Secret Father (40 page)

She had removed one glove, presumably to turn the shower knob, and was now removing the other, a deliberation that seemed to have overtaken her concentration. The effect of seeing her head-on and in both profiles simultaneously was dazzling. The mirrors were an absolute showcase of her beauty.

But against the gravity of her fierce expression, the very idea of beauty, hers or anyone's, seemed banal. As if to underscore the frivolity of mere appearance, the fresh sight of her blunted but heroic fingers drew my gaze away from her face.

I pushed the door closed behind me.

"There are no wires in here," she said. "I have examined closely." She dropped her gloves on the table beside her.

"But you run the noisy shower anyway. You can't be too careful, is that it? What makes you think it is Krone?"

"You saw him with Erhardt."

"Yes, and I saw Erhardt sweating blood in front of the Russian. What Krone said is true. He owns Erhardt. He can destroy Erhardt. It's why they dealt with us."

"No. You were right before. They dealt with us because they expect me to lead them to what they want. I know that. Of course I know that. But neither Erhardt nor the commissar booked this room. Krone booked this room, Paul. Krone. I found the microphone five minutes after checking in. There was no time for anyone else to put the microphone there. Krone is Stasi."

I stared at her. She had to be wrong, but I could think of no way to rebut her. And I am ashamed to admit that my thought went at once to: If Krone is Stasi, what does that mean for Chase?

To hell with Chase, I told myself. "That makes no sense, Charlotte. Krone booked this room for me. He did that before knowing anything, before knowing who you are."

"But he knew by the time he left us at the
Fernsehturm.
He was away from us for most of an hour. He came back agitated. Do you remember that beer, how desperately he lifted that stein?"

"Exactly. If Krone were Stasi, would his hands shake?"

"My hands do not shake. That does not mean I
am
Stasi."

"Your hands shook at Schloss Pankow, Charlotte—although not in front of the Russian. Your hands shook in front of the tablet at the entrance. The Moabit martyrs. Why is that?"

She reached into her bag, which stood open on the vanity behind her. She took out her cigarettes and, with an easy flick of the wheel of her gold lighter, lit one, a show of transcendent calm. I sensed it as a ritual act, designed to cover up—no, to manage—a deep insecurity. When she exhaled, the smoke rose to the ceiling, where it was lost in the cloud of steam that had begun to pour out of the shower.

"That has no relevance to what you and I are doing."

"Oh? Isn't that what kept you from Schloss Pankow yesterday? You were afraid of what the tablet reveals."

"Which is what?" she asked with slit eyes.

"This parody of lovers that you had us enacting began when I asked you in the car about von Siedelheim. You kissed me to shut me up about von Siedelheim. Why?" I stopped, but only for a breath. "At a convention hall in Frankfurt a week ago, I saw a man named von Siedelheim take a bullet in the neck. And then I learn that a man named von Siedelheim was one of a group taking a bullet in the neck in Moabit prison just before you came here in search of your son's father. And this von Siedelheim was named Wolf."

Her expression could not have been colder. "What makes you think this Wolf, as you say, took a bullet in the neck?"

"That's how the Nazis executed Communists. That's what Moabit was, a prison for Communists. Every prisoner was executed just as the city fell to the Soviets, which the bronze tablet commemorates."

A startled buoyancy came into her eyes for a moment—a woman of feeling after all. But before I understood it properly, that clue to her swirling inner state was covered up again.

I thought I was on a starboard tack, so I pressed on. "Does General Healy know your first husband was a Communist?"

I waited, but she said nothing, which seemed answer enough to me. The expression on her face, all three of her faces, had gone to stone, simply stone. I thought of the carved face of that czarina, looking out from the lintel of the Russian Chapel above Wiesbaden, where I had asked how she knew of grief and she slapped my question away. As I recalled that moment now, I would recall this one in the future—no slapping away, just her immutable inscrutability.

All right. If she was not going to start answering, I was not going to stop asking. "Does General Healy know that Wolf's ... brother? cousin? was just executed in the same way? By whom, Charlotte? Secret Nazis? The cabal that protected Eichmann? And why doesn't Rick know that his father's name was von Siedelheim?"

This question landed a blow. "How do you know what Rick knows?"

"You told me as much when you said Rick signed his runaway letter 'von Neuhaus,' your name. Why haven't you told your son who his father was? What is the shame in Wolf's having been a Communist against Hitler? And wouldn't it be to Rick's advantage now if Erhardt knew? Jesus Christ, Charlotte, Rick's father is on the Stasi honor roll."

She shook her head firmly. "No. It would not be to his advantage."

"Because whoever his father was, his stepfather trumps it. But they know who his stepfather is. They know about his stepfather's flight bag, the thing that started this. They know about the stepfather's roll of film. What? The list of agents-in-place in anticipation of the sealing of the border? Whose agents, Charlotte? Ours or theirs? Or does it matter? Is that the secret you are protecting? Or are you protecting the secret of your husband's incompetence for having lost it?"

"I am protecting no one. But I am
trying
to protect my son. Trying to."

"I was right about Rick, wasn't I? He just told you where the film is."

She did not answer—which, again, was the answer.

"And I was right that Erhardt and the KGB watcher let him tell you, because now they expect you to lead them to it."

"You were right to warn me." She turned and mashed her cigarette in a porcelain ashtray on the dressing table, then turned back to me. "But I have no need of you telling me to be careful."

"I can see that. I admit, you've taken me by surprise. Clearly, you've learned a thing or two from your husband over the years." When she said nothing, I added, "Or is it he who has learned from you?"

"Do you dare ask me such a question?"

"You said that to me before, Charlotte. When I asked you about grief."

"I am asking you to leave me alone."

"What do you expect of me? That I should walk out of here and hope for the best? That I should slink down to my room and hide so that your subterfuge will work? I disappear and then you go into the other room and make noises for the microphone so that whoever is listening will believe what Krone told them—that the two boys' parents are celebrating the prospects of their release with an afternoon tryst?"

"No, Paul." She looked away, but an ardent roseate tide flooded her neck, rising into her jaw and cheeks. In the mirror to my left, her eyes came right to mine, the liquefaction of her former cold resolve. "How could I do that?" she asked, stunned, I knew, by my blunt crassness.

But her retreat now to girlish innocence angered me more. "How could you fake the love fest alone, you mean? Easy, Charlotte. The agents in their earphones are men, no doubt. And men only want to hear the sounds of the woman in throes."

"Please."

"You're offended? So am I. You set us up here this afternoon so that you could slip away a little later, to get the film for your husband, or perhaps for the free world. What did you imagine I would be doing? Am I supposed to stay here and, at the proper physiological intervals, resurrect the sounds of eros? Tell me what you expect of me, Charlotte."

"Let go, Paul."

"But I am not holding you."

"Of your son. Let go of your son."

"What has that to do—"

"Everything! You hold on to your son to hold on to your wife. But she is dead. You should let her go, too."

"Charlotte, I can't—"

"Michael has moved on from you, Paul. And he has moved on from his mother. He wants only to let go of his grief and to live. But you will not allow it."

"He needs me."

"Your son has made his own choices. And he is more than capable of living with them. And you cannot stand the feeling. It is what makes you ferocious with me."

In recalling this, I see now how I proved her point then by slapping my hand against the cold stone surface of the sink counter, jarring the bones in my wrist and forearm. "My son is in jeopardy! He put himself there because of your son. What is the jeopardy? You have to tell me!"

"I cannot."

"Why?"

Our eyes were still locked together, but through the mirror, which now wore the haze of steam from the shower.

She did not answer. I held my stinging wrist in my other hand, and I told myself—an old trick I had often used with Edie—Down, boy, down. "We are speaking different languages," I said. "What translation do we need here? German-English? Woman-man? Mother-father? Or is it spy and ordinary Joe?"

She laughed. "Ordinary Joe."

"I'm out of my element here. You see that. And if it makes me 'ferocious,' I apologize. But I'm lost. I don't know where I am."

"You are in Berlin, Paul. This is what it means—to be in Berlin."

"Which is why you left."

To my surprise, she took my simple statement as a blow, registering it physically. That slouched, elegantly world-weary woman was transformed in an instant. She had the bereft expression of a rubble woman, hankering for nothing more than not to be hit again.

Her voice had become almost inaudible when she said, "I never left. You see, I tell you to let go, recognizing how we are alike, because I myself never let go."

"Of Berlin?"

"Of all that Berlin did to me. I tried to leave, but I could not. David knows this. All these years with him I have been pretending. I never let go of Berlin. This is what I must confess now. I confess this to you."

I could not know then what she had just told me, and so I only looked at her.

Our silence became a kind of impasse, more painful in its way than the harsh exchange—to recall the cruelty of my words to her shames me—that preceded it. Moments passed. And more moments.

Finally, she drew herself up from the edge of the dressing table, coming to her full, impressive height. She folded her arms primly in front of herself. "You are right about the microphone. I must give them something to record. Otherwise they will know. They will—"

She brushed past me to pull the door open and go into the bedroom. She left the door open behind her, and a current of cool air rushed into the steamy bathroom, dispelling the shower cloud of which I had been barely aware.

F
ROM WHERE
I stood in the bathroom, I watched as she crossed to the bedside table and turned on the light. She picked up the phone and dialed zero, waited, then spoke several sentences in German, the last of which she punctuated with the word
Dankeschön.
She hung up.

As she walked out of my line of view, she shrugged of fher tweed jacket.

"I made a booking for dinner, Paul," she called. Her voice was loud, appropriately so, entirely offhand. "Half seven," she continued. "Is dinner in the hotel all right? They say the dining room is superb."

"All right," I said, marveling at her transformation, but failing utterly to match it. I said the curt words loudly enough to be heard above the shower, in the other room, but I knew that my voice, compared to hers, was false, stilted.

The shower, as far as the microphone was concerned, was now for me. Realizing that made me feel, once again, ridiculous. Ridiculous! I might as well have been poised on that circus stool, standing as I was in a steaming bathroom with my suit coat still on, my tie, my perfect creases gradually losing their edge.

I closed the bathroom door, as if for privacy. But from whom? Her? The listening strangers, whoever they were? The ghosts of her Berlin?

Only then did I notice her satin nightgown hanging by a pair of shoulder straps from the door's back hook. A forbidden garment, the sight stopped me. She had bought it for herself the day before, when she bought my shirt. The gown was the full length of her body, the color of burnished gold, a lace filigree at the neckline, a fold of material for her breasts to fill.

Involuntarily, I touched the garment, touched it where her hip would take its warmth, pinched it between my forefinger and thumb. The smooth fabric brought rushing back the sensation of balm on my fingers, what I had experienced in finding my hand at play upon her camisole in the car.

The last of whatever resentment I had felt at being made to seem her trick pony drained away, because the simple intimacy of this woman's need was real, even if her desire was not. It mattered not at all that the mystery of her need did not include me. I was here to help her—that was all—help her not to be dragged under by the ghosts of this city. Whatever the shadows of the local past, she and I did have a bond that protected us from them—the absolute future that was our children.

But her satin nightgown. I leaned toward it and brought the fabric to my nostrils. I recognized the perfume of her skin. Desire of this kind, I thought, like the gloss of silk to lovers who have left their clothes behind, is beside the point. I did not know it yet, but I was wrong. Desire is what separates human beings from the ghosts they fear. I let her satin gown fall from my fingers, and it twirled slightly, the hint of a dance.

When I turned, the varied images of myself in the mirrors were a puzzle. I would remember the odd sensation later in that decade when the maze of mirrors emerged as a cliché of the literature of espionage. I saw myself, in one surface reflecting off another, as a man seen from behind, his dark, close-cropped hair well up from his collar, the silver at his temples, the square shoulders of his sorrowful gray coat—none of it familiar. To this stranger, I would gladly have put my question, which at that moment would have run something like, If she is right about Krone, is she right about you?