Bliss, Remembered (38 page)

II.

The words only hung there. In an odd way, it was even easier dealing w/ the fact of Horst being there—I mean, after all, I already knew Horst, flesh and blood—than in that revelation. I can’t remember what exactly I did at that point. I guess I managed to take a deep breath. “Well,” I finally said, “it’d probably be easier for me if maybe you started at the beginning.”

“All right,” he said. It would take 3 Gunther beers for him to get through it all, but he began by going back to ’36:

Soon after the Olympics, Horst had grown even more disillusioned w/ Germany. Whatever hopes he’d had for a change in the Nazis’ attitude because of the good will of the Games quickly evaporated. After his parents went to Japan, he even thought about trying to somehow get out of the country, follow me to America.

He paused there & rubbed the cold beer bottle over his forehead. “Sydney,” he said, “I can’t tell you how much your letters meant. I read them over & over, then I’d rush to write you back.”

“Well fine, Horst, so then . . . why’d you break it off?”

“Please listen. I’ll tell you exactly.” He’d finished college in Heidelberg & started his naval training. He hated it. He hated his country. He grew ashamed that his father could be an official of the Reich, & he couldn’t even bear it any longer to have anything to do w/ his sister, Liesl, who, married to the SS officer, had become a Nazi fanatic herself. “I really thought I was going crazy, Sydney. Here I am, an officer in the navy, commissioned to fight for my country—but it’s a country I can’t abide anymore. Pretending, day after day. It was maddening. I’m not cut out for that sort of split personality.”

Right after he was commissioned & was about to be assigned to specialized battleship training—he really could’ve ended up on the Graf Spee—Horst was unexpectedly called to Berlin, there to meet w/ an army col. in intelligence. Apparently, someone had come across his records, which showed how much time he’d spent abroad & how well he spoke English. Horst Gerhardt could be more valuable in some intelligence capacity than as a mere naval officer. For the glory of Adolf Hitler, would he accept this greater responsibility?

“Yes,” he said, & then he snapped out his arm before me &, in a loud, sarcastic voice, he all but hollered: “Ja, oberst. Heil Hitler.” He swung his arm back down, & then, to me, softly: “My chance, Sydney, my chance.” You see, he explained, now he knew that he might be able to play some role in intelligence that could sabotage some Nazi plan.

He was reassigned to the abwehr, which, he said, was rather like the Nazi version of the OSS, our own new spy agency. First, tho, his past was subjected to a thoro going-over. Given that his father was a party member & an ambassador & his sister was married to an SS officer & they had no evidence of Horst ever expressing subversive views, he quickly passed muster.

Indeed, he explained, I, the Amer. girl he’d courted, was the only real question mark on his whole record. “Liesl,” he said. “I’m sure she told them about you. They checked. For example, they asked me if I hadn’t taken you to Goebbels’ party.”

“Boy, they didn’t fool around.”

“Oh, I anticipated all that, Sydney. I imagined I’d be questioned about you. And since I knew then that there was no way I could be w/ you—at least till the war was over—I wrote you the letter. If it matters, it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.”

“But you had to?”

“If I was to try & be the patriot, yes. I couldn’t take the chance they’d open my mail & find out I was still in love w/, well, an enemy.”

I nodded. “All right, I understand.”

“Do you really?” He didn’t ask for another beer, but I saw his bottle was empty, so I went for another. When I got back, he’d risen from the rocking chair & had turned away. He spoke that way, too, looking off from me. “I only prayed that somehow, somehow there wouldn’t be another man—you know, that you wouldn’t fall in love. But, I could-n’t expect—”

He shrugged, turning back then, & when I handed him the beer, we were standing next to each other. “I don’t want to talk about me, Horst.”

He took hold of my arm, but only ever so lightly. It was the lst time we’d touched at all, & I let his hand stay there. “I’m sorry,” he asked, “but what’s his name?”

“Jimmy.”

“What did he do before the war?”

“Please.”

“Just tell me that.”

“He was a banker,” I said, stretching the truth a little.

“I’ll bet he’s very nice.”

I said, “Horst, after you, I was spoiled, & I could only love a very nice man.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling, releasing that gentle grasp. “I won’t ask anymore. I promise.”

I just wanted him to pick up the thread again. “OK, Horst, so you were in intelligence—the ab—”

“Abwehr. Funny too, for a spy service, it really doesn’t seem to be very accomplished. You see, most of the Nazis’ efforts along that line are in spying on their own people. That takes lots of their most talented guys away from studying the enemy. Ironic, isn’t it?”

But, he went on, they used him reasonably well at lst, translating, reading English-language newspapers & other more confidential material, analyzing, etc. He was good at it & he was promoted, to hauptmann—Captain Gerhardt. As a translator, he was even chosen as a jr. member of the staff when Hitler went to Munich to meet w/ Neville Chamberlain in ’38. The next year, he was almost sent to N.Y. to accompany some German emissary to the World’s Fair. Horst’s excitement mounted. He was planning to run off then, find me, somehow defect. But, at the llth hour, some higher-up cancelled the trip. “That was my lowest moment, Sydney. That almost broke my heart.”

“Eleanor was the big star at the Fair,” I said, deflecting the personal stuff. “The Aquacade.”

“Oh yeah, I read about that. Did you go?”

I sat back down in my rocking chair. “No, but when she was beginning to rehearse the show, Jimmy was away on maneuvers, so I went up to B’lyn. Eleanor practiced at a hotel there, the St. George. It has this magnificent indoor pool, & when I saw the practice, it all looked very glamorous. I spoke to Eleanor afterwards, asked her if maybe I could swim in the chorus—”

“You wanted to?”

“Why not? Jimmy was away so much. I was lonely. Maybe I missed swimming. But Eleanor said she wouldn’t let me. She told me I was too good & too pretty—laid it on thick—”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Come on, Horst.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, she said if there’d ever be a road show, then I could be her, be the star. But she wouldn’t let me be a chorus girl. And she was right.”

“And there never was a traveling Aquacade?”

I shook my head. “So I stayed here. Mom got remarried. I run the office. I sell some too. I’m a certified insurance agent, Horst—certified.”

“I wouldn’t be a good risk,” he said. “They’ll probably hang me.”

“Stop it.” He shrugged. “So, all right, go on. Tell me.”

“Can we walk?” he asked. “Can I see the river?”

I got him another beer, & we strolled down there. “Is this like what you envisioned?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine a place you’ve never been to—but I did try to picture you here, swimming. It is pretty.” I couldn’t tell whether he meant that or was merely being polite. His mind wasn’t on scenery. Well, neither was mine.

By the dock there were a few Adirondack chairs, the kind that slope way back, & we sat down. He loosened his tie & I just let him look out over the river for a while. It was late in the afternoon, but it was still hot. “It’s more humid here than Germany,” I said.

“Yes. It sure is.” He only said that mechanically. Then he stared back out again, silent for another long patch. Finally, he turned back to me & began once more: “All along, I figured—well, I hoped—that they’d give me some sort of real assignment. Undercover. The real thing. But when it happened, I was overwhelmed.” He stopped. I waited. “Sydney, they wanted me to kill the president.”

“President Roosevelt?” He nodded. “Wow,” was what I said. I mean, what do you say?

“Yeah. It’s called Operation Hauptstadt. That means ‘capitol.’ See, they’ve assigned another spy to go to England to try & kill Churchill. Washington, London—capitols. I don’t know if they really thought either one of us could actually pull it off, but, sure, it was worth the gamble. I was given a lot of target practice w/ a high-powered pistol. I played along. I just figured the mere fact that it was me instead of somebody who might really TRY to kill Roosevelt already made me a success.”

“So, what’re you going to do?”

He took a long pull on his beer. “Hold on, Sydney. Let me back up. Now, at that time, I figured I’d just come see you, maybe figure how to lay low till the war ended. The main thing was, I wouldn’t kill the president.

“But then it got more involved. They asked me to bring some information to a guy named Jerry Goldstein in N.Y. Turns out Goldstein is their # l spy in the country.”

“Goldstein?”

“Well, obviously, if you don’t want anybody to suspect you’re a Nazi, Goldstein is a very good alias. So now, I’m thinking, I can kill somebody in America. I can kill Jerry Goldstein, then hand the secret papers they gave me over to the FBI.”

It surprised me that Horst could speak so blithely about killing someone, but then, it was war. I’d never thought Jimmy could kill anyone either, but he’d been trained to kill Japs. I guessed you could learn. So I just asked, “What’s in the papers?”

He shook his head. “No idea. It’s in code. But maybe the FBI or the OSS could break it. Anyway, Goldstein—as important as he is, if I kill him, I’m performing a real service.

“So they give me a fake driver’s license for identification, $3000 in U.S. currency & a small handful of diamonds I could sell if I had to.”

I broke in. “But how’d you get here?”

“You know, Sydney, it was actually remarkably easy.” He spoke in such an offhand manner about everything, it made it seem all the crazier.

“Really?”

“Yeah, they just put me in a U-boat. No. 5l8. We went out of Bremerhaven, crossed the ocean, & arrived here 3 days ago. We came into Maine. You know a place called Bar Harbor?”

“Maybe heard of it.” I was thinking, tho, of those towers I’d seen along the beach in Del., & how I’d thought at the time how Horst might be out there, just off our coast. And sure enough, he would be.

“Well, Bar Harbor—it’s quite a ways north, almost to Canada. We anchored there in something called French-man’s Bay, waited for nitefall, surfaced just off the coast, then some sailors rowed me to a place called Hancock Point. I got out of the boat, ambled over to the main road, & then shortly afterwards some Nazi sympathizer who Goldstein sent picked me up in his car. I got the next train to N.Y. It was like clockwork.” He chuckled. “Really, Sydney, it’s harder for me to get from Berlin to Hamburg. I took a room at the Statler, & the next morning I called Goldstein.”

“This was just yesterday?”

“Uh huh. God, it was only 3 nitets ago I was still on 5l8.” Horst shook his head. “Incredible.” There was such an air of the unreal to it—all the more so to me. Horst went on, still reciting it all very casually: “Goldstein answered, & I gave him the password rigamarole in case the phone was tapped. He went to a pay phone, called me back, said I should meet him that afternoon at 2 on a bench in Central Park.

“By half past one I was on his street. He lived on the Upper Western Side—”

“Upper West Side.”

“Right. A lot of Jews live there, I understand. He’s playing his part to the hilt. I simply waited for him to come out of his apartment bldg. I’m a pretty good shot by now, Sydney. All the practice they’ve given me. I thought it’d be quite easy, really. Get him in my sights”—he pantomimed raising a pistol—“& fire. Bang,” he said. “Easy.”

“Jesus, Horst.”

“Yeah. In Berlin, they’d shown me a photograph of Goldstein, so I knew what he looked like. And sure enough, a few minutes before 2, he comes out. I took a deep breath. Suddenly, I was scared to death. Not of being caught. No, that’s wrong—it wasn’t scared. Excited. I was thrilled, Sydney. Thrilled. I was actually going to do something important against the Nazis. I was actually going to play a role. Yes, I was excited. And, I’m sorry, but I felt no guilt about killing this man. None. So I took my pistol out of my little travel bag . . . & that’s when I saw the woman.”

“What woman?”

“His wife, I suppose. Little Frau Goldstein. She was w/ him. And that stopped me dead. Somehow, I just couldn’t kill a man—any man—in front of his wife. I couldn’t do it, Sydney. But I thought, well, maybe she’s just out shopping or something, & she’ll leave him before he gets to the park. So I shadowed them, staying back, on the other side of the street. After all, I’m pretty sure he knows what I look like, too.

“But she didn’t leave him. She stayed w/ him the whole way, sat down on the bench w/ him. I guess it made him look less suspicious to be w/ a woman—just a husband and wife out for a nice little stroll in the park. I watched them awhile longer. I could see Goldstein begin to look at his watch when it got to be a few minutes past 2. I started to take out my gun again, but it was the same thing. I couldn’t shoot him w/ her there.” Horst stopped then & took another swallow of his beer. “Or maybe, Sydney—”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe I couldn’t have shot him no matter what. Maybe I just can’t shoot a man. Maybe I’m not cut out for that.” He sighed.

“Yeah, who is?” I said.

“I don’t know, but when I realized I couldn’t do it, I left the park, went back to the hotel, checked out & headed to the train station. I figured, okay, maybe it’s just as good to tell the FBI about Goldstein. Maybe he’s more valuable to them alive. You know, this is a guy who knows a lot.”

“So, you were going to Washington?”

“Yeah. But I had to see you lst, Sydney. You understand.”

“Of course. And if I wasn’t married?”