Erika Holzer - Freedom Bridge

The boulevard reminded her of an abandoned parking lot but with one appalling exception. Where Unter den Linden began—or ended—she spotted some people. East Germans. They were milling about aimlessly. Despite a mass of shrubbery, nothing grew quite high enough to block the stone columns of Brandenburg Gate—and beyond the columns, the just-begun new Berlin Wall. “Can we stop the car for a moment?” she asked Andreyev.

Kiril nodded. “Halt.”

Adrienne leaned out the window, wanting to see beyond the columns from the same perspective as an East German, hungry for a tantalizing glimpse of West Berlin, now beyond her grasp. She pulled out her notebook and did a quick sketch—poor substitute for a camera—but she didn’t want it confiscated.

“Marx-Engles Platz,” Dr. Andreyev said.

“Why does that sound familiar?” she wondered out loud.

“Probably because it was once part of the famous Lustgarten. Strange how history repeats itself. Hitler held huge rallies and military parades there. Now the East Germans do. Just last evening I witnessed a stunning torchlight parade of tanks and marching soldiers. Do you like parades, Mrs. Brenner?”

“Just the American kind. Kids marching with high school bands and drum majorettes displaying their legs. No tanks. They can be hell on the roads,” she said drily.

She had thought her bluntness would offend him. Incredibly, he seemed pleased. A real enigma, this Dr. Andreyev.

As the limo moved on, she couldn’t help wondering why she sensed a grim purposefulness underneath his running commentary, like a discordant musical theme that contradicts the melody.

“We’d better wrap up this brief preview and head for the hotel before my husband thinks I’ve been kidnapped,” she said reluctantly.

“Zum Wohle aller!” Kiril said. “For the good of all!”

A smiling Galya repeated the toast in her halting English, and then passed around glasses of champagne.

Kiril tipped his glass in a mock salute to an unsmiling Luka, who stood off to the side.

Adrienne Brenner took a single sip of champagne before setting her glass down. “I’m sure you’re eager to check out the clinic, Kurt. Give me a few minutes to unpack a few things,” she said, and walked into the adjoining bedroom.

Kiril eagerly looked around. He had never been inside a modern hotel suite before. His own room down the corridor—his and Rogov’s—was one used by the hotel’s travelling auditors. Just a couple of narrow beds with the barest essentials. The Brenner suite was spacious. And cheerful, he thought. A sitting room with a nubby couch and two matching chairs. A bedroom nearly as large, with an armoire of glossy oaken wood, flanked by dressers that took up the entire wall. An enormous four-poster bed—

An observation he quickly pushed out of his mind.

He sensed that the Brenners were not impressed—a point in Kiril’s favor. People accustomed to luxury would be reluctant to give it up. He added up the morning’s other favorable points. On the first leg of his impromptu mini-tour, Adrienne Brenner had been both genuinely curious and remarkably open about her obvious distaste for most of what he’d called to her attention. She had not felt the need to be diplomatic about what she was seeing. Nor had she made any attempt to avoid politically awkward subjects. Even in his wildest imagination he had not been prepared for a woman who was so disarmingly direct. Her candor and independence intrigued him. He mentally transported her to Moscow and tried to imagine her standing before some bureaucrat, being told what to do, how to live, what to think. He could not imagine it.

If a police state were as real to her as it seemed, there was virtually no chance she would ever consent to live in one—certainly not in East Germany, let alone the Soviet Union. Would her husband defect without her? Unlikely.

His eyes drifted to Galya, still smiling, talking animatedly to Dr. Brenner. Flirting? He watched her cut through an elaborate cellophane-wrapped basket of fruit.

“Compliments of Colonel Aleksei Andreyev,” Galya told Dr. Brenner.

Kurt Brenner felt as if he’s been hit with an electric charge.

First Dmitri Malik. Now his former subordinate. Does this Aleksei Andreyev think I’ve forgotten his name after all these years? Or is he counting on my remembering? A colonel, now, doubtless KGB, with the same last name as our “tour guide . ” What have I gotten myself into? What in god’s name could they possibly want?

As Dr. Brenner excused himself to join his wife in the bedroom, Kiril saw Galya scan the room’s plush appointments. Her focus shifted almost imperceptibly to Adrienne Brenner’s clothes. They were casually strewn across the four-poster.

At first I’m captivated by the heroine’s clothes, her jewelry, even her high-heeled shoes! Then I notice how she acts so casual about the things I long for.

Poor dear Galya. It pained Kiril to see her listless posture. Her not-quite-lifeless eyes. The smile that never quite reached her eyes because she had not quite given up. How much longer before she did once she was condemned to spend the rest of her life in the Soviet Union?

As the five of them rode the elevator down—Galya and the Brenners in front, Kiril and Rogov in the rear—Kiril caught the faint scent of Adrienne Brenner’s perfume. While they waited for their limousine, he felt in league with the wind—urging it on as it blew the folds of Adrienne Brenner’s garment around her legs.

Wondering about the body underneath the cape.

“The Humboldt University medical clinic!”

Kiril’s announcement had the clarion call of a trumpet.

Adrienne Brenner’s expression brightened as she liberated pen and notebook from her shoulder-bag. Even Galya seemed to perk up, Kiril noticed.

Not Kurt Brenner though. As Kiril made perfunctory introductions to some of the hospital staff, he couldn’t help noticing Brenner’s tepid response—handshakes and glib phrases that seemed to slip automatically out of his mouth.

An alarm bell went off in Kiril’s head.

Brenner is just going through the motions.

Did he dare cut through the man’s preoccupation, even at the risk of being obvious? Luka Rogov spoke almost no English and understood even less. But Galya? he thought uneasily.

Kiril held off until the five of them were walking through the medical clinic’s long, mostly empty, corridors. Whenever Brenner made some offhand remark about medicine that Kiril could use as a transition, he would jump in with an artful description of nearly a half-century of Soviet medical progress—such as how Soviet medical schools graduated some thirty thousand physicians annually in three years! “I’m forced to admit, however,” he said, “that because of such an attenuated program, our doctors would later have much to learn on the job.” Kiril made a few more not-so-subtle attempts to extoll Soviet medicine, even as he undercut it.

Adrienne Brenner, as usual, wrote notes at a furious pace.

Brenner was still along for the ride.

As their party came to an area marked off-limits to visitors, Kiril ignored the sign with a wave and led them down a narrow hall, explaining that he was eager to show them some modern x-ray equipment he’d learned about only yesterday. They entered a room where a patient lay on a hospital bed, his massive chest covered with a number of black tubular objects, two of which were moving slightly. Brenner’s eyebrow shot up—he knew immediately what he was seeing. Adrienne Brenner was staring at the patient as if memory could substitute for the cameras she’d been obliged to leave at the reception desk.