The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Where did you go?”

  “Just down to the courthouse. I needed a bloody walk. Is that a crime?”

  Wolff pointed at the balled-up poster. “You will sit in this office and rewrite everything that was on that paper. Then you will give me an oral update on your progress. You will not leave until I have deemed everything you’ve done satisfactory.”

  But the Gruppenführer took no pleasure in watching Aubrion take a sheet of paper and pen and begin replicating his note. Aubrion was too happy, there was no other way of putting it. He did not walk with a gallows gait, as Wolff had expected. Something was wrong here, Wolff knew—and he knew he must yank Aubrion’s rope, or lose him like a stray balloon.

  14 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY EVENING

  The Smuggler

  LADA TARCOVICH LAY beside Andree Grandjean in bed, watching a group of refugees from her window. When Europe finally woke up to the Nazi threat, it did so in excess, putting every scrap of metal, every stray paper to use against Germany. As a consequence, the newspapers that traveled on the wind, those urban tumbleweeds of the pre-war days—they were gone, replaced by dull-eyed women and men, the homeless, refugees. Those below Andree’s eighth-floor apartment collected their carpetbags. Lada watched until the wanderers were out of view.

  “What are you looking at?” muttered Grandjean, her eyes closed. “If it’s not me, then it’s not important.”

  Smiling, Lada leaned into Andree’s body and kissed her. Groaning with pleasure, Andree’s lips parted, taking in all of Lada: her tongue, her smile. Lada’s hands tightened around Andree’s waist, pulling her closer. They broke away gasping.

  As Lada’s head fell back on the pillow, she allowed herself a bit of nosiness at Andree’s apartment. Lada herself divided her time between the FI base and her whorehouse, so she had not lived in a real flat since the occupation. Andree’s room was dense with leather texts, heavy furniture and that tasteless but expensive brand of minimalist art so fashionable those days. Hers was an apartment engineered to receive clients and bureaucrats.

  Lada rested her head in the crook of Andree’s arm. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello?” Andree laughed. She had a throaty, unashamed laugh. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “Perhaps that’s all that needs to be said.”

  “You talk far too much for me to think you believe that.”

  “Damn.” Lada rolled over onto her back. “You’ve never had a woman before?”

  Andree looked offended. “How did you know?”

  “Well, you did tell me you weren’t a queer.”

  “Right.”

  “And the first time was terrible.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it really?”

  “It was, really.”

  “I didn’t hear you complaining the second time.”

  “No.” Lada kissed her. “I was not complaining the second time.”

  Andree went quiet. Then she said: “I’ve always known, I suppose.” Andree Grandjean looked at Lada without seeing her, perhaps seeing a dozen other women she’d befriended a tad too closely, friends she’d hated once they took their wedding vows. “I’ve never spoken to anyone about it—or thought about it much, either. I suppose I was frightened of it. It was always a part of me that I knew was there, but never touched.”

  “A great tragedy.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The lack of touching.”

  Andree smacked her. “You are incorrigible.”

  “And you are encouragable.” Lada twisted Andree’s nipple.

  “Stop that,” said Andree, and the two laughed and kissed again. “Have you always known?”

  “I suppose. Lord knows I tried to beat it out of myself, though.”

  “How?” Andree rested her hand on Lada’s stomach, just below her breasts. The familiarity of the gesture almost made Lada Tarcovich weep.

  “I’m a prostitute,” she said plainly.

  “You’re—?”

  “You heard me.”

  “For...men?”

  “If there’s a prostitute for women, I’d love to meet her.”

  “How long have you been a—” Grandjean tripped on the word “—prostitute?”

  “Seventeen years. Though I’m not very good at it.”

  Andree Grandjean’s eyes hardened—and there was the judge who Tarcovich had seen on the bench two days prior. She’d forgotten that the two were the same person. Grandjean took her hand from Tarcovich’s stomach.

  “But, why?” she asked. The question was wide and open, with nothing more to it.

  “My mother and father were wealthy, so I had suitors before I knew what the word meant.” Lada’s voice turned to steel. She had not thought of this in many years: how her parents had paraded her child’s body before teenage boys, how they spoke of her to the gray-bearded men who thought they had a chance because they still had their hair. “At first, when I turned them away, it was all in good fun. ‘Oh, Lada’s just being difficult,’ and such. But as I grew older, my parents became suspicious. I could not bear the thought of tying myself to a man. And so, I sold myself to a whorehouse—partially to prove to my parents and myself that I was not a queer, and mostly to get away from my suitors.” Lada shrugged. “When I was young, it made sense in my head.”

  Grandjean took Tarcovich’s hand. “Oh, Lada.”

  “I did that for years—also wrote erotic stories.”

  “About what?”

  “Americans, mostly.”

  Grandjean shuddered. “Do you still have them?”

  “They’re terrible.” Lada brushed Grandjean’s hair from her face, kissed her chin. “Needless to say I did not prove anything, except that I wanted to fuck women.”

  “Why did you keep doing it?”

  “Fucking women?”

  “No, you fool.”

  Lada flashed a mischievous grin that Grandjean extinguished with a kiss.

  “I don’t know. It became different, after a time,” said Lada.

  “Seeing men?”

  “Yes.”

  “How so?”

  “I take no pleasure in it, and like I told you, I am not good at it. But I can do something—I can fuck powerful men who don’t know what I am, who are passing laws that make it impossible to be what I am—I can have that. That is my gift.” Lada laughed softly. “It is an illness, I know. Someone close to me—who was close to me—has been trying for ages to persuade me to see a psychoanalyst.”

  Andree Grandjean held her close. “Life passes too quickly for psychoanalysts.”

  Because they could, and because the alternative was so much uglier, Lada and Andree spent the rest of the afternoon in bed. There, the entirety of their world was the cool shock of each other’s skin. Church bells rang every hour or so, accompanied by the crackle of firearms shot into the air. Fog obscured the sun; Grandjean switched on a light, washing the ceiling and floors in shades of cream. These background clues that time was passing, night was falling—it was all a very strange, very zwanze counterpoint to whatever was growing in that bed.

  In the early evening, they both realized they were starving. Lada and Andree Grandjean got up to dress.

  “I want waffles,” said Tarcovich, “but also herring.”

  Grandjean buttoned up her shirt. “Why not both?”

  “When was the last time you had either?” Tarcovich slipped her dress over her head. “I think that cafe on Avenue du Vieux Cèdre still has waffles.”

  “If they do, that means it is run by Germans or collaborationists.”

  “Shit, you’re right, aren’t you?”

  “Inevitably.” Andree Grandjean finished with her shirt and began buttoning up her trousers. She leaned in to turn off the light
.

  “Don’t.” Lada shook her head. “I’ll miss you.”

  Grandjean whispered that Lada was a fool, which she was, and kissed her. “Lada, you haven’t asked,” said the judge, “but I’ve decided to help you.”

  Tarcovich looked at her. Andree’s hair was sticking up, her shirt half tucked into her trousers. Starving or not, Lada wanted to climb back into bed with her and never leave. She’d always thought people were exaggerating when they talked about love—to say nothing of love at first sight. Love was this, love was that...not so, not to Lada. Love was not hating them most of the time; that was what she believed. And now, to feel this way only weeks before Lada Tarcovich would die, a feeling so expansive, but so small, infinite, but only hers—it was incomprehensible. Andree was alive in a way that made Lada feel alive, not just as a whole, but in every instant.

  “Don’t do it because of this,” said Lada, directing her gaze toward the bed.

  “I am not.”

  “You are, though.”

  “Perhaps.” Andree tucked in her shirt. “But I am not going to be stupid about it. I want to know nothing about the FI’s operation—just the part of the operation for which you need my help. If you are caught, I will not be implicated.”

  Lada nodded.

  “What would you have me do, then?” asked Andree.

  “We need money,” said Lada.

  Grandjean laughed. “Is that all?”

  “You have not asked how much.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty thousand francs.”

  “Is that all?”

  “You have not asked by when.”

  “By when?”

  “Next week.”

  “Damn.” Andree paced the room, pushing her hair out of her face.

  Lada finished dressing and sat on the bed. “Is it possible?”

  “It is not impossible,” said Grandjean, which was the best they could hope for.

  * * *

  Lada and Andree selected a table under an awning for an early evening meal. Though the restaurant was vacant, the owner and his daughter were arguing loudly in the kitchen, so Lada and Andree had to lean close to hear over the row and the light rain. Shortly, their meal was interrupted by an old woman who approached their table as though she knew them. Wordless, Andree removed an envelope from her pocket and handed it to her. The woman accepted it, then withered into the crowded streets.

  “What was that all about?” asked Lada.

  “I’m buying an auction house.” Grandjean shrugged.

  Lada’s fork clattered against her plate. “You’re what?”

  “Well, she’s buying it.” Andree gestured at the old woman’s frail back with her spoon. “I’m simply paying for it.”

  “How much?”

  “About ten thousand francs.”

  “Why do you need an auction house?”

  “I don’t.” Andree licked the custard off her spoon. It was the most unglamorous thing Lada Tarcovich had ever seen, which was saying quite a bit, considering the nature of her profession. “But I do need somewhere to host our fund-raiser.”

  “Is there some reason you can’t simply rent a ballroom?”

  Andree Grandjean leaned back in her seat, regarding Lada. A light rain dusted their silverware and plates, plastering Andree’s hair to her forehead. Tarcovich’s skin prickled.

  “I’m not sure whether you’ve heard, but the Gestapo just formed a Ministry of Perception Management,” said Grandjean, “led by a man named August Wolff. Its goal is to turn the tide of public opinion, away from the Allies.”

  “I’ve heard,” said Tarcovich, perhaps dryly.

  “Have you? Good. I have slightly more faith in the FI than I did before. We fight wars with bullets and guns, Lada, but we win or lose them with propaganda.”

  Lada recoiled, half expecting Marc Aubrion to peel off Grandjean’s face and laugh at her for failing to detect his disguise. “You’re starting to sound far too much like a man I work with,” she said.

  “He seems wise.” A pale-faced waiter with bloodshot eyes refilled Lada’s coffee cup. Grandjean held up a hand. “None for me, thank you.”

  When the waiter had gone, Lada whispered: “An actor, do you think? In his spare time?”

  “How else could you explain those eyebrows?”

  “True.”

  “My point is that doing things is less important than how we do things. I could have just rented out a ballroom for our fund-raiser. But by renting out a building, a two-story building previously owned by the Ahnenerbe—”

  “Was it really?”

  “—I set up the expectation that this is going to be the event of the century, so grand and so large that I need an entire mansion to accommodate it.”

  Lada nodded, absently taking a bite of her veal pie. It had gone cold. “It’s smart.”

  “I know.” Grandjean smiled. Lada leaned in to kiss her, stopping herself at the last second. The two shared a heavy glance, then looked away.

  Lada said, “What is our next step?” to shatter the sudden quiet.

  “That depends. I’m not sure what kind of resources the FI has these days—”

  “What do you need?”

  “I’ll need someone with connections at a newspaper. And someone who knows how to wreck a reputation. Oh, and do you happen to know anyone who can print some posters?”

  14 DAYS TO PRINT

  EVENING

  The Professor

  MARTIN VICTOR USED to say that no one ever accused a punctual man of lying. And so he planned to arrive at the auction sponsored by the Ahnenerbe—that group of thinkers who concocted absurd stories about the superiority of the so-called “Aryan” race—twenty minutes before its start. Victor’s purpose, of course, was to steal a booklet containing the list of locations at which Le Soir was distributed throughout the country: every newsstand, shop and cart in Belgium. Victor twice tried to hail a cab, but drivers grew sparse as evening fell, going home to avoid German soldiers en route to whorehouses and pubs. The professor was forced to walk on shaky legs.

  He had not slept the night prior; I know because I’d heard him moaning from his cot. Sleep had been a hard-fought battle for Victor since the Auschwitz assignment. “I close my eyes,” he’d once confessed to René Noël, in a rare moment of intimacy, “and I’m surrounded by those faces from the camp, their pale lips. They’re wordless—with pain, maybe, or perhaps they simply forgot how to speak.”

  He paused to wipe the sweat from his face and catch his breath. In his youth, Victor could work half the day and night without stopping, could juggle twelve projects without pause. His wife Sofia had teased him for it. The night before their wedding, he’d stayed up past sunrise working on a paper, thinking she wouldn’t notice his exhaustion through the next day’s excitement. When they reached the chapel, though, she’d chastised him soundly.

  A piece of Victor, one that he’d spirited away after Auschwitz, wondered how his wife would have felt about Faux Soir, whether she’d think it brilliant or reckless, a waste of Victor’s time and efforts. Though Sofia believed in heaven and hell, of course—the staunchly Catholic Victor never would have married her otherwise—she always said it would be a bitter afterlife indeed if it were tinged by earthly regret. Nothing upset Sofia more than a wasted hour, a squandered drop of sweat. It was perfectionist nonsense. Victor had loved her for it.

  Marc Aubrion, who had agreed to meet him at the auction house, did not share Victor’s views on punctuality. He appeared fifteen minutes late in an ill-fitting suit. “Guten Nachmittag,” said Aubrion.

  “You’re late,” said Victor. “I instructed you to arrive twenty minutes early.”

  “Who arrives twenty minutes early? And when did you instruct me?”

  “Last night,” Victor said through gritted teeth.

 
; “I was not awake last night.”

  “That much is evident. Come.” Victor produced Spiegelman’s forged invitations. “We’re already behind schedule.”

  “Let’s see,” said Aubrion, “whether our friend David is as good as his reputation.”

  Aubrion and Victor joined the other latecomers in front of the auction house. It was a well-dressed bunch, and a stern wind threatened their hats and bow ties. In his baggy blue suit and gray fedora, Aubrion looked misplaced, “like a human-interest story in a finance magazine,” as he put it later. He shifted uncomfortably as he handed the usher his invitation, holding his breath as the man’s eyes swept across the embossed paper. The man returned the invitation to Aubrion, giving him directions in German.

  “Danke,” said Aubrion, tipping his fedora. He strode into the auction house, pursued by the usher’s admonishing eyes.

  Martin Victor appeared at Aubrion’s side moments later. “Well done, David Spiegelman,” he murmured.

  “I’ll remind Noël to give him a raise,” said Aubrion. “What did the usher say?”

  “He said refreshments are on the left, the water closet is on the right, and the main room is straight ahead.”

  “To the left we go, then.”

  “How are you planning on asking for refreshments, with your accent?”

  But Victor’s irritation was halfhearted, for his attention was elsewhere. The auction house had been turned into a temple to pseudoscience, an unholy museum for the Ahnenerbe’s spoils. A rage as deep and cold as his wife’s grave took hold of Victor’s bones. Beneath the banners with their eagles and their swastikas sat pieces of stone carved with prehistoric inscriptions, a chunk of rock with a Nordic pagan symbol etched in the body, a pile of scrolls, a Medieval painting. Some of these things were up for auction, while others were there simply to show the reach of the German archaeological arm. Victor studied these things at university; though he was a sociologist by trade, he was a historian by training. This was truly why Martin Victor had joined the resistance: he knew that any civilization built atop a mythology of lies and thefts must be a civilization of sin. The swastika would forever symbolize evil. That itself was a crime.