Spyfall

by John Hegenberger

  “Never mind,” Walt said. “Show us.”

  I turned to Ian and began groping about in the pockets of his coat. My trussed up hands and wriggling fingers found a hard, thin object. “This it?”

  “If it isn’t,” Walt said, “then you’re doing something obscene. Let me see what you’ve grabbed.”

  I could feel the holder with its tapered plastic on one end and a circular cylinder on the other.

  “Try to break it so the metal tip comes to a point,” Fleming instructed.

  I grasped the thing between my half-numb hands and snapped it in two. The metal part fell to the floor.

  “I’ll get it,” Walt said, kneeling and bending back into a sitting position again.

  Ian went down too and turned his back to us. “Now work the sharp flange into the hole of my manacles.”

  I directed the operation as best I could while the two men slouched together back to back. Maybe they really knew what they were doing, after all.

  We spent an eternity like that.

  “Ian, move your arms more to the left, your left,” I ordered. “Walt, push down more and get your fingers closer to his right hand. No, the other way. Steady now.” I caught a glimpse of the metal tip sliding into the access hole. “Now twist your wrist, Walt. Easy. Try it again the other way.”

  Ian held his breath. Walt swore. “I’m getting a cramp.”

  “Try it again,” Fleming growled. “I know it will work.”

  They were so close to each other now that I could no longer see their actions.

  “I hope your right hand knows what my left hand is doing,” Ian joshed.

  They continued to fumble while I felt an intense urge for a cigarette, a shot of Scotch, or a way to wipe the sweat from my forehead.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Walt announced.

  I looked around the room again for some way to help, but found nothing. “Come on, guys. You can do it. You have to before the Reds get back.”

  Something between them went click and Fleming yanked his arms up over his head, the open handcuffs dangling from his right wrist.

  It took another couple of minutes to get Walt’s hands free and then mine. We were as happy as three Houdini’s, but still needed to figure a way out of our dingy prison.

  “If we break down the door,” Walt said, rubbing his wrists and cracking his knuckles, “someone will hear and see us.”

  “Not if we create a distraction,” Ian countered.

  Walt shook his head and winced. “If we create a distraction, they’ll just come for us, anyway.”

  I eyed the electrical box on the wall. “Not if they can’t find us.”

  Behind my back, one of my artful companions inquired, “What are you thinking?”

  I turned my head to ask Walt, “Does that pen light you mentioned really work?”

  “Of course,” he answered, taking a thick fountain pen from the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. “But what good will it do?”

  Ian began to catch on. “We need a way to short out the power.”

  I popped open the switch box. There were no switches inside, just a tangle of pre-war wires and two short rows of electrical terminals.

  “If we yank out the wires, we might kill the lights upstairs,” Ian went on, “but it might do the same to--”

  I cut him off in mid-thought. “We can use the cuffs to bridge the gap between the terminals.”

  “Once the lights are out,” Walt said, clearing his throat, “my flashlight will help us find the way out.”

  “Still could get electrocuted,” Ian said.

  I let my fingers do the walking along the loops of my trousers. “I think I can insulate the cuffs with this,” I said, pulling my belt free and wrapping its length around my right hand. I slide the belt’s tongue through the closed clasp of my handcuffs. “The metal buckle will short out the power and the stiff leather should give me some--protection.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Walt advised.

  “What other choice have we?”

  Nobody answered.

  I sighed and turned back to the open power box with its menacing collection of Strickfadden-like circuits. I draped my coat over my head to shield against fireworks and whispered, “Get it done.”

  Ian went up the stairs to prepare to kick in the door.

  Walt switched on the tiny light in his fountain pen.

  I clenched my teeth. “Count of three.” That wasn’t all I clenched.

  We exchanged glances and nodded, like we’re rehearsed this a million times.

  “One.” I tightened my grip on the leather strap. “Two.”

  “Good luck,” Ian hissed.

  “The Three Caballeros,” Walt said.

  ‘More like Stooges,’ the Noir Man crabbed.

  “Three.”

  ***

  My hand went up and out. The cuff clanked into place. I heard a sizzle that I hoped wasn’t my fist. An intense, reddish light flashed through my closed eyelids. There was a loud pop and a sudden blackness that I hoped wasn’t my death. Instead, I was knocked back on my ass as a thunderous crash came from where Ian had stood. I came up in one piece, as if energized by a bolt of lightning. Shazam!

  “Door’s open,” Fleming shouted. “Come on.”

  We clambered up the stairs, following the thin beam from Walt’s flashlight, and scurried down the hallway like rats.

  I wasn’t sure which one of us said, “Not bad for a broken-down cartoonist, an old scribbler, and a beat-up detective.”

  I didn’t think it was me, but--

  “Hurry,” Ian called. “Someone will be coming to find out what the hell just happened.”

  “I thought this was supposed to be a distraction,” I panted, “not an attraction.”

  “We need to think these things through better next time,” Walt counseled.

  Next time?

  We navigated down the corridor and made a left into the club’s kitchen. The room was dark and thankfully empty of inhabitants. I almost tripped over a clutter of mops and pails.

  “Must be later than we thought,” Walt said, casting his beam past a grease-caked grill to what looked like a back exit.

  “We must have been out for hours,” I deduced, grasping a door knob and turning it. It wouldn’t open.

  Fleming flipped a latch above the knob and we spilled out into the East Berlin night.

  The buckle on my belt had been warped by the electrical surge and I was having trouble keeping my pants up as we waded through the waist-high weeds and stacks of rubble that stretched away to a deserted cross-street lit by a central cluster of yellowish arc lamps. Far in the distance, I could make out the glittering ribbon of the Zimmerstrasse River on the border with West Berlin, but naturally we went the other way.

  It must have been long past the designated curfew hour, for we dodged several light-armored vehicles patrolling the streets, accompanied by motorcycle escorts.

  Keeping to the shadows and hugging the walls, it felt like something out of a cloak-and-dagger B-movie. We avoided the big new ten-story block edifice of the Haus der Ministerien, which Ian said was the chief brain-center of East Berlin. At the front entrance of the building, guards were stationed, standing casually in large caps and long coats, but with serious Kalashnikov sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders. I put the collar of my coat up to ward off the night’s chill and possible recognition. It didn’t help much, but felt satisfying, nonetheless.

  My stomach growled. We continued down an ill-lit side street. Walt stumbled on the cracked and buckled sidewalk, almost calling out in surprise, but I dashed around a ruined wall and got a hand over his mouth. He nodded his thanks and nearly fell into a pit that had once been someone’s cellar.

  Ian seemed to know where he was going. We came back onto the Unter den Linden and passed a statue of Frederick the Great, glistening on horseback in the night. “The State Opera House is just ahead,” he whispered, peering around the side of a dark building. “T
he annex must be in back.”

  “Makes sense,” Walt said. “That’s where I’d put it.”

  Yeah, these spy guys were brilliant thinkers, all right. I couldn’t believe that I was following their lead, but they’d pushed me to the point where I was making bad decisions. As if I had any real choice in the matter.

  Off we went again into the frustrating night.

  CHAPTER 18

  The air was crisp with October. The full Jamaican moon had waned to three-quarter. I hobbled along behind my fellow escapees, holding up my sagging pants by hand, since the buckle of my belt had been warped by excessive voltage.

  In the distance somewhere, a clock tower tolled a single stroke. I looked at my watch and saw that it was slightly after one a.m.

  Following these two men through the dark streets of East Berlin troubled me no end. Why were they involved in all of this? Why were they even here? Ostensibly, they were fighting for Queen and Country and the American Way, but that couldn’t be the whole truth and nothing but.

  I began to think for the first time about the bigger picture and the future, rather than my own situation and past. Thirty years from now, I’d be their age. What would the world be like then in, say 1990 or beyond? Would we still be in a stalemate with the Russians? Or would Communism have become the dominant political force on the planet?

  Already, England felt to me like a country past its prime. Would America become similarly obsolete and inconsequential? Democracy a thing of the past? Or would the world end in the holocaust of nuclear war? Bombed back to the Stone Age?

  And where would I be in the far future? My detective work seemed trivial when compared to the imagined alternatives. All the hype and media blitz from Hollywood wouldn’t matter one bit. I’d have wasted my life gumshoeing blackmailers and doing my little justice thing, when the important game had been to stop the Soviets.

  As uncomfortable as I was not knowing what these two men were up to, underneath all the secretiveness, it seemed that what they were doing would ultimately matter a whole lot more than my little hill of beans.

  I remembered my brother, Josh, who’d died fighting the Japs at Midway. His death mattered a lot to me, but I’d always thought that it wasn’t very important to the rest of the world. Maybe I’d been wrong about that. Maybe the small event of his death had a much larger consequence. We might have lost at Midway if Josh hadn’t died there, and that loss would have probably changed the course of the war and the world, or at least America’s part in it.

  I thought again of my parents. Had they too died for their country? Walt had suggested that they’d helped stop the Reds from getting the A-bomb, back in the ’forties. What if, instead, they had held back, unsure of what to do, choosing to stand down at the wrong moment and thus letting the Commies advance too far, too soon?

  So, now, what was I doing? Was I going to step aside when needed? Or step up to the challenge, even though I didn’t have all the answers, even though I didn’t fully get what the hell was going on or where the night led?

  Norman hated Commies--with good reason. My parents had apparently died fighting them. My brother had done his duty and given his life for American freedom. And then there was poor Max.

  None of them had a guarantee that what they did would pay off in the long run, but they all must have felt it was the right thing to do at the time. To do your duty, even if you don’t know that it will ever matter or make a difference. Anything else would seem pointless and selfish.

  I had always considered my duty was something simple, like helping other people. Their troubles were my business. And right now, that troubling business came down to trusting Walt and Fleming, even if I didn’t know how it would turn out. Blind faith?

  For all I knew, rescuing Agent Poole might eventually have major results in the Cold War thirty years from now. And I had to admit that it did, in fact, feel like the right thing to do. Even if it meant my--

  “There,” Ian hissed, pointing into the heart of darkness. “That’s where we’re going.”

  The Berlin State Opera building was four-stories high with a colonnaded front like a Corinthian temple and dark at this hour. Stone stairs flared out from either side and three statues stood regally above the entrance. Surely, stately structures like this were part of the inspiration for our ornate movie palaces back home, halfway in time between the Greeks and Graumans.

  The annex was much more modest and modern, only three stories and of plain, square architecture, but yet another armed guard stood out front of the building’s closed entrance door. I circled around to the back, hoping to find another way in. A cat in a shadowy alley started my heart racing. Or maybe it was a big rat. What would Marlowe do?

  ‘Get the hell out of Dodge,’ the Noir Man answered.

  I hunched up my trousers and groped on.

  Of course, there was no back entrance. Not even a window. They had all been bricked up years ago.

  I crept back around to a secluded side street in the front where Walt and Ian were quietly arguing about something, again.

  “You need to let your characters grow up and have fun,” Fleming whispered.

  “No chance of that happening,” Walt replied. “I caught hell from the public when my characters got drunk in Davy Crockett.”

  “Well, my stories are basically just like yours.”

  “Ha,” I said, coming up to them. “With a little sex in it.”

  Walt gestured with his chin. “There’s a window up on the second floor. Looks like it might be open.”

  I peered through the night and saw that he was right, maybe. But I couldn’t see any way to reach the ledge or roof, except for a string of power lines that stretched about five feet from the back of the Opera House.

  “It might be possible to climb up the side of the adjacent building to where those cables cross,” I said, immediately regretting the statement.

  “You mean go up there like Harold Lloyd?” Walt asked.

  I ran my tongue over the cut where I’d bitten my lip earlier and kept my mouth shut.

  “If you go in through the window,” Ian advised, “you should be able to come out through the front and take the guard from behind.”

  I tasted blood again, but finally said, “Are you volunteering me for a commando raid?”

  “I’m only outlining a potential plan of attack,” Fleming whispered. “It’s up to you.”

  Walt surprised me by saying in a low tone, “Forget it. Those power cables probably carry over 400 volts. He’d have to slide down them to reach the window ledge.”

  “Dangerous work, that,” Ian agreed. “Young man’s game, too. Not good for us old folk, but I’ll flip you for it.”

  “Okay,” Walt answered. “Have you got a quarter?”

  “I’ve something like one right here,” Fleming breathed, tossing and catching a coin in his palm. “What is it?”

  “Heads,” Walt called.

  “No, it’s a shilling. You lose.”

  If there had been crickets nearby, we would have heard them rubbing their little German legs together.

  “Look you guys,” I reluctantly said. “There doesn’t seem to be any other way in and we don’t even know for sure that your Agent Poole is still being held in there.”

  “If she’s not,” Walt said, “we’re all in for a long cold war.”

  I put my full weight on my sore leg to test its strength. No pain. But I dare not touch the back of my skull for fear that it might fall off. “I know I need my head examined,” I mumbled, “but I think I can use my belt again to slide across those cables.”

  “Ah,” Fleming said. “A fascinating and new sort of action hero. Beltman.”

  I grimaced. “And here I thought we left Norman and his gags back in West Berlin.”

  Moving slowly and carefully down the dimly-lit street, I crossed over far from the guard’s point of view. I stood there and took in a few lungfuls. Then, I eased myself into a shadowed alcove in the side of the Opera House and clutched
at the horizontal seams in the building’s façade, pulling myself up a couple of feet at a time.

  A car passed slowly on the street below me. I froze. If the driver had glanced over at the right moment, he might have seen my shoes wedged into a crack about six feet above the roadway.

  The building’s stone surface was gritty with soot and other crud I didn’t want to think about.

  When I started back up, a sleeping pigeon suddenly awoke and fluttered past my head. My fingers began to ache along with all the other pains I’d collected recently. The light here was worse than down at street level. I had to feel my way up the last six feet, around an overhang, gripping a gutter downspout that wobbled when I transferred my weight across it. Seconds later, I was a true second-story man, still having second thoughts about the whole thing.

  I reached around the crumbling, rough corner of the building where the power lines stretched down and across what appeared to be a mile-long chasm to the annex. Flexing my sweaty fingers, I began tugging my trusty belt from the loops of my pants. Why hadn’t I thought to use Walt or Ian’s belt instead?

  ‘Because, you’re an idiot,’ said my dark passenger.

  “Nobody asked you,” I countered, deep in my throat.

  ‘Maybe they should have.’

  “And maybe the sun will come up in the west!”

  ‘Stop arguing and get going!’

  Doctor Heckle and Mister Jib.

  I fastened the top button of my pants into a buttonhole of my shirt. It seemed to hold well. Confident now that I was an intercontinental op, I looped the belt over the cable and tested the assembly with a few short tugs.

  ‘This isn’t going to work.’

  “Yes, it is.”

  The cable sagged as I lowered myself onto its limber expanse. I cast free and resisted the demanding urge to grab the power line with both hands, instead of sliding down the cable via the leather strap.

  The belt creaked and sank from my weight, but held. My suspended body began to turn slowly, which I didn’t like since it would cause me to face the wrong way and I wouldn’t be able to see where to put my feet when I arrived at the annex building’s window ledge. Assuming that I ever did.