Shining Through (54 page)

There was no doorman, but just to be safe, I walked around the huge stone building until I found the service entrance. There was an elevator inside, a cage. It was open. The operator was gone; he’d left his newspaper on his tiny half circle of a stool.

But I walked past it, over to the door to the service stairs. It was locked.

I had no choice. I got into the elevator, slammed the gate shut after me and turned the operator’s wooden handle to the right.

The elevator jerked and then started slowly,
so
slowly, to creak upstairs. Finally it stopped. Margarete had once remarked that she lived on the top floor of her building; it was an endless cave of an apartment, she’d said, but it had a magnificent view of the Brandenburg Gate.

I stepped out of the elevator, into a small alcove. There was a large metal door, the back door to her apartment, and another to the staircase. I made sure the door to the stairs was open and took the elevator down three or four floors, where I left it. Then, heart in throat, I climbed all the way up again.

It was obvious Margarete’s endless cave took up the entire floor of the building; besides the door to the stairs, there was only one other door in the service alcove: The area itself was all empty space, with nothing to hide behind. I crouched close to the door to the apartment and waited, knowing all the time that if anyone came up on the service elevator, I was dead.

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You focus on crazy things at times like that. There I was, listening at a back door for a front door to open, my picture about to circulate all over Berlin, and I was thinking: Why did I have three cups of tea this afternoon? because I had to go to the bathroom. That’s all I could concentrate on. Okay, so maybe I thought a little about the rumor of the Gestapo’s latest persuas-ive technique: They smashed the joints of your fingers, one by one, with a hammer. And then I thought: Wouldn’t it be funny if all of a sudden, after going untouched, this building gets an early-evening bomb, with me on the top floor. But in truth, those pictures of peril seemed like nothing compared to the strain on my bladder.

I must have been there nearly an hour when, through the metal door, I heard someone enter the apartment. I listened: There must have been rugs but, finally, wood floors, because there was the click of a woman’s heels. The noise advanced. I tapped at the door. Nothing. I knocked. The footsteps stopped.

I said to myself, Oh, God, let it be her, then I put my mouth to the door and called out, “Margarete!”

The footsteps clicked closer. “Who is it?”

“Lina.”

The door was opened a slit. “It is you!” she whispered.

“Why…?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. You must be…in terrible trouble. Come in.” She led me into a small vestibule between what must have been a maid’s room and the kitchen.

“Do you have a bathroom?”

“Lina!” she said softly, smiling. “If that’s why you came here, I shall be extremely annoyed. All right, follow me.”

Some cave. We walked through hallways hung with framed paintings—a couple of old barons, and the kind of German still-life paintings of fruit bowls that somehow always have dead rabbits and candlesticks too.

There were crystal bottles of bath salts, perfumes and lotions all over her bathroom, as though it never occurred to Margarete that in the middle of the night she would hear a 402 / SUSAN ISAACS

whistle and then her life would be reduced to shattered glass.

She took me into her kitchen and we sat together on some sort of fancy wooden bench she had along one wall of the huge room. “Let me make you something. A nice omelet?”

I said, “Please, I can’t eat.”

“Nervous stomach again?”

“Nervous…everything. More than nervous. Oh, Margarete, I’ve done a terrible thing coming here. I’ve brought you into this whole mess. If I’m seen coming or leaving, everything, all this”—I waved in the direction of the hallway, with its rich gold-framed barons—“won’t do you any good.”

Margarete slipped off her shoes and tucked her feet under her.

For a minute she didn’t say anything. She studied her hands, fiddled with the heavy gold bracelets she wore, but didn’t look at me. “Lina, it is simple. If you had a choice, you wouldn’t be here, so there is no reason for you to feel remorse. Now tell me what happened.”

I told her all about Horst, Hedwig and the key. All about my work. Every time I added another detail, I felt as if I was digging her grave a little deeper. So, for whatever it was worth, I didn’t tell her about Captain Grayson and how urgent it was that I get that message through. If I couldn’t save her, at least I could try to give her a little protection, allow her to have the luxury of a little ignorance.

Both of us might be captured and forced to talk. But despite what she had once told me about how members of the resistance movement committed the sin of pride by thinking: Oh, yeah, I can withstand the worst kind of torture, I felt that I could last longer than Margarete. She had extraordinary courage and nobility, but I was afraid that the nobility might be the thing to do her in. Even though she’d talked a lot about how much she hated her pampered childhood, she had still lived it. Okay, I wasn’t raised on the toughest streets in New York, but no one had ever ironed my clothes or polished my chandeliers for me. I was older, and just a little bit tougher. Looking at her perfect white hands,

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with their opal and gold rings, her gleaming buffed nails, all of precisely the same length, I sensed that that small difference might be important.

And there was another difference: I was half German but completely American. Even after all this time, they were foreigners to me. And if it came down to me and the Gestapo, I really believed I could hate them—and withstand them—a little better than she could. They had murdered her dear friend Alfred. Well, they’d rounded up and slaughtered my family. My people.

Margarete finally looked me right in the eye. “Is there anything else I should know?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “You know everything now. How terrible does it look for me? Would it save time,” I demanded, trying to smile,

“if I just went straight to the Berlin police and gave myself up?”

She leaned over and adjusted a loose hairpin on one of my braids. “It might save time, but it would be infinitely stupid.

Now listen to me, my dear friend. I’m going to tell you exactly what to do.” She glanced at a big wall clock. It was almost seven-thirty. “You have to get out of here. The pig is due here in an hour, and he might stay the night, so I can’t offer you my most choice accommodations. The first thing you must do is get to this Rolf.” She paused. “But his fish store is certainly closed by now.” I nodded. “So you will get to him first thing in the morning. Now, is your hair in your passport photograph braided?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Let’s hurry inside. You’ll take down your hair and I’ll give you something to put on—less domestic, more well-kept mistress. You’ll spend tonight in the Friedrichstrasse underground. Get in the middle of the crowds. Stay in the middle but don’t talk. Anything, even the tension in your voice, could give you away. I don’t think you comprehend how frightened you are, Lina.”

“Oh, Margarete, I really think I do. I’m
terrified
.” She stood and led me back through the long hallway, into her bedroom.

I took out my hairpins. She wrapped them in toilet 404 / SUSAN ISAACS

tissue and buried them in a wastebasket that was full of cold-cream and makeup tissues. She handed me her brush. Silver. I brushed my hair and she said, “Don’t leave the underground too early—even though there are always a few people who get up and go around dawn. Wait a little later, for the main part of the crowd to leave, and go out with them, blend in. Now listen to this: Do not take the train from that station to Rolf’s. No one does that. Everyone goes home, to see if they still have a home and to wash up. Take your time. Walk to the Französische Strasse station. You should plan on getting to Rolf’s between seven-thirty and eight. Even if the store is still closed, he will be there; they go to market early.” I put down the brush. “How is his fish?”

“Not bad,” I said, “but probably not up to your standards.”

“Isn’t it odd?” Margarete said. She looked in the mirror of the dressing table, picked up the brush and ran it through her long brown hair. “All these years I’ve never even heard there was a fishmonger in the movement.”

“It’s too bad you don’t know him,” I said. “There’s something really admirable about him,” I said. “I mean, I don’t really know him. The only strong opinion I’ve ever heard him express is that it’s wrong to cut the heads off fish. But I know, to me, he really represents everything good about Germany. Well, Rolf—and you.”

“Oh, don’t flatter me. But him. Lina, there you have it: the greatness of the common man.”

“And the greatness of the uncommon woman.” And then I turned to her and said, “Thank you, Margarete.”

2 5

I
didn’t dare risk sleep, so I sat up. All night long I felt the damp chill of the wall of the Friedrichstrasse underground through my coat. I couldn’t risk taking it off and rolling it into a backrest or a pillow, as I’d done in the past; the report on Captain Grayson was slipped into the slit I’d made months before, in the lining of the cuff of the sleeve.

Lives could be saved or lost; I
had
to get the intelligence to Rolf. So I leaned against that clammy wall all night, listening to the slow, heavy night breathing of the crowd, just waiting to get free, and thinking about Captain Grayson. Either he was an OSS jewel—the world’s supreme conveyer of disinformation—or one selfish, rotten, weak son of a bitch. Selling his country down the river. For literature! I smiled for a second, imagining the army recruiting Nan and all the other little cerebralettes into a special WAC battalion to take care of morale for guys like him: Oh, Captain, forget the three panzer divisions. Tell me about Verlaine’s metaphors.

Seven-thirty or eight, Margarete had said. Your friend should be there by then.

I half closed my eyes and pictured Rolf’s store: the sawdust-covered wood floors, the scrubbed counters, the orderly rows of fish on their beds of chopped-up ice. They were all laid out whenever I got there—usually around ten o’clock. But, I thought, by ten o’clock the ice was always partially melted. I remembered it clearly then; I was careful always to lean forward, not to step too close to the counters,

405

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because the freezing, fish-scented water would drip onto my shoes. I figured they must set out the ice about five-thirty, six in the morning.

I couldn’t stand the waiting. And so, soon after the “all clear”

signal, just after daybreak and the end of curfew, I copied the first of the early risers; I yawned, stretched my neck and made my way on cautious tiptoes among the still-sleeping mounds.

But when I got to Rolf’s, a little after six, he wasn’t there. No one was. The door was locked, the store dark. I walked to the corner. The old man who ran the newspaper kiosk, a man I’d seen a million times, glanced up at me, not so much suspiciously as curiously. I couldn’t afford curiosity.

“I was told to get here early,” I said, to explain. “To the fish store. They might have some haddock.”

“No haddock today,” the newsdealer said. “The policeman told me.” Oh, God, I thought. “The man who worked there was killed last night. The one-armed man.”

You’re effing falling apart! an instructor at OSS Training School had roared to me one time. Don’t give me any of that tender-maiden crap! No flutters! No fainting! This is war, girlie.

“The one-armed man?” I showed surprise. A little regret. “How was he killed?”

“A bomb.”

“Oh.” All the energy I had left seemed to seep out of me. Was it horror? Relief that Rolf hadn’t been caught? I felt so weak.

The apple in my pocket that I’d taken from the Dreschers’

weighed me down.

“His wife came first thing, the policeman told me. Before dawn. Took his knives, the kind fish people use, and some other things that were his. Said she didn’t know if they would bother opening the store again.”

A
bomb?
I kept thinking. But what did I expect? A special RAF

note engraved on each casing: Abstain from detonating in presence of friends.

“Did he own the store?”

“Yes.” He cut the cord on a pile of papers. “You know, I SHINING THROUGH / 407

never knew how he lost his arm. I couldn’t ask. He was quiet, kept to himself.” He looked at me expectantly. “Do you know?”

“No,” I said. “I never…”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walking down the street toward Rolf’s. Maybe it was nothing more than my own dread that made the whole world seem menacing, but I felt something was wrong about him. He looked okay, not tight, cold Gestapo. But even from a distance, his raincoat looked too clean and well-pressed. Or it could have been that his walk was not quite brisk enough for a government worker getting an early start on his day.

Maybe Rolf had been carrying something on him when he was hit, and when they found his body, searched it…

“Well,” I said to the newsdealer. “It is sad. He seemed like a nice man.”

“A good business, if you don’t mind smelling like that all the time.”

“Yes,” I said. “Goodbye.”

And then I turned the corner, out of sight of the man in the raincoat, and walked fast. Not too fast. Just the sharp pace that an energetic cook would take when she is on the trail of haddock.

I went to the zoo. There was no grass; the ground was black, and the air was absolutely still. It had been bombed a few weeks before. The cages had been so badly damaged that the police had had to shoot the animals, for fear they’d get loose and run wild in Berlin. Boy, had everyone gotten all weepy over that.

Poor animals! The slaughter of the innocents! The Germans were so compassionate.

I sat on what was left of a bench. The jagged ends of the wooden slats were scorched; when you touched them, they broke off into cinders. I took the apple out of my pocket and bit into it. It’s funny; when you read about people who know their time is up, they’re always tasting or smelling something and going Ahh! at the beautiful sense experience they never noticed before.