Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Exhausted yet tense, anxious, wired, I tried to sleep on the train, but could not.

We changed some money at the Deutsche Verkehrs-Bank office at the train station, and then I made hotel reservations for the night. The Metropol, with the unique advantage of its location directly across from the Hauptbahnhof, was booked solid. But I was able to book us a room at the Bayerischer Hof und Palais Montgelas, on Promenadeplatz, in the city center — inordinately expensive, but any port in a storm and all that.

From a pay phone I placed a call to Kent Atkins, Deputy Chief of Station, CIA, in Munich. Atkins, an old drinking buddy of mine from Paris days, was, as I’ve said, a friend of Edmund Moore’s — and, more important, was the one who had given Ed Moore documents warning of something “ominous” in the works.

It was about nine-thirty by the time I called Atkins at home. He answered on the first ring.

“Yes?”

“Kent?”

“Yes?” His voice was sharp, alert, but it sounded as if he had been asleep. One of the vital skills you acquire in the business is the ability to snap awake, be perfectly attentive in a split second.

“Boy, you’re asleep early. It’s barely nine at night.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Father John.”

“Who?”

“ Père Jean.” An old, inside joke; a reference I hoped he would remember.

Long silence. “Who is — oh, God. Where are you?”

“Can we meet for a drink or something?”

“Can it wait?”

“No. Hofbraühaus in half an hour?”

Atkins replied quickly and sarcastically: “Why don’t we just meet in the lobby of the American embassy?”

I got it, and smiled to myself. Molly looked at me with concern; I nodded reassurance.

“See you at Leopold,” he said, and hung up. He sounded distraught.

Leopold, I knew — and he knew that I knew — meant Leopoldstrasse, in Schwabing, the section to the north of the city. That meant the Englishcher Garten, a logical meeting place, and specifically, the Monopteros, the classical temple built in the early part of the nineteenth century, on a bluff in the park. A good place for a “blind date,” as we spooks call it.

Instead of taking the U-bahn directly from the train station, which had certain risks, we exited the station and strolled a bit, circuitously, to Marienplatz, the always-crowded central square of the city, overpowered by the Gothic monstrosity of the New Town Hall, its gray gingerbread façade illuminated frighteningly at night, and on the southwest corner a rather barbarous modern department store building, which utterly destroyed the kitsch-Gothic unity of the square, awful though it was.

In some ways Germany hadn’t changed since last I saw it. I was reassured to see a crowd waiting bovinely at a flashing red Don’t Walk sign on Maxburgstrasse, where not a single automobile was in sight and the whole bunch could have crossed without anyone noticing, but laws were laws. One young man hopped up and down on alternating feet, desperate with impatience, like a horse champing at the bit, but even he wouldn’t violate the social etiquette.

Yet in significant ways Germany had changed drastically. The crowds in Marienplatz were louder and more threatening than the usually polite evening throngs there. Neo-Nazi skinheads lurked in spiteful little gangs, hurling racial epithets at passersby. Graffiti covered quite a few of the otherwise-tidy Gothic buildings. “Ausländer raus!” and “Kanacken raus!” — “Foreigners get out,” in varying degrees of derogation. “Tod allen Juden und dem Ausländerpack!” — “Death to the Jews and the foreign hordes.” “Deutschland ist stärker ohne Europa” — “Germany is stronger without Europe.” There were attacks on the former East Germans: “Ossis — Parasiten!” Inscribed in Day-Glo pink on the front of an otherwise elegant restaurant, an evocation of an earlier time: “Deutschland für Deutsche,” “Germany for the Germans.” And one plaintive cry: “Für mehr Menschlichkeit, gegen Gewalt!” meaning “For more humanity, against violence.”

Dozens of homeless people slept on cardboard flats above grates. Many storefronts were boarded up, plate-glass windows were smashed and unrepaired, and many businesses seemed to be dying. “Wegen Geschäftsaufgabe alle Waren 30 % billiger!” one sign read: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS ALL GOODS 30 % OFF.

Munich seemed a city out of control. I wondered whether the entire country, which was in its biggest economic crisis since the days before Hitler’s rise to power, was like this.

Molly and I took the U-bahn from Marienplatz to Müncher Freiheit and made our way through the Englischer Garten’s asphalt tracks, by the artificial lake, the Chinese Tower. We quickly located the Monopteros, which has always reminded me of a bulimic Jefferson Memorial, all gawky columns and scrolled capitals. We circled it in silence. In the sixties the Monopteros was a hangout for street people and protesters and the like. Now it seemed to be a rendezvous point for teenage boys and girls in American college sweatshirts and black leather jackets.

“Why do you think the money was wired to Munich?” Molly asked. “Isn’t Frankfurt the financial capital of Germany?”

“Yes. But Munich is the manufacturing center. The industrial capital as well as the capital of Bavaria. The real city of money. Sometimes Munich’s called Germany’s secret capital.”

We were early, or, rather, Atkins arrived late, in his antique Ford Fiesta, little more than sheaths of rust held together by duct tape. He had the radio blasting, or maybe it was a tape: Donna Summer doing the old post-disco classic “She Works Hard for the Money.” In Paris, I remembered, he’d had an embarrassing affinity for discothéques. The music died only when he keyed off the ignition and the car sputtered to a stop fifty feet from where we stood.

“Nice car,” I called out as he approached. “Very gemütlich. ”

“Very crappy,” he returned unsmilingly. His face showed great strain, the same anxiety I had heard in his voice. Atkins was in his mid-forties, lithe, with a mane of prematurely white hair contrasting with heavy dark brows. He had a long, thin face and virtually no lips, but he was good-looking all the same. He was also gay, which for a long while made career advancement difficult for him (the upper echelons in Langley have become enlightened only very recently).

Atkins had aged quite a bit since I had last seen him in Paris. He had deep circles under his eyes, which told of nights of insomnia. He hadn’t been a worrier when I knew him in Paris, but something was obsessing him now, and I knew what it was.

I began introducing him to Molly, but he would have no social pleasantries. He reached out a hand and gripped my shoulder.

“Ben,” he said, alarm in his eyes. “Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of Germany. I can’t afford to be seen with you.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“Vier Jahreszeiten,” I lied.

“Too public, too vulnerable. I wouldn’t even stay in the city if I were you.”

“Why?”

“You’re PNG.” Persona non grata.

“Here?”

“Everywhere.”

“So what?”

“You’re on the watch list.”

“Meaning?”

Atkins hesitated, glanced at Molly and then at me, as if asking for permission to proceed. I nodded.

“Cauterization.”

“What?” In Agency lingo, a compromised or identified agent is “cauterized” for his own protection by being swiftly yanked out of a hostile situation and taken into safety. But more and more often the term is used with irony — meaning the apprehension of an agent by his own employers when he’s deemed to be dangerous to the organization.