Heroes

by David Hagberg

  Just now there wasn’t much food in Berlin. Most of what little. they had been able to gather went to the downed fliers who would need their strength to return to their units and fly other missions.

  Always other missions.

  “The end of the war can be counted by the number of missions it will take to beat Hitler and the OKW into submission,” Dannsiger was fond of saying. “For every flier we return to the fight, it means that many less days we will have to endure this war.”

  But this was another story. Hitler, they suspected, was spending most of his time in his bunker behind the Reich Chancellery building on Wilhelm Strasse.

  The place was heavily guarded, of course. There’d be no getting close to it.

  No suicide missions, Bern had radioed. There would be no other way. Even if they got into the bunker, even if they could actually get to Hitler and gun him down, there’d be absolutely no hope for escape.

  In the small porcelain bowl that was still hooked to the plumbing, Deland ran a small stream of water into his cupped hands, rinsed his face and his mouth, then dried himself off with a dirty towel.

  He put on his shin, his shoes, and a cap, then went out the back way, across the littered courtyard, through the ruins of an apartment building, and finally out onto Taunte Kleist Strasse.

  He had no cover, not at this hour of the morning. Anyone out at this time was either on some official duty or Up to no good.

  His only hope was stealth. If he was discovered, he would have to make a run for it through the bombed-out buildings.

  Actually he wasn’t too worried. Berlin had become a labyrinth of back alleys and rat-maze passages through the blocks of rubble. He had come to know the city in a way he had never dreamed possible in his student days. He knew her sewers, her passageways, and he knew some of her dark wartime secrets: where to buy cigarettes, where to find a woman (though he had no need of that kind of woman), where, at times, even to find liquor. Food was much more difficult, but not impossible.

  But he was getting tired of the game. He was burning out on all the death and destruction. He was becoming numb to the constant fear, the ever-present over-the-shoulder feeling that men in black uniforms and jack boots were coming for him.

  Bern’s message was intriguing though. He cut up across Kurfurstendamm and then Budapester Strasse, past the Auslands organisation building on Tiergarten Strasse, and finally the park itself, one block west of Wilhelm Strasse, behind the Foreign Office and the Reich Chancellery.

  He could hear the animals in the zoo howling and screaming in fear and rage. They were upset because of the bombing. Someone had told him that people were starting to come to the zoo to hunt for fresh meat.

  It turned his stomach to think about it. But all the police horses had long since disappeared from the city, as had most of the dogs. Why not the zoo animals? Next it would be the family cats that had escaped and had gone wild, and finally the plump rats by the river.

  What would one do to survive, Deland asked himself from the shadows. Assassinate a madman who had brought this once proud people to absolute ruin?

  It took him more than an hour to make it to the area behind the Reich Chancellery by his circuitous route, and yet he was not tired. Less than two hundred yards away, and perhaps not too many feet beneath the garden, was the seat of German power.

  Adolph Hitler.

  There had been a lot of street patrols, but from here Deland could see nothing but the dark back side of the Reich Chancellery building. The entire area seemed deserted at this moment. He knew better. Anyone starting across the open ground behind the building would be cut down before they got ten yards, and certainly long before they got within a hundred yards of the bunker entrance.

  Dannsiger had told him about it, though how the underground leader knew about the entrance was anyone’s guess.

  Was there a chance of getting to Hitler and killing him?

  Deland kept his eyes on the back of the building, waiting to catch a flash of light, a movement, anything that would signify there was life there. But he saw nothing. Nothing at all, which was frustrating.

  Was there a chance, Bern asked. Probably, but it would have to involve Dannsiger and the underground. They were the only ones who knew enough to pull it off. If they would. After all, they were still Germans. It would almost be like planning to assassinate Roosevelt because you didn’t like the way the Americans were conducting the war.

  He shook his head. He had been here too long. He stepped across the dark street and started back the way he had come, but then he stopped, an overwhelming sense of loneliness rising up within him.

  It would be morning soon. He looked back toward the bunker.

  There was no way of knowing for certain whether or not Hitler was actually there. They’d have to post a watch to see when he came or went. It would be the only way in which to make certain their efforts were not wasted.

  He turned in the other direction, heading up Bellevue Alice through the park, instead of down Tiergarten Strasse.

  There could be no wasted time. Bern wanted an answer. He would have to speak with Dannsiger immediately. The only way was to return to the girls’ school. To the shelter. Marti would know where he was.

  By the time Deland made it all the way up to the Charlotten burger Strasse, the dawn had come and people were coming out of the bomb shelters and out of the remains of their homes to congratulate each other that they were alive.

  Each time after a bombing raid the streets filled with people— celebrating life over death, Deland supposed. He and the others did not fit. The people out and about this morning were civilians, whereas he, Dannsiger, Marti, and the others were soldiers.

  A half-dozen black market shops had sprung up on the corner where Deland turned to head the final few blocks to the school.

  Quite a crowd of people had gathered to haggle over the few bits of limp vegetables and a couple of bottles of cheap wine at one of the stands.

  Deland stepped around the knot of men in front of the tobacco stand when he brushed past a man in rags, who looked up. <

  Deland saw the face out of the corner of his eye, and alarms began going off in his head like the air raid sirens last night and this morning. He knew the man!

  “Deland!” the man behind him shouted. Deland’s blood ran cold. He kept walking.

  “Robert Deland!” the man shouted. “Aye yiyi yi" he hooted. It was the unmistakable secret call from their student days at Gottingen. He could not ignore it. He stopped in his tracks and spun around as Rudy Gerhardt, ‘ dressed in rags, his right leg gone nearly to the hip, an Iron Cross around his neck, hobbled up to him.

  “Gott in Himmel, it is you,” Gerhardt boomed. He let his crutch fall and grabbed Deland in a powrful bear hug. He smelled very badly.

  It had been the mid-thirties since he had seen Gerhardt last. They had been mathematics students together under Professor Doktor Reichert at the university. They had never been close, but ibfcrxr they had attended the same parties, and there had been the one girl they were both interested in for a short while.

  Gerhardt stepped back, balancing himself on his one leg. Tears streamed from his eyes.

  “Gott in Himmel,” he said again. “It is so good to see you here like this, Robert. My God, it’s been so many years.”

  “It’s Rudy,” Deland forced himself to say with surprise.

  “Yes! Of course it is Rudy, you old bastard.” Then something came into Gerhardt’s eyes, and his manner. “But wait,” he said.

  “But wait, you have … you are here, in Germany. You defected?”

  Deland smiled as broadly and as sincerely as he could. “Don’t say that so loud, Rudy,” he whispered. “Scheisse, it’s been years since I was back in … America. I am a German now. A soldier.”

  “A soldier? What kind of a soldier? Where is your uniform?

  Why are you not on duty? Was gibt, Robertt’

  “I can’t tell you. Not like this. Not out here on the street.”<
br />
  Gerhardt just looked at him. He was shivering. His complexion was very pale, and a thin line of sweat had beaded on his upper lip. He was a very sick man.

  “What happened to you?” Deland asked. He felt very much out of control of the situation. The entire Reich was looking at him. Everyone in Berlin was looking, wondering who he was, wondering when he would be arrested by the Gestapo.

  “It was in France,” Gerhardt was saying slowly. He seemed to be measuring his words.

  Christ, he knew! Deland’s heart hammered so hard that his chest ached. “I’m sorry, Rudy.”

  “It was just bad luck, that’s all. The Resistance set out homemade mines across the road. I was the only one to come out alive. I was the unlucky one.”

  Deland glanced around. Everyone was interested in the black market shops, especially the tobacco stand. No one paid them the slightest bit of attention. Yet he still felt as if he were on stage.

  “Listen, Rudy, I want us to get together very soon. Perhaps for supper. Some potatoes and some sausage. Can you make it for supper?”

  “What are you doing here in Berlin, Robert?”

  “I told you, Rudy; I’m working for the army.”

  “Doing what?” Gerhardt asked. He grabbed Deland’s arm.

  “Doing what, Robert?”

  - “Later, Rudy. We’ll have supper and I will tell you everything.

  Promise.” He pulled Gerhardt’s hand away. “Now, tell me, where do you live? Where can I come see you? I will bring some eggs.”

  -*m^

  It had been four days since he had stumbled on the Los Alamos laboratory in the mountains and had taken his photographs.

  It had been three days since he had sent his first radio message that he had a batch of films for delivery. There had been no answer that evening, so he had tried again.

  He had walked five miles from the ranch, mostly up, so that by the time he was ready to set up his radio, he was at a very high elevation.

  The radio signal with Berlin was very weak, the Morse code buried within the static.

  “Acknowledged,” they had radioed.

  But instead of rendezvous coordinates, they advised him that in this instance the photographs would be picked up.

  It was very late. Well after two in the morning. Overhead the stars were so bright and seemingly so close that they looked unreal.

  He tapped out his acknowledgment signal, then repacked his radio in its suitcase and headed back to the ranch.

  He and Eva had been here for several months now with no trouble. She had fit well into the domestic role. At times, lying in bed together in the evening, she would talk to him about saving their money and buying their own spread of land some day. This wasn’t so far from Milwaukee, after all.

  “My grandfather and my father were fishermen on Lake Michigan. My grandmother and mother tended the house, had the babies, baked the bread. What’s the difference here, if you go out to tend the herd and I keep the house?”

  At first Schey had reminded her that they were German and this was war. But after a while he let it go. She lived in a fantasy world. Or at least, in that one respect, she did. At the ranch, the war seemed very far away, in any event, except on the nightly news when Walter Winchell or Edward R. Murrow spoke about the latest battles with the Reich, and then Schey would descend into a deep depression.

  There was a definite procedure he had been taught for making what was termed “blind contacts,” which were meetings with another agent in enemy country when the meeting had not been prearranged.

  In each different language the code was, of course, different, but in each language the message which was placed in the local newspaper’s classifieds, read: Beriihrung, which was German for CONTACT. In English the ad would read something like: B.E.

  requests ur honest reply, unloved N. G., the initials of each word spelling out the single German word.

  Any combination of words that spelled that word would signal the contact. A phone number would be given, in most cases a public phone booth, and the contact would stand by at ten minutes before ten in the morning, three minutes before three in the afternoon, and eight minutes before eight in the evening, until the meeting was consummated.

  Before the war, Canaris had come up with a lot of schemes such as that one, literally hundreds of codes for his agents to use in whatever circumstances they found themselves.

  There was no reason to think now that the contact procedure wasn’t as valid as it had been when it had first been devised. And yet Schey was nervous about it.

  They had told him at Park Zorgvliet that the longer he remained in the field, the more skittish he would become.

  “At first your survival will be simply another military exercise.

  You are in enemy country; you will feel like a soldier on a mission, and you may well act like a soldier on a mission.

  “Later, however, once you have been in place months, or perhaps even years, you will begin to better understand the nature not only of your assignment but also the nature of the people you are living with.

  “At that point you will discover that your instructions truly were only guides to your performance. The successful field man will adapt to whatever situation he may find himself in. Adapt with a firm feeling for the people he is living with … and spying on.”

  Coming down from the mountains, the early morning air wonderfully cool, he thought about Katy and the baby. Katy had been

  ‘ *^y, so grateful to be married that at times Schey had felt embarrassed.

  At first he told her he loved her and he had not meant it. She knew that, but she loved him desperately and she was willing to go along with whatever he said, as long as they could be together.

  Later, when he had truly fallen in love with her and it frightened him because he worried about his assignment, she began to doubt their relationship.

  Poor Katy. She had been out of sync the entire time. Now, thinking about her, it was hard for him not to go completely berserk, take a gun, and indiscriminately kill whomever he chanced upon.

  Katy! Christ, he had finally loved her and she had been taken from him. She, along with Robert, Junior.

  Schey would meet with his contact when the message came, but the rules had changed now by virtue of the importance of the information he was transmitting home. When the message came, he would devise his own method of contact.

  He came within sight of the ranch and stopped. The out buildings were all dark, except for the one he and Eva lived in. A soft yellow light glowed in the single window facing north. She would be waiting up for him. Like Katy, she had become dependent upon him, and it bothered him, mostly because he did not know exactly how he felt about her.

  They had been making love, as if they were married, for several months now. But just lately he was getting the strong impression that Eva was falling very much in love with him.

  Two weeks ago it had caused him some irritation to realize it.

  But now, standing several hundred yards off from the ranch, cold, nervous about what the future would bring, he found that he was looking forward to getting back to his home and crawling into bed with Eva. There was a certain comfort in that.

  The horses whinnied softly as Schey came onto the property, skirted the corral, and stopped beside the barn. He looked up toward the ranch house set on a small rise. None of the windows showed any light. The Romeros were all asleep. So far as he could see, no one was on the front porch, either. Nor was anyone lurking in the yard. No one to see him return in the middle of the night, carrying his small suitcase. No one to ask questions or to report his strange behavior to the authorities.

  Because of the installation up in the mountains and the several military bases down in Albuquerque, people in this part of New

  Mexico were very jumpy. They had heard stories about conditions in Europe, and they all believed it was the Germans’ fault.

  Everything in that part of the world was Germany’s fault.

  Eva was s
itting up in bed when he came in, the covers around her neck, the small table radio playing softly, the lamp by the window on. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flared. They were signs that, Schey had come to know, indicated she was frightened.

  He put his radio down. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Did it … go well? Did you get through?”

  He nodded.

  She sucked her breath. “What’d they say? Did they tell you what they wanted?”

  “Yes,” he said. He took off his coat and hung it up. Then he pulled a chair to the middle of the small room, got up on it with the radio, and shoved open the small trapdoor that opened above to the rafters. He shoved the radio up, replaced the cover, and stepped down.

  “Well what’d they say, for God’s sake? What are we supposed to do with the god damned pictures?”

  She had been extremely frightened to have the photographs in the house. Anyone could find them, she said. And then it would be the gallows for both of them.

  He went to her on the bed. It would be a lot better when he got rid of the photos. She could not go on like this much longer.

  Sooner or later Mrs. Romero would notice that something was wrong. Sooner or later Eva would make a mistake. She was not cut out for this.

  “It might be a few days yet,” he said.

  She reached out for him, letting the covers fall. She wore a flannel nightgown, the buttons undone. He could see the swell of her breasts which never failed to excite him.

  “And then what?” she asked. “Do you put them in a package and mail them? Or put them under a rock? What?”

  Schey sat down on the bed, her hands in his. He looked deeply into her eyes. “Listen to me, Eva. You are going to have to be very brave now.”

  “Oh God …” she said. She shook her head. “I don’t like this.”

  “I could lie to you and tell you everything will be all right.

  But you deserve better than that.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “There may be some trouble.”

  “What is it?”

  “They are sending a courier to pick up the photos. I’ll have to meet him somewhere. Soon.”