Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  “In gathering possible evidence,” Kohlwasser said, “we naturally conducted a number of interviews. Most of the passengers were American, and for now we’re treating them as off-limits. So this left us with the crew and the Labor Front volunteers—especially the latter, whose job, after all, was to mingle with the passengers and keep tabs on their activities. And indeed they proved to be a fruitful source of information.”

  He paused; Toby would have sworn it was to heighten a certain kind of effect, the chill that falls on a room when a high-ranking Nazi utters a phrase like that one. Unable to restrain himself, he laughed—at the banality of the idea and because he wanted to take the piss out of Kohlwasser. Maybe he was trying for an effect of his own.

  “We were naturally interested,” Kohlwasser went on icily, “in any contacts young Townsend might have made during the voyage. Secondarily in anyone who might have shown a particular interest in him, a suspicious interest. The Sinclair couple was mentioned, especially the wife. She and Clairborne seem to have struck up a casual friendship. Nothing remarkable: a few drinks, a stroll on deck. Our friend Kaspar figures in these accounts as something of a bystander. But the overriding theme, which we kept hearing over and over again, in one way or another, was that young Townsend and his military escort kept to themselves for the most part.”

  “In other words, you got nothing. And a whole table full of pictures that prove it.”

  “We kept hearing this,” Kohlwasser repeated, drumming a finger now, “over and over again. In one way or another. But some of these accounts were distinct. Noteworthy. The informants themselves found them to be. One DAF man observed—” He slipped his hand into a pocket and pulled out a little notebook.

  Toby interrupted: “DAF, that’s the—”

  “The Labor Front, I’m sorry. Very sharp eyes, the DAF. This fellow reports ‘an unusual attachment’ between Townsend and the officer, von Ewigholz. Another uses the word ‘intense.’ Still another says, ‘Their affection seemed more than comradely,’ and goes on to describe—”

  “All right,” said Toby, grimacing, waving a hand as though to fan these ideas away. “I see where you’re going. But two things, Standartenführer. One, who the fuck are these people to be saying things like this? And two, I’ve known Clairborne most of his life—hell, I know his family, I’ve watched him grow up—and yeah, he’s not exactly what I’d call manly, but he’s not some damn degenerate. If you guys picked some goose-stepping pervert to watch over him, hold his little hand so he doesn’t fall overboard—well, that’s hardly his fault.”

  Kohlwasser took this in without comment, but when Toby was finished he rested a fingertip on one of the pictures—an underexposed image captured by someone out on deck—and slid it toward him across the table until it nearly tipped into his lap. “The window, Mr. Lugan,” he said. “Look in the window.”

  Toby raised the photograph to peer at it closely, even though he already had a premonition of what he might see there. This fell so shockingly short of the mark that he lowered the picture to the table.

  “Christ on a rocking horse,” he said, picking up a napkin to dab his brow but then regarding it abstractedly, as if unsure what it was doing there. “This would kill Bull. I’m not lying to you, it would kill him. Not even to mention the scandal involved. Jesus.”

  Kohlwasser was gracious in victory. Whatever sick game he was playing, he’d won the round and now efficiently gathered up the photographs and slipped them back into the envelope.

  No matter how many times you wrap that string around the button, thought Toby, it isn’t enough. “Who’s seen these pictures?” he asked quietly.

  “No one who will ever speak of it. You can trust me, Mr. Lugan. As I trust you. This is the nature of our partnership.”

  So now it was a partnership. The minority counsel of the Senate German Affairs Subcommittee and a senior intelligence officer of the Third Reich had conceived it in a cabaret with a tame vampire and now it had sprung from the womb as ugly as sin, christened with cheap whiskey, bawling for the life’s blood of Bull Townsend himself, Toby’s friend and a pillar of his universe.

  “Not a word to the press,” he said.

  “Nor to anyone else,” Kohlwasser promised.

  They stood up to leave, but Toby paused and grabbed Kohlwasser’s arm, pulling him close. “You’re telling me everything, aren’t you? You really don’t know where they are?”

  Kohlwasser didn’t blink, not even slightly. “We’ll know very soon. We have a good idea where the policemen went missing. We’ll locate the car. It won’t be long. We have men on the ground.”

  Toby let go. “Men on the ground. Men in the air, men in the water—this just needs to be over. And out of the papers. And…” He hesitated. “I’m grateful for your discretion, Standartenführer.”

  Kohlwasser’s smile made Toby wish he hadn’t smiled at all.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Lugan. In a day or two it will all be over. We’ll deal with the culprits in a very quiet, very final way. And we’ll make sure Clairborne returns home safely.”

  Toby didn’t say, It might almost be better…He would never have said it, and didn’t dare to finish the thought. Make that: He never started the thought. He walked out of the Black Shoe into the sunlight and took a deep breath of Berliner Luft heavy with brown coal dust, wishing he were back on Beacon Hill or, hell, Capitol Hill. Someplace where you could tell your friends and your enemies apart.

  WHEN WARS START

  BERLIN, GRUNEWALD: LATE THAT AFTERNOON

  It had been years since Jaap Saxo had held a tennis racket. He’d never played on a court like this one at the Rot-Weiss Club and was loath to do so this afternoon. His misgivings centered chiefly on the prospect, imminent now, of staring down the court at an opponent like Cissy—not because he knew her to be insuperably good or shamefully awful, only because in her pleated skirt she looked exactly like what, in genealogical fact, she was: a White Russian princess. How did you—a commissioned naval officer—conduct yourself in a game like that? Would sending her nothing but high, easy shots amount to insubordination? Or, conversely, would smashing the ball straight back at her constitute a physical threat? Like many career servicemen, Jaap did not lack confidence or composure, yet social nuances often eluded him.

  But die Pflicht ruft, meine Herren. Duty calls. The point of Jaap’s being here, which had taken some doing, was to run a modest surveillance operation on Hans-Bernd’s meeting with the American senator, which would happen—if it actually was going to—in the next few minutes. He wasn’t worried about the tough and wily Hans-Bernd, who’d scrabbled up through the party hierarchy before growing disillusioned and switching sides. As for the senator, Jaap didn’t care one way or the other; he was simply a target of opportunity, a man in a key position “over there” who, at present, was standing on German soil. The fact remained that this was a sensitive encounter: high-level secrets were involved, and people could end up getting shot. Jaap would be among the first to fall, but by the time the scandal ran its course there might be a bullet left for Admiral Canaris himself. And that would be the end of the Abwehr.

  The admiral knew it, and was backing Jaap’s gambit to the extent of loaning him his private car: a Mercedes so ludicrously long you could play darts in the back seat. Canaris had had it custom-built with full armor plating and a secure radio-telephone system, not because he needed such a thing—he walked to work at the Tirpitzufer or, when he was in a hurry, rode a horse—but because Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, had had a similar automobile built for him by Rolls-Royce. It was Jaap’s opinion that the spy business would run more efficiently if such men could focus instead on exactly what kind of war they were fighting, but as usual no one had sought his advice. He was happy about the radio-telephone, however. He had an agent on the loose and was hoping to get in touch.

  It was three minutes to four and Cissy was ready to volley, shifting restively near the baseline. Jaap indulg
ed himself by watching her for a few moments: a princess bouncing a white ball on copper-red clay with the Grunewald at her back, a million leaves turned golden green by the afternoon sunlight of northern Germany. Such a vision could break your heart, and delude you into thinking there was imperishable beauty in this world, a pure and Platonic ideal beauty that wouldn’t be snuffed out in one second by a well-aimed bomb. The Luftwaffe had a one-thousand-kilogram bomb they called the Hermann. The Brits were reportedly working on something bigger. And if the Yanks got involved…

  “They’re coming,” said a short gentleman sitting nearby on a bench, mostly hidden by a newspaper. Guido, the art dealer, the other member of the classic three-person surveillance team. They were backed up by a driver–cum–radio technician–cum–sharpshooter whose presence the admiral had stipulated as a condition of loaning the car. A fresh-faced ensign, he was sitting somewhere behind Jaap’s back in a service drive with a K98k sniper rifle on his lap. The admiral trusted navy men, as Jaap did fallen aristocrats, jaded socialites and former members of the dj.1.11.

  Cissy hit the ball, so excited that the shot came in low and fast, far too wide for Jaap to reach. She fished out a second ball and this time lobbed a gentle shot that bounced in Jaap’s forehand territory, and now they had a volley going. Cissy moved around the court with an effortless grace that made it hard to tell if she was an experienced player or a quick study or just adept at sports in general. Whichever it was, this gave Jaap plenty of opportunity to glance over at the adjacent court, where Hans-Bernd was unscrewing the brace from his racket and, across the net, a large and boisterous-looking man was jogging in place and pumping his arms as though preparing to leap into a boxing ring. Jaap barely recognized Senator Townsend, who looked quite different in this context than he did in the newspapers. A third man stood off-court in the fluttery shade of an ash tree, where Jaap couldn’t get a real look at him without turning to stare. Such things are done deliberately by professionals, but Jaap hoped—and dared to believe—that this wasn’t the case here. He glimpsed the man wiping his brow and guessed he was merely hot and had sought out the shade for that reason, and this just happened to fall in Jaap’s blind spot—nothing sinister about it.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter. Guido, from his bench, could see everything. The ensign had checked the important sight lines. And Jaap was pretty sure who this other American was. His name was Toby Lugan, and he was no stranger to Berlin; he’d worked at the U.S. embassy for a while and was said to be a friend of Colonel Truman Smith, the military attaché and a friend, in turn, of Hermann Göring, namesake of the bomb. This tidy web of connections had once upon a time led Jaap to dispatch an agent to approach Lugan in America—a misbegotten adventure whose consequences were still playing out. But as much as he’d love to get Lugan in a room and question him about that, he couldn’t let himself be distracted. What mattered right now was the leather case in Hans-Bernd’s tennis bag, lying in plain sight beside the post from which the net was strung. He was staring at the bag while Cissy’s shot flew past his ear.

  “Let’s play!” she called.

  Jaap nodded and moved himself into position to receive her serve. Toby Lugan was now behind him. Jaap glanced at Guido, who fluttered his newspaper. Cissy threw the ball straight up, and for an instant Jaap imagined it was just hanging there. But then it dropped and she smashed it and it caught the outside corner of the box. Jaap nearly fell on his face trying to stretch for it. Cissy squealed in triumph. The game was on.

  —

  Anyone who doubts that sport is a proxy for armed combat should consider this: nothing seemed to be happening for a long time; then too many things happened all at once. Cissy and Jaap were into their third set, the princess having won the first 6–3 and the second 7–5—Jaap having finally overcome his class consciousness and started scrapping in earnest—while on the other court Hans-Bernd was trouncing the senator, who seemed indifferent to the score and possibly unaware of it. His sole interest appeared to lie in pounding the ball as hard as humanly possible. In the course of one especially savage stroke, his legs got tangled up and he fell to the court and lay there rocking on his back, clutching a knee and bellowing curses that were beyond Jaap’s powers of translation. Hans-Bernd leapt over the net and the third man, Lugan, came quickly to kneel at the injured man’s side—and at that moment the ensign appeared with his fresh face flushed with urgency to tell the Kapitänleutnant he’d gotten a phone call.

  Jaap looked at Guido, who nodded and cocked his head to the side: It’s all right, go. The ensign led Jaap through the trees to the waiting Mercedes, bounding ahead to open a massive passenger door. Jaap climbed aboard and seated himself before an elaborate console with many colored lights, picking up an oversized handset that weighed as much as a bowling ball.

  “Yes, Saxo here,” he said loudly. “Who’s calling, please?”

  From the handset came a squall of static and then a bored-sounding male voice: “I’m sorry, this call was meant for Herr Braun.”

  Jaap squeezed his eyes shut, though it didn’t help much. He still felt like an Abwehr officer and not an insurance claims adjuster, and his mind was still mostly wrapped around that leather case on the tennis court. Still, one must try.

  “Braun here,” he said, in what he hoped was a natural-sounding voice, though there was surely nothing natural about the way it tumbled and echoed through whatever secret contraption the handset was wired to.

  At the other end, the world-weary man said, “All right, then. Meine Dame, I have Herr Braun on the phone for you. Go ahead, please.”

  Jaap waited until finally a quavering but distinctly female voice said, “Herr Braun? Hello, Herr Braun? If you’re there, I’ve got some news about your cousin Peter.”

  There was silence then; Jaap feared the connection had been lost. “Yes, I’m here!” he said. “I can hear you! About Cousin Peter, you say? Well, I hope the news is good!”

  “The news is good! Cousin Peter says—”

  There was some problem on the line—the woman’s voice seemed to break up; you’d almost think she was laughing. Then it came back clearly again.

  “Cousin Peter is feeling better! He would like you to please drop by for a Scotch on the rocks!”

  Now the distortion returned, much the same as before. Jaap tapped the handset a couple of times. “Did you say Scotch on the rocks?”

  “That’s what he said. Well—that’s all, I guess. It was nice to talk to you, Herr Braun.”

  “Wait!” Jaap’s mind was swirling, the lights on the console seeming to flash sympathetically. “Don’t hang up, please. Just a…”

  It was right there, he knew—whatever simple message Oskar was trying to send him. He tried the back-to-front trick: rocks, Scotch, better, Peter. Nothing. Then straight through again: Peter, better, Scotch, rocks. And there it was.

  “Tell Peter,” he began excitedly. “Meine Dame, are you there?”

  “I’m still here, yes.”

  Thank God. “Tell Peter there’s plenty of Scotch where the tchaj came from. Have you got that?”

  “I don’t know. Could you spell it, please?”

  For a second or two Jaap’s memory failed—it was one of those words you never wrote down because it always looked wrong. “Just tell him ‘that weird drink’—all right? The place where that came from. And—one more thing, meine Dame—tell him to bring the whole family, there’s plenty for everyone.”

  “You people are very odd,” said the woman on the telephone. “But I’ll tell him. I’m hanging up now.”

  —

  The tennis courts had changed hands by the time he made it back. New players were warming up; Cissy and Guido had been relegated to a bench near the dressing rooms.

  “They took the bag!” Cissy blurted.

  “Tell me slowly,” said Jaap, who felt as though he were undergoing a mental process akin to depressurization.

  “Some medical people were here,” said Guido. “They showed up almost right aw
ay, so I imagine they were on the club staff. They examined the senator, and after a couple of minutes they carried him out on a stretcher. While that was going on, Hans-Bernd transferred the case to the senator’s bag. Then the other man picked up the bag and left with it.”

  “The other man.” Jaap needed to be absolutely certain. “Not the senator.”

  “No, the senator was on the stretcher. And making quite a fuss.”

  “Did the other man look in the bag?”

  “He did!” said Cissy. “I saw him.”

  “Had he noticed Hans-Bernd putting the case in the senator’s bag?”

  Cissy shook her head.

  Guido shrugged. “Not that I could tell. But would that matter? When he finds the package, he’ll be able to guess where it came from.”

  Jaap smiled at the two of them. “Thank you—that was really well done. I’m sorry I had to—”

  Cissy laughed. “Anything to avoid getting beaten by a woman.”

  “It’s funny you should say that.” Jaap winked at her. “You know, something interesting’s come up. Do you fancy a bit of travel? It would mean taking tomorrow off—can you manage that?”

  “She couldn’t get today off,” Guido said. “But she doesn’t care, she came anyway. What do you have in mind?”

  “I was thinking,” said Jaap, though in truth he hadn’t really started to, not in earnest. There’d be long hours of that ahead; for now he was running on instinct. “How about a drive in the country? Germany in summertime! What do you say?”

  “Germany in summertime.” Cissy had instincts of her own. “That’s when wars start, isn’t it.”

  THE NAÏVETÉ OF YOUTH

  REINHARDSWALD: THE SAME AFTERNOON

  Now Oskar knew how it felt to have an agent out in the field. He hadn’t been worried about Lena until she vanished from sight. And even then, some period of time passed during which he imagined her marching along in her Wandervogelin disguise—her stride bounding and confident, her chin set, her eyes sharp—through the old forest and over the stream and into the clearing once planted with dangerous thorn roses, to the castle of Dornröschen and a public telephone.