The Children's War (52 page)

Something told him to panic, but he did not. If they were for him, there was nothing to do but wait—there was no escape from his fourth-floor room. He had noticed and accepted that as an unavoidable risk when he had first taken the room. So he waited, hoping it would be for someone else.

There was a pounding on his door. He finished the last of the gin. The door splintered under an assault of heavy bodies. Three Gestapo burst into the room waving their guns. Strictly speaking, they weren’t really from the
Geheime Staatspolizei;
they were, in fact, English. Just local police. Whatever their association, he knew what to do next. He put down his glass and stood to greet them by raising his hands above his head. The game was up: seventeen days and twentytwo hours without an identity, and the game was up.

They made him kneel with his hands clasped together on his head as they searched his room. He mused about who might have betrayed him. Probably someone in the building—maybe even the desk clerk. He felt too numbed by the gin and bereft by his losses to really resent the betrayal. The lure of easy money was hard to beat. Maybe he had been selected at random: it was a good bet that if he lived here, he was guilty of something, and now the guards tore the room apart to determine what that was.

They found only forty-seven marks in total and nothing else. They were rank amateurs: the loose floorboard should never have escaped their notice. Not believing his luck, he stood when ordered. Then they told him to produce his papers. He let his hands down and showed them his identity card. They wanted to know why it was not updated—where were his labor service stamps? He had no answer. They wanted to see his work documents. He shrugged and, knowing he would not be believed, said, “I lost them. Just today.” Without even bothering to ask anything else, they threw him against a wall, bound his hands behind him, and led him away.

He spent the time in Green Park prison—it wasn’t called that, but that’s how everyone referred to it, due to its location—and listened daily to the sound of shots as various prisoners were executed on the grounds outside his cell. He whiled away the time trying to determine what his defense against the as-yet-
unstated charges might be, but nothing brilliant suggested itself. Weeks later, when his case finally came to trial, it was determined that the person he claimed to be did indeed exist in the files and matched his description and fingerprints, but there was no record of him ever having fulfilled his national-service labor contract. In fact, it appeared that he had not held a job, accepted ration coupons, or registered his residence since he was sixteen. By a minor bureaucratic miracle his fingerprints were never cross-referenced. That the papers in his possession matched his face and prints was sufficient; nobody bothered to check to see that his prints were also those of a wanted man of a different name. Doubtless his file had crossed some heavily laden desk without even being opened.

It meant that in the end, with the painful lack of evidence, even a Reich court could manage to convict him of nothing more than draft-dodging and lack of proper registration. He was sentenced to fifteen years of labor to compensate for the six he had not done and another five for the insufficient documentation. He remembered looking down at the floor and swallowing in dismay. Twenty years: it was more than twice what he had expected.

“Peter!”

He looked up, shocked back to reality by Elspeth’s voice. From the tone, he guessed she must have called more than once.

“Are you asleep?” she snapped. “Hurry up here, there’s more to be done. Let me know when you’re finished. It’s almost time for supper. Hurry up!”

52

“I
’M
SORRY,
the congressman is very busy,” the polite young staffer said. “Appointments for his time must be made months in advance!”

“If I knew where I would be ‘months in advance,’ I would happily oblige the congressman,” Alex replied with a forced little smile, “but the nature of my business prevents that. Nevertheless, the information I have is very important to the defense of this country, and I should think it would be the patriotic duty of the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee to make time to hear me.”

“We have no proof that your information is important,” the staffer replied.

“I’m offering proof!”

“You have no idea how many cranks—”

Alex drew himself up.

“—not to say, sir, that you are one, I’m just explaining that we have such an influx of people with very important information—”

“Psia krew cholera,”
Alex muttered.

“Sir?”

“Nothing. Never mind. I’ll go to the press. I think they’ll not only be interested in our evidence, they’ll wonder why the congressman wasn’t.”

“Sir. Please. I wouldn’t advise that. If, as you said, this is a very sensitive issue, you could be violating our security laws—and that would land you in prison.”

“So what I have to offer is not important enough for the committee to hear, but too important for the press? That in and of itself will make for an interesting headline.”

“You’d be risking breaking the law!”

Alex leaned forward and pressed his face close to the staffer’s. “Young man, I live in Gestapoland! You can’t scare me with your puny threats! Get me a hearing with the committee or I will go to your press!”

The staffer raised his hands. “All right. Look, give me a couple of days to arrange something. It will be behind closed doors, you understand?”

“Fair enough. Two days,” Alex harrumphed, and left.

Three days later Alex and Adam were ushered into a small conference room. Along one wall was a table with fourteen chairs, all facing the same way. Opposite the table was a smaller table with three chairs. Adam and Alex were seated at the small table.

“There’s no one here,” Alex commented to the young woman who had shown them in.

“Oh, the committee will be here soon,” she soothed, and left quickly.

“Fuckers,” Adam muttered. “They’re letting us cool our heels a bit.”

“This is ridiculous,” Alex concurred, but short of walking out, he could think of nothing to do.

Adam began pacing the room, studying the portraits on the wall. “The setup looks like we’re on trial, facing all those judges,” Adam commented sourly.

“Oh, that’s typical.” Alex watched as his son-in-law paced the room, then said, “So what do you think about it?”

“About America? I’ve seen it before.”

“No, about government. You could get elected, move your family to the NAU. Raise Joanna here.”

“I’m not averse to it.”

“You’d have to give up your, er”—Alex glanced around at the walls—“um, activities.”

“I know. I wouldn’t mind. I’d miss teaching, but as for the rest of it . . . Well, it’s moot.”

“Why?”

“Zosia would never agree to it.”

“I should have brought her.”

“Yes, if your goal was to convince us to leave field work, you should have brought her, not me. Besides, she would have done a better job charming the committee.”

“I don’t want you to charm them. I just want to give them a sense of authenticity. You were there, you saw it all. Personal testimony is best.”

“It’s expensive,” Adam said. “The money could have been better spent on guns.”

“Think of it as educational. There’s no point fighting in a vacuum—all of us need experience dealing with the Free World, otherwise we’ll lose track of what we’re aiming for and how we’re going to get there.”

“It’s still expensive.”

“There’s a cost to everything we do,” Alex conceded.

Within a few minutes two committee members entered the room. Both apologized for being late, made appropriate excuses, then noting that their colleagues had not arrived, one departed, promising to return in a few minutes, and the other opened a file and pored over its contents.

A few more committee members arrived and seated themselves. Adam finally sat down again, tapping his fingers impatiently on the table. When a cameraman entered the room, Adam lowered his head onto a hand and muttered to Alex, “Get that out of here.”

Alex was also perturbed and jumped up and, keeping his back to the camera, demanded, “That has to go!”

Two of the committee members looked up. “All proceedings must be recorded,” one said in surprise.

Adam, still shielding his face behind his hand, sang quietly, “Get that out of here.”

“It’s only for the record,” the other member explained helpfully.

“A public record!” Alex snapped.“Now get that thing out of here!”

As he made his demands, the chair of the committee walked in. “What’s the problem?”

“We can’t be filmed,” Alex explained patiently. “Our lives depend on anonymity!”

“Anonymity? How can we take a statement from anonymous individuals? This is for the public record!”

Alex squeezed his eyes shut in exasperation. He breathed deeply, opened his eyes, and releasing his words carefully, explained, “You have proof of our credentials from our government in exile. If you peruse the file, you will see that, though you may use our names, it is necessary for us to maintain our security, and therefore we cannot be photographed or filmed.”

“What about your voices?” a committee member asked.

Alex glanced at Adam. Adam nodded subtly. “All right,” Alex answered for them both.

The camera was ordered into a corner, facing only the committee members, and as the rest of the committee had filed in and taken their places, the proceedings began.

“Great start,” Adam muttered to Alex.

“Typical,” Alex assured him. “Don’t worry, once they hear what we have to say, they’ll forget their procedures.”

That, of course, was not true. Nevertheless, they managed to work their way through the meeting and inform the committee of their discovery of at least one chemical weapons factory on the outskirts of Berlin. Alex referred them to the maps that had been distributed, he pointed out the documents verifying the chemical analysis of the samples taken, he verified the translations of the smuggled security-service documents that they had acquired.

“Quite an impressive collection of material here,” one member of the committee commented. “Almost too impressive.”

“What? What do you mean?” Alex asked.

“We’re not saying that you’re lying, but—”

“Lying?” Adam leapt in. “I was there. I scraped this muck off the ground, riskingmy life, the life of my colleague, and even the life of a hapless worker! Countless people risked everything to get you this evidence and you say—”

“Calm down, young man, it’s not that we don’t believe you . . .”

Two hours later it had reached a complete equilibrium and everyone admitted-that there was nothing more to be said. Ignoring Alex’s weary protests that the “appropriate people” had already seen the evidence he was presenting, the committee assured Alex that his evidence would be forwarded for further study. The committee then reminded their witnesses of the sensitive nature of the material and that it had been classified as secret and warned them not to publicly release any of the information that they had presented. After that, the witnesses were politely dismissed from the room.

“We’re doing this all wrong,” Alex commented later in their hotel. He paced nervously, smoking a cigarette, as Adam sat on the edge of the bed pulling apart and inspecting a pistol.

“I wonder if this thing is any good,” Adam muttered. He ejected the clip and then slammed it back into place.

“I don’t know what the right way is, but we’re obviously doing something wrong,” Alex continued, oblivious to what Adam was doing. “We break our backs getting them valuable information which they could use to justify any action, and they just sit on it.”

“Maybe we’ve got it backward,” Adam suggested. He finished inspecting the gun and aimed it questioningly at a vase of flowers. “There, time to test it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going out and see if I can’t find somewhere to fire this thing.”

“No, I mean, what do you mean about backwards?”

“Oh, that. I meant, maybe we should get the American public riled and then the politicians will take action.”

“Rile the public?” Alex asked. “How can we? They’d stomp on us in a minute—didn’t you hear them? It’s all classified. We’d be under arrest the
moment we opened our mouths. And given the publicity we’d get, neither of us could ever go home after that—it’d be a virtual death sentence.”

“I didn’t mean with this information.” Adam tucked the gun into a holster. “We need something safer. Completely unclassified. No weapons, no secrets. Something that touches the human spirit. A poster child.”

“Oh, they’ve heard all that. Nothing affects them! If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the congressional records from ’42 or ’43 when word got out about the ‘final solution.’ If it’s not an American . . . I mean, what’s going on now is nothing compared to the slaughter of the forties and fifties. And they weren’t interested then. Doubted our sources, claimed their hands were tied, blah, blah, blah.”

“I think they were overwhelmed by the numbers, and by the gruesomeness of it all. No, what I have in mind is something different.”

“What in God’s name do you think would work?” Alex asked forlornly.

“Did you notice something odd when I talked to the committee about gathering the evidence—I saw the same thing when we gave a summary to our American friends about what I was doing here.”

“What?”

“They asked about that man.”

“Which man?”

“The one who was working in the factory. Next time we discuss it with a group of any sort, look at the faces. At least half of them look concerned and interested only then, only when I mention how one person was treated. We would have done better bringing
him
here.”

“No.” Alex shook his head. “As soon as he opened his mouth and spoke only German, or some other language they don’t understand, they’d lose interest.”

Adam shrugged. “Eh, I suppose you’re right. If he’s still alive, I doubt he has much to say in any language.” Adam stood and pulled his jacket on. “I guess it doesn’t show,” he said, inspecting himself in the mirror. “I’ll take a subway out toward a park, then see if I can’t find somewhere sort of private. Could you loan me a pack?”

“Cigarettes? I thought you had a pack of your own!” Alex exclaimed.

“I did. Now, are you going to loan me a pack?”

Alex handed him a pack and watched as Adam removed one and tucked the rest into his pocket. He frowned as it finally dawned on him what Adam had just said. “You’re going to fire a gun in the city?”