Anne was becoming accustomed to surprises, but she wasn’t prepared for the scene that she encountered when she got off the elevator. Chrystal sat slumped against the hall’s chipped plaster wall, her legs straight out, quietly weeping. Her wig was in the corner and her face was bruised and bloody.
Anne was on her knees at her side, her voice urgent. “What happened?”
Chrystal’s whole body shuddered in one convulsive spasm and she looked up with pain and embarrassment. Anne saw a split lip and a purpled cheek. Tears mixed with eye shadow and streaked down her cheeks.
“Who did this?”
Chrystal breathed deeply and leaned her head back against the wall, but said nothing. She tried to smile but winced when her lips parted. “I must look like a mess.”
Anne put a hand on her cheek. “You’re fine. You don’t have to tell me.”
Chrystal’s eyes dropped to the floor. “He took my purse.” She presented her wrist. “And my watch. He hit me when I pushed him away. He didn’t look suspicious when we met at Neues Ufer, but it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for.” Chrystal stood up.
Anne’s face was flush from the cold and her track suit was dark with perspiration. They looked at each other and then, feeling a sort of communion, Chrystal leaned down to the string bag Anne carried and smelled the food she’d bought at the Turkish grocery.
“Chicken, garlic, cured ham, and I think a lemon. So, you didn’t forget about dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, your dinner,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing at the string bag. “You look surprised. Did you forget?”
Anne cocked her head, uncertain what Chrystal meant, not yet offended by her presumptuousness but also surprised.
“Not dinner with me,” she said. “I still have a show to do tonight. How bad do I look? Will lipstick and rouge do, or will I have to perform my Frankenstein shtick?”
Anne wasn’t in the mood for humor, but Chrystal had a way of making her laugh and then, not wanting to laugh, she did.
“You are so more attractive when you laugh. You wear sadness like a nun’s habit. It doesn’t suit you and your visitors will be turned off.”
“What visitors?”
“First, there was a TV reporter from ARD. Very aggressive and pushy when I said I had no idea when you’d be home. ‘I’m not my neighbor’s keeper,’ I said, which she took the wrong way, as if I’d intended an insult. She asked me to tell you that she wants to talk about Stefan. And then she asked what I knew and why the police were asking questions. She was insistent. I had to shut the door on her. She stood outside shouting questions.
“And then a man showed up for dinner. The front door must have been stuck open. He rushed up the stairs, huffing like a bull, out of breath. I thought he was Paul Revere without his horse.”
Anne stared. “Who?”
“That embassy man.”
“Jim Cooper?”
“Yes. That’s him. James Bond.”
Anne knew from her sarcasm that Chrystal’s only lasting injury would be to her pride. “What did he want?”
“What all men want.”
Anne grunted displeasure.
“You only had to look into his eyes to see a man with appetite. He came rushing up the stairs past me and my date. He had flowers and a bottle of wine. I told him you were out. He looked at me like I held a dagger, but then he stared at his watch and his eyes rolled in his head. He said, ‘All mistakes are bad, but some are worse than others.’ ”
Chrystal smiled, but winced at the pain. “Yes, that’s what he said. All I could think of was George Bernard Shaw. The easiest way to sound witty, to avoid looking foolish, is to invoke the paradox.”
Anne was apologetic when Cooper got off the elevator. She drew her bathrobe tighter and stood in the doorway in bare feet. Her wet hair glistened and fell straight down as if each strand was weighted. She touched her hair self-consciously. “I was in the shower. Come in.”
She took the bouquet of flowers he offered and added, chagrined, “I forgot. I was jogging. It was a bad day at the office. I had a lot on my mind. I just need a moment to dress.”
“Did he tell you I came by earlier?”
“Chrystal prefers she. Yes, she told me. That’s why I called.”
“Did I get the time wrong? Seven, right?”
“Yes. My mistake. Come in.” Her bathrobe opened when she reached for the bottle of wine and she quickly closed it, hiding her embarrassment. “I’ll dress. I’ll only be a minute. Dinner is cooking. Come in.” She stepped aside to let him pass. Anne looked at the wine’s vintage and the chateau. “Did you pay for this or is it on expense account?”
“Out of my own pocket.”
They sat across from each other at the dinner table. She wore a comfortable cardigan and she had pulled her hair back so it fell behind her shoulders. She had prepared coq au vin with pearl onions, chicken breasts, thick-cut bacon, and carrots, which she served with saffron rice. The pleasant aroma and two glasses of wine turned their attention to dinner, with only a brief conversation about forgetfulness and a mention of the unfolding political crises in East Berlin. She was sipping her wine when she put down the glass and looked at him.
“Do you think he is dead?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“The wallet. The witness. His zither. It fits a pattern. If he isn’t dead, you would have heard something.” Cooper’s expression was grave.
He’s done this before, she thought.
“It’s not what you want to believe, but the sooner you accept the fact, the easier it will be for you.”
She put her fork into a carrot, cutting it in halves, quarters, and eighths, and then looked up. “What stage of grief am I in? Shock? Anger? Denial? Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?”
She waited for him to answer, but saw that he didn’t have one. “An ARD reporter came by today asking questions about Stefan.” She saw Cooper’s surprise.
“What did he want?”
“A woman. I wasn’t home. She talked to Chrystal, but you can guess what she’s interested in. It’s the same thing I want—answers.”
“This can’t get into the press. It would complicate matters.”
“What do you suggest?” She waited for him to answer, but she saw that he didn’t have an answer, or if he did, he kept it to himself. Her eyes came back to Cooper. “Stefan knew he was in danger.”
“How do you know?”
“I confronted him before he left for Vienna.”
Cooper set down his glass, alert.
“I had come home late. I found him looking at the Wall. He tried to deflect my questions, but then he said things were not going well. I assumed one of his clients was unhappy. Temperamental pianists blame the piano—or the piano tuner—for a poor performance. He talked of quitting.” She looked at him. “I’m not sure how much I should say. I wasn’t sure if I should have invited you tonight.”
“Why not?”
She fingered a silver bracelet, a keepsake, turning it round and round. She met his eyes. “I don’t trust you.” A smile creased her cheeks. “But I don’t have anyone else to confide in.” She struggled to keep her torment from becoming obvious, but her glass shook in her trembling hand. She set it down. “Today, I felt like I was going crazy.”
She looked at Cooper, trying to see into his mind. “I don’t know you. You showed up at my door and told me my husband was missing. You know more than you let on. You try to be pleasant. Are you being pleasant or are you using me? What do you want?”
“I’m here to help. Leave it at that.”
“Help who? Me? Winslow?”
“You can help us. It will work out better for you.”
She laughed. “Can you promise that what I say stays between us?”
“I can’t agree to that. I’d be lying if I did.”
Anne shook her head dismissively. “That may be the first truthful thing you’ve said to me.” Anne looked at Cooper, trying to read his thoughts, but saw only his professional demeanor.
“God, this is hard,” she gasped. “I hate this.” She took two deep breaths to settle her nerves and she poured herself more wine.
“Talking helps,” he said.
Now he’s a priest, she thought. She began to speak but hesitated, and then was silent. She looked into the dark scarlet of her wine, seeing herself in the reflection. She raised her eyes.
“I knew something was wrong.” Her voice was measured, but as she began to speak her confession came quickly in a rush of words. “We rarely argued but we argued that night. I had come home late, upset, and I found Stefan with the binoculars at the window. I confronted him with the defector’s claim of a Stasi agent working as a piano tuner. He laughed, dismissing it, calling it preposterous. I then presented him with inflated hotel receipts that I’d found. I asked what they were and why he was cheating his employers. He said that it was none of my business. I pressed him. He said he was falsifying invoices to save money for our move to London. I said I didn’t want to leave Berlin. That’s when he got angry. He said the money was for me in case something happened to him.”
Anne looked at Cooper. “I wasn’t sure how to react to his comment. Something might happen to him? At first, I thought it was a normal concern. He might step off a curb and be hit by a bus. I asked what he meant and I pushed him for an answer. He said he was in danger.”
“What type of danger?”
Anne shot forward. “He brushed me off, as if he wanted to take back what he’d said. He kissed me, like he always did, using his affection to distract, but of course, I knew exactly what he was doing.” Anne paused. “He made me promise that if anything happened to him, I would leave Berlin. He said it would be dangerous for me to stay in this apartment. Men would be watching.”
“Who?”
“He pointed to an apartment across the street. A man was in the window. I saw him again this morning.”
Anne turned off the living room light and moved to the casement window. She pulled back the closed blinds and peeked out. “He’s there now.”
She was joined by Cooper who stood behind her and looked across the street at the fourth-floor apartment. Below the moon, the apartment building opposite her window blazed black in the transparent shadow, but a radium wristwatch or a glinting buckle gave the man away. Anne’s eyes adjusted, and in a moment, she saw a black figure silhouetted in the dark window. “He’s been there off and on,” she said, dropping the blinds.
Anne returned to the table and Cooper sat across from her. Anne lifted her wine, swirling the liquid slowly—thinking. “I know Stefan lied when he said the money was to help us move to London. I confronted him. I said, ‘I’m your wife. Tell me what’s happening.’ He was sitting where you are.” She raised an eyebrow and looked at Cooper. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“I can have you moved to another apartment where they won’t find you.”
“They? Who? The Stasi?”
“Probably.”
“I want to leave Berlin.”
“Winslow and Praeger won’t agree. For now, you have to stay.”
They talked for another hour. Certainly, the wine helped relax her, and they opened a bottle of sweet Muscat when the burgundy was finished. Certainly, Cooper was a good listener. And certainly, she felt awkward sharing feelings for her dead husband with a stranger. But holding on to her silence was suffocating. The wine, the Muscat, and his patient concern slowly eroded her reticence. Her urge to share nagging thoughts became a confession.
“Meeting and marrying Stefan seemed like a dream,” she said. “It was an adventure. He made me laugh.”
Anne went over the details of their first meeting, reliving it by retelling it, and in the process understanding it. “Christmas was a bad time to be an American woman alone in Berlin. I had been divorced for two months and I needed to get away. There was a direct flight from Tegel to Rotterdam and the resort’s location on the sea was enough. I had fond childhood memories of visiting grandparents by the ocean in Maine.”
Anne said restaurants were closed for the season, but that, too, attracted her. She walked barefoot on the sandy beaches in front of the boardwalk. Most of the grand Beaux-Arts hotels were closed. The Ferris wheel at the end of the pier was shut down. It had been rainy and damp the first week, but not cold enough for snow. A biting, moist chill, a gray mist, then a pale winter sun. It rained most of the week and temperatures were never lower than 30 degrees and never higher than 45.
“Like my mood,” she said. “Never enough sadness to cry, never enough joy to laugh. A quiet moody time for reflection. I chose the resort because it was easy to get to—a short cab ride from Rotterdam. The idea of spending New Year’s among loud, partying drinkers did not appeal to me. I had the stamina to be by myself, so I booked a room with a sea view.”
Anne grimaced. “I suppose I was the vulnerable person that the Matchmaker was looking for.”
Anne picked up the photograph of their wedding in a small Dutch church. A country priest performed a union between two lovers. She presented it to Cooper. “I was happy. Perhaps he was, too. Happy because he got me to do what they wanted.”
Anne slumped in her chair. “I accepted his story. He gave me a convenient explanation for being in Scheveningen in winter. Fog at Rotterdam had been thick. He’d missed his connecting flight and had a few days before the weather cleared for his onward flight to Hungary. We laughed, ate well, drank too much. At night we read to each other. From the beginning, books were a thing that we shared. The first night it was the King James Bible. There was one in the hotel room and I’d told him I was a Quaker, so he insisted. We read it for the beauty of the language. He was an atheist he said, but he enjoyed the poetry of the words. So, you can imagine, if you’re in bed with a man and he says something like that, you believe him. You want to believe him. You’re taken in.”
Anne paused. “Every couple finds one thing to go back to when stress enters a relationship, and for us it was reading. In bed at night, he read to me. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Borges, le Carré.” She laughed self-consciously.
“Yes, spy novels.” She shook her head. “A spy in bed with his so-called wife reading a spy novel. I can only imagine what he was thinking.”
Anne laughed quietly. “He enjoyed the stories and the tradecraft.” She wiped a tear with her knuckle and waved off Cooper’s offer of a tissue.
“He had a good reading voice. I trusted his voice and he enjoyed reading out loud. It was a thing we did together. He said he had never done it with anyone else. I believed him. Was he lying? Possibly. It is also possible he wasn’t. Can you understand that?”
Anne continued her account. Having shared one confession, it was easy for her to continue, and when one glass of Muscat became three, her urge to speak became a torrent of words.
“I didn’t question the story. It was no more crazy than my own. He had a budget for taxis and a flagrant indifference for what things cost. And he was a musician. He could sing.
“Now, I see how those first days he was testing how easily I could be misled with a plausible lie. He wanted to know how far he could go without raising my suspicion.”
Anne considered a thought. “I didn’t want to believe it when Winslow said it, but I now see what happened.” She’d had several days to reflect on the life they had shared. He said he loved her, and she had believed him. She thought about all the falsehoods, all the lies and yet, even knowing that, her heart ached. She wondered: “Is it possible that happiness built on falsehoods is still happiness?”
“Did you ever suspect him?”
“No. Not then.”
“Nothing you saw troubled you?”
“It was a good life. You can live pretty well with half-truths. He was a kind husband. He traveled and when he was home, we were a normal couple. We did what every couple does. What do you want me to say? He was terrible? He wasn’t.” She looked away. “I’ve thought about it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I see how our meeting was an elaborate ruse.”
Anne described how she came to understand she had been taken in. “I’m not stupid. I’m not naïve.”
It didn’t come to her at first, but thinking about it while jogging, she made sense of it. The imbalance of their personalities worked to the Stasi’s advantage. She was a quiet, introverted interpreter and he was a gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most. Tall, good-looking, well read. He eased her social awkwardness and she was happy to become a part of his life, giving up a part of her own. He serenaded her with bawdy German folk songs on his zither, making her laugh until she begged him to stop. He bragged he didn’t have to be good on the zither—just good enough. No one played the instrument anymore and for money he tuned pianos.
There was another power imbalance, she realized. The Matchmaker had studied her. Stefan knew things about her that he used against her and she knew nothing about him. The Stasi had marked her as a divorced, thirty-four-year-old woman without children looking at the horizon of her childbearing years. Gullible, vulnerable, eager for affection, looking for a man to make her a mother.
She looked at Cooper. “God, how easy I made it for them.”
Then there was the imbalance of money. She had little and he seemed to have plenty. He could afford a large apartment. Piano tuning, he said, paid well enough and despite his complaint that there were never enough jobs, his generous expense account paid for restaurants, clothing, and five-star hotels. They enjoyed evenings at the theater, vacations, and slowly she’d been happy to give up her frugal life for his lifestyle. He bought off her curiosity with chocolate from Vienna, silk scarves from Milan, earrings from Venice.
“I didn’t ask. I don’t think I wanted to know.” She turned to Cooper. “You asked if I ever suspected something. There was one thing. There had been a security alert at Clay Headquarters and we were sent home early. He had just returned from Cologne and was in the shower when I entered. I called out, but he didn’t hear me. He’d left his attaché case open, which he never did, but it was there on this table.
“I found an envelope on top of his tools. It was addressed to him with a return address in East Berlin. The envelope was open. I found a photograph of a young boy inside. At dinner I asked him who it was. He was surprised and became upset. He scolded me for looking. He said the boy was a nephew and that was the end of it.”
Anne walked to the desk and removed a notepad. “I copied the address.” She presented the paper to Cooper. “Do you recognize this address?”
“No.”
“Do you know who the boy is?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“There are some things you shouldn’t know.”
“There is nothing I shouldn’t know. This is my life. I don’t need you to protect me.”
Cooper hesitated. “He has a son.”
Anne stood, covering her shoulders with a wrap she took from the back of a chair, and she intently fingered the silver bracelet on her wrist.
“His wife lives in East Berlin. That’s her address.”
Anne turned. “I’m not surprised. Would you have told me if I hadn’t asked?”
“No.”
She was mildly annoyed. “That’s the second honest thing you’ve said.”