Another Green World (32 page)

The morning would be sunny, the treetops east of the castle gleaming like emerald cobblestones, the tile-roofed houses of Seitenroda neatly arranged as toys in a well-run nursery, the River Saale rushing as swift and full as the night's last dream.

The German boy, Hagen von Ewigholz, delivered his warning to Isaac in person over the midday meal, which was Isaac's usual breakfast.
They must know you have come here
, he said, or words to that effect.
I myself could guess where you had gone, and I am only young, so they must know as well, for they are older and more clever than I.
That was how the kid talked, in careful, schoolboy's English. Under other circumstances, it would have had appreciable charm.

Afterward, naturally, there was more talk, too much of it, breaking out finally into open argument. Plans were proposed and rejected and finally settled upon, decisions taken and instantly regretted. There were partings, vows, prophecies, promises, irreverent asides. Embraces and tears and drollery. Butler striding about, giving someone instructions about the horses, counting out mark notes. Anton jotting an entry in the guest book. Isaac giving Frau Möhring the finger. Ingo staring hard at Saint Sebastian, until Martina walked over and touched him on the arm. The look in his eyes then. Hagen in the background, half noticed, spectral, until his abrupt declaration—
I will go with you, I know this area quite well, there are paths I can show you—
taking everyone by surprise. Isaac apologizing and Frau Möhring bestowing forgiveness, as people always would. Käthe arriving from the
Bahnhof
barely in time to bid them farewell. And Martina…

But she had no image of herself from that day. No clear memory of what she'd done or said, how she'd felt, what position she'd taken in the long debate over what to do. Already, perhaps, she was torn between the onrushing future and the fast-receding past. When all was said and done, she probably could have stayed forever in that falling-down castle. Leaky roof, cold floors, frightful plumbing and all.

*    *    *

august 1944

Grabsteen's face was red from shouting. The woman partisan, Petra, tried to maintain her air of stoic indifference, but he wasn't making it easy for her. Her fingers slowly tightened around the tommy gun that dangled from her shoulder.

“You must take us to your headquarters,” Grabsteen yelled at her. “I demand to see your commander. You must take us
immediately.
And I'm not talking about some little field camp. I'm talking about the place where orders are given. Are you hearing me? If you don't understand English, go fetch the other one. That Shuvek person.”

Eddie tried to calm him. “If she doesn't understand English—”

“She
does
understand! Can't you see it? Look at her eyes.”

By this time the commotion had attracted the other two partisans, posted as sentries up and down the trail. These men in their ragtag clothing, coats sagging with ammunition and grenades, stood hesitantly at the edge of the encampment. Evidently the task of dealing with the Americans had been assigned to the woman alone.

“Shuvek will come soon” is all she would say.

“That's not good enough,” said Grabsteen. “I'm sorry, but we can't afford to wait any longer. Our people are being murdered while we stand here. It's vital that we proceed with our mission, with or without your Shuvek.” He glanced at Martina, then away. “And with or without our Miller. Now, I'm going to head up that trail, and I'm going to make for the Polish border. On the way, I intend to find a radio and make contact with… some people who can help us.”

“That's just crazy,” said Bloom.

“Is it? Just a Hollywood stunt, huh? Something only a crazy Jew would think of? Try to take action—to
move
, to
strike—
instead of just, be sensible, don't get excited, just sit there, we'll take care of everything, can't you see the President is a busy man?”

“Save it for your contributors, Rabbi. That crap doesn't flush with me.”

“Without Ingo,” Martina pointed out, “there is no mission. He's the whole point of it. The only one the Fox will trust—remember? We've been over and over this.”

“Indeed.” Grabsteen turned his anger on her. “And the more we go over it, the less willing I am to swallow it. This operative, this so-called Fox— nobody's even certain who he is.
You
say he's your friend, but the odds are pretty strong he's not even American. The analysts I've spoken to believe that in all probability he's a Silesian Jew who went underground in 1939,
and has been fighting the Nazis ever since. Naturally such a man would take great pains to obscure his real identity—in order, among other reasons, to protect any surviving relatives from reprisals. He operates independently of the ZOB, which is smart—look what's happened to the rest of them. It's thought he receives minor support from the Jewish Brigade in the Ukraine, but of course you can't trust the Russians to tell the truth about something like that. From all we've been able to learn—”

“We
meaning who?”

“We meaning Agudas and certain well-placed overseas contacts. You'll understand why I can't be more specific. This Fox has managed, nobody knows how, to live off the land, right through the occupation, in one of the most venomously anti-Semitic places on Earth.”

“All that aside—”

“Wait, I'm not finished. What I'm telling you is that nowhere, in any intelligence I've been privy to, is there a
hint
that the Fox has maintained ties, even distant or indirect ties, with any person or organization in the United States. Not with you, not with anti-Nazi groups, not with distant aunts or cousins, and
damn
sure not with some goy bartender at a second-rate uptown saloon.”

Martina glared at him a few moments, then made a game attempt to shrug it off. “You don't know everything, Harv. Neither do your well-placed overseas contacts. No matter what you guys think.”

“I'm afraid I have to agree,” said Stu, who'd been uncharacteristically quiet through all this. “It doesn't make sense. Let's think: how did this whole business get started? It started with a personal message from the Fox, delivered to Miller and Martina via an old pal of theirs, some left-wing journalist. Miller was singled out by name. ‘The only one I trust,’ or some such thing.”

“Well, of course he was—and quite an artful gambit, wouldn't you say? Because this deflected our attention from the true target of the communication.”

Stu shook his head. “
What
true target? Who, and why?”

Grabsteen pointed a finger in Martina's face. “The target was
her.
A publicly recognized official of the United States War Refugee Board. Hence, a point of access to the Roosevelt administration. The purpose of this entire scheme is to involve the American government, to bring a Washington insider here, into occupied territory, to witness firsthand the crimes of the Nazis—thus to make it impossible for Roosevelt to claim ignorance or to remain personally uninvolved. It's an immensely clever plan, and the only shame is, it was hatched a couple years too late.”

A few moments passed during which everyone considered this. Eddie was the first to speak.

“It still doesn't add up, I don't think. Even if what you say is true—the Fox was aiming at Martina, so as to bring the government in—well, that proves that the guy
must
be her old friend, right? Because who else could possibly know about their mutual connection with a private citizen named Ingo Miller? Unless you think, what—somebody's gotten hold of their high school yearbook?”

“Oh, I don't know.” Grabsteen's mouth curled into a mean smirk. “Let's imagine that somebody—it could've been anyone—happened to stumble across the April 1930 issue of
Harper's Bazaar
? Eh, Miss Panich?”

She rolled her eyes. It wasn't enough, she thought, that Butler's damned article, when it finally appeared, had made her the object of scandal and notoriety—and, she supposed now, secret envy—among her college set. There she was, portrayed to all the world as a dizzy, big-mouthed brunette whose chief function, story-wise, was that of a typical Hemingway gal: a convenient and adoring sexual accessory for the hard-drinking, two-fisted hero. Even Ingo had come across as a more compelling figure. And so, of course, had Isaac.

“Did your well-placed overseas contacts dig that up for you?” she asked Grabsteen. “Or did you manage to find it all by yourself?”

“What's the difference? The point is, anyone reading that article and making the connection between
that
Martina Panich and
this
one—it's hardly a common name—would know everything they needed in order to push the right buttons. Names, relationships, personalities. Every little quirk and foible.”

“Not every one. Not even Butler knew—” She caught herself; though really, it was a bit late to acquire the habit of discretion. “You know what, Harv? Sometimes a cigar really
is
a cigar. Maybe not in the circles
you
move in, but sometimes, if a person says he'd like to see so-and-so, it's because so-and-so is who he wants to see. End of story.”

“That is utter crap, and you know it. Why would a man like this Fox— no matter who he is—want to see a man like Ingo Miller?”

“I guess you'd have to ask them about that, wouldn't you?” she said, scoring a small point. Then the afterthought struck her:
If we ever see either of them again.

Bloom pushed forward. “None of this makes—excuse me, Marty—a fucking bit of difference, does it? The only thing that matters is, we're stuck here till Shuvek gets back. I'd suggest we all sit down—”

“No!” shouted Grabsteen. “I am
not
sitting down. I am moving onward
right now. W
ith or without,” he added, turning to gesture at the woman partisan, “this fool's cooperation.”

“Without it you won't get very far,” Stu said mildly.

“No? Then
you
try communicating with her, why don't you? I've done everything I can think of. It's like talking to a rock.”

Martina had forgotten about Timo. He'd become all but invisible since the plane landed, as though some Serbian instinct for furtiveness had reawakened in him. She didn't notice him now, really, except as a shadow moving at the edge of her vision. Perhaps she felt the slightest flicker of curiosity—what's
he
up to?— but certainly not alarm. Nothing like that, not until Timo raised his gun and blew the first man's head apart.

By the time she turned her head, the second partisan's eyes were wide in terror. Almost instantly they vanished in a burst of scarlet as his face split open like a water balloon.

Timo spun, aiming his rifle at Petra. She was gripping her PPD, but Timo's left eye was already squeezed shut and his right peering down the barrel, which was perfectly steady and pointed straight at the woman's heart. “Ask her again,” he said. “I think you will find she understands much better.”

Martina thought she might vomit. Or else shriek like a madwoman and strangle Timo with her bare hands. She waited for someone—Bloom, Grabsteen, sensible Eddie—to react in some coherent way. But everyone stood there, as stunned as she was. Everyone except Petra, whose face merely showed a passing sadness, or perhaps disappointment.
Why wasn't I able to stop this?

In the end, Martina watched dumbly, her knees wobbling beneath her, as Grabsteen said something quietly, his head inclined toward Petra's ear. Martina didn't catch what it was, her own grasp of English seemed to have left her, but she saw the woman nod. There was no discernible expression on her face—only a profound weariness so deeply ingrained in her features that it was part of her being. Petra turned up the path and began walking.

“Should we take her gun?” said Grabsteen. It was not clear whom he was asking, and at first no one responded.

“I shouldn't bother,” said Timo, reslinging his rifle. “There won't be any more trouble. Not from that one.” Then he bent quickly and began stripping the dead bodies of weapons and grenades, dropping everything into a rucksack.

Wordlessly, they moved up the trail. The woman leading them never looked back. Maybe that's the secret, thought Martina.

3 NOVEMBER 1944

T
he place was not what Butler had expected. It was not, after all, a fetid and smoldering city of the dead. For months now, since the Red Army slugged its way onto Polish soil, Butler had been horribly titillated by reports of a so-called Nazi death camp near Lublin, an old university town whose chief distinction heretofore had been its exceptional concentration of Catholic churches, said to be the greatest in Central Europe. That changed at the end of July when Konstantin Simonov, sometime novelist, landed a sensational story in
Pravda
about a facility known as KZ-Majdanek, where—so he claimed— upward of one million Jews had been “exterminated”: poisoned by gas, then burned in industrial-scale crematoria. Similar reports came thick and fast from all the Soviet papers.
Red Star
ran a shot of two captured SS guards taken shortly before their execution, standing in a vegetable garden among enormous heads of lettuce, grown, the caption explained, in a mixture of manure and the ashes of murdered Jews.

It was a pornography of evil. The public was mesmerized. Butler as well. Yet the Western press made next to nothing of the whole affair, deeming it, apparently, something cooked up by Soviet propagandists. Red meat for the masses. Well, who knew? Butler, however—who knew something about propaganda and its reigning
auteurs—
believed the stories to be true, more or less. True enough.

In mid-August, Marshal Rokossovsky—indignant that the word of his officers should be doubted—had invited a select pool of Western correspondents to tour the site. They were chosen for “credibility,” which is to say the likelihood their stories would run in leading periodicals, especially in America. Butler's widely known pro-Red leanings ruled him out. But a few weeks later, on a rare visit to Moscow, he bumped into Alexander
Werth, the
Sunday Times
man, at the bar of the Hotel Lux, that grubby mecca of expatriates on Gorki Street.