The Berlin Conspiracy (17 page)

I rang the bell.

A wave of regret hit me as soon as I did, but it was too late. The door opened and Hanna appeared, dressed in her bathrobe, though it didn’t look like she’d been sleeping.

“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” I said as casually as I could.

She looked at me sideways and narrowed her eyes, looking more curious than angry. “Horst isn’t here,” she said warily.

“Right,” I said, faking disappointment. “Out on the town?”

“I suppose so.” She smiled politely, holding the door tightly, ready to push it shut. I hesitated, decided I’d better spit it out.

“I don’t think I came to see Horst,” I said.

She gave me a long ambiguous look. “You’re not sure?” She cocked her head to one side and I thought maybe she was flirting, but I wasn’t convinced.

“One of those nights,” I said, with no idea what that was supposed to mean.

“It’s very late,” she frowned.

“I’ll go,” I said, knowing I had just one more shot at it. “But you have to tell me to.”

She stood there for a moment, looking out from behind the door, trying to decide what to do with me.

“Wait here. I’ll get my coat.”

I walked around in a circle for a few minutes, asking myself what the hell I was doing, not getting any answers. I would’ve given a lot of money for a Marlboro.

Hanna finally reappeared wearing a raincoat over her nightgown and a scarf tied over her head. She looked down at the road as we walked, hands shoved into her pockets. I stole a glance at her as she brushed a strand of hair off her face when a gentle breeze lifted it from under the scarf. She looked lovely in the pale light.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” I said, breaking the silence.

“What idea do you think I have?” she said, sounding slightly bemused.

“Well, ringing your bell in the middle of the night, you might wonder what I had in mind.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Nothing. I …”

“Nothing?”

“Well, not nothing. I guess I thought it would be nice to see you. You know, I enjoyed talking to you the other day, and—”

“Oh, yes … How was your business meeting?”

“Business meeting?”

“Isn’t that why you left so suddenly? That’s what Horst told me.”

“Oh, right, yes, the business meeting,” I waffled. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Sorry about what?”

“Well, that I had to leave … so suddenly. I was late for this meeting and—”

“Did you make it in time?”

“No,” I lied. “He’d already left.”

“Too bad,” she said. We continued on in silence while I tried to think of a way to start over.

“I’m sorry about Otto,” is what I came up with.

“Otto?”

“Your car,” I said, getting a blank look. “The Volkswagen … convertible?” She didn’t know what I was talking about. “Horst said you called it Otto….”

“If I had a car, I wouldn’t call it Otto,” she laughed. “But I don’t have a car. … Not even a driving permit.”

“Oh,” I said, forcing a smile. “I guess I got it wrong.”

She let it go at that, but I wondered whose car I had wrecked and why Horst had told me it was Hanna’s. It could’ve been stolen, of course, but that didn’t seem like Horst. Then again, maybe I was underestimating him.

“Do you have any more apologies?” She smiled up at me.

“I think that’s it,” I smiled back. “For now, anyway.”

“Good. Then what would you like to talk about?”

“Well…” My mind went completely blank.

“Has it been a successful trip for you?” she asked, saving me only after letting me twist in the wind for a moment. “In spite of missing your meeting.”

“Too early to tell,” I said. “But it’s certainly been interesting.”

“Berlin is an interesting city.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed, then surprised myself by adding, “I was born here.”

“Really?” She looked genuinely surprised. “I wouldn’t have guessed it. You seem such an American.”

“I left when I was thirteen,” I explained.

“Ah.”

“It’s a different city than the one I remember,” I said.

She thought about that for a moment then looked at me. “The past is hidden in Berlin,” she said. “Buried inside the people.”

I realized then why I’d come looking for Hanna. I wanted to tell her everything. Why, I don’t know. Something in the way she looked at me maybe. Something that made me feel safe. Whatever it was, I opened up—about the memories, the ghosts, the feelings that had been engulfing me that night. I even told her how I’d seen my brother again after all those years, although I said he was a factory worker and that I had searched him out. She listened intently as I described the memory of my father’s departure and how I’d felt his presence on the bridge.

“It was his spirit,” she smiled.

“You think they stick around this long?”

“They never leave,” she said softly, almost to herself. She
let a few moments pass, just the sound of our steps on the pavement, before speaking again. “My father was killed at Stalingrad. I don’t remember much about him.” She looked up and smiled unexpectedly. “I think his spirit never came home.”

She took a deep breath and continued. “Horst and I had an older sister. Her name was Katharina….” Her voice fell away and she gently cleared her throat. “She was fourteen when the Russian soldiers came in Berlin.” She hesitated, looked to me again. “You know what they did.”

I nodded.

“I was too young, just ten, but Katharina—” She stopped, but not because she couldn’t go on. I don’t think she had ever told the story before and she wanted to tell it correctly.

“We were hiding in the basement when the soldiers came. One of them who spoke a kind of rough German told my mother to go upstairs with Katharina. She begged them to leave her with me and Horst, but they didn’t care. First they laughed, then they threatened to kill us all if Mama didn’t do as they said….”

I would have stopped her, but I sensed that she wanted to finish.

“I stayed with Horst, telling him everything was all right, but really I thought the soldiers would—” She hesitated. “I thought they would just kill them and then come back for us. It was hours before Mama and Katharina returned. It seemed forever. But I didn’t cry until I saw them, because then I could see into my sister’s eyes and I knew she would never be the same again. How could she be?”

Hanna didn’t expect me to say anything, but I said I was sorry. She looked at me with compassion, knowing that I wished there was something better to say.

“Katharina killed herself two weeks later. Mama found her in the basement, where she had hung herself, in the same
place that Horst and I had waited for their nightmare to end. But of course, it never ended. Mama tried, for us I think, but she died two years later.”

Hanna stopped walking and raised her eyes toward the road ahead of us. “Look,” she said. “We’re blocked.”

I saw that the street came to an abrupt end, interrupted by a twenty-five-foot-high concrete barrier. I had seen the wall from a distance, but its impact was different from this perspective. It seemed to tower over us, more imposing than its size, an ominous reminder of the dangers that still inhabited our insane world.

“I hate it,” Hanna said quietly.

“It’s just bricks and barbed wire,” I said. “You should hate the men that put it there.”

“I don’t know the men,” she said. “I know only the wall.”

She reached into her pocket, removed a small black-and-white photograph from her wallet, and handed it to me. She watched my face closely as I turned it toward the light of a nearby street lamp and studied the picture. Hanna and a young man sat on a blanket laid out on the grass of some park, the remains of a picnic lunch scattered around them. They were sitting close to each other, but didn’t touch except for their hands, which overlapped inconspicuously on the ground between them. There was something relaxed and contented about the two of them. They looked happy.

“His name is Alfred Mann,” she said. “He’s a teacher, of mathematics. We were to be married last year, but now he’s behind this wall. Perhaps he’s found a wife already.”

“Not if he’s smart,” I said, handing the photo back to her.

She looked up and smiled at me. I’m not sure if she was crying or if it was the mist hanging in the air between us that
made her eyes flash the way they did. Whatever it was, they cut through the darkness and nailed me.

“It’s not easy to leave the past behind,” she whispered.

I moved toward her, until I was close enough to feel her warmth. She held my look without flinching and I reached out to touch her cheek. She responded, closing her eyes and turning her head into my hand so that her mouth brushed against my palm. I wasn’t prepared for the shiver that ran up my arm and through my body.

I woke in the early hours as the predawn light filtered through the worn curtain that was pulled across the window of her bedroom. I was on my back, naked, and she lay on top of me, head nestled in my arm, more or less the way we’d finished. I felt the delicious softness of her breasts pressing against my chest and I thought I could easily wake her and start all over again, but I didn’t move.

Having my brother turn up out of the blue had thrown me into a tailspin. He knew what he was doing, too, had gone out of his way to throw me off balance, setting me up and stringing me along, then hitting me with it at the cemetery. It had been calculated for maximum impact. That didn’t matter, though. I knew where we stood now.

“History has put us on opposing sides,” he had said, breaking a twenty-minute silence as we reentered the Western sector. His eyes were closed, head pressed into the back of the soft leather seat. Light from the street lamps flashed on and off inside the car as we passed under them, creating a slow strobelike effect on his face. “There’s nothing we can do about that. But for the moment, even if our motivations are different, we share the same goal.” He turned his head
and looked straight at me, underlining his point: “Kennedy must not be assassinated in Berlin.”

“I don’t know if anyone in Washington would be so concerned if the KGB was trying to knock off Khrushchev.”

“We’d do it quietly and call it a heart attack.” It was a good point.

“I need a starting place,” I said.

He sat there for a moment, very practiced, then leaned slowly forward and reached into the seat pocket in front of him. He removed a manila envelope and held it on his lap. “You’re not supposed to see this,” he said.

“I guess contempt for authority runs in the family,” I responded, not believing a word of it.

He sighed, removed an eight-by-ten glossy from the envelope and passed it to me. It was a black-and-white shot of a man standing in front of a white wall with a large Soviet flag pinned to it, the familiar hammer and sickle against a red background. The man held a rifle, a Russian-made Tokarev with a telescopic sight. A sniper’s weapon. He grasped it military style, with both hands, and wore a sidearm over combat fatigues. The guy himself was small, dark and kind of bony. Frail-looking. And deadly serious.

“He goes by the name Aleks Kovinski,” Josef explained. “A Polish national living in West Berlin. He’s been used by KGB in the past.”

“I don’t think much of his cover,” I said.

“He also works for your side.”

“Whatever side that is.”

“The Central Intelligence Agency,” Josef said drily.

“Is that my side?” I deadpanned. “I’m getting very confused.”

“You know,” he said, stone-faced, “I don’t find you nearly as amusing as you seem to find yourself.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “Nobody does.”

“Kovinski was recruited by CIA,” he continued. “About eighteen months ago. We found it useful to let him think we didn’t know. He was fed false information about our assets in the West, hoping to create some confusion. We obtained some information about how they handle their double agents. None of it was very important. He’s insignificant, really.”

“Then why are we talking about him?”

“After the assassination, this photograph will surface. It will be one of the pieces of evidence that will convict him in the court of public opinion. Posthumously, of course. He is, as you would say in Hollywood, the fall guy.”

“Where’d you get the photo?”

He hesitated. “A reliable source.”

“Look, Colonel, brother, whoever you are—if you’re serious about this, we don’t have a lot of time. I need to know what you know. Everything, no fucking around. Whoever gave you this photo knows something.”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

If he was right about the conspiracy, it had to be someone inside the Company. “Someone in Berlin?” I asked.

Josef was quiet.

“Washington?”

“No,” he said, a little too quickly. There had been speculation for some time that there was a double agent operating out of Company headquarters. Counterintelligence, run by the enigmatic spy catcher James Jesus Angleton, had set up a unit specifically to hunt for the theoretical traitor.

“The Langley mole,” I said. “You got this from him.” The Colonel’s look was confirmation enough.

“How high?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything about a mole,” he said, looking pretty uncomfortable. If that was Josef’s “reliable source” it
was no wonder he couldn’t tell me about it. The implication suddenly hit me.

“You’re on your own in this, aren’t you?” I said.

He didn’t answer, just looked out the window. Christ, I thought, he is alone. He’d been telling the truth about going against orders when he showed me the photo. The Soviets would rather let Kennedy be assassinated and take the blame for it, risking a world war, than compromise an asset operating at the highest levels of the CIA. It fit. Why would the Soviet Union assign a colonel in the East German secret police to enlist his long-lost, burnt-out brother of a spook to save the world? The answer was easy—they wouldn’t. The Kremlin knew about the conspiracy and knew they’d be blamed for it, but they chose to risk the extinction of the human race over compromising their most valuable asset. We were all as fucked up as each other. And Josef was as far out on a limb as I was.

“Speaking hypothetically,” I said softly, “if there was an individual, someone near the top, who provided this photograph to you … It means that the plot to get Kennedy—if it’s real—goes to the highest levels of the U.S. government.”