Freedom Bridge: A Cold War Thriller (13 page)

Chapter 29

H
err Gelb drove them to the beach, organized changing rooms, and settled his charges with beach chairs and umbrellas. “I’ll have you back in plenty of time to get you to your dinner appointment with Chancellor Malik,” he assured them.

The blazing sun was low in a blue cloudless sky, the small beach filled with bathers. Lake Muritz was surprisingly blue, much like a bay adjacent to the sea, the water barely beginning to turn seasonally chilly. Children romped, parents chased after them. Men and women swam, some venturing beyond the buoys and white rope that demarked the allowable swimming area.

Adrienne walked toward the water and sank ankle-deep in warm white sand. Arching her back, she stretched luxuriously, looked around at her fellow sunbathers, and for the first time lost the tension that had ridden with her like an uninvited guest through the streets of East Berlin. Glancing at the placid blue lake, she was reminded of travel brochure clichés: picnic baskets, castles in the sand, carefree chatter—

Except that the chatter was practically non-existent, she realized. How could people compete with the blare emanating from loudspeakers that perched on long poles buried in the sand? She heard the strident notes of a military march as it oom-pahed its way into a clash of cymbals, followed by the razored cadence of carefully enunciated German.

“What are they saying?” she asked Galya, who happened to be nearby.

“I understand few words only. For me, the foreign language is hard.”

Adrienne smiled. “Your English is a lot better than my German.”

“How kind to give me compliment on my not very good English,” Galya sniffed.

Adrienne restrained a sigh. For the umpteenth time, she wished she could retract her tactless offer about the gown. But if last night’s apology hadn’t cleared the air by now, nothing would.

As the two women moved away from the shoreline, their silence assaulted by the relentless staccato of the loudspeaker-voice, a strong breeze caught fringes of the beach umbrellas they passed, snapping them with the same staccato beat.

Adrienne almost laughed when she spotted the ever-vigilant Luka Rogov. He had plopped down under an umbrella adjacent to an empty chair, even though Dr. Andreyev was sitting right next to him.

Comrade Ahab
in a perspiration-stained Russian uniform, keeping a watchful eye on his Moby-Dick.

Andreyev wore the inevitable sunglasses. Interesting how they’d given him an air of mystery—but how commonplace they seemed on a beach. No, it wasn’t the glasses that were off-putting, she decided. It was his yachting cap. He wore it tipped jauntily to one side. It struck her as . . . unseemly and out of place on a man who had gone out of his way to pointedly show her the underbelly of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

The sudden blast of another marching song ended her reverie just as he half-turned in her direction. “Dr. Andreyev,” she called out, “would you mind translating—”

“Dr. Andreyev is chest deep in Lake Muritzsee,” Kurt told her, wearing a Cheshire-cat grin. “Will Dr. Brenner do?”

“I . . . it was the dark glasses.”

“Darling! I didn’t think you knew how to blush.”

“I’m glad you’re amused,” she said tartly. “Since your German is impeccable, mind telling me what’s coming out of those loudspeakers?”

“Lectures, announcements. That sort of thing.”

“They’re broadcasting
lectures
to people on a beach?”

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “They’re also checking identity cards. See that uniformed guard over there?” He started to put his dark glasses back on. “Is it okay?” he teased. “Or are you apt to confuse me with our mysterious guide?”

“There is no mystery in dark glasses,” Galya remarked with a faint smile. “Dr. Andreyev must keep away light from eye infection. But is
big
mystery why your wife is mistaking him for her husband. I tell difference if
my
husband,” she purred, reaching up to adjust Brenner’s yachting cap at a more rakish angle. Looking him over with a mock-frown, she said, “Maybe Mrs. Brenner not notice
this
.” She touched a mole on Brenner’s shoulder. “Or
this
.” Her finger traced a thin line down his chest, white against deep tan. Dropping her hand, she laughed like a defiant child, then turned to face Adrienne Brenner’s anger.

Damn you!

Adrienne almost said it aloud—to Kurt, not the Barkova woman. To his arched eyebrow—a not-so-subtle sign that he was flattered. To the same half-smile that he flashed at operating-room nurses and cocktail-party hostesses.

“Having fun?” she said acidly. Turning her back on them both, she laid out a colorful beach towel, sank into it, and closed her eyes.

The sun was a lightweight blanket on her body. Surrendering to its warmth, she shut out the world—tried to anyway. Her article was practically writing itself. Entire paragraphs darted in and out of her head. The only thing she’d dared reduce to writing were some memory-jogging words that would be meaningless to anyone else. Photographs were more accurate than memory—and much more incriminating, she consoled herself. If only she could manage to take the ones she
really
wanted. Lugging a conspicuously large camera around for the few photos she was allowed to take was a nuisance. On the other hand, she had to admit it was a terrific distraction on the rare occasion when she could whip the tiny Minox out of her shoulder bag and snap away.

She let it all go finally and surrendered to the delicious warmth of her sun-blanket.

Until she felt the blanket slip away, as if some presumptuous cloud had crossed the almost cloudless sky. Turning lazily on her side, she reached with half-closed eyes for the terrycloth robe she’d dropped next to her towel.

Her arm stalled in mid-air as if someone had grabbed it.

Kiril Andreyev stood looking down at her. His shadow across her body had blotted out the sun.

She felt the weight of his glance. Her own tight breathing. The shock of seeing his body outside the prison of an ill-fitting suit.

Even her eyes betrayed her. She couldn’t take them off his hands as they reached for a towel. The insolent line of his legs, braced against the hard-driving wind. She was aware of the curve of her hip. Of a bathing suit that rose obediently to her neck but left her shoulders and back exposed—

The shadow ruptured like broken glass. He had turned to respond to something Kurt was saying.

She dropped back onto the towel and closed her eyes, feeling cold even though the sun was back.

* * *

When the helicopter was ready to board the passengers for the flight back, everyone resumed the seats they’d occupied before. Takeoff was uneventful.

As soon as the aircraft reached the altitude for horizontal flight, Kiril addressed the Brenners. “Before we took off, I instructed the captain to fly as low as possible as we approach East Berlin. I thought you might like to see East Germany’s newest attempt at improving its security against ‘capitalist encroachment’ on its sovereignty.”

Adrienne Brenner went into high alert, immediately grasping what  Andreyev was getting at. Convinced that there was a subtext to everything he said and did, and given the worldwide headlines a month or so earlier about East Germany’s newest attempt to “improve its security,” he
had
to be talking about
The Wall.

Before leaving New York, she had learned as much as she could about what was happening. Then on August 12, 1961, just a few weeks before she and Kurt set foot on East German soil, the Council of Ministers of the GDR had put out a patently self-serving and facially absurd statement.

“I know what you’re talking about,” she told Andreyev as she flipped to a page in her notebook. She paraphrased the Council of Ministers’ statement. How, in order to put a stop to the “hostile” activity of West Germany’s and West Berlin’s “attempt to regain lost territory and militaristic forces,” border controls of the kind generally found in every sovereign state would be set up at the border of the German Democratic Republic. Adrienne looked up from her notes. “What prompted the creation of those so-called border controls, Dr. Andreyev?”

“Mind changing seats with me for a few minutes?” Kiril asked Brenner. “It will make it easier for me to answer your wife’s questions.”

Brenner shrugged indifferently and took the seat next to Galya.

“Five years after the end of World War II—between 1950 and 1953—nearly one million citizens of the GDP’s workers’ paradise moved to West Germany. As the American saying goes, they voted with their feet. A quarter-million left within the first six months.”

Adrienne scanned her notes. “A million people in three years,” she said evenly. “How long did this go on?”

“A few more years. In 1957 the Communists imposed a passport law severely reducing the number of people leaving East Germany. Ironically, it was as if pressure applied to one end of a balloon forced the other end to bulge. By the end of 1958, the percentage of refugees using West Berlin as an escape hatch rose from sixty to ninety percent. And don’t forget, the subway was still running between East and West Berlin.”

“All defectors had to do was take a
subway
?”

He nodded, almost as if he couldn’t trust his voice. But Adrienne saw in his expression what he was unable to hide: a terrible sense of longing.

“How many people escaped?” she asked.

“By the end of 1961? Three and a half million East Germans—20 percent of the population. And because most of them were young and well-educated—physicians, teachers, engineers, skilled workers—some party officials were calling it a ‘brain drain.’ It got so bad that by 1960, only 61 per cent of East Germany’s population was of working age. It was obvious that the combined efforts of East Germany and the Soviet Union were needed to avert a crisis.”

“Are you telling me this combined effort has already begun?!”

“Several weeks ago. At midnight on August 12 to 13. East German Vopos and soldiers began to close the East to West Berlin border. Streets running parallel to the border were torn up. Barbed wire was strung. Four days later, the regime began to lay large concrete blocks. Guards were ordered to shoot anyone attempting to cross the border. According to Soviet intelligence, all of East Germany and East Berlin will in time be entirely sealed off from the West.”

“How exactly?”

“With chain fences. Concrete walls. Minefields in a no-man’s-land ‘death zone’ between what will later become
two
walls parallel to each other and snaking for miles. Vicious guard dogs will be caged and released to find and kill people trying to escape.”

“People whose only crime is wanting to be free,” she whispered.

“The entire East German population will be caged in,” he told her. “Family members will be sealed off from one another.”

Reaching for the wall telephone, he told Rolf Gruner in German to get as low as he could over what Kiril thought of as the early stages of The Wall’s
construction.

“I’ll do my best,” Gruner replied after a moment’s hesitation. “But I can’t enter West German airspace and I sure as hell don’t relish getting shot down in the East.”

“Thanks,” Kiril said as Gruner swung as close as he dared to the East Berlin side of the wall. He translated for the others, making sure Kurt Brenner, as well as his wife, heard him loud and clear.

Adrienne had stopped taking notes. Pressing her face to the large window next to her seat, she followed the helicopter’s trajectory—treetop level. Her face felt oddly still . . . like a wax dummy’s. She zeroed in on the smooth gray of concrete. The grainy unevenness of cement. The still-intact wall of some forgotten home. An unbroken series of bricked-up doors and windows. She shivered as a bright gold speck signaled malevolently—the sun’s reflection caught and held by razor-sharp glass shards all along the top. Like a sewing machine needle on a band of retreating fabric, her eyes drilled down the wall. She spotted a roller device—lengths of pipe atop the wall that forged a path through the broken glass so that anyone groping desperately for a handhold would slip. Between the pipes she saw metal poles with outspread arms, taut wires stretching from one pole to the next. Electrified? she wondered, closing her eyes as she stifled the urge to weep for its future victims.

Gruner banked sharply.

“Our pilot wants to avoid not just West Berlin,” Kiril explained, “but what might be called ‘aggressive notice’ from East Berlin radar.”

They were flying low enough for Adrienne to see a large park with a huge bronze statue on a white pedestal. She asked Kiril about it.

“The park? It’s the East Berlin Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park.”

“A memorial to what?” Adrienne asked cautiously.

“More precisely,
to whom
. It’s a military cemetery—an enormous mass grave commemorating 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin.”

Adrienne restrained a shudder. “What is it about mass burials and unmarked graves that seems so . . . so unsettling?” she wondered aloud.

“When a man dies, he should be permitted the dignity and solitude of a private resting place, not—” Kiril’s mouth twisted. “—not lowered into some anonymous collection of humanity.”

Luka Rogov understood virtually nothing of Kiril’s explanation. But his face brightened at the mention of the word “
Treptower.”
He’d heard about Treptower, all right. Tugging at Kiril’s sleeve, he said in Russian, “Look down there.”

“At what? I see the park, a bronze statue—and now the cemetery.”

“No, not cemetery of Great Patriotic War. Look at what comes after
.
”

“I see a field of some kind,” Kiril said, puzzled.

“Is secret, this field.” Rogov lowered his voice as if he were a fellow conspirator.

“Then why tell me?” Kiril asked warily.

“From kindness,” Luka said with a sly, setting-a-trap smile. “Field is new but not empty. You like know what is in it?”

He pressed binoculars into Kiril’s hands.

“I
don’t
like,” Kiril said, handing the binoculars back.

“Your friend Brodsky is in this field!” Luka announced triumphantly. “Your friend and other traitors, all together in one big hole, like garbage in garbage dump. Look!” Luka said insistently, brandishing the binoculars. “Still have time to say goodbye!”

Kiril’s head snapped back as if he’d just caught the sting of a whip.

Not Stepan. Not in such a place!

Swinging around in the small aisle until he faced Rogov, Kiril lunged for his throat.

With a swift upward motion, Rogov broke Kiril’s hold with one hand. With the other, he brought the butt of his Nagant revolver against the side of Kiril’s head. Staggering backward, Kiril fell against Galya and Brenner before dropping to the floor. Luka resumed his seat and holstered his gun.

His head bleeding, his mind reeling, Kiril pulled himself up as the others sat frozen in their seats. Reaching for the wall phone, he shouted orders in German to the flight deck.

Galya gasped.

“Godammit,” Brenner muttered, gripping the arm rests again.

Adrienne Brenner’s hand was shaking as she pressed a handkerchief against Kiril’s head wound.