Berlin, 1979
The older man sat down at the kitchen table in the back of the safe house and recited the words for a second time. His monotone made it sound like a lesson, or maybe an incantation—some spell he was trying to cast over his listener:
“To swim the pond you must forsake the bay. You may touch the lake, but you must never submerge, and you must always return to the pond.”
The younger man, with his arms crossed, nodded.
“And the zoo?”
“Dry. To all of us, anyway. The pond is also dry, to the zookeeper.” A pause, a wheezing intake of breath. “All of their people believe it to be long since drained, and its waters shall forever be invisible. Except of course to those of us with special eyewear. And that’s what we’re offering, if you’re interested.”
“Eyewear?”
“So to speak. A new way of seeing. And access, opportunity. More than you’ve ever dreamed of.”
The older man poured some whiskey. He swallowed and set down the glass sharply, like he was knocking for entry.
“You don’t understand a word of it, do you?”
“Some of it. Not all.”
“We’re inviting you in. But before that can happen we have to dry you off.”
“From my swim in the bay?”
“Of course.”
The younger man frowned and shuffled his feet. But the tilt of his head, the narrowing of his eyes, betrayed heightened interest. He uncrossed his arms and spoke again.
“First you have to tell me more.”
“No. First you have to tell me the route you took to get here.”
“Just like you said.”
“You were alone? No shadows, start to finish?”
“You saw the finish. There was no one at the start, either.”
“Positive? Even on the S-Bahn?”
“I took every precaution. The route was clean. I have done this before, you know.”
A long pause, followed by another gurgle of whiskey, a second knock of the glass.
“Come here, then.” The wheeze, yet again. “Sit down.”
The younger man took a step forward and then stopped, as if something else had just occurred to him.
“What if it’s no sale? This isn’t one of those things where if you tell me then you have to kill me, is it?”
The older man laughed, choppy notes from an old accordion.
“Come. Have a drink.”
“Was that a yes or no?”
“It wasn’t a yes-no question. Sit down and I’ll explain. People are dying out there, Lewis. They’re drowning with no one in the whole damn bay to save them, and you can change that overnight. As that Polish girl of yours likes to say, time’s a-wasting.”
“How do you know about her?”
“Rule one, Lewis. Always assume we know more than you think.”
Upstairs, in the room with the equipment, Helen Abell took note of the name “Lewis” as she leaned forward on stocking feet, straining to listen through the headset. A cryptonym, no doubt, but something about it was familiar. He wasn’t part of Berlin station—or, as the old-timers still called it, the Berlin Operations Base, or BOB—but maybe she had come across his name in a memo, or the cable traffic.
For the next few seconds all she heard was the sound of the younger man’s footsteps crossing the kitchen floor—clop, clop, clop, as loud as a Clydesdale—and the scrape of a chair as he sat at the table. It made her recall his polished black shoes, clunky, like the ones the East Germans wore.
The men had arrived a few minutes earlier. Helen had peeked out the window the moment she heard the rattle of a key in the lock, and she’d spotted them on the doorstep out front. Unexpected visitors, and neither looked familiar. But the mention of “Lewis” was a thread she could work with.
The wheels of the tape recorder kept turning, twin planets in rotation, absorbing every word. She was afraid to move lest the floor creak, giving her away. Too late to announce her presence. Was she wrong to leave the recorder on? To be listening at all? Probably. Undoubtedly. The whole thing was almost certainly way above her clearance. But she’d never heard any conversation like it.
From her brief observation she’d discerned that both men carried themselves with an air of competence and seniority—experienced hands in a special order, one which she aspired to join. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation of the gods. Nonetheless, she was off-limits and it was time to bow out. She should switch off the recorder, remove the headphones, and quietly wait for them to leave. With a sigh, she reached for the off switch.
Then the needles flicked on the dials as the younger man spoke, and her hand stopped in midair. He’d lowered his voice, and Helen, unable to help herself, squinted in concentration to make out the words.
“Do the effies know?”
“Not a thing, or not since Jack kicked the bucket in ’72.”
“Jack? You mean…?”
“Of course.”
“He was a friend?”
“Of a sort. The enemy of my enemy, that whole business. Last of his kind. Here, drink up.”
A splash of whiskey, then silence.
Helen was transfixed. What in the hell were they talking about? The effies. The zoo. The pond, the bay, and the lake. And now a reference to a former power figure named Jack—probably another cryptonym. Everything about the conversation was baffling, and not just because she didn’t know the lingo.
For starters, why speak in code? The whole point of a safe house was to make you feel secure enough to dispense with the mumbo jumbo. You kicked back, put your feet up, traded all the secrets you wanted in the plainest possible language. Safely, and with absolute confidence. That’s how she’d rigged these houses, four of them in all across the zones and neighborhoods of West Berlin, available at any given moment for privileged access and secret consultation. Each house was clean, unobtrusive, and practically soundproofed against the curiosity of neighbors, due mostly to her own efforts during the past year.
She was particularly proud of the job she’d done at this location, a crumbling brick townhouse a block south of Alt-Moabit. She had labored zealously to craft the most secure possible environment for the Company’s case officers and their agents, or for whoever else among their friends might temporarily need shelter from the cold and lonely hazards of their profession.
Why, then, this strange collection of buzzwords? Unless it wasn’t so much a code as a special language—and, yes, there was a difference—an exclusive lexicon for some obscure fraternity of operatives. Perhaps for someone with a higher security clearance this would be no mystery at all.
She also wondered how the men had gotten a key. Helen knew the identities of all six key holders for this house. Someone had given them a key without telling her. That in itself was a serious breach of security.
In addition, the meeting was unscheduled. When people wanted to use one of her facilities—okay, one of the Agency’s facilities—the rules said they were supposed to provide at least six hours’ notice, so she could ensure that no one else would barge in on them, and that conditions would be welcoming and ready. Before she took over, embarrassing run-ins and overlaps had been infrequent but not at all unheard of, a state of affairs that the chief of station had seemed to accept as an occupational hazard. Helen had taken pains to eliminate such snafus. It was all in the details—controlling the leaseholders, managing traffic, making the places easy to use, clean, and functional. She had carefully vetted the current cover tenant for this house, a Pan Am stewardess with Agency connections whose work schedule meant she was home only on Wednesdays and Sundays, and even on those days could clear the premises at a moment’s notice.
There were contingencies for unannounced meetings, of course, and also for use by operatives and agents who weren’t regular customers. Espionage emergencies were hardly uncommon in Berlin. But the meeting Helen was hearing downstairs had none of the snap or crackle of an urgent rendezvous.
This chat was unrushed, collegial, and despite the age difference she suspected that these men were on roughly equal footing, meaning it probably wasn’t a meeting between a case officer and his local agent. Their English was flawless, no trace of a foreign accent. They were either American or very practiced at pretending to be American.
Of course, technically speaking, Helen wasn’t supposed to be there, either. That was the rub, and the reason for her deathly silence. Unbeknownst to the Agency, she had begun making surprise weekly inspections of her four properties. It was the most efficient way to uncover shabby upkeep and lax practices. She kept the visits off the books or they wouldn’t have worked. Yet another way in which she went the extra mile, a trait she’d become known for since her arrival in Berlin fourteen months earlier.
The job certainly hadn’t been her top choice. Not even close. She’d always suspected that the chief of station, a randy old mossback named Ladd Herrington, made the assignment to demean her, to put her in her place.
“You’re only twenty-three?” he’d said on that first day, peeping above the frames of reading glasses as he pawed through her file. His eyes wandered quickly from her face to her breasts, where he let them rest long enough to make her uncomfortable.
“You do know you’d be happier as an analyst, don’t you? In the long term, anyway. Much better prospects for advancement. For marriage, too, although perhaps that doesn’t interest you. Here, on the other hand…”
He flapped a hand dismissively, as if they were assessing her chances of discovering a new comet, or of recruiting Leonid Brezhnev as a double agent. Analyst. The default assignment for any Agency female, except the ones exiled to records, or to some other “special branch” of this or that department as long as it was well behind the scenes. Hardly any made it into the field.
Nonetheless, there she’d been, arriving on Herrington’s doorstep with only two years of experience for a posting to the city that had defined the Cold War, and he’d responded by slotting her in a position that until then had been largely clerical, staffed by someone two steps below her pay grade. To make it sound less offensive, or perhaps to heighten the joke, he’d come up with a new title: Chief of Administration for Logistics, Property and Personnel Branch, Berlin Station.
Helen had sulked for a week before deciding to make the most of it. She explored and then exploited the job’s opportunities, which turned out to be more expansive than anyone had realized. She revetted the tenants, rescouted the locations. Finding all of them lacking, she replaced them several months ahead of the usual rotation. She tightened hiring practices for support staff, upgraded the facilities at minimal cost, and instituted greater accountability among users. Overlaps and screwups disappeared, as did the mice and bedbugs. Complaints from field men dwindled. She made connections, widened her niche, found a lover, and settled in to Berlin’s cold, grim majesty with a sardonic viewpoint worthy of a lifer.
And now, here she was, caught in the middle of one of her surprise inspections, silent and still and, for the moment, trapped upstairs on a gray October Monday at mid-afternoon as she wondered what the hell she’d stumbled onto.
She had arrived at the house shortly after 2 p.m., dressed in maid’s clothing and carrying a mop and bucket to minimize curiosity from the neighbors, although she already knew enough about their work schedules to be confident that the block would be empty, apart from the usual scattering of Kinder und Hausfrauen.
After entering, she proceeded by her customary routine. Locks and latches? Check. General cleanliness? Better than last time, at least. No more mouse droppings beneath the sink, which in this neighborhood was all you could hope for. Refrigerator? Well stocked, nothing gone sour or moldy. Liquor supply? Ample and safe in its usual hideaway, off-limits to the cover tenant.
Last on her checklist was the taping system. She always tested it by walking from front to back downstairs while reciting a favorite poem from Rilke. Sometimes she declaimed in German. Today, in English. She spoke the opening lines while standing in the parlor near the front door.
How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
Noting the cleanliness of the carpet and the furniture, she began stepping slowly toward the back of the house. Passing the stairwell into the dining room, she spotted a smudge on the wall to her left; above, a crack in the celling. But she never stopped speaking:
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
She entered the kitchen. Rilke had named the poem “Love Song,” but for Helen the words never brought to mind any man, past or present. It instead made her reflect on this strange profession of hers, this realm where it was risky indeed to touch the souls of others or, sometimes, even to try and shelter them in some dark and silent place—like this house.
Helen uttered the final lines while peering out the back window into the small garden with its bare plum tree.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
With the words still resonating in her head, she climbed the stairs. Her routine was to rewind the tape and play it back, listening carefully to make sure the microphones had picked up every syllable. If no tweaks or repairs were needed, she erased it and was on her way.
Today she’d heard the key in the front door just as she was reaching for the stop button. Heart beating fast, she’d moved to the window. That’s when she saw the older man, the key holder.
He looked to be in his late sixties. Salt-and-pepper hair, a bit on the long side, untamed in the breeze. Five o’clock shadow, which somehow suited him. He grimaced as he wiggled the key, which suggested it was a new copy, meaning further cause for worry. How many more copies were out there that she didn’t know about?
Then she heard the slide of the dead bolt, the opening of the door. She watched the man on the porch disappear across the threshold. At first she stayed by the window, not daring to move as she listened to the door shutting a floor below. She heard a footstep or two, followed by a few seconds of silence, and then the creak of a floorboard as he settled onto the couch in the parlor. A long sigh, suggestive of a lengthy journey.
She debated whether to announce herself. Why not let him know she was here, so there would be no surprises later? That way she might also find out who he was. She would gently remind him to log his use of the house on the proper form afterward, and then gracefully make her exit.
A knock at the front door preempted her. She again peered out the window. A younger man, early thirties, glancing up and down the street like he knew he wasn’t supposed to be there. Hair, dirty blond but neatly barbered. Ruddy face. Like the other man, he wore a tweed jacket and a long wool overcoat unbuttoned in the front, as if they’d both come directly from the moors in some du Maurier novel. Or, no, more like a pair of fellows you’d see in one of those fake Irish pubs you found all over the world, keeping to their own kind while on foreign soil.
She again heard the door open and shut, followed by an exchange of greetings, voices floating up the stairwell as they made small talk in the parlor. Helen instinctively nudged off her shoes. She slid rather than stepped across the floor—slowly, to minimize creaks or groans from the boards—until she was close enough to the tape recorder to reach for the headphones. She slipped them on, and for a few seconds held her breath as she listened to their footsteps, trooping toward the kitchen. A slap on the back. A joke about Herrington’s sex life that she’d already heard twice, followed by a snort of laughter.
Then and there, she told herself she would use this occasion to further test the taping system, even as she recognized it right away as a dodge, a justification for unauthorized curiosity. Shamed, she was about to slip off the headphones when she heard the older man announce that he needed a drink.
Only if you can find it. The liquor supply was in a lower kitchen cabinet behind a trash can, one of the last places you’d think to look. And you had to manipulate the latch—just so—to click open the door.
His footsteps were direct, nothing the least bit uncertain about the route. Then, the metallic click of the latch, neat as you please, followed by the clatter of bottles as he rummaged among them for his poison of choice.
Well, now.
It was one thing to have an unauthorized key, or for a meeting to be off the books. Quite another to know the secrets of the house. This old fellow sounded right at home. And that was when he had begun speaking of mysterious bodies of water, of hidden lakes and ponds and bays that no one but him could see.
Not long after the younger man sat down, they lowered their voices further, and for the next few minutes there was only a single moment of clarity, when the older fellow, as if intensifying his sales pitch, spoke up and said, “There’s never been a better time to jump in, Lewis. We’re branching out again. Overflowing our banks.”
“Is that so smart? With floods come leaks.”
“Not with our clientele, the Vee people and all the rest. Too selfish for any spills. Too intent on winning their next wrangle on the hump.”
The hump? The Vee people? And who were all of these clients?
The men then lapsed back into indecipherable muttering. Helen pictured them with their foreheads nearly touching across the table, face-to-face in furtive conversation. It told her that, at the very least, she needed to install new and more sensitive microphones, presuming the bean counters said yes. Budgets were only getting smaller. Congress had its dander up, and Berlin—yes, even Berlin—was starting to feel like a Cold War backwater.
Helen had arrived in the city with expectations conditioned by noir films and spy thrillers, a Berlin where intrigue lurked in every shadow, where every gun had a silencer and every safe house was subject to ambush or takeover. Instead, the ones she ran were paragons of tranquility—safe, just as their name suggested. No one ever showed up armed, and no one ever got hurt.
Even the Wall, with its watchtowers and razor wire, had begun to take on the look of something touristy, a graffiti-covered structure where someday you might stroll the Kill Zone with children in tow and camera in hand, snapping poses for the folks back home. It had been more than two and a half years since anyone had died while trying to cross without permission—poor old Dietmar Schwietzer, age eighteen, RIP. In fact, for all its formidable symbolism, the Wall was the biggest reason her posting had fallen so short of expectations. By cutting off all access to the opposition—the KGB in Karlshorst, the Stasi on Normanenstrasse—its ninety-mile perimeter had long ago robbed their mission of the thrill of the chase. The Agency’s work in Berlin was now all defense and no offense. Helen felt like she’d arrived at a wondrous playground only to discover that the most exciting rides had been cordoned off.
Langley’s concerns were now focused on Iran, where the CIA-installed Shah had recently fled, ceding power to a scowling, black-turbaned ayatollah who seemed capable of just about anything. Berlin was an afterthought.
The two men downstairs continued muttering, and even as their tone grew heated she could barely understand a word. Did she detect a phrase or two of German? Maybe a snatch of Russian?
Finally, the younger man spoke louder, his voice almost shrill. A chair scraped, meaning he had probably decided to stand. The older man also raised his voice. At last, she again heard every syllable.
“But what if it does happen?” the younger man said.
“It won’t. I assure you.”
“Nothing is foolproof. What’s the contingency? And please don’t tell me you don’t have one.”
“Elimination, plain and simple.”
“Elimination?”
“Surely I don’t have to spell that out for you, do I?”
The answer rendered the younger man momentarily speechless. By then, sweat was prickling on Helen’s spine.
Then the second chair scraped, followed by the clip-clop of shoes, the clank of glass as the older man put away the bottle and relatched the liquor cabinet. Water gushed in the sink as someone rinsed the glasses and set them in the drying rack. Mumbled goodbyes, a burst of laughter.
Friends again? Or maybe just allies, partners in crime. Whatever deal had been on the table seemed to have been sealed. Helen heard muffled movements and pictured them shaking hands. The door rattled open. A voice said something indecipherable from out on the front stoop. Then the door shut and the key turned the dead bolt.
Yet again, she wondered: Whose key? And where will it go now?
She slid back over to the window, taking care in case one of them was still downstairs. No. They were both descending the front steps to the sidewalk. She watched through the gap in the curtains as the younger man headed south, toward the Tiergarten. The older one strolled north, toward Alt-Moabit, where unless he turned he’d soon reach the Wall.
Or maybe the Wall was his destination. The closest checkpoint was less than half a mile from here. The mere thought of him crossing into East Berlin with that precious key in his pocket was enough to make her hyperventilate.
Helen exhaled loudly. The beginnings of a headache crept forward from her temples. She recrossed the room and switched off the recorder. Perhaps twenty minutes of conversation were now stored on the tape—all of it contraband, of course. Worse, her own reading of Rilke was on there, too, a preamble that implicated her in this unauthorized taping. Whatever they’d been up to, she had to assume it was according to Hoyle, at least by someone’s rules. By every rule she played by, she should erase the tape immediately.
She stared at the machine a few seconds longer. Then she hit rewind, letting the reels spin until the tape came loose and slapped against the guide. She switched it off. Now she was supposed to rethread it and hit record, erase this strange conversation forever, as if it never happened.
Instead, she pulled the reel from the spindle and carried it to a side table, where she opened the top drawer and slipped the tape inside. She would erase it later.
Then, another thought, coming at her like a double dare: By using enhancement technology, she might be able to decipher some of the inaudible portions of their exchange. Helen lit a cigarette, inhaled, and considered her options. She shook her head, reached for an ashtray, and stubbed out the reckless idea.
She reopened the drawer, looked again at the tape, and then closed the drawer. To distract herself from any further heretical thoughts she unwrapped a fresh reel and loaded it onto the spindle. A frantic sense of urgency began to build at the base of her stomach. She needed to leave, to get out into the streets, the room now claustrophobic. Hurrying, she slipped on her shoes and ran downstairs. Gathering up her mop and bucket, she headed for the front door. Thinking better of her haste, she set down the mop and bucket by the door and turned toward the kitchen.
She opened the liquor cabinet and inspected the bottle up front, its seal broken. It was an eighteen-year-old Macallan, a single malt Scotch aged in a sherry oak cask. She knew the details because someone in Langley, a middle manager in Facilities whose name she hadn’t recognized, had specially requisitioned it only a month ago. It was damned expensive, and at the time she’d thought the order was a bit unorthodox. But she’d written it off as one of those needs that cropped up from time to time in the delicate relationships between case officers and their agents. A Soviet military officer with a rural background had once asked his handler to provide regular copies of Progressive Farmer magazine, so he could wallow in the luxuries of state-of-the-art American agriculture whenever he visited the safe house. Being a case officer was a stressful occupation. Being an agent, more so. So whenever someone had a special request, you tried to accommodate them.
Until today no one had opened the Macallan. Whoever the older fellow was, he seemed to have at least one supporter in Langley. She closed the cabinet and paused. Footsteps approached the house on the sidewalk out front, and she held her breath until they passed. What if he returned? The thought sent her rushing back toward the door in such a hurry that she almost forgot the mop and bucket. She didn’t begin to calm down until she was out on the porch, snicking the dead bolt into place. Turning, she looked up and down the street from the stoop. North seemed like the best option for now, toward Alt-Moabit where there would be people and voices, shopkeepers and traffic, the company of strangers. Safety in numbers.
Was safety really necessary? She didn’t know, and the uncertainty troubled her. For the moment all she knew for sure was that she wanted a drink. Plus some advice, and perhaps a bit of male comfort.
Fortunately, she knew just who to turn to for all of the above.