The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “You weren’t prepared for it?”

  “Prepared? God, no. We weren’t prepared for anything.”

  13 DAYS TO PRINT

  DAWN

  The Pyromaniac

  WE HAD NOT concocted a story to tell the Gestapo if we were caught; after all, Faux Soir had come about in the first place because we’d already been caught. So, when August Wolff stormed the basement to interrogate us—each of us, mind you, separately—on the state of La Libre Belgique, we had to decide on our own stories. Fortunately, we all came to the same conclusion: to think like Marc Aubrion. That was how we each found ourselves tied to a chair in a different room of the FI headquarters, yelling some permutation of:

  “Honest to God, monsieur, the dirty books are a distraction! To throw off the rest of the factory!” (Me.)

  “It’s a distraction. The rest of the factory thinks we’re distributing pornography. To other rebels. To boost morale.” (Theo Mullier.)

  “Obviously a distraction. Why else would we order erotica? For David Spiegelman?” (Tarcovich.)

  And: “We’re interested in Le Soir only insomuch as it is the most popular collaborationist newspaper in the country. That is what we were doing on the chalkboards, you understand? Trying to devise a calculus for ensuring that La Libre Belgique consumers will turn to Le Soir after the success of this endeavor.” (Victor.)

  “How the devil should I know what’s on the chalkboards? It’s Aubrion’s doing.” (Noël.)

  “Christ, Wolff, would you settle down? We are just trying to make sure the market turns to Le Soir after we’re finished with La Libre Belgique. We’re doing you a favor.” (Aubrion.)

  The only people who were not playing along were the prostitutes, who simply repeated “We know nothing,” until the music of those words filled the warehouse.

  After three hours of questioning, the Gruppenführer was satisfied. He ordered his men to untie us and set our workers free, and he called everyone into the main room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “my name is Gruppenführer August Wolff. Forgive me for this rough treatment. I am part of a new program in the Ministry of Perception Management that is aimed at building alliances with the underground. You have created an impressive operation here. I am giving you eleven days to decide whether you would like to begin working for the Reich—after which, I’m afraid, I will have to deal rather harshly with those of you who say ‘no.’ But those who say ‘yes’ will be rewarded with a stable income, a good job, and the knowledge that you will remain safe and comfortable in the hands of Germany. That is all.”

  With a businesslike nod, Wolff and his men filed out of the building. We watched them go, one by one, until the only evidence of their existence was a few overturned chairs.

  * * *

  While René Noël remained upstairs to calm the men and women of the FI—indeed, to see how many had not fled the base immediately after the raid—Aubrion and I and the others banished ourselves to the basement to figure out what the devil just happened.

  “It makes sense,” said Lada Tarcovich, sitting backward in a cracked chair.

  Aubrion kept trying to sit, but every time he spoke, he stood up to pace. “What about this makes sense?” he said. His agitation disturbed me. I could not sit still, either.

  “That Wolff would drag the workers into this mess,” said Tarcovich.

  “He is threatening us,” Victor agreed. “Holding the others who work here hostage. If we slip up before La Libre Belgique is complete, he will kill us and those who work with us. That is what he’s saying.”

  “But by betraying him,” said Aubrion, “we’ve already condemned our brothers and sisters to death.” He seemed to be realizing this fact only now. Aubrion put his hand on a discarded propaganda poster, a charcoal sketch of a mother carrying her child from a ruined building. Our brothers and sisters at the FI—the writers and artists and journalists and delivery boys—they may not have been famous, and history may have been careless with their names, but by God, they labored for us. My dear friend Aubrion picked up this poster, cradling it. “They will be killed for our sins,” he said.

  “Do we have any reason to think Wolff is telling the truth?” said Mullier. “He’ll probably kill them regardless of what we do.”

  “Why would he lie?” asked Aubrion.

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Tarcovich shot back.

  Mullier’s fist came down on a table, frightening the typewriters. “He’s a damn German!”

  “Obviously,” said Aubrion, “but we can’t just—”

  “All right, everyone.” Noël came downstairs with his hands raised. His ink-splattered waistcoat was ripped at the bottom, and exhaustion shaded the skin below his eyes. “There is no use analyzing why Wolff does what he does. He wanted to check up on us, remind us who we’re working for. We must remain focused. We can all agree on that, right? Well?” Everyone muttered an assent. Noël nodded. “Let’s get back to work. Gamin? Coffees for everyone, please.” I left to fetch the coffees, but hovered at the top step to eavesdrop. The director said, “Monsieur Victor, can we have an update on the distribution list?”

  Victor muttered, “I was not successful.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” said Aubrion.

  “I do not have the list.”

  “Martin, you had one task.”

  “And a great deal of money,” said Lada.

  Aubrion advanced on Victor. “Out of all of us, you had the easiest job—”

  “Did I?” said the professor. “Then tell me something. Why wasn’t I informed of your plan? Didn’t you think I might want to know you were going to pretend to be captured by Nazis?”

  “No need to snap,” said Aubrion. “We thought it would be more realistic if we waited—”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “What?”

  “Who did you collude with?”

  “Theo and I, and that’s not what that means.”

  “You were part of this?” Victor demanded of Mullier.

  Mullier grunted. “It made sense.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Victor rubbed his forehead. “I don’t believe it. How on earth am I to trust either of you if you won’t tell me your bloody plans?”

  “You’re the one who botched this operation,” said Aubrion. “We were not the ones—”

  Their voices faded as I dashed upstairs to fetch the coffees. One of our men had just returned from a coffeehouse with a pallid, sickly brown tumbler of the stuff. Upon my return to the basement, René Noël had his hand on Aubrion’s shoulder.

  “Marc,” said Noël. It looked as though Aubrion might shake him off, but he did not. The fury in my friend’s eyes waned. “Let it go. Martin, you too. Perhaps your ‘failure’ was a blessing. Wolff would have caught us if you’d been successful.”

  Victor would not acknowledge that.

  “We will find another way to get the list,” Noël went on. “I have faith in our creativity. Speaking of such, where’s Spiegelman?”

  “He’s working on a Maurice-George Olivier column for Faux Soir,” said Aubrion, “and a bit for La Libre Belgique du Peter Pan—so we’ll have something to show Wolff. He sent me a telex that he’ll be in Brussels for most of the day.”

  Noël nodded. “Good, good. Tarcovich? The books?”

  Tarcovich’s cheeks and nose were flushed as though she’d been out in the cold. She unwrapped her blue scarf. “As you might have noticed, they’ve been delivered.”

  “Where were you all day yesterday?” Mullier grunted.

  “I don’t believe that’s any of your business.”

  “Oh, I believe it is.”

  “Fine. You want to know?” Tarcovich threw down her scarf, like a gauntlet. “I was with Judge Andree Grandjean. She has agreed to help us raise funds for the Nazi school caper. There. Do I have your approval?
”

  “With her?” said Aubrion. “As in ‘with’ her?”

  “We’re not discussing this,” said Tarcovich.

  “You were with her!”

  “Shut up, Marc.”

  “I thought you were with a different woman. What was her name? Titanic? She was strangely obsessed with ceramic.”

  I handed Tarcovich a mug of coffee, which she wielded rather irresponsibly. “Titania is fucking a man now, someone named Joseph Bucket or Becket, so I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “Joseph Beckers?” I said, passing a mug to Aubrion.

  Tarcovich looked at me in surprise. “You know him?”

  I nodded. “If he’s the fellow with the huge mustache, the one who dresses smartly—”

  “That does sound like him.”

  “Doesn’t that sound like everyone?” asked Aubrion.

  “Not you,” said René Noël.

  “What about him, Gamin?” asked Aubrion.

  All attention was upon me. “Well, monsieur.” I licked my lips, chapped from the cold. I was conscious of my every word. “The paperboys and me—and I—we all know Beckers. He’s the one who makes sure all the newspapers get to where they need to be. Beckers is in charge of the postal service, you see, and you were just talking about a distribution list, if I heard right.”

  Aubrion’s eyes caught fire. “The postal service?” he said, and my heart sang.

  “That’s him, monsieur.”

  “No, but that’s splendid,” whispered Aubrion, “far too splendid.”

  “If there’s a distribution list, I’d wager ole Beckers got it on him,” I said.

  “Gamin has a point,” said Victor, handling my urchin’s name between a pinched thumb and forefinger. “Men like Joseph Beckers are required to carry classified information on them at all times. It’s standard procedure for the Reich. Where he goes, the distribution list goes with him.”

  Aubrion snatched up a piece of chalk, scrawling Joseph Beckers! on the chalkboard, like the title of one of those shoddy plays that used to be popular in Brussels. Stepping back, Aubrion regarded the fellow’s name, which sprinted wildly across the blackboard.

  “A collaborationist runs the post?” said Mullier. “Isn’t the postal service in our hands?”

  The professor said, “Most of the postal workers are for the resistance, to be sure. Just not the fellow in charge.”

  And this was true. I knew the rumors, the whispers that would coalesce into facts and figures only after the war. Whenever the Nazi High Command sent a letter ordering the imprisonment or execution of a Belgian citizen, it passed through the hands of a postal worker before landing on a bureaucrat’s desk. But these men and women who worked at the post—and there were so many women, once the men began to disappear—they took it upon themselves to destroy the letters. Though this would not stave off the Germans forever, it would allow the condemned enough time to flee the country. The Germans later began shipping little fabric Stars of David to every town in Belgium; when the men and women at the post learned of the Stars’ purpose, they took the Stars home and burned them.

  Joseph Beckers may have been in charge of the post, but that meant nothing. Think of it. You know of the brave soldiers at the front, their bayonets held high and cheeks flushed with victory. But did you know of the quiet postal worker with her grim smile, the small acts of resistance that saved a country?

  “You said your Titania is going with him?” Aubrion asked Tarcovich. “With this Joseph Beckers?”

  “She is not my Titania. But yes.”

  “Fascinating,” said Aubrion. “Is there going to be a wedding, do you think?”

  13 DAYS TO PRINT

  MID-AFTERNOON

  The Smuggler

  EVADING THE GERMAN patrols was an art, in those days, and Tarcovich knew all the places where the patrols did not venture. She’d trafficked books and supplies through every vein and artery in Brussels; she knew the abandoned farmhouses, the torn-up bridges. Tarcovich led Aubrion over one such bridge, a small footbridge that straddled a ravine. The Nazis believed the bridge to be structurally unsound and instructed their patrols to avoid it. “It is structurally unsound,” Tarcovich said to Aubrion, “but thankfully, so are we.”

  “That’s not the comfort you intended it to be,” said Aubrion, placing one tentative foot on the bridge.

  Below them, the ravine gagged on human detritus: ripped-up shirts and urine-stained trousers discarded by refugees. Lada held her breath. She heard Aubrion’s heavy footsteps as he picked his way across the snow-dusted wood.

  “What’s it called again?” said Aubrion. “Your judge’s organization?”

  “The Society for the Prevention of Moral Degradation. And she is not my judge.”

  “Not your judge, not your Titania... You’re not doing too well any longer, Lada. Are the glory days of your youth so far behind you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Sounds horrible,” said Aubrion. “This ‘society,’ I mean.”

  “Yes, well.” Tarcovich stepped off the bridge, landing in a puddle. She swore at the mud on her boots. “Hopefully yours is a minority opinion.”

  “What’s Grandjean’s plan?”

  “Christ, Marc, do you have to be so loud about it?”

  “No one knows what we’re talking about.”

  “Could we keep it that way, do you think?”

  “All right, all right.”

  Aubrion sped up to walk beside Tarcovich. The road from the footbridge was unpaved, a dirt trail leading to the middle of town. Houses and shops bordered the road, grief-stricken in their bare wooden facades. People had stopped repainting their homes after the air raids; there was no point to it, and besides, where would they get the paint? Enghien sat naked in the cold, vulnerable to whatever the world had planned for it. As a light snow began to fall, mothers and their children emerged from the houses to cover their windows in wax paper. They worked and worked, and the snow performed a vanishing act in their hair.

  Marc Aubrion was, as per his usual, underdressed for the weather, shivering in his rolled-up shirtsleeves and short trousers. He looked like a beggar to Tarcovich, a happy beggar who stole bread and whispered a thank-you to the sky. She wondered whether his childish fervor insulated him from the cold.

  “What is the plan?” Aubrion stage-whispered.

  Tarcovich rolled her eyes. “The plan is to make the fund-raiser the event of the year—hell, the event of the century. We’ll need ads in all the major newspapers.”

  “René can arrange that.”

  “And posters, all across the country.”

  “I’ll have Gamin and his friends do it. What else? Do we have a location?”

  “Apparently there was a building owned by the Ahnenerbe—”

  Aubrion froze. “No. That was her?” He told Tarcovich about the old woman at the auction, the one Grandjean had sent to purchase the auction house. “It’s brilliant. I am in awe of this Grandjean person. I don’t think I’ve ever been in awe of anyone.”

  “Yourself.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “But of course, ads and posters will not be enough.” Tarcovich kept walking in the direction of old Enghien, the part that had not been bombed out by the Americans and the Royal Air Force. The clouds were gray with unshed tears. They cast a shadow over the city, bathing Enghien’s shopkeepers in false, shifting hues. “Inviting and cajoling can only get you so far. The FI’s recruitment numbers have told that story clearly enough.”

  “What does she have in mind? My God, Lada, she sounds utterly fantastic. I’d love to meet her.”

  “Yes,” Tarcovich said flatly, “she feels the same about you.”

  “Does she really?”

  “It will not happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “She wants nothing to do
with the Front de l’Indépendance.”

  “Clearly that’s not true.”

  A girl, no older than ten, walked up to Lada with her hand out and head down. Lada was accosted by the familiar animal smell, everything human stripped away—or perhaps the most human of smells, the body reduced to something primeval. Lada could not look away from the girl. The bones that slid beneath her skin told a story that would end in death, if the child was lucky.

  “Sorry, I have nothing,” said Tarcovich. There was a bit of strength around the girl’s eyes, which reminded her of Andree Grandjean. As the child walked away, it occurred to Tarcovich that she hadn’t the slightest idea where Andree had been born, what her parents were like, whether she had any siblings. Their hiding and secrets had left little room for the mundane.

  Aubrion passed the child a coin with an air of secrecy and watched her disappear. “Where do they all come from?” he murmured.

  “Who, the refugees?” asked Tarcovich.

  “How do they end up here, of all places?”

  “They end up everywhere, Marc.”

  “Do you ever wonder how much they make per day?” Aubrion looked around, perhaps searching for others—and there were others, there were always others. The air raids had left most of Enghien dessicated and raw, but this part of town looked almost ordinary. Only the papered-over windows, pocked streets, and refugees betrayed the truth. Aubrion said, “Is it more or less than the average laborer, do you think?”

  “I’m guessing less. Look at the way she’s dressed.” Tarcovich ached to clothe the poor girl, to give her soup and a trade. Though she hadn’t many regrets, Tarcovich was often reduced to tears over the girls she could not save, the stories that would be cut short.

  After a brief pause, Lada continued, “Think about it, Marc. With her resources, Andree Grandjean would be a fool to join the FI.”

  “Why, what does she know that we don’t?”

  “How this is going to end.”

  Aubrion trudged to a halt. He was in front of Tarcovich, so she could not see his face, but she watched him put his head down and rub the back of his neck. In some sense, Lada believed, Aubrion wrote and acted and made art to extend his childhood. Denial was the magic spell that kept it whole. Death was a bedtime story to him. It had been that way even before Faux Soir, when the war had only just begun: he would not call it a war until the king’s surrender, and he would not call it a surrender until blood ran in the streets. Tarcovich feared that the shock of their task—not the story, but the ending—would not reach him until moments before it was all over, when it was too late for him to grapple with it. She longed, improbably, to hold him.