Crazy in Berlin (10 page)

The captain withdrew a cigarette, fired his lighter and then held it aflame interminably without using it.

Squinting, Schild made known a mild complaint, and St. George forthwith snapped shut the pigskin-jacketed Ronson. He disliked giving hurt, but took a modest pleasure in being an agent of mercy.

“Oh,
I’m
sorry,” he said, victoriously. “Something exciting on the string?”

Schild received a malicious impulse, gave it its head.

“Look, she has a friend, a small blonde with fine skin and breasts like lemon-halves...”

“Haha...”

“You know these Germans are unleashing the bottled-up passions of years.”

“Hahahaha...” St. George thought this a genuine joke. He could not place himself in any kind of relation with illicit sex but the comic. Besides, he regarded all Jews as humorists.

He chuckled a stanza and then said sanctimoniously: “No, Nate, you go and have fun. I’ve got work to do. By the way, you haven’t seen, have you, a missing folder of Kraftfahrkorps correspondence?”

“I’ll look in my files tomorrow. Offhand, though, I can’t remember it.”

“No hurry. It was among that load I brought in today. I may have it myself.”

The odd thing was that although St. George would have been a success as a civilian, he had never been one; not ever, if one didn’t count his eighteen years or so as a legal infant, after which he entered the Point. He was now forty-five, with twenty-odd years of garrison and administrative duty in the States and the peacetime colonies behind him. In the war he led a small Intelligence team that during the hostile phase jeeped company to company on the Third Army front and interrogated German prisoners. At present its business was more sedentary. In many of the buildings occupied by the American forces there were great stores of abandoned Nazi correspondence. Somebody had to assemble and classify them: in the reams of paper that had fallen behind the police state like dung from a plodding horse, St. George and his little crew were put to picking straws.

The captain now reiterated his counsel about having fun and squished into the house on his crepe soles.

It had taken Schild months to accept the reality of the captain’s stupidity, for despite Marx’s and Lenin’s examples to the contrary, Schild generally tended to overvalue people. But St. George’s was far too crude a role for a double agent. And this was, in the smallest way, that is to say, personally, regrettable, providing nothing against which to sharpen the teeth.

Darkness again, lightly flavored with the smell of growing things. He resented this street which showed no mark of war. Lovett’s house across the way was marked by a globed light above the door, but the window blinds were drawn—indicating, no doubt, the conservative character of a party made by medical men. At the gate, it struck him that he had no motive whatever for accepting the invitation. Lovett had rudely flung it at him as he was about to leave the office after speaking with Lieutenant Nader, a preposterous, almost illiterate officer who assured him that yes, the place was loaded with papers but he better claim them fast because the colonel had fifteen men on permanent assignment to burn all the useless trash in the building and they were already halfway through.

Next he had gone to see the colonel, to whose inner office he was conducted by an insolent sergeant-major with a border-Southern accent who announced him as “Child,” and stayed to listen to his business. On his entrance the colonel, who had been sitting in deep study of the ejection device on a mechanical pencil, snatched up a huge bolo knife from beneath his desk and sprang to the open casement, screaming: “Look sharp there, private!” Handing the weapon to an unseen soldier outside: “Here’s the only thing for that crabgrass—wait a minute, what are you doing with that butt?
What?
Field strip it, balls! Carry it around to the can! Wait a minute, where’s Lovett?
Where?
An hour ago I saw, God damn him that nance, a lid missing from one of the garbage cans in back of the hospital. You tell Lovett to mince over there and find it. No, not you,
him
—a gold bar doesn’t make him too good for that.”

The colonel, Nader had told him, was scared shitless of anybody, even a corporal, from another headquarters, invariably assuming it to be a higher one that had him under surveillance for suspicion of untidiness. Schild’s request to impound what remained of the enemy documents scarcely salved his nerves.

“Don’t tell me Lovett hasn’t been sending them to you all the while! That silly pimp!”

Schild sternly put down in himself the dirty little pleasure that it was probably not abnormal to feel at Lovett’s being abused—but why does the girl-man stimulate sadism rather than pity?—and made a defense.

“That is true, colonel, today’s the first time I’ve seen him,” said the sergeant-major, neutral and hateful at the same time; he was that kind of man, just as he was the sort to turn accusingly a confession upon its maker. This worthy, it was clear, held the reins of authority; typical suburban, neat-haired, office-manager type, probably from some middle place like St. Louis or Lexington.

“I have it,” said the colonel, nervously popping the eraser from his pencil, scattering across the green blotter the contents of the reserve-lead reservoir. “I’ll assign Sergeant Shelby here to complete responsibility for the allocation of whatever it is you require. Shelby’s your man, Lieutenant Shields, want something around here, ask the enlisted men. My officers just weren’t there when the brains were passed out.” He retrieved the leads one by one, a neat trick with hands sheathed in white gloves. He answered Schild’s stare with a smile that vanished as quickly as oil into leather.

“Eczema,” he said ruthlessly. “On all ten fingers.” He tore off a glove and showed his right hand, which looked as if it were made of rusty metal. “Neurodermatitis—terrible for a man of action.”

Shelby grunted “Yeah” and grandly proceeded Schild into the outer office where he imperturbably took a seat behind his desk and began to read Sad Sack in
Yank,
from time to time calling one of the clerks to witness an especially funny turn.

“Sergeant,” called Schild, after a few moments had defined the insolence, “I want you to show me where the papers are stored.”

“Well yes, I will.” Not looking up from the page. “If you’ll tell me when.” But already he was weakening, that shadow of the coward was stealing across his eyes.

“Now.” Schild spoke it in his smallest voice, to demonstrate to the man and his lackeys what a small, two cents’ worth of force was needed to bring him to heel.

Shelby sullenly arose and led him out, smelling of after-shave lotion. In the hall Schild told him he had changed his mind, would come another day, smiled, and left almost lazily.

But the outfit was a nest of madmen and clowns, a traveling medicine show rather than a hospital. And he realized, at Lovett’s gate, that this condition of comedy was what lured him to the party, that he could handle it or let it go at his pleasure, without, as it were, a tab to pay. He had already freed the latch, was stepping into the yard, when a low, evil whisper, as if from the conscience, said: “Enjoy yourself. Why not?”

He drew away in the illusion that he had collided with a kind of animate bush which, weightless and retreating, yet aggressed with whipping branches in a hundred quarters, and although he stepped to the side, off the path onto the lawn, Schatzi continued to press him. Thus, without a word, he was forced to return to the public walk, where a hand jerked his sleeve in the direction of the street corner and left off, and he followed.

At the corner, where in sound underground practice they could survey all paths of approach—or in the darkness, hear them—Schatzi spoke in a queer tone that was loud while pretending to be low, an undertone which must have been audible behind Lovett’s closed door a hundred meters off.

“Yes, my good sir,” he said. “I am authorized to buy from you five cartons of cigarettes. Payment on delivery.”

If they were overheard, it was a black-market deal—more than that, if an enemy operative lurked behind the tree, he was forced to hear what was after all the description of a crime towards which the Allied authorities were turning severe, and might ignore it in favor of the larger, for which he had insufficient evidence, only at the cost of his clear duty. The beauty of the method was Schatzi’s acting in worse and more furtive conscience than when he met Schild unmasqueraded, as at the Wannsee contacts.

However, having gone so far to establish urgency, stealth, and a suggestion of controlled hysteria, Schatzi began to talk quite banally of Lovett’s party.

“I have sold them some glassware, very lovely crystal glasses which I am relying upon you to guard over. Some persons may get drunken, you see, and it will be a scandal to break these glasses which cannot be replaced all over Germany. I speak not of my own convenience, since they have paid me, but namely of the uselessness to destroy pretty objects which also have their place in the world, or don’t you agree?”

This preface out of the way, he thrust himself under Schild’s nose and in a passion of distrust asked: “What are your relations with Lieutenant Nader? I know yesterday you have seen him!”

It was degrading that Schatzi, with his own active assistance, managed always to take him by surprise.

“He’s Intelligence officer for the 1209th General Hospital and therefore the logical man to see about the German documents in their area.”

“Of course,
Intelligence officer
—does not that mean to you something odd?”

Schild regretted saying “German”; he was commonly careful to use “Nazi” or “Hitler,” rather than the adjective that comprehended an entire people, not only because the distinction figured importantly in Soviet policy, but also because Schatzi was a non-Hitlerite German. And finally because he could not truly believe in the separation and clung to it all the more, in an effort towards self-mastery.

“As a matter of fact, it does.” He made a joke: “He has no intelligence.”

Schatzi hooked into his elbow with murderous fingers. “
Was, was?
I don’t understand!” And still claimed not to on repetition. “Don’t smile!” he whispered angrily. “If you do not think this is serious, something can perhaps be done about you.”

He had never spoken this way before. True, he was Schild’s superior, but for purposes of organization rather than discipline. And he was a German. ... How easily vileness slips in when one is momentarily weak with indignation! Yes, Schatzi was a German, a good one, which in his time meant a hero it was a privilege to know, an honor to be rebuked by, and thus Schild accepted the onus: What error had he made with Nader?

“The responsibility of an Intelligence officer is that of an open police spy, no?” asked Schatzi. “Therefore you present yourself to him conveniently. He can simply sit in his desk and you walk into his hands. This leads a person to say there are two possibilities: you might be a fool or you might be a counter-agent.” He floated an inch away, and returned to his earlier, crafty voice: “But I cannot pay more to you, since Captain Josephson of the Engineers Department has promised already to sell me all I would need for a thousand mark the carton.”

Not until he finished did Schild hear the footfalls, deliberate, soft, and yet massive as a lion’s on the route of his bars. As they approached, the courier grew ever more spurious, and when at last the organism that made them, in his own agonizingly good time, arrived in closeup, Schatzi sprang dramatically to the curb and found on his forehead a sweat so heavy it required both hands to dry. Now the melodrama was inflated beyond all sane proportion, and it was Schild who felt wet all over in genuine perspiration, certain, in a dread moment as the newcomer stopped before him and he saw a face as puffed and insensitive as a medicine ball, that it was an arrest.

“Lovely evening, men. May I trouble you for a light?”

A great curved pipe like Sherlock Holmes’s, like Stalin’s, and by the flare of the match, a golden lapel-cross. He continued to intake and expel till the flame seared Schild’s fingers, and then, with one last cumulus of smoke straight into Schild’s eyes, he padded on with a clabbering “good night.”

“A holy man,” said Schild derisively, regulating his breath as Schatzi returned. And then, as Schatzi said nothing, stood rather in silent, corrosive accusation as the minutes vibrated through the watch on Schild’s wrist, up his forearm, biceps, shoulder—
“Yes. That would be the perfect disguise!”

“Don’t be ridiculouse,” Schatzi answered in a very low voice. “That was the Protestant chaplain for the 1209th Hospital. He is quite likely looking for girls, the younger the better, the dirty old man. ... You have then no explanation.” It was not a question. “Among the papers of Nader was concealed a memorandum which read ‘Documents—Schild.’ They all go to him before you deliver them to me, yes?”

To be frightened by a fat, buttery, strolling chaplain! Schild recovered so rapidly that he all but made another small joke. “Ridiculouse,” how ridiculouse it was. Schatzi was after all accusing him of treachery; of all imaginable moments it should have been the most terrible, yet he could barely withhold laughter. Nader, Lovett, the colonel, Shelby, the chaplain, and, in his own house, St. George, with their uniforms and pipes and insignia and parties and cleanup details and evening walks—who but Schatzi could envision that fat, genial toad with the gold cross pinching some German teen-ager’s behind, or Nader’s playing the deep game?

“I had to go to Nader, you see,” he whispered. “Anything else would have been suspicious. I assure you he’s a buffoon.”

“Now I must not again hear you say that of anyone,” said Schatzi, “or I will know you for a traitor. I have told you those are the most dangerous persons. But even so, you do not have a connection with Nader,
you say,
however, you go from him to the office of the commanding colonel and insult Sergeant Shelby.”

Surely he did not presume to direct Schild’s official relations with enlisted men; he was getting now clearly beyond his limits, and Schild forbore from righteous protest only because his intuition told him Schatzi had not yet reached the serious argument of which this was preface.