The Foreign Correspondent

“The best thing I ever saw.”

From Christa, a dubious smile.

“No, it’s true.”

“It’s your eyes, love. But I love to be what you see.”

He lay back, hands clasped beneath his head. She turned on her side and stretched an arm and a leg over him, her face pressed against his chest. They drifted in silence for a time, then he realized that his skin, where her face rested, was wet, and it burned. He started to speak, to ask, but she put a gentle finger on his lips.

Standing at the desk, with her back to him, she waited for the hotel operator to answer the phone, then gave her a number. She was, without clothing, slighter than he remembered-this always struck him-and enigmatically desirable. What was it, about her, that reached him so deeply? Mystery, lover’s mystery, a magnetic field beyond words. She waited as the phone rang, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, one hand unconsciously smoothing her hair. It stirred him to watch her; the nape of her neck-hair cut short and high, her long, taut back, pale curve of hip, deep cleft, nicely shaped legs, scuffed heels.

“Helma?” she said. “It’s me. Would you please tell Herr von Schirren that I am delayed? Oh, he isn’t. Well, when he gets home then, you’ll tell him. Yes, that’s it. Goodby.”

She placed the phone back on its high cradle, then turned, read his eyes, rose on the toes of one foot, hands raised, fingers in the castanet position, and did a Spanish dancer’s twirl on the Adlon’s carpet.

“Ole,” he said.

She came back to the bed, found an edge of quilt, and pulled it over them. Weisz reached across her and turned off the bedside lamp, leaving the room in darkness. For an hour, they would pretend to spend the night together.

Later, she dressed by the light of the streetlamp that shone in the window, then went into the bathroom to comb her hair. Weisz followed and stood in the doorway. “How long will you stay?” she said.

“Two weeks.”

“I will call you,” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.” Looking in the mirror, she turned her head to one side, then the other. “At lunchtime, I can call.”

“You have an office?”

“We all must work, here in the thousand-year Reich. I’m a sort of executive, at the Bund Deutscher Maedchen, the League for German Girls-part of the Hitler Youth organization. A friend of von Schirren’s got me the job.”

Weisz nodded. “In Italy, they go down to the six-year-olds, make fascists of children, get them while they’re young. It’s awful.”

“It is. But must is what I meant. One must take part, otherwise, they come after you.”

“What do you do?”

“Organize things, make plans-for parades, or mass gymnastic exhibitions, or whatever it is that week. Sometimes I have to take them out to the countryside, thirty teenagers, for the harvest, or just to breathe the air of the German forest. We have a fire, and we sing, then some of them go off hand in hand into the woods. It’s all very Aryan.”

“Aryan?”

She laughed. “That’s how they think of it. Health and strength and Freiheit, freedom of the body. We’re supposed to encourage that, because the Nazis want them to breed. If they don’t wish to marry, they should go and find a lonely soldier and get pregnant. To make more soldiers. Herr Hitler will need all he can get, once we go to war.”

“And when is that?”

“Oh, that they don’t tell us. Soon, I would think. If a man is looking for a fight, sooner or later he’ll find it. We thought it would be the Czechs, but Hitler was handed what he wanted, so now, maybe, the Poles. Lately he screams at them, on the radio, and the Propaganda Ministry puts stories in the newspapers: those poor Germans in Danzig, beaten up by Polish gangs. It isn’t subtle.”

“If he goes for them, the British and the French will declare war.”

“Yes, I expect they will.”

“They’ll close the border, Christa.”

She turned and, for a moment, met his eyes. Finally, she said, “Yes, I know.” A last look at herself in the mirror, then she returned the comb to her purse, hunted around for a moment, and brought out a piece of jewelry, holding it up for Weisz to see. “My Hakenkreuz, all the ladies wear one, out where I live.” On a silver chain, a swastika made of old silver, with a diamond on each of the four bars.

“How beautiful,” Weisz said.

“Von Schirren gave it to me.”

“Is he in the party?”

“Heavens no! He’s old, rich Prussia, they hate Hitler.”

“But he stays.”

“Of course he stays, Carlo. Maybe he could’ve left three years ago, but there was still hope, then, that somebody would see the light and get rid of the Nazis. From the beginning, in ‘thirty-three, nobody here could believe what they were doing, that they could get away with it. But now, to cross the border would be to lose everything. Every house, every bank account, every horse, the servants. My dogs. Everything. Mother, father, family. To do what? Press pants in London? Meanwhile, life here goes on, and in the next minute, Hitler will reach too far, and the army will step in. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day. This is what von Schirren says, and he knows things.”

“Do you love him, Christa?”

“I am very fond of him, he’s a good man, a gentleman of old Europe, and he’s given me a place in life. I couldn’t go on any longer, living the way I did.”

“Everything else aside, I fear for you.”

She shook her head, put the Hakenkreuz back in her purse, closed the flap, and snapped the button shut. “No, no, Carlo, don’t do that. This nightmare will end, this government will fall, and then, well, one will be free to do what one wants.”

“I’m not so sure it will fall.”

“Oh, it will.” She lowered her voice and leaned toward him. “And, I guess I can say this, there are a few of us in this city who might even give it a little push.”

Weisz was at the Reuters office, at the end of the Wilhelmstrasse, by eight-thirty the next morning. The other two reporters hadn’t come in yet, but he was greeted by the two secretaries, both in their twenties, who, according to Delahanty, spoke perfect English and French and could get along in other languages if they had to. “We are so happy for Herr Wolf, will he return with his bride?” Weisz didn’t know-he doubted Wolf would do that, but he couldn’t say it. He sat in Wolf’s chair and read the morning news, in the thinking man’s newspapers, the Berlin Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and Goebbels’s Das Reich. Not much there, Dr. Goebbels writing of the potential replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill, that “swapping horses in midstream is bad enough, but swapping an ass for a bull would be fatal.” For the rest, it was whatever the Propaganda Ministry wanted to say that day. So, government-controlled newspapers, nothing new there.

But control of the press could have unexpected consequences-Weisz recalled the classic example, the end of the Great War. The surrender of 1918 had sent waves of shock and anger through the German public. After all, they had read every day that their armies were victorious in the field, then, suddenly, the government capitulated. How could this happen? The infamous Dolchstoss, the stab in the back, that was the reason-political manipulation at home had undermined their brave soldiers and dishonored their sacrifice. So it was the Jews and the Communists, those crafty political guttersnipe, who were responsible for the defeat. This the German public believed. And the table was set for Hitler.

Done with the newspapers, Weisz started on the press releases, stacked in Wolf’s in box. He tried to make himself concentrate, but he couldn’t. What was Christa doing? Her lowered voice would not leave him-give them a little push. That meant clandestine business, conspiracy,