That night, Anne slid into a blue leather lounge chair opposite Cooper in the Kempinski Hotel’s bar. Dim wall sconces reflected on brass fixtures and a wall of alcohol was illuminated behind the bartender, who poured generous drinks. The room was filled with the cloying smell of cigarettes and the coughing laughter of drinkers putting aside urgent preoccupations from the day’s headlines. Above it all was the raucous din of American and British officers engaging in flirtatious conversation with sullen German call girls, who pretended interest in the small stage where Anne’s neighbor sat at a baby grand piano and entertained the crowd with bawdy falsetto songs and off-color jokes. Marlene Dietrich’s Blue Angel publicity photograph was among the gallery of celebrity photos on the wall, casting her pleasantly sad smile on the room. Everywhere sparkling cocktails, sweet murmurs of seduction, and a nostalgic spirit for the Berlin from between the wars with its Strauss music and bohemian charm.
Anne waited for the jolly waitress to drop a drink menu, and she turned to Cooper, who told the waitress he wanted another beer. He ordered one for her, too.
“What’s this all about?” Anne said. “What’s going on?”
A stranger suddenly appeared, silent as a shadow, as though he knew how to move through a restaurant without catching the waiter’s eye. It surprised Anne.
Cooper made space for the man to join. He was tall, even as he bent to sit, and it was only when he’d settled into the banquette that she realized he was the man from the conference room. She looked intently at his face, veined hands, and graying hair still tinged with its original straw color, and she thought he was in his sixties. He had the full neck of a man whose age had crept up on his body, and she saw obvious vanity in his carefully knotted silk tie and bespoke Savile Row suit. She saw his expression soften when he lifted his face and looked at her with patient blue eyes.
“My colleague, Dick Winslow,” Cooper said. “CIA.”
Anne turned to Cooper. “What’s going on?”
Winslow leaned forward, polite, but not obsequious, a man who carried his authority without having to show it. “The BND believes your husband worked with a Stasi network that operates here and elsewhere in Europe.” Winslow let the implications of his news settle in and then he lowered his voice. “We have evidence that supports their suspicion.”
“That’s not possible,” Anne snapped, drawing attention from the neighboring table. “You people are making things up.”
“Let me explain,” Cooper said. The waitress put two beers on the table. Cooper waved off the dinner menus. Suddenly, the bar grew loud as Anne’s neighbor rose from the piano in her low-cut sequin gown and blew kisses at the rowdy GIs. “I’m the Chrystal for those of you who don’t know, and for those of you who do, I’m your Chrystal.”
Anne turned to Cooper and spoke over the loud clapping, “He is my husband. Do you really think I wouldn’t have suspected something?” Her face was stubbornly incredulous, masking the lie. She looked at Winslow. “I don’t know who you are. But I know a little about my husband. A Stasi spy? You have to be joking.” She laughed.
“Praeger believes you’re hiding what you know,” Winslow said. “He believes you helped him. He found half a million West marks in a numbered Swiss bank account. You’re listed as the beneficiary. They want to arrest you.”
Anne started to speak, but stopped, not certain what to say. Stunned, confused, disbelieving, letting the news sink in.
“They have a good circumstantial case against you,” Cooper said. “His trips. The bank account. The binoculars. Living together. Your job at JAROC.”
She stared. She brought her beer to her lips, but thought again, and placed it on the coaster, centering it carefully, thinking.
“This is all tragically unfortunate,” Winslow said.
“Oh yes, very unfortunate,” Anne said. “But not tragic. He’s not dead, at least you don’t know that he’s dead. I would call this more of a comedy of errors. Certainly, the two of you sitting across from me have the comic faces of men who think you’re being helpful. Well, you’re not.”
“Come on, Anne!”
“No!” She fumed. She didn’t say anything else for a long time. Her hands clenched and were knuckled white, and when she spoke her voice had the tightness of a violin. “Stefan a spy? He’s a piano tuner.” Even as she denied the accusation, she knew the truth. Their argument that day. Her suspicions. Old doubts were being clarified by a new perspective that came from seeing odd behavior through a different lens. She looked at Winslow like she would a doctor who’d just delivered a difficult diagnosis.
Winslow spoke calmly. “We believe Stefan was sent to Scheveningen to find a way to get your attention. He was sent by a man we call the Matchmaker, who is head of counterintelligence in the Staatssicherheit, the GDR’s ministry of state security. He has close ties to the KGB and Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies.”
Winslow leaned forward. “The Matchmaker has a specialty. He can pick women who will fall for one of his Romeos. You were Stefan’s cover. The Matchmaker built a network of spies in West Germany who married women and carried out ordinary lives, all while collecting military intelligence on NATO’s Pershing missile deployment plans, which your husband passed to the Stasi.”
Anne’s hand trembled as she reached for her beer mug, thinking she wanted to smash it against Winslow’s head. She was suddenly cold in the overheated bar. Numbness settled in, and with it, a feeling of violation.
“How was I chosen?”
“You speak German. You work at JAROC. You interpret for interrogations of civilian defectors and refugees from Warsaw Pact nations. Some of the information would be of interest to the Stasi. Did Stefan ever ask you about your work?”
She looked at Winslow. Indignant. “Absolutely not.”
“They studied you,” he said. “They would have known that you were divorced. A woman in her thirties with no children. They believed that you would respond to affection and attention.”
Her angered flared. “You don’t know me.”
“Anne!”
She pushed Cooper’s hand away. “You shouldn’t presume who I am.”
“That goes without saying,” Winslow said. “I’m here because Langley has gotten involved. I work for the director of central intelligence and Cooper works for Berlin’s chief of station. It gives me no pleasure to say any of this, but we need to understand what happened—how it happened—so we can get to the Matchmaker. He is our interest. Not your husband.”
The conversation that followed surprised Anne, and the bits of information that Winslow shared made her curious, kept her from indulging her urge to leave. She heard his confidences like a confession, and who can resist the impulse be to let in on a secret? She crossed her arms and listened. The Matchmaker’s name was Rudolf Kruger. Kruger was important to the CIA in a particularly important national security matter. The agency had lost a dozen covert assets in the Soviet Union and believed Kruger had information that would help address the matter.
As Winslow spoke, Anne recalled little inconsistencies about Stefan, things he had done that confused her, which she had dismissed, but now, when seen in a different light, took on a new meaning. His constant tardiness. Endless travel. How he dismissed her innocent suspicions with a kiss, or used a joke to cover up an awkward discovery. And there were phone calls that came when he was gone, which she answered, but there was no one on the other end. The list of things that she didn’t understand, or overlooked, came to her now as a pattern of deceptions, culminating in the drugged prisoner’s accusation. She saw the ruinous thread of incidents woven into a tapestry of deceit. She felt cold. Anne raised her eyes and saw that both men were looking at her.
“What?” she snapped and motioned to the waitress. “Whiskey.”
When it arrived, she downed half the glass. She studied the amber liquor and then set the glass down. She felt the subversive effect of the knowledge drawing her into their orbit, and a part of her wished she could unhear what she had been told. The idea of returning to her apartment and seeing everything she’d shared with Stefan as a contaminated memory, kept her from leaving. As Winslow went on, Anne felt a desperate need to save herself.
She drank the balance of the whiskey slowly and listened reluctantly. Winslow explained how Kruger was smart about human relations. She heard in Winslow a vague admiration for his adversary’s tactics.
“Kruger could blackmail as well as any of us, but he understood how to use the human need for affection to weave his web. It’s nothing to feel good about, but you shouldn’t take this personally. You were picked. It could have been anyone. You weren’t the first or the only one, but we want to make sure you are the last.”
Anne felt like she was hearing things being said about a different Anne Simpson, a woman of the same name, who shared her appearance, but wasn’t her.
“Love silences doubt,” Winslow said. “It blinds us. All of us. There is no shame in being a victim here. You trust a person you love and you ignore hints, clues, suspicions. The Matchmaker turned love into tradecraft. And when love ends, and it always does, you become expendable. Then, in place of love, there is fear. Fear will also silence you.” Winslow looked at Anne. “You are probably feeling a little frightened now.”
Anne stared at Winslow with contempt.
“There is another emotion you might be feeling. Anger. I see it in your face. Anger at Kruger. At Stefan. You’re probably angry at me. We’d like to use your anger to help us get to Kruger.”
Winslow motioned for another glass of water and saw that Anne’s shot glass was empty. “Another whiskey. A beer for my colleague.”
Winslow pulled a grainy black-and-white photograph from his attaché case and showed it to Anne. It was the telephoto shot they had shown in the interview, of a man of medium height in profile with a Soviet-style fedora, stepping into a Chaika limousine.
“I saw this.” She pushed it back. “His face is blurry.”
“We believe this is Kruger—the Matchmaker. There are no known useful photographs of him. All we have are these grainy blow-ups. We know him as the man without a face. That poses a challenge. We want to get to him, but we don’t know what he looks like.” Winslow paused. “Did you ever meet Kruger, or see a photograph?”
Anne took back the grainy blow-up, studying the man’s height and the shape of his shadowed face. “Maybe.” She saw their excitement, and she felt the power of her ability to disappoint them. “Stefan had a photograph in his desk. He usually locked it, but for some reason it was open. I looked inside and saw a man’s photograph. It was odd. I thought for a moment that I had seen him somewhere, but I couldn’t place him. Stefan came out of the shower and saw me looking.”
“Kruger?”
“He didn’t use that name. He was upset I was in the drawer. I asked who the man was. Then, as he often did when I asked a question that he wanted to avoid, he joked. He said it was his crazy uncle. He used the same name. Matchmaker. I laughed. It was an odd description, not one you forget. That was the end of it.”
“Where is the photograph?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it in the desk?” Winslow asked.
Cooper intervened. “Praeger looked. There was nothing.”
Winslow looked at Anne. “Would you recognize Kruger if you saw him? It would be of great help.”
“Helpful to whom?” Her brow furrowed. “You don’t care about me, or Stefan. You’ll use me like he used me.”
Silence fell among them. Anne slumped in her chair and stared at the two men, ignoring the noise coming from the bar. All around them were cheering voices and fits of laughter in response to the cabaret performance. In the awkward pause among them, Winslow’s pretense of civility vanished. He assumed the belligerent indifference of an intelligence officer confronted by an uncooperative witness.
“Did you report your marriage to Stefan to JAROC?”
She didn’t answer.
“Poor judgment and a serious security violation.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“We’re talking.”
Cooper intervened. “She was lied to for God’s sake.”
“That doesn’t change the facts. Or the consequences. You will be questioned. Your security clearance will be revoked. You will be dismissed. You may be arrested and serve prison time.”
Cooper stared fiercely at Winslow. “That wasn’t part of our deal.”
“Nor was her unhelpfulness.” Winslow turned to Anne, whose eyes were averted. His voice softened. “It doesn’t have to come to that. We need your cooperation.” Winslow’s expression changed again—anger turned to sympathy, and like an experienced interrogator who knew how to work a reluctant prisoner, he was suddenly reasonable.
“Stefan most likely drowned. Murdered? We don’t know. We have to assume he is dead. We want a little cooperation. We’re not asking for much. We want you to act like he is alive—missing but alive.”
“Why?”
“Stefan is important to the Matchmaker. They can’t afford for him to defect or be arrested. We want the Matchmaker to show his hand.”
“You’re dangling me as bait?”
Winslow paused. “Yes.”
She wanted to stand up and walk out, but she understood the disparity of power between them. Her voice remained calm even as her mind was a riot of thoughts. “What do you want?”
“Did you have arrangements with Stefan? Ways you communicated when he traveled?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did you talk when he was away from Berlin?”
“He called me. I had a number in case of an emergency. Jim has it.”
Cooper turned to Winslow. “An East Berlin exchange. Untraceable. No one answered.”
“There was one thing he asked me to do when he was gone.” Anne drank the rest of her whiskey. The alcohol settled the trembling in her hand. “I cut out classified ads in Die Zeit seeking a piano tuner who specialized in American Steinways. I saved them for him. He would call the telephone numbers listed in the ads. That was how he got his private clients.”
“Do you have the ads?”
“One from this week.”
“Where?”
“In the apartment.”
“Did you call it?”
“There was no answer.” Anne didn’t like Winslow, but she had no reason to distrust him in the Kempinski Hotel. A part of her didn’t accept his claim that Kruger was key to uncovering a traitor, knowing that it was dangerous to rely on freely offered confidential information, and JAROC’s training had taught her to listen for obfuscations that lay beneath easy explanations. As she made her way home from the hotel, she struggled to understand Winslow’s intentions.