In War Times (28 page)

T
HE FOLLOWING NIGHT
, a blonde walked into the
biergarten
. Fairy lights glimmered in the linden tree, and the scent of some sweet night-blooming flower was rich in the air, blending with the delightful undertone of good, fresh German
bier
as it flowed from the tap.

The soldiers at the
biergarten
relaxed on barstools, chairs, and picnic tables, talking, drinking, and listening to Sam’s growing jazz record library. There was no dancing; fraternization with German women was forbidden, and the town’s residents were subject to arrest after curfew, anyway.

In the midst of “Koko,” which Sam figured he could slip in at least once an hour, Sam looked up to see Major Bette Elegante right in front of him, in uniform, leaning on the bar. “Can a girl get a drink here?”

“Right away, sir!”

She grinned.

As they drank and talked, Sam was struck by the feeling that Bette seemed immensely familiar to him, even dear. This seemed odd. He had spent only a few hours in her presence, and hadn’t necessarily expected to see her again after the last time. It didn’t seem sensible that his heart should leap. But it did.

Her face glowed in the light of the Chinese lanterns as she sipped beer. She was knocked out by “Koko,” and made him replay it so many times in a row that they had a mutiny on their hands. Her vibrant laugh echoed in the night as the hours passed and she seemed to relax, shedding some unseen burden.

And she was beautiful, down to the tiny nick on her right earlobe, revealed when she brushed her hair back with one hand.

Maybe it was as simple as that.

At three in the afternoon of the following day, as Sam was setting up after another wearying day of trying to track down Perler, Bette walked in once again.

She looked waiflike in a tight red dress and massive fur coat—never mind that Sam thought she could probably toss grown men over her shoulder.

“Like them?” She wagged her right foot, ensconced in a two-toned heel with several straps, and pirouetted on the flagstone patio of the Dance & Winklemeyer Biergarten, loosening her coat so that it fell from her shoulders. Her hair swung out as she turned. Silk stockings gleamed on her long legs. She pulled the coat tight and rubbed her face in it. “Mmmm. There’s something to this fur stuff. All I need are boots and trousers and I’d be warm in a Moscow winter.”

“I think this is the first time I’ve seen you out of uniform. You look absolutely smashing.” Sam polished glasses with a white cloth. Soldiers would soon start drifting in.

Bette leaned against the bar, sipping schnapps. “I’ve got two great dresses they made me in London. One is in the German style. One is made to French specifications, down to my underwear.”

“French underwear, eh? How is that different?”

“None of your damned business.”

“Is that the French dress?”

“This is my American dress. Story is that I’m a Russian woman forced into slave labor in Germany. You, Mr. Nice American Soldier, have given me this fine American dress from New York.”

“Right. I carried it in my kit in the Ardennes? I wrote to my mother and asked her to send one of my sister’s dresses? No, they’d howl. They work hard for their money. I know. I tell Ma that I have this German girlfriend, this tiny little thing, and could she please send me a fancy dress from New York so that I can impress her? Just run over there from Middleburg, Ma.”

“I’m sure that they have nice dress shops where you come from. But I guess you’re right.”

“It would make much more sense for you to be wearing a real German dress, one that I’ve stolen from some departed fräulein’s closet.”

She frowned. “I thought so too, but then I really wanted to wear this.” A sigh. “I’ll get out a fräulein dress. I’ve got several.”

“What’s the point, anyway? I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Oh yeah. I was going to mention that soon.” She pulled his orders from the pocket of her coat and handed them to him.

“Berlin? I’m just getting settled in. The D and W Biergarten is looking forward to a very profitable spring. I’m going to drink beer, relax, play cards, listen to records, and practice.” And do some important work in the lab. He was seized with anxiety at the thought of more postponement. “The world-famous Perham Downs have an engagement tonight in Krefeld.”

“World famous?”

“Well, maybe just company-wide famous. Our dance band.”

“And you play?”

“Alto sax.”

“A dime a dozen, Dance. Tell them to get another saxophone.”

“I’m the bandleader. This will to be a huge loss to the war effort. It’s to help morale.”

She finished her schnapps. “We leave in two hours. Class A uniform.”

They made slow progress through the overflowing farm wagons, carts, and foot traffic—Germans fleeing the Russians, who had finally captured Berlin, as well as captured Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians released from labor camps. Their car, a striking black Mercedes recently driven by high-ranking Nazis, repelled the usual hordes of begging children who clustered around jeeps, certain of a handout from G.I.’s. Men and children startled Sam with a Nazi salute. “Are these the Germans who had nothing to do with anything?” asked Sam.

“I don’t see many women saluting,” said Bette. “They learn how to hide what they think.”

Sam almost laughed. He was sitting next to one of the least repressed women he’d ever met, a spy who swore like a man. He caught himself. “My sisters complained that they couldn’t do all the things I could do. It made them pretty angry at times. But the war has changed that.”

“Not much. I mean, I can shoot, but I could before the war. I can fly—”

“You fly?”

“I was in the Civil Air Patrol before I was recruited. I own a plane with three other women from my hometown. A yellow Piper Cub. We have a flying club. That’s why we joined the CAP. They’d pay for our fuel. We had patriotic reasons for it too—”

“Right.”

She looked a little annoyed.

“Can’t take a joke?”

“I don’t—” she began heatedly, then said, “I really get quite serious about these things.”

“What are we doing in Berlin?”

“Intelligence. I need to meet someone there. We need to find out how much the Russians know about Hadntz’s Device. It seems to have some sort of…potential. We’re going to be fighting the next war with the Soviet Union. We need to establish lines of communication.”

Sam felt a pang of guilt about withholding information about Perler. “Aren’t they our allies?”

“You don’t trust Stalin any further than you can throw him, Sam. He’s a murderer on a grander scale than Hitler. We just cut him off from Denmark last month. Hear about that?”

“I’m going to stick with you. You know everything.”

“I’m briefed. I just know what I need to know. I sure as hell don’t know much.”

“More than me. I’m just a cog.”

“You’re—”

“I don’t mind. I just want to do my part as best I can and then get back home. I want to finish my education. I was working nights before I joined up and going to school during the day. If I was doing nothing but going to school, I could knock it off pretty quick.”

“You want to be an engineer?”

“It’s not glamorous work. But it’s essential. The country is going to need engineers like never before.”

“What kind of engineer?”

“I want to be the kind of engineer that can do just about anything. Now, what the hell are we doing in Berlin, again?”

In their billet, a sparsely-furnished flat without gas, running water, or electricity, Sam spent a half hour practicing the use of a camera concealed in a matchbox. It was made by Leitz, the company where Keller’s father had been an officer, and was rather amazing. When he opened it, there was a compartment of real matches. The operation of taking the picture was concealed by the act of striking the match and lighting the cigarette.

“No, no,” she said. “Hold it in your hand like this. Bring it up to eye level, above the cigarette, as you strike the match.” She guided his left hand, in which he held the camera. “You
are
right-handed?”

“Yeah. I’m just not particularly adept.”

“Let’s go over that again.”

It took them another hour or so to prepare for their expedition. Then Bette locked the door behind them, to protect the bottles of water, tiny camp stove, food, and candles they’d hauled up. They descended narrow, scarred stairs and ventured out into ruined Berlin.

“How do you like your promotion?”

“Not much,” Sam growled, imprisoned in a lieutenant’s uniform. “I think I could be court-martialed for this.” He carried two flashlights in his pockets. Bette had her own, as well as a small wireless, in her bag. Between them, they had three guns.

She linked her arm with his, and patted it with her free hand. “No, you’re completely cleared for gigolo duty.”

They walked between mounds of rubble, and passed countless blocks where only the ragged foundations of buildings remained. Berlin stank of bodies trapped under concrete, unfound and just beginning to thaw, and of feces and urine.

Sam was wildly uncomfortable holding the arm of a woman dressed to the nines. Beaten people shuffled past, picking through refuse wearing shoes held together by knotted rags. “I feel like I have a target on my back.”

“Stop complaining, Dance. I’ll protect you.”

He had no doubt about that. In addition to her more obvious guns, Bette had a pen that was a gun as well as a stiletto, and shoes that extruded a knife from the heel. “Although I think they’re misdesigned,” she had grumbled as she sat on the single chair to squeeze her feet into them. “It would make more sense for the blade to come out of the toe. I’m sure it was designed by a man. I have to take the damned thing off to use it—not exactly subtle.”

Bette prevented Sam from giving his two packs of cigarettes to anyone, even after he saw one woman bend over and pick up the pinched, soggy butt he had thrown away and drop it into a tin cup.

“She’ll trade a bunch of them for a loaf of bread,” Bette told him. “We’re not here to save Berlin. It’s beyond saving. See that gang of boys? Can’t be any older than twelve. I guarantee that two weeks ago they were slaughtering everything that moved with machine guns. If they were honest, they’d tell you that they haven’t lost—that the Fatherland has been betrayed. They’ve been taught since they were born that it’s impossible to lose. Have you heard about Hans the Rocket Boy?”

“Who?”

“The SS was putting children in these rocket-fueled planes as test pilots. The kids were doomed. The planes couldn’t be landed. The wheels dropped off to reduce drag once they took off. Hans managed to land it though, and when he got out he was wearing lederhosen and he looked like he was twelve years old. Actually, he’s all of sixteen.”

“I wouldn’t have minded flying a rocket when I was sixteen.”

Narrow lanes had been bulldozed through some of the streets. Roman aqueducts still supplied a trickle of water, but all of the waterworks, the pumps, and underground pipes were completely out of commission. Every few blocks, they saw long lines of grimy, exhausted-looking Germans, most of whom had passed the last few weeks of fierce battle in underground shelters, waiting to pump water. Two Russian soldiers sitting on a stoop called out to Bette.

“What did they say?”

“What do you think? They want to mate with me. They would pay me handsomely with cigarettes.”

“They probably think I’m your pimp,” he said grimly.

“That’s enough out of you. There’s the place…yes, there on the next block.”

The setting sun shot an orange glow through a shattered building, and they walked through its jagged shadow.

A smiling Russian in a broad-shouldered gangster-type suit with a mended lapel greeted them at the threshold of what was now a club. Sam heard strains from a pretty fair dance band inside. Bette wore a red hat with a huge white ostrich feather sweeping down on one side of her head, and her face was behind a fine black veil studded with tiny rhinestone sequins.

“Five dollars each,” the Russian said.

“Five—”

“Pay the man, dear,” said Bette, jagging him with a sharp elbow. It was breathtaking. But once they sat down he had to buy two ten-dollar shots of vodka. The small fortune he’d been given was as nothing in this wasteland. Bette tossed back her drink and smiled. “There, now.” She stuck a cigarette in an ebony cigarette holder. “Can’t stand those ugly nicotine stains. They’re
so
hard to get out of white gloves.” She’d shrugged off her coat, revealing that her gloves extended to her elbows. “I really should have brought the mink wrap instead.”

Sam bit his tongue. It was her show.

The room danced with candlelight. A few generator-powered airstrip lights hung from bare steel girders, blotting out the night sky, but they only served to give a bit of dim illumination to the goings-on. A woman in a long, tight-fitting, black dress took the microphone and crooned “Shine On, Harvest Moon” in Russian. The people at the next table clapped rowdily.

A man in a frayed business suit dropped into the empty chair between them. He said to Bette, “That is a marvelous hat. Where, may I ask, did you find it?”

“At a little shop on Avenue Montaigne in Paris.”

“Will you excuse us, please?” he said to Sam, and they began conversing, very quietly, in Russian.

After a moment Bette threw back her head, laughed, and kicked Sam under the table with her toe. “Could I have a cigarette, dear?”

Sam thought the light was way too dim, but he commenced chain-smoking and taking pictures with his amazing matchbox camera.

At four
A.M.
, they were back in the billet, and Bette had him photographing the papers she’d been passed. He’d taken pictures of one set, in which he recognized drawings of the Hadntz Device—though again, configured slightly differently. Now he was on the second set. “Supposedly these are from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Heisenberg’s work. They were doing atomic research.”

“For atomic bombs?”

“Of course. Heisenberg discovered nuclear fission, and he was a Nazi. Word is, though, that Hitler wasn’t pursuing a bomb. He put everything into his vengeance weapons. But apparently the Russians have hauled off the heavy water and the uranium. Which is very bad luck. I don’t know why Eisenhower left all this to them.” She was becoming angry.