Secret Father (29 page)

Charlotte snapped the toothpick in two, an involuntary reaction.

I checked my watch. It was not yet five. "Take us there, Hans."

Krone shook his head. "No. I have never met Erhardt there. He would be under immediate suspicion."

"Not if I'm with you. The office in charge of everything concerned with foreigners—where else should an American father go if his son has disappeared in East Berlin?"

"But if I—"

"You are my local factotum, Hans. Is that not so?"

It was a humiliating designation, but just then it was accurate. Hans, nodding, even welcomed it. He raised his beer to his mouth and chugged. How far he'd come from the cozy urbanity with which he'd greeted us at Tempelhof.

"Let's go," I said when Krone's stein hit the table. This time he wiped his upper lip with his sleeve.

He and I started to get up, but Charlotte stopped us. "I can't," she said.

She held the two halves of the toothpick, each one between a forefinger and thumb, pressing against the splinters.

"I cannot go with you there. It is impossible."

I settled back into my chair. "You are Rick's mother. They know who he is. It tells them nothing new if you come." If you don't come, I added to myself, that tells them something, too. But what?

She shook her head. That was it.

"Then go to the hotel," I said.

"Yes." She was no more surprised by my authority than I was.

I asked Krone, "What hotel did you say?"

"The Kempinski. On the Ku'damm. The car will be waiting at Friedrichstrasse. The driver will take you."

She nodded, put the toothpick halves neatly in the ashtray, then picked up her gold cigarette lighter and dropped it in her purse.

I said, "Why don't you wait here for a few minutes after we leave. If only one person is following, he will have come after us."

"It does not matter," she said, slipping a tan glove onto her left hand. "I am accustomed to the shadows of watchers." She tugged on the second glove, then glanced at Krone. "Perhaps they will take me for a
mozhnos.
"

If this was a test, Krone no longer cared. He looked at me. "A swallow," he said. "A Soviet term for what your CIA calls a 'sister.' A female who lures an agent." Krone turned back to Charlotte. "Unless, of course, the agent being lured is female."

"A 'crow,' in that case," she said with a bitterness I had not seen. "I will go and sit in the Tiergarten. I will look at the trees that were gifts from the queen of England, and that my little boy helped to plant. Then..."She looked directly at me, her expression transformed by dependency. She brushed a strand of hair away from her face, an elegantly unselfconscious move with which she brushed away her need, becoming once more a self-possessed patrician lady. "...I will wait for you at the hotel."

"And Cummings?" I asked.

"The initiative is his. Presumably he will have learned what we have learned. Meanwhile, he assumes I am being followed." She said this with a hard glance at Krone. "I will protect the truth of what I am—not an agent, a mother."

"Consistent with that," I said, "you could come with me."

"To Schloss Pankow? Impossible."

Why? But I knew not to ask in front of Krone. Whatever he was to me—and I wasn't sure—he was something else entirely to her.

Krone started, a sudden recognition. "Ah. I booked only one room. Under the name Montgomery."

She looked quickly at me. Was she thinking of the scene later when her husband would call and find her in another man's hotel room?

It was just that prospect that had prompted Krone's abrupt disclosure. Even now, to him, anything was possible between me and this world-weary, mysterious woman. Was that a measure of a Berliner's implicit moral anarchy, which came with life lived on the edge of an abyss? Or was it tied to a Berliner's knack for reading what was written on the air? A hotel room, a rendezvous between two anguished people, the movement of fear into the realm of desire. Whatever such things were to Krone, what were they to me?

Charlotte nodded, snapping shut her purse and saying under her breath, "
Sehr gute.
" Then she turned to me and said, "It is better if I do not use the name Healy. Better if I leave all my names behind."

"Right. You can take the room. I will call you later. If your husband calls—"

She stopped me. "I will be calling him."

"Of course," I said, sounding like a perfect fool. But it was not my puerile imagination when her suddenly wet eyes stayed with mine for an instant longer than necessary.

S
CHLOSS PANKOW
, Krone explained as we approached it, was the former palace of Prince Elector Joachim II. He pronounced the name as if I would know it. The building, he said, was an exceptional example of early-nineteenth-century architecture. Krone had sublimated his anxiety again in the pose of a tour guide. Or was it his anxiety that was itself the pose?

The palace, he said, was built to resemble a stone castle of a much earlier time, with towers, turrets, and crenelated rooflines. One wing was deliberately left unfinished, to evoke the ruins of the Middle Ages—a hallmark of the Romantic period. "The odd thing," he said, "is that when the Soviets reconstructed the
Schloss,
they restored the ruins, too, which is quite a joke in West Berlin. Stasi and its brand-new ruins."

It had taken us perhaps ten minutes to go by S-Bahn east from Friedrichstrasse to a stop marked Heinerdorf, in the heart of the Soviet zone. From there it was another ten by foot to Schloss Pankow. En route we passed a new cemetery on one side of the rough avenue, and on the other the stucco buildings of a hospital complex. Both the cemetery and the hospital had been built on the formerly sprawling parkland of the palace estate.

A spiked iron fence set off what remained of the palace grounds from the avenue. A guard booth marked the entrance, and as we approached, a soldier stepped out. He wore a crisply pressed gray uniform, a steel helmet, and the golden epaulettes of some elite unit. He held a machine gun in his left arm.

Krone, with the panache of one empowered by another's authority, went right up to the guard, handing over his own visa and my passport. I missed most of what Krone said, but I heard his reference to Colonel Erhardt, which was enough to prompt the guard to hand back our documents and wave us through. I glanced back to see him return to his booth and pick up his phone.

We crossed into what would once have been an elaborate terraced garden but now was a large, crudely paved parking lot running up to the huge building. The lot was full. Some cars were the olive green of state officialdom, some had police lights on their roofs, all were unimpressive minis. Yet these cars were the height of luxury in East Berlin.

The building was four stories high and, despite its provenance, was far more hulking than palatial. The monotony of its dark granite façade was broken by large windows. Archers' slits between each pair of windows had been filled in with daubed cement. From a central tower flew the red flag of the DDR, and from several smaller towers other flags fluttered in the early evening breeze. As we drew into the building's shadow, I felt the temperature drop, the chill onset of night. Out of the fading sunlight, the
Schloss
seemed especially sinister. I thought of Kafka, and the weak grasp I had on the false confidence of my stride.

Far to the right, jutting out from the main part of the building, were the "ruins," a faux-Gothic remnant of wall with an archway that led, from what I could see, nowhere. The wall was anchored by a half-built Norman keep, a folly whose whimsy seemed out of place in East Berlin. From the tower a huge banner hung, showing the goateed, unsmiling face of Walter Ulbricht.

Soon we were at a second guard station, where two more members of the military elite stood with their machine guns. Before Krone spoke, one of them waved us through.

We crossed a planked drawbridge traversing the vestige of a moat. Like the paved-over garden behind us, the ditch had been flattened and shoddily lined with asphalt. On second glance, I saw that the drawbridge was no Romantic relic. Its hinges were wet with oil, so the bridge could be pulled up to seal the entrance against the onrush not of an invading army but of an unleashed mob. The thing to fear most was a population deprived of automobiles, even small ones.

We went through the open archway into a tunnel that led into a spacious inner courtyard the size, say, of a country club's set of tennis courts. The image was prompted, no doubt, by the startling sight of close-cropped grass carpeting the area. The grass was split by the neat, pebbled driveway on which we entered. The surrounding walls seemed made of windows. A border of flowering shrubs lined the courtyard. Benches sat every few dozen yards all around, but they were unoccupied. Indeed, not a soul was anywhere to be seen. Kafka indeed. All the drivers of the cars outside, all the bureaucrats at desks and file cabinets behind the windows, all the apparatchiks and commissars, where were they?

In the far right corner of the rectangular courtyard were gently flapping tarps attached to lumber scaffolding; apparently the restoration was still under way in that section of the building. The canvas tarps covered the façade there, its four full stories. The horizontal roofline at that point was interrupted by the lone upright figure of a sentry standing with his weapon, looking toward us. Even across the distance, his cool observing eye intimidated, and I focused on what was before us.

The driveway led to a surprisingly modest doorway in the center of the
Schloss.
As we approached, our feet crunched the gravel, an overly loud sound to my ear. Sure enough, there was movement behind a row of ground-level windows to the right. When Krone saw me turn toward the windows, he said quietly, "The barracks of the Dzerzhinski Guard, the Stasi SS. They are not here to guard against you Americans or us West Germans, but against citizens of the glorious Socialist republic. They want you to see them watching you."

"And you, Hans," I muttered.

"It is the
feeling
of being watched that keeps the East the East. A feeling that belongs to dreams, but not here."

"You know about the barracks because you've been here before? Or was that a dream?"

He did not answer.

"Hans, you said you never meet Erhardt here."

"Erhardt is not my only client, Paul. Now, do you actually desire to discuss this right into the building? Or can you trust me?"

"I don't have a choice, do I?"

He stopped. "Look. Chase Manhattan engaged my services. You depend on me for ties to Berlin finance. Berlin is not Vatican City. Berlin finance is not the Holy Office, and I am not the Virgin Mary. Which is precisely why Chase Manhattan depends on me. You either cease pretending otherwise, or we halt this enterprise right here."

"I take your point. But I am depending on you to level with me."

"Nothing I have told you is false."

"But you don't tell me everything."

He laughed. "Until now, that is why you paid me so well."

"Right. Until now. And one other thing, Hans. The Holy Office—isn't that the Inquisition? Where they burned heretics?"

"Yes. And Jews." He stared at me hard, almost scornfully, as if I were Roman Catholic. Then he grinned, slapped my arm, and set us walking again.

We were soon in a spacious entrance hall, at a desk, with Krone once more presenting our documents to a guard, who pointedly compared the photographs with our faces.

There was razor wire in the way the man looked at us. He never uttered a word. Then he stood and disappeared with our papers through an adjacent door. Some moments passed. I became aware of a faint, acrid aroma in the air. I worked to identify it—the smell of stale ash, the blowback of an aged coal burner, cinders falling from the sky, the aftermath of some inflamed astonishment—or not. Something mundane, more likely.

Out of restlessness, I surveyed the once grand foyer. Plaster moldings on the walls and ceiling, reliefs, and fluted faux columns topped by Corinthian capitals—all the elaborate work had been lost in a careless overcoat of dull beige paint. I noticed a large bronze plaque on the wall opposite the doorway. It had clearly been mounted after the walls had been painted over. With a small stand holding a vase of fresh flowers before it, the ornamented metal plate—about four feet wide, six feet high—seemed like a shrine or the back of an altar. Names in two columns were engraved below the familiar seal of the DDR. "
Moabiter Märtyrer,
" read the heading above the columns of names. Below were a few lines of text, impossible for me to decipher, but presumably an epigraph extolling heroism. At the very bottom of the plaque, in letters to match the heading, was the date: "
1 Mai, 1945.
"

Krone was beside me. "What's this?" I asked.

"Moabit was a notorious Nazi prison in Lehrter Strasse, long gone, never replaced. It was where they kept the so-called political criminals—KPD, Communists. That is whom this commemorates. The DDR gloriies the Communist anti-Nazis as the founders of the Socialist state. The only Germans who fought Hitler." There was sarcasm in his voice.

"And why not glorify them?"

Krone shrugged. "Moabit was a spa compared to Buchenwald." He tossed his head toward the columns of names and at the same time touched the back of my neck with his forefinger. "Who would not prefer a bullet in the back of the neck to choking asphyxiation, naked, befouled, in the crush of a gas chamber?"

At that, he turned and strode back to the desk. Such an emotional expression was rare for him, I sensed, but I found it perplexing. To me, Nazi victims were alike in being Nazi victims. But was it so simple for Jews? For Communists? Could the victims be in competition? Degrees of victimhood? Certainly no American had the right to ask such questions.

But what about that date, May Day 1945? Wasn't May 1 the date of Hitler's suicide? The day before the Soviets overran Berlin? A riddle in time: What happened on that single day of Berlin's interregnum?

I glanced toward Krone, wanting to ask what was being commemorated here, but his back was to me, and I hesitated. I looked again at the plaque, the text, but my mulish mind could not translate most of the German. Several words registered—no more.