The Eighth Dwarf

by Ross Thomas

  “There is no work for a printer in Berlin?”

  “There is always work for a printer in Berlin provided he doesn’t care what he prints. I care.”

  “So you came West.”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Across the canal?”

  “Yes.”

  “You experienced no difficulty.”

  Bodden shrugged. “I got wet. And they shot at me.”

  “Your papers.” Rapke held out his hand.

  Bodden took out the oilskin pouch, untied the string, and handed his papers over. Rapke studied them methodically. At the third document, he looked up at Bodden again. “So. You were in a camp.”

  “Belsen.”

  “How long?”

  “From 1940 on.”

  Rapke went back to his study of the papers. “It must have been hard.”

  “It was no holiday.”

  “You look fit enough now.”

  “I’ve had a lot of outdoor exercise recently.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Clearing rubble. There is a lot of it in Berlin. I helped clean some of it up. Before that I worked as a printer for the Russians. But I decided I’d rather clean up rubble.”

  Rapke started making notes of some of the information contained in Bodden’s papers. “We have nothing here,” he said as he wrote. “Nothing permanent, that is. Only temporary. One of our employees, a printer, was attacked by a band of DP’s two days ago. Poles probably. They stole his bicycle. And broke his leg. He’s an old man, so I’m not sure when he will return. But if you’re interested, you can have his job until he does.”

  “I’m interested,” Bodden said.

  “Very well,” Rapke said, handing back the papers. “You will report to work at seven tomorrow morning. I have some of your particulars here, but you should give the rest to my secretary, Frau Glimm. And be sure to register with the police.”

  “Yes, I will,” Bodden said. “Thank you, Herr Rapke.”

  Rapke didn’t look up from the notes he was still making. Instead, he said, “Please close the door on your way out”

  When Bodden had gone, Rapke reached for the telephone and placed the trunk call himself. It was to a large country house located some fifteen kilometers north and west of Lübeck. A male voice with a British accent answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Colonel Whitlock’s office; Sergeant Lewis speaking.”

  Summoning up what little English he had, Rapke said, “Here is Herr Rapke. I wish with Colonel Whitlock to speak.”

  “One moment, please,” Sergeant Lewis said.

  The Colonel came on speaking an idiomatic, though strongly accented, German, and Rapke let his breath out. Rapke found speaking English a trying business, one which he did so badly that it made him sweat. He was so grateful to be speaking German that he forgot to elaborate conversational niceties he usually employed when talking to the Colonel.

  “He came,” Rapke said. “Early this morning, just as you said.”

  “Calls himself Bodden, does he?” the Colonel said.

  “Yes. Yes. Bodden. Otto Bodden.”

  “And you hired him, of course.”

  “Yes, yes, just as you instructed.”

  “Good work. Rapke. Perhaps he will even turn out to be a competent printer.”

  “Yes, that is to be devoutly wished. Now, is there anything else that I am to do?”

  “Nothing,” the Colonel said. “Absolutely nothing. You will treat him exactly as you would treat any other temporary employee. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, naturally.”

  “And one more thing, Rapke.”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep your mouth shut. Is that also clear?”

  “Yes,” Rapke said. “Most clear.”

  After Rapke had hung up, the Colonel asked Sergeant Lewis to have Captain Richards come in. A few moments later Richards came in, filling his pipe, and sat down in a chair before the Colonel’s desk. The Colonel watched bleakly as Richards went through the ritual of lighting his pipe. The Colonel didn’t mind pipe smoking. He smoked himself, cigarettes; chain-smoked them, in fact. But all that business of filling a pipe and tamping it down and lighting it and then knocking it all out somewhere, it really was a bloody nuisance.

  “Rapke called,” Colonel Whitlock said.

  The Captain nodded and went on with the lighting of his pipe.

  “He’s across,” the Colonel said.

  The Captain nodded again. “Came across this morning about seven. They even shot at him. Or toward him. Three fishermen were there. They saw it.”

  “Rapke hired him.”

  “Good. Does he call himself Bodden?”

  “Mm. Otto Bodden.”

  “I’ll let Hamburg know.”

  “Yes, do that,” the Colonel said. “And you should ask them how long we might have to keep an eye on this fellow before that major of theirs arrives. What’s his name?”

  “Baker-Bates. Gilbert Baker-Bates.”

  “Coming from America, isn’t he?”

  “From Mexico, sir.”

  “Same thing,” the Colonel said.

  7

  If the dwarf hadn’t got drunk in the French Quarter in New Orleans and stayed that way for two days, and if he hadn’t insisted on visiting Monticello in Virginia, and later insisted that Jackson give him a guided tour of the University of Virginia, then they could have made it to Washington in a week instead of the eleven days that it took them. During the tour of the university, Jackson had to listen to Ploscaru lecture learnedly on Thomas Jefferson. The lecture went on so long that they were delayed another day and had to spend the night in Charlottesville.

  They arrived in Washington at a little after noon the next day and managed to get two rooms at the Willard. After unpacking and sending his suit out to be pressed, Jackson went down the hall to Ploscaru’s room.

  The dwarf let Jackson in, went back to the bed, hopped up on it, and sat cross-legged while he examined his four passports. One was French, one was Swiss, one was Canadian, and the last was German. The dwarf tossed that one aside and picked up the one issued by Canada.

  “Canadian?” Ploscaru said.

  Jackson shook his head and looked around for the bourbon. He found it on the dresser. “What would a Canadian be doing in Germany?” he said as he poured himself a drink.

  Ploscaru nodded, put the Canadian passport down, and picked up the Swiss one. “Swiss, I think. A Swiss would have business in Germany. A Swiss would have business anywhere.”

  Jackson picked up the Canadian passport, flipped through it with one hand, and tossed it back onto the bed. “If these things are so perfect, why didn’t you use one of them to go down to Mexico with me?”

  Without looking up from the Swiss passport, Ploscaru said, “Then I would have run into Baker-Bates, wouldn’t I’ve?”

  Jackson stared at him for a moment and then grinned. “You knew he was there, didn’t you?”

  The dwarf only shrugged without looking up.

  “God, how you lie, Nick.”

  “Not really.”

  “You lied about Baker-Bates. You lied about Oppenheimer not speaking English. You lied about his daughter, about her being a spinster.”

  “She is.”

  “She’s not even thirty.”

  “In Germany a woman if not married by twenty-five is a spinster. Eine alte Jungfer. It’s the law, I think. Or was.”

  Jackson went over and stood by the window and looked across Fourteenth Street at the National Press Building. A man directly opposite stood at a window and scratched his head. The man’s coat was off, his tie was loosened, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. After a moment, the man quit scratching his head, turned, and sat down at a desk. Jackson wondered if he was a reporter.

  Jackson turned from the window, found a chair, and sat down in it. “And then there’s Kurt Oppenheimer, the boyish assassin. You lied about him too.” />
  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  “No?”

  “No. What I did was fail to mention everything that I knew about him.” Ploscaru looked over at Jackson and grinned. “You’re getting wet feet, aren’t you?”

  “Cold feet.”

  “Yes, of course. Cold feet.”

  “No. Not exactly,” Jackson said. “It’s just that I haven’t figured out what lies I’m going to tell the Army and the State Department.”

  The dwarf smiled cheerfully. “You’ll think of something.”

  “That’s what bothers me,” Jackson said. “I probably will.”

  Ploscaru had to see the White House first, of course. After that they followed Pennsylvania Avenue down to where it jogged around the Treasury Building and had lunch at the Occidental, where the dwarf was impressed by all the photographs of dead politicians on the walls, if not by the food.

  When they had finished lunch, the dwarf said that he had to see some people. Jackson didn’t ask whom. If he had asked, he was fairly sure he would have been lied to again.

  After the dwarf caught a cab, Jackson went back up to his hotel room and started making phone calls. It was the third call that paid off. The man whom Jackson had phoned was Robert Henry Orr, and when Jackson had first known him he had been in the OSS and everyone had called him Nanny, because it was to Nanny that everyone turned who wanted something fixed. Now Orr was in the State Department, and he didn’t seem at all surprised that Jackson had called.

  “Let me guess, Minor,” Orr said. “You finally decided that you wanted to come home and you called poor old Nanny. How nice.”

  “I didn’t know there was one,” Jackson said. “A home.”

  “Not yet, but give us another year. Meantime, I could put you on to something temporary, perhaps in Japan. That would be nice. Would you like that?”

  “Not much,” Jackson said. “Maybe we could get together for a drink later on.”

  There was a silence, and then Orr said, “You’ve got something going on your own, haven’t you, Minor? Something naughty, I’ll bet.”

  “How about the Willard at five-thirty in the bar?”

  “I’ll be there,” Orr said, and hung up.

  Robert Henry Orr had been a beautiful child in the early twenties—so beautiful, in fact, that he had earned nearly $300,000 in photographic-modeling fees not only in New York but also in London and Paris. Most adults who had been children in the twenties could still remember that beautiful face with its long dark curls grinning out at them from a box of the cereal that then had been the chief competitor of Cream of Wheat. In fact, a large portion of adult America had grown up hating Robert Henry Orr.

  But when he was thirteen, Robert Henry Orr had developed a case of acne, the nasty kind for which nothing can be done other than to let it run its course. It had left him with a splotched and pitted face, which, as soon as he was old enough, he had grown a beard to conceal.

  Although the beard had disguised his ruined face, nothing could conceal his brilliant mind and his mordant wit. Living nicely on the income from the $300,000 he had earned as a child, and which his banker father had prudently invested, Robert Henry Orr became a professional student. He studied at both Harvard and Yale and at the London School of Economics. From there he went to Heidelberg and from Heidelberg to the Sorbonne. After that, he spent a year at the university at Bologna and another two years studying Oriental languages in Tokyo. He never earned a degree anywhere, but in July of 1941 he was either the sixth or seventh man hired by Colonel William J. Donovan for the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which, after a number of twists and turns, was to become the OSS.

  It was in the OSS that Orr had discovered his true calling: he was a born conniver. Although he was given the title of deputy director of personnel, his real job had been to champion the OSS cause against its most implacable enemy, the Washington bureaucracy. For weapons he had used his brilliance, his by now immense girth, his bristling beard, his wicked tongue, and his encyclopedic knowledge about almost everything. He had awed Congress, intimidated the State Department, flummoxed the military, and deceived them all. Most of the strange collection of savants, con men, playboys, freebooters, patriots, socialites, fools, geniuses, college boys, and adventurers who composed the OSS had adored him and called him Nanny. Many of them had needed one.

  Promptly at 5:30 Orr entered the Willard bar and strode across the room to the corner table where Jackson sat. Jackson started to rise and shake hands, but Orr waved him back into his seat. He stood, carefully tailored as always, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped comfortably across his huge belly, as he inspected Jackson for evidence of sloth and decay.

  “You’re older, Minor,” he said, settling into a chair. “You’re older and thin. Far too thin.”

  “Your beard’s gone gray,” Jackson said. “What do you want to drink?”

  Orr said he wanted Scotch, and Jackson ordered two of them from a waiter. When the drinks came, Orr tasted his and said, “Did you ever get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Your medal. They put you in for one, you know. A Bronze Star, I think, for something wonderful and brave that you did in Burma. What thing wonderful and brave did you do in Burma, Minor?”

  “I got jaundice.”

  “Maybe it was for that.”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll have to look into it.”

  “Is that what you’re still doing, looking into things?”

  Orr took another swallow of his drink. “We’re in hiding. That’s mostly what we do all day long. Hide.”

  “They’re after you, huh?”

  “Indeed. You’ve heard, of course.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “They split us up, you know. The War Department got Intelligence and Special Operations. Research and Analysis went to State. Nine hundred of us. You should have heard the screams from the old-line State crowd. Can you imagine Herbert Marcuse in State?”

  “It’s hard. Who else is left?”

  “Well, a few are hanging on by their much-gnawed fingernails overseas. Let’s see, Phil Horton’s in France, Stacey is here, Helms is in Germany, Al Ulmer’s in Austria, Angleton’s in Italy, Seitz is in the Balkans, of course. And—oh, yes—Jim Kellis is in China.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Give us a year and we shall rise again like the Phoenix, God and Joe Stalin willing.”

  “The Communist hordes, huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who’s going to run it—Donovan?”

  Orr shook his head. “Not a chance. I suspect that he’ll be made ambassador to somewhere dreadful and unimportant. Chile or Siam—one of those places. I understand he needs the money. Now tell me, what mischief are you up to, Minor? I do so hope it’s something really nasty.”

  Jackson shrugged. “I just want to get to Germany, and I don’t want anybody to bother me when I get there.”

  Orr stroked his beard and pursed his lips. “Why Germany?”

  “I think I can make some money there.”

  “Legally?”

  “Almost.”

  “Dare I ask doing what?”

  Jackson grinned and said, “A very delicate mission of a most confidential nature for old friends.”

  Orr beamed. “Oh, my, you do have something naughty, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s see, how shall we work it? You could go as Germany’s first postwar tourist. You’d be just in time for the Oktoberfest. But I think we’d better come up with something just a tiny bit more blatant so that the Army can understand it. Let me think.” Orr closed his eyes. When he opened them a few moments later he was smiling. “Next Thursday at Two.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Nobody knows about that.”

  “I do,” Orr said. “But then, I know everything. It really wasn’t that bad a play. I’m surprised it was never produced.”

/>   “I’m not.”

  “But there we have it, you see. Minor Jackson, noted playwright, war hero—I must dig up that medal—and, let’s see, what else have you done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No matter. You have decided to turn your sensitive gaze on postwar Germany and to write, I think, a book; yes, a book about what you have seen with your own eyes. A friend of mine’s in publishing in New York, and I can get a letter down from him with no problem, since it won’t cost him a penny. After that, I’ll simply walk it through. Let me have your passport”

  Jackson took his passport out and handed it over. Orr thumbed through it idly and said, “Rather a nice likeness.”

  Jackson swallowed some more of his drink and, keeping his voice toneless and casual, said, “Did you ever hear of a Romanian who calls himself Nicolae Ploscaru?”

  Still thumbing through the passport, Orr said, “The wicked dwarf. Where ever did you hear of him? He worked for us once, you know, in—when was it—’44, ’45? He was most capable. Expensive, but capable.”

  “What’d he do?”

  Orr tucked Jackson’s passport away in an inside pocket, patted it protectively, and said, “We used him to see what he could do about our wild-blue-yonder boys. You know, the ones who were shot down over Bucharest and Ploesti. We finally sent a team of our own in just before the Russians got there. Well, the dwarf had organized things to a fare-thee-well. The fly-boys swore by him. It seems that Ploscaru knew everybody in Romania—everybody worth knowing of course. His father had been a member of what passed for nobility in that dreadful country—a count, or perhaps a baron—and so the dwarf used his contacts to see that nothing bad happened to our lads. Some of them, in fact, were living off the fat of the land by the time our OSS team got there. The fliers gave the dwarf all the credit.”

  Orr put his glass up to his lips and stared at Jackson over its rim. It was a long, cool stare. When he brought the glass down, he said, “Still, he was such a wicked little man. We got into a frightful flap with the British over him. It had been one of those co-op things that never work out. I think they wanted to shoot him when it was all over, except that he couldn’t be found—or the fifty thousand in gold that we’d supplied. Gold sovereigns, as I recall. He simply disappeared, but we thought it was money well spent I’m curious. Where ever did you hear of him?”