“Tell me about it,” she said as she slipped underneath the covers next to him. “Tell me about how your hair turned gray overnight.”
“All right,” Jackson said.
It was about eight when Ploscaru wandered into the bedroom holding a saucer and a cup of coffee. He took a sip, nodded pleasantly at Jackson and Winona Wilson, said, “I see you two have met,” and wandered out. Winona Wilson giggled.
Their departure from the house in the Hollywood hills was delayed nearly an hour because of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, and New Orleans. Ploscaru wanted to visit all of them on the way to Washington. It was only after a bitter debate, with Winona Wilson siding with the dwarf, that a compromise of sorts was reached. Yellowstone was out, but both the Grand Canyon and New Orleans were in.
“It’s still about a thousand miles out of the way,” Jackson said grumpily as he studied the oil-company map that he had spread on the hood of the Plymouth.
“But well worth both the time and expense,” Ploscaru said. He jumped up on the convertible’s running board, took Winona Wilson’s hand, and brushed his lips against it with a bit of a flourish. “Winona, you have, as always, been more than generous.”
“Anytime, Nick,” she said as she smiled, leaned over, and kissed him on the top of his head.
Jackson folded the map, stuck it in his jacket pocket, moved over to the tall blond woman, put an arm around her, and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You’re the best thing that’s happened in a long time. Thanks.”
She smiled. “If you’re ever out here again, Slim, stop by. You can tell me more war stories.”
“Sure,” Jackson said. “I’ll do that.”
6
His papers said that he was a journeyman printer. The papers were tightly wrapped in yellow oilskin tied with stout string and were now pressed against his lean stomach by his belt. The papers also said that his name was Otto Bodden, that he had been born in Berlin thirty-nine years before, and that his political preference was the Social Democratic party, a preference which had cost him five years in the concentration camp at Belsen.
He had been a printer. That much was true. And he had been born in Berlin and grown up there. That was not only true, but also necessary, because the people around Lübeck distrusted Berliners — despised them, really — and could recognize them in a second by their gab as well as by their figuratively big noses which they were always poking into places that didn’t concern them. Berliners were Prussians. Wisecracking Prussians, perhaps, but still Prussians.
As for the name, well, Otto Bodden would serve as well as any. There had been many names since he had taken his first alias thirteen years before. He tried to remember what that first one had been. It came to him after a second or two. Klaus Kalkbrenner. His lips twitched into a smile as he crouched in the trees and studied the three early-morning anglers across the canal. Young Klaus Kalkbrenner, he remembered, had been something of an idiot.
He had no watch, so he had to depend on the sun. He turned to examine it. It was already up, but not quite enough. It would be a few more minutes until the patrol came along. He turned back to continue his study of the fishermen across the canal. One of them had caught something; not a bad-sized fish; a carp perhaps, although Bodden wasn’t at all sure whether carp swam in the Elbe-Trave Canal.
He adjusted the rucksack on his back which contained his one coat and the shirt and trousers he would change into once he made it across the canal. They too were all wrapped up in oilskin. No spare shoes or socks, though. That would have been overdoing it, because no refugee printer would have an extra pair of shoes. He would have sold them by now, or traded them for something to eat.
He turned for another look at the sun. Ten more minutes, he estimated. Turning back, he fished out his last cigarette. It was an American cigarette, a Camel. They had given him a pack of them in Berlin a week before, and he carefully had made them last until now. American cigarettes were another thing a refugee printer wouldn’t have. He wondered what the black-market price for an American cigarette was in Lübeck: three Reichsmarks; four? It had been five in Berlin.
He took a match from one of the three left in the small waterproof steel canister and struck it against the sole of his shoe. He lit the cigarette and pulled the smoke down into his lungs. He liked American cigarettes. He liked their names, too: Camels, Lucky Strikes, Old Golds, Chesterfields, Wings. For some reason, Wings didn’t bring as good a price on the Berlin black market. He wasn’t sure why. He pulled in another lungful of smoke, held it down, and then luxuriously blew it out. It was his first smoke in three days, and he could feel it — a slight, pleasant, dizzying sensation.
Someone had once told him that the Americans used treacle to cure their tobacco. He wondered if that was true. He also wondered how good his English really was. He had learned it in Belsen from a Pole. The Pole had been a very funny fellow who had claimed to have once lived in Cleveland and had assured Bodden that the English he was being taught was the American kind. The Pole had had a lot of amusing theories. One of them was that Poles made the world’s best fighter pilots. That’s the problem with us Poles, he had once told Bodden. All our politicians should really have been fighter pilots.
There wasn’t much left to his cigarette now. A few centimeters. Regretfully, Bodden took one last puff and ground it into the dirt with his shoe. He heard them then, the patrol. One of them was whistling. That was how it was supposed to be.
Well, here goes nothing, he said to himself in English. That had been one of the Pole’s favorite phrases, which he had also guaranteed to be proper American usage. In fact, it was the last thing he had ever said to Bodden that April morning in 1944 when they had led the Pole away to be shot or hanged. Hanged probably, Bodden decided. They wouldn’t have wasted a bullet on a Pole. Gniadkiewicz. That had been the Pole’s name, Bodden remembered. Roman Gniadkiewicz. A very funny fellow.
Bodden took a deep breath, scuttled out of the trees and across the path, and slipped into the canal with a small splash. Christ, it was cold! He heard the Russian patrol shout Halt. How the hell do you halt when you’re swimming? he wondered. They were supposed to shout it three times, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening — for the British especially; but a lot of the Russians were dumb bastards, farm boys who might not be able to count that high. So Bodden took a deep breath and dived underwater just as the first rifle cracked.
When he came up, they were still shooting at him — well, almost at him. A bullet smacked into the water less than a meter away, far less, and Bodden dived under again. A show-off, he thought as he used a breaststroke to swim the last few meters. One of them had to be a show-off.
When he came up again, he saw that he had come up right where he had wanted to — not far from the three German fishermen, who stared down at him as he treaded water, blowing and sputtering.
“Well, what have we got here?” said one of the anglers, a man of about sixty.
“A very wet fish,” Bodden said.
“Maybe we ought to throw him back,” the old man said as he put down his pole. The other two men laughed. They were old too, Bodden saw; somewhere in their late sixties.
The first old man came over to where Bodden still treaded water. He knelt down and stretched out his hand. He was a big, still-powerful old man, who barely grunted as he hauled Bodden up and onto the bank of the canal. “There you are, Herr Fish,” the old man said. “Nice and dry.”