"Anyone who is interested in the story not appearing," I said, "or all of them together. They may have hired a hit man—who can tell? The story is not to be published. Herf ord doesn't want it, the Amis don't want it, the Russians don't want it, and—who knows? Vandenberg may not want it either."
"But he told you to write the book!" cried Irina.
"Yes, he did," I said. "But perhaps on order or with the complicity of others. So that they could be sure I was writing the book for Vandenberg and not letting anyone else in on it. Only, they did away with the wrong man! I'll sue them all: Herford, the Amis, the Russians, and Vandenberg! From here on in I don't trust anybody. You'll see—they'll never find the murderer!"
And I was right—they never did.
"One of us has to go and speak to Bertie's mother," said Hem. "I will, if you want me to, Walter."
"No," I said, "that's something I want to do myself."
Bertie's mother lived not far away from Hem in a section of the city called Bockenheim on Leipzigerstrasse. A maid, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, said Frau Engelhardt had collapsed after the police had informed her of her son's death, but I was to come in; she was expecting me. I had phoned that I was coming.
The maid led me into a large, beautifully furnished room. Frau Engelhardt was sitting very upright on a sofa, wearing a black dress. To my knowledge, she was eighty-four years old. She was slender and tall, her hair was gray, and her fine features gave her face an effect of transparency.
"Sit down, please, Herr Roland," she said, and her voice, the voice of an old woman, was firm and calm. "I am glad you came and not anyone else. Bertie's publisher and editor-in-chief and so many others have called—reporters from the newspapers, too—so an hour ago I took the receiver off the hook."
I sat down and looked at the old lady whom I had known for so many years, and found I couldn't utter a word. There were a lot of flowers in vases on various tables. Bertie's mother gestured in their direction. "They just came. Bertie had so many friends. He was a good boy, wasn't he?"
"Yes," I said. "He was my friend. We worked together for many years. I—I—"
"I know," said Bertie's mother. "He was very fond of you, you know. He admired you."
"Ac/i...."
"He really did. And he was always happy when he could work with you." She looked at me, a gentle expression in her eyes. I was silent. I still didn't know what to say. Everything that came to me seemed banal. "God's ways are strange," she said. "I have been waiting for death for a long time, yet I am alive, and my Bertie is dead. Now I am all alone. He wasn't home much, but we always
kept in touch. He called me whenever he could, or sent a wire or wrote, and sent flowers. Perhaps God will be merciful and let die soon, too. What is there left for me to do on this earth.-'"
"Dear Frau Engelhardt—"
"No, don't say anything. I know how you feel. This is a moment when the best thing we can do is be silent and think of Bertie. Would you like to be silent with me?"
I nodded, and for quite a long time neither of us said anything, and I thought of the many adventures I had shared with Bertie, of his blithe spirit, of how often he had laughed and of how even in death he had been smiling. At last his mother rose and walked over to a chest, which she opened. She motioned to me to join her, and I did. The chest was three-quarters full of letters and telegrams. There must have been hundreds. "All from him," she said. "In all these years he wrote me these letters and sent me these telegrams. He is not altogether gone. I still have a lot left, don't I? I can read these letters and wires, can't I?"
"Yes, Frau Engelhardt."
"And that is a great consolation to me."
"I'm sure it is," I said, and thought, surprised and depressed at the same time: What can be a comfort to one in one's misery! She showed me a few of his letters, from Tokyo, Hollywood, Saigon, Johannesburg, and as she did so she forgot more and more that I was present. She was so old, so tired of life, and finally, as I said good-bye, all she did was nod vaguely, without getting up. The last thing I saw was her reading a letter of Bertie's, a letter he had written to his beloved mother from some faraway place on this earth. I closed the door of the room softly and felt absolutely miserable.
The cremation took place two days later. Bertie had expressed the wish to be cremated, and the ceremony took place at the crematorium. A lot of people came: Bertie's colleagues, and from Blitz, everybody who could possibly have been present—Herford to the fore, of course, with Mama. Hem was there. Irina and I didn't go, and Hem told us that Herford held a long speech, in execrable taste, listing all that Bertie had done for Blitz. "I loved him like a son," Herford had said, sobbing. There were wreaths and flowers and everything was pompous to the nth degree, and Bertie's mother had sat through the entire ceremony in the first row, motionless. She had looked at no one, spoken to no one; and when the urn had finally been lowered into the grave, she had simply walked away.
That evening—it was Tuesday, January 14, 1969—Hem said
to me, "You know what it means, don't you? That they shot the wrong man and that you're still alive."
"Yes," I said. "I know."
"And you have a wife now, and your wife is expecting a child."
"What are you talking about?" asked Irina.
"Nothing, my darling," I said. "Nothing. Don't get excited. But there's something I have to do now, Hem, isn't there? Right away."
"Yes," said Hem. "As fast as you can."
"Oh, I see," said Irina. "Yes, Walter. Of course. That's what you must do." And suddenly I remembered something FrSulein Louise had said to me in the Ludwigskrankenhaus in Bremen. "It is a message from my friends, for you and Herr Engelhardt. I am to pass it on to you because you are good people. You are going to be happy, Herr Roland—that is my friends' message, but you still will have a long way to go until you reach a state of bliss, and you will have to overcome many trials and be patient. But for your friend Engelhardt it will be easier, and more beautiful. He has always had it easier, hasn't he? And he will soon attain everything that is desirable—"
His name was Peter Blenheim. He was a graphics artist, in his late forties, and he had a shy charm and a habit of placing the tips of his beautiful fingers together when he spoke. He was tall and tanned, looked happy, and had thick brown hair, a long face, and the blank, dark eyes of a squirrel. In spite of his height, there was something about him that reminded you of the speed and comic playfulness of a squirrel.
But of course he wasn't like a squirrel at all. He wasn't tall, nor did he look happy. He didn't place the tips of his beautiful fingers together when he spoke, he didn't have a sly charm nor was he a graphics artist. But he was near fifty. His name certainly wasn't Peter Blenheim. It is obvious, I am sure, that I have had to give him a different name and persona.
"Any friend of Max Knipper's is a friend of mine," was his greeting. Then he asked Irina and me to come into his mansard apartment and led us into a big studio, where he worked. Posters and designs for advertisements were attached to the walls with thumbtacks—big ones, little ones, colored, and black and white. Crayons, pens, brushes, and templates were scattered across a table. There was an easel with a canvas on it.
He asked us to sit down on a couch with a low table in front of it. The couch had no feet and was covered with a colorful blanket. He sat down opposite us on a red-leather Oriental hassock. He made a good impression on Irina and me right away—reliable, capable, a man who could be trusted, and that he was.
"You can't get a better man," Max had said, when I had told him our problem. "Wait. I'll call him and tell him you're coming."
"Is he so busy?"
"Naw... but he'll only see you if a good friend has recommended you. And he's right. He's been doing this all his life, and he's never had any trouble with the police."
Peter Blenheim forged papers—passports, citizenship papers, birth and baptismal certificates, whatever you needed. For any country, in any language. Any original documents that he
couldn't dig up didn't exist. We soon found that out when he asked us what country we intended to reside in and what we wanted our names to be.
"I work fast and well, and I'm expensive," he said. "I've never had an unsatisfied customer, and nothing's ever gone wrong."
A pity that I can't identify Peter Blenheim and recommend him highly to whoever might be interested. He looked after us fabulously. And he wasn't all that expensive in the end. I still had the diamonds. I was able to pay for everything else easily—the flight tickets and what we needed when we finally reached our destination. We managed the whole first difficult time on the money I was able to get for the diamonds.
All this seems to lie an eternity behind me. Naturally, I can't reveal our names and where we have found a new home on this earth. We are well. I don't write anymore but have a completely different profession, and I'm making good money. And there are three of us. Irina gave birth to a girl, whose name I shall also not reveal. I adore the child. Sometimes I think Irina is a little jealous. The work I am doing is honest and decent, a far cry from my past. And I have changed, too, to the extraordinary extent that I
paid off my debts to Blitz and my tax arrears—complicated transactions, but I managed them. And to this day I haven't drunk a drop.
We were with Peter Blenheim a long time that day because we had no time to lose, and he set to work right away. He took our passport pictures and we looked through two collections of printed forms with him and composed two new lives, one for Irina and one for me, with names, dates, and places.
"You must learn these dates and places by heart," said Peter Blenheim. "If anybody wakes you out of your sleep and yells at you with your former name, you mustn't give the slightest sign that it means anything to you. Your new life must be in your blood. Practice it! Try it! Let one of you wake the other in the middle of the night and ask him when he was born, and where, and what his mother's name is. That's just as important as the papers."
"Yes," I said, and we actually did practice these nightly alarms for a long time after our flight.
"I always say," said Blenheim, "that one hundred percent perfect papers are no use if the person himself isn't one hundred percent forged."
I looked at Irina, then at him again. "What's the matter?" he asked.
"You speak with an accent," I said. "A slight dialect. You're not from Frankfurt, are you?"
"No," he said, pressing the tips of his fingers together and smiling. "I'm not from here, although I've been living here for many years. But it's a funny thing—I don't seem to lose my accent."
"Where are you from?" I asked slowly. "Austria?"
"A little farther away. Bohemia. That's where I come from. My parents were born there, all my family from way back. We had a small farm in Spindlermiihle."
"Spindlermiihle... where's that?" asked Irina.
"In the Riesengebirge. Not far from the White Meadow," he said. "There's a high moor there. You won't believe it, but after I graduated from high school, I went to the University of Vienna. Studied philosophy. That startles you, does it?"
"Yes," I said, and looked at Irina, and she looked at me.
"Well, that didn't last long. I got together with some people doing—well, this kind of work, and I gave up my studies. Soon after that my parents died, and I sold the farm." His eyes looked
far away. "But those were good days, at the university. I always went home for my vacations, to Spindlermuhle and the White Meadow. Was there every summer." His smile broadened. "Even fell in love. Lasted for a whole summer. "With a girl who'd come from Vienna. She worked in a children's home. Social worker. A pretty girl and a beautiful love. Well... and since then so much time has gone by."
"Your friend was a social worker?" asked Irina.
"Isn't that what I said?" said Peter Blenheim. "There were a lot of them around at the time. Young. Pretty. But I liked this ooe best. Only lasted a few months, then we had to part. But it waj true love, and for her, the first, even though she was a litde older than I—" He nodded nostalgically, a middle-aged man recalling his youth. "I often dream of her and that wonderful summer, and the wide expanse of moor. But—" He stopped.
"But?" I asked.
"But however hard I try to remember—I've even tried searching for her—" He shook his head. "Nothing to be done about it. After all, it's almost forty years ago. Frankly, I don't even recall the exact year it happened. As for the name of the girl—"
"Yes?" asked Irina.
"I've forgotten it," he said, with a shy smile, fingertips touching, a man with brown hair, tanned, reminding one of a squirrel. In his clear dark eyes there was an expression of wonder, veiled by sadness over the fact that in our world we forget everything. We forget what was painful and terrible, but also what was beautiful and lovely... after a time.
,.,.11
This book made available by the Internet Archive.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Pages
Back Cover
The Traitor Blitz Page 63
