by Janice Law
“But the embassy will miss him.”
“The embassy has been informed. And about your assistance.” With that, Mac got up, bundled my dirty clothes in the paper, and stuck it under his arm. “We’ll dispose of these. Leave nothing behind wherever you hide.”
“Right,” I said. More useful advice that I hoped never to need again.
We walked along the track to the station, slowly, as my ankle had started to puff up. Dusk was falling before Mac secured our second-class tickets to Stralsund. The train was not expected for another two hours, and we spent the time in the waiting room, drinking bad coffee and eating stale sandwiches. Mac seemed the picture of tranquillity, smoking his pipe and reading a discarded newspaper. I don’t know what bothered me more: the bizarre events of the past thirty-six hours or his nonchalant air.
“Were you really after Underwood?” I asked finally. “I mean, instead of looking for me.”
“Both. I got lucky. Two birds with one stone.” He took a closer look at me and added, “He would have killed you without thinking twice.”
I nodded. “He shot Oskar. And probably Belinda.”
“The only surprise is that he didn’t kill your friend.”
“Was my uncle his real target?”
Mac made a fuss of relighting his pipe before he said, “Everyone and his brother wants your uncle.”
“But he’s a con man. Don’t you know that?”
“Even con men can have real information,” Mac said.
Although it was late when we reached Stralsund, Mac insisted on going to the hospital right away, an urgency that made me nervous; I wasn’t just imagining danger if the unflappable Mac was so serious. At the admitting desk, he asked if Oskar’s father had arrived and claimed to be my friend’s British uncle. “A far-flung family,” he said, explaining that he had raced up from Berlin as soon as he heard the news. “A dreadful, dreadful business. And shot! Have the police been notified?” And so on. He secured a good deal of information, including the name of the officer who had taken a statement from Oskar.
“We’ll maybe talk to him tomorrow,” Mac said to me in an undertone as we entered the men’s ward.
A single oil lamp cast a faint light down rows of beds screened by white canvas curtains. The ward was mostly empty, just the two old men I’d seen that morning who were now snoring contentedly. Oskar had been moved closer to the tall windows, and he was dozing, propped up on pillows, his face toward the town and the Baltic.
He stirred when he heard us approaching. “Francis! You’re supposed to be in Berlin!” He sounded alarmed. Maybe he was expecting his father any minute, or maybe he was worried about my safety. I’d like to think that.
“This is Mac,” I said. “He got me out of a jam. We needed to be sure you were safe.”
“I’m going home tomorrow,” he said. “With Father.”
I patted his shoulder. Good-bye to the free and easy life in the “welcome circus of depravity”; hello to the stifling embrace of disapproval and respectability. No more nights on the town and maybe no more of der Bund and the Wandervogel, either. I could sympathize, I really could. “You will be safest at home. Until you get well.”
“They say it will be some time. My head aches so.” He moved restlessly, and I guessed that he was still feverish.
“Sleep,” Mac said. “We will stay with you tonight and leave before your father arrives in the morning. We don’t need to meet him.”
Oskar gave a half smile at this and closed his eyes. Mac settled back in his chair, lit his pipe, and prepared to make a night of it, but I was suddenly overcome with weariness. I leaned forward, put my head in my arms at the side of Oskar’s bed, and instantly fell asleep.
I woke up when Mac laid a warning hand on my back. I straightened up, disoriented, and he touched my lips for quiet. Someone was walking along the hallway outside the ward, and it was not the soft-footed nurses who I hazily remembered had looked in with their lamps and their watches to straighten pillows and to check pulses and temperatures. Mac had argued with one about our presence. She wanted the ward cleared. Mac said that a gunshot victim needed protection. He raised just enough doubt that she’d let us stay. This was someone else.
Mac reached over and drew the curtain carefully, then crouched on the floor behind Oskar’s bed. I slid down beside him. A dark figure appeared against the hall light, then the glowing red dot of a cigarette held at an odd angle, and I felt my heart jumping. The oberst had discovered where Oskar was and had come to pay a visit. A friendly visit? I didn’t think so, not at this time of night.
I started to rise, but Mac put his hand on my arm and shook his head. I heard footsteps, the sound of the curtain on the far side being drawn back cautiously, then a rustle like something being taken out of a paper parcel, and a smell. Oh, I recognized that! I remembered kerosene lamps and heaters in our nursery as a child.
Forgetting Mac and his warning, I leaped to my feet, shouting, “Stop! Halten! Stop!” just as a sheet of flame appeared with a flare and a whoosh over Oskar’s bed. He woke with a scream, and I threw all my weight onto the near curtain, bringing it down over the flames and over Oskar. Careless of his injuries, I threw myself into the smells of burning fuel, linen, wool, and flesh, flailing my arms and trying to smother the flames. There was a scuffle beside the bed, but Mac was more than a match for Oberst Weick, whose false arm came loose to give the nurse who rushed in a bit of a turn.
“Help! Oskar needs help!” I cried, trying to disentangle myself from the curtain and to yank the smoldering sheets off the bed. I tumbled to the floor with the front of my sweater smoking and threatening flames, until a hefty nurse heaved a bucket of water over bed, sheets, and yours truly. Another nurse got the smoking bedcovers off Oskar and a third saw to the oberst, who was lying prone with Mac seated on his chest.
In short order, the police arrived. Oskar was moved to another bed, where they dressed his burns and put a new bandage on his leg, which was bleeding again. This time, a policeman sat guard. Both Mac and I had been summoned for an interview in a little storage room just off the ward. “Let me handle this,” said Mac. I was quite willing to let him, and I must say he was very good. Maybe Harold was right that a top regimental sergeant, at least one with embassy connections, could manage anything.
I was presented as a juvenile on my own in Berlin: “A precarious life, gentlemen,” Mac said. I had been befriended by a boy of good family—this was Oskar—who had important evidence to provide in a capital case. The boy was shot at the home of Oberst Weick, formerly a sponsor of their outing club. “Just how that shooting happened remains somewhat of a mystery,” Mac said, “but his injuries were grossly neglected until Francis, here, managed to get his friend safely off the island and into the hospital.”
You can believe that I glowed, if only momentarily, in the light of friendship and heroism. Were the Kripos impressed? Yes, and, of course, they were grateful that our “timely action” had prevented serious injuries, even death. But—in my experience with police, there is always a but—there would be more questions, and the little matter of my stolen passport would have to be sorted out.
“Naturally,” said the silken-tongued Mac. “The embassy will take care of that. And I will escort him back to Berlin immediately.”
I think they likely wanted to ask Mac a thing or two—or three—but he was a bona fide member of the diplomatic corps with documents to prove it, and when he put his arm around my shoulders and claimed to be in loco parentis and what all else I don’t remember, we were released with the caveat that I was to remain at my present address in Berlin for the foreseeable future. I thought that I might just get that clandestine run across the border yet.
By the time we walked past the ward, the mess had been tidied up, leaving only a faint oily, burned smell, and the ripple of nervous chatter passing between the beds of two old gaffers, who seemed to be arguing
over who’d had the best view of the incident. I told Mac that I wanted to say good-bye to Oskar, as I thought it unlikely that I would ever see him again. When I stepped up to the officer in the doorway, he recognized us and nodded.
The curtains were closed around Oskar’s bed, and when I peeked in, I saw that there were new bandages on both his arms. There was also a tall, stout man with a square face and little wire-rimmed glasses sitting beside the bed. He had Oskar’s handsome features and fair complexion, and his hair was just touched with gray. In different circumstances, I’d have given him the eye, because he was just my type.
I nodded to him and said, “How are you, Oskar? How much damage?” and I put my hand on his shoulder.
Well, talk about an explosion. His father jumped up and began shouting, the heart of the message being to “get that little poofter away from my son!”
I was taken aback, and poor Oskar was speechless, but Mac put his arm around me and said, “Without this ‘little poofter,’ your son would have been dead twice over. You might think about that.” He continued in quick and complicated German, probably revealing a lot more than Oskar had cared to about our adventures on the island and our vigil the night before.
“I’m leaving Germany,” I said when Mac was finished, and Oskar’s father had sat back down, looking as white and drained as he had looked red and angry just minutes before. I could see that he loved Oskar, although I knew his son didn’t believe that. And I felt sad, because I realized that fathers and sons may love each other and long to be happy with each other yet not be able to manage. I suppose I might have taken a lesson from that.
Instead, I was mannerly, for though I would have liked to kiss him, I touched Oskar’s hand instead. “Get well,” I said. “Take care. And tell them about Belinda, who was brave, too.”
Then I pushed the curtain aside and walked out. “I want to leave,” I said to Mac. “One way or another, I’ve had enough of Berlin.”
Chapter Twenty
My Dear Nan,
You will be surprised when you get this letter, as I am writing it from a second-class carriage on the SNCF! Yes! I am in France and, Nan, I am headed for Paris! The very best part is that I am traveling gratis, thanks to the Weimar Republic, which paid for my trip to the border, and to His Majesty’s government, which has afforded me the rest. They would have sent me all the way to London, but with you being in Manchester now—and I hope your newest old lady employer is not too much trouble—I thought I would save the benefactors some money and get off in Paris.
I know you are asking yourself if this official generosity is in gratitude for my assistance. Not exactly. Our government is grateful; the Germans feel my presence is undesirable. Perhaps that is a natural difference of opinion given recent history.
The train rolled over some particularly rough points, and I stopped writing when my pen began to jitter across the paper. Nan admires good penmanship, and I try to send her my best. I was also uncertain how much of my recent adventure I should commit to paper. My friends at the embassy had been very clear that silence was expected: Loose lips sink ships, as the old slogan has it, and I had certainly seen Mac sink Underwood’s ship without hesitation.
The Germans had also been enthusiastic about discretion. The oberst had heavyweight connections who weighed in with his war service and battle injuries and managed to shift ninety-nine percent of the blame to Aubrey Underwood, the missing British military attaché. There was some justice in that—and I certainly won’t complain if only he’ll stay missing!
At the same time, my dear Nan does love a good mystery—real, fictional, or something in between, which, I think, is the real nature of most accounts. I tried to frame another paragraph without success, and once the ink was dry—I’m never using a blotter again—I folded the still unfinished letter and got up to stretch my legs with a walk along the corridor.
The engine accelerated as we moved onto our new track, and I went swinging down the corridor, bouncing back and forth from the wall to the compartment doors. I was two carriages further on when the door of one compartment slid open by itself, and in surprise, I came to a dead halt and had to grab the doorframe to keep from sliding right into their seats.
He was sitting in the middle of a full compartment. Hair now a bright auburn that I did not find flattering. Ditto a narrow continental-style mustache. Open-necked shirt, blue jacket, not terribly well cut, and a beret. A beret for God’s sake! His cigarette smelled like a Gauloises Bleu. He had everything French except the espadrilles, but I knew him right away. There sat my uncle Lastings, large as life.
“Pardon, messieurs,” I said, recovering myself. I continued along the carriages, pausing outside the dining car, where I planted myself by a window to wait. I wanted an explanation for my uncle’s extraordinary behavior, and I thought that a first-rate French meal would not go amiss, either. Sure enough, within a quarter of an hour, my uncle arrived, trailed by a plume of acrid French tobacco smoke—or, I should say, the man who had been my uncle but was now, as I was to discover, Monsieur Luc Pinot, an Alsatian exporter of wines based in Strasbourg with no relation to any Bacon anywhere on the globe.
For all that, he was friendly enough. “Ah, mon ami,” he said in greeting and expressed his regret that the train was too crowded to allow us, as he put it, “to revisit pleasures past.” Becoming French had obviously given a poetic slant to his conversation.
“Your hair is frightful,” I said, which certainly hadn’t topped the list of things I’d intended to say, but he was at once so himself and so different that I was momentarily at a loss. I recognized, as I had not when I first knew him, how completely he could inhabit a role, undoubtedly the knack that made him a successful con man. I realized that there might be little point in being angry with Monsieur Pinot, who was a totally different character from my feckless uncle.
“And where are you bound?” he asked, ignoring my remark.
“Paris.”
“Paris! You lucky young dog! Paris does a man’s heart good. You see if I’m not right.”
“And you?”
“Just passing through,” he said mysteriously. “But you look like you’ve thrived. And now you’re off on a new adventure.”
That was laying it on a bit thick. “I was deported.”
He smirked at this. “Better yet. Saves the fare, don’t you know. But don’t tell me the good men of Weimar ponied up for Paris!”
“His Majesty’s government gave me the rest.”
With this, he clapped me on the shoulder. “Mon ami! If ever I see your respected father again, I will tell him he’s raised a boy in a million. I will.” He took another look at me. “And properly suited-up as well, though continental tailoring can’t hold a candle to Saville Row. More’s the pity,” he added with a glance at his jacket.
“I landed on my feet,” I admitted. Mac had kindly shopped again and replaced the badly singed sweater.
“What did I tell you? Didn’t I say you’d be fine?”
“No thanks to you. I’ve been pursued by fanatics, nearly murdered twice, had one friend badly wounded, and another shot dead in an alley.”
At this, Uncle crossed himself. He’d apparently gone over to Rome as well as to Paris. “Poor Arek,” he said. “We met during the Great War. We must have a drink to absent friends.” He motioned toward the dining car.
“You have funds?” I didn’t fancy washing dishes on the SNCF.
“Ye of little faith. I have been entrusted with a project.” He winked and opening the door to the dining car, waved me inside and patted me on the bum as I passed. In some ways, the Gallic edition of my uncle was unchanged.
White tablecloths, damask napkins, heavy cutlery—which, thanks to German and Swedish design, I now saw as hopelessly old-fashioned—and big leather-bound menus. “Shades of the Adlon,” I said. The luxury of the hotel seemed years, not weeks, behind me.
“Champagne,” said my French uncle. “We must have a champagne toast to Arek.”
“To Belinda,” I said. “As I knew him.”
We touched glasses, and a quiet pall settled over our table, broken only by the arrival of the waiter with Chateaubriand for two, roast potatoes, and spring vegetables. By the time we were finished, I was halfway to forgiving him. Except for the White Cat.
“What did you do with the Webley?” I asked. We’d reached coffee and pastries. If he kicked me out of the carriage, I’d already have enjoyed a good meal.
He looked up sharply, and for a moment, Uncle Lastings as I had known him in Berlin reemerged. “That’s bothered you.”
“Of course it’s bothered me. I had to keep ahead of the police, hide out, acquire false papers. And I was pursued by right-wing, combat-league fighters. I was cornered once and nearly beaten, and I was threatened with death on Rügen.”
“A charming resort.”
“More charming without fanatics with revolvers and savage dogs.”
“Well,” he said after I had told him a little more about my stay at the oberst’s, “you see now what we’re up against. They want to rebuild Germany in their own image—fanatical, militaristic, nationalistic. You wait and see, but I’m betting on them to do it.”
“The men you shot—”
“Would have killed me. They intended to kill me and lured me there, unarmed, to do so. But first, they wanted my information, my contacts, and they might have gotten them, because I’m no bloody hero, and I’ve had enough pain to do me for a lifetime. So I took action.”
