Lucky Bastard (15 page)

1
Jack's only class that day began at eleven o'clock. By noon, television crews were set up outside the gates, interviewing students who might have known Greta and her fellow terrorists. One of these was an NBC crew, whose director was calling out in English, “Americans over here! Americans over here!” A woman reporter holding a microphone stood on tiptoe, searching the crowd for American faces.

Jack looked for an escape route, but he was pushed forward toward the cameras by the jostling crowd. One long-haired German boy kicked over a light stand, crying, “Shitty imperialist television!” On camera, a policeman seized the boy, shook him roughly, shouted in his face, then let him go with a violent push that sent him staggering halfway across the street. Jack watched him run away, hair flying.

“He was lucky,” the American cameraman said. “Two cops were killed in this thing.”

“Plus five terrorists,” said the woman with the microphone. “The driver of the BMW just croaked in hospital.” British style, she left out the
the
before the noun. She added, “So it's five to two in favor of the
Polizei.
”

“They got them all?”

“That's the word.”

Heart pounding at this good news—he was not a suspect!—Jack walked briskly past the camera, face averted, concentrating hard so as not to run. He got past and hurried on toward home, a dozen different plans of escape forming in his mind: escape from the TV cameras, escape from Heidelberg, escape from the police if he found them waiting in his room as surely he would. But where could he go? All the money he had in the world was in his pocket. He had counted it during the lecture: 13 marks, 43 pfennigs.

Behind him, where the policeman had been, he heard firm footsteps hurrying to catch up. Jack's hair prickled on his scalp. He walked on. Then a male German voice—therefore loud and commanding—said, “Jack Adams.”

Jack twitched and halted, sure that a gun, or at least a camera, must be pointing at his back. His hands trembled. He plunged them into his trousers pockets; the palms were wet with sweat. He began to hyperventilate. He took a deep breath, held it, and turned around.

It was Manfred, Arthur's friend, the lecturer in political philosophy. Jack let out his breath through his nostrils and took another mighty breath. Manfred stared at him, flicked a glance at the sweat that shone on Jack's face.

He said, “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Jack replied. “Long time no see.”

Since the night in the rathskeller, Jack had seen Manfred only in the lecture hall. For his part, Manfred had read Greta's reports before passing them on to us, so he knew a great deal about Jack.

Solemn-faced, Manfred said, “You've heard?”

Jack said, “Heard what?”

“Greta Fürst was shot dead by the police this morning.”

Jack stared back. He thought he saw a sardonic light in Manfred's eyes. Did he know?
How could he know?
God knew what Greta had told him, or what she had told the world. For all Jack knew, she might have kept a diary and sent it to the newspapers. Or written a farewell manifesto. Better than anyone, he knew that she was capable of anything. Jack tasted the metal of the handcuff key he had spat out while Greta bled her last. Suddenly, with a lurch of the heart, he remembered that he had left the handcuffs in the Daimler. He remembered himself saying,
I'm going to get perspiration all over the leather.
What else had been left on the leather by his last coupling with Greta, and what would the police make of it? His stomach heaved; he tasted bile. He smelled Greta as she had smelled on his own body.
He had not washed his running shorts! They could be matched to the evidence in the Daimler!

Jack said a silent prayer, his second that day, on which he had had his first thoughts of his Maker since childhood:
Get me out of this.
He was answered by what seemed to be a miracle: Jack's nature took over. He lied.

“Greta who?” he said.

“The girl I introduced you to at the rathskeller,” Manfred said. “The redhead. Smoked Gauloises. Walked you home.”

“Oh yeah,” Jack said. “The nutcase. Actually she just walked away. I wandered around in the rain for hours.”

Manfred, who knew in graphic detail what had happened that night, and on every other meeting between Greta and Jack, opened his eyes wider in feigned surprise. “Really? What bad manners. You never saw her again?”

“I wasn't exactly keeping an eye out.” Jack smiled.

“So you don't remember her?”

“The bad manners I remember. What happened?”

The lies had relaxed Jack. He took his hands out of his pockets. He gazed frankly into Manfred's eyes, feigning interest, registering innocent ignorance. Lost in his favorite role, Smiling Jack.

Manfred said, “It's big news. She and some friends tried to rob a bank. The police killed them all.”

“Wow. Were they terrorists, or what?”

“The Red Army Faction has claimed responsibility.”

“What's that?”

“The Baader-Meinhof Gang. Serious people.”

“Good God. What a mess.”

The Baader-Meinhof Gang?
Jack's breathing was back to normal now. He struggled to keep it that way. The pores opened along his spine, releasing a rivulet of sweat. Manfred watched him very closely, with something that could easily be called suspicion in his eyes.

Manfred said, “The talk around here is that they must have been betrayed. The cops were waiting for them right around the corner.”

Jack said, “What do you mean, betrayed?”

Manfred shrugged.

Jack was seized by a sickening realization: The police
knew.
How else could they have known the precise moment of the bank robbery, how else could they have arrived so quickly, in such overwhelming force? Why else would they have used so much firepower, been so intent on killing with such merciless brutality, if they had not been sure they were dealing with terrorists—people who deserved to die, people of whom they wished to make a bloody example?

Jack regained control of himself. In an even voice, holding on to the character he was playing, he said, “I wouldn't want to be the guy who called the cops.”

“Whoever did will be in a nutcracker,” Manfred said. “Police on one side, Baader-Meinhof on the other.”

What was Manfred saying to him? That Greta had been marked for death? That she had been betrayed to the police?
That she had been an object of suspicion? That Jack was also under suspicion?
If she had been watched by someone, how could that someone
not know about Jack?

Jack inhaled, shook his head. Manfred's eyes, still fixed on his open, smiling face, opened a little wider and his lips twitched. He was not smiling, exactly, but once again Jack had the feeling that he was aware of the truth, that he saw through Jack's lies, that this casual meeting was no accident.

Don't be paranoid
, Jack told himself.
Be cool.
He said, “Too bad about the girl. She seemed like a nice enough person, underneath the politics.”

Manfred laughed aloud. “Greta? A nice enough person? She was a psychopath who came from a gene pool swimming with Nazis. And if she didn't have syphilis it was a miracle.”

Syphilis?
Jack held on to himself. He made what he hoped was a wry face.

Manfred said, “You're lucky she walked away.”

Manfred laughed at his own joke. Jack snorted appreciatively. But another terrible thought was racing through his mind—through his bloodstream:
If they do an autopsy, they'll match my semen to the semen they find in Greta's body.

Jack thought,
Of course they'll look there; they'll look for semen. They'll look for everything. They're Germans.
He was doomed; he knew it. He wanted to get away from this German. He lifted a casual hand and said, “Well, good seeing you.”

But Manfred was gripping his arm, preventing him from going. Manfred said, “Anyway, rest in peace. On to the next thing.”

Hand on Jack's biceps, Manfred walked him down the street, speaking into his face: German intimacy.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you for an entirely different reason,” Manfred said. “An opportunity has come up. There's a student peace conference in Stockholm, starting tomorrow, and the Swedes need an American to give a little speech about the U.S. antiwar movement. I thought of you.”

Paranoia, Jack's close companion, returned in a rush. “Why me?” he asked.

“Because I've been impressed by your papers, by the way you've improved your German,” Manfred said. “And I understand from Arthur that you're a good speaker.”

“Not in Swedish,” Jack said.

“You'll be speaking in English. Even the Swedes don't talk Swedish.”

Jack's heart was leaping. Escape! Luck! But his voice was calm. He said, “When would I have to leave?”

“Tonight, I'm afraid, change trains in Frankfurt. I have your tickets with me.”

“Why such short notice?”

“As I said, there was a no-show.”

Manfred had said no such thing, but Jack did not argue. He was remembering the American soldier in the trunk of Greta's roadster, and the Swedes who had been waiting on the other side of the Danish frontier. They had been parked beside the highway, in a misting rain. The whole experience had been like a page from a thriller: three short blinks of the headlights followed by two long. Greta walking Duane to the Swedish car. Duane, stiff from his long ride in the fetal position, limping in the glow of the headlights. Were the Swedes Manfred knew the same Swedes Greta knew? Terrorists? Allies of the Baader-Meinhof Gang? Jack's blood ran cold.

“I don't know,” Jack said. “I have studying to do.”

Manfred said, “Jack, no one has to study for the courses you're taking. Take the tickets. Go to Sweden for a few days. There is even an allowance for expenses.” He smiled. “When was the last time you got laid?”

“I can hardly remember,” Jack replied.

“All right, then!” Manfred said. “The sun is out, so the Swedes will be fucking.”

Jack gave him a sharp look. But Manfred himself was the picture of guilelessness. He was holding out a plain, sealed envelope. Jack took it.

“Okay,” he said. “Why not?”

Manfred shook his arm, gave him a little salute, two fingers and a thumb touching an imaginary hat brim. “
Wiedersch
ö
n!
”

In his room, Jack opened the envelope. Anonymous second-class train tickets, couchette, to Copenhagen and return.

Copenhagen?

A sheaf of hundred-deutsche-mark notes was paperclipped to a file card on which were typed instructions for taking the ferry from Denmark to Sweden. “Buy your tickets when you get to Copenhagen,” said his instructions. At the bottom of the card was a typed name and phone number: “Your host in Sweden; call on arrival.”

Jack counted the money: one thousand deutsche marks, worth over five hundred dollars—more money than he had ever held in his hand before.

Our money, of course. He suspected it might be, even then. But it was money—angel's wings—and at the moment that was all that mattered.

2
Manfred's underground railroad had more than one set of tracks. In fact, the Gl-smuggling operation was nothing more than a branch line, a temporary scheme designed to take advantage of a passing opportunity.

The main line, a much older and much more useful enterprise, catered to a different class of passengers altogether: sympathetic graduate students, usually but not always Americans, who were on Peter's short list for recruitment. It ran through Stockholm, where the semifinal selection was made by our agents, then on to Moscow. Inside the Soviet Union, the final, very serious assessment would be made by professionals. Very few were recruited in Moscow. The final act of the drama was quite often staged in Prague, where the various youth organizations financed and controlled by Soviet intelligence were located.

Although sex was the usual bait—you can't make a revolution without free love—few candidates required the sort of conditioning that Greta administered to Jack. For one thing, there was only one Greta—and, more to the point, only one Jack. Not many young men would have stayed the course with a psychopath like Greta no matter what the epoch or the sexual rewards.

In this, as in so many other ways, Jack Adams was the exception. If Greta proved nothing else before she went to meet her Maker, she confirmed that Jack would follow his appetites wherever they led him. He really would do anything for pussy. In nearly all other respects he may have been as fearful as a lamb. But lust made him brave. This is an important thing to know for certain about a human being whom you propose to manipulate on a lifetime basis.

Jack's case was unique. In the first place, Peter was managing it personally. In the second, as I have mentioned, it was Peter's aim to shield Jack from the curiosity of the rest of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. And finally, after Jack's experiences in Heidelberg, Peter felt that he already knew as much about this particular handful of clay as it was necessary to know. Jack Adams was ready for recruitment if ever anyone was.

Nevertheless, Jack won high praise from our people in Sweden. He acquitted himself well at the youth rally. Without ever actually uttering such terms, he gave a rousing speech about the struggle by American youth against the Nixonites and their evil war against the Vietnamese patriots. Even so early in life, Jack was a gifted orator who connected instantly with his audience. This was not a matter of substance: Then, as later, Jack hardly ever said anything that anyone could disagree with, and dealt in the tiniest of concepts. No, what worked the miracle was technique—tone, body language, facial expressions, an entire demeanor that was Jack's alone, inimitable and endearing. The audience listened to Jack as if hearing their own thoughts. Of course they agreed with everything he said. Strangely, they were unable to remember, after the speech was over, exactly what he had said. Jack was good with audiences because to him a speech was just an elaborately developed lie, with all questions forbidden until the end, when it was too late. He loved to speak and his exhilaration showed, bonding him even more firmly to the audience.