The Cold War Swap

by Ross Thomas

  CHAPTER 18

  I was running down the long corridor again toward the brightly lighted door at the far, far end which seemed to grow no closer when I stepped in the snake-made noose and it began to jerk my leg. But it was only Padillo in his master-sergeant’s uniform, complete with the ribbons, the hash marks, and the gold overseas-duty bars. He looked like the kind who wasn’t overly generous with a three-day pass.

  When he saw I was awake he quit shaking my foot and turned toward the Scotch. He poured himself a drink and said, “I have some coffee coming.”

  I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for a cigarette. “The sleep was good—what there was of it. You make a hell of a toughlooking top sergeant.”

  “You find your uniform?”

  “In the closet.”

  “Better get into it. We have an appointment at the beauty parlor.”

  I took the uniform out of the closet and started to dress. “This is a comedown for an ex-captain, you know.”

  “You should have stayed in,” Padillo said; “you could have retired this year.”

  “There seems to be some chance that another institution may make me a free-bed-and-board offer. For twenty years or so, if I play it right.”

  Somebody knocked on the door and Padillo said come in. It was one of the big men with a large pot of coffee and two cups. He put them down on the dresser and left. I tied my tie and walked over and poured a cup. Then I slipped on the blouse and admired myself in the mirror. “I knew a guy who looked like me twenty-one years ago in Camp Wolters,” I said. “I hated his guts.”

  “No dog tags,” Padillo said. “If they start asking for those, we’re dead anyway.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Wolgemuth is a little skittish about the airport. He’s got his expert in to do a make-up job on us. All of us.”

  “The guy has quite an operation.”

  “You read the report?”

  “Seems as though we had some company we didn’t know about.”

  “So did Weatherby,” Padillo said.

  “That still bother you?”

  “It will for a long time. He was a good man.”

  I finished my coffee and we went down the hall to the paneled room where we had first met Wolgemuth. He was dressed in a single-breasted blue suit, white shirt, carefully knotted blue-and-black tie, and black shoes that glistened. A white linen handkerchief peeked casually out of his breast pocket.

  He nodded at me in a friendly way and asked if I had slept well and seemed interested and happy when I told him that I had.

  “If you and Mike will come this way,” he said politely, indicating the door.

  We followed him down the corridor, past our bedrooms, and into a room lined with closets on one side and a series of dressing tables on the other.

  A tall blond woman with a lantern jaw and pale skin was arranging some articles on one of the dressing tables, which had a row of frosted bulbs around its mirror. “This is Frau Koepler,” said Wolgemuth. She turned, nodded, and went back to her arranging. “Frau Koepler is in charge of this section.”

  Wolgemuth opened one of the closets. “Here we have uniforms of every description. The ones located in this closet are a complete range of sizes of those worn by the Volkspolizei. Complete with boots, hats, shirts—the lot,” He closed that door and opened the next. “These are military—American, British, French and West German. Also East German—which the Vopos are switching to shortly, I understand. Next police uniforms—Berlin variety. And here are dresses for women—made in New York, London, Berlin, Chicago, Hamburg, Paris, Rome: the labels are authentic, as are the materials. Coats, undergarments, shoes—a complete wardrobe. Next are men’s furnishings—civilian variety. Off-the-peg suits from the Fankfurt Kaufhof, from Chicago and Los Angeles and Kansas City and New York. Also from London, Paris, Marseilles, East Berlin, Leipzig and Moscow—almost anywhere. Hats and shoes, button-down shirts and wide-spread collars. Three-button suits, double-breasted, dinner jackets, and so forth.”

  I was impressed and said so. Wolgemuth grinned proudly. “If we have time, Herr McCorkle, I would like to show you our reproduction facilities.”

  “He means his forged-document shop,” Padillo said. “I took a look at it earlier. It’s good. Maybe the best.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

  “I’m ready,” Frau Koepler said.

  “Good. Which of you will volunteer first?” Wolgemuth asked.

  “Go ahead,” I said to Padillo.

  He sat down in the chair before the dressing table and Frau Koepler draped a sheetlike affair around him—the kind that barbers use. She studied his face in the mirror and then covered his hair with a rubber cap that fitted down over his sideburns and neck. She murmured to herself, cocked her head this way and that, and then selected some soft wax. “Our nose is straight and thin,” she said; “we will broaden it slightly, flaring the nostrils just so.” Her hands flew deftly around Padillo’s face. She patted and probed and shaped and molded. When she was through, he had a new nose. I would still have recognized him, but his features were altered.

  “Our eyes are brown and our hair is black. We will soon have brown hair, but we shall also have brown eyebrows.” She picked up a tube and rubbed some of its contents into Padillo’s eyebrows. They became brown—or dirty blond. “Now the mouth: it is one of the most important features of the face. May I see our teeth?”

  Padillo leered at her.

  “They are very white and contrast nicely with our rather olive complexion. We will stain them ever so slightly, giving them a strong yellowish look—like a nice old horse.” She squeezed some paste onto a toothbrush that she had taken from a clear-plastic container and handed the brush to Padillo. “Let’s brush our teeth now carefully. It will wear off in a few days.” He brushed. “Now for the shape of our mouth and cheeks,” she went on. “We will balloon them slightly.” She inserted some flesh-colored sponge rubber into her mouth. “Bite down. Now open. Now here and here. Now bite down. Now open. You see we have a slightly pendulous lower lip now, rounder cheeks, and we have become a mouth breather. It is always slightly open, as if we were suffering from a slight respiratory ailment. We will also lighten our complexion and give it some of the heavy drinker’s veins.”

  Frau Koepler opened a small white pot, dipped her fingers into a grayish paste, and began to work the paste into Padillo’s face. His skin took on a yeasty, almost unhealthy look, as if he had spent too much time in a hospital—or a bar. Just below the sideburns she fitted a small adhesive-backed stencil; then she dabbed at it with a stick wrapped in cotton, which she had dipped into a small bottle of liquid. She let the liquid dry and peeled off the stencil. Padillo’s capillary veins had burst into a curlicue profusion of purples and reds. She did the same to the other side of his face and then began similar work on his nose. “Not too much here,” she said; “we have been friends with good schnapps for let us say—oh—fifteen years. A half-bottle a day perhaps.” She peeled off the stencil and the tip of Padillo’s nose glowed merrily. She whisked off the rubber head cover, reached into a bottom drawer, and produced a hair piece, which she fitted carefully to his head. Instead of a thick, gray-flecked crew cut he had a thin crop of dirty-blond hair, parted carefully on the right. Pink scalp gleamed through near the beginning of the hairline.

  She examined her work critically. “Perhaps a small blemish on the chin—a pimple from a sour stomach.” She reached into a small box—the size of the ones that aspirin comes in—and applied her forefinger to Padillo’s chin. He had a pimple. He also had an unhealthy, puffy face; a drinker’s complexion; thinning hair; and a yellow-toothed mouth that never quite closed. He stood up. “Slump,” she ordered. “A man of our appearance avoids military bearing whenever possible.”

  Padillo slumped and shuffled up and down the room.

  “The perfect-thirty-year man,” I said.

  “Think I could pass muster, Sergeant?” Padillo had ev
en changed his voice to a White House drawl.

  “Well, you’re not pretty—but you’re different.”

  “If we had more time … but … ” Frau Koepler brushed off the chair and shrugged.

  “Next,” I said, and sat down. She did a similar job on me, except that I grew tanner but unhealthier looking. She also gave me a neat, well-clipped mustache. New circles grew under my eyes, and they seemed to form deeper sockets than were there before. A slight but livid scar appeared over my right eye. “It is like a picture,” Frau Koepler explained. “The eye goes to the upper left-hand corner of a face automatically. That is where we put the scar. The mind registers the scar, scans the rest of the face, and runs into the mustache. Again the unexpected because the previous owner had no scar or mustache. Simple?”

  “You’re very good,” I said.

  “The best,” Wolgemuth said, and beamed some more. “We did not have to do so much work on the other two because they are known only by pictures. But they will pass. Now, then, we must have the pictures taken for your ID cards.”

  We said good-bye to Frau Koepler. The last time I saw her she was seated at the dressing table, staring into the the mirror and stroking her lantern jaw reflectively.

  After the pictures were taken we had lunch with Wolgemuth. Padillo and I chewed carefuly because of the spongy rubber doodads that Frau Koepler had clamped in our mouths. They weren’t too much trouble—no worse than the first set of false teeth. They didn’t slip and slide around, but they felt strange and foreign. We found that drinking was much easier, and Wolgemuth thoughtfully supplied some excellent wine.

  “You know, Herr McCorkle, I have been trying to get Mike here to come to work with us for a long time. He’s really one of the best in this rather difficult profession.”

  “He’s got a job,” I said. “Between trips, that is.”

  “Yes, the café in Bonn. That has been a really excellent cover. But I’m afraid that it’s completely exposed now—blown.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Padillo said. “After this they wouldn’t even send me down to the corner for coffee. That’s the way I want it.”

  “You’re still a young man, Mike,” Wolgemuth said. “You’ve got the experience, the firsthand knowledge, the languages.”

  “I’m not fancy enough,” Padillo said. “Sometimes I think I would have been good at running bootleg Scotch during Prohibition. Or perhaps I could still make it as a loner, knocking off suburban branch banks on Tuesday afternoons. I have the languages, but my methods are too orthodox, or maybe it’s just that I’m lazy: I won’t go into an operation loaded down with hollowed-out coins and fountain pens that unfold into motor scooters.”

  Wolgemuth poured some more wine. “All right; let us say that your past successes have been derived from the simplicity of your methods. Would you be interested in accepting occasional assignments—well-paying ones, of course?”

  Padillo took a sip of the wine and smiled at its taste. His newly yellowed teeth flashed like a warning light. “No thanks. Twenty, twenty-one years is a long time. Maybe years ago I should have gone to UCLA and majored in political science and languages, and when I graduated I could have sent in a Form 57 to the CIA or State and right now I could be an FO 2 or 3 with a house in Fairfax County or explaining Vietnam to the newspaper boys in Ghana. But don’t forget, Kurt, the only thing I really know is how to run a saloon. My languages are good, but only because I learned them early and correctly. I don’t know the first fundamentals of grammar. I just know when it sounds right. I’m weak in history, poor in political science, and ambivalent about the world power struggle. I respect—even admire—those who do know or think they do. But for twenty years now I’ve had bad dreams and cold sweats and I’ve had to concentrate just on how to keep on living.” He held out his hand and spread his fingers. They trembled slightly. “My nerves are shot, I drink too much, and I smoke too much. I’m used up and I’m worn out and I’m quitting this time around and there’s not a thing in God’s world that can stop me.”

  Wolgemuth listened carefully to Padillo’s speech. “You, of course, underestimate yourself, Mike. You have that rare quality that kept them coming back to you year after year to perform just one more task. You have the actor’s ability to assimilate an identity, to build a new personality with all its kinks and idiosyncrasies. When you are a German you walk like a German, you eat like one, and you smoke like one. These are little things, but after twenty years of occupation a European can recognize an American by his fat behind and the way it moves when he walks. You are a born mimic, an utterly ruthless rogue, and you have the cunning and skepticism of a successful criminal lawyer—and for that package I would be willing to pay a very high price indeed.”

  Padillo raised his glass in a mock salute. “I’ll accept the compliment but refuse the offer. You should be looking for younger blood, Kurt.”

  “I couldn’t even tempt you with the chance for a little revenge against your present employers?”

  “No chance. They thought they had a good business proposition. The Russians needed a blood-and-thunder agent for a full-scale production. My employers, God bless them, wanted to get Symmes and Burchwood back quietly and without fuss. So you trade A for B and C, especially if A seems to be getting a little crotchety. Who set up the deal in the East—the good colonel?”

  “So I understand,” Wolgemuth said. “He’s been back for several months now, supposedly in charge of propaganda.”

  “He’s had some experience in the art of the swap,” Padillo said. “But our side is made up of the percentage boys and, as our friend Maas told McCorkle, they have me down as an amortized agent.”

  There was a knock at the door. Wolgemuth said come in and one of the giant-size messenger boys came in carrying a large Manila envelope. He handed it to Wolgemuth and left. The German tore it open and produced two well-worn billfolds. “Some more of the fancy frippery you object to, Mike. But it might come in handy.”

  I opened mine. It had ninety-two American dollars, 250 West German Marks, an Army ID card that said I was T/Sgt. Frank ]. Bailey, carefully folded travel orders, a couple of dirty pictures, an American Forces driver’s license, a letter in bad English from a girl named Billi in Frankfurt that seemed overly explicit, a card that said I was a member of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, and a box of Trojans.

  Wolgemuth produced two more billfolds and said: “These are for the other two.”

  Padillo stuffed them into a hip pocket. “How does this make-up look to you, Kurt?”

  “It’s good enough. As she said, the whole theory is distraction. The uniforms, of course, are the main thing. Then the faces. If you don’t linger around Tempelhof, you should make it all right. And, of course, there’ll be a drunken fight to take their minds off you for a few moments.”

  Padillo shoved back his chair and stood up. “The tickets?”

  “The driver has them,” Wolgemuth said.

  Padillo held out his hand. “Thanks for everything, Kurt.”

  Wolgemuth brushed the thanks away with a wave. “You’ll get a bill.” He shook hands with me and told me how glad he was to have met me and sounded as if he really meant it.

  “You’ll find your two wards downstairs,” he said.

  Padillo nodded and we left the room. Max was standing by the sliding steel door in the fancy reception room that led to the elevator. He looked at us critically through his glasses. Then he nodded his head in approval.

  “I’ll see you in Bonn sometime soon,” Max said.

  “Tell Marta that—” Padillo ran out of words. “Just tell her I said thanks.”

  We shook hands with Max and walked through the door to the elevator. It took us down to the ground-level corridor. Symmes and Burchwood were there, shaved and dressed in Class-A uniforms. One of the giants leaned against the wall and seemed to admire the ceiling. Padillo handed Burchwood and Symmes the two billfolds.

  “You can memorize your new names on the way to Tempelhof. Symmes will
stick with me, Burchwood with McCorkle. We go through Pan American without fuss, just like you’ve done it before. I don’t think you need any more lectures. You both look nice. I like your haircut, Symmes.”

  “Do we have to talk to you?” Symmes asked. His voice was petulant.

  “No.”

  “Then we’ve decided not to any more.”

  “Fine. O.K., let’s go.”

  Outside was a 1963 Ford sedan. A tall Negro in an Army uniform with the single stripe of a PFC was wiping its headlights with a dust-cloth. He saw us come out and ran around to open the door. “Yassuh, get ri’ in. We fixin’ to leave heah in jus’ a second. Yassuh.”

  Padillo looked at him coldly. “You can cut out the Rastus act, Sambo. Wolgemuth said you picked up our tickets. Let’s have them.”

  The Negro smiled at Padillo. “I haven’t heard a Texas accent like that since I left Mineral Wells.”

  Padillo grinned back. “It’s supposed to be from nearer Kilgore,” he said in his normal voice. “You ready?”

  “Yassuh,” the Negro said, and moved around the car to the driver’s seat. I got in the front seat. Burchwood, Symmes and Padillo got in the back. The Negro opened the glove compartment and handed me four Pan Am tickets. I selected the one with Sergeant Bailey on it and handed the rest to Padillo.

  “What’s the plan at the airport?” Padillo asked.

  “I’ll let you out and park the car quick,” the Negro said. “It doesn’t matter where, because I’ll be coming back with either the police or the MPs. Then while you’re checking your tickets there’s going to be a nasty racial incident. An American tourist from Georgia will insist that I insulted his wife; he’ll smack me one and then I’ll light into him with this weapon, which is indigenous to my race.” He produced a straight razor and snicked it open. “If that cracker clips me too hard, I just might cut him a little.”

  “Who’s the cracker?”

  “One of the guys Wolgemuth recruited from Frankfurt a couple of years ago. He’s genuine enough. After the cops stop it and cart me off he won’t show up to press charges.”