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

A NEIGHBOR’S STORY BY VICKI DOUDERA

My name is Rachel Hirsch, and here is what passes for my life: I reside at the Stone Coast Home for Seniors, along with a dozen other old souls in various stages of decline. I’m sharp-tongued and silver-haired, five-foot-two, and Jewish, even if I have not practiced my religion since childhood. At sixty-one I am still fairly spry, and have the dubious distinction of being the youngest resident, although nobody knows my true age.

Every morning for the past month I have woken at dawn, read for an hour in my room, and then pulled on a jacket to hike down the hill to my old house and Roy’s. I watch the sun rise as the lobstermen visit their traps, I hear the shriek of the gulls winging beside the boats, and I breathe deeply of the cold, spruce-scented air. Thoughts of my prior life flit in and out, and, for a few seconds anyway, I feel something akin to peace. Turning, and taking the hill with slow steps, my spirit seems serene in a way that I suppose only the very wicked can understand. Perhaps the snowfalls to come will make these morning pilgrimages impossible, but who can say when — or if — that will happen. I’ve found that winters on the coast can be capricious.

I take my breakfast with the other denizens of the Home. Seated in the stuffy salon where we consume our meals, I spoon oatmeal from a big bowl, sprinkle raisins and chopped walnuts on top, and listen to the memories of my housemates.

Each of us has a story. There’s Frank, a former surgeon from New York, tall, white-haired, and wobbly; Rita, raised up in a restaurant-owning family in a small Vermont town; and Betty, a martini-drinking, summer-stock-singing beauty. I pass the oatmeal to Willis, once the owner of a sardine packing plant Down East, who controls both the conversation and seating arrangement. He hasn’t lost the bullying demeanor of one who single-handedly ran a factory, no more than Frank has forgotten a certain air of medical arrogance, nor Betty the lyrics to songs from South Pacific. Seated beside Willis is Evelyn, dressed as if she’s headed to a disco, even though it is 1989 and the disco craze is dead.

My own story will never be told, not unless the dementia that is gradually gripping my mind loosens my tongue in a way that torture never could. Every day I look for signs that I’ve become a slack-lipped, crazy woman like Mavis, who was removed from Stone Coast Home for Seniors last week because she’d begun shrieking profanity. I wonder whether I’ll know when the time is right to take the cyanide pill I’ve so carefully concealed in an antique locket. I ought to remove it from my jewelry box tonight, pour a glass of Riesling and be done with it, and yet my spirit is such that I cannot help but hang on to this life. Perhaps my tenacity — or cowardice — springs from an inability to imagine a reality beyond the one I now know. Visions of heaven, angels, and welcoming white lights do not ring true for me. Unlike Roy, I believe that the end is The End.

I tell myself that I am curious, that I cling fast to my meager existence because, even after all these years, my story is still unfolding and I long to see where it goes. I hope and pray that is my truth. But there is a terror lurking beyond even the bleakness of death: I fear I am already lost in the fog of forgetfulness, and do not know any better, that I am closer to being like Mavis than I really know.

There are a few things I can say with certainty, and here is one: Roy Mahoney was my next-door neighbor, and a good one at that.

For close to twenty years he performed a laundry list of little acts that bespoke friendship and kindness. Each fall he’d prune the rambling rosa rugosa that bordered my land and the beach, cutting the canes nearly to the ground so that the following June’s blooms would be riotous. Every spring he rustled up a rototiller to turn over the garden, mixing in the aged manure he’d hauled from a neighboring farm. In return, I baked zucchini bread, lent him Tom Clancy novels, and helped pick out presents for his grandkids. My contributions to our friendship seemed small in comparison to his, and yet the man never once made me feel guilty.

Roy brought over a tuna noodle casserole on the day the dog died.

I’d pulled into the driveway in my Civic, and there he stood, wearing jeans and an LL Bean chamois shirt, an aluminum-foil-covered pan in hand. I’d just left the vet, the feeling of the old retriever’s coarse fur still fresh in my mind. My hands trembled as I yanked the keys from the ignition, hot tears threatened to spill from my eyes.

“Cancer?” he asked as he followed me to the door.

I nodded. “Tumor as big as a grapefruit.” I blinked back the memory of Dr. Pease and his assistant carrying Sadie’s still body out of the examining room.

“Putting down a friend is hell.” Roy said. He plunked his casserole on the counter. “Comfort food. Figured you could use a little.”

Roy stayed for supper that night, something he’d done once or twice a week since we both became widowed. I tossed a green salad and uncorked a bottle of Burgundy, while he ripped the foil from his Pyrex pan, letting the smell of tuna waft up and around us.

We talked a lot about the past when we were together. My late husband Henry met Roy while serving at the American Embassy in Vienna, and they were colleagues and friends. Roy liked to reminisce about waltzing in the fancy palaces of alt Wien—old Vienna — especially the elegant dress balls held at the State Opera House. Dressed to the nines, young, and confident, Roy and his wife, Sally, made a handsome, happy couple, a light around which Henry and I fluttered like moths.

In addition to Austria, our chats centered on Connecticut, where we lived in neighboring towns and the men rode the commuter train into New York City each morning. Back then, we met most weekends for bridge. Sally would catch me up on the growing Mahoney family, and the men would smoke cigarettes and discuss politics. This was the tumultuous time from the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, before we’d sold our homes and moved up north to Maine, before Roy went into real estate, before our spouses passed away: first Sally, from breast cancer, and then Henry, from a heart attack.

Never once did we discuss Berlin. It was as if the five years between posts in Austria and New England did not exist.

Instead, we focused on pleasant memories, or kept our conversations firmly rooted in the present. A safe topic was the never-ending list of chores that went hand-in-hand with old-house ownership, like maple syrup and pancakes.

Alone, I never could have handled the work my antique Cape required, but with Roy’s assistance even the most arduous tasks were manageable.

He was ready to help with the roof when Hurricane Gloria tore up the coast back in ’85. I remember the morning after: a sky scoured clear of clouds, an August day so blindingly beautiful it made seeing the storm’s wrath obscene. Damage and destruction were everywhere. The Mahoney’s little dory was smashed into jagged chunks, and up the street a mobile home had been flipped and gutted like a carp. An old apple tree that still bore fruit lay ripped from the ground, the tiny nubs of Northern Spies now stillborn on the branches. In the front of the house, a gaping hole the size of a man now graced my porch ceiling.

Roy patched the roof that afternoon while quizzing me about other storms.

“Doria was back in ’71, right? That one did a heck of a lot of damage.” It was later in the day, and Roy had filled his pockets with roofing nails and climbed back up the ladder. He was sixty-six at the time, agile enough to do any chore. A cool breeze blew in suddenly from the water, a reminder of fall weather to come. I’d hugged my cotton cardigan closer to my body while shaking my head.

“I wasn’t here for that storm.”

“Right.” Roy had held the hammer ready to strike, a thoughtful look on his face. “You went home to see your father.”

“Mother.”

He tacked down a shingle and reached for another. “She lived in Germany.”

“Yes.” The pinched face of the woman I knew only as Mutti flitted through my brain. She had lived in Germany, and, although I took orders from her, she was not my parent.

There was often this type of teasing element to our conversations, as if Roy was trolling for information. That day I’d met his questioning eyes and we’d regarded each other for several seconds. What had I said next? Probably something light, like, “I’m not paying you to gab, Mahoney.”

And what had he answered?

“You’re not paying me at all.”

Because Roy seemed to enjoy this banter, and was in fact the one who initiated it time and time again, I was unprepared for his comments last month. It was Thanksgiving, and we were washing dishes from dinner in his steamy kitchen.

“It was all a game,” he’d said suddenly, stopping in the act of drying a piece of china.

“The Cowboys over the Eagles?” I said, even though I sensed he wasn’t talking about football.

He shot me a look. “Three weeks ago the wall came down,” he said, carefully placing the gravy boat back in the cabinet. “Did you ever think you’d see that in your lifetime? The Berlin Wall is history. If your relatives were still alive they could go back and forth freely.”

I shrugged. The times they were a-changin’. “True.”

“The Cold War is over.” He took an oval platter from my soapy hands. “I keep asking myself why it seemed to matter so much.” He dried the platter, set it on the counter, and draped the dish towel over one arm. “Remember that Thanksgiving we were detained?”

“Yes.” I turned off the water and faced him, my hands on my hips. “How could I forget?”

It was 1960 and a cold autumn had settled on Berlin. The four of us decided to visit English friends in Salzburg for a holiday dinner. It was snowing, hard, and Henry’s car, an ancient Lancia, broke down in the middle of Berlin’s Soviet zone.

“Were you frightened?”

“Of course,” I answered. “We all were.” But not for the same reasons.

I pictured Sally and me, waiting in the military police station, flanked by the men. I saw the watchful eyes of the little Soviet private, his AK-47 aimed at us as we sat on the hard wooden benches. I suppose that Sally feared imprisonment or death, and I assume the men did as well. But I dreaded being exposed, my carefully fabricated life destroyed by one stupid blunder.

“Sally was pregnant,” he said hollowly. “I don’t know if you knew that.”

“No.”

“She lost the baby the next day.”

I thought back. Sally had shared no news of her condition. Apparently she had kept secrets as well.

“You went on to have other children.” As if on cue, the voices of Roy’s grandchildren reached us from the backyard. They were returning from a walk to the little beach.

“Yes, but that was her first. It mattered.”

I untied the faded checked apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door. I’d seen Sally wear it, dozens of times, when baking chocolate chip cookies for the children, or stirring batches of Chex Mix for our bridge games. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well it was a long time ago.” He looked up at me. “Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. I’m grateful for your friendship, you know. Along with the kids, you’ve kept me going.”

I nodded. A shriek from the other room made us both smile.

“You and Henry — you never wanted children.” Stated like a fact, but I knew he was probing. Roy’s interrogation style was nothing if not smooth.

“There were medical issues,” I hinted, pursing my lips together as if the whole subject made me uncomfortable. Let him think Henry had been to blame, when in truth I’d swallowed pills surreptitiously to prevent conception.

“I’m sorry, Rachel — I don’t mean to pry.” He paused, changed the subject. “Sometimes I think you’ve hardly changed from our Vienna days. Those same blue eyes — just like when you came to work for us at the Embassy. What did Henry call them? Danube Blue? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man fall so hard for someone.”

I turned my blue eyes on him and fluttered my lashes. “That’s me — irresistible.”

He chuckled. “Apparently.”

Truthfully, it hadn’t taken much more than a little flirting to get hired by Henry as an errand girl. Once I’d gained his trust, I’d secured a marriage proposal and shown Mutti and my superiors that I was serious about undercover work.

Roy brought us back to the present by brandishing a folder. “Ready to sign that offer?”

I’d come to a decision in the early fall: I was tired of taking care of my old house. I reserved a spot at the Home and hired Roy to list the property in September. Two months later, we had an offer from a New Jersey nurse. A good offer.

“No time like the present.” I sat down at the kitchen table while Roy pulled papers from his file. The children flicked channels in the other room.

“As we discussed, the buyer is willing to pay cash and meet your price. You sure you can clear out of here in two weeks?”

“I can’t wait.” I took the papers from him and initialed several pages.

“Come on, you’ll miss living on the bay, won’t you?”

“I can walk to the water whenever I want. Where do I sign?”

Roy indicated the last page. “Right here.”

I scrutinized the buyer’s signature, a messy scrawl of unrecognizable letters. “Is this supposed to be her name?”

He nodded.

“But her handwriting… I can’t even read it. Is this legal?”

“Sure. You can sign your name with an X and it’s legit.”

“How insulting,” I continued. Proper penmanship had always been a thing with me, perhaps because my schools had been so strict when it came to writing. “I’ll admit it, I’m offended.”

“Come on, Rachel — who cares? So Miss Julie Lamont from Lyndhurst has a messy signature. All that matters is her bank account, and I assure you, it’s strong.”

I signed and handed him the papers. “I hope I don’t meet her,” I said. “Because if I do, I’m going to say that she ought to be ashamed.”

“Really?” He gave me an odd look.

“It’s rude and disrespectful, that’s all.” I gathered my jacket. “Is that all you need? I’m going home.”

I stomped out of Roy’s house, barely saying goodnight to his children and grandchildren.

The next day I called to apologize. “It’s a strange quirk with me,” I said. “You’re right — getting upset about a signature is ridiculous.”

He was silent for a few seconds.

“I’ll forgive you — if you make goulash with some of this leftover turkey.”

“Yes, but only if you’ll join me to have some.”

Roy brought a plateful of turkey over that afternoon and returned in the evening for supper. His company had gone back to southern Maine, and we were enjoying a glass of wine while our dinner simmered on my stove.

“I was thinking about Vienna,” Roy said, swirling the ruby red liquid in his glass. He was seated at the table, a big man who was comfortable in his skin. “I guess that’s why I craved the goulash, huh?”

I smiled. “Hungarian food always was your favorite — Henry’s too — and it certainly was plentiful there.”

He nodded. “What a fabulous city. I don’t think you’ve ever told me what brought you to Vienna in the first place?”

“Curiosity, I suppose,” I gave a little shrug to add credence to my lie. I had been sent to Vienna: there had been no choice about it. “It was such a lively spot once the war was over.”

“Yes.” He knocked back the rest of his wine. “It was a wonderful listening post, too.”

I stood, reached for the bottle, and refilled his glass. “What are you talking about?”

He chuckled. “Rachel, you know what I mean. Certainly Henry told you the real reason we were stationed in Vienna. It was fertile ground for information… for espionage.”

I moved to the stove and stirred. “Don’t tell me you and Henry were spies?” I kept my voice very light. “I can see my exposé now: I Slept with an Agent.”

“Rachel.” Roy rose from the table and walked to me. Put his hands on my shoulders. “Henry told me that you knew about our cover.”

I turned and regarded him with wide eyes. “I would have been a total dummy not to suspect something, especially once you both got transferred to Berlin. What about Sally? She must have known, too?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Sally had a very trusting nature.”

“And you’re saying I don’t?”

I watched as he walked back to the table and picked up his wine glass and seemed to study it. “We had a mole in the Berlin office,” he said quietly. “Lost several good men because of leaks we couldn’t plug.” He paused. “I always suspected Henry.”

“That’s ridiculous! Henry would never have betrayed his country. He didn’t have the…” I stopped. “He wasn’t like that.”

“What were you going to say? That he didn’t have the nerve? The imagination?”

“No, I—”

“You’re right, you know, Henry didn’t have the guts. He was the type that followed orders to the letter. You, on the other hand—”

“Me? Now you’re making no sense at all.”

“I’ve speculated about you for years.”

“What?” I faked a lilting laugh. “Roy, I think your days of drinking burgundy are over. Of all the crazy things to say! It’s the nonstop stories about the Berlin Wall. It’s put you into some kind of fantasy land.”

“Come on,” his voice was soft, cajoling. “After all this time, after everything we’ve shared, you can’t keep pretending. Not to me, Rachel. Admit it: you were an East German spy working right under our noses.”

“I see.”

“I’m not going to do anything about it, so why not come clean? It’s not like anyone would care at this stage of the game.”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. I knew people who would care very much. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His eyes were boring into mine, his jawline taut. “Who was your contact?”

I turned, removed the lid of a pot, and slammed it down on the stove with more force than I intended. “I’m not talking about this anymore. You’re accusing me of terrible things.” I stirred the noodles for the goulash and hefted the pot to the sink. Steam rose as the water poured out and they drained, fogging the window that looked out to the bay.

I carried the noodles back to the stove and added them to the turkey mixture. “Set the table, Roy,” I instructed him in a quiet voice, “and stop talking nonsense.”

He turned to the cabinets, opened one, and pulled down plates. They clattered as he placed them on the table.

“I’ve never had any real proof,” he said, opening a drawer for silverware. He pushed it shut with his hip. “That is, until yesterday.”

I reached up to a shelf where I kept spices. “Oh really? What gave me away, the type of cranberry relish I ate for Thanksgiving?”

“Signing that contract. Your strange reaction to the buyer’s signature.”

The house was silent except for the bubbling of the goulash. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either, at first, but then I remembered a man Henry and I interrogated.”

“This gets more and more complicated.” I sprinkled the contents of a jar into the goulash and stirred.

“Bear with me. This guy told us about a spy who was extremely fastidious about penmanship.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” My voice sounded flat.

“He described a young German woman whose father was a Jewish doctor. In 1933 her family fled the Nazis for Switzerland, eventually settling in Moscow.”

I swallowed, and he went on.

“She was educated at elite Party schools and trained for undercover work. After the war, she went to the Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin, becoming part of the East German foreign intelligence service. Sound familiar?”

“Yes.” I carried the pot of goulash to the table. “It sounds like a John le Carré novel.” I struggled to keep my voice light. “Sit down, Roy, and let’s eat.”

He pulled out my chair with a flourish. He was enjoying himself, demonstrating just how clever he was. “Don’t you want to hear the punch line?”

“You mean there’s more?” I gave a gay little laugh and spooned goulash onto his plate and then mine. I took my napkin, spreading it carefully onto my lap.

“Yes. The best part, you might say.” He put a forkful of the steaming noodles up to his lips and blew on them. “The agent we were questioning said that the German spy was known to be ruthless, with a strange trait: an almost sadistic hatred of poor penmanship.” He paused. “I’ll never forget what he did, Rachel. He held up his hands, like this,” Roy spread his fingers out, palms toward me, “and he was missing the middle finger from each. The agent had hacked them off to teach him a lesson.”

“Quite the story.”

“Isn’t it? Now you can see why I thought of you.”

“I see — my flair for the dramatic? My skills with a butcher knife?” I tried to smile.

“Your reaction to that signature yesterday.”

“I’m flattered that you think I could have been — could still be — a notorious spy.” I took a gulp of my wine. “Try the goulash.”

“Sure smells heavenly.” He peered down at his fork. “These mushrooms remind me of the ones we ate in Austria, the heaping basketfuls you gathered in the Vienna woods.”

“Yes,” I said. The same mushrooms I’d picked as a girl in Hechingen, and later in the forest outside Moscow. The ones often confused with deadly Amanitas, a small quantity of which I kept dried in a jar among the spices.

He took a bite, chewed, and gagged violently.

I watched him slump to the floor. Several moments later I would take his pulse, grind up the goulash in my garbage disposal, and carefully wash and dry the dishes. I would put dessert on the table, compose myself, and phone for an ambulance. But first, I bent down and kissed his cooling cheek.

“It’s over,” Roy rasped. “Can’t you see that it’s over?”

I knew he was referring to the Cold War, and I gave a sad smile. “Not for me, Roy. It will never be over for me.” A thin trickle of spittle seeped from his mouth as I sat back on my haunches. “Auf Wiedersehen.”

How often in the weeks that have followed have I wished for a different ending to Roy’s story? Wished that he had never made the connection exposing me, wished that he had not been the one to list my house, wished with all my heart that he’d anticipated my lethal nature? Even as I watched the emergency responders try to restart Roy’s heart, I pictured the way a different scenario might have played out. I saw Roy, raising a hidden gun, firing, and my world going black. Roy, realizing that my cover had to be protected at all costs because it was the only world I had ever known.

My wishes all vanished when they wheeled him away.

Now I rise at dawn to take my walks. I listen to stories, eat oatmeal. I keep my secrets and save my memories, especially those of good friends who were hell to put down.