Mother Night

33: Communism Rears Its Head ...

The third time I met my Blue Fairy Godmother, and the last time, from all indications, was, as I have said, in a vacant shop across the street from the house of Jones, across the street from where Resi, George Kraft and I were hiding.

I took my time about going into that dark place, expecting, with reason, to find anything from an American Legion color guard to a platoon of Israeli paratroopers waiting to capture me inside.

I had a pistol with me, one of the Iron Guard's Lugers, chambered for twenty-two's. I had it not in my pocket but in the open, loaded and cocked, ready to go. I scouted the front of the shop without showing myself. The front was dark. And then I approached the back in short rushes, from cluster to cluster of garbage cans.

Anybody trying to jump me, to jump Howard W. Campbell, Jr., would have been filled with little holes, as though by a sewing machine. And I must say that I came to love the infantry, anybody's infantry, in that series of rushes and taking cover.

Man, I think, is an infantry animal.

There was a light in the back of the shop. I looked through a window and saw a scene of great serenity. Colonel Frank Wirtanen, my Blue Fairy Godmother, was sitting on a table again, waiting for me again.

He was an old, old man now, as sleek and hairless as Buddha.

I went in.

'I thought surely you would have retired by now,' I said.

'I did — ' he said, 'eight years ago. Built a house on a lake in Maine with an axe and my own two hands. I was called out of retirement as a specialist'

'In what?' I said.

'In you,' he said.

'Why the sudden interest in me?' I said.

'That's what I'm supposed to find out,' he said.

'No mystery why the Israelis would want me,' I said.

'1 agree,' he said. 'But there's a lot of mystery about why the Russians should think you were such a fat prize.'

'Russians?' I said. 'What Russians?'

'The girl, Resi Noth — and the old man, the painter, the one called George Kraft,' said Wirtanen. 'They're both communist agents. We've been watching the one who calls himself Kraft now since 1941. We made it easy for the girl to get into the country just to find out what she hoped to do.'