Winter Work Page 5

  It was chilly, and he hadn’t put on his coat, partly because he hadn’t wanted to remind Dorn that he’d stashed it in the bedroom. He pulled an old pack of Juwel cigarettes from a pants pocket, along with a lighter he hadn’t used in weeks. He had been trying to quit since November, but he kept these items with him as an ongoing test of his willpower. Very Germanic, he supposed. But for the moment the temptation was too great.

  The lighter chirped three times before providing a flame. The tobacco smelled stale and tasted worse, but the rush of nicotine was warming and welcome. His brain felt the charge of it, and he was grateful for any assist to his powers of reasoning.

  He looked downhill. One of Dorn’s men was visible through the branches, pacing as if measuring the distance from the murder scene.

  Emil thought back over his chat, reexamining it for possible missteps. He was painfully conscious of having referred to Lothar mostly as a neighbor and colleague, but not as a friend. It felt like a betrayal, a craven act of self-preservation. Although it was also true that the two men had always maintained a certain distance, never quite crossing the final boundary to a deeper trust, even during their recent cooperation.

  He wondered if he should have mentioned to Dorn the possibility of Markus Wolf’s return. Emil had no interest per se in protecting his old boss. Maybe he was hoarding that line of inquiry for himself—for now, anyway.

  He took another drag from the cigarette, only to discover that it had gone out, a common fault of the dense Bulgarian tobacco. He decided to take it as a sign and dropped the cigarette to the ground, smashing it with the toe of his shoe. He looked up toward a patch of blue where the sun had broken through, and then watched with a dismayed sense of inevitability as the clouds sealed it back up.

  What happened to you this morning, Lothar? Where did you go wrong? Or had someone else’s mistake led to this? His own, perhaps. Emil began making a list in his head of everything he needed to do—some of it easy, some of it risky. Night chores would be involved, another walk through the trees. The moon was new, so he would be working mostly by starlight.

  Reflexively, he shook loose another cigarette from the pack, then stared at it as if wondering how it had gotten into his hand. His mind was running on its old tracks, as if he were back on the job. He examined the cigarette longingly before dropping it into his pocket, beating temptation for the moment. No more distractions, not until current matters were under better control. He resolved to begin thinking of this as his last op, even though the state would no longer be paying him.

  Then he grinned at his own folly. His last op? More like his first, since he’d always worked at a desk. Supposedly he was a spymaster, a Wolf acolyte who had learned all his tricks from the master himself, tricks that he had then passed along to the men and women he’d sent into the field.

  So, yes, he had run agents and operatives from afar. He had trained them, paid them, provided cover for them, and, when necessary, helped them elude capture. Yet Emil himself had never once made a brush pass, chalked a mark onto a tree, cleared a dead drop, or called for a crash meeting. He’d never once had to exfiltrate because he had never once had to infiltrate. The greatest personal hazards of his job had been paper cuts, indigestion, official reprimands, and lost sleep.

  The closest he had ever come to doing actual field work had been five years ago, when Wolf had decided to dispatch him into the wider world to run his own agents at ground level, not just across the Wall but across the water—in America. At the time the HVA had only a handful of assets there, mostly because they’d been running operations out of their embassy, which was carefully monitored. Wolf wanted Emil to run things from outside the embassy walls, in an undercover role, mostly with an eye toward stealing technological secrets. To prepare for the posting, Emil had begun running the USA desk, which had ruffled the feathers of Lothar, of all people, since that was part of his duties.

  But a few months before the posting, doctors diagnosed Bettina with ALS. She was already suffering early symptoms, and to Emil it had felt like fate telling him the option was closed. So he backed away from the offer, told Wolf to find a replacement, and returned to his old job.

  Here he was now, then, a virgin operative finally preparing to enter active duty. A two-man venture had become a one-man job, meaning he would have to do all the legwork, a handler to himself, self-taught and self-run. Impossible, perhaps, and certainly risky. Just ask Lothar.

  The rear door of the dacha opened. Dorn stepped outside with Karola behind him, her face unreadable in the shadow of the threshold.

  “I will be in touch as the investigation demands,” the policeman said. “If you learn anything about Krauss’s whereabouts…”

  “Of course. I will cooperate fully.”

  Dorn nodded and headed toward the lake. Emil watched until he was out of sight. He got out his pack of cigarettes yet again, lit one, watched it sputter out, then relit it and inhaled deeply. For today, at least, old habits were officially still in play.

  Emil was back on the clock, except now he was his own boss, fighting for his own cause, a patriot of his own private republic—an isolated spy, quite alone, with winter upon him. He gazed disdainfully at the burning cigarette, and then tossed it to the ground.

  6

  Bettina’s eyes were the first thing Emil had noticed about her on the night they met, thirty-three years earlier in a Berlin café. Now they were the only way she could speak to him. One blink for yes, two for no, with a wide range of emotions forever swimming deeper in those pools of blue. They were his last available portal to her thoughts, his best remaining refuge from his own.

  Sometimes he believed he could translate everything she was trying to tell him, just from the shimmer of her cornea, the quiver of her iris, the dilation of a pupil. Other times he was equally certain these powers were illusory.

  Now, with Lieutenant Dorn having just departed, Emil believed he was detecting fear, or at least apprehension. He leaned closer and spoke softly.

  “Did you hear any of what the policeman and I were talking about?”

  Bettina blinked once.

  “All of it?”

  Two blinks.

  “Would you like to know more about what has happened this morning, my love?”

  One blink—but slowly, perhaps reluctantly.

  He checked over his shoulder for Karola, who was straightening up in the kitchen as she prepared to go off duty. He took Bettina’s hand and whispered, watching intently to make sure she was comprehending every word.

  “Lothar Fischer has been shot to death. It happened down by the lake. I don’t know who did it, but I intend to find out. I am not in any danger, nor are you and Karola, but I will be keeping some odd hours for the next few days, and I may have to be away from you more than I’d like. So do not worry about me if my routines change, all right?”

  She waited a few seconds and blinked once. Her breathing was a little quicker, her gaze unwavering. Then she blinked again, slowly, as if to affirm her readiness for whatever came next.

  He squeezed her hand, nodded, and bent down to kiss her lightly on the lips. A smell of soap, meaning Karola had bathed her. His eyes watered at the thought of her helpless body, naked and wet, the slack muscles that no longer worked. He sighed and was angry with himself for having to blink back a tear. This was a moment to offer a brave face, a resolute smile. He placed her hand back at her side and released it. She exhaled slowly.

  “Whatever I do from here on out, it is for our future. Maybe that is how I should have always acted, but that is how I will act now. Not for the state. For us.”

  Her eyes watched him as he stood.

  Bettina had entered the “locked in” phase of her illness nearly a year ago—a vibrant mind shut inside an unresponsive body. At the onset of her symptoms, five years earlier, she had begun to stumble, drop things, feel fatigued. Her mouth would suddenly ref
use to function, unable to form a certain word. Then came the tests, the consultations, and the agony of learning what was ahead. She had last been able to speak eleven months ago.

  Emil now found himself confiding in her more than ever about his deeper feelings, a phenomenon that troubled him. Why hadn’t he done more of that before? He supposed his job was to blame, his bosses with their insistence on professional secrecy. A ministry where everyone was always looking over everyone else’s shoulder. The irony now was that his wife had become an unassailably secure source. No one on the planet was better equipped to keep his secrets. Yet for all that, he would not—could not—tell her everything about what he was up to now.

  When the events of November 9 had occurred—the crowds, the sledgehammers, the breach in the Wall, the TV lights illuminating everything for an astonished world—they had watched together as it unfolded on television, although some of it they could watch and hear through their windows. Upon returning from his own sorties into the streets of Berlin he had related to her in vivid detail everything he’d witnessed, as if it were the latest chapter in a radio serial. Even as he spoke, he was never quite sure how he was supposed to be feeling. Apprehension certainly, and repudiation. But there was also a sense of excitement, and even of vindication. Both took him by surprise.

  They shouldn’t have, he decided later. Emil had long since grown skeptical of the ideals that officially guided his work, his daily activities. Even with their privileged status, the state had become an overbearing presence in their lives. It had begun to rankle years earlier, during their futile visits to fertility clinics—so many forms to fill out, so many intrusive questions, all of those people who forever needed to know more. Buy a book and someone always had to know which one, and then made a note of it. Make a phone call and you assumed it was overheard. Say something critical, even in passing or in jest, and perhaps someone would get the wrong idea. If you heard nothing about it later, was that good or was that worrisome?

  Surely others, even in leadership, must have reacted this way? Emil hadn’t foreseen the system’s collapse—who could have?—but the widening gap between the party’s slogans and the reality on the street had been evident for anyone who wasn’t either blind or a fool.

  So if Emil had experienced relief in watching those sledgehammers do their work, then so be it, and he had imparted some of that excitement to Bettina in his account of the night’s events.

  The return messages from her eyes had been equally complex—pupils that widened in surprise; a little shock, a little uncertainty, but mostly a sense of wonder that also was evident in her pulse. Everything that they had depended on for decades had crumbled in a single night, but they couldn’t help but notice that even the light looked different now, and the shadows were not quite as dark.

  The other surprise was Emil’s sense of detachment as he watched the structures of the state collapse. All the battles he had fought for his country had in effect been on foreign soil, even though he had always worked from Berlin. Their operatives and agents had worked in Bonn, in Munich, the Ruhr, or scattered across Western Europe and the United States, and by focusing on them perhaps he had always averted his eyes from many events closer to home. That sense of distance had protected him, he supposed. Maybe it had also blinded him. Perhaps that was true for Bettina as well.

  Karola’s voice called to him from the great room.

  “Are you ready?”

  Bettina’s pupils dilated. She liked and trusted Karola. And why not? The two women had become close friends well before Bettina’s illness. They’d met on a lakeshore walk many summers ago, just after Karola had lost her husband, a farmer, to a heart attack. He’d been digging post holes on a far corner of the state’s acreage.

  To Emil’s shame—or maybe that was too strong of a word—there were additional reasons he was grateful to have Karola close at hand, ones more directly beneficial to him. And, yes, he and his wife had discussed even that topic in their own halting manner, with Emil fumbling for words while she blinked along, dry-eyed and rational and supportive.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Bettina blinked once, then shut her eyes.

  * * *

  · · ·

  Emil opened the gate to his driveway and started his boxy, mustard-colored Wartburg for the short ride to Karola’s house. She asked her first question before he had even backed into the rutted dirt lane.

  “How serious is this for you?”

  He looked over to read her face and was relieved to detect concern but not suspicion.

  “One could take that question in a lot of different ways.”

  The vehemence of her reply took him by surprise.

  “I’m not a damn policeman, Emil. He was your friend, so I’m worried for you, whether you had anything to do with it or not.”

  “Well, I didn’t, so you can stop worrying on that count.”

  “Good. I’m glad. But if someone wanted to kill Lothar…”

  Her words trailed off. The car bounced through a pothole that made the springs wheeze. A startled deer took off through the trees to their left. Emil braked to a halt, put the car in neutral, and took her hand. She started to pull away, then relented and squeezed his fingers.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I suppose that everyone in my line of work is vulnerable in some way now, although I’ll confess this shocked me.”

  “Do you think it was foreigners? Westerners maybe?”

  He shook his head.

  “All their interest now is in keeping us alive for our information. Even Dorn knows that.”

  “Well, I didn’t. For years I’ve been hearing how everyone on the other side—the CIA, MI6, NATO, all of them—were the sworn enemies of people like you.”

  He released her hand, put the car back into gear, and slowly accelerated.

  “They always said the same things about us, you know. Talking about what a threat we were to their way of life. It was a narrative that suited both sides, especially whenever budgets were being discussed.”

  “Are you saying it wasn’t true?”

  “Certainly we were always in competition. But would we have shot one of them, or them one of us? No. The only poor souls who ever got killed were the ones caught in the middle. The messengers and the cutouts. The bystanders. And those kinds of rules never change.”

  He glanced over to see her staring coldly.

  “Were you always this cynical about your work?”

  He sighed and looked straight ahead.

  “I’ve been learning all sorts of new things about myself, it seems.”

  “Then maybe he did kill himself. Because if you feel this way…”

  “Yes. I suppose it’s possible.”

  He didn’t really, not in the least, and not with that gun in the wrong hand. But if the idea eased her worries, then fine.

  They reached the end of the dirt lane and pulled onto a narrow paved road that ran past open fields and more forest. Nearby was a sad little golf course surrounded by chain-link fencing. A mile farther on was a small military barracks with an underground bunker that had been built years before as a shelter for the state’s top leaders, in case of nuclear war. From all the remote quietness, you never would’ve guessed that Berlin was only a half hour’s drive away. Hardly any traffic ever passed down this highway.

  Emil had bought their lot and paid for construction of the dacha in the 1970s, but he supposed that just about everything else around here—the farms, the golf course, the HVA safe house, even the bunker—would become part of a huge liquidation sale of state assets, a matter already being discussed in Bonn and Berlin.

  “Have you started thinking yet about what all of this might mean for us?” Karola asked.

  Emil was about to say something about the real estate market before he realized she was still talking about the murder, and
their status as a couple—or, as a man and a woman in some sort of complex relationship, however ill-defined.

  “I don’t think that anything happening in the country right now, here or elsewhere, will change our…our situation. You know my thoughts on that, Karola. Whenever I think of you, what I mostly feel, after the pleasure and gratitude, is guilt.”

  “It’s what she wants for you.”

  “I know. You’ve told me. So has Bettina, in her way. To my eternal embarrassment.”

  Karola smiled. She was always amused by his discomfort with these conversations. Emil supposed he was in love with both of them, although he was still uneasy about how it had all come about—more a result of discussions between the two women than anything he had ever asked for. Perhaps he should stop questioning it.

  “When will you need me next?”

  She always made it sound like such a loaded question. Or maybe he was imagining it.

  “I think we’ll need you for some extra hours in the coming week, if you can arrange it. Maybe some overnights. So while you’re home you should pack a bag and get your affairs in order for that.”

  “My affairs, yes.”

  “You know that’s not how I meant it.”

  She was smiling again, so he smiled back, even though his heart wasn’t in it. They were approaching the turnoff to her house.

  Prenden was a cluster of a few dozen farmhouses and barns at a picturesque bend in the road. Some of them had been built centuries ago, with plastered walls and timber beams. Shaggy goats and sheep kept watch over its narrow lanes, the rams with full sets of curled horns. Karola’s one-story house had a small lawn with a plum tree and berry bushes. It sat at the end of a cobblestone alley opposite a timbered medieval shed that leaned three ways at once. Bright green moss covered its wood shingle roof.

  Emil, a solid proponent of rational thought, had nonetheless always sensed that the little village was enchanted. Sometimes at dusk he would not have been at all surprised to see elves and dwarves come strolling down the lane. But this morning the usual view was ruined by the sight of Dieter Krauss’s car, a black sedan, parked on the verge just after the turnoff, only thirty yards from Karola’s house.