Mother Night

32: Rosenfeld ...

My lawyer here in Jerusalem, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, has told me that I would surely win my case if I could produce one witness who had seen me in the company of the man known to me as Colonel Frank Wirtanen.

I met Wirtanen three times: before the war, immediately after the war, and finally, in the back of a vacant store across the street from the residence of The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Only at the first meeting, the meeting on the park bench, did anyone see us together. And those who saw us were no more likely to fix us in their memories than were the squirrels and birds.

The second time I met him was in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the dining hall of what had once been an officers candidate school of the Engineers Corps of the Wehrmacht. There was a great mural on the wall of that dining hall, a tank coming down a lovely, winding country lane. The sun was shining in the mural, The sky was clear. This bucolic scene was about to be shattered.

In a thicket, in the foreground of the mural, was a merry little band of steel-helmeted Robin Hoods, engineers whose latest prank was to mine the lane and to implement the impending merriment with an anti-tank gun and a light machine gun.

They were so happy.

How did I get to Wiesbaden?

I was taken from a Third Army prisoner-of-war pen near Ohrdruf on April 15, three days after my capture by Lieutenant Bernard B. O'Hare.

I was driven to Wiesbaden in a jeep, was guarded by a first lieutenant whose name is unknown to me. We didn't talk much. I did not interest him. He spent the entire trip in a slow smoldering rage about something that had nothing to do with me. Had he been slighted, insulted, cheated, maligned, grievously misunderstood? I don't know.

At any rate, I don't think he would be much help as a witness. He was carrying out orders that bored him. He asked his way to the camp, and then to the dining hall. He left me at the door of the dining hall, told me to go inside and wait And then he drove off, leaving me unguarded.

I went inside, though I might easily have wandered into the countryside again.

Inside that melancholy barn, all alone, seated on a table under the mural, was my Blue Fairy Godmother.

Wirtanen was wearing the uniform of an American soldier-zippered jacket; olive-drab trousers and shirt, the shirt open at the neck; combat boots. He had no weapon. Neither did he wear any symbol of rank or unit

He was a short-legged man. When I saw him sitting there on the table, he was swinging his feet, and his feet were far off the floor. He must have been at least fifty-five then, seven years older than when last I'd seen him. He was bald, had put on weight

Colonel Frank Wirtanen had the impudent pink-baby look that victory and an American combat uniform seemed to produce in so many older men.

He beamed at me and he shook my hand warmly, and he said, 'Well — what did you think of that war, Campbell?'

'I would just as soon have stayed out of it' I said.

'Congratulations,' he said. 'You lived through it, anyway. A lot of people didn't you know.'

'I know,' I said. 'My wife, for instance.'

'Sorry about that' he said.

'I found out she was missing the same day you did,' he said.

'How?' I said.

'From you,' he said. 'That was one of the pieces of information you broadcast that night'

This news, that I had broadcast the coded announcement of my Helga's disappearance, broadcast it without even knowing what I was doing, somehow upset me more than anything in the whole adventure. It upsets me even now. Why, I don't know.

It represented, I suppose a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about

At that climactic moment in my life, when I had to suppose that my Helga was dead, I would have liked to mourn as an agonized soul, indivisible. But no. One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made.

'That was vital military information? That had to be got out of Germany at the risk of my neck?' I said to Wirtanen.

'Certainly,' he said. 'The instant we got it, we began to act.'

'To act?' I said, mystified. 'To act how?'

'To find a replacement for you,' said Wirtanen. 'We thought you'd kill yourself before the sun came up again.'

'I should have,' I said.

'I'm damn glad you didn't,' he said.

'I'm damn sorry I didn't,' I said. 'You would think that a man who's spent as much time in the theater as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die — if he was to be a hero.' I snapped my fingers softly. 'There goes the whole play about Helga and me, "Nation of Two,'' I said, 'because I missed my cue for the great suicide scene.'

'I don't admire suicide,' said Wirtanen.

'I admire form,' I said. 'I admire things with a beginning, a middle, an end — and, whenever possible, a moral, too.'

'There's a chance she's still alive, I guess,' said Wirtanen.

'A loose end,' I said. 'An irrelevancy. The play is over.'

'You said something about a moral?' he said.

'If I'd killed myself when you expected me to kill myself,' I said, 'maybe a moral would have occurred to you.'

'I'll have to think' he said.

'Take your time,' I said.

'I'm not used to things having form — or morals, either,' he said. 'If you'd died, I probably would have said something like, "Goddamn, now what will we do?" A moral? It's a big enough job just burying the dead, without trying to draw a moral from each death,' he said. 'Half the dead don't even have names. I might have said you were a good soldier.'

'Was I' I said.

'Of all the agents who were my dream children, so to speak, you were the only one who got clear through the war both reliable and alive,' he said. 'I did a little morbid arithmetic last night, Campbell — calculated that you, by being neither incompetent nor dead, were one in 'forty-two.'

'What about the people who fed me information?' I said.

'Dead, all dead,' he said. 'Every one of them a woman, by the way. Seven of them, in all — each one of them, before she was caught, living only to transmit information to you. Think of it, Campbell — seven women you satisfied again and again and again, and they finally died for the satisfaction that was yours to give them. And not one of them betrayed you, either, when she was caught. Think of that, too.'

'I can't say you've relieved any shortage of things to think about,' I said to Wirtanen. 'I don't mean to diminish your stature as a teacher and philosopher, but I had things to think about even before this happy reunion. So what happens to me next?'

'You've already disappeared again,' he said. Third Army's been relieved of you, and there'll be no records here to show that you ever arrived.' He spread his hands. 'Where would you like to go from here, and who would you like to be?'

'I don't suppose there's a hero's welcome awaiting me anywhere,' I said.

'Hardly,' he said.

'Any news of my parents?' I said.

'I'm sorry to tell you — ' he said, 'they died four months ago.'

'Both?' I said.

'Your father first-your mother twenty-four hours later. Heart both times,' he said.

I cried a little about that, shook my head. 'Nobody told them what I was really doing?' I said.

'Our radio station in the heart of Berlin was worth more than the peace of mind of two old people,' he said.

'I wonder,' I said.

'You're entitled to wonder,' he said. 'I'm not.'

'How many people knew what I was doing?' I said.

'The good things or the bad things?' he said.

'The good,' I said.

'Three of us,' he said.

'That's all?' I said.

'That's a lot,' he said. Too many, really. There was me, there was General Donovan, and one other.'

'Three people in all the world knew me for what I was — ' I said. 'And all the rest — ' I shrugged.

'They knew you for what you were, too,' he said abruptly.

'That wasn't me,' I said, startled by his sharpness.

'Whoever it was' said Wirtanen, 'he was one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived.'

I was amazed. Wirtanen was sincerely bitter.

'You give me hell for that — knowing what you do?' I said. 'How else could I have survived?'

'That was your problem,' he said. 'Very few men could have solved it as thoroughly as you did.'

'You think I was a Nazi?' I said.

'Certainly you were,' he said. 'How else could a responsible historian classify you? Let me ask you a question'

'Ask away,' I said.

'If Germany had won, had conquered the world — ' he stopped, cocked his head. 'You must be way ahead of me. You must know what the question is.'

'How would I have lived?' I said. 'What would I have felt? What would I have done?'

'Exactly,' he said. 'You must have thought about it, with an imagination like yours.'

'My imagination isn't what it used to be,' I said. 'One of the first things I discovered when I became an agent was that I couldn't afford an imagination any more.'

'No answer to my question?' he said.

'Now is as good a time as any to see if I've got any imagination left,' I said. 'Give me a minute or two — '

'Take all the time you want,' he said.

So I projected myself into the situation he described, and what was left of my imagination gave me a corrosively cynical answer. 'There is every chance,' I said, 'that I would have become a sort of Nazi Edgar Guest, writing a daily column of optimistic doggerel for daily papers around the world. And, as senility set in, the sunset of life, as they say — I might even come to believe what my couplets said: that everything was probably all for the best.'

I shrugged. 'Would I have shot anybody? I doubt it, Would I have organized a bomb plot? That's more of a possibility; but I've heard a lot of bombs go off in my time, and they never impressed me much as a way to get things done. Only one thing can I guarantee you: I would never have written a play again. That skill, such as it was, is lost.

The only chance of my doing something really violent in favor of truth or justice or what have you,' I said to my Blue Fairy Godmother, 'would lie in my going homicidally insane. That could happen. In the situation you suggest, I might suddenly run amok with a deadly weapon down a peaceful street on an ordinary day. But whether the killing I did would improve the world much would be a matter of dumb luck, pure and simple.

'Have I answered your question honestly enough for you?' I asked him.

'Yes, thank you,' he said.

'Classify me as a Nazi,' I said tiredly. 'Classify away. Hang me, if you think it would tend to raise the general level of morality. This life is no great treasure. I have no postwar plans.'

'I only want you to understand how little we can do for you,' he said. 'I see you do understand.'

'How little?' I said.

'A false identity, a few red herrings, transportation to wherever you might conceivably start a new life — ' he said. 'Some cash. Not much, but some.'

'Cash?' I said. 'How was the cash value of my services arrived at?'

'A matter of custom,' he said, 'a custom going back to at least the Civil War.'

'Oh?' I said.

'Private's pay,' he said. 'On my say-so, you're entitled to it for the period from when we met in the Tiergarten to the present.'

'That's very generous,' I said.

'Generosity doesn't amount to much in this business,' he said. 'The really good agents aren't interested in money at all, Would it make any difference to you if we gave you the back pay of a brigadier general?'

'No,' I said.

'Or if we paid you nothing at all?'

'No difference,' I said.

'It's almost never money,' he said. 'Or patriotism, either.'

'What is it, then?' I said.

'Each person has to answer that question for himself — ' said Wirtanen. 'Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.'

'Interesting,' I said emptily.

He clapped his hands to break the mood. 'Now then — ' he said, 'about transportation: where to?'

'Tahiti?' I said.

'If you say so,' he said. 'I suggest New York. You can lose yourself there without any trouble, and there's plenty of work, if you want it'

'All right — New York,' I said.

'Let's get your passport picture taken. You'll be on a plane out of here inside of three hours,' he said.

We crossed the deserted parade ground together, dust devils spinning here and there. It was my fancy to think of the dust devils as the spooks of former cadets at the school, killed in war, returning now to whirl and dance on the parade ground alone, to dance in as unmilitary a fashion as they damn well pleased.

'When I told you there were only three people who knew about your coded broadcasts — ' said Wirtanen.

'What about it?' I said.

'You didn't ask who the third one was,' he said.

'Would it be anybody I'd ever heard of?' I said.

'Yes,' he said. 'He's dead now, I'm sorry to say. You used to attack him regularly in your broadcasts.'

'Oh?' I said.

'The man you called Franklin Delano Rosenfeld,' said Wirtanen. 'He used to listen to you gleefully every night'