the corner.
That's odd, she thought. Hans was as human as the next man, but he
usually managed to keep his dirty clothes out of sight. In fact, it was
odd not to find him sleeping off the fatigue of night duty.
Ilse felt a strange sense of worry. And then suddenly she knew.
At work there had been a buzz about a breaking news story-something
about Russians arresting two West Berliners at Spandau Prison. Later,
in her car, she'd half-heard a radio announcer say something about
Russians at one of the downtown police stations. She prayed that Hans
hadn't got caught up in that mess. A bureaucratic tangle like that
could take all night.
She frowned. Telling Hans about the baby while he was in a bad mood
wasn't what she had had in mind at all. She would have to think of a
way to put him in a good mood- first.
One method always worked, and she smiled thinking of it.
For the first time in weeks the thought of sex made her feel genuinely
excited. It seemed so long since she and Hans had made love with any
other goal than pregnancy. But now that she had conceived, they could
forget all about charts and graphs and temperatures and rediscover the
intensity of those nights when they hardly slept at all.
She had already planned a celebratory dinner-not a health-conscious
American style snack like those her yuppie colleagues from the
Yorckstrasse called dinner, but a real Berlin feast: Eisben, sauerkraut,
and Pease pudding. She'd made a special trip to the food floor of the
KaDeWe and bought everything ready-made. It was said that anything
edible in the world could be purchased at the KaDeWe, and Ilse believed
it. She smiled again. She and Hans would share a first-class supper,
and for dessert he could have her-as healthy a dish as any man could
want. Then she would tell him about the baby.
Ilse tied her hair back, then she took the pork from the refrigerator
and put it in the oven. While it heated, she went into the bedroom to
strip the soiled sheets. She laughed softly. A randy German woman
might happily make love on a forest floor, but on dirty linens? Never!
She knelt beside the bed and gathered the bedclothes into a ball. She
was about to rise when she saw something white sticking out from under
the mattress. Automatically, she pulled it out and found herself
holding a damp sheaf of papers.
What in the world? She certainly didn't remember putting any papers
under the mattress. It must have been Hans. But what would he hide
from her? Bewildered, she let the bedclothes fall, stood up, and
unfolded the onionskin pages.
Heavy, hand-printed letters covered the paper. She read the first
paragraph cursorily, her mind more on the circumstances of her discovery
than on the actual content of the papers. The second paragraph,
however, got her attention. It was written in Latin of all things.
Shivering in the chilly ai'r, she walked into the kitchen and stood by
the warm stove.
She concentrated on the word endings, trying to decipher the carefully
blocked letters. it was almost painful, like trying to recall formulas
from gymnasium physics. Her specialty was modern languages; Latin she
could hardly remember. Ilse went to the kitchen table and spread out
the thin pages, anchoring each corner with a piece of flatware.
There were nine. She took a pen and notepad from the telephone stand,
went back to the first paragraph of Latin, and began recording her
efforts. After ten minutes she had roughed out the first four
sentences. When she read straight through what she had written, the
pencil slipped from her shaking hand.
'Mein Gott, ' she breathed. 'This cannot be.'
Hans exited the cinema into the gathering dusk. He couldn't believe the
afternoon had passed so quickly. Huddling against the cold, he
considered taking the U-Bahn home, then decided against it.
It would mean changing trains at Fehrbelliner-Platz, and he would still
have some distance to walk. Better to walk the whole way and use the
time to decide how to tell Ilse about the Spandau papers. He started
west with a loping stride, moving away from the crowded Ku'damm. He
knew he was duty-bound to hand the papers over to his superiors, and he
felt sure that the mix-up with the Russians had been straightened out by
now. Yet as he walked, he was aware that his mind was not completely
clear about turning in the papers. For some irritating reason, when he
thought of doing that, his father's face came into his mind. But there
was something else in his brain. Something he soon recognized as Heini
Weber's voice saying: 'Three point seven million Deutschemarks -- .'
Hans had already done the calculations. At his salary it would take 150
years to earn that much money, and that represented the offer of a
single magazine for the 'Hitler diaries.' That was a powerful
temptation, even for an honest man.
As Hans reached the mouth of the side street, a dark shape disengaged
itself from the gloom beneath the cinema awning and fell into step
behind him. It neither hurried nor tarried, but moved through the
streets as effortlessly as a cloud's shadow.
CHAPTER FOUR
5.'50 Pm. American Sector. West Berlin Colonel Godfrey A. 'God' Rose
reached into the bottom drawer of his mammoth Victorian desk, withdrew a
halfempty bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, and gazed fondly at the label.
For five exhausting hours the U.S. Army's West Berlin chief of
intelligence had sifted through the weekly reports of his 'snitches'-the
highly paid but underzealous army of informers that the U.S. government
maintains on its shadow payroll to keep abreast of events in Berlin-and
discovered nothing but the usual sordid list of venalities committed by
the host of elected officials, bureaucrats, and military officers of the
city he had come to regard as the Sodom of Western Europe. The colonel
had a single vice-whiskey-and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn
of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.
Pouring the Turkey into a Lenox shot glass, Rose glanced up and saw his
aide, Sergeant Clary, silhouetted against the leaded glass window of his
office door. With customary discretion the young NCO paused before
knocking, giving his superior time to 'straighten his desk.' By the
time Clary tapped on the glass and stepped smartly into the office,
Colonel Rose appeared to be engrossed in an intelligence brief.
