He’s staring straight up at the ceiling, floating on some narcotic cloud. “Is Sofia a spy?” he says slowly, his face sort of pinching up. A tear forms at the corner of his left eye and breaks loose, running down his temple to his ear. “Tell Paulus I’m sorry that Sofia’s a spy. He knew she’s a spy. He said she was a sneak. Sofia the sneak.”
A delicate decision: press the button on his morphine drip again and risk losing him to unconsciousness, or don’t press again and risk him shutting up. I press again. His face slackens, and the milky, compliant look returns to his eyes. He’s about to drift off, so I slap his face, lightly at first, then more forcefully. His eyes can barely focus. “Not now, Christian,” I say. “No sleep now. Where is the warehouse?”
“Tell Paulus I’m sorry.”
“Paulus says he’ll forgive you if you tell me.”
His eyes look away. I can tell he’s fighting the morphine, trying to find where his better judgment has gone. I place my hand on the bandages around his chest where the broken ribs are and press. His body jerks involuntarily, and his eyes focus again. He tries to bat my hand away, but he’s far too high and weak.
“Where is the warehouse, Christian?”
His face pinches up with agony, and I press harder. “On Adlergestell,” he grimaces.
“Where on Adlergestell? The cross street.”
“Jesus, it hurts.”
“Answer me or I swear on my mother’s soul that I’ll kill you in this bed, Christian.”
“Dorpfeldstrasse.”
I know he’s too far gone and that’s all the information I’m going to get. As I release my hand, his face relaxes. “Sofia the sneak should be careful,” he says through the drugs and whatever’s left of the pain. “We do bad things at the warehouse.”
“Good night, Christian,” I say, and give the button three more clicks.
Seventeen
The ride to Adlergestell and Dorpfeldstrasse lasts one thousand years. A train, a bus, another train, a trolley, and through it all, I run a little play in my head, rehearsing the dialogue of what I’ll say when I find my dad, what my dad will say when he’s found. Absent are any thoughts of what my dad will look like, or how I’ll get him free, or how we’ll get away. You can’t have a plan until you have facts. Since I have no facts other than a vague location, I’m going to stick to the little play I’m rehearsing for when it all works out, because, let’s be honest, a made-up play is probably all it’ll ever be.
We do bad things at the warehouse.
I climb off at the Adlershof stop. The neighborhood is one of bad restaurants and suspicious blandness. A pale man in track pants and an undershirt with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth pushes a baby carriage. An Asian guy in a bloodstained butcher’s apron leans against a wall drinking beer from a bottle. Beyond a row of trees and a chain-link fence, I hear the huff and shuffle of a commuter train. The interior is filled with yellow light, sleepy heads in the windows, bobbing as they head home to more prosperous towns beyond Berlin’s edge.
A skinny old man with a gray beard, like an emaciated Santa Claus, rides past me on a bicycle, weaving back and forth across the sidewalk like a drunk. From the beat-up radio strapped to his rear fender with duct tape, I hear old German folk music: tubas and trombones, a bass drum, music for his parade of one.
It’s mostly apartment buildings here. Nothing that could be described as a warehouse. But then I see it. A small one-story building that looks like an abandoned gas station is hidden deep in an empty parking lot, a place you’d never notice unless you’re looking for it. A sign making some vague mention of auto body services and used car parts is nailed up over the door, but that’s the only indication of its purpose. I walk past it at first, eyeing it in my peripheral vision to see if anybody’s there. There isn’t, at least not that I can tell.
There’s a garage attached to the building, and a wooden fence higher than my head that seems to extend all the way around to the back of the property. The fence abuts the windowless wall of a small apartment building on one side and an alleyway lined with small, unkempt trees on the other. I walk down the alley, stepping over broken glass and discarded tires and trash, until I notice that the wooden fence extends past yet another building that sits behind the auto body shop. It’s much larger and made of brick stained deep brown by at least a century of smog and smoke. Small arched windows peek out from the second story, some of them boarded over.
I test one of the limbs of a tree, then hoist myself up to peer over the fence. Below me, parts of dismembered cars are arranged in tidy stacks, windshields over here, doors over there. The older building faces the junkyard with three large arched doors locked from the outside with chains and padlocks. If there’s anything in this neighborhood that can pass for a warehouse where Christian and his friends do bad things, this is it.
From the back, as from the front, the whole compound appears empty. The gathering evening dusk provides good cover, so I swing my legs over the fence and land beside a dozen or so car hoods stacked in a neat pile. Bits of glass pop beneath my boots. I freeze and wait tensely to see if the proverbial junkyard dog is more than proverbial, but there’s nothing, only the sound of traffic and my own breathing.
The locks and chains securing the large arched doors of the warehouse are solid and new—gleaming and heavy things designed not to yield easily. But it’s the doors and handles themselves that catch my eye. They’re old wood and rusted iron, the kind of thing a banker back in New York might pay six thousand dollars to use as a dining room table.
A few seconds of scavenging around the yard is all it takes before I find what I’m looking for: a steel bar about a meter long. I slip it behind the chain of the third arched door and give it a twist so that it works like a tourniquet, tightening the chain against the old iron handles. The metal is stronger than I thought, and I have to put my entire body into it, but after a few moments of pressure, I see the handles start to bend inward toward each other. As I twist, shiny iron nails that have been buried in the wood for a century or more start to appear, millimeter by millimeter. I feel every muscle in my body, from my forearms to my butt to my calves, throwing itself behind the effort. The iron nails groan and screech each time the bar turns; then there’s a final pop as the handle on the left surrenders to my strength and springs free of the door.
For just the briefest of seconds, I see a flash of Yael’s smile in my head, feel her pride being transmitted like a radio signal from wherever she is now—Paris or Tel Aviv or hell.
*