Alan Furst: Spies of the Balkans

Twenty minutes later, Emilia Krebs was having a second cup of coffee when she heard the chime of the doorbell. Now who could be calling at this hour? Likely one of her fellow conspirators, she guessed, properly afraid to trust the telephone.

However, when she opened the door she faced a man she knew she’d never seen before. Heavily built, with a Prussian haircut, he wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses and looked, she thought, something like a mathematics teacher at a military academy. But he wasn’t that. He announced himself as “Herr Albert Hauser,” but, as it turned out, he wasn’t that either, not quite. What he was, he revealed as he sat on her couch, was Hauptsturmfuhrer Albert Hauser, of, as he put it, “the Geheime Staatspolizei.” An official title, the secret state police, simply one more government organization. But in Germany it was common usage to abbreviate this title, which came out “Gestapo.”

“Oh, that name, it’s become so …,” he said, hunting for a polite word but not finding one, and instead finishing, “… you know what I mean, Frau Krebs.”

She did.

“I called because I was wondering if you could shed some light on the whereabouts of a certain couple. Herr and Frau Gruen?”

Ah yes, she’d known them.

“Good friends of yours?”

Acquaintances.

“Well, it was reported to the local police that they’d disappeared, back in December this was, and when the detectives made no progress, it became my … concern.”

Not case , she thought. Concern . This Gestapo man seemed quite the gentle soul. Perhaps one could be, umm, forthcoming with him.

In a pig’s eye.

Emilia’s hands lay modestly folded in her lap, because she didn’t want Hauser to see that they were trembling.

“Unfortunately,” Hauser said, “I must consider the possibility that they met with foul play. They haven’t been seen since then, and there’s no record of their having-emigrated.”

They ran for their lives, you Nazi filth . No, she hadn’t heard that they’d emigrated, but still, they might’ve done so. Could the records be at fault?

“Our records, Frau Krebs?”

“Yes, Hauptsturmfuhrer. Yours.”

“I would doubt that.”

Very well. In that case, there was little she could add.

“Please, Frau Krebs, do not misunderstand the nature of this inquiry. We both know that the Gruens were … of the Jewish faith. But, even so, our security institutions are responsible for the protection of all our German citizens, no matter what people say.”

What people say. Do you mean that you are Jew murderers and should roast in hell for all eternity-that sort of thing? “Yes, I’m aware of what people say, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer. Some people.”

“What can we do, meine Frau?”

You poor thing .

It went on, but not for long, and Hauser’s exterior never showed the slightest fissure-he was, certainly, beyond courteous. Still, there he was, in her living room, the coffee cup of the fugitive Ostrova sitting on the kitchen counter. He hadn’t come in uniform, with three fellow officers, he hadn’t kicked down the door, he hadn’t smacked her face. Yet, nonetheless, there he was. And, as he prepared to leave, her hands shook so hard she had to clasp them behind her back.

“I wish you a good day, Frau Krebs. I hope I have not intruded.”

He closed the door behind him, it clicked shut, she called an office at the General Staff headquarters, and Hugo was home twenty minutes later. It was the worst conversation they ever had. Because they had to part. She was obviously a suspect, so obviously under surveillance but, as long as he stayed where he was, she was safe, she could leave Germany. If they were to attempt to leave together, they would both be arrested.

She took the train to Frankfurt that afternoon. Was she watched? Impossible to know, but she assumed she was. At the grand house in which she’d been raised, she spoke with her grandfather, and together they made their plans. If, he said, it was time for her to leave, then it was also time for him. Since the rise of Hitler in 1933 he’d hoped for the sort of catastrophe that always, sooner or later, brought such people down, but it hadn’t happened. Instead, triumph followed triumph. So now came the moment to abandon such folly, as Emilia’s grandfather put it, “and leave these people to their madness.” The next morning, with a single telephone call, he procured exit visas for a week-long vacation in Basel. He did not have to visit an office, he simply sent a clerk over for the papers. “The general’s aide asked that I convey the general’s warmest wishes for a pleasant stay in Switzerland,” said the clerk, as he handed Adler a manila envelope. No more than expected, from this general, for Adler had made him a very wealthy general indeed.

It was a long drive, ten hours, from Frankfurt to the Swiss border, but Emilia Krebs and her grandfather were comfortable in the luxurious Mercedes automobile. The cook, saddened because she suspected she would never see them again, had made up a large packet of sandwiches, smoked liverwurst and breast of chicken, and filled a large thermos with coffee. The cook knew what they knew: that even traveling in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and looking like powerful and protected people, it was better not to stop. There were Nazi luminaries everywhere along the way and when they drank, which was often, they were liable to forget their manners. The chauffeur drove steadily through the gusty March weather, Emilia Krebs and her grandfather watched the towns go by and, even though the glass partition assured them privacy, only conversed now and then.

“How many did you save, Emmi?” the elder Adler asked.

“I believe it was forty, at least that. We lost one man who was arrested at the Hungarian border, we never learned why, and a pair of sisters, the Rosenblum sisters, who simply vanished. They were librarians, older women; God only knows what happened to them. But that was in the early days, we managed better later on.”

“I am proud of you, Emmi, do you know that? Forty people.”

“We did our best,” she said.

And then, for a time, they did not speak, lost in their own thoughts. Emilia didn’t cry, mostly she didn’t, she held it in, and kept a handkerchief in her hand for the occasional lapse. Her grandfather was, in his way, also brokenhearted. Seven hundred years of family history in Germany, gone. Finally he said, some minutes later, “It was the honorable thing to do.”

She nodded, in effect thanking him for kind words. But we pay a price for honor , she thought.

So now she paid, so did her husband, so did her grandfather, and, for that matter, so would the Yugoslavs, and the Greeks. Such a cruel price . Was it always thus? Perhaps, it was something she couldn’t calculate, life had somehow grown darker, at times it did. Perhaps that was what people meant by the phrase the world is coming apart . But mostly you couldn’t question what they meant, because mostly they said it to themselves.

Hours later, they reached the Swiss border. The German customs officer glanced at their papers, put two fingers to the brim of his cap, and waved them through. The Swiss officer, as the striped barrier bar was lowered behind them, did much the same. And then they drove on, a few minutes more, into the city of Basel.

29 March. There was little to do in the office-only Sibylla and Zannis there now, and Saltiel’s bare desk, his photographs gone. The telephone rang now and then, the Salonika detective units continuing to work because they might as well, while they were waiting. Zannis read the newspaper as long as he could stand it, then threw it in the wastebasket. German troop formations moving south, diplomats said this and that; now it was only a matter of time.