by Greg Iles
"I'd rather have his income," Hans said, smiling. It was his stock
answer, but the American laughed. "Besides," he added, "I'm married."
"Yeah?" The sergeant grinned back. "Me too. Six years and two kids.
You?"
Hans shook his head. "We've been trying, but we haven't had any luck."
"That's a bitch," said the American, shaking his head. "I got some
buddies with that problem. Man, they gotta check the calendar and their
old lady's temperature and every other damn thing before they can even
get it on. No thanks."
When the sergeant saw Hans's expression, he said, "Hey, sorry 'bout
that, man. Guess you know more about it than you ever wanted to." He
raised his rifle again, sighting in on yet another invisible target.
"Bang, " he said, and lowered the weapon. "We'd better keep moving,
Boris." He disappeared into the shadows, taking the scope with him.
For the next six hours, Hans moved through the darkness without speaking
to anyone, except to answer the challenges of the Russians.
They seemed to be taking the operation much more seriously than anyone
else, he noticed. Almost personally.
About four A.M. he decided to have a second look at his map. He
approached the command trailer obliquely, walking backward to read by
the glow of the single floodlamp. Suddenly he heard voices. Peering
around the trailer, he saw the French and British sergeants sitting
together on the makeshift steps. The Frenchman was very young, like
most of the twenty-seven hundred conscripts who comprised the French
garrison in Berlin. The Brit was older, a veteran of England's
professional army. He did most of the talking; the Frenchman smoked and
listened in silence. Now and then the wind carried distinct words to
Hans. "Hess" was one"lefenant" and "bloody Russians" were others.
Suddenly the Frenchman stood, flicked his cigarette butt into the
darkness, and strode out of the white pool of light. The Englishman
followed close on his heels.
Hans turned to go, then froze. One meter behind him stood the imposing
silhouette of Captain Dieter Hauer. The fiery eye of a cigar blazed
orange in the darkness.
"Hello, Hans," said the deep, burnished voice.
Hans said nothing.
"Damned cold for this time of year, eh?"
"Why am I here?" Hans asked. "You broke our agreement."
"No, I didn't. This was bound to happen sooner or later, even with a
twenty-thousand-man police force."
Hans considered this. "I suppose you're right," he said at length. "It
doesn't matter. Just another assignment, right?"
Hauer nodded. "You've been doing a hell of a job, I hear.
Youngest sergeant in Berlin."
Hans flushed a little, shrugged.
"I lied, Hans," Hauer said suddenly. "I did break our agreement.
I requested you for this detail."
Hans's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Because it was busy work. Killing time. I thought we might get a
chance to talk."
Hans studied the slushy ground. "So talk."
Hauer seemed to search for words. "There's a lot that needs saying."
"Or nothing."
Hauer sighed deeply. "I'd really like to know why you came to Berlin.
Three years now. You must have wanted some kind of reconciliation ...
or answers, or something."
Hans stiffened. "So why are you asking the questions?"
Hauer looked hard into Hans's, eyes. "All right," he said softly.
"We'll wait until you're ready."
Before Hans could reply, Hauer vanished into the darkness. Even the
glow of his cigar had disappeared. Hans stood still for some moments;
then, shaking his head angrily, he hurried into the shadows and resumed
his patrol.
Time passed quickly now, the silence broken only by an occasional siren
or the roar of a jet from the British military airport at Gatow.
With the snow soaking into his uniform, Hans walked faster to take his
mind off the cold. He hoped he would be lucky enough to get home before
his wife, Ilse, left for work. Sometimes after a particularly rough
night shift, she would cook him a breakfast of Weisswurst and buns, even
if she was in a hurry.
He checked his watch. Almost 6:00 A.M. It would be dawn soon. He felt
better as the end of his shift neared. What he really wanted was to get
out of the weather for a while and have a smoke. A mountain of
shattered concrete near the rear of the lot looked as though it might
afford good shelter, so he made for it. The nearest soldier was
Russian, but he stood at least thirty meters from the pile. Hans
slipped through a narrow opening when the sentry wasn't looking.
He found himself in a comfortable little nook that shielded him
completely from the wind. He wiped off a slab of concrete, sat down,
and warmed his face by breathing into his cupped gloves. Nestled in
this dark burrow, he was invisible to the patrolling soldiers, yet he
still commanded a surprisingly wide view of the prison grounds. The
snow had finally stopped, and even the wind had fallen off a bit. In
the predawn silence, the demolished prison looked like pictures of
bombed-out Dresden he had seen as a schoolboy: motionless sentries
standing tall against bleak destruction, watching over nothing.
Hans took out his cigarettes. He was trying to quit, but he still
carried a pack whenever he went into a potentially stressful situation.
Just the knowledge that he could light up sometimes calmed his nerves.
But not tonight. Removing one glove with his teeth, he fumbled in his
jacket for matches. He leaned as far away as he could from the opening
to his little cave, scraped a match across the striking pad, then cupped
it in his palm to conceal the light. He held it to his cigarette,
drawing deeply. His shivering hand made the job difficult, but he soon
steadied it and was rewarded with a jagged rush of smoke.
As the match flame neared his fingers, a glint of white flashed against
the blackness of the chamber. When he flicked the match away, the
glimmer vanished. Probably only a bit of snow, he thought. But boredom
made him curious. Gauging the risk of discovery by the Russian, he lit
a second match. There. Near the floor of his cubbyhole he could see
the object clearly now-not glass but paper-a small wad stuck to a long
narrow brick. He hunched over and held the match nearer.
In the close light he could see that rather than being stuck to the
brick as he had first thought, the paper actually protruded from the
brick itself. He grasped the folded wad and tugged it gently from its
receptacle. The paper made a dry, scraping sound. Hans inserted his
index finger into the brick.
He couldn't feel the bottom. The second match died. He lit another.
Quickly spreading open the crinkled wad of onionskin, he surveyed his
find in the flickering light. It seemed to be a personal document of
some sort, a will or a diary perhaps, hand-printed in heavy blocked
letters. In the dying matchlight Hans read as rapidly as he could: This
is the testament of Prisoner #7. I am the last now, and I know that I
shall neve
r be granted the freedom that I-more than any of those
released before me-deserve.
Death is the only freedom I will know. I hear His black wings beating
about me! While my child lives I cannot speak, but here I shall write.
I only pray that I can be coherent. Between the drugs, the questions,
the promises and the threats, I sometimes wonder if I am not already mad
I only hope that long after these 'events cease to have immediate
consequencest . n our insane world, someone will find these words and
learn the obscene truth, not only of Hammier, Heydrich, and the rest,
but of England-of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her
existence forThe crunch of boot heels on snow jolted Hans back to
reality. Someone was coming! Jerking his head to the aperture in the
bricks, he closed his hand on the searing match and peered out into an
alien world.
Dawn had come. In its unforgiving light, Hans saw a Russian soldier
less than ten meters from his hiding place, moving slowly forward with
his AK-47 extended. The flare of the third match had drawn him. "Fool!"
Hans cursed himself. He jammed the sheaf of paper into his boot, then
he stepped boldly out of the niche and strode toward the advancing
soldier.
"Halt!" cried the Russian, emphasizing the command with a jerk of his
Kalashnikov.
"Versailles," Hans countered in the steadiest voice he could muster.
His calm delivery of the password took the Russian aback.
"What are you doing in there, Polizei?"lasked the soldier in passable
German.
"Smoke," Hans replied, extending the pack. "Having a smoke out of the
wind." He waved his sector map in a wide arc as if to take in the wind
itself.
"No wind," the Russian stated flatly, never taking his eyes from Hans's
face.
It was true. Sometime during the last few minutes the wind had died.
"Smoke, comrade," Hans repeated.
"Versailles! Smoke, tovarich!"
He continued to proffer the pack, but the soldier only cocked his head
toward his red-patched collar and spoke quietly. Hans caught his breath
when he spied the small transmitter clipped to the sentry's belt. The
Russians were in radio contact! In seconds the soldier's zealous
comrades would come running. Hans felt a hot wave of panic. A
surprisingly strong aversion to letting the Russians discover the papers
gripped him. He cursed himself for not leaving them in the little cave
rather than stuffing them into his boot like a naive shoplifter. He had
almost reached the point of blind flight when a shrill whistle pierced
the air in staccato bursts.
Chaos erupted all over the compound. The long, anxious night of
surveillance had strained everyone's nerves to the breaking point, and
the whistle blast, like a hair trigger, catapulted every man into the
almost sexual release of physical action. Contrary to orders, every
soldier and policeman on the lot abandoned his post to converge on the
alarm. The Russian whipped his head toward the noise, then back to
Hans. Shouted commands echoed across the prison yard, rebounding
through the broken canyons.
"Versailles!" Hans shouted. "Versailles, Comrade! Let's go!"
The Russian seemed confused. He lowered his rifle a little, wavering.
"Versailles," he murmured. He looked hard at Hans for a moment more;
then he broke and ran.
Rooted to the earth, Hans exhaled slowly. He felt cold sweat pouring
across his temples. With quivering hands, he pocketed his cigarettes,
then carefully refolded his sector map, realizing as he did so that the
paper he held was not his sector map at all, but the first page of the
papers he had found in the hollow brick. Like a fool he had been waving
under the Russian's nose the very thing he wanted to conceal! Thank God
that idiot didn't check it, he thought. He pressed the page deep into
his left boot, pulled his trouser legs down around his feet, and
sprinted toward the sound of confusion.
In the brief moments it took Hans to respond to the whistle, a routine
police matter had escalated into a potentially explosive confrontation.
Near the blasted prison gate, five Soviet soldiers stood in a tight
circle around two fortyish men wearing frayed business suits. They
pointed their AK-47s menacingly, while nearby their commander argued
vehemently with Erhard Weiss. The Russian was insisting that the
trespassers be taken to an East German poliee station for interrogation.
Weiss was doing his best to calm the shouting Russian, but he was
obviously out of his depth. Captain Hauer was nowhere in sight, and
while the other policemen stood behind Weiss looking resolute, Hans knew
that their Walthers would be no match for the Soviet assault weapons if
it came to a showdown.
The sergeants of the NATO detachments kept their men well clear of the
argument. They knew political dynamite when they saw it. While the
Soviets kept their rifles leveled at the wide-eyed captives-who looked
as if they might collapse from shock at any moment-the Russian
"sergeant" bellowed louder and louder in broken German, trying to bully
the tenacious Weiss into giving up "his" prisoners. TO his credit,
Weiss stood firyn. He refused to allow any action to be taken until
Captain Hauer had been apprised of the situation.
Hans stepped forward, hoping to interject some moderation into the
dispute. Yet before he could speak, a black BMW screeched up to the
curb and Captain Hauer vaulted from its rear door.
"What the hell, is this?" he shouted.
The screaming Russian immediately redirected his tirade at Hauer, but
the German bnisquely raised his hand, breaking the flood of words like a
wave against a rock.
"Weiss!" he barked.
"Sir!"
"Explain."
Weiss was so relieved to have the responsibility of the prisoners lifted
from his shoulders that his words tumbled over themselves.
"Captain, five minutes ago I saw two men moving suspiciously inside the
perimeter. They must have slipped in somewhere between Willi and me.
I flashed my light on them and shouted, 'Halt!' but they were startled
and ran. They charged straight into one of the Russians, and before I
could even blow my whistle, every Russian on the lot had surrounded
them."
"Radios," Hauer muttered.
"Captain!" the Soviet "sergeant" bellowed. "These men are prisoners of
the Soviet government! Any attempt to interfere-" Without a word, Hauer
strode past the Russian and into the deadly circle of automatic weapons.
He began a rapid, professional interrogation of the prisoners, speaking
quietly in German.
The black American sergeant whistled low. "That cop's got balls," he
observed, loudly enough for all to hear. One of his men giggled
nervously.
The terrified civilians were elated to be questioned by a fellow
countryman. In less than a minute, Hauer extracted the relevant
information from them, and his men relaxed considerably during the
exchange. It revealed a familiar situation-distasteful per
haps, but
thankfully routine. Even the Russians holding the Kalashnikovs seemed
to have picked up on Captain Hauer's casual manner. He patted the
smaller of the two trespassers on the shoulder, then slipped out of the
circle. A few of the rifles dropped noticeably as he stepped up to the
Russian officer.
"They're quite harmless, Comrade," he explained. "A couple of homos,
that's all."
Misunderstanding the slang, the Russian continued to scowl at Hauer.
"What is their explanation?" he demanded stiffly.
"They're homosexuals, Sergeant. Queers, Schwiile ...
golden boys, I think you call them. Looking for a temporary love nest,
that's all. They're all over Berlin."
"No matter!" the Russian snapped, grasping Hauer's meaning at last.
"They have trespassed on Soviet territory, and they must be interrogated
at our headquarters in East Berlin." He motioned to his men. The
rifles jerked back up instantly. He barked an order and started
marching toward the parking area.
Hauer had no time to consult his superiors as to legalities, but he knew
that allowing Russian soldiers to drag two of his fellow countrymen into
the DDR without any semblance of a trial was something no West Berliner
with an ounce of pride would do without a fight.
Glancing,around, he tried to gauge the sympathies of the NATO squads.
The Americans looked as if they might be with him, but Hauer knew he
couldn't rely on that if it came to a fight. Force would probably be
counterproductive in any case, he thought; it usually was. He'd have to
try a different tack.
Five steps carried him to the departing Russian. He grasped the burly
man by his tunic and spun him around.
"Listen, Sergeant," he whispered forcefully, "or Major or Colonel or
whatever the hell you are. These man have committed no serious offense
and they certainly pose no threat to the security of this site.
I suggest we search them, then book them into one of our stations just
like anybody else. That way we keep the press out of it, understand?
Pravda?
izvestia? If you want to make an international incident out of this,
you're quite welcome to do it, but you take full responsibility.
Am I clear?"
The Russian understood well enough, and for a moment he considered
Hauer's suggestion. But the situation was not so simple now. He had