The Honest Spy

by Andreas Kollender

  “Which OR?” Fritz asked. The whole building was an operating room.

  “In the cellar,” the nurse said. “The professor only operates down in the cellar now.”

  Marlene was sitting on a wooden chair, her surgical gown pink where she’d tried futilely to wash out the blood. She let her head hang, a cigarette between her fingers. Fritz crouched before her. At that moment, someone pushed a curtain to the side and passed by them carrying a bucket. When the bucket swayed, several severed hands within seemed to beckon to him.

  “Nice place,” he said. He reached for Marlene’s shoulders. When she looked at him, the black freckles in her eyes seemed far away.

  “How I love you,” he said.

  She blinked away tears.

  “I have to go to Bern one more time, Marlene. Tomorrow. When I get back, we’re disappearing from Berlin. I’m obtaining the necessary papers. For you too. We’re getting out of here. I’m bringing you to safety.”

  She inhaled on her cigarette. “Take a look around you, Fritz.”

  He gazed around at the stooped wounded, at the nurses’ legs rushing by, at the leather-strapped backs of heavily armed soldiers.

  “Berlin cannot be held, Marlene. The chaos will be unimaginable. A massacre. We’re getting out of here, you and I. It’s time for us to disappear.”

  She dropped her cigarette to the floor and ground out the stub with her filthy shoe. Then she glanced up and down the cement-gray hallway. From somewhere came a sound like a person’s screams, muffled by a towel. The place stank of disinfecting agents, tobacco smoke, and feces.

  “I’ll pick you up here this evening,” Fritz said. “Tonight we’re sleeping side by side. In our bed, Marlene. Do you hear me? You and I.”

  “I don’t know if I can get away.”

  “I’ll be here at eight o’clock.”

  She hugged him tightly. When he looked up again, he saw the broad back of a man in a white surgical coat hurrying past. “The professor,” Marlene said.

  “What do you want more than anything, Marlene? Tell me. I always love to hear you say it.”

  “To live,” she whispered. His ear was damp from her tears.

  “Live, she always said. Live.”

  In his mind, Fritz still hears her screams. He tried to turn around but all the damn bent metal wouldn’t let him. The car had rolled over.

  “The fall of Berlin,” he says. “That final trip to Bern, then our escape. Our suffering should have ended along with the war. It didn’t, though. It got even worse. We’d survived air raids, we’d survived my espionage work—and then what?”

  Wegner looks at him and his eyes give something away. Fritz guesses that Wegner is just now beginning to understand what he’s saying.

  Fritz grabs three bottles of beer from the well alongside the cabin and wipes the water off, the labels slipping under his fingers. “It’s about that time,” he says, and they pop the hinged lids and toast, the bottles clinking together. Wegner looks deep into Veronika’s eyes and she smiles at him warmly. Fritz thinks of Marlene. Often when he made her laugh or gave her a compliment, she would turn away slightly, lower her head, and look at him from the corner of her eye. He always found that so lovely.

  “You’re a long way away,” Veronika says.

  “I’m constantly going back and forth,” Fritz admits. “There was this one time when someone was knocking on our door like crazy, screaming my name. Marlene and I were just about to copy some documents. We thought: this is it. Gestapo, SS . . . we had no idea. Marlene . . . she wanted me to shoot her. I threw the files in the oven, then went up to the door holding my revolver. I was terrified. I almost fired. But then I realized the Gestapo or SS wouldn’t ever knock. It turned out to be the new block warden—that brown-nosing Nazi pig. My blackout curtains weren’t straight! That’s all it was. I’d gotten home before Marlene and had moved the cardboard slightly so I could peek onto the street. I wanted to see her coming home to me. I wanted to gaze at her as she made her way to me.”

  “Being in love under such high-pressure conditions . . . Does it feel different somehow?” Veronika asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t shown us one single photo of her,” Veronika says.

  “Later.”

  Wegner underlines something in his notes, circles a couple of other items, then loosens his tie. “My father was taken from Switzerland by the Gestapo,” he says. “We never found out why. It must have been a mistake. He was just a regular person.”

  “So am I,” Fritz says.

  “He never did anything illegal. Ever. He never would’ve dared. Not that I’m blaming him! Even so, a good friend of his . . . people said he was spying. We never heard from my father again, not even after it was all over. He disappeared without a trace. It was like the earth had swallowed him whole. My mother later married the friend.”

  “I’m very sorry about your father,” Fritz says. “It’s tough, not knowing what happened.”

  He takes a drink of beer. It’s strange how much good it always does him to raise that cool bottle to his mouth and let the bitter flavor flow out, to gulp it down and feel it relax his body and soul. “A lot of alcoholics got started under the Nazis,” he says. “If you got a bottle of beer in your hand, you drank it right down. When Berlin was falling, people held these bizarre orgies of all kinds—no one wanted anything more to do with discipline or order or standing at attention.”

  “After your third Bern trip, a death occurred,” Wegner says, “one that made you realize that in the new Germany you were . . . how should I put it?”

  “Persona non grata. In the new Germany, I was just as much a thorn in their side as I had been in Cape Town. They would’ve preferred that I never existed. My presence was a reminder that they had done nothing to stand up to Hitler. They still can’t bear to have a man like me around. There are some who are steadfast Nazis, of course, but there are far more who simply went along with it. They couldn’t tolerate sitting in an office next to me. And the ones who are now slowly inching their way back into positions of leadership? They would never permit it.”

  He lays a photo of the Nuremberg Trials defendants on the table among all the overlapping faces and maps.

  “All pleaded innocent. Many lower-ranking Nazis were acquitted; others were given sentences far more lenient than they deserved, including von Günther. The detention he served while awaiting trial counted toward his punishment. They’re being received with open arms. And me? They consider me the traitor—the one responsible for fatalities. How many murders are they guilty of, for God’s sake? One of the men who took part in the Wannsee Conference is now a tax consultant living right in Berlin. You do know what happened at the Wannsee Conference?”

  “Of course,” Veronika says. “Top Nazis planned the Final Solution for exterminating the Jews.”

  Wegner looks at Fritz. His eyes convey both recognition and disbelief, reminding Fritz of the way William Priest looked at him years ago in Bern.

  “Is conscience a provable fact, Herr Wegner?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m starting to think so.”

  Veronika runs her fingers over the photos and city maps. She looks von Ribbentrop in the eyes, turns General Gehlen toward the light, and smooths out a newspaper clipping that shows a photo from Auschwitz of a gray heap of bones and skulls crying out.

  “The photographer who took that was good,” she says. “But where’s the photo of you, Herr Kolbe?”

  “Of me?”

  “You have so much to be proud of,” Wegner says.

  The young man’s compliment moves Fritz. Who doesn’t like to receive a compliment? Yet inside, he is still crashing against a blood-smeared wall, something inside him still fighting this connection to the present. He is in the past: the filth of living in Hitler’s Germany, and the dead; Marlene screaming; Katrin at the dock.

  “There is a price to pay,” he says, “for doing what’s right.”

  Wegner writes down Fritz’s rema
rk. Veronika slides off her seat and walks out of the cabin. The men watch her go.

  “Are you in love with her, Herr Wegner?”

  “I’m married.”

  “People aren’t always married to the person they want to be with.”

  The door scrapes against the wooden floor as Veronika comes back in a few minutes later. She is holding her camera.

  “It’s time, Herr Kolbe. Please.”

  “Okay—I agree.”

  “Can you repeat what you just said? The part about having to pay a price?”

  “There is a price to pay,” he says, “for doing what’s right.”

  The camera clicks, its shutter working away. All Fritz can see of Veronika’s face is her jaw and forehead.

  He sits down at the table, his hands on his box. When all he takes into account are the facts, it’s impossible to sort out what happened. Yet the past can be explained. Photos, he thinks, are just frozen moments in time, without a history. No lies, no betrayal in them—or is there? He lays a picture on the table.

  “Having a drink in von Günther’s office, after the defeat of France,” he says. Veronika looks at the photo and Wegner leans her way, their shoulders touching. Fritz doesn’t need to look at this picture; he knows them all. In this one, he’s standing right next to von Günther, wearing a suit and tie as always, not exactly looking tall—he chuckles at that. He’s never described himself as short, he says. Maybe medium-size. He never did like looking up at a person. There are only men in this typical Nazi-era photo. Their arms are cocked and they hold champagne flutes. There’s a picture in the background of Hitler in profile. All the men are laughing, but Fritz is smiling with his mouth closed, showing no teeth.

  “Looking at this photo, one might think you don’t belong there,” Veronika says, “especially knowing what we know now.”

  “What can a photo tell a person anyway, Fräulein Hügel?”

  She raises her index finger and wags it left to right, like a metronome. “Photos don’t lie,” she says.

  “Sure they do,” Fritz says.

  She smiles at him. “That’s a whole other discussion,” she says.

  Fritz sets out another photo: he’s sitting on the bench in front of the hotel in Bern, legs crossed, a cigarette in the hand on his knee. His hat brim casts a shadow over his eyes. Eugen Sacher took this one.

  He doesn’t set out the photos that come next—he looks at a photo of the smashed car and again hears Marlene screaming, even after all these years. He turns the picture over and picks up the next: von Ribbentrop, in a black SS uniform, receiving an Italian delegation. Von Günther is laughing in the picture and Fritz stands at an angle behind him, looking like he might be gazing at von Ribbentrop.

  “You really were in the thick of it,” Wegner says.

  “No other intelligence source got as close,” Fritz says. He’s never expressed it quite like that, never said it so directly. It does him good, feels good, to say it.

  “Here’s one,” he says. “Allen Dulles and I met briefly in Berlin, after the war. The good man barely had time to see me.”

  “He abandoned you too?”

  Fritz flips the photo onto the table like a playing card.

  “Dulles has risen to the top of his field. He’s the big boss now in America. He was also the one who made General Gehlen palatable to his fellow Americans. It would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible. And this one here: William Priest and I, also in Berlin. He was a good guy whom I did grow to like, later on. Around this time, he was going crazy for German beer—thought it was splendid. Don’t get me wrong: the man was no drunk. Drunks are a lousy sort. Another beer?”

  His young guests nod. The atmosphere between them has changed, and an unspoken, delicate understanding is beginning to emerge. Fritz has told them a lot—he finally went on record with the Braunwein story—but he keeps leaving things out too. Something is working away on him, eroding his walls of resistance, and he’s yielding. It’s doing him good.

  Outside, he grabs three more bottles of beer from the well and looks toward the mountains. The sun hovers at the peaks, the rock face illuminated on one side and looming dark on the other, the shadows growing longer. The valley below spreads out gray-blue, and the river is now dark with white spots where the water gushes over stones.

  Fritz turns on the lamp above the table. Streaks of gloss appear on the photo paper, shining on different parts of the prints as he moves his head, adjusting his perspective.

  “So then,” Wegner says. “That final trip to Bern. The escape from Berlin.”

  “The final chapter, Herr Kolbe,” Veronika says.

  “The attack on you, Herr Kolbe,” Wegner says. This time he looks right at Fritz when he says it.

  Fritz shakes his head. “The final chapter is nowhere near written,” he says. He leans back, stretches out his legs, and lights up a cigarette. “You simply can’t let things get you down,” he says. “Now that would be betrayal—a betrayal of life itself. I don’t care how pathetic that sounds. I mean exactly what I said.”

  Outside his building, Fritz stood with his back to Marlene, slung her arms over his shoulders, and picked her up.

  “Fritz,” she muttered, “I’m bigger than you.”

  “I’m an athlete. And now I’m going to carry the woman I love up the stairs, no matter how uncomfortable it makes either one of us.”

  “Well, when you put it that way . . .” Marlene giggled. The steps creaked under their combined weight, Fritz laughing from the strain and their love. Once they were inside the apartment, Marlene dropped her overcoat and shuffled into the kitchen. Fritz made her tea and a slice of bread with jam and cut an apple into slices for her.

  “Let’s get you out of those smelly work clothes,” he said. He helped her undress, hung her blouse, skirt, stockings, and underwear in the window, and heated more water in the kitchen. “While we’re waiting for that to get hot,” he said, “let’s waltz.” Standing naked before him, Marlene laughed and opened her arms. Fritz placed his right hand on her back and took her hand in the other. “One, two, three,” Marlene said. He kissed her. “We’re really doing it, my belle. We’re getting out of here.” She linked her fingers at the back of his neck and held him firmly, pressing herself so close to him that he ached. He knew that she’d closed her eyes and was holding on to this moment of calm and togetherness just like he was. “You,” she was saying, “you, you.”

  Once the water was hot, he washed Marlene’s neck with a damp washcloth, and then her armpits, her breasts, and the inside of her thighs, all sticky with sweat, before covering her up with a blanket. When he kissed her, he kissed her all over her back so she could finish her food and tea. He longed to sleep with her and she surely wanted him too, despite her exhaustion and extreme fatigue, but in this moment, too much stood between them. Marlene smiled at him sleepily and he kissed her nose, her cheeks, her mouth. She fell asleep as he sat with her. Carefully he cradled the back of her head, settled her among the pillows, and turned off the light.

  A pile of secret documents lay on the kitchen table, dull and coarse in the lamp’s glow. Why in heaven’s name did all those Germans want to die? What honor was it supposed to bring, to die for those butchers who despise life itself? Life—not some Kaiser or Führer, and certainly not some ideology—was the source of honor. The fanatical Japanese were being beaten just as badly as were Hitler’s troops, so how were they surviving?

  Fritz flipped through the pages and laughed: just look at that! The Japanese owed the German Reich sixty million marks.

  He paged through reports on Japanese weapons and read that the Taisho machine gun was performing at five hundred shots per minute.

  Any reverses that were suffered in certain areas of the Eastern Front could be viewed as more or less final, he read. It was beyond Fritz how someone could write such a thing.

  A report to von Ribbentrop, addressed Dearest Reich Foreign Minister, claimed that the Allies’ invasion had in fact been welco
me. It’s not the material resources that decide matters, as you know, Herr von Ribbentrop, but rather the troops’ fighting spirit. Naturally, the writer said, Germany’s foreign posts had known about the invasion beforehand, as it would have been impossible for the enemy to keep such an undertaking a secret.

  Fritz put his hand to his forehead, shaking his head. He could not believe what he was reading. He continued to thumb through the pages one by one. Drastic measures. More Jews would need to go into individual rail cars. There was a need to free up more trains for the front. Dear von Ribbentrop, if the Jews arrive at the camps already dead, so much the better. Fritz wrote down the number of armored reserves and armored training battalions in the West. Someone calling von Ribbentrop Your Excellence wrote subserviently from Tokyo about a gratifyingly high level of fanaticism.

  Dear von Ribbentrop, just between you and me: are you sure you know what General Gehlen of Military Intelligence is up to?

  There followed a circular marked Secret, and issued by von Ribbentrop himself, which said that no negligent behavior by female receptionists would be tolerated.

  One report said that Churchill’s assessment of the situation was wrong.

  From another: bank gold reserves were to be sent to various locations in Switzerland as directed via X2Z. In Switzerland, operatives were waiting. Check courier trips closely. Hail victory!

  Fritz raised the page off the table. Check courier trips. His mind ran through what that could mean. Check Fritz Kolbe. Apprehend Marlene Wiese. Leave Katrin in the dark forever. He cursed, pulled the page closer to his eyes, and read about alleged secret negotiations in Italy. The traitors, he read, must be liquidated at once with no consideration given to name or rank.