Bernhard Schlink - The Gordian Knot

“Do you think that’s enough?” he asked.

Fern had been watching carefully. She flicked a lock of hair out of her face and said with conviction, “Five should do the trick.”

He dipped his finger two more times, and then carried Jill onto the terrace, through the rooms, down the stairs to the laundry room, and back up the stairs. He kept mumbling softly to her, telling her fairy tales and crooning lullabies. By the time he got back to the terrace, she was asleep. He sat down carefully on the edge of the deck chair and looked down the street, counting five abandoned car wrecks and three sailboats in the bay. He watched a dirigible heading north.

ON WEDNESDAY, AT PRECISELY TEN in the morning, Georg called the Soviet embassy in Washington from a pay phone.

“Embassy of the USSR, can I help you?”

“I would like to leave a message under the code name ‘Rotors.’ Have your man in San Francisco take a cab to the corner of Twenty-fourth and Third streets, then walk east on Twenty-fourth all the way to the end. Have him wait there for a motorboat that will appear at eleven. Did you get all that?”

“Yes, but…”

Georg hung up. It took him ten minutes to get back home. He didn’t hurry; it would take a good fifteen minutes for the embassy in Washington to contact its man in San Francisco and tell him where to go. Fern and Jill were at the Golden Gate Park, and Jonathan barely looked up from a new painting he was working on as Georg went over to the desk. “If you want some paper, it’s in the top left-hand drawer,” Jonathan said. Georg took the gun out of the bottom right-hand drawer. It was still unclear what Jonathan’s new picture was to be of.

By twenty past ten Georg was lying on the roof. Illinois and Twenty-fourth streets were quiet. From time to time he saw a van, trucks with or without containers, construction machinery, and delivery vehicles. For ten whole minutes there was no car, then at ten-thirty a police car drove slowly up Illinois Street, made a U-turn at the intersection, and slowly drove back down. At ten-thirty-five a big, squat Lincoln turned onto Twenty-fourth Street from Third. Its exhaust pipe rattled and its springs groaned as it drove over the rough pavement of the intersection. The Lincoln came to a halt at the end of Twenty-fourth Street. Nobody got out. Dense traffic was rumbling on Third Street and on the highway beyond.

Georg was nervous. The police car. The Lincoln. What he needed was two pairs of eyes so he could watch both the intersection in front of him and the Lincoln behind him. He kept asking himself whether the Russians were playing along, or whether they thought all this was just a prank-or a trap. “Wait and keep cool,” he said to himself. “What kind of a prank could this be, or what kind of trap? The Americans could hardly corner a Soviet agent waiting by the bay for an unknown man.”

To his relief, Georg saw the Lincoln backing up onto Twenty-fourth Street and then turn at the intersection and drive away along Third. It was quarter to eleven.

At ten to eleven a cab stopped at the corner of Third and Twenty-fourth. A man got out, paid through the open window, and looked around. Having gotten his bearings, he walked toward the intersection. With every step Georg could see him more clearly. He wasn’t one of those Soviet musclemen with white blond hair and Slavic cheekbones, but a thin, balding, older man in a dark blue suit with a blue-and-white striped shirt and a patterned tie. He walked carefully, as if he had recently sprained his ankle.

There were no backup men following him, stealthily hiding behind parked cars. Georg could hear the man’s footsteps as he walked past the terrace, one foot with a strong tread, the other with a light shuffle. He saw him go to the end of Twenty-fourth Street and disappear behind the berm. Again Georg’s eyes scanned the streets, the parked cars, the wrecks, but he didn’t see anything suspicious. It was five to eleven.

He climbed down from the roof onto the terrace, grabbed his jacket, in which the pistol lay heavily in a side pocket, and hurried down the stairs. He opened the front door a crack and peered out at the intersection one more time. There was no sign of the distinguished-looking gentleman.

Georg walked down Twenty-fourth Street and up the berm. The man was standing on the shore looking out on to the bay. Georg put his foot up on the berm, rested his elbow on his knee, and waited. After a while the man turned and looked back, saw Georg, and came up to him. As they stood facing each other Georg noticed that his tie was covered with a host of tiny white garden gnomes-standing, sitting, lying-all wearing pointed red hats.

“Shall we stay here?” the Russian said, eyeing Georg over the rimless spectacles perched on his nose. He looks like a professor, Georg thought.

“Yes, here’s fine,” Georg replied. He took his hand with the pistol out of his pocket. “May I?” He frisked the “professor,” who stood there shaking his head. Georg found no weapon.

“Doesn’t one do this sort of thing?” Georg asked with a smile. “I’m not up on the etiquette of this kind of meeting.” They sat down. “I’ve brought along the merchandise,” Georg continued, taking out the can with the negatives and giving them to the professor. “There are, altogether, fourteen rolls of film.”

The professor took the negatives out of the can and held them up to the sky. He slowly eyed one frame after another. Georg looked at the sailboats. When the professor was finished with the first roll, he handed it back without comment and Georg gave him the next. Two boats, one with red sails and one with blue, were racing past. A ship with an array of brightly colored containers on its deck came by, then a fast, gray warship. Georg kept handing him can after can. The sun glittered on the shivering waves.

“What price are you asking?” the professor inquired in a thin, high voice, pronouncing the words with a clipped British intonation.

“My party prices them at thirty million, and anything over twenty is mine. If it’s under twenty, I’ll have to check back with my party.”

The professor carefully rolled the last roll of film tighter and tighter, until it would have fit into the can five times. He slid it into the can and held it there with his finger. “Tell your party that we have been offered the same negatives for twelve million, and that we find even that price too high.” He let go of the roll, and it expanded to the confines of the can with a hiss.

Georg was struck dumb. What the professor had just said was unthinkable. What did it mean? What if it was true? What if it wasn’t? “I will inform my party. But I don’t see them believing that there is another offer-they will see that as a ploy on your part to lower the price.”

The professor smiled. “The matter is more complicated than you seem to realize. Were you to view the matter from our perspective, with the premise that the first seller does in fact exist, you will see that just as you have doubts about the existence of the first offer, we have reason to doubt the existence of a bona fide second offer that you are presenting. Not to put too fine a point on it, the crux of the matter not only hinges on the contingence you have surmised-that a potential buyer who has two offers might pitch them against each other-but a seller for his part can also influence the negotiations to his advantage by stepping up to the negotiating table, so to speak, and donning the garb of yet another seller.”

How could anyone formulate such sentences! The logic behind what the professor was saying was as immaculate as his grammar.

“Why don’t you simply decide what the designs are worth to you and name a price?” Georg said.