I was sitting before the window of my small cabinetmaking shop in the Czechoslovakian town of Beda. My widowed daughter, Marta, held the curtain back for me, and watched the Americans through one corner of the window, being careful not to block any of my view with her head.

“I wish he would turn this way, so we could see his face,” I said impatiently. “Marta, pull the curtain back more.”

“Is he a general?” said Marta.

“A general as commandant for Beda?” I laughed. “A corporal, maybe. How well fed they all look, eh? Aaaaaah, they eat—how they eat!” I ran my hand along the back of my black cat. “Now, kitty, you have only to cross the street for your first taste of American cream.” I raised my hands over my head. “Marta! Do you feel it, do you feel it? The Russians are gone, Marta, they’re gone!”

And now, we were trying to see the face of the American commandant, who was moving into the building across the street—where the Russian commandant had been a few weeks before. The Americans went inside, kicking their way through rubbish and splintered furniture. For a while, there was nothing to see through my window. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.

“It’s over, the killing is all over,” I said, “and we’re alive. Did you think that was possible? Did anyone in his right mind expect to be alive when it was over?”

“I feel almost as though being alive were something to be ashamed of,” she said.

“The world will probably feel that way for a long, long time. You can at least thank God you’ve come through it all with very little guilt in all the killing. Having been helpless in the middle has that advantage. Think of the guilt on the shoulders of the Americans—a hundred thousand dead in the Moscow bombings, fifty thousand in Kiev—”

“What about the guilt of the Russians?” she said passionately.

“No—not the Russians. That’s one of the joys of losing a war. You surrender your guilt along with your capital, and join the ranks of the innocent little people.”

The cat rubbed her flanks against my wooden leg and purred. I suppose most men with wooden legs conceal the fact as best they can. I lost my left leg as an Austrian infantryman in 1916, and I wear one trouser leg higher than the other to show off the handsome oak peg I made for myself after World War I. Carved in the peg are the images of Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, who helped the Czech Republic rise from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919, when I was twenty-five. And below these images are two more, each within a wreath: Tomáš; Masaryk and Eduard Beneš;, the first leaders of the Republic. There are other faces that should be added, and now, now that peace is with us once again, perhaps I’ll carve them. The only carving I’ve done on the peg in the past thirty years is crude and obscure, and maybe barbaric—three deep nicks near the iron tip, for the three German officers whose car I sent down a mountainside one night in 1943, during the Nazi occupation.

These men across the street weren’t the first Americans I’d seen. I owned a furniture factory in Prague during the days of the Republic, and I did a great deal of business with buyers for American department stores. When the Nazis came, I lost my factory, and moved to Beda, this quiet town in the foothills of Sudetenland. My wife died soon after that, of the rarest of causes, the natural ones. Then I had only my daughter, Marta.

Now, praise God, I was seeing Americans again—after the Nazis, after the Russian Army of World War II, after the Czech communists, after the Russians again. Knowing this day was coming had kept me alive. Hidden under the floorboards of my workshop was a bottle of Scotch that had constantly tried my willpower. But I left it in its hidingplace. It was to be my present to the Americans when they finally came.

“They’re coming out,” said Marta.

I opened my eyes to see a stocky, red-headed American major staring at me from across the street, his hands on his hips. He looked tired and annoyed. Another young man, a captain, tall, massive, and slow, and very Italian-looking except for his stature, strode out of the building to join him.

Stupidly, perhaps, I blinked back at them. “They’re coming over here!” I said excitedly, helplessly.

The major and the captain walked in, each looking down at a blue pamphlet, which I gathered contained Czech phrases. The big captain seemed self-conscious, and I sensed that the red-headed major was a little belligerent.

The captain ran his finger down the margin of a page, and shook his head dispiritedly. “‘Machine gun, mortar, motorcycle…tank, tourniquet, trench.’ Nothing about filing cabinets, desks, or chairs.”

“What the hell you expect?” said the major. “It’s a book for soldiers, not a bunch of pansy clerks.” He scowled at the pamphlet, said something completely unintelligible, and looked up at me expectantly. “There’s one hell of a swell book,” he said. “Says that’s the way to ask for an interpreter, and the old man acts like it was Ubangi poetry.”

“Gentlemen, I speak English,” I said, “and my daughter, Marta, too.”

“By God, he really does,” said the major. “Good for you, Pop.” He made me feel like a small dog, who had cleverly—for a small dog—fetched him a rubber ball.

I held out my hand to the major, and told him my name. He looked down at my hand superciliously, and kept his hands in his pockets. I felt myself reddening.

“My name is Captain Paul Donnini,” said the other man quickly, “and this is Major Lawson Evans.” He shook my hand. “Sir,” he said to me—his voice was paternal and deep—“the Russians—”

The major used an epithet that made my jaw drop, and amazed Marta, who has heard soldiers talk for the better part of her life.

Captain Donnini was embarrassed. “They haven’t left a stick of furniture,” he continued, “and I’m wondering if you could let us have some of the pieces in your shop here.”

“I was going to offer you them,” I said. “It’s a tragedy they smashed everything. They confiscated the most beautiful furniture in Beda.” I smiled and shook my head. “Aaaaah, those enemies of capitalists—they had their quarters fixed up like a little Versailles.”

“We saw the wreckage,” said the captain.

“And then, when they couldn’t have the treasures anymore, then no one could have them.” I made a motion like a man swinging an axe. “And the world becomes a little duller for us all—for there being fewer treasures. Bourgeois treasures, maybe, but those who can’t afford beautiful things love the idea of there being such things somewhere.”

The captain nodded pleasantly, but, to my surprise, I saw that my words had somehow irritated Major Evans.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I want you to take whatever you need. It will be an honor to help you.” I was wondering if now was the opportune time to offer the Scotch. Things weren’t going quite as I’d expected.

“He’s real smart, Pop is,” said the major acidly.

I suddenly realized what it was the major had been implying. It was a shock. He was telling me that I was one of the enemy. He meant that I should cooperate because I was afraid; he wanted me to be afraid.

For an instant, I was physically sick. Once, as a much younger and more Christian man, I liked to say that men who depended on fear to get things done were sick and pathetic and pitifully alone. Later, after having seen whole armies of such men in action, I saw that I was the kind that was alone—and maybe sick and pathetic, too, but I would have killed myself rather than admit that.

I had to be wrong about the new commandant. I told myself I’d been suspicious and—now that I’m old, I can say it—afraid too long. But Marta felt the threat, the fear in the air, too, I could tell. She was hiding her warmth, as she had hidden it for years, behind a dull, prim mask.

“Yes,” I said, “you are welcome to anything you can use.”

The major pushed open the door of the back room, where I sleep and do my work. I was through being host. I sank back down in my chair by the window. Captain Donnini, ill at ease, stayed with Marta and me.

“It’s very beautiful here in the mountains,” he said lamely.

We lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, broken from time to time by the major’s rummaging about in the back room. I took a good look at the captain, and was struck by how much more boyish he seemed than the major, though it was quite possible that they were the same age. It was hard to imagine him on a battlefield, and it was hard to imagine the major anywhere else.

I heard Major Evans give a low whistle, and I knew he’d found the commandant’s desk.

“The major must have been a very brave man, he has so many medals,” said Marta at last.

Captain Donnini seemed grateful for a chance to explain about his superior. “He was and is an extremely brave man,” he said warmly. He said that the major and most of the enlisted men in Beda had come from an apparently famous armored division, which, the captain implied, never knew fear or fatigue, and loved nothing better than a good fight.

I clucked my tongue in wonderment, as I always do when hearing of such a division. I have heard of them from American officers, German officers, Russian officers; and my officers in World War I solemnly declared that I belonged to such a division. When I hear of a division of war-lovers from an enlisted man, maybe I will believe it, provided the man is sober and has been shot at. If there are such divisions, perhaps they should be preserved between wars in dry ice.

“And what about you?” said Marta, breaking into the captain’s blood-and-thunder biography of Major Evans.

He smiled. “I’m so new to Europe, I can’t—if you’ll pardon the expression—find my behind with both hands. The air of Fort Benning, Georgia, is still in my lungs. The major—he’s the hero, been fighting for three years without a break.”

“And I didn’t figure to wind up here as a combination constable, county clerk, and wailing wall,” said Major Evans, standing in the doorway of the back room. “Pop, I want this desk. Making it for yourself, were you?”

“What would I do with a desk like that? I was building it for the Russian commandant.”

“A friend of yours, eh?”

I tried to smile, unconvincingly, I imagine. “I wouldn’t be here to talk to you, if I’d refused to make it. And I wouldn’t have been here to talk to him, if I hadn’t made a bed for the Nazi commandant—with a garland of swastikas and the first stanza of the Horst Wessel Song on the headboard.”

The captain smiled with me, but the major didn’t. “This one is different,” said the major. “He comes right out and says he was a collaborator.”

“I didn’t say that,” I said evenly.

“Don’t spoil it, don’t spoil it,” said Major Evans, “it’s a refreshing change.”

Marta suddenly hurried upstairs.

“I was no collaborator,” I said.

“Sure, sure—fought ’em every inch of the way. You bet. I know, I know. Come here a minute, will you? I want to talk about my desk.”

He was seated on the unfinished desk, an enormous and, to me, hideous piece of furniture. I’d designed it as a private satire on the Russian commandant’s bad taste and hypocrisy about symbols of wealth. I’d made it as ornate and pretentious as possible, a Russian peasant’s dream of what a Wall Street banker’s desk looked like. It glittered with bits of colored glass set like jewels in the wood, and it was highlighted with radiator paint that looked something like gilt. Now it appeared that the satire would have to remain private, for the American commandant was as taken by it as the Russian had been.

“This is what I call a piece of furniture,” said Major Evans.

“Very nice,” said Captain Donnini absently. He was looking up the stairs, where Marta had fled.

“There’s just one thing wrong with it, Pop.”

“The hammer and sickle—I know. I was going to take—”

“How right you are,” said the major. He drew back his boot, and gave the massive escutcheon a savage kick on its edge. The round piece broke free, rolled drunkenly into a corner, and settled face down with a rowrroworrowrr—clack! The cat investigated it, and backed away suspiciously.

“An eagle goes there, Pop.” The major took off his cap to show me the American eagle on it. “Like this one.”

“Not a simple design. It’ll take a while,” I said. “Not as simple as a swastika or a hammer and sickle, eh?”

I’d dreamed for weeks of sharing the joke of the desk with the Americans, of telling them about the secret drawer I’d built in for the Russian commandant, the richest joke of all. Now, the Americans were here; and I felt little different than before—rotten and lost and lonely. I didn’t feel like sharing anything with anyone but Marta.

“No,” I said, answering the major’s poisonous question. “No, sir.” What was I supposed to say?

The Scotch stayed under the floorboards, and the secret drawer in the desk remained a secret.

 

The American garrison in Beda was about a hundred men, almost all of them, save Captain Donnini, veterans of years of fighting in the same armored division from which Major Evans had come. They behaved like conquerors, with Major Evans encouraging them to do just that. I’d expected a great deal of the coming of the Americans—a rebirth of pride and dignity for Marta and me; a little prosperity and good things to eat, too; and for Marta, the better part of a lifetime worth living. Instead, there was the bullying distrust of Major Evans, the new commandant, multiplied a hundred times in the persons of his men.

In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along. One of these is the understanding of the psychology of occupation troops. The Russians weren’t like the Nazis, and the Americans were very different from either. There wasn’t the physical violence of the Russians and Nazis, thank God—no shootings or torture. What was particularly interesting was that the Americans had to get drunk before they could make real trouble. Unfortunately for Beda, Major Evans let them get drunk as often as they liked. When they were drunk, they were fond of stealing—in the name of souvenir hunting—driving jeeps through the street at breakneck speeds, firing guns in the air, shouting obscenities, picking fistfights, and breaking windows.

The people of Beda were so used to keeping silent and out of sight, no matter what happened, that it took us a while to discover the really basic difference between the Americans and the others. The Americans’ toughness, callousness, was very shallow, and beneath it was grave misgiving. We discovered that they could be embarrassed easily by women or older men who would stand up to them like parents, and scold them for what they were doing. This sobered most of them up as quickly as buckets of cold water would have.

With that insight into our conquerors, we were able to make things a little more bearable, but not much. There was the crushing realization that we were regarded as the enemy, little different from the Russians, and that the major wanted us punished. The townspeople were organized into labor battalions, and put to work under armed guard, like prisoners of war. What made the labor particularly deadly is that it wasn’t concerned with repairing the war damage to the town so much as with making the American garrison’s quarters more comfortable, and with building a huge and ugly monument honoring the Americans who had died in the battle for Beda. Four had died. Major Evans made the atmosphere of the town the atmosphere of a prison. Shame was the order of the day, and budding pride or hope was promptly nipped. We weren’t entitled to them.

There was one bright spot—an American unhappier than any of us—Captain Donnini. It was up to him to carry out the major’s orders, and getting drunk, which he tried several times, didn’t do for him what it did for the others. He carried out the orders with a reluctance I’m sure he could have been court-martialed for. Moreover, he spent as much time with Marta and me as he did with the major, and most of his talk with us was a guarded apology for what he had to do. Curiously, Marta and I found ourselves comforting this sad, dark giant, rather than the other way around.

I thought about the major as I stood at my workbench in the back room, finishing up the American eagle for the front of the new commandant’s desk. Marta lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. Her shoes were white with rock dust. She had been working all day on the monument.

“Well,” I said gloomily, “if I’d been fighting for three years, I wonder how friendly I would be. Let’s face it, whether all of us wanted to or not, we gave men and materials that helped to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.” I gestured at the mountains to the west. “Look where the Russians got their uranium.”

“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” said Marta. “How long does that go on?”

I sighed and shook my head. “The Czechs have paid with interest, God knows. Hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” We’d lost most of our young men, Marta’s husband among them, in suicide waves before main Russian attacks; and our largest cities were little more than gravel and smoke.

“And, after paying it, we get a new commissar. They’re no different from the rest,” she said bitterly. “It was childish to expect anything else.”

Her terrible disappointment, for which I’d built her up, her apathy and hopelessness—good God in Heaven, I couldn’t bear it! And there would be no more liberators. The only strength left anywhere in the world was in America, and the Americans were in Beda.

Dully, I set to work on the American eagle again. The captain had given me a dollar bill from which to copy the insignia. “Let me see—nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen arrows in the claw.”

There was a diffident knock on the door, and Captain Donnini walked in. “Pardon me,” he said.

“I guess we’ll have to,” I said. “Your side won the war.”

“Afraid I didn’t have much to do with it.”

“The major didn’t leave anybody for the captain to shoot,” said Marta.

“What happened to your window?” said the captain.

There was shattered glass all over the floor, and a big piece of cardboard now kept the weather from coming in the window. “It was liberated last night by a beer bottle,” I said. “I’ve written the major a note about it—for which I’ll probably be beheaded.”

“What’s that you’re making?”

“An eagle with thirteen arrows in one claw, and an olive branch in the other.”

“You’re well-off. You could be whitewashing rocks. You were kept off the list, just so you could finish the desk.”

“Yes, I saw the rock whitewashers,” I said. “With the whitewashed rocks, Beda looks better than it did before the war. You’d never know it had been shelled.” The major had ordered that a stirring message be written on his lawn in whitewashed rock: 1402 MP Company, Major Lawson Evans Commanding. The flower beds and walks were also being outlined in rock.

“Oh, he’s not a bad man,” said the captain. “It’s a miracle he’s come through it all as well as he has.”

“It’s a miracle any of us have come through as well as we have,” said Marta.

“Yes, I realize that. I know—you’ve been through terrible times. But, well, so has the major. He lost his family in the Chicago bombings, his wife and three children.”

“I lost my husband in the war,” said Marta.

“So what are you trying to tell us—that we’re all doing penance for the death of the major’s family? Does he think we wanted them killed?” I said.

He leaned against the workbench, and closed his eyes. “Oh hell, I don’t know, I don’t know. I thought it would help you to understand him—make you not hate him. Nothing makes any sense, though—nothing seems to help.”

“Did you think you could help, Captain?” said Marta.

“Before I came over here—yes, I did. Now I know I’m not what’s needed, and I don’t know what is. I sympathize with everybody, damn it, and see why they are the way they are—you two, all the people in town, the major, the enlisted men. Maybe, if I’d got a bullet through me or had somebody come after me with a flame-thrower, maybe I’d be more of a man.”

“And hate like everyone else,” said Marta.

“Yes—and be as sure of myself as everybody else seems to be on account of it.”

“Not sure—numb,” I said.

“Numb,” he repeated, “everyone has reasons for being numb.”

“That’s the last defense,” said Marta. “Numbness or suicide.”

“Marta!” I said.

“You know it’s true,” she said flatly. “If gas chambers were set up on European street corners, they’d have longer queues than the bakeries. When does all the hate end? Never.”

“Marta, for the love of Heaven, I won’t have you talking that way,” I said.

“Major Evans talks that way, too,” said Captain Donnini. “Only he says he wants to go on fighting. Once or twice, when he’s been tight, he’s said he wished he’d been killed—that there wasn’t anything to go home to. He took fantastic chances in the fighting, and never got a scratch.”

“Poor man,” said Marta, “no more war.”

“Well, there’s still guerrilla action—a lot of it around Leningrad. He’s applied for a transfer there, so he can get into it.” He looked down and spread his fingers over his knees. “Well, anyway, what I came to tell you was that the major wants his desk tomorrow.”

The door swung open, and the major strode into the workshop. “Captain, where the hell have you been? I sent you on an errand that should have taken five minutes, and you’ve been gone thirty.”

Captain Donnini stood at attention. “Sorry, sir.”

“You know how I feel about my men fraternizing with the enemy.”

“Yessir.”

He confronted me. “Now what’s this about your window?”

“One of your men broke it last night.”

“Now, isn’t that too damn bad?” It was another one of his unanswerable questions. “I said, isn’t that too damn bad, Pop?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pop, I’m going to tell you something that I want you to get through your head. And then I want you to make sure everybody else in town understands it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve lost a war. Have you got that? And I’m not here to have you or anybody else cry on my shoulder. I’m here to see that everybody damn well understands they lost a war, and to see that nobody makes trouble. And that’s all I’m here for. And the next person who tells me he was a pal of the Russians because he had to be gets his teeth kicked in. And that goes for the next person who tells me he’s got it rough. You haven’t got it half rough enough.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s your Europe,” said Marta quietly.

He turned to her angrily. “If it were mine, young lady, I’d have the engineers bulldoze the whole lousy mess flat. Nothing in it but gutless wonders who’ll follow any damn dictator that comes along.” Again I was struck, as I’d been on the first day, by how awfully tired and distracted he seemed.

“Sir—” said the captain.

“Be quiet. I didn’t fight my way here so the Eagle Scouts could take over. Now, where’s my desk?”

“I’m finishing the eagle.”

“Let’s have a look.” I handed him the disk. He swore softly, and touched the insignia on his cap. “Like this one,” he said. “I want it exactly like this one.”

I blinked at the insignia on his cap. “But it is like that one. I copied exactly from a dollar bill.”

“The arrows, Pop! Which claw are the arrows in?”

“Oh—on your hat they’re in the right claw, on the bill they’re in the left.”

“All the difference in the world, Pop: one’s the Army, the other’s for civilians.” He raised his knee, and snapped the carving over it. “Try again. You were so anxious to please the Russian commandant, please me!”

“Could I say something?” I said.

“No. All I want to hear from you is that I’ll get the desk tomorrow morning.”

“But the carving will take days.”

“Stay up all night.”

“Yes, sir.”

He walked out, with the captain at his heels.

“What were you going to tell him?” said Marta, with a wry smile.

“I was going to tell him that the Czechs have fought against the Europe he hates as hard and long as he has. I was going to tell him—Oh well, what’s the use?”

“Go on.”

“You’ve heard it a thousand times, Marta. It’s a tiresome story, I suppose. I wanted to tell him how I’ve fought the Hapsburgs and the Nazis, and then the Czech communists, and then the Russians—fought them in my own small ways. Not once have I sided with a dictator, and I never will.”

“Better get to work on the eagle. Remember, arrows in the right hand.”

“Marta, you’ve never tasted Scotch, have you?” I dug the claws of a hammer into a crack in the floor, and pried up the board. There lay the dusty bottle of Scotch I had saved for the great day of my dreams.

It was delicious, and the two of us got quite drunk. While I worked, we relived the old days, Marta and I, and for a while it seemed almost as though her mother were alive again, and Marta was a young, pretty, and carefree girl again, and we had our home and friends in Prague again, and…Oh God, it was lovely for a little while.

Marta fell asleep on the cot, and I hummed to myself as I chiseled out the American eagle long into the night. It was a crude, slap-dash job, and I covered its faults with putty and the fake gilt.

A few hours before sunrise, I glued the emblem to the desk, applied clamps, and dropped off to sleep. It was ready for the new commandant, exactly, save for the emblem, as I had designed it for the Russian.

 

They came for the desk early the next morning, a half-dozen soldiers and the captain. The desk looked like a casket for an Oriental potentate as they carried it like pallbearers across the street. The major met them at the door, and cried warnings whenever they threatened to bump the treasure against the doorframe. The door closed, the sentry took up his position before it again, and there was nothing more to see.

I went into my workroom, cleared the shavings from the bench, and began a letter to Major Lawson Evans, 1402 MP Company, Beda, Czechoslovakia.

Dear sir: I wrote, There is one thing about the desk I neglected to tell you. If you will look just below the eagle, you will find…

I didn’t take it across the street right away, although I’d intended to. It made me feel a little sick to read it over—something I never would have felt had it been addressed to the Russian commandant, who was to have received it originally. Thinking about the letter spoiled my lunch, though I haven’t had enough to eat for years. Marta was too lost in her own depression to notice, though she scolds me when I don’t look out for myself. She took away my untouched plate without a word.

Late in the afternoon, I drank the last of the Scotch, and walked across the street. I handed the envelope to the sentry.

“This another one about the window, Pop?” said the sentry. Apparently the window episode was a joke in wide circulation.

“No, another matter—about the desk.”

“O.K., Pop.”

“Thanks.”

I went back to my workshop, and lay down on my cot to wait. I even managed to nap a little.

It was Marta who awakened me.

“All right, I’m ready,” I murmured.

“Ready for what?”

“The soldiers.”

“Not the soldiers—the major. He’s leaving.”

“He’s what?” I threw my legs over the side of the cot.

“He’s getting into a jeep with all of his equipment. Major Evans is leaving Beda!”

I hurried to the front window, and pulled aside the cardboard. Major Evans was seated in the rear of a jeep, in the midst of duffel bags, a bed roll, and other equipment. One would have thought from his appearance that a battle was raging on the outskirts of Beda. He glowered from beneath a steel helmet, and he had a carbine beside him, and a cartridge belt, knife, and pistol about his waist.

“He got his transfer,” I said in wonderment.

“He’s going to fight the guerrillas,” laughed Marta.

“God help them.”

The jeep started. Major Evans waved, and jolted away into the distance. The last I saw of the remarkable man was as the jeep reached the crest of a hill at the town’s edge. He turned, thumbed his nose, and was lost from sight in the valley beyond.

Captain Donnini, across the street, caught my eye and nodded.

“Who’s the new commandant?” I called.

He tapped his chest.

“What is an Eagle Scout?” whispered Marta.

“Judging from the major’s tone, it’s something very un-soldierly, naive, and soft-hearted. Shhhh! Here he comes.”

Captain Donnini was half solemn, half amused with his new importance.

He lit a cigarette thoughtfully, and looked as though he were trying to phrase something in his mind. “You asked when the end of hate would come,” he said at last. “It comes right now. No more labor battalions, no more stealing, no more smashing. I haven’t seen enough to hate.” He puffed on the cigarette and thought some more. “But I’m sure I can hate the people of Beda as bitterly as Major Evans did if they don’t start out tomorrow to rebuild this into a decent place for the children.”

He turned quickly, and recrossed the street.

“Captain,” I called, “I wrote a letter to Major Evans—”

“He turned it over to me. I haven’t read it yet.”

“Could I have it back?”

He looked at me questioningly. “Well, all right—it’s on my desk.”

“The letter is about the desk. There’s something I’ve got to fix.”

“The drawers work fine.”

“There’s a special drawer you don’t know about.”

He shrugged. “Come on.”

I threw some tools into a bag, and hurried to his office. The desk sat in magnificent isolation in the middle of the otherwise spartan room. My letter lay on its top.

“You can read it, if you like,” I said.

He opened the letter, and read aloud:

“Dear sir: There is one thing about the desk I neglected to tell you. If you will look just below the eagle, you will find that the oak leaf in the ornamentation can be pressed in and turned. Turn it so that the stem points up at the eagle’s left claw. Then, press down on the acorn just above the eagle, and…”

As he read, I followed my own directions. I pressed on the leaf and turned it, and there was a click. I pushed the acorn with my thumb, and the front of a small drawer popped out a fraction of an inch, just enough to let a person get a grip on it and pull it out the rest of the way.

“Seems to be stuck,” I said. I reached up under the desk, and snipped a strand of piano wire hooked to the back of the drawer. “There!” I pulled the drawer out the rest of the way. “You see?”

Captain Donnini laughed. “Major Evans would have loved it. Wonderful!” Appreciatively, he slid the drawer back and forth several times, wondering at how its front blended so perfectly with the ornamentation. “Makes me wish I had secrets.”

“There aren’t many people in Europe without them,” I said. He turned his back for a moment. I reached under the commandant’s desk again, slipped a pin into the detonator, and removed the bomb.