'You'll take what you can get and you'll be happy with it. You're lucky I find a Yank girl for you at all.'
'I'll do you the favor and take both of them tonight.'
'You arsehole!'
Then there was the sound of playful shoving and good-natured punches exchanged. The two young men laughed. They scuffled directly above Siegfried's bomb and then set to work. For thirty minutes Siegfried remained motionless in place. Everything in his body throbbed.
'That does it, then,' one of the sailors finally said. Then they turned and jumped down from the platform. Siegfried heard them walk away. The door closed.
He waited several more minutes. Then he slowly took his hand off the bomb. It stayed in place, held securely by the adhesive. As he slid back toward his exit, his shirt rode up toward his shoulders. Then he reached a part of the steel that was slightly concave. For a moment in the blackness, his chest was stuck and he was stricken by panic. But then, with a mighty shove, he pushed himself along with his arms. A few seconds later he was free, and a minute thereafter he was out, sitting upright again and feeling his body creak. He breathed hard and told himself that he would never ever do this again. Not even for Hitler personally!
He stood and was filthy. He stripped his dress shirt from his chest and kept his undershirt on. He saw a pair of coveralls and pulled them on. Then he found a pair of mops and a pail in a corner of the engine room. He filled the pail with soap and water. A sailor on a work patrol would arouse no suspicion. He emerged into the corridor carrying the mops and the buckets.
No one stopped him. When the petty officer took his eyes off the gangplank for a moment, Siegfried abandoned his housekeeping tools against a lifeboat station and walked calmly down the plank. He mingled with the other men in the navy yard and, fifteen minutes later, disappeared through the main gate.
*
Rev. Stephen Fowler, Laura's onetime husband, was a man capable of radically changing his opinions. But he was only formulating opinions, not changing any, as he sat by the green-shaded desk lamp in his parish house, staring at the blank sheet of paper rolled into his typewriter. It was eight in the evening of the same day that the spy had been an uninvited guest at the Red Bank navy yard. That evening Reverend Fowler felt himself quite incapable of any strong opinion at all.
Perhaps it was an unenviable aspect of being a celebrity cleric. A man's opinion is asked so often that it becomes difficult to have any opinion or ideas left. Collier's had asked him to write two thousand words on why a young man from a good family would choose to enter the ministry. What relevance did it have to 1939 and a world perched on the brink of war? And by the way, could he include a clear black and white photograph of himself and his wife?
Christian Century had initiated a monthly symposium of views concerning American involvement in European politics. Their editors, bless them, had found an eloquent, ostrich-headed isolationist, an old Benedictine named Father Quinn, who could warp any of the parables of Christ to his own purposes. Would young Reverend Fowler, the clear-eyed young Lutheran, care to craft a five-thousand-word response?
'Of course,' answered Stephen Fowler from his study over the long-distance wire to his editors in Chicago. 'I've been a fan of Father Quinn's muddled theology for years. It's about time someone took him on, isn't it?'
Stephen Fowler typed:
Can a Christian sit by, in the safety of his own home, and watch his neighbor's house in flames?
Displeased, he leaned back and stopped typing. Other things were slipping into perspective this evening and they drew his attention away from his writing. He stared at the framed portrait at the corner of his desk. He saw himself and Laura, arms entwined during more agreeable days. The photograph had been taken on the ramparts of Quebec City during their honeymoon. In the picture, they stood smiling broadly, arms entwined, possessed of a love that seemed it would last two lifetimes. Laura, at age twenty-three, was so very beautiful. How had he let his marriage get so out of hand?
He brooded suddenly. He had not heard from her since she had gone home to England.
He wondered if she still loved him. He told himself that he had only one person to blame if she did not. Himself.
Reverend Fowler picked up the typewriter and moved it aside, clearing his desk. Only one unsatisfying sentence of his current article had been written. He could get back to it, he told himself.
He drew a piece of personal stationery as well as an envelope from his desk. He fished in a side drawer for a ten-cent stamp for airmail to England. Then in the methodical neat script of his own hand he addressed the envelope to Laura Worthington Fowler, care of her father's name and address in Salisbury.
He wrote Laura a short but succinct letter. He said the things that finally needed to be said. He was sorry for his inattentiveness, he wrote. Ideas had swept him away and taken his eyes off what he cherished more than anything: her. Could she come home and forgive him? He wrote that he still loved her and prayed that she loved him.
He sealed the letter. He took it from his study and placed it on the table near the front door. He would be sure to mail it the next morning even if it meant a special trip into town. He was about to return to his study, when something caught his eye through the window by the front door. He looked again. He was certain-or was he?-that he had seen a man leaving his church.
Stephen Fowler stood very still and stared. The trees between St. Paul's and the parish house obscured his view, particularly when they rustled. He could obtain no clear sight lines, but he watched for several seconds.
Why would someone be at his church at this hour? Though the doors were unlocked, Reverend Fowler was the only one ever to have cause to enter the church in the evening. He continued to watch. He caught his breath and held it. He felt a certain apprehension and he stared hard, as if intensity might help. He searched and scanned for the ghost of a tall crooked figure in a dark coat that he may or may not have seen. But the shadow, or whatever it had been, was gone.
He exhaled and the air rushed from his lungs. He breathed again as he relaxed. He was now convinced that he had probably seen a rustle of leaves, an errant configuration of branches, or a stray dog. He admitted to himself how much he had been on edge recently, particularly since his wife had left him. A man could imagine many things under the circumstances and very few of them were any good.
And so what if someone had passed by the church? This was Liberty Square, New Jersey, population four thousand gentle souls, established 1759. It was not New York or Philadelphia. A parishioner might have simply wanted to offer an evening prayer, or seek the comfort of the Almighty's presence.
What could be more innocent? Why else were the church's doors always open? Reverend Fowler watched for another half minute. When no one appeared or emerged from the front doors of his church, he returned to his writing. There was no use in worrying about the unimportant things. Not with his country-and the world -- in the state it was in.
FIFTEEN
The next evening Siegfried locked the door of his clandestine radio room and pulled the curtains across the single window. He unraveled his antenna and strung it carefully across the floor, up the cream-colored walls, along the bookshelf that held no books, and parallel to the molding where the ceiling met the walls. He positioned the wire for optimum communication with Hamburg. He checked his watch. It was 10:17 on a Wednesday. He had more than enough time.
The spy plugged in his receiver. It hummed as it warmed up. Then he adjusted the tone by tuning into the dots and dashes of various amateur operators in the area. He donned a set of heavy headphones, plugged in his transmitter, and connected his telegraph key. He limbered his fingers, then cut his own power and monitored a dummy transmission of his own steady hand on the key.
Satisfied, he moved his transmitter back to an ON position, tuned the receiver to the assigned frequency for AOR-3, and raised the volume as high as possible. He listened to static on the frequency as he checked his watch again.
It was 10:48. He was ready. He smoked two Pall Mall cigarettes. His anxiety heightened as he watched the minute hand on his watch edge with painful slowness toward the twelve. Would the hour for transmission never
