He jotted a quick list of the calls he would have to make: KGB chairman Zemenek at Moscow Centre; the Soviet commandant for East Berlin; and of course the prefect of West Berlin police. Kosov would enjoy the call to West Berlin. It wasn’t often he could make demands of the arrogant West Germans and expect to be accommodated, but today would be one of those days. The Moscow call, on the other hand, he would not enjoy at all. It might mean anything from a medal to expulsion from service without a word of explanation.
This was Kosov’s fear. For the past ten years, operationally speaking, Berlin had been a dead city. The husk of its former romance clung to it, but the old Cold War urgency was gone. Pre-eminence had moved to another part of the globe, and Kosov had no Japanese or Arabic. His future held only mountains of paperwork and turf battles with the GRU and the Stasi. Kosov didn’t give a damn about Rudolf Hess. Chairman Zemenek might be obsessed with Nazi conspiracies, but what was the point? The Soviet empire was leaking like a sieve, and Moscow was worried about some intrigue left over from the Great Patriotic War?
The Chairman’s Obsession. That’s what the KGB chiefs in Berlin had called Rudolf Hess ever since the Nuremberg trials, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau. Four weeks ago Kosov had thought he had received his last call about Spandau’s famous Prisoner Number Seven. That was when the Americans had found the old Nazi dead, a lamp cord wrapped around his neck. Suicide, Kosov remembered with a chuckle. That’s what the Allied board of inquiry had ruled it. Kosov thought it a damned remarkable suicide for a ninety-three-year-old man. Hess had supposedly hanged himself from a rafter, yet all his doctors agreed that the arthritic old Nazi couldn’t lift his arms any higher than his shoulders. The German press had screamed murder, of course. Kosov didn’t give a damn if it was murder. One less German in the world made for a better world, in his view. He was just grateful the old man hadn’t died during a Soviet guard month.
Another sharp chest pain made Kosov wince. It was thinking about the damned Germans that caused it. He hated them. The fact that both his father and his grandfather had been killed by Germans probably had something to do with it, but that wasn’t all. Behind the Germans’ arrogance, Kosov knew, lurked a childish insecurity, a desperate desire to be liked. But Kosov never gratified it. Because beneath that insecurity seethed something else, something darker. An ancient, tribal desire—a warlike need to dominate. He’d heard the rumors that Gorbachev was softening on the reunification issue, and it made him want to puke. As far as Kosov was concerned, the day the spineless politicians in Moscow decided to let the Germans reunite was the day the Red Army should roll across both Germanys like a tidal wave, smashing everything in its path.
Thinking about Moscow brought Kosov back to Hess. Because on that subject, Moscow Centre was like a shrewish old woman. The Rudolf Hess case held a security classification unique in Kosov’s experience; it dated all the way back to the NKVD. And in a bureaucracy where access to information was the very lifeblood of survival, no one he had ever met had ever seen the Hess file. No one but the chairman. Kosov had no idea why this was so. What he did have was a very short list—a list of names and potential events relating to Rudolf Hess which mandated certain responses. One of those events was illegal entry into Spandau Prison; and the response: immediate notification of the chairman. Kosov felt sure that the fact that Spandau now lay in ruins did not affect his orders at all. He glanced one last time at the scrawled letters on his pad: Hauer, Polizei Captain. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and lifted the red phone.
6:25 A.M. British Sector: West Berlin
The warm apartment air hit Hans in a wave, flushing his skin, enfolding him like a cocoon. Ilse had already left, he knew it instinctively. There was no movement in the kitchen, no sound of appliances, no running shower, nothing. Still jumpy, and half-starved, he walked hopefully into the kitchen. He found a note on the refrigerator door, written in Ilse’s hurried hand: Wurst in the oven. I love YOU. Back by 18:00.
Thank you, Liebchen, he thought, catching the pungent aroma of Weisswurst. Using one of his gloves as a potholder, he removed the hot dish from the oven and placed it on the counter to cool. Then he took a deep breath, bent over, rolled up his pants leg and dug the sheaf of onionskin out of his boot. His pulse quickened as he unfolded the pages in the light. He backed against the stove for heat, plopped a chunk of white sausage into his mouth, and picked up reading where the Russian soldier had surprised him.
… I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for a chance to sit at Hitler’s blood-drenched table. The facts are few, but I have had more time to ponder them than most men would in ten lifetimes. I know how this mission was accomplished, but I do not know why. That is for someone else to learn. I can only point the way. You must follow the Eye. The Eye is the key to it all!
Hans stopped chewing and held the paper closer to his face. Sketched below this exhortation was a single, stylized eye. Gracefully curved, with a lid but no lashes, it stared out from the paper with a strange intensity. It seemed neither masculine nor feminine. It looked mystical somehow. Even a little creepy. He read on: What follows is my story, as best I can remember it.
Hans blinked his eyes. At the beginning of the next paragraph, the narrative suddenly switched to a language he could not understand. He didn’t even recognize it. He stared in puzzlement at the painstakingly blocked characters. Portuguese? he wondered. Italian maybe? He couldn’t tell. A few words of German were sprinkled through the gibberish—names mostly—but not enough to get any meaning from. Frustrated, he walked into the bedroom, folded the pages, and stuffed them underneath the mattress at the foot of his bed. He switched on the television from habit, then kicked his mud-caked boots into an empty corner and dropped his coat on top of them. Ilse would scold him for being lazy, he knew, but after two straight shifts he was simply too exhausted to care.
He ate his breakfast on the bed. As much as the Spandau papers, the thought of his father weighed on his mind. Captain Hauer had asked him why he’d come to Berlin. Hans often wondered that himself. Three years it had been now. He hardly thought of Munich anymore. He’d married Ilse after just five months here in Berlin. Christ, what a wedding it had been. His mother—still furious at him for becoming a policeman—had refused to attend, and Hauer had not been included in the plans. But he’d shown up anyway, Hans remembered. Hans had spied his rigid, uniformed figure outside the church, standing alone at the end of the block. Hans had pretended not to notice, but Ilse had waved quite deliberately to him as they climbed into the wedding car.
Angry again, Hans wolfed down another sausage and tried to concentrate on the television. A silver-haired windbag of a Frankfurt banker was dispensing financial advice to viewers saddled with the burden of surplus cash. Hans snorted in disgust. At fifteen hundred Deutschemarks per month, a Berlin policeman made barely enough money to pay rent and buy groceries. Without Ilse’s income, they would be shivering in a cold-water flat in Kreuzberg. He wanted to switch channels, but the old Siemens black-and-white had been built in the dark ages before remote control. He stayed where he was.
He took another bite of sausage and stared blankly at the screen. Beneath his stockinged feet, the wrinkled sheaf of papers waited, a tantalizing mystery beckoning him to explore. Yet he had already hit a dead end. The strange, staring eye hovered in his mind, taunting him. After breakfast, he decided, he would take a shower and then have another go at the papers.
He never made it off the bed. Exhaustion and the warm air overcame him even before he finished the sausage. He slid down the duvet, the unfinished plate balanced precariously on his lap, the Spandau papers hidden just beneath his feet.