Secret Father (31 page)

"Three Americans," I said.

Erhardt looked again at the page. "No, two. A man and a woman."

"There are two boys and a girl."

"No. My information is otherwise. Perhaps it is that the second boy was not arrested."

Krone touched me. "If they counted the one as a native of Leipzig, he would not be in an
Ausländer
report."

I looked sharply at Krone. Why was he bringing up Leipzig? "He's an American citizen."

"I am only speaking to the possibility—"

I turned back to Erhardt. "
Three
American children."

Erhardt shrugged. "I have no record of three. You will have to take it up with the
Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung.
I have done what I can do. I have done too much."

"I am not waiting until Monday."

"Herr Montgomery, your son stands accused of violating the laws of the
Deutsche Demokratische Republik.
I said a moment ago that this is a minor violation. But perhaps I spoke inaccurately. It is better to say that there are no minor violations of the law in this nation. We take the law as serious—"

I slammed my ist on his desk. "Don't give me this garbage, Colonel! You have kidnapped these Americans. I want them released."

"Nothing occurs until Monday."

"I want to see them. I demand to see them. I demand that you arrange for me to see them."

"You perhaps must then take this up with the American consulate, as you said." Erhardt's finger went back into the fold of his empty sleeve.

It was as if Krone took that slight gesture as a signal. He touched my arm, then leaned over the edge of Erhardt's desk. "As one Berliner to another, Colonel; as a man appealing to your sympathetic heart—let me ask you to use your influence on behalf of these young people, on behalf of this father. I know you can help. I am asking you to help as a fellow Berliner."

Erhardt said nothing for a long time. I could hear the Russian breathing from his place across the room, and I was sure Erhardt could hear it, too. Finally, he stood. His desk chair clattered back. He looked at me and said, "We do not want an 'incident,' as you term it. I will learn more. I will inquire about a visit to your son—"

"All three," I said. "I want to see all three."

"Out of respect for your position, Herr Montgomery, I will do this."

Krone handed Erhardt a business card. "I will await your call."

Without looking at it, Erhardt put the card on the sheet of paper on his desk.

That was it.

I wasn't sure it was enough, but it was all we were going to get. Krone and I turned and crossed toward the door. By the time we reached it, the Russian was there ahead of us, pulling it open. We walked through without breaking stride. The Russian slipped ahead of us and led us back the way we'd come, with the soldier following.

 

Downstairs in the foyer, I stopped Krone. The Russian, having held a door, was several paces behind. "Hans, before we leave, I want you to ask this man where Michael is."

"He will not tell us."

"Ask him."

Krone, dutiful assistant, did as he was told. That gave me the moment I wanted to step across to the bronze plaque I had noticed before. I focused on the explanatory paragraph, looking for the words that had faintly registered in my brain. I saw them now.

Von Siedelheim.

The name was buried in the account of the
Moabiter Märtyrer,
in the next-to-last sentence of the paragraph, near the bottom of the plaque.

Von Siedelheim—a martyr in 1945, in Berlin.

Von Siedelheim—the name of the man I had seen murdered only last Monday in that Frankfurt lecture hall. I had replayed the instant of savage violence again and again, the torpedo striking below the waterline of my already listing mind. But now, what had reasonably been taken to be a neo-Nazi assassination in Frankfurt was stripped of political meaning, coming into view as telltale white bubbles streaking toward my son.

Krone joined me. "He has nothing to say."

But he did. The Russian snapped a word in our direction. "
Bitte!
" A command. He was pointing at the door.

Krone pulled me.

We went out into the night. Light from windows on all four sides of us—the Stasi graveyard shift—established the margins of our passage, made it possible to see.

The soldier behind us remained at the doorway as we moved into the unlit courtyard across which, in a rectangle of light by his sentry box, another soldier waited, watching.

With the slow, steady gaze of an officer scanning the ocean's horizon from the bridge, I took the measure of the eerie world of Schloss Pankow at night. But inside I was trying to grasp the implications of what I had just seen.

Von Siedelheim. My mind flashed again with the image of that tall, handsomely balding aristocrat taking a bullet in the back of the neck, the crack of the single pistol shot, the shocked intake of breath of a thousand witnesses, the spurt ofblood from the man's exploded face as he fell forward on the lectern.

I stopped walking.

We were in the center of the courtyard. Krone continued on for a couple of paces, his shoes crunching the gravel. Then he stopped and came back to me. The pair of sentries watched from opposite ends of the driveway. The dark silhouette of the crenelated building, with flags still flying from its towers, loomed over us. But we were alone.

"Paul," he said urgently, "we must get out of here."

"What was it you said about a bullet in the back of the neck?"

Krone looked impatient, resentful. My question made no sense to him, but he stifled his reaction.

"At Moabit. Bullet to the back of the neck, you said."

"Yes. The favored way Nazis executed political criminals. Traitors were hanged. Jews were gassed. A method for every category of enemy of the Reich. The KPD took it as a point of pride to be shot in the neck."

"Shot from behind?"

"Yes."

"And what day was the fire?"

"What?"

"The fire here, when Sohlmann died. When was it?"

"Tuesday night, Wednesday morning."

A day after the shooting of von Siedelheim, events connected by a name on the wall, a name on a bankers' program in Frankfurt. Markus von Siedelheim—a developer of trade with impoverished Africa—martyred, it was coming clear, by racist neo-Nazis.

And this other von Siedelheim, this earlier one, martyred, too. A Communist murdered by the racist Nazis who started it all.

To leave all my names behind
—Charlotte Healy's words came back to me. I felt a surge of hatred for General Healy for leaving her unprotected, but his reaction—"national security"—at last made a kind of sense. The murder in Frankfurt had set an emergency in motion, I saw that much now.

And whatever Healy was protecting—a roll of film?—it was not his wife and not her son.

Overhead, the dark sky was full of stars, a measure of how little light the city of Berlin threw even now. I was suddenly aware of the vast infinite wonder of the night canopy. I could have been on the bridge of my ship on that blowing ocean. On the dock by the lake. I was in the presence of some unseen reality, conscious as I was both of the negative strike of my anger at Healy and of a fresh desire to consecrate my life, as if for the first time. To what? The rescue of Michael, that was all.

"All right," I said to Krone, "let's go."

But he had just put his hand firmly against my chest. "Whatever you are thinking, Paul, be careful. If Erhardt is helping us, it is not because of me or what I can bring against him. It is because he needs something, needs it desperately, with the KGB pressing him—and he thinks you can bring it to him."

"What?"

"You tell me."

And there was the reason for my anger at General Healy. Erhardt wanted what Healy had, and Healy's wife, her son, a girl named Kit, and my son were caught in its snare, whatever it was. National security? A roll of film? The coming crisis of border closure? A May 1 anniversary of 1945? The cause of a mortal fire in the devil's own sanctum sanctorum? Charlotte's fear of the name Sohlmann? What?

Each question was its separate prick oflight in the radical dark, like the stars above. Yet I could not imagine the design, the architecture, what gave those lights the order of constellation. In my ignorance, would I lead Colonel Erhardt to the cosmic secret, with Hans Krone as the guide? Was he my Virgil or theirs?

All I knew for sure was that in America's valiant war against brutal, godless communism, Charlotte and Rick were on their own, and with them so was Michael. The snare was tied to some long-dead martyr, a man still bound to America's enemy, and therefore mine. He was a man whose family was somehow still at risk.

Markus von Siedelheim, murdered on Monday, assassinated, executed.

Von Siedelheim. Completing the name I had just read on the bronze plaque, not Markus, was
Wolf.

T
HAT FIRST NIGHT
they kept us in a small room in a big house someplace near a railroad crossing, which we knew because there were regular blasts of a locomotive whistle right through until midnight, plaintive wailing sounds that could have been coming from our own throats, we were so afraid.

Kit and I were together, but not with Ulrich. We had been interrogated again, one at a time, in the early evening, in a musty basement room of the same house, and Ulrich, after they took him away for his turn, had never come back. The woman who brought us a tray of food—again soup and bread—told us he was being held in another part of the house, but that was all she would say. We worried that Ulrich was the one in real trouble because, as Kit put it at one point, the trigger was his bag and the gun was his father. Stepfather, I corrected her.

Being with Kit kept me from going insane, although before the night was over, I was sure I had slipped into a dream state in which everything that happened, bad and the unexpected good, was imagined. Even now, in relating the events of that frightful yet exotic night from the vantage of a mundane middle age, I find it hard to believe I am referring to what happened to me.

They arrested us at the transit point in a subway station. Before crossing from West to East Berlin, Josef Tramm had instructed us in how to fill out the temporary visa applications. He was standing beside us when the East German policemen began their search, and at first he acted like our protector, with a few gruff exchanges in German, as if announcing us as VIPs. The police ignored him. They made Kit take off her father's khaki field jacket, which Tramm protested, but when they then searched its flap pockets and handed it back to her, I realized that they had not wanted to risk touching her breasts. The
Vopos
were not much older than we were.

They searched Ulrich's bag with no special show of interest. I watched as they turned to the zippered side pocket, which I had seen Tramm search the night before. Even in my paranoia, I had not imagined that they would find a white envelope that held a wad of dollars—twenties and tens. The shocked look on Ulrich's face, his immediate denying exclamation in German, told me what I already knew. When I turned to look at Tramm, he was gone.

Of course, it was cash Ulrich had not declared on his visa application. He continued his protesting denials as Kit and I exchanged a stupefied look. Stupefied and stupid. Her dark, wide eyes were always ready to be surprised, yet this time they showed her absolute bafflement. This was so, as she told me later, because in her anxiety she had pictured just such a thing. And now it had actually happened! She stepped toward me, took my arm in her firm grip, and whispered, "Damn, Monty, damn!"

One of the
Vopos
took Ulrich's arm, but Ulrich shook him off, looking wildly around—looking for Tramm, I knew. A second policeman moved in on him. Kit and I backed away. The
Vopos
took Ulrich's arms again, and now when he struggled one produced a nightstick out of nowhere and brought it down on Ulrich's head.

Ulrich staggered but didn't go down. Both policemen began to beat him, a succession of quick blows to his face and head, one using the stick, the other his fist. I had never seen such mayhem, and my reaction was only visceral. "Hey," I said, and unconsciously raised my cane, pointing at the nearer policeman as if it were a weapon. He slammed the nightstick against my cane, knocking it out of my hand. It clattered loudly on the floor, bouncing away.

He turned back to Ulrich and clubbed him once more. Ulrich slumped, out cold, as the other
Vopo
held him. Blood streamed down his face. My arms were jerked together behind my back by someone I did not see. I saw an expression of pure terror on Kit's face. I wanted her to look at me, but the blood on Ulrich had seized her, and I knew that, as horrible as this was for me, it was even worse for her. Why did I sense that? She had seen blood like this before.

Suddenly Kit was pulled away, out of my field of vision, all of this accompanied by German imperatives—the language, to my ear, never more itself. My arms were yoked behind me by a set of manacles closed around the bones above my elbows, causing an excruciating pain in the nerves and muscles there. As I was being hauled away, my eyes went to the crowd of people who had witnessed our arrest, Germans from West Berlin as well as from East Berlin, faces that would come to mind years later when I read of that famous bystander detachment.

Behind the people was the tunnel entrance through which, only moments before, we had come from the subway into the cavernous transit hall. Now I saw a man making his way against the flow of May Day traffic pouring out of that tunnel, and I knew that it was Tramm, heading back to West Berlin, his job done. We never saw him again.

In short order, Kit, Ulrich, and I were thrown into the back of a windowless van, all three manacled in the same way, but with Ulrich still unconscious, bleeding.

When the
Vopos
slammed the doors shut on us, we were plunged into darkness. The stench of fresh vomit filled my nostrils, and for a moment I feared that I, like some recent occupant of the van, was about to puke. When I successfully stifled the nausea, I felt the power of my own will, what we called in those days mind over matter. To my surprise I thought, I can do this.