The Eighth Dwarf (26 page)

“How old is he?”

“In his early thirties.”

“Intelligent?”

“He is no fool. He also has some interesting theories.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the theory that Berlin—or I suppose I should say, Moscow—wants Oppenheimer in Palestine. Jackson came up with the unusual suggestion that a renegade Jew could be quite useful to the Palestinians. And to Moscow.”

“Your Mr. Jackson has a complicated mind.”

Eva Scheel nodded. “Yes, I thought you'd think so.”

Bodden clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and gazed up at the ceiling. “The dwarf is playing a double game, of course. That's to be expected. He's a Romanian, and they must learn it in their cradles. But what about this Jackson? You say he is without ambition. Deception requires a certain amount of that.”

“A good point. The dwarf, I suppose, could simply be using him. My young American tells me that Jackson has some unofficial but very influential connections with American intelligence in Washington. I would say that the Americans are letting Jackson run to see where he goes. My young American had a very unusual description for Jackson. How good is your English?”

“Try me.”

“He called Jackson an ‘ex-OSS hotshot.'”

“Hotshot I know from the Pole.”

“What Pole?”

“The one who taught me American English. A very funny fellow.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What would happen, do you think, should this Jackson learn that the dwarf was playing a double game?”

“Nothing perhaps. He might only shrug—unless it turned out badly for him. In that case, I would hate to be the dwarf.”

Bodden was again silent for several long moments as he examined all that he had been told. “Then,” he said finally, “there are the British.”

She sighed. “I was wondering when you would get to them. I was almost hoping that you wouldn't.”

“Why?”

“Because if the British find Oppenheimer first, then Berlin has additional instructions for you.”

“What?”

She dropped her gaze to her drink. “You are to kill him—somehow.”

“Well, now.”

There was yet another silence until, looking at him this time, she said, “Have you ever done anything like that before?”

He nodded. “I have killed, but I have never murdered. There is a difference. At least, I like to think there is. It makes my sleep more restful.”

She went back to the inspection of her drink. “Could you do it?”

This time the silence was longer than ever. Bodden at last decided that there was nothing to lose by being honest. “I don't know,” he said. “It would depend on—on many things.”

She looked up at him. “Opportunity?”

“Yes, there is that. If the British had him locked up, there might not be any opportunity.”

She nodded. “That's why I will also be going to Bonn. As I said, Berlin doesn't expect miracles. But it would be no miracle if the British were to let his sister and her oldest friend in to see Oppenheimer, would it?”

Bodden frowned with his forehead. Distaste was written across the rest of his face. “They don't expect
you
to kill him, surely?”

“No, but I could easily slip him the means to kill himself. It is really only a very small pill.”

“Which he would choose over a hanging.”

She smiled slightly, although there was no trace of humor in it. “If Berlin can't have Oppenheimer for themselves, they would be quite happy for the British to hang him—or the Americans. But they won't hang him—either of them.”

Bodden was beginning to understand. He nodded slowly. “Yes, I see. If Berlin is willing to pay twenty-five thousand dollars for an assassin, think what he must be worth to the British—not to mention the Americans.”

“They are very rare, I suppose,” she said. “Assassins. Good ones, anyway. Tell me, printer, do you ever think of yourself that way—as an assassin?”

“No,” he said. “Never.”

“I thought not.” She patted the bed by her side. “Sit over here—beside me. That way you won't have to keep hopping up to fill my glass. We are going to finish it, aren't we—your bottle—just to keep warm?”

Bodden rose. “I thought we might.” He kicked the chair over near the bed, placed the bottle on it, and sat down next to her.

“You know what they say about Berlin in the winter, don't you?” he said.

“What?”

“That there're only two places to keep warm—in bed or the bath.”

“You have no bath, of course.”

“Only a bed.”

“Then that will have to do.”

He kissed her then. She was quite ready for it, both her mouth and her tongue eager and exploring. When it was over, she leaned back on the bed, supporting herself on her elbows.

“There is no hurry, is there, printer?”

“None.”

“We will finish the bottle first and you can tell me about yourself and then we will go to bed. It has been a long time since I have been to bed with a man.”

“What about your young American?”

“He is a very nice boy and, like most boys, very eager, very impatient. Were you ever like that, printer—young and impatient and eager?”

“A long time ago.”

“Tell me about it Tell me about you and what you did before the war in Berlin.”

He leaned back and put an arm around her. She shifted slightly so that her head rested on his chest. “I had my own shop,” he said, “not far from the Adlon Hotel; do you know it?”

“A very fashionable district.”

“I was a very fashionable printer. The rich liked me—the rich and the poor poets. I printed their invitations and calling cards—the rich, I mean. No one was anyone unless they had them done by me. I did the best work in Berlin, and I was very expensive. By being expensive I could afford to print the poor poets. You know the kind of thing—slim volumes on thick paper. I also did commercial work—fancy brochures, things like that; more bread-and-butter stuff. And, of course, there was the political material. I printed that too, and kept on printing it even after I was warned not to. I was what your young American friend would call a very ‘hotshot' Social Democrat at the time. They came for me eventually, the Gestapo. They wrecked the plant. I got to watch that. Then they took me away, and finally I wound up in Belsen. And there I broadened my political horizons.”

“So you could eat.”

“So I could eat.”

“You sound as though you like to live well, printer.”

“It is a weakness.”

“I suffer from it too. Do you think you ever will again?”

“Not unless a miracle happens—one of those kinds that you say Berlin doesn't believe in.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she turned onto her stomach and looked at him. “Twenty-five thousand dollars can buy a great many miracles, printer. Twenty-seven, actually.”

He grinned and wrapped a strand of her hair around his finger. “You have dangerous thoughts, little one.”

“So do you.”

“I'm surprised.”

“At my thoughts?”

“That you didn't mention them sooner.”

“It could be done.”

“It would also be dangerous.”

“No more dangerous than killing a man whom you really don't want to kill.”

He gave the strand of hair a gentle tug. “I bet you even have a plan.”

She kissed him—a quick, friendly, warm, wet kiss. “You're right, I do. Make love to me, printer. Make love to me and then I will tell you about my plan.”

“To abscond with twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Twenty-seven, actually.”

He grinned again. “With that much money I could afford you, couldn't I?”

She kissed him quickly again. “That's right, printer. You could.”

24

On the way to the black-market restaurant, Leah Oppenheimer didn't even seem to notice the huge old roadster or the stares that it attracted. She sat silently in the passenger's seat, a silk scarf around her head and a small, shy smile on her lips: the kind of smile, Jackson decided, that a proper young woman would wear on her very first date.

After parking the car near the restaurant, he gave a shabbily dressed middle-aged man five cigarettes to watch it. For another two cigarettes the man offered to dust the car off with a dirty rag that he produced from underneath his hat. Jackson shrugged and paid him his price.

The restaurant was called the Blue Fox Cellar, and it was located in the bowels of a building that had been erected sometime in the late eighteenth century. There was nothing left of the building now except for a pile of rubble and a new, jerry-built entrance that was about as inviting as the entrance to a New York subway.

To get to the restaurant itself they had to go down a steep flight of stairs, then along a corridor, and through another door. But before they were allowed through that, they were inspected by an eye that peered out at them from a speakeasylike peephole. Jackson thought that the eye looked beady, but he didn't say anything.

Past the door, they found themselves in an immense, round room with stone walls and a wide stone staircase that hugged the curving wall as it descended into the dining area thirty feet below. The place was lighted by a number of kerosene lamps and what Jackson estimated to be hundreds of thick, squat candles.

At the bottom of the stairs they were met by a bowing, properly obsequious headwaiter dressed in white tie and tailcoat, who showed them to a table, took their coats, and handed them their menus. Before examining the bill of fare, Jackson looked around at the the other diners.

Most of them were Germans: prosperous, flush-faced men in their forties and fifties. Nearly all of them were accompanied by much younger women who seemed to be eating hungrily. There were also a number of middle-ranking American Army officers: majors and lieutenant colonels mostly, with a sprinkling of captains. The Americans' women, for the most part, seemed better looking, better dressed, and not quite so hungry. On a small raised platform a four-piece string ensemble played moody waltzes. A few couples danced.

The shock that Jackson got when he examined the menu almost cost him his appetite. The prices were higher than New York's highest, higher even than the astronomical black-market prices he had paid, in Paris during the week's leave he had had there in '45 just before they had flown him out to Burma. He guessed that it was going to cost him 10,000 marks to get out of the Blue Fox Cellar. Ten thousand marks was about fifty American dollars.

Leah Oppenheimer smiled shyly and asked if he would mind ordering for her. Since the menu was written in bad French and boasted caviar and champagne, he ordered both plus coq au vin, a salad, and a Moselle, which the menu claimed to be prewar. He ordered in French, and the German waiter replied in English.

Although the caviar was a bit suspicious and the champagne equally so, the chicken was good, as was the Moselle. Leah Oppenheimer ate and drank everything that was set before her. Afterward, she said that she really didn't care for a dessert, but wouldn't mind the coffee and brandy that Jackson proposed instead.

The brandy made her bold, or perhaps just less reserved. With her elbow on the table and her chin cupped in her hand, she gazed at Jackson and said, “You have done this many times, haven't you?”

“Well, not exactly like this,” he said, thinking of the bill that was yet to come. “This is rather special.”

“I think you have had much experience with many women.”

Jackson could think of nothing to say to that, so he smiled and hoped that it was a noncommittal smile and not a leer.

“But you have never married.”

“No.”

“Do you think you will one day?”

“I'm beginning to wonder.”

“I think you will marry a nice American girl and settle down and live in—in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

Jackson realized that for her Tulsa was as remote as Timbuktu. Perhaps even more so. “I think you're a lousy fortune-teller,” he said.

“When I was young, I thought that I would like to get married someday,” she said. “But now, of course, I'm too old.”

“You are pretty old, all right—at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight,” he said, slicing at least a year from her age because he thought it might make her feel better.

“That is old for a European,” she said, and sighed—somewhat dramatically, Jackson thought. He also wondered if she had gone back to reading from her awful script again.

“My friend, Fräulein Scheel,” she said, and paused.

“What about her?”

“She is both very fortunate and very foolish, I think.”

“Why?”

“There is this very nice young American—but you know him, don't you: Lieutenant Meyer?”

“We've met.”

“That's right; of course. Well, she has allowed him to think that she will marry him, but she has no intention of doing so.”

“What's the matter—doesn't she care for Milwaukee?”

“She says he is far too callow a youth.”

She's reading from the script again, Jackson decided. “Did she say callow?”

They had been speaking English, and Leah Oppenheimer blushed slightly as though embarrassed. “Is that not the correct word—callow? In German it is
ungefiedert
.”

“It's the correct word all right. It's just that Lieutenant Meyer didn't seem all that
ungefiedert
to me.”

“Eva has always liked older men,” she said, turning almost confidential. “Even when we were young girls together, she was a terrible flirt. The Scheel family was quite well-to-do before the war, you know, and they had many visitors, and Eva was always flirting with the men, even the ones who were old enough to be her father. I think she misses it.”

“What? The men?”

“No, being well-to-do. I think that finding herself in reduced circumstances is very difficult for Eva.” Jackson by now was almost beginning to believe that there really was a script and that it had been written for her by a Victorian novelist. A lady novelist.