The Moment (45 page)

“What?” I asked, thrown by this conversational change of direction.

“Radar. Ever heard of it?”

“Of course, I’ve heard of it. But what does this have to do with—”

“Know how radar works?”

“What’s the point of this?”

“It’s just a ‘general knowledge’ question—and one which a smart guy like you must know.”

“I’m leaving.”

“Just hear me out. Radar. Do you understand its basic principle?”

“Something to do with an electromagnetic field, right?”

“My, my, they did teach you well at the elite eastern college of yours—even if you never took a science course there. Radar is an acronym created by the US Navy in 1940: Radio Detection and Ranging. But it was the Brits who perfected it once the Krauts starting bombing the shit out of them. What they discovered—and I want you, in that writerly way of yours, to consider the subtext of what I am about to tell you—is that radar works when a magnetic field, almost like a field of attraction, is set up between two objects. One object then sends out a signal to another object in the distance. When that signal hits the other object, what is transmitted back is
not
the object itself. Rather, it’s the
image
of that object.”

“Very interesting. I still don’t see the point of this little scientific lecture.”

“You don’t?” he said, all smiles. “You
really
don’t?”

“Not at all.”

“Now that surprises me, Mr. Nesbitt. Because as a man profoundly in love with a woman, so profoundly in love with said woman that the happy couple have approached the US consul in this great city to inform the authorities that they are planning to marry . . . well, you should really think long and hard about radar and its ‘subtextual meanings.’ I mean, my first marriage collapsed after ten years and two kids. I fell in love at the same stupid age as yourself. But in the wake of the divorce a decade later, what I realized was that, from the outset, I wasn’t looking at who this woman really was. Rather, what I was seeing was the
image
of this woman that I had projected onto her amidst all that magnetic headiness that comes with thinking you’re in love.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” I said, standing up.

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what? Besides the fact that you have so little to do here—and you people are so obsessed with knowing everything about everyone who even tangentially comes into your field of vision—that you have to go through their lives with the proverbial fine-tooth comb.”

“You’re a man in love, Thomas.”

“My, my, what brilliant intelligence-gathering operations you run.”

“But the thing is, you’re in love with an image. An image that, in your adolescent romantic way, you’ve projected upon . . .”

“How dare you.”

“How dare I?” he said with a smile. “I
dare
because I
know
.”

“Know what?”

He paused and took a long sip of his beer. Then, fixing his cold gaze directly on me, he said:

“I know that Petra Dussmann is an agent of the Stasi.”

TEN

F
OR A MOMENT or two afterward, I experienced what could only be described as complete manic disorientation. I was in shock. But it was the shock that accompanies disbelief, a refusal to accept the news that had landed on me like a kick to the stomach.

“You asshole,” I hissed at Bubriski. “You lying, sadistic asshole.”

His smile grew wider. The smile of a chess player who has just made a sudden Black Knight move and checkmated you before you could even see what was coming.

“I figured you’d react this way,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me. Because you’re in stage one of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief—and I bet you never expected some Ohio Stater to know cerebral shit like that. But I’m sure you remember—from the one sociology course you took at that fancy eastern school of yours—that stage one of grief is denial. That’s what you’re dealing with right now: the belief that what I’ve just told you is nothing more than a malicious falsehood designed to mess up your afternoon and generally destabilize you.”

I shouted back:

“They taught you this crap at spy school, right? How to put ‘the subject’ in a position of psychological disadvantage. Undermine their belief in the most important thing in their life.”

“And Frau Dussmann is certainly
that
. Especially given the way you never received much in the way of love from your two parents and couldn’t exactly commit to that lovely willowy thing from Juilliard.”

“I’ve had enough . . .” I said, standing up.

“Sit down,” he ordered.

“Don’t go fucking telling me . . .”

“I could have your passport stripped off you tomorrow,” he said in an even, level voice. “I could have you deported back to the United States and held in a detention center indefinitely. I could have your name put on the blacklist of every Western European country. And the reason I could wreak such havoc with your life, your
career
as a roaming man of the world, is that you have been linked with an enemy agent. You can hire an entire truckload of lefty ACLU lawyers and they still won’t be able to get you traveling again—which, let’s face it, is what you live to do—because you will be classified a major security risk. So sit down
now
before I get really pissed and make good on my threat.”

I sat down.

“Smart guy,” Bubriski said.

I felt my hands shaking. Bubriski saw that. He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed a packet of Old Golds onto the table.

“Here, have a proper smoke—not one of those backpack specials you call a cigarette.”

I reached for the packet, but my hands kept shaking.

“
Fraulein
,” Bubriski shouted at the waitress. “
Zwei Schnaps. Wir Möchten Doppelte
.”

Two double schnapps duly arrived. I managed to fish a cigarette out of the packet and accepted a light from Bubriski’s outstretched Zippo.

“Get that into you,” he said, pointing to the schnapps. I lifted the little shot glass and tossed it back, wincing as it went down but welcoming its immediate balming effect.

“Did that help?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Now, just to get one thing clear,” he said. “I don’t think you’re in cahoots with this woman. If anything, I consider you nothing more than an innocent dupe—and your reaction just now reinforces my opinion. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t tainted by your association with Frau Dussmann—especially since, from what we can gather, you carried back microfilm in those photographs you collected on her behalf from her friend Judit.”

“They were pictures of her son.”

“That they were. And how many of them has she displayed to you?”

“I don’t know . . . ten, twelve.”

“And how many did you bring back?”

“Maybe twenty.”

“So where are the others?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you where they are. They are with her boss over here—a Stasi man named Helmut Haechen. Herr Haechen has been on our radar for the past two years—as he has been running three women agents in West Berlin, one of whom happens to be Petra Dussmann. And he also has been sleeping with Frau Dussmann since she was allegedly ‘expelled’ from the GDR just over a year ago.”

I shut my eyes, wanting to black out the world.

“Let me guess: you’re telling yourself right now, ‘
I can’t believe that . . . because she told me again and again that I was the love of her life.’
She did tell you that, didn’t she?”

“How do you know that?”

“The same way I know about the one and only sociology course you took at college, and the fact that your dad smokes Old Golds. It’s our business to know lots. And we do know lots about you.”

“I need proof that Petra . . .”

“Ah yes, why believe a representative of his own government when it comes to matters of the heart and the betrayal of trust? What you need is something factual, if not downright empirical. All right then. Can you remember the night you first had dinner with Frau Dussmann, the night when she first stayed at your apartment? It was January twenty-third,
ja
?”

“How did you know that?” I asked, sounding shocked.

Bubriski just shrugged and said:

“Can you confirm it was January twenty-seventh when you had that first dinner with Frau Dussmann?”

I nodded.

“And can you confirm that halfway through the dinner, she raced off into the night without any apparent reason?”

“Were you watching us?”

“We were watching
her. You
just happened to be there. Why did she run off in the middle of dinner?”

“She gave no reason. She just got all emotional and . . .”

“She was checking in with her controller, Herr Haechen.”

“Bullshit.”

“Ah yes, the man needs proof.”

He reached for the attaché case by his chair, hoisted it onto the table, and flipped it open, bringing out a hefty manila file. Then, after closing the case, he flipped open the file.

“Proof the man wants,” he said, pulling out a photograph, “proof the man gets.”

He pushed two grainy eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs toward me. The first showed Petra hurrying out of the restaurant where we had that first dinner—and the time signature imprinted on the left-hand corner indicated that it was on the date in question at 21:22. The next shot showed her entering a hotel at 21:51.

“The hotel was up near Tegel Airport,” Bubriski said. “She had to run off because she had a liaison with this man.”

He tossed another grainy photograph in front of me, showing a stocky man leaving the hotel at 22:41. It was hard to see his face, though I did note that he had a goatee.

“So she was entering a hotel,” I said, “and this man exited the same hotel sometime later. That doesn’t mean she was seeing him there.”

“Then why did she leave your dinner so abruptly? And when she did leave, did she inform you she was heading to a sleazy hotel on the other side of town?”

I shook my head.

“The man at the hotel was Helmut Haechen. As to why she ran out of the restaurant . . . we don’t read minds, Thomas. Or, at least, not yet. And yes, that was my attempt at a bad joke. So all I can do is speculate. Maybe she had to get clearance from Haechen to sleep with you. Maybe it was all part of an elaborate ploy to make her seem troubled and complex and, as such, all the more desirable. That’s my theory. They decided to reel you in by letting you sense that she had some hidden tragedy in her life. Then, when she realized that she had you, she sent you across the border to collect the all-important photographs of her lost son, on which was embedded microfilm containing something rather crucial for Haechen’s attention.”

“But her son was taken away from her.”

“She gave the kid up for adoption at birth.”

“That I can’t believe. The pain she expressed when talking about him—”

“The man needs more proof.”

The file was flipped open again. He handed me a photocopy of a document which, judging from its slightly blurred imagery, might have been originally photographed. It was an official document from the
Deutsche Agentur für das Wohl das Kinder
—the State Agency for Child Welfare in the GDR. The names of the child, the father, and the mother were clearly visible. The word
Tote
(Dead) in brackets next to Jurgen’s name. In the semiblurred but still visible legal text below I read that the undersigned, Petra Alma Dussmann, was hereby giving her son, Johannes, up for legal adoption; that she waived all further legal rights over this child; that she was signing this document without coercion or any outside pressure, and was allowing her child to be adopted out of her own free will and in the best interests of the child. The document was dated 6 May 1982.

“We have an operative over there who, at great personal risk, managed to photograph this document for us. Let me guess what you’re now thinking. What mother agrees to have her child adopted at a year old? A mother who has been informing on her mad husband to the Stasi for years.”

“That I cannot believe.”

“More proof needed,” he said, digging around in the file. He handed me another grainy photographed document. It was from the MfS—Ministerium für Staatssicherheit: the Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi. There was Petra’s photograph, her date of birth, home address, and two telling words:

Spitzelaffäre seit
. . . Informer since. And the date: 20 January 1981. She must have been pregnant with Johannes.

“The operative who scored us this document, along with dozens more, is now doing twenty years’ hard labor for his pains. They play rough over there. Then again, so do we. But, as you can see, she was working for them for several years before she crossed over. What was the story she gave you about Johannes?”

“Could I have another schnapps, please?”

“After you answer the question.”

“She told me that Johannes was taken away from her because her husband went mad, tried to make contact with American agents, and screamed at the minister for culture before peeing on him.”

“All true—except that, as you see from that earlier document, she voluntarily gave up Johannes for adoption. As for all her crocodile tears to you about having the kid taken away, my theory is a simple one: the Stasi offered her an opportunity for promotion if she would go west and spy for them. They gave her the perfect cover: the unjustly persecuted spouse of a dissident whose son was forcibly wrenched from her hands by the heinous, demonic forces of the
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
. They had her whisked away from her life in Prenzlauer Berg for months before trading her over to our side as a victimized innocent. We appeared to buy it, whereas the truth was we were certain from the outset that she was being ‘run’ by Herr Haechen. We directed her into the job at Radio Liberty to let her seem to have a big score. The people we have there, they left out certain ‘allegedly’ classified documents as bait—which she later photographed. And if you’d like proof of that . . .”

He was about to reach into the file for another photograph. I waved it away. I knew it would confirm what he was alleging. I knew that it would just have the effect of even more acid dropped into a pair of eyes that had been forced wide-open by all this terrible visual evidence.

“Well, do you want to have a proper look at the man she’s been fucking all this time?”

“Not particularly.”

“I insist,” he said, pulling out a new photograph from the file and tossing it in front of me like a croupier dealing a card that he knows is going to cost a player big.

The image that landed in front of me was of the same man seen in the earlier photograph, only this time the image was far too crisp and vivid. Helmut Haechen was a diminutive, bloated man with greased-back black hair, thick black glasses, a terrible goatee, bad teeth, and a complexion that was oleaginous.

“Now I could definitely lose twenty pounds,” Bubriski said. “And I wouldn’t call myself a pretty boy. But this thug . . . and that’s the only word to describe this vicious little bastard . . . well, ‘physically repulsive’ are the two words that come to mind when I have to stare at his picture. This is the man whom your beloved started to sleep with around a month after she was ‘settled’ by us in her room in Kreuzberg and her job at Radio Liberty. All during your ‘romance,’ she saw Haechen at least twice a week—and his debriefings of her always involved sex. I can’t imagine that Frau Dussmann enjoyed having this garden gnome inside of her.”

“Please stop that.”

“I’m just imagining what it must be like for you to discover that you had to share her with that grotesque—”

“You’ve made your damn point.”

“Now, as I was hinting before, we do need to give Frau Dussmann a little bit of sympathy here. Because when you are being run by a Stasi agent—and you have all the benefits of life in the West—the deal is: you have to fuck him on a regular basis. Which is what she was doing.”