The Fifth Column

by Andrew Gross

  It was the first time I’d seen her since the night we’d slept together, and I wanted to tell her how much it had meant to me.

  “Charles, there is something bothering you, I can see. If perhaps you wish that we hadn’t done what we did the other night … I understand. It was only—”

  “No, that’s not it.” I cut her off. “In fact, it’s the opposite. The other night was swell. The best thing to happen to me in a couple of years. It’s just—” Maybe it was best that I did tell her. As much as I wanted to keep her out of this part of my life, it was hard to simply put it aside. It was Noelle, after all, who was the one who had introduced me to Latimer. So she was a part of it.

  “Look, something happened yesterday.…” I sucked in a breath. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

  She covered my hand with hers and gave me a look of concern. “Emma?”

  “No. No. Emma’s fine.” Reflexively, I glanced at my watch and took note of the time. It was a little after 3 P.M. Here goes … “You remember I said I’d found a book locked away in the Bauers’ closet? That had previously been on the coffee table.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it had some writing in it. Words and numbers circled and underlined…”

  She nodded. “Yes. You told me of this.”

  I was just about to tell her how I came to the conclusion that it was a time and date, when I heard a commotion coming from the bar. People were crowded around a radio, the bartender tuning it in. He raised the volume so everyone around could hear. They were shouting with anger, shaking their heads with what looked like dismay.

  “Something’s happened.” I grabbed Noelle by the hand. “C’mon…”

  “Charles, finish, please…”

  “No. Someone’s making an announcement. We should hear.” I pulled her up to the bar, pushing our way in close. A man slammed his fist onto the bar in rage. “Those bastards…” A woman in a purple suit shook her head with tears in her eyes. “My God…”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  There was a news flash. Everyone leaned in close to catch the scratchy report, which sounded like it was coming from a long ways away. There was suddenly also a lot of noise outside, cars honking, police whistles blowing.

  “The Japs just sneak-attacked Pearl Harbor,” the bartender said. “Lots of ships lost and people killed.”

  “My God!”

  I turned to Noelle and a whitened cast came over her face. Like, Here it is all over again. Within a day, we’d be at war. Not with the Germans as I’d hoped for and everyone expected, but with the Japanese.

  “Dozens of the most powerful ships and carriers lie broken and in flames in Honolulu Bay…,” the newscaster intoned.

  In the restaurant, the crowd grew solemn. The bartender lined up glasses on the bar. He poured a shot of whiskey in all. “Here’s to our boys,” he said, raising his glass.

  We all raised them. “To our boys!” we all shouted.

  Even I gulped down a shot. People started singing “God Bless America.”

  This changed everything for me.

  I knew I had to get to Latimer fast. That with what I’d seen, the Germans infiltrating our shore, bringing something in that I knew was meant for harm, things were only going to get worse. A lot worse.

  “I know what this is,” Noelle said, looking at me. “I’ve already lived through it once, and now here too.”

  I put my arm around her. “But this time you’re not alone.”

  She didn’t answer. Just gave me a brief smile and kissed me.

  By the following afternoon, America and the kingdom of Japan were at war.

  29

  It took until Wednesday for Latimer to get back to me. A declaration of war had a way of turning the State Department upside down, he said. We met at the same Midtown hotel where we had met the first time. A porter let me in and he kept me waiting in his suite a while, and when Latimer finally came in, he looked tired and somber and there were lines of strain on his face. The attack on Pearl Harbor had given way to two days of national mourning. Flags everywhere hung at half staff. People broke out in patriotic songs spontaneously in public. No one could comprehend how our defenses had been so ill prepared for such an attack, and the casualties were numbing. The effect on our navy was just as bad. The draft was being reenacted and young people all over the country were kissing their wives and moms goodbye and leaving home and school and their jobs to sign up.

  The country was at war. Just not with the people I had evidence against.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” I said to Latimer. “I know your time’s important. Especially…”

  “I’m here,” he said, his lips thin and flat, his hair slicked back, and adjusted his wire rims. “I’m interested to hear what you have.”

  “I think you’ll find it important,” I said, and took out the packet of photographs I had had developed the day before. I laid them out on the table. “The people I told you about last week are named Bauer,” I started in. More “specific.” I pointed to a black-and-white photo of Willi and Trudi as they stepped outside their brownstone. “They live at 174 East Ninetieth. Apartment 3B. The other night, on a hunch, I followed them as they left their home at eleven P.M. and went to the brewery they once owned. On Ninety-second Street.” I put down another photo. “I know it’s dark. I’m hardly a professional, you can see. Here, you can see the truck.…”

  “You say you followed them?” The State Department man stopped me. “How did you know to do so on this particular night?”

  “You remember I said last time I thought I had stumbled upon their code?”

  Latimer nodded. “Those strips of burnt paper in the trash. With numbers on them.”

  “The numbers corresponded to a book I also found there. Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. In German. I put together that the numbers I saw in the trash corresponded to December 6, three A.M.”

  “You broke their code?” He took out a cigarette from his gold case and lit it with a lighter. “You’re a very resourceful man, Mr. Mossman,” he said admiringly. “You’ve been quite the eager beaver, I can see.”

  “This is only the half of it,” I said, setting up what would happen next.

  Latimer pulled the ashtray over to his side. “You have my attention.”

  I told him about the truck ride. About finding myself trapped inside while inspecting the cargo being moved in there, and then being unable to get out. Latimer’s narrow eyes grew wide. I told him that the Bauers’ accomplice, actually the janitor in the building they lived in, drove, and had a gun with him. That I’d spent the two-hour ride certain that when they arrived at whatever destination they were headed to, they would open the doors, find me there, and I’d be killed.

  “I can only imagine,” he said, flicking an ash. “So what was in the truck in the end?”

  I laid down another photo. It was dark, a little blurry, but showed shiny objects taken from inside. “Beer kegs,” I said, as he squinted closely at it but couldn’t seem to make out what it was.

  “Beer?” Latimer wrinkled his brow.

  “At least barrels. From the brewery. I don’t know what they were filled with. This wasn’t exactly a delivery, if that’s what you mean. The brewery is shut down. It was after midnight. Trudi Bauer was along for the ride. It took a couple of hours, but we finally came to a stop in the town of Bridgehampton.”

  “Bridgehampton…?”

  “It’s a town all the way out in eastern Long Island,” I explained. “We pulled up to this house with nothing else around it. Directly on the beach.”

  “A little late in the season to work on your tan, I suspect,” he said. He seemed surprised at the destination.

  “You might say.”

  “And obviously you weren’t discovered. When you arrived.”

  “They opened the cargo door, but never unloaded what was inside,” I said. “Which gave me the opportunity to escape. They all gathered on the beach. I was able to sneak out and hide behind a
hedge. That’s where I took these.”

  I put out two more photographs. Willi, Trudi, Curtis, and the other driver as they waited for what they were there to meet.

  He looked at them and stared at me.

  I said, “At just before three A.M., the exact time I recorded in the code I broke, I saw this dark shape appear out on the water. It rose up, pretty much out of nowhere. Maybe a quarter of a mile offshore.”

  He looked at me quizzically. I showed him what I had taken, the dark outline of the ship barely distinguishable from the black of the ocean and the dark, moonless sky.

  Latimer took off his wire-rim glasses. I could see an air of importance spark to life in his hooded, gray eyes.

  “It’s a sub,” I said. “A German sub.”

  “You can be sure of this?” he said.

  “I’m sure, because approximately twenty minutes later check out what came ashore.…”

  I laid out two more pictures. Neither of them were particularly clear or revealing. Mostly just dark, blurry shapes. But clear enough that he could make out the launch coming ashore, Curtis and Willi helping to pull it in through the surf, and the four German seamen climbing out onto American soil.

  “This is completely incredible,” Latimer uttered dully, his jaw slack. “I can’t believe what I’m looking at. You just stayed there? You could have been killed.”

  “By that time, I have to admit I was far more mesmerized by what I was watching than I was afraid for my life.”

  He pushed away from the table, seemingly shell-shocked. “A German submarine. On U.S. soil. There is no dispute, this is highly provocative material,” he said. “People must see this. And what are they taking out…?” Latimer put his glasses back on and brought one photo up close. “It seems to me it’s…” Then he looked at me again.

  “Beer,” I answered.

  “Yes.” He blinked blankly. “More beer.”

  “I’m no intelligence agent, Mr. Latimer, but I would suspect there’s not a single drop of beer in any of these canisters, whatever they might contain.”

  Latimer put the photographs back on the table, his face ashen. “Yes, I would have to agree.”

  “Now you know why I needed to see you so urgently,” I said.

  “Yes, of course.”‘He nodded peremptorily. “You’ve done well, son.” He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. “And at great risk to your own safety, I can see. And … there is something you don’t know—how could you, that’s just taken place, barely an hour ago—that only adds to the urgency of all this. It’s why I was late joining you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Germany and Italy have joined Japan and declared war on the United States.”

  “My God.”

  “Tonight, President Roosevelt will address the nation and respond in kind.”

  “Jesus…” I sat back. My heart pounded like a drum. We would be at war.

  “A day ago it was no crime to believe in National Socialism,” the State Department man said. “Half of Congress was pressing FDR to stay out of things. But today, it’s no longer someone’s convictions, but outright sedition we’re looking at here. There’s always been the concern that some kind of fifth column was conducting espionage behind our backs.…”

  The Bauers were traitors now.

  “I assume you’ll let me keep these…?” he said, and tapped the photographs together into a pile. “I promise they’ll be safe. You have the negatives? We’ll need to make copies.”

  “Of course. They’re in there.” He put the prints back in their envelope from the photography store and stuffed them inside his jacket pocket.

  “So who have you told about this?” he asked.

  “Not a soul.”

  “Not even Noelle?”

  “Not even Noelle,” I said.

  “Keep it that way.” He rubbed his face. “You just stay out of it at this point. It’s far too dangerous. This is in our hands now. And for God’s sake, don’t breathe a word of it to the police. That’s all we need, the press or the wrong agencies getting wind of it and coming down our backs.”

  “I understand.”

  Latimer stood up. I got up too. He put out his hand. His grip was firm and resolved and I felt gratitude in it.

  “You better give me a way to reach you,” he said. “We’ll likely need to speak again.”

  “Of course.”

  “You understand you’ve done a helluva good thing for your country, son.…” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “A brave and a helluva good thing.”

  “Thank you,” I said, a glow washing through me.

  The glow of having done something for my country. And at last, corroboration for Liz.

  30

  At the brewery, everything was in a state of readiness.

  Willi’s nerves were on edge. The Führer’s declaration of war against America suddenly put their plans on the front burner. What was once merely organization and planning was now elevated to action. The kegs they had unloaded off the sub were hidden amid many similar kegs from the brewery that were filled innocently with beer, so that if their truck was stopped they could show it was only a normal delivery. Only they knew which was which. Each had to be handled with the most extreme caution. If opened improperly and spread, the contents of each could kill half the people within a mile radius. They had the plans, the commitment; they’d put in the training. They had met and gone over their roles a hundred times.

  All they had waited on was the final go-ahead from back home. And now it had come.

  Operation Prospero was to commence.

  Germany and America were at war.

  All they had been missing for weeks was an unwitting stooge to blame it all on, someone on the ground here who would look like a fitting “dupe” when the investigators looked into it, and now blessedly one had come their way.

  He thought he was so smart, Willi and Trudi agreed, with his highbrow education and his vast knowledge of things, but in the end, what would officials find, when they looked into it: no more than an angry and unpredictable young man, someone who had been trampled on by society, denied his own dreams, who had scorn for all. Someone estranged from his wife and now his daughter. A life in ruins. Only a memory of what it once was. Alone.

  Willi had to laugh; they couldn’t have come up with a better fall guy for their plans if they had called up Hollywood and gotten in touch with central casting.

  “Willi,” Trudi called. She had the maps spread on the office table. She noticed his nerves. “You seem agitated.”

  “Just excited, my dear, now that everything is now in work,” he said reassuringly. “I am fine.”

  “Good,” she said. “Stay strong.”

  Curtis, or Oberleutnant Kurt Leitner as they knew him, in overalls and heavy workman’s gloves, was prying the lids off the new “beer” canisters.

  “Be careful,” Willi warned him. “The wrong move and we will all be dying the worst death imaginable.”

  “Everything is perfectly secure,” Kurt said. He had been sent here two years before for this very purpose. “But they need to be loaded now.”

  “Just be careful, for God’s sake,” Trudi said. “You know what you’re dealing with.”

  “I know precisely what I am dealing with,” the oberleutnant said. As a chemical engineer who had once worked at IG Farben, where the contents of the canisters were made, he had been trained for this very task for years.

  The phone rang. Trudi went to answer. Very few people had the phone number here, now that the business had closed, so it could only be one of a handful of people.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh…” She nodded soberly. “I see.…” Her color turned gray. “We know what to do then,” she said. She caught Willi’s eyes. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

  She put down the phone.

  Willi looked at her, agitated. “What’s wrong, dear?” he asked.

  “Have you taken your stomach pills this morning?” Trudi looked at him. />
  “Of course.” Though he already felt the acid starting to burn. “What is it?”

  “Take another then, Willi,” Trudi said. “And get Kurt and Friedrich in here. It seems a situation has developed. It’s time to speed up our plan.”

  31

  “Charlie…”

  I had just gotten back from work, around six, and was trying to keep my mind off the events of the past weekend and Latimer, which I could no longer do anything about. The entire country was abuzz with the news that we were at war. Headlines blasted all over the papers. Radio broadcasts. From the president! I grabbed a soft drink, settled on my bed, and unfolded the afternoon Trib: “COUNTRY LURCHES INTO PREPAREDNESS,” when the landlord knocked on my door and said there was a call for me.

  Because I didn’t get many calls there I thought maybe it was Latimer with news about Willi and Trudi. I went downstairs, closed the door to the parlor where the phone was, and turned away from the door. “Hello.”

  “Charlie, it’s me,” a harried voice blurted. I heard immediately that it was Liz. She sounded upset.

  “What’s going on?” I said, though I already knew the answer to my next question. “Is everything all right?”

  “No, everything’s not all right, Charlie. Something’s happened. Emma is missing.”

  “Missing…?”

  “She never came home from school. Mrs. Shearer and I made a time to have her back here at four today—she had a dentist’s appointment. And it’s six now and they’re still not here. I’ve called the school and everywhere I can think of. No one’s seen them. I’m worried sick, Charlie.”

  “Calm down, Liz. We’ll find her.” I sat down. Nausea balled up in my gut. “What about Mrs. Shearer?” A thought ran through me. “Is she around?”

  “No, she’s missing as well,” Liz said. “The school told me they left as they do every day, more than two hours ago. I went around on the street, on the route they usually take, and I can’t find her anywhere. No one’s seen them. Oh Charlie, I know something bad’s happened. I can feel it. You know I’m not like this—I don’t get all out of sorts—but we spoke about her appointment just this morning. They’re never late. It’s over two hours now. I’m just letting you know, I’m calling the police.”