The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  For all at No. 76—Emilia, Nikolai and Clare—Maureen most of all

  To my late father, James Loftus

  The following text is a facsimile of a decrypted “most secret” Nazi Party cable, dated October 2, 1944, and captured a week later by an Allied special unit at Gestapo headquarters, Strasbourg.

  The original teleprinter decrypt exists and is held in the massive vaults of the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, U.S.A.

  A16/937850302/006.4/02/10/1944

  Streng Geheime Reichssache!

  to be routed through Reichsmarschall Goering’s liaison to Party Leader Bormann for permission to onsend to Sicherheitsdienst/OKW/appropriate Luftforschungsamt field units

  Memo unter vier Augen! (our four eyes only!—translator)

  Mein Liebe geheerte Herr Reichsleiter Bormann

  Luftforschungsamt has decrypted a series of 142 cables from various Swiss banks to correspondent banks throughout the Reich on behalf of a Colonel Dulles, American intelligence operative in Switzerland.

  Dates of cables December 1942 until present. Last cable September 18 1944. LFA analysts believe this Dulles is organizing a banking network for German flight capital overseas in anticipation of the defeat of the Reich.

  This criminal defeatism is claimed by Dulles to have the sponsorship of the highest officials of the Reich.

  Please advise.

  Goering

  Reichsmarschall

  Reply:

  Matter already known this HQ. Appropriate measures taken. Bormann

  ACT ONE

  With a woman, always make good use of a secret

  HONORE DE BALZAC

  I

  HENDERSON HARBOR, UPSTATE NEW YORK

  NOVEMBER 1911

  Night and the lake and a distant blurred cry in the silence: John Foster Dulles opened the big cottage front door and caught himself in the simple hall mirror for a moment. He listened, stock-still. There was only quiet from above, from the bedrooms under the long eaves, the quiet of a sleeping house.

  Outside, the trees stood guard, the last of their foliage filigreed by moonlight. His shoes scraped on the polished floorboards. At twenty-four, he was practiced at late night entries; he and his brother Allen had often snuck back into the house after a stolen dip in the lake, bollock-naked, dripping and smirking, creeping up the staircase, thieves in the dark, their shoes in their fingers.

  Foster listened again, willing a clue from the stillness.

  This fall of 1911, Foster’s last year of law school, had been altogether a troubled season, with low leaden clouds and the strong Lake Ontario waves full of storm wind crossing from the Canadian steppe, reaching over the dock’s smooth woodwork for the rough creek-stone stairs above: there was something occult in this November’s unseasonable weather. The rain was relentless and the nights were restless and tropical and close, more June than Thanksgiving eve. Nature seemed out of kilter—even the horses in the Reaveys’ stable up Old Lake Road slept poorly, pawing and kicking at their stalls.

  The neighboring farmers reckoned something foul was afoot tonight. So said Sully, the chain-smoking fisherman who rowed John Foster from Duck Island, where he’d spent the day cramming for the fall exams then fishing by dark, toward the Dulleses’ lantern-lit pier, Sully’s cigarette glowing orange as he breathed. The farmers had killed a pair of deformed calves born that night, Sully reported. They’d burnt the remains, in silence, leaning on their pitchforks, thoughtful, the greasy smoke a veil over the moon as Sully and Foster had rowed past the pyre.

  There it was again.

  At first Foster thought he’d heard the cry of a lynx or one of the nameless wild cats that roamed in packs in the dunes, living off the gulls, but this was different, and keener, closer to home.

  Foster slipped back outside and listened to the hush of the shore breeze in the pines. Then came the crackle of breaking brush, the snap of scrub beneath boots moving fast. There were two paths to the open green behind the cottage where they’d played croquet and the women took tea during the long summer afternoons—but only one led from the Old Lake Road. That path produced a flailing figure sprinting down its narrow dirt length, up from the thornbush hollow, as if pursued by the hounds of hell.

  Allen clutched his plaid shirt in his hand, his chores shirt, flying like a flag as he ran, bare-chested, his legs pumping as fast as they could, gasps of terror thudding out of him with each breath.

  From behind him came a wailing. For a moment Foster thought Allen had been set after by a bear, but the crash of big boots behind Allen belonged not to a bear but to big Mack Reavey, damn near as big as a bear, yelling curses.

  Allen broke into the open, sparing a glance backwards only when he reached the relative safety of Foster, a roadblock in the middle of the sloping lawn. “Oh, hell, Foster,” Allen wheezed, his chest moving like a bellows, “I’m done for!” Allen stared at the hulking shape of a very angry Mack, who, secure in his moral and physical superiority to his quarry, slowed to a rolling walk. Behind Mack, a slim white shape floated in the brush, the source, Foster knew with sudden certainty, of the feline cries. He instinctively placed himself between Allen and Mack Reavey, the town’s cooper, who had arms big as Allen’s legs and a fierce grin on him as he came into the moonlight, a grin that looked a lot like murder.

  Eleanor had awoken at the first of the cries, blinking herself awake in the attic bedroom beneath the bare rafters. She’d pressed the lenses of her deep spectacles against the windowpane above her headboard, searching the night shapes.

  She slipped out from under her comforter and wrapped herself in the gray cardigan stowed at the foot of her bed. She fitted her moccasins, then stepped lightly to the head of the stairs, past her parents’ closed bedroom door, straining to hear more.

  She peered out the landing window, through a tendril of fog snaking through the treetops below: she could hear Foster’s dour tenor and the rough, low monosyllables of a voice that sounded like Mack Reavey’s. Caught in a fan of moonlight where the lawn met the pine forest darted a smear of red, white, and blue. Eleanor blinked. Mo Reavey in the woods at midnight? She remembered Mo and the two other girls at the general store that afternoon, their laughing faces crisp as a photograph, a conspiracy of giggles on the front porch, and Mo’s friend Carmel Kelly locking a mocking eye with Eleanor’s own mystified gaze. Eleanor, no slouch at the cruel emotional arithmetic of those girls, smelt scandal.

  The three fifteen-year-old girls walked off, still giggling, knowing something Eleanor had no ken of, something powerful and exclusive. Then the girls were gone, heading for Mack’s big whitewashed cooperage, a converted barn where Carmel and the Reavey girls were known to hide in the dusty old loft, wantons reading penny dreadfuls in whispers. Rumor at school had it that you could get a homemade cigarette from Carmel Kelly, fresh from her father’s rolling machine, for a tariff so secret you had to negotiate with Carmel at the fence behind the fish company shed.

  They’re Catholics, Eleanor reminded herself, they’re different. She moved down the stairs, the planking squeaking under her weight. The front door opened quietly and she stepped along the flower bed smelling of rain and mulch, toward the row of poplars Grandpa Foster had had planted on the windward side of the cottage. Her moccasins left silvery wet footprints in the grass. Ahead of her, moving downhill, toward the lakeshore, Foster and Mack walked together, their voices low against the shore breeze.

  She saw no one else until a branch in the bramble angled down and the smudge of blue and white became Mo Reavey’s peaches-and-cream face, a blue ribbon falling from the tangle of her hair.

  She had a snub nose and quick eyes and the terrified look of a daughter with an irate ox for a father and nowhere left to run. She wiped her
nose with a flick of her wrist and sniffled, watching the two men in the distance.

  “Are you all right?” Eleanor inquired.

  Mo Reavey sniffed again. “I’m fine. For now. Gonna get a whupping from my pa.” A curious gloss came into her eyes, triumph registering there. “You’re his sister, ain’tcha?”

  “Foster’s my brother, yes,” Eleanor acknowledged. “Here, take my handkerchief.”

  Mo gave her nose a poke, once in each nostril, and stared at Eleanor over her fist. “Nah. Not that one, the other one.” She had a catlike smile now and Eleanor realized why Foster was gesturing and talking so carefully to Mack Reavey down by the lakeshore. She turned and saw Allen on the back steps of the cottage, his lank legs splayed open, a geometry of defeat.

  “Yes,” was all Eleanor replied. “You have a sweater, Maureen?”

  Mo Reavey was rubbing her knee. “Skint it,” she said.

  “Take mine,” Eleanor said, and wrapped her cardigan over Mo’s shoulders, thinking, then searching the windows of the cottage for any sign of wakefulness from the others. Only stillness.

  Mo Reavey held up three cigarettes. “That’s what I got,” she said.

  “You had a bet with Carmel.”

  “She said that brother of yours wouldna come see me ifna I asked.”

  “Generally depends on what you ask a person,” Eleanor said, still careful, treating Mo Reavey like the skittish cat she so resembled, waiting for her to steady.

  “Smarter’n yah brother,” Mo Reavey said. “He’s a fish.” She tugged the sweater tighter around her. “Said I’d show him something he ain’t never seen before and his eyes lit up like the Fourth ’a July. I knew right then Carmel owed me.” She smiled her cunning smile and Eleanor could make out Foster saying “understanding” and Mack backing off, the two of them calmer now, their hands at their sides.

  Eleanor examined Mo’s face for some sign the girl could be trusted. “You like smokes?”

  “Makes me feel like the Queen ’a England. Rich, like.”

  Eleanor motioned Mo closer. “You can have all you want, right off Mr. Moxley’s shelf,” Eleanor whispered. “But you can’t tell your father. He wouldn’t approve of a girl smoking, now, would he?”

  Mo flinched at the thought of it.

  “He shouldn’t hit you, Mo,” Eleanor stated, nodding in Mack’s direction. “It’s not right.”

  The girl shook her head. “No,” she muttered. “No.”

  Eleanor had a sudden vision of this girl-child trapped in a life she, Eleanor, could only watch helplessly. “Next time,” Eleanor said, her hand falling gently on Mo’s thin shoulder, “next time you remind him his missus would never let him raise a hand to his children. You remind him of that. Your mother, God rest her, she’d never have let him do that to you.”

  Mo nodded, mute.

  “Then we understand each other,” Eleanor said. “You keep quiet and there’ll be a box of Camels in the tree behind Sully’s fish packing shed the day after Thanksgiving. And a week from now and the week after that.” Eleanor bent over and looked hard into Mo Reavey’s eyes. “You understand?”

  “Yeah.” Next thing, Mo Reavey was walking up the dirt path, her haunches swaying beneath the cheap fabric of her one good dress, the dress she wore for Eleanor’s brother, Eleanor’s cardigan tossed carelessly over her shoulders.

  Eleanor turned to find Foster and Allen alone on the back steps. They hadn’t seen her. She carefully circled beyond the reach of the moonlight between the trees, keeping well away from the cottage until she reached the cover of the poplars. Inside, each step up the stairs was a stopped heartbeat, until she reached her cold bed and stared at the roof beams. She didn’t sleep for a good long while. Foster, she was certain, was still having his say and Allen his silences, their voices low beneath the crash of the waves, deal-making.

  II

  Family legend held that the fine little Dulles sailboat could navigate the fifteen-minute passage to slender Duck Island solo, so many times had Foster and his brother and sister crossed the mile of channel. Foster had done it blindfolded once. On Allen’s dare, he’d landed the sailboat, furled the sail, then tied her down, all with Eleanor’s red bandanna kerchief over his eyes.

  Today, Eleanor had taken the windward post, Allen the lee, and Foster the helm. Their maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, once President Benjamin Harrison’s envoy to the whole world, sat on the bench seat to Foster’s left. A red and black blanket lay across the old man’s knees, its edges curling in the rising evening breeze. This was Thanksgiving with the Dulleses, as ever it was.

  “The sun’s racing us,” the old man said. “There’ll be a long tack home, Foster.”

  The sun winked behind the clouds as the trees of Duck Island appeared dead ahead, skeletal fingers above the shifting gray water. The slap of the water against the wooden hull increased in tempo as the sailboat reached new air midway. Eleanor looked back at Foster, who stood stone-faced, exchanging nautical small talk with his grandfather, the crosswind carrying their voices away from her. Allen sat like a Buddha in the shadow of the sail, out of earshot, staring into the horizon, lolling with the motion of the boat. Eleanor nipped back, along the gunwale, a nearsighted gamine, a foreshortened double of brother Foster, with masculine hands and spectacle lenses so thick they could pass for quartz.

  She crept into the cockpit and Grandpa looked up at her with his slow eyes. “You’re quicksilver, Ellie, part of the boat, you are.”

  Eleanor smiled back. “Love it, Grandpa, in my blood. Foster, I need to talk to you.”

  Foster turned the tiller over to Grandpa and motioned Ellie into the claustrophobic cabin.

  Eleanor hesitated. “This is harder than I thought.” She swallowed. “I saw the girl. Last night. I talked with her.”

  Foster’s face clouded. “Yes,” he said. He looked at her carefully, his face unreadable. His was the kind of face older men find reassuring across a boardroom table, one poised with a well-turned answer—and an appreciation of the timing required of a young man bent on bigger things. He turned and looked out the hatchway, back at the mainland, at the cottage and the trees behind. “What did she want?”

  “What did her father want?”

  Foster’s eyes widened fractionally. “Entering rather into the spirit of things, aren’t you, Ellie?”

  Her face didn’t change. “Cigarettes.”

  Foster blinked, once. “And who’s paying her off in cigarettes?”

  “Allie is. He’s going to find that out in about ten minutes.”

  Foster’s lower lip tucked up under his front teeth, something he did only when he’d won a close poker hand and he sensed another good fall of the cards. He looked at her, a hint of admiration in his eyes. “Evidently,” was all he said, and stepped back up onto the deck.

  Eleanor crept back along the rail to her post. She checked the tension of the line against the flat of her hand and eyed the swell of the sail, and waited for landfall. Ahead, a single birch beckoned.

  Eleanor and Allen didn’t speak as they tied down the boat. Foster and their grandfather were already in the dunes, heading for their usual spot on the far beach, the old man with an arm around his grandson’s solid shoulder for balance. Eleanor looked at Allen out of the corner of her eye: he had his soft, meaningless smile in place, the blank charm that was second nature to him. She waited until Foster and Grandpa were well gone, pushed her glasses up her nose, and took Allen’s measure.

  At nineteen, five years Foster’s junior and two Eleanor’s senior, Allen was experimenting with a mustache. This Eleanor found amusing, the way he nibbled at it and flexed his lip, wetting the hairs with his tongue like a cat; she wondered if Mo Reavey found the bristly moistness appealing. Allen tied off the sailboat and slapped the beach sand from his hands.

  “Want to see if the old lighthouse is still standing?”

  “Sure, I guess,” Allen said, and began to walk ahead of her.

  “You seem tired,�
� Eleanor offered.

  Allen said nothing, his boots scratching over the rocks as they walked along the low outcrop of shale set among the dunes.

  “Maybe those Canada geese’ll be there, for a visit. The couple, the two we used to call Saul and David.”

  “The disciples,” Allen said, not looking back.

  They walked around the point. There, a derelict lighthouse, its aged glasswork cracked, kept guard over a flat strip of marl beach, littered with stones, glowing in the feeble sun.

  “Why d’you think Grandpa never talks to us out here?” Allen asked. “I mean, we fish together, but it’s like we don’t exist when Foster’s around.”

  They had run out of island; there was nothing ahead of them now but the lake. The entire horizon was water, a seam of blue-black where it met the sky. Eleanor smoothed her skirt, then tucked her crinkly hair behind her ear and sat down against a flat-faced boulder.

  “It’s simple,” Allen said, answering his own question as he joined her. “Grandpa talks secrets only to Foster.”

  Eleanor examined Allen’s face for some clue to the emotions she sensed within him. At times like this she reckoned he had no edges; he was a kind of mirage, with his old man’s hollow laugh and mocking eyes.

  “You have your secrets, Allen,” she said.

  He sat very still.

  “Allen, I saw last night.” She said it quietly. “I saw Mack and Mo Reavey come and go and I saw Foster talk to Mack. I saw it all.”

  Allen mightn’t have heard.

  “We’re on the island,” she said. “I have to tell you everything, that’s the rule.”

  The island was haven to a pair of deer and a clutch of hardy mallards. No one knew how the deer had managed to swim the mile-wide channel from shore, so by default the island was named for the ducks.

  It was also home to a particular tree, the only birch in the island’s stand of jack pine, the source of a secret sibling compact. A decade ago this weekend, Foster, barely fourteen, had held an oath swearing beneath the birch. He had extracted a dire covenant from his two closest siblings, Allen, a wide-eyed nine, and Eleanor, half blind in those days before her spectacles, tomboy-bony and fast, all of seven.