The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “They were pictures of her son.”

  “That they were. And how many of them has she displayed to you?”

  “I don’t know . . . ten, twelve.”

  “And how many did you bring back?”

  “Maybe twenty.”

  “So where are the others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you where they are. They are with her boss over here—a Stasi man named Helmut Haechen. Herr Haechen has been on our radar for the past two years—as he has been running three women agents in West Berlin, one of whom happens to be Petra Dussmann. And he also has been sleeping with Frau Dussmann since she was allegedly ‘expelled’ from the GDR just over a year ago.”

  I shut my eyes, wanting to black out the world.

  “Let me guess: you’re telling yourself right now, ‘I can’t believe that . . . because she told me again and again that I was the love of her life.’ She did tell you that, didn’t she?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The same way I know about the one and only sociology course you took at college, and the fact that your dad smokes Old Golds. It’s our business to know lots. And we do know lots about you.”

  “I need proof that Petra . . .”

  “Ah yes, why believe a representative of his own government when it comes to matters of the heart and the betrayal of trust? What you need is something factual, if not downright empirical. All right then. Can you remember the night you first had dinner with Frau Dussmann, the night when she first stayed at your apartment? It was January twenty-third, ja?”

  “How did you know that?” I asked, sounding shocked.

  Bubriski just shrugged and said:

  “Can you confirm it was January twenty-seventh when you had that first dinner with Frau Dussmann?”

  I nodded.

  “And can you confirm that halfway through the dinner, she raced off into the night without any apparent reason?”

  “Were you watching us?”

  “We were watching her. You just happened to be there. Why did she run off in the middle of dinner?”

  “She gave no reason. She just got all emotional and . . .”

  “She was checking in with her controller, Herr Haechen.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Ah yes, the man needs proof.”

  He reached for the attaché case by his chair, hoisted it onto the table, and flipped it open, bringing out a hefty manila file. Then, after closing the case, he flipped open the file.

  “Proof the man wants,” he said, pulling out a photograph, “proof the man gets.”

  He pushed two grainy eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs toward me. The first showed Petra hurrying out of the restaurant where we had that first dinner—and the time signature imprinted on the left-hand corner indicated that it was on the date in question at 21:22. The next shot showed her entering a hotel at 21:51.

  “The hotel was up near Tegel Airport,” Bubriski said. “She had to run off because she had a liaison with this man.”

  He tossed another grainy photograph in front of me, showing a stocky man leaving the hotel at 22:41. It was hard to see his face, though I did note that he had a goatee.

  “So she was entering a hotel,” I said, “and this man exited the same hotel sometime later. That doesn’t mean she was seeing him there.”

  “Then why did she leave your dinner so abruptly? And when she did leave, did she inform you she was heading to a sleazy hotel on the other side of town?”

  I shook my head.

  “The man at the hotel was Helmut Haechen. As to why she ran out of the restaurant . . . we don’t read minds, Thomas. Or, at least, not yet. And yes, that was my attempt at a bad joke. So all I can do is speculate. Maybe she had to get clearance from Haechen to sleep with you. Maybe it was all part of an elaborate ploy to make her seem troubled and complex and, as such, all the more desirable. That’s my theory. They decided to reel you in by letting you sense that she had some hidden tragedy in her life. Then, when she realized that she had you, she sent you across the border to collect the all-important photographs of her lost son, on which was embedded microfilm containing something rather crucial for Haechen’s attention.”

  “But her son was taken away from her.”

  “She gave the kid up for adoption at birth.”

  “That I can’t believe. The pain she expressed when talking about him—”

  “The man needs more proof.”

  The file was flipped open again. He handed me a photocopy of a document which, judging from its slightly blurred imagery, might have been originally photographed. It was an official document from the Deutsche Agentur für das Wohl das Kinder—the State Agency for Child Welfare in the GDR. The names of the child, the father, and the mother were clearly visible. The word Tote (Dead) in brackets next to Jurgen’s name. In the semiblurred but still visible legal text below I read that the undersigned, Petra Alma Dussmann, was hereby giving her son, Johannes, up for legal adoption; that she waived all further legal rights over this child; that she was signing this document without coercion or any outside pressure, and was allowing her child to be adopted out of her own free will and in the best interests of the child. The document was dated 6 May 1982.

  “We have an operative over there who, at great personal risk, managed to photograph this document for us. Let me guess what you’re now thinking. What mother agrees to have her child adopted at a year old? A mother who has been informing on her mad husband to the Stasi for years.”

  “That I cannot believe.”

  “More proof needed,” he said, digging around in the file. He handed me another grainy photographed document. It was from the MfS—Ministerium für Staatssicherheit: the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi. There was Petra’s photograph, her date of birth, home address, and two telling words:

  Spitzelaffäre seit . . . Informer since. And the date: 20 January 1981. She must have been pregnant with Johannes.

  “The operative who scored us this document, along with dozens more, is now doing twenty years’ hard labor for his pains. They play rough over there. Then again, so do we. But, as you can see, she was working for them for several years before she crossed over. What was the story she gave you about Johannes?”

  “Could I have another schnapps, please?”

  “After you answer the question.”

  “She told me that Johannes was taken away from her because her husband went mad, tried to make contact with American agents, and screamed at the minister for culture before peeing on him.”

  “All true—except that, as you see from that earlier document, she voluntarily gave up Johannes for adoption. As for all her crocodile tears to you about having the kid taken away, my theory is a simple one: the Stasi offered her an opportunity for promotion if she would go west and spy for them. They gave her the perfect cover: the unjustly persecuted spouse of a dissident whose son was forcibly wrenched from her hands by the heinous, demonic forces of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. They had her whisked away from her life in Prenzlauer Berg for months before trading her over to our side as a victimized innocent. We appeared to buy it, whereas the truth was we were certain from the outset that she was being ‘run’ by Herr Haechen. We directed her into the job at Radio Liberty to let her seem to have a big score. The people we have there, they left out certain ‘allegedly’ classified documents as bait—which she later photographed. And if you’d like proof of that . . .”

  He was about to reach into the file for another photograph. I waved it away. I knew it would confirm what he was alleging. I knew that it would just have the effect of even more acid dropped into a pair of eyes that had been forced wide-open by all this terrible visual evidence.

  “Well, do you want to have a proper look at the man she’s been fucking all this time?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I insist,” he said, pulling out a new photograph from the file and tossing it in front of me like
a croupier dealing a card that he knows is going to cost a player big.

  The image that landed in front of me was of the same man seen in the earlier photograph, only this time the image was far too crisp and vivid. Helmut Haechen was a diminutive, bloated man with greased-back black hair, thick black glasses, a terrible goatee, bad teeth, and a complexion that was oleaginous.

  “Now I could definitely lose twenty pounds,” Bubriski said. “And I wouldn’t call myself a pretty boy. But this thug . . . and that’s the only word to describe this vicious little bastard . . . well, ‘physically repulsive’ are the two words that come to mind when I have to stare at his picture. This is the man whom your beloved started to sleep with around a month after she was ‘settled’ by us in her room in Kreuzberg and her job at Radio Liberty. All during your ‘romance,’ she saw Haechen at least twice a week—and his debriefings of her always involved sex. I can’t imagine that Frau Dussmann enjoyed having this garden gnome inside of her.”

  “Please stop that.”

  “I’m just imagining what it must be like for you to discover that you had to share her with that grotesque—”

  “You’ve made your damn point.”

  “Now, as I was hinting before, we do need to give Frau Dussmann a little bit of sympathy here. Because when you are being run by a Stasi agent—and you have all the benefits of life in the West—the deal is: you have to fuck him on a regular basis. Which is what she was doing.”

  He dug into the file and pulled out a written report, scanning it as he spoke.

  “According to our surveillance team, they fucked twice a week. They never met at his apartment, by the way. He always organized a room in some cheap hotel, usually near the Hauptbahnhof, but he changed the location all the time. I doubt she thought she was being observed, given how she’d been made to feel by our people from the outset that she was a heroine. But Haechen was very careful about changing U-Bahn stations, dashing out and jumping into taxis just to make certain he wasn’t being followed. He did manage to lose us occasionally—but the rest of the time . . .”

  He dealt me photograph after photograph—all time-signaled in the corner—of Haechen entering some sleazy hotel and Petra following seven to ten minutes later.

  “Where do you think your beloved is right now?” he asked.

  “En route to Hamburg as a last-minute translator for Mr. Wellmann.”

  “That was her story, huh?”

  “And you knew she was about to head out of town with her puppeteer.”

  “Nice turn of phrase, Thomas. I might steal that.”

  “So you got Pawel to call me in. I bet it’s Pawel who has been leaving out bogus classified documents for her to copy, right? I mean, he’s the sort of opportunistic shit who probably thought being your lackey was the way up the propagandistic ladder. What’s his payoff for his services rendered going to be? A green card?”

  “You are so way out of line, mister. But, like I said before, you’re in the ‘denial’ phase right now. You’re thinking: She had to have been set up. There were bad people leaving classified documents around, just tempting her to photograph them. And, of course, she so loved me—and fucked me so passionately. I bet she said you were the man she always dreamed about, but thought she’d never find. When you talked about marriage, children, the life together in New York that you were about to start next month—”

  “Shut up,” I hissed.

  “The truth is an uncomfortable conundrum, is it not? I mean, we never taped your conversations. But you don’t have to be a clever writer like yourself to imagine the sort of intimate postcoital dialogues you had together. Because we’ve all been there, chum. ‘I’ve never felt this way before . . . the passion we have will never ebb . . . I will always be there for you . . . You are the one. The only one. I trust you with my life.’”

  I put my head in my hands, wanting him to stop, yet also perversely wanting him to continue berating me for my stupidity, my naïveté, for the love that I so craved and which I had thought I had found. And now . . . now . . . even if only part of what this bastard was telling me was correct . . . and he had so much terrible, overwhelming proof in that fucking file of his . . . I couldn’t sidestep the fact that he was speaking a terrible truth: I had been deeply and profoundly duped. Even if part of her really did feel the things she had articulated to me.

  Oh please. She sent you across the border on a mercy mission for the photographs she craved of her lost son. And now you’ve seen proof that she willingly gave up the child for adoption while also getting you to unknowingly smuggle out microfilm for that repulsive pig whom she was sneaking off to service twice a week, while telling you that she had never known love before you walked into her life.

  “Evidently all those sentiments I just expressed—those emphatic expressions of love and devotion—ring true,” he said. “As I said earlier, you were a man in love. And she wanted to feed that desperate need of yours to be loved. Because she knew that once she gave you the image of that love you never received before, you’d walk over hot coals for her. Radar, my friend. It all comes back to radar. She and her handler worked you out so quickly. Give him the image of love, but also make it hard to win. Play up the idea that you are a woman who can’t fully commit because she has been so damaged by the monolith of a Communist state. Let him in on your tragic secret. Talk eternal devotion and marriage. And then get the unsuspecting errand boy to collect and carry documents across a foreign border for you.”

  “And you have no idea what might have been contained on those photographs?” I asked.

  “Not a chance. Herr Haechen is a clever operator. He’s either burnt the evidence or so carefully hidden it all that we’ll never know what level of espionage those microfilms revealed.”

  “And the way I was treated on the GDR side of Checkpoint Charlie upon my return?”

  “Oh yes, I heard you were detained there for a couple of hours.”

  “Your sources are impeccable. And do you think—knowing what you know—that this semi-arrest was designed to . . .”

  “. . . make you believe that you were in jeopardy because you visited Frau Judit Fleischmann, a discredited Stasi informer? Absolutely. You came back from this experience rather shaken, didn’t you? But a little proud about having been held for several hours by the forces of a police state, yet having still managed to deliver the snapshots of the child seized from Frau Dussmann’s arms.”

  “So they did stage that all for me?” I said, cutting him off. I could see Bubriski smile the smile of a psychological grandmaster who knew that he’d just “turned” somebody.

  “I can’t one hundred percent confirm that, but yes, I do feel that the detention was a final theatrical flourish to make you think that you had just been in your very own Cold War thriller. Like I’m certain you were followed from the moment you stepped into East Berlin, again just to heighten the drama of the situation. Had we not finally decided to call time on Herr Haechen and his band of female operatives, I’ve no doubt that before you and your beloved went to New York, she would have asked you to make one more foray to the other side and collect more souvenirs of Johannes for her. I bet she would have told you about another friend who had all the dolls she once bought for him—and back you would have come with a teddy bear stuffed with more microfilm. One aspect to this story does intrigue me: What are the ulterior motives of Herr Haechen in allowing her to move with you to the States? Might they have considered her useful over there to them? Perhaps finding her some high-level translating job at the UN? Or was this all an elaborate setup?”

  “A setup for what?”

  “We’ve gathered, from our people in the GDR, that Haechen’s superiors aren’t happy with the level of intelligence he’s been feeding them through his operatives, that he needs a big score. We need to catch Haechen red-handed to both interrogate him and use him as a bargaining chip for three of our own people—including the man doing twenty years’ hard labor—whom we want to get out of assorted GDR
prisons. The problem is, we sense that Haechen and your beloved have started to wonder if our man at Radio Liberty is feeding them bogus documents. What we need to do is catch her actually photographing a classified item.”

  “But you could have probably done that many times over the last year.”

  “True, but we didn’t want to arrest her. Because we wanted to create the illusion that she and Haechen were getting away with their little espionage operations, as we also wanted to see their so-called game plan. Now we have come to the conclusion that they are both, at best, lower-echelon operatives but useful to us under arrest for all the reasons I just explained. The thing is, we don’t want a public scene at Radio Liberty when it comes to arresting her. Whereas if we were to stage the arrest at your apartment—”

  “No damn way.”

  “Hear me out, Thomas. I know there is a part of you that is still refusing to believe that all this about Frau Dussmann is possible. It’s understandable, given how much you have invested in this relationship and the profound trust you placed in her. Everything that I told you, all the evidence that I have presented to you, must be difficult to absorb. Like anyone who’s been told the person they thought to be the center of their existence is a fraud—”

  “Could you please spare me the fucking editorializing?”

  “You still don’t trust what I’m telling you, do you?”

  “Proof is always flexible, especially in the hands of people like you.”

  “Very elegantly put and, yes, quite true. We share with ‘the other side’ the capability of bending the truth to suit our purposes. But how am I bending anything here?”

  “She could have just been meeting this man for debriefings,” I said.

  “Good point,” he said, all too brightly and with the sort of ironic undercurrent that a teacher might bestow on a pupil who has made a particularly naïve comment. “But we can show you photos—taken from a distance, but still pretty damn clear—of the two of them in bed together. Taken as recently as three weeks ago. Feel like a peep?”