The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  He flipped open the file again, thumbing his way through the eight-by-tens.

  “You really have got me checkmated, don’t you?”

  “And why do you say that?”

  “Because if I offer up any hypothetical alternative to the reality you are presenting me . . .”

  “. . . we have visual veracity on our side? All right, say she was just going to meet Haechen in those crummy hotel rooms for debriefings. The fact remains: she’s the agent of a totalitarian regime, and she tricked you into thinking—”

  “I know what I thought. I know what was said between us. I know . . .”

  I fell silent. A new double shot of schnapps arrived. I downed it. I thought: just get up and walk out the door and don’t come back. Go home. Pack everything up. Get the last train out of town . . . only that would probably be the night train to Hamburg, the city where she is allegedly shacked up with the troll who has been running her life for more than a year.

  “I need proof that she isn’t in Hamburg translating for Wellmann,” I said.

  “Easily arranged,” Bubriski said. “Herr Wellmann is taking his wife to hear the Berliner Philharmoniker tonight. You’re quite the classical music nut, aren’t you? So you’ll approve of the fact that it’s that Italian guy, Abbado, conducting Mendelssohn and Schubert. Given that we are rather cultured people at the USIA, I happen to have a spare ticket for the concert. The seat is just two rows back from where Wellmann will be sitting. So if you want proof . . . ?”

  He reached into his pocket and slid a Berliner Philharmoniker ticket toward me. I covered it with my hand.

  “So after you see Wellmann there tonight . . . ,” he said.

  “I still need proof that she is actually working for the Stasi.”

  “I would demand the same thing if I were in your position.”

  “But you’re not. And you want something from me. And I am not willing to set her up.”

  “But here’s the thing. You told her that you were interviewing those two East German dancers who just defected, right?”

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  “I will take that as an ‘affirmative.’ So if you told her about the interview, you also told her about the transcript you’ll be receiving over the weekend of the conversation you were supposed to have with these two dancers.”

  “You fucking set me up,” I hissed.

  “The fact is, it is you who set yourself up, sir. Now I must tell you: this interview is never going to take place. But say we were to give you a copy of this alleged transcript, all marked ‘Classified.’ Say you were to leave it out on a table for your beloved—”

  “Stop calling her that!”

  “Sorry, sorry, I can see why you’re now a little bit touchy.”

  “Fuck you, ‘chum.’ Fuck your mental head games and your Good Cop/Bad Cop routine. I don’t like you. I don’t like who you are, what you stand for, or the shitty little games you play in the name of God and country. Just as I don’t like the contempt you feel for anyone who isn’t a ‘team player,’ ‘plainspoken,’ ‘a real American.’ And the thing is, though you spout neocon nastiness about any compatriot who doesn’t embrace your black-and-white worldview, you live in the biggest fog of moral grayness imaginable.”

  “And you, sir, are someone whose worldliness on the page is not mirrored by that in real life. I may talk a sardonic game, Thomas. I may needle you with my Midwestern bluntness. But I am also sympathetic to the dilemma into which you have been tossed. Which is why, instead of trying to convince you any more of the ‘truth’ of this situation, I am proposing a simple test that will either incriminate or exonerate Frau Dussmann. It will give you a definite yes or no as to whether she is what I am alleging her to be. Will you allow me to outline this plan, please?”

  I lowered my head. You want proof. Here’s the possibility of proof.

  “Go ahead,” I said quietly.

  “When Frau Dussmann returns to your apartment on Sunday, you must muster up what few clandestine bones you have in your body and pretend that all is as it was before. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s an honest answer. But for your own sake—by which I mean, in order to get the answers you need—you are going to have to act a role for a few days. The role you have been playing up to now. The role of the man who adores her. And yes, that means pulling her into bed, making love to her, telling her, as always, how much you adore her, acting as if nothing has changed. But then, the subject of your interview with the two dancers will come up. What you will then need to tell her—besides saying how interesting the two dancers were, and how disoriented but pleased they were to have escaped—is that the transcripts of the interview make fascinating reading . . . and it’s going to be quite the coup for Radio Liberty to break this news first. Then you say no more about it. You have a nice evening. You take your lady to bed. I bet the two of you fuck every night.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I mention this simply as a tactical consideration. If you do make love every night, then do so again here. Afterward do you usually fall asleep straight away?”

  “Is this necessary?”

  “Yes, it is. And I will explain why. Because Haechen is a major security risk—”

  “Whom you’ve allowed to operate here for more than two years.”

  “We’ve been hoping he’d lead us to even bigger fish. But he’s a thug. Used to work in a special Stasi division at Hohenschöenhausen prison breaking down detainees through extreme psychological torture. Last year he picked up a prostitute near the Tiergarten and roughed her up so badly that she lost an eye. Her face is disfigured for life. And he’s been targeting genuine defectors in the Bundesrepublik—one of whom was found dead on the InterCity express train tracks near Hamburg last year. The authorities ruled it a suicide, but our forensic people said the man was clearly thrown in front of the train. This is the man your friend has slept with repeatedly, and for whom she has photographed more than two dozen bogus classified documents. And if you dare say anything about her being forced into this role . . . there are thousands of dissidents in East German prisons who could have chosen the informant role but didn’t. Everything in life comes down to two things: choice and interpretation. We make decisions—and then we generally fashion our interpretations of these choices in a manner that allows us to live with them. Which is what Frau Dussmann has been doing. Loving you and betraying you at the same time, and telling herself it’s the only way she can maintain the huge plum assignment of living in the West. But remember this, Thomas—she chose this role. Just as she chose to deceive you.”

  Considered now, years later, I see that Bubriski was such a master at poisoning me by cleverly ratcheting up my sense of outrage at having been so wronged that I did come to see him as a difficult but essential ally. Though, again, a competing voice within me urged: run away from this now.

  But my distress and mounting rage kept me rooted to the vinyl chair in that bierstube, listening intently as Bubriski plotted out, step by step, the scenario I was to act out. The specificity of his instructions—the way it was already so clearly thought through—made me realize that, like the sort of novelist who needs everything plotted out before putting pen to paper, he’d been working out the mechanics of it all for a very long time.

  “So we are back in the bed you share with Frau Dussmann. It is now late Sunday night. You have just had sex. I repeat my question of before: do you usually fall asleep straight afterward?”

  “If it’s late, then yes.”

  “Don’t get into bed before midnight then. When you’ve finished, I want you to fake falling asleep—but under no circumstance should you surrender to sleep. That would throw everything out of kilter. My hunch here is that once she is certain you have passed out, she will get up and find the briefcase . . . no, you carry some leather satchel, don’t you? . . . the satchel in which you have kept the interview transcripts which we will supply you with that a
fternoon. Leave the satchel in your living room on that big table of yours.”

  “I don’t ever remember inviting you up to my apartment.”

  “We are aware of its layout,” he said. “Just as we know there is a sizeable keyhole in the bedroom door—and one which, when squinted through, gives you a clear line of vision onto the living room table. Once she has shut the door behind her, count to sixty, then creep out of bed and put your eye to the keyhole and see if she is photographing the documents. My guess is she will use the little camera that she carries everywhere. Then she will return to bed, so make certain that you are back under the covers with the lights off before she returns. If, however, she does decide to steal away to Herr Haechen while you are asleep, you do nothing—as we will have someone posted near your doorway who will follow her from there. If she comes back to bed, make certain you wake up with her that morning—and, again, you must act as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Then, when she leaves, I want you to simply go to the window in the kitchen, the blinds of which are always open, if I’m not mistaken. All you need to do is lower the blinds. That will be the signal to our people that she has photographed the documents. If nothing has happened, don’t touch the blinds and we will do nothing. But my great hope, Thomas, is that having seen proof that she is who we are alleging she is, you will not let her get away with it. I cannot emphasize how important it is that we capture Haechen red-handed. He has destroyed so many lives. And his work against GDR refugees who have settled in the Bundesrepublik . . . put it this way, if you help us here, you will also be doing a great service to your country, and that will be noted.”

  “I don’t need any of your blue ribbons or your patriotic pats on the back. If I do this, it’s because . . .”

  But I couldn’t get to the end of the sentence. Because I still didn’t want to believe it all.

  “Just remember this, Thomas. You won’t be betraying her. Because she betrayed herself years ago when she—”

  “You don’t know when to stop, do you?”

  He knew he had me. By playing on the betrayal theme, he was tapping into a fundamental part of my psyche, the part that believed love was, at best, an elusive notion. Was that also in his file on me—the fact my parents acted as if I was the weight that had dragged them down and, as such, left me thinking I could count on nobody in this world? Until, that is, I met Petra—and her love for me made me think that trusting someone else emotionally was finally possible. Which made the discovery that she had completely deceived me, that she was all that time working for the people she told me had destroyed her life . . .

  I had to bolt this place now. So I scooped up the Berliner Philharmoniker ticket and pocketed it, then stood up.

  “I’ll go to the concert. I’ll think things through.”

  “And then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “What makes you think I will want to see you?”

  “If you choose not to cooperate with us, then we will have to presume that you are aiding and abetting a foreign agent. I have already outlined for you the blowback resulting from your refusal to aid us: loss of passport, possible detention back home, possible border difficulties in the future.”

  “In other words, I have no choice, do I?”

  “But you forget my earlier comment, Thomas. We all have a choice in everything we do. But that choice inevitably invites consequences. The question you must ask yourself: is this duplicitous woman worth it?”

  Now he stood up and proffered his hand.

  “I am certain you will make the intelligent choice—as hard as that choice is. See you tomorrow at the Café Istanbul. Shall we say breakfast at nine, seeing that it is a Saturday?”

  “You know the Café Istanbul?”

  “I know that it’s your outer office. Until then, enjoy the concert. Abbado really shows up von Karajan’s need to beautify everything. He defogs the music and lets it truly live. But what do I, a guy from Indiana, know about such things, right?”

  I didn’t hear a damn note of the Berliner Philharmoniker that evening, even though I had a seat in the center block just six rows from the platform. Jerome Wellmann was in the row directly in front of me and turned around when I sat down.

  “What an interesting coincidence, finding you right behind me.”

  “I was given a ticket at the last minute,” I said.

  “You must know somebody with real clout,” he said, then quickly introduced me to the small, hawk-featured woman seated next to him.

  “My wife, Helen,” he said. “And this is the famous Thomas Nesbitt.”

  What did he mean by that? Was he nudging her to say: here’s the guy I was telling you about who’s been sleeping with the East German spy we allowed to be hired by us, never once revealing to her that, from the outset, we were on to her game. Was that comment about me “knowing someone with real clout” his way of telling me that he knew exactly who had supplied me with this seat tonight? All I could feel as Wellmann smiled hello at me was desperation. Did he know, via Bubriski, that Petra had used him as an alibi this weekend? The very fact of his presence here in front of me slammed home the truth that Bubriski had confronted me with only an hour or so earlier. She had lied to me about being in Hamburg on professional translation duty with her boss.

  Could she actually be with that fleshy creep Haechen? Had she slept with him throughout our love affair? How could she profess that I was the man of her life, then sneak off to that greasy little man and spread her legs for him?

  Listen to you, sounding exactly like the betrayed lover.

  I was still at that stage of disbelief where I wanted to find some sort of other interpretation of events, where Petra knew she was supplying him with false information, where she wasn’t sleeping with the guy, where she was only doing his bidding to . . .

  What exactly? She’d given up her child for adoption. She had to play the game in order to . . . ?

  The concert passed in a blur, as I kept trying to tell myself: this is all smoke and mirrors. The photographs were only half-incriminating. The faces of the couple in bed were blurred. She only went to Hamburg this weekend because . . .

  When the concert ended—amidst an eruption of bravos—Wellmann turned around and said:

  “May your weekend be an interesting one.”

  He knew. The bastard had been fully briefed. Yet his comment was also designed to be laden with ambiguity. After all, he could just be telling me to have an “interesting” couple of days.

  Again I was faced with the ongoing quandary of this shadowy realm into which I had been dropped. Was there anything called truth within its clandestine frontiers?

  It was a mild night—so I walked home, thinking, thinking, trying to reason this all out, telling myself that when Petra came home on Sunday there would be a logical explanation for it all, that all the pieces would fit, all the doubts would be quelled, and we’d be on our way to the States in a few weeks, married, happy, with Petra ready to find some sort of accommodation with the nightmares of her past.

  Enough, the voice of reason shouted in my inner ear. You are weaving a romantic fantasy in your head—and one that ignores documented facts.

  But when the facts are too difficult to bear . . .

  I reached the apartment by midnight. Alaistair was up as I came in, a bottle of vodka open on the table, a glass in front of him. The three canvases were no longer there—and he was staring at the now blank wall where they once lived.

  “Feel like a shot or three?” he asked as I walked in.

  I shook my head.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Just a lot on my mind,” I said.

  “Where’s Petra?”

  “Off in Hamburg.”

  “Business?”

  “Something like that.”

  I could see him studying me with care.

  “What’s happened, Thomas?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Where are your paintings?”
/>
  “Shipped this afternoon to my gallery in London. And you’re changing the subject. Something is seriously amiss with you.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “You’re being evasive, and that is not like you.”

  “Good night.”

  “Thomas . . .”

  “I don’t feel like talking right now.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, studying me with considerable care. “But whatever is going on—and I sense it has to do with Petra—don’t be imprudent or careless. She is wonderful and you need her.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said, sounding far too sharp and angry.

  I went upstairs and slammed the door. And dug out my own bottle of vodka and drank shot after shot until intoxication sent me reeling toward my bed. But the five percent of my brain that was still rational somehow remembered to set the clock for eight before throwing off my clothes and climbing in between the sheets.

  Then it was morning. The alarm was ringing. My head felt cleaved by all the clear Polish spirit I had imbibed. While subjecting myself to an arctic shower—and then forcing three cups of coffee down my throat—I decided on the course of action I would take when I met Bubriski in just less than an hour.

  He was awaiting me in a corner booth of the Café Istanbul, stirring a glutinous cup of Turkish coffee with one of the tiny bent demitasse spoons that were a feature of the place. And he was dressed in his version of casual: a red Lacoste shirt and yellowish khakis. It didn’t sit too well with his entire ultra-alert demeanor. It was as if he was trying to dress for a round of eighteen holes at a midscale country club and maintain surveillance on anyone who ventured near him at the same time. As I approached the booth in which he had parked himself, it was clear that he was eavesdropping on the Turkish guy and his very blond, very emaciated German girlfriend in the adjoining one.

  “She’s a junkie, he is her dealer and her occasional pimp,” he said as I slid in opposite him.