Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War

A CARD FOR MOTHER ^{BY GAYLE LYNDS AND JOHN C. SHELDON}

At seven o’clock on an August morning, Fraulein Doktor Anna Klaas joined the crowds hurrying into Munich’s Central Railroad Station. In her mid-thirties, she was a pretty woman, with glossy black hair, large black eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, and porcelain skin that was a little too pale. She was dressed in a fitted brown jacket, a matching wool skirt, and sensible brown pumps. As if it were a talisman, she held her briefcase in both hands close in front of her. She walked purposefully.

The train station was the city’s largest. Handsomely rebuilt in modern architecture by Krupp, it’d opened only two years before, in 1960. Like nearly half of Munich’s buildings, its predecessor had been destroyed by Allied bombing. She could still feel the ground shuddering under her feet, hear the thunderous explosions in those last terrifying months.

Nervous, Anna glanced around the massive station. The spicy aroma of breakfast wurst drifted across the crowds. Long lines of commuters queued up for tickets. As the wood wheels of baggage carts rumbled across the floor, she headed down a short corridor, pushed into the ladies’ washroom, and waited. When the second stall from the window was empty, she entered and locked the door behind her. Opening her briefcase, she took out a playing card sliced in half. It was the five of diamonds. She crouched, reached behind the stool, and lodged it between the pipes. She flushed the toilet, left the stall, washed her hands, and walked out of the station.

Promptly at 7:55 a.m., Anna strode down Sendlinger Strasse in the Alstadt, Munich’s historic center. Tall cathedral spires loomed over her, gray against the cloudy sky. Tired and worried, she closed in on the eighteenth-century rococo building where she worked. The elegant brass sign announced Forschungszentrum Für Historische Landwirtschaft—Center for the Study of Historical Agriculture.

She climbed the granite steps and, forcing a pleasant smile, entered an expansive room, a library of some ten thousand books dealing with crops and practices of farming dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Passing antique reading tables and chairs, she skirted the carved wood counter.

A librarian was sorting through the card catalog. She looked up and smiled. “Guten morgen, Fraulein Doktor.”

“Morgen, Frau Schröder.”

Behind the librarian stood rows of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that extended to the back wall. Anna walked down the end aisle, opened a door labeled Mitarbeiterstab (“Staff”) and entered a short corridor. At the end, she reached a door that had no sign and no knob. She stopped.

A moment later the door swung inward, and she stepped into a secret world of scientists and engineers, technicians and secretaries. The hum of voices and the tap of typewriters sounded from open doors along the hallway. The agriculture library she’d just left was used primarily by scholarly researchers—but it was also a front for the work that went on here. She liked the irony of it—the research library celebrated the past, while this hidden research institution focused on the future.

The duty guard looked up from his desk. “Willkommen, Fraulein Doktor.” He pushed a button, and the door swung closed behind her. Encircling his desk were screens displaying the corridors throughout the library and the research facility. Anna’s employer, Siemens AG, had pioneered the first closed circuit camera system, in 1946, so naturally the latest version was installed here.

“Guten morgen, Herr Steinbock.” She heard a quiet click as the door locked.

He gestured. “Bitte.”

She handed him her briefcase. All purses, briefcases, and backpacks were inspected when employees arrived or left. It wasn’t personal. Still, she felt a frisson of fear as he took it, wrapping his hand authoritatively around the leather handle. Opening it, he examined the journal articles, magazine clippings, and latest Siemens newsletter.

“Danke.” He returned the case.

Anna headed down the hall, nodding and greeting administrators, assistants, and fellow engineers.

The door to her office was open.

“Good morning, Fraulein Doktor.” Her secretary, Helga Smits, held up a large white envelope bordered in black. “I have a Confidential for you.” A “Confidential” was a controlled document. Only those with Class 2 security clearances, such as Helga, could handle them; only those with Class 1 clearances, such as Anna, were allowed to read them.

“Good morning, fraulein. Thank you.” Anna raised the hand in which she held her briefcase and accepted the Confidential envelope with her thumb and forefinger. With the other hand she took the pen Helga offered. Helga pushed an acknowledgment-of-receipt form across her desk, and Anna signed it.

In seconds, Anna was inside her office. Closing the door, she hurried to her desk, dropped her briefcase at her feet, and sank into her chair. She opened the big envelope. Inside was a memo followed by five more pages. Leafing through them, she saw they were detailed diagrams and figures. She read the memo. It was from Herr Doktor Gunter Vogel: “How would you like to lose some weight?”

So droll, Gunter, Anna thought, but that was Gunter. An engineer’s humor. By asking whether she’d like “to lose some weight,” he was asking for help. The five technical pages illustrated the problem.

Anna picked up the phone. “So you’re calling me fat, Gunter?”

“Would I dare? And risk a date with Germany’s most beautiful PhD?”

“Check your fingers, Gunter. Is your wedding ring still there?”

“Wait a moment.” There was a pause. “Nope, not there.”

“Sudden transfer to your vest pocket, no doubt. Stop proposing bigamy and let’s get down to business.”

“If the Soviets ever attack, we’ve always got you—you can shoot down anyone.” He was trying, poorly, to sound hurt.

“Talk to me about your other problem—your engineering problem.”

Anna and Gunter were team leaders of a project to design new technology—a turbofan jet engine that would give the West a critical military edge over the Soviets. Conventional jet engines worked by sucking air into the compressor then driving it into the combustion chamber—“combustor”—where it was mixed with fuel and ignited. The resulting hot exhaust created the thrust that propelled the aircraft. What made the turbofan engine cutting-edge was that it diverted some of the air around the combustor, forcing it out the back of the engine cold. The combination of hot and cold exhaust produced more power without consuming more fuel. Such new engines would significantly increase the range of NATO’s bombers and fighters.

Anna’s team was designing the turbine, and Gunter’s the combustor.

“We’re having trouble with the inner combustor casing,” Gunter told her. “It’s too fragile at peak temperatures, so we have to switch to a heavier alloy.”

“So you need a heavier casing,” Anna said, “which means—just a wild guess here—you’re asking us to reduce our weight to compensate. How much?”

“Two kilograms.”

She sighed. Her team had spent months refining the turbine. They’d developed an exquisitely light and strong alloy for the blades and shaved every gram possible from the rotor and shaft. Now they were supposed to cut even more weight? Where? Damn. Weight versus budget, heat versus weight, weight versus thrust, thrust versus fuel efficiency, production schedules versus budget—Sisyphus had it easy.

Anna considered the situation. At last she nodded to herself. “How about I lend you our expert on heat dissipation, the good Herr Doktor Sterne.”

Gunter laughed. “Hermann Sterne? Isn’t he the one who told you a real German woman belonged in a kitchen making strudel? If I remember, you asked for the address of his cave.”

“That’s the guy,” she said grimly.

“Sure, I’ll take him off your hands—and you owe me.”

“No, Gunter, Neanderthal or not, he’s good at his job. He’s yours for a month. Then I want him back.”

The problem resolved for now, they ended the call.

The sudden quiet in her small office gave Anna relief. She gazed at her desktop—the telephone was set at the corner equidistant from both edges. Then at her file cabinet—the labels were perfectly horizontal. And at the stacks of working papers and blueprints—aligned like marching soldiers along the edge of her credenza. She prided herself on orderliness. It gave her a sense of decency, of control and purpose.

She stared around her immaculate office. Control and purpose—the very things she’d lost. She dropped her head into her hands. What had she done? How could it have gone so far? All she could think about was her mother. Her mind churned; her heart ached. With effort she pulled herself together. They would get through this crisis, she vowed. Taking a deep breath, she lifted her head and reached for the diagrams and notes Gunter had sent in the Confidential. Yes, this information would be useful.

She picked up her phone again and pushed a button. The noise of the buzzer on Fraulein Smits’s phone was muffled by the closed door.

“Ja, Fraulein Doktor?” Fraulein Smits’s voice sounded in Anna’s ear.

“I’m working on some new specs. I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, of course.”

Hanging up the phone, Anna reached for her briefcase. Using a razor-thin blade from her desk drawer, she popped open the leather handle. Inside, nestled in black felt, was a metal cylinder about two inches long and the width of a man’s thumb—a miniaturized microdot camera.

Moving quickly, Anna unscrewed the camera’s top, inserted film, and began photographing Gunter’s diagrams.

For lunch, Ines Klaas sliced freshly baked rye bread, plump red tomatoes, and fine Emmentaler cheese, a Bavarian specialty. With care, she took out her favorite blue-and-white porcelain plates from the old days, before the war. She was a tall woman, taller than her daughter, Anna. Her long gray hair was parted in the middle and gathered back into a ponytail. At one time her hair had been as black as her daughter’s, and in the old days it was said her smile could light up a banquet hall.

But much had happened since then. Her husband had been killed in the early years of the war, a Luftwaffe captain. Anna’s fiancé had died in 1946, a teenage army private who’d survived the Soviet campaign but come home with end-stage tuberculosis. Now only the two of them were left, she and Anna. The story of her family’s losses wasn’t unusual.

Remembering better times, Ines went to the mirror in the sitting room and pulled her fine linen tunic close. It was pale yellow. Anna had given it to her, brought it home when she’d finished her studies at the California Institute of Technology—Caltech, she called it. With a critical eye, Ines studied her body. She’d lost fifteen pounds in the last month. The frames of her eyeglasses accented the thinness of her face. Her back hurt all the time now; she was always weary.

Still, as she returned to the kitchen to finish making the sandwiches, she began to smile. Anna would be home soon. She pinched her cheeks to bring color to them.

Anna and Ines shared a two-bedroom flat on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building overlooking Beethovenplatz. Sitting on their balcony, they enjoyed the views across Munich’s church spires and red-tile roofs as they ate their sandwiches and drank their coffee.

“Simple, good food,” Ines commented.

“Delicious. But I was going to make lunch for you.” Anna’s eyes searched her mother. “How do you feel today?” She saw how stiffly her mother held herself, how carefully she moved.

“Wonderful. Excellent. Better all the time.”

Anna shook her head. Then she smiled. “You’re impossible.” But that was Mamma, upbeat, optimistic. From what the doctor had explained about Hodgkin’s disease, Ines was probably in constant pain, but she never complained, in fact wouldn’t even talk about it. Her bravery strengthened Anna’s resolve. “I think I’ve found a way to send you to the Mayo Clinic in the United States.” The renowned hospital was considered the preeminent treatment center for Hodgkin’s. Nothing in Europe was nearly as good.

Ines shook her head. “Darling, don’t bother. You can’t afford it. I’ve had a good run, a good life.” She changed the subject. “I heard a funny joke this morning from Frau Dingmann down the hall.” Her eyes danced as she launched into it: “Two workers of the state were assigned to improve a street in East Berlin. One dug a hole, and the other came along behind and filled it. This went on all day, digging holes and filling them, with timeouts for the usual schnapps and cigarettes. Finally someone from around here, who was visiting relatives over there, asked what they were doing. One of the East Germans said, ‘Just because the comrade who sticks the trees in the holes didn’t show up, that doesn’t mean the state is going to let us off work, too.’” Ines laughed hard, her eyes watering.

Anna laughed, too. Then she reached across the table and took her hand. “I love you, Mamma.”

“When are you going to find a nice man and make your own life again? You mentioned a ‘Hari.’ Is he your beau?”

Anna felt a chill. “Hari?”

“You were talking in your sleep again last night. I was worried, so I went into your room. You were muttering the name Hari. It seemed to me you were having a long conversation with him.”

“Oh, just someone I work with.” Anna patted her mother’s hand. “Speaking of which, I’m going to be a little late tonight. Don’t cook. I’ll bring you dinner.”

Following a long afternoon at her desk, Anna arrived at Karlsplatz at 5:30 p.m., just as the bus pulled up. From the corner of her eye she saw Hari Bander sitting on a sidewalk bench reading a newspaper. She had signaled him she wanted a treff—a meeting—by leaving half of the five of diamonds in the ladies’ toilet in the train station that morning. The suit—diamonds—meant the Karlsplatz bus stop. The number—five—meant five o’clock, and half of the card meant half past the hour. One of Hari’s associates, undoubtedly a woman, would have picked up Anna’s message and left it at another dead drop for him.

Anna hurried to the queue waiting to board. He stood up and ambled toward it, too. He was small and gangly, with a clean-shaved face and a ski-jump nose. He looked like a shop owner or perhaps a college professor, dressed as he was in a tweed sports jacket, brown silk tie, and fawn-colored homburg. He joined the queue three people behind her. She boarded and sat in front on the right side. Passing her, he sat in the rear on the left. The bus drove east, jostling through the traffic. After ten blocks, she disembarked and turned north, walking casually. She passed restaurants and pubs then went around the corner, heading east again, feeling the sun’s warmth on her back. She stopped to peer into the display window of a dress shop. Soon he came around the same corner.

Hari had an easy walk, the gait of a confident man.

If he passed her, she’d know they’d been followed.

With the slightest smile, he tipped his hat to her. “I’ll meet you at the macaws.” And he was gone, walking off, lighting a cigarette.

Now that she had their final destination, she hailed a taxi.

In the middle of the city, Tierpark Hellabrunn was an oasis of serenity. A vast open space with a zoo and surrounding park, it was renowned for its grassy hills, specimen trees, and bright flowerbeds. Following signs, Anna took a winding path past a picnic area to the macaw exhibit. A dozen colorful males and females sat on tree branches, preening.

An older couple paused at the display. They glanced at Anna, and she exchanged nods and smiles with them. Over the woman’s shoulder, Anna saw Hari approaching.

With a flicker of his eyes, he took in the situation. “Hello, Anna,” he called. “Is that really you?” With a large smile, he hurried over and shook her hand.

“How lovely to see you, Hari,” she said, playing the game. “It’s been a while.”

The older couple moved on, her arm in his.

Glancing around, Hari lowered his voice. “Why did you want to meet?”

“Let’s walk.”

He nodded, and they headed off. There was something nice about Hari, something charming. Yet he carried a pistol, in a shoulder holster under his jacket, that he’d admitted to using. He’d told her he was the child of German artists who were members of the Communist Party. They’d believed communism was the only humane political system, and if Germans followed Marxist rules the nation would be set right. Instead, Adolf Hitler rose to power, and the family left, emigrating to southern Russia. Hari’s father served in the Soviet Army, while Hari and his sister attended Russian schools. When the war ended, Hari was sent to Moscow University. Afterward the Soviet government assigned him to work in the German Democratic Republic—East Germany. Like his parents, Hari was a true believer in communism.

“I have something your bosses will want.” As they walked, she took a gift-wrapped package from her briefcase and handed it to Hari.

He felt the package. “A book?”

“On page 37, the dot over the third i on the seventh line is a microdot. It shows a problem we’re working out on our turbofan engine.”

He frowned. “What’s a turbofan engine?”

“It’s a new jet engine design. It can increase the range of a bomber or a fighter up to twenty-five percent, which means NATO will have much deeper penetration into Soviet airspace.”

Hari’s eyebrows rose. “Shit!”

She gave a grim smile. “Exactly.”

They paused to let a crush of locals pass them. Chatty and friendly, the group was exuberant, as if the world was theirs, but then the country was finally experiencing prosperity again. An awful taste gathered in her mouth. They were her people—and she was betraying them. She looked away. It had all begun six years earlier when she was writing her PhD dissertation. Since East German doctoral students weren’t allowed to publish their theses, many sold them for much-needed cash to students in the West. The buyers felt safe that their professors or colleagues would never be able to identify the work as someone else’s. Anna had bought one and hadn’t attributed the portions she’d used. Then a year ago, East Germany’s dreaded state security agency, the Stasi, had discovered her plagiarism and threatened to reveal it to Caltech, jeopardizing her degree, and to Siemens, jeopardizing her career.

“I always liked Goethe.” Hari had opened the package—Selected Poetry by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Anna took a deep breath, collecting herself. “You’ll like him even more now. What I’ve given you is only a sample. Your engineers will salivate over the prototype data. You’re going to be a hero, Hari.”

He assessed her. “You’ve always resisted giving us anything we asked for. But now you seem to be offering technological gold. It doesn’t make sense. In fact, it makes so little sense I’m inclined not to believe you.”

Keeping her tone even, she said, “My mother has Hodgkin’s disease. It’s a form of cancer. We only found out a few days ago, when I finally convinced her to go to a doctor.” She paused, controlling her emotions. “The cancer is advanced. The best treatment is in Minnesota, in the U.S., and it’s expensive. Siemens won’t give me a raise or a loan. So that leaves the Stasi.” She told him the lump sum she needed. “That’s to fly her there and begin treatment. We don’t know how long she’ll stay. It may take more money.”

Saying nothing, Hari stopped at a railing and leaned on it, apparently thinking as he peered down a steep hill into a stand of birches. He clasped his hands in front of him, the book solidly between them.

She stood beside him, anxiously waiting for him to say something.

His gaze was solemn as he glanced at her. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

But then he looked away again. “We operate on a small budget. Most of our assets believe in the better world we’re trying to build. They work for free. We give a small stipend to others. You’re one of the lucky few who gets some money. We want you to enjoy the extra deutschmarks, even become dependent on them. But that’s all there is for you.” His voice grew low, too quiet. “Be realistic, Anna. You’re in a precarious position.” He turned toward her and enunciated each word clearly: “We have standards of pay. We don’t exceed them. There are no exceptions. No one negotiates with the Stasi.”

Anna felt as if she’d been gut-punched. She gripped the rail and saw in her mind’s eye her mother turning on her heel, a butcher knife in her hand. It’d been the first winter after the war, the harshest in living memory, so deadly it became known as Der Elendswinter, The Winter of Misery. Temperatures plummeted to twenty-five below zero Fahrenheit. Their house was a bombed-out hulk, little protection against the biting cold. Anna’s fiancé died. Every day she and her mother went off to join the army of grandmothers, housewives, and girls cleaning up the rubble of the town with their hands and whatever tools they could find. They were called Trümmerfrauen, rubble women. They were paid in food and the equivalent of ten cents an hour. Anna was fifteen years old; her mother forty. They were hungry all the time.

Anna’s mother heard about an old Nazi food depot that others were raiding. Insisting Anna stay home, she left at midnight and returned two hours later with a gunny sack of canned meats and vegetables, enough to get them through the month. Anna was crouched, shoving the canned goods into a hole they’d dug under the house, when she sensed motion and looked up just as her mother whirled around and jammed a long-bladed butcher knife into the belly of a man. “I knew I was being followed,” was her only comment. Her expression hard, she’d dragged him out to the street and left him there. People died in the street all the time then, from the cold, from violence. Anna had tried to talk to her about what happened, but Ines had only smiled and shrugged. Nevertheless, Anna understood: Without her mother, she wouldn’t have survived.

Now it was her turn. She wasn’t going to let her mother die. “Don’t try to play that game with me, Hari. There’s nothing ‘precarious’ about my situation. If you tell anyone about me you’ll get the exact opposite of what you want—I’ll be arrested, probably go to prison, and you’ll lose your source for the turbofan engine and whatever other state-of-the-art technologies Siemens develops.”

For an instant she thought she saw concern, perhaps even fear, in his eyes. Encouraged, she gave her head a firm shake. “Tell your Stasi bosses they need to make an exception for my mother.”

He looked away. “You’ll have our answer shortly, Anna.”

“Good. I think we’re done here.” She turned on her heel and walked away.

The call came at 4 p.m. the next day.

Anna was at her desk at work, double-checking equations with her slide rule, when Fraulein Smits knocked on her door, cracked it open, and peered around it, her eyes wide with fear.

“The polizei are on the phone.” She whispered “police” as if she could hear jackboots on pavement. She had crossed over from East Berlin a year earlier, escaping to her relatives only a week before the Berlin Wall went up.

“Danke.” Anna gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll handle it.”

Fraulein Smits nodded and vanished, closing the door softly.

Puzzled, Anna reached for the telephone.

“Fraulein Doktor Klaas?” The man’s voice was strong.

“Yes, and you are?”

“Police Lieutenant Dominique Harbeck. I’m afraid your mother’s had an accident.”

Anna went rigid. “She’s all right, isn’t she? Did you take her to the hospital?”

“One of your neighbors said she had cancer. Is that right?”

“Yes, but we were getting her treatment. She was worried about how much it would cost, but I was managing it.” Her heart seemed to stop. “You said had—”

“Fraulein Doktor, you should come home. Your mother fell off your balcony. I’m afraid she didn’t survive.”

Tears streaming down her face, Anna ran the eight blocks from work. A police car and ambulance were parked in front of their apartment building. The neighbors stood in clumps, watching as policemen detoured the traffic. Wiping her eyes, Anna gazed up the six stories to the balcony where she had shared so many happy meals with her mother. Before she could stop it, she saw in her mind’s eye her mother plummeting down through the air, helpless, knowing she was going to die. Anna wanted to scream, to shake her fists at the heavens, to hold her mother tight in her arms.

“Fraulein Doktor,” a man called.

She turned.

A handsome man in a sleek black suit was walking toward her. “I’m Lieutenant Harbeck. I’m the one who called you.”

“Where’s my mother?”

“This way.” He led her to the ambulance, opened the doors, and pulled a sheet back from the covered figure lying on a gurney.

“Is this Ines Klaas?” he said. “Sorry, but we have to make it official.”

Her throat thick, Anna forced herself to look. Her mother’s strong-featured face was smooth, waxen, her dark eyes closed. Her long gray hair was matted with blood.

“Yes, it’s her.” Anna reached for her mother’s hand. It was still warm. For an instant, she could almost believe Ines was alive. She burst into tears.

“Come, Fraulein Doktor.” He handed her a large white handkerchief and led her away.

Losing her mother was like losing herself. In her mind she could see her mother laughing, see her stab the man who wanted to steal their food, see her dance in the years afterward as Anna got her degrees and they slowly reached a comfortable standard of living in their pretty apartment overlooking the city.

“The super let us into your apartment,” the lieutenant told her. “Forgive us, but we had to look for a note. We didn’t find one. If you do, please contact us. We’ll need to add what it says to our records.”

She nodded.

“Your mother was well liked,” the lieutenant went on sympathetically. “Had she been talking about killing herself?”

“No. She was cheerful. She was… as much as anyone can be under the circumstances… herself. She never discussed her illness.”

He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows sympathetically. “Sometimes, something as devastating as cancer can lead to deep depression.”

Anna walked into the silent apartment. What had once been soothing in its quiet orderliness was now lifeless. There’s nothing worse than emptiness, she thought. She looked around the living room and kitchen then went down the hall to her mother’s bedroom and peered inside. It was a lovely room, done up in pale blue. She inhaled the scent of face powder and closed her eyes, remembering her mother’s zest, her vibrancy. Why would she have killed herself? She’d been through hell during the war. It was her personality to be optimistic, to be happy.

Crossing the hall, Anna went into her own bedroom and sat in the corner chair where her mother used to settle when she came in to chat. She gazed around the room, at her smooth bed quilt, her jewelry box square atop her dresser, the simple wooden frame of the mirror.

The mirror. She stared. Stood and ran to it. Lodged in the lower right corner was half of a playing card—the five of diamonds. She saw the corner was bent, the same corner that she had jammed between the toilet pipes in the train station. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine. She recalled Hari’s words: “No one negotiates with the Stasi.” She snatched the card. “You’ll have our answer shortly,” he’d said.

Horrified, she smashed the card between her hands. Then she looked up and saw in the mirror’s reflection her bedroom doorway behind her, and the hallway beyond that, and then her mother’s bedroom. The emptiness, and the silence.