Winter Sniper: A World War II Novel

Chapter 8

“You want anything?”

Eva watched as Colonel Carl Fleischmann slipped out of bed to pour himself a drink. It was so cold in her bedroom that he was instantly covered in goose bumps. She appraised his nude body as he crossed the room, floorboards popping under his heavy step. Fleischmann was a big man, over six feet tall. Naked, his skin pale and white, he could hardly be mistaken for an outdoorsman. But Eva noticed that his arms and shoulders were well-toned for a forty-something man who sat at a desk all day, mainly because he was a fanatic about doing fifty push-ups twice daily. He often did them in front of her — to show off as much as anything. For the colonel, exercise and vanity went hand in hand. Sometimes he had Eva lay on his back while he did push-ups. He could not do as many then, but he was still shockingly strong.

A rather unpleasant roll of flab gave him a rounded belly and then gathered steam at his love handles. Eva was surprised at the potbelly because from what she had seen, his diet consisted of alcohol and cigarettes. But like many things about the colonel, his excess flesh was deceptive. She knew he did twice as many sit-ups each day as he did push-ups, and beneath the flab his abdominal muscles were rock hard.

Properly dressed, Fleischmann did possess dark good looks, she reluctantly admitted to herself, almost like a Jewish Clark Gable. Dark hair and stormy eyes. The trouble was that he was well aware that he was handsome and it made him cruel toward women. Her eyes slipped lower, taking in his ivory buttocks and hairy legs. He was circumcised and his vaguely purple member, shrunken into its nest of pubic hair, resembled a hunk of cold, carved meat.

Eva had been about to say no to the drink, but then changed her mind. “Vodka,” she said. A drink always helped when she had to be with him.

Fleischmann brought the drinks and slid back under the covers. He handed her a glass, and then reached out to tweak one of her nipples. She winced at his cold touch.

He laughed at that, took a drink.

Eva downed her vodka, letting the heat of it flow through her naked body. Then she propped herself up on an elbow and turned toward Fleischmann. They had been too busy during the last hour to talk.

“You have not been to see me,” Eva said, putting a note of complaint in her voice. “I hope they are not working you too hard at the War Department.”

“There’s been a lot going on,” the colonel said in a self-important tone. “I’ve been working a lot of late hours.”

Eva knew that the colonel was highly placed in the War Department and privy to most of what took place there — although she guessed that he was not as vital to operations as he would have her believe. She had found that while civilian men tended to lie about how much money they earned in an effort to impress, military men — who never made much money — preferred to lie about their own importance.

Fleischmann told her enough to be useful, so that was all that mattered. He shared all sorts of office gossip and discussed the day-to-day politics of the Office of Special Services or OSS. Fleischmann had a wife and family somewhere in New Jersey. She had an inkling that the Fleischmanns were nicely set up thanks to his wife’s money — not his military pay. Eva suspected that she had taken on the role that many wives had at the end of the day, listening as their husbands unburdened themselves. She did her best to listen intently, even to the useless stuff. As for Fleischmann, he was living out the male fantasy of having a wife in a distant city and a mistress to take care of his more immediate needs. The best of both worlds.

Eva allowed herself a small smile. Fleischmann was smart — the trouble was that he knew it and spent most of his time trying to impress everyone around him. Little did he know that the nuggets of useful information he dropped often reached the German high command that very night. He never would have guessed that Eva was a spy — though she was careful never to let down her guard. She thought of Bruno Hess downstairs and wondered how the colonel would react if he knew there was a German agent in her house at that very moment. Not that she was about to wave him under Fleischmann’s nose.

“Will you be sent to Europe in the spring?”

Fleischmann looked at her with those dark eyes. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“It is just that — well, I have heard rumors about an invasion. I was worried you might have to go into battle —”

“I wouldn’t be afraid to go, if that’s what you mean,” he snapped, finishing his drink. “But I doubt I’ll be sent to England. There’s plenty enough to do here.”

England, but not Italy. There were two routes the Allied invasion could take — up through occupied Italy or across the English Channel to France. It was hard to defend so vast a front, so anything that helped determine where the Allies would strike enabled the Germans to fortify their defenses at the right location.

The colonel didn’t add anything else, and Eva did not press. He got out of bed and started to pick his clothes off the floor, where they had been scattered an hour before.

“Are you sure you can’t stay?” she asked. Eva waited until he had already pulled on his pants.

“Another night,” he said. Eva knew that Fleischmann’s wife called him every evening at odd times to make sure that he was at his apartment. The excuse that he was working late only went so far with Mrs. Fleischmann.

He paused and looked down at Eva, still propped up in bed. “Someday, Eva, I want you all to myself.”

“Carl —”

He shook his head and grinned. “I know all about the others. Do you think I’m a fool? I have plenty of money, Eva.”

You mean your wife has plenty of money, Eva thought. “I am happy enough,” she said.

“I can get you a nicer place than this. It’s no way for a movie star to live. Driving that old car. You can even turn up the damn heat.”

“I like it cold.”

He tugged on his shirt. “Cold? Hell, you could hang a side of beef in here. It’s not normal. I swear, I think it’s that damn German blood of yours. You’ve got ice in your veins.”

She forced a smile. “Come back and see me soon, darling. You can warm me up.”

With a grunt, he walked out, leaving the bedroom door wide open behind him. Eva was sure he had done it to annoy her.

She waited until she heard the colonel go down the stairs, and then listened for the sound of the heavy front door closing. He had a car parked out front. An engine started. By the time the car was pulling away, Eva was out of bed, wrapping a robe around herself. It was cold in the room. But heat cost money. Besides, maybe Fleischmann was right about there being ice in her veins.

Zumwald spent his first few days in Washington living in terror of being found out. Every man in an overcoat might be a detective; every soldier in uniform was an enemy. For all he knew, every pretty girl or waitress was a spy waiting to snare him.

He found a cheap hotel, checked in, and seldom left except to eat a hamburger or buy a fresh supply of Westerns. He spent the hours reading, trying not to think too hard about his predicament.

Zumwald thought about giving himself up — although Americans hated the U-boats, he hoped he might face prison instead of a firing squad — but the thought of Bruno Hess stopped him. Hess wasn’t any hapless survivor of a U-boat sinking. If Zumwald gave himself up, he would have to tell the Americans about Hess. Giving himself up was one thing, but Zumwald wouldn’t drag another German soldier down with him. Anyhow, it wasn’t something the hero of a dime Western would do, and Zumwald liked to think that he was as good a man as some pulp fiction character.

What he soon discovered, however, was that no one was looking for him. He read the newspapers and saw no mention of U-351 or of a manhunt for survivors. He was puzzled by this at first, but came to realize that perhaps the government had its reasons for keeping the news quiet. The idea of U-boats off Delaware might not help convince the public that America was winning the war.

Manhunt or not, that didn’t mean Zumwald wasn’t afraid to open his mouth. He was sure his accent would give him away and that no sooner would he speak than whistles would start blowing. But Zumwald hadn’t read all those Westerns or watched all those movies for nothing. His English was pretty good — and as for his accent, he tried talking like a cowboy, slang and all. He tried it out on a waitress and she took him for an Australian. That afternoon, feeling brave, Zumwald went to the movies.

Sitting anonymously in the dark, Zumwald had an inspiration. Hess had given him hundreds of American dollars — if he was careful with the money he could live for a year or two. But why did he have to live in a Washington hotel room, and a dingy one at that?

The next morning, Zumwald bought a map of the United States. He spread it out on the thin cover of his hotel room bed, put a finger on Washington near the wide blue of the Atlantic, and then let his gaze wander over the expanse of paper that lay beyond. A muted rainbow of colors differentiated the states. He picked out landmarks: Appalachian Mountains, Mississippi River … Kansas! Texas! New Mexico!

His whole life he had read stories about cowboys and Indians, cattle drives and rustlers. If nobody was looking for him in Washington, there was even less chance that anyone would expect a German soldier to turn up in, say, Wyoming.

He folded up the map and put it under his pillow. He would stay in Washington a few more days — long enough to make sure that no one was looking for him. That night, Zumwald had a hard time getting to sleep. When he finally drifted off, all the colors of the map seemed to permeate his dreams.

Hess turned up the water as hot as it would go and let the heat soak through him until it felt like he was being scalded. The heat finally seemed to melt the cold that had settled into his muscles and bones after the U-boat went down and he had been forced, wet and hungry, to cross the Delmarva Peninsula.

When he finally climbed out of the water, the bathroom was filled with a vast cloud of steam. There were shaving things laid out on the sink, so he rubbed a spot clear on the bathroom mirror and attacked the stubble that had been growing since the U-boat left Germany. Finished, he splashed on some Mennen aftershave and felt its satisfying sting. Looking at his visage in the foggy mirror, he decided that this was the cleanest he had been in months.

He glanced around the bath and realized he had nothing to wear. His old clothes had gone — he hoped — to the rubbish bin, but there wasn’t so much as a robe to put on. Hess unlocked the door, then wrapped himself in his towel and ventured into the hall. It was like stepping from a sauna into a refrigerator.

He was surprised to find Frau Von Stahl standing just a few steps away, wearing a bathrobe and holding a stack of neatly folded clothing. With some embarrassment, he noted that the top garment appeared to be a pair of boxer shorts.

“I tried to set these inside the bath while you showered, but the door was locked,” she said in German. “Tell me, is that how German soldiers defend themselves these days — by locking the bathroom door?”

“One cannot be too careful,” he replied, reaching for the stack of clothes.

Eva took a step back, causing Hess to step off balance. He raised his eyebrows but made no further attempt at the clothes.

“Come with me,” she said.

She led him down the hall to her bedroom. Eva could smell Colonel Fleischmann’s cologne lingering on the air. She wondered what Hess thought about that. She put down the clothes and turned to face him. To her surprise, Hess was not looking at her but was busy inspecting the room. Eva’s boudoir was simple, but she spent so much time in the room that it was furnished almost as completely as a studio apartment. Besides the huge bed, there was an antique dresser made of chestnut and a matching vanity piled high with hairbrushes and perfume. The hardwood floor was partly covered by a soft carpet. The liquor cart stood in the corner — adding that had been Fleischmann’s idea — near two comfortable sitting chairs and a reading lamp. A neat stack of books and magazines was piled on the floor between the chairs.

The room was still very cold, but Hess appeared to be unaffected by the chill, even wrapped in a towel and fresh from the shower. He walked to the cart covered with bottles and poured himself a cognac from one of the more expensive bottles, then downed it in one smooth swallow. He refilled the glass without offering to pour one for her, and then came back to stand in front of Eva. She noted that he moved as gracefully as a cat, his bare feet not so much as making the old floorboards squeak.

Hess had shaved and now looked much younger. He was slightly built, thin across the chest and shoulders almost like a boy, but she could see taut ropes of sinew working under his skin. The muscles of his abdomen stood out in ridges on his flat belly just above the towel. An angry, red ridge of scar tissue cut across his belly and down his side toward his lower back, as if his flesh had been raked by a single claw.

“What do you want of me, Frau Von Stahl?”

Her hand trembled as she reached out to undo his towel, letting it fall to the floor. Hess did not respond, other than to stare at her with his strange, colorless eyes. She shivered as if she were the naked one.

She wondered if she had made a mistake, thinking she could manipulate him like the other men who came to her house. For the most part, she had found that the rational part of a man’s brain shut down as soon as he got a whiff of perfume and a taste of her on his lips. She took men by the balls — both literally and figuratively — and led them to tell her things they shouldn’t have. Eva knew that was her chief method as a spy.

She realized that all men could be dangerous to her in their own way, especially if they found out her secret, but there was something more elementally frightening about Hess. He was no bureaucrat. She had seen eyes like his on a falcon once, indifferent as it sat with its talons sunk deep into a hare. Eva had not been informed of his purpose in Washington, but she was sure it had something to do with Eisenhower. She understood that Berlin’s vague instructions were simply a way of creating another level of secrecy, but she found it maddening.

Berlin had hinted that she was to assist a saboteur, but Eva doubted that he had come to America to blow up train stations and power plants. A saboteur was really just an engineer who was good with bombs. He would have to be capable of fitting into crowds to plant his explosives. An anonymous man would make a good saboteur. Hess wasn’t like that. He had the eyes of a raptor.

Eva had vowed to know his real purpose in Washington before the night was through. Now she was not so sure that would happen. She and Hess stood facing each other as if sizing each other up.

Then Hess seemed to remember the glass of cognac in his hand. He sipped at it, savoring the flavor. Eva took the cognac from him and drank the rest, then set the glass on the dresser. She let her robe slip off.

She reached out and touched his chest. “Bruno —”

But Hess was not interested in talking. His experience with women consisted of a milkmaid back home before the war and then a few Slavic whores. As far as he knew, love was meant to be made quickly and forcefully. He took Eva by the shoulders and pushed her roughly onto the bed. Startled, she tried to shove him away, but Hess caught both her wrists in his left hand and pinned her arms above her head. She struggled, but it was no use. He was much stronger than he looked. He used his right hand to guide himself into her. A moan escaped Eva’s lips.

Each thrust carried Hess’s mind farther and farther away. The sheets might have been a clean white field of snow, the woman under him an ice queen. He was vaguely aware of her shuddering and crying out in a way that the whores never did. When he exploded inside her a fireball seemed to go off behind his eyes. He rolled off, panting, heart pounding.

“Mein Gott,” the woman beside him said, trying to catch her own breath. “That was, that was —”

“Sshhh,” Hess said. He rolled onto his side away from her. Eva spooned against him. Might as well cozy up to a fence post, she thought. There was nothing soft about Hess — every inch of him was bone or muscle.

“I can understand now why they sent you,” she whispered in his ear. “But why are you here, Bruno Hess?”

Hess did not answer. Eva waited a full minute, watching the rise and fall of his chest, before she realized that Hess had fallen asleep. She might have laughed — typical man — if she had not noticed how young he truly looked now. Eva felt a pang remembering how the years had seemed to disappear from her husband’s face when he slept. Kurt. He had been harsh and stern in his own way — an officer in the SS could be nothing less — but as a husband he was also capable of tenderness. What would Kurt think of her now? Eva forced the thought from her mind. He had given his life for Germany. Now she was giving her soul.

She leaned close to the sleeping man’s ear. “Hess? Bruno Hess?”

Satisfied that he was asleep, Eva slipped out of bed as quietly as she could. She put her robe back on. The clothes she had brought for him were scattered on the floor and she bent to pick them up and put them on a chair without bothering to refold them. She doubted that a few wrinkles would bother him.

Eva went out into the hallway. “Petra?”

The girl seemed to materialize out of the shadows. Eva wondered, not for the first time, if Petra was in the habit of listening at her keyhole. If so, she had just gotten an earful. “What is it, Frau Von Stahl?”

“What have you done with his clothes?”

“They are in the laundry room,” the girl said.

“Come,” Eva said.

The washer was in the cellar. They went down the rickety steps. Perhaps decades before, someone had made an attempt to whitewash the stone foundation walls, but moisture had turned the paint brown. Previous residents of the old house had left behind boxes and castoffs that Eva had not bothered to open, but they had cleared a path to the washer and laundry sink beneath the single bulb that struggled to illuminate the dingy space. More like a dungeon than anything, Eva thought.

She grabbed up Hess’s shirt. It was grimy and stank of sweat and salt. Eva nodded at the rest of his clothes. “Go through the pockets,” she ordered.

Their search turned a package of cigarettes, a book of matches, a jackknife. It was Petra who found the real prize in the back pocket of his pants. When she held up the billfold, Eva snatched it out of the girl’s hands. There were several American bills inside.

“Look at all that money,” Petra said, her eyes wide. “What did he do, rob a bank on his way here?”

Eva quickly counted out one hundred dollars and set it aside. She thought a moment, and then took out another twenty-dollar bill and handed it to Petra.

“He will know we took his money,” the girl said, but she made no effort to put it back in the billfold.

“We can use it,” Eva said.

The billfold also contained a Maryland driver’s license, nicely forged. The only other item was something hard wrapped in a tiny square of silk. Curious, Eva opened it to reveal an Iron Cross.

“A medal?” Petra wondered.

“The stupid fool,” she said. She shook her head. “Men and their medals. If he had been caught with his, he would have been hard-pressed to explain it.”

She considered the medal a moment, then carefully wrapped it up again and slid it deep into the billfold. She knew Hess would not say anything about a few missing dollars, but she did not dare take the medal.

Petra gathered up the clothes and dumped them in a pile. “That is all, Frau Von Stahl.”

“There was nothing else in the bath?”

“A pistol, which I left where it was. A knife. I left that too. Do you want me to get them?” Petra said nothing to Eva about the rifle in the kitchen. The girl did not doubt that Hess would keep his promise to hurt her if she revealed his secret to anyone. She had seen what the SS men were capable of in Poland.

“No, leave them. They won’t tell us anything, Petra.”

Petra felt better that she hadn’t said anything about the rifle. Maybe it did not matter.

Eva climbed the cellar stairs, leaving the girl to wash the clothes. She was disappointed that they had found nothing more than they had. She was hoping there might have been some clue to Hess’s mission. Perhaps he was a saboteur, after all, but she couldn’t help wondering what he planned to blow up using nothing more than a book of matches. What was he doing in Washington? This was her city now. One way or another, Eva was determined to find out what Hess was up to.