Joy, lovely divine spark,
Daughter from Elysium!
We enter fire-drunk,
Heavenly one, your shrine.
Your magic binds again,
What custom has strictly parted.
All men become brothers
Where your tender wing lingers.
Fritz began to hum. Biermann joined in, then so did his wife. They sang together, poorly and feebly, but they didn’t mind. They sang, and the tears ran down Fritz’s cheeks.
“It’s all right, Herr Kolbe,” Frau Biermann said. “It’s quite all right.”
“Have you heard from Katrin?” the consul asked.
Fritz wiped at his eyes and shook his head. “I’ve abandoned her.”
“No,” Frau Biermann said, “you’ve kept the girl away from all this. That’s good, Herr Kolbe. Do not go blaming yourself.”
After their visit, the consul escorted Fritz to the door. Walking was tough on Biermann, his knees and hips stiff. His beard had grown long. In the hallway hung gold-framed landscapes: rustling woods, splashing streams. It was his opinion that nature was always there to console, and he said he knew Fritz saw things the same way. On the wall beyond Biermann’s head, a mountain range basked in sunlight, its snowcaps as white as the consul’s hair. Only now did Fritz realize that he couldn’t be absolutely certain Biermann would approve of his treason. The word might not even have entered the elderly man’s head.
“Is it that bad, Herr Kolbe?”
“Yes.”
“You must sit tight,” Biermann said. “You can withdraw within yourself, and perhaps you should in times like these. But there is no other alternative to sitting tight. Don’t try any nonsense. Don’t go down the wrong track. I understand that you were alluding to something earlier, but I don’t want to know the details. Stay at your post and raise your hand once this is all over. Then you’ll be well positioned. You’ll understand what to do then. If you try the wrong thing now, who knows what will happen. Your character will be marked irreparably. Farewell, Herr Kolbe.” In their handshake, Fritz sensed an assumption of how he would respond. “And please, do not come here anymore.”
“No,” Fritz said. “Why would I ever come to you again?”
The old man jerked back. The back of his head tapped the landscape behind him.
As he rode home, Fritz clung to his bicycle. Biermann had noticed. The old consul had seen right through Fritz and had turned his back on him. Fritz couldn’t take this. He couldn’t stand it anymore. It would always be unbearable, but never more so than now.
“The British Secret Service were good,” Fritz says. “It’s possible that they located that transmitter in Dublin using intelligence other than mine. People in MI5 and MI6 could have gathered their own clues by listening in on U-boat radio traffic, or whatever. Who knows.”
Fritz has taken more photos out of the box. He’s fastened them to the lime-washed cabin beam with little nails: the picture of him and Walter on safari in South-West Africa; a photo of the car he and Marlene were riding in when they were attacked; and an image of the smoking remains of the Leuna Works in Berlin, the factory halls nothing but blackened carcasses, the giant steel lathes twisted into tentacles by the force of the explosions.
“I gave the coordinates of the Leuna Works to the Americans,” he says. “I thought about going over to the factory right after the air raid—I could see the fire when I came out of the shelter. I didn’t do it.”
Veronika looks at Wegner, who makes a note and mutters that he understands.
“You didn’t make contact with the OSS for a long time.”
“I was fed up—up to here, for God’s sake! Can you imagine the pressure I was under? And letting Marlene in on it only made things worse.”
Fritz’s heart is pounding. He rubs his forehead as if this could somehow suppress his thoughts. He’s exhausted and feels empty and depleted. The weight of the past is great.
“The air raids on Berlin got worse and worse. Refugees from the East started streaming into the city. Hell finally broke loose at the hospital where Marlene worked.”
“But where is she right now?” Veronika asks.
Fritz looks past her, out the window.
“She’s probably out getting something to eat with Eugen Sacher and his wife,” he says.
The sun has passed its highest point, and the shadows of the mountains are starting to settle into the valley closest to the hillsides, turning groves a bluish color and dimming the light along the stream as it winds around the mountains.
Six years of war, Fritz thinks. Six years of living a double life. He hasn’t stopped lying since. The lies and parallel worlds have become so much a part of him that he keeps losing his way, again and again. Sometimes it’s as if he has amnesia, and he has to rediscover his identity through the photos and notes, through his globe he’s repaired, through the folds of torn city maps. He wants to be rid of the past, wants to get it onto the page, truly and finally. The impulse to be rid of it is as strong today as it was on the day someone violently banged on his door and Marlene demanded that he do the unimaginable. “Marlene was the one,” Fritz says. “I kept going for her sake.”
“The fact is the Americans sent someone to talk to you,” Wegner says.
“Perhaps he shouldn’t have come,” Fritz says.
“Let’s stick to the facts,” Wegner says.
“You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Oh, I do, Herr Kolbe, I get it completely. But there are certain facts. Period. There was a Hitler, and there were mountains of people gassed and starved to death, whether we like it or not. These are the facts. And just so you know, it’s very clear to me that each and every one of these people once had a living, beating heart. But we have to make progress here. I’m writing an article about possibly the most important anti-Nazi spy of the Second World War. So, your OSS contacts did send someone to Berlin, is that correct?”
Fritz pulls the photo of Eugen Sacher from the stack. Gray suit, white shirt, smiling as always.
“They weren’t at all shy about exposing Eugen to danger. That was when he got to know Marlene. And me.”
“What do you mean and me?” Veronika asks.
“This whole time, it’s as if I’ve been talking about someone I don’t know. About someone I never wanted to be. Not Fritz Kolbe, and not George Wood either. I’m not sure how insane a person has to become to be able to cope with such a situation. I was completely at wit’s end. Did you know that Eugen wanted to send me to a psychiatrist, no matter what happened? No? Well, now you know.”
For a time Fritz and Marlene tried to keep Fritz’s blackout-darkened Berlin apartment a place free from war, resolving that when they were together there, they would not talk about all the horror and death and destruction.
Whenever she came to the apartment, Marlene made a habit of jingling her wedding ring in the cutlery drawer. She’d open the front door, pass by him into the kitchen without a word, splay out her ring finger, and tug on the gold. She only let Fritz embrace her once the ring had disappeared between the forks and knives.
When they had time, they would go strolling through the rubble. They shared their love at busted railings along the Spree River, where scorched wooden planks bobbed in the water; on the inexplicable remains of barges; and upon mountains of debris, where they lost their footing on slopes they’d climbed in order to look out over the shattered city. Their walks, taken hand in hand, led them down former streets that were now only paths and onto badlands where buildings had once stood, before being blasted away by doomsday force.
Marlene sometimes went for weeks without mentioning his inaction regarding matters of espionage, leaving him in peace. Then all of a sudden she would allude to it in the middle of conversation, wondering aloud how much her love for him had to do with his working for the OSS. Wasn’t that the major difference between him and her husband?
Every time Fritz took files down to the basement for incineration, his st
omach burned, as if the flames in the burn barrels were igniting within him. What might Dulles have done with the material he was destroying right now? He kept picturing von Günther sitting at his desk, telling him Walter Braunwein was dead. Instead of running straight to Käthe, he had let sorrow overtake him, had told himself, Tomorrow I’ll go to her, tomorrow I will. But tomorrow was too late. Tomorrow, Käthe was dead, the knowledge of that shooting a hole straight through all of Fritz’s memories of her.
After one of their scenic strolls, Marlene turned to face him in the kitchen. Holding a cup of tea in one hand, she asked him about the secret files.
“I wanted to do what is right,” he told her. He balled his fists and held them to his eyes. “What is right supposed to mean anyway? You tell me. What?”
Marlene set a chair before the kitchen cabinet and climbed atop it. He rushed over to support her, holding her hips. She reached into the top of the cabinet, felt around, and handed down a yellowed page, curling along the edges. She stared down at him from up on her perch, her broad jawbone and her nose looking unusually attractive from this angle, even a little arrogant.
“A German spy in southern England, codename Brandt. You wrote about it in that crazy handwriting of yours.”
She reached into the cabinet again.
“A report from General Gehlen that you transcribed into concise notes. Take it!”
He was holding the pages in his left hand, his right resting on Marlene’s hip. He grumbled that she needed to come down from there.
“Why don’t you come back up?” she said. “My son is dead. My boy, Fritz. I’m deceiving the man who married me. You confided in me. Our life is hanging by a thin thread. And all for nothing? Did we do all that just so you could stop now? You can’t stop, Fritz. Not something like this. It would—that would be treason. Real treason.”
Someone knocked on the door. Fritz stared down the dark hallway and handed Marlene the papers. The knock was gentle, friendly. It was funny how a person could read so much into such small things.
“Who’s there?”
“An old friend.”
Fritz recognized the voice immediately. Eugen Sacher.
They hugged, Eugen smelling of aftershave and cleanliness, not like war and hardship. Fritz pulled him into the apartment. He could hardly believe it—he had an actual friend here with him in a Berlin that was more flattened and hollow than ever.
“Nice place,” Eugen said.
When Eugen saw Marlene leaning against the kitchen cabinet, he gave her a little bow and a kiss on the hand, his big nose brushing her wrist. Fritz introduced them. Eugen said he’d brought chocolate and Marlene sighed with pleasure. Fritz got a bottle of Mosel wine from the cabinet.
“Fritz is quite good at stealing booze these days,” Marlene said. She polished three water glasses, held them up to the lamp’s caramel glow, and passed them around. She told Sacher he was only allowed to tell them about Bern, please; she only wanted to hear about a city no bombs fell on. Sacher could take her on a little imaginary stroll through his city—please, please, she said. They toasted and Eugen took them there. Marlene shut her eyes and tilted her face up as they listened to descriptions of shop windows full of sausage and cheese, Marlene breathing it all in.
When Eugen asked why Fritz had broken off contact with Bern, Fritz stammered something about the Braunweins dying. They fell silent awhile and listened to banging from the neighboring apartment, sounds like furniture being rearranged.
“Eugen, did anyone see you coming here?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why would they take a risk like this?”
“I’m afraid you have to choose which side you’re on,” Eugen said.
“Says who?” Fritz asked.
Eugen raised his hands in defense and apologized.
“I’ve chosen sides,” Fritz said. “It’s just that I’ve had to choose more than one of them. Is that clear enough for you, Eugen?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s fine, Fritz.” He drank a gulp of wine and smiled at Marlene.
“Easy for you, coming from Switzerland.”
“Fritz, please,” Marlene said. “That’s unfair.”
“Listen to me,” Eugen told Fritz. “No harm done, everything’s all right. I do understand what you’re saying. But here’s what Dulles is asking: troop movements westward, out of Russia and Italy; restructuring of forces in France; supply routes, coastal defenses, and divisional commanders.”
“The invasion!”
“We can hope. This madness does have to end at some point.”
“My God,” Fritz said. “A landing in France! That’ll break that pig’s neck. Finally.”
“Dulles told me next to nothing, of course.”
“They’re good at saying nothing.”
“Yet you think a great deal of Dulles.”
“That amount has been reduced considerably.”
“They provided me with a first-rate fake Swiss passport. And they didn’t force me at all. They asked. I’m here on business with a trade delegation. I don’t have much time. What should I tell Dulles?”
Fritz looked at Marlene, her gaze forceful, demanding. She opened the kitchen cabinet, pushed a few things around inside, and pulled something out. She set the globe on the table. She had glued it back together.
“My globe! It’s whole again. You even repaired Germany.”
Eugen ran his fingers over the resinous scars of glue. “It’s not like the world’s as smooth and round as portrayed anyway.”
“How much time do I have?” Fritz asked.
“One hour.”
“Fine. I’m going out for a bit.”
“It doesn’t look good out there,” Eugen said.
Fritz left.
He sat down on a pile of rubble and it gave under his weight, dumping grit and little bits of earth inside his shoes. At one point a truck drove by, then a man on a bicycle, now and then a dusty car. He had one brief hour in which to decide. Fritz felt the weight of his revolver in his jacket pocket. He looked both directions down the destroyed street, past the gray debris and the buckling buildings, some bulging out into the street, as if trying to topple one on the opposite side. He would never get used to witnessing such horror.
He lit a crooked cigarette and blew out smoke. Katrin, what do you think? The ones I’ve killed, my girl, are not all Nazis; they are not all swine. I always wanted to be decent, to keep my composure. But how do I do that here? Take a look around here, Katrin, and see for yourself! It’s unbelievable.
He heard the low drone of an engine, a double-clutching howl: that first grumble of a new gear and then the motor running at speed. Fritz looked up. A military transport was rumbling down the street, its grayish camo tarp raised, dull and sucking away light. Fritz drew his revolver. “Bang,” he said. A woman was staring at him from across the street, her daughter holding her hand. “Get out of Berlin!” Fritz shouted. “Take the girl and leave—now!”
The girl glanced at her mother and said something; the woman pulled her onward by her thin arm. The little girl was limping, her right leg stiff, her shoulder lifting with each step. The children are suffering too, Fritz thought. He put the revolver away.
How could he continue to live with Marlene if he was no longer spying for Allen Dulles? How could he live with himself? It was awful to imagine British, American, Canadian, Russian, and French soldiers shooting at their targets when their targets were German men. Fathers, sons, husbands. Cartographers. Walter Braunwein. It was that bad. And that irreversible.
Fritz flicked the cigarette, white and smoking, onto the street. It landed in a crater and disappeared, only a thin string of smoke rising from the churned-up earth. In the books he’d read, there always came those dramatic moments when a decision loomed. He was at such a moment now: he and his thoughts, with his bad luck and with his good-luck charm Marlene, and a stiff-legged girl who will find no luck in love, and the dead Braunweins. He lifted his hat off his forehead, surpris
ed at how easily the decision came in the end. I’ll finish you all off, he thought. He went back to his apartment.
“Tell Dulles I’ll start delivering again. Not a word about anything else, nothing of what we discussed here. Nothing about the Braunweins. Just tell him Wood is back. A different Wood.”
“Wut?” his friend said, pronouncing the German word for rage.
“Not Wut—Wood,” Fritz said. “But in my case, it’s one and the same thing.”
11
INVASION AND ASSASSINATION
Berlin and Paris, 1944
“Madam, if I may?” Fritz held out his arms for Marlene to dance with him in the kitchen. It was the night of June 7, 1944. The Allies had landed in Normandy.
“You may, sir.”
They moved the table aside. Marlene was humming a waltz. “Singing is nice,” she said. “It makes me happy. I used to be in a choir. Don’t go thinking I’m too bourgeois, though.”
“I don’t,” Fritz said. “Music is never bourgeois.”
“Oh no, then what about the Nazis’ music?”
Fritz sighed. “The Nazis can kiss our asses.”
Marlene giggled. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You can kiss mine, though. But no one else’s.”
Fritz laughed bitterly about the announcers on the People’s Receiver, who were constantly worked up into a state of excitement. It didn’t matter how badly Hitler’s armies were defeated; their battle results were always depicted as victories, brilliant military maneuvers that would cost the enemy dearly. Everything worked to the Führer’s advantage. Goebbels was screaming into the microphone, his voice breaking. Fritz watched Marlene through a cognac glass, saying that maybe he too had become a fanatic—at least, about her.
“I can live with that,” she said.
The little creases at the corners of her mouth had deepened over time; sometimes, when she stood before the mirror, she said that seeing all the maimed people and dealing with all those clanging prosthetics were going to do her in. She bent down close to the mirror as if searching for something on the surface of her face. The use of prosthetics was decreasing, though. “It’s all about amputating now, saving lives in any way possible. Nothing gets replaced anymore.” No one was discussing research either. Or human experiments.
The Honest Spy Page 24
