by John Altman
Not terrific.
But nice.
Besides—Hobbs had never truly loved her at all. In retrospect their love affair had been revealed for what it was: a cynical and manipulative thing on his part, and a naive one on hers. If Hobbs had truly loved her, after all, would he have sent her away, back to Germany? Would he have endangered her, separated himself from her? Of course not.
He had never loved her. He had only recruited her.
Klinger came back into the room and handed Eva a glass. She propped herself up on one elbow and took a tentative sip. He had mixed a Razzle-Dazzle, a drink that was becoming increasingly popular in Berlin these days, thanks to the lack of supplies. It consisted of wood alcohol and grenadine. She pulled a face, then took another sip anyway.
Klinger collapsed onto the bed beside her, naked, somehow managing to avoid spilling his own drink. His hands began to roam again. For a man his age, she thought, he possessed admirable ardor.
“Eva,” he said. “You are something, Liebling. You are something special.”
She took another sip of her Razzle-Dazzle, and said nothing.
“You make a man feel young again,” Klinger said. With that, he struck off on more reminiscences of his youth, of his days during the Great War. He seemed nostalgic for it—but, strangely, less than eager about the Great War that lingered even now on the horizon. Perhaps this was simply because he was too old to be a footsoldier. Or perhaps it was something else, something that Eva had sensed among many of her countrymen. They had been behind the First War completely, body and soul. They had taken to the streets to proclaim their enthusiasm in parades and celebrations. This new war was Hitler’s battle, not theirs … not, at least, until it started going well.
But it was possible, she thought, that Klinger’s lack of enthusiasm for the war ran deeper than that. To know for certain, she would need to get a better sense of the man, of where his true values lay.
Time is of the essence, her contact had said.
But also: You must tread softly.
She listened, enjoying the sound of his voice and the feel of his hand on her skin. She had been alone for so long that any human company was welcome. Ever since her return to Germany, she had kept a studious distance from coworkers and neighbors and prospective friends, afraid to let anyone get too close. She had not even told her own parents that she had come back. But the isolation had taken a toll. Her need for companionship had become something disconcertingly close to desperation.
Klinger, at least, was not such bad company. He liked to talk.
“Berlin is terribly normal for a city at war—don’t you think? The cafés and the beer halls are all still open. The theaters are still playing American cinema. Last week I saw a Mickey Mouse movie. Mickey Mouse!” He laughed. “Not quite what one expects when one’s at war—hm?”
The question seemed to be rhetorical; he talked on without waiting for an answer. Despite the man’s garrulous nature, unfortunately, he had kept most of his secrets to himself. He had not yet told her that he was married. He had mentioned his job at OKW only to pique her interest at the beginning, and since then had not returned to the subject. Most important, he had not told her of his debts. This would provide an opening, if and when he decided to reveal it. But first they would need to grow closer, much closer than they were now. Why would he tell a young lady he was trying to impress that he was poor?
You must tread softly.
She listened, nodding at the right times, still enjoying his hand on her belly. He mentioned jokingly, in passing, that his only goal in life was to earn a tremendous amount of money, enough to buy himself a title. Von Klinger. She giggled and let it pass. It was still too soon. Next time …
“But you never talk about your life, Eva, your work. Where did you say it was?”
She blinked, then told him about the propaganda ministry, and about how tiresome and dull her time there was. It seemed that her years spent in England had qualified her only to pore over endless newspaper advertisements, searching for faint clues to the state of British morale. It was nothing to compare to the excitement of his position with OKW.…
He hardly seemed to have been listening. His hand was moving lower now, below her belly. He set his drink aside and dropped his cigarette into it, creating a sibilant hiss.
“Why must we talk of these things?” he murmured. “Why must we waste our time together talking of work?”
He was kissing her breasts, then moving down and kissing her belly. She set her own drink aside. Lay her head back on the pillow, closing her eyes.
She had introduced the concept, at least, of being dissatisfied with her work at the Rundfunk. Now she would let his own mind worry at the subject for a while. Deep down, he must want more than just a title; he must. Deep down, he must want justice.
She made herself lie still and accept the man’s favors.
You must tread softly.
LEIPZIGER STRASSE
William Hobbs stood by the window, watching.
In the course of ten minutes, he saw a few pedestrians, scurrying like mice; a few black-suited SS men strolling as if they owned the sidewalk—which in a way they did—and two prostitutes. The prossies were out early tonight, Hobbs thought. But then, the prossies had been coming out early more and more often lately. Enforced blackouts were like gold to whores and thieves.
He kept watching as twilight settled across the city. The twilight was preternaturally clear, partially as a result of the blackout, with a plump alabaster moon materializing overhead. Under Hobbs’ gaze, the evening crowd melted into the streets, jacketed and coifed, as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The sounds of conversation and occasionally even laughter drifted on the night air. They were determined to have fun, he thought, for as long as it was humanly possible. And for that he couldn’t blame them—he felt in dire need of a drink or two himself.
He had not left this flat for twenty-three days now.
For the past twenty-four hours, he had been sharing it with a corpse.
After looking out the window for another moment, he turned and crossed the apartment, moving with a slight limp. He opened the icebox and crouched in front of it. His stomach executed a slow, queasy roll. He closed the icebox again and crossed back to the window. He couldn’t eat—not with Borg in the room.
Borg lay near the bookcase, on his back, with one hand flung over his head like a man sunbathing on a beach. The pool of blood beneath him had coagulated during the course of the day, turning a rich, organic brown.
Hobbs returned to looking out the window. His hazel eyes, a shade lighter than his hair, moved back and forth in steady arcs. There was nobody watching the apartment from the street. He knew this for a fact because he had spent the past week making sure of it. For the first two weeks of his imprisonment—for imprisonment was what it was, regardless of what the Nazis chose to call it—a Gestapo agent had kept an eye on the apartment from the far street corner. As of nine days ago, however, the man had vanished. Hagen had evidently decided that Hobbs was secure enough under Borg’s vigilant eye.
Hobbs kept looking for watchers anyway. As soon as full dark had fallen, he would make his bid for freedom, and he had no desire to end up in the basement of Prinz Albrecht Strasse, in the hands of the Gestapo interrogators.
He raised one finger to his mouth and began to nibble on the ragged cuticle.
He should have gone last night—immediately after killing Borg.
But he had lost his nerve. He had dawdled for too long, under the pretense of thinking it through from every angle, and by the time he had found his courage, the sun had been rising. So he had been forced to wait through another day, although he had been extremely conscious, painfully conscious, of the time slipping away.
Three months had passed since he had sent the letter to the cover address in Lisbon—to a sister, according to the story he had told Hagen, back in the days when they had still been playing nice with each other. The letter had contained n
o codes, and no secret messages; the simple fact of its dispatch had been the trigger for the next phase of the operation. Once the letter had arrived, Eva would be activated. And so by now Hobbs should have liberated himself, so that he would be able to shoulder his part of the burden: watching her back and, using the radio transmitter in the possession of his contact family, arranging the extraction.
But it had taken him nine days, after the Gestapo had stopped watching the flat, to summon the courage to kill Borg. It was not an easy thing, killing a man. Oldfield had warned him of that—and yet despite the warning, Hobbs had underestimated the difficulty involved.
Perhaps he was already too late. Perhaps Eva had already fallen into their clutches. Perhaps this was all for nothing.
Full dark descended in dribs and drabs; lights blazed to life behind blackout shades. Hobbs’ eyes continued following the pedestrians as they came onto the streets. A couple walking arm in arm. An older gentleman with a bristly, fashionable Hitler mustache. A group of young women, doing their best to look glamorous without makeup or expensive clothes. They made him think of Eva; and that led his mind to the German named Teichmann.
If not for Teichmann, Hobbs would not have found himself in this room in Berlin with a dead man.
Teichmann, a double agent who had been working for both the British and the Germans, had been the one who had revealed that the entire official network of MI6 agents in Germany had been compromised—by Teichmann himself. By now, the man would have hanged for it. Hobbs hoped it had not been a clean hanging. Sometimes, he knew, the neck did not break immediately. Sometimes it took hours to die: a slow, painful strangulation.
He hoped the man had suffered.
Eva, however, had not been given up by Teichmann; for she had been part of a separate network, a set of sleeper agents who numbered only six. Oldfield’s own show, kept separate from the rest of MI6 operations. British Intelligence was not above a few power games of their own. Nothing to compare with the endless machinations of Hitler’s intelligence services, from what Hobbs had gathered during his time at the SD villa; Oldfield and his peers only had to worry about their careers and their reputations, not their lives. But careers and reputations were lives, in the hoary old halls of Whitehall, and so games were played, secrets kept. And it was a good thing, he supposed. Had things been different—had the old boffins around Leconfield House played all their cards above the board—then Eva would not be free at this moment. She would have been just another domino in the official MI6 network, a network that had come tumbling gloriously down.
But Eva had not been in contact with the British, during her time in Germany. She had been kept apart, waiting for her activation signal to come over the BBC, at which point she would rendezvous with her contact at a prearranged place, at a prearranged time.
The operation had come together over three long days spent at Whitehall.
Hobbs and Oldfield had devised the plan together. They would activate Eva and send her after the OKW clerk, Klinger. The need for intelligence concerning the invasion had, by then, become undeniable. Teichmann’s revelation had closed off all the usual avenues. But Eva, and the few like her, were the aces up Oldfield’s sleeve.
Yet by sending Eva to meet with her contact they would risk sending her into Canaris’ hands. For her contact, a man named Waldoff, may have been given up by Teichmann. From England, there was simply no way of knowing.
They had decided to activate Eva anyway. Their options had been limited, and time was trickling away. When spring came, so would the invasion. But they would send another agent into Germany, to lend her a helping hand. And if Eva could get her information from Klinger, then they would sweep her out, right under Canaris’ nose.
Oldfield, of course, had not wanted to make Hobbs the second agent.
His reasoning had been persuasive. He had produced several photographs of Hobbs and Eva together, taken during their long courtship around London. If MI6 had the photographs, Oldfield had said, then the Nazis might have similar ones. It was entirely possible that they would make the connection between Hobbs and Eva, and his attempts to reach her would be frustrated.
Hobbs had argued back with convincing reasons of his own. He had already been established as a traitor in the eyes of Hagen. He could suggest a kidnapping, saying that he was ready to go over to the other side for good. The method of getting into Germany, therefore, would be taken care of. Once he had arrived, Oldfield would wait for four weeks after receiving the letter, to give Hobbs time to emancipate himself, and would then activate Eva. The extraction would be confirmed via a radio message sent by Gehl. Hobbs would make contact. And then they would disappear—riding off together into the sunset, the way he had pictured it, like the heroes at the end of a Hollywood flick.
The argument had gone back and forth. It would be less risky, Oldfield had insisted, to use another agent. To parachute him in. To keep the personal and the professional separated.
Hobbs had countered that Eva would be less likely to trust a stranger who showed up on her doorstep. Hobbs, on the other hand, she knew. Hobbs, she trusted.
Oldfield had raised his eyebrows. Does she trust you, William?
He had convinced the man that she did.
But now he felt less certain. Why, after all, should she have trusted him? He had used her—seduced her, recruited her, and sent her away.
He quirked his lips sourly. There was no use in thinking it to death.
It was time to go.
But he looked out the window for yet another moment, dallying. The Gehl family was in Wilmersdorf, not so far from this very spot. But Hobbs had no papers, no weapon except the knife with which he had killed Borg. So the journey tonight promised to be dangerous. He was not anxious to undertake it. But he was even less anxious to stay here with Borg.
Nothing to be gained by wasting more time, he thought. The sun had vanished completely now. The stars had come out, glittering like diamonds.
He crossed the room for a final time, stepped gingerly over Borg, and removed his trench coat from the closet. He took a last moment to bolster his faltering courage, and went.
As soon as he was in the street, a strange thing happened: He considered stopping into a beer hall for a drink.
The idea was ludicrous. He did not even have false papers with which to protect himself. But as he walked, surrounded by jovial Berliners, keeping one eye peeled for a taxi, the idea gained a certain mad appeal. He had not had a drink for weeks. He was not accustomed to going weeks without a drink. One drink—what could it hurt?
He heard Oldfield speaking, from somewhere deep in the recesses of memory:
Agents may go days, weeks, months, or even years in complete or near-complete isolation. It is not uncommon for agents in such a situation to feel strange, self-destructive tendencies. Our business is based on deception, and the human mind does not take kindly to that. There is nothing wrong with feeling the urge to confess everything to the nearest friendly ear. But there is something very much wrong, of course, with acting on that impulse.
Was that the urge he felt now—to find some innocent German in some bar and confess everything? He supposed it was. He had committed a murder, after all. He had taken a man’s life. He had crossed a line. The need to confess was strong.
Or perhaps he only wanted a drink.
You think too much, he thought.
Stop thinking. Keep moving.
He kept moving.
The people around him were loud, boisterous, drunk. During the days, they walked on eggshells, these Germans. Would the war come, as it seemed it must? Or would the English, at the last possible instant, sue for peace? At night, their tension was released; they drank, danced, brawled, and celebrated as if the world itself was ending. The beer halls and cafés were doing a thriving business behind their new blackout shades.
Litter crackled under his feet as he walked—discarded newspaper, windswept trash, an occasional crumpled leaflet. The British confetti campaign had
begun on the very day that war had been declared. Thirteen tons of propaganda had landed in Germany on that first night alone. Hobbs and Borg had watched later deluges together from the apartment window. At one point, Borg had brought a leaflet up to the flat, and they’d shared a laugh over it. The rhetoric was simple and to the point. Your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries, and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win.
A taxi was drifting toward him. He raised a hand and it immediately pulled over to the curb. He slid into the backseat and opened his mouth to state his destination—
—and then paused.
An idea had just occurred to him.
He would go to Eva’s flat right now, at this very moment. He knew her address. He would go to her and make his plea, demanding that she give him another chance. He had been rehearsing the words over and over in his mind, during his time locked in the apartment with Borg. It would be a relief to finally say them.
But it would be better, no doubt, to stick to the plan. To visit his contact family in Wilmersdorf, get set up with false papers, and arrange the extraction. In the long run, it would improve his chances—both his and Eva’s.
Best to stick with the plan, he thought again. He was far enough behind schedule that another twenty-four hours wouldn’t make much of a difference. He would go to Wilmersdorf tonight, and visit Eva tomorrow.
The words he wanted to say to her would still be there tomorrow.
“Hohenzollerndamm,” he told the driver blithely. “Wilmersdorf.”
LAKE WANNSEE
The staff car drifted to a stop in front of the villa; a single passenger emerged from the backseat.
He was a slender man, lithe and compact, with a widow’s peak just beginning to gray around the temples. His hooded, restless eyes promptly scanned the entire area—lake, trees, porch, bristly frost-speckled lawn—in one long, smooth sweep.
The man’s name was Frick, and his eyes had not been so restless a few months before. But since then he had spent time in Poland as commander of an Einsatzgruppen squad, following behind the regular army and rounding up Jews for deportation to the ghetto, and now his eyes never stopped moving.
