Target Churchill (12 page)

“It's nice being with you, Frank,” she said, as if it were a confession.

She paused, obviously priming herself.

“What I don't understand….” Hesitating, she explored his face. “…Don't you have anybody
in Washington…?”

“I'm fine,” he interrupted. “I told you, I'm just passing through.”

“From where to where?” she asked.

He continued to look at her, not knowing exactly how to respond. Apparently, she was ahead of him.

“It's all right, Frank. I was being nosy. Your prerogative—I won't pry.”

For the moment, her statement satisfied him. But he was certain that she would continue to be curious. Better to put the onus on her, he decided.

“Why did you become a nurse?” he asked, deflecting the conversation.

He admitted to his own curiosity now, still unsure about her role.

“There was a shortage,” she replied. “And please, I don't want to sound noble. Someday, I think I'd like to go to medical school, become a doctor. When things settle down.”

She seemed to be talking in shorthand, which raised his suspicions again.

When he asked no follow-up questions, she continued, “I mean I like nursing. I guess I'm a natural caregiver.”

He waited with trepidation, wondering when she would begin to pry again, wary of the ultimate response:
And you?

The blue plate special came. The chicken was stringy and the cottage fries greasy, but they did not comment on it and picked at their food. But when they looked at each other, their eyes held.

Miller had never been in this position before. He felt the odd pull of it, the strange sense of inchoate longing.

“Been in Washington a year now. Actually, in two weeks it will be my anniversary,” she said, suddenly as if in midsentence.

He suspected she was talking about herself to induce him to speak about himself.

“Do you like it here?” he said, deliberately focusing the spotlight on her.

“Lots of stuff happening. They say that now that the war is over, they might be reducing staff here. There'll be plenty of work at the VA hospitals, lots of wounded men to be cared for. I used to work in Massachusetts. We treated everybody, POWs, too.”

“Germans?”

Without thinking, he had blurted the question.

Her eyes widened, and she nodded and smiled.

“Some Italians, too. The human body is the human body; we're all flesh and blood.” She knocked on his cast through his shirt. “Even you—big, silent Frank Miller.”

Oddly, he felt a sudden unburdening, a release. He heard himself chuckling.

“Well, well,” she said. “The man doth smile.”

She looked at her wristwatch, the face of which was on the underside of her wrist. He noted that her fingers were long and graceful, tapered with short nails. Leaving most of their food untouched, he paid the check, clumped his way outside, and got into the chair.

Keeping silent, she rolled him into the lobby of the Y.

“Have a good ride, Miller?” the clerk at the desk said.

They both ignored the comment.

“Remember the rules.”

There was a little room off the lobby and away from the prying eyes of the man at the desk. She wheeled him there, and he got out of the wheelchair, which she folded and leaned against the wall.

Then she turned to face him. He felt his stomach tighten and beads of sweat roll down his back under his cast. They faced each other for a long moment.

“I'm glad I came, Frank. I wasn't sure.”

He stood silently looking at her, rooted to the spot. His strange yearning seemed to overwhelm him, but he could not bring himself to react.

“I'm glad you did,” he stammered.

His knees started to tremble. Reaching out, she moved toward him, and they kissed, a long deep kiss, yet another totally new experience for him. He felt her hand caress the back of his head.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered. “I wouldn't want to cause you trouble with the management.”

She disengaged reluctantly and started to move away, then she came back, and they kissed again. Her pelvis pressed against him, and he was certain she felt his erection, which, inexplicably, embarrassed him. She moved away, looked back, and waved, then was gone.

Back in his room, he lay down on the bed without undressing and tried to make sense out of this uncommon encounter. What did it mean? He could not relate it to anything he had ever experienced. Try as he might to put it out of his mind, he could not succeed. His reality seemed skewered. This situation was interfering with his concentration. He tried going through the machinations of an impending assassination attempt on the president but could not get a potential plan straight in his mind.

He was still erect. But it was a different kind of desire, something more than merely the anticipation of impending pleasure. There was more to this, a lot more. He reached for his penis with his left hand. It was too awkward for him to masturbate. Besides, the expression “beat the monkey” seemed too crude to associate with her. He felt oddly ashamed.

She came the next day and the next. He made his regular call before she arrived, and they spent the day together. Strange things were happening. The mission, which had totally absorbed him since arriving in the States, seemed to fade into the background of his life. He was well aware that one day, he would be summoned, but the anticipation seemed to be getting less real.

Before his accident, he had been totally focused on the impending assignment. Now, he no longer bothered to read the papers or listen to the radio. What was happening in Europe was of little interest; even Dimitrov's face faded in his memory.

It had been months since he had arrived in Washington. If it weren't for his daily call, he might have thought that he had been forgotten.

Stephanie was what absorbed his full attention. He felt charged, invaded. It was getting increasingly hard to be evasive and was becoming less and less difficult to clump around. She wheeled him around Washington, and they kissed and fondled each other wherever they could snatch some privacy. At times, they indulged themselves in mutual masturbation, but it seemed demeaning and unsatisfactory.

It was awkward and frustrating for both of them. She lived with three other nurses in a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest Washington. The housing shortage was acute. He had been lucky to get his room at the Y, but he suspected that his so-called sponsors had pulled strings to get him in. Apparently, they wanted him based at that specific spot. He suspected that he might be under surveillance, but he soon dismissed the idea.

“We could go to a hotel,” he suggested.

She told him it would be uncomfortable for her. House detectives might make trouble. She could lose her job. It would have been an unacceptable risk for him as well.

Dimitrov had warned him that once he got the car to Washington, he should use it only as necessary for the mission, the less exposure the better, with no risk of being stopped and ticketed for a violation. What would be the harm, he decided, provided he could handle it in his present condition? After all, he had been careful on his trip from Canada. Besides, the car was America's love chamber. In Germany, the cars were too small and cramped.

His revelation about the car surprised her.

“Can you drive?” he asked.

She shook her head in the negative. “Too busy to learn.”

He was able to manage it, and they began to drive and park along deserted roads in Virginia. They began to make love in the car.

“I'm not very experienced, Frank,” she told him. “I'm also a virgin.”

“Is that important to you?” he had asked.

“It was,” she said. “Until now.”

He did not press the point. Yet their lovemaking was passionate, and they satisfied themselves in ways that did not interfere with her virginity.

“Are you sure, Frank?” she would ask at times, when they had reached a point where a little more effort would have settled the question.

Of course, his being in a cast was inhibiting, even when they moved to the backseat. They never undressed completely. Besides, they each felt the tension of accidental discovery.

He remembered an expression from his teen days in America: “Everything but.” Even the girls at Yaphank were guarded about their virginity, although it was at Yaphank that he had lost his with an older girl. He had been fifteen; the girl was seventeen.

Back in Germany, Himmler had created camps where SS men and carefully screened girls were available strictly for propagation purposes. There was no love involved; it was sex by the numbers. He had been paired with a girl from Munich who was hell-bent on having a baby for the Führer. It hadn't been a very satisfactory episode, barely pleasurable, and he learned later, she hadn't conceived. Remembering that, he did not press the issue. Besides, an accidental pregnancy would be a complication he did not want.

Despite their physical intimacy, he kept himself carefully guarded, always leaving open the possibility that she might be an agent, a mole like himself, planted to find out what he was up to. And yet, when he held her in his arms, he could not imagine someone so beautiful, open, and loving could stir such suspicions.

Of course, there was dialogue between them, but he kept any answers deflective and evasive. He was wary of revealing anything of his past, his point of view, his beliefs and prejudices, his hatred of the Jews and all mongrel races, his absolute belief that the destiny of the pure Germanic race was to one day rule the world, that Adolph Hitler's defeat was merely a temporary pause in this great crusade.

Surely, he was convinced that she was of Aryan stock. She was blue-eyed, and her pubic hair was golden. Her breasts were large, delicious, and he greedily sucked her nipples. Together, with their classic Germanic looks, they could make beautiful Aryan children. Despite all his discipline and self-control, something had occurred deep inside him, beyond his control.

She made some small effort to probe beyond the scrim of his silence; and in order to protect himself, he invented a line of half-truths. He had grown up in New Jersey, which was true, although he was not specific. When she asked about his parents, he said they were both dead, which was true. He gave his correct age of twenty-seven, which she could find out if she went through his forged identification papers.

“Have you plans for the future?” she asked, numerous times.

That answer departed from any semblance of truth. In his mind, he remained an SS man, a soldier, a knight in a holy cause. Instead, he invented another persona. He told her he had planned to study architecture, build things. He was on his way to California—it could have been anywhere. He had spent the war years in the merchant marine on Victory ships. But when she probed beyond the thin slice of information, he balked and changed the subject.

Rather than questioning her, he waited until she volunteered. She was twenty-two, had grown up in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father was a physician, her mother a housewife. She had two brothers; both had been in the army. Yet, he detected hesitation, which instigated brief episodes of heightened suspicion, and he could not contain his curiosity.

“Why me?” he asked. “Why single me out?”

“That again,” she sighed.

“You must have had reasons. You see many patients in the hospital.”

“I can only say, my darling, the human heart cannot be explained. It takes you on strange journeys when you least expect it.”

He admitted some difficulty with the explanation.

“But why
me
?” he pressed.

“I can't explain attraction, Frank. I was just drawn to you, I guess. Maybe you were sending out signals. Who knows? Maybe you looked needy. But there is no denying you struck a chord. I'm sorry, but I guess I yielded to an impulse.”

She started a playful chain of kisses from his forehead to his lips. Then she stopped and observed his face.

“And to you,” she said.

He laughed and kissed her forehead.

“I guess I was a vulnerable target.”

“Are you sorry?” she asked coyly.

“No,” he admitted, but it was another half-truth.

“Could be, we bit off more than we can chew,” she told him.

He was baffled by her comment and, in an odd way, relieved. To explore it further seemed as if they would be poking into dangerous ground.

Accept the present,
he urged himself.
Savor it. Enjoy it.

He loved these halcyon days, the joyful pleasures. At times, she begged him to penetrate her. For some complicated reason, he held back. Perhaps, it was some sense of distorted honor, or, he reasoned, she was entitled to some sacred, personal place, something untouched and pristine. Such thoughts baffled him.

Considering his situation, he dared not speculate beyond the moment. He was a caged predator, programmed to kill, trapped by his past, and condemned to an uncertain future. He berated his foolishness for this involvement. Dimitrov had been absolutely right. Such relationships were dangerous to him and a hindrance to his mission. He had stepped across a red line.

When left alone at night, he contemplated what had become a dilemma. He could not find the will to break off a debilitating complication. When she left him, his longing was like some disease he could not shake. Worse, he had discovered a certain tenderness, a vulnerability that he did not know he had. He tried demonizing her, imagining her as some ruthless Delilah who had blinded him, a Mata Hari, a Jezebel, an evil castrator of the flower of German youth. Unfortunately, all his accusations melted under the power of his longing.

Six weeks passed like lightning. He clomped around with less and less difficulty and was able to do away with crutches. A wheelchair had long been abandoned. Then, at her insistence, he went back to the hospital. He was x-rayed and the cast on his arm was removed. As Stephanie had predicted, the x-ray of his ankle had revealed that the healing process was not complete.