Marco Polo, If You Can Read online

  Blackford went to the large bed, sat down, and began to laugh. For a moment he thought he might actually lose control of himself, and it was only when he saw that Adele, her expression now changed, was moving her hand in the direction of a highly visible bell on the wall that he took control of himself, rose, bowed gallantly, and said, “Permit me to introduce myself. I’m Adrian.”

  She hesitated. “At what were you laughing?”

  “Oh,” said Blackford, his mind racing, “it’s—it’s that you’re wearing the absolutely identical nightgown my girl in Washington wears, and the coincidence was just too much.” Adele smiled and brought Blackford closer to her, removing his coat and filling a glass of champagne, all this without moving from her languorous position on the couch.

  Adele indeed. “Adele” had consumed—when you added them all up—probably thirty hours of Blackford’s time during the past six weeks, ending only that morning when, reviewing Günter’s step-by-step reconstruction of her movements over a period of three days, and examining her photographs, for which neither Berlin Station nor Washington had any counterpart, Blackford authoritatively struck her off the list of possible suspects. “She sees too many people,” he told Michael. “Hell, she’s probably a call girl.” Michael, looking at the picture, said he doubted that. “Too much class. Maybe she works for a travel agency.” By this time he knew a considerable amount about Adele’s background, and everything about her regular and detailed correspondence with her sister in New York, which had put her on the suspect list last November.

  Now, he figured, I can get a free ride by astonishing her, by telling her her fortune! No, Blackford, no, he said to himself. Then he wondered why he had overlooked asking Günter to get the results of her last Wassermann test.…

  But that was his final preoccupation with business. Adele was more engrossing now than ever she had been when he studied her face in his room at Hochstrasse. He had, so to speak, spent weeks in disrobing her. Here, in a matter of minutes, she had disrobed him. He had spent hours attempting to penetrate her secrets, if any. In just a few minutes, he found her secret entirely, joyously, hospitably penetrable, and, after the first explosive round, his mind went back to the irony. Perhaps he might add an addendum to the report he had prepared for Rufus. Something like, “Checked her out all the way. Left no room for doubt.”

  Mustn’t play games with Rufus.

  Blackford rose at eight. He could easily remember mornings when he had bounded out of bed with less difficulty. Ah well, let’s see, he thought, is entropy—the word was getting around—the right word for it? No, probably not, though it sounded better, to describe his condition, than other words that came to mind. He smiled at something Adele had said—but smiling and brushing his teeth were incompatible, and he decided he had better get on with his ablutions. It was his day to make breakfast, though as often as not he would rise on his duty day to find that Michael had already prepared it. Prepared breakfast and—supreme sacrifice—gone out to the corner restaurant to buy the morning paper. Ugh. He put the water kettle on the stove and, wearing only a T-shirt and pants, stuffed himself into his overcoat, rang for the elevator, and pitched himself into the cold, walking to the newsstand and picking up Die Welt. He fumbled with the change, head still bowed against the cold, turned back, and let himself in. The water was boiling. He broke four eggs and one tenth of a bar of butter into the pan, and added lots of salt and pepper. Time to wake Michael.

  With a hot cup of coffee in hand, cream and sugar stirred, he kicked open the door of Michael’s room.

  “Wake up, Romeo. Izza dis my pretty-witty little Michelino? Michelino wantsa niza cuppa coffee, uh? All right, goddammit. Wake up.” Michael shot up in bed, his eyes unfocused.

  “What time did you get in?”

  “In?” said Blackford meditatively. “Oh, I’d say about four and one-half minutes after I last saw you.”

  “Oh come on.” Michael took the coffee. “What time did you get back here?”

  “Before Romeo got back, because I looked in, and Romeo wasn’t in his room.”

  “Aahhh …” came from Michael’s lips after sipping the coffee.

  “‘My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words/Of that tongue’s utterance, yet I know the sound,/Art thou not Romeo.…?’”

  “Black, would you cut it out? Please? What time is it?” Michael got out of bed.

  “Eight-fifteen; eggs in two minutes.”

  At first Michael ate tentatively, but then greedily. By the time he had finished his third piece of toast, his color was restored. Blackford read the paper.

  “Any news?”

  “Yup. The State Department has revealed that it has denied visas to East German reporters to cover the Olympics at Squaw Valley.”

  “That wasn’t very nice of the State Department.”

  “Especially after what the Czechs did. Listen: ‘American hockey coach Jack Riley of West Point credited Nikolai Sologubov, Soviet team captain, with first suggesting that the U.S. team take inhalations of oxygen to overcome fatigue after the 2nd period of its game with Czechoslovakia, when the Czechs led by 4–3. After following Sologubov’s advice, the Americans rallied for 6 goals in the 3rd period to win.”

  Michael laughed. “Oh my God, poor Sologubov. Do they play hockey in Siberia?”

  “Get this. ‘The Russian coach, asked to comment on his team’s performance, said, “They played like goddam amateurs!”’”

  “Imagine! Sending amateurs to the Olympics! What are the Russians coming to!”

  “We’d better get to work,” Blackford said, emptying his coffee cup.

  Blackford showered, dressed, and attacked the files. At ten he would check the mailbox. Michael, with a magnifying glass, was comparing sets of pictures. A few minutes after ten, Blackford came in with the mail. The Washington material was picked up from a drop, but it was time to hear from Sally, or his mother. He came with several letters in hand, tossing one to Michael. Blackford opened Sally’s letter and experienced, as ever, a slight quickening of the pulse. It was a long, discursive letter, adamantly affectionate, with only a single inflection of the old hostility (“Will the Agency permit Senator Kennedy to run for President?”), a long and amusing anecdote involving a student who had written a term paper spelling the subject’s name throughout “Jane Austin,” and other levities, calculated to make Blackford laugh—and feel homesick. He heard a noise in the bathroom.

  He walked over to it and opened the door to see Michael bent over the toilet.

  “Michael, you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Blackford could smell the nausea. Tactfully, he drew the door shut. When, after ten minutes, Michael had not emerged, he went back. This time he knocked on the door. The reply was a most uncharacteristic “Yeah?”

  “Michael, are you going to be able to make it? To Mittelstrasse?”

  Again, just: “Yeah.”

  Blackford stepped back. He was concerned. Michael had eaten a good breakfast, and seemed easily to have metabolized the dissipations of the preceding night. Blackford took the customary precautions, checking his pockets, taking his special wallet. And sliding the bulky envelope—fifty thousand Deutsche Marks, authorized only yesterday by code—into a tobacco pouch, the tightly packaged bills covered by loose tobacco and a small weatherbitten pipe, the whole fitting bulkily, but not obtrusively, in the deep pocket of his heavy woolen trenchcoat. Once again he approached the door of the bathroom.

  “I’m off. Remember, you get to the garage at 11:14. The door will open to let you in. No knocking.”

  “All right.” The tone of voice was metallic. Blackford was genuinely concerned. On reaching the door, he thought to return to the bathroom and have it out with Michael. He decided against it. But he knew that at 11:14 Michael would slide through the garage door.

  Blackford turned right and, as usual when deciding to hail a taxi, went on a block or two and turned a corner or two. He entered a cab and gave his destination—the center of the Ti
ergarten, Strasse des 17. Juni.

  In ten or fifteen minutes he was there, the center of Berlin’s oldest park, the pride of the great city over a period of two hundred years. It had been something of a battleground during the war. On the park the Nazis had impacted their antiaircraft batteries, mutilating the grounds. Though ironically it wasn’t until after the war had been lost—or, better, won—that the irreversible damage was done. In the bitter winter following the death of Hitler, Berliners cut down the trees, even as the French had done to the trees in the Bois de Boulogne during the siege of Paris seventy-five years earlier—to make heat. Trees that had taken one hundred years to grow. Much had been done to replace them, but the forest looked young as Blackford walked down the Strasse des 17. Juni toward the Brandenburg Gate.

  On his left was the Soviet Memorial, a Russian enclave in West Berlin, guarded by two Soviet soldiers: a colonnade surmounted by a massive statue of a soldier, flanked by the usual artillery pieces and tanks. It was put together, celebrating the Soviet gift for cannibalization, from the marbled remains of the former Reichstag nearby, whose destruction by fire in 1933 gave Hitler the excuse he needed to suspend the opposition. Now it was redeveloped, at a cost of one hundred million DMs. Blackford could discern, though not easily, the Italian Renaissance structure built to house the Prussian parliament. He walked on to the Brandenburg Gate, just inside East Berlin, where the Volkspolizist extended his hand, examined Blackford’s passport, and waved him on. Here was what had been the Arch of Triumph for the German capital, through which victorious troops had been accustomed to march. Only a year or two earlier had the famous quadriga been restored—the two-wheeled chariot, drawn by four stallions, that sits on top of the Gate. It had been destroyed during the war, but in 1957 West Berliners discovered the molds in which the original had been cast in the late eighteenth century; and, in a relatively uncharted venture of cooperation, East and West Germans worked side by side to restore the Gate to its former eminence. Blackford passed the Soviet Embassy, turning left on Schadowstrasse toward Mittelstrasse, a ten-minute walk from the Gate.

  He went at a brisk but unhectic pace. In his gloved hand he clutched a rolled-up newspaper, in the fashion of bus and subway riders. He stopped outside a hardware shop to look in the window, in fact to look at his watch. At seven minutes to eleven Reynard would open the garage door. It was now three minutes short of that moment, and Blackford had two blocks to walk. He set out, slightly moderating his pace.

  He turned the corner at Mittelstrasse. The street was dilapidated, but then so was the whole of East Berlin. On the south side there were row houses, opposite them a few makeshift buildings abutting a block-wide area that hadn’t yet been completely cleared from the rubble of yesteryear’s bombings. Fifteen years, and still uncleared! There was no comparable block in West Berlin. Blackford spotted, just beyond the derelict building without windows or shutters, a concrete garage with a prewar gas pump on its old tarmac, the rubber hose gray with dust and rot. Blackford edged closer to the buildings on the north side of the street. When he found himself abreast of the gas pump he paused, turned, and walked directly into the space that had opened up for him. The door closed behind him. There was light in the loft, insufficient to illuminate the area where he stood. Reynard turned on his flashlight.

  “Sorry about the cold. Believe it or not, there’s still electricity here. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to show you the little film I have to show you. Since we may be here for a while—in fact, you may have to come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—we must struggle to keep warm.” Blackford could feel Reynard’s cynical smile, though he couldn’t see his features. Why on earth, Blackford thought angrily, didn’t I bring along a flashlight? Innocent stuff to carry in a greatcoat in midwinter, where the daylight goes before six. He wondered whether Michael would remember to bring his.

  “What do you mean?” Blackford asked, while following Reynard up the ladder to the loft.

  “They may not act today. But Monday is a very good day. Especially since last Friday and Saturday the postal workers were on strike. Today, the mailman will bring the mail for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.”

  Blackford, gripping the ladder, was hardly helped by occasional bursts of the flashlight into his face—Reynard trying to be courteous. Not his style. Blackford subconsciously counted the rungs on the ladder—seven—before reaching loft level. He gratefully approached the little heater that gave off its orange glow in the dark. But then, he thought, probably he had reason to be grateful for the cold: it stood off the dissipated, but still mephitic, odors of oil, gas, rust, and rotted and burnt rubber.

  “Come,” Reynard beckoned him toward the semicircular mullioned window overlooking the street. “You will have to stand on the wooden case. When your friend comes, we can all take turns watching for the postman. Meanwhile I will show you the film. You brought the money, no?”

  “Yup. I brought the money, Reynard. But unless I’m convinced you’ve got the right drop, the money stays with me.”

  “We will see. Today, I hope. If not, soon. I will show the movie,” he stopped to look at his watch, “as soon as your friend comes. I will go down the ladder now. He will be here in two minutes.”

  With a single illumination of the ladder, Reynard turned around and, flashlight in hand, descended into the void. On reaching the ground floor he looked again at his watch. Blackford stood up on the case to see whether he could discern the approach of Michael, but the angle was wrong. In a minute he saw daylight below, and the profile of a figure moving in. The door closed and it was dark again.

  “Your friend,” said Reynard.

  “How’re you doing … buddy?” Blackford said.

  “All right” was the reply. The tone of voice had not changed.

  “Did you bring a flashlight?”

  “Yes.” A second beam pierced the darkness. Michael, with his usual thoroughness, did some instant reconnoitering. The garage was mostly empty, but there were some barrels scattered about, and workbenches, and rusty oilcans, and a few lengths of pipe and discarded hoses.

  In German, Reynard told Michael to climb the ladder. Blackford no longer needed to translate functional German for Michael’s benefit. Holding the light in his right hand, Michael worked his way up, followed by Reynard. The beams from Reynard’s light never fell on Michael’s face. Blackford was anxious to look him in the face, but didn’t want to borrow the flashlight for that purpose.

  “Now, either sit on the floor, or stand”—Reynard guided Blackford by the shoulders—“approximately there. Your friend at your side. All right? Now I will go to the projector.”

  A crude but serviceable screen—a bedsheet hanging from two convenient nails—had been installed. An 8-mm projector was brought out from behind a barrel. Flashlight in mouth, Reynard connected the cord to the electrical outlet. The projector creaked on, focusing on a postman arriving at a clearly visible No. 48 Mittelstrasse. He deposited the mail in a postbox situated inside the archway and perfunctorily rang the bell, resuming his rounds. The camera zoomed in on the postbox, and in an exasperatingly long couple of minutes the door to No. 48 opened and a woman’s sweatered arm reached out through the opening and with a little key unlocked the bottom tray of the box, taking out its contents. The door closed. The screen went to white.

  “Here,” Reynard said, “obviously I did not keep the camera running. But I read to you now from my log, Sebastian. ‘The … lady … opened her mailbox at 12:05.’ What you will now see is the camera which I turned back on at”—his flashlight focused down on his notebook—“at 12:21.”

  The moving picture was now of a Wartburg, a driver, and a passenger in the front seat. The car stopped directly in front of No. 48. The front-seat passenger, a man of middle age and exaggerated paunch, wearing a brown fedora, groped his way out of the front seat and rang the bell. The camera focused closely on his hand. The doorbell he depressed by more than a single casual flick. Less than an elaborate code, Blackford no
ted: something simple, on the order, perhaps, of–––. In less than one minute the door opened again; again, only partly. And the woman’s hand extended through the narrow opening, giving the man an envelope.

  He walked casually back into the car, and now the camera zoomed onto the license plate, IZ 58–23. The car drove off, and the screen went again to white.

  “Now,” said Reynard, his voice audibly excited, “now—watch this.”

  The screen showed 63–65 Unter den Linden, from a discreet distance—“You cannot, my dear Sebastian, place a camera too close. It is, after all, the principal KGB office outside of Moscow.”

  “That’s good news,” Blackford said. “I thought it was in Washington.”

  “I like your jokes, Sebastian. But now watch. Because my camera has a very highly developed telescopic lens. Watch now. And please understand, Sebastian, it took many hours of filming and watching to get this.”

  The camera—after blipping through a number of obvious false starts, filming sedans that turned out to be of similar model and color, but not distinctively qualified—now focused on a car that came to a stop, having paused first at the well-guarded sentry post under the portico of the recently rebuilt Soviet Embassy. “The time now”—Reynard beamed his flashlight on his log—“is 12:30—in normal circumstances, the time required to go, let us say, from 48 Mittelstrasse to 63–65 Unter den Linden.” The camera brought in the sedan, and by the time it came to a full stop under the wide portico, its focus was exclusively on the license plate: IZ 58–23. “Now watch, watch,” Reynard said excitedly. The camera lens had obviously reached the limit of its telescopic reach, but succeeded in discerning the profile of the man who opened the door and mounted the steps. That profile was distinctive.

  The screen went again to white. And Reynard turned off the main switch, reducing them all to virtual blackness. Only the beam from Reynard’s flashlight, muted by his fingers to prevent it from blinding, lit, barely, the surroundings: insufficiently to discern the features of any of the three participants. Michael had not said a word.