This Is How It Really Sounds

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  “Mr. Pico, please, there was no need to get up!” He extended his spotty hand toward the couch. “Can I offer you some American whiskey?”

  Maier poured him some Old Grand-Dad from the cart and sat down across from him in a chair. Charlie noticed it was a brand-new bottle.

  Mr. Maier was wearing a brown tweed sport jacket with a bow tie and a white shirt. He spoke English with a strong German accent. The man radiated cunning the way some people radiate sex appeal or physical strength, but it was complicated by a nervous sadness that collected in the droop of his shoulders. Before the war, Mr. Maier had been in the shipping business in Kiel, had gotten out of Germany in 1936, bounced through Singapore and Bangkok, then landed in Shanghai in 1937. He’d spent six years watching the Nazis cut his country into perfect little swastikas, and then another six watching them set it all on fire.

  He tried to imagine Maier’s life in Kiel. A nice house by a canal, a family, relatives. Years of worry, standing by as the worst people in the world slowly get the upper hand, and then one day you wake up in Shanghai with diamonds sewn into the hem of your overcoat praying for a letter from Argentina, Bolivia, Palestine: whoever hasn’t slammed the door shut yet. He noticed a photo on the piano that had a younger Maier in it, in a schoolboy’s outfit, surrounded by parents and brothers and sisters. He didn’t ask where they were now.

  They chatted a bit about the United States: Mr. Maier had visited America on business in 1930, so he’d been to the East Coast. He had a first cousin in Los Angeles. “And you?” he asked. Charlie told him he’d grown up on a farm in Washington State. By way of explaining his presence in Shanghai, he threw the import-export cover at him, but the old man just waved his hand at him, smiling. “I already talked with Sassoon,” he said.

  Charlie returned the grin, though he wasn’t completely happy about it. He didn’t want his identity to be an open secret in Shanghai. Mr. Maier seemed to anticipate that. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s a very small group of us. And besides, I take no sides in that argument. The Communists will crush everyone sooner or later, as they did in Russia, or the Nationalists will run a gangster state, as they are here in Shanghai. Either side will one day take notice of me. I’m moving to the United States. I want to be somewhere I don’t have to flee again.”

  He had no idea why this meeting had been set up. He’d only gotten a message from Benjamin, saying call this man at this number, he wants to make a proposition to you. Sassoon had finally gotten his properties back from the Japanese and would be clearing out for the Bahamas. Maier, too, having fled Germany, would be hightailing it out of Shanghai before long. One step ahead of the Fascists, and one step ahead of the Communists. He was a nimble man.

  “That’s the advantage of shipping,” he said. “Your assets are movable. Most of them.”

  They talked a bit about Charlie’s service record behind the lines in Germany and western China and what it was like to parachute out of a plane at night. It seemed like small talk and it seemed like an interview. Maier asked him if he was a spy in the war, and he said no, he didn’t know anything about spying, but if you asked him to blow something up he had a moderate degree of competence. Still, the man wasn’t revealing anything.

  “I’m at your service, Mr. Maier,” he said at last. “But I’m also at a loss here. Is there something specific you wanted to talk to me about?”

  He had just opened his mouth to speak when someone came in the front door and called out, “Papa!”

  Maier answered her in German and she came into the room. A young woman of perhaps eighteen, dressed in a schoolgirl’s outfit of a white blouse and a blue and white checked skirt down to her calves. Tendrils of her ash-blond hair were swept up over her forehead and cascaded down in curls to one side like Veronica Lake. She stopped short when she noticed Charlie sitting there on the sofa.

  He stood up for her. She was a living version of the young bride in the photograph. It threw him off a little.

  “Anna,” Maier said, “this is Charlie Pico. He is a friend of ours from America. I’m asking him to help us.”

  She shook his hand cautiously.

  “Anna!” her father said, “have a seat. Don’t be shy. These are things you should know about. You are old enough.” The girl sat down, quietly radiant. “Anna is the one who plays the piano,” Maier said.

  “Very poorly,” she said.

  “So poorly that she was asked to play three of Chopin’s Nocturnes for Princess Elizabeth when she visits next month.”

  “Papa!” She rolled her eyes toward Charlie. “They couldn’t find anyone else. Do you like Chopin?”

  “I’ve never met the man,” Charlie said.

  She smiled for the first time. “You’re very funny, Mr. Pico. I’ll play you some Chopin one day and then you can give me your opinion of him.”

  Hermann Maier began again. “I’ll tell you my story, Mr. Pico. It’s not a unique story, not for you, who I am sure has seen many terrible things in the last three years.”

  Nothing surprising about the story, as Maier had promised, given the sad state of affairs the world had been in. He’d arranged for the whole family to get out of Germany. It had taken him nearly a year of bribes and arrangements, and he’d had to sign over much of his business to various third parties who stood in for prominent Nazis. The problem was that his wife was a beautiful woman. “Anna gets her looks from her mother.” From her time at Mittelschule she’d had an admirer, a Karl Richter. Richter had come into her orbit because their mothers had grown up in the same neighborhood; they had been playmates from a young age. But Richter’s mother had married a drunken, brutal man, a stevedore who had long bouts without work during the chaos of the Weimar Republic. It was due to his own oafishness, but he blamed it on the bankers and the profiteers, and in his mind that meant Jews. Richter took after the father. He was a rough, simpleminded adolescent with dark hair and a wide Slavic face, far from the Germanic ideal, like most Nazis. That was the funny thing about the Nazis, Maier said, the top ones never measured up. Goebbels, a cripple; Göring, a fat buffoon; Hitler himself, a dark-haired misfit. It was as if they’d invented an ideal they couldn’t possibly meet so that, by naming it, they could possess it. Richter enjoyed sports like boxing and rugby and was constantly having trouble at school. Unfortunately, he had also had an affection for Lille, Maier’s wife, and as he reached the age of eighteen, the affection grew into a mania. She rejected his advances, and though he was hurt, Richter’s attitude toward her was still solicitous and courteous, in his brutish way. As time went on, though, his attentions began to have a slightly sarcastic tone to them. After she married Maier, Richter became bitter and abusive toward her, emotions that were given a new articulation when he threw himself into Fascist politics. By 1931 he was an important person in the Kiel Nazi Party, a prominent speaker about the “stab in the back” and the Jewish bloodsuckers. On those occasions when they had the misfortune to meet him in the street, he would insult them. It’s so nice to see you with an animal of your own species! he might say, favoring them with a grand smile. And what a charming little brood of rats! Always with a gleeful and venomous flourish. Hatred had devoured him completely; it had become a kind of joy.

  The unfortunate thing was that the path to an exit visa ran directly through him. He had extracted everything he could: offices, warehouses, even their residence. He was convinced that Maier had a large fleet of ships, just because he was a Jew and Jews always hide their true wealth, and it was only through the intercession of a sympathetic Lutheran minister that he could be persuaded to release his hold. They received their visas the morning their ship was to depart, though they had been stamped a week earlier. They rushed to the port with whatever they could fit into their suitcases, and he and the children passed through Immigration first. At that very moment, just as their papers had been stamped with all the officiousness that the Reich could muster, Richter appeared with his usual vicious pleasantry, and he told them to go ahead, that his wife wo
uld be with them shortly. When he hesitated, Richter screamed at him. “Go now, or you will never leave!”

  Charlie glanced at the girl, Anna, who stared down at her lap as the ugly words rolled through the room. Her shoulders were hunched like a child’s, as if she was still cowering.

  His wife was no longer the object of youthful fantasies that Richter had desired. She was near forty, a mother of two, immersed in a life that had long ago cast off from whatever dreams Richter might have harbored. His goal was not to possess her but to take revenge on the fact that there were things he would never possess, no matter how much he wanted them, no matter how vaunted his new role as a high Nazi official. Maier knew this, but he was trapped. If he left, he didn’t know what would happen to his wife, but if he stayed, his children would be caught, too. In the way that was particular to the Nazis, Richter controlled the situation with another lie. He’d smiled and said, “Do not worry, Herr Maier. I am just saying good-bye to a childhood friend.”

  To his shame, this lie had been enough. He’d gone with the children and checked into their stateroom. The purser, a Frenchman, seemed to know they were escaping and treated them sympathetically. Maier had waited five minutes for Lille’s knock on the door, then, at the blast of the ship’s horn, rushed to the gangplank just as the crew began to raise it. He hurried off to find the purser, but then the horn sounded again, and he felt a slight lurch as the ship began to move. He dashed through the passenger lounge and the ship’s bar, finally spotting the purser and grabbing him by the arm, demanding to know of his wife. The purser told him, with alarm, that his wife was not on board but that they had been ordered by the highest local authority to cast off. Maier had to be helped back to his cabin, where his young daughter and toddler son were waiting for their mother. Richter had won.

  That was the last time he’d seen her. He’d written her letters, but they were never answered. From his Lutheran minister friend he heard she’d been deported, but she hadn’t appeared on any of the lists of survivors that the Red Cross had issued. He’d made every kind of inquiry in every Displaced Persons camp; nothing had turned up so far.

  Charlie listened to the story. There were a lot of stories like that. Few of them had good endings. “I could make some inquiries for you. I have some friends in the service who are working with DPs.”

  “She is lost!” the older man answered. “I know that! She would have contacted my cousin in America to look for us. Only one thing can keep a mother from searching for her children. She is lost!” Maier was leaning forward in his seat, a frail and ferocious little man, but now, in a motion that indicated to Charlie the degree of self-discipline he had, he calmed himself and leaned back, then said offhandedly, “But Richter is in Shanghai. He’s alive and enjoying the clean air of freedom.”

  Footsteps crossed the ceiling over their heads. The maid rattled some pans in the kitchen. “And you’d like to see that situation change.”

  Maier nodded. “Of course.”

  “I’m not a hired assassin, Mr. Maier. I’ll bet if you ask around you can find a Chinese guy who can do the job quite well. It’s a buyer’s market for that stuff these days.”

  “Mr. Pico, I have no connections to the Triads, and I do not want any. Men like that may come back and ask for favors. I know you are someone I can trust.”

  Killing somebody wasn’t really his line of work—at least, not unless it was a war. Once the war was over, the rules changed, for some reason. Ten months ago parachuting into Germany and killing Richter would have gotten him a medal. Today, it would get him a murder rap. Was Richter less guilty now that an armistice had been signed? Was he any less deserving of dying, or of living?

  The three of them just sat there. Maier probably offered him another drink or a smoke. It seemed a little odd that the shipper would have his daughter sit in on his attempts to hire a killer, but she had a right, he supposed.

  Charlie knew already he wasn’t going to take the job. The idea of clipping an ex-Nazi didn’t bother him too much, but he was busy with his other work in Shanghai, and the government didn’t look fondly on side jobs. Those kinds of deals were a slippery slope. He’d seen it plenty during the war and would see a lot more of it afterward: you start out using your connections to do favors, and the next thing you know you’re a black marketeer or a mercenary.

  The problem was, he couldn’t ignore the girl. It had been a long war, with the closest thing to romance being the whorehouses in Rangoon and Kunming. Anna was the kind of pipe dream he’d hung on to in the jungle, when he’d imagined someday turning the misery and fear into stories he’d tell to impress someone intelligent, civilized, beautiful. He wasn’t any of those things himself: he was a dumb farm boy from Washington State that got demolitions training because he knew how to blow up stumps and then got pretty good at killing people, yet here she was, like the secret reward he had earned by being a “hero”: A hero’s wife. A spy’s mistress. There was something about the unknown, the endlessly possible that she represented. And at the same time, beneath all that, she was a young girl who had been grievously wronged.

  “Just for the sake of discussion, Mr. Maier, what’s this Richter doing in Shanghai?”

  This wasn’t known, Maier answered. He had arrived several days ago and had taken up residence at the Cathay Hotel, directly below Sassoon’s offices. The day manager at the Cathay was from Kiel, and he had recognized him immediately.

  At this Maier’s face burned slightly brighter. “Right below Sassoon, the most prominent Jew in Shanghai. As if he has done nothing wrong and can never be punished! He is mocking us! He is mocking the very idea of justice!”

  Charlie didn’t answer. Lots of Nazis had stood trial at Nuremberg that year; if this Richter was traveling freely, he might have been investigated and cleared. Which didn’t prove anything. He’d heard through the grapevine that the geniuses at Military Intelligence were letting a lot of Nazis off in exchange for promises of future help against the Soviets. But to stay at the Cathay … “Maybe it’s because he wants you to know he’s here. Can you think of a reason he might want to contact you?”

  Maier let his gaze roam out the window, then linger on the wedding portrait. “I cannot allow myself to hope anymore, Mr. Pico.”

  Charlie doubted that was true, but he said nothing.

  The shipper collapsed slightly. Without any further answer, he walked over to the liquor cart and opened the ice bucket as if to make himself a drink, then closed it again. He and his daughter looked at each other. “Let us do this, Mr. Pico: let us say you are not hired to kill him, only to watch him and find out why he is here…”

  “Mr. Maier, I’m up to my ears in other business right now—”

  Maier smiled and held up his hand. “Only to go to the Cathay and watch him and learn a little more about him. Find out why he is in Shanghai. Anna will go with you. I have no picture of him, but Anna will know him.”

  He turned to her. She seemed extraordinarily calm and adult and expectant. “Are you sure you’ll remember him? You must have been eight years old when you last saw him.”

  “Nine,” she said, and her next words felt cold. “I have not forgotten his face, Mr. Pico.”

  In the quiet, cultured interior of the house, the gazes of Maier and his daughter held him in place. Part of him had known as soon as Anna walked into the room what he was about to say. “I’ll give it a few hours. But you can’t pay me. Consider it a favor.”

  At six the next morning he and Anna were both sitting in the hotel bar with coffee and French pastries, at a table that afforded a view of the lobby and the coffee shop from behind a dark wooden balustrade that screened them. The bar was closed, but Mr. Maier had cleared it with Sassoon beforehand. It should be easy to spot him. People tended to leave hotels in the morning and return before dinner to freshen up, so morning or late afternoon were both good times. Would Richter make the girl, if he hadn’t seen her since she was nine years old? A Nazi on the lam would be wary, but a Nazi who’d b
een cleared and checked into Shanghai’s foremost hotel owned by its foremost Jew didn’t seem like a man who was worried about his past. Anna wore a black pillbox hat with a lace veil in case Richter glanced over at them.

  They chatted awkwardly as they waited, like two people out on a date. She was shy, as an eighteen-year-old girl talking to a war veteran might be, and tense because she was about to lay eyes on the man who had taken her mother away from her. At the same time, he detected a thread of curiosity.

  “Where are you from, Mr. Pico?”

  “Call me Charlie, please.”

  “Charlie. How did you grow up? What was your home like?”

  “I grew up on a farm in western Washington. That’s in the northwestern corner of the United States.”

  “How was it? Did you have cows and a … a house for the cows?”

  “Yes, we have a house for the cows.” He smiled. “It’s called a barn! With a couple of horses and chickens and ducks and a pig.” He told her about the crops they grew: corn, alfalfa, mustard, wheat. Different crops depending on the year. Vegetables for the family and a few extra to sell. “We have a little white house, with a porch and a glider, and a big black woodstove to heat it, because there’s a lot of forest around, and we have a creek on the property. It’s in the foothills of the mountains. Really, Anna, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. For a home.”

  “It sounds wonderful.”

  “It is wonderful, Anna.” He thought of his mother fetching water from the well and his sister coming back from the barn with a tin pail of milk. He thought of the dinner bell ringing, of firewood popping and a spark rocketing from the open stove when he stoked it. What you knew on the farm was that you had everything a man really needed. You had your family close by, right beside you, and food and milk and fire. The whole beautiful world revolved outside your windows, and it was the only world that mattered. The snow fell. The leaves turned green. You found a good wife and you loved up your children: “I’ll probably be going back there when this Shanghai thing is over.”