Secret Father (36 page)

"It is making me crazy not to be able to see you. Who else is in here?"

"No one. Just us," I said. I lit my lighter again.

Now, when the golden circle of light brought us alive to one another again, I was shocked to see Ulrich's face wet with tears. There had been no such emotion in his voice—which seemed impossible. I clasped him by the back of the neck. "Hey, comrade, you're okay. In fact, you're better than okay. You are great. You are doing great!"

"This is all my foolishness. This is completely my unforgivable foolishness. And I do not know what they are doing"—Ulrich looked up and locked his eyes on mine—"with you. I told them to let you go. This has nothing to do with you." He faced Kit. "Or you."

"Or you, either," Kit said. "You haven't done anything, Rick. Don't let them make you think you've done something."

As if that was what had happened to him, Ulrich lowered his face into his hands, muffling words that I heard as "I am afraid." His head and shoulders began to shake with sobbing. How far he was from my cocky tutor, berating me, his mulish pupil, with the slogans of a pop radical. Where was the power ofnegative thinking now?

As I watched him, I felt a deep pity, and also an embarrassment that was new to me. The word that sprang to mind—a word very much of the era—was "brainwashed." They had done something awful to our friend.

As if to protect Ulrich's dignity, Kit touched my arm, indicating I should put out the Zippo, which I did. Whatever else, immediate and remote, prompted Ulrich's distress, the truth is that he was giving vent to what all three of us were feeling. But Ulrich had not been consoled as I had been last night by Kit. I'm not sure where I stood with her just now, but I had experienced the consummation that matters most. I could not remember what Marcuse had said about sex and revolution, but I knew he was right, whatever it was.

In the unsteady darkness, Kit and I balanced against the jolting of the van by leaning together, but our leaning was over Ulrich, to hold him. I was aware of the physical feel of each of them, but differently. My left hand reached around Kit's ribs, the tips of my fingers extending just to the wire of her bra at the rise of her left breast. Her right hand was on my left thigh, above the wasteland of my lower leg, no secret from her.

"It's okay, comrade," I said again.

"Don't call me comrade," he hissed.

"All I mean is, we're with you all the way. Honest to God."

This was as solemn a promise as I had ever made. Indeed, that I pronounced it as "we," certain that I was speaking also for Kit, moved the statement, more than its rote evoking of the deity, from mere promise to vow. We three slumped together then in silence, a desperate trio in the corner of the lurching vehicle.

 

Minutes later—or was it an hour?—the van seemed to jump a curb. Then it went steeply downhill, tossing us, brakes pumping, snapping us alert. We must have been going down a ramp.

The van halted abruptly. Seconds later the door was pulled open. The dim light of a large garage filled the metal cubicle. I glanced at my comrades. Ulrich was wiping his nose with his sleeve, stifling his emotion. Kit was rubbing her eyes against the light.

Guards in uniforms unlike any we had seen before stood at the ready by the open door. They carried machine guns, and one of them, as he ordered us out, used his as a pointer. Kit was the first to climb down. I was amazed by her apparent self-possession, as if she knew what was coming and knew we were up to it. The girl who was afraid to be alone was, in her chosen company, indomitable.

With a dancer's grace, she reached back to me—less an offer of help than an act of choreography. It was the most natural thing in the world to take her hand, then to lean on her. As I clumsily hoisted myself out of the van, of course, the illusion of fluid movement broke. Then we both turned to watch Ulrich climb down behind us—he sullenly refused help—and Kit held my hand until one of the guards struck my arm with the stock of his gun.

Instead of the baggy green serge of the
Vopos,
whose uniforms came from the quartermaster's pile, these guards wore tailored and crisply pressed gray tunics and fitted trousers falling neatly over polished black boots. Their black helmets shone. On their shoulders rode golden epaulettes. At their belts were chromed bayonet sheaths. They ordered us to move. We followed one into an ill-lit corridor while the other came behind.

The soldiers wore steel taps on the heels of their boots, causing the click of each footfall to echo with a sinister lack of synchrony. At a succession of heavy doors, we banged through. At each threshold, the decor of the linked hallways improved, from unpainted cement block to block painted gray; from painted block to walls surfaced with a mustardy stucco; from naked bulbs hanging by cords to ceiling fixtures fashioned, saucer-like, of pressed tin. Finally we halted in an almost handsome, wood-paneled vestibule before an elevator cage featuring cast-iron florets and brass fittings. The gate slid open, and we went in.

The elevator operator wore a dark blue smock and a felt cap with a bill—decidedly civilian, proudly proletarian. He closed the gate, leaving the two guards outside. He tended to his throttle with his back to us. As the elevator ascended through the grilled shaft in the gyre of a winding staircase that showed vestiges of opulence—a brass banister, crystal wall sconces, however dull—I caught Kit's eye and whispered, "Not a jail. Not a police station. Too fancy."

"
Sei still!
" the elevator operator said, half delighting in his interlude of authority, although not daring to look back at us. He reminded me of Charlie Chaplin or Stan Laurel.

I nudged Ulrich. He would be the one savvy enough to guess where they had brought us. When he looked at me, I mouthed, "On Sunday? Court? Questioning? What?"

He let his eyes drift to the slowly moving needle indicator above the gate, a gauge showing that the building had five floors including the basement, where we started. When the needle approached 2, the operator dropped his throttle and the car slowed with a hiss, softly bounced a couple of times, then stopped. The machinery sighed. With a pronounced dip of his right shoulder, the operator pulled the gate open. A man in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie stood there waiting for us. He looked like a mortician.

He wore heavy black-framed glasses that drew attention to the unhealthy pallor of his bony face. Not only the frames were thick; so were the lenses, which magnified his eyes out of proportion with the rest of his face—a man of several disjunctions. He said nothing, just gestured with one hand, a simple movement that revealed him as someone accustomed to being obeyed.

We went across a small lobby, through a door, and out into a broad, vacant corridor. It was illuminated by one dim ceiling fixture, but the hallway proper was a shadowy tunnel that went on and on into darkness. To the left, only a few dozen feet away, the corridor ended not in a wall but in a hung tapestry toward which our escort directed us.

The tapestry showed a medieval hunting scene—a wounded deer, a huntsman in breeches, dogs with blood dripping from their muzzles. As we approached, I smelled something acrid, as if the tapestry had recently been rescued from a burning building. Before we drew nearer to it, the man in black led us through a door into a narrower hallway.

As in the basement corridor, I moved with one hand skimming along the wall, my leg braces clicking, and the other hand gripping Ulrich's arm. Despite the clamp he'd fixed on his emotions, he still seemed disoriented. He was nevertheless all the support I needed just then—Ulrich and Kit, all the support I would ever need.

Ironically, it was because he had proved to be less than stalwart, once we were arrested, that I began thinking of him as a true friend, a guy like me. His presence at my side, his firm arm under my grip, was helping me—and I knew I was helping him. His need was calling from me a strength I did not know I had.

When the next door opened ahead of us, showing a small room crowded with furniture, Ulrich brought his free hand to my forearm and pressed it.
Friends, friends forever!

When I looked at him, he nodded. I mouthed "comrade" at him, the word he'd swatted away, but now he grinned.

A conference room. Its wood-paneled walls, long table, and leather-backed chairs gave it the air of a place where important meetings were held—unlike the crude interrogation cells we'd seen earlier. The room had a large Palladian window looking out onto a grassy courtyard awash in the light of midday. Across the grass was another wing of the same building, huge. We were in some kind of old palace.

The man in the black suit had said nothing up to this point, and now he only gestured toward the table, indicating chairs for us on the near side. Four other chairs stood opposite. Once we were seated, the man exited the way we had entered, closing the door behind him. A second closed door broke the wall on the other side of the table.

I leaned toward Ulrich, but his hand shot up, stopping me from speaking. He cast his eyes to the ceiling:
How can you keep forgetting?
They were always listening. I looked at Kit, thinking that they had even listened to us the night before. She had her left fist inside the cup of her right hand on the table in front of her. She was staring at her hands, a way of not looking at me.

I turned back to Ulrich. "
Edelweiss
" I said, touching him. Who cared if they heard us?

"
Piraten
" he answered. We were like chums in a clubhouse, checking the secret password—an association all three of us must have had, because we burst into laughter.

I took out my cigarettes and offered them around. My friends each took one, then I did. We smoked in silence, letting the nicotine work its magic on us, the potent rush followed by the chemical ebbing, which we mistook for calm. When Kit blew a smoke ring, it hung in the air before us. I tried to match it, imagining that my ring could go through hers. But I choked on the smoke, which made us laugh again. Some pirate.

Then we were quiet, still, each of us holed up inside. Okay, I thought, imagine something good.

The U.S. consul general. Ulrich's stepfather. The Marines. An intervention, after all. The cavalry. Rescue. Free.

What else would explain their bringing us here on Sunday? I warmed to the argument, a debate-team captain after all: What else would explain the disappearance of our guards? The reunion with Ulrich? The posh surroundings? The resentful withdrawal of the mean-spirited man in black? The only answer to every question: the Americans have come for us.

W
HEN THE DOOR
opposite, across the table, opened at last, it never occurred to me that the first person to enter, after the now familiar bespectacled man in black, would be not some Eisenhower or Wild Bill Donovan or Hap Arnold or either Dulles brother, but my own father.

And, goddammit, what did I see as the table between us stopped cold his rush toward me but the old anguish in his eyes, the most familiar sight of all—the worry, the expectation of disaster, the sure conviction that, in my case, all was lost, lost forever. And how could my heart not have sunk at the sight of him?

"Michael!" He moved a chair aside to lean closer. If he could have moved the table, he would have. I recognized the coiled energy, the power that would collect in his fist, say, as he squeezed the tiller of the Lightning to make it go faster in a light wind. Some races we won simply because he willed us to, which was why, approaching the finish line, in addition to being thrilled, I could be intimidated.

My father was dressed in a gray suit, and his rep tie was like mine, but as always he exuded that peculiar American masculinity, embodied in the understatement of style, while I still only aspired to it. The foundation of a man's style lies in his shoes, and I yearned for penny loafers. My blazer and tie made the blocky orthopedic shoes protruding from my chinos that much more ridiculous. My father's shoes, as I knew without looking, would be English cordovans, slim, perfect.

Is it necessary for me to state here that I dearly loved my father? That I lived for his approval? That I understood myself in terms that I had from him? But in these hours, all thoughts of my father had dropped away, and now, instead of feeling rescued, I felt ambushed. His goddamn worry, what a burden it was.
He worries, therefore I am.
His worry—therefore his presence—was the last thing I needed. "Hi, Dad," I said. But I did not move.

Right behind him was Mrs. Healy, who brushed past my father as she entered the room. She wore a fitted tweed jacket over a long brown skirt, and with her tan kid gloves she seemed ready for the paddock. She had often struck me as really good looking, especially for somebody's mother, but there was an unworldly implication of anguish in her face—an emotion transcending my father's mere worry—and it made her all the more beautiful. She said nothing as she moved quickly to the end of the table and around it. Ulrich was on his feet and moving, too. They met at the table's head, opposite where the man in black stood watching. The desperation with which Ulrich and his mother embraced set them apart from the rest of us, as if Kit and I were mere teenagers charged with curfew violations, while Ulrich was a man charged with murder.

"Please to separate," the dark-suited man said, his gruff accent, even in three clipped words, sounding not at all German.

Mrs. Healy and her son ignored him. A helmeted soldier in the crisp gray uniform appeared in the doorway. He entered efficiently, but before he could move to Mrs. Healy my father stepped ahead of him. It was my father who took Ulrich's mother by the shoulders and pulled her back. "Charlotte," he said. "Not now."

I had experienced my father's tenderness many times, and I had also witnessed it occasionally in his responses to my mother, even when she came at him in anger. But the intimate way he approached Ulrich's mother seemed entirely new to me.

"Let your mom go, son."

What?
My father's authority with them surprised me.