The final turn was to the south, and by now it was midmorning. No sign announced the Gasthaus Schwalbenthal—you came upon it offhandedly while thinking of something else, gazing off in the wrong direction. You’d just trudged over a rise, winded, then ducked around a bend overhung with oak limbs—and there it was a hundred meters ahead of you, an assertive and unlikely presence in this wild landscape, three stories tall, half-timbered, with too many windows to count. The timbers were stained ochre red to match the roof tiles; the stucco had once gleamed white but the paint had milked down to an ashen gray—or maybe the white was only an artifact of Oskar’s memory.
His eye ran from the building to the terrace to the row of tables. He was close enough now to see the people out there pretty clearly, and none of them was Jaap Saxo. Though Oskar hadn’t been consciously holding his breath, he exhaled in disappointment anyway.
Weariness overcame him. Hope had been holding it off—a phantasmal hope he hadn’t dared acknowledge—but that figment vanished in the mountain air, and the weight of exhaustion came down so heavily that he almost sagged beneath it. He thought of stopping, of sitting down right here in the road and waiting for destiny to run him over. But then something kicked in—stubbornness or curiosity or army discipline, or maybe simple thirst—and whatever it was made him actually quicken his step, pulling ahead of the others, first to tag the old gatepost where guests had once tethered their horses.
While his companions straggled up behind him, Oskar had a quick look around, recording small changes, appraising the motorcars in the courtyard—one caught his eye, a small Bugatti whose license plates bore the letter code for Berlin—and finally spotting the landlady standing by a small door that led, he remembered, into the kitchen. He waved at her, swinging his whole arm. She might have smiled back—hard to tell, from thirty paces off—but her arms were filled with tableware, which she carried inside.
“Okay,” said Lena, close behind Oskar and more loudly than necessary, as if she wanted to share her skepticism with the valley below. “So now what?”
“Now we sit down,” said Clair cheerfully. “Or lie down!” The thought seemed to please him. “How long are we staying? Can we get a room? Do they have room service?” He aimed these questions at Hagen like a series of playful jabs.
Wearing his usual Übermensch mask, Hagen affected to be oblivious, though Oskar was pretty sure he was acutely attentive to everything and perhaps to Clair most of all. He stared at Oskar like a sentry waiting for the watchword.
“Let’s get a table,” Oskar said.
Maybe that was the watchword, or so obvious as to require no deliberation. They trooped over to the nearest empty one, squeezing between a matronly woman, who lowered her book to stare at them, and a well-dressed pair of urbanites, whom Oskar immediately placed in the folder marked “Bugatti.” These two made a point of not regarding the newcomers as they knocked chairs aside and thumped themselves down with groans of relief.
Clair said, “Are we going to get some food?”
“Are we?” Lena aimed this at Oskar, a challenge of sorts. “Do we have time? Isn’t your friend Herr Braun—”
Hagen cut her off by the expedient of shifting his chair on the flagstones, fractionally narrowing the angle at which he faced her across the table. It was odd how his inexpressive features could be read as placid or stern or even menacing, depending on factors Oskar had yet to work out. Lena swung her head away and now appeared to be scanning the horizon for hostile forces.
“Well, I’m hungry,” said Clair. “Isn’t there a waiter?”
Oskar wondered about that. He knew the landlady had seen them arrive, but she hadn’t reappeared from the kitchen, and as the moments stretched out, her absence seemed to become a new and possibly meaningful element of the scene. Stop staring at the damned door, he told himself, and in so doing his gaze happened to brush against another set of eyes at the adjacent table—belonging to the female half of the well-dressed Bugattis. So, she’d deigned to glance over and he’d caught her at it, but now she gave him the tiniest of smiles. Her eyes were a startling bright amber and her skin was preternaturally pale, and Oskar got a discomfiting feeling he’d seen her before. Though where could he have seen a person like that? She looked away, and Oskar’s eyes lingered a while longer, first on the woman in profile and then on her male companion, who was short enough to be almost completely hidden behind his newspaper. The last detail Oskar noted was the name of the paper, the Hamburger Abendblatt. Yet the license plate was from Berlin.
Maybe it meant nothing, like the landlady’s protracted absence. He’d simply guessed wrong about who owned the car. His brain was overtaxed by exhaustion and fear. He took a breath and turned back to his companions and willed himself to relax, to behave naturally. A mountain inn, a breathtaking view, a welcome and restorative respite. He tried to smile but sensed it wasn’t working—something was out of place here. Something was wrong.
“Should I go and get somebody?” Clair said. “What should I say? Können Sie mir helfen, ich habe Angst, dass ich—”
But then the side door opened and out came the landlord himself—Just Plain Müller, pausing on the stoop to peer this way and that, checking every feature of his environment as if worried that some guest might have clogged the mountain stream or knocked a few ancient trees over. In time he surveyed the terrace, where at last he found something that needed his attention. He came at them catlike, not quite directly and not quite looking.
“The same as ever,” said Hagen, the audible trace of a smile in his voice.
It was true: Müller looked no older and no slower and no surlier than he ever had. Oskar would have found it hard to describe the man if pressed on it. He was neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, handsome nor ugly. He might have been the product of a generations-long breeding program whose goal was the elimination of all distinctive traits. When he reached the terrace, he visited each table according to some inscrutable hierarchy that placed the elderly couple first, then the men in lederhosen, the matron with her book, the Bugattis. Oskar tried to guess the pattern and hoped it wasn’t what it appeared to be: that Müller was closing in on the new arrivals by degrees, getting a look at them from every possible angle.
At the next table over, the pale woman motioned for the landlord to draw closer, into whispering range, and leaned toward him as if about to broach some delicate topic—but if that was her intention, her voice undermined it to an almost comical degree: it was too clear, too musical, with an accent that made you think of old cities and lamplit streets and chambers hung with tapestries.
“Tell me, mein lieber Herr,” she said, “what is that extraordinary drink you have here, the one people always talk about?”
Müller looked startled for a moment. His smile came hesitantly but grew warmer as the effusion of charm took effect. “I…I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Oh yes, you must! I know—I’ve heard—it’s a specialty of the house, your own secret recipe. I won’t tell anyone, I promise! But please, you must let me try it. My husband as well.”
Her companion lowered his paper at last and looked up at Müller, his dark eyes full of sympathy. And Oskar knew—he was sure this time—he’d seen those eyes before.
“I’m afraid we have no choice, my friend,” the little man said. “She sets her mind to something and…well. So, this mysterious beverage—I trust you can guess what she’s talking about?”
Müller straightened his shoulders. “I believe, sir, she means the tchaj.”
—
As performances go, it wasn’t awfully convincing. But the realization that it was a performance—therefore scripted for a certain audience that, given the tchaj, could only be Oskar—ran through him like an electric current. He felt as though the pale young woman had very discreetly, and unnoticed by anyone else, dropped a live wire in his lap. Now he was obliged to sit there as though nothing extraordinary was happening—carry on with the pointless niceties of ordering food and
drink, chuckle at old Müller’s banter about their being late for breakfast (they’d have to call it lunch now; the menu was the same but the prices were double), while ignoring the couple at the next table as steadfastly as they were ignoring him. Buckle down, breathe normally, be a good operative. Live your cover.
He tried to focus on the table, his dining companions, ordinary things. Lena removed her sandals to inspect the blisters on her heels. Clair was studying the view, trying to match up sights with their corresponding symbols on the hiking map. Hagen seemed to be lost in contemplation, but that might have been a pretense, like Oskar’s, because when the woman flipped a page of her novel, with a sound like a dry leaf rasping in the woods, he visibly twitched and gave her an irritated look. The woman frowned back. Oskar glanced at her book; he could just make out the author’s name, Werner Beumelburg, and enough of the cover to surmise that this was a “front experience” novel, another volume in the approved genre celebrating the glories of life during wartime. The woman noticed his interest, and he gave her what he hoped was a suitably patriotic nod.
What was the plan now? Oskar assumed there must be one, because there’d been a signal and a messenger, two messengers, to deliver it. Jaap must have sent them. It couldn’t mean nothing.
Both Müllers, Herr and Frau, emerged from the Gasthaus weighted with serving trays. Accorded the lesser task of delivering food and coffee to the newcomers, she performed it to a minimal standard of professional competence while mumbling to herself, indistinctly, on the general topic of life’s unfairness. Just Plain Müller carried a smaller tray with an earthenware jug and two glasses, which he set out with modest ceremony before the charming young lady and her undeserving spouse.
“You’ll note the clarity,” he said, pouring three fingers of alarmingly red liquid into one of the glasses. “This comes only with proper aging in special casks.”
Oskar turned away—it was somehow vaguely embarrassing—and stared at the bloody-looking sausage and puffy rolls on his plate, trying to decide if he had any appetite. He remembered feeling hungry during the climb, but now it seemed that communication between his stomach and his brain had ceased, the sight of food triggering no response at all. Clair and Lena were meanwhile tucking in with evident pleasure. Hagen, toying with his knife, met Oskar’s eye and gave him a wry, comradely half-smile.
At the next table, the couple whom he took to be his secret allies were waving their glasses of tchaj around, deeply engaged in a lively conversation about nothing important. Oskar caught the names Ricky and Dodo, mention of a cabaret “down in the slums,” a sardonic allusion to an event identified only as “the incident”—the empty chatter of socialites. He was all but grinding his teeth. When were they going to make their move?
Then it occurred to him that maybe they were making it already.
He’d been watching them for a while; there was no reason not to, since they were so fully self-absorbed that people at other tables were looking too. He reflected that in all this time he’d seen a lot of tchaj being splashed around, tipped from glasses, replenished from the pitcher and waved gaily in the sunshine, but not much actually being drunk. Yet the couple—the woman especially—seemed well along toward intoxication.
Now she drew herself upright and looked around brightly—she had an idea, an inspiration!—then bent down to peer under the table, searching for something, where had she put it, around here somewhere…aha, there it is! She came up holding a large black box, leather-covered, its corners reinforced with brass, and laid it heavily on the table. That’s right, thought Oskar, leave it there for a couple of seconds, let the suspense build. As before, she overplayed it—how hard can it be to open a simple spring latch; you just press the damn button—but she did it with such conviction that even Oskar was dying to know what was in there.
Give them a mystery to solve. He recalled that precept now, one of the hundred nuggets of fieldcraft compressed into his weeks of training at Bremerhaven. The best course is to make yourself unnoticeable. But if you can’t do that—if people are going to be looking, thinking, wondering—then create some trivial mystery and, next, provide its solution. The textbook example was the bulge in a jacket pocket that turns out to be a fat detective novel. But it can be anything, they told him. Be original.
The young woman opened the black box, and inside was what looked like a very nice camera, a Rolleiflex, with a neck strap and a shiny attachment for flashbulbs. She pulled it out carelessly and held it wrong. He worried that she might drop it.
“Darling, we must have pictures! Such a marvelous backdrop!”
She rose and spun around to face the cliff’s edge, a scant two paces away, making a conspicuous effort to keep from wobbling. This part was so convincing that Hagen stood quickly and reached her in one easy bound, taking her by the elbow and sliding his other hand around in case he needed to catch a falling camera.
She turned her face toward his with a look of surprise and gratitude and only maybe a dash of flirtation. “Such a gentleman!” she said. “And what quick reflexes!” She stepped back for a better look at him. “Well, since you’ve come to join us, would you mind taking our picture? Here, it’s quite easy…”
The putative little husband stepped in now. “Liebchen, don’t bother these good people. I’m sorry, sir, it’s the altitude that affects her. Come away, Liebchen.”
“I don’t mind,” said Hagen. He took the camera and examined it respectfully. “This is a fine instrument. German-made, isn’t it?”
“Indeed. And the lens is by Zeiss, also of impeccable Aryan pedigree.”
Hagen looked at him sharply, unamused, but before anyone could stray further down that path the pale woman grabbed her partner by the wrist and maneuvered him into position to be photographed. Hagen popped open the viewfinder and took his time arranging the composition. “To the left, please…yes, hold it there…now smile”—a familiar ritual that on this spot must have been enacted a thousand times. They ran through it in various iterations, lining up different aspects of the backdrop, and then the young woman had a fresh thought.
“You’ve been so kind—why don’t I take your picture now? You and your friends! It will be lovely, you all look so…authentic. And we’ll have copies made for everyone. Darling, don’t you agree?” She turned to her partner. “Wouldn’t it make a lovely, a lovely”—here her excellent German seemed to abandon her—“podarok na pamyat.”
“Keepsake,” the little man said quickly. “Yes, Liebchen, it would make a lovely keepsake. There, there, don’t fret.”
Oskar wondered at this new twist in the performance; he had no doubt it was calculated, but toward what end? Then he saw that the two fellows in lederhosen at the farthermost table had paused in their conversation and were looking toward them. A glance over his shoulder—yes, the matron had lowered her novel. Evidently a young lady speaking Russian in the heart of Germany was something one couldn’t ignore.
“Kommen Sie dann!” The lady was on point again, this awkward moment behind her. She motioned to the three of them still at the table like a choir director—everyone rise, bitte. “Yes, good. Stand over here, please. How wonderful you all look! Proper Wandervögel!”
What was she up to? Oskar watched her grappling with the Rolleiflex, which looked quite large in her hands. She glanced up once and caught his eye—half a second at most, enough to verify that he was paying attention. In that instant, he experienced an intuitive flash: She’s going to have trouble with the camera. She’s going to need help.
And so he was ready. The companions lined up with their backs to the panoramic view. The little man stood by the table with a glass of tchaj in his hand. The woman assumed an awkward stance with her feet spread well apart and the Rolleiflex dangling low on its strap, staring down at the viewfinder and steadying the camera with one hand while groping with the other for the focus knob. She was muttering quietly, as if coaxing the balky creature to be a nice Rollei and take a pretty picture.
“Oh
,” she said, looking up, chagrined and exasperated, “I just can’t get this thing to work!”
Hagen moved to help, but Oskar was a step ahead, drawing up close.
The woman didn’t meet his eyes, just kept fussing with the knob. “I think it’s stuck,” she said. “I can’t make it turn. Could you have a look?”
He bent forward, staring down, his head nearly touching her shoulder.
“You’re Ossi, yes?” she said, sotto voce, in the same breathy tone with which she’d been muttering to herself. Even he could barely catch it, just inches away. “There’s a way out—but only one. You’ll be leaving in police custody. Now, show me how the focus works.”
She shoved the camera into Oskar’s hands, which had the effect of pushing him slightly away.
He felt his awareness rotating as slowly as a kaleidoscope, making strange patterns out of familiar objects, even the camera. He clutched it and pulled it out of that swirl, staring hard until it coalesced again into a solid, single-faceted object. “You just touch it lightly,” he said. “Look, you can do it with one fingertip. See how the focus changes?”
The woman leaned in again, allowing Oskar to guide her finger onto the knob. “Draw attention to yourselves,” she murmured. “To him, especially. He needs to be recognized. Do it quickly.” Taking back the camera, she swung it around, showing off her new skill. “It works now! It’s easy! Thank you so much, mein Herr—but look, you’ve dropped something.”
At her feet, just where Oskar had been standing, lay a small packet, evidently a letter—the envelope crumpled, the address blurry as though the ink had run. He snatched it up, nodding his thanks, and stuffed it into his pocket.
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