Up in Honey's Room

Seventeen

Bohdan came in the kitchen with Dr. Taylor’s glass, empty but with dregs, a maraschino cherry, orange rind and bits of melted ice Bo dumped in the sink. He said to Vera fixing a cheese tray, “The doctor’s turning into a chatterbox. He said the most I’ve ever heard come out of him at one time. All by himself in the parlor reading Collier’s, he licks his thumb getting ready to turn a page, very deliberate about it. He hands me his empty glass, he says, ‘I’ve told Vera a hundred times sweet cherries simply don’t agree with me.’”

“I forgot,” Vera said. “I forget everything he tells me almost instantly.” She repeated, “‘I’ve told Vera sweet cherries simply don’t agree with me.’ What’s that, ten words? It’s about average for him. Unless he’s telling us what the Jews are cooking up.”

“You left out he’s told you a hundred times, that makes thirteen words, but I haven’t come to the good part. Really, he couldn’t seem to shut up. I took the glass and said, ‘Doctor, it will be my pleasure to fix this one myself.’ He looked up and did a doubletake. I turned to walk away and he said, ‘Bohdan?’ with that sort of British accent he puts on, though not all the time. He waited for me to turn to him and said, ‘You look very handsome this evening. You’re doing something different with your hair?’ I said no, it’s the same, and shook my head so my hair would bounce around. I said, ‘How do you like this outfit on me? It’s pure cashmere.’ He said, ‘Oh, you’re wearing a skirt,’ as if he’d just noticed. I said, ‘Do you like it?’ He said, ‘It’s very chic, I like it with the sandals.’ He asked me to turn around, but didn’t say anything about my fanny.”

“His drug must be kicking in,” Vera said. “I told you he takes Dilaudid. That druggist, the one who flirts with me, said it’s more potent than morphine. The doctor prescribes it for a physical infirmity, his gallstones.” Vera was cutting wedges of hard and soft cheese for the tray, with soda crackers. “Walter will pout because there’s no King Ludwig beer cheese, or Tilsit.”

“There’s Tilsit in the fridge.”

“That’s mine, I’m not putting it out.” She said to Bo, “You decided against the black dress.”

“I love it, but it’s not me. The shoulder pads. I look like a footballer in drag.”

“This way you’re a little boy in drag. The pearls would look nice.”

“I’m easing the group into what I might do more often. Oh, Jurgen came down. He’s wearing his sports coat but no tie in sight. He could use a scarf, or one of my bandanas. I introduced him to Taylor. The doctor rose to his feet and saluted.”

“The Nazi salute?”

“The snappy one. But then looked embarrassed, sorry he’d tried it. Jurgen gave him a rather pleasant nod. He’ll have a whiskey with ice, no ginger ale. I’ll take care of the doctor.”

“I’m waiting for Joe Aubrey to see you,” Vera said. “Walter called. Joe took the train this time. Walter, his faithful comrade, met him at the station. I don’t understand their friendship, Joe is so crude.”

“But he’s the one with money.”

Vera closed her eyes and opened them. “I can’t imagine kissing him.”

“But if it gets you what you need-be brave, it won’t hurt you. Take off your dress and ask if he’ll make out a check payable to something German, Dachau? They need funds too, you know, repair the gas chambers, do a little redecorating.”

“In what amount?”

“One hundred thousand simoleons. Life will be bliss for at least ten years.”

“This is too spur of the moment.”

“Vera, take off your undies and get out the invisible ink. The bedroom’s dark. He writes in whatever amount the cheap fuck wants in invisible ink and we write over it what we want.” Bo said, “Listen, why don’t you seduce him tonight?”

“Please-”

“He’s here. He goes home, how do you get to Griffin, Georgia? Ask him to stay. You want to talk to him about going into some business, wigs, expensive wigs made of human hair. I see the little Oriental girl crying as they cut off her beautiful hair. Tell Mr. Aubrey I’ll drive him to Walter’s after, ‘after’ being whenever you’ve finished with him. He won’t stay the night, knowing Walter would give him the silent treatment, not offering a word, but willing to give his left nut to know what happened. So when you’re through fucking Mr. Aubrey, let me know.”

“Please, I don’t like you to use that word.”

“I love it when you’re a prude. You can’t say the word but go wild doing it.”

Jurgen stood with his drink waiting for Walter to arrive and deliver his statement, his plan, whatever it was, to a gathering of ersatz spies, Vera the only genuine one, a paid-at least at one time-espionage agent of the Abwehr, but never with her heart in it. She’d said to him last night, “There is nothing I can do for your people, it’s too late.” She said, “To tell you the truth I would have been more comfortable working for the British a few years ago, in 1938, ’39, when Germany began taking whatever it wanted. I’ve had to rationalize like mad to send information to Hamburg, trying to help the cause of your Führer.” Vera said, “I’ve given up. Still, I don’t want you to be caught. You’re here because Walter can’t be responsible for you and work on his plan. That’s the reason he gave me.”

“It’s enough,” Jurgen said. “But once I meet your associates I can’t risk staying. I don’t know these people.”

She told him about Dr. Michael George Taylor, an obstetrician who saw quite a number of German women in his practice. “He tells them, goes to their ladies’ groups and tells them about the tremendous leap forward the Nazis have made in the history of man. He doesn’t say what they’ve done for women, if anything. He loves Germany because he hates Jews. Don’t ask him why, he’ll recite his speech on the international Jewish conspiracy. I think what he tells anyone who will listen is seditious rather than treasonable, though he did give me information, at least a year ago, about a nitrate plant in Sandusky, where he’s from originally, in Ohio. In the late thirties the doctor lectured on Mein Kampf for ladies’ clubs. Imagine the glazed expressions on the faces of the women.” Jurgen smiled and Vera said, “Yes, but Dr. Taylor doesn’t try to be funny. He’s serious, he’s afraid, he worries. If he’s arrested I’m quite sure he’ll give us up.” She said, “Did you ever read Mein Kampf?”

“I’ve never felt it necessary.”

“Last summer in my backyard the doctor pissed on the American flag. No, he set fire to it and then pissed on it.”

“To extinguish the flame.”

“The fire was out,” Vera said. “I think he simply had to piss.”

He liked Vera and liked being with her; she was warm to him. He knew if he stayed she would take him to bed before long. Unless Bohdan was providing the love, the going-to-bed love. At this time he liked Bo and admired his skirt and sweater, like a baby step into pure decadence, if that’s what he wanted to do. Jurgen hadn’t yet made up his mind about Bo. What all his duties were. What he might be up to. It didn’t matter to Jurgen; he wasn’t going to wait around to find out.

He wished he could help Vera. Think of something she could do with her life, use her personality in some way, when the war was over. If she didn’t go to prison. Bo swore, kissing his Black Madonna holy medal, he had not told the G-men anything they could use against Vera. But Jurgen thought he must, from time to time, tell them things that happened. Good liars spoke in half-truths.

Walter came in with Joe Aubrey, they approached Jurgen and Joe Aubrey gave him a salute that was stiff, military, and told Jurgen meeting him was a special honor, something he couldn’t wait to tell his grandkids.

Jurgen said, “Oh, you have grandchildren.”

Joe Aubrey said, “My first wife was barren, my second wife frigid, and my third wife’s gonna get traded in she don’t have a duck in the oven by this time next year.”

“You could see a doctor,” Jurgen said, “find out it isn’t your fault your wife can’t conceive.”

“All I have to see,” Joe Aubrey said, “is a good-lookin’ high yella, high-assed Georgia-Hawaiian in Griffin with a light-skinned boy looking dead-on like yours truly when I was a tad.”

Jurgen paused to make sure he understood.

“You’re his father.”

“Don’t say it too loud now.”

“You support him?”

“Twenty dollars every month. I told his mama, ‘You see he behaves. He’s going to that nigger college in Atlanta, Morehouse, when he’s of age.’”

Joe Aubrey looked off and then turned to watch Bo talking to Dr. Taylor.

“My goodness, will you get a load of Bo-Bo, finally showing he’s a girl at heart. Look, he even stands like a girl, one that’s kinda lazy.”

Now he was walking across the Oriental carpet in the middle of the sitting room to join Bo and Dr. Taylor, Aubrey saying, “Hey, Bo-Bo, you had knockers you wouldn’t be a bad-lookin’ broad, you know it?”

Now the doctor was telling Aubrey to leave him alone. “Why do you have to be so crass? Bohdan isn’t bothering you, is he?”

Joe Aubrey turns on the doctor, Jurgen thought and watched him do it, Aubrey saying, “What’re you, Doc, on the fence? Tired of looking up the old hair pie all day, so what’s the alternative? How ’bout a boy dresses like a woman, looks like a woman, acts like one . . . Doc, I know you have a wife name of Rosemary. How’s it work, you go either way?”

Dr. Taylor was saying something about his wife Jurgen couldn’t hear. He felt someone come up next to him. Vera.

“Why can’t he behave himself?”

“He holds Negroes in disdain,” Jurgen said, “but fathers a child by a Negro woman.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“He called the woman high yellow. If ‘yella’ means yellow.”

“You know what a mulatta is, or a quadroon?”

“Ah, I see.”

Vera started to move away and he touched her arm.

“Are you afraid Joe Aubrey will give you up?”

“Joe talks without hearing what he’s saying. He could give me up without realizing it. And Dr. Taylor . . . Dr. Taylor the drug addict.”

Jurgen listened, but now was distracted. He said, “Let me speak to your guests,” and walked across the room to join Vera’s spies: Bohdan with the palm of his hand to his mouth; Walter frowning with all his heart. Frowning when he told Jurgen he was being moved to Vera’s so Walter could concentrate on what he planned to do for the Führer. Still frowning as he admitted yes, Carl Webster had come to see him and lied, saying Jurgen and Otto had been caught and put back in the prison camp. Why? Jurgen said, “To confuse you. Get you to say no, we’re still free.” Jurgen could feel Carl coming closer in his cowboy boots, with each stride. He remembered Carl saying, “I like to hear myself walk.” Hardly ever saying what Jurgen expected. He missed talking to Carl, missed his company, this federal lawman from Oklahoma who believed Will Rogers was the greatest American who ever lived because there wasn’t ever anyone as American as Will Rogers. He was funny and dead-on accurate when he took shots at the government, and he was always a cowboy. Carl said, “You could tell he was the real thing by the hundred-foot reata he carried around, could do tricks with, throwing his loop over whatever you pointed to and never had to untangle it. Jurgen was thinking that if he ever saw Carl Webster again, even if Carl had him handcuffed, he’d ask him how one became a cowboy.

He heard Joe Aubrey telling the doctor, “The reason you don’t talk much ’less it’s about Jew boys, you know you sound like a woman. You use words like lovely and precious you never hear men saying. Or you come off creepy having all those drugs in your medicine cabinet.”

Jurgen reached them.

He said, “Gentlemen, Walter Schoen is ready to give his address. He’s going to tell you about all the women he’s been screwing for the past five years or so and give you their names. Vera will introduce Walter in a moment. Dr. Taylor, have a seat, please. Bohdan, if you’ll turn these chairs around . . . And, Mr. Aubrey, come with me, please. I want to see how you make your mint julep.”

“With rye? Are you kiddin’,” Joe Aubrey said, “and no mint? I swear, Vera’s the cheapest rich broad I ever met.”

Vera began with a quote from her predecessor assigned to Abwehr’s Detroit station, Grace Buchanan-Dineen.

“You will recall that when the Justice Department threatened Grahs with acts of treason, and she allowed them to plant a recording device in her apartment, Grahs said, ‘I was technically involved in the spy ring, yes, but I never considered myself morally guilty.’”

The statement made no sense to Vera. If turning in her spy ring wasn’t an immoral act, what was? It was a cheap out, getting the woman twelve years instead of a rope around her neck. Still, Vera used the quote. She made herself say to the group seated in her living room, there was no reason for any of us to feel moral guilt, fighting the good fight, working for the cause of National Socialism. But, she said, as the end of the war draws near, our efforts have proved to be, well, insufficient, despite the Führer’s inspiration, Vera said, wanting to bite her tongue. Even our brave saboteurs, two months from the time U-boats put them ashore, were tried by a military court and convicted. Six of our fellow agents were hanged, the remaining two, the informers, languish in prison. Vera had to pause and think before telling them the indictment against the thirty defendants last year for sedition ended with prison terms. We are told we have a right to free speech, but when we stand up for the truth, say that Communists control the American government, that Franklin Roosevelt, the cripple, gets down to kiss the ass of the midget Josef Stalin, we are imprisoned.

“I recall one of the defendants in that trial,” Joe Aubrey said, “invented what he named a ‘Kike Killer,’ a short round club that came in two sizes, one for ladies.”

Maybe she could get him to write the check and not have to kiss him or do anything else.

“This evening,” Vera said, “could be our last meeting. There are no recording devices in my house, or any one of us likely to inform on the others, despite the ruthless efforts of the Justice Department. Let’s refill our glasses, toast our future”-looking at Walter now-“and hear what our Detroit version of Heinrich Himmler is so anxious to tell us. Walter?”

They had turned off Woodward and were creeping along Boston Boulevard, the street divided by a tree-lined median and big, comfortable homes on both sides.

Honey said, “I can’t read the house numbers.”

“The one with two cars parked in front,” Carl said. “The Ford belongs to Walter,” the cars shining in the streetlight, “and a Buick.”

“That’s all?” Honey said. “What about the one we’re coming to?” Another Ford, three houses from Vera’s on the same side of the street.

“That’s FBI surveillance.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s where you’d park to watch the house.”

They crept past the car, Honey sitting taller to have a look at the black four-door sedan.

“There’s no one in it.”

“I’ll bet you five bucks the house is under surveillance.”

“Okay, turn around, and we’ll go back.”

Now she was telling him what to do. At the Paradiso, the restaurant, she kept telling him what to order, like the collards. In charge now since he’d chickened out. Would not jump on her when she showed him her bare breasts, Jesus, using them like a buck lure, and they’d gone out to eat instead of falling in bed. She didn’t act pissy or disappointed, she was making fun of him by giving him orders. Carl turned at the next opening in the median and started back toward the house. Now she told him, “Park behind Walter’s car.”

“What’re we doing?”

“I thought we’d drop in on the meeting.”

Carl pulled to the curb and stopped.

“You believe they’ll invite us in?”

“Don’t you want to see Jurgen?”

“When they tell me I can pick him up.”

“What if he’s gone by then?” She said, “You know what? I’ll say my ex-husband asked me to stop by and I brought a friend. We’d never met any spies before.”

Carl said, “You’re having fun, aren’t you?”

“Or, I’ll go in and you can wait here.”

“How about this,” Carl said. “You get out of the car you’re on your own.”

Honey got out and stood holding the door open.

She said, “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” Closed the door and waved her fingers at him in the window.