The Secret Lovers (26 page)

Christopher, standing in the noisy foyer of the post office, read Cathy’s letter and read it again. It was the twelfth of July. He sent her a wire:

Because they had made it into a code, he couldn’t use the word “love” in a telegram.

2

Barney Wolkowicz met Christopher at Tempelhof Airport, outside the customs barrier. Wolkowicz’s presence was a calculated insult. Christopher walked by him as if he were
invisible and went into the mens room. In a moment, Wolkowicz followed him. They stood side by side at the urinals, and waited for the cleaning woman to finish mopping and leave the room.
Christopher and Wolkowicz had met first in East Africa, and when Wolkowicz spoke, he spoke in Swahili.

“Is this language secure enough for you?” he asked.

“You’re good at languages, Barney,” Christopher replied, in the same tongue. “Its a pity you like to let the chickens out of the hen house.”

“Nataka kujua mahali utakapokuwapo,” Wolkowicz said: I want to know where you are. “Door to door, minute by minute,” he added in English.

Wolkowicz cared nothing about the security of covert action operations, and he lost no opportunity to show his contempt for them. He operated in Berlin, gathering information, under official
cover; he was in daily contact with the police and the German security agencies. Meeting Christopher openly at the airport, where security operatives—eyes and cameras—were constantly on
the watch, was as good as identifying him, in a liaison meeting, as an agent of U.S. intelligence. Wolkowicz was giving Christopher something—access to one of his agents. Exposing Christopher
to embarrassment, if not to risk, was his way of exacting payment.

“Niende sasa?” Christopher asked—shall I go now? Wolkowicz began to speak, but Christopher cut in, speaking in English. “Or shall I take out your dentures and throw them
in the urinal?”

Wolkowicz showed his porcelain teeth. They were a sore point with him; a torturer had taken his natural teeth during the last war after he had parachuted into Burma, into the middle of a
Japanese patrol.

“Wait inside till you see me go by in a blue Mercedes with local plates, last two numbers 56, then take a cab,” Wolkowicz said. “I’ll stay ahead of the cab. Get off at
Kempinsky’s Hotel. Walk around the block and I’ll pick you up in front of the hotel when you reappear. If all’s well, transfer your briefcase from your left hand to your
right.”

He walked out of the room. Christopher lingered, washed his hands and face. He left a mark in the saucer for the old woman. Wolkowicz, he saw, had tipped her ten pfennigs.

In the safe house, an actual house in Spandau rather than an apartment, Wolkowicz drank beer from a bottle and watched while a technician disguised Christopher. The technician
fitted a dark wig, salted with gray hair, over his head, and affixed matching eyebrows with spirit gum. Christopher refused a beard. The technician stepped back like a painter observing a
brushstroke, and changed one pair of windowpane eyeglasses for another, tinted yellow. “Your eyes are easy to remember, we’ll just make it a little harder,” he said. “And
your face is too lean; we can take care of that.” He hooked a finger in the corner of Christopher’s mouth, slipped a thin sponge between his teeth and the inside of his cheek, took it
back out, trimmed it with his scissors. “I think a little pancake, don’t you, Barney?” he said. “And if we shadow those eyes, they won’t look so blue.”

Christopher said, “I think we’ve gone far enough.”

“The sponges change his voice, they always do,” the technician said. “He’ll be speaking German. Will the asset be able to tell he’s a foreigner?”

“No,” Wolkowicz said.

“Then he ought to have German clothes instead of that stuff he has on. It has Brooks Brothers written all over it.”

“Too late. The fellow will be here in twenty minutes.”

“Then I’d better go,” the technician said. He walked around Christopher slowly, shining a bright lamp on his head. “You’ll do,” he said. “Just give the
equipment back to Barney—and, oh, don’t drink anything with those sponges in your cheeks. It makes you squirt when you talk. We almost drowned an asset once, spoiled the whole
effect.”

Wolkowicz let the technician out. When he came back and spoke to Christopher his voice was friendly; the disguise, Christopher supposed, had something to do with it.

“Now this asset is not the brightest kid in the world,” Wolkowicz said, “so don’t go too fast with him, and for Christ’s sake don’t let him get the idea that
he’s in on anything important. He’s always after more money and I don’t want him bringing you up as a justification. His name is Wolfram. I’ll introduce you and leave.
Actually I’ll be down-cellar on the earphones. We can’t spare a tech for something like this. If you want me up here, say that you have a nephew in Munich.”

“Why would I want you up here?”

“Wolfram can be a little odd. He carries a gun, and I know you don’t believe in violence.”

“You think he’s going to stick me up, Barney?”

“Not for money. He may want your wig.”

3

Wolfram, though he could not have been older than twenty-five, was totally bald. When he removed his Tyrolean hat, after coming in out of the July sun, his skull shone with
sweat. He shook hands with Christopher, then mopped his head with a handkerchief already damp from earlier use. The blinds were drawn in the room where he and Christopher sat in facing chairs;
Wolkowicz, before he left, put two bottles of cold beer on the table between them. He gave Christopher a winking smile. The straps of Wolkowicz’s shoulder holster were clearly visible under
his summer jacket. He always went armed; the fact that this was obvious was, like having a disguise detected, one of the signs that Wolkowicz flashed to his agents that they were dealing with a
real spy.

Christopher let Wolfram quench his thirst before he began to speak to him. The young German drank off most of his bottle of beer in one long pull. Wolkowicz had provided no glasses.

“Did you walk here in this heat?” Christopher asked.

“Almost a kilometer, from the S-Bahn station at Spandau-West. I was a little behind time, so I ran part of the way.”

“Surely that’s not good security, to run in the streets?”

“Better than being late for a meeting with Krupp.”

“Krupp?”

Wolfram pointed a thumb over his shoulder and spoke the name by which he knew Wolkowicz. “We call him Krupp because he loves his cannons so.”

The German settled back in his chair, his ankle thrown over his knee. He eyed Christopher’s untouched bottle of beer; he had swallowed his own so quickly that his scalp was sweating again,
and he wiped away the moisture with his sleeve. His shirt, under his woolen jacket, was soaked and transparent. Christopher uncapped the second bottle and gave it to Wolfram; the faint skunklike
aroma of German beer escaped from the neck of the bottle.

Christopher spread a half-dozen glossy photographs on the table under the strong light that the makeup technician had used. These were pictures of European men, some of them studio portraits,
others candid shots of unwitting subjects. Wolfram leaned forward and moved aside with a stiff forefinger all but two photographs. One was a passport photo of Horst Bülow; the other showed
Bülow in an overcoat and hat, crossing a Berlin street with a bombed wall in the background.

“I recognize this man,” Wolfram said. “None of the others.”

“Tell me what you remember about him.”

Wolfram gave Christopher a complete physical description, an inventory of Bülow’s mannerisms, the brand of cigarettes he smoked, his drinking habits, a list of restaurants he
frequented in West Berlin. “He lived in East Berlin, in Christburger strasse,” Wolfram said; he gave a music-hall smirk. “That street is near some hospitals. The subject used to
go out in the evenings and in the mornings and watch the nurses come and go when the work shifts changed. He liked to look at nurses, but he never approached one.”

“
Lived
in the Christburger strasse? Past tense? Has he moved?”

“I don’t know. I was assigned to surveille him for several weeks last winter, then I was put onto something else. I don’t ask what I don’t need to know.”

“What were the exact dates you were on him, please?”

“My superiors would have that.” Wolfram drank beer.

“So would you,” Christopher said. “Your orders are to cooperate fully with me. If you haven’t understood, I can contact your superiors and have them repeat your
instructions in my presence.”

Christopher sat bolt upright, speaking in harsh German. There had been, on Wolfram’s face, the beginnings of a smirk. As Christopher spoke, he cocked his head as if listening for an
accent. Hearing none, his face cleared itself of all expression. He uncrossed his legs, sat up straight, put down his beer bottle. He took a notebook from an inside pocket and opened it.

“These are my field notes,” Wolfram said. “I received the assignment to carry out a spot surveillance of this subject on January 30. Surveillance commenced at 0700 on 1
February, and continued, with one nine-day interruption, from 1 March to 10 March, until 24 March, at which time the assignment was terminated. I spent a total of 156 hours in actual surveillance
of this subject.”

“In East Berlin as well as West?”

“Yes, sir. The nurses were from the Prenzlauer Berg Hospital, which is in the East. I went where he was, wherever he was, when I was on duty.”

“What about this subject was remarkable?”

Wolfram closed his notebook, marking the place with a finger, and made a show of collecting his thoughts.

“Number one, he was nervous, a regular alley cat, always looking around to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Of course, he never spotted me.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he never tried to lose me, and he never tried to lead me on wild-goose chases. When he went someplace, he always had something to do when he got there.”

“That could have been professionalism. Perhaps he knew you were on his back.”

Wolfram laughed, “Never. You would have seen, if you had been behind him. This man was no professional. I followed him by myself, with no partners, alone, and never once lost him. That
tells you something.”

“What did he do? What was his pattern?”

“To work every morning, right on time. Home every evening, right on time. He’d stop and have one beer on weeknights, always at the same Stube. He bought cold food and ate it alone in
his room. He was very careful with money. But one night a week, Saturday, he’d cross into the West and have a tremendous big meal at a fancy restaurant; he’d find a whore first and take
her with him to dinner, then go home with her for an hour, never more.”

“Different girls each time, or the same one?”

“Always different, always young. He’d
dance
with them—take them to places like the roof of the Hilton and buy them champagne cocktails. All week, evidently, he ate
cold sausage alone in his room in order to have this night in West Berlin with a girl he had to pay for.”

“And this is what he always did, without fail, when he came into West Berlin?”

“So I thought for a while. I used to follow him to the girl’s place, wait outside, take him home on the S-Bahn, see him into the door, and then go home myself. One night he made a
lot of phone calls from public booths. I thought I’d wait around outside his place a little longer. It wasn’t too cold.”

“And?”

“And at two o’clock in the morning, out he came, in his usual shabby clothes, with his briefcase, and walked across the zone frontier. He went the long way, up north, and through a
bombed building instead of using a street.”

“What happened on the other side?”

“At 0318, exactly, he was picked up in a car, in Schiller Park.”

“License number?”

“I was too far behind—after all, we were practically the only two people on foot in Berlin at that hour and I had to stay out of sight. Also, the car had no lights on. It was a new
car, an Opel.”

“Date?”

Wolfram opened his notebook and ran a finger down the page. “Sunday morning, February 7.”

“Did you follow up, go back to his place and wait?”

Wolfram laughed. “My dear friend, it was almost dawn. It was starting to rain. I’d walked fifteen kilometers. The subject had gone somewhere in a car. I went home and went to
bed.”

“Your unit didn’t regard this target as high priority?”

“I don’t know that. If they had, more than one man would have been used. I assumed we were spotting, assessing.”

“You had no backup?”

“No, me alone. But I never lost him. He was slow, old.”

“You never saw him make another contact at night like that?”

“No.”

“Never saw the car again? It was an Opel?”

“It was a dark-colored Opel Kapitän, and if I ever saw it again, this subject certainly was not inside it.”

Christopher had never met Bülow on a Sunday morning and never in Schiller Park. He wasn’t surprised that Horst, doubled, would stay in a pattern—early-morning contact in a
park—nor that he would sneak across the border, clambering through ruins like a commando, if left to his own devices. For Christopher’s meetings he had been instructed to ride the
S-Bahn, crossing in the rush hour, and to pass the evening in a cinema or a theater, afterward eating a simpler supper than the ones he had bought for his tarts, and to make a secure contact in a
secure location. But that had been Christopher’s planning, not Horst’s—and not that of the unknown people in the Opel.

“This period in February, from the seventh to the end,” Christopher said. “What else did you observe?”

“Normal activity, except for one contact.”

“Describe it, please.”

Wolfram had been trained to speak when spoken to; Christopher knew it was no use waiting for him to volunteer information. He had to be activated, like a soldier in ranks, by voice commands.