The Arms Maker of Berlin, page 18
But she seemed most disturbed by the realization that this was the eventual fate of all aging scholars—done in by their passions, then relegated to postmortem dissection by tipsy peers at a dreary gathering around cold cuts and a punch bowl. Nat noticed her watching sympathetically as poor Viv was cornered repeatedly by the same colleagues who only weeks ago had been gloating over Gordon’s takedown in the Daily Wildcat.
“Is this all there is?” Karen asked, and he knew she didn’t mean the buffet.
“His work will be remembered,” Nat said, patting her arm, although he, too, worried for Gordon’s legacy. Soon the old man might be better known as a thief and a blackmailer, or even as some sort of blundering spy. Worst of all, Nat’s work for the FBI might play a big role in the revision.
“He never had children, did he?” Karen asked.
“No. I guess that’s one way I’ve already outdone him.”
He smiled, keeping it light, but she seemed grateful all the same. It had been nice, having her stay in his house the night before and knowing she would still be there in the morning, bleary-eyed by the toaster as they ushered in the new day. It made him feel like he had finally been readmitted to the fraternity of Fatherhood. After years of associate membership, he again had full rights and privileges, even if those included compulsive worry and constant concern.
He saw her look toward Viv with a tear in her eye.
“She’d love to see you if you could drop by while I’m away,” he said. “It would do her good.”
“Sure. But you’re the one I’m worried about.”
“Me? I’ll be okay.”
“Mom said it was hard enough when you lost him the first time, after the bad review. Now he’s gone for good, and you never won him back.”
“You keep forgetting the benefits of my field of endeavor. I’m a historian. I may find him yet, out there in some lost archive. With his help, even.”
“All that old stuff worries me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more dangerous than it’s worth.”
“Let me guess. You came across some warning from the Belle.”
She nodded, but didn’t return his smile. This was serious.
“I’ll bet you can recite it from memory.”
She nodded again, solemnly, then obliged him, keeping her voice low so no one else would hear. It gave her words more impact, as if the poet herself were speaking through his daughter, a resurrected Cassandra:
The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A transport may receipt us,
Or a disgrace—
Unarmed if any meet her
I charge him fly
Her faded Ammunition
Might yet reply.
“That’s good,” Nat replied. “A little too good.”
“I thought so, too. Be careful.”
You, too, he wanted to say. But didn’t, for fear of alarming her. He hoped Holland’s men were still on the job.
THE JOLT OF JET WHEELS against the tarmac brought Berta’s head upright.
“Zurich?”
He nodded. Her scent lingered on his shoulder. They were finally in Europe, the place where all the old things hide best.
“Assuming they didn’t lose our luggage, we should make the 8:40 train to Bern,” he said. “What’s our plan of action?”
Berta had begun courting her archival source by telephone, hoping to finagle a look at the Swiss surveillance reports from the war years. She proposed to go see him right away, and Nat agreed. He would check them in at the hotel and stash their bags while she visited the archives. Then they would reconvene at the Bahnhof at 11:30 to pay a joint visit to the doorstep of Gustav Molden, the Swiss flatfoot who had been assigned to Gordon during the war.
In the meantime, Nat would get his bearings with a brisk walk through the medieval heart of the city. He wanted to shake off the jet lag, stop for a double espresso. Then he would begin collecting images to go with all the names and facts jammed in his head.
It was his favorite way of making old documents come to life, and the best part was that central Bern looked much as it had sixty-four years ago. That made it easier to imagine the young Gordon Wolfe slouching along the arcaded sidewalks, hands stuffed in the pockets of his leather bomber jacket as he headed to a meeting with Dulles, the pipe-smoking spymaster in a rumpled overcoat.
It was Nat’s imaginative powers that had eventually given him an edge over Gordon as a historian. In fact, Gordon’s envy of those powers had contributed to their falling-out. Nat could make the old characters from the archives live and breathe. It was one reason he enjoyed his craft. The more vividly he began to see an era, the easier it was to tease out its secrets.
They easily made the 8:40 train, and upon arrival Berta set out for the State Archives while Nat secured their rooms. Earlier he had decided that, like Gordon, they would stay at the Bellevue, the posh hotel on a bluff above the River Aare. During the war it was a notorious den of spies, which to Nat made it the perfect starting point. Pricey, but the FBI was paying.
Bern was named for a bear, as if the city had crawled out of a crease in the Alps to lie down on its horseshoe bend. Its bluffs sheltered a medieval grid of narrow arcaded streets marked by grand clock towers and cathedrals and lined by timbered buildings along bustling market squares. While the arcades gave the city much of its charm, they also lent a certain hooded aspect, a shadowy sense of concealment.
Nat set out for the town center. He tried seeing the place through Gordon’s eyes by thinking back to an item he had found in the archives, a Dulles memo to his mistress and Girl Friday, Mary Bancroft, which described how he had taken their newest operative out for an introductory stroll.
Gave 543 the grand tour. Christened him Icarus, seeing as how he literally fell to us from the sky. He finds it quite a lark being here in Shangri-la and comes across as a sharp tack. A Princeton man, and his German is first rate. We’ll start him slow and see how well he learns to walk—or fly, as the case may be with our Icarus. Let’s hope he doesn’t emulate all of his namesake’s destiny. The sun is very hot in our business.
Dulles described their progress stop by stop, and Nat followed their route. He proceeded with an odd sense that at any moment he might spot them up ahead or catch a whiff of pipe smoke. Reaching the Nydegg Bridge, he gazed down at the green river, swollen by spring melt, and then crossed to the city’s famed bear pit, where shaggy beasts loped in the sunlight, craning their necks toward the moms and children at the rim.
I told Icarus those bears were like us, hemmed in by every border, unable to roam. Yet see how everyone approves of their presence and smiles down on them? He, too, would receive such favorable treatment, so long as he lived by their rules and didn’t stray. Try breaking free and they would hunt you down. So work hard, but behave.
Nat followed their trail to the Cathedral of Bern, or Münster, where the young spy and his master had inspected the magnificent central portico, a profusion of painted characters carved against a colorful tableau. The Archangel Michael stands tall with his sword as he fights a demon worthy of the Axis Powers. On either side are teeming mobs—to the left, robed in white, the Chosen; to the right, naked and wretched, the Damned.
That will be us up there someday, I told him, cast among the winners or losers. Your work may well decide which.
From there they proceeded to the Dulles bachelor digs on Herrengasse, eluding a flatfoot by detouring to the back entrance through a small park behind the Münster, with its sweeping view of the river. Today a small orchestra was playing in the gazebo, just as Swiss musicians had played throughout the war. Shangri-la indeed, Nat thought, when you could stroll to your boss’s house to the tempo of a Strauss waltz.
With dusk falling, Dulles had prepared a crackling fire to ward off the October chill. He then brought out the port, sherry, and brandy. They must have talked tradecraft, because two days later Dulles sent Icarus a typewritten checklist, 1 through 9, headlined “The Technique of Intelligence.”
Some high notes from our discussion, he scribbled in the margin.
Most of it was standard fare: 3—Assume that every phone call is over-heard, and so on. But the last item seemed just as appropriate for a prowling historian as for a budding spy, not only for its wisdom but for its strong sense of foreboding:
9—Be skeptical of everything, everybody. Don’t let pride of discovery blind you as to worth of individual or info.
Nat checked his flanks, half expecting to notice several people watching from behind newspapers and hat brims. But his untrained eye saw only shoppers on their way to market.
Before heading to the Bahnhof he pulled from his pocket the faded old matchbook Gordon had left in the wooden gun box. Nat had brought all of the strange items with him, partly out of superstition. The matchbook advertised the Hotel Jurgens on Aarbergergasse. Not a single match had been used. Obviously a keepsake, but why? There had been no reference to the place in his tourist guidebook, which made Nat wonder if it still existed. But when he turned the corner a few minutes later, there it was—middle of the block with a modest sign over the entrance.
He stepped into the small lobby, barely big enough for a couch and an easy chair. The place wasn’t particularly modern. Yet, at least on this floor, it was clean and well kept. He figured it for one of those hotels where the floors squeaked, the radiators whined, and the windows stuck, but you always had clean linens and ample heat for the rawest winter night. No one was at the desk, but when he cleared his throat a chambermaid poked her head out of the office. She held a stack of towels.
“Is the manager in?”
“Nein. No. Back soon, one hour. But the rooms, they are not free.”
Her way of saying there were no vacancies, probably. He wasn’t sure what he would have asked the manager anyway. He supposed he had naively believed that in some strange way he would know right off what to do, but this time his intuitive powers failed him. Not a single vibe. Maybe jet lag was to blame. Or maybe there was nothing to find.
He glanced again around the lobby, and when it became clear that he was making the maid uncomfortable he said good-bye. Halfway down the block he turned, feeling he must be missing something. But before he could determine what it was, his new cell phone rang. He had bought one in Wightman that would also work in Europe.
“Success,” Berta said. “Karsten has arranged for a viewing.” A male. Of course. “He’ll have Molden’s and Visser’s surveillance reports ready for us at 3 p.m. Since I’m done early, why don’t I meet you at Molden’s house? Maybe you should go up first to break the ice. It’s a nice sunny day. We could invite him to lunch.”
“You should be there, too, when he opens the door. With an old fellow it never hurts to show a pretty face.”
Molden seemed grateful for the company and invited them in. He certainly wasn’t dressed for visitors—droopy brown sweater frayed at the elbows, wool pants dotted with lint, white socks, house slippers. A bald spot like a tonsure gave him a monkish air, and his apartment smelled of dust and old cheese. On the other hand, a state-of-the-art sound system blared a Debussy prelude, and his coffee table brimmed with new magazines.
“So you want to talk about my work during the war?” he asked, smiling wistfully. “Now those were enjoyable days. Bern was the spy capital of Europe, you know. And my job kept me out of the army. No marching through the mountain snow for me, thank God. With my luck the Germans would have invaded the day I arrived at the frontier.”
He placed a hand on the small of Berta’s back as he spoke, having warmed to her right away, as Nat had predicted. It was easy to see why. Rather than suiting up in her usual ensemble, Berta had worn a button-up silk blouse the color of fresh cream. It was tucked tightly enough into a trim pair of black slacks to show every contour.
When they suggested lunch, Molden steered them toward a café in the sunny Bärenplatz, only blocks away. They took a table bordering the square, where vendors sold vegetables and cheeses beneath colorful awnings. Molden and Nat ordered tall glasses of lager and platters of Röstí—fried potatoes piled high with melted cheese and two eggs, sunny-side up. Berta got mineral water and a salad.
“What were conditions like during the war?” Nat asked, still hungry for atmospherics.
“Well, there were all the shortages. The bumpkins in the hills didn’t have much beyond their kitchen gardens and their cows. Cheese on the table, morning, noon, and night. But here? Not so bad. And there was a strong sense that we were the last light left on in the whole house of Europe. Everyone else had rolled up their awnings and put things under lock and key. Hiding under the bed until the last bomb fell.”
“While you fellows partied on.”
“The ones with expense accounts did, anyway. I mean, look at Dulles. The man had gout. All of us laughed about that. But for a young fellow like me, it was a strange way to come of age. Working in a trade where nobody was who he said he was and everyone had something to hide.”
Berta sighed and gave Nat a look that said, “Enough small talk—this fellow could drop dead at any moment.” Nat reluctantly took out his notebook.
“Something tells me you’re going to ask next about that slippery American I followed for two years.”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, he was one of only three people I was assigned to, and he was the only American. Plus he damn near cost me my job. Him and that fucking German. No offense to you, my Liebchen.” He winked at Berta.
“You may say whatever you wish about my countrymen from that era,” Berta said. “But to which one in particular are you referring? Kurt Bauer?”
“All in good time,” he said, sipping his lager. It left a foam mustache on his gray stubble. “First I must tell you about my adventures with Icarus.”
“You called him that, too?” Nat said.
“We knew his real name, of course. Gordon Wolfe. He made it easy to find out, the way he operated. Sloppy and reckless, at least at first. Always in a hurry.”
No wonder Dulles had sent the laundry list of advice.
“Give me an example.”
“Well, the thing with the phone, for starters. Back then Swiss phones didn’t cut off when you hung up. That made it possible for the central exchange to plug in to almost any room, using the phone as a microphone. The only way to stop it was to unplug the phone between calls. Dulles discovered this right away, of course. But not Icarus.”
Molden told a few more tales like that. Slipups and bumbles that made his job easy. But with experience, Icarus became increasingly elusive. Berta, who seemed impatient with the talk of tradecraft, tried to move the conversation forward by mentioning the name of Kurt Bauer’s Swiss shadow.
“Your colleague Lutz Visser,” she said. “Did you work with him much?”
Molden flicked his hand dismissively, as if to shoo a fly.
“Visser is dead. And good riddance. An overbearing liar. Spinning so many stories about every German he tailed that toward the end they just put him on a few Belgians and let him say whatever he pleased.”
“What kind of stories?”
“You are interested in lies? I thought you were historians.”
“Sometimes even a lie contains a grain of truth.”
Molden shook his head in irritation.
“What did Visser say about Kurt Bauer?”
“Same sort of claptrap he said about every German. That Bauer was mixing with Gestapo bad guys. Cooking up plots. Hell, he was a boy barely eighteen. Not that youth ever kept any Germans from behaving badly. Bauer was lost here, mooning about with nothing to do. Probably left a girlfriend behind, that’s what I always said.”
“How did you happen to get a look at him?” Nat asked.
“Easy. He met with Icarus. Several times.” Another swallow of beer. Another mustache. Then he laughed. “Bauer didn’t like our man Icarus one bit, I can tell you that! But of course Visser only took that as a sign that Bauer must be up to no good.”
“And you’re certain he was wrong?” Berta asked.
“Oh, as you say, there is often a grain of truth. The Gestapo contact, for example. You couldn’t be a German in Bern without having the Gestapo look you up, especially if you were as prominent as Bauer. Naturally they wanted to know his whereabouts. But by that late in the war I would say he was the one with more influence in that relationship.”
“How so?” Nat asked.
“Well, this was late ’44. Even the Gestapo knew the war was lost. Their people here were well beyond the orbit of Berlin, and they weren’t interested in fighting to the last man no matter what the Führer said. A few began placing their bets on the Americans. Some of them probably figured Bauer would be a good middleman for meeting Dulles. But people like the Bauers were already too preoccupied with looking out for themselves.”
“Of course they were,” Berta said. “And the Bauers came out of it quite well.”
“People like them always do, and with good reason. They’re more interested in making money than ideology. So you see? Visser was a lying shit.”
“But even you said Bauer didn’t like Icarus,” Berta said. From her aggressive posture, you could tell she wasn’t thrilled with Molden’s conclusion that Bauer was an okay guy.
“This is true. And the feeling was mutual. You saw it in their body language whenever they met. Shoulders turned away from each other. Never face-to-face, unless it was confrontational. Visser wasn’t exaggerating that part.”
“Bauer must not have been that much of an opportunist,” Nat said, “if he couldn’t even bring himself to butter up a small player like Icarus.”
“He felt he had been pawned off. He wanted an audience with the big boss and thought if he sulked enough they might let him see Dulles himself. When that didn’t work he tried making big promises to the errand boy.”
