Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  “We interrupted you, I’m afraid,” the Brigadier said to him. “You were talking about the conference with Hitler.”

  “Yes—the Führerbetreff of 5 November. I wasn’t there—I’ve only read the minutes. The admiral has been discreetly passing them around. He’s aghast, I can tell you.”

  “The war, damn it,” said the Brigadier. “You’d just gotten to the war.”

  The navy man sighed. “The only question, the Führer says, is when. His tone reportedly was blunt—he wants to leave no doubt of his intentions. Our military preparations, he goes on to say, are more or less complete, our forces battle-ready. Our new armaments are superior to those of other nations. He doesn’t name these nations, but later he speaks derisively of the British and the French—‘two hate-inspired countries.’ Then he changes tone. This favorable situation won’t last forever, he says. Given time, our enemies will update their arsenals. So we have a definite but limited opening—a window of superiority. It closes, he thinks, no later than ’43, but we mustn’t wait till then. Providence has granted us this opportunity to solve our age-old problem of Lebensraum. So we must seize it, quickly and decisively. The first steps must come soon—next year if we can manage it. And so, my loyal commanders, as the scouts say: Be ready!”

  The navy man paused. His voice had become high-pitched and strenuous, an unconscious imitation of the Führer’s, and he dropped it to its normal register. “I’ve left out the details, of course. But that’s the thrust of it.”

  The four men looked at one another, as though none wanted to be the first to react.

  Finally, the brash Hans-Bernd slapped an open hand against his thigh. “Well, there you see the bloody insanity of the thing. Lebensraum—where does he plan to find that, I wonder? As far as I know, all the space on this continent is currently occupied. Does he plan to invade Antarctica?”

  “The East,” said Oskar, surprised by the sound of his own voice. Everyone in the room turned to stare.

  “Gentlemen,” said the Colonel wryly, “I present my adjutant, Leutnant Oskar Langweil. You were saying, Oskar—the East?”

  “It’s in his book,” Oskar said, aware that he was talking too fast. “Mein Kampf—we were required to read it in Gymnasium. It’s quite…difficult. All but impenetrable, actually. Most people only skimmed through. But you know, it’s also quite informative. ‘Our destiny lies in the East—only there can our Volk find the space it requires to breathe freely and increase in number.’ ”

  “The East,” fumed the Brigadier. “What the hell’s he talking about? Poland? Czechoslovakia?”

  “Russia,” said Oskar. “He means Russia. Of course, the others too. But ultimately—”

  Hans-Bernd shook his head. “It’s madness.”

  “It’s nonsense,” said the Brigadier. “The army would never allow it. Not even Blomberg.”

  “Then he’ll rid himself of Blomberg,” Hans-Bernd said with a shrug. “There are other generals. Good, reliable National Socialist generals like Kluge or Reichenau.”

  The Brigadier seemed to be working up a sharp reply—Reichenau, indeed!—but Oskar’s attention was deflected as the dog-faced Kriegsmarine officer stepped toward him with an apologetic smile.

  “Pardon the intrusion,” he said quietly, “but I wonder if you’d care to speak briefly about a matter of mutual concern? If so…” He motioned toward a shadowy recess that Oskar had taken for the entrance to a WC.

  Oskar nodded uncertainly and followed him through a narrow doorway into a kind of sanctum sanctorum, a small writing chamber furnished with a leather-padded chair, a rickety escritoire and a lectern bearing a very old edition of Goethe’s Faust. The navy man closed the door and turned back to him, his gaze now frank and devoid of social nicety.

  “Verlasst die Tempel fremder Götter,” he said.

  Oskar was startled, but his lips formed a reply without conscious direction: “Glaubt nicht, was ihr nicht selbst erkannt.”

  It was the opening couplet of the Secret Anthem, a brisk and stirring tune that was sung in ritual fashion to open meetings of the Deutsche Jungenschaft vom 1 November, a progressive youth group banned in 1933 and then banned again, to little effect, at least twice since. Leave the temple of the strange gods; believe nothing you haven’t discovered for yourself. A whole body of boyhood mythology surrounded this song, whose lyrics were forbidden to be written down or revealed to outsiders.

  The man gave Oskar a fraternal nod. “I’m sorry, I guess that was unnecessary, but I hoped it might…reassure you. I’ll be brief, then. I assume you’re a patriot.”

  “Herr Kapitänleutnant—”

  The other man made a gesture with one hand, waving military etiquette aside. “Call me Jaap, please—that was my Movement name. Yours, I believe, was Ossi. When I say ‘patriot,’ I don’t mean a fool waving the swastika while kicking the shit out of some Jew on the sidewalk. I mean someone who understands what Germany means, someone with a sense of history who’s upset by what’s going on now in the name of the Fatherland. Crime masquerading as national pride. Contempt for knowledge, for culture, for books, for people who read books. Contempt for everyone who doesn’t fit their picture of the New German Man. Look—you don’t need to say anything right now, just listen. All right? Shall I go on?”

  Oskar nodded. Whatever this was, it was happening fast. He’d never heard anyone speak like this—so openly, and to a stranger. But then they weren’t really strangers, were they? As people in the Movement used to say, they’d circled the fire together. They’d made the same pledges, sung the Geheimeslied. Now they could trust each other. Or so Oskar hoped.

  “You’re expecting orders soon,” Jaap said. “I imagine you’re hoping for something challenging, something…away from all this.” He cocked his head toward the party carrying on beyond the door. “As it happens, there may be a job that would be just the thing for you. A position somewhat out of the ordinary that requires a particular set of attributes, chief among them a certain…let’s say, disregard of danger. You’ve got that, haven’t you? I heard about your foray into Denmark.”

  Despite himself, Oskar laughed. “It was only milk paint. It wasn’t meant to permanently deface the statue.”

  “ ‘Deface’ is a curious verb, considering the body part in question. A job well managed, though. What I have in mind is a bit like that, only—please understand this—considerably more dangerous. You’ll be going overseas, you’ll be going alone, and you’ll have absolutely no one to back you up if things turn out badly. You can’t talk about it afterward, and very few people will know what you’ve done. The work is important, but the rewards are very quiet. So tell me, Ossi—does what I’m saying interest you?”

  The question struck Oskar as faintly ridiculous. “Of course it does.”

  Jaap smiled. A look of relief? Oskar thought so.

  “Very well, then.” All business now. “This is how it will work. You’ll be contacted presently through ordinary channels. Everything will appear strictly routine. An officer seconded to the Foreign Ministry will be seeking an individual, a courier, available on short notice. A number of candidates will be interviewed, and you’ll be selected. From that point you’ll be working for the Abwehr, military intelligence. We’re outside the normal chain of command, and our boss is an admiral named Canaris who reports directly to the chief of the General Staff. There will follow a short period of training—you’ll enjoy that, I think—and then you’ll be given a very important, extremely delicate assignment. Do you have any questions?”

  Oskar had so many that they seemed to crowd together in his throat, blocking his ability to pose any of them. He shook his head.

  “Excellent!” Jaap nodded cheerfully. “I heard about Scotland too. Quick thinking there. I wonder, did you have any trouble with the language? With English in general?”

  “No trouble. My English is—”

  “Good. You might want to sharpen it up in the days to come. Go to the cinema. Practice on tourists. The G
erman-American Friendship League has got something going this week, I believe. That might prove useful for you. Well—good evening, Ossi. And best of luck.”

  Oskar stood watching him lope in his rumpled uniform through the library and back into the cheerful mayhem of the main hall. He felt a growing sense of unreality. Had he really just—without pausing to think, without asking a single question—agreed to become a spy?

  —

  The short, dark man who’d put the Baroness in mind of a mountain dwarf (in truth a Munich-based art dealer whose business had more or less collapsed since 1933, as his clientele now lived mostly abroad) lowered his glass of wine. “It’s quiet this evening,” he said.

  Cissy, the White Russian princess, touched his forearm. “Guido, dear, wasn’t that Jaapi? Why do you suppose he’s leaving so early? I haven’t seen him in simply ages.”

  Her voice sounded slow, something between a purr and a drawl. You might have guessed she’d been drinking, but not how much. Guido seriously believed that the poor girl—not really a girl anymore, but you couldn’t help fretting about her—obtained the greater part of her caloric intake from liquor at gatherings like this one. He imagined her in the days between soirées, nibbling day-old bread sold cheap out of the bakery’s back door. An aristocratic rodent. What were they paying her at the ministry? Secretary’s wages, he supposed. A foreigner, after all. Worse: a blue blood. Lucky to be working at all. He strained to picture Cissy toiling in one of those mysterious offices in the Wilhelmstrasse, identified only by letters and numbers—Special Bureau IV-d-7 or some such.

  “Where is everyone tonight?” she wondered, her tone plaintive. “Where’s Ricky? And Dodo? Will there be dancing, do you think? Darling, ask them to play something for dancing.”

  Guido did not care to humor her. To be frank, he found her faintly annoying at times like this, fond of her though he was. She needed to toughen up, to grow a shell.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed, spotting a well-known but officially non grata newspaperman wandering through the crowd like a hermit. “Greimer, how good that you’re here! You know our Cissy, I believe.”

  Mechanically Greimer bowed, bringing his lips within an inch of the girl’s hand. Close enough, Guido thought—there were crumbs in his beard. The man looked a shambles.

  “It’s all politics in there,” the newspaperman said.

  He waved absently over his shoulder toward the Baron’s old library, still a refuge of sorts, though not one to Guido’s liking. He preferred to keep his secrets out in the open: always the safest place to hide. Look, there’s Guido—an awful scoundrel, but harmless enough.

  “Politics,” Greimer went on, “as understood by militarists. Rather like sex as understood by schoolboys.” His voice became droll: “ ‘This can’t go on! It’s an outrage against German honor! We won’t stand for it!’ Well, then, gentlemen—do something about it. ‘But oh my, whatever can we do? From whom shall we take our orders? They never taught us at General Staff College to think for ourselves!’ The very idea!” Greimer snorted. “Right along they’ve wanted another war—now they’re terrified he’s going to give them one.”

  “Oh, war,” said Cissy, “who could want that? There won’t be a war, will there, darling?”

  Guido’s mouth was open with the ready lie—Of course there won’t, don’t be silly—but the journalist spoke first.

  “Well, that’s just the problem, isn’t it, Prinzessin? Most people want peace. I mean in the broadest sense, in our daily lives—our dealings with neighbors, tradesmen, strangers on the S-Bahn. It’s in our nature to placate the bastards, appeal to reason, bite our tongues—anything to avoid a fight. And that’s all to the good. But it only works when you’re dealing with civilized people. These ones we’re talking about—”

  Guido glanced around, worried about who might be listening, and Greimer caught him at it. He glared back but kept his mouth shut. Cissy—sensing his anger though perhaps not understanding it—looked dazed, and for an instant Guido feared she’d burst into sobs. Her mercurial temperament ran to such extremes. Instead she rallied herself, took firm hold of the journalist’s forearm and shifted her weight with surprising steadiness.

  “Let’s find you a drink,” she said, “something good and strong. And we’ll ask them to play something more fun. Something for the saxophone! Look, darling, isn’t that Dodo? Kommst du, Herr Greimer. Over here, Dodo! Look!”

  Watching them weave across the floor, Guido let his lungs slowly empty. In relief or exhaustion? He couldn’t decide which, but with Cissy off his hands, he felt at loose ends. She brought something, undeniably—a spark of gaiety. Now his eyes moved disconsolately across the room, from the musicians in the little nook under the balcony to the ancient and faintly ridiculous ormolu chair beside the hearth, from which the Baroness held court. The old gal was practically alone there, accompanied only by a tall fellow in a rumpled navy uniform who’d bent nearly double to hold a match near the tip of her cigarette. The flame rose dead steady while the cigarette, in its long meerschaum holder, bobbed crazily, as though the Baroness was…what? Beside herself with laughter? Quaking with grief?

  Guido, now curious, strayed toward them, stopping once or twice to nick a canapé. At his approach, the Baroness raised her head and gave him a blank stare as if she had no earthly notion who he might be. Or because—this was probably it—her mind was somewhere else entirely. Some glamorous, long-vanished era. There followed a long silence whose awkwardness might have registered only in Guido’s mind. He knew better than to break it.

  “Isn’t it time,” the grande dame said at last, looking straight at Guido but perhaps not addressing him or anyone present, “for the talking to stop? Time to have done with it? Can’t we just…get rid of them?”

  Guido affected to have heard nothing: the only safe course.

  But the navy man took her bony old gloved hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “God help us,” he said, barely loud enough for Guido to hear, “God help us, we are going to try.”

  CRIME IN AMERICA

  WASHINGTON, DC: MARCH 1938

  Come out, thought Oskar. Come out, damn you.

  He stood on the glittering pavement outside the Argentine embassy in weather that was neither warm nor cold enough. The air was clammy as a wash rag, with a smell of rotting leaves and petrol. In Berlin at this hour it would be coal black, but here in Washington a drab sort of twilight prevailed—the gloaming of cocktail hour. Around him at intervals traipsed an assortment of ladies and gentlemen in semiformal attire, and for the sake of distraction he tried to guess who they might be, what nation or political faction or social category they might represent. His training hadn’t covered any of this—hurriedly conducted at an Abwehr field station, given the general theme of paranoia—so his guesses were uneducated and probably wrong. This lady in a severe black waistcoat, for example, might be a banker from Luxembourg—her smile calibrated to the last decimal point of charm—or she might be an American secretary with an invitation passed along by a boss who was otherwise engaged. And this gentleman with a top hat and a walking stick, who was he? He looked so painfully British he must be Australian, perhaps a chargé d’affaires, or an international criminal, or a newspaperman.

  Oskar wondered how he himself must appear to these distinguished-looking people in their evening clothes. Hopeless, probably. His suit was well-made but drab, light wool dyed just to the yellow side of tan, probably copied from a back issue of some American magazine with a view toward making him inconspicuous, whereas in practice it made him outstandingly unstylish. Who is that man? Why, I believe it’s the Polish industrial attaché. To go with the suit, they’d given him a new identity, equally unbecoming: he was Erwin Kaspar, a low-ranking functionary in the Agriculture Ministry, dispatched to Washington to explore an upward revision of grain export quotas. They hadn’t troubled to brief him on this. “The man you’ll be talking to,” they assured him, “won’t know any more about it than you do.”

  The
man I’ll be talking to, he thought. And where is this man now, exactly?

  It had taken some doing to run the target to ground. When Oskar had stepped off the Hamburg-America liner in New York two days ago, he’d had little to go on besides a name (Tobias Lugan), a job title (minority counsel, Senate German Affairs Subcommittee) and a profile patched together from Abwehr files (law degree from Boston University, friend of the Lindberghs’, fond of parties, no known prior contact with German intelligence). The embassy staff had been of little help; they probably doubted Erwin Kaspar’s bona fides, and good for them. The local Abwehr Rezident, who knew Oskar’s real identity but not the nature of his mission, had only suggested, “Pick up the telephone. It’s what people do here.”

  So Oskar had called Counselor Lugan’s office and asked about arranging an appointment. The woman on the other end found something funny about this—he hoped it wasn’t an embarrassing flaw in his dialect, the English they spoke here being unlike anything he’d heard in Gymnasium—but after that first bout of giggles, she became more helpful.

  “Mr. Lugan doesn’t really make appointments,” she said. “His schedule is…always subject to change. You know the Hill—things come up.” After a pause she added, “Verstehen Sie?”

  “Yes, I think so,” he said. Of course she speaks German, he told himself. It’s German Affairs. It doesn’t mean anything, so stop worrying so much. She doesn’t think you’re a spy.

  “Well, look,” she said, now with a note of sympathy in her voice. “If you want to catch up with Toby, you might try the diplomatic circuit. There’s a reception tonight at Finland, and one tomorrow at, let’s see—Argentina. He might be there, but I can’t promise anything. Toby’s all over town these days. Ich wünsche Ihnen gutes Glück.”