Safe Houses Read online

  I would like to shelter it, among remote

  lost objects, in some dark and silent place

  that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.

  She entered the kitchen. Rilke had named the poem “Love Song,” but for Helen the words never brought to mind any man, past or present. It instead made her reflect on this strange profession of hers, this realm where it was risky indeed to touch the souls of others or, sometimes, even to try and shelter them in some dark and silent place—like this house.

  Helen uttered the final lines while peering out the back window into the small garden with its bare plum tree.

  Yet everything that touches us, me and you,

  takes us together like a violin’s bow,

  which draws one voice out of two separate strings.

  Upon what instrument are we two spanned?

  And what musician holds us in his hand?

  Oh sweetest song.

  With the words still resonating in her head, she climbed the stairs. Her routine was to rewind the tape and play it back, listening carefully to make sure the microphones had picked up every syllable. If no tweaks or repairs were needed, she erased it and was on her way.

  Today she’d heard the key in the front door just as she was reaching for the stop button. Heart beating fast, she’d moved to the window. That’s when she saw the older man, the key holder.

  He looked to be in his late sixties. Salt-and-pepper hair, a bit on the long side, untamed in the breeze. Five o’clock shadow, which somehow suited him. He grimaced as he wiggled the key, which suggested it was a new copy, meaning further cause for worry. How many more copies were out there that she didn’t know about?

  Then she heard the slide of the dead bolt, the opening of the door. She watched the man on the porch disappear across the threshold. At first she stayed by the window, not daring to move as she listened to the door shutting a floor below. She heard a footstep or two, followed by a few seconds of silence, and then the creak of a floorboard as he settled onto the couch in the parlor. A long sigh, suggestive of a lengthy journey.

  She debated whether to announce herself. Why not let him know she was here, so there would be no surprises later? That way she might also find out who he was. She would gently remind him to log his use of the house on the proper form afterward, and then gracefully make her exit.

  A knock at the front door preempted her. She again peered out the window. A younger man, early thirties, glancing up and down the street like he knew he wasn’t supposed to be there. Hair, dirty blond but neatly barbered. Ruddy face. Like the other man, he wore a tweed jacket and a long wool overcoat unbuttoned in the front, as if they’d both come directly from the moors in some du Maurier novel. Or, no, more like a pair of fellows you’d see in one of those fake Irish pubs you found all over the world, keeping to their own kind while on foreign soil.

  She again heard the door open and shut, followed by an exchange of greetings, voices floating up the stairwell as they made small talk in the parlor. Helen instinctively nudged off her shoes. She slid rather than stepped across the floor—slowly, to minimize creaks or groans from the boards—until she was close enough to the tape recorder to reach for the headphones. She slipped them on, and for a few seconds held her breath as she listened to their footsteps, trooping toward the kitchen. A slap on the back. A joke about Herrington’s sex life that she’d already heard twice, followed by a snort of laughter.

  Then and there, she told herself she would use this occasion to further test the taping system, even as she recognized it right away as a dodge, a justification for unauthorized curiosity. Shamed, she was about to slip off the headphones when she heard the older man announce that he needed a drink.

  Only if you can find it. The liquor supply was in a lower kitchen cabinet behind a trash can, one of the last places you’d think to look. And you had to manipulate the latch—just so—to click open the door.

  His footsteps were direct, nothing the least bit uncertain about the route. Then, the metallic click of the latch, neat as you please, followed by the clatter of bottles as he rummaged among them for his poison of choice.

  Well, now.

  It was one thing to have an unauthorized key, or for a meeting to be off the books. Quite another to know the secrets of the house. This old fellow sounded right at home. And that was when he had begun speaking of mysterious bodies of water, of hidden lakes and ponds and bays that no one but him could see.

  Not long after the younger man sat down, they lowered their voices further, and for the next few minutes there was only a single moment of clarity, when the older fellow, as if intensifying his sales pitch, spoke up and said, “There’s never been a better time to jump in, Lewis. We’re branching out again. Overflowing our banks.”

  “Is that so smart? With floods come leaks.”

  “Not with our clientele, the Vee people and all the rest. Too selfish for any spills. Too intent on winning their next wrangle on the hump.”

  The hump? The Vee people? And who were all of these clients?

  The men then lapsed back into indecipherable muttering. Helen pictured them with their foreheads nearly touching across the table, face-to-face in furtive conversation. It told her that, at the very least, she needed to install new and more sensitive microphones, presuming the bean counters said yes. Budgets were only getting smaller. Congress had its dander up, and Berlin—yes, even Berlin—was starting to feel like a Cold War backwater.

  Helen had arrived in the city with expectations conditioned by noir films and spy thrillers, a Berlin where intrigue lurked in every shadow, where every gun had a silencer and every safe house was subject to ambush or takeover. Instead, the ones she ran were paragons of tranquility—safe, just as their name suggested. No one ever showed up armed, and no one ever got hurt.

  Even the Wall, with its watchtowers and razor wire, had begun to take on the look of something touristy, a graffiti-covered structure where someday you might stroll the Kill Zone with children in tow and camera in hand, snapping poses for the folks back home. It had been more than two and a half years since anyone had died while trying to cross without permission—poor old Dietmar Schwietzer, age eighteen, RIP. In fact, for all its formidable symbolism, the Wall was the biggest reason her posting had fallen so short of expectations. By cutting off all access to the opposition—the KGB in Karlshorst, the Stasi on Normanenstrasse—its ninety-mile perimeter had long ago robbed their mission of the thrill of the chase. The Agency’s work in Berlin was now all defense and no offense. Helen felt like she’d arrived at a wondrous playground only to discover that the most exciting rides had been cordoned off.

  Langley’s concerns were now focused on Iran, where the CIA-installed Shah had recently fled, ceding power to a scowling, black-turbaned ayatollah who seemed capable of just about anything. Berlin was an afterthought.

  The two men downstairs continued muttering, and even as their tone grew heated she could barely understand a word. Did she detect a phrase or two of German? Maybe a snatch of Russian?

  Finally, the younger man spoke louder, his voice almost shrill. A chair scraped, meaning he had probably decided to stand. The older man also raised his voice. At last, she again heard every syllable.

  “But what if it does happen?” the younger man said.

  “It won’t. I assure you.”

  “Nothing is foolproof. What’s the contingency? And please don’t tell me you don’t have one.”

  “Elimination, plain and simple.”

  “Elimination?”

  “Surely I don’t have to spell that out for you, do I?”

  The answer rendered the younger man momentarily speechless. By then, sweat was prickling on Helen’s spine.

  Then the second chair scraped, followed by the clip-clop of shoes, the clank of glass as the older man put away the bottle and rela
tched the liquor cabinet. Water gushed in the sink as someone rinsed the glasses and set them in the drying rack. Mumbled goodbyes, a burst of laughter.

  Friends again? Or maybe just allies, partners in crime. Whatever deal had been on the table seemed to have been sealed. Helen heard muffled movements and pictured them shaking hands. The door rattled open. A voice said something indecipherable from out on the front stoop. Then the door shut and the key turned the dead bolt.

  Yet again, she wondered: Whose key? And where will it go now?

  She slid back over to the window, taking care in case one of them was still downstairs. No. They were both descending the front steps to the sidewalk. She watched through the gap in the curtains as the younger man headed south, toward the Tiergarten. The older one strolled north, toward Alt-Moabit, where unless he turned he’d soon reach the Wall.

  Or maybe the Wall was his destination. The closest checkpoint was less than half a mile from here. The mere thought of him crossing into East Berlin with that precious key in his pocket was enough to make her hyperventilate.

  Helen exhaled loudly. The beginnings of a headache crept forward from her temples. She recrossed the room and switched off the recorder. Perhaps twenty minutes of conversation were now stored on the tape—all of it contraband, of course. Worse, her own reading of Rilke was on there, too, a preamble that implicated her in this unauthorized taping. Whatever they’d been up to, she had to assume it was according to Hoyle, at least by someone’s rules. By every rule she played by, she should erase the tape immediately.

  She stared at the machine a few seconds longer. Then she hit rewind, letting the reels spin until the tape came loose and slapped against the guide. She switched it off. Now she was supposed to rethread it and hit record, erase this strange conversation forever, as if it never happened.

  Instead, she pulled the reel from the spindle and carried it to a side table, where she opened the top drawer and slipped the tape inside. She would erase it later.

  Then, another thought, coming at her like a double dare: By using enhancement technology, she might be able to decipher some of the inaudible portions of their exchange. Helen lit a cigarette, inhaled, and considered her options. She shook her head, reached for an ashtray, and stubbed out the reckless idea.

  She reopened the drawer, looked again at the tape, and then closed the drawer. To distract herself from any further heretical thoughts she unwrapped a fresh reel and loaded it onto the spindle. A frantic sense of urgency began to build at the base of her stomach. She needed to leave, to get out into the streets, the room now claustrophobic. Hurrying, she slipped on her shoes and ran downstairs. Gathering up her mop and bucket, she headed for the front door. Thinking better of her haste, she set down the mop and bucket by the door and turned toward the kitchen.

  She opened the liquor cabinet and inspected the bottle up front, its seal broken. It was an eighteen-year-old Macallan, a single malt Scotch aged in a sherry oak cask. She knew the details because someone in Langley, a middle manager in Facilities whose name she hadn’t recognized, had specially requisitioned it only a month ago. It was damned expensive, and at the time she’d thought the order was a bit unorthodox. But she’d written it off as one of those needs that cropped up from time to time in the delicate relationships between case officers and their agents. A Soviet military officer with a rural background had once asked his handler to provide regular copies of Progressive Farmer magazine, so he could wallow in the luxuries of state-of-the-art American agriculture whenever he visited the safe house. Being a case officer was a stressful occupation. Being an agent, more so. So whenever someone had a special request, you tried to accommodate them.

  Until today no one had opened the Macallan. Whoever the older fellow was, he seemed to have at least one supporter in Langley. She closed the cabinet and paused. Footsteps approached the house on the sidewalk out front, and she held her breath until they passed. What if he returned? The thought sent her rushing back toward the door in such a hurry that she almost forgot the mop and bucket. She didn’t begin to calm down until she was out on the porch, snicking the dead bolt into place. Turning, she looked up and down the street from the stoop. North seemed like the best option for now, toward Alt-Moabit where there would be people and voices, shopkeepers and traffic, the company of strangers. Safety in numbers.

  Was safety really necessary? She didn’t know, and the uncertainty troubled her. For the moment all she knew for sure was that she wanted a drink. Plus some advice, and perhaps a bit of male comfort.

  Fortunately, she knew just who to turn to for all of the above.

  2

  By candlelight you almost didn’t notice the modest roll of flab around Clark Baucom’s waist. You couldn’t very well call it baby fat, not at his age. But at tender moments like this, Helen Abell found such flaws endearing. Nakedness made Clark seem vulnerable, and she thought of his paunch as a mark of experience, the inevitable toll of all those sedentary hours spent at checkpoints and observation posts. Far too much lying in wait in this business of theirs. Not to mention the diet he’d endured in long stretches behind the Iron Curtain. Whether ferrying royalists out of Budapest or relaying vital messages to dissidents in Warsaw, he had often subsisted on potatoes and goulash, pierogies and spaetzle, boiled cabbage and white sausage—a pale, gelatinous cuisine, all of it flavored by cigarette smoke and washed down with Czech beer. Once, right here in Berlin, she’d watched him wolf down the entirety of a fatty old Eisbein, a boiled ham hock as big as a severed head.

  For all that, he still cut a dashing figure, with lively brown eyes and a face built on classic lines. If he were an actor, she would have guessed that he was still doing his own stunts.

  Helen curled up against him and kissed his chest, the hairs tickling her lips. He smiled and reached across her for his pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. Gitanes, an affectation from his schoolboy days in Paris. Some Americans became expats as part of a phase, or for a few years at a time. Clark Baucom had made a career out of it. Since the age of fourteen he hadn’t lived in his home country for longer than a year at a time.

  “Light one for me while you’re at it,” she said.

  He obliged her, and she inhaled slowly. Strong and unfiltered, but the extra kick of nicotine helped marshal her thoughts. A moment later the words finally fell into place for the conversation she’d been waiting to have all evening.

  “Do you know of any spook with a cryptonym of Lewis?”

  “One of ours?”

  “Presumably.”

  He furrowed his brow and stared at the ceiling.

  “Vienna, maybe? No, I think it’s Bulgaria. But only as a fly-in. He comes and goes. Why do you ask?”

  “Something I overheard today, out on the job.”

  In the three hours that had passed before she met Clark Baucom at a café in Charlottenburg, Helen had wrestled with the question of what to do with her knowledge of that afternoon’s events. She couldn’t very well take the matter to Herrington. Hey, boss. Just happened to be making an unauthorized visit at Number Three and ran across two fellows I’ve never heard of, saying all kinds of weird shit. And guess what? They didn’t know I was listening, and I taped it!

  Besides, if Herrington already knew about the rendezvous, he’d be angrier at her for nearly disrupting it—or for knowing about it at all—than at any breach of protocol by the participants. For all she knew, the station chief had loaned them his own key, or had authorized the making of a new and secret copy. That would be just his style. Yet another means of knocking her down a peg.

  On the other hand, what if something funny was up? Something so far off the books that even Herrington didn’t know? Shouldn’t someone in authority be notified?

  That’s why she’d wanted to see Baucom. Yes, for the sex—their affair had been going on since June—but more for the lingering aftermath, when he was always more talkative about tr
icks of the trade, the lay of the land in Eastern Europe, or his strategies for negotiating the Agency’s byzantine interoffice politics. He was part lover, part tutor, and secure enough to not mind that she seemed to value his company as much for the latter as for the former.

  They were in the back bedroom of a small house on a grassy suburban tract in Zehlendorf, a safe house in the old American zone of occupation that she’d de-commissioned two months earlier. Agency janitors hadn’t yet removed the sound equipment, which was terribly outdated, and the lease didn’t expire for another two months. By her reasoning—and with Baucom’s concurrence, which would count for more if they were ever caught—she had decided that someone ought to use it from time to time, if only to convince the neighbors that it wasn’t vacant.

  Baucom had been a field man since before she was born. He was fifty-five. Robbing the cradle, her mother would’ve said. People would say what they wanted to say, but the reality was that this relationship had been her idea. It was not built to last, and that was how they liked it. He was charming in an Old Boy sort of way, and he was an attentive and experienced lover. Best of all, he was a raconteur of the first order. If Baucom had one professional weakness, it was his fondness for telling stories between the sheets.

  Presumably he wouldn’t have been nearly so free with his words if Helen hadn’t also worked for the Agency. She nonetheless sensed a certain reckless indiscretion whenever he started talking about his past, and that was fine with her. She savored this vicarious taste of the life she hoped to lead someday, if only people like Herrington could be convinced. After three decades in the field, Baucom’s memories were lined up like freighters waiting to be unloaded, and Helen was always eager to coax ashore the payload, with its wonderful color and detail.

  “Did I ever tell you about that time with Dixon at that botched dead drop in Prague?” he would typically begin. In this way she came to be a sort of keeper of his flame, or of the flame for that whole core of people who had worked at the heart of things during the Agency’s formative years.