Deal with the Devil Page 9

  Come on, Erhard had said, come for a ride with papa. It’ll be just like going home for you.

  “You’re forgetting, Mr. Stoner, I’m a military officer in uniform. Doesn’t that protect me against allegations of espionage?”

  “It does nothing of the sort.” Stoner stubbed out his cigarette. “The Geneva Convention does exempt soldiers in uniform on reconnaissance missions from charges of espionage. However, its otherwise specific language does not define the term employed, the ‘zone of operations of the hostile army,’ and my own powers-that-be boggle at applying such a term to these islands.”

  Faust rubbed his neck and forced himself to breathe. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then allow me to conclude.” Stoner folded his hands atop his spotless blotter. “We know there is a German intelligence network in place within Oxford.”

  “You know more than I do.”

  “We know because we’ve broken it.”

  “Then it wasn’t so hot, was it?”

  “And they told us another agent was coming.”

  Faust quit breathing again.

  “Under these circumstances, Herr Major, surely you understand we must verify your position before accepting you as an honorable prisoner of war.”

  He realized he was chewing his lower lip and made himself stop. Again he cursed Erhard. Why here, you cretin, of all the places on the planet? “I see.”

  “You should also understand I am not the person you must convince of your innocence. I am only the caseworker, so to speak, gathering information to forward to my superiors. The decision of whether to accept you into the prisoner of war system within this country, or to charge you with espionage and seek your execution, will be made at a higher level within the chain of command.” Stoner paused. “I do hope this is clear.”

  “Devastatingly so.” He glanced at the packet of Players, temptingly near beside the ashtray at his right elbow. “Excuse me for a temporary change of subject, but are cigarettes rationed?”

  “Of course. One pack per month.”

  A welcome surge of anger warmed his chilled skin. “Ten cigarettes for thirty days is cruel and unusual punishment, Mr. Stoner. I guarantee I won’t survive it.”

  “Such a pity.” Stoner’s smile was brief. “I must ask you again to explain your presence here,” he paused, as if for emphasis, “even if only in general terms.”

  Faust stared out the left-hand French window at the line of apple trees bordering the outer wall, with Woodrow’s upper story, spiraling chimneys, and slate roof rising above. Seen from this angle, Jennifer’s idea of cleaning the upper windows from the apple trees didn’t seem all that silly; the lower branches dangled almost to the ground, the middle ones were at the same level as the windows, and it would require neither a remarkably agile person nor a long reach for the task. It would take balance more than anything else, to know how far one could stretch before toppling off.

  Stoner’s charges were horrifyingly plausible, and beneath Faust’s fading flush of anger his fear remained, colder than ever. If he said nothing, he faced possible execution, which would help no one, least of all himself. If he said too much, he became a traitor. Somewhere in between those extremes, he had to find a point of compromise, as close to quiescence as he could persuade Stoner to accept. It was balance again, with a long way to fall.

  “Okay,” he said, “in general terms — on Saturday I visited an acquaintance who was a Luftwaffe pilot. He suggested I ride along on his next bombing run and see what it was like. Like an idiot, I agreed, and here I am.”

  Stoner kept staring at him, eyebrows slightly up as if awaiting more. The pause stretched until even the background scratching of Bruckmann’s pencil stopped. Faust forced himself to hold Stoner’s unwavering stare but he reddened beneath its weight, and finally he admitted defeat and looked back out the French window.

  “You didn’t expect my entire life history, did you?”

  “Granted, it’s a start. And granted, it’s in general terms.” Stoner tapped his fingers on the blotter. “I must have more detail, you know, enough to convince the chain of command above me you are speaking the truth.”

  “Mr. Stoner, I don’t have a good face for poker. If I’m telling a lie, you’ll know it.”

  Stoner’s eyebrows crept higher. “I’m afraid that’s not evidence which will convince those powers-that-be of your innocence. Perhaps we should try this another way.” He pulled a small sheaf of papers from the top drawer of his desk, the first indication this was more than a show office. “I am going to ask you a series of questions concerning the details of the aircraft and the flight, things we already know, and we’ll judge how well your answers correspond to these unassailable facts.”

  Faust looked away again. It would be easy for Stoner to lead him on, query after query, until he said more than he’d intended. They’d done that dance before Woodrow’s apple-wood fire. “I don’t know much about flying.”

  “Do you know what type of plane it was?” Stoner took a blank sheet of paper and wrote on it, then flipped it over. “There’s my answer, based upon the wreckage we recovered.”

  He cradled his injured arm closer to his side. This seemed so harmless, there had to be a catch. “Mr. Stoner, do you have any idea how difficult this is for me?”

  “Oh, yes, Herr Major, I’m afraid I do.”

  Faust glanced up, surprised. There was only one way Stoner could know — by personal experience.

  “To explain,” Stoner said, “I’m going to tell you a story. In the Great War, I was a major commanding the Fourth Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. At that time, the Fourth was composed of volunteers from the university, and I had served as their commander in a reserve capacity for seven years prior to nineteen-fifteen, when we took part in the attack at Neuve Chapelle, in the Pas-de-Calais, on the tenth of March. We were attached to General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Corps and were assigned a position in the center of the attack against the village itself.” Stoner riveted Faust with a keen stare. “Notice, Herr Major, the amount of detail I am giving you. Should you need to confirm my story, it would not be difficult.”

  Faust reddened at the urbane rebuke.

  “By nightfall, we had captured the village but had received no further orders. Communication with headquarters was not good and we weren’t certain of the location of the Gharwal Brigade on our right, so we dug in and waited for morning rather than push forward and perhaps allow ourselves to be flanked.”

  “I would have done the same,” Faust said, intrigued despite himself.

  “I believe any sane commander would have done so.” Stoner tapped his already neat papers into a squared stack and aligned them on the blotter’s center. “However, during the night, the German units reinforced their new line before the Bois de Biez. Specifically, they brought up machine guns and positioned them behind steel plating, so they fired just above a man’s knees. Our follow-up attack the next day — the eleventh of March, it was — ran into those machine guns and ground to an abrupt halt. During the final retreat from no man’s land, I was struck in both thighs and fainted into one of the wide drainage ditches common to the area.

  “It was dusk before I came to my senses. I heard my name being called, again and again, and when I peered over the edge of the ditch I saw a line of my men searching for me through the shell holes and debris. Unfortunately, I was nearer the German lines than my own and to rescue me, my men would have to run the gauntlet of those machine guns.” Stoner shrugged. “Sometimes the Germans honored a cease-fire to rescue the wounded from the field; sometimes they didn’t. I decided not to chance it and remained quiet. After midnight, my men gave up and returned to their trenches. I crawled from the ditch and began dragging myself back to our lines, but the German sentries spotted me within minutes and I was taken captive.”

  Faust fought a shudder. Stoner’s calm description of an ordeal which could only be described as brutal was more horrifying than anything h
e had experienced in combat himself. His own capture, at the hands of a young lady — beautiful or not — seemed tame, even trivial, by comparison. The chill climbed his spine as Stoner kept speaking in the same steady voice.

  “I spent two years as a guest of the Kaiser, as we termed it, including a week of intense interrogation from a hospital bed in Douai.” He leaned forward and folded his hands atop the irritatingly neat stack of papers. The intensity of his stare softened, but only at the edges. “So when I say I understand your current confusion and trepidation, Herr Major, you may believe what I say.”

  The shudder won. Faust measured the depth of Stoner’s poise and contrasted it to the shattered stumps of humanity which were the Great War veterans he had known as a boy — gas victims with wet sucking coughs, amputees in wheeled chairs or with flapping sleeves. For the first time, he realized his greatest fear in combat was not death.

  “Mr. Stoner, may I ask, do your wounds still bother you? I mean, after all these years — ” The question suddenly seemed invasive and personal. Faust fell silent.

  But Stoner didn’t even shift in his chair. “No, not for years. I used to have a weather leg, and knew when it would rain or when to expect the first snows, and everyone laughed at me — ”

  Faust laughed.

  “ — but it’s mostly passed off.” The intensity faded further from Stoner’s gaze and his eyes softened. “No, the medical care I received as a prisoner was rather good. It was the overall treatment which was bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “Rather dreadful must be the most accurate description.” Stoner leaned back again. “The Germans didn’t seem to know what to do with us once the interrogations were complete. Their solution was to herd us together in old factory buildings with barbed-wire fences about them, and post guards with dogs on the outside.”

  “Isn’t that what a prison is supposed to be?” The way Stoner kept mentioning “the Germans,” as if there wasn’t one sitting across from him, was both annoying and disquieting. Faust refused to squirm.

  “No, it was actually an inhumane arrangement. It omitted such creature comforts as private space, activities to consume time, and room for exercise. Food became scarce, especially beginning the winter of nineteen-seventeen, and what was available was both inadequate and mediocre. Many of us would have starved were it not for parcels from home. And the German general staff rather naturally tended to place their most capable officers on the front lines, leaving the dregs of the corps to tend for us.”

  Stoner fixed Faust with a professorial eye, and he realized he was being lectured. Amusement routed his nervousness; it was impossible not to like the old geezer, despite the situation and despite his incessant tidiness.

  “In all armies, there is a sort of officer who doesn’t know how to wield his authority. He’s not necessarily sadistic, but the sensation of power goes to his head and he tends to lord it over anyone unfortunate enough to fall beneath his rule, such as prisoners of war. These officers referred to me as ‘truculent’ because I refused to tolerate their petty abuses.”

  “I know the sort you mean,” Faust said. “In basic training, I ran into a lot of career corporals. They particularly enjoyed making trouble for those of us who’d attended gymnasium or university. Mr. Stoner, is my math off?”

  Stoner’s eyebrows lifted into question marks.

  “You said you were captured in March of nineteen-fifteen and you were a prisoner for two years. But the war lasted until November of nineteen-eighteen.”

  Stoner shook his head. “No error, Herr Major. I was also called ‘unruly’ because I refused to settle down and enjoy life in the camps, such as it was. My fifth escape attempt bore much fruit and I returned safely to the Allied lines, where I was almost shot by a nervous French sentry for my pains.”

  “I’m impressed.” He felt comfortable enough to risk the obvious question. “How did you escape?”

  Stoner chuckled. “I am not here to give you ideas, young man.”

  “Perhaps not.” Despite this second rebuke, their growing relationship still gave Faust confidence. Stoner wasn’t such a bad old codger, after all. “May I ask a rather personal question? Do you dream about these events?”

  Stoner’s eyebrows arched again. “Why do you ask?”

  He chose his words carefully. “Because a friend of mine who died in Poland — well, in his last letter, he said he’d seen some things he’d rather forget. But he kept dreaming about them.”

  Again Stoner fixed him with a relentless stare. “You say your friend died in Poland, not that he was killed in battle.”

  With a shock, Faust realized how much he had relaxed and how off-guard he’d become. Stoner’s perceptivity shot through him like a cold enema. With his decades of managing students, the old man could read him like a sign. It was Faust’s third warning and it was embarrassing he’d needed it. He looked away from that keen gaze, out the window at the apple boughs heavy with green fruit, but heard himself answering even though he hadn’t intended to. “He was found in his quarters. It might have been an accident while cleaning his pistol.”

  “And then again, it might not?” Stoner’s voice was gentle. “If, as you say, he was a sensitive man.”

  Faust spoke the simple truth. “Siegi should have been a monk. He had no business in the army.”

  Stoner silently closed his silver cigarette case and slipped it into his inner pocket. He didn’t seem to want to answer, any more than Faust had, but when he looked back up his expression was frank. “I don’t dream of those events, but rather of similar ones which evoke the same ugly, searing emotions.”

  Again words were dragged from him and this time he could taste them. “Ugly emotions.” The bitter flavor roused memories of his own, quick repulsive flashes. He quelled them. But once awakened they refused to leave, and his heart began beating faster.

  The old man’s gaze was kindly, as if he spoke with a child, and his voice sank to a murmur. “The initial fury of the assault. The utter helplessness of finding myself and my men beneath those German machine guns, and panic when the bullets ripped into my legs. Horror and despair when I realized I would not be rescued.” He paused. “And of course, as you know, the bitter pill of surrender.”

  The gentle voice reached into Faust’s soul and ripped it open, showing him emotions he hadn’t known what to call, hadn’t even known he’d experienced. It aroused a gut-wrenching echo within him. This time, he couldn’t look away from Stoner’s stare. He wasn’t certain he understood Stoner, but he now knew the old man understood him to his core and his heart thumped at the thought.

  But before he could digest that, Stoner leaned forward. He rapped one finger on the sheet of paper, shattering the brittle moment like a pane of glass. “Come, Herr Major, your answer. What type of plane was it?”

  For a moment longer he agonized. What to say? Stoner’s logic was so relentless, so frigging logical, he could think of no rebuttal and no reason not to comply. To say nothing was to risk execution as a spy — and his only certainty at that moment was, he didn’t want to die. But if he made one admission, it would be easier to make the second and harder not to continue.

  On impulse, he reached across the desk, grabbed the sheet of paper, and tugged it from beneath Stoner’s unresisting fingers. No one stopped him. Stoner sat still, complacent hands clasped atop the blotter. Faust flipped the paper over and read Heinkel 111 P-4, written in a beautiful flowing script, and slumped in his chair.

  “Did I lie to you?” Stoner’s voice was even gentler.

  He leaned against the desk and let relief wash through him. But the position stretched his right side and the injury fired a warning salvo across his ribs. He settled back.

  “No, sir, you did not.” He rubbed his neck. Tension had ironed his muscles into ridges. “It was a Heinkel.”

  Stoner leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, as if nothing important had just happened. “You say you visited an acquaintance. Did you go to the airfield where
he was based?”

  His neck tightened again. “Yes.”

  “What airfield?” When Faust again hesitated, Stoner took another sheet of paper, wrote on it, then flipped it over. “And this time, you first.”

  He sighed. “All right, Mr. Stoner, I’m going to trust you. It was Le Havre.”

  Stoner displayed his answer, Le Havre, then removed both sheets from the desk, leaving only the small sheaf of papers in their neat stack. Otherwise the desk held a glass ashtray, now with a few scatterings of ash and one butt in its geographic center, an old and battered pen-and-ink stand, the spotless blotter, and a reading lamp with a wide decorative brass base off to Stoner’s right. Faust wondered what the old man’s bedroom looked like. Were his shoes aligned on the floor? Shirts and suits arranged by color with ties pre-knotted?

  “Did you say your acquaintance was the pilot?” Stoner asked.

  “Yes, Erhard Bohnes. We’ve known each other since we were kids.” There was nothing he needed to add; Stoner wasn’t interested in his personal history; but again he found himself rambling. “There were four of us the same age at the orphanage, and we all joined the military. Siegi died in Poland in January, Tomas was killed in France in June, and now Erhard.”

  Stoner leaned forward abruptly. “Are you saying all of your friends died this year?”

  He stared out the French window at the apple trees. Why had he brought up this subject? Surely Stoner couldn’t care less, and his ears warmed. “I don’t know about the English ones. The last letter I received from them, a farewell until the end of hostilities, was dated September first of last year.”

  He looked back into Stoner’s gaze in time to see a flash of something, understanding, perhaps, quickly stilled behind the old man’s usual steady intensity. So it struck home. Good; reciprocal emotion could only help.

  But before they could continue, there was a knock on the door. Without prompting, Bruckmann set down his pencil and went to answer, walking as silently past Faust as he’d sat in his chair all morning. Stoner folded his hands and watched his lieutenant without speaking.