The German Agent

by J Sydney Jones

  Just down river from Cabin John, Niel and Lewis were stalled on the road when a local farmer decided to lead his cows in to the barn, using the macadamized surface to avoid the mud. Lewis, now at the wheel himself, honked his horn furiously at the animals and they began scurrying every which way, the farmer shaking a stick at them as they sped past.

  He won’t walk away from this one, Niel promised himself, sitting rigidly in the passenger seat, his hand on the door handle. The bastard won’t do it again to us.

  ‘Hurry up, Lewis.’

  Max stood apart from the skating party, his disguise protecting him for the time being.

  He had attacked the guard at the telephone pole, knocking him unconscious and taking the uniform and tying and gagging him with his own clothes. The disguise had allowed him to get close to the house, had even saved him when the bodyguard had spotted him, ordering him to join them on watch at the pond. But he knew he had to act quickly now. Soon either Fitzgerald or his wife would recognize him.

  They were busily putting on skates near the pond; Catherine was the first to get hers on.

  ‘Careful,’ Fitzgerald warned Catherine as she headed onto the ice. ‘Watch out for thin spots.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Max saw the colored servant, Thomas, picking his way down the slippery and slushy drive toward them, bundled in an improbable fur-collared black overcoat, a tray holding a champagne bottle in an ice bucket and glasses in his hands.

  The rest happened so quickly that it stole choice from Max and he could only react as his training had taught him to do. Fitzgerald looked up from lacing his boots, staring squarely into Max’s face. Recognition was immediate.

  ‘Get down, Adrian,’ Fitzgerald shouted, and drew a pistol from his coat pocket.

  Instead of ducking, Appleby sprang nimbly to his feet from the crouching position he had been in putting on his skates, and he too drew a pistol from his coat. The two guards were looking in the wrong direction for attack: to them Max was still another policeman on duty at Brantley.

  Lewis stopped momentarily at the main gate, calling to the guards on duty there, ‘Have you spotted him?’

  Their blank faces told both Lewis and Niel that they were ignorant of the German’s ambit.

  ‘Open the gate,’ he shouted at them. ‘We’ve got to get to the house.’

  One guard opened the gate quickly and his partner, a young and intelligent looking officer, caught the desperation in Lewis’s voice. ‘They’re not at the house, sir. They went down to the pond. Ice-skating.’

  He pointed off to the left, and Niel could see the entire tableau: the woman on the pond; what looked to be Fitzgerald and Appleby side by side at the edge of the pond, their backs to it; the colored servant coming down the hill toward them, champagne in hand; Paxton and Scott watching over it all, and another police officer in back of them.

  ‘The fools,’ he said. ‘Get going, Lewis. We’ve got to get them inside before the German shows up.’

  And then they heard the first shot.

  Fitzgerald could not believe his eyes. The German, here. He felt the gun in his hand before he even realized he’d drawn it. He sensed rather than saw that Adrian was not seeking cover. His eyes were on the German as the man suddenly produced his weapon, shooting instantly through the two bodyguards who had not yet figured out what was going on.

  He continued thinking in shocked surprise even as the bullet struck him full in the chest, throwing him onto his back in the snow. He could hear screaming, and realized it was his wife, Catherine. Screaming his name, over and over.

  Why is she screaming so? he wondered.

  ‘Edward! Edward!’ She could hear her own voice shrill in her ear, piercing and cold. She watched horrified and helpless from the ice as she saw the guards turn toward another policeman who she suddenly recognized as the man she knew as Maximillian Voetner, but now dressed in a uniform a size too large for him.

  She watched in horror as the German agent shot the closest man, who sat down hard on his rump, holding his stomach. Then there were more shots and she saw the German dive, roll, and shoot.

  She came alive and started skating as hard as she could toward Edward. Her arms pumped as she glided over the ice, and suddenly she heard a loud crack beneath her as the ice began to break.

  ‘Edward!’

  Max rolled in the snow, the pain in his left arm intense where the second guard had shot him. Another crack of the pistol sounded and a bullet splattered into the soft earth by his head. He stopped rolling, held the gun straight out ahead of him lying flat on the ground, and pulled off two fast rounds. The first took the guard in the shoulder, and the second one hit him in the middle of the chest. The man fell to the ground like a dead weight.

  Max got up slowly. Time had lengthened for him and his left arm dangled uselessly at his side. From the pond came Catherine Fitzgerald’s scream once again.

  He looked toward her and her attention fixed on her fallen husband as she skated over the ice.

  To his left the colored servant had dropped the tray and was running toward him. On the far side of the pond he saw yellow vest and the big cop racing through snow up to their knees. Only then did he fix on Appleby. The Englishman stood defiant and angry, the gun held in his pudgy hand like a cricket bat.

  ‘Damn you to hell,’ Appleby yelled, then pulled off a round that whizzed past Max’s head like a pesky bee.

  Max felt absolutely no anger as he leveled his gun at Appleby. The crack of his pistol left his ears ringing. A dark splotch blossomed on the front of Appleby’s light gray dress coat, and for a long moment the man continued to stand as if riveted to the earth.

  ‘Help!’

  The woman’s scream from the frozen pond seemed to topple Appleby; he fell like a statue, flat onto his face.

  Then Max saw Catherine Fitzgerald sinking through the ice.

  It was all like a dream to Fitzgerald. He could hear his breathing, a wet sounding whistle. The sky above was incredibly blue and still. Champagne corks were popping all around him.

  A piercing scream brought him momentarily out of his stupor, and he rolled onto his stomach, facing the pond, and saw Catherine’s fur coat billowing up around her as she slid down through the ice.

  How strange, he thought.

  Then, seeing her hand clutching at the ice as she began to sink beneath the water’s surface, he finally realized what was happening. He began painfully and slowly to crawl out onto the ice to her.

  Once again, events overcame him. Training, instincts, yes, and his basic humanity took over.

  Max gave no thought to escape, but ran instantly, automatically toward the pond. Shots rang out from in front of him: yellow vest was shooting at him, but was too far away to be anything but an annoyance.

  He ran past Fitzgerald who was laboriously pulling his way to his wife, and the moment he hit the ice he knew it was breaking apart. There will be no safe spot here, he thought. Anyone who goes out on it will be lost.

  Catherine’s hand clawed frantically as she went below the surface, and then she bobbed up again momentarily, spluttering and choking.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Max yelled out. ‘Don’t panic.’

  But he could see that the heavy coat, now soaked, was dragging her down. To his left, Thomas was just reaching the pond.

  ‘Stay there,’ he ordered the servant. ‘The ice won’t hold us both. I’ll get her.’

  But Thomas continued to edge onto the ice, and Max ignored him as he dashed for Catherine’s hand as she was going under again.

  Everything was a blur and confusion. She felt the sting of water in her lungs and the freezing cold of it all over as she floundered in the water. She wanted desperately to get her fur off: it was pulling her down like some fierce animal. But she had no control over her arms. All she could do was flap them helplessly in the water, lost in panic and fear. Her lungs felt like bursting and she knew she was going to die.

  Suddenly, out of this chaos, came a firm hand gripp
ing hers, and she felt herself being hauled out of the icy water. She gasped for air as her head broke the surface, and finally her cheek was laying against the brittle surface of the ice. She could feel someone pulling her up and up, out of the water to safety, but could do nothing to help.

  Opening her eyes, she saw the German leaning over her, giving one last desperate jerk to push her back away from the ice hole she had created.

  There was another loud crack and she thought it was a gunshot, but was mistaken. It was the ice all around Max giving way, crumbling beneath his weight.

  ‘Get her away from here!’ he shouted. She looked behind her and saw Thomas reaching out to pull her by the collar of the fur along the ice to safety.

  She saw the hole widening and Max sliding into the cold water. Thomas, letting go of her collar, crawled to the edge to Max, extending his arm as far as he could. Max bobbed to the surface once again and Thomas was able to barely grip his hand.

  ‘Get him! Pull him out. He’s mine!’ Niel was shouting at them from the far edge of the pond, then stopped and began circling to their side.

  ‘Let me go,’ Max said, and Catherine watched numbly as Thomas seemed to nod at him in understanding.

  Thomas gripped Max’s hand more tightly for an instant, black on white over the icy water. Suddenly Max’s hand escaped the grip, and he cast a quick glance Catherine’s way. Then his whole body slipped underneath the water. She watched and watched, but he did not re surface.

  A hand touched her side and she saw that Edward had pulled himself to her, leaving a trail of blood in the snow behind him. Turning him onto his back, she cupped his head in her hands and rested it in her lap.

  Please don’t die, she prayed.

  A shadow loomed over her. ‘Where is he? Where’s the German?’ Niel demanded.

  Thomas slid back off the ice, stood and wiped snow from his front.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘All over.’

  EPILOGUE

  There were no winners.

  History leaves no record of Maximillian Volkman. He died as anonymously as he had lived.

  There was nothing linking Max to Germany – nothing but the British intercept, and London was loath to bring that up and compromise their secret Room 40. There was no posthumous hero’s ceremony for him in Berlin. In fact, Berthold, his master, had aborted the mission soon after losing contact with Max.

  But his mission was a success – for a time. Sir Adrian Appleby was mourned in America and England, yet as Berlin had calculated, his death prevented immediate transmission of the Zimmermann telegram. Moreover, the assassination was attributed to a personal vendetta, and President Wilson, swamped by more pressing matters, accepted this explanation.

  Whitehall initially accepted this loss. After another week, however, and desperate to bring America into the war before Germany totally destroyed her shipping, Lloyd George’s government decided to approach Wilson through normal diplomatic channels. They would hold their breath and simply hope that the US president did not ask too many compromising questions about the provenance of the telegram.

  President Wilson, when finally presented with the Zimmermann telegram at the end of February, was first shocked and then horrified by its contents, for Mexico had long plagued his administration. Ultimately, however, he did ask the compromising questions that London feared. When the British showed themselves to be reluctant to prove the authenticity of the telegram, and thereby reveal the existence of Room 40 and its code-breaking secrets, Wilson, like many others, became convinced that the telegram was a hoax.

  Again, Berlin had calculated on this.

  Yet one thing that Max, the spymasters, and diplomats in Berlin and London had not reckoned with: the arrogance of Foreign Minister Zimmermann himself. Zimmermann honestly believed that his Mexico gambit had been simply an extension of diplomacy; that there was nothing underhanded about it and thus no reason to deny the telegram when asked about it by the press.

  The telegram, once authenticated by Zimmermann himself, had its hoped for and feared effect: on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.

  Meanwhile, Edward Fitzgerald slowly recovered from his wound. By the time the first American soldiers reached France, he was finally beginning to put on weight again. But he’d had enough of the half-truths of diplomacy. He and his wife Catherine ultimately retired to the hills of Brantley, Edward to create a model farm, and she to pursue her photography, eventually publishing in 1921 a photographic study of poverty in Washington that shamed the federal government enough into cleaning up the alley dwellings in the capital.

  The Fitzgerald’s also had three children: two boys and a girl. The first boy, a golden-haired and warm-hearted child, they named after Adrian. The second son, Edward. The daughter, a rangy and inquisitive creature even as a baby, was named after Catherine’s servant, who died the year before the girl’s birth in 1923. Thomasina – Tommy to her friends – grew into a long-legged beauty, not unlike her mother.

  Chief Inspector Lewis had no easy retirement: as a result of his failure with the case, he was demoted to a precinct chief in southeast Washington, finishing out his career dealing with domestic violence and small-time crime.

  Agent Niel was more fortunate, for his name was not officially linked with what became known as the Appleby Affair. His star rose in the Twenties with the advent of the Red scare, and he ultimately became one of the top officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He never forgot Catherine Devereaux Fitzgerald. Upon his death, a file code-named St Jude was found in his safe: a dossier on Catherine. In it was everything from a detailed exposition of his suspicions of her connections with Maximillian Volkman in 1917, through her growing involvement with the Left through the Thirties and Forties.

  Throughout all the following years, until Edward Fitzgerald’s death in 1951, Max Volkman’s name was never mentioned in the Fitzgerald household. His act of bravery in saving Catherine was commemorated, however. On a knoll overlooking the Potomac, well within the property line of Brantley Hall, stands a simple lichen-covered gravestone under an old sycamore tree. The inscription on the stone is short and as anonymous as events of the time forced it to be:

  If you have come,

  You know me.