The Ventriloquists

by E. R. Ramzipoor

  In a windowless vault just beyond the business room, someone had hung a chain with a curved iron hook at one end. The curly-haired soldier affixed the hook to the handcuffs behind Mullier’s back and exited. Shortly, another man joined Theo Mullier. The gray uniform of the SS clung to his short, stocky body. A horsewhip swung from his belt.

  “Good day, Monsieur Mullier. You may call me ‘Lieutenant,’ if you’d like.” Lieutenant spoke French with the sunken vowels of a Berliner. He sounded like a good-natured fellow, like he usually offered to buy the first round at a pub. “You’re an intelligent chap, so I’ve no doubt you know why you’re here. But I am told I must explain anyway. I am going to ask you some questions about your involvement in the FI. Some will seem quite strange, or even boring, but here we are. You must do your best to answer them regardless. Do you understand my instructions as I have given them to you?”

  Mullier nodded.

  Lieutenant’s mouth crinkled into a frown. His eyes seemed misplaced, too close together and too deep. “I will need you to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ please.”

  “Yes,” grunted Mullier.

  “Thank you. Now, who were your accomplices at the FI?”

  Mullier kept his eyes on the floor. I know this because all prisoners kept their eyes on the floor, unwilling to look up, believing that as long as they looked down, it would not come, it would not happen. A crack split one of the concrete tiles. Aubrion would have said it looked like something. Aubrion would have had a sarcastic remark and fake names for Lieutenant. Mullier had his silence, and that was all.

  “You were based in Brussels, yes? Who was your director?”

  The gap-toothed crack smiled up at Mullier. That was what it looked like: a smile, to match the crack in the floor of the FI basement. Lieutenant stepped on the crack as he walked behind Mullier. Something clicked, and then the chain raised Mullier three feet off the floor. The muscles and joints in his shoulders caught fire. Mullier hung like that for a few seconds, and his entire world folded up and crumpled into his shoulders. He gasped, sweating, spitting wordless curses. Just as the pain reached such heights that it no longer existed, when it became its own anesthetic, Mullier’s shoulders wrenched from their sockets. He cried out, falling, caught by his own dislocated arms, which were knotted up behind him like frayed rope. Torture, I learned on my tour of Fort Breendonk, is from the Latin torquere: to twist.

  5 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY HOURS OF MORNING

  The Smuggler

  LADA TARCOVICH SLIPPED past a Nazi soldier on patrol, his face illuminated by the tip of his cigarette. She took quiet, deliberate steps, keeping her breathing slow. But he did not notice her, or perhaps he did not care. Most Germans stationed on the bridges and walkways in downtown Enghien were young boys. It was still dark out, not quite dawn, so Lada could not see their faces, but she felt sure she’d recognize a few of them from her trade.

  But the patrols had thinned with the snow, so the road to Andree’s building was mostly deserted. Lada paused on a hill overlooking the town center. With the sun crouched behind the miniature buildings, the gentle rivers, the bony trees holding fast to the snow, the wooden homes—it was a postcard, a fairy-tale city. The snow kissed Lada’s face and neck with corpse’s lips. They were a month from Christmas, Lada realized. The lights would go up soon; not even the Germans could put a stop to that. How had she spent her last Christmas? The memory floated just out of reach. It had rained, she could remember that. People were singing something outside. Outside where? There might have been a small dinner, but maybe not. Lada’s pulse quickened. She felt suddenly that she must buy ornaments and wrapping paper, that she must light a candle and sing carols and all the other silly, stupid things she’d never done before, she must go wassailing like the song instructed, whatever that meant, whatever it entailed. Lada looked up at a tree, memorizing the snow’s gentle handprints on the branches. She must do it now; she must do everything now.

  Lada forced herself to stop this nonsense, to keep walking until she reached Andree’s door. She had wanted to come here yesterday, but yesterday had been a day for mourning, with no room for love. Once there, she knocked.

  Andree Grandjean opened it, falling into Lada’s arms. “I am so sorry about Monsieur Mullier,” she whispered into her hair.

  Lada nodded, taking Andree’s hand. She fell into her eyes, too dark and serious and bright. “I need very much to sit with you.”

  “We can do that.”

  “And drink.”

  “We can do that, too.”

  “And make filthy jokes. And possibly have sex.”

  Andree smiled as she led Lada inside. “We can do one of those, but not the other.”

  Tarcovich looked at her quizzically. Andree was paler than usual, she noticed—and, indeed, the judge put a sickly hand on her stomach.

  “Oh, Christ,” Lada groaned. “It’s your time?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I am. I’ll brew some tea.”

  Lada drew bathwater while Andree fiddled with the teapot. When the bathwater cooled and Lada’s skin grew wrinkled, she climbed out of the tub, wrapped a towel around her body, and returned to Andree. They sat with the teapot between them, sipping from chipped mugs. Sleet pattered against the window, but it was somehow warm anyway. They did not say anything for a while. Lada enjoyed that, not having to say anything. Both of her lives, as a smuggler and as a whore, were so loud. Silence felt easy here, like something that had always been.

  “This is terrible,” said Lada, lifting her cup. “What is it?”

  “I am not sure.” Andree Grandjean stared into the brownish stuff. “A woman sold it to me at some outlandish price. I thought it would be good.”

  “You bought it without sampling it first?”

  “Never again, I promise you.”

  Lada poured more water into her cup, to drown out the flavor. “It tastes like a twig.”

  “Then don’t drink it.”

  “A muddy twig.”

  “Is anyone forcing you to drink it?”

  “That a dog shat on.”

  The two looked at each other, then laughed, longer and harder than they had any right to. Lada almost spilled her tea. She put her cup on the table, still laughing. But then the laughter lost its way and became tears. Sobbing, Lada Tarcovich fell into Andree’s lap. She cried at her feet like a child.

  “What is it?” Andree murmured. “What’s the matter, my love?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You are a liar.”

  “Theo is gone.” Lada wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Andree’s eyes were red, and Lada was sure her eyes were red, too. They stung. “And I have an idea for a story.”

  “For Faux Soir?” Andree touched Lada’s hand. “You said you could not write a story.”

  “I lied,” said Tarcovich, but even that was not the whole truth. Lada herself might suffer the same fate as Mullier; she herself would be caught and killed and Andree may never know why she disappeared. But even this small admission felt like clean air. So Lada said it once more. “I lied.”

  5 DAYS TO PRINT

  EARLY MORNING

  The Pyromaniac

  WHILE THE OTHERS mourned Mullier, somebody had to do their job. I knew, as we all did, that time was running out. We had five days until Faux Soir was to be released, until Wolff expected La Libre Belgique. And so I set out to do two things: to build bombs, and figure out where to hide them.

  “Your job is an important one, Gamin,” Aubrion had said to me, days before. We were in the basement, as per our custom, and a drainpipe rattled in the wall behind us. I remember the sound, a throaty hissing. “Listen closely. Every afternoon, at four o’clock, all the printers and linotypists in Brussels end their shifts. They’ve been hard at work, printing copies of Le Soir for Peter the Happy Citizen. They’re desperate
to get home to the wife and kids. Do you follow?”

  “Sure, monsieur.”

  “They get off work, but elsewhere, a different sort of work is just starting.”

  “The vans.”

  “Precisely! Vans line up at the factories to collect the day’s copies.”

  “Then the vans drop off the papers, monsieur. I know this bit. They take them to the newsstands and such.”

  “Right, that’s how it is. Here’s what we need to do. We need to delay the distribution of Le Soir, of the real thing, long enough to push out our copies of Faux Soir.”

  “Naturally, monsieur.”

  “Naturally, naturally. I knew I could count on you, Gamin.” Aubrion grinned, mussing my hair. “The way René and I see it, there are two ways we can do it—or at least two points when it can be done. We can delay their distribution before the vans leave, or we can do it as the vans are leaving. But once the vans have reached their destinations, the game is up.”

  I nodded. “Do you have a plan for delaying the vans as they’re leaving, monsieur?”

  “It’s going to depend on Spiegelman, but yes, I do. And you, Gamin—you are my plan for delaying the vans before they leave. You are to sabotage them in any way you can. Make it so that they cannot depart. You don’t have to—say, blow them up—”

  “Blow them up, monsieur?”

  Aubrion looked at me as though trying to discern whether it was fear or hope in my eyes. It was a bit of both: I hungered to turn the Nazi uniforms from black to red, but I feared losing myself in the flames. “I’ll have to see what kind of authorization I can get from René.” Aubrion made a face at the word authorization. “But whatever you do, those vans must not leave, and you must not get caught.”

  Making bombs was easy. The tricky part was making bombs without tipping off the police or the Germans. You see, whenever the Nazis invaded a country, one of their first moves was to register things. Anything that could be used to make weapons—raw metals, scrap metals, assembly lines, screwdrivers, nuts and bolts—and anything that could be used to tell people that you’d made weapons—printing presses, radios—received a serial number and an entry in a logbook. If a copper or a man from the Gestapo or a Nazi guard stationed in town encountered something without a serial number, they destroyed it. The system was simple.

  The problem for me, then, was that everything I needed to construct bombs had been assigned a registration number. And if the Germans caught wind that someone in Enghien was buying up pipes, charcoal, matches, and the like, there would be trouble in a black uniform. With that in mind, I devised a plan. All I needed were my workhouse boys, a construction site, someone’s grandmother, and twenty-four hours.

  The Gastromancer

  David Spiegelman received Wolff’s summons like a man resigned to his death sentence, or to a bad meal at a relative’s house. This was something to be endured, not worth trying to avoid. Spiegelman stood before Wolff’s desk with no memory of walking there.

  “Please sit down,” said August Wolff.

  “I’d prefer to stand.” Spiegelman knew that if he sat down, he might weep. His knees were weak, so standing up required effort, which steadied him.

  “As you prefer. I’ve invited you here—” Wolff’s eyes moved up and down Spiegelman’s body, a parody of Spiegelman’s desires. “Please, Herr Spiegelman. I cannot speak to you this way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Only my inferiors stand up when they speak to me.”

  Spiegelman lifted his chin, suddenly aware of his paunch and narrow shoulders. “Am I not your inferior?” He did not know what game he was playing here, but he was giddy with the recklessness of it.

  “You are my advisor.” The Gruppenführer tried to adopt what he clearly believed was a friendly expression. To Spiegelman, it looked pained. “Correct?”

  “Am I free to leave this place whenever I choose?”

  “Spiegelman, you know I do not make decisions about—”

  “Order me to sit down.” Spiegelman spoke these words like a dare.

  Wolff’s mouth clamped shut. A pair of men laughed at a joke as they passed outside the office. The laughter floated into the room like an ill-mannered ghost.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Wolff.

  “Order me to sit down,” replied David Spiegelman.

  Wolff pulled on his shirt to straighten it. The Gruppenführer might have been a handsome man in his youth, but his deeds had sculpted his face into narrow, tired lines. “I order you,” he said, “to take a seat.”

  Flushed with a triumph he could not name, David Spiegelman sat across from August Wolff. “As you command, Gruppenführer.”

  Wolff took a sip of water. “Herr Spiegelman, your temporary leave from the La Libre Belgique project is no longer temporary. Given the circumstances, it is not a good idea for you to continue.”

  “Which circumstances?”

  “The circumstances under which—”

  “Are you saying you don’t trust me?”

  August Wolff leaned back. “Do you trust yourself?”

  “More than I trust you.”

  The Gruppenführer adopted a surprisingly petty tone. “I have never done anything more or less than what I’ve had to do. I’ve been lenient—”

  “Lenient?” The sharpness of the T hit Wolff like a slap. “Wolff, my family was murdered because they were—”

  “They were executed.”

  “Is that where you’ll quibble with me? Over terminology?”

  “I don’t have time to entertain this discussion. I do not know how or why, but you have gotten involved in Marc Aubrion’s affairs. I am not sure whether this involvement is logistical or emotional, or something more perverse, but I can only turn a blind eye for so long. Do you understand me?”

  Spiegelman would not acknowledge the question.

  “We had an agreement,” said Wolff. “I promised that if you kept quiet and did your duty, I would try to grant Monsieur Aubrion immunity at the end of this endeavor.”

  “I never—”

  “You never did what?” The Gruppenführer dared Spiegelman to say that he never got involved, that he had never entertained thoughts of betrayal. Of course, Spiegelman could not muster such a lie. “I have another meeting to attend.” Wolff got up and straightened his shirt again. The bars denoting his rank and medals clattered against each other. He showed Spiegelman to the door. “Good day, Herr Spiegelman.”

  “Does this mean you will not grant Aubrion immunity?”

  “That is a decision I will make at a later time.”

  Wolff ushered him out and closed the door before Spiegelman could muster a protest. He stood, white-knuckled, in the hallway, listening as the wind blew past the tapestries.

  The Jester

  Spiegelman turned. Aubrion, who was flanked by Martin Victor, gave a halfhearted wave. It seemed the two had been waiting in the hallway. “Fancy meeting so many close friends today,” said Aubrion, but the quip felt weak.

  He and Victor moved past Spiegelman to enter Wolff’s office, closed the door, and sat. “How goes it, Wolff?”

  Wolff’s posture was stiff. “Good day, Monsieur Aubrion, Professor Victor.”

  Aubrion passed Wolff a folder. “The latest.” He could hardly look at the man, this creature—not while Theo, the brilliant bastard, was being tortured and shot while the Gruppenführer drank sherry. Wolff’s manners did not make him any less of a murderer, of that Aubrion was certain. The Gruppenführer’s swastika armband had slipped down toward his elbow. Mourners wore armbands: people who had lost those they loved. Aubrion wondered what Wolff had lost.

  “We have four additional pages for La Libre Belgique,” said Victor.

  Wolff withdrew Aubrion’s documents from the folder. “Give me a summary.” He started to look them over.

  “On
e of them questions the motivations of Roosevelt and Churchill,” said Aubrion, “while another questions their morals. We’ve invented all manner of depravity for those two.”

  “We say none of it outright, but by the end of the paper,” said Victor, “our readers will be assured that Roosevelt is a greedy, immodest—”

  “—parasitic, irreligious—”

  “—beastly Satanist.”

  “And that Churchill is a homosexual.”

  Nodding, Wolff returned the folder to Aubrion. “Be careful not to exaggerate too much. Black propaganda is a subtle art, remember that.”

  “Have you seen photographs of Churchill?” said Aubrion. “The only greater fantasy than a man wanting to sleep with him is a woman wanting to sleep with him.”

  “What of the other two pages?” Wolff asked Victor.

  “Two columns focus on the war,” said Victor. “Essentially, we pick apart every tactic the Allies have ever come up with.”

  “Throw a few jabs at the Soviets, for good measure,” added Aubrion.

  “I see.” Wolff paused, and Aubrion filled that pause with all manner of conspiracy theories. Despite his looks, the Gruppenführer was no idiot. He must have known Spiegelman had lent his pen to a scheme unrelated to La Libre Belgique. If Wolff interrogated the situation, Aubrion was not sure how he might defend himself. But Wolff said, “Well, that is all for now, I think. I would like to see one more draft before we print.”

  Aubrion was too stunned to speak, so Victor spoke for both of them: “Of course.”

  “Professor, may I have a word with you in private?” said Wolff.

  Victor glanced at Aubrion, his expression unreadable. “Absolutely, Gruppenführer.”

  Ever the showman, Marc Aubrion took that as his cue to exit.

  The Dybbuk

  “Professor,” said Wolff, “I will not mince words. I need to know whether David Spiegelman is attempting to defect.” Wolff’s mouth was dry. The room tasted of sulfur and heavy furniture.