He dug into the file and pulled out a written report, scanning it as he spoke.
“According to our surveillance team, they fucked twice a week. They never met at his apartment, by the way. He always organized a room in some cheap hotel, usually near the Hauptbahnhof, but he changed the location all the time. I doubt she thought she was being observed, given how she’d been made to feel by our people from the outset that she was a heroine. But Haechen was very careful about changing U-Bahn stations, dashing out and jumping into taxis just to make certain he wasn’t being followed. He did manage to lose us occasionally—but the rest of the time . . .”
He dealt me photograph after photograph—all time-signaled in the corner—of Haechen entering some sleazy hotel and Petra following seven to ten minutes later.
“Where do you think your beloved is right now?” he asked.
“En route to Hamburg as a last-minute translator for Mr. Wellmann.”
“That was her story, huh?”
“And you knew she was about to head out of town with her puppeteer.”
“Nice turn of phrase, Thomas. I might steal that.”
“So you got Pawel to call me in. I bet it’s Pawel who has been leaving out bogus classified documents for her to copy, right? I mean, he’s the sort of opportunistic shit who probably thought being your lackey was the way up the propagandistic ladder. What’s his payoff for his services rendered going to be? A green card?”
“You are so way out of line, mister. But, like I said before, you’re in the ‘denial’ phase right now. You’re thinking:
She had to have been set up. There were bad people leaving classified documents around, just tempting her to photograph them. And, of course, she so loved me—and fucked me so passionately
. I bet she said you were the man she always dreamed about, but thought she’d never find. When you talked about marriage, children, the life together in New York that you were about to start next month—”
“Shut up,” I hissed.
“The truth is an uncomfortable conundrum, is it not? I mean, we never taped your conversations. But you don’t have to be a clever writer like yourself to imagine the sort of intimate postcoital dialogues you had together. Because we’ve all been there, chum. ‘
I’ve never felt this way before . . . the passion we have will never ebb . . . I will always be there for you . . . You are the one. The only one. I trust you with my life.’”
I put my head in my hands, wanting him to stop, yet also perversely wanting him to continue berating me for my stupidity, my naïveté, for the love that I so craved and which I had thought I had found. And now . . .
now
. . . even if only part of what this bastard was telling me was correct . . . and he had so much terrible, overwhelming proof in that fucking file of his . . . I couldn’t sidestep the fact that he was speaking a terrible truth: I had been deeply and profoundly duped. Even if part of her really did feel the things she had articulated to me.
Oh please. She sent you across the border on a mercy mission for the photographs she craved of her lost son. And now you’ve seen proof that she willingly gave up the child for adoption while also getting you to unknowingly smuggle out microfilm for that repulsive pig whom she was sneaking off to service twice a week, while telling you that she had never known love before you walked into her life
.
“Evidently all those sentiments I just expressed—those emphatic expressions of love and devotion—ring true,” he said. “As I said earlier, you were a man in love. And she wanted to feed that desperate need of yours to be loved. Because she knew that once she gave you the image of that love you never received before, you’d walk over hot coals for her. Radar, my friend. It all comes back to
radar
. She and her handler worked you out so quickly.
Give him the image of love, but also make it hard to win. Play up the idea that you are a woman who can’t fully commit because she has been so damaged by the monolith of a Communist state. Let him in on your tragic secret. Talk eternal devotion
and marriage. And then get the unsuspecting errand boy to collect and carry documents across a foreign border for you
.”
“And you have no idea what might have been contained on those photographs?” I asked.
“Not a chance. Herr Haechen is a clever operator. He’s either burnt the evidence or so carefully hidden it all that we’ll never know what level of espionage those microfilms revealed.”
“And the way I was treated on the GDR side of Checkpoint Charlie upon my return?”
“Oh yes, I heard you were detained there for a couple of hours.”
“Your sources are impeccable. And do you think—knowing what you know—that this semi-arrest was designed to . . .”
“. . . make you believe that you were in jeopardy because you visited Frau Judit Fleischmann, a discredited Stasi informer? Absolutely. You came back from this experience rather shaken, didn’t you? But a little proud about having been held for several hours by the forces of a police state, yet having still managed to deliver the snapshots of the child seized from Frau Dussmann’s arms.”
“So they
did
stage that all for me?” I said, cutting him off. I could see Bubriski smile the smile of a psychological grandmaster who knew that he’d just “turned” somebody.
“I can’t one hundred percent confirm that, but yes, I do feel that the detention was a final theatrical flourish to make you think that you had just been in your very own Cold War thriller. Like I’m certain you were followed from the moment you stepped into East Berlin, again just to heighten the drama of the situation. Had we not finally decided to call time on Herr Haechen and his band of female operatives, I’ve no doubt that before you and your beloved went to New York, she would have asked you to make one more foray to the other side and collect more souvenirs of Johannes for her. I bet she would have told you about another friend who had all the dolls she once bought for him—and back you would have come with a teddy bear stuffed with more microfilm. One aspect to this story does intrigue me: What are the ulterior motives of Herr Haechen in allowing her to move with you to the States? Might they have considered her useful over there to them? Perhaps finding her some high-level translating job at the UN? Or was this all an elaborate setup?”
“A setup for what?”
“We’ve gathered, from our people in the GDR, that Haechen’s superiors aren’t happy with the level of intelligence he’s been feeding them through his operatives, that he needs a big score. We need to catch Haechen red-handed to both interrogate him and use him as a bargaining chip for three of our own people—including the man doing twenty years’ hard labor—whom we want to get out of assorted GDR prisons. The problem is, we sense that Haechen and your beloved have started to wonder if our man at Radio Liberty is feeding them bogus documents. What we need to do is catch her actually photographing a classified item.”
“But you could have probably done that many times over the last year.”
“True, but we didn’t want to arrest her. Because we wanted to create the illusion that she and Haechen were getting away with their little espionage operations, as we also wanted to see their so-called game plan. Now we have come to the conclusion that they are both, at best, lower-echelon operatives but useful to us under arrest for all the reasons I just explained. The thing is, we don’t want a public scene at Radio Liberty when it comes to arresting her. Whereas if we were to stage the arrest at your apartment—”
“No damn way.”
“Hear me out, Thomas. I know there is a part of you that is still refusing to believe that all this about Frau Dussmann is possible. It’s understandable, given how much you have invested in this relationship and the profound trust you placed in her. Everything that I told you, all the evidence that I have presented to you, must be difficult to absorb. Like anyone who’s been told the person they thought to be the center of their existence is a fraud—”
“Could you please spare me the fucking editorializing?”
“You still don’t trust what I’m telling you, do you?”
“Proof is always flexible, especially in the hands of people like you.”
“Very elegantly put and, yes, quite true. We share with ‘the other side’ the capability of bending the truth to suit our purposes. But how am I bending anything here?”
“She could have just been meeting this man for debriefings,” I said.
“Good point,” he said, all too brightly and with the sort of ironic undercurrent that a teacher might bestow on a pupil who has made a particularly naïve comment. “But we can show you photos—taken from a distance, but still pretty damn clear—of the two of them in bed together. Taken as recently as three weeks ago. Feel like a peep?”
He flipped open the file again, thumbing his way through the eight-by-tens.
“You really have got me checkmated, don’t you?”
“And why do you say that?”
“Because if I offer up any hypothetical alternative to the reality you are presenting me . . .”
“. . . we have visual veracity on our side? All right, say she was just going to meet Haechen in those crummy hotel rooms for debriefings. The fact remains: she’s the agent of a totalitarian regime, and she tricked you into thinking—”
“I know what I thought. I know what was said between us. I know . . .”
I fell silent. A new double shot of schnapps arrived. I downed it. I thought:
just get up and walk out the door and don’t come back. Go home. Pack everything up. Get the last train out of town . . . only that would probably be the night train to Hamburg, the city where she is allegedly shacked up with the troll who has been running her life for more than a year.
“I need proof that she isn’t in Hamburg translating for Wellmann,” I said.
“Easily arranged,” Bubriski said. “Herr Wellmann is taking his wife to hear the Berliner Philharmoniker tonight. You’re quite the classical music nut, aren’t you? So you’ll approve of the fact that it’s that Italian guy, Abbado, conducting Mendelssohn and Schubert. Given that we are rather cultured people at the USIA, I happen to have a spare ticket for the concert. The seat is just two rows back from where Wellmann will be sitting. So if you want proof . . . ?”
He reached into his pocket and slid a Berliner Philharmoniker ticket toward me. I covered it with my hand.
“So after you see Wellmann there tonight . . . ,” he said.
“I still need proof that she is actually working for the Stasi.”
“I would demand the same thing if I were in your position.”
“But you’re not. And you want something from me. And I am not willing to set her up.”
“But here’s the thing. You told her that you were interviewing those two East German dancers who just defected, right?”
“That’s none of your damn business.”
“I will take that as an ‘affirmative.’ So if you told her about the interview, you also told her about the transcript you’ll be receiving over the weekend of the conversation you were supposed to have with these two dancers.”
“You fucking set me up,” I hissed.
“The fact is, it is you who set yourself up, sir. Now I must tell you: this interview is never going to take place. But say we were to give you a copy of this alleged transcript, all marked ‘Classified.’ Say you were to leave it out on a table for your beloved—”
“Stop calling her that!”
“Sorry, sorry, I can see why you’re now a little bit touchy.”
“Fuck you, ‘chum.’ Fuck your mental head games and your Good Cop/Bad Cop routine. I don’t like you. I don’t like who you are, what you stand for, or the shitty little games you play in the name of God and country. Just as I don’t like the contempt you feel for anyone who isn’t a ‘team player,’ ‘plainspoken,’ ‘a real American.’ And the thing is, though you spout neocon nastiness about any compatriot who doesn’t embrace your black-and-white worldview, you live in the biggest fog of moral grayness imaginable.”
“And you, sir, are someone whose worldliness on the page is not mirrored by that in real life. I may talk a sardonic game, Thomas. I may needle you with my Midwestern bluntness. But I am also sympathetic to the dilemma into which you have been tossed. Which is why, instead of trying to convince you any more of the ‘truth’ of this situation, I am proposing a simple test that will either incriminate or exonerate Frau Dussmann. It will give you a definite yes or no as to whether she is what I am alleging her to be. Will you allow me to outline this plan, please?”
I lowered my head.
You want proof. Here’s the possibility of proof
.
“Go ahead,” I said quietly.
“When Frau Dussmann returns to your apartment on Sunday, you must muster up what few clandestine bones you have in your body and pretend that all is as it was before. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s an honest answer. But for your own sake—by which I mean, in order to get the answers you need—you are going to have to act a role for a few days. The role you have been playing up to now. The role of the man who adores her. And yes, that means pulling her into bed, making love to her, telling her, as always, how much you adore her, acting as if nothing has changed. But then, the subject of your interview with the two dancers will come up. What you will then need to tell her—besides saying how interesting the two dancers were, and how disoriented but pleased they were to have escaped—is that the transcripts of the interview make fascinating reading . . . and it’s going to be quite the coup for Radio Liberty to break this news first. Then you say no more about it. You have a nice evening. You take your lady to bed. I bet the two of you fuck every night.”