Louise's Chance

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Ice cream next,’ Merle said.

  Miss Osborne wiped her mouth and pushed her plate away. ‘First, work,’ she said. ‘Merle, can you suggest any potential candidates we can interview this afternoon? That is, in addition to Jens Geller and Hans Marek, whom Agent Williams suggested to us?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, pulling his notes out of his jacket pocket. ‘I would recommend Thomas Hanzi.’

  ‘Is Hanzi a German surname?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not common,’ he said. ‘It’s more Hungarian in origin, I think. I’m curious about the man. He’s young, just nineteen; he was unemployed at the time he was conscripted. He’s a laborer with an engineering squad, which means he digs ditches. Maybe he’s someone the Reich good-times parade passed by.’

  There were plenty of those, I thought, just about anyone who didn’t fit into the Aryan mold.

  ‘It’s worth looking into,’ Miss Osborne said. She turned to McVey. ‘Private, would you please tell Commander Lucas that we’d like to interview Hans Marek and Thomas Hanzi this afternoon. Then come back here and pick us up, please. We’ll get to Geller later today.’

  After McVey left Miss Osborne relaxed into her seat. ‘Let’s bolster ourselves with ice cream, cigarettes and coffee before we head back to the salt mines,’ she said.

  Our interview with Hans Marek was tough going.

  ‘His German is heavily accented,’ Merle said. ‘I can barely understand him.’

  ‘Take your time,’ Miss Osborne said.

  Miss Osborne asked Marek questions, Merle translated her sentences slowly and Marek answered even more slowly. It was like herding a cow through quicksand. Little by little a picture of Marek emerged. He was a native Pole, although he had been living in Germany, working as a stevedore in Bremerhaven, when he was drafted. He explained that his family owned a dairy farm in Silesia. A private, Marek loaded and unloaded military supplies at a depot outside Tunis and was taken prisoner when the Allied front rolled over it, hiding under a Mercedes-Benz utility truck until the firefight was over.

  ‘Ask him if he is a Pole or a German first,’ Miss Osborne said.

  After Merle spoke to him, Marek laughed, but the tone of his voice when he answered was sarcastic. Merle nodded. ‘He says there is no Poland, only the Reich, and anyone who doesn’t see this is a fool.’

  ‘But if Germany loses the war, then Poland might be free again,’ Miss Osborne said. After Merle translated Marek looked at her as if she was insane.

  ‘Such a thing is not possible,’ Marek said.

  ‘The Germans have surrendered in North Africa, the Italians have surrendered, why isn’t it possible?’

  Marek didn’t answer, but he looked interested.

  ‘Think about it,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘And one last question. Did you know Aach and Muntz, the men who died on the Atlantic crossing?’

  Marek shrugged, unconcerned. ‘Hardly. What fools they were! Here there is plenty to eat and drink and a cot with a mattress. And no one shooting at you. It’s like heaven with beer.’

  Miss Osborne nodded at the MP to escort Marek from the room, but first the POW pulled out a handful of items from a bulging pocket.

  ‘All for sale,’ he said in terrible English, and then turned to Merle to translate the rest of his pitch.

  ‘He wants money for beer from the PX,’ Merle said, ‘and he has souvenirs to sell.’

  Marek laid his merchandise on the table in front of us. A trench cigarette lighter, a silver wound badge (comparable to our Purple Heart), an empty matchbox stamped with the German eagle and a stained ribbon bar.

  ‘For goodness’ sakes,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Tell him we aren’t interested in buying his trash.’

  ‘I wonder how much he wants for the lighter,’ Merle said. He spoke in German to Marek, who answered him back. ‘He says it works, just needs fluid. Ten bucks.’

  Merle dug into his back pocket for his wallet, but Miss Osborne put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Collecting German souvenirs is against regulations. Period.’

  Merle, clearly disappointed, shook his head at Marek, who grinned and stuffed his trinkets back into his pocket.

  ‘Someone will buy that lighter,’ Merle grumbled. ‘Why can’t I?’

  Schütze Thomas Hanzi was an extraordinarily handsome young man, barely more than a teenager. He had coal-black hair, olive skin, a chiseled face, slim build and, I swear, eyes so blue they were almost violet. He was definitely not Aryan, except for his eyes.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed Hanzi’s looks. Miss Osborne leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Roma.’ Hanzi was a gypsy; only his blue eyes, thanks to whatever ancestor bestowed them on him, had prevented him from being locked up in a camp somewhere for being too impure even to dig ditches for the Nazi war machine. Just thinking about it made my heart ache for the millions who didn’t fit into the Nazi plan for the future of Europe. Miss Osborne caught my expression and I saw worry in her eyes too. She turned off the tape recorder for a minute.

  ‘If we did turn him,’ she whispered to Merle and me, ‘Private Hanzi wouldn’t last an hour behind German lines. If he wasn’t attached to a German labor detail he’d be halted, searched and executed immediately. But we should interview him anyway,’ she continued. ‘We don’t want the other prisoners of war to notice anything different about the way we treat him.’ She started the tape recorder again.

  We needed to keep Hanzi in the interview room as long as the others to protect him from reprisals. Merle just spoke to him conversationally. Hanzi told us he’d been a street sweeper, living in a gypsy ghetto, leaving it only to work and to take a meal of black bread and barley soup at a Nazi Party soup kitchen, until he’d been drafted. He had no idea where the rest of his family was.

  Hanzi told us that he and the other prisoners of war were stunned when they arrived in the United States. They had been told it was a smoking ruin near collapse. Instead the size of the country, the number of automobiles, buses and trains, the amount of food at meals astounded them. They’d been issued clean clothes, towels and blankets. They could shower whenever they wanted. They got two packs of cigarettes a day, free. They could even buy beer at the PX after dinner!

  ‘I don’t care if I never return to Germany,’ he said.

  After a suitable passage of time Miss Osborne had the MP escort Hanzi back to the stockade.

  When we’d been left alone in the interview room Miss Osborne turned off the tape recorder again. ‘Private Hanzi will be much safer right here in an American prisoner-of-war camp than he would be back in Europe,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘If it weren’t for those eyes he might already be a dead man instead of a ditch digger.’

  It was late in the day but we still had time for one more interview. Miss Osborne consulted her notes, then called the MP over. ‘We need to see Jens Geller,’ she said. ‘We requested his presence. Why haven’t you brought him in?’

  ‘Ma’am,’ Steesen said, ‘prisoner Geller has been placed on bread and water, in solitary confinement, for today. I asked Lt Rawlins if he could be released for this interview, but he said no.’

  ‘We’ll have to talk to him another time, then,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘What did Geller do to get punished?’

  ‘Socked a guard, ma’am. The guard called him a German pig. Guess he knows some English.’

  ‘How about Felix Steiner, then?’

  When Steiner came into the tent I was astonished to see that the man wore his Panzer beret and carried a walking stick, which looked absurd, to say the least. The only way he could get away with wearing the beret was to rip off the SS insignia, including the skull and crossbones. Without hesitation he introduced himself as Obersturmführer Felix Steiner, an Austrian SS officer, and made sure we understood that his father was a Nazi Party member and a high-ranking official in the Viennese police force. He confirmed that he was the second in command of a signals battalion of the Twenty-first Panzer Division and that he had surrendered at Tunis. He insisted he di
d not know Major Kapp personally. ‘The Twenty-first was the largest tank division in history,’ he said, ‘and it will be one day again.’ He then folded his arms across his chest and refused to answer any more questions. ‘Pretentious fool,’ I wrote in my notes.

  I was pleased to see that Major Lucas, the camp commander, wasn’t having dinner in the POW mess with the rest of us tonight. I didn’t like the man much and I found his attitude irritating. Lt Rawlins was the senior officer in the group that gathered to have sherry before dinner was served. Even though we hadn’t had time for a drink in our barracks before dinner, Miss Osborne refused a sherry. I followed her example and turned away the tiny cut glass that Rawlins offered me. Merle took one though, drained it and requested a refill.

  Agent Williams was the last of the American group to enter the mess tent. He was accompanied by a middle-aged, balding man in GI khakis wearing an International Red Cross armband, whom he introduced as Lucien Chantal. He was the camp’s liaison with the Red Cross, here to protect the interests of the German prisoners. Chantal spoke English well, with a minimal French accent.

  Chantal refused a sherry too, and FBI agents weren’t allowed to drink on duty, so we took that as our signal to fill our plates at one of the cafeteria lines before the POWs entered the mess tent.

  More beef! Pot roast this time, with fresh onions, carrots and potatoes. And I couldn’t resist a thick slab of chocolate cake. I didn’t feel guilty, yet, about eating meals exempt from rationing, but as the prisoners of war took their place in the line once we were seated at our table, I began to feel a prickle of annoyance that they were eating so well. I wondered what our boys in German prisoner-of-war camps were having for dinner.

  Now that I’d met several of the prisoners it was interesting to see them interact. Major Kapp, the SS flame tank commander we’d interviewed today, again sat at the head of the table nearest ours. A private who sat next to him spent much of his time refilling Kapp’s water glass, lighting his cigarette and then getting him a cup of coffee. Once, when the private failed to strike a match immediately, Kapp turned an eye on him that chilled me, and I was sitting twenty feet away from him, guarded by MPs.

  Bahnsen, the seminarian turned Luftwaffe navigator, sat as far away from Kapp as possible. His bruised face looked awful, and I saw him wince as he ate.

  Chantal noticed Bahnsen too.

  ‘What happened to that man?’ he asked Rawlins.

  ‘He said that he fell climbing into his bunk,’ Rawlins said. ‘But I understand that he was beaten by a couple of other prisoners. I couldn’t get him to admit it.’

  ‘That’s unacceptable,’ Chantal said.

  Rawlins shrugged. ‘That’s his story and he’s had plenty of opportunity to change it.’

  ‘I’ll need to question him, in private,’ Chantal said.

  ‘Of course, I’ll arrange it,’ Rawlins answered. ‘But you’ll be wasting your time. He won’t want to tell you the truth; he’ll just get beaten again.’

  When we gathered for coffee in the officers’ lounge I took Miss Osborne aside and told her what Steesen had said and then about the exchange between Chantal and Rawlins.

  ‘If Kapp has the camp under such close control we must be very careful not to indicate which prisoners we think we might turn,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘We can’t isolate them from the rest of the prisoners, not until we make our final decisions, so we can’t protect them until then.’

  ‘You think Bahnsen would be a likely recruit?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  Miss Osborne waited for my answer. I still wasn’t used to being asked my opinion and I wanted to give her a reasoned reply.

  ‘If the man was studying to be a Lutheran priest, and he’s not a member of the Reich church, he can’t be committed to the Nazi regime. And if Major Kapp had Bahnsen disciplined they must have had a conflict about something.’

  Miss Osborne nodded. ‘I agree,’ she said. ‘I think he’s a good option for us. I just wish there was some way to protect him.’

  Merle joined us in our barracks later for a drink from Miss Osborne’s apparently bottomless flask of bourbon. She swallowed half her slug in one gulp.

  ‘Miss Osborne,’ I said, ‘I’m just wondering, why don’t you have a drink with the men before dinner?’

  ‘Men don’t take women seriously as it is. Men think they can hold their liquor and women can’t. So I prefer to give them one less thing to diminish me with.’

  ‘That’s silly,’ Merle said, holding out his cup for a refill. Miss Osborne poured him a generous slug.

  ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘If a woman has two stiff drinks before dinner, and a man has two, what do you think of the woman, compared to the man?’

  ‘Oh,’ Merle said. ‘Well, I guess I think that the woman is – I don’t know.’

  ‘Sloshed?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  ‘Is the man?’

  ‘Not after two drinks.’

  ‘I’ll have you know I can drink most men under the table,’ she said. ‘But I decline to do it.’

  My admiration for Miss Osborne etched up yet another notch.

  She threw back the rest of her bourbon. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘let’s talk about tomorrow. We’ll be heading back to DC first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Already?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve just been casing the joint, as you might say,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Now we know who we have to deal with at the camp, and I don’t mean just the prisoners. But we need to be better prepared for the rest of our interviews. Merle has a project to finish, a forged letter that needs to go on the plane to London on Friday. How long do you think it will take to finish it?’

  ‘Half a day at the most,’ Merle said.

  ‘Good. Then I’d like you to spend the rest of tomorrow and Friday going over the prisoners’ pay booklets. Do a short summary of each, on a separate page. If your writing is legible it doesn’t need to be typed up.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Louise, you and I will go through the prisoners’ intake documents, the ones filled out at the holding centers in North Africa, and summarize each one. Between those and Merle’s work we’ll have a portrait of each prisoner, as we did for the five we interviewed today. We’ll come back to Fort Meade Monday and, with luck, finish the rest of the interviews in a couple of weeks.’

  We’d be in Washington for the weekend! I was going to see Joe if I had to hire Ellery Queen to track him down.

  SEVEN

  The air-raid siren squealed through the night, waking me from a sound sleep. I bolted upright, my heart pounding and my breathing short and shallow. Instinctively I threw myself under my bed.

  Across the aisle I met Miss Osborne’s eyes from her position on her stomach under her own bed.

  ‘What was that?’ Miss Osborne said.

  ‘An air-raid warning?’ I said.

  ‘There haven’t been any air raids in weeks,’ she answered.

  She was right. The United States had officially accepted the fact that the east coast was safe from air attack. The Germans didn’t have even one aircraft carrier. No German aircraft could reach our eastern shores. Submarines were another matter entirely, but no one expected a German attack from the air anymore.

  To save space in our luggage neither one of us had brought bathrobes, so we wrapped ourselves in sweaters and went outside to stand on the stoop. The screech of the siren stopped, then began to sound again in short spurts. Searchlights ranged all around us, but appeared to be coming from the watchtowers at the prisoner-of-war camp.

  A couple of jeeps passed by, horns blasting, followed by a detachment of MPs, running hard toward the camp, some of them still buttoning their shirts and unholstering their side arms.

  Merle appeared beside us, looking a bit disoriented but fully dressed. Miss Osborne grabbed his arm.

  ‘Go find out what’s happening,’ she said. Merle nodded, and took off running himself.


  ‘Do you think there’s been an escape?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ she answered. ‘I can’t imagine what else would cause this kind of ruckus.’

  After about half an hour the siren stopped blasting and the searchlights ceased ranging about, focusing instead to the north of the camp. Miss Osborne and I sat on the steps to our quarters and waited. Merle trudged back to us, breathing hard.

  ‘A POW escaped,’ he said. ‘They haven’t caught him yet.’

  He sat on a step below us to catch his breath.

  ‘He’s one of ours,’ he added.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Miss Osborne asked.

  ‘It’s Hans Marek, the Pole, the one who tried to sell us souvenirs,’ he answered. ‘I talked to one of the guards. Marek shimmied up one of the supports of a watchtower and leapt over the stockade fences, both of them! It’s a miracle he didn’t break a leg.’

  ‘Surely they’ll pick him up right away,’ I said.

  Merle shrugged. ‘He made it to the road, and he managed to steal a mess boy’s white shirt, so there’s nothing about him that identifies him as a prisoner. And it’s dark as Hitler’s soul out there.’

  ‘Marek can’t speak English!’ Miss Osborne said. ‘How far can he get?’

  ‘True. The MP said they were calling Agent Williams. I reckon the FBI’ll find him real soon.’

  Agent Williams would be beside himself. He was sure every German POW was a potential saboteur. Pretty soon the area around Fort Meade would be crawling with G-men, bloodhounds and the Maryland state police. They’d find Marek.

  We had breakfast at the camp officers’ mess just outside the stockade, where we learned that Marek was still at large.

  ‘He could be anywhere by now,’ Lt Rawlins said, as he filled his plate with eggs and bacon. ‘There’s a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad spur about a mile from the camp. He could have hopped a freight train. They run all night.’

  ‘What would he use for money?’ Miss Osborne asked.

  ‘He had the cash from selling all that German junk,’ Rawlins said. ‘Badges, cigarette lighters, ribbon bars. Half my soldiers were buying trinkets from him. Everyone wants a war souvenir.’