Spandau Phoenix

by Iles, Greg

  He felt the hand holding the cigarette start to shake. He tried to swallow, but his throat refused to cooperate. Had he actually found the journal of a Nazi war criminal? With Heini Weber’s cynical comments echoing in his head, he tried to recall what he could about Hess. All he really knew was that Hess was Hitler’s right-hand man, and that he’d flown secretly to Britain sometime early in the war, and had been captured. For the past few weeks the Berlin papers had been full of sensational stories about Hess’s death, but Hans had read none of them. He did remember the occasional feature from earlier years, though. They invariably portrayed an infantile old man, a once-powerful soldier reduced to watching episodes of the American soap opera Dynasty on television. Why was the pathetic old Nazi so important? Hans wondered. Why should even a hint of information about his mission drive the price of forged diaries into the millions? Catching his reflection in a shop window, Hans realized that in his work clothes he looked like a bum, even by the Ku’damm’s indulgent standards. He stubbed out his cigarette and turned down a side street at the first opportunity. He soon found himself standing before a small art cinema. He gazed up at the colourful posters hawking films imported from a dozen nations. On a whim he stepped up to the ticket window and inquired about the matinee.

  The ticket girl answered in a sleepy monotone. “American western film today. John Wayne. Der Searchers.”

  “In German?”

  “Nein. English.”

  “Excellent. One ticket, please.”

  “Twelve DM,” demanded the robot voice.

  “Twelve! That’s robbery.”

  “You want the ticket?”

  Reluctantly, Hans surrendered his money and entered the theatre. He didn’t stop for refreshments; at the posted prices he couldn’t afford to. No wonder Ilse and I never go to movies, he thought. Just before he entered the screening room, he spied a pay phone near the rest rooms. He slowed his stride, thinking of calling in to the station, but then he walked on. There isn’t any rush, is there? he thought. No one knows about the papers yet. As he seated himself in the darkness near the screen, he decided that he might well have found the most anonymous place in the city to decide what to do with the Spandau papers.

  Six rows behind Hans, a tall, thin shadow slipped noiselessly into a frayed theatre seat. The shadow reached into a worn leather bag on its lap and withdrew an orange. While Hans watched the tides roll, the shadow peeled the orange and watched him.

  Thirty blocks away in the Lützenstrasse, Ilse Apfel set her market basket down in the uncarpeted hallway and let herself into apartment 40. The operation took three keys—one for the knob and two for the heavy deadbolts Hans insisted upon. She went straight to the kitchen and put away her groceries, singing tunefully all the while. The song was an old one, Walking on the Moon by the Police. Ilse always sang when she was happy, and today she was ecstatic. The news about the baby meant far more than fulfilment of her desire to have a family. It meant that Hans might finally agree to settle permanently in Berlin. For the past five months he had talked of little else but his desire to try out for Germany’s elite counter terrorist force, the Grenzschutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9), oddly enough, the unit whose marksmen his estranged father coached. Hans claimed he was tired of routine police work, that he wanted something more exciting and meaningful. Ilse didn’t like this idea at all. For one thing, it would seriously disrupt her career. Policemen in Berlin made little money; most police wives worked as hairdressers, secretaries, or even housekeepers—low-paying jobs, but jobs that could be done anywhere. Ilse was different. Her parents had died when she was very young, and she had been raised by her grandfather, an eminent history professor and author. She’d practically grown up in the Free University and had taken degrees in both Modern Languages and Finance. She’d even spent a semester in the United States, studying French and teaching German. Her job as interpreter for a prominent brokerage house gave Hans and her a more comfortable life than most police families. They were not rich, but their life was good.

  If Hans qualified for GSG-9, however, they would have to move to one of the four towns that housed the active GSG-9 units: Kassel, Munich, Hannover, or Kiel. Not exactly financial meccas. Ilse knew she could adapt to a new city if she had to, but not to the heightened danger. Assignment to a GSG-9 unit virtually guaranteed that Hans would be put into life-threatening situations. GSG-9 teams were Germany’s forward weapon in the battle against hijackers, assassins, and God only knew what other madmen. Ilse didn’t want that kind of life for the father of her child, and she didn’t understand how Hans could either. She despised amateur psychology, but she suspected that Hans’s reckless impulse was driven by one of two things: a desire to prove something to his father, or his failure to become a father himself.

  No more conversations about stun grenades and storming aeroplanes, she told herself. Because she was finally pregnant, and because today was just that kind of day. Returning to work from the doctor’s office, she’d it)und that her boss had realized a small fortune for his clients that morning by following a suggestion she had made before leaving. Of course by market close the cretin had convinced himself that the clever bit of arbitrage was entirely his own idea. And who really cares? she thought. When I open my brokerage house, he’ll be carrying coffee to my assistants!

  Ilse stepped into the bedroom to change out of her business clothes. The first thing she saw was the half-eaten plate of Weisswurst on the unmade bed. Melted ice and dirt from Hans’s uniform had left the sheets a muddy mess. Then she saw the uniform itself, draped over the boots in the corner. That’s odd, she thought. Hans was as human as the next man, but he usually managed to keep his dirty clothes out of sight. In fact, it was odd not to find him sleeping off the fatigue of night duty.

  Ilse felt a strange sense of worry. And then suddenly she knew. At work there had been a buzz about a breaking news story—something about Russians arresting two West Berliners at Spandau Prison. Later, in her car, she’d half-heard a radio announcer say something about Russians at one of the downtown police stations. She prayed that Hans hadn’t got caught up in that mess. A bureaucratic tangle like that could take all night. She frowned. Telling Hans about the baby while he was in a bad mood wasn’t what she had had in mind at all. She would have to think of a way to put him in a good mood first.

  One method always worked, and she smiled thinking of it. For the first time in weeks the thought of sex made her feel genuinely excited. It seemed so long since she and Hans had made love with any other goal than pregnancy. But now that she had conceived, they could forget all about charts and graphs and temperatures and rediscover the intensity of those nights when they hardly slept at all. She had already planned a celebratory dinner—not a health-conscious American style snack like those her yuppie colleagues from the Yorckstrasse called dinner, but a real Berlin feast: Eisben, sauerkraut, and Pease pudding. She’d made a special trip to the food floor of the KaDeWe and bought everything ready-made. It was said that anything edible in the world could be purchased at the KaDeWe, and Ilse believed it. She smiled again. She and Hans would share a first-class supper, and for dessert he could have her—as healthy a dish as any man could want. Then she would tell him about the baby.

  Ilse tied her hair back, then she took the pork from the refrigerator and put it in the oven. While it heated, she went into the bedroom to strip the soiled sheets. She laughed softly. A randy German woman might happily make love on a forest floor, but on dirty linens? Never! She knelt beside the bed and gathered the bedclothes into a ball. She was about to rise when she saw something white sticking out from under the mattress. Automatically, she pulled it out and found herself holding a damp sheaf of papers. What in the world? She certainly didn’t remember putting any papers under the mattress. It must have been Hans. But what would he hide from her? Bewildered, she let the bedclothes fall, stood up, and unfolded the onionskin pages.

  Heavy, hand-printed letters covered the paper. She read the first paragraph cursorily, her mind
more on the circumstances of her discovery than on the actual content of the papers. The second paragraph, however, got her attention. It was written in Latin of all things. Shivering in the chilly air, she walked into the kitchen and stood by the warm stove.

  She concentrated on the word endings, trying to decipher the carefully blocked letters. it was almost painful, like trying to recall formulas from gymnasium physics. Her specialty was modern languages; Latin she could hardly remember. Ilse went to the kitchen table and spread out the thin pages, anchoring each corner with a piece of flatware. There were nine. She took a pen and notepad from the telephone stand, went back to the first paragraph of Latin, and began recording her efforts. After ten minutes she had roughed out the first four sentences. When she read straight through what she had written, the pencil slipped from her shaking hand.

  “Mein Gott, ” she breathed. “This cannot be.”

  Hans exited the cinema into the gathering dusk. He couldn’t believe the afternoon had passed so quickly. Huddling against the cold, he considered taking the U-Bahn home, then decided against it. It would mean changing trains at Fehrberliner-Platz, and he would still have some distance to walk. Better to walk the whole way and use the time to decide how to tell Ilse about the Spandau papers. He started west with a loping stride, moving away from the crowded Ku’damm. He knew he was duty-bound to hand the papers over to his superiors, and he felt sure that the mix-up with the Russians had been straightened out by now. Yet as he walked, he was aware that his mind was not completely clear about turning in the papers. For some irritating reason, when he thought of doing that, his father’s face came into his mind. But there was something else in his brain. Something he soon recognized as Heini Weber’s voice saying: “Three point seven million Deutschemarks—” Hans had already done the calculations. At his salary it would take 150 years to earn that much money, and that represented the offer of a single magazine for the “Hitler diaries.” That was a powerful temptation, even for an honest man. As Hans reached the mouth of the side street, a dark shape disengaged itself from the gloom beneath the cinema awning and fell into step behind him. It neither hurried nor tarried, but moved through the streets as effortlessly as a cloud’s shadow.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  5.50 pm. American Sector. West Berlin

  Colonel Godfrey A. “God” Rose reached into the bottom drawer of his mammoth Victorian desk, withdrew a half empty bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, and gazed fondly at the label. For five exhausting hours the US Army’s West Berlin chief of intelligence had sifted through the weekly reports of his “snitches”—the highly paid but under-zealous army of informers that the US government maintains on its shadow payroll to keep abreast of events in Berlin—and discovered nothing but the usual sordid list of venalities committed by the host of elected officials, bureaucrats, and military officers of the city he had come to regard as the Sodom of Western Europe. The colonel had a single vice—whiskey—and he looked forward to the anaesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation. Pouring the Turkey into a Lennox shot glass, Rose glanced up and saw his aide, Sergeant Clary, silhouetted against the leaded glass window of his office door. With customary discretion the young NCO paused before knocking, giving his superior time to “straighten his desk.” By the time Clary tapped on the glass and stepped smartly into the office, Colonel Rose appeared to be engrossed in an intelligence brief.

  Clary cleared his throat. “Colonel?”

  Rose looked up slowly. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Sir, Ambassador Briggs is flying in from Bonn tomorrow morning. State just informed us by courier.”

  Rose frowned. “That’s not on my calendar, is it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “Apparently the Soviets have filed some sort of complaint against us, sir. Through the embassy.”

  “Us?”

  “The Army, sir. It’s something to do with last night’s detail at Spandau Prison. That’s all I could get out of Smitty—I mean the courier, sir.”

  “Spandau? What about it? Christ, we’ve watched the damned coverage all day, haven’t we? I’ve already filed my report.”

  “State didn’t elaborate, sir.”

  Rose snorted. “They never do, do they.”

  “No, sir. Care to see the message?”

  Rose gazed out of his small window at the Berlin dusk and wondered about the possible implications of the ambassador’s visit. The American diplomatic corps stayed in Bonn most of the time—well out of Rose’s area of operations and he liked that just fine.

  “The message, Colonel?” Sergeant Clary repeated.

  “What? No, Sergeant. Dismissed.”

  “Sir.” Clary beat a hasty retreat from the office, certain that his colonel would want to ponder this unpleasant development over a shot of the good stuff.

  “Clary!” Rose’s bark rattled the door. “Is Major Richardson still down the hall?”

  The sergeant poked his head back into the office. “I’ll run check, sir.”

  “Can’t you just buzz him?”

  “Uh … the major doesn’t always answer his pages, sir. After five, that is. Says he can’t stand to hear the phone while he’s working.”

  “Who the hell can? Don’t people just keep on ringing the damned thing when he doesn’t answer?”

  “Well, sir … I think he’s rigged some type of switch to his phone or something. He just shuts it off when he doesn’t want to hear it.”

  Rose stuck out his bottom lip. “I see.”

  “Checking now, sir,” said Clary, on the fly.

  Since 1945, Berlin has been an island city. It is a political island, quadriseated by foreign conquerors, and a psychological island as insulated from the normal flow of German life as a child kidnapped from its mother. Berlin was an island before the Wall, during the Wall, and it will remain so long after the Wall has fallen. Kidnapped children can take years to recover.

  The American community in Berlin is an island within that larger host. It clusters around the US Military Mission in the affluent district of Dahlem, a giant concrete block bristling with satellite dishes, radio antennae, and microwave transmitters. In this city of hastily built office towers, bomb-scarred churches, and drab concrete tenement blocks whose colour accents are provided mostly by graffiti, the American housing area manages to look neat, midwestern, suburban, and safe. Known as “Little America,” it is home to the sixty-six hundred servicemen, their wives, and children who comprise the symbolic US presence in Berlin.

  These families bustle between the US Mission, the Officer’s club, the well-stocked PX, the private Burger King and McDonald’s, and their patio barbecues like suburbanites from Omaha or Atlanta. Only the razor wire that tops the fences surrounding the manicured lawns betrays the tension that underpins this bucolic scene.

  Few Americans truly mix with the Berliners. They are more firmly tied to the United States than to the streets they walk and the faces they pass each day in Berlin. They are tied by the great airborne umbilical cord stretching from Tempelhof Airport to the mammoth military supply bases of America. Major Harry Richardson—the man Colonel Rose had sent Sergeant Clary to find—was an exception to this pattern. Richardson needed no umbilical cord in Berlin, or anywhere else. He spoke excellent German, as well as Russian—and not with the stilted State Department cadence of the middle and upper ranks of the army. He did not live in Dahlem or Zehlendorf, the ritzy addresses of choice, but in thoroughly German Wilmersdorf. He came from an emancipated and wealthy family, had attended both Harvard and Oxford, yet he had served in Vietnam and remained in the army after the war. His personal contacts ranged from senators to supply sergeants at distant Army outposts, from English peers to Scottish fishing guides, from Berlin senators to kabob-cooks in the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg. And that, in Colonel Rose’s eyes, made Harry Richardson one hell of an intelligence officer Harry saluted as he sauntered into Rose’s office and collapsed into the colonel’s infamous “hot s
eat.” The chair dropped most people a head lower than Rose, but Harry stood six feet three inches without shoes. His gray eyes met the stocky colonel’s with the self-assured steadiness of an equal.

  “Richardson,” Rose said across the desk.

  “Colonel.”

  Rose eyed Harry’s uniform doubtfully. It was wrinkled and rather plain for a major. Harry had won the silver star in Vietnam, yet the only decoration he ever wore was his Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Rose didn’t like the wrinkles, but he liked the modesty. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Bigwig Briggs is flying in from Bonn tomorrow,” he announced.

  Harry smiled wryly. “I thought he might.”

  “You did. Why’s that?”