by Dick Cluster
“Very funny, Alex.” Meredith didn’t like him being cryptic, he knew. “You’ve fallen in love with the dead, so I won’t take offense, is that what you mean?”
Alex tried to pull it together. He didn’t know how to begin to explain.
“How long has she been dead?” Meredith asked. “And why did he send you to her, in that case?”
“No, dammit.” Once he found his tongue, the story took care of itself. “She was alive when I met her. When we went to get the package, someone assumed we and it would both get back into the car. Or maybe not. Anyway, she got back in, and I didn’t.”
“And?”
“They blew it up. I tried to get her out, but I was too late. I don’t know, maybe other people had already tried. The gas tank went up. Somebody knocked me down. Too late for her. Just in time for me. That was this morning. Since then I’ve been to the cops, and the cemetery.”
Meredith’s tone was no longer frosty.
“Where are you, exactly?”
“I’m in the Palace of the German Democratic Republic. A showcase of democracy if I ever saw one. I think I know who killed Jerry Meyer, or who the police have decided killed him, at least. I’m sure I know what Meyer was up to for Jack Moselle, more than I should. I need to get out of here, and I need to see Jack. Tomorrow. I need to see him before any of his friends see me.”
“Not alone,” Meredith said.
“What?”
“I said ‘not alone,’ damn you, Alex. Not this time. I explained this already.”
“I’m okay,” Alex insisted. “I can do it.” He pictured the color risen in her cheeks, the cool, level stare projecting from her eyes. He didn’t even convince himself.
“No.”
“All right,” he said. “We. We can do it.” He felt, absurdly, like Popeye handed a can of spinach. “But the cops have your address, and I don’t know who’s giving out what information to whom. So meet me at Moselle’s hideaway, where I told you it is, at ten o’clock in the morning. Or, wait, is there someplace near there, public, not too near, where we can meet?”
“Victoria Park. By the goats.”
By the goats? Victoria Park? Victory Park, by the zoo.
“All right. I can find that. Has anybody been looking for me?”
“A policeman has been here inquiring. Your Sergeant Trevisone may be getting impatient. But you don’t seem to be hunted, if that’s what you mean.”
“Okay, good. I’m not going to have any luggage, I don’t think. Just a few papers. Will that raise questions at customs?”
“I doubt it. But a briefcase and a tie wouldn’t hurt.”
“Okay,” Alex said.
“Suppose Moselle isn’t there?”
“Call him and make me an appointment. What time is it there? Maybe somebody takes messages, after hours. Or call first thing in the morning. Give my name and say I’m interested in buying some shares— hold on, I’ve got to check Meyer’s list. Say I’m interested in, um, Siebert Industries. That ought to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Let him know I’m coming, so he doesn’t have to send anybody after me. And let him know I’ve got his package, and I understand what’s in it.”
“I see. Take care, Alex. Ten A.M.”
“Right.” I love you wanted to come next, but stuck for a while before it worked its way out. When it did, it sounded rather like a rasp.
“Yes,” Meredith said. “Well. Let’s get through tomorrow, shall we? Then we can go back to talking about things like that.”
Okay, thought Alex. Let’s. He called Lufthansa and found there were seats available on the last flight from West Berlin to London, at ten. He did not make the reservation. Then he had one more call to make, but he put it off. He took the escalator down again and detoured to a sunken bar not far from another set of phones. He ordered Russian vodka and drank it down, straight, with apologies to his stomach lining. He got some change and dialed once more.
“Gasthaus,” a male voice said.
“Alex Glauberman hier. Cenap?”
Let it be Cenap, he requested silently. Cenap would be best. A man, a foreigner, like himself. Let him not have to explain himself to Marianne, not yet, not now.
“Polizei, Herr Glauberman. Wo sind Sie?”
Gestapo, Alex thought. Why can’t you leave those people in peace? Then for an instant he wondered whether Schultheiss could have been right. But no. Cynthia and her friends were not terrorists who bombed train stations and department stores.
“Ich bin wo ich bin,” Alex told him. “Could I please speak to one of the… to someone who lives there, or works there?”
“Nein, Herr Glauberman. Wo sind Sie?”
“Well, fuck you,” Alex said. “You know that much English, fuck? Whose phone is it, anyway?”
“Wo sind Sie, Herr Glauberman?” the polite police voice repeated.
“Moscow.” Alex said. “Beirut. Jerusalem. Johannesburg. Washington. Where the terrorists are. Go fuck yourself, okay, and tell Schultheiss, too.”
He banged down the phone, went back to the bar, piled a second vodka on the first. There was nothing more to do today. He wanted to get on a vehicle, any vehicle, that would take him directly to the chi-chi rehabilitated firehouse in Bethnal Green, London. Instead he reclaimed his jacket, left most of his remaining Ostmarks for a tip, and caught the bus that the appreciative widow said would get him to Friedrichstrasse.
On Unter den Linden, the bus stopped in front of the Memorial to the Victims of Militarism and Fascism. An everlasting flame burned, and an honor guard of the DDR patrolled. The honor guard goose-stepped. The bus moved again, and at the next stop Alex got off and retraced his afternoon steps between high-rise apartments and ministries. Somewhere around here, he had read, would be the buried remains of Hitler’s bunker.
At Checkpoint Charlie he showed his passport and turned over his unspent Ostmarks. On the American side, nobody wanted to see anything. The black GI in the booth had been replaced by a white one. Just beyond was a German cabbie, looking for customers. Alex climbed in, said, “Tegel Airport, bitte,” and took refuge in sleep.
When he woke up, the panic came back. The streets outside meant nothing to his groggy brain. But the driver pulled up in front of Lufthansa as nice as could be.
A tie and a briefcase cost nearly as much as his ticket. There were no rock posters, and this was not the place to shop for excellent wool sweaters. So he bought Maria a Swiss army knife instead— one with nail file and scissors as well as can openers and blades. He bought a picture postcard, which he addressed to Hans Heidenfelter’s shop in Grand Island, Nebraska— or where Hans Heidenfelter’s shop in Grand Island had once been. “Dangerous town,” he wrote. “Love, Alex.”
He passed up newspapers in several languages, but he did leaf through an English-language tour book on Berlin. He learned that along the Ku-Damm, near the Berlin Zoo, one could find pickup lounges in which customers sent confidential messages from table to table via pneumatic tubes. He liked the idea of the pneumatic tubes. When he checked in and boarded without interference, Alex felt he was entering just such a device. He visualized himself as a very confidential message for Jack Moselle.
25. Under Glass
Traveler’s checks paid for a sterile, expensive room at the airport hotel. For fifteen pounds more, Alex badgered the night staff into photocopying the contents of Meyer’s package. He mailed the copy to Bernie with instructions that it should be opened only if Bernie didn’t hear otherwise from Alex. He mailed the page torn from the cemetery register to Trevisone.
With sleep, the elephant dream recurred. This time the flaming elephants did not die. Charred, blackened by the fire from his weapon, they rose again after each blast. There was infinite sadness in their liquid eyes. They stepped forward, crumpled, struggled laboriously up, and came closer. The smell of fried flesh clogged his lungs.
Alex woke, showered, and forced down a hearty British breakfast. Then he rode for a long time undern
eath London, turning over in his mind what he was about to do. It was not so much a matter of turning over, though. It was pushing and shoving— trying with all his might to force what he wanted into the mold of what he could get. That explained the dream, perhaps, because it was without doubt a hard, bitter thing to do.
When he emerged from the tube, in Stepney, he had just a short, chilly walk to Victoria Park. The park proved to be a big, pancake-flat, green place with scattered groves of trees and a hint of formal garden here and there. The entrance was deserted except for a trio of gardeners at work in a flower bed, digging. Alex watched them for a moment, then asked what they were doing.
One gardener leaned on her shovel and said they were digging up the bulbs. The flowers would be kept alive in hothouse for the winter. She gave Alex a quick once-over and added that tourists were rare in this park. It was a pretty park, Alex said. The gardener explained that it been planned, originally, to separate the rich from the poor— “You know, to stop the spread of disease.” Alex asked her to point him toward the goats.
The goats ran back and forth, nibbling at the sparse grass in their pen. They made irritated old-man noises at Alex as they went by. Alex turned his back, watching a few figures come and go along the black-paved path that wound through the green of the park. Soon he could see Meredith in her red leather jacket, flanked by a black woman in long, beaded cornrows and a gangly white man whose blue jeans were shredded. These escorts slowed down as Meredith came up to Alex.
“I know you don’t like to ask for help,” she said. “I brought some anyway. This is Paula, and Stork. This is Alex.”
Alex shook hands with them and kissed Meredith on the cheek.
“Are these a few of the panting groupies?” he whispered.
Meredith did not smile, but only nodded and brushed the straight dark red hair from her eyes.
“These are my students, yes. Paula grew up in a neighborhood that’s as tough as they come. Stork is an expert in kung-fu. I thought they might sit over pastry with me and keep an eye on matters.
“Oh,” said Alex. “Thanks. Why not?”
The four of them left the park, marching past stately row houses newly spiffed up. Stork wore a bleached tail down his neck and strode forward like a tin man in seven-league boots. Paula was equally silent but steadier, watchful, catlike. Alex remembered what Meredith had said about her students— her disturbing feeling that to them it was all some kind of game.
Nearing Moselle’s building, Alex described the soft-faced man in the cap. Other than that, he found he was grateful for Meredith’s presence but had no advice to give. He waited for the brass cage to come to him, riding its shiny pole down the transparent shaft. When it arrived, he opened the glass door, pressed 2, and slid easily upward. No alarms went off to signal his arrival. He stepped out and offered the receptionist his name.
This receptionist was not the young, wide-eyed one who had sent him to lady Jane Friedhoff. She was closer to Alex’s age, a small, skeptical woman in a dark blue suit. “Mr. Glauberman, is it?” she said. Her accent had an affected quality that grated on him. So did her attempts at flamboyance— big designer glasses and exuberant curls, unnaturally blond. He wanted no preliminary battles with gatekeepers. Armored in what he now knew, he wanted to fight with the man himself.
“That’s right,” he said haughtily. “I believe I’m expected.”
She looked down at something on her desk, pursed her lips, and finally consented to press a button on the intercom. “Mr. Moselle,” she announced without intonation. “A Mr. Glauberman is here.”
“Alex.” Moselle’s voice crackled with contrasting enthusiasm. “Fast work. Come on in.”
This time Moselle was behind his big, antique desk. He sat with his accustomed healthy ease in an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. He was wearing a soft cashmere sweater with leather patches at the elbows. His hands rested calmly on the uncluttered top of the desk. Alex plopped his Tegel Airport briefcase onto the green blotting-paper surface. He snapped open the lid to reveal the envelope that Meyer had sent.
“I let Cynthia keep the family memorabilia,” he reported. “I brought you the rest.”
Moselle looked the papers over, then slid them into a drawer. He opened the drawer below that to get a checkbook. He wrote Alex out a check for fifteen hundred pounds.
“You’re an honest man, Alex. Depending on the market for sterling when you cash this, my payment ought to match Jerry’s, or better. Let’s treat it as a gift rather than a payment, though, shall we? The paperwork to escape double taxation can use up a year in itself. Most of us don’t have so many years to waste.”
“Cynthia,” Alex said, “didn’t have any.”
Moselle turned his palms up, dropping his eyes toward them as if their lines held wisdom. “Cynthia tangled with the wrong people.” His hard eyes came up to meet Alex’s through the dark-rimmed glasses. “I protected her while Jerry was alive, because she was useful to me. I can’t be expected to protect her forever.”
“Meyer wanted to give her a hold over you,” Alex said. “It was his awkward way of taking a bit more revenge. It was his way of making up for her dependence on you when she was young. Maybe he didn’t realize all he was doing was setting her up for trouble. Then he panicked and told your boys where he’d sent the stuff, am I right? Meanwhile, I came along, and he decided I was nice and expendable. Maybe I could undo what he’d done. If not, maybe I could draw fire away from his daughter. But let’s go back a step, can we? Why was Meyer double-crossing you after all these years? Because the feds were closing in?”
Moselle blinked twice behind his glasses. On the second one, his left eye gave that little tic that might have been a wink. Nothing else moved— not his hands on the desktop, not a strand of his handsome gray hair. Alex felt loose, disorganized, by contrast. He wasn’t sure he was making enough of an impression.
“You seem to be doing the talking,” Moselle said.
“Okay. Let me tell you what he did for you. Say you own two dummy firms. Let’s call them Siebert Industries and Mannheim Gesellschaft. Siebert places an order with Mannheim for, what was it, warehouse cranes? They send Mannheim a letter of credit from Meyer’s bank. Mannheim goes through the motions, pretending to ship the cranes, and the papers end up on Meyer’s desk. Meyer accepts. Only he doesn’t return the acceptance to Mannheim Gesellschaft, for them to cash in. Instead, Meyer forwards it to, say, the Minister of Justice of the state of Hesse. The Minister is happy, because that piece of paper is as good as gold. Mannheim Gesellschaft doesn’t mind, because it never really shipped any cranes. Meyer’s bank will be happy, as long as Siebert Industries makes good on the loan within the ninety days. And Siebert is happy, because they don’t need any cranes, they— or you— only need to get a sum of money to the Minister of Justice. And the Minister is happy, because instead of cashing a check from Interface, Inc., or even Siebert Industries, which might come back to haunt him, he’s just having his broker sell some commercial paper, presumably part of his broker’s normal wheeling and dealing on his behalf.”
Moselle made a show of examining his checkbook, then smiled, shut it, and put it away.
“Very ingenious,” he said. “What you don’t understand is that this was nothing new. It was a new riff on something Jerry and I used to do together a long time ago, in Berlin. I wanted concrete, okay, and a certain supply sergeant was in charge of the concrete. Jerry was a desk soldier, in the paymaster’s office. Jerry paid the supply sergeant off, legal as could be. I got Jerry the money to make up the deficit in his accounts. Same idea, higher society.”
“And you weren’t afraid your dog would turn on you someday?”
“Sure, but when a dog gets old, and sick…”
“You have it put to death.”
Moselle said, “What is it you want, Alex?”
Your neck, Alex said silently. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t what he’d come to get.
“I want evidence that’ll convict Cynt
hia’s killers and clear her and her friends of any bomb charges. I don’t expect this evidence to implicate you. Just the ones that did the work.”
“Or else?”
“A copy of Meyer’s list is already on its way someplace safe. If I don’t get what I want from you, the copy goes to the feds investigating Meyer’s irregularities. In case I’m not around to go with it, the list is traveling with an explanation of how I acquired it, and where I was headed this morning. I think that adds up to a lot of hot water you’d rather avoid.”
“Maybe.” Moselle leaned his chair back on creaking springs. Alex expected him to put his feet up on the desk, but he didn’t go that far. “Hot water washes off me like— what was it I said?— like whiskey off a duck. But I don’t like trouble. What happens if I manage to give you what you want?”
“The copy goes up in smoke. Believe me, I know better than to double-cross you.”
Moselle plopped flat again. The springs creaked, and wood met wood with a solid, resonant sound. Moselle linked his hands in front of him and cracked his knuckles.
“You ought to sell cars, my friend. You got yourself a deal. I’m not anti-Semitic. I sold Nazis east or west, depending on the bid. East, they got a big, showy trial and jail, usually. West, they sometimes got a deal and a job spying on the Russians.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Alex. “Now you’ll expose them when it’s useful to you, the way Cynthia said. But you’re just as happy employing them to run your errands— like blowing up people that get in your way. With luck, the cops don’t go after the bomber at all. If they do, you’re still covered. The victims are a known left-winger, half-Jewish, and a visiting American Jew. It’s terrible to learn there are still such Nazis about, but the case is open-and-shut. You probably staged the business with the knife on the train, too, just to set things up right.”
Moselle held up a warning hand. “I said we had a deal. Don’t go peddling stories I don’t want to buy. And remember, switch-hitting is what made Mickey Mantle great. When Cynthia became a hindrance, her enemies got wind of a rumor that she was about to expose some of their most important friends.” He stopped suddenly, with a boyish grin that admitted he’d said more than he’d meant to. “Now. What am I supposed to do with this evidence?”
