The Cutout (27 page)

TWELVE
Bratislava, 6:45
P.M.

O
LGA TECIAK FLED FROM HER APARTMENT
with her cello case dragging behind her like a corpse. She fled with her blood pounding in her veins and tears welling in her eyes. In all the years of her life, years when Slovakia was a police state and years when it was a democracy in name only, she had never felt the depth of terror that animated her at this instant. The police state had never threatened her child.

She tossed the cello into the back of her car and drove out into the night, through the chasms of ugly concrete buildings, all of them alike. Rain lashed down, and a dark gray service van—electricity? plumbing?— blundered heavily into a puddle ten feet away and sent a sheet of water slapping against her windshield. She jerked backward, as though the dirty brown stream had struck her in the face. The van shouldered past. It went on, the driver glancing neither to right nor left.

Olga sped over the bridge that spanned the Danube. She did not spare a glance for the houseboats pulled up along its banks. She ignored the floodlit ramparts
of Bratislava Castle; the fortress had never saved her from anything. She drove toward the city’s heart, debating within her mind what exactly she should do.

“Mlan,” said Vaclav Slivik quietly. He was positioned at the window, staring through a slit in the drawn drapes. A pair of high-powered binoculars hung around his neck. Behind him, the lights were doused. With the coming of night and Olga’s release had also come caution; they would post a guard until she had returned, until they could leave.

“What is it?”

Vaclav held a finger to his lips and with his other hand motioned Krucevic to his side. The two men stared down at the darkened parking lot. Vaclav pointed. On the curb opposite the building’s main drive, the dark gray van was almost invisible in the night; Krucevic could make out nothing but a broad, square hump. An apparently deserted hump. The hairs rose along the back of his neck.

The listeners had arrived. They had tracked him through Greta Oppenheimer’s phone call; soon they would be searching the building with electronic ears for the voice that matched their profile.
Criminal stupidity.
Why had he waited for darkness? He should have gone when he had the chance.

They would not find him immediately. But in a matter of minutes, the building would be surrounded. The roof, a landing pad for commandos. And he had let Olga Teciak go.

“The fire escape,” Krucevic murmured in Vaclav’s ear. “There must be one. Take the car and find that woman while you still can. Then meet us tomorrow in Budapest. Go!”

The Slovak State Orchestra was performing that evening in the opera house, not far from the U.S. embassy, where even now, the CIA station chief was in communication with the team in the dark gray van. Olga Teciak looked at her watch. She had twenty-seven minutes until curtain time, which was in fact no time at all. At this very moment, she should be pulling into her parking space, unloading the cello, and tuning her strings amidst the gabble of her section’s voices.

She drove past the opera and the Carlsbad Hotel (where the Soviet-era casino lights gleamed red and white in the darkness), past the U.S. embassy building with its invisible guards. Rain pelted her windshield, rain that held the promise of snow, and she mopped frantically with her bare hand at the steam clouding the underside of the glass. Unable to come to a decision.

They did not simply let you walk into the embassy, of that she was certain. It was United States territory, after all, and no one could merely walk into the United States. You required powerful friends, influence, a great deal of money or the proper kind of blackmail. Olga’s life was too ordinary for these.

She drove aimlessly, her vision clouded by the fog on her windshield. Then she swerved abruptly and brought the car to a halt at the curb. She fumbled in her purse for a token.

A dash through the rain in her high heels and long dress, the coat pulled willy-nilly around her, no protection at all. The icy rain streamed through her chignon and down her neck as she reached the pay phone. Her hair would be ruined now, the hem of her formal gown splashed with mud. Impossible to appear onstage even if
she threw down the receiver and drove back like a maniac. She willed her numbed fingers to thrust the token through the slot. Her die was cast. She asked for the number of the U.S. embassy.

The operator gave it to her in a neutered voice. The operator had no conception of what it was like to leave a terrified little girl in a house full of violent men, to leave your only child because you had no choice. The operator did not know what this phone call would cost.

“Embassy of the United States,” said a woman in abominable Slovak.

“Please,” Olga said, the tears suddenly crowding her throat, “you have got to help me and I have not much time. I must speak to your ambassador.”

“The ambassador is engaged this evening.”

“But the woman you are looking for is in my house, and they are going to kill her. They are going to kill my daughter, they are going to kill me—”

A hand slammed down abruptly on the phone’s cradle, cutting the connection. The line went dead.

Olga gasped.

Vaclav Slivik stood behind her, a quizzical smile on his face. She must look wild, and pathetic, Olga thought: wet snarls of hair about her forehead, mascara streaming.

“You’re soaked, my dear,” he said. “That will never do for the performance. What are you thinking of?”

“I—I needed to call a friend,” Olga said.

She replaced the useless receiver, her fingers clenched as though she could not bear to relinquish hope.

Vaclav grasped her arm. “You’re in no condition to drive. It has been a long day.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then perhaps I should take you to the opera.”

His fingers tightened around her coat sleeve; she was a rabbit in a snare. She stumbled at the curb. Rainwater drenched her shoes. Vaclav pulled her upright without a word and steered her toward his car.

It was parked a few feet behind her own, and in his haste to reach her, Vaclav had left the headlights on. They flooded the backseat of Olga’s car and the cello case huddled there like a third person. Vaclav didn’t bother to fetch the instrument. They both knew she would never need it again.

Otto Weber ignored the fire escape—no one who intended to appear innocent before the eyes of a dark gray van would consider climbing by stealth down the back of the building. Otto walked out the front door, in a drab old raincoat borrowed from Olga’s closet, with a serviceable black nylon briefcase slung over his shoulder. He wore a knit cap on his shaved head. And for the first time in a long time, he looked possessed of a certain decency.

He strolled casually down the drive, head bowed in the rain, his eyes on the puddles forming at his feet. His gloved hands swung idly at his sides. He seemed oblivious to gray vans and their questionable occupants, although he was making directly for their position at the curb.

He went up to the blue car sitting two spaces behind the van and groped in his pockets for keys. They would be studying him in the rearview mirror now, ready to drive on at a moment’s notice. He let his eyes drift indifferently over the bulky old vehicle, its lettering scratched and the bumper eaten with rust, and then his expression changed to one of joyful interest. He had need of an electrician himself. He
had been meaning to call one today. He sauntered up to the driver’s window and tapped on the glass with one large knuckle, grinning foolishly at the guy behind the wheel.

They were polite to a fault, these Americans.

When the window slid down, Otto put a bullet in the driver’s brain. His companion died reaching for a gun.

THIRTEEN
Berlin, 9:17
P.M.

W
ALLY CALLED A TAXI FOR CAROLINE
and gave the driver instructions to take her directly to the Hyatt. But the moment the lights of Sophienstrasse dwindled in the distance, she tapped on the man’s window and told him in passable German to pull over. She handed him some marks and set off alone, on foot, into the darkness of the Jewish Quarter. She was looking for Oranienburger Strasse and Mahmoud Sharif.

The abandoned building that Wally had called the Tacheles was really the remnant of a much larger structure that had been mostly destroyed by Allied bombs. It rose five stories above the street and consumed most of a city block. Neon lights and clouds of steam punctuated the Berlin darkness. She stopped in front of Obst und Gemüse, a restaurant across the street, and studied the wreck of a building from a safe distance. It was the sort of structure a giant might assemble as a play toy, all tumbled blocks of concrete, jagged frames where there had once been windows, a few massive Art Nouveau figures still poised on the ends of columns. Arches that trailed
away into nothing. An elevator shaft exposed to sky. Most of the windows were boarded up or bricked over; the scorch marks of intense heat still flickered up the walls. Derelict pipes and the remains of a refrigerator were scattered on the ground, found art. And from within came the sounds of laughter, a racking cough, the current of voices.

The helmeted Volksturm guards were there, of course, pacing along the broken sidewalk with machine guns raised. But the policemen seemed less menacing against a backdrop of smoky light and laughter. It was remarkable, Caroline thought, that they even allowed the Tacheles to exist. It looked like the kind of building the Fritz Voekls of the world tore down.

There were several entrances punched in the building’s side. She chose one, hitched her purse higher on her shoulder, and dashed across Oranienburger Strasse.

A rusted iron door, standing ajar. She slid inside and paused an instant, allowing her eyes to adjust. Before her, a corridor tunneled into the Tacheles, bare bulbs swinging from an outlet in the ceiling. She followed it until it dove right and presented her with a flight of stairs; then she went up, heels clattering on the bare iron treads.

The second floor was less claustrophobic. A gallery ran around the open stairwell, with doorways opening off it. Some were dark, some glaringly lit. A jangle of guitar chords floated through one yawning entry; Caroline peered inside.

A man stood before a table, blowtorch raised. He wore a steelworker’s metal helmet and canvas overalls, but his arms were bare; a hammer and sickle was tattooed on his right bicep. Before him on the table was a mass of metal; beyond it, entirely nude, a woman posed
in a chair. A boom box played at maximum volume— German techno rave—and the man was shouting his own lyrics, enthusiastically off-key. A window was open to the night, cold enough to raise gooseflesh on the model’s thigh; her teeth, when she glanced at Caroline, were chattering.

Caroline turned to go, but the woman in the chair barked an unintelligible word, and the man wheeled, thrusting his visor skyward, and shouted in her direction. Caroline stopped in the doorway. The blowtorch was switched off. Another word in broken German, and his bloodshot eyes were staring at Caroline from a face streaming with sweat.