Secret Father (24 page)

He turned back to Mrs. Healy, already aware of her as versed in this language. "Karlshorst, in the Soviet compound, Mielke's offices, yes. But unlikely to be penetrated. And the rumormongers would surely have passed along that detail. Therefore, less notorious offices ... more likely someplace like..."His hesitation was for effect. I did not know what game he was playing, but his partner in it was certainly not me. He and Mrs. Healy were circling one another. "Like, perhaps, Schloss Pankow, the former palace, in the heart of a residential area, where the
Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer
has its headquarters."

"What is that?" I asked.

"An office in charge of all matters relating to foreigners inside the DDR, including East Berlin. Which is why I am, shall we say, acquainted with it." He bowed. "At times it falls to me to be one of those foreigners. A man in my position, we have dealings with the
Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.
We have subtle ventures in East Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, four or five other cities in the DDR. We must travel. We must interact with certain officials."

"Subtle ventures?"

Krone's gaze became steely. "Extralegal, Paul. Commerce in the zone between zones, if you receive my meaning."

Black market. Bribery. Zone between zones. A classic instance of criminal rationalization. I said nothing.

"This is work of my own," he said coldly. "Not related to my work for Chase. Not related to the Commercial Bank. Not related to you, Paul. I only refer to it now to indicate the range of my connections, which is relevant to my ability to provide you with the help for which you have turned to me."

"I see that."

"So time is short," Mrs. Healy said. "Our sons need us. How do we find them?"

Krone responded as if he'd been waiting for her sharp inquiry. "
Sind Sie deutsch?
"

"Born in Germany, yes," she answered. "But I am an American citizen. I am the mother of an American citizen, the dependent child of an American officer, a child at risk in this city. You have made me understand the risk very well. Now I want to know how you can help me find my son."

Krone nodded, apparently reassured by her crisp authority. "If the youngsters have come for the May Day fest"—he shot his cuff, revealing a gold cufflink, a stainless steel Omega watch—"then we have just time enough to go there, which is how I have instructed the driver. Chairman Ulbricht and his Central Committee and august guests from the Kremlin are just finishing their borscht and goulash under the chandeliers of the
Rathaus.
They are moving outside to the reviewing stand which looks out over the great market square, which for hours has been crowded with what they will say was two hundred thousand people but is closer to fifty thousand, no doubt including your three children. Are you feeling lucky?"

"Not particularly," I said.

To my surprise, since we were still in prosperous West Berlin, the car pulled over to the curb and stopped. The driver jumped out and, as he moved around to Mrs. Healy's door, Krone looked out the window, saying, "Ah, we are here."

To one side was a tidy park with pebbled paths, benches, and flower beds choking with tulips, daffodils, and lilies. To the other was a broad set of once elegant but now badly rusting cast-iron stairs heading up to an overhead platform. Paint was flaking off a sign that read, "Tiergarten."

The driver opened Mrs. Healy's door, but she did not move.

Krone explained, "We cannot drive into East Berlin without drawing attention to our party. Am I correct in understanding that as undesirable?"

"Yes, you are," I said.

He indicated the stairs. "We are one stop away from the Soviet sector. To cross by S-Bahn, we are like everyone else. It is how we go if we are merely tourists."

"That's what we are."

Mrs. Healy started to get out, but Krone said, "One moment."

From the floor beside his foot, he picked up a small briefcase and opened it. It was empty. Balancing the case on his knee, he reached into his suit coat for his billfold. He took out one note, and then two others like it, and he held them for us to see. Three bills, each twenty deutsche marks. "This is the admission. We must exchange this for East German marks, twenty D-marks each. Otherwise, we should leave all money here." Krone took a wad of bills out of his wallet and dropped them into one slot of the briefcase. I did the same with my money, into another slot, and then Mrs. Healy, removing the cash from her purse, did likewise. "German money," Krone said, "American money, everything." Then he handed a twenty-mark note to each of us. "And you have your passports, yes?" We both nodded, and then so did he, snapping the briefcase shut and twirling a small built-in combination lock. He reached across to touch my arm. "We are what we are, Paul. You are my banking colleague, here from Frankfurt for meetings." Still touching me, he looked at Mrs. Healy. "You are my colleague's friend. Let the officials draw their own conclusions. The less said the better. They are imbeciles at these crossing desks. They know nothing. They will ask a question. They always ask a question. Keep it simple. If possible, keep it true. But do not mention your children."

"Of course not," Mrs. Healy said, that authority again.

Krone nodded at her. "
Sehr gute. Jawohl?
"

Pointedly, she made no reply, and that apparently pleased him.

Mrs. Healy got out of the car. Krone caught my eye to wink, obviously, about her shapeliness. I turned away from him, quite aware of it myself.

W
E FOLLOWED
Krone up the ratty iron staircase. It shook frighteningly on its bolts, but at that moment the danger from an ill-maintained item of public accommodation seemed the least of our problems. Indeed, the wobbly stairs seemed to amuse Krone, and with his large frame he shook them deliberately as he ascended, pounding his feet like a kid. "Become accustomed to such wreckage," he said over his shoulder. "The S-Bahn is administered by authorities in the East, according to the terms of the 1948 treaty. East Berlin municipality—corrupt, inefficient, bankrupt—maintains stations and tracks even in West Berlin, which is to say does
not
maintain them. That is why these stairs shake, why the train rattles, why the tracks do not meet each other smoothly. You will see." He laughed. At the top of the stairs, before a rusted turnstile, he waited.

A dozen yards away was a small booth with a uniformed figure behind a grille—a woman in a tattered blue hat. She was staring in our direction, but was so impassive it seemed possible she did not see us. Krone laughed again, clapping my shoulder. "The S-Bahn is
already
East Berlin, you see, even here above our beloved Tiergarten, the most exquisite city garden in Europe." He handed us each a token and led us through the creaking turnstile. All the while, he kept speaking loudly, as if he were a tour guide. And then I realized that that was the effect he was going for. Apart from the dull woman in the booth, however, there was no one on the platform. So if he was acting a part, it was for my sake and Mrs. Healy's. He was preparing us.

"With the S-Bahn administered and manned from East Berlin, you see why conditions are so poor. Very dramatic, really, the S-Bahn all the way past Wannsee and out into the DDR, yet also bumbling along above the cafés and boutiques of the Kurfürstendamm. People from the East coming this way in the morning for work, returning at night. At this time of day, even not a holiday..." He gestured broadly at the empty platform, moving lightly on his feet, a kind of dance step. Krone was good.

His routine was cut short by the sound and vibrations of a train crashing into the station. The lead car had the word "Friedrichstrasse" crudely printed on a board affixed above a single headlamp, the glass of which was broken. The entire platform structure had begun to move, and the sensation of steel plate trembling under my feet brought the
Stephen Case
to mind, the train platform having taken a torpedo.

"Shake, rattle, and roll," Krone called over the noise, and, as if he'd read my mind, he made a show of taking a legs-akimbo stance appropriate to the swaying deck of a ship.

The train slowed to a stop with an ungodly screech. There was not a lubricated gear, a balanced wheel, or an unworn brake pad anywhere aboard. The cars were brown, round-topped relics of the Weimar era, made of slatted wood, not steel, wood that had not seen a paintbrush since Hindenburg.

The doors opened unevenly, some only halfway, all with the groan of swollen wood against warped iron grooves. We stepped through the door nearest us, to be greeted by a lone figure, an East German policeman in knee boots and peaked hat. He held a machine gun in the crook of his arm. A fat cigarette clung to his lower lip, with a thin stream of smoke causing him to squint, yet his eyes were steadily upon us, as if he had been lying in wait.

Despite the James Dean pose of that cigarette, I sensed the policeman's nervousness, and recalled what Krone had said about the general tension here, the universal expectation of something deadly. Torpedo indeed.

Squelching my fear, I took Mrs. Healy's elbow for the moment required to move into the car. We imitated Krone in turning our backs to the policeman, each reaching to grasp a cracked leather strap and taking up a position to look out the window. Not out. In the station, the window was a slate mirror in which to see the
Vopo
eyeing us. The door closed, the train jerked into motion, and very quickly we were out in the brightness of the midday sun, a relief.

The windows had become windows again, not mirrors. They were cloudy with dirt, but the sight that opened before us was breathtaking nonetheless. We had a clear view down the length of the opulent shopping street, the Kurfürstendamm. In the distance, I glimpsed the looming Lindenhof, a skyscraper of olive glass, the building Chase had underwritten and that I had helped dedicate in December.

The Ku'damm was marked by four lanes of gleaming automobiles divided by a center rank of youthful linden trees, which were showing off a fresh crop of pale green leaves. The sidewalks below were a riot of colorful café umbrellas and awnings. At eye level, I saw the bright signs and flags attached to the multistory buildings. The neon displays, illuminated even at midday, were not nearly the kaleidoscope they would be at night, but for that they were a more outrageous assertion of Western extravagance.

This glimpse of color gave way in a blink to the gray open stretch of a weed-ridden field beyond which sat the hulking ruin of the Reichstag, a sight that no one of my generation could fail to recognize. Hitler had set it afire in 1933, blaming its destruction on the Communists, successfully sparking an electoral victory from which the rest of the awful century had unscrolled. And forever after, the Communists, thus branded the mortal enemy of the monster himself, would claim the loftiest perch of the moral high ground—not just as victims of Hitler, like Jews, but as active, deadly opponents. The Reichstag had become, in effect, a permanent memorial to the heroic Communist resisters.

Just as quickly as it had come into view, the building was gone. Now the train careened onto a timber-and-rod trestle bridge, crossing the muddy Spree, which marked the border there between East and West Berlin. It seemed less a geographic boundary than a temporal one, for all of a sudden the view was of the yawning jaggedness of bombed-out buildings, ruins, and rubble of the sort cleared in the West fully a decade before. I saw an entire city block of roofless buildings, of walls stripped away to show the interior spaces, once vivid wallpaper made gray by weather. A second similar city block quickly followed, and then a warehouse district, the drabness of which was relieved only by a huge bright poster showing the unsmiling face of Walter Ulbricht above a red star and a red hammer and sickle.

I looked at Mrs. Healy. She, too, was staring out at the passing scene. "Colorfast?" I said. Really, the only color out there was the red on Ulbricht's poster. She looked at me vaguely, missing my reference to her phrase that morning.

And then snap! The scene outside went completely black, the window once more a reflecting glass. The policeman behind us was exactly as he had been, with his fat cigarette, his machine gun, his cold eyes on our backs. The rattling noise of the train had doubled, which was how I knew we had entered a terminal. Friedrichstrasse station, I guessed.

As the train abruptly slowed, the single weak light bulb behind us flickered, then went out, plunging our car into total darkness. My free hand went automatically to my breast pocket, to cover my billfold. The jolt of darkness disoriented me. How would I ever find Michael here?

The car stopped. My eyes adjusted. Not darkness now, but the shadows, as it were, of night. Krone led us out onto a narrow platform that reeked of ash. Cinders in the air made me squint, and when I looked back, to my surprise, our squinting policeman had never moved.

With a few other people who had been on the train, we walked to a set of stairs that took us down to a starkly lit chamber that seemed a basement room but could not have been, since we'd started well above street level. We lined up at a set of grilled turnstiles, patiently passing through into another, far larger, brighter chamber, also win-dowless. This room was encircled by an iron-grid catwalk near the ceiling. A pair of blue-uniformed policemen stood opposite each other, looking down at us. They, too, cradled machine guns, but unlike the guard on the car, these two were openly nervous, their eyes darting down to us, then to each other. They were young and scared and therefore truly intimidating.

Krone nudged us away from the passengers toward a doorway to the right, leaving the others in a line before a doorway on the left.

"West Germans and foreigners this way," Krone explained. He tossed his head toward the others. "They are East Germans, poor devils." A dozen or so men and women, drably clothed, preoccupied at that moment with retrieving passbooks and identification from purses and pockets; they were decidedly uninterested in us.

The doorway led to an iron staircase that took us down into yet another large room, about street level. In its center was a towering desk behind which a female guard sat—another threadbare blue uniform, not cut for any woman. She was sour looking, of indeterminate age. Beside her, standing on the raised platform, was a green-uniformed, helmeted soldier. He held the end of a chain that was attached at its other end to the throat of a Doberman pinscher. The soldier and his dog watched us approach as the woman studied papers on her desk.