“Right up to the line,” Butler told him.
“Yes?” Seryoshka eyed him with new interest, taking his eyes for what seemed an imprudently long time off the pitted, washed-out road. “Which part of the line?”
“The sharp edge,” said Butler. For some reason, he felt compelled to prove himself to this hardened survivor of Stalingrad, with his sniper's rifle cradled in the seat between them. “Special Reconnaissance Company, 104th Guards Division.”
Seryoshka gave a loud, unexpected laugh. “So that's the sharp edge, is it? That's good. That's very good.”
Butler couldn't decide what to make of this boisterous Cossack. He just sat there, waiting, as the truck bounced crazily along. Soon Rownje was behind them. Ahead lay an empty and devastated countryside—and beyond that, destiny in all its dark splendor.
“Perhaps you can tell me, comrade,” said Seryoshka, breaking a long interval of silence, “what ‘special reconnaissance’ means. I've been wondering for a while now.”
“You have? Might I ask why?”
The Cossack offered him a wry, side-of-the-mouth smile. “It's my new assignment. Me and that asshole back there, we're both headed up to join this unit of yours. This Special Reconnaissance Company. I have been given to understand…”
Butler noted the shift to more formal, academy-grade locution. Seryoshka held his gaze, and there was no mistaking the intelligence in that open, unblinking stare.
“… that something interesting is about to happen in your sector. Some unusual operation. I was told nothing definite. Only that my particular talents—that's how they put it, your particular talents—might be useful there. I wonder what you can tell me about that.”
Butler said evenly, “I guess it depends what your particular talents are.”
Seryoshka looked thoughtful for a moment, then he laughed. “You know, I've never met an American.”
“What makes you think I'm American?” Butler felt a shiver of paranoia. It occurred to him, belatedly, how improbable this meeting had been. The pair of them, bound for the same spot on a four-hundred-kilometer front. And both winding up in the same Studebaker cab.
“What else could you be?” said Seryoshka. “Dressed like that. Talking such abysmal Russian. And doing it with such damned self-assurance—like everybody else ought to talk that way, too.” He shook his head. “You're American, all right.”
Butler nodded. Not at what Seryoshka was saying—he didn't care that his Russian was no good—but because he had struck an agreement with himself: not to care, nor even to wonder, if this encounter was in fact a setup, and Seryoshka some kind of agent assigned to keep an eye on him. What difference did it make? The individual does not matter. The operation will go forward. The plan is set, the stars aligned.
Seryoshka's next question caught him in this odd, fatalistic state of mind; otherwise he wouldn't have answered as he did.
“Tell me—what's an American doing in such a godforsaken place?” This without looking over, while manhandling the truck through a rough stretch of road. “Why aren't you with Koniev or Zhukov, heading for Berlin? You must be on to some story, eh? A real scoop.”
Seryoshka used the English word, and Butler responded in that language, so alien here, so starkly literal, devoid of nuance and subtlety. “It's a scoop, all right,” he said. “Bunch of innocent Yanks lured into a complicated plot by an old friend—not a loyal friend, just an old one. They get ambushed, robbed, and, I don't know, probably left for dead. But that's okay. That's swell. They're only ephemeral personalities. We're all good Marxists, so we don't care about that. We understand history. We know what's what.”
Seryoshka throttled the truck down and turned to gaze at him with an air of melancholy so profound that it seemed a species of wisdom. “Open the map box,” he said. “I think we could both use a little something.”
He spoke the sort of English—careless with consonants, but every article properly inserted—taught at the larger Russian universities and other, more selective institutions. Quite different from the minimally functional English they crammed into you at service academies.
In the map box, Butler found a bottle of decent but not first-rate vodka and a single tin mug. “Did Puak send you?” he asked, pouring the mug two-thirds full.
“Who is Spider?” asked Seryoshka. He seemed genuinely puzzled. It proved nothing.
Butler raised the mug. “To the great struggle.”
“Bugger that,” laughed the Cossack. “To coming out alive.”
EASTERN SHORE
LATE SEPTEMBER 1944
It was Ingo himself, they would recall, who thought of bringing Timo in. The cabdriver—a Serb, as it turned out—came to mind during a meeting of the small group of conspirators known as the Search Committee (Marty loved making up names like this) when some out-of-towners voiced a desire to meet in restaurants where they wouldn't risk being glimpsed by the press. Such places existed, mostly in neighborhoods you'd have trouble whistling up a cab to fetch you out of. Unbidden to Ingo came the image of a sawed-off Louisville Slugger, then the rough, swarthy hand that gripped it, and finally the stenciled logo of Earnest's Hackney Service. A number was rung, a taxi conjured from the depths of Foggy Bottom, and after a staggering luncheon laid on by a barbecue specialist on an avenue that dare not speak its name, Timo delivered everyone back to hearth, home and hotel in seemly fashion. The modest expense was put down to Logistics.
Not long afterward, a need arose that was in certain respects analogous. Marty popped in to the Rusty Ring one evening to announce a Major Breakthrough. It involved money; it involved powerful backers; unfortunately, it also involved an overnight drive to Ontario.
“The one in Canada?” Ingo asked helplessly.
Yes, that one. And so, some thirty-six blurry hours later, Ingo found himself staring at a stark, unpeopled, coldly beautiful landscape from the window of a limousine normally used for hauling war brides in haste around the District. Timo manned the wheel, a marvel of tireless competence. Their destination was an RCMP training camp on loan to the British Secret Intelligence Service, which had used it earlier in the war to train resistance operatives.
“Not the most convenient spot for a meeting, is it?” said Ingo.
“That's the whole point. These are Hollywood people, Ingo. If you make things too easy, they don't take you seriously.”
He didn't get it, but that didn't seem to matter. The camp was patrolled by rough-looking lads in trench coats. Marty flashed a laissez-passer and the limo bumped up a long drive to a shambling timbered structure whose parking lot was crowded with luxury motorcars. Inside, beneath rough-sawn beams and mounted antlers, a table was draped in baize and set for twenty-four. At each place stood a water glass, a fountain pen and a stiff-bound sheaf labeled operation smoking gun. Around it, the lavishly costumed all-male cast hovered as though awaiting some cue, which presently came with the entrance of an éminence grise, a man of such obvious importance that, in lieu of speaking, he took his place at the head of the table and nodded curtly to a thirtyish factotum. This fellow, one Ari Glasser, thanked everyone for coming, singling out some of the more important guests for a personal welcome—including “Miss Martina Panich, joining us today on behalf of the Roosevelt administration in a strictly off-the-record capacity,” which seemed to impress the movers and shakers around the table. He then declared, “Now we must speak of what Mr. Churchill has rightly called a crime so terrible, it does not even have a name.”
Ingo had heard it before, or so he thought. But a few minutes into his spiel, Glasser yielded the floor to a wild-eyed, gangly man, “the well-known Rabbi Harvey Grabsteen of Agudas Israel Worldwide,” who started talking even while struggling to disentangle himself from his chair. Where Glasser had been polished, Grabsteen was all jagged edges. His voice was high-pitched and quavering; thick veins throbbed at his temples; his whole being radiated moral outrage. And he didn't mince words: Ingo tried to stop listening after a detailed account of SS troopers
swinging tiny children by their feet so as to smash their skulls against a railway carriage. It came as a relief to everyone, surely, when the éminence cleared his throat and said simply, “Rabbi, what can we do?”
At which point, Glasser gave Marty a discreet little nod.
“If you'll just take a look at the documents in front of you,” she said, all businesslike, “I think you'll find we've put together a workable proposition. Now we're calling this Smoking Gun because, until now, the one thing that's eluded us…”
Looking back, Ingo was amazed at how easy it had been, though he doubted whether Marty would see it like that. Her part in the affair had left her untypically exhausted; she slept for most of the long ride back to D.C.
* * *
By summer's end, what began as a wild-eyed scheme and developed into a closely held plot had become a full-blown hush-hush operation. And since an operation requires a center—someplace grander than Ingo's digs on Connecticut Avenue, please—a new and discreet one had been found for it. The original conspirators, joined now by an agglomeration of mappers, trainers, bagmen, financiers, arms suppliers, cooks (no bottle washers), politically committed and currently out-of-contract Hollywood personalities, a golf-cart-load of attorneys, one butcher (no baker, unless you counted Ingo), one cheeky dentist, the howling mad Rabbi Grabsteen and, with a view toward the rough business ahead, a small army of extras, had betaken themselves to a chicken farm allegedly owned by a cousin, or something, of Vernon, the Rusty Ring's conniving chef, in the boggy tidal country across the bay from Annapolis.
They called themselves the Varian Fry Brigade. Another of Marty's unhelpful names, though this one evidently meant something to somebody, if nothing to Ingo. But then what did, during that confusing time? The whole of life had turned upside down or inside out or whichever happened when you began to think the unthinkable and, worse, believe the incredible: that they were really going ahead with this.
In the beginning he figured it was safe to play along. After all, there was zero chance Marty's woolly-headed scheme would bear fruit. Sure, mount a safari to Darkest Europe, why not? Go wading up some godforsaken, Gestapo-patrolled creek looking for our old pal Isaac—did you hear he's a big warrior chief these days? Receive his jolly tidings—the horror—and then sail into the sunset while savages in their Death's Head costumes fling poisoned spears at the boat. No problem, Miss Panich, and by the by, how do you take your martini—four to one, or are you a philistine?
The trouble with thinking like this, as he did for a few weeks in August—the Last Days of Innocence, revisited—was that, like many a losing general, Ingo had failed in his appreciation of the enemy. He hadn't allowed for Marty's grim determination, which must come from her mother's Anglo-Catholic side, or, more fatally, for all the favors and phone numbers and political IOUs she'd hoarded over the years. As everyone knew, these New Dealers were in bed with the very worst people—indeed, many of them were the very worst people themselves—and as with birds of a feather, no sooner had Marty tossed a few crumbs in the air than the whole flock of them took wing: sculptors and scriptwriters, trade unionists and deodorant heiresses and orthodontists, soothsayers of the Commodities Exchange and matinee heroes reputed to be homosexual. Ingo by now was lost in his own metaphorizing but that was the general idea.
True disaster struck, he had concluded, when the phone rang late one night and a butter-smooth voice murmured gently in his ear.
“I'm trying to reach Marty Panich. This is Ari Glasser speaking, hope I'm not disturbing you.”
He wouldn't have been, except that it was eleven p.m. in California, hence an hour indecent to calculate in Ingo's bedroom in Washington.
“A mutual friend gave me this number,” the silky voice ran on. “Is she there by any chance?”
Perhaps it was the fellow's use of the familiar Marty, to which Ingo felt singularly entitled. Perhaps it was the hour of night. In any case, and to his lasting regret, he did not do what he ought to have done—Sorry to hit you with this, pal, but Miss Panich, she dead—and instead, out of dumb nosiness, hung on the line. Which in turn gave Glasser a chance to speak, which was like giving Houdini a little wiggle room. Because the next thing Ingo knew, Ari had charmed out of him not just Martina's address but also that of the Ring and of “a decent place to camp out in that town of yours.” (Ingo named the Hay-Adams on the misplaced assumption it would bankrupt the oozy bastard.) By lunchtime two days hence, Ingo found himself watching helplessly as Bernie Fildermann delivered a plate of warmer Kartoffelsalad, bacon chunks and all, to table 3, the big one by the plate-glass window, where he lingered a while chatting about Vienna, which Mr. Glasser seemed to know quite well. He claimed to have attended a performance of the chamber ensemble in which little Bernie had played— splendid, moving, fantastic!— and who knew, perhaps he wasn't lying. Bernie spent the rest of the afternoon floating in bliss an inch above the carpet, as if borne aloft on the wings of Mozart.
In the fullness of time, even Ingo found much about Glasser to admire. It took some learning, but he came to understand how the man's sunny, skin-deep charm might be put to uses infinitely more noble than stitching together a film production deal. Once while chatting up Ingo—a protracted campaign he waged with stout heart, as he would for “any friend of Marty's”— he seemed to receive an unfathomable flash of insight, whereupon he switched in mid-sentence from English to German, not the slurry Wiener variety but a clean, literary Hochdeutsch suitable for quoting Schiller. Then to Ingo's astonishment he did quote Schiller, and moreover so easily that the words fit the context like a chamois glove. Meanwhile, across the room, the mad rabbi was arguing with the proprietress of the chicken farm, a willful gal named Charleva, over the condition of her long, washed-out driveway, which impeded delivery of heavy cargo ambiguously labeled For Trans-shipment/Matériel.
“But we give you money,” Grabsteen shouted, his arms flopping about as though longing for their straitjacket. “We give you money and you do what with it? Spend it on extra mud?”
Catching Ingo's eye, Glasser gave him a smile—a marvel of nuance and complexity, like a Burgundy aged to perfection—and purred, “Nimmer, das glaubt mir, erscheinen die Götter, nimmer allein!” Believe me, never do the gods appear alone: a more fervent variation on the theme of taking the good with the bad.
The good, or god, that came attached to Harvey Grabsteen took the form of fervid ideological zeal. He hated Nazis with every strand of his being. He had hated them yesterday, he would hate them tomorrow. The fact of their existence, sharing the atmosphere with the rest of us, was to him a personal affront. Desperate to give expression to these feelings, he had latched on to Agudas Israel, a radical Zionist organization whose entire membership he personally constituted in a strategically located patch of southern California. Agudas had spent the war years lobbying hard in every capital of the West, espousing among other radical notions the suggestion that rail lines leading to known death camps be bombed, news of German racial atrocities broadcast, and, most ludicrously, a company of armed volunteers, commanded by Jewish veterans of the First World War, recruited. To what end, no responsible official could imagine, unless it was just the inarticulate urge to do something, damn it. But all such proposals, no matter what form they took or what intelligence supported them, had been in vain.
For how, pray tell, could this lunatic group succeed where such responsible bodies as the American Jewish Committee, touting more moderate and sensible ideas (Mr. Roosevelt could give a speech, couldn't he?), had been courteously but definitively rebuffed? (No, sorry, he cannot.) The complete response of the American government to date had been the creation of the War Refugee Board, a savvy executive conjuration that, in one stroke, mollified Henry Morgenthau and got that hothead, Martina What's-her-name, safely out of the White House to someplace Eleanor couldn't find her.
Yet behold what the gods have wrought. Here stands Harvey Grabsteen, the soul of disrepute, yelling at a colored chicken farmer, who sensibly ignores
him, while a film star with both money and time to burn dangles a wrist in the face of a Great War noncom roughly the size of a Brahma bull, and Ari Glasser, noted Hollywood impresario, purrs Schiller into the ear of a humble barkeep from the sheltered lanes of Brookland who, in blatant disregard of Aristotle's law of probabilitas, has somehow become the star of the show.
Happen? Is it really going to happen? Dear Lord, please, I beg you, show me how to stop it.
In late September the weather turned cooler and very dry. By the third week of October the fallen leaves, dry as parchment, presented a serious danger to the three dozen extras who were poised to launch yet another humiliating mission in their make-believe war. You couldn't move without setting off a racket, and the trainees, so-called, had some moving to do.
Realism, they called this. The objective was a low ridge maybe three hundred meters ahead. You could make it out as a row of dark pines against the gray sky. The problems here were (a) you had to get there quickly and (b) undetected, despite certain complications known to include, but perhaps not limited to, (c) hounds and (d) machine guns. The machine guns might not be loaded, though the NCOs claimed otherwise; Ingo wouldn't know about that. But he didn't guess you could unload a hound dog. Vernon claimed they'd been trained by his Uncle Leon to detect white people by their scent.
“I guess that makes Jews safe,” quipped a little guy named Stu—a dentist, hence ex officio the Varian Fry Brigade's medical officer. Being a dentist did not make him by any stretch the most unlikely or ill-suited trainee in D Squad, which was a dumping ground for the aged, the slow, the timid and the maladroit—in short, for those would-be guerrillas deemed least likely to survive by the troika of Great War sergeants running the show. The fitter candidates—though even here you were speaking in relative terms—had been divvied up like sandlot ball teams between squads A and
B. There was no C. Evidently the higher-class letters wanted a bit of space between themselves and these uncouth combatants. To make things worse, in radio chatter, for the sake of unambiguous communication A became “Alpha” and B “Bravo,” whereas the lowly D could do no better than “Dog.” It was like living on the wrong side of the tracks; after a while, Ingo found, you began to acquire a sort of outlaw pride.
Another Green World Page 7
