The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “No, none at all.”

  She leaned toward him and touched her fingertips to his lips. “You’re deluding yourself, I’m afraid. You’re not that inconspicuous at all.”

  Fritz didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He could smell Greta’s perfume.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Now, a few ways of communicating.” She taught him some astoundingly easy codes. She told him that these ciphers couldn’t be broken so long as the enemy didn’t have a snitch on the inside. She laughed.

  “Reminds me of good old Ancient Rome,” she said. “They’d shave some young associate’s head and then write a secret message on the skin of his bald dome. The boy gets a break from the action, long enough to grow his hair back. Now with flowing locks, our courier hurries to the message’s recipient, who shaves off those very locks again and, ta-da, now reads the message. Brilliant, right?”

  “I love simplicity.”

  “That can be pretty tough to maintain in our line of work. Be that as it may—you got it all in your head now?”

  “Yes.”

  Greta raised an eyebrow at that. She gazed toward a window. “You know, Washington has the same crummy weather as here,” she said. “But you wouldn’t believe how impressive the Capitol and White House look with the sun shining on them, and with the American flag flying on the roof. There’s something quite extraordinary about that country of mine.”

  “You should have seen Berlin before the war,” Fritz said.

  “We Americans won’t ever experience air raids like you get. Ever. What’s it like being in an air raid?”

  “Afterward, men come up to you carrying the corpses of their daughters in their arms. You have children, Ms. Stone?”

  “Do I look like I do?”

  “A husband? Dulles likes you.”

  “Allen? I’m not so sure about that. You pay attention to such things?”

  “Always. On that note, I think that our good Herr Weygand likes to have Frau von Lützow pinch him.”

  Greta laughed out loud, her mouth open wide like an opera singer’s. Her teeth were snow white. “A slave to lust? That’s a good one.” Fritz shrugged at her.

  “What will these men do when the end comes?” she said. “Goebbels, Göring, Himmler? Uncle Adolf?”

  “They’ll try to run, maybe assume new identities. Or they’ll kill themselves. None of them will defend what he’s done. How could a person defend such a thing?” Fritz glanced out the dark window. “That is the question: How can I defend what I do?”

  “Ah, well put. You know anything about that rocket scientist von Braun?”

  “Not a thing. Well, not much anyway.”

  “Washington wants more intelligence on the Pacific Theater.”

  “I can’t always just go picking and choosing.”

  Greta laid her pencil on a folder and eyed him. “I understand that, Wood. I truly do. But there are people in Washington who still don’t trust any of this.”

  “That’s your issue to resolve, not mine. Give me one logical reason for not trusting me. I’m risking my life here. If I were going to blow the OSS’s operation in Bern, it would’ve happened long ago. And I’ve never asked a single one of you for information, not one time. So why the runaround?”

  “That’s just the way it is, okay?”

  “No, not okay.”

  “The highest levels of the intelligence services are a little like some absurd stage play. There are no clear lines. An intelligence service is sort of like the subconscious of a society or of a political system.”

  Greta lit her cigarette and slid the pack over to Fritz. Fritz had Greta light his, their hands touching.

  “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “I’m from Berlin, Ms. Stone, Berlin at war. That’s enough to change any human being. I need something in return.”

  “So William was right.”

  “Her name is Marlene.”

  “Like Dietrich? Is she good looking?”

  “You have to help me get her out of Berlin.”

  “I’ll see what can be done. Meanwhile, don’t forget you’re operating all on your own. Just make sure you go west when things get too dire. To the south works too. Just not to the east.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t get more about the Pacific,” he said. He glanced at the portrait of Roosevelt. “What kind of man is he?”

  “Some men become greater in wartime. He’s such a man. It’s the same with you. The way I hear it, you admire chubby Mr. Churchill? Now I ask you, where would Churchill be without Hitler? Where would you be without Hitler?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You are the Kappa spy. You will go down in history, whether you survive or not. Without Hitler you would still be a minor German official.”

  Fritz realized that Greta meant all this nonsense. He had to laugh. They were all crazy. Greta Stone was crazy. Whether he survived or not? Good God.

  “A minor official who could be with his daughter,” he said, “who could be strolling through a lovely Berlin with Marlene, drinking a beer in the Tiergarten, ambling down the boulevard Unter den Linden, well dressed, holding his woman’s hand. Reading books, listening to music. I shit on your history books, Ms. Stone. I shit on Hitler, whether I’m nobody without him or not.”

  “Please, Mr. Wood. A man who doesn’t want to become the hero? There’s no such thing. You’re the one making it all happen.”

  “Not me, Ms. Stone.”

  Greta stubbed out her cigarette, confident in her assessment. Fritz could see she felt she was in the right and that no one would convince her otherwise. Many men in the Foreign Office had the same attitude.

  “I’m doing what is right,” Fritz said. “What are you doing?”

  “Being an American.”

  Fritz laughed. Greta raised both eyebrows. She either didn’t understand his reaction or she disapproved of it.

  “I’d like to say good-bye to Mr. Dulles and Mr. Priest before I go,” Fritz said.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Not here.”

  He and Greta said their good-byes. She told him to be sure to watch out for himself and to keep his head down in Berlin.

  “Actions have consequences. If you keep going as you are—and I really hope you do—you’ll eventually have to make the sort of decisions you wouldn’t want to make for anything in the world.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “It’s my job. One other thing: the smartest thing a traitor can do is make the world believe he never existed, even afterward—for a long time afterward.”

  “But a person has to talk about it at some point.”

  “Don’t! For her sake too—what’s her name again?”

  “Marlene.”

  “For Marlene’s sake too. Just don’t.”

  “Do you have any idea how much ridiculous bullshit I’m already forced to say yes and amen to?”

  “I do not. Not interested either.” Greta held her hands to her forehead, then let them fall to her sides. “Just know this: if you’re not capable of doing what I’ve told you, it could be curtains for you.”

  She escorted him through the other office and was just opening the door to the stairway when the telephone rang. Greta picked up and said something in Italian, her brow furrowed. Then she held a hand over the receiver, looked at Fritz, and glanced toward the door. Even this rude gesture looked charming coming from Greta Stone, and she had the air of one who assumed no one could really hold such a thing against her. Fritz wondered if she had taken acting lessons in America.

  He nodded and left.

  The next morning he had breakfast with von Lützow and his family. “You’re such a pleasant guest, Herr Kolbe,” von Lützow said. Weygand was wearing his uniform. Von Lützow’s wife told them about theatrical productions in Berlin starring Heinrich George and Gustaf Gründgens, and how much she regretted not being able to see them. “My husband ended up out here
, unfortunately. But don’t misunderstand me, Herr Kolbe; Bern too has its benefits.” Weygand reached for the knot of his tie. Von Lützow gazed at his three daughters as if they were about to vanish and he would be left all alone.

  “The fight is going to get even tougher,” Weygand said. “But the best will prove themselves. I like that more drastic measures are being taken now. Soon, every last man will grasp what this is all really about. It’s the final sanding, polishing to perfection.”

  Frau von Lützow fingered her neck. The chain she wore had unusually large silver links. “My husband’s secretary,” she said, gesturing at von Lützow. “Now there’s a man who truly understands matters.”

  “One cannot shy away from our heroic mission,” Weygand said. “This is a Wagnerian opera in its most potent form. We will wade in the blood of our enemies and destroy the hordes of subhumans.”

  “Peace would be nice,” Fritz said. Everyone, including the three girls, looked at him. He could feel the tension that had entered the dining room, just because he had uttered the word peace.

  “Well,” von Lützow said.

  “Until that happens,” Weygand interrupted, “we still have much to do, Herr Kolbe. It surprises me that you would even think about peace at a time like this. This is a sacred battle.”

  “Horrible and wonderful,” Frau von Lützow said.

  “Indeed,” Weygand said.

  Von Lützow was turning a jar of red jam and looking at it as if something were moving inside. It seemed that all the man had left in this moment was a jar of preserves, the thickest chunks glistening like ice.

  “Madame, this jam is outstanding,” Fritz said.

  “Would you like to take a jar back to Berlin, Herr Kolbe?”

  “The woman I love would be beside herself with joy.”

  “It’s so lovely when even from hundreds of miles away a man thinks of the woman at his side. Is she holding down the fort in Berlin?”

  Fritz put a hand over his mouth. He shouldn’t have mentioned Marlene. These people were getting too close, reaching down into even his deepest thoughts.

  “Who is this woman?” Weygand said.

  “The best there is. For me, that is.”

  “Heil Hitler,” Frau von Lützow said.

  “Heil Hitler,” the girls said. They were watching Fritz, their faces fair, eyes bright, everything about them clear.

  10

  THE PRICE OF SECRETS

  On the table are wartime maps of Berlin and of Bern. The light reflects off photos of von Ribbentrop, von Günther, and Käthe Braunwein. Postcards from Bern and Berlin lean against the scarred globe, and obituaries on yellowed, dust-dry paper soak up the sunshine.

  “So the Russians were onto you,” Wegner says. “I’m unclear about how that could happen.”

  “Unclear is better than clueless,” Fritz says. “I’m afraid it’s going to stay that way.”

  “And good former-general Gehlen is about to become a real big shot in your new Germany,” Wegner says. “Both the Russians and Americans were asking you about him before the war was even over.”

  “There was also that ham,” Fritz says.

  “Ham again? Herr Kolbe, come on. Please.”

  “You keep thinking the story is about great events. The story’s never about that, except perhaps in hindsight. Great events piece themselves together from many everyday occurrences—and from lies. My God, man, do you have any idea how important a ham was at that time? In Berlin? I used to feed Marlene little pieces of it and she took a good whiff of every morsel.”

  “Back to Gehlen,” Wegner says.

  Fritz grabs another box of photos. He selects a portrait of General Gehlen and lays it on top of the papers. The slender man stares up at the ceiling. “A Nazi,” Fritz says, “is about to become the head of the first intelligence service in the new Germany.”

  “That must drive you nuts,” Veronika says.

  Fritz lights himself a cigarette. Yes, he thinks. That it does.

  “A person gets used to it,” he says. He looks at Veronika, sitting with her back to the window, her hair shimmering like metal in the sunlight, her fingers making a little camera. “No,” Fritz corrects himself. “That’s not true. A person does not get used to it. I was hassled so much about never having joined the Nazi Party—and now it doesn’t matter at all whether someone was a Party member or not. This cannot be happening.”

  He pounds a fist on the table. Papers flutter, a cup jingles on its saucer.

  “Adolf Eichmann,” Fritz says. “One of the top-ranking annihilators of the Jews. I was the one who gave the Allies his name for the first time. I read letters Eichmann wrote to von Günther, requests for assistance to the Wehrmacht and the like. Eichmann was able to flee. I’m telling you, more people than we think know where he’s hiding. I’m certain the pig has a real nice life now. I mean, how could a man like that go underground without help? He’d need expertly made counterfeit papers, he’d need money, he’d need people to cover for him and provide him with a hideout, and on and on and on. It was I, you understand, who told the Americans who this man is.”

  “That all said, let’s get back to you . . .” Wegner reaches for a pencil. “After your second trip to Bern, you go back to Berlin. And no one in the Office ever caught on to you? The situation there must have been getting worse and worse, the way the war was progressing. There had to be even more suspicion and lies and fear, right?”

  “It was hell. Silence and pretending—those were the tricks that got me through. Pathetic. You try doing that for years on end, acting against every one of your convictions. It would kill you.”

  “After the second trip, and after what happened as a result, you must have felt so—”

  “Did Sacher tell you about that?”

  Fritz goes through one of the photo boxes until he finds a picture of his friend. He lays Eugen Sacher’s face on the table—that sympathetic smile, so content—and one corner overlaps the picture of General Gehlen. It’s just as Fritz suspected: Sacher told Wegner more than he should have.

  “Click,” Veronika says.

  “Let’s not do that. Please.”

  “Your face was so candid just then.”

  Fritz needs to have a talk with Eugen. He shoots up out of his chair and goes into the bathroom. His mirror image contorts and blurs before him. He’s back in Berlin, during the war. Heil Hitler. Calm down. Stay calm. It’s over, it’s over. He considers canceling the rest of his interview with Wegner and Veronika and tries to find the right words to send the two away.

  He doesn’t want to be rude. But just what was Eugen thinking? Sympathetic to everyone, and so uncorrupted himself, Eugen has a hard time seeing that others might try corrupting him. He only wants to feel safe. Good people like him—they tend to think everyone else is like them. For such bourgeois types, maintaining harmony always comes first. They cannot, nor do they wish to, comprehend that life can treat others far differently than it does them.

  Fritz turns on the faucet and cups his hands to run cold water over his face. He feels it run down his cheeks, his goatee. It always felt so lovely when Marlene stroked his face or Katrin placed a hand on his cheek. Marlene. Mar-lay-nah.

  How could I?

  Along the corridors of Charité Hospital, there were even more wounded on cots and the floor than there were the last time Fritz visited, their bandages oozing red. A man with his head fully wrapped in bandages like a mummy was smoking a cigarette and muttering to himself. Moans carried throughout the building and joined the stench of bodies shredded by bullets. Fritz knocked on the door to Marlene’s office, his briefcase bulging from the ham, his heart swelling with agitation and delight.

  “Come in.”

  Luckily for him, he always made sure never to speak before knowing the score. Any “Darling” or “Hi, sweetheart” or “I missed you so much” would have been a huge mistake. In a fraction of a second, a gate shut inside him and he became not who he was to Marlene but what he was to all o
thers: an upstanding, smartly dressed, not-very-major official from the Foreign Office.

  The man standing behind Marlene’s chair with both hands resting on her shoulders was noticeably taller than Fritz. He wore a Wehrmacht uniform, a strand of hair forming a comma on his forehead. He smiled at Fritz. Fritz had feared they would encounter each other at some point. Hopefully the man is unpleasant, he had thought.

  He wasn’t.

  “Ah, Herr Kolbe,” Marlene said.

  “Frau Wiese, nice to see you.”

  “Let me introduce my husband. Gerhard, this is Fritz Kolbe, an acquaintance of mine.”

  Gerhard Wiese shook Fritz’s hand.

  “Pleasure,” Fritz said.

  “Likewise. Always good to make new acquaintances in times like these.”

  “I know Herr Kolbe from the Foreign Office. He handles the professor’s visas.”

  So she was going on the offensive. She was disguising herself. Marlene glanced right at him, and her look of recognition receded.

  “Yeah,” said Fritz, “and I was just on an official trip to Switzerland. I took the liberty of bringing your wife some chocolate. I hope you don’t object.”

  “Chocolate for my Marlene—you don’t say? Give it here. But do keep some for yourself.”

  “Sure,” Fritz said, and opened the briefcase. He reached past the ham for the chocolate bars and handed them to Marlene.

  “Oh, how lovely,” she said. Their fingers brushed as she reached for the gift. More prosthetics than usual were leaning against the wall behind her: a row of metal legs, with and without knee joints.

  “I go on a whole week’s leave,” Wiese said, “and my Marlene ends up living here. This woman is an angel, Herr Kolbe. An angel to her husband, an angel in her work.”

  Just get the hell out, Fritz did not say. He cleared his throat. “It might be nice if you could get your wife away from Berlin.”

  “That won’t happen,” Marlene said.

  “You see? That’s the way she is.” Wiese leaned over her and kissed her hair.