Secret Lovers

Christopher, before he went to Berlin, collected an express letter from Cathy, and an old telegram, from poste restante. He had not written to her or tried to telephone, and he had expected no word from her. The telegram told him that she was going to Spain; the letter was from Pamplona, written on the third day of the fiesta.

July 9th

Fireworks in the plaza, Pablo—I was just in time for them, as you and I were last year. The clock striking midnight was like my mind striking off the months of our marriage, and then that great cheap explosion of colored light in the sky, and everyone singing and gasping. The Spaniards’ festival clothes were pure white when I got here and they were their good selves, sober and nice and correct. Now they’re drunk and lewd and nasty in the same clothes, dirty and stained with wine. Why don’t we have a week in every year when it’s all right to be a beast? Far better than doing it a bit at a time. After three days of this I’m not exactly squeaky clean myself. I’m going to Madrid today, after the corrida. Paco Camino is fighting, and oh so well. I saw him in Barcelona, in the rain, on the way down here (I brought the car), and I longed to have you with me to watch. Hemingway is not here again this year, and it’s so comical. The crowd wants to believe he is here, and you hear them in El Choko and all over, saying to each other, “Hemingway está aquí, Hemingway está aquí,” and yesterday, some German movie actor who’s burly like Hemingway arrived and everyone thinks Ernesto has shaved off his beard and is this German. So at the corrida, Chamaco (I think it was) spread his cape on the barrera in front of the German (I was sitting right behind him in the tendido) and dedicated his third bull to him, “A usted, Don Ernesto,” and a lot more flowery stuff. He thought he was killing the bull for Hemingway. It couldn’t have been more funny if Mama had made up the story, the German was so thrilled at being recognized because he didn’t know it was a case of mistaken identity, and his starlet catching the matador’s hat. Oh, Paul, you would have thought it was so funny. I am feeling alone. I hope you are too. Will you come to Madrid? Will you wire me at the Palace Hotel? Will you please? Camino will be at the Plaza de Toros there. I hate seeing joy all around me. Is that all right? Do you see me at all in your mind these days? I believe you do. You knew I was here, I’ll bet. (Yes, the room in Pamplona where I sleep has shutters at the foot of the bed and a pottery crucifix with a chalk-white Jesus you can see in in the mirror from any point on the bed; and, yes, I swam at the waterfall in the modest blue bathing suit. And yes, what’s been said between us rings in my ears, and yes, I borrowed a guitar from a man in Las Pocholas at four in the morning and sang “La Paloma.”) And yes, you’re right, it’s a beautiful song. And Paul, if I don’t have you soon, in Madrid, with me in the places we’ve loved, I’m going to be worse off even than I am now.

Christopher, standing in the noisy foyer of the post office, read Cathy’s letter and read it again. It was the twelfth of July. He sent her a wire:

JOINING YOU MADRID JULY NINETEENTH MEANWHILE I DO SEE YOU BETTER EVEN THAN YOU IMAGINE AND SOMETIMES HEAR THE SONGS CATHY DON’T SPEND ANY REAL MONEY

Because they had made it into a code, he couldn’t use the word “love” in a telegram.

Barney Wolkowicz met Christopher at Tempelhof Airport, outside the customs barrier. Wolkowicz’s presence was a calculated insult. Christopher walked by him as if he were invisible and went into the mens room. In a moment, Wolkowicz followed him. They stood side by side at the urinals, and waited for the cleaning woman to finish mopping and leave the room. Christopher and Wolkowicz had met first in East Africa, and when Wolkowicz spoke, he spoke in Swahili.

“You’re good at languages, Barney,” Christopher replied, in the same tongue. “Its a pity you like to let the chickens out of the hen house.”

“Nataka kujua mahali utakapokuwapo,” Wolkowicz said: I want to know where you are. “Door to door, minute by minute,” he added in English.

Wolkowicz cared nothing about the security of covert action operations, and he lost no opportunity to show his contempt for them. He operated in Berlin, gathering information, under official cover; he was in daily contact with the police and the German security agencies. Meeting Christopher openly at the airport, where security operatives—eyes and cameras—were constantly on the watch, was as good as identifying him, in a liaison meeting, as an agent of U.S. intelligence. Wolkowicz was giving Christopher something—access to one of his agents. Exposing Christopher to embarrassment, if not to risk, was his way of exacting payment.

“Niende sasa?” Christopher asked—shall I go now? Wolkowicz began to speak, but Christopher cut in, speaking in English. “Or shall I take out your dentures and throw them in the urinal?”

Wolkowicz showed his porcelain teeth. They were a sore point with him; a torturer had taken his natural teeth during the last war after he had parachuted into Burma, into the middle of a Japanese patrol.

“Wait inside till you see me go by in a blue Mercedes with local plates, last two numbers 56, then take a cab,” Wolkowicz said. “I’ll stay ahead of the cab. Get off at Kempinsky’s Hotel. Walk around the block and I’ll pick you up in front of the hotel when you reappear. If all’s well, transfer your briefcase from your left hand to your right.”

He walked out of the room. Christopher lingered, washed his hands and face. He left a mark in the saucer for the old woman. Wolkowicz, he saw, had tipped her ten pfennigs.

In the safe house, an actual house in Spandau rather than an apartment, Wolkowicz drank beer from a bottle and watched while a technician disguised Christopher. The technician fitted a dark wig, salted with gray hair, over his head, and affixed matching eyebrows with spirit gum. Christopher refused a beard. The technician stepped back like a painter observing a brushstroke, and changed one pair of windowpane eyeglasses for another, tinted yellow. “Your eyes are easy to remember, we’ll just make it a little harder,” he said. “And your face is too lean; we can take care of that.” He hooked a finger in the corner of Christopher’s mouth, slipped a thin sponge between his teeth and the inside of his cheek, took it back out, trimmed it with his scissors. “I think a little pancake, don’t you, Barney?” he said. “And if we shadow those eyes, they won’t look so blue.”

“The sponges change his voice, they always do,” the technician said. “He’ll be speaking German. Will the asset be able to tell he’s a foreigner?”

“Then he ought to have German clothes instead of that stuff he has on. It has Brooks Brothers written all over it.”

“Then I’d better go,” the technician said. He walked around Christopher slowly, shining a bright lamp on his head. “You’ll do,” he said. “Just give the equipment back to Barney—and, oh, don’t drink anything with those sponges in your cheeks. It makes you squirt when you talk. We almost drowned an asset once, spoiled the whole effect.”

Wolkowicz let the technician out. When he came back and spoke to Christopher his voice was friendly; the disguise, Christopher supposed, had something to do with it.

“Now this asset is not the brightest kid in the world,” Wolkowicz said, “so don’t go too fast with him, and for Christ’s sake don’t let him get the idea that he’s in on anything important. He’s always after more money and I don’t want him bringing you up as a justification. His name is Wolfram. I’ll introduce you and leave. Actually I’ll be down-cellar on the earphones. We can’t spare a tech for something like this. If you want me up here, say that you have a nephew in Munich.”

“Wolfram can be a little odd. He carries a gun, and I know you don’t believe in violence.”

Wolfram, though he could not have been older than twenty-five, was totally bald. When he removed his Tyrolean hat, after coming in out of the July sun, his skull shone with sweat. He shook hands with Christopher, then mopped his head with a handkerchief already damp from earlier use. The blinds were drawn in the room where he and Christopher sat in facing chairs; Wolkowicz, before he left, put two bottles of cold beer on the table between them. He gave Christopher a winking smile. The straps of Wolkowicz’s shoulder holster were clearly visible under his summer jacket. He always went armed; the fact that this was obvious was, like having a disguise detected, one of the signs that Wolkowicz flashed to his agents that they were dealing with a real spy.

Christopher let Wolfram quench his thirst before he began to speak to him. The young German drank off most of his bottle of beer in one long pull. Wolkowicz had provided no glasses.

“Almost a kilometer, from the S-Bahn station at Spandau-West. I was a little behind time, so I ran part of the way.”

Wolfram pointed a thumb over his shoulder and spoke the name by which he knew Wolkowicz. “We call him Krupp because he loves his cannons so.”

The German settled back in his chair, his ankle thrown over his knee. He eyed Christopher’s untouched bottle of beer; he had swallowed his own so quickly that his scalp was sweating again, and he wiped away the moisture with his sleeve. His shirt, under his woolen jacket, was soaked and transparent. Christopher uncapped the second bottle and gave it to Wolfram; the faint skunklike aroma of German beer escaped from the neck of the bottle.

Christopher spread a half-dozen glossy photographs on the table under the strong light that the makeup technician had used. These were pictures of European men, some of them studio portraits, others candid shots of unwitting subjects. Wolfram leaned forward and moved aside with a stiff forefinger all but two photographs. One was a passport photo of Horst Bülow; the other showed Bülow in an overcoat and hat, crossing a Berlin street with a bombed wall in the background.

Wolfram gave Christopher a complete physical description, an inventory of Bülow’s mannerisms, the brand of cigarettes he smoked, his drinking habits, a list of restaurants he frequented in West Berlin. “He lived in East Berlin, in Christburger strasse,” Wolfram said; he gave a music-hall smirk. “That street is near some hospitals. The subject used to go out in the evenings and in the mornings and watch the nurses come and go when the work shifts changed. He liked to look at nurses, but he never approached one.”

“I don’t know. I was assigned to surveille him for several weeks last winter, then I was put onto something else. I don’t ask what I don’t need to know.”

“So would you,” Christopher said. “Your orders are to cooperate fully with me. If you haven’t understood, I can contact your superiors and have them repeat your instructions in my presence.”

Christopher sat bolt upright, speaking in harsh German. There had been, on Wolfram’s face, the beginnings of a smirk. As Christopher spoke, he cocked his head as if listening for an accent. Hearing none, his face cleared itself of all expression. He uncrossed his legs, sat up straight, put down his beer bottle. He took a notebook from an inside pocket and opened it.

“These are my field notes,” Wolfram said. “I received the assignment to carry out a spot surveillance of this subject on January 30. Surveillance commenced at 0700 on 1 February, and continued, with one nine-day interruption, from 1 March to 10 March, until 24 March, at which time the assignment was terminated. I spent a total of 156 hours in actual surveillance of this subject.”

“Yes, sir. The nurses were from the Prenzlauer Berg Hospital, which is in the East. I went where he was, wherever he was, when I was on duty.”

Wolfram closed his notebook, marking the place with a finger, and made a show of collecting his thoughts.

“Number one, he was nervous, a regular alley cat, always looking around to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Of course, he never spotted me.”

“Because he never tried to lose me, and he never tried to lead me on wild-goose chases. When he went someplace, he always had something to do when he got there.”

“That could have been professionalism. Perhaps he knew you were on his back.”

Wolfram laughed, “Never. You would have seen, if you had been behind him. This man was no professional. I followed him by myself, with no partners, alone, and never once lost him. That tells you something.”

“To work every morning, right on time. Home every evening, right on time. He’d stop and have one beer on weeknights, always at the same Stube. He bought cold food and ate it alone in his room. He was very careful with money. But one night a week, Saturday, he’d cross into the West and have a tremendous big meal at a fancy restaurant; he’d find a whore first and take her with him to dinner, then go home with her for an hour, never more.”

“Always different, always young. He’d dance with them—take them to places like the roof of the Hilton and buy them champagne cocktails. All week, evidently, he ate cold sausage alone in his room in order to have this night in West Berlin with a girl he had to pay for.”

“And this is what he always did, without fail, when he came into West Berlin?”

“So I thought for a while. I used to follow him to the girl’s place, wait outside, take him home on the S-Bahn, see him into the door, and then go home myself. One night he made a lot of phone calls from public booths. I thought I’d wait around outside his place a little longer. It wasn’t too cold.”

“And at two o’clock in the morning, out he came, in his usual shabby clothes, with his briefcase, and walked across the zone frontier. He went the long way, up north, and through a bombed building instead of using a street.”

“I was too far behind—after all, we were practically the only two people on foot in Berlin at that hour and I had to stay out of sight. Also, the car had no lights on. It was a new car, an Opel.”

Wolfram opened his notebook and ran a finger down the page. “Sunday morning, February 7.”

Wolfram laughed. “My dear friend, it was almost dawn. It was starting to rain. I’d walked fifteen kilometers. The subject had gone somewhere in a car. I went home and went to bed.”

“I don’t know that. If they had, more than one man would have been used. I assumed we were spotting, assessing.”

“It was a dark-colored Opel Kapitän, and if I ever saw it again, this subject certainly was not inside it.”

Christopher had never met Bülow on a Sunday morning and never in Schiller Park. He wasn’t surprised that Horst, doubled, would stay in a pattern—early-morning contact in a park—nor that he would sneak across the border, clambering through ruins like a commando, if left to his own devices. For Christopher’s meetings he had been instructed to ride the S-Bahn, crossing in the rush hour, and to pass the evening in a cinema or a theater, afterward eating a simpler supper than the ones he had bought for his tarts, and to make a secure contact in a secure location. But that had been Christopher’s planning, not Horst’s—and not that of the unknown people in the Opel.

“This period in February, from the seventh to the end,” Christopher said. “What else did you observe?”

Wolfram had been trained to speak when spoken to; Christopher knew it was no use waiting for him to volunteer information. He had to be activated, like a soldier in ranks, by voice commands.

“This contact took place at 0818 exactly, on Monday, February 15, in the English Garden in the Tiergarten,” Wolfram said. “The contact was a woman. Clandestine signals were exchanged. The male subject removed his left glove; the female covered her mouth with her right hand and coughed. They walked together for a time, then sat down on a bench. The contact lasted fourteen minutes.”

Wolfram described the meeting between Bülow and the woman as Wilson had described it in the American Cathedral in Paris: they spoke Russian, an envelope passed, Bülow went to the bank, the woman went into the American Consulate.

“If there was only you on the surveillance, how do you know where both went?”

“That day there were two of us. I had an assistant. For him it was a training exercise. I put him on the man when they split; I took the woman.”

Christopher questioned Wolfram about the woman’s appearance. He described her coat: green with a fur collar. She wore a fur hat; her hair wasn’t visible. She held a scarf in front of her face; the day was windy and bitter, so it was a natural gesture. Christopher spread another set of photographs on the table. Wolfram could identify none of the women. Christopher went on to something else.

“On the last days of the surveillance, up through March 24, did you observe anything?”

Wolfram checked his notebook again. “All routine until the twenty-fourth. Then, after work, he went home as usual, but went right back out again. He went to the station and took a train to Dresden—the 18:05. I didn’t follow; I have no papers for the East Zone outside Berlin.”

“Yes. But before he went to the station he took the S-Bahn into West Berlin and made a telephone call from a booth. I got the last three digits he dialed—two seven five. And the first two—eight four.”

“He said, I have it down here, ‘Here is Heinz. Let’s have an early breakfast tomorrow. Eighteen after the hour.’ Then he rang off, got back on the S-Bahn, rode it to East Berlin, and took the Dresden train. Obviously he was setting up a clandestine meeting.”

Christopher knew: eighteen after the hour of eight on March 25, by the zoo. Bülow had been six minutes early for his own murder.

“Anyway, we ended the surveillance on that day, the twenty-fourth,” Wolfram said. “I wasn’t told why. I didn’t ask.”

Christopher touched the photographs of the women one after the other, trying one last time to stir Wolfram’s memory. But the German shook his head. “She was wearing too many clothes,” he said. “I never saw her face.”

“Normal, a little harder than usual for a woman, but they were speaking low and I was twenty meters away. I had my young helper walk by to try to overhear, but all he could tell was that they were speaking Russian.”

“One thing only,” he said. “It was the way she smoked. She would light a cigarette, take one very long inhalation—only one—and then throw the cigarette away. I thought that was very wasteful. Not like a Russian.”

Wolkowicz held out his hand and Christopher gave him the tinted eyeglasses he had been wearing and the salt-and-pepper wig. Wolkowicz, smiling, removed Christopher’s false eyebrows with two quick motions. “Like ripping Band-Aids off a kid,” he said, “the faster you do it, the less they notice it.” Christopher went into the bathroom and washed his face; he used alcohol to remove the traces of glue above his eyes.

“That was a nice piece of handling you did on Wolfram,” Wolkowicz said. “Of course, you sound like a high-class German, and look like one too with those thin lips and mean eyes.”

They were back in the sitting room. Dusk had fallen. Wolkowicz, while Christopher was out of the room, had taken away the bottles that he and Wolfram had handled, and washed and smashed them. The drapes were still drawn, and one dim light burned on a side table.

Wolcowicz put a recording of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony on the phonograph. Hearing it as he approached the door, Wilson would know that it was all right to enter.

Christopher and Wolkowicz did not speak to one another while they waited; Wolkowicz had heard everything that had passed between Christopher and Wolfram, and he would add anything he wished in Wilson’s presence. Nor did he offer Christopher anything more to drink: he had already destroyed one set of fingerprints, smashing the beer bottles and wiping the furniture; the odor of American spray wax lingered in the unventilated room. Christopher sat in an upholstered chair, well away from the polished surface. Wolkowicz listened to the music with his hands cupped behind his ears; it was a trick Cathy had, she said it captured more sound. Christopher wondered if Wolkowicz was a musician. It was useless to ask; Wolkowicz answered all questions except official requests for information with sarcasm.

Wilson, when he arrived, asked Wolkowicz for an assessment of the young German Christopher had just interviewed.

“A good gumshoe,” Wolkowicz said. “He’s very good at simple jobs. Dogged, but no imagination. Just what you want.”

Christopher spoke the phrase, signaling success, that they had arranged between them, knowing that they would have to discuss this matter in Wolcowicz’s presence. “We went over all the details,” Christopher said. “He added a dimension or two.”

“I suppose,” he said, “that you fellows must want something else from us.”

“The digits Wolfram noted down when Horst was phoning on the night before he was killed,” Christopher said.

“Ah. Eight four blank blank two seven five. I checked that out before you got here, thinking you’d want to know. I have here a list of all Berlin numbers that begin and end thusly, and you’re free to call them one by one.”

It was a long list, and it included three hotels and several public phone booths. They all knew there was no point in doing what Wolkowicz suggested.

“I might be able to narrow it down a little for you,” Wolkowicz said, “but I’d like a thing or two, not much. I’d like a full briefing, in the next five minutes, Christopher, about what the hell is going on. You got a man killed on my territory. Your fucking operations cause me more trouble than the opposition. You and Patchen and the rest of you CA types think you can do whatever you like under that global charter you think you’ve got, come in and run ops under my protection and tell me nothing. So far, I’ve given you everything you asked for. I want my money, and I want it now.”

Wilson wasn’t used to hearing one officer speak to another in this way. He said, “Barney, Paul has been on the sidewalk as much as anyone.”

“I know twice as much about that subject as you do,” Wolkowicz said. “I’ve seen Christopher work. There’s nothing personal in this. Paul knows that.”

Wolkowicz touched a switch under the rug with the sole of his shoe. Christopher told him what Wolfram’s information had confirmed. Wolkowicz, stung, lurched forward in his chair.

“That’s the question, isn’t it? You see the obvious reason—we were supposed to detect the opposition’s hand in Bülow’s death. That was supposed to make us reckless—and it did. But what’s the real reason, the one in the guts? It must be something powerful, and black as hell. They really wanted the silence of the grave for all concerned.”

Wolkowicz walked around the room, excited by new secrets. He said, “You have to admire the tradecraft, Paul. Meeting at eighteen after the hour, pickups in a blacked-out car, contacts in the open air, using the female Russian-speaker. The hit with the car. Its KGB technique right down the line.”

“Yes. And I’ll bet you a gallon of Bowle that she spotted Wolfram and friend in the Tiergarten. That’s why she went into the American Consulate. She’d have assumed Wolfram was on the other side, and that would double the hazard for Horst.”

“It’s something Horst used to drink, when he was young and happy,” Christopher said.

He had taken them to a steam bath near Schiller Park. Men and women, few of them beautiful, walked about naked in the hot mists, and plunged into bubbling pools of water dyed blue, red, and green. The three Americans sat, alone except for a stringy woman who stared fixedly at the bullet wounds on their bodies—the neat puncture and incision on Christopher’s knee; the puckered shrapnel scars on Wilson’s flanks; the row of red dots like surprised crayon mouths that had been left by the exit of small-caliber Japanese machine-gun rounds on Wolkowicz’s rib cage.

“Are you a scar freak?” Wolkowicz asked her. “My friend here has one of only three circumcisions remaining in Germany. Come closer if you like.”

Wolkowicz was in a cheerful mood. Learning a new secret always made him happy; over the years, Christopher had fed him many bits of information. Wolkowicz was an honest trader who gave value for value. A few hours before, almost as soon as he had heard the truth from Christopher, he had offered something in return.

“The phone number,” he had said earlier, when they were still in the safe house in Spandau. “My guess would be it’s the Schaefer Baths, in Wedding. It’s on the list, under S. The fellow who runs it is a sort of universal dead-drop and antenna. We use him, just a little. The Polizei think that the opposition uses him. They know that the Berlin criminal element uses him—he’s an arranger. A public figure. Everyone tolerates him because everyone can tap in. And he has a nice little business in the baths. On Saturday night more fornication is arranged in those steam rooms than in the rest of the city combined. What you see is what you get.”

Wilson, his file cards out, had asked a number of background questions. During the war, Wolkowicz said, the owner of the Schaefer Baths had been an enlisted man in the SS, a clerk in the occupation of France; when the Abwehr was absorbed in 1944, the man had moved to the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail to help collate Abwehr files with the general security files of Himmler’s apparatus.

“Schaefer was one of the forgivables,” Wolkowicz said. “After the war he was de-Nazified, having cooperated like a prize student, and sent home to Berlin. He changed his name. Our side gave him genuine documentation as a member of the fighting SS named Karl Schaefer.”

“I suppose he salted something away while he was in the SS; a lot of sergeants came out of that war rich.”

“He was an under-headwaiter at the old Jockey Restaurant in Berlin in the late twenties and thirties. It was blown up by our brave aviators, so when peace returned he had to find some other way to fleece his betters.”

“Openly, in ’39. But he’d been a Gestapo informer for years. It, the Gestapo, existed as a secret police under the Weimar Republic, you know. The Nazis inherited it—and refined it, as you might say. Karl went way back. He was giving them bits and pieces while he was working at the Jockey. Waiters hear a lot of stuff.”

Wilson took his sensitive file out of his pocket and leafed through the little stack of file cards. He was confirming dates and names. Christopher had already made the connections, but Wilson was a researcher, not an artist.

“Okay,” Wilson said. “Bülow was at the Hotel Lutetia as a captain in the Abwehr’s secret field police, Section III F, from May 1943 until early August 1944. He and Schaefer met there, certainly. And, of course, at the Jockey before the war.”

“Its just a matter of blowing the dust off,” Wilson said. “The contacts are there. They’re always there. You just have to find the cross-references.”

“There are two ways to handle this,” he told Christopher. “You can expose yourself to Schaefer and ask your own questions. Or you can let me shake the tree. I won’t make a recommendation.”

Christopher realized that it was just a matter of confirmation now. He asked Wilson if he would remain behind for a few hours and bring Wolkowicz’s information with him to Paris.

“You have to realize,” Wolkowicz said, “that old Karl isn’t going to tell us the identity of the driver of that black Opel that killed Bülow. He doesn’t owe us that much.”

“All I want is the auspices—whether it was free-lance or an organization. And how the killing was set up. I’d like the phone codes, the dates, the amount that was paid. If there was a sighting in this place—that, too.”

“Yes,” Christopher said. “You can use CA funds, and you can put in a formal bill so that your hand shows in the file. It’ll show in Bud’s report anyway.”

Christopher stood up. Wolkowicz, reclining on the smooth wooden slats of the bench in the sauna room, raised himself on an elbow. He shook hands with Christopher. Their bodies glistened with sweat.

“Paul,” Wolkowicz said, “for whatever it’s worth, I don’t take any pleasure in this. We have different philosophies and different methods and all that. But I don’t like to see you kicked in the crotch.”

Christopher took a cold shower and dressed. His locker had not been disturbed, the marks he had left were untouched. The man at the desk, a battered middle-aged German with the manners of a clever servant, called a taxi. He paid no obvious attention to Christopher, who had come in fifteen minutes before Wolkowicz and Wilson, and was leaving while they remained. The man wore a white singlet with the name of the bath house printed across the chest. On the inside of his heavy biceps was the tattooed double lightning flash of the SS. Schaefer might have been rewarded with a new name, but he had kept the real marks of his identity.

FOURTEEN