Secret Father (39 page)

"You can trust me, Charlotte. I promise."

She smiled. "And you keep your promises. So does your son. Your son is magnificent."

I didn't think so at the time. It wasn't that simple to me, not yet. But I left my complications with Michael aside. "And yours," I said, "yours is in trouble. What trouble, Charlotte?"

I think she was going to tell me, but just then the pavement turned rough, and with wheels rumbling, the driver slowed. I saw that we had come into Potsdamer Platz with its cobblestones. That quickly, having crossed through the trafficless streets of a Sunday afternoon in what the Soviets called democratic Berlin, we were approaching the checkpoint of the American sector.

Automatically, we turned from each other, reaching for our passports, the entry receipts. I pushed the button to lower the partition and handed the documents to Krone, who took them without comment. I raised the partition, waiting for the kiss of its seal.

Charlotte had moved away, and again sat facing the window. She watched as our car pulled into the slotted line. The border police wore long green trench coats and peaked hats. Rifles were slung at their shoulders. The cars ahead moved forward slowly but steadily, a candy-striped gate rising and falling at each one. When our car pulled to the barrier, the soldier bent to the driver's window, glanced at the proffered set of documents, at the pair of us in back. He then straightened to wave us through.

As if it were the soundtrack only of time in the East, Bach's canticle was just then winding through its ...
in saecula saeculorum.
Before we had pulled fully away from the checkpoint, the chorus finished its
Amen
with a decisive snap, and all at once the air was blank. Behind the Iron Curtain, silence on the radio could seem not a void, as in the West, but a positive statement, a broadcast version of a soundless scream. The silence went on and on.

Charlotte looked at me with an expression that said, There, now we will be overheard. But what the silence sparked in me was a fresh urgency, the warning I had yet to give her.

I slid next to her and put my arm around her shoulders, like a boorish date. I brought my mouth to her ear. She seemed to understand what I was doing and did not resist. "Whatever Rick told you back there as we were leaving," I whispered, "they
let
him tell you. They
wanted
him to tell you whatever he told you."

She started to pull away from me, but I held her I was aware of Krone turning to look back at us, and perhaps so was she, because suddenly she relaxed against me. She put her hand on my leg. I continued to whisper, "What they wanted Rick to tell you is probably why they let us in to see the kids in the first place. So now you know the secret, whatever he told you. And they will expect you to act on it now. And they will be watching, following."

Her finger shot toward Krone: Him.

"It's the film, isn't it? Rick told you where the film is."

She made no reply, but I was aware of her body stiffening against me. The honeyed perfume of her hair filled my nostrils.

She brought her hand up to my face, her fingers at my cheek, what could have been a tender caress. But I knew the gesture for what it was, an obscuring of Krone's view of my lips.

"So you must not do it, Charlotte," I said. "Let the film go until tomorrow, until after the kids are out."

"What film, darling?" she whispered.

Darling? "What?"

She adjusted her face so that now it was her mouth at my ear. "Tell them," she whispered, "to take us to the hotel."

I began to pull away from her.

But with both her hands at my neck, she held me. And then a sudden change of mind. "No, wait! Don't tell them yet."

And to my amazement, she brought her mouth around to mine. With her lips parted, she kissed me, and I tasted the sweetness of her saliva.

Her leg pressed against my leg, from ankle to thigh, a first promise of her long, muscled body. As she adjusted, forward and over on the seat, to more fully embrace me, her mouth all the while on mine, I felt the fullness of her breasts on my chest. My hands closed, one on her back, one on the curve of her hip.

I responded with lavish willingness, pulling her to me, so that she would know, despite my surprise, how I had wanted this. This obliteration of the confusion I had felt, or rather, the suspension of it. Confusion would return in short order—it always does. For the moment, no one was asking how this carefully unacknowledged hunger had come here, like an animal, to be fed. Her hunger, apparently, as much as mine.

My one hand went under her tweed jacket, into the silk, I thought, of her blouse. But it was not silk, not her shirt, but her satin camisole, which rode up from her waist. Then that hand was on her flesh, incandescent to the touch of my fingers, which then measured the hollow perfection of the small of her back.

Krone was watching us, I knew it.

And then I realized that Charlotte knew it, too, because she pulled her face back. Sowing mine with kisses, her mouth moved across my cheek to my ear—the ear away from Krone. Instead of devouring it, as I wished, expected, she whispered with cold urgency, "Now! Now tell them to take us to the hotel!"

To fool Krone about the hours ahead of us, the woman had—was this possible?—just fooled me.

 

At the Kempinski, I followed her across the lobby, her heels clicking on the bright marble, that brown skirt swirling at her legs, her leather shoulder bag swinging with each step like a slanted pendulum. She walked with the assurance of a well-to-do shopper returning from a spree. At the desk, she asked for her key and, right beside her, I asked for mine, as ifwe were not shoppers now but fellow conventioneers returning from sales conference.

By the time I had arrived at the hotel the evening before, she had the privacy sign on her door. At the desk, she had left a note for me, together with a bag containing a new shirt, underwear, and socks, as well as a razor and toothbrush—purchases she had made for me at a department store. Her note had proposed breakfast in the hotel dining room the next morning. I had been afraid that I would be unable to book another room, but people who came to Berlin for May Day were not the type to stay at the Kempinski. Charlotte's room was on the seventh floor, facing the Kurfürstendamm. Mine was down the hall, a room with a window on an air shaft. I had slipped a note under her door, thanking her for the clothes and saying "Yes. See you at breakfast."

Now, when the tuxedoed clerk handed her the stout brass room key, he also gave her a folded piece of pale blue paper, which she took without any show of interest. She put the note in her bag without reading it.

As the clerk passed me my room key, Charlotte covered my hand with hers. "My room, darling," she said, then laughed brightly, a woman without a care in the world. "It's in your name anyway."

"Whatever you say,
Liebchen.
" I winked at the clerk, which was surely overdoing it, but what the hell. Charlotte and I linked arms.

In the elevator going up, in addition to the operator, were a pair of dour old ladies, one of whom reeked of talcum powder. The other leaned on a thick rubber-footed cane, which made me think of Michael.

The ladies got off at five, making it seem we were alone. The elevator operator, a short man in the round, stiff-sided cap of his kind, looked like an organ grinder's monkey and appeared to be just as oblivious. When the doors closed after the ladies, I said, "I don't like it that they took his cane away."

"I think he is coping well with that," she said, "as with everything." Her confidence in Michael seemed total, and that alone was enough to set her apart from Edie, not to mention from me.

I was more than irritated at my son for his spirit of cavalier recklessness. I knew that my irritation was beside the point, but still, my simple view was that he should have been out of East Berlin by now, with me. I had taken a room with twin beds, expecting him to sleep here tonight. Charlotte had her reasons for feeling differently—Rick not alone—and I understood that. But there was also something spacious in her response to my son, whom I suddenly envied for that.

At the seventh floor, the operator pulled the doors open for us. Charlotte said, "
Dankeschön,
" and led the way out. When the elevator doors had closed again, she dropped my arm.

She went immediately to her room, content to show me her back. She unlocked the door, and then left it open for me to follow her in. The room was large, far more elegant than mine, decorated in a sort of muted art deco style, with sleek surfaces, mirrors, variations of black and beige. A canopied double bed anchored one end of the room, a settee arrangement the other. A highly enameled black-and-white chandelier marked the room's center. On the far side of the entrance was a set of French doors, slightly ajar, open to a balcony. A filmy curtain billowed in the soft afternoon breeze.

Charlotte walked to the French doors, opened one side, and turned, waiting for me. "Step out here, darling," she said. "I want that you should see this,
eine schödne Aussicht.
" A beautiful what? Her demeanor, blowing hot and cold, for show and not for show, had me off balance by now. I went past her, out onto the balcony, as she wanted. We went to the stone balustrade and looked out over the tidy rooftops of Berlin's most prosperous district.

Across the avenue was a new tall building made of glass the color of the Caribbean, and a block to the west was an even taller one, newer, also glass, the color ofolives, like the new skyscrapers nestled behind Rockefeller Center. I realized it was the Lindenhof, my building, the one I had helped dedicate in December. I had never seen it from an angle like this.

From directly below, the bustle of the Ku'damm carried up to us, a glad cacophony of horns, streetcar bells, the general buzz of traffic, and the voices of strollers and café patrons up and down the boulevard.

Side by side, leaning on elbows, facing the view, we were also fully in view ourselves. That, too, I realized, was her point. She put her hand on my arm, an easy, familiar gesture that had nothing to do with what either of us was feeling then. But whether we were being observed or not, she felt free to talk here, and said so. "Here we are alone," she said.

"Charlotte, they are not omnipresent."

"You are the one who warned me," she said brusquely. "But foolishly, you warned me in front of Krone."

Krone. I leaned to look down at the curbside where I had said goodbye to him only moments before. He had not bothered to conceal his resentment, convinced as he was that I still needed him, the insult he took from my instructing him not to return for me until morning. His quick glance at Charlotte had conveyed his disapproval, but despite his peevishness, I was sure he'd bought it—the blood urgency of our afternoon rendezvous.

"Let go of it, Charlotte. Krone is trustworthy. I am certain of it."

As she replied, her face remained in profile to me. "Krone is Stasi. That was the point."

The point, of course, of her kissing me, the point of"darling."

I watched her as she calmly took in the stunning vista. My every intuition told me that Krone was what he claimed to be. If I was wrong about Krone—

"Ridiculous," I said, not bothering to keep the anger from my voice. Ridiculous was, in fact, how I was feeling. First my son toying with me, now her.

Instead of answering, Charlotte pushed away from the balustrade, turned, and walked back into the room. Once more she waited at the door for me. I followed. She closed the doors, then pulled the curtains closed, first the sheer layer and then the heavy brocade drapes, which plunged the room into shadow. She went to the wall switch, snapped on the black-and-white art deco chandelier, then pulled an ottoman over from one of the chairs, positioning it just below the hanging light fixture. She gestured at the ottoman with a swirl of her wrist.

I stepped onto it, a surprisingly firm pedestal that brought me up so that my head was level with the chandelier. In its workings, I saw at once what she wanted me to see—a small black knob attached to a thin cord winding into the hole from which the electrical wire ran. A microphone, of course. I stared at the thing as if it were aware of me doing so.

I was back for a second on the
Stephen Case,
on the bridge, stretching like this to see. To see. Where was the telltale white streamer in the blue water? Futility itself—because by the time you do see, it is too late.

I looked down at Charlotte, dumbly.

She put her finger to her lips and made a pointing gesture at the microphone.
Leave it in place.
A contradiction of my impulse, which was to rip the thing out. She shook her head.
If you rip it out, they know.

I nodded. She took several steps back and turned. She walked past the bed and through a door into what had to be the bathroom.

I did not move. Ridiculous, I thought. Standing on my cushioned stool, wishing it were the bridge of a ship, a rampart, but seeing it,
seeing
it for the ridiculous thing it was: an ottoman from India, land of elephants. And just like that, I realized what I was, and what she was. I was a circus animal doing tricks, waiting now for the sound of my trainer's whip.

The sound coming from the bathroom was that of a sudden gush of water slapping a plastic shower curtain. I hopped down and went to her. If she did not want me to join her, would she have left the door ajar?

The bathroom was the size of an office, a display of ostentation that at a later time would seem thoroughly American, but which then smacked of the decadence of old Berlin. At one wall a pair of gleaming alabaster sinks were set into a sheen of black countertop. Opposite were a toilet and a bidet of Carrara pink, and the third wall was taken up with the tiled counter of a dressing table. Its cushioned wire chair stood before a large gilt-framed mirror. Attached to the wall beside the mirror was a slung telephone, pink in color—in those days, any color but black was unusual. A second large mirror dominated the wall above the sinks, so that when I focused at last on Charlotte, languid against the dressing table, I also saw reflections of her to my right and left. Beside her was the bathtub and its drawn shower curtain on which water was beating, a sound that filled the space.