The Fifth Column

by Andrew Gross

  “The trash is where?” I called, looking under the sink for the bin.

  “Please, just leave them on the counter. I insist,” Trudi said again, hearing me fumbling around.

  “Found it!” I said. I started scraping the crumbs into the wastebasket when suddenly something caught my eye.

  Facing up at me were several strips of paper. Torn strips of paper. Lined writing table paper ripped into half-inch strips. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was that the strips had not only been shredded, but seemingly burned as well, from one side to the other as if lit by a match. And what I was looking at were the charred embers curled up in the trash.

  I noticed that one of the shreds had not completely burned.

  Part of it was still a curled-up fragment with writing on it. Numbers, I could read. Organized into what seemed like groups of three:

  128 3 7. 14 12 3. 0300.

  I leaned in closer and my heart stopped.

  It was as if I was looking at some kind of code.

  I glanced to the bedroom, about to reach into the trash and pick up the unburned fragment—why would they be set afire in the first place?—when Trudi suddenly came back in. “Don’t! Please!” she said peremptorily, catching me over the trash.

  At first, she seemed to lose all color. A grayish pall took over her face. Then, just as quickly, she regained herself and merely smiled. “I simply didn’t want you to go to any trouble, Charles, that’s all. That’s for me to clean up. Please, be with your daughter.”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” I said.

  But inside, my heart had begun to pound like the drums at the end of the fourth movement she’d just been talking about. As if we had both stumbled on something important. For a second, neither of us spoke or acknowledged a thing, perhaps not sure exactly how much the other had seen. Finally, I just placed the two plates in the sink. “It was delicious,” I said. “There you go.”

  “Daddy, Aunt Trudi and Uncle Willi have a picture of them in front of the lions in a zoo,” Emma said, coming out of the bedroom holding a frame.

  “One of the very finest in Europe,” Trudi said. “Emma, darling, it’s been wonderful spending time with you today. Please give my best to your mother.”

  “All right.”

  I closed the cabinet under the sink and said goodbye, took my daughter’s hand and led her back across the landing to Liz’s place, but by the time we stepped inside, I had no doubt Trudi Bauer had already reopened it and stood over the bin, staring at the charred, curled-up remains of what had been written there that was meant to be destroyed, wondering just what I had seen.

  11

  “You think he saw this?” Willi Bauer inspected the charred strips of paper Trudi had taken from the trash and shown him on his return.

  On the part that was not fully burned, the scheme of numbers ending in 12 3. 0300 were clearly visible.

  “I don’t know.” Trudi looked back at him. “He was asking so many questions. About the brewery. About the people who have come by. I got nervous once when they ran into Herr Atkins on the landing and I told him he was a customer. But he also knows we closed the business a year ago.”

  “Yes, he’s a nosy sort.” Willi nodded, tugging on his pipe. “That Lebensraum thing. From now on, we must be far more watchful. But not to worry, darling.” He affectionately squeezed her arm. “He’s a nobody. Just a drunk with a serious conviction on his record. He barely has a roof over his head. Who would he even turn to?”

  “Maybe, but he’s smart, Willi. And no one’s fool. Tomorrow, our friend Kubler is scheduled to come by in the afternoon.”

  “No matter, it’s not Charlie’s day to visit, if I recall. He comes Mondays and Thursdays.”

  “Yes, but maybe our customers should no longer come around the house. Perhaps we need to find a new place to meet, Willi. The park perhaps? Near the concertina.”

  “You might be right, darling,” Willi said. He laid the half-burnt strip of paper in an ashtray. “And maybe we should move this, as well.…” He patted the Darwin book. “Out of sight. Just to be sure. In any event, we must conduct our business with a shade more secrecy, I’m afraid. Now is not the time for any mistakes.”

  “No, it’s not,” Trudi agreed.

  Willi took out a match and struck it, then dropped it into the ashtray and watched the remaining part of the strip that had not been burned curl and turn to ash, the damning set of numbers along with it. “See, my dear,” he smiled and brushed his hands clean, “all gone.”

  “I’m sorry if I didn’t handle things perfectly,” Trudi said, taking a seat next to him. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Now, now…” He squeezed her hand. “It all works out. You’ll see.”

  She looked straight ahead in a fretful way, nodding, as if to say, Yes, it always does. “Would you care for a schnapps before dinner?” She smiled back at him. “I’ve made your favorite. Rosti. With dumplings. It will be ready at seven.”

  “Yes, a schnapps would be just the thing,” Willi said, smoothing his white mustache.

  “And what would you like to listen to?” Trudi asked, on her way to the bar. “Brahms, perhaps. It always helps you relax.”

  “Yes, Brahms’s Second would be perfect, darling.” He sat back and refilled his pipe as Trudi went over and removed the recording from its sleeve.

  “And don’t you worry too much about this.” Willi stoked the gray ash around with the bowl of his pipe. “If our friend becomes too big of a nuisance, we have the ways to deal with him.”

  “Yes, I know, Willi.” Trudi nodded.

  “And the good news is, my dear,” Willi smiled, “I only know of one person in the world who would even miss him.”

  12

  “It clearly looked like a kind of code,” I said to Sam Goldrich, who’d been the defense attorney at my trial, and was the only person I could think of to go to on such a delicate matter.

  He listened attentively to how I described it from across his desk.

  “There were numbers. Organized in groups of threes.” I pushed a piece of paper across to him. “As soon as I left I wrote them down. The rest was burned beyond recognition.”

  “A code, you say…?” Sam inspected the paper with a skeptical frown. The lawyer was the son of a family friend and had done an excellent job of playing upon the shift in public opinion against Germany in getting my sentence reduced. “Don’t you think you’re getting your oars ahead of you just a bit on this, Charlie?”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you saw the look Trudi gave me when she caught me staring at it,” I said. “She turned white as a ghost.”

  “Maybe she thought you were throwing out the rest of her fruitcake,” he said, suppressing a grin.

  “Very funny,” I scoffed. “Anyway, that’s what Liz thinks too. That I’ve been seeing too many war propaganda films.”

  “And have you?”

  “Unless you call Sergeant York a propaganda film.” I looked at him. “No.”

  “All right then. Let’s go through it again. There are a couple of unusual visitors you’ve bumped into on Liz’s landing or spotted having a coffee at a restaurant where pro-Nazi agitators have been known to congregate. Then there’s this particular German word that this elderly couple who lives next door supposedly taught your daughter.”

  “Lebensraum,” I repeated for him. “And it’s not just a word, Sam. It’s a core Nazi belief. You might recall, it was their basis for annexing the Sudetenland and invading Poland back in ’39.”

  “Yes, I do know that, Charles. But to be fair, half the neighborhood speaks German up in that part of town, do they not?”

  “The Bauers claim to be Swiss,” I corrected him. “Or so they say.”

  “Yes, Swiss. Of course. Though what’s the most common language in Switzerland, if I’m not mistaken…? Anyway, what else…? Oh, yes, these burnt strips of paper you say you found in their trash bin. When you were throwing out the fruitcake.”

  “
You’re making it all sound so trivial, Sam,” I said with an edge of frustration.

  “Okay, sorry, with numbers on them then. These numbers. That you’re interpreting as a kind of code. But just as easily, and in fact far more likely, could simply be a date. Or a telephone number. Or the number of a receipt for a pair of shoes Mrs. Bauer purchased.”

  “These are no telephone numbers, Sam. And tell me if they resemble any receipt. And why would they be torn up into tiny strips,” I asked, “and then set on fire? All but this one fragment. Unless they were trying to hide something.”

  “Maybe because the wife didn’t want her husband to find out?” he surmised.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About the shoes. All very nefarious.” Sam’s eyes twinkled. “Who knows?”

  “You’re making me sound like a fool, Sam. Like I’m inventing the whole thing. I assure you I’m not. You know I’m not the most believable person in the city right now. I didn’t have anyone else to go to.”

  “I know that, Charlie. I’m sorry. And I trust you’re not making it up. But it is possible you are attaching some unjustifiable importance to all these events. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s possible. But putting it all together, it all adds up.”

  “To what? What exactly are you saying, Charlie? That these people are spies?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying, Sam.” I pushed myself back in my chair.

  His secretary stepped in, saying, “Excuse me, Mr. Goldrich…” and put a message on his desk. He glanced at it a second, then nodded soberly at her. “Just give me a minute,” he said.

  I said, “The government itself is concerned about the existence of some kind of fifth column at work here.” The term had originated in Spain, during the civil war. A Nationalist general announced that five separate columns were advancing on Madrid. One from the south, one from the north, another from the southwest, and a fourth from the northeast. A fifth column, he said, made up of foreign agents and domestic traitors, who employed espionage, was ready to erupt from within the capital itself. People were now concerned that a German “fifth column” could happen here.

  “You saw the headlines last month, Sam. Twenty-six of them, operating right here in New York. Ordinary citizens,” I said. “Engineers, accountants, even attorneys. And look what they were on to apparently—some supersecret bomb site no one even knew existed. But they knew.”

  “Yes, and the FBI was all over them, weren’t they?” Sam countered. “They didn’t need some out-of-work history instructor drawing pictures with his daughter to root them out.”

  “I don’t know how they got onto them, Sam. Maybe at some point it was just someone attaching an ‘unjustifiable importance’ to something he saw that didn’t seem kosher.”

  My lawyer exhaled a breath and put up his palms, as if granting me the point. Then he said, “Your brother died in Spain, right, Charlie?”

  I stared. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m just saying … He was fighting the Nationalists, no?”

  “Sam, this isn’t some suppressed attempt to come to terms with Ben’s death,” I said, not liking the inference I was drawing. “I’m presenting you facts. This is real.”

  “More like suppositions,” the lawyer said. “And I’m not saying that’s what it is—about Ben. Look…” He pushed back his wire-rim glasses. “This isn’t exactly my expertise. If they sued you for slander, or beat you up on the street—Christ, bad example, sorry”—he put up his palms in apology—“then I’d know exactly what to tell you to do. With this, I suppose you could go to the police. Or the FBI. But I’m pretty sure the police would tell you that half the people in Yorkville are seeing Nazi spies across the hall these days. And let me remind you that as of now we’re not at war with anyone. It’s not a crime, congregating with Nazis. Of course, with what happened in the North Atlantic a couple of weeks ago…” The Kearny, a destroyer, was sunk by a German U-boat, while guarding an Allied convoy, with fourteen sailors lost. The first U.S. casualties with Germany. “We may soon well be.”

  “So, in your non-expertise, Sam”—I exhaled in frustration—“what would you have me do?”

  “What would I have you do…? I’d have you do nothing, Charlie. Mind your own business. As you said, you don’t exactly have the kind of résumé that would be an asset in court. Just work on getting yourself back into society’s good graces. That would be my professional advice.”

  I snorted an annoyed blast out my nose.

  “Now as a matter of domestic security…” He shrugged. “My gut is that you would need a bit more tangible evidence to interest someone in what you have. Not that I want you to go around digging for it, mind you. Leave that up to the professionals. Please. And not a good thing at all these days for a Jew,” he wagged his finger at me, “to be going around ratting on their neighbors, if you know what I mean. It only makes it seem as if we’re trying to gin up a war, to protect our own interests with what’s happening in Europe. Not the country’s interest. You heard Lindbergh’s speech last month. Even though as a member of the tribe, and as someone who hates these Nazi bastards as much as anyone, I’d be the first to stand up and cheer if we did. It’s going to happen, Charlie. Sooner or later. We all know that. Then maybe some of the things you’re alleging might actually get someone’s attention.

  “But now, if you don’t mind, since I’m not charging you a dime for this conversation, I’ll have to take this…,” he said, holding up the message. “Wife shot her husband who was cheating on him. Precisely my stock-in-trade.”

  “Well, I may need you on something else,” I said, standing up and taking hold of my hat. “Closer to your usual business. Liz is going to seek a divorce.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” the lawyer said. “Though it’s not completely out of the blue, is it? Sorry for your little girl though. Keep me posted and I’ll get you with the right people. They’ll fleece you dry though. And Charlie…”

  I turned at the door.

  “Please stay out of this espionage thing. You hear me? Either you’re right and they’re truly bad sorts, or you’re wrong, and they’re the nicest people in the world. Either way, you’ll only get yourself in trouble. Or worse—God forbid—if you catch my meaning. If they’re engaged in the kind of business you’re thinking they are. Whichever way, it doesn’t bode well for you. You understand?”

  “I understand.” I nodded, opening his office door. “And I’ll be in touch on that other thing. With Liz. Thanks.”

  13

  My lawyer’s words rang clear. Let the professionals handle it. You need more tangible evidence. All I had were pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fully fit together. Threads that led nowhere. I bet half the people in Yorkville are seeing Nazi spies across the hall these days.…

  His other statement hit me square in the face as well. Your brother died in Spain, right…? From an act of sabotage committed by a Nationalist agent. Part of the fifth column resistance there. A stretcher carrier, a member of the medical personnel in Ben’s own unit. The blast brought down half the lobby, which was being used as a makeshift hospital. For a day or two, I sat around and tried to assess if what Sam said carried any truth. Was that why I reacted so aggressively in the bar? That, and four Rob Roys? On our birthday. Because of Ben? Was it why I felt so driven to find something on the Bauers? To prove they weren’t who they said they were. Was it all no more than just a deeply buried attempt to resolve the guilt I felt over my brother’s death?

  No. I was sure it wasn’t that. It was that I was certain the Bauers simply weren’t who they said they were. And that they were hiding behind some veneer, as clean and polished as the Biedermeier table in their front parlor. I knew it and no one else seemed to. No more.

  My next visit with Emma, I stayed around as long as I could before Liz came home. The Bauers actually stopped in to drop off some crumb cake to Emma—and to Mrs. Shearer as well, who they clearly seeme
d to like—another characteristic I put on the ledger against them—and mentioned they had an engagement later that night.

  So after I left that night, just before six, I remained in the shadow of the stairway of a brownstone across the street. Tangible evidence, I said to myself. There has to be something. I felt foolish, hiding there in the darkness. Not even knowing what I was looking for. Slinking back into the shadows whenever someone walked by. I was just curious to see where they went or who they met with.

  After about twenty minutes, Liz got home, carrying a bag of groceries, and I huddled deeper into the cover of the stairway so she wouldn’t see me. She’d be furious. We’ve been all over this, Charlie. No telling how she’d react. Shortly after, I also saw Curtis, the janitor, come out, still in his work clothes but with a plaid wool jacket over him, to smoke a cigarette in the crisp night air. He once told me he had a daughter himself. I asked him where. “Here?” I inquired. I knew nothing about him. He clearly lived alone in the basement. He just shrugged and said, “No. Back home,” without volunteering any more information. It was clearly something he didn’t care to talk about. That was about the deepest conversation I ever had with him.

  Around fifteen minutes later, at six forty-five, the front door of the brownstone opened and Willi and Trudi Bauer stepped out. They came down the stairs, he in a tweed Alpine cap over his jacket, a vest and tie, and a walking cane; Trudi in a dark dress and wide-brimmed hat. They turned east on Ninetieth toward Third Avenue. I waited until they’d gone about twenty yards down the street, then decided to set off after them. I knew it was wrong; Liz would be fuming at me if she found out. She would probably ban me from coming to visit. But, I thought, if I stayed back from them at a reasonable distance, what harm could there be?

  They walked, arm in arm, at a leisurely pace, to the corner, and then turned north. Third Avenue was busy with cars and trucks zooming by and the sidewalks were lined with German beer halls and cafés and banners. An open delivery truck was parked in front of Shein’s Market on Ninety-first.