He’d rigged this with every hook he could think of. The dark hint of failure. The chance to upstage the command center in Berlin. A dash of clandestine flavoring with “sheet music,” the trade term for documents, especially fake ones, to be fed deliberately to an enemy. As it turned out, none of that may have been necessary.
“I don’t much care for honey traps,” Pfeiffer mused, as though his attention had run aground on that point and gone no further. “But there’s no denying they can yield solid intelligence. I’d leave the boy out of it. Well, unless there’s no luck with the others. Keep me posted. I should say, keep me current on this one. I won’t be waiting months for your report this time.”
“Understood, Commander. Thank you, sir.” He considered snapping to attention and offering a salute, but Pfeiffer was already waving him out. He made for the doorway.
“Oh, Jaap?”
He halted at this unexpected use of his Christian name. Pfeiffer wasn’t normally given to informality.
“I’m sorry about your man, the young officer you sent to Washington. We’ll find out what happened to him; then we’ll do something about it. Field agents are one thing, but this was a colleague. One of us. We’ll do right by him, if we can.”
“Yes, we will,” said Jaap—saluting, this time.
ONE THINKS OF DYING HEROICALLY
BREMEN, ÖSTLICHE VORSTADT AND THE RIVER WESER: 24 MAY
The Resistance woman was called Anna. Her name was Hanna, but that sounded Jewish and made people look at you closely, note the dark hair and a certain—what?—Mediterranean quality about your features. But if you said Anna and put your hair in a knot, you reminded them of someone else, the singer in that movie, perhaps, or the pretty teacher at their children’s Grundschule—someone, they just couldn’t put their finger on it. But not a Jewess, and certainly not a cell leader in the Resistance living underground with false papers and a cyanide capsule disguised as a bead in your necklace.
So she was called Anna, and from here on, as an officer of the SOPADE, currently holding a loaded pistol, she was in charge. Let that be perfectly clear.
What was also clear to Oskar, an officer of the Wehrmacht on secondment to the Abwehr, was that he had a gun too, though he’d tucked it into his pocket. And he had a duty, a mission to complete. He studied Anna across the oil-polished expanse of Aunt Tilde’s formal dining table and then looked past her to the old clock on the wall. Just past midnight: Tilde and Dr. Ruhmann had gone off to their rooms an hour ago, though Oskar doubted they were sleeping. As for the others…he moved his gaze around the table, wordlessly polling them. Lena seemed unimpressed, either by Anna or the pistol. She looked sick, exhausted. Clair had his head down, resting on folded arms—but his muscles were taut, his fingers twitchy.
Finally the prisoner, von Ewigholz, who didn’t look or behave like one, despite being bandaged around the ribs and lashed to a dining chair with an electric cord (no one had been able to find a proper rope). His eyes were shut but he was obviously alert, taking in every word, sensing every movement around the table.
“All right,” Oskar said to Anna. His cover identity, Stefan, the mildly political librarian, was wearing so thin he was tempted to shuck it. But maybe not just yet. “What will we do now? Where will we go?”
Anna stared at him—rather by default since no one else was looking back at her. Her gaze was fixed and hard, yet it struck Oskar as unfocused, or maybe focused on something beyond this room. She’s lost, he thought. She had orders—a mission, like his own—and now everything’s gone sideways. One of her comrades is dead, the other badly wounded. But worst of all—a nightmare, the thing she most dreaded—the SS has gotten involved.
Was Oskar reading her thoughts or was she reading his? Anna shook her head, as though to clear some obstruction, then swiveled her gun hand toward von Ewigholz and said, “First, we do away with him.”
“No!” said Clair, lifting his head from the table. His face was flushed and his long hair matted. He might or might not have known the dark connotation of the verb umbringen, but a pointed gun spoke for itself. “You’re not going to do anything else to him. He’s been…very patient with me. Very kind, actually.”
Anna made a dismissive sound, a little snort. Kind? An SS man?
“You already shot him,” said Clair. “Isn’t that enough? Just leave him here with me, and you all go on with your…whatever it is you’re doing. Your little conspiracy. Go on! I won’t tell anything to anyone, I promise. This is all so completely insane I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m just here for a…a fucking summer camp.”
Oskar couldn’t tell if Anna understood. Enough, apparently.
“You will come with us,” she told Clair.
“Well, in that case…”
Everyone—Lena, Clair, Anna, Oskar—was caught off guard. Von Ewigholz had opened his eyes but made no effort to move; he addressed them calmly, reasonably, like an attorney explaining a point of law.
“…I’m afraid you’ll have to take me, too. I’ve pledged to accompany this young man and to protect him from harm until he reaches his destination, which is Ordensburg Vogelsang. I intend to fulfill that pledge—in fact, I cannot do otherwise; it’s a matter of honor. So you may murder me, or leave me tied up here, but in that case you’ll have to murder Mr. Townsend as well, or detain him indefinitely. Because when and if you ever do release him, he’ll report your actions to his father, the senator, and that will bring, at the very least, discredit to your cause, as well as the wrath of the authorities upon everyone you’ve dragged into this criminal escapade. Aunt Tilde, do you want her to experience a Gestapo interrogation? Kindly Herr Doktor Ruhmann? So, you will take us both, me and Mr. Townsend, or you will kill us now. Go ahead, do it—just point the gun and shoot. Please aim better this time.”
He stopped, finally, and sat looking smug, to the extent that he betrayed any emotion at all. Oskar felt one impulse to shoot the man himself and another to applaud him. Personally, he’d have been hard put to capture the full absurdity of this cock-up the SOPADE had made of a simple Treff, the most straightforward of operations. The SS man had summed it up pretty well.
“This does make a certain amount of sense,” said Stefan Sinclair, the mild librarian. “But Lena and I—people are expecting us, you know. Maybe we should go it alone, and leave you”—looking at Anna now—“to manage the, ah, complications.”
It was a delicate moment, and he hoped he’d judged it right. So many degrees of unknowing. He’d been blown as a Resistance operative but not, as far as he knew, as an Abwehr officer beneath that. If he could shake himself free of Anna, he could easily retreat to the Nest. Though his mission had failed, he had important information to pass along. There would be a second mission, and he would redeem himself.
Anna was staring at von Ewigholz, seeming at once grim and weary and tough. She had a mission as well. After what felt like a very long time, she shook her head. “I don’t know what went wrong here. You brought the SS to a safe house—why do that? No, don’t answer, I can’t think now. Maybe there is a reason, maybe we were betrayed somewhere else along the line. We’ll find out eventually. The first thing is to get somewhere safe. Away from here. Tonight. We’ll leave Alex in Dr. Ruhmann’s care. Everyone else will get on the boat.”
The boat? Oskar felt the pocketed Walther in his hand, weighing it like a stone on some unfortunately literal scale of destiny.
He could walk out of here. God knows what he’d leave behind him, but no one could stop him if he decided to leave right now. He glanced at the people around the table and each one was another stone, piling up on the scale and tipping it in the other direction. He’d never gone along with Nietzsche, back in Gymnasium. There seemed to be so much more in life than the Will, the Self.
“Where’s the boat, and how do we get there?” he said. “Is there room enough?” His cover was slipping again, but maybe no one would notice.
“We walk,” Anna told him. “It’s not far. There’s
room—I think. Would you like to give me that gun?”
“I would not,” Oskar said.
She actually smiled. It was almost a nice smile; you could glimpse the pretty schoolteacher she liked to be mistaken for. But Anna’s teacher was no more real than Oskar’s librarian. “Do you know how to use it, at least?”
“I do.”
A short while later—having gagged von Ewigholz, freed him from the chair and relashed his hands behind his back—they left through the back door, making for the river.
—
It was what the English would call a narrow boat: long and low and nearly symmetrical, stern and bow closing into wedges meant to punch through the reeds and water grasses and cast-off debris that congested slow-moving inland waterways. For hundreds of years, vessels quite like this one had hauled cargo and passengers between cities and towns throughout Europe. But over time the roads got better and safer, and the railways came in, and finally the high-speed motorways, so by now the notion of traveling by riverboat was, frankly, not a serious option. No, it was something you might persuade tourists to pay for—Come see Old Germany as your ancestors did!—but beyond that, what was the point? Even in the old river towns, people seldom gave these boats a second thought.
Which, of course, made this mode of travel perfect. Oskar was impressed. Not enough to change his opinion of the SOPADE as a bunch of hopeless amateurs, but you had to give them credit. They knew how to make themselves invisible. They’d done it in 1933, when Hitler got himself named chancellor and Germany held its breath, but the Socialists never took to the streets; indeed, they all but vanished from sight. Abwarten ihrer Zeit was the phrase you heard—“awaiting their time.” And from what Oskar could tell, they still were, five years on. Perhaps their day would come, and perhaps there’d still be a Germany when it did.
There were two boatmen, evidently a father and son, the latter still school-aged though there was nothing of the classroom about him. Both were lumpen, coal-smeared, slow-moving types—a good match for this boat and for the Weser itself as it uncoiled from deep in the heartland. They emerged from the pilothouse at the stern as the passengers approached, standing by an open hatch that gave access by a steep ladder to the compartments below. Their faces, characteristically expressionless, grew alarmed when von Ewigholz came into the faint halo of the boat’s kerosene lanterns, moving stiffly and favoring his wounded side. They’d removed his hat and covered his uniform with a cloak, but he nonetheless made a terrifying impression: chiseled alabaster features, white-blond hair, eyes both blue and red, like ice crystals floating in blood.
“It’s all right,” Anna told them. “This man is our prisoner.”
Scarcely reassured, the boatmen drew back and, after the others had descended, left it to Oskar to wrestle von Ewigholz through the hatch and down the ladder into a cabin that apparently served for both dining and sleeping. It was lit by two more lanterns and, in a nod to domesticity, furnished with a pair of old-fashioned armchairs that were screwed to the floor near a small potbellied stove, on either side of a filthy Persian rug. When von Ewigholz had regained his balance, Oskar let him go, and they both stood for a moment looking up at the older boatman through the open hatch.
“What is your vessel called?” said von Ewigholz.
They were all surprised, except perhaps for the boatman, who smiled with pride or satisfaction or, possibly, appreciation of such good manners. He said, “She’s called Eulenspiegel, and you’re all—”
If he’d been about to add “welcome aboard,” he thought better of it and drew back out of sight. They could hear him conferring quietly with his son before the hatch thumped down and a metal fitting clanked into place. Oskar felt a stab of claustrophobia, but on inspection this was an ordinary door latch, accessible from either side. If not quite trapped, they weren’t really free—a feeling that by now was familiar.
—
Incredibly, it was possible to sleep. There were four bunks, two forward and two aft, in little compartments separated from the main cabin by sliding doors. Clair and von Ewigholz were assigned to one, Oskar to the other, while the two women took turns on watch so there would always be somebody guarding the prisoner. Oskar volunteered to stand a shift, but Anna explained that this was now a SOPADE operation and he would do as he was told, that he should be thankful they’d let him keep the Walther. And so he was. Though he suspected that, from their point of view, it would turn out to be a mistake.
The berthing compartment was efficiently arranged so as to be just large enough for its purpose with not an inch of wasted space. He admired the ingenious craftsmanship of its tiny closets, its washstand with a night pot on a sliding tray beneath, cabinets nested into the slanting side panels, bedside shelves with a finely worked railing to keep the books from sliding off. There was enough light through the open door to make out a few titles, and God help the psychoanalyst hunting for an underlying pattern among Hegel’s biography of Jesus, Twain’s Leben auf dem Mississippi, Baedeker Deutschland (1913), Der grosse Gatsby, Emil und die Detektive, a collection of folk songs, a guide to Hannoverian cuisine, Der Steppenwolf, and Till Eulenspiegel, der bekannteste Narr der Welt. Oskar chose the starboard bunk and opened the small port to admit a puff of cool night air, the odors of brine and diesel, and the intermittent clang of a bell buoy. He hoped to doze off for an hour or two, until first light—maybe he’d see things more clearly then.
When he opened his eyes, it was midmorning and Lena was asleep in the neighboring bunk. The boat’s engine throbbed somewhere beneath him. Lena lay on her side facing him, an elongated disk of sunlight lapping over her shoulder and gilding stray wisps of hair like new-spun filaments in a fairy tale. The loveliness ran through him as sharp and fast as an arrow. He almost gasped. Waking had never come as such a shock, even when it had been occasioned by bugles and accompanied by the shouts of a drill sergeant. He tried to sit up but had gotten tangled somehow in his own clothing—or no, it was a thin blanket someone, he supposed Lena, had drawn over him as he slept. He squirmed free, feeling stupid and confused. His body had doubled in weight, it seemed. The ceiling boards were high enough for a man of Oskar’s height to stand upright, but he managed to knock his head, hard, against a narrow beam that ran down the center, amidships. He groaned and caught himself as the boat lurched to port, then stepped toward the doorway. Before leaving he took a final look at Lena, who hadn’t stirred.
Out in the main cabin he found Anna and Clair occupying the two chairs—she with the gun in her lap, nestled there comfortingly like a skein of yarn, the boy twisted sideways with his legs over an armrest, looking peevish.
“She won’t let me go out on deck,” Clair said, as though he’d been waiting a long while for someone with whom to lodge this complaint. “It’s a beautiful day, and I just have to sit here. What’s the point? So what if somebody sees me? It’s a boat. I’m a passenger. If anyone stares, I’ll just wave. What could be more innocent?”
Anna gave Oskar a look that—as with all the rest, now that he thought about it—seemed to contain elements of both collusion and challenge. He reckoned that at some point he and Anna were going to have an interesting conversation, but this wasn’t the time for it. He tried to think of how best to answer Clair, whose objections seemed reasonable enough. Could he explain to this young American that, yes, it would seem entirely innocent, and that was exactly the problem? That innocence in Germany today was a rare and potentially fatal affliction? But that, lucky for Clair, he was surrounded by people who’d become immune to it?
“Just wait a while,” he said. “There are some books in here you can read.”
“I can’t even read German.”
Anna laughed. “Das ist absolut nicht richtig von dir.”
“I don’t speak German, either, but I know that wasn’t nice.”
“She does have a point, though,” said Oskar, who suspected that Clair’s incomprehension was at least partly tactical.
The boy gave him a funny sort of
smile, not unlike a game player’s: that move’s clever, but you’ll get nothing out of it.
Anna stood up. She’d had enough of this, and there was other business to get on with. She gestured toward the second berthing compartment, whose door had been left slightly ajar. “You need to look in on him,” she said. “I’m worried something’s the matter. With the wound or…I don’t know. Just have a look.”
Oskar had barely entered the other room before Clair elbowed past him. “What did she say? Angst über what?”
The compartment was dark but Oskar, obliged to look over Clair’s interposed shoulder, could see sweat gleaming on von Ewigholz’s forehead. The air was close and too warm, and there was a strange smell, sickly and unpleasant. He slid back the curtain on the opposite side and opened the window as far as it would go. When he turned around, the SS man had opened his eyes and was frowning up at Clair, who was hovering just out of reach, anxious as a cat.
“Let me—” Oskar pushed closer, kneeling close to the bunk. Somebody—Clair? surely not Anna—had untied von Ewigholz’s arms and removed his uniform jacket. Blood had soaked through the bandages into the shirt, already torn and stained from the shooting, and Oskar could see now that it had also run down into the musty bedding. The wound must have reopened. He caught the man’s eye—sharp as ever, though glazed, maybe feverish.
“What do you think?” von Ewigholz asked.
Oskar thought first that this was a remarkable question, not only for the absolutely calm voice but also for how it seemed to address Oskar personally—not Stefan Sinclair or some anonymous enemy but a fellow German officer, a comrade even, who wouldn’t lie to him under these circumstances.
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