothing, yet act like you care? How do all those stooges in power sleep at night? It must be their baby blankets.
After five days of it, I got my call in a white envelope with no return address and postmarked Munich. Inside was one typed page, w
hich told me to meet the train in Dollendorf at 0700 hours on Friday, August 3rd.
One week away. My first thought was to find Katarina in Munich. I left Captain Wilks in charge, headed north, and rode the Harley hard and fast, swerving into corners, passing all vehicles and columns and the endless lines of refugees.
Once in Munich, I headed straight to the Nymphenburg Palace.
The palace itself was a grand baroque copy, yet another mock Versailles to please yet another show-off king, in this case a direct ancestor of the baron’s beloved Crown Prince Rupprecht. I parked in its sweeping C-shaped courtyard. A gate of black iron blocked the entrance arch. The Yugoslav DP sentry saw me and unslung his rifle. “You!” sentry grunted, “Go wait behind in garden!” and he waved me on through, eyeing my back.
Behind the palace I sat on the terrace steps for five minutes. No one came to me. The last thing I wanted to do was appear a threat so I put on my dark flyboy sunglasses and strolled around, making myself as casual as could be. I wandered the planned garden’s symmetrical, landscaped pathways. Hard dirt and scorched scrubs had long replaced flowers and topiaries in the beds and plots, but the gardens still looked vast and tranquilizing, stretching on to the horizon. I was the American tourist. I perused statues and fountains, ponds and bridges over canals, all of it so well sheltered by a perimeter tree line that the city’s grimy stench invaded only with a good wind.
As I was admiring a statue of Neptune, Sergeant Horton ambled up in a blue pinstriped suit that was far too classy for his meaty face. Of course, he wasn’t a sergeant, and probably never had been. Spanner had probably busted him out of some stockade long ago, and Horton played the grateful muscle ever since.
Liberated Page 21