He’d had a disturbed night’s sleep, as was increasingly normal for him these years. And he rattled around this huge, two-thirds-empty house like a dried pea in a toothless mouth. The sheer distance from bed to bathroom was a nuisance, forcing him to fully awaken when he had to rise in the small hours to deal with his old man’s bladder. If Greta had been around she could have helped him fill the house. But as things stood, he almost resented its size. Franz expected him to keep the place proudly, like a janitor in a palace that his grandchildren would inherit in due course.
Collecting his coffee, he retreated into the comfort of his morning routine. Everything was much the same as any other day, until he came to his e-mail. A letter from Rita! He read it with increasing engagement, looking for the little signs between the written words. So: she had run into a special friend? Or a friend, anyway? One of the girls from back when they’d lived on the East Coast. His brow wrinkled unconsciously. Interesting. Of course Rita knew better than to use e-mail for anything important … What was the girl trying to tell him—oh. Of course.
Kurt did not hurry his routine. But when, half an hour later, he dressed in sweatpants and shirt and sport sandals and walked slowly across to his son’s mailbox, he was unsurprised to find a letter within, addressed by hand to “K. Douglas,” laboriously and in unpracticed capitals. Someone unused to writing longhand; someone young. (Or at least young by Kurt’s standards.)
His pulse quickened, but he refrained from deviating from his routine in any way. He carried the post into Franz and Emily’s house, sorting the other items into two neat piles and placing them on the breakfast bar. Only after the normal delay did he go home, with the envelope concealed under his shirt.
Once inside, Kurt locked the door and shuffled upstairs to the spare bedroom he sometimes used as a study. He drew the curtains, then turned on a portable camping lantern for illumination. He placed it on the small desk beside the letter and a battered paperback and some writing materials. He pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves, careful not to touch their exterior. Then he sat down and pulled a blanket over his head, forming a tent above desk, lamp, and letter. It was no guarantee that he was free from observation, but unless the observers in question had glued a webcam to his forehead while he slept (one small enough that he had missed it in the bathroom mirror while shaving), it was fairly certain that they had no direct knowledge of the letter’s contents. (Unless it had been opened and scanned and resealed in transit, even though it had been addressed to another—but that way lay madness.)
It was a letter, an old-fashioned handwritten missive directed to him by name. “Dear Mr. Douglas, your granddaughter Rita said I should write to you. I’ve been reading the book you gave her, and I have some questions you might help me with for my comprehension class…”
Kurt suppressed the impulse to nod approvingly. The code words were in place, falling in their assigned word order like pins between a key’s serrated teeth, ready to unlock hidden wisdom. One of the youngsters, a little cub nosing up to the pack leader for advice. He turned to his copy of the book and began to draw the grid for the one-time pad. The questions were a neat block, written painstakingly in a crabbed hand that bespoke focus and paranoia:
RITA IN DHS STOP URGENTLY NEED SUPPORT STOP CAN ORCHESTRA CONTACT BIRTH MOTHER ENDS
Kurt grunted painfully. For a moment he felt despair. He’d been afraid of this, or something like this, for many years. It was not just the very specific fear that something might reach out from the dark heart of the security state and snatch away his granddaughter (who, for all that she bore none of his genes, thought more like him than his own son). It was the broader, agoraphobic fear that the unquiet dead were stirring in their graves, a third of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was impossible to outrun memory, or to outlive one’s sins. As long as the Wolf Orchestra remained hidden, abandoned in place by the state it served when the cold war ended and the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, the temptation to awaken the musicians was there. He could summon them to their instruments and play a last devilish ditty—tempting and taunting those who knew.
Kurt had remembered, and silently practiced the necessary rituals for all the years of their exile. For more than three decades he’d let them lie, trusting that save for the annual ritual of the greeting cards—to keep track of his players—he could allow his conductor’s baton to gather dust. But now another hand had reached out: this Angie, Rita’s friend. Angie Hagen. Alex Hagen’s granddaughter, another of the third-generation children, born and raised on American soil. Children trained by their parents and grandparents to serve the fatherland, whether they knew it or not.
I could try to do this on my own, he thought dubiously. Why disturb his musicians’ beauty sleep? Many of the first generation were dead of old age. Some of them were senile, disturbing their fellow nursing home inmates with the black comedy of their memories, dismissed as demented confabulators by children and carers alike as they randomly blabbed state secrets over the dinner table. Most of the active ones today were children or grandchildren, born and educated here like the descendants of conversos, Jews living under suspicion as Catholic converts after the reconquest of Spain. They kept to the rituals of their parents out of habit, living in constant fear of the Inquisition’s knock on the door.
Few of them were truly aware of what they had once been expected to do, and fewer still were ideologically committed. The inner citadel of belief in the workers’ duty to build a paradise on Earth had been betrayed by history. They’d been misled by their own leaders and teachers, then abandoned in the dark abyss of late-stage capitalism. Nobody really believed anymore. But it was still too dangerous to contemplate reconciliation with the nation in which they were embedded like a fragment of shrapnel from an unremembered cold-war explosion.
The bastards have Rita, Kurt reminded himself. They had stolen her and they would use her until she broke, for they knew her to be of enemy breeding—even if she herself did not. His resolve hardened. I will visit this Angel, he decided. She cared enough for Rita that she’d written a coded plea to the orchestra conductor. Philadelphia? It’s been a long time. He’d visited the City of Brotherly Love once before: it would be interesting to see how it had changed. He would talk to Rita’s Angel, and then he would commence the search for Rita’s birth mother.