Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “My superiors would have that.” Wolfram drank beer.

  “So would you,” Christopher said. “Your orders are to cooperate fully with me. If you haven’t understood, I can contact your superiors and have them repeat your instructions in my presence.”

  Christopher sat bolt upright, speaking in harsh German. There had been, on Wolfram’s face, the beginnings of a smirk. As Christopher spoke, he cocked his head as if listening for an accent. Hearing none, his face cleared itself of all expression. He uncrossed his legs, sat up straight, put down his beer bottle. He took a notebook from an inside pocket and opened it.

  “These are my field notes,” Wolfram said. “I received the assignment to carry out a spot surveillance of this subject on January 30. Surveillance commenced at 0700 on 1 February, and continued, with one nine-day interruption, from 1 March to 10 March, until 24 March, at which time the assignment was terminated. I spent a total of 156 hours in actual surveillance of this subject.”

  “In East Berlin as well as West?”

  “Yes, sir. The nurses were from the Prenzlauer Berg Hospital, which is in the East. I went where he was, wherever he was, when I was on duty.”

  “What about this subject was remarkable?”

  Wolfram closed his notebook, marking the place with a finger, and made a show of collecting his thoughts.

  “Number one, he was nervous, a regular alley cat, always looking around to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Of course, he never spotted me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he never tried to lose me, and he never tried to lead me on wild-goose chases. When he went someplace, he always had something to do when he got there.”

  “That could have been professionalism. Perhaps he knew you were on his back.”

  Wolfram laughed. “Never. You would have seen, if you had been behind him. This man was no professional. I followed him by myself, with no partners, alone, and never once lost him. That tells you something.”

  “What did he do? What was his pattern?”

  “To work every morning, right on time. Home every evening, right on time. He’d stop and have one beer on weeknights, always at the same Stube. He bought cold food and ate it alone in his room. He was very careful with money. But one night a week, Saturday, he’d cross into the West and have a tremendous big meal at a fancy restaurant; he’d find a whore first and take her with him to dinner, then go home with her for an hour, never more.”

  “Different girls each time, or the same one?”

  “Always different, always young. He’d dance with them–take them to places like the roof of the Hilton and buy them champagne cocktails. All week, evidently, he ate cold sausage alone in his room in order to have this night in West Berlin with a girl he had to pay for.”

  “And this is what he always did, without fail, when he came into West Berlin?”

  “So I thought for a while. I used to follow him to the girl’s place, wait outside, take him home on the S-Bahn, see him into the door, and then go home myself. One night he made a lot of phone calls from public booths. I thought I’d wait around outside his place a little longer. It wasn’t too cold.”

  “And?”

  “And at two o’clock in the morning, out he came, in his usual shabby clothes, with his briefcase, and walked across the zone frontier. He went the long way, up north, and through a bombed building instead of using a street.”

  “What happened on the other side?”

  “At 0318, exactly, he was picked up in a car, in Schiller Park.”

  “License number?”

  “I was too far behind–after all, we were practically the only two people on foot in Berlin at that hour and I had to stay out of sight Also, the car had no lights on. It was a new car, an Opel.”

  “Date?”

  Wolfram opened his notebook and ran a finger down the page. “Sunday morning, February 7.”

  “Did you follow up, go back to his place and wait?”

  Wolfram laughed. “My dear friend, it was almost dawn. It was starting to rain. I’d walked fifteen kilometers. The subject had gone somewhere in a car. I went home and went to bed.”

  “Your unit didn’t regard this target as high priority?”

  “I don’t know that. If they had, more than one man would have been used. I assumed we were spotting, assessing.”

  “You had no backup?”

  “No, me alone. But I never lost him. He was slow, old.”

  “You never saw him make another contact at night like that?”

  “No.”

  “Never saw the car again? It was an Opel?”

  “It was a dark-colored Opel Kapitän, and if I ever saw it again, this subject certainly was not inside it.”

  Christopher had never met Bülow on a Sunday morning and never in Schiller Park. He wasn’t surprised that Horst, doubled, would stay in a pattern–early-morning contact in a park–nor that he would sneak across the border, clambering through ruins like a commando, if left to his own devices. For Christopher’s meetings he had been instructed to ride the S-Bahn, crossing in the rush hour, and to pass the evening in a cinema or a theater, afterward eating a simpler supper than the ones he had bought for his tarts, and to make a secure contact in a secure location. But that had been Christopher’s planning, not Horst’s–and not that of the unknown people in the Opel.

  “This period in February, from the seventh to the end,” Christopher said. “What else did you observe?”

  “Normal activity, except for one contact.”

  “Describe it, please.”

  Wolfram had been trained to speak when spoken to; Christopher knew it was no use waiting for him to volunteer information. He had to be activated, like a soldier in ranks, by voice commands.

  “This contact took place at 0818 exactly, on Monday, February 15, in the English Garden in the Tiergarten,” Wolfram said. “The contact was a woman. Clandestine signals were exchanged. The male subject removed his left glove; the female covered her mouth with her right hand and coughed. They walked together for a time, then sat down on a bench. The contact lasted fourteen minutes.”

  Wolfram described the meeting between Bülow and the woman as Wilson had described it in the American Cathedral in Paris: they spoke Russian, an envelope passed, Bülow went to the bank, the woman went into the American Consulate.

  “If there was only you on the surveillance, how do you know where both went?”

  “That day there were two of us. I had an assistant. For him it was a training exercise. I put him on the man when they split; I took the woman.”

  Christopher questioned Wolfram about the woman’s appearance. He described her coat: green with a fur collar. She wore a fur hat; her hair wasn’t visible. She held a scarf in front of her face; the day was windy and bitter, so it was a natural gesture. Christopher spread another set of photographs on the table. Wolfram could identify none of the women. Christopher went on to something else.

  “On the last days of the surveillance, up through March 24, did you observe anything?”

  Wolfram checked his notebook again. “All routine until the twenty-fourth. Then, after work, he went home as usual, but went right back out again. He went to the station and took a train to Dresden–the 18:05. I didn’t follow; I have no papers for the East Zone outside Berlin.”

  “So at that point you saw the last of him?”

  “Yes. But before he went to the station he took the S-Bahn into West Berlin and made a telephone call from a booth. I got the last three digits he dialed–two seven five. And the first two–eight four.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “He said, I have it down here, ‘Here is Heinz. Let’s have an early breakfast tomorrow. Eighteen after the hour.’ Then he rang off, got back on the S-Bahn, rode it to East Berlin, and took the Dresden train. Obviously he was setting up a clandestine meeting.’

  “You didn’t follow up?”

  “Eighteen after what hour? Where?”


  Christopher knew: eighteen after the hour of eight on March 25, by the zoo. Bülow had been six minutes early for his own murder.

  “Anyway, we ended the surveillance on that day, the twenty-fourth,” Wolfram said. “I wasn’t told why. I didn’t ask.”

  Christopher touched the photographs of the women one after the other, trying one last time to stir Wolfram’s memory. But the German shook his head. “She was wearing too many clothes,” he said. “I never saw her face.”

  “What about mannerisms? The voice.”

  “Normal, a little harder than usual for a woman, but they were speaking low and I was twenty meters away. I had my young helper walk by to try to overhear, but all he could tell was that they were speaking Russian.”

  “Nothing else? Nothing odd that sticks in your mind?”

  Wolfram snapped his fingers.

  “One thing only,” he said. “It was the way she smoked. She would light a cigarette, take one very long inhalation–only one –and then throw the cigarette away. I thought that was very wasteful. Not like a Russian.”

  4

  Wolkowicz held out his hand and Christopher gave him the tinted eyeglasses he had been wearing and the salt-and-pepper wig. Wolkowicz, smiling, removed Christopher’s false eyebrows with two quick motions. “Like ripping Band-Aids off a kid,” he said, “the faster you do it, the less they notice it.” Christopher went into the bathroom and washed his face; he used alcohol to remove the traces of glue above his eyes.

  “That was a nice piece of handling you did on Wolfram,” Wolkowicz said. “Of course, you sound like a high-class German, and look like one too with those thin lips and mean eyes.”

  They were back in the sitting room. Dusk had fallen. Wolkowicz, while Christopher was out of the room, had taken away the bottles that he and Wolfram had handled, and washed and smashed them. The drapes were still drawn, and one dim light burned on a side table.

  “What time did you tell Bud to come?” Christopher asked.

  “Anytime now. I was just going to play his song.”

  Wolcowicz put a recording of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony on the phonograph. Hearing it as he approached the door, Wilson would know that it was all right to enter.

  Christopher and Wolkowicz did not speak to one another while they waited; Wolkowicz had heard everything that had passed between Christopher and Wolfram, and he would add anything he wished in Wilson’s presence. Nor did he offer Christopher anything more to drink: he had already destroyed one set of fingerprints, smashing the beer bottles and wiping the furniture; the odor of American spray wax lingered in the unventilated room. Christopher sat in an upholstered chair, well away from the polished surface. Wolkowicz listened to the music with his hands cupped behind his ears; it was a trick Cathy had, she said it captured more sound. Christopher wondered if Wolkowicz was a musician. It was useless to ask; Wolkowicz answered all questions except official requests for information with sarcasm.

  Wilson, when he arrived, asked Wolkowicz for an assessment of the young German Christopher had just interviewed.

  “A good gumshoe,” Wolkowicz said. “He’s very good at simple jobs. Dogged, but no imagination. Just what you want.”

  Wilson turned to Christopher. “Anything?”

  Christopher spoke the phrase, signaling success, that they had arranged between them, knowing that they would have to discuss this matter in Wolcowicz’s presence. “We went over all the details,” Christopher said. “He added a dimension or two.”

  Wolkowicz smiled; he knew a rehearsed phrase when he heard one.

  “I suppose,” he said, “that you fellows must want something else from us.”

  “A thing or two, not much,” Wilson said.

  “Christopher?”

  “The telephone number,” Christopher said.

  Wolkowicz made a face of exaggerated confusion.

  “The digits Wolfram noted down when Horst was phoning on the night before he was killed,” Christopher said.

  “Ah. Eight four blank blank two seven five. I checked that out before you got here, thinking you’d want to know. I have here a list of all Berlin numbers that begin and end thusly, and you’re free to call them one by one.”

  It was a long list, and it included three hotels and several public phone booths. They all knew there was no point in doing what Wolkowicz suggested.

  “I might be able to narrow it down a little for you,” Wolkowicz said, “but I’d like a thing or two, not much. I’d like a full briefing, in the next five minutes, Christopher, about what the hell is going on. You got a man killed on my territory. Your fucking operations cause me more trouble than the opposition. You and Patchen and the rest of you CA types think you can do whatever you like under that global charter you think you’ve got, come in and run ops under my protection and tell me nothing. So far, I’ve given you everything you asked for. I want my money, and I want it now.”

  Wilson wasn’t used to hearing one officer speak to another in this way. He said, “Barney, Paul has been on the sidewalk as much as anyone.”

  “I know twice as much about that subject as you do,” Wolkowicz said. “I’ve seen Christopher work. There’s nothing personal in this. Paul knows that.”

  “I’m not authorized to share information with you on this,” Wilson said.

  But Wolkowicz’s full attention was turned on Christopher.

  “Barney, turn off the tapes,” Christopher said.

  Wolkowicz touched a switch under the rug with the sole of his shoe. Christopher told him what Wolfram’s information had confirmed. Wolkowicz, stung, lurched forward in his chair.

  “Jesus Christ, why?” he said.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? You see the obvious reason–we were supposed to detect the opposition’s hand in Bülow’s death. That was supposed to make us reckless–and it did. But what’s the real reason, the one in the guts? It must be something powerful, and black as hell. They really wanted the silence of the grave for all concerned.”

  Wolkowicz walked around the room, excited by new secrets. He said, “You have to admire the tradecraft, Paul. Meeting at eighteen after the hour, pickups in a blacked-out car, contacts in the open air, using the female Russian-speaker. The hit with the car. It’s KGB technique right down the line.”

  “Yes. And I’ll bet you a gallon of Bowle that she spotted Wolfram and friend in the Tiergarten. That’s why she went into the American Consulate. She’d have assumed Wolfram was on the other side, and that would double the hazard for Horst.”

  “What the hell is Bowle?”

  “It’s something Horst used to drink, when he was young and happy,” Christopher said.

  5

  “This place would have made him happy, too,” Wolkowicz said.

  He had taken them to a steam bath near Schiller Park. Men and women, few of them beautiful, walked about naked in the hot mists, and plunged into bubbling pools of water dyed blue, red, and green. The three Americans sat, alone except for a stringy woman who stared fixedly at the bullet wounds on their bodies–the neat puncture and incision on Christopher’s knee; the puckered shrapnel scars on Wilson’s flanks; the row of red dots like surprised crayon mouths that had been left by the exit of small-caliber Japanese machine-gun rounds on Wolkowicz’s rib cage.

  “Are you a scar freak?” Wolkowicz asked her. “My friend here has one of only three circumcisions remaining in Germany. Come closer if you like.”

  The woman hugged herself and scurried out of the hot room.

  Wolkowicz was in a cheerful mood. Learning a new secret always made him happy; over the years, Christopher had fed him many bits of information. Wolkowicz was an honest trader who gave value for value. A few hours before, almost as soon as he had heard the truth from Christopher, he had offered something in return.

  “The phone number,” he had said earlier, when they were still in the safe house in Spandau. “My guess would be it’s the Schaefer Baths, in Wedding. It’s on the list, under S. The fellow who runs i
t is a sort of universal dead-drop and antenna. We use him, just a little. The Polizei think that the opposition uses him. They know that the Berlin criminal element uses him–he’s an arranger. A public figure. Everyone tolerates him because everyone can tap in. And he has a nice little business in the baths. On Saturday night more fornication is arranged in those steam rooms than in the rest of the city combined. What you see is what you get.”

  Wilson, his file cards out, had asked a number of background questions. During the war, Wolkowicz said, the owner of the Schaefer Baths had been an enlisted man in the SS, a clerk in the occupation of France; when the Abwehr was absorbed in 1944, the man had moved to the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail to help collate Abwehr files with the general security files of Himmler’s apparatus.

  “Schaefer was one of the forgivables,” Wolkowicz said. “After the war he was de-Nazified, having cooperated like a prize student, and sent home to Berlin. He changed his name. Our side gave him genuine documentation as a member of the fighting SS named Karl Schaefer.”

  “Where did he get the money for the baths?”

  “I suppose he salted something away while he was in the SS; a lot of sergeants came out of that war rich.”

  “What was he before the war?”

  “He was an under-headwaiter at the old Jockey Restaurant in Berlin in the late twenties and thirties. It was blown up by our brave aviators, so when peace returned he had to find some other way to fleece his betters.”

  “When did he join the SS?”

  “Openly, in ‘39. But he’d been a Gestapo informer for years. It, the Gestapo, existed as a secret police under the Weimar Republic, you know. The Nazis inherited it–and refined it, as you might say. Karl went way back. He was giving them bits and pieces while he was working at the Jockey. Waiters hear a lot of stuff.”

  Wilson took his sensitive file out of his pocket and leafed through the little stack of file cards. He was confirming dates and names. Christopher had already made the connections, but Wilson was a researcher, not an artist.

  “Okay,” Wilson said. “Bülow was at the Hotel Lutetia as a captain in the Abwehr’s secret field police, Section III F, from May 1943 until early August 1944. He and Schaefer met there, certainly. And, of course, at the Jockey before the war.”