The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  “Stag party?” said Tarcovich.

  “I’m drawing up a plan to secure the Le Soir distribution list during the party,” said Aubrion. “It should be fun, don’t you think?”

  “Joseph Beckers?” said Spiegelman. “Isn’t he in charge of the postal service?”

  “He’s the one.”

  “How are you going to get him to hand over the list?”

  Aubrion grinned, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Catastrophically.”

  “Where is the location of the party?” asked Victor.

  “Remind me: what’s the address of your whorehouse?” said Aubrion, nodding at Tarcovich.

  “Beg pardon?” said Lada.

  “Haven’t you heard? Before Beckers slips on the perfumed handcuffs of marriage, his pals are taking him out for one last hurrah. A night of revelry, of untamed masculinity. You know how these things go, Lada.” Aubrion’s hands went to his hair, his shirt, restless with anticipation. “They’ve chosen, as their venue, the best whorehouse in the city. I have here an invitation that was mailed to Monsieur Beckers last night.” He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. “Oh, right, that’s the address. I knew it, too. Twenty-Seven Rue de—”

  “Hang on a moment.” Lada held up a hand, as though Aubrion’s scheme was a physical thing—a boulder, or an avalanche—that she sought to ward off. “Joseph Becker, that wretched man in charge of the post, is having his stag party at my whorehouse?”

  “You really are a tad slow today, Lada,” said Aubrion.

  “Did his friends plan this...this?”

  “Of course! That is to say, I’m sure one of them did, though it’s unclear to me—to Beckers, too, I’m sure—which of them it was. But no matter. A jolly surprise, don’t you think? Isn’t that the sort of word he would use? Jolly?”

  Tarcovich’s hand went to her throat. “Oh, God.”

  “Everywhere Beckers goes, the list must go with him,” said Aubrion. “That is his agreement with the Reich.”

  Victor added, “That is the procedure for any top-secret information. For the Germans, that is. It must travel with the official who can give clearance.”

  “Did you really make poor Spiegelman draw up invitations for this?” said Tarcovich.

  “I did not ‘make’ him,” said Aubrion.

  “You made him.”

  “He didn’t refuse.”

  “You’re cruel, Marc.”

  With a nod at Victor, Aubrion said, “Your girls show the lads a good time. You snatch the list from Beckers’s pocket. What is Beckers to do, admit he was cavorting with prostitutes?”

  Tarcovich had gone pale. “It is brilliant.”

  “Second update.” Aubrion smacked the tip of his chalk against the board. It occurred to me that it was a good thing we did not have neighbors. “The posters advertising our fund-raiser are going up today.”

  Mullier asked, “Who’s in charge of that?”

  “Gamin is taking care of it,” said Aubrion, and I sat up straight at the sound of my name.

  “I don’t know...” Mullier hesitated.

  “What don’t you know?” said Aubrion.

  “The whole fund-raiser business. It seems needlessly risky. The FI is trusting too many people with far too little to lose.”

  “You mean Andree?” said Tarcovich, handling the question like it might burn her fingers.

  “The judge is part of it.” Mullier looked at Tarcovich. “I’ll do my bit to get the guests to the fund-raiser, but I don’t like it.”

  “We know perfectly well what you don’t like,” said Tarcovich. Mullier did not reply. Consider where we were, when we were. Mullier may have put his hands and wit and soul to work for the resistance, but he was still a man of faith, a man of the times. I am not sure Mullier would have shed blood for Tarcovich or Spiegelman.

  “Third update.” Victor got up out of his chair. “We will be performing the Nazi school caper tomorrow afternoon. Any last-minute suggestions would be appreciated.” He pushed up his spectacles. “Or prayers. We will gladly take those, too.”

  “All right, then.” Aubrion wrote School caper tomorrow on a blackboard, the way one might put an appointment in a datebook. “Monsieur Spiegelman, what do you have for us?”

  Spiegelman buttoned up his coat as he spoke, for the November air had infected the brick and concrete. “I’ve written about five pages of material for La Libre Belgique. You can look over the draft if you’d like, but I believe it’s ready to be presented to Wolff. I have also written a parody of Maurice-George Olivier’s ‘Effective Strategy’ for Faux Soir.”

  “Have you really?” Smiling, Aubrion dashed Effective Strategy and four exclamation marks across the chalkboard. “That’s brilliant. It’s similar but not quite like that feature the Dutch paper did a few months ago, so it’s just unique enough to capture people’s attention. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it.”

  “I also have an idea,” said Spiegelman, haltingly. “For another column.”

  “For Faux Soir?” asked Aubrion.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “In my time with—the Reich—” These last two words spilled out of him together, coagulating among the typewriters. “—I’ve come to see the sorts of people they usually press into service. Whenever they occupy a city or a country, you see, they fill their ranks with whatever that place did not want. I don’t believe that’s something ordinary people know about, or even think about.”

  Tarcovich leaned back, crossing her arms. “What sorts of people?” she challenged.

  “All sorts,” he said with a helpless gesture.

  “Lada, let him finish,” said René Noël, waving her quiet.

  “My idea is to write a column mocking the Nazi ranks,” said Spiegelman, a tad too quickly, speaking in clumps and shards, “showing our readers that they’re full of the most unwanted members of our society.”

  “And this would be a joke column?” said Aubrion.

  “As I’ve conceived of it.”

  “You would want to write it?” asked Victor.

  “With your permission.”

  “What,” said Aubrion, “would be the punch line?”

  “The punch line?”

  “Yeah, you see, every joke has three components—”

  Tarcovich rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, here we go.”

  “—the setup, the meat, and the punch line.”

  “Don’t take it too hard, David,” said Tarcovich. “He’s been giving me this speech for the past four years.”

  “So, your setup is that the Nazis need people. The meat is that these people are often undesirable, at least according to the rest of us. But what’s your punch line?”

  Spiegelman shook his head. “I suppose I will have to do a bit more thinking.”

  “David, we appreciate having you on this project,” said Noël. “We truly do. But—”

  “—this column isn’t going to work,” said Aubrion.

  Spiegelman cheek’s flushed. “Why not?”

  “As Marc said.” Noël picked up a bit of cloth and idly erased one of the blackboards. Some diagrams, a childish doodle of a face, and words in French and German disappeared with a sweep of his hand. “There’s no punch line.”

  “And there’s a bigger problem,” said Aubrion. “It’s mean-spirited.”

  “Does that matter?” said Spiegelman. “We’re at war.”

  “It matters because we are at war,” said Tarcovich.

  “But isn’t this whole project mean-spirited?”

  Aubrion shook his head furiously, stepping down from the table. “No, God no, that’s not what zwanze is.” He approached Spiegelman, and I thought my friend might hit him or shake him. But Aubrion stopped, perhaps half a meter from Spiegelman. I heard, and I can still hear, the lecture
he wanted to give, the one Marc Aubrion had delivered before: “Zwanze is punching up,” he always said. “You can’t hit people who are already on their knees. That’s what they’re doing.” And yet he did not speak those words to David Spiegelman. Something gentle stirred in his eyes. “Spiegelman,” he said softly, “I appreciate what you’re doing here. I really do.”

  “But it’s not right for the paper,” said Spiegelman.

  I watched Aubrion falter. “You have done beautiful things,” he said, but if Spiegelman had rapped on those words with his knuckles, he would have heard their hollowness.

  Lada Tarcovich said, “We all admire your work, Spiegelman.”

  As Tarcovich continued to reassure him, and Noël did the same, I ran to fetch him a stale mug of coffee. When I returned, Spiegelman looked as though he were sinking lower into himself, down where no one would ever find him.

  I did not understand what had hurt him so until much later—until recently, if I’m honest. At the time, I’d thought it was simply the pain of rejection. Not so. It was that David Spiegelman believed his brand of work—writing that mocked people like him, like August Wolff—that this would be the thing that exorcised his hands, that eased his discomfort at what he could do. He meant to use his column as a torch to melt the ice of his prison walls. Aubrion had rejected not only his work, you see, but his escape plan. If the FI would not allow him to write this column, then he had nothing left; that was how Spiegelman felt. He could not atone for the evil he had taken into his pen. All he had were August Wolff and his promises.

  12 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY EVENING

  The Pyromaniac

  WHILE THEO MULLIER was explaining how he planned to wreck the reputation of one Sylvain de Jong Jr., Aubrion jerked his head at the door, signaling that it was time for me to leave. And so I went upstairs to gather up a few bags of supplies, marveling at how empty the building was that day. I set out into the streets as a clock tower struck noon, the lonely pang of bells cutting through the afternoon fog.

  After two years by Marc Aubrion’s side, I was an expert in getting people’s attention. I marched past the Flemming Workhouse. One of the shifts was just getting out for their midday meal. They saw me, the lot of them, kids with accents flavored by every country the Germans had taken. When they called out to me—“Gamin, where are you going in such a hurry? What are those things you have, Gamin?”—I ignored them. Keeping my head high, I marched onward, away from the workhouse and toward the center of town. Naturally, the kids were curious; not even the smoke in their lungs and pipes in their mouths could diminish that. “C’mon, let’s tail him,” said one, and that was all it took. They set off after me. I marched in time with their footsteps.

  My next stop was the Enghien School for Boys. I’d always kept away from it, hearing stories about what happened there in the dark, so I didn’t know any of the lads who called it home. They’d heard tales of me, though, and shouted after me as I walked past, a Pied Piper with carpetbags and a ragged, noisy train of work-weary boys. “Gamin, where are you going?” I heard. “What’s in the bags?” I did not look at them, kept up my march. High voices whispering and muddy footsteps behind me were the only indication of my success.

  This went on until my train grew restless. Each stop was punctuated by groans and angry fists in the air from those who drifted away. After my last stop—perhaps my thirtieth, or my fortieth; I’d lost track some time ago—I took my followers into an alley. Only then did I drop my bags and turn around.

  I gasped, for close to a hundred children stood behind me. They were mostly boys, as I’d expected, but a group of girls—eyes defiant—huddled off to the side, as well. Though I kept my expression neutral, my heart tingled with a curious longing. The girls mimicked the boys’ posture: the half slouch of the career vagrant, at home anywhere and nowhere. Their hands sat loose in their empty pockets. These girls looked settled into themselves, wearing their bruises like badges. Was this true, I wondered, or was I spinning tales? Were they as comfortable with themselves as they appeared? When I first started masquerading as a boy, a thousand small cracks in the breastplate of my disguise—a pronoun here, a “good lad!” there—had left me desperate to tell Aubrion who I was. By God, I was drowning and kicking in the lie. As time passed, however, and our confidence deepened, I felt the lie less frequently, often not at all. I built my home out of the trappings of boyhood. I had thought it impossible to inhabit this new world as a girl, but perhaps it was simply that I had not wanted to.

  I faced the crowd of kids, blowing smoke from their pipes, tossing around secondhand marbles or jacks, eating a candy bar they found in a dead soldier’s backpack, pulling their caps down over their faces, chewing on bits of straw—all of them quiet, waiting for me to speak. So, I did.

  “Marc Aubrion has a job for us. It’s more of a game, really.”

  I cannot remember whether I actually felt that way or whether I repackaged my feelings for the others. I do remember that it had been so long since I’d said that word, the word game, that it tasted of a lie. There had been games before the war; there hadn’t been any since.

  My associates were skeptical. “What sort of a game?” asked a boy near the front. His high voice bounced off the alley walls. He was around my age, I think, no older than twelve.

  I pulled a fund-raiser poster out of my bag, holding it up. “See this poster? The game is to put up loads of these things all over the place, anywhere you can get to. You get one point for every poster you put up. Two points if you put it up in a fancy neighborhood.”

  “Which neighborhoods is the fancy ones?” asked a different boy.

  “Any ones where they’d kick out the likes of us. But be quick about it. No mucking around, or you’ll be—” I fished around for the word “—disqualified.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you’ll be kicked out, you dummy.”

  “What’s the winner get?” called a tall girl.

  “A reward.” I hadn’t quite worked that part out. “Something big, from Marc Aubrion.”

  “But you promised us something big if we helped with the other thing,” said the first boy who’d spoken. “The bomb thing.”

  “Yeah, and have you helped yet?” I said. “Eh, you ass?”

  The boy studied the holes in his shoes.

  “That’s what I thought. Any other damn fool questions?”

  Everyone shook their heads.

  “Good.” I planted my feet far apart and put my fists on my hips: René Noël’s posture. “I have two bags up here, filled with posters. Each of you lot gets no more than ten at a time. When you’re done with your ten, you can come back to get more. But no wasting ’em, you get me? Marc Aubrion won’t like that.”

  “Will we get to meet him?” asked a kid in a cap three sizes too big. “When we’re done?”

  “Marc Aubrion? He’s got things to do, you know. He’s not one for lazing around, not like the lot of you. Now make two lines before I change my mind about letting you play. One in front of each bag.”

  To my surprise, they listened—but I suppose that was to be expected. All they did, these children of the workhouses and boarding schools, was stand in lines from waking to sleep. They surged forward, a mass of oversized shirts and sticky fingers and wooden pipes.

  “There’s paste up here, too,” I added. “But don’t take more than what you need.”

  I watched as they reached inside the bags, grabbing no more than ten posters each, stopping only to make a polite request for paste. No one cut the line, or tried to cheat, or grabbed more than their share. Some of them even thanked me before they skipped off. Once or twice, a too-eager kid tripped and fell against someone else, usually someone larger. But no punches were thrown; the kid murmured an apology, and his apology was accepted.

  Though rain threatened to interrupt our activities, my associates were unda
unted. I kept an eye on the bags, trying not to gnaw on my fingernails as the supply of posters dwindled. I need not have worried: in the end, each kid got his or her fair share of posters, and there were more than enough to go around. When the last boy ran off with his ten, I peered into the bags. A small stack of posters remained in each.

  Sighing, I closed up my bags and took a seat under an awning some shopkeeper had set up in the alley. It would be at least an hour, I knew, before one of my associates returned for more. I spent most of that time marveling at how smoothly everything had gone. To this day, I remain convinced that I was once commander-in-chief of the most civilized army in Europe.

  11 DAYS TO PRINT

  NOT QUITE MORNING

  The Jester

  THE 3:00-A.M. PATROL marched overhead, escorting a tank through the streets. The ceiling lightbulbs jerked on their strings like dying legs at the drop of the hangman’s rope. Aubrion did not notice. He was stacking ale bottles on the basement floor.

  “Mullier wouldn’t let me listen to the whole thing,” Aubrion was telling Tarcovich, “but my God, Lada, my God! He persuaded de Jong to say, while he was recording, that he loves Winston Churchill more than life itself.” Laughter threatened to shake Aubrion apart. “Isn’t that extraordinary?”

  “That can’t be the exact quote,” Lada said through a smile. He and Lada were sitting side-by-side on the basement floor.

  “I have the recording upstairs.”

  “You do not.”

  “But can you hardly believe it?” Aubrion clutched at his glass of ale, contorting his wrist to keep from spilling it on the basement floor. Angular and clumsy on the best of days, Aubrion became an acrobat with ale in his hand. “It’s artful. Mullier says it’ll air this morning. I knew there was a reason we kept him around.” Aubrion took a long drink of his ale, or rather what was left of it.

  “You are not particularly good at sharing,” said Tarcovich.

  “You are not particularly good at asking.”

  “Please?”