The Witness Tree
Page 25
Misha barely slept that night, rising at three to make tea and lemon on the single gas ring in the yellow-tiled kitchen, watching the clouds dodge the chrome white moon over Havana’s Vedado. He heard the car coming from a long way off, a big American sedan, the thrum of its overpowered engine echoing off the multicolored stucco of Misha’s apartment block. When the big white Chevrolet stopped in the street below, a familiar figure emerged, identifiable by both thickset body and leather cap. He glanced up, then strode straight at the doorway below.
“You get around, don’t you?” Misha asked in his rough Hebrew as he let Kauffmann in.
“My job is to get around, sonny. I could use a rum.”
They stood at the window of Misha’s big bare central room while Misha poured Kauffmann a treble, backlit by the glow of a kerosene lamp, the night sounds filtering in.
“What brings you here? Shiloah on the warpath?”
“Ask him yourself. I’m just the messenger.”
“So what’s the message?”
Kauffmann tipped his fisherman’s cap back on his head then spread his feet, bracing himself. “Your mother never got out of Warsaw, Misha. She’s all right, living in a safe house in the suburbs with a Swedish family. Your stepfather is sending money, but it’s not possible to move her. She lost her papers in the air raids when the war started.”
“What the hell was she doing anywhere near Warsaw with bombs about to fall?”
“Your grandmother wanted to die in Warsaw. Your mother tried to persuade her, but the old woman had her wish. That’s all I was told. I’m sorry.” A condolence from Kauffmann was something rare: it gave Misha pause.
“What the bloody hell was Samuel thinking, letting her stay?”
“Don’t know,” Kauffmann said, stone-faced, sliding a thick envelope across the table. He rose to go. “Mind your back, sonny. We’re not exactly the flavor of the month right now.”
Misha opened the envelope and found a worn but well-maintained Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and a box of cartridges. “Good of Shiloah. To help like this.”
“Did he hell,” Kauffmann snorted. “It’s my spare kit. As far as Shiloah’s concerned, you’re still wandering the desert.” He flipped an envelope underhanded at Misha’s chest. “There’s some Swiss francs. On my tab.”
“Decent of you.”
“I see your reports,” Kauffmann observed. “You’re getting there. And who doesn’t deserve a second chance in this racket?” At the door he said, “Tell me—the girls here as good as they say?”
“One or two of them. Keeping a low profile myself.”
Kauffmann nodded. “There’s Germans about, heard ’em at the bar. They own half the Cuban police, I hear.”
“The Germans have the run of the docks—they make sure their oil moves first.” Misha then asked, “What’s next?”
“Mexico, see if I can buy some visas for that lot in the harbor.” Kauffmann exhaled hard. “There’s already enough Jews to open a delicatessen on every street corner in Mexico City. Most depressing thing I’ve ever done, this job, know what I mean?”
Misha said he did and watched Kauffmann descend the stairs, something simian about the way he moved. The Chevrolet roared off; in the distance, a ship’s horn mourned. Misha looked out over the rooftops at the Malecón below. The tide was in: the Caribbean battered the old Spanish seawall mercilessly, tossing the walkway manhole covers up like poker chips.
At least, he thought, Mother’s safe where she is—God alone knows what lies in store for the thousand out there in the harbor. The portholes of the German ship glowed in the dark and cast a necklace of light about the ship, reflected on the low, smooth waves. Misha took a deep breath. He tried to picture a good outcome—perhaps a presidential order to accept the refugees at his audience on Saturday? Perhaps.
But all Misha could picture was an empty jetty and the trail of an ocean liner’s wake, headed east.
ROYAL NAVY: MOST SECRET
DOWNGRADED TO UNCLASSIFIED by auth. [signature] 2/xi/1996
not for public release until 2004
Typescript of telephone call #48
10:12 am
October 12 1941
Auditor: W/O R.J.H. Parker-Rees, RN
Transcribed by Lt. L.J. Kelly
UNKNOWN OPERATOR/WASHINGTON
its an open line sir youll have to scramble
Q/112
right tell his operator to scramble
UNKNOWN OPERATOR/WASHINGTON
its going through theres the line noise itll cut out once your caller starts his
Q/112
terrible [two seconds line noise] get used to it
UNKNOWN OPERATOR/WASHINGTON
go ahead sir youre scrambled now
Q/112
good morning allen bill donovan here calling from
washington how are you this morning
W/056
fine thanks bill nice to see you at the club the other night thought old ralph macatee was in great voice didnt you
Q/112
the mans missed his calling couldve been one of the great irish tenors except hes a new yorker cant have that where i hail from mans got to be dublinborn sing like that reason im calling allen is that somethings come up
W/056
oh somethings come up
Q/112
along the lines we talked about at the club the idea you had
W/056
i see im all ears bill you know me chance to do something instead of driving this law desk of mine all over town
Q/112
youd be doing something all right allen whats going on is a new push a real effort to start up an intelligence service here i want you to be a part of it right here on the ground floor starting in the spring when i have a budget some hawkeye at state wont confiscate at the drop of a hat
W/056
ha ha ha ha ha
Q/112
early days yet allen ive got arthur goldberg the labor lawyer from chicago good man lining up things for you contacts a real good start on oh half a dozen networks from here right through to the far east good challenge right up your alley we think theres real action here allen and itd get you in on the start of things
W/056
ok tell me more about whats going in dee cee why spring why not now
Q/112
may take even longer uphill fight for every nickel I can shake out of a budget anybodys budget ive got the world mad at me here state war treasury all wanting to shut me down cut the purse string im a one-man band these days talking it up all over hells half acre trying to find people wholl buy the idea we need an overseas eyes and ears what we need you for is what you do best: run agents we need you allen we need your old magic with field agents run the maritime unions for us out of new york
W/056
pays great too ill bet
Q/112
dollar a year for starters probably less once you really have to work at it
W/056
i run my own shop my way
Q/112
i havent got the manpower to do anything but run stringers allen never mind the money sure youre your own man promise you that
W/056
all right heres my counteroffer ill take it but if theres a war and were in it I want bern I dont want london or anywhere else bern I know like the back of my hand I can do something there without the generals shining a flashlight up my backside every five minutes and counting the paper clips I used last week
Q/112
you got a deal can you get out of sullivan in a couple of months
W/056
ill work something out
Q/112
shake things out with goldberg idea is an office for you rockefeller center have to buy off the existing tenants
W/056
youve got a bank somewhere
Q/112
ill courier you the money fifty to start run your own books watch every penny
W/056
nobo
dy launders money like a wall street lawyer bill you know that
Q/112
ha ha ha once youre in say march or so you get three staff you better have a demon secretary because the filing goes through the roof art goldbergs down in the bowels of the war department I think he was last seen in the room next to the furnace so let it ring a few times before you give up he might not hear you if the heats on so long
W/056
bye bill
TRANSCRIPT ENDS
CENTRAL REGISTRY addendum
The attached original document is PF File No. v45/946/1941, with two annexes, to be filed under personal files of Dulles Allen Welsh and Donovan William Francis.
This document is graded ORANGE. DO NOT DETACH / COPY/ DESTROY
This document is not to be cross-referenced in any other document
This document requires BLUE-WHITE priority for removal from this file
XXXI
WASHINGTON, D.C./CONNECTICUT
NOVEMBER 1941
The Cuban stamp she noticed immediately, but the image on the front of the homemade black-and-white postcard caught her between the eyes: staring into the sun, knee-deep in the Havana harbor, his kayak tethered behind him, stood an unshaven, darkly tanned Misha Resnikoff, his hair tucked back under a bandanna, a Cuban shirt, the sleeves rolled up, fluttering around him in the sea breeze off the Caribbean.
Hello from Havana, where the photographers have these big Victorian box cameras—they’ll make a postcard for you, right on the beach. I’m working here, various things—it’s cheap and not at all like NYC.
I’ll call you as soon as I reach Miami.
Sorry about the short notice.
Hope we might connect
All affection, M.
The moment she heard Misha’s voice all the way from Florida, Eleanor called Clover to look after Sophie. She knew she had just the place: a state park, in the Connecticut hill country near Danbury, where the boating was fine and the shores dotted with clapboard cottages, owned mostly by city people come for the fishing. She put the postcard in her purse. From time to time, fascinated by it, she’d take it out and peer at the face beneath the emulsion, trying to read his expression.
Who knows if I’ll ever feel like this again—who knows? she asked herself in the village when she rented a cottage from a pharmacist she knew, a tired widower with three straitlaced daughters, all of whom had taken sailing lessons up near Henderson Harbor. The cottage boasted a dock and a boat, and a broken path between the trees. She threw all the windows open, then set about cleaning the kitchen to her own fierce standards, relishing having to carry the bucket from the pump outside for some puritanical reason that amused only her. She made the bed last, with no expectations, only anticipation. It was quite unlike anything she had ever done; she even placed a quartet of her favorite photographs on the side table, to place herself in time: Henderson Harbor, Bryn Mawr with Grace and Marta, the courtyard in Paris with the aid workers, Sophie in her crib at F Street. As she sliced the cheese for a salad plate, she noticed that a shiny steel rectangle the size of her palm dangled from a shower curtain hook over the kitchen sink—a fisherman’s shaving mirror. She looked at herself and smiled, allowing herself, for a moment, the thrill of feeling desired again.
He arrived that night, his flashlight bobbing down the trail from the dirt road to the village where the fisherfolk hauled their boats out, the crunch of his boot leather on gravel preceding. The trees along the roadside gave way to a view of a silvered lake cupped among the Berkshire Hills, mercury in a black lacquer bowl; it seemed to him as if the Masurian Lakes had been transplanted to America, pines and Polish birch and all.
As he walked through the village, following Eleanor’s directions, he wondered if he’d ever really believed outside the moment. She accepted him; she was uncomplicated and listened. Acceptance: perhaps that was the why between the lines of what held them in one another’s lives.
They slept together that night after a meal by camp lantern and a walk down to the dock to pick out the stars in the cold November sky. She made him laugh with her memory of his cornet on the Krumme Lanke and sobered him with talk of her daughter, that being a world beyond him, a different planet, having another in one’s care utterly. He offered small thoughts, recognizing her nerves; she smiled back, anticipating the night, as they made their way between the trees back to the cottage, its kitchen window providing the only light on the path ahead of them.
The bed was small and creaked. She was afraid, timid, and surprisingly unschooled in her own body. After, when they lay together in the dark, the pines scratching at the shingles overhead, she apologized for her awkwardness, quietly ashamed she had disappointed him. He listened and entwined himself in her, seeing the loss in her. “Think of us swimming together,” he whispered. She threw caution to the winds and astonished him. Afterwards, he curled together with her, spoons in a drawer.
Finally, at sunrise, snug in sweaters and flannel shirts, in the boat she skippered to their breakfast spot, Eleanor disclosed, with eyes shining, that she’d never felt that before, and laughed, unfettered and hugely pleased, her eyes on him. They stayed on the island until well into the afternoon, tending a warming fire, sharing a down comforter she’d brought, talking about everything and nothing.
Aside from the shivery secret experiments with Grace at school all those years ago, Eleanor had never completely entrusted her body to another person, not even David. The affair thrilled Misha too, seeing the new power in her. They made love in their beach clothes for warmth and slept and made love again, refusing to scramble into the cover of the trees once when a biplane droned overhead. “The mail plane to Boston,” she explained, shirt wide open, beaming, as they huddled on the verge below the willows. Then she reprised her new ferocity.
“Just who are you, really?” Eleanor asked softly. The power had gone off just after ten that night and they went to bed with candle stubs in jam jars on their bed tables. They had made love and he was wide awake, reading one of the pharmacist’s cowboy pulps.
He laughed and rolled onto his back. “I’m the adopted son of a secular Latvian Jew named Resnikoff, who used to work for Nobel Oil in Russia and now runs the London branch of a Swedish bank. My real name is Misha Alboim and I’m really seven feet tall.”
“Enskilda Bank?” she asked, impressed, once she’d stopped laughing.
“One and the same,” he agreed. “My stepdad married my mother after my father died. He’s civilized, quiet, respectful of my mother, everything my father wasn’t.” Misha tucked the book jacket into the western to keep his place. “He was really an unhappy man, I suppose,” he continued, “but I miss him still.”
“My late husband … I feel the same way about him,” Eleanor said softly. “A quiet man who loved French the way you love your music. He was one of those people who aren’t quite capable of managing the real world. I’m afraid I didn’t help him much.”
Misha rolled over on his side and examined the stand of photographs Eleanor had posed on the bed table. “Who’s the beauty chorus?”
Eleanor reached across him and he kissed her. “That’s Bryn Mawr, my dormitory. A long time ago. The redhead is Grace, the dark one Marta Neimann. Marta and her husband are in Switzerland.”
“Are they all so beautiful at Bryn Mawr?” he said, holding the photograph up in the half-light.
“Grace … she’s too hard to speak of, even now. Marta was voted the most likely to marry a millionaire. She married an economist instead.”
He reached for her face. Eleanor had put her glasses on to see him and he moved too close; she couldn’t make him out for a moment.
“David worried terribly about money. He had a few dollars from translations and literary analysis work, but he couldn’t survive on that. And wouldn’t take money from me. He had a child from his first marriage. That ended in divorce. I don’t think he could cope with that either. And, as you can plainly see, we weren’t the world’s most experienced lovers, e
ither,” she said, smiling a little now.
“How strange, given your family, that you’d choose him.”
She nodded. “My family is as upstate New York Scots-Irish as it’s possible to be. It’s true.”
A fractured silence followed: Misha realized she was utterly open to him, not just her body but her life was there in her eyes, all of it.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
She was staring at the reflection of one of the jam jar candles in the window. Through the trees, the moon lit the lake, flat yellow light, smooth as ceramic. “Princeton, they both went to Princeton, my brothers. Foster was the class of ’07 and Allie class of 1912,” she began. “Foster will be secretary of state someday. He is brilliant, rich, well connected, and knows how power works. I love him as much as I respect him, and that’s saying something both ways.” Eleanor stopped and Misha gathered that was her way: she could only unfold her thoughts so far before she felt the strain and had to regroup.
“Allen? You know him a little now from the campaign. Here’s a story: I have a younger sister you’ve never met, Nataline. One day Allen and Nataline were alone on the family raft at Henderson Harbor and my three-year-old sister slipped into the water, right at Allie’s feet. He just watched her, floating there in her summer frock. Didn’t raise a finger to save Nattie. My mother had to swim out to rescue her.” Eleanor blinked behind her glasses at the memory. “He said he didn’t know she was drowning. That was his excuse.
“Well, neither Foster nor I quite trust him. Allie’s a walking shortcut. He’s forever trying to get out of Foster’s shadow without doing the work Foster did to get where he is. Foster is an old-fashioned saltwater Yankee, more Victorian than anything else. There’s no comparison—and I love them both,” Eleanor went on. “And I hate him too. He and Grace … that was terrible. I’m convinced he jilted her. She was far less strong than people think.”
Misha listened, saying nothing.