“How’s the money holding out?” Padillo asked.
Max frowned and shook his head. “Langeman cleaned me except for a couple of hundred Marks.”
“How much do we have in West Berlin?”
“There should be twelve or fourteen thousand Marks, plus about five hundred dollars.”
“O.K. Tell Kurt to make the plane reservations for tomorrow evening and then have a car for us at Frankfurt. At the airport. Tell him to get us a fast one. He can get it back in Bonn.”
Max made another note. “Is that all?”
“That’s all I can think of. You’d better get moving.”
“I’ll go down and get the bottle,” Max said. “If they stop me, I’ll be tipsy, just getting home from my girl friend’s.” He opened the trap door and went down the ladder, reappearing moments later with the bottle of potato gin. He uncapped it, took a mouthful, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “My God, that’s terrible.”
My hand was already reaching for it.
“One more thing,” Max said. “How long do I wait at this park?”
“Until six,” Padillo said.
“And if you don’t show?”
“Forget about us.”
Max peered at Padillo through his glasses. He smiled. “We’ll see,” he said. Then he opened the door to the alley and left.
I handed Padillo the bottle and he took a long drink. He almost got it down without a cough.
“Who’s Kurt?” I said.
“Kurt Wolgemuth, Berlin’s version of Available Jones. An honest crook. The blond kid who got shot on the wall worked for him. He supplies things in a hurry for a price. You’ll meet him. He made his first money in the black market; then he caught the crest of the jump in German stock prices and rode that. He gets people over the wall and furnishes passports, new identities, secondhand clothes, guns—anything that turns a dollar. We’ve done business before.”
“I can follow you on the uniforms and on the stripes,” I said. “We’d be a little old to pass as privates. But why Frankfurt? Why not straight back to Bonn?”
“GIs don’t go to Bonn—not even to Cologne. They go to Munich or Frankfurt or Hamburg, where there’s booze and women. How many GIs have you seen in Bonn?”
“Damn few,” I admitted. Then I asked, “How do we get our two sleeping friends on and off the plane?”
“You still have that belly gun?”
I nodded.
“Just keep it in your raincoat pocket and nudge one of them with it every so often. They’ll behave. And once they’re across the wall, there’s no place for them to hide. If they kick up a fuss, they’ll wind up where they’re going anyhow. It’s just a matter of who delivers them. I intend to deliver them.”
I reached for the bottle. “I think you’ll miss it.”
“What?”
“Your other calling.”
Padillo grinned. “When’s the last time you killed anybody, Mac?”
I looked at my watch. “About twenty minutes ago.”
“Before that?”
“More than twenty years ago. In Burma.”
“Were you scared just now?”
“Terrified.”
“What have you done for the past twenty years?”
“Sat on my ass.”
“You like it?”
“It’s pleasant.”
“Suppose you went back to Bonn and we ran the place for a couple of months and then one day you got a phone call and they told you that you had to do something like this all over again by yourself. Only it might be worse. So you’d come around to see me and you’d tell me you’d have to take off for a week or so, and your stomach would be cramping because you wanted to tell somebody, anybody, where you were going and what you had to do, but you knew damn well you couldn’t. And so you’d have a drink with me and then you’d walk out by yourself and catch the plane or train by yourself. You’d be all alone and there’d never be anybody to meet you when you got there and there’d never be anybody waiting when you got back. Try that off and on for twenty years and count the dead ones at three o’clock in the morning and then panic sometimes because you can’t remember their names or what they looked like. And after twenty years they don’t give you a gold watch and a chicken-and-peas dinner. They send you off on another one and tell you you’re damn good and it’s just a routine job. But before you’re forty you’re superannuated and they’re writing you off like a tax loss because they think your nerve’s going—and they’re probably right. And you tell me I like it.”
“Maybe I said that because you seem good at it. From what I’ve seen.”
