Secret Father (32 page)

"Kit, where are you?"

"Behind you. Over here."

"Are you all right?"

"Rick is hurt, Monty. Rick! Rick!"

I shifted in place, finding them. As my eyes adjusted, I made out Kit. She was leaning over the slumped form of Ulrich. A loud rumble shook the steel plating under us, the engine starting. When the van lurched into motion, Kit fell back, audibly banging her head against the metal wall.

"Are you all right?"

"Shit, Monty," she said. "What the hell."

On my knees, I was able to get over to Ulrich. With my hands useless behind me, I nudged him with the knob of my left knee. "Ulrich! Ulrich! Can you hear us?"

He groaned.

"Good man, Ulrich! Way to go, comrade! Do you hear me? It's Michael. Monty."

"Oh, God," he said.

I put my face down to his, unsteadily and off balance with the bumping of the van as it careened along over rough and broken pavement. "You're okay," I said. I placed my cheek against his head, my nose into his hair, which was wet with blood. "The bleeding stopped, comrade," I said, only hoping it was so. "You're going to be okay." But I was panicked, thinking, Shit, what if he's really hurt?

"Quit calling him comrade, Monty," Kit said.

"Let me wipe your face, Rick," I said. I put my shoulder against his head, pressing.

He groaned and pulled away.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Ulrich pulled himself up. "No,
I
am sorry. Oh, God." He rolled onto his side and came to his knees. "I am so sorry."

"Don't be crazy," Kit said from her place by the wall.

"Are you still bleeding?" I asked.

"I don't think so. I am just sorry. Sorry."

"Why should you be sorry?" I asked.

"It is because of my stepfather," Ulrich said. "The bastard. The bastard!"

"It was Tramm," I said, "not your stepfather." Ulrich's anger at his stepfather made no sense to me. On the contrary, didn't we need the general more than ever? As an American big shot, wasn't he our best chance of getting out of this? "You've got to tell them who your stepfather is. They won't mess with an American general."

"Oh, Monty, you really amaze me."

The old snap in his voice relieved me. I was glad to have something to disagree about. He was okay. "Tramm is the one who screwed us," I said. "He's the one who planted that money." If you made a mistake, it was with fucking Tramm, not your stepfather.

"Yes, Tramm put the money in there. But this is all a work of theater. Tramm played his role. Now they play theirs, and we ours. But for what audience? For General David X. Healy. This is why I do not need to tell them who my stepfather is. They already know. And not just because of my ID, either."

"What do they want?" I asked.

"I do not know," Ulrich said, but with a new note of defeat.

"That film?" Kit said.

"Shh!" Ulrich said. Until then, it hadn't occurred to me that we could be overheard. All at once the question hit me, the one that should have the night before: Where
was
the film? Why had Tramm not found it in Ulrich's bag?

Ulrich had slumped back against the wall of the van. Unlike me, he was able to steady himself against the jostling, bumpy ride. My left thigh was pressing painfully down onto the metal of my right leg brace, and when I tried to adjust, I fell over, knocking against Kit. "I'm sorry," I said. I looked for her face. Her eyes were closed. Back into that nightmare of hers, whatever it was.
Incurable.

When I regained my balance, I turned back to Ulrich. Something in his slumped posture made me ask, "What's wrong?"

His voice, when he answered, was strangely disembodied. "I came here to get away from him, from what he does, from what he represents, from what he made my mother become."

"You shouldn't have come to Berlin."

"Berlin is the one city where he cannot follow. And Berlin is
my
city."

"Well, you can have it," I said, trying to lighten the mood.

Some moments passed. To my surprise, Ulrich had begun quietly sobbing.

"Rick," I said. What pain he must have been in.

But it was not the beating that made him cry. "I cannot get away," he said. "I cannot get away from him. Not even here. I cannot. I cannot."

The van swerved, taking a turn fast. Kit fell against me this time, and as she did, a strange, guttural groan escaped her lips.

"Kit, are you all right?"

When she didn't answer right away, the question resonated in the close air.
Are you all right?
I remembered the words, a woman's voice coming to me from a threshold, a light behind her figure, a kind of halo around her head, making individual strands ofhair stand out like silver threads. Those words had always soothed me, no matter what.
Are you all right?
They soothed me now, just to have spoken them.

"No," she said finally. "My arms. My arms have gone numb. My hands. I can't move my damn fingers. Something's wrong."

"It's the clamps. They've cut your circulation. You have clamps on your arms. You know that, right?"

"Monty, my arms are paralyzed."

I heard the panic in her voice. Oddly, her agitation had a calming effect on me. "The manacles on your arms, Kit. Here, turn toward me." I swung around so that my back was to hers, to take her arms in my hands, one at a time. "Can you feel that?" I massaged her upper arms, first one, then the other, my hands moving up and down over her elbows, kneading the flesh around the metal cuffs. How thin she was, how easily I could make out the contours of her bones. "Is that better? Your arms are just asleep, that's all."

"Why does it smell like vomit in here?"

"Somebody before us. Drunk. May Day. The parade. Do you feel that? Can you feel me touching your arms?"

"Yes."

"Then you're okay. You'll be okay." My fingers found hers, intertwined with them, kneading and pressing. "You're okay, Kit."

All this while Ulrich, apart from us, was softly crying against the wall.

"How come my arms are tied, Monty, and yours aren't?"

"Mine are, Kit. Same as you. That's why I have my back to you."

"You do?" She looked around at me. "Holy shit." Then she laughed, and I realized with a rush of absurd self-satisfaction that she was grinning at me with some kind of admiration. That I was coping. At that moment, I believed in myself because she did.

It had yet to occur to me that if I uncovered unexpected resources of strength or resolve in myself, they had not been put there by someone else. Yes, I was afraid. Yes, I was sure that, not for the first time, my body was about to fail me. But Kit seemed more real to me than my premonitions. Her simple presence was the vertical axis by which I measured balance, her presence and the stunning fact that she had turned to me in need. And I was meeting it.

Here is proof that beauty is a trick of the mind: in the dark, in that terrible moment, Kit seemed beautiful to me, beauty itself. I rejoiced in the sweet sight of her near invisibility.

 

The van rolled down into what seemed an underground garage. The garage also was dark, so that when they opened the van doors, it felt like night. I had to remind myself it was the middle of the day. I could see Ulrich's face more clearly now, and was relieved that the blood had dried. He seemed to have regained some physical resolve. Indeed, I was the only one to stumble and bump the cinderblock walls as they herded us along. Ulrich tried to help me, but without the use of his arms there was little he could do. The clicking of my leg braces had never seemed so loud. Without my cane I had to lope along with an exaggerated stride. I knew what rhythm to strike, but I knew also that the gait made me look spastic, and I hated to have Kit see me that way.

They pushed us into a dimly lit elevator. Fliers were crudely taped to the walls of the elevator car, showing faces of mean-looking men, head-on and in profile. Mug shots. Wanted posters. There were about ten of them.

I leaned toward Ulrich and whispered, "Police station." One of the
Vopos
poked me in the ribs. "
Sei still!
" And I shut up.

On an upper floor of the building, they led us into a kind of hearing room, with a long table at one wall, three vacant chairs behind it. Opposite the table were three or four rows of straight-backed chairs. One of the policemen pulled three of these forward, closer to the table, while two others, from behind us, unlocked the manacles on our arms. Oddly, it was when I brought my arms forward that I felt the sharpest crack of pain in my shoulders, but that quickly gave way to the undiluted physical relief it was to be free. That feeling passed, too. We sat, with Kit between me and Ulrich.

I turned toward him, trying to appear casual. He sat slumped, inert, his eyes on the floor. This deflation, on the heels of his frenzied happiness before our arrest, should have warned me of what was coming, but I knew too little still of the ways we come unglued.

Just then, a mustachioed man in civilian clothes entered. That he had a white handkerchief steepled in his suit pocket reminded me of my father. The man's eyes met mine and he nodded. He walked to the table, taking one of the three chairs behind it. He carried a thick manila envelope, which he placed square on the table in front of him. "Good afternoon," he said, and though he smiled at me there was something sinister in his expression. "You are Herr Montgomery?"

"Yes."

He unclasped the envelope and upended it. Our passports, ID cards, visa forms, and wallets tumbled out. Last came the white business envelope I had seen before, with the money. He lifted it and said, "This envelope is for your club?"

"What?"

"Your school group. What is it called? The Pirates?"

My heart sank. I could not think of what to say.

"The Edelweiss Pirates?"

Kit put her hand on my arm. Ulrich did not react. He was still staring at the floor.

"That isn't our group," I said. "We are the school debating club." How easily the lie came to me, a kind of truth by now. "We came to Berlin to debate the team from the American high school here. In West Berlin."

He smiled and nodded. I felt a wash of cold fear on my neck. I was saying what he expected me to say.

Ulrich raised his head. "The bag is mine," he said. "The money was in my bag. These two have nothing to do with it. You know this. You are interested only in me."

The man's smile thickened as he turned his gaze to Ulrich. He spoke to him in German, something I missed.

Ulrich's reply, also in German, given calmly, was a denial, I knew that much.

The man lifted the white envelope and slapped one end of it on the table. "Two hundred dollars in ten-dollar notes, twenty-dollar notes. Officially, ten DDR marks to the dollar. Unofficially, one hundred marks to the dollar. Your two hundred dollars, with the well-planned rendezvous, would fetch twenty thousand marks, which you then, in the West, trade for two thousand dollars."

"We don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Quiet, Monty," Ulrich said.

"And you,
Fräulein?
Do you know the penalty for illegal currency activity?"

"Don't answer, Kit," I said. To the man I said as firmly as I could, "Josef Tramm put the money in the bag. And then he made sure it was not noted on our visa forms. He was with us at the border, and you let him go."

"Montgomery!" Ulrich barked. He brought himself up, squaring off before the interrogator. "If I tell you the money was mine, will you let these others go?"

The man smiled benignly. He answered in German.

Ulrich replied in German.

"Speak English, please," I said.

Finally Kit spoke. "We want to see the American ambassador."

The man laughed. "The American ambassador is in Bonn,
Fräulein.
"

"The American consul, then. The military attaché. Somebody."

He said, "The American authorities will be notified. Regarding you"—he rifled through the papers in front of him, picked up one of the passports, opened it, and made a show of matching it with Ulrich's face—"you are German born.
East
German born."

Ulrich said nothing.

I said, "He's American. An American citizen. Tell him you're American, Rick."

"Monty, he sees my passport. He knows what I am. He knows everything."

"Not everything," the man said, and his eyes went gray, locking on Ulrich. I sensed he wanted something from Ulrich, but he wasn't going to say what. I thought of Tramm the night before, looking for the film. Fucking roll of film. The film was what they wanted. And Ulrich was mute.

 

Later, after they brought us to the house—again a garage, and we did not see surrounding buildings or streets, but it felt like a house you'd find in a pretty nice neighborhood—they resumed interrogating us. This time they took us one by one into the room in the basement. Without my cane, I had to move from place to place while holding on to the wall. It was all right with me that they never offered to help.

The interrogator was a different man, but again a civilian, a chain smoker. He spoke excellent English, I remember. For part of the time during my session, a woman was also in the room. She would be the one who later brought me and Kit soup, after Ulrich had failed to return.

In this second interview it seemed that the guy was just going through the motions, at least with me. He asked where we stayed in West Berlin, what we did before crossing the sector border, what I thought of Willy Brandt's speech at the Schöneberg rally. I asked him for a cigarette, which he gave me. It was German and tasted rotten, but the hit of nicotine felt great.

He asked me about Ulrich, and when I shrugged and said I didn't know him that well, he did not press me. He seemed not to care about me—and he never mentioned Chase Manhattan Bank. They took Kit after me, and when she came back, she said it was the same with her.

"Except they asked if Ulrich was my boyfriend."

"What did you say?"

"What do you think I said?"

"'Mind your own beeswax,' probably."

"Nope."

"What?"

"I said you are."