Michael had already noticed the crusted sores on Frankewitz’s legs. They looked like rat bites. “How did this man know you could do the job?”
“Art is my life,” Frankewitz said, as if that explained everything. But then he stood up, moving like an old man though he couldn’t be more than thirty-three, and he went over to the easel. Leaning against the wall near it was a stack of paintings. Frankewitz knelt down and began to go through them, his long white fingers as tentative as if having to prod sleeping children awake. “I used to paint, in a café not too far from here. I’d moved indoors for the winter. This man came in for coffee. He watched me working. Later he came in again, and several more times. Ah, here you are!” He was addressing a painting. “This is what I was working on.” He pulled the canvas out and showed it to Michael. It was a self-portrait, of Frankewitz’s face in what appeared to be a cracked mirror. The cracks looked so real Michael imagined slicing a finger on one of the jagged edges. “He brought another man in to see it: a Nazi officer. I later found out the second man’s name was Blok. Then, maybe two weeks later, the first man came to the café and asked me if I’d like to make some money.” Frankewitz smiled faintly, a chilling smile on that frail white face. “I can always use money. Even Nazi money.” He regarded the self-portrait for a moment; the face in the picture was a fantasy of self-flattery. Then he returned the canvas to the stack and stood up. Rain was slashing against the windows, and Frankewitz watched the drops run trails across the grimy glass. “They picked me up one night, and we drove to the airfield. Blok was there, and several more men. They blindfolded me before we took off.”
“So you have no idea where you landed?”
Frankewitz returned to his chair and pushed the cigarette holder between his teeth again. He watched the rain falling, blue smoke drifting from his mouth and his lungs rasping as he breathed. “It was a long flight. We landed once, for refueling. I could smell the fuel. And I felt the sun on my face, so I knew we were flying west. When we landed, I could smell the sea. They led me into a place where they took off my blindfold. It was a warehouse, without windows. The doors were locked.” A blue haze of smoke whirled slowly around Frankewitz’s head. “They had all the paint and tools I needed, arranged very neatly. They had a little room for me to live in: a chair and cot, a few books and magazines, a Victrola. Again, no windows. Colonel Blok took me to a large room where the pieces of metal and glass were laid out, and he told me what he wanted done. Bullet holes, he said; cracks in the glass, just as I’d done the cracked mirror in my painting. He said he wanted patterns of holes painted on the metal, and he marked them with a piece of chalk. I did the work. When I finished, they blindfolded me and led me out to an airplane again. Another long flight, and then they paid me and drove me home.” He tilted his head to one side, listening to the music of the rain. “That’s all.”
Hardly, Michael thought. “And how did Ad-Werner find out about this?”
“I told him. I’d met Werner last summer. I was in Paris, with another friend. As I said, Werner was a gentleman. A dear gentleman. Ah, well.” He made a despondent motion with his cigarette holder, and then terror flickered across his face. “The Gestapo… they didn’t… I mean, Werner didn’t tell them about me, did he?”
“No, he didn’t.”
Frankewitz sighed with relief. Another cough gurgled up, and he suffered another spasm. “Thank God,” he said when he could speak again. “Thank God. The Gestapo… they do terrible things to people.”
“You said they led you from the airplane to the warehouse. They didn’t drive you?”
“No. It was maybe thirty paces, no more than that.”
Then the warehouse had been part of the airfield, Michael thought. “What else was stored in the warehouse?”
“I didn’t get much of a chance to look around. There was always a guard nearby. I did see some barrels and crates. Oil drums, I think they were, and some machinery. Gears and things.”
“And you overheard the term ‘Iron Fist’? Is that right?”
“Yes. Colonel Blok was talking to a man who came to visit. He called the man Dr. Hildebrand. Blok used that name several times.”
Here was a point that needed clarification. Michael said, “Why did Blok and Hildebrand let you overhear them talking if the security was so tight? You had to be in the same room with them, yes?”
“Of course I was. But I was working, so maybe they thought I wasn’t listening.” Frankewitz blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. “Anyway, it wasn’t such a secret. I had to paint them.”
“Paint them? Paint what?”
“The words. Iron Fist. I had to paint them on a piece of metal. Blok showed me how to make the letters, because I don’t read English.”
Michael paused as that sank in. “English? You painted-”
“ ‘Iron Fist’ in English letters,” Frankewitz said. “On the green metal. Olive green to be exact. Very drab. And underneath that I painted the picture.”
“The picture?” Michael shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll show you.” Frankewitz went to the easel, sat down in the chair, and arranged a pad of drawing paper in front of him. He picked up a charcoal pencil as Michael came up to stand behind him. Frankewitz spent a moment in silent deliberation, then began to sketch. “This is very rough, you understand. My hand hasn’t been doing what I’ve asked of it lately. It’s the weather, I think. This apartment’s always damp in the springtime.”
Michael watched the drawing take shape. It was a large, disembodied fist, covered with armor plate. The fist was squeezing a figure that had yet to be defined.
“Blok stood and watched over my shoulder, just as you are,” Frankewitz said. The pencil drew skinny legs dangling down from the iron fist. “I had to do the rough sketch five times before he was satisfied with it. Then I painted it on the metal, beneath the lettering. I graduated in the upper third of my class at art school. The professors said I had ‘promise.’ ” He smiled wanly, his hand working as if with a mind of its own. “The bill collectors bother me all the time. I thought you were one of them.” He was drawing a pair of limp arms. “I do my best work in the summer,” he said. “When I can get out in the park, in the sunshine.”
Frankewitz had finished the figure’s body: a cartoonish form, caught in the fist. He started on the head and facial features. “I had a painting in an exhibition once. Before the war. It was a picture of two goldfish swimming in a green pond. I’ve always liked fish; they seem so peaceful.” He drew in a pair of wide, bulging eyeballs and an uptilted slash of a nose. “Do you know who bought that painting? One of Goebbels’s secretaries. Yes. Goebbels himself! That picture might be hanging in the Reich Chancellery, for all I know!” He sketched a sweep of dark hair hanging down over the forehead. “My signature, in the Reich Chancellery. Well, the world is a strange place, isn’t it?” He completed the face with a black square of a mustache, and lifted the pencil. “There. That’s what I painted for Colonel Blok.”
It was a caricature of Adolf Hitler, his eyes popping and his mouth open in an indignant cry as he was squeezed by the iron fist.
Michael was speechless. Wheels were spinning in his brain, but they found no traction. SS Colonel Jerek Blok, a Nazi loyalist, had paid Frankewitz to paint a rather ludicrous caricature of the Reich’s Führer? It made no sense! This was the kind of disrespect that granted a person an appointment with a noose, and it had been authorized by a Hitler fanatic. The bullet holes, the cracked glass, the caricature, the iron fist… what was it all about?