We caught a cab and told the driver to take us to Brandenburgische Strasse, which was about three minutes away. We picked out a new Mercedes 220. I showed my driver’s license.
“How long will you have use for the car?” the man asked.
“Two or three days.”
“A two-hundred-Mark deposit will be sufficient.”
I gave him the money, signed the rental agreement, and put the
“Sounds tinny,” he said.
“They don’t make them the way they used to.”
“They never did.”
I turned left out of the
“What’s the form?” I asked Cooky.
“Get your passport out; a GI will want to look at it.”
I drove on and stopped when a bored-looking soldier standing in front of a white hut waved me down. He glanced at our passports and then handed us a mimeographed sheet, which warned against carrying any non- American persons in the car, admonished me to obey all traffic regulations because “East Berlin officials are sensitive about their prerogatives,” and cautioned us about engaging in unnecessary conversation with East Berliners.
“What if I have to ask where the John is?” Cooky said.
“You can pee in your pants, mister, for all I care. Just fill this out first.”
It was a form requesting the time we could be expected back at the checkpoint. I put down midnight.
“Anything else?”
“That’s all, buddy. Just be nice to the krauts.”
A West German policeman nearer the crossing yawned and waved us on and I zigzagged the car through a series of white pole barriers and parked it. After that it wasn’t much worse than having a tooth pulled. There was the currency declaration. We lied about that. Then there was the passport inspection. There was nobody else in the line, and the Volkspolizei seemed to have nothing better to do.
“You are a businessman,” he said, thumbing through my passport.
“Yes.”
“What type of business?”
“A restaurant.”
He read some more about me and then slipped the passport through a slot behind him, where somebody else got the chance to find out how tall I was and how heavy and what color my hair and eyes were and what countries I might have visited in the past few years.
Cooky was next. “Herr Cook Baker?” the Vopo asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that not a strange name?”
“One gets a comment or two.”
“You are a public-relations man?”
“Yes.”
The Vopo nodded thoughtfully. “Just what is a public-relations man, Herr Baker?”
“We deal in controlled revelation,” Cooky said.
The Vopo frowned. He was a short, wiry man with a foxy face and eyebrows that needed combing. “You are a propagandist?”
“Only for inanimate objects—soap, underarm deodorant shaving lotions. Just the essentials. No government work.”
The sharp-faced German read some more about Cooky and decided that his passport didn’t need to travel through the slot. He got mine back, shot his cuffs, and prepared for the operation. First the stamp was inked twice on the pad, then it was examined, and then it was applied to the passport with a firm yet flashy bang. The Vopo admired his work briefly and then gave us back the passports after a cursory glance at the car’s papers. We got into the Mercedes and drove up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, about a half-mile away.
I drove slowly. East Berlin was even more drab than I had remembered it, the traffic was spotty, and the pedestrians walked as if they had to and not because they were out for a late-evening stroll. Their faces were stolid and they didn’t seem to smile much, even when talking to one another; but, then, I couldn’t recall many metropolitan boulevards these days where the pedestrians are noted for their cheerful faces.
“What happens if we don’t get back by midnight?” I asked Cooky.
“Nothing. They probably marked our passports somehow so that if we don’t show up and somebody else tries to use them they can spot it. But that form we signed about when we thought we’d come back is just routine.
