Mother Night (15 page)

“Was I?” I said.

“Of all the agents who were my dream children, so to speak, you were the only one who got clear through the war both reliable and alive,” he said. “I did a little morbid arithmetic last night, Campbell—calculated that you, by being neither incompetent nor dead, were one in forty-two.”

“What about the people who fed me information?” I said.

“Dead, all dead,” he said. “Every one of them a woman, by the way. Seven of them, in all—each one of them, before she was caught, living only to transmit information to you. Think of it, Campbell—seven women you satisfied again and again and again—and they finally died for the satisfaction that was yours to give them. And not one of them betrayed you, either, when she was caught. Think of that, too.”

“I can’t say you’ve relieved any shortage of things to think about,” I said to Wirtanen. “I don’t mean to diminish your stature as a teacher and philosopher, but I had things to think about even before this happy reunion. So what happens to me next?”

“You’ve already disappeared again,” he said. “Third Army’s been relieved of you, and there’ll be no records here to show that you ever arrived.” He spread his hands. “Where would you like to go from here, and who would you like to be?”

“I don’t suppose there’s a hero’s welcome awaiting me anywhere,” I said.

“Hardly,” he said.

“Any news of my parents?” I said.

“I’m sorry to tell you—” he said, “they died four months ago.”

“Both?” I said.

“Your father first—your mother twenty-four hours later. Heart both times,” he said.

I cried a little about that, shook my head. “Nobody told them what I was really doing?” I said.

“Our radio station in the heart of Berlin was worth more than the peace of mind of two old people,” he said.

“I wonder,” I said.

“You’re entitled to wonder,” he said. “I’m not.”

“How many people knew what I was doing?” I said.

“The good things or the bad things?” he said.

“The good,” I said.

“Three of us,” he said.

“That’s all?” I said.

“That’s a lot,” he said. “Too many, really. There was me, there was General Donovan, and one other.”

“Three people in all the world knew me for what I was—” I said. “And all the rest—” I shrugged.

“They knew you for what you were, too,” he said abruptly.

“That wasn’t me,” I said, startled by his sharpness.

“Whoever it was—” said Wirtanen, “he was one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived.”

I was amazed. Wirtanen was sincerely bitter.

“You give me hell for that—knowing what you do?” I said. “How else could I have survived?”

“That was your problem,” he said. “Very few men could have solved it as thoroughly as you did.”

“You think I was a Nazi?” I said.

“Certainly you were,” he said. “How else could a responsible historian classify you? Let me ask you a question—”

“Ask away,” I said.

“If Germany had won, had conquered the world—” he stopped, cocked his head. “You must be way ahead of me. You must know what the question is.”

“How would I have lived?” I said. “What would I have felt? What would I have done?”

“Exactly,” he said. “You must have thought about it, with an imagination like yours.”

“My imagination isn’t what it used to be,” I said. “One of the first things I discovered when I became an agent was that I couldn’t afford an imagination any more.”

“No answer to my question?” he said.

“Now is as good a time as any to see if I’ve got any imagination left,” I said. “Give me a minute or two—”

“Take all the time you want,” he said.

So I projected myself into the situation he described, and what was left of my imagination gave me a corrosively cynical answer. “There is every chance,” I said, “that I would have become a sort of Nazi Edgar Guest, writing a daily column of optimistic doggerel for daily papers around the world. And, as senility set in—the sunset of life, as they say—I might even come to believe what my couplets said: that everything was probably all for the best.”

I shrugged. “Would I have shot anybody? I doubt it. Would I have organized a bomb plot? That’s more of a possibility; but I’ve heard a lot of bombs go off in my time, and they never impressed me much as a way to get things done. Only one thing can I guarantee you: I would never have written a play again. That skill, such as it was, is lost.

“The only chance of my doing something really violent in favor of truth or justice or what have you,” I said to my Blue Fairy Godmother, “would lie in my going homicidally insane. That could happen. In the situation you suggest, I might suddenly run amok with a deadly weapon down a peaceful street on an ordinary day. But whether the killing I did would improve the world much would be a matter of dumb luck, pure and simple.

“Have I answered your question honestly enough for you?” I asked him.

“Yes, thank you,” he said.

“Classify me as a Nazi,” I said tiredly. “Classify away. Hang me, if you think it would tend to raise the general level of morality. This life is no great treasure. I have no postwar plans.”

“I only want you to understand how little we can do for you,” he said. “I see you do understand.”

“How little?” I said.

“A false identity, a few red herrings, transportation to wherever you might conceivably start a new life—” he said. “Some cash. Not much, but some.”

“Cash?” I said. “How was the cash value of my services arrived at?”

“A matter of custom,” he said, “a custom going back to at least the Civil War.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Private’s pay,” he said. “On my say-so, you’re entitled to it for the period from when we met in the Tiergarten to the present.”

“That’s very generous,” I said.

“Generosity doesn’t amount to much in this business,” he said. “The really good agents aren’t interested in money at all. Would it make any difference to you if we gave you the back pay of a brigadier general?”

“No,” I said.

“Or if we paid you nothing at all?”

“No difference,” I said.

“It’s almost never money,” he said. “Or patriotism, either.”

“What is it, then?” I said.

“Each person has to answer that question for himself—” said Wirtanen. “Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”

“Interesting,” I said emptily.

He clapped his hands to break the mood. “Now then—” he said, “about transportation: where to?”

“Tahiti?” I said.

“If you say so,” he said. “I suggest New York. You can lose yourself there without any trouble, and there’s plenty of work, if you want it.”

“All right—New York,” I said.

“Let’s get your passport picture taken. You’ll be on a plane out of here inside of three hours,” he said.

We crossed the deserted parade ground together, dust devils spinning here and there. It was my fancy to think of the dust devils as the spooks of former cadets at the school, killed in war, returning now to whirl and dance on the parade ground alone, to dance in as un-military a fashion as they damn well pleased.

“When I told you there were only three people who knew about your coded broadcasts—” said Wirtanen.

“What about it?” I said.

“You didn’t ask who the third one was,” he said.

“Would it be anybody I’d ever heard of?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “He’s dead now, I’m sorry to say. You used to attack him regularly in your broadcasts.”

“Oh?” I said.

“The man you called Franklin Delano Rosenfeld,” said Wirtanen. “He used to listen to you gleefully every night.”

T
HE THIRD TIME
I met my Blue Fairy Godmother, and the last time, from all indications, was, as I have said, in a vacant shop across the street from the house of Jones, across the street from where Resi, George Kraft and I were hiding.

I took my time about going into that dark place, expecting, with reason, to find anything from an American Legion color guard to a platoon of Israeli paratroopers waiting to capture me inside.

I had a pistol with me, one of the Iron Guard’s Lugers, chambered for twenty-two’s. I had it not in my pocket but in the open, loaded and cocked, ready to go. I scouted the front of the shop without showing myself. The front was dark. And then I approached the back in short rushes, from cluster to cluster of garbage cans.

Anybody trying to jump me, to jump Howard W. Campbell, Jr., would have been filled with little holes,
as though by a sewing machine. And I must say that I came to love the infantry, anybody’s infantry, in that series of rushes and taking cover.

Man, I think, is an infantry animal.

There was a light in the back of the shop. I looked through a window and saw a scene of great serenity. Colonel Frank Wirtanen, my Blue Fairy Godmother, was sitting on a table again, waiting for me again.

He was an old, old man now, as sleek and hairless as Buddha.

I went in.

“I thought surely you would have retired by now,” I said.

“I did—” he said, “eight years ago. Built a house on a lake in Maine with an axe and an adze and my own two hands. I was called out of retirement as a specialist.”

“In what?” I said.

“In you,” he said.

“Why the sudden interest in me?” I said. “That’s what I’m supposed to find out,” he said. “No mystery why the Israelis would want me,” I said.

“I agree,” he said. “But there’s a lot of mystery about why the Russians should think you were such a fat prize.”

“Russians?” I said. “What Russians?”

“The girl, Resi Noth—and the old man, the
painter, the one called George Kraft,” said Wirtanen. “They’re both communist agents. We’ve been watching the one who calls himself Kraft now since 1941. We made it easy for the girl to get into the country just to find out what she hoped to do.”

I
SAT WRETCHEDLY
on a packing case. “With a few well-chosen words,” I said, “you’ve wiped me out. How much poorer I am in this minute than I was in the minute before!

“Friend, dream, and mistress—” I said,
“alles kaput.”

“You’ve still got a friend,” said Wirtanen.

“What do you mean by that?” I said.

“He’s like you,” said Wirtanen. “He can be many things at once—all sincerely.” He smiled. “It’s a gift.”

“What was he planning for me?” I said.

“He wanted to uproot you from this country, get you to another one, where you could be kidnapped with fewer international complications. He tipped off Jones as to where and who you were, got O’Hare and other patriots all stirred up about you again—all as part of a scheme to pull up your roots.”

“Mexico—that was the dream he gave me,” I said.

“I know,” said Wirtanen. “There’s a plane waiting for you in Mexico City right now. If you were to fly down there, you wouldn’t spend more than two minutes on the ground. Off you’d go again, bound for Moscow in the latest jet, all expenses paid.”

“Dr. Jones is in on this, too?” I said.

“No,” said Wirtanen. “He’s got your best interests at heart. He’s one of the few men you can trust.”

“Why should they want me in Moscow?” I said. “What do the Russians want with me—with such a moldy old piece of surplus from World War Two?”

“They want to exhibit you to the world as a prime example of the sort of Fascist war criminal this country shelters,” said Wirtanen. “They also hope that you will confess to all sorts of collusion between Americans and Nazis at the start of the Nazi regime.”

“Why would I confess such a thing?” I said. “What did they plan to threaten me with?”

“That’s simple,” said Wirtanen. “That’s obvious.”

“Torture?” I said.

“Probably not,” said Wirtanen. “Just death.”

“I don’t fear it,” I said.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be for you,” said Wirtanen.

“For whom, then?” I said.

“For the girl you love, for the girl who loves you—” said Wirtanen. “The death, in case you were uncooperative, would be for little Resi Noth.”

“H
ER MISSION
was to make me love her?” I said.

“Yes,” said Wirtanen.

“She did it very well,” I said sadly, “not that it was hard to do.”

“Sorry to have such news for you,” said Wirtanen.

“It clears up some mysteries—not that I wanted them cleared up,” I said. “Do you know what she had in her suitcase?”

“Your collected works?” he said.

“You knew about that, too? To think they would go to such pains—to give her props like those! How did they know where to look for those manuscripts?”

“They weren’t in Berlin. They were neatly stored in Moscow,” said Wirtanen.

“How did they get there?” I said.

“They were the main evidence in the trial of Ste-pan Bodovskov,” he said.

“Who?” I said.

“Stepan Bodovskov was a corporal, an interpreter, with the first Russian troops to enter Berlin,” said Wirtanen. “He found the trunk containing your writings in a theater loft. He took the trunk for booty.”

“Some booty,” I said.

“It turned out to be remarkably fine booty,” said Wirtanen. “Bodovskov was fluent in German. He went through the contents of the trunk, and he decided that he had a trunkful of instant career.

“He started modestly, translating a few of your poems into Russian, and sending them off to a literary magazine. They were published and praised.

“Bodovskov next tried a play,” said Wirtanen.

“Which one?” I said.

“‘The Goblet,’” said Wirtanen. “Bodovskov translated that into Russian, and he had himself a villa on the Black Sea practically before they’d taken the sandbags down from the windows of the Kremlin.”

“It was produced?” I said.

“Not only was it produced,” said Wirtanen, “it continues to be produced all over Russia by both amateurs and professionals. ‘The Goblet’ is the ‘Charley’s Aunt’ of contemporary Russian theater. You’re more alive than you thought, Campbell.”