The Arms Maker of Berlin, page 2
“Neil Ford, FBI.”
“You might have told me.”
Nat’s shoulders relaxed, and he saw now that the guy was practically a kid, a buzz-cut rookie. Amazing how much menace you could project as a disembodied voice.
“Sorry. Protocol.”
“You have a protocol for apprehending people from libraries?”
Neil glanced around, as if there might be someone in the hedge eavesdropping.
“There were extenuating circumstances.”
“Such as?”
The agent cleared his throat.
“We should get moving.”
“Where? What’s this all about?”
“You’re needed on an expert consultation, a matter of some urgency. Voluntary, but we’d have to leave now. It’s up at a place called Blue Kettle Lake, five hours from here.”
“More like six. They must want me to review Gordon Wolfe’s files.”
“You already know?”
“Viv—Gordon’s wife—called just before you did. How’d you find me?”
“Your daughter. She said the library was your second home. Sometimes your first.”
Ouch.
“No offense, sir, but she sounded like she’d been, well, hoisting a few.”
“End of exams. She’s entitled. How’d you do that thing to my phone?”
“Excuse me?”
“Make the signal disappear.”
“I didn’t. Lost mine, too.” He glanced around again. Something was making him nervous. “I would have ID’d myself right away, but I wasn’t certain the line was secure. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure we were alone.”
“Are you sure now?”
“To my satisfaction.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“I left my cell on the desk. With a note saying I’d been abducted.”
“We’ll take care of it.”
“You better, or this place will be in an uproar. Small campus. Bad news travels fast. And make sure my daughter gets word that I’m okay.”
“Like I said, we’ll take care of it. I’m supposed to tell you that you’ll be compensated for your services. Whatever your going rate is.”
“I don’t have a going rate.”
“Then make one up. Think big—it’s the government’s tab.”
“Good idea. We taking your car?”
“Have to.”
“Protocol?”
Neil nodded.
“Then I can sleep on the way up. How will I get back?”
“We’ll provide transportation. You should also be apprised that the Bureau has rented a car for your exclusive use while you’re up there.”
“Consider me apprised. Sounds like they expect this to take a while.”
“A few days, tops. We can stop by your house to pick up your things.”
“I should probably clear this with my department head.”
“He’s already signed off.”
“You work fast.”
“Your name was at the top of our list.”
“Figures. I was Gordon’s protégé.”
“Was?”
“Long story.”
Actually it was fairly short, but Nat didn’t feel like telling it for the umpteenth time. He had once been far more than a protégé. He was Gordon Wolfe’s heir apparent, anointed years ago by the great man himself, when Nat proved to be the best and brightest of several graduate assistants.
At first it was an unspoken arrangement, a natural progression. For five years Gordon and he attended conferences together, coedited research papers, and collaborated on articles for the popular press. Eventually he began fielding Gordon’s cast-off requests for speeches and interviews. The old fellow’s temperament didn’t make it easy. But Nat persevered, mostly because the work was so damned exciting. Part sleuth and part scholar, he was always eager to track down the next lead, even when it meant forsaking his duties as husband and father.
On a snowy afternoon ten years ago he finally attained the ultimate level of trust and acceptance when Gordon took him aside in an off-campus tavern to confess that he was driven by more than just a lust for knowledge.
“Money, old son,” Gordon said tipsily “Let’s face it, the swastika sells. Always has, always will. Nobody did it quite like those bastards, and everyone still wants to know why. Hell, I still want to know why.”
Gordon had to shout to be heard above a neighboring table of undergrads, who were loudly discussing Simplicissimus, the prewar German satirical magazine. Or was it The Simpsons? Wightman wasn’t exactly covered in Ivy.
“Stay the course,” Gordon said, “and you’ll always be assured of a paying audience.”
At one level it was disillusioning. At another it was comforting—Hey, you could actually make a living at this! So Nat and the old man clanked mugs to seal the deal just as a student shouted, “Doh!” quoting Homer.
Not long after that, Nat began receiving congratulatory e-mails, indicating that Gordon had passed the word. And so it was ordained: Nat would become America’s next great university authority on all aspects of Germany’s wartime resistance movements, small as they were, just as Gordon had been for the previous thirty years.
Then things began to fall apart.
The biggest problem was personality. Gordon Wolfe was vain, prickly, and abrasive, a bullish temperament to match his welterweight build. He was worse when he had hoisted a few, as Neil Ford would have said, and unfortunately Gordon believed booze was a vital part of the professorial persona. His daily regimen included wine at lunch, bourbon before dinner, brandy by the fire, and, if he was restless enough, more bourbon at bedtime. By the time he realized alcohol was a mere stage prop, just like his Dunhill pipe, it might as well have been stitched into the fabric of his campus tweeds.
Yet in other ways the two men were perfectly matched. Both could disappear into their work for weeks at a time, and both gravitated to the sort of research that shook things up—digging up the goods on a Kurt Waldheim, for instance, or discovering the shameful folly about some purported hero—a “gotcha” aspect that now seemed ironic in light of what had just befallen Gordon.
They also shared a belief that scoundrels, not heroes, were the driving forces of history, and thus worthy of greater scrutiny. The pop concept of the “Greatest Generation,” for example, struck them as quaintly ridiculous, albeit ingenious in its marketing. Even the self-infatuated boomers would have looked Great seated alongside Hitler and Stalin.
So, for every resistance movement or Hitler assassination attempt that had failed, Gordon and Nat wanted to know more about the weak links than the strong ones. Just as when a building collapsed no one wasted time studying the parts that didn’t fail. Look deeply enough into the origins of some huge movement in history, they believed, and you would inevitably find a personal snub, a romantic breakup, or some kind of thwarted ambition.
Neither would have been satisfied studying an era that survived only as parchment and tombstones, or tumbledown ruins. They needed a history that could still speak through the mouths of those who had lived it or, at the very least, through interrogation transcripts and frames of old film. Nat’s idea of a perfect afternoon was an interview in a musty Bierkeller with some aging soldier, spy, or diplomat. Meeting one of those relics was like coming upon a majestic old maple in which the sap of memory had flowed and collected to the point of bursting. Tap it at the right spot and you could capture it all. He had come to think of himself as history’s version of a sugar farmer in snowy Vermont—bucket in hand and earflaps down against the cold of ignorance as he notched the old giants one by one, before the last of them withered and fell. And what better subjects than the Germans, who were themselves obsessed with the past.
Early on, Nat’s hard work attracted all the right sorts of notoriety. Speaking invitations multiplied. Honors were bestowed. So was a book contract. The only colleague who wasn’t impressed was Gordon Wolfe. It was one thing to groom a successor. It was quite another to be usurped before you’d departed the throne, especially when your oldest sources kept telling you what a charmer, what a sage, what an insightful and indefatigable digger this sober young fellow Nat Turnbull was.
Then Nat published his first book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Knights of Conscience, a slim, scholarly volume that examined a network of Berlin resistance figures and, typically, focused on their downfall. Its appeal was narrow, but reviews were glowing. Soon afterward Nat noticed a marked coolness in Gordon, but they soldiered on.
Three years later Nat celebrated the publication of his second book, The Gentleman Underground. It, too, was about the doomed resistance movement, but took a stab at a wider audience with a broader perspective and a breezier style.
Gordon was notably absent from the launch party. Hurtful, but hardly ominous. Then the summer issue of the Central European Historical Quarterly landed in Nat’s mail slot at Wightman. His book was the subject of the lead review. The critic was Gordon Wolfe. Nat could still recite the signature paragraph from memory.
“The Gentleman Underground,” Gordon wrote, “is marked by faulty logic, thin research, and an overweening dependence on the clever turn of phrase. Perhaps blinded by the prospect of attaining a wider audience as a writer of ‘pop history,’ Dr. Turnbull has lost touch with the core values of his profession. Or maybe he is simply one of those cynical types who believes that because the swastika sells he can pawn off any half-baked effort as serious scholarship.”
The reception elsewhere was far kinder, but nothing could ease the humiliation of Gordon’s public rebuke. Everyone in the field knew its larger message: The king had smothered the heir in the cradle.
In the five years since, Nat had never regained his zeal or his balance. He still threw himself deeply into research, but more in the manner of an alcoholic on a bender, drinking to forget. His projects had lost their sense of daring, and in the intervening doldrums he settled for the snug comforts of tenure, lapping at academia’s daily bowl of lukewarm gruel at insular gabfests and conferences.
His personal life was equally uninspiring. With a failed marriage already in his ledger, he began settling for easy liaisons with like-minded burnouts, relationships that ended not in tumult but from lack of interest. His canceled date that night was a case in point. She was smart and attractive, a professor of economics. Nat begged off by citing a scholarly deadline, but now realized he simply hadn’t been up to the chore of discussing John Maynard Keynes in order to earn an invitation back to her place.
About the only positive recent development was that he had reestablished relations with his daughter, Karen, beginning with her enrollment at Wightman. They now spoke almost daily, and their friendship had progressed to the point that she was moving into his spare bedroom for the summer, with her mother’s blessing.
Gordon and he, on the other hand, had spoken only four times since the big breakup. The conversations were always via telephone, and always after midnight—calls placed by Gordon from well beyond the bounds of sobriety. The first two times a halting apology gave way to a rant. The third time he rambled on about the old days, one story after another while Nat lay in bed with the receiver tucked to one ear and a graduate assistant with striking legs nuzzled against the other. Half asleep and half aroused, Nat kept waiting for a punch line that never came.
In between he occasionally saw Viv in town, usually at the local organic grocery. She always waylaid him in the store’s farthest reaches, as if it were an operation she had plotted for days—reconnoiter the produce, lurk past the omega-3 eggs, then ambush Nat at the whole-grains bakery. She invariably approached with the sympathetic expression of a kindly aunt at a funeral, and chatted for as long as he would let her.
“Don’t worry,” she always said. “He’ll come around.”
Their last such conversation had occurred only weeks ago, when she had nearly admitted defeat, and for the first time had tried to explain Gordon’s behavior.
“I know it’s a cliché, Nat. But I’ve always blamed the war for the way he is.”
“The war?”
“The Gordon I knew before the war never would have written that review. And never would have let your estrangement go on this long. What makes it so hard to understand is that he still thinks of you as a son.”
Another shopper reached past him for a bag. It was embarrassing having this conversation next to a bagel bin. Nat prepared to bolt, but Viv continued.
“Gordon keeps walking himself up to the precipice, up to where you’re waiting on the other side, but he can’t bring himself to make the leap. It’s the same reason we never had children, Nat. He could never make the leap. And I blame the war.”
A few days later Gordon followed up with the last of his late-night calls, a self-pitying diatribe against the history department and “all our enemies,” whoever they were. But, as if finally heeding Viv’s advice, he ended on a note of conciliation, promising great things yet to come if only Nat would bear with him a while longer.
“Legacy,” was the word Gordon kept slurring as in “a legacy from me to you that will make things right.” It was striking enough that Nat perked up his ears during the next several days for any departmental gossip, or any other hint that the old fellow had come up with something new—or old, as the case might be.
His hopes faded as the days passed. Then the newspaper story came out, shooting down Viv’s theory that Gordon was traumatized by the war. The man had never even been under fire. Maybe he was just an ornery old bastard. Sometimes it was that simple, a possibility that seemed likelier still now that Gordon had been caught with a batch of stolen files. If this was the “legacy” he’d mumbled about, Nat would know soon enough.
“So what, exactly, are these files they want me to look at?” he asked Neil once they were under way. “Viv didn’t seem to know much, other than it was a lot of old boxes.”
The agent glanced over. The green glow of the dashboard display seemed to transform him into a shadowy young troll, hoarding treasure beneath the bridge.
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Oh, c’mon. I’ll see them in a few hours anyway.”
“Special Agent Clark Holland will debrief you. He’s my supervisor.”
Nat sighed. Then he sagged against the door to watch the street-lamps pass on the road leading out of town. He was on the verge of nodding off when Neil asked a question.
“How old are you, sir?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“My brother’s thirty-nine. Dangerous age.”
“Possibly.”
“What’s the ‘E’ stand for?”
Although everyone called him Nat, the name in the phone book and on his office door was Dr. E. Nathaniel Turnbull.
“ ‘Emerson.’ As in Ralph Waldo. He was a New England Unitarian, same as my mom.”
True, but misleading. The full story was that his mother took a fancy to the name after reading it on the console of the delivery room television. She must have thought it sounded stout and reliable. Or maybe she confused its cachet with that of Zenith, whose slogan at the time was, “The quality goes in before the name goes on”—a reassuring thought when you’re about to give birth.
Not that his gene pool offered an excess of quality. His father was a high school mathematics teacher and baseball coach, raised in northern Virginia by Southern Baptists—not the foot-washing variety, thank goodness. His mother also taught school—home economics, as it was known then—before she quit to begin producing a quartet of children in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Nat had a younger brother and two older sisters. As children they argued over Monopoly deeds, the last slice of pie, and a wide variety of territorial rights involving couch space, the backseats of cars, and the television remote. To prove this was not mere childishness, they later argued over their parents’ eulogies and worldly possessions. In some strange migratory quirk, all three of his siblings ended up in Orange County, California, where each ran an electronics store. All three lived within minutes of the freeway, and for all Nat knew all their stores offered both Emersons and Zeniths. They were enthusiastic Republicans, and he almost never spoke with them.
“You like it at Wightman?” Neil asked.
“What’s not to like? Small and undistinguished. Bland campus in a bland town in the blandest part of Pennsylvania.”
“The basketball team’s pretty good.”
“When you can get tickets. Trouble is, town and gown value hoops more than scholarship, but I guess you can’t have everything when you’re only charging $42,000 a year.”
“Wow. That much?”
“And going up five percent in the fall.”
“They treat you okay?”
“Not bad. Once you’re tenured, they pretty much leave you alone.”
“Well, you certainly look like a professor.”
Nat smiled. He wasn’t sure if it was a compliment, but he supposed it was true, at least for his generation of academics. No pipe and no tweed. His wardrobe was that of the perennially rumpled class—frayed chinos, wrinkled oxfords, low-cut hiking shoes, and whatever shapeless jacket was at hand. He drove a twelve-year-old Jetta with rust spots on the doors. The wall-to-wall bookshelves in his small frame house were overflowing with the latest books and journals from his field of study, although most items in his refrigerator would soon qualify for historic preservation.
There was a rugged aspect to his features—coarse sandy hair, strong jawline—and he got outdoors just enough to put some color in his cheeks. But the most intriguing thing about his looks was a slight squint, which betrayed not only inquisitiveness but an air of intensity. Some women took it as a challenge—“This one’s difficult, but possibly worth it”—and concluded he must be searching for something, possibly them, only to discover far too late that what he was really after was an old piece of paper from 1938.
Males, on the other hand, often interpreted his expression to mean that he must be up to something. Maybe that was why Neil Ford was still playing things close to the vest.
