Swanton lapsed into a brooding silence for a moment, but brightened when Jackson offered him the flask again. After a drink, Swanton lit another cigarette and said, “Remember nonfraternization?”
Jackson nodded. “It didn’t work out too well.”
“It didn’t work because the GI’s wouldn’t stand for it. So Ike, the great compromiser, decided that it was okay for GI’s to fraternize with children — little kids. Real little ones. But that rule didn’t last long either, so now the GI’s can screw anyone they want to, although there’re still some kind of dumb rules about not having Germans into your home.”
Swanton was silent for a moment and then asked, “You know what the burning issues are now?”
“What?”
“Denazification and Democratization.” He shook his head over the awkwardness of the words. “I’m no Nazi sympathizer, but the fucking country’s half starving and it’s going to be another cold winter and there’s not going to be any coal again and a lot of ’em haven’t got any place to live, so I’ve decided that maybe the Russians are right.”
“How?”
“Well, everybody in the American Zone had to fill out the Fragebogen.” He looked sharply at Jackson to see if he understood the German word.
“Questionnaire.”
“Yeah, questionnaire. It’s a six-page job with a hundred and thirty-one questions to determine if you are now or ever were a big, medium, or little Nazi or none of the above. Some Scheisskopf has even decided that if you joined the Nazis after ’37 or so, it’s not as bad as if you joined back in ’33. Well, shit that doesn’t make any sense, if you think about it for half a minute. Back in ’33 there was a hell of a depression in Germany. You might have joined then out of desperation more than conviction. But by ’37 it wasn’t so easy to join, and by then, by God, you had a pretty good idea of what being a Nazi meant. But the Russians, well, they don’t give much of a shit whether anybody was a Nazi or not. What they did was, they shot a lot of them, if their records were real bad, and put the rest to work. They’d say ‘You guys used to be Nazi engineers, right? Well, you’re not Nazi engineers anymore, you’re Commie engineers, understand?’ And, like always the Germans would say, ‘Führer befehl — wir folgen’ and go out and fix the steam plant.”
Swanton shook his head again. “So that’s how it stands. We’re denazifying them, whatever that means, and the Russians have got ’em out fixing the gas works. As for how we’re gonna make small-d democrats out of ’em, I don’t know.”
“You like them, don’t you?” Jackson said.
“Who?”
“The Germans.”
Swanton thought about it. “I like people. They interest me. I have a hard time blaming Hitler on a six-year-old kid with malnutrition and no place to sleep. No matter how you slice it, it’s really not his fault. But he’s going to be paying for it all his life. So that’s why I had to go back to New York. They had to cut ’em out.”
“What?”
“My ulcers,” Swanton said,
13
Otto Bodden, the printer, stood in the cold rain across from the ruined Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt and waited for the woman. Out in the middle of the intersection a tall policeman in a long, warm blue coat directed traffic. The policeman had a cheerful smile on his face despite the rain, and Bodden decided that the smile was there because the policeman was fed and warm and had a job that let him order other Germans around.
It was Bodden’s second day in Frankfurt since his arrival from Hamburg, where he was almost sure that he had lost the yellow-haired man. Last night he had slept in the cellar of a bombed-out Gasthaus whose owner, after a fashion, still followed his innkeeping trade by renting out the cellar’s corners to the homeless. The innkeeper had wanted to be paid in food, but since Bodden had none, he had accepted one of the printer’s razor blades. For another blade he had provided Bodden with a bowl of potato soup and a chunk of black bread.
It had been cold, but dry, in the cellar. Now Bodden was both cold and wet, and he wished that the woman would appear, although he was not sure that she was really late because he still had no watch. A spy should have a watch, Bodden thought, and grinned in spite of the rain and the cold. The profession demands it.
Five minutes later the woman appeared, better dressed than most in a long fur coat and carrying an umbrella. She walked purposefully to the steps that led up and into the ruined train station, paused, looked at her watch with the air of someone who knows she’s on time, and glanced around. In her left hand she carried the yellow book. Pinned to her coat was the red carnation.
Bodden started across the street against the traffic. The policeman yelled at him; Bodden gave him a merry grin and hurried on. When he was a few meters from the woman, he discovered that she was younger than he had first thought — not much more than twenty-five or twenty-six. And pretty, by God, he thought. Well, there was no rule that they couldn’t be pretty.
The woman, despite the cold and the custom, wore nothing on her head. She had long, thick dark hair that framed a pale oval face with full lips; a small, straight nose; and enormous brown eyes. That one could use a few potatoes, Bodden thought. Their eyes get like that when they don’t eat — big and dark and shiny, at least for a while, and then when the hope goes, they grow dull.
The woman clutched the fur coat to her throat and nestled her chin into it. Bodden wondered what she wore under the coat. Maybe nothing. He remembered the girls in Berlin last summer who had worn their fur cats in July. That and nothing else. They had sold every last stitch they owned, or traded it for food. But not their fur coats. They remembered the previous winter too well to part with their coats. There would be no coal this winter either, and without their coats they knew they would freeze.
Bodden stopped before the woman, made a little bow, smiled, and said, “Excuse me, Fraülein, but do you have the time? My watch has stopped.”
She looked at him for a moment with her enormous eyes and then glanced down at her watch. “It is five past twelve.”
“Is that midnight or noon?”
“Midnight.”
The woman handed him the book with the yellow cover. Bodden thanked her, moved off, and tucked the book away underneath his coat. The woman looked around as though trying to decide which way she should go and then walked off rapidly in the opposite direction.
Across the street in the right-hand seat of the blue Adler with the CD plates, Major Gilbert Baker-Bates gave his mustache a quick brush and said in German, “The woman, I think, don’t you?” to the yellow-haired man behind the wheel.
“He’s too good for me,” the yellow-haired man said as he started the engine.
“How long did it take him to lose you in Hamburg?”
“Twenty minutes. He knows all the old tricks and perhaps even some new ones.”
“A yellow book,” Baker-Bates said. “I wonder why the Reds always use a yellow book.”
“In Bern they liked green ones,” the yellow-haired man said.
“Both are spring colors. Perhaps that has something to do with it.”
“Perhaps,” said the yellow-haired man as he let the Adler crawl along the curb nearly fifty meters behind the hurrying woman in the fur coat.
“You had no trouble with him yesterday?”
“With the printer? None. He hadn’t counted on our flying down. Since we knew where he was heading, it was no trouble to pick him up at the station. This time I stayed far back, though. Very far back. He slept in a cellar last night and paid with razor blades. He must have a lot of them. That’s what he was using in Lübeck.”
“About here, don’t you think?” Baker-Bates said.