Secret Father (43 page)

As we neared the entrance, beggars, including the aging war-wounded and one or two gypsy women holding infants, reached out, and, unseeing, Charlotte brushed by them as if their proffered hands were turnstiles. At the last moment, before entering the station proper, she stopped. She turned and looked back the way we'd come, and I sensed it as she spotted the man from the hotel. For a long moment she simply watched him, as if rules required that we not get too far ahead. Then, without a glance at me, she turned and walked into the train station.

Compared to what it must have been on weekday evenings, the cavernous waiting area was no doubt uncrowded now. The restrictions on travel between Berlin and its environs meant that this station was a terminal mainly for trains from distant West Germany. Most of the trains would normally have carried businessmen, few of whom were in evidence. Charlotte strode through the vast hall, heading for the overhead arrival board.

With its clacking letters and numbers, the display was designed around a large clock. It was 7:18. Charlotte barely slowed down as she took in whatever information she needed. She angled toward the wall of doorways and the train platforms beyond.

Beside track 11 was posted a permanent block-lettered sign reading "U.S. Army Duty Train," with times for two daily departures and two daily arrivals, one of which, I saw as we whipped past, was 1915 hours. Now.

This train had set the day's schedule, I realized. The afternoon had in effect been Charlotte's killing time. To my surprise, recognizing this changed nothing.

Track 11, alone of the track platforms, was bustling with people, a stream coming toward us in the dull smoky cavern. Evening light filtered gray through the massive glass roof above us, the light fading but bright enough to dominate the electric lights on columns along the platform. It was instantly apparent that the arrivals were Americans, mostly young soldiers in khaki, with duffels hoisted, but also dressed-up women holding the hands of toddlers and porters pushing luggage carts. There were middle-aged men in suits and ties—American suits with cuffed trousers and three-button jackets, not German ones with narrow legs and boxy coats. The men's ties, like my own, were narrow and clipped.

We breasted through the arriving travelers, walking beside the long line of train cars. Passengers were still disembarking, stepping gingerly down. This was an American train with English-language signs and the Stars and Stripes painted on the doors, but the cars had the characteristic rounded rooflines of the German railroad, windows that displayed not rows of seats but individual compartments, the small plush parlors that made European rail travel exotic.

As I followed Charlotte along the train, I noticed that every car—those upholstered sofa-like benches, brocade curtains framing shades, gleaming railings—was first class. No second-class travel for the occupying Army, or its women and children.

I assumed that Charlotte was there to meet someone, one of these arriving travelers. Then it hit me: Healy? She was clearly on the lookout. As she slowed at each new car, I realized she was eyeing its number. So she was searching for a particular car.

Two thirds of the way down the train, she found it. By then, the stream of passengers had thinned, and now only the odd straggler passed us. Charlotte swung up and onto the car. As I followed, I paused from the high step to glance back again. In the distance, yes, I saw the man from the hotel, just coming onto the platform, and then, closer, I saw another man, tall and bearded, heading for us. As he pushed past a laden luggage cart, he rudely bumped the porter. Behind him, obscured but evident from passengers making way, someone else was violating the traffic flow.

In the car, Charlotte moved quickly along the aisle, checking number plates at each compartment.

No one else seemed to be in the car. Near the far end, she read a compartment number, slid the door open, and went in. By the time I reached the door, she was bent over the seat in the corner by the window, like a woman looking for a dropped earring. Both her hands were plunged into the crevice of the upholstery where the seat joined the backrest.

My visceral alarm, I think, was that she had lost her mind.

"Charlotte!" I said, but she ignored me. What she was doing made no sense until, just then, she straightened and faced me, holding the thing she had found. She held it between her fingers, a 35-millimeter film canister.

"Now, Paul, I need you." She brushed by me, out into the aisle, down the short distance to the near exit. She leapt off the train. Quite deliberately, she peered down the length of the platform toward the terminal.

When I joined her, I saw two men running toward us, closing from perhaps thirty yards away. Behind them was another running man, and behind him, another.

I glanced the other way. A pair of exceptionally tall, white-helmeted black MPs were sauntering our way, as yet unaware of us.

"Here," Charlotte said. She had unscrewed the canister lid and was now calmly unfurling the roll it held. She pulled the gray film out into the light as if it were a streamer to throw at a departing ship.

I noticed how thin the film was—8-millimeter at most, not 35-millimeter at all.

The day before, Healy's man in Alexanderplatz had said the missing film was tourist pictures with an edge of microfilm, but this, I guessed, was the microfilm itself.

Charlotte had the film unspooled. It was perhaps six feet long, draping her arm and shoulder.

With a quick glance at the men rushing us, she said, "Here, hold it. Hold it high."

I did, unsure exactly what I was doing or what she wanted. I gripped the film at its midpoint, letting it dangle over my hand in two roughly equal ribbons. I held it up like a starter raising his gun, and then I realized that what she wanted was for the thing to be seen.

"Hey!" A gruff voice from behind. I turned. One of the MPs, approaching fast, was pointing. "Hey!"

The MP was not calling to us, as I saw when I turned. The nearest man approaching from the other direction had a pistol in his outstretched hand. Not the man from the hotel, yet he was someone I had seen before. The MP was pointing at him.

Charlotte had bent to her bag, and as she came up from it, I saw the gold lighter in her hand. She made it flame and brought it to the bottom of the film strip I was holding, igniting first one end, then the other. The celluloid flared and the fire shot quickly up. I had to extend my arm away from my body. "They will not release Ulrich," she had said, "tomorrow or
ever
until the film is dealt with one way or another."

One way, exposing it to light,
and
another, burning it. The film with its state secrets—names of agents, plans for war, whatever the hell it was—gone.

The pair of flames met in the air to become one licking tongue of fire. It scaled the film, rising toward my hand. I held on to the thing as long as I could, displaying it for all. Once again I was her trained circus performer, happily so. Every ounce of my former unwillingness had drained from me as I joined in her defining choice. No to national security and state secrets. No to General Healy. Yes to Ulrich, pure and simple—to see the film removed as a factor from her son's future. I was a mere instrument of her choice, not an object of it, which was all right with me.

Amid the swirling commotion of which I was the momentary still point, my mind settled on the flame. Oddly, instead of turning to ash and blowing away, the film, as it burned, was melting, an ignited liquid. I think now of the sea afire around the still point of the sinking
Stephen Case.

"Stop right there!"

To one side, the MP had gone into a marksman's crouch, his side-arm aimed at someone coming fast toward us. The prescribed posture, yet the MP was far from cool. His hand shook. "Drop that, goddammit!" His voice, high-pitched, cracking, carried an overpowering note of terror.

The man rushing at us, his gun just as ready, I recognized as the Russian, the black-clad KGB apparatchik. It was at him the MP was aiming. "Drop!" the MP cried again, and there were a pair of gunshots in succession, whose echoes bounced off the glass roof above.

It happened too quickly for me to take in intelligibly until later. The onrushing man whose drawn gun sparked the MP's panic was familiar to me because he had silently watched over our meeting with the kids the day before, clearly intimidating Colonel Erhardt. As I eventually understood, this Russian was the KGB imposing itself on the Stasi after the Schloss Pankow fire that had killed Erhardt's chief, Sohlmann. As Moscow had moved in on East Berlin, the KGB officer moved in on us—at just the wrong moment.

He was the one, obviously, who set it up for Ulrich to confide his secret in his mother's ear, and he was the one who then followed her. But the KGB strategy was one with which Charlotte had her own reasons to cooperate, and of which she needed no warning from the likes of me.

So this was the figure rushing toward us with his weapon drawn, hoping to prevent the destruction of the film, his only object. Beside him had been his comrade—the man I saw following from the hotel. And behind them had come Hal Cummings, in his false beard and dark turtleneck. His firearm, too, was drawn.

And with Cummings, finally, had come the hard-breathing Hans Krone, clutching not a weapon but binoculars—the binoculars I had glimpsed in the Lindenhof, across from the Kempinski. So Krone was not Stasi after all. He had been recruited through Cummings by General Healy, either yesterday or a long time before. Cummings's presence with Krone meant it had been Healy's men watching us at the hotel, Healy's men listening in on us.

As quickly as this knot of people had converged, at the sound of gunshots it dispersed. The KGB man and his partner, seeing the film destroyed—its agents' names? its war plans?—had simply turned and run back the way they'd come, disappearing. At first I assumed that they were the ones who had discharged their weapons.

One of the MPs ran after them, but he was crying, "Medic! Medic!"

The other MP had fallen to his knees beside me and Charlotte. He was crying over and over, "That bastard was going to shoot!" His explanation. His excuse. "That bastard was going to shoot."

This MP was the one who had fired, the only one. Whether because of his ineptness or because Charlotte had put herself between me and the KGB agent, one of the two shots had struck her in the head.

I think she was already dead by the time I lifted her from the cold cement into my lap, where I sat beside the last mercury-like beads of the burned celluloid. The film was destroyed, but so was Charlotte.

I remember trying to pull strands of her auburn hair free of the blood. I remember wiping her face with my sleeve, trying to dam the red flow away from her neck, as if she would have wanted me to protect the collar of her blouse.

What I do not remember is leaning down to her face and kissing her. But I must have, because the metallic taste of blood was on my lips for a long time. I can taste it now.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Hans Krone rang my room at nine sharp, as he'd said he would. I was ready. I never slept that night. Instead, I had relived everything—pushing up through the blue water, lungs bursting, body stretching toward the light, coming at last to the surface. And breaking through the surface with a gasp, what had I found but more water. After rising from the bottom of one ocean, I found myself at the bottom of another.

First Edie, then Charlotte. One of my permanent regrets had been that I was not with Edie when she died. I always thought it would have mattered—to me if not to her. But being with Charlotte taught me that at such a moment, nothing matters.

Edie's death: Charlotte had wanted me to put aside the self-damning burden of it, with the obvious benefit that would be for Michael. In our two brief days together, she never said what the benefit might have been for her.

Edie's death: Charlotte had wanted me to accept the independence of Edie's own destiny by acknowledging at last that the accident on the road was no more my fault than hers.

Edie's death: I had stolen her wind in the Lightning race on that first day; years later, by making her death something of mine, I had stolen her wind at the last. Through that endless night in the hotel, I saw all of this, and the proof of my overdue honoring of Edie's quite separate integrity was that I honored Charlotte's—her freedom, the mystery of her choices, her life—by not taking the accident of her death as something I had caused.

Yet one day can mark a person forever. That day marked me.

I knew that night that its shock entailed a loss I would not recover from—not the loss of Charlotte, since she was never mine to lose. What I lost was the hope she gave me that the harsh and dreadful ache of loneliness was something of which I could, as she kept putting it to me,
let go.
She would not approve of this, I know, but as the weight of this story shows, it never happened.

After such a night, I was relieved to get Krone's call.

I walked out of the hotel into a bright, crisp morning. A breeze was blowing into the city from the unobstructed flatland stretching to the Urals, a great plain that had put Eastern Europe at the mercy of the Red Army and its tanks. Killer tanks. We
were
at war.

Krone's car was at the curb. A first clue of what was coming was that I saw Krone sitting in the passenger seat in front, as he so unwillingly had—was it only the day before? The rear windows had curtains drawn across the glass. A second clue was that the driver did not get out to open the rear door for me.

When I opened it myself, I saw General Healy sitting in the far corner, looking not quite the same as I remembered him. He was wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke. As he turned to look at me, the smoke and some undefined quality of his presence made it seem a movement in slow motion. He was in civvies, wearing aviator sunglasses. He had shaven his RAF mustache. But it was him.

I returned his stare for the stretch of time it took him to remove the sunglasses, so that his unfiltered, steely eyes could settle on me. "Get in," he said.