Content Note: The following chapter includes scenes of violence and descriptions of injury consistent with the historical events portrayed.
Chapter 7
Jona floated in a a sea of mist, mesmerized by the vaporous wisps that formed and reformed all around him. It was very early. The first morning spray of sunlight was just beginning to color the fog with a pearly touch. The ship was rolling very slightly, giving Jona the dizzying feeling that he was flying through a bank of clouds. He could feel the steady rhythmic vibration of the ship’s engines, but there were no sounds except for the deep thud of waves against steel. As Jona stared out to sea, whitecaps were just barely discernible along the murky reaches of the waterline. They approached regularly, wave by wave, with unfailing frequency. Some seemed to lash at the sides of the ship with frenzy, others with an ordered calm, each crest completely unpredictable in its form and strength. Further off, visible through tracers of light in the semidark, the waves seemed disembodied from the ocean itself, appearing as on a remote horizon of time and space, roiling with their own intrinsic rhythm.
Just for a moment, Jona wanted to believe he was in a magical, almost mystical place. Perhaps he could unearth deep secrets in this space, or find contentment, or wisdom, or come face to face with the inner membrane of his being. But his mind spun actively, telling him that the haze was the product of atmospheric condensation as warmer air struck cooler water. He could deduce that his perception of water and sky was actuated by the reflection and refraction of light waves, generating energy in certain wavelengths which in turn stimulated retinal receptors that fed the information in the form of neuro-impulses to his brain. There was no magic.
As he leaned on the railing Jona turned his face into the wind, squinting towards the dawn. Visibility is zero, he thought. Visibility is zero. I can’t see a thing. He paused a moment, feeling the wind brush across his face, a soft reminder of his place in the present. My father would say that’s exactly when everything should be most clear. Visibility is then really infinite, unshackled from everything we are supposed to see. And then he would probably say something very clever, like visibility is both infinite and zero.
Zero. The word brought him back sharply to the time he was recuperating from the active phase of polio. He had come home from the hospital, heavily sedated with laudanum because of the pain from muscular contractions. It was already more than six weeks into the course of illness, and recovery of muscle function in his legs had progressed much too slowly. A noted doctor from Chicago had come to examine Jona, at his father’s request. He was young appearing, with a brusque manner, foul breath and cold hands. At the end of the examination, he announced in a loud voice to no one in particular that there was zero chance of complete recovery. He emphasized the word zero with a harsh finality that allowed for no discussion or argument. That was the first time it dawned on Jona that he might remain permanently bedridden, that he might never walk again. The revelation frightened him beyond comprehension. His father had been furious with the doctor, bellowing at him as if he were a first year medical student. Later that day, he was exceptionally attentive to Jona, sitting at his bedside and reading to him for hours from The Count of Monte Cristo. Jona could still remember each thrilling narrative from the book. Earnest Lieb did not have to explain to his son that it told the story of a man who was able to overcome every adversity. At the end of the reading his father leaned very close to Jona, seeming to struggle with words for a few seconds. He made a sobbing noise but said nothing. Grief lay suspended between them like a filmy web, a net catching every sound and motion, every feeling and thought. Then, in a tick of the clock, the moment ended. The elder Lieb composed himself and gave his son a squeeze of the shoulder. Jona had a sudden premonition that some kind of parable, wise saying, or paradigm was about to be conferred upon him, like a gift from a munificent prince. Something like ‘Zero is the mirror image of the infinite,’ or ‘Every possibility begins from zero.’ But nothing was said. No magic words, no profound utterances. It was one of the few times he could remember his father sitting in total silence, staring at the floor while touching Jona on the arm.
Two indistinct forms abruptly materialized out of the fog, a couple walking slowly down the deck arm in arm. They were both bundled into overcoats to protect against the chill dawn air. As they passed he could see they were elderly. The man walked with shuffling steps and his right hand tremored rapidly, as if he were rolling some unseen dice. The old woman held him tightly, supporting him carefully as they strolled. Jona scrutinized them carefully. Based on their head shape and cheekbones they appeared to be eastern European. Not Slavic. Very likely Jews. Poles, perhaps. Or Estonians. Skull size and orbits suggested moderate intelligence. Nothing else of importance was noticeable. He felt a sudden wave of appreciation for his forensic training. They nodded amicably as they passed, their lips twitching into smiles flashing with silver and gold. Jona stared after them as they continued silently towards the stern of the ship, leaving him in their wake as they disappeared into the mist.
For some reason the sight oppressed him, throwing his mind into a whirlwind of further thoughts. From the start, the ocean passage had prompted many memories. Now three days into the voyage, Jona was awash with reminders of his childhood. This was his first trip abroad since he and his father had first gone to Germany, eventually to flee the South permanently. His mother had died just three months earlier, and their departure had been arranged hastily. Jona recalled his excitement about missing school, but little else about their preparations.
He was only nine then, and spent much of the voyage terrified that a wave might wash him overboard, or that the boat would founder on a hidden reef. There were no nannies with them on that trip; the elder Lieb kept him close at all times. He pointed out details of the ship’s construction, explained all about screw driven propulsion, airtight compartments and bulkheads, and reassured Jona that it was all quite safe. Nonetheless, the young boy remained apprehensive throughout the passage and clung to his father as much as possible.
Nights were the worst time. Falling asleep in his bunk, he imagined that every noise coming from the hull and every vibration coming from the engines was an impending sign of disaster. Almost every night it seemed an eternity before he could drift into sleep. Often, visions of his mother came to him during periods of semi arousal. She coughed incessantly in his visions, a throbbing cough that merged with the powerful rhythmic pulsations coming from the engines.
One night he was awakened by a nightmare. Frightening dreams were uncommon for Jona, but whenever they did come they continued to terrify him for weeks afterwards. That night’s dream was now lost to his memory, but he remembered that he awakened in a panic to find the cabin in complete darkness. He could hear the ship creaking and throbbing, just as if it were cracking apart. Instinctively, he got out of his bed and attempted to crawl in with his father, whimpering all the while.
Earnest Lieb awakened with one of those crazed, unreasoning explosions of anger that usually resulted in a fiery welt across Jona’s bottom, or worse. This once, however, his father calmed down quickly. After turning on the bedside lamp he told Jona to sit on the floor facing him.
“What is the matter?” he demanded sharply.
Jona responded the only way he knew, by crying and rubbing his eyes as he sobbed.
Earnest Lieb heaved a disapproving sigh. “You’re scared?” He waited a moment while Jona bobbed his head up and down. “Look, Jona, you’re no longer a young child. You’re nine, aren’t you? I can’t baby you every time you’re frightened. Fear is something you will have to learn to overcome. Fear itself is no more than a disease, an illness that can be diagnosed and treated effectively. Sometimes the therapy itself is difficult or even painful, like an operation, but in the long run it’s well worth it.”
The little boy sitting on the floor merely nodded his head, unsure what might be coming next.
His father commanded him sharply back onto his own bunk. Using a long thin leather belt from one of their suitcases, Earnest Lieb tied his son’s wrists together, and then to the bed’s side rail. Without a word he then turned off the small bedside lamp, leaving the cabin in darkness once again. Jona spent the night in agony, terror, and anger. For hours afterwards he could not fall asleep, feeling trapped and immobilized by the restraints around his hands. Of course, crying out for help was out of the question. Eventually, a grey, filmy dawn appeared through the porthole and awakened him, a dawn very similar to the one just blossoming through the fog of the current day. In the light of that long ago daybreak, Jona was able to see that his father had fashioned the knot in such a way that it came apart simply by shaking his wrists vigorously. If he had made any effort during the night to escape, the knot would have fallen off, releasing him. That memory still pierced him. Ha, ha, he thought, that was very clever, dad, teaching me a lesson like that, making it so I will never forget. Jona held on to the railing as the ship rolled across some deep swells. He began to feel some of the same anger he had felt that night returning again. Without realizing it, he began grinding his teeth. His thoughts piled rapidly and grimly, one upon the other. Well, it’s time, he thought. It’s time to make my own memories now. He’s gone, so I’ll chart my own course. Like taking on this mission. He took on assignments, now I’ve got one. Maybe I’ll be the one to do something important for the cause of world peace. I guess he’d like that.
Jona was still amazed at himself for agreeing to the venture. It was most certainly not a patriotic gesture. He did not believe that America was the last great hope of mankind, even though he called it his home. Appeals to jingoism were just so much political tripe, and he hated politics. Jona had been taught from childhood that patriotism was the last refuge of the indolent beggar searching for meaning and had never observed a reason to change that opinion. He supposed that his home was as good as some places, and as bad as some others. No difference, really. His father had filled him with many stories of the wider world: England, France, Germany, Russia, Central Africa, China, the Balkans. Earnest Lieb had travelled to each of those areas to teach, to research, to help, to heal. Each had it’s special place in the sun, each its special mission, each its individual lesson for all mankind. Undoubtedly that was true of the CSA as well, despite all the criticism it received on the world stage. ‘We are born citizens of the world’, was one of his father’s maxims. Jona grimaced. Another cosmic incantation to live up to. Still, there was a ring of truth to it, and Jona was determined to enjoy the experience of new and foreign lands for himself.
“Up kinda early, doc.”
Jona’s head and neck snapped around, his eyes quivering in the direction of the greeting. It was Murphy, slicing into view as sharply as the prow of a ship emerging from a fogbank.
The federal agent walked up to him briskly, extending his hand. “Sorry about that, didn’t mean to scare you.”
Lieb looked past the agent. “Good morning yourself. Where is Andrews?”
Murphy smirked. “Still getting his beauty sleep, pal.”
“It is early, agent Murphy. What gets you up at this hour?”
“Routine, Doc. Learned it in the Marines, and it’s been a habit ever since. And by the way, no more ‘agent Murphy’ crap. It’s ‘Murph’, or ‘Murphy’, or just ‘hey, bub!’ That’s all”
Jona realized that the fellow was trying to be friendly but felt uneasy in his presence all the same. Somehow, Murphy did not project the same warm, quiet reassurance that flowed from Andrews. On the contrary, the older agent gave the appearance of someone perpetually determined to bash his head through a solid brick wall. The man’s jaw protruded forward as if inviting confrontation. Most disturbing, he had a way of squinting as he spoke that made his eyes bulge enormously. The whole image projected raw, primitive power. Jona wanted to get away gracefully, without having to say anything that might seem curt or rude. “Look, I was just going for some tea...”
“Sure, I’ll join you, doc.” Murphy spoke loudly and with supreme confidence.
Lieb took pains to stare down at the deck, trying to hide his chagrin.
Both men ambled slowly and soundlessly towards the aft garden lounge, which served coffee and tea through all hours. They passed a group of deckhands who were securing the rigging around a lifeboat. The sight made Jona pause and shudder involuntarily.
Murphy noticed immediately and chuckled. “What’s the worry, doc? Don’t concern yourself. There are plenty to go around, and they all work. The crew are just performing safety checks. No worries, these modern ships can’t sink. You weren’t thinking of the Titanic, were you?”
“No, not really...It made me think of the Lusitania.”
“No chance. The Lusitania was torpedoed by a Kraut U-Boat during the war. We’re not at war.” Murphy paused a moment, thinking. “Well, we’re not at war with anyone who’s going to shoot at us on this boat. Not that kind of war.”
They entered the garden lounge, passing from gray light into bright illumination. Scratchy music was playing from a gramophone in the corner. It sounded like Bing Crosby singing ‘You’re Getting to be a Habit with Me.’ For some reason, Jona detested the song, and immediately wished that he could be alone, back in his room, and far away from Mr. Joe Murphy.
As they sat down Murphy stared at Jona intensely. “You don’t like me very much, do you, doc?” His voice was raspy, choked by years of inhaling tobacco smoke.
Jona fielded the question nervously, sipping from his cup before answering. “It’s not that I don’t like you, Agent Murphy. Put yourself in my place. I’m virtually assaulted by federal agents on the day of my father’s funeral, and pressured to do something I had no intention of agreeing to do until I was threatened by your boss. All of you made it sound like I’m a Red sympathizer. If you ask me, Moran’s the one acting like a Bolshevik!” Jona took a deep breath, trying to keep his hand from shaking as he lifted the tea cup to his lips.
Joe Murphy let out a small grunt as he leaned over the table. “You are quite a little shit, aren’t you.”
“What did you say?” Jona appeared stunned.
“You heard me.” Murphy spoke softly, as if describing the floral arrangement sitting in the middle of the table. “I’ve seen a million guys like you before. Everything has to be just right for them, or they go running to mommy. Or daddy in your case, I guess.”
Jona hesitated but decided to stand his ground. It was very important that he establish control over this man. “That’s no way to talk to me, and very unfair,” he quavered. “I’m no weakling. I’ve had to overcome quite a bit in my life, as you may have noticed.”
Murphy lit up a cigarette despite the early hour. Lieb really was a little shit, and the grizzled agent wanted to push him a little further. “Yeah, I noticed. Like overcoming the fact that you were dumped by that Marielle broad. I bet that was rough, big boy!”
“She didn’t dump me, if you must know. I’m the one that broke things up with her...” Jona trailed off, looking nervously around the room. “Look, that’s really none of your concern, and something I’d prefer not to discuss.”
“Is that so?” Murphy laughed. “Well, doc, I have to tell you that I’ve seen her picture, and she is one hot little cookie. Why the heave-ho?”
Jona gave every appearance of being miserable. His shoulders slumped, his head drooped, and after a moment he let out a sigh. When he spoke at last it sounded like he was mumbling to himself. “I suppose I didn’t really want to, but dad... He insisted. He made me.”
Joe Murphy’s brain raced at the mention of the elder Lieb. “That must have been tough, kid. Did you love her?”
“Yes. Maybe. Yes, I think so. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure.”
“What was it, then? Was it because she was a crazy anarchist? A Commie? Come on, your dad had lots of Commie friends.”
“No, it wasn’t that at all. That part was OK, I think. I’m not sure. There must have been something wrong with her. Something that wasn’t visible to me, but he could see.”
Jona shifted uncomfortably in his chair, his mind filled instantly with a thousand different visions of Marielle. He could see her red hair flashing across her face as she turned to look at him, her eyes gleaming with impish glee as she teased him, the smell of her neck...Their last night together she had smothered him with kisses, begging him to go with her, to drop everything and leave it all behind. “Let’s make a new life with just the two of us,” she had said. He could still feel the electricity in her touch.
In the beginning, everything had been easy. There was no thinking, no decision making, no plus or minus to consider. He was mesmerized by her. Everything about Marielle - her pale beauty, her wit, her fire, the way she sighed - intoxicated him. When he was near her, it was like nothing he had ever felt previously. He had never seen things so clearly, and he had never been so certain about anything before. From almost their first encounter, Jona knew he was hopelessly in love with Marielle.
When they were not together, he felt a dull, aching void deep inside. By daytime he was filled with visions of her. By nighttime he was in a special torment, overpowered by a burning lust that stabbed into his belly as if a knife were twisting inside him. Like a man with a draining wound, he tossed, heaved and flailed, unable to sleep. His symptoms often carried over into his work, rendering him useless, mindless and hapless for hours at a time. He wanted to find her, speak to her, and touch her. Sometimes, visions of her lustrous body came to him as he performed autopsies, carrying with them every imaginable fantasy.
And she was so free. She was a modern woman, unfettered by what she called enslavement to societal norms and conventions. Margaret Sanger was one of her heroines, and she loudly proclaimed her belief in women’s equality. She argued for abortion and communal centers for child rearing in order to free women to pursue their dreams.
One evening she told him she believed in free love, whispering it in his ear with an impish look in her eye. An electric charge pierced Jona as surely as the strike of a lightning bolt. He repeated her words in his mind, but could not process or understand her meaning. “Do you mean have others in our bed? Not just me and you?”
She whispered the gentle laugh he loved so much. “Darling, we haven’t even been in bed yet. Don’t worry, I didn’t mean that others would be draped around us when we’re together. I just mean that there’s no reason to feel trapped. That goes for you too. Of course.”
He must have appeared shocked, because she pulled at the lapels of his jacket, pulling his face near hers. “What’s the matter, darling? Are you jealous? You don’t want me to abandon everything I believe, do you?”
Jona could still close his eyes and remember the soft warmth of her breath upon his neck as he held her close, and feel once again the turmoil in his brain as he struggled to understand her meaning. “What are telling me, Marielle? Have you been with others?”
“You are jealous, after all. It’s sexual jealousy, isn’t it, and you must drive it out of your mind immediately. It is not allowed. You cannot feel that way if you want to be a modern man. Actually, you cannot feel that way if you want to be with me.”
“Of course,” he told her, saying the only thing he could possibly say. “But you must never leave me.”
“Never, darling.” She breathed the words with a with a silky laugh.
Jona could remember the quick thought that flashed through his mind that moment, a feeling that probed at him like the burnt tip of a stake. “No jealousy. Anyway, I’ve always been told what my feelings should be or not be. Always.” The thought flickered out quickly, and with Marielle in his arms, he again abandoned himself to the miracle of love.
Most miraculous of all, Jona felt that he had started a whole new life, a new existence, something he could not even conceive of before he met Marielle. He felt, at some times joyously and at other times almost somberly, as if he were whole again. For the first time since his boyhood illness, he stopped dwelling on his limping gait and atrophied legs, and pain abandoned him. Marielle was the first woman he had ever touched. She was the first woman he had ever allowed to touch him. His first time alone with her had been like a dream, free of almost all inhibitions. His only thoughts were for her, as if the person previously known as Jona had disappeared, swallowed up in a tidal wave of new and powerful emotions. He had wanted even more, much more. He had wanted to both devour her and subsume himself within her, and consummate their love in every possible way. But, he had never dared those possibilities. An unseen, inner breakwater funneled his actions, permitting his waves of desire to go so far, and no further. Beyond that was fear and uncertainty, a place he would not speak of, a void within him patrolled by monstrous anxiety.
He introduced her to his father on Columbus Day at a reception held at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant. The affair was meant to raise money for food relief in the Bowery, and ordinarily would be an odd sort of event for Earnest Lieb to attend. As a rule, he preferred to speak on behalf of more cosmic causes, such as the political precursors of famine in China, or malaria control in the Congo River basin. This time, however, his father came to attend and not to speak, since the featured guest was Babe Ruth.
Earnest Lieb loved baseball, and like millions of simple-minded adolescents he idolized the infamous Yankee baseball giant immortalized as The Babe. Baseball was virtually the only distraction the elder Lieb allowed himself in the conduct of his everyday affairs. It was also the only thing that could induce him to sit in a public place, whether a restaurant or a ballpark, without being the center of attention himself. Jona never understood his father’s passion for a game that he considered terminally tedious. His father tried repeatedly to interest him in the nuances of baseball, without any success. The summer after Jona contracted polio the elder Lieb insisted that they go to the Polo Grounds together to see a game. At the time, he was still using crutches and simply getting to his first row seat was agony. Several of the players came by to leave autographed baseballs for the convalescing boy, but it was all meaningless to Jona. The only one he could remember afterwards was someone called ‘The Flying Dutchman’, and then only because of the absurdity of his name.
At the fund-raising affair, Jona couldn’t remember what his father said upon meeting Marielle. It all seemed to be going well, though...
“Hey, Doc. Wake up, are you daydreaming?” Murphy leaned over to tap Jona on the elbow.
He responded slowly, almost drowsily, as if awakening from a convalescent sleep. “Sorry. That’s a part of my life I would like to leave behind, if you don’t mind. It makes no difference now. Anyway, it’s all over.”
The Secret Service agent took another drag from his cigarette as he contemplated Jona. “Doc, I don’t think it is. As I said, I’ve seen guys like you before. Don’t be a sap, you’ve still got a lotta shit floating around upstairs.”
In an instant Jona found himself exploding with anger. “You go to hell! You go right to dirty darned hell!” He struggled to his feet, almost as if he were going to lunge at Murphy. “What do you know about me, about what I am? All you think you see is a cripple and you pretend to be polite about it while you secretly laugh your guts out. You’ve seen guys like me before? Let me tell you, I’ve seen your type a million times before as well, you brute faced ape, and inside here I’m just as much a man as you are!” Jona thumped his chest as he finished, and almost immediately he felt deflated. He sat down slowly, aware that the busboy was staring at him. A quick scan around the room confirmed that a couple in the corner were eyeing him warily.
Murphy watched him coolly, dragging deeply and then stubbing out the cigarette. “Well done, doc, well done. I want to thank you sincerely for that little demonstration.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s good to see you’re actually alive and kicking. A living, breathing human being with a pair of cojones between your legs. Before that, I thought you looked like a man dying from some sort of disease. Like some kinda cancer, maybe.”
By the time Andrews got out onto the first-class promenade deck the sun had burned through the low lying layer of clouds, and it had become a beautiful, clear day. The sea had calmed down with the advent of daylight, now stretching out to a straight green horizon. He knew Jona was an early riser and had wanted to be up in time to meet him for breakfast. But, like every other night since the start of the voyage, he had slept miserably, tossing for what seemed like hours before finally drifting off. Although he looked clean shaven and relaxed, he was nauseated and had a terrific headache.
It had taxed his enormous powers of self discipline to maintain his daily composure while getting almost no sleep since leaving New York. He found his cabin to be suffocatingly small, the bed too short for his lanky frame and the air in his room musty and oppressive. It all brought back too many memories of his youth in Baltimore, growing up in his sister’s ancient, dilapidated frame house. He had slept in a small cubbyhole next to the stairs. It was more a closet than a room, and he had sworn then never to live like that again, whatever it might take. The crossing was now almost over, and none too soon for him.
Despite feeling washed out, he remained attuned to the mission, and most importantly to Jona. By this time, he felt that he could read Lieb like a book. All the elements of his background and makeup were readily discernible to anyone who would see: A brilliant, overbearing father, an enduring love-hate relationship with his long dead mother, a life of shame and humiliation due to a disability, and a record of mediocre achievement in his field. Andrews nodded to himself as he briskly ticked off each point in turn. It was all there, a classic profile of a man who was a loner. And a loser. Someone who had lost both in the game of life and in the game of love. Andrews had seen this personality type before, someone who could not easily trust others and who in turn could never be trusted completely. And he had certainly not changed his initial opinion about Jona; he just didn’t like him.
It was his task, however, to engage Jona, and to appear supportive and understanding. Someone who could be leaned upon in time of need. A friend. On a clinical level, he knew the confidence building methods that could be used to foster attachment, and John Andrews applied what he knew without hesitation. Demeanor, intonation, facial expression, and even dress were elements that he brought to bear on Lieb, with obvious success. It was clear that Jona liked him and seemed to want him around whenever possible. Ironically, that was just what Joe Murphy had predicted would happen.
At the thought of the senior agent, Andrews frowned. Murphy had remained abrupt, and even harsh with him since embarkation. He didn’t really give a rat’s ass what Murphy thought of him personally, but it remained important to his career track that he remain on good professional terms with the senior agent on the case. He could not risk a poor written evaluation. Of course, a successfully completed mission, with himself as the lynchpin, would assure advancement. After all, this was all being reported right to the top, possibly even to the president directly. Moran would see to that. When it was over, he would be sure to get the lion’s share of credit and Murphy could take a hike.
In fact, the whole crowd back at Secret Service could take a hike. Andrews knew they talked about him behind his back. There was nothing new in that. And he knew why, but it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was going forward and advancing to the head of the line. The Secret Service, after all, was not the end of the world. Other agencies would want to gobble him up, like the FBI. The Director himself had told him so. And, it had to be admitted, no agency was more powerful than the Bureau, not even the Secret Service. J. Edgar Hoover had taken a personal interest in Andrews and had made it clear that there was an appropriate position being prepared for him upon his successful return. Hoover was the kind of mover and shaker who would pull his whole team with him to the highest strata of power in Washington. John Andrews planned to be right there with the charismatic Director as the Bureau advanced in prestige and influence. And down the road, who could know what might happen?
As he turned towards the port side of the deck, still searching for Jona, Andrews heard his name called. He whirled around to see a cabin boy approaching with a piece of paper in his hand. “Mister Andrews,” he said briskly, “Telegram, sir.”
The agent snatched the telegram, signed for it, and took a snap glance at it. He stuffed it into his pocket and looked quickly up and down the deck to make sure neither Jona nor Murphy had seen the message delivered. Especially Murphy. He was virtually alone, and no one within view had given a look in his direction. Striding aft rapidly, he made his way back to his cabin in a few moments. He prayed not to bump into Joe Murphy, who would almost certainly question him about where he was going, and why.
Once in the cabin he locked the door and sat down on his bed before taking out the telegram. It was from Washington, timed and dated from earlier the same day. He had been told before he left that he might receive a communication during the course of the mission, but he was surprised nonetheless. Considering the risks involved, something important must have triggered the transmission of a cable by public channels, even in code.
Andrews retrieved a small notebook and a pencil from his suitcase and opened it next to the telegram. After a few minutes he had it deciphered into plain language. He read it twice, then thoroughly ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. Once he was satisfied the note was destroyed, he first checked himself carefully in the mirror, then went out to find Jona. Andrews smirked as he took the stairs two at a time. His buddy must be missing him by now.
Southampton was alive with a writhing mass of humanity shouting and waving from the pier as the ship was docked. The scene brought back a vivid memory of arriving in Bremen in 1909, with Jona comfortably in the embrace of his father as their vessel was nudged into its berth. He remembered the stale, salty ocean smell, the cobblestoned streets and the hansom driver wearing an ornate, shiny-black peaked hat.
After arrival they entrained directly for Berlin. Jona was to live there for about a year while his father worked at the Institute. During that time the elder Lieb traveled frequently, sometimes around Germany, sometimes to England or France. It was not unusual for him to be away for weeks at a stretch, but he always traveled alone. Jona was left behind to attend classes dutifully at the British Embassy School, under the watchful eye of his nanny, Mathilde.
They lived in a modest brick home in Kreuzfeld, near Hallisches Tor, and so it was a short trolley ride to either the Friedrichstrasse or Wilhelmstrasse and then on to the center of the city. Mathilde had a son, Gregor, who lived with them in an upstairs bedroom. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time, but tolerated Jona’s company and took the younger boy under his wing. He worked the night shift at a chemical plant in Pankow, so that he was free in the late afternoons, when Jona was home from school. Jona quickly learned enough German to pester the older boy to play with him. Gregor took him on bike rides around the neighborhood, often careening in front of an onrushing tram or car just for the thrill of it. Jona, ensconced on the handlebars and holding on for dear life, shouted in delight with every screaming swerve of the bicycle. He could not remember that he ever had such fun in his life again.
One day near the end of their stay in Berlin, Gregor came home from work and announced very grandly that he was now, and would be henceforth, a Socialist. He had signed on to the SPD, the Socialist Party, that very day at the factory. From that point onwards he seemed less playful with Jona, and they spent less time together. Gregor barraged Jona with newly acquired polemics on social justice, worker’s rights, and capitalism. He talked about the need for a cataclysmic revolution in order to rectify past wrongs, and to commence a future of fairness and equality. Everything that had come before was nothing but evil cloaked as progress. In the new world to come the truth about the past would be exposed, and a new course would be charted. Gregor thought he might go to university and study to become a historian. When the new era came, he would thus be well poised to expose humankind’s past inhumanity. The young man always spoke intensely, as if the revolution and the coming socialist paradise were imminent, possibly about to explode before them at any moment. Very little of it made much of an impression on nine year old Jona, who simply wanted more bike rides.
Years later, after the war in Europe broke out, Earnest Lieb received a letter from Mathilde, which he read to Jona. They learned that Gregor had rushed to join his reserve regiment in the first days after mobilization. Like most young men of the time, he was euphoric as he marched off to war under the banner of the Kaiser’s Reichskriegsflagge. It seemed odd that Gregor shrugged off his socialist ideals so quickly in the deluge of enthusiasm for war. He was killed just a few weeks later at the battle of Tannenberg. According to Mathilde, it was a very great victory for Germany. But, she did miss Gregor very much and was sorry for his death, even though he had lost his life in the noble performance of a sacred duty. If he had lived, he would have become a very great man, she wrote. Maybe even a great scientist like Herr Lieb.
Now, as he remembered his boyhood friend, Jona forced himself to stifle a sob that welled up, unbidden and unwanted. As he watched while the ship was lashed tightly to its pier, memories of Gregor and his own boyhood engulfed him in a swell of grief. “No more,” he vowed. “No more crying, I swear. The past is done. I’m turning the page, and then I’m closing the whole damned book.”
Jona spent until well into the afternoon walking slowly down the Strand from the West End, working his way past St. Paul’s and down Fleet Street before meandering into the congested side streets of the City. It was his second day in London. A very good day. His legs felt unusually strong, the sky was bright and spotless, and he loved the twists and turns of the old London streets. It was not New York, of course. Leicester Square was not like Herald Square, and venerable old Hyde Park could not compare with Central Park, or so he told himself. He was staying at the newly opened Cumberland Hotel, which was just across from the London Arch. The Arch was striking, but Jona had no doubt that it was humbled by the more imposing monument at Washington Square. London was wonderful, but it seemed to Jona that New York was smarter, younger, and somehow more alive. It did occur to him that Londoners visiting New York might see things differently, but that was undoubtedly due to their biased view of the world. He was just being objective
One thing that London shared in common with New York was the astonishing diversity of people who mingled freely on the streets. It was curious. Jona had expected to find a dominance of classical Northern European dolicho-blond racial characteristics among native Londoners. In fact, he saw very few passers-by who demonstrated the anticipated traits. There was a sprinkling of tall and fair types, but far larger numbers of dark haired, squat, round faced, cucumber necked and pear-shaped individuals crowded the streets of the city center. There were gangly Africans, portly Arabs, and smooth skinned Indians bustling in and out of shops, as if hurrying back to their own little corners of the Empire. Jona noted with interest that there appeared to be Jewish owned shops scattered here an there. In any case, just being in London was grand, and his wonderful adventure was beginning just as he had hoped.
The best part of all was his early morning escape from his two shepherds. He had told Andrews the evening before to meet him for breakfast at eight. Jona was quite sure neither agent would be looking for him before then, and gleefully stole through the empty hotel lobby at six. From there it was a few strides to Hyde Park, and the Underground was just a short walk away. As he returned to the Cumberland, Jona wondered what his reception would be like. He didn’t have long to wait.
“Hey, doc!” It was Murphy, his footsteps muffled by the heavy carpeting as he jogged across the lobby towards him.
Jona prepared himself for the worst. He decided to strike first. “Look, you have no control over my movements. As far as I’m concerned, I have every right to come and go as I wish to.”
Murphy stopped abruptly, knitted his brows into the contour of a washboard, and gave a crooked smile. “What, lie to your friends one minute and sneak around like a thief in the night the next? Why, sure you can doc. Sure you can.”
Lieb gave a skeptical nod. “Really. If you are alright with that, why have you been loafing around here, waiting for me? I know you want to lace into me for taking off on my own this morning.”
“Not at all, my good doc. Hell no. I suppose a little note telling us about your plans would’ve been nice, just so’s me and Andrews wouldn’t be going nuts. But that’s your call, like you said. No, no. I’ve been waiting for you because I have a message to deliver. An invitation.”
Jona was instantly wary. “An invitation from who?”
“A guy from this side of the pond who’s somewhat important, I’m told. A member of Parliament. He wants to see you. Name’s Churchill.”
Their formal itinerary in Europe did not include meetings with politicians or state leaders. Jona had wondered about that. His father had certainly known enough of them, like Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and even Germany’s president Hindenburgh, himself a colossal remnant of the former Empire’s war machine. The name Churchill sounded vaguely familiar, but Jona could not remember any specific incident that linked him with Earnest Lieb.
Murphy made a great show of distancing himself as Jona tore open the flimsy envelope he was handed. A handwritten note inside simply said “Would you care to meet for dinner at Ciro’s tonight? Come at 8.” followed by a barely legible, exuberantly scrawled signature.
Jona regarded Murphy warily. “Why me? What do you think he wants?”
“Only one way to find out, doc. His secretary dropped the note off but wouldn’t say shit about it. Since this is private, you can go alone. You know, have your freedom, act like a big shot, and so forth.” Murphy tried hard to restrain his sarcasm, remaining all smiles. “You don’t have to sneak out.”
Jona stared at the agent with some suspicion. “What does Andrews think? Where is he, by the way?”
“Out in the park, looking for you, my man. He was actually worried about you. Thought he might find you tied and gagged under a bush.” Murphy reached into his pocket and brought out a long, elaborately wrapped cigar that he offered to Jona. “Since you’re going to a high class place, take this. All these upper class Brits smoke like a furnace. And when it’s time to light up, don’t act like a fucking momma’s boy.”
Ciro’s combined high society charm with art deco chic. The murmured buzz of conversation and careful laughter reflected the restaurant’s patronage, a proper blend of black tie, old whiskey, and highbrow intercourse.
Jona arrived first and was promptly seated at a booth by a small window. The early evening sky was partially obscured by streaky clouds and was still surprisingly bright, playing out long shadows on the pavement as pedestrians passed by. Jona did not really care that Churchill was late; he was quite happy to rest his legs, relax, and stare out the window. The view reminded him of home in some ways, but there were no homeless tramps on the streets, which were quite clean, and no soup lines to be seen. Jona knew that times were tough in Britain, and wondered vaguely where all the homeless were hidden. Across the street, bright lights illuminated a billboard:
Duke Wellington and his Orchestra
With their new smash hit
“Down a Carolina Lane”
Direct from New York
Two nights only
And only at the Palladium
Jona loved Duke Ellington’s music and had gone to some effort to purchase several of his recordings. Anything called jazz music was still illegal in most states back home, though no one regarded that prohibition seriously. Speakeasies and private clubs made fortunes by serving illegal booze and playing deliciously illicit music. By cleverly calling his music “swing” and not “jazz”, Ellington had been able to play openly to the mainstream public and avoid any legal harassments. Of course, in England none of that mattered. That seemed to be a small advantage. It occurred to Jona that catching the London show would be a thrill, but he had no idea whether it would be possible.
He wondered absently how blacks were accepted in England. Earlier in the day he had wandered past a rundown pawn shop on the West End when his eye was caught by a small medallion in the display window. It seemed to be propped randomly in one corner, where its polished white surface caught the morning’s rays. Jona was struck by its elegant craftsmanship. It showed an ebony-black figure, kneeling on a background of pure white porcelain. The figure had its hands raised as if in supplication, girded by iron chains. Above them were the words “Am I not a man and a brother?”
When he inquired about it with the shop owner he was told it was a Wedgewood from the late 1700’s. Jona found this astonishing. “Why would they make something like this?”
The owner wanted to be helpful, but could only shrug his shoulders. “Don’t know, guv. All about the slave trade, I think. They made quite a few of these, I know that. And charged a pretty penny for them.” After a pause he leaned over the counter and whispered in a guttural voice, as if Jona were a co-conspirator in a desperate plot. “Good thing they stopped the whole business, or we’d have many more of the kaffirs living here now, wouldn’t we.”
Jona knew it was an unnecessary extravagance, but purchased the token anyway. He pinned it carefully inside his vest, determined to bring it home as a memento of his trip.
A sudden bustle of activity inside the restaurant announced Churchill’s arrival, as he was escorted to the table by the maitre d’hotel. Jonah’s first view was of a squat, burly, bulbous nosed man in a bowler hat and blue polkadot bowtie who approached the table and stretched out his hand lazily as he came within reach. Jona liked him immediately.
“Dr. Lieb, pleased to meet you. And thank you for joining me for dinner. I am Winston Churchill. Please call me Winston, but Churchill will do just as well.” He spoke in a sharp, cutting, nasal voice, and very quickly, enunciating each sentence distinctly.
Before Jona could respond Churchill peremptorily ordered a bottle of champagne and simultaneously produced two cigars, offering one to Jona. “Service here is quite slow. It will be an hour before we eat - might as well light up.”
Jona had smoked cigars before, but very few. As a general matter he found smoking to be an unhealthy practice. Nonetheless, with Murphy’s admonition in mind, he hesitated only briefly before placing the end firmly in his mouth. “Thanks. Call me Jona, by the way.”
Churchill perused him with a look of amusement, reached out, and plucked the cigar from Jona’s lips. “Let’s clip the end off the bugger first.” He gave a broad smile as he offered it back. “These are Cubans, the only cigars worth smoking. Romeo y Julieta. The privilege, you might say, of the patrician class.”
There was something ingratiating about Churchill. Ordinarily, Jona would have been acutely embarrassed by his gaffe. Churchill managed it in a way that made it seem very natural and understandable. He accepted the cigar back as gracefully as possible and allowed Churchill to light him up.
Jona took a deep draw and the cigar tip glowed into an ember. Inhaling the smoke was out of the question. Simply puffing on it made Jona dizzy, but to his own surprise it gave him a feeling of satisfaction. He managed a grin. “Thanks for inviting me to dinner...I’m not sure why...” Jona fumbled for words. “I don’t know how we’re connected, or even if we are. How did you come to find me?”
It was Churchill’s turn to grin. “The Home Office informed me of your whereabouts. You’re not an everyday visitor, after all. They thought it would be a good idea for me to look you up because of your father.”
“Did you know him?”
“Oh, yes!” Churchill laughed. “We were friends of a sort. He was quite a pest, particularly in the beginning, when we first met. Over time, though, we became giddy with friendship!”
Jona leaned forward, straining to hear over the surrounding clatter. “How did you meet?”
“I can tell you exactly.” Churchill paused to pour them both champagne. “December 31, 1918, about 4:30 in the afternoon. I was at my desk at the Metropole. You see, I had been there up to the end of the war holding the Munitions portfolio and was about to enter the cabinet as War minister the next day. All I could think of at that hour was going out to dinner with my wife and friends to greet the New Year. Dreadful, bloody 1918 was finally over, the bloody war was finally over, bloody rationing was finally over, and there was much to celebrate. Well, cheers.” He doffed his glass towards Jona and took a gulp. “Then in comes this rather intense fellow to see me on the spot. They told me it was a famous American, but honestly I had no idea.”
“My father?”
Churchill bobbed his head quickly a few times, took a puff on his cigar and raised his glass, all at the same time. “Indeed. It was the famous Nobel winner, Dr. Lieb. He arrived out of nowhere, like Banquo’s visitation before Macbeth. Why, he materialized so abruptly I shouted out to him, ‘Prithee, see there! Behold! Look! Lo! How say you?’ He was no ghost, though, of that I can assure you. Of course, it was terribly urgent that he see me right away, and so on and so on. Your father was rather....energetic.” At that, Churchill laughed lightly, as if at a private joke.
Jona had never heard the story - there was so much about his father he didn’t know. In December 1918 he was at the end of his first semester at Harvard, waiting to take his final examinations in chemistry and natural philosophy. He remembered spending the holidays alone that year. “Why so urgently?”
Churchill knotted his brow as he considered his answer. “Well, that was how he was, his style. Once he decided something needed to be done, it assumed a matter of instantaneous importance. Importance not just to him, you see; importance to humanity at large. And in December 1918 it was imperative that he go to Russia. He knew I was taking over the War ministry and he had the crazy idea of having the Royal Navy take him to Archangel, which we occupied at the time, or at least have the Army take him to Riga. The Baltic. Any way into Russia.”
“But why?”
“Denikin. He wanted to get to Denikin.”
Jona hesitated, feeling that his questions were almost boyish. “Who was Denikin?”
Churchill tapped the embers from his cigar and scowled. His gaze became fixed and more intense. His voice deepened and veered into an almost cadenced rhythm, as if he were reciting an ancient ode. “Don’t you know the history of that time? The Russian Empire had succumbed to the might of the German Imperial Army. Furor Teutonicus had struck with savagery, and had sunk them out of the war. The Tsar and his regime were fallen. In the following year the Bolsheviks had captured all of heartland Russia. The Red Army, five million strong, seemed ready to burst across its frontiers and into Eastern Europe...Who could know, possibly sweeping as far as Berlin. That might seem unthinkable to some nowadays, but Marx himself predicted that the workers’ paradise to come required an industrial base, and Germany at the end of the war fit the bill perfectly. It was a veritable hotbed of revolutionary fervor at the time.”
Churchill paused long enough to take a long sip of champagne, followed promptly by a puff of his cigar. He leaned intently over the table, as if passing on a desperate last message to Jona. “Of course, the mass of peasantry in Russia wanted nothing to do with the Bolshies and their bloody revolution. A few brave souls organized them into armies of resistance, the White Armies. Denikin led one of them, the one massing out of the southeastern part of the country. Did damn well, for a while. In the beginning of 1919 all these events were beginning to unfold.”
“But why...”
“Why did your father want to go there? He had heard, of course, as we all had, of the horrible things done by Red Army units throughout southern Russia. Ukraine, actually. Whole villages razed at the point of the bayonet, innocent peasants slaughtered en masse. Women, children, it didn’t matter. It was utter barbarity. Any person, any town, any district siding with the Whites was the target of a deliberate reign of terror. No, even more crushing, anyone not actively assisting the Reds was obliterated. No one was allowed to stand neutral. So, your father told me he had to go there, to see for himself I suppose, to help in some way. Ultimately, to tell the world.” Churchill managed to send huge plumes of smoke snorting out of his nostrils as he spoke, as if venting a blazing fire from deep within.
Jona thought for a moment. His father had talked about Russia, and some of this sounded vaguely familiar. “Wasn’t Denikin fighting to restore the Tsar, the aristocracy, the system as it was, as if the war never happened? Something the peasants would never accept no matter how awful the Reds might be?”
A sharp glance told Jona he had struck a nerve with Churchill. He lifted his chin defiantly. “It was the Kremlin’s policy to take food from the countryside and send it to the cities, to support their precious worker’s paradise. Prodrazverska, they called it. Feeding the factory workers while starving the farmers. You know, I had pictures of dead and sickened babies who were obviously starved, proving the Bolshevik atrocities, but I couldn’t convince anyone here to publish them. They were considered too shocking, and of course everyone thought me a warmonger for urging intervention into the whole infernal mess.” He stopped in full gear and abruptly grinned at Jona. “Well, I’ve been talking about me again. Sorry, dear chap, a congenital weakness. You want to know about your father.”
“Did he get there?”
“He did, but not with us. He cajoled the French to take him. They occupied the Crimea at the time.” He paused a moment, as if to reflect. “Well, we all carved out little parts of Russia when the Reds came to power. Brits, French, Yanks, Nipponese. We all took our little piece, hoping to drive them under by a show of strength. It came to nothing, though. Yes, he did make it to Denikin, but what happened after that is quite a mystery, you know.”
Jona did not hesitate, responding like a curious child raising a large rock out of the mud to look underneath. “What do you mean? What did my father do?”
“Well, actually, I was hoping you might know, my dear fellow. Did he ever talk about it with you? Did he write any letters? He spent three or four months there and seemed to be a changed man when he got back. Some say he really wanted to get to Moscow. Some say he did get to Moscow. The Denikin thing was no more than a ruse.” Churchill sat back in his chair expectantly, his face wreathed in smoke, but his eyes gleaming in the faint light.
“Didn’t he speak to you about it? Ever?” Jona was hoping there would be more.
“I’m afraid we drifted apart years later. The old chap became quite upset with me as time went on.”
“Why?” Jona asked more sharply than he intended to.
Churchill gave the merest hint of discomfort as he puffed a large cloud of smoke over their heads. “Dr. Lieb was unhappy about how we handled Ireland, I’m afraid. More correctly, how I handled Ireland. The Irish question and Home Rule have been a cancer eating at our body politic for centuries. I suppose he wanted us to simply give the keys to the kingdom to the Godawful Republicans, Jona, the rebels. A serious mistake on his part, I should think. Come now, anything about Russia you might recall?”
Jona knew his father had spent some time in Russia, and that he traveled back there at least a few times. But he traveled to many places a few times. There was something about what Churchill said, though, about seeing horrible things there. Jona shook his head slowly. “Mr. Churchill...Winston, I know much less than you seem to know. I was in school at the time. My father never really talked about his work, or his travels very much. I do know he came to hate the communists.”
“Yes he did, my dear boy, but not right away. In fact, he returned from his sojourn in Russia quite enamored with the Bolshies. It seems he was quickly scooped up by Lev Bronstein and they were soon bosom friends.”
“Bronstein?”
Churchill smirked. “You know him by his nom de guerre. Leon Trotsky.”
Jona’s mind raced. Trotsky! Lenin’s right hand man. Founder of the Red Army. He had vied for leadership of the Communist apparatus after Lenin’s death and had lost out to Stalin. He was now Joseph Stalin’s arch enemy. Trotsky was an intellectual who could comfortably and knowledgeably talk and write about the historical, philosophical, economic, and even scientific basis of Marxism. The kind of man who could mingle very easily and affably with Ernest Lieb.
An uncomfortable silence descended. Jona sensed that Churchill did not believe he could be so ignorant about his father’s activities in Russia. “I can’t recall that he ever mentioned Bronstein, or Trotsky, or anyone like that, I’m afraid. I don’t think he really knew any of these people very well.” He looked at Churchill defensively. “Otherwise, he surely would have said something to me about the whole matter.”
Churchill lurched forward as if propelled by an unseen force, leaning across the table with his cigar in his right hand, just inches from Jona’s face. “Indeed, that’s the very thing, my dear Jona.” He spoke intensely, his voice descending into a growling baritone snarl. “We learned, much later mind you, that the esteemed Dr. Lieb already knew Mr. Bronstein quite well at that time.”
Like a little child overturning a large rock and staring at the underside, Jona’s mouth gaped in astonishment. “But how could that be?”
“It seems they met in the spring of 1917. Bronstein was in New York city at the time, in exile, just getting ready to return to his homeland. The whole of Imperial Russia was in turmoil right then. The Romanovs were deposed, a provisional government was in power, the army was disbanding by desertion and refusing to fight the Germans. Remember, a peace treaty between Germany and Russia was not signed until much later. It was really quite a mess. You may recall that just a few months later Bronstein and Lenin orchestrated the so-called October revolution, a ballsy coup that swept the Bolshies into power. It pains me, Jona, it pains me deeply to think that your father was not completely truthful in wanting to see Denikin, just a year later. He duped us all.”
“But why?”
Churchill shifted back on his seat, took a long puff on his cigar, and gave Jona a kindly smile. “Yes. Quite. Why.” Churchill abruptly stood up, holding his champagne glass outstretched directly before him. “Well, we shall never know, shall we? And as you said, Dr. Lieb was certainly a contrarian within a few years thereafter. While many of the international intelligentsia swooned with ecstasy over the worker’s paradise, Earnest Lieb sounded the alarm about Bolshevik barbarism. Well, that’s all behind us, now. There were, I am sure, good reasons for the secrets he dared not share with us.” At this point Churchill merrily, almost mischievously swirled his glass up high in the air and raised his voice loud enough to be heard by patrons at adjacent tables. “As one of the greatest of our poets once said:
‘Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;
The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape,
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
But O too fond, when have I answer’d thee?
Ask me no more.’
So, let us drink a toast to the memory of a man who dared much and achieved much. To a great scientist, a great humanitarian and a foe to the Red heathens. To a man who devoted his life to the betterment of all mankind to the very day he would die, though our humble selves may never understand the what and where and why. To Dr. Earnest Lieb!” He shouted the last words triumphantly, turning to left and right with glass upraised. It was all so staged, so pompous, so rehearsed, so Churchill.
Jona struggled to stand, as his left leg sent sharp rays of pain to his back. “To my father!” he almost shouted, and then slumped back into his chair, feeling somehow silly. He looked around furtively, wondering if any others were staring at him. “So is that why you brought me here, to burrow into what my father did in Russia?”
Churchill was all smiles now. “Not at all, sport! Come, Jona, I understand you have quite a trip ahead of you! I read in the Times today that your next stop is Berlin. And then on to that most eccentric of all countries, the CSA, where banality meets evil. That must be exciting for you.”
“Yes, very much, I think. I will be meeting with some of my father’s old associates in Berlin. I really, uhm, don’t know them myself. I was very young when we left Germany. Before the war.”
“Will you be meeting with Herr Hitler?”
“Well, he’s not on my itinerary. I will be at the University, meeting the scientists, attending lectures, and so forth. All rather academic kinds of things only.” Jona took a short breath, took a puff on his cigar, and decided to forge forward. “Are you interested in Mr. Hitler? He’s a fascinating fellow from what I read and hear.”
Jona was astonished at Churchill’s reaction. The man stiffened in his chair, pushed aside his champagne glass, and visibly scowled as he worked furiously at his cigar. The whole effect made Jona straighten in his seat, despite the pain in his leg.
“Jona, I am beginning to hear things from Germany that worry me.” Churchill spoke as if mesmerized, staring down at the table. “Terrible things, really. This man has written a book, by the way. Have you read it?”
Jona shook his head.
“I have, and it gives no comfort. I’m worried, my dear Jona. No, I’m frightened. At first, I considered him a third rate actor playing out his role in a second rate play, begging for applause. Now, through some insane reversal, I’m beginning to believe that the play has been written for him, the lines constructed for him, the role created entirely for him.”
“I understand that he is trying hard to make himself dictator, now that he is Chancellor.” Jona spoke confidently, authoritatively.
“That’s nothing!” Churchill waived his hand dismissively. “Dictators come and go. It’s not that he wants power, it’s what he wants to do with that power.” Suddenly, he slammed his hand on the table, very hard. Heads swiveled in their direction from all around, but Churchill was oblivious, focused intently on Jona. “Just think, my young friend. Germany will be rearmed and driven by the holy grail of revenge. Russia is lost. France is castrated. We ourselves are an empty shell, with the exception of our navy. No army. No air forces. What is there to stop this madman?”
A narrow faced, balding, bearded man sitting at an adjacent table leaned in their direction. “Winston,” he hissed. “Everyone can hear you! You must be quite drunk.”
Churchill gave a broad grin and waved his glass in the other’s direction. “Yes, Max, but in the morning I’ll be sober and you’ll still be bald!”
Laughter erupted all around them, the kind of genteel laughter that could be expelled while maintaining the body motionless and keeping the hands politely and firmly on either side of the dinner plate.
Jona gave a half smile, unsure whether he should laugh as well. Everyone in their immediate area seemed to know each other, and it was quite clear he was an outsider and not part of the crowd. He concentrated on puffing on his cigar slowly without inhaling. After a few moments the laughter subsided and Churchill abruptly lapsed into a morose silence. His facial expression transformed into a glacial rigidity, and he began to play distractedly with his glass of champagne. Before the silence became too uncomfortable, he smiled weakly, and lifted his glass towards Jona.
“Well done, old boy, you’ve unmasked me. Perhaps I’ve unmasked myself. No subtlety here. This is why I’ve taken the liberty of intruding into your schedule. It’s all about Hitler. It’s all about the Narzies.” Churchill seemed to deliberately distort the word ‘Nazis’ in a peculiar, drawn out manner, as if saying the word with a mouth full of ashes.
“But how can I possibly help you?”
Churchill gazed at Jona minutely and intensely, as if taking measurements before drilling into him with a hidden instrument. As he spoke his voice maintained a gravel hard, determined edge. “You know, when I was a very young man, younger than you are now, Jona, I was seconded to a pitifully small British army that set out to fight the dervish hordes outside Khartoum. Sudan, you know. After an exhausting march through the desert, we met the enemy at Omdurman. You may have heard of it.”
“I have, sir, but I didn’t know you were there.” It was startling to realize how old Churchill must be.
“Indeed, I was there, and I would not have had it otherwise. On the day of battle I accompanied the 21st Lancers as we set out to reconnoiter and develop the enemy’s positions. Lord Kitchener ordered us into the teeth of the Dervish formations. After a short ride, I found a slight elevation beyond our lines. Jona, the entire Mahdi host was spread out on the plain before me. The river opposite us could be seen in its entirety. Every man, camel, horse and wagon in their thousands was out in the open, and I could see every one for miles around. It was quite exhilarating, not least because of the danger. I like to think it may have been the last time in history that one man could view the entirety of the enemy with one sweep of his own eyes.”
“And now...you can’t see the enemy?” Jona felt the thrill of a sudden insight. “You want me to be your eyes?”
“It would be an immeasurable service to hear from you, Jona. Go to Berlin. Meet whomever you are to meet. Write back what you see, what you hear. Keep me informed.”
“You mean send you reports?” Jona could hardly contain himself. “Send reports, with my observations?”
“Precisely.”
“Absolutely! I would be happy to!” Jona took a long drink of champagne, waving his goblet in Churchill’s general direction. He suddenly felt euphoric, almost drunk, and lightheaded. Another mission to accomplish. He would send his own reports, possibly to the highest levels of the British government.
“Sir Winston, have no fear. Everything I see of the Naaarzi regime will be promptly reported back to you. Perhaps you could write back too?” Jona didn’t know what else to say, and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Now let’s eat!” He felt famished, as if he could consume a king’s feast.
Churchill chuckled, and then Jona started to laugh loudly, not caring who heard, or whether he was making a scene. As he did, he felt the hairs on his neck and arms begin to tingle, as if taking on a life of their own, making him laugh all the louder.
Chapter 8
Deep green gorges carpeted with yellow-green pine. Swollen, ruddy gray skies. A stretch of trestled bridge spanning a murky brown stream. Jones recorded individual sights as if taking photographs, trying to commit each panorama to memory. Somehow, he felt as if he’d been here before, as if this train ride was something from the past that he was now reliving.
He had traveled in his life, much more than he could have expected as a young boy. When he was twelve he was sold to a pig and strawberry farmer in Arkansas whose name Jones could not now remember. His new master, a raw young man who looked scarcely older than young Robbie, was very proud of acquiring his first slave. He had several of his neighbors come over just to inspect his new property. Apparently, young Jones was the first slave in the county who was purchased by mail order, and this raised quite a bit of conversation among the sober, thoughtful men of Marble Creek. Jones was poked and prodded like an over ripe melon, but apparently met universal approbation. His young master bragged that Robbie was more fit in person than he looked to be in his catalog photograph. Just as the advertisement had said, he had a strong back, a quick disposition, and was free of the clap.
Undeservedly, his young owner died within the month of a vicious mule kick to the head. Jones was trying to harness the surly animal when his master ran up to take charge. The mule bucked in terror, and it was over in an instant. The helpless Robbie watched in horror as the man gasped once or twice, twitched, and then lay completely still.
Death was not a novel sight for Robbie Jones. Despite his youth he had encountered the dead and dying many times, at all ages and from any number of causes. His older sister had died not long before he was sold, of the pox, leaving this world with a shrill death rattle in her throat as her brother held her hand. Over time, he had learned not to cry simply because a life passed on, even though at times it seemed so sad. Old Man Misery had told him often that death was just a release with a ticket to yonder, the Lord’s manumission from the tyranny of this earth, and in some poorly understood way Jones accepted that as gospel truth.
No, it was not the man’s death that frightened Robbie. It was the awful fact that they were the only ones on the farm, he and the master, and now the young slave was all alone, left with the responsibility and most likely the blame for what had happened. Under the circumstances, almost anyone would run.
Jones laughed at himself as he thought about that day, and about how foolish he had been. Well, he was just a boy at the time, after all. The dogs caught up to him just after the terror of darkness began to set in, finding him at the edge of a dank, foul smelling pond swarming with giant skeeters and tiny noseeums. He willingly ran into the rough hands of the determined men who had tracked him, and they treated him fairly after that. Cuffed him about somewhat, that was about all. Everyone seemed to agree that the unfortunate farmer was the victim of an ornery mule, and consequently no fingers were pointed at Robbie in the matter of his master’s death. The next morning the magistrate was kindly, but firm. Because Robbie had run away, violating the terms of his service, a lashing was ordered. The ruling seemed fair, even to young Robbie at the time. It just wouldn’t do to have nigger slaves running off just whenever they felt like it, and for whatever reason. Not that he was happy about it. No. But it happened to be the way the clock ticked, and that was all that could be said about it. It would be easy for Jones to look back and see the injustice and inhumanity of it all. But looking back was no different than peering into a strange and distant world. Jones had no time for that. He had his hands full dealing with the world he lived in now.
Justice was applied without malice, twelve steady strokes, and the magistrate’s elderly wife then ministered to the youngster by applying a healing poultice to his back and offering a nourishing soup. A more vexing problem was what to do with him after that, since his dead master had no next of kin available to make a claim on his property. Should the young slave be sold together with the farm? Sold separately? Who would take the responsibility of custody until he was legally purchased? His legal status seemed to be a source of concern for quite a number of people. Luckily for young Jones, good fortune intervened when the Reverend Nebuchadnezzar Smith offered to take Robbie into his household for the purposes of care and instruction.
The good reverend and his wife Nell brought Robbie into their home on the fringe of town. Nell refused to allow the young man to work the fields, insisting that he learn the household duties of a domestic. Robbie was beaten often, of course, once quite severely over the head with a heavy silver candelabra, leaving him senseless for the better part of a day. That was because he fell dead asleep on the kitchen floor one hot, sultry summer afternoon, both fatigued and famished, and allowed the dog to eat a good part of Mrs. Smith’s freshly baked bread pudding still cooling on the table. He was very careful in the presence of puddings from that time onwards. Generally, though, he found the daily household routines to his liking, and could tell that his work met with the approval of his new master and mistress.
Within a year, a distant relative of the deceased farmer appeared in town to make his claim, and formally sold Jones to the Smiths. The purchase was completed ‘for a song’, according to an ecstatic Nell. The very next day Robert Jones was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. From that time forward, Reverend Smith devoted an hour every Sunday teaching his young slave to read from the Holy Book of Scriptures. Nell devoted much more time than that. Robbie took to learning with an avid, keen intelligence. Stories of saints, kings, and prophets came alive within him under the tutelage of the stolid Reverend and his wife. And he learned to pray, to pray intensely, and with the fervent belief that the Lord of Hosts was with him while he prayed. More and more, as the years passed Jones began to feel the hand of God upon him, leading him, guiding him.
By the time he was eighteen, he was not only personal servant to Nebuchadnezzar Smith, but also substantially in charge of the daily operations of the household. Purchases, visits to the marketplace, and payments to merchants all became his responsibility. It was about then that Jones began the long trial of locating his mother, in hopes of reuniting with her. Unfortunately, it was also about then that his aging master, Reverend Smith, became ill, and they came to Richmond seeking the best of medical care, and his world changed again.
Jones shook himself back to the present, abandoning his reverie reluctantly. Yesterday was long gone, and there was much to do today. He was riding in what felt like, and shook like, and screeched like, an antique passenger train, and had only a small grimy window to look through, forcing him to peer at the outside world as if through the long bore of a rifle. His chains made it difficult to stretch too far as he craned his neck to spot a crack in the clouds, rimmed with golden sunlight. At one bend in the tracks he saw a pure white waterfall that spawned dual rainbows arching into the far, far distance, far beyond the reach of his vision. Perhaps as far as paradise, for all he knew. Jones did not have faith in omens necessarily, but he did believe that God often gave signs to those who would see.
“Whatsoever things you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you shall have them.” He intoned the well-worn prayer to himself, starting quietly at first, but almost shouting the last few words: ‘you shall have them!’
“Man, shut your mouth, ‘cause even Jesus won’t save your sorry ass when I get through with you.” Warrant Officer Doak raised a massive black hand as a cautionary gesture in the general direction of his prisoner but did not bother to open his eyes. He sat on the bench seat facing Jones, his head propped against the sealed window. It seemed he had an infinite capacity to sleep under any circumstances.
Jones did not respond, continuing to study the visions streaming by outside his window. He felt both a sense of contentment and purpose since the last day of his imprisonment. Why should he not, since the Lord himself had stretched out a hand of deliverance at the twelfth hour.
He made no attempt to forget or diminish the terrible moment of supreme anguish that gripped him as he was carried, limp and weak as a newborn pup, into a charnel house of torture deep within the heart of the prison. A giant of a man waited for them there, and like the ones who carried Jones, his contorted yellow face was heavily pockmarked, giving him a cavernous, demonic appearance. A short white man, an evil looking gnome, stood not far away. On a table before the giant was an array of knives, ranging from the size of a scalpel to a large, square cleaver. A deathly still grin was upon his face.
Jones felt himself descending in an instant into a hellish state of crazed fear. He lost everything in that moment; his mind, his soul, even his faith. His previous self-control broke down completely. He began to scream, shouting to them that he would confess everything just to be let alone, or better yet dispatched into the merciful arms of Satan. His giant tormentor seemed to listen patiently, shaking his head to and fro rhythmically. “No, no, no, nigger. No time for confessions now. No sense in talking to me, I don’t know nuthin’ exceptin’ you time is up now.” The short white ogre said nothing, merely giving a short nod of the head.
And that was when the miracle happened. Just as they were strapping him down onto a cold polished metal table, a voice was heard from the back of the room. Jones could not make out the words, and could not see who uttered them, but felt their meaning immediately. Was it the Lord speaking? Was He using one of them as His instrument? It made no difference, as His will would be done. It would be revealed plainly to all who would see.
And so it was.
The men holding him promptly stopped what they were doing. The glittering blades were put away. He was picked up, and carried back to his cell, it seemed to him, almost tenderly. And he knew he was saved. Not just saved momentarily but saved forever. The hand of the Lord was truly upon him. The next morning he was boarded onto the train, and there he sat one day later, immersed in the surety of his salvation. His prayers had clearly been answered, and would be answered still.
“Hey, Doak, how much farther?”
“Shut your mouth, or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Come on, brother, tell me something. Anything.”
Doak opened his eyes and stared blankly at Jones. He had a massive square face that was mostly obscured by a beard as thick as wool. The collar of his jet black uniform, embroidered with the letters CSA, was clasped closely at the neck, giving him a rigid, soldierly appearance. Since taking custody of Jones they had barely exchanged a dozen words. Jones knew that men from Negro Guards units were routinely used for prisoner transport. They were all free men, and their callous contempt for slaves was legendary. Doak had a long chain of chevrons on his tunic sleeve, indicating many years of service. He slowly and deliberately placed a plug of tobacco firmly into his mouth, creating a huge bulge in his cheek. “What do you care, old man, anyway? If I was you, which I ain’t, anyway, I’d just sit back and take whatever’s coming. There’s nothing you can do, anyway, nowhere you can go, no way you can hide. Anyway, where you think you wanna go?”
Jones chuckled. “I’d be happy if this train just turned around, take me north to Kentucky or Ohio, maybe take me right to Cincinnati.”
It was Doak’s turn to laugh softly. “No chance of that, old fella. Ain’t gonna run that way. Anyway, this train runs on Southern gage track. Five feet. Nice and comfy. Up north, track is four foot eight and a half. We keep it that way, don’t you know, so they can’t come down here with their armies and their trains. So’s they tell us, anyway. No, boy, you’re going to Georgia, anyway.”
Jones shifted his gaze back to the window and rested his head against the hard edge of the seat-back, satisfied with what he’d learned. Georgia might as well be Tibet for all he knew. He’d never been there, had no family and had no friends there. Truth was, he didn’t have many friends anywhere. His particular situation did not allow for many friendships. Wherever he might go, being alone would be nothing new.
Intruding into the serenity of his formless thoughts came the sudden advent of odd sounds; muffled staccato pops vibrated through the car, like off-notes from a fretless guitar. The train was moving slowly through heavily forested, hilly terrain. Jones sat bolt upright, thinking that he detected some movement among the trees just outside his car. Doak sensed the noise too, cocking his head to one side as he lifted his massive frame into the aisle. His hand reflexively dipped towards his sidearm.
Suddenly, the train gave off a steely stricken shriek, the sound of a horrible death knell, and abruptly skewed to a grinding halt. Harsh, hoarse voices were now echoing from everywhere, and there were more sharp popping noises. Doak was thrown to the floor as the train came to a precipitous stop, but with an agile twist began to regain his feet. He was no more than three feet from Jones, and began to lurch forward, struggling with his holster, when he suddenly dropped down as if poleaxed by the hand of God. Jones jumped up to look at his jailer, and saw that his face was completely gone, leaving just a bloody rim of beard to identify the man who had been Doak. A viscous red stain appeared on the floor carpet adjacent to his head.
There were other men in the car now, many men, brandishing pistols and rifles and making loud hoarse noises that Jones could not comprehend. The smell of gunpowder was suddenly thick in the air. A key chain was retrieved from Doak’s body, and in short order Jones felt his shackles undone. It was not until he was led outside into the cool morning air that Jones came to his senses, and to the realization of what had happened. He knew he was saved yet again.
A clot of ten or fifteen men, all heavily armed, waited for him expectantly, and began to cheer as he appeared at the door of the passenger car. In the center of the group stood Cox, the itinerant merchant, craning his neck until he satisfied himself that Jones was safe. He hissed something in a low tone, and two men scurried up the track towards the train engine.
Jones dropped easily onto the ground, stepped up to Cox, extending his right hand, and simply said “Cox.”
The other gave a wide grin and extended his own hand. “Jones.”
“Casualties?”
“For us, none. Six dead on the train. It was easy, once we were sure about what train you were on.” Cox caressed the dull matte metal trigger of a new looking Colt .45 handgun.
“Where are we?”
“South Carolina. Fifteen miles from Florence.”
Jones gazed around searchingly. The morning sun was breaking through molten clouds, illuminating the scene with almost ethereal light. The tracks gleamed like silver lances thrusting into a deep mixed forest of ash, maple and old hickory. A thin drift of purple smoke wafted from the motionless steam engine, which still hummed and hissed with incipient power. As he watched, the two men dispatched by Cox earlier trudged back toward the group, a bound man walking between them. His head hung down, but Jones could see blood from his scalp dripping down onto the pitch black uniform of a Negro Guardsman. Jones had seen him the previous day, visiting with Doak. He wore master sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.
“Pretended to be dead,” said one of the men, speaking to Cox. “Whatcha we do with’m?”
The prisoner looked up, but only briefly, then fell to his knees. He looked barely conscious and swayed perceptibly. Cox turned to Jones. “Let’s ask the boss.”
Robert Jones felt himself swell with a sense of supreme euphoria. He took in the whole scene again, feeling somehow that he had rehearsed all this before. He raised his right arm straight up, ready to either bless or curse, to smite or lift up. The men, his men, soldiers of the Underground Railroad, shuffled together to hear his words. With a mighty voice he cried out “As the Lord God said long ago, let it be said again, ‘When I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me.’”
And then, triumphantly, “Smite him! Death to any man who has consented to make himself a slave! Death to all of them, all who do the work of Pharaoh, white or black, high or low. Let their blood fertilize the soil below in preparation for the day of Jubilo!” The men broke out in cheers, whoops, and the quavering of the Rebel yell.
As the man was dragged into a thicket nearby, whimpering with the soft mews of an infant, Jones was drawn back to the now silent train. It would be derailed, of course, before they left. His men were already prying at the rails with shovels and picks. The track lay straight and true, as if laid out by the hand of God. From where he stood, it was not possible to know where it began, and where it ended.
Five feet wide. Jones reflected on it for a moment. His own life was more than fifty years wide. And like the course of the track, his ultimate destination was fixed, preordained long ago. Robert Jones, leader of the Underground Railroad, knew that prayer, and not men or machines, would lead him where he needed to go. He was free now, free of all bondage, free of all fear, free of all restraint. He vowed that the Lord’s justice would be administered by the hand of his servant Robert Jones, and that wherever his road led it would be washed equally by tears and blood, applied without mercy or appeal. Much pain would be expended to bring heaven to earth, but these were the Lord’s dues, and had to be paid.
He searched his mind for a passage from scripture appropriate for the moment, perhaps from Isaiah 61, supremely undisturbed by the sound of two successive gunshots, wafted by the wind from the nearby woods.
“Well, we’all’s gonna have to crow small right now, won’t we momma. At least until we get to where we want.” George Patton wiped his brow with a handkerchief already soiled with sweat, unsure whether he was more oppressed by the stifling heat, or by his mother’s relentless tirade. He held the phone away from his ear, unwilling to hear more than he had to. She was just repeating herself, and he already knew what she wanted him to do. After what seemed like an endless harangue, he saw his opportunity and interrupted her.
“Sorry, momma, my aide is here with a message that I must attend to. No, I can’t put him off, it’s urgent. Yes, momma, poo poo to you too.”
He slammed the phone down in a foul mood, grabbed his service cap, and stormed out of his office. There would be no more telephone calls. It was time for direct action. With a single gesture from Patton, his driver understood their destination, and within fifteen minutes he was at the Executive Mansion.
President Pickett was not happy to hear that Patton was pacing in the anteroom to the Executive Office, but he knew that a blow-up was inevitable. Might as well be now than later; there was really no good time. Besides, he couldn’t pretend to be unavailable. As the general in chief strode in, Pickett thought he leaned in like a cut wolf. Mean and hungry.
“Good mo’nin, George, you look hot. Want some lem-o-nade?” Pickett drawled his words out as much as possible, knowing that Patton hated this particular kind of deep southern affectation.
“No!” Patton almost shouted, visibly irritated. “Mr. President, we have to talk. We are in a crisis that must be resolved, and quickly. The nation cannot endure more of this. People are beginning to panic. Big Business is beginning to panic. Big Banks are beginning to panic. Our creditors are beginning to panic. The stock market fell eleven per cent after yesterday’s news. We can’t afford more days like that.”
Pickett sat back in his chair, cocked his head to one side, and searched Patton’s face earnestly. “Yesterday’s news? Well, why don’t you tell me about it. Are they taking potshots at us from across the Cumberland again? I thought our northern cousins stopped that long ago.”
Patton knew he was being played for a fool, and would have none of it. “A massacre! Seven dead! One, maybe two were execution style. This attack was carried out by skilled and trained guerrillas, not by armed hoodlums, let me tell you. And who was it that escaped? Who was rescued? Can there be any doubt that your boy was at the center of the whole thing all along?”
Pickett sighed, running a hand through the short curls at the nape of his neck. “I know, George, I know.” He dropped the drawl. “What I don’t understand is where these bastards get their organization, and their intelligence. They knew exactly where to find Jones. How?” He pounded the table with his clenched fist in frustration.
Patton shrugged. “We’ll pick up everyone who knew Jones, anyone who bumped into him at the market, every blood sucking tick that ever lit on to him. We’ll find out something, but not nearly everything. They operate out of small cells, completely blinded to other units. A UR man could pass another on the street and never know it. That’s why so many of our arrests are dead ends. But someone had to be the mastermind in charge, Mr. President, and that someone was spawned in your household, right under your...”
“Enough, general!” thundered Pickett. “You are on the verge of insubordination! You are speaking to the president of the republic. Deport yourself accordingly.”
“Well, Mr. President, it is imperative that you do something if you’re going to save your bacon on this one. The newspapers are having a field day, and it’s going to get even more ugly. Public confidence is already shaken. Read the Examiner if you don’t believe me. The editorials are predicting massive insurrection in the fields, in factories, everywhere. You’re the politician, not me. What do you think the reaction will be when the true story gets out? What happens when the general public learns it was your man that was rescued? I suggest you have to preempt this somehow.”
“Thanks, George, I already have enough political advisors, those jobs are taken. And I suggest that you get back to headquarters and make sure the Army is doing everything it can to help out. Now, I’ve spoken to the governor of South Carolina this morning, and assured him of all the help I can bring to bear. See to it that you do the same.”
George Patton had a congenital short fuse, a profane vocabulary, and social skills that did not fathom the meaning of decorum. It took every ounce of self control he could muster to keep from assaulting the President of the Confederate States of America with the first epithet that came to mind. You nigger loving son of a bitch, he thought. I will have your sorry old ass for lunch. Remarkably, he was able to swallow his words as he began to pace back and forth. “I’m sorry, but that’s not enough of an answer. Mr. President, by virtue of my rank as General in Chief, duty compels me to formally request that you unveil the administration’s plan for dealing with this crisis. The nation can’t absorb any more shocks. People are ready for almost any solution. Any.”
Pickett regarded him carefully. He detected something in Patton’s voice that made him uneasy, a deeper, more ominous layer of threat. “That, sir, is a topic to be reviewed at the coming cabinet meeting next week. Consider yourself invited. In the interim, I retain in my own hands any decisions regarding a domestic matter.”
The words seemed lost on Patton as he stood scowling speechlessly. He had heard enough to satisfy himself that the president was a coward, without the guts to take the necessary measures that the times demanded. He had never believed all the heroic fairy tales attributed to Pickett in any case. Many old timers in the army had told him that Pickett’s service in the ranks was just like his service in public office: indolent, poorly prepared, erratic. Personally brave? Maybe, but so were untold others. Hero? Absolutely not. Abruptly, he snapped to attention, saluting Pickett briskly. “Sir, I must inform his Excellency that the Army considers that this is not a domestic matter. Sir, it is an insurrection, funded and directed by external powers. Therefore, the Army requires that a national emergency be acknowledged, and that martial law be declared.” He remained at attention, staring at a horizon one foot over Pickett’s head.
“The Army requires?”
“Yes sir, and may I add that there are many outside the Army who agree with this assessment. Some, in fact, from within the administration.” Patton could barely restrain the triumph in his voice.
Pickett felt stunned. His first impulse was to call the Secret Service agents guarding his door to come in and arrest Patton, but he quickly realized that there was great weight behind this punch. Arresting Patton alone was no better than blowing up one cell of the UR. In practical terms, such a move would trigger a political crisis of nightmarish proportions. A sudden wave of nausea came over him, accompanied by a familiar twinge of pain radiating over his chest. “Are you out of your mind,” he snarled. “Suggesting some kind of banana republic coup that would leave the army in charge, making you dictator, making a mockery of everything we stand for? Never, general, never while I draw breath.”
Patton leaned over the president’s desk, his blue eyes gleaming. His tight fitting gray tunic seemed to expand as he drew a deep breath. Something within him began to shake, deeper than any earthquake. It was time for the walls to come tumbling down. It was time for the moment, at last, to meet the man. And he was that man. He spoke softly, and with great control. “This is not a request, Mr. President. Think carefully about your choice, and how it will affect the nation. We must avoid the appearance of anarchy and chaos within the highest reaches of government. With a word from you things will go smoothly, and power will be transitioned back to civilian control once the emergency is over. In any event, please understand the Army is ready for any eventuality.”
George Pickett Jr. had fought Mexican irregulars on the Texas border, hacked his way through the fetid Nicaraguan jungle in a fevered haze, fought in Cuba’s blazing heat, and killed a man in Kentucky without a moment’s hesitation. He had a violent history and did not feel fear easily. However, he did recognize danger when it appeared, and right now great danger literally loomed over him in the person of the General in Chief of the Confederate States Army.
He tried to temporize. “George, I can’t decide this myself, you know that. Look, I will convene the Cabinet in emergency session tomorrow if you wish. Why don’t we take the matter up then? In any case the entire cabinet would have to weigh a decision like the one you propose.”
In that moment, Patton knew he had won. He snorted loudly. “That won’t be necessary, Mr. President. I will return this evening at eight. The Vice President and Secretary of War will be coming with me. You can call them to confirm the appointment, if you like. We can complete our arrangements then.”
Pickett slumped in his chair and nodded. He was the perfect picture of defeat.
Patton smirked, his thick, fleshy face contorted by the upward curl of his lips. “It will be easiest and best if we avoid a fight.” He attempted a conciliatory tone. “You see you have no choice. Give us what we want, the country will be better for it, and everything will work out in the end. It’s all about the nation, after all.”
The president looked down at his desktop, and in a firm voice said “Sure.” As the General in Chief turned away to stalk out of the room with a triumphant swagger, Pickett carefully modulated his voice to a low murmur as he straightened his back. He was not going to bend to the whim of any man. Honor and duty required him to throw the gauntlet down at the feet of the usurper. The ancient challenge that sprang from his throat was barely audible, but reverberated to the depths of his being. He spoke in a long dead language, saying the words as if they had just been fired in flames of defiance: “Molon Lave.” As Patton disappeared he breathed out the same words again, somewhat louder. “That’s right, General, that’s right. Come and get it.”
Hate the sun. Hate the humidity. Hate the smell of cows. Hate stinking from perspiration. Hate my father. Hate the Otley’s. Hate Atlanta. Or Buckhead, or whatever it’s called. Madeline sat on the lawn, legs laid out over the thick carpet of grass, feeling bored with everything. Dr. Kotmeyer had told her to list her likes and dislikes, but she found it a stupid waste of time, and found him a stupid waste of time as well.
Over the past two weeks she had been seeing him daily. In the beginning, Maddy found it hardly possible to talk to him. Most of his questions had to do with her father and mother, questions she could not possibly answer. After all, her mother passed on from typhoid or something else when Maddy was too young to know a thing, just a baby, that’s what her father had told her. Kotmeyer seemed unimpressed by that inconvenient little fact, insisting that Madeline should be able to remember things like whether her mother hugged or kissed her, or kissed her father, or kissed whomever. He even asked whether she was nursed by her mother, as if Maddy could simply close her eyes and bring it all back. She told him that she could hardly remember anything from six months before, never mind going back to when she was weaned. She wasn’t about to tell him she could remember almost everything, and it was no business of his if she could.
The questions about her father were even more absurd. None of them had anything to do whatsoever with her life. At one point she was asked whether her father had ever fondled her. That was how Dr. Kotmeyer phrased it. Fondled! When she heard that question Madeline paused a moment, then answered. “Maybe he did. Or maybe he didn’t. That’s for me to know.” With a sly smile she then arose from her chair and marched out of the consultation room with a magisterial air, snickering all the while, not bothering to even look back at the ugly quack who called himself a doctor, much less speak to him.
Not that she ever wanted to look at him. He was the most grotesque creature she had ever seen. For beginners, he was missing his left arm. It had taken almost an hour of strained staring during their first visit to realize that his left coat sleeve was empty. He did not have the courtesy to pin the empty sleeve onto his jacket as common etiquette demanded. Apparently, he was determined to keep that obvious fact a secret, proving that he was nothing more than a liar. Also, his face was cavitated like the landscape of a heavily mined quarry, with deep irregular scars running across a tallowed skin. Finally, a scrub brush of a beard projected at an odd angle from a narrow chin, giving him the appearance of a hapless, hornless billy goat.
Altogether, Maddy considered him an ogre of a man, and much too ugly to look at, something she told Lou Ellen repeatedly. Someone of her station should not be properly associating with a loathsome, low class creature like Dr. Kotmeyer under any circumstances. Lou Ellen responded by pointing out that Maddy had improved dramatically under the care of the ogre. She was now walking normally, her headaches were gone, and she seemed less tense and introverted. Lou Ellen knew her charge well, and perceived that the fires simmering deep within Madeline had receded.
The Ottley’s Buckhead estate was located in the rural, sparsely populated outskirts of Atlanta proper. By any standards it was vast, including sculpted gardens, grazing pastures, peach and cherry orchards, and tennis courts. Artfully hidden in a small copse of crabapple trees and far beyond the house was a long reflecting pool lined with bronze and marble statues of wood nymphs and sylvan gods. Here, Maddy sought out some comfort in the late night hours when, unable to sleep, and with the moon peeking through the gnarled and twisted features of the trees, she walked along the water’s edge as if she were greeting the forest spirits lurking in the shadows.
The plantation featured its own rail spur coming to within a comfortable walk of the main house. Madeline found herself staring at the quiet metal tracks. Somewhere on the other end of that line she fantasized that an entirely different universe percolated with an energy of noise, commotion and confusion. Love, hate, desperation, hope and wonder all whirled in a continuous rhythm, she thought, from the rundown single family shotguns of Cabbagetown to the rising edifices on Peachtree Street. She felt that the pulse of newness was just a few minutes away but might as well be ages away. Madeline was not allowed to experience any of it. She was trapped in a cocoon that would never open, compelled to a life of sameness. And none of Dr. Samuel Kotmeyer’s little tricks of memory or suggestion could change that.
Madeline spread her dress out on the lawn, just within the arc of shadow flowing from an ancient sycamore, so that she could feel the cool blades of grass tickling up and down the back of her bare legs as they swayed back and forth. Lou Ellen was seated on a chair next to her, snoring pleasantly under a large straw sun bonnet festooned with fresh picked flowers. Maddy thought about what Dr. Kotmeyer had told her during their session earlier that day.
She had refused to answer a question about her dreams, informing him that dreams were a very private matter that she would never discuss with a stranger, even a doctor.
“But dreams are just a window into the disturbance,” he sighed. He spoke with a slurred, heavy tongue, almost as if he had a paralysis that prevented normal speech. “Miss Pickett, if you would just allow yourself to respond honestly, a whole new world of understanding will open up to you.”
“Doctor, I’m sure you are a very smart man, but you can’t possibly know what I do and don’t understand.”
“Well, do you understand why you are constantly becoming so angry? Explosive anger, it appears. Please don’t try to deny it. Both your father and your Negress have told me about it. The description they gave is quite striking.”
“Oh, you discussed this matter with Lou Ellen? She will hear about this, believe me!” Madeline was beside herself at the thought that her servant would talk about her behind her back.
“But you don’t deny it’s true, do you?” Dr. Kotmeyer’s gaze fixed upon Madeline. His deep, amber colored eyes were not the same size, something that generally made her avoid looking at him directly. He tilted his head very slightly, as if trying to transfix her with the larger eye. She was sure this was another one of the tricks and games he played to confuse and distract her. He was quite the charlatan.
“It’s impossible to explain in words what I feel and see in my dreams. It’s not like other people, I’m sure. I feel like I’m...I’m...” Madeline hesitated.
“You’re different, perhaps? Chosen for something? Or special in some way? Is that what you were going to say, that you’re a special person? With special powers, or special feelings?” Kotmeyer leaned forward aggressively, his good arm shaking ever so slightly.
His question seemed to unnerve Madeline. Her pale gray eyes began to flutter rapidly, as if striving to find something just out of eyesight. “I am special,” she whispered, “Just look at me. Nothing you can say will make me look any different. I will never be normal, like the good little girl ya’ll want me to be. I will always be this way, whether my mother nursed me or not.”
Dr. Kotmeyer paused a heartbeat, trying to time his response perfectly. “Madeline. Listen to me. Hear me. I am special also.”
His words propelled Maddy back into a sudden vivid memory of her childhood. She was walking through dense woods with her father and her beagle puppy, Master. How she loved Master! It was very cold, and she could remember long streams of icy breath flowing from both of them as they puffed through the underbrush. She was no more than six. Master suddenly took off, sprinting after a small brown rabbit, one small furry ball chasing another. Madeline followed in a flash, chasing the dog as it bounded down a shallow ravine. With a slip of the foot on wet and frozen leaves, the child tumbled down the culvert into an ice cold stream that was fringed with snow.
The water was not terribly deep, but was frigid. She was immersed for a few terrifying moments before her father’s strong arms yanked her up. Maddy recalled his soothing voice as he held her close, opening up his own jacket to envelope her and protect her as he hurried back to the warmth of their home. She was whisked up by Sue Ellen who bundled her up in front of a smoky fire.
Later, her father came back. She could recall that he was festooned with bandoliers and wore a gun at each hip, saying something about going out in search of a runaway. He patted Maddy on the head, then without any warning drew his gun and pointed it squarely at Lou Ellen’s head. He said in a very even voice, “Take care of my little girl while I’m gone.”
Everyone froze for an instant, until her daddy flashed his dazzling smile at Lou Ellen and chuckled, twirling the gun back into its holster. Lou Ellen responded by hurriedly stacking a bundle of logs onto the fire, as if building a pyre.
Madeline felt something cold begin to seize at her throat once again, and out of fear began to whimper. “Daddy, I don’t feel good. It’s cold.”
Her father stretched his arm as far as it would go and brushed her hair. “Hush, darlin’. Now don’t you worry, you’re my special girl. Use your magic powers, princess, and it will be like summer. You’ll be fine.” Madeline squinted hard, forcing herself to concentrate on the long ago scene. Dr. Kotmeyer was silent, and there were no sounds from the grounds outside. Her thoughts swirled randomly, as if thrown on the table before her like a puzzle. That’s what her father had told her. Hadn’t he? It all felt real enough.
Consciously, she pushed the memory away to reorient on Dr. Kotmeyer. Her eyes slowed their herky-jerky motion. She felt that she was back in focus. “I understand, doctor. We are all special in our own way. You and I. Everyone.” Her tones were measured, almost passive.
“Really? You seem very quick to give up your past beliefs, and everything you have adhered to for so long, Miss. Pickett.”
“You’re the doctor, aren’t you? I’m trying to be a good patient. You know what you’re talking about. After all, I’m listening to you, aren’t I?”
Kotmeyer continued to stare intently at Madeline. With a start, she realized that his smaller eye was actually false, nothing more than a small glass orb meandering on its own sightless axis.
“Well, that’s interesting indeed. You know, you are making great progress. I think we can change our visit schedule to thrice a week. Continue to scrutinize yourself, though. Be attentive to whatever may trigger your bouts of rage.”
Sitting on the Ottley’s lawn, feeling the heat soak into her, Madeline thought about Kotmeyer’s last words. The day was very still, with sunset almost upon them. Lou Ellen’s heavy, irregular breathing was virtually the only audible sound. It would be so easy, she thought, to prove you are wrong, doctor weasel, no matter how clever you may think you are.
Memories shimmered, as if from a distance, barely out of reach. It would be easy to simply pick one out, like a card from an index file, and have it relive itself over and over, as often as needed to prove that she did have gifts that no one else could know. After all, the past was her friend, and memories were old acquaintances that came to visit for a while and keep her company. They were locked inside her forever, ready to be tumbled out like dice and played repeatedly, one toss after another. They were the only friends she really had. They were the only loved ones she would ever have. Did that repulsive fool of a doctor really expect her to share any of them, or turn them away?
Times past could bring gossip, sadness, excitement and heartfelt laughter. Sometimes, when the fury was upon her, memories would oscillate in and out of her mind, alternating the past with short glimpses of what the future might bring, as if teasing her with grainy images of a photograph not quite in focus. And sometimes memories brought something else, harder to comprehend, and much more hurtful. Mirages. Desires. Deep longings. Fantasies without number. They could be painful, like reading a soulful poem, but she endured them. Welcomed them. After all, it was all real. Wasn’t it?
A breeze lashed at her cheek. Without warning Madeline felt herself sinking into a quicksand of unreasoning, mindless rage. The pathway downwards was familiar, trodden many times before. With a supreme effort, this time she stepped back. One by one, she shut the doors. Thoughts, remembrances, emotions all receded, like a great bonfire dying out in the deep of night. She willed the embers to stop glowing, and they gradually turned an ashen gray. And, miraculously, she began to feel at peace.
“Maddy?” It was Sue Ellen, opening first one eye and then the other with a drowzy curiosity. “What is it child? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost!”
Maddy smiled at her servant, feeling almost giddy. “No, Sue Ellen, no more ghosts.” For all his humbuggery, she began to believe that Kotmeyer was pushing her in a new direction. Something new right now would be nice. She would still be special, in her own way, but she would try to keep it all within herself. It was time that her spectral visions, howling furies and emerald skies should all be packed away in a secret place, very carefully, like expensive old lace, to be taken out and displayed only for special guests and other occasions, like weddings and funerals.
Samuel Kotmeyer finished his notes hurriedly. He had a sloppy script, even though his right hand was fully functional. Quite often he could not read what he himself had just written. Scrawling quickly just made matters worse. But the sun was setting soon, the candles would need to be set, then Kiddush would need to be recited, and then of course no further work until Shabbat was done. By that time, he would have scant memory left of the day’s session with Madeline Pickett.
She was a fascinating case, one of the most interesting since his arrival at the University a year earlier. She clearly had a personality disorder that included relatively classic megalomaniacal and narcissistic manifestations. But beginning so early in childhood! That was unusual. He wondered whether it might have something to do with her skin color. Kotmeyer was quite certain she had a form of albinism with incomplete penetrance. It was a somatic weakness that might have profound psychological implications. Could her lack of pigmentation affect behavior or personality? Was there a primary physical basis for her emotional dysfunction? A common phenomenon, in his opinion.
He shook his head as he scribbled furiously. Most interesting of all, she was responding to therapy in a manner quite contrary to expectations. She refused to be cleansed by the process of shining a light into every corner of her psyche. Rather, the patient was deffervescing her emotional excesses by deliberately blocking every effort to examine her psychological landscape. There was no doubt, against all odds, that she was improving, at least in terms of her behavioral responses. What she might be experiencing within her internal milieu was another matter. Her mind, more mysterious than most, was closed to him.
Dr. Kotmeyer placed his pen down and pondered for a moment, stroking the wispy remnants of his beard. How interesting that it was the patient who chose this volitional approach to the problem, something she willed upon herself. It could not possibly last, however. Madeline Pickett was trying to smother a seething cauldron, and eventually there would be an inevitable, volcanic eruption. She would need his services when that happened, and desperately so. In the interim there was nothing he could do to preempt the explosion.
Oh, it all had to do with suppressed sexual expression and tension without doubt. Something sexual might in fact be the trigger for the next crisis. His colleagues in Vienna were right about assigning the causes of many personality disturbances to dysfunctional sexuality, whether in the context of desire, orientation, misguided morality, and so on with numberless permutations. In this case, though, he was sure there was more. Dr. Kotmeyer, formerly of Vienna and Berlin, and trained in the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, nonetheless remained open to other possibilities, other explanations of life’s disruptions. The interface of internal sexual thought and external behavior was foundational to personal experience. However, there was an even deeper impulse that moved humans ever since their first creation on earth; the desire for meaning in a meaningless universe. Kotmeyer believed this with all his soul. Sex was not everything.
In any case, this particular patient was a godsend. The president’s daughter! Undoubtedly, she would serve as an entrée to the cream of Southern society, something he had been desperately trying to accomplish since his arrival in Atlanta. No more of uneducated, neurotic housewives obsessed by handwashing, or fearful of walking into a marketplace. From now on, only uppercrust women terrified of being assaulted at night by their slaves, and willing to pay well for any release from their anxieties. All in all, Kotmeyer thought, that seemed like a good trade. No. It was a superb trade. Penury did not agree with him, especially when contrasted to the past, when he lived within the very heart of poverty stricken Europe.
After completing his medical charting, Dr. Kotmeyer hastened to prepare for the fall of dusk. The small apartment was slovenly, but his well thumbed siddur was kept meticulously in the same spot, on the bureau next to his bed. Right above it on the wall hung the only visible ornament in the room, a silver framed black and gray and white picture of modest proportions. He stopped to gaze at it, as he often did. In the picture stood a slender young woman in a summer dress that hung loosely from her hips, wearing a hat hanging rakishly to the side of her head, barely covering her curly hair. Her smile seemed almost bubbly, framed by generous lips daubed in dark lipstick, barely offsetting her dark complexion and thick, nearly opaque glasses. The picture was inscribed along the bottom, in small, neat letters. Kotmeyer knew them by heart:
My love, for all eternity.
Paris, 1922.
He felt his throat constrict, and he sobbed involuntarily. He knew he was too sentimental, too much anchored to the past, but he could not help himself. O, Rosa, he thought, you should be here with me, tonight, lighting the candles and ushering in God’s day of rest. Kotmeyer composed himself quickly. He knew the truth would be very different. Rosa was not one to light candles, lay out loaves of bread, or give the blessing.
Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam
Kotmeyer exhaled the words slowly, intoning them for Rosa, as if speaking for someone who was present.
No, for Rosa it was always about her work. The Work, as she called it, as if it required no other description or explanation. She had been swept to Berlin from Hungary, fleeing the aftershocks of the communist regime that had crumbled in 1919. They were inseparable from the time they met, and she finally agreed to marry him, but only in a civil ceremony. Her father was a rabbi, but she rejected any adherence to Jewish faith. In fact, she rejected any notion of being a Jew at all. She staunchly identified herself as a simple member of the proletariat, and denounced what she called tribalism. Religion, she often said, was an opiate, just as Marx had written, and she would not be drugged. Religious creeds were used to asphyxiate thought and to permanently subject mankind to the dominance of old ideas. No matter, she liked to say, a new age was coming.
Later, as the Nazis grew stronger in Germany, Rosa began to change. She deliberately identified herself more frequently as a Jewess. Kotmeyer suspected that she believed more deeply than she pretended to, but on the surface, at least, she claimed to espouse her faith and blood only as a means of confronting fascism. She urged other Jews also to identify themselves proudly and publicly, and to stand up to the thuggish brownshirts who roamed the streets. By 1929 that had become a terrible mistake. No one could have anticipated the viciousness of the SA, as Jews all over Germany were subjected to a systematic campaign of savagery.
It was then that Kotmeyer read Hitler’s book, his so-called autobiography. Professor Kotmeyer prided himself on his openness to new ideas, and his willingness to see the other person’s point of view. There was always another side to every disagreement, he believed. Books, to him, were simply a way to communicate, and to bridge ideas, cultures, and perspectives between human beings everywhere. But this specific book, this book of Hitler’s, horrified him. It was then that he decided it was time to leave Germany. It was not just Hitler, after all. It was all of them, or at best, most of them. Neighbors, coworkers, colleagues, tailors, mechanics, grocers…they all shared the virus. Max Wertheimer had told him to be patient, that Germans were not intrinsically against Jews, that they were expressing anti-Jewish sentiment only because they were attracted by the Nazis. Kotmeyer did not believe it; he could sense the hatred growing like a malignant tumor that was rapidly metastasizing. It was best to depart.
Rosa disagreed. The Work needed to go on. Fascism needed to be fought. Workers and students needed to be mobilized and enrolled in the Party. Rosa in turn urged him to go immediately, but he would not leave her, and put a brave face forward. After all, he was a wounded, decorated hero of the Great War, a Captain in an elite Austrian regiment. That background might buy him some time, at least until they could flee together.
Looking back, it all seemed like a distant, dark dream, an insubstantial nightmare lacking any explanation or understanding. One day the virulence swirling within the heart of Germany spilled over, like poisonous fluid overflowing a boiling pot, overwhelming and destroying the world he once knew. Coming to the CSA was easy when the time came. Germany and the CSA were after all kindred spirits.
How insane, he thought, I left a country tearing apart with race hatred and came to a country sewn together by race hatred. Jew, negro, what’s the difference. It could as easily be Chinaman or Arab. One day it might be Paddy or Pole. It’s easy to hate. Simply choose an object that satisfies the needs of the hating class.
As if it were yesterday, he could remember the two plainclothes policemen who had come to his Berlin office in the middle of a bright June afternoon, interrupting a session with a patient, to give him the news. They informed him that Rosa had undoubtedly brought the whole matter down upon herself by taunting a group of stormtroopers at an outdoor rally. It was, they said, a stupid thing to do. Really, they said, in a very practical way it was her own fault. There would be no trouble like this if people would just keep their mouths shut and go about their own way. She had been stabbed to death, they said, surrounded by screaming Nazis. Kotmeyer made the mistake of asking how many times she had been stabbed. One of the men, short and bald with a bull neck, shrugged and said, “I don’t know, ten, maybe twenty. What’s the difference.” They had left her on the street for over an hour afterwards before she was picked up, much like sweeping up some debris from a passing parade. History and time receded, and would never speak her name again. But he would, cherishing her in a place deep within himself.
Dark had come now. The candles were lit, the washing of hands was done, and the comfort of things familiar surrounded Kotmeyer. It was pleasing to him, reassuring somehow, to recite the Kiddush, even though he was completely alone. He said each word carefully, omitting nothing, holding his prayer book tightly, with a cup of wine close at hand. As he came to the end, he paused momentarily, feeling the pain of lost love, loneliness, and lamentation. But the moment was brief. The prayer had its own requirements, which he fulfilled faithfully.
Chapter 9
Time passes. It intersects a space, and a moment is born. And, for every age, a moment comes that changes everything. A moment without conscience.
Grains of sand pass through the maw of the hourglass, reverse, and pass through again, over and over in an unending cycle. Each one, each single grain, might be a self-contained cosmos of time and space. Each one, each single grain, might bear its own burden of pain, lust, pleasure and love before it is dispersed by time. But a few, a very few, streak through eternity as if ablaze, circuited into an illimitable maze of memory:
Armed warriors stand astride a narrow pass.
A wrist is nailed onto roughly hewn timber.
A warlord bestrides a thousand mile wall.
Green flags of conquest sweep over the desert.
Fragile ships leave harbor for an uncertain shore.
A bloody guillotine slashes downwards.
Whenever such moments are spawned, they rush like a tidal wave of lunatic madness through the hearts and minds of all they touch, illuminating their existence, separating dark from light, hope from despair, one from all. Nothing before or after can ever be the same. Feeling, sight, and thought are altered irrevocably, and memory soon becomes myth. Why and how this happens cannot be comprehended. It is as if a curtain is drawn back by unknown, mystical hands and a slightly different species of humankind shuffles onto the stage, replacing the previous cast, and begins the play anew.
Whispers from generations past might linger, heard in the quiet spaces between breath and heartbeat, recalling ordinary deeds and common acts, memories that hemorrhage like old bloodlines dying out. But it is the awesome power of the iconic moment that breathes new energy into the simmering fluid of life. There is no narrative, no moral, no right or wrong. Urgency, compulsion, and clangor skitter around and around as if in orbit, embracing the great central fact that the course of human history - no, the course of the entire universe for as far as the human eye can see - is changed forever when time meets space, and a moment is created.
The moment was here.
The sound of hard leather on cobblestones echoed through the night, as the crowd rippled like a supple, prowling predator across the boulevard. Jona moved with the others, feeling the tautness, the intensity, the thrill that wound around him like a serpent’s coil.
The Unter den Linden was lined by lamp-posts at regular intervals all along its length, each one wreathed by a circle of intense light at its base, sharply warding off suffocating night. It seemed that phantasmagorical shapes shimmered on the ground as shadows leaped beneath the boughs of the swaying linden trees. All around him were heard the feral growls and intonations of shouted slogans and ancient songs as the students marched. Jona felt himself spinning as he walked, almost overcome by the electric feeling that surged through him. It seemed as if a bolt of lightning had thundered down, coursing from body to body within the multitude, ungrounded and unchecked. It was thrilling. It was sensual. It was malevolent.
They had started south on Universitatstrasse, the narrow street bordering one side of the University grounds, and as the gathering proceeded it swelled in size progressively. More and more students fed into the procession like so many tributaries feeding into a swollen, rampaging river. Some carried burning torches high in the air. Most of them carried books.
By the time they reached the broad, grassy, central island of the Unter den Linden the students had sorted themselves into an orderly parade as they continued across the avenue. Strategically placed men in brown uniforms and authoritative armbands bearing the swastika symbol ushered them along. It was a cool and clear evening. Jona paused briefly to smell the pungent, acrid odor of smoke in the air, feeling drenched in the exhilaration of the moment. This was an experience like none he had ever felt before, immersed in the energy that crackled around him. He stood in the middle of the broad, tree lined boulevard in the very heart of Berlin and twirled himself around and around, performing his own crazy dance, wanting to see everything, to hear everything, to feel everything.
Students gathered in groups in front of the University gates, dressed in the respective colors of their burschenshaften, each fraternity calling out clashing chants that coalesced into the cacophony of sounds that charged the atmosphere. A large group of them clustered around an enormous statue of Humboldt, which occupied an honored niche immediately in front of the ornate fence that separated the campus grounds from the street. The great naturalist and explorer was portrayed as seated, with one leg outstretched, staring pensively in judgement at the students gathered at his feet. As Jona glanced towards his right further down the avenue, he could see the solid, classical lines of the Neue Wache, the graceful colonnade of its façade still visible in the dim light. Beyond it, murky in the distance, was the looming multi-domed mass of the Berliner Dom, its church bells now stifled and hanging dormant.
It was barely past eight. A steady stream of men and women, including ordinary citizens as well as students, funneled towards the large open square across from the University grounds, a plaza called the Opernplatz. Jona hesitated, feeling increasing frustration. His escort for the evening had arranged to meet him on the avenue’s grassy concourse at eight precisely. Lieb looked around for him carefully but suspected that they would not meet. It would be difficult to intersect one another in the dark among this throng in any case. He glanced at the imposing baroque features of the Staatsoper across the boulevard, the opera house that framed the eastern side of the Opernplatz. Jona had been there just the night before with his host, but memory of their evening together had already drifted, and for now at least it seemed ages away.
With what sounded like a roar the passing swarm of humanity suddenly surged forward, and Jona allowed himself to surrender to the moment. Enveloped by a mass of bodies, he felt arms and chests and hands propelling him forward. Jona felt as one with the mob and pushed back at those next to him as well. To his own surprise, he did not feel repelled by the closeness of others and allowed himself to flow freely within the swarm that surged onwards. As they crossed the street into the broad, open space of the square a hush descended over the ocean of people that pressed forward, and the peculiar, crackling, memorable sound of that night could finally be heard.
It was a low pitched hum at first, but then became a louder, harsher hissing as Lieb got closer to the center of the plaza. For just a few seconds the air was rent with sudden high pitched flaring sounds followed by squealing sounds, as if something were dying in a last squirm of agony. And then, finally, an enormous bonfire came into full view. Jona stared at the pyre, transfixed by the flames that rippled and licked upwards. Youthful faces all around him were exultant, eyes straining forward, mouths open in hoarse prayer.
Jona could see and hear a short, intense appearing man on an elevated stage shouting with raspy voice into a microphone that sent his words reverberating throughout the Opernplatz. That had to be Goebbels, the minister for education and propaganda. Jona had been told about him, that he was Hitler’s right hand man. He was saying something about the flames lighting up a new era. Jona paid no attention, mesmerized by the conflagration that illuminated the scene before him. Suddenly, the little man raised his right arm straight up to the sky, a little man made smaller still by the huge throng that stretched before him. As he shot his hand upwards the crowd appeared to snap to attention as one.
“Heil Hitler!” they shouted.
And then, “Sieg Heil !”
And one more time, a tremendous shout in unison, “Sieg Heil !”
And again, and again, and again, in a seemingly unending chorus of invocations to the high priest of the new German Reich. “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”
Students with torches raised them high in gestures of determination as well as salutation. Jona looked around at the ecstatic faces that surrounded him, filled with the euphoria of the moment. He sensed his own heart pounding, he felt as if he was one with them, and felt an urge as if he, too, should raise his arm and scream out the name of Hitler as everyone around him was doing. The crescendo of roaring salutes continued, the crowd seeming to twitch in a frenzy with each repetition.
Then, in a split instant, it happened. The moment came.
Someone ran up to the fire and tossed in an armful of books. The crowd moaned and screamed, delirious with joy. One young woman went down on her knees with arms upraised and shouted incoherently. A thin, blond haired boy who appeared to be barely into adolescence stood next to Jona, tears coursing silently down his cheeks. More students surged forward, throwing book after book into the searing fire. Jona was seized by an unreasoning sense of urgency, driving him to push through to the front of the tightly massed crowd, nearer the blaze. He came close enough that the flaring of the flames was palpable, and the heat beat upon his face. Like a voracious beast, the bonfire swallowed up volume after volume as the tomes were heaved into its very heart. Novels, philosophical tracts, scientific works, poems, essays of history were all transmuted into carbonized embers spewing into the night, evaporating into empty space. It seemed that thousands of books were lined up, stacked in the center of the square, very passively waiting their turn to be marched forward and consumed in the conflagration.
Small groups of students standing at the edge of the fire began to chant the titles, or the names of the authors, or both as the books were heaved into the flames, as if reciting a roll of the condemned. Jona realized with an odd prickling at the back of his neck that he knew many of these works; these were books he had read as a schoolboy, or at his father’s bidding, or simply for his own enjoyment. Some of these were old friends, joyous companions and wise advisors, yet even so Jona felt the thrill of the moment as they were surrendered for incineration and consigned to death. He joined the mob in screaming out the names one by one, as he too condemned them to annihilation:
Hemingway. ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ Poor Jake Barnes, thrown finally into a burning hell by unrequited lust!
Yes, cried the crowd.
‘The Metamorphosis,’ from Kafka. How Gregor Samsa’s insect body will quiver in the flames!
Yes, mocked the mob.
Sinclair Lewis and ‘Arrowsmith.’ Onto the fire with the futile Martin Arrowsmith and his absurd phage treatment for bubonic plague!
Yes, shouted the multitude.
‘All Quiet on the Western Front.’ Paul and Mr. Kantorek go equally into the funeral pyre!
Yes.
John Dos Passos. ‘1919.’ Eveline Hutchins, Miss Mathilde, Hollywood executives, the Roosevelts, the war, all up in smoke!
Yes.
Emile Zola!
Yes.
HG Wells!
Yes.
Freud!
Yes, Yes.
Upton Sinclair!
Yes, Yes.
Bertold Brecht!
Yes, Yes.
Jack London!
Yes, Yes.
Heinrich Mann!
YES, YES.
James Joyce!
YES, YES.
Einstein!
YES, YES, YES.
The roars surpassed all ability to endure. Jona’s left leg felt seared by pain and a burning numbness, but he tried to will the sensation away. The throng around him continued its berserk bellowing, some calling out the book titles, and some continuing the ‘Sieg Heil.’ One student nearby seemed to be reciting something, rocking his upper body backwards and forward at the waist repeatedly, reminding Jona of a Hebrew prayer.
And so the evening went on, becoming eventually a blurr of inchoate sounds and images. Without any clear signal, the audience to the great event, exhausted and satiated, emptied of its last measure of passion, began to break up and disperse. The last act of the great performance was finished. Jona was suddenly exhausted himself, and felt again the paralyzing pain in his leg and hip. The affair was over. The actors were done. The theater darkened as the pyre subsided. It was time to return to his hotel, where his Secret Service friends would undoubtedly be waiting. As fatigue descended upon him, he felt suddenly as if he needed to change out of his sooty, smoke impregnated clothes, and he wanted badly to take a hot bath and feel clean again. He lingered only slightly as the crowd thinned out, watching the smoke drift upwards and out over the low-lying mound of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral just beyond the square.
“Jona, we have found you!” The words vibrated in the air as if erupting spontaneously out of the ether. It was Kohler, approaching steadily with a thin cane in his right hand and a tall, somewhat sturdy appearing young woman holding on to his left arm. He appeared supremely at ease.
“Guten abend, Herr und Frau Kohler.” Jona could not curb his enthusiasm. “Sie waren hier? Haben Sie alles?“ He nodded respectfully towards the lady. “Es war eine Nacht werde ich nie vergessen!”
Kohler chuckled softly. “Please, Jona, no more German! I know you are trying hard to be gracious, especially on a night like tonight, but we’ll all be more comfortable speaking to you in English. This is not Mrs. Kohler, thank you, but I do want you to meet Elfieda Brunner.”
Jona bowed formally. “Pleasure.”
She smiled back. “The pleasure is mine, Dr. Lieb. Dr. Kohler has told me about his adventures in the U.S.A. and the terrible murder you witnessed. I hope you have recovered from the shock.”
The question was abruptly jarring to Jona. He had not thought about that incident in many weeks, but as the memory was revived he could recall it vividly. Like a surgical specimen fixed in formalin and placed on a back shelf, it could still be retrieved and studied in detail. “I have. I suppose getting away has been good for me.” And then, with great animation he continued. “And being here tonight was simply overwhelming!”
Kohler appraised Jona carefully. “Indeed. And what, pray tell, was so wonderful my dear friend?”
“The energy. The enthusiasm. The belief these people have. It makes me feel something important is happening here, something that is going to change the world.”
“And the theatrics you witnessed, with the books and so forth. Rather medieval, I must say. That did not bother you?” Kohler pointed vaguely towards the sputtering bonfire with his cane.
“No, not at all. I understand that this was symbolic. I’m sure they don’t want to actually destroy works of literature and science. Probably, I’m guessing, this was meant to send a message...maybe to be cautious with whatever one reads, or skeptical at least. Or when it’s inappropriate. That kind of thing, maybe, I think.” Jona felt suddenly very deflated.
They began to trudge slowly back towards the boulevard, trailing a large group of very enthused students. The high pitched quaver of feminine laughter pealed through the night air like a sharpened knife. Kohler’s cane clicked rhythmically on the pavement. His voice was very subdued when he spoke. “But that is where you are mistaken, Jona. We do want those texts destroyed. All of them. One must have the moral courage to say some things are simply destructive to society at large. Common people are too easily influenced by propaganda nowadays. As Goebbels himself just proclaimed moments ago, there should be a return to basic truths.”
Jona remained quiet for a moment. “Back in Cambridge you told me you wanted to eradicate subversive art. I didn’t believe you then and I don’t believe you now.”
“Not the same thing. Very few can truly appreciate and understand art. Works of art can change a person, but alone cannot change the world. Art is too nimble, too elusive, always just beyond our grasp. As a work becomes more well known, poof! It can take on a new identity, change into something else, almost anything you want it to be, really. Art is in the eye of the beholder, after all. Furthermore, Jona, many aspects of fine art, let’s say perspective, texture, allegory, symmetry and spatial development require...umm.... shall we say these things are difficult for ordinary people. A high intellect is needed to really appreciate these kinds of fine points. The masses would hardly understand sacred geometry, for example. A book on the other hand, a book can be bought by anybody, and read by anybody. Its meaning is usually quite plain. One reading can turn you for or against anything. Books, Jonah, books change the world. The first thing revolutionaries do is write.” Kohler paused. “Marx wrote. Thomas Jefferson wrote. St. Paul wrote.” And then more softly, “Hitler wrote.”
“There is no shame in this, Herr Kohler.” It was Elfieda Brunner, who sidled in between Kohler and Jona as they walked, grabbing an arm from each as she spoke. “We must do what we must in order to protect ourselves from both pernicious lies and the pernicious liars.”
Jona shifted uncomfortably. He felt that Kohler’s lady friend was leaning on him too closely, but she would not be denied, and tugged at him more firmly.
“Yes, Frau Brunner, but...”
“Fraulein,” she interrupted. “Please call me Elfieda.”
“Yes, Elfieda, I agree, I guess, but now that I think about it, I wonder about some of the books that were selected for, uhm...deletion. And who chooses? That little Goebbels guy?” Jona now felt very fatigued, almost drugged.
Elfieda jumped into her response as if she were entering a boxing ring. “All works of art must conform to the standards of the Party! No more can Undeutsches schrifftum be allowed. The Fuhrer, and he alone, decides the fate of literature, art, music, film, theater. Everything!” She was almost shouting now. “Everything must support the work of the Party. All to the greater good of the Reich.”
“Why was Jack London burned?”
“A Marxist-Socialist misfit. He does not deserve to be read.”
“Freud?”
“A Jew.” She answered as if responding to a math quiz.
Jona began to feel a void gnawing at him. He could sense a great truth yawning overhead, one that caused an indefinite unease, a discomfort, a vague feeling of dyspepsia and nausea that could not be shaken.
“Well... I don’t think I care about Jews one way or the other either...” A sudden vision of old man Shapiro standing at his deli counter flashed through Jona’s mind. “I mean, well, I don’t want to associate with them, of course. Not really, I don’t think. Not so much. But I don’t hate them. Or anyone else, for that matter.” He raised his voice at the end, sounding a defiant note.
Kohler interjected. “Yes, you do, Jona. You do hate them. Their strangeness, their difference, their separateness. You are aware of it every time you meet one of them. You despise them, in fact, but you feel it very inconvenient to say so. It’s somehow ungentlemanly to admit it openly. It seems offensive to you to view them as less than you are. But not for us. You see, my dear Lieb, we understand what has been happening to us. The cabal of Marxist, Bolshevik, intellectual, international Jewry has been killing us for some time, sapping our strength and vitality, and so now it’s time to resolve this problem. To, I believe, move on as you Americans might say. Come, come, this has been written about extensively. You must know what I say is true.”
“Well said, professor! Germany must be for Germans only!” Elfieda hugged Jona even closer, pressing his arm into her breasts and leaning into him to speak towards Kohler.
Jona felt confused. It was not true. It was absolutely not true. Was it? Old man Shapiro was not part of a cabal, was he? His mind whirled furiously but he couldn’t organize his thoughts and felt mildly disoriented. What would his father say? Oh, Earnest Lieb had his own prejudices, without doubt. But they were private, internal, personal. They didn’t count. It was not how he felt but how he acted that mattered. He had preached the equality of all peoples and the importance of social justice, didn’t he? Jews, Ethiopians, Mongolians, tall, short, fat, yellow, black... all equal. After all, wasn’t that what his life stood for? A life of science dedicated to the betterment of all mankind. Prejudice of any kind must be fought. That was the way. The only way, more or less, almost certainly.
He had a sudden thought. “How do you know who’s a Jew?”
Kohler offered a low titter and a broad smile. “We own the word. We decide.”
An inspiration erupted into Jona’s mind. “You need a magic bullet,” he murmured.
“What is that, Herr Doktor?” Elfieda laughed the words softly into Jona’s ear.
“Magic bullet. That was an expression my father learned from Paul Erlich, an old friend and colleague here in Berlin. He had a theory that any bacteria could be destroyed by tailoring a chemical to bind with specific proteins on its surface. Inject the chemical and it would kill that particular bacterium. Like an antibiotic would do, for example. So, there could be a magic bullet for every type of infecting agent. My father liked to say that if we can create a magic bullet for microbes, we can create one for poverty, hatred, ignorance, war, and on and on.”
Kohler thought for a moment. “Of course, I remember Professor Erlich. He was here at the university. A great scientist. Noble Prize winner. A giant, really. He was a Jew, by the way.”
“Well, then, you see. You recognize Paul Erlich as a great man, a pioneer of science, a great teacher. You may dislike Jews in general, which I don’t believe for a moment, but you can’t possibly hate him, can you?”
Kohler stopped completely, turned to face Jona, and tilted his head up with a loud, derisive laugh. “Dear, dear, Dr. Lieb, why should I hate Professor Erlich? He’s dead! He died years ago. There is nothing of him left to hate!” He placed his thin hand on Jona’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. Kohler, Jona and Elfieda formed a small stationary island standing in the midst of a torrent of passersby sweeping down the avenue. The old professor squinted into Jona’s eyes. “Death, Jona. The ultimate panacea. Death. Death is the universal magic bullet.”
“I’m telling you, they’re all fucking crazy in this country!” Joe Murphy tugged on a cigarette and scowled at Andrews simultaneously. “Can you believe the shit that’s going on? Burning books!”
Andrews sat opposite Murphy, burrowed into a plush sofa and seeming quite relaxed. They were in the lavish bar of their luxury hotel, the Adlon, just a few blocks from the Opernplatz. A large picture window gave view to the street, and they could see streams of people drifting past, giving sign that the rally was over. Murphy had spent the last few hours drinking beer, schnapps, Russian vodka, and a noxious something called Doppelkorn, mixing drinks without hesitation. He had not stopped fulminating about everything they had seen since their arrival in Germany, getting louder and louder with each drink. Andrews had heard stories about Murphy’s prodigious capacity for alcohol but had never seen him behave this way. It appeared that something had snapped inside the older agent, and that he had become unhinged somehow. Andrews felt helpless to put a stop to the drinking and hoped that Lieb would be back before Murphy became uncontrollably drunk.
It had been a miserable day for both of them. Jona appeared on edge all morning, looking forward to the rally later in the evening and talking incessantly about the opera he had seen the night before. Kohler had taken him to see something called Parsifal. Andrews had never studied music. He had a vague recollection of Wagner, the great German composer, but could not recall anything specific about any of his compositions, including Parsifal. From the moment they met for breakfast, Jona couldn’t stop raving about it, and couldn’t say enough about Kohler. It was the best music, he had said. It was the best libretto. It was the best story. It was the best opera house. And regarding Kohler, he gushed on and on. Kohler knew so much. He was so insightful and so clever. He was able to explain and reveal everything about everything. Lieb went on about it continuously during their meal together. It made Andrews yearn for the old Jona, the one who wouldn’t say a word that wasn’t dragged out of him.
After breakfast Lieb had insisted that he would take a foray into the city together with Kohler and most definitely without his two chaperones. That left the two agents at odds right away. Andrews wanted to stay around the hotel in case Jona sent word that he needed them. Murphy wanted to go out and see the city.
The hotel’s concierge settled the matter when he insisted they go to a place called Hause Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz. It was supposed to offer a dozen regional German restaurants under one roof, each one with a distinctive flavor and with characteristic decor from the corresponding part of Germany. He told them it would give them a true taste of German cuisine. It turned out be nothing more than an enormous tourist trap. The place was spotless, almost sterile, and the waiters stamped around as if they were practicing the goose-step. The head waiter took one look at the two Americans and insisted that they sit at a Berlin style Weissvierstube, which Murphy seemed to enjoy enormously. He had two orders of succulent boulotten while slurping clean three enormous steins of malodorous dark beer, belching all the while. By the end of the meal he appeared slightly tipsy. Andrews, on the other hand, was hardly able to handle more than a few bites of rubbery veal.
More than anything, he was worried about Murphy. It seemed to him that his partner was deliberately abandoning any control over himself. A successful mission required both of them to be at the top of their form, something that no longer seemed to concern the older agent. Of course, a successful mission also required that Jona run a steady course. All in all, Lieb’s quirky demeanor, the garish, noisy environment of the restaurant, and Murphy’s abysmal behavior combined to make his stomach turn. Andrews’ mind was left spinning, taking a darker cast. Was Murphy simply losing control, or was he deliberately trying to deep six the entire effort? Either way, if his senior didn’t shape up soon, the end result would be disastrous for them both.
Potsdamer Platz swirled with heavy pedestrian and street traffic as the two men emerged from the multistoried restaurant and theme park. Trams, buses and trucks added their weight to the congealed mass of autos, horns blaring, attempting to crawl through the congested traffic of early afternoon. Shoppers darted in and out of a myriad of glass cased store fronts. Modern city life raced at a frenetic pace in the heart of modern Berlin. The bustling scene only increased Andrews’ feeling of nausea.
Murphy seemed not to notice anything. He made an abrupt turn and barreled rapidly in the direction of nowhere in particular.
“Hey Murphy, wait.”
The burly agent did not pause, merely casting a surly look backwards as he strode even faster. “What?”
Andrews drew even with him. “I have to make a stop. I think that’s a pharmacy over there.” He pointed to a large sign emblazoned with an engraved caduceus, overhanging the sidewalk a short distance away.
“Wha’samatter, got the runs?” Murphy chortled derisively.
They said nothing more until they approached closer to the store. Without warning, Murphy abruptly reached out spasmodically and clutched Andrews by the neck of his jacket, arresting his progress.
“Don’t take another step,” he hissed.
“You’re mad!” Andrews struggled to maintain his composure as he twisted out of the clamped hand that gripped his collar.
“Shut it, Mac, and look over there.”
A small group of men were clustered on the street in front of the pharmacy. Two of them were dressed in brown military fatigues with carbines slung over their shoulders. Even from a distance, blazing red armbands with black swastikas over a white field were easily visible.
Andrews paused to study the situation, analyzing the meaning of the ominous tableaux that confronted them. After just a moment’s pause, he yanked back on Murphy’s hold. “Alright, let’s get out of here. Those are some mean, hungry looking dogs.”
“Save that homespun shit for someone else, Andrews. Come on, we’re going in.” He seemed eager to forge ahead.
As they approached, the uniformed men stiffened. One of them seemed young. When he sighted the ominous figure of Joe Murphy he began to finger the stock of his weapon nervously.
Murphy halted conspicuously, facing them squarely. He stood with arms akimbo, gigantic, exuding an air of anger, menace, and confrontation. He looked completely American, from the tips of his brown Bostonians to the flat peak of the pork pie hat perched sturdily on his head. The men in uniform shifted slightly.
“Andrews, can you read this load of bullturd?” He bobbed his chin in the direction of the display window as he unfurled a cigarette from a pack of Camels.
A poster was hung on the window, much like a notice for an upcoming pancake breakfast to benefit the Boy Scouts:
Meidat alle
Jüdischen Geschäfte!
Kauft nur bei Deutschen
Boykott!
Andrews stared at it, uncomprehending, then looked quizzically at Murphy. “I don’t know German.” He studied the sign again impassively. “The last word seems obvious.”
Without another word, Murphy moved quickly to the doorway. He smiled brightly at both troopers and waved his hand in a friendly manner. “Hey fellas, need to get something for my friend here, he’s got the craps. Don’t want any trouble, unless you want us to beat the livin’ shit out of you, just like in ‘18.” He stopped in front of the older guard, who might have been his own age, grinned broadly, and offered him the open end of a pack of Camels. The German did not hesitate to pluck two from the pack, placing one in his breast pocket. Murphy made a half turn towards the other, who grinned back and also took two.
While they lit up Andrews sidled past them. The pharmacy was brightly lit inside and he could see immediately that the establishment was practically bare. Almost empty shelves stretched across one side of the store, holding a smattering of nondescript bottles, jars, cans, and boxes. A large mural hung on one wall, depicting what might have been a medieval surgeon in a forest clearing. He was hacking off someone’s leg using a grotesque knife, with several onlookers gawking rigidly at the stolid fellow undergoing the amputation.
A young woman at the counter stretched, as if rousing herself from a nap. She eyed the stranger with curiosity but said nothing until he came near, then leaned over the countertop with a neutral curve to her lips. Andrews took note that she was pretty enough.
He tapped the counter with his index finger. “Brioschi.”
“You are American? English?” She spoke with a thick, almost guttural accent.
“American.”
She stooped behind the counter and retrieved a small blue bottle. Just as she offered it to Andrews she let out an enormous sob. A thin trickle of tears appeared on both cheeks. “Please, sir, take me with you.”
“How much?” Andrews felt a surge of annoyance as he pulled out some German paper money from his wallet.
“No, please, no money. Take me with you, please. Out of the country, please.” The woman half extended both arms in the direction of the American as if she were raising them in prayer.
Andrews was nauseated. He was tired. There was almost certainly trouble brewing between Murphy and the armed Germans at the entrance to the store. He didn’t have time for the woman’s hysteria. None of this had been in his plan for the day. He threw some bills on the counter, grabbed the bottle of Brioschi and took jogging steps towards the door. The sun peeked out from underneath a cloud just as he emerged from the recesses of the store. It felt good to be outside.
He found Murphy smoking easily with the two Germans, singing “Yankee Doodle” at the top of his voice. A small crowd had gathered around them, curious enough but not appearing friendly.
“Hey Andrews, get a load of these jerks. I’m giving them jive and they don’t even get it. What do you expect, these two here are Brown Shirts. Both of them are shitheads. We should ram something up their asses, that’ll teach ‘em.” He nodded with an amiable smile towards the two armed men as he spoke. The younger one nodded back with a boyish grin. He looked no more than sixteen.
Murphy took a last drag of his cigarette and flicked the stub onto the curb. “The sign in the window is about Jews, by the way. They’re being kicked in the nuts by the Nazis. How I hate these bastards. They’re scum, all of ‘em. Come on, I’ve seen enough.”
As they walked away Andrews popped two Brioschi into his mouth, and experienced relief almost immediately. Briefly, he turned his head to look back at the pharmacy, and an image of the young woman inside, hands outstretched, flashed through his mind. It occurred to him that for once he felt exactly the same as Murphy. He had also seen enough.
After they arrived back at their hotel Murphy insisted he wanted to sit in the garden courtyard in the rear of the hotel, admire the enormous spouting fountain on display there, and have a beer. Andrews checked his watch. It was a little before three. He announced he was going to take a walk, declaring he needed to work off the effects of lunch.
In minutes he was meandering at a leisurely pace down the Unter den Linten to Brandenburg Tor and on to Pariser Platz to the west of the great arch. The ruins of the burnt out Reichstag, destroyed by fire just a few months earlier, were still visible in the near distance, covered with workers busily disassembling the building’s carcass brick by brick. He wandered through the Tiergarten and then on to Konigsplatz, dominated by the overwhelming height and mass of the Siegessäule, Germany’s Victory Column. He found a park bench on a corner of the scrupulously tidy Siegesalle mall and sat for almost an hour, taking several more brioschi as he studied the monumental statuary that lined the carefully manicured boulevard. Statue after statue bore Berlin’s ceremonial witness to the successful wars that birthed the German empire.
His contact came right on time, passing him a plain brown envelope by simply tossing it on the bench next to Andrews. The man scurried away quickly, disappearing behind the looming edifice of the Siegessäule. Siegessäule, Andrews thought, Victory column. Siegesalle. Victory street. These people honor war. War has its uses, that’s obvious, but Germans are living in the past. They should spend more time thinking about tomorrow and stop poking their neighbors in the eye. On the other hand…He shook his head in acknowledgement. Power has it’s privileges. The walk back to the hotel cheered him up somewhat, and his indigestion was much improved by the time he was back in his room. The deciphered message promptly gave him heartburn.
Now it was evening, both agents were seated at a booth in the hotel bar, and Andrews gazed at his partner with a mixture of pity and disgust. “You know, book burning is not that unusual. It’s happened in history many times. They say that the first emperor of China had every book in his kingdom burned or destroyed. That was two thousand years ago. Lots of book burnings since then.” Andrews paused a moment to take a sip of the seltzer water he had allowed himself. “Lot’s of people burnings, too, for that matter.”
“That’s just the half of it.” Murphy went on as if he hadn’t heard a thing. “The same sign we saw today is on every store run by Jews, sometimes with those Jewish stars...you know...”
“Star of David.”
“Yeah. Of David. Painted on the windows, warning people to stay out. And listen to this, they’re also picking up men off the streets just on suspicion of being a queer and sending them to jail just like that. No trial, no nothin’. If you’re a Red you’re royally screwed. You know what the waiter told me? The SA, like the two heavies we saw today, are still the enforcement arm of the Nazis, not the cops. They are the real muscle behind Hitler. They’ve been fighting union thugs, socialists, and commies in the streets for years. Real dirty stuff, back and forth. Well, this guy tells me the SA have just been deputized, and now they have the authority to pick up anybody without a warrant, just like the regular cops. So, who do you think they’re going after? No wonder anyone on the other side is on the lam. People are disappearing left and right. I’m telling you, this place is a fucking horror show. They’re worse than the Mafia. Someone’s gonna have to pay, ‘cause right now there’s blood in the streets.” Murphy shrugged and took another long gulp of brown beer.
Blood in the streets. Andrews stared out the window absently, his thoughts suddenly removed far away by the echo of a memory. For just a moment, he had a vision of himself as a youngster, maybe nine or ten, walking the dirty streets of Hampden, in Baltimore. He could remember stopping outside Odetta’s Bar and Grill. He squatted on the pavement, his black wooden shoeshine box next to him, right in front of a sign in the window that announced:
NO DOGS!
NO NEGROES!!
NO CHINAMEN!!!
IRISH WELCOME
He hoped a drunk would walk out of the bar and ask for a shine. A drunk did stagger out a few minutes later. It was his stepfather, Mickey Ray O’Banyon.
Mickey Ray was something of a legend in Hampden. He never had a steady job as far as anyone knew, but always had scratch in his pocket. They said he played horses, women, and niggers, in no preferred order. Every once in a while, he disappeared for long stretches of time, some said to Dover, and he generally returned herding a helpless looking group of newly arrived blacks. Newbies, escaped slaves, all of them just raw meat for the sharks that circled them expectantly. And the biggest shark of all was Mickey Ray.
In the old days these pitiful, ignorant people were taken into the warmth and protection of private homes or churches, taught the ways of their new homeland, and ushered further North. No more. Johnny Andrews’ observant eyes had seen the men contracted out to the railroads for gang work on pennies a day, and the young women brought to the back alleys of East Fifth street. For the simple, trusting ex-slaves conveyed into town by Mickey Ray O’Banyon, their escape to freedom all too often ended in penury, disease, and torment.
For John’s sister Myra, marriage to O’Banyon had resulted in much the same. Andrews hated him, not least for the way he often treated his sister.
Mickey Ray staggered out from the saloon and into the sunshine, already scowling. He stank of cheap whiskey, or something resembling whiskey. His pants were stained with urine, and there were particles of sawdust in the nap of his hair. When he saw Andrews squatting down next to his shoeshine box, he first stopped and stared as if to focus carefully, and then gave a long legged kick that shattered the box and sent it flying into the gutter. In a flash he was on top of the boy, cuffing him around the head and cursing in the most vicious way. “You fuckin’ guttersnipe!” He howled as if baying to the moon. “Now you gonna die!”
Mickey Ray had lived his life by riding the winds of luck wherever they would take him. It was his bad luck that day that a police patrol happened on the scene at that very moment, clattering up on big brown horses that snorted with anticipation. Police clubs made the sound of loud thumps on Mickey Ray’s back and head as they grappled him to the ground. One of the cops grunted as he struck, “Break the goddamn darkie’s head!”
John Andrews could still hear Mickey Ray’s screams echoing, still echoing from whatever private hell yet harbored his ghost. “I’m not a nigger!” he wailed, “I’m not a nigger!” Time and place had not erased the memory of that moment. The event was neatly trimmed and tied, folded carefully, and like many of his other remembrances, stored behind a clearly labeled doorway that led to days gone by.
Sitting silently, aware but unresponsive to everything around him, he willfully subdued the images from his past. The past was not now, and he only had time for right now. But, just as he began to let go, Andrews felt again the hatred and the power captured in the words that he spoke at that moment, on that day. As Mickey Ray lay bleeding, broken, and still on the ground, with the roundfaced, heavyset policemen panting over him, the young boy pointed coldly at his stepfather. “Kill him,” he had said calmly, “Go ahead. Kill him. Nobody’ll care.”
There was a sudden bustle at the bar’s entryway. Jona entered, leading Kohler and Elfieda. Murphy saw them first and stood to make himself seen. He couldn’t help swaying slightly. Andrews waved at Jona, giving a look of concern. As they approached, he also arose.
“Dr. Lieb, I was beginning to worry about you. Everything alright?” Andrews looked inquiringly at Elfieda.
“Andrews, you should have been there!” Jona almost gushed the words out. The sight of his friend waiting for him patiently made him feel re-energized. “You know Professor Kohler, and this is Frauline Brunner. Elfieda.”
“Hello. And what do you do, Frauline?” Joe Murphy spoke quickly, almost before Jona stopped talking. He did not like surprises, and this woman’s appearance was a surprise he definitely did not like. She looked a little too cozy with Lieb. She looked a little too made up. She looked a little too merry. She looked a little too busty. She looked a little too much like trouble.
Elfieda laughed. She took a quick glance at the six or seven emptied glasses on the table in front of Murphy. “Excuse me, what did you say?”
Murphy remained dogged, indifferent to the angry look flashed by Andrews. “What do you do?” He really wanted to ask her ‘Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?’ “It’s just that, you know, I’m curious, seeing as you’re with the perfessor and all. Are you in the art business too?”
It was Kohler’s turn to laugh softly. He turned towards Jona. “May I share our confidential talk of yesterday?”
Lieb hesitated briefly then nodded assent.
Kohler had materialized like an unexpected sea wind the day before, only Jona’s second day in Berlin. In an eerie replay of their last encounter, Kohler’s dignified form appeared in the hotel restaurant just as Jona was finishing breakfast with Andrews. Lieb was genuinely happy to greet his distinguished visitor.
Kohler explained that he had read about Jona’s arrival in the newspapers. In any case, he had learned something about Jona’s itinerary from a friend, one of the professors at the School of Physics. The faculty was abuzz about Jona’s upcoming lecture, he reported. Announcements about it were posted everywhere on campus. It was easy to guess that he would be staying at the Adlon, a short walk down the street from the University.
Jona had introduced Andrews as a friend, and mentioned Murphy, who joined them shortly. Murphy, of course, gave every impression of being snappy and unhappy with anything and everything. Later in the day, on their way to the opera, Jona confided that both men were private detectives he had hired to provide personal security during their trip South. This was the cover story he was instructed to use whenever questions arose about the two agents.
Now, in the presence of both agents and Jona, Kohler was able to turn squarely towards Murphy with a gleam in his eye and a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I am sure you are curious, Herr Murphy, but with a purpose, no doubt. Dr. Lieb has already told me you are a private detective, hired to guide and guard him during his difficult journey. But, I am also sure...” Here, the professor paused for dramatic effect. “That you are not what you are said to be!”
Joe Murphy stared at Kohler with such intensity that his eyes appeared to erupt right out of their orbits. “And how is that, my dear Herr Maestro Perfesser?”
Kohler smiled at the barb and nodded triumphantly. “I believe you are both agents of the United States government, probably of your Federal Bureau division, and you are to conduct Jona safely to his destination and back.” He folded his hands on the table in a gesture of satisfaction.
Andrews leaned forward with a big smile. “Now, Professor Kohler, what would make you say that?”
“It’s obvious, really. Dr. Lieb is the son of one of the great men of our times, but a man who was a renegade to his native land. Indeed, some in the Southern country might view Earnest Lieb as a traitor. It might be tempting for some authorities in the government to detain Jona, perhaps even use him for some kind of perverse propaganda. Or, a hostage perhaps. Thus, having U.S. Federal agents as bodyguards would be logical. It would be doubly provocative to undertake anything against Jona with the two of you surrounding him at all times. So, Herr Murphy, I am sure that it is in fact necessary for you to know all about Fraulein Brunner, and about me, and about everything going on here. For your reports to your superiors, of course.” Kohler ran his hand through his sleek white hair and shook his head. “And besides,” he continued, “Jona could not possibly afford to hire two detectives with the salary he makes as an assistant to the Medical Examiner of New York, exalted though the position might be.”
An uncomfortable silence descended around the table. Jona shifted in his chair unhappily, and again felt the urge to strip out of his clothes and crawl into a hot bath. He felt the situation slipping out of his control.
Murphy took out a pack of cigarettes and held it out silently towards Elfieda. She nimbly retrieved a cigarette and held it to her lips while Murphy shook one out for himself. He gave her a light, lit up himself, and after taking a vigorous puff he drained a glass of vodka, then leaned towards her with a herculean sigh. “Well?”
“Well what, Monsieur FBI?” Her voice was melodious and low, subdued by the tobacco smoke.
“Well, what do you do?”
As if on cue, everyone around the table broke into thunderous laughter. Not tittering laughter, or the pleasant laughter that follows a bon mot or clever joke. No, this was bellowing laughter, staccato inhalations and exhalations, coming with great wheezes, gasps, yelps, snorts and stridorous noises that left the eyes tearing and the sides sore. Even Andrews joined in, unveiling himself briefly with riotous mirth.
Elfieda was the first to calm down sufficiently to speak. “Well, Mr. Murphy...”
“Please, lady, call me Joe.” Murphy was still rubbing his eyes vigorously with both hands as he chortled out the words.
“Well, Joe, if you must know, I am a writer.”
“Oh yeah? What kinda writer?”
“Mostly for magazines. Sometimes newspapers.” She hesitated slightly, peering towards Kohler.
Jona found himself staring at Elfieda. Sitting down, she seemed slimmer than before. Her hair was a dirty blond, set severely short under a red cloth cloche hat with an enormous white feather swooping around the side and down towards her neck. She wore a stunning black and red checkered swagger coat with a flurry of ruffled white silk showing at the neck. When she smiled at him, her thin nose crinkled, reminding him of a rabbit. And she seemed to smile at him often.
Murphy was relentless. “So, what newspaper do you write for?”
Elfieda again glanced quickly towards Kohler, who seemed to nod. She took a slow drag and tapped out some ash before answering, her mouth pouting upwards. “Mostly for Arbeiter Zeitung.”
Joe Murphy looked dazed for a moment, as if he had just been plunked between the eyes by a mallet. Andrews cocked his head inquiringly in the direction of Kohler and then turned to Elfieda. “I believe that’s a Socialist newspaper.”
“It’s practically a Commie rag.” Murphy’s jaw seemed to protrude involuntarily, making him appear as if he were ready to chew marbles. “We had an Arbeiter Zeitung in Chicago when I was growing up. They were nothing but a bunch of troublemakers. Filled people’s heads with crazy ideas. Hey, Perfesser, you have some strange friends, don’t you?”
“Yes, it might seem that way,” he responded calmly. “In fact, Elfieda is an important member of the influential ‘Proletarian Revolutionary Writers Union.’ Treasurer, I believe.”
Jona listened in disbelief. “What’s going on here? What about all that stuff you said earlier? About the Fuehrer being in charge of everything?” Elfieda looked straight ahead stolidly.
“It’s very clear, Dr. Lieb.” Andrews spoke in a calm, almost clinical tone. He picked up his seltzer water, slumped back into the couch, and crossed his legs. “So, Herr Professor, who does she report to? You? Unlikely. I bet, frauline, that you once reported directly to Party headquarters. Or maybe to those new people at the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the Gestapo. I would also presume that your spying activities are no longer needed. Now that the Nazis are the power of the land, they can arrest whomever they want whenever they want. The entire Proletarian Revolutionary Writers Union can be picked up tomorrow, if it hasn’t been already.”
Kohler was quick to respond. “If their activities are against the common good, why shouldn’t they be arrested? My friends, this is not the great and powerful United States. Please, look around you. We have lost a war. Almost three million of our best and brightest young men died in defeat. Millions of others disfigured forever. Parts of our country are still occupied by foreign troops, including the French, our ancient enemies. Because of the Allies and the war reparations they imposed on us, our economy is in a shambles, and both foreign and domestic revolutionaries are trying to undermine us. Our national identity, our culture, our virtue as a nation is at risk of annihilation. We are in peril every day. In a time of crisis, in a time of war, surely these difficult procedures are justified. You would do the same!” As he ended, his voice began to break with emotion.
Elfieda continued to look straight ahead in silence.
Jona was struck by something in her face. Sadness, perhaps, or perhaps shame, he couldn’t be sure. He was startled out of his thoughts by the abrupt blaring of horns and the thumping of a drum. A brass band, probably coming back from the Opernplatz, was beginning to play on the street right outside the bar’s broad window, and an exuberant crowd could be seen gathering around. It was lively music, and before long Jona found himself tapping his feet to the rhythm.
Murphy also seemed to be enjoying the music. Before long he began to clap his hands and whistle loudly. Patrons in the lounge began to stare, or turn away to keep from staring. “Hey, Perfesser, what do they call what they’re playing?”
“That is a song from long ago. From the time of the Kaiser. It is called ‘Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.’ “ Kohler smiled as he responded. Even he seemed to nod his head up and down to the sway of the tune. “I can see you are enjoying it. This is authentic German music!”
“Sure, I’m lovin’ it! It’s really great stuff. I’ve heard it before, ya see. We could hear it playing across the lines during the war. And after we beat the living shit outta you Krauts, we let the prisoners sing this little ditty as we marched them back to old Deutchy-land!”
Jona couldn’t restrain himself. “Mr. Murphy, you are out of line here. The professor is my friend.”
“Yeah, kid, but maybe you need some new friends. This guy is a dyed in the wool Nazi. As far as I can see, the whole bunch are dirty. Don’t you get contaminated.”
Suddenly, a hugely formed man in a pitch black leather coat erupted out of nowhere. With a loud grunt, he grabbed Murphy by the shoulder, spinning him around. Jona could see that the man’s face was plethoric, and his neck veins were engorged. He appeared quite drunk.
“Ich habe gehört was sie gesagt haben!” With an effort, he then snarled some words in broken English. “You haff no right to sprech like dat. I vas dere! I vas Frontsoldaten! In ze trench! Auch ich Kampfte im Krieg!”
Andrews sprang to his feet in a split second. “Look, my friend, we want no trouble here. My associate meant nothing personal.”
The intruder was not assuaged. He pointed to Murphy and then pointed with his index finger to his own forehead. “You crazy! Say sorry! Tschuldigen! Entschuldigen uns sofort! “
Murphy staggered to his feet. He smiled weakly at the intruder, spread his arms out wide, then gave a military salute and bellowed with stentorian clarity, “Fick dich!”
All hell was promptly released. The German swung a huge paw at Murphy, which he dodged adroitly, following with a knee to the man’s groin. Within seconds a general melee broke out. Several young Germans, some of them appearing to be students, rushed Murphy. In a flash, Andrews jumped up to cover his partner’s back. Tables overturned with loud crashes, glassware smashed on the floor with explosive cracks, and women’s screams were heard among the grunts and groans of the combatants. The bartender shouted out “Hör auf damit!” but no one paid heed and the mayhem continued despite his entreaty. Jona and Elfieda retreated rapidly towards the exit. Kohler followed, but moved slowly and almost grudgingly.
It was really no contest. Murphy and Andrews were trained fighters in top physical condition, and easily held their own against their assailants. Two of the Germans were sprawled on the floor unconscious within just moments. Someone came at Andrews with what looked like a rubber truncheon. He expertly dodged the blow and landed a crushing counter punch over the man’s forehead, dropping him like a felled tree. A chair was thrown at Murphy’s head. He caught it in mid-air, whirled it around his head, and then tossed it right through the adjacent windowpane. The window was shattered, sending glass shards flying outwards towards the band outside, which began to disperse very quickly.
Through the broken remains of the window the noise of the outside world gushed in, and a klaxon could be heard blaring out in the street. Kohler shouted out “Die Polizei kommt!”
With Kohler’s warning spinning through the frenzied sounds of the brawl, Andrews sprang around towards Jona with a look of urgency. “Dr. Lieb” he called, “you have to leave right now! The police must not find you here. The two of us will be fine. Please, leave now!”
Kohler grasped Jona by the elbow. “He is quite right. We should make our escape from here.”
Lieb hesitated. He needed little persuasion to leave, but at that very moment Joe Murphy fell to the floor in a heap under the weight of two brutish attackers. For a split second he considered throwing himself into the fray, perhaps by kicking one of the attackers, or pulling on their hair. Kohler tugged again, and Jona turned towards the doorway decisively, with Elfieda right behind. As they made their way hastily towards the hotel lobby he could hear someone, perhaps a woman, screaming with a shrill cry, “Toten sie ihn! Toten sie ihn!”
When they reached the elevators, Jona spoke to Kohler with a hoarse breathlessness. “Professor, what do you think we should do?” An enormous mob of curious, gaping onlookers thronged in the lobby, taking in the sights and sounds coming from the bar, just as if they were watching a heavyweight prize fight. The hiss and buzz of shouted, garbled conversation bounced around them, making it difficult to hear easily.
“There is only one thing for you to do, my friend. Go to your room immediately and lock the door. One of us will come to you when this is over.”
“But...” Jona turned back towards the tumult coming from the lounge.
“My dear Lieb, don’t be a fool. Anyone can see that your friends are professionals who are well able to take care of themselves. I will wait for the police and speak to them. Remember, I am a Party member and may have some influence. Rest assured, Herr Murphy and Herr Andrews will be fine. But, your status may be compromised if you are found to be involved in a bar room fight. It would be scandalous. Think of the lecture you are due to give at the University! Now, upstairs, go, quickly!”
Elfieda spoke for the first time in an eternity. “The professor is correct, Doctor. You must go.” She chanced a glance into Jona’s eyes, then turned towards Kohler.
The elevator operator held the doors open patiently and closed them quickly as soon as Jona entered. Just as they clicked shut he glimpsed uniformed police rushing into the lobby.
It was only then that Jona succumbed. His knees began to shake and he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to urinate. By the time he got out of the elevator he was barely able to make it to his room, and once inside he fell face first onto the bed. Exhaustion and fear coiled around him, choking the breath out of him and leaving him gasping. Unwanted images appeared before him like a kaleidoscope. He saw again the big man with the red beard sprawled on the pavement, heaving with the death rattle in his throat. He imagined his father lying still as stone encased within his casket. He saw...Marielle’s face swimming up to him as if arising from some unfathomable depth, her lips curling into a cry of terror...
He slept.
Hot mists exuded from the surface of the water, whirling, contracting and coalescing into floating, twisting vapors that condensed into beaded droplets on the walls and ceiling. All was silent, with the simple stillness found only in the predawn. Jona lay limp inside the steaming bath, motionless, mindless. He wanted only to float suspended within the warmth and allow the cleansing waters to wash away the wastes of the day.
All the silly boyishness that had embraced him at the thought of the great adventure he was to have was now replaced by the same sense of foreboding that had engulfed him before the start of the journey. Something was terribly wrong. Dangerously wrong.
He had awakened at his usual time, well before the touch of sunlight. He did not remember falling asleep. Repose had come quickly and stealthily, a quiet, cat-like actor stalking in the night, pausing for no whisperings or murmurings before the curtain’s fall. As he opened his eyes to the darkness, his mind turned immediately to Andrews, Kohler, and Murphy. No one had come to him during the night, and he had no idea what happened after he fled the lounge. Jona thought about going back downstairs to see for himself, but Kohler’s last instructions to him were to stay secluded in his room. And, the police were down there. Jona certainly didn’t want any trouble with them.
The bath both relaxed and deadened him, but something tugged at the back of his mind, gently, but persistently. He could not make it out, but the vague pull engaged his mind and brought him back into focus. The fracas in the bar was hours ago, undoubtedly broken up by the police when they arrived. Even after answering questions, the agents and the elderly professor should have been free of the whole affair long ago. I should have gone down there to help, he thought. An odd weight, a disturbance, pressed against him, gnawing silently. Dad would have stayed, he would never desert a friend like that. A friend should never be abandoned.
The weight on his mind lifted like a curtain. It was about his father. His father had been in his dreams, calling out something, no more than a disembodied voice speaking to him from an offstage location. How strange, Jona thought, how strange that dad is gone. Is he really gone? And then, with an involuntary shake of his head, I haven’t even thought about him in so long, but it feels like he’s still here.
In retrospect, it was peculiar that Kohler had not once brought up his father, despite their long acquaintance over so many years. Jona wondered idly how they had met and become friends. His father had never talked to him about Kohler, but they were similar in many ways. Both carried themselves with an austere reserve. Both possessed an enormous intellect. Both had great passion for their work. In some ways, Kohler, more than his father, was a man for all seasons, easily able to blend his insights regarding art, politics, music and history into any conversation. Jona genuinely liked him.
Whorls of steam swirled silently, creating a pearly mist. Jona felt his body melting into the limpid warmth of the water. He knew he should climb out of the tub and get dressed, but he hesitated, not wanting to emerge into the morning cold. The silence was broken only by small drops of water dripping from the faucet, each one striking a crystal-pure tone as it struck the bath. Jona listened intently, judging the timbre of each drop as it hit. It was not easy, but with each repetition he softly called out a note, as if reading from a musical score. This was just what Kohler had instructed him to do the other evening as they prepared for the opera.
“Jona, listen to each note,” he had said, “listen to each chord, to each theme. Train yourself to record what you hear. It will make music a second language for you!”
After their encounter at breakfast the previous morning, they arranged to meet in the early evening at the foot of the Schlossbrücke, just across from Museum Island. They walked leisurely down the broad, tree lined Unter den Linden to the opera house. Kohler was bubbling with enthusiasm, using his slender cane to point out the sights along the grand avenue. Jona was happy to be outside and away from his two escorts.
“Do you know Parsifal?” Kohler asked, his eyes twinkling as if he already knew the answer.
Lieb shook his head, feeling shamed that the work was completely unknown to him.
“It is a sacred story. Wagner composed it particularly to be performed at the annual festival in Bayreuth. He drew from many mythical elements, of course, but from the beginning he intended it to be a purely German parable.” The gray haired professor went on to describe the story line.
Jona found the tale to be confusing, obscure, and almost childish. As they walked, he scarcely listened while Kohler discoursed about castles, flower maidens, Knights of the Grail, and a spear with healing powers. It all sounded nonsensical. As they passed through the ornate atrium of the Stadtsoper, Jona found himself regretting that he was trapped by Kohler’s invitation, and as a result committed to an evening of boredom at the opera.
The performance proved to be magical. From the opening tones Jona was entranced, engulfed by the massive force of Wagner’s opus. Medieval characters flitted around a blackened, otherworldly stage, singing words from a libretto that Jona could barely hope to understand. Kohler was there beside him, whispering into his ear, explaining a symbolic movement or accompaniment. As the protagonist gradually evolved in mythical fashion from a simpleton into a heroic figure, Jona felt the power swell within himself as well. He imagined it was he who journeyed through darkened forests on an inscrutable mission, and it was he who carried with him the sacramental touch of healing and renewal.
As he lay in the bath, immersed in the warmth, stroking water idly over his thighs, Jona closed his eyes and attempted to reprise the climactic third act. He could visualize the players and scenes, but recalled very few of the words. At one point Kohler nudged him to attention as Parsifal was shown undergoing his heroic metamorphosis. “Listen Jona,” he whispered in a reverent tone, “Listen to the sounds of the ostinato bells as Parsifal is transformed! Can you hear the notes? Glorious! C...G...A...E.” Jona remembered, and intoned the notes to himself, while the sound of droplets striking water echoed in the porcelain room, each successive drop also sounding C…G…A…E.
As he mumbled aloud, he thought he could hear something for just a moment, an acoustic accident perhaps, a murmuring in the distance. He closed his eyes and listened intently, straining to hear. Words came to him, confused and with no pattern. At first, it was as if Goebbels were shouting at him, in loud brass at a shrieking pitch. Then, he could feel the mob moving towards the bonfire flames as they shouted incoherently, their drums beat-beat-beating a steady cadence in the night. Kohler was there, reading poetry to the gentle, drawn out sound of a flute, merging with the steady strum of years and years gone by, evaporating and condensing, breathing words of marvel and regret. Somewhere among the whispers, words began to coalesce and cohere, and then Jona remembered, remembered what came to him through the notes and rhythms and sounds and swellings, remembered the words wrung out from his memory, whooshing into his awareness through whorls of haze:
Mein Vater
Hochgesegneter
du Helden
The words called for him to join his father in death, just as Parsifal had wished. As the lines melted into his mind, they deposited a complex alloy of feelings and memories. Jona drifted away, as if hovering on a distant horizon, events and moments streaming by with lightning speed, overcoming the current of time and place. Abruptly, without warning, a wandering thought struck him like a stray beam of light: Was dad really a hero? The question sprang into being out of nothing, fully grown and armored as if ready for a dark and primitive combat. Of course he was. Millions owed their lives to him. An image flashed before him, of children all over the world coughing violently as they hid under their bed covers. Earnest Lieb helped to save them, didn’t he? He acted nobly, didn’t he? He was a hero, wasn’t he? The vision receded quickly, as if turning into an alleyway to hide among the shadows.
Jona took a deep breath, sat straight up, and struggled to his feet. The sound of water streaming from his body struck the bath like a cannonade, energizing him into action. I should sit right down and write a report to Churchill, he thought. He will want to know what I’ve seen here for his...uhm...Jona stopped in mid-thought. I really have no idea why Churchill wants any kind of report, about Germany or anything else. My God, why the fuss over the Nazis! What’s he so worried about, anyway? A few things might be extreme, but these people are just trying to find their way. Just trying to get by. The whole Jewish thing is just an aberration. He should talk to Kohler, then he would understand. I’ll put that in the letter.
After throwing on a bath towel, Jona ambled dutifully to a small desk in the corner of the room. He flicked on the desk lamp and sat down to pen and paper. He wrote furiously fast, feeling the need to get dressed:
My dear Sir Winston:
I am writing you from the very heart of the Nazi regime, and I can report that all here is transformed …
A soft tapping at the door interrupted him. He turned excitedly and rushed to answer. At last. Andrews, or perhaps Kohler had come to him. Finally, some fresh news about the aftermath of the previous night’s debacle in the bar. Jona swung the door open quickly.
Elfieda Brunner stood in the doorway. She glanced him over quickly, a bemused smile on her lips. “Good morning, Herr Doctor.”
“Frauline!” Jona tried not to collapse from embarrassment and placed both hands firmly on the edges of the towel tied around his waist. He gave every appearance of wanting to shrink into it. “Why are you here? I mean, where are the others?”
She stood her ground in the doorway, gazing intently into Jona’s eyes. “I am very sorry, Dr. Lieb, your friends have been arrested. They have all been taken away by the police. I thought you would want to know.”
It took a few moments for Jona to assimilate what she said. “But where are they? How are they? How do I find them?”
“I cannot be sure where they were taken. But it was the regular police who made the arrest, not Gestapo or SA. Don’t worry, they’re not in danger of disappearing. Your friends and the Professor can be found with the correct inquiries. You will have to contact your embassy to assist.”
“What happened after I left?”
Elfieda shrugged her shoulders. Her coat was now unbuttoned, revealing a blouse of silk foulard that fell in ruffles down to her waist. Her eyes gleamed in the relative darkness of the hallway.
“What you might expect. The police apprehended your two bodyguards and the Germans involved in the fight. Six or seven altogether, I think. Your friend Mr. Murphy is quite rude, by the way. He is fortunate the police treated him in a civil manner. The professor tried hard to save the situation, but he was picked up as well. He tried to order the police away, but that just made them more angry.”
Elfieda paused a moment, opened her purse, and retrieved a cigarette. She gave Jona an expectant look as she placed it at the very edge of her lips. Jona stared at her as if stuporous. “And what about you, Miss? How did you get away?”
“Well...” For a very brief instant, she gave a look of irritation, and then composed herself rapidly. “I did not go back into the lounge with the professor after we left you. I stayed outside...It would be awkward for me to be arrested...You understand, because of my situation.” Elfieda tossed her head gently, as if shaking out her hair.
Jona stood in the doorway dumbly, staring as if transfixed by the cigarette dangling from Elfieda’s mouth. He felt a hint of cold sweeping in from the hallway but made no move to retreat into the warmth of his room. Elfieda slumped slightly, resting her hip firmly against the doorjamb, and coolly removed the unlit cigarette from her lips. She came closer by straddling the threshold, placing one leg forward. A faint aroma of admixed tobacco and lilac twisted through the air. Her lips parted slightly as her mouth stretched into a silky smile.
“Well, Jona, aren’t you going to invite me in?”