The Other Side of Love (62 page)

“He was my father.”

Myron?”

Leventhal jumped. Then his jaundiced deep-sunk eyes nickered over Wyatt’s face.

“My God, I knew you reminded me of somebody! Yes, except for the fair hair almost a mirror image. He married a gentile girl”

Mother. He died a few months after the wedding. Before I was born my mother married Dad - the man who is my father. Nobody

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in the Kingsmith family knows about the first marriage except Dad, and he’s forgotten.”

“What about Fraulein Kingsmith?”

“Yes, Kathe knows.”

Wyatt turned the ignition.

“Let’s go some place to talk.”

IV

German guests were not permitted in the Casino, but Wyatt, truthfully, informed the guard that Heinrich Leventhal was his long-lost cousin. The smell of roasting beef was strong, but lunch wasn’t yet being served. The two men sat in the near-empty bar, Wyatt sipping his drink as Leventhal described meeting Kathe - through Schultze

- in the New Museum’s Egyptian wing.

“Was that when she saved your life?”

Wyatt asked.

“No, later.”

Leventhal stared down at his drink so that Wyatt couldn’t see his face properly.

“Even now I can’t talk about BergenBelsen. Just let’s say that by comparison the first camp seems like the Hotel Adlon.”

He paused.

“It’s a year ago since I managed to escape. The war was almost over then, yet still they kept on killing us. Eight men on my work detail planned to break out and tell the Allies what was going on. I was the only one who survived.”

His voice faded.

“Forgive the blanks. The journey’s not easy to talk about, either. You can imagine how I fitted in a skeleton in stolen rags with my head shaven. I had planned to go to Schultze’s so he could pass on a report to your people. But poor old Schultze’s building was gone

- an incendiary bomb. So were the other safe houses I’d known. I was starving”

“Nobody helped you?”

“It was a capital crime. Why would they risk their lives and their families”

lives? Fraulein Kingsmith gave me bread, she gave me clothes that had belonged to her father.”

The sunken eyes were wet.

Wyatt gestured to the waiter for more drinks.

“Kathe’s declared a moratorium on the war,”

he said.

“She seems bogged down by shame.”

Leventhal had regained his composure.

“We survivors do carry heavy burdens.”

“She’s not Jewish.”

“Is there something wrong with my hearing? Or my English? Didn’t you tell me her father, mother and step-brother are dead? That makes her a survivor, and eligible for the benefits. Guilt, and more guilt.”

The drinks appeared. Leventhal downed his.

“Wyatt. Such an American name.”

“The Wyatts are my mother’s family.”

“Myron was named after our great-grandfather, the Leventhal who founded the business. Mendel. Did you know that?”

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‘Mother only talked about him once, when she told me.”

“Still, you went to meet the judge with a poker up his arse?”

Wyatt gave a brief smile and shrugged. It was twelve, and the bar was filling up with officers having pre-lunch drinks.

“Heinrich, would it be too painful for you to repeat what you just told me? Would you testify for Kathe?”

“Testify?”

“I’m defending her. She’s being tried as a Nazi.”

“Fraulein Kingsmith? I can’t believe it! You Americans are crazy.”

“We do our best with the cards dealt us.”

“But why her?”

“Among other things she admitted to having top clearance at the OKW and being friendly with the late lamented Fiihrer.”

Til not only testify, I’ll see if I can trace any of the others she helped.”

V

The following afternoon Wyatt set his briefcase on the board table. Because this was his last pre-trial visit to his client, he was permitted to meet her away from the cell in this bare little room that had been used for similar anxiety-laden conferences since before Kaiser Wilhelm’s coronation.

A guard with a rifle led her in.

“Good afternoon,”

Kathe said.

Wyatt didn’t respond. The encounter with Heinrich Leventhal had shaken him in so many areas that at times his thoughts got derailed.

“Thank you for the chocolate bars. IVUtda enjoyed them.”

After another silence, she asked:

“What’s wronff”

“You baffle me. You always have,”

Wyatt said.

“Will you answer one simple question honestly?”

“If I can.”

“Are you trying to kill yourself and make both me and the Military Government accessories?”

She lowered her eyelids, hesitating.

“It’s difficult to care about anything.”

Don’t you owe Aubrey a bit more than that?”

“Aubrey?”

Remember him? The man you’re meant to marry. You realize, don t you, that he won’t let you serve a sentence? He’ll go to our top brass and explain that you were spying for the British”

He told you that? she whispered through white lips.

Until now Wyatt had not been positive whether Aubrey’s hint had

een on the level. Warning himself not to soften up on her, he went

on: The story will be officially denied. And as for Aubrey - have

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you ever met anybody better-qualified to play Sydney Carton? He’ll face a court martial.”

“Please, Wyatt.”

“I’d also like you to consider that these trials are not frivolous. We Americans are revolted by what a bunch of sadists did in Germany. We want to punish those who gave the orders and those who carried out the horrors. If that’s simplistic and naive … well, we are both of those. But, Kathe, we are trying to reach the world with a message that some evils are too monstrous to be borne. And, if our military tribunals convict the wrong people, why, then, our efforts become a laughing-stock. Is that what you want? It sure as hell is what the Nazis want. Germany will heal eventually, and the same old bunch’ll be right back in power. Hitler will have won. Do I sound as if I’m on a soap-box? Well, I am. But I mean every word. I’m telling you exactly what I believe.”

The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the light coming through the barred window was grey.

“I’ve never heard you like this before,”

she said in a low voice.

“Normally I hide behind my brilliant wit. But now I’m laying myself on the line.”

He leaned so close that he felt the warmth of her breath.

“Fraulein Kingsmith, I’m going to lose this case if you keep playing your nihilistic little game with me.”

“You’ve twisted everything around.”

“The tribunal’s decision might be no big deal to you, but it’s important to me. And to Aubrey.”

He paused.

“And to Heinrich Leventhal.”

“Herr Leventhal?”

“I met him yesterday.”

Sudden pleasure blazed on her face.

“So he made it to the American line!”

“Because of you, or so he says.”

“Thank God! But how did you find him?”

“One of those coincidences that make me believe in the Sledgehammer of Fate. Or a Higher Power. I went to the International Red Cross to get a bead on Sigi’s lady-friend, and who should be there at the exact moment? Who should be sitting near enough to hear my name? A great way to learn there’s a star witness, right?”

“Could I see him? Can a witness visit the prison?”

Wyatt relaxed, perceiving that he had blasted through some sort of barrier. For the time being at least, he had hauled Kathe out of her enigmatic grieving inertia.

“He’ll be at the tribunal.”

404

Zeppelinalee, a long narrow parkway where old trees exposed their wintry limbs, was surrounded by belle epoque homes built by a happier generation of Frankfurt bankers and industrialists. A few of these mansions had survived, and Kathe’s trial would take place in one of them, in a third-storey ballroom.

Reddish scars showed in the ebony panelling, and much of the lacelike ceiling moulding was gone. The stai d-glass oriel windows had been repaired with ordinary glass so thfrt glaring sunlight mottled the jewel colours falling on the huge American flag stretched across the musicians”

dais behind the judges”

empty table. A hundred or so of the uncomfortable gilt chairs once used by Frankfurt chaperons and wallflowers had been neatly ranked, but only the front rows were taken. Those present were relatives of or witnesses for the two other defendants who would be tried this morning.

As the MPs led Kathe in, she peered searchingly at the worriedlooking women, the men in shabby suits or Wehrmacht uniforms. A legless veteran perched on a little wheeled cart. Herr Leventhal wasn’t in the courtroom. She sighed. She had been looking forward to seeing him.

Wyatt already sat at one of the pair of tables facing the bench. Don t look so worried,”

he said.

“Heinrich’s not playing hookey. He’s at the airport meeting a witness who stayed at your house. He’ll be along in a few minutes.”

Kathe put on a look of interest. She hadn’t given a thought to

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how Herr Leventhal’s absence might affect her case. Other than her concern about Aubrey’s reaction, she had no interest in the outcome. Since that snowy evening in Darmstadt, depression had clamped her like an Iron Maiden, constricting her arms and legs, compressing her lungs so that on occasion she imagined her breathing needed to be monitored. Inhale, exhale. She slept lightly and awoke weeping.

In the panelling to the right of the flag, a nearly invisible door opened. A stout ruddy-faced major strode out, followed by two far younger lieutenants. When they were seated behind their triangular brass name-plates, the marshal, a bemedalled sergeant, clicked his polished heels.

“The Honourable the judges of Military Tribunal IB!”

he bawled.

“Military Tribunal IB is now in session. God save the United States of America and this honourable Tribunal.”

The white-haired women who sat at the end of the judges”

table translated the words rapidly into German.

“The two looies were traffic cops. Major Fitzpatrick in the middle is a lawyer; he’s the one who counts,”

Wyatt said in Kathe’s ear.

Occupation courts mixed American and German legal customs. She, the accused, went to stand at the table in the lonely space below the bench.

The prosecutor, Lieutenant LeFar, stood to read the indictment. The muscles around his left eye jumped as he droned that the accused had been cleared by the Gestapo to work with military secrets, she had been a guest at Hitler’s Chancellery and been invited to his ultimate hideaway in the mountains above Berchtesgaden. Though not a member of the Nazi Party, she was one of the Third Reich’s inner circle. The white-haired woman repeated the charges in German.

Major Fitzpatrick leaned forward.

“So you knew Hitler, Fraulein …

“

He consulted his papers.

“Kingsmith?”

Before the white-haired interpreter could say anything, Kathe responded in English:

“I met him three times.”

The moustached lieutenant to Fitzpatrick’s left enquired suspiciously:

“Where’d you learn to speak like that?”

“My father came from England.”

The major did not so much as glance at either of his fellow-judges.

“The court feels it’ll speed things up if we proceed in English,”

he said.

“Tell us how you came to be in such close contact with Hitler.”

When she said the dictator had congratulated her on winning a gold medal at the Olympic Games, the young lieutenants sat up straighter. Fitzpatrick skipped to her work, enquiring what she had done at the OKW.

“I filed documents in the Most Secret hall.”

“In our country,”

he said,

“for a job like that you’d have needed some mighty heavy clearance. There must have been even tighter

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security here. Or did the Fiihrer put in a word for you?”

Wyatt responded:

“My client obtained the job through her halfbrother, Colonel Siegfried von Hohenau, adjutant to General von Hohenau of the German General Staff. Both were involved in anti-Nazi activity. And so, we intend to prove, was Miss Kingsmith.”

He emphasized the

“Miss’.

“The accused will answer for herself, Counsellor,”

Fitzpatrick said, turning back to Kathe.

“You were cleared by the Gestapo, then?”

“Before 1943, the OKW used its own intelligence, the Abwehr.”

“Are you trying to tell us’, said the lieutenant with the curly hair,

“that a gal entrusted with filing the biggest secrets in the Axis wasn’t given the once-over by the Gestapo?”

“I’d assumed only the Abwehr,”

Kathe said uncertainly.

“But I understand what you’re saying. Possibly they did clear me, the Gestapo.”

As the tribunal exchanged glances, she heard Wyatt’s fingers tapping on the wood. A warning.

“In your work,”

the major asked,

“did you spot any evidence of the camps?”