“Such vegetables. This time of year.”
“California,” Ben said. “They grow all year round. Have you been able to get out? See anything?”
“The ocean. Fay took me for a drive. The rest, it’s all houses, no- buildings. Not like Berlin.”
“Liesl’s father says it’s still the first layer here. Before the Schinkels.”
He smiled but she seemed not to understand this, at a loss. She looked over at Liesl.
“She’s your wife?”
“No,” he said, looking across with her, so that Liesl smiled back.
“Maybe one day. See how she looks at you.”
“No,” Ben said, flustered. “She’s my brother’s wife. Was.”
“I don’t understand. The same brother? He wasn’t killed? Years ago.”
“No, just this month. Why did you think-”
“Why? It was so dangerous. Back and forth. The courier. I never thought it was right-for your father to use a boy like that. Well, not a boy. Still, young. To risk his life. When you said he was dead, I thought, yes, it must be. Of course they killed him.”
“Who?” Ben said, suddenly feeling light-headed.
“The Nazis,” she said simply. “It was always a risk.”
“For an American?”
“A Communist,” she said, her voice steady, matter-of-fact.
“What?”
“You didn’t know this?”
Involuntarily, Ben glanced toward Minot’s table, apprehensive, the word itself now like a pointing finger. But no one in the room was paying attention, hearing anything more than a murmuring of German. Only Ben felt the words shouting in his ears. He shook his head slowly, barely moving.
“And he never told you? Well, that’s right. We had to be secret to survive. The first enemy. Even before they started killing Jews. No one was safe from them. I said to Otto, how can you use your own? But of course it was important to him. And he was like you-an American passport would protect him, they wouldn’t suspect. His mother’s in England. Of course he travels. So, a courier.”
“For the Communists,” Ben said numbly, as if repeating the words would give a sense to them, steady the room.
“Yes, for your father. Anything for your father. For him it was like a religion, so maybe for the boy, too. I don’t know.”
“Like a religion,” Ben said, still catching echoes.
“Yes. And he died for it.”
“For being a Communist? That’s why he stayed in Germany?” Not another woman, a career he couldn’t leave behind, a misguided sense of safety.
“They didn’t suspect him. He could do things the others couldn’t. Goebbels liked him. All of them-they liked to watch those comedies. They thought he was like that. So he was useful to the Party. So close and they didn’t suspect.”
“They didn’t protect him, either. He was still a Jew.”
“That’s what you think? All these years. That he was foolish? That he trusted them?” She shook her head. “They didn’t kill him as a Jew. They killed him as a Communist.” She paused. “He was betrayed,” she said, her voice suddenly low, looking away, across the table.
Ben said nothing. He heard forks, people laughing, sound track noises from another movie. In this one, everything was still. He looked at Genia’s hands, the bony fingers resting now on the table, pale, webbed with veins, the hands of an old woman.
“How do you know that?” he said finally.
For a minute she kept looking across the table, then turned to him. “Because it was me. I betrayed him,” she said, her voice still detached, a confession without emotion or self-pity, something willed. He felt it like a hand on his arm, a restraint, making him look directly at her. “Why? Why else? To save myself.” Staring back, the rest unsaid. Then she looked away, breaking the connection. “But I didn’t. Not in the end.” She picked up the small bag at her side. “Excuse me. I must have a cigarette. Apologies.”
She stood up, catching Liesl’s attention, who looked at Ben, first with casual curiosity, then, taking him in, with real alarm. Paulette was already putting her hand on his.
“I’m not ignoring you, really. Mike was just telling me about Selz-nick. You know, he’s still in therapy. He believes in it. Since Spellbound. I said he could save a bundle and just give up the pills — Are you all right? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
He tried to smile, shaking this off.
“Seriously. You’re all white.”
Finally the smile. “Just old war stories. I’m fine.”
From the corner of his eye he could see the emerald bracelet covering his hand. At the next table Fay and Ann Sheridan were charming Minot, who wanted to get rid of termites. Bunny, apparently still worried about the seating, kept looking over at Liesl, watching her. Jack Warner was telling jokes. The waiters had begun to clear the tournedos, replacing it with floating island, puffy clouds of meringue. And Otto had risked Danny’s life. The one Ben knew nothing about.
“I’d better check on her, make sure she’s okay,” he said to Paulette, getting up.
Liesl, still concerned, shot him a what? look, but he made a nothing movement with his head. As he crossed the room, still half in a daze, he noticed Bunny chatting with Marie Minot, keeping things going.
She was sitting behind the coffee table, tapping her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray.
“I thought I would never say that,” she said, not even looking up, as if she’d expected him. “Not to anybody. And now his son. For years I thought, what if someone finds out? What if someone knows? And it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
“Everything matters.”
She looked at him, then made a half smile. “To the living.” She drew on the cigarette. “So, what do you want me to say to you? An apology? It’s late for that.”
“Tell me about Danny. What did he actually do? My father made him carry things?”
“In his mind only,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “Messages he had to remember. No papers. If they had found papers, they would have arrested him. Killed him. So it was safer up here. Of course, if they tortured him, he would have told them-everybody did-but without papers there was no reason to suspect him. And an American passport. They couldn’t arrest Americans so easily. So he was perfect for us.”
“My father’s idea?”
She nodded. “There was a problem. Before, we had a network with merchant seamen, for outside communications. You couldn’t use the radio. By hand. By mouth. And then there was a roundup-one of the cells in Hamburg-and we knew they had been given away. An informer. We traced it to one of the sailors, so we couldn’t use the network anymore. That’s when your father had the idea. The one person he could really trust.” She stopped. “Except me, he said. But he couldn’t send me. So he was wrong about that, too.”
“But what did he actually carry? What kind of messages.”
She shrugged. “To help get people out. At that point, all we were trying to do was survive. Save ourselves. There weren’t so many left. He would travel through Paris. There were people there who could make arrangements, to get people across. This was before the war. If we could get people to France-”
And later to Spain, Ben thought, helped across by someone with experience. By then you didn’t have to be a Communist to be in danger.
“So we used him for that. Not a spy, not like in the films. Just messages, to help get people out.”
“But he would have been hung just the same. If they’d caught him.”
“Yes, naturally. That’s why I thought it was too dangerous. But he wanted to do it. You know, at that age-no fear. It’s exciting to them, everything a secret. They don’t know yet what it’s like to live that way, to live in secret.” She rubbed out the cigarette. “But he survived, you said, so I’m glad for that. They never got him. Well, he stopped when Otto- He did it for Otto. He never came back to Germany after that. So maybe that saved him.”
“Tell me what happened. With my father.”
“It’s not so much to know,” she said, shrugging. “A familiar story. They caught me. My fault-I was careless. So, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. We used to talk about it, if the Gestapo- I knew what it would mean. Not just for me. My family. They didn’t have to torture me. I already knew what they wanted, the names. Who was head of the cell? Well, Otto, Goebbels’s friend.” She looked up. “So I gave them your father.”