The Cold War Swap

Chapter 11

As we threaded our way deeper into East Berlin, the girl Marta said nothing but “right” and “left” and “straight ahead.” Both pedestrian and automobile traffic grew lighter as the residential area gave way to an industrial section.

“We’re in the Lichtenberg District,” she said. “It’s not far now. The next right.”

I turned right and drove half a block.

“Here,” she said; “turn down this alley.”

It was between two five-story buildings that had escaped major combat damage. The alley was narrow — just wide enough for the Mercedes. I drove slowly, keeping only the parking lights on.

“At the back there is a shed. You can put the car in there.”

“Left or right?”

“Left.”

The alley was a cul-de-sac ending against a brick wall. Between the brick wall and the building was a shedlike building with sliding doors. I stopped the car and the girl got out.

“Help her, Cooky.”

The girl handed Cooky a key and he unlocked a door and slid it open. I drove the car in and killed the engine and the lights. There was another car parked in the shed — a fairly new Citroën ID-19. It was green or black: I couldn’t tell in the dark.

“This way,” the girl whispered. She opened a door that led from the shed into the building. “They used to make uniforms here during the war, but the Russians took the machinery. Then it was turned into a sleeping barracks. Then a light-manufacturing concern. And now it is vacant. It will be for another month.” She opened her purse and produced a pencil flashlight. “All the way to the top. Five flights.” We moved up the stairs, guiding ourselves by the railing. By the time we reached the fifth floor I was gasping a little. The stairs ended on a small landing that had a large door. The girl knocked and it opened quickly. Padillo stood in the door, a cigarette in one hand, a revolver in the other. The girl brushed past him. She said, “There is trouble.”

Padillo ignored her. “Hello, Mac.”

“Weatherby’s dead. Cooky decided to come along.”

“Hello, Cook.” Padillo never called him Cooky.

“Mike,” Cooky acknowledged. “You can point that thing the other way.” Padillo smiled and tucked the gun in the waistband of his slacks.

We entered the room. It was at least seventy-five feet long and thirty-five feet wide. From the twelve-foot ceiling hung long cords ending in two sixty-watt bulbs that fought weakly against the gloom. The windows were covered with tar paper. At one end of the room were a sink and a two-burner hot plate. A wooden box of canned goods and dishes and glasses sat on a low bench next to the sink. A long, unpainted wooden table with some nondescript kitchen chairs clustered together under one of the sixty-watt bulbs. At the other end of the room were six cots covered by thick gray blankets. A closetlike cubicle stood in one corner of the room.

“That’s the john,” Padillo said. “Let’s sit over here.” We sat at the long table. “What are you smoking?” he asked.

“Pall Malls.” I handed him the pack.

“I ran out yesterday. You want a drink?”

“I’m half tight now,” I said, “but, now that you mention it, yes.”

“Marta, would you mind?” The girl had taken off her green leather coat. She wore a skirt and a frilly blouse. The blouse curved pleasantly. From the sink she brought a bottle of Stolichnaya, one of the better brands of Russian vodka. She poured drinks into water tumblers.

We drank. There were no toasts.

“Weatherby,” Padillo said. “What happened?”

“We were in my room at the Hilton. He knocked on the door, stumbled in, and died on the rug. He’d been shot. In the back, if that makes any difference.”

“He say anything?”

“He apologized for being early.”

Padillo’s lips compressed into a thin line and his fingers drummed on the table. “Christ.”

I took another drink of the vodka: more high-octane. “So what brings us to East Berlin?” I asked.

“A couple of promoters have a clever one going,” Padillo said. “They want to trade me for a pair of NSA defectors and I’m trying to buy up my contract. Weatherby was helping. Now that he’s gone, we may have to cancel.”

“How many do you need?” Cooky asked.

“Four.”

“Weatherby, Mac and you would make three.”

“There’s another guy due: Max.”

“With me you have four,” Cooky said.

“You seem anxious for trouble, Cook.”

Cooky smiled his half-joke smile. “In for a penny, in for a pound. I don’t think we can get back through Checkpoint Charlie. When we came out of the café a big black car dumped a dead one right in front of us. He worked for your outfit, I understand. Then we were followed and I had to shoot the tires off another big black car. I think we’re pretty well tagged.”

“Cooky’s very handy with a gun,” I said. “Show him.”

Padillo looked at him thoughtfully. “Go ahead, Cook.”

Cooky stood up. “Give me a count, Mac.”

I counted once more by thousands. Cooky dropped his shoulder, rolled his hip again, and made the draw in a swift circular motion.

“You’re fast,” Padillo said. “What are you wearing — a Berns-Martin?”

Cooky nodded and reholstered his gun.

“You’d have to be sober for what I have in mind. Or nearly so,” Padillo said. “How hard would that be?”

“Hard enough,” Cooky said, “but I can cut it.”

“You don’t know what it is yet.”

“Look, either you recruit me or you don’t. I thought you needed some help and I volunteered. Now you sound as if you’re trying to steer me off.”

“I just want to make it plain that you can’t change your mind at the last minute because you think you’re coming down with a bad case of the nasties. And if something happens, something sticky, just remember that you volunteered. I still don’t know why you want in. Did Mac sell you?”

“Nobody sold me,” Cooky said. “I thought you were in trouble and might need some help.”

“I’ve known lots of guys in trouble,” Padillo said, “but damn few that I’d run the chance of getting shot at for. I’m not in your best-buddy classification, Cook. And if Mac is, that’s brand new, too.”

I waved a hand. “Tell him what you have in mind, Mike. Maybe he won’t want any part of it.”

Padillo took a sip of his vodka and studied Cooky over the rim of the glass. “After I tell him, he’s in,” he said. “What about it, Cook?”

“I told you,” he said, and tried his half-joke smile, “I’m a volunteer.” The smile didn’t come off too well.

“O.K.,” Padillo said. “You’re in.”

“One thing more,” I said to Padillo. “I ran into our fat friend Maas again. He said the main purpose of his trip to Bonn was to sell you the information about the trade.”

“He give you any details?”

Quite a few. He also has a way out: a tunnel under the wall, which he’ll sell for five thousand. That’s how Cooky got involved. He brought me the five thousand from Bonn.”

“You know how to get in touch with him?”

“He gave me his phone number,” I said. “But if he knows about this swap, how many others know — and how did you tumble to it?”

Padillo lighted another cigarette. “They were a little too casual, a little too pleasant when they told me about it. It was their offhand attitude. Sort of ‘Why don’t you drop over and pick up these two because the Russians are tired of them?’ It wasn’t my kind of a job, and so I started checking with Weatherby’s outfit. They found out that the opposition was expecting a new prize for its zoo: the kind of agent that the States keeps denying exists. It all added up to a swap: me for the NSA pair.”

“Maas says you’re an amortized agent. They can write you off as a tax loss.”

Padillo nodded. “The Soviets haven’t had anyone big since Powers. They could use a full-scale public trial if they plan to resurrect Stalin. Our side wants the two NSA guys back without any fanfare, and I was offered up — a little long in the tooth and creaky in the joints perhaps, but serviceable.”

Padillo told us that he had crossed over into East Berlin with a spare passport after flying from Frankfurt to Hamburg to Tempelhof. I told him about Lieutenant Wentzel and Maas and the visit from Burmser and Hatcher at the saloon. I went through my chats with Bill-Wilhelm, Maas, and Weatherby, and finally the story seemed to dribble away and my mouth was dry and leathery. “I’m hungry,” I said.

Marta rose from her chair. “I’ll prepare something. It will have to be from a tin.” She walked over to the hot plate and began to open a couple of cans.

“She doesn’t talk much,” I said.

“I suppose she doesn’t feel like it,” said Padillo. “She was Weatherby’s girl.” He got up and walked over to her. They talked briefly in tones so low that I couldn’t hear. As Padillo talked the girl shook her head vigorously. Padillo patted her on the shoulder and came back. “She wants to stick with it,” he said. “And we can use her. With you two and Max, we may be able to bring it off.”

“Bring what off?” Cooky asked.

“A daylight snatch. The two NSA defectors.” He looked at each of us carefully. His eyebrows were arched in a quizzical fashion; a wide grin was on his face.

I sighed. “Why not?”

Cooky licked his lips.

“How about it, Cook?” Padillo demanded.

“It sounds like an interesting proposition.”

“What happens after we kidnap the two from NSA?” I said.

“We get them over the wall. They buy up my contract for me. And I’m out — finished. I can go back to running a saloon.”

“It’s not exactly crystal-clear,” I said.

Padillo took a sip of his vodka. “The chief reason that the Soviets haven’t publicized these new defectors is that they have become increasingly effeminate. At least that’s what Burmser told me. If they put them on TV or let them be interviewed by the Western press, then Moscow could be turned into the mecca for the world’s disenchanted homosexuals. The two guys are really of the la-de-da variety. They would be laughed at, and so would the Russians. So the KGB comes up with a deal, a quiet swap: me for the two defectors. Burmser is the contact, the go-between. He had to find something to trade and he settled on me because if I vanished one fine spring day there’d be none to cry, no Congressman to go visiting out in Virginia to find out what happened to a valuable constituent. Mac might get drunk for a day, but he’d get over it. After that, nothing — until the propaganda drums started beating in Moscow. Then the Soviets could produce their American agent of the variety which is said to be nonexistent by Washington.”

“How can the defectors get you off the hook?”

“It’s simple. Their defection is still a secret — one that has been kept by both the Russians and the States. I get them back over the wall, turn them in, and threaten to blow the lid off the whole story unless they turn me loose for keeps.”

Marta silently placed a bowl of soup in front of each of us. She also set a platter of bread and cheese on the table.

“Aren’t you eating?” Padillo asked.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “I’ll eat later.”

“I’ve told them about how it was with you and Weatherby.”

She nodded.

I started to say I was sorry, but I knew it would be flat and meaningless. I drank the soup instead.

“Where do you plan to kidnap them?” Cook asked. His forehead glistened with sweat and his hands shook slightly.

“Better have a drink, Cooky,” I said.

He nodded and poured himself half a tumbler of vodka and took a large swallow.

“If they fly them in, they’ll arrive at Shonefeld, probably on an Army TU-104. Max is trying to check this out now. The guard should be light. If they follow the usual pattern, the guards who accompany them will hand them over at the airport and fly right back to Moscow. Since this is supposed to be a combined effort — the GDR and the Soviets — they’ll probably bring them to the MfS on Normenstrasse.”

“Not the Soviet Embassy?” Cooky asked.

“No. It’s too well watched, for one thing; and the East Germans like to keep their hand in.”

Padillo spread a map of Berlin on the table. “They’ll drive north from the airport along this route. At this intersection is where we’ve planned to pull it off: nothing fancy — just a plain, daylight Chicagostyle snatch. One car — the one you brought — will be parked here,” he said, indicating a side street. “Their car will be traveling north, and you will be on their left on a one-way street. The job is to get your car into the main thoroughfare and make them smash into it — but not enough to hurt anybody, so your timing has to be just right. I’ll be right behind them in the Citroën. I’ll park so they can’t back up. Then all of us out. We get the two pansies in the Citroën, one in front and one in back, and we drive like hell to here. We smash their radio first. It’ll take them a few minutes to get to a telephone from that particular spot. By the time they do, we should be back up here.”

“You kept saying ‘you,’” I said. “You want me to drive the crash car?”

“You or Max.”

“How’ll I know when to pull out?”

“I’ve got a couple of miniature walkie-talkies. I’ll give you the word. Cooky goes with me. Max goes with you.”

Cooky pushed his bowl of soup away and poured himself another glass of vodka. “You don’t think they’ll be looking for something? Don’t forget we’ve already been spotted.”

“They may be. But by the time they get that far they’ll have grown a little careless. Secondly, it’s the only time the two NSA guys will be out in the open. It’s the only chance — unless you can bust them out of the Ministry for State Security. I don’t think we’re that good — or dumb enough to try.”

We heard the door slam five floors down. “That must be Max,” Padillo said. We waited until the footsteps reached the door. There was a knock. A pause. And three quick knocks. Padillo moved to the wall by the door.

“Max?”

“Ja”.

Padillo unlocked the door and opened it for a tall, stooped man in his late twenties who wore horn-rimmed glasses that rested on a prominent nose that leaned casually to one side. Quick blue eyes flickered over Cooky and me. The man was wearing a greenish-blue raincoat and a gray felt hat. He shook hands with Padillo, who introduced him as Max Vess. We shook hands and he walked over to Marta, who had cleared away the dishes, and embraced her. “I’m sorry,” he said in German. “I am truly sorry. He was a good man.” She smiled slightly and nodded and turned to the dishes in the sink.

“You heard, then?”

He shrugged. “It’s on the West radio. The police are looking for Herr McCorkle. He was last seen crossing at Friedrichstrasse. With Herr Baker. Nothing more than that. They described Weatherby as a British businessman.” His eyebrows shot up and he smiled slightly. “An accurate enough description, I suppose.”

“How’d you make out?” Padillo asked.

Max took a small notebook out of his pocket. “They arrive tomorrow at noon. A car will met them — a Czech Tatra. They’ll be handed over to one KGB operator and two from the MfS. They’ll be taken to the Ministry on Normenstrasse. There’ll also be a driver.”

“How much did it cost?”

“Dear. Five hundred D-Marks.”

“Here.” Padillo took a roll from his pocket and counted out five hundred West German marks.

Max put them in his pocket. “I’ll take Marta home,” he said. “She’s had enough today.”

Padillo nodded and Max helped the girl into her green leather coat. “I’ll be back in the morning around nine. I’ll bring Marta.” He nodded to us and they left. The girl had said nothing.

“Let’s go over it again,” Padillo said.

We went over it again, not only that time, but ten times more. At two in the morning we’d had enough. I fell asleep on a cot quickly and I dreamed a long dream about locks that wouldn’t lock, doors that wouldn’t open, and cars that wouldn’t move when I pressed the accelerator.