A Game of Spies

by John Altman

  Frau Ilgner had promised her husband, before he had gone off to fight the war, that she would undertake this particular task without complaint. She still brought the meals over on Wednesdays and Sundays, like clockwork, but lately she had offered the plates with a smile so poorly manufactured that it seemed closer to a sneer. She despised Brandt, and he thought that he had a fairly good idea of why this might be so. When Brandt died, his house would become the property of the Ilgners; he had never sired an heir, and the families had been close for generations. But Brandt held on—and on, and on. To Frau Ilgner, his continuing good health must have been a source of frustration. He took endless pleasure in providing this particular aggravation. On the day of his death, he would leave behind few regrets, but one of them would be the knowledge that Frau Ilgner had finally gotten her way.

  Katie, a pretty girl of twelve with straw-blond hair that cascaded down her back, was so deeply immersed in her book that she didn’t glance up until Brandt had come within a few feet of her. When she did raise her eyes, her face tightened with nervousness.

  “Herr Brandt,” she said. “Forgive me, sir. I didn’t realize I had …”

  She looked around, trying to realize what mistake she had made.

  Brandt felt himself smiling. Somehow he had become the short-tempered old man of Gothmund, the man whom the children laughed about in private and tried to avoid in public. He wondered what nicknames they had for him. He wondered if there was any point in trying to explain to this girl that he had once been a child himself, that life had a way of making one’s face sour, and that, inside, he was still just the same as she was—wanting nothing more than to sit in front of the harbor and read his books or work on his paintings, without fear of harassment.

  “Katie,” he said. “Don’t you look pretty this morning. What are you reading, there?”

  She shrugged, and tilted the cover to show him. The title was The Zaniest Summer, by Cissy van Marxveldt. “Papa sent it to me,” she said.

  “Isn’t that nice. How is it?”

  She shrugged again. “Boring.”

  “Well, it’s good to read anyway. Reading keeps the mind sharp. Even at my age.”

  “Especially at your age,” she said, seemingly without guile.

  His smile faded. “Yes,” he said. “Especially at my age.”

  “Are you looking for your cousin? She’s inside, having breakfast with Aunt Gerda.”

  “My … cousin?”

  Katie nodded toward her aunt’s house. “She was knocking on your door for ten minutes.”

  Brandt licked his lips. “She was, was she?”

  “Aunt Gerda says you must not have known she was arriving today. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone on your walk.”

  “Well,” Brandt said. “She is a bit early. Excuse me, Katie, please.”

  He approached the Ilgner house, his blood hissing through his veins with nervousness. Somehow he had known that his visitor would be arriving today. But he had not expected a woman.

  He knocked and then waited. After a moment, the door opened and Frau Ilgner was there, looking at him archly.

  “Herr Brandt,” she said. “It’s not enough for me to keep you supplied with meals, I suppose. It’s also my job to look after your cousins, I suppose. Because I don’t have enough to keep myself busy, I suppose, without looking after you at every turn.”

  Brandt only hung his head, and looked past Frau Ilgner to the woman sitting at the breakfast table.

  The woman was young—around twenty, he guessed, although he had some trouble judging the ages of young people these days—and pretty, in an unspectacular way, with shoulder-length auburn hair and the fair complexion of a city-dweller. Their eyes met; then she stood, offering a slight curtsy.

  “Thomas,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

  She came around the table to embrace him. As her hands closed around his back, she whispered: “Greta.”

  “Greta,” he said. “How wonderful to see you.”

  “Thank you so much for inviting me. I thought I’d be all right in the city, with Hans gone; but after spending a week by myself, I thought I was losing my mind.”

  Frau Ilgner was watching them closely.

  “You’ve grown,” Brandt said. “A young woman now. The time passes so quickly.”

  “It does. But you look well, Thomas. Very well.”

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” Frau Ilgner said, “and join us for breakfast?”

  “Thank you, Frau Ilgner. But we’ve got too much to catch up on for that. We haven’t seen each other for … How long has it been?”

  “Three years,” Eva said.

  “Three years! But thank you anyway, Frau Ilgner. Your generosity is most commendable. And thank you for looking after my cousin. The truth is, I wasn’t expecting her quite so early.”

  “We made good time,” Eva said. “The trains are running so well these days. And do you know, there’s almost no crime at all left in Berlin? It’s just remarkable.”

  “Yes—yes. Well, come along. Do you have any luggage?”

  Eva nodded toward a single case resting inside the door. Then she turned to Frau Ilgner. “Thank you so much for your hospitality,” she said. “It’s so nice to know that people are still friendly, once you get outside of the city.”

  “How long will you be with us?” Frau Ilgner asked.

  “Just for a few days,” Eva said airily. “At some point, I’ll need to get back to Berlin. My job, you know, won’t wait forever. But since Hans went off, the loneliness took me by surprise. It was so kind of Thomas to extend his invitation.…”

  “Then I’ll see you again.”

  “I hope so.” Eva turned back to Thomas and crooked an arm. “Shall we?”

  Frau Ilgner watched as they left the house. She kept looking after them for a long minute, her face expressionless. Then she turned away, and began to clear the table.

  Eva had achieved such divine distance from reality that she was—against all reason, against all sanity—actually enjoying herself.

  When one heard enough bad news, she thought, one slipped away from confronting it. So she had been found out? So she needed to run to an unknown place, to trust a stranger with her life? Why, what fun. At first she hadn’t been able to achieve such divine distance. At first—during the night at the rooming house, and all through the long night just passed—she had been taking things all too seriously.

  But now she saw things for what they were: a game, a play. All fun, after a fashion. She had found her own theater, here in this remote seaside town. Brandt’s small cottage on the Fischerweg looked like a stage set, all deep shadows and too bright colors. She had the feeling that if she could step around a wall quickly enough she would find nothing behind it. It was a façade, constructed entirely for her benefit.

  But the fisherman was worried.

  He sat at the splintery table and talked—talked endlessly. What had she told the neighbor? The neighbor would be watching them. How long did she plan on staying? How had she gotten here? Were there others coming as well? How many cousins was he expected to have? Noyce had not thought this through, he said. But Noyce was miles away, oceans away, and so he wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences. Brandt would be the one to suffer the consequences. Had Noyce made any plan at all?

  Eva, who hadn’t the faintest idea who Noyce might have been, heard the fisherman out and then answered his questions to the best of her ability. Beneath it all she wanted to reassure him: it was only a game, only a play. He should relax and learn to enjoy it, the way she had.

  “I told her we’re second cousins. My mother’s mother, from Leipzig, was your mother’s sister.”

  “My mother didn’t have a sister,” Brandt said.

  “Does Frau Ilgner know that?”

  Brandt shook his head—a gesture of confusion, not an answer.

  “I’ll be gone in a few days,” Eva said. “And yes, someone is meant to meet me here. But I’m not certain
if he …”

  She trailed off. She was not certain if Hobbs had managed to escape after passing her the message, she had been about to say. But it did not seem prudent to tell the old man any more than she needed to. The play into which she had stumbled, after all, wasn’t a romance. It was more like a masquerade ball. And when the masks came off, who knew what faces would be revealed?

  “I’m not certain if he’ll make it,” she finished, and left it at that.

  Brandt looked at her with his rheumy eyes, then puffed out a coil of smoke. “And how did you get here? Railroad, as you said?”

  “No. I had a car.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I left it outside of town. Don’t worry. They won’t be able to trace it.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I would say so. It’s at the bottom of a pond.”

  He smoked his pipe again, then resumed talking.

  During her time in his home, he said, she was to keep a low profile. Damage had already been done by letting Frau Ilgner see her, but that was nobody’s fault but his own. He had not been here to meet her. From now on, however, she was to behave like a U-boat—the vernacular for refugees on the run from the Nazis. She would not leave the house at all until she was leaving for good. She would sleep in the bedroom; he would bring out his old pallet for himself and lay it down here, by the fireplace. If anybody asked, they would stay with the story she had told Ilgner. She was a cousin from Berlin, who had become unexpectedly lonely when her husband had gone off to join the service. She had written Brandt a letter, and he had invited her to come spend a few days in Gothmund. Only to get over the worst of it. She had a job, after all, and they would soon expect her back. And beyond that she was to say nothing.

  Eva listened, nodding, still marveling at the divine distance she had achieved.

  Thank goodness, she thought, that none of this was real.

  9

  MECKLENBURG

  The bait and switch had failed.

  Hobbs knew this for a fact when he came back to the tree with the two flat rocks on either side. This was the landmark he had chosen for himself: the tallest tree in the area, visible from a good distance. If his trick had worked, then there would have been only three sets of tracks around the tree, the ones he had left on his first and second passes and the ones left by his pursuers. But instead he counted four sets. So they had kept his trail, although he had given them bait clear as day—his own footprints heading off through a stretch of muddy earth—and then given them the switch.

  He stared at the ground for a long moment. There seemed to be twelve men following him. That was too many by half. Six he could handle—with a good perch to fire from, if he could make certain the sun was behind him. But twelve?

  He was beginning to feel quite afraid.

  If the bait and switch had failed, then they had a woodsman among them. Which meant that he would need to come up with a better trick.

  But he didn’t have a better trick.

  After staring, he started to move again.

  For the first few hours of the chase, when night had still lain across the land, he had not felt especially afraid. He had been high on adrenaline, and optimistic about his chances of shaking the pursuit easily. They were townsfolk, after all, whereas he had spent countless hours in the woods around Surrey during his youth. But now his confidence was flagging. The townsfolk were better trackers than he had assumed. And the leg, which he had barely noticed during the night, had started to give him a fair bit of trouble. For the past hour, he had been using the Enfield as a cane, moving in a clumsy shuffle-step designed to keep as much weight as possible on the rifle.

  Yet he still felt a flicker of optimism. This was partly due to the fact that, with the rising of the sun, he had been able to pin down his position. He had studied maps before coming to Germany and now he realized that the Kahr woman had told the truth when she had identified her hometown as Wismar. That meant that he was not so far from Gothmund—which meant that all was not yet lost.

  The optimism was also partly due to the Enfield. With the Enfield, he was far from helpless. But a dozen men? Too many.

  He would need to wear them down.

  The damned leg, he thought. If not for the leg, he could have left them behind by now with sheer speed. But instead he needed to use his brain, and using his brain had never been his strong suit. So what now?

  Persistence, of course. During his youth, Hobbs had learned the value of persistence. People rarely had quite as much resistance as they thought they did. And the men following him had less invested in the chase than Hobbs himself.

  The first bait and switch had failed. So he would try another.

  He moved halfway across a clearing and then carefully retraced his steps. Once he had reached the field’s edge, he struck off in a new direction.

  He was not tired. He couldn’t be tired—not yet, not until there were fewer of them. So he was not.

  And his leg was not throbbing like a low bass note from a string that never stopped vibrating. He was not famished; his stomach was not trying to eat itself. He was not terrified beyond all rationality. He couldn’t be these things, or he would have no chance. And so he was not.

  Every few minutes, he doubled back. The old tricks, cominng from instinct now more than anything else. He wondered where Eva was, if she had managed to escape from Berlin. Why had they been watching her, instead of arresting her? Because they didn’t want to arrest her. They wanted her free. As bait? Perhaps.

  His mind was not running in a thousand directions at once. He was not on the verge of delirium. His leg was not bleeding again, no matter what his eyes told him.

  He misplaced his foot and slipped down into a patch of mud.

  Then came to his feet again, growling with fear and frustration. A stitch in his side welled, gave him a few moments of intense pain, and then subsided. He backtracked again. If he stayed within a few miles of town, then his pursuers’ desire to give up and go home would be that much stronger. Play on their own weakness. Bait and switch.

  Eva was the bait—but what was the switch?

  He was coming back, once again, to the tree with the two flat rocks. Please, he thought, let them have given up. Please let there be no fresh tracks by the tree.

  But there were. Fewer fresh tracks—but fresh tracks nevertheless.

  As he looked at them, the last of his optimism faded. He was left feeling empty, weak, hungry, and very afraid.

  Don’t give up now, he thought.

  No. Because there were fewer tracks. He counted eight, although the elaborate crisscrossing made it difficult to be certain. If he could find the reserves to keep going awhile longer, long enough to find a good perch, to let the sun crest and then drop a bit lower in the sky …

  Why bother? He was finished. He just hadn’t admitted it to himself yet.

  For several moments, he let the pessimism flood through him. Then he looked up at the sun, still climbing toward its midday apex. Finished or not, he would do his best to see this through. Because there was something else at stake, wasn’t there? He couldn’t quite pin it down, but there was something. Something about Eva …

  A rustling sound caught his attention. In a flash, the rifle was off the ground, trained in the direction of the trees.

  The deer who emerged looked at him curiously, then turned and vanished with a flick of its tail.

  Hobbs planted the Enfield back on the ground and leaned his full weight on it. He considered smoking a cigarette and decided to save them. A cigarette would make a fine reward, if and when he discouraged the last of the men who had followed him from Wismar.

  He struck off again, trying to ignore the fact that his leg was rapidly passing beyond the point of pain, to numbness.

  BAYSWATER, LONDON

  Arthur Deacon looked up from his comic strip. “Mary,” he called. “It’s starting.”

  Lord Haw-Haw repeated his greeting—thanks to his twang, it came out “Jarma
ny calling, Jarmany calling”—and then launched into a spirited condemnation of the Jewish Communists, backed, as always in his broadcasts, by shadowy Jewish international financiers. Deacon returned his attention to the Daily Mirror in his lap. He finished reading his comic strip, paged past an article that failed to catch his interest—deadly serious David Walker—and spent a few moments admiring a photograph of four blank-faced showgirls standing in line. Lovely young ladies, despite their vacant expressions. Ah, if he had still been a single man …

  Then he realized that Mary had not yet come into the study.

  “Mary,” he called again. “You’re missing it.”

  He set the paper down and went to check on her.

  He had expected she’d be tending to the baby; but as he stepped into the bedroom, he saw that Hugh was in his crib, sound asleep. Mary was sitting before her vanity, going through a tray of cosmetics. He went to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “You’re wound tighter than a tourniquet,” he said. “Why don’t—”

  “Shush,” she said crisply. “You’ll wake Hugh.”

  He stopped rubbing. After few moments, his hands started to move again, tentatively.

  “Do you know,” he said, “I thought we could go out on the town tonight. Give your mother a bell, see if she’ll come watch the old ankle-biter—”

  Mary reached up and pushed his hands off her shoulders.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Deacon said.

  “Bright boy.”

  “Good. Very good. Brilliant.”

  He went back to the study, fell into his chair with a flounce, and picked up the newspaper again. He stared at it without seeing. The two rooms separating him from his wife, in reality the length of a single railroad car, felt only slightly smaller than all of King’s Cross Station.

  She was angry, of course. And for that he couldn’t blame her.

  When Mary had finally agreed to marry him—on his fourth proposal, by which time he had been desperate—her affirmative had been dependent on a number of conditions. Deacon had agreed to the bulk of them without arguing. He could go without whiskey, late nights, and tobacco, if that was what it took to win her hand. He would even have sworn off food and water, he sometimes thought, if she had insisted on it. For when he had first seen her, it had been like something out of a storybook. For the first time in his twenty-two years, life had suddenly made sense.