The Children's War (117 page)

He smiled at her uncomplicated response, returned her salutation, and drank to her toast. “But,” he replied after he had swallowed, “it’s not one for us. The kid is in their camp.”

“Well, steal it back!” she suggested with the casualness born of a happy alcoholic glow. “Why not? They take our kids all the time. And this one is one of ours anyway.”

“Why not,” he repeated somewhat more seriously. Save the child from a life as a Nazi. Why not?

They talked in great detail for several hours about the Vogels and his life with them. Once Barbara realized he wanted to talk, she quite openly asked for details and listened with rapt attention to everything he had to say. And she talked freely about her own life—her weird life under the ground, as she put it. “My parents don’t understand us, they think their children are strange, part of the elite,” she said, using the word as though it had gained a special significance among the denizens of the encampment.

She reminded him of Zosia when he first knew her, when she did not judge him so harshly. He smiled at Barbara’s openness, hugged her to keep her upright as she slipped into drunkenness. She clung to him, moaning or singing softly to herself as she put her hands into his coat to warm them. Finally, after swearing her to secrecy, he decided it was time to see her back to her room before she fell asleep in the woods, so he walked her home and delivered her safely into her parents’ arms. They looked at him rather curiously but did not ask any questions. They were both low-ranking—her father did maintenance work, her mother cooked in the mess—and neither felt comfortable questioning Colonel Król’s husband about why he was delivering their daughter home, hours later than her shift ended, and in such a state of drunkenness.

He muttered an incoherent explanation and then returned to his bed to sleep for a few hours in peaceful forgetfulness.

45

“Y
ES,
I
AGREE,
Peter shouldn’t stay in our flat. It’ll be crowded enough with you and Joanna here.” Alex’s voice emerged from a small box set on the table on which Zosia was sitting.

“I was thinking more that we don’t want him associated with us,” she explained.

“Oh, that won’t be a problem. He’ll be surrounded by hundreds of Americans—why should two more make a difference?”

“So, I’m going to be an American?”

“If anything. I don’t see why you’ll be discussed at all. Anyway, as my relatives, you’re safe from retribution for any action taken under my auspices.”

“I realize that. I also don’t think they’ll imagine anybody who has made it safely to America would ever want to go back. I was thinking more along the lines of my undercover work. Say somebody in Berlin is assigned to go through the publicity photos where I happen to be present, and there I am in Berlin pretending to be somebody’s wife or something!”

“We’ll make sure you’re not present. And you two shouldn’t see that much of each other anyway. You’re going to be in D.C. a good part of the time, aren’t you?”

“Yes, it’s a great opportunity to do business—what with the British picking up the tab and all. But what about surveillance photos?”

“Their network here is pretty pathetic—mostly some amateurs from the brethren associations. They’re more likely to heckle Peter—that’s the level they work best at. Anyway, I have confidence in your masquerading abilities, my dear.”

Zosia wrinkled her nose in amusement at the term. She swung her legs back and forth as she sat on the table, pressing the little buttons that let her converse with her father. Alex continued, “But, honey, why are you fretting so much? You know how to take care of yourself.”

“Oh, I think it’s Peter. He’s so jittery about this, he’s got even me seeing ghosts.”

“What isn’t that boy jittery about?”

“Once burned, twice shy.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie. Nobody’ll link you to him. We’ll put him in a hotel, on his own. I managed to get the Brits to promise to pay for that as well.”

“How about some spending money? He’ll need to look around and buy things—you know, in order to better present himself.”

“I’ll do my best to wring more hard currency out of them,” Alex replied after some hesitation. “But I don’t hold out much hope for their cooperation.”

“Why not?” She waited as the answer wended its way through the ether.

“Well, apparently, there’s a strong movement for them to dissociate themselves from us. Seems they think we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell—and they don’t want to be dragged down with us. As they put it, twenty years of independence in the past two hundred is not much to pin one’s hopes on. They assume our culture is on the verge of annihilation and our people will soon be extinct or totally assimilated.”

“What about the eight hundred years of statehood prior to that?” Zosia asked huffily.

There was silence and Zosia guessed her father had resorted to shrugging, then realizing his listener would not hear that response, he said, “Well, if you’ll excuse the phrase, I think they are indulging in realpolitik. They’re not the majority, but I can understand where they are coming from. They view their own position as weak but salvageable—hoping to gain some concessions from Berlin, maybe autonomy. Cultural rights, education in English, the usual—sort of on the Flemish model. They know there is no hope of our ever being given any of that—not with the current bunch of ideologues in power. Besides, half our country is in Soviet hands and the NAU is currently trying to cozy up to them. Anyway, they figure they’re in better shape negotiating alone, and to prove some measure of loyalty to Berlin, they want to dissociate themselves from us. We’re considered to be extremists and all that has occurred in our land is—they say— our own fault for not cooperating. I’ve even heard some of the more extreme of them refer to our Carpathian exclusion zone as a ‘terrorist-controlled zone.’ ”

Zosia winced. “But you say they’re not a majority.”

“No, I’d guess not, but nobody is, really. Ever since the hard-liners gained the upper hand after Braun’s death, there’s been utter chaos among the strategists here. These so-called Conciliators are the only ones who have a consistent and convincing line right now. The other English factions are in complete disarray— united only in their belief that the Conciliators are would-be traitors. The Polish contingent has been spared that to some extent since the Nazis so kindly ruled out the possibilities of collaboration or conciliation for us. Since we turned down that anticommunist alliance with them at the beginning, they’ve made our decisions easy—fight or die.”

“And we’re dying,” Zosia could not refrain from saying.

“Yes, I’m afraid so—soon we’ll just be another historical footnote. We need action—whereas the Western powers, and especially the Brits, they have time to come to some better solution. And the NAU, well, it’s hard to convince people to die or even pay money for someone else’s pipe dreams of nationhood and survival. I’m afraid that as long as we keep insisting on not disappearing quietly, we’re a bit of an embarrassment to them all. A lot of politicians just wish we’d go away so they can ignore Nazism’s meaner aspects and deal with the Germans as
just another political force. Every time we make a noise about mass murder, starvation, deprivation, et cetera—well, we’re just spoilers.

“That’s where Peter’s so important. We’ve got to make them see that the various groups targeted so far are not all special cases. First the Jews, Gypsies, political inconvenients, religious types, and invalids, then they move on to groups that had possessed statehood prior to the war—us and our neighbors and then . . . It’s obvious, there’s no particular reason for them to stop.”

“But they’ve never professed a desire to annihilate the British. At least not consistently,” Zosia countered.

“Ah, yes, and their word has been worth so much in the past!” Alex’s voice took on a bitter edge.

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

“I know, and I know that everyone else thinks they won’t be next. It’s our job to make them think that they will—our survival depends on it; it’s irrelevant whether we’re right or wrong at this juncture. If they’re not clever enough to find some relevance in the fact that the Reich is murdering us, then we’ll make it relevant to them in other ways. Again—that’s where your husband comes in. We’re getting his travel money from the anti-Conciliation factions—they’re hoping he’ll prove that it can happen to anyone and that the Reich has no intention of treating anyone equitably.”

“Just as I’ve always said!” Zosia could not stop herself from saying. “But it’s the
anybody
part I’m worried about. The Americans will assume he was a criminal, everyone does. How do you think we should redo his history?”

“Well, he’s going to have to mention the Underground, otherwise you’re right, disappearing like he did will make him look like he joined the criminal underground, and as honorable as that may be, we don’t want to confuse our audience. Besides, it will make him more heroic. Freedom fighter, et cetera. He should just stick to the Halifax name and story—abandoned as a babe, raised in an orphanage. Then say he was adopted at eight or so and his adoptive parents were arrested when he was twelve, at which point he was on his own. That’ll work, won’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose.” Zosia tried out the story in her mind, began to fill in details for later use.

“At that point, he should stick with the German-documented history. He can join the Underground at sixteen—that’ll explain his sudden disappearance. From then on, he can pretty much tell the truth, just the names are changed to protect the innocent.”

“Why even have his parents arrested? Why not stick with his documents all the way through to sixteen?”

“Pathos. We need that lone-kid-standing-on-the-street-corner imagery. Very, very powerful image. Beats the hell out of his arrest as an adult.”

“I see. But the Germans might spot the inconsistency.”

“So? What are they going to do, complain? Ask for equal time? If they grumble
about that, it will only serve to verify everything else. Oh, yeah, that reminds me; have him change that Allison thing. Make her his wife, dump her husband from the picture.”

“Why not leave her out altogether?”

“Same reason, love interest—makes him more human. But make her his wife or at least fiancóe. We don’t want him to be too human!”

“All right. That only leaves one thing he’s worried about: he still assumes that the English might assassinate him as a presumed traitor. What should we tell him about that?”

There was a longish pause and Zosia wondered if they had lost the connection, but then Alex spoke. “Well, tell him I gave them the Halifax name and they didn’t recognize it as one of their own. Their only information on that name is the information that the Germans hold in their files—presumably when he was supposed to destroy those papers, they wiped all information about that identity from their records.”

“So I’ll tell him he can use that name without them linking it to Yardley or Chase or anyone else.”

“Exactly.”

“But once they hear his story, he thinks someone is sure to make the connection.”

“Tell him the history of that incident is sure to be safely buried in diplomatic files and long ago forgotten.”

“But there are people who would recognize him on sight as Yardley. He wants to know how to stop them from denouncing him as a traitor,” Zosia explained.

“Tell him his story will speak for itself, and besides, it would be politically disastrous for them to attack him. Tell him to stop fretting, he’ll be safe.”

“Maybe we should just tell him the truth?”

“No! For God’s sake, Zosia, it’s taken this much to bring him this far! That could blow everything.”

“I may have blown it anyway.”

“How so? What’s happened?”

Zosia paused.“Nothing really. Look, don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. Don’t worry.”

“Please do that. I’m really banking on him now. And it was your idea in the first place!”

“I knew you’d remind me of that if things didn’t work out.” She laughed. “I’m going to work on sorting everything out today, don’t worry.”

“What did happen? Why the big upset? Did you lose your temper?”

“It was nothing, really nothing. Just newlywed stuff, that’s all.”

“Good. Well, get to work on him, girl. You’ve got what you asked for, now deliver the goods.”

“Yes, sir! Daddy sir!” Zosia laughed and signed off.