The Cold War Swap

tables and chairs that almost looked inviting.

If it weren’t for money, I told myself, I would sell out and go to Santa Fe or Kalispell and open a bar where the only problem would be how to get old Jack Hudson back to the ranch of a Saturday night. But there is a lot of difference in saloon-keeping. Here in the shadow of the Siebengebirge, in the purple shadows of the seven hills where once lived Snow White and the Seven Drawfs and where Siegfried slew the fearsome dragon, I was more or less the Sherman Billingsley of the Rhine. A community fixture, friend and confidant of minister and jackanapes alike. Respected. Even admired.

I was also making a great deal of money and could probably retire at forty-five. The fact that my partner was a spook for busybodies who flitted about looking under God knows what rocks for the blueprints of the Russians’ next spaceship to Saturn was incidental—even trifling. And the fact that my place was actually our place—the spooks and I—and the fact that they used it, for all I knew, as an international message center with the secret codes imbedded in the Gibson onions—all this would only serve as cocktail conversation over a couple of tall cold ones at the Top of the Mark in the good days to come.

And the fact that two masked desperadoes burst into the saloon, shot some little man dead, and then walked out followed by a fat stranger I met on a plane would only serve to lend an air of international glamour and intrigue: a decided asset. It was like postwar Vienna in the movies, where Orson Welles went around muttering so low and fast you couldn’t understand what he was saying except that he was up to no good.

There was the money. And the good cars. And the imported clothes, the thick steaks, and the choice wines that came gratis to my table, the gifts of friendly cellars from the Moselle, the Ahr and the Rhine. And then there was the fact that Bonn abounded in women. With that cheery thought I took down my mental “for sale” sign, told Karl to watch the cash register, checked to see that the chef was sober, and went out into the street, bound for the apartment of an interesting young lady who went by the name of Fredl Arndt.

CHAPTER 5

It was around six-thirty when I arrived at Fraulein Doktor Arndt’s apartment, which was on the top floor of a ten-story hochaus that commanded a splendid view of the Rhine, the Seven Hills, and the red crumbling ruins of the castle called Drachenfels.

I rang her bell, told her who it was over the almost inaudible intercommunication system, and pushed open the thick glass door as she rang the unlocking buzzer. She was waiting for me at her door as I stepped out of the elevator, which happened to be working that day,

“Guten Abend, Fraulein Doktor,” I murmured, bending low over her hand, a continental touch that had taken me a few rainy afternoons to perfect under the watchful eye of an old Hungarian countess who had taken a shine to me when she had learned I ran a saloon. I had brushed up on my manners while the countess had run up a sizeable bar bill. We had parted, mutually satisfied.

Fredl smiled. “What brings you around, Mac? Sober, I mean.”

“There’s a cure for that,” I said, handing her a bottle of Chivas Regal.

“You’re in time for the early show. I was going to wash my hair. After that I was going to bed.”

“You already have an engagement then?”

“Solo. For a girl on the wrong side of thirty in this town it’s the usual way.”

While it was true that the female population greatly outnumbered the tired but happy male population of Bonn that year, Fredl wasn’t one of those who sat by the phone hoping that it would ring so she could go to the junior prom. She was distinctively pretty in that European way that seems to wear almost forever and then changes slowly into beauty. And she was smart. The Fraulein Doktor title was real. She covered politics for one of the Frankfurt papers, the intellectual one, and she had spent a year in Washington, most of the time on the White House assignment.

“Fix us a drink. It makes the years slough away. You’ll feel like sixteen.”

“I was sixteen in ‘forty-nine and part of a teenage gang that played the black market with GI cigarettes to work our way through school.”

“At least you weren’t a loner.”

She retired with the bottle into the kitchenette. The apartment was a large one-room affair that boasted a small balcony for the sunwor-shipers. One wall was lined with books from floor to ceiling. In front of them stood a huge antique desk that I had thought of marrying the girl for. There were also a pale-beige carpet, two sofa beds, some good Swedish chairs and a small dining table. The wall along the balcony was all glass and the other two walls were hung with some good prints and some outspoken originals. It wasn’t a place just to hang your hat. Somebody lived there.

Fredl placed the drinks on a low ebony cocktail table that seemed to float in the air because of its cleverly concealed legs. She sat next to me on the couch and kissed me on the temple.

“You’re getting grayer and grayer, Mac. You’re getting old.”

“Nothing soon but memories. When all of us old geezers gather around the corner bar in a few years to spend our Social Security checks and start wheezing and drooling to each other about all the girls we’ve laid, I’ll just let that film of memory descend and mutter, ‘Bonn, lovely, lovely Bonn.’ ”

“Whom do you know in the States, Mac?”

I thought a minute. “Nobody, really. Nobody I want to see. A couple of reporters and embassy types perhaps, but I met them over here. I had a doting and dotty great aunt I was fond of, but she died years ago. That’s where I got the money to open the saloon. Or part of it.”

“Then where’s your home now?”

I shrugged. “I was born in San Francisco, but, hell, that’s nobody’s home town. I like New York and Chicago. I like Denver. I even like Washington and London and Paris. Padillo thinks Los Angeles is Paradise-west. If he had his way he’d have the Autobahn run right through the heart of Bonn and plant palm trees along the verge.”

“How is Mike?”