The Cold War Swap (21 page)

However, we have learned from Max Vess that Padillo shot and killed Cook Baker prior to the attempt at the wall. The body has not yet been discovered.

The accident at the wall was a fluke. A two-man patrol was inadvertently in the area. The diversion of the gasoline bombs worked well, and it is regrettable that this pattern, not used in three years, should be expended on a failure. Max Vess reports that Padillo and associates took refuge in Langeman’s garage, where they paid DM 2,000 for bed and board. I suggest that I speak to Langeman about his billing.

Padillo and McCorkle met Maas in an East Berlin café. Maas, for $10,000, offered to get the group into West Berlin through a tunnel. Padillo and McCorkle agreed. On their return to Langeman’s garage they were forced to kill two members of the Volkspolizei and dispose of their bodies in a manhole.

Max Vess is to meet Padillo and associates shortly after 0500 this morning and transport them here. You are acquainted with their
subsequent needs from the verbal reports received from Max Vess.

Item: All our automobiles used in this operation have been recovered. I have sent a special memorandum to accounting informing them of all overhead charges.

I turned off the water in the tub and walked back into the bedroom. I put the report down and picked up the bottle of Scotch, uncapped it, and poured a drink. I took a long, deep swallow and stood there in the clean little bedroom with the turned-down bed and the picture of a café scene on the wall and let the liquor spread from the stomach to the cortex. I topped up the drink and opened the closet door. A Class-A Army uniform, complete with tech-sergeant’s stripes, combat infantry badge, and some ribbons indicating that the wearer had gone through a couple of battles in the Pacific, hung neatly in the closet. I closed the door and went back into the bathroom and set the glass down on the toilet lid within handy reach of the bath. I went back into the bedroom and fetched a package of the cigarettes and an ash tray and set them next to the glass of Scotch. Then I stripped off my clothes and threw them into a corner of the bathroom. I eased myself down into the water, which was a little short of scalding, and lay there staring up at the ceiling and letting the muscles unkink themselves.

I soaked in the bathtub, drinking the Scotch and smoking the cigarettes and thinking, but not too hard, until the water grew cool. I ran some more of the hot and then used the soap and rinsed myself off with a shower. I shaved and brushed my teeth and smoked a final cigarette. Then I got into bed.

Beds like that are too good for the common people.

I was running down the long corridor again toward the brightly lighted door at
the far, far end which seemed to grow no closer when I stepped in the snake-made noose and it began to jerk my leg. But it was only Padillo in his master-sergeant’s uniform, complete with the ribbons, the hash marks, and the gold overseas-duty bars. He looked like the kind who wasn’t overly generous with a three-day pass.

When he saw I was awake he quit shaking my foot and turned toward the Scotch. He poured himself a drink and said, “I have some coffee coming.”

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for a cigarette. “The sleep was good—what there was of it. You make a hell of a toughlooking top sergeant.”

“You find your uniform?”

“In the closet.”

“Better get into it. We have an appointment at the beauty parlor.”

I took the uniform out of the closet and started to dress. “This is a comedown for an ex-captain, you know.”

“You should have stayed in,” Padillo said; “you could have retired this year.”

“There seems to be some chance that another institution may make
me a free-bed-and-board offer. For twenty years or so, if I play it right.”

Somebody knocked on the door and Padillo said come in. It was one of the big men with a large pot of coffee and two cups. He put them down on the dresser and left. I tied my tie and walked over and poured a cup. Then I slipped on the blouse and admired myself in the mirror. “I knew a guy who looked like me twenty-one years ago in Camp Wolters,” I said. “I hated his guts.”

“No dog tags,” Padillo said. “If they start asking for those, we’re dead anyway.”

“What’s next?”

“Wolgemuth is a little skittish about the airport. He’s got his expert in to do a make-up job on us. All of us.”

“The guy has quite an operation.”

“You read the report?”

“Seems as though we had some company we didn’t know about.”

“So did Weatherby,” Padillo said.

“That still bother you?”

“It will for a long time. He was a good man.”

I finished my coffee and we went down the hall to the paneled room where we had first met Wolgemuth. He was dressed in a single-breasted blue suit, white shirt, carefully knotted blue-and-black tie, and black shoes that glistened. A white linen handkerchief peeked casually out of his breast pocket.

He nodded at me in a friendly way and asked if I had slept well and seemed interested and happy when I told him that I had.

“If you and Mike will come this way,” he said politely, indicating the door.

We followed him down the corridor, past our bedrooms, and into a room lined with closets on one side and a series of dressing tables on the other.

A tall blond woman with a lantern jaw and pale skin was arranging some articles on one of the dressing tables, which had a row of frosted bulbs around its mirror. “This is Frau Koepler,” said Wolgemuth. She
turned, nodded, and went back to her arranging. “Frau Koepler is in charge of this section.”

Wolgemuth opened one of the closets. “Here we have uniforms of every description. The ones located in this closet are a complete range of sizes of those worn by the Volkspolizei. Complete with boots, hats, shirts—the lot,” He closed that door and opened the next. “These are military—American, British, French and West German. Also East German—which the Vopos are switching to shortly, I understand. Next police uniforms—Berlin variety. And here are dresses for women—made in New York, London, Berlin, Chicago, Hamburg, Paris, Rome: the labels are authentic, as are the materials. Coats, undergarments, shoes—a complete wardrobe. Next are men’s furnishings—civilian variety. Off-the-peg suits from the Fankfurt
Kaufhof
, from Chicago and Los Angeles and Kansas City and New York. Also from London, Paris, Marseilles, East Berlin, Leipzig and Moscow—almost anywhere. Hats and shoes, button-down shirts and wide-spread collars. Three-button suits, double-breasted, dinner jackets, and so forth.”

I was impressed and said so. Wolgemuth grinned proudly. “If we have time, Herr McCorkle, I would like to show you our reproduction facilities.”

“He means his forged-document shop,” Padillo said. “I took a look at it earlier. It’s good. Maybe the best.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

“I’m ready,” Frau Koepler said.

“Good. Which of you will volunteer first?” Wolgemuth asked.

“Go ahead,” I said to Padillo.

He sat down in the chair before the dressing table and Frau Koepler draped a sheetlike affair around him—the kind that barbers use. She studied his face in the mirror and then covered his hair with a rubber cap that fitted down over his sideburns and neck. She murmured to herself, cocked her head this way and that, and then selected some soft wax. “Our nose is straight and thin,” she said; “we will broaden it slightly, flaring the nostrils just so.” Her hands flew deftly around Padillo’s
face. She patted and probed and shaped and molded. When she was through, he had a new nose. I would still have recognized him, but his features were altered.

“Our eyes are brown and our hair is black. We will soon have brown hair, but we shall also have brown eyebrows.” She picked up a tube and rubbed some of its contents into Padillo’s eyebrows. They became brown—or dirty blond. “Now the mouth: it is one of the most important features of the face. May I see our teeth?”

Padillo leered at her.

“They are very white and contrast nicely with our rather olive complexion. We will stain them ever so slightly, giving them a strong yellowish look—like a nice old horse.” She squeezed some paste onto a toothbrush that she had taken from a clear-plastic container and handed the brush to Padillo. “Let’s brush our teeth now carefully. It will wear off in a few days.” He brushed. “Now for the shape of our mouth and cheeks,” she went on. “We will balloon them slightly.” She inserted some flesh-colored sponge rubber into her mouth. “Bite down. Now open. Now here and here. Now bite down. Now open. You see we have a slightly pendulous lower lip now, rounder cheeks, and we have become a mouth breather. It is always slightly open, as if we were suffering from a slight respiratory ailment. We will also lighten our complexion and give it some of the heavy drinker’s veins.”

Frau Koepler opened a small white pot, dipped her fingers into a grayish paste, and began to work the paste into Padillo’s face. His skin took on a yeasty, almost unhealthy look, as if he had spent too much time in a hospital—or a bar. Just below the sideburns she fitted a small adhesive-backed stencil; then she dabbed at it with a stick wrapped in cotton, which she had dipped into a small bottle of liquid. She let the liquid dry and peeled off the stencil. Padillo’s capillary veins had burst into a curlicue profusion of purples and reds. She did the same to the other side of his face and then began similar work on his nose. “Not too much here,” she said; “we have been friends with good schnapps for let us say—oh—fifteen years. A half-bottle a day perhaps.” She
peeled off the stencil and the tip of Padillo’s nose glowed merrily. She whisked off the rubber head cover, reached into a bottom drawer, and produced a hair piece, which she fitted carefully to his head. Instead of a thick, gray-flecked crew cut he had a thin crop of dirty-blond hair, parted carefully on the right. Pink scalp gleamed through near the beginning of the hairline.

She examined her work critically. “Perhaps a small blemish on the chin—a pimple from a sour stomach.” She reached into a small box—the size of the ones that aspirin comes in—and applied her forefinger to Padillo’s chin. He had a pimple. He also had an unhealthy, puffy face; a drinker’s complexion; thinning hair; and a yellow-toothed mouth that never quite closed. He stood up. “Slump,” she ordered. “A man of our appearance avoids military bearing whenever possible.”

Padillo slumped and shuffled up and down the room.

“The perfect-thirty-year man,” I said.

“Think I could pass muster, Sergeant?” Padillo had even changed his voice to a White House drawl.

“Well, you’re not pretty—but you’re different.”

“If we had more time … but … ” Frau Koepler brushed off the chair and shrugged.

“Next,” I said, and sat down. She did a similar job on me, except that I grew tanner but unhealthier looking. She also gave me a neat, well-clipped mustache. New circles grew under my eyes, and they seemed to form deeper sockets than were there before. A slight but livid scar appeared over my right eye. “It is like a picture,” Frau Koepler explained. “The eye goes to the upper left-hand corner of a face automatically. That is where we put the scar. The mind registers the scar, scans the rest of the face, and runs into the mustache. Again the unexpected because the previous owner had no scar or mustache. Simple?”

“You’re very good,” I said.

“The best,” Wolgemuth said, and beamed some more. “We did not have to do so much work on the other two because they are known
only by pictures. But they will pass. Now, then, we must have the pictures taken for your ID cards.”

We said good-bye to Frau Koepler. The last time I saw her she was seated at the dressing table, staring into the the mirror and stroking her lantern jaw reflectively.

After the pictures were taken we had lunch with Wolgemuth. Padillo and I chewed carefuly because of the spongy rubber doodads that Frau Koepler had clamped in our mouths. They weren’t too much trouble—no worse than the first set of false teeth. They didn’t slip and slide around, but they felt strange and foreign. We found that drinking was much easier, and Wolgemuth thoughtfully supplied some excellent wine.

“You know, Herr McCorkle, I have been trying to get Mike here to come to work with us for a long time. He’s really one of the best in this rather difficult profession.”

“He’s got a job,” I said. “Between trips, that is.”

“Yes, the café in Bonn. That has been a really excellent cover. But I’m afraid that it’s completely exposed now—blown.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Padillo said. “After this they wouldn’t even send me down to the corner for coffee. That’s the way I want it.”

“You’re still a young man, Mike,” Wolgemuth said. “You’ve got the experience, the firsthand knowledge, the languages.”

“I’m not fancy enough,” Padillo said. “Sometimes I think I would have been good at running bootleg Scotch during Prohibition. Or perhaps I could still make it as a loner, knocking off suburban branch banks on Tuesday afternoons. I have the languages, but my methods are too orthodox, or maybe it’s just that I’m lazy: I won’t go into an operation loaded down with hollowed-out coins and fountain pens that unfold into motor scooters.”

Wolgemuth poured some more wine. “All right; let us say that your past successes have been derived from the simplicity of your methods. Would you be interested in accepting occasional assignments—well-paying ones, of course?”

Padillo took a sip of the wine and smiled at its taste. His newly yellowed teeth flashed like a warning light. “No thanks. Twenty, twenty-one years is a long time. Maybe years ago I should have gone to UCLA and majored in political science and languages, and when I graduated I could have sent in a Form 57 to the CIA or State and right now I could be an FO 2 or 3 with a house in Fairfax County or explaining Vietnam to the newspaper boys in Ghana. But don’t forget, Kurt, the only thing I really know is how to run a saloon. My languages are good, but only because I learned them early and correctly. I don’t know the first fundamentals of grammar. I just know when it sounds right. I’m weak in history, poor in political science, and ambivalent about the world power struggle. I respect—even admire—those who do know or think they do. But for twenty years now I’ve had bad dreams and cold sweats and I’ve had to concentrate just on how to keep on living.” He held out his hand and spread his fingers. They trembled slightly. “My nerves are shot, I drink too much, and I smoke too much. I’m used up and I’m worn out and I’m quitting this time around and there’s not a thing in God’s world that can stop me.”