Fear Itself

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Schellenberg looked at him questioningly, and Heydrich answered impatiently, ‘The Ambassador. And when Werner disappeared, we received a cable from the Ambassador asking where he was.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Quite. We recalled Ambassador Luther right away.’

  Schellenberg remembered this. Eyebrows had been raised when the former President of the former Republic, made Ambassador as a sop to the old-style diplomats still in place, had been brought back from Washington peremptorily.

  Now Schellenberg knew why, but the satisfaction of solving that small mystery was far outweighed by the chilling realisation that this American plant, fruit of a guard’s brave intervention years before, must be more important than even Schellenberg had sensed, since in order to protect his hidden identity a man as distinguished as Herr Luther had been humiliated.

  ‘You see what is missing?’ Heydrich eyed him keenly.

  It wasn’t clear to Schellenberg whether he was supposed to know or not, so he simply said truthfully, ‘I’m not sure if I do. Except that if Werner was the connection, and he only told the Ambassador, then no one in America knows this man is there.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Heydrich seemed delighted. ‘I knew your lawyer’s training would show through. No one knows at all.’

  ‘What about our Washington friend?’ The other contact at the embassy. ‘Can we not use him as an intermediary?’

  Heydrich shook his head emphatically. ‘As far as he knows, he is simply there to help the Bund. Since the Führer himself has publicly forbidden German citizens in America from joining it, he will think he has a highly secret mission. He won’t suspect that he’s serving any other purpose – the best way to use a decoy is to plant one who doesn’t realise that’s his role. Which is particularly true in this case, since this embassy fellow is no more reliable than Röhm.’ He added drily, ‘And with the same deviant predilections.’

  Schellenberg must have looked surprised, for Heydrich explained, ‘Not that this is known. He would have been booted out of the Foreign Office if it were.’

  Schellenberg nodded thoughtfully. Heydrich was famous for his knowledge of the personal peccadilloes of his colleagues, subordinates, and sometimes even superiors – Heydrich had hinted more than once in Schellenberg’s presence that Field Marshal Göring had a private fondness for opiates. Still, it seemed remarkable to Schellenberg that Heydrich would know of the sexual preferences of a middle-ranking member of the Foreign Service staff based in Washington. ‘You must have a very good source,’ he said now, trying, not altogether successfully, to sound complimentary.

  ‘I do,’ said Heydrich simply. ‘But then, I am paid to know about people. Even people working directly for me – perhaps I should say especially for people working for me.’ He had put his glass down but still stared at it. Schellenberg tried not to show the agitation he was starting to feel. Heydrich went on, with a calmness that seemed contrived, ‘Say, for example, that a member of my staff wanted to get married. Normally a matter of congratulations, but in this case there’s a problem: his bride-to-be has something irregular about her. Spitzer my adjutant is awfully good at flushing these things out.’

  ‘Spitzer?’ The name rang a bell. Slowly a picture formed in Schellenberg’s mind like a sketch under construction by a police artist, until suddenly it corresponded with the face of the man he had noticed earlier here in the café, sitting with his eyes darting around him, a creased brown derby on the table before him. Schellenberg instinctively looked over at the corner of this outside section of the café, but the man was gone. ‘Was he …?’ he started to ask, staring at the now-empty table.

  Heydrich shrugged, then smiled broadly, like a cat who knows his mouse has backed himself into a corner. ‘Spitzer is everywhere,’ he declared. ‘That’s the point of having a man like him around. But back to my little story. Perhaps the fiancée has a dubious antecedent – a mother with some foreign blood. Something lumpen and normally unacceptable. Slav, perhaps, or even Polish.’

  Schellenberg was trying not to flinch. How had this man learned about Irene? Even she hadn’t known until the last month that her mother had Polish blood.

  ‘Marriage of that sort would be out of the question for your average Party official. But for a valued member of my organisation a waiver could be arranged.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘Or not.’

  The message was clear: Heydrich had a hold on him, despite all Schellenberg’s best efforts to avoid putting himself in that position. It didn’t matter now, perhaps, since he had not crossed Heydrich in any way he knew of. Indeed, it sounded as though he was being given dispensation to marry Irene. But he would be beholden to Heydrich ever after – like almost everyone else who worked for the man.

  Schellenberg tried to collect his thoughts. Stick to business, he told himself, as he always did when meeting with the Gruppenführer. ‘If the man in the Washington embassy is not to be involved, then how do we make contact with the Dreiländer? Assuming we wish to.’

  ‘Oh, we may well wish to,’ said Heydrich knowingly. ‘Though the Führer says that will be up to Roosevelt. If he finishes his term and bows out gracefully, then there will be no need to contact our friend over there. No one else is going to drag America into the war. But if Roosevelt lets the Jews persuade him that he’s needed, then that will be a different matter.’

  ‘So how—’ began Schellenberg.

  But Heydrich cut him off with a short chop of his hand. ‘The answer lies abroad.’

  ‘Abroad? Why there?’

  ‘If the link comes from here in Germany – either written or radio transmission – then we are just asking for trouble. The Americans are innocent in many ways, but they seem to have a natural aptitude for technology. I am convinced that half the transmissions coming from our people over there are either overheard in Washington – or actually controlled by the Americans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve turned over most of our agents. We can’t afford that to happen with Dreiländer. So I’ve chosen a different route for our communications, which are strictly one way. You see that, too, I take it?’

  Schellenberg thought for a moment. Yes, of course he did, but he was wary, in case his view differed from Heydrich’s. There was always an agenda, wasn’t there? Sometimes ideological, sometimes personal, but always political. Which meant truthful replies were often more dangerous to express than bromides; highly intelligent men, capable of the most complex manoeuvres and intrigues in private, were impotent to speak the truth.

  Taking his silence for assent, Heydrich went on, ‘We need a trigger in his case and we arranged that with him, even before Werner was removed. It was a backup channel precisely in case something happened to Werner.’

  Schellenberg thought about this for a moment, and then said at last, ‘How do we contact the Dreiländer then?’

  Heydrich smiled again, pleased that Schellenberg had got there in the end. But he didn’t answer the question directly. ‘I need you to make a trip. How are you fixed?’

  Schellenberg thought of his office, the dizzying pile of reports that sat like Sisyphus’s rock on his desk – the more he read, the more there was to read. If he went away, the pile would be twice the height on his return. ‘Not so well,’ he said.

  Heydrich was shaking his head already. ‘Take your time, and take your new bride with you.’ He saw the surprise on Schellenberg’s face and suddenly clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excellent cover for your mission. But you need to go well before the end of summer. You wouldn’t want to find yourself stuck there if war broke out, now would you?’

  ‘Stuck where?’ asked Schellenberg.

  ‘In England. That’s where I need you to go. If we want Dreiländer to make his move, the message will come from England. No one in America would expect their President’s death warrant to come from that small, presumptuous island.’

  10

  August 1939

  Near Woodstock, Vermont

  NESSHEIM TOOK HIS copy of the Deutscher Weckru
f und Beobachter, house organ of the German-American Bund, and shoved it into the trash. What a mouthful, and what a terrible paper. Amidst its unread pages he had placed torn-up bits of the letter he’d received from the post office. C/o P.O. Box 172 – the address made him feel transient, as well as phoney. Phoney went with the job, he supposed. If there was a war, and he was starting to think there couldn’t help but be one in Europe soon, would he really have to go through it under the name Chug? That was what all the girl campers called him. For Christ’s sakes, it was as bad as Chip.

  Membership in the Bund gave him a subscription to its newspaper. Joining had been at Guttman’s insistence, as had Nessheim’s adoption of a phoney name – this time a surname. He couldn’t really fault the logic when Guttman said, ‘We can’t have you up there under Nessheim, just in case somebody’s seen you play football.’

  At least he’d been allowed to keep his first name. Guttman had said, ‘That way, you’ll react if somebody shouts “Hey, Jimmy”.’

  Only nobody did. They shouted, ‘Hey, Chug’ instead.

  If Nessheim didn’t like the subterfuge much, God knows what his mother would make of it. She must have been puzzled to be writing to a P.O. box, and mystified that his new employer, which he’d told her was the US Treasury Department, had him working in Vermont. Small-town Vermont, to boot, though from what he gathered there wasn’t really anything but small-town Vermont.

  He turned the corner onto Central Street, a straight stretch of neat shops that were well-preserved and freshly painted. There was money in this town, though from what Nessheim had seen, it was a different story in the countryside. For all the picture-postcard beauty of Woodstock – the elegant Episcopal church, the town green with its iron railings, the quaint covered bridges – the country around it was poor farming land, rocky and too broken up by mountains to allow large crop conversions. It was as green as Wisconsin but without its lushness, and there was a flint resilience to the people here that suggested the good life for them would always have to be a hard life. It seemed fitting that the place was full of quarries.

  Now Nessheim saw the girls gathered on the pavement outside the drugstore, excitable as moths. They wore the camp uniform of green shirts, brown skirts, and green socks. He could also see the gangly figure of Frances Stockton, hair pulled back, corralling them, and he went to help her herd the girls onto the camp bus. There Emmet Hale, who drove the local school bus during the rest of the year, sat yawning in the driver’s seat as they trooped aboard.

  Nessheim plopped down next to Frances in the front row, from which they could both turn and stare down any misbehaviour in the rows behind. Not that there was much to deal with – the ‘campers’ ranged in age from eight to twelve. They were all German-American, and likeable kids for the most part, though Nessheim didn’t even pretend to understand the ways of young girls – all giggles one minute, tears the next.

  He found Frances hard to make out, too. She was not much older than Nessheim, but acted like she had a decade’s worth of living experience over him. Assertive, often prickly, Frances was a modern woman – smoking cigarettes, professing a fondness for gin (though there was no drinking allowed at Camp Schneider), and always wearing trousers. She was a sharp-featured Yankee from a genteel family that had fallen on hard times, and she made it clear she found the sheer Germanness of Camp Schneider repellent, and was working there only because it was close to her parents’ home in New Hampshire. Nessheim was for some reason exempted from her disdain for German stock, though he failed to meet her high standards on other counts – especially education. She let him know early on that she had graduated from Wellesley, and viewed ‘Rossbach’s’ failure to graduate from college with ill-disguised compassion.

  If she could be cutting to Nessheim, she could also be coy. ‘Some people say I look a little like Katharine Hepburn,’ she’d confided one evening, but though Nessheim had watched the movie Holiday the year before he couldn’t see the similarity himself. True, Frances was also tall and uncurved and wore her hair up, but except on the tennis court, she moved awkwardly, with legs and arms that were all sharp angles. Sitting next to her he was always worried he’d get clocked by an elbow.

  ‘Get your business done?’ Frances asked now, slightly peeved.

  ‘Yes, thanks. Had to mail a letter.’

  ‘You always do.’ She paused but didn’t let it go. ‘Who’s the lucky girl, then?’

  He smiled with a dutiful amusement he didn’t feel. ‘My aunt, actually.’

  ‘Good boy,’ said Frances, managing to sound as patronising as an older sister. ‘You’re on the aisle, so you can do the count.’

  He got up and faced the back of the bus, counting quickly to himself. A minute later he declared, ‘I’m one short.’

  ‘You can’t be. Everybody was with me outside the drugstore.’ Suddenly the bus door opened. Nessheim turned and saw Emmet gesturing at someone outside. Nessheim saw to his surprise that it was Adele Kugel, running towards the bus, looking pale as a sheet. She was a nice girl, if a little docile – this was unlike her.

  He went down the steps. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked, more in relief than anger.

  She avoided his questioning eyes, saying, ‘Sorry, I had to buy something.’

  ‘Okay, hurry up and get on the bus,’ he said. He turned to follow her on board when something caught his eye, and he stared down the street to where a car was parked in front of the post office. It was a Dodge Roadster, and its driver sat in front with his feet up on the dashboard. The pose was familiar to Nessheim, as was the fedora tipped down over the driver’s eyes.

  ‘You comin’ then?’ Emmet shouted out crankily.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Nessheim, his eyes focused on the car. He took a few steps towards it, feeling adrenalin start to surge through him. He remembered the menacing voice back in Milwaukee – Like I said, beat it. Then as he peered at the car he relaxed. The plates were green and white – Vermont plates. Besides, there were plenty of Dodges around, and plenty of fedoras.

  Nessheim went and sat down next to Frances as the bus started up. They moved north onto Route 12, passing a vast mansion on the outskirts of town, its bricks the colour of burnt oranges. He felt jumpy about the fedora false alarm, and realised it was the first true nervous moment he’d experienced since arriving in Vermont. What an anti-climax this assignment was proving to be, for all of Guttman’s strictures on secrecy and his insistence that this undercover work was of critical importance. It was hard to see anything critical about teaching little girls how to swim. Just why had Guttman placed him in this backwater?

  11

  THE TRIP EAST had seemed to take for ever. Nessheim had left early in the morning, taking a ferry over to the station in Oakland – the only trains out of San Francisco went south along the peninsula. The City of San Francisco was a long string of gleaming cars, yellow and grey with red trim. He hopped on the rear first car and walked down the middle corridor of the train, looking with envy at the luxury of the Pullman sleepers, then took a seat in the chair car. The Bureau had bought him a berth, but he had cashed in his ticket for an upright seat, and in Cheyenne, Wyoming, defied orders, wrapping the $50 he’d saved in tissue paper and mailing it to his mother. In Chicago he had changed stations; when at La Salle Street he looked in a phone book to see if Stacey was still living on Lincoln Park, he discovered she was, but this time he obeyed Guttman, and didn’t call her.

  He’d had plenty of time to think on the train, though his situation seemed persistingly unreal. After all, it had been eighteen months since his sole encounter with Guttman, the man who was pulling his career strings like a marionette. Nessheim remembered the afternoon of their encounter vividly. He had been standing around shooting the breeze with Ferguson’s secretary and agents Lithgow and Franklin.

  Lithgow jerked a thumb towards the SAC’s office, where Ferguson was talking to a stranger. ‘Who’s the sheeny?’

  Franklin shrugged. ‘Some big shot from D.C.’
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  ‘What, a Congressman or something?’ asked Lithgow.

  ‘No,’ said Franklin. ‘He’s from the Bureau.’

  ‘Really?’ said Lithgow, who liked to wear starched collars and gold tie pins. ‘Jeeze, what must Hoover make of him?’

  Nessheim turned to look through the half-window of the SAC’s door. He saw the man talking with Ferguson. He was wearing an ugly chocolate-brown suit, with a wide tie that had a knot the size of a pastry. He had receding hair and a sweaty forehead and eyes the colour of cocoa, and this late in the day his cheeks were sprinkled with iron filings that shouted their need for a second shave. Short but heavily built, he looked like an oversized bowling ball.

  Then Ferguson had come out, and pointed at Nessheim. ‘There’s an assistant director from Headquarters sitting in my office. Name of Guttman. He wants to talk to you.’

  And eighteen months later, when Nessheim had started to wonder out in San Francisco if Guttman’s plans for him were real, he’d finally received his second set of marching orders from the man, with a train ticket and a large dossier on the German-American Bund which he read on his journey east. Nessheim’s existing view of the organisation, shaped by Uncle Eric and the drunken get-together out in Livermore with Mueller, was soon and sharply changed by its contents.

  Originally founded as the Friends of New Germany (and renamed the Bund in 1935), the organisation had grown rapidly at first. But that had been a time when right-wing groups had sprouted like weeds across America, growing in the dessicated soil of the Depression, fed by populist fears and populist hopes for a strong leader. Most notably, Father Coughlin of Detroit had for a time enjoyed a popularity that threatened the traditional institutions of the country.