The Knife-Edge Path Read online

  “Yes?”

  “Do you remember sailing on a freighter from Rhodes to Bremerhaven in 1938? It was detained in Karpathos for suspected smuggling. Your name appeared on the manifest as Geli Straub. No Gunther aboard, however, just you.”

  Footsteps climbed a gangplank in her mind, she saw herself in the salt air on the lido deck, looking out at the streaks of twilight on the sea. The twinkling from the masts of fishing boats as they bore toward the steadier lights that sketched the harbor of Karpathos, and the sounds of the sea washed up on a song spun into the night from the bar – ‘C’est l’amour qui fait qu’on s’aime.’

  She said, “Yes. I had to sail back to Germany without him. We’d been on our honeymoon when he got orders to report to Athens. What about it?”

  “General and Frau Straub appears on the manifest, even though one ticket was not used. I’d call this fairly persuasive proof of your marriage.”

  “But how am I to prove I was the woman who used my half of the passage?”

  He looked down at her hand draped over the side of the package. “You might try putting on your wedding ring the next time you pay a visit to OKA.”

  She heard the gentle scolding in his tone, brought up her unadorned left hand. “Yes, if I hadn’t had to pawn it.”

  He raised his eyebrows, swung his face away with a long slow-motion blink. “You may be interested in a couple of other items that my friend came up with. Probably nothing to worry about, since it all took place so long ago, when you were young and fancy-free.”

  He levelled a bemused look on her, and she saw herself in those heady days when she sang three nights a week for Max de Groof’s dance band. There in the chorus line, fourth from the right – but if you weren’t half naked, why be a Tiller Girl at all, the best show in Berlin? Out late with almost anybody who wanted her, a regular at the Rezidenz Casino where she could watch the sun come up while her escort’s eyes beside her couldn’t stay open long enough to get what he had paid for.

  With a cocky lilt she drove fear out of her voice. “We all lived in a very different world back then, Herr Stumpff.”

  “How well I remember. Long enough ago to be forgiven by your marriage to a dashing General.” He came around and sat beside her on the sofa, brushing her arm with his sleeve.

  She didn’t try to move away.

  “Since we last spoke I’ve been wondering if you might consider doing a certain - well, let’s say a little job for me.” He held a cheery grin on her.

  This was it, she thought.

  The package sat there like it might contain a flimsy lace nightie.

  Say yes and it would be all over.

  He was saying, “It would entail your coming out of retirement for a time.”

  She gave him a long look, began to shake her head. “You don’t mean -”

  He clasped his hands across his belly. “Don’t get excited. Nothing to involve the Abwehr. Merely a little arrangement, strictly between you and me.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m through with all that.”

  He sat back, gazing at the ceiling dreamily. “You haven’t heard me out. Try to think of me as a man off the street, looking to hire a private detective. My organization, perforce, will remain in the dark.”

  “You’re not serious. When I was in Cairo I had the Abwehr and my husband to back me up if anything went wrong.”

  “Or hang you out to dry.”

  “It’s been too long, Herr Stumpff. I’m rusty, and -”

  He brushed a rutting once-over from her legs up to her face, eyes like X-rays, empty of desire, scanning horseflesh. “I don’t believe you’ve lost your touch. There’s no substitute for the kind of talent that kept you from being shot in Cairo.” He snuggled forward, wriggling over his elbows on his knees. “You wouldn’t have to go away, need not ever leave Berlin. Simply assume your old identity – if those papers are still good.”

  “They’re due to expire a year from now.”

  “How good of the Abwehr. Well then?”

  She saw him, safe now from the harmless little dance he’d backed away from, and her throat filled with the kind of fear you can’t tell from excitement as a cloud of Cairo like a dust storm bore down on her little life that she had grown so used to.

  He plucked at the tips of his gloves.

  She’d never seen his bare hands. They must be plump and pink, like strings of sausages ready to be dropped into boiling water. The bribe sat in the package beside her, now it was her turn. She said, “I don’t know, Herr Stumpff. What would I be getting into?”

  “To begin with I must warn you. Everything I tell you henceforth must be kept in strictest confidence.”

  “Yes, all right, but -”

  He cleared his throat with a loud hack into his fist. “It wouldn’t be unlike your Cairo job, except this man won’t be so easy.”

  She threw a blistering look his way.

  He went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “I met this man before the war. He’d been arrested and imprisoned at Welzheim Concentration Camp for distributing seditious pamphlets protesting the absorption of Church youth groups into the Hitler Youth. I was a brash up-and-coming lieutenant, assigned to review his case. In his cell I found him to be near suicide – a man of celebrated successes as a Youth Group leader in the Church, going to utter waste. He wasn’t ready to recant, but I decided not to turn away and let him rot. I took a different tack. God knows he wanted to get out, but how? It came to me that the very zeal with which he clung to his religious ideals made him an ideal prospect of our organization, so I put that to him. Agree to join up with the SS and I will speak in your behalf. It didn’t hurt, either, that his father was a noted magistrate at Neuruppin.

  “At first he balked, but didn’t hold out long. My argument won over the review board, who saw things my way – much to the satisfaction of his father, I might add. He was assigned to train in Holland for our Hygiene Service, after which we went our separate ways. Till this day we’ve never so much as had a beer together, in fact I haven’t seen him personally at all, since the day I bade farewell to him in Stuttgart. My fond memories of him went beyond the feather he was in my cap I had every reason to believe he would pan out as the model SS officer he seemed to have the makings of. You might say he became, from being my protégé, something of a son to me. The son I never had and never will.”

  He stopped a moment to watch her. “I’m in no hurry to do him harm. He’s definitely on our side, for all intents and purposes. However, something recently has happened to cast doubts on the ideals I dressed him up in. I will not hand it over to the Gestapo and their clubfooted methods. I could be wrong, yet I cannot afford to leave a stone unturned. The Gestapo would plow up a whole field and eat everything in sight. That’s where you come in.”

  “How do you think you’ll get away with this?”

  “With the utmost discretion between you and me.”

  “To what end?”

  He took a deep breath, blew it out through puckered lips. “Gain his confidence. In a word, seduce him. You’re French. As such you’ll harbor anti-Nazi sentiments. Appeal to the religious side that may still lurk in him. In time he will begin to tell you things. He’s married, but he and his wife live apart because of the nature of his work and for her safety. Your job will be to get him to talk about his work, pro or con. Get close enough to him and he’ll open up.”

  “What kind of work would that be?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say just now. You’ll find out, or you won’t. Anybody who talks about it will be shot.”

  “Then if he talks to me, his doom is sealed.”

  “Only if it gets repeated.”

  She looked at him, but he just stared back. She began to knead her fingers in her lap. “How long could I be left to run around with information that could get me shot?”

  “Who’s going to shoot a General’s wife?”

  “Unless that General is dead.”

  “All you have to do is play your part as if
you really were Mlle Miroux, and you won’t get hurt.”

  “So you say. How much time would I have?”

  “I won’t lie to you, he’ll be a tough nut to crack. You might not even like him. When it’s over, you’ll resume your life as if the whole thing never happened.”

  She looked over at Gunther staring sternly back. “I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t feel up to -”

  “What did you know about your subaltern in Cairo before you started in on him?”

  Her eyes came up ablaze. “I’m not exactly proud of that, Herr Stumpff.”

  He clucked, waving a dismissive hand. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot more in you than you think, both inside and out. Age has only made you prettier. If I were in his shoes -”

  “You wouldn’t be trying to blackmail me, would you?”

  “How am I doing?” he said merrily, eyes slipping past her onto the package she was sitting up against.

  “I still don’t quite understand why you don’t put the Gestapo on this man.”

  “Because I don’t want to be wrong. I brought this boy along. He was my piece of work, and I’m not out to get him. Understand? So what do you say?”

  “Will you let me think about it, Herr Stumpff?”

  He grunted, pushing off the cushions to get up laboriously. His tone was brusque. “I don’t have a lot of time. Do me the courtesy of keeping our discussion to yourself.” He stared down at her as he fitted on his cap, tugging down the bill to just above his scant eyebrows. “I’d better get down to the car before Obermeyer turns into an iceberg. Stay where you are, I’ll let myself out.”

  He started briskly toward the door, and as she watched him she wanted to say something else, but didn’t know what. Then it was too late. He opened it, went through and eased it shut behind him, soundlessly.

  Geli looked down at the package, then began to tear it open. A bottle of wine rolled out, wedged itself between two cushions. She dumped out all the other goodies onto the sofa: several packs of cigarettes, a string of sausages, blocks of Grueyere and Munster. She picked up a cigarette pack, tore into it and tapped out a clutch of three from which she took one, regaling in the fragrance of tobacco. She plucked the top off her King Tut humidor, dumped out a few and lined them up, picked up the matchbook, tore one out and struck it. Holding the flame under the tip she took a drag, swooning as she leaned back. A little raw, she thought, but you didn’t have to count it out because the bluebloods wouldn’t touch one. She waved out the match and took another long, voluptuous drag. Not Melachrino Number Twos by any means, but not bad. Not bad at all. She looked over at Gunther still accusing her of something on the piano. “What about it, darling? Shall I do it? What if something awful happened to me? What if I had to sleep with a man I might catch something from? Would you hate me more than that time when -”

  His unyielding stare told her she was wasting her breath. She thought she heard him saying, like old times, “Sorry, dear, you’re on your own. You never wanted to be loved for what I loved you for.”

  The goodies lay strewn around like Christmas, and she sat there with a semblance of herself, so quickly was he gone, and her heart kept beating in its soundproof room. She slumped down a little and dragged again on the cigarette, and Cairo seemed to close in, the camels’ dung and the heat in the dust outside, shimmering in the distance past the window and the sun that brought it down into the cooling breezes off the Nile. Would it be anything like that? Cairo all over again? The adventure!

  The date palms and the stucco rooftops loomed, the paddle-wheel churned up the sultry smell of the green Nile under the long hollow honk of a smokestack. The waterfront bustled with white-clad boys. Should she put away her parasol to set foot on this land where Cleopatra watched from the books that she had gone to live in forever?

  His name was Reggie, he said. Hadn’t been here but three weeks, and you? ‘Oh, I’m teaching French to officers like you. It’s so awfully hot all the time, isn’t it? So much worse here than in Tunis.’ There on the terrace voices floated over the rattan chairs and the highballs, and it became their favorite table after that, and what she’d do with liking him so much she didn’t know. Where they were – my God! It was as if the war was a million miles away. It raged out there like the long-gone agonies of the slaves that left the Pyramids for them to grasp, but couldn’t. And she would look at him the same way, with no right to make him hers. He wouldn’t stay, as if she’d never cried out ‘I love you!’ to a boy that young. Tomorrow he’d be on his way across the desert. Then he would come back to her. Others would die, but not him. He was the only one of them she loved.

  She still had him like a ghost whispering, ‘I need you.’

  ‘The Jerries don’t know what they’re in for, Love. We’ll get them good and proper.’ And she could hear him loving her, and see his face in the dark when being jolly wasn’t him at all. So she would think of him, years ahead, when the paddle-fan above their naked bodies stopped, and there across the sands where he must die he would tell her to shut up about such things, it was bad luck. Do you feel it? she’d say, and gesture into the cool breeze coming in from the verandah, her Pimm’s Cup waiting on the table, and he’d lean over whispering you don’t know how damned sexy you look all in a sweat like that, and she would have to tell him stop it, now, they’ll think I work here. What’s so bad about that? But she knew it was just for him, nobody else, how what was there for ogling eyes to take was his, and that was why he said it. And she loved him for it; how he could excite her so soon, then upstairs, as if the incense burning somewhere wrapped them up into that nether world that lasted like the life of butterflies – like that was where they burned and burned and for that night the Nile came down silently along their naked bodies and they could fall asleep far from the bugle that would one day blow the charge into the impossibility that he could die.

  She went over to the phone, looked down at it and dialed his door number, 3-0-8. The bell rang twice.

  “Yes?” Stumpff’s voice groaned sleepily.

  “All right, Herr Stumpff,” she said. “I’ll do it. You forgot to tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “His name.”

  “Not on the phone. We’ll meet tomorrow morning. Breakfast, shall we say, across the street. Seven o’clock. We’ll iron out the details, then we can go from there.”

  “All right. In the morning, then. Goodnight, sir.”

  “Goodnight, Madame.”

  3

  The ticket agent said, “The converter station at Baumeister has been destroyed. The tunnel’s collapsed at Innsbrucker Strasse and Bayerischer Platz.”

  “I want to go as far as Bulowstrasse,” Geli said.

  “That line is open up to Falkenberger Strasse, for now. You can expect delays. From there you’ll have to walk unless the trams are running.”

  “All right, I’ll take my chances.” She went ahead and bought her ticket.

  She took the underground as far as Falkenberger.

  Night was coming on, storm clouds had begun to gather and she set off walking with directions from a passerby, hurrying to beat the dying light. Three blocks later she turned where she’d been told, and hadn’t far to walk before she found the two-story building, labelled 47 in tarnished brass above the entryway, undamaged while a few doors down the skeleton of a wall gaped with its blown-out windows and the floors collapsed into a mound of timbers, splintered furniture and bricks. She climbed a flight of stairs into a dim corridor, turned right and with a few steps came to number 12, fourth door on the left.

  Behind the door a radio blared: the tinny voice of a news commentator, not German. She hesitated to knock. But she was here, she raised her fist, then held back, listening. The voice was British.

  “Reports from Stalingrad are sketchy, but communiques leave little doubt that the circle is closing in around the German Sixth Army, and only a matter of time remains before General Paulus will be forced to surrender and the Russians will emerge victori
ous.”

  Geli rapped, hard. She heard the screeching of a chair, the volume of the radio quieted, then clumping and the door swung open and a tall, good-looking man in uniform stood there, tunic open at the collar, lank blond hair falling carelessly across his forehead.

  Behind the brilliance of his cobalt blue eyes, there was a sort of pain that humbled his good looks. A streak of something tired, or tender, that scratched itself across the hard surface like the scar that cut through his right eyebrow. He said brusquely, “Yes, what is it?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m looking for Marlene Spilde. Is she at home?”

  “There’s no Marlene Spilde here. You’ve come to the wrong door.”

  “Oh!” Geli held her ground as the tinny British voice behind him weaved in and out of crackling airwaves: “German losses have already mounted to staggering proportions…”

  He glanced back at the radio, then quickly back at her.

  Before he could speak she said, “Would you happen to know of a Frau Spilde living in this building, sir?”

  “No.” He began to shut the door.

  “Oh, dear,” she said fretfully. “Somebody really steered me wrong.”

  He held back on the door. “I’m not acquainted with any of the other tenants here. I’m rarely home. Have you tried any of the other doors?”

  “This was the one I was directed to. Frau Spilde has no telephone.”

  Behind them on the stove a teakettle began to shriek, piercing the voice on the radio. He marched back toward the kitchen, paused in passing the radio to switch it off. At the stove he turned the burner off. The teakettle sighed. Now he was coming back and she clutched at her turned-up coat collar, giving off a little shiver.

  “Well, I’ll be on my way. So sorry I bothered you, sir. May I just -”

  “Yes?” he said irritably.

  “Well, I was going to say I thought I’d seen you someplace. But that was so long ago, it couldn’t be. Besides,” she gestured with one hand, “the uniform -”