Winter Work, page 32
Dorn nodded at Claire’s answer.
“He says you’ve been an immense help. He asked me to leave you alone. But, well, it appears obvious that a crime has been committed, so I must question you both.”
Claire looked at Kent. He sat with his arms folded and his mouth shut.
“We’ve done nothing illegal,” Claire said.
“No, no. At the dacha, I mean. It is clear that someone tampered with the flue of the chimney, up on the rooftop. There were sticks, twigs, a lot of debris like that. I’m guessing that whoever did it wanted to make it look like the work of birds, but…” His voice trailed off.
“Storks,” Kent said.
“Pardon?”
“Sorry. I’m kind of into birds. Storks like to build their nests on chimneys. Maybe that’s what they were trying to make it look like.”
“I see. I will need your names, of course. For the report.”
They again exchanged glances. Then they gave him their names.
“Show me your identification.”
They handed over their passports. He gave them a long look, wrote down the numbers and other details, and handed them back, which was a pleasant surprise.
“Emil did not tell me your occupations, but I think I can probably guess it, since I know his. Perhaps you could confirm this for me.”
This time Kent did the talking.
“We’ll refer you to our embassy for any kind of statement on that. Besides, I think we all know who’s responsible for what happened to those two women.”
Dorn sighed wearily and nodded.
“Yes. I suppose we do.”
Claire was a little surprised by the remark. Did Dorn really know about the Russians? She had also been taken aback by the detective’s apparent familiarity with Emil Grimm—calling him by his first name, readily admitting to knowing he was a Stasi spy. Obviously the two men had a history, even if it was of a recent vintage.
Dorn spoke again, this time sounding a bit wistful.
“You know, if this were the old times…” He caught himself, and then laughed beneath his breath. “Listen to me—the old times, as if they were not a mere four months ago. But if we were in those times, I would already be busy filing an extra report on each of you. Then I’d have to detain you while someone made a phone call to a special number in Berlin. It would all have been very messy. Not that it feels particularly neat even now.”
Claire waited, wondering what this all meant for any action he would have to take now. She got her answer right away.
“I believe that instead I will simply describe you as a pair of American friends of his. Out of respect for that, perhaps the two of you could arrange to be gone from here by, let us say, midday?”
“Yes, I think we can accommodate that request. And thank you.”
He nodded. Then he shook his head like a man clearing the cobwebs, seemingly as baffled by his own behavior as by the events of the past twenty-four hours.
“I have been telling myself for these past few weeks that this new Germany of ours will be so much more open and uncomplicated than the old one. I am beginning to think that was a mistake.”
“I do have something for you,” Claire said. “The tag number of that Citroën we saw.”
Dorn’s eyes widened.
“That would be very helpful indeed. Yes, let’s have it.”
She told him. He thanked her and wrote it down. Then he shut his notebook with a sigh and slumped off toward the exit.
A few moments later the doctor who had been attending to the women stepped into the lobby. Claire tried to get an update, but he waved her off. She set off down the hall to the room, but a nurse barred her from entering, so she waited until the nurse came back out the door and bustled off in the opposite direction.
She entered to find Grimm standing between the two beds. He was hunched over the one where Bettina’s body lay still, her face reddened, probably from carbon monoxide poisoning. Her eyes were shut.
The other woman, who she now knew was named Karola Weber, was hooked up to a respirator, an IV, and various monitors. One of them beeped steadily.
Claire took a step forward, and Emil turned at the sound. His eyes flashed, and she was poised to apologize for her intrusion when his expression softened and he nodded as if to sanction her presence.
“I’m so sorry. We’ll do what we can to help both of you. But only if you want our help.”
“I’m a little surprised you stayed. Even in my sorrow I have been thinking hard about what to do next, and it may already be too late. But I know one thing clearly. This will not stand. I cannot let it. So, in an hour or so, if you’re still here…”
“We’ll stay. Yes, we’ll stay.”
“Stand by, then. One hour, and we’ll move.”
Claire nodded and turned to go. A question occurred to her as she reached the door, so she stopped to speak, only to see Grimm tugging the blanket on his wife’s bed, as if poised to cover her face. Then he hesitated, dropped it, and shook his head, unable to complete this act of finality. Instead, he turned toward the other bed and gently took the hand of the sleeping woman, Karola. It was a moment too intimate to interrupt. Claire left quietly and returned to the lobby.
One hour. Then they would get moving, the two of them and this deeply wounded man. She had no idea what sort of action Grimm had in mind, but she felt the same need to marshal their anger, to fight back. Sometime before the sun set again, they needed to cross back over into the West, with both Grimm and the folder in their possession, and perhaps the rest of his items as well, wherever they might be hiding.
Provided, of course, that they were all still alive by then.
52
It was his fault, of course. Emil knew that.
Yes, the Americans had spilled the key bit of information that had made him a target. But he had been too clever by half in dropping the hints that had sent Dorn in pursuit of Kolkachev, Volkov, and Krauss, which had in turn made them more careful. So instead of just coming for Emil directly, with the blunt force of a Makarov or a butcher knife, as they no doubt would have done once they learned he was Lothar’s silent partner, they had resorted to a more subtle method—a chimney blockage. And with the Wartburg parked in the driveway they must have assumed Emil was home.
It should be him lying dead in this hospital room with a blanket on his face. Instead it was Bettina, and Karola had nearly joined her.
Now he wanted only to strike back, to beat them, to bring them to heel. But how? “Winning” seemed beyond reach, only because the idea of any victory under these circumstances was so hollow as to be meaningless. The only possible remaining solace would be to secure a future for Karola. The doctor said she would recover, probably with no long-term side effects. Her vital signs were improving. Bettina’s frailty had made her an easy mark, and Emil would never forgive himself for deserting her at such a vulnerable moment.
What to do next, then? Kolkachev and Krauss would no doubt learn of his survival within a few hours, probably by midday. It was just after 8 a.m.
He picked up a water glass from the bedside table and took a swallow, thinking, thinking. What would he tell Karola when she awakened? Your best friend is dead, and I was complicit. Then his anger rose in a wave of heat in his face, and the glass shattered in his tightening grip.
“Scheisse!”
He dropped the broken shards into a trash can, and carefully brushed fragments off his palm. Miraculously, he wasn’t cut. More dumb luck in his favor, when he gladly would have redirected it toward Bettina. Had he really been standing inside Erich Mielke’s darkened house only a few hours ago?
A spark of doubt ignited deep in his thoughts: What if the Americans simply drove off in their Mercedes now that they had the documents? They might decide they didn’t even need the rest of what he was offering. Then the spark died. He trusted them not to do that, or they would have already left. They still wanted the rest of what he was offering, he was sure of that. And the woman, at least, seemed to be on his side.
Emil’s thoughts drifted along in this haphazard manner for another few seconds until he idly looked down at Karola and, to his surprise, saw that her eyes were open.
She smiled, ever so slightly, and moved her lips as if trying to speak. Emil smiled back, wiped at a tear, and stooped low to listen. Her words emerged in a raspy whisper.
“What happened?”
“Someone blocked the chimney while you slept. Probably the Russians. We got you out just in time. You’re in the hospital now, in Bernau, but the doctor says you’ll be fine.”
She smiled wearily. Her eyes began to close, then fluttered open even wider than before. She whispered again.
“Bettina!”
It was a cry of alarm, not a question, and Emil knew he couldn’t fend her off with a lie, not with his wife lying there dead, only a few feet away. So he shook his bowed head and squeezed her hand. Then he gently wiped a tear from each of her cheeks.
She rested awhile longer. He was on the verge of leaving to fetch a cup of coffee when she reopened her eyes, fighting her way back up to the surface through the drowsiness of exhaustion and the drugs of the IV drip. He again leaned lower to listen.
“The hunting stand,” she whispered. “They know. They know. The ranger…”
Her voice fell away, and her eyes shut. But as she faded from consciousness she squeezed his hand, as if to communicate her urgency.
Emil was alarmed. Much of his remaining hope depended on the items buried at the hunting stand—his hopes for vengeance, for justice, and for recruiting any sort of American help in bringing them about.
He fled from the room and sprinted down the hall toward the lobby, where he desperately hoped the Americans were still waiting.
53
Clouds rolled in as they drove back to Prenden, and it was snowing by the time they parked at the dacha. Claire and Kent waited while Emil retrieved his Pistol-M, their only weapon, and his Zeiss spotting scope. They set out into the woods, with Emil leading the way.
They climbed the hill in silence. Emil’s knee ached, his nose was running, his breathing labored. He was exhausted.
“How big is the item?” Claire asked. “Would they have needed help moving it? Will we?”
“No. It’s quite compact. A single pilot’s flight case, containing seventy-six boxed reels of microfilm. The case is a foot and a half long, a foot high, and eight inches deep. The total weight is twenty-five pounds. Even if only one person came for it, he’d have no trouble walking it out of here.”
“How did Karola know they found out?”
“I’m not sure. Something to do with the forest ranger. He keeps all the plans for the hunting stands, with all the locations. She was drifting in and out when she told me, so she didn’t say a lot more.”
Kent spoke up.
“Any chance she was hallucinating?”
“No. At that moment she was quite lucid. I could tell by her eyes. Although…I suppose there’s a chance she could have dreamed it.”
“Let’s hope. If not, someone might even be there now, digging it up.”
“Or on their way, like us.”
The thought silenced them as they approached the top of the hill. A few steps later, Emil stopped abruptly and raised a hand to halt them, in the manner of a soldier leading a patrol. There was a snap of twigs, the sound of plodding footsteps coming from the brush just ahead to the right.
Emil went into a crouch. He slipped his right hand into his coat pocket to grip the stock of the gun. Claire stepped off the trail, easing behind a tree. Kent held his ground.
It was a boar, blundering across the trail just ahead. It stopped and turned to face them, snow flecking its bristling dark coat. It huffed once, jetting steam out its snout, then continued into the woods.
The three of them exhaled as one. Kent chuckled.
“Well, that’s a first.”
“You don’t usually see them in daylight.”
“Maybe something on the other side of the hill flushed him from cover.”
“Maybe.”
They crested the hill and angled left. The snow, heavier now, began accumulating on the trail. Claire checked behind her and saw they were leaving clear prints, which gave her an eerie sense of being a stalked animal, easily trackable prey.
It reminded Emil of the night he had buried the pilot’s case. Lothar had given it to him for safekeeping, and he had waited until an evening when snow had been forecast for the following morning. The moon had still been shining when he set out, but it had been covered by clouds by the time he finished. When he awakened, hours later, snow had been blowing in a high wind, and four inches were already on the ground, covering his path and the evidence of his labors.
The day before, he and Lothar had buried a decoy pilot’s case in the vegetable garden in front of Lothar’s dacha. It, too, had been filled with seventy-six reels of microfilm, but the labels on the boxes were fakes, and the reels were blank.
Emil had told Lothar it was the real thing, a deception that had felt necessary at the time. His reasoning was that Lothar, being their front man, the face who handled all their dealings with Andreas Plotz and other sources, would also be the most vulnerable to revealing any hiding place. And the move had paid off, of course, on the night that Kolkachev’s thugs had come for Lothar. That’s why they had dug up his vegetable garden, finding the decoy case and probably not discovering until hours later that they’d been duped.
Or had they, perhaps, checked the microfilm that very night and, finding it blank, decided to torture Lothar even more before killing him and turning his body over to Krauss for his clumsy arrangement of a suicide tableaux? It was a possibility that had haunted Emil from the moment he first saw Lothar’s body, and more so after Dorn told him that Lothar’s testicles had been marked with clamps.
He flexed his bad knee and moved forward.
“How much further?” Kent asked.
“It’s right around this next bend.” Then, a few steps farther on, “There’s the stand. The green one. And it’s…Scheisse!”
“What?”
“Look at the ground beneath it! Fuck!”
Someone had dug into the dark soil, leaving an open trench that was swallowing snowflakes as they blew into the protected space beneath the stand. Down in the hole, the lid of the secret underground compartment that he and Lothar had built was propped open, and the compartment was empty. Whoever had taken the pilot’s case had been in too much of a hurry to cover up afterward. Or maybe they had left everything this way to taunt him.
The only good news, he supposed, was that the theft might buy some time for Emil to move to a safer location, if only because Kolkachev would be momentarily preoccupied with validating and securing his booty. Perhaps he’d even seek an additional buyer—the West Germans, or the Brits. Sell his own copy to the Americans, and this one to someone else. Either way, the KGB man had now cornered the market on the puzzle set of the HVA’s agent files. A few thousand identities, up for grabs.
Three people had died for this secret, one of them his wife. Emil dropped to his knees and gazed up into the swirling snow. Claire laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Emil. I’m so sorry.”
“What do we do now?” Kent asked.
Emil stood creakily and brushed off his trousers. He blinked away the snow sticking to his eyelashes.
“We go back to the dacha. We finish airing it out, and we try to think. Unless, of course, the two of you decide that I’m no longer worth the effort.”
The Americans exchanged glances, but he could not get a read on their expressions. He supposed that if he were in their position, he would have driven away without delay. Take the folder, cut their losses.
But they followed him back to the dacha, and when he opened the door they accompanied him inside.
“I could use some coffee,” Claire said.
It was the sanest suggestion he’d heard all day. He experienced an overwhelming desire to lie down for a long rest. Maybe the lingering scent of smoke had something to do with it, with its suggestion of death and loss. With all the windows open, the air inside was as cold as the outdoors, even though the coils of the space heater shone a bright orange. He wanted to curl up beneath heavy blankets and drift into mindless slumber.
Claire, reading his face, tried to throw him a lifeline.
“We can still make this work for you and Karola. We owe you that much.”
“Thank you.” But his eyes felt hollow, his energy spent. “You know, for a while, after Lothar’s death I wondered, how can this be happening to people of his rank and stature, and of mine? Have all the old rules of our game suddenly become null and void?”
“The old gentleman’s agreement, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Everyone in their business knew of it, even though it had never existed on paper. It applied to all the major players of the Cold War spy game, especially in a contested zone like Berlin: Don’t harm our people, and we won’t harm yours. As for all those other poor saps who got caught in the middle, well, heaven help them. Emil continued.
“Then I realized, Lothar didn’t really count anymore. Nor did I, now that our employer had been removed from the board. We’d become like all of those unfortunate souls who used to get in the way. People like Bettina.” He drifted away for a second. “I never ordered anyone’s death. Still, in my way, I suppose I was as cavalier with lives as Kolkachev. I’m sure your boss is no different.”
