Winter Work Page 8

  Claire asked again about the logistics of crossing in and out of East Berlin now that the Wall was breached. He filled her in on the latest. But as they neared the bottom of their glasses he decided to at least take a stab at articulating his thoughts on where his life had led him. Maybe he was feeling fatherly. Or maybe he was just curious, because Claire had always struck him as someone worth knowing better.

  “So, any men in your life?”

  “Why’s that always the question every guy eventually asks?”

  “Is it? Well it’s not some sort of ham-handed pass, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t. But would you be asking a male colleague that kind of question?”

  “Five years ago? No way. Now? I kind of wish someone had asked me back when it might have made a difference.”

  Her expression softened.

  “I don’t go begging for company, if that’s your worry. I lead quite the full life in Paris. In fact, there’s one man in particular who I am sure is missing me as we speak.”

  “And are you missing him?”

  “I will be in an hour or so.”

  Baucom laughed along with her, even as he couldn’t help but picture her later in her hotel room, undressing for bed as she thought of her lover in Paris. He pushed away that image and swallowed more beer.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. Or not that much. And they do tend to come and go. Men, I mean.”

  “Your doing or theirs?”

  “They seem to think it’s mine.”

  “This work will do that. The travel, the isolation. And the trust issues alone, well…”

  She nodded in sympathy.

  “You spend entire months building a personal façade and concealing the real you, then in your downtime you’re supposed to open up to somebody you’ve just met? How’s that supposed to work? Your glass is empty, want another round?”

  “No. But go ahead.”

  “God, no. Haven’t had this much beer since college. I’ll be peeing till two in the morning.”

  He laughed and reached for the tab, but she grabbed it first and motioned for the waiter.

  “Let Paris station pick this up. Besides, you’ll be earning it tomorrow.”

  “And beyond then?”

  “Good question. Let’s see how it goes.”

  And now he was watching from the tram stop as dusk approached, with today’s Berliner Zeitung unfolded in his lap. He wore a fraying wool overcoat, black wool pants, clunky brown shoes, and a gray flat cap, which made him look like one of those old men who sold hot chestnuts from dented chrome carts.

  Taking stock of his surroundings, he noticed that flourishes of color and Westernized glitz were already sprouting on the wider boulevards like this one. The bench opposite him was plastered with a red ad for West cigarettes. The slogan read like a cheeky taunt: “Taste the West!”

  Baucom supposed it wouldn’t be much longer before discarded burger wrappers from McDonald’s would be blowing around his ankles. The signs of rapid change had been even more prevalent at Potsdamer Platz, where he’d crossed over without even being stopped.

  That had felt strange, and other crossings were reopening every week. Long-shuttered “ghost stations” on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines were stirring to life after years of disuse, as city transit workers began restitching the wounds of division. The station at Anhalter Bahnhof still looked like a time capsule from the end of the Nazi era, an echoing vault of white tiles and Gothic lettering, still smudged with the grime of the 1940s.

  After walking through the Brandenburg Gate an hour earlier he had passed Soviet soldiers selling watches, uniforms, mess kits, rifle scopes, and other military items recently stripped from their barracks. Word on the street was that, with minimal discretion, you could bargain with some of these fellows for more lethal items stashed in more secure locations a few blocks away, like AK-47s, or even grenade launchers.

  He had taken a roundabout path to the observation post, partly to check for surveillance, partly to see how things looked on the narrower, drearier streets where change would be slower in coming. He still found it hard to imagine how people had lived here, year after year, without going a bit crazy from the drab sameness of it all. Stucco buildings coated in soot, a monochrome gray world where the curbs were lined bumper to bumper by boxy Trabis, the same scene replicated on every block, grim little tunnels that led deeper into dystopia. It even smelled different over here, especially at this time of year—a sour bouquet of coal smoke and boiled vegetables that would cling to his overcoat for days.

  Baucom checked his watch, trying to look like a bored passenger awaiting his tram. Claire was due almost any second. They had agreed the night before that it would be better if he didn’t follow her here.

  “If you acquire an entourage along the way, I’ll have a far better chance of spotting it if I’m not a part of it,” he’d said.

  “And there’s no sense in giving them an easy look at you this early in the game,” Claire said.

  “True for our side as much as for theirs. I’m not too keen on losing my pension over an unauthorized involvement in a sensitive op.”

  They had agreed that at the first sign of any CIA personnel, Baucom would quietly depart the playing field and melt into the background. If Ward had secretly provided for backups, then his role would not only be superfluous, but potentially disruptive. He was seeing no sign of that, however, as he watched from the tram stop, waiting for Claire.

  And there she was now, emerging from around the corner at the spot where he had expected to see her, striding at an unhurried pace up Karl-Marx-Allee, with three blocks to go.

  She was good at this. Baucom felt that instinctively as he watched her stride, her face, the way she carried herself—alert, but not glancing around like someone who felt hunted; a spy in her natural state, meaning watched yet essentially alone. No pursuers yet from either side, or none that he’d been able to spot. It brought his own alertness to the fore, and the old excitement as well.

  Claire reached the block of the café. And that’s when he first saw them, maybe forty yards farther back—two men who had just moved out of hiding. Then a third man stepped into view a block beyond the café. Like Baucom, all three must have been lying in wait, and they were now converging like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Each man was dressed in dark warm-up pants and a black leather coat, plus shiny leather shoes, probably Italian. It was the signature wardrobe of a new breed of Russian mobster that had arisen as the effects of Perestroika began opening the Soviet economy. That, plus the collapse of the Wall, had inevitably drawn these sorts of fellows to East Berlin. But why here, for this meeting? Had the HVA contact hired them as cheap labor, now that his own agency was being dismantled?

  Two of them were younger, late twenties. One had a tattoo on his neck. The third fellow, hanging farther back, looked closer to forty, and was probably the team leader.

  Christ, they were so obvious. It was like they wanted to be noticed, thugs staking a claim to this newly abandoned turf, and to this woman who had dared to enter it. Either they’d known in advance she was coming alone, or they simply didn’t care who spotted them.

  Claire reached the café and disappeared inside. She did not pause to check her purse, meaning she apparently didn’t feel threatened by the recent arrivals—not yet, anyway—because she certainly would have noticed them.

  One of the men behind her continued toward the door. The one in the opposite direction took up an observation post at the news kiosk, the spot where Baucom had planned to go next. The older fellow, the apparent leader, hung back a block away, still not making any effort to blend in.

  His face was vaguely familiar, and Baucom wondered if that was because he was one of the regulars from the big KGB complex down in the suburb of Karlshorst, where the Russia
ns had been based since the end of the war. In 1945 they had shared their barracks with the Red Army and its victorious leader, Field Marshal Zhukov, who became such a celebrated hero that a jealous Stalin got rid of him.

  Baucom checked his watch and began his countdown. Half an hour. If he didn’t see her by then, he was going in. He yawned and stretched, wanting to look as bored as possible, and in doing so allowed himself a look at the apartment buildings behind him, Sovet-style drabness at its worst, yet also an achievement of a sort. The East Germans had managed to construct hundreds of these buildings almost overnight back in the late 1970s.

  On a gloomy day like this the residents tended to keep their blinds drawn to prevent the warmth from bleeding out their poorly insulated windows. Maybe that’s why his eyes were so easily drawn to one particular window in the middle of the sixth floor, where a solitary figure stood in the fading light as if he, too, were watching this scene unfold.

  A passing bus diverted Baucom’s attention. He turned his gaze back toward the café, where the first of Claire’s pursuers was now stepping inside. The second one was still lingering at the newsstand, although he hadn’t bothered to buy anything as a pretext. Yes, they were making a statement. It was a show of force. For his benefit, or someone else’s?

  He shook open his newspaper and watched the doorway of the café from above the pages. No vehicle had yet entered the alley behind the building.

  A creeping sensation of being observed overcame him, but neither of the two Russians was looking his way, nor was their boss down the block. He glanced over his shoulder, up toward the apartment window in the middle of the sixth floor. The shade was now drawn, but not completely.

  Baucom didn’t like being this outnumbered, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. If someone was able to whisk Claire away from here, she’d have only him and the tracking beacon to help her.

  He decided that wasn’t good enough, which meant he needed to start planning some contingencies. Two blocks down, on the opposite side of Frankfurter Allee, he watched a taxi stop at the curb to let out a fare.

  Baucom again checked his watch. Twenty-five minutes to go. He stood, folded his newspaper, and set out across the boulevard.

  11

  Several hours after Claire and Baucom had finished their last beers at Zwiebelfisch, Emil Grimm had headed up a woodland trail near his dacha on the first of two nocturnal errands. It was bitterly cold. A doughnut glaze of ice already coated the shallow end of the lake.

  Night animals stirred as he ascended. A massive owl passed overhead with a gentle throb of wingbeats, which Emil felt more than heard. The underbrush crackled as something on four legs moved off to a safer distance. On the horizon, a new moon came to rest atop the tree line like a clipped thumbnail. Stay out here long enough and he would almost certainly hear the shriek of a fox searching for a mate.

  Emil’s business was just as urgent as that of the fox, he supposed, so he took care to move as quietly as possible as he continued uphill. Earlier scouting had revealed a car parked on the dirt lane about forty yards down from his front gate, a dark Citroën, no doubt manned by one of Krauss’s goons. By now the driver was probably chain-smoking to stay awake as he kept an eye out for Emil’s Wartburg. Emil doubted the fellow would have the initiative to come tramping after him through the woods at this cold and lonely hour, but he assumed nothing.

  A thump to his rear made him stop and switch on his flashlight. The sound repeated itself as the beam settled on a pair of glowing white eyes in the underbrush, shoulder high. Probably a buck, stamping a hoof to warn him off.

  Years of practice had made Emil pretty good at decoding these eerie orbs of light. Pale red eyes lower to the ground usually belonged to a rabbit. Yellow, a raccoon. Green was a housecat, greenish white a fox. Boar eyes didn’t glow at all, which was disconcerting because their poor night vision meant they—and their tusks—were more likely to blunder into you.

  That was how he now thought of Dieter Krauss—as a dangerously equipped creature blundering about in the dark. After their chat near Karola’s house, Emil had watched Krauss’s Volvo loom up in his rearview mirror in a clumsy show of intimidation on his way out of Prenden. He had tested Krauss’s resolve by pulling into a gas station just beyond town. The Volvo had braked, paused, then accelerated onward. Emil watched it turn onto the ramp for the Autobahn as he rolled to a stop by the gas pumps.

  As soon as Krauss was out of sight, Emil went inside the gas station and asked to use the telephone. When the clerk hesitated, Emil showed his Stasi ID. In Berlin the gesture might well have provoked a defiant insult, a snort of derision. Out here it still carried some weight. The clerk put the phone on the counter without a word, and then disappeared into the back as if to wash his hands of the matter. Fine by Emil. It was a call he hadn’t wanted Bettina to overhear, and any additional privacy was a bonus.

  He dialed the number for the police station in Bernau. Dorn wasn’t in, so he left a message.

  “Tell him that his friend from Prenden called and left an address. He’ll know what it means. Ready?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Emil read out the address Krauss had given him for his new base of operations.

  “Tell him that the best time to go is probably around noon, just before lunch, when his target usually heads over to an Imbiss next door. Oh, and one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “He should make sure his evidence technician carefully checks the lining of Lothar Fischer’s jacket.”

  “Noted. Your name and number, sir?”

  “The lieutenant has it.”

  He hung up, pleased by the idea of letting Krauss and Dorn keep each other occupied. He then returned to his dacha, where he fried a leathery schnitzel and made a salad for his own dinner, and then carefully fed Bettina before reading her a short story by Stefan Heym, from a new collection that probably would have been banned only four months earlier. Not everything was worse than before.

  Afterward, he attended to his usual nightly chores for keeping Bettina clean and sanitary, which by now came as naturally to him as doing the dishes. He decided to make an early night of it, turning in at 9:30. It was an easy adjustment out here in the quiet woods. He cranked open his bedroom window a few inches because he liked to sleep in the cold beneath heavy blankets.

  There was a light thump on the roof overhead, and then a skittering sound, like tiny feet. Mice, perhaps, or a squirrel, always a problem in these old wooden dachas, but he was accustomed to it by now.

  After a few hours that felt like only seconds he jolted awake to the chirping of the alarm on his plastic Casio watch. He had set it for 3 a.m., because that was when his Stasi training told him these sorts of errands were most likely to be successful. The Hour of Opportunity, the instructors called it. So here he was, then, out on the prowl.

  Emil switched off the flashlight and listened as the buck sauntered off. Thinking of Krauss made him worry again about two-legged creatures, so he slowly backtracked twenty yards to check for pursuers. Then he stopped to flex his right knee, which had stiffened after the climb. He sniffed the air for cigarettes but detected only the smokiness of his own coat—another reason he never should have lit up earlier that day. Otherwise, the air was sharp and clean, like on a night in the Arctic.

  The big owl called out, four hoots with a rising note at the end. Emil took it as a good omen, the town crier saying all was well. The trail forked at the top of the hill, and he turned left onto a wider path favored by mountain bikers.

  Just ahead, lit dimly by starlight, was the spindly outline of a twenty-foot-high structure built of planks and two-by-fours. It looked like a scale model of a watchtower, a security outpost you’d find at the border. In the night it gleamed black, although it was painted forest green. It was a hunter’s stand, with a ladder leading up to a rough hut with firing slits and a sloped plywood roof.


  Emil and Lothar Fischer had built it seven years ago after securing permission from the local hunting collective. As with all such activities, this one had been strictly regulated. They had filed their design plans with the district forest ranger, who had locked them away at the lodge next to his house, where the collective’s members stored their rifles and ammunition. Technically, any member could use the stand by registering in advance. But once word got around that two Stasi colonels had built it, Emil and Lothar tended to have exclusive use, which was fine with them. Of the two, Lothar was the more frequent and enthusiastic hunter. Emil tended to enjoy the waiting and watching more than the shooting.

  He slowed his pace as he passed to the right of the stand, not daring to stop in case he was being observed. He flicked his flashlight a few times, ostensibly to check the path ahead, and those flickering moments offered just enough light to see that the ground beneath the tower was undisturbed, still covered by pine straw and windblown leaves. The framing around the base was sturdy enough to keep out any boars, and it seemed clear that no human had been poking around.

  So that was one chore done.

  Emil continued to the next trail junction, where he turned left and headed back downhill toward the lake. It was the route Lothar must have taken on his final walk, and within seven or eight minutes Emil reached the yellow crime scene tape. The body was gone, the scene searched and combed. He shivered, probably from the cold, and then checked over his shoulder before resuming his walk. At his rear gate he punched in a security code to enter, and then walked around the house to the nearest bedroom window, where he cupped his hands on the pane to peer inside.

  It was like looking in on a child in a winter slumber. He envied her the warmth of the bed and hoped that she was dreaming of a scene in which her health was restored, her legs strong as she bounded along, laughing, at his side. Emil looked down at the ground to collect himself. His toes were numb, so he stamped his feet twice on the hard ground and set out for his next stop.