THREE
The sound shot through my head like a bullet on fire. I came to in the dark and froze, trying to get my bearings. The goddamn buzzer wouldn’t quit, scrambling my already decimated brain cells into a lump of confused pain in the center of my skull.
Then it went quiet.
The room started to take shape, but I knew if I tried to move my head it would explode. I managed to locate the bedside light, fumbled around for my watch until I realized it was still on my wrist. I squinted up at it, waited for my eyes to focus. A couple of minutes past five—I’d been asleep roughly an hour. I shut my eyes, went blank right away.
Then the buzzer again. What kind of a*shole—!
“Open the goddamned door, Jack!”
An Ivy League a*shole. What the hell did Powell want at this hour?
And more buzzing. He obviously wasn’t going anywhere, so I scraped myself off the bed and slumped toward the door. Noticing that I was fully clothed, except for bare feet, I tried to recall my last moments of consciousness but drew a blank. It didn’t matter, so I let it go.
Powell was standing in the hallway, groomed, pressed, and scrubbed behind the ears, briefcase neatly tucked under his arm. He took one look at me and said, “You look like shit.”
“Yeah, well, I feel a lot worse,” I croaked. His aftershave wafted across the threshold and made me want to puke. I left the door open and retreated back inside. He followed.
“Big night out?”
I dropped into an armchair and closed my eyes. I could feel him checking the room out.
“How the hell do you rate a place like this?”
“Friends in high places,” I mumbled, eyes still shut.
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
He couldn’t get over that they’d put a lowlife like me into a five-star suite at the Kempinski. Even the Berlin station chief didn’t rate that kind of treatment. What Powell didn’t know, of course—and what I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him—was that I had scammed the room. Nothing elaborate, just a quick call while I was on a layover in Frankfurt airport to the CIA travel office. I’d introduced myself to an overworked young lady as the concierge from the Kempinski, explained that there were no single rooms available for Mr. Teller after all, but the hotel would be happy to accommodate him in a suite, at no extra cost, if that could be authorized. The lady couldn’t care less what kind of room I had, and as long as it stayed on budget, nobody else would care, either. So she agreed when I asked her to send a telex to the hotel confirming the conversation. “For our records,” I explained in my German accent. When I got to the Kempinski, the reservations desk had the following message from Washington:
Confirm Mr. J. Teller, guest arriving 22 June, authorized for upgrade to suite at hotel cost. End.
There was some question about the phrase at hotel cost, but I assured them that it meant at normal hotel rates. If I’d learned anything in my agency days, it was how to sell a story. It doesn’t matter how big the lie is—in fact, the bigger the better—as long as it’s either: (a) what people want to hear; (b) what they dread to hear; or (c) what they couldn’t care less about. In other words, pretty much anytime.
Powell pulled the drapes on the floor-to-ceiling window, flooding the room with unwelcome early-morning light. He took a gilded armchair from behind the Louis XIV writing desk, placed it in the middle of the room, on the Persian carpet, sat down, crossed his legs, and stared silently, his lips forming a cocky grin that made him look empty-headed. I felt the crumpled pack of HBs in my pocket, but thought better of it. It wouldn’t help the pain that was now migrating to my right temple.
Powell finally broke silence:
“Enjoying Berlin so far?”
“I’m gonna recommend it to all my friends.”
“I didn’t know you had any friends left.”
“One or two,” I said.
“In high places.”
“That’s right.”
He paused, kept his eyes locked on me. Powell was the perfect Company man. Urbane, smart, arrogant, ambitious, and a coldhearted bastard. He’d probably be director one day.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” he asked cutely.
“I’ll take a wild guess. You got another letter drop from the man with the cane. He’s offering another meeting and Washington wants me along even though you tried hard to convince them that I’m a f*ckup.”
Powell shrugged. “Nothing personal.”
It never is with these guys. They’ll wire a man’s balls up and zap him until he passes out and it’s okay, as long as it’s not personal. I needed coffee, picked up the phone on the side table. “You want anything?”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. I ordered the coffee anyway, along with poached eggs and orange juice just to piss him off.
“Why do you think our friend is so interested in you?”
“I’ll ask him when I see him.”
He stood up, looking like he had a bad case of heartburn, and replaced the chair behind the writing desk. The interview was over.
“What time are we on?” I asked.
“Seven,” he said, checking his watch. “Just under two hours.” I asked where, but he didn’t want to say.
“What are you gonna do, take me there blindfolded?” I forced a laugh, even though I wasn’t sure that it was out of the question.
“The market in Kreuzberg. And no f*ckups this time.”
“I didn’t f*ck up last time,” I said. “I’m gonna get cleaned up. Answer the door if room service rings.” He gave me a look as I left the room. Maybe it wasn’t personal, but it sure looked like he hated my guts.
My brain started to turn over in the shower. Our mystery man hadn’t wasted any time getting back in touch, so whatever he had in mind, he was eager. Maybe there was a time element. That he was a pro was no longer in doubt, not in my mind anyway. He might be out in the cold, looking for a way west. But if he was in trouble, why would he wait for me to fly all the way to Berlin from Florida? He wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t care if I was alone, either. In fact, he’d feel safer with a crowd. I was intrigued, even on one hour’s sleep. I wanted the answer, but I knew that if this guy spotted a crowd—and I was sure he would—he’d be gone before we knew he was there. And there certainly wouldn’t be a third chance.
Powell was getting anxious by the time I reappeared in the living room, shaved and dressed. It wasn’t six o’clock yet, but we had to get me wired up again and pick up Johnson and Chase at the Berlin Operations Base (BOB) offices on the edge of the city.
I saw that the coffee had arrived.
“Can I see the letter?” I asked Powell as I poured a cup.
“What for?” He seemed genuinely surprised that I would ask.
“Just curious,” I answered.
“Don’t be.”
“He’ll know if I’m not alone,” I said. “And if he walks this time, you really won’t hear from him again.”
“Then he’d better not walk. Let’s go.”
“Why don’t we do it his way?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Leave the wire and the honor guard at home. He’ll spot them. I’ll make contact, see what it’s all about, and report back to you.” I knew there was no way in hell that Powell was ever going to agree to anything of the sort, but I thought I’d better give it a try before doing what I was thinking of doing.
“I’m not even going to respond to that.” He was already at the door, waiting.
“It’s your party,” I said as I headed out.
“You’d be smart to remember that,” he snarled.
I followed him into the hallway, but stopped short. “Damn,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “The key … Must be in my other pants. I’ll get it.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Powell grumbled as I headed back into the bedroom.
I quickly gathered the clothes off the bed, where I’d thrown them before showering, went into the adjoining bathroom, threw them over a towel rack, then covered them with a wet towel. The crumpled pack of HBs fell on the floor and I grabbed them, thinking I might need one after all. I quickly ripped the receiver off the telephone that was next to the toilet and stuck it in my pocket before returning to the bedroom, where I bent over like I was looking under the bed and waited for Powell to appear, which he did pretty quickly.
“Can’t find my pants,” I shrugged.
“Forget it!” Powell barked. “Get another key from reception!”
“Hey, my wallet, my passport, everything’s in there. I thought I left them on the bed before I went into the shower.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” he spouted.
“Look in the bathroom, will you?” I said while making a show of pulling the sheets off the bed.
Powell shook his head and took the bait—he headed into the bathroom. I moved quickly across the bedroom, caught a glimpse of him pulling my trousers off the towel rack, grumbling, “Can’t even keep track of his own f*cking pants and I’m supposed to …”
I couldn’t hear the rest because I pushed the door shut and locked it from the outside. There was a beat of silence while he registered what was happening, then all hell broke loose.
“WHAT THE F*ck DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, TELLER?! OPEN THIS GODDAMN DOOR RIGHT NOW, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”
“Sorry, Chief, but I think it’ll work out better this way in the long run,” I called through the door.
“You are f*cking crazy,” he said, with surprising composure.
“Could be,” I agreed. “But look, your boys’11 come looking for you in an hour or so. Why don’t you get in the bath in the meantime? It’s got jet sprays.”
“You are in very deep shit, Teller. Very, very deep shit.”
There was no doubt about that. I wondered why I was doing it. Why should I care what this East German bozo wanted with me? I could go home to Florida and… Well, maybe that was it. What the hell would I do when I got back to my beach? Sit there and wonder what the mystery man with a cane wanted to tell me, that’s what. And if Powell and his crew were tagging along I’d never know. Anyway, I was used to deep shit. I seemed to feel pretty comfortable in the stuff.
“Come on, Jack.” He sounded pitiful now. “Open the door and we’ll forget all about it. Hey, we can work together on this, can’t we?” Then I realized—I might be in deep shit, but Powell wasn’t going to come out smelling too good, either. Not the kind of report you want to send to Washington. “Sorry, guys, I couldn’t get your defector because I was locked in the bathroom” wouldn’t go over too well. I started to feel better about the situation. …
“Don’t worry, Chief,” I called out as I exited. “If you’re a good boy, I might bring you back a spy and we can be heroes together.”
His screams faded away as I closed the bedroom door behind me. No one could possibly hear him through the solid oak outer door, which I double-locked. I noticed that the “Do Not Disturb” sign was still on display over the doorknob from the previous night.
Funny enough, as I left the hotel I felt pretty good, as if I’d had a full night’s sleep.
The taxi dropped me outside the Markthalle a few minutes before seven. I glanced around the square, wondered who might be watching. It was a pretty safe bet that once Johnson and Chase realized something was up, they’d head for the Kempinski before coming here, which gave me at least an hour. If I didn’t have contact by then, I’d go straight to Templehof, get the first flight out to anywhere. Goldilocks didn’t fancy the idea of spending the afternoon with the Three Bears.
It was a bright, clear Sunday morning and the place was already lively with delivery trucks and vendors setting out their stalls. The market was housed in a huge nineteenth-century cast-iron building opening onto Marheinekeplatz in the Kreuzberg district. The area seemed to be a haven for a wide variety of fringe dwellers—beatniks, anarchists, pseudointellectuals, revolutionary squatters, that sort of thing. Most came from comfortable middle-class homes and were playing out some romantic notion of bohemian life at the same time they did penance for not being born poor and desperate. A majority of them would end up in the family business.
Heading toward the market, I passed a man washing down the sidewalk in front of his shop. Something about the biting scent of the soap he was using brought back a vague but unmistakable sense of the distant past. Funny how a smell can trigger a sudden remembrance of a place without connecting it to a specific moment or event. It was an unexpected, but somehow comforting sensation, in spite of the sting it delivered to my eyes and nose.
Not knowing where the meeting was supposed to take place, I figured I’d wander, make myself visible. He’d find me when he wanted to. After two years as a beach bum, it felt good to be back in the game. I hadn’t forgotten all the reasons I’d gotten out, and it’s not like I wanted back in, even if I could (which I couldn’t), but I had to admit that I enjoyed the feeling of being out on a limb again.
It was almost exactly a decade earlier, in April 1953, that an encounter at a jazz club on Forty-seventh Street had brought me into the fold. I was doing time behind the bar of the Three Deuces, waiting for something better to come along, when Sam Clay strode in with an Ava Gardner look-alike on his arm. Sam was not your typical ladies’ man—short and squat—but he had charisma and back then he even had hair, so he never went lonely. At the time I tagged him as just another overpaid, undersexed executive on a recreational night out and ignored him except to note that the ma?tre d’ led him to a prime table, front and center, on reserve for VIPs. The girl started going through Dom Pérignon like it was water, and after a while I noticed that she was getting more and more agitated about something, while Sam sat back, puffing on a Havana, staring straight ahead like she wasn’t even there. The girl got louder and louder until eventually everyone in the place was looking over at them.
That went on for a while until, finally, Sam stood up slowly, faced the room, and said: “Ladies and gentlemen … As you can see, I’m in the company of a very beautiful woman here. … Top-drawer. Unfortunately, she’s also a very large pain in the ass. Therefore, if any man here thinks she’s such a knockout that she’s worth a large pain in your ass, you have my blessing. I hope the two of you will be very happy together.”
There was dead silence. After a beat Sam turned to his date and said, “Sorry, honey, no takers.” The girl got up, gave him a voodoo look, and marched out the door without a word. The musicians took the cue and launched into “Bye, Bye, Baby” and Sam got a round of applause, at least from the male half of the room. You had to admire the guy for style, even though I thought it was a touch on the cruel side. I sent a thirty-year-old whiskey over to his table anyway, on the house, and he ended up at the bar, where he finished off the bottle and closed the place down with me.
I liked him from the start—a no-bullshit kind of guy who knew the world from the bottom up. I guess he liked me, too, because three days later I got my first late-night phone call from him, offering me a job with an oil consortium he was involved in. “The money’s not great,” he said, “but you’ll see the world and I guarantee you it won’t be boring.” I told him I might be interested and that was enough for him—a ticket to Teheran arrived the next morning, with a note saying he’d meet me there in a few days to show me the ropes.
It didn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t working for any oil company, and Sam confirmed the obvious when he finally turned up, two weeks late. He threw his feet up onto his desk, blew smoke at the ceiling fan, and poked the air with his cigar. “I want you to know two things, Jack,” he began. “One, I don’t invite just anybody onto my team. I invited you because I think you’ll be a good player and I believe I can rely on you. Two, if you don’t want to get involved, you can go back to New York right now. Because once you get involved, you don’t get uninvolved. … Ever.”
“You decided to come alone today.”
I’d been aware for some time that I was being shadowed, so I’d headed for a dark corner of the market where an old lady was selling an unimpressive array of homegrown fruit. I knew that if he was ever gonna break the ice, this would be his moment.
“Blind dates are hard enough without a chaperon,” I answered without turning around, continuing my inspection of little green apples.
“Your people are clumsy,” he said flatly. “If they had come today, I would have given up on you.”
I gave the old lady a coin for an apple then turned toward the voice. He was younger than I had expected. Mid- to late forties, although the grim expression etched into his face made him seem older. He studied me with a clinical detachment, blue-gray eyes peering guardedly out from behind round wire-frame lenses. His features seemed to be set in stone, and I noticed that the cane had been discarded.
“I was about to give up on you,” I said.
He nodded, pulled a pack of nonfilters out of his jacket, and offered me one. I turned it down, although I was tempted. He lit up, took a long drag.
“Shall we go somewhere private?” I suggested.
“We’ll walk,” he said coolly. “I prefer the open air to a stuffy room full of microphones.”
We seemed to go forever, first through busy streets and then empty alleyways, without a word being said. He was chainsmoking foul-smelling cigarettes, and combined with sleep deprivation, it was getting to me. I needed something to eat, pulled the apple out of my pocket, and started munching on it. It was delicious and I wished I’d bought more.
We walked through a small park where a couple of young mothers supervised small children playing on swings.
“Do you know Berlin?” he began.
“I got here yesterday,” I answered.
“It’s quite a place. Perhaps you’ll get a chance to become acquainted.”
“I don’t plan to stay long.”
He nodded, tossed his butt aside, and opened a new pack. He offered me one again, and I remembered the HBs that were in my pocket. “I’ve got my own.” I dug into the crumpled pack.
“Suit yourself.” He had a deep, raspy voice, a result of the smokes, no doubt. His English was heavily accented but good. It was time to get down to business. I lit one of the HBs off his lighter and went fishing.
“You a diplomat?”
“In the Foreign Office I hold the position of Director for North American Political Studies. In fact, I’m an officer in the Ministry for State Security. I hold the rank of colonel.”
It was a stunning piece of news that was said in such a matter-of-fact way that I had to replay it in my head. A colonel in the Ministry for State Security—the infamous STASI—doesn’t generally blow his own cover, especially not to a member of the opposition, which is how I assumed he saw me. If he was planning to defect… I tried not to jump the gun. He was controlling the meeting.
“And how do I know that you are who you say you are?” I asked.
“I haven’t said who I am. I’ve said what my job is.”
“Would you like to tell me your name?”
A comer of the Colonel’s mouth showed a trace of a grin. “No, I wouldn’t care to do that.”
“You know mine,” I said, hoping it might draw him on the big question that was still bouncing around my head—why me?
“Then I have the advantage.” He stopped, watched a young boy climb up the slide. “But only for the moment.” He stubbed out another cigarette, but didn’t light another this time. I had a feeling he was about to walk away.
“So … Here we are, alone at last.” I sat down on a park bench, hoping he’d follow. “What do you wanna talk about?”
He remained standing, watching me and the surroundings at the same time. “I may decide to provide you with some information.”
“That could be arranged—”
“I want to be clear,” he interrupted, showing the first sign of emotion. “I have no intention of defecting or becoming a double agent.”
“Fair enough,” I said, wondering where he was heading then. I decided I had nothing to lose by being direct. “Why did you ask for me?”
The Colonel paused to think about his answer. “Does it matter?”
“I came a long way,” I said. “It’d be nice to know why.”
He nodded slowly, then offered his hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
“Is that it?” I blurted out as I stood up. I wished I hadn’t pushed him, but it was too late to take it back.
“Thank you for coming,” he added, pressing his palm into mine. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Berlin.”
As he turned and walked briskly away I realized there was a small scrap of paper in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket and looked around. One of the young mothers had come over to help her son down from the slide, and I thought she turned away too quickly when I looked over at her. I looked back toward the Colonel, but he was gone.
For the first time I realized just how far out on a limb I was.