Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

Conrad rode off under the chalk-blue sky, eventually arriving home in Friedrichshain, circuitously, over an hour later than usual. His father was standing outside their building, banned from the apartment to smoke his cigar on the sidewalk. He was chatting with the grocer, who also smoked, when Conrad appeared, in his uniform, riding Herr Muller’s bicycle.

The rage that spread across his father’s face so startled Conrad that he almost fell off the bike. “Are you out of your mind?” his father hissed in a tone new to Conrad, who had always admired his father’s even temper. “Get off that bike. Get off it now.”

“Take it easy, Erich,” the grocer advised in a low voice, practically a whisper. “You don’t want to attract attention to the situation.”

“What situation?” Conrad asked. “It belongs to Herr Muller. You remember him, Father—the one Gabi threw over for Lutz. He loaned it to me until tomorrow.” For reasons Conrad couldn’t decipher, it seemed like a bad idea to mention that he was in fact considering buying the bicycle.

The offending bike now stashed in the front hallway of the apartment he shared with his parents, he overheard them whispering frantically in the kitchen though couldn’t make out what they were saying. Eventually his father appeared with a bottle of schnapps and two glasses, and sat his son down in the living room for a man-to-man talk.

“The Schumanns don’t ride bicycles,” his father began. Conrad noticed that, when his father ran his fingers through his thinning grey hair, a tremor shook his hand. “What’s wrong?” Conrad asked. “Is it your health?”

His father drained his schnapps and poured another. Conrad hadn’t touched his. “My health is fine, and so is your mother’s. But please, listen to me. The bike has to go.”

Conrad was nineteen. In two months, he would be twenty. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited for the explanation he believed he was due.

“It’s like this,” his father finally began. “These days, a bike is not a bike.”

“Which means?”

“The woman who threw the garlic yesterday, has she been found? Have you thought about what will happen to her?”

“She’s a traitor. She killed Hans. Why do you care what happens to her?”

“Let me explain something to you.” His father spoke in the tone he used with his students, the same tone with which he had often enlightened Conrad and Gabi throughout their childhoods. His voice fell to a whisper and he leaned in, as if fearful of being overheard. “The bicycle is to get around more easily.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t interrupt. Let me finish.” Agitated, he poured himself a third schnapps.

Conrad’s throat tightened. There was something his father needed to say but didn’t know how. Never before had he seen the man speechless. He laid his hand on his father’s knee. “Don’t worry. I’ll return the bike to Herr Muller tonight. Gabi might still know where he lives.”

“You don’t know what a bike means these days. You don’t understand.” When his father’s hand landed on top of his, the sticky heat was overwhelming, but he left his own hand where it was. “IMs ride bikes to get around quickly, and they’re given clearance to pass through the checkpoints.”

“But it isn’t possible,” Conrad argued, “that everyone with a bike is an IM.”

“Who else can afford a bicycle these days?”

“You once said that, before the war, a lot of people had bikes.”

“Conrad, do I have to remind you how little survived the war?”

Of course he didn’t; it was a ridiculous suggestion. Almost nothing survived. Every building in Berlin was scarred with bullet holes. The Jews were all gone. Nearly everyone in the east was scraping by with what little was left after the Soviets cleaned them out, while the west rebuilt itself and snickered at them across the border.

“I’ve often wondered,” Conrad ventured, curious what his father thought about the tender issue of informers, and questioning now the depth of his concern, “if IMs provide a necessary service, even if it makes us uncomfortable when we don’t know who is…” How exactly to put it?

“Betraying you,” his father spat.

“But is it a betrayal when it’s for the good of the country? I don’t like IMs any more than you do, but I’ve wondered about this. Mielke must have a good reason for needing them. It’s no secret that splitting the country has been a tricky business.”

His father’s mouth tightened. A frightening clarity overtook his eyes. “IMs are scum. Mielke doesn’t need them, he wants them. He’s terrified of losing his grip around our throats.”

It was the first time Conrad had heard his father speak so bitterly about the leader of the GDR. He was taken aback, and waited for the rest to pour out.

“You remember, when you were seven, and I went away for five months?”

“Of course I remember.” Their mother had explained that their father was on a teacher-training expedition, which had seemed plausible at the time, but suddenly didn’t.

“I was in prison, first tortured, then put in solitary. And what was my transgression?”

Transgression? His father? Never had Conrad known a more loyal citizen than his father, which is why he’d been trusted with the honor of educating the new country’s youngest minds.

“I sat down for a cup of coffee one afternoon. At the table next to mine was a man. I’d never seen him before. I didn’t know his name or anything about him, only that he was drinking a beer at the next table. I asked him the time. That was my transgression. I was picked up the next day, accused of subversion. Apparently, the man with the beer was a spy for the Americans. They wanted to know what we talked about. They wanted to know if he “recruited” me. They kept me awake for four straight nights. No sleep, Conrad, you have no idea how insane that makes you. No sleep at all, and very little food or water. I thought I would never see you children or your mother again. I was out of my mind.”

“So you confessed?”

“They never broke me. Not like that, anyway.”

“How, then?” Conrad knew as well as anyone that traitors, even perceived traitors, weren’t released back into society without paying a price.

“A promise was extracted from me. I vowed to teach my students, all of them, year after year, the purest values of the GDR. If I wanted to see my family again, that was what I had to do. And I’ve done it, haven’t I?”

“What were you teaching them before?”

“Mathematics. Science. History. Literature. To ask questions and to think critically. After, I kept my lessons to the benefits of socialism, and still do.”

His father watched him, waiting for it to sink in: the new understanding that, for much of Conrad’s lifetime, his father was not exactly whom he’d seemed to be. “I see now why you don’t want me to appear to be an IM.”

“Don’t let them turn you into a monster,” his father whispered, hands gripping his knees, eyes sharp as crystal, “like they did me. I can’t live with that. Do you understand?”

“I’ll go right now and find Gabi. I’ll walk to her apartment, leave the bike here, and when I have Muller’s address I’ll wait until dark and return it.”

Conrad rode shakily to Muller’s, and in the twenty minutes it took to get there, he tried but couldn’t digest his father’s confession. All these years, his father, the man he loved and respected above all other men, the man he emulated, the man he’d hoped to make proud by wearing the uniform of the GDR, had sustained his loyalist persona under duress. Conrad felt trapped in a quicksand of bewildered disappointment.

Muller’s elderly sister answered the bell by peeking through the curtains onto the street. In moments, Muller himself appeared at the door.