The American Ambassador (23 page)

“It is time for me to be a grandfather. All my friends are grandfathers, those who have families, and are still alive. It is thrilling to watch them with their grandchildren at the zoo, looking at the animals, eating an ice.” He looked at Gert a long moment, up and down. For the first time, she turned to meet his gaze, her eyes widening; it was an innocent look, without guile or complexity. They could have been strangers. She smoothed her dark hair with the palm of one hand, tucking stray curls behind her ears. Max leaned forward, and suddenly he looked very old. “It would be a wonderful thing, if you could make me a grandfather.” Gert continued to stare at him, smiling brilliantly now, as if posing for a photograph. “Oh,” he said, “I hope you are not barren. That would be a great pity.”

She turned to Bill and said, “Dead men on furlough.”

Max's eyes narrowed. “What? What did she say?”

“I'm surprised you don't know it,” Bill said. “Comrade Lenin's remark. Surely you remember.”

“I don't know it,” Max said brusquely.

“Shall I explain it? Perhaps Gert will explain it.”

Max stirred uncomfortably. “At my age, what good would it do?” Bill said, “Shall we get down to business? My time is short.”

“I thought we might come to know each other.”

“Why?”

“It is correct.”

“It is foolish,” Bill said. “The situation is very tight.”

Gert said, “Excuse me. I am going to the toilet.”

Max said, “Through that door, darling, to the left.”

“There has been a change this past week. The security people are everywhere.”

Max watched Gert rise and walk slowly out of the room. He said, “I am surprised that she knew me. But I could tell right away, when I handed her the hat. I could see it in her eyes, that I had not been forgotten.”

“Her memory comes and goes in bits and pieces. But you have not been forgotten, no.”

Max nodded, apparently pleased. “She was that way from the beginning, you know. We were living with friends, and she was the first child born to any of our group. We were poor, living badly in a little town outside of Munich. We were underground, living in filth. We did not have experience with children, but still we knew. It was a difficult time for all of us, living that way. We thought it was inherited, her mother's brother was slow.”

“Gert is not slow.”

“The stories I have heard—”

“At your age, are you suddenly believing the capitalist press?
La belle dame sans merci
? Is that where you get your information,
The International Herald Tribune
?”

“Not only the press.”

“Nothing you have heard is true,” Bill said.

“How do you know what I have heard?”

“I know the stories, the stories in the press, the stories in the Street. None of them are true. I am the one who knows the truth, all of it.” Unsmiling, he looked down at Max. He had spoken the last sentence in German.

Max avoided his eyes. “I am her father, after all.”

Bill said nothing, but moved so that he was behind Max, out of his vision.

“It was a noisy house. There were many arguments. Some people do not behave well when there is danger. But she was quiet as a child, always kept to herself. We were not young, her mother was thirty-eight and I was forty, when she was born. Her mother was gone during the day, working. I was often absent for other reasons. We all had our duties to perform, and we were under the strictest discipline. It was a difficult time, those years.”

“You already said that.”

“But exciting and passionate, perhaps a little different from now.” He hesitated, thinking. “Some of what she remembers of that time, or thinks she remembers, is highly colored. Her imagination—” Max sighed and flopped his hands on his knees. The only sound in the room was the squeak of his wheeze. He said, “She was a very imaginative child, a romantic.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “And time's short. When I spoke to our mutual friend. And arranged for our meeting. He said you would be of help. So let's get down to business.”

Max said, “I will try to be of help. I am authorized to be helpful, in what way I can. My information is, they have assigned Duer to investigate. That is a measure of the seriousness.” He smiled. “You are public enemies, you and Gert. Duer personally is in charge.”

Bill said, “Who's Duer?”

Max sighed again, shifting position so that he could see the younger man, and observe his expression. Everyone knew who Duer was. He said, “Very clever. He is a very clever officer.”

Bill moved back to the window, looking left and right. The street was as before. “So?”

“They have a picture of you and Gert. The picture was taken in Hamburg, I don't know when or where. I do not know the circumstances, it could have been last month or last year. But Hamburg now is flooded with Duer's people. Do you understand?”

“I know that.”

“A few years ago, your father was in Hamburg, Is this not true?” He waited for a reply and when there was none said, “In my business, the journalist's business, we say that silence is acquiescence.” He smiled winningly, point scored. “So my sources of information are not so bad. They are adequate. I have been told to assist you. I have been told not to ask too many questions, that you are uncomfortable with questions, and suspicious. Your reputation precedes you. We are eager that you be satisfied with the arrangements, and that there be mutual confidence. I am told you are a paranoid young American, obsessed with security. Americans and Jews are known to be obsessed with security. And it is only sensible to be paranoid, so I do not object to any of this. It is normal. I understand it. But still. Here we are together. We must have an exchange.”

She opened the bathroom door a crack, and peeked out. She could see Max in the armchair and Bill behind him, Bill framed by the window, his face in shadows. It was no longer raining, but the light was gray. She looked at Max, a wrung-out old man; red-faced, heavier, thicker around the middle, but she would know him anywhere. She had recognized him immediately behind the false beard. She knew him by his hands, thick with long heavy fingers, and his dark eyes. He frightened her, frightened her so much she could barely look at him; in the café she had kept her eyes averted, hoping he would not see her, but then the hands were holding her rain hat. She saw his knuckles, and the nails bitten to the quick, and the mat of black hair on his wrists. His eyes, black as night, seemed to drill into her person. Did he know what she was thinking? Could he see into her tangled memory, her life, what it was like for her? Could he see her wherever she was, in the tub, in bed with Wolf? Could he read her emotions? Yes, he could; he always could, wherever she looked there he was, big as a tree, big as the Brandenburger Tor and as indestructible. Watching him through the crack in the door, she began to tremble; she smoothed her mind, and tamped it down. She made it as placid and unreadable as the surface of a pond on a hot summer's day, thick and opaque as dark tea.

Pour the tea, darling.

Yes, Papa.

Isn't she looking well?

A tragedy.

Ill so many years.

Pour the tea, darling.

Wolf so good, betraying nothing. Wolf behaving as if it were normal, this reunion. Wolf so handsome and good, pouring the tea when he saw her hands shaking. She watched them now, through the crack in the door, her father talking in his deep guttural. She put her hands over her ears. It was correct that they were with her black-eyed father now, in this apartment. It was not his. She knew the way he lived, knew his bourgeois love of old furniture and thick carpets, his taste for the bourgeois commonplace, and he would never live in an apartment like this one. It was too—ordinary, with its blond wood furniture and glass-topped coffee table, the plastic tea service, the newspapers piled in the corner. Her father thought of himself
comme il faut.
And the district was conspicuous, near the zoo. He looked uncomfortable, as opposed to Wolf, who fit in anywhere. Wolf wanted something from him and he was reluctant to give it, whatever it was. They had discussed Wolf's approach and he promised he would be careful—circumspect, alert. Expect treachery, she had said. Watch him every minute. Watch his dark side. Treachery was typical of her father. It was normal.

She did not want to show herself. She would wait until they had concluded their conversation, making whatever arrangements they were making. She trusted Wolf. She had never found cause to regret living inside his forehead, imagining him imagining her, seeing through his eyes. She depended on him to arrange the future that she would secure, never having lost her early enchantment with his voice, as soft and sweet and full of promise and satisfaction as Mick Jagger's.

 

Wolf watched her open the door a crack. He could tell from the frightened expression in her face that she was not with them. She was way back in her mind somewhere, living in her vision of the future. Her mouth and eyes were troubled and he knew that had to do with Max. Max, a dark shadow from the first day they met, when he chanced to stop at the café in St. Germain to read the
Herald Tribune.
It had taken her weeks to speak a complete sentence, but it didn't matter because he thought he could read her mind; in those days, he had a belief in magic.
Why are you afraid of your father
? And he had hit home, as he knew he would. Everyone had a doppelganger, and Max was hers; as the ambassador was his. He knew her because he knew himself: looking at her was like looking into a mirror, and when he spoke he knew he was understood.

She opened the door another inch. It had been a calculated risk, meeting Max in the café; but it had been the safest of the available options. He wanted Max off-balance and if that meant Gert being off-balance too, well, it was unavoidable. Everything had its price. But she had done very well, with Max and with the boy, following the scenario to the letter, dropping her rain hat and remaining indifferent. She had not flinched when Max approached. She had not looked at any of them, and all the time they were undressing her; they stripped her naked. All the men in the café were staring at her—some openly, others not—but that, too, was unavoidable. On other occasions, it was useful. Her eyes were narrowed now, no more than slits. He tugged at his ear, a signal for Gert to stay where she was. He could not be certain she understood the signals. Gert was not always predictable.

She pulled back into the darkness, her face invisible now; he could see only the black toes of her shoes. Max was talking, a long reminiscence about the old days, the nineteen fifties in voluptuous Berlin. He and his friends had taken a little pockmarked house near the Dahlem, pretty little place with a garden in the back, on Sundays they'd take long walks in the Grünewald, it was there he'd met Gert's mother. . . . He listened with a show of interest, Max circling the target. He saw nothing of her in him, everything about them was dissimilar; his heavy build and bank clerk's face, and volubility. But there was no one like Gert, he had never imagined anyone like Gert.

“We were cautious in those days,” Max said, smiling as if he expected a reply. When none came, he went on, “It was the effect of the war, and being on the run for so long. And we never knew the fine points of the program. We never knew the end point, the destination. Do you see? Everything was uphill. In those days, Berlin was the center of the universe. But”—he brightened—“many of us are still alive, and that's something. We are still around, here and there. Doing our jobs. Semiretired.” He leaned forward, grinning, biting his lower lip, homing in at last. “My friend, tell me this one thing, now that we are together here. It would help me so much to know, and I am burning with curiosity. You remember Aachen?”

He nodded, knowing this was coming, expecting it.

“Aachen. It was about two years ago, that
aktion?
”

He said, “About that.”

“Charlemagne's city, his court, before he became Emperor of the West. Was that Gert, in Aachen? I think it was. The newspapers said that a girl put the device in the
Damen.
The girl drank beer with the American soldiers, and the only thing the bartender remembered was that she spoke very little and seemed . . . distracted. He thought that perhaps she was Italian, something about the way she looked and moved. The soldiers gave a description, and naturally it didn't fit at all. Blond hair, short legs, jewelry, sneakers, a little red hat, a dumpy little tart. But I know that Gert has the ability to . . . change herself. She could have been an actress, my Gert. Mother Courage one night, Hedda Gabler the next night. She has range, do you not agree? There were two groups that claimed responsibility, and I knew that one was false. And I had never heard of the other. And when I read the account, I thought it must be her. It sounded like her, my Gert.”

“No,” he said.

Max continued, warming to the subject, “And the incredible thing, the girl leaves the café only minutes—seconds, according to one newspaper—before the device explodes. An act of daring. Looks at her watch. Oh, she says, I have to go collect my little sister, who is at school. I have to catch a bus for the school. I must leave right away. Don't go, Herr Hauptmann, I'll be back. And a few seconds later, when she is in the street, supposedly waiting for the bus, the device explodes. Except when witnesses are questioned, no one remembers a girl in a red hat waiting for a bus.” He smiled. “How many killed?”

“Four,” he said. “And a dozen wounded.”

“I understand about the security,” Max said.

“Gert has never been in Aachen.”

“Nor does she have a little sister. As I say, I understand about the security. I understand about security, and anyone's natural reluctance to explain things. This is normal. But I keep wondering. I can't help myself. After Aachen, there was the industrialist in Strasbourg.”