* * *
“I went to track him down,” my grandfather said. “Like I was supposed to. More or less.”
“More or less?”
“Well, I wasn’t supposed to go solo. But that didn’t make any sense to me under the circumstances.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about a specific, local set of circumstances or the general ones under which, like some gumshoe, he always preferred to work alone. He had made an exception in the case of Aughenbaugh; he would never entirely recover from the lapse. I nodded, but I must have looked confused.
“The circumstances being that when I found him, I was planning to, y’know,” he said.
“Kill the guy.”
“Right. On the other hand, I did have a fair amount of latitude. I had an Eisenhower pass signed by Ike himself, all of us CIOS guys did. I had been given a degree of discretion,” he said. “Which I totally abused.”
23
In the town of Nordhausen, an intelligence officer attached to the 3rd Armored Division told my grandfather of being approached by one of the locals, who had hinted that he might be persuaded to betray certain of his neighbors. This fellow did not know exactly what behaviors the Americans might be looking to punish or secrets they hoped to extract, but he was certain they would find something in his inventory to suit their needs. He kept a shop in town that, appropriately enough, sold hunting and fishing gear.
In the early morning of his second day in Nordhausen, my grandfather went to the shop with cigarettes, SPAM, chocolate, and, he recalled, a miraculous bunch of bananas, the hand of a golden Buddha ablaze against the gray morning. He found the shop on a street that bore signs of damage from the RAF raid the previous week, the one that had killed fifteen hundred inmates of the Boelcke-Kaserne. The shop had two display windows. One was covered over with a stained oilcloth tarpaulin. The other was intact, but its shade had been lowered to hide, or spare the passerby from having to see, that there was nothing to display. If you turned around, you could see a corner of the walls of the Boelcke-Kaserne rising down at the end of the street. No doubt it had carried sounds and odors to the doorstep when the wind was right.
My grandfather went around to the back door. He did not care if his visit endangered the shopkeeper’s life, but he wanted it to seem as though he did. He rang the bell and showed his Eisenhower pass. They spoke in riddles and allusions, and then the shopkeeper let him in.
The shopkeeper explained to my grandfather that he belonged to some minor Christian sect that had been first frowned on and then harassed by the Reich. Recently, his stock of excellent Mannlicher rifles had been requisitioned by the local Volkssturm during a short-lived moment of planned resistance, in exchange for worthless promissory notes. He was garrulous and priggish, and it was a wonder his neighbors had not done away with him years ago.
He turned down the cigarettes and chocolate as immoral indulgences. The bananas and SPAM were welcome enough but struck the shopkeeper as perhaps, on their own, inadequate payment. My grandfather said that if his question got a useful answer, he would try to come up with a few more cans of SPAM and maybe a tub or two of corn syrup. If that would not do, my grandfather proposed hanging the shopkeeper by the ears on a couple of fishhooks from his heaviest-gauge fishing line, giving him a push to get him swinging, and inviting those neighbors whom the shopkeeper was so eager to betray to come and test their marksmanship using whatever blunderbusses the Volkssturm had left on the shelves.
A breeze blew in through the smashed window. The tarpaulin rustled and snapped like a sail.
The shopkeeper suggested that my grandfather try the Herzog farm, on the road to Sondershausen. Herzog was an infantryman killed during the course of the long retreat from Italy. His widow had taken up with one Stolzmann, an engineer from the Mittelwerk who was now living at the farm and posing as Herzog.
My grandfather rode the Zündapp out to the Herzog farm. The sidecar rode empty beside him. He crossed a stream and, just before the road made a bend to the south, entered a birchwood. The birches congregated in the fog, wrapped in their bark with its cryptic inscriptions. They reminded my grandfather of monuments in a graveyard. He felt a premonitory shiver and, a second later, a sharp tug at the left elbow of his army coat. He heard a crack of rifle fire. Small-caliber, by the sound. Someone was shooting at him from the cover of the trees north of the road. My grandfather glanced back and to his left but saw only trees and a bright dot of daylight in the wool at the elbow of his coat.
My grandfather felt foolish, which bothered him, since he would prefer to die in the grip of any emotion, no matter how abject, than in the knowledge of his own stupidity. If the dealer in sporting goods would betray his own neighbors for some canned ham and bananas, then it was likely he would not hesitate to betray an American soldier for less. The bastard probably had arranged for an ad hoc ambush as soon as my grandfather left the shop. My grandfather opened the throttle and let the beautiful engine do what its designers had engineered it to do. There was another rifle crack, but this time the shot went wide. The road left the birchwood and made its bend to the south. There was no more shooting after that.
When he saw the promised farmhouse and its stand of poplars about a quarter mile ahead on the left, he slowed the motorcycle and killed its engine. The farm had the appearance of prosperity neither untouched nor entirely diminished by war. The stucco farmhouse was large and new, with a second story and signs of modern plumbing. The large ground-floor windows had leaded lozenges in their upper panes. There was half-timbering, a red tiled roof, and an overall air of ersatz medievalism that my grandfather supposed to be good Nazi style. The barn was capacious, with a metal roof in fine repair. The Alsatian bitch who came bounding and chesty across the meadow to give my grandfather a piece of her mind had a lustrous coat. It had been a long time since my grandfather had seen a civilian dog who did not slink around corners with the ribcage visible and the head lowered in shame or calculation. This bold specimen was frankly asking to be shot, but in addition to the headless officer’s rifle and Walther, my grandfather had come armed with a small can of Vienna sausages. After a moment’s quick work with the can opener of his folding knife, a truce was agreed to. My grandfather fed the sausages to the dog at one-minute intervals until he gained some measure of adoration. She followed him to the house but gave no warning of his approach until he was almost to the kitchen door.
In the spotless kitchen he found Frau Herzog trying to help a boy of nine or ten to adjust his artificial leg. She was a good-looking woman with a remarkable bosom who displayed mild anxiety at an American officer’s sudden appearance in her dooryard but nothing that was not called for. She explained that the boy, her son, suffered from diabetes and regrettably would have to decline the proffered Hershey bars. The boy, fair and slender, stared at my grandfather, fear showing unbribed and plain on his face. The bulb of his stump reminded my grandfather of the nosecone of a V-2. The skin over it looked chafed and sore. The prosthesis was too big, too long. At one time it might have been the property of another, larger amputee child. My grandfather had planned on confronting the widow Herzog to cut the bullshit and just ask for Stolzmann, but he was derailed by something in the face or the gestalt of the wide-eyed silent boy with his legs dying out from under him.
“Herr Herzog?” my grandfather inquired.
Alarm deepened the groove between Frau Herzog’s eyebrows. She apologized. She said that she hoped there was nothing amiss. She said that her husband was an infantryman and that he had stepped on a mine—a German mine—in a place called San Gimignano. Now he was out of combat and of no danger to anyone. In the midst of making this statement, she glanced at the boy. My grandfather did not hear a lie in her voice but noted the ambiguous phrasing. If her husband was dead and she was covering up for this Stolzmann, my grandfather could not help but admire her apparent reluctance to tell an out-and-out lie in front of her child.
“My business is not with your husband,” he said, answ
ering her ambiguity with his own. “I’m in a hurry and would like nothing better than to leave all of you in peace as soon as I have the answer I need.”
The bitch came in through the open door and, with a loving tongue, addressed herself to the fingers my grandfather had used to serve the Vienna sausages. She sat down at my grandfather’s side and yawned. Frau Herzog stood with her arms folded under her bosom, which my grandfather could not help but admire, too. He could see that although it was likely she had never wanted anything more than she wanted him to leave them in peace, that would still be insufficient payment, in her view, for what he was asking in return. Then he thought of something she might want even more.
“I can get you insulin,” he said. “Say three months’ supply. If the man of the house answers my question.”
Frau Herzog carried the boy to the bench of a refectory table and posed him there with the leg beside him. “Six months,” she said.
She led him out to the barn, where a man dressed in duck overalls was busy delivering a pair of calves, so persuasively that my grandfather began to doubt the information he had been given by the shopkeeper. The overalls fit and so did the face, lean and raw-boned with patient blue eyes. Before Frau Herzog called out to him and interrupted his work, the man’s face wore an expression of blissful absorption in the procedure and its proper execution, usual enough with engineers but presumably not unknown among farmers.
The man in the overalls inquired as to the nature of my grandfather’s business. My grandfather turned to Frau Herzog. Speaking in the most formal German he could muster, he made the polite suggestion that her son was no doubt wondering when she would be returning to the kitchen. He made the deliberate mistake of addressing her as “Frau Stolzmann.” A blush filled in the pale skin between her freckles and spread to the hollow of her throat. My grandfather took it for embarrassment, but it might just as well have been rage.
“Go,” Stolzmann told her.
She seemed to be about to try to remonstrate or make some case, but in the end she kept silent and left the barn. Stolzmann turned back to the parturient animal in the stall. It was working over its pale pink firstborn with its tongue, raising moist spikes and whorls in the dappled tan coat. The cow lifted its head as if hearing a sound that alarmed it. It made an oddly human sound of uncertainty. It clunked drunkenly two steps to the side. A smell of iron filled the barn. Veiled in its pearly amnion, the second calf squirted out of its mother. The sound was like a boot being pulled from the mud.
“She had twins,” my grandfather said. “Is that common?”
“Not very common, no,” Stolzmann said.
He tended to the newborn, squatting beside it. He moved with deliberation and apparent calm, but my grandfather could see that he was stalling for time, going over his story, his head twitching a little from side to side as he aired it to himself. My grandfather waited him out. At last the cow seemed to lose patience with Stolzmann and brought the charade to an end by interposing itself between him and the calves. Stolzmann tumbled backward and sat down hard. My grandfather almost laughed.
When Stolzmann stood up and turned to my grandfather, he had his face arranged to represent what he must have hoped would pass for rustic matter-of-factness, calves safely delivered, another chore done out of the day’s long schedule. He saw the Walther in my grandfather’s hand. He sighed. He wiped his hands on the coveralls. They left long bloody streaks.
“I’m looking for a colleague of yours,” my grandfather said, lowering the gun. “At the Mittelwerk.”
“The Mittelwerk,” Stolzmann repeated. His tone committed him to nothing. He might have heard of the Mittelwerk once or twice. He might just have been trying the word for the sound of it. He might have been trying to imagine what type of mittel was manufactured in this peculiar-sounding werk.
“We know you were employed there. You have been identified by witnesses.” By trial and error my grandfather had learned that when he needed to tell a lie in the course of an interrogation, the technique that worked best was to sound like what he was saying bored him to tears. “We have the paymaster’s ledgers and your name appears there.” He fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and put one to his lips.
“If you please,” Stolzmann said, sounding considerably less noncommittal. “No fire.” He gestured to the hay bales stacked man-high in the stall behind my grandfather, in the stalls to either side of him, in the loft.
My grandfather lit a match, held it to his cigarette, then gave it a shake. He tossed the match over his shoulder without looking to make sure it had gone out. “I want you to understand,” he said. “I would gladly burn down this barn and everything in it if doing that would bring me one step closer to Freiherr von Braun.”
A muscle twitched at the hinge of Stolzmann’s jaw. Understanding leaked into his eyes, along with a hint of contempt. At the time my grandfather was not sure how to read that contempt but later thought he understood. Stolzmann had been looking down on him, a filthy and haggard American dogface, and on the backward empire whose army he served in, bent on stealing the stars they could not attain on their own.
“Tell me where he is hiding,” my grandfather said. “I urge you to cooperate, or I will be obliged to see that you are arrested and imprisoned.”
“If you must,” Stolzmann said, working hard in his own right to sound dreadfully bored. “Do your duty, Lieutenant. Obviously, I am at the mercy of you and your country now. And its prisons.”
“Oh, not our prison,” my grandfather said in his sleepiest tone. “I’m going to have to hand you over to the Russians.”
Stolzmann blinked. He gestured to my grandfather’s cigarette and put out a hand. My grandfather handed him the pack and said he could keep what was left. Stolzmann lit a Lucky with the careful flame of his lighter. He cupped a hand under the end of the cigarette to intercept any coals that might fall out. He inhaled without bothering to conceal his pleasure in the quality of the cigarette. “I’ve never heard of this von Braun. I’m sorry.”
My grandfather made a rough and hasty estimation of Stolzmann’s weight, his reach, his agility, preparing for violence, but Stolzmann’s eyes flicked to his right and he looked abruptly irritated. There was a scrape. My grandfather turned around. Frau Herzog was carrying the boy, hugging him against her. The chunky brown shoe of the artificial leg protruded from the cuff of his trousers. My grandfather could not see either of her hands.
“Tell him,” she said to Stolzmann. “Help him, he is going to help Martin.”
“Go back to the house,” Stolzmann said.
She set the boy down. She was holding my grandfather’s M1911, which he had exchanged for the Walther. Her finger snaked around the Browning’s trigger. She raised her arm and took aim. But it was Stolzmann she was pointing the gun at, not my grandfather. “Tell him,” she said again.
“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Tell me.”
Stolzmann smoked attentively, watching the coal at the end of his cigarette. My grandfather could hear the lapping of the mother cow’s tongue. The widow moved the gun a little down and to the right, aiming for Stolzmann’s shoulder. She pulled the trigger. Stolzmann cried out and looked suitably surprised but suffered no other ill effects, since the magazine of my grandfather’s gun was empty.
My grandfather did not like the smug smile that crept across Stolzmann’s face. He asked Frau Herzog for the Browning and took an extra clip from a pocket of his coat. He gave her back the gun. He hoped she would not use it to shoot him. Frau Herzog raised the Browning and, having already demonstrated her willingness to put a bullet into her paramour, took aim at Stolzmann’s shoulder again. Stolzmann’s smile was retired for the evening.
“Wernher is not hiding,” Stolzmann told my grandfather. “He is being hidden.”
“By whom?” my grandfather said.
Stolzmann and Frau Herzog eyed each other and engaged in a telepathic exchange that ended when she racked the slide of the Browning.
“By th
e SS,” Stolzmann said. “To ensure that you don’t find him. They’re afraid that von Braun will surrender as soon as the opportunity presents itself, and offer his services to the American government.”
“Why would he do that?”
Even with the end of his dream of von Braun’s company in a motorcycle’s sidecar or the cold empty reaches of space, and even with his horror at what had been done to the workers of the Mittelbau in the name of rocketry, my grandfather could not believe that the man was prepared to betray his country as smoothly as the shopkeeper his Nordhausen neighbors.
“So he can get to the Moon,” Stolzmann said. “The SS know it. Two years ago they arrested him because they thought he was trying to divert resources from weapon development to space flight. They don’t trust him.”
“And where are they holding him, please?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Frau Herzog raised the Browning again. Its eye maintained its lidless vigil. Her fingers looked admirably relaxed on the grip.
“In Bavaria, in the mountains, but I don’t know precisely where! Why would I know? Anna!” he appealed to Frau Herzog. Frau Herzog nodded and lowered the gun, looking disappointed. My grandfather grabbed the gun away from her and then she looked afraid.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Please, Frau Herzog. I will get you the insulin. A six months’ supply.”
The Bavarian Alps. It was not enough, but it was something. A long way from Nordhausen, three hundred miles or more. He would have to check his maps, but even without looking he knew he would have to cross territory not yet occupied by the Allies to reach mountains where—according to rumor and U.S. intelligence reports alike—teenage Nazi fanatics known as Werwolf, bred to kill, had been equipped and provisioned to hold out for five years in an impregnable fortress called the Alpenfestung.* To the tally of crimes reckoned against von Braun by my grandfather, he added the offense of making oneself a pain in the ass to find. In his current state—which today would likely be diagnosed as post-traumatic shock—this felt like the most unpardonable offense of all. He told himself that he was only going to apprehend von Braun and turn him over to the authorities to be hanged as a war criminal, but offered the slightest pretext, my grandfather knew, he planned in his heart to shoot the bastard.