Reynard, who through the screening had relied on Michael to keep one eye on the street to catch the arrival of the postman, said he thought the evidence he had already shown them was conclusive, but the probabilities were high that the entire performance would be repeated any moment now, always assuming that the post brought something “from America.” He did not need to wait long. “Come!” he hissed. The three men were now mounted on the wooden crate. The postman—the same man as in the moving picture—approached No. 48. His movements were identical. Moments after he left, the hand reached out with the key. And fifteen minutes later the car approached. Blackford could not make out the license plate, but Reynard handed him a set of pocket binoculars. Now he could see that the numbers were the same. And the courier, unmistakably the same. The Wartburg drove off.
“You are satisfied, Sebastian? But why should I ask if you are satisfied? I have risked my neck for your enterprise. I have worked for three months, for three months solidly. You have seen only one small portion of all the film I have had to make. Of course you are satisfied! It is I”—he rose, rather grandly, Blackford thought—“who now need satisfaction. Please, dear Sebastian, and without further delay, we will go down to the garage floor, and you will give me the money.”
Blackford didn’t move. The silence brought Reynard back again to his seat on the wooden case from which he had operated the projector. “You have problems, Sebastian?” he said, fusing irritation and supplication.
“I think that you have done an excellent job and are entitled to be paid. But we must, Reynard, act as businessmen. For one thing: I must have the film.”
Reynard paused. Blackford was certain that the pause was done for theatrical reasons. Clearly he had made up his mind, before the event, whether he would part with the film. But he believed, clearly, that grudging acquiescence should gain him bargaining points.
“I don’t know, Sebastian. There is a danger. If it should fall into … enemy hands—who knows? No, I think I must keep the film.”
“I’ll have to have the film, Reynard, or you don’t get your money, that’s point number one.”
Silence.
“Now, point number two: why didn’t you film the sequence we just now saw?”
The astonishment of Reynard appeared to be absolutely genuine. “Film what you have seen with your own eyes? Sebastian, I must at this point wonder whether you are, as you put it, ‘on the level.’ If your own superiors will not believe what you have seen with your eyes, they are expected to believe a film which, theoretically—” Reynard stopped himself; what hazardous line of speculation had he adumbrated! “… that theoretically, hypothetically, could have been an imposture! I mean, it is risky enough to take films under any circumstances, but to take them merely to confirm evidence available from one’s own eyes—I mean, Sebastian, you are obviously an experienced agent, but you cannot expect that I, as an experienced agent, would agree to any suggestion so, so—Sebastian, I do not want to offend you—so grotesque.”
Blackford didn’t move. Was this the right moment to bring Michael to life?
“What do you say—buddy?” Blackford took the conventional care to conceal his colleague’s name.
The answer might have been delivered by a robot. “Whatever you say.” Not even, “Whatever you say … Sebastian.” He wished, how he wished he might have a flashlight, casually to pass over Michael’s features.
He turned to Reynard. “Okay. My friend and I will go on down. You get the film rewound, and package it. We’ll wait for you.”
“You strike a very hard bargain, Sebastian,” said Reynard, delivering the ritual lines. Blackford’s consolation was that Reynard could not begin to know the true value of his information to Blackford’s superiors.
So he descended the ladder. Michael shone his light down, obliquely, so that it would not blind Blackford, but would give him a sense of perspective. Michael followed his partner down, his flashlight pointing upward from his hand. On reaching the garage floor, he turned it off and said nothing. Blackford, waiting for Reynard, inched toward the door and, easing the bolt to the right, opened it slightly and surveyed Mittelstrasse from the visible west side. There was nothing there to attract his attention. He looked across the street, at such an angle as would have precluded a binocular from No. 48 from distinguishing him in the blackness of the interior. He looked for the telltale refraction of a light from a binocular, but saw none. Carefully he closed and bolted the door as Reynard, his flashlight on, descended the ladder.
Reynard took a nearby barrel, rolled it to a few feet from the entrance, and turned it vertically, where it served as a circular table.
On it he placed the reel of film.
“Your money please, Sebastian.”
Blackford reached into his pocket and tossed the tobacco pouch onto the barrel.
Reynard said, “Your friend will perhaps be so kind as to shine his light on our little, ho ho, table, while I count the money? You understand I do not doubt you, Sebastian; it is that bankers sometimes make mistakes.”
Michael obliged by turning his light on and directing it toward the barrel top. Reynard switched his off, put it in his pocket, and opened the pouch. He made a slight noise of disgust as he came on the loose and redolent tobacco. He took the pouch at both ends and turned it upside down. The pipe came tumbling out, a half pound of tobacco, and then a neatly bundled package of bills, bound in rubber bands. First Reynard counted the number of bundles. “Eins zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben acht neun zehn.” Ten bundles. He then said to Blackford, “My dear friend, you point to the one I shall examine,” giving off a philanthropic grunt that Blackford elected to ignore.
Mechanically, Blackford pointed to one of the ten piles. “That one.”
Reynard picked it up. “Shine your light close, friend. Close, so that I can not only count, but inspect.”
There were fifty one-hundred-DM bills, and he not only counted but felt them, one by one, calculating aloud monotonously. Blackford’s impatience was not easily noticed since, standing outside the flashlight’s beam, he was an invisible figure. Michael was, as ever, silent. Along about the time Reynard reached twenty-eight, Blackford permitted himself to say, “Oh shit, Reynard, can’t you count faster?” Reynard merely smiled and, if anything, counted even more slowly. When he came to the end, he asked Michael to point his light even more closely at the tobacco pouch, so that he could stuff the bundles back in. In doing so—to the increasing exasperation of Blackford, who was cold, nervous, and apprehensive—he began to count the twenty bundles as he inserted them into the pouch. When he came near to the end he slowed down, as if to enjoy the experience to its fullest: 15 … 16 .… 17 .… 18 ..… 19 .…… 20! And with simultaneous motions he dropped the tobacco pouch into his left pocket and, with his right hand gripping his flashlight, knocked Michael’s light out of his hand to the floor. His voice turned to steel.
“Raise your arms!” He flashed his light from Blackford to Michael and back. He exchanged the flashlight in his right hand with the automatic pistol in his left. He then shone the light on the automatic pistol. “Move back. Three paces. No more. Exactly three paces.” Reynard’s voice was entirely collected, entirely authoritative, entirely rehearsed. As Blackford and Michael cautiously retreated, he stopped to pick up Michael’s flashlight, still lit. He turned it off and inserted it into his right-hand pocket. Blackford could see, now, only the light from a single flashlight. But, for the first time, he caught a glimpse of Michael’s face, because now the beam irradiated light, however dim, over a broad diameter. He was hardly recognizable. He was white, and appeared to have aged. Blackford turned toward Reynard, lowering his eyelids to protect himself from the beam.
“Goddammit, Reynard, what the fuck’s going on? You got your money, we got our information—”
“Yes, Sebastian. I do not cheat individual clients. I did not cheat you when you were my client. But the deal is consummated, and I have elected to have a fresh client. He—they—w
ill be with us in … just a few moments. They will drive up to this door and take you and Michael away, and you will never again have to suffer such suspense as you have had to suffer in your present occupation. Oh my dear Sebastian, you must know that you are as valuable to me dead as alive. Well, I must be honest. Not quite. My alternate clients look forward to the opportunity to question you. But my fee will not by any means be … taken from me, if I should have the unfortunate obligation of delivering to them not a live Sebastian, but a dead Blackford Oakes.”
It was hard, later, to reconstruct exactly. The whole of it could not have consumed five seconds. In his nightmares, Blackford saw himself as a movie director. “Quiet on the set. Take one. We’ll walk through this one now, slow motion. Ready? All right, go ahead, Michael. Speak real slow, like one-half normal speed.”
The shadowy figure, while the surrounding cameras whir in the infrared light, says in a loud but rhythmically slow voice, “Come … in … after me … Black.” Then the considerable figure of Michael, at slow motion, dives toward the flashlight. Simultaneously two shots—the first … and then the second—sound. Michael is on the floor, Reynard under him. Blackford advances … slowly: hurling himself at the tangled bodies … reaching for the flashlight, wrenching it from Reynard … spotting the pistol, gripped by Michael’s powerful hand against Michael’s own abdomen so that it could not be aimed at Blackford.… The bodies writhe, but with the light, Blackford has the advantage, and—always slowly, balletically, with both hands, even though one also grips the flashlight—he reaches down to the barrel of the gun and twists it up, up, up, ninety degrees, so that it points now at the rictus of Reynard, and now he moves his hand down and, using Reynard’s own fingers—Reynard’s wrist has snapped—depresses the trigger once … slowly, goddammit, the director says, slowly … twice. Up the nose, already bloodied, of Reynard.… Heaving him aside, Blackford turns to Michael. He is still alive? He gasps out a single word, another, repeatedly, but the word is barely audible.
In the myriad reconstructions, the sound scratched at his memory. Blackford in due course concluded that what Michael had said was “Go! go! go! go! go! go! go! go! go!” It was a single syllable, and he remembered that a car was supposed to come. A KGB car, presumably. He began to lift Michael, but the very first motion precipitated Michael’s unmistakable collapse. Blackford was standing. At his feet, Reynard was dead. In his arms, Michael was dead. Tenderly—slowly, in life as in his dreams—he lowered the body. A vague professional imperative asserted itself, and he took from Michael his passport and other papers. And, from Reynard, his papers, and the film from the table top. He rose to go, when he remembered. With grim hatred he kicked over the body, reached into the overcoat, and recovered—a pouch, smelly with rancid tobacco. Now he had instantly to go. He went to the door. Opened it slightly. Saw nothing. He turned in the direction traffic was least likely to come from. He took off his bloody coat, folding it inside out. Around the corner, three blocks down, he bought a ticket to the cinema. In the men’s room, in the toilet, he examined himself. The overcoat was soaked with blood. Affecting to wash his face, he looked for other signs of violence on his person, found none. His overcoat artfully slung over his arm, he went down the aisle of the dark movie house and took a seat. He emptied the contents of the coat into his pockets and stuffed it under a seat in a remote corner, bought a box of chocolates from which, as he wandered coatless, distracted, down the street, he picked, cultivating the image of a vague poet, entering the store a block down where, complaining that he had mislaid his coat in the museum, he bought a coarse East German surplus army coat for fifty DMs. Back in the street, in stages, he transferred the booty from his overstuffed jacket to the deep pockets of his trenchcoat. He could not remember—not even in his recurrent nightmare—passing the two guards at the gate. He caught a taxi and made his way to 322 Hochstrasse, leaned on the doorway, barely able to manipulate the key and, as he very nearly fell into the living room, the telephone rang. Somehow, he knew that he must answer it, even though half the telephoning during the past two weeks had come from an enterprising advertising firm that had devised a computer assault mechanism for captive listeners to hear about the new coffee … peanuts … movies … condoms. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.
“Günter here. Get out, and I mean get out quickly.” The phone went dead.
Blackford knew that he would have to be deliberate. He and Michael had several times discussed procedure in the event of the need to make an emergency departure.
He walked, with near rhythmic exactitude, to the cabinet in the dining room and opened it. He poured a wineglass full of brandy and downed it. He stood there and forced his memory to reconstruct the checklist.
When he planned it with Michael, each would carry a suitcase. Would a single suitcase carry what he needed, or would he need to lug two? He forced himself to think methodically. There were no records anywhere in the apartment of the names or telephone numbers of Günter, Ada, or Niklaus. The photographs, about fifty, were of men and women he now knew not to be implicated—at least, not in what concerned Operation Tango. Wait—with the one vital exception. Did they have a photo of the inhabitant of No. 48 Mittelstrasse? He looked quickly. Negative. He could always just leave the other photographs. Still, they might be harassed. So he shoved the photographs and the accompanying dossiers into his suitcase. The contents of the file cabinets would now be meaningless. Not worth the time to burn them, time being important. He went to the bathroom and flung his articles into his toilet kit and it into the suitcase. He opened a drawer and clutched at a fistful of clean underwear and socks. He went to his bedside drawer where he kept Sally’s letters and the Bible his mother had inscribed to him. Into the bag. No point in even trying to collect the books. The bag was not nearly filled—he left his clothing, all his suits, jackets, sweaters. He paused, and went then into Michael’s room. He took the family pictures, tossing them into the bag. He opened Michael’s bedside drawer and there found knickknacks—a key chain, a penknife, an address book—and, lying on top of a packet of envelopes neatly bundled together by an elastic band, a letter, together with the envelope it had evidently come in. It was crushed, as if Michael had at one point decided to destroy it. But it was there; so, along with the other letters, he tossed it in, closed the case, went to the elevator and depressed the button corresponding to the second floor. This was the landlady’s floor, and he rang insistently.
Frau Burri, her hair in curlers, opened the door in evident astonishment. “Forgive me, Frau Burri, but I must see if my car is here.” Without another word he went to her window and looked out in the waning light at the street below. It was apparently deserted.
“I’ll be away for a few days, and so will my friend. But we will be in touch with you shortly.” Impulsively he leaned down and gave her a kiss, an expeditious way of aborting conversation. She smiled through her surprise, said nothing, and led him out into the elevator. He walked out the door and five blocks before signaling a taxi, to which he gave an address four blocks from the safe house whose address he had memorized. Anthony Trust opened the door.
Three hours later a delivery van, with uniformed representatives of the Friedrich Schulze Spedition, a West Berlin moving company, drove up to an empty garage opposite 48 Mittelstrasse in East Berlin. Two men emerged and opened up the back of the van. The driver, Emil, complained to his companion.
“You’d think we were horses, they treat us like horses. We’re supposed to get those spare parts into the garage, and I bet that package alone weighs sixty kilos.” His companion grunted.
“I’ll take a look inside, so we can see where to store them.” Emil opened the garage door, and closed it. He flashed on his light. There was no indication that anyone had been in the room. Just two corpses, grotesquely dead, lying in their own blood. Emil went out, and in a normal voice said to his companion:
“Max, we’re going to have to shove some things around in there before we can dump this stuff. Let’s take the
big empty trunk, and put the crap in it.”
Max grunted, and pushed out of the back of the truck a large, steel-reinforced container used for transporting car engines, sliding it down the loading plank. Emil took one end of it and together they lugged it into the garage, again closing the door—but leaving their moving van casually open, the inside light on.
“We should try to get this done in less than five minutes,” Emil whispered. They lifted both bodies into the trunk and sealed it. Looking about with his flashlight, Max saw a large barrel of old crankcase oil, half full. With Emil’s help he rolled it to where the bodies had lain and then, with some care, spilled out enough of it to cover entirely the traces of blood.
“Let’s go.”
It was hard work. Reaching the outside, they complained again at normal volume about the hard manual labor imposed on them.
“Should have sent three men, bloody fools.”
Using the winch inside the truck, they levered the trunk up a plank.
“All right,” said Emil. “We’ll get to the rest of it tomorrow. Time to turn in.”
They drove through East Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate.
At the gate, Emil was questioned. He took out his bill of lading: delivery of various auto parts—to the garage that serviced the KGB.
“Bloody idiots,” Emil cursed. “The garage was closed! And the gasoline station wouldn’t take delivery. We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
The guard ordered the van opened, ran his flashlight about the tightly packed interior, and told them to get moving. “Maybe next time you will make deliveries on time, eh?”
“We were only fifteen minutes late,” Emil said, slipping his truck into gear.
Trust picked up the telephone. “Good. Good. Good.” He turned to Blackford, who for two hours now had talked without stopping. He wouldn’t even take the proffered brandy, or whiskey. He spoke about Michael. Trust had been listening with genuine sympathy, interrupting only to give instructions and receive bulletins.
Marco Polo, If You Can Page 12
