Secret Father (37 page)

The soldier behind my father had frozen in place, deferring to him.

Ulrich was crying again. As his mother released him, my father said, "We're going to get you out, Rick. You're going to be okay."

"Please," the dark-suited man said, but with sharp impatience, a clear imperative.

Ulrich came back to his chair between me and Kit, wiping his face with his sleeve, ashamed.

Mrs. Healy and my father went to the chairs opposite us. My father pulled one out for her, an unconscious gallantry that seemed out of place. I had to stifle a visceral resentment, my father with his banker's manners, everyone a potential client. What a phony he was.

"Okay," he said, leaning my way. "Here's the situation. You guys are all three going to be all right."

Again his authority surprised me. "Dad, how did you get here? Where's Ulrich's dad?"

Because of the tense reaction in my father, and in Mrs. Healy, too, I realized at once how stupid it was to mention Ulrich's father. Ulrich's father the master spy. Obviously, my father was here because Ulrich's could not be. I sat back holding the red flower of my face—
fucking asshole
—and resolved to just shut up.
Just shut the fuck up.

"There's been a mixup," my father said. "We've spoken to the authorities, and it will be rectified quickly."

Rectified, I thought. What a pompous word.

My father's gaze was on Ulrich. "Rick, you are being charged with failure to declare currency at the border—not border, but sector demarcation. Because it's a question of sector, border regulations do not apply. The lines between Berlin sectors are not international borders, or at least the U.S. refuses to recognize them as such. That's the heart of the mixup. You guys have stepped into a political minefield."

"Minefield?" Ulrich asked with alarm.

"Metaphorically," my father answered He was the soul of calm "And the trick is to go out the way you came in, a step at a time, by the book. The book, in this case, is the Four-Power Agreements, which say the Allied Control Council must be represented at your hearing, but they also say internal sector regulations apply, so your hearing cannot be held until the standard magistrate session. It's a formality. As an American citizen, you are not subject to DDR authority, exercised solely."

"But if the sector line is an international border?" It took me a moment to catch the drift of Ulrich's question, of why it was frightening.

My father answered, "That is the point of dispute. But it's a larger 258 issue than you, and it's something the Allies aren't prepared to yield on. The point is, Rick, we'll have you out of here by this time tomorrow."

"What do you mean
Rick?
" I asked. There went my resolution to keep quiet. And then, with the mystified expression they all turned on me, I realized they thought I was raising the banality of Ulrich's name. I added quickly, "What do you mean
Rick
is charged with the violation?"

The distinction had been clear in my father's words and in his addressing them to Ulrich alone, speaking of"exercised solely."

"Yeah," Kit joined in on my side. "All three of us are charged."

Mrs. Healy was sitting stock still beside my father, staring at her hands clasped on the table in front of her. She had not removed her gloves, and for the first time I sensed that she was ashamed of the rough ugliness of her hands. We all have things, Kit had said, that we hate about ourselves.

Then I looked at my father's hands. I thought of his fierce grip on the tiller—
Hard alee!
His voice had that kind of determination in it when he finally answered Kit. "No," he said, "only Rick is charged. That's also part of the mixup. You and Michael have been held by mistake. They claim they didn't know whom to release you to, but now they know."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

My father did not look at me at first, a hesitation that told me he had heard quite well what was in my voice. I thought of the moment he had come into my room at the house on the lake, to ask me to come downstairs where he told me about the phone call from the state police; told me that it had come nearly two hours before; told me that he had already been to the scene of the accident without me. "Why didn't you take me with you?" I had demanded. He was unable to put his answer into words, which I knew anyway: Because you are not strong enough to withstand the blow of your mother's death. You are my weak and wounded son, and now you will be weaker and more wounded than ever.

"What does that
mean?
" I repeated when he did not answer.

"It means you are coming with me. Now." He faced Kit. "And so are you, Katharine. Only Rick is being charged. The currency at issue was in his bag. Only Rick remains in custody."

Mrs. Healy brought her face up. She found her son's eyes. "Tomorrow for sure," she said. "You will be out."

"But that's crazy," I said.

"No, it's not, Michael. It is the way it is." My father said this with his simple authority, as if he were telling me all over again that Mom is dead.

Okay. Right. Mom's death—a fact of life. Get over it. Something to accept. No choice. But not this. I do not accept this. "But the currency violation," I said calmly. "That was my money, not Ulrich's." The lie came as easily as the feeling. What was Berlin but one lie after another, harmless lies adding up to their fucking opposite. Berlin, for all these lies, felt like my first real experience of the truth. My truth.

"Mine, too," Kit said. "The money is mine, too."

"We put it in Ulrich's bag," I said, "without his knowing about it. His was the only bag we had."

Ulrich put his hand on my arm, the bone of it. Then he pulled back, a clear signal of indecision.

But on his other side, Kit, who had the nerve to light one cigarette from another as she spoke, picked up the beat as surely as I had laid it down. She said, "We heard you could make a killing on the black market."

I looked across at her, loving the way her father's jacket decked her thin shoulders, the overlong sleeve cuffed back like an artist's smock, the sexy bandana. The girl's self-possession was a marvel to me.

Not to my father. "Don't be ridiculous," he snapped. He may have seen right through us, but his irritation showed that we had him.

He glanced at the man in the dark suit, who was still standing at the foot of the table, listening to every word—but doing so, it seemed, through the slit of his mouth.

Pathetic Dad, I thought. Didn't he realize they would be listening to us even if the zombie apparatchik wasn't hanging over the table like a Commie gargoyle?

"So Kit and I have to be at the hearing, too," I said. "We remain in custody."

"Michael—" Mrs. Healy began.

But I interrupted her. "Even if we are guilty, Allied Control takes over our case, right?" Looking at Ulrich's mother, my eye went to a line of perspiration that had formed on her upper lip. I had to look away, even if it meant looking at my father. "Because we are U.S. citizens, all three of us. Right?"

As I said this, I may well have grinned—the point I'd scored. In recalling this scene now, I wonder if my extraordinary sense of invulnerability was a matter of entitled American exceptionalism or the mark of a virgin boy still flush with the exuberance of having been naked with a girl and survived.

My father's hand was suspended, palm outward, a foot or so above the table, and as he spoke it remained poised like that, as if he were swearing an oath. He and I occupied different realms altogether. He spoke slowly and calmly, the way he always did when he was pissed, really pissed.

"The undeclared currency was not yours, Michael. Nor yours, Katharine. Nor was it Rick's. We know that it was planted in that bag by the unidentified man known as Tramm, who brought you to the sector boundary. We know this. And so do the East German authorities."

He glanced again at the man, which is when I understood that he was not of "the East German authorities." He was Russian. At the time, I could not fully grasp the significance of such a distinction within what to us was the monolithic Communist enemy. Later I would get it—that to the East Germans, Communist or not, the so-called Soviet Military Mission remained in 1961 an unwelcome occupation force. I would get it also that by then we Americans amounted to something similar, if subliminally, to West Germans—although West Germans who defied Americans were not kidnapped, made to disappear, written out of history. The night before, that had been my terror—that we had "disappeared," and here I was daring them to make it happen.

My father, afraid at that moment of what
I
was doing, not Russia, was speaking with measured gravity. "That the dollars were planted has been acknowledged in discussions we have had. The authorities are prepared to stipulate the likelihood that the man known as Tramm was a West German provocateur, an agent of the intelligence service of the Federal Republic. But that assumes your continuing to deny any knowledge of the dollar currency in excess of what you declared, as you have done until now—all three of you." My father lowered his voice and stared at us. "Changing your story at this point, out of loyalty to Rick, is a mistake for him as well as for you."

Somehow I found it possible to keep looking him full in the face, his smooth-shaven, handsome face. He was self-assured but also guarded, as if an inch below his composure was an expression of rank mystification. Was that hint of bewilderment a sign of what had gone wrong between us?

At the lake. That night he had asked me to join him downstairs on the porch, where we could talk, as ifwe could not talk in the knottypine box of my room. Each of us sitting in a rattan chair, the sky black through the screen, no star cutting an arc, no star falling. When he told me that Mom was dead, I found it impossible to look him in the eye, impossible even to find his eye. I realize now that the porch's many other places for our eyes to settle was why he'd brought me down there. In my room, we would have had to look at each other.

Blind. Mute. I had been equally unable to give voice to what flooded into me, a terrifying feeling of rage, rage at him.
Mom is dead!
Here was what I could not say.
Because of you! You made her mad again! And this is what happened!

My father was staring back at me across the table. Familiar as that face would become years later, when it was mine, it seemed then like the face of someone I hardly knew. It was, of course, how I must have seemed to him. Absolute and mutual incomprehension. I said, "I'm not leaving Ulrich, Dad. That's all."

"Me neither," Kit said, God bless her.

"You do Rick no good by staying here."

"His name is Ulrich," I said, stupidly, passionately.

My father ignored this. "We are getting him out tomorrow. I promise you."

"Do you keep your promises, Dad?"

"You know I do, Michael."

"So do I, Dad." I put my hand on Ulrich's arm and kept it there. Ulrich brought his face up, and the three of us sat there looking at my father and Ulrich's mother as ifwe were immovable. I guess we were.

Mrs. Healy said very quietly, "Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Kit."

After a long silence, my father said, "All right. But it is important not to change your stories. About the money. Forget this crap that it was yours. Tramm put it there. Tell them the truth, Michael."

I nodded, but I knew that he was still in charge, or thought he was. Still fucking in charge. What I said then surprised me, a pristine expression of my anger after all. "The truth? Tramm? The BND? That the money was planted by a provocateur of the
West?
That's the
truth?
"

From the way he flinched, I could see that my father was afraid of what I was doing. Tramm was a Stasi plant and everybody knew it. Would I use that to upend the deal they had made? My father was afraid of
me.

A first-time feeling for both of us. A shattering of some pact of falsehood that we had made. What an odd satisfaction it was to finally be coming back at him. Especially odd then, since I knew very well that all he wanted was to take care of me. But that was exactly what had made me angry. I wasn't stuck in an iron lung anymore, waiting for Daddy to come and unlock it.

At the time, I had no clue about any of this. At the time, all I had were wave-like feelings breaking over me, a torrent of emotions that closed off from my conscious mind the countercurrents swirling just below the surface—but below.

So, yes, my father was afraid that I was going to bollix the tidy deal he'd struck at his own private Potsdam Conference, but he was afraid beyond that, I sensed even then, of something else I could do—do to him. What?

Force out the truth, I might have guessed at the time, of what he had done to Mom?
You made her mad and she died!
I was too young to imagine for a moment that his fear was tied, not to her, but only to me. I am a father now myself, and understand what it is: the mortal dread that a once needy child can live without you. Not only can, but must.

My father was nothing if not self-disciplined, and he found it possible to bracket the chaos of his emotion, stilling it with a patently false calm. "Just tell them the money was not yours. That it was
none
of yours.
That
truth, Michael. Don't play games with these people. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Dad. I hear you."

"Good. You will have no lawyer. The hearing is not public. Allied Control will have a representative standing by, an American officer from the Army provost marshal's office, but you will have to handle the back-and-forth of the hearing yourselves. Rick declares his innocence. You two back him up. Tell them about the guy who brought you to the checkpoint, Josef Tramm. It's not for you to know or say who he was. That will confirm what they already have. Then they will release you." The three of us sat quietly, taking this in. My father glanced again at the apparatchik. That he was privy to this briefing did not matter, since tomorrow's hearing would be
Berlinsky
charades in any case.

Kit broke the silence. "Why isn't the American embassy handling this? No offense, Mr. Montgomery. No offense to you, Mrs. Healy. But at the dorm they tell us ifwe get in trouble, we should always call the embassy."