Down by the river was a little terminal that looked like a country railroad station. It had its own tidy wharf, a sign facing up- and downriver that read POLLE and a prominent flagstaff with an arm for running up signal pennants. Oskar guessed the stationkeeper was an old navy man; the two flags on display had been rigged smartly to catch the wind without wrapping around on themselves. From the main mast waved a bright red swastika, from the arm a four-squared black-and-yellow pennant that stood for the letter L.
L? It had been a couple of years since he’d had to memorize these things, but a few clung oddly to Oskar’s mind, and L— or “Lima”—was one of them, because it meant Stop your vessel immediately.
That was bad enough, and to enforce the suggestion, two men emerged from the station house. One wore the uniform of a local policeman while the other, perhaps the old navy man Oskar had imagined, was dressed in proper bürgerlich fashion, all the way to a hat and waistcoat. They bade their time near the water’s edge while the boatman throttled down and eased up to the wharf, his son at the bow snaring an eyebolt with the barge pole to drag the old vessel to a halt.
And so, without fanfare, the show was on. Oskar rose from his seat beside Lena on the quarterdeck—a pair of canvas chairs, rarely used, having been dragged out for stage dressing—and faced the two men on the shore with a half-smiling, half-impatient look he’d rehearsed in front of the polished nickel plate that passed for a mirror. “What’s all this?” he demanded, drawing on all of Stefan Sinclair’s meek imperiousness. (Why is this book two weeks overdue?) “I don’t believe a stop was scheduled here. Already we’re running late. We paid full fare, right through to Bad Karlshafen.”
The policeman took this badly—a challenge to his authority—but the stationmaster just tipped his hat and said courteously, “Good morning, sir, good morning, gnädige Frau.” Casting a dark eye back toward the stern, he called, “Good morning, Herr Tiller.”
The boatman muttered, his words unclear but his annoyance unmistakable.
Tiller, thought Oskar, seized by this irrelevance. Till Eulenspiegel. A boat named after a wise fool, a fairy-tale trickster.
“I’m afraid we need to search your vessel, Tiller,” said the stationmaster. “There was some trouble in Bremen, the police are looking—”
Now the policeman interjected himself: “May I see your papers, please? And, Tiller, get all your crew and passengers on deck now. Everyone! This is no joke.”
The old boatman strolled forward from the pilothouse, as though curiosity had overcome his aversion to authority. “No joke—well, I should hope it isn’t. And what crew? It’s just me and Josef, same as ever, you know that. As to the passengers, well…”
Oskar had never seen anyone who so obviously had something to hide. He lowered his cap, wiped his mustache, shuffled indecisively and finally declared, “There are no other passengers! What do you think I’m running here, a ferry service? There’s Herr and Frau Sinclair, just back from America—they’ve paid the full fare, you heard him yourself! Now look at their papers and go back to polishing your paperweights. If you’re searching for criminals, there’s a coal merchant in Minden I can tell you about.”
The policeman was having none of this. Summoning the dignity of his office, he charged the quarterdeck and brushed past Oskar and Lena, making straight for the hatch leading down to the main cabin. Oskar got the impression he’d had dealings before with old Tiller and wouldn’t trust him to count the fingers on his own hand. The stationmaster followed, perhaps worried that he might miss something. Lena added her own bit to the confusion by tugging at the policeman’s coat sleeve, waving her travel papers at him, insisting that he examine them immediately. The whole performance peaked naturally when the hatch opened of its own accord, a second before the policeman could yank it open himself—and there stood Anna, wearing a nurse’s cap and a hospital face mask over what Oskar expected was the world’s most affronted scowl.
She came slowly up the ladder, full of grim purpose—and, good Lord, he could see how she’d gotten away with this kind of thing for five solid years. The policeman backed off, making room for her. After reaching the deck, she closed the hatch softly but definitively, easing the latch into its cradle, dusting her hands on her sleeves, one at a time—and only then did she look from the policeman to the stationmaster and back again. Carefully she lowered the mask, leaving it resting under her chin, and calmly said, “Would someone please tell me what is going on?”
The two officials answered at once—a shooting in Bremen, eyewitness accounts, a manhunt under way, all boats being searched—and Anna nodded patiently. She’d heard enough, thank you.
“You’ll need to see my papers, then,” she said. “And, I suppose, the patient’s as well. Shall I get them, or would you like to—?” She motioned toward the hatch.
The men looked at each other, and the policeman said, “What can you tell me about this patient?”
Anna sighed. “Of course until the doctor sees him, there’s no official diagnosis—you understand that. But I must tell you: I fear it’s consumption. Highly contagious at this stage. Naturally, we’ve taken every precaution. These people have been very kind. I’d never have chosen to bring him to the clinic by boat; but under the circumstances, a train seemed inadvisable, and when I inquired into hiring an automobile—”
“Ach!” said the policeman, now sympathetic. “Not with the Himmelfahrt! Everything’s booked. You couldn’t hire a tractor and a farm wagon.”
The nurse wasn’t a hard-hearted sort, after all. She knew this was a joke and played along with it. “Well, I don’t think that would have been quite suitable either, Herr Offizier.”
“Aha! No, Schwester, perhaps not. Well, then.”
They all stood there, crowded together, in a situation that Oskar recognized as straight out of Clausewitz. Between them on the narrow deck lay the Schwerpunkt, the invisible pivot on which every other thing—formations and alignments and concentrations of force—must turn. Here, a canny and well-timed move could decide the outcome of a battle or, indeed, make the battle unnecessary. Clausewitz was a great one for ducking actual combat. “Bloodshed in war,” he’d written, “is like the occasional cash transaction in a business normally run on credit.”
Anna might have studied the same text. She played it easily, almost carelessly. “If you wear this,” she told the policeman, “you should be quite safe.” From a pocket she drew a mask identical to her own. “The patient is isolated in the forward berthing compartment. I imagine you’ll need to have a look at him, to confirm his identity. I’ll fetch the papers from his luggage—don’t worry, there’s no chance of infection, I’ve kept everything quite clean. You just need to be careful”—now offering him the mask, holding this protective talisman reverently—“about breathing.”
The policeman looked as though he had no wish even to touch it. Still, he’d puffed himself up for the others’ benefit—the nurse’s especially; he would admit that. Now he wasn’t sure what to do.
At this point, Anna turned almost brazen. “If you don’t see the patient with your own eyes, and later your superiors ask about it, what will you tell them? Here, mein mutiger Offizier, I’ll be right beside you.”
The policeman sighed. He took the mask and held it to his face and, with a nod of the purest fatalism, disappeared into the cabin below, followed closely by Anna.
They were back in under two minutes. Oskar had no idea what had happened down there, what she’d done to make the prisoner presentable—drugged him into unconsciousness, he later suspected—or where she’d hidden Clairborne the whole time. It was just conceivable, in hindsight, that she hadn’t bothered to hide him at all, that the boy was simply lounging in the other compartment with the door shut. It wouldn’t have mattered. The moment of maximum danger came and went, an anticlimax. Clausewitz couldn’t have done any better. Oskar wasn’t fond of Anna, but he would never question her judgment again.
They stood awhile longer on deck, some dark
energy having been discharged, as if a quick storm had blown through. The stationmaster took the opportunity to reprimand the boatman Tiller: He’d known in his heart the man was up to something, and now we see what! Taking on new passengers after all the berths have been paid for! A glance at the ship’s log will tell a lively tale!
“Yes, sure,” grumbled Tiller, “go on now, off my boat. These good people are in a hurry. It’s a question of hygiene.”
Oskar was back in his deck chair beside Lena when Tiller the younger nudged the Eulenspiegel’s bow away from the wharf and the old man pumped up the engine and they nosed into the channel, pushing against the slow current. Oskar looked back at the village of Polle, watching the stationmaster lower the Lima flag and fold it neatly while the policeman stood nearby taking notes, until something by the building distracted him and he closed the notebook and walked over. The river resumed its long turn to port, and the little station was about to be swallowed by a bank overgrown with bilberries. Oskar could barely make out an automobile, smallish and black—an Opel, something like that—and two men in dark coats, inappropriate dress for this kind of weather. For a few seconds he studied the three tiny figures standing together in the sun, and then the village was gone and there was only the Weser, rolling in its ancient bed like a place in a storybook.
GOLDEN PHEASANTS
LAKE ALSTER AND THE RIVER HAVEL: 26 MAY
The Honorable Thomas DeWitt “Bull” Townsend, ranking member of the Senate German Affairs Subcommittee, was not happy.
Certainly not with his suite in the Atlantic, which his staff had assured him was the best place in Hamburg—built like a palace, with a breathtaking view of the water.
“It’s called the Atlantic, damn it, so why am I looking at some pissant lake? And who do you have to fuck to get hot water in here?”
Nor was he happy with his schedule, which his staff had spent half the night revising, so as to give the senator more time for sightseeing.
“Who’s this guy from the Interior Ministry? Why’s he want to meet me informally? The hell’s that mean—over a couple beers? At a bowling alley? Hiding behind some rosebushes? I can’t even pronounce his name—Jesus-voos? Look here, tell me what this says.”
Gisevius, with a hard G. Hans-Bernd Gisevius. Old aristocratic family, deep connections with the Prussian officer corps, friend of Lord Halifax, the British—
“I know who Lord Halifax is, you moron. So this Geeza-voos is a pal of his? Hmm. What’s Toby say about this? Where the hell is Toby, anyway? All right, just—keep it short, okay? And no rosebushes—friends with the Brits, probably try to kiss me. What’s next?”
Finally, he was not happy with the news about his son—more specifically, the absence of any.
“Long’s it been now—two, three days? Should’ve got to that place by now, shouldn’t they? Even if Clair’s calling the shots. Even if they stopped to buy a whole new summer wardrobe. Boy can spend money faster than his mother. Least he doesn’t drink, not that I know of. Look, you didn’t hear that, okay? Mother’s a fine woman, just—she’s never taken to Washington, is all. Hell, I’ve never taken to Washington. Gotta do it, though. Slay the beast in his lair. What was that soldier’s name? The one from the boat. Von something. Look, get somebody on the phone, see what you can find out. Call the school, the camp, whatever the fuck it is. Mother’s gonna ask, next time I speak to her. All right—what’s next? And where the hell’s Toby?”
—
The sun smiled wanly over the river Havel, north and west of Berlin, like some irony-laden Nordic commentary on the theme of summer. Tobias Lugan had been rowing for a while—not really biting into it, just giving the oars a yank now and then for the sake of stirring up some waves—but now he stopped, let the oars ride high, and marveled at how little difference it made. The water was flat, and the current, if there was one, wasn’t about to sweep them out to sea. The boat was on loan from the military attaché, along with, Toby supposed, the girl, whose name was Susan and who worked in something called Liaison, which he supposed entailed walking around with important documents like the one in her lap, bound in red imitation leather and blocking the sight line up her skirt.
“Pour me another drink, would you, doll?” he asked nicely.
Susan must have been glad to have a day out on the water—or else she found him an interesting change from the Ivy League pricks at the embassy—because she took out a new chilled glass from the cooler and filled it halfway to the top before tonging in ice cubes. She bent toward him with the imitation leather firmly in place and Toby leaned forward to meet her. The smile she offered him was on the same thermostatic level as the sunshine: if you liked sweating, you’d have to work at it.
He swallowed some of the liquid—nearly straight gin—and decided to kill time making conversation. “What’s that?” he said.
He was looking at a body of land with a pointy tip that stuck out into the river. It was mostly woods, with wide patches of well-mown turf and an occasional glimpse of a house back among the heavier foliage. The houses looked big, but you couldn’t see much from here.
“That’s the Schwanenwerder,” the girl said. Her voice was what it might be if she’d watched Billy Wilder movies and then decided to try that out on guys who hadn’t seen their wives in a while.
“Yeah, I mean is it an island or—”
“I think technically it’s an island, yes. But there’s a causeway connecting it to the mainland. There has to be—a lot of party bigwigs own houses out there. Golden pheasants, the locals call them.”
She used the Deutsch for that, and her German was more appealing than her English. Toby wondered if he’d misappraised her. Maybe this Susan was a bona fide operative. Worked the Bendlerstrasse circuit, teasing Foreign Ministry types out of their tuxedos and blackmailing them for spy gold—like leprechaun gold, only less fungible, in Toby’s experience. It bore thinking about.
“I appreciate your doing this,” he said.
He meant the big red book, and she seemed to understand that.
“It’s not really all that sensitive,” she said, handing it over.
The cover was blank, but inside was a title page of sorts, typed in capital letters.
GOVERNMENT OF THE THIRD REICH
PRINCIPAL STATE AND NSDAP DIVISIONS
INCLUDING AN APPRAISAL OF FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
(REV. 7 MARCH 1938)
“Basically, it’s a lot of organizational charts,” she said. “Mostly that’s all it is. But you wouldn’t believe what we had to— I mean, this stuff changes all the time. They’re constantly pushing career people out and bringing political people in. But sometimes they leave the career person in place and just make up a new title for the party hack. Or sometimes they’ve got an old hack already in place—the ones with low party numbers, they’re called the alte Kämpfer—who they kind of surreptitiously replace with a career person, just so the work gets done. Sometimes they set up a whole new Amt to do what an existing Amt has been doing and then leave both in place. It’s up to the office chiefs to fight it all out, which creates some really interesting incentives. And sometimes we can’t figure out what the heck they’re doing—there’s just a designation on a chart and you have to make your best guess. I’ll give you an example. What do you think the Reich Settlement Office does? The boss has a PhD in anthropology. This is part of the SS. The SS. I mean, you tell me.”
Lugan chucked appreciatively, to encourage her, though he couldn’t care less what the Reich Settlement Office did. He flipped through some pages, and it was just as she said: chart after chart.
“I was kinda curious,” he said as casually as possible, and the gin probably helped, not being a serious kind of drink, “about the intelligence part of it. Like we’ve got the FBI and the Customs Service and Treasury agents and whatnot—”
“Customs is actually part of Treasury.”
Lugan smiled: how he loved a smart girl. Loved and loathed. “So I was wondering what they�
�ve got, exactly. I’ll give you an example.” Leaf out of her book, ha. “I was having drinks last night with a gentleman from the Sicherheitsdienst. I only know this because he gave me his card—he was in civilian clothes and this was an unofficial occasion, to say the least. But from the general, ah, tenor of our conversation, I got the idea he’s hot under the collar about some rival agency or department or whatever it might be. Seems to think this other outfit’s running an operation that he—being the SD—would like to squash. So I’m trying to get a feel for how these things work over here. Who are the players? How deep’s the rivalry? How high up does it go? That kind of thing.”
Girl Susan heard him out with what he took for a shrewd look in her eye. When he was done she said, imitating his tone with fair competence, “Who are the players.” Then, in her own voice: “How long have you got?”
“I’m not sure—when does your boss need his boat back?”
“When does your boss need his errand boy back?”
“My boss is Uncle Sam,” said Toby, liking this.
“So’s mine.”
They’d both watched too many movies. Toby didn’t even like movies, but the few he’d seen had been too many. “I guess we’ve got all day, then.”
He waited for her to say the next line, which he knew would include “all night”—but instead she said, “Take a look at Appendix 6. There’s a breakdown of information-gathering and counterintelligence responsibilities.”
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