Robert Adams - The Memories of Milo Morai

On a night when Milo and Betty and Buck and Judy sat in the parlor of the shared bungalows, chatting and drinking and smoking, three new subjects were occupying the tar-paper barrack, their screenings to begin in the morning. This was the smallest number to arrive to date, and all of this lot were German, or listed themselves as such. Earlier in this evening, the four house mates, along with Emil Schrader and Hugo, had listened for a while to the conversations of the three via the microphones well hidden in the subject barrack and latrine, now they and Schrader sat discussing what the three men had said and the thus-revealed personalities of the men, themselves.

“This Hizinger,” asked Milo, “what do you make of him, Emil?”

“Clearly the leader of this bunch. A born leader and accustomed to command, I’d say, too. He may well be a German intellectual, but he’s clearly not a civilian one; he walks like a soldier, he talks like a soldier and he behaves like a Prussian officer of the alte Garde. He puts me in mind of an SS Panzer officer we captured in southern France—hard as nails, tough-minded and so damned convinced that he was right that nothing would or could ever shake his beliefs. That Untersturmfuhrer was from the same part of Germany my own folks came from, too, and after I’d come to talk with him for a while I could almost’ve come to like him, but then he come to get ahold of a carbine, some-way, and shot Lieutenant Mallow and I had to blow his head off with my pistol. I think Hizinger over there is just the same kind of Nazi fanatic.”

Milo nodded and turned to the others. “Betty, Buck, Judy?”

“Emil is right,” said Betty, “Herr Hizinger has got Nazi and SS written all over him. He seems very intelligent, very voluble and well educated, very precise and methodical, but it’s clear that he was no civilian specialist at whatever our three scientists—Smith, Jones and Doe—are interested in; no, he was a military man, all the way, probably from birth. I’d give odds that his real name, his patronymic, has a ‘von’ preceding it, Milo.”

“Yes,” agreed Buck. “You know, what I think is that this Hizinger got wind of what was going on and thought he might have the ability to pass himself off as a scientist and thus escape Germany, Europe and his just deserts for whatever he may have done in service to Hitler, the Party and the Fatherland.”

While Betty and the others had been talking, Judy had just sat in silence, biting her lips and wringing her hands. Now she spoke. “Look, if anyone here in this room has real reasons for hating and despising the Nazis, it’s me. But there is this, too, to be considered and not ever forgotten. Not all Germans were Nazis, not all German soldiers were Nazis, not even all German officers were Nazis. There were even SS men who were not Nazis or even Germans, for that matter. Whether this Hizinger was a scientist or a soldier or both or neither, he deserves to be judged just as objectively as we judged all of the men who came before him and will come after him. If he is a Prussian—and I doubt that he is, he doesn’t have that accent—that is not at all his fault. Who has choice in where he is born?

“I do not in the least like this dirty business of listening to the conversations and private acts of our subjects without their knowledge or leave, Milo. Yes, I know, you are going to say that the general says that it is necessary to do such things for the good of the nation, but reflect, if you all will—this is precisely the excuse used by Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and every other dictator to legalize even the most heinous and unspeakable acts against individuals and groups.

“After this exchange, tonight, I suggest, in the pursuit of being fair and truly objective, that Herr Hizinger be turned over to Team Two. Let Hugo, Ned and Dr. Jones determine his true status-to-be.”

The next morning, Milo did turn Hizinger over to Hugo, giving the subject called Faber to Team One and the one called Gries to Team Three, with Emil Schrader filling in for him in his absence. He felt a need to confer with Barstow, not because of what Judy had said as much as because of the way she had said it, and also partially because of things not heard but felt, sensed.

Barstow ushered Milo back into the small window-less, soundproofed conference room, closed and locked the door, and offered Scotch and a cigar. When he had heard it all, he carefully nudged the ash from off the end of hispuro and raised his bushy eyebrows. “Milo, in any operations of the kinds I’ve been running, the chance of innocently harboring one or more jokers in the deck is a distinct possibility, but if we do have such here, I don’t think Judy is the one. I’m going to tell you why, but what I say is for your ears alone—you don’t repeat it to anyone, not even to Betty. Verstehen?

“Of course, you’ve noted how close Buck and Judy are? They’ve been together for a long time and through particular hell. They’re what is left of a team of three people, the third of whom was Judy’s husband. They were not really military, they worked for another group and worked in France for quite some time before D-Day and after, successfully passing themselves off as French.

“After the landings, as the Allied armies got closer, Judy’s husband must have gotten a little too cocksure. He stayed on the air long enough one night for the Germans to finally triangulate the location of his transmitter. When the Gestapo and Wehrmacht burst in, they caught both Judy and her husband, and very nearly Buck and a member of the underground.

“At that particular time, Milo, maquis units were shooting German soldiers in the countryside and underground types were doing the same thing in the very streets of Paris while the German Occupation Command was debating just how and when to start to demolish Paris as ordered by Hitler himself. The German forces at the front were fighting like hell and still getting pushed farther and farther back, day by day. In that aura of pessimism and facing the specter of approaching defeat, the Gestapo was become exceedingly vicious, frantic to obtain information that might help to briefly stave off or even slow down Armageddon.

“The things that were done first to Judy’s husband, then to Judy herself, were unprintable, unspeakable, almost unthinkable to any sane, normal human being. Townspeople said that their screams could be heard even through the five-foot-thick stone walls of the seventeenth-century building the Gestapo was using for a headquarters and prison in that area.

“By the time Buck had gotten together enough men and arms, ammo and explosives, to blast his way into that complex and, after killing a number of Germans, rescue them, Judy was the only one left alive, and she was in a bad way.

“Two days later, elements of the American Second Army liberated the town and Judy was flown to a hospital in England. Buck went back to England, too, but only long enough to be teamed up with some new people and gotten into still-occupied Elsass—Alsace, as the French call it. I understand that they did a bang-up job there, too. Buck was recommended to me when the München operation was first being planned at SHAEF, in England. When I offered him a slot, he told me flat out that he would only come with me if Judy came with him, and I’ve yet to have reason to regret that I took them both on.

“As you’ve accurately guessed, Judy is a German. Although her family were aristocrats, the Great War transformed them into what we Americans would call ‘genteel poor.’ In her teens, she met and married the son of a wealthy, titled English house while the young man was pursuing a course of study at one of the great German universities. Despite the unholy, sophisticated barbarities committed by Gestapo perverts upon her and her Sate husband, Judy still is proud to be a German, and in light of the truly stupendous fight that Germany put up against impossible odds—a little country of only some sixty million people, total, taking on half the world . . . and nearly winning!—I can’t blame her, I’d guess that her outburst last night was simply an upswelling surge of national pride, Milo, nothing more sinister than that.