I stepped out into the street, forgetting traffic went in the opposite direction of America. A taxicab swerved to avoid hitting us. I turned like a top, thinking I might push Fritz into the taxi’s path, but it had already gone its way.
We came to Grosvenor Square, which some people were calling “Little America,” because of the American Embassy and all the hub-bub caused by the American Armed Forces streaming into England. If I had any hope of escaping, this was going to be the place. We passed an American woman dressed in an army uniform. I winked. She winked back and passed on, giggling.
We were almost to the far side of the park when I spotted Ambassador John G. Winant himself, walking toward us on his way to the embassy. I recognized him from the cover of Time magazine. He was wearing a camel-hair coat, with a black homburg on his head. His owl shaped spectacles were same as Roosevelt’s. The Ambassador was carrying a small aluminum suitcase that contained state secrets. No kidding: it was chained to his wrist. I glanced past him and saw we were about to leave the square. John G. was my last hope.
“Help!” I shouted. “I’m a hostage of the Nazis!”
Ambassador Winant heard my cry. Our eyes met across a bench.
Fritz laughed like a loon and patted me on the back. He whispered, “Do that again and I will shoot both this man and you.”
Did I want the American Ambassador’s blood on my hands? In a time of war? And more to the point, did I want a bullet lodged in my own skull? I looked into the Ambassador’s eyes and shrugged my shoulders, like it was all a big lark. He had no idea what that cost me. My consolation was knowing that when he put two and two together, he’d recommend me for a posthumous Medal of Honor. It was the least he could do.
“Not funny, young man,” said the Ambassador, as he strolled on by. I wanted to start blubbering.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SIGN READ CULROSS STREET, just like on the note in Fritz’s stomach. It was a two story house—what the British call a mews house, because it’s where they kept cows at one time. We were right near Hyde Park—the Central Park of London—where they’d once grazed cattle. Mews houses were simpler than the fancy mansions they stand next to. This one had two garage doors at the ground level, both painted green. There wasn’t a Nazi swastika flag flying from the roof, like you find in Paris. Fritz looked into the glass windows on the garage door. I took a peek myself. Inside was an open-topped Crossley: a British car. And piles of cardboard boxes.
He shoved me to a door and made me ring the buzzer. No one answered. Maybe they were still sleeping. Fritz leaned over, pressed the muzzle of his Lugar to the buzzer and held it there. I heard a window sash slide open above us. Both me and Fritz looked up.
An old woman with curlers in her hair was leaning out of the window so she could get a good look at us. She was wrapped in a pink chenille robe. Nazis will stoop to any level to disguise themselves. Fritz took a step backwards, so the secret agent could see him clearly.
“Peter!” she shouted. “Oh, my Lord!” She slammed the window shut. I could’ve sworn she spoke like the queen.
I looked at Fritz, “Peter, you rotten liar.” Just to annoy him, I was going to keep calling him Fritz.
The latch was slid open and there she stood, not even five-feet tall. I bet she was strong though, her arms were as thick as a prize-fighter’s. “Come in!” she whispered, “Quickly now.” She shut the door behind us, put a key in the lock, turned it, and then placed it back in her robe pocket. She grabbed Fritz, smooching him all over his pimply face.
Very odd behavior for a secret agent, I thought.
Fritz hugged the lady to him, rested his head on her shoulder. “Omi,” he said. “My plane was shot down. It was furchtbar. It caught on fire and I baled out. I had nowhere else to hide. Mutter gave me your address. She put it in my boot, just in case.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The lady was Fritz’s grandma.
“And whom might you be?” she asked me.
“I’m the hostage.”
“Dearie me!” she said. “Whatever are we to do?”
“Let me go, that’s what.”
“Nein, Omi!” said Fritz.
The lady was rattled, that’s for sure. She was jerking her head back and forth, her mouth opened wide enough to catch a fly.
“Aiding and abetting a Nazi is punishable by death,” I said, not sure if my facts were straight, but laying it on thick anyway. “Beheading in the Tower of London.”
She put her hands around her neck.
Fritz began speaking to her in rapid fire German, explaining that if they let me go I’d run for the police.
He had that right.
“It’s not the police I’m worried about,” she said to me, in English. “I don’t know if you are aware, but recently a mob of angry Englishmen lynched a downed German airman. You must believe me when I tell you that I’m not a Nazi sympathizer.” She shook her head. “Why, my other two grandsons are serving in the Royal Navy as we speak. It’s just that—” here she started crying—“Peter is my grandson, too. My stupid, misled, foolish grandson, yet my grandson none the less. I won’t have him face an angry lynch mob. Please, stay a moment and we will try and sort out a plan for his surrender. That wicked man has divided my family and wreaked havoc on the world.”
I knew she meant Hitler.
Fritz stood there looking baffled, not getting much of what his grandma said. I had to say, she had me confused too. I’d read stories about the Ku Klux Klan lynching innocent people in Alabama. One photograph gave me the willies, nightmares for months. But Fritz wasn’t innocent, I told myself. He’s a Nazi, right? I took a good look at him: freckles dotted his nose and cheeks. But it was the fuzz above his lip that got to me. And that stupid afghan.
“How old is he anyway?” I asked.
“He’s just turned seventeen,” said his grandmother. “His father is a general in the Luftwaffe and taught him to fly when he was still in knee-breeches. Hermann Göring is a madman—he’d let toddlers fly bombers if they could. Please, I’m begging you. Peter is just a child.”
My eyes were bugging out. “Hermann Göring is his father?”
“No, no,” she said. “You misunderstood me. Peter’s father is only a Flieger-Generalingenieur, not the Reichsmarschall.”
Seventeen wasn’t a child in my book. Heck, twelve wasn’t. Still—Fritz had probably been brainwashed in the Hitler Youth. He wasn’t even drinking age. In America, he’d still be in High School. And I didn’t want anyone hanging from the end of a rope. But on the other hand, I wasn’t going to help him get back in a Messerschmitt. Or a FW-190, for that matter.
We were still standing in the foyer. Fritz was gripping my wrist the whole time, so I couldn’t escape. The grandma was begging me to come upstairs and have a cuppa. “Tell Peter to leave the Lugar downstairs,” I said. My plan was to bolt down when I got the chance and snatch it.
She began pleading with her grandson to do as I wanted. He started to lay the gun on the welcome mat. But he changed his mind and stuck it in his holster, instead. At least it wasn’t aiming for my body. He made me lead the way up the narrow and steep staircase that opened into a warm and cozy parlor. A fire crackled in the grate. The place smelled like fresh baked bread. The grandma headed straight to the fireplace mantel and took a framed photograph in her hands, bringing it to me.
“This is Peter here.” She pointed to a small boy standing next to his mother. He was cute, I had to say: curly blonde hair and a pug nose. She was good at getting the sympathy vote.
Fritz looked exhausted. He yawned and his eyes rolled around in the sockets. I’d missed another night of sleep, myself. Suddenly, I felt my knees buckling. Fritz took a seat in an upholstered recliner. He leaned back, making the footrest pop up and the back lay down. The minute he was horizontal, he conked out. I wasn’t feeling sorry for him exactly, but he’d had a rough night—flying all the way from Germany, a dogfight with one of the RAF’s top ace pilots, bailing out of a fi
ery plane, then an all night escape across England. I was falling asleep just thinking about it.
“I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll have a cuppa,” whispered Fritz’s grandma, pointing me to the kitchen.
“No thank you, ma’am,” I said, mostly because I hated tea. “Get me some rope.” When she backed away with her hand on her heart, I said, “I’m warning you lady. If you don’t do as I say, I’m ratting on you to Winston Churchill. You know what they do to collaborators?” I jumped toward the mantel place and grabbed a poker. No way I wanted to clobber an old lady with curlers in her hair. But look—this was war, not the Boy Scouts.
She pointed toward a wooden box sitting next to the recliner. When I opened the lid I saw dozens of balls of yarn—in a rainbow of colors.
“It’s the best I can do,” she said, “honest to God.”
It would serve Fritz right for tying me up with dish rags. First I removed the Lugar from his holster, checking to see the safety was on. I was planning to wedge it in my waistband and didn’t want it to go off by mistake. I knotted the end of a ball of red wool to the armrest and ran circles around the chair, repeating the move with each ball of yarn in the box, making sure his arms and legs were pinned down good. Before long he looked like one of my sister Mary’s knitting projects. Fritz didn’t even move a pinky finger the whole time.
“Shall we have that cuppa? I do so need it.” Fritz’s grandma was as British as Marmite yeast paste.
We went into the kitchen. A small paraffin heater was warming the room nicely. There were loaves of homemade bread cooling on a rack on an oak table in the center of the room. I preferred Wonder Bread, but I wasn’t complaining. The grandma slobbered marmalade all over a big slab and handed it to me.
“Would you like for me to fry up some bacon and eggs?” she asked. “One of my grandsons is a vegetarian and he gives me his meat rations.”
I should’ve been making a run for it just then. Only I felt like Robinson Crusoe stuck on a deserted island with nothing but bugs to eat, then along comes a ship.
Before I knew it, a nice breakfast was laid out in front of me. In no time flat I was licking egg yolk from the plate. I knew it wasn’t proper table manners—my ma wouldn’t like it—only I had no idea when my next meal would be. I put away a whole loaf of bread and most of the jar of orange ginger marmalade. Meanwhile, Fritz’s grandma went on a yarn:
“My husband worked for the Foreign Service, and we were assigned to Berlin. This was before the Great War, mind you. Gerard was thrilled—Gerard was my husband, my late husband. Relations with Germany were in a precarious state at the time, simply dreadful, with that Kaiser Wilhelm flashing his sword left and right.”
“Was he really?”
“Just a figure of speech,” she said. “For an ambitious man in the Foreign Service, it was a chance to shine. And we loved Berlin—such old world charm. We went to oodles of social gatherings. It was all part of the job, you see. Our daughter was at the age when young girls beginning courting. We couldn’t refuse her when she wanted to go to parties. If we had known what was coming around the bend, we would have shipped her home. But fools that we were, we watched as she threw herself at a handsome young pilot of the German Luftwaffe. Hans is his name. He came from such a good family—practically royalty—and we were all taken in by his good looks and pitch perfect manners. Why, he’d bow deeply whenever he saw me—made me feel like the queen. But he was a snake in the grass. Before we knew it, our Carolyn was in the family way.”
She stopped short for some reason. “What kind of snake?” I asked.
“Just another figure of speech—all right, a boa constrictor, that’s what he was. Is. They were married just as we were ordered to return home. Then the war: the Great War—that dreadful bloodbath. It all started as a family squabble, if you want my opinion.”
I asked her to elaborate. I’d always loved military history. That’s when I found out the Kaiser was the grandson of Queen Victoria, if you can believe it. And the queen’s husband was German and so was her mother. According to Fritz’s grandmother, the first war with Germany started because the Kaiser was jealous of King Edward, his cousin, and decided he wanted control of the North Sea, where the Royal Navy had supremacy ever since Lord Nelson crushed the French back in 18-something. It sounded like two spoiled kids playing with tin soldiers. And yet millions of people died. I’d once met a Frenchman up on top of the Eiffel Tower, whose lungs were damaged by mustard gas in the Battle of Ypres. He wasn’t happy about the Nazi flag hanging from the steel beams all these years later.
“My son-in-law, Hans, became an ace and a hero in Germany during that war. Carolyn fell pregnant again with our second grandchild while the war was still raging.”
“Fritz?”
“No. They named him Wilhelm, after the Kaiser.” She paused for a minute to stack dirty plates in the sink. “We weren’t even able to meet our grandsons until after the Armistice. Peter arrived after the war.” She counted on her fingers, then said, “1926. I went over for his birth. That might account for the sweet spot I have for the lad.”
She looked toward the parlor. I’d had my eye and ear on Fritz the whole time. We could hear his snores. The grandma continued with her tale of woe.
“By then our two nations were friends again, the Kaiser dethroned. Everyone hoped that Germany would become a parliamentary democracy, like Britain or your America. No one knew then that Adolf Hitler was waiting in the wings: a monster a million times worse than the Kaiser.”
“So you knew Fritz—I mean Peter—was flying for the Luftwaffe?”
“I feared as much. He’d always been keen on airplanes. There was a mobile hanging over his crib—little Red Baron biplanes twirling around in circles. I prayed this war would be over before he was old enough to join up. Obviously, my prayers went unanswered.”
I asked who she’d prayed to, and she gave a vague answer. I suggested she try Saint Simon of Cyrene next time. Then I got back on track. “Where’s your telephone?” I asked. While she’d been telling her story, I’d decided to call the base and talk to Jack. He’d know just how to get us out of this mess.
“I haven’t one, I’m afraid,” she said.
Just in case she was holding out on me, I scoped the place. No telephone.
“There’s a telephone booth at the corner,” she said. “What is your strategy?”
She agreed that calling the RAF was a good move. She said, “We British have a policy of never firing upon an enemy airman while one is parachuting from his plane, nor once he’s on the ground. It’s part of the RAF code of honor. I’m less certain of the police or Home Guard, though. Everyone’s touchy since the Blitz. Why, if I saw a Nazi in London I might be persuaded to act rashly myself.” She took a deep breath and started tearing up. “Now my imbecilic grandson—he’s a different story. All I want to do is give him a good thrashing and send him to bed without supper.”
“He was shot down escorting a bombing raid on a naval and RAF base. They dropped bombs on a hospital.”
“Oh, good gracious. I can’t bare it. My own flesh and blood!”
“And he tortured a puppy.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. If I went to the pay phone myself, she might help Fritz escape. If I sent her to make the call, she might claim that she called when she hadn’t. I rubbed my forehead, stimulating my brain.
“Now, listen up,” I said. “You call my brother. I’ll write down the information for the operator. If he’s not there, ask for Squadron Leader Kennard. And if he’s not there, talk to a WAAF named Geraldine Noble. And just so’s I know you’re not pulling a fast one, ask them for the name of the squadron mascot. Got that?”
“Squadron mascot—Squadron Leader Kennard—WAAF named Geraldine Noble,” she said.
“And ask for the squadron leader’s first name.” I wasn’t taking chances.
“Very well, if you insist. But you must see I want this more than you, child. For starters, I’d like nothing better than to dep
rive the Luftwaffe of a pilot. And do you imagine for a second I want my Peter killed in a daredevil battle with the RAF? The best thing is for that boy to sit out the war in a prisoner camp, and if I can do anything towards that goal I shall do so forthwith.” She shoved a pencil and a pad of paper toward me and I wrote down Jack’s name and airfield.
“And tell my brother to get here as fast as he can. Tell him to fly his Spitfire and land in Hyde Park if he has to.”
“It might not be safe to land a Spitfire in the park. People are often found strolling there.”
“He’ll figure something out,” I said.
She wanted to take the curlers out of her hair and make up her face before she left. I patted the Lugar and told her to get moving. At any minute, Fritz might rise all chirpy and I was in no shape to whoop a 17-year old.
“Oh, my!” she said, wrapping a scarf around her head, biting her lips to get color into them, and putting a Macintosh over her nightgown. Then she placed a pocketbook over her wrist, first checking to see she had enough change for the phone. Leaning out the window, I watched as she walked to the end of the block. A red phone booth stood on the corner. She opened the door and stepped in.
A picture of the king hung from a hook above the recliner where Fritz was passed out. I wished I had a camera right then. The photo would’ve been perfect for a Life magazine article featuring yours truly. Dribble from the corner of Fritz’s mouth wet his blue Luftwaffe shirt. I looked up close and saw sleepers near his tear ducts: those little globs of dried gunk you have to wash off in the morning.
I headed straight for the bookshelves, since books tell you a lot about a person. No surprise here. Not a swashbuckler in sight. On a sideboard I found leaded-crystal decanters. I uncorked one: it smelled like gooseberry wine. Another bottle contained whiskey. Fritz’s grandma was a drinker. Other than that, the only thing interesting was a collection of little ceramic figurines, most of them of children playing instruments: flutes and banjos, violins and drums. The figurines were made in Germany and the children wore lederhosen. They looked so sweet. Who would believe they would grow up to be Stormtroopers?
Message For Hitler Page 14
