Using operational funds, Wolkowicz bought digital watches and ballpoint pens and cheap cameras in job lots. Such items were scarce in peoples’ democracies and like a trader in Indian country, Barney handed them out as a way of making friends and influencing people behind the Iron Curtain.
He had shown up unannounced in Christopher’s room. “We should talk,” he said. “Patchen is on his way to spirit you away, so this is a preemptive strike.”
Sarcasm was Wolkowicz’s way of disabusing Christopher of any idea that he was capable of a corporal act of charity like visiting the sick. Christopher smiled.
Wolkowicz said, “Let’s make this simple. Tell me what you thought you were up to in Berlin and I’ll answer a question from you. Any question. There must be something you’re dying to know.”
“How did I get here?” Christopher asked.
“That’s your one big question?”
“No.”
“Let me know when we get to it. You remember making a phone call?”
“Yes. To your home number.”
“Correct,” Wolkowicz said. “We sprang right into action, and here you are.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me and some of the guys.”
“What guys?”
“The ones who were on call that night. You were lying on Bülowstrasse in a pool of vomit, covered in blood and not breathing. Somebody cleaned out your windpipe and gave you the kiss of life. Puke and all. Imagine. Most people would have held their nose or given you a tracheotomy with a Swiss army knife. Not this guy. He must really love his fellow man.”
“He must have got there pretty quick,” Christopher said. “Usually people who breathe in their own vomit die in no time.”
“Not you, apparently.”
“So why am I here?”
“Well, for one thing you were full of dope and we couldn’t wake you up, so our doctor in Berlin thought you should be in an American hospital. For another thing headquarters thought you should get out of Berlin. I agreed.”
“How did I get full of dope?”
“Search me. And that’s your last irrelevant question. I’ve got a few of my own.”
“You think this is the best place to talk?” Christopher said.
“If it’s not, then it’s too late to start worrying,” Wolkowicz replied. “But everything’s fine. This room is like a medical safe house. It belongs to the Outfit. We own all the equipment. We use the room when we need it and the army keeps it under lock and key the rest of the time. It was swept last night before you woke up. It’s clean as a whistle. The door is bazooka-proof. The window is bulletproof. There’re guards outside the door. It’s like we’re in Action Comics.”
This may or may not have been the truth. It was standard reassurance, page one of the agent-handler’s manual. The case officer always told the agent that everything was fine, that he was safe and protected by an omniscient employer who loved him, that nothing could possibly go wrong.
Wolkowicz said, “Sadlowski—our guy, by the way—tells me you remember everything up to the time you passed out. I know from Heidi that you can do the tango like Valentino and that you took a lot of crazy chances with Stutzer and the Stasi, like riding by him on a bicycle and letting him see your face. I know that you slipped out of Heidi’s hotel in the wee hours of the morning in question. I know you’d be dead if it wasn’t for my timely arrival.”
“Now you’re boasting.”
“I’m not a WASP, I’m allowed. Tell me the rest.”
Christopher gave him a step-by-step report of everything he had done in East Berlin. Wolkowicz listened intently. He took no notes. A stranger to his ways might have supposed that he was relying on hidden microphones and a tape recorder, but Christopher knew that Wolkowicz would remember every word he was hearing, probably for the rest of his life.
When Christopher finished his narrative, Wolkowicz closed his eyes for a long moment and whistled a tune through his teeth. Then he said, “So after you were shot in the head and while you were bleeding like a stuck pig, you bashed Stutzer with a rock and carried him across the line, across the Potsdamer Bridge, and down Potsdamerstrasse into the heart of West Berlin?”
Christopher did not reply. Wolkowicz had heard what he said. There was no need to tell him again.
“And nobody followed you?”
“I saw nobody behind me.”
“Were there any witnesses?”
“Yes. I talked to some of them.” Christopher described the encounter with the Christian and the others.
“Okay. So tell me what happened when you found the telephone.”
“I put Stutzer on the ground and called you.”
“And then?”
“And then I passed out.”
“All of a sudden you conk out, after this superhuman fireman’s carry through the ruins. Why?”
Christopher said, “I couldn’t stay conscious. I thought I was going into shock. The world spun around. Everything went black.”
“Where was Stutzer while all this was going on?”
“Lying on the pavement, propped up against the phone booth.”
“In other words, he was right where you dropped him. Was he conscious or unconscious?”
“Immobilized. He couldn’t talk or walk. He made a noise. His jaw was broken. I think I tore up his knees when I clipped him.”
“But his face was the last thing you saw before you went under?”
“Yes.”
“And he was alive.”
“No question.”
Wolkowicz inhaled, bit his lower lip with his impossibly perfect false teeth. He covered the teeth with his upper lip and again whistled the same unrecognizable tune. “That’s amazing,” he said. “Because your call came in at one minute after five and my first man, who just happened to be in the neighborhood, was on the scene at five-oh-four, and when he got there, there was no Stutzer. Just you, out like a light and choking to death.”
No Stutzer? Christopher was so startled by this information that he moved suddenly—plunged toward Wolkowicz, who stood at the foot of the bed. This triggered a vertigo attack. Nausea rose into his throat, his mouth, his nostrils. The hospital bed turned upside down and he seized the rails to keep himself from falling out.
He put his head back onto the pillows. The attack passed. He said, “You didn’t find Stutzer’s Stasi ID in my inside pocket?”
“No. No sign of him whatsoever.”
Another man, hearing what Wolkowicz had just told him, might have said, “That’s impossible.” But Christopher knew that in his vertiginous world and Stutzer’s and Wolkowicz’s, the possibilities were unlimited, so he held his peace.
4
Christopher was slow to recover from vertigo and even slower to reconcile himself to the reality that he had had Stutzer in his grasp and then lost him or had him stolen from him. The episode in East Berlin faded in everyone else’s memory, if not in his own. On O. G.’s orders the capture of Stutzer was never put into writing. No one outside the original circle of knowledge was ever briefed. Nothing about it was recorded, nothing remembered. No one but Patchen ever discussed the episode with Christopher, and Patchen himself spoke about it only once. This conversation took place as the two friends walked once again across the campus of Georgetown University. They had dined on limp pasta in a bad Sicilian restaurant that Patchen liked because it was always nearly empty. The night was damp, mist rising from the Potomac. Patchen was recovering, as he often was, from a lung infection. Every few steps he coughed, one sharp dry bark after another, and the paroxysm stopped him in his tracks. The Doberman sniffed his coat sympathetically and licked his hand.
“O. G. ordered me to make no file and to keep knowledge of the operation strictly quarantined—his word,” Patchen said to Christopher. “On our side of the fence, only he and you and Wolkowicz and I know what happened and only you know everything—except of course for the most intriguing things, namely what happened while you were unconscious and wh
at happened to Stutzer. Apparently O. G. wants to preserve the ambiguity.”
“And do we know what is known or believed on the other side of the fence?”
“All is darkness,” Patchen said. “Even the Israelis don’t have a clue, and needless to say they’re at least as interested in Stutzer as you are. We assume that Stutzer’s absence was noted by MfS. The accepted hypothesis is that MfS people found the two of you in the nick of time and spirited Stutzer away before Wolkowicz and his goons came on the scene. Do you agree?”
“No. If that’s what happened why they didn’t spirit me away, too?”
“Everyone wonders about that, except Wolkowicz. There’s not a doubt in his mind. According to his hypothesis, they tried to kill you with an overdose of something instead.”
“That was Stutzer. Who else could it have been? He was draped across my back, he had every opportunity and every motive.”
“You didn’t search him?”
“I did, and found all kinds of weapons, but I guess I missed the syringe.”
“How?”
“I wasn’t looking for it. I thought he was trying to kill me, not keep me alive. But I should have remembered what he is—an interrogator. I had aroused his curiosity. His plan would have been to knock me out, take me to a safe house, break me. The dose was never meant to be fatal.”
“So why didn’t his men throw you in the trunk of the getaway car so he could question you?”
“Because there were no such men. His priorities changed. After I made the phone call all he wanted was to get back home. He crawled away on his own or had other help.”
“Excellent point. But then there are a lot of nice debating points in this case. Consider Wolkowicz’s hypothesis.”
“Which is?”
“That you were hallucinating. That the slug that split your scalp addled your wits. That you imagined the whole thing, and that what you think happened never actually happened. It was all a crazy dream.”
“How did he arrive at that?”
“For one thing, you told him you had Stutzer’s papers in your pocket when you passed out. But the pocket was empty.”
“True but irrelevant. Anybody could have picked my pocket. What else?”
“Barney submitted the sterilized facts—no names, no place, no time, just a hypothetical situation—to our best forensic shrink and that’s what he came up with. It made all the sense in the world to Barney. Stutzer got away from you. But nobody gets away from Wolkowicz.”
Patchen’s lip curled. His disdain for Wolkowicz was well known, especially to Christopher, to whom he spoke frankly at all times. Apparently he felt that he should say a good word for his enemy. He continued, “In justice to Wolkowicz and the shrink, you were shot in the head. And in both versions, yours and the shrink’s, everything follows from that. However, the questions remains, if there was no Stutzer, who shot you, who stuck a needle in you, and why would they bother?”
Patchen had another fit of coughing. Refusing to yield to it, he walked on, the sound of his cough echoing from the portentous architecture.
When he had recovered his breath, Christopher said, “So what do you believe?”
“Let’s just say I believe you to be perfectly capable of carrying a wounded man a couple of miles on your back while wounded yourself.”
“And O. G.?”
“It’s my job to tell him everything that’s in my mind,” Patchen said, “not to read his mind. But he is, I believe, your godfather, and he’s the one who put you into this situation, so he’s got to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Christopher was tempted to say more, to tell Patchen what O. G. knew about Stutzer, to tell him what Stutzer had been to the Christophers in the past. He had never told anyone—not O. G., not Hubbard, not Lori, not Paulus—what had happened to Rima. None of them—and not Patchen either—had had a need to know or a right to know. That did not mean that they hadn’t guessed the truth. What mattered was that Stutzer had taken everything but Rima’s own death away from her. She had a right to keep that for herself, and keep it she had, stored in the mind of her lover.
ELEVEN
1
For two years there was no news of Stutzer. No one was looking for him, and thanks to the way in which O. G. had erased him from the Outfit’s archives, no one ever would except by mistake. This did not mean that there was no Stutzer still in the world, whatever his reinvented identity might be. Christopher’s life, like everyone else’s, was a map of coincidence and he believed in its power. He went from assignment to assignment, always expecting that at the next turning of a street in Cairo or Hue or Leopoldville he would glimpse the matchstick man again, just as had happened before, and that this time Stutzer would either kill Christopher by treachery or Christopher would have his revenge. But what revenge could cause the sea to give up Rima, could cut the loop of image and sound and scent that haunted him—Rima’s arms in her last moment curved above her head, the glare of the searchlights, Mahican aflame and running before the wind into the night, the Baltic taking the girl, the disbelief. The briefness of it. Maybe when the moment for retribution came, it would simply happen like a poem that was ready to be born running onto paper out of a pen. This frozen zygote he had been carrying within himself for half a lifetime would somehow at the last moment turn into a complete being and tell him what to do and how to do it.
After a long uninterrupted time in the field he took a month’s leave. A year or two before he had moved to Rome. One night as he waited for his supper in an open-air restaurant in Trastevere, Heidi slipped into the empty chair across the table. He had not seen her since Berlin. She was no longer the unsmiling hotel manageress in a green apron that she had been in East Berlin. Now she wore sunglasses after dark, a jumble of cheap beads around her neck, rows of bracelets on both arms and slacks and sandals and a bright red shirt that perfectly matched her painted toenails. Her hair, formerly twisted into a bun, now hung to her shoulder blades. She shook it back so that Christopher could see her face. “Fancy meeting you here,” she said in English.
In her new costume she seemed smaller and prettier than he remembered. “This is a surprise,” he replied, also in English. “What brings you to Rome?”
“Curiosity,” Heidi said. The waiter brought pasta. “And hunger,” she said. Christopher told the waiter to divide the pasta into two portions and bring another glass. Heidi ordered the same main course as Christopher—grilled sea bass. “Everything in Italy tastes so wonderful,” she said after her first mouthful of pasta, “and olive oil is so much better for the digestion than lard.”
While they dined, two mimes in clown suits and white greasepaint performed in the street near their table. Their routine was to do everything in mirror image. They were very good. Each gesture, each expression was an exact duplicate of the other man’s. One of them was rotund, the other thin, but this difference only made the synchronization funnier. Christopher came often to this restaurant but he had never seen these performers before. Looking over Heidi’s shoulder, he studied them. Greedily, Heidi ate her tortellini con funghi and sipped Frascati and studied Christopher as if waiting for him to do some particular thing she knew he must do. Finally he recognized the mimes. When this happened Heidi must have seen some change in his eyes because she said, “You’ve identified the suspects, am I right?” Her English was American, and unlike her German, entirely free of accent.
“The bicyclists in the fur hats on Stalinallee,” Christopher said.
Heidi said, “You are good, aren’t you?”
“They are. Are you part of the act?”
“Sometimes, but I’m just décor. They’re the artistes.”
“This is their hobby?”
“No, no, they’ve studied with the best. It’s what they want to do when they grow up.”
“Work in the streets?”
“Not forever. World fame is their goal, Marcel and Marceau. It might happen, don’t you think?”
The mimes were passing
the hat, going from table to table. Christopher gave them a thousand lira. They paid him and Heidi no particular attention.
“It’s amazing how much money they can make in an evening,” Heidi said. “Sometimes a kilo of coins. Cheapskate tourists give them foreign coins which are useless because they can’t be exchanged.”
The mimes wandered away. Heidi paid them no further attention.
Christopher said, “You’re traveling with them?”
“Always.”
“Then you are an act.”
“Sort of. Sometimes.”
Heidi changed the subject to movies. Marcello Mastroianni grew up in this neighborhood, she said, and was sometimes seen dining with friends at one of the restaurants in the piazza. “He wears sunglasses at night, just like his character in La Dolce Vita—just like me, when in Rome et cetera,” Heidi said. “Nobody bothers him when he materializes. He’s just Marcello from the neighborhood. He eats his pasta and talks to his friends and walks home to his mama’s house. How do the Romans do it—live so naturally?”
Heidi herself hadn’t the knack. Her conversation, her costume, her expressions were as studied as the mimes’ had been. In Berlin she had played a hotel manageress. Now she was playing an American girl in Rome. Christopher wondered if really she was an American girl, and if she was, who had set her on his trail and what she wanted. He suspected Wolkowicz.
The waiter brought the check. Heidi took it from his hand and paid for their dinner with a ten thousand lira note the size of a page ripped from a book. “Another thing I like about Italy is the money,” Heidi said. “It’s just the right size.”
They walked along the Tiber for a few blocks, stopping at a bar to have coffee. Heidi said, “Add cappuccino to the list of things I like about Rome.” They crossed a bridge. She seemed to know where she was going. Christopher followed along, and finally she led him into a tiny street and then into a necktie shop. It was closing time and the shop seemed to be empty, but after a moment a man wearing a beautiful necktie and a suit with the jacket cut short in the Italian style bustled out of the backroom, and paying Heidi and Christopher no more attention than he would have done if they were tourists here to waste his time and buy nothing, went outside and cranked down the metal shutter that covered the door and the display window. They were locked in.
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