The Cold War Swap

Chapter 10

I stepped back and bumped against the bed. It seemed that I should do something, so I sat on it and stared down at the sprawled body of Weatherby. I tried to think of something else to do besides sit on the bed, but nothing came to mind.

“Who is he?” Cooky asked.

“He said that he was John Weatherby and that he was British and that he used to work with government here in Berlin. He said he was going to take me to the Café Budapest tonight to meet Padillo. He was working for him. He said.”

“Now what?”

I stared at Weatherby some more. “Nothing. I’ll go to the café alone. You’d better get down to your room.”

“No cops?”

“They’ll be here soon enough after the maid comes in to turn down the bed. If Mike’s in the kind of a fix that gets people killed, he’s in a bad way. I can’t wait around. There’s not enough time.”

“I think I’ll tag along.”

“It’s not your show.”

“I’ve got five thousand invested and you might be passing bum checks.”

“Tag along and you might not get the chance to find out.”

Cooky smiled his private-joke smile. “I want to stop by my room first. Meet me there in five minutes.” He stepped over Weatherby’s legs and went out.

It was some while after Cooky left before I got up and put on my raincoat and slipped the bundle of money into one pocket and the revolver into the other. It no longer felt ridiculous. I went over to the window and stared out at the lights, and after I felt that five minutes had passed I took the elevator down to Cooky’s suite.

“A whore’s dream,” he said, opening the door to my knock. He walked over to his suitcase, which lay spread open on one of the twin double beds that took up most of the room. He took out a long, thin silver flask and slipped it into his hip pocket.

“Taking only the essentials, I see.”

“Emergency rations,” Cooky said. “I intend to make do with the local stuff.”

He looked down at his suitcase thoughtfully, seemed to hesitate, and then took out a wicked-looking revolver with a short barrel. It was an ugly gun, designed to be used quickly and up close, not for plinking at rabbits off the back porch.

“What’s that?” I said.

“This,” he said, holding the gun delicately by its two-inch barrel, “is a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. Note that the forward end of the trigger guard has been removed. Note, too, that the hammer spur has been eliminated, thus removing the possibility of its snagging the clothing if the weapon has to be produced quickly.” He put the revolver carefully down on the bed, fished into his suitcase again, and came up with a short leather holster.

“This was made by a good old boy from Calhoun, Mississippi, name of Jack Martin. It’s called a Berns-Martin holster. The forward edge is open, and it has a spring that passes around the cylinder of the gun to keep it snug.” He picked up the revolver and snapped it into place. “Thusly. I will shortly demonstrate.”

He took off his jacket and belt and threaded the belt through the holster. When he slipped the belt back on, the holster, with the gun, rode high on his right hip. He got into his jacket and tugged at the lapels. The gun was invisible — not even a bulge. “Now, when you wish to produce the weapon rapidly, you just swish it forward. If you’ll count to three by thousands...”

I counted “one thousand.” Cooky’s body relaxed like a loose rubber band. His right shoulder dropped slightly on the count of “two thousand,” and on “three thousand,” he swayed his hips to the left and his hand brushed away the edge of his coat. Before I finished saying “three thousand” I was looking into the barrel of the revolver. It seemed uglier than before.

“You’re fast.”

“About a half-second, maybe six-tenths. The best there is can do it in three-tenths.”

“Where did you learn it?”

Cooky replaced the gun in the holster. “In New York when I was on the flit. I was planning a showdown on Madison Avenue with my two partners. It seemed like a good idea at the time. There was an expert who took advantage of the fast-draw craze a few years back and started accepting pupils. I had it in mind to challenge Messrs. Brickwall and Hillsman of Baker, Brickhill and Hillsman to a duel. I used to lock myself in my office and practice for hours before a mirror. When I got good enough I went up to my farm in Connecticut and started target practice. It was a goddamned obsession. I must have fired fifteen or twenty thousand rounds. And finally I found the perfect target.”

“What?”

“Quart cans of tomato juice. I bought them by the case, set them up — with the ends facing me — against the barn wall, and banged away. Ever see a .357 slug open up a can of tomato juice?”

“I never have,” I said, “but, then, I’m not much on tomato juice.”

“It’s bang and wow and shleep. The goddamn stuff explodes all over everything. Looks like blood. Flattens the can out like you had snipped it open with tin shears and pounded it flat with a sledge hammer. Most satisfying.”

“But you never got satisfaction from your partners?”

“No. I spent a couple of weeks on a funny farm instead, drying out.”

Cooky closed his suitcase and slipped on his topcoat. “Shall we go?”

I looked at my watch. It was nine-twenty. We were to be at the Café Budapest at ten. “You don’t have to go, Cooky. You’ll probably land in trouble.”

His secret-joke smile flickered for an instant. “Let’s just say that I think I’d like to come along because I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve never done anything really all the way down to the wire.”

I shrugged. “They threw Christ out of the ball game at thirty-three and He got back in. But you’re trying to make it the hard way.”

We took the elevator down and walked swiftly through the lobby. Nobody stared or pointed. John Weatherby must have been still alone and undiscovered and dead in my room. I couldn’t mourn for Weatherby because I han’t known him, although I had liked what had seemed to be a quiet competence. If anything, his death seemed to have been too casual and meaningless, as most violent deaths are. But perhaps they are better than the kind that have the dark, quiet room; the drugged pain; the whispering nurses slopping around in rubber-soled shoes; and the family and the friend or two who give a damn and who also wonder how long you’ll hold out and whether there’ll be a chance to keep that cocktail date at half-past six.

We left the Hilton and walked toward the Kaiser Wilhelm church.

“When was the last time you were in the East Sector?” Cooky asked.

“Years ago. Before the wall went up.”

“How did you go through?”

I tried to remember. “I think I was slightly tight. I recall a couple of girls from Minneapolis who were staying at the Hilton. They were with me. We just caught a cab and sailed through the Brandenburg Gate. No trouble.”

Cooky looked over his shoulder. “Things have changed. Now we foreigners go through Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse. It could take an hour or so to get through, depending on whether the Vopos liked their dinner. You have your passport?”

I nodded.

“There used to be eighty official ways to get into East Berlin,” Cooky said. “Now there are eight. We need a car.”

“Any ideas?” I said, and looked over my shoulder.

“Rent one. There’s a place called Day and Night on Brandenburgische Strasse.”

We caught a cab and told the driver to take us to Brandenburgische Strasse, which was about three minutes away. We picked out a new Mercedes 220. I showed my driver’s license.

“How long will you have use for the car?” the man asked.

“Two or three days.”

“A two-hundred-Mark deposit will be sufficient.”

I gave him the money, signed the rental agreement, and put the carnet de passage and other papers into the glove compartment. I got behind the wheel, pumped the brakes to see if they worked, and started the engine. Cooky got in and slammed his door.

“Sounds tinny,” he said.

“They don’t make them the way they used to.”

“They never did.”

I turned left out of the Tag und Nacht garage and headed for Friedrichstrasse. You can usually ignore the speed limit in Berlin, but I kept to a modest forty to fifty kilometers per hour. The car handled well, but it wasn’t especially eager. It was just a machine designed to get you there and back with a minimum of discomfort. I turned left onto Friedrichstrasse.

“What’s the form?” I asked Cooky.

“Get your passport out; a GI will want to look at it.”

I drove on and stopped when a bored-looking soldier standing in front of a white hut waved me down. He glanced at our passports and then handed us a mimeographed sheet, which warned against carrying any non-American persons in the car, admonished me to obey all traffic regulations because “East Berlin officials are sensitive about their prerogatives,” and cautioned us about engaging in unnecessary conversation with East Berliners.

“What if I have to ask where the john is?” Cooky said.

“You can pee in your pants, mister, for all I care. Just fill this out first.”

It was a form requesting the time we could be expected back at the checkpoint. I put down midnight.

“Anything else?”

“That’s all, buddy. Just be nice to the krauts.”

A West German policeman nearer the crossing yawned and waved us on and I zigzagged the car through a series of white pole barriers and parked it. After that it wasn’t much worse than having a tooth pulled. There was the currency declaration. We lied about that. Then there was the passport inspection. There was nobody else in the line, and the Volkspolizei seemed to have nothing better to do.

“You are a businessman,” he said, thumbing through my passport.

“Yes.”

“What type of business?”

“A restaurant.”

He read some more about me and then slipped the passport through a slot behind him, where somebody else got the chance to find out how tall I was and how heavy and what color my hair and eyes were and what countries I might have visited in the past few years.

Cooky was next. “Herr Cook Baker?” the Vopo asked.

“Yes.”

“Is that not a strange name?”

“One gets a comment or two.”

“You are a public-relations man?”

“Yes.”

The Vopo nodded thoughtfully. “Just what is a public-relations man, Herr Baker?”

“We deal in controlled revelation,” Cooky said.

The Vopo frowned. He was a short, wiry man with a foxy face and eyebrows that needed combing. “You are a propagandist?”

“Only for inanimate objects — soap, underarm deodorant shaving lotions. Just the essentials. No government work.”

The sharp-faced German read some more about Cooky and decided that his passport didn’t need to travel through the slot. He got mine back, shot his cuffs, and prepared for the operation. First the stamp was inked twice on the pad, then it was examined, and then it was applied to the passport with a firm yet flashy bang. The Vopo admired his work briefly and then gave us back the passports after a cursory glance at the car’s papers. We got into the Mercedes and drove up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, about a half-mile away.

I drove slowly. East Berlin was even more drab than I had remembered it, the traffic was spotty, and the pedestrians walked as if they had to and not because they were out for a late-evening stroll. Their faces were stolid and they didn’t seem to smile much, even when talking to one another; but, then, I couldn’t recall many metropolitan boulevards these days where the pedestrians are noted for their cheerful faces.

“What happens if we don’t get back by midnight?” I asked Cooky.

“Nothing. They probably marked our passports somehow so that if we don’t show up and somebody else tries to use them they can spot it. But that form we signed about when we thought we’d come back is just routine. Nobody cares how long you stay over.”

We turned right on Unter den Linden. “Go through Marx-Engels Platza, straight ahead till you hit Stalinallee or whatever the hell they call it now — Karl Marx Allee — and I’ll show you where to turn left. I think.”

“Sounds as if you’ve been here before,” I said.

“No. I asked the bellhop at the Hilton. Bellhops know everything. He said it’s a dump.”

“It would fit in with the rest of the evening.”

“How much do you know about the whole thing?”

I lighted a cigarette. “Nothing firsthand. Just from hearsay. I saw Weatherby today and he said he would take me to Padillo, who is in some kind of jam. After Weatherby I ran into Maas, the mystery man, who claims that Padillo is being suckered — that he’s up for trade for two defectors from the National Security Agency. For five thousand dollars Maas says he can get Padillo out of East Berlin through a tunnel. He seemed to think Padillo would buy the idea. He wanted half in advance, but I said no deal and then called you for the cash. That’s it, except Burmser and his assistant with the big, white smile.”

“One thing,” Cooky said.

“What?”

“Mass is giving you a deal if he’s got a tunnel.”

“How’s that?”

“Rooms on this side close enough to the wall to make a break are just about nonexistent. But the West Berliners, across the wall, are charging up to twenty-five hundred bucks just for a room to run to so you won’t get shot after you jump over.”

“There are people who will make a buck whatever the graft — fire, pestilence, famine or war.” The apartments we were passing were the ones that had been thrown up in a hurry in 1948. Their plaster or stucco exteriors were flaking off, exposing the red brick underneath. The brick looked like angry red sores. The balconies sagged and clung halfheartedly to the buildings.

“You can still walk back,” I said.

“Straight ahead,” Cooky directed. “You know how many of them were crossing over just before the wall went up?’

“About a thousand a day.”

“That’s thirty thousand a month. Working stiffs mostly, but also a boatload or two of engineers, doctors, scientists, technicians of all kinds. It was bad public relations on Bonn’s part.”

“How?”

“They talked it up too much. They rubbed it in until it stung. Ulbricht went off to Moscow and convinced Khruschchev that he had to seal it off: the GDR couldn’t stand the embarrassment. The West kept score, and every time they hit a thousand the newspapers carried it in ‘second-coming’ headlines. So one hot August day when Ulbricht got back from Moscow the word went out. First there was just the barbed wire. Then they started putting up the wall: concrete slabs a meter square. And when they found that that wasn’t enough they topped it off with a yard or so of cinder blocks. A guy I know from Lone Star Cement took a look at it and said it was a lousy job — from a professional viewpoint.”

“So what should Bonn have done?”

“Turn left here. They should have known it was going up. Their intelligence was lousy, but no worse than ours or the British. Maybe there wasn’t time, but the blocks had to be cast, the cement ordered. Somebody should have buttoned on. You don’t set out to build a twenty-seven-mile-long wall through the middle of a big town without a few leaks. If they had known, they could have turned their propaganda guns loose. RIAS could have knocked hell out of the Reds some more. The British and the Americans and the French could have sent what are called ‘tersely worded notes.’ There were sixty thousand East Berliners working in West Berlin. Some of them could have stayed. Hell, they could have done a lot of things.”

“All they needed was a good PR man.”

Cooky grinned. “Maybe. At least the East was all set for it with an outfit they called ‘The League of the German Democratic Republic for the Friendship Among the Peoples.’ The flacks for this outfit started pounding away on three points, all aimed at excusing the wall. First, they cried a lot about how the West was inducing doctors, engineers and others to cross over by the use of what they called ‘cunning and dishonorable methods.’ It comes out money in the translation.

“Second, those who lived in East Berlin and worked in West Berlin were getting four East German Marks for every Western D-Mark they earned. This meant that a guy could go over to West Berlin, sign on as a common laborer, and make as much as the specialist with a university education who worked in the East. That seemed to bother them some, too.

“And, third, they were all upset about the smuggling. Or maybe the Russians were unhappy. At any rate, the East’s flacks claimed that the wall went up to stop the ‘illegal export’ of such stuff as optical instruments, Dresden china, Plauen laces and the like. They claimed it cost them thirty-five thousand million marks a year — however much that is.”

“You may be right that the West bragged too much about the numbers of refugees,” I said.

“I’d have probably done the same.”

“It was just too good to ignore — especially if you’re screaming for unification. But it’s academic now — like calling that third-down play on Monday instead of Sunday. And if you want a McCorkle prediction, I’ll be happy to make one.”

“What?”

“That wall isn’t coming down — not in our lifetime.”

“You only bet cinches, Mac. We’re damn near there — wherever there is. Turn left.”

I turned left down a dark, mean street whose name I didn’t catch and didn’t even look for. We drove a block, and the Café Budapest was on a corner, the first floor of a three-story building with a small electric sign that had half of its bulbs burned out. It was a prewar building, and you could see where it had been patched up with plaster that was newer than the original. Parking was no problem. We got out and walked toward the entrance, which was recessed into the corner of the building, catawampus to the sidewalk.

Cooky pulled open the heavy wooden door and we went in. The room was about sixty feet long and thirty-five feet wide. It had a high ceiling, and at the far end there was a platform where a four-piece band gave out a weary version of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” A few couples moved around the twelve-by-twelve dance floor. Two girls danced together. There were some dark wooden booths along both sides of the room and the bar was at the front, next to the door. The place was a quarter full, and we seemed to have missed the happy hour. We didn’t take off our coats.

“Let’s try a table,” I said.

We sat down at one near the door.

“What time is it?” I asked Cooky.

“Five till ten.”

“Let’s stick to vodka. I understand it’s halfway decent.”

A waitress came over and I ordered two vodkas. We attracted about as much attention as a flea in a dog pound. The waitress came back with the drinks and waited to get paid. Cooky gave her some D-Marks and waved the change away. She didn’t smile. She didn’t say thank you. She walked off and stood tiredly by a booth and examined her fingernails. After a while she started to chew on one of them.

Cooky drank half his vodka and smiled. “Not bad.”

I sipped mine. I can’t tell the difference in vodka, except for the proof. This was high-octane.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“We wait.”

“What if nothing happens?”

“We go back to the Hilton and I explain what a dead body is doing in my room. You can be thinking something up.”

We sat there and drank vodka and listened to the band give its version of “Deep Purple.” At exactly ten P.M. the door opened and a girl came in. She wore a belted dark-green leather coat and high-heeled black pumps. Her hair was dark and long and fell to her shoulders in what they used to call a page-boy bob. She moved to our table and sat down.

“Order me a glass of wine,” she said in German.

I signaled the waitress. She trudged over and I ordered the wine.

“Where’s Weatherby? The girl asked. She pronounced the “w” like a “v” and the “th” like a “z.”

“Dead. Shot.”

Persons register shock in many different ways. Some gasp and start saying “no” over and over as if, through denial, things can be changed back to the way they were. Others are more theatrical and they grow white and their eyes get big and they start chewing on their knuckles just before they yell or scream. And then there are those who just seem to die a little. The girl was like that. She grew perfectly still and seemed to stop breathing. She stayed that way for what seemed to be a long time and then closed her eyes and said: “Where?”

I foolishly started to say “in the back,” but I said, “In West Berlin, in the Hilton.”

The waitress was bearing down on us and the girl said nothing. Cooky found some more money and paid again, this time increasing the tip. There were still no thanks.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Marta. He was to have a car.”

“Who?”

“Weatherby.”

“I have a car.”

“You’re McCorkle?”

I nodded. “This is Baker. This is Marta.” Since it was a girl, Cooky gave her his dazzling smile. His German hadn’t been sufficient to keep up with the conversation. I wasn’t sure that mine had been either.

“Padillo said nothing about another man.”

“He’s a friend.”

She glanced at her watch. “Did Weatherby — did he say anything before he died?” She got it out well enough.

“No.”

She nodded. “What kind of car do you have?”

“A black Mercedes — the new one parked just across the street.”

“Finish your drinks,” she said. “Tell a joke. Laugh and then leave. Shake hands with me, both of you, before you go. He does not speak German?”

“No.”

“Tell him then.”

I told him.

The girl said, “Go out to your car and start the engine. I will follow in a minute or so.”

I turned to Cooky and clapped him on the back. “When I get through saying this see how loud you can laugh. O.K. You can start any time.”

Cooky laughed, the girl laughed, and I laughed. We shook hands and said auf wiedersehen and went out the door. The girl remained seated at the table.

It had grown cool, and I turned my coat collar up as we hurried toward the Mercedes. A car parked down the block started its engine, flicked on its lights, and spun its tires in its hurry to get away from the curb. It roared toward our corner and I jerked at Cooky’s arm. The car was long and dark and looked something like a postwar Packard. It seemed to be aimed at us and we stumbled backward on the sidewalk. The car drew abreast and slowed slightly and I saw that there were two men in the front seat and one in the back. The two in the front didn’t look at us. The back door flew open and a man spilled out, somersaulting once before he came to rest on his back in the gutter.

A face looked up at us with open eyes and long black hair that was mussed and dirty. Yet the teeth gleamed as whitely as ever. None were missing, but the smile held no humor. Bill-Wilhelm lay dead in the gutter, and the car kept on going and skidded around the corner, the engine straining, the back door still flapping as the man in the rear seat tried to close it.

“Let’s go,” I said, and raced for the Mercedes.

I started the engine and pounded the horn ring three times. The girl seemed to have understood, because the café door opened and she ran toward the car as I flicked the lights. When she saw the body she paused slightly but not much. I had the back door open, and the car was moving when she slammed it shut.

“What happened?”

“They dumped an American agent on us. Which way?”

“Straight ahead and then left at the second crossing. He looked dead.”

“He was. Is Padillo all right?”

“He was an hour ago.”

“That’s a long time in this town.”

“Where are we going?” Cooky asked.

“I’m just following directions,” I said.

“We’re being followed,” she said.

I caught a glimpse of the headlights in the rearview mirror, “Brace yourself,” I told her. “How good are you with that pistol, Cooky?”

“Not bad.”

“Can you get a tire?”

“From thirty or thirty-five feet. No more.”

“O.K., I’m going to take the next corner fast and then slam on the brakes. Jump out and see what you can do.”

I sped up, threw the Mercedes down into second, and yawed around the corner on fat springs. I braked quickly to the curb and Cooky jumped out and ran to the corner. His gun was in his hand. He shielded himself with the edge of the building. The car started the corner fast, the driver making excellent use of gears and brakes. Cooky aimed carefully and fired twice. The car’s right front and rear tires blew, giving the gun’s blast a double echo. The car slewed toward the curb and I could see the driver wrestling for control, but it was too late, and it bounced over the far curb and crunched nicely into a building. By then Cooky was back in the Mercedes and I had it in low, the accelerator pressed hard against the floor board. It wasn’t competition pickup, but it was steady. Cooky took out his flask and drank. He offered it to the girl in the rear seat, but she refused.

“Which way?” I asked her.

“We must take the side streets. They’ll have radio contact.”

“Which way?” I snapped.

“Left.”

I spun the wheel and the Mercedes bounced around another corner. I was hopelessly lost.

“Now?”

“Straight ahead for three streets... then right.”

I kept the Mercedes in second to provide braking power if we needed to turn quickly.

“I wonder why they dumped him on our doorstep.”

“Burmser’s boy?”

I nodded.

“Maybe they thought he was a friend of ours.”

“I hope they weren’t right.”