The Bridge of Sighs (20 page)

“Here,” she said, pointing at a scratched dining table. It was an order, so he settled down quickly. “What’s wrong with your leg?” she demanded as she sat opposite him.

“It’s not my leg. I was shot in the stomach.”

She nodded, unfazed. “Americans?”

It took him a moment to understand. “No, no. Back home.”

“Counterrevolutionaries.” She spoke as if she knew all.

The apartment was cluttered like a grandmother’s—lace on the end tables, lace covering the sofa, lace on the shelves. He wondered how her poor grandchildren would fare. On the mottled wall was a portrait of the Comrade Chairman, his thick brown mustache like a roach on his lip. “Konrad Messer sent me.”

“Of course he did,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”

He shrugged.

“Dado!” she called, her mouth stretching at the edges. “Tea!”

He could hear Dado grunting behind the kitchen door as he stood up. Birgit smiled at him, but only briefly.

“Konrad did this before, you know. Sent me someone from your liberated nation. I was of some small assistance. Tell me. Do you know…” She paused, touching her lower lip in thought. “Mihai, yes. General Secretary Mihai? You know him?”

He shook his head.

“You have friends that do.”

“No,” he said. “The General Secretary keeps to himself.”

This seemed to displease her. She tapped her lip, nodding absently until her eyes snapped back to him. “Do you want to get to the Tempelhof air field basement as well?”

“Yes,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

“It’s a simple thing for the children, you know. They’re always cutting through the fence and running wild. The Americans spend half their time rounding up little German boys.”

He smiled obligatorily and nodded.

She brushed some dirt from the corner of her eye. “What for?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why, then, do you want to go to Tempelhof?”

Konrad had told him she would ask this question. He had given Emil the answer, just as he had given it to Janos months before. “For the interests of world socialism.”

She closed her eyes and nodded sharply. This was what she had suspected; the one reason worth her efforts. Dado stumbled out of the kitchen with a metal tray and two glasses filled with hot, brackish water. His blue worker s shirt was stained by tea drippings, and his thick hands were motor-oil black. He set out the glasses with the efficiency of a drunk headwaiter, then departed.

“Tonight?” she asked.

The tea was unsweetened and bitter. “What?”

“You want to get into the Tempelhof basement tonight?”

“Oh God, yes,” he said automatically.

She frowned at his invocation of the deity, but slowly told him what he needed to know.

Tempelhof Airport was shaped like a parenthesis, the planes collecting on the inside of the curve. She drew it on a piece of butcher s paper. It was a vast complex, she said, much larger than the Americans needed for their airlift, and many sections, particularly in the seven-level basement, remained unused. At the end of the war, German soldiers—boys, probably, the only ones left— laid bombs that destroyed the lowest two layers, but the remaining five were still too vast for the Americans. “This is to your advantage,” she pointed out, hovering over the pencil drawing he was barely able to make out in the candlelight. She drew five
Xs
for planes, then an angular line around the whole thing. “The fence. Here,” she said, marking, “is the main gate, simple enough. But your concern is the basement, the third floor down. Right here.” She drew another X at the bottom of the parenthesis, on the outside of the curve.

Tempelhof had its own generators, so he would not be left in the dark, not like the rest of the city. “I can get you an ID and a ration card, and that will put you inside. Unlike the little boys, you’ll have to go in the front gate.” She used her chubby finger like a teacher’s pointer. “This is where you will enter the gates. With the other workers. This is where you will separate from the workers. This is where you will enter the building. Here is your storeroom. What are you looking for?”

After all the commands, the question was unexpected. He stalled.

“Why are you sneaking into this place?”

“I’m looking for something,” he said finally. “A file.”

She nodded. “You won’t tell me what.”

“Ijust did.”

She looked as if she didn’t believe him, and moved her teacup away from herself.

“Did Janos Crowder go through this as well?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Comrade Crowder came before the blockade. Any fool could get onto Tempelhof. It was just a matter of waiting in a bathroom until the lights were turned off in the evening. Now…” She shook her head sadly.

He looked at the sketch in the wavering light. This was all quite crazy. But nothing he had done in the last month had any sanity to it. He would see it through, though, because seeing it through was the only dignity left to him. He looked at her. “How did you learn all this?”

“Nothing’s all
that
secret,” she confided, and smiled a second and final time. “And anyway, prostitutes know everything, haven’t you ever heard that?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

*******************

A
t the busy, dark street, he boarded an overcrowded tram marked
tempelhof
. Simple enough. Her directions had been specific and concise, with little possibility for deviation. Emil had one foot inside the car; the other hung out. His bare hands and face froze in the night breeze, and the strain of holding himself up was wrenching his guts. An old man packed inside looked down at Emil’s foot, then shrugged helplessly.

They went through all of Berlin, it seemed. In some areas there was solely rubble, while in others the only damage consisted of chipped façades. But most of the bits of Berlin he could see through the darkness were a mix of the two. Jagged walls rose into the air, surrounded by hills of broken stone and intact homes. Occasionally, men in suits rode bicycles alongside the tram, and their car stopped a few times to let convoys of American jeeps pass.

Finally, at the end of a long, bomb-riddled square, beside a gated subway stop, he saw the sign: an arrow beside the words
air port tempelhof
. Everyone got off with him.

The whine was continuous here, and deafening.

Workers collected at the high chain-link fence. A few American soldiers stood on either side of the gates and took a look at each man’s ration card and ID. Beyond them, the black wall of the airport rose. There were maybe a hundred men here, stuffed tight, and Emil was in the midst of them, their hard jackets scraping his chapped fingers, their stench filling his nose. He wondered if bathing was a luxury here. The old man from the tram noticed him, his white-furred chin shifting as he spoke: “So you held on, did you?”

Emil nodded and smiled.

The old man moved closer, eyes glimmering from the electric lights on poles along the fence. “Usually, I’m the afternoon, but they took me off. How do you get used to these hours?”

Emil shrugged and rubbed his arms for warmth.

The old man nodded with lips pressed tight, and looked around. They all moved up a few feet, then stopped.

Emil’s stomach began to act up again. His accent was a badge here.

They moved a few more feet. A plane roared off from the other side of the terminal, and another plane’s tires screeched against the runway. The electric lights lit the men from above, casting their faces in long shadow. The old man looked like death. “My daughter-in-law says they’re flying in their own prostitutes for the GIs. Direct from Paris.” He winked. “I hope we can unload some of
that”

Some other men growled their agreement, and a short, wiry worker took off his cap. “
Madame, pourrais-je vous aider à descendre de cette échelle
?” He held up a hand and squeezed, as though supporting a woman’s ass. The laughter rippled through the crowd, and the little man, pleased, put his cap back on.

They were almost at the front. Three American soldiers, looking very stern in the shadows of their caps, examined each ID closely, twisting it in the light, and then stared deeply into each face. Back to the photo, then the face, again.

Emil would not get through. He knew this as soon as he looked again at his ID card with
Schlieger, Dado
beneath the picture: dark hair, dark eyes, double chin. Even accounting for weight loss, this could never be him. What was Birgit thinking? What was
he
thinking, letting her talk him into this?

He put away the papers and turned around. The old man put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re almost there.”

Emil shook it off and didn’t look back, but said, “I forgot something.”

As soon as the words came out he went numb, but pressed on. There were eyes on him, white eyes against dirty cheeks. Their faces were slack in their momentary surprise, then, when he was nearly out of their mass, shoulders began bumping into his. “
Russian
came whispered German voices, hot breath in his ear. White teeth flashed. He pushed forward, just breaking free. Warm spittle hit the side of his neck. He didn’t wipe it off. They were yelling at him, hoarse voices in the cold. He walked faster, the cane helping him gallop further into the darkness. He didn’t look back until he had crossed the street, and the screaming airplanes obscured their shouting. They raised fists, a cloud of hot words hovered above their heads, and occasionally one broke from the crowd a few paces and spat, but they did not follow. They remained beside the gate, waiting to work for their ration cards. The promise of food held them right where they were.

A cold, black drizzle fell as he hobbled along the outside of the fence. He was cold all the way through. His jacket was thin— worker materials, the Uzbek would say—and when a wind came along, his battered hat blew off, and he had to stumble after it. He reached the other side of the Tempelhof complex, where he could see the activity inside the parenthesis. There were some children up ahead watching a plane touch down—a black silhouette marked by lights and sparks behind the propellers. Trucks burdened with food and coal rolled across the wet runway. From the shadows tiny workers jogged toward a parked truck. A burst of voices shot out—hooting—and the children clung to the chain- links, shouting with pleasure. Little blond boys dressed as poor adults, or in family lederhosen. They trembled like eager puppies.The plane taxied, disappearing on the other side of the airport, and another immediately touched down. There were lights in the sky, more planes lining up for the descent. On the ground, figures loaded trucks with the feverish single-mindedness of the hungry. The children whistled. Emil stood at the fence beside them, hands in his pockets fingering the useless ID.

“What kind of plane is that?” he said, and they looked at him. The plane was empty now, moving to the line of those waiting to leave. Another one took off.

There were five of them, feverish with the excitement of big machines, and one with mud on his cheek blurted, “C-47.” He seemed very convinced of it.

Emil nodded at the fence. “And this one coming in?”

“I’ll bet it s a C-54,” said another boy.

“You can t tell,” said the first, wiping the mud away with the back of his hand. “You can’t
see
it.”

“I can see it as well as you,” came the bitter reply.

It was, in fact, a C-82—a rare bird, they all agreed. He asked how often they saw the planes up close, and the first boy proudly said, “Whenever we want.”

“Shut up”
whispered another.

The first boy realized then what he had done. His confused silence endured as he wondered how to talk himself out of his slip, but he finally gave up. “Everyone does it.”

“Seen any C-4s?” Emil asked conversationally, as if he hadn’t understood the slip. “There were some around earlier.”

The rain had stopped, and the boys seemed to want to leave. They retreated a few steps, but one—the smallest, a dark-haired child with perfectly combed hair and immaculate lederhosen— asked if he had a cigarette.

Emil squatted and pulled out his pack. The others approached as he distributed them. When he offered them lights the first boy shook his head. “They’ll see us. Want to know how to see them up close?”

The littlest made some sound of discontent, but another gave an unimpressed sigh that shut him up. “
Baby

It was another fifty yards farther along the fence. In the darkness one of them tripped, but bounced upright again and ran to catch up. They had marked the spot with two sticks crossed on the ground. At first Emil didn’t see anything—it was a fence and two sticks, and on the other side the wet tarmac led toward the planes and, to the left, the Tempelhof building. But then the first boy, with a smile Emil could just make out, touched the fence, demonstrating that the chain links had been cut along a jagged vertical line, about three feet high. The boy bent and pushed through—there was the sound of his shirt tearing—and looked back, beaming. “Come on in!”

Emil came through next, painfully, holding the cane ahead of himself to open the way, and was followed by three boys. The last one, the baby, stood on the other side, watching, frowning. He had his cigarette behind his ear. He muttered something no one could hear.

The first boy crouched and rushed forward. Emil tried to follow his lead, bending and rushing forward, but his damaged body wouldn’t bend easily, and could not move that fast. “We should split up,” Emil told them. “That way if one of us is caught the others can get away.”

They liked the conspiracy in his voice, and were soon running far ahead and to the right, to where the planes were settling down. But Emil waited, then ran to the left. Behind him, he knew, the baby was standing on the other side of the fence, watching, muttering his worries.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

*******************

B
irgit’s scrawled directions were impeccable. They led him down the dark outside of the building s arc, where the planes on the other side were muted by brick. He was to skip the first door, which was locked, and make it to the second, which had been busted two months ago and never fixed. As promised, where its deadbolt should have been there was a perfect hole drilled in the door. He put two fingers through it and pushed.

A generator kept a dull sidelight burning that barely lit the concrete walls, and he had to pause at each turn to make sure the path was clear. Birgit had told him to look for stairs, and had marked where he could find them. The stairwell was completely black, and he had to feel his way. After the noise of outside, the silence made his footsteps elephantine.

First underground level. Then the second. Third. He pushed through the door.

The corridor was lit by a single fluorescent and, at the far end, light spilled from beneath an office door. He waited, sweating. His stomach made noises. He listened. Nothing.

He crept to the door and stopped again. Still, nothing. He turned the knob slowly, hearing the mechanism clicking, then stopped again. This door was not supposed to be unlocked. Birgit had told him he would have to break the lock. But he still heard nothing. He pushed it open.

It was a long office, more like a small warehouse, filled chin- high with brown boxes in all conditions. Ripped, cut, punctured by holes, water damaged. On half of them Emil spotted the small red imprint of flat wings on either side of a circled swastika. A few on the floor were open, revealing files, and more files covered the gunmetal desk in the center of the room, where a single lamp burned. The chair was empty, save a crumpled gray army blanket.

He heard a noise. A door closing.

He scrambled back into the darkness between the towers of boxes, his jacket scraping—loudly, it seemed—on cardboard as he squatted and waited.

A thin man came in and wiped his eyes, pushing round wire- framed glasses up his red nose.

Lieutenant Harry himself. Emils bubbling stomach threatened to explode.

Harry Mazur went to the desk and closed some files, dropping them into the squeaking desk drawers. He coughed into a thin hand, sniffed and belched. Emil noticed how gaunt the man was, how pale. The office was windowless, subterranean, and he imagined this historian hadn’t seen much sun these last months. He was practically wilting. Mazur took his coat and hat from a rack in the corner and turned off the desk lamp. The only light was from the hall. The historian muttered something—a deep, hoarse English Emil couldn’t understand—and left, closing and locking the door behind himself. The hall lights went off. Emil sweated and gritted his teeth against the pain in his stomach, but did not move.

Five minutes, maybe ten. He no longer had a watch to judge. He waited in the blackness, wishing he had sent Leonek here instead, Leonek with all his limbs and organs intact. But Leonek would have given up at the front gates; anyone else would have.

Once he was sure Mazur was gone for good, he felt his way to

the desk and turned on the lamp.

*********

He didn’t know where to begin; Birgit’s directions were only meant to get him here.

A dullard would pick up these boxes, one at a time, and go through each file, looking for the name Michalec, or Smerdyakov, or Graz. But the boxes were everywhere, stacked in little fascist towers that would take weeks, months to get through. About a third of the boxes, he noticed, had been moved to the front of the room, beside the desk. Maybe a hundred boxes, stacked tight. Each of these had been marked with a black X through its winged swastika, and a number beside it. The one closest to him was numbered 0087. He assumed these boxes had been through Mazur’s cataloguing process.

Emil went through the desk.

Beside loose files filled with economic forecasts written in German, there was a thick, hardbound notebook. Inside, grid paper was covered with columns of numbers and English writing. Emil didn’t understand a word. Mazur had written
records
on the front cover.

It was in here, he knew. There were columns of descriptions, each followed by a number, presumably to one of the boxes. The only way Janos Crowder could have found his evidence, Emil decided, would be to use these boxes, and this chart. He went quickly through the pages, dragging his finger down the lists, looking for anything familiar. But other than the occasional loose word he recognized nothing.

He found a few pages in English that were duplicated in German—a report by Lieutenant Harry Mazur on the history behind the files—but even that didn’t go into the contents of the boxes. The files had been taken, it said, from two places: a schoolhouse in Munich and a depot north of Berlin that had been set ablaze by retreating soldiers, then saved by the Red Army (many boxes, he saw, had water stains and running ink). Most of the Munich documents had begun in a warehouse in Oranienburg. When it was bombed, the boxes were moved, inexplicably, all the way to Munich. Even Harry Mazur had no explanation.
It’s the madness of war,
he offered in the report.

The rest of the drawers had only pencils, stale fried potatoes wrapped in paper and a full ashtray.

Emil took off his jacket and removed his tie. He would have to be a dullard.

The first box was filled with records of oil shipments from Ploieçti, Romania, and lists of gas usage in five Reich cities between 1942 and 1944. At the height of war the measuring and gauging had gone on unabated. There were letters from a colonel in France requesting extra petroleum rations for trucks that brought cheese shipments of Claqueret from Lyon to Paris.

Emil retrieved the next box and settled at the desk, and by the time he was on the third he had noticed a chill and used the gray blanket to cover his shoulders.

There were boxes of water records and others with troop movements. There were reports on Austrian wheat harvests and predictions for economic activity within Czechoslovakia.

Emil almost fell asleep after the ninth box, but hobbled to the end of the room and back a few times, quickly, to get the blood flowing again, then returned to a box on Dutch black-market activities.

It was late, he suspected, or early. But down here he could hear nothing, not even the planes. For all he knew, there was a war going on up there.

He skimmed over boxes that reported on grain shipments scheduled for the retreating forces on both fronts, and saw their tonnages dwindle. He’d heard stories from men on the seal boat about starving German soldiers raiding homes in a fury. Less verifiable stories had the soldiers eating each other. The one German in their crew, a pink-skinned Bavarian named Jos, sank into silence whenever the stories came up. No one prodded him, not even the Bulgarian. They knew he had seen his future, and it was iron bars, and walls.

A water-stained box contained wrinkled reports on awards given for valor in battle. Lists of men who had received their Iron Crosses posthumously, or those who had killed so many Allies that their lists of commendations went on for many pages. There were reports on brave soldiers of the Reich, and most of the recommendations came from the final months of the war. The soldiers were becoming younger, until they were just children with rifles and sticks, lined up in a ring around Berlin: the Home Guard. Three-quarters were posthumous recommendations. The Luftschutz medal, War Merit Crosses, a few West Wall medals for the builders of the failed D-Day defense on the Siegfried line, and numerous Russian Front medals. Each recipient had his own folder, filled with biographical information and photographs when available.

Then he spotted the folder in the back. Unlike the other orderly files, it was shabby, as if it had been perused by someone unorganized, or excited, or artistic, and then stuffed back into the box with no regard for order.

The label said
kontakt: “graz.”

The first page was an identification sheet. A small photo of Jerzy Michalec: a younger, smooth face. Boyish. Born in Szek- szárd, Hungary, 12 January 1909, to a Polish father and a Magyar mother. Married Agnes HÖller in Vienna, 1933. A handwritten note in the margin said that Agnes Michalec had died in 1943 in Mauthausen labor camp, Austria. Jerzy Michalec s association with the Gestapo, said line 26, began on 6 February 1941. Line 31:
For decorations, see attached.

The attached included typewritten letters that recommended “Graz” for medals of distinction. On 15 March 1942, Michalec had, at peril to himself, used prewar contacts within France to secure the identities of sixteen members of the French Underground. Thirteen of these sixteen had been taken into custody.

Firm block letters at the bottom of the recommendation:
neinjud.
Jew.

No—Michalec was not a Jew. It was his wife, Agnes. For that they could not award his work.

During the week of 10 October, that same year, Michalec caught and personally executed three British spies in Prague. Again,
nein.

Then, in March 1944, he led thirty boys of a mobilized Hitlerjugend regiment into a Soviet garrison in Poland. They returned with the mangled caps of nearly a hundred Russians. Two large, messy letters—
ja
—in red ink.

Next was a page-sized photograph of Michalec, much older than the young man who had, only three years before, entered the mess of battle. His face was heavy with killing, a blackness lingering beneath the flesh. He wore a loose-fitting black suit, and his smile was weary.

He stood shaking hands with the man Emil had seen twice before in his life: on a series of ten photographs, and stepping out of a blue Tatra with a Walther pistol. A little younger, this man s features were shadowed by his Wehrmacht officer s cap. His dress uniform showed the stripes of a colonel—
Oberst.
He handed Jerzy Michalec a small ribbon, weighted in the center with a cross, and a certificate. Emil could just make out the elaborate Gothic script—
lm Namendes Führers…

It took him a moment. He stared, unbelieving, for a long time.

Then he folded the photograph down the middle, and again, into quarters, then slipped it into the back of his pants, into his underwear. He turned off the lamp, grabbed his cane, unlocked the door and left.

Up three dark flights to the corridors, then out into the shadows. It was still dark, but dawn wasn’t far away. He could tell by the increased activity—figures jogging in the distance, workers and soldiers, shifts changing. He followed the curve of the wall to the corner, where the noise of planes grew to a pitch, whining loudly. Across the tarmac, where he and the children had crept onto the base, two American soldiers stood at the fence. One kneeled at the hole with pliers, mending, while the other stood with the lederhosen-clad baby boy. The boy was crying, waving his arms around, telling the soldier everything he knew about the hole in the fence. And, no doubt, the man with the cane, the bad cigarettes and Slav accent who had gone through it. The soldier brought a two-way radio to his face and started speaking.

Half-jogging back along the perimeter of the airport, he was glad, at least, that he hadn’t brought the whole file. Lightness was imperative. Speed. The knots in his stomach plagued him, but he pressed the pain down.

He slid his cane into his pant leg until its end hung by his ankle. It made him look awkward, crippled, but everyone in this city was.

Up ahead, a crowd of white, flour-dusted workers, tired and sagging, mumbling to themselves, approached the front gate, about twenty yards away. He didn’t know if it could work, and the sharp grind in his stomach was becoming unbearable. He needed to lie down. He needed sleep.

He walked as fast as his stiff leg would allow and joined the men. He hung back, behind them, in case they were from earlier—in case they recognized him. He stuck his hands in his pockets to hide his trembling.

Some GIs smoking by the gate looked casually through the papers of the men lined up to enter.

No one recognized him. The workers were too tired to see who was following them out, and the guards were busy with the newcomers. They didn’t care who left Tempelhof.