by Nina Berry
“Flabbergasted?” Ulbricht frowned, looking at Mielke and pronouncing it wrong. “Jets?”
“Flabbergasted. That means blown away,” Pagan said helpfully. “Brains about to explode from the unholy surprise of it all. Which mine are.” She rubbed her left cheek and gave them both a little frown. “When am I going to get an apology for that slap your guard gave me? I’ll be bruised for a week!”
Mielke tossed the soccer ball from one hand to the other. “Perhaps if you report it to your embassy, they’ll try to extract further reparations from our country.”
Ulbricht barked a short, humorless laugh.
Pagan sulked, as if she took him seriously. “You can bet they’re going to get an earful from me about this whole stupid evening!”
Mielke’s face flattened into something so cold it made her shiver. In German, he said, “If you survive the evening.”
Pagan rubbed her upper arms to disguise her trembling. If only she were as brainless as the persona she was faking. “And tell your thugs not to squeeze so hard next time. I’m going to have to wear bracelet sleeves at the very least for weeks—in the middle of summer!”
Ulbricht stared at her, stroking his trim little beard. “You must have known what Thomas was planning to do before you came here,” he said in English. “Why else would you come here, if not to help him spy?”
“’Cause he’s a flutter bum, of course, and I wanted to make good, not that it’s any of your business.” Pagan flushed and fanned herself as the two men exchanged puzzled looks. “He’s a golden god hot rod for sure. Not the usual subterranean type I meet. A real square shooter, you know?” She frowned, as if searching for a more easily translated turn of phrase. “He’s a cute boy and I like him.”
Mielke sat down heavily in the chair behind his desk. Ulbricht looked down and massaged his forehead with one hand.
Pagan allowed herself to feel a twinge of actor’s pride. So far so good. If she didn’t jump out of her skin, this could work.
Mielke asked Ulbricht, in German, “Did she say he’s not the normal underground?” Watching him try to make sense of her hepcat use of subterranean was a good distraction from her terror. “Do you think she means that he’s not a spy or not the usual kind of spy?”
“I have no idea what she means,” Ulbricht said. “I’d wager good money she doesn’t know herself.”
“Whoever decorated this place is trying a little too hard,” Pagan said, glancing around to get a better idea of where she was. “You know what Freud would say about that.” The long front windows were draped with heavy dark red curtains, but her internal sense of direction told her they must look out onto the front lawn of the estate, where the cars were parked. Other than the door to the hallway, there was a narrower door behind her, which looked like it might lead to a bathroom, and another next to Mielke’s desk. Both were closed.
Mielke ignored her comment and tried again, one square hand drumming fingers on his desk. “Fraulein Jones, think back carefully. What did Thomas tell you about his reasons for coming to this party?”
Pagan blinked, as if trying to recall. “Well, he said that Mister Secretary here had a daughter who was a fan of my films and would I like to come meet her? So I said sure, of course, anything for you, Daddy-O.” She looked at Mielke, wide-eyed and slightly hopeful. “Do you think that means he likes me?”
Mielke rolled his eyes. In German, he said, “It doesn’t seem possible, but her head is even more vacant than I thought.”
“It’s likely that Kruger saw my request to bring her here as his chance to go through my papers. Apparently he used his good looks to get her to say yes,” Ulbricht replied in German.
Pagan lowered her eyebrows in faint puzzlement to make sure they kept on thinking she had no idea what they were saying.
Mielke narrowed his already pinched eyes at Ulbricht, thinking. “Was it you who asked Kruger to invite her?”
Pagan’s gaze darted to Ulbricht. Was Mielke challenging his boss, accusing him of bringing in the spy?
Ulbricht pursed his lips at Mielke, overgrown eyebrows lowering in anger. “Beate suggested it to me after she read in the paper that this stupid girl was in Berlin making a movie with him. It seemed harmless.”
Blame it on your daughter. What a nice father. Pagan waited for Mielke to question his boss’s judgment. But after a flash of calculation, Mielke shook his head and looked down, backing away from the conflict. Pagan couldn’t help thinking he’d made a note of his boss’s weakness. If the tide turned against Walter Ulbricht at some point, it might come in handy.
“Beate read it in one of our papers?” Mielke made a sort of tsk-tsking sound. “I need to have a talk with the editors.”
“No,” Ulbricht said. “She got hold of one of those West German rags somehow while she was out shopping.”
Mielke leaned back in his chair as if that answered everything and waved his hand at Pagan. “The ones obsessed with celebrities.”
Pagan sat up straighter, as if responding to his gesture and waiting for an explanation in English. When neither of them bothered to even look her way, she sagged in puzzled frustration and began picking at the heavy leather on the arm of her chair like a bored child.
But she would’ve bet the Renoir hanging over her parents’ bed that Devin Black had arranged for those “West German rags” to fall into Beate Ulbricht’s shopping bags.
God, what a genius, ridiculous, convoluted plan. Somehow, Devin must have uncovered that Walter Ulbricht’s only daughter, Beate, was Pagan Jones’s biggest fan. So he’d engineered to get Pagan to act in a film in Berlin with an East German costar. Then he’d arranged for Beate to ask her father to get Pagan to attend a private party. How to get Pagan there? Have the East German costar invite her, a costar Devin had already recruited to spy for the West.
If it wasn’t for Devin Black, Beate Ulbricht’s fandom, and the cold war tensions in Berlin, Pagan would still be sharing a cell in Lighthouse Reformatory with Mercedes. She should be grateful to the CIA or MI6 or whatever institution Devin was working for, but right now she wanted to smack him.
To keep up her act, she shifted uneasily in her chair, as if worried by all the chatter she supposedly couldn’t understand.
“Just as well this girl’s not involved,” Ulbricht was saying. “We don’t need any incidents to further rile the West while Operation Rose is in play.”
Operation Rose—a lovely name for a plan to cut off the last piece of freedom their citizens had.
Mielke nodded, leaning forward in his seat to grab a paper from a neat pile on the desk. “True. Kennedy’s just the type to start a war because we mussed up a pretty little actress.”
“Kruger’s the key,” Ulbricht said. “If we can get him to name his contacts…”
“Even he matters little,” Mielke said. “Nothing can stop Operation Rose now.”
A phone rang, shrill and high. It brought Pagan, fists clenched, to her feet. Realizing what it was, she quickly sat back down and put a hand on her heart, smiling as if at her own foolishness.
But neither man was paying her any mind. Mielke stood and opened the door next to his desk to reveal a whole other office behind it. The ringing came again, much louder. Mielke moved into the other office and picked up the receiver. “Allo? Ja. Ah.” He motioned to Ulbricht, who joined him and shut the door.
Pagan was alone in the office of the head of the Stasi. She had to think, to act—now. While Ulbricht and Mielke were out.
She stood up cautiously. Not only were East Germany’s leaders on the other side of one door, but two guards stood behind the other.
She darted silently over to the narrow side door and gently opened it to see a small but very clean bathroom, as she’d suspected. It had its own door out to the hallway, where the guards were watching, and a big window covered with drapes.
She stepped in and shoved the drapes aside to examine the window. Carefully, so as not to draw attention from any patrols who might see the light from outside, she ran her hands over the sill and found the latch. She lifted it and pressed on the glass. The window slid open. Fresh air rushed over her face. There was no screen. She stuck her head out and saw that the ground was only three feet below the bottom of the window. If she turned sideways and took off her heels, she could slip out and jump down to the ground.
But should she? She peered out at the dark lawn. The porch light from the building’s front door to her right was dim. It glinted off the bumpers of the cars parked on the lawn but revealed little else. The cloud-veiled sky showed no stars.
The patrols of Stasi soldiers were still out there. Ulbricht and Mielke wanted to keep them all bottled up until the border was completely closed. She glanced at her watch. Eleven forty-five. From what Ulbricht had said in the screening, the border would be closed at one in the morning. Less than an hour and fifteen minutes away.
She thought of Frau Kruger and little Karin and her stomach clenched. They’d been questioning Thomas for hours by the look of it. If Mielke had called his office in East Berlin, the Stasi might have already taken his mother and sister away to be questioned, too.
A shout of what sounded like victory came through the walls to her. She pulled her head out from behind the curtain to stare at the closed door where Ulbricht and Mielke had gone. Although the free air was telling every nervous cell in her body to jump through the window now, she had a chance here to learn more before deciding what to do.
Pagan slid the window shut, rearranged the curtains, and closed up the bathroom before tiptoeing over to press her ear against the other door.
The sounds on the other side were muffled but audible. Ulbricht’s higher-pitched voice was saying in German, “What about the Bernauer Strasse station?” A pause before he remarked, probably to Mielke, “Ah, good, that is also now closed.”
He lifted his voice louder, as if yelling into the phone receiver. “Excellent work, Honecker. Soon all the metro connections will be cut off. Any resistance yet? Good. And all of those on the border know to fire blanks at first? That should be enough to keep most citizens in line. Yes. Good. Keep us informed.”
So they were shutting down all the underground metro stations and connections between East and West Berlin. They’d also have to block up the hundreds of streets that crossed the border, not to mention all the buildings that straddled it. The scale of the endeavor was mind-bending.
The receiver thunked down. Pagan, about to pull away, paused long enough to hear Mielke say, chortling, “Not a whisper from the West. They have no idea what’s going on right next door!”
“It’s splendid, splendid!” Ulbricht said, equally gleeful. “Even now the troops are moving into place with the barbed wire. Felfe has kept them from discovering anything.”
Felfe. Where had she heard that name before?
“I told you recruiting him would pay off.” Mielke’s voice was alarmingly close. Pagan stomach leaped into her throat, and she sprinted over to the wingback chair to throw herself into it as the two men emerged, still talking.
Mielke continued speaking in German. “Operation Rose is keeping my soldiers very busy, Comrade Secretary. It may be a few hours before I have enough men free to collect the Krugers. We have to prioritize our assets tonight of all nights.”
“The Krugers can wait,” Ulbricht said. “It’s not as if they can go anywhere.”
Both men laughed heartily. Pagan’s tormented gut burned with fury. She channeled it by fidgeting impatiently like a toddler about to have a tantrum.
“We have some more calls to make, no?” Ulbricht walked over to the big door and opened it up. The two guards there turned on their heels and saluted. “One of you. Take this girl back to sit with the others. We’re done with her.”
Pagan looked at her nails and hoped they couldn’t see her hands tremble. “I’m kind of hungry again,” she said. “Can I get room service or something?”
“You will leave now,” Ulbricht said in English, waving her out the door as a guard stepped forward.
“All rightee, then,” Pagan said, getting to her feet. Dang. How was she going to sneak out the window now if the guard took her back to that windowless screening room with all the others?
As she swept toward the hallway, Pagan took hold of the handle on the big oak door, as if to shut it behind her in a grand exit. At the last minute she paused and peeked around the edge back into the office.
Ulbricht and Mielke turned to stare at her as if she’d grown an extra head.
She favored them with a big sweet smile. “If I don’t get to say it later, thanks for throwing the craziest party ever. And I’ve been to Frank Sinatra’s.”
She shut the door with a click and pulled up the edges of her gloves, keeping her smile at its highest wattage for the guards. “Which one of you lovely gentlemen is my escort?”
The guards exchanged perplexed looks and the taller one stepped forward to take her upper arm in his hand to push her down the hallway.
She paced two steps with him and then halted. “I’m so sorry, but where’s your nearest little girls’ room?” As he stared and tugged on her arm, she shook him off and said, “The Klosett, bitte?” She pointed toward the door next to Mielke’s office, which she knew led to his private bathroom. “I’ll just be a minute.”
She almost made it to the door, but his hand on her shoulder brought her up short. “Nein,” he said, shaking his head. “Hier, bitte.”
He pointed toward a larger door across the hall from Mielke’s office. Damn. So much for that plan. She smiled, said, “Danke,” and went in.
Her heart jolted with happiness as she saw it was the same layout as Mielke’s bathroom, only this one had no second door adjoining it to a personal office.
From what Mielke said, because they needed all their troops for the huge job of closing the border, it would take a while before they could arrest Karin and Frau Kruger. If she was lucky, she might get to them before the Stasi did. She had no idea how she’d get them safely past the troops into West Berlin. She was better with a script, but this time she’d have to improvise.
She clicked the light on, locked the door behind her, turned on the tap to cover other noises, and paused for a moment. She was in no danger herself anymore. They’d decided she knew nothing and was no threat. If she wanted, she could wait it out in the screening room with the drunks and bootlickers.
She stared at her face in the bathroom mirror. Her crimson lipstick was still perfect from her postdessert application; the liquid liner winging her eyelids had not yet faded. The rich chocolate-brown wool of the Dior suit dress was unstained, the fit a marvel. Was she just wearing it because it brought out her brown eyes and narrow waist? Or was she wearing it to put it to good use, to be the girl of action and grace the suit clamored for?
She flashed on Karin Kruger’s bright blond head bent over the Wonder Woman comic, the warmth and eagerness of those skinny little arms wrapped around her as they hugged goodbye. The thought of Karin being dragged away by men in uniforms made her fists curl up inside their leather gloves. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t do everything within her power to prevent that.
Her power. That was funny. She was an actress, a screwup. Hell, she was powerless against alcohol. What possible ammunition could she bring against the East German army?
One thing at a time. She left the water running and sidled between the heavy drapes and the window. The architecture here was the same, only overlooking the backyard and the lake. The cement patio where they’d eaten dinner was twenty yards to the left, lit only by a single porch light near the central back doors. The food and trash had been cleared away long ago. Nothing moved except the black shadows cast by the birch trees.
Two men with rifles in hand walked by her, not five feet away. She stifled a yelp of surprise and the urge to step back, which would have sent the light streaming past her and allowed them to see her silhouette in the window. As it was, they walked past without turning their heads, feet marching in rhythm. They turned onto the lawn and moved toward the boathouse on the lake. Each set of guards probably had an area to patrol. They would be back in a few minutes.
Pagan removed her shoes and clutched them in one hand. The drop down from this window was farther than on the other side of the house, and landing in kitten heels on wet grass was a recipe for a broken ankle. With one last look around to make sure no other guards had wandered into view, Pagan opened the latch and slid the window open. Cold lake air sent the drape behind her billowing. A sliver of light cut a wavering shape on the grass.
Was she really going to do this? She could close the window now and no one would be the wiser.
Instead she slung her purse crossways over her chest, slipped through the opening, and jumped down. Her feet hit cold wet grass and a stone half buried beneath it. With a muffled “Mmf!” she fell on her side, the arch of her left foot pulsating with pain.
So landing without the kitten heels was terrible, too. The menu tonight didn’t hold a lot of great choices. She rolled to her feet, slipping the shoes on over wet stockings, thankful for the somewhat water-repelling wool of her dress, and got to her feet.
She crouched, waiting to see if her fall or the brief peek of light from behind the drape had drawn any attention. She heard only the leaves rustling and the far-off lapping of small waves on the lakeshore. To a city girl, all was ridiculously quiet. The nature-dampened hush and the sharp scent of pine reminded Pagan of her grandmother’s little house in Maine.
The natural stillness around her was strengthening. Her grandmother wouldn’t have approved of anyone slapping her granddaughter, of threatening Thomas’s mother and sister, of slicing a city in two.
