The Predicament, page 19
‘Mystery piles on mystery,’ Gabriel said. ‘I think I’ll head back to the hotel – Tyrone is leaving for London.’
Tyrone handed him two lock-picks.
‘What you have here, Gabriel, is a hook-pick and a rake-pick,’ Tyrone said. ‘In my brief experience here in Berlin, trying out things as an experiment, like, these picks will allow you to open ninety per cent of the locks here. If they don’t work, then you’ll just have to kick the door in.’
Gabriel looked at the picks. Slim, dark, long-handled pieces of metal with a unique, tiny angled turn at the end. Like incredibly thin daggers, vaguely reminiscent of the keys with which one opened a tin of sardines or anchovies. Or more like dental implements …
‘Stick the rake-pick in the lock,’ Tyrone said. ‘Whip it out – that may do the business. If not, then test the pins inside one by one. Very gently. Some will give, some won’t. Turn the pick when you feel the pin give. Work down the pins. The lock will open.’
‘Right,’ Gabriel said. ‘I think I’ve grasped the principle.’
‘Practice makes perfect,’ Tyrone said. ‘Try it out on a few locks. Get a feel for it. My gift to you. A present from Denis Ritter.’
Gabriel opened his wallet and paid Tyrone in pounds what he was still due for his Berlin sojourn.
‘What about the taxi to the airport?’ Tyrone said.
Gabriel added some Deutschmarks.
‘Keep the change,’ he said.
They wandered out to the front of the hotel where the taxi was waiting and shook hands.
‘I still don’t know what the fuck you’re really up to here in Berlin, Gabriel,’ Tyrone said, sincerely. ‘I smell a rat. But mind how you go – yeah? Look after yourself.’
‘I’ll take every precaution,’ Gabriel said. ‘Don’t worry. Safe journey home. Give my love to Lorraine.’
He waved vaguely at the taxi as it turned out of the hotel parking area and wandered back inside, looking at the two picks in his hand. He was fairly sure he would have no need of them – but you never knew, he told himself. Tyrone’s legacy.
He went to the hotel bar and ordered a kühles Blondes, a Berlin Weißbier with a shot of raspberry juice, a drink that Tyrone had recommended. He sat in the bar drinking his beer – perfectly agreeable – and registered the strange fact that he rather missed Tyrone, his good companion. He had done well, Tyrone – more than well – but to what effect? Furlan had met Vollmöller and had given him something. Vollmöller had been identified. That was all that they had verifiably achieved. What did that mean in the scheme of things? And Tyrone, of course, had been more than well recompensed for this paltry return.
Still, he felt a thin shroud of melancholy descend on him, like a kind of mental drizzle. The Furlans had gone, Tyrone had now gone. Parker had called off Vollmöller’s surveillance. Vollmöller appeared to live a life of diurnal rectitude. He went to work at the printer’s six days a week. On the way home he might shop, go to a café, visit a small bar and then return to his flat, from which he promptly emerged early the next morning. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Hence his own melancholic mood, Gabriel realized. What exactly had he contributed during all these days in Berlin? What exactly was the point of all this effortful subterfuge? Then he had an idea. Sunday, he said to himself. Sunday was the day after tomorrow. On a Sunday – a day off work for Vollmöller – everything might change.
Gabriel decided to follow Vollmöller himself. There was nothing to be gained by alerting Parker to his hunch and obliging her to re-engage the CIA surveillance team.
Consequently, he found himself across the street from Vollmöller’s apartment block at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, sheltered by a bus stop and a privet hedge with a good oblique view of the entrance to the building. It was a cloudy but warm day, strangely humid, giving the atmosphere an untypical tropical feel for mid-June in Berlin. He had chosen to use Tyrone’s scooter rather than the Taunus – easier to follow Vollmöller’s motorbike should the man venture forth. He had an apple in his pocket and a full pack of Gitanes. Let’s see if anything might unfold, he speculated, trying to gee himself up. Maybe he’d get lucky.
By midday, he had eaten the apple, smoked six cigarettes and was hungry again; and there was no sign of Vollmöller, who was doubtless enjoying a well-earned long lie-in, he supposed, on his day of rest. He wondered if he should abandon his stake-out and return to the hotel for some lunch. Then, just as he was preparing to leave, Vollmöller appeared. He was wearing a black leather jacket and had a rucksack on his back. He mounted his motorbike and kicked it into noisy life. Gabriel was on his tail seconds later as they motored on in a westerly direction on quiet Sunday streets.
Vollmöller seemed to be taking no precautions – Gabriel never saw him look around once – but he kept a careful distance all the same. They whizzed through Schöneberg and Schmargendorf and eventually arrived at the edge of West Berlin’s own forest, the fifteen square miles of the Grunewald.
Vollmöller seemed to know where he was going, heading down narrow paved roads through the forest of pines, beeches and birches towards the artificial hill, the Teufelsberg, constructed from the millions of tons of rubble that the bombed and flattened city provided in 1945. Now capped with fat white towers surmounted by geodesic golf-ball domes packed with listening devices, Teufelsberg was the eyes and ears of the Allied forces’ interception of East German radio traffic. A hill built from rubble created by Allied bombing now had become the highest point in West Berlin – perfect positioning to listen in to the chatter on the other side of the Wall. There were too many ironies to list, Gabriel thought, following Vollmöller as he skirted the artificial hill. It was enough to recognize the facts.
Vollmöller parked his bike by some waterworks next to a small lake and headed off at a brisk pace down a gravelled roadway that led deeper into the forest. Gabriel dutifully kept a careful distance, fifty yards back, concentrating on Vollmöller’s striding figure, his bouncing rucksack a helpful visual aid. The park was busy. Families wandering around, picnicking, couples sunbathing, people playing games, throwing balls and quoits at each other, children running after dogs – the place was thronged with Berliners enjoying the last clement hours of the weekend.
It was apparent, as they progressed, that Vollmöller was going as deep as he could into the forest, leaving the idling Berliners to their pastimes and heading down ever-narrowing tracks and footpaths. He strode around a small swampy lake and took what looked like a deer-path that disappeared into a dense stand of alders.
Gabriel paused. It might be tricky to follow him now, he thought. The path was too singular, and too narrow. And if Vollmöller was waiting … He stepped a few yards to his right and pushed through the screen of alders. He followed a parallel route, making his way through bracken and undergrowth, on what he assumed was Vollmöller’s trajectory. The early-afternoon sun slanted dustily through the foliage and the setting, he thought, was ideally bucolic, though he quickly realized, to his frustration, that in fact he now had no real idea where Vollmöller was. He was lost in the Grunewald. He paused by an ancient oak, hearing only birdsong, feeling the wind-pulse of a breeze on his face, listening intently. He assumed this must be a rendezvous of some sort – Vollmöller meeting someone in a secret place they shared in the forest. For some reason he imagined the encounter would have a dubious sexual content to it … Who knew what someone like Vollmöller got up to on his Sunday off?
Perhaps he should go back to the track, he thought, then simply follow the deer-path and see where it led him. Vollmöller had no idea who he was – even if they bumped into each other it needn’t necessarily seem suspicious: just another nature-lover out for a ramble. A ‘Guten Tag’, a smile, a tip of the hat, as it were. But how to rediscover the deer-path? He turned through 360 degrees. He had no idea what direction to go in. Fuck and shit.
Then he heard someone sneeze – three times.
Gabriel headed carefully in the direction of the sneezer. Obligingly, the person sneezed again, twice. Gabriel pushed around the side of a willow – and then drew back. He had a view of a sizeable clearing, about fifty feet wide, with an old beech tree right in the middle and surrounded on three sides by a line of Douglas firs. Vollmöller was standing there, jacket off, rucksack at his feet, blowing his nose vigorously. Thank the Lord for hay fever, Gabriel thought, carefully edging round to a small clump of young, dense robinias. He crouched down, watching. Vollmöller was about ten yards away from him, he calculated, happily unaware that he was being watched, and, indeed, giving the impression of a man entirely confident in his absolute solitude.
Vollmöller took a sheet of paper from his rucksack and a hammer and, Gabriel supposed, a nail. He then paced out the distance from his rucksack to the beech tree – about ten long strides – and proceeded to nail the sheet of paper to the trunk. He then walked stiffly back to the rucksack, still counting, his lips moving. He dropped the hammer, cracked his knuckles, inhaled, exhaled, flexed his shoulders and stooped to remove something from the rucksack.
It was a piece of wood, oddly shaped, like a haunch of meat. Then Gabriel saw Vollmöller open the end of the wooden container and remove a gun – an automatic weapon of some sort. He saw a heavy pistol with a drop-down magazine in front of the trigger. It had a long barrel. More intriguingly the wooden holster was then fitted by Vollmöller to the grip of the gun to form a stock, like a small rifle. The word ‘Mauser’ came into Gabriel’s head for some reason. He had seen films in which such guns were used, he was sure.
Vollmöller braced himself, spreading his legs, and took aim at the target he’d nailed to the beech tree. Gabriel held his breath. Why had he not brought Tyrone’s Minolta camera? Because it had been returned to Parker Baumgarten, of course. However, here he was, a witness, and his eyes would have to record everything.
Vollmöller fired three times in quick succession. Blam! Blam! Blam! Flat retorts, not particularly loud, the surrounding vegetation acting as an efficient damper to the percussion.
Gabriel heard birds squawking and the flutter of panicked wings. It suddenly became very quiet. Gabriel saw Vollmöller step forward and advance to the beech tree where he inspected the success of his target practice.
Then Vollmöller visibly froze. The sound of children’s voices singing – boys’ voices, treble voices – carried through the trees, gaining in volume, voices singing a song that Gabriel knew intimately, a song he had heard many times on the radio: ‘The Happy Wanderer’. The voices, the song, grew louder – maybe twenty or thirty singing, Gabriel thought – and beneath the melody the sound of tramping feet.
Mein Vater war ein Wandersmann,
Und mir steckt’s auch im Blut;
Drum wandr’ ich froh, so lang ich kann,
Und schwenke meinen Hut.
Faleri,
Falera,
Faleri,
Falera ha ha ha ha ha ha,
Faleri,
Falera,
Und schwenke meinen Hut.
The singing immediately spooked Vollmöller. He rushed back to his rucksack, broke the gun into stock and weapon and thrust the two pieces inside. He picked up his jacket and the rucksack and blundered quickly out of the clearing, racing back down the deer-path.
Gabriel stayed, not moving, letting the singing die away. ‘I love to be a wanderer,’ he reflected: it could be my theme song, soundtrack to my life. He stood and stepped carefully into the clearing. Who could have been singing? he thought. A troop of young boy Scouts, he supposed, or some similar children’s organization. Berlin kids at a weekend camp in the Grunewald, out for a day’s rambling …
He crossed the clearing towards the great tree. Vollmöller had forgotten to remove his target and Gabriel was curious to see how accurate he had been.
He paused in front of the beech tree, with its wide, pale grey trunk, and looked at Vollmöller’s target, feeling his throat thicken with tension and alarm.
It was a picture of a smiling John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States of America. Three small, ragged bullet holes punctured his face.
8.
The JFK Predicament
Gabriel pushed Vollmöller’s bullet-riddled JFK target across the desk towards Peter Carlyle. Parker Baumgarten was sitting on Carlyle’s side of the table – a small symbolic illustration of the power balance in this encounter, Gabriel thought.
Carlyle looked at the punctured image, and ran his fingertips over the tears.
‘I guess this is evidence of some sort,’ he said.
‘Pretty hard evidence of some sort,’ Gabriel said, adding diplomatically: ‘I’d have to say.’
‘Well done, Gabriel,’ Parker said. Then turned to Carlyle. ‘We’d ceased surveillance on Vollmöller. Gabriel took up the tail on his own initiative.’
Loyal Parker, Gabriel thought, shooting her a quick smile of thanks.
‘What’s your take?’ Carlyle said. He was sweating. He mopped his brow with his handkerchief. ‘Haven’t they heard of air conditioning in West Germany?’ he added, vaguely, waving a hand in front of his face as if to generate a breeze.
‘My take,’ Gabriel said, ‘is that Hendrik Vollmöller will try to assassinate President Kennedy when he comes to Berlin. When exactly is that, again?’
‘June twenty-six,’ Parker said. ‘He’s here just for the day – not even staying a night.’
‘Do you have a complete itinerary of his visit?’ Gabriel asked.
‘That’s classified,’ Carlyle said.
‘Sir, Gabriel is assigned to the Agency,’ Parker interjected. ‘We wouldn’t know about Vollmöller without him. We wouldn’t know the Furlan connection.’
‘Where is Furlan, anyway?’ Carlyle said, almost as if irritated.
‘We haven’t any recent information.’
‘Well, he’s not in Berlin,’ Carlyle said. ‘That’s a plus, I guess.’
‘But Vollmöller is,’ Parker said.
‘OK.’ Carlyle paused. ‘Let’s bring him in. Reduce the threat to zero. Who’s our guy in the Berlin police? Heinrich?’
‘Ödön Hempel,’ Parker said.
‘Hempel, that’s it. Get Hempel to bring in Vollmöller on some charge. Keep him under lock and key until after June twenty-sixth. Problem solved.’
‘I’ll set things in motion,’ Parker said. ‘The sooner the better.’
The meeting was over. Gabriel and Parker left Carlyle’s office and walked down the corridor towards hers.
‘He looks, forgive me, a bit like a man out of his depth,’ Gabriel said, quietly.
‘He’s under a lot of pressure,’ Parker said. ‘The US President visits Berlin. It’s a global news event. Eyes of the world on the place. Cold War brinkmanship, et cetera.’ She shrugged, opening the door to her office. ‘You could be right. Maybe Carlyle is out of his depth. What’s that British saying? “People rise to the level of their incompetence.” I’ve always liked that.’
Gabriel sat down opposite her.
‘Good for you, Gabriel,’ she said, leaning across her desk. ‘I thought Vollmöller was a dead end.’
‘I think I was just bored, you know,’ Gabriel said, with false modesty. ‘Nothing else to do on a Sunday in Berlin.’
‘Do you want to come on the raid? Five a.m. tomorrow morning, I’d say. I’ll get Hempel and his team on it.’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Gabriel said. They both took out their cigarettes and lit up. The mood was mildly jubilant, Gabriel reckoned. Something had happened. There was a plan.
And in that moment of jubilation, he noted, something suddenly changed in his relationship with Parker. Or, rather, hers with him.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Here’s an idea. Why don’t you come and have supper at my place tonight? I found a German butcher who can cut a decent T-bone. And I’ve a good bottle of Valpolicella.’
‘Sounds great,’ Gabriel said, managing what he hoped was a sincere smile. For some reason, he wasn’t sure if he was ready for a diner à deux with Parker Baumgarten. Still, needs must. ‘Needs Must’, he thought – maybe that should be carved on my tombstone.
‘I’ll get you Kennedy’s itinerary,’ Parker said. ‘Don’t worry. Carlyle doesn’t need to know.’
‘I have a feeling that’ll be very useful,’ Gabriel said. ‘Where exactly in Berlin do you live?’
Parker Baumgarten’s apartment was in the Westend district of Charlottenburg in a quiet street off Branitzer Platz. On the way there in his taxi, Gabriel looked at the swarming shoppers on the Kurfürstendamm and the neon glowing in the advancing dusk. People were streaming out of cinemas and the café terraces were full. When he wound down the window of the taxi he could hear pop music coming from the bars – reputedly over a hundred of them up and down the wide thoroughfare. As ever, it was hard to remind oneself that this was an island of freedom, commerce and capitalism in a dour communist country. This was new Berlin – but the old, grey, unsmiling one surrounded it on all sides. It was easy to forget – but forgetting was a mistake in this city, he was coming to realize.
Parker lived in a modern 1950s building and her apartment was on the top floor. Gabriel rang the bell and a buzzer admitted him. The lift in the foyer took him up to the fifth floor. He had brought a small bunch of flowers as a token, ranunculus, and a bottle of Montepulciano, should the Valpolicella run out. He felt oddly nervous, as if he were on a first date. We’re colleagues, he told himself – this is only a way of getting to know each other better, not a prelude to some romance.
Parker opened the door. She was wearing a pale blue shirt and black pedal-pusher trousers. It was odd to see her made up, Gabriel thought, lipstick and mascara – suddenly the efficient CIA operative no longer firmly in view. She led him into the sitting room with its floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. She gestured westwards.
‘Apparently you could see the Olympic Stadium from here – before they built that office block,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the flowers and the wine. Give me one minute and I’ll be back. I have to check on the potatoes.’
