by Nina Berry
She forced her thoughts into something like order and pressed her feet back on the ground. “You’re being prudent again, damn you.”
He laughed quietly, lips against her hair. “Someone has to. I never should have let it go this far.”
She exhaled shakily. “Anyone ever tell you you’re the world’s biggest tease?”
He put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her farther away, as if her closeness was too much of a temptation. “Everything changed last night when the Wall went up. The world is different, and I have a lot work to do.”
She ran her index finger over his lips, wiping away traces of her lipstick as a nurse clomped by. “I could put you to work,” she said.
His fingers on her shoulders tightened, but then he dropped his hands. “You’re good, you know.”
“At kissing?” She smiled slyly.
“Well, yes.” His eyes fell to her lips, and it took him a moment to lift them back up to meet her gaze. “But I meant last night. You were good out there, better than good. So there’s one more thing I need to tell you.”
“Tell me,” she said, and stepped back from him, straightening her skirt.
He took a deep breath and ran a hand through his own hair to put it to rights. “The CIA has a file on your mother.”
Surprise opened up inside her. “But—why?”
He shook his head. “I wish I knew. The fact that such a file exists tells you there must be more for you to find out. They won’t let me or anyone at MI6 see it. They only shared a few facts when we talked to them about this operation—that your mother was born here in Berlin, that perhaps her father wasn’t Emil Murnau.”
“So you did know that,” she said, resentment of him rising. “You could have told me instead of stringing me along.”
“No,” he said. “My mission was to keep you here, interested in finding out more about your mother. If I’d told you what little I knew, you never would have gone to that garden party with Thomas. For your sake, part of me wishes I had told you so that none of this had ever happened, but I had to do my job. People’s lives depended on it.”
“Maybe I’m a little glad it happened this way,” she said. “Not just because the Krugers are safe. But because of your lies, Mercedes will get out of Lighthouse soon. Because you were a manipulative jerk, I’m getting a second chance at a movie career and an opportunity to find out why Mama killed herself. Because of you, I’ve got two men on the movie set I can turn to whenever the need for a drink takes over.”
What she couldn’t quite say was that now, finally, she had real reasons to stay sober, reasons to live. Because of what Devin had helped make happen.
He was smiling. “You’re the one who turned it around, not me. Now…” His voice became more clipped and English, more distant and efficient. “The only way the CIA will ever show you the file on your mother is if you help them out in some way. I believe at some point they or we or one of our allies will come asking, now that everyone knows what you’re capable of.”
“But I’m an actress,” she said. “What would they ever want with me?”
“Fame is a key that opens many doors,” he said. “So I wanted to warn you.”
Her back stiffened. “Warn me?”
“I know you,” he said. “You won’t stop until you learn all there is to know about your mother. They’ll use that.”
“I’ll use them right back,” she said.
“Yes, but they’re better at it,” he said. “It’s what they do. Just…be careful. Don’t trust them.”
The wall between them was going up again. He was putting it there, against his will, because he had to.
She had to help him build that wall. That was the only way she could bear its existence.
So much division. So many boundaries and restrictions between people, between countries, between two halves of a now sadly divided city. Pagan took her gloves out of her purse and pulled them on, armoring herself with their formality, layering another barrier between them.
“Why should I trust you?” she asked.
His smile was tinged with regret. “You shouldn’t.”
This really was goodbye. “You’re not coming back to the suite, are you?”
His eyes were troubled. He tried, without success, to mask it. “There’s a nice young lady named Patty waiting for you back at the car with the driver. She’ll take you to see Karin and Frau Kruger before you go to the Hilton to pack. Given the current situation, you should leave the city today. Patty will make sure you get on the right plane. Only please don’t tell her, or anyone, about last night, or about Mister Ballantyne and Heinz Felfe.”
“When…” She stopped herself. She wanted to know when she would see him again, when she might touch him again. But he was telling her, in his own way, that he didn’t know. He was going to be very busy now that the Wall had gone up, and she was off to Munich to finish shooting the movie. Without him.
He took her hand and kissed it. The heat from his lips seared through her white silk glove. “Thank you,” he said, looking at her with those damned blue eyes. “For everything.”
She took her hand back slowly. She didn’t want it back, but it was clear: they were parting.
Chin up, Mama had always said. Shoulders back. Good posture could get you through anything. She even managed a smile. “Goodbye, Devin Black.”
She turned and strode away, her heels clicking steadily on the hospital tile.
“I have a feeling we’ll meet again, Pagan Jones,” he said, his voice echoing down the hall.
She swiveled around on one foot and shot him a smile.
“If you’re lucky,” she said, and walked on.
She didn’t look back at him again. She didn’t need to. She knew that he stood there watching her until she was out of sight.
* * * * *
I want to thank my talented critique partner and friend Elisa Nader for giving me such excellent notes on all the versions of Pagan Jones as the story developed over the years. Big thanks as well to brilliant writer and good friend Jen Klein, who helped hone the book with her writing expertise and insight.
My marvelous agent Tamar Rydzinski gave me invaluable creative guidance and immediately understood the potential in this character. My first editor, Annie Stone, poured her love for the book into terrific notes on the manuscript. I owe a huge thanks to the entire amazing team at Harlequin Teen, including the marvelous Natashya Wilson and T. S. Ferguson.
My parents, Jackie Berry and Paul “Doc” Berry, exhibited their usual supportive, loving behavior throughout the long process of writing and editing this book. How lucky I am to be able to say that, for me, this is the norm.
My friends put up with me bailing on plans because I had to write and found encouraging words whenever I wanted to bang my head against the wall. They are my family, and they include John Mark Godocik, Brian Pope, Valerie Ahern, Maria de la Torre, Maritza Suarez, Michael Musa, Scott and Pam Paterra, Peter Shultz, Roger Alt, Matt Chapman and family, Jennifer Frankl, Diane Stengle, Katherine Munchmeyer, Geoff and Emma Chapman, Lisa Moore, Cathy Kliegel, Chris Campbell, Frank Woodward, Jim Myers, Meriam Harvey, Cheri Waterhouse, Cathleen Alexander, Kathleen, Tay and Kasey Bass, and Joe and Sharon Salas. A shout-out to cats Lucy and Marlowe for being good company during the long hours of writing.
Special thanks to close friend and travel buddy Wendy Viellenave, who offered to get me to Berlin to do hands-on research for this book, and then to Buenos Aires for Pagan’s next adventure. I only wish I could have found the time between drafts to go! Here’s to more eye-opening journeys together.
I grew up during the Cold War, so I can remember being at school, watching jumpy 16mm films instructing us how to duck and cover under our desks if a nuclear bomb went off nearby. Even in second grade, I knew this had to be a fantasy. If nucl
ear war started, we were all dead. It was perversely reassuring to know that my home town of Honolulu was a primary military target. I and everyone I loved would be annihilated in the first wave of bombs, turned into dust or a shadow. None of us would linger and suffer from the fallout.
Thoughts of nuclear war didn’t consume me as a child. Life was good. But during the Cold War, that threat lurked on the borders of everyone’s life. There were nights when I’d lie awake, listening to a jet flying overhead, and wonder vaguely if the war had started after I went to bed. In that case, maybe the jet was actually a missile carrying the bomb with my name on it. When I got a little older, my friends and I would joke about whether you could get a sunburn during nuclear winter.
I’m happy to say that those who came of age after 1991 didn’t have to deal with pointless duck and cover drills or imagine inventing SPF five-million. They may not even know what “nuclear winter” means. So when I decided to write a book set during the height of the Cold War, I knew I had to get the basic facts right, even though I was going to embellish them to suit my story. I owed it to all those who grew up after the Berlin Wall came down, and to all those who died trying to cross it before it fell.
The truth behind my fiction starts with the character of Pagan herself, who came into being after I learned about famous people who were also spies at some point in their career. Casanova, Julia Child, Josephine Baker, writers Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, Mata Hari, mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Shi Pei Pu (aka M. Butterfly), Harry Houdini, and baseball player Moe Berg were all well-known public figures who did clandestine work for their countries. When we think of spies, we usually think of people working under the cover of a false identity, but many of these people used their fame, in one way or another, to help their cause. I decided that my teenage version would be a child movie star whose fame, family, and bad reputation would give her unique access to people and places, access which might come in handy to a spy agency.
But which Cold War story to tell? I found the answer when I read that East German leader Walter Ulbricht threw a deceptive little garden party at a hunting lodge once owned by Hermann Göring the night the Berlin Wall went up. The idea of East German leaders keeping possible opponents locked down at a supposedly festive event as they also imprisoned an entire city was horribly twisted, and thus perfect for a story. Even better, the party gave me a way to fit fictional disgraced movie star Pagan Jones into real Cold War events.
The more I learned about how the Wall went up, how the Western powers were taken by surprise, and the horrible consequences for the East German people, the more compelling the story became. For, just as Pagan witnesses, the divide that became the Berlin Wall did go up at approximately
1:00 a.m. local time on August 13, 1961. There were no protests or shows of force by the armed forces in West Berlin. (Although the citizens did protest vehemently later that morning.) Even though Berlin was teeming with spies of every kind, the West was blindsided. Walter Ulbricht and his head of state security, Stasi chief Erich Mielke, had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Pagan arrives in a city already divided. After Western and Soviet troops overtook Berlin, defeated Hitler’s Germany, and ended the Second World War in Europe, the city was divided into four factions—French, English, American, and Soviet. The four Allied powers had an agreement to keep that arrangement while Germany was rebuilt.
But by 1961, the Soviets were no longer allies with the other three countries and had swallowed up all of Eastern Europe, including the Eastern chunk of Germany which included Berlin. The partition of Berlin remained, but the “Soviet” sector had become part of the new state of East Germany, aka the German Democratic Republic, a Soviet satellite state as yet unrecognized formally by the Western powers.
At that point, the East German economy was in tatters, even as Western Europe experienced dramatic growth. Lack of jobs, lack of freedom, and the brutality of their Communist regime sent East Germans fleeing to the West in record numbers. By 1961, because of the presence of Western forces still in sections of the city, Berlin was the only place from which East Germans could sneak into the West. The rest of their country was cut off.
In June of 1961, 630 refugees entered West Berlin from East Berlin every day. July averaged 1,000 per day, and the numbers kept rising. On August 8, for example, 1,741 people fled East Germany into West Berlin. These refugees are the people Pagan sees on her way from the airport to her hotel with Devin, clutching their suitcases and their children, leaving everything else behind. East Germany’s best and brightest were fleeing, and the Communist regime was determined to put a stop to it.
This mass exodus helped turn Berlin into a hot spot for intrigue and danger. Because of it, the Western intelligence services expected some kind of action from the East Germans, but they mistakenly thought Soviet premier Krushchev, without whom the East German leaders would never make such a bold move, hadn’t yet given his permission for a wall. He had.
Also, the Western committee to coordinate intelligence in Berlin couldn’t decide if a Wall going up between East and West Berlin was even feasible. They waited, thinking that drastic action by the East would take place after a separate peace treaty was signed between the two Germanys, probably in the fall of 1961.
They were wrong.
On Friday, August 11, 1961, the East German Parliament gave its approval for whatever measures were deemed necessary to stop the exodus. The official name for that plan was, as Pagan overhears, Operation Rose.
Because the Western espionage agencies were so clueless about the plan to put up the Wall, I couldn’t make Devin’s need to use Pagan to be about the Wall, specifically. Instead, he uses her to get his spy, Thomas, into Walter Ulbricht’s private hunting lodge. Western agencies suspect someone working for the them is acting as a mole, or double agent, and Devin hopes that Thomas will be able to search Ulbricht’s private office to find out who that agent might be.
The identity of this mole, too, is based on fact. Someone within the Western ranks was indeed sending sensitive information to the East Germans and Soviets. I gave the discovery to Pagan, who overhears the agent’s name while being questioned by Ulbricht and Mielke. His name: Heinz Felfe.
Historically, Heinz Felfe was an Obersturmfuhrer (senior assault leader) in the Nazi SS during World War II, captured by the British in 1945. Later, he went to work for the US intelligence-supported Gehlen Organization in West Germany in their counterespionage department. Both East and West had few qualms about hiring former Nazis and using them to their advantage. Felfe had a high rate of uncovering Soviet spies in West Germany, until it was discovered in 1961, after the Wall went up, that he was in fact working for the Communists. He was convicted of espionage in 1963, and served 14 years until he was exchanged for three West German students being held by the East Germans. He spent the rest of his days teaching criminalistics at East Germany’s Humboldt University.
The book is sprinkled with many details based on what actually occurred. Ulbricht did have an adopted daughter named Beate. He did screen the Soviet film comedy Each Man for Himself (which I suspect from the title was a parody of capitalist doctrine) during his garden party even as Stasi guards patrolled the surrounding woods, more to keep the guests in than to keep anyone else out.
Around 10:00 p.m. Ulbricht announced the plan to put up a Wall in Berlin, asking “Everyone agreed?” No one dared to disagree, and he informed them they would all have to stay at the House of the Birches until Operation Rose was complete.
Under the direction of Erich Honecker, the Berlin Wall began to go up around 1:00 a.m. on August 13, 1961, mostly using barbed wire and concrete blocks. That night was very cold for that time of year in Berlin. The waxing moon was just a sliver.
My research lead to other fluffier facts making their way into the book. The Dior suit dress Pagan lusts after and wears was a brand-new design from that house for Fall of 1961. Th
e Berlin Hilton on Budapester Strasse was brand-new that year, and often featured dinner and dancing on its roof. It overlooked the nearby parkland of the Tiergarten. Throughout this book, I’ve used actual street names, like Bernauer Strasse, whenever I could, and I’ve tried to stick to the actual geography of Berlin and its buildings wherever possible.
The movies Pagan starred in are all fictional, including Neither Here Nor There, the one shooting in Berlin. But I came up with the idea of her costarring in a film shot in that city when I learned about a film directed by the late great Billy Wilder, titled One, Two Three. That film was shooting in West Berlin when the Wall went up. You can still see footage of the pre-Wall border crossing at the Brandenburg Gate in its opening minutes.
However, Neither Here Nor There is its own film, with a different plot, characters, and dialogue. The actors and crew members working on it are entirely fictional. The actions of the spiteful Jimmy Brennan are in no way intended to reflect upon One, Two, Three’s star, James Cagney, who is brilliant in the film and was notoriously kind to everyone, including his fellow actors.
Billy Wilder, one of my favorite film directors, fled his homeland of Austria before World War II, and some of his relatives died in Hitler’s concentration camps. Those facts inspired me to give those attributes to the director Bennie Wexler. But Bennie is fictional. Billy Wilder is not.
The one detail the fictional movie shares with an actual movie is that after the Wall went up, production of One, Two, Three moved from West Berlin to studios in Munich, a safe distance from the hotbed of danger that was Berlin.
As far as I know, no one on the real movie was involved in espionage.
Suggested books and links for further reading about Berlin, the Wall, and other historical elements in this book:
Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Krushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe, Berkeley Trade, 2012.
