As they entered the outskirts of Kreuzberg, Chin could still hear bands less than a mile away and the tinny sounds of loudspeakers. It seemed as if someone was being denounced and then a band would strike up, but because of a wall of trees, he could not actually see what was going on, and this put him on edge.
When he arrived at the row house, a three-storied “redbrick” ‘ place out of the nineteenth century, he saw that the gardens about it had run wild, unattended for years, many of the cobblestones in the street visible beneath the worn-out scabs of bitumen through which green vegetation was poking. Very un-German this, he knew, but one way that frustrated landlords had of trying to force squatters out. All it did was attract more.
Appearing twisted and bent, the woman walking toward him as he looked through the bubbled glass was an elderly asthmatic, and it took her a long time to answer his knocking. Even before she reached the door, Chin could smell strong, pungent Turkish coffee and sausage. A battered-looking “Golf” van came round the corner, stopped, and unloaded a group of Turks, who were talking and laughing at the day’s end as they dispersed down the street, most of them smoking and taking no notice of him. Several doors opened, children spilling out onto the road, greeting fathers who, putting lunch boxes down on the pavement, lifted their children high, twirling them in the air. They seemed oblivious to the racket from beyond the Wall.
Chin looked up for the late sun to judge how much time they’d have, but it was blocked by me Wall, which in this part of Kreuzberg had not been battered by the souvenir hunters of Gorbachev’s heyday. Then he wondered whether the rapidity of the fading light was due to the fact that the Wall that rose straight up from the small backyard of the house was blocking it or whether someone in Seoul had slipped up in the panic, looking at the wrong month on the calendar and so getting the wrong sunset time. For all his training, this uncertainty panicked him for a moment, but then the door opened at last. As he entered, bowing graciously to the Turkish woman, he saw the other agent emerging from the bathroom, head bowing, apologizing profusely. When the old woman had passed them back into her kitchen, they matched the deutsch mark, though it was hardly necessary, as Chin recognized him as one of the agents whom had worked with years before, when assigned to Bonn. Behind the Wall they could still hear massed bands playing in the distance as they got into a gray BMW.
Six miles south along the line of what used to be the graffiti-scrawled Wall they came to a cream-colored, nondescript apartment building in the suburb of Neukolln, near East Berlin’s Schonefeld Airport. From the black- tarred top of the apartment they would be able to see the airport proper, the two giant Condors, Soviet-made transporters, sitting side by side a hundred feet from each other, not far from the main terminal, their tail planes much higher than Chin remembered from any of the recognition charts he’d had to memorize. The sheer brutishness of their size, their lower half a blue wave pattern, the top a mottled khaki, made them frightening even from a distance. Now more bands could be heard; they were obviously marching south from Alexander Platz, the sound of the bands drowning out the usual putt-putting sound of East German cars, Tribants mostly, which during his earlier posting had always sounded to him like the two-stroke motorbikes mat weaved in and out of the traffic, a law unto themselves. He could smell a mixture of high octane in the late afternoon air as the fumes from planes landing and taking off from Schonefeld washed over into the west on a brisk east wind.
There was a tremendous roar from the southeast, and turning, he saw it was the 6:00 p.m. Aeroflot flight from Moscow. Through the smell of the kerosene fumes he could detect a faint but much more pleasant odor of fried liverwurst. Everything was at once so foreign yet so familiar. Here the DMZ had been known as the death strip. The mixture of the familiar and unknown was unsettling in Chin’s tired and nerve-racked condition, the Wall having once created the deadly illusion of safety in the West. But he knew that the Wall had served exactly the same purpose as the DMZ in Korea: locking in the peoples of the Communist blocs, prisoners of the totalitarian state, the same state that was at this very moment ripping his country apart, sweeping down from the North like the barbarians of old had swept against the Great Wall of China.
Then it happened. The other agent had assured him that everyone necessary from the trade legation in Berlin was ready. But now he learned that one of the men, the RSO, or resident station officer, had had to back out at the last moment because he felt someone, either from the West German police or from the Staatssichereitsdienst, the reinvigorated East German state security service that was supposed to have disappeared in the post-Gorbachev euphoria, was watching him.
The agent Chin had made the meet with realized that Chin was not listening to the explanation. Instead, the older man had stopped, hands in his light gray summer raincoat, looking up and down the street. “Those trees,” he said, “I’d forgotten—”
“What?” asked the other agent apprehensively. “Oh, yes, ginkgo trees — the same as home.”
“But they are not indigenous to Germany,” said Chin. “I remember it struck me the first time I was here. In —”
The other agent didn’t care about trees and, as delicately yet persuasively as he could, ushered Chin inside the apartment block. “I don’t know about the trees,” he told Chin. Chin could see he didn’t care, but the older man was smiling. It was an omen. How was it, how could it be, that the same beautifully exquisite fan-shaped leaves, native to his homeland, were here— across the other side of the world in Berlin? Still green and full of light, bravely growing and vibrant in the dying rays of the sun that were now flickering down through leaves intertwined with — or were they being strangled by? — the indestructible barbed wire that was still there. Through the branches of the ginkgo trees, he saw scrawled, “Freiheit!” Freedom. The
“Eight o’clock,” answered the other agent.
Chin glanced at his watch. “Then we have two hours to fill.” The other man said nothing.
The five of them were in a room on the eighth floor, on the eastern side of the apartment. “Huh,” one of the agents grunted. “After Gorbachev they were going to be one big happy family.”
“That was before Suzlov,” said another agent. “Everything changes and everything stays the same.”
One of the three men who were introduced to Chin began brewing coffee, another passing around cigarettes from a gold-plated case. Chin hesitated. He’d tried too many times to give it up.
“American,” said the junior man, an army captain in mufti.
Chin took one, sat back, and felt himself relax, inhaling the smoke deeply, letting it settle in his lungs before blowing it out in a bluish-gray jet. He felt strangely at peace; everything would now be simply a matter of operational procedure, and the men under his command could tell from his face there was no turning back. Chin told them of the five U.S. and ROK servicemen who had been beheaded at Panmunjom. Seoul HQ, he said, had told him that they had a video of it, not a very good one, taken by one of the last units to get out of the DMZ but that Seoul HQ wouldn’t release it to the media. “Upset the folks at home,” Chin said. “What about the airport security tower?” he asked.
The younger one drew a sketch on the back of a copy of
“Have you got suppressors?” Chin asked. “We don’t want any noise here putting us off.”
“Yes, suppressors, of course. Two rifles.” The agent identified the marksman, who inclined his head respectfully. Chin told him to destroy the sketch, then said nothing more. There was a long silence, the evening light growing dimmer.
Chin could sense the question in the air from all four of them but calmly kept smoking, composing himself. The marksman was looking over at the younger agent and the other two with the suitcases. “We were wondering, sir,” began the younger agent tentatively, “should we not do it now?”
Chin looked around at them, taking his time. “Are you afraid? I don’t want people who are afraid.”
“No, no,” hastened the younger agent with forced unconcern. “I merely thought that while there is light —”
“There is no point in half measures, son,” Chin responded. He paused, the end of his cigarette glowing more brightly now. No one put on any of the lights in the apartment. Nearing the end of the cigarette, Chin asked for another one, accepted it graciously, tapping it on the gold case, thinking for a moment about his young colleague who’d been trampled outside the Secret Garden. Chun looked up.
“Are there any other questions?”
There were none.
“Lee,” he signified to the young agent. “You should stay here to stop anyone at the door. Just in case. I will
