The first box was filled with records of oil shipments from Ploiecti, Romania, and lists of gas usage in five Reich cities between 1942 and 1944. At the height of war the measuring and gauging had gone on unabated. There were letters from a colonel in France requesting extra petroleum rations for trucks that brought cheese shipments of Claqueret from Lyon to Paris.
Emil retrieved the next box and settled at the desk, and by the time he was on the third he had noticed a chill and used the gray blanket to cover his shoulders.
There were boxes of water records and others with troop movements. There were reports on Austrian wheat harvests and predictions for economic activity within Czechoslovakia.
Emil almost fell asleep after the ninth box, but hobbled to the end of the room and back a few times, quickly, to get the blood flowing again, then returned to a box on Dutch black-market activities.
It was late, he suspected, or early. But down here he could hear nothing, not even the planes. For all he knew, there was a war going on up there.
He skimmed over boxes that reported on grain shipments scheduled for the retreating forces on both fronts, and saw their tonnages dwindle. He’d heard stories from men on the seal boat about starving German soldiers raiding homes in a fury. Less verifiable stories had the soldiers eating each other. The one German in their crew, a pink-skinned Bavarian named Jos, sank into silence whenever the stories came up. No one prodded him, not even the Bulgarian. They knew he had seen his future, and it was iron bars, and walls.
A water-stained box contained wrinkled reports on awards given for valor in battle. Lists of men who had received their Iron Crosses posthumously, or those who had killed so many Allies that their lists of commendations went on for many pages. There were reports on brave soldiers of the Reich, and most of the recommendations came from the final months of the war. The soldiers were becoming younger, until they were just children with rifles and sticks, lined up in a ring around Berlin: the Home Guard. Three-quarters were posthumous recommendations. The Luftschutz medal, War Merit Crosses, a few West Wall medals for the builders of the failed D-Day defense on the Siegfried line, and numerous Russian Front medals. Each recipient had his own folder, filled with biographical information and photographs when available.
Then he spotted the folder in the back. Unlike the other orderly files, it was shabby, as if it had been perused by someone unorganized, or excited, or artistic, and then stuffed back into the box with no regard for order.
The label said kontakt: “graz.”
The first page was an identification sheet. A small photo of Jerzy Michalec: a younger, smooth face. Boyish. Born in Szek- szard, Hungary, 12 January 1909, to a Polish father and a Magyar mother. Married Agnes HOller in Vienna, 1933. A handwritten note in the margin said that Agnes Michalec had died in 1943 in Mauthausen labor camp, Austria. Jerzy Michalec s association with the Gestapo, said line 26, began on 6 February 1941. Line 31: For decorations, see attached.
The attached included typewritten letters that recommended “Graz” for medals of distinction. On 15 March 1942, Michalec had, at peril to himself, used prewar contacts within France to secure the identities of sixteen members of the French Underground. Thirteen of these sixteen had been taken into custody.
Firm block letters at the bottom of the recommendation: neinjud. Jew.
No-Michalec was not a Jew. It was his wife, Agnes. For that they could not award his work.
During the week of 10 October, that same year, Michalec caught and personally executed three British spies in Prague. Again, nein.
Then, in March 1944, he led thirty boys of a mobilized Hitlerjugend regiment into a Soviet garrison in Poland. They returned with the mangled caps of nearly a hundred Russians. Two large, messy letters- ja — in red ink.
Next was a page-sized photograph of Michalec, much older than the young man who had, only three years before, entered the mess of battle. His face was heavy with killing, a blackness lingering beneath the flesh. He wore a loose-fitting black suit, and his smile was weary.
He stood shaking hands with the man Emil had seen twice before in his life: on a series of ten photographs, and stepping out of a blue Tatra with a Walther pistol. A little younger, this man s features were shadowed by his Wehrmacht officer s cap. His dress uniform showed the stripes of a colonel- Oberst. He handed Jerzy Michalec a small ribbon, weighted in the center with a cross, and a certificate. Emil could just make out the elaborate Gothic script- lm Namendes Fuhrers…
It took him a moment. He stared, unbelieving, for a long time.
Then he folded the photograph down the middle, and again, into quarters, then slipped it into the back of his pants, into his underwear. He turned off the lamp, grabbed his cane, unlocked the door and left.
Up three dark flights to the corridors, then out into the shadows. It was still dark, but dawn wasn’t far away. He could tell by the increased activity-figures jogging in the distance, workers and soldiers, shifts changing. He followed the curve of the wall to the corner, where the noise of planes grew to a pitch, whining loudly. Across the tarmac, where he and the children had crept onto the base, two American soldiers stood at the fence. One kneeled at the hole with pliers, mending, while the other stood with the lederhosen-clad baby boy. The boy was crying, waving his arms around, telling the soldier everything he knew about the hole in the fence. And, no doubt, the man with the cane, the bad cigarettes and Slav accent who had gone through it. The soldier brought a two-way radio to his face and started speaking.
Half-jogging back along the perimeter of the airport, he was glad, at least, that he hadn’t brought the whole file. Lightness was imperative. Speed. The knots in his stomach plagued him, but he pressed the pain down.
He slid his cane into his pant leg until its end hung by his ankle. It made him look awkward, crippled, but everyone in this city was.
Up ahead, a crowd of white, flour-dusted workers, tired and sagging, mumbling to themselves, approached the front gate, about twenty yards away. He didn’t know if it could work, and the sharp grind in his stomach was becoming unbearable. He needed to lie down. He needed sleep.
He walked as fast as his stiff leg would allow and joined the men. He hung back, behind them, in case they were from earlier-in case they recognized him. He stuck his hands in his pockets to hide his trembling.
Some GIs smoking by the gate looked casually through the papers of the men lined up to enter.
No one recognized him. The workers were too tired to see who was following them out, and the guards were busy with the newcomers. They didn’t care who left Tempelhof.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
He urinated in an alley, pulled out the cane, then leaned against a brick wall and vomited a thin stream. He took the tram back to the center of town. The black streets were mostly abandoned, and he even found a seat on the unlit car. His empty stomach bubbled angrily. He wanted to hold the photograph again, to prove to himself what he had seen, but was afraid that if he held it in his hands it would fly away.
Michalec.
A Hungarian who had married a Jew who had been put in an Austrian concentration camp. He had begun working with the Gestapo in 1941. Was his wife in the camp by then? Was this the leverage they had used on him?
But then she died in 1943, and his best work was yet to come. Did he know she was dead? Or was he working under the illusion he was saving his wife’s life by all the insidious jobs he did?
Or had he, by that point, become a different person?
Others make the rules, he had said. We only try to live by them.
Berlin slid by, and a drunk man in the front of the train gazed at him, squinting.
A war hero twice over: first for the Nazis, then for the Russians. He had turned sides as quickly as the war had shifted. With each shift of history he had relearned the rules. A clerk and then a spy and then a war hero, and now-Jerzy Michalec was a politicos. Untouchable. Almost.
When he recognized the annihilated Tiergarten, he got out and walked the rest of the way to the Gate, where the gray dawn lit pockmarked columns and loitering soldiers. He held up his passport, but no one looked. He didn’t recognize the American GIs who waved him through, nor the Russian peasants in soldiers’ uniforms who accepted him back into their sector. He asked one of them the time, and the Russian looked at his left wrist, where he had
