The Cold War Swap (2 page)

“My friend,” Mass said, “you are an excellent driver.”

“Thanks,” I said, pulling the knob that unlocked the front lid where the spare was kept.

“If you will indicate where the tools are stored, I will make the necessary repairs.”

“That’s my job.”

“No! At one time I was a quite competent mechanic. If you do not mind, I will make the reparations.”

The Porsche has a side mount for the jack, but I didn’t have to tell Herr Maas. He had the blown-out tire off in three minutes, and two minutes later he was giving the spare’s last lug a final jerk with the wrench and slapping on the hubcap with the air of a man who knows he has done a competent job. He didn’t take off his coat.

The hood was up and Maas rolled the blowout to the front of the car and wrestled it into its nook. He banged the lid down and got back into the car, butt-first this time. Back on the Autobahn, I thanked him for his efforts.

“It was nothing, Herr McCorkle. It was my pleasure to be of assistance. If you would be kind enough to drop me off at the Bahnhoff when we arrive in Bonn, I will still be in your debt. I can obtain a taxi there.”

“Bonn’s not that big,” I said. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

“But I must go to Bad Godesberg. It is far from Bonn’s center.”

“Fine. That’s where I’m going too.”

I drove over Victoria Bridge to Reuterstrasse and then to Koblenzerstrasse, a double-laned boulevard dubbed the Diplomatic Racetrack by the local wags. Of a morning you could see the Chancellor gliding grandly in his Mercedes 300, heralded by a couple of tough motorcycle cops and the White Mouse, a specially built Porsche that preceded the entourage, shooing the common folk aside as the procession made its solemn way to the Palais Chambourg.

“Where do you want to go in Godesberg?” I asked.

He fumbled in his suit pocket and produced a blue notebook. He turned to a page and said: “To a cafe. It is called Mac’s Place. Do you know it?”

“Sure,” I said, shifting down into second for a red light. “I own it.”

You can probably find a couple of thousand spots like Mac’s Place in New York
, Chicago or Los Angeles. They are dark and quiet with the furniture growing just a little shabby, the carpet stained to an indeterminate shade by spilled drinks and cigarette ashes, and the bartender friendly and fast but tactful enough to let it ride if you walk in with someone else’s wife. The drinks are cold, generous and somewhat expensive; the service is efficient; and the menu, although usually limited to chicken and steaks, affords very good chicken and steaks indeed.

There were a few other places in Bonn and Bad Godesberg that year where you could get a decently mixed drink. One was the American Embassy Club (where you had to be a member or a guest); another was the Schaumberger Hof, where you paid expense-account prices for two centiliters of Scotch.

I opened the saloon the year after they elected Eisenhower president for the first time. What with his campaign promise to go to Korea and all, the Army decided that national security would not suffer appreciably if the Military Assistance Advisory Group housed in the sprawling U.S. Embassy on the Rhine did without my services. In fact, there was some mild speculation as to why they had called me up for the second time at all. I wondered, too, since no one had asked me to advise or
assist on anything important during my pleasant twenty-month stay at the Embassy, which is to be turned into a hospital if and when Germany’s capital is ever moved back to Berlin.

A month after my discharge in Frankfurt I was back in Bad Godesberg, sitting on a couple of cases of beer in a low-ceilinged room that once had been a
Gaststatte.
It had been gutted by fire, and I signed a long lease with the owner on the understanding that he was to provide only the basic repairs; any additional redecorating and improvement would be at my own expense. I sat there on the beer cases, surrounded by boxes of fixtures, furniture, and unpacked glasses, nursing a bottle of Scotch, and filling out on a portable typewriter my eighth application in sextuplicate for permission to sell food and drink—all by the warm glow of a kerosene lamp. The electricity would take another application.

When he came in, he came in quietly. He could have been there only a minute or he could have been there ten. I jumped when he spoke.

“You McCorkle?”

“I’m McCorkle,” I said, keeping on with my typing.

“You got a nice place here.”

I turned around to look at him. “Christ—a Yalely.”

He was about five-eleven and would have weighed in at around 160. He dragged up a case of beer to sit on, and the way he moved reminded me of a Siamese torn I had once owned named Pajama Cord.

“New Jersey, not New Haven,” he said.

He wore the uniform well: the crew-cut black hair; the young, tanned, friendly face; the soft tweed three-button jacket with a button-down shirt and regimental-striped tie that sported a knot the size of a Thompson seedless grape. He also had on plain-toed cordovan shoes that gleamed blackly in the lamp’s light. I didn’t see his socks, but I assumed that they weren’t white.

“Princeton, maybe?”

He grinned. It was a smile that almost reached his eyes. “You’re
getting warm, friend. Really the Blue Willow Bar and Grill in Jersey City. We had a dandy shuffleboard crowd on Saturday nights.”

“So what can I do for you besides offering a beer case to sit on and a drink on the house?” I passed him the Scotch and he took two long gulps without bothering to wipe the neck of the bottle. I thought that was polite.

He passed it back to me and I took a drink. He waited until I lighted a cigarette. He seemed to have plenty of time.

“I’d like a piece of this place.”

I looked around at the shambles. “A piece of nothing is nothing.”

“I’d like to buy in. Half.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that.”

I picked up the Scotch and handed it to him and he took another drink and then I had another one.

“Maybe you'd like a little earnest money?” he said.

“I don’t think I mentioned it.”

“I’ve heard it talks,” he said, “but I never paid much attention.” He reached into his jacket’s inside breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that looked very much like a check. He handed it to me. It was a check and it was drawn in dollars on a New York bank. It was certified. It had my name on it. And it was exactly half of the nut I needed to open the doors of Bonn’s newest and friendliest bar and grill.

I handed it back to him. “I don’t need a partner. I’m not looking for one.”

He took the check, stood up, walked over to the table where the typewriter was, and laid it on the typewriter. Then he turned and looked at me. There was no expression on his face.

“How about another drink?” he asked.

I handed him the bottle. He drank and handed it back. “Thanks. Now I’m going to tell you a story. It won’t take long, but when I’m through you’ll know why you have a new partner.”

I took a drink. “Go ahead. I’ve got another bottle in case we run dry.”

His name, he said, as he sat there talking in the cluttered, half-lighted room, was Michael Padillo. He was half Estonian, half Spanish. His father had been an attorney in Madrid who chose the losing side during the civil war and was shot in 1937. His mother was the daughter of an Estonian doctor. She had met Padillo senior in Paris in 1925 while on a holiday. They were married and he, the son, was born the following year. His mother had been a striking, even beautiful, woman of considerable culture and accomplishment.

After the death of her husband she used her Estonian passport to reach Lisbon and eventually Mexico City. There she survived by teaching piano and giving language lessons in French, German, English and, occasionally, Russian.

“If you can speak Estonian, you can speak anything,” Padillo said. “She spoke eight without accent. She told me once that the first three languages are the hardest. One month we would speak nothing but English, the next month French. Then German or Russian or Estonian or Polish and back to Spanish or Italian and then start the whole thing over. I was young enough to think it was fun.”

Padillo’s mother died of tuberculosis in the spring of 1941. “I was fifteen then and I spoke six languages, so I said to hell with Mexico and headed for the States. I got as far as El Paso. I became a bellhop, a guide, and a part-time smuggler. I also picked up the fundamentals of bartending.

“By mid-1942 I decided that El Paso had offered all it was going to. I got a Social Security card and a driver’s license and registered for the draft although I was still under age. I swiped a couple of letterheads from two of the better hotels and wrote myself glowing recommendations as a bartender. I forged the managers' names on both of them.”

He hitchhiked through the Big Bend country of Texas up to Albuquerque, where he caught 66 all the way to Los Angeles. Padillo
talked about Los Angeles in its palmy, scared, war-feverish days of 1942 as if it were a personal but long-lost Beulah Land.

“It was a crazy town, full of phonies, dames, soldiers and nuts. I got a job tending bar. It was a nice place, they treated me well, but it only lasted a little while before they caught up with me.”

“Who?”

“The FBI. It was August of 1942 and I was just opening up. The pair of them. Polite as preachers. They showed me their little black passbooks that said sure enough they were with the FBI and asked if I would mind coming along because the draft board had been writing letters to me for the longest time and they kept coming back marked ‘address unknown.’ And they were sure it was a mistake, but it had taken them five goddamn months to trace me and so forth.

“Well, I went downtown with them and gave a story of sorts. I made a statement and signed it. I was mugged and fingerprinted. And then they took me in to see an assistant U.S. attorney general and he gave me a lecture and a choice. I could either join up or go to jail for draft evasion.”

Padillo joined the Army and applied for cooks and bakers school. In late 1942 he was happily running the bar of an officers’ club at a small Infantry Training Replacement Center in north Texas, not too far from Dallas and Fort Worth, before someone, browsing through his records, discovered that he could speak and write six languages.

“They came at night,” he said. “The top sergeant and the CO. and this jerk in civilian clothes. It was all very bad, late TV. The olive-drab Packard, the silent ride to the airport, the tight-lipped pilots glancing at their watches while they paced up and down under the wing of the C-47. Pure corn.”

The plane landed in Washington and Padillo was shuffled from office to office. “Some of them were dressed in civilian clothes, some in uniform. I seem to remember that they all smoked pipes that year.”

They tested him on his languages. “I can speak English with either
a Mississippi or an Oxford accent. I can talk like a Berliner or a Marseille pimp. Berlitz would love me.

“They sent me to Maryland then, where I learned some tricks and I taught them a few I’d picked up in Juirez. It was all very gung-ho with assumed names and identities. I said I was a towel boy in a Mexican whorehouse. The rest of the guys never busted me, but they liked to ask detailed questions about my occupation.”

When the Maryland training was over, Padillo was hustled back to Washington. It was a house on R Street, just west of Connecticut Avenue. They told him the colonel wanted to see him. “He looked very much like the Hollywood actor who used to play the colonel in all the VD movies they showed you in basic,” Padillo said. “I think it embarrassed him.

“He told me that I could make a very important contribution to what he called the ‘national effort’. If I would agree to do so, I would be discharged, given American citizenship, and a certain amount of money would be paid to an account in my name at the American Security and Trust Company. I could collect the money when I got back.

“So I asked him back from where.

“ ‘Paris,’ he said, sucked on his pipe, and stared out the window. He was having a fine time for a former assistant professor of French at Ohio State.”

Padillo spent two years in France with the underground, most of the time in Paris, where he operated as American liaison with the Maquis. After the war they shipped him back to the States. He collected his money from the bank, was handed a draft card that said he was 4-F, and received a discreet pat on the back from the General himself.

“I headed for L.A. It was still wacky in 1945, but it wasn’t like it was. But perhaps the reason I liked it is because it was so goddamned phony, I’d had enough of reality.

“I also had enough money so I could hang around the strip for a
while. I got a few jobs as an extra and then started bartending in this small place on Santa Monica. I was even buying in when they came. You know: young, single-breasted suits, hats. They had a little job, they said, that would take two or three weeks. In Warsaw. Nobody would ever know I was gone, and there was a couple of grand in it for me.”

Padillo ground his cigarette out on the floor and lighted another. “I went. That time and maybe two dozen times more, and the last time they came around in their dark suits and their fraternity-house manners I told them no. They just got even more polite and reasonable and kept coming back. They started dropping hints about the fact that some question had been raised in Washington about the validity of my citizenship, but they were sure that if I took on this one more job everything could be straightened out.

“I got back part of the money I had invested in the place and headed east. I was working in Denver at the Senate Lounge on Colfax and they found me there. So I went to Chicago and from Chicago to Pittsburgh and from there to New York. In New York I heard about this place in Jersey. It was nice and it was quiet. Some college kids, some neighborhood traffic. I made the down payment.”

It was completely dark outside. The kerosene lantern gave off its soft warm glow. The Scotch bottle was getting low. The silence seemed thick and thoughtful.

“They came once more, and that time they weren’t polite. So now I’m doing to you what they did to me. I need a cover in Bonn, and you’ve been thoughtful enough to provide a perfect one.”