by Ross Thomas
Burmser shook his head in disgust. “You’re dumb, McCorkle. A real dumb bastard. Let’s go, Bill.”
They left. I walked over to the phone and dialed a direct long-distance call to Bonn. It answered on the first ring.
“Sitting in your favorite chair sipping your favorite beverage, Cooky?”
“Hello, Mac. Where are you?”
“The Berlin Hilton, and I need five thousand bucks by eight o'clock tonight. Fifties and twenties.”
There was a silence. “I’m thinking,” Cooky said.
“You’re taking one straight from the bottle, you mean.”
“It helps. There are two possibilities: a pigeon at American Express or another one at Deutsche Bank downtown. I’ve got plenty in both accounts. I’m rich, you know.”
“I know. The bank’s closed, isn’t it?”
“I’m a big depositor. I’ll get it.”
“Can you get an evening flight up here?”
“Sure. I’ll tell New York I’ve got a touch of virus.”
“I’ll get you a room.”
“Make it a suite. I know a couple of pigeons in Berlin. We may need room to romp. By the way, my friend from Düsseldorf just left. Somebody had a tap on the phone at your apartment and at the saloon.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I’ll see you tonight. With the money.”
“I appreciate it, Cooky.”
“No sweat.”
My watch said it was four P.M. I had five hours before Weatherby was to pick me up. I looked at the Scotch bottle but decided against it. Instead I went down to the lobby and reserved a suite for Cooky and cashed a check for two thousand Marks. I went back up to my room, wrote out a check to Mr. Cook Baker for five thousand dollars, put it in an envelope, and sealed it. I took the .38 out of the suitcase and put it in my jacket pocket. Then I mixed a drink and hauled a chair around so that I could look out over the city. I sat there for a long time, watching the shadows deepen from gray into black. The grays and blacks matched my thoughts. It was a long, lonely afternoon.
At eight forty-five Cooky called from the lobby. I told him to come up and he said he would as soon as he checked in and got his bag to his room. He knocked on the door ten minutes later. I let him in and he handed me a tightly wrapped package a little over an inch thick. “I had to take hundreds—ten of them,” he said. “Ten hundreds, fifty fifties, and seventy-five twenties. That’s five thousand bucks.”
I handed him the envelope containing the check. “Here’s my check.” He didn’t look at it and I didn’t count the money.
“Was it much trouble?”
“I had to threaten to withdraw my account is all. Where’s the booze?”
“In the closet.”
He got it and poured himself a drink, his usual half-tumbler.
“Want some ice?”
“Takes too long. I had a very dry trip. I sat next to this pigeon who was afraid of landings. She wanted to hold my hand. She held it between her legs. She’s the secretary for a Turkish trade mission. What’s new with you and why the suspicious-looking bulge in your pocket? It ruins the drape.”
“I carry large sums of money.”
“Is Mike in a five-thousand-buck jam? That’s respectable trouble.” I turned the chair back from the window so that it faced the room and sat down. Cooky had propped himself up on two pillows on the bed, his drink cuddled against his chest.
“Mr. Burmser paid me a call,” I said. “He thinks I’m a dumb bastard. I tend to agree.”
“Did he have his boy with him—the toothpaste ad?”
“You know him?”
“We’ve met. He’s very handy with a knife. I understand.”
“It’s part of his image.”
Cooky’s private joke played around his lips. “You seem to be running with the fast crowd at the country club.”
There was a light tap at the door. I got up and opened it. Weatherby stood there, his face the color of wet newsprint. “Little early, I’m afraid,” he muttered, then stumbled into the room and sprawled on the floor. He tried to get up once, shuddered, and lay still. There was a small hole in the back of his mackintosh. I knelt quickly and turned him over. His hands were covered with blood, and when his topcoat and jacket flopped open I saw that his shirt was soaked with it. His eyes were open, his mouth gaped, and his teeth were bared in a smile or a grimace: it was hard to tell which.
Cooky said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“He must have been holding the blood in.”
I felt for the pulse in his neck. It seemed like the thing to do. It wasn’t necessary. He was as dead as he looked, as dead as he would ever be.
CHAPTER 10
I stepped back and bumped against the bed. It seemed that I should do something, so I sat on it and stared down at the sprawled body of Weatherby. I tried to think of something else to do besides sit on the bed, but nothing came to mind.
“Who is he?” Cooky asked.
“He said that he was John Weatherby and that he was British and that he used to work with government here in Berlin. He said he was going to take me to the Café Budapest tonight to meet Padillo. He was working for him. He said.”
“Now what?”
I stared at Weatherby some more. “Nothing. I’ll go to the café alone. You’d better get down to your room.”
“No cops?”
“They’ll be here soon enough after the maid comes in to turn down the bed. If Mike’s in the kind of a fix that gets people killed, he’s in a bad way. I can’t wait around. There’s not enough time.”
“I think I’ll tag along.”
“It’s not your show.”
“I’ve got five thousand invested and you might be passing bum checks.”
“Tag along and you might not get the chance to find out.”
Cooky smiled his private-joke smile. “I want to stop by my room first. Meet me there in five minutes.” He stepped over Weatherby’s legs and went out.
It was some while after Cooky left before I got up and put on my raincoat and slipped the bundle of money into one pocket and the revolver into the other. It no longer felt ridiculous. I went over to the window and stared out at the lights, and after I felt that five minutes had passed I took the elevator down to Cooky’s suite.
“A whore’s dream,” he said, opening the door to my knock. He walked over to his suitcase, which lay spread open on one of the twin double beds that took up most of the room. He took out a long, thin silver flask and slipped it into his hip pocket.
“Taking only the essentials, I see.”
“Emergency rations,” Cooky said. “I intend to make do with the local stuff.”
He looked down at his suitcase thoughtfully, seemed to hesitate, and then took out a wicked-looking revolver with a short barrel. It was an ugly gun, designed to be used quickly and up close, not for plinking at rabbits off the back porch.
“What’s that?” I said.
“This,” he said, holding the gun delicately by its two-inch barrel, “is a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. Note that the forward end of the trigger guard has been removed. Note, too, that the hammer spur has been eliminated, thus removing the possibility of its snagging the clothing if the weapon has to be produced quickly.” He put the revolver carefully down on the bed, fished into his suitcase again, and came up with a short leather holster.
“This was made by a good old boy from Calhoun, Mississippi, name of Jack Martin. It’s called a Berns-Martin holster. The forward edge is open, and it has a spring that passes around the cylinder of the gun to keep it snug.” He picked up the revolver and snapped it into place. “Thusly. I will shortly demonstrate.”
He took off his jacket and belt and threaded the belt through the holster. When he slipped the belt back on, the holster, with the gun, rode high on his right hip. He got into his jacket and tugged at the lapels. The gun was invisible—not even a bulge. “Now, when you wish to produce the weapon rapidly, you just swish it for
ward. If you’ll count to three by thousands …”
I counted “one thousand.” Cooky’s body relaxed like a loose rubber band. His right shoulder dropped slightly on the count of “two thousand,” and on “three thousand,” he swayed his hips to the left and his hand brushed away the edge of his coat. Before I finished saying “three thousand” I was looking into the barrel of the revolver. It seemed uglier than before.
“You’re fast.”
“About a half-second, maybe six-tenths. The best there is can do it in three-tenths.”
“Where did you learn it?”
Cooky replaced the gun in the holster. “In New York when I was on the flit. I was planning a showdown on Madison Avenue with my two partners. It seemed like a good idea at the time. There was an expert who took advantage of the fast-draw craze a few years back and started accepting pupils. I had it in mind to challenge Messrs. Brickwall and Hillsman of Baker, Brickhill and Hillsman to a duel. I used to lock myself in my office and practice for hours before a mirror. When I got good enough I went up to my farm in Connecticut and started target practice. It was a goddamned obsession. I must have fired fifteen or twenty thousand rounds. And finally I found the perfect target.”
“What?”
“Quart cans of tomato juice. I bought them by the case, set them up—with the ends facing me—against the barn wall, and banged away. Ever see a .357 slug open up a can of tomato juice?”
“I never have,” I said, “but, then, I’m not much on tomato juice.”
“It’s bang and wow and shleep. The goddamn stuff explodes all over everything. Looks like blood. Flattens the can out like you had snipped it open with tin shears and pounded it flat with a sledge hammer. Most satisfying.”
“But you never got satisfaction from your partners?”
“No. I spent a couple of weeks on a funny farm instead, drying out.”
Cooky closed his suitcase and slipped on his topcoat. “Shall we go?” I looked at my watch. It was nine-twenty. We were to be at the Café Budapest at ten. “You don’t have to go, Cooky. You’ll probably land in trouble.”
His secret-joke smile flickered for an instant. “Let’s just say that I think I’d like to come along because I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve never done anything really all the way down to the wire.”
I shrugged. “They threw Christ out of the ball game at thirty-three and He got back in. But you’re trying to make it the hard way.”
We took the elevator down and walked swiftly through the lobby. Nobody stared or pointed. John Weatherby must have been still alone and undiscovered and dead in my room. I couldn’t mourn for Weatherby because I han’t known him, although I had liked what had seemed to be a quiet competence. If anything, his death seemed to have been too casual and meaningless, as most violent deaths are. But perhaps they are better than the kind that have the dark, quiet room; the drugged pain; the whispering nurses slopping around in rubber-soled shoes; and the family and the friend or two who give a damn and who also wonder how long you’ll hold out and whether there’ll be a chance to keep that cocktail date at half-past six.
We left the Hilton and walked toward the Kaiser Wilhelm church.
“When was the last time you were in the East Sector?” Cooky asked.
“Years ago. Before the wall went up.”
“How did you go through?”
I tried to remember. “I think I was slightly tight. I recall a couple of girls from Minneapolis who were staying at the Hilton. They were with me. We just caught a cab and sailed through the Brandenburg Gate. No trouble.”
Cooky looked over his shoulder. “Things have changed. Now we foreigners go through Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse. It could take an hour or so to get through, depending on whether the Vopos liked their dinner. You have your passport?”
I nodded.
“There used to be eighty official ways to get into East Berlin,” Cooky said. “Now there are eight. We need a car.”
“Any ideas?” I said, and looked over my shoulder.
“Rent one. There’s a place called Day and Night on Brandenburgische Strasse.”
We caught a cab and told the driver to take us to Brandenburgische Strasse, which was about three minutes away. We picked out a new Mercedes 220. I showed my driver’s license.
“How long will you have use for the car?” the man asked.
“Two or three days.”
“A two-hundred-Mark deposit will be sufficient.”
I gave him the money, signed the rental agreement, and put the carnet de passage and other papers into the glove compartment. I got behind the wheel, pumped the brakes to see if they worked, and started the engine. Cooky got in and slammed his door.
“Sounds tinny,” he said.
“They don’t make them the way they used to.”
“They never did.”
I turned left out of the Tag und Nacht garage and headed for Friedrichstrasse. You can usually ignore the speed limit in Berlin, but I kept to a modest forty to fifty kilometers per hour. The car handled well, but it wasn’t especially eager. It was just a machine designed to get you there and back with a minimum of discomfort. I turned left onto Friedrichstrasse.
“What’s the form?” I asked Cooky.
“Get your passport out; a GI will want to look at it.”
I drove on and stopped when a bored-looking soldier standing in front of a white hut waved me down. He glanced at our passports and then handed us a mimeographed sheet, which warned against carrying any non-American persons in the car, admonished me to obey all traffic regulations because “East Berlin officials are sensitive about their prerogatives,” and cautioned us about engaging in unnecessary conversation with East Berliners.
“What if I have to ask where the John is?” Cooky said.
“You can pee in your pants, mister, for all I care. Just fill this out first.”
It was a form requesting the time we could be expected back at the checkpoint. I put down midnight.
“Anything else?”
“That’s all, buddy. Just be nice to the krauts.”
A West German policeman nearer the crossing yawned and waved us on and I zigzagged the car through a series of white pole barriers and parked it. After that it wasn’t much worse than having a tooth pulled. There was the currency declaration. We lied about that. Then there was the passport inspection. There was nobody else in the line, and the Volkspolizei seemed to have nothing better to do.
“You are a businessman,” he said, thumbing through my passport.
“Yes.”
“What type of business?”
“A restaurant.”
He read some more about me and then slipped the passport through a slot behind him, where somebody else got the chance to find out how tall I was and how heavy and what color my hair and eyes were and what countries I might have visited in the past few years.
Cooky was next. “Herr Cook Baker?” the Vopo asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that not a strange name?”
“One gets a comment or two.”
“You are a public-relations man?”
“Yes.”
The Vopo nodded thoughtfully. “Just what is a public-relations man, Herr Baker?”
“We deal in controlled revelation,” Cooky said.
The Vopo frowned. He was a short, wiry man with a foxy face and eyebrows that needed combing. “You are a propagandist?”
“Only for inanimate objects—soap, underarm deodorant shaving lotions. Just the essentials. No government work.”
The sharp-faced German read some more about Cooky and decided that his passport didn’t need to travel through the slot. He got mine back, shot his cuffs, and prepared for the operation. First the stamp was inked twice on the pad, then it was examined, and then it was applied to the passport with a firm yet flashy bang. The Vopo admired his work briefly and then gave us back the passports after a cursory glance at the car’s papers. We got into the Mercedes and drove u
p Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, about a half-mile away.
I drove slowly. East Berlin was even more drab than I had remembered it, the traffic was spotty, and the pedestrians walked as if they had to and not because they were out for a late-evening stroll. Their faces were stolid and they didn’t seem to smile much, even when talking to one another; but, then, I couldn’t recall many metropolitan boulevards these days where the pedestrians are noted for their cheerful faces.
“What happens if we don’t get back by midnight?” I asked Cooky.
“Nothing. They probably marked our passports somehow so that if we don’t show up and somebody else tries to use them they can spot it. But that form we signed about when we thought we’d come back is just routine. Nobody cares how long you stay over.”
We turned right on Unter den Linden. “Go through Marx-Engels Platza, straight ahead till you hit Stalinallee or whatever the hell they call it now—Karl Marx Allee—and I’ll show you where to turn left. I think.”
“Sounds as if you’ve been here before,” I said.
“No. I asked the bellhop at the Hilton. Bellhops know everything. He said it’s a dump.”
“It would fit in with the rest of the evening.”
“How much do you know about the whole thing?”
I lighted a cigarette. “Nothing firsthand. Just from hearsay. I saw Weatherby today and he said he would take me to Padillo, who is in some kind of jam. After Weatherby I ran into Maas, the mystery man, who claims that Padillo is being suckered—-that he’s up for trade for two defectors from the National Security Agency. For five thousand dollars Maas says he can get Padillo out of East Berlin through a tunnel. He seemed to think Padillo would buy the idea. He wanted half in advance, but I said no deal and then called you for the cash. That’s it, except Burmser and his assistant with the big, white smile.”
“One thing,” Cooky said.
“What?”
“Mass is giving you a deal if he’s got a tunnel.”
“How’s that?”
“Rooms on this side close enough to the wall to make a break are just about nonexistent. But the West Berliners, across the wall, are charging up to twenty-five hundred bucks just for a room to run to so you won’t get shot after you jump over.”