Hour of the Assassins (16 page)

He took time to examine his table companion out of the corner of his eye, a chunky dark-haired man in his mid-twenties who kept ostentatiously glancing at his Rolex as if he had something to do tonight besides checking out the girls. He was the new European man, riding the economic boom like a surfer. His watch was Swiss, his jeans French, his disco shirt and jacket Italian, and his slang came from American TV. He nervously jiggled his knees against Caine's and winked at him, conspirators in the eternal quest for the one-night stand. While Caine checked the crowd for Harris, his table partner researched the club for girls.

The telephone rang and before Caine could move, his partner grabbed the receiver like he was a racetrack tout waiting for results of the Kentucky Derby. But it was for Caine. A busty blonde with the heft of a Wagnerian singer at Table 43 waved at him and invited him to dance. At Caine's “
Nein, danke
” she shrugged in an exaggerated manner to show off the low-cut bosom he had turned down and hung up. Caine noted with satisfaction that with the band blaring the telephone was almost completely private, in the midst of the huge crowd.

The second call was also for Caine. This time his partner handed the phone over with a touch of annoyance. It was a pretty dark-haired girl with a sweet gentle smile a few tables away. She had on a tight pink cashmere turtleneck that seemed to glow like neon in the dim light. Caine felt his groin stir as he reluctantly turned down her offer to buy him a drink. He looked at her and thought, another time, another place, another life, and hung up. His table partner looked at him curiously, probably figuring him for a queer, and moved his chair a fraction of an inch away from Caine, not wanting to be guilty by association.

There was a loud series of cheers and catcalls and Caine glanced back at the stage, where the lead singer was working himself into an erotic frenzy. The phone rang again. This time it was Harris. Caine's table partner smiled broadly as he handed over the receiver. The call from a man had confirmed his suspicion. He knew Caine was a queer for sure.

“I'm at table thirty-one. Do you come here often?” Harris said. Except that Caine wasn't playing.

“Only during the mating season,” Caine replied, spotting Harris lounging indifferently, his legs crossed, at a table near the door. With his blow-dryed blond hair, black pin-striped Cardin suit, and cocktail in hand, Harris looked like he belonged in an expensive whiskey ad.

“I bet you only come here for the classy acts,” Harris said, using a code identification. On stage the lead singer was gyrating his hips to the music while the band blasted a hard rock version of Beethoven's Fifth.

“Cut the shit, Bob. I left my Junior Secret Agent kit at home.”

“Is that the one with the plastic mask and the water gun that looks, like a Luger?”

“Yeah, and fifty snappy sayings to keep the KGB in stitches.”

The strobe lights flickered madly and the dancers writhed uncontrollably as the band and the audience went wild.

“What's it all about, Alfie?” Harris asked.

“You tell me. You're the one dealing the cards.”

“I think we have a communication problem. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.”

“You say that so sincerely, Mr. Jennings. Why don't I believe you?”

Harris shrugged and sipped his drink as the audience exploded into applause and stamped their feet like a giant beast with two thousand legs.

“Then we're even,” Harris taunted. “Your passport says William Foster, but I'm not holding it against you.”

“That's big of you. Look, let's stop fencing, sweetie. The applause is dying down and my table partner has already got me marked for a queer.”

“That's because you look so cute in your three-piece suit. What about lunch tomorrow?”

“I love you too, you sexy thing,” he replied. His table partner overheard him and smiled broadly.

“In the Tiergarten, by the elephant cage.”

“Just the two of us, lover,” Caine said and hung up, suppressing an impulse to plant a cross-bottom fist between his table partner's teeth. He waited till the music started again and the aisles were filled with couples making contact and crowding their way to the dance floor, before getting up and leaving his table partner smirking over the telephone.

It was in the Tiergarten that the teen-aged werewolves and cripples of the Home Guard made a last pathetic stand against the Red Army. The few old trees that managed to survive the Battle of Berlin were cut down for fuel during the frigid postwar winter of '45. During the fifties the ground was reseeded, saplings were planted, and rose gardens once again replaced potato patches. As he walked down the path to the zoo, the only evidences of the war Caine could see were the strange mounds several hundred feet high that dotted the park. The mounds had been constructed of rubble, then covered with soil and seeded with grass. Under the leaden winter sky they looked like tells from a long-lost civilization. Caine wondered what some archeologist from the distant future might make of them. He checked his watch and decided he had enough time for a bite before his r.d.v. with Harris. He stopped at a stand and bought a bockwurst dipped in mustard, which he ate as he walked through the zoo. Harris had used the code phrase “What about lunch …” which meant fourteen minutes after twelve.

A plaque on the outside railing of the elephant enclosure identified the elephant as “Shanti.” The massive gray animal ambled near the rail, her long trunk searching the concrete lip of the moat for peanuts. Like the rest of her breed, she was a survivor. She had come through the Allied bombings and the Russian onslaught to become something of a local institution. The irony of her name was not lost on Caine, with his linguistic background. It meant “peace” in Sanskrit.

Two small children, their long blond hair tousled by the wind, were throwing peanuts at each other. The little boy chased the girl around the massive bulk of their mother, who watched them with an air of stolid patience. The little girl's shrieks of excitement sounded thin and high-pitched in the air, like the calls of a bird in distress. Caine watched Harris approach and rechecked the large open area. It was secure; Harris was alone. He turned back to the enclosure and watched the elephant until he felt Harris lean against the railing beside him.

“You're looking well, Herr Foster,” Harris said, his lopsided grin giving him the boyish charm of a street urchin that women found irresistible. He wore a well-cut camel's hair overcoat that seemed to match his trim blond hair. His blue eyes twinkled with sincerity and as always Caine had the feeling that Harris wanted to sell him something he would be better off without.

“I'll bet you say that to all the girls.”

“How's civilian life treating you?”

“I wouldn't know. It looks to me like you bastards are trying to run me without the benefit of a salary.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“What are you doing in Berlin, Bob?”

Harris pulled away from him for a moment and looked at him curiously. Perhaps he was remembering some of the things Caine had said when he quit. He reached into his pocket, brought out a handful of peanuts, and tossed them over the moat at the elephant.

“Do you really expect me to answer that? Come on, you know better than that. You were a Company man yourself once, or have you forgotten?”

“No,” Caine said. “I haven't forgotten.”

For a moment the two men were silent. They watched Shanti's powerful trunk pick up a peanut and put it into her mouth.

“What makes you think we're running you?”

“Not ‘we,' you. You're the one who put Wasserman onto me in the first place. Then I run into you here in Berlin, the one place someone interested in Nazis would have to come to eventually. Quite a coincidence, wouldn't you say?”

“Is that what Wasserman wanted you for? Jesus, that's funny.”

“Then why aren't I laughing, Bob?”

“For Chrissakes, Johnny,” Harris said, smiling his sincere boyish grin for all it was worth. “I thought I was doing you a favor and picking up a little change on the side. I didn't know you were going to go all paranoid on me. Until you walked into the consulate I had no idea you were in Berlin.”

“If you were running a mission, would you tell me?”

“Sure.” Harris grinned. “Would you believe me?”

“Of course not.”

The two men smiled. Harris handed Caine a few peanuts and cracked one open for himself. He spit out a speck of shell and wiped his mouth.

“I was tailed to the consulate,” Caine said, his eyes an icy green, like shallow Arctic water.

“Of course you were tailed, marching through Checkpoint Charlie like Napoleon,” Harris retorted irritably. “It has nothing to do with you. The Gehlen Bureau has a runner coming across and we want to get our hands on him before they bring him around the corner”—using the German intelligence slang phrase for killing. “As soon as I saw you, I figured those junior G-men had snafu'd and called them off.”

Caine lit a cigarette, cupping his hand against the chill breeze. The wind whipped the smoke away as fast as he could exhale it, the pale whiff swirling into the gray air.

“So Berlin is just a coincidence, it that it?”

Harris grabbed Caine's lapel to emphasize his point. Caine let him, knowing how vulnerable that made Harris, since he could snap Harris's elbow by locking the grip and using a base palm blow against the outside upper arm. It was the kind of amateurish mistake that not even a rookie operative would make. But then, Harris was a senior case officer. The kind who moved pins around on a map and never got his hands dirty unless he spilled a drink at an embassy party.

“Look, Johnny. You are out of it. Neither I nor the Company give a shit what kind of a kraut-hunt you and the old pimp have cooked up. You wandered across an open op and I came here to tell you to get off the field because there's a game in progress. That's it.”

Caine glanced at Harris's hand for a moment, then back at Harris, who dropped his hand from Caine's lapel as if it had grown suddenly heavy.

“Aren't you even a little curious about what we're up to?”

“C'mon, Johnny, whatever you and Wasserman are up to with the krauts, just tell me it has nothing to do with the Company and I promise to keep it to myself. I won't report it. Scout's honor”—holding up his right hand in the three-fingered Boy Scout sign.

“It's a private beef, Bob.”

“Then you have my word.”

“Thanks, I'll sleep better at night knowing that,” Caine said, the sarcasm heavy in his voice. Harris smiled his patented boyish grin.

“Once and for all, Johnny. The tail was a bureaucratic foul-up and Wasserman paid me an easy five grand for an ex-agent's name. You're off the books. You and I are just two ships that accidentally went bump in the night.”

“Then there is no problem, is there? If I see any of your people in my rearview mirror, I'm going to step on them.”

Harris shrugged. “Grind them up and feed them to the pigeons for all I care. Christ, you have been out of the game too long. What makes you think the Company gives a shit about the krauts? The only thing that counts these days is oil, kiddo,” Harris said, biting his lip as if he had said too much.

Caine wondered about that. He wondered about it for a long time. It was a loose thread and those are the kind that trip you up. Then he shrugged the thought away. The only thing that mattered now was to get at the Mengele records in the official archives. “Then you wouldn't mind doing me a favor,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Get me authorization to get into the American Document Center.”

Harris looked at him quizzically, as if he were Scrooge being asked to play Santa Claus at the office Christmas party.

“Why should I?”

“Money.”

Harris grinned broadly, as though Caine had just handed him a Valentine. He really was the all-American success story, Caine thought, with a shine on his shoes, credit cards in his pocket, and good old-fashioned greed in his eyes.

“That's what makes the world go around,” Harris said.

“Funny. Somebody told me it was love.”

“You'd be surprised how loveable money can be,” Harris replied with a wink.

That was pure Harris, Caine thought. He always had to get in the last cliché, even while picking your pocket.

Harris left after they agreed that he was to call the document center and verbally authorize access for an American named William Foster. In exchange Caine agreed to a drop of twenty-five hundred marks in an envelope addressed to P. Jennings at the American Express office on the Kürfurstendamm. But instead of leaving the Tiergarten after Harris had gone, Caine sat down on a bench and smoked a cigarette, staring vacantly at the bear cage.

If Harris was lying, then he had to get out. Because if he was being run blindly on a Company mission, it could only mean that he was expendable and sooner or later they would bring him around the corner. Even if Harris wasn't lying, the fact that the Company knew what he was up to would queer the pitch for sure, because every intelligence service is playing its own game and security is never that good, no matter how many “Top Secret” and “For Your Eyes Only” stamps are plastered on each page. Intelligence services are more tangled than bodies at a Hollywood Hills orgy, no matter which side they were coming from—which was why an agent could whisper something in a bar girl's ear in Miami and two days later an unidentified body would be found floating facedown in one of the
klongs
in Bangkok.

Of course, everything Harris had said sounded reasonable, and Harris seemed sincere. But then, the world isn't a reasonable place and sincerity was Harris's long suit. It could have been coincidence running into Harris in Berlin. But it was farfetched, because Harris was the thread that tied Wasserman and Mengele and the Company together. If Koenig were here now, he would say that if Caine bought Harris's story, he could let him have the Brooklyn Bridge at an after-Christmas discount price.