Jonathan de Shalit - Traitor

And then she spoke about Gunther, Gunther who took her breath away, who was their top field operations officer. There wasn’t a person out there whom he couldn’t recruit, turn into his best friend, turn into a secret soldier in the service of the revolution. Because as she saw things, it was and remained a revolution. No less. And she told him about Gunther’s murder, “Of course it was murder, who goes for a walk by the side of the highway on a dark rainy night, in the middle of nowhere? The big bosses from Moscow show up and take the Cobra dossiers just a few weeks earlier, and all of a sudden Gunther is dead. Just like that? He just happened to be killed? My sweet Gunther.”

“What do you know about Cobra?” the priest asked in a whisper, holding her dry burning-hot hand.

“Nothing, almost nothing,” she replied. “That was our system. Nobody knew the full picture. Only those who needed to. What did I know? I knew that Werner, Gunther that is, recruited him from nowhere. That his wonderful senses had led him to believe that Cobra was worth it. All the risks and effort. That he would go far. Thanks to agents like him, Markus and Gunther were able to walk tall even in Dzerzhinsky Square, at the KGB headquarters. I didn’t know his real name. I only knew he was from Israel, from the Holy City, from Jerusalem. A highly intelligent young man, an aide to a senior minister. Gunther used to say that he’d be a minister himself one day, or a very senior government official. I knew he was important enough for the Russians to take him for themselves and destroy everything that could expose him. We were already at a point of no return when they demanded that we hand him over. At some point, after all, we knew it was all over, right? But why did they have to kill him?” she asked, and her tears streamed silently down her cheeks and dripped onto the hand of the priest that was holding hers. “Why did he have to be killed? Gunther would never have betrayed Cobra. He may just as well have killed himself.” She sobbed softly, her breath catching now and then on a quiet whimper. “Why kill him like a dog on the side of a highway, in a dark field, with the rain pouring down on him incessantly, and his eyes staring up at nothing but black skies?” It was plain to see that she had pictured that horrific image in her mind on numerous occasions, and that it remained as distinct as ever. The priest clasped both his large hands around her bare fingers. He stroked her thin hair and said, “Marlene, Marlene, that’s enough now, it’s passed, it was a long time ago. And Gunther knew, I’m sure, Gunther knew you had feelings for him. Someone like him would surely have known. Only his work, his loyalty, the war he was waging stopped him from telling you that he knew, from telling you that he loved you, too. That’s how we were in those days, right? That’s just the way things were. Too often,” he whispered. He stroked Marlene’s head, trying to soothe and comfort her. We all carry a cross on our backs, he thought. A cross and a bag of sins alongside. Living a blemish-free life in those days was impossible. The truly good managed to keep some piece of their soul out of reach, untainted. But the truly good also had to survive, also had to give something in return for their lives. Father Jacobs wondered about the constant compromises, endless small humiliations, uncountable acts of betrayal that had allowed him to go on living, to continue leading his small congregation, small and ostracized, which found sanctuary in itself, comfort and a little warmth in those days, days that one couldn’t even term black. No, it was worse. They were days of dreariness, of obscurity, like opaque windows that had been smeared with brown paint and dirt that could never be scraped off.

BERLIN, JANUARY 2013

The Hotel Adlon’s elegant concierge raised his eyes and gazed in irony at the elderly man struggling to get inside. The doorman, wrapped in a thick coat, his stately uniform underneath, as if he were an admiral in the Imperial Navy, was patiently holding the door, while the old professor—thus he appeared to the concierge observing him—was trying with his one hand to hold on to his hat, so that it wouldn’t blow off in the sharp and icy gusts of wind, and with his other to close his umbrella, which had folded in on itself in the opposite direction, as his body pressed ahead, determined to feel the pleasant warmth that permeated the lobby. And indeed, a huge fireplace was ablaze in one of its corners, and a yellowish light, homely looking, dripped onto the ornate marble floor, from the direction of the bar. The professor finally made it through the doorway, mumbling a word of thanks to the doorman, nodding in the direction of the concierge, and waving his umbrella around as if he were fencing with a ghost, trying with his movements to fold it back to its natural state. His casquette was in his hand now, after almost falling to the floor, and he made his way toward the bar in long and spritely strides, hopping with surprising agility up the two steps, his coat already open and flapping, his gray hair tousled. And there we go, the old man had spotted the man who was waiting there for him, who rose from the plush armchair to greet him. At the same time, he also noticed the young man at the corner of the bar whose muscles seemed to be fighting to get out of his gray suit. The young man went tense upon seeing him and readied to rise from his chair, too, but the man who had already stood and moved toward him with his hand outstretched in greeting signaled to the muscular young man with a glance—it’s okay, it’s him, you can relax.

The two embraced like old friends. “Walter, Walter, it’s good to see you.” “Good to see you, too, Aharon, good to see you too. Thank you for coming on such short notice.” They looked at each other with affection. Walter returned to his leather armchair, Aharon dragged a second leather armchair closer, dropping his umbrella and coat on a third. “A cognac, if you please,” he requested from the waiter who had appeared discreetly at their table. “A glass of hot wine, please,” Walter said, and waited for the waiter to walk away.

“I see you’ve yet to get rid of your bodyguard,” Aharon remarked with a smile. “I, on the other hand,” he added in the same breath, “am no longer considered important enough. As you can see, fame is fleeting. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” he went on, failing as usual to complete the sentence and allowing it instead to fade out.

Aharon Levin and Dr. Walter Vogel—the former head of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, known as the Israeli Mossad, and the former chief of the BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. Vogel had retired a few months earlier and, in keeping with procedure, was still entitled to a security detail, or required one, depending on how you looked at it and who was doing the looking. Vogel had spent his entire professional life in the West German intelligence service, signing up shortly after earning his Ph.D. in law from the University of Goettingen. He had spent his whole career fighting the communist threat. He loathed the KGB, and felt the same loathing for the Stasi, too, which had imposed a reign of terror on the citizens of East Germany, the celebrated German Democratic Republic, whom it was supposed to have protected and whom it was supposed to have served. He reserved respect and admiration, accompanied nevertheless by hatred, only for the Stasi’s foreign espionage division, the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, in which he had seen not only bullying fists, but also artistry, from professional and sensitive hands that knew their craft well.

“Look,” Walter said to Aharon, “I’ll get straight to the point. It sounds like an old-timers’ thing—you and me, and an old priest from Dresden, and an old woman who served in the Stasi and has passed away.”