The Berlin Conspiracy (3 page)

The pub was a traditional place—high ceilings, rows of long wooden tables, large fireplace, and a warm atmosphere. About half-full with a cheery crowd. I ordered sausages and a Pilsner, found the
Tribune
in my pocket, and settled in. I felt like a smoke, decided what the hell, and bought a pack of HBs from a machine. It seemed to go with the scene.

I realized that I’d been sitting on the bench at the
platform for well over an hour staring at the front page of the paper and hadn’t read a word of it.
KENNEDY DEPARTS ON EUROPEAN TOUR
was the lead item. I read the first paragraph:

It’s a trick of journalism that when a newspaper wants to put an editorial on the front page, they simply write an opinion, then go out and find someone to attribute it to. What did “according to many diplomats” mean? It meant the writer had been to a cocktail party full of junior ministers who’d spent the night second-guessing American foreign policy. That’s news? And the “high-ranking NATO officer” was bound to be one of de Gaulle’s cronies. The French president, unable to understand why the world gave Kennedy the adulation that should have been his, took potshots at the president whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I skipped to the next item, which was much more interesting. It involved sex, drugs, abuse of power, and human betrayal. Stuff you can get your teeth into. I’d been following
the story since it broke in London a few weeks earlier, thought maybe I could use it in one of my many unwritten novels.

The published version went like this:

Of course, there’s always more dirt if you dig a little deeper. I got the scoop from a friend at the Bureau who was keeping tabs on the case (code-named “Bowtie”) for Hoover, who claimed to be interested in U.S. citizens who might’ve been friendly with Miss Keeler, and who might’ve dropped a secret or two along the way. The London FBI office had, in fact, uncovered a couple of air-force officers based at Lockenheath who’d had £100 worth of “friendliness” one night, but they were cleared after an exhaustive interview. (The highly descriptive tape of the interrogation was apparently a hot item around the Bureau.)

But my guy thought the director wasn’t so much worried about the affairs of state as the other kind. The word was that maybe the current occupant of the White House had more
than a passing interest in the sex scandal because one of Keeler’s cohorts, a classy Czech girl named Maria Novotny, had told the Brits that she and another girl, Suzy Chang, had together serviced the president when they were working New York. My man at the Bureau hinted that the director, no great fan of the president, was collecting information and feeding it to his friend the vice president to use if the Kennedys tried to dump him from the ticket in ‘64, as rumor had it.

Comrade Ivanov was KGB, that’s for sure. What did he take back to Moscow? Not so sure. Keeler, under interrogation, had said he wanted her to find out from Profumo if and when West Germany would be joining the nuclear club. (You’d be surprised what a responsible government official will say to a sexy redhead who has his dick in her hand.) Keeler insisted she never asked the question. Maybe so, or maybe the girl was exceptionally good under questioning. Certain interrogation techniques, well known to SIS, would’ve been ruled out in this case because of the media profile. My guess was that Ivanov didn’t go home empty-handed. And it was certainly possible that the Brits got more out of Keeler than they cared to admit. That kind of security breach would have severely limited Washington’s willingness to share sensitive information with our friends in Whitehall.

At one time I would’ve seen all this as a big win for Moscow, necessitating some sort of countermeasure. Now I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what difference it made whether the Soviets knew if West Germany would go nuclear. For Christ’s sake, they already had something like twenty-two hundred warheads pointed at Western Europe. So what if they decided to point a few more? But that was the game. If West Germany was going to install warheads, Moscow had to be ready to put them into East Germany.

The guy who intrigued me was an osteopath named Stephen Ward, the guy who’d put Keeler together with both
Profumo and Ivanov. Ward, who palmed himself off as an artist, was being accused by the press of all sorts of depravity. Stories of uninhibited orgies, wife swapping, marijuana, pills, whips, and chains were good grist for the paper mill and, no doubt, most of it was true. But it was all smoke, meant to obscure the obvious. The kind of “public relations” campaign I’d run many times.

What neither side wanted to say was that the good doctor and his orgies were bait. Nothing special or unusual about it; there were dozens like him in every capital around the world, set up by both sides to see what kind of fish they could hook. But the big news was that the good doctor was
our
bait. MI5 had put him in business with the hope of getting Ivanov on film in a compromising position, then turning him. But putting a dabbler like Ward up against the Russian was like putting Fred Astaire in the ring with Joe Louis. He can dance around for a while, but sooner or later he’s gonna find himself trapped in a corner and it’s a pretty good bet who’s gonna leave on a stretcher.

The good doctor wouldn’t have fully understood his position until it was too late. A guy like him goes along for the ride, so taken with the thrill of it all that he can’t see where it’s taking him until it’s too late. When he finally realized they owned him, he ran for cover, forgetting that the guys he was running to were on the other side now, because he put them there. In fact, Ward had no side, and no future. Not important enough to get a ticket to Moscow, but clued in enough to make him a liability to both sides. He was used up and was about to be discarded. Chumps like him always end up dead, one way or another.

I thought about ordering another drink, lit a second HB to help me decide. My throat still ached from Andy Johnson’s
Green Beret move, but I convinced myself that the smoke was soothing it.

“May I use a match from you?”

I looked up and was greeted by the widest, silliest grin I’d ever seen, beaming down at me from a tall and skinny bag of bones in a loose-fitting suit. Leaning over the table pointing at his Camel, he was young, early twenties, and more than a bit wobbly.

“Sure,” I said, and lit him up.

“America,” he winked, blowing smoke.

“Are my stars and stripes showing?”

“All Americans read this newspaper and stay at the Kempinski,” he smiled proudly, indicating the hotel matchbook. He held out his hand. “Horst Schneider.”

“Jack,” I responded in kind. “Jack Teller.”

“It’s a pleasure to get your acquaintance,” he said, holding the handshake a beat too long. Then, noting my amused smile: “Is it not correct?”

“Happy to
make
your acquaintance would be better, but you could just say, ‘Glad to meet you.’ It’s less formal.”

“Yes, of course. Much better. Glad to meet you. Jack, yes? May I sit with you?”

He did before I could answer, but I would’ve said yes anyway. He looked a little unstable and I was already starting to like him.

“We must have a schnapps together. Let me buy you one.” He signaled the waitress and turned quickly back to me. “Have you seen Berlin before?”

“Not lately,” I answered.

“It’s quite unique. One of a kind, really. An island surrounded by no water. From which parts of America do you come? New York? Or is it Los Angeles?”

“Florida.”

“Ah!” He closed his eyes, recited, “Miami Beach, Daytona Beach, Palm Beach …” then got stuck.

“Pompano Beach.”

“Key Largo!” he exclaimed, ignoring me. “How could I forget! Humphrey Bogart is the war hero—by killing lots of Germans, of course—but wants only a quiet life now. In Key Largo lives the father of his good friend who was killed in the war, and the beautiful young wife, of course, who is Lauren Bacall, the wife of Bogie. Not in the film, but in life. Then comes the gangster, who is Edward G. Robinson, of course, Johnny Rocco, from Cuba, where is he—
verbann
… ?”

“Exiled.”

“Yes! … Ah,
sprechen sie deutsch!”

“Just a little.”

“Good—and here is our schnapps. Of course, Bogie kills the bad guy and wins the girl. To your good health.” He raised his glass.

“Down the hatch.”

“Very good! Down the hatch!” We knocked them back, chased with fresh Pilsner.

“Italy,” I said.

“Sorry—?”

“Bogie’s character in Key Largo. He was in Italy, so he didn’t necessarily kill lots of Germans. He might have killed lots of Italians.”

Horst wrinkled his forehead, then rocked his head back and forth a couple of times, acknowledging the possibility that maybe I was right. “It doesn’t matter for the story. It matters only that Bogie has stopped believing in the fight against evil and must regain his principles in order to kill the gangsters.”

“The reluctant hero.” I stubbed out my cigarette, lit another almost immediately. Horst dug out another Camel.

“I’ve never been to America. Someday I will go.” He leaned across the table and picked up the matchbook. “Where dreams come true.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too high.”

“I know quite a lot about it already.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t believe everything you see in the movies.”

He studied me while he sipped his beer, then took a drag off the Camel and blew smoke rings.

“You see, the problem in Germany is that everyone wants to be the same as their neighbor. It’s a nation of conformists. Not like America, which is the opposite, a country of freethinkers.”

“America has more than its share of followers.”

“I don’t mean as in the films, with cowboys and gangsters.”

“Oh, there are plenty of cowboys and gangsters. But we were talking about freethinkers.” A dissatisfied expression crept onto Horst’s face, so I suggested we have another schnapps, which brightened him up right away.

It went on like that for a while, Horst reciting the plots to
Shane, High Noon, Rebel Without a Cause,
and
Little Caesar,
to name just a few, in an attempt to help me understand the true nature of the American spirit. I was patriotic enough, and still am, but I’ve seen the American spirit from top to bottom and nothing is pretty from every angle.

We ended up—I don’t know how many hours later—the last two drunken souls in the place, him trying to convince me that Bogart was the best actor of all time, me championing Henry Fonda, who I’d never given a second thought to until my fifth schnapps. The waitress, a big round lady with a mustache, whose initial good humor had evaporated with the crowd, told us they were about to close, so this would have to be the last round.

Horst saluted her with his drink. “You have served us well! Down the gate!”

“Hatch,” I corrected him.

“Yes, hatch!” As he tossed the drink back a strange look came over him—a bizarre smile frozen onto his face. He stood up very slowly, eyes locked onto a nonexistent horizon, placed his hat on his head, bowed to the waitress, and said, “I bid you a good night.” One step toward the door and the bottom fell out. He went down hard, breaking the fall with his face.

Feeling a bit light-headed myself, I reacted slowly, pushing away from the table and methodically walking around to where Horst had landed. I steadied myself with hands on my knees and took a good long look at him—he wasn’t moving.

“Do you know where he lives?” I asked the waitress.

“Kirchstrasse,” came from Horst, still glued to the floor.

I leaned over, asked him if he could move.

“I think not,” he responded, one eye opening.

I asked the waitress to call a taxi, but she said none would come at this hour. (Not quick enough for her, anyway.) Behind the bar a big bald guy, who I presumed was her husband, was shaking his head while he wiped out beer glasses. I was on my own.

“Is it far to Kirchstrasse?”

Horst answered again. “Very near. I can show you.”

I took a deep breath, pulled Horst up to a sitting position, and hoisted him onto my shoulder, facing backward. He didn’t weigh much, but he was all over the place, arms and legs everywhere. The waitress was happy to hold the door open for us and I heard the lock as soon as we stepped onto the street. I regretted leaving her such a large tip.

“I thought you said it was close.” After walking for twenty minutes, I was starting to sober up and Horst was getting a lot heavier.

“It is,” his voice echoed off the empty pavement. He picked his head up to see where we were—or at least where we’d been, as he was facing backward. “
Very
close.”

“Which way?” I turned in a circle so he could see each street in the intersection.