Dark Tunnel Page 5

  Dr. Wiener went on trembling in his chair, trembling with rage and humiliation, trembling with terror. SS men had attacked him at the head of the street, he said, and flung him down in the gutter. They had kicked him like a dead dog in the gutter, him! a respected physician before they took away his practice, a scientist and a family man and a veteran of the last war. He spluttered with rage.

  He went on trembling with terror. He must not venture forth on the streets of this accursed city, this doomed Sodom, in the light of God’s day. He must move in darkness, skulk in back streets, live underground like a rat in a tunnel, because he was the unchosen of the chosen of Moloch. He wept with humiliation and trembled with terror. He was afraid to go home.

  “I will take you home, Dr. Wiener,” Ruth said and put her hand on his arm.

  “I’ll come, too, if I may,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” Franz said from his corner, smiling as if at a personal joke. “I think those SS men are looking for me.”

  “Stay with me as long as you wish,” Frau Wanger said. “Both of you.”

  “Vielen Dank,” Franz said. “Until dark.” He stayed in his corner, relaxed but ready like a boxer between rounds.

  Dr. Wiener said, “You are very good. But I must go home to my wife. She must not be left alone.” As night fell in the German cities, Jews were safer in the streets and less safe in their houses.

  He got up and walked slowly to the door on knees that were bent with age and weakness. Frau Wanger said Auf Wiedersehen with anxiety in her voice, and Ruth and I went down the long stairs with Dr. Wiener between us, each of us holding an arm.

  He walked slowly and heavily but bore most of his own weight. We went out into the street and along the deserted sidewalk. The brown stone buildings looked ancient and obtuse. The lighted windows seemed to hum with a mad, inner fire consuming a doomed city.

  I said to Ruth, “Why are they after Franz?”

  “He’s a worker for the Austrian Sozialdemokraten. He came to Germany to fight Anschluss. He should not have come.”

  “You must not stay,” I said. “Will you marry me and come to America?”

  She spoke across Dr. Wiener, who was moving like a sleepwalker, lost in the old melancholy dreams of the Jew. “I love you. When all this is over, I will go with you if you want me to. Now there is work to do in Germany. It will take years. It may take all my life.”

  “You’re going to stay, then?”

  Before she could answer, four men in black uniform came out of an arched doorway at the head of the block and approached us walking in step, their polished belts shining dully in the lamplight. Their black metallic bodies were like the products of a foundry and lent no humanity to the street. We stood still and watched them come. Ruth took two steps towards them and stood still again. We moved up behind her. The four SS men passed under a streetlight and their shadows lengthened towards us on the pavement.

  Their heels clicked on the concrete like four metronomes synchronized, and they came to a halt facing us, as if somebody had pressed a button. The smallest of the four, a slim, elegant job with a baby face whose works alone must have cost a fortune in marks, spoke to Ruth in German:

  “An Aryan lady promenading with a Jew. How charming.”

  In the face of what he feared, Dr. Wiener had stopped shaking. I felt his arm stiffen under my hand.

  “A von Esch promenading with Nazi cut-throats,” Ruth said. “Equally charming.”

  “You treacherous whore,” said the beautiful young man. “Get out of my way and go home.”

  She struck him across the face and he seized her arm and twisted it and flung her into the road. She fell on her hands and knees.

  I stepped in front of the old man and hit out at the officer. He stepped back and raised his stick in the air. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ruth get up from the road with blood on her torn stockings and run towards us. The stick came down across the side of my face and my left eye seemed to burst in my head. I struck wildly at the white sneering face and jarred my arm on flesh with bone and teeth under it. I heard a live skull thud on the pavement.

  Something hit me over the head and I saw black swastikas swarming in a red sky.

  The first thing I saw when I came to was a framed and enlarged photograph of Der Führer accepting a bouquet of flowers from a little girl in a white dress. It moved me deeply.

  I raised my head and the shifting weight on top of it and looked around me. I was lying on a bench against the wall where the photograph hung, in a long, dimly lit room. Most of Dr. Wiener was lying on the next bench, but parts of his head and face were missing. I went over to him but he did not say anything because he was dead. I felt his cold hand.

  Ruth was not there but several officers of the law were. I had attacked a Nazi officer, Captain von Esch, and they suspected me of worse crimes. They questioned me all night. They would not answer my questions about Ruth Esch. I would not answer their questions about Ruth or Franz or anyone else.

  In 1937, the Nazis were still leery of mistreating American citizens, although they had killed one or two and imprisoned and deported several newspaper correspondents. In the morning, two Gestapo men in plain clothes collected my luggage, took me to the Bahnhof and put me on a train for Switzerland. I didn’t see Ruth after that.

  CHAPTER III

  WHEN I FINISHED HUNTER said, “And that’s the end of the story, eh?”

  “I hope not,” I said. “It’s beginning to look as if it isn’t. But I haven’t heard anything of Ruth for six years.”

  “I suppose you tried to get in touch with her—”

  “I did what I could. They wouldn’t let me back into Germany but I wrote letters to everyone I could think of. The Repertory Theatre, Frau Wanger, the manager of her apartment building. I even called her father in Köln by long distance but I couldn’t get in touch with him. All I ever found out was that she wasn’t in her apartment any more, and she wasn’t at the Repertory Theatre.”

  “Maybe they concentrated her,” Hunter said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of. I even thought they might have killed her. It was the uncertainty that got me more than anything. It still gives me nightmares. You’re walking across a bridge with a girl and she falls through a trap-door into dark water and disappears. You’re dancing with a girl in a bright ballroom and the lights go out and when they come on she’s dead in your arms with her scalp peeled off and hanging into your face.”

  “Christ you’ve got a grisly imagination. Skip the horrible details, eh?”

  “That night in Munich wasn’t imagination,” I said. “Nor the six years of wondering what happened to her.”

  “But it’s over now. What did Schneider say?”

  “I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to him. I’m going out to Schneider’s for dinner to-night and then we’re going to meet her at the station. She’s coming on the nine o’clock train from Detroit.”

  “So it’s a romance with a happy ending.”

  “I hope so. Six years is a long time but I know how I feel about her.”

  “Good luck to you. We need an Héloise and Abelard love-story around here. The faculty gets more and more bourgeois every year, more and more like a flock of insurance company employees. You’ll be Prometheus the Firebringer if you can show us a little grande passion. Why, this town hasn’t had a spot of the pure flame since the Assistant Dean of Women went to Australia and had a baby on sabbatical leave.”

  “I can’t promise anything like that. My intentions are strictly honorable. In fact, I can’t promise anything and I prefer not to talk about it.”

  “No doubt that’s why you’ve been talking about it for an hour,” Hunter said with a lopsided smile. He looked at his watch and got up to go. “It’s nearly six. I’ll be looking forward to meeting Ruth Esch.”

  “You’ll meet her,” I said. “Thanks for lending an appreciative ear. And don’t use it against me if she’s already married.”

  Hunter flic
ked his hand at me and left the shop. I finished drinking my final cup of coffee and got up to follow him out. When I was paying my check, an elegant grey suit mounted on whalebone and plush came through the door on elegant painted legs. Helen Madden’s figure was the kind that makes other women look vulpine when they pass it in the street. Her face was not so stunning but it was pleasant enough: a wide, amiable mouth, a straight nose, intelligent brown eyes, and hair that must have cost her seven percent of her salary.

  “Hello, Bob,” she said. “I’m glad you happened to be here. There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay. I’ve got a dinner engagement. But let me be the first to congratulate you.”

  She blushed and looked happy. “Did Alec tell you?”

  “Yes. It’s the second-best news I’ve heard this year.”

  “What’s the best?”

  “I’ll tell you to-morrow when I’m sure. There’s many a slip between cup and lip, especially when the cup runneth over.”

  “Don’t be so mysterious. You’re just like Alec.”

  “Has he, too, been whispering cryptic nothings into your ear?”

  “It’s past a joke.” Her voice had a faint hysteric screech which I had never heard in it before. “Come and sit down for a minute.”

  She sat down in a booth and I sat opposite her.

  “What’s bothering you, Helen?” This was the first time I had ever spoken to her like an uncle, but our relations were always shifting. Friendship between the sexes is invariably complicated, even when it is not impossible. Helen and I had gone around together a bit but it came to nothing by mutual agreement. We hated each other a very little, because we couldn’t forget that we might have loved each other.

  “I suppose it’s nothing really,” she said. “But Alec has seemed strange lately. He hardly noticed me when he came into the office this afternoon.”

  “I can’t understand why.”

  “Bob, is something on his mind? I know he’s anxious to get into the Navy, but that hardly accounts for the way he’s been looking. He’s been terribly grim the last few days. And he never used to be that way at all.”

  “He’s over-working,” I said. “There’s a lot of business to clean up before he leaves. And he’s got his ups and downs like anybody else.”

  “Not Alec. I’ve been working with him every day for nearly two years. Alec is the original vitamin-fed personality, and when he acts grim he has a reason.”

  I couldn’t tell her what I knew just then so I introduced a diversion. “There’s been no trouble between you, has there?”

  “None at all. And there won’t be.” Her voice was warm and firm again, the voice of a woman sure of her man.

  “Why should you worry, then? He has a tough job. Forget you’re engaged to him in the office. Outside of the office, forget that you’re his secretary.”

  “And end up with schizophrenia,” she said with a smile. “You don’t know of any special trouble he’s having then?”

  “Of course not,” I lied. “And if I did know of anything I wouldn’t tell you. Alec can handle any trouble he’ll ever get into. Watch him when he gets into the Navy. He’ll be the terror of the seas.”

  “Run along to your dinner engagement, Bob. You’ve made me feel better. Alec’s secretive about his feelings, you know, and I guess it’s been getting me down. Heavens, I’ve been acting like a calf.”

  “Not a bit. I’m sorry I can’t stay.”

  “I told you to run along. Good-bye.”

  I looked at my watch on the way out, and made a bee-line for my apartment. It was nearly six-fifteen and my engagement with Schneider was for seven. But if I was going to meet Ruth at the station, I had to shave and change my clothes.

  My livingroom-bedroom-kitchenette was ten minutes from McKinley Hall, but I made it in less. By the time the tower clock rang the half-hour, I had finished shaving. Two minutes later I was tying my tie when the phone rang.

  I picked it up and said, “Branch speaking.”

  “Hello, Dr. Branch, this is Dr. Schneider. I tried to get you before but you were out.”

  “I just got in a few minutes ago.”

  “I merely wished to suggest that I pick you up in my car. Save gas, you know. I have to run into town anyway.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but it’s a fine fall evening and I think I’ll walk. I’ll see you shortly.”

  “Oh, of course, if you’re going to walk—We can drive down to the station together. Good-bye.” He hung up.

  I looked at the clock on the mantel. I had twenty-five minutes to walk out to Schneider’s place, a distance of about a mile and a half, and I put on my coat and started immediately. Germans like trains and guests to run on time.

  He had bought the house on Bingham Heights when he first came to Midwestern. I had never seen it from the inside, because Schneider was not usually hospitable to his academic inferiors, but I had seen it from the road. What made it interesting was the university grapevine report that it had cost Schneider most of the small fortune he had brought with him out of Germany.

  He couldn’t have bought real estate in a better place. Bingham Heights is an escarpment overlooking Arbana from the north. Cut off from the city proper by a hundred-foot cliff with a stream running along its base like a moat, it constitutes a sort of upper town for the aristocracy, the deans and department heads and retired automobile millionaires. But any ordinary man can reach this plutocratic eyrie by a scenic road which winds up to the heights.

  It was just on seven when I reached the top of the cliff, but I stood for a minute to catch my breath. The road ran near the cliff at the top of the rise, and beyond the wire cable and white posts of the guard-fence, fifty feet of scraggly bushes sloped down to the bare lip of the edge. From the road I could look down over the city.

  The still trees and the quiet buildings seemed to lie under amber in the evening light. Fifty miles away Detroit vibrated steadily like an engine that could not stop, and planes and tanks in an endless stream roared and rattled away to war. But in the fall of 1943, Arbana seemed as peaceful as ever. I could have stood and watched it for an hour, but Schneider was waiting and like a little man I went to meet my dinner.

  The road curved away from the cliff and ran along the top of the escarpment two or three hundred yards from the edge. There were houses standing in spacious grounds on both sides of the road, but the houses to my left, between the road and the cliff, were bigger and looked as if they cost more. The third house on the left, a long, low white brick building with modernistic shoebox lines, was Schneider’s. It stood in several acres of landscaped grounds, terraced down to the cliff edge and surrounded by trees which had been left standing when the house was built. A concrete runaround driveway masked by elms led in from the road. The porch was at the back for the sake of the view, and the front door opened directly onto the driveway.

  When I came down the driveway, Schneider was standing in the doorway waiting for me.

  “Dr. Branch,” he said, “I was beginning to despair of you.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m late. I didn’t hurry particularly because you said you were going to drive into town and I thought you might pass me on the road.”

  “Oh, I decided not to go. I can do my errand to-night quite as well. Shall we go in?”

  He spoke very amiably but there was awkwardness and strain in his gesture when he moved aside to make way for me. I noticed his eyes when I passed him and they were dull and opaque like brown wood.

  He followed me in and took me down the central hall to the living room at the back. The floors were blue varnished concrete, slippery and smooth like semi-precious stones. There was a big Persian rug in the living room with the same deep blue in it, relieved by old, decadent rose. The lights were fluorescent and invisible and came on like dawn when Jupiter pressed the switch. The fireplace was big enough to roast a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound pig.

  I wondered where Schneider’s money came fro
m. The Nazi chiefs had always objected to money going out of Germany, except for what they invested abroad themselves. Was Schneider a Nazi investment as Alec thought? It was strange that he had left his son in Germany for seven years after he left himself. But perhaps he couldn’t help himself. I thought of Ruth.

  “Won’t you sit down,” Schneider said, nodding towards a chair by the window. “Martini?”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  He poured and handed me my cocktail and sat down with his own on the curved leather seat in the bay window which overlooked the garden.

  I sipped my drink and said, “May I ask how you happened to get in touch with Ruth Esch?”

  “Of course, my dear boy.” I have several grey hairs among my raven locks and I dislike being anybody’s dear boy. “It’s really very simple, though it seems strange now that I tell of it.”

  “It’s a strange world,” I said. “Melodrama is the norm in 1943.”

  “Exactly. Ruth’s story in a case in point. She has had six grim and terrible years, experiences which must have been most arduous to a woman of her culture and sensibility. She was imprisoned by the Nazis for alleged treason activity.”

  “When?”

  “In 1937, I believe.”

  “So that’s what happened. You’ve been in touch with her, then?”

  “Yes, of course, during the last few weeks. Ruth has been in Canada for several weeks. There has been some difficulty about her entering this country, but it’s cleared up now. I have been able to prevail upon the Department of Justice to relax, in her case, their somewhat stringent attitude towards so-called enemy aliens.”

  He stroked his beard as if it were a trophy he had won, but I didn’t resent his vanity. If he really had helped Ruth to get into the country I’d get up early every morning and currycomb his beard with loving care.