The Eighth Dwarf

6

His papers said that he was a journeyman printer. The papers were tightly wrapped in yellow oilskin tied with stout string and were now pressed against his lean stomach by his belt. The papers also said that his name was Otto Bodden, that he had been born in Berlin thirty-nine years before, and that his political preference was the Social Democratic party, a preference which had cost him five years in the concentration camp at Belsen.

He had been a printer. That much was true. And he had been born in Berlin and grown up there. That was not only true, but also necessary, because the people around Lübeck distrusted Berliners — despised them, really — and could recognize them in a second by their gab as well as by their figuratively big noses which they were always poking into places that didn’t concern them. Berliners were Prussians. Wisecracking Prussians, perhaps, but still Prussians.

As for the name, well, Otto Bodden would serve as well as any. There had been many names since he had taken his first alias thirteen years before. He tried to remember what that first one had been. It came to him after a second or two. Klaus Kalkbrenner. His lips twitched into a smile as he crouched in the trees and studied the three early-morning anglers across the canal. Young Klaus Kalkbrenner, he remembered, had been something of an idiot.

He had no watch, so he had to depend on the sun. He turned to examine it. It was already up, but not quite enough. It would be a few more minutes until the patrol came along. He turned back to continue his study of the fishermen across the canal. One of them had caught something; not a bad-sized fish; a carp perhaps, although Bodden wasn’t at all sure whether carp swam in the Elbe-Trave Canal.

He adjusted the rucksack on his back which contained his one coat and the shirt and trousers he would change into once he made it across the canal. They too were all wrapped up in oilskin. No spare shoes or socks, though. That would have been overdoing it, because no refugee printer would have an extra pair of shoes. He would have sold them by now, or traded them for something to eat.

He turned for another look at the sun. Ten more minutes, he estimated. Turning back, he fished out his last cigarette. It was an American cigarette, a Camel. They had given him a pack of them in Berlin a week before, and he carefully had made them last until now. American cigarettes were another thing a refugee printer wouldn’t have. He wondered what the black-market price for an American cigarette was in Lübeck: three Reichsmarks; four? It had been five in Berlin.

He took a match from one of the three left in the small waterproof steel canister and struck it against the sole of his shoe. He lit the cigarette and pulled the smoke down into his lungs. He liked American cigarettes. He liked their names, too: Camels, Lucky Strikes, Old Golds, Chesterfields, Wings. For some reason, Wings didn’t bring as good a price on the Berlin black market. He wasn’t sure why. He pulled in another lungful of smoke, held it down, and then luxuriously blew it out. It was his first smoke in three days, and he could feel it — a slight, pleasant, dizzying sensation.

Someone had once told him that the Americans used treacle to cure their tobacco. He wondered if that was true. He also wondered how good his English really was. He had learned it in Belsen from a Pole. The Pole had been a very funny fellow who had claimed to have once lived in Cleveland and had assured Bodden that the English he was being taught was the American kind. The Pole had had a lot of amusing theories. One of them was that Poles made the world’s best fighter pilots. That’s the problem with us Poles, he had once told Bodden. All our politicians should really have been fighter pilots.

There wasn’t much left to his cigarette now. A few centimeters. Regretfully, Bodden took one last puff and ground it into the dirt with his shoe. He heard them then, the patrol. One of them was whistling. That was how it was supposed to be.

Well, here goes nothing, he said to himself in English. That had been one of the Pole’s favorite phrases, which he had also guaranteed to be proper American usage. In fact, it was the last thing he had ever said to Bodden that April morning in 1944 when they had led the Pole away to be shot or hanged. Hanged probably, Bodden decided. They wouldn’t have wasted a bullet on a Pole. Gniadkiewicz. That had been the Pole’s name, Bodden remembered. Roman Gniadkiewicz. A very funny fellow.

Bodden took a deep breath, scuttled out of the trees and across the path, and slipped into the canal with a small splash. Christ, it was cold! He heard the Russian patrol shout Halt. How the hell do you halt when you’re swimming? he wondered. They were supposed to shout it three times, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening — for the British especially; but a lot of the Russians were dumb bastards, farm boys who might not be able to count that high. So Bodden took a deep breath and dived underwater just as the first rifle cracked.

When he came up, they were still shooting at him — well, almost at him. A bullet smacked into the water less than a meter away, far less, and Bodden dived under again. A show-off, he thought as he used a breaststroke to swim the last few meters. One of them had to be a show-off.

When he came up again, he saw that he had come up right where he had wanted to — not far from the three German fishermen, who stared down at him as he treaded water, blowing and sputtering.

“Well, what have we got here?” said one of the anglers, a man of about sixty.

“A very wet fish,” Bodden said.

“Maybe we ought to throw him back,” the old man said as he put down his pole. The other two men laughed. They were old too, Bodden saw; somewhere in their late sixties.

The first old man came over to where Bodden still treaded water. He knelt down and stretched out his hand. He was a big, still-powerful old man, who barely grunted as he hauled Bodden up and onto the bank of the canal. “There you are, Herr Fish,” the old man said. “Nice and dry.”

“Thanks,” Bodden said. “Thanks very much.”

The old man shrugged. “It was nothing,” he said, and went back and picked up his pole.

Across the canal, the three Russian soldiers were yelling at Bodden. He grinned and yelled back at them in Russian.

“What did you tell them, Herr Fish?” asked the old man who had dragged him out of the canal.

“I told them what their mothers do with the pigs.”

“You speak Russian?”

“Just enough to tell them that.”

The old man nodded. “Somebody should.”

Bodden looked around. There was no one in sight except the three old fishermen — and the Russians, of course, but they didn’t count. He took off his shoes first. Then he removed his knapsack and his wet shirt and squeezed the water out of the shirt. The three old men looked away politely while Bodden changed into the dry clothes.

When dressed, Bodden went over and squatted down by the old man who had hauled him out of the canal. “How far into the center of town?”

“A little over six kilometers — along that path there.” The old man gestured with his head.

“That fish you caught earlier — what was it?”

“You were watching?”

“From over there.”

“It was a carp.”

“That’s what I thought it was,” Bodden said. “A carp.”

It took Bodden a little more than an hour and a half to reach the center of Lübeck. Before the war it had had a population of about 100,000, but German refugees from the East and displaced persons from almost everywhere had swollen that figure to nearly double its prewar size. Some of this Bodden learned when he stopped several times to ask directions. The refugees and the DP’s flocked to Lübeck because it had been bombed only once, on Palm Sunday in 1942. The raid was supposed to have taken out the docks and the industrial belt, but instead it had wiped out about a third of the old city center.

“Because of Coventry, you know,” one old man told Bodden. “We hit Coventry; they hit us. Retaliation.”

The DP’s, Bodden learned, were mostly Poles and Latvians and Estonians, and nobody liked them. Many of them were thieves — clever thieves, one man said, who “lust after bicycles.” Whatever they stole often turned up on the black market which flourished in a small street that was pointed out to Bodden.

The street was called Botcherstrasse, and it seemed to contain not only the town’s black market but also its brothels. Because it led from Fischergrube to Beckergrube, which was on his way, Bodden took it. He found that one could buy almost anything for a price in that one short block. There were cigarettes, of course, mostly British, as well as coffee, meat, poultry, fats, and clothing. Bodden even found a pair of shoelaces, which he quickly bought from a Pole who brandished a thick wad of notes. Bodden had looked for two months in Berlin for a pair of laces without luck. The ones that he bought after the customary bargaining seemed new, probably prewar, and he felt lucky to have found them despite their exorbitant price.

From Beckergrube it was only a short walk to the newspaper plant on Königstrasse. It was a crowded, busy street packed with pedestrians and bicycles, and Bodden had to shoulder his way to the entrance of the Lübecker Post. The street floor was given over to a job printing shop, and after inquiries Bodden was sent to the director’s office on the second floor.

He had to wait, of course. The Herr Direktor was a busy man, with many important affairs and responsibilities that commanded his time, but if Bodden would care to wait, it was just possible that he would be granted an audience, although a brief one.

The director’s secretary hadn’t asked him to sit while he waited, but Bodden sat anyway, in a straight-backed wooden chair. He sat for fifteen minutes, almost without moving, and then crossed his legs. The secretary was a stern-faced woman of about forty, skinny almost to the point of emaciation, who pounded away industriously on an old typewriter. The telephone rang four times while Bodden waited the first fifteen minutes; five times while he waited the second fifteen.

Three minutes later, he was shown into the presence of the director, Dieter Rapke, who, Bodden thought, was too young for the self-important air that he gave himself. At forty-two, Rapke looked like a man whom the war and its aftermath had cheated out of middle-aged plumpness. He had a round head that by now should have been growing some double chins, but wasn’t. It gave him a curiously unfinished look. When times get better, Bodden thought, that one will eat.

Rapke peered up at the man who stood before his littered desk. He didn’t ask the man to sit down. It didn’t occur to him. After a moment he took off his rimless glasses, polished them with a handkerchief, and put them back on.

“So,” Rapke said, “you are a printer.”

“Yes,” Bodden said, “and a good one.”

“From Berlin.”

“From Berlin.”

“There is no work for a printer in Berlin?”

“There is always work for a printer in Berlin provided he doesn’t care what he prints. I care.”

“So you came West.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“Across the canal?”

“Yes.”

“You experienced no difficulty.”

Bodden shrugged. “I got wet. And they shot at me.”

“Your papers.” Rapke held out his hand.

Bodden took out the oilskin pouch, untied the string, and handed his papers over. Rapke studied them methodically. At the third document, he looked up at Bodden again. “So. You were in a camp.”

“Belsen.”

“How long?”

“From 1940 on.”

Rapke went back to his study of the papers. “It must have been hard.”

“It was no holiday.”

“You look fit enough now.”

“I’ve had a lot of outdoor exercise recently.”

“Doing what?”

“Clearing rubble. There is a lot of it in Berlin. I helped clean some of it up. Before that I worked as a printer for the Russians. But I decided I’d rather clean up rubble.”

Rapke started making notes of some of the information contained in Bodden’s papers. “We have nothing here,” he said as he wrote. “Nothing permanent, that is. Only temporary. One of our employees, a printer, was attacked by a band of DP’s two days ago. Poles probably. They stole his bicycle. And broke his leg. He’s an old man, so I’m not sure when he will return. But if you’re interested, you can have his job until he does.”

“I’m interested,” Bodden said.

“Very well,” Rapke said, handing back the papers. “You will report to work at seven tomorrow morning. I have some of your particulars here, but you should give the rest to my secretary, Frau Glimm. And be sure to register with the police.”

“Yes, I will,” Bodden said. “Thank you, Herr Rapke.”

Rapke didn’t look up from the notes he was still making. Instead, he said, “Please close the door on your way out”

When Bodden had gone, Rapke reached for the telephone and placed the trunk call himself. It was to a large country house located some fifteen kilometers north and west of Lübeck. A male voice with a British accent answered the phone on the second ring.

“Colonel Whitlock’s office; Sergeant Lewis speaking.”

Summoning up what little English he had, Rapke said, “Here is Herr Rapke. I wish with Colonel Whitlock to speak.”

“One moment, please,” Sergeant Lewis said.

The Colonel came on speaking an idiomatic, though strongly accented, German, and Rapke let his breath out. Rapke found speaking English a trying business, one which he did so badly that it made him sweat. He was so grateful to be speaking German that he forgot to elaborate conversational niceties he usually employed when talking to the Colonel.

“He came,” Rapke said. “Early this morning, just as you said.”

“Calls himself Bodden, does he?” the Colonel said.

“Yes. Yes. Bodden. Otto Bodden.”

“And you hired him, of course.”

“Yes, yes, just as you instructed.”

“Good work. Rapke. Perhaps he will even turn out to be a competent printer.”

“Yes, that is to be devoutly wished. Now, is there anything else that I am to do?”

“Nothing,” the Colonel said. “Absolutely nothing. You will treat him exactly as you would treat any other temporary employee. Is that clear?”

“Yes, naturally.”

“And one more thing, Rapke.”

“Yes.”

“Keep your mouth shut. Is that also clear?”

“Yes,” Rapke said. “Most clear.”

After Rapke had hung up, the Colonel asked Sergeant Lewis to have Captain Richards come in. A few moments later Richards came in, filling his pipe, and sat down in a chair before the Colonel’s desk. The Colonel watched bleakly as Richards went through the ritual of lighting his pipe. The Colonel didn’t mind pipe smoking. He smoked himself, cigarettes; chain-smoked them, in fact. But all that business of filling a pipe and tamping it down and lighting it and then knocking it all out somewhere, it really was a bloody nuisance.

“Rapke called,” Colonel Whitlock said.

The Captain nodded and went on with the lighting of his pipe.

“He’s across,” the Colonel said.

The Captain nodded again. “Came across this morning about seven. They even shot at him. Or toward him. Three fishermen were there. They saw it.”

“Rapke hired him.”

“Good. Does he call himself Bodden?”

“Mm. Otto Bodden.”

“I’ll let Hamburg know.”

“Yes, do that,” the Colonel said. “And you should ask them how long we might have to keep an eye on this fellow before that major of theirs arrives. What’s his name?”

“Baker-Bates. Gilbert Baker-Bates.”

“Coming from America, isn’t he?”

“From Mexico, sir.”

“Same thing,” the Colonel said.