TWENTY
A medium-rare sirloin steak with baked potato, tossed salad, and a bottle of ’54 Chateauneuf du Pape were waiting for me back in the room—and so was Horst. He was sitting silently on the edge of the bed, staring at me with heartfelt contempt.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said, toweling my hair dry.
“I think you know.”
“I’m the one who should be pissed off,” I said. “After all, it was you that set me up.”
“I’ve brought your dinner,” he said, standing up. “I can say that I hope you choke on it.”
“What did Sam tell you?” I called after him as he headed for the door.
“The truth about you,” he said, stopping to give me a bleak look. “Perhaps I have expected too much, but I thought you might find again your ideals and rejoin the battle.”
“I’m not Humphrey Bogart, Horst.”
“You can make a joke if you like, but perhaps to be a little bit like Bogie is not such a bad thing.”
“Even Bogie wasn’t like Bogie,” I said. “Nobody is.”
“Is this the excuse you tell yourself so you can betray your country?”
“I’m not betraying my country.”
“I have seen the photos,” he said dramatically.
“What photos?”
“Of you and the STASI colonel in a secret meeting.”
“So?”
“Sam has told me—”
“For Christ’s sake, Horst, wake up!” I was losing patience. “Sam will tell you what’s convenient for whatever he’s cooking up. He wanted you to set me up at the warehouse, so he told you I’m a traitor to get you to do it. He’s a lying bastard, like the rest of them. And that’s coming from somebody who actually likes the guy.”
I poured a glass of wine, swirled it around in the glass, and held it up to the light. It was a good, rich vintage, but I didn’t have a taste for it. I put it aside.
“Why, then, are you under arrest?” he asked skeptically.
“What do you want me to say, Horst?”
“Just the truth,” he answered.
“I’m afraid the truth is kind of elusive around here. Everyone’s got their own version of it.”
“Then tell me your version,” he said, easing back into the room.
“I don’t think you’ll like it,” I said.
“I would still rather know it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sit down, because it might take a while. This kind of truth doesn’t come in a neat little package.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and listened intently as I laid it out for him. I told him about Cuba and why I quit the game, and how Sam called me back into service to come to Berlin, and what the Colonel had told me about the plot to hit Kennedy. I told him about Kovinski and Iceberg and how he himself had unwittingly helped them set me up as their new patsy, then I explained how Sam was working inside the conspiracy, trying to get to the source, and about my encounter with Johnny Rosetti, Harvey King, and the man with the red bow tie. Finally I told him about “no awkward questions being asked.”
He sat there with a stunned look on his face for a moment after I’d finished. “What can I do?” he finally said.
“Go home,” I answered firmly. “And forget about all this. Go back to doing an honest day’s work, like stealing cars.”
“It must be stopped,” he said.
“I’m not sure it can be.”
“It must be!”
He stood up and paced back and forth a couple of times. “I believed you were an agent for STASI, which is no different than an agent for the Soviets!” he said frantically. “If I believed it, the world will believe it!” He stopped in his tracks and looked at me, an expression of alarm on his face. “What will be the consequences of this?!”
I shouldn’t have told him, of course. I’m not even sure why I did, except that I wanted to remove that look of contempt he gave me when I came into the room. I think I probably liked being Bogart in his eyes and I wasn’t willing to give it up. It turned out to be a costly conceit.
He dropped back onto the bed with wilted shoulders, looking totally defeated. “How can it be?” he said, more to himself than to me. “How can something like this happen with America?”
“What do you think America is, Horst?” I asked, not expecting an answer. He frowned and looked down into his lap, which I took to be an expression of disappointment, or dejection, or something else. In fact, he was formulating his answer. He began softly.
“I was nine years old in the summer of 1948 when the Russians blocked all of Berlin. We had no food, no electricity, and no way to escape. It sounds like a nightmare, I know, but it was the most amazing time for me. Do you know how I spent this summer? Each day I woke at dawn and, with my friends, we ran to the same place, just near the airport, to climb onto a pile of rubble where we could watch the airplanes land. They came one after the other, night and day, American planes filled with not just food and coal, but also with hope. Hope that we could remain free … We would stand there, all day sometimes, and wave our arms to each of the pilots as he crossed in front of us, hoping that he would see us and understand that we wanted to thank him. Then one day we saw the most fantastic thing. … As one of the planes flew over us there came a shower of boxes, each with its own small parachute, filling the sky. Do you know what was in these boxes? … Chocolates! Imagine it! Standing on the rubble of our city, with no food to eat, and the sky is raining with boxes of chocolates!” He paused to reflect on the memory for a moment, allowing himself a little smile before continuing.
“Then the next day came the same plane again and there were more boxes, and again the day after until I think every child in Berlin was getting a box of chocolates from this American pilot! It was the most amazing thing ever I have seen!” He shook his head, still in awe of the idea of the sky filled with boxes of chocolates.
I didn’t say anything because, of all things, I had a lump in my throat. What a strange condition for a terminal cynic like me to find himself in. Horst looked up and, I think, sensed my situation. He gave me a schoolboy grin, from ear to ear, and said, “Perhaps one day, when I become a big producer in Hollywood, I can make a movie from this story. It can be quite a tearjerker, don’t you think?”
I extracted a promise from Horst that he would slip away and go home in return for my assurance that I had a cunning plan to foil the bad guys and save the world. As we know, people will believe anything if it’s what they want to believe. And I believed I was rid of Horst.
I started in on the steak, but it was cold and I had no appetite anyway, in spite of not eating for over twenty-four hours. I managed to force a few bites down and was pushing the tray away when Sam came in. I think he was there to say a final good-bye, which didn’t do wonders for my confidence in the cunning plan.
“Where did you find Horst?” I asked him.
“He was after a visa,” he explained. “Wanted to immigrate. Turned down because of his police record.”
“You told him you’d get him in?”
“That’s right.”
“Do me a favor, Sam. Leave him alone.”
“Sure,” he said offhandedly, sitting down and helping himself to my dinner. “I don’t need him anymore. Why do you care?”
“I don’t know. Can you get him a visa?”
“I don’t see why not. Anything else?” Sam’s way of asking if I had any unfinished business I wanted him to take care of if I wasn’t able to.
“Can’t think of anything,” I said.
He nodded and we exchanged a brief look. There wasn’t anything to say really, and even if there was neither of us was going to say it. It wasn’t necessary.
“They’ll come for you just before sunrise,” he said. “They’ll put you in cuffs until you get there, wherever ‘there’ is.”
“It would help to know.”
“I couldn’t get it,” he said. “Harvey would see his grandmother as a security risk. But I do know that there’ll be three shooters, at least one in an elevated position, from an upper floor of a tallish building. That’s where you’ll be, too. Once the hit is confirmed and the president’s down, you’ll be given a chance to run. A Secret Service agent will be waiting around the corner to put two in your chest. The team’ll get out in the confusion and the world will be left with one lone assassin, dead as a doornail.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it on my account,” I said. “When should I make my move?”
“Go for the shooter first. If you get him, they have to abort.”
“How close will I be?”
“Not a clue,” he said sheepishly.
“How about afterward?”
“You’re on your own.”
“Jesus, Sam.”
“You’re gonna have to play it by ear,” he said, heading for the door. “Your specialty.”
“Do me a favor if it doesn’t work out, Sam.”
“Just name it,” he said.
“Die a slow and painful death.”
He chuckled and left without saying good luck. We both knew if I had to count on luck, I’d be out of it.
I lay in the dark, hoping for sleep, exhausted but wide awake, experiencing a strange sense of stillness and serenity. It wasn’t that I was filled with confidence about what was to come. Far from it. I think I felt at peace because I’d finally put the pieces of my life together and they seemed to make some kind of twisted sense.
I didn’t need Horst to sell me on America. I was sold when I first stepped onto the crowded streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and was met with a surge of humanity hustling to get their piece of the dream. The America I found wasn’t pure or pristine, not by any stretch of the imagination, and the good guys didn’t always win. The streets weren’t paved with gold and chocolates didn’t fall out of the sky, either, but the air was filled with optimism. It was alive with possibilities, with the belief that good people who worked hard would be rewarded with a good life, free from the tyranny and constraints they’d left behind.
I saw America at its best and I saw the worst of it, but I always believed in it and I would always be there when it needed to be defended. And I don’t mean the buildings or the roads or the bridges, or even the people. I mean the idea of it. The simple idea that individual freedom is something people are born with—the state can’t give it to you, it can only take it away. That’s it. Easy to put into words but, judging by the world’s history, tough as hell to put into practice.
I’m not talking about the Fourth of July, flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it kind of freedom. That’s something else. I mean the whoever-you-are, whatever-you-do, no-matter-how-you-look or what-you-think, welcome-to-the-party, be-an-American kind of freedom.
And don’t let anyone tell you that the Soviet Union didn’t pose a threat to that kind of freedom, either, because it did. It was a brutal tyranny that stripped its people of their rights and took away their humanity, and we needed to defend against it. But what I didn’t see when I was in the front line of our secret war was the disadvantage we labored under, and the effect it was having on us. It would have been suicide to meet the enemy on the battlefield, so we were forced underground, and in that dark world we had to play the game by their rules.
Subterfuge, deceit, treachery, subversion, betrayal—they were the tried and tested tools of tyranny, not of a free society. The United States didn’t even have a peacetime foreign intelligence service until 1947. None. So we were the new kids on the block, and the longer we played their game, the more we became like them. Not the American people, of course. They were blissfully unaware of the creeping tyranny that was growing like a cancer inside their government. It had spread, unseen, until it would strike at the heart of its host, killing the essence of what it was supposed to be defending.
The coup was an inevitable consequence of giving men like Henry Fisher and Harvey King the responsibility for our freedom. They had planned to attack our own troops at Guantánamo. I guess that said it all. We had become our own enemy.
I had turned a blind eye and gone fishing, mistaking disengagement for freedom. Like a lot of people, I saw our dirty war as a necessary evil, something we needed in order to defend against the enemy at the gate. Now I realized that the enemy amongst us was the more dangerous one—and they were already inside the wall.
So I lay in the dark, feeling calm because I was ready, at last, to rejoin the battle.