The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2 Page 3

Initially I was too frightened to request parachuting practice. But when five days shaved to two, I became frightened not to. Rigby, however, pshawed my petition. Falling from a plane, insisted he, was simplicity itself. His concerns were granular. OSS was paying good money to purchase wardrobes from European refugees and had amassed a warehouse from which to costume infiltrators in authentic fabrics, underwear, watches, and wallets. This was important, as I needed to make it into Berlin proper before giving myself up for arrest. Were I apprehended in the sticks, rural police might have their fun with me and never say a word to anyone.

  The clothing was genuine, all right: It reeked of desperate sweat.

  Travel by moon, drilled Rigby. Stick to forests. If you take something from a farmer, pay for it. If a confrontation becomes unavoidable, fight. Eyeballs are best gouged with fingers in tiger-claw formation. Knife strokes are most effective testicle-to-chin. No knife? Fold a piece of paper six inches by two, diagonally to a point, and drive it under the jaw. Firearm prep was saved for last. We threaded through tunnels to arrive at the underground range, where Rigby indicated paper targets hung fifteen yards away, and then he numerated the best areas for kill-shots. From his multifaceted briefcase he produced a snub-nosed, nickel-plated Smith & Wesson revolver that he introduced as the “Victory” model. Cradling it in his palms as though it were a kitten, he began, in his dullest drone, to define each part, from sight to cylinder to grip.

  I rolled my eyes, nabbed it, pulled the pin, checked the chamber, flung the chamber shut, and fired six bullets into the target: three to the head, three to the chest. My cherished old Peacemaker the Victory model was not, but it felt fine to fire; the release of pent-up violence was the real Geschenk. I handed the revolver back to Rigby. His reaction was typical.

  “Good. We can skip this lesson.”

  “We cannot,” said I, “for I have yet to hear how I will obtain a gun in Germany.”

  Was it my imagination, or did the wooden-faced Rigby wince?

  “It’s next on the schedule.” He gestured toward the tunnels.

  Back behind closed doors, he sat me down, did his usual hand-folding, and adopted the blank visage of one accustomed to enduring forceful objections. It was probable that every OSS agent at Rigby’s pay grade possessed this skill. It did not escape my notice that the neighborhood screamer had gone silent.

  “Tonight you go into surgery.”

  “Surgery? I thought you knew my eccentricities.”

  “There’s a rectangular flap cut into your abdomen.”

  If he’d hoped to shut me up, that did the trick. Multitudes of disfigurements had I, but none disquieted me so much. Dr. Leather had carved it into me atop a dining room table in 1913 to prove to a colleague that I couldn’t digest food. Weeks later, Merle had sewn it shut, and throughout subsequent decades I’d forced myself to make required repairs. It had been, I realized, wasted effort; I knew before Rigby spoke another word what he was planning.

  “We’ll use that flap to gain access to your chest cavity. Beneath the left half of your rib cage, we’ll embed the revolver you fired today. We have surgeons preparing right now to make the insertion and remodel your outer abdomen so that the flap will be undetectable if you’re searched. When the time comes, you’ll have to . . .”

  Even Rigby blanched at this.

  “Extract it?” prompted I.

  He offered a minuscule shrug.

  “Cut with a knife if you can. But anything will work. A piece of glass, a sharp stone. The remade skin won’t be thick. You’ll need ten, twenty seconds. The gun won’t be loaded; we can’t risk it going off inside you if you fall down a flight of stairs. The bullets will be taped to the handle. Insert them, fire, and keep firing. It’s that simple.”

  Was it? Death had lurked within me for some time, but now I’d evolved into a dischargeable weapon. I nodded assent, but my head felt heavy, my neck weak, my body hollow. The surgeons, at least, could save their anesthesia for men who needed it.

  For my last night in America, Rigby procured for me a legitimate Hollywood picture, thankfully one not headlining Bridey Valentine. It was called The Lady Eve, and across the curled pages of Mein Kampf cavorted scheming Barbara Stanwyck and gullible Henry Fonda. Everything ended in love; I rewound the reels and watched it again, then again, all night. It was a comedy, but I did not have time to laugh. Harder than I’d ever worked at one of Rigby’s lessons, I labored to memorize every detail of this clean, happy, flirtatious world. Chances were, thought I, I’d never see its like again. Would anyone?

  III.

  IN THE NIGHT SKY OVER Amsterdam I was handed a brass snap-case small enough to tuck into a palm. Inside were three colored capsules. Rigby shouted straight into my ear over the dual-engine roar. The white one, said he, would knock out a grown man for five hours. The blue one, benzedrine sulfate, was used to combat fatigue. The third one was an L-pill—a suicide pill—encased in white rubber so that it could be swallowed without effect. Biting on it, however, would release a lethal dose of cyanide.

  Psychological boons to the average grunt, but to me, worthless. Rigby, though, was a stickler for protocol, and I buckled the case inside one of my roughly one thousand pockets. This took time, so encumbered was I with twenty pounds of parachute and fifty pounds of associated gear: a zippered jumpsuit baggy enough to fit over civilian clothes, chin-strapped helmet, goggles, leather gloves, rubber-cushioned boots, life jacket, raincoat, compass, flashlight, wire cutters, trowel, and knife, should my chute need to be cut down from a tree.

  Unlike most paratroopers, I forwent rations and guns, instead filling their spaces with five hundred reichsmarks of cash as well as the currency that could truly buy favors in Germany: chocolate, canned meat, liquor, cigarettes, and nylons.

  The thundering fuselage of the C-53 Skytrooper was big enough to fit twenty jumpers, but that night only Rigby and I rattled about. The ride was too rocky for drinking, yet Rigby glugged coffee from a thermos. Smoking was forbidden, yet he hadn’t quit puffing. I’d been heartened that OSS had furloughed the bespectacled flyweight from his natural habitat of fluorescents, before realizing they’d done it only to limit my interactions to a single agent: under torture, there would be minimal data I could spill.

  We’d embarked from a darkened air field outside London. Rigby explained that MI6, British Intelligence, was leery of American cowboys like us undoing years of their judicious maneuvering. But the plane that transported us was itself RAF, Royal Air Force, the result of a U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff arrangement known by fewer than ten people on earth. Why use RAF? Because their pilots were, said Rigby, “nuts,” a description he applied admiringly.

  Hour after hour, a soccer ball with Hitler’s face drawn on it rolled up and down the cabin. I booted it when it came close—practice, you might say, for the real thing. Polish crackled from the cockpit radio until we entered airspace rich in Flugzeugabwehrkanone (that’s “anti-aircraft flak” to you, Civilian) and the Nazi stealth fighters known as “bogeys.” Our Skytrooper made abrupt banks and shifts in altitude. We were slung about; the Hitler-ball bounced wall to wall, floor to ceiling; the Smith & Wesson sewn inside my chest rattled against my ribs, and I was grateful that it was unloaded.

  Rigby noticed my disquiet, scooted close, and shouted into my ear.

  “We did a drop once. Can’t say where or when. Three men. Top secret. Months of prep. It’s night. We make the drop. Wind picks up. Men drift into a Wehrmacht unit watching a film outdoors. Our men come down right in front of the screen. Germans laughed so hard, one of our guys got away.”

  I gave him a dry stare.

  “You think this makes me feel better?”

  Rigby shrugged.

  “It’s January. Too cold for outdoor movies.”

  A whistle from the cockpit indicated T-minus five minutes. My stomach plummeted. Seconds later, an actual plummet—the Skytrooper dropping to jumping altitude. I tried to unbuckle myself from the seat, but my hands shook. Rigby reached over, did t
he job. With the help of fuselage bars, I lifted myself, affixed my goggles, and tested my parachute straps, then again, then again. My knees waffled. I was numb with terror. Eleven years ago, I’d white-knuckled a flight from New York to Los Angeles, and here I was, only my second time in a plane, and I was about to jump out of it?

  A green bulb above the jump hole lit up. My disciplined, professional instinct was to take my fist and shatter the smug piece of shit before Rigby saw it, but he was already giving the pilot a thumbs-up. He unlatched the door; the moan of wind became a scream. Darkness, horsewhips of fog, moonlight daggering from unspecified waters. No geography to be seen, no bearings to be had—no, no, no!

  I turned to Rigby, frantic to plead prudence, but the man who until that instant had betrayed only what emotion a forehead dimple could divest, was—Reader, about this I would not jest—smiling. A river system of wrinkles had grown from the corners of his eyes, and in their winding loops I read histories of laughter and romance; barbecues and picnics; sports fandom and pet care; the million other fishing holes in which the American male, myself not included, cast his rod.

  He held out his cigarette.

  I grabbed it, inhaled, and then watched smoke waft from a dozen open wounds. I dropped the butt, saw it blink away into the night, and then glanced back to Rigby to find him extending a hand. I regarded it like a grenade before accepting it; thus was my first physical contact with the agent a crushing handshake. In hindsight, I should not have been surprised. Rigby, too, wore a suit of one thousand pockets, each packed with more fortitude than I’d ever know.

  “My wife’s name is Janet and we have six children. Roy, Sandra, Walter, Patty, Stanley, and Florence.”

  Allen Rigby was, finally, at liberty to say.

  I smiled back; I could not help it.

  “How do you know that I won’t do what your bosses warned, and run away?”

  Rigby winked and gave my hand a final, firm pump.

  “I don’t.”

  I shook my head at the beaming fool, and then, taking a full-body influx of cold atmosphere, faced the roiling black universe. The time to step into the abyss was now! Wait, wait—now. Hold on. Hold on. And—now. No! Wait. Wait. Now! Now! Go, go, go! No, not just yet. Now? The green light was blinking—yes, now, you twit, now!

  In the end, it was Adolf Hitler, or at least a soccer ball resembling him, that provoked the plunge. A buffet of wind caused the Skytrooper to tip its wings; I stumbled for balance, and my foot landed atop the ball. So it was entirely without grace that I went somersaulting out of humanity’s steel-and-screw placenta and into nature’s amniotic oblivion.

  Indeed, the plunge was twin to la silenziosità, though even shorter-lived. Like many a novice jumper before me, I yanked the ripcord the moment my primal brain recalled its existence. The breathless slapping of the wind’s millions of palms ceased as I was jerked upward. Rightside-up again, I throttled the harness, fumbled for the steering line, and ogled upward to make sure the suspensions hadn’t tangled.

  It was several overwrought seconds before I accepted the nighttime shushing. I quit my infant thrashing and let myself be cradled—by Gød’s own hand, I’d say, if I didn’t know the bastard better. A sleeping world unsheeted itself: Lilliputian landscapes of teensy trees, bitty barns, and pygmy paths. I permitted a breeze to sweep me parallel to the earth so that I might catalogue each wonder. There in the ether I was neither of nor other; I floated on silvered currents in which I had no history, no regrets, no grief.

  I wished it never to end.

  So, yes, Reader, I drifted a bit off-course from the intended drop zone of a sugar-beet field. Instead I touched down in a frost-crusted stretch of wild grass, where the chute dragged me ten yards before dropping atop me like an avalanche of snow. From on high, the environs had seemed agrarian enough, but I dared not dally. I slashed my way free, stripped myself of jumpsuit and related paraphernalia, and then bunched them inside the chute and used my trowel to dig a hole beneath an overhang of trees. There, as trained, I buried all evidence of my arrival and checked my compass bearings.

  Rigby had gone to lengths to show me aerial maps in case I needed to self-navigate. The maps, though, had been confusing, and I recalled only the overarching directive: go southeast. It was night; there was nothing to stop me. I crept through forests, copses, and vineyards, and when I had to dart across roads, I did so unobserved. It was by dawn’s slate shading that I stumbled upon dangers—a pastoralist and son digging fence-post holes, two women crossing a field with baskets of eggs, a rabble of children with lunch pails beginning a trek to school. Each German looked skeptical, and to each I mumbled the talismanic “Heil Hitler” before scurrying.

  Dabergotz? Stöffin? Buskow? Were these, or were they not, villages about which Rigby had briefed me? Blast all those nights I’d spent watching movies instead of studying! On the periphery of a farm in Wustrau, I found an abandoned, slanting barn and squatted to wait out the daylight.

  That night near Kremmen, I found, to my relief, road signs to Berlin. I had a fifty-kilometer walk ahead of me (and no clear concept of what a “kilometer” entailed), so I doubled my pace, even as travel became more taxing. At night, cars, trucks, and even tanks ran the roads, and swastika-banded sentinels operated roadblocks; my woodland trajectories, meanwhile, were stymied by barbed-wire barricades. I could not make it into Berlin, not that night, and wiled away the following day among the feathers and pellets of an outmoded chicken coop.

  On the third night, I buried inside hedges my money and any tools that might be construed as weapons and used my wire cutters to pioneer a path into the northwestern perimeter of Berlin. I perceived only silence and cobblestone; like the London I’d glimpsed, the city went dark at night to complicate air raids, and I felt like the lone survivor of absolute annihilation. Not quite; I heard a whistle blowing to my right, then German shouts, none of them friendly. I stopped in the middle of a street and steadied myself for impact before turning around.

  The footfalls came softly but as quickly as wolves’—four men in white-piped olive-brown tunics spiffed by rank insignia, flattop caps, and knee-high jackboots. Red swastikas banded their biceps, and their black-gloved hands were at their sidearms. They encircled me, hot breath congealing the cold, barking wolf-calls I couldn’t understand. I kept my arms over my head and tried not to show fear, for wolves could smell it. Reader, it was a challenge, for not all of my studies under Rigby had been in vain. I knew these uniforms on sight.

  Geheime Staatspolizei—the Gestapo.

  IV.

  THE GESTAPO FORAGED MY POCKETS for detritus emblematic of Berliners: house keys cut from regional templates, matchbooks of local branding, ticket stubs to district entertainments. Unsatisfied, one of the police took my hand to check for nicotine stains (Germany suffered widespread tobacco shortages) and gasped at its deadness. He dropped the hand, hissed a word, and that, Dearest Reader, was that.

  I was handcuffed, hooded, and shoved into a backseat. Panic not, I told myself. This is all according to plan. The auto hugged a hundred hairpin turns before it jolted to a halt and I was heaved back to my feet. A baton prodded my vertebrae, and I blundered blindly across a threshold and into what sounded like an aviary, chirping as it was with German jeers, and into a chamber degrees darker and colder. There the blindfold was removed and I found myself in a jail cell resembling the one in California, except that this one was too clean, as if recently hosed.

  Three Gestapo gorillas, fresh and hairy, stood stretching their muscles. A doctorly sort instructed me to remove my clothing. I detested this routine but did what he asked. He applied rubber gloves and conducted a physical that, let us just say, was scrupulous. Rigby’s surgeons, thankfully, had been talented. The physician detected neither my patched stomach nor the weapon beneath my ribs. The gorillas, though, turned away, appalled by my purplish pallor, arid open wounds, and eunuch groin. The instant the examination concluded, the Gestapo hurled prison-issue shirt and trousers at my face�
�silly, really, considering what had to come next.

  Rigby, that straightest of shooters, had described the typical scenario. Gestapo custom was to disorient new captives with a nice-to-meet-you drubbing. The Reich’s security office, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (what a word!), limited its agents to twenty-five strikes with a stick per prisoner. But the Gestapo was more imaginative than sticks! Their unofficial tool set included soldering irons, skull rings, testicle vises, anal electrodes, and other items too tawdry to enumerate in the refined company of my Dearest Reader.

  As I dressed, my mantra grinded like teeth: all according to plan, all according to plan, all according to plan. My insusceptibility to pain would bring me to the attention of a senior officer, then an officer senior to that, and so on, until word reached Hitler. The path of travail was corporeal and therefore nothing for a corpse to fear.

  Why, then, did I tremble like a boy of twitching nerves and pumping blood?

  Before the trio of silverbacks could land a single punch, a Babel of arrival erupted. Through the wall boomed a sonorous voice, first merry, then damnatory. One of the Gestapo muttered an odd, short word—Lüth—and his mates cursed. Thrown locks cracked through the jail like gunshots, and the dark walkway was blasted by a big, bright beam of sun or, as I came to discern, a person, huger even than the gorillas.

  He was both colossus and child: seven feet tall but pudgy and pink-cheeked, his gemstone eyes sparkling from above corpulent cheeks while a curled imperial mustache sprung with every long stride. Though it was but midday, he wore the evening attire of a country squire: shirt, bowtie, and waistcoat—all snow-white—beneath a powder-blue suit draped in silver aiguillettes. The ensemble was tailored to fit, but still the man’s pot belly protruded, creating the impression not of an idle overeater but rather of a white whale breaching the surface. Strapped to his belt, quite insanely, was a beveled mjölnir, the kind of square-headed hammer the Norse mythological god Thor used to obliterate mountains.