Berlin Encounter (10 page)

When Sally had finished translating, the man nervously replied, “I know nothing, madam. Nothing at all. I am a simple laborer. My family is hungry. I will work hard. Please, tell us what it is we are to do.”

“It’s like trying to get an answer out of a rabbit,” Sally told the major.

“Well, he’s had a lot of experience in learning how to survive.” He raised his hand toward the old man, motioning for him to stay where he was, then grasped her arm and led her toward the first sand pit. More quietly he asked, “See the good Colonel Burnes around here anywhere?”

“No.” She squinted in the growing sunlight, searched the empty grounds, willed him to appear before her eyes, for them to get back in the truck and leave and have all this behind them for good. “Not a sign.”

“With our minders over there, I’m not surprised.” Theo motioned toward the bottom of the pit. “Okay, then let’s make a little circuit, just the two of us. I’ll point out places and afterwards you go back and tell them where they’re supposed to dig. A sack from each. Got that?”

“Yes.” They were so close. If he got her message. If he wasn’t picked up. If, if, if. Her legs suddenly felt weak as water.

“Steady, now.” They made a slow circuit of the first pit, started over the uneven ground toward the second hole. Beyond was a pile of dirt excavated and mixed and ready for shipment. It had rested there long enough to sprout a meager crop of weeds. Beyond it rose a motley-colored sand dune with a giant hunk bitten from the nearest face. Theo led her slowly but steadily in that direction, pointing every once in a while, Sally nodding with one hand pressed to her chest, certain that if she did not keep a solid grip her heart would leap from her body.

“Maybe he’s worried about me,” Theo muttered. “Guy doesn’t know me from Adam. Okay, let’s split up here, you walk over that way, keep your eye on me. I’ll make little motions, you mark spots with your foot.”

Sally moved off and headed toward the hillside. And even though she was waiting for it, eager for it, hoping with all her heart for it, when the hiss came from the little channel she was about to cross, she almost collapsed with fright. She recovered quickly enough to make it look like a stumble, returned Theo’s signal, stood and looked across the pit toward the major, and whispered, “Jake?”

The pan he was just about to stack slipped from his hand, rattled on the tailgate, then clanged on the rocks below when the voice announced, “Your wife is a very beautiful woman.”

Jake did not need to look to know it was Hans Hechter. “Where is Rolf?”

“Gone.” He kept his voice low as he bent over, picked up the pan, and wiped it with his grimy handkerchief. “She is intelligent as well. Not to mention courageous.”

“Gone where?”

“To the American base. Disguised as a sack of sand, riding in the back of a dump truck, escorted by two jeeploads of Soviet troops.”

Jake accepted the pan, set it in place at the top of the stack, turned back and leaned nonchalantly upon the tailgate. The morning customers for coffee and husks were gone. Now the market was almost empty. A few stragglers stepped hesitantly over the rough ground, picking at the paltry items on offer.

Jake was stationed as he had been instructed, between two other trucks also bearing hardware and household goods. Their vehicle’s front bumper rested close to the single remaining wall of an office building; above their heads were the ghosts of a few placards proclaiming the proprietor who had lost all in the war. Crumbling relics of walls extended to either side, forming a mini-tunnel into which he had nosed his truck. This position offered them a semblance of privacy and distance from their neighbors.

Jake kept his face immobile as Hechter swiftly sketched out their journey and the contact, his eyes flickering in bored fashion over the few would-be shoppers. If there were watchers, Jake could not identify them. Even their neighbors gave them little mind. They had paid their dues like all the others and been assigned a spot and merited little further concern.

Hechter reached the point where they had spoken from the ditch and said, “Your wife was most concerned that you had not accompanied us.”

“I can imagine.”

“More than concerned. She was distraught. It took the major quite a time to calm her enough to make plans.”

“What major?”

A trace of humor came and went within the depths of Hechter’s clear blue eyes. “He said that you would probably ask that very same question.”

In a voice so low that it scarcely carried to Jake, much less to the people around them, Hechter related the little that he had gathered from the pair while remaining hidden in the ditch. How there had been a leak, probably a spy, within NATO intelligence. How their local operatives had not been simply sent elsewhere, but rather eliminated. How Jake himself might already be compromised. And how the Russian officer had ordered Sally and the major to leave by noon and not return.

“I have to tell you,” Hechter finished. “Your wife was less than impressed with your reason for not coming.”

“No,” Jake agreed quietly. “She wouldn’t have been.”

“She told me to remind you of the promise you made to her before your departure. She said that several times.”

“I remember,” Jake murmured, his heart aching. “One thing I don’t understand, though. Why couldn’t they take you, too?”

Hechter shifted his gaze. “They could.”

“So?”

“I decided,” Hechter said slowly, “that I owed you a message.”

Jake inspected the scientist, wondered at his own inability to overcome his aversion and offer the man a simple thanks. But in that single glance toward Hechter’s proud features, Jake found himself again confronted by the specter of the past and what he had lost. The anger simply would not let him be.

A querulous voice startled him by demanding, “Well? Are you open for business, or is this gossip of yours going to continue on all day?”

Jake swung around, then lowered his eyes to meet the impatient gaze of a woman as broad as she was high. Two beefy arms rested propped upon her ample hips. A pair of legs thicker than his waist were planted in the rocky soil. Jake started to comment about her not appearing to have suffered overmuch from a lack of food, then changed his mind. The woman looked like she packed quite a wallop. “What can I do for you, mother?”

“Mother, is it now? You’ll not be garnering a higher price from me with those fancy words of yours, gypsy. That I can promise you for sure.” She stepped forward, shouldered Hechter to one side, and went on loud enough for the neighboring trucks to hear, “I’ve a need for a skillet. One large enough to cook for a hungry man and six children determined to eat everything the cursed war has not destroyed.”

“Then you’ll be after this one,” Jake said, shifting the pile around and hefting a cast-iron pan fully two feet across. “The finest you’ll find anywhere.”

She accepted the long handle, grunted noncommittally, and demanded, “So how much do you want to steal from a defenseless old mother, then?”

“You’re the one who’ll be doing the stealing,” Jake replied, taking in the steel-gray bun, the hands so chapped they had swollen to almost twice their normal size, the determined set to her chin. “You’ll not find a lower price anywhere.”

“If that’s the case, then perhaps I could find means to buy more than one.” Her back to the market, she leaned over, rattled the pile of pots, asked quietly, “Do you have the Bibles?”

Jake faltered for a second time that morning. “What?”

“The Bibles, man, the Bibles.” Her voice carried the continual hiss of a scalding teapot. “Don’t you dare tell me that blind bear of a man sent me to the wrong truck.”

“No, no,” Jake muttered, collecting himself. “I have them.”

“Then listen. Set them in the space between the front of your truck and the wall.”

“But how—”

“Just do it, and if you want to save your own worthless hide, you’ll take your lunch in the same spot.” She wheeled about, said more loudly, “You’re as big a thief as the rest of them.”

“Take it or leave it,” Jake said flatly, his voice as loud as hers.

“Aye, there it is,” the huge woman said bitterly, handing him a tightly folded bundle of notes. “No choice at all for the likes of me, is there.”

Jake made a pretense of counting the bills, shoved them in his pocket, hefted two of the larger pans, recognized genuine avarice in her gaze when he passed them over. There was need here, as well as subterfuge. “Wait,” he said.

He scrambled into the truck and came out with three pairs of children’s boots. He piled them on top of the pots in her arms, was pleased to see her eyes open larger and her voice say softly, “Shoes.”

“A gift,” he declared loudly. “All I ask is that you tell your friends, those with money, that here stands an honest trader.”

“Huh!” she snorted. “And how many would a woman of my means know who have money? Saved all winter for these pots, I have.” Then she pretended to shift the pots for a better grip, making a racket in the process, and saying swiftly, “All the shoes up with the Bibles. But none of the pans. Too much noise.”

Jake nodded, pretended to help her organize her load, asked, “What’s happening this afternoon?”

“Questions for later.” She took a step back, stopped to eye him up and down. “It’s not often I have to make a second judgment, especially of a gypsy and a man of the road. But I’ll say to all who ask, it’s a pity we don’t have more like yourself.”

“Good day to you, good woman,” Jake called after her, conscious of the eyes. He then made a pretense of inspecting the almost empty market lot before turning to Hechter and proclaiming loudly, “Is that to be our only customer of the day? I’ve seen more activity in a morgue.”

He motioned for Hechter to climb on board. “Get up there and start handing me down things. We might as well clean the truck as stand around here looking miserable.”

Attention soon turned elsewhere, as Jake piled the pots and pans about his feet, then began accepting the bales of shoes and feed and taking them up front. With swift motions he shifted the secret handle, then started pulling out the burlap sacks of Bibles. There was nothing on the outside to differentiate these sacks from those holding the shoes.

By the time the compartment was empty and resealed, both men were puffing hard. Jake handed him a rag and said quietly, “Just move the dirt around as you wipe. Best to keep the doors hidden even if they are empty.”

Hechter nodded and set to work, all his former bluster silenced. Jake watched him work and wondered again at his own lingering resentment. The man had clearly apologized as best as he was able. He had even returned to tell him of the contact with Sally, when all reason and self-interest would have urged him to escape. Yet here Jake stood, trapped within emotions which both reason and his own faith told him were not only wrong, but also unworthy. But telling himself these things did nothing to free him from what he felt, nor dim this flame of anger whenever he looked in Hechter’s direction.

Jake waited until Hechter had settled down beside him, then asked quietly, “What was the real reason you came back?”

Hechter started to reply, then caught himself, looked beyond Jake, and his eyes grew wide. Before Jake could turn around, a tremulous woman’s voice replied, “Because I begged him to.”

“Don’t be mad with me. Please. I couldn’t stand it just now.”

“I’m not mad,” Jake replied, and continued to hustle her up front. But when they approached the wall, Jake stopped cold, looked about, asked, “What is going on around here?”

“I couldn’t go back without you. I just couldn’t.” Sally’s features played halfway between stubborn defiance and a teary-eyed plea. “So I staged a fight with Theo, that’s the major—well, only half staged, because he said I was being a total fool and might jeopardize your safety, but I didn’t care, I don’t care, I couldn’t leave you here with goodness knows what’s about to happen.”

Jake walked around the space in front of the truck where he had left the sacks of shoes and Bibles. The space was completely empty. He inspected the wall, found it as rock solid and unyielding as before. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“I just walked off. The Russians didn’t try to stop me. Their orders must have been about Theo and the truck, or maybe they were just worried because it was getting toward eleven-thirty and we had to be back by noon. The roads coming here were empty. Totally, completely empty. I wasn’t stopped once. I came straight here. There aren’t even any policemen down on the street in front of the market. Nobody.” She reached over, stopped Jake’s baffled gaze about the space in front of their truck, said, “Tell me you’re not mad.”

Hans stepped up beside them. “It’s just gone noon.” He looked around the area, demanded, “Where are the goods?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that,” Jake replied.

“Jake, please, would you look at me and—” Sally stopped with a little squeak. She hopped back a step and sat on the hood of the truck. “The ground just moved.”

A section of the dusty earth came up, pushed aside, and revealed the scraggly dark beard of the one-eyed man. He nodded at Jake, jerked at the sight of Sally, demanded quietly, “What is she doing here?”

“Long story.”

“No time. Come, quickly, all of you. And watch your step. There are rats.”

———

“Berlin has become a microcosm of all Europe,” the burly man was saying. “This was Stalin’s decision. What happens here will determine what will happen first in Germany, then France, then Italy. Then, my friend, it will be too late.”

“Too late for what?” Jake still had difficulty fitting together the jumbled pieces confronting him. This one-eyed man and his precise speech. The surroundings, the atmosphere, the urgency with which this man spoke.

“Too late to do what must be done,” he replied.

Before he could continue, Sally interrupted him with, “Where is everybody?”

He looked at her. Clearly he was unsure what to think of this woman and resented her presence. “We have sent everyone home until the emergency has stabilized. It is safer.”

“What emergency?”

“All in good time.” The man returned his attention to Jake. “You hold to the same error as most of your countrymen. I saw this coming, as did others. In order to fight the war with Stalin’s Russia on your side, you chose to overlook the kind of man with whom you dealt. Now it is hard for you to accept the truth.”

“And that is?”

“That this man is your enemy. And not just yours. He is the enemy of all freedom. And all faith.”

A bear, Jake decided. That was what this Karl Schreiner most resembled. A big hairy bear, scarred from countless battles and carrying the burden of things which Jake could only imagine. He ventured a guess, “You were on the Russian front?”

“I was. And walked home when it was over, seven months on the road through ice and snow and mud and rain, with hunger and pain as my only companions.” Karl started to scratch at his blind eye, caught himself and lowered his hand. “You think this is what has caused me to think the way I do? Listen, my friend. Stalin’s world has no room for faith in anything but Stalin. He may dress his lie up in other words, like brotherhood or Communism or Mother Russia. But in truth Stalin is the new Caesar, setting himself up to be worshiped and made a god on earth.”

Faith. This was the most jarring fragment of all. The man claimed to be not just a believer, but a lay minister as well. They sat together in a stone-lined office. Beyond the stout open door was what had become a meeting hall and before had been the wine cellar of a gracious manor. The manor was gone, the wine racks now stacked with Jake’s Bibles, as well as clothes and shoes and medicines and children’s toys.

Sally interrupted them again. Her voice was soft and tired, yet somehow stronger because of the effort it took to speak. “Jake and I are believers.”

Surprise registered on the broad-bearded features. Karl looked from one to the other. “This is truth?”

“It is,” Jake confirmed. Proud of her. So glad to be with her that for the moment, for this tiny sliver of time and safety and comfort, there was no room for worry or condemnation. She was here. It was enough.

Narrow windows lined one wall of both the office and the meeting hall, permitting in meager afternoon light. The ceiling in the hall was high and vaulted, rising in great stone arches which intersected before descending to sturdy pillars. The benches were hard and wooden and still bore the marks of vineyards which had supplied the crates from which they were made. The room was unadorned save for a single large cross, the timbers taken from the derelict manor, rough and scarred by war and bombs. Jake found his gaze repeatedly drawn through the office doorway and out to that war-scarred cross, as though there were a message being whispered to his heart, something he either could not hear or was frightened to accept.

Karl gathered himself and went on, “The West sits at the table and argues about border disputes and the fact that they can no longer move easily through the eastern sector of Berlin. But this is just a smokescreen. It is intended to keep you occupied while other, greater operations go unnoticed.”

“What operations?”

“This is what I shall have to show you.” He rose to his feet. “We leave in fifteen minutes.”

Sally waited until Karl had moved off before asking, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Jake looked at her. She had not released his hand since descending into the sewer and watching the burly man and his assistant slide the segment of false flooring back into place. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” she said, and showed it. Her face bore the finely etched lines of extreme fatigue and tension. “I don’t think I’ve really slept since this started.”

“Do you want to rest?”

“Later.” Her eyes rested calmly on Jake as she declared, “I trust him.”

He nodded, accepted the information, said, “You’ve changed since we’ve gotten here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were a frightened little mouse back at the truck,” he replied.

“I was afraid you were going to try and send me away,” she said, her fingers linking themselves more tightly with his. “I didn’t want to fight with you.”

He freed one hand to trace a feather-touch down the side of the frame made by her tousled hair. “I’m glad you came.”

The haunted look returned, flitting across her features like clouds across a windswept sky. “After you left England, I found myself lying there awake at night, facing changes. Some nights I felt like it was the only thing that kept me intact, feeling like I needed to use this time to make these realizations and build for the future. A future together. Otherwise I might have drowned in my fears that you wouldn’t . . .”

He stilled her words with a finger to her lips, or tried to, but she shook her head. Whatever it was, it needed to be said. Jake settled back, filled to bursting with the wonder of being so loved.

“I’ve always been independent, determined to go my own way and be my own person. I never thought being married would change this. But it has. Before, I thought it was going to be just fine, you’d go off on your own little adventures, and it would give me the space to be myself. But it won’t work, Jake. I’m too much a part of you.” Sally leaned over far enough to place her head on his shoulder. “We have to do something about this, Jake. I’m not asking you to change. I’m only asking for you to make it so whatever it is you need to do, I can do it with you.”

“I understand,” he murmured. He did.

A sharp knock sounded on the door. Karl pushed through, every action fueled by his impatient strength. He looked at Sally, said, “You and your husband may take my quarters. They lie beyond the kitchen and the dorm where your Hans Hechter has bunked down. I suggest you go rest.” His attention swiveled to Jake. “Time to move.”

———

“Anyone who lives by faith in the coming days will have to be a fighter.”

They were crouched in the same rabbit warren of sewer tunnels that had carried them from the market to the manor’s bombed-out hulk. Overhead rumbled a seemingly endless train of vehicles so heavy they caused the walls around Jake to tremble. The only light came from a kerosene lantern in Karl’s massive grip. The smell of burning oil helped to stave off the worst of the sewer’s stench.

“That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?” the burly man pressed. “How one of Hitler’s soldiers came to be sitting here beside you, a spy for the West and a soldier for God.”

“There is a lot about this whole business,” Jake replied, “which I do not begin to understand.”

“God speaks to a man when he is ready and able to listen. For me, it happened on an icy field in the middle of nowhere, when death was as real to me as the cold that blistered my feet. He spoke to me then. I heard His voice, and I knew that I was to be saved.” He thumped his barrel chest. “Not saved in the sense of living longer in this pitiful body. For an instant of clarity I realized that if I lived or died, it was
His
choice, and I was going to be content with the decision.”

“I understand,” Jake said quietly.

“He called me back here,” the deep voice rumbled on. “Back to a city and a country as ruined by war as I was myself. Filled with needs which no human hand could answer. Desperate with hunger for the truth I had found and brought back with me.” The single dark eye glimmered in the lantern light. “But it will take a fighter to be a Christian in these coming times. Make no mistake. Stalin’s world has less room for true Christian faith than the Nazis did. Already the NKVD, the secret police, and their German minions called the People’s Police have started their sorties. Invading houses of worship, stripping them bare. One Bible per church.”

“What about the ones we brought?”

“We will not keep them long.” He pointed toward the gradually diminishing noise overhead. “As soon as this moment of crisis has passed, we will distribute them to those who have lost everything. There are many such among us. It is the struggle that keeps me busy, seeing to their needs.” Karl paused, squinted as he examined Jake, then went on, “At least, the external struggle. My internal struggle is far different.”

“So is mine,” Jake said quietly, the words coming out before he had realized he had spoken, as though the burly man’s own confession was an invitation he had been waiting for. Jake found the growing silence overhead pushing at him. Urging him to open doors that he vastly preferred to keep shut. He found himself struggling to speak, and at the same time to keep still, unwilling to discuss personal matters with this man who had once been his enemy. And then he could not remain silent any longer. “I feel like I’m going back over the same problems again and again inside myself.”

“I have sensed this struggle within you.” The burly man did not seem the least bit surprised to hear such things, seated there in the dank putrid darkness of a Berlin sewer. “Yours is a common trait among believers.”

“I thought I had left all this behind me,” Jake went on. “But here it still is, worse than before.”

“Not worse,” the man corrected. “Seen in the fullness of its proper time.” He set the lantern on the stone ledge beside him and rubbed two tired hands down the sides of his face. “Four months after I set up the
Evangelische Keller,
that is what we call our cellar church, I was approached by a group of neighbors. The rubble lot where once three blocks of apartments and an office building had stood was being taken over by black marketeers. There was liquor and fights and growing evil. Yet the people did not want the black marketeers to leave. They needed the goods. What they wanted was for me to control them. They knew I was a fighter, a former soldier, and most of those who remained were either women with children or too old or too infirm to do it themselves.”

Karl’s deep voice echoed gently up and down the concrete way. “I was terrified that I would revert to what I had been before. After all, I had only been a Christian for not even two years, and I had been a soldier three times that long. The only reason I ran the Keller at all was that none of the priests who had been carted off by the Nazis had returned from the concentration camps. None. Our little region of Berlin was without either church or minister. But my neighbors did not see me as a preacher. They saw me as a
man.
Someone who could be called on in their hour of need. My fears meant nothing to them. So what if I returned to my angry ways and fought and struggled and even perhaps killed again? They trusted me because I was a Christian, but they needed me because I was strong.”

The stare was inward directed, the coarse features twisted with the power of his struggle. “I did the only thing that made sense. I prayed. I prayed and I waited, and as I waited I watched the situation worsen. Prostitutes began collecting around the market area, drawing in more of the war’s refuse. So with my former comrade whom you have met, a man who has also now committed his life to the Lord, together we did what was needed. We cleared out the worst of the criminals and set out to control the others. We paid the bribes demanded by the Soviet soldiers and the German bureaucrats. We fought when we had to. We collected payments from all the traders, and with this money we financed the church. The only working church now in all this segment of Berlin.”

“You did right,” Jake said quietly.

“Yes? You are sure of this?” The fierce gaze turned outward again. “But what of the anger that is drawn out of me? What of this pleasure I feel for the battle and the struggle and the power in controlling this market?” When Jake did not answer, the gaze returned inward. “Then through church channels, through
church
channels, I was asked to send my assessment of the Communists’ attitude toward the faithful. This led to other questions, about the rebuilding, the economy, the attitude of the people, the police, the effects of the Soviets. And then to helping directly with problems such as yours. I did not hesitate to respond. Yet I knew great reluctance. Not about the actions, about
myself.
All these activities were drawing out things within myself which I did not wish to see. I was confronted time and again with my own anger, with my own unsolved problems, with battles that still raged far below the surface.”