Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

As he walked the border one afternoon, his attention kept landing on the black bicycle propped against a lamppost, his bicycle, with its menacing gleam. He hated it. Muller waited for him every evening, asking what the guards had discussed on their breaks. As if he spoke to anyone these days. There, in the distance, was Axel. He remembered bunkering under a homemade tent with his friend when they were children, late at night, bending their fingers to make shadow puppets dance on the glowing white sheet they had pilfered from the hall closet. He blinked away the reminiscence. Axel was lost to him. Any sort of intimacy would be impossible now; no one could be trusted, including him. And Emilie. Someday, when he looked back, would she glimmer in his memory as his one and only love? When he thought of the rumor of their child, blood pumped wildly at his temples, deafening him against the usual discipline of his thoughts. Hans was dead. Axel was a stranger. His father was heartbroken. Emilie had vanished into a world he staunchly refused to imagine.

Suddenly, without thinking, Conrad turned to face the lens of a photographer… and heard a click.

“Come on,” the man shouted. “Give us something to look at.”

Before he knew what was happening, Conrad was flying over the barbed coil, dropping his rifle on the eastern side and landing, suddenly, in the west.

The chaos that followed was instantaneous. Axel and another guard ran to intercept him, but were too late. The photographer’s camera clicked mercilessly, capturing Conrad’s every move. Others joined in. The mechanical clacks and whirs sounded more voracious than any of the excited voices. People were shouting but he heard nothing of substance. It happened fast: suddenly, without thought, he was over. For a moment his body felt light as a feather, though when he landed he experienced the full force of his weight. He thought of his father’s disappointments, the open sore of his own uncertainty, and ran.

Emilie’s Kreutzberg building would have been visible from Conrad’s side of Berlin, if he had known where to look. It turned out she hadn’t made it very far, but west was west and east was east whether you were an inch or a mile from the border.

Her window was open. From the street below he saw stained white curtains billowing on a lackadaisical summer breeze. A couple of books were piled beside a crusty-looking glass half-full with water. The high wail of a baby crying followed a breeze onto the street, landing painfully in Conrad’s ears.

The building’s front door was unsecured so he walked right in. He took the steps in pairs until he reached the third floor, breathless, and knocked three times.

Emilie’s porcelain face, stiff as a doll’s, held its composure when she opened her door and found him. “I saw the papers.” She wore the same crimson lipstick she used to.

“May I come in?”

“What took you so long?”

“I’ve been busy.” He didn’t have to explain why it had taken him nearly a week to find her. Defectors were always held and questioned by the Allies until their motivations were fully understood.

She was dressed for the office, in a skirt and blouse, and was barefoot; the red polish on her toenails was badly chipped. Conrad stood at the entrance of her small living room and listened for a baby. The tepid silence unnerved him. He was sure he’d heard it crying.

“Where is it?”

“What a nice greeting.” She plopped down on a tattered couch, bundling her knees in front of her. There was little furniture in the place other than the couch and a table with a single chair. There was no sign of a child. On a mantel across the room a pair of bricks served as bookends, with a single book lapsed sideways between them. This was the Emilie he remembered: haphazard, improvisational, a reader. Often selfish. “Why are you here, Connie?”

She had once whispered that in his ear at the height of passion. Connie. Teasing him, calling him a woman’s name, just at his moment of release. She had been his first and only lover. He had assumed they would marry, and was devastated when she disappeared across the border without warning.

“Just tell me: Is it true you had our baby?”

Her eyes were black scythes in a white face. A new pageboy haircut made her severe. Finally, she answered, “I gave it up. I had to. I couldn’t make it on my own with a child.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were expecting?”

“I didn’t know until I was already here, and then it didn’t matter anymore. I wasn’t going back, and you weren’t coming over. You were always too good a comrade for me.”

“And yet here I am.”

“Why?”

It was an excellent question. “The truth is, I’d rather be home.”

“But you defected.”

“It was an impulse. I wanted to…” Words failed him. It wasn’t as simple as finding her and learning the truth. He’d wanted to get away from Muller, and from the black bicycle. “Was it a boy or girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can that be?”

“They were instructed not to tell me at the hospital. I never even saw it.”

“So you don’t know where it is now?”

“How could I?”

She had walked away from her newborn, just as she’d walked away from him. Her mercilessness was electrifying. He wondered if she was telling the truth; if there really had been a baby. A shiver of cold passed through him. Why was he here?

“Want something to drink?”

He sat down beside her. “Why not?”

They drank beer until midnight, after which it was agreed that he should spend the night on her couch. By the second night, he was in her bed. It quickly made no sense for him to leave at all.

“The wall will be finished soon,” Emilie whispered in his ear. “They say it’s going to seal off West Berlin completely, turn us into a little island unto ourselves.”

Conrad thought of his father and mother, trapped on the other side. He’d written to them several times, but doubted any of his letters had gotten through. “I need to see my parents.”

The sheet slid off when she propped herself on an elbow, exposing her small breasts. “I know a way we can both go back.”

“You said you’d never make a good socialist.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Without her lipstick, the wild self-assurance of that slash of vivid red, her smile betrayed a rare vulnerability. He kissed her.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.” She lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. A blue shadow from yesterday’s makeup lingered in the relaxed folds of her lids. Wetting a finger, he smoothed away the color. He disliked it when she became mysterious.

“Explain,” he insisted.

“Do you really want to go back?”

“Yes, but only if you come with me.” He kissed her, and she threw her arms around him.

“Someone very special is in town,” she whispered in his ear. “He can help us. I’m told he’s willing to meet with us today.”

A slender man in a suit and tie reclined in an easy chair in the back room of the construction outfit where Emilie worked. His dark hair was brushed neatly off his forehead, and his fingernails were conspicuously clean. There was no denying his elegance. He held a tiny espresso cup on a saucer, balanced on his knee.

“This is Mischa,” Emilie told Conrad, the moment they walked in. He wondered why she hadn’t introduced him, as well. Did the man already know who he was?

“A pleasure to meet you, Herr—”

“Wolf.” His voice was as unimpeachable as his manicure, without tone. The name Mischa Wolf rang a distant bell in Conrad’s mind. And then it struck him like a thunderbolt.

Markus “Mischa” Wolf was second in command of the Stasi, the notorious spymaster who ran the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. It was rumored that the HVA sent its tentacles worldwide, and well known (if rarely discussed) that the East German secret police recruited far and wide, and greedily. It had to be some kind of absurd dream, finding Wolf in the dusty back room of a minor capitalist enterprise in West Berlin. Unless of course this business was a front. Conrad glanced at Emilie’s pretty face and saw nothing different from before.