“Does he talk to you about his work?”
“Incessantly. He thinks that we are to be married.”
“Sometime you must tell me what he talks about.”
“I will. But for now all you need to know is that he is no closer to Kurt Oppenheimer than you and I.”
Bodden grunted. “Then he will get no promotion soon.”
“But it is a big army, and they are not the only ones interested. So are the British, which should be no surprise to you.”
“None.”
“The British want to keep him out of Palestine,” she said.
“Ah.”
“What does ‘ah’ mean?”
“Perhaps that the deep thinkers in Berlin would like to see him in Palestine.” He shrugged. “But that is not my concern, of course.”
“Or mine.”
They stared at each other for a very long moment — too long probably, because they recognized in each other something that would perhaps be better unrecognized. But Bodden made himself examine it, if only briefly. This one, he thought, does not have the true faith. No more than you do, printer.
“There is one more thing,” Eva said.
“My simple brain aches from what it has absorbed already.”
“Not so simple, I think. But there is this, and this is the last. I received a letter from Leah Oppenheimer. We have been corresponding by airmail through my Lieutenant’s Army Post Office. It is quicker. In her most recent letter, Leah told me that she and her father have engaged two men to help her find her brother. One of them will be arriving in Frankfurt today. His name is Jackson. Minor Jackson.”
She paused and then finished her cold coffee, apparently not realizing that it was cold. “This evening my American will be at the airport. He will meet an airplane. The man on the airplane that he will meet is Minor Jackson.”
“I see,” Bodden said. “I don’t really, but I thought I should say something. You said the Oppenheimers have engaged two men. Who is the other one?”
“He is a Romanian called Ploscaru. I am also told that he is a dwarf.”
“You said ‘told.’ Did she tell you that?”
“No, printer,” Eva said. “Berlin told me.”
15
Bodden watched as she shrugged into her fur coat and turned its collar up around her chin. Her fingers stroked the fur as though its touch and feel were somehow reassuring. This one still likes a little luxury, he thought. Well, who could blame her? Certainly not you, printer, who always found the Spartans just a bit stupid.
“You disapprove of my coat?”
He shook his head. “It looks warm.”
“So is wool, but I prefer marten. I also would choose caviar over cabbage.”
It was another signal of sorts, weak but unmistakable, and Bodden sent back a careful reply. “Then we have that much in common.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps even more. Who knows?” Suddenly, she was all business and crisp efficiency again. “The man upstairs, the one with the scarred face. His name is Max. He is a sympathizer of sorts and can be trusted — up to a point. But not that one.” She nodded slightly toward the middle-aged woman who still stood by the coal cookstove.
“His wife?”
“Sister. Max disapproves of her black-market dealings, in principle anyway, but not enough to refuse her food. Without her, Max would starve. Like many today, they are stuck with each other. But Max will be your contact with me. You should check with him every day, and you may as well eat here, too. It’s not haute cuisine, but it’s nourishing.”
“I cannot afford it.”
“That packet of cigarettes you gave her will buy your meals for the next four days.”
He held up the partially smoked pack of Camels. “May I keep these?”
She smiled, and Bodden noticed that it came more easily this time. “You may even smoke them, if you like, printer. Although you don’t know it yet, you’re rich. How does it feel?”
Bodden grinned. “Tell me more and then I’ll tell you how it feels.”
“I noticed you have no briefcase. It makes you look naked. Sometimes I think every German’s born with a briefcase in his hand. Well, you have one now. It’s upstairs with Max. In it are two thousand American cigarettes.”
“You’re right. I am rich. And it feels fine.”
“You’ll need a room and transport. Max will fix you up with a room. It won’t be warm, but it’ll be dry. For transport, well, the best you can hope for is a bicycle. The going rate is six hundred cigarettes or three kilos of fat.”
“A stolen bicycle, of course.”
“What else?”
“I’ll try the DP’s. The DP’s and I get along — especially the Poles. I knew many in the camp. Some were very funny fellows.”
“What camp were you in?”
“Belsen.”
She looked away. When she spoke, still looking away, her voice was elaborately casual almost to the point of indifference. “Did you ever know a man there called Scheel? Dieter Scheel?”
Bodden realized that she was holding her breath until he answered. “A friend?”
She sighed the breath out. “My father.”
“It was a big camp,” he said as kindly as he could.
“Yes, I suppose it was.”
“Eva Scheel. A pleasant name. Was he Jewish, your father?”
She shook her head. “My mother was. My father, like you, printer, was a Social Democrat with a big mouth. Well, no matter.”
She took an envelope from the pocket of her coat and handed it to Bodden. “I will leave now. In the envelope is a report on everything that my American Lieutenant has told me about his investigation of Kurt Oppenheimer. Also about the man whom they think Oppenheimer killed.”
“Damm, wasn’t it?”
“Karl-Heinz Damm. It seems that he sold identities to those who had need of them.”
Bodden nodded. “A most profitable profession, I would say.”
“Yes. The report is rather long because my Ami Lieutenant seems to think his fiancée should be interested in his work. I suggest that you read it here and then burn it in the cookstove.”
“Now that I’m rich, I’ll read it over another cup of coffee.”
Eva rose. “The yellow-haired man, the one you parted company with in Hamburg. Did he have a long face and wear a blue cap?”
The warmth of the room had made Bodden relax. The warmth and the food and the cigarettes and the Schnapps. And the woman, of course, he thought. A woman can relax you or wind you up like a clock spring. She has just wound you up again, printer.
“Was he wearing a coat?” Bodden said. “A blue coat?”
“Dyed dark blue. A Wehrmacht coat”
“Yes.”
“He picked me up shortly after the train station. He is very good.”
Bodden nodded slowly. “The British. They must have flown him down.”
“He is not British.”
“No? Did you hear him speak?”
“I had no need. I could tell from his walk. He walks like a German. Haven’t you heard the saying? The British walk as if they own the earth. The Germans as if they think they should own it And the Americans as if they don’t give a damn who owns it. Shall I lose him for you, printer? He is very good, but I am better.”
Bodden smiled. “You have a great deal of confidence.”
She nodded. “Almost as much as you do.”
“Then lose him.”
“They will find us again, of course.”
Bodden shrugged. “Or perhaps, when the time is ripe, we will find them.”
The name of the man with the yellow hair who stood outside the Goiden Rose in the rain was Heinrich von Staden, and he had been a captain in Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr until the twenty-first of July, 1944, which was the day after the one-armed Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg had placed the black briefcase under the heavy table at the Wolfschanze, or Wolf’s Fort, in the forest near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg. Captain von Staden might not have been standing now outside the Golden Rose in the rain if Colonel Brandt, the famous horseman of the 1936 Olympics, hadn’t reached down and moved the briefcase because it was bothering him. He moved it just enough so that when the bomb it contained exploded, it killed several men, but not the one it was supposed to kilclass="underline" Adolf Hitler.