The Matchmaker E-Book

Paul Vidich

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 350

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Berlin, 1989. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door. Nothing about her marriage is as it seems. Anne had been targeted by the Matchmaker - a high level East German counterintelligence officer - who runs a network of Stasi agents. These agents are his 'Romeos' who marry vulnerable women in West Berlin to provide them with cover as they report back to the Matchmaker. Anne has been married to a spy, and now he has disappeared, and is presumably dead. The CIA are desperate to find the Matchmaker because of his close ties to the KGB. They believe he can establish the truth about a high-ranking Soviet defector. They need Anne because she's the only person who has seen his face - from a photograph that her husband mistakenly left out in his office - and she is the CIA's best chance to identify him before the Matchmaker escapes to Moscow. Time is running out as the Berlin Wall falls and chaos engulfs East Germany. But what if Anne's husband is not dead? And what if Anne has her own motives for finding the Matchmaker to deliver a different type of justice?

Leseprobe

Praise for Paul Vidich

‘An author in control of both his story and its arena. Vidich’s style is sparse but atmospheric. Carefully deployed tradecraft and technical knowledge only add to the air of verisimilitude’ – Financial Times, on The Mercenary

‘In short, this is one of the year’s premier spy novels, a close study of individual lives set against global turmoil, a heady blend of spy games and their very human consequences’ – Crime Reads (Best Books of the Year So Far), on The Mercenary

‘Vidich’s visualisation of time and place is masterly’ – Times, on The Mercenary

‘Paul Vidich delivers a spy yarn that revels in the old certainties’ – Irish Times, on The Mercenary

‘Vidich carries the wintry mood of Soviet menace and danger powerfully, and his plot twists are tight and all too believable… A fast-moving and emotionally powerful ride into the darkness of both spying and the battered soul’ – New York Journal of Books, on The Mercenary

‘Compelling’ – Sunday Times, on The Coldest Warrior

‘Vidich perfectly captures the era’s paranoid mood’ – Times, on The Coldest Warrior

‘With this outing, Vidich enters the upper ranks of espionage thriller writers’ – Publishers Weekly, on The Coldest Warrior

‘In the manner of Charles Cumming and recent le Carré, Vidich pits spies on the same side against one another in a kind of internal cold war’ – Booklist, on The Coldest Warrior

‘The US’s actual deep state during the cold war is evocatively portrayed in The Coldest Warrior, a finely written, taut novel’ – Financial Times

‘A richly detailed work of investigative crime writing perfect for fans of procedurals and spy fiction alike’ – LitHub, on The Coldest Warrior

‘Vivid and sympathetic… a worthwhile thriller and a valuable exposé’ – Kirkus Reviews, on The Coldest Warrior

‘Chilling… more than an entertaining and well-crafted thriller; Vidich asks questions that remain relevant today’ – Jefferson Flanders,author of The First Trumpet trilogy, on The Coldest Warrior

‘Vidich spins a tale of moral and psychological complexity, recalling Graham Greene… rich, rewarding’ – Booklist, on The Good Assassin

‘Cold War spy fiction in the grand tradition - neatly plotted betrayals in that shadow world where no one can be trusted and agents are haunted by their own moral compromises’ – Joseph Kanon, bestselling author of Istanbul Passage and The Good German, on An Honorable Man

‘A cool, knowing, and quietly devastating thriller that vaults Paul Vidich into the ranks of such thinking-man’s spy novelists as Joseph Kanon and Alan Furst’ – Stephen Schiff, writer and executive producer of acclaimed television drama The Americans, on An Honorable Man

‘An Honorable Man is that rare beast: a good, old-fashioned spy novel. But like the best of its kind, it understands that the genre is about something more: betrayal, paranoia, unease, and sacrifice. For a book about the Cold War, it left me with a warm, satisfied glow’ – John Connolly, #1 internationally bestselling author of A Song of Shadows

For my mother,

Virginia Vidich

There’s no future

No future

No future for you

– ‘God Save the Queen,’

the Sex Pistols, 1977

PART I

1

Kreuzberg, West Berlin

1989

Peril came early to the apartment on Bethaniendamm, overtaking the changes that were sweeping through the streets and alleys of a divided Cold War Berlin.

Anne Simpson stood at the ironing board in her kitchen doing one of the chores that were a part of her morning routine, when she heard cries in the street. For a moment she thought it might be her husband. A premonition darkened her face, but she put it aside and held onto the idea that his tardiness was the oversight of a forgetful partner. She tried to concentrate on the blue jeans’ stubborn wrinkle, but her mind was elsewhere, and hot iron grazed her wrist. A curse burst from her lips. At the sink, she ran cold water over the burn.

She always became restless waiting for her husband to return from one of his Central European business trips, but this time there was an added complication. They had argued terribly the night before he left and then he was gone at dawn. She had awakened feeling alone and resentful. It started with her suspicions about his work, but it became the disagreement that was a frequent part of their young marriage – she wanted a child and he said that it wasn’t the right time.

As she was storing the ironing board the apartment’s doorbell chimed. She glanced at the wall clock as if, by some unconscious association, knowing the time would better prepare her to confront him when he walked in. She vigorously wiped her hands on a dish towel.

The jeans were still warm when she slipped her legs into the pants, fingers fumbling with the zipper. On her way across the living room, she glanced in the beveled wall mirror, thinking that it was best to look cheerful. She shook her hair to give it body and shaped it. As an afterthought, she undid the blouse’s top button, revealing the pearl necklace on her pale breasts. It had always been their agreement that when he returned from a long business trip, he rang the lobby buzzer – to warn her, he liked to joke, in case she’d taken a lover while he was away.

She glanced out the window to see if he’d stepped back and was waving. There was only tobacco haze from the Turkish café next door and a gaggle of children hanging on their mothers’ jilbabs, pointing at a couple of guys with orange cockfighting hair and steel-studded leather jackets. The neighborhood had become just that. Streets bleeding into streets of the old Berlin now taken over by immigrants and young squatters. Store windows burst with boxed fruit shaded by overhanging balconies and everywhere rude political graffiti. It was a lively cosmopolitan city with a thriving punk music scene but always conscious that it was a walled-in enclave surrounded by Soviet armed forces.

Again, the chime.

‘Coming!’ She grabbed the yellow rose she had bought as a peace offering and pressed the buzzer twice to open the unreliable lobby door lock.

Leaning over the hall’s railing, she looked down four flights into the dark stairwell. She listened for his enthusiastic run up the stairs, taking two at a time. There was only silence.

‘Stefan?’

Behind her, the elevator suddenly opened and a man she didn’t recognize stepped out.

‘Anne Simpson?’

‘Yes. Can I help you?’

‘I’m James Cooper, American embassy. I’ve come about your husband. Is he here?’

‘No.’

‘We thought you might know where he is.’

She took Cooper in all at once. A man in his early forties with a grave face and an exaggerated expression of concern that he didn’t try to mask with a polite smile. He removed his hat and held it solicitously in one hand, using the other to brush back hair that had fallen to his forehead.

‘I’m sorry. Who are you?’

‘Jim Cooper.’ He presented a business card with two hands, nodding slightly. ‘Consular officer.’

‘He’s not here. I’m expecting him.’ She knew his type from her job – foreign service officers in tailored suits and Oxford wingtips who were equally good at seeming confident or naïve. They were always holding ad hoc meetings in the courtyard, talking in whispers and keeping the mystery of who they worked for.

Cooper’s eyes were sympathetic and somber. ‘We believe he may be missing.’

Missing? The word hung in the silence that followed. Without being aware of the sensation until it gripped her, she felt cold. This was a mistake, she thought. He was looking for a different man, perhaps one with the same name. Her mind grasped for reasons to doubt the claim. But one question led to another, the end of one becoming the beginning of the next and her thoughts became clouded.

‘I don’t understand.’

A neighbor’s door suddenly opened, a pleasant-looking middle-aged man in a collarless shirt emerged, and upon seeing two people in the hallway, he quickly descended the stairs. In the open door, stood a startled young drag queen in pink slippers and a sheer peignoir under a kimono, which she abruptly closed. Dark eye shadow graced her face and her short black hair was slicked back. She cocked her head at Cooper and turned to Anne, speaking over the soft jazz coming through her door. ‘Do you need help?’

‘Can we go inside?’ Cooper said.

Anne acknowledged her neighbor, ‘I’m okay.’

Cooper entered the bright living room and stopped at the wall mirror, taking in the apartment’s eclectic furnishings like a realtor evaluating a new listing. The original splendor of old Berlin remained in the elaborate ceiling plasterwork, parquet floors, and several graceful casement windows with views across the Wall into East Berlin. But the original Beaux Arts details suffered neglect. Repeated coats of paint obscured the craftsmanship and a naked light bulb was in a ceiling fixture designed for a chandelier. Parquet tiles had loosened in spots, or were missing. Sunlight coming through venetian blinds illuminated the black lacquered finish of a Steinway piano.

Anne looked at his card again. ‘I don’t understand. Missing? What does that mean?’

‘We don’t know where he is. We thought he might be here. My job is to help Americans who find themselves in trouble or in need of help to deal with local police matters.’ Cooper removed his coat and laid it across his arm.

She thought hostilely that she hadn’t invited him to stay.

‘The Polizeifound his wallet. I was told to come here before they arrive to be the first to inform you. And to speak with you. To see if he was here, or if you knew where he was. To help you through this.’

She stopped listening when she heard the word wallet. ‘Found where?’

‘Landwehr Canal.’

She was confused. ‘He’s been in Vienna.’

‘They confirmed it’s his.’

‘I see. Which part of the canal?’

‘The Polizei will know. They’re searching the water.’

Her hand went to her forehead, dimly aware in the moment that she was short of breath, and then her heart started to race and a sudden lightheadedness overcame her. Without knowing it, she had backed up against the wall and was slowly sliding down to the floor. Her hand went to her mouth realizing all that she didn’t know, knocking her glasses off.

‘Mrs Simpson!’ Cooper knelt at her side, retrieving the lenses.

She smiled. ‘I’m okay. Thank you.’ She went to stand, but her left knee buckled. He caught her arm and helped her to the sofa.

‘Sit here.’

She looked at him. ‘Is he dead?’

‘He’s missing. There is no reason to jump to conclusions.’

She nodded. He seemed nice enough, like a therapist paid to listen, and she thought his job must have trained him to provide comforting lies. Her mind had jumped to the worst thing, but she allowed herself to be open to his opinion. He explained again what he knew and bit by bit she stopped giving into fear. She projected optimism. She nodded at his reassuring composure and listened politely to what he had to say. Slowly, her urge to ask him to leave became gratitude that he’d come.

‘The Polizei will have more information. They’ll be here in an hour, maybe less.’

‘I see.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Will you be staying until they arrive?’

‘I can do that, yes. I have an idea what they’ll ask. And what you should say.’

‘What I should say?’

‘What you know.’

She paused. ‘I don’t know anything.’

‘Then that’s what you’ll tell them.’

She nodded. ‘Can I offer you tea, coffee? There’s fresh pastry.’ She had bought it for Stefan, but now it would go to waste.

‘Why don’t you sit,’ Cooper said. ‘I can serve you. What would you like?’

He had done this before, she thought. His business card. His confidence. ‘Tea would be fine.’ She stood.

He motioned for her to sit. ‘I’ll make it.’

‘You don’t know where anything is.’

‘I’ll figure it out. Sugar? Cream?’

‘Black, please.’

Cooper had disappeared into the kitchen and she suddenly felt very alone in the apartment. Husband missing? He was away for two weeks, but in that time she had never felt alone. He was away but would return. Now, aloneness came over her like a dark shadow. Waiting was torture. The mystery corrupted her reasoning. In spite of what she knew not to do, her mind filled with terrible thoughts.

Anne looked at the apartment door thinking that he would suddenly appear – lively, upbeat, offering foil-wrapped Viennese chocolate that he always brought as a peace offering. She imagined the exaggerated smile on his face. His jaunty step. His coat carelessly tossed on a chair. It’s what had won her over – his optimism, his wit, his predictable routines. When he walked in, he would take her in his arms, kiss her, and smile. Of course, I’m back. What’s all this foolishness? I called last night, didn’t I?

There were no footsteps in the tiled hallway. No car honking in the street. No voice calling her name. Only the shrill sound of the whistling kettle.

Cooper returned with two teacups. She took hers with both hands and sipped, savoring the herbal fragrance. She hadn’t been thirsty, but drinking tea was a ritual, and rituals helped her get through the day. He sat opposite, crossing his legs, and continued their conversation. She appreciated his effort to fill the time with chitchat about life in West Berlin – all the shallow details of idle conversation that took little effort to appreciate and made no demands on her attention. She listened indifferently to his remarks about the Turkish immigrants who’d moved into Kreuzberg. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the protests in East Berlin. They had only to look out her fourth-floor window to see the Wall that divided the city. The idle conversation made her feel more alone. She wanted to turn off the switch that kept him talking.

Lost in contemplation, Anne failed to hear his question. ‘I’m sorry. What did you ask?’

‘Where was he traveling from?’

‘Vienna and Prague.’ She couldn’t remember if he’d gone back to Vienna or was coming straight home from Prague. ‘He’s a piano tuner. Orchestras hire him.’

‘He travels a lot?’

‘Pianos don’t come to him.’ Her glib reply cut off uncomfortable questions she wasn’t prepared to answer.

‘He’s American, isn’t he?’

She hesitated, uncertain. ‘East German. My first husband was American.’

The phone rang. Cooper motioned for her to stay seated while he answered. She surprised herself by doing what he instructed, feeling even then that she was a pawn.

Anne moved to the window and stared in the direction that Stefan should have walked home from Kottbusser Tor, thinking: Did he pass out in a bar? Did he miss his flight?

Her eyes closed and her heart raced. All the little things that she had come to know about her husband, and resent, welled up – his forgetfulness, his lapses, his too-clever excuses, and the easy way he dismissed her concerns. She felt guilty for having those thoughts. She gazed out the window, looking at nothing. How does a man go missing?

Shock aside, worry at bay, she tried to think calmly. He had been traveling home from his weeklong job in Vienna. Prague was added. One week became two. Their call the night before had been a fine conversation. ‘We’ll talk when I get home,’ he’d said. ‘Make dinner reservations.’ He’d said the name of their favorite restaurant. He had sounded hassled, but not any different from the many other times he had called while away, and as he always did, he ended the call by saying he missed her. Loved her. Then again, the mystery took over. Landwehr Canal was not on his way home from Tegel Airport.

‘Anne?’

She turned and stared at Cooper.

‘Do you mind if I call you Anne?’

A line being crossed. She pointed at the telephone. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘The police will know more. They’ll answer your questions and I’m sure they’ll have questions for you.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They’ll be here soon.’ He nodded at the muted television screen, where the network anchor interrupted his delivery to cut to a reporter giving an update on violent protests in Leipzig and across East Germany. ‘There is a lot going on now. A lot of demands on their time, but I know this is important to them. Can I make lunch?’

Lunch? She looked at the wall clock. Stefan’s plane landed at 8:45 a.m. It was now past two. The yellow rose lay on the credenza. Little irrelevant details clogged her thinking. Lunch? ‘Sure, go ahead. You already know your way around the kitchen.’

She found herself thinking that it was surreal to be eating lunch with a stranger in her home. It felt like a bad dream. All she had to do was wake up.

Anne suddenly rushed to the television.

An ARD reporter stood in front of Landwehr Canal. She pointed toward an American patrol boat bobbing in the water by the cement plant where the canal entered the Spree. Stefan’s photograph flashed on screen and then shrunk to a small picture-in-picture while the petite blond reporter described the search for the body of a missing East German.

Anne knelt close to the screen, hardly able to contain her shock. Her hands trembled as she watched news coverage shift to Polizei headquarters in West Berlin, where the ARD reporter thrust her microphone at a plainclothes policeman but he paid her no notice.

Cooper turned off the television. ‘It’s better not to listen to the news. Better to wait for the police. Reporters get their facts wrong. Speculation isn’t helpful. I strongly suggest you wait for the BND.’

BND? It was part of her job to know the difference between the West German Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Criminal Police, the BKA. What would the BND want with him?

2

Polizei

Inspector Erich Praeger, a tall man in late middle age with an erect military bearing, entered and stood in the middle of Anne’s living room. Anne recognized him from the television as the man who ignored the ARD reporter’s shouted questions. Praeger’s flat expression hid whatever was on his mind.

He removed his green, tapered Tyrolean hat, revealing uniformly gray hair swept back on his forehead, giving prominence to his attentive eyes. He wore a brown suit jacket and a bow tie that was tightly knotted on a pale-yellow shirt. His overcoat was draped over one arm and his hat delicately dangled from two fingers. A shorter detective with a coarse appearance had arrived a few minutes earlier, and suddenly grew quiet in his presence.

‘Frau Simpson?’ Brusque politeness without the salute.

‘Yes.’ Anne wondered what he had done during the war. She offered to take his coat.

‘We won’t be long.’ He presented his card with the embossed black eagle of the Bundesnachrichtendienst – the BND. Praeger turned to the man at his side. ‘My colleague, Tomas Keller. BKA. A joint operation.’

At the coffee table, he passed over a National Geographic, open to a spread of red-eyed seabirds slick with oil from the Exxon Valdez, and lifted a framed wedding photograph of bride and groom from a table. ‘Is this him?’

‘Yes.’

‘The glass is cracked.’ He nodded. ‘A pity.’

‘It fell two weeks ago. I haven’t had time to replace it.’

‘Where was the ceremony?’

‘The Netherlands.’

Praeger arched an eye.

‘We met in The Netherlands. Scheveningen.’

He set down the photograph, careful to place it exactly as he’d found it. Praeger asked a few more questions, covering ground that she’d gone over with Cooper. She repeated what she had said earlier, answers that she would repeat again and again in the next days. Anne saw a rigid man of few words who knew exactly what he wanted. When he spoke, he looked right at her as if he’d rehearsed his questions to reveal little about his thinking. When she answered, she had the uncomfortable feeling that he was looking into her mind.

He paused at a wall poster from an exhibit, Art of Germany 1945–1985, and moved toward the windows. ‘And those?’ Praeger pointed to high-power binoculars that sat on one sill.

‘The rabbits.’ Anne pointed beyond the Wall’s razor wire fencing to the treeless death zone, where large rabbits lived freely without predators. ‘My husband worried about them. The large ones set off the land mines.’

Praeger used the binoculars to look. When he was done, he placed the binoculars on the window sill. ‘And you believed him?’

His sarcasm put her off and, in that moment, she started to dislike him.

Praeger moved to a desk that sat beside the bookshelves. ‘May I?’ He indicated the closed drawer.

Anne stepped forward, but Cooper’s hand abruptly stopped her. Praeger poked in the drawer with his riding crop with the vague curiosity of a man not looking for anything in particular, but open to the possibility that he might find something of interest. He lifted a manila envelope and pushed aside papers, handwritten notes, pamphlets.

‘What are these?’ He presented a sheath of colored pencil sketches. Each drawing depicted five differently colored and shaped vases on a window sill. The arrangement of the vases changed in each drawing, and sometimes the shapes changed, but there were always five and they were always in a row on a window sill.

‘He likes to draw. It’s his hobby.’

‘Bottles in a window? Anything else? Rabbits, perhaps?’

She hesitated. ‘Sometimes flowers.’

‘A wild imagination.’ He dropped the sketches. ‘Bottles in a window and flowers. Flowers in a bottle perhaps?’

‘What are you looking for?’

Praeger took a vase with fluted neck from the window sill. ‘A bottle like this?’

‘What is this about?’ she demanded, taking the vase. Frustration rose up in her. ‘This is my home. Nobody has told me anything. What are you looking for?’

‘Your husband. We need to speak with him. If you know where he is, you can save me some time.’

‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ He looked at her. ‘What can you tell me about yourself?’

‘Is that necessary?’ she said. She closed her eyes to calm herself, knowing that no good would come from being difficult. ‘I work at the Joint Allied Refugee Operations Center at Clay Headquarters,’ she said. ‘I’m an interpreter. I debrief refugees from Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. I’m fluent in Russian and German. What else do you want to know?’

Praeger considered her question. ‘Do you have a security clearance?’

‘I do.’

‘Did you report your marriage to the embassy?’

She wasn’t aware of her loosening grip and the vase dropped, breaking.

‘He’ll clean it up.’ Praeger sent his junior colleague to the kitchen. Praeger looked at Anne again. ‘Did you?’

She knew the rules and had ignored them. It wasn’t the embassy’s business who she slept with. By the time the six-month grace period for reporting her relationship had expired, they were already married. It would have been easier to ignore the security requirement and leave her job before her violation was discovered. But she hadn’t left.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘An oversight, I’m sure. It’s easy to be careless about who you sleep with.’

She wanted to slap him. ‘What do you want?’

‘I have enough for now.’

Inspector Praeger abruptly pushed one arm and then the other through his bulky overcoat’s sleeves. Without explanation, and in the same businesslike manner of his arrival, Praeger moved to the door, followed by his shorter BKA counterpart. But having come to the door, he turned.

‘Frau Simpson, as a courtesy to us, please remain in Berlin.’

*

Later, when she thought about that day, Anne felt the events like a heavy weight on her chest that kept her from breathing, and she came to see how fate had caught up with her life. She had let three complete strangers into her apartment, but part of her had known for some time that one day men like them might show up. And when they did, bringing the news of his disappearance, her mind had fogged and her thoughts became disconnected, the specifics of the day, the names of the police, the details of the questions, even the date itself, were lost in that part of her memory that endured trauma.

In the weeks that followed, she would engage in an act of memory contortion to remember the day he disappeared. The Leipzig protests became a memory marker. When she was asked when Stefan vanished, she recalled that the protests fell on Republic Day, the 40th anniversary of the GDR, and by that unconscious association she would answer, October 7. With that date, other blocked memories of her husband flowed, and a dark tenderness arose. Memories of their marriage came in waves of loss, regret, guilt, and anger. How unlikely their story. How hard they tried to be good partners to each other, and not be prisoners of their expectations of marriage. To know how to be a couple without forgetting how to be individuals. She believed they had found the happiness that was possible between a man and a woman of different backgrounds and different languages – an earned love. Reading stories out loud to each other in bed before sleeping. It was a thing they did that neither of them had done with another lover. She would listen to him read, enjoying his soft tenor voice, and she’d feel content. That was all she ever wanted.

And then he was gone. Disappeared. Vanished.

Perhaps that was why she blocked that day from memory, and remembered it only by association with the tragic events of 1989. His disappearance and the televised violence that brought down the GDR were joined.

Stefan had always been intimately mysterious, even when he was naked in bed next to her. She often tried to look into his mind to know his thoughts, but he had remained remote, even when he was present.

3

Landwehr Canal

Waking, Anne saw a shimmering light on the ceiling, the morning sun reflecting on bathwater she’d forgotten to drain the night before. She raised her head, letting go of the pleasant dream that stirred in the last moments of sleep and looked to the other side of the bed. Then she remembered. There would be no morning kiss, no light touch of his fingers on the small of her back, no gentle caress of her cheek – none of the careless sensual pleasures of waking beside Stefan.

She sat up. Took a deep breath. Slowly and quietly, she climbed out of bed and padded across the floor and looked in the living room. Improbably, she thought that he might be there asleep on the sofa. The depth of her disappointment was measured by the enduring mystery. In spite of her loneliness, a part of her preferred being alone.

On the way out the door, late for work, the phone rang. She answered it, thinking it might be Stefan, but when she heard Cooper’s voice, her hopeful tone hardened. He said that he would be there in ten minutes and would fill her in when he arrived.

‘We’re driving to the canal,’ he said when she slid into the passenger seat. She wore a scarf and boots in preparation for the day’s promise of snow. ‘The police are there now. A witness came forward.’

Witness to what? Anne felt a cold trepidation.

They drove in silence, moving along the street that followed the Spree, and through the side streets she saw the watchtowers on the other side of the river. She knew the route. It was the street she jogged every morning.

‘How are you holding up? How did you sleep?’

‘Not well.’

She looked away. It had been worse than that. She had tossed restlessly in bed, as her mind tried to banish the distracting images invading her dreams. She had lain awake for a long time, and when she finally accepted that sleep wasn’t going to come, she’d taken a long run in the predawn darkness. Berlin’s silent fog abstracted the licks and points of the streetlights along her path that followed the ominous glow of East German watchtowers. Jogging had always been a reliable companion. It helped keep her mind focused. Exhaustion, sweat, and sucking breaths in the cold drove away her anxious thoughts, and helped her achieve something not quite like calm. It was a long run alone on empty streets. A dark moon, curling fog, and gutters collecting fallen leaves. Her mind focused on her pace and the rhythm of her strides, reaching longer to meet a curb. Jogging helped her settle the images that came to her mind’s eye. One image, then another, like a flickering film montage of a forgotten past. The first kiss. Laughter in a bar. Lovemaking. With each memory, she took a longer stride and a deeper breath to dispel the images. Then exhausted, hands on her knees, bent over breathing and weeping.

‘We’ll make this short,’ Cooper said.

‘Good.’

‘The BND believes your husband was involved in espionage.’

She stared at Cooper.

‘We won’t spend more time here than necessary. You’ll want to answer their questions and get on with your life. Not get caught up in this thing.’

Cooper turned onto a side street that paralleled the canal and drove toward the Spree. They passed a parking lot of idled long-haul trucks, some with containers, others just cabs. It was a grim industrial area with low factory buildings that did nothing to brighten her mood.

Anne felt helpless in the face of everything she didn’t know. She was tired from lack of sleep, which brought on a strange unreality. As a child, she greeted her father’s Quaker faith with skepticism, thinking his invocation of the Lord old fashioned, like a horse-drawn carriage, but, in that moment, she wished she had a God she could turn to.

Anne watched Cooper be waved through a chain-link gate held open by a West German policeman.

*

A giant limestone mound rose beside the rusted cement kiln and to one side there was temporary housing for immigrant labor, RVs parked in random order. The cement tower cast a long shadow on cracked pavement sprouting grass browned by the passing season. A rising sun had burned off the morning mist and the sky was bright, cold, and cloudless, and the promise of snow was gone.

Anne had grabbed her coat and boots on her way out of the apartment, but now, as she walked toward men huddled together at the far end of the lot, she wished she had taken her gloves. She shoved her hands in her pockets and walked beside Cooper, eyes taking in the abandoned heap of rusted machinery beyond the tall mountains of sand. Between the mounds, and running along the Spree’s far bank, was the graffitied Wall topped with razor wire. Further along, and set back, a scrubbed concrete BT-11-type watchtower loomed. Cawing seagulls circled overhead and tree branches torn by the evening’s storm in the Lusatian Highlands were swept along in the gray, murky river.

Anne saw East German border guards in the tower with binoculars looking at the mouth of the canal, where scuba divers hung from the side of an idling U.S.-flagged patrol boat. One diver fixed his mask, as did a second, and both dropped below the surface. Two other divers worked at the base of the canal’s stone embankment, fixing a swimming pool–like ladder to help anyone lucky enough to swim across the Spree without being shot.

‘Frau Simpson, thank you for coming.’ Inspector Praeger stepped away from the men, greeting Anne with a brisk nod. His Tyrolean hat did nothing to warm his ears, which were blushed pink, but he did wear gloves, which again reminded Anne that hers were at home.

‘Join us.’ Praeger nodded toward a short man with wire rim glasses and a thick scarf that made it look like he had no neck. What Anne noticed first was his indeterminate age – he could be forty or sixty-five. His face had the unhealthy pallor of a man with cirrhosis or a man who was a frequent patron of a tanning salon. His eyebrows were trimmed and his toupee was one of those obvious hairpieces of rich brown hair that ended abruptly on the ears. She thought he looked made-up – a man so interested in looking young that he looked false. Later, she would tell Cooper that she was put off by him, thinking that a man so eager to alter his appearance couldn’t possibly be trusted.

‘A witness,’ Praeger said. ‘He saw it happen.’

‘Saw what happen?’

‘There was an altercation. An accident perhaps. We don’t know everything. Maybe a robbery.’

‘My husband? Here?’

‘It would appear so.’

Appear so? ‘Accident? Robbery? Altercation? They are very different.’

Praeger waved over the man with the toupee. ‘He filed a report yesterday, but it went to the BKA and was not at first linked to what we are investigating. We came here this morning and this man described what he saw. In the course of our examination of the area, we found something we’d like you to see.’

Praeger turned to the man who joined them. ‘Dr Knappe, please repeat what you saw.’

Dr Knappe glanced at Anne, nodding, and took his instruction, speaking in German. ‘I was standing there when my poodle found a dead pigeon, so I let her have a sniff and while I did, I happened to glance at the canal. It was early. Thick fog was in the fir trees. I could barely see the bank, but I come here often, so I knew it was there. It was the day of the pileup on the autobahn.’

‘Repeat what you saw.’

‘It’s not what I saw. I could hardly see. It’s what I heard. A man’s voice. The cry of a man being threatened or attacked. I ran, thinking I could help, but when I came to the bank, there was no one. Then I saw him in the water, face down, motionless. He was floating just over there.’ Dr Knappe pointed to the patrol boat.

‘He didn’t stumble or jump. I remember the cry. He was pushed. I am certain it was the cry of a man who had been struck, and then shoved into the water.’

‘People cry out when they fall,’ Praeger said.

‘This was a scream. Fright, not surprise. How does a grown man fall into the canal? There was fog, but I could see the body well enough and he would have seen the edge. His wallet was over there.’

Inspector Praeger turned to Anne. ‘We haven’t found your husband’s body yet.’

Dr Knappe’s hand suddenly covered his mouth, embarrassed. ‘Oh, my. Please accept my apology. I didn’t mean to offend, speaking so irreverently. Had I known…’

Anne thought his exaggerated sympathy misplaced, like a wrong-sized overcoat he was trying on. She pondered Dr Knappe’s reaction and it seemed as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on. Perhaps for that reason, and in light of what happened next, she clung to the idea that Stefan was alive. Even in the face of Dr Knappe’s eyewitness account, hope lived on with the vividness of a dream.

Praeger looked at Anne. His voice deepened. ‘Was your husband involved in espionage for East Germany?’

‘You don’t have to answer that,’ Cooper said.

She stared at Praeger. She laughed. ‘Espionage?’

He pointed to the trucks. ‘Air conditioners have been fitted with false panels to hide people when they cross the border.’ Praeger’s hand swept the lot. ‘They are expected to pay when they get out. If they don’t pay, well, there are consequences. Some are Stasi agents pretending to be refugees.’

Anne didn’t know what to say. She wanted to reject the idea that Stefan was involved in some type of racket, but the stubborn mystery left her without the confidence to reject even the most outlandish accusation. She looked at Praeger. ‘How do you know it was him?’ She turned to Dr Knappe. ‘Did you know him? Could you even recognize him?’

‘We have his wallet.’ Praeger said.

‘Maybe it was stolen.’

‘There is another thing.’ Praeger took a black instrument case from Detective Keller and presented it to her. ‘This was found there.’ He pointed to undergrowth by the lot’s edge where shrubs grew wildly. Praeger opened the case. ‘Do you recognize this?’

She touched the mother-of-pearl inlay around the zither’s sound box, letting her fingers confirm what her eyes knew. She wanted to speak, but words were the prisoners of her shock. More than money, more than his wallet, Stefan prized his instrument, and would never be without it.

‘It was dropped or hidden in the shrubbery.’

Anne knelt at the spot where it had been found, lifting a handful of earth and let it sift through her fingers. Her mind tried to find a logic to all that she had been told – but everything was unexpected and unthinkable.

‘Did your husband need money?’

She shook her head.

‘Did he carry a lot of money?’

‘No.’

‘Were there people he wanted to help?’ Praeger looked toward the Turkish laborers who sat outside the RVs. ‘Any idea why he would come here?’

She turned to the rusted kiln beside the mountains of sand and limestone, and then her gaze turned to the Wall on the other side of the Spree. ‘He’s a piano tuner.’ Her voice was incredulous. She stood abruptly, and brushed off her hands to remove the dirt. She turned to Praeger. ‘I have no idea why he was here. None of this makes sense.’

Just then, an East German patrol boat turned sharply from the Spree and entered the canal, engines shrill, moving at full throttle. A stern-mounted heavy caliber machine gun was manned by a gunner in a helmet and a yellow life vest. The patrol boat bore down on the American divers bobbing in the water, swamping them. It made a sharp turn and sped to the embankment where divers were installing the ladder, coming dangerously close. Again, the boat made an abrupt turn and headed a second time for the American divers bobbing in the water.

Cooper walked right up to the Polizei. ‘Fire at them,’ he shouted. When the policeman didn’t move, Cooper grabbed the man’s automatic weapon and fired in the water in front of the speeding boat. Two shots went unheeded so he emptied the magazine in an angry burst on the boat’s hull.

‘Enough!’ Praeger yanked the weapon from Cooper and motioned frantically at the patrol boat gunner, who was aiming his large caliber weapon to return fire. ‘Nicht mehr!’ he shouted. ‘Nicht mehr!’

Praeger turned to Cooper, furious. ‘We don’t need to start World War III.’

‘This is the American sector. Those are American divers.’

Praeger moved close to Cooper. His face stern and indignant. ‘Common sense knows no nationality, Mr Cooper.’

*

Anne was slumped on her sofa feeling overwhelmed. She had asked Cooper to drive her home because the thought of going to work depressed her. There was nothing normal about her life now and after twenty-four hours she knew she wouldn’t get her life back anytime soon.

Cooper had accompanied her upstairs. She’d begun to think of him like an adviser, or ally against the West Germans. She’d been startled when he fired on the East German patrol boat, thinking that he had acted recklessly, but then in the car ride back she’d listened to his frustration. She appreciated his decisiveness. Everything in her world was indefinite and confusing. His simple defiant act impressed her.

Anne listened to him give his report to someone on the phone, heading off whatever diplomatic catastrophe might follow from the incident, and she closed her eyes. The moments of relative calm gave way to an indiscriminate anger. She knew she should be angry at someone, but it was hard to sustain anger against Stefan, not knowing if he was at fault, and the obvious target for her anger, the police, she knew was misplaced. She was mute and helpless in the face of this thing she couldn’t understand. Her mind grasped for the missing critical fact, which she felt was teasing her at the periphery of her brain, that would solve the mystery.

Anne went to the window and peered through the binoculars at the empty, overgrown death zone. One large rabbit hopped across the minefield and she waited for the explosion, but it didn’t come. How easy Stefan’s explanation had been. I worry about them. So easy and so unlike him. Anne shifted the binoculars a degree and looked at the grim, soot-scarred apartment buildings across the Wall. How often had he looked in that direction?

Anne lifted the framed wedding picture, letting her fingers trace the crack in the glass. One memory triggered another. Their argument. His arm knocking the frame to the floor. She gazed at the happy couple in the photograph thinking about the evening she’d rushed home from work, distraught, and found him peering through the binoculars, making notes in his diary.

That afternoon, staffing crises and holiday absences had drawn her into an urgent interrogation with two U.S. Army special forces. When she had entered the windowless basement cell, she saw a shirtless man strapped into a wooden chair with electrodes on his calf and breast. He was a big man, with a barrel chest and thick neck, whose head was hanging down. He was breathing hard. Blood leaked from his nose and his lip was split, but he looked up with fierce eyes. Anne had turned to walk out, but was stopped by the shorter American interrogator, who rejected her protest that this was not her job. She was directed to stand while the other interrogator injected the prisoner’s arm, making him grunt and violently resist his confining straps. In a moment, the prisoner’s face was pale and he experienced sweating, tremors, and nausea.