by Tom Gabbay
There was no sign of anything by nine o’clock, so I paid the driver and sent him off. I made my way through the pitch-black toward the house, wondering if the Colonel was already inside or if he was the one who was gonna be late this time. It seemed unlikely that he’d hang around in that rat hole for longer than he had to. I wished I’d thought of buying a flashlight.
The street was eerily quiet and my heart picked up a beat as I approached the gate. Something made me stop there—a noise, maybe thirty yards in front of me. I held my breath and listened….
Suddenly an engine roared to life and I was hit with a blinding white light. The car came off the mark quickly and was there before I could figure out which way to jump. It screeched to a halt in front of me and sat there idling for a moment. Then the Colonel’s raspy voice came at me out of the darkness.
“Get in,” he ordered.
The door opened and I slid into the backseat of the Mercedes sedan. The Colonel sat there, motionless, his face obscured by shadow. A glass partition separated us from the driver, who eased the car into gear and gently pulled away.
“You certainly have a flair for the theatrical,” I said after a moment of dark silence.
“Yes,” he said ambiguously, reaching for one of his revolting cigarettes. He lit up without offering me one, which was just as well because I probably would have taken it. “Have you made any progress?”
“I passed your information on,” I answered. “It’s out of my hands now.”
The light caught his face as he turned toward me. He looked edgy, kind of anxious, unlike when I’d seen him before. “Did they tell you that I’m running a disinformation campaign?”
“Something like that,” I answered.
“What do you think?”
“I think I’d have a hard time buying your story even if it was in paperback.”
He let that stand for a moment, nervously flicking an ash. “Fact can be stranger than fiction,” he finally remarked. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
“They say a lot of things and most of them aren’t true. Anyway, your story’s a bit thin in the plot department.”
“I was hoping you would help fill it out.”
“You hoped wrong. I’m going home, where the only thing that smells fishy are fish.”
“I see.” He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was the first overt sign of strain I’d seen. “Why did you come, then?” he asked.
“I guess I wanted to see if you had anything new to say,” I shrugged.
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“Then why are you here?”
He sighed. “What would you like me to say?”
I paused, looked him in the eye. “You could tell me about Iceberg.”
He looked at me blankly. “I’ve never heard of it. What is it?” I shook my head. “You don’t believe me,” he said.
“Imagine that,” I laughed.
“What reason do I have to lie?”
“You guys don’t need a reason. It comes naturally.”
“Do you include yourself in that?”
“You invited me to this party, Colonel. I’m happy to go home if we’re gonna play the same game over and over.”
“I see,” he said quietly. “Where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us nowhere,” I answered bluntly. “So feel free to drop me anywhere.”
He returned my stare for a moment, then nodded. “Of course.” He tapped the glass and signaled the driver to pull over. There was nothing out there but darkness and trees and more darkness. We were probably in Grunewald Forest, a massive woodland in the southwest corner of the city. It was a long walk to anywhere, even if I had somewhere to go, which I didn’t.
He smiled. “Is this all right?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping my bluff was better than his. “Perfect.”
I opened the door, stepped onto the road, and looked around. If it wasn’t a bluff I’d be sleeping under a tree. Bastard.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said. “Let’s do it again soon.” I started to close the door but he stopped me.
“There is one thing,” he said. “Something I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“If you’re so certain that I’m lying, why did you perform such a dramatic escape in order to meet me?”
“You know about that, huh?” I was busted, so there was no use pretending.
“You weren’t very subtle.”
“Not my specialty,” I agreed. “Did you actually see it?”
“Enough to know that they want to keep you away from me. Why do you think that is?”
“They think you’re a bad influence.”
He motioned me back into the car. “You have nowhere else to go, so you might as well get in.” He was right, so I did and we moved off, saving me from a night with the squirrels.
“It seems that circumstances have forced us into a temporary alliance,” he said.
“What’s your angle in this?” I asked.
“The same as yours.”
“Which is … ?”
“To prevent something stupid from happening.”
“What else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Why did you lie about Iceberg?”
“I wanted to see what you already knew,” he shrugged.
“Give me a little credit, Colonel.”
“You’re right. I apologize.” He cleared his throat and continued. “Iceberg is the code name for a unit working under the CIA Executive Action Group known as ZR/RIFLE. Have you heard of it?”
“Not by name,” I confessed. I knew the Company had been involved in several political assassinations, directly or indirectly, in recent years, but those operations were held pretty close to the vest. I was surprised the Colonel knew the code name and even more surprised he was telling me he knew.
He went on: “Iceberg is the public-relations unit within the group. They attempt to divert blame by creating false evidence or, at the very least, to cause enough confusion that no one can be certain who is behind the action.”
“Plausible deniability,” I added.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it the first time we met?”
“I wanted to see what, if anything, they would tell you.”
“They told me it’s KGB, and that you’re probably part of it.”
“That’s what they would say.” He put another cigarette between his lips. “It’s not true.”
“And that’s what you would say.”
He lit up. “For the moment, you don’t have any other choice but to believe me.” It was bluntly put, but it was on the money. I hadn’t just burned my bridges, I’d incinerated them.
“Okay,” I conceded. “Let’s say I believe you and there’s some kind of internal conspiracy to get Kennedy. What makes you think I can do anything about it? As you pointed out, my stock’s not too high at the moment.”
“It’s possible you have more friends than you think. … Sam Clay, for example.”
I gave him a look, genuinely surprised. “Is that why you dragged me into this?”
“Not entirely.”
“Because if you think I have some kind of special influence over Sam, then you really are wasting your time.”
“He recruited you, didn’t he? And was always your advocate within the agency.”
“Was is the key word,” I stressed. “You must have a hell of a mole hidden away somewhere.”
“Because I know about your relationship with Clay?” He forced a laugh. “That’s hardly top secret.”
“ZR/RIFLE is. How do you know about that?”
“That’s not going to be part of our discussion,” he said firmly.
“This isn’t a discussion,” I said, getting peeved. “It’s a goddamned merry-go-round! How am I supposed to do anything if you won’t tell me anything? How did you come across this alleged conspiracy?”
“In the course of—”
“—our normal intelligence activities! See what I mean? It’s déjà vu all over again. If you can’t give me anything to work with, Colonel Becher, what the hell are we doing here?”
He took a long drag off his cigarette. “Bravo, you know my name. Should I be impressed?”
“Believe it or not, impressing you wouldn’t give me much of a thrill.”
He chuckled, then looked at me cagily. “Shall we come to an agreement?”
“What kind of agreement?”
“Can you give me your word that anything said here remains strictly between us?” It was a strange thing for him to ask. Either he was willing to place an unusual amount of trust in my word, which wasn’t likely, or he was going to tell me something that he wanted to get back to Sam.
“You can’t trust my answer any more than I can trust your question,” I replied.
“You make it sound like a hopeless situation.”
“It is what it is,” I said.
“What can I do to make you trust me?”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He paused, looked me up and down, then smiled uncomfortably. “All right,” he said, his expression dropping back into neutral. “I will.”
He hit the glass twice, nodded to the driver, then settled back into his seat. We continued the journey in silence.
I recognized the unique metal profile of the Glienicke Bridge as we approached from the west. The border crossing had been in the headlines the previous winter when it was the scene of the only spy exchange to take place during the Cold War. Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down by the Russians in 1960, and Rudolf Abel, a Soviet agent who’d been caught with his fingers in the nuclear-secrets cookie jar, had walked the length of the bridge on a frigid February morning, passing each other halfway across as they went from captivity into freedom. It wasn’t the happy ending that the papers made out, though, at least not for the two men. Both had violated the First Commandment of Spookcraft—Thou Shalt Not Get Caught. Powers was excommunicated by Central Intelligence, reviled for not swallowing the poison pill he’d been provided for just such an occasion. Abel fared no better. Denied the rank of “Hero of the Soviet Union” because his name sounded too Jewish, he was dumped in a two-room apartment in Moscow and forgotten. It made you wonder why they went to the trouble of arranging the exchange in the first place.
I looked over at the Colonel as we pulled up to the floodlit barrier on the American side. “Say nothing,” he whispered. An armed guard stepped out from a portable hut that had been plunked down in the middle of the road, jotted down our license-plate number, and approached the car. Our driver lowered his window and handed him three East German passports. It wasn’t too big a leap to assume that one of them was mine. The soldier flicked through the documents, opening each one to the photo, then shining a flashlight into the car until he found the corresponding face.
I wondered why the hell I was going along with this. If Powell had been sharp enough to post my picture at the crossings, I’d be up shit’s creek without so much as a canoe, let alone a paddle. And what was the Colonel up to? He’d gone to the trouble of having a passport made for me, so he’d obviously been planning to smuggle me across for some time. Why? I could think of a few unpleasant answers, but there was no point playing a guessing game. It was too late to back out and I’d find out soon enough what they had in mind.
The guard handed the papers back to the driver and signaled his colleague inside the station to raise the barrier. We pulled away, and had only to slow down for the East German guards to let us pass. I guess the Colonel was a frequent traveler on the Glienicke. As we left the bridge he said, “Welcome to the German Democratic Republic,” and then fell back into silence.
We’d driven through dark countryside for a good thirty minutes when the scenery started to change. At first it was clusters of broken-down old houses, then, as we hit the outskirts of the city, huge concrete structures rising up out of the ground like Stalinist monsters. I assumed they were apartment buildings, although there was no detectable sign of life in them. As the car headed toward the heart of the city, a light rain began to fall. We drove through dark, empty, colorless streets, past bullet-ridden buildings and piles of rubble not touched since the city fell in 1945. East Berlin looked like a ghost town that was stuck in a time warp.
“I’m sorry we’ve taken such a long route”—the Colonel suddenly came to life—”but it was the safest way.”
“What now?” I asked.
“Be patient,” he answered. “We’re nearly there.”
A few minutes later we pulled off the main road and stopped in front of a set of tall black iron gates. The driver got out, unlocked the thick chain that was wrapped around the doors, then pushed the rusted gates open and returned to the car. As we moved through the entrance onto a gravel road, the headlights swept across a worn-out old sign. I felt a jolt in my gut as I read it:
KIEFHOLZ-BRÜCKE FRIEDHOF
I didn’t react, still unsure if I was right about what was happening. The car made several twists and turns through the darkness before finally coming to a stop. The Colonel looked to me, then got out of the car without saying a word. I did the same and saw that he was already walking away, the flashlight that he was holding the only way to track him on the moonless night. The light danced around as he stepped over the uneven ground, occasionally illuminating one of the stone crosses or black marble monuments that filled the grounds.
I found a narrow path and followed, stumbling several times and nearly falling. Then, a few yards in front of me, I could see that the light had stopped moving. It was perfectly still, a solitary beam pointed onto the ground in front of where the Colonel stood. I moved closer and stood next to him. There, half-hidden in the overgrown grass and weeds of the forgotten cemetery, he was lighting a headstone. On it were the carved letters that were also etched somewhere deep in the hidden recesses of my memory:
Gertrud Teller
1895–1927
I fought a rising tide of emotion as the full impact of the moment came down on me. I had carried my mother with me since that day in September when I stood on that same spot and watched her being lowered into the ground. She traveled in some secret place inside me, somewhere that even I was unaware of. But now, as I stood over her grave, she was no longer some delicate shadow that could be filed away under “lost childhood” and forgotten. She was warm flesh and soft breath, the tender arms that held me when I was hurt or afraid, the only safe place in the world. I was thirteen again and knew what it felt like to watch her being covered with earth, knowing that I would never have the safety of those arms again.
I didn’t cry on the day they buried her, or anytime that I can remember since, but I couldn’t stop my eyes filling up now, thirty-six years later. I remembered her laugh, the way it came from deep in her throat, and how her eyes lit up when I came into a room. I thought about how she’d been there, forgotten for all those years, with no one to pull the weeds or put flowers on her grave. She deserved better.
“I used to come here quite often.” The Colonel’s voice came from behind, jolting me back to the present. I turned my head sharply, and when I looked into his eyes I finally recognized the younger brother I’d left behind all those years ago.
TEN
“Josef … ?” I whispered.
“So now you know my name,” he said drily, eyes cutting through the darkness and meeting mine head-on.
I stood there, stunned into silence, studying his face, trying to equate it to an eight-year-old boy I hadn’t seen in almost forty years. If anything of that child remained in this man’s features, it was lost to me. Still, I had no doubt that it was my brother standing in front of me—something more than a face tells you that. And if I did have doubts, they would’ve been erased by the recollection of a black-and-white photograph that hung on the wall by my mother’s bedside, an image of a smiling soldier. The Colonel was the spitt
ing image of our father.
Josef turned away, looking toward the stone that marked her grave. “I haven’t been here in some time,” he said quietly. “I came several times after the war, but then…” He trailed off. “It wasn’t a conscious decision, I just stopped coming.”
We stood silently over her resting place, thinking about what came next. A thousand questions flew through my mind, but this wasn’t the place for them.
“Come,” he finally said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We’d better have a drink or two before we leap blindly into the past.”
A mist hung in the air as the driver pulled over to the side of a dark road and killed the engine. The dank smell of crumbling bricks mixed with the unmistakable scent of cat piss wafted into the backseat as he opened the door and approached what looked like a deserted building across the street. It was a desolate area, even by East Berlin standards. The shell of a house stood precariously on the corner of the block, rising out of the debris of its own wreckage. It was as though the bombs had fallen yesterday, not twenty years earlier.
The driver rang the bell several times until the lights on the ground floor finally came up. A man appeared in one of the windows, pulling a lace curtain aside and peering warily out into the night. Once he spotted the car, he hurried to the entrance, where we were enthusiastically beckoned inside.
It was a small rectangular room with faded gray walls. A plain wooden counter ran along its length, behind which shelves were stocked with copious amounts, if not a wide selection, of alcohol. Half a dozen round tables were lined up on the opposite side of the bar, chairs turned up on them so the cracked tiles on the floor could be washed down. The only decorations were three faded prints depicting turn-of-the-century Berlin and some sad-looking red Christmas tinsel taped precariously to the ceiling.
The proprietor, a short middle-aged man with several gaps in his nervous smile and a mop of dirty brown hair, nodded respectfully to Josef as he removed the chairs from atop a table in the back. I got the impression that this was not the first time my brother had called on our host in the off-hours and that the barman obliged with equal measures of pride and fear.