Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

But the son was not the father. The son had known the contagion of sin this war had brought to the world, and had lived to see himself that strange thing, the hunted fugitive.

  “I can’t stand this,” Stafford had said, whispering between his teeth as they sat in the almost deserted railroad car while it pulled slowly away from the station at a place called Milford. It had been a long day, and Stafford’s apparently infinite capacity for panic was beginning to take its toll. “They could be on to us already, you know. They could be following us right now, just waiting to see where we lead them.”

  Von Niehauser had looked up over the edge of the newspaper he had purchased in New Haven. Finally he shrugged his shoulders.

  “Then we will shake them off. We will step up over their heads.”

  Stafford hadn’t understood. But then, fortunately, very little depended on what Stafford might or might not understand. And, in any case, how could something like that be explained? It was one of the advantages of breeding.

  The last of the von Niehausers, who had followed his parents to London and Copenhagen, to Paris and Madrid, to all the places where his father had been posted as a military attaché, had been allowed to come to manhood without seeing life from the narrowing perspective of someone born to a uniform. He was the third son—it had hardly mattered, since the tradition was safe, so the baron had raised no very serious objection when little Joachim’s interests had drawn him in other directions. But perhaps, unprotected as he was by the gold braid of an officer’s epaulets, he had grown up more alert, more apt to notice things.

  And one of the things he had noticed was that the police were great believers in the virtuousness of the upper classes. Out of habit and self-interest, they sought their criminals among the socially defenseless. They looked up to the rich and the powerful or, rather, they hardly looked at them at all. At a certain economic level, you became invisible.

  And it was just as true in the other direction. Von Niehauser doubted very much if his father had ever noticed a policeman in his life. Why should a baron and a member of the German General Staff notice the police?

  But, then, his father had never been a spy.

  Notwithstanding, one of the first things von Niehauser did after he and Stafford arrived in New York was to rent a large furnished apartment in a respectable neighborhood. He had sent Stafford around to the closest branch office of the National City Bank and had him establish a checking account. They had paid out the first six months’ rental in advance—after all, the SS could afford it.

  Then, the next morning, he had set out for a men’s clothing store on Madison Avenue, one he had passed while walking up from Grand Central Station and which gave the impression that it didn’t cater to the working classes, to buy himself a suit. Both of the ones he had brought with him from Germany were copied out of American magazines, and he felt some misgivings about their perfect accuracy. It took only a trivial mistake, something as insignificant as the width of one’s lapels, for someone to notice and remember, and von Niehauser didn’t want to be noticed. So he would buy a new suit—and a new overcoat and shoes and shirts and underwear—and set his mind at ease.

  The precaution was unnecessary with Stafford, since all of his clothes dated from before his defection. Stafford presented other difficulties.

  It had been a pleasure picking out the suit. The store carried only a limited selection, but he found a gray pin stripe that would require very little tailoring and could be ready the next afternoon.

  “Wartime scarcities,” the tailor assured him, folding his hands together apologetically. “We can’t get the cloth.”

  He was an elderly Jew who spoke heavily accented English with a kind of wheezing murmur, his shoulders assuming a gentlemanly stoop as he adjusted von Niehauser’s lapels, making him feel at once homesick and ashamed. From the shape of his vowels anyone could have guessed that he was from Breslau. One wondered what his history could have been.

  “Yes, tomorrow, around four.” He helped von Niehauser out of the jacket. “It just needs a little taking in.”

  And it really was a good suit. Von Niehauser had only worn it once, but he liked to leave it hanging from the hook on the outside of his closet door, simply because it gave him so much satisfaction to look at it. It was the first purely personal item of clothing he had bought since before the beginning of the Polish campaign, and its purchase had been like the rediscovery of some forgotten emotion.

  Finally, that was the most vivid impression of this country, something that came to one gradually, like an object recognized as one’s eyes adjusted to the dark—the war seemed so distant. It was almost possible to imagine that the world had returned to normal.

  “I read in the paper that they’ll probably lift meat rationing by May,” he had overheard a woman saying to the man, possibly her husband, who sat next to her on the subway. “Then you’ll see the butchers change their tune!” The newspapers even talked about what would happen in what they referred to as the “postwar period,” as if they had already won. As if it were over.

  And why not? Except, perhaps, for the dying, perhaps it was. New York was a long way from Berlin, where all you had to do was to walk to the next block to see the evidence of the previous night’s bombing raid: the broken buildings, the stunned, sleepless families setting up their furniture on the sidewalk because there was nowhere else. All over Germany, people would start at the slightest sound. The whole country was under siege.

  People there wondered when it would end. They all knew how it would end, and they couldn’t imagine any kind of life for themselves beyond that. Hitler was right—everyone in Germany was a soldier now. They all knew that the final defeat would be theirs too.

  But Stafford was an American. He had been shielded by thousands of miles of ocean from the consequences of war; he understood nothing of defeat. It was merely a word to him.

  “Do you think we’ll get a medal for this?” he had asked once. “You probably don’t care—you’ve probably got a chestful of medals. They told me at the training school that you had the Knight’s Cross.”

  The submarine had been nearly four hundred miles beyond the Irish coast, far enough away from enemy territory to risk surfacing for a few hours in daylight, and von Niehauser had been taking what advantage he could of the cold winter sun. He had been alone on the conning tower for about twenty minutes, just watching the way the prow split through the slate gray water, when Stafford joined him. He turned around and smiled thinly.

  “Hitler has given the Ritterkreuz to his physician, who, they say, injects him with amphetamines and bull semen. Be content to do the thing we are being sent to do, and to come away alive. There will be glory enough in that.”

  “What are we being sent to do?”

  If you looked at Stafford for longer than a few seconds, he would always grin at you. Probably it was nothing more than embarrassment—he had an almost pathetic need for approval—but von Niehauser took it simply as a sign of weakness. Stafford couldn’t keep his countenance; he was constantly the victim of self betrayal. Whatever his loyalties might be, whatever he might imagine them to be, he was not a man to be trusted.

  This time, von Niehauser did not smile.

  “Be thankful you have been spared that knowledge. What you need to know, you know—be content with that.”

  No second warning had proved necessary.

  Or perhaps it had. He didn’t know—he couldn’t read a man like Stafford. The motives of such a person were a mystery to him.

  He rested the palm of his hand against the windowpane, surprised somehow to find it so cold. He could feel the little drops of condensation trickling down between his fingers. It was too hot in the apartment. One would have thought that in time of war. . .

  But here it seemed to be no one’s war but his own. He wondered where Stafford could be, what he was doing. He didn’t trust the man unless he was right there before his eyes. Perhaps, now that he was home, Stafford had forgotten all about the fact that
they were here as agents of the Reich.

  “What are we being sent to do?” he had asked, actually expecting to be told. It had been a wise precaution to exclude him from that particular secret.

  But perhaps Schellenberg hadn’t trusted Stafford quite so far as he had pretended—perhaps Stafford had grinned at him too. Or perhaps it had been the simple prudence of his trade. After all, vulgar little climber that he was, Schellenberg had never shown any signs of being a fool, and this particular assignment required the kind of specialized technical training one normally didn’t pick up in the hold of a merchant ship. Stafford was there merely as decoration.

  “We need a man who knows what he’s doing,” Schellenberg had said, “someone with the proper background. You studied under Schleiermacher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, didn’t you?”

  As they walked along together, he peered around at von Niehauser, cocking his head to one side just as if it had been a real question. But, of course, he already knew the answer. There seemed to be precious little about von Niehauser that he didn’t know.

  “Yes, right up until 1938, when he lost his professorship.”

  “Ah, well. . .” Schellenberg smiled to himself. He had a handsome, rather infantile face, and the soft boyishness of his smile was supposed to be one of the reasons he had been able to climb so high so fast. “That, as it turns out, was something of a mistake.”

  They continued on in silence for a while, walking across the hospital grass in perfect step, their hands clasped behind their backs. Despite the difference in their uniforms, anyone would have thought they had been comrades in arms for years.

  “I wouldn’t wish to be in your place,” Schellenberg said finally, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “Of course, it would have been impossible for you to refuse—a man like you couldn’t, could he?—but, still, I shouldn’t like to be the one to go. Aside from the danger, there’s the responsibility. There’s every chance you might end up settling the fate of Europe for the next thousand years.”

  “I thought the Führer had already done that.”

  “Well, yes. . .” And he had smiled again, seeing the joke. Precisely because he was such an opportunist, it was possible to talk to Schellenberg—a real Nazi would never have seen the joke. “But you might actually make it happen. We could still win the war—or, at least, keep from losing it, which comes to the same thing. We could keep Britain and the United States at bay, and that would mean we could hold on to what we have in the East. And that was always the plan anyway. Lebensraum, remember? We could still have it all.”

  “And you think I might be able to give it to you?”

  “Well. . . you might be lucky enough to be the instrument of your country’s salvation—yes. I needn’t tell you what will happen if you fail.”

  And Schellenberg, who had never seen combat, visibly squared his shoulders, as if in preparation for that end which, doubtless, he could hardly imagine.

  But von Niehauser had no trouble imagining it. What had Russia been but a massive preview? Starvation, misery, death in the full range of its horror. The land a vast waste, populated only with corpses and broken, burning machines. No men left, only instances of wretchedness.

  And the Russians would extend that all the way across the face of Germany. Germany would be like a second Carthage. The Russians would lead the people away as slaves and sow the ground with salt. There would be no mercy—why should the Russians show them any mercy?

  That was what his father would never have understood: war as the totality of existence, the absolute condition of life. It wasn’t just an affair between armies anymore. For Hitler, everyone was the enemy, and the fate of an enemy was extinction. And he had taught that lesson to the Russians.

  No, there would be no mercy. The Germans would not be forgiven so soon again.

  Once, just a few months before a random mortar round put an end to his military career, von Niehauser had been extended the rare privilege of two weeks’ leave. Except to attend his father’s funeral, he had hardly been home since the beginning of the war, and he had just been decorated a second time, so perhaps they decided he had earned it. At any rate, he was given two weeks—just enough time to get home for a day or two to refresh the spirit. That was the idea.

  By then, of course, he thought he had seen it all. He had been spared nothing, it seemed. Conquest had been bad enough, but defeat. . .

  He had always imagined that losing must be so simple. It had never occurred to him that it would take so long and turn out to be so astonishingly intricate. But it left you no time for anything else—everything was going wrong and there were no replacements and your men were dying around you like rats from exhaustion and the cold and the sudden early morning attacks of the partisans. There wasn’t even time to think.

  That was all he wanted, really—just a little time to think. After all, there was nothing at home. Since the deaths of his two older brothers, he was the last of the von Niehausers. There would be no one to whom he needed to explain anything, no one to offer the distraction of a friendly word. He would be quite at liberty. Perhaps the nightmare would come clear to him if he could just give it a little time.

  He was lucky enough to have a cousin attached to Governor­General Frank’s staff, who arranged his passage for him through the conquered territories; he traveled with a couple of colonels in the Sturmbanne who were returning from a tour of inspection. During the journey they had all stopped off at a place called “Treblinka”. The colonels had insisted. They seemed to be under the impression they were offering him some sort of treat.

  “This will give you a story or two to tell your grandchildren,” one of them said, and they both laughed.

  That was the day von Niehauser had learned that if they lost this time not even God would pity them.

  He had hardly spent an hour at his family estate before he realized that he no longer belonged there.

  Garlitz was too insignificant a place to have suffered much from the Allied bombing raids—of course, Dresden, which was only about a hundred kilometers away, was another matter—and his home was to the northeast, almost half an hour by car. He could stand in the middle of his mother’s drawing room, the room where she had died of a heart attack the last year he was a student at the Institute, and imagine, for a moment, that the war was simply something he had dreamed. It couldn’t possibly have really happened. Presently Egon and Kurt would come striding in, tanned and arrogant from a day of grouse shooting, and everyone would laugh and drink sherry while they waited for dinner to be announced. During the meal, his father would sit at the head of the table, listening silently—only nodding now and then—while Kurt talked about Army politics.

  Except that Kurt had burned to death under his half-track during the second Battle of El Alamein, and Egon, poor Egon, who had never had very much to say if there was anyone else to do the talking and who would, on the whole, have preferred breeding horses to a career in the military, poor Egon had been blown to atoms six months later when the officers’ mess at Gukovo found itself under point blank Russian artillery bombardment.

  An hour—the familiar feeling of safety lasted an hour, no more—and then von Niehauser felt as if he had somehow blundered into a museum after closing hours. Nothing here had anything to do with him any longer. He slept that night in his old bedroom, where his school diplomas still hung on the walls and against one corner of his closet leaned the cricket bat he had used during his four terms as a student at Winchester. The next morning he packed up his kit and caught a troop train back to Russia—running away as if to a place of refuge.

  And then, six weeks later, the mortar round that had almost killed him. And then all those months in the hospital at Bitterfeld, where there had been nothing to do but to turn over his memories, one at a time, like old photographs with torn corners and the indelible smudges of unnumbered fingers. Memories oddly impersonal, as if they belonged to someone else’s life.

  And then, as the brown leaves began to
curl and the weather turned cold again, and he found he was once more able to raise his left hand above his shoulder, along had come Schellenberg, smiling and boyish in his carefully tailored Brigadier-SS uniform, offering a path back from the tyranny of foreboding.

  “Yes. I’ll do it. You knew that before you asked. But I have a condition.”

  Schellenberg’s eyebrows shot up—doubtless he was thinking of the price, whether in money or promotions or immunity for friends; that was simply the way his mind worked.

  “I wish to resign my commission first. This is not the sort of business with which to sully a uniform my family has worn with honor for two hundred years. I should prefer to go as a civilian.”

  “Yes, well, I imagine something of the kind can be arranged.”

  It had rained all the night before, and the hospital grounds were covered with shallow pools of water in which the grass seemed to be lost in shadow. As they walked along, Schellenberg was taking great care to keep his boots dry.

  “I suppose they are ready to let you leave this place,” he said, glancing around with very evident distaste at the row of chair bound patients that lined the front porch.

  “Oh, yes.” Von Niehauser smiled mirthlessly. “I haven’t any idea why I’ve stayed so long already. Except—one feels rather at loose ends. . . I had hoped for another posting to Russia, but they tell me that a return to active service is out of the question.”

  The brigadier looked surprised, as if he suspected he was being lied to. The impression passed away quickly enough.

  “Well—I imagine you’ll see enough active service in America. And at least the winters there aren’t as bad.”

  Of course, at that time he had said nothing about Stafford. There had been a good deal that had been left unsaid.

  It was hard to believe, with the whole world at war, that there could still be anyone left who would be so affected by the shedding of a little blood. Schellenberg might have warned him.

  What an exhibition Stafford had made of himself, as if the hazard should have been in any way changed by the murder of a farm boy.