Dan Fesperman - The Arms Maker of Berlin

“Something like that.”

“Cool. Why didn’t you say so?”

Boland crossed the room to a set of gray drawers, where he retrieved a yellow invoice.

“What’d you say the name was?”

“Gordon Wolfe.”

“Wrong guy.”

“With an address in Wightman, Pennsylvania? 819 Boyd Circle?”

Boland glanced down.

“Yeah. Home phone?”

Nat rattled it off, and for good measure recited the number for Gordon’s cell.

“Three for three. In that case, who the heck is ‘Gordon Bern-hard’?”

“Bernhard?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Hold on a second. I’ll be right back.”

Berta sighed with impatience while Nat went to the car. He returned with one of Gordon’s books that Viv had given him that morning and opened it to the author photo.

“Is this the man who called himself Gordon Bernhard?”

“Absolutely. He was in here a couple weeks ago.” Boland stepped to a wall calendar, where he ran his finger across a row of days. “May seventh, to be exact. The Monday from hell. We had a power outage later that afternoon, which always screws things up and gripes out the customers. Mr. Bernhard needed a new swipe card. He was probably the only customer that day who wasn’t screaming at me.”

The timing put Gordon’s visit only a few days after the gotcha story broke in the Daily Wildcat , the one that had sent him heading for the hills.

“Have you got a surveillance camera with a view of 207?”

“We’ve got cameras covering every part of the building. Want to check it for the seventh? It’s a digital system, stored on a hard drive.”

Boland called up the log on a PC. The door of 207 showed up at a great angle from camera 4. Boland easily found the right day slid the time bar back to the approximate hour of Gordon’s visit, and scanned forward on high speed until a blurry figure darted in and out of the frame. Then he backed up, slowed down, and there it was, a black-and-white image of Gordon Wolfe from behind, as if they were peeping over his shoulder from the ceiling. He was empty-handed, except for the key. He turned the lock, went inside 207, and shut the door behind him. The time signature read 1:12 p.m.

“So by this time he’d already stopped by for the new swipe card?” Nat asked.

“Correct. Said his old one wasn’t working.”

That meant Gordon had put the new swipe card in the box in the attic during the past week. He had certainly been attending to a lot of old business lately. Tidying up. Getting ready for something.

Boland scrolled ahead. Gordon reemerged at 1:38, still empty-handed.

“What the hell?” Nat said. Had Gordon just spent twenty-six minutes visiting a taped-up novel? “Any way to slow that down?”

“Sure.”

Boland scrolled back. This time Gordon exited in slow motion.

“Hold it! Back it up to when he opens the door, then freeze it. There, do you see it?”

Just behind Gordon’s right leg was the right edge of a box, the size of the ones found at the Wolfes’ summer home. By now even Berta was riveted.

“He left without them,” he said. “He must have come back later.”

“Couldn’t have,” Boland chimed in. “Like I said, we lost power right after that. The swipe card system went down, so I had to let people in manually the rest of the day. I’d have seen him.”

“I guess he could have come back some other day,” Nat said. “But if not, then he was right about one thing. Somebody planted those boxes at his house. Could you rerun his exit one more time?”

Boland nodded, and they watched again.

“Something’s funny,” Nat said. “Have you got any shots from farther down the hall?”

“Sure. Camera 5.”

“Let’s see ’em. Arrival and departure.”

Boland complied. Gordon arrived at the bottom of the screen at 1:12 and walked slowly up the hall, staying on camera for eleven steps. At 1:38 he reappeared in the opposite direction, but with an altered gait. He paused halfway to hitch up his pants.

“Does it look to you like he’s limping?”

“Yes,” Berta said. Now she was leaning forward intently. “Run it again.”

Boland wrinkled his nose at the sound of her accent. She obviously didn’t fit his idea of who should be working for the FBI. But he did as she asked.

“Maybe he stiffened up while he was on the floor, looking at everything,” Nat said.

“No,” Berta said. “It’s something else.”

They watched again.

“It’s like his pants were bothering him,” Nat said.

Then it came to him, a bolt straight from memory.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “It’s just like George Wood.”

“You’re right,” Berta said in amazement.

“Woody who?” Boland asked. By now he was as engrossed as they were.

“George Wood,” Nat said, unable to resist the urge to teach. “Code name for an old German spy named Fritz Kolbe. During the war he smuggled documents out of the Foreign Ministry by taping them to his thigh and carrying them all the way to Switzerland by train. All Gordon had to do was make it to the parking lot.”

“But why not just take them out in a briefcase?” Berta asked.

“Maybe he knew someone was watching him. Either way, if he hid them up at the summer house, I suppose the FBI will find them soon enough.”

“No!”

“Afraid so. Holland said they’d be making a thorough search as soon as Viv left. They’ll take the place apart board by board before they come up empty.”

“Scheise!”

“Hey, I thought you were working for the FBI,” Boland said warily.

“Like I said, contract employees. If an agent comes up with the goods first, we’d, uh, lose our commission.”

“Oh.”

“Gordon’s rental agreement-how old is it?”

Boland checked the invoice.

“Wow. Way before my time. Nineteen seventy-eight.”

“Place looks newer.”

“They’ve modernized a few times, but this was one of the first self-storage joints in the city. He must have been one of the original customers.”

Seventy-eight, Nat thought. Probably around the time bulldozers started knocking down the neighborhood to make way for industry. He had a feeling those boxes had been sitting around Fairfield, one way or another, for quite a while.

THEIR NEXT STOP was the National Archives, right down the road in College Park. They had two days to search for leads before returning to Wightman, so Nat had booked a pair of rooms at a Holiday Inn. An impatient message from Holland was waiting at the front desk when they checked in: “Where are you? Please call.”

Berta took her key and announced curtly that she would be eating room service and retiring early. Hot and cold, this strange woman. Or maybe just cold, now that she had secured Nat’s cooperation. Just as well, considering his first order of business. Holland could wait. It was time to check up on Berta’s credentials.

He quickly found her name on the Web site of the history department at Berlin’s Free University. The thumbnail bio matched what she had told him. Several published papers were referenced. Most concerned the Berlin activities of the White Rose. A slender thread of scholarship, even by the eccentric standards of historians. Berta’s grandmother must have told her some great tales to get her this hooked.

Surprisingly, there were almost no other online traces of Berta or her work. No quotes in the media. No speeches or seminars. It told him two things: She didn’t crave attention, and she kept to herself.

Next, he Googled Kurt Bauer. Holland was right. It took about ten minutes to figure out why the FBI must be interested in helping the man.

Nat was already familiar with the family’s industrial dynasty. The Bauers were a sort of junior version of the Krupps-not as rich or colorful but nearly as well connected-by virtue of their long-standing ability to produce weapons for emperors and despots the world over. Kurt entered the picture during the postwar years, when he took over management of the company in his early twenties, an impressively callow age for an arms merchant. The company’s rise from the ashes was a prototype of West Germany’s “economic miracle,” which had been nurtured by the Western Allies as a hedge against communism.