by Dick Cluster
“Here’s your treasure,” she said. “I guess. The rest really is the pictures, and, oh shit, a spoon, verdammt, meine Kindermütze, baby bonnet, more pictures…” She stood, sifting down in the box with one hand, more tears coming. “Jesus,” she said, “I don’t believe he saved all this, all these years… Alex, you go. Call Jack, call your policeman, go chase clues in the cemetery, whatever you must. I need to be alone with this… these relics for a while.”
Alex reached out again but she shrugged him off. He turned and walked out of the building, down the three wide stone steps and into the early-afternoon crowd. He leaned against the furniture showroom window, envelope still unopened, waiting for her to come out. She turned the other way, toward the car, a tall, rounded blond woman pushing her way past a knot of skinny teenagers in leather and army-surplus drab. She blended slowly into a stream of shoppers, women on their way to and from work, men getting in and out of cars, a haze of exhaust from the parade of cars down the wide, divided street. She became nearly as invisible, as anonymous as she had been when Alex had stood daydreaming in line in front of her father the past Friday.
Now he opened the packet that seemed to have cost Gerald Meyer what had been left of his life. He thumbed through a pile of forms that looked like oversized cashiers’ checks. They bore computer-generated names of commercial firms and banks, labeled as drawees, drawers, and payees, as well as invoice and shipping numbers. They bore dollar amounts, none less than $25,000. The words and numbers were obscured, here and there, by darker letters overprinted at right angles with a rubber stamp. ACCEPTED, the stamp said, and below this was a line labeled AUTHORIZED SIGNATURE. In every case, the authorized signature was that of Gerald E. Meyer.
The market value of this pile of checks was impressive, as Alex had guessed. Behind the wad of acceptances, however, was something he had not guessed: several sheets of white, thick, high-grade paper, clipped together, covered with notations in Meyer’s neat, precise, fountain-pen hand.
The notations were dates, serial or identification numbers, banks and brokerage houses, and the names and titles of individuals. Alex did not recognize the names, but the titles placed them in public positions in West Germany, Holland, and Great Britain. It slowly dawned on him that this information, to Interface, Incorporated, would be worth guarding at least as closely as the money itself. Alex groped to an understanding of what kind of dynamite Gerald Meyer had changed his mind about sending to his eldest daughter. His concentration was shattered by the explosion down the street.
He ran toward the sound, knowing as he ran that running would do no good. Other bodies were running the same way as he was, and the opposite way, banging each other as they crossed. Alex forced a path, head down and elbows flailing. He fought his way through the tight crush of onlookers. There was a faint, familiar whiff of gasoline in the air.
Alex forced his way into the space— not comprehending why there was so much space— between the edge of the crowd and the car. The windshield was shattered, the maze of cracks hiding the inside from view. But the passenger door was open. If her legs were working, she was out already. Even so, out didn’t mean safe. He tried, frantically, to pick her out of the crowd. Then he got a step closer, and he could see around the open door. Cynthia Meyer was inside, slumped over both bucket seats. Her face, toward him, was streaked with blood. More blood made an intricate, irregular red pattern on her white pants. One hand, the index finger torn to the bone, hung out the door toward him. As Alex sprang forward, somebody screamed harsh, meaningless, high-pitched syllables. From behind, something hit him so his knees buckled. He couldn’t reach her. He fell backward, away from the car. A shock wave rolled passed him, and his eyes closed against scorching heat. He smelled acrid black swirling smoke. The roar of flames was joined by a siren’s scream.
When he opened his eyes, he was crawling after the retreating crowd, the manila envelope still clutched in his right hand. He reached the edge of a building, sat on the envelope, drew up his knees, and watched what was left of the car slowly burn. He didn’t know who had tackled him, but he knew that whoever had done it had saved his life. The fire was cremating Cynthia’s body inside her car. Tears trickled down Alex’s cheeks, as they had washed down hers only moments before.
The siren became a fire truck, from which came firefighters who hosed down the wreckage with chemical foam. Another siren wailed, and this became a police car, from which two policemen emerged. One of them set about persuading the crowd to move on. The other, following a slew of shouted advice and pointing fingers, advanced toward Alex.
“She was my friend,” Alex explained in a simple declarative German sentence. The policeman’s answer was the equivalent of “You’d better come with us.”
22. Keep Your Temper
Alex gave the victim’s name and address, which the policeman duly radioed in to his dispatcher. The order that came back made him hang a quick U-turn, siren blaring once again. He shut the siren off as he approached the central Police Presidium near the railway overpass that was no longer there. He made a sharp turn into an underground vehicle entrance, then came to a stop. Alex waved his passport and demanded an English-speaking officer. A new cop took him to a room with a desk and two chairs and told him to sit.
The chairs were new, with aluminum alloy frames and plastic seats. Alex felt the twice-folded manila envelope in one back pocket as a lumpy wad between himself and the plastic. In the other pocket, when he replaced the passport, he found the death threat Cynthia had told him to keep as a souvenir just before she had invited him to her bed. He tried not to think about what she had looked like then. He tried not to think about what she had looked like in her shattered VW bug. He tried to focus on the mechanical details of how the explosion had happened, and the factual details of why.
Those who are gone live on with us, in the memory of their dear ones. The sentence rose in Alex’s mind unbidden. It was a line from the section of the Jewish worship service set aside for mourners. It was the kind of line that lay inside, dormant, because you had absorbed it by osmosis, dozing through your friend’s bar mitzvah. He wasn’t sure he qualified as a dear one, but if he did, then Cynthia lived on in her off-center smile, her clear eyes, the white rose pinned to the brown strap. The feel of her tongue in his mouth. Yet those memories happened to survive only because blood still carried oxygen to Alex’s brain. And that— he was sure— was sheerest accident. He was sure the bomb had been intended for him as well.
Did the planter of the bomb know that these memories, and Gerald Meyer’s dangerous gift, survived? If Alex had stayed in Boston, intent on putting nothing right but chipped teeth on timing gears, would the result have been any different? If he had plunged the switchblade into the neck of the man on the train, would there have been someone left to place the bomb? These questions had no answers, not yet. Nor did the others that circled about, snapping like voracious scavenger fish. Especially there was no answer to the great, implacable white shark of a question: Why is it that she is dead and I am not?
Finally a square-jawed, silver-haired officer came in, cassette recorder in hand, to place simpler questions of his own. The officer sat on top of the shiny metal desk, adjusting the crease of his gray slacks. He plugged in the recorder and pressed a button to get it rolling.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Glauberman.” His English was British, not American. “They had to rouse me out of a conference, you know. Could I take a look at your passport, please?”
In exchange for the passport he handed Alex an embossed card. Hauptmann Gerhard Schultheiss.
“Hm.” Schultheiss returned the passport, intertwined his fingers, and cracked his knuckles in a self-satisfied way. “And where were you between the time you entered Britain at Heathrow on Sunday and the time you crossed the DDR border, by train yesterday?”
The precision of the query brought Alex back to the present. Hauptmann meant “captain.” Captains were not hauled out of conferences to interrogate witnesses jus
t because of linguistic skills. It was time for another duel with another policeman— and not by long-distance telephone this time.
“I stopped over in London and in Hannover.”
“Could I have the addresses where you stayed in each of those cities, and in Berlin?”
“Excuse me, Captain. Am I a suspect, is that it? My address in Berlin is Gasthaus Mockernstrasse. What does my address in London matter to your investigation?”
Schultheiss straightened his tie, which was red with gold lions rampant.
“That depends. How long had you known Fraulein Meyer?”
“Since early yesterday morning. I’m staying now at her Gasthaus.”
“The witnesses say you headed for the car to drag her out, milliseconds before the gas tank blew. You would have gone up with her, except somebody got in your way. They say you were rather broken up afterward.”
Schultheiss regarded Alex steadily for a minute without putting his observation into the form of a question. His silver hair was fashionably long, maybe longer, parted back over his ears and held there as if by spray. When Alex did not comment, he raised his eyebrows and his voice.
“Bed-and-breakfast sort of affair, Mr. Glauberman?”
Alex tried with all his might to hit the captain on the point of the square, close-shaved jaw. He lashed out with his right fist into empty air. Schultheiss slid easily off the side of the desk, out of reach.
“Keep your temper,” he warned, straightening his tie once more. “Your record is clean, as far as our files are concerned. We have no evidence you are involved. You just picked the wrong dolly, maybe. What do you think caused her departure to Valhalla this afternoon?”
Alex sat down. Sharp steel tools kept their temper; so could he. It wouldn’t do anybody any good to get himself locked up. He took a deep breath and then answered.
“I think somebody wired an explosive into the starter switch of her car. In those old bugs, you just have to open the trunk, in the front, and yank out the cardboard divider. The switch is exposed, and you can just leave the bomb in the trunk. The gas tank is right underneath. It looked to me—” Alex shut his eyes and took another breath, in and out. “It looked to me like it was a fragment bomb, and whatever was in it went right through the dash. Or else it blew the dash to pieces, and the pieces went into her. She was bleeding a lot, all over. That first explosion must have put a small crack in the gas line or the tank. I guess the fumes ignited from the heat.”
“You seem to have this all figured out.”
“I’ve had time.” The rest of Alex’s answer was his stock one, hollow in the circumstances. “And I fix cars, besides.”
“Then I pardon your ingenuity. I wouldn’t put much stock in your theory, though. My guess is it was her bomb, that she was carrying in the boot, and it went off ahead of schedule. We’ll see soon enough, because right now your pleasant little Gasthaus is being raided. We’ve only been waiting for sufficient cause. I expect we’ll find the makings of quite a few bombs under the pretty furniture. You’re a very lucky chap, Mr. Glauberman. You picked a quite subversive dolly, and the wrong time to go riding in her car. She didn’t say anything that might give us a lead about where she was heading, did she?”
“No,” Alex said, staying put with an effort. “She said she was going home.” He thought of Marianne and Cenap and Hans, or whoever else of Cynthia’s makeshift family might be around. Raid first, the police procedure would be. Explanations afterward. Thus far, they wouldn’t even have revealed she was dead. He did not expect much from Schultheiss, but he would do what he could with the captain, for them.
“You’re Red Squad, I guess, or whatever you call it around here. So you won’t want to think about what I have to say until you don’t find any bombs under the furniture. But I have a few leads that you can pass on to the appropriate officer. One— Cynthia Meyer had been receiving threats from neo-Nazis. I have one of the threats right here.”
He handed the note over. The policeman looked at it quickly, then looked up and spoke airily.
“This is not the 1930s. I grant you, there’s a lot of feeling in this city against whole neighborhoods starting to smell of garlic. I’ve heard that, even in Massachusetts, there are rotters who don’t like to see their neighborhoods invaded by other races. But do give us some credit for being one jump ahead of that sort of thing. I grant you a slight possibility of a sort of gang war, right versus left.”
He started to hand the note back, then thought better of it.
“Thank you,” Alex said. “If you’re one jump ahead, maybe you’ll know where to look for the killer. Now, two— if you’ve got files anything like the FBI, I bet you’ve got a big one on Cynthia. You’ll see in the file that she has a father in America. You probably won’t see that Gerald Meyer was murdered, gangland-style, as they say in the American papers, last Friday night in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You’d want to speak with a Sergeant Trevisone there.”
“Is there a three?” Schultheiss interrupted with an ironical smile.
Yes, Alex said silently. The evidence for lead number three is in my back pocket. But I don’t want to trust you with that, just yet.
“No, that’s it. I’m sorry I got angry, but I didn’t… well, I’m sorry. Are you going to let me go now? If not, I’d like to call the American consul, please.”
The detective sighed. “If you’re a terrorist, your country breeds sentimental ones. Otherwise you wouldn’t have waited around to be picked up. Yes, you may go. If you change your address— which I would strongly advise— be sure to let me know your new one immediately. And don’t leave the city. That would look suspicious.”
“Yes sir,” Alex said. A patrolman showed him to the street door. The sky was still blue and clear, the air comfortably warm, the traffic steady. But Alex felt his adrenaline dripping away, replaced by dogged, gritty sludge in his veins. This sludge was a grimy, abrasive substance that mocked the cheeky performance he’d just put on. The grit was made up of images: Cynthia’s friends, spread-eagled against the wall while cops made ghoulish, cryptic jokes. Cynthia slumped over, possibly alive, while the fumes built up and nobody pulled her out. Cynthia by his hospital bed, hands on hips, a woman to all appearances in control of her destiny. The sludge hurt, but it had power.
Alex entered the subway, as she would, without a ticket. He studied the map, rode two stops to the north, and got off where the Mehringdamm met Friedrichstrasse. This was a busy intersection next to one of Berlin’s myriad canals. He found what he needed— a phone— inside a bar, smoky and hot. The smoke felt like airborne death in his lungs, but somehow talking here was less lonely than it would be in an open booth on the bustling street. In German, he negotiated details about the number and credit card. In English, the desk man told him Trevisone was busy. Alex felt all the lonelier, hearing this.
“This is Alex Glauberman,” he insisted. “About the Gerald Meyer murder? Meyer’s daughter has been murdered too. This time I was a witness. I’m calling from West Berlin.” Alex began counting, silently, to pass the time. Trevisone got to the phone on eight.
“Glauberman,” he said. “What the hell was that?”
“Somebody just blew up Cynthia Meyer’s VW. She was in it, and I think they expected me to be in it too. Soon they’ll find out they were wrong. It may be that all this killing is about race, religion, and politics, but I doubt it. What Meyer sent his daughter was somebody else’s money, as I thought, but it was also a long list of names, numbers, and dates. Meyer must have figured Cynthia could use that to blackmail Moselle. It turns out she wasn’t the blackmailing type. Do you think the names, numbers, and dates would interest that federal agency you mentioned? The Treasury or the SEC or whoever?”
“Maybe.” Trevisone’s voice was matter-of-fact. Just one more killing to him, and very far away at that. “Off the record, you were right. They say they’ve been closing in on Meyer for about the past six months. But you haven’t convinced me that stuff explains why he got killed. A
lot more often there’s a garden-variety motive involved.”
“Right,” Alex said. Tell me another one. “Did you arrest that girlfriend yet, then?”
“I can’t arrest somebody I can’t find.” The sergeant sounded peeved for the first time. “You trying to tell me this Cynthia was put out of the picture by the same hand?”
“We’ll see. Right now I’m trying to tell you that you might get a call from a Captain Schultheiss, who seems to be in charge of the investigation here. If you do, I’d appreciate it if you try to talk some sense into his head. Meanwhile, I’m going to run one more errand, where I hope nobody’s expecting to find me.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not going to waste your money giving you any more advice. Just maybe drop me a hint about where that might be.”
“Sure,” Alex said, his mother’s tongue rushing to the fore. “If I don’t come back, I’d like you to know. It’s in walking distance. To get there, I head up along Friedrichstrasse and then on through Checkpoint Charlie.”
“Aw, fuck, Glauberman. I hope the damn Russians keep you.”
23. Knives Sharpened
It was three o’clock, building toward rush hour. Walking up the street he had named, Alex left all the bustle behind. This had been Berlin’s Fifth Avenue— once. Now it was desolate. Its only reason for being, in the West Zone, anyway, was that it led to one of the few breaks in the Wall.
Across vacant lots to his left, Alex could see other kinds of walls. On two apartment buildings, maybe eight to ten stories tall, the sides had been left exposed by demolition of adjacent structures. The exposed surfaces were painted in huge surrealist murals. One featured melting shapes of missiles and doves. The other depicted clouds, planets, human shapes, spires— and likewise doves, for good measure.