The Arms Maker of Berlin (3 page)

“So what, exactly, are these files they want me to look at?” he asked Neil once they were under way. “Viv didn’t seem to know much, other than it was a lot of old boxes.”

The agent glanced over. The green glow of the dashboard display seemed to transform him into a shadowy young troll, hoarding treasure beneath the bridge.

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“Oh, c’mon. I’ll see them in a few hours anyway.”

“Special Agent Clark Holland will debrief you. He’s my supervisor.”

Nat sighed. Then he sagged against the door to watch the street-lamps pass on the road leading out of town. He was on the verge of nodding off when Neil asked a question.

“How old are you, sir?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“My brother’s thirty-nine. Dangerous age.”

“Possibly.”

“What’s the ‘E’ stand for?”

Although everyone called him Nat, the name in the phone book and on his office door was Dr. E. Nathaniel Turnbull.

” ‘Emerson.’ As in Ralph Waldo. He was a New England Unitarian, same as my mom.”

True, but misleading. The full story was that his mother took a fancy to the name after reading it on the console of the delivery room television. She must have thought it sounded stout and reliable. Or maybe she confused its cachet with that of Zenith, whose slogan at the time was, “The quality goes in before the name goes on”—a reassuring thought when you’re about to give birth.

Not that his gene pool offered an excess of quality. His father was a high school mathematics teacher and baseball coach, raised in northern Virginia by Southern Baptists—not the foot-washing variety, thank goodness. His mother also taught school—home economics, as it was known then—before she quit to begin producing a quartet of children in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Nat had a younger brother and two older sisters. As children they argued over Monopoly deeds, the last slice of pie, and a wide variety of territorial rights involving couch space, the backseats of cars, and the television remote. To prove this was not mere childishness, they later argued over their parents’ eulogies and worldly possessions. In some strange migratory quirk, all three of his siblings ended up in Orange County, California, where each ran an electronics store. All three lived within minutes of the freeway, and for all Nat knew all their stores offered both Emersons and Zeniths. They were enthusiastic Republicans, and he almost never spoke with them.

“You like it at Wightman?” Neil asked.

“What’s not to like? Small and undistinguished. Bland campus in a bland town in the blandest part of Pennsylvania.”

“The basketball team’s pretty good.”

“When you can get tickets. Trouble is, town and gown value hoops more than scholarship, but I guess you can’t have everything when you’re only charging $42,000 a year.”

“Wow. That much?”

“And going up five percent in the fall.”

“They treat you okay?”

“Not bad. Once you’re tenured, they pretty much leave you alone.”

“Well, you certainly
look
like a professor.”

Nat smiled. He wasn’t sure if it was a compliment, but he supposed it was true, at least for his generation of academics. No pipe and no tweed. His wardrobe was that of the perennially rumpled class—frayed chinos, wrinkled oxfords, low-cut hiking shoes, and whatever shapeless jacket was at hand. He drove a twelve-year-old Jetta with rust spots on the doors. The wall-to-wall bookshelves in his small frame house were overflowing with the latest books and journals from his field of study, although most items in his refrigerator would soon qualify for historic preservation.

There was a rugged aspect to his features—coarse sandy hair, strong jawline—and he got outdoors just enough to put some color in his cheeks. But the most intriguing thing about his looks was a slight squint, which betrayed not only inquisitiveness but an air of intensity. Some women took it as a challenge—”This one’s difficult, but possibly worth it”—and concluded he must be searching for something, possibly them, only to discover far too late that what he was really after was an old piece of paper from 1938.

Males, on the other hand, often interpreted his expression to mean that he must be up to something. Maybe that was why Neil Ford was still playing things close to the vest.

Soon they hopped onto the interstate, and Nat fell asleep to the whine of tires and the prop wash of passing rigs. He didn’t awaken until they exited for an all-night truck stop. You could tell from the loneliness of the road that it was quite late.

“What time is it?” he croaked.

“Four. I need coffee.”

“Want me to drive?”

“Can’t. It’s against—”

“I understand.”

The coffee smelled like hot Styrofoam, but it did the trick for both of them.

“So you know his wife well?” Neil asked.

“Viv? Pretty well. She’s always been kind to me.”

“Special Agent Holland said they’d been drinking. A lot.”

“The drinking isn’t Viv’s fault. She has to, to keep up with Gordon.”

That’s how it had been for years. Viv either played along or spent the balance of the evening watching her husband fade from view on the wrong side of a glass. On weekdays he left her behind, but on Saturdays and Sundays she gamely kept pace. Nat had never been comfortable watching it happen, and on previous visits to Blue Kettle Lake he finished his two beers and retired early rather than witness their mutual disintegration.

“Well, from what I heard about the arrest she was pretty pissed off.”

“Wouldn’t you be? She says the files were planted.”

“Wouldn’t know about that.”

“How’d you guys end up on the case?”

“Local police. They’d gotten a tip.”

“Anonymous?”

“Like I said. A tip. They went to the house, saw the boxes through the window, found a key beneath the mat, and walked right in.”

“No warrant? Sounds iffy.”

“Not when there’s probable cause. And not when the cop’s best buddy is the local judge. Weird legal system they’ve got out in the sticks of New York. Town judges with all the power in the world. I doubt this one’s even got a law degree, and the cop is his business partner. Holland said they own a gas station together, and the courthouse used to be a body shop.”

“How’d they know to call you guys?”

“I gather it was pretty obvious this wasn’t your average stash of paper. Although, any way you look at it, it’s still just paper.”

Spoken like a true bureaucrat, for whom any pile of documents was just some headache to be sorted and filed. In Nat’s line of work it was the stuff of dreams, of untold enchantment, especially on the rare occasions when it still had the power to create and destroy—matter and anti-matter, rolled into one. Nat’s fingertips tingled.

“And the boxes are still at the house?”

“Seemed like the best place for now. We’ve posted guards round the clock.”

“No wonder Viv’s pissed. House full of agents and her husband in jail. So I guess we’re stopping there first?”

“That’s the plan.”

An hour later they exited the interstate for good. Nat rolled down a window to let in the cool night air, and they began the long creep into the Adirondacks. The road was virtually empty, and the woods closed in from the shoulders. Now and then their headlights caught the glowing eyes of some animal on the prowl.

Nat wondered what was about to unfold. Fireworks, probably, once Viv realized he was working for the opposition. But memories awaited him, too, and plenty were good ones. The Wolfes’ summer home was comfy and rustic, the setting peaceful. To Nat it was tangible proof that even a lifetime of academia might not render you penniless at retirement, although he wasn’t the only one who had always wondered how Gordon was able to afford the surrounding twenty acres. Department gossip maintained that Viv’s family had carried the freight. Or maybe Gordon’s book contracts were better than advertised. Not the case with Nat’s, alas. Both his volumes were already out of print.

In past summers Gordon and he had often collaborated there, hashing out scholarly problems during hikes and fishing trips. The old man, in spite of his limp, could be quite the outdoorsman when the spirit moved him, stalking the trails in his leather bomber jacket.

The best part had always come when they arrived back at the house. Nat sank into the leather couch and breathed in the aroma of wood smoke and grilled trout. Then, after dinner, Viv served as moderator while Gordon and he talked shop. Until the drinks began piling up. Always the drinks.

Now those images were joined by the thought of the old boxes, looming like an oracle, awaiting only the right command before yielding their secrets. He wondered if he would be able to view them without Neil or someone else looking over his shoulder. Maybe they would even let him make copies. He had packed his camera and tripod just in case.

Nat slept again, and this time the sun woke him. They were almost there, working their way past towns with names evoking real estate scams and Indian war councils—Green Glen, Naugatuck Falls, Wopowog. Shuttered tourist cabins huddled in the woods by thawed lakes, awaiting summer.

“Your rental is parked at the house,” Neil said. “Here are the keys.”

When they reached the turn for the gravel road that led to Gordon’s driveway, Nat borrowed Neil’s cell phone to call ahead.

“Viv? Hope I didn’t wake you. I’m headed up the drive.”

“Thank God you’re here. They’ve got me surrounded. I’ll put some coffee on.”

So they hadn’t yet told her about his arrangement with the FBI. Poor Viv.

“Sounds great. Be right in.”

He snapped the phone shut and braced for the worst.

THREE

Berlin

A
NOTHER DREAM
of Liesl, his first in years.

As always, her image fled before Kurt Bauer could hold it, chased from his eyelids by the chill martial gray of a Prussian morning. A blink, a sigh, and she was gone. Throw open the lace curtains and perhaps he would see the last wisp of her spirit, racing across the dim rooftops of Charlottenburg. And if he ever caught up to her, how would she greet him? With a smile of gratitude? A glare of accusation? Love? Forgiveness?

Downstairs, a loud voice echoed in the foyer. A door rattled shut.

Now Kurt knew what had brought on the dream. Nearly sixty-four years ago he had been awakened by the very same noises on the day he learned Liesl was gone—slammed doors, shouting messengers. All that remained to complete the sequence was the tread of slippers as his father, Reinhard, plodded upstairs to break the news. The old man had relayed it with the clacking dispassion of a stock ticker, as if he were announcing a pay cut down at his factory.

Kurt’s father had just come in from the rain, having gone out to buy a newspaper, knowing that the weather would hold the bombers at bay. He had peeled off his wet woolen socks and laid them on the big tile furnace to dry. Their vapors had preceded him up the stairs, and to this day Kurt associated the smell of wet, baking wool with death. It turned his stomach like the stench of a rotting corpse. He insisted that his wife, Gerda, buy him only cotton socks, much to her puzzlement.

Like the vast city he lived in, Kurt lay down each night with a host of unwanted shadows—guilt, loss, regret, the pain of old wounds. Bleak visions poured from within like smoke from a brick chimney.

The guilt, he believed, was unwarranted. He attributed its staying power less to his own actions than to his homeland’s tormented psyche. Here they pushed atonement as if it were a commodity, force-feeding it via the leftist media like some miserable brand of muesli, until you couldn’t stomach another bite. At least today’s young people, for all their faults, were wising up to that con. Never let them make you pay for something you hadn’t bought.

The front door slammed again. Then silence, until he heard Gerda’s house slippers scraping down the hall toward the kitchen.

“Who was it?” he called out, his voice a rasp.

“Repairman.” Wearily, as if she had been up for hours, and maybe she had. “For the icebox. He’s gone to fetch a part.”

Yet another item to mend in the house of the man whose very name meant durability for millions of consumers worldwide. Not that Kurt Bauer was any stranger to irony. Try to be good and play by the rules, and what did it earn you? Heartbreak, then ruin. Admit to any imperfection and they held it against you for life. Stray beyond the lines aggressively enough, however, and not only did you get things done, you also earned accommodation, even respect.

But soon enough he would no longer have to worry about such things. At age eighty-one, Kurt Bauer had begun clearing the books, settling old accounts, and smoothing the path toward immortality, for himself and for his family’s esteemed name in the world of commerce. To his surprise, most of his unfinished business still had to do with the war, even though Kurt had been only nineteen the day Hitler finally did everyone a favor by blowing his brains out.

A desire for vengeance also figured into Kurt’s plans. After decades of being on the defensive about certain delicate matters, he was at last in position to strike back. Those who had tormented him the longest, and had taken away what he cherished most, would finally answer for their crimes.

Kurt would have said that love was the driving emotion behind his plans. But his brand of love was a case study in arrested development. Most people who reach his age have long ago discovered that love’s deepest pain comes from watching the suffering of others—our children as they stumble, our elders as they grow feeble, or our spouses as they succumb to pain and infirmity. But Kurt had no children, his parents died suddenly while he was bustling through his twenties, and his marriage had long ago devolved into a series of bloodless jousts, drained of empathy. He still viewed love through the eyes of a young man who has suffered a signature heartbreak. For him, the idea of emotional pain still boiled down to a single name: Liesl.

As he lay in bed he rubbed a scar on his chest as if it were a battle medal that had been pinned there by a head of state. It was a comet’s tail of wrinkled pink flesh, carved by hot shrapnel on the morning of Liesl’s death.

After his father delivered the news, the young Kurt had refused to believe it without seeing for himself. He jumped on a bicycle and raced through the streets to the prison just as the sky began clearing in the west to open the way for more bombers. The ride took a good half hour, and his lungs were heaving as he spied the first pile of fatal rubble through a breach in the outer wall. The place was still in chaos from the raid the night before—three prisoners had reportedly escaped—and Kurt walked through the opening as boldly as if he were a guard. Workers were already picking through the debris.

Nearby, a pair of legs poked barefoot from beneath a collapsed wall. It made him light-headed with agony and fear. He wondered if he could even bear to look at her face. Why hadn’t they yet dug her out? Was it Liesl? Did he have the courage to check?

A siren sounded. More bombers were approaching, black insects against the sky. The flak guns began to pound. Everyone ran for cover except Kurt, because he had resolved to see her, come what may. He pulled away a splintered doorframe, tore aside a pile of bricks, then knelt coughing in the dust as he dug blunt fingers into a mound of shattered masonry.

That was when he saw the hand, poking from beneath a few bricks just to his right. A girl’s hand, covered in dust and grasping a sheaf of crumpled papers. Kurt snatched the papers, read them. They confirmed the worst possible news. This was Liesl, and these were her release documents, signed only moments before her death. She had been walking toward freedom when she was killed.

The papers fell from his hands, and he sobbed loudly just as a huge explosion emptied his lungs and threw him forward atop the bare legs. His face landed hard against something clammy and stiff. A toenail cut his cheek.

Kurt struggled to his knees, looking around wildly for assistance, for anyone who might help dig her body from this terrible grave. Glancing down, he saw the delicate feet that he had once playfully buried in the sand at the beaches of Wannsee, the slender calves he had stroked while the summer sun warmed their backs.

Hands grasped him roughly from either side, lifting him to his feet. Someone shouted an angry command, which he barely heard over the ringing in his ears.

“Get him out of here! Take him to the shelter. More planes are coming!”

Glancing at the sky, Kurt registered vaguely that the sun had come out. Oncoming bombers flashed silver, like a school of fish. They spewed wobbly lines of black dots, bombs headed for the ground. As someone yanked him away he saw that shrapnel had torn Liesl’s wrist, but there was hardly any blood. She was dead, a slab of spoiling meat.

A prisoner shouted from an upper window.

“Get out of the weather, you stupid fool!”

Laughter erupted from other cells, and then a second blast blew a searing chunk of metal across the yard and into Kurt. It raked his flesh just below the sternum, marking him forever as the war’s own, a stigmata of his martyrdom upon the altar of Liesl.

The old Kurt stroked the scar again as he lay in bed, feeling the puckered flesh beneath the coarse gray hairs on his sagging chest. Rescue workers had taken him for treatment even as he begged them to keep digging. Witnesses later told him Liesl had been thrown clear of the prison by one of the first bombs. Killed instantly, they said, right there on a walkway as guards led her toward the front gate.

But in the confusion of war no one was ever able to tell him where they took her body. A common grave, perhaps, because her family never came to claim her. Her parents and sister were killed that very day as well, by another bomb across town. And by the time the Red Army arrived more than a year later, the Bauers themselves had fled Berlin. They escaped south by southwest, traveling first by car, then by train, and finally by foot until they reached the Alps and the border of Switzerland, all the while cutting deals and making new plans for the future.

Ancient history, Kurt supposed. But sometimes, as with his dream moments earlier, the ache of longing from those distant days seemed brand-new, sharp enough to make him clutch his chest in pain.

Kurt swallowed a cry of agony. Then he pushed away the heavy blankets and forced himself out of bed. His bare feet were unsteady on the oak floor. Tendons flaring, he stepped stiffly toward the chilly tiles of the bathroom, then swayed a bit while he endured the interminable wait to make water. There was a burning sensation as the weak yellow stream plinked into the echoing bowl. He glanced at the mirror, the sink, the huge old tub, all of which had somehow survived not only the war but also his family’s long absence in Switzerland. The house remained grand, despite everything that history had thrown its way. Like Kurt, it was a miracle of survival but in constant need of repair. Roofers last week, plumbers before that. Now the refrigerator.

But outside the house, the Bauer name had quite a different connotation. Bauer factories were still among the most profitable in Europe, and in consumer circles it was received wisdom that anything bearing the Bauer name was built to last.

Not that Kurt had much to say about it anymore. Several years ago he had turned over daily operations to his nephew, Manfred. A sixth generation of Bauers now ruled, while a seventh waited in the wings. Not bad, considering that the Bauers had now endured socialism, Nazism, anarchy, monarchy, Weimar hyperinflation, the reichsmark, the deutschmark, the euro, two world wars, and then the Cold War.

Of course, it was always easier to survive upheaval when your business provided the chemical and metallurgical building blocks of destruction. Keep coming up with ways to make killing more efficient and you would always have friends in high places and, when necessary, in plenty of foreign lands.

Even that status hadn’t kept the Bauers from occasionally running afoul of various official snoops and regulators, though, especially in the years after Kurt led the family business into the nuclear marketplace. The sensitivity of that venue, plus the fickle nature of peacetime alliances, made for tricky relationships. A country that was a friend during the week you took an order might have been designated an enemy by the time you filled it. And who could say for sure where some middleman might next peddle your merchandise? Best not to ask, especially as long as export laws remained comfortably vague.

So affairs had become cumbersome at times, and even dangerous. Other nations filed complaints. Investigators came calling, wanting a peek at the Bauer books. Kurt had offered testimony when pressed, but kept his Rolodex well hidden, memorizing certain key contacts when necessary. And when that didn’t work, he had resorted to baser tactics. Amazing how much it could cost to make a few paragraphs disappear from some UN report on proliferation issues.

Under those kinds of circumstances, who would ever blame an old arms maker from Berlin for deciding that there was still some tidying up left to do with regard to his standing in the world?

So, on a morning already freighted by memory and regret, Kurt cleared his throat and picked up the bedside phone. He paused to make sure Gerda was safely out of earshot, then punched in the number for an apartment across town in Kreuzberg, temporary home to a foreign fellow who, as a precaution of cover, was living well below his means among Turks and Arabs.

Kurt used a CryptoPhone for these transactions, a state-of-the-art machine. Made in Germany, of course. Three thousand euros, but worth it. Its scrambling and encryption technology meant every conversation was secure. But he played it careful, all the same. You didn’t make it this far by trusting just anybody.

A man answered in German. The voice and accent were familiar.

Kurt, being the only regular caller to the number, didn’t bother to say hello.

“Any news?”

“Yes. The American is in jail.”

“Encouraging. So are you about to make the acquisition?”

“Nothing certain. But I feel strongly that it will be soon.”

“Any sign of the girl?”

“I am told she is nearby.”

“Tell your man to take care with her, even if she is a pest. Girls always get caught in the middle of these things, and it never ends well. At this point you need concern yourself only with him.”

“Are you ready to arrange delivery?”

“Only when you have something to deliver.”

“As I said, I expect it to be soon.”

“As soon as you are proven correct, I will act. But not a moment sooner. Phone immediately when it is done.”

“Of course.”

Kurt hung up and glanced toward the window, past the lace, where a weak sun was trying to burn through low clouds. To his mind, his present position was enviable. Three important people now awaited his latest pronouncement—one in Washington, one in Tehran, and one in that godforsaken little outpost in the hills of New York. None were his employees, although a few of his own recent hires were already on the march as well. But for the moment all three seemed quite willing to dance to his tune. He just needed to make sure things stayed that way.

His legs ached, so he climbed stiffly back into bed and sagged against the pillow. Liesl was always on his mind after these phone calls, even when he hadn’t just dreamed of her, and this morning she seemed closer than ever.

He wondered if she might still be out there, flitting between the chimneys, daring him to take a look, her eyes lit by the fires of her old causes. Nobility and rightness had always been on her side, and so had Kurt. If he slid back beneath the covers instead of going downstairs, would she favor him with another visit? Probably not. She never came at his bidding.