Greg Iles - Spandau Phoenix

She concentrated on the word endings, trying to decipher the carefully blocked letters. It was almost painful, like trying to recall formulas from gymnasium physics. Her specialty was modern languages; Latin she could hardly remember. Ilse went to the kitchen table and spread out the thin pages, anchoring each corner with a piece of flatware. There were nine. She took a pen and notepad from the telephone stand, went back to the first paragraph of Latin, and began recording her efforts. After ten minutes she had roughed out the first four sentences. When she read straight through what she had written, the pencil slipped from her shaking hand.

“ Mein Gott ,” she breathed. “This cannot be.”

Hans exited the cinema into the gathering dusk. He couldn’t believe the afternoon had passed so quickly. Huddling against the cold, he considered taking the U-Bahn home, then decided against it. It would mean changing trains at Fehrbelliner-Platz, and he would still have some distance to walk. Better to walk the whole way and use the time to decide how to tell Ilse about the Spandau papers. He started west with a loping stride, moving away from the crowded Ku’damm. He knew he was duty-bound to hand the papers over to his superiors, and he felt sure that the mix-up with the Russians had been straightened out by now. Yet as he walked, he was aware that his mind was not completely clear about turning in the papers. For some irritating reason, when he thought of doing that, his father’s face came into his mind. But there was something else in his brain. Something he soon recognized as Heini Weber’s voice saying: “Three point seven million Deutschemarks …”

Hans had already done the calculations. At his salary it would take 150 years to earn that much money, and that represented the offer of a single magazine for the “Hitler diaries.” That was a powerful temptation, even for an honest man.

As Hans reached the mouth of the side street, a dark shape disengaged itself from the gloom beneath the cinema awning and fell into step behind him. It neither hurried nor tarried, but moved through the streets as effortlessly as a cloud’s shadow.

Colonel Godfrey A. “God” Rose reached into the bottom drawer of his mammoth Victorian desk, withdrew a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, and gazed fondly at the label. For five exhausting hours the U.S. Army’s West Berlin chief of intelligence had sifted through the weekly reports of his “snitches”—the highly paid but underzealous army of informers that the U.S. government maintains on its shadow payroll to keep abreast of events in Berlin—and discovered nothing but the usual sordid list of venalities committed by the host of elected officials, bureaucrats, and military officers of the city he had come to regard as the Sodom of Western Europe. The colonel had a single vice—whiskey—and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.

Pouring the Turkey into a Lenox shot glass, Rose glanced up and saw his aide, Sergeant Clary, silhouetted against the leaded glass window of his office door. With customary discretion the young NCO paused before knocking, giving his superior time to “straighten his desk.” By the time Clary tapped on the glass and stepped smartly into the office, Colonel Rose appeared to be engrossed in an intelligence brief.

Clary cleared his throat. “Colonel?”

Rose looked up slowly. “Yes, Sergeant?”

“Sir, Ambassador Briggs is flying in from Bonn tomorrow morning. State just informed us by courier.”

Rose frowned. “That’s not on my calendar, is it?”

“No, sir.”

“Well?”

“Apparently the Soviets have filed some sort of complaint against us, sir. Through the embassy.”

“Us?”

“The Army, sir. It’s something to do with last night’s detail at Spandau Prison. That’s all I could get out of Smitty—I mean the courier, sir.”

“Spandau? What about it? Christ, we’ve watched the damned coverage all day, haven’t we? I’ve already filed my report.”

“State didn’t elaborate, sir.”

Rose snorted. “They never do, do they.”

“No, sir. Care to see the message?”

Rose gazed out of his small window at the Berlin dusk and wondered about the possible implications of the ambassador’s visit. The American diplomatic corps stayed in Bonn most of the time—well out of Rose’s area of operations—and he liked that just fine.

“The message, Colonel?” Sergeant Clary repeated.

“What? No, Sergeant. Dismissed.”

“Sir.” Clary beat a hasty retreat from the office, certain that his colonel would want to ponder this unpleasant development over a shot of the good stuff.

“Clary!” Rose’s bark rattled the door. “Is Major Richardson still down the hall?”

The sergeant poked his head back into the office. “I’ll run check, sir.”

“Can’t you just buzz him?”

“Uh … the major doesn’t always answer his pages, sir. After five, that is. Says he can’t stand to hear the phone while he’s working.”

“Who the hell can? Don’t people just keep on ringing the damned thing when he doesn’t answer?”

“Well, sir … I think he’s rigged some type of switch to his phone or something. He just shuts it off when he doesn’t want to hear it.”

Rose stuck out his bottom lip. “I see.”

“Checking now, sir,” said Clary, on the fly.

Since 1945, Berlin has been an island city. It is a political island, quadrisected by foreign conquerors, and a psychological island as insulated from the normal flow of German life as a child kidnapped from its mother. Berlin was an island before the Wall, during the Wall, and it will remain so long after the Wall has fallen. Kidnapped children can take years to recover.

The American community in Berlin is an island within that larger host. It clusters around the U.S. Military Mission in the affluent district of Dahlem, a giant concrete block bristling with satellite dishes, radio antennae, and microwave transmitters. In this city of hastily built office towers, bomb-scarred churches, and drab concrete tenement blocks whose color accents are provided mostly by graffiti, the American housing area manages to look neat, midwestern, suburban, and safe. Known as “Little America,” it is home to the sixty-six hundred servicemen, their wives, and children who comprise the symbolic U.S. presence in Berlin. These families bustle between the U.S. Mission, the Officers’ club, the well-stocked PX, the private Burger King and McDonald’s, and their patio barbecues like suburbanites from Omaha or Atlanta. Only the razor wire that tops the fences surrounding the manicured lawns betrays the tension that underpins this bucolic scene.

Few Americans truly mix with the Berliners. They are more firmly tied to the United States than to the streets they walk and the faces they pass each day in Berlin. They are tied by the great airborne umbilical cord stretching from Tempelhof Airport to the mammoth military supply bases of America. Major Harry Richardson—the man Colonel Rose had sent Sergeant Clary to find—was an exception to this pattern. Richardson needed no umbilical cord in Berlin, or anywhere else. He spoke excellent German, as well as Russian—and not with the stilted State Department cadence of the middle and upper ranks of the army. He did not live in Dahlem or Zehlendorf, the ritzy addresses of choice, but in thoroughly German Wilmersdorf. He came from a moneyed family, had attended both Harvard and Oxford, yet he had served in Vietnam and remained in the army after the war. His personal contacts ranged from U.S. senators to supply sergeants at distant Army outposts, from English peers to Scottish fishing guides, from Berlin senators to kabob -cooks in the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg. And that, in Colonel Rose’s eyes, made Harry Richardson one hell of an intelligence officer.