‘I know of him,’ Sophie said.
‘Yes, but not too much, I hope.’ She took the girl’s hand. ‘As time passes you will … no, you won’t forget, you won’t ever forget – but the pain will ease.’
‘I don’t want to forget.’
‘Of course not,’ Patricia said, making a vague downward gesture. ‘Sit. Eat your oatmeal. Drink your orange juice. Have a cup of coffee. Do you drink coffee?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘I wasn’t sure. You’ll have to be sure to tell me what sixteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to do, so I can tell you not to do it,’ Patricia told her.
‘All right,’ Sophie agreed.
Patricia waited until Sophie was finishing her oatmeal before interrupting by holding something up in front of her. ‘Pemmy was emptying out the pockets of the boy’s jacket you were wearing when the fates brought you to us,’ she said. ‘To send it out for cleaning, you know. And she found this in the lining.’ It was a stiff cardboard packet about two by three inches taped shut on all four sides. She handed it to Sophie.
Sophie took it gingerly, as though something might suddenly spring out and bite her thumb. ‘What is it?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No. I’ve never seen it.’
‘Perhaps your father … I didn’t want to open it, it’s yours after all.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘Perhaps my father …’ She held the packet back out to Patricia. ‘Please – you open it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I think so. Please.’
‘All right.’ Patricia took the packet and examined it. ‘It’s pretty well sealed and I don’t want to … I think at the top, here.’ she looked up. ‘Do me a favor, child, and bring me my purse – it’s on the edge of the couch.’
Sophie retrieved the small black clutch purse from the couch and moved around to the other side of the table and sat back down. Her eyes welled up with tears.
Patricia pulled a pair of small scissors out of the purse, but now she paused in her attempt to open the packet. ‘What is it, Sophie; what’s the matter?’
‘It’s – whatever this is – it’s my poppa coming from the past, from last week, to speak to me for perhaps one last time. It’s …’
‘I understand,’ Patricia said. ‘He was pretty wonderful, your poppa?’
Sophie burst out crying. Patricia fished a handkerchief out of her purse and handed it across the table. ‘Silly me,’ she said. ‘Of course he was. I actually saw him conduct once, I believe. Mahler’s Fifth. In Vienna about three years ago.’
Sophie nodded and wiped her eyes. ‘Yes, possibly. He was guest conductor for the Vienna Symphony for the first half of the thirty-five season. He loved Mahler.’
‘I could make some trite comment about how good he was,’ Patricia said, ‘but I’m no judge. My father is a musician – amateur, I mean – piano, church organ, and for some reason viola. He used to tell me what to listen for, but I’m not sure I ever actually hear it. I like some music and I dislike other music, but I never know why. But I remember liking the Mahler.’
‘It was the last Mahler performed in Vienna. His music was banned in Germany as “degenerate”, and the ban soon spread to Austria.’
‘Degenerate?’
‘Mahler was a Jew.’
‘Ah!’
‘My poppa, he was very good, everyone said so. And these music people, they do not say kind things to you if you do not deserve them. Even then if you do, sometimes, they do not say kind things.’
There was a silence. Patricia stood up and refilled her coffee cup from a silver urn on the sideboard that bore the Saboy family crest. ‘These people,’ she said, turning back to Sophie, ‘these Nazis – they have a lot to answer for.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said, ‘but why …’
‘Why what?’
‘Why are they getting away with what they do – arresting people: Jews, Communists, Socialists, Catholic priests, anyone they feel like it – and putting them in camps? No trials, no charges even, just a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Why are they able to do what they do? Why is no one stopping them?’
‘That is a question,’ Patricia agreed.
Geoffrey appeared in the doorway resplendent in a plum-colored dressing gown and a red fez with a tassel that hung over his right eye, and advanced into the room. ‘Morning, my dears,’ he said. ‘I trust you’ve left me a kipper. I have my fancy set on a kipper.’
Patricia smiled. ‘We have spared you a kipper,’ she told him. ‘Shall I order your eggs?’
‘I have stopped at the kitchen and cook is, even now, boiling a brace of eggs for me,’ Geoffrey told her. He poured a cup of coffee, decanted a measured amount of cream, and sat down.
‘You are truly a sartorial delight this morning,’ Patricia told him. ‘The fez adds a certain je ne sais very much at all. That is, I hardly know …’ She paused.
‘Words fail you?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘How very rare. Anyhow, I have worn the headpiece in honor of our young guest, who is, I believe, of the Jewish persuasion. It is the closest thing I could find to a yarmulke.’ He smiled at Sophie.
‘We didn’t,’ Sophie began. ‘I mean I don’t …’ She suddenly burst into tears.
‘What?’ Geoffrey looked startled. ‘What did I do?’
Patricia reached over to pat Sophie on the shoulder. ‘He didn’t mean—’
‘No, no,’ Sophie said, dabbing at her eyes with the napkin. ‘It’s nice. It made me feel – I mean – thank you. It was sort of a joke, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Geoffrey admitted.
‘But a nice joke. I thank you. You can take it off now.’
‘I don’t know,’ Geoffrey said thoughtfully. ‘I think it makes me look …’
‘Take it off,’ Patricia told him. ‘We love you. We will not discuss how it makes you look.’
Geoffrey took the fez off and put it sadly aside as his eggs arrived. He slithered a kipper onto his plate and added a slice of toast, then sat down and set about the delicate business of decapitating the first soft-boiled egg.
‘We have a small mystery here,’ Patricia told him a few minutes later, as he was pouring his second cup of coffee.
‘Ah!’ he said, turning to look. ‘What sort of mystery?’
Patricia held up the little cardboard packet. ‘This was found in the lining of Sophie’s jacket – the one she was wearing on the train. We were about to open it when we were distracted by the sight of that red growth on your head.’
Geoffrey grinned. ‘Red growth indeed. No need to cast asparagus. Why, at Oxford every year we … Never mind about that now. As you don’t know what’s in the envelope, Sophie, it must have been put there by someone else. Presumably your father?’
‘It must, I mean, I don’t know,’ Sophie said.
‘Shall we find out?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘I don’t want to open it,’ Sophie said. ‘I mean, I’d like her to do it for me,’ she said, with a gesture toward Patricia.
‘Of course,’ Geoffrey agreed.
Patricia retrieved her scissors from a corner of the table and carefully eyed the packet. After a minute she worried a hole into one corner and then inserted one blade into the hole and slid the scissors across the top. ‘Now,’ she said, reaching two fingers inside and gingerly extracting a small white envelope, ‘what have we here?’ She tried the flap and found that it wasn’t glued down.
‘Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice,’ Geoffrey said, leaning in closer. ‘Tip out the contents. Here – wait a second.’ He took a clean white napkin from the sideboard and spread it on the table. ‘Onto this.’
Patricia turned the envelope over and shook it gently over the napkin. When nothing emerged she tried tapping it on the side, then the other side, then the bottom which was now the top. Finally six small objects fluttered out and fell onto the napkin, followed after a second by two more.
‘Stamps,’ Geoffrey said. ‘What do you know!’
&nb
sp; ‘Stamps?’ Sophie echoed, sounding puzzled. ‘Why would …’
‘Let me see if that’s the last of them,’ Patricia said, peering into the interior of the small envelope. ‘I think there’s one more. No – two!’ She stuck her pinky inside the envelope and wiggled it about, and several more small paper rectangles fell to the napkin. ‘I think that’s – no …’ She carefully pried the packet apart, finding several more stamps hiding in the folds. ‘I think that’s – yes, that’s it.’
‘Sixteen stamps,’ Geoffrey said, nudging them gently into a row. ‘They all, ah, seem to be German, and they’re all overprinted – what? – “K-i-a-” uh, “Kiautschou”, whatever that might be, but they don’t seem to be otherwise related.’
Sophie peered down at them. ‘Related?’
‘Yes. You know, part of the same series or theme or what have you.’
‘They must be collectable,’ Patricia said. ‘And I think they must be quite valuable,’
Geoffrey looked up at her. ‘My dear,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about postage stamps.’
‘Nor do I,’ Patricia told him. ‘But what other possible reason could Sophie’s father have had in sewing them into the lining of her jacket? Didn’t you tell me that when those horrible guards assaulted him they seemed to be looking for something?’
‘Yes.’ He turned to Sophie, who was staring at the stamps but perhaps seeing something else. ‘These, my child, would seem to be your legacy.’
TWENTY-FOUR
Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare;
To-morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.
– Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
‘We have been watching you,’ Gauleiter Frank Gerard told Andrew Blake, leaning over and putting his arm around his shoulder in a determinedly cheerful manner. ‘We believe that you have a great potential and can be of greater use to the Cause.’
Watching me? The thought did not cheer Blake up. There was, to Blake’s eyes, an undertone of menace in every gesture of Gerard’s, no matter how bland the facade. ‘Anything I can do,’ Blake said. He did not mean it.
‘We have devised for you a special task,’ Gerard went on.
‘What sort of task?’ Blake asked, thinking Why me? so loudly that he was surprised Gerard couldn’t hear it.
They were standing behind the front counter in George Vander’s print shop. It was dusk and the daylight through the shop window was vague and uncertain, filtered through a gray and cloudy sky. The lights in the back of the shop were off, and a single bulb above the counter merely served to cast the rest of the shop into unfriendly shadows. Vanders, having been asked to leave them alone for a few minutes, had shrugged and gone out for coffee. That had been enough to raise Blake’s panic level to the boil, and Gerard’s attempt to achieve a friendly smile did not relieve the pressure.
‘We have had our eye on you for a while,’ Gerard told Blake, which did nothing to reassure him. Although the image of them – whoever they were – sharing one eye between them like those mythical Greek sisters would have amused him if he’d been able to find anything funny at that moment. ‘You do not say much, but you do what is needed, and that is good.’
Now Blake was thoroughly puzzled and even more worried. What was it that he did? Put out chairs before the meetings? Sell magazines and books at the back of the hall? Get followed home by a man he’d rather never meet?
Gerard paused and was looking at him as though he expected a response. Blake managed a grunt of assent and a meaningful nod. ‘I try my best,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Gerard agreed. ‘And you do not make a fuss. You believe in the cause but you are not a shouter. I distrust shouters and fuss-makers.’ He pushed himself to his feet. ‘You are a follower, my dear Blake, and not a leader. And this is good. We have enough leaders, we need more dependable followers.’
‘Well—’ Blake began.
‘And you do not live wildly or beyond your means, or draw attention to yourself,’ Gerard went on. ‘You do not go drinking or gambling or whoring in the evening like so many single men.’
So this, whatever it is, is why I’ve been being followed, Blake thought.
‘And so we have an assignment for you. You can turn it down, of course …’
Blake was relieved to hear that.
‘But we think you will find it interesting, certainly interesting. It will require self-control, and the ability to manage your feelings, but you can do that if needed, yes?’
We? Why do they, whoever they are, think that?
‘I admit I am interested,’ Blake said, wondering if the lie showed on his face. He wasn’t interested, not at all. He didn’t even want to hear about it. He wanted to go away somewhere. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
Gauleiter Gerard walked back to the letter press looking thoughtful, paused, then turned and walked back. ‘Do not say anything until you have heard me out,’ he said. ‘This is, um, an unusual thing we ask of you.’
‘OK,’ Blake said. Shit! He thought.
‘We want you to join the Communist Party,’ Gerard told him. ‘Go to meetings – Communist Party meetings. Get to know who is there.’
Blake stared at Gerard. He did not have to feign shocked surprise. If he had made a list of the ten – fifty – things Gerard might be going to say, this would not have been among them. Hell, make that a hundred. A thousand. ‘You want …’ The words stopped coming.
‘I know,’ Gerard said. ‘They are scum – Jews, Negro-lovers, college professors. I don’t know how much you know about them.’
‘Not much, actually,’ Blake told him. ‘They march, hold rallies; a lot like us, actually that way. They’re pacifists and they’re for Negro rights, and a better deal for the working man, or so they say. But it’s all propaganda. They get their orders from Moscow and their eventual aim is to subvert and destroy the American way of life.’ He was quoting what he remembered of a Bund pamphlet he had printed a few days before.
Gerard bobbed his head back and forth in an exaggerated nod. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘So you can see …’
‘What?’ Blake asked, honestly puzzled, when Gerard paused. ‘What can I see?’
‘How can I put this? We must have eyes on them. We must know what they are doing, what they intend to do. You can keep your job at the print shop, and you will be paid something extra for this work.’
Blake pushed his chair back from the desk. ‘You want me to be a spy?’ He stood up and felt faint so he sat down again. ‘I can’t, I mean, I really can’t.’ Then the incongruity of his claiming to the Bund that he couldn’t be a spy struck him and he almost giggled. What would Gerard have thought if he had giggled? Probably not the truth. But still …
‘No, no, not a spy,’ Gerard insisted. ‘We have already some people inside their organization. But it is difficult for them to commune with us. We want you to go to meetings and whatever, sit quietly in the back and hear what there is to hear, learn what there is to learn, and not draw attention to yourself. That is all. Meet the members but do not, how to say, impose on them. We do not ask you to sneak into their headquarters or follow anyone about.’
‘Then why …?’
‘You will learn much just by being there. The size of the meetings, where they are held, who speaks, who comes. Who is important, who is not. Who the leaders are. You can gather up their printed material. Once in a while, in a manner to be determined, one of our people who is deeper into the party may pass you some information to be brought back to us. You will not know who this agent is, and the information will be in some innocent form that you can show to anyone interested.’
‘How are you going to manage that?
‘We’re working that out. There are several possibilities.’
Welker was just leaving his office to take a cab to Penn Station and there board the evening trai
n to DC when Andrew Blake got through to him on the phone. ‘What am I to do?’ Blake asked.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I’ve got to see you right away. I don’t know what to do.’
‘About what?’
‘I don’t understand what’s happening, why they’re doing this, and I don’t know what I should do. We have to talk.’
‘About? Never mind. Where are you?’
‘I’m using the payphone across from the print shop.’
‘Meet me at the Café Figaro on MacDougal Street. I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Try not to be followed.’
The Figaro, a Greenwich Village coffee house catering to artists, writers, musicians, and those yearning to join their ranks, was not a place where they were liable to run into anyone who knew either of them. Welker got there first, and took a table toward the back where he was able to watch Blake as he came in. He had a good view of the street through the plate-glass windows, so he might be able to spot an incautious tail if Blake happened to be wearing one. A few minutes later Blake came in looking anxious, took a moment to spot Welker in the dim light, then with great restraint managed to not quite run over to the table and drop into the seat opposite.
‘What am I to do?’ Blake began with no preamble. He wasn’t actually wringing his hands, but it seemed to Welker that in another few seconds he would begin.
Welker resisted the temptation to reach over and pat Blake on the back, and instead used his deepest and most soothing voice, the voice he had used when he had to tell senior commanders something they didn’t want to hear. ‘You are to calm down, take a few deep breaths,’ he said, ‘look up at the ceiling – for some reason that seems to relieve tension – and then tell me what the hell the problem is.’
Blake paused for three deep breaths, glanced up at the ceiling and back down, then put his hands flat down on the table. ‘They want me to be a spy,’ he said.
‘A spy?’
‘Well, they say it isn’t that, but it is. Gerard – he’s the Gauleiter, which is like the boss of this area – came to talk to me. He says they want me to spy on the Communists.’
The Bells of Hell Page 19