The Honor of Spies

"Get yourself some lunch during that time, but before, before you eat, find a public telephone--there's a booth at the intersection of Lavalle and Carlos Pellegrini--and call the embassy and tell Ambassador von Lutzenberger or Fraulein Hassell--no one else; keep trying until you get one or the other--that I am taking lunch with el Coronel Martin and possibly someone on his staff at the ABC; that I expect to be finished before three and will then go to the embassy."

"Jawohl, Herr von Gradny-Sawz."

"Now, Gunther, who are you going to call, and when, and what are you going to say?"

"Before I eat, Herr von Gradny-Sawz, I am to find a public telephone, and call the ambassador or Fraulein Hassell and tell them you're having lunch with el Coronel Martin at the ABC restaurant, and expect to be finished before three, and after that will go to the embassy."

"And, Gunther, and?"

"Excuse me, Herr von Gradny-Sawz?"

"And who are you going to give that message to if neither Ambassador von Lutzenberger nor Fraulein Hassell is available?"

Gunther was visibly confused for a moment, but then said, "Herr von Gradny-Sawz, you said I was to keep trying until I got one of them; not give the message to someone else."

"Correct," von Gradny-Sawz said, and got out of the car.

As he crossed the sidewalk and pushed open the door to the restaurant, von Gradny-Sawz thought, somewhat smugly: What that zealous but none-too-bright would-be Sicherheitsdienst agent is going to do is go to the pay phone, call Commercial Counselor Karl Cranz or, failing to get him on the phone, Deputy Commercial Counselor Erich Raschner--

"Deputy Commercial Counselor" Raschner, my left foot's big toe!

Does SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Cranz really think people don't know SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Raschner's not a diplomat? Raschner is crude, ignorant, and a peasant!

--and tell one or the other of them that I'm having lunch in the ABC with Martin.

Only then--or perhaps even after he has his lunch--will he try to call Ambassador von Lutzenberger and tell him what I'm doing.

Which is exactly what I want him to do.

Cranz and Raschner will think both that (a) Gunther is keeping a close eye on me and (b) that I don't even suspect that he is.

Von Gradny-Sawz felt a little light-headed.

He was, he realized, about to cross the Rubicon.

There was something surreal about it, even though this would not be the first time he had realized that he had had to, so to speak, cross the Rubicon.

From the moment Ambassador von Lutzenberger had shown him the message from Canaris about the "senior officer to be later identified" and told him to set up the identity card, driver's license, and the rest of it, von Gradny-Sawz had known he was going to have to do whatever was necessary to keep himself from being identified as the traitor everyone--certainly including the "senior officer to be later identified"--knew was in the embassy.

That he

wasn't the traitor was irrelevant.

They were going to find a traitor, he well knew, even if they had to invent one.

Actually, von Gradny-Sawz wasn't sure who "they" were, only that the senior officers of the embassy--Ambassador von Lutzenberger, "Commercial Attache" Cranz, and Naval Attache Boltitz--who were all, of course, under suspicion themselves, were understandably not going to find themselves and their families in Sachsenhausen or Dachau as long as they could throw someone else to the Sicherheitsdienst.

But von Gradny-Sawz recognized that First Secretary Anton von Gradny-Sawz could easily be that sacrificial lamb.

When Wilhelm Frogger, the commercial attache of the embassy, had gone missing with his wife, there had been a brief moment's hope that they had been the traitors. Yet that hope had been shattered when "they" had decided the Froggers had been kidnapped by the American OSS.

Von Gradny-Sawz thought what had happened was that Frogger--or, for that matter, his wife, who was sub rosa working for the Sicherheitsdienst--had decided that he was going to be the sacrificial lamb and had gone to the Americans to save his life.