Another Green World (2 page)

*    *    *

Before the war (how many sentences began that way) Ingo had owned a
Bierskeller
called the Hessian House. Today he owned an old-world restaurant and lounge called the Rusty Ring. It was the same place—the only changes were the sign out front and, on the menu, certain concessions to wartime food rationing. The same heavy door still crouched at the bottom of the same four concrete steps. The same lace panel—no longer “German”— was strung across the plate-glass window. And somewhere within, proprietarily brooding, changeless, and, in fact, an avowed enemy of change, the same Ingo.

Martina did not pause at the door. In the long, narrow, dimly lit front room she made like a regular patron, trooping up the well-worn path toward the distant mirrored twinkling of the bar. Tables stood mostly empty beneath their starched white cloths. Two guys who looked like wire-service reporters, ties loose and jackets slung over an extra chair, eyeballed her from a corner. Near the center of the room a blue-haired, regal-looking woman brandished a cigarette in a long holder, aiming rather than smoking it, dancing with her head alone to the schmaltz oozing out of the old Victor phonograph. Trust Ingo not to install a jukebox. On the other hand, who'd drop a nickel to hear this stuff?

Inside as out, the place was the same as ever. Maybe old-timers found it comforting. But Ingo had lost his most loyal and free-spending customers—this Martina knew for a fact—back in ‘41, when the German embassy around the corner on Mass Ave closed shop. Before that, Nazi money had paid for the forest-green carpet and the simulated log fire and other dubious improvements. Martina suspected, and Ingo never explicitly denied, that the row of pictures along the side walls—cheap reproductions of nineteenth-century landscapes of the German Romantic school, mounted in flashy gilt—had begun life as a series of travel posters, shorn now of their inspirational slogans.
American cousins—your Homeland beckons you! See what's doing in the New Europe!
It was to vomit.

She reached the screen of potted greenery that separated the dining room from the lounge. These plants, she believed, had been dying from lack of daylight for the better part of a decade. Even in the final act, nothing here happened quickly.
Twilight of the Palms
, a tragic opera in four parts. Ingo Miller, baritone, sings the part of the Jolly Innkeeper.

Martina parted the fronds. And there he stood: an unmovable eminence, not fat but fleshy, a redoubt of
idées fixes
, safe in his usual spot behind the taps. Ingo's in his cellar, all's right with the world. His yellow hair might be a bit thinner than when she saw him last—
but hey, Marty,
we're neither one of us getting any younger.
The difference was, Martina might have hit thirty-five not long ago, but Ingo had been forty his whole life.

Spotting her, he faltered briefly in his routine swabbing of the varnished, glowing surface of the bar, then quickly recovered, slapped the bar rag back in its usual place across his shoulder and broke into a smile. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he said cheerfully. “Another bomb-throwing New Dealer.”

She affected not to hear. In their history of intramural conflict, politics was only one of several fields on which they'd skirmished. The first shot had been fired in their sandbox days, growing up two doors apart in Brookland, a leafy neighborhood on the northeastern edge of the city. Ingo once tried to yank off her hated pigtails. Martina struck back a few days later under a backyard sprinkler, attempting, with blunt nursery scissors, to excise his penis. How little really had changed. Yet beneath it all she loved him dearly, and she supposed he must love her back; the symmetry of their antagonism seemed to require that.

You couldn't give an inch, though. Martina stepped up to the bar, splaying her fingers on the shiny wood like a predator clawing onto his turf. The effect was diminished by the state of her nails—battered by file drawers, chewed during tense committee hearings, unpainted and, let's face it, unfeminine.

“Can I get you something?” Ingo said placidly, staring through blue and blameless Boy Scout eyes. “Something cold to drink? A bone to gnaw?”

From stage left, a chuckle. Martina whipped her head around to glare at the culprit, a small man in a cheap suit, half hidden behind his newspaper. She held the look until he retreated into the sports pages of the
Washington Herald—
among the District's warring dailies, the only one Martina actually found objectionable. Mission accomplished, she panned in the opposite direction, making certain no trouble would issue from that flank. The face there she vaguely recognized, sallow and gaunt, sweating into a stiff Arrow collar. A would-be war profiteer, she imagined, who'd underestimated both the complexity and the small-town insularity of the place now styling itself Capital of the Free World.

“Ingo,” she said, even before her eyes had swung back. “I need to talk to you.”

“You know, Marty, I've just put in one of those new
telephones.”
Leaning slightly over the bar, his voice chummy, letting you in on a little joke. “It's amazing how well they work. You don't have to shout or anything. People
dial your number
, and you can make plans to meet when it's
mutually convenient.”

Surprise, however, was a crucial element of her plan. Catch the enemy
on the ground, swoop in with the sun at your back; a quick strafing run, customers looking on; then later, in private, the bombshell. “Ingo, I need to talk to you.” Pause, emphasis, timing. “Now.”

“Why don't you have a seat, Marty?” He indicated an empty bar stool, then a booth along the wall: lady's choice. “I'll have Bernie bring you something. You like those cream tortes, don't you?”

“It's about Isaac,” she said.

He didn't react. But that, she thought, was just his talent for impassivity, a protective trick that had become a habit and finally a character trait. The bomb was away, and the pair of them stood there watching it fall.

“You remember Isaac?” Not a question. A goad.

Ingo sighed. He pulled the bar rag off his shoulder, folded it, laid it carefully down. Watching him, Martina caught a glimpse of herself, tensely posed in the wide mirror between bottles of liquor. Her skin looked yellow in this light, the cheeks hollow, a warning flash in those dark eyes. Given the proper sort of hat, she was all ready for Halloween.

“Let's go upstairs,” Ingo said wearily.

She knew the way. Around the bar, down the little hall past the restrooms, through a swinging door to the kitchen, Ingo close on her heels. From there, a staircase at the rear of the building, near the alley door. En route, she managed a brief hello to Vernon, Ingo's longtime chef.

“We don't see much of you these days, Miss Panich.” Vernon paused to wipe perspiration from a wrinkled brown forehead.

“Official duties,” suggested Ingo, nudging her from behind. “Affairs of state. There's a war on, even Treasury's got wind of it.”

“Guten tag, Bernie,” she called doggedly to the waiter, a more recent arrival, delivered from a chamber ensemble in Vienna via a long boat ride out of Lisbon. Little Bernd Fildermann gave a quick, silent bow, as though still not quite sure of his welcome here.

And with no further ceremony Martina allowed herself to be hustled up the stairs.

How many years has Ingo been living here? And still the place looks like he hasn't settled in. The rooms feel vacant, airless, as if the windows haven't been opened since the Coolidge administration (it is just possible they have not), and the furnishings might have been chosen by some long-dead aunt. Only the distinctive sag of an armchair, recognizably similar in shape to a certain present-day bottom, hints at current habitation. Beside it, a three-legged table holds a reading lamp and one slender volume, hardbound,
jacketless. Ever hopeful, Martina lifts the cover.
Love Poems of August von Platen (1796‒1835
). Ex libris Dead Auntie.

“Okay, Marty.” Ingo rounded the damask corner of a love seat and drew up with arms folded, countenance grim. “Spill.”

She drew a breath. From this point forward, everything hung on how he would react.

“You know what I do for a living,” she began.

“Move paper from one basket to another, I should think, like everyone else down there.” Quickly he raised a hand, forestalling her. “Wait, yes, I know—you've been in the papers. Something to do with displaced persons, liberated prisoners, that kind of thing.”

“That
kind
of thing. But it goes well beyond that. May I sit?”

“Please.”

She settled into his armchair—was that an act of covert aggression?— gripping the big handbag by its clasp. “The truth is, Ingo, and I'm saying this off the record, the Board is more or less a personal undertaking of Henry Morgenthau's. He strongly believes”— hastening here, ignoring Ingo's
de rigueur
grimace at the name of the Secretary, her boss, a notorious bleeding heart and, incidentally, the only Jew in FDR's cabinet— “believes very strongly that the United States has a moral obligation toward the victims of Nazi racial policies.”

“Nazi, racial, policies.” Ingo pronounced the words with elaborate care, as if weighing each on his tongue. “Sounds like a euphemism.”

“You could say that. In plain language, we're talking about murder. Murder on an unprecedented scale.”

“I thought the term for that was
war.”

“I'm not talking about the war, Ingo. This isn't soldiers killing other soldiers. What I'm talking about—what's
happening
over there is…”

While she groped for words, Ingo lowered himself to the love seat with a noisy exhalation, coming to rest in conspicuous discomfort. “I should think, Marty, in your position, with your access to classified reports and whatnot, you'd have developed a more skeptical attitude toward that sort of overblown rhetoric. It's normal in warfare, isn't it, to accuse the other side of atrocities, war crimes, all that? Keeps the blood hot, pumps up support on the home front. ‘Why We Fight,’ as revealed to Frank Capra. Gives us all a chance to take part. They also serve who sit and preach.”

“This isn't propaganda, Ingo.”

“I'm not saying we're as bad as
they
are. Don't think I'm saying that.”

“I know what you're saying. Just—listen to me.”

He made a little show of impatience, tapping his toes, glancing at his
watch. Somehow, in her laying of plans, she had pictured him sitting here like an attentive schoolboy while she explained the facts of life in a brisk, no-questions-till-I'm-done-please voice—that voice employed to such good effect by a series of interchangeable nuns while she and Ingo sat side by side,
backs quite straight, children, thank you
, at Francis Xavier Elementary.
In a land like ours, boys and girls, only very far away, bad men are taking all the little Jewish children and putting them on trains, and making them breathe bad air, and then burning them.
But now she could see how Ingo would take that—roughly the same as the press and the War Department and the key people on the Hill were taking it. Only more so. It was not, she had come to think, a matter of disbelief. It was an incapacity to imagine. Like you couldn't imagine a sky full of swirling yellow blobs until Van Gogh painted one for you. Then
voilà
, of course, I see it now. How marvelous! How frightful! Surely not
all
of them.

All of them—but how to spell that out for Ingo, the instinctual unbeliever?
The Nazis are artists, true geniuses, and their medium is immorality.
No: the only way forward was the most brutal and direct, a blow to the heart.

“You're right.” She fixed him in a particular kind of stare: Oh, you poor, uninformed civilian. “I do have access to classified reports—look, I've brought a few along. Care to join me in breaking the law?”

She thought she saw his shoulders twitch. Unclasping the handbag—a bit of improvisation here, yielding to a sudden impulse toward violence— she tipped it upside down. A blizzard of daily briefing sheets, memoranda, transcripts, petitions, press clippings, statistical abstracts, railway timetables and fourth-layer carbons on onionskin stormed down, entombing Platen, spilling over onto the drab Edwardian rug.

For seconds the two of them sat there, joined in a state of mild astonishment. Ingo shook his head. “When I said
spill
, Marty…”

A giggle escaped her. Like an ear-pop, a sudden equalizing of pressure. It seemed to her that Ingo was struggling to conceal a smile.

“God,” she said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

He waved it off. No need for apologies between old pals, right? “I get the impression, Marty, that you feel you need to
demonstrate
something to me. I wonder why.”

Not I wonder
what.

With the practiced eye of a bureaucrat, she parsed the seeming chaos of paperwork. Daintily she plucked up this and this and that, shuffled them together and pressed them on Ingo in the order she deemed most likely to
persuade. A State Department circular, distribution limited, three pages dense with columns and numbers, drafted by an expert in Slavic languages not eager to share his trade secrets. A map of the Carpathian Mountains, Count Dracula's old stomping grounds. A crumpled photo spread from an Australian Socialist weekly,
The Anvil
, cheaply printed, brittle to the touch. Last, deceptively slight, a square of brown paper just larger than needed to roll a cigarette. Ingo accepted the pile incuriously.

“What you're looking at”— she fingered the topmost sheet—” is our best recent tally of resistance organizations in Central Europe. First column name, second column numerical strength—that's a guess, of course—and third operational status. ‘A’ means fully active, ‘I’ is for intelligence services only, ‘S’ for groups devoted primarily to sabotage—you get the idea. ‘NI’ means no information available.”

“A lot of NIs, aren't there.”

“Small wonder. You'll notice they tend to coincide with the groups whose strength is given at less than twenty. What happens usually is, these smaller outfits get rounded up and shot. Or they may simply be out of contact. Our information isn't perfect. A lot of it comes via the British, who may or may not be sharing everything they know.”