by Nina Berry
“Oh, Vater!” she exclaimed in German. “It’s true. She’s here!”
“Yes, yes.” Ulbricht gave Pagan a little shove toward Beate. “I have brought you Pagan Jones, just as I promised.”
Pagan felt like a pony with a bow in its mane being presented to a spoiled child. She plastered a confused smile on her face to cover up her resentment, pretending she didn’t understand the German.
“Fraulein Jones,” Beate said, blushing slightly as she moved up and held out her ungloved hand. Maybe gloves were bourgeois. Beate couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old herself. Her crisp white cotton shirt was meticulously buttoned up to the top, tucked into a well-made circle skirt in a dull flowered print. The style had gone out of fashion in the fifties. “You are my favorite movie star. I have seen all of your films!” She spoke English almost as well as Thomas did.
“What a lovely way to start a party, meeting you,” Pagan said, and her outstretched gloved hand was pumped up and down enthusiastically.
Beate didn’t look at all like her pasty-faced father. Her ruddy skin was clear and firm, her eyes much rounder than her father’s, her nose a cute snub turned up at the end. Pagan recalled vaguely having read that Ulbricht and his wife had adopted a daughter. Beate must be the one.
His job done, Ulbricht abandoned them, leaving Thomas to stand forgotten behind Pagan so he could whisper something to a stout woman with short curly blond hair. Pagan recognized her from the Time magazine photo spread as Ulbricht’s wife, Lotte.
Beate was speaking. “I saw your performance in My Brother Michael last month. Father obtained the movie for me especially when I came back from school in Leningrad, and I enjoyed it very much.”
“It was kind of your father to get it for you,” Pagan said. “But that wasn’t my best effort.”
“Oh, no, you are mistaken, the movie is delightful!” Beate slipped her arm through Pagan’s, drawing her over to a table as heads turned. Thomas trailed two paces behind them.
Fans always wanted to touch Pagan, as if somehow they could absorb what they loved about her through their skin. But she was here for Thomas, so Pagan nodded and smiled, letting Beate chatter on about the movie, one she barely remembered because she’d been drinking so heavily, as she scanned the crowd. Ulbricht’s wife wandered over to join a clutch of women while Ulbricht was joined by a very short, powerfully built brick wall of a man with heavy jowls, a receding hairline, and a lipless, downturned mouth that sank even more deeply into disapproval as he surveyed Pagan and Beate.
Pagan tugged Beate a little closer to her and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Who is that man staring at me over there, next to your father? You must help me. I know no one here but you and Thomas.”
“Oh, that’s Erich Mielke,” Beate said. “Head of the Stasi. He works for father and has a football team. Don’t worry. He frowns like that at everyone.”
Head of the Stasi. So that was the man in charge of East Germany’s dreaded secret police, the man tracking tens of thousands of spies and commander of the soldiers they’d passed outside. The West Berlin newspapers referred to him as “the master of fear,” because his ministry kept the East Germans quiescent after the labor uprisings in 1953 had been violently crushed.
“Can I meet him?” Pagan asked impulsively. It wasn’t every day you got the chance to annoy an evil mastermind.
Beate shrank back. She obviously didn’t like Mielke. But she quickly pushed a smile onto her lips. “Of course,” she said, and led Pagan to where her father and Mielke were talking in low tones. They stopped speaking abruptly as the girls approached.
Mielke was shorter than Pagan, barely five foot four, but even in his midfifties, he’d taken care to remain in top physical shape. He didn’t blink as she came up, topping him by several inches in her heels. He was not a man who could be intimidated. Behind her, Pagan could feel Thomas, tight as a piano wire, staying well back.
Ulbricht attempted a smile at his daughter, but Mielke’s narrow, slitted eyes glittered with open contempt.
Pagan had seen that look before, on the face of the judge as he sentenced her and on Bennie’s face as he told her she was fired from the movie. But the head of the Stasi emanated the confidence of a man with far greater power than those men would ever know. He held an entire country in the grip of fear, and he had no time for stupid capitalist little girls like her. For kicks, she decided to prove him right.
“Herr Mielke,” Beate said, keeping to her stilted but excellent English. “May I present Fraulein Pagan Jones. She is one of my favorite actresses.”
“An actress,” Mielke said, also in English, lips forming precisely around the syllables. “I have heard of you and your recent difficulties.”
“Oh, you are too kind!” Pagan fluttered her eyelashes at him and took hold of the square, powerful hand he was not extending to her and shook it heartily. “Which of my movies is your favorite?”
Mielke withdrew his hand, one side of his nose wrinkling as if he smelled something bad. “I have not seen any,” he said. “I have a job to do.”
“No doubt you are as busy as a little bee,” Pagan said. His frown deepened at the word little, but Pagan pretended not to notice. “My poor head can’t even begin to fathom what you men have to deal with, running a country, keeping track of everyone, and all. It’s just marvelous!”
Mielke almost sniggered to her face. How easy it was to be exactly what they wanted her to be.
“It must seem marvelous,” Mielke said, “to one who dwells in a decaying and frivolous industry in a country that values only greed.”
Pagan frowned and shook her head. “Oh, no, didn’t you know? We also value beauty and fame.”
Mielke’s eyebrows came together in a sort of wondering pity. “Can you not see how all those qualities demonstrate your worship of the individual over the collective? Where is your love for humanity? Your sacrifice for the greater good? That is why your society is as rotten as a three-day-old fish.”
She could tell from his voice that he genuinely wished to enlighten her, to help her understand where her values were awry. It sounded strangely naive coming from a man who kept his people in line through surveillance and terror. But it meant he was a true believer, a man who tortured, killed, and spied for what he thought was “the greater good.”
She managed a girlish giggle, as if he’d made a joke. “Well, it smells like piles of cold hard cash to me!”
“Tea and hors d’oeuvres are over by the view of the water,” Ulbricht interrupted, dismissing them. “Perhaps it would be best if you partook of them now.”
Beate, taking her father’s cue, tugged on Pagan’s arm. Pagan waved and smiled at the two men as she allowed herself to be led slowly away. “You all are just so gracious,” she said, and made her attempt at German deliberately lame. “Danke so much!”
Frau Ulbricht and her contingent of matrons also turned to watch them move through the stiff-necked crowd of graying male bureaucrats. The men and women weren’t mingling much. The women fetched food for the men and then retreated to talk in low voices among themselves. The men gathered around ashtrays, nodding as they exhaled smoke through their nostrils at each other like posturing bulls on a crisp day in the pasture.
Pagan had to be the youngest person there, with Beate and Thomas the only other teenagers. There were no children, no families, even though the patio opened onto a grassy lawn leading to a beautiful still lake with a boathouse on the shore. It screamed out for crazy games of croquet and volleyball, for motorboats and inflatable rafts, for waterskiing and toddlers splashing in the rocky shallows.
Instead a sour-faced bunch of officials in ill-fitting suits were picking tobacco leaves off their lower lips and talking in hushed tones as patrols of Stasi soldiers marched past the boathouse. All eyes glanced furtively toward Ulbricht and Mielke, as if waiting for
an execution.
Maybe they were.
The table covered with shiny bottles of vodka was surprisingly easy to ignore. Pagan’s growing sense of unease made her want to stay alert. She tried to pay attention as Beate launched into a glowing assessment of her award-winning role in Leopard Bay. Fortunately, the girl didn’t need much encouragement to chatter on, nervous and eager to impress.
When she got up to fetch tea and finger sandwiches for Pagan, Thomas leaned and said, low, “What in heaven’s name were you doing with Erich Mielke?”
“Giving the audience what they want,” she said.
“I thought he was going to put you in a cell and give you the full Marxist indoctrination,” he said.
“This place is scary enough without imagining that, thanks,” she said. “Everyone looks like they think my capitalist cooties are catching.”
“At least Beate loves you.”
“You could have told me she’s the reason Ulbricht wanted me here,” Pagan said.
Thomas looked abashed. “I know. That’s the only reason he asked me to come—so that I could bring you to meet Beate. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier.”
“I would have come anyway,” she said.
“I know.” A mutinous look crossed his face. “But Devin Black told me not to tell you.”
“That boy Devin,” she said, “is at the center of every web, and he’s caught you in it, too.” She fixed Thomas with a serious eye and asked, “What’s really going on here?”
A million thoughts blazed behind Thomas’s eyes. “Pagan,” he said, and put his hand on her arm. His fingers were trembling. “If you can’t find me for a little while this evening, don’t worry. And please don’t point out to anyone that I’m gone.”
She opened her mouth to demand to know why. But the strange urgency in his eyes made her choke it down. She wanted to ask if he was okay, if she could help in any way, but she could tell now was not the time.
“All right,” she said.
He looked as if he was about to say more, but pulled his hand away and looked down again. “Thank you,” he said.
“Look what I have for you!” Beate was approaching, holding a pot of tea and a cup.
Pagan worked up to a smile. “You’re so kind, Beate.”
Beate set the teapot down, eyes aglow. “Now I must tell you what my favorite movie of yours is.”
“Please!” Pagan said.
The sun set into a crimson and violet haze in the western sky. Harsh electric lights along the roof of the house glared down at them, and an overboiled dinner was served. Pagan decided to keep speaking English, throwing in awkwardly phrased attempts at German to whomever she met as a game to see if anyone could tell. But nobody cared enough to probe beneath her bright, shiny surface. One man openly rolled his eyes at her and spoke in German to his friend about the rampant corruption of youth in capitalist countries, and an elderly woman took her hand and pulled her in close to sniff, as if she were a carton of milk that might have gone bad.
Thomas was pulled away into other, more genuinely admiring conversations as a few of the attendees revealed themselves to be fans of his work. At one point Pagan looked around and realized she hadn’t seen him in the past ten minutes.
He’d warned her he might have to step away, but what for? Did he have someone he needed to meet with in secret? She hoped it was someone he cared about, something sweet and positive. But she couldn’t help thinking it was the exact opposite. That he was stepping into something dangerous. And she couldn’t help, because she was flying in the dark without a compass.
By then Venus was sparkling on the horizon, and the sky had turned a deep indigo that made her think of Devin Black’s troubled eyes.
She was furious at him for engineering this long, awkward evening, but perversely she missed him, too. Her own fakery was going splendidly. Everyone but Thomas and Beate thought she was an empty-headed child with nothing more than her own fame to discuss. But that diversion had lost its flavor hours ago. She opened her purse to get out her lipstick and found instead keys with the Mercedes-Benz symbol on them.
She kept them in her lap so that no one else could see as she tried to think. These had to be the keys to the car. She’d seen Thomas give one set to the servant outside. Had he put this second set in her purse before he went off to do whatever it was?
She looked around for Thomas. He hadn’t come back to the patio. It was tempting to say goodbye, walk out the door, and drive away then and there. She was itching to get out. But she couldn’t ditch Thomas.
She walked toward the lake to see if he was there, but two Stasi soldiers patrolling the shore waved her back.
So she made an extra trip to the dessert table. Cake could only be helpful now. Not far away, two men spoke in German, their heads close, their voices low. Pagan could understand almost every word.
“Is this why we fought the Nazis?” a thin man with a thinner mustache was asking rhetorically. “To stand around and wait for Walter Ulbricht to tell us what to do?”
Strange to think these men who hated her and all she supposedly stood for had fought the Nazis, like her father, while Pagan’s own mother had…what, exactly? Sympathized with them? Or had Eva Jones done more than that?
“It’s something big this time,” a tall man with a double chin said, also in German. “He’s never invited me here before, let alone every member of the Central Committee.”
“And where’s Honecker?” the thin man asked, deeply annoyed. “Everyone’s here except Honecker.”
Pagan pretended to be deciding between a chocolate cake and a pastry topped with streusel, edging slightly nearer to catch their rapid back-and-forth. She probably should’ve known who Honecker was, but the words something big peaked her interest.
“He was here early,” double-chin said. “But he left. Business to attend to.”
“Why does he get to leave while the rest of us must stay here, trapped?”
Trapped? Pagan did not like the sound of that.
“Whatever Honecker’s up to, there’s no one with any power left in Berlin to challenge it,” thin mustache said.
Double-chin cast a dubious look at Pagan.
“Don’t worry,” the thin mustache said. “That silly slut couldn’t speak German if she’d been born here.”
Pagan held herself very still and began humming “Gee, Officer Krupke” under her breath to hide the surge of anger that flooded her at his words. She’d worked hard at making them think she was silly. His comments were a tribute to her acting ability, really. And, as the analyst she’d briefly visited had told her, whatever people said of her was a reflection on them, not on her.
Still, she wanted to punch him in the throat. Thanks to Mercedes, she knew exactly how to visualize it.
Double-chin nodded and leaned into his friend to whisper rather loudly, “I think it’s happening tonight. Honecker’s in charge. You know what I mean. The event we’ve all been…” He uttered a German word she didn’t know. But he’d given the event a particular emphasis.
Pagan eyed a sweet roll and was glad no one but herself could hear the sudden acceleration of her heartbeat. She should know what event he meant, but it was eluding her. She picked up a piece of Black Forest cake and eyed the layers.
“I had the same thought,” said thin mustache. “Yesterday, Parliament voted to allow the Secretary to do whatever he thinks best to address the situation in Berlin.”
The “situation in Berlin” probably referred to the fact that East Germany was losing thousands of citizens to the West every day across the porous border to West Berlin. What, then, would Ulbricht do to “address” that situation tonight?
Double-chin pulled his chins in tighter. “What if Kennedy is more stubborn or more foolish than we think?”
“Then, my friend,�
�� thin mustache said sourly, “we all die in the service of our Party.”
“As long as Mielke dies with us,” double-chin said with a dark look toward the head of the Stasi.
Thin mustache shook his head. “He’s like a cockroach. He’d survive a hundred atom bombs.”
Pagan widened her eyes and tilted her head, increasing the blankness of her look to counteract the contraction of her throat. Two East German officials were talking about the possibility of nuclear war here, tonight, as a result of an event in Berlin happening now, while she stuck her fork in a sachertorte.
“We’ll be here all night, I suppose,” said double-chin.
“Why do you think the Secretary had Mielke post so many soldiers around this place? It’s to keep us here until we all give our consent. As if we wouldn’t.”
“Even if we didn’t, it would make no difference.” Double-chin set down his cake in disgust. “The event is already in motion, and we must go along or be swept aside.”
He caught Pagan’s eye and frowned. Pagan waved her piece of cake at him. “I declare,” she said in English with just a touch of Violet Houlihan’s Southern accent. “You all have the best desserts.”
They peered at her as if she was some molting creature at the zoo. “What is an American doing here?” double-chin asked, in German.
“I’m sorry?” Pagan said, blinking uncomprehendingly at him.
“The Secretary’s daughter likes the foolish films the actress makes,” thin mustache said, ignoring her. They were turning away, heading back to their table, desserts in hand. Pagan trailed along ten feet behind, eyes back at the desserts as if rethinking her choice. “Comrade Ice feels so guilty for having sent his only daughter to boarding school in Leningrad that he made Thomas Kruger invite her favorite Hollywood actress to dinner.”
“How much longer do you think that boy will be around?”
Thin mustache shrugged. “He only wants to be an actor. So far he’s harmless.”
