Safe Houses Read online

Helen opened her mouth to speak, but Frieda beat her to it.

  “I was warned,” Frieda said in English. “Before.”

  “By Robert?” It felt like a betrayal to use only his cryptonym, even though she knew it was proper procedure. “He threatened you?”

  Frieda shook her head.

  “Kathrin, she warned me.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “Her name, I should not have said it. Please…”

  “Don’t worry. I’m cleared for it. What did Kathrin tell you?”

  “That I should not go into a house with him, not alone. Dead drops, brush passes. Yes, all of these are fine. In his working ways he is careful. If I am discovered in this work, it will not be from any mistake he has made. But with women, and in places like this?” She shrugged. “She said to stay away unless others are there. Then I come here anyway, alone, and you see it. You see what happens.”

  “So this was not with your consent?”

  “No. It was not.” She stood, holding herself, shivering now. Helen stepped closer to console her but Frieda raised up a hand and backed away.

  “You were here, then? At the beginning?”

  “Well. Yes.” Frieda’s eyes accused her. “I didn’t know he was like this, and I wasn’t supposed to be here. I…I came downstairs as soon as I knew, and now I want to help you. We can start by reporting this.”

  Frieda shook her head violently.

  “Nein! Please, no! He will expose me. I will be as good as gone. I will have to leave, go back to Braunschweig. You cannot tell anyone!”

  “We can’t let him get away with this.”

  “We?”

  She glared at Helen, face streaked with tears. Then she slowly shook her head, as if to say Helen couldn’t possibly understand. But Helen did. Report this, and Gilley might burn her to cinders among the groups she worked with. If she was an insert, an infiltrator, then they would not only cast her out, they might also tell the East Germans, the Stasi, whose people would be quite happy to punish her. Brutally, perhaps.

  That was how it worked here. Even from the earliest days of the Cold War, the Agency and their Soviet counterparts had operated under a gentleman’s agreement when it came to inflicting casualties: Don’t touch ours and we won’t touch yours. But everyone in the middle—the locals who did their bidding—well, they had better watch their step. And now this one was as vulnerable as a fawn on the Autobahn, all because she had been wronged by her case officer, the man she had entrusted with her life the moment she agreed to work for their side.

  “Maybe I can do something through back channels,” Helen said. “To try and stop him.”

  “No. Please.” She reached out, but was too far away, so Helen closed the gap and took her hand, squeezing it. Frieda flinched from her grasp and stepped toward the door. They heard the sound of rain.

  “Do you think he has gone?” Frieda asked, voice quavering.

  “Where do you need to go? I’ve got a taxi waiting a few blocks from here.”

  “No.”

  “It’s raining. Let me get you an umbrella. We have some in the closet.”

  “No. I must leave.”

  “Tell me your name, at least. Your real name.”

  “No!” She opened the door and looked out into the rainy night. A downpour, an empty street in darkness.

  “Your coat. Here.”

  Frieda turned, nodding absently as Helen picked up the coat from the chair and handed it over. Frieda slipped it on. Three sizes too large, something from a secondhand shop. So young and helpless, and now she was about to disappear.

  “Please, use my taxi. I’ll give the fare to the driver.”

  “No!” But as Frieda reached the threshold she turned and spoke again.

  “You will look out for me, yes? Not to report this, but to see that he does not reveal me to the others. You can do this, yes?”

  “Yes. Of course.” An empty promise, but at the moment it was all Helen could offer.

  Frieda looked around the room a final time.

  “Safe house,” she said disdainfully. She shook her head and walked into the rain and darkness.

  Her parting words stabbed Helen as the door shut. For a moment she couldn’t move, and by the time she rushed to the window and pulled back the curtains Frieda was gone. Numbly, she began tidying up—straightening cushions, repositioning the couch, sweeping up the shards of broken glass. She checked her watch, remembering Baucom and his deadline. Even if she left for the cab now she’d be cutting it close, assuming the driver was still waiting, so she decided to telephone instead. Tell Baucom to stand down, that she was on her way.

  She used the house phone in the kitchen, an unsecure line that belonged to the tenant, and dialed the number for the house in Zehlendorf.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me. All’s well, but there are a few chores I need to attend to, and I didn’t want you sounding the alarm.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You don’t sound very convincing.”

  “Long story, but not on this phone.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll be back within the hour. Don’t wait up.”

  “As you wish.”

  After hanging up she wondered what she would tell him later. Handle this rashly and Gilley would get away with everything. She wondered how many other times he’d done something like this. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind. Was she forgetting anything?

  The tape.

  She ran upstairs, her stomach hollow, and switched on the light in the room with the equipment. The reels were turning. Which button had she hit earlier? The red record button was pushed down.

  That meant every spoken word, and every noise from the struggle between Frieda and Gilley, were now on tape. So were Frieda’s words afterward. Feeling her heart lift, Helen hit the stop button and exhaled in relief. She rewound the tape, removed it from the spindle, and put it into her bag alongside the other one. Two reels, with two stories. Her own little archive of the forbidden, collected in a single day.

  Enough trouble to last her a lifetime, she supposed. The only thing she knew for sure was that none of her training or experience offered the slightest bit of guidance as to what she should do next.

  4

  Helen awoke at the house in Zehlendorf to the smell of brewing coffee. Baucom stood by the window in his boxers, raising the blinds onto a gray Berlin morning. She felt as wrung out as if she’d endured hours of nightmares, and then she remembered why. A gust of rain pelted the windowpane, and she wondered if Frieda was still out in the elements, too scared to take shelter in any of her familiar places.

  Baucom climbed into bed and handed her a steaming mug. Frothed milk on top, the way she liked it.

  “Thank you.”

  “The way you were last night, I figured you needed it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were in quite a state when you got back.”

  “How would you know? You were fast asleep.”

  “Later. Tossing and turning. Shouting in your dreams.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Incoherent. But your face?” He shook his head. “You looked scared. Hunted. I shook you once, to wake you, but that only made it worse. I was afraid to try again.”

  “Clark Baucom, master spy, afraid to wake a sleeping harpy.”

  “I take it that everything didn’t go as planned?”

  “What makes you say that?” She wasn’t ready to tell him what she’d witnessed, not yet.

  “Well, for starters, your handbag seemed a little full this morning.”

  “Those tapes are none of your business!”

  “I seem to recall you making them my business. Or one of them, anyway. But if you don’t want me to interfere, fine.”
r />   “All right, then. If you’re going to poke around in my things, the least you can do is help. What can you tell me about Kevin Gilley?”

  “He was there?”

  “Who says this is about last night?”

  “Then why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  He smiled, not fooled a bit, but answered, anyway.

  “One thing I know is that for security reasons you’re supposed to call him Robert.”

  “Isn’t he supposed to be out of favor? I heard he was up for a transfer.”

  “That’s the cover story, anyway. It must be working if you’ve heard it.”

  “What’s the real story?”

  Baucom shook his head, frowning.

  “He plays in another part of the sandbox from me. Sorcery and black bags. Deals with things I wouldn’t want to know, and would shut my ears if someone started to tell me.”

  “Supposed to be quite the Casanova, isn’t he?”

  “That would cover half our field men, present company excluded.”

  “Does this rep extend to his treatment of female agents?”

  Baucom frowned and shook his head.

  “What are you saying, exactly, that you caught him with his pants down?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Last person I saw drop trou in a safe house was a prim little Bohemian who used to bring me telexes from the Czech Foreign Ministry. He’d smuggle them out of the office by taping them to his ass in the washroom. Always made me turn around when he took his pants down. He’d offer a proper little ‘Excuse me,’ and then all I’d hear was the rattle of his belt buckle, a quick zip, and a bunch of ripping sounds while he tore the tape off with little grunts and shrieks.”

  “I believe we were talking about Kevin Gilley.”

  “I believe we were. And I told you all I know about the man, and even that was too much.”

  He went silent, and for a while she thought the subject was closed. Then he moved closer, slid his thigh against hers, and slipped his arm beneath her head like a pillow. She sat up, took a swallow of coffee, and set the mug on the bedside table before easing back down. His body felt like a bulwark, a firewall. His next words emerged in a whisper, directly into her ear.

  “Every now and then I do wonder who Robert’s really working for.”

  She was careful not to move.

  “You think it’s them?”

  “Oh, no. Robert would never work for them. But there are times I suspect he’s mostly working for himself.”

  “How so?”

  She felt him shrug, and waited for more. He said nothing, and a few moments later he asked where she’d like to go for breakfast. Perhaps that new Bäckerei around the corner on Teltower Damm? The one that dusted everything with confectioner’s sugar and made the strongest coffee for blocks? She said that sounded fine, and then she tried one more time, sidling up to the subject carefully, as if it might reach out at any moment and grab her by the arm.

  “You think Robert is just selfish, then? Looking out for number one?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  His new favorite question, which irritated her, and made her wonder if Gilley’s predatory nature was common knowledge, even a subject of Agency banter among the select, and therefore not a topic for discussion among those at lower clearances, like her.

  “Well, let’s say, just as a hypothetical, that Gilley was at the house last night. As a customer, but not exactly playing by the rules.”

  “Like us, you mean? Intimate acts in an Agency facility?”

  She blushed, and was grateful he was staring at the ceiling.

  “I wouldn’t call his behavior intimate by anyone’s definition. Besides, this house is decommissioned, and I’m authorized to be here. To keep the place looking occupied, show my face to the neighbors until we’ve had time to remove the equipment, close up shop.”

  “True enough.”

  “So, then.”

  “What?”

  “The hypothetical. What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t engage in hypotheticals. Not for people like Kevin Gilley.”

  He again let the topic drift away, off into the smoke from the Gitane he’d just lit.

  “So, then,” he said at last. “Breakfast?”

  “I think I’ll sleep a while longer.”

  “Wise decision.”

  He climbed out of bed and began to dress.

  “The only problem,” she said, “is that I’m not sure I can sleep.”

  “Well, it all depends on your approach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How you approach sleep. How you prepare yourself to enter it.”

  “You act like it’s a place, a destination.”

  “Don’t you think of it that way?”

  “Usually I’m so tired that I just fall right in.”

  “I enter it willfully, with gratitude. It’s the only way I was able to sleep at all sometimes during the war, or later, during some of those scrapes I got myself into. I’d think of sleep as a warm shelter on a cold night. I’d be lying there in a tent, maybe, or in one of those huts full of soldiers, everybody snoring, their breath clouding the air, and I’d picture sleep as this realm where you must prepare yourself in order to be admitted, like a sanctuary.”

  “A sanctuary. I like that.”

  “It’s kind of like the feeling I get when I arrive at a safe house in hostile territory, that moment when you lock the door behind you and realize you’re going to be fine. You stop and listen to the quiet, to the familiar little noises a place always makes. The hum of the refrigerator, maybe, or a car outside crossing a loose manhole cover. The drip of a downspout. Things you’ve noticed before, so that when you hear them again it’s a reassurance and all the tension drains right out of you. The way the dirty oil comes pouring out of a car when you unscrew the oil pan.”

  “An oil pan. How poetic.”

  Helen was about to smile when she was reminded of poor Frieda, who had also put her trust in a safe house, despite being warned about Gilley. And if a safe house wasn’t really safe, then maybe sleep wasn’t, either. But it was an appealing notion.

  “A destination,” she said. “That’s good.”

  Helen curled up in the bed. Baucom tugged the covers into place and lightly stroked her hair.

  “I don’t know what happened last night, and I won’t press for details,” he said. “Whatever it was, I’d say you’ve earned some peace. Sleep as late as you want. I’ll cover for you with Herrington.”

  “Thank you,” she said lazily, already easing through the gates toward a necessary oblivion. She sensed her troubles and anxieties remaining behind, refused entry. Even the haunting image of Frieda, pale and wet and frightened, floated off into the shadows like an untethered soul.

  And from that day onward, no matter how tired or shaken or upset, Helen held fast to the idea of sleep as a secure destination, a welcoming refuge, up to and even including the night thirty-five years later when she was murdered in her bed.

  5

  August 2014

  On the night Willard Shoat killed his parents, he walked barefoot to the edge of town with a can of red spray paint, out to the sign that said, “Entering POSTON, pop. 924.” He shook the clicking can, raised on his tiptoes, and opened fire. First he slashed out the number. Then he painted a new total to account for the subtraction of Mom and Dad: 921.

  Willard never was much for math.

  But it took the police a while to figure that out, and for two days running they dug holes all over the family farm in search of a third body. They ran backhoes and unleashed sniffer dogs, going after anything that hinted at rot or decay. Being a farm, there was plenty of both. The manure heaps alone kept them busy for an entire afternoon, and they tore up the
better part of an acre before concluding, as almost everyone else in town already had, that Willard had simply gotten his sums wrong.

  Henry Mattick, new to Poston and living in a small frame house less than a block from the scene, took a contrary view. Dumb as the boy was—an unkind word, perhaps, for a twenty-four-year-old whose mind never made it past kindergarten—Henry believed Willard was simply counting himself out of the game as well. For what better way to negate yourself than to do away with the two people who brought you into the world?

  Henry got wrapped up in the story almost from the moment he first heard the sirens.

  It wasn’t as if he had much else to do, marooned in a rural village on the Maryland Eastern Shore. He was between jobs and romantically unattached, quartered in a spartan rancher owned by a distant relative who’d offered temporary refuge at a bargain rate. Or so Henry told the neighbors on the few occasions they induced him to talk. They knew he was from Baltimore by the stickers on his car, but when they asked about that he only nodded.

  His only companion was a brindled, underfed mutt left behind by the previous tenant, a dog so accustomed to neglect that he would disappear for days at a time, showing up only to eat, accept a scratch or two on the head, and poop in the grass by the porch before again wandering off. Henry, deciding not to take it personally, gave the dog a name—Scooter—and accommodated his unpredictable schedule by keeping his bowl filled at all hours.

  Watchful by nature, Henry kept an eye on the house down the street as the police came and went. He followed the saturation media coverage almost minute by minute, and when the cable networks began to lose interest he switched to the Internet.

  By the lurid and violent standards of the age, the case struck Henry as fairly run-of-the-mill. And with only two fatalities it probably would have attracted little media attention if not for Willard’s strange sojourn to the sign at the edge of town. Otherwise, the basics were simple. The murder weapon was a hunting rifle, a .30-06 bolt action Ruger American that Willard’s dad had bought him for his fourteenth birthday. Up to then he’d used it only for shooting at deer. He shot both his parents in the face—Dad first, Mom second. Investigators settled on that order of events partly by reading the spatter of blood and gore, but also because his mother’s body was found sitting upright in bed, meaning she had probably awakened after the first shot.