The Knife-Edge Path

by Patrick T. Leahy

  Mattei was there already, sitting at a table at the back, near the rear door where the light was poor, and as she walked past empty booths her heels clicked on the tiles. He watched her with a faint, slightly wicked smile as she approached him, and she said, “Hello, Monsieur. Been waiting long?”

  He got up and pulled a chair out for her. “Not at all. Will you have an absinthe?”

  She saw that he was having one in his small glass. A cigarette was burning in the metal ashtray. She let him push the chair in under her, making her a lady in the barman’s eyes and those two other men who, every time they looked around, pretended to be just airing their curiosity.

  “Yes, that would be nice,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Mattei raised his hand and snapped his fingers. “Philippe! Another absinthe down here!”

  “Coming right up!” the barman called out.

  Mattei dragged his chair under him, reached for his cigarette and tapped the lopping ash into the sooty tray. “May I offer you a cigarette, Mlle Miroux?”

  “No, no. I’ve been smoking too much, lately. But thank you.”

  Sitting back, he blew smoke from a fulsome laugh. “You know, I don’t really need this, either.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She tossed off a saucy smile, let it linger on her lips. “Do you come here often, Monsieur?”

  “If you mean with other women, no.”

  “Sorry, I meant often.”

  He laughed again, tapping his cigarette over the ashtray unnecessarily. “Every now and then would be more like it.”

  “Sorry, Monsieur. I shouldn’t pry.”

  Mattei wrung a tepid smile out of his pursed lips. Just then the barman came over and set her absinthe on the table. As soon as he went away Mattei raised his glass. She picked up hers. They clinked.

  “Thank you for coming, Monsieur. I hope it’s not inconvenient.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if it was,” he said cheerily.

  She dipped a smile into her glass, the licorice flavor burned going down. He watched her with aroused eyes. She said, “Monsieur, I actually I’ve come here to apologize for something.”

  He sat back, throwing one arm back across the chair. “Come, now, this is neither the hour nor the place for apologies.”

  “No, really, I - I lied to you this morning. That moment when you were concerned about me. I wasn’t coughing. It was -”

  “That? Think nothing of it. Actually I thought you were distraught, but held my tongue. Sometimes these prisoners come to life when you’re just trying to do your job. There’s no crime in being human.” He sucked on his cigarette, looked at her through smoke.

  She kept her eyes on him. “When that happened, I was wondering if you could tell that he was gravely ill.”

  “The prisoner? Well, none of them are exactly the picture of health, now are they? As far as -”

  “I have a confession to make,” she said.

  Mattei waved his hand. “So you were upset, Mlle Miroux. Forget it, I don’t blame you.” He raised his glass. “Let’s drink to being out of that dreary old bastion. That place can get you down.”

  Geli left her glass where it was on the table. “I’m trying to say, Monsieur, I’ve been deceiving you. It’s time I put a stop to it.”

  He stared at her, eyes trying to nudge her like a bug that wanted to go the other way. He began to shake his head, looking at his upraised glass, poised for a sip. “Well, it can’t be that bad, Mlle Miroux, really. Go on, then. Get it out of your system. Then I’ll tell Philippe to bring us over some of his lovely gruyère from Marseille.”

  She looked across at him as he wet his lips with absinthe, steadying her eyes as if she were about to read back to him some of her own dictation. “My name is not Simone Miroux. I’m not French, but German. I haven’t lived through the war in Paris. I have no sister named Maxine. I made her up.”

  He stared at her with a fixed, uncertain smile, the way you’d watch a rabid dog for the precise moment when you would have to shoot it. He reached for his dead cigarette in the ashtray with a trembling hand, took it back without the cigarette and covered one hand with the other on the table, clearing his throat. “What reason do you have for telling me this now?”

  “I’ve known Kurt Langsdorff since late in the winter of 1944. We were friends. More than friends, if – if I’d had my way. I couldn’t. Forgive me, Monsieur, but I couldn’t go on letting you think I had nothing but hatred for all Germans, and wanted them all hung.”

  There was a sudden tightening around his eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said.

  “I’m not proud of it, Monsieur.”

  Mattei swallowed. He looked down at his miniature glass, turning pale. “That’s quite a mouthful. What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I want to see him, Monsieur. I want him to know I’m here.”

  Mattei flung his cigarette at the ashtray, missing as it skittered, tumbling across the table and came to rest at the edge. He left it there. “But he must know already. He’s seen you.”

  “He can’t have recognized me. I’d know. He would have made some sign. You saw how beaten down he looked. He’s gravely ill. It would be like him not to tell you.”

  Mattei’s eyes hardened as if smashed into white heat on an anvil. “What is he to you?”

  “It all began in Germany when I was hired to spy on him. I’d worked for the Abwehr in Cairo, but this time they weren’t involved. They were kept out of it. It was a private arrangement between myself and – and a -”

  Mattei clenched his fist, his red eyes struck out across the table. “God damn it, who are you?”

  “My name is Geli Straub,” she said breathlessly. “When my husband, a general in the Wehrmacht, was lost in Russia, I became destitute. A way out came along by accident – a deal I made with an officer working for Central Security who wanted me to spy on his protégé. That man was Langsdorff – on the surface every inch a model SS officer. But then in time I found that he was only posing as the kind of Nazi you and I both hate. After that, everything changed. I changed sides. I had enough on him to tell this officer, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to sell him out, but I couldn’t run, either. One night he confessed to me those things he now so desperately wants you to believe. I knew too much about him to forsake him at that time or any other. Whether he wanted me or not, I left Berlin with him. With the help of two Dutch partisans we got as far as Rottweil, where he surrendered to French forces. French security turned the tables and remanded him to Paris, where I tracked him and – the rest you know. Now you must also know that I can testify to the absolute truthfulness of every word in his report.”

  Mattei sat back, clutching his glass, arm stiffly braced. “Wanted you,” he said. “So that’s why you’re here.”

  “No, I -”

  “Did you confess to him your real identity before you went with him toward Allied lines?”

  “No. I was afraid to. He still doesn’t know. Will you - will you let me see him in his cell?”

  Mattei jutted out red fury, and slamming down his fist made the ashtray and the glasses and the dead cigarette at the edge of the table jump. “Out of the question! I could have you arrested!”

  “Do it, then! And you might be next for letting me slip through your fingers.”

  He stared, then seemed to crank himself back off his elbows on the table, saying with a sneer, “So that’s it. Blackmail.”

  She hesitated, staring at him. “What are his chances if I disappear?”

  “What are they if you don’t?”

  “You saw how drained of hope he was. No witnesses. Not even his wife. Please let me see him, Monsieur. He’s got to know I’m here. If your morals aren’t just painted on, try to see me as a woman who wants to save one of your prisoners from the prejudice she once sought to make you think was hers.”

  Mattei’s hand came off his forehead like bandages being peeled off a face disfigured by rash love, mutilated by a siren he’d let
play him for a sucker. The pleading in his voice crawled hand over hand. “Were you in love with him?”

  She’d left it somewhere in the footlights. A crowd roared and she took the bow, the laurels and the flowers, and love came out glittering in the rave reviews. “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Monsieur.”

  His face twisted with hate, then just as quickly fell back leaving its dead around the corners of a bitter smile. “If I have you arrested, you’ll never see him. If I don’t, Colonel Laurent will have my head.”

  “Not necessarily. There is a way around that. How well do you trust Corporal Dax?”

  Mattei began to shake his head. “Nobody goes down there, except the jailers and the doctor. We’d have to do it in the dead of night. I don’t know. It’s too risky, implicating Dax. To say nothing of the other jailers.”

  “Swear him to secrecy.”

  “I won’t lie to him. There’ll have to be a reason that lets him off the hook if things go wrong. I’d have to make it worth his while.”

  “You’ll think of something,” she said.

  Mattei’s eyes glowed like pulsing embers. “Why should I take that chance and go to jail, too - for what?”

  “For a man who needs you desperately.”

  He stared at her. “If you get what you want, do you think he’ll get what he wants?”

  She searched his face. “He won’t leave his wife for me. I don’t want him to. I never did.”

  “Unless you gave him other ideas.”

  “They couldn’t have lasted if I did.”

  “Now that you’re some actress and I got to play the fool.”

  “Go on, then – arrest me.”

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t. For now it seems you’ve got me over a barrel.”

  “It’s up to you and me to give Kurt hope enough to stay alive.”

  He lifted his chin a little to look down at her. A haughty look in which she saw him groping for some way out. “When we’re found out,” he said, “which one of us is going to take the fall?”

  “I’ll take it all upon myself.”

  “Will you? Telling them what? You held a gun to my head? The gun of a beautiful woman I let slip through my fingers because I was -” He swallowed hard.

  “Monsieur -”

  He raised his palm. “Save it. No pity, please.”

  “It wasn’t that,” she said.

  He shoved his glass away so hard it tipped over, but didn’t crack. He left it rolling like a pendulum onto its side.

  “Tell me – why did you have to do it this way? Why couldn’t you have simply –“

  She stared at him as if he ought to know. “There wasn’t any other way,” she said.

  “Damn it, you didn’t try.”

  “Maybe Mlle Miroux told me not to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Suppose I’d walked in off the street and told them I’ve come all the way from Germany to bear witness to the deeds of a presumed Nazi killer? Or staying French, explain what good I’ve got to say about a Nazi. Yes, the war is over, but feelings still run high. They’d peg me for a collaborator.”

  “You didn’t try,” Mattei said stubbornly.

  “Well, then - I’d be your prisoner, wouldn’t I?”

  He brought his eyes up, smoldering, then with a sigh grabbed his forehead. “God, you’ve made a fine mess of things!” He picked up his empty glass and righted it on the table. “Give me another day or two.”

  She said almost in a whisper, “All right,” and glanced back toward the bar.

  The two men had gone. Philippe began to gather up their empty glasses, then busied himself with something under the bar. Bottles clanked.

  Mattei was tapping the table with the nails of one hand. All at once he got up, knocking back his chair and reaching for his wallet. He fished out a few franc notes, tossed them on the table, muttering, “That’ll take care of it,” then marched off past Phillipe’s big unrequited smile.

  “Adieu, Monsieur Mattei!” the barman said. “Until we -” His face fell.

  At the door Mattei stopped, half-turned toward Geli who was on her feet beside the table. “My car’s outside if you need a lift home, Mlle Miroux!” he brayed huffily.

  Geli sat still. “No, thank you, Monsieur. I’m sure I’d get you lost.”

  “I should be so lucky,” Mattei said, and went out under the jingle of the bell.

  26

  Worn slick steps led down into the stench of urine, mold and methane gas cooking in the dim cauldron of a dungeon. Geli took shallow breaths along the narrow corridor, hemmed in by slimy stone walls and passing eyes that sprang, inflamed, to the barred apertures to peer out. Mattei took her arm as Corporal Dax strode briskly ahead, becoming more and more darkly silhouetted by a light on the wall, masked like a fencer’s face, down toward the end. Keys jangled, a bolt clanked and Dax swung open the strap-iron door and stood there waiting until they caught up.

  “You may go, now, Dax,” Mattei said. “Wait for us at your station.”

  “About how long, sir?”

  “Ten minutes at the most.”

  “Leaving this gate unlocked, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you should run past ten minutes -”

  “Unlikely, but if so, don’t wait. Come back for us.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dax turned his face toward the gloom inside the cell. “The prisoner seems to be asleep. Shall I wake him for you?”

  “Yes, go ahead, Dax. Do that.”

  Nerves began to jitter along Geli’s spine. In that fetid semi-darkness lived the man for whom her love felt suddenly unreal, beyond her reach, so seldom had she touched him, so restless was his place in her heart.

  Dax stepped in a short way, ducking his head in under the low entrance. “On your feet, chien! You have a visitor!”

  Geli cringed at the savage slur, then heard a stirring inside, wood creaking and the crackle of dry straw.

  Dax backed out. “I’ll go now, sir.”

  “Thank you, Dax,” Mattei said.

  Boots clapped Dax to attention, his salute quivered at the elbow. “Sir!”

  They stood a moment watching Dax as he grew smaller trudging back through the shadowy ochre light.

  Mattei stood aside. “He’s all yours, Mlle Miroux.”

  Geli went in, followed by the clank of the heavy, rusted gate. To the left in the corner she could make out something like a coal shuttle, a foul odor that went with it. In a feeble shaft of moonlight that shone down from a small barred window cut high into the wall, a tall stooped figure in a striped smock rose from the straw-stuffed cot. He began to shuffle toward her, stopped and stood there, eyes peering from the face she wanted it to be, the cobalt blue eyes turned pewter in the half-light. She said, “I wondered if you knew me up there, Kurt, I was so afraid. I’m not afraid, now. Don’t you be.”

  He didn’t move.

  She forced a playful lilt into her voice. “You know you ran out on me back there in Rottweil. When I woke up that morning, you were gone. I knew you couldn’t help it. Colonel Darlan told me.”

  He stared at her as if his eyes were not enough, then reared up making fists, and she saw now that he was sweating and it struck her that the diabetes must have come back on him. She hurried toward him, and how fatally she loved him, wanting to hold him but afraid – this man promised to a girl named Elfriede, kept always to himself behind the locked door of her mind. She plucked her glasses off and shook her hair out, then as if his hand came from some other direction, from Bornichen, she felt his fingers touching her forehead like a blind man, trickling down along her cheek and trembling on her neck behind her ear. She reached around him, coming up on tiptoe. Suddenly he pulled away. “No, I’m so filthy -”

  She wouldn’t turn him loose, but held on tight, and he stopped bucking and was still. She said in a brusque, commanding tone, “Listen to me, Kurt. We haven’t got much time. Mattei knows, now, I’ve known you since Berlin, but it’s all right. I’ve made
a deal with him. In return for letting me keep the promise I made to you in Rottweil, to serve as your material witness, he won’t give me away. They could arrest me for impersonating a French stenographer, but not when my only crime is to back up all you’ve stated in your report. I’m no threat to them because the war is over. That’s why, if they have me arrested, they’ll go down for letting me slip through the cracks. The Court may never hear or know of me at all, but that won’t take away the things I’ve told Mattei to make me every bit the kind of witness he could call upon. He may never have to use me, but I’m here if he does.”

  He looked down at her, then turned aside like a long-caged animal afraid of being let out into the wild. A chill gripped her like a cold, dead hand. She tried to pump cheer into her voice. “You mustn’t give up, Kurt. Soon you’ll be seeing improvements down here in the food. You’ll get a shower, something clean to wear. Has the doctor been to see you?”

  He shook his head. “They’re onto tricks like that – too many Germans claiming to be sick.”

  She reached for his hand, but it felt limp and cold and she began to wonder whether she’d fallen out of his heart long ago, the day they’d taken him from Rottweil. Given up on her and now Elfriede never had to know. Fear struck down into where she’d once thought she could love him to the end. She took his face in both hands. “Look at me.”

  His eyes came up as hard as gems, but nothing glittered in them, and she couldn’t tell what hid behind them in the dark.

  Just then the door clanked.

  Mattei looked in, saying, “I’m afraid your time is up. Corporal Dax is here.”

  She wanted to take Kurt in her arms, but Mattei was standing there, watching like Elfriede’s lawyer. He turned away and stepped outside, leaving them alone.

  Kurt stood still.

  She pulled him close, the smell of him and all so he would know she didn’t mind the filth he was ashamed of. “You’ve got to hold on, Kurt,” she said. “You’re getting out of here. You’ll be going home. Believe that.”