The Berlin Conspiracy (16 page)

“I’ll get a gun and kill the enemy when I grow up,” I said defiantly, tears welling up inside me.

She grabbed my arm tighter and pulled me closer. “No, Jakob,” she said firmly. “There will be no more wars after this. Papa has died so that you will never have to fight.”

I realized that I was crying. It was a strange sensation, something I wasn’t used to, and it took me by surprise. I’d left the lights of Kurfürstendamm behind and was standing on some dark bridge over a fast-running river, with no idea where I was, how I got there, or how long I’d been walking. Thankfully, I was alone and could wipe the tears away without feeling foolish. But I felt foolish anyway. So many years had passed since that morning in the park. Could I really feel his loss so poignantly after all that time?

Then, out of nowhere, a lost moment came to me and I could see him as clearly as if it had been yesterday. He was in uniform. A bright, pristine uniform with polished boots and a wide belt that smelled of new leather. He towered over me, arms held aloft, as if he expected me to jump into them. Then his voice came through, clear and distinct, like he was standing next to me on the bridge.

“Are you too big to kiss your papa good-bye?”

He laughed and leaned over to scoop me up in his arms. “You have to be strong now, little man,” he whispered in my ear. “You take care of everything.”

What would a small boy feel at that moment? Could he know that the man who had thrown him over his shoulder and chased him around the house until he collapsed in helpless laughter had strapped a gun on in order to fight, kill, and maybe die for his country? How would a child comprehend
any of that? But I must have understood something about the significance of the moment to have stored it away for so long. I thought I felt my father’s presence, there beside me, and tears started to come again.

For Christ’s sake, get a hold of yourself, I thought. Not a good time for a breakdown. I tried to regain control, but some barrier had been broken and there was no holding back the tide of memories that rose from somewhere deep in my subconscious. I took a shaky breath and crossed the bridge, feeling better once I was moving, invigorated even. It was as if, now that the wall had burst, I’d been released from the burden of supporting it. I picked up my pace and let the images wash over me.

I thought about the day I left home, the last time I’d seen Josef. I’d looked back just once, and saw his face in the window of the attic room we shared. Neither of us made any gesture to mark my departure, but I thought I saw a smile on his face, probably the result of the newly acquired armies he held under his arm. Then, when I turned away, I left it all behind. My parents, who I loved dearly, were both gone, but I felt no overpowering grief or sadness—just an unrelenting emptiness that I interpreted as resolve. The world would never betray me like that again.

I thought about the disparate paths Josef and I had taken since that day and wondered what he had been like as a young man. He would’ve been just fourteen when Hitler came to power, the same year that the Nazis fed “Marxist” books to a bonfire at Berlin University. He could have easily joined the mob, like most of his generation, but he chose instead to read the books. When he was fifteen the first Jews were shipped off to concentration camps, along with forty-five thousand socialists. Perhaps he had already joined the Communist Party by then and had to hide from the police, or maybe his sympathies were still forming. He had fallen
out with his adopted father over his beliefs. Had the Fascist postman betrayed him, maybe even reported him to the authorities? Life in Nazi Germany in the late thirties would have been hell for a young Marxist. He must have been thrilled to arrive in Spain and find an international brigade of young idealists like himself, ready to change the world. They probably thought they could do it, too.

Life went a little differently for me. I arrived in New York in February 1928 after working my way over on a Norwegian freighter that I’d picked up in Hamburg. Things were pretty tough that first frozen winter, but I got my bearings, learned the ropes, and changed my name to Jack. By midsummer I had settled in, delivering groceries for tips in the Bowery, sleeping rough in Washington Square. It wasn’t bad, unless it rained. I got to know a few guys my age who were competing for the same benches and we formed the “Brotherhood of Greenwich Village Nights.” We weren’t doing anything too illegal, at least nothing we got caught for, and we looked out for each other. When warm summer evenings gave way to cold autumn nights, we pooled our resources and four of us shared a room on Delancey Street. It was a good time.

We soon went our separate ways, but the brotherhood came through a couple of years later when I was on the edge of desperate. I ran into Tommy LaPorta, who told me he’d been making good money driving a cab and thought he could get me in. When I said I’d heard you could make up to twenty a week hacking it around Manhattan, Tommy couldn’t stop laughing. These weren’t just any cabs, he informed me, producing a fat roll of twenties out of his pocket and peeling one off for me. These were Johnny Kaye cabs.

Johnny Kaye was a gangster straight off the silver screen.
A flashy dresser with a smart-ass personality, he was the top bootlegger in Manhattan and he ran the biggest, loudest, wildest speakeasies in the Broadway district. He got into the business by accident in 1920 when, driving a taxi himself, he’d picked up a fare on Seventh Avenue who wanted to be driven to Montreal. The fare ended up being over sixty dollars, but when Johnny arrived in Canada he realized that there was even better money to be made on the return trip. A case of whiskey that cost ten bucks north of the border could easily sell for ninety back home. By 1930, when I started driving, there were a dozen cabs making the trip twice a week, carrying twenty cases per load. I was pulling in a very cool eight hundred a month and getting a lesson in how capitalism worked.

It wasn’t long before I was moving up in the world. Kaye liked me, thought that I was wasted behind the wheel, and put me in charge of the Kit Kat Klub on West Forty-third. Aside from running the usual functions of a nightclub—food, drink, entertainment, and security—my duties included taking care of graft, bribery, and extortion. Mostly it was making sure the weekly deliveries of fat envelopes got to the right people, but occasionally a judge or a politician would try to put the squeeze on us and I’d have to arrange for a night out, which would invariably end with a photograph of the greedy party in a compromising position. Resolution of the dispute was usually achieved in the early hours of the following morning. It was a valuable lesson in human psychology and came in handy when I went to work for the Company. In fact, there were quite a few similarities in the way the two organizations operated.

Things went downhill for Johnny Kaye after the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933. Kaye’s delusions of grandeur got the better of him and he decided to become a Broadway producer, dropping a load on a turkey starring his girlfriend,
who was devoid of any talent that you could put on a respectable stage. But Johnny’s ego was too big to quit. He started pouring more money into a worse play, which came crashing down on opening night when he finally figured out his girlfriend was fucking the director. He pumped four .38s into the poor bastard and decided to pin it on me. I decided it was time to lower the curtain on New York.

I spent the next two years drifting west, keeping a low profile. I’d blown most of what I’d made in the rackets, so I was soon riding the rails, scrounging for whatever work I could get. I sold Bibles door-to-door for a while and did a short stint in St. Louis as a professional boxer, making some pretty good money taking dives until I realized that life as a punching bag didn’t offer much in the way of long-term prospects. In 1937, the same year that Josef signed up to fight fascism in Spain, I hit Hollywood. I managed to land a job as a stuntman and was living it up, being shot off horses with pretend bullets, while my brother was trying to stay alive dodging real ones.

I reached the pinnacle of my movie career in 1939, in a scene with Randolph Scott. The picture was
Frontier Marshal.
Scott played Wyatt Earp and I was Curly Bill’s Man. My first and last spoken line on celluloid went like this:

I thought it was the highlight of the picture, but, sadly, it marked the end of my acting career. My Hollywood days came to an end soon afterward, having to do with a certain unbalanced studio executive and his gorgeously sexy wife. But that’s another story.

My mother had been wrong, of course. Our father hadn’t given his life so there would be no more wars for his sons to fight. In one of those ironic twists that history seems to love, Josef and I ended up fighting against the same army that our father had died for, though we fought from opposite ends of the field, in different uniforms.

I didn’t know when I joined up that Josef had deserted Germany, too. I thought about the prospect of facing him across a battlefield, but decided pretty quickly that I’d have to put that out of my mind. If I was going to wonder whether it was my younger brother lined up in my sights every time I took aim at a German soldier, I knew I would leave the war in a body bag. So I forgot about it. Forgot about Josef and forgot about my childhood and anything that connected me
to Germany. Berlin became nothing more than a military objective.

It was the right thing to do, too. By the time we hit Omaha Beach, I’d been given a platoon of young men to command and there was no room for second thoughts. It’s possible that somewhere in the far reaches of my mind I made a deal with myself that if I made it to Berlin, I’d try to find Josef, but I was stopped by a bullet in the Ardennes and spent the rest of the war in an army hospital in Sussex. I never considered returning to Germany after that. I guess I had let my past go and didn’t see any reason to go chasing after it.

Of course, I wouldn’t have found Josef even if I had tried. He was already well underground in the Soviet sector, preparing the way for a new tyranny, though he wouldn’t have seen it that way. He had kept faith with the system he’d fought for, though I couldn’t imagine how. How could he be so blind to the obvious? My brother’s “comrades” were a different breed of oppressors, but not so different from the Fascists he had started out hating. I guess that’s why the words
blind
and
faith
go so well together.

The CIA had their religion, too. The agency might’ve been packed with a misguided bunch of lunatic psychopaths, but they were true believers, worshipers at the altar of Capitalism, which they referred to as democracy and freedom. There was no doubt in their collective mind about the righteousness of the cause, either. We were the good guys and they were the bad guys, plain and simple. For Christ’s sake, we had Coca-Cola and Ford Mustangs and Sinatra and the goddamned Green Bay Packers! What the hell did they have?!

As I lay in that hospital in Sussex I consoled myself with a lie. I didn’t know it was a lie at the time, any more than my mother did when she said my father had died in a cause that
would put an end to war. I told myself the same lie: This time there really would be peace. It sounds naive now, maybe it was then, too, but after what the world had been through, it seemed impossible that we could contemplate going through that horror again, at least not in our lifetimes.

But here we were, less than twenty years later, at it again. Sure, it was a quiet, dirty war, and the lie this time was that it was being fought to prevent yet another war—one that really would be “The War to End All Wars” because if we let this one loose there wouldn’t be anybody left to fight in the next one. I bought it for a while, and to be honest, it was fun playing cloak-and-dagger. But Josef was right: I had lost faith. Not in the system we were fighting for, but in the men who had been enlisted to fight for it. Guys like Henry E. Fisher—an intelligent man whose logic had become so twisted that he believed it was a patriotic act to train a bunch of Cubans to attack American soldiers. For the greater fucking good.

Sure, somebody had to do it, and yes, it was a dirty business, but how dirty were these guys willing to get? How far would they go?
Would they murder their own leader?

The assassination of heads of state was nothing new to the CIA. If it was decided that killing a foreign president or a prime minister served the national interest, the Company was not only sanctioned to carry it out, it was expected to carry it out. It was called “Executive Action,” giving it that boardroom sound that the Company loved so much.

But in the tangled minds of spooks and spies, how hard would it be to turn their crusade inward in the same way Fisher had in Cuba? What if the congregation of true believers decided the president was detrimental to the cause? What would they do when they determined that
he
was the risk to national security, a stooge who was being played for
a sucker by the international Communist conspiracy? In their minds, they would have an obligation—no, a
sacred duty
—to do the sordid job.

They would have to kill the president in order to save democracy from its own gullible electorate.

I looked up and saw
that I’d taken myself to the doorstep of Horst’s building. Not intentionally, but not by accident, either. My subconscious seemed to be running the show that night.

I decided to turn around and go back the way I came, but found myself stepping into the doorway instead. It was one of those times when every bone in your body knows that you’re about to do something stupid but it doesn’t matter a damn because you’re gonna do it anyway. That kind of behavior is usually a by-product of alcohol-bloated brain cells, but I was perfectly sober as I stood there pretending I could decide whether to stay or go.