by Tom Gabbay
“Down the hatch.”
“Very good! Down the hatch!” We knocked them back, chased with fresh Pilsner.
“Italy,” I said.
“Sorry—?”
“Bogie’s character in Key Largo. He was in Italy, so he didn’t necessarily kill lots of Germans. He might have killed lots of Italians.”
Horst wrinkled his forehead, then rocked his head back and forth a couple of times, acknowledging the possibility that maybe I was right. “It doesn’t matter for the story. It matters only that Bogie has stopped believing in the fight against evil and must regain his principles in order to kill the gangsters.”
“The reluctant hero.” I stubbed out my cigarette, lit another almost immediately. Horst dug out another Camel.
“I’ve never been to America. Someday I will go.” He leaned across the table and picked up the matchbook. “Where dreams come true.”
“Don’t get your hopes up too high.”
“I know quite a lot about it already.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t believe everything you see in the movies.”
He studied me while he sipped his beer, then took a drag off the Camel and blew smoke rings.
“You see, the problem in Germany is that everyone wants to be the same as their neighbor. It’s a nation of conformists. Not like America, which is the opposite, a country of freethinkers.”
“America has more than its share of followers.”
“I don’t mean as in the films, with cowboys and gangsters.”
“Oh, there are plenty of cowboys and gangsters. But we were talking about freethinkers.” A dissatisfied expression crept onto Horst’s face, so I suggested we have another schnapps, which brightened him up right away.
It went on like that for a while, Horst reciting the plots to Shane, High Noon, Rebel Without a Cause, and Little Caesar, to name just a few, in an attempt to help me understand the true nature of the American spirit. I was patriotic enough, and still am, but I’ve seen the American spirit from top to bottom and nothing is pretty from every angle.
We ended up—I don’t know how many hours later—the last two drunken souls in the place, him trying to convince me that Bogart was the best actor of all time, me championing Henry Fonda, who I’d never given a second thought to until my fifth schnapps. The waitress, a big round lady with a mustache, whose initial good humor had evaporated with the crowd, told us they were about to close, so this would have to be the last round.
Horst saluted her with his drink. “You have served us well! Down the gate!”
“Hatch,” I corrected him.
“Yes, hatch!” As he tossed the drink back a strange look came over him—a bizarre smile frozen onto his face. He stood up very slowly, eyes locked onto a nonexistent horizon, placed his hat on his head, bowed to the waitress, and said, “I bid you a good night.” One step toward the door and the bottom fell out. He went down hard, breaking the fall with his face.
Feeling a bit light-headed myself, I reacted slowly, pushing away from the table and methodically walking around to where Horst had landed. I steadied myself with hands on my knees and took a good long look at him—he wasn’t moving.
“Do you know where he lives?” I asked the waitress.
“Kirchstrasse,” came from Horst, still glued to the floor.
I leaned over, asked him if he could move.
“I think not,” he responded, one eye opening.
I asked the waitress to call a taxi, but she said none would come at this hour. (Not quick enough for her, anyway.) Behind the bar a big bald guy, who I presumed was her husband, was shaking his head while he wiped out beer glasses. I was on my own.
“Is it far to Kirchstrasse?”
Horst answered again. “Very near. I can show you.”
I took a deep breath, pulled Horst up to a sitting position, and hoisted him onto my shoulder, facing backward. He didn’t weigh much, but he was all over the place, arms and legs everywhere. The waitress was happy to hold the door open for us and I heard the lock as soon as we stepped onto the street. I regretted leaving her such a large tip.
“I thought you said it was close.” After walking for twenty minutes, I was starting to sober up and Horst was getting a lot heavier.
“It is,” his voice echoed off the empty pavement. He picked his head up to see where we were—or at least where we’d been, as he was facing backward. “Very close.”
“Which way?” I turned in a circle so he could see each street in the intersection.
“To the left… My left, not yours.”
“Are you sure this time?”
“Quite sure!”
I started walking, but the noises coming from above were sounding ominous.
“You all right up there?” I asked.
“I feel somewhat ill,” Horst confessed.
“Maybe you should walk now.”
“I’m afraid I don’t feel my legs. If you are tired perhaps we should stop for a rest.”
“If I stop now you sleep in the street.”
“It’s not far at all. Very close.”
We eventually located Horst’s building—a nondescript six-story walk-up, the kind that appeared all over Berlin after the war. I leaned against the cold concrete while Horst, still slung over my shoulder, rummaged around in his jacket pockets.
“Can you feel inside my pants, please, Jack?”
“Not on the first date, Horst.”
“I seem to have lost my keys. Perhaps they are in the pocket of my pants.”
I reluctantly groped Horst’s pockets and came up empty. “When was the last time you saw them?” I asked.
“All the time I keep them in the pocket of my jacket. They must have fallen out while I have been on your back.”
“Well, sleeping in the gutter isn’t as bad as it sounds.” I started to unload him.
“Wait—you can ring the bell.”
It was something just short of 3 A.M., SO whoever Horst was planning to roust was not going to be overly thankful to me for delivering him. But that was his problem. I was just being a good citizen.
“It’s the fourth bell from the top,” he said. “I think.”
I counted four from the top. “Vogel?”
“No!” he sputtered. “Vogel will murder me if I wake him. Perhaps it’s the fifth. Turn me around.” I did a one-eighty and faced the street while Horst tried to make sense of the doorbells. “Yes, I was right, it’s the fifth.” He pressed the button, waited ten seconds, then pressed it again.
“I hope that’s your mother up there,” I remarked.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to believe that you’re dumb enough to do that to your wife.”
After a minute I heard footsteps inside followed by a female’s muffled voice: “Horst? … Bist du das?”
“Can you open the door please!” he bellowed.
“Shhh,” she whispered as the door creaked open. “Ihr weckt alle!” I couldn’t see her face, but she had a good voice—rich, like honey, but not too sweet. And positively not his mother’s.
“I’ve lost my keys!” Horst whispered loudly.
She asked if he was injured: “Bist du verletzt?”
“I can’t feel my legs,” he smiled.
“Und wer ist das?”
“This is my good friend Jack Teller, of Pompano Beach, Florida. Turn around, Jack, so you can meet my sister.”
She had pale blue eyes—soft and sympathetic, but wary—and silky blond hair, still mussed from her pillow. A white cotton nightshirt, open at the neck, was visible underneath a frayed light blue bathrobe that she pulled tighter when I looked at her. I noticed the long arc of her neck as she cocked her head sideways, trying to figure out if I was to be trusted. She pursed her lips, flattening the lovely curve of her mouth, and said, “Hmm.” There was something serene and graceful about her—a quiet, soulful beauty.
“Her name is Hanna,” Horst added.
“Sorry about this,” I said. “W
here would you like me to put your brother?”
“Come in,” she answered, with an air of resignation, but also with unexpected warmth.
I navigated the entrance without knocking Horst’s head too hard against the frame and found myself facing a flight of narrow stairs.
I looked to Hanna. “Up?”
“The top floor,” she confirmed.
I nodded and she followed us up. Horst said, “I feel sick” in German and Hanna responded with, “It serves you right.”
The place was small and pretty basic, but neat and clean. The furniture seemed to come from a secondhand shop and the faded wallpaper was peeling away at the edges. I dumped Horst on a worn-out sofa and he stayed where he landed, eyes shut tight. “You must be quite strong to carry me so far,” he said.
“You said it was close.”
He peeked up at me and smiled like a kid. “It’s not so far.”
Hanna reappeared from the kitchen with a glass of water and two Bayer. She sat Horst up, gave him the tablets, and let him fall back with a groan, pretty much unconscious.
“He’s gonna have a tough morning,” I said.
“It’s morning already.” She looked away quickly, moved toward the door.
“I guess it is,” I answered.
“He’ll have a tough afternoon, but he deserves it.” I finally got a half smile. It was nice. “Thank you for seeing him home.”
I hesitated at the door, waiting to see if there was anything else to say. There wasn’t, so I just said good-bye.
I headed back to the hotel feeling surprisingly good. The sun was up by the time I saw my pillow, so I pulled the drapes and put the “Do Not Disturb” sign outside the door, figuring I would sleep all day.
THREE
The sound shot through my head like a bullet on fire. I came to in the dark and froze, trying to get my bearings. The goddamn buzzer wouldn’t quit, scrambling my already decimated brain cells into a lump of confused pain in the center of my skull.
Then it went quiet.
The room started to take shape, but I knew if I tried to move my head it would explode. I managed to locate the bedside light, fumbled around for my watch until I realized it was still on my wrist. I squinted up at it, waited for my eyes to focus. A couple of minutes past five—I’d been asleep roughly an hour. I shut my eyes, went blank right away.
Then the buzzer again. What kind of asshole—!
“Open the goddamned door, Jack!”
An Ivy League asshole. What the hell did Powell want at this hour?
And more buzzing. He obviously wasn’t going anywhere, so I scraped myself off the bed and slumped toward the door. Noticing that I was fully clothed, except for bare feet, I tried to recall my last moments of consciousness but drew a blank. It didn’t matter, so I let it go.
Powell was standing in the hallway, groomed, pressed, and scrubbed behind the ears, briefcase neatly tucked under his arm. He took one look at me and said, “You look like shit.”
“Yeah, well, I feel a lot worse,” I croaked. His aftershave wafted across the threshold and made me want to puke. I left the door open and retreated back inside. He followed.
“Big night out?”
I dropped into an armchair and closed my eyes. I could feel him checking the room out.
“How the hell do you rate a place like this?”
“Friends in high places,” I mumbled, eyes still shut.
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
He couldn’t get over that they’d put a lowlife like me into a five-star suite at the Kempinski. Even the Berlin station chief didn’t rate that kind of treatment. What Powell didn’t know, of course—and what I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him—was that I had scammed the room. Nothing elaborate, just a quick call while I was on a layover in Frankfurt airport to the CIA travel office. I’d introduced myself to an overworked young lady as the concierge from the Kempinski, explained that there were no single rooms available for Mr. Teller after all, but the hotel would be happy to accommodate him in a suite, at no extra cost, if that could be authorized. The lady couldn’t care less what kind of room I had, and as long as it stayed on budget, nobody else would care, either. So she agreed when I asked her to send a telex to the hotel confirming the conversation. “For our records,” I explained in my German accent. When I got to the Kempinski, the reservations desk had the following message from Washington:
Confirm Mr. J. Teller, guest arriving 22 June, authorized for upgrade to suite at hotel cost. End.
There was some question about the phrase at hotel cost, but I assured them that it meant at normal hotel rates. If I’d learned anything in my agency days, it was how to sell a story. It doesn’t matter how big the lie is—in fact, the bigger the better—as long as it’s either: (a) what people want to hear; (b) what they dread to hear; or (c) what they couldn’t care less about. In other words, pretty much anytime.
Powell pulled the drapes on the floor-to-ceiling window, flooding the room with unwelcome early-morning light. He took a gilded armchair from behind the Louis XIV writing desk, placed it in the middle of the room, on the Persian carpet, sat down, crossed his legs, and stared silently, his lips forming a cocky grin that made him look empty-headed. I felt the crumpled pack of HBs in my pocket, but thought better of it. It wouldn’t help the pain that was now migrating to my right temple.
Powell finally broke silence:
“Enjoying Berlin so far?”
“I’m gonna recommend it to all my friends.”
“I didn’t know you had any friends left.”
“One or two,” I said.
“In high places.”
“That’s right.”
He paused, kept his eyes locked on me. Powell was the perfect Company man. Urbane, smart, arrogant, ambitious, and a coldhearted bastard. He’d probably be director one day.
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” he asked cutely.
“I’ll take a wild guess. You got another letter drop from the man with the cane. He’s offering another meeting and Washington wants me along even though you tried hard to convince them that I’m a fuckup.”
Powell shrugged. “Nothing personal.”
It never is with these guys. They’ll wire a man’s balls up and zap him until he passes out and it’s okay, as long as it’s not personal. I needed coffee, picked up the phone on the side table. “You want anything?”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. I ordered the coffee anyway, along with poached eggs and orange juice just to piss him off.
“Why do you think our friend is so interested in you?”
“I’ll ask him when I see him.”
He stood up, looking like he had a bad case of heartburn, and replaced the chair behind the writing desk. The interview was over.
“What time are we on?” I asked.
“Seven,” he said, checking his watch. “Just under two hours.” I asked where, but he didn’t want to say.
“What are you gonna do, take me there blindfolded?” I forced a laugh, even though I wasn’t sure that it was out of the question.
“The market in Kreuzberg. And no fuckups this time.”
“I didn’t fuck up last time,” I said. “I’m gonna get cleaned up. Answer the door if room service rings.” He gave me a look as I left the room. Maybe it wasn’t personal, but it sure looked like he hated my guts.
My brain started to turn over in the shower. Our mystery man hadn’t wasted any time getting back in touch, so whatever he had in mind, he was eager. Maybe there was a time element. That he was a pro was no longer in doubt, not in my mind anyway. He might be out in the cold, looking for a way west. But if he was in trouble, why would he wait for me to fly all the way to Berlin from Florida? He wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t care if I was alone, either. In fact, he’d feel safer with a crowd. I was intrigued, even on one hour’s sleep. I wanted the answer, but I knew that if this guy spotted a crowd—and I was sure he would—he’d be gone before we knew he was th
ere. And there certainly wouldn’t be a third chance.
Powell was getting anxious by the time I reappeared in the living room, shaved and dressed. It wasn’t six o’clock yet, but we had to get me wired up again and pick up Johnson and Chase at the Berlin Operations Base (BOB) offices on the edge of the city.
I saw that the coffee had arrived.
“Can I see the letter?” I asked Powell as I poured a cup.
“What for?” He seemed genuinely surprised that I would ask.
“Just curious,” I answered.
“Don’t be.”
“He’ll know if I’m not alone,” I said. “And if he walks this time, you really won’t hear from him again.”
“Then he’d better not walk. Let’s go.”
“Why don’t we do it his way?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Leave the wire and the honor guard at home. He’ll spot them. I’ll make contact, see what it’s all about, and report back to you.” I knew there was no way in hell that Powell was ever going to agree to anything of the sort, but I thought I’d better give it a try before doing what I was thinking of doing.
“I’m not even going to respond to that.” He was already at the door, waiting.
“It’s your party,” I said as I headed out.
“You’d be smart to remember that,” he snarled.
I followed him into the hallway, but stopped short. “Damn,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “The key … Must be in my other pants. I’ll get it.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Powell grumbled as I headed back into the bedroom.
I quickly gathered the clothes off the bed, where I’d thrown them before showering, went into the adjoining bathroom, threw them over a towel rack, then covered them with a wet towel. The crumpled pack of HBs fell on the floor and I grabbed them, thinking I might need one after all. I quickly ripped the receiver off the telephone that was next to the toilet and stuck it in my pocket before returning to the bedroom, where I bent over like I was looking under the bed and waited for Powell to appear, which he did pretty quickly.
