by Andrew Gross
“No, don’t call the police, Liz.” I stopped her. I knew the Bauers were bad. Something popped into my head. Mrs. Shearer. She’s missing too. “You once told me the Bauers found Mrs. Shearer for you, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. They did. But what do Willi and Trudi have to do with this, Charlie? I knocked on their door too. Trudi said she hadn’t seen them today.”
“Liz, just listen to me, I want you to go to your sister’s, please.” Her older sister, Sophie, lived with her husband on East Forty-seventh. I had to get Liz away from there. “Just go, now. I know what to do. I promise. I’ll be in touch with you shortly.”
“My sister’s? Charlie, you’re honestly not going to start this again with Willi and Trudi, are you? Didn’t you hear me, Emma’s missing. I can’t bear this right now.”
“I know Emma’s missing, Liz.” And if Mrs. Shearer was as well, and not in touch, I felt certain the two events had to be connected. “And I have an idea why. Just promise me you won’t do a thing till you hear from me.”
“What are you saying, Charlie? Why…? Look, maybe I shouldn’t have called you. I’m going to hang up now and contact the police. I just wanted to let you know.”
“No, Liz, don’t!” I begged her. “Don’t contact the police. Not just yet. Just hear me out—I’m going to get her back, Liz. Just go to Sophie’s. Don’t do anything. Promise me. I’ll be in touch.”
I could hear the consternation in her voice. Laced with panic. She was confused, petrified. As was I. Who wouldn’t be? “Charlie, I don’t know … I think I should be at home. What if they—”
“Mrs. Bainbridge can call you if they come home. Just leave the number with her. But they’re not, Liz…”
“They’re not what?”
“They’re not coming home today.” I was sure of it. I was sure I knew where they were.
Her voice shook. “What are you saying, Charlie?”
“Just give me a chance to resolve this. Promise me you’ll go there,” I pressed. “Please.”
She finally gave in. “Okay, I will.”
“Trust me, I’ll find her for you, Liz. I will. I’ll be in touch.”
32
How do they know?
I didn’t know the answer to that, but they did. I felt certain. Things like this didn’t just happen. They’d found out I was onto them. Something had happened.
Liz had said, They even found Mrs. Shearer for us, and what would we do without her? If Mrs. Shearer was missing as well, I had no doubt the two had to be connected.
My first thought was to call Latimer. But it was well after six now and I knew the State Department switchboard was closed. I grabbed a cab into the city and instructed the driver to East Ninetieth. To Liz’s brownstone. My blood pulsed like a steam valve thrown open on a train, flooding my veins with simmering anger. Half out of my mind with worry. Half boiling with rage. Liz was right on one thing. I’d let my little girl become caught up in this.
I had the cabbie let me off on Third and I sprinted the block and a half to 174. I bounded up the stairs and threw open the door. I pressed the buzzer over and over for Willi and Trudi, and when Willi finally came on, I said, “It’s Charles Mossman. Let me up.” He buzzed me in without even asking why.
My blood racing, I bounded up the two flights to the third floor, not even stopping at Liz’s apartment. I was set to pound on the Bauers’ door when it opened.
Willi Bauer stood there. In a sweater vest and loosened tie. “Come in, Herr Mossman.” He looked around. “We’ve actually been expecting you.”
Expecting me.
Trudi stood there, her gray hair pulled back in her bun, her eyes fierce and glaring. Next to her, wearing his work uniform, was Curtis. No pretense anymore: He pulled his jacket back to reveal a gun in his waistband. Seated on the couch was an older man with a bushy white mustache. It took me a second to realize who it was.
And as I did, I began to see precisely where this was unfolding.
It was Karl, my waiter from the Old Heidelberg. I shook my head at him with disappointment and confusion. “Karl.”
He didn’t answer.
I looked around in anger, going from face to face. I settled on Willi, who had followed me in, and who stood facing me with a hand on the rounded arm piece of the couch. Trudi sat on the love seat with a saucer of tea. “Swiss, huh…?” I sniffed at them with contempt.
“I think we can dispense with all the pretense at last, can we not, Herr Mossman?”
“Yes, please. I dispensed with it long ago,” I said. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Emma is quite safe, I assure you of that.” He made no effort to even hide that he had her. “We have no thought in the world of harming her. You have my word on that. At least for now. She is with Mrs. Shearer. We would like nothing less than to hurt her in any way. But that is up to you, Mr. Mossman. Should you decide to do anything foolish.”
“I’ve already been plenty foolish,” I said. “By ever letting her and Liz trust you. And you.” I turned to Trudi and Curtis. “All of you…” My gaze ended up on Karl, my kindly German waiter, sitting there with his hands folded in his lap. “You’re traitors. All of you. Whatever you’re up to. That witch Mrs. Shearer, too.”
“Traitors…” Willi Bauer smiled. He came over and stood by his wife. “I would hardly use that word, Mr. Mossman. Soldiers, perhaps. One is never too old to do one’s duty. We are all natural-born Germans. Even Herr Leitner here.” He nodded to Curtis. “Oberleutnant Leitner, as he is better known to us. From the Abwehr. All of us living in a country we now find ourselves at war with. And now, at last, doing what has to be done.”
“Spies, then,” I said. “If that sits better with you. Have it however you wish. And just what do you mean, doing what has to be done? What does it have to do with my daughter?”
“Why, the first blow in the war against your country, of course. From our side. A war I assure you our country did not seek. And a decisive blow, you will find out soon enough. And I’m afraid that is why we had to enlist your lovely daughter in this enterprise.”
“My daughter? What does Emma have to do with any of this?”
“Why, nothing.” Willi Bauer shrugged with a contrite smile. “She has nothing to do with any of this, of course. She was merely a necessary step for us to guarantee your participation. You see, it is you who we need, Charlie.”
I looked around at the coven of Nazis. “Me?”
“Indeed. Look, Charlie…” Bauer led me over to their eating table outside the kitchen. A large map was spread on it. Armonk. Chappaqua. Towns I recognized that were north of the city. In Westchester County. And a part of the map circled in red. It appeared to be a body of water.
I looked closer and saw that Kensico Reservoir was printed on it.
“You see, Charlie, the drinking water of New York City is fed by a network of reservoirs. Here, north of the city.” He tapped on the map. “And in Queens. Near Aqueduct Raceway. You can only imagine how many millions of people use that water every day. And how harmful it would be, the panic it would cause, how very distrusting people would be of their own government, were something to be put in to contaminate it. Not just contaminate it, in fact, but to make it lethal to drink. And for it to be made clear to all that agents of the German government had the means to have done it.”
I looked at him and it became clear to me what they had in mind. I flashed back to the beer barrels. The ones they had taken off the launch. From the sub. What I now knew they were filled with. “You’re planning on poisoning the city’s water supply,” I said, my jaw slack. The thought hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest. “It was poison in those canisters, not bombs.”
“Sarin, to be exact,” Curtis said, in an accent I could now hear clearly was German. “At least, a liquefied form of it. Very, very lethal. A product of the IB Farben Company. A pinprick is sufficient to cause instant death. A hundred-liter keg … Four of them, in fact. Introduced into the city’s water supply…” He s
hrugged with a roll of his eyes. “Well, one can only imagine…”
“You’re all insane.” I glared. “And you think I’m going to help you in this plot? I’d rather die.”
“Maybe you would.” Willi nodded. “As might any of us. If you had the choice. But yes, we do expect it, Herr Mossman—that is, if you value the health of your pretty daughter. Or unless you’d like to think of her taking a healthy dose of it in her morning orange juice,” Willi Bauer said. He had lost his smile.
“I don’t believe you would do that.”
“You don’t, do you? But would you be willing to wager it? You see, you have made yourself a bit of a nuisance, Charlie. I admit, more than we thought. That’s for sure. What we Germans call ein Ärgernis. And as such, I’m afraid, you’ve made yourself quite expendable as well.”
Curtis reached inside his jacket and took out the gun he’d had there. “Don’t doubt me, Mr. Mossman.” He held it firmly in his hand. “I have no compunctions about using this.”
“Now, now, that won’t be necessary, Kurt,” Willi said. “Herr Mossman perfectly understands the situation. I’m sure he knows if there is any resistance on his part, even the slightest, or if he decided to bring anyone in on this, it would have the utmost consequences for Emma. Painful as that would be for all of us. She is like part of the family to Trudi and I.”
“Yeah, a part of the family.” I sniffed, looking at Trudi. “Look, I don’t care about me. Just give me Emma. And I’ll go through with it. What does she have to do with any of us?”
“I wish I could, Charlie. I truly do.” He wagged his finger. “But that wouldn’t be getting us what we need.”
“Me?”
“Who do you think will be responsible for all this? Long after Trudi and I, even Herr Leitner, have left this beautiful country. Where do you think the curtain of blame will fall? Certainly not on two kindly Swiss grandparents. Without an enemy in the world.” He patted Trudi’s shoulder. “Who do you think would have the intelligence and the resentment against how his life had treated him to pull something like this off?”
“That’s crazy.”
“Is it, Charlie? Not as much as you think, I’m afraid.” Willi smiled.
Was it? It started to dawn on me. How, yes, they’d set me up. I was going to be their patsy. And there were things, yes, that fit their description of me. They had me trapped to play the spy, the saboteur, or lose Emma. I thought it was them, as I tried to hunt them down, uncover evidence, but it turned out that I was the fifth column here.
Me.
“How did you know?” I asked dejectedly.
“Know?”
“That I knew.”
“It’s our job to know, Charlie. How did you think you could act so foolishly and not be found out?”
I still didn’t know what Karl was doing here.
“Okay. Say I agree,” I said. “But there’s only one little problem. You see, the Feds already know about you and your plans. They know about everything, Willi. Your Nazi ties, the radio transmitter that was in your trunk over there; the code I came upon in your trash. Even your little delivery the other night. Your countrymen in that sub. If you ask me, they’ve probably got the place under surveillance right now, just like they had those other spies under surveillance and,” I snapped my fingers, “the whole thing went up in smoke. All I have to do is call them.”
“Do you, Charlie? Is that right?” I expected to see panic in their faces, their plans falling apart. But there was no sign of any. “Call them, you say…?” Willi Bauer said, looking at Trudi, seemingly holding back a smile. He went to the side table and picked up the phone and extended it to me. “Then by all means, go ahead, call them. Here…”
Something wasn’t right. I didn’t move.
“Please, go ahead.”
“Anyway, that won’t be necessary, Mr. Mossman…” Another voice rang out. Not from the living room, but from inside. A familiar voice. “I’ll make the conversation painlessly easy for you.”
The door to the bedroom opened and Warren Latimer stepped out.
In a gray pin-striped suit, no jacket, suspenders, his dark hair slicked back. Wearing a smug, even slightly embarrassed smile on his face.
My jaw fell open and a surge of vomit formed in my gut and started to climb up my throat.
He was here? How? He was part of the State Department.
What was he doing here?
My knees buckled and my legs almost gave out. My head started to spin. I reached out to hold on to something.
In a flash, I thought back to everything I had divulged to the man. The transmitter. The code. The sub. Everything I thought had been passed on to the right people.
The pictures I had given him. The negatives …
You’ve done a helluva brave thing here, son … A helluva good thing, he had said. For your country.
And he was one of them. A Nazi. Part of this plot.
A traitor.
I felt a burning in the back of my eyes, as I held back the urge to lunge at him and grab him by the throat.
I’d told him everything. Everything I knew about the Bauers. I’d given him my proof. And all the while he was feeding it right to them, working with them.
Half the State Department wants FDR to stay out of the war.…
“You sonovabitch,” I said.
Then suddenly my body felt like a weight was crashing through it, as an even more painful truth became clear to me. My thoughts swirled in a daze as I slowly put it all together.
Not just Latimer—but how he had first come into my trust. How I had met him. And the answer I was getting felt like a ledge had given way out from under me and I was suddenly in free fall, in a disappointment and confusion so deep I was being swallowed up in it. Crushed by it.
I recounted precisely how it had been: Who had introduced us. Who had vouched for him.
He’s a very important man, Charles. He’ll know precisely what to do.
“God, no…” I shook my head.
And I knew then that I had been set up from the very beginning. Going back to the chance meeting on Houston Street. From the moment those pages flew in the air. “My dissertation,” she had uttered so perfectly.
Taking me in.
And I had to reach out for the table next to me to even remain on my feet, as, following Latimer, just steps behind, Noelle stepped out from the bedroom too.
“Hello, Charles.”
She was wearing a navy polka-dot dress, her lips blanched and pale. Her eyes hung in a downcast patina of guilt and shame, no life in them, almost a different person from the one I knew.
“How?” I looked from face to face, my body concussing in a wave of shock and foolishness, realizing in that instant everything that the sight of her, here, in this room, with these people, meant.
It had all been set up from the start. Those papers rustling in the wind. Our laughter together. Our lovemaking. Noelle, who I’d fallen for. Whom I had shared it all with. All. And which I now saw in the ghost of her wan, downcast face meant nothing to her. Nothing.
She was part of them too.
“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said, her cheeks blanched, her lips pale, looking at me with deeply hooded eyes.
“It was all just, what…,” I said, shaking my head. “A lie? All a lie? Everything you told me. About how you got here? Your family back in France? How you hate the Bosch?”
“Ms. Leperrier did her job admirably,” Willi Bauer said. “No less than what was expected of her as a member of the French milicia.”
“Milicia?” Pawns of the Gestapo, she had said. “Even your name…?” I said, shaking my head with a grudging smile. “Was any of it true?”
“You must know, I had no love for any of this, Charles. I told you.” She shrugged, and I detected a tinge of sadness in it. “The circumstances of how I got here were not straightforward either.”
We all have our pasts, she had said.
“Yes. I guess that’s perfectly clear now,” I
said. I turned back to Latimer. “And you…? Do you even work for the State Department? Or is that a ruse too? Is that your real title, Head of Immigrant Affairs? Or are you just a run-of-the-mill, everyday traitor?”
“Don’t be so naïve, Mr. Mossman.” Warren Latimer sat down on the rounded arm piece of the couch. “Half the State Department doesn’t want this war. We may not agree with the Nazis on everything, but we both recognize who the common enemy we face is. Where the real threat to our democracy lies. The Bolsheviks and the Jewish interests aligned with them—that will be the real war, after this one in Europe is resolved and our own government is brought down and we sue for peace. It’s the Russians, any clear thinker on the world will agree. You’re a student of history. Surely you can see. Communism is the dark, lurking danger. The one true existential threat. Not what’s going on in Germany now. That will all sort itself out.”
Sort itself out … The bombing of London on a nightly basis. The horrific persecution and relocation of the Jews.
“I’m truly sorry you’ve been forced into becoming a small cog in the formidable wheel of history, Mr. Mossman. But that is where you are now, at this moment, and I want to impress upon you that your daughter’s safety is purely a matter of what you choose to do about that.”
“You harm one hair on her head and I’ll kill you myself, you can be sure of that,” I said.
“Rest assured, Herr Mossman,” Trudi Bauer finally spoke up, “no one here has any desire to see her harmed.” Her eyes were deep and hardened in a manner that was nothing like the caring, grandmotherly way I always saw her before. “Still, you must also know we would not hesitate one second to do what needs to be done. Her fate lies with you, Herr Mossman. Not with us.”
“With me … And what if I go straight to the police,” I said, with a glance to Curtis’s gun, “and tell them all I know about all this? What happens then?”
