An Honorable German (45 page)

“I have eleven dollars,” Max said.

“That’ll do.”

Using both hands, Malachi brought the shotgun to his shoulder and took steady aim at Max’s face. “Now get your goddamn selves
out of here.”

_________

Their strategy was simple. Max spoke English well enough to pass as an American from another part of the country. “Just tell
’em you’re from Brooklyn if they ask about the accent. Them buckras is so stupid they won’t know the difference,” Malachi
had said. “And don’t keep looking around like you got the nerves. Just walk straight and steady like you own the place. That’s
how white folks do.”

_________

At the station Carls was to stay at a distance from Max, find a seat, and pretend to sleep. With his bib overalls, dirty shirt,
and the smell of sweat all over him, he looked the picture of a Mississippi dirt farmer. They reached the rail station in
the late afternoon, 4:15 by the gilt clock on the King Edward Hotel across the street from the station.

Max bought the tickets without trouble, spreading his six dollars on the smooth wooden counter and telling the clerk, “Two
coach for New Orleans.” He felt a strange fear she was going to look up and say, “Ausweiss, bitte,” but the woman behind the
barred window didn’t even look up as she passed the tickets through. So different from the Reich, where identification papers
and leave papers and permits were required to travel anywhere on a train.

“Luggage, sir?”

Max spun around and saw a colored man smiling at him from beneath a red leather cap. A police check?

“Do you have any luggage you need carried, sir?”

“No. No, thank you. I don’t have any luggage.”

Couldn’t he see that Max had no luggage? Was it suspicious not to have any? But the colored man was just a porter, Max realized,
not a police officer. Still, his heart raced. There were plenty of real policemen stationed around the terminal, and he had
to keep steady. Get hold of yourself. Where was Carls? Max scanned the crowd, but he knew that standing in the middle of the
huge waiting room staring about made him stick out. He needed a newspaper to hide behind. A newsstand stood on the far side
of the cavernous room, he could see the sign:
NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, CIGARETTES, CIGARS, CANDY, ICE COLD COCA-COLA
.

He walked across the terminal, eyes straight ahead. American soldiers were everywhere in the station in their strange-looking
khaki uniforms. It felt odd to move through them unnoticed, but they all seemed to be sleeping or playing cards.

At the newsstand he took a paper from the stack by the register and saw his own picture staring up at him.
NAZI SUB CAPTAIN AT LARGE
, the headline shouted, and, below that:
Top U-Boat Ace Escapes from Work Detail
. Luckily, the photograph was from his identity card issued at the transit camp in Virginia months back. It was grainy and
didn’t look much like him since he had lost more weight in the time since the picture was taken. Nor was he in uniform now
like he was in the picture. Instead he wore the ill-fitting black suit Malachi had given him that made him look like an undertaker.
He dropped the paper and ducked into the coffee shop next door, finding a stool at the counter.

“What’ll it be, hon?”

“Coffee.”

The waitress stared at him over half-moon glasses and smiled. “You ain’t from around here. You a Yankee?”

“Ship captain. From New York.”

“Honey, you’re a long way from New York, but I reckon with the war on, we got more Yankees down here in Jackson than any time
since y’all burned the place down.”

Max smiled. He had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s the war. Changes everything.”

“You got that right, hon.” She walked away to a large urn and returned with the coffee. “Two bits, hon, pay the cashier.”

How much was two bits? Damn these Americans and their stupid slang for everything. He sipped the coffee. It was hot and strong;
real cream, too. People over here had no idea how good they had it. The light tap on his shoulder made his whole body go tense,
and he spilled coffee on his hand. He turned slowly around on his stool to see a soldier standing with a cigarette in his
mouth.

“Say, bud, got a match?”

“A match?”

“A match, pal, a light.”

“No.” Max turned back to the counter, wiped his hand off with a napkin. His heart was thudding against his chest. Would the
Americans be looking for them even here, at the train station in the middle of Jackson? They would certainly be beating the
swamps and combing the pine forests, but would they imagine that Max and Carls would have the guts—or the stupidity—to walk
right into the state capital and catch a train?

He finished his coffee and paid the cashier without speaking, dropping two quarters on the register and stepping back out
into the crowded terminal. Two uniformed policemen walked toward him and both saluted. Max’s arm began to jerk up by reflex
but he stopped, looked over his shoulder and saw an American army colonel behind him, returning the policemen’s salutes.

Max crossed to the far end of the terminal and there was Carls, sitting quietly as he was told but fast asleep. Max dropped
heavily onto the wooden bench across from Carls, then closed his eyes and tried to sleep. How long before the train came?
Thirty minutes, maybe. Longer? Were American trains on time like German trains? Or like German trains had been before the
war. He put his head back and thought for a while that he might actually drop off, but the tension was too much. It didn’t
matter how tired he was. It seemed a week before the announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Panama Limited 5:45 to Brookhaven,
Macomb City, Hammond, and New Orleans now boarding gate seven. All aboard.”

Max blinked, felt for the tickets, found them. He stood and nudged Carls, leaving one ticket on the bench. Carls was to follow
him at thirty paces—just close enough to keep him in sight. Max walked slowly across the terminal and through the two large
doors leading to the cement platform of track seven. As he walked down the platform toward the train he glanced around and
saw Carls hanging back, watching him. Max went to the nearest car, the last one on the train, standing aside at the metal
steps to let a Negro woman board in front of him. She gave him a skeptical look. He ignored her and climbed into the rail
car.

Fortunately it was almost deserted, only a few Negroes scattered about, so Max knew he wouldn’t have to talk with anyone.
He settled into one of the plush seats. If they could get to New Orleans unnoticed, maybe they could get aboard a ship—even
a ship to Mexico. It wasn’t totally out of the question. Neutral ships called in New Orleans all the time. It was one of the
biggest ports in America, with ships from all over the world. The very activity around the port would serve to disguise them.

Max closed his eyes again and kept them closed for five minutes before he felt the cold steel of a pistol barrel pressed against
his left temple.

“Hands up,” said a voice. “Real slow.”

Max put his hands in the air.

The two policemen he had almost saluted were standing over him in the aisle. One held the pistol to his head while his partner
did the talking. “Pretty ballsy, you Krauts coming here to get a train,” he said. “And you almost got away with it, didn’t
you? Almost. But I gotta tell you, son, down here white never goes with colored. Even a Yankee would know not to sit in the
nigger car.”

ABOARD A TRAIN BOUND FOR NEW MEXICO

ONE WEEK LATER

14 JULY 1944

N
IGHT
. T
HROUGH HIS RIGHT EYE
M
AX SAW THE STARS, BRILLIANT
and seemingly so near in the clear air of the desert. His left eye ached and wasn’t working very well, still swollen from
the beating Stoddard’s guards had delivered when Max and Carls were returned to Camp Taylor by the police. Sitting in the
rail car with the Negroes had been a foolish mistake. Max had seen the separate restaurants and bathrooms for Negroes, and
he should have guessed that colored people would be forced to ride in separate railway coaches as well.

Carls sat beside him in the closed compartment, both of them handcuffed like convicts—a strict violation of the Geneva Convention,
but Max could see how much that meant in the American wilderness. Stoddard’s men had made that clear as day in a back room
in the camp warehouse. Both of Max’s eyes had been blackened, lips split, a tooth chipped, balls kicked till they swelled,
the bottoms of his feet strapped. A week later he was still sore every time he moved, waking each morning stiff as a board
before his bruised muscles gradually loosened up. The guards had been even harder on Carls because he struggled with them,
tossing one across the room and breaking the noses of two others. Besides beating him all over, they shattered his nose in
return and the big man was in terrible pain until an escort aboard the train became concerned enough to summon a doctor during
a thirty-minute stop in Baton Rouge. The doctor set Carls’s nose, gave tetanus injections and pain pills to both men. “This
is a disgrace,” he told the young escort officer.

It was a disgrace, but the doctor didn’t know the half of it. Colonel Stoddard had come in after the beating and forced Max
to watch as the special protection orders were ripped from his file. Stoddard put a match to the orders and dropped them into
a metal wastebasket, watching the papers burn as if they were his promotion orders. “I’ll let your own people do for me what
I’m not allowed to do myself,” he said. “I warned you boys not to make me look the fool, but you don’t care a thing for old
Colonel Stoddard and he’s never gonna make full colonel now.”

So now Max and Carls were headed to New Mexico, probably to the very same camp Lehmann and Heinz had been shipped to—the camp
for Nazi troublemakers. Leutnant Lehmann would no doubt be very pleased to see Max arrive. True, Max could write an angry
letter to the Swiss Red Cross, but it hardly seemed worth the effort: he’d be dead at the hands of his own countrymen before
the complaint ever reached Geneva.

He leaned his head against the train window, the glass cool against his cheek. Max had never imagined that the desert would
be this flat or this immense or this cold. It went on forever, big as the sea itself, and seeing it made him ache for the
bridge of a ship with the salt wind in his face and spray breaking over the prow. Instead he was handcuffed in a rail car
filled with unwashed men smelling of a U-boat.

At least Carls was doing better. Max had tried to focus on worrying about him since they boarded the train in Jackson two
days before, escorted in shackles through the same station where they’d been captured on the way to New Orleans. The painkillers
seemed to have done Carls some good. But the big man had paid dearly for standing by Max. Just as Malachi had paid dearly
for even letting them into his home. He had been dealt with the way troublesome Negroes had been dealt with for centuries
in the American South: dragged from his jail cell by an angry white mob and lynched. Max felt sick, he tried not to think
about it. But that didn’t work. When he learned of Malachi’s fate, Max had wondered if he should kill himself, as Captain
Langsdorff had done. How else could an honorable man atone for causing the death of another? But what had Langsdorff’s suicide
accomplished? It left his crew stranded in a foreign country without a leader and left a sorrowful mother, a grieving widow,
and two fatherless children back in Germany. Max thought of his father in Bad Wilhelm, of Mareth in Mexico City, of Carls.
Killing himself would not bring someone back from the dead. There was nothing he could do for Malachi but grieve for him as
he had already grieved for so many in this war.

As he watched from the train, a fire flared in the distance and was gone. It might have been a campfire, like the old days
in the far west—sleeping beneath a star-spangled sky, tracking wild beasts across the plain, living simply off the bounty
of the land.

At dawn, a guard—a new man Max had not seen before—came on duty with coffee for them. Max held the tin cup in his shackled
hands, swaying to the rhythm of the train as he drank.

“Smoke?” the guard asked.

“Yes,” Max said, including Carls with a nod of his head. “Thank you.”

The young guard reached out and placed the cigarettes directly into their mouths, then lit them. Even so, it was no simple
trick to smoke and drink coffee at the same time while wearing handcuffs.

“You guys don’t look so tough, for Nazis,” the American said pleasantly. “I seen some other Nazis and they looked tougher.”

Max looked at the youngster. “We are not Nazis. We are German navy men.”

“Well, I guess you boys ran up against somebody who ain’t too fond of German navy men.”

“Yes.”

The guard smiled. “Camp you’re going to’s full up with Nazis. That’s what it’s for: Nazis and rabble-rousers. They’re always
running around yelling, ‘Heil Hitler’ this and ‘Heil Hitler’ that.”