Wheaton, Maryland 1990
It was a comfortable furnished living room, with a low fire burning in the fireplace giving a pleasent smell of cozy comfort on this winter afternoon. A medium brown and white mutt lay curled up in front of the fireplace, soakng in the warmth. Only when someone moved she lifted her head to see if it involved food for her, and if not she lay her head back on her paws and dozed off again. On the sofa lay an elderly woman with a colorfull afgan over her. Now gaunt in the face, she was showing the effects of the panchriatic cancer she had been diagnosed with a few months earlier. She had weeks only, but there was one thing left she wanted to do.
The evening before she had her son and daughter sit by her side and she told them of the real life of their father that they had seen little of durring their childhood. For forty years she had kept her silence as her husband had told her, but now most everyone involved was gone, and there was not even a Berlin wall anymore. She wanted her children to fully understand the man they knew as dad. Telling her daughter where it was, a small key had been fetched from her dresser and early the next morning the son had went to the bank and taken the contents of the safty deposit box home. Now in the late afternoon he and his sister had been reading some very captivating material. Diaries, papers.
"Uh, mom, is this classified or anything? I mean this is something else." the daughter said.
'Its okay, I transcribed it just as you father told it to me, and everyone involved is dead, or like me, close to it. Heck, there is'nt even a Soviet Union anymore and the Berlin Wall came down last year. I only wish your father could have lived to see it."
The old woman lay back tired from talking, and the brown haired fortyish woman came and tucked the afgan up around her. She glanced back at her brother, older than her by three years. The family resemblance was unmistakable, the same slightly wavy dark hair, finely chiseled cheek bones and grey-blue eyes. She sat down beside him and looked over at what he was reading.
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East Berlin, 1962.
The man in the grey suit and slightly rumpled trench coat stood under the tree and cursed to himself. It was a cold dark night with a light drizzle of rain falling and the public park was deserted at this late hour. He knew he should not even be here as a section chief, but there was a problem and he just happened to be in Frankfurt at a meeting when word reached him. A young field agent he had recruited five years before had missed two drops in a row. Now he had come over to the east to try to find him. This was the third night and he waited in the park for the young man to show. He had just looked at his watch and decieded to leave when a rustling in the underbrush near him made him freeze. A familiar voice gave the right word in a pained tone. The man walked over and found the young agent stumbling toward him. The agent collapsed in his arms. Something warm and sticky was on his back. He'd been shot.
" I got it...in my right pocket." he gasped.
The man took a piece of paper out of the young mans coat pocket and put it in his own. He set the wounded young agent down gently.
They picked me up...at.." the voice trailed off, and then the eyes were just staring at nothing. With his last bit of life he'd made it to the third nights drop with a bullet in his back, and judging from the distant sounds of footfalls on the deserted park walkways, the hounds were on the trail. It must have been of major importance to have given his life to get it there, so the grey man in the old trench coat took off through the trees at a run. The rubber soled shoes he wore made no sound as he lightly ran, and he left the park and slowed to a walk to blend in with the people on the sidewalks. He pulled the hat down lower on his head as he walked up the street.
He approached the checkpoint and saw the black coated state security people all over, and the traffic was at a standstill. The checkpoint was totally shut down. He crossed the street and walked away into the city. If the hue and cry was out he'd need a place to stay. Finding a seedy back street cheap hotel, he paid for a room and went up. Locking the door behind him he sat down at the beat up table by the window and looked at what the young agent had died for. it was a sheet of paper with a series of numbers in what looked like a book code.
Taking a sheet of very thin paper from his wallet he copied the numbers to that paper writing as small as he could with a stub of a pencil from his pocket. At one point he took a small brown bone handled pocket knife out and put a very fine point on the pencil. When he was done he took the original and burned it in the ashtry on the table. Taking out his pen, he took out the filler and wrapped the much smaller piece of paper around the ball point filler and replaced it in his pen. Now he had to wait. It was a little past midnight, and to venture out now in the deserted city would mean certain capture. He had to stay down till morning.
The night passed slowly, with the man dozing a little now and then in the chair by the window. Finally the grey light of dawn started to break, and the city came to life in the new day. A light wet snow replaced the drizzle of rain. The trolly cars began to rumble by and the workers of all types came out. The man went downstairs and joined the growing morning crowd. He went to a store and bought a second hand briefcase of scuffed brown leather. Purchases of two pair of warm wool socks, a piece of hard cheese and some bread went into the old briefcase as did a tin cup. Then he jumped on a southbound trolly. That morning he made his way south by trolly to the edge of the city limits. He switched trollys a few times when he saw security people board and start checking papers. By afternoon he was on a bus south of the city. At the last stop he started walking south. He was well out in the country now and as he walked down a rural lane, he bent down as if to tie a shoe. Kneeling, he took out the little bone handle knife and carefully slit the bottom seam on the trench coat. A small button compass was taken out, and the man set off cross country.
He walked most of the day, and by nightfall was in heaviely wooded terrain and he held a western course toward where he knew a river was from his memory of area maps. At dusk he stopped to make a small fire to warm himself. He used the small bone handled pocket knife to shave off the wet outer layer of some small twigs, and took some of the paper the cheese was wrapped in and crumpled it up and put the twigs in top. With some dry pine needles from under a thick fir tree, he soon had a small fire going. Sitting by the fire on the briefcase he sliced up the cheese and bread and ate, listening to the quiet hiss of the falling snow. He set the tin cup full of snow by the little fire and sipped at the warm water. He knew he had to keep his body core warm if he was to survive and escape. He finished his spare meal and changed to dry socks and trudged on. He had on good solid rubber soled walking shoes, but soon the footing was dicy. Finding a sapling the right size, he used the pocket knife to notch around the base, and broke off the sappling. He did the same at the other end and soon he had a sturdy hiking staff. He shapened one end to give him a good grip on the icy ground.
Soon he came to the river he was seeking. Water was home and safty for him, where others saw water as an obsticle. A river that had the west on the far bank. A river ment boats. For another several hours he made his way along the river bank in the night, looking for a home or cabin that may have a boat. Just before midnight he found what he was looking for. A small home with a short dock and a skiff tied up. He watched for a while, planning his moves with care.
Slowly and quietly he made his way down to the dock and stepped into the skiff. There was a pair of oars, and he took out the spare socks from the briefcase and cut the tops off them. He silently worked the sock tops down over the oars to where they fit in to the oar locks to quiet them down. The hemp rope holding the skiff was soaked from the wet snow, so he just cut the rope with the bone handled pocket knife rather than fight with the knot. The current took the little skiff out imediatly. He began to row. He was familiar with boats from his childhood on the Choptank river back in Maryland. He put his back into it, bracing his feet against the ribs, and had the skiff across the wide river in 20 minutes, fighting the current out in the middle for a bit.
Finally the bow grated on the far bank, and he stepped out onto friendly ground. He made his way up the bank planning on finding a road when suddenly flashlights pinned him in the beam.
"Hold it, stand right there. Put you hands up!" a voice commanded.
Uniformed men of an American army patrol stepped out of the woods. He breathed a sigh of relief. He explained to the officer in charge who he was, and to call Frankfurt to confirm his identity. He was transported to a local base and escorted to an office.
"What in Gods name are you doing here?" asked a familiar man behind the desk.
The man in the rumpled trench coat stared in amazment at the intellegence officer. They'd worked together durring the war in occupied France.
The man explained what he was carrying, and his old wartime comrade got on the phone and started things going.
"Their're flying you out first thing in the morning old buddy. They want to get their hands on what you've got real bad. Your boss also told me to pass on a message. He said get back to Washington and get your ass back behind the desk where you belong. I think he's a bit ticked, and rightly so. Just what the hell were you doing over there?"
The man explained about how he felt responcible about the young agent. Then they talked about all the things since they had last worked together durrng the war. But soon the army intellegence officer could see the exhaustion. He took the man down the hall to a room with a bunk in it and told him to get a few hours of sleep. He watched as the man emptied his pockets on the small table beside the bed. Wallet, change, the small brown handle pocket knife.
"Jeez, you still carrying that little knife?" the officer asked.
"It does what I want, and its been with me a long time now." the man said.
The man lay down and was asleep instantly. The officer softly walked to the door and as he went to shut it behind him he looked at the items on the bedside table and smiled to himself. The man had that little bone handle pocket knife when they were on the run from some SS troops in the Vosges mountiains in 1943. He shook his head and closed the door gently, wondering if that had anything to do with the mans code name of jackknife.
--------------------------------------------
Wheaton, Maryland, 1990
They finished reading the neatly written pages in their mothers handwriting.
"Its like someone we never really knew." said Anne Devlin. "The shooting may have stopped in 1945, but his war went on."
"It sure does explain alot. Just think of what he had to hold back all those years." her brother said.
Across the room their mother opened her eyes.
"He believed in America. He said it was worth fighting for against those who would see it fail" she said quietly. Then she smiled. "When I met him in 1938, he already had that little bone handle pocket knife, He'd use it on picnics we'd go on. He carried it his whole life."
"What happened to it?" asked Anne.
Her brother dug into the pocket of his jeans and held out his hand. In his open palm was the small bone handle peanut. His sister and mother looked at it.
"He carried it so long," their mother said, "I wonder if there is some small part of him left there?"
Anne reached out and gently laid her hand on the knife in her brothers palm.
"Yes, there is." was all she said.
It was a comfortable furnished living room, with a low fire burning in the fireplace giving a pleasent smell of cozy comfort on this winter afternoon. A medium brown and white mutt lay curled up in front of the fireplace, soakng in the warmth. Only when someone moved she lifted her head to see if it involved food for her, and if not she lay her head back on her paws and dozed off again. On the sofa lay an elderly woman with a colorfull afgan over her. Now gaunt in the face, she was showing the effects of the panchriatic cancer she had been diagnosed with a few months earlier. She had weeks only, but there was one thing left she wanted to do.
The evening before she had her son and daughter sit by her side and she told them of the real life of their father that they had seen little of durring their childhood. For forty years she had kept her silence as her husband had told her, but now most everyone involved was gone, and there was not even a Berlin wall anymore. She wanted her children to fully understand the man they knew as dad. Telling her daughter where it was, a small key had been fetched from her dresser and early the next morning the son had went to the bank and taken the contents of the safty deposit box home. Now in the late afternoon he and his sister had been reading some very captivating material. Diaries, papers.
"Uh, mom, is this classified or anything? I mean this is something else." the daughter said.
'Its okay, I transcribed it just as you father told it to me, and everyone involved is dead, or like me, close to it. Heck, there is'nt even a Soviet Union anymore and the Berlin Wall came down last year. I only wish your father could have lived to see it."
The old woman lay back tired from talking, and the brown haired fortyish woman came and tucked the afgan up around her. She glanced back at her brother, older than her by three years. The family resemblance was unmistakable, the same slightly wavy dark hair, finely chiseled cheek bones and grey-blue eyes. She sat down beside him and looked over at what he was reading.
----------------------------------------------------------
East Berlin, 1962.
The man in the grey suit and slightly rumpled trench coat stood under the tree and cursed to himself. It was a cold dark night with a light drizzle of rain falling and the public park was deserted at this late hour. He knew he should not even be here as a section chief, but there was a problem and he just happened to be in Frankfurt at a meeting when word reached him. A young field agent he had recruited five years before had missed two drops in a row. Now he had come over to the east to try to find him. This was the third night and he waited in the park for the young man to show. He had just looked at his watch and decieded to leave when a rustling in the underbrush near him made him freeze. A familiar voice gave the right word in a pained tone. The man walked over and found the young agent stumbling toward him. The agent collapsed in his arms. Something warm and sticky was on his back. He'd been shot.
" I got it...in my right pocket." he gasped.
The man took a piece of paper out of the young mans coat pocket and put it in his own. He set the wounded young agent down gently.
They picked me up...at.." the voice trailed off, and then the eyes were just staring at nothing. With his last bit of life he'd made it to the third nights drop with a bullet in his back, and judging from the distant sounds of footfalls on the deserted park walkways, the hounds were on the trail. It must have been of major importance to have given his life to get it there, so the grey man in the old trench coat took off through the trees at a run. The rubber soled shoes he wore made no sound as he lightly ran, and he left the park and slowed to a walk to blend in with the people on the sidewalks. He pulled the hat down lower on his head as he walked up the street.
He approached the checkpoint and saw the black coated state security people all over, and the traffic was at a standstill. The checkpoint was totally shut down. He crossed the street and walked away into the city. If the hue and cry was out he'd need a place to stay. Finding a seedy back street cheap hotel, he paid for a room and went up. Locking the door behind him he sat down at the beat up table by the window and looked at what the young agent had died for. it was a sheet of paper with a series of numbers in what looked like a book code.
Taking a sheet of very thin paper from his wallet he copied the numbers to that paper writing as small as he could with a stub of a pencil from his pocket. At one point he took a small brown bone handled pocket knife out and put a very fine point on the pencil. When he was done he took the original and burned it in the ashtry on the table. Taking out his pen, he took out the filler and wrapped the much smaller piece of paper around the ball point filler and replaced it in his pen. Now he had to wait. It was a little past midnight, and to venture out now in the deserted city would mean certain capture. He had to stay down till morning.
The night passed slowly, with the man dozing a little now and then in the chair by the window. Finally the grey light of dawn started to break, and the city came to life in the new day. A light wet snow replaced the drizzle of rain. The trolly cars began to rumble by and the workers of all types came out. The man went downstairs and joined the growing morning crowd. He went to a store and bought a second hand briefcase of scuffed brown leather. Purchases of two pair of warm wool socks, a piece of hard cheese and some bread went into the old briefcase as did a tin cup. Then he jumped on a southbound trolly. That morning he made his way south by trolly to the edge of the city limits. He switched trollys a few times when he saw security people board and start checking papers. By afternoon he was on a bus south of the city. At the last stop he started walking south. He was well out in the country now and as he walked down a rural lane, he bent down as if to tie a shoe. Kneeling, he took out the little bone handle knife and carefully slit the bottom seam on the trench coat. A small button compass was taken out, and the man set off cross country.
He walked most of the day, and by nightfall was in heaviely wooded terrain and he held a western course toward where he knew a river was from his memory of area maps. At dusk he stopped to make a small fire to warm himself. He used the small bone handled pocket knife to shave off the wet outer layer of some small twigs, and took some of the paper the cheese was wrapped in and crumpled it up and put the twigs in top. With some dry pine needles from under a thick fir tree, he soon had a small fire going. Sitting by the fire on the briefcase he sliced up the cheese and bread and ate, listening to the quiet hiss of the falling snow. He set the tin cup full of snow by the little fire and sipped at the warm water. He knew he had to keep his body core warm if he was to survive and escape. He finished his spare meal and changed to dry socks and trudged on. He had on good solid rubber soled walking shoes, but soon the footing was dicy. Finding a sapling the right size, he used the pocket knife to notch around the base, and broke off the sappling. He did the same at the other end and soon he had a sturdy hiking staff. He shapened one end to give him a good grip on the icy ground.
Soon he came to the river he was seeking. Water was home and safty for him, where others saw water as an obsticle. A river that had the west on the far bank. A river ment boats. For another several hours he made his way along the river bank in the night, looking for a home or cabin that may have a boat. Just before midnight he found what he was looking for. A small home with a short dock and a skiff tied up. He watched for a while, planning his moves with care.
Slowly and quietly he made his way down to the dock and stepped into the skiff. There was a pair of oars, and he took out the spare socks from the briefcase and cut the tops off them. He silently worked the sock tops down over the oars to where they fit in to the oar locks to quiet them down. The hemp rope holding the skiff was soaked from the wet snow, so he just cut the rope with the bone handled pocket knife rather than fight with the knot. The current took the little skiff out imediatly. He began to row. He was familiar with boats from his childhood on the Choptank river back in Maryland. He put his back into it, bracing his feet against the ribs, and had the skiff across the wide river in 20 minutes, fighting the current out in the middle for a bit.
Finally the bow grated on the far bank, and he stepped out onto friendly ground. He made his way up the bank planning on finding a road when suddenly flashlights pinned him in the beam.
"Hold it, stand right there. Put you hands up!" a voice commanded.
Uniformed men of an American army patrol stepped out of the woods. He breathed a sigh of relief. He explained to the officer in charge who he was, and to call Frankfurt to confirm his identity. He was transported to a local base and escorted to an office.
"What in Gods name are you doing here?" asked a familiar man behind the desk.
The man in the rumpled trench coat stared in amazment at the intellegence officer. They'd worked together durring the war in occupied France.
The man explained what he was carrying, and his old wartime comrade got on the phone and started things going.
"Their're flying you out first thing in the morning old buddy. They want to get their hands on what you've got real bad. Your boss also told me to pass on a message. He said get back to Washington and get your ass back behind the desk where you belong. I think he's a bit ticked, and rightly so. Just what the hell were you doing over there?"
The man explained about how he felt responcible about the young agent. Then they talked about all the things since they had last worked together durrng the war. But soon the army intellegence officer could see the exhaustion. He took the man down the hall to a room with a bunk in it and told him to get a few hours of sleep. He watched as the man emptied his pockets on the small table beside the bed. Wallet, change, the small brown handle pocket knife.
"Jeez, you still carrying that little knife?" the officer asked.
"It does what I want, and its been with me a long time now." the man said.
The man lay down and was asleep instantly. The officer softly walked to the door and as he went to shut it behind him he looked at the items on the bedside table and smiled to himself. The man had that little bone handle pocket knife when they were on the run from some SS troops in the Vosges mountiains in 1943. He shook his head and closed the door gently, wondering if that had anything to do with the mans code name of jackknife.
--------------------------------------------
Wheaton, Maryland, 1990
They finished reading the neatly written pages in their mothers handwriting.
"Its like someone we never really knew." said Anne Devlin. "The shooting may have stopped in 1945, but his war went on."
"It sure does explain alot. Just think of what he had to hold back all those years." her brother said.
Across the room their mother opened her eyes.
"He believed in America. He said it was worth fighting for against those who would see it fail" she said quietly. Then she smiled. "When I met him in 1938, he already had that little bone handle pocket knife, He'd use it on picnics we'd go on. He carried it his whole life."
"What happened to it?" asked Anne.
Her brother dug into the pocket of his jeans and held out his hand. In his open palm was the small bone handle peanut. His sister and mother looked at it.
"He carried it so long," their mother said, "I wonder if there is some small part of him left there?"
Anne reached out and gently laid her hand on the knife in her brothers palm.
"Yes, there is." was all she said.
.