Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Unlike Hiss, who was never more than the bureaucratic equivalent of a gentleman’s gentleman, a valet to the Old Guard, Jack would fight the good fight in the open, proud of his beliefs, always on camera, eager to answer any question, his whole being written on his face. Talking the talk, smiling the smile.

  “But first we must bind him to us,” Peter said. “I have made certain arrangements in Heidelberg.”

  “Who do we have in Heidelberg?”

  “An old friend named Manfred,” Peter said. “He arrives tomorrow, to meet you. Manfred loves beaches.”

  Manfred was a lecturer in political philosophy at Heidelberg University, a talent spotter like Arthur, but a more serious person, with more serious resources. Every August he was rewarded for his difficult and valuable work with an all-expenses-paid holiday at a beach. These were working holidays; he always spent a day or two with Peter or one of his men, who gave him his next assignment. Sometimes Manfred went to Tunisia, sometimes to Greece, once to an island in the Indian Ocean—wherever skies were blue and skins were dark.

  This year he was recreating himself in Haiti, and I would give him his instructions. To prepare me for this task, Peter sketched in the Heidelberg phase of his plan for Jack Adams. He mentioned individuals, wild young vandals who called themselves terrorists. Their cases were familiar to me.

  “Give them latitude,” Peter said. “They’re very creative. And they’re expendable, as long as Jack is protected.”

  I said, “You see the risks. These kids are mad, unpredictable.”

  “That will help Jack remember his adventures all the more vividly,” Peter said.

  That evening by the swimming pool he introduced me to Manfred.

  “You can have absolute confidence in Dmitri,” Peter said. “He is my opposable thumb.”

  Manfred, the screwdriver Peter had just handed to me, smiled in quiet satisfaction at the subtlety of the image: revolutionaries as the users of tools, all others as apes.

  We made our arrangements. Then I left Manfred among the urchins.

  2 Heidelberg, a living postcard, was the first foreign city Jack had ever seen. Arriving by train from Frankfurt, he thought it looked like a set for a Hollywood musical about a prince in disguise—his favorite story line. Manfred met him at the Hauptbahnhof, claiming to be an old friend of Arthur’s, who by this time was moldering in a Cuban grave and was in no position to deny it. Manfred took him to lunch in a student hangout, then drove him to the old quarter, where garret rooms had been engaged for Jack. The dormer windows looked out on a narrow cobbled street. All very picturesque: heraldic Teutonic shields carved into the ancient stones, leaning eaves all but touching so as to admit only a thread of light. As if on cue, zither music drifted through a window: the Third Man theme, issuing from a television.

  As Jack soon discovered, this romantic medieval exterior concealed a bloated capitalistic Heidelberg, awash in the new money of the German economic miracle and drenched in counterculture sex and politics that were far more intense, far darker than anything he had known in the United States. On his second night in town, a Saturday, Manfred invited him to dinner at a cellar restaurant in the old town. Like the city itself, the rathskeller was a peep show into a vanished Germany. Oompah Muzak played in the background. Waitresses in dirndls and white knee socks rushed about serving mugs of beer and having their bottoms patted by hearty fat men who stuffed enormous tips into their aprons.

  Most of the girls were pretty in the smooth-skinned German fashion. Jack was immediately alert. A waitress bustled up to the table. Manfred ordered a Pilsner, Jack his usual Coca-Cola.

  “No, no. You must have beer,” Manfred said.

  Jack held up a hand in firm refusal. “No thanks. I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “But beer is not alcohol! It is—”

  Jack interrupted. “Liquid bread. I know. But I don’t want any.”

  Jack waited for Manfred to ask him why. This was an opportunity to establish a bond with this new acquaintance by revealing that he had grown up in a house with an alcoholic. However, Manfred’s attention was directed elsewhere. Ignoring Jack, he stood up and waved. A red-haired girl, standing on the stairway at the other end of the long, low room, saw him and returned his greeting with a sullen gesture.

  She headed toward their table, striding purposefully past parties of old men who gazed at her in astonishment as she passed. The girl wore boots, a miniskirt, a Bundeswehr camouflage field jacket, and a long student scarf. An ancient green rucksack was slung over her shoulder by its one remaining strap. Her red hair was wild, curly, uncombed. She marched as if in uniform—which in a way she was. She could hardly have caused a greater stir if the year had been 1930, and memories of the Kaiser were as fresh in customers’ minds as Hitler was now, and she was the first storm trooper any of these people had ever seen.

  “Here comes someone I want you to meet,” Manfred said.

  Jack pushed back his chair, legs squealing on the stone floor, and stood up.

  The girl arrived, a scowling pale face inside a mare’s nest of Titian curls.

  Up to then, Manfred and Jack had been speaking German—slow, textbook German to accommodate Jack’s unpracticed ear and tongue, but German nevertheless. Manfred made the introductions in English. “Greta Fürst, please meet Jack Adams from the United States.”

  Greta said, “An Ami? For God’s sake, Manfred, why?”

  Jack held out his hand. Greta ignored it. In slurred, barely enunciated German, the worldwide accents of youthful scorn, she said, “Don’t tell me he can’t even speak German?”

  Her eyes, heavily made up, were green, intelligent, and icy with contempt.

  Jack said, “I like your voice, Greta. You sound like Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.”

  Greta stared at him in disbelief. “God!” she said.

  “Just the voice,” Jack said. “You’re much thinner than she was then.”

  Manfred said, “Sit down, Greta. Join us for some supper.”

  “No thanks. I’m not hungry.”

  “Something to drink, then.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Then at least sit down.” Greta sat down. To the waitress Manfred said, “Bring her a lager, please. And three mixed sausages.”

  Eyes fixed on Jack, Greta dug a package of Gauloises out of her rucksack and lit one. She picked a fleck of tobacco off the end of her tongue, inhaled deeply, and blew a cloud of acrid smoke across the table.

  Jack coughed, then smiled apologetically. Greta, refusing to look at him, feigned interest in the ceiling and took another drag from her poisonous caporal.

  Greta caught Jack’s smile and made a sour face. Manfred watched, waiting to see what might happen next.

  In his slow, annoying German, Jack said, “So, Greta, do you go to the university?”

  Greta did not respond. The food came. Cigarette burning in her right hand, she cut up her sausages into little pieces and ate them with her fingers. She ate her fried potatoes, even her salad, in the same way. Jack recognized the style: He knew a lot of bourgeois Movement girls who had adopted infantile table manners along with round heels as a means of semaphoring radical political beliefs. He himself used a knife and fork in the American manner—cutting a morsel of sausage, putting down his knife, shifting his fork from left hand to right, spearing the food, lifting it to his mouth, chewing thirty-two times before swallowing. This unmistakable evidence of Jack’s revolting nationality further disgusted Greta.

  While they ate, Manfred carried on a dialectical discussion with Jack. The subject, inescapably, was politics—American politics as seen from the Left. At first, Manfred’s questions were condescending, and he only half-listened to Jack’s replies. But before long he began to realize that these answers were subtle, deeply informed, and, most surprising, free of cant. Jack was no fervent youth, unsure of his opinions and eager for approval. He did not protest the correctness of his own beliefs, or even bother to describe them. Nevertheless the l
istener felt that Jack’s political convictions were so pure, so deep, so genuinely held, that he felt no need to announce them, even on first meeting. He seemed to assume, while offering no bona fides that this was the case, that Manfred would take it for granted that he believed in all the right things. This was an amazing trick of the mind.

  Quite soon Jack turned what had started out to be a Socratic dialogue with himself as the learner into a tutorial on American realities—a monologue that rushed along like a river in flood, swelling as it went, picking up all sorts of strange debris. Jack was calm, collected, good-humored—impervious, apparently, to the stimuli that drove most people his age, and many older men and women, into frenzies of resentment and anger. Drowning, Manfred seized an uprooted oak—Richard Nixon—in the hope that his weight would cause it to snag on the mud of Jack’s rhetoric and give him a chance to scramble ashore onto the terra firma of Marxist-Leninist principle.

  But Jack was dispassionate, even about Richard Nixon.

  “By any rational standard of judgment,” he said, barely pausing for breath, “Nixon has been a very effective president. An enemy, yes, and a dangerous one. He’ll end the war as soon as he can, on whatever terms he can get.”

  “What about his constituency, the warmongers?”

  “There are no warmongers,” Jack said. “Just people who want the whole thing to be over. If he gets peace on any terms he’ll be reelected in a landslide.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then Armageddon. Nixon will have so much power that his enemies will either have to destroy him or be destroyed by him.”

  “Which will happen?”

  “Both, in the end.”

  Up to then, Greta had shown no sign that she understood a word of the conversation. Suddenly she said, “What a load of shit.”

  Jack said, “Interesting point. Would you like to elaborate?”

  “No.” Greta ground out the stub of her third Gauloise.

  Manfred smiled indulgently, then, as if remembering something, looked at his watch. “Oh dear,” he said, in English. “I’m late. Greta, will you see that Jack finds his way home?”

  She replied in German. “What is he, blind?”

  “No, darling, not blind. Jack is our guest, a stranger in Heidelberg, and he doesn’t know the town yet. And you are his first experience of German womanhood, which is famous for submission and kindness to strangers. So walk him home, please.”

  Greta shrugged. She stood up. “Come, Jack,” she said. “Time for your walk.”

  She spun on her heels and marched toward the exit.

  Manfred said, “Take my advice. Go with her. She’s not so bad when you get to know her.”

  Greta had reached the stairs. She stood at the top, glaring.

  Jack smiled at her, the full Kennedy display.

  “I’ll bet,” he said.

  3 Outside the rathskeller it was raining. Glistening in the dim glow of the streetlights, the city itself was the color of rain—roofs, steeples, cobblestones, parked cars, even the whey-faced people hurrying by in wet raincoats, holding wet umbrellas. The only splashes of color were the bedraggled flags and banners, wrapped around their poles in watershot floodlight.

  This dismal scene seemed beautiful to Jack. He said so, invoking the name of Ingmar Bergman because everything he had so far seen in Heidelberg reminded him of foreign films. The city was black and white, badly lit, hokily mysterious, so filled with solemn meaning that it would be ridiculous if filmed in a language you could understand.

  “Beautiful?” Greta said. “You think this is beautiful?”

  Greta, raised in sunless northern Europe, stared at him in pitiless disbelief, then pulled a collapsible umbrella out of her book bag and popped it open. One of the ribs was broken. A dimple in the cloth filled with water, which ran over the edge of the umbrella in a tiny cascade. Greta darted into the traffic. Jack, who had no umbrella or hat or raincoat, stayed where he was in the doorway of the rathskeller.

  Greta, realizing after a few emphatic steps that Jack was not following her, stopped in the middle of the street and looked back.

  “What are you waiting for?” she called in English.

  “For this to let up,” Jack replied.

  “What?”

  “The rain. I’m waiting for it to stop.”

  “Stop? It will never stop. You are in Germany. Come.”

  Jack shrugged and stepped out in the downpour.

  Greta said, “You have no umbrella?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Ach! Use this!” She pulled a copy of Bild Zeitung out of her book bag and handed it to him.

  Jack held the newspaper over his head. “‘Ach!’” he repeated. “Vunderful!”

  “It won’t be so wonderful for you in Germany if you have no umbrella,” Greta replied. “Come!”

  Greta really did pronounce her w’s as v’s. It was the only flaw in her English. Jack said, “Just like Marlene.”

  “What?”

  In Dietrich’s throaty diction Jack sang, “‘Falling in luff again, never vanted to …’”

  Again Greta stared at him, again pointedly unamused. “Unbelievable,” she said. “Come, quickly.”

  She strode away under her tiny broken umbrella, red curls bouncing, combat boots splashing decisively through puddles. Jack hurried to catch up, then skipped a stride when he was beside her in order to walk in step.

  Unspeaking, she led the way into a steep, narrow street, then through several turnings into other medieval passages. Most were dark, but at length they turned into a particularly picturesque alley lined with luxury shops. Jewels, crystal, silks, were tastefully displayed in tiny windows.

  “Beautiful stuff,” Jack said admiringly.

  “Garbage,” Greta said. “For ersatz Americans. Look.”

  They were standing in front of a shop window. Inside, a clerk hovered, smiling, as an expensively dressed man considered buying a bracelet for an expensively dressed woman. Both were middle-aged, smiling, overweight. The woman smiled adoringly at the man.

  “His mistress?” Jack said.

  “That sausage?” Greta said. “Never. She’s his wife. His mistress would be skinny. They make you vomit.”

  “Who?”

  In the reflected light, Greta’s face twisted with disgust. She looked up at Jack, her umbrella tilting so that rainwater spilled from the dimple in its fabric.

  Vehemently she said, “What do you mean, ‘Who?’ Them.” She pointed at the fat couple in the shop. “The class enemy.”

  “Oh,” Jack said. “Is that what fat people are?”

  “How do you think they got fat?”

  “Gosh. Just like in those German expressionist pictures. But better—pictures can’t fart.”

  Greta’s lip twitched. Jack thought that she was going to smile, but she stopped herself in time and attacked instead.

  “You are very, very clever,” she said. “But you are not serious.”

  “Really? How do you know?”

  Greta spun on her heel and led him onward past more glittering shops. “I know because you are an American,” she said. “You see these people, all alike, all looking at jewels and clothes and all these beautiful things, all with full bellies while half the world starves or dies from American bombs? They are what America has made in Germany.”

  Under streaming umbrellas, well-fed men and women in matching trench coats, mostly Burberrys, window-shopped like sleepwalkers.

  “Look at them!” Greta said.

  Jack looked. “Okay, what’s the point?” he asked. “Ersatz Americans have nice raincoats and umbrellas, and real ones hold newspapers over their heads?”

  “The point is,” she said, squinting fiercely, as if Jack’s smiling American face were a page she could not read without her glasses, “the point is that they are blind. America, your country, has blinded the world to reality, to the suffering of others, to hunger, to everything that is wrong in life.”

  “Okay. So?”


  “So this is the result. They are hypnotized by baubles, they are under a spell, they are oblivious. They are lost.”

  She was speaking German now, a torrent.

  “Verloren,” Jack said, repeating the only word of hers that he had really understood. “Can you maybe talk a little slower?”

  “No.” Greta switched back to her fluent, comical English.

  “All that shit you were speaking to Manfred,” she said. “As if politics as usual will change things, as if clever maneuvers will satisfy history. You are all alike, you Americans. You march, you scream like babies who have pissed in their diapers, you burn little pieces of paper and a shitty piece of fascist cloth that is red, white, and blue, and you call yourselves revolutionaries.”

  The rain was falling harder now. Water spurted from downspouts and swirled down cobbled gutters into storm drains. Jack could hear it rushing through the sewers, he could feel it running underground through the worn-out soles of his soaked shoes. The shoppers took shelter in doorways or hurried away. Greta paid the downpour no attention.

  “In Germany, we know what fascism really is,” she said. “We have seen it up close, and we fight it with a million fists.”

  “You do?” Jack said. He made a gesture at the shoppers, women clinging to the arms of the men and smiling through the trivial misery of this cloudburst, all of them seemingly happy after a good supper, a show, taking a stroll before conjugal sex. “These people don’t seem to have any black eyes.”

  Greta was stung. “You think not? That is because they are blind. So are you, my friend! You ask what antifascists do in Germany? I will tell you what they do—things that a spoiled American brat could not possibly imagine. They act. They don’t just whine and play guitars and piss their pants. They make bombs, they rob banks, they attack American military bases with rockets! They hijack airplanes! They take fascist prisoners of war and try them in people’s courts and execute them with people’s justice. Even if they are their own mothers and fathers. I have friends who have arrested their own fascist parents, their fat capitalist uncles, and delivered them into the custody of people’s tribunals.”