The Fifth Column

by Andrew Gross

  “Without your jackets?” Mrs. Shearer said, with kind of a curious expression. “It’s almost November. A child could get her a whiff of cold, Mr. Mossman.”

  “Yes, sorry,” I said, with a chagrined shrug. Inside, my heart careened back and forth against my ribs. “I forgot. Stupid of me. C’mon, Emma.…” I took her back inside 3A.

  Before Mrs. Shearer even came back in I let out a deep, relieved breath, my heart pounding out of control and my body encased in sweat, my back pressed against the door.

  “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  All I could picture were Trudi’s eyes going from me to Emma to her own slightly open front door, and the key to the Bauers’ trunk sitting visibly on the dresser, no longer in the bowl, which she would see in a second and wonder, looking around the apartment with a rising beat in her heart, Were they in here?

  “Yes, honey, everything’s fine.”

  16

  “Willi, come quickly!” Trudi Bauer said with alarm not two hours later as he stepped back into the apartment.

  He put down his cane and took off his scarf and coat. He saw the peremptoriness that had come over his wife’s pallid face. “What’s happened, dear?”

  “In here.” She drew him into the bedroom.

  She stood over their dresser and pointed to the glass bowl on top, and to the brass key lying next to it.

  The trunk key.

  “Did you happen to place that there?” she asked.

  Willi looked at her and shrugged. “No.”

  “You didn’t happen to go inside the trunk when I went out to the market earlier?”

  “I haven’t been in there since the last time we opened it the other day. What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that when I tidied up the room this morning, the key was where we always keep it. In the bowl. Not on the dresser.”

  As he began to absorb the importance of what she was telling him, the lines around Willi Bauer’s eyes deepened. “You’re certain of this, Trudi?”

  “As certain as I am of my own name. Look, the counter is perfectly dusted. I cleaned it earlier. I would have noticed it here. And anyway, that is where we always keep it. It’s not a thing to be uncertain of.”

  “No, it’s not.” Willi nodded, knotting his brow with concern and scratching his white mustache. “You’re saying someone was in here?”

  “This afternoon I left the door open a crack when I went downstairs to talk to Mrs. Bainbridge for a short while. I didn’t have my door key handy. I was only gone a few minutes. And when I came back up, Emma and her father were standing right outside our door.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, it is their door too,” Willi said.

  “Yes, but you would had to have seen them. He was rigid as a board. It was like we came upon them completely unexpectedly and caught him in the act of something.”

  “We?”

  “Mrs. Shearer and I. She was doing laundry downstairs. You would had to have seen his reaction. He muttered something about them going outside, but neither of them were wearing their coats. You were out. You know how chilly it was today. Would you take a child out in the cold in a flimsy dress? If I didn’t know better I would have thought they were coming from our apartment.”

  “Our apartment?” Willi’s eyes widened.

  “Yes. And then I found this on the dresser.” She held up the key. “This is not good, Willi.”

  “No, it is not good at all.” He sat on the bed. “Is anything missing?” he asked. “Have you checked?”

  “Of course. I went through the trunk as soon as I came home. Everything is there. Completely undisturbed. But I’m still worried. He’s been snooping around since I caught him over those shredded messages in the trash.”

  Willi rested himself on the edge of the bed. He put his thumb and forefinger to his forehead in thought. Then nodded pensively. “This man is becoming far too much of a nuisance.”

  “A pest is a nuisance, Willi. This Mossman has become a threat. And threats…” She looked at him with a steeled determination in her eyes. “Must be dealt with.”

  “Please, Trudi … let’s not get ahead of ourselves on this. He’s a nobody. A nobody with a fancy degree and a felony conviction around his neck. Who would possibly believe a word he has to say on anything? He barely has a roof over his head.”

  “Still, he is no one’s fool, Willi. You are underestimating this. And he saw the shredded messages last month. Who knows what he’s put together. Now this … There’s too much at stake, Willi. We have to find out what he knows.”

  Willi looked up at her. “That’s a big step, Trudi. But yes, I agree.”

  “You are always slow to take the difficult steps, Willi. This must be done.”

  Willi exhaled a breath from his nose and nodded. For a moment he seemed lost in thought. “He and his wife have no hope of reconciling, do they?”

  Trudi shook her head. “From what she tells me, no.”

  “Then there is a way. Still, in the meantime there is also a way we can be sure if he was in here or not.”

  Trudi looked at him.

  “You said he was with Emma, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but Willi, he’s her father. Who knows where her loyalties lie now?”

  “Her loyalties are with us. Do not doubt it. Our darling Emma will always talk to her Aunt Trudi and Uncle Willi,” Willi said with a knowing smile. “Especially when there is a big slice of apple cake to entice her with, my dear.”

  “Yes, we must do whatever it takes, my husband, I agree. There is far too much at stake now for us not to be sure.”

  “Do not worry yourself.” He patted her shoulders. “I have a way.”

  17

  I made Emma promise that what she saw at the Bauers’ would stay between us. That I was merely looking for my hat, which I thought I’d mistakenly left there, but that Willi and Trudi—or even Mommy, I told her—might get the wrong idea if they ever thought we had gone inside. I hated to manipulate her in that way, my own daughter, but what other choice did I have? The Bauers couldn’t know we were in there. Or Liz, for that matter. There was so much at stake. I couldn’t let what I’d seen come out to them.

  And Emma promised she would keep this our little secret. Even if they tried to ask her about it. Even over a bowl of schoggibirnen.

  But now what to do about what I saw?

  I was sure it was a radio transmitter I had seen in the Bauers’ closet. The meeting in the back room at Marienplatz might have been something one could overlook; seeing the burnt strips of paper with a lot of numbers was something I could never fully prove—and in any case, that evidence was long gone; and the jumble of circled and underlined words in a book could be just random jottings without those shredded numbers—nothing in and of itself.

  But a transmitter! Hidden at the bottom of a steamer trunk in their home. On top of everything. That was something the authorities would surely want to know about. Especially with all that was going on in the world between the United States and Germany as our countries lurched toward certain war. That was damning! I didn’t know the law, but I was sure having such a thing in one’s possession had to be illegal. Certainly the kind of thing people who focused on such matters would want to know about.

  But just who did I take this to?

  My lawyer had already told me to stay clear of it. That this wasn’t his expertise. And I was pretty certain, the precise way I’d come upon it, sneaking into their apartment, if not actually breaking into it—well, certainly breaking into the steamer trunk—wouldn’t sit well with Sam at all. You don’t exactly have the perfect résumé to be pointing the finger at people, about Nazis, he had pointed out to me.

  Still, this had to be something the police would want to be aware of.

  Or the FBI.

  And I also knew it would kill Emma to lose her “auntie and uncle,” and that she might well not understand why—how could a six-year-old possibly understand how people so apparently loving could be trying to do
harm. And even though I knew any investigation of them would inevitably be traced back to me—no matter how diligently I pushed to keep myself out of it—and Emma might well hold it against me, as might Liz—there was still a greater duty here that had to be done. Far, far greater than the mere satisfaction I felt at being proven right about the Bauers. Spies were spies. One’s duty to country had to come first, didn’t it? To a cause. What would Ben do, I asked myself? I didn’t even have to answer. Whether the Bauers truly loved my little girl; whether they made the greatest strudel, or had found them Mrs. Shearer, and had been the best of friends and support to Liz when she needed someone at a trying time in her life, when I, her husband, had failed her, I spent the night going over and over what was the right thing to do. If there even was a right thing. If I could simply just look the other way. And let this go. For the sake of Emma.

  Or do what I knew was the right thing. The only thing.

  And I came up with only one answer.

  * * *

  The 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street served the entire Upper East Side, including all of Yorkville. It was a dreary, four-story brownstone building with high, arched windows, and looked like it had been built in the worst gloom of the early 1930s, with a dozen or so police cars angled on the street outside.

  I went there the following day, and walked up to the duty officer who sat behind the elevated counter. He pushed aside some papers and looked at me.

  “I have a complaint I’d like to register,” I said.

  “Nature of the complaint?” he replied officiously.

  “It’s difficult,” I started to explain. “My wife has an apartment up on Ninetieth Street between Lex and Third. And I think the people across the hall from her might be German spies.”

  “Spies?” The balding cop sniffed with an amused roll of the eyes. “Hey, Eddie,” he called to a colleague, “we got more spies.”

  “I’m not a crank,” I said to him. “I have a doctorate in European history.” Well, almost a doctorate, I meant. “I’m pretty sure what I have would interest the FBI.”

  The sergeant behind the desk looked at me plainly, seemingly sizing me up. “Name?”

  “Mossman,” I told him. “Charles.”

  “Mossman.” He wrote it down on a pad and pointed to a bench. “Just wait over there.”

  He picked up the phone and rang someone, twisted around in his chair so I couldn’t hear him, and then after a few seconds put the phone back on the cradle. “See Lieutenant Monahan.” He pointed upward. “Third floor.”

  “Thanks.” I walked up the two flights, uniformed cops and plainclothesman coming down past me, and got to a large bullpen of desks set back to back. About half of them were manned, the rest empty. I asked someone sitting near the front for Monahan’s desk, and was pointed toward the back and a kind of pudgy, ruddy-faced detective with Brillo-like white hair, wearing a white shirt, loose striped tie, and suspenders.

  “Take a seat,” he said as I stopped in front of his desk, without getting up or even looking at me. The desk was cluttered. Shelves behind him were stacked with thick, bulging files. “You’re…?”

  “Mossman,” I said. “Charles. I spoke to the officer downstairs.…”

  “Yes, Mossman,” he said. He finished up some kind of report, then looked up finally and pushed his chair back. “All right … So you live up in Yorkville.”

  “My wife lives in Yorkville,” I said. “With my daughter. We’re separated.”

  “All right.” He took out a new form. “And you live where?” he inquired.

  “In Brooklyn. 157 Powers Street. I rent a room there.”

  “A room … So why don’t you take this matter to Brooklyn,” he shrugged perfunctorily, “if that’s where you live?”

  “Because what I have to say takes place here,” I explained. He didn’t even react. Just started writing. Hey Eddie, more spies. Did I end up with the most brusque and completely functionary detective in the precinct?

  He jotted down my name and address and finally looked up at me, seemingly ready to listen. “All right, Mr. Mossman, you say you have a lead on some German spies. Your dime…”

  Though I already had the feeling I was about to be pushing a large boulder up a very steep hill, I took him through everything I knew and had put together, starting with the first times I had met Willi and Trudi, and the kinds of visitors that were showing up at their door, customers, they called them.…

  “Hold it a minute,” he interrupted me right away. “I thought you said they’re German?”

  “I think they are German. But they claim to be Swiss. I can’t know for sure. They say their family was from Germany, and German is definitely their first language.”

  “You realize the Swiss are neutral so far,” he felt an urge to remind me, “in what’s going on over there.”

  “I understand that,” I said. I found my frustration starting to rise. “Can I go on?”

  “Be my guest. I was just reminding you of the facts.…” He waved me onward. And I continued, describing the word Emma had overheard them using, Lebensraum, which I already knew was way over his head, or at least, way beyond his interest.

  “Your daughter’s six, you said?”

  “Yes, six.”

  “And she’s the one who overheard them using this word?” He rounded his eyes. “Lebens-room?”

  “Lebens-raum,” I corrected him. “It means elbow room.”

  “It could mean ‘storm the Bastille’ for all I care, Mr. Mossman, ain’t no crime people speaking German. And to a six-year-old,” he added. “So she’s the witness?”

  “I’m perfectly aware it’s no crime,” I said. “If you’d let me just go on…?” I told him about the torn, burnt strips I had seen in their kitchen trash, a message of some kind, I was sure. “It could well be a code.” But his interest didn’t seem to peak any higher. “They seem to adore Emma, and my wife isn’t happy with any of this.” I shrugged.

  “You and your wife fight a lot?” he asked.

  “We used to. But what does that have to do with anything? I’m trying to tell you something important.”

  “And this Swiss couple have taken a liking to your daughter?” he said with plodding gray eyes.

  “Yes. I was away for a while. She actually calls them her aunt and uncle. But…”

  He jotted a note down, then looked back up at me. “You were saying…”

  “I was telling you about these strips of paper I found. That it was a message, I’m sure. That she didn’t want me to see. A bunch of numbers. But in a kind of pattern. Groups of three numbers. Like a code. I even think I might have found the key to the code.”

  “What makes you think it’s not a telephone number or maybe the numbers racket?” he asked.

  “Who tears a message into strips and then burns them?”

  “Maybe someone who lost. Happens all the time. Truth is, I can think of a dozen credible explanations. And so far I’m not hearing anything so credible on your end—”

  “Look, I followed them one night,” I said, cutting him off. “I know that might not be so kosher. But I did. Just to see where they went. And it was to this German beer hall on Second Avenue called Marienplatz. You know it?”

  “No.” Monahan shook his head. “Should I?”

  “It’s a known hangout for Nazi sympathizers and organizers up there.”

  “It is, huh? And how do you know that?”

  “It just is.… Look, you guys just arrested twenty-six of them, for God’s sake. I’m not making this up. I followed them there and saw the Bauers embraced by the owner and then go back to this meeting room, where they were all doing that Nazi salute they do. Sieg Heil-ing. With a Nazi banner on the wall behind them. So for all the effort they’re putting into denying any association with Hitler, here they are being welcomed like heroes at a meeting where they’re all saluting him. Tell me why?”

  “I can’t tell you why. Could there be any other possible explanation?”


  “Well, I suppose I should mention they were in the beer business at some point,” I said. “That they apparently had a small brewery.”

  “Yeah, that was good to mention,” the detective said, “this being in a bar and all.…” He jotted it down. “That all?”

  “No, it’s not all,” I said. It was clear I wasn’t exactly knocking him over, and now this next part of the story got even trickier. “I don’t want to say how—at least not right now—but I saw something the other day. In their apartment.”

  “And what is that?”

  “A radio transmitter…”

  “A radio transmitter?” This time his eyes did grow wide. “And you’re sure of this?”

  “I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but that’s what it appeared to me. It was about this big…” I stretched my hands about eighteen inches apart, “and black, had what looked like a frequency gauge on it and two knobs. An antenna and a headset. What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know what it could be.” The lieutenant shrugged, looking at me. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Look, like I told the officer downstairs, I’m not a crank. I was in the doctoral program in European history at Columbia. I’m not making this up. Or trying to waste anyone’s time.”

  “And you found this transmitter exactly where?” The detective tapped his pen on his desk.

  “In a closet. Inside a trunk.”

  He looked up at me again. “Inside their apartment?”

  “I told you I didn’t want to get specific on how I found it. Just that I did. And it should be of interest to someone. It’s not legal to have that, is it?”

  “I don’t know if it is or it isn’t. No more legal than maybe how you found it. And everything you’re telling me pretty much hinges on the specifics, if you know what I mean? I assume they didn’t invite you to rummage through their belongings. This trunk … it was locked?”