by Dan Pollock
And although the first plenary session wouldn’t be till Friday afternoon, the delegation would continue on into the main conference hall, a high-wainscoted, two-storied hammer-beamed space that reminded Taras of some of the larger Tudor rooms at Hampton Court. Again, only pool video would be allowed in, as the conferees and their aides settled into the red plush chairs and posed for the TV lights around the same red-baize-covered table used by the postwar Big Three.
Retracing his steps through the White Salon beside the Secret Service men, Taras had the sudden sense of being watched. He glanced through the lace-curtained French doors in time to catch the distinctive profile of Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Starkov moving away on the garden path. But later, outside, Starkov had come straight up to him.
“I am surprised to see you here, Major Arensky.”
“Are you?”
“May I ask in what capacity you are here?”
“Unofficial.”
“Good. Professional security officers, such as your escorts over there, don’t usually tolerate amateurs who lack the nerve to pull the trigger on assassins. But perhaps you now regret that you allowed Marcus to escape?”
“Yes, I do.” God, how he regretted it! And yet, on that fateful night on the Crimea, how could he have done other than he did?
“If you’ll permit me a suggestion, Major?”
“Go ahead, Colonel.”
“If there is an attempt made on President Rybkin on Friday, I suggest you stay out of my line of fire.”
“Thanks. I’ll try and remember that.” Taras turned to leave, but turned back when he heard Starkov’s chuckle.
“That ugly ring,” the KGB officer said, “you’re still wearing it.”
Taras glanced down at the monstrosity on his index finger as if seeing it for the first time. The truth was, he wore it with a strange purpose. After getting Marcus’ fiendish letter, Taras had sworn to rid himself of the cursed thing only by sliding it back on Marcus’ lifeless finger.
At five o’clock, Taras was pacing back and forth beside the ornate Gothic gateway to the Neue Garten, watching the passing traffic and incoming cars, repeatedly conjuring an Opel Omega, but to no effect. He had hiked the half kilometer of winding blacktop from the palace, needing to be in motion, unable to remain impotently rooted in one spot. Suddenly Bob Strotkamp drove out, pulled over to the curb and got out.
He had an ashen expression.
“What happened?” Taras said, bracing for the worst.
“Charlie’s credentials are gone. Her name’s crossed off the fucking list! The idiot Fräulein at the T to Z table doesn’t remember who picked them up, even after the goddamn briefing we gave!”
“I can’t believe it! Jesus, Bob, Charlotte couldn’t have gotten by us.”
“No. She must have sent somebody else in with her ID and a letter of authorization. “
Taras swore again and again, and slammed his fist into his palm till it ached. So fucking close, then she’d slid through the net through a fluke of incompetence. He got in beside Strotkamp, who swung around and headed back through the park to the palace. As they pulled up, Strotkamp turned to him:
“You know, there’s a good side to it.”
“What?”
“At least it means she’s alive and planning to attend.”
“Yeah, I guess it does.” That was a comfort, and he needed one desperately.
But where was she?
Thirty
Seventy kilometers south and slightly west of Potsdam, on the river Elbe, is the little market town of Wittenberg, made famous by Martin Luther, who, one day in 1517 nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Schlosskirche, the Castle Church. Wittenberg’s picturesque, cobblestoned Old Town, in fact, is today called Lutherstadt, and a bronze statue of the great reformer, ornamentally sheltered from pigeons, stands before the broad town hall in the market square. On all sides of the little square, cheek by jowl, are the dignified faces of Gothic buildings. And one of these along the south side, a four-story jade-green facade, is the Goldener Adler Hotel. It was here, in a second-story room overlooking the Marktplatz, that Charlotte Walsh had gone to ground with Jack Sanderson. But she was getting increasingly restless, surfeited with him and eager to return to her work and her world.
Jack was slumped in an armchair by the window, watching a televised tennis match, while Charlotte was reading an International Herald Tribune that featured columns by several of her colleagues, when there came a knock at the door.
Christ, what if it’s Taras? she thought as she hurried to open it. But it was only Frank, back from Potsdam. The spike-blond, leather-jacketed teenager grinned as he handed her the packet of press credentials. She foraged in her purse, handed him some deutschmarks and smiled back.
“Danke schön, Frank.”
“You need anything else, remember, I’m your dude,” he said in his best Americanese.
“I’ll do that.”
She closed the door on the sound of his motorcycle boots crashing down the narrow hotel stairs.
“Cocky little bastard, isn’t he?” Jack commented.
“Now, now, don’t be jealous of a mere child, even if he is quite fetching. And if I remember correctly, you’re the one who suggested I didn’t need to pick these up in person.”
“Only because you’re so afraid your old boyfriend might be hanging around. Anyway, let’s see them.”
She perched on the wooden frame of the German-style double bed, opened the packet, dumped the credentials out on the eiderdown coverlet.
“You need two passes just to get in?” Sanderson said, moving beside her.
“Apparently.” She looped one round her neck with the attached string. It looked like an elaborate baggage tag, with the conference dates imprinted below a stylized European Community logo that prismed in the light. “Pretty fancy. This seems to be a perimeter pass. Probably gets you into the grounds to park your car. Now this one, you see, even fancier. Because your little Liebchen happens to be one of the elite who gets right into the palace for the reception. They don’t give these out to just anybody, only your way-above-average newshens.”
“And that’s it? Two pieces of paper and you’re in?”
“I guess. After they x-ray my handbag and walk me through a metal detector.”
“No strip searches?”
“No, but you’re welcome to conduct one now if you’d like.”
“In a minute.” He smiled. “Honeymoon’s winding down, huh?”
“Sort of.” She glanced around the room. “I’m sorry our place is so little. The Kempinski would have been a hoot, and we could have gone strolling on the Ku-damm. But I just couldn’t risk it. Forgive me?”
“It’s not so bad. At least we have our own bath.”
“It’s damn intimate, and I guess that’s what matters most for our last couple days together. Jack, would you mind terribly switching channels for a while? CNN should have some background stuff on the conference, and it’ll help me jump-start my poor lifeless brain. I’m supposed to hash out a column by tomorrow, telling my scads of devoted readers exactly what I think this big powwow will mean for the future of the world.”
“Sure. I’ll watch too. Maybe I’ll learn something.”
While he turned the dial, she unpacked and plugged in her laptop to charge the batteries, then sat down, keeping one eye on the little screen while she continued to scan the newspaper. Jack settled at her feet, his back propped against her shins, also watching the TV, where a map of Europe was gradually changing its colors to illustrate past and proposed changes in borders and strategic alliances.
So, Jack was aware of her distraction, her restlessness, she thought. It must be damned obvious, even though she’d tried to conceal it. She reached down absently and tousled his sandy hair as she watched the screen. He’d seemed a little sad just now, a little wistful. And he’d been such a wonderfully attentive lover. He deserved at least a good last couple of days—and her full romantic response. But sure
ly he was under no illusions that there could be a future for them? No matter how fantastic the sex had been, there was more to life. And she couldn’t even begin to picture Jack Sanderson as her husband or as the father of her children.
Much later, in the early morning hours, she found herself suddenly quite awake, staring up at coruscating darkness. To divert herself, she began to replay in her mind the most flagrantly erotic images of their last lovemaking. But an odd thing happened. After a few minutes her mind began to wander instead to issues of collective European security.
Charlotte Walsh, you are absolutely hopeless! she scolded herself. But dammit, why not? She threw back the coverlet, padded over to the desk, unplugged her recharged laptop, took it back to bed with her, flipped the screen up and settled herself against the pillows. Then, while Jack snored softly beside her, she began to peck, watching a series of liquid crystal characters dance rapidly across the backlit screen. It was a column for John Tully, the one she’d file tomorrow:
FOR RELEASE FRIDAY, JULY 16
POTSDAM—The Schloss Cecilienhof seemed to many observers a peculiar choice for an international conference in 1945, and so it still seems to some of us all these dramatic decades later. But in a grand bit of diplomatic déjà-vu, the world is once again turning its manic attention on this rambling mock-Tudor manor house built by Kaiser Bill for his brother on the watery outskirts of Berlin.
Here, Messrs. Ackerman, Rybkin et al. can deposit their respective backsides in the exact wickerwork garden chairs where Messrs. Stalin, Truman and Churchill once sat surveying a quite different Europe, one still smoldering from the long firestorm of World War II. And, like those Big Three, our statesmen will also be overlooking, at somewhat nearer focus, the ...???
[Note to John Tully: please have someone check the name of the body of water behind the palace; I can’t recall it, and I don’t have any maps handy. PS. I don’t mean the lake beside it.]
I mention this because, in one of those frequent ironies of history, sixteen years after the division of Germany was sketched on maps spread over the Cecilienhof conference table, the Berlin Wall began its obscene march across the city and countryside, following the Potsdamers careful tracings—and eventually marched right across the back lawn of the Cecilienhof itself, blocking that prized lakeside view that so delighted the diplomats.
Potsdam, you see, was placed on the frontier of the Eastern Zone, and just across the ..... [John, again, name of body of water, please.] lay the West, and freedom. If only the Big Three could have glanced out over the greensward and seen their monstrous handiwork-to-be before they adjourned—a twelve-foot-high concrete barrier complete with barbed wire and floodlights. Might it not have altered their minds a wee bit and saved us all a world of suffering?
In our time, of course, a great deal of the damage has been undone. That Wall has been torn down and the lovely view restored, not only to the back garden of the Schloss Cecilienhof, but clear across Eastern Europe. And the statesmen who glance up from their deliberations here this week and look out the garden windows will also be confronting a far more beckoning vista—that of a brave new, brand new Europe.
[Note to John: Please verify that the Germans have in fact torn down that awful eyesore behind the Cecilienhof. I assume they have, but, as you know, I’m still in the boondocks over here.]
Charlotte paused, coming up for air. Well, it was definitely what John Tully called her Radcliffe style, too full of collegiate conceits. But it wasn’t bad for a backgrounder. And by the time she plugged in a few specifics, it would damn well run the right number of column inches and be filed on time. Which was, after all, the most critical thing.
Let John fiddle with it.
*
The next day, Wednesday, two days before the conference, Taras spent the morning making phone calls from his room in the Hotel Potsdam, a high-rise on the Havel near the Lange Brucke, the main bridge to Berlin.
There was, however, nothing new from any quarter. It was still predawn in Washington, and there was no need to disturb John Tully’s sleep, but Taras had talked to the newspaper switchboard and the overnight attendant in the wire room, and neither one could find any trace of a recent communication from Charlie—no messages, computer downloads, telexes, faxes or direct dictation. She was due to file, but thus far it didn’t look like she had.
German police still had no leads to her or the rental Opel. The search radius had widened dramatically—to the northernmost suburbs of Berlin, east to the Polish border, south to Leipzig and Dresden, west to Magdeburg—but the net was wide-meshed, and a slippery fish like Marcus would not likely turn up in it. Taras was convinced Charlotte and Marcus were near to hand. What was needed was a task force to go from hotel to hotel and gasthof to gasthof, circulating photographs of them. Unfortunately, the manpower was not available; police and security forces were already stretched dangerously thin meeting the imperatives of the Potsdam Conference.
Taras put down the phone, stared north along the riverside, his eye drawn to the burnished sunlight on an old copper church dome in Potsdam’s Alten Markt. He was ready to do something decisive, dammit, but what? It was pointless to go rushing off, or even to proceed one step away from the phone, without some rationale. He sensed that the duel between himself and Marcus was reaching its finale, yet Taras was unable either to strike or properly defend. He could only wait for the Cowboy to make his final thrust—a thrust that could come at any instant, and from any direction.
At one-thirty John Tully called. A faxed column from Charlie had been on his desk when he’d arrived at 8:15; it had arrived in the newspaper wire room a few minutes before. The fax cover sheet indicated it had been sent from the post office in Dessau.
“That’s just south of here!” Taras said.
“Yeah, about eighty kilometers southwest of you. I just looked it up. It’s an industrial city on the river Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe.”
“John, did she leave any number for you to call her back?”
“No. And she usually does, that’s the damn thing. It’s just not like her.”
“What’s the column say?”
“I’ll fax you a copy at your hotel. It’s one of her cotton candy pieces, spun out of air. There are some nifty turns of phrase, but she’s obviously not done any real homework or even been to Potsdam. She couldn’t even think of the name of the Havel, or the Jungfern See behind the Cecilienhof, and she says she’s out in the boondocks, whatever the hell that means. I’m worried, Taras. Find her for me, will you? And make sure nothing happens to my girl. I want to be able to give her a damn good scolding.”
Taras swallowed hard, promised—and rang off. Then he immediately dialed Strotkamp, who was his liaison with various German security services, and passed along the information.
“I’ll get right on it, Taras. Meanwhile, I suggest you hang right where you are. Who knows? Ten minutes from now she’ll probably walk into some journalistic watering hole in Berlin and buy everybody a drink.”
“I can’t hang in any longer, Bob. I’m going crazy here, and Dessau’s right off the Autobahn. I can be there in forty minutes.”
Thirty-One
Dessau still seemed to be struggling to wake itself from its decades-long Stalinist nightmare. Like Berlin, it had a bombed-out church, but this rubbled relic didn’t seem to be a conscious memorial; it looked more like the downtrodden Dessauers just hadn’t gotten around to repairing it. Amid the post-euphoric realities of reunification, the industrial city still lay under a gray pall of pollution. Old diesels and lawnmower-engine Trabants still grumbled through its streets, belching noxious fumes; superannuated trams that should have gone to the scrap heap instead went grinding and shrieking around the squares; and, driving in from the Autobahn, Taras had noticed a jaundiced froth clotting the margins of the river Mulde.
It had taken him several minutes to locate the main post office, which offered Telefaxdienst—fax service—and he was just in time to catch the clerk who’d transmi
tted Charlie’s column to America over the Fernkopierer before he went off duty. But that was the extent of Taras’ luck.
The young man recalled only that the copy had been brought in by a blond punker in a motorcycle jacket, obviously just a delivery person. The postal clerk glanced over the pictures Taras showed him of Charlotte and Marcus without a flicker of recognition.
Taras thanked him, then went outside to ingest raw hydro-carbons while waiting for one of Strotkamp’s federal police contacts to show up. Was the motorcycle punk a confederate of Marcus? Taras didn’t think so. More likely he was just a kid hired to do an errand. But hired by Charlie or Marcus? There was no way of knowing. All Taras could be sure of so far was that Charlotte had definitely written the column; he and John Tully agreed the style was hers. But that could have been days earlier. There was no internal evidence to date it more recently.
She could already be dead.
Or trussed up in a closet.
And there was another alternative, one he prayed for, though it was wretched enough—that she was just not ready to come out, still too enamored of the Cowboy, a devilishly handsome man who had not yet revealed himself as a homicidal maniac.
As Taras was forcing his mind to grapple with these grisly scenarios, an Audi sedan pulled to the curb. Taras jumped in and gave a quick briefing to the driver—a captain of GSG-9, the German hostage rescue unit—on the short ride to Dessau’s main police station, where arrangements were made to duplicate the photographs of the missing pair and distribute them to the city’s hotels. The police, Taras was assured, would also comb the streets and garages for the missing Opel.
Taras expected absolutely nothing to come of it, just like the ongoing stakeout at the Cecilienhof and the journalistic hangouts of Berlin. With an ever-increasing conviction of hopelessness, he got back in his own rental Escort and headed back to the Autobahn and Potsdam.