Creep Around the Corner. Douglas Atwill

for a meal at the transient’s mess. It was a spread of rump roast, crisp browned potatoes, and fat Scottish peas, served by a red-cheeked, red-haired woman with a soiled apron. She spoke a foreign language that sounded somewhat like English.

      A few hours later, we landed at the misty airport at Frankfurt-am-Main and boarded a German train down to Stuttgart, where it was even mistier. It was mid-afternoon and completely dark.

      Eric Follum was my traveling companion, a tall Wisconsin farm lad with an elegant nose, pale-blue eyes. So deep was his depression about leaving the States that he had not said more than thirty words the entire trip. I was in no mood to pull him out, engage conversation, the way I was taught. Nice people look after each other, Grandmother Bradford often said, but I had the feeling that family rules for a good life were not operational in the West Germany of 1956.

      After I mentioned the early darkness to our driver from the train station to Intelligence Headquarters, he said wait until you see how nasty a German winter can be. As we drove up the hill, Schloss Issel loomed in the fog with dormant rows of grape vines on either side; the yellow-lighted windows shone like curious, unfriendly eyes. Where were the Bronte sisters when I needed them?

      Sergeant Major Tetley of the Quarters Detachment waited for us. He said, gruffly but not without sympathy, “Mess is closed up for the night. Bradford, there’s an empty bed in room three eighteen. Follum, three twenty-two. Morning formation is o-eight-hundred, so have breakfast early. Corporal Murgon will catch you up to speed tomorrow.”

      Glancing down further on his clipboard, he said. “We have both of you assigned to Historical Section. Sorry, men.” I should have slept fitfully, but the narrow bed was welcoming and soft, despite the twanging of the bed springs. I fell deep asleep.

      UNBEKNOWNST TO HIS HOLINESS

      duplicity. The practice of being two-faced, of dishonestly acting in two opposing ways; deceitfulness; double-dealing.

      –Oxford English Dictionary

      THE NEXT DAY FOLLUM AND I were issued our plastic-covered passes for the electric gates at the Schloss Issel offices, clipping them onto our shirt pockets. When I asked directions, the security sergeant motioned in the direction of the Historical Section, a long walk past the other iron gates. Counter-Sabotage, Counter-Espionage, Technical Operations, Covert Operations, Communications, Code Room and finally the Historical Section.

      Captain McQuire, a tall woman in her late thirties with close-cropped red hair and a well-pressed uniform, came to open the gate for us. She wore the perfectly round, Army-issue eye glasses. I noticed among her medals the Expert Rifleman’s Badge, as well as the Airborne Paratroopers wings. She waved us into the Historical Section, a long room with desks in rows, a green-shaded study lamp at each desk, men and women facing away from the casement windows. Those in civilian clothes were as numerous as those in Army uniforms, and all the eyes turned to inspect us.

      She said, “Welcome, men, you’re just in time. MacIntosh and Bloomberg left for stateside yesterday, so you’ll take their desks, forty and forty-one. We’re in the middle of a great project here, not unlike the Doomsday Book. We report on people rather than estates, though. We document every known European spy since the war, what he did, why he did it, and who he did it with. Our group is pulling it all together, one dossier at a time.”

      I asked, “So we write the entries?”

      She nodded. “When this is done, staff everywhere can cross-reference by place or name, instantly find the data they need, compressed into several volumes. Every command will have a copy. We have a vast resource here, the Central Registry, but have not used it effectively until now. You both have Top Secret clearance, I see, and Bradford, the Sharp-Shooters Badge. Never know when a fellow might need that. Callard, here, will show you the ropes.”

      She walked away from us with her clipboard pressed to her flat bosom. There was no conversation in the room, only the hush and paper-rustling of a large university library. I could hear my mother. Little you would know of library sounds; rustling, indeed.

      Callard was a tall man, a Corporal by his stripes, with bad complexion. Despite his years, only a few more than me, he had thinning blond hair, a Dickensian stooped posture, and his blue eyes moved past us and flickered around the room as he talked. It was clear that he was bright, curious about the world, and that he was fully able to consider more than one idea at a time. His voice was soft and nuanced.

      “So many bad people to write about in Europe today. We’ve divided it into sectors, fifty of them and you’ll each get a sector. You’ll note how things seem to get more evil as you go south and east, the most evil in Vienna. Let me see, you’re Bradford, desk forty, and will work on the Austrian desk with Countess von Kravitz, and Follum, desk forty-one. Don’t look so worried, sweetheart, you’re Czechoslovakia with the countess, too. Follow me.”

      We walked out the gate and up the stairs to the Central Registry, the entire top two floors of the schloss. Every room on both floors, perhaps fifty of them, was filled with filing cabinets, narrow rows going every which way between them, arrowed signs like road directions at each door pointing to dossier numbers. Six hundred thousands this way, eight hundred thousands that way. Russia to the left, Czechoslovakia straight ahead.

      “I haven’t counted them myself, mind you, but McQuire says there are over a million dossiers here. A through J from Berlin, H to Z from Vienna. In London, the British have K through S from Berlin, and the Russians have everything else. The big boys divvied them up in the last days of the war. It was a grab bag. We also have all our own dossiers. And the ones we bought from the Vatican.”

      “Why the Vatican?” I asked.

      “McQuire says that certain cardinals in nineteen forty-six needed money for new robes, theirs all tatty from the war. One night those naughty girls sold us copies of thirty thousand dossiers, a dollar each, unbeknownst to his holiness.”

      As we walked up the stairs to the Central Registry, Callard told us more about our dealings at the Holy City. The good prelates sold the same dossiers to the British, the French, the Canadians, the East Germans, Lichtenstein and separately to the Russians, each sale in small denomination American dollars only, per favore. The tailors and shoemakers on the narrow streets near the Vatican were kept busy for months making new crimson pumps and sewing up the full-skirted red robes.

      Callard explained the registry system of dossier numbers and locating them in the upstairs warren. A list pasted on each drawer showed the missing dossiers, ones currently being read with a desk number following.

      Follum asked, “How do we know where to start?”

      “Katherine, the Countess Kravitz, will direct you. The project is like a huge piece of crochet, one strand connecting to another, to another, to another. An antimacassar of secrets. Only a small number of people know the grand scheme, how these all fit together. McQuire, Katherine, and a few others.”

      Follum said, “I guess I understand.”

      Callard said, “We’re like that family who paints the Golden Gate Bridge again and again; we will never be done but what we need start again. To add to the confusion, people come and go, men get reassigned just as they become expert on the Salzburg cabal or the Red Professors at Tübingen. Draftees, when their time is up, get to go home in the very middle of a dossier, leaving it open on the desk for the next person.”

      In the weeks that followed, I understood more about Callard’s offhand description of our mission. It was an endless pursuit, references here crossing over to other citations, new names and sometimes, folding back upon itself when a formerly-read dossier popped up again. If we were the lowest caste at the schloss, at least the chairs were comfortable.

      I thought of the monks in the monasteries on Irish headlands and their years of writing scrolls in the gray light until their ink-stained fingers were so crippled that they could only hold a quill, nothing else. What did you do with your life, Brother Harold, how did you make a difference? I wrote mostly the small black letters but sometimes the large red ones or the gold-leafed borders. The gold-leaf days were