Pandora's Closet

SEEBOHM’S CAP by Peter Schweighofer

Major Prentice Vance of St. Louis, Missouri, peered across the table at the supposed German spy. Headquarters claimed the man could betray Operation Overlord, but Vance couldn’t tell how an ordinary army rifleman might have useful strategic knowledge about the impending invasion of Europe or how he could have transmitted it to Germany without detection.

And why would the man be foolish enough to carry around any evidence betraying his allegiance to Nazi Germany like that cap?

Vance gazed at the cap in fascination. It sat limp on the vast table between him and the spy-nothing more than a crumpled piece of faded tan fabric with a bent visor and worn patches halfway down the top seams, and marks that seemed to indicate its former owner wore wireless headphones over it. A spattering of blood dried brown in the harsh desert sun dotted one side. Such a worn, mundane cap seemed out of place sitting on the highly polished massive table, centerpiece of the palatial dining room in the countryside mansion the Office of Strategic Services had requisitioned from its British cousins.

Private Benedict Kelly of Culbertson, Nebraska, army infantryman and alleged German spy, stared at the cap as if it were some kind of malevolent demon waiting to pounce on him and consume his very soul. He craned his head as far back as the tall dining room chair would allow, his white-knuckled hands gripping the armrests. Vance couldn’t tell whether the sleepless, bloodshot eyes and the sallow skin came from several days of imprisonment and questioning or from sheer dread of that cap.

Vance’s assistant, Lieutenant Laura Jackson from Peekskill, New York, didn’t take any notice of the cap and didn’t display any discernible emotion at all. She sat in a chair pushed well away from the table, one leg draped over another just enough to show off her nicely turned ankle. Someone had pushed back the heavy curtains to allow light from the tall French doors nearby to filter through the sheers, casting a diffused light throughout the dining room and giving Jackson a deceptively angelic aura. She might only serve in the Women’s Army Corps, but Jackson possessed an uncanny knack for disappearing on errands and returning at the right moment with exactly what Vance required (a baffling trait Vance secretly intended to investigate someday.) Jackson maintained her focus on the steno pad balanced on her leg, occasionally glancing up from her notes to size up Private Kelly and his reactions to Vance’s polite queries-questions phrased more as conversation starters than demands.

“It says here you bought the hat from Private Sewell. Where did he get it?” Vance removed his steady stare from fidgety Kelly and casually perused the file set before him. His lithe fingers nonchalantly turned the pages as he gazed down his nose at the reports. Vance spoke with even tones, measuring his speech more as if they were having a relaxed tea than a military interrogation.

Kelly blinked a few times, shrugged his skinny shoulders, and stuttered. “I… I dunno. Uh, Africa, I guess.”

Vance’s fingers touched the pencil-thin mustache over his lips, drawing attention to the faint but friendly smile. “Surely Private Sewell mentioned something about the hat’s provenance.” He noted Kelly’s perplexed expression-he wasn’t much more than a gawky farm boy who more than likely dropped out of school-and corrected himself. “Where the cap came from. Didn’t Sewell weave some fanciful tale bragging how he acquired the cap?”

Kelly made that exasperating shrug of his shoulders again.

“We could always send for Sergeant Mullen to refresh your memory.” Vance’s grin took a slightly menacing curve. Sergeant John Mullen of Moose Lake, Minnesota, took care of the heavy work during Kelly’s earlier interrogations with the Military Police. “But I don’t think Lieutenant Jackson would like that.” Vance’s assistant looked up, batted her eye lashes with a doleful look, and pouted her ruby red lips in a possibly mock frown, right on cue. Vance expected she’d reprimand him later for involving her in his mind games.

“No, ma’am,” Kelly drawled. He allowed himself a glance from the cap to Lieutenant Jackson with a bashful smile, then glared at Vance. “I told them before, more than once, dammit, that Sewell got the cap in a battle in North Africa.”

Vance’s lips maintained their sinister curve. He smoothed his mustache before reaching across and closing Kelly’s file. “Fine. Perhaps, then, you’d like to give us a firsthand demonstration of what happens when you wear that cap.”

All color drained from Kelly’s face. His hands gripped the chair, and his army uniform visibly trembled on his lanky frame. Vance thought a bit of drool leaked from Kelly’s quivering lips. He recalled the reports in the folder. Kelly’s unit occupied one of the sealed training camps in the south of England where troops waited to embark on the imminent invasion. Kelly’s friends found him twitching on the ground near his tent, eyes rolled into the back of his head, his mouth spitting foam and frenzied words that sounded like German… all while wearing the Afrika Korps cap.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Vance asked in fluent German. “ Sind Sie Deutscher?”

Kelly controlled his tremors and shot Vance a befuddled look.

“Obviously not,” Vance answered. “Do you have any knowledge of the imminent invasion of Europe?”

“Huh?” Kelly shrugged. “Sure, everyone’s getting all ready for something big, but nobody knows exactly what or when. Come on, anyone looking around here knows something’s about to happen. Why else would American troops swarm all over southern England, doing invasion exercises and practice drills?”

“Well, then, I think we’re done for now. Sergeant!” Vance called. An army sergeant-not the bruiser from Kelly’s earlier interrogations-entered the dining room through one of the tall, double doors and stood at attention. “Escort Private Kelly to the room we’ve prepared-not a cell, Kelly, but a real room-and make sure he gets something decent to eat. As I recall, the kitchens here are as well-stocked as a Chicago steakhouse.”

Kelly didn’t budge. “When can I go back to my unit?”

“Oh, I doubt you’ll be returning to combat, though that should prove a relief,” Vance said with an understanding grin. “Not after all you’ve gone through. I’m sure they’ll put you on the next ship home. Oh, don’t worry about your patriotic duty. You’ve done your part, soldier, that’s for certain, and there’s no disgrace in what’s happened. If I’m right, you might have delivered to us a valuable weapon in the fight against fascism.”

Kelly pulled himself out of the chair and stumbled over to meet the sergeant, never taking his terrified eyes off Vance and the cap.

Vance knew Kelly wouldn’t really go home to Nebraska. He’d most likely enjoy a lengthy stay at St. Elizabeth’s, the hospital in Washington where the OSS and other government agencies sent “mentally ill” psychiatric patients-devoid of any right to habeas corpus-to languish in guarded isolation for the duration.

With all he’d seen, and would see, Vance wondered if he’d end up there himself before war’s end.

“Should I tell Colonel Donovan we have a spy on our hands?” Jackson asked, looking up from her notes.

“Of course not,” Vance replied. The head of OSS wanted straight answers, not conjecture, before he made any report to General Eisenhower. “Kelly’s just some country bumpkin from Nebraska. Doesn’t know a damn thing. Looking over his file, there’s no possible way the Germans could have recruited him either in America or during his service in Italy, and he seems to have no means of communicating any intelligence to them, certainly not from a sealed camp with rigorous security restrictions. Besides, Kelly wouldn’t know good intelligence if it came up and kicked him in the pants.

“But he knows about that cap.”

Vance stared a moment at the cap, brow furrowed with curiosity, his fingers caressing his mustache. The crumpled cloth sat there lifeless, the German eagle patch emblazoned on the front, a ghostly aura of dust settling around it on the veneered tabletop. The hat’s former owner obviously belonged to the German Afrika Korps, which had ranged across the deserts of North Africa until General Montgomery had begun beating him back from Egypt at el Alamien and Patton drove him from Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch. Defeating Rommel there led to a swift invasion of Sicily and then Italy, but the Allies needed another foothold in Europe from which to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Who was the Afrika Korps officer who wore that hat? By the worn marks midway along the fabric, Vance figured the fellow wore headphones a lot, meaning he served some function in communications, possibly with a wireless company or as a radioman with a mobile reconnaissance unit. His glance followed the trail of dried blood tracking up one side.

Soldiers always picked up souvenirs of their experiences, badges of courage proving they had participated in particular battles and had come away alive once more. Why was this cap special? Vance leaned forward, enthralled by the potential power of this simple, crumpled hat.

“Where do we go from here, sir?” Jackson asked, a glint of suspicion in her eyes.

Vance leaned back in his chair, the opulent dining room suddenly coming back into focus and diminishing the cap’s presence in his mind. He turned to Lieutenant Jackson with a charming smile. “Why don’t you contact our British cousins and track down this Sewell fellow. Kelly was with the First Infantry Division stationed near Poole on the southern coast of England. Follow his deployment to determine when it came in contact with any British units. Probably some element of that British army division stationed around Southampton. I want to know exactly when and where Sewell found that cap.”

“Should I forward any recommendations to Colonel Donovan?” she asked.

Vance peered back at the cap. “Not at this time,” he replied. “This situation calls for a bit more investigation on our part before we make any concrete recommendations.”

“General Eisenhower can’t wait,” Jackson noted. “They’re deliberating even now whether to launch Overlord in the next few days.”

Simple strategy for invading the continent dictated an amphibious landing with the shortest crossing from England to France at Calais, not a longer, riskier crossing to Normandy. All intelligence from agents behind the lines pointed to Hitler expecting an invasion at Calais given the deployment of his armies. German army wireless traffic intercepted and deciphered by the British code breakers at Station X confirmed the field reports. But even they could only provide a small view of the overall picture.

“They have more intelligence to corroborate than we can provide,” Vance countered. “At this point, with British and American forces poised to strike after months of planning, Hitler’s armies deployed somewhere along the Atlantic wall, and Eisenhower watching the weather reports, Eisenhower’s taking as low a risk as he can get.”

“I don’t think SHAEF would quite see it that way,” Jackson countered.

“Well, we have nothing conclusive to give them until we uncover more about that cap.” Vance walked over to stare out the window over the carefully manicured English gardens outside.

Jackson closed her notebook and collected Kelly’s file. “Do you want me to lock that up in the vault?” she asked, nodding at the cap.

Vance didn’t interrupt his examination of the light rain falling on the gardens and a few visible portions of the great old manor house. “Just leave it there,” Vance said. “I’ll take a closer look at it in a few moments, thank you, Lieutenant.”

Jackson sauntered out of the dining room, her heels clicking severely on the ornately patterned parquet floor. Vance stole a glance at her as she slipped out the tall double doors and closed them behind her.

Vance stood at the windows a few more minutes taking in the scenery outside. He found such peaceful contemplation of the natural world or mundane matters necessary in steeling himself for encountering the unnatural. He inhaled the lingering scent of candle wax and perfume that haunted the room, heard the patter of raindrops against the windowpane merge with clattering typists in a nearby room, felt the muggy air close about him in his woolen uniform.

Vance casually walked to the table and picked up the cap. It electrified the goose bumps on his arm and sent shivers up his spine. Though he slicked back his wavy hair, it seemed to stand up on end and tingle as if covered with excited bees. His ability to detect items or people with otherworldly qualities had brought him to the attention of the OSS, which appointed him head of its Bureau of Special Investigations (derisively named “BS Investigations” by those ignorant of its true purposes). By now Vance knew Kelly wasn’t a German spy; he was more interested in the cap, what it did to those who wore it, and what it might do to help the Allies win the war.

Vance ran his fingers over the cap, ran his thumb over the Nazi eagle patch on the front. He felt granules of warm sand, leather-padded headband and earphones, sticky sweet blood. Vance inhaled its scents: dust, sweat, cordite, and fear. Then he put the cap on his head.

Information, sensations, and emotions flooded every corner of Vance’s mind. He reached out to steady himself against the dining table. His vision narrowed into distant tunnels; he breathed more rapidly to delay the unconsciousness racing up to meet him. He fought to focus on the ancient family portraits and ornate candle sconces on the far wall to keep his eyes from rolling up into the back of his head.

The burst of paranormal energy dropped him to the floor. A maelstrom of dots and dashes, clicking, blinking, typing, spinning metal rotors, clumps of four-letter groups, and finally cohesive German words rushed through his mind, a tempest of sensations not simply of the man who had fought and died wearing that Afrika Korps cap, but of all those past and present involved in the wireless telegraphy, codes, and ciphers the Nazis used to coordinate their vast war machine. For a fleeting second Vance realized no ordinary soldier like Private Kelly could possibly comprehend, let alone maintain mental and emotional control over this overwhelming storm of information. But Vance fought, shaking his head and body in apoplectic convulsions in an effort to physically and mentally discern the sensations flooding his mind.

Once he managed to isolate and understand streams of seemingly dissonant information, Vance tried arranging them in a logical order, much like conducting an interrogation or sifting through a file, starting with the basic information and working deeper. The originating signals pounded through his head, overlapping drumbeats of dots and dashes of multiple transmitters broadcasting messages in Morse code. These rapidly passed through stages of clicking typewriter keys, smooth electrical current passing through advancing metal rotors, and finally blinking letter lights. The letters gathered into groups of four, then transformed into comprehensible abbreviations and even entire words.

Vance realized this cap somehow channeled and deciphered all German radio communication within Western Europe through its wearer.

He doubted anyone intentionally designed the cap that way-the Nazis would be fools to allow such a fantastic weapon to fall into Allied hands-but surmised the emotional heat of combat and anguish of death imbued it with the knowledge and expertise of its wearer, who must have served with a wireless communications company in North Africa.

Vance’s body twitched as he focused on the nearest messages, those most clear that translated into lucid intelligence about Nazi units guarding northern France. Orders to march, divisions held in reserve, units reforming after combat elsewhere. He started forming a vast strategic picture of towns and units between Normandy and Calais. One static and one active attack infantry division sat directly along the coast where the Allied amphibious forces hoped to establish a beachhead. Three smaller infantry groups stood in reserve south of the operational theater. Rommel had deployed his much-feared German panzer divisions far from the invasion point, with the 21st Panzers moved ten miles southeast of Caen and the infamous 12th SS Panzer Division more than fifty miles away, just west of Dreux, and the messages coming through the cap indicated they were stationed in the rear for rest and recuperation. Vance knew Eisenhower would like to know exactly what kind of opposition he was facing once American, British, and Canadian troops took the beaches of Normandy.

But the way he deployed his divisions confirmed that Hitler fully expected an Allied assault at Calais. Although a handful of divisions stood ready to repel any invaders at Normandy, Hitler had ordered at least nine infantry and four panzer divisions into the vicinity of Calais. The Lehr Panzer Division sat in reserve just west of Chartres to counter any Allied attack on either target. Clearly the Nazis expected an attack at Calais.

Vance could not comprehend how long he’d been unconscious exploring the mysteries of the cap. He heard the dining room door swing open and Lieutenant Jackson’s shoes clicking evenly on the parquet floor, then halt abruptly.

“Call a medic!” Jackson screamed.

Vance opened his eyes wide, shook the cap off his head, composed his expression, and smiled calmly at Jackson. “No, everything’s all right,” he said, trying to sound confident despite the enduring tremors coursing through his body. He pulled himself up to his elbows, used the table to help him rise unsteadily to his feet, and then found coordination enough to make a show of dusting off his uniform jacket sleeves. Vance addressed the cautious yet curious crowd of sentries and typists who had gathered at the gaping double doors. “No need for alarm,” he said. “I’m fine.” The others reluctantly dispersed.

Vance leaned down to retrieve the cap from the floor and faltered; Jackson reached for it, but Vance grasped her arm. “I’d advise against touching that, my dear,” he said. He saw her eyes go wide in response to his menacing look. Jackson quickly regained her composure and stood up, stony faced. After taking a few deep breaths, Vance bent down to pick up the cap himself and casually tossed it onto the table near his seat. Jackson knew it was an act and pulled his chair out so he could sit down.

“Tell me, Lieutenant, what you discovered about our friends Kelly and Sewell and how they acquired this cap.” Vance’s lithe fingers crept along the table and began absently fingering the dusty fabric, hoping simple contact might endow him with some of the cap’s supernatural insights.

Lieutenant Jackson drew up a chair, crossed her legs, and flipped open her notebook. “I tracked down Sewell encamped near Southampton as you thought,” she began. “Sewell traded the hat to Kelly for an amazing amount of booze and cigarettes for his unit. It’s a long and twisted trail of trades, but I tracked the cap’s original owner to Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Gazala. During a counterattack, General Montgomery’s forces overran Rommel’s communications detachment, 3rd Company, 56th Signals Battalion, what the Germans call a Fernemeldeaufklärung Kompanie or Horchkompanie.”

“A long-range radio intercept unit,” Vance interjected. “Probably handled all of Rommel’s headquarters-level code and cipher work, with broadcasts heading into the field and back to Berlin. It probably also carried out interception work targeted against Montgomery ’s wireless traffic.”

“Exactly, sir. I pored over the operational reports, both for the army and intelligence, and determined this Horchkompanie helped Rommel stay one step ahead of Montgomery ’s forces… at least until Gazala, when things started falling apart.”

“Yes, because he was woefully disorganized at el Alamein and certainly while retreating afterwards.” Vance’s other hand began smoothing out his pencil-thin mustache as his brows furrowed in thought. “Lose your ability to intercept and decrypt enemy wireless messages and you lose your advantage.”

“Sewell’s buddies destroyed the unit and took souvenirs. He claimed the cap came from the Horchkompanie commander, Captain Alfred Seebohm. Apparently he was a genius regarding anything to do with codes, ciphers, and radio work.”

“That would explain this,” Vance said, patting the cap and withdrawing his hand. “Seebohm was undoubtedly wearing it when they killed him. The trauma of death might have imbued it with his expertise and, well, quite a bit more about the workings of the German cryptographic system. On par with Station X at Bletchley Park, only through a different medium.” Vance flashed a playful smile.

The two remained silent for a moment, respectfully contemplating the cap. “Where do we go from here?” Jackson asked.

Vance’s lips curled in a sinister smile. “We put Seebohm’s expertise to our own use. Sergeant!” he called. The fellow posted just outside peered around the door. “Would you kindly fetch me an operational map of northern France and a handful of pencils?”

“What should I tell Colonel Donovan?”

“Assure him that Operation Overlord can go ahead on whatever schedule Eisenhower chooses,” Vance stated confidently. “The impressions from this cap confirm that Hitler’s fully expecting an assault at Calais and give us a good view of those forces waiting for us in Normandy.”

The sergeant returned with a large, rolled-up map under his arm and a handful of pencils. “Thank you, Sergeant,” Vance said with a disarming smile. While the sergeant returned to his post outside the door, Vance unrolled the map and began marking German unit placements with a pencil.

“They won’t believe it,” Jackson said. “It’s absurd. A German wireless operator’s cap imbued with all his knowledge, all the workings of the codes and ciphers, even intercepting radio waves.”

“It’s as reliable as any intelligence Colonel Donovan is ever going to get out of our bureau,” Vance countered. “Ike may not believe it-heck, if Donovan’s his usual cagey self, he’ll obscure the source of this seemingly dubious intelligence-but the Colonel himself wouldn’t have authorized our bureau if he thought our investigations didn’t have merit.”

“Say what you want about the cap, there’s no way you can know all that,” Jackson said, pointing to the map on which Vance continued jotting notes.

“True,” Vance conceded. “Though operatives in France might confirm it, probably too late or after the fact. I doubt anyone would believe the veracity of the unit deployment I’ll sketch for reference. I guess in retrospect it will seem uncanny, if not downright suspicious.”

The cap sat next to Vance and the map, no longer an object of horror or curiosity, but another weapon to use in defeating Hitler’s Nazis.

“Trust me, Lieutenant, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of such strange occurrences during this war.”