The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “Yes.” Wolff took it from her, tossed it to the carpet. “Let’s talk, shall we?”

  “What do you want to talk about?” said Tarcovich.

  “Your trade.”

  Tarcovich’s lips curled. “You came all the way from Germany to talk about fucking? I’ll admit I’m flattered, Brigadeführer, but—”

  “Gruppenführer.” The four syllables tugged themselves free from Wolff’s mouth before he could stop them. His rank was new, and he still cared about it, which embarrassed him. “Be smart about this, madame. The Gestapo has records of all your activities from the past three years.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “That must be exciting for them.”

  “Two years ago, we had enough information to put you away for a very long time. Now we have enough information to put you away forever. Do you understand?”

  A breeze stirred the red drapes. “What do you know?” said Lada.

  “Since 1940, you have aided in the proliferation of over two hundred and fifty underground publications—the most recent of which is La Libre Belgique.” Wolff stepped on the newspaper. It crunched into the carpet under his polished boot. “You run the largest book smuggling ring in Belgium. You are a trespasser, a rabble-rouser, and you write disgusting erotic stories about the English.”

  “That is not true. I write them about the Americans.” Tarcovich pulled the shawl tighter, her skin cold and prickling.

  She allowed her attention to drift to her bookshelves and cupboards. Whispers of Tarcovich’s identity glittered among the stocky paintings and plain oak brothel furniture: jewelry she’d smuggled from Germany, ivory and jade, old books, things that should not have existed during wartime—the lives she had saved. A cigarette smoldered in a gold ashtray. Aubrion himself had passed many hours among the treasures and spoils of Tarcovich’s trade.

  The smuggler gathered herself and spoke: “You want me to do something, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Wolff.

  “For you. Or you would have shot me already.”

  Wolff nodded. His face was lined with premature wrinkles. Tarcovich had seen her girls age before their time, working a trade that chipped away at their souls. She had seen their lips crack and their skin grow thin. So it was with August Wolff. But her girls had not asked for this war—men like Wolff had begged for it.

  “What do you want me to do?” Tarcovich asked him.

  “There is a matter you’re going to help me with. A matter of words.”

  The Saboteur

  Contrary to what August Wolff would type that evening, Theo Mullier was not at the restaurant Le Lapin when Lada Tarcovich and the Gruppenführer found him. Instead, Mullier was ending his shift at a Nazi print factory. From the back of a gray Mercedes, Wolff and Tarcovich, now clothed in a collared dress and defiant red scarf, watched him shuffle out the door, dragging his left foot. (Wolff had planned to bring Aubrion along for the ride, too, but Aubrion annoyed him so much that the Gruppenführer dropped him in a cell.) Mullier glanced down the narrow street. Dusk had painted everything an inky blue: the lampposts, Mullier’s brown jacket and short trousers, the high buildings with their sightless windows. The Germans must have hosted a parade yesterday. Flags stamped with swastikas had been draped over windows and awnings.

  “Is that him?” the Gruppenführer asked, rolling down the window of the Mercedes.

  Tarcovich nodded. “He looks like a peasant, I know.”

  It was far worse than that: he looked like an invalid. Theo Mullier moved with the uneven gait so common among prisoners of war—shuffling, his shoulders drawn together and sloped. In those days, the Germans made no secret of their devotion to perfection: the Übermensch, the sculpted army.

  “I’ve never actually met him, to be honest,” Tarcovich went on, “but I’ve been a fan for ages. I used to read about him in between customers. That bit with Goebbels...” She shook her head. “Horrible.”

  “Brilliant,” said Wolff. He addressed his men, restless and smelling of shoe polish in the airless car. “Hold off. We must wait for the street to clear.” Wolff asked Tarcovich, “Isn’t he a printer, as well?”

  “Editor, printer, writer. He doesn’t look like much, but that’s part of his charm, as I’ve heard it.”

  Mullier hobbled to the poorhouse next door. There, he waited. He was soon rewarded by a shout that carried down the street and into the car: the factory director, screaming at his workers in Flemish. Mullier did not smile—he rarely smiled, that man—but permitted himself a nod of contentment. The next day’s paper would report that a pair of factory workers discovered a half-naked girl in the director’s office. She was distraught, filthy and American. The director would be disgraced, his perverted loyalty to the Allies exposed.

  Wolff asked, “How many times has Mullier performed that operation?”

  “I can’t say.” Tarcovich’s eyes were on Mullier. “Girls with passable English are a cheap investment these days.”

  “To be sure.”

  “It’s a fantastic scheme, isn’t it? If you want to destabilize a Nazi print factory, convince the higher-ups that the director is not a Nazi. People see what they wish to see, and your type is especially paranoid. Such is the secret of sabotage.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Indeed,” Tarcovich mocked. “Don’t be so sullen, Gruppenführer.” She laughed shortly. “I suppose no one suspects a scrubby man with a clubfoot to be a leader in the Front de l’Indépendance, do they? Let alone an editor of the infamous La Libre Belgique.” Tarcovich reached into her dress pocket. The soldiers in the front seat of the car whirled, going for their handguns.

  Wolff leaned sideways to shield Tarcovich with his body. “Gentlemen, please. We have already searched her.”

  “Don’t be afraid, boys.” Tarcovich removed some lipstick from her pocket and unscrewed the top, waving it in front of the soldiers’ faces. She held their gaze, applying the makeup as slowly as she could.

  “Wait until he’s turned the corner, then surround him,” the Gruppenführer told his soldiers. “Take a lesson from Monsieur Mullier, gentlemen, and do it quietly.”

  The Professor

  The coffeehouse was mostly empty that evening. People did not gather anymore, you understand, unless they were trying to start something, and if they were trying to start something, they certainly did not gather in public. There was none of the prattle and push from before the war. Martin Victor sat hunched over a small table, his suit a clump of tweed and chalk dust. Three young men with self-conscious leather notebooks and a pair of older women sat at adjacent tables. Victor was joined, shortly, by a second man in a long coat.

  “I was starting to worry.” Victor took a notebook and a pencil out of his pocket. “Did you run into trouble?”

  The second man sat across from Victor. The two were separated by a table engraved with the fingerprints of the day: pen-scratches, beer stains, blood. Though it had been a week since the last German raid, the coffeehouse was still heavy with the memory of it.

  “I thought I was being followed,” said the other man, “so I took a different route.”

  “Good, good. You’re based at the French outpost, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. If you don’t mind, I will leave my coat on. It’s rather cold in here.”

  “Devilishly cold.”

  “Should we exchange names?” asked Victor’s contact. “Or does that violate protocol?”

  “We could exchange code names, of course, but they’re rather ridiculous, I find. Would you like to order anything? I’m having coffee—”

  “I think we should get to work.”

  “I agree.” The professor brought his chair closer to the table. Victor’s voice carried, a teacher’s curse. He tried to talk softly. “My paper has received word that the Nazis have formed a new Ministry of Perception Management that’s administered by the
Gestapo, specifically a man named August Wolff. We’re trying to do a profile on this Wolff character.”

  “Understood.”

  “Here’s what we know about him so far. He’s in his early forties. Young for a man of his rank. We think he’s at least a gruppenführer. He was in school for journalism, somewhere in Berlin, but he didn’t perform very well. The man can’t write to save his life, we hear.” Victor shuffled his notes. “Before he was put in charge of the Ministry of Perception Management, he was the Germans’ number one man for book burnings. There’s a rumor—mind you, we don’t know whether it’s true—that he keeps a book or a paper from every burning he’s assigned. And...” Victor glanced through his notes again. “And I think that’s all. What intelligence have you gathered on him?”

  “His primary interest is propaganda. Particularly black propaganda.”

  Victor tapped his lip with his pencil. The professor was fairly certain he’d heard the term before, but devil take him if he could remember what it meant. “How would you define black propaganda?” asked Victor.

  “Propaganda is ‘black’ if it is supposedly from one side, but is actually from the other,” said Victor’s contact. “If you create a false Nazi publication full of misinformation—about Hitler’s illnesses, say, or German war crimes—that is black propaganda.”

  “Ah, I see. The German people would believe this information because the newspaper would seem to have been written and published by the Nazis.”

  “When, in actuality, the Allies are writing it to sway public opinion. The small resistance presses have done this sort of thing before, but Wolff is interested in something much larger.”

  “Then he’s an idiot,” said Victor.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s not possible. The resources and talent you’d need, not to mention the funds—”

  “How long have you been a journalist for the underground?” interrupted the man in the long coat.

  “Since the war started.”

  “And in all your years, you’ve never seen a large-scale feat of black propaganda?”

  “No, never.”

  “You don’t believe it can be done?”

  Victor thought, then decided: “I don’t believe the Nazis can do it.”

  “Neither do I,” said the second man, opening his coat to expose the swastika on his sleeve. As the German stood, the patrons traded their coffee cups for handguns, which they leveled at Martin Victor. Silent, the professor raised his hands above his head.

  “I beg your pardon for the circumstances of our meeting, Professor Victor,” said the German. “I am Gruppenführer Wolff.”

  The Jester

  Back at the Nazi headquarters, Wolff’s men deposited Aubrion, Tarcovich, Mullier and Victor in a room furnished with a low, square table, handcuffing them to their chairs. Two soldiers with machine guns paced in front of the door. The combination of stone walls and heavy furniture warped the sounds of their footsteps, shading them in hushed, dreamlike tones. Shortly, Aubrion grew bored. He turned to Theo Mullier, who was rubbing a bruise over his left eye.

  “What is that?” Aubrion asked, pointing at a patch on Mullier’s jacket.

  “This?” Mullier craned his neck to look at it, like he’d never seen it before. The patch depicted a lion reared back on its hind legs, bordered by the letters F and I. “Our insignia.”

  “We have an insignia?”

  “The Front de l’Indépendance does.”

  “Since when?” Leaning back in his chair, Aubrion put his feet up on the table. He noted with some pleasure that his shoes were filthy, and that the guards were scowling at him from below their hideous mustaches.

  “A while now.” Mullier ran a hand through his beard. It was mostly white, streaked with ink from the printing presses. “Some months, maybe.”

  “Why the hell,” said Aubrion, “does a secret organization have an insignia?”

  “Oh, here he goes,” groaned Lada Tarcovich.

  “But I’m serious!”

  “I’ve no doubt of that.”

  “That’s rather like hanging a sign above a refugee shelter that says ‘Jews Hidden Here.’”

  “We’re not really a secret organization any longer,” said Victor.

  “I wonder why,” retorted Aubrion. “And what kind of a typeface is that anyway? Mullier, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Mullier spat on the carpet.

  “It was necessary,” said Victor, too loud in the close room. “For legitimacy. The insignia, I mean.” The professor wiped his glasses on his coat. His handcuffs complicated this process. “Given our goals, it is important that the people perceive us as a viable entity.”

  “A viable entity that is currently discussing policy initiatives in front of their captors,” said Tarcovich.

  Aubrion laughed. “We are doing a better job sabotaging ourselves at this moment than Mullier ever could.”

  “Amusing,” said Theo Mullier.

  “I just hope someone is smart enough to screen our teams for Nazi informants when we don’t report in on time,” said Aubrion.

  Tarcovich’s makeup was smudged, just a little, so it looked like she had a mostly-healed black eye and a slightly bloody lip. Aubrion wondered why his theater pals never thought to use lipstick for stage effects; it was far cheaper than fake blood. Now there was an aphorism, he thought: lipstick is cheaper than blood. He’d have to work it into an article sometime.

  “We’ll report in on time,” said Tarcovich.

  “How do you figure?” said Aubrion.

  “If they wanted to kill us, they would have killed us.”

  “And so?”

  “And so, they obviously mean to turn us loose. Our people will never know to check for Nazi informers. It will be as if nothing happened at all.”

  “You seem to know a lot about these matters,” said Mullier, trying to maintain a neutral tone. But because Mullier had the subtlety of a rabid boar—at least according to Aubrion—he sounded as though he were launching an interrogation.

  “Oh, shut up.” But Tarcovich had paled. In the years he’d known her, Aubrion had rarely seen her so rattled, even in the direst situations. She knew what became of women who fell to the Nazis, particularly women of her ilk. “I’m allowed to speculate,” she added thinly.

  “Perhaps the Germans only want information.” Victor shifted in his chair as though he found this theory unlikely.

  Aubrion glanced around the room. “I don’t see any thumbscrews.”

  “Maybe they mean to hold us here until we die?” offered Mullier.

  “I do not see any corpses, either—” Aubrion again.

  The door creaked open, emitting August Wolff and a man in a suit.

  “Oh, hang on—there’s one now,” said Aubrion, and his companions laughed. Though Wolff could not have been over forty, he had gray hair and the frail bones of the old or recently ill. It seemed odd that a man of his rank should look so fragile. Aubrion had rarely met a German who was not obsessed with physical vitality, and he had never met an officer of the Gestapo who did not radiate health.

  Gruppenführer Wolff dismissed the guards at the door with a wave and instructions to wait outside.

  “Good evening.” Wolff and the second man joined the others at the table. “I am Gruppenführer August Wolff. This is my colleague, Herr Spiegelman. Please allow me to apologize for the way you have been treated. We had no alternative. Is there anything you require before we get started?”

  “May I smoke?” asked Tarcovich.

  “Certainly.”

  Wolff motioned to his colleague—Spiegelman, whose impeccably tailored suit, trimmed beard and graceful movements were at odds with the dark circles under his eyes. Spiegelman took a metal case from his pocket and handed Tarcovich a cigarette and a match. She took it with some di
fficulty, pulling at her handcuffs.

  Mullier’s clenched fists shook on the table. “You’ll take cigarettes from a Jew who’s whored himself out to the Reich?”

  Saying nothing, Tarcovich took a drag on her cigarette. Aubrion watched Spiegelman’s face; the man didn’t flinch, not exactly, but his eyes narrowed, and he stared down at the table.

  “Now,” said Wolff. “Is there anything else?”

  “May I drink?” said Aubrion.

  “I believe you’ve had quite enough to drink today, Monsieur Aubrion,” said Wolff.

  “I liked you better when I thought you were a stage prop.”

  “Let us get to business, if you please. Herr Spiegelman?”

  Spiegelman placed a copy of a newspaper on the table. The title page shouted Colère! Though far from the most widely-circulated paper at the time, the Communist publication had a loyal following. Like the other paperboys, I loved Colère. It always sold out.

  “This is one of the last surviving copies of your separatist paper Colère,” said Wolff.

  “Hang on,” said Aubrion. “Last surviving?”

  “We burned the factory last week.”

  “You fucking pig.”

  The Gruppenführer carried on as if he hadn’t heard Aubrion. “I’ve singled out Colère not because it’s particularly well-written or crafted. It is not. It’s long-winded for a revolutionary paper. The people like simple, catchy sentences. You’ll corroborate that with a great many theories, I’m sure, Professor.” He nodded at Martin Victor. “However, there is something unique about this paper.” The Gruppenführer turned it over and flipped to the third page. “This column here. Dispatches from the High Command. What can any of you tell me about this column?” No one replied. “Anyone?” Even Aubrion remained silent. “Oh, come now. Must I resort to crude threats?”

  “It was written by a Nazi turncoat.” Tarcovich took a drag on her cigarette. “A former oberführer, I think. It was mostly information about military movements, and the like.”

  “As you know, that sort of column is very much in demand,” said Professor Martin Victor. He attempted to smooth his tie—a nervous, compulsive movement—but it tangled in his handcuffs. “After I returned from my investigations at Auschwitz back in ’41, and I wrote about—what I saw there...” Victor paled. “After that, the Belgian people were clamoring for more information on the atrocities, the horrors—the numbers. It’s always the numbers that get them. One hundred thousand refugees. Twenty-two thousand casualties. You know. There became a great demand for information about what Germany has been doing, what its goals are.”