Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  Tonight, for example.

  Toby slipped into the calming shadows of a neighborhood known formally as Kalorama, or simply the Caves. Rising like a walled fortress above Dupont Circle, its somber mini-castles stood buttress to buttress on small lots among magnolia and boxwood and holly, a favored roosting ground for the high and mighty who felt cramped in Georgetown but didn’t care for the drive out Foxhall Road. Flanked by Embassy Row to the west, rolling down to Rock Creek in the north, it was a rarefied enclave where rumors of the Depression had scarcely penetrated. Lugan doubted that even all-out war would rattle these tall sashed windows. The ceaseless round of garden parties, dinner parties, after-theater suppers, Sunday brunches, extravagantly catered “teas,” backyard cookouts, receptions and wakes and comings-out would, he was sure, roll along unabated. Forever and ever, amen.

  He came in due course to a two-story brick Colonial squeezed tight by more prepossessing neighbors. Lights glowed handsomely through heavy maroon drapes, suggesting a cheery interior. Though he hadn’t really thought this through, he mounted the steps and raised the preposterous knocker, a cornucopia in brass representing the bounty that sustained the good senator’s midwestern constituency. It fell with a clunk loud enough to gavel half the District to order. From inside came a shout—“See who that is, damn it, would you?”—and after a few moments, the door swung heavily open. Toby cranked his head back so as to meet the gaze of young Clairborne Townsend, Clair to family and friends, the sole and strapping son of the Honorable Thomas DeWitt “Bull” Townsend, ranking Republican on the German Affairs Subcommittee.

  Toby felt strangely nonplussed. Clair continued to hover in the doorway and seemed perfectly content to stare down at him, as though issuing a silent challenge: Explain yourself or go away—you don’t really belong in a place like this. Which was true enough, but fuck it. Fuck the Townsend whelp, too. This snot, who might or might not have turned eighteen, had been handed the life of a soft-skinned, mollycoddled plutocrat’s boy by none other than Tobias Lugan and men of his ilk—anonymous foot soldiers who carried out the unglamorous business of government while public figures like Townsend père were pleased to claim the credit, smiling for the cameras and signing their names to legislation that had been fought over so bitterly it ought to have been printed in hot blood on human skin. Clair might score top marks at a hoity-toity place like St. Albans, but let him try to survive even an afternoon in the schoolyard at Francis Xavier, Toby’s alma mater up in Southie.

  “I need to see your dad” was what he boiled this down to when pushing his way through the door.

  The boy stepped back, barely in time. He smelled womanish, or maybe it was the florid air of the house itself—a mystery, inasmuch as you never saw the Mrs. about. Word was she spent most of her time back home (if that’s what you’d call a drafty manor where the family camped out for a few weeks every summer) and the remainder on the top floor here, stone drunk.

  “I’m sure my father will be delighted,” Clair muttered.

  The gathering, too loose to be termed a meeting, too quiet for a party, was in the back parlor, where French windows gave cheerlessly onto a moonlit patio. Toby recognized, besides the senator, one of his senior aides, a despondent-looking Post reporter and a woman named Maude who was said to be the mistress of a Supreme Court justice. There were others in armchairs whom Lugan ignored, though his gut suggested that a slender man with a crooked black tie, side-lit by a table lamp, bore keeping an eye on.

  “Toby!” Townsend gushed, with the instantaneous ease of a modern bathroom fixture. “What’s your poison? Jameson, I think?”

  Toby drank anything; he seldom bothered to taste it anymore. Too much else to think about. He was half lost in thought even now, watching the senator enact with due solemnity the ritual of pouring a cocktail. No question, Bull cut a striking figure. He was a large man, nearly as tall as his son (who’d vanished from sight, though Toby didn’t trust the brat to stray out of earshot), so featurelessly handsome that political cartoonists had little to work with. He was often accused—likely as not by a shill he’d planted in the audience—of being a thorn in Franklin Roosevelt’s side. To which he’d reply, with an aw-shucks humility that played well back home, that he liked the word barb—one of those sharp things on cattle fences—because he felt more at ease on a ranch than in the Rose Garden. Thank you, ha-ha, next question, please?

  “Here you go, Toby,” he said, advancing toward him with a glass the size of a cannon shell. “What brings you around tonight?”

  “A little something has come our way,” Toby said—loudly, as he said all things, on the theory that people really take notice only if they catch you whispering. Nothing bellowed at painful volume could possibly be worth listening to, not in this town. “A little package from overseas.”

  “Wonderful!” Townsend exclaimed, as if he had the faintest fucking idea what Lugan was talking about. “That’s just great—and you brought it here first!”

  This was probably a question, though you couldn’t tell from how Bull was beaming at all his other guests. Belatedly, Toby wondered what was actually going on here. Was it anything at all, necessarily? Did Bull Townsend have an ordinary social life? Real human friends? The idea disappointed him. This man was only the third-ranking Republican on Foreign Relations, and his subcommittee assignments were nothing to retire on, German Affairs being roughly the Senate’s equivalent of forty acres and a mule. He couldn’t waste time on just plain friends—not yet.

  Not that Toby worried much about that. What made Townsend of special interest wasn’t his current standing in the pecking order—those things were apt to change—but, rather, his well-deserved reputation for knowing what, and whom, to come out against at a given moment. Immorality in the movies had been a good thing for Bull in ’34—it was hard to find a Democrat with the temerity to defend it—but that had run its course, and resentment about freeloaders from the Dust Bowl wasn’t showing any legs. Lately Townsend had gotten an inkling that German bashers (or maybe we should call them saber rattlers or warmongers—all perfectly respectable terms that voters would understand as synonymous with Jews) might be the next useful target.

  Toby glanced around at the others in the room, most of whom were studying him with barely disguised avidity, hungering for some fresh morsel of Hill gossip. “Senator,” he said, “would you, ah—maybe we could go somewhere and talk?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Townsend said, exuding good will for all and sundry. “I’m sure we’re among friends here.”

  Toby doubted that. The slender man with the crooked tie was avoiding his gaze. He looked disreputable, like an artist in town to ride the WPA gravy train. Or a writer—could Bull be friends with a writer? Picturing dime novels full of horses and gunplay and virile cowboys, Toby relaxed a little.

  “Well, listen,” said Townsend, dropping his voice. “I just need to wrap up a little business with Mr. Viereck here, then I’ll meet you up in the study. You know where to find it, don’t you?”

  Toby was glad to be excused. En route to the staircase he passed young Clairborne again. The two exchanged looks but neither spoke. What, really, could they have to say to each other?

  —

  Oskar woke early the next morning and lay in his bed listening to unfamiliar bird calls outside the window. They’d given him a room in a back wing of the embassy that normally would have been occupied by a low-level diplomat, but the resident staff had been pared down this year as relations between the Third Reich and the United States had chilled and the two nations found fewer things to talk about. Recent arrivals tended to be young men of undiplomatic character who were listed in the directory under ambiguous titles, the most popular being “attaché” with no indication of an exact field of expertise. There apparently was no limit to the number of attachés without portfolio a German legation in a Western capital could employ. Oskar couldn’t help wondering if he’d seen two of them in the tavern last night.

  The room was monas
tic: a bed, a cabinet and a writing desk. A previous occupant had tried to enliven it with a travel poster, circa 1935, depicting “Motoring in the New Germany” with a three-color rendering of mountains, a ruined castle and the front half of a modern motorcar, strangely dispiriting in all. But the window opened onto back grounds that had been fashioned into a modest walled park—clipped yew hedges and strapping oaks and grass so perfectly groomed you imagined a gardener on his knees with a ruler and scissors. The birds must be up in the trees somewhere; Oskar couldn’t see any, but their trills and peeps and polyphonous cross-chatter made a convincing case that it was spring and he should be out in it.

  He was just passing through reception—a pleasant domain with tall, south-facing windows that might have graced the lobby of a prestigious law firm, except for the swastika banner and the imposing portrait of Adolf Hitler—when a matronly woman spotted him from her desk in a corner and waved for his attention.

  “Herr Kaspar?” she called. “You are Herr Kaspar from Agriculture? A moment, please, sir. I believe we have something for you.”

  She rose from the desk and vanished into a smaller room just off the main chamber; a younger secretary at another desk lowered her pen to look at Oskar too intently for his liking, and now others were staring too. One of them was a round-faced man with tiny spectacles whose desk, near the front door, was utterly bare save for a German newspaper. Oskar had noticed him before; he sat there all day, and in the evening another man took his place, yet neither of them appeared to do any work at all. On the front page of the newspaper was a large photo of the Führer launching a battleship. There’d been no launches in the weeks before Oskar left, so the paper must be quite recent, probably flown over in the diplomatic pouch. And therefore this Nobody must be Somebody. Perhaps, as they said in the Abwehr, he was “from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse”—that is, a member of the rival intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst, an arm of Himmler’s sprawling SS.

  The matron emerged from the back room bearing a small squarish envelope. She bustled over to Oskar and placed it rather delicately in his hand. It was pinkish beige and seemed to emit a faint scent of lilac.

  “This was delivered for you last night,” she told him, in a confidential whisper probably audible from the farthest corner of the room. “Delivered by a young woman—a quite attractive young woman, I’m told. Very late last night.”

  The secretary at her desk began to titter. Everyone was smiling except for the man with tiny spectacles, who seemed to have lost interest and had gone back to his newspaper. Führer tauft Linienschiff “Gneisenau.”

  Oskar exited the embassy at a pace that might have been taken for panicked flight but that he hoped would read as the natural excitement of young Herr Kaspar at having a received a communication from a quite attractive Fräulein. He stood on the sidewalk by Massachusetts Avenue, a wide and tree-lined boulevard oddly lacking in traffic, at least compared to Berlin, holding the envelope with his fingertips, as though without careful handling it might explode. From what he could see, it hadn’t been opened—but if it had, how could he tell? He opened it now and pulled out a note card imprinted palely with yellow flowers and inscribed in a neat, presumably feminine hand:

  Enjoyed our lovely talk. Can’t wait for more, and…!

  Can we meet tomorrow? (Probably today for you!) Working late, but I can make it by 10. Say the Q Street Bridge? (The one with the buffaloes!) I know Germans are punctual, so I’ll be right on time. Cross from the east side, I’ll meet you halfway!

  ’til then—V.

  He slipped the note gently into a pocket. He wondered about the V.—was that some kind of message? If so, coming from Lugan, it was likely a crude one.

  There’d be plenty of time to think about that later, too much of it, really—he’d be going mad by ten o’clock. In the meanwhile, there was business to get on with. The list he’d given Lugan at the Hessian House had been more or less a teaser, with enough to make Erwin Kaspar seem credible but also a hint of deeper, more tantalizing secrets to come. Somewhere in this city was a package—he imagined a box, battered at the edges, wrapped in brown paper and stamped with the usual postal clearances—with an intelligence treasure inside it, something so precious that even the Americans in their purblind neutrality would tremble to behold it. Oskar had no clue what the treasure was or where it was hidden. But he knew how to find it, or so he hoped.

  Toward the end of his training, he’d been called in for an unusual interview touching upon certain aspects of his past. There’d been other conversations of this sort, quite a few of them, as his trainers sifted through the various stages of his life, his education, his years as a cadet at Lichterfelde. It was a matter of truly understanding the operative, his unique strengths and possible vulnerabilities. The questions were intimate yet oddly impersonal, as though his trainers didn’t really care about the answers; they merely needed to hear them. But this time was different. For one thing, Jaap Saxo was there, the man who’d recruited him in Berlin. For another, the questions were more pointed than usual; these people were driving at something, and this time his answers clearly mattered a great deal.

  “Tell us, Oskar,” one of them said—it wasn’t Jaap, who was just sitting there, staring out the window. “Do you know anybody in Washington? Any friends of the family who thought it prudent to, ah, seek employment abroad? Distant cousins, old pals from the Movement, the nice Jewish doctor you saw as a child?”

  Something in the man’s voice unsettled him. And when Oskar didn’t answer at once, he pressed harder.

  “Ideally, this should be someone you feel you can trust. Someone who will trust you in return. The personal connection is key, for the other party’s comfort as well as our own. Because we need to ask a favor of this person. Not a large or dangerous favor, but one that is important for Germany.”

  Jaap looked around at that point, his gaze brushing over Oskar before he again turned away, and in that moment Oskar understood.

  “Think hard,” said the other man. “Is there anyone?”

  Well, yes—but they’d already known that. Oskar had felt it at the time, but he was certain now. The whole plan hinged on their knowing. But they had to hear it from him. They wanted to hear the whole story about Leo and its terrible ending—though it wasn’t really an ending, was it?—in Oskar’s own words.

  Well, damn them. But they were simply doing their jobs, following the rules they’d written themselves. Oskar had been the target that day, and as with Toby Lugan, they’d wanted him to play the archer, aiming his bow across the Atlantic and loosing the arrow at Leo Gandelmann. And now—right now, this morning—he needed to track Leo down and find out how deeply his betrayal had struck.

  —

  Leo had been, once upon a time, the older boy next door, a musical prodigy, destined for greatness. But then came the braune Pest and, not long after, dark tidings from the Gandelmann household. The mother summoned for “questioning,” returning two weeks later, ghostly pale. Her equally sudden death, a rumor of suicide. The hapless father, weeping at the dinner table. Finally it was Leo’s turn. Grinning, yellow-shirted goons waiting outside the Gymnasium. Oskar ordered to empty Leo’s desk and burn its contents, sheet music turned to ash, unheard notes blowing away on a sullen breeze. Just a lousy bunch of paper, Leo would say later. Then one summer morning, he and his father were suddenly gone—the house still standing empty when Oskar departed for Lichterfelde. By Christmas a new family had moved in, Volksdeutsche reemigrating from Uruguay.

  A letter had come eventually. The father was living in New York; Leo had quit school and found a job teaching music in Washington. God must be laughing—a Gandelmann working at a place called St. Albans! There’d been more letters back and forth, but they tapered off; there seemed to be no common language shared by people in the Reich and those in the unimaginable world beyond.

  So that was what Oskar had to go on: a place called St. Albans. Which was (per the guidebook he’d bought upon arrival) a college
preparatory school for boys in grades four through twelve, situated at the highest point in the District of Columbia, where it shared grounds with the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul—an Anglican institution, mind you, not Roman Catholic. If God was laughing, He was doing so politely with a teacup in His hand. It was three-point-five kilometers from the German embassy and all uphill, a pleasant morning walk.

  The weather had changed overnight as a cold front pushed through, clearing the sky and honing the wind to a nice edge that seemed to whittle away the blandness of Erwin Kaspar, revealing the Wehrmacht officer inside and the Freideutsche Jugend inside that. Oskar thought about practicing the tricks he’d learned for spotting people who might be tailing him, but he didn’t feel like breaking stride, and it seemed pointless, anyway. Who would be tailing him, and why? At one point, passing a stretch of undeveloped woodland, he turned abruptly onto a footpath and halted a dozen paces in, affecting interest in a little sign indicating that this network of walking trails was a project undertaken by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935. No one turned after him, no silhouettes loomed tellingly at the trailhead—he was almost disappointed.

  The grounds of the school and the cathedral were edged by a wall of mortared fieldstone, which he followed to a gate topped by an elaborate Gothic arch. It felt a bit like entering a castle, and he wondered if American boys also played at being knights, making swords and shields out of scrap wood and defending their realm. The ones he saw in the playground here were wearing blazers and ties—little knights in a new kind of order—but he walked past them to a small building with well-worn steps and a sign reading BURSAR. Though his English didn’t register the word, the door handle was modern and designed for heavy use, so he turned it and stepped inside.