The Children's War (154 page)

25

“T
HIS
IS INTOLERABLE!”
the Führer fumed. “The Americans! This videotape fiasco! Close that door!”

Richard pulled the door to the Führer’s office shut behind him. It closed with a muffled click that made the security of the room seem even more oppressive. Richard took a moment to smooth his clothing. The frisking always annoyed him, but this time they had been exceptionally thorough. Clearly the Führer was feeling edgy.
“Mein Führer?”

“Oh, Richard, I’m so glad you could come here on such short notice. You’re the only one who talks sense to me. I can’t trust any of them. Günter, I swear, deliberately tries to mislead me, forcing me into situations where he can embarrass me. I swear it!”

“So it was his idea to murder the little girl?”

The Führer pursed his lips. “No,” he answered sourly, “that was my idea. I wanted to keep that Halifax bastard alive so that I could roast him slowly, and when they said there was some brat involved, I thought it would be a nice opener to a long series of tapes. I didn’t think it would have such an effect!”

“You should have consulted me first,” Richard chided. “I warned you about the protocols.”

“I have a whole damn Reich here to run, how the hell am I supposed to keep track of every region’s petty compromises?”

“Always check with me first,” Richard suggested.

“Besides, I never expected someone to go and steal the videotape,” the Führer griped.“We’re going to have to track that bastard down and hang him by his balls!”

“And is the investigation proceeding at all well?”

“No! We can’t locate any leak at all. Maybe I’ll just remove everyone who had anything to do with the tape!”

“That would be unwise,” Richard cautioned. “Given the speed with which the tape made it to America, I think it’s clear the leak occurred very early. That probably means a copy was made right in Neu Sandez, before it even got to Berlin. It was probably done by one of the men present at the interrogation. Perhaps they thought they could sell it on the black market.”

“Can they do that? Copy a tape like that, I mean.”

“I don’t know, but if you haven’t already questioned the men present, I would do so now.”

“Oh, that’s another problem. Three of the four of them are already dead!”

Richard raised his eyebrows. “Three?” he asked.

“Yes, the fourth is hiding out in Berlin. Obviously, they were murdered. We must retaliate, massively!”

Richard shook his head. “That would be disastrous. Given the evidence on the tape, we clearly violated the protocols; we’re lucky we’ve gotten off so lightly.”

“Lightly? Since when do we take orders from some hooded bandits? We cannot be seen to be weak!”

“Their judgment on those men was, no doubt, based upon the protocols and publicized to the local administration accordingly. Everyone there will know that what happened were judicial executions. The local officers probably haven’t been told, but I’m sure they suspect that the original violation of the protocols was at your order. They will already be pretty upset about that. If you violate the treaty again and retaliate, no officer in that region will be safe, and they will know it was you who put them in that sort of danger. You’d have a mutiny on your hands.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. It’s what I’ve told you about before,” Richard explained as patiently as he could. He offered the Führer a cigarette and then lit one for himself. “It’s all very delicately balanced there. We try hard to keep things quiet so that we don’t scare the colonists, and things like this ruin everything, besides creating bad publicity abroad.”

“Well,” the Führer huffed, “I wasn’t trying to kill an envoy’s grandchild! That was only mentioned incidentally to prove she was not a hostage! I should shoot the interrogator myself for blathering that on tape. My intent was to punish that renegade, and you told me that I was in my rights to do that!”

“Punish him, by all means, but next time, do be careful about collateral damage,” Richard suggested rather snidely.

“Well, what the hell do you think I should do?” the Führer moaned. “I can’t be seen to be weak. Now, not only is this English criminal loose and, I’m told,
back in America, but I’m taking orders from Polish partisans and worrying about officer mutinies! We can’t look weak like this. We must act! I’m going to order an invasion of that mountain area near where he was discovered.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Günter’s pushing me to do it.”

“Proves my point.”

“Are you telling me it’s not within our rights to suppress terrorist enclaves on our own territory?” the Führer asked angrily.

“Not at all. But it might look like a retaliation against the envoy’s involvement in the Halifax affair, rather than what you really want, which is a direct punishment of the traitor himself.”

“Bah! It’s high time we reclaim that land! It’s ours, damn it!”

Richard shook his head. “Face it, our troops are not at all prepared for that type of warfare, nor will they be very motivated; whereas they will face a very prepared, very motivated resistance. It will be an embarrassing failure.”

“They’ve never lost a battle!” the Führer trumpeted.

Richard coughed.“They haven’t fought a real battle in decades! They go into some village with overwhelming manpower and technological superiority and a willingness to kill anything that moves, and we call that a military victory! We’re deluding ourselves—which is fine, as long as we don’t start to believe our own propaganda!”

The Führer sucked in his breath. “Herr Traugutt, you are out of line, questioning the military prowess of our forces. I suggest you reconsider your words.”

Richard sucked on his cigarette and then slowly let out a stream of smoke as he surveyed the Führer. “
Mein Führer,
whatever the strengths of our troops, I don’t think it’s a good idea. If it succeeds, you will have achieved nothing that you can publicize since we do not publicly admit to the existence of this partisan enclave in the first place, and if it fails, you will be humiliated. Schindler is pushing you to do it for that very reason.”

The Führer dropped himself heavily into his padded leather desk chair. “Richard, you’re not there at these meetings! They all advise me to act tough! I don’t know what to do.”

“Be tough by sticking to your decision. No retaliations, no invasions. You understand diplomacy, they don’t, that’s all there is to it.”

“I’ll think about it,” the Führer sighed. “I’m not really sure I understand diplomacy. I’m having no luck at all with the Americans. I thought I had them all nicely lined up to work with us, and now this fiasco.” He shook his head. “Nobody knows what to do with them.”

“How is your new spokesman turning out?”

“Oh, I thought he was doing really well, but he’s had one piece of bad luck after another. I don’t know if I should keep him on or what. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“Vogel? I think his wife is friends with my wife,” Richard answered obscurely. “I believe they sometimes take the babies for walks together.”

“Ach, that’s right, you have a baby. How is he doing? What is he now?”

“Five months.”

“And your eldest? How is she?”

“She’s away at the moment,” Richard answered, trying not to show his irritation.

The Führer smiled wistfully. “She’s a fine young woman. Make sure she visits me the next time she’s in town. I’d like to see her.”

“I’ll do that.”

“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” The Führer did not wait for an answer as he waved Richard from his office and buzzed his secretary to send in his next appointment.

26

T
HE FOLLOWING
SUNDAY,
Barbara asked to see where Peter had really grown up. It wasn’t that long a walk, and Peter wondered why he hadn’t bothered to look at the old place sooner. But then again, why should he? It was just an apartment near the top of a prewar block of flats. They had not been too awful. Round and about a lot of the prewar terraced housing had been destroyed to make way for concrete high-rises, but his building had been tall enough to escape deliberate destruction.

Where the brick or masonry had crumbled or been damaged during the war, the repairs had been done in concrete slopped on like some sort of bandage paste, and the cracks that had appeared in the walls after a terrorist bombing had never been repaired. The chimneys for their small coal fires were unreliable, the water arrived in rusty spurts, and all the flats had been subdivided and divided again. Their flat had originally been one large room with three windows facing the street. A wall had been built dividing off one window and that part of the room for his parents’ bedroom, and a kitchen had been shoved in a corner near another window. The bathroom had been torn apart and the bath replaced by a shower. The saved space was used to make a closet, whose wall cut right across the old bathroom window.

The flat had high ceilings, a leftover from better days, and even though the plaster dropped from them in little powdery bombs whenever a lorry rumbled down the street, they gave the pathetic room a wonderful sense of space. The windows were marvelous as well. Huge old windows that pushed up to open in a way that modern windows would never allow. The glass leaked cold air and it was impossible to find replacements for the cracked panes, but the bitter winter draft and the patches of taped cardboard were a small price to pay for such a luxurious view of the world.

The route to the apartment had changed considerably from what Peter remembered. A highway cut a swath through what had once been residences and one of his favorite hangouts. They clambered over the railings and strolled across the vast, empty, pitted lanes. On the other side they climbed over the guardrail and dropped about a meter down to ground level next to a terraced house that had inexplicably survived as an isolated outpost of the past. An outline of an old stairway climbed up one of its outer walls, and some plaster clung in a decorative diagonal stripe up the length of the ghostly stairs. There was no door on the brick house and the windows were boarded up, but the smell of burning wood and trash emanating from within told them that it was certainly occupied nonetheless.

They walked along. Again the layout had changed, and they had to walk some distance out of their way to skirt around a huge administrative center. As they rounded the front of the building, Peter read the small sign over the main doors:
CRIMINAL COURTS AND DETENTION CENTER.
There was always money and space for more prisons. Local residents, those who would not lose their homes, usually liked having new prisons and competed for the influx of money and the promise of well-paid jobs.

“ ‘And they sold their birthrights for a mess of pottage,’ ” he quoted quietly to himself, unaware of the religious allusion.

His family’s old apartment building was right up against the wall of the new courts and not surprisingly had a sign in front indicating that it was slated for eventual destruction to make room for an expansion of the detention center. The date of completion of the new wing was set for a month prior, but there was no sign that any action had been taken other than to dispossess the previous residents of their homes. The old building loomed in front of them, officially empty, clearly occupied by hundreds of squatters.

“Have you been inside since that day?” Barbara asked in a subdued voice as if she expected ghosts to leap out at them.

“I went in to listen at the door of our flat after my parents were arrested. There was somebody living there. After that, I never came back,” he answered distantly. He had been afraid of being recognized, of somebody turning him in for a reward. Even now, he felt a chill of terror as he remembered the van parked on the rubble-strewn street out front. The neighbors had looked out from behind closed curtains, had peered around the corner to watch. A small group of passersby had stood respectfully distant and waited until they were given permission to continue on their way.

As they stood there, some children emerged from the shadows and scrambled past them. Even from a distance they stank. Their grime-covered faces indicated that there was no water in the building and had not been for months. Peter wondered what he and Barbara must look like to them. What were two clean and well-dressed Germans doing here in the center of all this garbage? Inspectors? Social workers?

Peter began walking toward the building, but Barbara hung back. “Do you think it’s safe?” She looked worriedly toward the dark, glassless windows.

“I think so.” Linking his arm in hers, he strode purposefully down the path. There had once been small patches of grass on either side of the entrance—a luxury that bespoke the building’s prestige. Now the lawns were nothing but hard-packed mud covered with piles of discarded building material from the works next door.

They stepped out of the unusually bright November sunshine and over the threshold of the lobby. Though the sudden contrast left them nearly blind, Peter did not hesitate even a second since he knew that pausing would be taken as a sign of weakness. He walked confidently across the lobby, holding on to Barbara to reassure her. Somebody grimaced at them from across the room but did not make a move toward the strangers. As they approached the base of the stairwell, a group of four youths moved to intercept them, standing with crossed arms in front of the steps.

Without even breaking his stride Peter tossed three fifty-mark coins to the side of the steps and said in English, “Bugger off.” The boys overcame their surprise to scramble in the direction of the coins, leaving them free to climb the steps unmolested.

At the sixth floor they turned down the hallway and came to the door of the flat. It hung crookedly on one hinge, the other having been torn loose when it was kicked in at some earlier date. Inside there were clear signs that the rooms were occupied, but nobody was currently in the main room. Peter glanced around. The furniture was gone, everything, even the sink and the light fixtures. The last legitimate resident had apparently stripped the place bare upon receiving orders to move out. Or the squatters had sold off anything they could carry. He was glad to see that the piano was gone; he had hoped he would not have to see its ruined hulk sitting in a corner of the doomed building.

He went into the bedroom and found a family of four gathered around a pot of food having their lunch. The wife looked deranged, the husband simply tired. The two children stared up at him with weary expressions. Peter guessed the second child had been unofficial and had eventually cost them their housing and their jobs. Or maybe they were original residents who had been obliged to leave when the apartment block had been slated for destruction, and now they had to squat in their own home, ever fearful of a police roundup, beset by crime, cold, and unable to find enough food.

He opened his wallet and pulled out two five-hundred-mark notes. The woman licked her lips sloppily, then carefully wiped the saliva onto her sleeve. He handed the notes to the man and said in English, “Don’t come back until evening.”

The family rose as one and left the flat. One thousand marks? What sort of weird sexual perversion drove a man to bring his girlfriend to a place like this and pay them off with a thousand marks? The woman argued that they should turn
the couple in to the police since they were obviously up to something and clearly they would get a reward for
frenching
them. The man hit her and she shut up.

“A thousand marks?” Barbara asked.

“It will feed those kids for at least a month. That is, if the parents don’t spend it on some miracle cure or drink it all away,” he replied, somewhat ashamed of his spontaneous and useless generosity.

“Why until evening?”

“I don’t know. I can’t really see spending more than fifteen minutes looking around.” Nevertheless, he had felt an intuitive need for time. There was something he had meant to look for, something that he had put out of his mind years ago because it had been so impossible. Now was his chance, he just had to remember what it was.

To jog his memory, he gave Barbara a tour of the place. He gestured with mock grandeur and said, “This room contained the artfully combined foyer, sitting room, kitchen, library, boys’ bedroom, formal dining room, and music room!” He explained where everything had been: the fold-down couch, the armchair, the television and its table, Erich’s closet and Anna’s cupboard.

“Where did you keep your things?” Barbara interrupted to ask.

“Hmm? Oh, behind the couch, on the floor.” He gestured toward a corner.

She raised her eyebrows. “On the floor?”

“Yeah, I called it my ‘cave.’ I would vault over the couch and duck back there to sort through my things in my own private little world.”

“Didn’t you resent the fact your sister and brother had closets?” she asked.

He looked at her, surprised by the question. “Resent?” He lowered his head as he tried to think back. “I guess I never really thought about it. Anyway, I did get Anna’s cupboard eventually, after she died.” Again he thought back, then added, “It took about two years before my mum could remove her clothes and I could use it. I felt guilty using her space like that, but, no, I don’t think I resented it.”

“I would have,” Barbara asserted, but he was already explaining how his mother had also squeezed in a piano as well as a table with six—imagine six!— chairs: no fold-up coffee table for their dinner, they had a proper dining table. Against the wall the hanging wires and pipe ends testified to where the cooker and sink had been. Later, they had even acquired a refrigerator—an unheard-of and completely unnecessary indulgence.

Looking around like that, with the place empty of furniture or people, he realized for the first time how large the two rooms were, much larger than the flat he and Barbara shared. A young couple living on their own in two large rooms with a private bath, a kitchen that they did not have to share, three children, private-school fees, good clothes, fresh fruit and vegetables, meat—often beef—at least three times a week. What had once been obscure was now obvious: his father had to be in the Party, how else could they have afforded such luxury? Other couples, where, of course, both husband and wife worked, could barely scrape by, lived with in-laws, limited themselves to one child, whereas his family
had bathed in luxury on his father’s salary alone. His mother’s job, which she had kept throughout his youth, had been needed only for the extras: the bottled water, the chocolate, the books, the piano.

“What’re you thinking?” Barbara asked.

Surprised out of his reverie, he answered, “Oh, I was just wondering if it was worth it.”

“If what was worth what?”

“My mother working. She had a really lousy job, and with three children, it must have been absolutely exhausting, especially when we were young, but despite the fact that my father obviously made good money, she never gave it up.”

“Maybe it wasn’t enough money for her. Some people never have enough.”

“That’s true, or maybe she enjoyed her friends at work.”

“Or her independence.”

They walked into the bedroom. Though smaller than the living room it was still quite spacious; there had been room enough for a double bed, a writing desk, and while she was still alive, Anna’s little bed. Now there was nothing except some wires dangling where the overhead light had been and the meager possessions of the squatters.

The only remaining room was the bathroom. Due to the overwhelming stench of urine in there, Peter and Barbara did nothing more than poke their heads through the doorway so he could point out the now-famous shower. The toilet and sink were gone, but the shower was still there, though of course the water was permanently shut off.

“Shower!” he said suddenly, clicking his fingers with recognition.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s a word in a rhyme my mother used to recite. As a kid, I always thought it was just a standard English nursery rhyme—you know, one of those poems that are almost nonsensical because they are so historical or garbled. Well, later, after they were arrested, I never heard it again, and much later when I just happened to quote it to a girlfriend, she claimed to have never heard of it. That didn’t surprise me, but then I started to ask, just casually curious, and I learned that nobody else had ever heard of it. It might have just been old-fashioned or regional or just something my mother made up. Then it dawned on me that it might be some sort of code that my mother was passing on to me. It seemed a bit too much to hope for, and besides, there was nothing I could do with it since I had no idea what it meant and it was all so far in the past.”