by Dan Pollock
There was obviously nothing further to be found, lacking as he did either Sherlockian powers of observation or a portable crime lab. And Taras had sufficiently overstepped bounds, invoking professional credentials on behalf of personal jealousy.
The manager led him back down a narrow corridor. Halfway along, as Taras was squeezing by a maid’s cart poking out of an open door, something caught his eye. He backed up a step, snatched a paper out of a plastic trash basket hooked to the cart. It was a colored drawing. Taras stared at it in horror.
“You have found something, monsieur?”
“Yes, I have. A picture of the man she was with.”
There were two large cartoon faces on the drawing. One was Charlie. The other was Marcus Jolly. The artist had captured both of them with minimal exaggeration. Beneath their smiling faces he had drawn miniature cartoon bodies—in bathing suits, holding hands and riding surfboards.
Darkness descended on Taras’ mind. A black screen on which he saw from floor level across a room the dead body of Eva Sorokina, ghastly white in the sepulchral light of a Siberian winter morning. Only it was no longer Eva’s nightmare-empty face turned toward his eyes, but Charlie’s.
Standing in that hushed corridor, he heard an anguished scream echoing from a dozen years earlier. Eva’s screams—before the monster strangled her—surely Taras must have heard them that night echoing down the dark corridors of his alcoholic stupor. Because sometimes, like now, he thought he heard them echoing still.
It wasn’t over. The Cowboy had come again to kill his girl.
What do you want with her, you bastard! Let her go! I’ll kill you if you touch her, you know I will! But not only would Marcus know that, Taras realized, he would count on it. Hadn’t he hinted, in his letter to Taras, of “one more enticement” to make Taras come after him again? Taras stared down at the picture of the two of them together, knew with terrible certainty that Charlie was that enticement and that Marcus was going to kill her.
The manager had returned, his elegant face only slightly marred with concern. “Monsieur, shall I call a doctor?”
Taras brought his eyes into focus, stilled the trembling paper in his hand. “I’m fine. This signature on the cartoon, a local artist?”
“Yes, Etienne. His studio is right along the beach, the Boulevard de Lattre de Tassigny. Between a glacier—you understand, ice cream?—and a boite à couture, what I think you call a haberdashery.”
*
Taras parked the Fiesta on a side street, two wheels up on the sidewalk like everybody else, then sprinted around a corner to the artist’s closet-sized studio.
The damn place was shuttered. Taras stared in the window. A hand-lettered sign advertised PORTRAITS, FROM 150 FR. PASTEL, BLACK & WHITE. There were samples taped all over the glass. Another sign in the door said Etienne would be back at two. But it was a quarter to three and the lazy bastard was still out to lunch.
Taras swore, stepped back, nearly lost his balance and swore again as his shoe skidded in dog shit. Behind him someone giggled. Taras whirled angrily and a fat kid in a bathing suit backed away, licking an ice cream cone. Taras scraped his shoe on the low cement curb and felt despair sapping even his rage.
What the hell was he doing here, surrounded by somnolent, sunblasted holidaymakers and blinding Kodachrome vistas? He was killing time—and perhaps killing Charlie—when he should be alerting the world and rushing off for Berlin. What did it matter what the sketch artist said about them? But Taras wanted to know. He hurried across the street to a brasserie telephone, deciding to call John Tully in Washington while he waited another few minutes for Etienne to show up.
But the fucking French phone wouldn’t work. The barman gestured at him violently, then a nearby patron explained the telephone only swallowed jetons—tokens. Taras spilled out some change to buy some, when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a bent-over man in walking shorts poking a key into the portrait shop door.
Before Etienne had pocketed the key, Taras was beside him displaying the drawing.
“Yes, yes, of course I remember them. I have captured their essence.”
“What were they like together?”
“Very much in love. Exactly as I show them here.”
“But—but I found this in the trash. One of them threw it away. If they had been lovers—”
“That is only a color Xerox. They make around the corner. They bought several, I think. Perhaps this one was damaged. I am sure they have kept the original. She is older, but was like a very young girl with him. You know her?”
“Yes.”
Etienne peered more closely at Taras, blinking rapidly as if from a nervous tic. “But I perceive, monsieur, that what I have said causes you great distress. I regret it.”
Taras finally reached Tully from the PTT on Avenue de Gaulle. It was ten in the morning in Washington. “John, Charlie’s in terrible danger.” Taras gave the briefest explanation, promising to call back with more as quickly as possible. “Where is she going? You’ve got to tell me.”
“Hold on, Taras.” Tully was back in a few seconds. “Taras, who are you calling next?”
“The CIA.”
“Christ! Okay, but get back to me damn fast. Where the hell are you?”
“In a Postes and Télecommunications in Le Lavandou. You can’t reach me. I’ll call you.”
“You damn well better. You’re giving me a fucking heart attack here. If there’s anything we can do—”
“I promise, John. Give it to me.”
“Charlie’s due at the Kempinski tonight. It’s right on the Ku-damm, in Berlin.”
“I know it. Thanks. I’ll call you right back.”
When it took several maddening minutes for the PTT to place a simple call to Langley, which then got disconnected, Taras bolted out of the booth, drove back up the street to the Auberge, buttonholed the manager and exchanged a credit card for an hour in an empty room with a phone. He got through to the Agency’s deputy director at once, spoke for twenty hectic minutes, then dialed John Tully back at the newspaper.
*
A half-hour later Taras was squinting into the afternoon sun as he drove west on motorway A-50 to Marseille, racing to catch a direct flight to Berlin. His panic hadn’t abated, his right foot squeezing every millimeter of speed out of the little Fiesta; but he had at least the comfort of knowing a contingent of CIA and plainclothes German federal police was en route to the Kempinski, ready to swoop down and save Charlotte, then take out Marcus.
Taras prayed they would show up.
He called the Kempinski from Marseille, again from the air and finally from Berlin, only moments after his plane landed at the Tegel Airport.
His Agency contact prepared him for extremely bad news. Lufthansa had just confirmed that Charlotte had arrived in Berlin on a flight from Paris and had rented an Opel Omega at the airport, giving the Kempinski as her local address.
“So what’s wrong?” Taras cut in.
“Unfortunately a few minutes ago a man with an American accent called the hotel to cancel Fräulein Walsh’s reservation."
Twenty-Nine
Marcus drove the luxurious Opel south from Berlin, past the dismantled Checkpoint Bravo at Kontrollpunkt Drewitz and onto the E6 Autobahn toward Leipzig and Nuremberg. Charlotte, close beside him in darkness pulsing with a Mozart divertimento, gestured ahead at the lighted sign for the Babelsberg-Potsdam turnoff.
“I see it,” Marcus said.
“Ciao, Potsdam,” she laughed as they flashed past. “I’ll be back.”
No, you won’t, Marcus thought.
There would be, alas, one less scribe to chronicle the historic conclave four days hence, when the U.S. and Soviet leaders joined those of the major European countries a few kilometers off to their right, beyond the dark precincts of Babelsberg and the Potsdam woods, in the Cecilienhof Palace. In the meantime, at Charlotte’s suggestion, she and Marcus were heading south, fleeing both duty and detection, sixty kilometers down
the Autobahn to Coswig, where they would turn east onto a smaller road a few kilometers to Wittenberg. There Charlie had reserved a modest hotel room for them—under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sanderson.
An interesting charade, Marcus thought, and, again, mainly of Charlie’s devising. Could he imagine such a union? No, he could not. Charlotte was attractive, amusing and erotically imaginative. Their time together had not palled, as was so often the case when Marcus found himself in the uninterrupted company of a woman, no matter how lovely, beyond a day or so. Once the conquest was made, it was Marcus’ experience, each frenzied repetition or coital variation counted for less, until he was merely going through the motions, while his eye wandered to fresh conquests. Worst of all were the tedious hours between sex, enduring all the ceaseless feminine prattle with its inevitable and pathetic romantic overtones.
But Marcus had not wearied of Charlotte. Thus far she had contrived to keep them both in a protracted state of light amusement and coincidentally recurring horniness; and, of course, all this only further sweetened Marcus’ ongoing triumph over his rival. His worry with Charlotte was rather the other way around—that she might tire too quickly of him.
To prevent this, he had exerted himself in several ways. Her sexual appetite must be gratified, yet constantly stimulated, so that he didn’t cure the addiction he had created. His intellectual shortcomings—as compared to her sparkling erudition—must be minimized, concealed by his best insouciant manner and baritone chuckle. And never for an instant must she glimpse him without his mask of masculine charm.
He played upon her carefully, dismissing his own fictitious life with an occasional deprecatory anecdote, while plying her with questions about the political celebrities she had interviewed, the vagaries of her journalistic career and the latest Washington party gossip. Charlie was a wonderful raconteur, and Marcus had little trouble maintaining a fascinated gaze and responding with loud and frequent laughter. In so doing, he saw in her eyes her reciprocal delight at the conquest she had made of him. So far, at least, his own general reticence hadn’t seemed to bother her, beyond an occasional comment.
There were other ways in which Marcus had catered to Charlotte. He surfeited her with compliments, sometimes offhand, sometimes thoughtful, never formulaic. At times he had even flirted with servility, running her bathwater, enquiring about her favorite scent, the details of her toilette, makeup and wardrobe, until she began to give him queer looks and accuse him of having quite lost his mind.
“Perhaps so,” he had responded once. “But since I am obviously fascinated by your nakedness, and by you fully clothed and coifed... well then...”
“Well then, what?”
“Why not be fascinated by the magical transition from one state to the other?”
Marcus had his private reason for these intimate questions, and, having so thoroughly established his masculine credentials, he dared to pursue them, convinced they could only further endear himself to her.
He intended to continue this amorous performance for at least three more days and the opening ceremonies at Potsdam. Even under ideal conditions, Marcus thought, their affair could not last much longer than that. Even if his fascination somehow endured, Charlie would begin to tire of him and seek her freedom. But it would not have to come to that. Three days would do it.
Marcus felt now a sudden and unexpected pang, glancing over at her determined profile in the subdued glow of the dashboard lights, and knowing the unfortunate fate that awaited her at his hands. Charlotte had given him a great deal of pleasure, and, in many ways, he had come to cherish the creature.
Getting rid of her, however, if not an enjoyable task, would be an astringent and appropriate one for launching his new freelance career. For sentimentality or personal preference must play no part in the acceptability of his future victims. That was what professionalism was all about.
He reached over and found Charlotte’s hand, enveloped its warmth, basked briefly in the soft gleam of her eyes.
*
The following morning Taras Arensky was standing beside the Holy Lake, the Heiliger See, in Potsdam’s two-hundred acre Neue Garten, watching a line of mallards peevishly abandon a thicket of reeds and take to the water in a series of splashlets, apparently upset by the approaching footsteps. A hundred meters down the waterside path the half-timbered bulk of the Cecilienhof Palace was just visible through the trees. A slight breeze riffled the glassy lake surface, which otherwise mirrored the hazy early sun with opaline serenity. It was a lovely vista, one laid out and landscaped expressly to tranquilize Prussian nobility, but Taras saw none of it. His eye was inward, and his spirit stretched taut on a rack of self-torture. He turned to the trim, bespectacled man beside him:
“Goddammit, Bob, she’s here somewhere, and she’s got to be found!”
The man, who had very hard eyes in a deceptively soft face, only shook his head. As the Berlin CIA station chief, Robert Strotkamp had just delivered to Taras all the news there was on the subject of Charlotte Walsh’s disappearance and possible whereabouts. If there were any further developments, the pager on Strotkamp’s belt would immediately announce the fact with an insistent vibration.
The federal police had checked every hotel in Berlin overnight without uncovering any trace of the journalist or the Opel Omega. Either she had registered under another name—perhaps whatever Marcus was using—or had simply driven beyond the radius of the search, which was, in consequence, being widened.
However, as the two men started back along the path to the Cecilienhof, Strotkamp had a further thought:
“You know, if it were still the ‘bad old days’ of Honecker and company, we could have eliminated the entire GDR by now. They were damn efficient, the Stasi and the Vopos. All tourists passports were confiscated at their hotels and delivered overnight to the local Volks Polizei for checking. We would know exactly who is staying where and for how long. But with a new Germany and the state security apparatus all but dismantled, nobody is tracking random movement.”
“What about the car? The Omega is a luxury model.”
“Exactly. Before the Wall came down, a big Opel like that would have stuck out over here among all those midget Trabants and Wartburgs, like an honest man in Congress. Now, of course, people are used to seeing fancy cars in the east, even if they’re still too expensive for most folks. But you’re right. Sooner or later somebody’s bound to spot it.”
“Yeah, sooner or later,” Taras echoed dismally.
“Don’t worry. She’ll either show up here today, or call in. She’s a pro. She’ll be in touch with someone.”
That was precisely what was eating away at Taras. Charlie would get in touch—if she were still alive. Not knowing was the worst part. Taras had to keep fighting off nightmare images of her suffering at the Cowboy’s hands.
Instead, Taras tried desperately to share Strotkamp’s confidence that Charlie would surface at the Cecilienhof Palace to pick up her press credentials. She had three full days to do so in order to be able to cover the conference on the fourth day; but, in Taras’ opinion, after today the chances of her appearing would drastically diminish.
The other hope, of course, was that she would call John Tully, who was primed to alert her to her danger, unless he suspected Marcus might be eavesdropping, find out her location and instantly relay the information to any of several numbers here or in Berlin. Taras had talked to Tully within the hour. The foreign editor had heard nothing from his correspondent, but hastened to explain that her actual filing deadline wasn’t until the following day, for release the morning the conference opened.
Some earlybird journalists were already on the scene, their cars and vans crowding the asphalt car park in front of the Cecilienhof. But a negative head shake from a security man stationed near the entrance signified that Charlotte was not among them, so Taras and Strotkamp continued to stroll along the palace front.
The palace had been built before and during World War I by Kaiser Wilhel
m as a pleasant hundred-and-seventy-odd-room country retreat. For some reason, he’d had it done all in Tudor style, with half-timbered gables, stone portals and a profusion of tall, narrow chimneys. Locally it was overshadowed by Sans-Souci, the far grander palace of Frederick the Great on a hill overlooking all of Potsdam and the river Havel. But the Cecilienhof had won its surprising place in history during seventeen days in the summer of 1945 when Stalin, Truman, Churchill and later Attlee had gathered here to decide the fate of the defeated Germany.
Taras paused to inspect the noisy queue of journalists outside the palace’s hotel entrance. The Hotel Schloss Cecilienhof had been closed for the conference, and its reception hall set aside for the issuance of credentials. Everything so far was being handled with typical Teutonic efficiency, but Taras couldn’t help wondering where in hell the Germans were planning to stick all the reporters when the event began. Some recent summits, he knew, had attracted an international press corps of more than two thousand. Potsdam invitations had apparently been restricted to half that. Even so, the conference rooms were extremely modest in size. Was the fourth estate to be relegated to bleachers on the back lawn? Or would they watch the proceedings via closed-circuit TV from the hotel dining room?
Actually, those ideas weren’t in the least farfetched, as Taras found out an hour later tagging along with Strotkamp on a Secret Service walkthrough of the arrival ceremony. The limousines would start pulling in at 9:45—on Friday, three days hence. There would be pooled television coverage at the entrance and in the large interior courtyard, which was emblazoned with a giant star formed of hundreds of red begonias, a blatant design originally planted by the Russians in 1945. The various delegations would proceed down a corridor and into the White Salon, a long, vanilla-rococo reception hall with red Turkish carpets, white-and-gilt Louis XVI decor and neo-Corinthian pilasters.
There would be brief welcoming remarks made here, but only a select media coterie could be accommodated, roped off alongside the French doors. The bulk of the press corps would be outside on a garden terrace, just as they had been in 1945, and some farther away yet, massed on the lawns that sloped down to the Jungfern See, one of the lakes formed by the river Havel. And indeed, closed-circuit monitors would be mounted in various public rooms.