by Ross Thomas
So, on the twenty-first of July, 1944, Captain Heinrich von Staden had left the German Embassy in Madrid, carrying with him as many documents as he thought both pertinent and useful, and presented himself at the office of his counterpart at the British Embassy.
His counterpart had not been especially surprised to see him. “Pity about the bomb, wasn’t it?” he had said.
Von Staden had nodded. “Yes, a pity.”
“They won’t try again, will they?”
“No, they’ll all be dead shortly.”
“Canaris too?”
“Yes, Canaris too.”
“Mmm. Well, what do you think we should do with you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why don’t we just send you back to London and let them sort it out?”
“Very well.”
So they had flown him back to London and they had sorted it out. First there had been the solitary confinement and then the interrogation, followed by a long stretch in a POW camp. Then there had been more interrogation, and finally, there had been the one long, especially grueling session which had lasted sixteen hours until, against all rules, Major Baker-Bates had said, “How’d you like to go to work for us?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No, not very much of one, I’m afraid. The POW camp, of course. You could always opt to go back there.”
“I think not,” ex-Captain von Staden had said, which was why he was now standing outside the Golden Rose in the rain.
The streets had been crooked in that old section of the city where, before the war, Frankfurt had done its drinking and whoring. Those streets which had been cleared were still crooked, with narrow winding paths that led off into the rubble and ended, sometimes, apparently no-where.
Von Staden watched as the woman came out of the Golden Rose, opened her umbrella, and hurried off down the narrow, crooked street. He moved after her, keeping close to the edge of the uneven rubble. The woman turned off the street into one of the twisting paths. Von Staden followed, not hurrying, but keeping the woman within twenty meters, not letting her get farther ahead than that. Another path led off the one that they were on. The woman stopped, hesitating, as if she were not sure of her directions. Then she turned right. Von Staden gave her a few moments and followed.
The path that she had taken was no more than a meter wide. It went right, left, and right again almost at ninety-degree angles. Von Staden had lost sight of the woman now, so he picked up his pace. He made the final turn and stopped, because the path ended abruptly at a small shrine that marked the site of someone for whom the rubble was both grave and crypt. The shrine was nothing more than a small, painted wooden figure of Christ. Some soggy, faded flowers lay before it. The woman was nowhere in sight.
Von Staden swore and quickly retraced his steps. At the second turning he stopped. Coming from this direction, he could see it—a space no larger than a large crate. It was somebody’s hovel, fashioned out of the rubble and a piece of old sheet iron that shielded its entrance from view unless approached from this angle. He realized that she could have closed her umbrella, ducked into the hovel, waited for him to pass, and then doubled back. It would have taken no more than a few seconds.
Walking slowly back along the path to the street, making sure that there were no other holes in which she could be hiding, Von Staden admired her cleverness. This little rabbit knows her warren well, he thought. Now he would have to go back to the Golden Rose. The other one, the man, would be gone by now, of course. But a little chat with the proprietor might be useful to find out how much he knows about his patrons. He will know nothing, but if pressed hard enough, he might produce the bottle of Schnapps—the good stuff that he keeps under the counter. With luck, even some Steinhager. And with the Schnapps perhaps will also come some inspiration, which Von Staden knew was going to have to serve as the principal ingredient of his essentially negative report to Major Baker-Bates.
From 1917 until 1935, Brigadier General Frank “Knocker” Grubbs had been a first lieutenant in the United States Army. In 1935, despite the fact that everyone regarded Knocker Grubbs as just a trifle dim-witted, he had been promoted to captain, the rank he had held until Pearl Harbor. Only a national emergency, or, some said, a disaster, could have created the confusion that permitted General Grubbs to rise to his present rank; but rise to it he did, pinning on his single silver star in late 1944.
Some said that Knocker got to be a general because he knew all the right people. But others, and these were his detractors, and there were a legion or two of them, claimed that it was not only because he knew all the right people, but also because he knew all their dirty little secrets. And perhaps that was the real reason that Knocker, although not really very bright, had wound up in intelligence.
Whatever the reason, Knocker Grubbs was determined to retire as a general. He had only one year to go until his thirty were up, and after that, as he often told his wife, “Fuck ’em. We’ll go back to Santone and drink Pearl beer at the Gunther and raise quarter horses.” Knocker Grubbs, like all men, had his dreams—and his nightmares. His recurring nightmare was that he would be recalled to Washington and reduced to his permanent rank of major. The difference between the retirement pay of a major and that of a one-star general was considerable, and when Knocker had nothing better to do, which was often, he would calculate the difference on the back of an envelope with a kind of morbid fascination. He always burned those envelopes, of course. Knocker Grubbs wasn’t a total fool.
Now fifty-three and in what, as he always told his disbelieving wife, was his prime, Knocker, from his pleasant sixth-story office in the Farben building, directed half of the Army counterintelligence efforts in the U.S. Zone of Occupation. The other half was directed down in Munich by some pantywaist colonel with fancy notions who, before the war, had done postgraduate work at Heidelberg—at the fucking Army’s fucking expense, Knocker often told his cronies.
The Colonel in Munich might be a pantywaist, but he was also smart, and this had worried Knocker until he remembered that generals could chew out colonels. And one thing Knocker Grubbs had learned and learned well during his twenty-nine years in the Army, and that was how to chew ass.
He had once spent two hours upbraiding the Munich Colonel with vivid epithets culled from Cavalry days, and the results had been delightful. So now that was what Knocker did most of the time. He chewed ass. He was good at it, he enjoyed it, and he dimly perceived that it was the one perfect disguise for his own shortcomings, of which, he was just smart enough to realize, there might be a few.
The ass that Knocker was chewing that afternoon wasn’t a colonel’s, but it was almost as good because it belonged to a Limey major. To add to the Major’s discomfort, an American lieutenant was serving as witness—a Yid lieutenant at that.
“Now, let me just get this straight, Major,” General Grubbs said as he rubbed his bald head—a gesture that for some reason he thought might make him look harmlessly puzzled. “You were at the bar at the Casino, having a drink, minding your own business, and this guy comes up, this American major, just promoted, he said—except that he wasn’t no American major, he was this shit Oppenheimer, and you mean to sit there and tell me you actually bought the cocksucker a drink?”
Baker-Bates sighed. “In point of fact, General, he bought me one.”
“He bought you one,” the General said, packing his tone with incredulity.
“A Scotch and soda.”
Knocker Grubbs nodded slowly several times. He had a big chunk of a head, still vaguely handsome, with small, very pale blue eyes that looked stupid, the way some very pale blue eyes do. His best features were his strong nose and chin, which rescued his profile from not enough forehead and a wet, weak mouth. What was left of his hair was a smoky gray.
Grubbs stopped nodding, but kept his voice full of amazement. “And so you just stood there, bellied up to the bar with this Kraut killer that half the Army is looking for, and you and him just bull
shitted each other: have I got it right, Major?”
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid that you do.”
“And you couldn’t tell from his accent that he wasn’t American?”
“He had no German accent.”
“None at all?”
“None that I could detect, General. But he had two American accents. One was what I suppose could be called American standard, and the other was Texan.”
“How the fuck would you know what a Texan talks like?”
“Are you from Texas, General?”
“Amarillo.”
“Actually, sir, he spoke very much the way you do.”
“Like I do?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re not trying to be cute, are you, Major?”
“Only accurate, General.”
“I’d hate to think that you were trying to be cute. I don’t know what they do with majors with funny little cocksucker mustaches who turn cute in your army, mister, but I know what they do with them in mine. And I’ll tell you one more thing, fella; you’re goddamned lucky you’re not under my command.”
“Yes, sir, I would think that I am. Lucky, that is,” Baker-Bates said, and decided that Knocker Grubbs wasn’t quite real.
“So you two, you and this Kraut killer, parted the best of pals, right? And then you sat down all by yourself in the American officer’s club and had a nice, hot American meal, and maybe smoked a couple of American cigarettes and then when all that was done, you wandered over to see Lieutenant Meyer here, maybe an hour later, and that’s when you found out you’d been boozing it up with the Kraut killer that everybody’s looking for. And that’s when you told the Lieutenant here that maybe it might be a good idea to seal off the complex on account of this crazy Kraut killer you’d just had a friendly drink with might still be killing an hour or two hanging around the PX or the Class Six Store, right? Except that he’d long skipped, and we’ve got fuck-all ideas about where he skipped to. Are those the facts, Major? I wanta be good and goddamned sure I got the facts right for the report I’m gonna have to send your CO.”
“Your facts, sir, are essentially correct.”
“How ’bout you, Lieutenant: you think I’ve got the facts right?”
“Yes, sir: except that we’re having copies made of Oppenheimer’s photograph, and we’ll distribute them throughout the Zone.”
“You know what they call that down in Texas?”
“No, sir, I don’t,” Lieutenant Meyer said, wondering how long this dimwit was going to continue with his reaming out of Baker-Bates—who, in Lieutenant Meyer’s estimation, had slyly got in a few licks of his own, especially that one about the Texas accent.
“Well, I’ll tell you what we call it down in Texas,” Knocker Grubbs said. “We call it locking the barn after the horse is gone.”
“Gosh, sir, that’s vivid,” Lieutenant Meyer said.
“They don’t say that in England, do they, Major?”
“Not recently, General,” Baker-Bates said.
“Well, I’m gonna tell you one final thing, sonny. You’re down here because Berlin wants you down here. But you fuck up one more time, and Berlin or no Berlin, I’m gonna have your sweet ass for Sunday breakfast. Do I make myself clear?”
“Quite clear, General,” Baker-Bates said. “In fact, extremely so.”
“Dismissed,” the General snapped.
Baker-Bates and Lieutenant Meyer rose.
“Not you, Lieutenant,” Knocker Grubbs said with a mean smile. “Hell, I haven’t even half started with you yet.”
16
After the plane landed at Frankfurt’s Rhine-Main airport, Jackson and Bill Swanton, the INS man, watched as the Army wives filed out of the aircraft first. While the two men waited, Swanton took out a notebook and a pen.
“You ever see one of these?” Swanton said.
“What?”
“The pen. They call ’em ball-points. I bought it for twenty-nine ninety-five on sale in New York.” He wrote his name and his Berlin address in his notebook, tore out the sheet, and handed it to Jackson. “Maybe if you get up to Berlin, I could be of some help on your book.”
“Thanks very much,” Jackson said.
Swanton gave his pen one more admiring glance before returning it to his shirt pocket. “You know what they say these things will do?”
“What?”
“Write underwater. Now, just what in hell would you want to write underwater?”
Jackson thought about it. “Maybe a suicide note if you were drowning yourself.”
Swanton brightened. “Yeah, that’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
He followed Jackson off the plane. When they reached the terminal, he held out his hand. Jackson took it. “Thanks for the booze, Brother Jackson,” Swanton said. “And in Berlin. If you get up there, look me up.”
“I’ll do that”
When they entered the terminal, a loudspeaker was calling Jackson’s name. “Will Mr. Minor Jackson report to the information desk. Mr. Minor Jackson.”
The information desk was manned by a harassed Air Corps staff sergeant
“I’m Jackson.”
“Okay, Mr. Jackson,” the Sergeant said, opening a drawer and taking out an envelope. “This is for you, and so is the Lieutenant over there.” He nodded at Lieutenant Meyer, who was standing nearby and trying not to stare at Jackson.
“What’s in the envelope?” Jackson said.
The Sergeant sighed. “I don’t know, sir. I didn’t open it. I don’t usually open other people’s envelopes, but if you’d like me to, sir, I will. All I know is that an Air Corps captain gave it to me about three hours ago and made me swear that I’d get it to you. And that’s what I’ve just done, haven’t I, sir?”
“You’ve been swell,” Jackson said.
“Can I be of assistance, Mr. Jackson? I’m Lieutenant Meyer.”
“From Milwaukee.”
“Yes, sir.”
“My nursemaid.”
“Liasion, Mr. Jackson, but if you want to call me a nursemaid, or anything else that might come to mind, even something a little vulgar, well, that’s just fine, because I’m used to it on account of this very afternoon I spent one hour and fifteen minutes having my ass chewed out by a one-star general who’s not very bright, but who does know how to chew ass, and who called me names that are a lot worse than nursemaid. So if you want to call me that or, as I said, anything else that comes to mind, that’s just fine, Mr. Jackson, sir.”
Jackson stared at him. “You’re in shock, pal.”
“Probably. It’s been a very long, very rough day.”
“What kind of orders did you get from Washington about me?”
“Very explicit ones. I’m to be at your beck and call and worm my way into your confidence.”
“We’re off to a good start.”
“Yes, sir. I was hoping you’d think so.”
“Think you could beckon or call up a drink around here?”
“Yes, sir. There’s a VIP lounge. With only a little skillful lying I can probably get us into that.”
“Let me see what this is all about first,” Jackson said, and ripped open the envelope. Inside were a key and a plain white card. On the card were written an address and the message “Try to make it by nine.” The message was unsigned.
Jackson handed the card to Lieutenant Meyer. “You know where this address is?”
Lieutenant Meyer glanced at it. “Yes, sir. It’s a rather nice address not too far from the zoo. I mean it will be a rather nice address if it’s still standing.”
“Can we have a drink and still make it by nine?”
Lieutenant Meyer glanced at his watch. “Easily.”
“Well, let’s go do that and you can worm your way into my confidence some more.”
It took Lieutenant Meyer, talking steadily, a little more than fifteen minutes to relate virtually all that he knew about Kurt Oppenheimer. When he was finished, so were the drinks. Lieutenant Meyer tipped his up
, let an ice cube bounce against his teeth, swallowed the last drop, put the glass down, and stared at Jackson.
“Tell me something,” he said with the air of a man ready to receive a confidence.
“Sure.”
“Why’re you looking for him?”
He really expects an answer, Jackson thought. Not only that, but he also expects a truthful answer. Jackson smiled and said, “I don’t think I said I was looking for him.”
“Washington says you are.”
Jackson kept his smile in place. “Washington hopes that I am.”
It was a long, bleak stare that Lieutenant Meyer gave Jackson. “Well, shit, mister.”
“Disappointed?”
“Oh, hell, no,” Lieutenant Meyer said. “I don’t feel silly, either.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“You used to be with the OSS, didn’t you?”
“Is that what Washington says?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Then it must be true.”
“How good were you?”
“Average,” Jackson said. “Maybe C-plus.”
Lieutenant Meyer shook his head. “They wouldn’t let you run like this if you were just C-plus.”
“I wouldn’t put too much faith in Washington if I were you.”
Lieutenant Meyer’s mouth tucked itself down at the corners as he again shook his head. “Jesus, that’s all I need, a mystery man.” He reached into the pocket of his blouse and brought out several cards. “Well, here you go, mystery man,” he said, and slid the cards over to Jackson. “One of them will get you into the PX so you can buy cigarettes and toothpaste. Another one’s for the Class Six Store where you can buy your booze. That one you’ve got your finger on will let you eat at the officers’ club. The food there’s not so hot, but it’s cheap, and if you don’t eat there, then you’re going to have to depend on black-market restaurants. They’re as expensive as hell, but since you’re a mystery man, and probably rich with it, maybe you can afford them. And the last one’s for gasoline, if you should get hold of a car—which I hope to hell you will, since I don’t much like playing chauffeur. As for where you’re going to sleep, Washington said that’s going to be up to you, so I don’t really give much of a shit.”
