Shining Through (40 page)

I knew, unofficially, that he’d talked to me in a way he’d never talked to anyone else—about Caroline, and about other things: How he felt like such a hick when he first went to Yale and no one wanted to bother with him, and how he had to force himself to stay and not run away, back to the farm. And how when he was recuperating in the hospital after all the operations on his face and shoulder, he couldn’t understand why he didn’t hear from his kid sister; he wrote and wrote, but it wasn’t until he got home that his mother told him she’d died from polio a year before. He said he’d felt deceived in the cruelest way; someone who hadn’t wanted to hurt him had caused him the greatest pain.

Well, old buddy, I wanted to tell him now, I know just what you mean. Because in this whole world, you were the 298 / SUSAN ISAACS

closest I had to a friend—and you deceived me in the cruelest way.

“Linda,” Edward said. He stood, walked around his desk and came up beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother.”

I pulled myself back, so his hand dropped off. “Thank you.”

I thought: For a whole month you knew, and you didn’t give me a clue. You could have said, I’ve been pretty busy lately, with Nan in town. Or if you’re telling me the whole damn story of your life, forget the economics professor who took you into the bosom of his family and gave you warmth and sherry in New Haven, and instead drop me a hint that your daughter and Husband II may have had a bit of a tiff. That’s all it would have taken, Ed, my friend.

“It must have been a double blow,” he said. “She was the last of your immediate family, wasn’t she?”

“I really don’t feel like talking about it.”

“All right. I understand.”

He did, a second later. All of a sudden, we had one of our flashes of tacit understanding. We were looking at each other, and just like that, he stiffened. He knew that I knew—not only about John and Nan but about his knowledge of the whole business. The whole affair. Then Edward did what I never thought I’d see him do: He averted his eyes. Suddenly, a telephone message on the edge of his desk became overwhelmingly important. He picked it up and studied it as if it was a new cryptographic code he was just getting familiar with.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve got to get to work. That girl you had sitting in for me left about three days’ worth of dictation to transcribe, and her shorthand’s a mess.”

He put the piece of paper back down. “Linda,” he began. Then his voice fell, and I had to strain to hear him. “I don’t know what to say, but I want to say something. I—”

“Thanks for your condolences.” And then I walked out of the room.

I became an efficient machine. For days I followed Edward to meetings, took dictation, answered phones, SHINING THROUGH / 299

typed, translated. The line of refugees streaming in, offering up information, grew longer and longer. The anteroom where I worked was packed with people on folding chairs, chalky-faced people who never looked right into anyone’s eyes—not mine, not each other’s. They studied the floor, or their shoes.

When Edward was ready for the next one, I’d say, “Frau Schluter [or: Herr Abendroth], please follow me.” And they’d shuffle inside, staring down at the floor like it was a treacherous path that might crack open, engulf them and then smash shut, crushing them so they couldn’t even shriek for help before they were obliterated forever. For every one of them, I’d think: Poor lady, Poor guy, as I steered them over to the couch. Because Edward would never just question them, seeking out whatever intelligence he needed; he always wanted to know what had happened to them. So when I translated their unbearably sad stories, I’d think: Terrible. But it was the automatic pity of a machine. Tsk-tsk. Next. Tsk-tsk.

But then, a week after I went back to work, I led Werner Liedtke into Edward’s office. He’d worked for the electric utility in Berlin, dispatching meter readers all over the city: an ordinary man, but one who might confirm or challenge the information we’d been getting on power-generating plants all over northern Germany.

“Would you like some coffee?” Edward asked him. Herr Liedtke, who had come into Philadelphia two days before on a boat full of refugees, didn’t speak any English, so I translated as I took notes.

“No, thank you,” he said. “No coffee.” He gazed down at his shoes. New shoes, American, maybe a little too wide for him.

“The government of the United States appreciates your cooper-ation in coming here today. We know it must be difficult to talk about what you have just left, but we need all the details, all the facts, we can get.”

“Thank you, sir,” Herr Liedtke mumbled.

“And it is urgent that we get whatever information we can 300 / SUSAN ISAACS

on power generation as soon as possible, before conditions change.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you come here alone?”

“Yes. Alone.”

“Do you have any family still in Germany?”

“My family…My brothers. A sister.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“Oh, no. Not me.” He pulled back his feet and hunched over, as if trying to make himself smaller, less of a target. “My wife.

She was a Jew. They took her in 1940. May 18. Gestapo came to the apartment and said, ‘Ruth Liedtke?’ and she said ‘Yes.’”

“And they took her then?” Edward asked softly.

“Yes.”

“You never saw her again?”

“No.”

I thought to myself: How many of these pathetic stories did Edward want to hear? “Did you have any children?” he asked.

“A boy.”

“What is his name?” Herr Liedtke shook his head. “I’m sorry,”

Edward said. “I won’t ask you any more—”

I was translating almost simultaneously, and so we were both interrupted when Herr Liedtke said, “Jurgen. His name was Jurgen,” he said to his new American shoes.

“I see,” Edward said.

“No. He was not taken when they took my wife. After that…nothing happened. I waited, but a long time passed and I knew…I thought: Jurgen is safe. He was allowed to go to school. No questions were asked. He was a good boy. Twelve, he was. He’d been a little fat, but he was growing, you know, so he grew more lean, except his face was round.”

“He sounds very nice,” Edward said. “A fine boy.”

“Yes. A fine boy.” The father shook his head. His hair was gray. He had a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. “There was a roundup of Jews the last week of June. I didn’t fear very much.

But suddenly they were at the door, banging on SHINING THROUGH / 301

it, kicking with their boots, terrible noise, and they ask for Jurgen and I show them the boy and say, ‘Look, he is no…’ And I show them his papers. ‘See?’ I said. There were two of them. They each took an arm and dragged Jurgen out, down four flights of stairs. I ran after, and all the time he was screaming. ‘Father!’

And they dragged him over to a small bus and tried to put him on and I ran to him and he was screaming and they told him to shut up and get on, but still he was screaming. ‘Father!’”

Herr Liedtke spoke in a monotone, and I tried to translate like that, but I called out “Father!” too loud.

Herr Liedtke said “‘Father!’” again, quietly, but his hands stretched out, involuntarily, reaching for his son. “A soldier came down off the bus. Not Gestapo. An ordinary soldier with a rifle.

A rifle with a bayonet. And Jurgen struggled with the men holding him, trying to break away, and all the time screaming for me, and I ran toward him, but before I could get there…”

He lifted up his head and looked into Edward’s eyes. “The soldier—just a regular soldier—he drove the bayonet into Jurgen’s throat. To silence him.” Herr Liedtke touched his Adam’s apple with his index finger. “There was blood, so much of it, and his mouth said ‘Father,’ but he could not speak. And he could not…he could not die yet. He was in agony. Oh, his eyes. My boy’s eyes, crying for me to help him, then looking down…at the thing in his throat. He didn’t believe…He kept waiting for me to help him.” Herr Liedtke’s eyes were dry.

I turned in my chair, so I could look out the window, hide my face. Edward said, “Linda?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I could see that nice, fat-faced boy, howling in terror, making no sound. My shoulders jerked. A shudder. A convulsion. A machine breaking down.

“Try to keep going, if you can,” Edward said to me.

“Yes,” I said. “I can.”

Herr Liedtke’s voice remained flat. “The soldier pulled out his bayonet. The blood then. He was almost gone. I was nearly beside him as he started to fall. But they would not give me…my Jurgen. They hauled him onto the bus, had 302 / SUSAN ISAACS

the driver shut the door so he wouldn’t tumble out. They drove away.” He shrugged. “And that was the end of it.”

Two weeks later, at the beginning of August, on a day so cool and pleasant and, therefore, so abnormal for Washington that it was almost suspect, part of some sinister Axis plot, Norman Weekes came to Edward’s office to discuss the OSS’s crisis in Berlin. He had not given up a single member of his usual company of six; they trooped behind him in twos, like obedient first graders.

The ill-will level was lower than it had been at the earlier meeting. The two groups of men seemed to realize that since Donovan did not have the time to fire Norman Weekes (and perhaps also to realize that Norman’s Boston bank gave its New York business to Donovan’s law firm), they were doomed to work with each other. They were gathered in the couch and chairs around the coffee table, which was covered with legal pads, pens, coffee cups, water glasses and ashtrays. Everyone was determinedly congenial.

Well, except for Edward and John. They sat beside each other, but the relaxed give-and-take between colleagues had been replaced by strain. Bad strain. John’s head was drawn down, his shoulders up, as if he half expected any minute to be yelled at.

Maybe he thought he had it coming. Three nights before, he’d slipped out of bed. It was two-thirty. I’d murmured—fake-murmured, since I’d woken up startled and full of dread—What’s the matter? and he’d said, Shh, go back to sleep. I’m just going downstairs for a glass of milk. When he’d been gone for a minute, I’d tiptoed to the head of the stairs. There were no sounds at all. But then I heard him hang up the phone. I went back to bed and pretended to be asleep. All of a sudden, I knew what the word “heartsick” meant.

The next night, John called home a little before eleven. We have a bad situation at one of the safe houses. I’ll be late, Linda.

He came home at three. His hair was perfect, just SHINING THROUGH / 303

combed. I knew. I
knew
. It’s Nan, isn’t it? She’s back.
No
, he said. I swear.

Whenever Edward spoke to John, he turned toward him but never quite looked at him.

“Norman,” Edward said, “we’ve gone over your list of candidates for the, um, position vacated by Alfred Eckert. We’ve read your evaluations, had a look at their security clearance reports where they existed and done some preliminary investigating on our own. Shall we take them one at a time?”

“It’s your meeting, Ed,” Norman said. They both smiled, hiding their loathing of each other pretty well.

I sat about two feet away from Edward. We were both facing Norman, who’d obviously just been to the barber, and a bad one; his one claim to distinction, his white hair, had been cropped close to his head, so he looked less like a Boston big shot and more like some old man who’d somehow been captured and sent away for basic training. Throughout the meeting, his hand kept drifting up to where his tufted sideburns used to be.

He felt vulnerable.

Edward opened the first of three folders on his lap. From where I sat, it looked as if John had a couple more. I couldn’t stand to look at him. He was so beautiful. The night before, he’d called and said he had to conduct an interrogation. He’d called again around midnight. This is going very slowly, he said.

I said, Why can’t you be man enough to tell the truth? Would you stop your nagging! he’d snapped. Then I heard his deep intake of breath. All right, he said, I’m with Nan. Then he added quickly, But we’re just talking. They must have had a lot to say.

He didn’t come home at all.

“Klaus-Dieter Fischer,” Edward said. “Age, twenty-seven. Born in Leipzig. Moved to Berlin in 1925, at age ten. Father taught history at a
Gymnasium
—the German equivalent of a high school—and was also a Communist, something of a rabble-rouser. Father lost his job in ’33, arrested in ’34, presumed dead.

Klaus-Dieter took up the cause, handed out pamphlets, escaped to Czechoslovakia in ’35,

304 / SUSAN ISAACS

just before he was about to be arrested. Escaped again to England in July ’39, again by the skin of his teeth. Has worked at odd jobs—grocery clerk, waiter—but lives for the party. Made over-tures to British intelligence, but they turned him down because of his political leanings.” Edward closed the folder. “We should decline too. His loyalty is highly suspect.”

“He’s willing to go in wherever we want him,” Norman said.

“And I’ve spent time with him. He is a Communist, but a realist too. Not at all the raving ideologue.”

“Is it likely he’d wave
Das Kapital
in your face?” Edward demanded. Everyone chuckled. “He wants the job, Norman. And from what we can gather, he wants it badly—so he can pass information back to the Russians.”

“They
are
our ally, after all,” Norman protested, although without much conviction. A moment later, he waved his hand and said, “Next.”

“Hugo Dreyer. Age, fifty-two. Born, raised and currently living in Berlin. Secretary to an officer of I. G. Farben, has been passing information to us for years through Sunflower.”

“He’s really ideal,” Norman said. “Right in place. And willing.”

“Excuse me,” John broke in. “He’s out of the picture. He had a stroke three weeks ago. He’s incapacitated.”

“I see,” Norman said. He flashed a look of such malice at one of his men that if I’d been that guy, I would have had a stroke myself. Then Norman turned back to John, gracious, amicable.

“Any more surprises?”

John smiled. For a man who had been up all night, John still had unlimited energy to charm. The entire espionage unit smiled back. Even Norman bared his yellow teeth. “No surprises I know of, Norman. Unless Ed…”