Since her arrival in Berlin, Helen had almost never been homesick. Wixville was barren ground for nostalgia. As a preacher’s daughter she had been hounded at every turn by classmates who maligned her for her brains, and for her penchant for solitude. The surrounding countryside had only added to her misery. It was flat and unforgiving, a tangle of scrub oak and poison ivy. The forests were mostly tree farms, endless pines lined up like bowling pins. The few stands of natural woodland were almost invariably infested by briars that tore at your jeans and bloodied your arms. Even a ride into town offered scant relief—a dreary promenade of strip malls, billboards, car lots, trailer parks, and discount stores with parking lots bigger than football fields. Crossing their blacktops on a hot summer day was like tiptoeing through a lava flow.
She did miss America from time to time, if only for that feeling of limitless joy she used to get whenever she eased free of the flatland clutter, driving into green hills with a friend at her side and good tunes on the cassette deck, lured toward adventure by the promise of the open road. So many Germans that she’d met since coming to Berlin were enchanted by the American West, less for its cowboy mythology than for the spacious vistas they’d seen in the Technicolor of films and dreams. She’d always found that a bit amusing.
But now, surrounded on the S-Bahn by silent, unsmiling commuters—most of them dressed in black and smelling of the damp and the cold—Helen felt overwhelmed by a deepening sense of Eurogloom. She was out of place and out of sorts, a naive American in over her head among secretive, violent people. Out the window, lengthening shadows announced the approach of winter, and the usual three layers of clouds were closing in from the west. This was the time of year when the sulfurous smell of coal smoke began to haunt every street in Berlin.
Take me back to the States for just one deep breath, she thought, back to a land where history was only a matter of a few hundred years, and its more fractious moments could be patched over by unstinting optimism and the heroics of Lincoln and MLK, by baseball every summer and by football in the fall. A place where, rightly or wrongly, even the most complex problems were routinely summed up by bumper stickers. She was not at all religious, this preacher’s daughter, yet she offered up a silent prayer all the same: Deliver me from these pale and earnest strangers, among whom my worst enemies may be lurking. Or, if that’s not feasible, God, then simply leave me in peace and safety until I’ve had more time to think.
If Baucom’s intent had been to buck her up, or put her on high alert, then he had failed. She instead felt only burdened—by the weight of her struggles, by this city’s grim history. What was the Cold War to her, really, other than the means to a job? A job going poorly, by any measurement. She again scanned the faces on the crowded S-Bahn car, everyone swaying and bouncing as the train rounded a curve. In doing so she locked on to a teenage girl reading a book. Raven hair, skin as white as talcum. A younger version of Frieda. Helen pictured the girl’s dead face laid out against the cobbles of an alley, collecting raindrops in its creases and divots. Anneliese, she reminded herself. Not Frieda. Stay in this business a few years and you didn’t even recall people by their real names. There was Frieda, Robert, Beetle. Masks, each and every one. And now she had her own mask snug in her purse, the Canadian passport issued to Elizabeth Waring Hart. She wondered how Baucom had chosen the name. From an old girlfriend, perhaps? For her health and well-being, he’d said, even as he’d gently urged her to pursue matters that might get her fired, or worse.
If this was what it meant to learn the deeper secrets of the trade, then why had she yearned for so long to be admitted to the club? Even now she was still only a gate-crasher, an unauthorized entry caught in a place she’d rather not be.
The train car rattled onward, everyone silent beneath the noise of the tracks until finally, mercifully, it screeched to a halt at Helen’s stop. She stood, jelly-legged, as the sliding doors thundered open.
Then, in spite of every dragging counterweight, she hauled herself off to begin completing the necessary chores. It was time to buy a wig—blond, to match her hair in the passport photo. Time to gather cash in several currencies. Time to select a new and safer mail drop and then notify the Sisterhood of the change. Time to fire off a discreet inquiry with regard to Edward Stone, aka Beetle. Only when all of that was done would Helen allow herself the luxuries of food and further medication. Only then, she vowed, would she deem it permissible to drift away to that distant refuge of sleep. Gate-crasher or not, she was a professional now, and had better start acting like one.