Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Jack said, “Jesus, Greta—”

  Greta knelt on the seat beside him. She said, “And now, our first kiss.”

  Never before had they kissed; Swallow customs were not so different in this regard from those observed by other prostitutes. And Jack, who liked his sensations localized, did not really care for kissing. But now Greta grasped his head with both hands, and covered his open mouth with hers. He felt her tongue on his, then something else.

  The key to the handcuffs.

  “Don’t swallow it, Liebchen.”

  Greta put on her Jeanne Moreau glasses and smiled her mad smile. She leaned over the back of the seat, her sweet round dirndled behind sticking up, and wrestled her rucksack into the front seat.

  She opened the rucksack, unbuckled and unlaced its puckered top, and removed an Uzi machine pistol and a magazine.

  Jack leaped in his skin. Voice cracking, he cried, “What the fuck is that?”

  Greta said, “Quiet. You’ll swallow the key. And then what?”

  Greta put the loaded Uzi back into the rucksack and put on her wig, smiling sweetly, tucking rufous curls up under the blond helmet.

  Jack’s heart was pounding. He rattled the chain of his handcuffs. He said, “Unlock these.” He stuck out his tongue, key balanced on the tip.

  Greta shook her head no and, with a stiff forefinger, pushed Jack’s tongue back into his mouth, tucking the key beneath it. He tasted Vaseline.

  Wild-eyed, Jack said, “You belong in a fucking concentration camp.”

  “And you’re in one, piglet. Now listen to me.”

  Jack’s eyes still popped from his head. He could hardly breathe. He threw himself violently toward Greta. The cuffs cut into his wrists with all the force generated by this sudden movement of his two-hundred-pound body.

  Greta said, “Jack, be calm. See the bank across the street? It opens in three minutes. I am going to go in. I will be followed by others you will recognize. We will make a great victory for the people.”

  Realization, followed by overwhelming sensations of dread and fear, flooded into every cell of Jack’s body. “You’re going to rob the bank!”

  “No,” Greta said. “We are going to collect the people’s taxes.”

  “Greta, don’t do this.”

  Greta said, “You will stay here and watch, lucky boy, until I come out and get into another car. Then you will drive away. You can shift with your foot, so.” She demonstrated. “When I come out of the bank,” she said. “But not sooner. If you try to go sooner, this car will explode. Someone is watching. He will press a button and Goodbye, Jack. Do you understand?”

  “No!” Jack screamed. “I don’t understand, you fucking maniac!”

  “Good, then you will learn something,” Greta said. She looked intently at her Rolex, counting the minutes.

  Then she turned the key in the ignition and started the Daimler. When she opened the door, Jack could hear its exhaust, regular and soft as the respiration of a sleeping human.

  She said, “Goodbye, Jack. Find yourself a wonderful American girl and have lots of little Jacks and Jills. But never forget Greta!”

  Jack was too terrified to reply. She gave him no last smile. Greta saved that for the old bank guard, who watched with unconcealed pleasure as she waited obediently for the light to change, then crossed the street, dirndl swinging with every stride of her shapely calves in their snow-white kneesocks, blond cap shining in the morning sunshine, the very picture of German girlhood. When she added a virginal smile to all this, the guard exclaimed, “Wunderschön!”

  Greta disappeared into the shadowy interior of the bank. Moments later she was followed by three other young people. All carried rucksacks.

  Suddenly the air was split by police hooters—many of them, approaching at high speed. Traffic scattered as cars got out of the way. Half a dozen police cars arrived, strobe lights flashing. Policemen wearing bulletproof vests and steel helmets with transparent visors leaped out, assault rifles at the ready.

  At this moment, inside the bank, gunfire erupted. A squad of policemen rushed the front door. Two of them were knocked down by a burst of gunfire from within. The others flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the entrance. The old guard pulled his pistol and charged the door. He was killed before he could fire his weapon; bullets exiting his body stitched a line of bloody pockmarks across his back.

  Greta’s three friends came out the door abreast, crouching and firing Uzis. The remaining policemen, using their cars as breastworks, fired back, killing them all. One of them, a painfully skinny boy, jerked upright and did a crazy final dance, spewing bullets from his Uzi and splintering upstairs windows as he went down.

  Greta had emerged while this was happening, and was now running down the sidewalk, concealing the Uzi against her dirndl. She had lost her wig. Her own wild red hair stood out around her head as if electrified. Guns at the ready, the police watched her, puzzled. Was she one of the terrorists, or was she what she was dressed to look like?

  A BMW waiting at the end of the block threw open its door. Greta made for it, and as she turned, the police saw her gun. She raised it, but before she could shoot, they fired on her in unison with twenty automatic weapons. These sounded like the enraged snarl of so many animals. Greta’s body spun as if gripped by the terrible fangs of an invisible wolf pack, blood whipping like long red tresses from dozens of puncture wounds.

  Sobbing with fear, Jack put the Daimler into gear with his foot, let out the clutch, and drove slowly away. In the rearview mirror he saw the BMW being torn apart by police bullets as it sped in the opposite direction. He expected to be followed by the police cars, to be pulled over, to be told to put up his hands, to be unable to obey because his hands were chained to the wheel, to be killed in indescribable pain by a hundred rounds of ammunition. He prayed, shouting: “Save me, save me, let me live, I’ll do anything you say!”

  But nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Two blocks away from the battle, the world went on in the bright May sunshine as if death and madness had never been invented by a deaf supreme being, as if Jack could not smell Greta on his own fouled body with every breath he drew.

  He drove into the old city and parked the Daimler near the castle. He spat the key to the handcuffs into his palm and freed himself. Then he put on his clothes. They were cold, wet with sweat.

  Trembling violently, Jack got out of the Daimler, locked all the doors, and began to run again, the car keys in his hand. A few blocks from the car, as he passed a storm drain, he let the keys drop from his hand and kicked them down the sewer.

  Following some instinct he had not known he possessed, he ran in a long circle, to protect the secret of his den. Home at last, he ran up the stairs and went directly to the toilet. He closed the door behind him and vomited. Minutes later, when he threw the key to the handcuffs into the bowl, he realized that he was still wearing the surgical gloves. He stripped them off and threw them in, too, but then fished them out again, afraid that they would stop the drain and regurgitate the only evidence against him.

  And then he realized that the gloves were not the only evidence. There was more, if the police looked in the right place for it during the autopsy.

  Greta! Obeying her last instruction, he remembered her as she was in their last game together, shrieking and twisting in pain or pleasure—who could know which?—in the final, unforgettable moment of what neither of them had ever called love. But was.

  Three

  1 Jack’s only class that day began at eleven o’clock. By noon, television crews were set up outside the gates, interviewing students who might have known Greta and her fellow terrorists. One of these was an NBC crew, whose director was calling out in English, “Americans over here! Americans over here!” A woman reporter holding a microphone stood on tiptoe, searching the crowd for American faces.

  Jack looked for an escape route, but he was pushed forward toward the cameras by the jostling crowd. One long-haired German boy ki
cked over a light stand, crying, “Shitty imperialist television!” On camera, a policeman seized the boy, shook him roughly, shouted in his face, then let him go with a violent push that sent him staggering halfway across the street. Jack watched him run away, hair flying.

  “He was lucky,” the American cameraman said. “Two cops were killed in this thing.”

  “Plus five terrorists,” said the woman with the microphone. “The driver of the BMW just croaked in hospital.” British style, she left out the the before the noun. She added, “So it’s five to two in favor of the Polizei.”

  “They got them all?”

  “That’s the word.”

  Heart pounding at this good news—he was not a suspect!—Jack walked briskly past the camera, face averted, concentrating hard so as not to run. He got past and hurried on toward home, a dozen different plans of escape forming in his mind: escape from the TV cameras, escape from Heidelberg, escape from the police if he found them waiting in his room as surely he would. But where could he go? All the money he had in the world was in his pocket. He had counted it during the lecture: 13 marks, 43 pfennigs.

  Behind him, where the policeman had been, he heard firm footsteps hurrying to catch up. Jack’s hair prickled on his scalp. He walked on. Then a male German voice—therefore loud and commanding—said, “Jack Adams.”

  Jack twitched and halted, sure that a gun, or at least a camera, must be pointing at his back. His hands trembled. He plunged them into his trousers pockets; the palms were wet with sweat. He began to hyperventilate. He took a deep breath, held it, and turned around.

  It was Manfred, Arthur’s friend, the lecturer in political philosophy. Jack let out his breath through his nostrils and took another mighty breath. Manfred stared at him, flicked a glance at the sweat that shone on Jack’s face.

  He said, “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” Jack replied. “Long time no see.”

  Since the night in the rathskeller, Jack had seen Manfred only in the lecture hall. For his part, Manfred had read Greta’s reports before passing them on to us, so he knew a great deal about Jack.

  Solemn-faced, Manfred said, “You’ve heard?”

  Jack said, “Heard what?”

  “Greta Fürst was shot dead by the police this morning.”

  Jack stared back. He thought he saw a sardonic light in Manfred’s eyes. Did he know? How could he know? God knew what Greta had told him, or what she had told the world. For all Jack knew, she might have kept a diary and sent it to the newspapers. Or written a farewell manifesto. Better than anyone, he knew that she was capable of anything. Jack tasted the metal of the handcuff key he had spat out while Greta bled her last. Suddenly, with a lurch of the heart, he remembered that he had left the handcuffs in the Daimler. He remembered himself saying, I’m going to get perspiration all over the leather. What else had been left on the leather by his last coupling with Greta, and what would the police make of it? His stomach heaved; he tasted bile. He smelled Greta as she had smelled on his own body. He had not washed his running shorts! They could be matched to the evidence in the Daimler!

  Jack said a silent prayer, his second that day, on which he had had his first thoughts of his Maker since childhood: Get me out of this. He was answered by what seemed to be a miracle: Jack’s nature took over. He lied.

  “Greta who?” he said.

  “The girl I introduced you to at the rathskeller,” Manfred said. “The redhead. Smoked Gauloises. Walked you home.”

  “Oh yeah,” Jack said. “The nutcase. Actually she just walked away. I wandered around in the rain for hours.”

  Manfred, who knew in graphic detail what had happened that night, and on every other meeting between Greta and Jack, opened his eyes wider in feigned surprise. “Really? What bad manners. You never saw her again?”

  “I wasn’t exactly keeping an eye out.” Jack smiled.

  “So you don’t remember her?”

  “The bad manners I remember. What happened?”

  The lies had relaxed Jack. He took his hands out of his pockets. He gazed frankly into Manfred’s eyes, feigning interest, registering innocent ignorance. Lost in his favorite role, Smiling Jack.

  Manfred said, “It’s big news. She and some friends tried to rob a bank. The police killed them all.”

  “Wow. Were they terrorists, or what?”

  “The Red Army Faction has claimed responsibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Baader-Meinhof Gang. Serious people.”

  “Good God. What a mess.”

  The Baader-Meinhof Gang? Jack’s breathing was back to normal now. He struggled to keep it that way. The pores opened along his spine, releasing a rivulet of sweat. Manfred watched him very closely, with something that could easily be called suspicion in his eyes.

  Manfred said, “The talk around here is that they must have been betrayed. The cops were waiting for them right around the corner.”

  Jack said, “What do you mean, betrayed?”

  Manfred shrugged.

  Jack was seized by a sickening realization: The police knew. How else could they have known the precise moment of the bank robbery, how else could they have arrived so quickly, in such overwhelming force? Why else would they have used so much firepower, been so intent on killing with such merciless brutality, if they had not been sure they were dealing with terrorists—people who deserved to die, people of whom they wished to make a bloody example?

  Jack regained control of himself. In an even voice, holding on to the character he was playing, he said, “I wouldn’t want to be the guy who called the cops.”

  “Whoever did will be in a nutcracker,” Manfred said. “Police on one side, Baader-Meinhof on the other.”

  What was Manfred saying to him? That Greta had been marked for death? That she had been betrayed to the police? That she had been an object of suspicion? That Jack was also under suspicion? If she had been watched by someone, how could that someone not know about Jack?

  Jack inhaled, shook his head. Manfred’s eyes, still fixed on his open, smiling face, opened a little wider and his lips twitched. He was not smiling, exactly, but once again Jack had the feeling that he was aware of the truth, that he saw through Jack’s lies, that this casual meeting was no accident.

  Don’t be paranoid, Jack told himself. Be cool. He said, “Too bad about the girl. She seemed like a nice enough person, underneath the politics.”

  Manfred laughed aloud. “Greta? A nice enough person? She was a psychopath who came from a gene pool swimming with Nazis. And if she didn’t have syphilis it was a miracle.”

  Syphilis? Jack held on to himself. He made what he hoped was a wry face.

  Manfred said, “You’re lucky she walked away.”

  Manfred laughed at his own joke. Jack snorted appreciatively. But another terrible thought was racing through his mind—through his bloodstream: If they do an autopsy, they’ll match my semen to the semen they find in Greta’s body.

  Jack thought, Of course they’ll look there; they’ll look for semen. They’ll look for everything. They’re Germans. He was doomed; he knew it. He wanted to get away from this German. He lifted a casual hand and said, “Well, good seeing you.”

  But Manfred was gripping his arm, preventing him from going. Manfred said, “Anyway, rest in peace. On to the next thing.”

  Hand on Jack’s biceps, Manfred walked him down the street, speaking into his face: German intimacy.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you for an entirely different reason,” Manfred said. “An opportunity has come up. There’s a student peace conference in Stockholm, starting tomorrow, and the Swedes need an American to give a little speech about the U.S. antiwar movement. I thought of you.”

  Paranoia, Jack’s close companion, returned in a rush. “Why me?” he asked.

  “Because I’ve been impressed by your papers, by the way you’ve improved your German,” Manfred said. “And I understand from Arthur that you’re a good speaker.” />
  “Not in Swedish,” Jack said.

  “You’ll be speaking in English. Even the Swedes don’t talk Swedish.”

  Jack’s heart was leaping. Escape! Luck! But his voice was calm. He said, “When would I have to leave?”

  “Tonight, I’m afraid, change trains in Frankfurt. I have your tickets with me.”

  “Why such short notice?”

  “As I said, there was a no-show.”

  Manfred had said no such thing, but Jack did not argue. He was remembering the American soldier in the trunk of Greta’s roadster, and the Swedes who had been waiting on the other side of the Danish frontier. They had been parked beside the highway, in a misting rain. The whole experience had been like a page from a thriller: three short blinks of the headlights followed by two long. Greta walking Duane to the Swedish car. Duane, stiff from his long ride in the fetal position, limping in the glow of the headlights. Were the Swedes Manfred knew the same Swedes Greta knew? Terrorists? Allies of the Baader-Meinhof Gang? Jack’s blood ran cold.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “I have studying to do.”

  Manfred said, “Jack, no one has to study for the courses you’re taking. Take the tickets. Go to Sweden for a few days. There is even an allowance for expenses.” He smiled. “When was the last time you got laid?”

  “I can hardly remember,” Jack replied.

  “All right, then!” Manfred said. “The sun is out, so the Swedes will be fucking.”

  Jack gave him a sharp look. But Manfred himself was the picture of guilelessness. He was holding out a plain, sealed envelope. Jack took it.

  “Okay,” he said. “Why not?”

  Manfred shook his arm, gave him a little salute, two fingers and a thumb touching an imaginary hat brim. “Wiederschön!”

  In his room, Jack opened the envelope. Anonymous second-class train tickets, couchette, to Copenhagen and return.

  Copenhagen?

  A sheaf of hundred-deutsche-mark notes was paperclipped to a file card on which were typed instructions for taking the ferry from Denmark to Sweden. “Buy your tickets when you get to Copenhagen,” said his instructions. At the bottom of the card was a typed name and phone number: “Your host in Sweden; call on arrival.”