An Honorable German (48 page)

“She did, Herr Lehmann.”

“And did Herr Brekendorf then make any effort to leave the scene of the sinking in order to avoid enemy patrols?”

“Quite to the contrary, Herr Lehmann—Herr Brekendorf forced me to radio the enemy patrols myself.”

Lehmann animated his face with false surprise. “And what did Herr Brekendorf do when the enemy patrol vessels arrived?”

“He immediately surrendered the U-boat.”

The men at the table now stared at Max in unison with mock disbelief. Max just shook his head slowly. He’d seen more combat
than all six of them combined.

“Now, Herr Brekendorf,” Lehmann said, “do you have any response to these charges before the court presents its findings?”

Max looked steadily into the hostile faces before him. “This trial is a sham,” he said quietly, “and all of you know it. If
I am a traitor, then Germany has no heroes. I have given my life to the navy, done all that I was asked, killed more men than
I wish to recall, and watched my friends die around me, just as my father did in the trenches at Verdun. Although it was within
my orders to do so, I would never have sunk the
Dundee
had I known it was a passenger vessel. Nor would it have befitted the honor of the German navy, the navy of Admiral Graf
von Spee, the navy of Count von Luckner and Captain Langsdorff, to stand by and watch women and children drown when it was
in my power to save them. If we have lost our humanity to this war, then we are fighting for nothing. If Germany gives her
honor for Final Victory, she will still have lost.”

“Stirring.” Lehmann smiled, then turned solemnly to his panel. “How say you?” he asked the first man.

“Guilty.”

“How say you?” he asked the second.

“Guilty.”

They went down the line like that—the verdict unanimous.

Standing now, boyish in his wrinkled khaki uniform, Lehmann said, “Of course there is only one punishment for treason against
our Führer, Adolf Hitler, and cowardice in the face of the enemy. That punishment is death.”

Max swung with all his strength and hit the soldier on his right in the kidneys. As the man doubled over in pain, Max swung
the other way and hit the big soldier to his left in the balls.

“Stop him!” Lehmann bellowed, scrambling over the table, dagger in hand.

Max leapt up from the chair, seized it, and broke it over Lehmann’s head. The other jurors rushed forward, one of them catching
Max full in the face with a roundhouse punch. The guards recovered, pulled at his arms, and Max struggled free before more
punches knocked him to the ground. Three men piled on top of him. He squirmed like an eel, flailed wildly with his fists,
smelled the sour breath of the men as they pinned his body to the wooden floorboards. Then a loud crack sounded as the building’s
flimsy door flew from its hinges.

Carls leapt forward with a lead pipe. It landed heavily on somebody’s head, then again, and suddenly everyone was shouting
until a new voice froze the room.

“Hände hoch! Hands up or I shoot!”

Heinz. He stood in the doorway pointing a pistol. Carls helped Max up from the floor. Massaging his face, Max could feel the
blood pouring out of his nose. “I thought you men would never get here.”

“We wanted to watch the end of the movie, Herr Kaleu,” said Heinz.

Lehmann seethed, his face also bloodied, knuckles white on the hilt of his dagger. He glared at Max, then Carls, then finally
at Heinz. “I will kill you all,” he hissed.

Heinz smiled. “Not if we kill you first. Hand over that dagger.”

Lehmann didn’t move.

“Hand it over,” Heinz repeated, twitching the barrel of the pistol for emphasis.

Lehmann tried to twist his lips into an ironic grin of his own. He held the dagger out in his open hand and Carls snatched
it away. “Go,” the big man said to Max, who turned and ducked out the door into the darkness, followed closely by his rescuers.

The compound teemed with men just out from the movie and they mixed in with the crowd, Carls pushing Max toward the camp’s
southern end, Heinz trailing just behind in case someone gave them the jump. They cut between two of the narrow wooden huts.
Carls looked around. “Under,” he ordered. Max dropped to the sandy ground and rolled underneath the hut, which sat about a
meter up on cinderblocks. The big man and Heinz did the same and the three of them stretched out behind the cement pedestal
that supported the water pipes. They lay there panting for air in the dark without speaking for several minutes. Finally Max
caught his breath and said, “Where in the name of Saint Peter did you get a pistol, Heinz?”

Heinz smiled and whispered, “Keep your eyes open, Herr Kaleu, and you can find anything around here. When I find some bullets
for this it will be even more useful.”

Now Max shook his head in amazement. “You have the courage of a lion, Heinz. The two of you have done more for me than I deserve.
Thank you.”

“You should be holding off them thanks for a while, sir, since we ain’t out of the jungle yet. We have to get you out of this
camp, sir. It’s much too dangerous for you here now.”

Around them men tramped across the yard, heading to their huts for the night. Footsteps echoed through the floor above Max’s
head as well. Lehmann and his dupes might be out searching for them right now, moving from building to building, sweeping
the camp. Or maybe they felt there would be time enough for that. After all, Max would be around the next day, and the next
day, and the day after that.

“We have to get you out of this camp,” Heinz said again.

“Ja, you are correct, Heinz. You are correct. But it would be easier to smuggle a crate of schnapps onto a U-boat than to
get me out of here.”

“Not at all, sir. Me and Carls smuggled a case of schnapps onto the boat before every patrol, if you must know, Herr Kaleu.”

Max looked from one of them to the other. “How? Where did you put it?”

“Begging your pardon, Herr Kaleu, it would be best for us not to be getting into all that. You go out tomorrow. Tomorrow morning,
sir. On the garbage truck.”

_________

The garbage truck entered the camp each Monday morning near the time of roll call and backed up to the garbage shed on the
western edge of the main yard. Two civilian workers in beige coveralls then emptied the garbage cans into the back of the
truck. Each can required both men to lift, and they usually worked at a measured clip, so the process took perhaps fifteen
minutes. After the cans had all been emptied, the garbage workers would share a smoke with a few of the guards. Then back
in the truck and out through the main gate. The truck was usually inside the camp fence for twenty minutes.

Max had seen it but he hadn’t taken much notice. Heinz had taken notice and had carefully timed it out over weeks. Of his
many escape plans, the garbage truck was the best, he said.

“You want me to hide in one of those garbage cans, yes?” Max asked. That would be unpleasant, though it could hardly smell
worse than the inside of a U-boat after a few weeks on patrol.

“No, Herr Kaleu,” said Heinz, “that’s a bad idea. The truck is a new American model with a compactor built right in. It would
crush you into a bouillon cube, even if the workers somehow missed you when they emptied the can. You go underneath, Herr
Kaleu.”

“Underneath? Underneath the truck? You are certain of this?”

“The truck is quite large, Herr Kaleu. It has plenty of clearance and I think there are pipes and grips you can hold on the
undercarriage. I took a quick look several weeks ago—seems to me that a man could wedge himself in between the rear axle and
the drive shaft.”

“How long will I have to hold on?”

“That I don’t know, Herr Kaleu. I don’t know where the truck goes when it leaves here.”

Max bit the inside of his lip. Underneath a garbage truck? A bugle call sounded, reminding the POWs that it was almost 2230—five
minutes until all prisoners were confined to their huts for the night.

Heinz said, “Stay here until morning, Herr Kaleu. Just to be safe, stay here until roll call begins. I’ll bring you some supplies
at roll call, and then you can make your break. Do you understand, sir?”

“Ja, ja. And what of you, comrades?”

“They won’t be looking for us—not tonight. Perhaps for you, but not for us.”

“Thank you, Heinz. Thank you both.”

“Take this,” said Carls, pressing the hilt of Lehmann’s dagger into Max’s hand. “We will see you tomorrow morning, Herr Kaleu.”

“Carls, Heinz,” Max whispered.

“Sir?”

He shook each by the hand. “May you always have a hand’s breadth of water under your keel,” Max said quietly.

Heinz whispered: “Good luck and good hunting, Herr Kaleu.”

Carls nodded, too overcome to speak. Then they were gone. Max lay alone beneath the hut, the dagger clutched to his chest.
Quiet came with the men in bed. Max knew he wouldn’t sleep a wink on the hard ground with nothing for a pillow. He hadn’t
worn his jacket to the movie and shivered now, though it had been almost a hundred degrees at noon.

Mexico. Heinz’s plan sounded simple enough, and if Max could get out of the camp, Mexico would be only a hundred and twenty
kilometers away. How far then to Mexico City? He wasn’t sure, but he might be able to make it if he got across the border
somehow. He closed his eyes and tried to picture how it would be when he walked into the courtyard of Schrempf’s house: Mareth
with a glass of cold gin and a parasol in the heat, leaning in the portico with a flower behind her ear. A carnation, a rose.
But this was just a fantasy. It would never happen. He hadn’t been able to stay on the outside for more than a day in Mississippi;
this time, if the Americans didn’t just shoot him, Lehmann and the Nazis would finish him off when he was returned to the
camp.

Lying there in the dirt, Max thought of the night he had proposed to her. They were in a small boarding house in Flensburg,
the gasthaus where Mareth always stayed when she came to visit him at the Marineschule, because it was easy for Max to steal
up the back stairs into her room. Of course, no men were allowed in the building, nor were Seekadetten supposed to be off
base at night. But the boarding houses in Flensburg were often full of young women, and they hadn’t come for the scenery.
The Marineschule was just three kilometers away.

Max had bought the ring that week without settling on when to ask her—he wanted something spectacular: a mountaintop, a sailboat
on the Baltic, an intimate table at the Germania. But the ring seemed to burn a hole in his pocket once he had it, and it
was all he could do to get through their first dinner together without showing her. That night, after she let him in and latched
the door behind them, he dropped immediately to one knee and opened the velvet box in the lamplight for her to see. She wore
a crafty smile as he stumbled through the question.

“Are you certain of this, Seekadett Brekendorf?”

“Of course I’m certain.”

“And have I been approved by the Kriegsmarine to be your wife?” The navy had to approve an officer’s choice of bride before
he could marry her.

“You have, Fräulein Countess von Woller, although the request had to go to the very top of the Kriegsmarine, because of the
year you spent as a showgirl at the Wintergarten.”

“Forever is a long time,” she warned him, “and that’s how long you will have me.”

“Good.” He put the ring on her finger. It was much too big—he’d never even thought of rings having sizes before the jeweler
asked him. It wouldn’t stay on her finger. “Did you buy this for another girl?” Mareth said.

“Yes, I did. A fat girl I was seeing in France.”

They both began to laugh.

Max stood and put his arms around her. “Well, we have the rest of our lives to improve on it.”

“Yes, we will, Max,” she whispered in his ear, pulling his body tightly against hers. “We have the rest of our lives.”

When Max awoke from his dream it was morning. He was surprised to find that he’d slept. For how long he wasn’t sure, but when
he opened his eyes, the sun was already bright and men in the hut above were filing out for the morning roll. He waited until
they had all gone out and formed up in the middle of the yard. The American sergeant began calling names. Then Max scrambled
out, stiff all over from sleeping on the packed earth, and joined the rear of the formation.

Over to his left he saw Carls and Heinz, caught their eyes, then looked away. When Max answered to his own name, Lehmann turned
full around from where he stood, several rows ahead. He had a gash above his right eye that would need stitches. That was
from the chair. Max fixed him with a hard stare. Lehmann faced forward again just as the main gate opened to admit the lumbering
garbage truck.

After the men were dismissed Heinz approached Max with a haversack in his hand. “Sleep well, Herr Kaleu?”

“Well enough.” Max eyed Lehmann as the lieutenant crossed the yard to his group of Nazi toadies. They shot sidelong glances
in Max’s direction, talking briefly among themselves before slinking off.

Heinz handed the haversack over. “I wish I had more to give you, Herr Kaleu, but this is a start: a suit, some food, twenty-five
dollars of American money, an Esso map of Mexico, a compass, one canteen of water. The suit won’t fit you very well, but it’ll
be better than your uniform.”

Max looked into the bag. “I can’t take all this, Heinz. You’ve been scavenging these things for months—it’s bad enough that
I’m stealing your escape plan.”

“Take it, Herr Kaleu, take it.” Heinz smiled, not without a little sadness. “It’s like I said: scheming gives me something
to do, but I can’t make it out there. I don’t speak English, and even if I could, why take the risk? You don’t got much to
lose. They’ll kill you if you stay.”

“They’ll try to get you, too, you know. You and Carls both.”

Heinz shook his head. “No, sir. They won’t. I’ve been here longer than Lehmann, Herr Kaleu. I have friends among the men,
and among the Americans, too. I may have helped you, but I didn’t surrender
U-114
. There are some other prewar petty officers in the camp. We stick together. And we know how to use our knives and the youngsters
don’t. If I may beg your pardon, Herr Kaleu, it will be easier for us once you aren’t here.”