The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  An hour later, a steady autumn downpour dripped off the perfect blue firs of Herr Echkenazi’s fine garden. They’d moved into the villa’s dining room and turned the lights on. It was a splendid room, high-ceilinged, with putti flying nowhere in the corners and a flickering chandelier big as a jeep. Eleanor thought of the children’s rooms upstairs—the beds were still there, still made. She hadn’t the nerve to look in the children’s dresser drawers. Lieutenant Vanbrocklin packed up his thin satchel, a philosophical look on his narrow face.

  “He knows far too much to be a simple flak officer, sir. My guess? He’s Abwehr. It’s all over him. What I don’t get is why the Russians let him go. Really unusual. You’ve been slipped one under the door, sir. A real present. There’s NKVD guys in Berlin who’d love to take him apart.”

  “You sound convinced, lieutenant,” Allen offered, along with his wash-and-wear smile.

  “You don’t seem worried, sir. I’d be, for sure. You vouch for this guy, you’re bucking for egg all over your face.”

  “You’ve seen a few Abwehr cases from the eastern front, then, I take it?” asked Puddicombe, who was frowning, a tad heavily, Eleanor reckoned.

  “One or two or six or so,” Vanbrocklin said.

  “What other cases are you working, lieutenant?” Allen asked, all charm.

  “Here’s one from my collection,” Vanbrocklin said. “Bussinger, Alois, DOB 26 March 1909, Austrian citizen, long line of military officers, colonel, Abwehr liaison section to Wehrmacht high command. Six-one, one-ninety, looks like Tyrone Power—must be heck on the ladies. One fine intelligence officer, brain like a Swiss watch. Only he scouted Jews for the Wehrmacht list makers all over central White Russia. Made up the death lists, village by village. He also handled the commissars, the captured ones, the ones Hitler personally wanted shot. Signed off on hundreds of ’em. Oh yeah, I talked to him all right. DP camp at Bolzano. Funny thing. He was pretty calm about telling me all that. That puzzled me, why he was so cool about it all. That was about three weeks ago. He was all ready for the rope, you ask me, open and shut: top one hundred war crime suspects in American custody. The Russians would’ve hanged him faster than shit runs out of a goose, you’ll pardon my French, sir. Then the Brits asked for him, waving a warrant for war crimes on the eastern front.”

  There was a very long pause there, Eleanor noted, with neither Puddicombe nor Allen nor Wisner meeting one another’s eye.

  “Why stop there?” Puddicombe demanded.

  “I’m thinking,” Vanbrocklin said.

  He’s going to take them all on, Eleanor thought.

  “What’s there to think about?” shot Wisner, electric with impatience. “You’re a professional, an army counterintelligence man: you know what you’re after. Where’s Bussinger?”

  “The Brits lost him, sir.” Vanbrocklin was putting his notebook away.

  “They lost him,” Frank marveled.

  “Lost him, that was careless,” Allen observed. His eyes had never left Vanbrocklin.

  “Doubt that, colonel,” Vanbrocklin replied, looking straight at Allen. “I reckon it was a done deal. There’s a pattern. To my way of thinking, that is, sir.”

  “You’re saying our allies are deliberately losing …” Puddicombe couldn’t finish.

  “That would be careless, Max,” Allen eased in. “You know, lieutenant, you ever want a job, you ask for Colonel Allen Dulles at OSS Wiesbaden. You’re just what we’re looking for. You can spot a black-eyed pea in a bushel of beans blindfolded, I can tell.”

  “No thanks, sir.”

  “I wouldn’t be so quick, lieutenant,” Allen purred. “You know how many CIC men would jump at the chance? You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “Could be, sir, could be. But back home in Wisconsin, we got this other expression about horses: if your horse’s bolted, no sense slamming the barn door. I’ll be going now. But one more thing. Colonel Dulles, you know what I think, sir?”

  Allen favored the CIC man with a cold smile. “Always happy to hear from a fellow officer, lieutenant.”

  “Sir, you want to keep Monsignor Sommer’s brother right where you can see him? Hire Brink’s. One of those big gray armored trucks. These Abwehr birds have a funny way of flying west for the winter, sir.”

  A thin laugh edged from Allen, but his eyes were all business. “I’ll bear that in mind, lieutenant.”

  “I’ll see you out,” Eleanor offered.

  “Kind of you, ma’am.”

  In the entranceway, Eleanor touched Vanbrocklin’s sleeve. “That coat’s not CIC issue, lieutenant. Those tabs are quartermaster corps. There a story here?”

  “It’s quartermaster corps all right, colonel,” the CIC man replied. “It’s my uncle Mort’s, ma’am. He was killed during the Arnhem mess, setting up a field hospital. Sniper got him. Some of the guys in his unit tracked me down. Uncle Mort talked about me all the time, they said, about me going to the University of Chicago. They figured he’d want me to have the coat. Keeps me honest.”

  “So it’s more than just a coat.”

  “Never told a lie, ma’am. Never saw anybody wrong. That was Uncle Mort. Good day, ma’am. Thanks for the tea.”

  Men’s laughter carried from the dining room; Allen had made a joke about Brink’s. And then the pop of a champagne cork and more laughter when the cork hit the chandelier. Eleanor climbed the stairs slowly as the big guard stared straight ahead, pointedly ignoring her. At the landing, Eleanor ran her hands over a tiny pit in the plaster: a painting had hung there once. The nursery was the next door on the left.

  Standing frozen in the doorway, Eleanor tried to imagine the children who’d lived there, their sounds, their footfalls, their tiffs, their faces in sleep. She made herself move to the chest of drawers between the two children’s beds. Thinking of Sophie, Eleanor opened the top drawer, hoping to find some last remnant of the long-vanished Echkenazi children, something to keep their memory alive.

  Atop the neatly folded shirts and underwear lay a Hitler Youth uniform.

  An hour later: Allen and Puddicombe were locked in the main floor office down the hall, in conclave; Eleanor and the monsignor remained in the parlor, drinking Puddicombe’s best Bushmills from Herr Echkenazi’s fine crystal. Wisner and Klaus Sommer had left by truck, three in a row on the front bench seat of the Studebaker truck with the stone-faced guard, bound for God knew where.

  “Play the padre some music, don’t answer the door,” Allen had ordered curtly, locking. “The phone too.” So Eleanor sat like a wallflower with a very thoughtful Monsignor Sommer, the gramophone on, playing a Beethoven sonata, number fourteen it was, C-sharp minor, Gieseking’s note-perfect recording, as she waited in the parlor.

  Not since Grace’s funeral did she remember so wanting a cigarette.

  “This Gieseking is sublime, in my opinion,” offered Sommer.

  Eleanor kept her silence, smoking. The young CIC man had set her thinking.

  “The elegance of his phrasing. Listen.”

  “You’re here because you’re in it up to your ears.”

  “In what?” Sommer asked, startled.

  “What are you, monsignor, the money? Is that it?” She paused, but Sommer made no reply. “This house used to belong to a family called Echkenazi,” Eleanor went on. “They had two children. Those children are never coming back from wherever they were sent, them and a couple of dozen of my old German socialist friends who’re no longer this side of heaven. I don’t know what’s going on here, but you’re in it. You and Allen and his enthusiastic friend Wisner. You know what Max Puddicombe told me was going to happen today?”

  Sommer would never reply. Puddicombe appeared in the doorway, putting on his hat, nodding to Sommer as he passed. They left together, brusquely, the big thick oak front door settling quietly into its jamb behind them. Allen and Eleanor were left alone.

  “You’ll want a ride to the hotel.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Allen, what are you thinking?
”

  “Don’t start. You don’t know what you’re talking about, believe me.”

  “You’re dead right. I thought I was here to keep Monsignor Sommer cheerful for some sensitive operation you and Max had cooked up. So I did. And what happens?”

  “I said, you want a ride to the hotel?”

  “I don’t know what you’re running, but I want no part of it. And no, thanks, I’ll walk. I need the air.”

  She left without looking back. Allen stayed at the window, half in darkness, half draped in the Echkenazis’ beautiful white lace curtains, half ghost, half shadow, watching her walk away, a doughty shape in her best wool coat, brimful of ire.

  XLVIII

  BERLIN

  A WEEK LATER

  A crowded street market in the dust, in a city shorn of cartography, acres wiped clean, ash-white from the incendiaries, revenge for Guernica, Rotterdam, and Coventry. Nothing in Berlin worked: not the sewers, bleeding a high reeking stench; not the streetlights, empty eye sockets; not the burnt-out tram beached at the corner, roofless, a rib cage on wheels. Misha registered the haunted milling amongst the market stalls, drawn, hungry, their faces marking the end of the nightmare.

  “We miss each other everywhere else, but we keep meeting in Berlin,” the smiling woman in the thick glasses said to Misha, who’d just finished haggling over a dozen bottles of Bordeaux with a tiny, fierce Berlin Frau. “Like the car?”

  “Eleanor!” Misha beamed, and gave her a hug, looking over her shoulder at a huge black Mercedes-Benz limousine, a six-wheeler … and then it dawned on him. “Is that …?”

  “It is indeed,” Eleanor said proudly. “Hitler’s own. I was assigned to deliver it here, with State Department plates, all the way from Salzburg. And it’s Colonel Dulles, if you please, State Department political adviser, Occupied Austria.” She was laughing and holding both his hands.

  A crowd of Berliners gathered, gawking at the infamous big car, nodding and pointing and then moving on. A solitary woman spat. The two of them stood in the rubble-filled courtyard of the only government building still standing on that stretch of the Potsdamer Platz: since VE day, the building, an annex of the old Foreign Ministry complex, had become English-speaking Berlin’s nerve center, its untouched forecourt littered with messages for lost kin and handwritten advertisements for everything from refrigerators to spare tires. All Berlin was for sale, including its women, several of whom, quite beautiful, lingered nearby in the privacy of a deep archway, smoking the Camels their bodies had bought.

  Misha pointed at a crate at his feet. “And a good thing, too. I’ve some rather good wine here. Care for an early lunch, a picnic?”

  Behind them, a young woman in American sunglasses detached herself from her station on the streetwalkers’ row. Another day Misha might have spotted her, a pretty young thing wearing a yellow floral dress and the expression of someone who’d just made an important discovery.

  “Surprise me,” Eleanor ordered, and held his arm tighter.

  His eye fixed on the U.S. Army corporal sitting in the limousine, Misha reached into his wine crate and pulled an armful of bottles free of the wooden slats and packing shavings. “Let’s see how free enterprise works in free Berlin,” he said, grinning.

  “His name’s Dave,” Eleanor said.

  They left for a picnic in Hitler’s limousine, zigzagging through the maze of rubble and ruined streets, making for Grunau and the old Olympic rowing grounds to the southeast, deep in the Soviet zone. With Colonel Dulles’s POLAD papers from the U.S. State Department and the big Benz as their vehicle, Eleanor and Misha watched straight-faced as the awed Russian sentries waved them straight through the checkpoint. Twenty minutes spent on clean gravel road—the Russians were too poor for asphalt—and they were on familiar ground.

  “Hey, Mac,” the corporal named Dave asked, pointing at the barbed wire and empty guard towers of an abandoned prison camp on the banks of the Spree, “that can’t be the place, huh?”

  “Keep going,” Misha ordered, drinking the French red from a mess-tin cup, “we’re almost there.”

  “I’m lost,” Eleanor said.

  “No, you’re not. You’ll recognize this. It’s the Langer See. Schönefeld airport’s over there.”

  “What’s left of it, Mac,” Dave said laconically. “That place is deefunct. Won’t be flying in and out of there for a while.”

  “There!” Misha pointed. “Left down this road, towards the river.”

  The limousine swayed over two small bomb craters, its suspension groaning as Dave ground slowly down the tree-shaded lane in first gear.

  “My God,” Misha said. “Look at that.”

  A line of craters walked toward the shattered building—they could see how the bombs had fallen in a pin-straight line, ending with the low white building at the water’s edge, its roof completely gone and the south end gutted and blackened by flames.

  “It’s—” Misha corrected himself. “That was the Olympic boathouse. Hell. What a pity. It was beautiful.”

  “You want me to take you back?” Dave asked.

  “No,” Eleanor declared, fixed on something Misha didn’t catch. “We came for a picnic and a picnic we shall have. Let’s try down by the river.”

  They found a spot a half mile from the boathouse and gave Dave three hours to return, in exchange for a brace of Bordeaux bottles. The riverside was eerily quiet, no boats, no birds, nothing. It was as if the ruined city had been frozen in the May sun, with only the river itself in movement.

  They had found a table and a pair of chairs in the rubble and had a civilized meal in the shade of a copse of lindens half stripped by the blasts that had leveled the boathouse.

  Misha chewed on a heel of hard Emmenthal. “I’m still working the German banks for a part of the War Office that still cares—they folded the MEW so fast it was almost indecent.”

  “Count on it, it was indecent. Sleeping dogs, I suspect.”

  Misha made a face. “That’s exactly the problem—millions are missing but very few leads. I’ve been interrogating the senior Reichsbank officials. A depressing lot.” He lay on the grass, staring out over the water, thinking. Eleanor let him. “I tore my wrist up just over there, past those birch. I was leading. The Olympic quarterfinals. A long time ago.”

  “A long time ago,” Eleanor agreed.

  Misha rolled over onto his belly. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Remember your beautiful friend from Bryn Mawr, who married the German economist—what was her name?”

  “Neimann, Marta Neimann. Why?”

  “The Neimanns. That’s right. Ever hear what happened to them?”

  “No, no, I didn’t. I’ve filed a request with the Red Cross, but nothing yet.”

  He looked at her for a moment. “I saw them arrested,” he said slowly. “In Davos, no farther away than from here to that tree. Now here’s the coincidence: they were walking with Allen just moments before their arrest.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Misha shrugged and frowned. “I’m not sure what I mean myself. All I know is the Neimanns walked right into the arms of the Swiss police. Eleanor, the Swiss deported German Jews all the time. I wouldn’t be too hopeful they’re alive.”

  Eleanor thought before replying. “You don’t think Allen betrayed them, do you?”

  It was Misha’s turn to pause. “I don’t have a scintilla of proof. But Allen’s a veteran agent runner. He wouldn’t just walk into a police trap.”

  “But he didn’t,” Eleanor replied. “You just said he walked away.”

  “Let me put it this way: I’d feel a whole lot better about it if he’d been there when they were arrested, d’you see?”

  Eleanor sighed. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I do see. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “It does, actually,” Misha interposed. “Perhaps they are alive,” he added, without much conviction.

  “I’ve got friends at the Red Cross from ages ago. I’ll give them a p
ush.”

  Misha nodded, content to leave the topic alone. “Back in ’36 there was a Weinstube somewhere near here, I had drinks there. You ordered with this pneumatic system, a vacuum took your order away. All very German.” He blinked, thinking, examining the low line of trees across the Spree. “I think I’ve made up my mind I’m going to live here.”

  “But it’s a ghost town for Jews, Berlin! Why?”

  He stared out over the water then took another sip of the rich Médoc. “So I don’t ever forget. So they never forget. Besides, I’m not the Mediterranean type. The sun makes my eyes hurt.”

  Eleanor weighed this, then the look on his face. “I think we need to go for a walk. We’re thinking too much.”

  She took him by the arm and led him along the path beside the embankment, away from the sight of the prison camp on the far shore, away from the shell of the boathouse, into the hillside woods, dark and cool and green despite the sun.

  “Do you know people, people on the inside, at the Jewish Agency?” Eleanor asked as they walked.

  “Here and there, yes. Why?”

  “I’ve never told anyone this before, you understand, not even Foster. Especially not Foster. You’re the only one I’d trust. Okay?”

  Misha nodded.

  “My husband, I believe, was sending reports to the Jewish Agency in Paris before he died.”

  Looking at her sidelong, Misha declared: “What on earth makes you think that?”

  Eleanor told him about David’s postal receipts and the Paris telegraph agency’s address. They’d stopped at the crest of a hill crowded with birch, survivors of the fires nearby.

  Misha put his back to one and crossed his arms on his chest. “You have German? Then you’ll get Yiddish. Lakhn mit yashtsherkes— get it?”

  Eleanor worked it out slowly. “‘Laughing with lizards …’ That’s my answer?”

  “You Americans, always too literal. Rough translation? ‘To laugh so bitterly you don’t cry.’ There’s your answer.”

  “Not much of an answer, is it?”

  “If he was, he was. If he wasn’t, he wasn’t.” Misha kissed her very gently, then leant back. “Let it go, all right? You won’t bring him back, knowing or not.”