The Cold War Swap

by Ross Thomas

  “Yes.”

  “Did you bring the map?”

  Max reached into his inside coat pocket and produced the map that we had used to trace the route of Burchwood and Symmes from the airport. It seemed that all of that had happened sometime last month. Max spread the map out on the floor. Padillo knelt beside it and ran his finger through the Kreuzberg area for a moment. “Here. This park. The one in the shape of a triangle.”

  “I know it,” Max said.

  “We’re coming out there—in the middle of a clump of arborvitae. There’s a tunnel from a house that’s located here.” And his finger moved to a block shaded in light tan, which indicated, according to the map, a “built-up area.”

  Max tapped a finger against his lower lip. “I don’t remember that block—just the park. But the wall runs right next to the park. It almost touches its point.”

  “Right,” Padillo said. “I want you to be there at five-thirty with a van: a Volkswagen panel truck will do. Park it here. Also set up a place for us to go and get in touch with Kurt’s outfit. Now you’d better write this down.”

  Max produced a spiral notebook and a ball-point pen.

  “Four GI uniforms,” Padillo said. “One with tech-sergeant’s stripes, one with master-sergeant’s, one with corporal’s, and one with bucksergeant’s. Get hold of two combat infantry badges.”

  “What sizes?” Max asked.

  “What do you take, Mac?”

  “Forty-two long,” I said.

  “One forty-two long, one forty regular, one thirty-eight short—you think that’ll do for Burchwood?” I nodded. “And a thirty-eight long for Symmes. And get them some shoes: they can wear ten-B. Anybody can.”

  “You want this by five-thirty?” Max asked. “It can’t be done.”

  “No, just get Kurt’s outfit working on it and tell them to get it to wherever they’re going to hole us up. Don’t forget the shirts—all fifteen necks and thirty-four-inch sleeves.”

  “They’ve got most of this stuff already,” Max said.

  “How about the identification?”

  “No trouble.”

  “Furlough papers?”

  Max paused and thought. “We worked that once before with Passen, if you remember. We may have to cut some new orders, but maybe not. I’ll check. Fourteen-day ones?”

  “Good,” Padillo said. “And four round-trip tickets to Frankfurt. Let them figure out the names, but tell him not to get clever. Just plain names like Johnson and Thompson and Miller. The kind you don’t remember.”

  Max scribbled some more.

  “How’s the money holding out?” Padillo asked.

  Max frowned and shook his head. “Langeman cleaned me except for a couple of hundred Marks.”

  “How much do we have in West Berlin?”

  “There should be twelve or fourteen thousand Marks, plus about five hundred dollars.”

  “O.K. Tell Kurt to make the plane reservations for tomorrow evening and then have a car for us at Frankfurt. At the airport. Tell him to get us a fast one. He can get it back in Bonn.”

  Max made another note. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all I can think of. You’d better get moving.”

  “I’ll go down and get the bottle,” Max said. “If they stop me, I’ll be tipsy, just getting home from my girl friend’s.” He opened the trap door and went down the ladder, reappearing moments later with the bottle of potato gin. He uncapped it, took a mouthful, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “My God, that’s terrible.”

  My hand was already reaching for it.

  “One more thing,” Max said. “How long do I wait at this park?”

  “Until six,” Padillo said.

  “And if you don’t show?”

  “Forget about us.”

  Max peered at Padillo through his glasses. He smiled. “We’ll see,” he said. Then he opened the door to the alley and left.

  I handed Padillo the bottle and he took a long drink. He almost got it down without a cough.

  “Who’s Kurt?” I said.

  “Kurt Wolgemuth, Berlin’s version of Available Jones. An honest crook. The blond kid who got shot on the wall worked for him. He supplies things in a hurry for a price. You’ll meet him. He made his first money in the black market; then he caught the crest of the jump in German stock prices and rode that. He gets people over the wall and furnishes passports, new identities, secondhand clothes, guns—anything that turns a dollar. We’ve done business before.”

  “I can follow you on the uniforms and on the stripes,” I said. “We’d be a little old to pass as privates. But why Frankfurt? Why not straight back to Bonn?”

  “GIs don’t go to Bonn—not even to Cologne. They go to Munich or Frankfurt or Hamburg, where there’s booze and women. How many GIs have you seen in Bonn?”

  “Damn few,” I admitted. Then I asked, “How do we get our two sleeping friends on and off the plane?”

  “You still have that belly gun?”

  I nodded.

  “Just keep it in your raincoat pocket and nudge one of them with it every so often. They’ll behave. And once they’re across the wall, there’s no place for them to hide. If they kick up a fuss, they’ll wind up where they’re going anyhow. It’s just a matter of who delivers them. I intend to deliver them.”

  I reached for the bottle. “I think you’ll miss it.”

  “What?”

  “Your other calling.”

  Padillo grinned. “When’s the last time you killed anybody, Mac?”

  I looked at my watch. “About twenty minutes ago.”

  “Before that?”

  “More than twenty years ago. In Burma.”

  “Were you scared just now?”

  “Terrified.”

  “What have you done for the past twenty years?”

  “Sat on my ass.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s pleasant.”

  “Suppose you went back to Bonn and we ran the place for a couple of months and then one day you got a phone call and they told you that you had to do something like this all over again by yourself. Only it might be worse. So you’d come around to see me and you’d tell me you’d have to take off for a week or so, and your stomach would be cramping because you wanted to tell somebody, anybody, where you were going and what you had to do, but you knew damn well you couldn’t. And so you’d have a drink with me and then you’d walk out by yourself and catch the plane or train by yourself. You’d be all alone and there’d never be anybody to meet you when you got there and there’d never be anybody waiting when you got back. Try that off and on for twenty years and count the dead ones at three o’clock in the morning and then panic sometimes because you can’t remember their names or what they looked like. And after twenty years they don’t give you a gold watch and a chicken-and-peas dinner. They send you off on another one and tell you you’re damn good and it’s just a routine job. But before you’re forty you’re superannuated and they’re writing you off like a tax loss because they think your nerve’s going—and they’re probably right. And you tell me I like it.”

  “Maybe I said that because you seem good at it. From what I’ve seen.”

  Padillo snorted. “Think back over it. It’s been a sloppy show from the beginning. I called you in because you’re sentimental enough to think that friendship means something more than a card at Christmas and because you’re big enough to be useful in case they start throwing bottles down at the corner bar. I used you to get Cook involved to the point where I could control him so that my chances of getting back to Bonn with our two pansies would be better than sixty-forty. I’ve used you, Mac, and I can get you killed yet. I managed to do it for Weatherby, and he’d been around a long time and was twice as cautious and careful as most. Put it this way: I’ve already promised you my gold cuff links. You’ve got another favor coming. You can call it any time.”

  “I’ll think up something. Meantime, what about our two friends downstairs?”

/>   “They’re the insurance,” he said. “NSA never announced their defection, and the boys who work in the new building out in Virginia just past the sign that says Bureau of Public Roads aren’t going to broadcast the fact that they’re back. But unless they clean up everything, including Weatherby turning up dead in your room in the Hilton, and the money we’ve spent, I’m going to call a press conference at Mac’s Place and blow the lid off everything.”

  “They wouldn’t like that.”

  “No, but the reporters would.”

  “What’ll happen to Burchwood and Symmes?”

  “They’ll disappear quietly.”

  “Dead?”

  “Possibly, but probably not. Sometime somebody may pick up a rock and start wondering what happened to a couple of the bugs. They’ll have to be produced quickly.”

  “You think it will work out the way you just told it?”

  “No, but if I didn’t say it and try to believe it then there wouldn’t be any reason for any of it. And I’d feel more like a damn fool than I do right now.”

  I looked at my watch. “We have a couple of hours until our good fairy comes. You want to get some sleep? I caught a nap this afternoon.”

  Padillo rose from the swivel chair, lowered himself to the floor, and stretched out full length, his head resting over the closed trap door. “Wake me up in a couple of weeks,” he said. I took over the chair, leaned back, and put my feet up on the desk. I noticed that I needed a shine—and a shave, and a bath, and six eggs over easy with a dozen or so slices of thick bacon, a stack of well-buttered rye toast, a fresh, red whole tomato and a gallon of coffee. Instead I settled for another swallow of bad gin and a cigarette of doubtful merit. I sat in the swivel chair and waited some more. It was quiet. The telephone didn’t ring and nobody knocked on the door. I told myself I was learning patience. I was a poor student.

  At four-thirty I poked Padillo with my toe. He was up immediately, fully awake. I told him the time. “I’ll rouse them up downstairs,” he said. He opened the trap door and went down the ladder. Symmes was the first up, followed by Burchwood, and then Padillo. I closed the trap door.

  “In about ten minutes we’re going to take another little ride,” Padillo told the pair. “You will do exactly as you are told. You will say nothing regardless of whom you see or what you are asked to do. You will speak only if he or I ask you a direct question. Is that understood?”

  “I don’t care what it is any more,” Symmes said. “I just want to get it over. I don’t want any more killing and I don’t want to be pushed and shoved and ordered around like an idiot. Just get it over with, whatever it is, for God’s sake.”

  “Have you got anything to say, Burchwood?” Padillo asked.

  His dark eyes snapped and his tongue ran around his lips nervously. He shook his head in a weary, hopeless manner. “I don’t care any more,” he mumbled. “I’m just too tired to care.”

  “In a couple of hours you’ll have a chance to rest. Just do as you’re told. All right?”

  They stood there, disheveled, pale and drawn, their hands hanging loosely by their sides. Symmes closed his eyes and nodded. Burchwood said, “Yes, yes, yes, Christ, yes.”

  Padillo looked at me and shrugged. I leaned against the wall. Padillo again sat in the chair. Burchwood and Symmes simply stood, weaving a little. Symmes kept his eyes closed.

  At four forty-five we heard the car. Padillo took out his revolver and opened the door. I removed my gun from my coat pocket. It was getting to feel like an old friend.

  Maas was at the door. He had left the car engine running. “Ah, Herr Padillo.”

  “Everything ready?”

  “Yes, yes, but we must hurry. We should be there at five.”

  “All right,” Padillo said; “get back in the car. We’ll load up.” He swung around from the door to face us. “You two in the back seat with Mac. Get in this side.”

  He went out first. I followed Symmes and Burchwood. Outside, Padillo held open the door of a brown 1953 Mercedes 220. Burchwood and Symmes crawled into the back seat. I followed. Padillo closed the door to the office and got in the front seat next to Maas. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Maas drove slowly down the dark alley, using only his parking lights. When he got near the end he stopped. Without saying anything Padillo got out and walked to the corner and looked carefully both ways. He signaled Maas on. The car started up, stopped for Padillo, and we were out in the street. Maas switched on his driving lights.

  “Where’d you get the car?” Padillo asked.

  “From a friend,” Maas said.

  “Your friend forgot to give you the key to the ignition.”

  Maas chuckled. “You are very observant, Herr Padillo.”

  “For five hundred Marks we could have avoided a hot car,” he said.

  “It will not be missed until late tomorrow. I chose it carefully, and it is very easy to cross the ignition on this model.”

  The ride took twenty-one minutes. We passed a few trucks on a boulevard, and then Maas took to the side streets. East Berlin was asleep. At five-nine he pulled up in front of a house.

  “Is this it?” Padillo asked.

  “No. It is around the next corner. But I will leave the car here. We will walk.”

  “You take Symmes,” Padillo told me. “Burchwood will come with me. Let’s make it a group, not a procession.”

  We walked in a bunch. Around the corner Maas stopped before a three-story house. He went up three white marble steps and knocked softly on the door. It opened and Maas whispered, “In quickly!”

  We went in. A tall, indistinct figure stood in what seemed to be a hallway. There were no lights. “This way,” a man’s voice said. “Walk straight. When you come to a door, be prepared to step down past me on the stairs. When you are all on the stairs, stop and I will turn on a light.”

  We moved slowly in the dark. I went first, feeling my way, my hands in front of me.

  “You are at the stairs,” the voice said, right next to me. “The railing is on the right. It will guide you.”

  I found the railing with my right hand and walked down six steps and stopped. I heard the rest of them follow. I heard the door close and a light was turned on. We were standing on a stairway that led down to a landing and then turned right. I glanced back up. A tall, thin man with a hawk nose and bristling salt-and-pepper eyebrows stood at the top of the stairs, his hand on a light switch. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck. A few tufts of gray hair poked out at his throat. He could have been fifty or fifty-five. Maas was on the next step down from him, and below Maas were Padillo, Burchwood and Symmes.

  “Straight down,” the thin man said.

  I walked down the remaining two steps, turned and walked down five more. The basement walls were painted white and blue, and bluespeckled linoleum covered the floor. A workbench with a vise attached to it ran the length of one side of the room. Above it was a series of cabinets, stained a dark brown. At one narrow end of the basement, at what I judged to be the street side, was a five-foot cabinet of good walnut. It had four small shelves at the top and a series of flat drawers beneath them. Brass knobs were attached to the drawers. I kept my hand on my gun in my coat pocket. Padillo motioned Burchwood and Symmes to one side of the room. He stood next to them.

  The tall man came down the stairs and looked at us. “They are Americans,” he said angrily.

  Maas took his hands out of the pockets of a tan raincoat that I hadn’t seen him wear before and spread them in a placating gesture. “Their money is good. It would not be wise to change your mind at this point. Please open the passage.”

  “You said they were Germans,” the man muttered.

  “The passage,” Maas said.

  “The money,” the thin man demanded.

  Maas took his left hand out of his pocket again and handed over an envelope.

  The thin man walked over to the workbench, ripped open the envelope, and counted the money. Twice. He stuffed th
e envelope and the money into his trouser pocket and moved to the chest. He pulled out the first drawer, closed it; pulled out the third, closed it; and then pulled out the bottom drawer and left it open. There was nothing in any of them, but the pulling and closing were some kind of combination.

  He tugged at the chest and it swung open easily. It seemed to have clearance from the floor of less than a fourth of an inch. Behind the chest was the tunnel, its mouth about three feet high by two and a half feet wide. I could see that a reddish linoleum covered its floor. Rough, brown-stained boards framed its entrance. The thin man reached into the tunnel and switched on the lights. Padillo and I knelt to look. When we rose, Maas had a Luger in his right hand. It was aimed at the tall, thin man. I made a motion in my pocket, but Padillo caught my arm. “It’s his play.”

  “Please, Captain, would you hand back the money?”

  “Liar!” the thin man yelled.

  “Please, the money.”

  He reached into his pocket and handed it to Maas. The fat man stuffed it back into his pocket. “Now, Captain, would you please put your hands on the top of your head and stand next to the wall? No, turn around so that your back is to me.” The man obeyed. Mass nodded in satisfaction.

  “You remember, Herr Padillo and Herr McCorkle,” Maas continued in German, “that man Schmidt I told you about? His name was no more Schmidt than mine is Maas. But he was my brother and I feel I have a debt to pay. I think you will understand, Captain.”

  He shot the thin man in the back twice. Symmes screamed. The thin man was knocked against the wall and crumpled in a heap on the floor. Maas put the Luger back into his coat pocket and turned to us. “It was a matter of honor,” he said.

  “You’re through?” Padillo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go, then. You first, Maas.”

  The fat man got down on his hands and knees and disappeared into the tunnel. “You next, Mac.”

  I followed Maas. Symmes and Burchwood scrambled after me. The tunnel was shored with rough lumber, about the size of two-by-fours. In a few spots dirt had dribbled down on the linoleum. The forty-watt electric bulbs were spotted every twenty feet. I counted nine of them. We crawled on our hands and knees. My head occasionally knocked against a piece of the wooden shoring. Dirt got down my neck.