Christopher's Ghosts (30 page)

Wolkowicz looked at Christopher in silence for a long interval. Christopher knew he was counting his breaths. That was how he had got through the interrogation by the Japanese in Burma, by counting inhalations and exhalations between bursts of pain and thinking of other things—in that particular case, his escape across the steppes as a small boy carried on his father’s back. He had used breath-counting as a timing device ever since.

After half a dozen breaths Wolkowicz said, “Sure, why not? Are you armed?”

Christopher said, “No.”

“What a surprise. Do you want something now?” Christopher was notorious in the Outfit for his disdain for weapons. In Wolkowicz’s view, his refusal to carry arms was demented.

“No, thanks.”

“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. “If need arises, and if you just happen to be in East Berlin, take the U-bahn to Klosterstrasse, go to the Red Orchestra Inn in Littenstrasse, and ask for Sepp Bauer. He won’t be there. Ask to use the bathroom as a matter of very great kindness—use those exact words—and then unbuckle your wristwatch and drop it in the left-hand pocket of your suit coat.”

“Wow.”

“Shut up and listen. You’ll find what you need under the windowsill above the toilet. Push the board toward the window, hard, and keeping the pressure on, lift up. When you hear the click, it’s open. Don’t force it. Be sure to put it back together before you leave.”

As he talked Wolkowicz dressed himself against the bitter damp Berlin winter in a heavy scarf and a thick loden overcoat with a button-in lining that must have weighed ten pounds.

He said, “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

Christopher shook his head no.

Wolkowicz fished a key from the thumb of one of his fur-lined gloves and tossed it to Christopher. “Lock up when you leave and throw away the key before you go through the checkpoint,” he said. “Don’t ditch it in this neighborhood, and not too close to the checkpoint.”

Christopher nodded his thanks.

With his hand on the doorknob Wolkowicz said, “Don’t put beans in your ears.”

He left, but as Christopher listened to him descending the stairs at a heavy trot, he knew that he would be seeing more of Wolkowicz. Or of people Wolkowicz knew.

 
 
4

When Christopher left the apartment at about ten that night he looked for surveillance but saw none behind or ahead of him. He wasn’t surprised. This was a desolate neighborhood with practically no cover. Anyone attempting to following him would stick out like a sore thumb. Wolkowicz would have stationed his scouts farther away, somewhere between here and the checkpoint Christopher was likeliest to use when crossing the line that separated the two Berlins. Christopher understood this and had expected it. If he would not tell Wolkowicz where he was going and why, Wolkowicz would put a team on him and find out for himself. If Christopher ran into trouble in the East, then in the worst-case scenario the Outfit would know at least that he had been taken hostage. In the best case, Wolkowicz’s men would help him in case of need.

At this time, the Berlin Wall and the long period of quarantine it symbolized were in the future, though not very far in the future. With the proper papers almost anyone could walk across the frontier from west to east. Christopher had all the documentation he could possibly need, all of it false and all of it forged in the Outfit’s shop, located in one of the temporary buildings on the Mall. Patchen had handed it over. “You are an obscure toiler in the vineyard of world socialism,” he said. “You are an employee of the Ministry of State Security. How’s that for chutzpah?” Christopher gazed at his own picture on an official Stasi identity card and tasted bile.

Wolkowicz’s sidewalk man picked up Christopher in the Kochstrasse U-bahn station. Two of his friends were posted outside and fell into position as soon as Christopher emerged. All were shabbily dressed and of average size. All were gray-faced men of a certain age, war veterans probably, Z Group possibly. They wouldn’t know who Christopher was, only that Wolkowicz was interested in him. As Christopher walked briskly toward Checkpoint Charlie, they followed him, working with tired efficiency like figures from a mechanical clock, changing positions at every crosswalk. They could do this with their eyes shut. Their eyes, thought Christopher, might as well be shut.

At the checkpoint, no one on the American side paid attention to Christopher—the job of the young military policemen was to watch people coming from the other side, and besides they spoke almost no German. The Vopos on their side of the neutral strip looked at Christopher’s Stasi ID and asked no questions. The whole process took perhaps three minutes, and then he was walking down Friederich-strasse, but not too briskly because only two of Wolkowicz’s men were following him and he did not want them to lose him before the third joined up and he could ditch him, too.

Patchen’s had shown Christopher pictures of his target—the building in East Berlin that Patchen called the Mosque, a place where Arabs came and went. Some of these images were mystifying high-altitude aerial photographs. A handful were snapshots taken at ground level. The Mosque was not actually a building, but rather something that used to be a building, a bombed-out wreck whose missing top stories resembled a row of ragged triangles scissored from a sheet of cardboard by a small child. It appeared that two or three rooms on the ground floor of the Mosque had been cleared of rubble to make a sort of cave. Tons of shattered masonry rested on top of this space that was, according to the Outfit’s hypothesis, the trigger mechanism of a coming explosion of terrorism in the Middle East. The snapshots were badly underexposed, taken perhaps by a miniature camera hidden under an agent’s coat, so that they were not much more informative than the U 2 photos. Nearly everything about the building had to be deduced. Not even its exact address was known, only the street on which it stood and the name of the nearest cross street. Christopher had long since ceased being surprised at how little the U. S. espionage service, and presumably all other such agencies in the world, knew for certain. Their wasteful methods—photographs taken through buttonholes by furtive cameramen trembling in fear of arrest and torture—were so cumbersome that the smallest scrap of knowledge was treated as the bluest of diamonds. Combined and rightly arranged with some of the millions of other scraps of information that rained down daily on headquarters, and with the right luck, this speck of knowledge might someday become a treasure trove. At least that was the theory. Christopher wanted to see
the Mosque, which lay near the River Spree, not far from the Ostbanhhof, with his own eyes.

By now it was almost midnight, late to be out in East Berlin, and other pedestrians hurried past, trying to catch the last train from the Underground station a block away. In minutes, if he did not hurry like the others, Christopher would be the only figure on the most patrolled street in this half of the city. Only one of Wolkowicz’s men was still behind Christopher. The second had overtaken him and was now bustling ahead, on his way to cover the entrance to the Underground station on the next corner. The third man, easy to spot because he wore a tightly cinched trench coat, had disappeared.

Christopher hung back. The other pedestrians were not numerous enough to make a crowd, but just the same it would be hard to single him out. He wore dark clothes, a dark hat, an end-of-the-day stubble on his chin. He carried a worn briefcase that contained that day’s party newspaper, a piece of hard cheese, a half-eaten sausage. He walked with self-importance, like a German who in his youth had been taught to march and stand up straight. He looked and moved and smelled like any other citizen of the German Democratic Republic hurrying home after a long day at work or an evening in a beer hall. When he was close to the station, perhaps twenty steps away, he felt the train rumbling beneath the pavement. He broke into a run. Wolkowicz’s lookout waited at the top of the stairs. Christopher stamped on the arch of his foot as he went by, felt limber bones bending under his heel and heard the man gasp in pain. He ran headlong down the stairs, flashed his Stasi ID at the ticket-taker, who saluted, and at the last possible second wriggled sidewise through the closing doors of the crowded car. All eyes were on him for the first second. Like the Stasi man he was pretending to be, he glared back at these inquisitive nobodies, ostentatiously studying their faces as if he intended to recognize them if ever they met again. After that no one met his eyes. He got out his newspaper and read it until it was time to get off. Actually reading the mind-deadening thing was a sign of loyalty to the regime. No one else seemed to have a copy.

He got off the train at the Frankfurter Tor station. There were few streetlights in this bleak quarter of the city. The night sky was overcast.
Christopher was in darkness, and as far as he could tell, alone. This had been a squalid neighborhood even before the bombing by the RAF and the shelling of the Red Army. The damage had been so great and the local population so scattered that the Russians had not even attempted to clean up the damage, except to clear the streets. Because property had no commercial value in a socialist economy, no one else had done so, either. Fires that had burned here fifteen years before could still be smelled on the stones, as if like fossils of the Nazi regime they had colonized the pores in the brick and granite.

Before the war there had been an indoor public swimming pool nearby and on winter Saturdays he had come here with Hubbard, who as a sailor and a former member of his school’s swimming team set great store by water sports. He taught Paul the Australian crawl, the breaststroke, the backstroke, the butterfly, even a muscle-twisting, breath-burning Civil War era stroke called the trudgeon that sent water flying for many meters when Hubbard slammed the surface with his long arms and legs. The two of them had always walked back to the streetcar with wet hair smelling of chlorine, stopping along the way at a coffee shop for hot chocolate with whipped cream. Christopher had studied maps to refresh his memory of this neighborhood, to pinpoint the Mosque, but as he walked through the streets leading from the railroad station, he remembered them even though the landmarks had vanished.

The Mosque was on a short street close by the River Spree. By the time Christopher reached it—the way was roundabout and he reckoned he had walked more than a mile—his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The glow of West Berlin, just across the river, cast a helpful light. He saw that the Mosque in the photograph was not the only one that was occupied. Caves in the rubble had been made in two or three others. On closer inspection he saw that all these were empty. The people who had lived there, perhaps for years, had been cleared out. Stronger doors, clearly brand-new, had been installed and padlocked. Windows had been bricked. Signs had been posted:
Entry Strictly Forbidden
.

It began to rain, softly. Outside the blacked-out Mosque Christopher
saw no light but knew that lights burned inside because he heard the putt-putt of a small electric generator and smelled its exhaust. He heard the faint clatter of a typewriter being operated by a fast typist. He looked for a place to conceal himself but spotted no cover. The padlocked caves, let alone the Mosque itself, would be checked regularly by whoever from the Ministry of State Security was responsible for guarding them. He decided that the best observation point was the roof of the Mosque.

By now his night vision was good, and all around him, wet and gleaming, he saw hillocks of rubble. It would be difficult, he knew, to climb them without dislodging stones and making noise, but after studying the vertical face of the building he could think of no other way to hide himself and see what he had come here to see. Gingerly, he began to climb. The mountain of rubble to which he clung was a landslide waiting to happen, but as on a real mountain there were solid bits to hold onto—old cornices and sills and beams and fragments of chimney. Christopher groped for these handholds and footholds, and moving as slowly and cautiously as if he had been climbing the rock face of a peak in Austria, made his way to the roof. He perceived, rather than saw or heard, some of the scores of feral cats who made their home on the roof bounding soundlessly into the darkness. The smell of cat urine and feces was overpowering. Where there are cats, he thought, there are rats, but what do the rats eat? He took up a position between two of the saw-tooth fragments of wall atop the roof and watched the street below. He was directly above the entrance to the Mosque.

Hours passed. The rain stopped. He heard what he thought might be a pack of rats scurrying across the roof. The smell of the cats’ droppings nauseated him. He thought about living the life of a librarian in a small New England town—the harmlessness of it, the seasons, the scent of old books, the walk home under elms that filtered the afternoon sun. A wife, a child who liked to listen to stories, iced tea and soft American sandwiches on a screened porch. Rima. He hadn’t pictured her in years. He forced her from his mind now. Two uniformed men on bicycles came by and checked the doors of the Mosque and the padlocked caves. They shone flashlights, too
feeble for the job, on the rubble and stirred up some cats. One held his torch on a scampering cat while the other pegged stones at it, missing every time.

Shortly after three in the morning, two new figures approached. They shared an umbrella. One of them carried a flashlight. Clearly they knew where they were going, but they did not move with the assurance of Germans, who in this part of town were still conditioned to make an impression even when they were not being observed. Talking incessantly, these fellows sauntered carelessly, following the bull’s eye of the flashlight beam as it moved before them over the pavement. The light turned them into silhouettes so that it was difficult to make them out in detail. They were bundled up in heavy coats and what looked in the dimness like knitted ski caps. One of them clapped his gloved hands together. As they drew closer Christopher could see their breath in the beam of the electric torch and wondered about the visibility of his own exhalations. When the two were directly below him, he made out the throat-clearing sounds of Arabic, and even understood a few words. They were talking about women, German women, and the hasty way in which they made love instead of waiting, instead of enjoying the prospect of pleasure, instead of letting themselves be brought to a proper pitch. They were interested only in themselves, they just lay there and waited for the pop. What was wrong with them? As they studied their watches with the flashlight, waiting for the minute hand to move, Christopher glimpsed their faces—dark men, young, one of them bearded. They knocked on the door of the Mosque—two loud bangs, a pause, four taps.