The Cold War Swap
the cold
war swap
also by Ross Thomas
The Seersucker Whipsaw
Cast a Yellow Shadow
The Singapore Wink
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
The Backup Men
The Porkchoppers
If You Can’t Be Good
The Money Harvest
Yellow-Dog Contract
Chinaman’s Chance
The Eighth Dwarf
The Mordida Man
Missionary Stew
Briarpatch
Out on the Rim
The Fourth Durango
Twilight at Mac’s Place
Voodoo, Ltd.
Ah, Treachery!
the cold
war swap
Ross Thomas
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR
NEW YORK
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martins Press.
THE COLD WAR SWAP
. Copyright © 1966 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction © 2003 by Stuart M. Kaminsky. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Ross, 1926–1995.
The Cold War swap / Ross Thomas.—1st St. Martin’s Minotaur ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-31581-3
1. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Fiction. 2. Americans—Germany—Fiction. 3. Bonn (Germany)—Fiction. 4. Defectors—Fiction. 5. Cold War—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H58C65 2003
813'. 54—dc21
2002191951
First published by William Morrow & Co., Inc., in 1966
D 1 0 9 8 7 6 5
introduction
by Stuart M. Kaminsky
Ross was forty years old when he wrote his first novel,
The Cold War Swap
, in 1966. Coming from a career as a soldier, reporter, and political campaigner, he leapt onto the literary scene with that first attempt at fiction and won himself an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery.
The principal settings for Ross’s first novel were two cities in which he had worked, Bonn and Berlin. The cities are portrayed vividly with a postwar noir style that sets a tone of quiet despair in which the characters will do almost anything to survive. And the beauty of Ross’s characters in this dark world is that they are colorful and alive and they seldom plan ahead. Critics have compared Ross’s work to that of Raymond Chandler, not in subject matter but in style. I've always thought of Ross as the American Eric Ambler by way of Elmore Leonard. Ross was the master of colorful, unpredictable characters, thieves, scoundrels, drunks, assassins, madmen, fools, bureaucrats, and confused and bewildered professionals.
In
The Cold War Swap
as in so many of his novels, it is sometimes difficult to tell if we are meant to take the characters seriously or if the author is leading us down a series of streets, alleys, and dark rooms with no idea himself of who or what will be around the next corner.
Is McCorkle, who sits in his shady bar in Bonn and drinks, broods,
and smokes to generic excess, the comic side of Rick in
Casablanca?
Is Maas, the fat, sweating villain, the comic side of Sidney Greenstreet in
The Maltese Falcon
? Is Padillo Zachary Scott’s distorted mirror image in
The Mask of Dimitrios
?
The book is a nonstop tale of blunders by both sides of the Cold War, a constantly changing attempt by mistaken spies and agents to hatch schemes they never quite put together. Is this book a soft laugh at the Cold War novel? I like to think that it is.
Men stagger into hotel rooms and fall dead. Bullets slowly kill off most of the cast. The best character in the book, Cook, the rich alcoholic, leaves the stage with the reader feeling that Thomas has played a dark joke on us, removing the character most full of life when we need him most.
There are things in
The Cold War Swap
that would seem badly outdated in other hands. In fact, there are dozens of books with the same theme, the rescuing of scientists from behind the Iron Curtain. Most of them are forgotten not because of their subject matter but because their pages were not peopled by the memorable, colorful characters of a Ross Thomas.
A caricature in other hands became a vulnerable human in Ross’s books. The two gay defectors in
The Cold War Swap
move from near cliché to sympathetic humanness. Waas, the vile fat opportunist, is given his best shot and gradually becomes a basically bad man whom we can truly understand.
I knew Ross, a very soft-spoken, generous, quiet man who displayed none of the flamboyance of his characters. Ross was almost nondescript, seldom smiled, traveled everywhere with his wife, and quietly took in and turned to brilliant fiction the quirks and quivers of those around him, from the small, enthusiastic Mexican band that couldn’t carry a tune to the Italian taxi driver who displayed his pride in his mastery of the English language by destroying it.
Ross listened. He took no notes. He didn’t seem to be there, didn’t ask questions. He observed. He imagined.
Ross could turn a phrase with the best of our ilk and not draw attention to it. Ross could surprise us with a sudden turn that left us bewildered and in the palm of his hand, wondering what would happen to the survivors.
The man was a masterful storyteller.
He once told me that he had no idea what his characters were going to do when he sat down each day to write, no idea of how fate might step in. He said, "I often wonder what’s going to happen next and that’s what makes it interesting for me and, if I’m lucky, for the reader."
He was more than lucky.
the cold
war swap
He was the last one aboard the flight from Tempelhof to the Cologne-Bonn
airport. He was late and became flustered and sweaty when he couldn’t find his ticket until the search reached his inside breast pocket.
The English stewardess was patient and even smiled sweetly as he finally handed it over with mumbled apologies. The seat next to mine was vacant and he headed for it, banging a shabby briefcase against the arms of the passengers as he bumbled down the aisle. He dropped into the seat with a snort, not tall, squatty, maybe even fat, wearing a heavy brown suit that seemed to have been cut by a tinsmith and a dark-brown hat of no particular shape or distinction other than the fact that it sat squarely on his head with what seemed to be a measured levelness.
He tucked his briefcase between his legs and buckled his seat belt but didn’t remove his hat. He leaned forward to peer out the window as the plane taxied to the end of the runway. During take-off his hands blanched white at the knuckles as they squeezed the arms of his seat. When he realized that it wasn’t the pilot’s first time up he leaned back, produced a package of Senoussi and lighted one with a wooden match. He blew out the uninhaled smoke and then glanced at me with that
speculative look which stamps a fellow traveler as something of a conversationalist.
I had been in Berlin for a three-day weekend, during which I had managed to spend too much money and to acquire a splendid hangover. I had stayed at the Hotel am Zoo, where they make Martinis as good as any place in Europe with the possible exception of Harry’s Bar in Venice. They had taken their usual toll, and now I needed to sleep during the hour or so that it takes to fly from Berlin to Bonn.
But the man in the next seat wanted to talk. I almost sensed his mind working for the gambit as I leaned back as far as the chair would recline, my eyes closed, my head throbbing in close harmony with the grind of the engines.
When his opener came, it wasn’t original.
“You are going to Köln?”
“No,” I said, keeping my eyes closed, “I’m going to Bonn.”
“Very good! I too am going to Bonn.”
That was nice. That made us shipmates.
“My name is Maas,” he said, grabbing my hand and giving it a fine German shake. I opened my eyes.
“I’m McCorkle. Delighted.”
“Ach! You are not German?”
“American.”
“But you speak German so well.”
“I've been here a long time.”
“It’s the best way to learn a language,” Maas said, nodding his head in approval. “You must live in the country in which it is spoken.”
The plane kept on flying and we sat there, Maas and I, making small talk about Berlin and Bonn and what some Americans thought of the German Situation. My head kept on aching and I was having a rotten time.
Even if it hadn’t been cloudy, there is not much to see between Berlin and Bonn. It’s drear and it’s drab, like flying over Nebraska and Kansas on a February day. But things got brighter. Maas rummaged
through his briefcase and produced a
Halbe Flasche
of Steinhaeger. That was thoughtful. Steinhaeger is best when drunk ice cold and washed down with a liter or so of beer. We drank it warm out of two small silver cups that he also furnished. By the time the twin-spired Dome of Cologne came into view we were almost on a “du” basis—but not quite. Yet we were good enough pals for me to offer Maas a ride into Bonn.
“You are too kind. Surely it is an imposition. I thank you very much. Come! A bird cannot fly on one wing. Let us finish the bottle.”
We finished it and Maas tucked the two silver cups back into his brief case. The pilot set the plane down with only a couple of bumps and Maas and I filed out past the mild disapproval of the two hostesses. My headache was gone.
Maas had only his briefcase, and after I had collected my one-suiter we headed for the parking lot, where I was pleasantly surprised to find my car intact. The German juvenile delinquents—or half-strongs—can hot-wire a car in a time that makes their American counterparts look sick. I was driving a Porsche that year and Maas crooned over it. “Such a wonderful car. Such machinery. So fast.” He kept on murmuring praise while I unlocked it and stowed my case in what is optimistically called the backseat. There are several advantages to a Porsche that I find no other car has, but Dr. Ferdinand Porsche did not design it for fat people. He must have had in mind the long, lean racing types, such as Moss and Hill. Herr Maas tried to get into the car head first, instead of butt-first. His brown double-breasted suit gaped open and the Luger he wore in a shoulder holster showed for only a second.
I took the Autobahn back to Bonn. It’s a little longer and less picturesque than the conventional way, which is the route used by the junketing prime ministers, presidents and premiers who have reason to come calling on the West German capital. The car was running well and I held it to a modest 140 kilometers an hour and Herr Maas
hummed softly to himself as we whizzed by the Volkswagens, the Kapitans, and the occasional Mercedes.
If he wanted to carry a gun, that was his business. There was some law against it, but then there were some laws against adultery, murder, arson and spitting on the sidewalk. There were all sorts of laws, and I decided, somewhat mellowed by the Steinhaeger, that if a fat little German wanted to carry a Luger, he probably had very good reasons.
I was still congratulating myself on this sophisticated, worldly-wise attitude when the left rear tire blew. With what I continue to regard as masterly self-control I kept my foot off the brake, hit the gas pedal lightly, oversteered a bit, and brought the car back into line—on the wrong side of the road perhaps, but at least in one piece. At that point there is no divider in the Autobahn. We were equally lucky that there was no traffic coming from the opposite direction.
Maas did not say a word. I cursed for five seconds, at the same time wondering how well the Michelin guarantee would pay off.