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

EAST MEETS WEST BY JONATHAN STONE

Yes, sure, joy, celebration, jubilation, dancing in the streets, standing atop it triumphantly with upraised fists for the world’s photographers, rock music blasting from open apartment windows, spray painting the dirty grim brick and stone in exuberant neon red and orange and blue, happy vodka- and schnapps-fueled reunions and toasts and excitement and tears of gratitude, yes, sure, but now there is also the jurisdictional nightmare, the integration of Berlin city services separated for almost three decades, subway line and bus line confusion, new hospital assignments and emergency vehicle routes, new patrol zones and a new public safety management grid, and that is why I am striding, in cold November, two days after the fall of the Wall, to meet one Inspector Alexander Grimmenkauf at one of the old checkpoints, because the investigation’s thin trail of evidence so far winds a path on both sides.

Because amid the joy and jubilation and celebration, a young woman has been murdered.

And if you were to observe this meeting — say, from one of the celebratory open apartment windows — you would laugh at the cliché of it, because I am so West German — from my leather jacket and moptop black hair (an indirect legacy of the Beatles’ famed Hamburg stint), to sloppy mustache, to my jazz CD collection, to my sweet blond American girlfriend, Susie (dozing this morning at my pad on Tiergartenstrasse), and Grimmenkauf (whose reputation precedes him) is so Eastern bloc — stepping out of the past and out of one of those noir American films Susie and I have been seeing — trenchcoat, collar turned up, black fedora. Short, squat, compact, and powerful beneath it. Classic Stasi. As schooled in torture and coercion and confession as I am schooled in forensic techniques and databases. As steeped in enforcement’s murky ugly past as I am in police work’s best practices and weekly white papers. And the idea of our working together — of my selection for the case, and of his — with our methods so utterly separated by technology, culture, style, police law — is someone’s idea of a joke. A lab experiment assembled by our respective departments. Even our ages conspire in the metaphor — I am just thirty, looking forward in career and life, he is past sixty, looking back at both.

“Herr Grimmenkauf.”

“Herr Bunder.”

He shakes my hand, glances up at me merely dutifully, and allows only the briefest ironic smile — just enough to tell me that he knows too, what a joke this is. Some administrative committee’s hasty response to sudden shifting conditions. Symbolic. And ridiculous.

And then — no preliminaries, no chat from him. “We can walk to the crime scene and the morgue,” he says flatly. “In that way, a very convenient murder.” He turns, and begins leading me.

Making it clear. I’m not going to be a poster boy for détente. For Western victory and normalization. Let’s figure this out, and go our separate ways as quickly as possible.

Cops don’t walk on the Western side, we’ll take our Mercedes sedans even two blocks. But Grimmenkauf walks, I learn. And as I fall in silently behind him, I notice the limp, of course. Trenchcoat, turned-up collar, gruff monosyllables — and he’s even got the grim limp. Noir on noir. You couldn’t make this guy up.

We walk in silence. And it is walking through the past. Floating through an alternate universe existing alongside my own. Through the trash, and the crumbling, and the decades of sorrow and isolation and imprisonment, and two days later there is still jubilation and smiling and energy from the people, but the buildings around them, the crumbling infrastructure and roadway beneath them, are the vision into what their lives have been. The stunning events of the last two days don’t suddenly erase the last thirty years.

The morgue is as primitive as I expected. Slabs in a basement room, indecipherable paperwork and record-keeping, grumbling resentful functionaries who recite the rules mindlessly and unbending. A dead woman on a slab in a basement morgue: to me, a perfect summation of East Germany.

“Anna Hoppler,” Grimmenkauf says, as we stand over her. “Twenty-four. Graduate student in pharmacology. Found at 31 Strasse Aussenlander. Multiple blows to the skull with a blunt instrument,” he recites with what must be an Eastern bloc sense of irony, because we are looking at a thoroughly crushed-in cranium. Just about enough, coupled with the displaced cranial and facial bone, to obliterate the vision of her original beauty — but not quite.

“Pretty.” I correct myself. “Once.”

He leans closer to her, as if trying to see for himself. He shrugs.

Her body — pale, deflated, now a mere used vessel — is nevertheless taut and supple. Nights dancing, and in the small hours, spreading those long legs and with them, languorous joy. A good-looking grad student. What a waste.

“Pharmacology? Sounds ambitious and practical.”

Grimmenkauf smiles grimly, briefly.

“What?”

He wipes the smile away, still looking at her. “Anna was a prostitute.”

I look at him questioningly. He shrugs again. “On this side, it’s a way of life. To get cigarettes, booze. To save some money. To barter for a little joy.” Then his steely blue eyes go hard again, professional. “We know the prostitutes. We know the trade, the traffic. That’s our research. Our database.” And he taps his head.

He is teasing me, of course. On our side, it’s computers, national databases, interagency cooperation, orderly electronic files. On this side, it’s a more traditional method of information storage.

I ask the obvious. “So where are you on her johns? Any regulars?”

“One in particular. American military boyfriend. With all the access, plus goodies and treats to bring her. That’s why she was with him.” The Allies moved relatively freely between East and West, papers issued by embassies a required but quick and painless formality. They are the kings; the chosen; the Americans.

I’m already getting the sense — the instinct. This could turn out to be very easy — and very hard.

“And what do we know about the boyfriend?”

“Corporal Chad Miller. Chicago, USA. Good looking.” Adding, after a pause, so the thought can stand on its own, “Entrepreneurial.”

“Meaning…?”

“You name it… he traded it. We know of Chad. A very industrious young man. An American love of commerce,” he says with a smirk.

It’s clear that I can ask a former Stasi directly, cop to cop; no intervening nicety or formality required. “Was it him?”

“Oh, it was him.” He points to his belly, still impressively tight, disciplined, from what I can see. “I know it here.” And then to his head. “But not yet here.”

Grimmenkauf’s initial “fieldwork,” let’s call it, has already informed him how Ms. Hoppler’s pharmacology studies put her exactly where she needed to be. In the hospital supply rooms. At the medical lockers. Access — and privacy. “So they each were bringing something to the dance. On his side, he was dealing the drugs. Selling to other soldier dealers in Western Europe. Trading them for drugs and other products that he would bring to the East German side. Making money in both directions.” He looks at me mournfully, his face hanging. “And we’ll never get him for it, and he knows it.”

“Why not?” I’m already building the case in my mind. “Relationship to the victim. Establish movement on the night of the crime. Trace the money trail. Testimony from recipients of stolen goods in exchange for avoiding prosecution…” Seems straightforward enough.

He shakes his head, starts to explain. And I quickly come to understand that Chad is not only one enterprising bastard. He is lucky beyond belief. And lucky, perhaps, beyond justice.

In the East German judicial system, a murder case comes before a panel of three administrative judges — no jury of one’s peers, nothing so egalitarian. They are appointed by the state, and in the pocket of the Communist Party — career Party stooges — who normally would convict on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. It was a systematized corruption that would make an African warlord blush. Mock trials — invented here.

But now, according to Grimmenkauf, with the prospect of a real system of law being established in short order, all these corrupt East German judges were suddenly facing lawsuits against them from countless unjustly convicted defendants. West German lawyers had filed cases already, literally thousands, in the past forty-eight hours. And these judges would now be looking to demonstrate an understanding of such subtle and previously unexercised concepts as due process and reasonable doubt in order to curry favor with their new West German colleagues who would soon be sitting in judgment of them, and especially with the Americans — who would have significant influence in the new judicial policies of a united Germany. These corrupt career jurists were angling to avoid prison themselves. They could see the handwriting on the Berlin Wall — and they would do what they could to hastily rewrite it.

Grimmenkauf smiled, explaining the irony. How previously it would delight them to convict an American serviceman dealing contraband on the Eastern Bloc side. (Would the American military intervene? If so, it would appear as if they were trying to manipulate the system.) But now, these judges would only convict if a case was utterly proven. The testimony of informants, the mere say-so of local cops, circumstantial evidence, would never cut it. There would need to be an unbroken chain of evidence, certainly including a murder weapon. In an environment of leniency, of liberation, of enlightenment, they would do everything to not appear as the force of darkness they had always been.

“These are political appointees, these judges, political creatures. All their lives, their verdicts have had nothing to do with evidence or justice, everything to do with politics. Now, they feel the political wind shifting, and they will shift with it — it’s all they know.”

Politics. Bringing the liberation of millions of East Germans. And one American corporal who doesn’t deserve it.

Justice — a blunt instrument, at best, behind the iron curtain.

And now apparently, no weight to the instrument at all.

One more aspect of the joke Grimmenkauf and I are inhabiting.

“This Corporal Miller. I assume I’m going to meet him shortly?”

“Our next stop,” smiles Grimmenkauf. “We can’t hold him. But the military has made him available to us…” he grunts, raises an eyebrow, “as a witness.”

The rest of the world hears about the Wall, sees the photos, the barbed wire, the sections made broader and thicker over the years, as if the Wall itself is growing into grim, gray adulthood, and the world knows the stories of those shot trying to cross, their bodies left to bleed out, for those on both sides to see. But in fact, it’s a sieve. How could it not be, with a border of over 100 kilometers between the countries; 43 kilometers in Berlin alone. Thousands have made it across successfully over the years. A remarkable brave few evading the guards above their heads (by glider and balloon), and many more under their feet, in the leaky maze of the subway tunnels — those subway lines that cross the border officially sealed off, but the network of repair tunnels still there. And in fact, in the years since the West Germans were allowed to cross in and out daily with the right paperwork, it became of course even tougher to police.

Hence, Corporal Miller.

He is in uniform camos. Black wavy hair grown out a little, as the U.S. military now allows. He has a smiling, cheerful, upbeat way, practically a spoof of the guileless American character. There is also a U.S. military advocate in the interview room, which the U.S. military always provides. In fact I know him, Captain Laughton, and I know the type, from dealing with soldiers stationed in West Germany who get themselves into some bit of trouble over the years. I can see that Grimmenkauf is a little surprised and annoyed by this bit of procedure. I’ve seen the soldiers inevitably get off with a slap of the wrist, with good relations maintained and unjeopardized between Western powers. Not always, but generally.

“Corporal Miller, I’m Inspector Bunder of the Berlin police department,” I tell him. Grimmenkauf has decided to listen from outside the interview room, muttering to me that his anonymity might be useful later. “We have a few questions for you.”

“Go ahead,” says Captain Laughton. Puffing out his chest. As if to say, This all goes through me. I have authority here.

“Did you know Anna Hoppler?”

“Sure,” Miller says. “Everyone knew Anna.” A slippery little smile.

I feel a twinge of anger at this. At its rudeness, at its casual, insolent carelessness. Corporal Chad Miller, operating with impunity. The American military moved liked kings. Immune. Lofty. Unassailable. Heroes, unscarred and untested. “What does that mean, everyone knew Anna?” Does that mean everyone slept with her?

“A group of guys from the base used to party with her and her friends.”

“Regularly?”

He considers. Cocks his head. “Off and on.” That slippery little smile again.

Off and on. I leave it alone for now.

“Were you partying with her on November ninth?” The night the wall fell. The night Anna died.

“Everyone was partying with everyone, man.” He smiles. “It was some wild shit.”

And though he is pretending to be a regular American dumbass GI — and doing a passable job at it — I am picking up more. And here is what I already feared, and what Chad is already confirming. It was such a wild, confusing, crazy night over here, you’ll never be able to sort out who was where, who saw what, who was doing who. Generalized insanity — the perfect cover for murder. As the murderer would know in a premeditated way — or get extremely lucky with, if it was a crime of impulse or passion.

“Do you know where Miss Hoppler worked during the day?”

He shakes his head. “Nah.” Still playing the dumb soldier.

“You don’t know she worked at the hospital pharmacy?”

He shrugs.

I look at his wrist. “That is an awfully nice wristwatch, soldier,” I said.

The arrogance, the insolence, to wear that wristwatch to a meeting like this. Or perhaps, not to even think about it? It could not have been more apparent. Chad the black marketeer. Casual or big time, remained to be seen.

There is probably no more vibrant black market in the world than Berlin’s. No surprise. All the abundance of the West on one side of the wall, all the want and need of the East on the other. It creates an irresistible vacuum, a spinning vortex of goods and desire, with everything imaginable swirling in it — jeans, TVs, computers, cell phones, watches, cigarettes, liquor, jewelry. Even chocolates and candy. And, at the center of the swirling vortex, of course, its common currency, its constant rate of exchange — drugs.

“American goods. And with them, American values,” Grimmenkauf mutters summarily, as we watch Chad saunter out of the stationhouse with Captain Laughton. “And now all of Germany can have those American values. Wunderbar.”

I look at Grimmenkauf, and stay silent, not wanting to be lured into a political argument. Is he needling me, commenting on my own values, on my American girlfriend? He seizes my momentary silence as a chance to go further.

“American-style freedom,” he snickers. “Freedom of choice. Sure. The freedom to choose who you kill, and kill who you choose.” He broods. He warns. “You watch. East Germans won’t know what to do with freedom. Won’t understand it.”

And Anna, did she want, admire, lust for, those American values too? Commerce? Freedom? Did she want to better herself, lift herself up? Did she want just a little piece of Chad’s business? To be a capitalist? To be free to choose?

And maybe Corporal Miller didn’t like that. Didn’t like it one bit.

Corporal Miller — earnest witness, thanked for his time and testimony — goes blissfully, ignorantly on with his life, full speed ahead, in the wide-open, post — collapse party atmosphere. People are celebrating, rules are changing or suspended outright, it’s Chad’s time to shift into high gear; to shine. Over the next several days, Grimmenkauf tracks Chad everywhere — limping after him, unseen, invisible, serenely and superbly professional and adept, unsuspected by the arrogant Chad, who is blind to all but the profit motive. And Chad, it turns out, is dealing everything. Swapping jewelry for pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals for cocaine, cocaine for cash, cash for cigarettes. Born richer and more privileged, he would be peddling institutional bonds and trading insider tips on Wall Street, but the kid is Army, so he’s doing the next best thing. He is a one-man supermarket. Operating with the impunity, access, and mobility of his U.S. citizenship and the implied might and threat of his armed military pals behind him. It was every confirmation of Grimmenkauf’s hard-line, right-wing, cynical view of the world. And worse, it could turn out to be exactly right.

Chad — what kind of name is that anyway? Has no meaning. American meaninglessness. American blandness. It itches at me, annoys me. And I realize: Grimmenkauf’s anti-American sentiments are rubbing off on me.

Grimmenkauf had recently lost both his wife and son to cancer — larynx, bladder, one year apart. He presses on alone. As if fairly certain that cancer can’t ever touch him. Can’t incubate in him. That nothing can. He is too hostile an environment, too harsh, too forbidding, for cancer. Cancer will have to nestle somewhere else.

I only learn about the cancer deaths from my own comrades on the West German side, who ask how it’s going with bemusement. Not from Grimmenkauf. He never mentions it.

We are building a case step by laborious step — as if with a limp. We have turned up some eyewitnesses who will place Chad and Anna together, alone, on the night of the murder, who can put Chad in Anna’s apartment, but can they prove themselves coherent enough amid the partying, if they’re put on the witness stand? They are all kids; all jobless. And Grimmenkauf grumbles, reiterates the politics, that the panel of judges won’t convict on merely a logical chain of connection, they’ll need proof, irrefutable. Proof as blunt and unforgiving as whatever killed Anna Hoppler.

Anna’s dark, drafty apartment has been picked over thoroughly. The West German police have swept it carefully, professionally. The East German police swept it brutally. And Grimmenkauf and I inspect it ourselves afterward — look at every chipped corner of furniture, every pot handle, every hairbrush, every book, every closet top, every toilet tank, every fireplace implement — for blood, for anything, and find nothing.

Chad’s apartment is clean — mockingly so. Nothing stashed. It is a spoof of the bachelor pad — sleek and clean, burnished and expensive, polished gleaming surfaces, utterly unused kitchen utensils, shiny sinks, way out of line for a soldier (he spends scant time in the barracks, only the two nights a week he is required to). As if the apartment says, Look all you like. There is nothing here.

And as we search it, Grimmenkauf won’t let the beer garden politics go. “An apartment like this — this is what the typical East German thinks freedom will mean. An existence of sleek modern surfaces with no history and no past. They long for freedom, because they think it comes with accommodations like this. Because that is the sales job that the Western media has done on us. Freedom as Western goods, as American lifestyle. No wonder the Americans are such champions of freedom. Because they know deep down that it is really a matter of untapped markets, of economic potential…”

Grimmenkauf’s hatred of American values only finds more expression as the days go on.

He is still dutifully limping after Corporal Miller when Miller wanders into a West German post office branch.

A fact which, when Grimmenkauf mentions it, catches my interest — and my instincts — much more than it does his. Because I know, as Grimmenkauf doesn’t, that Corporal Miller can ship and receive at no cost, overnight, any cargo, any freight, through the PX at the military base. The faster, cheaper, far superior way for him to ship. So why the German post office?

“Obviously,” says Grimmenkauf, “to avoid the risk of his packages being inspected by the American military.”

He’s right. It is obvious. Safety. Anonymity. And there I would have left it. But something is beating at me; something feels odd. No cost. Overnight. Ship and receive for free. Lower middle-class Army kid from the wrong side of Chicago, out hustling the world. The transactional personality. The trader. Wouldn’t he gravitate to the most profitable method? Figure out an arrangement, as he apparently had with Anna? Wouldn’t he find a way to make a deal?

On a hunch, I checked with authorities on the base, with whom we West Germans have a good working relationship and who saw no reason not to cooperate, and it turned out that Colonel Miller was shipping plenty of goods through the American PX. He clearly felt a high degree of safety and confidentiality in using the American PX. Clearly he had his own contacts there, partners he could trust, cut in on some profits, and thereby blackmail and control.

A little digging and prodding, and we get the full picture: Pharmaceuticals. Untracked duty-free timepieces. African pelts. Monkey brains. Rhinoceros testicles. Freeze-dried poppy seeds. Corporal Miller is a one-man transfer station. A one-man import-export center. We could bust him on any of these, of course. But it will be another slap on the wrist; a tortuous legal process. We want him, we need him, for Anna.

So — a robust use and enjoyment of the American PX advantages.

Except, maybe, if you’re sending something you really can’t risk. Only then do you turn to the official, anonymous, utterly reliable German postal system.

Anonymous, that is, until we persuade the postal service for an inspection exemption. Circumventing privacy rules with the reluctant assistance of none other than my brother Siggy, a long-standing, dutiful postal employee, who nervously, grudgingly, locates the appropriate confidential shipping waybills for us. A little family connection. A little back-scratching. A little arm-twisting. A little East German tactics on my part, I guess. My nod to my partner of the moment, Herr Grimmenkauf.

We find only a couple of receipts. The bare minimum disclosed on them. Including the shipping date.

A package sent the morning of November 10th, 9 a.m. Contents undisclosed, as is permitted. But the date stamp is clear.

The morning after the Wall fell. The morning after the partying. The morning after Anna Hoppler was murdered. Just as the post office opened.

Giving me a thin hope, the sliver of a sense, that Chad didn’t hide the murder weapon, didn’t bury it, or throw it in the river.

That he shipped it.

Remember I said it was a joke, this East West partnership of Grimmenkauf and me? Well, the joke now accelerates. Gets straight to the punch line. Because the German police — as if to have the full belly laugh out of this — happily pay to put us both on a flight from Berlin to London to Los Angeles, California. To Grimmenkauf’s fabled, beloved America. To Los Angeles, no less, the belly of the beast. To an address in West Hollywood, where some particularly large cartons sent by Corporal Miller have made their way before us.

Grimmenkauf in Los Angeles. The trenchcoat, the squat form, hunched against the unfamiliar sunshine, the gleam off buildings. Squinting out the rental car’s passenger side window as we wind our way up into the Hollywood Hills. Looking at the gleaming, buffed, immaculate ostentation. Disgusted, dreamily, fascinated, silent, as if he has arrived in heaven and hell simultaneously.

I am fully expecting one of Grimmenkauf’s anticapitalist diatribes. Look how precarious, Herr Bunder. Look where they build, on outcroppings of rock, on shifting land. It is irresponsible. Arrogant. A statement of impermanence. Beautiful homes built on the backs of Mexican laborers. Who tend their green lawns and picture-book shrubbery for them. These hills themselves like a Hollywood set.

Of course, these are my own observations. Grimmenkauf never utters a word. Are his anti-American views infecting me? Or perhaps, convincing me?

We cruise now along Mulholland Drive — a street name I recognize from the noir movies with Susie — but on this Los Angeles morning, sunshine bright and bouncing against the rental car sheet metal, against the bright clean road bed. It is the polar opposite of East Berlin, I’m thinking. In weather, appearance, attitude, in past and history (or lack thereof), in atmosphere both literal and metaphoric, in every possible way, its opposite. Grimmenkauf stares out. Blue eyes soaking it in.

The woman’s name is Elaine Markham. The home is beautiful, of course. A big glistening swimming pool, overlooking the Los Angeles valley. Bright colorful abstract paintings on the wall. Ms. Markham greets us in her red tracksuit. Early forties. Bronzed. Gleaming smile. Plastic surgery on her upturned nose, her high cheeks, and her ample and equally upturned breasts. A Hollywood liberal. I once thought that Grimmenkauf and I were opposites, but I have been significantly trumped — as I see polished, sunny Elaine Markham and wrinkled, trenchcoated Grimmenkauf regard each other — from across the globe, from across the universe, divergent species passing unexpectedly close.

We see it on display in the bright living room at the same time, Grimmenkauf and I. Presented beautifully on a pedestal, with a pin light on it. She sees us both looking, and smiles.

“That’s right,” she says. “A piece of the Berlin Wall. To us, it’s so symbolic,” she says, eyes glistening, still visibly moved by this recent triumph of the human spirit. “Such a powerful political moment. Such a statement of freedom.” She looks at it with awe. We step closer to it.

It is amusing, entertaining, to see a piece of the wall we have lived with, dull obtrusive brick, part of our lives like roadway or culvert or drainage pipe or curb, enshrined like this. Worshipped. Like bowing down to a roll of toilet paper.

“This is what Corporal Miller shipped to you?” I ask.

“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Chad the black marketeer.

Another product. Another sudden lucky way to make a buck.

Grimmenkauf then asks her, in his hesitant English: “He sent you more pieces, yes?”

“Oh yes,” she says proudly.

“We can see?”

“Sure.”

“Each one you will sell?”

She looks offended. “Fund-raising. To promote the cause of freedom.”

“How much for a brick?”

“Each goes for $3,000 dollars.”

We stare at her blankly — both of us imagining what $3,000 dollars U.S. would mean in our pay envelopes and in our lives.

“It goes to charity,” she explains. “A charity in West Germany to benefit sick and disabled East German children, called Liberation.”

Liberating you from your cash, I thought. Grimmenkauf and I both knew who we would find behind said “charity.” We knew its founder and sole proprietor.

Grimmenkauf takes the other bricks out of the big open cartons in Elaine Markham’s huge walk-in storage closet.

Ordinary bricks, though most with splashes of vibrant celebratory spray-painted color, all of them still wrapped fully, carefully, in tissue paper.

He finally comes to — unwraps — the last brick in the bottom of one of the cartons.

One side of the brick is completely covered in red.

Merely more paint, graffiti, to the untrained eye. The running joyful color of protest, the bright vibrant evidence of the human spirit.

But to Grimmenkauf and myself, it is obvious.

The West German lab will confirm the blood type. I will guide Grimmenkauf through the new process of DNA matching.

A blunt instrument.

Symbol of freedom.

Though Corporal Miller’s has finally come to an end.

A brick from the Wall. All the weight, heft, and consequence a panel of skittish judges could ask for.

The carefully bagged brick is between us now, as we wind our way back down out of the Hollywood Hills.

In the celebratory chaos of that Berlin night, wouldn’t it be easy for Corporal Miller to simply dispose of it? Drop it in a river or stream? Leave it by the side of a road in the dust and rain? Crush it into pieces, bury it in one of the growing piles of Berlin wall rubble? Yes, he is a risk taker, with a risk taker’s personality, but doesn’t this go foolishly beyond that?

“Why ship it?” I ask. “Why take the chance?”

Grimmenkauf narrows his blue eyes. And the old Stasi — lifelong student of, and witness to, human behavior under duress — smiles thinly, and soon shows he has given up none of his acuity. A limp, yes — but he has not lost a step.

“Panic, Herr Bunder. Panic shipped in a cardboard box.” His steely blue eyes stare out, unblinking. And then, more quietly: “It is one thing to be a cool, confident young entrepreneur. Party drugs, contraband, fancy watches, exotic pelts — sure, why not? But when you kill someone?” His blue eyes squint. “You suddenly enter a new terrain. You cross a border,” he says, pausing, looking at me, and speaking, I realize, from a place very distant from this California sunshine. “And when you first cross this border, everything changes. You are no longer cool and confident. You don’t think clearly. You miscalculate. Make poor judgments. You have fuzzy, childish thoughts — get the bad object as far away as possible, as fast as possible.” Now he looks away. “A twenty-year-old kid who murders someone, someone close, in cold blood? Trust me — you are shaken. You are no longer the same.”

Trust me. You are no longer the same. And I see that Grimmenkauf is speaking from that same far side of the border. From the dark side of that wall.

“For that brick to end up in some unknown wealthy American home — the ultimate hiding place, you think, yes? Forever anonymous among the other bricks. But that is the West German way to see it — a brilliant, inspired twist of commerce. Now look at it the East German way — a desperate act, terrified and impulsive, and in the end, futile.” He turns back to me, blue eyes swimming. “So which is it, Herr Bunder?”

Brilliant? Or desperate? But the verdict is already in. Miller is caught. Grimmenkauf is right.

Smiling a little now, feeling expansive, suddenly enjoying California, the sunshine on his pale craggy face, Grimmenkauf settles back in the passenger seat, and sums it up for himself. “In a panic, Colonel Miller resorted to capitalism,” he says. “But capitalism, Herr Bunder, can’t solve all life’s problems.” A pause. A chuckle. “Especially murder.”

His worldview confirmed — and basking in a rare, brief moment of justice and order — my partner Alexander Grimmenkauf turns his pale face to the passenger window, and rolls it down for one last blast of California sun and air.

But East will never meet West.