“How would I know? I’m from a very good family. I have manners. It wasn’t for me and I don’t read other people’s correspondence.”
He was toying with them again.
“Where did it come from?”
“Italy. Rome… Or was it Naples?” Alfred pretended to think. “No. I think it was Venice. What does it matter anyway? It was dated, July; wherever he had sent it from, Neumann isn’t stupid enough to hang around to wait for the reply.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“It was mailed. Regular post. Stamps and return address, all business as it should be – some monastery, if I remember correctly. I apologize for not being able to give you more precise information. My memory has been playing up. Malnutrition does that to you.”
“What was in it?” Morris pressed, ignoring the German’s sarcasm.
“I have already told you, I haven’t read it,” von Rombach repeated, articulating each word, as though for a child. “Ask Gerlinde,” he said and then delivered a final blow. “After all, you know her so well.”
Tadek felt himself shivering. The betrayal tasted bitter on the tip of his tongue. He stood in front of Morris desperately searching his face, only to see the same disappointment in the American’s downcast eyes. For some time after von Rombach was released, Morris played with his lighter without uttering a single word. It was that silence that Tadek couldn’t tolerate any longer.
“Perhaps, he’s lying.” He was grasping at straws and he knew it but it was all he had now. The very thought of losing the only friend he thought he’d found was unbearable to him. “Perhaps, he said it on purpose, to confuse us…”
“Tadeusz, how soon did you notice him talking to her, in that stadium?” Morris asked instead.
“The game was on but I was looking at her from time to time. I never let her out of my sight for a long period of time.” He regarded Morris tragically with his guilty eyes.
Morris waved away the unspoken apology at once. “Don’t blame yourself. Trained agents make mistakes worse than yours and you’re not a trained agent by any stretch of the imagination. I’m only asking, is there a possibility he could have actually slipped something into her hands without your seeing it?”
Tadek considered carefully and recalled his conversation with Gerlinde that took place a few nights ago before he brought von Rombach to Morris’s attention and suggested interrogating him. Irritably, he rubbed his forehead. “She wouldn’t take anything from him. She can’t stand the sight of him for… personal reasons.” It wasn’t his story to tell and if she chose not to tell Morris, Tadek wouldn’t be the one to betray her secret. “She broke off the engagement with him, he told you this much himself. She was screaming at him not to approach her ever again—”
“Are you not considering the possibility that it was all a mere act?” Morris sighed tiredly.
Tadek stared at him in stunned silence. Hiding the letter was one thing but this… this was an entirely different matter altogether. But that night when she’d come to talk to him, how could one lie about such things? He saw her eyes, her hands – her voice didn’t lie.
“No. She wouldn’t. Wouldn’t do it to me,” he finished in a mere whisper.
“You would be surprised to what lengths they, Nazis, go sometimes.”
“She’s not like them. Not like von Rombach. Not even like her father.”
“She is his daughter.”
“No.” Tadek found it difficult to breathe.
“I hope you don’t have any sort of feelings for her?” Morris regarded him closely.
“No, it’s not like that…” She was his very good friend. He’d grown to love her like a sister. Tadek closed his eyes and rubbed them with force. It was all too much.
“I’ll repeat my question: is there a possibility that von Rombach could have passed something to her without your noticing?”
After an interminably long pause, Tadek hung his head. “Yes,” he felt like he was confessing to murder.
Morris only nodded several times, to some thoughts of his own, no doubt. “Well, that shall be a lesson to us all. Never trust a Nazi, no matter how artfully they worm their way into our trust. It’s all right.” He reached for Tadek’s hand and patted it in a fatherly gesture. “We fell for it once and now we shall be smarter. No harm done. It’s just one letter. Gerlinde is still here. We’ll just watch her closely from now on. I’ll have plain-clothed men monitoring her every move. Perhaps, it’s all for the better. And, Tadeusz?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell her anything. Don’t tell her we know.”
The drive home was sickeningly long and silent. It poured outside and some of the roads were washed out. The wall of rain obscured everything from their sight and Tadek was forced to look at his hands instead and wonder at his own gullibility and curse his own nature and Gerlinde and the entire hostile world around. Outside the window, streaked with rain, the mourning parade of people lining up for their meager rations, their black umbrellas turning their lines into one long funeral procession. He mourned, along with them, mourned the loss of the last person the Nazis had taken from him. How ignorant was the hope that at least she was safe from their reach and how hard that blow had hit him! Even without being personally present, Gruppenführer Neumann had corrupted the last thing Tadek held dear and now, there was nothing else for him left in this world to love or to fight for. What a wretched day! What a wretched existence, to live like that, for the sake of revenge only… It wasn’t what he wanted for himself and only now did it dawn on him – a moment too late.
13
November brought snow, denazification trials, and more uncertainty. The Americans were promising elections early next year and tried to explain democracy to the starving people in their zone. People listened, nodded impatiently, agreed to everything the Amis were saying and, prompted
