Ross Thomas - The Eighth Dwarf

“You disapprove of my coat?”

He shook his head. “It looks warm.”

“So is wool, but I prefer marten. I also would choose caviar over cabbage.”

It was another signal of sorts, weak but unmistakable, and Bodden sent back a careful reply. “Then we have that much in common.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps even more. Who knows?” Suddenly, she was all business and crisp efficiency again. “The man upstairs, the one with the scarred face. His name is Max. He is a sympathizer of sorts and can be trusted — up to a point. But not that one.” She nodded slightly toward the middle-aged woman who still stood by the coal cookstove.

“His wife?”

“Sister. Max disapproves of her black-market dealings, in principle anyway, but not enough to refuse her food. Without her, Max would starve. Like many today, they are stuck with each other. But Max will be your contact with me. You should check with him every day, and you may as well eat here, too. It’s not haute cuisine, but it’s nourishing.”

“I cannot afford it.”

“That packet of cigarettes you gave her will buy your meals for the next four days.”

He held up the partially smoked pack of Camels. “May I keep these?”

She smiled, and Bodden noticed that it came more easily this time. “You may even smoke them, if you like, printer. Although you don’t know it yet, you’re rich. How does it feel?”

Bodden grinned. “Tell me more and then I’ll tell you how it feels.”

“I noticed you have no briefcase. It makes you look naked. Sometimes I think every German’s born with a briefcase in his hand. Well, you have one now. It’s upstairs with Max. In it are two thousand American cigarettes.”

“You’re right. I am rich. And it feels fine.”

“You’ll need a room and transport. Max will fix you up with a room. It won’t be warm, but it’ll be dry. For transport, well, the best you can hope for is a bicycle. The going rate is six hundred cigarettes or three kilos of fat.”

“A stolen bicycle, of course.”

“What else?”

“I’ll try the DP’s. The DP’s and I get along — especially the Poles. I knew many in the camp. Some were very funny fellows.”

“What camp were you in?”

“Belsen.”

She looked away. When she spoke, still looking away, her voice was elaborately casual almost to the point of indifference. “Did you ever know a man there called Scheel? Dieter Scheel?”

Bodden realized that she was holding her breath until he answered. “A friend?”

She sighed the breath out. “My father.”

“It was a big camp,” he said as kindly as he could.

“Yes, I suppose it was.”

“Eva Scheel. A pleasant name. Was he Jewish, your father?”

She shook her head. “My mother was. My father, like you, printer, was a Social Democrat with a big mouth. Well, no matter.”

She took an envelope from the pocket of her coat and handed it to Bodden. “I will leave now. In the envelope is a report on everything that my American Lieutenant has told me about his investigation of Kurt Oppenheimer. Also about the man whom they think Oppenheimer killed.”

“Damm, wasn’t it?”

“Karl-Heinz Damm. It seems that he sold identities to those who had need of them.”

Bodden nodded. “A most profitable profession, I would say.”

“Yes. The report is rather long because my Ami Lieutenant seems to think his fiancée should be interested in his work. I suggest that you read it here and then burn it in the cookstove.”

“Now that I’m rich, I’ll read it over another cup of coffee.”

Eva rose. “The yellow-haired man, the one you parted company with in Hamburg. Did he have a long face and wear a blue cap?”

The warmth of the room had made Bodden relax. The warmth and the food and the cigarettes and the Schnapps. And the woman, of course, he thought. A woman can relax you or wind you up like a clock spring. She has just wound you up again, printer.

“Was he wearing a coat?” Bodden said. “A blue coat?”

“Dyed dark blue. A Wehrmacht coat”

“Yes.”

“He picked me up shortly after the train station. He is very good.”

Bodden nodded slowly. “The British. They must have flown him down.”

“He is not British.”

“No? Did you hear him speak?”

“I had no need. I could tell from his walk. He walks like a German. Haven’t you heard the saying? The British walk as if they own the earth. The Germans as if they think they should own it And the Americans as if they don’t give a damn who owns it. Shall I lose him for you, printer? He is very good, but I am better.”

Bodden smiled. “You have a great deal of confidence.”

She nodded. “Almost as much as you do.”

“Then lose him.”

“They will find us again, of course.”

Bodden shrugged. “Or perhaps, when the time is ripe, we will find them.”

The name of the man with the yellow hair who stood outside the Goiden Rose in the rain was Heinrich von Staden, and he had been a captain in Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr until the twenty-first of July, 1944, which was the day after the one-armed Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg had placed the black briefcase under the heavy table at the Wolfschanze, or Wolf’s Fort, in the forest near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg. Captain von Staden might not have been standing now outside the Golden Rose in the rain if Colonel Brandt, the famous horseman of the 1936 Olympics, hadn’t reached down and moved the briefcase because it was bothering him. He moved it just enough so that when the bomb it contained exploded, it killed several men, but not the one it was supposed to kill: Adolf Hitler.

So, on the twenty-first of July, 1944, Captain Heinrich von Staden had left the German Embassy in Madrid, carrying with him as many documents as he thought both pertinent and useful, and presented himself at the office of his counterpart at the British Embassy.

His counterpart had not been especially surprised to see him. “Pity about the bomb, wasn’t it?” he had said.

Von Staden had nodded. “Yes, a pity.”

“They won’t try again, will they?”

“No, they’ll all be dead shortly.”

“Canaris too?”

“Yes, Canaris too.”

“Mmm. Well, what do you think we should do with you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why don’t we just send you back to London and let them sort it out?”

“Very well.”

So they had flown him back to London and they had sorted it out. First there had been the solitary confinement and then the interrogation, followed by a long stretch in a POW camp. Then there had been more interrogation, and finally, there had been the one long, especially grueling session which had lasted sixteen hours until, against all rules, Major Baker-Bates had said, “How’d you like to go to work for us?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No, not very much of one, I’m afraid. The POW camp, of course. You could always opt to go back there.”

“I think not,” ex-Captain von Staden had said, which was why he was now standing outside the Golden Rose in the rain.

The streets had been crooked in that old section of the city where, before the war, Frankfurt had done its drinking and whoring. Those streets which had been cleared were still crooked, with narrow winding paths that led off into the rubble and ended, sometimes, apparently no-where.

Von Staden watched as the woman came out of the Golden Rose, opened her umbrella, and hurried off down the narrow, crooked street. He moved after her, keeping close to the edge of the uneven rubble. The woman turned off the street into one of the twisting paths. Von Staden followed, not hurrying, but keeping the woman within twenty meters, not letting her get farther ahead than that. Another path led off the one that they were on. The woman stopped, hesitating, as if she were not sure of her directions. Then she turned right. Von Staden gave her a few moments and followed.