Cave Dwellers Read online

  After he’d hung up, Oskar had found he was sweating under the tan wool suit. This strange game of being two people at once, speaking two languages in an alien land where important people didn’t make appointments—it was all a bit absurd, but also exhilarating. He’d fretted over the logistics of arranging an invitation to an Embassy Row soirée, but that turned out to be no problem: such papers were kept in a file at the embassy; you just took one and signed for it, and if none was available, then the matter could be resolved, again, with a telephone call. It seemed to him a kind of magic.

  And so by means of consular enchantment, Erwin Kaspar presented himself at the Embassy of Finland at six o’clock that same day. He was admitted with a courteous nod, after barely a glance at the heavy-stock card in his hand, and spent the next hour moving slowly around a large room with pale blue walls and remarkable chandeliers that seemed like a modernist evocation of reindeer horns. He forgot for a considerable time that he was a German intelligence officer and imagined himself instead an accredited member of this attractive, animated, champagne-sipping and ever-smiling crowd of…whoever they were. The diplomatic circuit. And the illusion was more compelling because at no point was it interrupted by the appearance of Toby Lugan—at least, no one who looked like the photo Oskar had stared at for hours before embarking on this American odyssey—so he was never obliged to stop being Erwin Kaspar and get down to the nonmagical business at hand.

  The second evening—tonight—at the Embassy of Argentina, the spell had snapped. He’d arrived earlier this time, just after the guest of honor, a writer named Borges, had finished his reading. Lugan was there ahead of him. There was no mistaking the man, even from across the wide and glittering ballroom. He was Oskar’s height but half again as massive, fair-haired, red-faced, a street brawler in a sharp blue suit. He’d parked himself in front of a buffet table, where he was chomping finger sandwiches two at a time while talking loudly to a Latin beauty young enough to be his daughter. He was drinking not champagne but something amber in a tall glass, filled too high and splashing out as he gestured expressively to enliven his monologue. The beautiful woman was laughing along with him, or at him, or just laughing. Oskar couldn’t tell what was going on, precisely, but he sensed that Lugan in his boorish way had managed to charm her, and knew it, and was going to ride this as far as it would go. Oskar felt irrationally and irrevocably repulsed.

  Trust your instincts, his trainers had instructed him at one point. At another point they’d told him the opposite: You can’t trust instincts you’ve acquired in Germany, because they won’t work in America, where people don’t look at you as they do here and your enemies won’t be so obliging as to show up in leather coats with an Opel idling at the curb. Now his instinct told him that Herr Lugan, minority counsel and man-about-town, was a dangerous brute, not just in a physical sense. There was something daunting about his presence, his power over a young woman who could be flirting with any man in the room. Should Oskar trust this instinct or not? Go ahead with the plan or change it in light of what his trainers had called exigent circumstances? But change it how, exactly—a different target? Or the same target but a new line of approach?

  In the end, his feet decided this for him. The crowd in the ballroom was in constant flow, some occult social current seeming to nudge people in one direction or another. Clusters formed and dissolved around him, people hurrying across the marble floor to join or to avoid someone, and Oskar was borne along on this mysterious tide. He found himself drawing ever closer to Lugan, who remained anchored beside the buffet table. The young woman noticed him first and raised her glass in a vague, catholic salutation. Lugan turned, his upper body swiveling and the ruddy face reluctantly pulling away from the woman toward Oskar, his expression just shy of combative. At close range, his watery blue eyes were bloodshot yet penetrating, as though alcohol served to amplify his menacing qualities without blurring his focus. They seemed to demand that Oskar explain himself or get the hell out of here.

  “Are you Mr. Tobias Lugan?” said the voice of Erwin Kaspar, Oskar now hearing it himself for the first time. It was about right, he thought: meek but self-important, the humble crewman who would rather be a budding captain.

  “I am he,” said Lugan, his own voice loud but modulated: the street brawler with a law degree. He raised an eyebrow: And you are?

  “Erwin Kaspar, sir—I believe we met once, many years ago. You won’t remember me; I was just a boy. At a Christmas party, I believe, in Charlottenburg. You were introduced to us by your friend Colonel Smith. You shared stories of Charles Lindbergh. It was a wonderful evening.”

  The party had really happened, so Oskar had been told. The long-serving U.S. military attaché Truman Smith had been there, and so had an Abwehr officer—probably an SD officer as well, and a Gestapo man, and someone from the Bendlerstrasse. No one liked to miss their slice of the pie when foreign dignitaries came to town.

  Lugan seemed to spend a moment trying to recall this occasion and then to decide it wasn’t worth it—it probably happened, or it didn’t happen; it was all the same to him. “Well,” he said, holding out a big hand, “it’s nice to see you again, Herr Kaspar. And all grown up, too. What brings you to town?”

  Oskar took the hand and allowed his fingers to be crushed. He reckoned it wouldn’t be in poor Kaspar to squeeze back in his own defense. “I’m with the Agriculture Ministry now,” he said. “I’m here to…but I’m sure this wouldn’t interest you. Grain import quotas, boring stuff. Nothing like your own stories, or Colonel Smith’s. Still, my father suggested I should look you up, were the opportunity to arise. He sends his greetings.”

  “Aha,” Lugan said thoughtfully. Or maybe half-drunkenly. “Well. Why don’t you stick around for a bit, then. Maybe we could go grab a beer afterward. Haven’t been over there for a while, so you can fill me in on what’s happening. How’s that sound?”

  It sounded like a dismissal, and indeed Lugan was already turning away, back to his lovely companion. Yet Oskar’s instinct—trustworthy or not—told him he hadn’t been dismissed altogether, that he’d gotten a hook in, that Lugan might be serious about going for a beer. Oskar rejoined the merry crowd, feeling mildly giddy. At the doorway he stopped and placed a palm against the jamb, sensing that he needed to steady himself. He looked back across the ballroom, and sure enough, Lugan was watching him. The man’s expression was hard to read: speculative, perhaps. Hungry, perhaps. Oskar stepped down onto the sidewalk, into the clammy Washington air. He posted himself there like a sentry and settled in to wait.

  —

  He was still waiting a considerable time later—he’d quit glancing at his watch an hour ago—when Lugan finally emerged from the ornate doorway. One of the final guests to depart, he did so alone and looked chagrined. So the beautiful woman had rejected him, after all that. Or maybe her father had arrived—her father the Generalissimo!—and Lugan had made a timely retreat, saving his body if not his honor, having eaten half his weight in finger sandwiches and tapped out the stores of Irish whiskey. He seemed surprised to see young Erwin Kaspar under a lamppost by the curb, at least to see him smiling. Lugan wouldn’t take kindly to being left out of a joke if there was one going around. He strode over, swinging his arms and taking deep swills of air, as though purging his lungs of diplomacy.

  “So you waited,” he said.

  Oskar shrugged.

  “How about that beer?”

  Lugan led Oskar onto a side street, a dark channel crimped on either side by narrow row houses and lined with ginkgo trees that rose above roof height and still clung to last autumn’s crinkled, fan-shaped leaves. Oskar would have feared coming here alone, having heard about the crime in America, but the thought of someone trying to mug Toby Lugan was laughable. Look at him: marching down the center of the road as though he’d fought and won an ugly battle for the right to do so. Oskar had seen the same walk before, in German cities, usually executed with far less aplomb by younger men in tall boots.


  They emerged after a few blocks onto a wide and well-lit avenue, eerily devoid of traffic. When a lone taxicab puttered past them—driven by a Negro, something unimaginable in Berlin—Lugan stepped out at mid-block and crossed the lanes at almost a trot, apparently indifferent to whether his guest was keeping up. He stopped, finally, in front of a row house with twin stairways, up and down, the first ending at a large door with a brass nameplate—O’BRIEN & ASHBY, ATTYS AT LAW—and the second at a smaller door under a painted signboard showing an eighteenth-century musketeer and identifying the Hessian House.

  Lugan swept a hand toward the concrete steps, deferring as one might to a lady, leaving Oskar to wonder what came next: conquest or mutual seduction? The tavern behind the narrow door would have lent itself to either, or to the sadder alternative of utter failure. One long side wall was given over to brooding landscapes, reproductions printed at poster size and mounted beneath tiny spotlights—every shade of forest green and mountain gray and earthy brown, shadows swirling around them, black-caped figures pausing in lonely contemplation, all the portentous trappings of deutsche Romantik.

  Lugan chose a table next to Knights Before a Charcoal Burner’s Hut and slumped down there, exhaling emphatically. Oskar joined him with such trepidation as befit his timid role, using the guise of nervousness to make a quick survey of the room. It was long and narrow, with a bar at the deep end camouflaged by failing greenery. There were few other patrons: a small man in a cheap suit reading a newspaper on a barstool, half a dozen sailors in uniform who’d dragged two tables together and sloshed beer over both of them, two other men, slightly older but still young, at a table nearby with their jackets draped over an empty chair and slouching postures that didn’t quite match their catlike eyes, slitted yet attentive. For no reason in particular, Oskar marked these last two as German.

  A waitress appeared, nails lacquered red and lips coated with impressive precision to match. A smile had settled permanently in the flesh around her mouth. Lugan ordered “a pair of tall ones, ma’am, and another in five minutes.” The beer arrived flat and sweet, but by that time Lugan had lost interest.

  “So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, studying young Kaspar from this new perspective. “Colonel Smith. A friend of your father’s, you say?”

  Oskar shrugged. “Not a close friend. They knew each other through mutual colleagues, I believe. My father works in the armaments industry.”

  “Armaments! So he’s not an, ah…public servant, then. Like yourself.”

  “He encouraged me to make my own choices.”

  “Smart man, I suppose.” Lugan reached for his beer and took a long swallow that knocked the level down by a third. “My father told me to go to law school. Earn some money, get out of Southie, make the smiling bastards cry.”

  Oskar laughed, a bit uncertainly, wondering if smiling bastards was American slang for anyone in particular.

  Lugan seemed to interpret this response correctly. His eyes were bleary, but they had attained a singular focus on this enigmatic young man across the table—a puzzle it would amuse and gratify him to solve. “The world is full of smiling bastards,” he said. “Washington’s got more per capita than any place I know of. But maybe it’s not so different from Berlin. I don’t know, I’ve only been over there a few times. Strictly business, not much time for socializing. I don’t think I remember meeting your father, though. In fact, I don’t recall this Christmas party at all. In, what was it? Charlottenburg.”

  Oskar wondered if this was a probe and, if so, if it required some kind of reply. Perhaps I was mistaken, then. Before he could decide, Lugan leaned forward in his chair, bringing his considerable weight to rest on elbows that suddenly crowded the table, dislodging the glassware. In clear phrasebook German he said:

  “Wer sind Sie, Herr Kaspar? Was tun Sie wirklich hier?”

  In a way, Oskar was relieved it had come to this so quickly—Lugan demanding to know who he was and what he was really doing. This was meant to happen eventually, with Lugan wondering and asking. He was the target but he should feel like the archer, aiming and loosing the questions at Oskar. So the answers, when they came, would seem reactive in nature, Oskar telling him what he wanted to know and Lugan feeling victorious, not like a man who’d been gulled. All these things were governed by a delicate protocol that Oskar’s trainers had explained carefully, and Oskar had listened, though it had seemed needlessly complicated at times, too finely rationalized, too cerebral. But he was an army man. His trainers were members of the Kriegsmarine, and he supposed sailors in general had a lot of time to think.

  “At the ministry that I represent,” he said, looking straight in Lugan’s eyes and trying to sound, as Kaspar, as bland and affectless as possible, “there’s a feeling that relations between our two countries have come recently under a good deal of strain. The feeling is that certain elements within your government, and certain elements in our own, may be at fault. These elements—which don’t truly represent the feelings of the majority, on either side—they are set on a course of antagonism. But perhaps they can be sidestepped. Perhaps more reasonable elements on each side can determine to communicate directly.”

  Lugan listened to this, looking smug. “You’re talking about grain exports now, I take it.”

  “Just so,” said Oskar—cautiously hopeful, since despite his attitude, Lugan seemed to be playing along. “The hope is, in the ministry I represent, that if such a dialogue were to occur, both sides would find it greatly to their benefit, yours as well as ours. And toward that end the ministry is prepared to offer…” He paused for effect, pretending to search for a suitable phrase in English. In truth, he was reciting a script that had been written for him weeks ago, and he guessed Lugan was clever enough to realize that. But this was part of the shadow play: the target should draw his own conclusions, and feel smarter than the other fellow. “A demonstration of good faith,” he concluded with a nod.

  There: it was said, it was done. Oskar had just offered, in the language of his new trade, das Baumeln—the dangle. Now the target would either reach for it or not. While Lugan was making up his mind, or finishing his beer, or replaying his unrequited courtship of the Latin beauty, Oskar stood and walked past the bartender, who was pale and pudgy but surprisingly young, back to the men’s room, where he stood looking at himself in the mirror under unkind light. Erwin Kaspar seemed to have aged a bit, but on the whole he looked pretty sound. The yellow-tan suit was an atrocity, though he might keep the tie as a memento. Too late he realized he was thinking beyond this moment, of the future, imagining himself back in Germany—and probably had just cursed himself and the mission, too. He left the bathroom to find Toby Lugan waiting placidly in the company of two fresh beers.

  “You were just telling me,” Lugan said, “about a demonstration of good faith. I wonder if you could give me some idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Not much of an expert on grain exports, myself. You might need to spell it out for me.”

  Oskar didn’t reply. Having already said what he’d come five thousand kilometers to say, he wasn’t in a frame of mind to improvise. Wordlessly he reached into an inner pocket and pulled out an envelope, opened and bent and closed again, addressed to Hr. Erwin Kaspar in a rolling scrawl, just an envelope like any other, this one with a single sheet of paper inside. The paper likewise was unremarkable: plain bond with a typewritten list of names followed by curious abbreviations like Ob d H and Chef HNV. There was no title, but an informed reader would have recognized it quickly enough as a list of current posts held by senior members of the German General Staff. From an intelligence standpoint, the list had only modest value—nothing a foreign service couldn’t piece together with its own resources—but by its existence, and by virtue of its being up-to-date as of the moment Oskar had boarded the ship in Hamburg, it served as a letter of reference, a telling signal of who he meant by the ministry I represent.

  Lugan didn’t open it—not here in the Hessian House. He stuffed it c
arelessly into a pocket and said, in an uncharacteristically soft voice, “Now, listen. I don’t know what you’re playing at and I’m not sure I even care. But I’ll take a look at this. And if it looks interesting, I’ll get back to you. Where you staying, the embassy? I’ll drop you a note. Don’t worry, it’ll be all innocent—you met a lady at the reception and she’s looking forward to seeing you again. Happens in this town all the time. Folks in the mail room open it up, see what’s in there, get a laugh out of it—didn’t know little Erwin had it in him. So the lady suggests a time and a place, and you be there. Got it? Sound all right?”

  As before, in the ballroom, Lugan was announcing that he was done. He stood up, flapped dollar bills onto the table and left without saying another word, without even looking back.

  Oskar felt light-headed, sweating in the muggy air of the tavern, steadfastly ignoring what he sensed were more than casual glances from the two men at the nearby table. He’d made the dangle, the target had grabbed it—the rest should be easy.

  —

  Toby Lugan headed north on Connecticut Avenue, his stride a bit slower than usual, staring at the next few yards of sidewalk with an attitude that might have passed for reflection. He was thinking of the envelope and the paper inside, which he’d merely glanced at because that one glance was enough; it told him all he needed to know and a bit more than he’d expected. He ignored the few other pedestrians, the passing motorcars, the traffic signal at Columbia Road. At California he turned left and crossed the street, scornful of drivers honking their displeasure. They weren’t in all that much of a hurry. People in this town wouldn’t know hurry if it ran up and bit them on the ass.

  Toby had come down from Boston a few years back—make that more than a few, more than he felt like counting—and still loathed this drowsy little backwater, its summers and slowness of life, its food and the damn smell. For Toby’s money, it was nothing but a sleepy southern town that lacked the genteel charm of Richmond or Savannah. Over the years, it’s true, his contempt for the District and its inhabitants had taken on a worn-in, almost homey quality. You couldn’t say he’d warmed to the place, only that he’d come to relish certain aspects: the ritual head bashing on the Hill; the visceral pleasure of gutting FDR’s harebrained agenda in committee; the marathon, booze-fueled negotiations; the press wars; the parties. And you never knew—sometimes there was a little surprise.