Flowers From Berlin (16 page)

"Them's fighting words!" Elmer exploded, leaping upward from his barstool, his fists raised like a pair of gnarled
.
potatoes. Two sailors quickly interceded before Elmer split up with laughter. Then the rest of the sailors realized that Elmer's rage had only been a lonely old man's sense of fun.

Someone else paid for his drink and Elmer watched the young men play darts. He fell appreciatively silent for the rest of the evening.

What a funny bunch of people these Brits were, Elmer was thinking. Motorcycles and sidecars from Detroit. Machine guns from Illinois packed fifty to a crate. The English were bolstering their ground defenses for a possible invasion from Europe. And Roosevelt, in defiance of every tenet of the Neutrality Act of 1937, was sneaking weapons to them.

*

Two nights later, Elmer told Billy Pritchard more about the secret telephone. It was a public booth located a short walk from Reilly's, up a hill toward the old truck route beyond Red Bank's downtown. The telephone did not work right and you could call anywhere in American for a pocketful of aluminum slugs. The telephone was near an all-night diner, Elmer said, which had failed when the new truck route was built east of the town.

"I don't believe it," Billy Pritchard answered, disconsolate and half drunk. "It's bull."

"I'll show you."

Ensign Pritchard studied the old man, wanting to believe. "Ah, go on. . ." he scoffed a second time.

"All right," grumbled Elmer. "If you don't want to talk to your folks, it's no skin off my ass."

"Okay. Show me the booth," Billy Pritchard said.

They left together and no one missed them.

The old man guided Billy up a steep incline several blocks from Reilly's. The incline followed a back street upon which the lighting was poor. There was no traffic and Elmer was always a step or two ahead. But sure enough, at the crest of the hill there was a telephone booth, standing like a lonely sentry at the edge of a dark parking lot. The diner that Elmer had mentioned was no more than a burned-out skeleton of an enterprise that served its last lukewarm hash before the stock market crash.

Billy Pritchard looked around. They were easily a mile from the old truck route and only a few yards from the wooded end of a public park. The place, Pritchard now noticed, was eerie.

"I still think you're full of crap, old man," Billy Pritchard said hotly. "What are you up to?"

"Do you see a telephone or not?"

"I see a telephone," he admitted. "Does it work?"

"Try it, you young jerk!"

The old man seemed not quite as bent over as he had seemed earlier, and although Pritchard was breathing hard from the climb, Elmer wasn't. Pritchard stared him eye-to-eye and suddenly came away with a queer sensation. Elmer's blue eyes were glaring now and filled with some intense emotion. The youth couldn't recognize it. Anger? Impatience? He did not know. He only knew that the glare put him off—scared him, almost—and Elmer's hand was in his coat pocket jangling something. Slugs, Pritchard assumed.

"Go ahead! Try it!" Elmer ordered.

The young officer turned, still trying to decipher the look in Elmer's eyes. Then, just as he faced the telephone, Pritchard realized what he had seen.

The eyes were not the glazed eyes of an older man. In the natural light, Pritchard had seen what the dimness of the bar had always hidden. Elmer's eyes were the piercing, intense eyes of a younger man. Much younger. The realization stabbed Pritchard like a stiletto. Pritchard began to turn, but suddenly the cold rough grasp of a bicycle chain was around his neck and Siegfried was pulling the young naval officer backward.

The chain had been knotted at the center, forming a murderous chunk of metal that could crush any Adam's apple and throttle any larynx or windpipe. The hands on the chain were powerful and Pritchard knew he would have only a few seconds to fight.

He flailed at his attacker. He kicked and twisted. He was not weak. He landed several blows of the elbow to Siegfried's body. None slowed the killer. Siegfried only clutched more tightly, as if he were trying to snap Billy Pritchard's neck in half. The youth's head was throbbing. His eyes felt as if they would spurt out of his head.

Pritchard managed to twist just enough to face his executioner. From a distance of inches, he saw the firmness and muscle of the flesh. He saw that the gray complexion was from powder of some sort, rubbed deeply into the crevices around the nose, eyes, and mouth. He saw that the lines were from a pencil. The gray hair, he now assumed, was a dye.

Who. . . ? Pritchard wondered insanely. Why. . . ?

With a final spasm of effort, Pritchard hammered at his assailant's ribs, pounded with an elbow, and brought a knee upward toward the man's genitals. But the killer blocked Pritchard's fists with his forearms. He stopped the knee with his thigh. And all the time, the chain tightened like a steel tentacle around the young ensign's throat.

Billy Pritchard's brain coursed with obscenities. His eyes felt as if they would explode. Then everything was fading and Billy felt terribly weak.

He thought of home in Ohio. . . . He fancied he was on his way there.

Then everything was black.

Working by moonlight, Siegfried stripped the young sailor of his uniform, then dragged the corpse fifty feet into a wooded area where he already had prepared a shallow grave. He laid the body in it and covered it with dirt. He dragged several branches and broken brambles into place across the grave.

Siegfried returned to Newark by car. As was usual, he quietly entered his rooming house through a rear door. He was unobserved. He removed the dye from his hair and the makeup from his face. He shaved.

Then he slept, secure in the knowledge that sometimes great sacrifices or odious deeds were necessary in order to perpetuate a far greater good.

It was the great new Aryan state, after all, that was important. Not the individual. Adolf Hitler thought that, preached that, and said that. And Siegfried believed it.

FOURTEEN

A special terror struck Siegfried when he reached the quiet, winding corridor that led to the engine room of the
HMS Adriana
. He stood in Billy Pritchard's white uniform, a black bag in his hand, and he waited, like a sentry frozen in place, to hear the slightest sound of a footfall.

There was none. But the terror convulsed him nonetheless.

How foolish his gambit suddenly seemed! He had no cover story and no weapon. His black bag carried only the evidence of his purpose there. He had only this sizzling anger toward those morons in Berlin.

Discover what you can concerning the Adriana . . . !

The fools. They would take him seriously in the future. Berlin would have no choice. His shirt was clinging to his ribs. “Come on! Move!”he told himself. “Keep standing in one place and you're nothing but a target.”

He stepped into a large communal toilet room and watched the corridor in the mirror. He calmed slightly. Everyone was on the top deck or in the yard. One of the last warm days of August, Siegfried mused. Well, if these Brit sailors liked heat, wait till they tasted Siegfried's latest device.

When there was no sound or movement in any direction, he crossed six feet of corridor and entered the deserted engine room. Two huge turbines, gray and ponderous and bracketed by all sorts of filthy black pipes, loomed in the center of the chamber. Somewhere in the distant background a large generator hummed, providing the Adriana's alternate power while the ship was docked. The twin turbines were silent.

Just perfect, Siegfried thought to himself. Now move again! Are you waiting for a confrontation? Do you want to be arrested?

Siegfried stepped between the two turbines and studied them. Yes, he grinned, one good bomb located between them would disable the vessel.

Siegfried looked across the concrete floor. His bomb was about twelve inches long and nine inches thick. He had to leave it somewhere where it would not be found, perhaps for several days. The device was Siegfried's most ingenious. It was keyed with nitroglycerin and would be detonated by combustible heat and the severe rocking motion of the ship once the turbines were working again, and once the Adriana was at sea. No one in the engine room, Siegfried mused idly, stood a chance. But where to place it? It had to be between the turbines and out of sight. There wasn't anyplace.

Or was there?

Siegfried eyed the area carefully. The hand on the black bag was soaking. His heart pounded. The two turbines were flush to the concrete floor. But between them was a sheet of steel, elevated about eighteen inches above the concrete. The steel formed a platform that would boost a man of normal height just enough to reach the top of the turbines. Then Siegfried was on his hands and knees, flush against the floor, peering underneath into the dark crawl space between the steel and the concrete.

A wave of claustrophobia splashed across him. He shuddered. Was there no other place? No, there wasn't. He removed his cap and tucked it into the black bag. Then he came to another brutalizing realization. He would have to mount the bomb against the underside of the steel to assure that it would blow directly upward. To do that, he would need to lift his arms. So Siegfried turned onto his back. He edged his way under the steel platform, squirming deeper, farther into the darkness until he had a creeping sense of being in some tomb, estranged from the rest of the world, a steel and concrete coffin.

He edged ten feet, fifteen feet, twenty feet under the platform, pulling his bag along with him. His whole uniform was soaked. And filthy! He hadn't counted on the grime and grease. And now the air seemed thin, as if he were suffocating. His heart jumped and all of his fears came back to him. Why did he have to prove himself to Berlin?

A vision of the Reich suddenly was before him. An open-air stadium in Nuremburg. The military marching music. A glorious sky. A thousand flags and fifty thousand uniformed troopers!

He pushed onward. He was where he wanted to be. He gingerly pulled the bomb from the bag and pressed it to the steel nine inches above his face. He pulled a heavy bolt of tape from the bag. Just a few more seconds and . . .

Siegfried froze.

He heard two male voices in the engine room. God in heaven! He heard the door close and the voices drew closer. Siegfried barely breathed.

Now he could feel the sweat running down his temples from his forehead. Footsteps came ever closer, and he heard the brogue of the northern reaches of the British Isles, Cumberland or Scotland, he couldn't be sure. His ear was not good enough on English dialects. And it barely mattered, anyway.

Then, with a tremendous thump, two sailors were on the platform above him. Their feet shuffled and they were inches above his face.

Inches above his device. If their thumping sets it off prematurely . . . Siegfried did not finish the thought. His hand was still on the bomb. He knew what would happen if the device were detonated.

He could feel the ship rocking gently. A panic seized him and he almost wanted to surrender. He would go to jail. Anything! Just get him out of that tomb!

He bit his lower lip. He heard snatches of conversation from above, the unswerving topic of interest for sailors at work.

"So how's she look? She got big ones, does she?"

"I've never seen Janie's friend."

"I want a girl with big ones, you know."

"You'll take what you can get and you'll be happy with it. You're lucky I find a Yank girl for you at all."

"I'll do you the favor and take both of them tonight."

"You arsehole!"

Then there was the sound of playful shoving and good-natured punches exchanged. The two young men laughed. They scuffled directly above Siegfried's bomb and then set to work. For thirty minutes Siegfried remained motionless in place. Everything in his body throbbed.

"That does it, then," one of the sailors finally said. Then they turned and jumped down from the platform. Siegfried heard them walk away. The door closed.

He waited several more minutes. Then he slowly took his hand off the bomb. It stayed in place, held securely by the adhesive. As he slid back toward his exit, his shirt rode up toward his shoulders. Then he reached a part of the steel that was slightly concave. For a moment in the blackness, his chest was stuck and he was stricken by panic. But then, with a mighty shove, he pushed himself along with his arms. A few seconds later he was free, and a minute thereafter he was out, sitting upright again and feeling his body creak. He breathed hard and told himself that he would never ever do this again. Not even for Hitler personally!

He stood and was filthy. He stripped his dress shirt from his chest and kept his undershirt on. He saw a pair of coveralls and pulled them on. Then he found a pair of mops and a pail in a corner of the engine room. He filled the pail with soap and water. A sailor on a work patrol would arouse no suspicion. He emerged into the corridor carrying the mops and the buckets.

No one stopped him. When the petty officer took his eyes off the gangplank for a moment, Siegfried abandoned his housekeeping tools against a lifeboat station and walked calmly down the plank. He mingled with the other men in the navy yard and, fifteen minutes later, disappeared through the main gate.

*

Rev. Stephen Fowler, Laura's onetime husband, was a man capable of radically changing his opinions. But he was only formulating opinions, not changing any, as he sat by the green-shaded desk lamp in his parish house, staring at the blank sheet of paper rolled into his typewriter. It was eight in the evening of the same day that the spy had been an uninvited guest at the Red Bank navy yard. That evening Reverend Fowler felt himself quite incapable of any strong opinion at all.

Perhaps it was an unenviable aspect of being a celebrity cleric. A man's opinion is asked so often that it becomes difficult to have any opinion or ideas left. Collier's had asked him to write two thousand words on why a young man from a good family would choose to enter the ministry. What relevance did it have to 1939 and a world perched on the brink of war? And by the way, could he include a clear black and white photograph of himself and his wife?

Christian Century
had initiated a monthly symposium of views concerning American involvement in European politics. Their editors, bless them, had found an eloquent, ostrich-headed isolationist, an old Benedictine named Father Quinn, who could warp any of the parables of Christ to his own purposes. Would young Reverend Fowler, the clear-eyed young Lutheran, care to craft a five-thousand-word response?

"Of course," answered Stephen Fowler from his study over the long-distance wire to his editors in Chicago. "I've been a fan of Father Quinn's muddled theology for years. It's about time someone took him on, isn't it?"

Stephen Fowler typed:

Can a Christian sit by, in the safety of his own home, and watch his neighbor's house in flames?

Displeased, he leaned back and stopped typing. Other things were slipping into perspective this evening and they drew his attention away from his writing. He stared at the framed portrait at the corner of his desk. He saw himself and Laura, arms entwined during more agreeable days. The photograph had been taken on the ramparts of Quebec City during their honeymoon. In the picture, they stood smiling broadly, arms entwined, possessed of a love that seemed it would last two lifetimes. Laura, at age twenty-three, was so very beautiful. How had he let his marriage get so out of hand?

He brooded suddenly. He had not heard from her since she had gone home to England.

He wondered if she still loved him. He told himself that he had only one person to blame if  she did not. Himself.

Reverend Fowler picked up the typewriter and moved it aside, clearing his desk. Only one unsatisfying sentence of his current article had been written. He could get back to it, he told himself.

He drew a piece of personal stationery as well as an envelope from his desk. He fished in a side drawer for a ten-cent stamp for airmail to England. Then in the methodical neat script of his own hand he addressed the envelope to Laura Worthington Fowler, care of her father's name and address in Salisbury.

He wrote Laura a short but succinct letter. He said the things that finally needed to be said. He was sorry for his inattentiveness, he wrote. Ideas had swept him away and taken his eyes off what he cherished more than anything: her. Could she come home and forgive him? He wrote that he still loved her and prayed that she loved him.

He sealed the letter. He took it from his study and placed it on the table near the front door. He would be sure to mail it the next morning even if it meant a special trip into town. He was about to return to his study, when something caught his eye through the window by the front door. He looked again. He was certain—or was he?—that he had seen a man leaving his church.

Stephen Fowler stood very still and stared. The trees between St. Paul's and the parish house obscured his view, particularly when they rustled. He could obtain no clear sight lines, but he watched for several seconds.

Why would someone be at his church at this hour? Though the doors were unlocked, Reverend Fowler was the only one ever to have cause to enter the church in the evening. He continued to watch. He caught his breath and held it. He felt a certain apprehension and he stared hard, as if intensity might help. He searched and scanned for the ghost of a tall crooked figure in a dark coat that he may or may not have seen. But the shadow, or whatever it had been, was gone.

He exhaled and the air rushed from his lungs. He breathed again as he relaxed. He was now convinced that he had probably seen a rustle of leaves, an errant configuration of branches, or a stray dog. He admitted to himself how much he had been on edge recently, particularly since his wife had left him. A man could imagine many things under the circumstances and very few of them were any good.

And so what if someone had passed by the church? This was Liberty Square, New Jersey, population four thousand gentle souls, established 1759. It was not New York or Philadelphia. A parishioner might have simply wanted to offer an evening prayer, or seek the comfort of the Almighty's presence.

What could be more innocent? Why else were the church's doors always open? Reverend Fowler watched for another half minute. When no one appeared or emerged from the front doors of his church, he returned to his writing. There was no use in worrying about the unimportant things. Not with his country—and the world --- in the state it was in.