20 
20 Just as I sealed the letter to Rosemarie and told myself that Rosie was a nice kid and I’d always love her as a sister, Brigitta entered our offices and walked over to my desk. Back from the Bahnhof. She looked especially discouraged, even worried.
“Anything wrong?” I asked lightly.
Solemnly she opened her purse and put a dirty, much used #10 manila envelope on my desk.
“From Herr Albrecht. He knew I would be out at the Bahnhof, waiting for the train. He said to give it to you and tell you he was sorry, but he could not take care of the matter at this time. He added that he was very, very sorry and you were a nice man.”
I touched the envelope. Small objects inside. Pictures.
“Did he show you what was inside?”
“Of course not. I’m sure they’re pictures, however. What else would they be?”
“He’s a good man, a very good man.”
“I know.”
“He realizes he should not make any more false documents.”
“Oh, yes. Not till there are new men in your CID.”
“Is there a Frau Albrecht lurking in the back of the store?”
“She was killed in the raid on Dresden.”
“I see.”
So perhaps he was a good man for Brig if her husband did not return. How long would she wait?
“His work is excellent,” I said, unwrapping the shot of the Me 262. “Color, composition, everything.”
“What are you getting into, Chuck?” she demanded. “It must be dangerous.”
“Not really, thanks to Albrecht’s loyalty to a man who gave him twice what he asked for when he bought this picture.”
“You trying to get someone out of the American zone?”
“Something like that.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
For a moment I was tempted. Then I knew better. “I don’t think so, Brigie. It would put you at unnecessary risk.”
“I see. . . . Do they deserve to be saved?”
“Oh, yes. I wouldn’t be trying to get them the papers unless they did.”
She nodded. “I trust you, Chucky.”
“Good. Can you find me another person who does this kind of work?”
“I have thought of it. He is expensive.”
“That does not matter.”
“And very good.”
“Fine. Where is he?”
“Nein, I cannot tell you that until I see him and ask if he will do it for you. Perhaps I will know tomorrow. Do not rush me, Chucky. This must be done carefully.”
“I won’t challenge that.”
“Are these people Germans?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She rose to leave. “I must go home and cook supper. Do you wish to join us?”
“Love to, but I have my Advanced Accounting exam tonight.”
“I forgot.”
“Anything at the Bahnhof today?”
“One of the men from my husband’s regiment. He has not seen Kurt since before the battle of Kursk.”
“Doesn’t necessarily prove anything.”
“I know. I believe he’s still alive. But, somehow, I am less sure.”
Poor dear woman.
I picked up the envelope of photos and the envelope with my letter to Rosie and walked over to the exam. I made sure that none of the CID gumshoes were trailing me. My plan was still on track, more or less, but I could not figure out why Carpenter’s men would want to follow me. Maybe it was just an unlucky chance. Maybe they were staking out Albrecht’s place when I happened by.
But I was still uneasy about Carpenter. What was he up to? Why did he hate me so fiercely? Because I had a role in the law enforcement business that he wanted? Because I was Frau Richter’s confidant and an obstacle to his possession of her? Maybe either or both, but it still didn’t make much sense.
The exam was a breeze. When I had finished—first one naturally—I put the paper on the teacher’s desk and walked out of the room. At seven o’clock the sun was still high in the sky, and because of the humidity, the world was bathed in mellow gold.
I walked across the Regens to Untersandstrasse and found Trudi, home from work and clad only in her panties. She was embarrassed but also delighted by my gasp of wonderment.
“Let’s go take some pictures while the sun is up.”
“Ja, Karl”—she snuggled in my arms—“we take pictures when it is light and save the dark for other things.”
She put on sandals, a blouse with three buttons open, and a skirt, and we left the house.
I loved her so much when I was with her that I could not imagine ever giving her up. In those moments, even when we were not engaged in our sexual games, she was beautiful, fascinating, witty, intelligent. The perfect woman.
I take out the dry and cracked prints of the shots I made of her in 1947 and find that she has the same impact on me now as then. She is beautiful and mysterious. Only a child perhaps, but a child who has known the tragedies and sorrows of life. Nor can I believe that the glow in her eyes when she looks at me is bogus. She loved me too. She must have known that she didn’t have to seduce me to earn my help.
Maybe she was lonely too—and frightened and fragile—and wanted a little bit of warmth in her life.
So that evening, giggling and laughing all the way, we walked through the streets of Bamberg, she with her treasured Leica (“My father gave it to me for my eleventh birthday,” she would say sadly) and I with my prized Kodak. Sometimes we would change cameras and I would make shots of her and she of me. As I look at prints of that skinny, eighteen-year-old punk, I shake my head in astonishment. What could she have seen in me? Other than documents that would make her and her family free?
When we had run out of film, we went over to the island upriver from the town hall and my favorite beer garden in the park in front of the Schloss Geyersworth. Against the background of the nineteenth-century Schloss gleaming in the pink and rose light of the setting sun, a small band was playing Strauss waltzes, GIs and their girls were dancing, and waiters were dashing around with trays filled with beer steins and plates of sausage, a frolicsome, Oktoberfest atmosphere. Had there been a war? No one seemed to remember. Young men and women were having fun on a Friday night. Neither the past nor the future mattered much.
“It is beautiful, is it not?” Trudi asked me, her hand on mine. “Time stands still.”
“Time never stands still Trudi, but sometimes it is necessary to pretend.”
We were in no hurry to eat. So we danced while we were waiting for a waiter. I was not much of a dancer despite the praise of the women with whom I had danced. Trudi joined the chorus. “Karl, you dance so well!”
“Not all that well, but thanks, Trud.” I drew her even closer.
Her breasts now so familiar but yet always a surprise were clearly visible under the loose blouse and the open buttons. She was so, so beautiful. I was almost overcome with love. Not desire, though that was present too, but love. Or so I thought.
Mind you, our dance was relatively chaste compared to most of those in the beer garden. Many of the GIs were as close to sexual intercourse with their dates as one could be while still wearing clothes. Soon they will go home to America, I thought, and leave the girls behind without a thought about them and perhaps only the faintest memories. I would be different from the rest of them. Did the girls realize this? Probably, but they could hope it might be different, could they not?
We went back to our table and a waiter appeared. I ordered a beer for Trudi and “mineral water” for myself and four large sausages.
“I can eat only one,” she protested mildly.
“I know. The three are for me.”
“But you’ll get sick!”
“Not me. I have an iron stomach.”
While we were waiting for our food and drink, I put my hand under her skirt and caressed the inside of her solid thigh. She stiffened and bit her lip.
“You drive me out of my mind, Karl.”
“That’s the general idea. I’ll stop if you want me to.”
“Nein, please don’t stop.”
Then the sausages came and I had to cease my amusements and devote myself to eating.
“Good,” Trudi said as she munched on her sausage.
“Very good,” I replied, banishing thoughts of caviar from my head.
Halfway through the second sausage, I saw Special Agent Clarke on the other side of the garden, at a table by himself, swilling down beer at a rapid rate.
“Excuse me, Trud. I have a little politicking to do.”
I sauntered across the garden, ducking waiters and dancing couples.
“My respects, sir,” I said to Agent Clarke.
“Hi, sport,” he mumbled. “Nice dish you have with you.”
“Thank you, sir. She is a very intelligent young woman.”
“More than just intelligent, I’d say.” He winked. “Is she any good in bed?”
“I am not able to offer a judgment on that, sir.”
“How’s your search coming?” he asked with sudden sharpness.
“My team is searching in the town, sir. But it is difficult without the photo and the descriptions which are still in your possession.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he sighed. “I did promise them for tomorrow, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir, at fourteen-thirty.”
“Right, but tomorrow is Saturday, isn’t it, sport?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You guys work on Saturday?”
“Yes, sir. Till noon.”
But not many of us showed and practically none of us worked.
“Silly waste of time. . . . Well, I can’t imagine being up that early. Monday be all right?”
“That’s up to you, sir. But it will delay the search.”
“I’m in no rush, sport. See you Monday.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Most people round the Residenz knew that the beer garden on the Geyerworthstrasse was one of my hangouts, my only hangout as a point of fact. Agent Clarke could have found that out, from Carpenter, maybe, and come to check on me. Did he see any resemblance between Trudi and the girl in the picture? Was his lackadaisical manner merely a trick to deceive me?
I’d have to take my chances that he was as dumb as he seemed to be.
“Who is that man?” Trudi asked when I had settled down again at her table and began to finish off my second sausage.
“An American civilian government guy I have to work with. I thought it might be wise not to appear to be ignoring him.”
“You are so clever, Karl.” She laid her hand on mine.
“Not really. Just careful.” I switched the third sausage to my other hand and found her thigh again.
She caught her breath and then sighed contentedly. “He looks evil . . . and dangerous.”
“He drinks a lot. He may not be all that dangerous.”
Or then again, he may. Why would Agent Clarke come over to the island for his beer when he could get his gin at the Bambergerhof? To enjoy the lovely evening and watch the young folk at play? Somehow that didn’t seem much like Agent Clarke.
“He is the man who stays at the Bambergerhof, is he not?”
“Yeah, and it’s a good idea for you folks to keep away from him, but he’s not worth worrying about. . . . Want another beer?”
“Of course.”
I ordered the beer and the mineral water. Then she guided me to the dancing area and leaned against me as though she were giving herself completely over to me in trust and faith, a gesture of generosity and surrender rather than mere sexual invitation.
Damn it, she did love me!
The full moon had risen in the eastern sky, orange and huge. A harvest moon, Mom would have called it.
We drank our beer and mineral water at a leisurely pace, and I continued to amuse myself with her thighs, now both of them.
When she had finished her second beer, I asked her if she wanted a third.
“Karl, I want only to go home and make love with you. Now. I want to run home and give myself to you.”
“Then let’s go home now.”
Under the full moon we rushed back to her apartment. We didn’t exactly run, but we walked fast.
“Oh, Karl, my love, hurry!”
We were barely inside the building when she stripped off her blouse and skirt and handed them to me as we walked up the rickety stairs. As she opened the door of the apartment, she discarded her panties and threw them inside ahead of her. Then she began an assault on my clothes.
It was a violent night of sexual games, our best night yet. Trudi needed passion and I provided it for her in every method I knew. Sex, I had discovered, was as important for women as for men but in a different way. I filed that insight for future reference.
“Tomorrow,” she said when it was time for me to leave, “I will be with my mother and Erika all day. Then on Sunday we go to church together.”
“Good. I’ll see you on Monday.”
“You will go to church too?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good.”
It might indeed be a good idea. Since I was trying to get back in the good graces of the One in Charge and since I thought we might need His help desperately, I figured it couldn’t hurt.
Theoretically, we worked at Constabulary HQ on Saturday morning—and men were always on call in case of an emergency. There were few emergencies because Germans are, as I have said, a law-abiding people—until a demon takes over in their society and they turn crazy and kill millions of people, all the while, however, being obedient to what they take as the law, their laws of course.
My Saturday routine was to drop in for a few minutes to see if there was anything doing and then sneak out, which is more than what most of the officers would do. However today I went to work early with the hope that Brigitta might have news for me.
That Saturday as I walked into the Residenz, I met General Meade walking out. Off for a game of golf, no doubt.
“Anything on the FBI case, son?” he asked, barely stopping for an answer.
“Agent Clarke thinks he might be able to get the documents over to me by Monday afternoon.”
“Idiot,” he barked as he went out the door.
It was one more brick in the wall I was building around Agent Clarke, or perhaps around myself for protection against Agent Clarke.
“Brigie,” I said to that worthy, the only person to be seen in the huge office, “hard at work?”
She did not look up from her typewriter. “I am German, not American, so I must work when I am told to work.”
She was wearing her usual “uniform” of white blouse and dark skirt, this time summer-weight blue. The jacket of the suit was draped neatly over the chair next to her desk.
“Do you think anyone woule fire you if you didn’t show up today? Hell, Brigie, no one would know the difference. Who, besides me, could report whether you were here or not here?”
She stopped typing. “I am supposed to work on Saturday morning,” she said stubbornly.
fawohl, I thought.
“Tell you what: next Friday afternoon ask Captain Polly if she needs you on Saturday. She’ll seem surprised but will tell you no. Then ask her the next Saturday and she’ll say, if you’re needed on any Saturday morning, she’ll let you know. Do you want to bet against that scenario?”
Brigitta looked up at me, a faint smile on her lovely face. “I am so grateful that I do not want to take advantage of you Americans. But you are right of course. I should have figured it out for myself.”
“Yeah, well, you can always ask me.”
“I know, Chucky, I know.”
I thought she was going to weep and wondered what the hell I would do in response to that.
“So, did you find out anything about new papers?”
“Yes, there is someone who will do it. But he is strange. You will bring him the pictures and the money—five hundred American dollars. He will make the papers for you. When they are finished, he will tell me and I will tell you. He will not tell you his name and he does not want to know yours. Is that too much money?”
“No.” If need be, I could always borrow some money from my family for college. I didn’t want to, but I could.
“The arrangements are all right?”
“I’ll live with them. . . . How long will it take?”
“He would not tell me. He is a fine artist with etchings. He had a good reputation before the war, but then no one wanted etchings. He made reichsmarks. Some say he had been making them long before the war. The Nazis always suspected him, but they could prove nothing. It is also said he made reichsmarks for them too.”
“I presume he is making American dollars now.”
“I would be surprised if he wasn’t. The challenge would be too much to resist. Probably he makes only a few, enough to provide him with money.”
“And his friends?”
“He has no friends. . . . You are to knock on his door, then go in. It is always open. You tell him Brigitta sent you and give him the pictures. Then you leave. No joking, Chucky, and no buying anything like the picture you bought from Max Albrecht. This is a very serious business.”
“Sounds like it.”
“You will ask him how long. He will exaggerate, but do not push him or question him. He knows it’s urgent. Maybe towards the end of next week.”
I glanced at her calendar. Thursday was the fourteenth, Friday, the fifteenth—Mary’s Day in Harvest time. The old Celtic feast of Lugnasad.
“Where can I find him?”
“You know where the Evangelical church is?”
“Sure, down the street from your parish church.”
“You walk past it and turn right. There is tiny lane leading into a square of very old buildings. In the far corner of the square on the left, right at the corner, there is basement apartment. You can recognize it because there are always black shades on the window.”
“All right, when is this eccentric genius at home?”
“He’s home all the time. You will not interfere with his, ah, minting American dollars?”
“None of my business—not till too many of his products turn up. And I don’t know his name, do I?”
She smiled thinly. “No, you don’t.”
“Okay. Why don’t you show me the place when you go home?”
“I have much work to do.”
“Did Captain Nettleton say she wanted it first thing Monday morning?”
“No . . .”
“Then she doesn’t. She’d be horrified if she knew you were working on a lovely Saturday like this and with your two kids at home wanting to go on a picnic.”
She hesitated. “Are you sure it will be all right?”
“Positive.” I picked up her jacket and put it on her. She reached for her purse, jammed a number of things into it—lipstick, tissues, pen, and suchlike, slipped the papers into a desk drawer, and admired for a moment her empty desktop.
“Very neat, Frau Doktor Doktor,” I said, dragging her toward the stairs. “Now let’s go. Connie and Hank are expecting a picnic.”
“They bothered me all last night about a picnic,” she admitted.
We strolled across the Domplatz and down the narrow streets to the parish church. I stopped at a small toy shop to buy a couple of things for her kids.
“You should not do that,” she insisted. “You will spoil them.”
“I should bring them back?”
She smiled. “No, of course not.”
“You certainly know your way around this town. I ask for someone who might forge papers for me and you think of two almost at once.”
“It is my neighborhood.” She shrugged. “I should know it well.”
“Well enough to have any leads on the black market?”
“I could not tell you if I did know. I cannot betray my friends.”
“And if they were not your friends and they were hurting innocent children by stealing penicillin and charging prices their parents could not afford?”
“Then I might. But actually I know nothing. I try not to listen. My position is a difficult one.”
“All we would expect from you at Constabulary HQ is that you tell us when Germans are being hurt.”
“I will always do that.”
The trouble with being a person with her kind of conscience, especially if you’re Catholic, is that you end up having a lot of tough moral choices to make—and afraid to follow your instincts when they’re all you have, which is most of the time.
We went beyond the Pfarrkirche and worked our way through the narrow lanes that created a maze of medieval streets, almost a labyrinth. In trying to explore during my early days in Bamberg, I became thoroughly lost and wandered by the same buildings several times till I asked one of the locals how to get to the Domplatz. I made it on the second try.
This area had once been the clerical quarters for the staff of the parish church and their aides. There must have been a lot of both. Then we passed the Evangelical (Lutheran) church and entered an even smaller, tighter web of old buildings. The area was the dingiest and most run-down part of the Bishop’s City, the closest thing to a slum that Bamberg possessed.
As we walked, Brig chatted happily about her childhood and her family and her children. Then she fell silent.
“It will get better, Brig. This is just a transition. In a year or two at the most the American, British, and French zones will merge into a new country.”
“It will be fine when Kurt comes home,” she replied, her jaw set in grim determination.
What if anything would shake that faith?
Finally we turned a couple of corners, walked down a few lanes, and emerged into a tiny, dirty square with benches on which some elderly people sat. Despite the warm weather, no one else was in the square. The only occupants were pieces of paper floating occasionally in the summer breeze, like minor lost souls.
“Over there in the corner.” She pointed. “You can just barely see the stairs going to his shop.”
“Got it.”
“Good luck.”
“I’m going to walk you back home.”
“That will not be necessary. It is safe here in the neighborhood.”
“Regardless. I can find my way back.”
During our half-hour stroll from the Domplatz, I had been on the watch for gumshoes. No one in sight—unless they were a lot better than the agents who worked for Sam Houston Carpenter. I found my way out of the maze with only one correction from Brig.
When we arrived at her apartment, I gave her the bag of toys.
“You must come in for tea.”
“Thanks but no thanks. The kids want to get out into the country and so do you. Besides, I have work to do.”
“Be very careful.”
“Always; you know me.”
“That’s why I worry.”
She looked as if she might kiss me, but then, good, prudent frau that she was, she decided not to do it in public.
“You really have quite a harem, don’t you, sport? That one is a really classy babe.”
“Agent Clarke,” I said. “Good morning, sir.”
He was standing at the head of Brigitta’s street, just in front of the Pfarrkirche. Where had he come from and what was he doing here? I had paid little attention to possible tails since we left the square where the engraver’s shop was.
“Yeah, how come you’re so lucky?”
He was wearing a white shirt, without a tie, trousers with suspenders, and a Panama straw hat. He looked exactly like what he was, an American detective who had drunk too much for a long time, a character from a Raymond Chandler novel.
“She’s a colleague at the Residenz, sir. I accompanied her home because I had some toys to give her children.”
“Well, you weren’t all over her, like you were that kid last night.”
He smelled of gin already.
“Yes, sir.”
“Figured I should get a view of this city before I leave. Pretty sloppy, dirty old place, huh? Too bad we didn’t bomb out all this mess like we did in Frankfurt, isn’t it?”
I let that go.
“How’s the search coming?”
“My team continues its investigation, sir, but . . .”
“I know, I know, you need the documents I got. Take it easy. I promised them sometime Monday and I’m a man of my word.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be shoving off. I’m getting thirsty and that bar at the hotel isn’t all bad. Cool too.”
“Yes, sir. Enjoy your excursion.”
“That’ll be pretty hard in this dump of a town. See you, sport. Keep on enjoying your women while you’re young enough to have fun.”
What the hell!
Was Rednose Clarke much smarter than he appeared to be? Was he wearing a mask to fool me? What kind of game was he playing? Why did he keep turning up at places where I was? He couldn’t possibly be the stupid drunk that he pretended to be, could he?
Or maybe he was a good agent gone sour. In that case he was dangerous only because he had remnants of intelligence and instinct that could start to work at almost any time.
That was the best interpretation. The worst was that he was part of some massive plot involving Sam Houston Carpenter to do me in. But why me? Why use a sixteen-inch gun to swat a fly, albeit a pesky fly?
If they knew where the Wülfes were, why not sweep in and arrest them? Why dangle all of us on a string for a week or so? What more could they possibly hope to learn?
Maybe they were all just dumb. I had learned even then that the American government was permeated by incompetent people—as I would later learn so were all other governments. In fact, we were better than most.
So, hoping that the “stupid” explanation was the right one, I ambled back to the tiny, dingy square where the great counterfeiter lived. I made only a couple of bad turns and found the square on the second, well, the third, try. Before entering the square I checked out the lane behind me. No one. Then the square. Only paper, noisy pigeons, and a few old folks sitting on the benches under the sun.
I looked around cautiously when I arrived at the far right corner of the square. Still no one watching. I hoped I wasn’t being trailed by real pros. But then, where would the Army of Occupation find any pros?
I hesitated before descending the dark and filthy steps to the foreboding shop. Somewhere I had read a story, I think by Charles Williams, about someone entering a shop like that and ending up in another world. I didn’t want to go to another world just yet, not until I had cleared some of the decks in this world.
So I squared my shoulders, strode down the creepy stairs, and pounded on the decaying oak door.
“Ja?” said a strange, musical voice.
I pushed the door open and went into the strangest room I have ever seen in all my life. It was filled with a kind of misty blue light, though it was not clear whence the light came. A sweet, not unpleasant smell permeated the place, a lot like the smell of the model-airplane glue I had used when I was a kid, only more appealing. The room was filled with presses, plates, bottles, retorts, discarded copper squares, and piled everywhere, stacks of paper. A smiling, bald, little man, looking like one of Santa’s elves and wearing a huge white apron, stood in the center of the room behind a large, white table that might have been a surgical operating table.
Where, I wondered, were Dante and Beatrice?
“Ja, ja?” the elf said, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically.
A closer look suggested that he was not a merry old elf at all. His eyes were stone cold, like hard, polished sapphires. I had better follow Brigie’s suggestions to the letter.
“Guten Tag.”
“Ja.” He nodded, a brisk seemingly amiable nod, and rubbed his hands together.
I put the three pictures together on the operating table.
“Ja.” He picked them up. “Ja, ja!”
I waited.
“Four hundred dollars.”
Another discount.
I counted out four hundred-dollar bills—I had been carrying five hundred around for the last couple of days, in case I would need it suddenly to buy papers. I’d have to get more from the bank on Monday. So I’d get a part-time job when I went to Notre Dame.
“Ja,” he said, examining my pictures, like a kid with new toys.
He shrugged. “Week, maybe.”
No choice. I hoped Brig was right about his delivering ahead of schedule.
“Ja.” He nodded again, continuing to study the pictures.
I left the room and climbed up the stairs back to the planet Earth. I glanced around the square. No one, save the pigeons and the old-timers on the bench. Carefully watching the people behind me, I walked back across the Regens to my room at the Vinehaus Messerschmitt.
On the way back I thought about my friends the Nettletons. They were the only ones I knew smart enough to carry out the black-market caper. Apparently he had a lot of money and was already a member of the family law firm back in Boston. They were charming and gracious and generous to me. But, truly clever criminals would also know how to be nice people. John could organize an extensive black-market ring with the same skill with which he would organize a political campaign at home in the Bay State. And you couldn’t have a better intelligence operative than your wife in the Constabulary commanding general’s office. They entertained tastefully but lavishly. Where did all the money come from?
Moreover John was smart enough, if he set his mind to it, to ferret out the black-market operation. It was not his job, of course. But it was his wife’s job more or less. Why didn’t he help her?
Perhaps because he truly believed that another ring would follow this one and found my argument for going against this one naive and innocent. However, he had nodded grimly at my oration the other night. Still that didn’t prove anything.
Or the general. He was a gifted and able man who could have earned a lot more money in private industry. Yet he chose to stay in the military and accept two more years of separation from his wife and family. Could not such a man persuade himself in the moral atmosphere of the time that a little extra money was the equivalent of what my father would have called “honest graft”?
My father spoke ironically when he said those words, implying that all graft could become honest when someone was willing to cut corners—as even devout and virtuous and upright men might do on occasion.
I remembered the case of Old Fitz and wondered.
Brigie was right. The black market was becoming an obsession. Well, it would have to wait till I got back from Stuttgart, hopefully on Friday.
I felt a little guilty about my suspicions. After all, these people were my friends. Would I really turn them in if I found them out? Then I thought of Trudi being assaulted in a dark alley on a cold winter night by some of the black-market people. Yeah, I’d turn them in.
I struggled to find solid proof that my friends were not involved. I couldn’t think of any. All my evidence was circumstantial. Mere speculation. But I had to be sure there was nothing more than circumstances.
In my room at the Vinehaus, I outlined my plan in full detail as I now saw it. Hopefully next Thursday night, the eve of Mary’s Day in Harvest, we would make the run to Nürnberg. I considered the plan carefully. A few twists and turns might not be necessary. Too cute by half, maybe. But each of them had a good reason behind it.
I still had a few days to think through the plan. I tore up notes. Nothing to do. I turned to American fiction and that obnoxious snob Sinclair Lewis. Then I went over to the Residenz and down into the basement darkroom next to the PX. Naturally Dr. Berman was already there.
“Who’s worse morally,” I began, “a German child who was born in 1940 or an American GI who trades in medicine on the black market?”
He chuckled as he carefully removed a roll of film from the developing tank. “You become more Jewish every day, Chuck. Now you charge in with your Talmudic questions. If you were still Irish, you would waste a half hour in preliminaries.”
“Fair play to you. But when with the Talmudists, do what they do.”
He laughed again. “You’re still Irish after all. The German is more guilty but the American more morally reprehensible.”
So we argued and had a grand time arguing. Only in the middle of the argument did I realize there was little difference between trading in medicine or Old Fitz and in trading in forged identity documents.
“Would you trade on the black market?” I asked him.
“Not usually, of course. Yet in a good cause, I might and indeed I have.”
“Everyone thinks his own cause is good.”
“Naturally.”
I didn’t ask him what his good cause might be. Was I not after all trading in forgeries for a good cause?
Yet my stubborn idealism said that, apart perhaps from the occasional good cause, Americans should not do those things.
They shouldn’t sleep with defenseless eighteen-year-old girls either.
I wondered if he knew who the bosses were in the local black-market outfit. He was a smart man. Probably he did. I didn’t ask him because I didn’t want to know.
The next morning I went to the noon mass at the Pfarrkirche, although the Martinkirche was much closer to the Vinehaus. I met Brigie and her family going in. The kids, like good little kraut kids, thanked me politely for my gifts, as did Frau Klein, Brigitta’s mother. A nice, decent German family going to church on Sunday as they had all through the Hitler years.
I wasn’t being fair. Bamberg had voted for the Center Party, not the Nazis. And Brig and her husband were involved with the group that had tried to kill Hitler. If there was any hope for the future of German democracy, it would be in people like them. How would I have behaved if there were a Nazi-like government in America?
During mass, I spotted Trudi and her family on the other side of the aisle. They also looked pious and devout. Well, who was I to claim anymore that I was a good Catholic?
I turned off the sermon not only because it was in German, at which I was getting better, but because I knew enough German to know that it was pious tripe, the kind that I had often heard at St. Ursula when I was growing up, especially by “missionary” priests who had come around to stir up scruples in the people—as John Raven had bitterly informed me.
At Communion time, all three of the Wülfes went up to the rail as did about a quarter of the people in the relatively full church. What the hell! Didn’t she know she was in the state of mortal sin because of what we had been doing? The good April had warned me that Europeans were “lax” in their morality. This was solid proof that she was right.
I was angry. How dare she not feel guilty when I did!
Well, maybe she’d made an act of Perfect Contrition.
Yeah, but that wouldn’t do any good unless she had promised God to give me up and that was most unlikely.
I’m afraid that despite my (moderately) good intentions I didn’t do much praying at mass.
After mass, when I had slipped away from a possible meeting, I realized that I was a hypocrite and that I would never dare ask her why she felt free to receive—not till after we were married anyway.
As John Raven would remark when I showed him my journal as part of my “general confession,” maybe the woman understood God better than I did.
I guess she did. Heaven knows we’d need a lot of God’s help in the next few days.
I spent the rest of the day in the PX darkroom working on shots that I would send home to the family on Monday with a letter telling how wonderful my summer life was here in friendly old Bamberg.
Nothing happened on Monday except that it started to rain and the temperature fell into the sixties, too much like autumn already. But next August I would be home, thanks be to God. I went over my plan repeatedly, picturing exactly what each move would look like. If only we had the papers now.
“Did it go well?” Brig asked me.
“I guess. He’s an odd one.”
“He is that. . . . Wasn’t his room cute?”
“That’s not the word I’d use.”
“Be careful, Chuck. You are in grave danger.”
“I don’t really think so.”
I also tried in my head to clear my friends the Nettletons from all suspicion. Couldn’t do it.
I wrote the letter to my family.
Trudi phoned from the hotel saying she had to work nights that day and the next. So we could not meet each other. Possibly Wednesday too.
I finished up the few manuscripts that Captain Polly asked me to type—with her usual charming smile. How could I possibly suspect such an appealing woman?
I glanced over the schedule for the new course in American fiction and then picked up Arrowsmith and deepened my dislike for Sinclair Lewis. How could he ever have been so popular? Then I turned to Dante, which was much more to my taste though I figured I’d have to learn Italian to really enjoy it. It’d be much easier to pick up after four years of Latin than German was.
Fourteen-thirty passed and no Agent Clarke. However at sixteen hundred he finally showed up, weaving uncertainly across the floor of the old ballroom.
“Here’s the stuff you been bugging me for, sport.”
“Thank you, sir. I didn’t mean to appear to bug you, but we need to have this material to focus our search properly.”
“Well,” he sneered, “now you’ll be able to properly focus it.”
“Split infinitive, sir.”
I glanced over the documents. Not much in it that I had not already seen. I tapped my fingers on my desk. I could give the men just the material on Gunther Wülfe and hold back the descriptions of the others. But that might catch up with me. Better that I give them everything now. If we got the materials tomorrow from the elf with the cold eyes, we could move out on Tuesday night. So the men would have only part of Monday and Tuesday to search. Moreover the kids in the picture didn’t look much like Trudi and Erika, and Magda had aged so much as to be hardly recognizable.
I told Captain Polly to inform the general, ma’am, that Agent Clarke had finally turned over the promised papers.
“Was that creep drunk, Chucky?”
“He sure was.”
“Should I tell General Meade that?”
“Great idea.”
Then I went downstairs to give the stuff to my “lads.”
“Here are pictures of the family we’re searching for and descriptions. Make copies and spread out in town and look for them.”
“Sarge, how old is this picture?”
“Then the kids would be in their teens now?”
“Probably.”
“Girls change in those years.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it, I think I have noticed it too.”
“So?”
“So you have to take that into account in your search.”
Groans.
“We’ll get in a lot of trouble if we ogle every blond adolescent in Bamberg.”
“How will that differ from your ordinary behavior?”
Laughs.
“Is the guy still the important one?”
“So I’m told by the Bureau.”
“Then maybe we should concentrate on looking for him.”
“Good thinking, Ken.”
“Do we have to start today?”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s pretty late now.”
“So we’ll start tomorrow, eh, Sarge?”
“I imagine that will be all right. We received these materials too late to start today.”
Tomorrow meant around noontime.
The conversation had gone better than I had hoped. Feeling more confident of what I was doing, I went back and made a note in the record I was keeping of the case.
“You may tell General Meade, Captain Polly, that my men have begun the search for our targets with the new material I have given them.”
“It will begin tomorrow morning, you mean, Chucky?”
“That may be a correct interpretation, Captain, ma’am, but let the general make it for himself.”
Polly chuckled at that. “Okay, Chuck. I’ll let him use the intelligence that God gave him. . . . This is the case about people the Russkies want, isn’t it? Who are they?”
“Alleged Nazis.”
“Men?”
“A man and three women, his wife and two daughters.”
“The man was a government functionary in Dresden so he had to belong to the party. So too apparently did the wife. The kids were in the Hider Jugend.”
“Any crimes charged?”
“Nothing specific.”
“How old are the kids?”
“Middle teens.”
“What will the Russians do to them?”
“Shoot the man, rape the three women to death. Turn them over to a battalion of sex-starved troops.”
“My God, Chuck!” she gasped.
“That’s the way they do things over there. And it’s what we get into when we deal with them.”
“Are we trying really hard to find them?” Captain Polly’s usually bright face had turned pale.
I shrugged. “When do we try really hard at anything? Let’s say that our main goal in this operation is to appear to have obeyed orders.”
She nodded solemnly.
Maybe I had found an ally to whom I might turn in time of desperate need. Even if she and her husband were involved in the damn black market.
Obsession!
Then I did my journal for the day, in an obscure code that I had made up so no one would know what was going on. When I finished that, I gathered my books and left for the classroom and the darkroom. As I crossed the town-hall bridge, I noticed that a couple of Carpenter’s gumshoes—a different pair this time—were dogging me. What was going on? Was Carpenter getting even with me because he imagined me standing between him and Brigitta?
When I left class, they had vanished. In the darkroom nothing worked the way it should. I gave up after a couple of hours.
My two roommates appeared for the first time in several days, harmless noncoms from Seventh Army whose only concerns were babes and beer. I suppose their intelligence level was a little higher than that of congenital morons, but sometimes it was hard to tell. I listened to them for a while and answered their questions about my own activities with polite caution. Then I sought solace in Main Street.
That night my dreams were filled with images of hundreds of Sam Houston Carpenters chasing me down the main street of Gopher Prairie.