Steam coated the inside of the windshield. I rolled my window down to let cooler air inside, and into my lungs. The Israelis wouldn’t cruise around for long in this rural area. Give it another ten minutes. By then they’d be on their way back to their base. They’d lost Casey, they’d report to my friends in Berlin.
My friends. Holger, Erika, van Hoof—all three of them had conspired to keep me ignorant of the blood tie between Stefan and Krüger. They’d known that Krüger had a most personal interest in Stefan. One that made him interested in me as a key to Stefan. They knew that. And yet my trusted colleagues had sent me into the field against Krüger without taking the most minimal steps to protect my father.
I saw him standing there on the bank of the Havel, the chill wind ruffling his hair. The memory of his bare head made my throat ache. He had looked so defenseless. I still thought of my father as a man who wore hats. When I was young, he never went downtown without his gray fedora. At home he kept it in a metal rack on the back of the hall-closet door. It was a serious hat, like police detectives wore in old black-and-white movies.
When I was fifteen, Lura’s parents had rented an oceanfront cottage for a week. My mother had a hundred reasons why we couldn’t do the same. I knew she didn’t want to leave our house. I tried to entice my father into taking only me for a real vacation at the beach. “Casey, girl,” he said unhappily, “you know we can’t do that.” Of course we couldn’t leave my mother alone overnight. We had to take care of her. But, stubbornly, I asked him again, and then again. His words didn’t change, just grew heavier with regret.
I was mad. My father’s world was bigger than mine. He had his business to run, a ten-employee agency that leased semitrailers to freight companies. My homebound summer was hot and arid, but he was enjoying himself with colleagues and customers—I was sure of it. Like a jealous wife, I went through his wallet in search of receipts and ticket stubs to tell me where he’d gone without me. I sniffed his discarded shirts for odors of tobacco, perfume, theater popcorn—proof that he was having fun though I was not.
By the time I was old enough to understand the concept of an unfaithful husband, I’d long since stopped searching for proof of my father’s infidelity. My first attempt at intelligence collection and analysis failed because of a faulty premise. There was no intelligence to collect. My compassionate father bent his rules for my benefit. For his own, never.
He’d stubbornly continued wearing his hats long after they’d gone out of fashion. If I closed my eyes, I’d see him in his gray fedora with his overcoat buttoned to the neck. My father. Clinging to old-fashioned ways, old-fashioned virtues.
Neither he nor I belonged in this half-world of deceit. I’d get us both out of it. I didn’t need backup. Krüger feared for his life. Taking my father hostage was an extreme measure of self-protection, a mark of how desperate he was to reach a safe haven in America. I controlled that outcome and I could make the deal on my terms. And my terms started with releasing my father. Once he was safe and I had Krüger on U.S. soil, the FBI would force the truth from him. We’d stop him from blowing up another plane. And I’d clear my name.
A breeze moved through the trees, forcing the branches against one another. The scraping noise vibrated inside me. I felt like one of those trees. Gaunt and brittle, surviving in a poisonous atmosphere, sustained by what lay at the core of my being.
I pulled off the bulky fur and tossed it onto the backseat. Then I turned on the ignition and maneuvered the car back the way I’d come. I got lost twice, the second time forced to spend ten minutes turning the car around in a space that constricted my corrections to increments of inches. It was one-fifteen before I reached a pair of ruts I could follow.
I bumped slowly eastward for a kilometer before they grew soggy, then disappeared beneath a greenish patch of water I didn’t dare to enter. When I tried to back up, my drive tires spun in the mud. I fought off panic, tried again. Got some traction, managed to reverse direction. The ruts led to gravel, and I followed it to pavement. I tried going east again, skirting the E-8 and Route 246 and all the carefully laid out east-west, north-south highways where the team in the Audi might be waiting. It was after two and I was only past Luckenwalde when a hailstorm rattled down. In seconds ice blocked the windshield, forcing me to pull over. I lost eight minutes.
At three, I was still west of Lübben. I hadn’t eaten. I felt nauseated, my insides twisted tight. My destination was at least thirty minutes away, at the far end of a peninsula formed by a curve of the Spree. On the hand-drawn map, it had the shape of a drooping male organ, the road like a vein along it, ending in a wartlike X at the end.
I reached the end of the road at 3:40. Fifty minutes late.
Krüger’s hideaway proved to be a weathered A-frame cabin, a fenced dog run extending from one side. No animal barked at me from beyond the ten-foot-high chain-link fence.
Flanking the front door of the cabin were windows as dark as the wintry dusk gathering outside. No vehicles in sight. No sign of habitation. No surprise. I was too late.
I tapped my finger on the steering wheel. Krüger wanted this meeting. He’d arranged it in elaborate detail and he’d surely prepared a contingency plan. I had to check the door, see if he’d left a message for me. As I climbed out into the chill, I caught a whiff of the gamy odor of the dog pen. Smelled woodsmoke. Heard music. A country tune, sung in English. I closed my eyes to listen better.
Two women in an old duet. Naomi and Wynonna Judd. Belting out a tune that Stefan loved to hear me sing.
18
I put a careful foot on the bottom step. Then stepped cautiously onto the porch. Hanging neatly from nails on each side of the doorframe were chains of different sizes. A set of fine links that looked like a choke collar for a dog. Beside it, a matching piece that would serve as a leash. Then three weightier lengths, strong enough to shackle a full-grown man. One six-foot strand with links so heavy-duty I could see the individual welds despite the fading light.
I pushed at the door. It swung slowly open. The Judds were louder, concert-volume, and the smoky smell was stronger, mixing with the scent of the polished pine floor. I was in a large room on the ground floor of the A-frame, the woodstove centered on bricks beneath a spiraling iron staircase. I got an impression of massive furniture on my left, a kitchen tucked into the rear on my right. Except for the glow from the burning logs, the only light came from the bulb inside the refrigerator, silhouetting a tall, thin figure.
The song ended and the tape whirred for a few seconds before clicking into silence. The refrigerator door whooshed shut. The man turned to face me, his right hand holding a bottle, his left reaching toward the wall. He flicked a switch and yellow lamplight splashed down from the suspended light fixture onto a round wooden table. Krüger’s hair turned to a dark gold cap and the lenses of his glasses went opaque, shiny as the isinglass in the door of the woodstove.
“St. Pauli Girl,” he said, popping the cap off the beer bottle. He set it on the table, beside a frosty mug. “I understand that’s the brand you prefer.”
I hadn’t expected to confront a gracious host. His courtesy jarred me. My voice came out harsh, the sound of a rusted hinge. “What do you want?”
“Come in and shut the door.”
Wary, I didn’t move from the doorway.
He dropped into a wooden chair on the far side of the table and lifted the bottle. He filled my glass, the foam glistening above the amber. “Now, come and drink this while it’s still ice-cold, the way you like it.”
My music. My brand of beer. The temperature at which I liked to drink it. He was letting me know he’d made himself an expert on my personal tastes. Giving me enough hints so I’d conclude that he knew everything there was to know about me. Unsettling, but in the end, only a ploy to improve his bargaining position. I wouldn’t let my uneasiness show. I pushed the door shut and forced myself to saunter toward the table.
A throaty humming came from near the stove. A large dog lay th
ere, muzzle resting on forearms, sharp-edged ears pointed toward me. A German shepherd. To the Germans, a schäferhund, sheepdog. Who had named this breed? Surely creatures like the one I was looking at had never herded sheep. More likely, torn them apart.
The dog’s eyes reflected the glowing coals. The rumbling thickened and grew more menacing.
Krüger said something in German. A sharp, grating phrase, heavy on the fricative. The dog noise stopped instantly.
I’d made it to the table by then. I sat casually, my gaze on Krüger. His face was as pleasant as it had appeared in his photograph. Behind the polished lenses of his glasses were eyes the color of mud. I picked up my drink and took a long swallow of beer. The flavor was traitorously perfect.
“Excellent,” Krüger said. “Now, it seems best to me that I travel to the U.S. with you and your father.”
Good. He wanted safe passage badly enough to ask for it. Deliberately, I put the mug down. “And how do you see us making the journey?”
“You arrange for an Air Force jet to pick us up from Templehof on Wednesday. Your father and I will meet you there, just prior to departure.”
“You want to travel in style,” I said.
“Style, yes. Wednesday is something of an epiphany for me. But safety is my chief concern. This particular arrangement will afford me the greatest amount of protection.”
Protection from whom? Not just the Mossad, not with these precautions. I hid my alarm under a taunt. “You’re that afraid of me, you need to use my father for a shield?”
“Your colleagues are not trustworthy. They’ve given you bad information. They’ve gotten you into trouble—your father will tell you that.”
“You don’t know anything about my father.”
“Of course I do.” He removed a cassette from his shirt pocket and waved it at me. “And I have this.”
The tape was the same size, shape and color as the one taken from my telephone answering machine. He’d sent someone to my condo. My throat tightened. I should have realized he was behind that break-in.
Krüger reached back to the boom box sitting on the counter behind him and ejected the Judds. He shoved the other tape into the machine and pushed Play. First came a half sentence in Lura’s breathless tones, ending her message. Then the voice of my father. After a querulous post-Christmas greeting, there was a long pause as though he’d hung up. Finally, “Is everything all right? I’m worried about you.”
Krüger stopped the tape. “I knew you hadn’t played back that message. And that was my fault. Collecting that tape from you was a bit of overcaution on my part. When I heard your father’s distress, I wanted to set his mind at ease. So I got in touch.” He leaned toward me, so close I could see the comb lines in his hair. “The FBI had been there. Told him you were involved with an unreformed Communist and other unsavory characters. Your father got the idea that you might try to make a new life someplace else.”
“You told my father that I’d fled from the U.S. permanently?”
“He got that idea.” Krüger shrugged. “Not so unlikely, under the circumstances. You have been sleeping with an agent of the Polish SB. Of course your father worried that you’d gone into hiding.”
“And you told him you knew where I was.”
He made a dismissive noise. “I offered him an opportunity to communicate his concerns to you. It must give you great joy, having so devoted a father. He came all this way to persuade you to return to America and turn yourself in.”
He’d made my father his ally. “That’s tidy. You’ll be his hero, then, helping him bring me home.”
“And keeping you out of prison when you get there. Yes, your father will be most appreciative. And you will, too, I think.” He reached across the table with a movement that was arrogantly sexual. I smelled an unfamiliar aftershave, testosteronal in its penetrating virility.
So that was it. He was making me part of the deal. He wanted to fuck his brother’s woman.
Krüger’s fingertips caressed the back of my hand. The flesh on my arms tightened, as though the skin might form ridges and inch away. This man must have been an invisible presence in my life for years, probing obscenely into my intimate secrets. The realization sickened me, souring the beer that coated my tongue.
It wasn’t Krüger who’d invaded my condo. Yet I felt as if he’d gone often into my bedroom and fondled my lingerie. I imagined his fingers unfolding and stroking every undergarment. Then carefully replacing them in my bureau so that I’d never guess what he’d done. When I dressed, it would be as if I were rubbing his scent on my body.
His touch felt like a trickle of icy water over my skin and I saw no heat in his umber eyes. His carnal insolence had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with intimidation. My stomach clenched and the sour taste flared again in my throat.
I tried to calm myself. This was a negotiating strategy, nothing more. Whatever his personal interest in me, his main goal was getting to safety. Once I had him in the U.S., I’d win. For now, I had to play along. Beneath his fingers, my hand lay like a dead thing.
“Where’s my father?” I asked in a conversational tone.
“He’s comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” I recalled how my father had looked, outside the Cecilienhof. I jerked my hand away. “You drugged him.”
“You’re mistaken.” He gave me a pitying look. “Of course, the long journey was stressful for him. I was prepared to offer medication. But sedation wasn’t needed. Nature has seen to that.”
He was hurting my father! I gripped the beer mug, willing myself not to panic. I had to stay calm now, concentrate on how to rescue us both.
Krüger stared at my fingers twined around the handle of the beer mug, his expression clinical. His murky eyes weren’t cold, I realized. They were empty. I thought suddenly of a pathologist, dissecting knife in gloved hand, slicing the prints from the ends of my fingers. Whatever it took to keep me and my father in line. I slid my hand into my lap and forced my voice to hold steady.
“This is a fine plan,” I said. “But you haven’t given me anything to merit military transport out of Templehof. And so soon. You might have to settle for something less grand.”
“I will settle for nothing else. I know precisely the degree of protection I need.”
I kept my face impassive, steeling myself for what I knew had to be coming next.
Krüger punched the play button.
The voice on the tape was unfamiliar. “This is Debbie calling from Crown Books. It’s noon on the twenty-sixth of December. That first edition of The Secret Sharer has turned up. Give me a call if you want to bid on it.”
Krüger pushed the stop button. He withdrew a thick soft-cover book from behind the machine, plucked an index card from it, then slid the book across the table. THE PORTABLE CONRAD blared up at me, the title all in caps and boldface, superimposed above a color photo of a South Sea island. Krüger said, “I admit, I’m overcautious. We checked. There is a Debbie working at the Crown Books outlet nearest the State Department. And she said that you’d inquired several times about different works by that author.” He palmed the card in his left hand, touched the writing on it with his left index finger. His mouth formed a word as he studied the card, but he made no sound. Then he looked up at me. “But that Debbie—she didn’t phone you on December twenty-sixth.”
“And that proves something?” I laughed. “There’s more than one Crown Books in Washington.”
“I can recognize the hallmarks of a code.” He folded the card carefully, slid it into his shirt pocket. “You did a commendable job laying down a foundation. I’m sure you fooled the FBI. But my man was persistent. He found a copy of the story for me, in case it contained clues. I didn’t have to look further than the name on the cover. I know who’s read every word written by Joseph Conrad. Such a hopeless romantic, my brother.” He sniffed. “The Secret Sharer. If he’d died, would someone have called you about The Heart of Darkness?”
He knew hi
s brother was alive. He’d known when he stopped the hunt for Stefan and paid off the assassins. That move had been part of the complex hoax that had drawn me to him. Krüger had made me his quarry and I didn’t know why. I felt light-headed, dizzied by that sudden awareness. I was lost in a house of mirrors where I saw nothing clearly. To get myself and my father out, I’d have to feel my way along, step by careful step. “Is that what you want?” I asked. “Protection from Stefan?”
“My brother is obsessed. Who can guess what he might do to me next?”
Did he fear Stefan? Or was he only feigning alarm, another ploy in a Byzantine con game I had no hope of penetrating? “So if I go ahead and set things up the way you want, I get to take my father home.”
“And I will help you clear your name.” His mouth curved up but the deadness in his eyes turned the smile to a grimace. “We will work together.”
He was too certain that he’d be the one in control. He didn’t fear future interrogation by the FBI. He’d done something to insure it would never come to pass. If I took him with me to the U.S., I’d end up as his new pet. Wearing a choke collar— the kind that would enable him, with a single motion, to force me into submission.
The back of my neck quivered, my sense of danger strong enough to lift the hairs at the base of my skull. I raised my chin. “And if I refuse to do this on your terms?”
“Then I won’t leave Germany. I’d enjoy a change of scenery, but it’s not vital. I can have a comfortable life without going to the U.S. You, on the other hand, will have to find some other way to solve all the problems my brother has created for you.”
It was a bluff. Could I afford to call it? “And my father?”
“I’ll arrange for his flight home.” He got up from the table, crossed to the stove. The dog raised its head, jingling the links of its collar. Krüger scratched the animal between the ears and the dog’s body elongated in a blissful stretch, showing the nipples along her belly, the folds between her legs.
12 Drummers Drumming Page 17
