Gravity slid me most of the way across the gap, but not all the way. I dangled like Dilly Dally a good fifteen feet above the alley. My palms began to put out an enormous amount of sweat, my forehead, too. My shoulder felt like it was being worked on professionally by Gorgeous George.
I stifled a grunt and jerked my body, trying to get the belt moving again.
A faint breeze kissed the side of my face and I thought of Suzi.
I looked down, trying to spot where Ian and Walt waited. Why had I let them talk me into this? Who the hell cared about Agent Poole?
My grip began to weaken. This wasn’t a cliff, but I was certainly hanging.
Just like at the end of a serial chapter when I was a kid. Spy Smasher.
Something Norm had told me about Ian’s Bond novels. SMERSH. It meant “death to spies.”
I tightened my slippery grip, vowing to smash all the spies in the world and heaved my weight one last time, causing the belt to work itself free and carry me to the window’s ledge.
Minutes later, I was in and fumbled my way through a dark room to a darker corridor and down a flight of faintly creaking stairs, while trying to work my belt back into my pants. I saw and heard no one.
I finally reached the inside of the front entrance, picked up a dusty umbrella from a stand, and fought to control a sneeze. I didn’t have a lot of time to hunt around for a better weapon, but the umbrella was almost as sturdy as a Louisville slugger, so I decided to become a swinger.
When I opened the door, I took the surprised guard from behind and hit a homer to the side of his head. The guard’s rifle clattered to the street and skidded along the gutter. He went down, too, but not out.
I back-peddled, preparing to take another swing, just as he reached into the top of his right boot and pulled out a stubby bayonet. His eyes locked on mine, and we played stare-down for a good two seconds. Where the hell were my pals when I needed them?
I backed farther away, shrugging out of my jacket and draping it over my left forearm.
The knife flashed toward my face. I raised my arm and caught the blade in the folds.
The guard pulled back and scanned the sidewalk for his firearm. I swung at him again, trying to knock him down, or at least position him away from the rifle.
The knife sliced at my face again and bit into the umbrella’s wooden staff and fabric. We both twisted our weapons and I lost. But the umbrella’s awkward shape and extra weight threw the guard’s arm off balance and I moved in to grab his left shoulder and spin him around to where Walt rose up and cracked him in the head with a paving stone.
The guard slid to the ground, and I jerked a thumb up and panted, “You’re out.”
CHAPTER 19
We silently collected our prize and pulled it inside the annex, closing the entrance as a tower clock rang out the half hour. I kept the rifle.
Ian helped Walt truss up the guard’s hands and feet with electric wires torn from a couple of floor lamps. At one point, the man came to his senses and started spouting a lot of German gibbety-gook, like “Kimo sabe I stanford jolley clu gulager.”
I said, “I’m sorry, Donald, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” and clunked him in the head with the rifle stock. I could tell that Walt enjoyed that, chuckling under his breath while he stuffed a thousand-year-old antimacassar into our captive’s mouth and secured it with a curtain cord.
“So they call you the Grey Seal, huh?” I said. “You devil.”
He laid a finger under his nose and scratched his missing mustache. “Mum’s the word, and my head still hurts, but let’s go find Poole.”
***
She was a modestly-dressed woman with gray hair and soft brown eyes. And she wasn’t all there when we found her tied to a lion-clawed, wooden chair in a back room upstairs on the third floor. They had deprived her of sleep or given her dope, perhaps both. She was gagged with a scarf tied round her head, which was fortunate, because otherwise she’d have screamed bloody murder upon seeing us.
Ian tried to explain who were. Both he and Walt seemed to recognize her from past encounters. I too felt perhaps I’d seen her before. She had that kind of a face. Wrinkled, thin and a little dazed.
The room they’d held her in was the kind of office I’d seen in hundreds of movies from the 1930s. Heavy draperies covering high windows. Massive oaken desk with pen and pencil set, French phone and a green shaded desk lamp.
A few paintings on the walls displayed landscapes with rivers and green fields running to forever. I wished we were.
“Is she going to be able to walk?” Fleming asked, while Walt loosened her bonds.
“I think so.” The film-maker directed his next statement to the woman: “Try and stand.”
She came to her feet and tipped gently into my arms. Her gray eyes searched mine and seemed to find what she wanted. “Water?” she asked.
“Here, Penny,” Walt said, finding a glass and pitcher on a stand beside a huge floor-standing radio from the ’twenties. She drank and sat back down. I took the empty glass from her shaking hand and noticed two syringes and a few small medical bottles of clear liquid setting on a nearby table. She had obviously been drugged and was now half delirious.
From over behind the massive desk, Fleming said, “The game changes again.”
I raised my voice. “When does this damn game end?”
“When the West hand knows what the East hand is doing,” the writer replied.
“And when is that?”
Walt answered, moving over to join Ian at the desk, “I think you know the answer, Stan,” he said off-handedly.
“You’re still not telling me everything, are you?”
He appeared to begin to answer, when Fleming looked up from the folder of papers he had been reading and remarked, “This is worse than I ever suspected.”
“What is it now?” I asked, resting a reassuring hand on Agent Penny Poole’s frail shoulder.
Ian held up a thin portfolio of dark brown leather. A few eight-by-ten glossy photographs dribbled onto the desktop. “Projekt GoldenHarz,” he read from a document in his hands while Walt picked up the fallen photos. “Or as we’d say, Project Goldenheart. It’s a weapon site in East Germany, about fifty kilometers, or thirty miles, north of here, near a small town of Vogelsang.”
“Yes.” Poole sighed next to me. “The Russians have rockets hidden there--against the arms agreement--pointed at England.”
There was an urgent tone in her voice. I bent down to study her. “Rockets? You mean like V-2 rockets?”
She blinked, trying to hold me in focus. “No.”
“No,” Walt agreed, looking up from the papers held in Ian’s hand. “They’re missiles with thermo-nuclear warheads.”
“Are you telling me,” I asked, rushing over to study the documents, “that the Russians have nukes in Germany? Pointed at England?”
“We have to stop this,” Fleming said.
“This is written in German,” I charged.
“I can read it. But you see clearly from the photographs.”
I tried to make sense of an aerial view of what could have been either a weapons depot or a housing development spread out near a river and a couple of lighter colored patches, intersected by straight lines that must have been highways.
“That’s the warhead storage area and missile base,” Ian said, pointing with a blunt finger. He then indicated an almost perfectly formed pentagonal shape in the middle of one of the gray areas. “That’s the launch pad.”
“Wait,” I said, easing into the chair behind the desk. “Let me sit down.”
“We have to get this information out to the West,” Walt said, clearly astonished, “or they will threaten all of Europe.”
“Nuclear missiles with a range that could strike and destroy London,” Fleming said.
“Just--just wait,” I said. “Let me get this straight. The Soviets have A-bombs trained on London. Is this why you needed to be here all along, Ian? To find p
roof of this threat?”
“H-bombs, more likely,” Walt corrected.
“Same difference,” I shot back. “This can’t be true. Can it?”
“It is very true,” Poole said, leaning earnestly toward us from her chair across the room.
“So, if it’s true,” I went on, “it would be like having nuclear missiles hidden, say, in Cuban bunkers, threatening to blast America into a...a...”
“Radioactive wasteland,” Walt said.
“Wait,” I said for the third time. “Let me think. Even if this is a hoax--”
“It’s not,” Fleming said. “This is the proof.” He held the portfolio up at eye level. “Poole is right. We have got to get this story out to the West, where it can be dealt with in a proper manner by trained professionals.”
“Once word gets out,” I said, “they’ll have to back down. Won’t they?”
“Or they’ll fire the things and start World War III,” Walt said.
“They wouldn’t dare. We’d retaliate and destroy them, ten to one. Wouldn’t we?”
“Not if they strike first.”
Mr. P had taught me to stay with a case until the end. Just being nosey or curious wasn’t a good reason to be a detective. That almost never paid off, except in the movies. It was like drawing to an inside straight.
I tried to figure out what I was trying to figure out. I wasn’t a fresh, young PI any more, like when I’d first started in the business with Mr. P. I was approaching middle-age and now knew that I wanted to do something that actually mattered and be more than just another hard-luck PI. If we succeeded getting this information out to the West, lives would be saved.
I’d missed World War II, because I too young. And then due to my bum shoulder, I’d missed the Korean conflict. All I had now was the Cold War. Maybe what I really wanted was to work a case that was bigger than anything Mr. P had ever handled.
I owed it to him to carry the tradition forward into the second half of the twentieth century. Or maybe I was still fooling myself. The truth was that most of the time, I didn’t know what I wanted and I let others decide things for me, like a pawn.
‘God, you’re depressing,’ my dark side said.
No wonder I joked around so much. If I didn’t, I’d be dead. And then where would I be? Probably just drinking cold beer in Akron.
I crossed back over to assist the woman by pouring another glass of water. Joyful participation in the sorrows of the workplace.
“It’s too important to risk treating as a hoax,” I said. “It has to be the Soviet’s hidden gambit.”
“But if we take these documents, they’ll know that we know,” Walt answered.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ian insisted. “We’ve got to take it.”
“And we’ve got to get out of here,” I stated. “Before Miss Russian Pegleg finds out that we’ve escaped.”
“Then this is the first place she’ll go, to secure her control over Poole,” Walt concluded.
“I say, we leave now and take Poole and the documents with us,” Ian directed.
“You’ve covered this part of the world for years,” Walt said to Ian: “Can’t you get us out?”
“All of my contacts here are long gone,” the writer replied. “Except--”
I headed for the door. “While you guys figure it out, I’m going down and check on the guard. And liberate his belt.”
***
That wasn’t all we liberated that night.
We found a suit of clothing in a closet to help disguise Agent Penny Poole. And, in addition to the guard’s rifle, we appropriated his cap and boots.
“Can they really expect to hit London with a missile?” I asked Fleming.
“Two weeks ago, they aimed one at the moon and hit it. Imagine,” he went on, “somewhere in the Black Forest, the whole of a green field slides back to reveal the dark mouth of a great subterranean bunker. The tip of a rocket emerges. First there’s a trickle of steam from the rocket exhausts and then a great belch of flame, and slowly the rocket climbs off its launching pad on its way directly at the heart of your nation.”
It sounded so vivid, I thought that I’d seen it on You Asked For It.
By now, the Vopos could be searching for us. We had to get back with this portfolio of information. Then the commies might withdraw the nukes for fear of recriminations, or a pre-emptive strike. I Felt like Errol Flynn in Desperate Journey, only this was desperate-er.
We needed to make contact with Fleming’s agent back at the Lenin Hotel. So while darkness and patrol cars still dominated the streets, we made our way across the broad, two-lane boulevard, halfway between the Berlin State Opera and the Russian Embassy. Taking time to hide the rifle inside a trash can in a dark alley, we walked into the lobby and searched for our man.
I yawned so hard to relieve the tension that I almost cracked my jaw.
“Stay alert,” Ian said. “There he is.”
Fleming left our group and walked over to the newsstand counter where he had a brief exchange with a weather-faced male attendant who looked a lot like Spencer Tracy. I casually followed along to lend protection, if needed. Ian purchased a newspaper and a packet of chewing gum, paying for them with one of his odd British coins. The attendant gave him back his change, including a key and a slip of paper.
The German chewing gum tasted like German chewing gum. I discreetly deposited it and the wrapper in a pot of sand beside the elevator.
The four of us filed into the cramped space and Ian pressed the button for the third floor. As the doors slid shut, I saw a Vopo enter the lobby and begin looking around.
Using the key to enter room 303, we eased Poole onto the bed, where she mumbled her thanks, closed her eyes, and began to breathe evenly.
“Is she going to make it?” I asked.
“She’d better,” Walt said.
“We can’t stay here,” I told them. “The state police will be searching and find us.”
“Is anybody else hungry?” Walt said.
Ian went over to the room’s telephone. “I’m almost out of cigarettes.”
“Good thing,” I said. “You’re not going to call room service, are you?”
He began dialing. “What do you take me for?”
“You guys are starting to go vague on me again,” I warned.
“Hello, Cork Travel Bureau. This is Manchester,” he said into the instrument. “Are you there, M?”
I watched Walt for a sign. The sign was to relax.
Fleming went on, “If you think someone is listening, say something with the word Tuesday in it.” He waited and then nodded, consulting what looked like a train schedule in the newspaper and giving instructions for our transport out of the country, while I again checked on the woman’s condition. She murmured something in her sleep, but otherwise lay quiet.
Fleming he handed the phone to me. “It’s Molly and your boy, Norman. They’ll arrange for us to get back to West Berlin, but we’ve got to tell them where to meet us. Walter, my man, can you locate the best spot?”
I accepted the receiver and put it to my ear, while Walt flipped the pages of a worn phonebook and consulted with Ian. “Testing, testing,” I said into the phone. “Is this thing on?”
“This is SS3 to SS1,” Norm said. “Over.” He was doing his Captain Midnight Secret Squadron signaling routine.
Walter, my man, came over and began pointing to a place on the map in the phonebook. Ian was with him, watching closely.
“Hold on,” I said to Norm. “I’ve got one for you.”
Walt tapped the map and I tilted my head to see where he was indicating.
“You reach the...Kurfurstendamm station about a quarter to five. Read a magazine and you’re in...Frankfurt, alive. Get me?”
“Dinner in the diner. Nothing could be finer,” Norm answered.
I nodded to Walt and Ian. “Good.”
They seemed relieved.
“Klaatu Barada Nikto,” Norm said and the line went dead.
“What is it now?” I asked, settling into an overstuffed chair and trying to massage the pain from my stiff leg.
“I can’t figure you out, Wade, old boy” he said, lighting a cigarette from the stub of one that Walt had given him. “As a writer, I’m constantly observing the way other people act. Sometimes you seem to stand outside of everything that’s happening around you, and other times you’re in the thick of it all.”
I transferred the massaging action to the lump at the base of my neck. “A man you can’t kid is a man you can’t trust,” I quoted. “But it’s probably just due to my thick head, old boy.”
“We need to get a truck out of here,” Walt said.
Fleming winced at the comment. “Language, please, Walter.”
“What?” I said. “He was speaking English.”
“I know.” Ian sighed. “And he’s right. We need to find transportation to our pickup spot. Let’s go.”
I unsettled out of the overstuffed chair and we all went.
CHAPTER 20
It was the easiest part of our escape plan. We hired a taxi. In a culture of fear and duplicity, everyone in East Berlin was out for himself, even at this late hour.
Our driver glumly accepted the high-denomination Marks that Fleming shoved at him. I gave the cabman the rest of the pack of gum, while we piled in. Walt retrieved the rifle without a word and set it in the back seat next to Agent Poole.
After a twenty-minute ride, we were dropped off in the northern part of the city about three-quarters of a mile from our intended destination. Out here, away from the lights of the metropolitan area, the night huddled in closer.
We made our way down a pocked road, past distant houses and a few out buildings, between weed-infested lots--three men god-fathering an elderly woman. Somewhere behind us, a dog barked forlornly and then quieted down again, as we moved farther along.
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