Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  Sometimes there was dancing, and the Baroness hoped there’d be tonight. She hadn’t danced in ages—and no, she didn’t plan to make a spectacle of herself this evening, thank you. But she loved the idea of dancing and felt rather strongly that more people ought to be doing it. There was something, as the English said, “in the air.”

  And there was something in the papers.

  In her newly restless state of mind, the Baroness amused herself for three-quarters of an hour arranging the latest editions on little tables around the Grand Salon. From one of them, the Tageblatt declared,

  SON OF U.S. SENATOR HELD

  BY SOCIALIST CRIME GANG

  while from another, the normally sober Allgemeine all but shouted,

  KIDNAPPED!!!

  VISITING VIP FEARS

  FOR SON’S LIFE

  But pride of place—an antique easel standing adjacent to the buffet—went to the Morgenpost, exceptionally sordid today with a front-page splash by the all-but-dead-and-resurrected journalist Greimer, under the headline

  DEAD OR ALIVE?

  “I SAW THE YANKEE

  KID ON A SLAB,”

  EYEWITNESS CLAIMS

  “Ach,” said the Baroness, admiring her handiwork from a tactful distance. “What trash! Such a horrid little person.” Then she remembered: “Where is my tea? Fräulein, where are you?”

  The girl was nowhere to be found, but it was half five already. So the Baroness decided to have some cognac.

  —

  The gathering a few hours hence in the late Baron’s library was more animated than usual—in the cartoonish fashion, with everyone’s features and characteristics exaggerated to an almost ludicrous degree. Except no one was laughing tonight. Even Cissy, the White Russian princess, sat quietly on the edge of an old armchair, its leather interior having caved in some weeks ago after decades of honorable strain and rigor, her posture regally upright, one hand clutching a martini while the other worried a table napkin.

  “I guess this is what you’d call a ‘setback,’ ” said the old Brigadier. “I hope it suits you.”

  “Now, Brigadegeneral,” said Guido, the art dealer. “You know Hans-Bernd had nothing to do with this.”

  “Well, who did, then? Don’t tell me it’s the damned Socialists. There are no Socialists in Germany. And if there are, they’re hiding under a bed somewhere, praying to Engels’s ghost to make all the bad people go away.”

  Hans-Bernd stood by the large globe, rotating it from east to west and then back again. One moment you saw Germany in green. The next, America in a pale, indeterminate blue-gray color. Then Germany again. Hans-Bernd was dressed casually, as though just back from motoring about in his flashy Mercedes or maybe playing a round of golf with his British pals. He displayed a sort of fatal calmness, but the skin above the neckline of his white cotton sweater was blood-red—to anyone who knew him, a frightening contrast. “It’s a cock-up,” he said. “And the timing could hardly be worse.”

  “You like to time your cock-ups, do you?” the Brigadier asked.

  Hans-Bernd turned on him. Still, the same fatal calm. “Yes, actually. Whenever possible.”

  Cissy started to interject—perhaps simply to remind everyone that there was a lady in the room, in case bloodshed was being contemplated—but the old general cut her off.

  “I thought you wanted something like this. A setback—you were always going on about that, weren’t you? Something to embarrass the regime and embolden the army to act. Isn’t this the sort of thing you had in mind?”

  “Well, that would depend—”

  This came from the naval officer, the one called Jaap. They turned to look at him. Such a reasonable fellow, you felt. He had that sailor’s quality: steady in a storm, feet planted solidly on deck.

  “That would depend,” he said, “on the exact circumstances, wouldn’t it?” Using his fingers, he ticked off the various points. “Is the boy dead or alive. If he’s alive, where, and who’s holding him. If he’s dead, who killed him. How will the father react. Who will the Americans hold responsible.”

  “Oh, but he can’t be dead,” said Cissy. There was a courteous silence, but she offered nothing to support this proposition. Perhaps it had been made on literary grounds.

  “I doubt the Socialists would harm anyone,” said Guido.

  “There are no damn—”

  “Who cares about Socialists?” said Hans-Bernd, flapping his arms like a querulous falcon. “Or even about this child? We’re talking about the fate of nations.” He thumped on the globe, wincingly hard. “Redrawing the map of Europe. Why should anyone give a damn about some pampered Yankee schoolboy?”

  The Brigadier was thunderstruck, and Guido shook his head—even by the standards of the art world, this was pretty cold-blooded. Jaap didn’t react, just kept watching Hans-Bernd as though anticipating a sequel.

  At last Cissy broke the silence: “Because he’s just a Junge, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Exactly!” Hans-Bernd almost shouted. “Ten thousand honest citizens get locked up in concentration camps—twenty thousand, a hundred thousand, it doesn’t matter—and we just get on with our business. But let the spoiled whelp of some foreigner no one’s ever heard of get snatched and it’s on every front page in Germany. Well—that’s human nature, isn’t it? Nothing good or bad about it, it’s just the way we are. And that’s why these cock-ups have to be managed. If there’s going to be a scandal, it should be our scandal. The timing, the reaction, the outcome…we should have somebody in there, driving it, steering it. Instead we’ve got a total catastrophe. And you know, I’m scheduled to meet with the senator tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You are?” said Guido. “What—”

  Hans-Bernd held up a warning hand. “Nothing to do with this. And more’s the pity.”

  Jaap stood up. Something was bothering him, a loose wire dangling in his mind, a connection that continued to elude him. He’d been troubled all day—actually, since the middle of last night. A call had come through from Nest Bremen saying they’d received a signal but couldn’t discuss it on the open line. Jaap had been obliged to leave his hotel in the Mitte and venture to the Tirpitzufer in order to place a secure call, wherein he was told that one of his operatives had surfaced after being out of contact for nearly three months. The message was garbled, unfortunately, Pfeiffer having changed the protocol a few weeks ago on the grounds of “heightened security.” In so doing, he’d torn up the old plain-language code that had been in use since the invention of radio and brought in new people to use the rewritten code—also in plain language but somehow better, more scientific, in that it didn’t sound like code, in case anyone was listening. Of course, that very possibility was why you talked in code in the first place, but no one had consulted Jaap. Nor had they asked him to sign off on hiring—could you believe it?—a theatrical coach to teach the duty officers how to speak naturally on the telephone, again for heightened security. The result of this hogwash was that the duty officer had scribbled down something about an agent being sick and then gone off watch. At least, thank God, Pfeiffer hadn’t changed the nomenclature—Jaap was still Herr Braun—so the message was properly flagged for his attention and the agent in question correctly identified as [Opname] Erwin Kaspar, [Name] Oskar Langweil, [Ort] DE, [Status] Unbekannt.

  So Ossi was alive, somewhere in Germany. And “sick,” which Jaap took to mean having some kind of trouble. At least it would have signified that in the old code. Jaap supposed you’d been in the spy game too long if you caught yourself feeling nostalgic about some outdated code.

  He began to pace. Hans-Bernd was talking, then the Brigadier, now Cissy, but Jaap was preoccupied, picking at this small but somehow important mental knot. He tried to, in the jargon, back-trace it: code, in-country, Ossi, Tirpitzufer, Bremen, midnight, meeting, senator, Socialists, boy, kidnapping, setback. Then he tried it sequentially, past to present. This time he remembered the broken chair, Hans-Bernd’s sweater, the globe, the telep
hone, the theatrical coach.

  The globe.

  He stopped pacing. He looked at the globe, then turned away. It wasn’t this globe he was thinking of; it was how he’d seen it a few minutes ago. Not focusing, just glancing. Hans-Bernd spinning it: green, blue-gray, green…

  “When did this boy arrive in Germany?” he said.

  They looked at him oddly. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Who knows what he’d interrupted. Whatever it was, he got the feeling they were happy to change the subject. Guido said, “I believe it was three or four days ago. I can check the newspapers, if you—”

  “Do check, please,” Jaap said. “Find out what ship he came on, if you can. Also, was the senator on the same ship? Anyone else? When was the boy last seen, and where? Wait, never mind, just—bring some papers here, would you? Thanks.”

  —

  The evening had been a rousing success, a social triumph, the high point of the season in the glittering Hauptstadt. Its most vivid moment had not been, as everyone expected, the arrival of the born-again journalist Greimer with a lady from the Press Office on either arm—nor the moment shortly afterward when a beefy percussionist, lately employed at the Cabaret Trigilaw and acting upon instructions from the Baroness herself, had shown these ladies to the door, one in each hand. “We’ll be having none of Goebbels’s whores here,” the Dame is said to have remarked, though no one could precisely remember hearing her say this.

  The moment had come around eleven. A young man whom no one seemed to know—“strange,” they said afterward, “underfed” or “discontent,” dressed despite the heat in a long cloak and clutching a volume of poetry—had either leaned on or stumbled into or, best of all, been violently thrust against the aged balcony rail, which had splintered and sent the fellow plummeting into the orchestra below, smashing a purported Guarneri violin. Despite no mortal injuries resulting, everyone who was present and many who were not would be speaking of only two things for days to come: the kidnapping and the party. The “May crisis” would be temporarily forgotten. The Press Office would not be happy.

  Among the last guests to leave that night were the handsome Hans-Bernd from the Interior Ministry and a Kriegsmarine officer in the rumpled uniform of a Kapitänleutnant. They left together but separated outside on Fasanenstrasse, the former carrying a nondescript leather case that held, had anyone looked, plans for the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the latter empty-handed though his mind was filled to capacity. He’d arrived hours ago feeling disconsolate. Now he was exhilarated, frightened, impatient and hyperalert.

  He had plenty to think about. His agent. The war that was coming (or not). The senator’s missing son. But foremost, his chat with Hans-Bernd in the late Baron’s sanctum sanctorum, the writing room next to the library. Their main topic had of course been the General Staff’s planning documents, passed personally to Jaap that afternoon by Admiral Canaris, commander of the Abwehr, to be delivered to Senator Townsend: proof certain, in the admiral’s own words, that this nation has no favorable intention toward the Czechs. Ponderous stuff indeed—but Jaap had yet one more thing on his mind.

  He’d waited until the tête-à-tête was drawing to a close, and then, while Hans-Bernd was packing the documents away in his briefcase and—who knew?—trying on the idea that he held the fate of Europe in his hands, Jaap said casually, “You know, back there you were explaining why we need to keep matters under our control. To drive them, you said. To steer them.”

  Hans-Bernd nodded. He was holding the leather case, feeling it, weighing it.

  “You said we need to have somebody in there,” Jaap went on. “I’m just curious—what did you mean, exactly?”

  Hans-Bernd blinked at him, his attention slowly shifting. “In there with the senator’s boy, that’s all. If there’s going to be a kidnapping—there never should’ve been, that’s foolish and counterproductive, but supposing there were—we should have something to say about it. Even if we can’t dictate the outcome absolutely, we should at least be in a position to make sure the worst doesn’t happen. The worst being, of course, the murder of the hostage.”

  Jaap nodded—yes, that was all perfectly reasonable. “And if we did have somebody in there,” he said, stepping as lightly as he could, “if we could dictate the outcome, what would it be? Just as, well, a thought experiment.”

  Hans-Bernd frowned, seeming unsure of how much thought this experiment deserved. Picking up the briefcase, preparing to leave, he said, “There are two possibilities, aren’t there? If the boy’s dead, the blame has to fall on the government. And I don’t mean passively—Oh my, how could they let this happen? Somebody’s got to have blood on his hands. And if the boy’s alive, the regime can’t get any credit. We’d have to find somebody—a beat cop, a Good Samaritan, a Catholic fucking priest, it doesn’t matter. This person saved the day, and as for the government,” he said with a shrug, “Oh my, how could they let this happen? Either way, it won’t make the papers. But that doesn’t matter. Our audience is a tiny group of senior officers, and maybe it’s only Ludwig Beck.”

  He took a step toward the door, then stopped. “Oh—and since we’re playing this game, everything should happen by tomorrow morning; I’m meeting Townsend in the afternoon. We’re playing tennis.” He paused, letting the word bounce. “The inspired thought being, when you play tennis, you carry a bag.” He gave the leather case a shake. “Out of one bag, into another.”

  With that wisdom he departed, Jaap on his heels. They said good night on the sidewalk. Hans-Bernd went off to commit treason, Jaap to puzzle out whether or not his man really was in there and, if so, what he might do about it.

  DO YOU TRULY WANT TO KNOW?

  REINHARDSWALD: 27 MAY

  By dawn they’d left the Opel behind, having driven it deeply into a rough stand of young Tannenbäume and then backtracked, setting out along trails that were marked at intervals by notches cut into the bark of certain trees or by tiny, elegant cairns. Oskar’s head throbbed for a while, but breathing the spring air seemed to ease it. The trails led generally southward, with bends and switchbacks taking them anywhere from southeast to due west. They were on high ground, though the trees enclosed them so completely that the only views were down forest naves so long that an arrow shot from a hunter’s bow would fall to the ground before reaching the end, and the new daylight was admitted only sparingly by leaves so high overhead you couldn’t identify them by shape.

  Oskar had been in mountains like this before—had conceivably hiked this very path—but the paradox of ancient woods was that they were always changing. However many centuries they’d stood there, the mood and character and the feeling you got walking through them were never alike from one time to the next. Von Ewigholz had been right to call it magic; hardly a childish thought, it came from a deep understanding of place, and there was no better word for it. How many hundreds of stories had grown from this black soil, how many witches had stepped out of the dawn mist, how many Jacks had strode whistling through, how many blooded princes had come to grief? These were just stories, and no grown-up believed in them. But then grown-ups had their own foolish and strange beliefs, far beyond the power of reason. Maybe such beliefs had driven these four companions here, maybe not; perhaps there was no good explanation.

  Oskar felt differently that morning than he had felt at any other time in his life, but the closest points of reference, the ones that seemed most useful, were certain moments from his youth and particularly from his days in the Jugendbewegung, when he’d come with his comrades to a place like the Reinhardswald after a spell of struggle and confusion at home or in Gymnasium or with the world in general, days when he hadn’t been sure who he was or might become, when life could not be endured and there must be an end to it, there simply must—and then he was here, among trees as old as Germany, with friends who would be his friends forever, and everything needful in life could be stowed efficiently in a rucksack, with room for a recorder and a songbook. If you could walk, the worl
d belonged to you. If you could play a song on your recorder, the children of Hameln would follow you into the mountains.

  Now Oskar was walking with a tune running through his head that he hadn’t given much thought to; it was pleasant enough and had the right sort of rhythm for the pace they were making, unhurried yet resolute, repeating itself untiringly—until he caught himself whistling along. And he realized it had to stop.

  It was the Geheimeslied—the Secret Anthem you learned when you were admitted to the dj.1.11, the song that could never be written down, the one you sang only at the start of meetings or around the holy campfire, with your comrades, your brothers. Never in public, nor even whistling or humming, nor even thinking it in your head. Oskar smiled. It seemed comical now but had been so serious then, and he supposed it still was, if for different reasons altogether. It was a kind of affirmation: who you were, who you stood with. Who had circled the fire with you. And so, by an inevitable chain of association, Oskar found himself thinking of Jaap Saxo—in the jargon of the trade, his controller. Where was Jaap now? Had he gotten Oskar’s message? And if he had, how could he possibly respond?

  That conundrum ran through Oskar’s head like the Secret Anthem, cycling endlessly, and he felt just as helpless in trying to break out of it. The predicament seemed familiar—another ghostly remnant of his boyhood, reanimated now in these ancient woods—and he supposed it was rather like those moments when he’d felt just at the edge of understanding something huge and important, if only he could find the one missing piece, the link that would tie it all together. So many pieces were already in place, so many ideas and yearnings and dreams and plans and poems and wordless intimations were floating there, available but waiting to cohere. Verdammt. This was never going to end, was it?