by Dick Cluster
“Those are squats,” Cynthia’s voice told him. “They’ll be knocked down soon, or renovated. We can’t have people living in rundown buildings, much less painting pictures on them. Anyway, they might smell of garlic.”
The words weren’t right. The real woman was already slipping away beyond Alex’s ability to conjure her up. But he knew that if she’d chosen to drive him to the crossing point, she would have given him some kind of self-assured, ironic commentary along the way. Except there wouldn’t have been any along-the-way, because shortly after she turned the key they would both have been dead.
Walking up the deserted street, Alex counted up the things done wrong, the angles not figured, in the interval they’d spent together between sex and death. What did you do, he asked himself, during the time you could have been planning a few simple precautions? Like, I’ll stay outside and keep an eye on the car. He had slept, asked pointless questions, drunk coffee, been polite to her friends. Then he had walked with her into a trap, with both eyes closed.
A block later he came to a collection of low, rusty fences and small, decrepit buildings. The buildings seemed makeshift and badly kept up— flaking gray paint, cheap corrugated roofs. There were crossing gates for cars, zebra-striped, like the ones at railway crossings. There were floodlights. On either side of the assembly of gates and fences rose a bare concrete wall, rounded at the top.
Checkpoint Charlie looked like World War II surplus, because that’s what it was. At this place, after joining forces to defeat the Nazis, Russia and America had flexed exhausted muscles and stared each other in the face. Forty years later, they were still flexing and staring. In the meantime, you could pass through to visit the East if you lived in the West, but not the other way around. The East German authorities called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier. In his own case, Alex thought grimly, the term might have its first claim to being accurate.
Death was a kind of checkpoint. A valve between two reservoirs. You could go through in one direction, but not the other. Alex found that it made very little sense to believe Gerald Meyer had anything more to tell him from beyond the grave, via Jewish cemeteries or any other means. It made very little sense that the man’s daughter, one moment such a complex organism of body and brain, should be nothing but ashes and police records now.
Alex told himself, aloud, to cut that shit out. He got a curious glance from the bored black sentry in his Plexiglas booth. Across the road from the soldier, a sign warned any unwary travelers they were now leaving the American-controlled zone. Beyond the concrete barrier, Alex could now see, there was a second fence, barbed and electrified. Beyond it rose several blocks of white, faceless high-rises. Alex joined a knot of foot-passage seekers like himself, shoving passports across a waist-high chain-link gate at an East Zone guard.
When his name was called, he imitated those who had gone ahead of him. He leaned over to press the mechanical latch that opened the gate. After the mandatory exchange of Westmarks for Ostmarks, he was admitted through a steel door into a gray-walled interior with a locker-room emptiness about it. A green-uniformed official, middle-aged and yawning, stamped a form and gave him a copy that he would need to get out.
Then it was just a matter of one more door, one more gate, and Alex resumed walking north along a more populated Friedrichstrasse. On this side people came and went busily, but most did not linger on the street. A policeman patrolled, with a walkie-talkie and a pistol on his hip. At the corner of Unter den Linden, once the center of the German empire, Alex stopped to buy a map. He studied the map and asked the tourist guide in her booth where he could board a bus to Dimitroffstrasse. She pointed across the street, where a billboard proclaimed a government message: WE WILL DEFEND THE PEACE BY STRENGTHENING OUR DEFENSES.
Alex reflected that his own President couldn’t have put the argument any better, or any worse. He was glad he did not have to wait very long for the bus. At Dimitroffstrasse he transferred to a crowded streetcar. At the third stop, he got off and walked down Kollwitzstrasse as Marianne had described.
The street was quiet, all right. Flowered windowboxes, where the upper stories caught sun, were the major sign of life. The apartment buildings were old. Looking closely at their weathered walls, Alex realized they bore the scars of streetfighting, bullet holes gouged like oversized fingerprints in the stone walls. The holes were left over from the death throes of the Reich, when the Red Army moved slowly westward, block by block.
His map showed not only the cemetery along this street, but also a synagogue. A decade before the Russians, who might have walked these quiet streets, close by the cemetery and the old shul?
Images of evacuation nagged at him. He thought of railroad cars, cattle cars, rumbling east through the city’s dawn. Lettering above a shuttered shop window stopped him for a moment— archaic, faded German letters, an old shop no longer open for business. He had to fill in missing characters, where paint had long since flaked away. “Knives sharpened,” the writing said.
The fact was, no one could have understood, really, what was about to happen to them. Suppose “authorities” came one sudden day, in Boston, and put Alex Glauberman and his daughter on a train. Suppose from that moment on he learned, and learned, and relearned the lesson that he was powerless to do anything for himself or for her. His child’s pleading eyes would remind him that he had once seemed all-powerful, but he was now, like her, powerless to do anything except endure the unraveling of every last shred of security.
Two blocks further on, Alex came to woods on his right. Trees grew untended beside a tennis court with no net. The place had an earthy, overgrown feeling. A few feet into the woods he found a dirt path, and a bench. Behind the bench was the cemetery wall, of old mossy stones. Trees grew inside the wall, too. He followed the path to an old iron gate, open. Inside it he saw a clearing with a small stone hut and several long rows of gravestones. The gravestones were crowded together like too many dominoes in the hand of a losing player. An attendant emerged from the hut just inside the gate. He wore nondescript brown pants and a brown jacket over a white dress shirt, collar open and no tie. A black skullcap perched on his off-blond hair.
“Leider habe Ich kein Hut,” said Alex. “Kein yarmulke.”
“Moment, bitte.” The man, a young man, disappeared into the little stone building and returned with a yarmulke that matched his own. The man offered him the yarmulke with a casual air.
“Danke.”
Alex placed the cap on top of his curls and looked away from the attendant, toward the headstones. When the attendant demanded nothing more, Alex wandered over to look at the names. The engraving on the old markers yielded no message to him— no Meyer, no Glauberman, only a Strauss, a Rossbach, a Hochchild. Many of the stones were chipped and some, lying flat in front of the others, were broken in half. Obviously they had at some point rested peacefully throughout the cemetery, marking the remains of the people they named. Then the cemetery must have been vandalized, in accordance with the policies of the Reich, and then, sometime since, the stones had been gathered together and righted. Friedhof literally meant “yard of peace.” Alex wanted to wander slowly among the trees, the bits of broken stone, and the unmarked graves. He wanted to pick a gravesite for Cynthia’s ashes, pretend to scatter them there, and say the good-byes or apologies or requests for absolution or whatever else he had not had time to say.
He wanted to linger and to grieve a little, here out of time, but the attendant had followed him quietly, waiting to be of service.
“Are there many visitors from America here?” Alex asked, half-turning his head toward the man. “Many Jews, like me?”
“Natürlich,” the man said.
“Ich meine, vielen? Very many? Every week? Every day?” Alex had thought that perhaps not so many Americans crossed into East Berlin.
“Groups come. They tell us in advance, so we can be prepared to make a little talk about the history.”
“But not so many on their own? Alone,
like me?”
“Natürlich, not so many.”
“I want to know about an older man who would have visited here, in the spring maybe, I’m not sure when…”
“Nicht sicher…” the attendant said doubtfully. “Not sure when?”
“I think a friend of mine visited here,” Alex began again, locking eyes at last. The attendant’s eyes were brown, mild, yet veiled. Alex considered the possibilities as to how he might find out. He wrestled with webbed-over memories of the German subjunctive. “Sei möglich,” he tried, “Dass es ein Register, ein Besuchsbuch gibt?”
“Ja, ein Register, das stimmt.” The attendant’s eyes narrowed, but he remained polite. “Would you like to look for the name of your friend there?”
“Bitte.”
Alex followed the attendant into the hut, ducking his head under the low stone doorway. This must once have been a place for keeping tools, where perhaps a caretaker sat and smoked a pipe, when the cemetery was a working place. Now he could make out in the dimness a spade, a rake, and a pair of shears resting in one angle of the stones. The hut had the same earthy, mossy smell as the woods. In another corner, a battery-operated fluorescent lantern glowed over a bookshelf filled with looseleaf binders, sealed in plastic. On the flat top of the bookcase rested a register and a ballpoint pen. The attendant turned toward Alex and then ducked past him out the door.
“Stay as long as you like,” he said. “I will be outside.”
Alex, bent over and squinting in the strange light, began slowly turning the pages of the register. Like an aged man nodding over his Talmud, he thought. Puzzling new meanings from old words.
There were visitors from New York, from Rome and Paris, a few from Israel, a few even from Boston, some more from L.A. But no names meant anything to him. None told him whom Gerald Meyer had awaited, drinking himself silly, or where that person might now be. None told him whether the same or a different hand had casually opened the hood of a battered VW and wired explosives inside. Alex continued to leaf backward until suddenly, there it was. Gerald Meyer, no city, just “U.S.A.”
So? Meyer had been there. So what? Alex focused on the names above and below. Natalya Peretz, Lyon, France. Joanna Connor, U.S.A.
Joanna Connor, U.S.A. Joanna. Joanna. Himself, holding that silly, half-dead houseplant, in the process of getting a door shut in his face. A man in sweatpants and a T-shirt. A woman in a purple bathrobe. Himself, feeling that he had gotten them out of bed. The man: “What the hell is this, Joanna?” The woman slammed the door, at 91 Old Mill Circle, the return address Meyer had put on the package of memories and bankers’ acceptances and dangerous names. That was who Meyer had met at the airport. And she was his girlfriend and killer, Trevisone had said.
It was just possible, though the timing would have had to be close. While Alex had been hearing Kim’s story and telling his own, changing the gears, putting the car back together, resting underneath, making out the bill, buying the ridiculous plant. Would that have been enough time to meet, talk, kill, and go home?
At the sound of footsteps, Alex tore the page from the book. He folded it quickly and added it to the crumpled evidence building up in his back pocket. The footsteps were only the attendant again, coming once more to be of service.
“Ich kann den Name nicht finden,” Alex told him. The attendant said he was sorry and followed Alex slowly back out to the gate, extending his hand silently for the yarmulke. “Gute Reise,” the attendant told Alex. Have a nice trip home.
Alex walked out the gate, turned right, and soon came to a corner with an U-Bahn stop, for the East Zone subway, from which a tide of commuters was emerging, headed for their homes. As he descended the stairs his knees felt unsteady under him, and he realized that he hadn’t eaten all day. He needed a place to sit, to eat, to study documents, and to think. He was tempted to do his business in some quiet, out-of-the-way restaurant, with wurst swimming in gravy and overcooked peas. But he knew that for a maudlin attempt to go back to yesterday, with a living Cynthia on a moving train. What he needed was different. Someplace nice and bright, modern and efficient, where above all they had good telephone connections to the West. He approached a young woman reading a paper, one of the few passengers waiting for a train toward the city center.
“Excuse me.” He unfolded his tourist map in front of her. He asked her where one could find international cuisine, the sort of place foreign businessmen might go for an expensive dinner.
“Why?” she said in English. “Are you inviting me?”
“No, I didn’t mean…”
“Oh,” the woman said. She wore high boots, designer jeans, and an expression Alex could not read at all. “I thought you were. I would have suggested the Palast.”
“The Palace?”
“Of the Republic. You are American?” Alex nodded.
“The Congress. The Capitol. And a playground, too. Food and drink, theater, sometimes rock music, Dixieland.”
“Telephones?”
She looked at him strangely and tossed her head as if to say she didn’t like being made fun of.
“Of course. Telephones, they work very well, escalators, toilets that flush, and beautiful waitresses who expect to be tipped. Where do you think you are, Mr. Jones?” She tossed her head again. “Havana?”
“No, um, thank you. I’ll take your advice.”
Alex didn’t know whether he’d just talked to a rapidly rising civil service professional or a high-class prostitute who catered to foreign businessmen. For all his hypotheses and all his history there was so much he had no way to understand. When the train came, the woman in boots and jeans, still reading her newspaper, told him what stop he needed. Holding onto an overhead pole, he tried to figure out what he did know, and especially, what he had just learned.
In a certain way, to come full circle to the woman he’d found at the address in Melrose made sense. Gerald Meyer may not have been a man who could stick to his decisions, but he was also not a man who did things at random. He had chosen that address in case the package was returned unopened, or in case investigators tried to trace it back to its source. That made Joanna Connor a partner, or a fall guy, or both, on top of whatever Trevisone knew. In any case, Meyer had gone to meet her, Friday night. He wasn’t pleased with what he’d done that day, and he wasn’t expecting her to be pleased, either. Drinking, alone and morose, waiting for her, he had remembered that her name rested next to his in the cemetery book. Only there, maybe, and nowhere else. He had found it pleasing, when pressed by Kim, to hand Alex that information in the form of a small puzzle. Then she’d arrived, and he must have told her about his arrangement with Alex. Maybe she’d used the LaFarges’ driveway to march him down at gunpoint as a warning to Alex, the way Trevisone had implied. Maybe just because she found Alex as good a red herring as any. That was a sentiment, it occurred to Alex with a shock, that she most likely shared with Gerald Meyer. Now Meyer was dead, and Joanna was apparently on the run. And Jack Moselle was sparing no effort to get hold of the package or make it disappear.
24. So Does Ophelia
Alex exited the underground and walked along the River Spree in the gathering dusk and the oncoming chill. Soon the Palace stood before him, gleaming with light emanating from its metallic plate-glass walls. Near the entrance, tour buses unloaded guided groups. Alex approached on foot, between buses, and pushed through a revolving door into a bright, surreal lobby that covered, at minimum, a city block. The lobby was studded with coffee and liquor bars full of well-dressed patrons. In the spaces between, teenagers in jeans loitered on the benches, near placards that announced Shakespeare and Schiller and, indeed, Dixieland. Alex approached a stout older woman behind a coat-check stand, offered his windbreaker, and asked where he could get something to eat. She directed him to a “Continental” restaurant one flight up— restaurants on level two, theater on three, legislation on four. In the restaurant he chewed mediocre pasta until he felt he’d taken in sufficient fuel.
T
hat chore over, he finished his meal with very good German chocolate cake and a kannchen Italien, a silvery pitcher of double espresso that did its job. While he sipped, he pored over financial paper like any businessman, crosschecking the computer-generated acceptances against Meyer’s notes. The notes recorded payoffs over a period of eight years. The latest ones seemed to be the people he’d been supposed to pay off, but hadn’t. The acceptances represented some of the missing payoffs. Others, presumably, had already been converted into cash, which included Alex’s salary like as not. Finally he paid, tipped heavily, and used a bathroom outside of which another stout old woman collected tips on a small tray. War widows. A half-century before, their husbands had marched off in the Wehrmacht. Now, as a matter of social policy, they had to be employed. He had a pretty good idea now what Meyer’s information contained and what he could do with it. Peace through strength, he reflected bitterly. A row of phones stood nearby. The war widow told him the operators would accept a British credit card, and that he could certainly dial England direct. Meredith’s voice answered on the fourth ring.
“It’s Alex,” he said.
“Alex,” she echoed. Her voice sounded flat. A voice requesting information from the unknown. “Where are you? Berlin?”
Alex looked around him. A uniformed usher was guarding the entrance to an escalator next to a sign proclaiming Hamlet. The line of Shakespeare fans formed, patiently, between plush purple ropes strung from gilded poles. Putting all the shows under one roof was an idea that might catch on. Alex imagined the headline of a travel article, sandwiched between the airline ads: SOLONS MAKE SPEECHES, AND SO DOES OPHELIA.
“East Berlin. I think.”
“Are you all right? How did things go with Cynthia?”
“About as you predicted.”
A strange city, she had predicted. A mysterious woman. A mission. A frosty silence met his comment now.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he added. “She’s dead.”
