Dedication: For Colleen, because you asked for it, and because I love you.
1.
It had to be here. It had to be. Behind these locked filing cabinet drawers. Maria paused. She could feel her heart rate. Feel the pulse of it accelerate in her chest and the tips of her fingers. Her brain was becoming ultra focused as well, but not in a good way. It was only picking up single items. Pens and pencils in a pen holder, paper, a typewriter, a basket of single sheets of paper, a trash can with a few sheets of paper by the single desk in the room and an empty one between the cabinets. Nothing of use there. There might be a letter opener in one of the desk drawers, but looking for one could also be a waste of time if there wasn’t one, and she couldn’t afford to waste a second. She also knew she didn’t know how to jimmy a drawer open, even if she found one.
Opening a drawer wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. She should have known something this important wouldn’t be easy. There’s always a catch for big things. She shouldn’t have trusted that Reinhard wouldn’t leave out key details, not so much out of purposeful obfuscation, as much as he didn’t have the mind for details his colleagues thought he had due to his bookish looks. He had simply never thought about the lock on the drawers, when he was telling her about his job over his fifth beer, because unlocking and opening this drawer every day had become second nature to him, and he had been on his fifth beer. She took a couple of deep breaths like she had trained herself to do, long ago, to calm herself and slow her heart rate. She felt it work and immediately the entire room came back into focus.
It had become second nature to unlock these drawers to Reinhard, she thought to herself. If that were true it would most likely mean the key was tangled in the keychain in her hand. She had taken the keychain out of his briefcase, just in case she might need it, right after he fled to relieve himself in the men’s room, most likely due to the ipecac she had secretly administered to his coffee that morning, right before they left so he could show her the glamor of the office he worked at. She rolled her eyes thinking about the naivete of men and thought how lucky she had been he drank his coffee black, ipecac was so bitter. And how shockingly easy it was to get into this building with Reinhard. She hoped the exit would be as smooth.
She looked down. There were about a hundred or more keys there, three bunches on three different keyrings. The one she needed would most likely be smaller than the rest. The fastest way to find it would be to pick the whole mess up by a single key and shake them until she saw the key she was after, but she couldn’t afford the noise. She couldn’t afford to be found in this room at all. Reinhard would be finishing in the bathroom any minute now. And she had to be at his desk waiting anxiously for him, if she wanted to make it out of this thing alive. She knew the cabinet, the drawer, she knew the name of the file. O.S.S. had been very clear about all that. The only thing no one had told her about and was currently working against her was this key. Yes, her contact from the O.S.S. had been thorough about everything, but like most men in Maria’s experience, they had been thorough about everything but the details.
She had been approached by Roosevelt’s C.O.I. which later became the O.S.S. in, what was technically, her senior year, in Berlin. She had thought, at first, it was her German looks that had attracted the strong, typical American to her, as she was walking across Potsdamer Platz with her books. By that time she was tired of German artistic types and welcomed the reprieve of a fellow countryman. After he took her to coffee, though, she found it wasn’t only her good looks this anything but typical American man was after; it was the kind of knowledge that had always attracted her. The secret, tangled, knowledge of roots, and what we of the topsoil, can never see but always want to know about them. He kept her on the hook until his organization needed her, which wasn’t often. A seduction complete with pictures from someone in another room here. A picture of a file from a briefcase, made with a very small camera, sometimes one that could be hidden in an everyday object, there. Enough escapades to keep her interested, to keep her wanting more. Never enough to truly satisfy.
Not until the big mission came.
Her handler, Mark, took her to dinner, when he told her about it. They were playing a married couple at a respectable German establishment. They needed time and privacy and this place had booths with curtains. The whole ambience excited her, which she hid behind double entendre and a little too much wine. She called her handler Mark, but knew by then it was an alias, which game always amused her. Mark likewise played well with her, but this evening something was off with him. He was taut, prone to lashing out about the smallest thing. He didn’t have the usual banter and didn’t drink the Chablis he ordered. Something was pressing on him, and its need made him more impatient than usual. Usually, he liked to play as much as she did. Tonight, as soon as the waiter brought the dinner and he told him, brusquely, they didn’t want to be disturbed, he pulled the curtains closed and sighed deeply, looked up, and rubbed his closed eyes.
She asked him what was wrong and he looked up at her, pulled his hands from his eyes, and she saw his eyes were bloodshot, he looked like he hadn’t slept the night before. Maybe longer, and he was actually choosing his words, and choosing them carefully, which he had never done before, at least, not this obviously.
He told her the allies were planning something big, some kind of a big invasion into Europe, a final move to end the war. They were looking for the perfect location to land their fleet. There was information, certain, secret information squirreled away on the second floor, down a hallway, through an antechamber of sorts to a little filing room. Mark, or whoever it had been at the O.S.S., had lost their contact with their informant after they had given this intelligence.
Now all they knew was that the information to make this final mission work was in that filing room, in a certain drawer marked NOR-NUZ, in a filing marked NOR. As far as they knew, this was the best copy of the Nazi’s mapped out concrete detail of the landing site the allies were after. Numbers of soldiers, locations of tanks, bunkers, guns, mines, along with schedules and routes of Luftwaffe air cover, even on site ranking officers along with maybe even their schedules. Everything. The problem was, this filing cabinet in question was in a filing room inside Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, the heart of terror and darkness, Berlin’s Gestapo headquarters, itself. Seemingly, the key to ending the war was in a filing cabinet in the heart of the most precise, most genocide-focused, lethal, systematic, machine mankind had ever built. It would be her job to retrieve that information from that location. Failure was unthinkable.
All she had to do was rendezvous, and she knew what that would mean, with a bookish SS member that worked in the filing room in question, get him to show her where he worked, and while there, somehow obtain the information. All she had to do, then, was make the usual drop in the usual place, stuck under the usual bench in the usual park. Simple.
When she got into bed that night she wondered, as she sometimes did, how she had got here. The thought most often came to her once a liaison, or mission, or whatever it was she was doing, was over, and she was back again, alone in her apartment. How had she gotten herself to Germany in the first place? What was it she was doing here, really? Especially now that it was Hitler’s Berlin? How had she gotten to this strange point in her life? What was she doing with these strange and secretive acts, presumably for the good of her government? How was any of it benefitting her? She wasn't so altruistic to neglect this consideration.
She only knew the answer to one of these questions which she kept coming back to. She knew how she had gotten here. She knew how she had gotten involved. And, when she was being truthful to herself, she knew what was keeping her here, as well. But she knew best of all, how she had gotten here. She would play it over and over to herself when she couldn’t sleep and she would be forced to lie on her bed, looking up at her high ceiling, wondering about her life and what was coming next, and what had come before.
She had always had good grades in school and had decided to use them, along with the good brains that went along with them. She took her looks, talents, and the hard work she had picked up from the family farm, perhaps, the only good thing she had picked up from there, and now directed all of her energy to escape as far away as she could think to get.
Her family had been German by ancestry. She had the shape, the blond hair and blue eyes, along with the Tutor pragmatism and wildness that went along with that designation. She wanted to experience the world, understand herself by her roots, have the fun that had been denied her for so long, and so, two years after abandoning the family farm, she worked herself all the way to Berlin.
At the time there had been a great cultural and artistic revival happening there, after the Great War, and it had drawn her in like a moth to the light. She had pursued Art History and been pursued by a grim but malleable artist named Otto. His friends were interesting and exciting, doing obnoxious paintings that flew in the face of everything from her classes. She enjoyed her conversations with them while toying with Otto, and to be perfectly fair, he with her. She enjoyed all that for a while. Then, as suddenly as she had decided to leave her home, she decided to leave her classes, so she could devote herself to being Otto’s muse. Before much time passed, though, she tired of the folly of his constant games and drama. She tired of the years of yelling, threatening, divorces, and afterwards, the pleading and final yielding. Before long, she tired of it all. Around that time, she also found a woman coming out of her and Otto’s apartment. After they explained to each other exactly what their relationship to the same man was, this free spirited woman also confided to Maria that he was playing similar games with others, as well. One of which was even a man Maria had met a few times, usually seen on the outskirts of a few parties who kept drawing Otto’s eye. So, Maria quit Otto altogether, and returned to her classes, more jaded but secure in her knowledge of good and evil which she had drawn from her period with Otto and his idiotic, self-absorbed, Surrealist friends.
It was soon after Otto, that Mark had bumped into her in the Platz. Mark was a pseudonym, she knew very well, just like Hilda was her pseudonym, but they kept it professional and never dropped the charade. The only good reason to drop pretenses would be for pleasure of another kind, they were both young and very attractive, but they had something so much better between them, to risk losing it over such a slight thing as mere bodily pleasure wouldn’t be worth it, so they thought better of it, while still leaving the door open to any possibility. Which was how the game was best played, which they both played intuitively and well.
2.
She looked down and started flipping through the first set of keys in her hand like a deck of cards. There were three sets of these bunches of keys. She flipped through the second bunch, as quickly as her nervous fingers could move, she didn’t want to miss it and have to backtrack. Suddenly she heard voices in the anteroom, one voice was Reinhard. He was supposed to still be sick. He didn’t sound well. There was nowhere to hide in this square room. She would have to take her lumps if they opened the door and found her here. She knew all about that. Her dad had given her enough to make that knowledge stick. No amount of demure flirtation would get her out of the hands of the Gestapo. It might have helped getting into Reinhard’s small waisted pants, but he didn’t have enough pull to get her out of a scrape that large, even if he wanted to. He would be in enough trouble himself, to be of any use to her. Her heart raced again, but the voices faded. She had heard her name and figured Reinhard had enlisted someone to help him find her. He didn’t sound well. He shouldn’t, either. She had slipped him enough ipecac. She was surprised he wasn’t still in the men’s room.
The last bundle yielded the desired small key, but it wouldn’t turn in the lock. She took a breath to help steel her nerves. She tried again but when it didn’t turn, she realized she hadn’t been through the whole set and it stood to reason since there was more than one cabinet there may be more than one key. She searched through the last few and found an equally small key further in the bundle. She slipped it in and it turned immediately. She breathed a sigh, opened the drawer, grabbed the papers in the file but left the folder and closed the drawer again and heard the soft click of the lock. She folded the papers neatly, and stuck the sheaf in the pocket inside her bra the O.S.S. had kindly furnished her with, and buttoned the hidden pocket, securing her trove.
She walked to the door, opened it a sliver to check if anyone was outside. In the twinkling she saw the coast was clear, she slipped into the room and closed the forbidden door. All was clear. She walked to Reinhard’s desk, one of the two facing desks in the antechamber, and sat down on the corner, slipped the keys back into the pocket of his briefcase she had seen, and noted, him put them in this morning, and waited for him to come back. It didn't take long. He came storming around the corner with someone on his heels, and on seeing her where he had last left her, asked her where she'd been.
She furrowed her brows and looked puzzled and asked him what he meant. “Where were you, where were you?” He asked, impatiently. “I’m not feeling at all well and I want to go home and when I came back from the men’s room, you weren’t here!” He looked pale but troubled. She laughed and told him she had been to the bathroom. He got angry then, and glared at her. “We checked the ladies room.” he said, eyeing her suspiciously “We asked Fraulein Schmitz to check there and she said you positively weren’t in there.” At that, Hilda looked down, a little sheepish, and mumbled to him that it was her time of the month and it had come on suddenly without her being aware. There had been a small indiscretion and she was embarrassed, especially here of all places. And he was nowhere to be found or seen, and she didn’t know what else to do. She went to check the ladies room, but when she saw there were so many high powered women in it, she wanted to have some privacy, so she asked a woman, a secretary or someone, who showed her another place.
He was too sick to care, and waved it away. Either he would have to report her for further inspection, while he was in this condition, and make himself look bad on top of everything else, or he could just believe her. It was easier, and better for him, to just wave it away and get back home. The alternative would be too horrible and too dramatic to possibly be real. This explanation would also ensure a definite out for her of anything he might suggest if he somehow felt better when she got him home. He told her to gather her things, that they were leaving. He became very demanding all of a sudden. Not quite the brow-beaten file clerk he had been. Maybe it was the illness, but she imagined it was more what now lay between them, that she was getting a better look at the man below the surface. It was alright. She only needed to get him tucked safely into bed, and then she wouldn’t have to think about him again. She nodded, agreeably and they headed out together.
They went smoothly past the guards and, as she had planned, she got him home and into his bed, told him she would leave him alone to feel better but she would ring later that evening to make sure he was feeling better. He nodded and asked her to draw the curtains, the last thing she would do for him, before he dropped his eyelids. After she drew the curtains, she went out, and closed the door quietly behind herself, and visualized the warm bath she was about to draw for herself.
This had been a grubby day, and she was looking forward to washing it off herself. After her bath, she decided to herself, she would head over to the park and make her last drop. It was a dirty business, sleeping with Nazis, and using them for information. Even if it was necessary information, it was still a dirty business. And dangerous. She had brushed too close to death, today. One of these times she wouldn’t be so lucky. If Reinhard had stood his ground and asked around about her, if they had checked the filing room, her torture would just be starting. She shivered.
She had heard the whispers. She had seen the jews spirited away. What wouldn’t they do to a spy? It wasn’t worth it anymore. She had her fun, she had helped her country, and all she would get in return was maybe a plaque and a thank you for your service, unless she got caught. No, the risks didn’t match the payback. It simply wasn’t worth it. Not anymore. Instead of going home and drawing a bath, she decided to simply drop off the packet immediately, and be done with everything altogether, for good. Her plan went off without a hitch, not like the filing cabinet, and within the hour she was safe and home and in her bath.
3.
The next time Mark reached out, she explained her position and he accepted, though not without a fight, which was to be expected from a man like Mark. She never heard from or saw him, ever again, after that. It made her sad to think about it, when she occasionally did, about him, and the fun they had together. But not sad enough to ever go back, or ever entertain the prospect. She would never go back, that was a certainty she had embraced.
Almost to prove the point, soon after her graduation, she returned home and got an underwhelming job as a secretary at a respectable law firm, where she made decent money and later met her husband. Two years after her return, at the office one day, she saw the papers, as everyone else did, and saw where the allies landed. She saw where the entire operation had taken place. D-Day. Normandy. She remembered the NOR from the filing cabinet and smiled. She cut the story out of the rest of the newspaper and put it in a little folder that she kept in her closet for the rest of her life.
From time to time, as the years piled on top of each other and she lost track of them, her family grew and grew, and she forgot about her early years, and with all their risks and thrills. Every so often, though, when she was looking in the closet for something, she would come across the folder again, looking more brittle with age and wrinkled each time she took it out and held it in her own wrinkled and brittling hands. She would look at the folder and sit down on the corner of her bed and take out the newspaper and remember what she had done and what it might have meant, and she would smile a little and shake her head and then put the folder back in the closet and turn off the light, saving it for the next time.
She never told her family about her contribution to the war effort, not to her dying day. That day finally came with a stroke while she was already comfortably ensconced in a hospital bed. Her oldest, Thomas, after the affairs of grieving were done and the unsettling prospect of the practicality that follows upon death loomed, went to his mother’s house and started the necessary and painful drudgery of going through his mother’s things, room by room.
When he got to her bedroom closet, he turned on the light, and decided to start from highest to lowest. He reached up to start taking down the piles of things there, when a small folder fell on his upturned face, and then to the floor. He bent down and picked it up and saw it was wrinkled, yellowed, and worn with age. He opened it and saw a single story clipped out of a newspaper about D-Day. He smiled and thought about how much that day had meant to his mother’s generation, how much it had meant to him and his generation, and everyone else’s as well. He got lost in thought, thinking about how much he missed his mother, but then the demands of the day reclaimed his attention, and with that he closed the folder, stood up, and threw the folder with the story in it, into the nearest trash bin, and continued sorting the rest of his dead mother’s things.
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