The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  Hamburg. The hotel was in the red light district. The Reeperbahn. This too was good news. They let me check in early. The hotel was cheap and shabby and very transient. Hookers work out of here. People come and go all the time. The sort of place where the staff are told not to notice anything—unless it involves nonpayment of a bill—and to never ask questions or tell anything to the police.

  I went for a walk in the Reeperbahn. I explored side streets and back alleys. I worked out a scenario in my head. I went back to the hotel. My sense of anxiety mounted. I smoked and studied a map of the city and its U-Bahn system. I waited for his call. It didn’t come until seven that night. He said he was in a bar across the road.

  “Do you want to come up?” I ask.

  “Later. I want to eat first.”

  Perfect.

  “I’ll be right down.”

  I picked up my daypack that I had brought along in my suitcase. It was unseasonably chilly, so I put on the denim jacket I traveled in, checking my pockets. All was ready.

  As I left the hotel I noted that no desk clerk was there to see me go out. I crossed the street. I entered the bar. It was packed. Haechen was standing at the counter, watching a naked woman on a nearby stage sticking a banana inside herself.

  “What do you think?” Haechen asked, nodding toward the stage show.

  I just shrugged, then said: “I’m hungry.”

  “We can eat here. They have food.”

  “I found a little Italian place not far away. Supposed to have the best pizzas in Hamburg.”

  “When did you do that?”

  “When I arrived.”

  “I ordered you to go straight to the hotel.”

  “And I felt like stretching my legs, so I took a little walk. And found this restaurant. And saw in the window some framed review from some newspaper saying . . .”

  “I don’t like you being insubordinate and disobeying my clear instructions.”

  “It was a ten-minute stroll, nothing more. I promise it won’t happen again. But this restaurant does look good.”

  “Expensive?”

  “No.”

  I could see Haechen thinking this over.

  “All right. But after dinner we go back to my room. And you will need to translate these before you return on Sunday.”

  He slid an envelope toward me. I immediately put it in my daypack.

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “And I have some great news for you. I will be able to score the transcripts of the interview with Hans and Heidi Braun by Monday.”

  “You serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is good news. You are certain you can get the interview transcript on Sunday?”

  “My friend said he would be working on it this weekend.”

  “Then you must photograph it that night. The timing is perfect. I’m staying on here for a few days, but they told me that getting that interview transcript before it is broadcast was a matter of extreme urgency. So you will need to leave the documents I’ve asked you to translate—and the photographs of the transcripts of the interviews—this Monday morning behind the cistern in the usual lavatory cubicle in Der Schlüssel. The fact that they will have it at the start of the week . . . believe me, my people will be terribly impressed with this prize you have given us. I think it will help your case enormously.”

  He threw some money on the bar. The woman onstage was currently doing unspeakable things with an orange. The lights were so dim—and the crowd so tightly packed—that I doubted anyone would ever remember that we were there.

  We started walking down some side streets, Haechen looking strangely relaxed, telling me he preferred Hamburg to Berlin, “because here not everybody is spying on each other.” He let me lead the way, going deeper and deeper into the labyrinth that was the Reeperbahn, passing numerous prostitutes and sex shops and loud bars, moving further into a quieter corner of the district.

  “You sure you know where you’re going?” he asked as we turned a corner into an area largely inhabited by warehouses.

  “Not far now,” I said.

  At the next corner I steered him right, saying the restaurant was at the end of this street. I let him walk a few paces ahead of me. As he turned right I could see him realizing that we had turned into an unlit back alley. Suddenly he wheeled around toward me. That’s when my right hand sprang out of nowhere and plunged a switchblade into his heart. I’d hidden the knife in the pocket of my jacket, along with a pair of plain black gloves. As he was walking ahead of me, I’d pulled the gloves on, coughed as the switchblade flicked open with a decided snap, then waited for him to turn around toward me as soon as he saw that we’d entered the dark alley from which he’d never emerge.

  Only that realization didn’t hit him until the knife made a direct hit. Using its now extended handle as a form of leverage, I shoved him up against the alley wall and immediately covered his nose and mouth with my free hand, pinching the nostrils closed, forcibly sealing his mouth with my palm, keeping my gaze fixed on him as he asphyxiated on his own blood. His eyes met mine—and I could see the shock, the fear, the terror. Then he began to vomit blood, and I had to pull my hand away. He collapsed on the ground, writhing for a few moments, before lying very still.

  Luck was still with me. No one was around. Nor were there any sounds of approaching vehicles or footsteps. Quickly I reached into his trouser pocket and removed his wallet. I opened his jacket and pulled out his identity papers. I loosened his belt and pulled down his pants and his Y-fronts. Then, with an almighty yank, I pulled the knife out of his chest. Holding the wallet, the identity papers, and the bloody knife in one hand, I stepped out into the side street again, looking both ways. I had chosen this area well. No one was here after dark. I turned right, walking quickly yet calmly down the street, then turned into another side alleyway, this one as dark and unlit as the one where Haechen now lay. Quickly I stripped off the bloody gloves, then my jacket, jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers—all of which were now stained with blood. Opening up the daypack I took out an identical set of clothes bought yesterday in Berlin. I was dressed in seconds, bundling the knife, my clothes, the wallet, and the papers into the bag. Again I looked both ways before stepping out into the street. No pedestrians. No cars. I had the place to myself. Turning right I hit a main thoroughfare and walked on until I found the U-Bahn station I’d discovered earlier. I took a train across the city to Planten un Blomen—a park that, according to the tourist map I had also bought at the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, had some forty-seven hectares and contained a lake. Emerging from the U-Bahn at the southwest corner of the park I walked into its confines, quickly finding my way to the lake, only passing one homeless man asleep on the grass. There was a bridge over a corner of the lake. The moonlight was noticeable here. I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the water. It sank quickly and, I sensed, deeply. Putting on the fresh pair of gloves that I had previously stuffed into my daypack, I then zipped open my shoulder bag, retrieved the knife, and tossed it into the water. I also pulled out the wallet—which was not that bloodied—removed the cash that was there, walked on until I was out of the park again, and dumped the wallet into a public trash can on the street. A few streets away, the identity papers went into another public receptacle. I was in an area not far from the Hauptbahnhof. Approaching the railway station I saw a huge industrial-sized trash container located in a refuse area behind its main entranceway. Fortunately the cover of this container was not locked, and it was swimming with rubbish. The backpack went in here. I moved on to the railway station. Having already balled up the gloves that had touched all the evidence, I dumped them into the first bin I could find.

  Then I turned into the U-Bahn station and took a train back to my hotel, where I stripped off all of my new clothes and had a very hot shower. I checked my watch. It was just 9:09. I had an hour or so before I needed to leave. I messed up the bed, so when the maid arrived tomorrow morning there were signs that somebody slept there. Then I opened a bottle of v
odka I brought with me and drank three shots and smoked three cigarettes. I gathered up my suitcase and went downstairs. Again luck was on my side, as there was nobody at the front desk as I left. A quick walk to the U-Bahn, a quick ride to the Hauptbahnhof, and the 11:07 back to Berlin.

  I was at home and in bed in my room before two this morning. I didn’t sleep well, expecting Stasi agents to burst in here any moment and cart me away.

  I hid at home all Saturday and translated the documents Haechen gave me. In an attempt to keep busy I also drafted my essay to be submitted with my US green card application. It’s now just after midnight. I snuck downstairs an hour ago to retrieve this notebook and start writing. I will see Thomas in less than eighteen hours. I’ll bring my suitcase with me, pretending that I’ve just arrived back from Hamburg. I must try to appear calm, try to mask all the fear I have right now.

  I know that, with Haechen’s people briefed, it’s obligatory that I photograph the interview transcripts on Sunday night and sneak out with the film while Thomas sleeps. The idea now is to play for time. Dropping off everything they’re expecting from me will cover my tracks. Because my story to them, should I be forced to tell it, will be:

  I arrived in Hamburg as directed. I waited at the hotel, but Haechen never appeared. I hung on until 10:00, then decided to leave—because Haechen and I had an unspoken rule that if he didn’t show up at a rendezvous I was to return home. And since home is Berlin, I caught the last train back. However, being the loyal operative, I still scored for you the transcripts of the interview with Hans and Heidi Braun.

  Indeed, being able to proffer these transcripts will be my alibi should the Stasi accuse me of having anything to do with Haechen’s disappearance.

  Anyway, when Haechen’s body is found, the knife wound, the missing wallet, the trousers around his legs will all make it seem like he picked up somebody for a bit of rough sex in a back alleyway and that somebody turned larcenous and homicidal. My hope, though, is that the lack of a wallet or identity papers means the body will go unclaimed. I doubt very much that the Stasi would send a representative to collect it. I checked into the hotel using false identity papers, thus there is also no official record of me ever having left Berlin.

  Perhaps, in the weeks remaining before Thomas and I move to the States, their new Haechen will get in touch and insist on meeting me in another sleazy hotel room. This time I will refuse to see him. Would they really expose me as their operative at Radio Liberty? That would be counterintuitive and hurt them, as it would have the American and West German security services on high alert for other operatives in other governmental bodies. Yes, they could kill me, but I gave them the big counter-propaganda coup by leaking them the Braun transcript days before the broadcast. Were they to kill me thereafter, it would probably expose the fact that I had been their mole at Radio Liberty. Again, would they really want that sort of interest around a lowly nobody like myself?

  I’m frightened. Frightened and desperate to get through these next few days. Though I feel a great shocked numbness in the wake of murdering Haechen, there is no guilt whatsoever. It had to be done. There was no other alternative if I wanted to be able to walk away, turn the page, start anew. Especially with this new life inside me.

  Can I do all that? Can I somehow shove this all into a dark room deep within my psyche and slam it shut, never to be opened again? I doubt it. But I do plan, as soon as I finish this entry, to go down to the basement and place this journal, alongside the first one, on the shelf inside the disused ventilation shaft that has always been their hiding place. Only this time I plan not to retrieve these journals again before Thomas and I leave the city. With any luck, ten, fifteen years from now, when I visit Berlin with Thomas and our two children, I will excuse myself for a couple of hours, make a pilgrimage back to Kreuzberg, loiter outside until someone enters or exits the building, then go downstairs and recover them again—as if they were a time capsule from a part of my life that has always shadowed me and made me what I am but which I have been able to compartmentalize. Not the loss of Johannes. I know that until the day I die, I will never be able to fully block that out of my life. Nor do I want to. Because his loss was such a profound one. But I will now try to slam the door on everything else, most especially the fact that I had to kill a man in order to live again. Haechen would have insisted on a termination as soon as my pregnancy started to show. His death allows me to keep the child that is now inside me. With strong effort I will be able to bury the memory of what I did to gain my freedom. Toss those remembrances into the darkest hole imaginable, cover it all with reinforced concrete, walk away from the burial site, never to visit it again.

  Can I actually do this? Can I force myself into willful amnesia about all that I have just done this weekend? Time will only tell.

  What I do know right now is this:

  All the murder evidence has been scattered. No sign of my ever having been in Hamburg exists.

  I’ve gotten away with it. I’ve gotten away with it all.

  And now . . .

  Now I’m free. Well and truly free. Now life with Thomas can really begin. Thomas and our child. I am going to be a mother again.

  I’m free.

  We’re free.

  PART FIVE

  ONE

  THE NOTEBOOK ENDED there. As I shut it and pushed it away from me, I glanced up and noticed darkness had fallen outside. In the few hours it took me to read through it all, I had been oblivious to the world outside of Petra’s words.

  I’m free.

  We’re free.

  I snapped my eyes shut and thought back to that scene in my apartment one day after she wrote this. When I confronted her with her “treason” against me. When she begged me to listen. When I refused to listen. When I was so enraged I couldn’t hear what she was telling me. Please let me explain.

  But instead, I only heard my own hurt pride, my own sense of outrage. Instead, in that crucial instant, I slammed the door.

  I reached for the bottle of Scotch near my elbow, poured myself another shot, threw it back, and stepped outside onto the deck that fronted my kitchen. As always, the Maine night was so black, so impermeable. The mercury was well below freezing, a light snow was falling, but I was indifferent to it all. For I was thinking back as well to that moment in that bar in Wedding and that CIA spook, Bubriski, explaining to me the theory of radar and telling me:

  “Radar works when a magnetic field—almost like a field of attraction—is set up between two objects. One object then sends out a signal to another object in the distance. And when that signal hits the other object, what is transmitted back is not the object itself. Rather it’s the image of that object.”

  Then he revealed all about Petra. And he used the radar metaphor to rub in the fact that I had fallen in love with the “image” that I had projected onto her and, in the process, had failed to see what she really was.

  Since then, whenever I found myself wondering whether I had made a desperately wrong call, when my guilt for shopping her to Bubriski and his fellow spooks sometimes loomed up out of nowhere, I tried to console myself with the thought: but she was projecting an image of herself that didn’t tally with the truth.

  Privately I always knew I was trying to validate the angry, impulsive decision I had made, a decision that, as I now learned, had destroyed everything.

  One moment. Why hadn’t I let her tell me what she was so desperate to tell me? Why had I allowed my hubris, my arrogance, to deny her the chance to explain everything?

  What page after page of the notebook told me was . . .

  “Love. Real love. Something—I have to admit within the safe confines of this journal—that I had never known.”

  Those were her words. One of so many declarations of love. For me. The man of my life, as she wrote so many times. When I read her thoughts about my vulnerabilities, my defenses, the way she so understood how all the childhood sadness still shadowed me. Had anyone ever really “got” me the way Pe
tra did?

  Standing out on that deck, staring out at the tenebrous void beyond, all I could now think was: you lost the one person in the world who ever truly loved you. And you lost her because you killed it. Killed it through self-righteousness. A need to be aggrieved. To punish without considering the circumstances.

  In page after page of the notebooks she also informed me of what she so wanted to let me know back then—that her role as a Stasi operative was one that had been imposed upon her, a form of maniacal blackmail that she only accepted because she knew it was the one and only way she might ever be reunited with her son. And I wouldn’t let her explain that to me.

  Or explain the horror of her indentured relationship with Haechen, and how she had finally resorted to murder because . . .

  Because it was the only way she thought she could be free to be with me. And because she was carrying our child.

  I’m free.

  We’re free.

  Our child.

  What happened to our child? Was it a boy, a girl? And he or she was now . . . ? My God, twenty-five years old.

  Immediately I reentered the kitchen, grabbing the cover letter from Johannes that accompanied the notebooks. On it was an email address. I moved quickly to my office, turned on my computer, and sent him an email that read:

  I am coming to Berlin the day after tomorrow. Can we meet up?

  And I signed my name.

  Then I switched over to a last-minute travel site and scored a cheap fare from Boston to Berlin via Munich. The flight would leave Boston tomorrow night at eight-thirty. On the same site, I found a hotel in a district called Mitte.