Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

I

Conrad slipped his rifle off his shoulder and took aim the moment he heard the thud. Across the road from where he guarded the border, a woman had stumbled rather dramatically. He blinked away perspiration dripping into his eyes from beneath his helmet and saw that the woman appeared to be in her thirties. She was loaded down with shopping bags, and something seemed to have fallen from one of them. A knot of garlic shed its papery skin as it bounced along the cracked pavement, settling just short of the snake of barbed wire separating east from west.

The slope of the woman’s cheekbones stirred something in Conrad, and for a moment he imagined touching her skin, its softness, even its taste. He thought fleetingly of Emilie. How long since he’d seen her? Swallowing the aching regret of her loss, he consulted his watch. It was nearly quitting time, and he was getting hungry. He reshouldered his rifle. He was about to fetch the garlic and toss it back to her when Hans, a fellow guard, beat him to it.

The woman was just out of sight when the explosion ripped Hans from the ground. Conrad rushed to his side along with Axel, his oldest friend and also a guard. As the smoke cleared, it was obvious that Hans was dead. The back of his head was crushed, threads of blood spinning lacework on the arid ground. His blue eyes, frozen, stared at nothing.

A siren wailed into the cacophony of panicked voices. Fellow East Berliners watched the scene through the dusty windows of apartments whose view had been radically transformed from open street to barbed wire. Conrad scanned the length of the street for any trace of the woman. Somehow, she had vanished into the havoc.

The next day, vultures appeared. The first three reporters came on foot, with notebooks, and the fourth on a rusty blue bicycle with a camera strapped across his back. Conrad refused an inner pull of jealousy; he’d had a bicycle as a child but it was stolen by the son of a neighbor who had been a Nazi. Conrad’s parents hadn’t dared complain. Axel would have remembered the bike, as he himself had borrowed it on occasion when they were boys. The friends glanced at each other now and in silent agreement refused to show any sort of response to the predators on the other side of the border. Hans had died a martyr for socialism, and if they couldn’t figure that out themselves, it was their loss.

“Officer!” The reporter slid off the bike and uncapped his camera. “Give us a wave.”

Conrad walked the border without changing his gait or even looking at the young man, who appeared to be twenty-one or — two, not much older than himself. He had to realize there was no way Conrad could reply. If he did, his commander would give him a severe talking-to; but worse, his own conscience would destroy him.

They hurled their questions like stones.

“How did it feel seeing your comrade die?”

“Has the bomber been identified?”

“Why did she do it? In your opinion. Why?”

“What will happen to her now?”

And then a ripple of laughter passed among the Westies. Journalists loved interpreting the German Democratic Republic for the benefit of the rest of the world, though what they came up with was predictable, generally something about Soviet imperialism, hypocrisy, tyranny.

Conrad ignored them. He had been raised well, and was proud of his work guarding the border. The two halves of Germany were too philosophically opposed to coexist. For the GDR to thrive, the capitalists needed to be kept out. As for the question of East Berliners being kept in, his father, a schoolteacher of some local renown, had explained that the resources of a new nation were vulnerable, and it was intolerable to continue allowing people to live in the east and work in the west, reaping the benefits of socialism while enriching themselves on filthy capitalism. “The soullessness of greed,” his father had called this kind of dual citizenship in a broken Germany. Still, Conrad was as surprised as any when the coils of wire appeared overnight, the root of a wall that enforced new rules of nonemigration. Within days, though, he was used to the idea and signed on as a guard while a permanent wall was gradually constructed.

“Give us something,” a reporter shouted. “Anything. A smile.”

Conrad marched steadily along his route. It wasn’t his problem if they’d missed the garlic bomb yesterday, if today their cameras were hungry for some sustenance. It wouldn’t come from him.

When finally his relief appeared, he handed over his rifle, and saluted. He noted with some disappointment that Axel, with whom he often shared an after-work beer, was still on duty. Conrad started for home.

“I saw you admiring the reporter’s bike.” Herr Muller, an older man his sister, Gabi, had briefly dated, pulled to a stop on his own gleaming black bicycle. He patted the handlebars. “Want to take her for a spin?”

“It’s a beauty. Where did you get it?”

“Bought it from a colleague last year.” Conrad tried and failed to recall what it was that Herr Muller did for a living. ”I’m thinking of getting rid of it. It takes up too much room in my apartment, and I never ride it.”

“You’re riding it now.”

“Thought if I took her out, it would help me decide.”

“And has it?”

Herr Muller shrugged, and suddenly Conrad remembered why his sister had broken up with him. It wasn’t his relative age, but his inability to settle on anything, anything at all.

“Go on, try her out, I don’t mind.”

Conrad took her around the block, twice, waving to Herr Muller each time he passed. He enjoyed the sensation of gliding. It was exhilarating. He decided he wanted the bike.

“I’ll buy it from you,” he told Muller, thinking he could free the man from his indecisiveness by putting it bluntly. “Name your price.”

When Muller smiled, a web of deep lines radiated across his temples. He was even older than Conrad had thought. His parents felt his sister had made a good choice marrying a man closer to her own age. They had two children now, and Lutz worked faithfully at the butcher shop where his own father had spent his life. He was your typical good man, or as his sister had put it, “a decent catch.” But Conrad had his suspicions after hearing from a friend who spotted his brother-in-law on Normanstrasse, in Lichtenberg, walking in the direction of Stasi headquarters. It was one thing to work openly for the GDR like Conrad, in uniform, so everyone knew who you were and what you stood for. It was quite another to work secretly as an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, informing on your friends and family. It was impossible to know who was an IM and who wasn’t. You had to watch your ground at all times, not that Conrad had anything to worry about. Even so, it was well known that when a Berliner was seen in Lichtenberg, chances were he was paying a visit to the House of a Thousand Eyes.

“Name your price.” Muller laughed. “You talk like a true Westy.”

“I only meant that—”

“Relax, son. Can’t you take a joke? I’ll tell you what: keep her until tomorrow and we’ll decide on a price. Same time and place. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even give her to you for nothing.”

Conrad rode off under the chalk-blue sky, eventually arriving home in Friedrichshain, circuitously, over an hour later than usual. His father was standing outside their building, banned from the apartment to smoke his cigar on the sidewalk. He was chatting with the grocer, who also smoked, when Conrad appeared, in his uniform, riding Herr Muller’s bicycle.

The rage that spread across his father’s face so startled Conrad that he almost fell off the bike. “Are you out of your mind?” his father hissed in a tone new to Conrad, who had always admired his father’s even temper. “Get off that bike. Get off it now.”

“Take it easy, Erich,” the grocer advised in a low voice, practically a whisper. “You don’t want to attract attention to the situation.”

“What situation?” Conrad asked. “It belongs to Herr Muller. You remember him, Father — the one Gabi threw over for Lutz. He loaned it to me until tomorrow.” For reasons Conrad couldn’t decipher, it seemed like a bad idea to mention that he was in fact considering buying the bicycle.

The offending bike now stashed in the front hallway of the apartment he shared with his parents, he overheard them whispering frantically in the kitchen though couldn’t make out what they were saying. Eventually his father appeared with a bottle of schnapps and two glasses, and sat his son down in the living room for a man-to-man talk.

“The Schumanns don’t ride bicycles,” his father began. Conrad noticed that, when his father ran his fingers through his thinning grey hair, a tremor shook his hand. “What’s wrong?” Conrad asked. “Is it your health?”

His father drained his schnapps and poured another. Conrad hadn’t touched his. “My health is fine, and so is your mother’s. But please, listen to me. The bike has to go.”

Conrad was nineteen. In two months, he would be twenty. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited for the explanation he believed he was due.

“It’s like this,” his father finally began. “These days, a bike is not a bike.”

“Which means?”

“The woman who threw the garlic yesterday, has she been found? Have you thought about what will happen to her?”

“She’s a traitor. She killed Hans. Why do you care what happens to her?”

“Let me explain something to you.” His father spoke in the tone he used with his students, the same tone with which he had often enlightened Conrad and Gabi throughout their childhoods. His voice fell to a whisper and he leaned in, as if fearful of being overheard. “The bicycle is to get around more easily.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t interrupt. Let me finish.” Agitated, he poured himself a third schnapps.

Conrad’s throat tightened. There was something his father needed to say but didn’t know how. Never before had he seen the man speechless. He laid his hand on his father’s knee. “Don’t worry. I’ll return the bike to Herr Muller tonight. Gabi might still know where he lives.”

“You don’t know what a bike means these days. You don’t understand.” When his father’s hand landed on top of his, the sticky heat was overwhelming, but he left his own hand where it was. “IMs ride bikes to get around quickly, and they’re given clearance to pass through the checkpoints.”

“But it isn’t possible,” Conrad argued, “that everyone with a bike is an IM.”

“Who else can afford a bicycle these days?”

“You once said that, before the war, a lot of people had bikes.”

“Conrad, do I have to remind you how little survived the war?”

Of course he didn’t; it was a ridiculous suggestion. Almost nothing survived. Every building in Berlin was scarred with bullet holes. The Jews were all gone. Nearly everyone in the east was scraping by with what little was left after the Soviets cleaned them out, while the west rebuilt itself and snickered at them across the border.

“I’ve often wondered,” Conrad ventured, curious what his father thought about the tender issue of informers, and questioning now the depth of his concern, “if IMs provide a necessary service, even if it makes us uncomfortable when we don’t know who is…” How exactly to put it?

“Betraying you,” his father spat.

“But is it a betrayal when it’s for the good of the country? I don’t like IMs any more than you do, but I’ve wondered about this. Mielke must have a good reason for needing them. It’s no secret that splitting the country has been a tricky business.”

His father’s mouth tightened. A frightening clarity overtook his eyes. “IMs are scum. Mielke doesn’t need them, he wants them. He’s terrified of losing his grip around our throats.”

It was the first time Conrad had heard his father speak so bitterly about the leader of the GDR. He was taken aback, and waited for the rest to pour out.

“You remember, when you were seven, and I went away for five months?”

“Of course I remember.” Their mother had explained that their father was on a teacher-training expedition, which had seemed plausible at the time, but suddenly didn’t.

“I was in prison, first tortured, then put in solitary. And what was my transgression?”

Transgression? His father? Never had Conrad known a more loyal citizen than his father, which is why he’d been trusted with the honor of educating the new country’s youngest minds.

“I sat down for a cup of coffee one afternoon. At the table next to mine was a man. I’d never seen him before. I didn’t know his name or anything about him, only that he was drinking a beer at the next table. I asked him the time. That was my transgression. I was picked up the next day, accused of subversion. Apparently, the man with the beer was a spy for the Americans. They wanted to know what we talked about. They wanted to know if he “recruited” me. They kept me awake for four straight nights. No sleep, Conrad, you have no idea how insane that makes you. No sleep at all, and very little food or water. I thought I would never see you children or your mother again. I was out of my mind.”

“So you confessed?”

“They never broke me. Not like that, anyway.”

“How, then?” Conrad knew as well as anyone that traitors, even perceived traitors, weren’t released back into society without paying a price.

“A promise was extracted from me. I vowed to teach my students, all of them, year after year, the purest values of the GDR. If I wanted to see my family again, that was what I had to do. And I’ve done it, haven’t I?”

“What were you teaching them before?”

“Mathematics. Science. History. Literature. To ask questions and to think critically. After, I kept my lessons to the benefits of socialism, and still do.”

His father watched him, waiting for it to sink in: the new understanding that, for much of Conrad’s lifetime, his father was not exactly whom he’d seemed to be. “I see now why you don’t want me to appear to be an IM.”

“Don’t let them turn you into a monster,” his father whispered, hands gripping his knees, eyes sharp as crystal, “like they did me. I can’t live with that. Do you understand?”

“I’ll go right now and find Gabi. I’ll walk to her apartment, leave the bike here, and when I have Muller’s address I’ll wait until dark and return it.”

Conrad rode shakily to Muller’s, and in the twenty minutes it took to get there, he tried but couldn’t digest his father’s confession. All these years, his father, the man he loved and respected above all other men, the man he emulated, the man he’d hoped to make proud by wearing the uniform of the GDR, had sustained his loyalist persona under duress. Conrad felt trapped in a quicksand of bewildered disappointment.

Muller’s elderly sister answered the bell by peeking through the curtains onto the street. In moments, Muller himself appeared at the door.

“What’s this? I thought we agreed on tomorrow.”

“I’ve already decided. Thank you, but I don’t want it.” Conrad leaned the bicycle against the bullet-scarred wall of the Mullers’ building. In the moonlight, he was able to see that someone had left a thimble in one of the holes. It made no sense to Conrad. Nothing made sense tonight. He turned to leave.

Muller stepped forward and grabbed Conrad’s arm. “I won’t take no for an answer.” In the strange shadows of night, Conrad noticed jowls on the man, who seemed to age rapidly with every conversation.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

“I don’t care about money. I’ll tell you the truth.” And here Muller leaned in to whisper in Conrad’s ear. “It’s my sister. She told me if I don’t get rid of the bike, she’ll toss me out. You’ll be doing me a favor by taking it off my hands.”

“I wish I could help you, Herr Muller. My father asked me to return it. Good night.”

“When Emilie fled for the west, she was pregnant.”

Conrad turned back to look at Muller, who stood now in a pocket of darkness, his face blackened. Behind him, the thimble glimmered.

“Who ended it?” Muller continued. “You, or her? Or did she leave you high and dry without mentioning she was going to the other side?”

Conrad stared at Muller, but the inscrutable thimble kept intruding on his attention. Why was it there? How did this man know anything of Emilie? He struggled to recall exactly when he had last been with her. How long now since she’d fled to the west? Fifteen months, he guessed, was the answer to both questions.

“I don’t understand why you’ve mentioned Emilie,” Conrad said, “when our business only concerns this bicycle.”

“Your girlfriend’s defection might look bad for you, don’t you think so? Especially now that she’s given birth to your child.”

Given birth. Child. Was it really possible that he, at nineteen, was already a father? His gaze melted against the hard thimble in the bullet hole.

“It seems to me, Herr Schumann, that someone could think you’d have good cause to follow her over. Who wouldn’t want to see his own child?”

“I’m not sure why I should believe you, Herr Muller.”

“But are you sure why you shouldn’t?” He stepped out of the darkness now, his old face pallid in the weak moonlight. “I can fix this problem for you, if you let me.”

“I’m not yet convinced it’s a problem, with all due respect.”

“All due respect.” Muller laughed. “I’m not your father, boy. Trust me. Take the bike.”

“No, thank you.”

“I insist. You’ll take the bike, and I’ll protect you from the powers that be. One hand washes the other. You understand?”

Finally, Conrad did understand.

“And if I refuse?”

“I’ll have no choice but to report that fact. How will it look? Someone could think that your uniform is just a costume to keep you near the border, giving you an opportunity to get to the other side before the wall is fully built. It could look very bad for you, Herr Schumann. Refusal to cooperate. Baby on the other side of the wall. If that isn’t begging to be put under suspicion, I don’t know what is.”

None of that had ever occurred to Conrad. He guarded the border out of pride as the wall was constructed, to please his father, and himself. Never once had he considered his daily proximity to the west as a temptation of any kind. His father’s words rang in his ears, “Don’t let them turn you into a monster, like they did me.” But his father was not a monster. Who was a good man, if not his father?

“You’ll be better off if you accept the bicycle,” Muller pressed, “as will your entire family. Your sister also has children now, I understand?”

The barely veiled threat against Gabi’s children startled Conrad. Apparently he was to become an informer, or else. Without considering it another moment, he took the bike from the wall, got on, and rode home. He did not, however, bring it into the apartment. Instead, he leaned it against a tree around the corner, hoping that when he returned for it, it would be gone. But to his dismay, the next morning, the bicycle was waiting exactly where he’d left it. He decided he was better off riding it to work than chancing his father seeing it abandoned against the tree, or Muller intercepting him on his way home without it.

“Did you hear the news?” Axel greeted Conrad as they prepared to assume their posts.

“What news?”

“The woman bomber. She’s been caught.”

“And?”

“She’s a baker’s wife with three children at home. She’ll be hanged.”

Conrad wondered briefly what the woman’s name was. He could still see the curve of her cheek. If he knew her name, he would mourn her, so he decided not to find out. Instead, impulsively, he asked, “Since you know everything, Axel, what can you tell me about Emilie?”

“Emilie?”

“Never mind. I don’t know why I asked.” Would anything Axel said to him now be fodder for the Stasi, that great iron ear that hovered above them and forgot nothing? Conrad tried not to listen to the answer, but found he couldn’t resist.

“I heard she had a child. Didn’t you know?” Axel stepped so near, Conrad was sure he caught a whiff of the currant and raspberry pudding Frau Bauer used to make them sometimes after school. The familiar yet distant fragrance sent a cascade of regret through him. He was to lose his friends, all of them, he was sure of it. He needed to keep quiet, say nothing, hear nothing, but there was one more thing he felt compelled to ask.

“Boy or girl?”

“I’ve heard both, so I can’t tell you.”

“Why didn’t you mention this to me before?”

“Only to hurt you?”

The morning progressed, and for the first time he wondered what he was doing and whom he could trust. How was it, for instance, that Axel had heard about Emilie and the baby but Conrad hadn’t? Was Herr Muller already an IM when he and Gabi were together, and if so, had he spied on his sister and perhaps the entire Schumann family? What, if anything, did Gabi know about it? Now, as the day passed, minutes mounting to hours, each one compounded his distress. It didn’t help that the same band of reporters had taken up their usual spots, waiting for something new to happen.

“A baker’s wife!” One of them tried to capture Conrad’s attention. “What do you think of that?”

“Do you, in your opinion, think she could have done more damage by loading explosives into a loaf of bread? Why garlic?”

“In your opinion, was the baker’s wife a traitor to the people?”

“What was her statement in throwing her little garlic bomb, in your opinion?”

Conrad’s job was not to hold opinions. His job was to guard the border. But at the end of that day, when Herr Muller intercepted him, it fully sank in that he now had another job as well. Today Muller rode a red bicycle, and traveled beside Conrad along the avenues of the Mitte.

“So tell me,” Muller began. “What were you and your friend discussing this morning, by the border?”

“You were there?” Conrad sped up, but Muller only followed.

“I’m asking the questions. So tell me. What’s on Axel Bauer’s mind these days?”

“Nothing. The weather.”

“You mean to say that he didn’t tell you about Emilie?”

“How would you know what we talked about?”

At that, Muller laughed and rode off in another direction. As he continued home, Conrad could hear the man’s cackle far into the distance. Once again he propped the bicycle against the tree, and was disappointed the next morning when it was still there.

He no longer spoke to Axel; it felt too dangerous. And now, he found that when the reporters called out to him, provoking him with their questions, he sometimes listened ponderously. He wished he could take his new concerns home to his father, but could see his parents had made a heavy peace with their past choices and only hoped that their children would follow the path of least resistance. A path Conrad believed no longer existed for him.

As he walked the border one afternoon, his attention kept landing on the black bicycle propped against a lamppost, his bicycle, with its menacing gleam. He hated it. Muller waited for him every evening, asking what the guards had discussed on their breaks. As if he spoke to anyone these days. There, in the distance, was Axel. He remembered bunkering under a homemade tent with his friend when they were children, late at night, bending their fingers to make shadow puppets dance on the glowing white sheet they had pilfered from the hall closet. He blinked away the reminiscence. Axel was lost to him. Any sort of intimacy would be impossible now; no one could be trusted, including him. And Emilie. Someday, when he looked back, would she glimmer in his memory as his one and only love? When he thought of the rumor of their child, blood pumped wildly at his temples, deafening him against the usual discipline of his thoughts. Hans was dead. Axel was a stranger. His father was heartbroken. Emilie had vanished into a world he staunchly refused to imagine.

Suddenly, without thinking, Conrad turned to face the lens of a photographer… and heard a click.

“Come on,” the man shouted. “Give us something to look at.”

Before he knew what was happening, Conrad was flying over the barbed coil, dropping his rifle on the eastern side and landing, suddenly, in the west.

The chaos that followed was instantaneous. Axel and another guard ran to intercept him, but were too late. The photographer’s camera clicked mercilessly, capturing Conrad’s every move. Others joined in. The mechanical clacks and whirs sounded more voracious than any of the excited voices. People were shouting but he heard nothing of substance. It happened fast: suddenly, without thought, he was over. For a moment his body felt light as a feather, though when he landed he experienced the full force of his weight. He thought of his father’s disappointments, the open sore of his own uncertainty, and ran.

II

Emilie’s Kreutzberg building would have been visible from Conrad’s side of Berlin, if he had known where to look. It turned out she hadn’t made it very far, but west was west and east was east whether you were an inch or a mile from the border.

Her window was open. From the street below he saw stained white curtains billowing on a lackadaisical summer breeze. A couple of books were piled beside a crusty-looking glass half-full with water. The high wail of a baby crying followed a breeze onto the street, landing painfully in Conrad’s ears.

The building’s front door was unsecured so he walked right in. He took the steps in pairs until he reached the third floor, breathless, and knocked three times.

Emilie’s porcelain face, stiff as a doll’s, held its composure when she opened her door and found him. “I saw the papers.” She wore the same crimson lipstick she used to.

“May I come in?”

“What took you so long?”

“I’ve been busy.” He didn’t have to explain why it had taken him nearly a week to find her. Defectors were always held and questioned by the Allies until their motivations were fully understood.

She was dressed for the office, in a skirt and blouse, and was barefoot; the red polish on her toenails was badly chipped. Conrad stood at the entrance of her small living room and listened for a baby. The tepid silence unnerved him. He was sure he’d heard it crying.

“Where is it?”

“What a nice greeting.” She plopped down on a tattered couch, bundling her knees in front of her. There was little furniture in the place other than the couch and a table with a single chair. There was no sign of a child. On a mantel across the room a pair of bricks served as bookends, with a single book lapsed sideways between them. This was the Emilie he remembered: haphazard, improvisational, a reader. Often selfish. “Why are you here, Connie?”

She had once whispered that in his ear at the height of passion. Connie. Teasing him, calling him a woman’s name, just at his moment of release. She had been his first and only lover. He had assumed they would marry, and was devastated when she disappeared across the border without warning.

“Just tell me: Is it true you had our baby?”

Her eyes were black scythes in a white face. A new pageboy haircut made her severe. Finally, she answered, “I gave it up. I had to. I couldn’t make it on my own with a child.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were expecting?”

“I didn’t know until I was already here, and then it didn’t matter anymore. I wasn’t going back, and you weren’t coming over. You were always too good a comrade for me.”

“And yet here I am.”

“Why?”

It was an excellent question. “The truth is, I’d rather be home.”

“But you defected.”

“It was an impulse. I wanted to…” Words failed him. It wasn’t as simple as finding her and learning the truth. He’d wanted to get away from Muller, and from the black bicycle. “Was it a boy or girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can that be?”

“They were instructed not to tell me at the hospital. I never even saw it.”

“So you don’t know where it is now?”

“How could I?”

She had walked away from her newborn, just as she’d walked away from him. Her mercilessness was electrifying. He wondered if she was telling the truth; if there really had been a baby. A shiver of cold passed through him. Why was he here?

“Want something to drink?”

He sat down beside her. “Why not?”

They drank beer until midnight, after which it was agreed that he should spend the night on her couch. By the second night, he was in her bed. It quickly made no sense for him to leave at all.

“The wall will be finished soon,” Emilie whispered in his ear. “They say it’s going to seal off West Berlin completely, turn us into a little island unto ourselves.”

Conrad thought of his father and mother, trapped on the other side. He’d written to them several times, but doubted any of his letters had gotten through. “I need to see my parents.”

The sheet slid off when she propped herself on an elbow, exposing her small breasts. “I know a way we can both go back.”

“You said you’d never make a good socialist.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Without her lipstick, the wild self-assurance of that slash of vivid red, her smile betrayed a rare vulnerability. He kissed her.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.” She lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. A blue shadow from yesterday’s makeup lingered in the relaxed folds of her lids. Wetting a finger, he smoothed away the color. He disliked it when she became mysterious.

“Explain,” he insisted.

“Do you really want to go back?”

“Yes, but only if you come with me.” He kissed her, and she threw her arms around him.

“Someone very special is in town,” she whispered in his ear. “He can help us. I’m told he’s willing to meet with us today.”

A slender man in a suit and tie reclined in an easy chair in the back room of the construction outfit where Emilie worked. His dark hair was brushed neatly off his forehead, and his fingernails were conspicuously clean. There was no denying his elegance. He held a tiny espresso cup on a saucer, balanced on his knee.

“This is Mischa,” Emilie told Conrad, the moment they walked in. He wondered why she hadn’t introduced him, as well. Did the man already know who he was?

“A pleasure to meet you, Herr—”

“Wolf.” His voice was as unimpeachable as his manicure, without tone. The name Mischa Wolf rang a distant bell in Conrad’s mind. And then it struck him like a thunderbolt.

Markus “Mischa” Wolf was second in command of the Stasi, the notorious spymaster who ran the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. It was rumored that the HVA sent its tentacles worldwide, and well known (if rarely discussed) that the East German secret police recruited far and wide, and greedily. It had to be some kind of absurd dream, finding Wolf in the dusty back room of a minor capitalist enterprise in West Berlin. Unless of course this business was a front. Conrad glanced at Emilie’s pretty face and saw nothing different from before.

Wolf set his cup and saucer on the arm of the chair, and stood. He was tall, with a guileless manner that commanded the room. “It took some time to figure out how to get you here.”

“I can’t imagine why you’d be interested in me, Herr Wolf.”

“It was Emilie’s idea. I’m told you’re trustworthy.”

She nodded, earning a small smile from Wolf. That they addressed each other on a first name basis made Conrad wonder how long they had been acquainted.

“Trustworthy? I myself crossed the border I was guarding.”

“You behaved exactly as we anticipated.”

“I don’t understand,” Conrad lied.

In fact, he understood perfectly. Finally, things made sense.

Herr Muller has been just the beginning. The bicycle. Muller’s threats against his family. That spin around the block had always led right here. For a frantic moment Conrad even wondered if the woman with the garlic bomb had also been arranged by the HVA, to attract the press, to bring the bicycle, to spark his reminiscing and make him susceptible to Muller’s offer of a bike. The story of a baby. How had they known precisely how to tunnel into his mind?

He felt the urgent need to speak with Emilie privately. How long had she worked for Wolf? Was her defection to the west always part of the plan? When had Conrad been factored into it? If this was the case, perhaps she’d been in love with him from the start, in her own strange way. Her face revealed nothing. As his mind awoke, he recognized another fact of life: There was never any baby. It was merely a lever to bring him over, as planned, because Emilie asked for him. But it was Emilie they really wanted. Emilie, with her looks, her brains, her confidence, her inscrutability, would doubtless make the perfect spy.

Light-headed, Conrad turned to leave. But when Emilie’s hand landed in his, with its blast of warmth, he found he couldn’t get to the door.

“What exactly do you want from me?”

“Eyes and ears,” Wolf answered. “Keep us up to date.”

“How long have you been doing this?” Conrad asked Emilie.

“Connie, you’ve got to understand. The wall is just the beginning. Once they’re isolated, once they’re hungry, the wall comes down again and the GDR will run the entire city. No more separation.”

“What do you mean, hungry?”

“There’s a plan for how it’s all going to work. All we need to do is pass along information that could be helpful.”

“What kind of information?”

“Anything. Anything we might notice. Whatever we might overhear.”

“You told me we could get back to the east. Is this what you meant?”

Emilie looked at Conrad with a spark in her black eyes. He hated what she had done to him, and yet he loved her. “We’ll get back home by staying here and working together. We’ll have each other. It’s going to be perfect, don’t you see?”

Thoughts crashing, Conrad did the political math. If he agreed, they would work for the east against the west, while appearing to have defected to the west, as all the while Wolf and his team surveyed and manipulated them. Double agents, if he’d done the puzzle correctly. And if he didn’t agree? He thought of the bicycle, leaning against the tree outside his parents’ building every morning without fail, and knew he’d never get away.

“How can you be so sure we won’t be caught by the Allies?” Conrad asked them both.

“I’ll protect you,” Wolf answered.

“How? What makes you think that you of all people can keep us safe in the west? And what about my parents? How can I know nothing will happen to them if I’m caught?”

Wolf smiled, his teeth slightly yellow in the dim light. “You’re right, no one can trust anyone these days. But even so, young man, you’ll have to make a choice.”