Nobody cares how long you stay over.”
We turned right on Unter den Linden. “Go through Marx-Engels Platza, straight ahead till you hit Stalinallee or whatever the hell they call it now—Karl Marx Allee—and I’ll show you where to turn left. I think.”
“Sounds as if you’ve been here before,” I said.
“No. I asked the bellhop at the Hilton. Bellhops know everything. He said it’s a dump.”
“It would fit in with the rest of the evening.”
“How much do you know about the whole thing?”
I lighted a cigarette. “Nothing firsthand. Just from hearsay. I saw Weatherby today and he said he would take me to Padillo, who is
“One thing,” Cooky said.
“What?”
“Mass is giving you a deal if he’s got a tunnel.”
“How’s that?”
“Rooms on this side close enough to the wall to make a break are just about nonexistent. But the West Berliners, across the wall, are charging up to twenty-five hundred bucks just for a room to run to so you won’t get shot after you jump over.”
“There are people who will make a buck whatever the graft—fire, pestilence, famine or war.” The apartments we were passing were the ones that had been thrown up in a hurry in 1948. Their plaster or stucco exteriors were flaking off, exposing the red brick underneath. The brick looked like angry red sores. The balconies sagged and clung halfheartedly to the buildings.
“You can still walk back,” I said.
“Straight ahead,” Cooky directed. “You know how many of them were crossing over just before the wall went up?'
“About a thousand a day.”
“That’s thirty thousand a month. Working stiffs mostly, but also a boatload or two of engineers, doctors, scientists, technicians of all kinds. It was bad public relations on Bonn’s part.”
“How?”
“They talked it up too much. They rubbed it in until it stung. Ulbricht went off to Moscow and convinced Khruschchev that he had to seal it off: the GDR couldn’t stand the embarrassment. The West kept score, and every time they hit a thousand the newspapers carried it in ‘second-coming’ headlines. So one hot August day when Ulbricht got back from Moscow the word went out. First there was just the barbed wire. Then they started putting up the wall: concrete slabs a meter square. And when they found that that wasn’t enough they topped it off with a yard or so of cinder blocks. A guy I know from Lone Star Cement took a look at it and said it was a lousy job—from a professional viewpoint.”
“So what should Bonn have done?”
“Turn left here. They should have known it was going up. Their intelligence was lousy, but no worse than ours or the British. Maybe there wasn’t time, but the blocks had to be cast, the cement ordered. Somebody should have buttoned on. You don’t set out to build a twenty-seven-mile-long wall through the middle of a big town without a few leaks. If they had known, they could have turned their propaganda guns loose. RIAS could have knocked hell out of the Reds some more. The British and the Americans and the French could have sent what are called ‘tersely worded notes.’ There were sixty thousand East Berliners working in West Berlin. Some of them could have stayed. Hell, they could have done a lot of things.”
“All they needed was a good PR man.”
Cooky grinned. “Maybe. At least the East was all set for it with an outfit they called ‘The League of the German Democratic Republic for the Friendship Among the Peoples.’ The flacks for this outfit started pounding away on three points, all aimed at excusing the wall. First, they cried a lot about how the West was inducing doctors, engineers and others to cross over by the use of what they called ‘cunning and dishonorable methods.’ It comes out money in the translation.
“Second, those who lived in East Berlin and worked in West Berlin were getting four East German Marks for every Western D-Mark they earned. This meant that a guy could go over to West Berlin, sign on as a common laborer, and make as much as the specialist with a university education who worked in the East. That seemed to bother them some, too.
“And, third, they were all upset about the smuggling. Or maybe the Russians were unhappy. At any rate, the East’s flacks claimed that the wall went up to stop the ‘illegal export’ of such stuff as optical instruments, Dresden china, Plauen laces and the like. They claimed it cost them thirty-five thousand million marks a year—however much that is.”
“You may be right that the West bragged too much about the numbers of refugees,” I said.
“I’d have probably done the same.”
“It was just too good to ignore—especially if you’re screaming for unification. But it’s academic now—like calling that third-down play on Monday instead of Sunday. And if you want a McCorkle prediction, I’ll be happy to make one.”
“What?”
“That wall isn’t coming down—not in our lifetime.”
“You only bet cinches, Mac. We’re damn near there—wherever there is. Turn left.”
