The Cold War Swap (17 page)

“I don’t need a sales talk,” I cut in. “Suppose we meet so we can get down to cases.”

“Of course, of course. Where are you now?”

My hand tightened on the telephone. “That’s a stupid question, coming from you.”

Maas chuckled over the telephone. “I understand, my dear friend. Let me propose this: I would assume that you are within a mile of where this evening’s—uh—accident—yes, accident—occurred?”

“All right.”

“I suggest a café—where I am known. It has a private room in the
back. It should be within walking distance of where you are now.”

“Hold on,” I said. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Padillo.

He nodded and said, “Get the address.”

“What’s the address?”

Maas told me, I repeated it, and Padillo wrote it down on a scrap of paper on Langeman’s cluttered desk.

“What time?” I asked.

“Would midnight be convenient?”

“It’s all right.”

“There will be three of you?”

“No, just Herr Padillo and myself.”

“Of course, of course; Herr Baker must stay with your two American guests.”

“We’ll see you at midnight,” I said, and hung up.

“He knows Cooky was with us, and he thinks he still is,” I told Padillo.

“Let’s let him think it for a while. Wait here and I’ll get some directions from Max.” Padillo climbed down the ladder and was back in a few minutes. Max followed him.

“It’s about nine blocks from here, Max says. He’ll stay on the door until we get back. Our two friends are sleeping.”

The café was ordinary-looking. We had made the nine blocks from Langeman’s garage in fifteen minutes, passing down dark streets, encountering only a stray pedestrian or two. We stood across the street from the café in the doorway of an office building of some kind.

Maas arrived on foot at fifteen minutes until midnight. Three men had come out of the café separately since we had begun our watch. Maas had been the only one to go in. Nobody else came or went during the remaining quarter-hour.

“Let’s go,” Padillo said.

We crossed the street and entered the café. The bar was immediately in front of the door. To the left of the door were three booths. The rest
of the café was taken up with chairs and tables. A couple sat at one. Three solitary drinkers brooded into their beer and a coffee drinker read a newspaper. The barkeep nodded at us and said good evening.

“We are expecting a friend to meet us,” Padillo said. “Herr Maas.”

“He is already in the back—through that curtain,” the barkeep said. “Would you like to order now?”

“Two vodkas,” Padillo said.

I led the way through the main room and pushed aside the curtain. Maas, still clad in his heavy brown suit, sat facing us at a round table. A goblet of white wine rested in front of him, next to a new brown hat. He rose when he saw us.

“Ah! Herr McCorkle,” he gurgled.

“Herr Maas, Herr Padillo.”

Maas gave Padillo’s hand the standard shake and bustled around, pulling out two chairs for us to sit on. “It is a real pleasure to meet you, Herr Padillo. You are a man of considerable reputation.”

Padillo sat down at the table and said nothing. “Have you ordered drinks?” Maas asked. “I have told the bartender to give you the best. It is my treat.”

“We ordered,” I said.

“Well, it has been a busy, busy day for you, I would say,” Maas said.

We said nothing and the bartender came in through the curtain and deposited our drinks on the table. “See that we’re not disturbed,” Maas ordered.

The bartender shrugged and said, “We close in an hour.”

He left and Maas picked up his wineglass. “Shall we drink to a successful venture, my friends?”

We drank.

Padillo lighted a cigarette and blew some smoke up into the air. “I think we can get down to business now, Herr Maas. What’s your proposition?”

“You have seen the map I gave Herr McCorkle?”

“I saw it: it could be anywhere. Or it couldn’t be at all.”

Maas smiled blandly. “It exists, Herr Padillo. It does indeed. Let me tell you something of its history.” He paused to take a sip of his wine.

“It has romance, treachery and death. It is quite a fascinating melodrama.” Maas sipped at his wine again, produced three cigars, offered us each one, smiled understandingly when we refused, put two of them back into his pocket, and lighted his own. We waited.

“Back in September of 1949, a sixty-two-year-old widow whom I shall call Frau Schmidt died of cancer. Frau Schmidt left her single valuable possession, a somewhat-bombed-scarred three-story house, to her favorite son—Franz, I think I shall call him—a mechanical engineer who worked at that time for the American Army in West Berlin. Housing was at a premium in both East and West Berlin, so Franz moved his family, consisting of himself, his wife, and a four-year-old son, to his late mother’s house. It was old, but it had been well built back in 1910 or 1911.

“There was virtually free passage between the East and West Sectors in those days and Franz Schmidt continued to work for the Americans. On the weekends he renovated the house. He received a small subsidy for his efforts from an agency of the East Berlin government. By 1955, Herr Schmidt was working for a private consulting engineering firm in West Berlin. Without much difficulty he managed to remodel his house completely, from basement to roof, installing new plumbing and even electrical-heating apparatus. It became his only hobby. Sometimes, I understand, Herr Schmidt considered moving to West Berlin, but he would have suffered a tremendous loss on his house and as long as he could travel freely from the East to the West Sector he saw no real reason to move.

“The Schmidt family made friends in their new neighborhood. Among them was the family of Leo Boehmler, who had been a
Feldwebel
on the eastern front during the war until he was captured by the Russians. He reappeared in East Berlin in 1947 as a lieutenant in the Volkspolizei. By the time that the Boehmler family had become friends with the Schmidt family, it was no longer Lieutenant Boehmler but
Captain Boehmler. But even a captain’s pay could not match that of a mechanical engineer employed by a prosperous firm in the West Sector, so I have good reason to suspect that Captain Boehmler was a trifle envious of the Schmidt’s fine house, their small car, and the general prosperity that surrounded the household, where the captain, his wife, and their pretty young daughter were often guests for real coffee and cakes.

“Schmidt was proud of his work on his house and insisted on showing it in detail to the captain, who, while devoutly of the Communist persuasion, could not prevent his mouth from watering at the modern trappings and innovations that Franz Schmidt had installed. The Boehmlers lived in a small apartment in one of the hastily built piles of flats that were thrown up in 1948. While it was much better than what most citizens of East Berlin had, it was a slum compared with the Schmidts’ fine residence.

“By 1960 or thereabouts, Franz Schmidt’s son Horst was a young man in his middle teens, and he was becoming interested in young girls—or, to be more specific, in one girl, the daughter of Captain Boehmler. Her name was Liese and she was six months younger than Horst. The parents of both children looked on the romance as—let me think of the American phrase—puppy love, but by 1961 Liese and Horst were spending most of their time together. Captain Boehmler had no objections to his daughter’s making a good match with the son of a prosperous engineer, even though the engineer remained steadfastly disinterested in politics. And while Franz Schmidt was avowedly without politics, he was something of a realist, and when the time came he saw no reason why it could not prove useful to have a daughter-in-law whose father was an ambitious officer in the Volkspolizei. So little family jokes were made about the romance and Liese blushed prettily and young Horst stammered and did all the things adolescents do when they are the butt of an adult joke.

“Then one fine August day in 1961 the wall went up and Herr Schmidt found himself without a job. He talked the matter over with
his good friend, Captain Boehmler, who suggested that it would be easy for him to obtain suitable employment in the East Sector. Engineer Schmidt found employment readily enough, but he also found that he was making only a fourth of what he had made in the West. And things that he liked—such as good coffee, chocolates, American cigarettes and what have you—were impossible to come by.

“It is now time to point out that Herr Schmidt’s house was fortunately situated. It was on a corner which faced the apex of a small triangular park in the Kreuzberg area of West Berlin. When the wall went up it almost touched the tip of the park’s apex. The park itself was no more than fifty meters from the Schmidt doorstep, and it was a pleasant spot of greenery in the midst of the city’s dreariness.”

Maas stopped his story to sip his wine. He seemed to enjoy the role of storyteller.

“After a few months of working at his low-paying position, Herr Schmidt took to standing in a third-story bedroom and staring out at the small triangle of greenery which lay over the wall. Then he began to spend much time in his cellar, tapping here and there with a hammer. And sometimes he would work late into the night, figuring with a pencil on a tablet of paper and drawing diagrams. In June 1962 he summoned a family conference around the dining table. He told his wife and son that he had decided to take them to the West, where he would regain his former position. As for the house—they would leave it. Neither his wife nor his son argued with him. But, later, young Horst drew his father aside and confessed that Liese was pregnant, that they must get married, and that, if he were to go west, Liese must go with him.

“The elder Schmidt examined this new information in his typically methodical manner. He asked his son how far along the girl was and young Horst said only two months. Schmidt then counseled his son that it would be wise not to marry Liese at once but to take her with them to the West Sector. He told Horst of his plans to tunnel under the wall and to come out in the small triangular park. He estimated
that the job of tunneling would require two months of work, both of them digging and shoring four hours at night and eight hours on Saturday and Sunday. He told his son that if he were to marry now the Boehmlers would be in and out of the house constantly. Horst asked if he could tell Liese about the plans for the tunnel so that she would be able to plan for the future and not worry about his intentions. The elder Schmidt gave his consent reluctantly.

“The next night Schmidt and son began the tunnel. It was not too difficult a job except for disposing of the sandy dirt. This was done by loading up their small automobile on weekends and driving to various isolated points in the city, where the dirt was dumped from sacks made by Frau Schmidt from bedsheets.

“The mouth of the tunnel in the basement was concealed behind Herr Schmidt’s hand-built tool case, which he mounted on cleverly concealed hinges to swing out from the wall. He illuminated the tunnel with electric lights as it progressed. It was shored with timber that he had accumulated before the wall went up, and he even laid down a rough floor of linoleum. By early August the tunnel was nearly finished. And if Herr Schmidt had been less of a craftsman I would not be telling you this story tonight.

“Schmidt had designed the tunnel to come up in a clump of arborvitae in the small park. It was a thick growth, and he had carefully arranged the exit so that a hard shove would work the earth loose above a circular metal cover. The earth could then be replaced. All of this care, of course, took longer than his original estimate. And Liese, nearing her fourth month, began to fret and to question young Horst about his intentions. Finally he brought her to the house and showed her the entrance to the tunnel. It may have been her pregnancy, it may have been her fear of leaving her parents, but the young lovers quarreled. It was the night before Herr Schmidt planned his escape.

“At any rate, Liese went home and confessed all to her father. Thinking quickly, the good captain told her to patch up her quarrel with young Horst the next day and said that, after all, they were in
love and perhaps it would be better for her to have her baby in the West, where she could be with her husband.

“The next night, having smoothed over her quarrel with Horst, Liese packed a small bag, said good-bye to her parents, and walked to the Schmidt house. She arrived an hour before the Schmidts were to depart.

“They had a final cup of coffee at the pleasant dining table. Then, taking only a few possessions, they made their way down to the cellar. As Herr Schmidt opened the tool-case entrance Captain Boehmler appeared at the doorway of the cellar holding a revolver in his hand. He said he regretted that he had to do this to his good friends and neighbors but he was, after all, a servant of the people. He told his daughter to go upstairs and go home. Terrified, she left. Captain Boehmler then told the Schmidt family to turn their backs to him. When they did, he shot them.

“He then dragged them one by one up to the living room. Next he went in search of the Vopos guarding the wall in that particular section and sent them on a mythical errand, saying that he would patrol in their absence. He waited until the Vopos were gone and then dragged the three bodies out of the house and to the wall. He carried out their few possessions and dumped them beside the bodies. He then fired three shots into the air, reloaded his revolver and fired two more. The Vopos came hurrying back, and the captain said he had shot the Schmidt family as they had attempted to escape. He ordered that the house be locked and sealed until he had the opportunity to search it the next day.

“The bodies of the Schmidt family were carted away. Captain Boehlmer himself took charge of the investigation of the Schmidt house the following morning, giving his personal attention to the cellar. In his report he pointed out that the house was dangerously close to the wall and should be either sealed up or occupied by a family whose loyalty to the government was above reproach. His superior pulled a few wires and Captain Boehlmer became the new tenant of the house he had long admired, complete with escape hatch to the West.