Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  Lengthy footnotes described the structures, notes that did not survive on modern plat maps of the city with which Nicolaus was intimately familiar. According to these notes, the structures were built by the Reich in 1943 as part of a plan to flood the city in the event of invasion by the Allies. Water would be brought by viaduct from ponds and rivers in the mountains to prevent tanks and planes from operating in the city, setting up the invaders as literal sitting ducks. The ducts would drain the water in a matter of a few hours to restore the city to normal operations. Whether these ducts still existed was not known. What was clear to Nicolaus, however, was that they had been completely forgotten and built over. They may never be used to drain water as originally intended, but they might still be quite useful to dispose of a body, or, perhaps as an escape route, something any good spy always has on hand in case the political winds change. Though not tall enough to fully stand in, being only 1.5 meters in diameter, any one of these ducts could suffice for Ulf’s new home, his taste in décor not being particularly well developed.

  Providing these ducts still existed, Nicolaus cross searched municipal records for possible ingress points, not missing the irony of his being on this side of the challenge of entering a secure underground structure for a change. Over the last two decades, buildings had been erected over all of them, but because of the zones cordoned off as the border to West Berlin, not all the buildings were currently occupied. Most were even boarded up and condemned. A name on one of establishments still open, however, jumped off the index card and rang in his brain as a klaxon in a panic.

  While not exactly on top of the duct, the building 100 meters away was a State-owned auto repair shop operated by a man named Raynor Zerrissen.

  Nicolaus returned to the Embassy, contemplating just how to utilize Zerrissen’s proximity to the drainage duct, where he encountered a colleague at the commissary over a cup of espresso, and chatting about the unusual street works going on all over the city.

  “It’s a wall” the colleague informed Nicolaus casually. “The Soviets told Honecker to build a wall. No one can come or go.”

  The idea was preposterous to Nicolaus. “If people want to leave, they’ll just go around the wall, like the Germans did the Maginot line.”

  “No,” his friend corrected him. “The wall completely circles West Berlin.”

  “West Berlin? All of it?”

  “Yep. The whole damn thing. West Berliners will be trapped in a bathtub of Capitalists in a bathroom of Marxists.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “They’re not saying, but I’ve heard rumors that they’re looking for new evidence of an old Nazi war crime. Now you know everything I know. ”

  Nicolaus sipped his espresso, trying to imagine the reaction of the West Berliners when they wake up in a few weeks, and the implications for him and Halina.

  Nicolaus got up and started making plans. Maybe the ducts are not a new home for Ulf. Maybe they are an escape route. In a society where no one could be a trusted, perhaps the time had come to be reacquainted with their old friend, Raynor Zerrissen.

  Mengele Nailed It

  Though he had not seen them in over twenty years, Nicolaus assumed that the pair of legs emerging from beneath the two-stroke, two-passenger car, its original veneer of green paint scrubbed away by salty roads revealing islands of expanding rust, heralded in propaganda for being manufactured exclusively in East Germany, were those of Herr Doktor Raynor Zerrissen. Clad in gray and greasy trousers, and worn boots of an auto mechanic, he was no longer the prestigious rocket scientist. Homer had observed that ‘clothes ARE the man’, in which case Zerrissen was a man stripped of all power he once held at The Bunker, making this conversation a much easier one for Nicolaus.

  While Nicolaus pondered the idea of how far the mighty could fall, the mechanic was remained unaware of his presence. He continued to peer into the undercarriage of the automobile, squinting out the glare of a bare lightbulb on the end of a threadbare fabric power cord, that snaked on the moist shop floor through three individual extension cords. Oil was dripping onto his face and eyeglasses. Draining radiators and replacing gaskets did not require Zerrissen’s degrees in math and mechanical engineering, but the State had offered him no more worthy challenges since his career came to that pyrotechnic end at the Bunker.

  Nicolaus announced his presence with a flat “Bitte,” choosing to use his Polish accent, a rare use of his native tongue, carefully intoned not to imply fondness, but rather something between a command and a threat.

  Zerrissen heard the word and noted the accent. He noticed a pair of men’s shoes with highly polished black wingtips, too polished to be from the neighborhood. They were possibly Stasi, an apparatchik dropping off a car, or a diplomat wanting to buy one. He could see sharply creased, gray-cuffed wool suit pants, not the bell-bottom, orange, and blue striped polyester synthetics with lapels the size of pizza slices in which agents with access to Western stores customarily strutted. Instead, cuffs ironed to a sharp crease broke carefully over the shoes, revealing just a glimpse of fine, black cotton socks beneath. He guessed that his visitor could be on a day visa from West Berlin looking to buy spare automobile parts on the black market cheap.

  Next to these feet were another pair of smaller feet in larger shoes made of unpolished brown leather; clearly a woman who worked for a living. Scuffed, frumpy, indelicate, not feminine, these belonged to a cleaning woman. The heels were a bit higher than hiking boots, one oddly higher than the other, and more brutish than the heels of women from West Berlin.

  Also visible was the hem of an unfashionably long flannel skirt the same color as every structure in East Berlin, the color chosen under the current Five-year plan for all women of the worker’s revolution. The skirt reached her mid-calf, hiding most of what looked like a leg brace. Her legs were bare and unshaved, true to Eastern European style. These two may have come together, but they were not together.

  When one spent his days seeing life through a ten-centimeter gap under automobiles, one became a shrewd judge of pants, cuffs, hosiery, and footwear.

  With a scratchy scrape of metal casters against concrete, Zerrissen pulled himself out from under the derelict car on the creeper, and hoisted himself to his feet, pausing to wipe his hands on a red rag that left his hands no less greasy, reached for the smoldering cigarette, nearly forgotten in an ashtray made from an old piston turned upside down. Nicolaus waited and watched the ceremony patiently, silently, noting black deposits of cigarette tar formed around the edges and interior of the piston. Drawing the last puff, Zerrissen looked at them both through the spiral of smoke curling around his head. A grease covered radio with one of the two bulbs illuminating the dial, its tuning mechanism long since broken and forever stuck on the only station allowed by the State, broadcasted a live performance of an orchestra playing an approved classical piece.

  “Yes?”

  Zerrissen stared into the young man’s face. He noted his clean shaven, blemish-free, smooth skin of salon caliber, square jaw, cleft chin, dark hair, dark eyebrows, teeth like the white keys of a new Steinway piano, and intact nose. He was good looking. He had the lean, chiseled features that spoke, not just to sophistication, but to money, and the knowledge how to spend it. An irresistible combination to women. And yet here he was, with a cleaning person who barely resembled a girl. A light fragrance surrounded him, but it was more subtle than cologne, and more as if he had just left a room containing an open bottle of cologne, without wearing any of it. The ambient air around the girl, on the other hand, was of dust, and candle wax. Perhaps it was just Zerrissen’s imagination. He squinted through the smoke at her to be certain. She was not easy to look at, but the large black eye made her hard to ignore. Zerrissen wondered if the black eye might be part of the story the stranger had to tell.

  Since his exodus from the Bunker twenty years ago, life for Zerrissen bouncing between Allied interrogations, de-Nazification, the assignment by the State to this auto repair shop,
and not being eligible or interested in becoming a member of the Party, was consigned to the rest of the population that must wait in hour-long food lines for basic edible food, drinkable water, coal for heat. This daily struggle legible on his undernourished face in the form of creases and poorly shaven folds of skin, dried out from smoking and other abuses of vice, mostly of the vodka persuasion.

  “We were told,” offered the young man, “that we would find Raynor Zerrissen under one of these cars. Would that be you?”

  Zerrissen nodded but declined Nicolaus’ extended hand, showing his greasy palms instead. Nicolaus shrugged his understanding and reached over to turn up the volume on the radio nestled among the orphaned engine, alternator, and brake cylinder parts; it was now loud enough to be heard across the potholed street in front of the shop. The potholes being serenaded were now two years old, grew each winter to eventually join into a larger one, like cavities in a neglected tooth, and reaching a vintage that, by East Berlin standards, nominated their eventual repair to sometime in the next two years.

  Zerrissen looked sideways at the radio currently broadcasting an original Russian opera extolling the virtues of Soviet life, wondered how this well-bred young man found volume would improve this libretto of obvious propaganda. Guessing his thoughts, Nicolaus signaled with his hands, pointing at the ceiling of the shop, then to his ears, an unmistakable silent communication that Zerrissen’s shop was bugged.

  Microphones and cameras hidden in public and private places in East Berlin were not news to anyone, so the proposition that Zerrissen’s shop was under surveillance did not surprise him. What was surprising to Zerrissen, however, was that Nicolaus dared acknowledge this otherwise unmentionable fact to a stranger.

  Over the sound from the radio, Nicolaus spoke into Zerrissen’s ear, “Herr Zerrissen, do we look familiar?”

  Zerrissen did not immediately recognize them and did not care to play games, especially with memories and at least two liters of vodka that he had worked so hard to swallow before lunch break. Zerrissen drew on the last of the cigarette, stubbed it out as he contemplated the possibilities while eying the leg brace poking out from under the girl’s dress.

  “Ah. You must be Pyotr, or is it Nicolaus? I could never tell you two apart.”

  “Nicolaus. We never found Pyotr.”

  Zerrissen regretted stumbling into that bad subject. “Ah. So… this must be…?” He had truly forgotten her name.

  “Yes. Halina,” Nicolaus volunteered on her behalf. “She doesn’t say much, as you might recall.”

  She smiled at hearing her name, but then grew bored and left the men. She started exploring the shop that quite fascinated her, like everything in life did.

  The crippled radio boomed kettle drums and horns, all the way from the concert hall in Moscow and into the shop; the worker supernumeraries must have triumphed over the evil landlord. Halina was poking among the piles of discarded car parts; this pile was apparently reserved for radiators.

  Distracted by Halina’s wandering and poking, Zerrissen turned back to Nicolaus.

  “The Red Cross would not tell me anything after absorbing you into their coven. Whatever they did to you, you look well cared for.” Indeed, the fully grown Nicolaus stood before Zerrissen like a character from Oscar Wilde, immune to aging. Was there a picture in someone’s attic expressing the suffering instead? Zerrissen, for comparison, caught his own reflection in a shiny hubcap on the bench, and realized that, were one to substitute this workshop for an attic, he himself could easily have been that famous picture of literature.

  Sounds of metal against concrete floor from a remote corner of the shop forced Zerrissen to look away from Nicolaus. What is Halina was looking for?

  Nicolaus offered no apology nor explanation as both men watched her dig through the discarded entrails of various assemblies from automobiles, washing machines, other appliances including a refrigerator with no door, de-fanged in effect, no longer a death trap for children, and latching refrigerator doors now banned, belatedly, by State law. Its resemblance to the trainer in the Iron Lung Lab no longer registered with either Nicolaus or Zerrissen.

  Deciding that Halina was in no immediate danger, and that they had no control over her movements in any case, they turned their attention back to each other.

  “So, how can I help you?” With that day he escaped the Bunker long behind him, the last twenty years of relative peace and inebriation, Zerrissen felt no urgency to put his life at risk, even if this life consisted of this simple day job, after which he could return unmolested to an apartment with a single electrical outlet, and a single bed, with a view of a factory through its single window.

  “Do you ever think about leaving?” Nicolaus let the question float around in Zerrissen’s head.

  “Leaving?”

  “Yes. Leaving the East for the West.”

  This question was a common trap by the toady informants among the East Berlin population, so Zerrissen was instinctively demurred. “What? And leave… all of this?” Zerrissen gestured to the greasy shop and the potholed street.

  But while Nicolaus may have been an informant, he was no toady.

  Nicolaus smiled. “Do you know how much they pay engineers of your talent in the West? In West Germany or even the United States? Or do you prefer fixing washing machines?”

  “Automobiles. Very few washing machines, actually.”

  Zerrissen contemplated the notion that he could return to the life of an engineer, a thought that needed a cigarette to metabolize, which Nicolaus, a non-smoker, produced from his tailored jacket along with a silver lighter that he carried for such ice-breaking occasions.

  Gesturing at the expensive lighter, Zerrissen added, “You seem to have done very well for yourself.”

  “Well, I have a job, yes.”

  “Doing what? State salaries do not buy gaberdine suits.”

  “At the Embassy. I’m a… cultural attaché.”

  “A what?”

  “I promote Marxist culture.”

  Zerrissen pointed at the radio. “You mean like operas?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes sport. Sometimes ballet. But we were talking about you. And how you never think about leaving.”

  This is not a subject one indulges in with Embassy staff. Zerrissen chose a safe, Party inspired response.

  “Are things really that better in the West?”

  “Probably not. But she will die if she stays in East Germany.”

  “Is she sick? We have doctors here too. Or is this about her black eye because I had nothing to do with that.”

  “It’s complicated, but yes, black eye. And we know who gave it to her.”

  “So, leave.” It sounded harsher than he wanted.

  “We can’t.”

  “Sure, you can. Go shopping on a day pass across the river. Don’t come back. People do it all the time. You have nothing to lose.”

  “On the contrary. We have everything to lose. All East Germans do, now.”

  “Now? What is different about ‘now?’”

  “What would you say if I told you that the Soviets are building a wall along the occupied sectors to keep people from crossing over to the West?”

  “A wall?” Zerrissen asked on an exhale of smoke.

  “Yes. West Berlin will be walled off, isolated as an island of Capitalism in a sea of Marxism. Only one way in or out.”

  Zerrissen blew another puff of smoke in the air, trying to picture how such a wall could be built. It was a ridiculous idea.

  “Like the Nazi ghettos for Jews?”

  “Ghettos, Raynor? Please. This is a Workers’ Paradise. Don’t you read the news?”

  “Why would the State build a wall instead of cars and washing machines?”

  “One does not question the wisdom of the Central Committee. Either way, Halina will die if she stays here.”

  “When does this so-called wall break ground?”

  “It already has.”

  Zerrissen raised an
eyebrow of skepticism.

  “Fences are begin put up on the few open border sections. The sections with fences are being replaced with barbed wire. Sections with barbed wire are being electrified. People are getting killed trying to cross, yet they keep trying. Minefields are being placed along all sections. The mines are killing people too, yet people are still trying.”

  “Mines,” Zerrissen mocked. “Really? Wouldn’t someone stepping on a land mine be on the news?”

  “You’re not listening to the right news.”

  Zerrissen cast a glance over at his one-station radio. Nicolaus had a point.

  “How do you know these things? It’s all a little hard to believe.”

  “I told you. I work at the Embassy. As a translator.”

  Zerrissen looked Nicolaus in the eye. “I thought you said, ‘cultural attaché?”

  Nicolaus returned his stare, not blinking or flinching. “Oh. That’s right.”

  “Ah…” Zerrissen watched a ring of smoke rise towards the ceiling, noticing some bulbs hanging there that needed replacing. “A spy.”

  Nicolaus smiled a thin, telling smile. “Raynor. The Workers’ Paradise does not need or employ spies. What’s wrong with you?”

  What about your friends at the American Embassy? I’m sure they would love to help you.”

  “The American Embassy is thoroughly compromised. I should know. I compromised it. No more temporary visas at the checkpoints. We’d be arrested if we tried.”

  Nicolaus paused while the radio announcer became silent, evidently changing programs. A few seconds later, an announcer returned to introduce the conductor of the concluded opera to polite applause.

  A bang sounded from across the room. Halina had pulled some scrap materials from the bottom of a greasy pile. The controlled roar of an acetylene torch bounced off the walls and ceiling. She had fired up the welder to piece some scraps together as if she owned the place. But her claim to ownership was no weaker than Zerrissen’s. All things on this side of the River Spree belonged to the State.