A Game of Spies by John Altman Page A

I need you, Herr Kriminal Assistant, I’ll find you.”
    Hauptmann looked pained. It must have been a promising report indeed, Frick thought, if the man was so eager to track it down. Hauptmann relinquished the papers, turned, and then paused at the door and turned back. “Got a joke for you,” he said. “Two Luftwaffe pilots walk into a bar. And who do they see sitting there but Field Marshall Goering himself? Goering has a plate in front of him. Pork schnitzel, smoked salmon, pheasant, venison. One pilot turns to the other—”
    â€œHerr Kriminal Assistant,” Frick said.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œMy schedule is very full today.”
    Hauptmann straightened.
    â€œOf course, Herr Inspektor,” he said, and let himself out.
    Frick looked after the man for a moment, then turned his attention to the papers on his desk.
    He soon realized that the Kriminal Assistant ’s eagerness had not been misplaced. Hauptmann had been lending a hand with the search for William Hobbs, and it seemed that he had struck gold. The papers described a family named Gehl, residents of the suburb of Wilmersdorf. Three days before, a mysterious visitor had appeared on the Gehls’ doorstep. Several neighbors had immediately reported the man’s appearance to the block supervisor. He was a tall man, they said, with an athlete’s build, who moved with a slight limp. Since his arrival, he had been seen slipping out several times, always under cover of darkness, only to return within an hour.
    The Gehl family—wife Ursula, husband Ernst—worked in the import-export business, and thanks to the nature of their transactions they had maintained ties with the British until fairly recently. It was not beyond the realm of possibility, the Blockwart suggested in his report, that the Gehl family might be British sympathizers. It was therefore not beyond the realm of possibility that this strange visitor might actually be somebody of considerable interest, a refugee or a spy. The report ended with a proposal that the Gestapo pay a visit to the Gehl family and demand to see the visitor’s papers.
    Frick read the report twice, then set it aside. Over the past few days, his men had chased down a half-dozen leads concerning Hobbs, and had found nothing except dead ends. But none of the other leads had seemed half so promising.
    The desk work was suffocating him. He decided to follow up on this one personally.
    He was just preparing to stand when he caught the odor of fresh bread, wafting through the air of the office like a half-remembered melody.
    Frick paused. It was his mother’s bread, he realized; the kind she had made on Sunday afternoons, the kind that filled the house with hearty good smells promising heavy dinners and early bedtimes. His mother’s bread—here in the offices of the Gestapo.
    Very strange, he thought.
    As he sat, smelling the ghost scent of his mother’s fresh bread, his mind began to wander. It wandered back to the front. The sky was cemetery gray, with twin columns of dun-colored smoke rising from the scarred ground. A young Jewess was touching her heart, almost tenderly, looking him straight in the eye. “Eighteen,” she said. It was her age, he understood. She wanted him to know how old she was before he shot her. “Eighteen,” she said again, with her hand on her chest, as if that might somehow save her life.
    Then his finger had tightened on the trigger …
    A telephone was ringing.
    Frick snapped back to the present, reaching for the phone on his desk. He had it to his ear before he realized that it had been some other telephone ringing, in some other office. He set it down again.
    For a moment, his mind was perfectly blank.
    Then his thoughts turned slowly, inexorably, back to the girl.
    She had been a beautiful girl: dark-eyed, raven-haired. “Eighteen,” she had said. Half-plaintive, half-accusatory. “Eighteen.”
    When he came