Secret Father (23 page)

When it came to women, German businessmen were afflicted, in a famous phrase from another context, with the disease that presumes itself the cure. Their sly, winking discretion intended to honor the appearance of a rigid post-Nazi morality, but like inquisitive confessors they managed to be both puritanical and lewd at once, if only by implication. There was no chance that Krone would bat an eye at my abbreviated introduction of my companion as the mother of Michael's chum. I had briefed Krone by phone, telling him the simple truth that my seventeen-year-old son had gone to Berlin without permission, probably for the May Day celebrations in the Soviet sector, and I wanted to find him. I'd told him that Michael was with two other American kids, but apart from descriptions, I had not identified them. I could sense in Krone now, even in his brisk greeting of the woman beside me, the assumption that there was more to her presence here than that. And who was I to tell him he was wrong?

A car was waiting for us on the tarmac, a gleaming black Mercedes. Unlike mine, this one was a recent model that had at last forsworn the traditional bulbous hood and fenders for a boxy sleekness with the barest hint of fins. This style shift to American aerodynamics, the illusion of speed even while standing still, could not occur in Germany without a simultaneous shift away from the deadweighted past symbolized by the classic Mercedes design. And we Yank bankers had conveyed to the denizens of Stuttgart the virtue of built-in obsolescence, which is the economic point of style. All of this, to your father, would have been an instance of capitalist waste, except for what was being rendered obsolete. Those old Mercedes fenders, after all, had never seemed more themselves than when flying flags that bore the swastika.

The driver, in black suit and cap, stood by the right rear passenger door, holding it for Mrs. Healy, while I crossed to the other side. When I slid in next to her, ahead of Krone, she was waiting to make eye contact with me, to flick an eyebrow, alerting me. To what I hadn't a clue, then realized she wanted no discussion in front of the driver. To keep up with her, I was going to have to sharpen the edge of my paranoia. In General Healy's household, apparently, the assumption had to be that servants were enemies.

In response to her muted anxiety, I covered her hand with mine, a less intimate act than it might have been because she was wearing her tan gloves again. It was an automatic gesture, even with her. Often I had reassured Edie with such a touch, but in this context I intended it in an impersonal way, only to convey that we had no choice but to trust Krone's methods, whatever they were. But Mrs. Healy lost no time in withdrawing her hand from under mine. There would be no calling this woman Charlotte unless we were not alone.

Krone joined us in the back, settling his ample frame on a swingdown jumpseat opposite me. The driver had taken his topcoat. His suit was a well-cut, double-breasted navy pinstripe carrying a hint of Savile Row. The midday heat had not registered on me until now, when Krone snapped his handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his large forehead. In America, but for those pinstripes, he would have been taken for a football fan, a man living for the glory days of his own gridiron career in school. The warm smile with which he had greeted us at the foot of the rolling staircase was gone.

"This is a very tense time in Berlin," he said. After wiping his face, he carefully wiped his hands. He returned the handkerchief first to its creases, then to its pocket in three perfect steeples. His fastidiousness made me think briefly of Edie.

"First of all," he went on, "you are correct, absolutely correct, to be concerned about your children. I have a son and a daughter, and I have sent them only this week to spend the summer, at least the summer, with my wife's brother in Geneva. Things cannot go on as they are."

The driver was at the wheel now. Krone touched a button in the door panel, and a glass partition slid soundlessly up from its slot in the driver's backrest, sealing him off. Mrs. Healy glanced at me, her point made.

The car began to move, smoothly, fast.

"What do you mean, Hans? The reports I have from you could not be more upbeat."

Krone now held my eyes with a certain coldness. He was a man of some Jewishness—not much, but enough to have prompted his spending the Nazi years in London. He spoke English with the same curt formality with which he dressed. "We live in two realms here, Paul." I could, in another circumstance, have taken his show of patience as condescension, but I didn't care about that. "There is the realm of commerce, and there is the realm of daily experience. You and I, in our normal transactions, have reason to be concerned only with the former. But that is not the case today, from what you have asked of me. Normally, we at the Commercial Bank succeed by emphasizing our success. But in this divided city, success has become our greatest danger. Commerce in West Berlin is the miracle that never ends.
Of course
in our reports that is all we say, and it is true. The last thing we want is to undermine confidence in investment. So yes, by all means, upbeat. That is what you expect, no? What New York expects?"

His eyes remained fiercely locked on mine, to make clear that until now he had given me exactly what I had wanted from him. If now I wanted something else, he would not be held responsible for any contradiction.

"And daily experience?"

"Berlin is the best investment in the world. But we are talking now about something else. He glanced at Mrs. Healy, this Charlotte, and turned back to me. "The unraveling rope.

"What?

"Berlin hangs over the abyss by a rope. A rope which unravels. It is a rope no more. Berlin hangs by a thread. Do you know how many crossed this week?

"Crossed?

"Into our sector, from East to West. More than five thousand. Last week, almost as many. Since winter, every week, thousands of the very people Ulbricht needs most—the young, the skilled, the motivated, the intelligent, the courageous. They are flocking west. The DDR cannot allow this to go on. And not only the DDR. Hungary. Poland. Czechoslovakia. All losing their best people through Berlin. It is
Moscow
that cannot allow this to go on. The border will be closed. It must be closed. And then, of course, the devils come loose. All hell cuts loose."

Krone looked fully now at Mrs. Healy, a deliberate display of hesitation.

I said, "As I explained to you, Charlotte is the mother of Michael's companion, one of his companions. Her concerns and mine are identical. You can speak freely.

But something was bothering him. What? That I had not used her last name?

The car had turned onto one of the broad, well-ordered boulevards of West Berlin. It was empty of traffic. A Saturday afternoon with no people out?

"Explain about the crossing to me," I said. "I know the Communists control their zone. How do so many get out so easily? I don't get it.

Krone shrugged. "Outside of Berlin, no one understands this. In
Bonn
they do not understand. It is because Berliners, going back to the war, live in one sector and work in another. Families live partly in the Soviet zone and partly in the American, or British, or French. The subway and elevated trains cross East and West every minute. At Potsdamer Platz, workers and students cross from one side to the other every day. This is the way the city lives. And the benefit to the Eastern sector is the tax that is levied, theoretically, on every person crossing in—the forced currency exchange that amounts to tax. East German marks are worthless relative to West German marks. To go into East Berlin, one must purchase East German marks with all the Western currency one is carrying, but a minimum of twenty Western marks. This is the main source of liquid currency for Honecker and Ulbricht. Therefore, the
Vopos
are concentrated on points crossing
into
East Berlin, in the city center—Potsdamer Platz, Friedrichstrasse. The dozens of points for crossing
out
elsewhere in the city, other S-Bahn and U-Bahn stops, for example, are relatively unguarded. The law still requires currency submission, but mostly and practically that involves entrance, not exit. East Berliners know how to play this game, and East Germans coming from outside the city, and Poles and Czechs, they learn it fast. The crackdown Honecker must be preparing will involve only people from the East. The border will be sealed against them. Not against us, you see? From us he will still need dollars and marks. And if he allows Americans and Britishers continued citywide access, then NATO will have no complaint. Only Bonn will have the complaint, because the border closing against the DDR means the end of the dream of Germany as one nation—Adenauer's dream, but Khrushchev's nightmare. The only question is whether Kennedy will listen to
der Alte,
to Adenauer, when the time comes. If he does,
then
the devils are set loose."

"Kennedy is committed to Berlin, Hans. I promise you that decision has been made."

"But committed to
West
Berlin or to
all
of Berlin? That is not decided, Paul."

"What are you saying? You want in Berlin what there is at the Iron Curtain? Klieg lights? Unmuzzled dogs? Razor wire? Machine guns? Watchtowers? You want all of that
here?
"

"We Berliners, Paul, have simple hopes. Stability. Predictability. And a possibility for something better in the future. If not one Germany now, as
der Alte
wants, at least let there be two. We want East Germany to remain
German.
If all Germans who want what we here in West Berlin want—freedom, democratic structures, the decent life—if all such people leave the East, then the Soviets will simply populate it with Slavs. East Germany will be Slavic Germany, which is not Germany."

There was a familiar curl in the way Krone said the word "Slav," inevitably evoking how once the word "Jew" had been spoken. That Krone was to a degree Jewish himself only reinforced the point; the Nazis had murdered six million Slavs, too. In Krone's mouth, one heard an implication of what, in the word, had brought it into English as "slave."

He must have sensed my uneasiness, because he veered from the thought. "But the main concern that we have in the Western half of Berlin is simply to live. The war that Adenauer would welcome will last five minutes here. The fifteen thousand American soldiers are in Berlin only to trigger the American response, which of course, once that garrison is crushed by Red Army tanks, is a nuclear attack on Moscow—and all that follows. Compared to that, what are klieg lights? What is razor wire? A sealed border without a war. It is what you should want as well."

"I don't want a sealed border until my son is home with me in Frankfurt."

"Well, your timing is good. You have arrived just ahead of the moment of truth. Why do they call it that?" He grinned. "Odd phrase, but compelling. Moment of truth. No equivalent in German." He looked over at Mrs. Healy, as if for concurrence. She knew better than to blink. Krone went on, "Everyone knows that Ulbricht had to allow access back and forth between the sectors until today, May Day, his big propaganda fest. All the Stalinist apparatchiks from Moscow to stand with him on his platform at Alex—Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Bulganin, their great parade, Soviet tanks, a flat truck to carry a large toy
Sputnik,
big trailers hauling green missiles. They say Yuri Gagarin himself is in Berlin today."

Gagarin had become the first man in space less than a month before.

"A great show of Soviet power for the whole city to see, the whole world—that is May Day. And of course to Berliners,
ersten Mai
also celebrates the day our city was liberated by the glorious Soviet heroes in 1945. So today, yes!" Krone leaned toward me. Beads of perspiration had once more appeared on his forehead. "But tonight? Tomorrow? The question about klieg lights and razor wire is not
if,
but
when.
The saying for weeks has been, 'After May Day.' That is why more refugees crossed last week than ever. Because it will be impossible
nach ersten Mai.
Well,
ersten Mai
is now."

"Great," I said with an exasperation unique to the parents ofingeniously mischievous teenagers. "How did they plan this so well?"

I looked at Mrs. Healy, who ignored me to ask Krone, "Are there signals of this tension? Anything unusual?"

"
Everything
unusual. First, if the border is to be sealed, entities on both sides of it are working to secure their methods of operation, if you receive my meaning."

"I don't," I said.

"To secure their, as they say, assets on the other side. Espionage, Paul. An industry in Berlin, one of our major enterprises. And second, each side is working to learn what it can about the other's assets-in-place before the curtain falls. Frenzy. And rumors. Wild rumors."

"Of what, for example?" Mrs. Healy asked.

Krone studied her for a moment before answering. "Of, for example, a shocking penetration in East Berlin of the offices of the Ministry of State Security."

"Stasi," she said.

"Yes. The rumor is that there was a fire at the ministry, a death, a death of a senior official prompting major security measures."

"When?" Mrs. Healy asked calmly.

"Earlier this week. Monday or Tuesday. So the rumor has it."

"A fire?" I asked. "An accident?"

Krone laughed with an air of
You Americans!
"There are no accidental fires at ministry offices in Berlin. Not in East Berlin, not in West Berlin."

"Was this at Karlshorst?" Mrs. Healy asked, a question that meant nothing to me except that she knew to ask it.

"I would not think so," Krone answered. "As I say, we are only talking about rumors, which lead to guesses. The ministry has offices in a dozen places in East Berlin." Krone interrupted the flow of his speculation to face only me, to explain what he apparently assumed my companion would know. "The Gestapo had forty thousand agents to keep under surveillance a population of eighty million. Stasi has nearly three times that many agents to watch a mere seventeen million. Stasi is everywhere in the East. They make the Gestapo seem amateur. By comparison, the Gestapo was kind."