by Roy Chaney
“I just moved in a couple of days ago,” Peach said. “They call it a garden apartment, I don’t know why. I haven’t found any gardens. But when the wind is just right you can catch the smell from the trash bins around back.”
“Sounds exotic.”
“Nothing but the finest.”
Peach stood there, next to the stove. Still studying him. Then she stepped up to him and took hold of his arm. “I’d welcome you home but this isn’t much of a homecoming for you, is it, Bodo. I’m so sorry for you. If there’s anything I can do, anything at all.”
Hagen let his eyes wander across her features. Her blond hair was very different now—cut into some sort of a bob that angled down toward the front, about an inch off her shoulders. But aside from her hairstyle she was just the way he remembered. The watercolor gray of her big eyes. The small nose. The full lips glistening now with lipstick. Even the perfume she was wearing seemed familiar—a soft powdery smell with a trace of spice. She hadn’t changed. He smiled. “It’s all taken care of, Peach. Right now I’m just worn-out. It’s been a long day. But it’s good to see you. You look great.”
Peach let go of his arm, stepped back. Stood there with her hands on her hips. Smiling now too. “You’ve put on weight, Bodo.”
“A little.”
“And you look older.”
“I am older. So are you.”
“Do I look older?”
“You look great.”
“You look great too.”
“You’re lying. Now how about that drink?”
“Any flavor you want, as long as it’s vodka.”
Peach rummaged around in a paper grocery bag, pulled out a fresh bottle of vodka. She found a couple of glasses in a cardboard box and wiped them out with a dish towel. Pulled cranberry juice and ice cubes from the refrigerator, Hagen noticing the take-out containers of Chinese food on the top shelf. Hagen stood back and watched Peach mix the drinks. He hadn’t been lying—Peach did look great. She was forty years old but her body looked lean and hard. Probably had a health club membership, sweated it out every day on the treadmill. But the curves were all still there. Maybe not as pronounced as they once were but still there, in the right places. Her blue jeans were tight and showed off the curves of her hips. And then the larger curves of her breasts that were now pressing against the thin cotton of her black camisole.
“Try that on for size,” Peach said, handing him one of the drinks.
There wasn’t any furniture in the living room to speak of, only the stacks of moving boxes. Hagen followed Peach out onto a balcony. Down below them in a long courtyard was a swimming pool. The lights in the pool were on and the deep blue of the water shimmered in the night. Hagen sat down at the small café table in the center of the balcony. Peach lingered by the railing for a moment, sipping her drink.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Peach said.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“There wasn’t much in the newspapers. Just that he was shot out at Hoover.”
“Then you know as much as I do.”
“The police must be working on it.”
“I’ve talked to them. They haven’t gotten far.”
Peach stepped away from the railing, sat down at the table. Set her drink down. She looked at him in silence and then she smiled again. That same wide smile that he remembered, with just a hint of sadness at the corners. Like there was some great unhappiness in her past that she could never quite shake off. Hagen had always thought the hint of sadness in her smile made her face more attractive, gave it depth. And yet it was off-putting too.
“I hear Jimmy Ray was killed,” Hagen said, just to change the subject.
Peach fidgeted with her hair. “You didn’t know that?”
“I haven’t exactly been around. Do you still see any of the old crew from Diamond Jim’s?”
“I can’t remember the last time. It’s been years.”
“Do you remember that you owe me a lunch?”
“I’m sorry about that. That was wrong.”
“Why didn’t you show up?”
“I tried to talk you out of leaving but I couldn’t. So I decided that I didn’t want to see you at all. I had no intention of being a good sport about it. I was angry. I think I’m still a little angry.”
“That was ten years ago, Peach.”
“All right. So maybe I’m not angry anymore. And to settle my debt, I’ll buy you that lunch. I’ve got some things going on today, but how about Friday?”
“Sure, it’s your nickel.” Hagen spoke now with a lightness he didn’t feel. “So what have you been doing for the last ten years, besides skipping out on lunch dates?”
“The usual. Breathing. Paying bills. Watching late-night television. Getting a tattoo. Watering the plants.”
“You’ve got a tattoo?”
“Everybody’s got one.”
“Let’s see it.”
“I can’t show it to you.”
“Is it ugly?”
“It’s pretty. It’s two roses, with their stems intertwined.”
“Sounds fraught with poetic feeling.”
“It was either the two roses or Minnie Mouse.”
“Minnie Mouse would’ve been good.”
“It was a tough call.”
“Show it to me.”
“I can’t. It’s in a private place.”
“What kind of private place?”
“Private as in ‘none of your business.’ ”
Hagen took a drink. The cranberry juice tasted a little bitter. The vodka was a good brand though. Smooth and strong. Down in the courtyard the reflections off the water played against the wall of the building opposite the balcony. Hagen recalled another apartment that Peach had lived in. Right about the time she left Diamond Jim’s to go to work at Caesars Palace. One of Peach’s neighbors in an apartment that faced hers had a taste for peeping into her windows with a pair of field binoculars. Hagen had to go over to the neighbor’s apartment one day and have a quiet word with him. And that put an end to the peeping. No doubt because the neighbor found it difficult to use binoculars with his broken nose covered by a metal splint held down with medical tape. Still, it was a better deal for the neighbor than the solution Peach had proposed at the time—load up her Remington target rifle and shoot out his windows, preferably with the neighbor standing behind them. Peach had grown up on a ranch in northern Arizona, and early on in her childhood she’d traded dolls and toy ovens for breaking horses and shooting empty soda cans off fence posts. She’d even won a few shooting trophies over the years—Hagen had watched her win one up at the Pahrump Rifle and Pistol Club, decided right then that she was a better shot with a rifle than he’d ever be.
“Still putting time in at the rifle range, Peach?”
“Now and then. Just to work off some energy.”
“How’s your eye these days?”
“Set your glass on top of your head and let me take a shot at it, and we’ll just see how good my eye is.”
“I’ll take a pass. I’m not real fond of parlor tricks with a Remington.”
Peach shook her head. “I sold the Remington long ago. Bought a souped-up Ruger from a company in England. Lightweight, the whole thing built to fit my specifications. Made out of some kind of composite metal that NASA or someone developed. Very twenty-first century.”
Hagen smiled. “Keep playing with guns, you’ll scare off all the suitors. Husbands don’t generally want wives who wave firearms around at awkward moments.”
“Who says I’m not married?”
“So where do you keep your husband?”
“I keep him in Texas. We’re separated. You want another drink?”
They finished the first round of drinks and then a second round. Sitting out on the balcony. Talking. When the second round was gone and Peach went inside to make two more Hagen stood up, stepped over to the railing. Looked up at the night sky. Looked down at the swimming pool. He was still standin
g there, leaning against the railing, when Peach returned with the fresh drinks. He heard her setting the drinks down on the table, stepping up behind him. She placed her hands on his shoulders. Began kneading the tight muscles under his shirt.
“You’re tense, Bodo. I can just look at you and see that you’re tensed up.”
“I’m not tense.”
Peach kept on kneading. “Your muscles feel like steel wire.”
“Like I said, it’s been a long day. That’s all.”
“You need to get more exercise.”
“That pool down there looks inviting.”
“Swimming. A good way to relax.”
“I didn’t bring my swim shorts.”
“Well, there’s other ways to relax.”
“Take a trip out to the rifle range?”
“I was thinking along different lines.”
Something in the tone of her voice made Hagen turn around. She was looking up at him, a smile on her face. With just that hint of sadness. He reached out and she moved into his arms and he held her. Looking down at the softness of her face. Wondering if he could work the sadness out of her smile by applying pressure with his lips.
He tried it. It seemed to work.
“You still interested in my tattoo?”
“Sure I am, Peach.”
6.
HAGEN AWOKE with a start.
For a moment he thought he was still at Peach’s apartment. Thought she was lying right there beside him in bed. Then his eyes focused and he looked around and saw that he was alone in his hotel room.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning.
Hagen shaved and showered. The merciless Las Vegas sun was creeping in through the cracks between the drawn curtains. Hagen’s hard-shell suitcase rested on the folding stand near the bed. When he opened the suitcase he paused to inspect the broken combination lock once again.
Someone had been in his room last night. And it wasn’t the maid giving him turndown service.
Hagen couldn’t be sure when the room had been tossed. He hadn’t come back to the room after his meeting with Suzanne Cosette. But when he returned from Peach’s place early that morning he found that Ronnie’s two suitcases and his own had been opened and searched.
It might have happened while he was at the Mirage, talking to Cosette. Or it might have happened later.
Hagen was inclined to believe the first option.
Cosette had asked him to meet her across the street at the Mirage. Most people pursuing a contact would’ve offered to meet Hagen at his own hotel, but no, she’d wanted him to come to her. And the Mirage wasn’t so far away that he might’ve balked. He’d been at the Mirage for forty-five minutes—more than long enough for an accomplice to search Hagen’s room. Hagen thought of the swarthy young man who’d seemed to be watching him when he first arrived at the Mirage. If Cosette had an accomplice, the swarthy man in the cardboard blazer got Hagen’s vote.
But whoever had tossed his room had left without the item they’d come for—the wooden hand of a Russian Jesus.
Hagen called room service for a pot of coffee. When the coffee arrived it was tepid and weak. He drank down a cup before he sat down to make some phone calls.
The first one was to the Sniff, who told Hagen what Hagen already knew. Sidney Trunk died in a house fire in Boulder City early that morning.
“I was supposed to meet Trunk last night,” Hagen said. “When I got out there his house was a barbecue pit and Trunk was on his way to the morgue.”
“It was on the news,” the Sniff said. “The Boulder police say it’s a torch job.”
“Did Trunk have enemies?”
“Who doesn’t.”
“Serious enemies?”
“I didn’t know him.”
“But Martinez knew him. Sniff, I still want to talk to Martinez.”
There was a pause. Hagen heard a rattling on the other end of the line, sounded like ice cubes in a glass. Then, “Martinez doesn’t want to get involved in this.”
“He’s already involved. If I go to McGrath right now and start talking about what I know, his name is going to come up. If he wants to stay away from the law, he needs to talk to me. Then maybe I’ll keep his name under wraps.”
The Sniff agreed to contact Martinez again.
The second phone call was to Diamond Jim’s Casino in downtown Las Vegas. The woman who answered transferred him to a man in the back office. Hagen asked if Marty Ray was around. The man said that Marty Ray wasn’t in right now but he might be in later. The man asked for Hagen’s name, said he’d take a message.
Hagen didn’t leave his name or a message.
Next Hagen dialed a long-distance number. Paris, France. Hagen studied the business card Cosette had given him while the phone line went through several clicks and changes in tone. It would be eight o’clock in the evening in Paris—maybe too late to catch someone at work. Hagen heard a muffled ringing that sounded like it was coming from underwater.
A man answered. “Amarantos Antiquités.”
Hagen asked in French to speak with Suzanne Cosette. The man said she wasn’t available. When Hagen asked if she was still in Las Vegas the man didn’t say one way or the other, but he wasn’t surprised by the question. When Hagen asked to speak to Cosette’s boss the man said that Mister Amarantos wasn’t available either. Hagen asked a few questions about the merchandise in the shop. The answers sounded genuine.
Hagen thanked the man and hung up the phone.
Hagen had learned two things—there was indeed an Amarantos Antiquités in Paris and there was a Suzanne Cosette who worked for that firm. The woman’s story had sounded far-fetched last night. It seemed slightly less far-fetched now.
As Hagen finished the last of the coffee he felt a presence in the room. He looked around, startled. Half expecting to see Peach standing there in morning disarray. Smiling, looking sheepish.
But there was no one there.
It was raining hard in Berlin the day Hagen arrived.
As the Boeing 757 broke through the cloud cover and began its final approach to Berlin Tegel Airport, Hagen studied the city through the window. Berlin looked vast and grim in the rain. Clusters of pallid brick buildings were hemmed in by thick stands of dark trees. In the distance Hagen could see heavy fog clinging to the landscape.
William Severance met him at Tegel and drove him directly to a small gasthaus in the Schoneberg District. There Severance and Hagen drank Berliner Pils and ate fresh hot spaetzle while Severance explained the job at hand.
“What do you know about Die Wende?” Severance said.
Die Wende. “The change.” The German name for the collapse of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik—East Germany—in the autumn of 1989. At the time of Die Wende, the East German Ministry for State Security, more commonly known as the Stasi, maintained spies throughout the world. Many of these spies—especially those who had worked within West Germany—were highly placed in government, the military or private industry. The Stasi’s six million intelligence files chronicled the activities of these Stasi agents within and outside of East Germany, as well as the Stasi’s support of numerous international terrorist organizations.
The Stasi files were too incriminating to be allowed to fall into the hands of another intelligence service. In the midst of East Germany’s collapse, Stasi officers around the country—from East Berlin to Potsdam, from Metterheim to Rostock to Zwickau—shredded intelligence files by the box full. When the shredding machines broke down under the strain the documents were burned or torn up by hand. But destroying six million files required more time than the Stasi had at its disposal. As East Germany crumbled teams of agents from the West German Federal Intelligence Service—the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND—aided by the CIA and Great Britain’s MI6, descended upon the Stasi offices and seized what files they could find. Even the shredded remains of documents were carefully collected and carried away. Garbage bags full of shredded Stasi documents were stored in office
s in Berlin and Nuremberg, and a staff of men and women with high-level security clearances was assembled and given the Herculean task of reassembling these documents, one sliver of paper at a time, using nothing but cellophane tape and patience. These men and women came to be known as “puzzlers.”
The job that Severance discussed in the Berlin gasthaus the day Hagen arrived carried the code name Blau Licht—“Blue Light.” Blau Licht was a joint BND-CIA-MI6 operation. The objective of Blau Licht was simple—use the documents reassembled by the puzzlers to identify former Stasi agents and other “individuals of interest”—a euphemism that included Stasi-supported terrorists and assassins as well as former agents of the Stasi’s sister service, the defunct Soviet KGB. In some cases the BND wanted to bring these individuals to justice. In other cases they wanted to place them under surveillance in the hope of learning who they worked for now.
Blau Licht went on for years. Hagen’s job was to assess the value of reconstructed Stasi documents and follow up on leads when leads could be identified. Much of the time there were too few details to go on. The documents full of code names and aliases couldn’t be made to reveal their secrets, as hard as Hagen and his colleagues tried. When particular individuals were identified and investigations initiated, the investigations more often than not led nowhere. At times Hagen felt like nothing more than a file clerk engaged in the day-to-day grind of papierkrieg—the paperwork shuffle of the petty bureaucrat.
Then one day Severance dropped the Totenkopf documents on Hagen’s desk. “Take special care with these,” Severance said. “You’re going to be spending some time with them.”
There were a total of twelve documents. Notations on several of the pages indicated that the documents had all once belonged in the same Stasi file—zentralarchiv file 47-5563/78. Ten of the documents detailed the training of three Stasi operatives code-named Totenkopf, Natzweiler and Hohle at a Stasi training camp near Dresden in 1985. The training reports appeared to have been written by at least two separate Stasi case officers. The remaining two documents appeared to be field reports on meetings with one of these individuals—agent Natzweiler—in Hamburg in 1986.