by Greg Iles
There were a few nervous chuckles. Hauer spat onto the snow. A hostage-recovery specialist, he plainly considered this token guard detail an affront to his dignity. “You should feel very safe tonight, gentlemen,” he continued with heavy sarcasm. “We have the soldiers of France, England, the United States, and Mother Russia with us tonight. They are here to provide the security which we, the West Berlin police, are deemed unfit to provide.” Hauer clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m sure you men feel as I do about this, but nothing can be done. “You know your assignments. Four of you will guard the perimeter. Apfel, Weiss—you’re designated rovers. You’ll patrol at random, watching for improper conduct among the regular troops. What constitutes ‘improper conduct’ here, I have not been told. I assume it means unsanctioned searches or provocation between forces. Everyone do your best to stay clear of the Russians. Whatever agencies those men out there serve, I doubt it’s the Red Army. If you have a problem, sound your whistle and wait. I’ll come to you. Everyone else hold your position until instructed otherwise.”
Hauer paused, staring into the young faces around him. His eyes lingered on a reddish-blond sergeant with gray eyes, then flicked away. “Be cautious,” he said evenly, “but don’t be timid. We are on German soil, regardless of what any political document may say. Any provocation, verbal or physical, will be reported to me immediately. Immediately.”
The venom in Hauer’s voice made it plain he would brook no insult from the Soviets or anyone else. He spoke as though he might even welcome it. “Check your sector maps carefully,” he added. “I want no mistakes tonight. You will show these soldier boys the meaning of professionalism and discipline. Go!”
Six policemen scattered.
Hans Apfel, the reddish-blond sergeant whom Hauer had designated one of the rovers, trotted about twenty metres, then stopped and looked back at his superior. Hauer was studying a map of the prison, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. Hans started to walk back, but the American sergeant suddenly appeared from behind the police van and engaged Hauer in quiet conversation.
Hans turned and struck out across the snow, following the line of the Wilhemstrasse to his left. Angrily, he crushed a loose window pane beneath his boot. With no warning at all this day had become one of the most uncomfortable of his life. One minute he had been on his way out of the Friedrichstrasse police station, headed home to his wife; the next a duty sergeant had tapped him on the shoulder, said he needed a good man for a secret detail, and practically thrust Hans into a van headed for Spandau Prison. That in itself was a pain in the ass. Double shifts were hell, especially those that had to be pulled on foot in the snow.
But that wasn’t the real source of Hans’s discomfort. The problem was that the commander of the guard detail, Captain Dieter Hauer, was Hans’s father. None of the other men on this detail knew that—for which Hans was grateful—but he had a strange feeling that might soon change. During the ride to Spandau, he had stared resolutely out of the van
window, refusing to be drawn into conversation. He couldn’t understand how it had happened. He and his father had a long-standing arrangement—a simple agreement designed to deal with a complex family situation—and Hauer must have broken it. It was the only explanation. After a few minutes of bitter confusion, Hans resolved to deal with this situation the way he always did. By ignoring it. He kicked a mound of snow out of his path. So far he had made only two cautious circuits of the perimeter. He felt more than a little tense about strolling into a security zone where soldiers carried loaded assault rifles as casually as their wallets. He panned his eyes across the dark lot, shielding them from the snow with a gloved hand. God, but the British did their job well, he thought.
Ghostly mountains of jagged brick and iron rose up out of the swirling snow like the bombed-out remnants of Berlin buildings that had never been restored. Drawing a deep breath, he stepped forward into the shadows. It was a strange journey. For fifteen or twenty steps he would see nothing but the glow of distant street lamps. Then a soldier would materialize, a black mirage against the falling snow. Some challenged him, most did not. When they did, Hans simply said, “Versailles”—the code word printed at the bottom of his sector map—and they let him pass. He couldn’t shake a vague feeling of anxiety that had settled on his shoulders. As he passed the soldiers, he tried to focus on the weapon each carried. In the darkness all the uniforms looked alike, but the guns identified everyone.
Each Russian stood statue-still, his shark-like Kalashnikov resting butt-first on the ground like an extension of his arm. The French also stood, though not at attention. They cradled their FAMAS rifles in crooked elbows and tried vainly to smoke in the frigid wind. The British carried no rifles, each having been issued a sidearm in the interest of discretion.
it was the Americans who disturbed Hans. Some leaned casually against broken slabs of concrete, their weapons nowhere in evidence. Others squatted on piles of brick, hunched over their M-16 Armalites as if they could barely stay awake. None of the US soldiers had even bothered to challenge Hans’s passage. At first he felt angry that NATO soldiers would take such a casual approach to their duties.
But after a while he began to wonder. Their indifference could simply be a ruse, couldn’t it? Certainly for an assignment such as this a high-caliber team would have been chosen?
After three hours’ patrol, Hans’s suspicions were proved correct, when he nearly stumbled over the black American sergeant surveying the prison grounds through a bulbous scope fitted to his M-16. Not wishing to startle him, Hans whispered, “Versailles, Sergeant.” When the American didn’t respond, he tried again. “What can you see?”
“Everything from the command trailer on the east to that Ivan pissing on a brick pile on the west,” the sergeant replied in German, never taking his eyes from the scope.
“I can’t see any of that!”
“Image-intensifier,” the American murmured. “Well, well … I didn’t know the Red Army let its sentries take a piss-break on guard du… What the—”
The noncom wrenched the rifle away from his face.
“What is it?” Hans asked, alarmed.
“Nothing … damn. This thing works by light magnification, not infrared. That smartass flashed a spotlight toward me and whited out my scope. What an asshole.”
Hans grunted in mutual distaste for the Russians. “Nice scope,” he said, hoping to get a look through it himself.
“Your outfit doesn’t have ‘em?”
“Some units do. The drug units, mostly. I used one in training, but they aren’t issued for street duty.”
“Too bad.” The American scanned the ruins. “This is one weird place, isn’t it?”
Hans shrugged and tried to look nonchalant. “Like a graveyard, man. A hundred and fifty cells in this place, and only one occupied—by Hess. Dude must’ve known some serious shit to keep him locked down that tight.” The sergeant cocked his head and squinted at Hans.
“Man, you know you look familiar. Yeah … you look like that guy, that tennis player—”
“Becker,” Hans finished, looking at the ground. “Becker, yeah. Boris Becker. I guess everybody tells you that, huh?”
Hans looked up. “Once a day, at least.”
“I’ll bet it doesn’t hurt you with the Frauleins.”
“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 flood lamp. 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, “lieutenant” 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 metre 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 metres 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 match light 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 never 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 consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth, not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honour and ultimately her existence for …
The 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 metres 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?” asked 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 t
o 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 police station for interrogation.