The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  Fritz pulled his sun hat farther down over his brow and left. Karl Heinz Sommer, from Chemnitz. Journey onward, mighty whale, he thought. Keep trekking on calmly through the sea. And when you pass the coast near Swakopmund, say hello to Katrin for me.

  One dark-blue and cool oceanic night, he looked to the south. Africa had long since vanished from view, and the water now surged and washed away into darkness.

  Katrin! he thought. My girl. Why do you children never know just how much your parents love you?

  After breakfast Fritz heard the sound of Therese Biermann’s cane going klock klock against the deck as they approached. Consul Biermann was wearing a pale-gray three-piece suit, white shirt, and bowtie, and his wife wore a dark ladies’ suit. Biermann again told Fritz how crucial it was for people like them to return to Germany; but Fritz was beginning to see doubt in the man’s eyes—that brief glance to the side, a slight contraction of his eyelids. Ever since they’d boarded the ship, Biermann had seemed increasingly alien to Fritz.

  A horde of young men in brown uniforms ran out onto the deck, red bands with the swastika on a white circle encircling their upper arms. They passed Biermann and his wife. One of the boys—Müller from the consulate—barged into Therese and kept on going. The consul wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders and wondered aloud just who did that young ruffian think he was?

  “When there’s no respect left, Herr Kolbe, when books are being burned and people are hated on command just because of their religion, when decent behavior disappears, then all the rest will be gone soon too.” Biermann balled his hand into a thick and wrinkled fist. “Perhaps the Foreign Office is one of our last refuges. We are simply too cosmopolitan, by the way we exchange ideas, by our very language.”

  “Germany is still our country, for heaven’s sake.” Therese reached into her jacket pocket, lit up a cigarette, and handed it to her husband. He stroked her cheek. At least she still had her cane, she said.

  “We’re very sorry about your daughter,” she added. “But you will be surprised to see how quickly children adapt. Your Katrin is a fine girl. Try not to fret over it too much, Herr Kolbe.”

  Fritz left them alone in their unanimity, and when he thought of them afterward, it was in sepia tones, like an old photo. He had gotten the posting in Africa he’d desired because Biermann had made it happen—they had already worked together in Spain, where Biermann had valued Fritz’s diligence. On Sunday mornings they used to meet on the Plaza Mayor in the heart of Madrid to play chess and enjoy some conversation. From Biermann, Fritz had learned a great deal about the history of diplomacy: that language was precise work, that certain treaties should be memorized, and that one always treated the opposing party nobly. Diplomacy was not the kettledrum but rather the oboe.

  “And sometimes, diplomacy lies,” Fritz had said.

  “It’s all in the language, Kolbe. The language.”

  Fritz stood at the stern railing looking out at the ship’s white trail. Standing next to him, Petersen advised him to put his hat back on, what with his thin hair and all. Fritz didn’t understand why the man kept trying to talk to him. He told Petersen he liked to get a lot of sun because its warmth traveled to his heart.

  “It’s time for the heart to be cold and hard, Herr Diplomat.”

  “Give us freedom of thought,” Fritz recited.

  “What kind of stupid saying is that?”

  “Schiller. A German writer and poet. You do understand German? Schiller! Ever hear of him?”

  “Of course I know who Schiller is.”

  “Born in 1620.”

  “I know that!”

  “You can go to hell.”

  Petersen stayed at the railing. Fritz left. He was stuck with having to share his cabin with this man for over a week; he would have to hear his breathing and grunting at night, and in the mornings he would continue to wake to the sight of him propped up, staring at Fritz. He needed to go deeper inside himself, find somewhere he could retreat to: that whale, the radio codes now in Carlsroupe’s hands. Katrin. He greeted a Dutch sailor, who angrily asked him what he wanted, saying they had too many Nazis on board who thought they could go around giving orders.

  “I’m no Nazi,” Fritz said. He told the man he merely wanted to ask if there was some sort of reclining deck chair on board he could use. He’d rather stick to the deck at night. “Please,” Fritz added. “It doesn’t have to be comfortable—only something to sleep on.” He was asking from the bottom of his heart.

  The closer the steamer got to the North Atlantic and the North Sea, the more men started appearing on deck wearing uniforms. Fritz wondered where they got them. He also noticed the few women on board changed their appearances. In Cape Town they had worn the top button of their blouses casually open and let down their hair sometimes. Now, every shirt was fastened up to the neck, and their hair was tight against their heads, like bonnets. Müller was in his brown uniform, baggy at his bony shoulders, the excess fabric fluttering in the wind. Whenever Fritz looked at him, Müller looked away.

  During the day the Dutch crew barely showed themselves on deck. Fritz heard that arguments had broken out in the small dining room because someone had hung up a Hitler portrait and one of the sailors had taken it down. Today Germany still belongs to us, Fritz thought, and this bullshit boat too.

  The Biermanns had retreated to their cabin. Fritz looked in on them now and then. “What is going on out there?” Frau Biermann asked. The consul just sat at a window, looking out over the ocean smooth as glass. His motionless face was half illuminated, like a portrait.

  “I’m trusting in what you said, Herr Consul,” Fritz said. “That we can do something.”

  Biermann turned to Fritz, who found he couldn’t meet his stare. Instead, he glanced at the yellowing world map on the cabin’s green wall: Africa to the east; the barren Strait of Gibraltar; Portugal and Spain, both descended into Fascism; France; the narrow channel to Great Britain. This solitary Dutch freighter was getting closer and closer to Germany, nearly in its clutches.

  “Herr Consul Biermann?”

  The portrait remained a portrait.

  When Fritz moved to leave, Biermann said his name.

  “I’m sorry about the telephone call, Herr Kolbe. I should not have let myself scream at you. One can’t allow such behavior.”

  Out on deck, it was cold and clear. The sea was swelling just as it always would, even when the war started hacking away at other parts of the world. The ship’s motor chugged on nonstop.

  Lacking a warm cap, Fritz that night wore his sun hat while sleeping. Rousing him from his sleep, something hard pushed at his foot. He shifted onto his side a little in his sagging deck chair. The something pushed at him again, and grumbling penetrated his dense grogginess. Fritz opened his eyes. The dark silhouettes of several men loomed over him.

  “The diplomat,” one said. Fritz recognized Petersen’s voice. The men looked huge against the dark-blue backdrop of sky. Fritz sat up. Someone kicked at the chair from the side. Wood cracked, and Fritz braced a hand against the cold deck floor. He pushed his blanket aside and moved as if to stand. Two hands pushed him back down.

  “We got our eyes on you, asshole,” a piece of the darkness told him.

  “One more wise move from you, buster,” said more darkness, “and you’re going overboard.”

  Again they kicked. The deck chair wobbled, and Fritz heard the sound of wood splitting as he tried to hold on. He tried to stand up once more and was pushed back down. The chair’s wooden skeleton squeezed at him.

  “We’ll teach you a lesson.”

  “Say it! Say Heil Hitler. Do it.” It was Petersen.

  The chair creaked and a gust swept cold across the deck. The contours of shoulders lined up white in the moonlight.

  “Say it!”

  Fritz had no chance of surviving this if he did not comply. No one would hear him cry out and even if they did, he would disappear fast in the night and would be left swimming along, on
e stroke as senseless as the next. The last thing he’d hear would probably be Petersen’s sneering laugh.

  “Say it!”

  “Heil Hitler,” he said. Hate and shame churned inside him, along with self-contempt and fear. The men laughed softly, one of the dark figures setting a hand on the shoulder of another.

  “Do it again!”

  “Heil Hitler.”

  “Well, well. So the diplomat does know how.”

  “We’ll get you yet,” Petersen said.

  They left and the night sky opened wide again, the sound of laughter drifting off in the wind. One of the figures walking away was slight. Was it Heinz Müller from the consulate? Fritz’s chest squeezed up. Never before in his life had he been so humiliated. He was small, he told himself, and a coward. He stood at the railing, gripping it hard, and breathed deep, in and out. At least I’m alive, he thought. He looked around him. He was all alone, his muscles so weak now that he trembled.

  “Hitler,” he hissed. The wind blew gloomily. The sea surged and washed up over the ship’s side, the waves sounding to him like jaws ripping open. “Nazis.” He cursed and pounded on the railing. The pigs, those damned pigs. Cowards. Such big talkers in groups.

  He returned to the deck chair and pressed on its arms. It was badly damaged, but it still worked. He sat back down, pulled his blanket over him for solace, and looked up at the dark sky with its dark-blue streaks and stars like white pinpricks. The voices burned inside him. His own words burned.

  With a curse, he leapt out of the deck chair and felt his way through the darkened ship to the Biermanns’ cabin. He hammered on the door. He felt ashamed acting this way yet kept hammering. A strip of light glowed along the bottom of the door, and Consul Biermann opened it a crack. He had combed his hair.

  “Herr Kolbe, at this hour? What’s happened?”

  “We can do something? You said so. We can do something? Right?”

  Biermann stroked his mustache with thumb and index finger. He glanced back at his wife and whispered that he would come out on deck and Fritz should wait for him there.

  Back out in the cold night air, Fritz silently begged for Petersen to appear again, alone this time, instead of with his cowardly gang of big talkers. Then they’d box. Fritz hadn’t known thoughts and feelings like this before, not to this degree. Then he heard the trusty klock klock of Therese Biermann’s cane.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Frau Biermann, my apologies.”

  “It’s fine, Herr Kolbe. But at the moment my husband needs to rest. He can’t speak to you right now. He wishes you a good night—as much as there is of it left.” The petite woman turned away. Fritz called after her.

  “No, Herr Kolbe. Not now. I’m sorry. Get some sleep now. Sleep is good.”

  Nowhere on board the Louisiana could he be alone. What he would’ve given for his own cabin, no matter how small or dirty. Petersen and his cronies watched him continually, sometimes following him down the decks, shoulder to shoulder, laughing, a surging wave of simplistic certainty. He couldn’t stand it. He wanted to finish them off, every last one of them. But he didn’t say anything. Heinz Müller kept eyeing him, his pale, pointy face void of expression.

  Fritz didn’t see the Biermanns on deck anymore, and he didn’t go knocking on their door. Apart from them and the Braunweins, Fritz knew hardly anyone in his old homeland whom he could still contact. His old friend from his Spanish days, Eugen Sacher, lived in the fragile safety of Switzerland. Perhaps he would find one or two people at the Office to befriend. He couldn’t possibly be the only one left who shared this view.

  Sometimes he stood at the railing with his arms folded and watched the women pass, their shadows long and slanting along the deck planks. It had been a long time since he had loved a woman.

  Back in Cape Town, at a small reception in the British consulate, he had become acquainted with Carlsroupe’s wife, a red-haired and green-eyed Englishwoman from Cornwall who was always in a sunny mood. They enjoyed talking that evening, leaning against the wall, drinking cool champagne. On his way home he’d recalled that they had been flirting a little, their eyes lowered, sharing little double entendres.

  Several days later he called her, then she him. They chatted about the city and Table Mountain, the ocean and the sun and the latest fashions. Work and the everyday receded. They agreed to meet in a café on Darling Street where they sat in the shadows of awnings, drinking whisky. Their fingers touched. Fritz felt agitated and unsure. He wondered what Katrin would think of Mrs. Harriet Carlsroupe, and he remembered that he liked her husband, Carlsroupe, who was a nice fellow through and through.

  Harriet and Fritz drove in his open convertible down to the sea and walked on the wet sand with their trouser legs rolled up. Suddenly Harriet wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. This was an unexpected leap, a quick plunge. He held her. The kiss lasted all of thirty seconds, then she pushed him away. She shook her head, brushing one of his thin strands of hair from his forehead.

  “It can’t work, Fritz. It would be treason.”

  He looked to the ground, then let his gaze travel up her legs, along the length of her body to her face.

  “Fritz, I’m sorry, but I can’t. Under any other circumstances . . .” she said.

  “Those are exactly what we don’t have,” Fritz said.

  “Let’s drive back. And not a word of it to anyone, ever. This kiss, this moment here, will remain between us forever. It’s for the best.”

  “Harriet, we—”

  “It can’t work, Fritz.”

  “But don’t things often work out better than people think?”

  Harriet laughed into the wind, her mouth wide open. “You blue-eyed Fritzi, you,” she said and tied back her dancing curls.

  “I will keep this lovely moment between us,” Fritz told her. “Thank you for the kiss.”

  “The pleasure was all mine.”

  He cursed this ship for carrying him steadily nearer to Germany and its red Nazi flags while at the same time dragging him miles away from Katrin. Fritz had dodged Petersen and his cronies whenever they came around to bully him, until his shame became so great he decided on another course. Now, as they came toward him on one of the well-worn decks, he stood his ground and felt his heart pounding.

  The men looked at him, muttered to each other, laughed, and walked by. They were on their way to the captain again, Petersen told Fritz in passing, to tell him he needs to raise the Reich flag. He said Fritz could come along—as a diplomat he must be real good at such things.

  After a few minutes, the men came back down the tarnished steel steps that led to the bridge. Fritz held a hand to his eyes and looked up at the flag mast. No swastika.

  “Strategic retreat?” he asked.

  Petersen came at him, his lips pressed together. “You better be real careful.” He moved to jab Fritz in the chest, but Fritz pushed his hand away. “I got your name and address, Sommer. You better watch out.” Petersen waved for his comrades, and they followed him down the deck, one of them kicking at a hatch that led to the Dutch sailors’ quarters.

  Why did he have to go provoking Petersen? He couldn’t stay clear of him or get off this ship. He couldn’t ask the Biermanns to take him in either, although the elderly couple surely would have done it.

  In the temporary dining hall Fritz got himself a bowl of thick pea soup and ate it on deck, his back to the wind. He then made his way up to the bridge. The sentry at the door was swinging a truncheon. Fritz raised his hands and said he needed to speak to the captain, that it was urgent.

  “Another one of you?”

  “Forgive me. No, I’m not another one. I’m completely different. I’m not here about a flag or anything like that. Please, tell the captain I must speak to him.”

  The sailor knocked on the door with its brass-framed porthole. He whispered to someone, then the captain came out. He had a firm, round belly. Fritz described his situation: that he didn’t want to share his cabin with that
barbarian anymore, that his life was being threatened. He couldn’t sleep out on deck in a deck chair anymore either. The captain must find another spot for him—he didn’t care what or where.

  “What? So you can go spying around my ship?”

  “Spying? Me? No, Captain, sir. Please. They’ll kill me. They’ll toss me overboard.”

  “One less to worry about,” the sailor said.

  “Please. I’m with the Foreign Office. I’m coming to you with a matter of international concern.” Fritz had had more than enough. First those philistines had made him say Heil Hitler; now he stood in the sun squinting up at this man, totally dependent on his mercy. The captain wasn’t wearing a uniform, only a shabby jacket with gold braids. He turned back and spoke to someone still in the bridge area. Fritz heard a man laughing.

  “Is Hitler shit?” the captain asked him.

  “Yes,” Fritz said.

  “Would you go say that real loud right now to your countrymen?”

  “No. Would you?”

  A grin showed through the captain’s gray beard.

  Passenger Fritz Kolbe, alias Karl Heinz Sommer, disappeared into the stink, noise, and shadows of the Louisiana’s engine room. There was no window, and the room sharply reeked of oil, coal, and diesel, or whatever was used in those pounding engines—Fritz had no idea. He used a napkin to make earplugs.

  It surprised him how few men worked in the engine room. Most ignored him until he started asking them about Dutch vocabulary and basic expressions, or about which of the insulated pipes running along the ceiling he could use for doing pull-ups. At night he sometimes dared to go back up on deck, the Louisiana’s white walls mottled with rust shimmering in the moonlight, her floorboards a dull matte finish as if formed from dust. He looked up into the starry sky and wondered where his beloved sun must be shining now. He lived in darkness. Two of the Dutch crew members brought him something to eat in the morning, afternoon, and evening. They told him he was one odd fellow. The situation on the ship was growing increasingly tense, they said. Germany had plagued their good old Aunt Louisiana like a curse. If anyone was the boss here, it was their captain. No one pissed on his leg! A bunch of real shits, the Germans.