“Go fuck yourself,” he said hoarsely.
The powder tickled as it cascaded down the backs of his legs. Then a burning sensation started and grew until he was convinced that a blowtorch was involved. He swayed on the stool. His body no longer seemed to be his, or was it that the pain was no longer at an endurable level? A strange notion occurred to him: Was this the nature of purgatorial fire? And in that instant, when he thought that he’d ceased to be corporeal but had not yet become nothing, he felt himself suffused with a clean light and an overwhelming sense of gratitude for something that had been conferred on him. And with that thrilling in his chest, he shouted out and leaped from the stool, kicking it away.
The Turk watched, shaking his head. He waited until Schafer’s legs stopped kicking. He crossed the floor to where Leena lay, rolled up her boilersuit, and removed her prosthetic leg. He left the light on, shut the door. Minutes later he left the building.
It was a fifteen-minute walk in subzero temperatures to the Bar Heftier on Beim Schlump. Arslan walked past the red leather-topped bar stools and found Foley in a corner with Spokes opposite him in comfortable armchairs. The room was warm and glowed with an amber luminescence, as if viewed through a glass of whiskey.
Foley offered Arslan a seat and a drink. He refused both.
“I’m not staying,” he said. “I’ve got a flight to Istanbul. I’m just delivering this.”
He handed Spokes the prosthetic leg. Spokes smuggled it rapidly to the floor by the table.
“What’s that about?” said Foley coldly.
“The last thing he shouted out before he died was that what you wanted was in her leg,” said Arslan, then hesitated, looking up into his head. “At least that’s what I think he said.”
The Turk shrugged, turned, and left the bar.
Forty-Eight hours later, as instructed in Rush’s phone call, a British journalist from the Guardian newspaper arrived in Hamburg on the 20:30 flight from Heathrow. He took a cab to the Water Tower Hotel in the Sternschanzenpark. He’d made sure that he was going to be given room 1015 when he’d made his reservation. Once there he dropped his bags and immediately lifted the painting from the wall. He stripped out the plastic bag and put it in the bottom of his case without looking at the contents. He opened the curtain and saw the blue block letters in the blackness of the freezing night.
fleisch grossmarkt
THE COURIER by Dan Fesperman
In this boneyard of Nazi memory where I make my living, we daily come across everything from death lists to the trifling queries of petty bureaucrats. Our place of business is known simply as the Federal Records Center, and it is housed on the first floor of an old torpedo factory down by a rotting wharf on the Potomac.
I am told that elsewhere in this cavernous building there is a Smithsonian trove of dinosaur bones and an archive of German propaganda films. But on our floor there is only paper, box after box of captured documents, with swastikas poking like shark fins from gray oceans of text. The more papers we move, the dustier it gets, and by late afternoon of each day the air is thick with motes of decomposing history. Sunbeams angling through the high windows shimmer like the gilded rays of a pharaonic tomb.
Seeing as how the war ended thirteen years ago, you might figure we’d have this mess sorted out by now. But, as I’ve discovered lately, lots of things about the war aren’t so easily categorized, much less set aside.
My name is Bill Tobin, and it is my job to decide which papers get tossed, declassified, or locked away. The government hired me because I am fluent in German and know how to keep a secret. I’ve worked here for a year, and up to now the contents have been pretty much what I expected-memos from various Nazi ministries, asking one nagging question after another: Have Herr Muller’s new ration coupons arrived? Must we initial every page of every armaments contract? How many Poles should we execute this Saturday?
What I didn’t expect to find-here or anywhere-was the name of Lieutenant Seymour Parker, a navigator from the 306th Bomb Group, U.S. Army Air Force. Yet there it was just the other day on the bent tab of a brown folder, our latest retrieval from a mishmash we have begun calling the Total Confusion File, mostly because we never know which ministry letterhead will turn up next.
At first, seeing Parker’s name was a pleasant surprise, like having an old pal visit from out of the blue. After reading what was inside, I was wishing he hadn’t dropped by.
It’s been fourteen years since we handed Parker over to the Germans in the spring of 1944, along with three other American flyboys. It was part of a prisoner exchange. The Germans had agreed to ship our boys home via occupied France. We gladly would have done it ourselves, of course, but at the time I was working for the OSS in Switzerland, a neutral country surrounded by Axis armies. To put it bluntly, we had no way out, and neither did the U.S. airmen who regularly parachuted into Swiss meadows and pastures after their bombers got shot up over Germany.
So we escorted Parker and the others up to the French border at Basel and then watched as a haughty SS officer in black ushered them onto a train bound for Paris. From there they would make their way to Spain, to be turned over to American custody for the voyage home.
I had helped Parker pack for the trip. His duffel was filled with cartons of cigarettes, and his head was stuffed with secrets. The former were for handing out to Germans along the way. As for the latter, well, that was more complicated.
It was the last time I saw him, and from then on our crew in Bern rarely mentioned his name, because surely everything had gone according to plan. Kevin Butchart had volunteered as much a year later, on the same afternoon the radio broke in with the happy news that Hitler had blown out his brains in Berlin. Someone else-I think it was Wesley Flagg-happened to ask if anyone knew what had ever become of Parker.
“Didn’t you hear?” Butchart said. “He’s back home in Kansas. Down on the farm with Dorothy and Toto, and didn’t even have to click his heels. Whole thing went off without a hitch.”
Since then, I had thought of Parker only once-last summer, while watching my son play Little League baseball on a leisurely Saturday. It was a key moment in the game. The best player on his team, one of those natural athletes who you can tell right away has a college scholarship in his future, was rounding third as the opponent’s shortstop threw home. Runner, ball, and catcher arrived at the plate simultaneously, and there was ajar-ring collision.
The catcher, a pudgy kid with glasses who had been flinching on every swing, took the impact square in the gut and went facedown in the dirt. A.s he righted himself and pulled off his mask you could see the conflict of emotions on his face-a rising storm of tears that might burst loose at any moment, yet also a fierce determination to tough it out without a whimper.
To everyone’s surprise he held aloft the ball, which had never left his mitt. The umpire called the runner out. The catcher then nodded for play to resume even as tears rolled down his dusty cheeks.
Something about the kid brought Parker to mind. He, too, had that contradictory bearing-flinching in one moment, stoic in the next-and for the remainder of the afternoon I was weighted by an inexplicable gloom. I wrote it off as yet another flashback, one of those anxious moments in which you realize yet again that the war still hasn’t left you behind. Then I mixed a crystal pitcher of gimlets for my wife and me, and by the following morning I’d forgotten all about it.
Not long afterward, I was offered my current job at the Records Center. The pay wasn’t great, but it sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than signing invoices at my father-in-law’s shoe factory in Wilmington, Delaware. So we packed up and moved to a rented town house in Alexandria, Virginia.