He was to find out the nature and goals of the project, and as many of the details as he could.
At one point, Macurdy had interrupted to clarify what “occult” meant. The question had startled the briefing officer. Macurdy had been recruited, the man told him, because supposedly he had occult powers, yet he didn’t even know what occult meant!
Before they left the briefing room, Macurdy set the man’s mind at rest: he lit his cigarette with a finger.
Among other things, for the next four weeks he worked with a drama coach on his role as an East Prussian peasant. He was to seem marginally retarded, providing an apparency of harmlessness. That would also help explain why, limp and all, he had not been drafted by the military. And of course, he was familiarized with the S S table of organization, including the SS titles of rank, which differed from those of the German army.
He was also given some old Swiss parapsychology journals to read, to get a sense of the field.
He proved a quick study; by the fourth week, the role was second nature to him.
During those four weeks, he was also put through intensive, personalized short courses in Bavarian geography, and the advantages and disadvantages of possible escape routes to Switzerland. He studied contour maps of those routes, even made rough clay table models of the likelier.
His limp had been well perfected: Repetition had programmed it thoroughly into his motor system. It was not severe, but worsened when he was tired.
Meanwhile he was given a further briefing. He’d been provided an identity: He would be Kurt Montag. And a landing site: He’d be taken to the Baltic on a British submarine, and landed by rubber boat on the Mecklenburg coast. There he’d be met by an agent who would take him to Lubeck, to his wife, a woman named Gerda Montag, nee Schwabe. She in turn would take him to Bavaria, her home state.
When he’d finished his training, he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant.
Meanwhile he’d written to Mary several times, and again to his parents, telling them nothing meaningful; if he had, the censors would have deleted it. He was, he wrote, on staff in London. Let them think the dangers were over.
21
Kurt Montag
For the Bavarian town of Kempten, it was a lovely January day, sunny, with a mid-morning temperature of 5 degrees C41 degrees F. A young couple, the woman seeming older than the man, walked across the square to the Rathaus-the town hall-the man liing slightly, more so on the stairs.
A guard stopped them in the foyer. “What is your business here?” he asked.
It was the young woman who answered. “We are newly arrived from Lubeck. We have come to register.”
The guard looked them over thoroughly, then pointed. “At the top of those stairs, turn right. You will see a door with Polizei on it. Go inside. They will tell you what to do.”
They climbed the stairs and went into the police office. A middle-aged desk sergeant looked at them with his one eye, squinting as if near-sighted, although he wore no glasses. “What is your business here?” he asked.
The woman gave him the papers, and frowning, he looked them over, muttering to himself in places, then looked up at her. “Why have you come here from Lubeck?”
“My grandparents live here. My grandfather was a farmer, but has severe arthritis and can no longer work My grandmother is partly blind. I am the only one of the family who was able to move here and care for them.”
He glanced at the young man, then returned his frown to the woman. “It says your husband is `brain damaged.”
“In what way?”
“It is not severe. He is not crazy, but he thinks slowly. His head was injured in a logging accident in Ost-Preussen, when he was still a boy. His other injuries are from an air raid on Lubeck.” She gestured at the papers. “He has been working as a longshoreman there. He is no longer agile, but he is very strong. And-” she paused “-he can do other things.”