Munich Signature (36 page)

Trump worked his mouth, opening and closing it but not saying anything. “What about this Mrs. Rosenfelt? The
Darien
? Eight hundred refugees?” he said at last.

“She has Charles. Somewhere. I told her to come here and meet me, but she’s a good old gal. Knows the kid doesn’t need a press reception.” Murphy shrugged. “I’m sorry Mr. Trump, the boy has been through more . . . stuff . . . than most people see in seventy years of living. I appreciate all this; I know you’ve done it with the best of intentions, but—”

Trump opened the book. His expression softened, and he flipped through the pages for a long time. “My grandson is five,” he said finally. “The same age as Charles. Looks like him, too.” Suddenly Trump looked up at Murphy, his eyes filled with tears and blazing with anger. “What if it was him, Murphy? What if it was
my
grandson who was condemned as subhuman for something he couldn’t control?”

Murphy gaped at Trump, astounded. Something in this story had pierced beyond the crust of this tough old newsman and struck a nerve. “It
could
happen here, Mr. Trump,” Murphy answered quietly.

“Not if I can help it!” Trump roared. He stuck out his lower lip. “I did it to sell papers, Murphy.” He looked up. “Every one of these hounds is out of my own kennel, so to speak, and I’ll call them off. He’s just a boy. And if it were my grandson—”

“Mrs. Rosenfelt will have plenty to say to the press. Can we give her a go at it in a day or so? There are iron bars around the Statue of Liberty now, Mr. Trump. Iron bars keeping a lot of desperate people out. She can speak of that. So can I. She can speak about people—real people, not just numbers and quotas.”

“Are you up to filling in the details, Murphy?” Trump was not only calm but apologetic. “People, not numbers. We can’t send the senators away empty-headed, like they came. Set the stage, Murphy. It’s a terribly blank stage for us over here. And we’ll do it because it’s right—” he closed the scrapbook—“and not just to sell papers.”

Murphy exhaled loudly with relief. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“We’ll need public support, something to show the State Department that America is for these people—petitions and such.” Trump was fired up. His steps quickened. “You have a mother, Murphy?”

“Everybody has a mother.”

“She go to church?”

“Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and Friday sewing circle. Why?”

“Call your mother. Ask her to call every other praying woman from every other church she knows of. Ask her to tell them to call everybody they know. That’s where we’ll begin—your mother’s sewing circle. We’ll need signatures for petitions to the State Department. Food—tons of it. Clothes. Medicine and the like. Christians who know how to pray with their hands and feet, Murphy. That’ll do it!”

***

By the beginning of the second week onboard the
Darien
, Maria joined a rotating shift of women who had taken over the job of cooking meals. The large oblong loaves of black bread, which had been hung in hammocks from the pipes in the galley, had now become hoary with white mold. “Fuzzy white rabbits,” Maria called them. “Fetch us another white rabbit, will you?” When the mold and crust was peeled away, the inside of the loaves was hard, but edible—especially dipped into a fine simmering stew of fish.

Once meal preparation had been taken out of the inept and frantic hands of a male cook hired on for the trip, tasteless food somehow became delicious. While the men and children labored to catch fish with improvised lines and hooks, the sea herself provided the salt to season the daily fare. Fish was boiled, fried, baked and poached. Like the manna in the wilderness centuries before, fish fed these wandering children of Abraham. Fish with potatoes. Fish with beets. Gefilte fish—almost. Breaded fish fried in the crumbs of the white rabbits in the hammocks.

More than once Klaus was called to help haul up a particularly large fish only to find that the line was snipped and the catch devoured by one of the sharks that patrolled beside the freighter. There were sharks everywhere. Their malevolent presence made mothers cling tightly to their little ones, and more than one passenger awoke in the night to a horrifying dream about snapping jaws and black eyes rolling back at the kill.

It was the sharks that Maria feared—more than storms, more than waves as big as a house, more than Nazis. The sharks could not have haunted her more if they had put jackboots on their fins and tattooed swastikas on their noses. She had seen them snap a dangling fish in two. Somehow they seemed like demon shadows in the water—skimming along, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for one false step. One slip of a foot. One careless child playing on the rail. For now, only the leftover entrails of fish satisfied their hunger.

Fish guts also aided in the harvest of more fish from the Atlantic. A fish head on the end of a hook was like seed sown in fallow soil.

“Y’ calls it boit!” Tucker explained to the rabbi of Nuremberg.

Maria knew that it should properly be called
bait
, but there was something literary in Tucker’s cockney pronunciation.
The fish should bite the boit
.

“More boit! More boit!” The rabbi would snap his fingers impatiently after landing a big, flopping something on the deck with the aid of six of his Torah school pupils. Then he blessed each glop of fish entrails and tossed the loaded hook into the water. The learned rabbi of Nuremberg became the finest fisherman on the ship. “Perhaps it is the prayers,” shrugged the less fortunate fisherman.

Contests were organized. The Orthodox Jews pitted their skills against the nonreligious Jews. The fishing was not so good that day. Bankers fished against shopkeepers. Doctors against lawyers. Boys against girls. The girls won easily, having overcome their squeamishness about all things slimy. There was a certain pride when the biggest catch of the day was announced. Of course, sliced, diced, and stewed, the fish never looked as magnificent as it had looked slapping against the deck. But it was good. Better than porridge and plain black bread with cheese or black bread with potatoes or black bread with beets.

When the last white rabbit was taken down from the hammock in the galley, no one noticed that there was no more bread. Most would have been relieved, since the white fuzz on the black bread had been a subject of concern for them. The sea would not run out of fish. This seemed a miracle to most. The landlubber rabbi of Nuremberg had taken to stretching his gnarled hands out to bless this source of manna every morning and every night.

“Blessed art thou, Lord God of the Universe, who bringeth us . . .
fish
.”

23

Command Performance

The morning sun glinted on the white silk and silver thread of the prayer shawl. Like a carved figurehead on the prow of a sailing vessel, the rabbi stood in the bow of the ship as he prayed. This was the first time in his life he prayed facing west. The wind billowed beneath the folds of his tallith, and the tied fringes extended like the feathers of a seabird reaching for the current of air.

The scent of America was in the spray and on the breeze. The name of America was laced in the prayers of every praying man and woman, and even on the lips of those who did not pray at all.

The rabbi of Nuremberg raised his voice above the winds and recited Psalm 92 for the Sabbath Day: “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Eternal; to sing praises unto thy name, O most High: to shew forth thy loving kindness in the morning and thy faithfulness every night.”

As the congregation prayed with the old rabbi, little Ada-Marie stood up and staggered forward on the gently rolling deck. Maria reached for her daughter, but already the child stood at the feet of the rabbi. He was their Torah schoolteacher. Their friend. Their storyteller and fish catcher.

Oblivious to the worship ceremony, Ada-Marie raised her arms to be picked up. Without missing even one syllable of the psalm, the rabbi chuckled with delight and hefted the child into his arms. “For thou hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands.”

As if on cue, Ada-Marie now stretched her arms up toward God. The fringes of the silk tallith were tangled in her fingers, and for a moment she too looked like a little bird longing to fly up into the heavens. She laughed and repeated the words of the rabbi: “
How . . . great . . . are thy works, O E-ter-nal
.” She was delighted that the grown-ups had come to join the children in Torah school.

***

Elisa awoke to the sound of birds chirping in the tree outside her window. The tree was ancient and tall and in full leaf. Sunlight dappled the new green of the top branches and filtered down to warm the window panes.

Here, in this massive old house on the outskirts of London, she had been allowed to rest and read for two days. But she still felt herself a sort of prisoner. The mansion was some sort of training area for men under the command of Tedrick, and she was allowed freedom only in her bedroom and the sitting room that adjoined it.

Tedrick had turned out to be a colonel. Two women who served on the house staff referred to the fact that Colonel Tedrick would be back in a day or so to begin her briefing. In the meantime, she had been promised that soon after that she would be allowed to place a trans-Atlantic phone call to Murphy at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

They seemed quite concerned that Murphy remain docile and placated. She had been warned that any indication of trouble from her would result in the communication being cut off. Colonel Tedrick would provide a script for her to fill in the details. Whatever personal assurances of her well-being and affection she wished to give Murphy would certainly be allowed.

Elisa resented the efficiency of Colonel Tedrick and his organization. They had left no detail unattended to, no avenue open for her to refuse to cooperate with them.

A young woman named Shelby Pence was assigned to question her regarding her life in Vienna. Shelby, who spoke fluent German and had spent two years as a secretary for the British Embassy in Berlin, had a remarkable ability for making what might have been a dull task quite interesting.

Where Elisa lived and shopped and went out with friends were the innocuous sorts of details Shelby seemed most interested in. Names and descriptions of orchestra members, their habits and peculiarities, became subjects that made both women howl with laughter.

If it had not been for Shelby, Elisa thought she might have passed the time in tears instead of laughter. Shelby, with her light red shoulder-length hair and ready smile, was two years older than Elisa and had already been married once and divorced. Often the interviews that were meant to garner details of Elisa’s personal life dissolved into personal conversation between the two women. Over endless cups of tea they discussed Berlin as it had been before such absolute evil had consumed it. Shelby squealed with delight when she discovered that Elisa’s father had been the owner of Lindheim’s Department Store—it had been her favorite place to shop. They might have passed each other in the aisles!

At this point, Shelby forced herself back to her assignment. She was not to interview Elisa Lindheim . . . but rather, Elisa
Linder,
holder of the Czech passport who played violin at Vienna’s Musikverein.

This morning, Shelby knocked softly on the door before Elisa had climbed out of bed. “It’s me, luv.” She opened the door a crack and then, seeing Elisa gazing out the window, she entered, wheeling a clothes rack behind her.

Elisa smiled and sat up, her eyes wide at the sight of a rack of lovely dresses with the tags still on them. “What . . . ?”

“I picked them out myself. The colonel noticed we’re nearly the same size, and so I got all the fun of shopping for you. Try them on. What you don’t like I’ll gladly wear for you!” She winked. “Well, today is the day, isn’t it? Colonel Tedrick promised a phone call to New York.”

Elisa had jumped up and was eagerly looking through the clothes. “Shelby!” she said at last. “They’re beautiful—all of them!” She gave Shelby a quick hug. “You’ve made this almost bearable.”

“Well, pick out something pretty and run take a bath. You have to look lovely when you talk to your husband.”

***

“The problem with the Czechs, of course—” Colonel Tedrick lit his briar pipe and studied the wreath of smoke—“is that they offered you no real training. Totally unprofessional. Plop you down in a jail in Vienna with the instructions that you must keep your mouth shut.” Puffing on the pipe, he considered the lack of instruction Elisa had received. “It is no wonder you were unable to follow through when you met with Le Morthomme. We shall do better with you, Elisa. Give you a taste of the sort of training Himmler gives his Gestapo and Canaris gives the Abwehr.” He stuck out his lower lip and cocked an eye to question her. “Ever fired a gun?”

Uneasy with the line of questioning, Elisa shrugged and shook her head. “But you told me I had only to make contact in Paris with Thomas, and then—”

“Of course, yes. But the Nazis may not take kindly to your involvement. If that is the case, a weapon may well come in handy.”

“What use—?”

“Might have been some use to you if you could have simply shot that fat fellow who cornered you and your friend in your Vienna apartment, eh?”

Elisa exhaled loudly, then remarked dryly, “I suppose if I had known how to fire a gun, I would be in New York right now with Murphy, and you would have two less men on your payroll.”

Tedrick laughed, then waved her anger away with the smoke from his pipe. “Quite! Well, well, well—technicalities! That was simply a matter of—”

“Abduction.”

“I was about to say
necessity,y
Elisa! How else might we have wrested you away from John Murphy without a scene?”

“You wouldn’t have! And I would not have had any need at all for learning to fire a gun.”