The Eighth Dwarf

15

Bodden watched as she shrugged into her fur coat and turned its collar up around her chin. Her fingers stroked the fur as though its touch and feel were somehow reassuring. This one still likes a little luxury, he thought. Well, who could blame her? Certainly not you, printer, who always found the Spartans just a bit stupid.

“You disapprove of my coat?”

He shook his head. “It looks warm.”

“So is wool, but I prefer marten. I also would choose caviar over cabbage.”

It was another signal of sorts, weak but unmistakable, and Bodden sent back a careful reply. “Then we have that much in common.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps even more. Who knows?” Suddenly, she was all business and crisp efficiency again. “The man upstairs, the one with the scarred face. His name is Max. He is a sympathizer of sorts and can be trusted — up to a point. But not that one.” She nodded slightly toward the middle-aged woman who still stood by the coal cookstove.

“His wife?”

“Sister. Max disapproves of her black-market dealings, in principle anyway, but not enough to refuse her food. Without her, Max would starve. Like many today, they are stuck with each other. But Max will be your contact with me. You should check with him every day, and you may as well eat here, too. It’s not haute cuisine, but it’s nourishing.”

“I cannot afford it.”

“That packet of cigarettes you gave her will buy your meals for the next four days.”

He held up the partially smoked pack of Camels. “May I keep these?”

She smiled, and Bodden noticed that it came more easily this time. “You may even smoke them, if you like, printer. Although you don’t know it yet, you’re rich. How does it feel?”

Bodden grinned. “Tell me more and then I’ll tell you how it feels.”

“I noticed you have no briefcase. It makes you look naked. Sometimes I think every German’s born with a briefcase in his hand. Well, you have one now. It’s upstairs with Max. In it are two thousand American cigarettes.”

“You’re right. I am rich. And it feels fine.”

“You’ll need a room and transport. Max will fix you up with a room. It won’t be warm, but it’ll be dry. For transport, well, the best you can hope for is a bicycle. The going rate is six hundred cigarettes or three kilos of fat.”

“A stolen bicycle, of course.”

“What else?”

“I’ll try the DP’s. The DP’s and I get along — especially the Poles. I knew many in the camp. Some were very funny fellows.”

“What camp were you in?”

“Belsen.”

She looked away. When she spoke, still looking away, her voice was elaborately casual almost to the point of indifference. “Did you ever know a man there called Scheel? Dieter Scheel?”

Bodden realized that she was holding her breath until he answered. “A friend?”

She sighed the breath out. “My father.”

“It was a big camp,” he said as kindly as he could.

“Yes, I suppose it was.”

“Eva Scheel. A pleasant name. Was he Jewish, your father?”

She shook her head. “My mother was. My father, like you, printer, was a Social Democrat with a big mouth. Well, no matter.”

She took an envelope from the pocket of her coat and handed it to Bodden. “I will leave now. In the envelope is a report on everything that my American Lieutenant has told me about his investigation of Kurt Oppenheimer. Also about the man whom they think Oppenheimer killed.”

“Damm, wasn’t it?”

“Karl-Heinz Damm. It seems that he sold identities to those who had need of them.”

Bodden nodded. “A most profitable profession, I would say.”

“Yes. The report is rather long because my Ami Lieutenant seems to think his fiancée should be interested in his work. I suggest that you read it here and then burn it in the cookstove.”

“Now that I’m rich, I’ll read it over another cup of coffee.”

Eva rose. “The yellow-haired man, the one you parted company with in Hamburg. Did he have a long face and wear a blue cap?”

The warmth of the room had made Bodden relax. The warmth and the food and the cigarettes and the Schnapps. And the woman, of course, he thought. A woman can relax you or wind you up like a clock spring. She has just wound you up again, printer.

“Was he wearing a coat?” Bodden said. “A blue coat?”

“Dyed dark blue. A Wehrmacht coat”

“Yes.”

“He picked me up shortly after the train station. He is very good.”

Bodden nodded slowly. “The British. They must have flown him down.”

“He is not British.”

“No? Did you hear him speak?”

“I had no need. I could tell from his walk. He walks like a German. Haven’t you heard the saying? The British walk as if they own the earth. The Germans as if they think they should own it And the Americans as if they don’t give a damn who owns it. Shall I lose him for you, printer? He is very good, but I am better.”

Bodden smiled. “You have a great deal of confidence.”

She nodded. “Almost as much as you do.”

“Then lose him.”

“They will find us again, of course.”

Bodden shrugged. “Or perhaps, when the time is ripe, we will find them.”

The name of the man with the yellow hair who stood outside the Goiden Rose in the rain was Heinrich von Staden, and he had been a captain in Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr until the twenty-first of July, 1944, which was the day after the one-armed Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg had placed the black briefcase under the heavy table at the Wolfschanze, or Wolf’s Fort, in the forest near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg. Captain von Staden might not have been standing now outside the Golden Rose in the rain if Colonel Brandt, the famous horseman of the 1936 Olympics, hadn’t reached down and moved the briefcase because it was bothering him. He moved it just enough so that when the bomb it contained exploded, it killed several men, but not the one it was supposed to kill: Adolf Hitler.

So, on the twenty-first of July, 1944, Captain Heinrich von Staden had left the German Embassy in Madrid, carrying with him as many documents as he thought both pertinent and useful, and presented himself at the office of his counterpart at the British Embassy.

His counterpart had not been especially surprised to see him. “Pity about the bomb, wasn’t it?” he had said.

Von Staden had nodded. “Yes, a pity.”

“They won’t try again, will they?”

“No, they’ll all be dead shortly.”

“Canaris too?”

“Yes, Canaris too.”

“Mmm. Well, what do you think we should do with you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why don’t we just send you back to London and let them sort it out?”

“Very well.”

So they had flown him back to London and they had sorted it out. First there had been the solitary confinement and then the interrogation, followed by a long stretch in a POW camp. Then there had been more interrogation, and finally, there had been the one long, especially grueling session which had lasted sixteen hours until, against all rules, Major Baker-Bates had said, “How’d you like to go to work for us?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No, not very much of one, I’m afraid. The POW camp, of course. You could always opt to go back there.”

“I think not,” ex-Captain von Staden had said, which was why he was now standing outside the Golden Rose in the rain.

The streets had been crooked in that old section of the city where, before the war, Frankfurt had done its drinking and whoring. Those streets which had been cleared were still crooked, with narrow winding paths that led off into the rubble and ended, sometimes, apparently no-where.

Von Staden watched as the woman came out of the Golden Rose, opened her umbrella, and hurried off down the narrow, crooked street. He moved after her, keeping close to the edge of the uneven rubble. The woman turned off the street into one of the twisting paths. Von Staden followed, not hurrying, but keeping the woman within twenty meters, not letting her get farther ahead than that. Another path led off the one that they were on. The woman stopped, hesitating, as if she were not sure of her directions. Then she turned right. Von Staden gave her a few moments and followed.

The path that she had taken was no more than a meter wide. It went right, left, and right again almost at ninety-degree angles. Von Staden had lost sight of the woman now, so he picked up his pace. He made the final turn and stopped, because the path ended abruptly at a small shrine that marked the site of someone for whom the rubble was both grave and crypt. The shrine was nothing more than a small, painted wooden figure of Christ. Some soggy, faded flowers lay before it. The woman was nowhere in sight.

Von Staden swore and quickly retraced his steps. At the second turning he stopped. Coming from this direction, he could see it — a space no larger than a large crate. It was somebody’s hovel, fashioned out of the rubble and a piece of old sheet iron that shielded its entrance from view unless approached from this angle. He realized that she could have closed her umbrella, ducked into the hovel, waited for him to pass, and then doubled back. It would have taken no more than a few seconds.

Walking slowly back along the path to the street, making sure that there were no other holes in which she could be hiding, Von Staden admired her cleverness. This little rabbit knows her warren well, he thought. Now he would have to go back to the Golden Rose. The other one, the man, would be gone by now, of course. But a little chat with the proprietor might be useful to find out how much he knows about his patrons. He will know nothing, but if pressed hard enough, he might produce the bottle of Schnapps — the good stuff that he keeps under the counter. With luck, even some Steinhager. And with the Schnapps perhaps will also come some inspiration, which Von Staden knew was going to have to serve as the principal ingredient of his essentially negative report to Major Baker-Bates.

From 1917 until 1935, Brigadier General Frank “Knocker” Grubbs had been a first lieutenant in the United States Army. In 1935, despite the fact that everyone regarded Knocker Grubbs as just a trifle dim-witted, he had been promoted to captain, the rank he had held until Pearl Harbor. Only a national emergency, or, some said, a disaster, could have created the confusion that permitted General Grubbs to rise to his present rank; but rise to it he did, pinning on his single silver star in late 1944.

Some said that Knocker got to be a general because he knew all the right people. But others, and these were his detractors, and there were a legion or two of them, claimed that it was not only because he knew all the right people, but also because he knew all their dirty little secrets. And perhaps that was the real reason that Knocker, although not really very bright, had wound up in intelligence.

Whatever the reason, Knocker Grubbs was determined to retire as a general. He had only one year to go until his thirty were up, and after that, as he often told his wife, “Fuck ’em. We’ll go back to Santone and drink Pearl beer at the Gunther and raise quarter horses.” Knocker Grubbs, like all men, had his dreams — and his nightmares. His recurring nightmare was that he would be recalled to Washington and reduced to his permanent rank of major. The difference between the retirement pay of a major and that of a one-star general was considerable, and when Knocker had nothing better to do, which was often, he would calculate the difference on the back of an envelope with a kind of morbid fascination. He always burned those envelopes, of course. Knocker Grubbs wasn’t a total fool.

Now fifty-three and in what, as he always told his disbelieving wife, was his prime, Knocker, from his pleasant sixth-story office in the Farben building, directed half of the Army counterintelligence efforts in the U.S. Zone of Occupation. The other half was directed down in Munich by some pantywaist colonel with fancy notions who, before the war, had done postgraduate work at Heidelberg — at the fucking Army’s fucking expense, Knocker often told his cronies.

The Colonel in Munich might be a pantywaist, but he was also smart, and this had worried Knocker until he remembered that generals could chew out colonels. And one thing Knocker Grubbs had learned and learned well during his twenty-nine years in the Army, and that was how to chew ass.

He had once spent two hours upbraiding the Munich Colonel with vivid epithets culled from Cavalry days, and the results had been delightful. So now that was what Knocker did most of the time. He chewed ass. He was good at it, he enjoyed it, and he dimly perceived that it was the one perfect disguise for his own shortcomings, of which, he was just smart enough to realize, there might be a few.

The ass that Knocker was chewing that afternoon wasn’t a colonel’s, but it was almost as good because it belonged to a Limey major. To add to the Major’s discomfort, an American lieutenant was serving as witness — a Yid lieutenant at that.

“Now, let me just get this straight, Major,” General Grubbs said as he rubbed his bald head — a gesture that for some reason he thought might make him look harmlessly puzzled. “You were at the bar at the Casino, having a drink, minding your own business, and this guy comes up, this American major, just promoted, he said — except that he wasn’t no American major, he was this shit Oppenheimer, and you mean to sit there and tell me you actually bought the cocksucker a drink?”

Baker-Bates sighed. “In point of fact, General, he bought me one.”

“He bought you one,” the General said, packing his tone with incredulity.

“A Scotch and soda.”

Knocker Grubbs nodded slowly several times. He had a big chunk of a head, still vaguely handsome, with small, very pale blue eyes that looked stupid, the way some very pale blue eyes do. His best features were his strong nose and chin, which rescued his profile from not enough forehead and a wet, weak mouth. What was left of his hair was a smoky gray.

Grubbs stopped nodding, but kept his voice full of amazement. “And so you just stood there, bellied up to the bar with this Kraut killer that half the Army is looking for, and you and him just bullshitted each other: have I got it right, Major?”

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid that you do.”

“And you couldn’t tell from his accent that he wasn’t American?”

“He had no German accent.”

“None at all?”

“None that I could detect, General. But he had two American accents. One was what I suppose could be called American standard, and the other was Texan.”

“How the fuck would you know what a Texan talks like?”

“Are you from Texas, General?”

“Amarillo.”

“Actually, sir, he spoke very much the way you do.”

“Like I do?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re not trying to be cute, are you, Major?”

“Only accurate, General.”

“I’d hate to think that you were trying to be cute. I don’t know what they do with majors with funny little cocksucker mustaches who turn cute in your army, mister, but I know what they do with them in mine. And I’ll tell you one more thing, fella; you’re goddamned lucky you’re not under my command.”

“Yes, sir, I would think that I am. Lucky, that is,” Baker-Bates said, and decided that Knocker Grubbs wasn’t quite real.

“So you two, you and this Kraut killer, parted the best of pals, right? And then you sat down all by yourself in the American officer’s club and had a nice, hot American meal, and maybe smoked a couple of American cigarettes and then when all that was done, you wandered over to see Lieutenant Meyer here, maybe an hour later, and that’s when you found out you’d been boozing it up with the Kraut killer that everybody’s looking for. And that’s when you told the Lieutenant here that maybe it might be a good idea to seal off the complex on account of this crazy Kraut killer you’d just had a friendly drink with might still be killing an hour or two hanging around the PX or the Class Six Store, right? Except that he’d long skipped, and we’ve got fuck-all ideas about where he skipped to. Are those the facts, Major? I wanta be good and goddamned sure I got the facts right for the report I’m gonna have to send your CO.”

“Your facts, sir, are essentially correct.”

“How ’bout you, Lieutenant: you think I’ve got the facts right?”

“Yes, sir: except that we’re having copies made of Oppenheimer’s photograph, and we’ll distribute them throughout the Zone.”

“You know what they call that down in Texas?”

“No, sir, I don’t,” Lieutenant Meyer said, wondering how long this dimwit was going to continue with his reaming out of Baker-Bates — who, in Lieutenant Meyer’s estimation, had slyly got in a few licks of his own, especially that one about the Texas accent.

“Well, I’ll tell you what we call it down in Texas,” Knocker Grubbs said. “We call it locking the barn after the horse is gone.”

“Gosh, sir, that’s vivid,” Lieutenant Meyer said.

“They don’t say that in England, do they, Major?”

“Not recently, General,” Baker-Bates said.

“Well, I’m gonna tell you one final thing, sonny. You’re down here because Berlin wants you down here. But you fuck up one more time, and Berlin or no Berlin, I’m gonna have your sweet ass for Sunday breakfast. Do I make myself clear?”

“Quite clear, General,” Baker-Bates said. “In fact, extremely so.”

“Dismissed,” the General snapped.

Baker-Bates and Lieutenant Meyer rose.

“Not you, Lieutenant,” Knocker Grubbs said with a mean smile. “Hell, I haven’t even half started with you yet.”