Anne knew that the best way to hide her surprise was to appear indifferent, and so she approached Jim Cooper from the opposite side of the street, wearing a headscarf and white-framed sunglasses. She walked right up to him, startling him. She thought him a comic figure standing by himself, trying to appear inconspicuous. November’s dusk had brought a light snow and an early winter. Flakes drifted, moving one way then another on the quiet street.
“I expected you,” she said, touching his coat in a familiar way to put him at ease. “I guess you had no trouble finding the address.”
Cooper was visibly startled. “Full of surprises, aren’t you? We need to get away from here.”
The two of them fell into step together, two people who had been strangers moments before, now a couple like couples everywhere, walking, casually engaged in conversation.
Cooper touched her elbow. “Keep walking.” He urged her along. “You were being watched,” he said.
“Really? I didn’t know.”
“Don’t look back. Keep walking.”
They had gone several blocks when Cooper glanced back, but spoke to her. “We’ll walk to the next corner, turn left quickly, and we’ll run. You’ll follow me. We’ll head for the first block on the right. There is a place to hide. Keep walking.”
Anne happened to glance back and she confirmed there were two suspicious men a few blocks behind. She looked at Cooper to judge what he knew, what he had surmised, and what she should withhold. “They followed you, not me,” she said.
Cooper pushed her forward. “Turn now. Run.”
Two weeks of shortening days brought a cold front that moved with vigor, but it hadn’t discouraged East Berliners who joined the daily demonstrations. Men and women in wool coats leaned into the light wind and blowing snow, holding hand-painted placards. Cooper and Anne moved past one tightly knotted group when he gave his order. Anne followed him, with a jogger’s stride.
Up ahead, by a small square, where the street divided into a V, a tense crowd was excitedly alive. Two opposing groups faced each other. Three beaten and bleeding protesters were sheltered in the arms of their sympathetic comrades. The person worst hurt was being carried to an ambulance parked on a side street. The crowd behind opened up to let the injured woman pass, calling out concern, and then directed their rage at the other group.
Three riot policemen whose cudgels had inflicted the injuries were now confronted by the taunting crowd. They wore the false confidence of frightened police retreating slowly. Fear in their eyes as the crowd shouted, “Shame on you.” The helmeted police were young men, too, likely schoolmates of the injured demonstrators they had been ordered to beat.
Wailing police sirens could be heard in the distance, which gave brief pause to the teenagers who held cobblestones they’d ripped from the street. They advanced on the three policemen like a wolf pack circling prey. People everywhere were a loose moving sea of humanity, shifting from one danger only to escape bloodied, and then to reassemble to engage another phalanx of shield-bearing riot police.
“This way,” Cooper said.
He sprinted around the corner down a narrow street, and as he had promised, there was another street on the right, which he turned onto, grabbing her hand. He slammed into a shallow recessed door in the second building and Anne followed. They took quick sucking breaths and tried to make themselves invisible. The perimeter of a streetlight ended at the bottom of the building’s steps. Urgent voices of the pursuing Stasi got louder, but then grew faint as their footsteps disappeared down the dark street.
“The border is closed,” Cooper whispered. “We’re stuck here. You have to come with me.”
“You have no authority here.”
“It’s not about authority. It’s common sense. I know a place where we can spend the night.”
Anne heard the violent clashes a few blocks away, but over the noise of sirens she could also hear singing. Soprano voices carried in the cold air like a defiant choir using song to battle the police.
“I’ve stayed here before,” he said. “Trust me, the streets aren’t safe.”
The hotel was an inconspicuous, older five-story building that once held grand apartments, and could still pass for a place where East Berliners returned after work, except for a red neon sign in the ground floor window that read simply: HOTEL. A plump young woman with dimples and blond curls stood behind the small lobby’s registration desk. She looked away from the television when Cooper entered.
“Hallo.”
While Cooper approached the desk, Anne moved to the fireplace, where blue natural gas radiated heat around concrete logs, and extended her hands toward the warmth. She watched the delicate flames, but her ears were tuned to the conversation at the desk. She recognized a Polish accent in the girl’s low German.
“Room for one night,” Cooper said.
“There are no rooms for foreigners.”
Anne stepped up to the desk, presenting her false East German identity papers. She looked at the clerk and spoke in a perfect Hamburg accent. “You are the foreigner here, my dear, not me. Just one room for me and my husband. Otherwise we spend the night in jail. I’m sure you can accommodate two travelers stranded because of the demonstrations.” She indicated the noise on the street. “We brought medicines for relatives.”
Anne kept talking, inventing a housebound, sick aunt. She saw that the clerk’s compassion deepened with the story that Anne told and then the girl relented, out of sympathy and social deference. Anne signed the register for both of them.
The hotel room on the fourth floor was closet-sized and cold. The creaking door barely cleared a double bed that was crammed between the wall and a dresser. There was enough furniture to fill a room twice the size. Two side tables, the dresser with mirror, a spongy chair, and the double bed were stuffed together.
Anne stood just inside, taking it all in, and felt a sudden acute social claustrophobia. This was where they would spend the night. Anne tested the spring in the mattress and then sat against the wooden headboard, legs straight out. “Here we are.”
Cooper took the overstuffed chair. “Better here than on the street.”
She stared at him, a tall man whose long legs shot forward from the chair, who looked strangely ill at ease.
Sometimes Anne felt like she had lived her whole life in one month. At other times it seemed like just hours since Cooper had stepped off the elevator and asked if she was Anne Simpson. The feeling had come to her before, and she felt it again together in the strange hotel room. The dislocation of the violence in the street, the city, the cold night. She felt no connection to anything in her life. She could be in any hotel room in any city with any man.
“Was he surprised to see you?”
“Surprised, yes. But maybe also relieved. He seemed less clever. Smaller. The emperor without his clothes. Do you know what I mean?”
“How did you feel?”
“I felt for his son. And his wife. They are the ones who will be hurt.”
“And you?”
She shrugged. She looked at Cooper to understand his reason for asking. “Anger. Denial. Acceptance. All the stages of grief balled up together.” She tried to laugh. “His son loves him.”
“Every kid loves their parents.”
“Did you?”
“Sure.”
She turned away. “Not every child gets the parents they deserve.”
Anne’s hands were at her side and she leaned back against the headboard, closing her eyes to cut off the conversation. She didn’t want their discussion to become about her. She was aware of the obvious—they were together in a cramped hotel room with one bed.
When she opened her eyes, she saw him looking at her. She was fond of him in an unexpected way—his forthrightness, his decency, and the intelligence that went along with the work that required him to hold two opposing thoughts in his head at the same time. It made him complex and unpredictable. She was drawn to him but she was also wary of him.
They had met early in her life, and later in his, and the imbalance of age made the easy intimacy between equals difficult. No good would come from crossing the line. She was drawn to him but not in the way some younger women find comfort and stability in older men. His attraction was his cynicism and the way he was trained to be fully skeptical of the world. He would never become attached and he would never surprise her with sloppy affection.
Cooper left in search of food that could pass for dinner, but he returned less than ten minutes later empty-handed. “There is no kitchen. The restaurant across the street is closed.” He held up a bottle of wine. “This is supper.”
Cooper produced two paper cups from the bathroom, which he filled, and raised his. “What to toast?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!” He raised his cup. “Nothing will come of nothing.” He drank his, poured himself another, and raised his cup again. “To nothing.” He leaned against the dresser and contemplated her on the bed.
“Are you disappointed in him?”
“Stefan?” She threw back her wine as if it were whiskey. “Yes, of course, I’m disappointed. Two years of my life I lived ignoring the clues. Pretending. He was doing what he was paid to do. I allowed myself to ignore what I should have seen. I’m disappointed in myself.” Her expression became provocative. “What haven’t you told me?”
“I followed you here.”
“I know that.”
“I get along with Winslow because I have to.”
“I know that, too.” She saw his surprise. “The way you talk to him. Chummy if you need to be. The whole of your cynical self gives you away. I could never do what you do.”
“What do you think I do?”
“Lie for a living.”
He laughed. “We all lie. I lie, you lie. You’re good at it. The difference is that I get paid to lie.”
“That’s a cheap excuse for a bullshit philosophy. You’re lying to yourself if you believe that crap. The people you work for say that to justify what they do, as if saying ‘we all lie,’ makes it okay.”
He shrugged, unamused.
Anne suddenly disliked him. “You’re a smug, not very funny—what? Intelligence officer? Spy? What do you guys call yourselves?” She slumped against the headboard. God, this is hard, she thought. She was quiet for a long moment. Her cup was almost empty and she sipped it dry. She wished it was whiskey.
Anne looked at Cooper. “Maybe I didn’t want to know what Stefan did. His absences, his clever excuses. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to lose what I had.” She looked at him. “Have you ever been married?”
“Once. It didn’t work out.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not a thing I like to talk about.”
“You think this is easy for me?”
Cooper nodded. “I worked too hard, shared too little. She was also to blame. I found out about her affair by accident. We tried to repair the marriage but we were too far apart. It became obvious the marriage was over. We were sad, but relieved. It turned out we were better at being sad than happy.”
Anne watched him, thinking that he was being half truthful. She smiled at Cooper. “Where would you like to sleep?”
“Here in the chair.”
“It’s a double bed. You can stay on your side. Pillows between us. Our own Berlin Wall.”
He laughed. “I’ll take the Western side.”
Anne shivered in the cold shower’s first meager flow, but she lingered to let the small electric water heater kick in. Her face turned up to receive the soothing warmth and her fingers plugged her ears. Hot water finally came steadily. It had crossed her mind to let Cooper sleep with her. Water flowing over her breasts stirred desire, but the thought of sex left her uncomfortable. It would come later, perhaps. Not tonight.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, she wore a towel wrapped around her. He had fallen asleep on his side of the bed in his clothes, back to the pillows. She was glad he was asleep.
Anne lay in bed listening to his quiet breathing. When she was certain that he was asleep, she removed the pillow wall and lay beside him. She wanted the comfort of companionship without the complications of intimacy. She surrendered to her need for physical contact. Her head lay against his shoulder and she felt his warmth and his steady breathing, but there was another thing that she sensed.
Sitting up, she looked down at his face feeling the restlessness of his sleep. When she kissed his forehead, she felt warm beads of perspiration on his skin. She felt him struggle with adversaries in the wild dominion of his dreams. She gently placed her hand on his damp forehead and said a prayer to comfort him, and to ask forgiveness for what she would do. Then she lay down beside him, drawing close. Excited by danger.
Morning sun peeked through the room’s small window. Pale light strengthened as the dawn hour passed and gave way to the first bright rays of sunlight that struck Cooper’s sleeping face. He covered his head with a pillow, but then sat straight up, as if coming out of a dream, suddenly remembering where he was. He saw that he was fully clothed. When he turned to the other side of the bed, he realized Anne was gone.
He found her note on the dresser. She had written JAMES on the folded paper in her cramped cursive script, which put him off for a moment. He had been Jim to her except when he first came off the elevator, and felt a need to be formal.
Cooper knew the note wouldn’t be good news. Notes were for awkward goodbyes and troubling confessions. Setting it aside, he splashed water on his face in the bathroom and used soap on his fingers to brush his teeth. He was sitting on the edge of the bed when he opened the note.
I didn’t want to wake you. I’ll make my own way back.
Christ, he thought. He tried to imagine how much forethought she’d put into her flight. Certainly she had planned it. His job would be more difficult now. Knowing that he’d come for her, she would avoid the places he was likely to look.
Cooper lifted the room’s telephone and asked for an outside line from the lobby clerk. He was surprised when the West Berlin number he dialed rang. He was certain the telephone circuits would have been cut.
“It’s me,” he said, when he recognized Winslow’s voice. He didn’t use his name. There was no reason to further excite the curiosity of Stasi operators who would have intercepted the call being routed to West Berlin.
“It’s early. Where are you?”
“Still here.”
“And our friend?”
“Nothing yet.”
“And the girl?”
Cooper stared at the empty bed. “With me.” He knew that he would pay for his lie later, but there was no easy way to explain all that he knew without jeopardizing his own safety. The audience for the lie were the Stasi listening to the call.
“Watch her.”
When Cooper hung up, he looked around the room for anything that she might have left. He tore the note and flushed it down the toilet. He had ten minutes before the Stasi arrived to question the desk clerk.