The Berlin Conspiracy (34 page)

“Why’d we have to go through all this?” I said to him. “Was there a point?”

“What’s the matter, Jack? Don’t you know you just saved the world?”

“You could’ve gone to Bobby Kennedy with what you had. He would’ve been all over it.”

“I needed some pressure,” he said, finally looking over at me. “To find the weak points.” He shrugged and turned back to the soccer game. “Anyway, you know me. I’m a backdoor kind of guy.”

“I’ve been thinking about how this all went down.”

“Sounds like you came up with something.”

“Maybe.”

“Wanna spit it out?”

“You know how the Colonel learned about the plot?”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I’m all ears.”

“A high-level source at Langley told him about it.”

“The elusive mole, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“What makes you think that?”

“He told me.” Sam forgot about the soccer game, gave me his full attention.

“Did he give you a name?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“I see,” Sam said with a smile, then went back to the soccer. “Got anything to go home to, Jack?”

“A leaky boat and a sticky typewriter.”

“Might be a good idea for you to get lost for a while. Until I can get a handle on things, anyway.” He handed me a British passport. “Use this,” he said with a smile. “And let me know when you get settled.”

“You can count on never hearing from me again,” I said.

“Maybe that’d be for the best.”

“You gonna go after these guys?”

“Let me tell you something you might not know, Jack.” He kept his eyes focused on the game. “I hate those bastards. … I hate ‘em with a passion. Not because they tried to kill Kennedy. I hate ‘em because they’re the scum of the earth. … You bet I’m gonna go after them.”

“I might just miss you, Sam. As ridiculous as that sounds, I just might.”

“Yeah, I guess I’m something of an enigma all right.”

“You’re being kind to yourself.”

“Maybe so,” he laughed and produced a manila envelope out of his pocket. “It’s the Kovinski picture. Give it to your brother when you see him.”

“I wasn’t sure if you knew.”

“Didn’t you know?” he said with a wink. “I’m a master spy. Watch your back, Jack.”

And he turned and walked away. The soccer ball got loose and he kicked it back into play, but he didn’t look back. That was the last time I saw Sam. He died two weeks later of sudden heart failure, although as far as I know, he never had a heart problem.

As hard as they tried, nobody ever unearthed the Langley mole. You don’t need all the facts to know the truth.

I was still registered at the Kempinski, so I thought, what the hell, I was owed a last night of comfort. I was sure nobody would look for me there, but I was wrong.

The doorbell rang early, just after dawn. I was already awake after a mostly sleepless night and wasn’t all that surprised to find Josef standing in the hallway.

“You should have left Berlin by now,” he greeted me.

“I haven’t seen all the sights yet,” I said, leading him into the living room. He didn’t sit down at first, just stood in the middle of the room looking uncomfortable.

“I thought I should see you before you leave,” he said.

“You make it sound like your Socialist duty.”

He shrugged, but didn’t disagree. “You’ll disappear?” he asked, although it sounded like more of a hope than a question.

“Seems like the thing to do,” I said, pouring two lukewarm coffees from a carafe I’d ordered an hour earlier. He sat down and put the cup aside. I felt that he wanted to say something, but was having trouble finding the way in.

“How’d you figure I’d be here?” I asked, just to fill the space.

“Your unpredictability has become predictable,” he smiled, shifting his weight and leaning forward. “I thought you might have stayed in Berlin because you hoped… well, that I could offer—”

“Thanks anyway,” I interrupted, saving him the embarrassment. “But spending my golden years in Minsk isn’t exactly what I had in mind.” I knew Josef had acted independently, which was even less tolerated on his side of the wall. The last thing he needed was me showing up at his doorstep, so he was here to head me off. I couldn’t believe that he actually thought I’d consider defecting, but I guess he had to cover all his bases. Anyway, he seemed relieved that I dismissed the idea out of hand and relaxed a little bit after that.

I wish I could say that we came to some conclusion about our relationship over the course of the next hour, but, of course, we didn’t. We had so little in common and what we did have was too far in the past to really matter. Seeing him had brought back memories that stay with
me to this day, and I was grateful for that, but it wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. I did wonder, though, if seeing me had brought something of that lost time back for Josef, too.

We talked politics, disagreeing on pretty much everything, and exchanged gossip about world leaders. He told me that he was going to be posted to New York in the near future, attached to the GDR’s delegation at the UN. I wrote down the name of a couple of good restaurants and said the best spot to see what America was all about was from behind first base at Yankee Stadium. When he stood up to go, there was a good feeling between us and that was enough to make me feel a little bit lighter.

“I wish you the best of luck,” he said.

I handed him the envelope containing the Kovinski photo. “From a mutual friend,” I said.

He smiled. “You know, most of us don’t have the opportunity to choose our side. … It chooses us. And those who do choose usually do so for selfish reasons. Once in a while, though, there’s an exception who chooses out of principle.”

“What if he makes the wrong choice?”

“He lives with the mistake,” Josef said with a shrug, then reached into his pocket. “I have something for you, too.” He extended his palm and revealed two faded toy soldiers. Much of the color had worn off in the forty-five years since they appeared under my Christmas tree, but you could still see that one was in red uniform, one in blue.

“For you,” he said.

“For as long as I keep our secret?” I smiled, taking the figures and looking them over. They were like old friends.

“If ever I can be of help …” he said, with a shrug.

“There is something,” I said, recalling the photograph Hanna had showed me. “A man named Alfred Mann.
He’s a mathematics teacher in East Berlin. He could use an exit visa.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Josef said, then we shook hands and parted.

I went to Horst’s funeral, but watched from a distance, mostly out of regard for Hanna, but also because there was a pretty good chance that someone would be keeping an eye on it in case I showed up. It was a short service, with a good crowd of mostly young faces, but Hanna kept to herself. I caught up with her as she waited at a bus stop outside the cemetery gates.

“Don’t say you’ve come to say you’re sorry,” she said evenly. “I couldn’t stand it.”

“I thought you should know the truth,” I said.

“Why? Will it change anything?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“He trusted you,” she said.

“He had no reason to,” I responded, having no wish to justify anything.

She smiled bittersweetly. “Horst saw the world in black and white, like one of those films he always talked about. He thought you were some kind of hero.”

“Your brother saved a lot of lives before he died, including mine,” I said. “If anybody was a hero, it was him.”

“In the movies, the hero never dies,” she said as the bus appeared and opened its door for her. She was about to get on, but paused and turned back to me. “It doesn’t change anything,” she said. “But perhaps someday it will.”

I slipped an envelope containing forty-five one hundred dollar bills into her jacket pocket before she stepped on board. It was the five grand that had been in Chase’s envelope,
minus five hundred to get me where I was going, wherever that was.

As the door closed behind Hanna and the bus pulled away, I hoped she would marry her mathematics teacher and live happily ever after.

I was drifting
in the waters off British Honduras on a balmy afternoon in late November when I turned on the radio:

Within three hours of the assassination, fully loaded American bombers were on their way to hit targets inside Cuba and all U.S. forces were placed on DefCon 3, which is a telephone
call away from launching an all-out nuclear attack. The Soviet Union went to full alert, also, and the party was ready to get into full swing when somebody at the Pentagon took it upon themselves to call the planes back, just seconds before they entered Cuban airspace. No one could say in the confusion following the assassination who had ordered the planes back or—more to the point—who had ordered the attack in the first place.

Dallas was a poor substitute for Berlin. The public will swallow a lot, but asking them to buy Dallas, Texas, as the breeding ground for a Communist conspiracy was too much. I used to wonder if those planes would’ve been called back had the president been shot in Berlin instead of Texas. But history has a way of writing itself in stone. Once it’s happened, it’s hard to imagine it occurring any other way, and it’s pointless to speculate. Still, I like to think that maybe Horst and Sam and Josef and me, maybe we did change the course of history, after all.

The men who killed Kennedy lit up cigars that day in November and slapped each other on the back, but they didn’t get the country they wanted. America’s strange form of democracy survived, as vibrant as ever—probably a lot more vibrant. The real coup took place not with bombs or bullets, but with ideas, and the irony is that the social revolution of the sixties probably wouldn’t have happened, at least not in the same way, had Kennedy lived.

When Johnson created the Warren Commission to look into the assassination, he told its reluctant chairman that there was evidence of Soviet involvement in Kennedy’s death. Unless people were convinced that Oswald acted alone, he said, the country might have to go to war, putting forty million lives at stake. Johnson was a first-class operator.

The FBI, under the watchful eye of Johnson’s friend, neighbor, and ally J. Edgar Hoover, was the sole investigative body for the commission. Six weeks after the president was killed, Johnson exempted Hoover from mandatory
retirement, making him director for life. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John Kennedy.

No awkward questions were asked.

My mother was a librarian, my father a history teacher. When my brother and sisters and I were young—and I mean very young—our bedtime stories consisted of tomes like
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey.
When I was ten years old, my father handed me Churchill’s
War Years.
Well, he didn’t actually hand it to me because it was six thick volumes. I eventually made my way through three and a half of them and produced my first “book,” a significantly condensed account of the conflict that I called
Hitler’s War.
It took me four decades to get around to my next effort—this one—but I’m certain that I owe Homer and Churchill a thank-you. And Mom and Dad, of course. Thank you.

Henry Ferris, at William Morrow, has been everything I could’ve hoped for in an editor—enthusiastic, supportive, honest, creative, and smart. He has made the experience of
going from manuscript to book a great pleasure. Thanks, Henry, for not hitting the delete button on that first e-mail.

It was an act of faith for Maggie Phillips to take me and the book on. I was an unpublished writer and I now share shelf space at the Ed Victor Agency in London with some very talented and notable authors. The fact that Maggie had faith gave me faith and, on top of that, she’s a very classy lady.

Thanks, too, to Bill Contardi, in New York, for his help and support. He’s not only a talented agent, but he’s a great pleasure to work with.

Although we haven’t met, I want to acknowledge Richard Aquan for designing such a beautifully evocative cover. Thanks, too, to the early readers of
The Berlin Conspiracy.
Simon, Ian, Amelie, Dick, Carola, and Francie, your ideas and words of encouragement were greatly valued. And, of course, Julia, who day after day puts up with the man hunched over a computer in the other room. She gets a big thank-you from him.

As for Jared, Jake, Max, and Sophie—you’re what it’s all about.