She waited, like a patient schoolteacher, for Toby to thumb through to the right place in the book. It was back toward the end, the sort of thing people have in mind when they say even the footnotes have footnotes.
“As you’ll see, there’s a great deal of overlap. We’re not completely sure, but it’s generally thought that this is another case of multiple agencies being tasked with the same general mission, so the bosses compete over every last thing. You do see this a lot, but: pay attention to the overlap between the military side and the civilian side. You’d think there’d be a clear separation, right? But from what we can tell, there’s not. The SD is part of the SS, which is technically civilian but has military aspirations. The Abwehr works for the General Staff, which is military, but traditionally it’s the fist inside the civilian chancellor’s glove. What I’m saying is, neither side’s happy with just part of the action. And if you bore down deeper”—now she was reaching over, turning the pages for him—“it gets even more Byzantine. You can’t imagine. Well, you’re from Washington, so maybe you can. Anyway, that’s where I’d start. Since you’ve got all day.”
She gave him a smile, the bitch.
There were happy shouts across the water—a family in a motor launch coming up from behind, kicking up spray. The sun felt marginally warmer. Toby felt marginally drunk. He looked around at the green inland shores of the Third Reich and wondered in passing what the hell he was doing here. A place just as strange as Washington, yet somehow even more convoluted. In DC, at least, the right hand knew it was the right hand and that its God-given task was to smash the left hand to a pulp. Here you had a guy like Kohlwasser who didn’t even know who his enemies were—they might be his own fucking army. Lugan closed the book and ran a finger down its imitation leather spine, feeling no desire to learn more of these secrets just now. A sickening burden had been placed on him. Or maybe he’d taken it on himself. Or maybe it had just been lying in his path one damp March night and he hadn’t had the sense to step around it.
“Pour me another drink, would you, doll?” he asked, not so nicely this time.
COUSIN PETER IS ILL
BAD KARLSHAFEN: LATE THAT AFTERNOON
Long white corridors. A gallery with French windows on three walls, all of them open, gauzy curtains fluffing their skirts in the irresolute breeze. A row of slender statues, classical figures mounted on square modernist plinths—Greeks and Romans and Teutons intermingled with careless promiscuity, but how many guests would notice a thing like that? A goddess is a goddess, and all of them looked so healthy, their poses so athletic, their gazes outward across the open grounds and the river so serene. They set the tone, for above all a spa is a place of healing, of restoration, of soothing and reinvigorating the senses, of tucking away your watch and opening your checkbook and accepting the care and nourishment and attention that are your due.
The spa at Bad Karlshafen was not the first place one would think of for treating a septic bullet wound. But business—which depended on the ancient thermal springs and the whims of a European leisure class that had been avoiding central Germany of late—was slow. The river Weser was at the door. A sympathetic physician was on the staff. And so the motor vessel Eulenspiegel called at the service wharf—normally used for the off-loading of food and medical supplies, occasionally for the on-loading of former patients whose cases had proved terminal, tucked discreetly into an inlet out of sight of the main grounds—and tarried there just long enough for the boatman to cure the most urgent of his many personal ills. Who says a visit to Karlshafen isn’t good for you? Tiller felt lighter and more chipper than he had in months. He was moved to wave good-bye to his erstwhile passengers, who were still collecting themselves on the shore as the vessel made its escape to the waiting river.
“Zum Wohl!” he shouted to them happily. To your health.
Only Lena waved back. Von Ewigholz, barely conscious, was lying on a makeshift stretcher, Clairborne was hovering over him, Anna was engaged in bitter negotiations with the dock crew and Oskar was scanning the nearest side of the spa, which was old and grandiose and shadowy, slipping his fingers in and out of the trigger guard of the little Walther in his pocket. On the whole, he was glad to have his feet on solid German soil again. On the whole, so far, they’d been lucky.
—
An entire wing of this temple of healing stood empty. The size and absolute stillness of the place were unnerving—but what stuck in Oskar’s mind, for some reason, was that all these well-lit spaces were free of dust, the floors buffed to a reflective sheen as though a cleaning crew had just made its rounds. He walked the whole length of the wing, peering in doorways, picking up magazines from the reading stands—there were foreign editions as well as familiar German ones, none more than a few months old—and trying not to mind the clomp and echo of his own footsteps. At the end of the hall, a set of wide glass doors opened into a greenhouse or conservatory, the glass ceiling supported by an ornate Wilhelmine armature that rose the full, three-story height of the building. It was drenched in sunlight and divided by clusters of tall potted plants into semiprivate alcoves, some of them with bathing pools. A sign mounted beside each of these indicated the water temperature: TEPID, VERY WARM and so forth, all the way up to WARNING: QUITE HOT, CARDIAC PATIENTS PLEASE AVOID. It was a strange place, jungly yet civilized. As with the other rooms he’d seen, there was no human presence apart from that phantom maintenance crew.
So it was true: they really did have the spa to themselves. They were safe—yet some part of Oskar refused to believe it.
Like a sentry on watch, he made a sharp Wehrmacht about-turn and marched the whole distance back, letting his footsteps echo, daring ghosts or spies or assassins to show themselves.
In the last suite on the right, he found his companions and the sympathetic doctor, whose name was Kleister. He’d been barred from practicing medicine on the grounds of being a vollblütig Jew; that term, now enshrined in German law, meant “full-blooded” and referred to persons who had at least three Jewish grandparents. This status came with a list of proscribed occupations, modes of attire and leisure activities. Kleister had managed to evade most of that—Oskar got this story from Anna, after a bit of prodding—on account of having treated a certain Nazi’s delicate complaint. “I bet it’s Riefenstahl,” she’d hissed. Officially, he was now registered as a naturopathic therapist. In practice, he attended a select number of longtime clients of the spa, where his private apartment had a telephone and a balcony overlooking the river.
Dr. Kleister had a calm, reassuring bedside manner and a face like the Alps, all valleys and ridges. His smile made you feel you were seeing your own good fortune reflected there—his joy in your recovery—rather than any happiness of his own.
That smile was now shining down on the Obersturmführer when Oskar stepped inside. Von Ewigholz was sitting up in bed, his hospital gown open enough to display fresh white bandages. A thin rubber tube ran between his wrist and a bottle mounted on a rolling stand. He was awake yet somehow absent, in a kind of trance, his eyes on something outside the window. Clair stood on the other side of the bed at his customary distance, just out of reach.
The doctor turned at the sound of Oskar’s entrance. “Ah, another friend.” For sanitary reasons, perhaps, he didn’t offer his hand.
“I’m Stefan Sinclair,” Oskar said.
“Oh, indeed?” Kleister responded indifferently. At a certain point, a man has heard enough lies.
“The doctor says he’s going to recover.”
This was Lena, using her newest voice, much like Anna’s. She was emerging from a white-tiled room with an unusual sort of bathtub set directly in the floor, big and deep enough to have a small ledge at one end, perhaps for sitting with the body only partly immersed. Probably it was somehow tied into the hot springs, with water piped from room to room—but this was only a guess; Oskar had never seen a place like this before. Lena paused in the doorway, her light sweater bulging near the hip to serve notic
e that it was her turn to carry the pistol. The doctor couldn’t have missed this, though perhaps he was used to such things or simply no longer cared. He shone a small light, no larger than a fountain pen, into the patient’s eyes, then snapped it off, then on again. From where Oskar stood, it didn’t seem to make any difference. Von Ewigholz continued to stare out the window. Clair continued to fret. And where was Anna?
“The doctor says,” Lena went on, “that whoever made the sutures did a competent job, but the wound was never properly cleaned. He says all he needs now is a good rest. He’ll be ready to move in a day or two.”
Maybe so—but the doctor hadn’t said any of this to Oskar, and a man might say almost anything to a lady with a gun. When Oskar caught Clair’s attention, the boy gave him a quick, wild look of…panic? Warning? Nothing good.
Dr. Kleister, apparently done with his exam, clasped his bag shut and turned to face Oskar and Lena as though he were about to impart grave news. “It would be my honor,” he said, “if you and your friends would join me for dinner tonight. Nothing at all formal—I could have some dishes prepared and sent up to my rooms. The desserts here are especially good. We can listen to music.” He paused, and his eyes softened a bit. “It would be an honor and a pleasure. I don’t have many visitors here. I understand, your visit doesn’t come under normal circumstances. Still, since you’ll be staying awhile…”
Oskar gave a slight, courteous bow, the kind they taught you at Lichterfelde. “That would be very nice, Herr Doktor. Thank you!”
Lena was a harder sell. “What about him? The patient?”
This was for Oskar, probably; Kleister must have sensed as much, but he answered anyway: “In my opinion, the patient would do better with some quiet. A bit of privacy. The healing process, you know, is quite demanding of one’s vital energy. Too much company can be a distraction. Perhaps, to ease your mind, I can have a nurse—”
“No,” said Lena.
“Ich wird von ihm bleiben,” said Clair, his rare German outburst catching everyone’s attention. He went on in English: “Don’t worry, I won’t make trouble. You can all go and eat.”
“Anna can stay,” said Lena firmly. “It’s her—” She bit it off.
Her turn on watch, thought Oskar. So that was how they’d organized it. Always one of them in the SS man’s room, with the pistol.
Something about Clair seemed to rouse Kleister’s sympathy. “I’d say you could use some rest yourself, my young gentleman. And a good meal too, I think. Do you drink wine back home? They bought cases upon cases here in the twenties, and now I’m afraid we’ll never manage to drink it.”
Whether from being young or American or too exhausted to listen carefully, Clair missed the dark implication—that a bottle of wine stood a better chance of surviving the Third Reich than anyone present, Kleister at the top of the list—and seemed to hear only an invitation to drink with the grown-ups. It made him smile.
Which the doctor returned. “Shall we say eight o’clock, then?”
—
The dinner proved to be excellent. In fact, it was too good to be merely praised, filling a void in Oskar nearer to the heart than to the stomach: Faisandeau aux champignons des bois, according to a card that had been lettered by hand in classical script, folded in thirds and placed on the serving platter along with a vase of fresh-cut flowers. The mushrooms too, Kleister assured them, had been gathered just that morning, the herbs snipped in the kitchen garden by the cook. Only the pheasant had been bagged yesterday, and hung overnight as per custom to properly cure. A precise method of doing so was recorded in etchings from centuries ago, the doctor explained; then he entertained them by impersonating a slain fowl, its wings pinned to the board just so. They laughed. They drank more wine.
His apartment was also nice—more sumptuous than “my rooms” had led Oskar to expect. The dining table stood at one end of a long chamber, bisected by an archway, whose other end held a piano and several chairs. You could have real dinner music here, given the means and the musicians, and Oskar wondered if Kleister had enjoyed such refinements in happier days. Something about the man’s present, fallen state suggested he had. Tonight’s music came from a phonograph connected by wires to a hidden loudspeaker; Grieg’s Lyric Pieces seemed to emanate at a tasteful volume directly from the heavens, an illusion Oskar initially found startling but soon grew accustomed to. Why Grieg? he wondered. A Norseman but not a proper German. A Romantic but not in the thunderous Wagnerian mold, with no hint of the twentieth century in those plainspoken melodies. Maybe there was nothing to think about—pleasing music, something to enjoy over dinner—or maybe the doctor was trying to transport himself to another country, a more civilized time.
A third possibility didn’t suggest itself until Clair exclaimed, “Oh, ‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’! I love this piece. I could listen to it for hours.”
The boy hadn’t spoken much except to praise the food. Oskar supposed he was following a code he’d learned at the senator’s house—mind your manners and leave the talking to your elders—but he’d been holding his own as new wine bottles were opened for each course, turning redder by degrees at the cheeks and nose, a change from his usual pallor, which until now had seemed comical. This new surge of vitality marked a return of the reckless spirit he’d shown aboard the Robert Ley. He leaned back in his chair, fingers tapping the air as the “Wedding Day” repeated its main theme in a march cadence.
“You have played this piece before?” Kleister asked him. His English, to Oskar’s ear, was fluent but strictly Continental, a lingua franca spoken these days in places where German might be impolitic.
Clair looked surprised. “I have. Why do you ask?”
“I thought, already, you must be a musician. Your fingers, when they’ve nothing to do—you play your scarf.”
Clair laughed uncertainly.
But the doctor continued in earnest: “And now, see, you’ve got even the fingering correct. You’re a flautist, I think?”
“Well, not really.” The boy was embarrassed. “I’ve been taking lessons, but— It’s a hobby, I guess. I mean, I enjoy it, but my teacher says I need to practice more.”
“I should say you practice all the time. Perhaps unwittingly, yet you can’t seem to help it. You’ve brought your flute?”
“I—it’s in my luggage somewhere.” Clair looked gratified and faintly amazed by the doctor’s interest. This must not happen much, Oskar guessed, at the senator’s house. “Do you—shall I get it?”
Kleister gave him a broad alpine smile, the furrows deepening kindly. “That would be wonderful. I’ve got some transcriptions—let me have a look.”
Clair rose quickly and Kleister more heavily; the boy left the room, and they heard the outer door open and close. The doctor strolled to the other end of the long chamber and stood looking at cabinets—a wall of them, hundreds of wide, shallow drawers designed for sheet music. Oskar and Lena, still at the table, found themselves alone in each other’s company for the first time in—since returning to Germany? Each seemed to browse the other’s face as though it were a stack of recent newspapers, scanning for who knew what: Items of shared interest? Recent stories they’d been wanting to talk about? A puzzle they’d half-solved but needed some help with? There was too much, and, strangely, there was also nothing.
Kleister brought the moment to a close by addressing them both from the far end of the room. “What possessed you,” he said, still poking at drawers, flipping through sheets and tucking them away again, “to bring him into this?”
“We didn’t bring him into anything,” said Lena. She rose with her wine glass and advanced to the archway, much less menacing without the pistol at her hip. “They offered us a ride, and we took it. It was a convenient way of throwing off suspicion.”
“Yes,” the doctor said, distracted now; he’d found the music he was looking for. Satisfied, he turned to look at them. “Yes, I imagine it must have seemed inspired and daring to step into an automob
ile with an SS officer. And a what? This boy is American. So, he’s a student, a vacationer? Or just someone who happened also to need a lift that afternoon? And none of this troubled you, at any time?”
“He’s the son of a United States senator,” said Lena. “The soldier is his escort. They came over on the ship together. And it looks like they’ve gotten to be friends. The boy won’t—”
“ ‘Friends,’ ” repeated the doctor. He looked at Oskar as though seeking a second opinion.
Lena went on: “I know it’s crazy, but these things happen. People make friends. I guess even in the SS. It’s a complication, I know. But we’re dealing with it.”
The doctor nodded. “No doubt you are.”
“Listen.” Lena was angry now; Oskar could see her neck turning pink. “This could prove to be an advantage. This boy—we can use him, do you understand? A senator’s son. People notice when someone like that goes missing. Even the government won’t be able to hush this up.”
“Use him?” Kleister came nearer, staring at Lena as if checking for signs of mental imbalance. “Use him as what, a hostage? A bargaining chip? Something to shame the Nazis with? These people don’t shame easily, I can tell you.”
Lena seemed troubled by this. Oskar guessed what they’d been hearing so far was mostly Anna’s thinking. Anna weaving her plots, Clair another thread in them.
The outer door opened and they heard footsteps—almost running, then stopping, backtracking. The door closed with a bang.
By the time Clair entered the room, his face flushed, they were more or less composed to meet him.
“It was under the books,” he said, “so it took me forever.” He laid the flute case softly on the dinner table and pulled the instrument out in pieces, which he then carefully twisted together. “I haven’t played in ages. I know I’ll be terrible.”
The doctor came nearer, his presence a kind of encouragement. “There are no mistakes,” he said, shaking a finger with mock sternness. “There are only variations from one performance to the next. In art, there is no ‘correct’—only beauty.”
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