Shining Through (45 page)

But she put her mouth to my ear and said, “Troop ship. England.”

“And then?” I whispered.

“And then, to the place where you belong.”

2 1

“S
ay as little as possible,” Konrad Friedrichs muttered. We walked out of the small white building onto a runway in the Lisbon airport, toward the biggest plane I’d ever seen. “Your accent is not what it should be.”

“Do I sound American?” I asked. I had to hustle to keep up with him. He was tall, over six feet, and took long, determined strides. Although he must have been at least sixty, he held himself as if someone had just yelled:
Achtung!

“No. You sound odd, as if you had a rare type of speech im-pediment.” I was about to chuckle, when I realized nothing Herr Friedrichs said was intended to be humorous. “That is why you have been sent in as a menial. If there are any questions about your pronunciation, people will assume you are slow-witted.”

It’s a measure of how dazed I was that I had even considered the possibility of chuckling. I’d been across the ocean on a troop ship where I had to lock myself in a tiny state-room and have my meals left on trays outside my door so no one could see me.

After that came three days in a metal hut with the rain beating down on it at an Army Air Forces base in England, where the head OSS guy, who looked like Al Capone, tried to convince me that no one they’d sent over had ever refused to go to parachute school and that, don’t worry, when the time came no one would force me to jump if I didn’t want to. I said no. I remembered Edward being angry once about the number of agents killed making blind jumps into enemy territory. It wasn’t so much that they were

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SHINING THROUGH / 335

getting shot; it was that the partisans couldn’t get their lights to where they were supposed to be half the time, so the OSS agents wound up impaled on trees, or drowned, or just plain pulverized.

After three days of being screamed at for being a coward, they sent me to a rooming house outside London, where I studied maps and memorized a safe address where I could go only in a life-or-death situation, although they admitted—after I asked them—that the Gestapo’s track record being what it was, “safe”

was maybe a slight exaggeration. Then I learned my peril code.

If I was captured and forced to send a message, I was to use the word “simply” in it. Like if there was a noose around my neck and a gun in my mouth, I should write: Don’t worry. I’m simply fine, or: The weather is simply lovely. Not that they would come and save me; they’d just know not to believe anything in the message.

They changed my name to Lina Albrecht. They told me I had to wear my hair in braids and pin them up; it was apparently the last word in Aryan elegance. They gave me my false identity papers and flew me from the air force base to beautiful, balmy, neutral Lisbon.

“What if someone asks me a direct question?” I asked Konrad as we hurried toward the plane. “Should I talk?”

“Obviously.”

“But this is not the time for idle chatter,” I observed. To put it mildly. About twenty feet ahead of us was the giant German plane, a Messerschmitt with six propellers—complete with an Iron Cross insignia on its side and a swastika on its tail. And talk about
Achtung
: a
Luftwaffe
officer, probably the pilot, whose posture made Herr Friedrichs look like a sloucher, stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for us.

There was a reason for this courtesy; Konrad Friedrichs was no slouch. He’d been working in the German foreign office since 1907, and was their ranking expert on Spain and Portugal. He was also a fervent anti-Nazi and Norman Weekes’s most highly placed spy. Until he sat beside me in 336 / SUSAN ISAACS

the waiting room in the airport, all I’d known was that code name Rex—Norman’s famous Rex—would find me. In a voice just loud enough for the people nearest us to hear, he said, My dear Lina. I am pleased you have decided to return with me.

Then he put his head close to mine and said, Konrad Friedrichs.

Foreign office. You know you are coming back to Berlin as my cook? I nodded. Smile at me, he ordered. I smiled. He went on: It is possible that people will assume you are also my mistress.

Do nothing to discourage this supposition.

We were almost at the plane. “Keep your eyes down,” he whispered; they were. “No friendly glances. No hellos. You are a servant.”

The pilot clicked his heels together and gave the stiff
Heil
Hitler
salute as we reached the plane. A terrible chill went up my back. I’d seen that gesture so often in newsreels that it seemed like part of a movie: something unreal, accompanied by popcorn. But now it was happening. Herr Friedrichs saluted back and, I sensed, held his breath for a moment. But I had been trained. The salute was not meant for me. Like an obedient German, I did precisely what was expected of me: held back, let my employer precede me up the stairs and followed, head down, suitcase in hand.

And then we were in the air, flying over Portugal, Spain and France, on our way to Germany.

Konrad Friedrichs’s house was pretty much what you’d expect of a high German official who’d been working in Berlin for thirty-five years and never married. But it took me two days to realize that. For the first forty-eight hours, I baked a cake, prepared his two favorite dinners, veal cutlets,
Naturschnitzel
, one night and codfish—the world’s most disgusting food—the next.

Somehow I managed to act in such a way that neither Herr Friedrichs nor his housekeeper noticed I was hysterical. But I was. As I grated a potato, I heard bombs dropping no more than a few miles away. All I wanted to do was crouch in a corner and cover my head with my arms and scream. Scream. Instead, I grated.

SHINING THROUGH / 337

The house was a modest one of brick in the Wilmersdorf area, about ten minutes from the foreign office. It wasn’t modest in an I’m-just-a-civil-servant way. It was on a pretty tree-shaded street with a lot of other small, well-kept houses. In a time of shortages and austerity—of wooden and cloth shoes instead of leather, when the bakers sold only day-old bread, to discourage demand for anything fresh and appealing—all the houses here had window boxes freshly planted with orange fall flowers. It was pretty obvious that this was a neighborhood for the privileged. Privileged but not prime; Goebbels didn’t live around the corner.

My room was in the basement. To say it was small makes it sound wildly luxurious. The furnishings were a cotton rug (which back in Ridgewood would have been called a substandard bath mat) and a bed—a mattress on a wood frame. There was a strip of window, painted black, just under the low ceiling. It didn’t open. It was a very poor room, but my room at home had been poor. Still, at least there’d been a lace doily on my night table, and a calendar with a picture of a girl with long hair on a windswept moor. This room, though, was so empty it was mean, as if someone had deliberately stripped it. The first night, I’d gone out of the room to see if maybe there was a chest of drawers outside that I’d missed, but all I found was the coal chute, when I banged my head on it.

If I’d gone out ten minutes later, I would have banged my head on Konrad Friedrichs. It must have been right around midnight. All of a sudden, the door to my room opened and there he was, in pajamas, slippers and a bathrobe. No one had even suggested that this would be part of the job.

In fact, it wasn’t. I saw that right away, when I watched him reddening at my expression. He closed the door behind him.

“This means nothing,” he said. His voice was lower than a whisper; it was more like a whoosh of air. “My housekeeper is old, deaf, but I must maintain a fiction—in case. Therefore, to knock on your door would be inappropriate.”

338 / SUSAN ISAACS

“I’m a domestic, so you can just walk right in?” I couldn’t believe this guy.

“I am not interested in your egalitarian sensibilities. Now, shall we get on with it?”

I motioned for him to sit near the foot of the bed. I sat near the head, or what I’d decided was the head; there was no pillow.

“Where does your housekeeper sleep?” I asked.

“On the other side of the furnace, the far side of the basement.”

“She has no idea…what I am?”

“No!”

“Does anybody—”

“Please, you are not to interrupt. I will tell you all you need to know. If inadvertently I leave something out, you may ask a question before I leave.” He blew what I guess was a speck of dust off the lapel of his bathrobe. “As you may know, I have permitted you to stay in my house only because Herr Forest”—Forest was Norman Weekes’s code name—“put undue pressure on me.” His thin lips drew so tight together that they became invisible; only the deep, resentful vertical lines that were etched into his upper lip remained. “A man in my position is entitled to better treatment. I am idealist
and
a good German.

For years I have passed information to Herr Forest in the hope that his…your people would wake up to the danger. I have risked my life in doing so, and what does he do in return? He gives me you to take care of, someone so unschooled that she is not fit to enter a house through the front door. You, who are to replace a clever, sophisticated, native-born German.”

“I was their only choice.”

“That is painfully clear. And so what can happen? They send in an amateur, she gets caught, and I—who for years have been above suspicion—am suspect. It is wrong!”

What was I going to do? Argue with him? “You’re right. It is wrong. Terrible. Outrageous.”

He only seethed on. “The situation—seeing that you are placed in a certain official’s household—compels me to SHINING THROUGH / 339

associate with…with resistance types I would much prefer to shun entirely. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes,” I said. “You only pass information to Herr Forest. What goes on among…these people in Berlin is of no interest to you.”

“That is correct. They plot over caviar. They care nothing about the Fatherland, only about their own circumstances. The degree to which they believe that that man will bring us to utter ruin is the degree to which they oppose him.”

His bearing never relaxed, not even when he sat on that terrible mattress, with what had to be a spring poking his behind.

Back home, I thought, only a person with a chest full of medals, a mahogany desk at the War Department and an office full of visitors would sit like that. I remembered walking through the War Department with Edward one day and glancing into an open office, with just that kind of officer: upright, his left side just slightly lower than his right from the weight of his medals.

A real stiff, right? The guy suddenly noticed me and blew me a kiss. I’d kept going, and Edward had asked, What are you smiling about? Oh, nothing, I’d answered.

But then I caught myself. Forget back home. In Training School, they warned us: Think only of the present. The future, when it is of immediate concern. Never the past: The past will devastate you. And when you think, think in the language of the country you have been sent to. Speaking it is not enough. To survive, you must
be
Czech or French or Hungarian. Or German.

I sat there in that impoverished little room trying to be fair, to admire Konrad Friedrichs, not detest him. If someone spends his whole life agonizing about the fate of his fatherland instead of what movie to see over the weekend or if he’ll ever fall in love or grow bald or get to visit Florida, he’s not going to develop a rollicking sense of humor.

And he had to be frightened, doing what he was doing—living in this Nazi hell he hated, spying for the United States—all those years. And he had to be bitter too; I’d 340 / SUSAN ISAACS

clearly been shoved down his throat. Instead of being treated as a treasure by Norman Weekes, Rex was being exploited. The OSS was treating him the way they would routinely treat some two-bit adventurer in an ascot who hangs around the resistance for thrills, not like the paragon of virtues—honor, bravery—that he was.

“You will continue to work in my kitchen as you have been working for the next four days. On that day, Saturday, I will suggest to my housekeeper that she deserves a vacation. I will give what, to her, is a great deal of money and a train ticket so that she can visit her family in Würzburg for three or four weeks.

She will think to herself that I am a foolish old man to take up with someone like you, but of course, she will not say anything.

She will go.”

The section of the mattress I was sitting on was incredibly lumpy. I edged back and tucked one of my legs under me. Herr Friedrichs’s nostrils flared wide and then closed, and you didn’t have to be his best friend to figure out this was a sign of intense displeasure.

“You will please,” he ordered, “sit like a proper German and not move about out of control as if…you are listening to jazz music. Now, once my housekeeper is gone, your training will begin. You are, as they claimed, a good cook…for those with a taste for the cuisine of common people. But where you are going…you must be taught to cook and serve in a more elegant manner.”

His house wasn’t exactly the sort of place where you’d find footmen slinging caviar at guests in white tie and tails. But if Rex wanted elegance…I smiled and said, “I’ll be happy to try and learn whatever you like. I realize I’m not a professional cook and—”

“Do not interrupt! In three to four weeks you must learn to be an accomplished chef. That was the best cover they could find, because it suits Herr Forest’s purpose perfectly. The plan is to get you into my colleague’s household.” Rex’s mouth turned down in disgust at the thought of the kind of person who had risen to become his colleague in the foreign office. “You are to be
in
the household but not
of
it. You SHINING THROUGH / 341

know our language, but you do not know our ways. So it is best that you be hidden away in the kitchen.

“Now, this colleague is a peacock who fancies himself a man of the world, a gourmet. His chef will have an accident in the next week or two.” He saw I was going to interrupt again, and he cut me off. “I am assured it will not be a fatal—or even terribly serious—accident. Two weeks after that, a very respected person will mention what a glorious meal was served at my house and offer to help this official secure your services.”