Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  But as the minutes crept by and the sun edged westward, his thoughts began to darken as though a shadow were moving over them. Hagen stretched out in the tall grass and fell into the abrupt, efficient sleep of a soldier. Clair strolled along the streambed plucking wild marsh marigolds and placing them carefully in the water like tiny boats, watching them swirl and bob and occasionally succumb to the swift current. He had to keep hitching up the baggy SS trousers. Oskar watched him until he, too, was out of sight, and by that time the shadow had overtaken a large region of his consciousness.

  He started considering how things might go wrong. At the beginning, his thoughts were constrained by probability: circumstances that could foreseeably arise and how Lena would conceivably deal with them. Say, a routine identity check. May we see your papers, madam? So you are Frau Lena Sinclair, this is correct? Just a moment, please, I must check this list. Wait—Frau Sinclair, where are you going? Offizier, stop this woman!

  At that stage, Oskar found such thoughts troubling yet manageable, yielding to rational analysis. He could posit some dire event and ask himself how likely it was that this might happen, how serious the ramifications would be. But with the next stage came a less reasonable kind of worry, and he began thinking about not just things that might happen but also those that already had. Why had Hagen left the car in that particular stand of fir trees, then led them to this meadow where they might be seen by anyone standing on that bluff? Or by an airplane flown out to search for them? What had Anna really been up to that night at the spa? And she and Lena—what had they been planning before Oskar stepped in? Was Lena still carrying out some secret SOPADE mission? And those Gestapo men—why only two of them? Surely there must be a pack out there, talking to everyone, sniffing at every trail, sifting the tiniest grains of evidence—and they had bloodhounds, rifles, radios…Lena was walking into a trap! Oskar had sent her there, armed with nothing but a telephone number on a scrap of paper!

  But even that wasn’t the worst. Yet another stage awaited, a sort of deutsche Romantik maze in which you found yourself chasing your own sanity up blind paths that grew narrower and darker still. Who was Oskar to imagine he could outwit the collective malevolent intelligence of the Third Reich? Who had ever strayed into the ancient German forest and come whistling out the other side? Only the truly innocent, the simple Jacks, the immaculate Hansels and Gretels—and Oskar was no innocent; he had blood on his hands. He’d sliced a man’s throat in half. He’d betrayed his country, putting others at risk by doing so. He’d botched his first and only mission. He’d slept with another man’s wife. He’d strayed from the path like a lost sheep, and now the wolves were circling around him.

  At a certain point, it became unbearable to sustain these thoughts, and he yelled, “I’m going after her!” Oskar didn’t know if anybody heard him; he just set off down the trail.

  —

  Clair heard Oskar call out; he didn’t catch all the words but recognized a form of “to go,” and that was more than enough. It meant that he and Hagen were alone, and this thing that had been crawling thrillingly, agonizingly inside him could be let out again. He’d almost shouted in relief, though at the exact same moment he also imagined himself shouting like a crazy person there in the meadow, looking ridiculous. This constant self-reflection was a terrible thing that was always happening, he couldn’t help it—watching himself as if he were living in front of a mirror, evaluating every minute of his life, and it was never quite right, there was always something a little off, a little fake, like he was putting it on for the mirror, which of course he was, because the mirror wouldn’t ever go away. This was deeply troubling, but it was so much a part of Clair that he didn’t think about it very often—only on rare occasions like this, when the immensity of everything inside him burst through all his steadfast efforts to contain it.

  And now he did shout, loud and wild, and he did feel like a crazy person, and deep in his mind the never-sleeping observer realized that this was what ecstasy meant, and what they meant by love. He ran through the meadow letting the too-large trousers slip down his skinny frame, kicking them away. He found Hagen where he’d been sleeping until Clair shouted, and partly fell but mostly threw himself on top of him, pulling the anorak away so their naked legs could intertwine, burrowing into his strong, warm chest, pressing his head into the sculpted null space between neck and shoulder, wrapping his arms around every part of Hagen he could reach. He wiggled pleasurably and then lay still.

  For now—for the next two or three minutes, if recent history was any guide—this was all Clair wanted. It was more, in fact, than he’d ever wanted, because it was more than he’d been able to conceive. Such conceptions as he’d managed to form had been fleeting, furtive, embarrassing and inaccurate. Worse than that, they’d been unworthy—unworthy of this. And of Clair. And what could possibly be worthy of Hagen?

  Hagen was sleepy but slowly waking up. The perfect, magical body stirred beneath him—that was a word he’d never appreciated before, stirred, a simple and rather boring string of letters Clair had dutifully learned in another, childish world that meant something altogether new and extraordinary in this one. Hagen stirred. And for Clair the earth seemed to shift on its axis and a thousand electric synapses to fire at once, from his optic nerve down to his groin. He was not one for stirring, himself, but other words had taken on secret new meanings just for him. Clair sprang, he pressed, he ground. He shuddered. At times it was downright alarming; until a week ago, the idea of sex had lain inside him like an odd, misshapen, imponderable lump seemingly medical in nature, producing symptoms like discomfort and swelling and the occasional low-grade fever. But generally speaking, it hadn’t troubled him and he’d more or less trained himself not to think about it.

  Now he could think of nothing else. At least not for very long. His body, as it turned out, was designed exclusively for sex, and its capacity for sustained and repeated exertion was astonishing. Not much stimulation was required—the first time, his first gasping and throbbing revelation, had been provoked by nothing more than Hagen’s arms around him, both of them fully clothed and standing in the middle of a ship’s passageway late one night. That wasn’t to say that his body didn’t crave stimulation or that he could ever get enough of it. He’d spent himself during Hagen’s kisses, his caresses, the other kind of kisses, the embrace of their naked bodies, and soon it became evident that there were other kinds of embraces too, an apparently infinite number of ways to address this constant, pressing and urgent need he’d only lately discovered.

  “God, is there something wrong with me?” he’d asked once.

  Hagen had laughed, wearily, as they lay together with cool air floating off the sea through the stateroom window. “Achtzehn,” he’d said finally. Eighteen.

  “Well, fünf-und-zwanzig isn’t exactly over the hill,” Clair told him.

  “Danken Sie Gott. There is nothing wrong with you. You are beautiful. You are perfect.”

  And Clair accepted it all—well, maybe not perfect—because his lover had said so. He believed he was beautiful to Hagen. And he knew there was nothing wrong with him. If there ever had been, he was cured of it now. He’d been cured by this.

  Hagen was staring up at him. Those bottomless eyes—Clair felt sometimes like he was tumbling into them, weightless, detached from his body. Then his body would move on its own, and he’d be back inside it, straining, yearning, breathing in short gasps, the whole swirling ballet of physical consummation.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” he asked Hagen, their mouths very close, breathing each other’s words.

  The blue eyes clouded, but even the clouds were marvelous, making the sky look touchable, and Clair ran a finger along Hagen’s cheekbone.

  “Nothing bad will happen to you,” Hagen whispered. “I will die to prevent that.”

  “You won’t die. Not ever.”

  The eyes closed. Clair felt a chill and pressed himself harder into Hagen’s warmth, comforted by the om
nipotent strength there, the unassailable protection. He lay motionless for an unusually long time. Finally he was distracted by a persistent buzz that might have been a hovering dragonfly but turned out to be a tiny aircraft, high above, flying slowly across the sky. It hardly seemed to be a real part of the world, and soon it was gone.

  —

  Oskar cursed himself for not bringing the map. Lena had studied it before she left, tracing out the twisty route to Sababurg and committing it to memory. Oskar hadn’t even glanced at it, too busy composing his message to “Herr Braun,” using insipid code words that would probably mean nothing to Jaap Saxo. He had a vague idea where the trails led and some vestigial instincts, mostly dormant now, from his Jugendbewegung days. He recalled with chagrin how he’d stood in a small remnant woodland in Washington imagining that someone might be following him and almost wishing this were the case—he’d been a proud Abwehr officer then, chosen for his disregard of danger and entrusted with a vital, delicate assignment. Which he’d woefully failed to complete. And his disregard of danger had amounted, in the end, to a willingness to jump off a bridge rather than fight it out with two men who’d just stepped out of a motorcar. Now he was being followed, by a number of men that was, in effect, beyond calculation, and his regard for danger had never been higher.

  He’d paused at a fork in the trail, trying to invoke whatever instinct or thoughtful choice or lucky guess might get him closer to Sababurg, when he heard an aircraft overhead. He couldn’t see it at first, but then it appeared in a gap through the trees, a small biplane with a dark gray hull and the black cross of the Luftwaffe outlined in white on the underside of its wings. This was hardly the inspiration he’d hoped for, yet it sufficed to send him scurrying onto the right-hand path, which ran down a hill into deeper cover than offered by the one on the left. He halted under a giant fir whose trunk was black and scabrous with age and stood there panting while the noise of the engine grew louder and then changed in timbre, as though the plane was turning or maybe dropping to a lower altitude. Whatever it was doing was happening slowly, because for several minutes the noise went from louder to softer to louder again, at one point seeming to pass directly overhead. He resisted the urge to duck.

  His first worry was for Lena, for whom he felt responsible, but he quickly realized that the greatest danger was to the other two back in the meadow. Would they have the sense to take cover? Yes—or at least Hagen would. We’re trained to act, he’d said. So then act, by God, thought Oskar. But then he remembered that at his last sighting Hagen had been soundly asleep and Clair had been playing like a kid by the stream—and now Oskar felt a kind of dread that seemed to rise from his stomach. Should he turn back? Warn the others, grab the map and hightail it for Sababurg?

  As before, the choice was made for him. The sound of the aircraft faded at last and the woods grew quieter, if not really silent. In the woods, there’s always some crackling or scurrying to keep you on your toes; the air is never so motionless that it doesn’t stir a few leaves; you leap at the tiniest thing when your nervous state is precarious. And the noise that was coming from somewhere down the hillside was not tiny. It was recurrent, it was steady and it was getting louder.

  It was footsteps. Oskar edged around the fir tree, pressing himself into the trunk. Thankfully, the ground was soft with fallen needles and mounds of moss. He squatted behind a tall clump of ferns where he judged he’d be hidden well enough to risk glancing out once the footsteps had passed. The proper moment was a long time arriving, the steps growing louder and louder—only one set of them, but so close he could hear the hiker breathing—and when he raised his head above the ferns, he saw it was Lena.

  He cried out, much too loudly, and if she’d been armed she probably would have shot him. Then she laughed and he stepped back onto the trail, where she surprised him by throwing her arms around his shoulders. It wasn’t so much a hug as a kind of proof that they were both really here and their plan had somehow worked. Lena was lugging a satchel loaded with fried bread and roasted pheasant legs and colorful bits of clothing already stained by the grease.

  “And I’ve got a message for you,” she said.

  “Not now,” he told her. “We’ve got to get back. Did you hear the plane?”

  She nodded, shrugged off the satchel and handed it over. It must have been heavy, but Oskar was too preoccupied to notice.

  —

  Back in the meadow, they found Clair and Hagen sitting together by the stream, looking flushed and a little bit wet. Perhaps they’d been swimming.

  “Time to move on!” Oskar announced, trying to make it sound like good news—some rollicking excursion, not a desperate run for their lives.

  Clair sprang up readily. Hagen rose more slowly but seemed to have recovered most of his strength. His expression was cautious and combative, as though he sensed danger close by and was prepared to deal with it.

  “Where are we going?” Clair asked.

  The boy seemed strangely happy, which Oskar put down to the naïveté of youth. He started to answer, but Lena cut him off.

  “I’ve got a message for you—don’t you ever listen?” And she gave it to him as she’d gotten it from Herr Braun: the weird drink, the place where it came from, bring the whole family.

  “That’s all?” said Oskar.

  “You want more? ‘Uncle Kurt is slicing the cheese’? You people really are ridiculous.”

  “Well,” he said, “I guess there’s a change in plan.”

  “I’m glad,” Hagen said, “to hear there is a plan.”

  “Please check the map,” Oskar told Lena. “We’re looking for the Gasthaus Schwalbenthal. At the edge of the nature preserve.”

  “Oh, they’re expecting us?” she said archly, pulling the map out. “Herr Braun made reservations?”

  Oskar didn’t know what Herr Braun had done or what he had in mind. Something, anyway—that was enough for now.

  “Is this the place?” said Lena, pointing at a spot near the bottom of the map, barely a thumb’s width from the southeast corner. “That looks pretty far.”

  “The moon is just past full,” said Hagen. “We’ll be there in time for breakfast.”

  Lena looked doubtful. Oskar felt tired already.

  Clair swung his arms, impatient to get started. “I love moonlight,” he said.

  WHAT HERR BOAR HAS TO SAY

  BERLIN, PRINZ-ALBRECHT-STRASSE AND SCHWALBENTHAL: THAT EVENING

  While Helmut Kohlwasser prided himself on being a cultivated man, he had no taste for Wagner. Was he missing something? He knew full well, as everyone did, that this was the favored composer of the national leadership (though not of the army, whose commanders were said to be Bruckner enthusiasts). But to Kohlwasser it all just sounded so…obvious. And things that were obvious were generally also, in his professional experience, incorrect, or at least incomplete. The great Ring cycle, for example, he found lacking in proportion, subtlety, finesse—and, maybe worst of all, in any flavor of genuine human experience. For life is lived, is it not, on a less than godly plane. One’s actions and motives are seldom purely noble or diabolical. One’s understanding is always imperfect, one’s feelings ambivalent. We do the best we can under the circumstances, knowing so very little.

  And thus in the cement-gray light of dusk Kohlwasser found himself standing before his window at the Reich Security Main Office listening to a jolly, tuneless, politically offensive yet quite funny piece of musical theater by the banned composer Hanns Eisler, in the company of Berlin’s—perhaps the world’s—most tiresome and unpersuasive Faust, the journalist Greimer. History, he was pretty sure, would not judge Greimer kindly. The man was peddling a dubious commodity and demanding a high price for it. What he—along with half the German press—wanted now was exclusive access to the big story of the day: the missing American boy and the breathless hunt for his kidnappers. What he offered in return was little more than parlor gossip.

  Ach, but such a parlor. The salon of the Barone
ss von F—— was one of the very few places in Berlin to which Kohlwasser had never managed to gain access by his own devices. The grand apartment in the Fasanenstrasse was, by some accounts, the apogee of the city’s social arc; according to others, it was the last redoubt of the old, pre-Nazi order. In the SD’s official reckoning, it was a sinister, hermetic lodge where the tottering aristocracy, the Prussian officer corps, foreigners, Bohemians, “cosmopolitans,” modernist painters and playwrights and antisocial elements of every stripe—not omitting the odd Jew—engaged in a ritual commingling so vile as to threaten the health of the German Volk.

  In Kohlwasser’s view all these notions were, like Wagner, a tad too obvious. He strongly suspected that the famous salon was simply a flat like many others in this old, once-fashionable district. That its most sacrosanct ritual involved playing waltzes and getting drunk. And that its shadowy denizens were not so much dangerous as out-of-date—the sort of people for whom there was no place in the New Germany. Political primitives. Cave dwellers. No one to worry about.

  But every rule has its exceptions. There were moments of brilliance in Wagner, and troublesome personalities among the Fasanenstrasse set. Some kind of conspiracy was being woven there, and Kohlwasser had turned up a corner of it. He couldn’t judge the scale or design of the offense, not just yet. He knew it involved the little sneak known as Erwin Kaspar; but beyond that, precious little. If Greimer could provide so much as a couple of real names to link with Kaspar’s false one, or a snatch of overheard conversation, or a glimpse of a document left carelessly on a table—well, then an hour of his ghastly company might prove endurable.

  “Take me through it again.” Kohlwasser turned from the window and peered down at the journalist, who sat hunched on the leather sofa, holding a large snifter protectively. He felt like a director trying to coax a credible performance from a singularly untalented player. “Not the chap falling off the balcony. Before that, the gathering in the back room. Who was involved there? Be as precise as you can.”