“Who is it?”
Macurdy couldn’t identify the accent.
“It’s Wicklow, come to ask after my spectacles.”
The door was thin; Macurdy could hear someone moving around inside. Then it opened, and a smallish balding man looked out at them questioningly through thick glasses. The Irishman fished a small-folded paper from his watch pocket and handed it to him. The baldheaded man unfolded it and read, then looked up. “Come in. Come in.”
“Not I,” the Irishman muttered, “I’ve things to do,” then turning, slouched toward the stairs.
Anna stepped inside, Macurdy following, the bald man closing the door behind them. He looked them up and down without speaking, then led them into the kitchen, and after gesturing them to sit, sat down himself. “What language shall we use?” he asked in English.
“Deutsch,” Anna answered in German. “You were no doubt given erroneous names for us. I am Anna Hofstetter, and he is Kurt Montag. He speaks only German.”
The man’s eyebrows arched. “Only German?” he said. “It is strange to send someone here who speaks only German.” He turned to Macurdy. “How did you come here? Under the circumstances.”
“We came in an Unterseeboot!” Macurdy’s pride and pleasure sounded childish. “All the way from”-he paused as if groping for the place name-“Saint-Nazaire. That is in France.”
Their host’s eyebrows had jumped again, not at what Montag had said, but at his dialect. “You are Baltic German!”
“Jawohl.”
“It is good to hear baltisches Deutsch after so long. Where are you from? East Prussia I think.”
Their host proved talkative, soon addressing himself more to Anna than to Montag, because she seemed much the more intelligent. He was an ethnic German from Lithuania, from Memel, where his father had worked in a shipyard, when there was work to be had. Times had been hard. As a child, he himself had gotten involved in the underworld, and later inpolitical issues. “Here,” he said, “I pass as a Litvak, a Jew,” and chuckled sourly. “I am known as Israel Geltman. At ten I was a runner for a criminal syndicate, and the fences to whom I carried messages were mostly Jews. I got on their good side by learning Yiddish. In Memel were enough Germans, the Yiddish wasn’t too different from German anyway.”
Then he asked more about Kurt Montag–where he’d grown up, what he’d done. Not primarily out of curiosity; he was examining the two, watching for signs of deceit. Macurdy was considerably protected by his mentally dull persona, and at length Geltman asked, “Fraulein Hoftetter, what is it that Herr Montag does, that he has been sent here?”
“He has certain-abilities, Herr Geltman, which I am not free to talk about, and you are better off not to know. Be content that he is not here to handle cargo on the docks, as he did before he was-discovered.”
Geltman looked at Macurdy thoughtfully; he had no idea what she was talking about. “Excuse me, Fraulein. I did not realize…”
“Of course. One would not realize. That is another virtue of Herr Montag’s: People look at him and do not realize.”
She paused. “I presume you will be notifying someone that we are h ere?”
He nodded and stood up. “Please excuse me. I must make a phone call.” He went into his living room, and they could hear him speaking Yiddish on the phone. When he was done, he came back in. “It will be awhile before someone arrives. When did you last eat?”
“At noon.”
“Ah. I suppose I must offer you super.” He took boiled potatoes an boiled beef from the ice ox, heated them, and put out unleavened bread and margarine. “I eat and live like a real Jew,” he said. “Ironic, is it not? I have even been circumcised! But I do not go to the synagogue. Fortunately, it is enough to be a secular Jew. Otherwise I’d have had to spend years learning all their verdammte rules.” He shrugged, then smiled. “Actually it is not a bad life. I make eyeglasses. Not very many; enough to serve as cover.”
When they’d eaten, he took two narrow mattresses from a cupboard. To Macurdy they looked like those on army cots, right down to the blue stripes. “You might as well sleep,” Geltman said. “We can’t know when you’ll be sent for, and I must leave. I have contacts of my own to see to.”