Secret Father (28 page)

"Rick is getting free of me. It is what they do. It is what we did."

"By getting ourselves in serious trouble? I don't think so. I am not in Berlin enacting an Oedipal drama. I am in Berlin because my son needs, at the very least, my support, and perhaps rescue. Michael is in a danger zone, whether he put himself there or was sucked into it."

"Sucked into it?"

"By your son, the gravitational pull of a boy Michael emulates, a boy whose world—well, look." I gestured at the window, at the scene outside, the abyss of the Eastern sector coming once more into view. "I am thinking of what you said before: 'Ulrich is his father's son. There is the curse.' I don't like thinking of my son in the pull of someone else's curse."

"Nor do I. I am sorry Michael is involved with this."

"Which father?" I asked then, sharply.

"What?"

"The curse of being the son of an American spymaster, or were you thinking of Wolf?"

Her silence was her answer.

"Why is it a curse to be the son of a philosophy professor who died for his country?"

"I did not mean 'curse' literally."

"But something is going on here that involves your first husband, your time here after the war. The gravitational pull of a celestial body that ceased to exist?"

"You are American. Things are simpler for you. Feelings of grief? Get a shrink. Feelings of anguish, guilt, dread—don't think about it. America is all future, no past. Is that not the point of your country? It is difficult for you to understand that here in Germany, certainly here in Berlin, everything involves the war. The war is the past that will never go away."

"But which past? First you told me that your husband died at the front. Then you told me he died here in Berlin."

She lit a fresh cigarette, shrugging with an exquisite indifference. "At the end, this was the front."

"That's not what you meant. You intended to deceive me. At first, in Wiesbaden, you recited from a script of your late husband's life, what you tell everyone. 'He died at the front.' It was the accident of your being ambushed by the sight of Berlin from the airplane that prompted you to say the other thing."

"I trusted you with 'the other thing.'"

"And I am worthy of your trust, Charlotte. Tell me why it is a secret that Wolf died here."

She shook her head once, decisively.

"You said Wolf had become like the nation. What he would not do in 1940, he did in 1945. What did he do?"

"Where were you in the war?"

Hadn't she asked me that before? No. Healy, in the vestibule of their home. She had not heard. She was not testing me.

"The Pacific," I answered. "The Navy."

"And you, Paul? Would you have approved the attack on Hiroshima in 1940, as surely you approved it when it occurred in 1945? That is all I meant. The war had its diabolical momentum. Even with the Jews. In 1938, at
Kristallnacht,
all Hitler wanted was to expel them. Eichmann, what they are saying now in Jerusalem—elimination, that grotesque word 'extermination,'
Ausrottung
— all of that came later. All of that came
after
the war had already destroyed us, destroyed us as human beings, destroyed our morality."

"So it was the war's fault?"

"How dare you say that to me!" The flash of her anger purified the air between us. She smashed out her cigarette. "I am not deflecting the fault! I am telling you how it was."

"So is that what Wolf did? The Jews?"

To my complete surprise, she laughed. Her anger dissipated. She said with strange mirth, "No, Paul. Not the Jews. Nothing to do with the Jews."

"Krone is Jewish."

She shrugged.
Who cares?

"He spent the Nazi years in England."

"He knows the new Berlin, I can see that."

"Why have you not been back here?"

Again a shrug. Exquisite indifference.

"Your husband?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"Which one?"

"Are you trying to trap me?"

"I'm trying to measure the hole my son fell into, that's all. You know the measurements, but you won't tell me."

"It is a rule of life, Paul. You get not what you look for. You get what you find."

"Dostoyevsky?"

"Healy." She smiled. "And do not ask which one." She reached past the ashtray to touch my hand, a gesture that reminded me of Edie. She, too, after the rough weather of our effort to talk to each other, could come out like sunshine. I kept my hand where it was, palm down on the cloth beside a water glass. She let her hand remain blanketed over mine.

"Hello."

It was Krone, who was standing several paces away, like an anticipating waiter. How long had he been watching us, reading our lips?

Mrs. Healy pulled her hand back, although only I seemed to feel we had been caught at something.

Krone joined us, pulling a chair from an adjacent table. He snapped a finger, and a waiter came over at once. "Scotch whiskey," Krone said.

The waiter shook his head. "Vodka."

"Bourbon," Krone countered, and I realized he was playing a Berliner's game, the cross-border one-upmanship, the parrying for control.

"Vodka," the waiter repeated.

"
Wacholderbranntwein.
" Krone winked at me, and mouthed, "Gin."

The waiter shook his head impassively. "Vodka."

"Ach
so. Ich möchte ein Bier, bitte.
" He winked again, and for my benefit said, "In that case, a beer."

The waiter went off. Krone bowed toward Mrs. Healy, then turned to me, speaking fast and low. "They were detained at the
Eintritt
desk. At least one of the three is at risk for being charged with failure to declare currency, which can easily be compounded with smuggling charges and black marketeering."

"How do you know it was them?" I asked.

"A boy with a beard? A girl? A boy with a cane? Leg braces?"

"Goddammit," I said. The explosive word seemed to split me in two, as if half my body now floated out the window, a mystical soul above Berlin, looking down not on a city but on a large steel hulk slicing into the sea, a smoking ship sinking while its klaxons screeched and flaming bodies leapt over the rail into an ocean of burning fuel oil.

That was what had terrified me when the
Stephen Case
went down—the sight, from my place on the upended bridge, of the sea afire, the impossibility of water in flames, an absurdity I would comprehend only later. "The Pacific," I had told her of my war only moments before. "The Navy." Answers that said nothing.

The other half of me, which had stayed in the restaurant with Krone and Charlotte, said, "They are being held?" An idea as impossible as water on fire.

Krone had raised his hands toward me, palms outward. Now he slowly lowered them, shushing me. "That is what I am telling you," he said softly. "I spoke to a friend who witnessed it in the station. My friend saw the three young Americans being challenged, then taken away by
Vopos.
A German man in a worker's cap was with them, not detained. That would be Tramm. His being able to walk away means Stasi for sure."

"
Wo sind sie?
" Charlotte demanded, and then another imperative question, also in German.

"Can we do this in English, please?" I asked.

Krone, again with the quieting hand gesture, said, "Extreme alarm would be premature. This may be minor harassment, designed to embarrass the Building."

"The Building?"

"American headquarters at Dahlem. GIs are often held for a few hours if they are flip, if they do not declare their unopened pack of cigarettes."

"You're the one who spoke of tensions approaching a climax. After May Day, you said, the border will close. Both sides maneuvering for position."

"It is still May Day," Krone said. "There are thousands of Westerners in East Berlin right now, like us. Tourists. Nothing will happen at the border today, not tomorrow morning. But tomorrow night, Sunday night, when all good Socialist workers are at home..."

Charlotte seemed indifferent to the question of border tensions, as if her worry transcended the armed push-pull of East-West politics. Eventually I would learn in what way that was so. But just then, watching her hand go to her cigarette, her fingers shaking as they had not before, I understood that it was up to me to respond to what Krone said.

"When was this?" I asked. Do this calmly, I told myself. Show nothing. Be a banker closing a deal. A Spartan with a wolf in his shirt.

Ah, wolf! There was an association to note, but not to express.

"They were detained after noon," Krone answered. "Before the festival began at Alexanderplatz, well before we arrived."

"That was hours ago."

"What witness?" Charlotte asked.

Krone's stern expression said he did not like being probed, but after a second look at her, he answered, "A cleaner in the station. A
Putzfrau
who sees everything."

"East Berliner?"

"Naturally. Although her son has crossed to West Berlin. He works in a factory I control. So his mother is grateful to me. She kisses my hand."

"A peasant woman."

"If you like "

"So she comes from the country, with other family members still in Soviet Germany." Charlotte's expression was one of dull simplicity, worn down by having to pluck out threads of the obvious. Krone returned her look with one of irritation. "We must assume," Charlotte continued, "that Stasi knows of your inquiry. If the
Putzfrau
kisses your hand, she kisses theirs as well."

Charlotte said all this with willed detachment, but I could sense her anxiety. All aristocratic hauteur was gone. Hers were the eyes of a woman ready to recognize a peasant as a sister—the eyes, say, of a starving child's mother scouring the ground beside a shuttered market stall for an overlooked potato.

What was the equivalent of water aflame for her? The discovery in the rubble of a shoe that still had a maggot-ridden foot inside? A decision calmly made to toss the shoe on the pile of harvested stones?

Looking at Charlotte, seeing her as I had seen her in the Russian Chapel, a haloed face at home with suffering, I felt ashamed to realize that, had she ever found such a shoe, she would have gathered the other rubble women to bury it with a prayer.

I touched her sleeve. "If the Stasi knows we are here poking around, that's good. We want them to know. We want them to know
right now
that these kids have parents who are here, parents the Stasi has to deal with." I leaned toward her, sensing weakness for the first time, weakness I could only misunderstand. "We are here to bring our kids out, Charlotte, and we will."

"I don't—"

She was about to disagree with me, so I cut her off. "It's too late to think they don't know who General Healy is. They've seen your son's ID. We have to
land
on them with who your husband is. We have to land on them with Chase Manhattan Bank. This is no trio of drunken GIs looking to score on the black market." I turned to Krone. "They don't do this with my son. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Paul. So do the waiters."

"Good. Not with my son they don't." Feeling, yes. Expression, yes. Feeling and expression, however, for the sake of power, a dazzling rush of power. I gripped Krone's forearm and saw him wince. "You have to make them deal with me. Get me to them."

"To whom?"

"That is what I am paying you to tell me, Hans. They have our kids. They know we're looking for them. They are waiting for us."

"I doubt the latter point, Paul. Despite Mrs. Healy's intuition, the people on whom I depend are not Stasi."

"Not intuition," Charlotte said. "Assumption."

She raised her eyes to Krone's, allowing us to see what was written in them—the stories of children dying by the roadside, of pits full of unclothed bodies, of young men shot dead at border crossings. Her assumption, clearly, was that Krone was Stasi, which would account for her sudden deflation. She had entrusted herself to me, and I had delivered her over to the enemy. And why should she not have been drained of fierce authority? Her nightmare was coming to pass.

But not mine, not yet. Why the kids' detention seemed the end of the story to her I could not know, but to me it was the beginning. "It doesn't matter," I said. "We want them to know. Even if there are 'illegal agent' charges because of something Ulrich was carrying, we have to react like what we are—parents concerned about our children."

I had said this too loudly, and she whispered, "
Sie sind keine Kinder.
" She had picked up a toothpick from a cup in the center of the table and was staring at it. Her face was crimson. I was the father of a bystander. Compared to Rick's mother, I had nothing to worry about.

The waiter arrived with Krone's beer, a foaming clay stein the color of pewter. Krone took a long swallow that signaled a need beyond thirst. When he lowered the stein, a line of foam marked his upper lip. He took his handkerchief and dabbed at it. All the while his eyes were on me.

I said, "You were telling us before about—what did you call it,
Arbeit
something?"

"
Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.
"

"The office for foreigners, you said."

"Yes."

"So, for example, three Americans detained for currency irregularities."

"Not necessarily that. No, no, not that at all. That would be border police."

"But the
Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer
would have preempting authority surely."

"Yes, but—"

"And your contact there was—?"

"Colonel Erhardt. Colonel Rainer Erhardt, the deputy chief. But Paul, our relationship is of necessity entirely discreet."

"Then you shouldn't have boasted of it to impress me. I am impressed. I want you to take me to him. Where is his office?"

"Schloss Pankow," he answered quietly. He glanced out the window as if to point the place out, but we were facing west again.

"That is where the fire was," Charlotte whispered. "You said before, the fire was there."

"Indeed so. And Erhardt's chief, Colonel General Sohlmann, is the officer who was killed."