The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “Don’t take it personally,” Marlene said. “She didn’t mean anything by it. Gisela decided long ago to do whatever she wants—usually for pleasure. She sleeps with quite a lot of men.”

  Marlene sat down on Fritz’s lap. She gave him one of her puckered-up girl kisses. “We only live once, after all.” She stroked his head.

  “I would never betray you,” Fritz said.

  “Ah, Fritz, but betraying people is what we’ve been doing this whole time. All the way down the line.”

  When Von Günther went along with von Ribbentrop to attend a meeting with the Japanese emissary, Fritz used the time to take even more file notes and sent them in code to the cover address for Dulles and his team. Sometimes it was all he could do not to grab for the telephone and call Bern to ask, “Why are you not bombing the Wolf’s Lair yet? Wipe them all out!” He kept asking himself the question, again and again. And after the war, when the attempt was made on him and Marlene, he was still asking himself why the air raid had never happened.

  Fritz saw General Gehlen speaking in the hallway with von Ribbentrop, looking white as a sheet. Shortly afterward, Gehlen came into Fritz’s office and said he was there for an appointment with von Günther.

  “Intelligence work,” he said, “is the best work there is.”

  Von Günther came out of his office, saluted, and disappeared inside with Gehlen, but soon opened the door again.

  “Kolbe, I’ll need the files on the Warsaw situation—we got them yesterday or the day before.”

  Something caught in Fritz’s chest. He could hardly breathe.

  “Kolbe?”

  “Yes sir, Herr Ambassador.”

  Von Günther shut the door. The files were at home under Fritz’s bed. He left his office and hurried down the corridor that stretched on and on. His footsteps echoed as he ran down the stairs.

  Down at the entrance Heinz Müller was talking with a courier. “What’s the rush, Herr Kolbe?”

  Fritz threw on a borrowed smile and said, “Work, work, work.”

  On the Wilhelmplatz he climbed onto his bicycle and pedaled, steering around the scars of war and sliding into curves. He stormed up his stairs but couldn’t get the door unlocked, then saw he was using the wrong key. He stuffed the files in his inside pocket, hurried down the stairs three steps at a time, and rode back to the office. He was wet with sweat. Did they finally have him? Was it over now?

  He hurled his bicycle against the railing for the Wilhelmplatz U-Bahn station and ran for his building’s entrance, gulping down deep breaths. He hurried into the Office with lungs pumping. Müller was standing in the doorway of the office next to his, arms crossed at his chest as if waiting for Fritz. He said nothing, but watched Fritz pass. Officially, Fritz was senior to the scrawny-shouldered Müller, yet the balance of power between them remained unclear. One day, though, he would find out for sure whether Müller had helped the others attack him aboard the Louisiana. Fritz smiled at him, saying there was always so much to do around here.

  If von Günther was waiting in Fritz’s office, Fritz would hardly be able to pull the files from his jacket. Luckily the room was empty. He made it to the safe just as von Günther came into the room, and he made a show of having just pulled the documents from it.

  “Kolbe? What’s going on? The Warsaw folder. The general is waiting. Where were you?”

  “My apologies, Herr Ambassador. I must have eaten something bad. Here’s the folder.”

  General Gehlen was standing in the doorway. Fritz hoped he didn’t notice the sweat on his face or any specks of grime on his shoes and trouser legs.

  “Forgive me, Herr General,” he said.

  “This doesn’t happen with my people, Herr Kolbe.”

  “It doesn’t normally happen with mine either,” von Günther said. “You can be sure that there will be consequences, Herr General.”

  Gehlen waved von Günther back into the office. The general was looking Fritz in the eyes.

  “I’m very sorry, Herr General,” he repeated.

  “You were abroad a long time,” Gehlen observed. “And you’re not a Party member.”

  “Yes sir, Herr General. No sir.” Fritz hated this. He was disgusted with himself. Gehlen was untouchable—Fritz saw no way of going on the offense, no way out of this at all.

  “Nothing escapes me, Kolbe.”

  “Yes sir, Herr General.”

  Gehlen glanced into von Günther’s office, then at Fritz again, resting a finger on his lips as if pondering something. Fritz struggled to keep his composure. He wouldn’t be able to take much more of the general’s scrutiny. His chest was heaving too hard, his breathing too fast.

  “Everything all right, Kolbe?”

  “Yes sir, Herr General. I’m really awfully sorry.”

  “As you should be. Right?” Gehlen whipped around and closed the door in one calm, fluid movement.

  Fritz staggered over to the sink and scooped handfuls of water over his face. Someone knocked. Fritz cursed. “What is it now?”

  It was Müller. He wanted to speak with von Günther.

  “The Herr Ambassador has a visitor,” Fritz said.

  “It’s important.”

  “It’s not possible right now, Müller. I’ll let him know you were here.”

  “Heil Hitler.”

  “Hi Hitler.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  “No, Müller. I have things to do. The Herr Ambassador has things to do. I’ll tell him that you’d like to speak with him. You might tell me what it’s about while we’re at it.”

  “Certainly not, Herr Kolbe.”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

  “You have to hang on,” Marlene told him. “Everything worked out all right in the end. Now come here, you. Come here and take me in your arms.”

  Fritz came to Marlene so forcefully, she stumbled backward against the kitchen cupboard, a little concert of porcelain clanging as she bumped it. “Ah, Fritz. It makes me so happy to sit at the table with you in the evening, copying files. Even with this war, I’m happy. I’m proud of you. We will live, Fritz. Live! And now I’m going to cook us these four potatoes, but not the onion.”

  “An onion?”

  She lifted it as if she’d conjured it up by magic: a medium-size onion with a light brown skin, its outermost layer peeling in one spot. Fritz watched as Marlene carefully peeled the onion so that not one single shred was lost and then cut it into fine, translucent slices the color of vinegar.

  The debacle with the folder had hit him hard, and he was still worked up about it. All his worries had mounted inside his head, and his thoughts kept turning to the sky over Africa, to the parks in Madrid and the boulevards of Paris, to foreign languages. He went back over in his mind what had happened earlier. As he had been getting ready to leave for the day, General Gehlen had come out of von Günther’s office and passed quite slowly through Fritz’s outer office, keeping an eye fixed on him the whole time, or so it seemed to Fritz. Once he was gone, von Günther stood in the doorway and eyed Fritz. He didn’t budge. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, looking at him. Fritz’s embarrassment made him want to scratch at his forehead. He had smiled and made notes until von Günther shut the door again, and then Fritz went completely weak at his desk.

  “I love you,” he said now without looking at Marlene. He said it earnestly, his voice sounding strange in the shadows of his darkened apartment. He’d just told her he couldn’t do this anymore—now he was telling her he loved her. Such fundamental declarations these were, full of trust and complete devotion. He looked into her eyes. She smiled, and started blinking. “Must be the onion,” she told him.

  “They’re watching me, Marlene. Von Günther is still partly blind, I’m hoping. The man trusts me, for whatever reason. He hates intelligence officers, he hates the Gestapo. There’s something about their deep mistrust that revolts him. But—”

  “But what, Fritz?”

  “Müller. Müller
saw me. That scrawny son of a bitch has been watching me for years.”

  “Is he a threat?”

  “No idea.”

  Marlene went into the bedroom, came back out, and set the revolver on the table in front of Fritz.

  We’ve reached that point, thinks Fritz. I must say something now. I want to say it now.

  “Roughly seventy million died in the war,” he says. “That’s just a number. But there’s more to it than that. That’s seventy million human hearts, seventy million screams. Everyone lost friends, family members, sweethearts. If only Marlene and I and Walter and all the others had never had to experience such complete and utter hell. The war had such power to destroy, you cannot imagine. Total madness.”

  “If it weren’t for the war,” Wegner says, “you never would’ve gotten to know Marlene.”

  “Not true. No, no matter what, Marlene would have crossed my path at some point.”

  “That’s a nice thought,” Veronika says.

  “He would have crossed your path no matter what too,” Fritz says to her.

  Wegner leans back and looks out the window.

  “I couldn’t help what happened,” Fritz says. “I didn’t want that. No one can blame me for it. Doing so is impossible. You understand me? It’s impossible. A series of events unfolded, that’s all. There’s no way I could control all that. Write that down, Herr Wegner. Make a note of it. It’s important. In such times there’s no one who can control everything, no one who can account for it all. It cannot be done.”

  “That’s already quite clear to me, Herr Kolbe.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes, really. At least you did something. Others did not.”

  “Perhaps I . . . I shouldn’t have done anything, after all.”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  “I’m not sure anymore.”

  Von Günther was the one who told him.

  The rain was hitting the office windows at a sharp angle, obscuring the view of the building on the other side of the street. Below them, the street was still.

  “Herr Kolbe . . .” Von Günther looked around for the chair that no longer stood opposite Fritz’s desk. Without a word, he went back in his office and returned with a lightweight green armchair. He sat in it and folded his manicured hands.

  “Churchill and his goddamn commando missions,” he said.

  Fritz didn’t understand. He set his pencil down on the desk pad. “What’s wrong, Herr Ambassador?”

  “You’re good friends with Walter Braunwein, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes. Since—well, as boys we went hiking together in the Allgäu.”

  “Like in that picture?” Von Günther pointed at the gold-framed landscape covering the safe.

  “Reminds me of better days,” Fritz said. “Why are you asking me about Herr Braunwein?”

  “The Office often sent Herr Braunwein away on special assignments. He had good connections in Ireland. You probably know that.”

  Fritz picked up his pencil again, wrapped his fingers around it, and pressed his thumb against the end until the narrow wood bowed with tension. Had Walter defected? Without Käthe? No, that could not be.

  “We had a secret transmitter near Dublin. Well, somehow the British must have gotten word of it. They . . . you know, these things do happen in war—”

  “What happened?”

  “They attacked the transmitting station.”

  “Was Walter there?”

  “Herr Braunwein was, yes. One of the men was able to get away, and three days ago he established contact with us.” Von Günther looked at his hands.

  “Walter’s being held captive?”

  “No, Herr Kolbe.”

  “He . . . he’s been wounded.”

  “No.”

  The pencil cracked, sending splinters of wood across the desk. A coarse noose was being pulled around Fritz’s neck, choking him.

  “I’m very sorry, Herr Kolbe.”

  Fritz grabbed his overcoat and hat off the hook on the door and walked out. He heard clattering behind him as his superior rose to call after him.

  “Kolbe! Kolbe!” Von Günther was bellowing at his back. “Don’t storm out like that! Kindly keep your composure. Others have lost comrades too. We’re at war. Kolbe! Kolbe!”

  Later, he couldn’t have recalled where or for how long he wandered in that brittle, crippled city, nor could he have recounted how many ashen, starving faces he saw or which debris heaps he climbed over.

  He had been the one. He was the agent who’d given Dulles the memo about the secret transmitting station in Dublin. A brief mention, one of hundreds passed along inside a clandestine office on the Herrengasse in Bern. He had done it. He should have known better. Ireland, Walter’s dream. His friend Walter Braunwein with his disheveled hair. Hey-ho. Käthe. Horst.

  Fritz stood before a building with a sign nailed to it: “No Entry, In Danger of Collapse.” He climbed through the fangs of the busted door, pushed himself along sooty walls, and climbed a stairway that was missing its railing, the grit-covered steps crunching under his feet. He found the top floor rotting away under the cold gray sky and sat down on a wooden chair next to an oven that was collapsing in on itself. He looked out over the monstrously violated city now nothing more than stone stalagmites: an endless, grotesque apocalyptic wasteland. The wind tugged at the brim of his hat. He had killed Walter. Käthe would never again hold her husband in her arms. And Horst, oh Horst—yet another boy without a father.

  He took the revolver from his jacket and set it in his lap, the metal cold and dark like the sky. Walter! His name was all that was left, written on the ruined walls in blackest soot. It was a name that encompassed everything, and Fritz was a small man in a dark overcoat inside a decrepit building, a face wet with tears in the wind. Only one thought was clear: he had betrayed Walter. Fritz Kolbe, the spy, the man who wanted to shorten the war. He was the one.

  Please, please, don’t let it be so, he thought. And yet another thought was clear: the Wolf’s Lair had not been bombed, but the British had sent one of their special commando teams to Dublin. Those men were lightning fast. They had gone because of information Fritz provided to Dulles, who would have shared it with the Brits, with their well-oiled boots, automatic weapons, and blackened faces in the night. Walter would have looked up when he heard the noise. Fritz pictured the flash of gun barrels and bullets piercing his friend’s body. The bullets would have gone right through him, maybe even through his face, his stomach. In the front and out the back, if no bones were in the way. This was it. It was over. Katrin. She’d turned her back to him at the harbor in Cape Town. He’d cried out for her, but she wouldn’t turn around, her black hair a shiny curtain down her little back. Fritz Kolbe did not exist anymore. George Wood did not exist. Nor did the Walter Braunwein he’d hiked with and raced to the buoy with in the sea off of Cape Town. It was all over. He wiped at his eyes, writhing in pain.

  What was Walter’s final thought before all went dark? Was it of Käthe? Horst? Fritz slumped down on the creaking chair and curled into a fetal position. He wanted to crawl into a gash in the earth like some tiny louse, to feel nothing but cold rock all around him. So this was the end. He stood up and stomped and stomped on the gritty floor. The building kept standing.

  Fritz stared at the door to his apartment, at the finish that got rougher and rougher each day. He turned the key. He could see Marlene down the hall, sitting in the kitchen. He couldn’t bring himself to step over the threshold and say to Marlene’s face what he had done. Marlene came to him, the golden light from the kitchen illuminating her profile and shining against her lush hair. She went past him and locked the front door, then clasped her hands behind her back and leaned against the wall.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Fritz felt himself shaking his head wildly. Marlene went into the kitchen, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw her busy with something. Then she came back and handed a glass to him. Cognac, she
said, that he himself had stolen from von Günther. They drank, leaning against the walls across from one another. Fritz couldn’t return her stare.

  “Fritz?”

  “It was me,” he said.

  She fell silent. At some point—seconds or hours later, or in some other age—she told him she had made something to eat.

  She had made him something to eat.

  Tears welled in his eyes.

  “Fritz, what’s happened?”

  Hand in hand, they went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. A folder from the Office labeled Top Secret lay next to a plate of bread with sausage. Fritz stared at the Reich eagle and the swastika and swept the folder off the table. It landed at Marlene’s feet, which were dressed in her thick stockings.

  “I wanted to do what’s right,” he said.

  “Please, tell me. Tell me what happened. Don’t leave me in the dark. It doesn’t matter what it is. Tell me.”

  Fritz grabbed the safari photo from the picture shelf, handed it to Marlene, and touched the face of Walter Braunwein.

  “I passed the information to Dulles. I did it.”

  She said nothing. Maybe she didn’t know what she should say. Maybe she was scared of saying the wrong thing and hurting him or making him angry, or maybe it was simply that there was nothing to say. She stepped close to Fritz and pulled his head to her chest. He clawed at her back. Then he wailed. Into her body he wailed it all: every Heil Hitler, every Yes sir, the hate, the self-loathing . . . and the death of Walter Braunwein.

  The next day, Käthe shot herself dead.

  In the Office, he now started taking folders down to the basement at the earliest possible opportunity. He’d have the man at the metal table sign off and then watch as the flames in the burn barrels devoured potential intelligence for the OSS, all orange and red, the papers’ edges turning blue. Bern might assume that he was dead. Dulles might have deduced from his silence that he’d confessed under torture and would already be taking certain countermeasures.

  Fritz decided to send a message to him. He kept Berlin-themed postcards in a desk drawer—the boulevard Unter den Linden in sunshine, men wearing hats, women holding flowers, gleaming cars. He put one in his typewriter and typed a coded message to the OSS in Bern on a margin, then slid it into an inside pocket. At home later, he handwrote some lines on the card, telling his imaginary friend in Bern that he would not be writing to her anymore. When Marlene saw him with the postcard, he told her he’d found it with the margins already like this, probably someone trying to learn how to type. Marlene snatched the card from his hand and tore it down the middle. She then ripped those halves in two and kept on ripping until fingernail-size shreds were falling to the floor.