The Cold War Swap

by Ross Thomas

  the cold

  war swap

  also by Ross Thomas

  The Seersucker Whipsaw

  Cast a Yellow Shadow

  The Singapore Wink

  The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

  The Backup Men

  The Porkchoppers

  If You Can’t Be Good

  The Money Harvest

  Yellow-Dog Contract

  Chinaman’s Chance

  The Eighth Dwarf

  The Mordida Man

  Missionary Stew

  Briarpatch

  Out on the Rim

  The Fourth Durango

  Twilight at Mac’s Place

  Voodoo, Ltd.

  Ah, Treachery!

  the cold

  war swap

  Ross Thomas

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martins Press.

  THE COLD WAR SWAP. Copyright © 1966 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction © 2003 by Stuart M. Kaminsky. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thomas, Ross, 1926–1995.

  The Cold War swap / Ross Thomas.—1st St. Martin’s Minotaur ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-31581-3

  1. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Fiction. 2. Americans—Germany—Fiction. 3. Bonn (Germany)—Fiction. 4. Defectors—Fiction. 5. Cold War—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3570.H58C65 2003

  813'. 54—dc21

  2002191951

  First published by William Morrow & Co., Inc., in 1966

  D 1 0 9 8 7 6 5

  introduction

  by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Ross was forty years old when he wrote his first novel, The Cold War Swap, in 1966. Coming from a career as a soldier, reporter, and political campaigner, he leapt onto the literary scene with that first attempt at fiction and won himself an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery.

  The principal settings for Ross’s first novel were two cities in which he had worked, Bonn and Berlin. The cities are portrayed vividly with a postwar noir style that sets a tone of quiet despair in which the characters will do almost anything to survive. And the beauty of Ross’s characters in this dark world is that they are colorful and alive and they seldom plan ahead. Critics have compared Ross’s work to that of Raymond Chandler, not in subject matter but in style. I've always thought of Ross as the American Eric Ambler by way of Elmore Leonard. Ross was the master of colorful, unpredictable characters, thieves, scoundrels, drunks, assassins, madmen, fools, bureaucrats, and confused and bewildered professionals.

  In The Cold War Swap as in so many of his novels, it is sometimes difficult to tell if we are meant to take the characters seriously or if the author is leading us down a series of streets, alleys, and dark rooms with no idea himself of who or what will be around the next corner.

  Is McCorkle, who sits in his shady bar in Bonn and drinks, broods, and smokes to generic excess, the comic side of Rick in Casablanca? Is Maas, the fat, sweating villain, the comic side of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon? Is Padillo Zachary Scott’s distorted mirror image in The Mask of Dimitrios?

  The book is a nonstop tale of blunders by both sides of the Cold War, a constantly changing attempt by mistaken spies and agents to hatch schemes they never quite put together. Is this book a soft laugh at the Cold War novel? I like to think that it is.

  Men stagger into hotel rooms and fall dead. Bullets slowly kill off most of the cast. The best character in the book, Cook, the rich alcoholic, leaves the stage with the reader feeling that Thomas has played a dark joke on us, removing the character most full of life when we need him most.

  There are things in The Cold War Swap that would seem badly outdated in other hands. In fact, there are dozens of books with the same theme, the rescuing of scientists from behind the Iron Curtain. Most of them are forgotten not because of their subject matter but because their pages were not peopled by the memorable, colorful characters of a Ross Thomas.

  A caricature in other hands became a vulnerable human in Ross’s books. The two gay defectors in The Cold War Swap move from near cliché to sympathetic humanness. Waas, the vile fat opportunist, is given his best shot and gradually becomes a basically bad man whom we can truly understand.

  I knew Ross, a very soft-spoken, generous, quiet man who displayed none of the flamboyance of his characters. Ross was almost nondescript, seldom smiled, traveled everywhere with his wife, and quietly took in and turned to brilliant fiction the quirks and quivers of those around him, from the small, enthusiastic Mexican band that couldn’t carry a tune to the Italian taxi driver who displayed his pride in his mastery of the English language by destroying it.

  Ross listened. He took no notes. He didn’t seem to be there, didn’t ask questions. He observed. He imagined.

  Ross could turn a phrase with the best of our ilk and not draw attention to it. Ross could surprise us with a sudden turn that left us bewildered and in the palm of his hand, wondering what would happen to the survivors.

  The man was a masterful storyteller.

  He once told me that he had no idea what his characters were going to do when he sat down each day to write, no idea of how fate might step in. He said, "I often wonder what’s going to happen next and that’s what makes it interesting for me and, if I’m lucky, for the reader."

  He was more than lucky.

  the cold

  war swap

  CHAPTER 1

  He was the last one aboard the flight from Tempelhof to the Cologne-Bonn airport. He was late and became flustered and sweaty when he couldn’t find his ticket until the search reached his inside breast pocket.

  The English stewardess was patient and even smiled sweetly as he finally handed it over with mumbled apologies. The seat next to mine was vacant and he headed for it, banging a shabby briefcase against the arms of the passengers as he bumbled down the aisle. He dropped into the seat with a snort, not tall, squatty, maybe even fat, wearing a heavy brown suit that seemed to have been cut by a tinsmith and a dark-brown hat of no particular shape or distinction other than the fact that it sat squarely on his head with what seemed to be a measured levelness.

  He tucked his briefcase between his legs and buckled his seat belt but didn’t remove his hat. He leaned forward to peer out the window as the plane taxied to the end of the runway. During take-off his hands blanched white at the knuckles as they squeezed the arms of his seat. When he realized that it wasn’t the pilot’s first time up he leaned back, produced a package of Senoussi and lighted one with a wooden match. He blew out the uninhaled smoke and then glanced at me with that speculative look which stamps a fellow traveler as something of a conversationalist.

  I had been in Berlin for a three-day weekend, during which I had managed to spend too much money and to acquire a splendid hangover. I had stayed at the Hotel am Zoo, where they make Martinis as good as any place in Europe with the possible exception of Harry’s Bar in Venice. They had taken their usual toll, and now I needed to sleep during the hour or so that it takes to fly from Berlin to Bonn.

  But the man in the next seat wanted to talk. I almost sensed his mind working for the gambit as I leaned back as far as the chair would recline, my eyes closed, my head throbbing in close harmony with the grind of the engines.

  When his opener came, it wasn’t o
riginal.

  “You are going to Köln?”

  “No,” I said, keeping my eyes closed, “I’m going to Bonn.”

  “Very good! I too am going to Bonn.”

  That was nice. That made us shipmates.

  “My name is Maas,” he said, grabbing my hand and giving it a fine German shake. I opened my eyes.

  “I’m McCorkle. Delighted.”

  “Ach! You are not German?”

  “American.”

  “But you speak German so well.”

  “I've been here a long time.”

  “It’s the best way to learn a language,” Maas said, nodding his head in approval. “You must live in the country in which it is spoken.”

  The plane kept on flying and we sat there, Maas and I, making small talk about Berlin and Bonn and what some Americans thought of the German Situation. My head kept on aching and I was having a rotten time.

  Even if it hadn’t been cloudy, there is not much to see between Berlin and Bonn. It’s drear and it’s drab, like flying over Nebraska and Kansas on a February day. But things got brighter. Maas rummaged through his briefcase and produced a Halbe Flasche of Steinhaeger. That was thoughtful. Steinhaeger is best when drunk ice cold and washed down with a liter or so of beer. We drank it warm out of two small silver cups that he also furnished. By the time the twin-spired Dome of Cologne came into view we were almost on a “du” basis—but not quite. Yet we were good enough pals for me to offer Maas a ride into Bonn.

  “You are too kind. Surely it is an imposition. I thank you very much. Come! A bird cannot fly on one wing. Let us finish the bottle.”

  We finished it and Maas tucked the two silver cups back into his brief case. The pilot set the plane down with only a couple of bumps and Maas and I filed out past the mild disapproval of the two hostesses. My headache was gone.

  Maas had only his briefcase, and after I had collected my one-suiter we headed for the parking lot, where I was pleasantly surprised to find my car intact. The German juvenile delinquents—or half-strongs—can hot-wire a car in a time that makes their American counterparts look sick. I was driving a Porsche that year and Maas crooned over it. “Such a wonderful car. Such machinery. So fast.” He kept on murmuring praise while I unlocked it and stowed my case in what is optimistically called the backseat. There are several advantages to a Porsche that I find no other car has, but Dr. Ferdinand Porsche did not design it for fat people. He must have had in mind the long, lean racing types, such as Moss and Hill. Herr Maas tried to get into the car head first, instead of butt-first. His brown double-breasted suit gaped open and the Luger he wore in a shoulder holster showed for only a second.

  I took the Autobahn back to Bonn. It’s a little longer and less picturesque than the conventional way, which is the route used by the junketing prime ministers, presidents and premiers who have reason to come calling on the West German capital. The car was running well and I held it to a modest 140 kilometers an hour and Herr Maas hummed softly to himself as we whizzed by the Volkswagens, the Kapitans, and the occasional Mercedes.

  If he wanted to carry a gun, that was his business. There was some law against it, but then there were some laws against adultery, murder, arson and spitting on the sidewalk. There were all sorts of laws, and I decided, somewhat mellowed by the Steinhaeger, that if a fat little German wanted to carry a Luger, he probably had very good reasons.

  I was still congratulating myself on this sophisticated, worldly-wise attitude when the left rear tire blew. With what I continue to regard as masterly self-control I kept my foot off the brake, hit the gas pedal lightly, oversteered a bit, and brought the car back into line—on the wrong side of the road perhaps, but at least in one piece. At that point there is no divider in the Autobahn. We were equally lucky that there was no traffic coming from the opposite direction.

  Maas did not say a word. I cursed for five seconds, at the same time wondering how well the Michelin guarantee would pay off.

  “My friend,” Mass said, “you are an excellent driver.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pulling the knob that unlocked the front lid where the spare was kept.

  “If you will indicate where the tools are stored, I will make the necessary repairs.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “No! At one time I was a quite competent mechanic. If you do not mind, I will make the reparations.”

  The Porsche has a side mount for the jack, but I didn’t have to tell Herr Maas. He had the blown-out tire off in three minutes, and two minutes later he was giving the spare’s last lug a final jerk with the wrench and slapping on the hubcap with the air of a man who knows he has done a competent job. He didn’t take off his coat.

  The hood was up and Maas rolled the blowout to the front of the car and wrestled it into its nook. He banged the lid down and got back into the car, butt-first this time. Back on the Autobahn, I thanked him for his efforts.

  “It was nothing, Herr McCorkle. It was my pleasure to be of assistance. If you would be kind enough to drop me off at the Bahnhoff when we arrive in Bonn, I will still be in your debt. I can obtain a taxi there.”

  “Bonn’s not that big,” I said. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

  “But I must go to Bad Godesberg. It is far from Bonn’s center.”

  “Fine. That’s where I’m going too.”

  I drove over Victoria Bridge to Reuterstrasse and then to Koblenzerstrasse, a double-laned boulevard dubbed the Diplomatic Racetrack by the local wags. Of a morning you could see the Chancellor gliding grandly in his Mercedes 300, heralded by a couple of tough motorcycle cops and the White Mouse, a specially built Porsche that preceded the entourage, shooing the common folk aside as the procession made its solemn way to the Palais Chambourg.

  “Where do you want to go in Godesberg?” I asked.

  He fumbled in his suit pocket and produced a blue notebook. He turned to a page and said: “To a cafe. It is called Mac’s Place. Do you know it?”

  “Sure,” I said, shifting down into second for a red light. “I own it.”

  CHAPTER 2

  You can probably find a couple of thousand spots like Mac’s Place in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. They are dark and quiet with the furniture growing just a little shabby, the carpet stained to an indeterminate shade by spilled drinks and cigarette ashes, and the bartender friendly and fast but tactful enough to let it ride if you walk in with someone else’s wife. The drinks are cold, generous and somewhat expensive; the service is efficient; and the menu, although usually limited to chicken and steaks, affords very good chicken and steaks indeed.

  There were a few other places in Bonn and Bad Godesberg that year where you could get a decently mixed drink. One was the American Embassy Club (where you had to be a member or a guest); another was the Schaumberger Hof, where you paid expense-account prices for two centiliters of Scotch.

  I opened the saloon the year after they elected Eisenhower president for the first time. What with his campaign promise to go to Korea and all, the Army decided that national security would not suffer appreciably if the Military Assistance Advisory Group housed in the sprawling U.S. Embassy on the Rhine did without my services. In fact, there was some mild speculation as to why they had called me up for the second time at all. I wondered, too, since no one had asked me to advise or assist on anything important during my pleasant twenty-month stay at the Embassy, which is to be turned into a hospital if and when Germany’s capital is ever moved back to Berlin.

  A month after my discharge in Frankfurt I was back in Bad Godesberg, sitting on a couple of cases of beer in a low-ceilinged room that once had been a Gaststatte. It had been gutted by fire, and I signed a long lease with the owner on the understanding that he was to provide only the basic repairs; any additional redecorating and improvement would be at my own expense. I sat there on the beer cases, surrounded by boxes of fixtures, furniture, and unpacked glasses, nursing a bottle of Scotch, and filling out on a portable typewriter my eighth ap
plication in sextuplicate for permission to sell food and drink—all by the warm glow of a kerosene lamp. The electricity would take another application.

  When he came in, he came in quietly. He could have been there only a minute or he could have been there ten. I jumped when he spoke.

  “You McCorkle?”

  “I’m McCorkle,” I said, keeping on with my typing.

  “You got a nice place here.”

  I turned around to look at him. “Christ—a Yalely.”

  He was about five-eleven and would have weighed in at around 160. He dragged up a case of beer to sit on, and the way he moved reminded me of a Siamese torn I had once owned named Pajama Cord.

  “New Jersey, not New Haven,” he said.

  He wore the uniform well: the crew-cut black hair; the young, tanned, friendly face; the soft tweed three-button jacket with a button-down shirt and regimental-striped tie that sported a knot the size of a Thompson seedless grape. He also had on plain-toed cordovan shoes that gleamed blackly in the lamp’s light. I didn’t see his socks, but I assumed that they weren’t white.

  “Princeton, maybe?”

  He grinned. It was a smile that almost reached his eyes. “You’re getting warm, friend. Really the Blue Willow Bar and Grill in Jersey City. We had a dandy shuffleboard crowd on Saturday nights.”

  “So what can I do for you besides offering a beer case to sit on and a drink on the house?” I passed him the Scotch and he took two long gulps without bothering to wipe the neck of the bottle. I thought that was polite.

  He passed it back to me and I took a drink. He waited until I lighted a cigarette. He seemed to have plenty of time.

  “I’d like a piece of this place.”

  I looked around at the shambles. “A piece of nothing is nothing.”

  “I’d like to buy in. Half.”

  “Just like that, huh?”

  “Just like that.”

  I picked up the Scotch and handed it to him and he took another drink and then I had another one.