Read Online Sleeper Agent by Ib Melchior - Free Book Online
Authors: Ib Melchior
Tags: Fiction, General, Action & Adventure, Mystery & Detective, Juvenile Fiction, Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh
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Steinmetz. Wife of a wanted Gestapo Colonel.
He placed the card on the table. He looked at the young naked girl standing in the middle of the room, her arms hanging dead at her sides, her head bowed. He swallowed. He turned to Larry. “Let her get dressed,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” He left the room.
The house taken over by the CIC team belonged to a local big shot. It was large, opulently furnished in typical Teutonic taste, situated on the outskirts of town.
The owner, his family and servants had been living in it when Tom and his teammates had commandeered it. The Germans had been given half an hour to clear out and allowed to take only the most necessary possessions. In fear and shock they had obeyed, and the CIC team had moved in. They’d stay there until they had to move on, at which time the family could return to their home.
It was routine procedure, a procedure that had been learned the hard way: Always take over a house that is occupied and kick the occupants out fast. Empty houses are booby-trapped!
Tom and Larry were using the family dining room on the main floor as their interrogation room. Now Tom stood in the large entrance foyer. For a moment he leaned against the closed door to the interrogation room. He seemed to see the foyer for the first time: the front door with the two etched glass panels, the grandfather clock stopped at 7:19, the ornate mahogany dresser with the bevel-edged mirror and the hanging clothes rack made of deer antlers, the rows of roebuck and elk antlers and the plaques with wild boar tusks adorning the walls.
His parents might well have lived in homes exactly like this, he thought, before they emigrated to the United States. Before he was born.
He wondered what his mother would have thought had she known that her insistence that he learn to speak the language of the old country fluently had made it possible for him to do his present job. To perform duties such as the one he’d just completed. She would not even have been able to comprehend it. Neither she nor his father. . . .
Hermann Jaeger came from a small town in Bavaria. He emigrated to America in 1910 and found employment in a watch repair shop. In 1913 he returned to his native Germany and brought back a bride, Fannerl, to his new country. In 1917 their only child, a son, was born.
Fannerl kept her Bavarian ways. She was slow to learn English, and the boy spoke mostly German at home. It was she who named her son Thomas—though it was never clear whether it was after Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Mann.
The family lived in New York City, in Yorkville. Hermann had his own little jewelry and watch repair shop within walking distance.
When after 1939 people began to equate Germans with Nazis, the Jaegers were deeply disturbed, but they could not bring themselves to leave their familiar neighborhood, although thy abhorred the spreading influence of Fritz Kuhn and his Bund.
Tom went to Columbia, majoring in English and European lit. He lived at home, helping with expenses by working part time as a reader and translator for various publishers, reading books in German and writing synopses of them in English.
After Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Germany, Hermann changed. He withdrew into himself. He was literally heartbroken. One night he did not come home. Tom went to the shop and found his father slumped over his workbench, dead, his jeweler’s eyepiece still wedged in his eye. Fannerl soon followed her husband. During her last weeks she spoke only German, as if she blamed her adopted country for having taken her husband from her.
Tom was at loose ends. He met a girl among the standees at the Metropolitan Opera. She was fun, intelligent and exciting. He desperately needed to channel his emotions, and after a whirlwind romance he proposed. He and Julie were married late in 1942.
With a German name, Julie—“American” enough to pass the strictest DAR scrutiny—soon began
He placed the card on the table. He looked at the young naked girl standing in the middle of the room, her arms hanging dead at her sides, her head bowed. He swallowed. He turned to Larry. “Let her get dressed,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” He left the room.
The house taken over by the CIC team belonged to a local big shot. It was large, opulently furnished in typical Teutonic taste, situated on the outskirts of town.
The owner, his family and servants had been living in it when Tom and his teammates had commandeered it. The Germans had been given half an hour to clear out and allowed to take only the most necessary possessions. In fear and shock they had obeyed, and the CIC team had moved in. They’d stay there until they had to move on, at which time the family could return to their home.
It was routine procedure, a procedure that had been learned the hard way: Always take over a house that is occupied and kick the occupants out fast. Empty houses are booby-trapped!
Tom and Larry were using the family dining room on the main floor as their interrogation room. Now Tom stood in the large entrance foyer. For a moment he leaned against the closed door to the interrogation room. He seemed to see the foyer for the first time: the front door with the two etched glass panels, the grandfather clock stopped at 7:19, the ornate mahogany dresser with the bevel-edged mirror and the hanging clothes rack made of deer antlers, the rows of roebuck and elk antlers and the plaques with wild boar tusks adorning the walls.
His parents might well have lived in homes exactly like this, he thought, before they emigrated to the United States. Before he was born.
He wondered what his mother would have thought had she known that her insistence that he learn to speak the language of the old country fluently had made it possible for him to do his present job. To perform duties such as the one he’d just completed. She would not even have been able to comprehend it. Neither she nor his father. . . .
Hermann Jaeger came from a small town in Bavaria. He emigrated to America in 1910 and found employment in a watch repair shop. In 1913 he returned to his native Germany and brought back a bride, Fannerl, to his new country. In 1917 their only child, a son, was born.
Fannerl kept her Bavarian ways. She was slow to learn English, and the boy spoke mostly German at home. It was she who named her son Thomas—though it was never clear whether it was after Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Mann.
The family lived in New York City, in Yorkville. Hermann had his own little jewelry and watch repair shop within walking distance.
When after 1939 people began to equate Germans with Nazis, the Jaegers were deeply disturbed, but they could not bring themselves to leave their familiar neighborhood, although thy abhorred the spreading influence of Fritz Kuhn and his Bund.
Tom went to Columbia, majoring in English and European lit. He lived at home, helping with expenses by working part time as a reader and translator for various publishers, reading books in German and writing synopses of them in English.
After Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Germany, Hermann changed. He withdrew into himself. He was literally heartbroken. One night he did not come home. Tom went to the shop and found his father slumped over his workbench, dead, his jeweler’s eyepiece still wedged in his eye. Fannerl soon followed her husband. During her last weeks she spoke only German, as if she blamed her adopted country for having taken her husband from her.
Tom was at loose ends. He met a girl among the standees at the Metropolitan Opera. She was fun, intelligent and exciting. He desperately needed to channel his emotions, and after a whirlwind romance he proposed. He and Julie were married late in 1942.
With a German name, Julie—“American” enough to pass the strictest DAR scrutiny—soon began
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