Another Green World Read Free

People
dial your number
, and you can make plans to meet when it's
mutually convenient.”
    Surprise, however, was a crucial element of her plan. Catch the enemyon the ground, swoop in with the sun at your back; a quick strafing run, customers looking on; then later, in private, the bombshell. “Ingo, I need to talk to you.” Pause, emphasis, timing. “Now.”
    “Why don't you have a seat, Marty?” He indicated an empty bar stool, then a booth along the wall: lady's choice. “I'll have Bernie bring you something. You like those cream tortes, don't you?”
    “It's about Isaac,” she said.
    He didn't react. But that, she thought, was just his talent for impassivity, a protective trick that had become a habit and finally a character trait. The bomb was away, and the pair of them stood there watching it fall.
    “You remember Isaac?” Not a question. A goad.
    Ingo sighed. He pulled the bar rag off his shoulder, folded it, laid it carefully down. Watching him, Martina caught a glimpse of herself, tensely posed in the wide mirror between bottles of liquor. Her skin looked yellow in this light, the cheeks hollow, a warning flash in those dark eyes. Given the proper sort of hat, she was all ready for Halloween.
    “Let's go upstairs,” Ingo said wearily.
    She knew the way. Around the bar, down the little hall past the restrooms, through a swinging door to the kitchen, Ingo close on her heels. From there, a staircase at the rear of the building, near the alley door. En route, she managed a brief hello to Vernon, Ingo's longtime chef.
    “We don't see much of you these days, Miss Panich.” Vernon paused to wipe perspiration from a wrinkled brown forehead.
    “Official duties,” suggested Ingo, nudging her from behind. “Affairs of state. There's a war on, even Treasury's got wind of it.”
    “Guten tag, Bernie,” she called doggedly to the waiter, a more recent arrival, delivered from a chamber ensemble in Vienna via a long boat ride out of Lisbon. Little Bernd Fildermann gave a quick, silent bow, as though still not quite sure of his welcome here.
    And with no further ceremony Martina allowed herself to be hustled up the stairs.
    How many years has Ingo been living here? And still the place looks like he hasn't settled in. The rooms feel vacant, airless, as if the windows haven't been opened since the Coolidge administration (it is just possible they have not), and the furnishings might have been chosen by some long-dead aunt. Only the distinctive sag of an armchair, recognizably similar in shape to a certain present-day bottom, hints at current habitation. Beside it, a three-legged table holds a reading lamp and one slender volume, hardbound,jacketless. Ever hopeful, Martina lifts the cover.
Love Poems of August von Platen (1796‒1835
). Ex libris Dead Auntie.
    “Okay, Marty.” Ingo rounded the damask corner of a love seat and drew up with arms folded, countenance grim. “Spill.”
    She drew a breath. From this point forward, everything hung on how he would react.
    “You know what I do for a living,” she began.
    “Move paper from one basket to another, I should think, like everyone else down there.” Quickly he raised a hand, forestalling her. “Wait, yes, I know—you've been in the papers. Something to do with displaced persons, liberated prisoners, that kind of thing.”
    “That
kind
of thing. But it goes well beyond that. May I sit?”
    “Please.”
    She settled into his armchair—was that an act of covert aggression?— gripping the big handbag by its clasp. “The truth is, Ingo, and I'm saying this off the record, the Board is more or less a personal undertaking of Henry Morgenthau's. He strongly believes”— hastening here, ignoring Ingo's
de rigueur
grimace at the name of the Secretary, her boss, a notorious bleeding heart and, incidentally, the only Jew in FDR's cabinet— “believes very strongly that the United States has a moral obligation toward the victims of Nazi racial