by Dan Pollock
Careful now.
Inside the small, dark lobby a family with several children was blockading the hotel desk, the father haranguing the elderly woman clerk, who was nodding her head but maintaining a steely glint in her eye. Taras shoved between them, ignored their sputtering Teutonic protests as he showed his credentials, and then the photos of Charlotte and Marcus.
The clerk’s eyes narrowed further and her mouth tightened as her glance shifted from the pictures to the credentials and back to Taras. Finally she nodded, only once but emphatically, and gestured at the ceiling.
“Ja, Zimmer sieben.”
They are both in?
“Ja, ja.”
Chalky light filtered down the gloomy stairwell from a stained-glass window on the landing above. Warped wooden treads groaned underfoot as he climbed, so Taras hugged the railing, placing his feet carefully along the edges. At the end of a narrow corridor on the first floor he found a black enameled door with a brass seven, slashed in the Continental manner. Zimmer sieben.
Taras stood with his ear against this door, gun in hand. But the only sounds were stage whispers drifting up the stairwell from the lobby. Taras tried to imagine some acceptable condition under which Charlotte would still be inside with the Potsdam Conference due to start in less than forty-five minutes. He drew a blank. But he had to go in. If he waited out here any longer, a squad of GSG-9 commandos would show up with explosive charges, stun grenades and H&K submachine guns. And this was not their show, but his.
He braced his arms on the balustrade behind, leaned back, cocked his right leg, kicked out explosively, aiming the sole of his shoe just above the door handle.
The door caved in, but only slightly. The latch was still caught in the splintered frame. So Taras flung himself forward, impacting with shoulder and hip and caroming inside, pointing and swinging his .45.
The room was empty except for Charlie.
And she was gone too. Leaving her body behind, naked, ankles tied to the bed.
Black rage exploded inside Taras. He stumbled away, smashed open the bathroom door, ready to empty his clip into anything that moved, preferably Marcus Jolly.
A leather-jacketed boy with spiked blond hair was lying dead in the bathtub, one arm draped over the side. A miniature Iron Cross dangled from one pierced pink ear. There was a fecal stench. Something clicked in Taras’ memory: The kid who’d faxed Charlie’s column from the post office in Dessau. His motorcycle downstairs.
But Marcus was gone.
Taras backed out, felt his knees buckle, sat down on the carpet, back propped against the bed. After a second or two he sucked air deep into his lungs and forced himself to look behind him. He avoided her eyes, saw the tape burns on her wrists and around her lips. His darling had been gagged and bound hand and foot. Then, with trembling fingers, he reached out and lowered her eyelids over the congealed horror of her last seconds.
He began to sob. He thought of the first time he had seen Charlie on the terrace at that party in Chevy Chase, of the time they had hiked out to her special place overlooking that woodsy Virginia valley and, instead of sharing poetic thoughts, had stripped and coupled like frenzied teenagers. He lay his cheek now against her arm, allowing himself to be cruelly deceived for an instant by her skin’s residual warmth and plasticity. She had been alive until very recently. On another nightmare morning, Eva Sorokina had been far colder—but no more dead than Charlotte was now.
He held her lifeless hand in his.
Why did you go with him? Why didn’t you wait for me to come back to you? You know I loved you, Charlie, I loved only you.
Realizing his grief could totally incapacitate him, Taras stood up and flung it away, embracing his rage. In two strides he reached the dresser, grabbed up a chair and smashed it to kindling on the carpet. He looked around for something else to destroy and saw the desk clerk standing in the splintered doorway, holding a corner of her apron over her mouth, her eyes enormous.
“Polizei!” Taras yelled at her. “Go call the police.” He motioned her violently away, and she went, stomping down the stairs in a panic. Now his gaze swept the room and fastened on the old armoire. He threw it open, pulled an extra blanket out and draped Charlotte’s corpse.
Then he stared down at the jars, vials, tubes and makeup-smudged tissues spread over the dresser top. He remembered the tidy elegance of Charlie’s taffeta-skirted vanity in the Cleveland Park condo. She hadn’t left this litter. He scoured the dresser and armoire and even under the bed for her emergency wig. It was gone. So was her handbag—and with it, he knew, her press credentials.
The fucking twisted bastard was going to Potsdam in drag. To kill Rybkin.
Then Taras realized he had seen Marcus in drag—no more than fifteen minutes before—in Coswig, driving a mustard-colored Trabant and wearing Charlie’s wig.
If he alerted Strotkamp immediately, they might still catch Marcus at the gate to the Neue Garten, or even on the Autobahn. But so what? Why should Taras do that? In order to save the life of Alois Rybkin? Or to preserve international stability?
At this moment Taras cared about only one thing. He wanted to be Marcus’ executioner, exactly the thing he had told President Ackerman he did not want.
I just changed my mind.
When the desk clerk saw Taras hurrying downstairs she quickly hung up the telephone, eyeing him warily. But he ignored her, glancing into the restaurant where a TV showed a man with a microphone, fronting the Cecilienhof Palace.
Taras checked his watch. Nine-fifteen. The presidential motorcades wouldn’t be showing up for another thirty minutes. There was still time.
He hurried outside and turned left, then froze. His car was gone. In fact, the street was empty of cars. He turned the other way, saw his little Ford just vanishing into an alley, upended behind a tow truck.
“Parken verboten!” explained a cheerful old man standing nearby. He waggled his cane helpfully at a large no-parking sign.
“Danke.” Christ! Hell of a law-abiding hamlet they had here. Tow an illegally parked car after fifteen minutes, but let a murderer walk away. So why was the big motorcycle left alone?
Taras looked at the cycle a split-second longer—a big Yamaha sportbike with red-and-white fairing—then dashed back into the Adler. Within a minute he had returned with a set of keys filched from the corpse in the bathtub. The second key he tried fit the ignition.
As a local police car pulled to the curb a moment later in response to the desk clerk’s terrified summons, the crescendoing whine of the Yamaha’s engine was still reverberating around the market square, but Taras was already out of sight.
*
“Guten Morgen, Fraülein.”
The guard at the gate of Potsdam’s Neue Garten smiled as he glanced at Charlotte’s perimeter credential and waved the Trabant through. Marcus smiled back in genuine relief, and joined a slow-moving serpentine of cars and vans on a narrow asphalt road that wound through overhanging lindens and oaks to a large parking area.
Leaving their vehicles, the arriving journalists were herded by uniformed guards with walkie-talkies along several parallel paths toward a perimeter fence of crowd-control barriers, then funneled into a half-dozen queues to pick up their press handouts and have their credentials checked again before they passed through metal detectors. Marcus gave no more thought to his disguise, made no attempt to feminize his walk or mannerisms. Rather he convinced himself—temporarily, as an actor—that he was simply what he seemed to be, a reporter, who happened to be a woman, on her way to cover a major event. If that subtly affected the way he walked and carried himself, so be it.
As a result, he was able to stroll through the security checkpoint and collect his camera at the end of the belted metal detector with hardly a quickening of his pulse. Next he found himself on a crowded footpath trailing a half-dozen voluble Middle Easterners, all of whom seemed to be feasting on Egg McMuffins from a big plastic sack. One fellow, catching sight of Marcus, made a gallant bow and o
ffered him a Styrofoam container.
Marcus was grateful, having been running on adrenaline since yesterday’s lunch. “I’m perfectly ravenous, thank you so much,” he answered, surprising himself as he heard the tenor lilt that had replaced his customary baritone. But there was nothing remotely ladylike in the way he wolfed down the little breakfast sandwich.
The parkland now opened on the long sweeping palace front, which was obviously modeled after a steep-gabled English manor house. But the idyllic setting was under full-scale media siege this morning, ringed with monster media trucks, smaller vans with hydraulic microwave masts, throbbing generator units, cables snaking across grass and blacktop toward the Tudor edifice. Federal police guards slung with submachine guns roamed everywhere, bolstered by sidearmed officers from several local jurisdictions and blue-blazered event security personnel—all talking into handheld radios. The police bandwidths must be nearly gridlocked, Marcus thought, as he kept scanning the crowd. He was looking for plainclothesmen, KGB or GSG-9 types, blank-faced, shrewd-eyed men with no apparent function. These, he knew, would constitute his greatest danger.
Despite his private errand, Marcus was not immune to the contagion in the air, the media-induced euphoria of a headline political event. Camera crews were unlatching their custom aluminum cases, testing battery packs, fitting gargantuan tripod-mounted telescopic lenses to little camera bodies. A dark-suited Japanese network commentator, doing a sober standup against a tree trunk with the palace over his shoulder, had a horse chestnut bounce off his head, cracking up his crew and finally himself. Marcus hoped it was going out live.
Still, he thought, none of them could anticipate the morning’s real shattering story. Not much more than an hour away now, if all went well.
It was 8:45, nearing the cutoff time for those journalists and invited guests with interior passes to present themselves. Marcus joined another queue, two or three people wide and twenty or thirty meters long, stretching from a projecting, half-timbered porte cochere to an arched gateway leading to the palace courtyard. Ahead of him in line he recognized several European television personalities, chatting animatedly with colleagues. No one gave him a second glance. If any suspected his gender, perhaps they simply assumed him to be an accredited member of the transvestite press—and no doubt there was such an eccentric entity, Marcus thought.
They shuffled steadily forward, under a Tudor archway and around a courtyard whose centerpiece was a five-pointed red floral star planted on the grass. The square garden was enclosed by more half-timbered gables, ivy-draped walls and little mullioned windows. At the opposite end they were ushered into an antechamber where credentials were again scrutinized and handbags inspected.
They moved next double file along a hallway beside photographs and documentary exhibits from the original 1945 conference. Stalin was pictured in his tailored generalissimo’s tunic with epaulets; the other leaders—Truman, Churchill and Attlee—wore business suits. Only one came dressed for battle, Marcus thought wryly.
A left turn fetched them into the White Hall, a salon perhaps thirty meters long, whose only color contrasts were red Oriental carpets and the giltwork on the Louis something-or-other tables, settees and armchairs. Here they were cordoned off and packed in like sardines five or six deep against the French windows, which opened onto a small garden terrace. As a television camera and lights were brought in and set up across the ropes, a white-haired spokesman in a gray morning coat walked the length of the hall to a podium where he huffed into a microphone. He then proceeded to greet them in four languages, apologize for the crowded conditions and go over the morning’s agenda.
At about ten o’clock, he said, Presidents Ackerman and Rybkin and the European heads of state would all be coming through to this very podium, where brief opening remarks would be made. In the meantime, the spokesman suggested, they might wish to avail themselves of the coffee and rolls now available on the terrace. They need only turn and file out in an orderly fashion through the French doors.
Marcus decided to take advantage of the ensuing stampede to improve his position. It was essential that he gradually work himself into the front row along the ropes for the best possible “photo opportunity” when Rybkin passed. With insistent elbows and lightly murmured apologies, he insinuated himself through the outbound tide toward the refreshments and quickly gained the red velvet ropes.
From here he could survey the entire salon. He picked out several plainclothes security types, but so far Taras Arensky wasn’t among them. Marcus did note with satisfaction that many invited guests had brought their own cameras for the occasion. His single click would hardly be noticed.
He was in position, with a half-hour to kill.
Thirty-Five
Just beyond Niemegk, for some diabolical reason, the two northbound lanes of the E6 Autobahn slowed, then ground to a complete stop. Taras, clamping the front calipers to brake the big Yamaha, saw flashing red and blue lights up ahead. It could be an accident, or maybe traffic was being temporarily halted for some security reason connected with the conference, or for the convenience of an official motorcade.
He could squeeze through on the Yamaha—if no doors were opened in his face. But what would that buy him? Instead, he swerved left off the highway, plowed through the grassy median, emerged onto the southbound lanes and charged back to the offramp he’d just passed.
Taras hadn’t ridden a motorcycle in years, and then it had been only occasionally, on streetbikes. This speed-sculpted Yamaha was hard-saddled, its footpegs were too high, handlebars too low and too far forward, giving him the feeling his nose was on the gas tank. But it went like a bat out of hell, turning him into a projectile fleeing a nightmare and targeting on vengeance.
Five minutes later he was off the snarled Autobahn and roaring up alternate Route 2, through a succession of bleak postwar Gothic villages—Treuenbrietzen, Buchholz, Beelitz—the sort of somniferous places that had been seriously depopulated during the westward exodus of ’89 and ’90, but which were now slowly being reconstituted.
Now if only someone would repave the old GDR roadbeds.
The Yamaha’s suspension soaked up some of the minor jolts, but some stretches—where the asphalting wore thin or vanished altogether over bare brick or cobblestones—nearly bounced Taras out of the saddle. Still, he kept pushing as hard as he dared, laying it over on curves, winding it out on straightaways, accelerating through intersections, occasionally scattering pedestrians and bicyclists. He dashed over a railroad crossing an instant before the barrier came down. Approaching Buchholz a tiny Wartburg sedan pulled out of a farm road, towing a sheep in a two-wheel wood-lathe cart. Taras swerved, nearly lost the bike in a skid, then straightened it with horsepower. Near Beelitz he flashed past a roadside sign that wished him a GUTE FAHRT.
After fifteen minutes of tearing a hole in the wind with his unshielded face, he suddenly realized the green blur streaming by was the Potsdam Forest. Route 2 had turned into the familiar Michendorfer Chaussee. A moment later, off to the left, he caught the first sun flashes on the river Havel. He was damn close. He leaned into another dogleg and came out of it pointing toward the Lange Brücke, with the Hotel Potsdam now shouldering starkly over the trees.
At the bridge approach, traffic was backed up. It had to be from the conference, Taras decided, although the Cecilienhof site was clear across the city. Maybe all of Potsdam was gridlocked. If his rental car hadn’t been towed, he could have used the mobile cellular phone Strotkamp had provided to radio ahead. As it was, he couldn’t wait. He swung right and gunned along the graveled shoulder, then ducked back in to avoid some kids on bicycles. Once across the bridge and into the old Prussian city he split lanes, tailgated a streetcar through a jammed intersection, wove in and out of idling cars and undoubtedly woke up a few patients in the big district hospital as he blasted past it and turned left onto Neue Garten Strasse.
It was backed up all the way to the royal park. But the oncoming lane was temporarily emp
ty, and Taras used it at high speed, covering several blocks to the brick-walled Neue Garten gateway, where a federal policeman stepped out to greet him with a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Taras flashed the honorary GSG-9 credentials Bob Strotkamp had provided, and the sentry moved back, opening the barrier as Taras shot through.
Inside along the meandering blacktop, police vans and motorcycles were parked at frequent intervals under the lacy trees. More police could be seen dotting the vast grassy expanses, carrying rifles and walkie-talkies. Three-quarters of the way through the long, narrow park, instead of following the road on to the main vehicle lot, Taras veered into a narrow, hedged lane, then nailed the front brake as three armed men appeared from the bushes.
Again his GSG-9 pass provided open sesame. Speaking into their radios, the policemen beckoned him through. Taras had to maneuver in low gear between red-and-white-striped iron poles set into the asphalt before twisting the throttle to full snarl. He had gone only a short way before he glimpsed ahead, under the graceful canopy of oaks and lindens, the long, half-timbered facade of the Cecilienhof, perhaps three-hundred meters away.
This gently curving lane, in fact, was aimed ultimately at the archway into the palace’s main courtyard. That would make a dramatic entrance, Taras thought. Of course he’d probably be shot off his saddle if he tried it without benefit of credential check. In fact, as the palace front loomed closer, he saw a line of limousines already drawn up, with fender flags and swarming security personnel. The arrival ceremonies must already be under way. It could all be over in seconds—with Marcus fleeing in his disguise, or lying dead by another hand.
Emerging out of the lane, Taras skidded the big bike left beside an iron railing, jumped off and hurried ahead on foot. As desperate as he was, he didn’t dare sprint flat out for fear of activating the trigger finger of some overzealous policeman. He also decided to avoid the media and security-clogged courtyard and headed left instead to the hotel entrance under the porte cochere, where a half-dozen uniformed and plainclothes cops immediately converged on him.