City of Spies (35 page)

She stopped. So did he. She turned.

Alaric Vogel stood a few feet away. He wasn't wearing a trench coat, but he had on his faithful gray fedora and a natty gray suit that couldn't have been tailored in East Germany.

“How are you?” he asked. His eyes on her were serious, assessing.

“I'll live,” she said. “And so will Naomi Schusterman and Mercedes, thanks to you.”

He shrugged, but he seemed pleased. “I already said you're welcome.”

“How did you get away?”

He smiled. “Easily. Thank you for helping me with that last stupid boy. I probably would have beaten him without you, but you made it a little easier hitting him like that.”

Typical. “It's good to see your arrogance hasn't suffered.”

His smile broadened. He took a step toward her. She could smell the trace of Winston cigarettes on his clothes. “I have a request, one you might like to fulfill.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she said. She didn't like him getting closer to her, but she stood her ground instead of backing toward the elevator.

He stopped only two feet away and took out a cigarette. “I know you want to see Von Albrecht punished for his many crimes. Something your country is unlikely to do given his expertise in nuclear physics.”

She didn't reach for the lighter, but watched as he pulled out his own. This one was plain silver, appropriate for a spy. “So?”

“So, if you found out where they're keeping him and told me, justice might be better served.” He lit the cigarette and blew the smoke up over her head.

“You want me to give information to the Stasi?” It was laughable. “Have you met you? You're far worse than the CIA.”

“So when you think about a Nazi war criminal being given a second chance to build better bombs, and you could stop it—your conscience doesn't bother you?” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Not even a little?”

She stared at him. That's what it was, the insistent drumming going on inside her. It wasn't her heart, or a migraine, or insanity. It was her conscience, calling out to her.

“Giving him to you wouldn't be any better,” she said automatically. “Your government would do the exact same thing as the CIA.”

“If you tell me where they're keeping him,” he said, easing closer to her. She could smell the smoke on his breath. “I promise you, I'll kill him myself.”

She almost believed him. She looked him directly in the eye. “I never said I wanted him dead.”

He smirked down at her. “But you do.”

“Killing is wrong.” Her heart was pounding harder than ever now. Could he be right? Would that be justice? “I asked you not to kill Dieter and his friends, remember?”

He shook his head at her, pityingly. “You deny it to yourself. But you can't see the look on your own face. You know that Von Albrecht has done the worst things a human being is capable of. He's a tumor, and he must be removed.”

Pagan said nothing, staring at him, trying to steady her battling thoughts.

“That ship he was taken from was headed for Germany,” Vogel said. “Whatever he had planned, it was intended for my country. Let my country punish him for it. It's only proper.”

There was a rightness to what he said. But when Pagan thought of East Germany, all she could see was the head of the Stasi punching her friend Thomas, torturing Thomas, taking Thomas's mother and sister into custody while he put up a wall to keep his own people prisoner. The East Germans weren't exactly a portrait in integrity.

But there might be someone else out there she could trust to see justice done, based on past experience. Maybe. In this case at least.

“I've met the head of the Stasi,” she said. “And your leader Walter Ulbricht. They're not much better than Von Albrecht. Sorry. I won't be your traitor.”

She started to push past him. She needed peace and quiet so she could think. But he slammed both hands into the wall on either side of her head, stopping her cold.

“You owe me,” he said. His arms stayed there, blocking her. He leaned in with a cold smile and exhaled smoke into her face.

It was a negotiating tactic. She didn't think he'd actually be violent with her. But he really wanted this. Thank the god of actors she had learned to cloak her fear with a paper-thin veneer of strength.

“Let me by,” she said, edging her voice with steel. “Or I'll arrange to let your bosses know you risked your life and your mission to help me last night.”

His hands on the wall beside her head tightened into fists. For a moment she thought he might strike her. But in the next moment he withdrew, backing down the hallway.

“You always have an answer,” he said. “But I'll be there the day you don't.”

He turned and was gone.

Pagan leaned against the gold-and-red wallpaper of that hallway and listened to the sledgehammer pounding of her scruples. She knew what she had to do. And she had Alaric Vogel to thank for that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Palermo, Buenos
Aires
January 15, 1962

SALIDA

To exit, go out, but used in tango to start a dance, as in “go out onto the dance floor.”

The ice-cream parlor was crowded, so it took Pagan several agonizing minutes of searching to find the empty table with the straw hat lying on top of it. It was a table in a quieter corner, far from the windows. At the table beside it sat a handsome older man with closely cropped receding white hair. He was reading the paper and dipping his spoon in and out of the chocolate sundae in front of him without eating any.

That had to be him. She took her second to last bite of dulce de leche and gave him the once-over.

He didn't look the way she expected him to, but then she was learning that spies rarely did. His short-sleeved linen shirt covered wide, strongly built shoulders and muscle-bound biceps that would have suited a much younger man. His hands were veiny but powerful. His face, lined with deep wrinkles from nose to mouth, was smoothly shaved and very tan. He looked like a local man out for a chocolate sundae, except that his deep-set brown eyes would dart up from his paper at regular intervals to circle the room. He'd probably seen her several times already.

He looked up again, and his gaze swept over her without stopping.

She'd made up her mind about this after running into Alaric Vogel yesterday. One phone call had been enough to set it in motion, and here he was, at the time and place she'd agreed to.

If she was going to do this, better to get it over with.

She walked over to the table with the straw hat on it, smiling at the old man with the chocolate sundae. “Hello. Is this table taken?”

“No.” He took the hat and set it on his own table. “Please.”

She set her purse down and sat so that she was facing him. She wanted to see his face as he spoke, to make sure she was doing the right thing.

“My name is Lev,” he said. He didn't hold out his hand, but he seemed to want her to know it. “It is a great pleasure to meet you.”

“I'm Pagan,” she said. “But you already know that.” His voice wasn't the one she'd spoken to on the phone. He must be someone they trusted greatly, then.

“Naomi Schusterman sends her regards,” he said.

Oh, very clever, to start with that. She clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling and, using Lauren Bacall's trick, lowered her head to look up at him. The posture helped keep her head from shaking, too.

“How is she?” she asked, and took the last bite of her ice cream.

“She will recover, unmarked, thanks to you.” He put his spoon down and looked at her from under bushy white eyebrows. “You have already done a great service by saving her. Thank you for that.”

“You're welcome,” she said, and thought of Alaric Vogel, saying, “You're welcome,” to her after he'd shot Dieter through the eye. She hadn't had a nightmare about that yet. Something to look forward to.

“I hope you will think I have done you another service today,” she said.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

She frowned. “You know why. The people at the embassy I spoke to must have told you.”

“Yes,” he said patiently. “But why?”

That really was the question. She couldn't answer him straight off. Her voice might crack.

“If your people find out, you could be tried for treason,” he said. They were speaking English, but his voice held a faint accent that could've been German, or Austrian like Bennie Wexler's. He must have emigrated after the war. “So you must have a good reason.”

She found her voice. “It isn't that you're better than us,” she said. “Or worse. But this one time, I think you're more likely to dispense justice. That's why I'm here.”

“Justice.” He mulled that over, looking down at his melted sundae, and nodded, almost reluctantly. “You may be right. But just this one time?”

“One time,” she said. “I won't come to you again, with anything, ever. I don't want anything in return, and I don't want anyone coming to me to ask for more.”

“Very well,” he said, and the way he said it made her catch her breath. That phrase had been one that her mother said frequently, in exactly that final tone.

How could it be that an agent of the Israeli Mossad, one of the most notorious secret service agencies in the world, reminded her of her Nazi-collaborating mother?

She had a sudden desire to tell Lev about it. But that was crazy. He'd take it as an insult.

“I want you to promise me something first,” she said. “I don't know you, but I ask you to swear on whatever you hold sacred that no one else will be hurt by what I tell you here today. No one but him.”

His eyes never left her as a smile flickered over his face. It wasn't a smirk or a condescending smile, but one that was almost fond, admiring. As if he liked that she'd asked him that. It was strangely reassuring.

“When a man voweth a vow unto the Lord, or sweareth an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth,” he said. “Numbers, 30:2.”

“That's probably from the Bible,” she said, feeling a little stupid. “But it's not a promise.”

He broke into a full smile, looked down at his sundae again, as if to keep from laughing, and nodded. When he looked up, his face was serious again.

“I promise you, on the lives of my grandchildren, that on this mission I will do all I can to prevent any harm coming to anyone other than the man we speak of,” he said. “That is all I can promise—that I will do my best. But you shouldn't worry. We will watch for now, wait until they move him and choose the right time.”

That was more information than she could have hoped for. And although she could never be sure, she believed him. Maybe it was because she wanted to believe him. But there was something about his face, about the firm, kind look in his eye, that she trusted.

In this at least. She would probably never trust anyone completely again. Under Lev's linen shirt and the aging, muscular chest no doubt lurked a heart of steel.

“The address is 35 Avenida Garibaldi,” she said. She could envision Devin, mouthing the address over and over to memorize it. “In Tigre. He should be there for another day or two, but I can't be sure.”

“We'll find the place quickly,” he said. “You have technically betrayed your country. Can you live with that?”

“It sounds so serious when you put it that way,” she said lightly, but the intensity of his gaze sobered her. “They'll never know it was me,” she said. “Unless you tell them. And it's for the greater good. Von Albrecht can't be allowed to get away with his crimes.”

“As your mother did with hers?”

Heat suffused her face. She nearly got up and walked away. But she needed to know more, so she shoved down her anger, put her temper aside as she had all her life and asked, “Does everyone on earth know? If they do I should probably cancel the ad I was taking out in the
New York Times
to announce it.”

“The child cannot atone for the mother's sins,” he said.

“I have my own sins to atone for,” she said. “Including this one. But thanks.”

As Von Albrecht had said, she wasn't her mother, after all. Mama had believed in her cause so much that she'd broken laws, endangered her family and helped a war criminal or two. But thanks to Von Albrecht and the CIA, Pagan would never believe in any government or cause that way again.

She was risking everything now to follow her own path. Maybe the name her mother had chosen for her had been the right one, after all.

Lev was studying her, as if memorizing her face. “I have left you something, in the briefcase by your feet.”

She glanced under the table. There was indeed a slim brown leather briefcase there.

He was standing up, wiping his mouth with a napkin as if he'd been eating, though he hadn't taken a bite. He threw the napkin down and walked around the end of her table. He paused by her side and put one strong hand on her shoulder. It was heavy but gentle, and strangely calming.

“Be careful,” he said. “You're being followed.”

So much for calming.

He looked down and smiled. “I hope we meet again. In different circumstances.”

She opened her mouth, unsure how to reply, but he was already striding away.

She sat there for a few moments, staring at his melted ice cream. Then she reached under the table, pulled out the briefcase and popped it open.

It contained a single file, less than half an inch thick. The name on the label read Jones, Eva Murnau.

Under that were some characters she couldn't read that looked like Hebrew. Probably Mama's name in that language. The file was stamped Copy in red.

The persistent hammering of her heart had stopped, but now it took up a strange skittering beat. The sound of nerves. There was only one way to be rid of this kind of anxiety—read the file.

She looked around. No one seemed to be paying the least attention. She opened the file.

The description of Mama was spot on: five foot five, light brown hair dyed blond, brown eyes, slim build. They'd left out “strong willed,” but the rest of the file seemed to confirm that. She skimmed the beginning of it, which laid out Mama's birth in a hospital in Berlin to Ursula Murnau, until she got to the words after “Father:” They'd been blacked out.

Were the blacked-out words the name of Emil Murnau, the man her grandmother claimed to have married? The Israelis must have discovered that he couldn't possibly be the right man, as Pagan had.

She kept skimming. Mama's work for the Nazis started before the war. She'd used her presidency at the local German-American Partnership Council to help elect local candidates that were more favorable to Hitler's Germany. By 1942, the FBI had given her the code name Mata Hari, and had labeled her a “fifth columnist.”

From what Pagan knew, that was basically another word for traitor. Pagan herself could be labeled a traitor for what she did today. Was she in any position to judge Mama harshly?

Pagan's birth—and Ava's—barely merited a mention. Poor Daddy. Arthur Jones was labeled “Probable dupe. No sign of disloyalty to the United States.”

Except that it was Daddy who had kept the letters from Von Albrecht and broken the code embedded in them. That wasn't in the file. Daddy had uncovered evidence that his wife was a Nazi sympathizer when Pagan was eight, but he'd loved his wife and children too much to do anything other than kick Von Albrecht out of the house. They called him a dupe. Another word for it might be loving father.

How strange it was to read the bare facts of the life of someone you loved. There was more to Mama than promoting Nazi Germany, and more to Daddy than being Mama's doormat. Mama had been her daughters' fiercest protector. Daddy had made sure to tell Pagan and Ava that he loved them every day.

Maybe spy agencies didn't think that mattered. But it did.

After the war, Mama's activities picked up. She became more politically active and three German men's names were listed as visitors to the Jones household in the late 1940s and early '50s. Von Albrecht was the last. They all had notations to see their file, with a blacked-out number beside their names.

The other names meant nothing to Pagan, but they had to be the fellow Nazis Von Albrecht had mentioned. Pagan had no memory of these men, but from the dates, it looked like they'd stayed with the family briefly when she was only three and four years old.

At last, she reached the fatal date—her mother's death, November 15, 1958. Two weeks after Pagan's twelfth birthday. The words on the page were brutal in their bald simplicity.

Found by husband in family garage hanging by the neck, dead. Coroner ruled time of death approximately 4:30 p.m.

Such a brutal way to take a life, particularly your own.

No note found.

The type jumped up half a line here, as if someone had added it in via typewriter later, and Pagan's breath stopped as she read it.

(Blacked out name) indicates CIA gave orders to “make an example” of Jones two days before her death.

Wait, wait, wait. Did this mean what she thought it meant?

Pagan put the file down and rested her face in her hands, pressing her fingers against her closed eyelids. This Israeli file was saying that an informer had heard the CIA give orders to make an example of Mama.

Two days before she died.

Pagan picked up the file again. There was another typed note after that.

No autopsy performed. Coroner ruled suicide: death by strangulation. No explanation given for second set of ligature marks. Possible that Jones attempted to hang herself once and stopped before completion, then attempted a second time and succeeded. Or possible foul play.

Possible foul play. Days after the CIA gave orders she be made an example.

A second set of ligature marks. Had she been strangled first by someone else and then hanged to make it look like a suicide?

No wonder the CIA didn't want to give Eva Jones's file to Pagan. They'd murdered her.

It all came into focus with a horrible, gut-wrenching click. The unease gnawing at her ever since Devin told her the CIA wouldn't be bringing Von Albrecht to trial, her impulse to give his location to the Mossad... It wasn't only the East German government that was horrible, or its Stasi. It wasn't only the Communists and Nazis who had secret agencies working outside the law, doing horrible things in the name of patriotism. The United States had killed a mother of two and sheltered a war criminal. Any government, maybe any large institution, was capable of horrible things, justifying anything and everything in the name of their security.

But Mama had been a true believer in the worst of the worst—the Nazis. She'd died because she believed.

Pagan wasn't much better. She'd believed working for the CIA was the right thing, the good thing. She'd gone out of her way to help them because she wanted to feel like she was making a difference.