Shining Through (36 page)

Edward nodded to Norman, then turned to John. “Alfred Eckert was reliable?”

“Yes,” said John. “As good as they come. He was able to glean an enormous amount of information from this official’s house.”

“I see. And now we have lost our gleaner.”

“Yes,” Norman responded.

“Any candidates for the job?”

“None. You know what it’s like there, Ed. You can’t slip a refugee into the home of a foreign office official, a man who is a prominent Nazi to boot; the danger of his being recognized is, well, enormous. And you can’t expect to pass off a Yale German major.” No, I thought. Even someone like me, an ordinary person with a working-class accent; if I worked as this guy’s file clerk or as one of his wife’s maids, even, I probably couldn’t pass. No matter how much a person knows—and I knew a lot about Berlin and its ways—it would still be a foreign city. To a German major from Yale, it would be another planet. “And who over there is going to take the chance? A clandestine meeting in a private house,

SHINING THROUGH / 267

perhaps. A word whispered in passing in a men’s room. But who would risk going into this man’s house, sneaking into his study, searching through his papers? No one is that brave.”

“Your little dressmaker was,” Edward said.

“Ah, yes,” Norman agreed. “But he’s dead now.”

“Assassinated, I assume?”

“Yes.” Norman lifted up his yellow legal pad and his pen from the table before him. All six of his men pushed back their chairs, ready to leap up the instant Norman rose. “Well, I thought it was important to pass this on to you and John, Ed. It puts us in somewhat of a pickle. We’ll all have to give it some thought.”

He stood, and his six men sprung to their feet. His secretary closed his steno pad with an embarrassingly loud slap.

But Edward remained seated, and so did John. Edward said,

“One moment, please, Norman.” I took it down. The other secretary was in agony, not knowing whether taking down Edward’s words would be viewed as his job or as an act of betrayal. He peered around, then finally, with one of those overdramatic silent movie gestures, clutched his pad passionately against his chest.

“This recruit of yours worked for us in one capacity or another for four years. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“He had powerful friends, people willing to vouch for him?

Other fashionable women married to influential men. Perhaps a highly placed deviate or two.” Norman said nothing. “Am I correct in that assumption?”

“Yes.”

“No untoward incidents before this? No hairbreadth escapes?”

“None.”

“And yet suddenly he is assassinated.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously not by our man, the one who replaced the florist, who passed Eckert’s information on to us.” He inclined his head toward John. “That is code name Cactus, 268 / SUSAN ISAACS

correct?” John said it was. Cactus was a German citizen, a surgeon, whose mother had been American and who had a brother, also a surgeon, in Ohio. “And we’ve cleared Cactus?”

“We’ve checked him over and over. He does eye surgery in Berlin, and every month he flies to Switzerland, to a clinic he owns. He operates there for a day or two, buys medical supplies unavailable in Germany and returns. We know he’s clean, and even better, they are convinced he is.”

Edward turned back to Norman. “Let’s move on, then, shall we? Was your man held incommunicado for a while? Tortured?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“That isn’t the usual pattern, is it? They must have been afraid that he was a threat to them.”

“Possibly.”

“And—I’m just thinking out loud now, Norman—they weren’t afraid of us. Once they had him in custody, he couldn’t give us any more. But perhaps they were fearful that his friends in high places could help him get free, or just manage to speak to him.

What information could he pass on to them that was so threatening?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“Could it be, Norman, that he suspected—or suddenly discovered—that one of the people in his own secret circle, perhaps one of the few he trusted, a seemingly devoted anti-Nazi, is a traitor? And the traitor had to silence him? Could that be why he was killed?”

“It’s your theory, Ed.”

“But it is safe to assume that the manner of his murder was rather swift and brutal?”

“I gather it was,” Norman said coldly.

“You talk about my theory. But tell me, have
you
given any thought at all to the possibility that your network may not be inviolate?”

“I resent your tone.”

“And I resent your passing this off as just another nasty little wartime mess. You listen to me, Norman. Both of us SHINING THROUGH / 269

have been around a long, long time. And both of us know there
has
to be a double agent operating in your network. And if I can hazard a guess, you realized it the moment you heard of Mr. Eckert’s sudden death.” Norman’s six men looked away or cleared their throats. “Someone found out your dressmaker was onto them. And so they quickly passed the word and—no more messenger service.” Edward paused. “Do you have any idea who the rotten apple is?”

“No,” Norman said.

“Not even a guess?”

“Not even a guess.”

I couldn’t get Alfred Eckert out of my mind. All that afternoon, while John sat in Edward’s office, I sat in the little vestibule right outside, trying not to hear them. “Calamity.” “Disaster.” “Catastrophe.” “Terrible blow.”

The strange thing was, normally my ears would have been positively throbbing in an attempt to absorb every syllable. This wasn’t just an Ivy League war; it was Grover Cleveland High School’s too. I was always right in there, having to know what was going on. Over the months working for Edward, I’d mastered homing in on the low pitch of his voice, so—nearly all the time—I could hear his end of telephone conversations even if I was busy typing away. And when his door was closed for a meeting, I’d file; I’d learned to save up my
S
through
Z

correspondence, and at those times, squatting to insert letters in the bottom-drawer folders, I could listen in on at least seventy-five percent of what was being said.

But that afternoon I just wanted silence, so I could reflect on Alfred. Because right away, I was on a first-name basis with him.

And I could
see
him: tall, with too-thin eyebrows, probably plucked; blond, marcelled hair; and a fairyish, fuss-budgety walk—like Edward Everett Horton in
The Gay Divorcee
.

Sure, I knew it was all in my mind. For all I knew, he could have been short and fat and resembled a fire hydrant. But his picture came to me over the ocean, and even if it 270 / SUSAN ISAACS

wasn’t accurate, it was real. I could see him riding through Berlin in his dark green roadster, wasting gasoline. He kept an alligator or a crocodile—whichever was better—briefcase on the seat beside him, with some sketches of evening gowns and his pincushion.

God knows I’d heard enough about Berlin from Olga. And I’d stood before enough open maps of the city, seen enough photographs, while refugees pointed out this Gestapo house to Edward, that armory, that new pipeline. I knew the streets, the neighborhoods, and I could see Alfred being admitted to the villa of the important foreign office official, kissing the lady of the house on the cheek, standing by a window in her dressing room, letting out or taking in some darts under her bosom, then, later, sipping tea with her. Her husband would come in and be delighted to see Alfred: such a delightful, amusing fellow, always welcome. Then the official would go to his study, and then—somehow—Alfred would figure out a way to get in.

And I saw him parking his roadster, getting out for his twice-a-week walk in the Grunewald, the forest on the edge of Berlin, humming some tune about champagne. He’d pass a chestnut tree with a knothole in it, and he’d keep strolling along so casually that even someone spying on him would probably have missed seeing him slip the message inside the hole, to be picked up the following day by someone Alfred would never meet.

Then, still humming, he’d return to his car and put the nosegay of wildflowers he’d picked on his walk on top of the dashboard.

Alfred wouldn’t be as fascinated with me as I was with him.

In fact, he probably wouldn’t give a girl like me two minutes. I didn’t hold it against him, though. I wasn’t his type. I would never go Ooh! over a bolt of silk shantung—although he might be a little intrigued with me when he saw John, because that would make me special. If he met me, he’d probably say, Delighted, although he wouldn’t be. I spoke with the accent he’d been trying to hide since he was fourteen.

Still, Alfred meant so much to me. It was as if I
knew
him.

SHINING THROUGH / 271

Somehow, I felt for him in a way that I’d never felt for all the refugees we’d interviewed: all the Jews—shoe store owners, movie directors, bus drivers, labor union organizers, even a butcher, like my father and grandfather—and all the others who had to get out: Catholic priests, Communists, intellectuals, financiers, journalists.

All that day I’d put Alfred in different places, driving along Unter den Linden, walking along the beach, the Strandbad Wannsee. I’d dress him in different outfits and watch him puffing out sleeves and being a spy.

It wasn’t until I was in bed late that night that I realized my newfound friend, the man who had become so alive to me so fast, who was doing the work I admired most in the world, was dead. Murdered.

1 8

T
he fourth of July fell on a Saturday, and for the first time since we’d been married, we actually took a vacation. It was just for the weekend, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but at least I got John to take me somewhere. I wasn’t exactly subtle, either.

I called him at his office on the third and said, “Hey, you owe me a honeymoon.”

“Hmm?” he said. He was probably reading a report.

“John, can’t we get out of town this weekend?”

He muttered, “I think Ed said he wanted to work straight through.”

“But I don’t. Please. Don’t you think I’m entitled to two days?”

And he actually sounded guilty when he answered, “Yes. All right. I’ll try to figure out something.”

We stayed at a country inn that was decorated in Early Duck.

There were carved ducks—decoys—on every mantel. There were duck doorstops, duck designs on curtains and wallpaper. The innkeeper, who must have been in his eighties, had ducks on his tie, to say nothing of duck designs on every plate, soup bowl, cup and saucer. From our room, we could see over the treetops, to Chesapeake Bay.

“I see a lot of fishing boats,” I said Sunday evening, as we were getting dressed after a last time in a too-soft bed that was probably stuffed with duck feathers.

“Any ducks?” John asked.

“No. Not a single one.”

272

SHINING THROUGH / 273

“I haven’t, either. But I think I heard some quacking in the middle of the night.”

“It was probably me, talking in my sleep. The atmosphere gets to you after a while.”

He smiled, then came over and put his arms around me. He was so sweet that weekend that at first I thought he might have me confused with someone else. But then I thought: Getting out of the office has done wonders for both of us. We took ferry rides, ate every form of oyster and crab known to man, went for long walks, and even talked. I told him all about Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and he told me all about Long Island Sound, and how Port Washington, where he’d grown up, had once been called Cow Neck. Okay, so it wasn’t “My darling Linda, I love you madly.” But it was still time together. And it wasn’t like weekends at home, when he was editing a brief or reading the paper or listening to Mozart with his eyes closed. I had his full attention, even with my clothes on, and on Saturday night, when we saw
The Pride of the Yankees
, with Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright, we held hands, and he gave me his handkerchief before I even thought to ask for it.

So that Monday afternoon, when John unexpectedly walked into the anteroom outside Edward’s office, where I worked, I was still so full of honeymoonish happiness that it didn’t occur to me to wonder why he was there. It was just a pleasure to see him. After two days in the sun, his skin had a bronze glow. His fair, silky hair was streaked with pale platinum. He came over, sat on the edge of my desk and took my hand between his. I mumbled something like, “Ed’s over at the War Department,”

even though I sensed, with a sudden flush of joy, that he’d come to see me.

“Linda.” His voice was gentle: not caressing, but compassionate. And that minute I understood he’d come to see me for a reason. Something was wrong. “I had a call from New York.”

He squeezed my hand. “Your mother’s nurse…”

“My mother?” I asked. It was a real question. I’d spoken to her right before we’d gone off to Maryland. Her voice had been so feeble it shook. She wouldn’t let go of the idea that I 274 / SUSAN ISAACS

was still pregnant, but she’d joked about being too young to be a grandmother, and told me to get smart with John and have him buy me a mink stole in the summer, when furriers are desperate for customers and you can pick up a good buy.

John squeezed my hand harder. “I’m sorry.”

“She died?”

“Yes. In her sleep. The nurse—”

“Cookie.”

“Cookie thought it would be better if I broke the news to you.”

I sat back in my chair, it squeaked. “I’ve got to get this thing oiled.” I said to myself, My mother is dead. It made sense, but it didn’t mean anything. “What do I do now?” I asked him.

“I’ll take you home so you can pack.”

“Where did they take…where is my mother?”

“The doctor arranged for her to be brought to a funeral home, Linda.” John’s voice was so sympathetic that for a second I wanted to say, Oh, come off it! It’s not like someone died or anything. “Did she go to a church where she’d want the minister…” I nodded. “We ought to call before we leave, to give him some time.”

“I forgot the guy’s name. But all the Johnstons get buried in Brooklyn.” I swiveled around in my chair, but it started squeaking again, so I sat still. “Did you know my mother’s maiden name was Johnston? They all have brown eyes—and they’re very good looking. A little short. I guess I never told you about them.” I thought: You never asked. “The men work on the subways.