The Berlin Conspiracy (5 page)

“Can’t find my pants,” I shrugged.

“Forget it!” Powell barked. “Get another key from reception!”

“Hey, my wallet, my passport, everything’s in there. I thought I left them on the bed before I went into the shower.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” he spouted.

“Look in the bathroom, will you?” I said while making a show of pulling the sheets off the bed.

Powell shook his head and took the bait—he headed into the bathroom. I moved quickly across the bedroom, caught
a glimpse of him pulling my trousers off the towel rack, grumbling, “Can’t even keep track of his own fucking pants and I’m supposed to …”

I couldn’t hear the rest because I pushed the door shut and locked it from the outside. There was a beat of silence while he registered what was happening, then all hell broke loose.

“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, TELLER?! OPEN THIS GODDAMN DOOR RIGHT NOW, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”

“Sorry, Chief, but I think it’ll work out better this way in the long run,” I called through the door.

“You
are
fucking crazy,” he said, with surprising composure.

“Could be,” I agreed. “But look, your boys’11 come looking for you in an hour or so. Why don’t you get in the bath in the meantime? It’s got jet sprays.”

“You are in very deep shit, Teller. Very,
very
deep shit.”

There was no doubt about that. I wondered why I was doing it. Why should I care what this East German bozo wanted with me? I could go home to Florida and… Well, maybe that was it. What the hell would I do when I got back to my beach? Sit there and wonder what the mystery man with a cane wanted to tell me, that’s what. And if Powell and his crew were tagging along I’d never know. Anyway, I was used to deep shit. I seemed to feel pretty comfortable in the stuff.

“Come on, Jack.” He sounded pitiful now. “Open the door and we’ll forget all about it. Hey, we can work together on this, can’t we?” Then I realized—I might be in deep shit, but Powell wasn’t going to come out smelling too good, either. Not the kind of report you want to send to Washington. “Sorry, guys, I couldn’t get your defector because I was locked in the bathroom” wouldn’t go over too well. I started to feel better about the situation. …

“Don’t worry, Chief,” I called out as I exited. “If you’re a good boy, I might bring you back a spy and we can be heroes together.”

His screams faded away as I closed the bedroom door behind me. No one could possibly hear him through the solid oak outer door, which I double-locked. I noticed that the “Do Not Disturb” sign was still on display over the doorknob from the previous night.

Funny enough, as I left the hotel I felt pretty good, as if I’d had a full night’s sleep.

The taxi dropped me outside the Markthalle a few minutes before seven. I glanced around the square, wondered who might be watching. It was a pretty safe bet that once Johnson and Chase realized something was up, they’d head for the Kempinski before coming here, which gave me at least an hour. If I didn’t have contact by then, I’d go straight to Templehof, get the first flight out to anywhere. Goldilocks didn’t fancy the idea of spending the afternoon with the Three Bears.

It was a bright, clear Sunday morning and the place was already lively with delivery trucks and vendors setting out their stalls. The market was housed in a huge nineteenth-century cast-iron building opening onto Marheinekeplatz in the Kreuzberg district. The area seemed to be a haven for a wide variety of fringe dwellers—beatniks, anarchists, pseudointellectuals, revolutionary squatters, that sort of thing. Most came from comfortable middle-class homes and were playing out some romantic notion of bohemian life at the same time they did penance for not being born poor and desperate. A majority of them would end up in the family business.

Heading toward the market, I passed a man washing down
the sidewalk in front of his shop. Something about the biting scent of the soap he was using brought back a vague but unmistakable sense of the distant past. Funny how a smell can trigger a sudden remembrance of a place without connecting it to a specific moment or event. It was an unexpected, but somehow comforting sensation, in spite of the sting it delivered to my eyes and nose.

Not knowing where the meeting was supposed to take place, I figured I’d wander, make myself visible. He’d find me when he wanted to. After two years as a beach bum, it felt good to be back in the game. I hadn’t forgotten all the reasons I’d gotten out, and it’s not like I wanted back in, even if I could (which I couldn’t), but I had to admit that I enjoyed the feeling of being out on a limb again.

It was almost exactly a decade earlier, in April 1953, that an encounter at a jazz club on Forty-seventh Street had brought me into the fold. I was doing time behind the bar of the Three Deuces, waiting for something better to come along, when Sam Clay strode in with an Ava Gardner look-alike on his arm. Sam was not your typical ladies’ man—short and squat—but he had charisma and back then he even had hair, so he never went lonely. At the time I tagged him as just another overpaid, undersexed executive on a recreational night out and ignored him except to note that the maître d’ led him to a prime table, front and center, on reserve for VIPs. The girl started going through Dom Pérignon like it was water, and after a while I noticed that she was getting more and more agitated about something, while Sam sat back, puffing on a Havana, staring straight ahead like she wasn’t even there. The girl got louder and louder until eventually everyone in the place was looking over at them.

That went on for a while until, finally, Sam stood up
slowly, faced the room, and said: “Ladies and gentlemen … As you can see, I’m in the company of a very beautiful woman here. … Top-drawer. Unfortunately, she’s also a very large pain in the ass. Therefore, if any man here thinks she’s such a knockout that she’s worth a large pain in your ass, you have my blessing. I hope the two of you will be very happy together.”

There was dead silence. After a beat Sam turned to his date and said, “Sorry, honey, no takers.” The girl got up, gave him a voodoo look, and marched out the door without a word. The musicians took the cue and launched into “Bye, Bye, Baby” and Sam got a round of applause, at least from the male half of the room. You had to admire the guy for style, even though I thought it was a touch on the cruel side. I sent a thirty-year-old whiskey over to his table anyway, on the house, and he ended up at the bar, where he finished off the bottle and closed the place down with me.

I liked him from the start—a no-bullshit kind of guy who knew the world from the bottom up. I guess he liked me, too, because three days later I got my first late-night phone call from him, offering me a job with an oil consortium he was involved in. “The money’s not great,” he said, “but you’ll see the world and I guarantee you it won’t be boring.” I told him I might be interested and that was enough for him—a ticket to Teheran arrived the next morning, with a note saying he’d meet me there in a few days to show me the ropes.

It didn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t working for any oil company, and Sam confirmed the obvious when he finally turned up, two weeks late. He threw his feet up onto his desk, blew smoke at the ceiling fan, and poked the air with his cigar. “I want you to know two things, Jack,” he began. “One, I don’t invite just anybody onto my team. I invited you because I think you’ll be a good player and I believe I can rely on you. Two, if you don’t want to get
involved, you can go back to New York right now. Because once you get involved, you don’t get uninvolved. … Ever.”

“You decided to come alone today.”

I’d been aware for some time that I was being shadowed, so I’d headed for a dark corner of the market where an old lady was selling an unimpressive array of homegrown fruit. I knew that if he was ever gonna break the ice, this would be his moment.

“Blind dates are hard enough without a chaperon,” I answered without turning around, continuing my inspection of little green apples.

“Your people are clumsy,” he said flatly. “If they had come today, I would have given up on you.”

I gave the old lady a coin for an apple then turned toward the voice. He was younger than I had expected. Mid- to late forties, although the grim expression etched into his face made him seem older. He studied me with a clinical detachment, blue-gray eyes peering guardedly out from behind round wire-frame lenses. His features seemed to be set in stone, and I noticed that the cane had been discarded.

“I was about to give up on you,” I said.

He nodded, pulled a pack of nonfilters out of his jacket, and offered me one. I turned it down, although I was tempted. He lit up, took a long drag.

“Shall we go somewhere private?” I suggested.

“We’ll walk,” he said coolly. “I prefer the open air to a stuffy room full of microphones.”

We seemed to go forever, first through busy streets and then empty alleyways, without a word being said. He was chainsmoking foul-smelling cigarettes, and combined with sleep
deprivation, it was getting to me. I needed something to eat, pulled the apple out of my pocket, and started munching on it. It was delicious and I wished I’d bought more.

We walked through a small park where a couple of young mothers supervised small children playing on swings.

“Do you know Berlin?” he began.

“I got here yesterday,” I answered.

“It’s quite a place. Perhaps you’ll get a chance to become acquainted.”

“I don’t plan to stay long.”

He nodded, tossed his butt aside, and opened a new pack. He offered me one again, and I remembered the HBs that were in my pocket. “I’ve got my own.” I dug into the crumpled pack.

“Suit yourself.” He had a deep, raspy voice, a result of the smokes, no doubt. His English was heavily accented but good. It was time to get down to business. I lit one of the HBs off his lighter and went fishing.

“You a diplomat?”

“In the Foreign Office I hold the position of Director for North American Political Studies. In fact, I’m an officer in the Ministry for State Security. I hold the rank of colonel.”

It was a stunning piece of news that was said in such a matter-of-fact way that I had to replay it in my head. A colonel in the Ministry for State Security—the infamous STASI—doesn’t generally blow his own cover, especially not to a member of the opposition, which is how I assumed he saw me. If he was planning to defect… I tried not to jump the gun. He was controlling the meeting.

“And how do I know that you are who you say you are?” I asked.

“I haven’t said who I am. I’ve said what my job is.”

“Would you like to tell me your name?”

A comer of the Colonel’s mouth showed a trace of a grin. “No, I wouldn’t care to do that.”

“You know mine,” I said, hoping it might draw him on the big question that was still bouncing around my head—why me?

“Then I have the advantage.” He stopped, watched a young boy climb up the slide. “But only for the moment.” He stubbed out another cigarette, but didn’t light another this time. I had a feeling he was about to walk away.

“So … Here we are, alone at last.” I sat down on a park bench, hoping he’d follow. “What do you wanna talk about?”

He remained standing, watching me and the surroundings at the same time. “I may decide to provide you with some information.”

“That could be arranged—”

“I want to be clear,” he interrupted, showing the first sign of emotion. “I have no intention of defecting or becoming a double agent.”

“Fair enough,” I said, wondering where he was heading then. I decided I had nothing to lose by being direct. “Why did you ask for me?”

The Colonel paused to think about his answer. “Does it matter?”

“I came a long way,” I said. “It’d be nice to know why.”

He nodded slowly, then offered his hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“Is that it?” I blurted out as I stood up. I wished I hadn’t pushed him, but it was too late to take it back.

“Thank you for coming,” he added, pressing his palm into mine. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Berlin.”

As he turned and walked briskly away I realized there was a small scrap of paper in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket and looked around. One of the young mothers had
come over to help her son down from the slide, and I thought she turned away too quickly when I looked over at her. I looked back toward the Colonel, but he was gone.

For the first time I realized just how far out on a limb I was.

It was midday
by the time I found my way back to the Kempinski. I knew the odds were pretty good that I’d find one or more of the Three Bears waiting for me, but I needed a bed and I was low on options because after all that crap I’d given Powell about losing my wallet, I’d actually left it at the hotel. Anyway, I figured it was worth a shot. After all, they’d have to think I was pretty feebleminded to return to the scene of my crime.

I spotted Chase first, which was no big surprise. He was parked half a block up, in a government-issue Chrysler, pretending to be invisible behind a pair of “Made in Saigon” mirrored lenses. He was what he looked like—a dickhead—but he was a dangerous dickhead. One of the “new breed” that was turning up more and more often, changing the face and the rules of the game.

Oddly enough, evolutionary throwbacks like Chase were
in fashion as a direct result of the space race. Forget all that stuff about the final frontier and mankind’s heroic spirit of exploration. It might be true, but it don’t pay the bills. And no one—not us or the Soviets—was sending those rockets up just to go where no man had gone before, no more than Ferdinand and Isabella bankrolled Columbus because they wanted to see if the earth might be round. The only thing the good king and queen believed in was a shitload of gold, and like them, the Company saw gold in them there rockets. Intelligence gold. By the late fifties, they were loading their spy-in-the-sky satellites onto NASA rockets as fast as Howard Hughes could build them (subsidizing the sideshow of blasting a few of America’s finest into shallow orbit so they could say on TV what a beautiful view it was). By 1962, there were forty-five satellites buzzing around the planet and forty of them were loaded with Kodak cameras, and I don’t mean Brownies.