The Eighth Dwarf

by Ross Thomas

  “How’s it going, Captain?” the Sergeant said as he served him his usual Scotch and water.

  “Not bad, Sammy,” Kurt Oppenheimer said. “How’s it with you?”

  9

  Major Gilbert Baker-Bates had been back in Germany for nearly a week when Damm was killed. He had been in Hamburg, attending to some routine chores, when an American Counter-Intelligence Corps courier brought news of Damm’s murder along with a typed list of five names and addresses.

  The CIC courier was a twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant named LaFollette Meyer who was from Milwaukee and who was in no hurry to get back there. Meyer liked his work and he liked Germany, especially its women. He watched as Major Baker-Bates read the list of names and addresses.

  “It gets a little more interesting, sir, when you match them up with these,” he said, and handed Baker-Bates another list, which contained the real names of five minor war criminals who were living in the British Zone.

  “Well, now,” Baker-Bates said. “This chap Damm, he was in the business of selling new identities?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many had he sold?”

  “That’s hard to say, sir. In his safe he had sixty-eight new ID’s all ready to go. Then there was that ledger we found. It contained sixteen names, and about that many seemed to have been ripped out by whoever killed him.”

  “Whoever?”

  “Well, we’re not positive, sir. Not one hundred percent.”

  “But you’re fairly sure?”

  Lieutenant Meyer nodded.

  Baker-Bates tapped the lists. “You’ve given this to the right people here at HQ?”

  “Yes, sir, but we also thought that you should have a copy.”

  “Because of my interest in him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Baker-Bates read the list again. “Five living in our zone, I see. How many in yours?”

  “Seven in ours and four in the French.”

  “Have you already collected yours?”

  “Last night. We got six of them. The seventh—the one in Stuttgart—killed himself and his wife just as we were going in.”

  “How?”

  “Well, we made the mistake of knocking first—”

  “I mean how did he kill himself?”

  “Oh. With a knife. He cut his throat. His wife’s too. They say it was a mess.”

  Baker-Bates brought out a package of Lucky Strikes and offered them to Meyer, who took one. Each lighted his own cigarette. When they were going, Baker-Bates said, “How was he killed? Damm.”

  “Shot. Twice.”

  “Who heard it?”

  “Nobody.”

  Baker-Bates’s eyebrows went up. The Lieutenant noticed that there were traces of gray in them. “Nobody?”

  “Well, sir, that’s something else that’s not quite kosher. This guy Damm lived all by himself in an eight-room house almost within spitting distance of us at the Farben building. Now, you know as well as I do that nobody in Germany’s got an eight-room house all to themselves, not unless they’ve got the fix in somewhere, which is something else that we’ve got our people looking into. We don’t think his name was Damm, either. He came out of Dachau clean as a whistle, but we figure that’s where he probably fixed himself up with a new ID. We’re checking on it.”

  “Where did Damm work—or did he?”

  “He didn’t,” Meyer said. “He was in the black market, apparently in a pretty big way. He had a cellar full of stuff—cigarettes, coffee; he even had three cases of Johnnie Walker Scotch, and you know how hard that is to get. So at first we figured that’s why he got killed, because of some kind of black-market deal that went sour. We figured that until we found that list of names, and then we started figuring something else.”

  “You say nobody heard anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did they see anything?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Well, there’s this one old woman, but her eyes aren’t too good. She said she saw an American soldier go into Damm’s house about seventeen hundred hours and come out about seventeen-thirty. He was driving a jeep.”

  “What kind of soldier—could she tell?”

  “No, sir. Like I said, her eyes weren’t too good, but she thought he was about six feet tall and kind of blond. That would fit, wouldn’t it?”

  “That would fit.”

  “Does he speak English?”

  “Oppenheimer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, he speaks English, Lieutenant. Perfect English.”

  “Then that would be a pretty good disguise, wouldn’t it?”

  Baker-Bates sighed. “Like his English, it would be perfect. How many names do you think he got?”

  “Well, sir, there were sixteen left, like I said, and he seemed to’ve torn out half the pages that had names on ’em, so we figure that’s about what he’s got. Sixteen.”

  “And he’ll start going for them one by one,” Baker-Bates said, and ground his cigarette out in a cheap tin tray.

  “You think he’s crazy, sir—Oppenheimer?”

  “Possibly. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, he’s doing pretty much what he did during the war. He acted out some pretty rotten ones then, from what I hear. Now he seems to be going back and picking off the ones that we missed or can’t find. Well, hell, sir, I know that’s not right, but I don’t think it makes him crazy. I think he’s just sort of—well, dedicated.”

  “Dedicated.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re thinking that maybe we ought to let this—uh—dedication run its course.”

  Meyer shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t guess I really think that.”

  “But you wouldn’t be too upset if he were to—as you say—ace out a few more? I mean some really rotten ones.”

  “Well, hell, Major—”

  Baker-Bates interrupted with another question. “You are, I believe, Lieutenant, of the Jewish faith.”

  “I’m a Jew,” said Meyer, the atheist.

  “Are you a Zionist?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you know what’s going on in Palestine.”

  “Yes, sir. You’re determined to keep the hundred thousand Jews that’re still left in the DP camps from reaching Palestine, where you promised them they could go.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t a Zionist. That’s the Zionist line if I ever heard it.”

  “Yes, sir, but it’s also fact.”

  “Well, we don’t want Oppenheimer in Palestine, Lieutenant, and that’s why we’re going to find him. We don’t want him there.”

  “No, sir,” Lieutenant Meyer said. “I bet you don’t.”

  Every day on his way home from work, Otto Bodden, the printer, would check the letter drop near the ruined Petrikirche in Lübeck. There had been nothing in it until now, the day after Damm’s death. When he reached home and the privacy of his small room, Bodden opened the envelope, which looked as if it had already been used several times. Inside was a flimsy sheet of paper with a block of numbers written on it in pencil. Bodden sighed and began the tedious chore of decoding them. When he was done, the message read: Proceed Frankfurt. Karl-Heinz Damm killed. Shot twice. U.S. Army uniform, possibly junior officer.

  Bodden memorized Damm’s name, then filled his pipe with the suspect tobacco that he’d bought on the black market and used the same match to light his pipe and burn the flimsy paper. The Russian was quick, Bodden thought; that much had to be said for him. The man, what was his name—Damm—was killed in Frankfurt only yesterday. The information had to be gathered and then transmitted to Berlin, and from there it had to be redirected to Lübeck. Very quick, very efficient.

  He puffed on his pipe and thought about what he must do. There was his job at the Lübecker Post. Well, that was no problem. He simply would not show up. They would check, of course, with his landlady, Frau Schoettle. Tonight he would see her a
nd tell her that he was leaving, that an emergency had come up and that he was returning to Berlin. He would present her with a small gift, perhaps a hundred grams or so of fat. He still had plenty of razor blades left. That had been intelligent of them, to supply him with razor blades. As a form of currency, they were almost as good as cigarettes. He wondered which of his black-market contacts he should see about the fat. Probably the tall, skinny Estonian. He seemed to be the most resourceful. The Estonian might even be able to come up with a little butter instead of lard. She would like that. He would take her to bed first, tell her he had to go back to Berlin, and then give her the butter. He would also give her his ration books. They would be no good to him in the American Zone.

  Bodden enjoyed dickering with the tall skinny Estonian. After ten minutes of it, during which time the Estonian had stretched his rubber face into expressions that ranged from grief to elation, they had struck the bargain. In exchange for five brand-new American-made Gillette razor blades, Bodden received a fourth of a kilogram of real butter plus one packet of Senior Service cigarettes. The Estonian had moaned and sworn that he was being robbed, but then his face had stretched into a wide, merry grin. Before the war the Estonian had been a lawyer, and he was, by nature, Bodden had decided, a very cheerful fellow. “This is my courtroom now,” he had once told Bodden, waving an arm grandly at the narrow black-market alley. “Do you enjoy my histrionics?”

  “Very much,” Bodden had said.

  Frau Eva Schoettle, landlady of the six-room, largely undamaged house where Bodden roomed, was a thirty-three-year-old widow whose husband had been either killed or captured at Stalingrad. Either way he was now of no use to her and her two children, and so she took in roomers, who paid their rent in potatoes or bread or eggs or vegetables or anything else that could be eaten.

  Frau Schoettle had twin dreads, one of them being that a British officer would suddenly appear at her door and requisition the house. The other was that her either dead or missing husband might someday return. She had never really liked Armin Schoettle, a big, coarse, loud, humorless man who, before the war, had been a contractor. Although he had built the house and had been reasonably good to their ten-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, he had been a dull, indifferent lover with questionable personal habits. She had not seen him in four years now, or heard from him in three, and her memory of him had grown dim, almost nebulous. Her one vivid recollection of him was his underwear. She remembered that because he had never changed it more than twice a month. And his smell. She remembered that, too.

  By contrast, the printer was a skilled, inventive, even laughing lover with neat habits, and she had gone to bed with him three days after he had moved into the small back room on the third floor, the room that was almost a wardrobe. She lay beside Bodden now on the narrow bed, smoking one of his British cigarettes and thinking about what he had just told her—about his going back to Berlin the next day. She realized that she would miss him. She would miss his lovemaking, of course, but that wasn’t all. She would also miss those wry little jokes that he was always making. The printer was sometimes a very funny fellow. But then, a lot of Berliners were.

  She turned to him and smiled and said, “I’m going to miss you, printer.”

  “Will you miss me or the eggs I bring you?”

  “Both.”

  “What else will you miss?”

  “This,” she said, and reached for him. “I’ll miss this.”

  “Ah, that,” he said, and reached for her cigarette. He put it out carefully in a tray. “Well, that particular item you may borrow one more time, provided, of course, that you return it in reasonably good shape.”

  “Reasonably?”

  “Reasonably.”

  As he made love to her for the second time that evening, she thought fleetingly of what she would have to do next. She would have to leave him and dress and then walk three kilometers to where the British Captain was billeted. For only a moment she thought of not telling the Captain, the one who was called Richards and who always smoked a pipe. She would let the printer go his way. What business was it of theirs? But no. She would tell them. If the printer left and she didn’t tell them, they would take away her house. Too bad, printer, she thought, and clutched him tightly to her.

  It was raining the next morning at 6:42 when Bodden boarded the crowded train to Hamburg. It was a cold, hard rain, and Bodden had been caught in it as he had walked from his rooming house to the Bahnhof. But then, so had the other fellow, he thought with a grin, the one who had fallen in behind him just as he had slipped out of Frau Schoettle’s house.

  The other fellow was a medium-sized, youngish man with yellow hair that flopped down over his eyes despite the cap that he wore. He looked well fed, or reasonably so, and Bodden wondered whether he was German or English. The man with the yellow hair now stood a few meters away in the packed aisle of the train. For a few moments Bodden toyed with the idea of approaching the man and trying out some of his English that the Pole had taught him in the camp. Something like “A nice day for ducks,” which, the Pole had assured him, both Americans and British said all the time. But then, so did Germans.

  No, Bodden decided, with just a tinge of regret, he would ignore him—at least until Hamburg. In Hamburg he would lose the fellow with the yellow hair. He had better lose him, because es geht um die Wurst. The sausage depends on it. He wondered if the Americans said that too, but decided that they probably didn’t.

  In the large country house that was located fifteen kilometers north and west of Lübeck, Colonel Whitlock stood at the French doors of the former sitting room that was now his office and stared out at the man and the woman working in the rain.

  The man and the woman were in their sixties, and they were digging in a garden that had once been a smooth expanse of carefully rolled green lawn. The lawn was now planted to potatoes. The woman and man who were digging them up were the owners of the large country house. Their name was Von Alvens, and they once had been extremely rich. Now they were extremely poor, as was virtually everyone else in Germany, and they bartered the potatoes that they didn’t eat for lard or eggs or a very rare chicken. They had had four sons, all of whom had been killed in the war. The Von Alvens still lived in the big house, but in a single room in the rear that once had been occupied by a servant.

  Colonel Whitlock glanced at his watch and thought, Goddamn the man. This was their third meeting in two days, and each time the Colonel had been kept waiting, sometimes for as much as fifteen minutes. The Colonel was a stickler for punctuality. It was, in fact, almost a fetish with him, and he felt his irritation grow as he stood at the French doors and stared out at the old couple digging in the rain.

  But it wasn’t just the man’s habitual tardiness that infuriated him. Everything about Baker-Bates was wrong, Colonel Whitlock felt. Wrong accent, wrong clothes, wrong school, and yes, damn it, wrong class. He knew about Baker-Bates’s record during the war and had to admit that it was good, perhaps even brilliant in spots. But lots of chaps had had brilliant records—even chaps like Baker-Bates who didn’t really quite fit. But when the war was over, they’d had the good sense to say Thank you very much and go back to where they belonged.

  Colonel Whitlock wondered what it really was about Baker-Bates that grated so much. Was it the man’s condescension, which almost bordered on mute insolence? Or was it his quick and restless mind, which flitted about hither and yon, racing on ahead of its rivals and then waiting impatiently for them to catch up, the boredom plainly evident on its owner’s face?

  The fellow’s clever, no doubt about it, the Colonel admitted, and because he prided himself on being a realist and, at any rate, put no real premium on cleverness, he went on to admit that Baker-Bates probably was cleverer than he himself. But that didn’t account for it—not for the fellow’s rapid, almost spectacular rise in the secret-intelligence business. Not in rank, to be sure, although they’d probably jump him to colonel before long. That was in the wind. You coul
d almost smell it. The fellow almost swung that much power now as a mere major. Might as well give him the rank to go with it. It was Baker-Bates’s wife, of course. An ugly little woman. The Colonel had seen pictures of her in the British press. Not because she was Mrs. Gilbert Baker-Bates, though. Scarcely that. But because she was a minister’s daughter. Married her during the war. Nobody had thought then that the Socialists would win. Probably one himself, Colonel Whitlock concluded with grim satisfaction.

  The telephone on his desk rang. It was Sergeant Lewis.

  “Major Baker-Bates is here, sir.”

  “Well, send him in; send him in,” the Colonel said grumpily.

  “Good morning, sir,” Baker-Bates said as he came in and took a chair before the Colonel’s desk.

  “You’re late.”

  Baker-Bates shrugged. “Sorry. The rain, you know.”

  “Well, he left this morning, just as that woman said he would.”

  “But not for Berlin.”

  “No. He caught the Hamburg train. We put that chap of yours onto him.”

  “Bodden’ll lose him,” Baker-Bates said. “Probably in Hamburg.”

  To hide his irritation, the Colonel lit a cigarette, his tenth of the morning. The man’s insufferable, he thought; then he blew some smoke out and said, “What makes you so sure?”

  “That Bodden’ll lose him?”

  “Mmm.”

  “He has to.”

  “You feel he’s that good?”

  “Our Russian friends wouldn’t have sent him unless he were.”

  “Well, he hasn’t had all that much experience, has he? As I recall, he spent four years in a camp. Belsen, wasn’t it?”

  “You can learn a lot in a camp. He did. They picked them out in the camps, you know, the ones that they would use later. They got the cushy jobs. From what I’ve been able to find out, he was one of the star pupils. After he got out, they sent him back to Moscow. They had a year to train him there. More than a year.”

  “After Hamburg. You think he’ll head for Frankfurt after Hamburg?”