Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Fifteen minutes a week.” Garbrecht was surprised that he had actually laughed. “That’s all.”

“Exactly.” Seedorf laughed. “It won’t be so bad. There’s always a meal to be had here, and cigarettes. It is almost like old times. There!” He stepped back, smiling widely. “I am so happy it is settled.” He took Garbrecht’s hand and shook it warmly with both his. “Till next week,” he said.

Garbrecht looked heavily at him. Then he sighed. “Till next week,” he said.

Seedorf held the door open for him when he went out. There was no one else in the corridor and no guards at the door, and he walked slowly down the creaking hall, through the rich smell of cooking, and on into the street and the gathering cold evening air.

He walked blankly through the broken brick wastes toward the American control post, staring straight ahead of him. Next week, he thought, I must ask him what the picture of Lenin is doing on the wall.

The office of Captain Peterson was very different from the bleak room in which Captain Mikhailov conducted his affairs. There was a clerk in the corner and an American flag on the wall, and the busy sound of American typewriters from the next room. There was a water cooler and a warm radiator, and there was a picture of a pretty girl with a small blond child on Peterson’s disordered desk. Garbrecht took his coat off and sat down in one of the comfortable looted plush chairs and waited for Peterson. The interviews with Peterson were much less of a strain than the ones with Mikhailov. Peterson was a large young man who spoke good German and, amazingly, fair Russian. He was good-natured and naïve, and Garbrecht was sure he believed Garbrecht’s excellently forged papers and innocuous, false record, and Garbrecht’s quiet, repeated insistence that he had been anti-Nazi from the beginning. Peterson was an enthusiast. He had been an enthusiast about the war, in which he had performed quite creditably, he was an enthusiast about Germany, its scenery, its art, its future, its people, whom he regarded as the first victims of Hitler. Mikhailov was different. He bleakly made no comment on the official soft tones issuing from Moscow on the subject of the German people, but Garbrecht knew that he regarded the Germans not as the first victims, but as the first accomplices.

Of late, Garbrecht had to admit, Peterson had not seemed quite so enthusiastic. He had seemed rather baffled and sometimes hurt and weary. In the beginning, his naïveté had spread to cover the Russians in a rosy blanket, too. The assignments he gave to Garbrecht to execute in the Russian zone were so routine and so comparatively innocent, that if Garbrecht had had a conscience he would have hesitated at taking payment for their fulfillment.

Peterson was smiling broadly when he came in, looking like a schoolboy who has just been promoted to the first team on a football squad. He was a tall, heavy young man with an excited, swift manner of talking. “Glad to see you, Garbrecht,” he said. “I was afraid I was going to miss you. I’ve been busy as a bartender on Saturday night, hand-carrying orders all over the place, packing, saying good-bye …”

“Good-bye?” Garbrecht said, shaken by a small tremor of fear. “Where are you going?”

“Home.” Peterson pulled out three drawers from his desk and started emptying them in a swift jumble. “The United States of America.”

“But I thought,” Garbrecht said, “that you had decided to stay. You said your wife and child were coming over and …”

“I know …” Peterson threw a whole batch of mimeographed papers light-heartedly into the trash basket. “I changed my mind.” He stopped working on the drawers and looked soberly at Garbrecht. “They’re not coming here. I decided I didn’t want my child to grow up in Europe.” He sat down heavily, staring over Garbrecht’s head at the molding around the ceiling. “In fact,” he said, “I don’t think I want to hang around Europe any more myself. In the beginning I thought I could do a lot of good here. Now …” He shrugged. “They’d better try someone else. I’d better go back to America and clear my head for a while. It’s simpler in a war. You know whom you’re fighting and you have a general idea about where he is. Now …” Once more the shrug.

“Maybe I’m too stupid for a job like this,” he continued. “Or maybe I expected too much. I’ve been here a year, and everything seems to be getting worse and worse. I feel as though I’m sliding downhill all the time. Slowly, not very perceptibly … but downhill. Maybe Germany has always struck everybody the same way. Maybe that’s why so many people have always committed suicide here. I’m going to get out of here before I wake up one morning and say to myself, ‘By God, they have the right idea.’”

Suddenly he stood up, swinging his big feet in their heavy army shoes down to the floor with a commanding crash. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you in to see Major Dobelmeir. He’s going to replace me.” Peterson opened the door for Garbrecht, and they went out into the anteroom with the four desks and the girls in uniform typing. Peterson led the way. “I think the United States Army is going to begin to get its money’s worth out of you now, Garbrecht,” Peterson said, without looking back. “Dobelmeir is quite a different kettle of fish from that nice, simple young Captain Peterson.”

Garbrecht stared at the back of Peterson’s head. So, he thought coldly, he wasn’t so completely fooled by me, after all. Maybe it’s good he’s going.

But then Peterson opened the door to one of the rooms along the hall and they went in, and Garbrecht took one look at the major’s leaf and the heavy, brooding, suspicious face, and he knew that he was wrong; it would have been much better if Peterson had stayed.

Peterson introduced them and the Major said, “Sit down,” in flat heavy-voiced German, and Peterson said, “Good luck, I have to go now,” and left. The Major looked down at the papers on his desk and read them stolidly, for what seemed to Garbrecht like a very long time. Garbrecht felt the tension beginning again in his muscles, as it had in Seedorf’s room. Everything, he thought, gets worse and worse, more and more complicated.

“Garbrecht,” the Major said, without looking up, “I have been reading your reports.” He did not say anything else, merely continued to read slowly and effortfully, his eyes covered, his heavy chin creasing in solid fat as he bent his head over the desk.

“Yes?” Garbrecht said finally, because he could no longer stand the silence.

For a moment, Dobelmeir did not answer. Then he said, “They aren’t worth ten marks, all of them together, to anybody. The United States Government ought to sue you for obtaining money on false pretenses.”

“I am very sorry,” Garbrecht said hurriedly, “I thought that that is what was wanted, and I …”

“Don’t lie.” The Major finally lifted his head and stared fishily at him.

“My dear Major …”

“Keep quiet,” the Major said evenly. “We now institute a new regime. You can do all right if you produce. If you don’t, you can go find another job. Now we know where we stand.”

“Yes, sir,” said Garbrecht.

“I should not have to teach you your business at this late date,” the Major said. “There is only one way in which an operation like this can pay for itself; only one rule to follow. All our agents must act as though the nation on which they are spying is an active enemy of the United States, as though the war has, in fact, begun. Otherwise the information you gather has no point, no focus, no measurable value. When you bring me information it must be information of an enemy who is probing our line for weak spots, who is building up various depots of supplies and troops and forces in specific places, who is choosing certain specific fields on which to fight the crucial battles. I am not interested in random, confusing gossip. I am only interested in indications of the disposition of the enemy’s strength and indications of his aggressive intentions toward us. Is that clear?”