The Cold War Swap (7 page)

“I got on the flit and just couldn’t get off,” he had explained to me one gloomy night. “They wanted to buy out my interest, but in a moment of sobriety I listened to my lawyers and refused to sell. I’ve got a third of the stock. The more lushed I got, the more stubborn I became. Finally I made a deal. I would get out and they would bank my share of the profits for me. My attorneys handled the whole thing. I’m very rich and I’m very drunk and I know I’m never going to quit drinking and I know I’m never going to write a book.”

Cooky had been in Bonn for three years. Despite Berlitz and a series of private tutors, he could not learn German. “Mental block,” he had said. “I don’t like the goddamn language and I don’t want to learn it.”

His job was to fill one two-minute news spot a day and occasionally do a live show. His sources were the private secretaries of anyone in town who might have a story. In methodical fashion he had seduced those who were young enough and completely charmed those who were over the edge. I had once spent an afternoon with him while he had gathered his news. He had sat in the big chair, the private-joke smile fighting to break through. “Wait,” he had said. “In three minutes the phone will ring.”

It had. First there had been the girl from the
Presse Dienst
. Then it was one who worked as a stringer for the
London Daily Express:
when her boss had a story, she made sure that Cooky had it too. The phone had continued to ring. To all Cooky had been charming, grateful and sincere.

By eight o’clock the calls had ended and Cooky had gone over his notes. Between us we had managed to finish a fifth. Cooky had glanced around and found a fresh bottle conveniently placed by his chair on the floor. He had tossed it to me. “Mix us a couple more, Mac, while I write this crap.”

He had swung the typewriter toward him, inserted a sheet of paper, and talked the story as he typed. “Chancellor Ludwig Erhard said today that …” He had had two minutes that night, and it had taken him five to write it. “You want to go to the studio?” he had asked.

More than mellow, I had agreed. Cooky had stuck a fifth of Scotch into his mackintosh and we had made the dash to the Deutsche Rundfunk station. The engineer had been waiting at the door.

“You have ten minutes, Herr Baker. They have already called you from New York.”

“Plenty of time,” Cooky had said, producing the bottle. The engineer had had a drink, I had had a drink, and Cooky had had a drink. I had been getting drunk, but Cooky had seemed as warm and charming as ever. We had gone into the studio and he had gotten on the phone to his editor in New York. The editor had started to reel off the AP and UPI stories that had come over the wire from Bonn.

“I’ve got that … got that … got that. Yeah. That, too. And I’ve got one more on the Ambassador.… I don’t give a goddamn if AP doesn’t have it; they’ll move it after nine o'clock.”

We had all had another drink. Cooky had put the earphones on and had talked over the live mike to the engineer in New York. “How they hanging, Frank? That’s good. All right; here we go.”

And Cooky had begun to read. His voice had been excellent, a fifth of Scotch apparently having made no effect. There had been no slurs, no flubs. He had glanced at the clock once, slowed his delivery slightly, and finished in exactly two minutes.

We had had another drink and had then proceeded to the saloon, where Cooky and I were to meet two secretaries from the Ministry of Defense. “That,” he had said, on the way to Godesberg, “is how I keep going. If it weren’t for that deadline every afternoon and the fact that I don’t have to get up in the morning, I’d be chasing little men. You know, Mac, you should quit drinking. You’ve got all the earmarks of a lush.”

“My name is Mac and I’m an alcoholic,” I had said automatically.

“That’s the first step. The next time I dry up, we’ll have a long talk.”

“I’ll wait.”

Through what he termed his “little pigeons,” Cooky knew Bonn as few others did. He knew the servant problem at the Argentine Embassy as well as he knew the internal power struggle within the Christian Democratic Union. He never forgot anything. He had once said: “Sometimes I think that’s why I drink: to see if I can’t black out. I never have. I remember every Godawful thing that’s done and said.”

“You’re not shaking very much today,” I said.

“The good doctor is giving me daily vitamin injections. It’s sort of a crash program. He has a theory that I can drink as much as I want as long as I get sufficient vitamins. He was a little looped when he left today and insisted on giving himself a shot.”

I sipped my coffee. “Mike says our place should be swept. My apartment too. He says you know who can do it.”

“Where is Mike?”

“In Berlin.”

“How soon do you want it?”

“As soon as possible.”

Cooky picked up the phone and dialed ten numbers. “The guy’s in Düsseldorf.”

He waited while the phone rang. “This is Cooky, Konrad … Fine.… There are two spots in Bonn that need your talents … Mac’s Place in Godesberg—you know where it is? Good. And an apartment. The address is … ” He looked at me. I told him and he repeated it over the phone. “I don’t know. Phones and everything, I would think. Hold on.” He turned to me and asked: “What if they find something?”

I thought a moment. “Tell him to leave them in, but to tell you where they are.”

“Just leave them, Konrad. Don’t bother them. Call me when you’re through and give me a rundown. Now, how much?” He listened and
then asked me: “You go for a thousand marks?” I nodded. “O.K. A thousand. You can pick it up from me. And the key to the apartment, too. Right. See you tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone and reached for a convenient bottle.

“He does my place once a week,” he said. “I got a little suspicious once because of some phone noise when one of the pigeons was calling.”

“Find anything?” I asked.

He nodded. “The pigeon lost her job. I had to find her another.”

He took a gulp of Scotch and chased it with another of milk. “Mike in a jam?”

“I don’t know.”

Cooky looked up at the ceiling. “Remember a little girl named Mary Lee Harper? Used to work downtown. She was from Nashville.”

“Vaguely.”

“She used to work for a guy named Burmser.”

“And?”

“Well, Mary Lee and I became friendly. Very friendly. And one night, after X-number of Martinis, right here in this place, Mary Lee started to talk. She talked about the nice man, Mr. Padillo. I gave her some more Martinis. She didn’t remember talking the next morning. I assured her she hadn’t. But Mary Lee’s back in Nashville now. She left quite suddenly.”

“So you know.”

“As much as I want to. I told Mike I knew, and I also told him that if he needed anything …” Cooky let it trail off. “I guess he decided he did.”

“What’s Burmser besides what it says in his little black cardcase?” Cooky looked thoughtfully into his drink. “A tough number. He’d sell his own kid if he thought the market was right. Ambitious, you might say. And ambition in his line of work can be tricky.”

Cooky sighed and got up. “Since I’ve been here, Mac, the little
pigeons have told me a number of things. You can add them up and it comes out shit. There was this pigeon from the Gehlen organization who talked and talked and talked one night. She—never mind.” He walked into the kitchen and returned with another glass of milk and another half-tumbler of Scotch. “If you see Mike—you are, aren’t you?” I nodded. “If you see him, tell him to play it cozy. I’ve heard a couple of things in the last few days. They don’t add up and I don’t want to be cryptic. Just tell Mike that it sounds messy.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“More coffee?”

“No. Thanks for getting the guy to check us out. Here’s a key to my apartment. I’ll tell Horst to send you a thousand.”

Cooky smiled. “No hurry. You can give it to me when you get back.”

“Thanks.”

“Take it easy,” Cooky said at the door, the faint smile threatening to turn into a grin.

I drove home. Nobody with a Luger was in the apartment. There were no fat little men with shabby brief cases and brown trusting eyes or cold-faced policemen with starched shirts and overly clean fingernails. Just me. I picked up my suitcase, opened it on the bed and packed, leaving room for two bottles of Scotch. I started to close it, then walked over to the dresser and took a Colt .38 revolver from its clever hiding place under my shirts. It was a belly-gun. I put it in the suitcase, closed the hasps, went out to my car, and drove off to Düsseldorf feeling like a complete idiot.

By nine that night I was sitting in my room in the Berlin Hilton waiting for the phone to ring or a knock on the door or somebody to come through the transom if there had been one. I switched on the radio and listened to RIAS knock hell out of the Russians for a while. After fifteen minutes of that, and another drink, I decided it was time
to get out of the room before I started leafing through the Gideon Bible’s handy guide to chapter and verse for times of stress. I wondered if it had one for fools.

I took a cab over to the Kurfürstendamm and sat in one of the cafés watching the Berliners go by. It was an interesting parade. When he sat down at my table, all I said was a polite “
Guten Abend
.” He was a bit of a dude, if the phrase doesn’t date me: middling tall with long black hair brushed straight back into not quite a ducktail. He wore a blue pin-striped suit that pinched a bit too much at the waist. His polka-dot bow tie had been knotted by a machine. The waitress came over and he ordered a bottle of Pils. After it came he sipped it slowly, his black eyes restlessly scanning the strollers.

“You left Bonn in a hurry, Mr. McCorkle.” The voice was pure Wisconsin. Madison, I thought.

“Did I forget to stop the milk?”

He grinned, a flicker of shiny white.

“We could talk here, but the book says we shouldn’t. We’d better go by the book.”

“I haven’t finished my beer. Does the book say anything about that?”

The flicker of white again. He had the best looking set of teeth I had seen in a long time. I thought he must be hell with the girls.

“You don’t have to ride me, Mr. McCorkle. I’ve got instructions from Bonn. They think it’s important. Maybe you will too when you hear what I’ve got to say.”

“Have you got a name?”

“You can call me Bill. Most of the time it’s Wilhelm.”

“What do you want to talk about, Bill? About how things are in the East and perhaps how they would have been better if the wheat crop had shown its early promise?”

The whiter-than-white teeth again. “About Mr. Padillo, Mr. McCorkle.” He shoved over one of the round paper coasters that are supplied
by German beer firms. It had an address on it, and it wasn’t a very good address.

“High-class place,” I said.

“Safe. I’ll meet you there in half an hour. That’ll give you time to finish your beer.” He rose and lost himself in the sidewalk traffic.

The address on the coaster was for a café called
Der Purzelbaum
—The Somersault. It was a hangout for prostitutes and homosexuals of both sexes. I had gone there once in a party of people who had thought it was funny.

I waited fifteen minutes and then caught a cab. The driver shrugged eloquently when I gave him the address.
Der Purzelbaum
was no better or worse than similar establishments in Hamburg or London or Paris or New York. It was a basement joint, and I had to walk down eight steps and through a yellow door to reach a long low-ceilinged room with soft pink lights and cuddly-looking little alcoves. There was also a lot of fish net hung here and there. It was dyed different colors. Bill of the shiny teeth was sitting at the long bar that ran two-thirds of the length of the left side of the room. He was talking to the barkeep, who had long blond wavy hair and sad violet eyes. There were two or three girls at the bar whose appraising stares counted the change in my pocket. From the alcoves came the murmur of conversation and an occasional giggle. A jukebox in the rear played softly.

I walked over to the bar. The young man who said his name was Bill asked in German if I would like a drink. I said a beer, and the sad-eyed bartender served it silently. I let my host pay for it. He picked up his glass and bottle and nodded toward the rear of the place. I followed, sheeplike. We sat at a table next to the jukebox, which was loud enough to keep anyone from overhearing us but not so loud that we had to shout.

“I understand the book says that these things can be bugged,” I said, indicating the jukebox.

He looked startled for only a second. Then he relaxed and smiled
that wonderful smile. “You’re quite a kidder, Mr. McCorkle.”

“What else is on your mind?”

“I’ve been told I should keep an eye on you while you’re in Berlin.”

“Who told you?”

“Mr. Burmser.”

“Where did you meet me?”

“At the Hilton. You weren’t trying to hide.”

I made some patterns on the table with my wet beer glass. “Not to be rude or anything, but how do I know you’re who you say you are? Just curious—but do you happen to have one of those little black folding cardcases that kind of outlines your bona fides?”

The smile exploded again. “If I have one it’s in Bonn or Washington or Munich. Burmser told me to repeat a telephone number to you.” He did. It was the same one Burmser had written on a slip of paper that morning.

“It’ll have to do.”

“How do you like it?”

“Like what?”

“The uniform. The suit, the hair—the image.” He actually said image.

“Very jazzy. Even nifty.”

“It’s supposed to be. I’m what our English friends would call a spiv. Part-time stoolie, pimp—even a little marijuana.”

“Where’d you learn German?”

“Leipzig. I was born there. Brought up in Oshkosh.”

I had been close.

“How long have you been doing this—whatever it is you’re doing?” I felt like the sophomore asking the whore how she’d fallen.

“Since I was eighteen. Over ten years.”

“Like it?”

“Sure. It’s for a good cause.” He said that, too.

“So what’s the story on me? And Padillo?”