Poets and Chess Players #14: In Which Miss Martin Visits the Suburbs

However many Jewish grandparents were listed on Frau Liechti’s Ahnenpass, Jeanne was willing to bet that it was more than she wanted anyone to know about.

This is chapter 14 of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial.

If you're following along: yes! we skipped chapter 13. Poets is, technically speaking, more of a draft than a real serial (so you can't say I didn't warn you.) I had my title cards made at a point when Chapter 13 still looked great on the outline. Lessons have been learned.

Previously, the American faction met up with the Soviets and agreed to work together to locate the missing informant Dr. Haber, while Miss Löwe has chosen not to explain that she already knows exactly where he is. This time, Jeanne Martin interviews the professor’s sister and makes a critical misstep.

(You can also read my Part One recap post!)

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December 3, 1941
Vienna, Greater Germany

Jeanne Martin watched over the top of her book—she’d finished Matterhorn and was on to Traven’s Das Totenschiff, for the language practice—as Marta Löwe pecked away at the typewriter keys with automatic precision. Typing was not a skill Jeanne had acquired while clerking for Agent Brennan, and she was considering whether it might be worth her time to do so.

“Do you need something, Mademoiselle?” Miss Löwe said briskly, frowning at what appeared to be a mistake she’d just made.

“No.”

“Then would you mind not staring at me? You’re making me nervous.” 

“Oh. I don’t mean to.” 

“Well, meaning to or not, you are.” The girl shot her a look of irritation and then returned to her clattering. Jeanne shifted sideways in her seat and directed her gaze back to the page while moving her mouth slowly without sound: meaning to or not, you are. She’d like to sound less conspicuously foreign, but was having trouble hitting some of the harder consonants without dropping back into an obviously American accent. 

“Where is it that you’re from, by the way?” Jeanne asked.

“I’m from Graz, to the south. Why?”

“I just like to know before I copy a pronunciation.”

“Please don’t,” Miss Löwe said, punctuating the sentence with a sharp return of the typewriter. 

“...all right.” Jeanne returned to the struggles of Gerard Gales under the assumption that she had, as usual, managed to offend the girl without noticing. Such was life. With the typesetter Herr Mueller deceased and presumed murdered, Mr. Echevarria’s friend Victor—whatever his real name was, she couldn’t keep track—had insisted on picking up the slack in the operations himself. Mr. Echevarria had meanwhile jumped at the chance to prove his bona fides by accompanying the Turk to meet some potential collaborators out in Salzburg. Not being allowed in the office or printing room, and having finished reinventing herself for the third time in two weeks as Marguerite Jolicoeur, French insurance-salesgirl, she had nowhere else to go.

The peace lasted less than two minutes, until Miss Löwe slapped a sheaf of paper against her desk with a loud huff, and Jeanne felt the edge of her St. Joan medal in her mouth and realized she had been jingling it along the chain again. “Could I possibly trouble you to run an errand for me?” the Autrichienne asked.

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Good.” Miss Löwe cracked a small smile for the first time since this morning. “You see, I promised Herr Graner that I would go and see Frau Liechti, but I never did have time to do so…you do remember?”

Jeanne nodded expectantly. She remembered that discussion very well, as Victor’d had to repeat everything in increasingly aggravated English for Matia’s benefit, finally triggering an argument about whether the one ought to learn German or the other ought to learn Basque. The gist of the thing had been that they had one more open lead—Dr. Haber's younger half-sister—but, given that Victor expected another interview with Dr. Weiss this weekend, no one thought very much of it. She had no doubt that Miss Löwe would have dropped it entirely if not for the opportunity it presented to clear her workspace of this interloper.

“Well, now that I haven't even Herr Mueller to rely on, I certainly can't go. But you could.”

Jeanne nodded again. “What shall I say?”

“About the same as I meant to, I imagine,” she said as she returned to her typing. “You're a friend of her brother's, and you're concerned by his disappearance. Herr Graner wants to know where he is and especially where he might have hidden those documents—without tipping her off, of course.”

“Yes, I do know that much,” Jeanne said. She dog-eared her page and sauntered through the door to the back to look in on Mr. Victor.

He had the door to the printing room locked, and Jeanne knocked hard to be heard. “Who is it?”

“Marguerite,” she called back. 

A stream of audible curses accompanied the spy to the door. “I told you not to come back here,” he snapped through a gap just wide enough to see her. 

“I know, but I thought you would want to know that I'm going out.”

He frowned suspiciously. “Where?”

“To see Adelina Liechti. Can I have the address?”

“Oh—that.” Victor fumbled in a pocket and produced a piece of paper. “Here. It'll be quite the trip. She lives in some tony neighborhood out in Baden. What do they call it—a spa town.”

Perhaps Mad Madge, cash-flush lady pirate, would have been the better cover after all. “Lovely. Is there anything else that I should know?”

“Well, I assume that you have a basic sense of discretion,” Victor said. 

“I spied on your Ybarre for the best part of two years and he had no clue,” Jeanne said bluntly. “I am very good at not saying things.”

“Hmph.” He gave her another hard look. “Just don't get us caught.”

“I intend no such thing.” One more thought occurred to her. “How would you describe Klemens Haber?”

“You mean personally?” Victor considered this. “Seriously neurotic. I mean eccentric, if not altogether unbalanced. Too clever for his own good. Pathetic, in the strictest sense of the word. But proud—very proud…hm. And lonely, I suspect.”

“I see.”

“Here.” He came out of the printing room, locking the door behind him, and made for his office with another key already in hand. “Fräulein Löwe dug up one photograph, but it's a few years old.”

“Then I suppose I won't have seen him in a few years,” Jeanne said. Victor came out again and handed her the photo of a solemn-looking, dark-haired young man with round glasses and rather large features underneath them. He had his head cocked to the side, as if in idle contemplation, to disguise the curvature in his neck. She held it out dispassionately with the thought that his polio had ruined a decent chance to be handsome. 

“Keep it,” Victor said, waving her off. “Go on. I've got real work to do.”

“Enjoy it, then,” Jeanne said. He looked back at her in some surprise, then nodded curtly and shut himself back into the printing room. She heard the lock drop into place as she was putting on her coat. 

It apparently took more than the daily-deepening chill of winter and the austerities of war to dampen Baden bei Wien's resort atmosphere. Once she was sure that she hadn't been followed, Jeanne allowed herself to enjoy the time alone, drifting around openly like a tourist and stopping off for schnapps or chocolate anywhere she felt like it. St. Nicholas’ Day was only three days off, and one of the parks had been taken over by preparations for the Christmas market. Jeanne toyed with the idea of returning next week, humoring the delighted gasps of an inner child who could have cried at the thought of oranges and gingerbread and all things small and shining…but, no, she was on a mission. She peeled herself away from the oncoming festivities and took up her place in the queue for the streetcar, regretting every step.

Tony was not the word Jeanne would have used to describe the neighborhood, which sat on the edge even of Baden’s territory with the countryside rolling away in the background—though no doubt it was expensive. The newly repaved streets were lined in succession with wide walks, charming waist-high fences, small front gardens, and an impressive number of traditionally-styled detached houses. A few had draped the front door in Advent greenery, while everywhere she looked were splashes of color from the national flag and, more often than not, equally prominent banners for the National Socialists’ Party. When she found the address she wanted, the house had a Party flag in the window and a slight young woman tending a bed in the garden.

Jeanne allowed a delivery man to pass her before she stopped at the gate and leaned over it, reciting from memory. “Excuse me, I am looking for Adelina Liechti?”

“You’ve found her,” the girl said, standing up and pulling off her work gloves.

“Oh.” Jeanne struggled to cover her surprise, and knew she hadn’t managed. Adelina looked very young—nineteen or maybe twenty at most—and she only barely resembled her brother. Everything about her was delicate, her face faintly pink, and her neatly arranged hair so blonde it was almost white. “Frau Liechti, you don’t know me, but—well, I am so sorry to bother you…”

Adelina came closer to the gate, smoothing out her apron. “Not at all. What is it?”

The whole idea suddenly seemed crazy, and that flag in the window hadn’t stopped ringing alarm bells in her head. All the same, she hadn’t come so far to give up at the first challenge. Jeanne mentally considered the crumbled remnants of her script and snatched at the only possibility she felt she could still pull off. “You will think me mad, I’m sure,” she mumbled, fidgeting with the strap of her handbag. “Ah—but, please…it’s about your brother. Klemens.”

She purposely mispronounced his name like an Englishwoman would, but it didn’t prevent Adelina’s pink face from blotching suddenly with white. “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong address,” she said firmly. “I don’t have a brother.”

Jeanne could have believed her but for the slightest shadow behind the young woman’s hairline, where she hadn’t completely touched up her roots—Jeanne knew from experience that within a couple of weeks she’d have a similar reddish shimmer of her own. The blonde was peroxide. “Please,” she said again, quietly, in the hopes that Adelina would realize she wasn’t trying to threaten her secrets. “Klemens hasn’t written back to me in six months now. I don’t know what is going on, it’s driving me to—I only want to know…I need to know if something has happened.”

Adelina looked at her hard through red-rimmed eyes. “Who are you?”

“I apologize. Marguerite Jolicoeur. Maggie. We knew each other when he was abroad…he never mentioned me at all, did he?” Jeanne tried her best to make her shaky sigh expressive as she twisted her fingers into each other. “I see. That is what I was afraid of… You can tell him I won’t make any trouble. I understand.”

“Wait,” Adelina said. She half turned back toward the house, listening. Jeanne could just hear a baby crying. “Come in, and let me get Peter up. My husband’s not at home. We’ll talk.”

Peter was eight months old and seemed to have two mutually exclusive objectives in life: to find out what was inside the lower kitchen cabinets, and to be carried everywhere. Jeanne regarded the baby warily as he gave up trying to open the door his mother’s foot had blocked and shuffled across the floor to grab a fistful of this unknown visitor’s stocking instead.

“The boy’s dreadfully spoiled,” Adelina said apologetically. She was standing over the stove, simmering a pan of water to warm up a bottle and a dish of leftover potato. “He’s the first grandson in Reimund’s family. Just pick him up and he’ll be alright.”

Jeanne briefly tried to remember when she had last picked up a baby. Would it have been Charlie…but even he must be nearly twenty now. She stooped down to collect the insistent child, conscious of a pained look at the thought of her younger brother. The less considered of him, the better.

“Marguerite, dear…” Adelina had been watching. “I need you to be completely honest with me. My brother hasn’t got you into trouble, has he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is there a child?”

“What—oh.” Jeanne felt her face warm as she bounced Peter a little on her hip. That wasn’t at all the impression she’d meant to give. “No! No, it never was like that. I have not even seen him in four years.”

“Don’t be offended, please. I had to ask,” Adelina said. “It’s the oldest trick in the book to tie a man down, you know.”

Jeanne frowned, forgetting herself. “Is it?”

“Oh, yes. The decent ones will do anything for their children. The trouble is, first you’ve got to find a man silly enough to fall for it, but intelligent enough you don’t want to scream sometimes at the thought of being married to him for the rest of his natural life.” She sighed deeply, shaking her head. “Of course, intelligence isn’t the problem with Klemens. He’s insufferable in other ways…” Adelina paused in thought over the sink as she tested the bottle’s temperature. “Four years, really?”

“Yes. Since he left Cambridge.”

“Mm. And he’d been writing all that time?”

“Yes.”

Adelina raised her brows noticeably, but something softened in her demeanor too. “He must have liked you. Tea?”

“Uh—yes. Thank you,” Jeanne said, feeling she had passed some kind of test. Adelina gestured for her to sit, handed her the bottle, and went back to the stove, leaving Jeanne to quickly realize that bottle-feeding calves wasn’t as adequate a background as she’d hoped. The baby snatched it away with a look of disgust and began to chug the formula noisily himself.

“Forgive my being nosy,” his mother said as she began to knock about the kitchen, looking for the teapot. “Klemens is just so much older than I am…I mean, Father sent him to England when I was five, and then he didn’t come back until I was practically grown up. I hardly feel I knew him at all. But I suppose you must have known him pretty well?”

“Well…he was always very kind to me.” Adelina laughed a little but said nothing, and Jeanne realized she was waiting for a real explanation. More jumbled pieces of the script spilled out in a way that hopefully sounded credible. “You see, my father had a job lecturing at the college, and we met in his office. I never thought that Klemens would think much of me, but he agreed to write when he left. Then we just kept writing, you know, even after I went back to Toulouse. I thought that it was going well and that he would be happy to see me again, but after I mentioned I would come and help my uncle during the winter…” She affected a despairing gesture, accidentally jostling baby Peter and having to soothe him again. “I thought I had offended him somehow. Then I started to worry. Now, I don’t know…oh, please, don’t tell him I came looking. Such a stupid thing to do. I just have to know he is all right.”

There she had it. This was Maggie, apparently: a silly girl with a silly infatuation, imagining herself far more important than she was to an older man with no one else to talk to. Yet Adelina didn’t seem to be letting go of the idea that there was something more to this, at least by the deeply unhappy smile she offered as she set down the cup of tea and held out her arms for the baby. “All right has always been relative with Klemens,” Adelina said. “Did he mention how much worse his back was getting?”

“A little,” Jeanne said, guessing wildly at which direction would get the truth out the most quickly. Miss Löwe had referred to Dr. Haber scathingly as ‘unfit for purpose’, drawing an eyebrow even from Victor. And Victor had said he was proud. “But you don’t think—no, he knows that would not bother me.”

“Really, it wouldn’t?”

“Not at all!” Bold words, but then they didn't cost her anything. 

“Really,” Adelina said again, evidently impressed. From his high chair, Peter flailed at her arm with a series of increasingly insistent grunts until she recollected herself and popped a spoonful of potato into his mouth. “I do wish he had said something about you. It would have given us something to discuss besides…well.” 

Jeanne allowed her to quietly struggle for words. That, she could handle.

“How did he seem to you, in those last letters?” Adelina asked. “I mean– he was different, wasn't he? Something had changed?”

Victor had said something of the kind, so Jeanne nodded. “Yes. What was it?”

Adelina knit her brows together, looking so thrown off that Jeanne wondered if she had accidentally skipped a step in their conversation. Very possible. “My brother has always been a terrible judge of character,” she said slowly. “I suppose you know that already. Mother constantly worried that he was falling under bad influences.”

“Oh?” If Maggie was supposed to draw a conclusion from this, Jeanne couldn't see it. 

Adelina inclined her head, focusing on the baby. “I…I suppose I'm trying to warn you, Marguerite. Whatever it was he got into, it will do you no favors to be associated with him. I haven't spoken to Klemens in quite a while myself.”

Jeanne swirled the tea in her cup and pressed her lips together. If that were true, she'd get no leads here. “I see. He mentioned some political differences—”

“We are good Germans.”

“Of course you are,” Jeanne said. Peroxide-blonde Adelina had a swastika in her front window, a poster-perfect Aryan son, and neighbors who didn't know that her half-Jewish Communist brother existed. Her choices made more sense than anything else Jeanne had encountered in this investigation. However many Jewish grandparents were listed on Frau Liechti’s Ahnenpass, Jeanne was willing to bet that it was more than she wanted anyone to know about. “I apologize, Madame. Klemens was so vague, he…I had no idea it was as bad as that.” She stared hard into the teacup, biting at her lower lip and wondering how on earth she could fake the necessary emotion. Real tears were hard enough to produce. She settled for holding her breath until she could feel the heat on her cheeks, as if she'd lose control otherwise, then gasping a little for air she didn't need. “So stupid,” she whispered.

Suddenly, Adelina had her hand pressing into her unwanted visitor’s shoulder. “You love him, don't you?” she breathed.

There was no other answer. Jeanne had backed herself into a corner she hadn't seen coming. She nodded silently, eyes still averted.

The other girl’s breath caught, and then she collected herself. “Swear, then—swear you won't breathe a word of what I'm about to tell you. Swear you weren't here, I didn't tell you this, and you'll tell nobody—swear it on your life!”

“I swear it on my mother's grave. I will tell no one,” Jeanne said fiercely, with all the respect that Siobhan Murray’s memory deserved. She turned slightly to look at Adelina’s face and found her pale but resolute.

“He's dead,” Adelina said, tears finally brimming over onto her cheeks. “Count him dead, anyway, and go home before they find you. Please. I-I tried for so long to reason with him, even behind Mother's back, but he wouldn't listen. He thought he could escape arrest, that he was so beneath notice—oh, I wish—”

The front door opened, and Adelina froze as a man's voice rang through the house. “Adi, sweet, are you there?”

“It’s Reimund,” Adelina hissed, her voice breaking and reforming itself in tones of fear. “Go along with whatever I say, please.”

Jeanne nodded. Adelina got up, scrubbing her face with her sleeve. “Yes, in the kitchen. I’ve got a friend with me.”

Reimund Liechti was a bland and dumpy little man, wearing a sharp suit that said he was too important for austerity measures. From the speed with which Adelina had reset her expression to a clear-eyed, modest smile, Jeanne guessed that she was used to putting on an act for him. They must still be newlyweds, she supposed. They hadn’t had time yet for Adi to snap and the inevitable conflict between them to become overt. As Jeanne tried to pretend she wasn’t watching, Herr Liechti kissed his wife drily on the cheek before asking after lunch.

“Is that really the time? I apologize, darling,” Adelina said, giving her visitor a pointed glance. “Greta and I must have gotten distracted catching up. Greta, I’m so sorry to have kept you…”

The other girl said nothing more to Jeanne as she hustled her out to the front door. To Jeanne’s discomfort, however, she did pause on the stoop and embrace her tightly. Then the door closed on Frau Liechti’s delicate balancing act, and Jeanne walked back slowly towards the town center. Perhaps she would return in a few days for the Christmas market, after all.

When she met up with her tentative allies outside the just-closing print-shop, Mr. Victor was so busy being annoyed with Echevarria (over God knew what, but it was Echevarria—did anyone really need a reason?) that he didn’t ask about Adelina Liechti for at least ten minutes.

“I didn’t learn much,” Jeanne admitted. “They hadn’t spoken for some time, even before his arrest.”

“So he was arrested,” Echevarria broke in.

“As far as she knew. She did try to tell me they weren’t close, but I don’t think that’s the case; she seemed too fond of him for that. That’s all, really.” There was also the small fact that Adelina was now determined to believe that fate had swindled her out of a sister-in-law—but, then, maybe that was a kinder way to leave her than believing that her brother had spent the last few months of his life completely isolated from the world.

“Well,” Victor said gruffly, “we will see about all that. LISA says that he has the lead now of his own.”

“It ain’ my lead,” Echevarria said. “Not really. It’s your Miss Löwe who’s fixing it up.”

“And it is you that are so excited about it, when I think that it must needs come to nothing.”

“What is it?” Jeanne asked, to forestall another ten minutes of argument.

“One’a the other guy’s old informants finally turned up,” Echevarria said. “He says he saw Haber alive just last month, but he wouldn’ tell her where. He had to talk to Vic and get payment, or nothing.”

Interesting. Dangerous. She saw immediately why Victor would distrust it. “Just try not to get shot, boss.”

“Christ! I am not—goddammit, Vic, don't you dare laugh. I ain’ nobody’s boss, an’ she knows it. For…that’s it. Where’s good around here? You're buying me dinner, and she’s buying me at least two drinks.”

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