The Arms Maker of Berlin (18 page)

When she again squeezed his hand, he even stopped thinking about what he had just learned at the church: that from here on out, he would be risking his life every time he met these people; that Liesl, the love of his life, was also the gravest threat to his future.

He shoved all that to the back of his mind and walked briskly forward, smiling grandly.

SIXTEEN

B
ERTA’S HEAD RESTED
against Nat’s shoulder as their flight crept up on a Zurich sunrise. She had been asleep for three hours, close enough for Nat to smell her hair. Shampoo and cigarettes, the same blend that had scented his pillow when she’d tossed it to him on the floor of the B&B. It had triggered a few dreams he would rather keep to himself.

Was she flirting now, wanting something, or just being human? He chalked it up to the cramped seating—the Bureau wouldn’t spring for business class—and also to her gratitude. No matter how much she knew about Bauer and the White Rose, she needed his reputation and credentials. Nat could open doors that had been slammed in her face. He was sympathetic to this need. Without Gordon to shepherd him through the early years, he, too, might have grown frustrated enough to do something stupid like stealing a document. Not that he wasn’t still wary of her. But as long as she kept coming up with new leads, they were better off working in tandem.

He hated long flights, but after the ordeal of the memorial service he had welcomed the idea of eight hours of enforced boredom. The muffled roar of the engines, the headset chatter of the in-flight movie—all of it helped him decompress. Grief wasn’t the problem. Viv’s tears, and his own, had been cathartic. The harder part had been enduring the hypocritical maundering from the podium and the unseemly congratulatory tone of his peers, who kept reassuring him with smug nods and arch asides that he had at last inherited the mantle of succession.

The day’s bright spot was Karen, who remained at his side throughout. She comforted him after his mess of a speech, which he rushed ungracefully and finished in tears. At the reception she helped ward off the supplicants who seemed intent on paying tribute. He supposed part of her reaction was simply a young person’s discomfort over a proximate death. She was also still a little spooked by the two hang-up calls she had received from Nat’s stolen cell phone, one of them only hours before Gordon’s passing—as if some angel of death had tuned in to her wavelength on its way north.

But she seemed most disturbed by the realization that this was the eventual fate of all aging scholars—done in by their passions, then relegated to postmortem dissection by tipsy peers at a dreary gathering around cold cuts and a punch bowl. Nat noticed her watching sympathetically as poor Viv was cornered repeatedly by the same colleagues who only weeks ago had been gloating over Gordon’s takedown in the
Daily Wildcat
.

“Is this all there is?” Karen asked, and he knew she didn’t mean the buffet.

“His work will be remembered,” Nat said, patting her arm, although he, too, worried for Gordon’s legacy. Soon the old man might be better known as a thief and a blackmailer, or even as some sort of blundering spy. Worst of all, Nat’s work for the FBI might play a big role in the revision.

“He never had children, did he?” Karen asked.

“No. I guess that’s one way I’ve already outdone him.”

He smiled, keeping it light, but she seemed grateful all the same. It had been nice, having her stay in his house the night before and knowing she would still be there in the morning, bleary-eyed by the toaster as they ushered in the new day. It made him feel like he had finally been readmitted to the fraternity of Fatherhood. After years of associate membership, he again had full rights and privileges, even if those included compulsive worry and constant concern.

He saw her look toward Viv with a tear in her eye.

“She’d love to see you if you could drop by while I’m away,” he said. “It would do her good.”

“Sure. But you’re the one I’m worried about.”

“Me? I’ll be okay.”

“Mom said it was hard enough when you lost him the first time, after the bad review. Now he’s gone for good, and you never won him back.”

“You keep forgetting the benefits of my field of endeavor. I’m a historian. I may find him yet, out there in some lost archive. With his help, even.”

“All that old stuff worries me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more dangerous than it’s worth.”

“Let me guess. You came across some warning from the Belle.”

She nodded, but didn’t return his smile. This was serious.

“I’ll bet you can recite it from memory.”

She nodded again, solemnly, then obliged him, keeping her voice low so no one else would hear. It gave her words more impact, as if the poet herself were speaking through his daughter, a resurrected Cassandra:

The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A transport may receipt us,
Or a disgrace—

Unarmed if any meet her
I charge him fly
Her faded Ammunition
Might yet reply
.

“That’s good,” Nat replied. “A little too good.”

“I thought so, too. Be careful.”

You, too, he wanted to say. But didn’t, for fear of alarming her. He hoped Holland’s men were still on the job.

T
HE JOLT OF JET WHEELS
against the tarmac brought Berta’s head upright.

“Zurich?”

He nodded. Her scent lingered on his shoulder. They were finally in Europe, the place where all the old things hide best.

“Assuming they didn’t lose our luggage, we should make the 8:40 train to Bern,” he said. “What’s our plan of action?”

Berta had begun courting her archival source by telephone, hoping to finagle a look at the Swiss surveillance reports from the war years. She proposed to go see him right away, and Nat agreed. He would check them in at the hotel and stash their bags while she visited the archives. Then they would reconvene at the Bahnhof at 11:30 to pay a joint visit to the doorstep of Gustav Molden, the Swiss flatfoot who had been assigned to Gordon during the war.

In the meantime, Nat would get his bearings with a brisk walk through the medieval heart of the city. He wanted to shake off the jet lag, stop for a double espresso. Then he would begin collecting images to go with all the names and facts jammed in his head.

It was his favorite way of making old documents come to life, and the best part was that central Bern looked much as it had sixty-four years ago. That made it easier to imagine the young Gordon Wolfe slouching along the arcaded sidewalks, hands stuffed in the pockets of his leather bomber jacket as he headed to a meeting with Dulles, the pipe-smoking spymaster in a rumpled overcoat.

It was Nat’s imaginative powers that had eventually given him an edge over Gordon as a historian. In fact, Gordon’s envy of those powers had contributed to their falling-out. Nat could make the old characters from the archives live and breathe. It was one reason he enjoyed his craft. The more vividly he began to see an era, the easier it was to tease out its secrets.

They easily made the 8:40 train, and upon arrival Berta set out for the State Archives while Nat secured their rooms. Earlier he had decided that, like Gordon, they would stay at the Bellevue, the posh hotel on a bluff above the River Aare. During the war it was a notorious den of spies, which to Nat made it the perfect starting point. Pricey, but the FBI was paying.

Bern was named for a bear, as if the city had crawled out of a crease in the Alps to lie down on its horseshoe bend. Its bluffs sheltered a medieval grid of narrow arcaded streets marked by grand clock towers and cathedrals and lined by timbered buildings along bustling market squares. While the arcades gave the city much of its charm, they also lent a certain hooded aspect, a shadowy sense of concealment.

Nat set out for the town center. He tried seeing the place through Gordon’s eyes by thinking back to an item he had found in the archives, a Dulles memo to his mistress and Girl Friday, Mary Bancroft, which described how he had taken their newest operative out for an introductory stroll.

Gave 543 the grand tour. Christened him Icarus, seeing as how he literally fell to us from the sky. He finds it quite a lark being here in Shangri-la
and comes across as a sharp tack. A Princeton man, and his German is first rate. We’ll start him slow and see how well he learns to walk—or fly, as the case may be with our Icarus. Let’s hope he doesn’t emulate all of his namesake’s destiny. The sun is very hot in our business
.

Dulles described their progress stop by stop, and Nat followed their route. He proceeded with an odd sense that at any moment he might spot them up ahead or catch a whiff of pipe smoke. Reaching the Nydegg Bridge, he gazed down at the green river, swollen by spring melt, and then crossed to the city’s famed bear pit, where shaggy beasts loped in the sunlight, craning their necks toward the moms and children at the rim.

I told Icarus those bears were like us, hemmed in by every border, unable to roam. Yet see how everyone approves of their presence and smiles down on them? He, too, would receive such favorable treatment, so long as he lived by their rules and didn’t stray. Try breaking free and they would hunt you down. So work hard, but behave
.

Nat followed their trail to the Cathedral of Bern, or Munster, where the young spy and his master had inspected the magnificent central portico, a profusion of painted characters carved against a colorful tableau. The Archangel Michael stands tall with his sword as he fights a demon worthy of the Axis Powers. On either side are teeming mobs—to the left, robed in white, the Chosen; to the right, naked and wretched, the Damned.

That will be us up there someday, I told him, cast among the winners or losers. Your work may well decide which
.

From there they proceeded to the Dulles bachelor digs on Herrengasse, eluding a flatfoot by detouring to the back entrance through a small park behind the Munster, with its sweeping view of the river. Today a small orchestra was playing in the gazebo, just as Swiss musicians had played throughout the war. Shangri-la indeed, Nat thought, when you could stroll to your boss’s house to the tempo of a Strauss waltz.

With dusk falling, Dulles had prepared a crackling fire to ward off the October chill. He then brought out the port, sherry, and brandy. They must have talked tradecraft, because two days later Dulles sent Icarus a typewritten checklist, 1 through 9, headlined “The Technique of Intelligence.”

Some high notes from our discussion
, he scribbled in the margin.

Most of it was standard fare:
3—Assume that every phone call is over-heard
, and so on. But the last item seemed just as appropriate for a prowling historian as for a budding spy, not only for its wisdom but for its strong sense of foreboding:

9—Be skeptical of everything, everybody. Don’t let pride of discovery blind you as to worth of individual or info
.

Nat checked his flanks, half expecting to notice several people watching from behind newspapers and hat brims. But his untrained eye saw only shoppers on their way to market.

Before heading to the Bahnhof he pulled from his pocket the faded old matchbook Gordon had left in the wooden gun box. Nat had brought all of the strange items with him, partly out of superstition. The matchbook advertised the Hotel Jurgens on Aarbergergasse. Not a single match had been used. Obviously a keepsake, but why? There had been no reference to the place in his tourist guidebook, which made Nat wonder if it still existed. But when he turned the corner a few minutes later, there it was—middle of the block with a modest sign over the entrance.

He stepped into the small lobby, barely big enough for a couch and an easy chair. The place wasn’t particularly modern. Yet, at least on this floor, it was clean and well kept. He figured it for one of those hotels where the floors squeaked, the radiators whined, and the windows stuck, but you always had clean linens and ample heat for the rawest winter night. No one was at the desk, but when he cleared his throat a chambermaid poked her head out of the office. She held a stack of towels.

“Is the manager in?”

“Nein. No. Back soon, one hour. But the rooms, they are not free.”

Her way of saying there were no vacancies, probably. He wasn’t sure what he would have asked the manager anyway. He supposed he had naively believed that in some strange way he would know right off what to do, but this time his intuitive powers failed him. Not a single vibe. Maybe jet lag was to blame. Or maybe there was nothing to find.

He glanced again around the lobby, and when it became clear that he was making the maid uncomfortable he said good-bye. Halfway down the block he turned, feeling he must be missing something. But before he could determine what it was, his new cell phone rang. He had bought one in Wightman that would also work in Europe.

“Success,” Berta said. “Karsten has arranged for a viewing.” A male. Of course. “He’ll have Molden’s and Visser’s surveillance reports ready for us at 3 p.m. Since I’m done early, why don’t I meet you at Molden’s house? Maybe you should go up first to break the ice. It’s a nice sunny day. We could invite him to lunch.”

“You should be there, too, when he opens the door. With an old fellow it never hurts to show a pretty face.”

Molden seemed grateful for the company and invited them in. He certainly wasn’t dressed for visitors—droopy brown sweater frayed at the elbows, wool pants dotted with lint, white socks, house slippers. A bald spot like a tonsure gave him a monkish air, and his apartment smelled of dust and old cheese. On the other hand, a state-of-the-art sound system blared a Debussy prelude, and his coffee table brimmed with new magazines.

“So you want to talk about my work during the war?” he asked, smiling wistfully. “Now those were enjoyable days. Bern was the spy capital of Europe, you know. And my job kept me out of the army. No marching through the mountain snow for me, thank God. With my luck the Germans would have invaded the day I arrived at the frontier.”

He placed a hand on the small of Berta’s back as he spoke, having warmed to her right away, as Nat had predicted. It was easy to see why. Rather than suiting up in her usual ensemble, Berta had worn a button-up silk blouse the color of fresh cream. It was tucked tightly enough into a trim pair of black slacks to show every contour.