Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. But . . . while I do, can you kit me out with another?”

  “Of course. Another American?”

  “No. Not American. I won’t be using Checkpoint Charlie again. I’d rather use one of the others. Make me German.”

  “What would you rather be, West German or West Berliner?”

  “West Berliner. I’ll play safe. Better not to trust to my vanity over getting accents right. Make me from Berlin. I can still do a pretty good Berlin. I’ll use . . . Bornholmer Straße . . . yes, Bornholmer Straße.”

  “The bridge? No problem. Now . . . age?”

  “My age will do. Thirty-five.”

  “My, my. Joe. Almost the grown-up. Make tea while I find the Leica.”

  Erno pushed the curtain aside. Wilderness could hear him rummaging around in the next room as he poured boiling water onto tea leaves, an act he could never perform without thinking of rationing.

  “Erno, while I’m running up a bill. There’s one more thing.”

  “Ask.”

  “A gun. Automatic. Nine mill. Could you arrange that?”

  “Cash?”

  “Of course cash.”

  The curtain moved. Erno reappeared blowing the dust off his camera.

  “If you’ll settle for a 7.65 I have a Walther PPK I could let you have. Unless of course you’re trying to kill a grizzly bear.”

  “I’m not trying to kill anyone.”

  “Then you can have it later today.”

  “Make it the day after tomorrow, will you. A spare clip and a holster, if that’s possible.”

  “Day after tomorrow. For sure. Going somewhere are you?”

  §185

  On the landing, outside Erno’s apartment, Wilderness glanced up the stairs.

  “It’s empty,” said Erno, reading his mind. “Nell left in 1951. Since then a succession of young women. But right now it’s empty. Take a look if memory has you in its grip. I am out of matches and must dash to the Tabak on the corner.”

  He ran down the stairs, lightly for a man of his age, and left Wilderness to make up his mind.

  The door opened to a touch, swung inwards on emptiness, an emptiness he could fill to bursting.

  There were four dents in the floorboards where their bed had stood. There was a line on the wall where Nell had hung a picture. No one had ever redecorated, but ten years and more of other people’s occupancy had left no more trace of Nell than this thin line of dirt along the stained plaster. He could smell scent, the faint lingering odour of some woman’s perfume. But that wasn’t Nell. He couldn’t remember the name of Nell’s perfume any more, such was time and erasure, but this wasn’t it.

  He stood with his back to the window, his mind reconstructing the room his eye could not see. Here stood her desk, there her dressing table, and there the plaster statue on which she draped her scarves and hung her hats. Then he turned to the window—the window box in which Nell had grown straggly thyme and parsley, and in the summer of ’48 three heads of lettuce, was still there, empty of soil, its boards splitting. He looked across into the window on the other side of the street, a room he had glanced into so many times without ever meaning to—it had been an old lady’s apartment, trapped in the deep, dark colours and bloated fashions of the Empire, now completely stripped and redecorated in a garish yellow. And down into the street, a fantasy that he might see her returning home.

  There was a small man on the opposite pavement. The same ridiculous goblin-green overcoat, but no Tyrolean hat. He ran for the stairs took them three at a time and hit the ground floor just as Erno was coming in the doorway.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Did I see who?”

  He looked down the street. No man in a green coat. He looked down the nearest alley. Walked back to a perplexed Erno, hovering on the threshold.

  “You didn’t pass a little man, all in green.”

  Erno shrugged.

  “I wasn’t looking. Unless he was a horned goblin I doubt I would have noticed. All in green? Did I miss Rumpelstiltskin?”

  §186

  He called Frank at the Connaught. But he’d take no risks with Frank.

  “Stop what you’re doing. We need to meet.”

  “Joe . . . not so fast. Why do we need to meet?”

  “Not over the phone.”

  “Jesus H. Christ . . . OK. Where?”

  “Where we met in ’51.”

  “Fifty-one . . . fifty-one . . .”

  Wilderness heard the penny drop like a threepenny bit into a pinball machine.

  “Jesus, Joe! If you’re worried you’ll be overheard in Berlin you just picked the most bugged city in Europe. Every fucker listens in on every other fucker!”

  “Maybe. But I know somewhere we won’t be overheard. Just don’t utter the name out loud.”

  “Sure. Sure. Like old times. I’ll bring my cloak and dagger. And I’ll be staying at the Old Soviet Boarding House. Capisce?”

  It was slang—spook slang from just after the war, but it told Wilderness exactly where to find Frank.

  “Yes. Ten tomorrow morning.”

  “Do I get to eat breakfast first?”

  Wilderness hung up.

  §187

  There was a light summer rain falling on the Vienna Ringstraße when Wilderness met Frank outside the Imperial Hotel. Commandeered by the Germans before the war, draped in swastikas for Hitler’s stay during the Anschluss, after the war the Imperial had housed the Soviet High Commission for several years—hence Frank’s nickname for it. Lately it had been the site of one of the world’s most unlikely liaisons dangereuses. Kennedy had met Khrushchev here a matter of weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in an earlier liaison dangereuse Wilderness had left a body in a bathroom on the fourth floor in 1955.

  Frank looked at the drizzle and turned up his collar. He’d had time for at least one breakfast and belched into his fist.

  “This better be good, Joe.”

  “How was your night, Frank? Hotel still full of Nazis?”

  “What makes you think the fuckers ever left? They run the joint. Just like they run half of Germany. Probably waving the denazification papers you issued to them.”

  “Very funny. Let’s walk to the Metro, shall we?”

  “Walk? I walked in New York for you. You think I fucking enjoy fucking walking. I came to talk not walk!”

  All the same he followed.

  Wilderness fended off his questions all the way to the Prater.

  Only when he caught sight of the Ferris wheel did Frank realise where they were going.

  “Up there? Again? Jesus, Joe . . . this is so fucking corny.”

  “Corny but quiet, and you can bet your last nickel it isn’t bugged. You might be right Frank. Maybe everywhere in Vienna is bugged, but not the wheel.”

  The wheel was in poor shape. A shabby symbol of faded glory. Half the cars had been removed—the whole thing looked in need of de-rusting and painting—it seemed as though it had outlived Vienna. Wilderness didn’t know how long it had stood here—since some world’s fair at the end of another century?—but its age was showing.

  Frank was smiling now, as though he’d finally heard the punch line at the end of a strung-out anecdote.

  “Joe, Joe, Joe,” he said as they car moved skyward. “Always the cute stunts. Still. I can’t complain. I was just the dry-goods guy, minding the store. You were always the one with the overactive imagination.”

  Wilderness looked at the ground receding, not at Frank. They were five degrees short of the zenith when the car stopped.

  “Hey? You pay the guy to do this?”

  Wilderness turned, looked at him, and nodded.

  “Okay. So what now, is this where you slide open the door and tell me everyone down there is just some fucking ant and ask me if I’d really mind if one or maybe a dozen of them stop moving? If that’s the movie we’re in, then I want the line about four hundred years of democracy and the cuckoo
clock.”

  “Right now the only thing you have in common with Orson Welles is that you’re roughly the same shape, and you’re both getting fatter.”

  “Well, fuck you. Don’t bother with small talk and politeness. Get to the point.”

  “She’s not seventy-five years old. She’s not Steve’s aunt. She doesn’t live in that apartment. She’s not a retired schoolteacher. She speaks English. She’s Marte Mayerling. And she worked on the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb at Berkeley.”

  Frank sat down with a bump. He wasn’t about to deny anything.

  He fished around for a cigar in his pocket, bit off the end, and lit up.

  “How did you find out?”

  “She’s wearing a wig. It slips. Her makeup’s OK, but not that good. She doesn’t even know where the cups are in what you tell me is her own apartment . . . and . . . I recognised her.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “Joe, I can never be sure what you know. You always seemed to know more than was ever good for you. You recognised her? Now, fuck me, what were the odds against that? What were the fucking odds?”

  “There’s more . . . the fake passport you gave me to get me through Checkpoint Charlie isn’t fake. You told me it was a fake to rope me in. If I’d known it was real I’d’ve asked questions. And if I’d been firing on all cylinders I might have queried why my ticket to New York was waiting for me at the embassy in Grosvenor Square instead of somewhere like Thomas Cook.”

  “So? So I fucked up. So what?”

  “So you’re not retired from the Agency at all, are you Frank? Tell me, did they buy you into Carver, Sharma, and Dunn? As cover?”

  Frank just stared back at him, not so much as a blink of assent.

  “And this mission to get Steve’s ‘aunt’ out isn’t private enterprise, a mission to save one old Jew. It’s CIA business, isn’t it Frank? It’s all legit. You’ve got me working for the Agency haven’t you? What am I Frank, the fall guy?”

  “Nah. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t let them, any of them, do that to you.”

  “So what am I? A Kopfjäger? Why do you need me to smuggle an atomic physicist out of East Berlin?”

  “We need deniability. You’re our deniability.”

  “What? Some kind of rogue Limey agent doing a job for cash in hand. A fucking mercenary?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So if I got caught that would be the tale?”

  “Getting caught’s not part of the plan.”

  “Then you’d better tell me what the plan really is.”

  Frank sighed, “How long have I got?”

  Wilderness sat down opposite him.

  “The wheel won’t move again till I lob down a coin.”

  “OK. OK. It’s like this . . . we want Dr. Mayerling out. We do not want to be seen to have . . . what’s the word . . . effected . . . effected her escape in any way. Clean hands.”

  “Clean hands if the Russians kick up a stink?”

  “No. The Russians won’t kick up a stink. They’re part of the deal. They want her out too.”

  “Then why not just drive her out to Potsdam and let her cross the Glienicke Bridge? Why the cloak, why the dagger, why me?”

  “Because in the eyes of the world’s press and in the eyes of every other nation this has to look like she has escaped with the help of all those idealistic young Berliners we’ve been talking about. It needs a touch of heroism, it needs to look as though it’s got nothing to do with us and above all nothing to do with the Russkis. All they have to do is go on doing what they’re doing. Turning a blind eye. You do all the rest. You get her out. The free press does its dance of joy, and when she gets to her final destination it’s all got nothing to do with anyone. She is a free individual exercising her new freedom. The GDR is publicly outraged, to say nothing of embarrassed. Russia mouths a few protests, but it’s all on the idiot boards. You and those kids in Berlin—you and the kids and the tunnel are our get-out clause. No one need ever know. It fits. It’s the perfect scenario. No one need ever know. You just fade into the background. The kids take all the credit. No one need ever know. No one need ever know about you.”

  “Why not tell me that at the start? Why the cockamamy story?”

  “Would I have got you this far if I had told you the truth? Besides it wasn’t that cockamamy. It didn’t look that cockamamy. I still say it was a long shot you recognising her. And . . . and it’s important the kids think she’s just another refugee. If they knew the truth . . . God knows. Would they keep shtum? Would they start boasting before you even got her out? Plan was she makes a statement when she gets there. That was to be the first the kids knew about it.”

  “Kids I haven’t even met yet.”

  “Right.”

  “And . . . ‘Gets there’? What is her final destination, Frank? Berkeley? Langley? Does America need one more nuclear physicist?”

  “No. But Israel does. She’s going to build them the bomb, Joe. If it all goes to plan she builds the Jewish bomb. You rescue one old Jew. And you’ll be a hero. An invisible hero, but a hero all the same.”

  §188

  Wilderness dropped a coin. The wheel slowly jerked its way back to the ground.

  The drizzle had stopped. The tourists were flocking in the Prater like summer birds returning.

  “We should walk a while.”

  “What is it about the English and walking. Have you guys yet to invent the wheel?”

  “Why do the Russians want any part of this?”

  “Oh, they got their reasons. You know Russia . . . a problem wrapped in a mess, inside a . . . I forget the rest but you get my drift.”

  “Tell me or I walk—and I don’t mean a stroll in the park.”

  “Aw . . . fuck. Joe, does it matter?”

  Wilderness’s look told him it did.

  “OK. It’s like this. If Israel gets the bomb, its future is pretty well guaranteed. Right? Nobody messes with a nuclear power. That’s obvious. Uncle Sam wants a secure Israel. Nobody gets to be president without the Jewish vote.”

  “Mayerling has agreed to this? After the war she was one of the refuseniks. Wouldn’t work on weapons any more.”

  “Perhaps a few years in the East has changed her mind. God knows it’d change my mind about a lot of things. I’d be grateful for a decent cup of coffee or even water fit to clean my teeth in. She’s been there too long. She left England with Karel Szabo when he got out of the slammer in ’55. Szabo wasn’t a refusenik, of course.”

  Wilderness thought better of telling Frank anything about the summer of 1955—once begun it would surely have to end with a dead Russian in his hotel bathroom, perhaps the same bathroom Frank now occupied—and took his potted history as though hearing it for the first time.

  “Are they still together? Where is Szabo? In Berlin?”

  “No. Odd as it might seem he’s right here in Vienna. Has been since 1961. Got out just before the wall went up.”

  “Then why not get Szabo?”

  “For onesers he ain’t Jewish, and for twosers . . . he’s the refusenik now. If we do this it’s Mayerling or no one. And she will do it. America wants her to do it. Like I said, nobody gets to be prez without the Jewish vote.”

  “So this is . . . presidential policy?”

  “It is . . . governmental policy.”

  “And Steve?”

  “A decent guy. Believe me, one of the best . . . who agreed to play a part for us. For us, for his country and for his people.”

  “Frank, that sounds like a slogan.”

  “It’s true. Steve acted out of one hundred per cent altruism.”

  “Russia. Let’s get back to Russia. Israel gets the bomb. Kennedy gets reelected. What the fuck does Russia have to gain?”

  “The persistence of the status quo in the Middle East.”

  “Wow. Did you read that off a card?”

  “Israel stays, Israel thrives. The
enmity of Jew and Arab persists. Israel is in our camp, so the Arabs aren’t. So long as that opposition persists there is zero chance of peace, zero chance of a major alliance between the Arab states and the US of A. Result . . . Russia keeps a toehold south of the Caucasus. Hell, toehold, ass-hold, both cheeks squatting down on the whole fucking region.”

  “Oil. It’s all about oil.”

  “At last. What took you so long? Of course it’s about oil. We get Israel, the Russkis get the oil. Everybody’s happy. Hell, it’s not as if we need the oil. We got Texas.”

  “And the whole deception is simply to convince the rest of the world that Marte Mayerling escaped through the Berlin student network and made her way to the promised land without the intervention of either side. The USA didn’t rescue her and the Soviet Union didn’t let her go.”

  “I’m not sure about the ‘simply’—but yeah. That’s the scam. If it weren’t, fuck I’d just give her a passport like the one I gave you and let her walk across. But there’s no . . . how should I put it? . . . no illusion of independence in that, and fukkit, no balls to it either. The scam is essential. It can’t look that easy. And now . . . this is where you get to tell me you don’t do scams any more.”

  Wilderness stopped with the sun behind him. Frank shielded his eyes.

  “No, Frank. This is where I tell you it’ll cost you double.”

  “What? Forty thousand bucks!”

  “Now it’s fifty. You say another word and it’s sixty.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “If you agree, just nod your head. Fifty thousand dollars and I finish the job.”

  A passing cloud clipped the sun. Frank lowered his hand and looked straight at Wilderness. It was a long pause, but it seemed to Wilderness that he and Frank had looked at each other this way a hundred times before. He would not be the one to break the silence.

  Frank nodded.

  “OK. Fifty it is. Hell, it’s not as if it’s my money.”

  They walked on a while. Frank was breathing heavily. Wilderness stopped.

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “I’m glad I don’t play soccer with you. You’re always moving the wickets.”