Deadfall in Berlin Read online

  I searched her face but couldn't see what she did. Hope? No, that was impossible. The only way any of this could get sorted out was to punish me. Send me to jail, put me to death. Was there anything more needed beside this awful confession?

  “Don't… don't you have to report this to someone?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “No. What happens between us is entirely confidential. Besides, Will, it was so long ago.”

  So long ago yet a wound ever-festering. Looking around this silly little room, I still found it difficult to believe I was here. And that I was Will, an adult. A man. No, part of me was still that boy. Willi lived in me, burned in me. He gave me energy to push in my career, to dream things beyond a normal imagination. And fuel to hate myself.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  She checked the silvery watch on her thin wrist. “Almost eleven.”

  “Oh, my God. I'm sorry I—”

  Crashing through my words came the sound of shattering glass. With an explosion of disaster, a window or door or something large burst into pieces. Alecia and I froze, turned toward the door, then stared at one another as distant shards cracked and finally fell into silence. It came from just down the hall, perhaps as close as the reception area. My heart recalled Berlin and bombs, then immediately started galloping forward. Flushed with fear, I turned to Alecia, my shrink, for direction.

  “George.” She rolled her eyes and laughed nervously. “I wonder what he's done now.”

  Of course. George, the janitor. “What did he do—throw a garbage can through a plate glass window?”

  “I better see if he's all right,” said Alecia, slowly pushing herself up.

  As she moved toward the door, Berlin pulsed through my body, my mind, and I thought of all who were dead. And who might be alive and could be here; someone from then who might have recently tried to run me over and later hurl me onto the subway tracks.

  I saw Alecia's hand on the doorknob and jumped up, shouting, “Wait!”

  Dancing in my mind was a faint vision of the face I'd seen behind the wheel of that blue car and again outside on Wabash Avenue. That present-day memory began to merge with faces I'd just seen in my trance, faces from Berlin, 1945. Now I knew who'd died and who'd lived, and I thought, oh Christ, it couldn't be.

  “Alecia, I…” My breath was coming short. How would we get out of here? “I think I might know who's been after me.”

  She gazed at me as she flipped back through my story, and then her face tensed, tripping on the same thought. I slipped up next to her, hit the lightswitch—finally, at last, killing those obnoxious lights—then carefully turned the knob. Silently opening the door a crack, I peered out and saw a chair just a few feet away. My God, that hadn't been there before, had it? No, which could only mean that someone had been sitting right out there in the dark, listening to my entire Berlin confession. My face surged red and hot. I stared down the lightless hallway. Was all this George's doings, or was someone else here with altogether different intentions?

  I nodded to Alecia, and she called, “George, is that you? Are you all right?”

  Her question passed down the hall and returned unanswered. I looked at Alecia. So maybe George was hurt or maybe he'd broken something and had gone for a broom. Or perhaps there was indeed another person. I opened the door further, looked, could see nothing. We had to find out. I took a breath and felt a calm sensation suffuse me. Was this the final confrontation I'd been waiting for all these years? Of course it was. My past was about to join hands with the present.

  Holding a finger to my lips, I led the way into the dark corridor, careful to stay close to the wall. Alecia followed right behind, and she reached over, took my hand. That alone should have been exciting, but I was too preoccupied trying to imagine what or rather who might be waiting ahead. Silent step after step, we eased through the faint light, reaching another office door. I tried the handle, found the room locked, then continued. The next office was locked as well, and we stopped there, listening, trying to glean something, anything. But there was nothing, and so hand in hand with my shrink, we made our way around a corner and toward the reception area.

  I stopped, pressed Alecia against the wall. Up ahead moonlight flooded into the waiting area, and in the gentle, bluish light tiny pieces of broken glass sparkled across the carpet. And on the floor just past a desk lay a body.

  “George!” shouted Alecia, rushing forward.

  I hurried after her. Ran right behind. Expected a bullet, prayed that I would be hit first. Eyes darting, I saw phones, file cabinets. Chairs. Leafy plants. But no lurking figure. I glanced at George, who was lying face down in a bed of glass that had once been the window onto the elevator lobby.

  Alecia dropped to his side, pressed two fingers into his neck, and said, “He's alive!”

  I suppose we should have run for help. Charged out of there as fast as possible. But I couldn't. There was someone I had to see. Just once. Once before I was killed. I only hoped the bullet—if it would be that—wouldn't strike me in the back, denying me this vision.

  “Stay down!” I ordered Alecia.

  My eyes swooped up and down, over and around. A couch. More plants. Drapes concealing a figure? No. And then I spotted it. The dark folds of a figure leaning against a tall file cabinet.

  My native tongue had somehow followed me back from Berlin, and I said, “Sie sind aber alt geworden” You must be old by now.

  “Alt? Gauze acht-und-sechstig Jahre alt. Ich war ein paar Jahre Jünger als sie” Old? Altogether I'm sixty-eight. I was a couple of years younger than her. “Oder’’ he said, employing Marlene Dietrich's famous line, “haben Sie vergessen?” Or have you forgotten?

  The figure dragged match over flint, sparked a light, lit a cigarette. Sauntered into the middle of the office. In the faint light I saw the patch, big and black. And then that nose. So sharp. And the skin. Now more ruddy than it was pink. Yes, this was the one who'd been after me. Even in the dim light I could tell that he was trim, had retained most of his hair, and had generally aged well.

  “Hallo, Heinrich.”

  “Guten abend, Willichen.”

  So this was it. Him, standing there in the ghostly light. The thing, the person, who'd chased me out of Berlin and my past. As if I'd just lost a very long race, I took a deep breath. It was a relief, almost comforting. So there really had been someone after me, pursuing me through the years and dreams. So I wasn't crazy after all.

  “Have you come to kill me?” I asked in English.

  “Gut geraten.” Good guess, he said. A small gun in one hand, a folder in the other, he continued in harshly accented English. “After I lost you in the subway, I went to your apartment. When you didn't return, I figured you'd come running back here like a lost puppy.” He smiled “It was a very interesting confession—and mostly true, by the way. I heard most of it until I was interrupted by this fellow,” he said, waving his gun at the unconscious George.

  Staring at Heinrich, I said, “I always knew you weren't dead.”

  “The intuitive one—that's what your mother used to say about you, anyway.” He shrugged. “I, on the other hand, thought you were long gone. You know, it wouldn't have come to this if you hadn't written that letter to the adoption agency. A contact of mine notified me.”

  “I'm glad you're here.”

  And I really was. This was the past incarnate, something real that I could not only see, but touch. And hopefully kill.

  “Dankeschon.” Standing in the faint light, he touched the patch over his right eye. “You shot out part of my face back then and I lost my eye, but you saved my life. Isn't that ironic? You wanted to kill me, yet you saved me.”

  I didn't want to hear this. My jaw clamped tight, mashed my teeth together. If only that second bullet had struck him, erased him forever!

  Smiling, Heinrich continued, saying, “I bandaged myself and then a stranger managed to get me to a hospital. They admitted me, and then there was a raid and the hospita
l took a bomb.” He laughed. “I passed out. I was unconscious for a week, they told me, and when I woke I'd been evacuated. Thanks to you I escaped Berlin and the final onslaught and those stupid Bolsheviks. I was taken to a village, a little town captured by the Americans. All my papers and everything had been lost in the bombing, and so I just made up a name and… and… well, here I am, ever so grateful to you, Willichen.” He asked, “How's my English?”

  “Very good.”

  “It should be. I helped the Americans, you know. Helped them identify the last bits of Nazism.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, sucking it until it glowed a fiery orange. “Alecia, you can stand up—I know you're back there behind the desk. I did so enjoy your file on Willi—it was me who stole it. You're very perceptive, I might add.”

  She rose, pushing herself up and immediately punching him with her shrinky logic, saying, “If he saved your life, then why do you want to kill him?”

  “Because, my dear, as you wrote in Willi's file, his main goal is to reveal everything that happened back in Berlin. And although that might be nice for him, I'm not about to let him ruin my life. We were all crazy during the war, you see, and Willi here is the only person alive who witnessed any crimes I may or may not have committed.” He smiled. “I've become quite successful—I own a chain of furniture stores, have a wonderful family, grandchildren even—and I won't let Willi jeopardize all that by spreading stories about my killing a Jew. No, I won't.” Turning to me in the faint light, he said, “I wanted to marry your mother, Willi, and I think she would have agreed after the war. But then…” He lifted my file. “Alecia says right here that she knows you're quite attracted to her, so perhaps I should kill her first. That would really hurt you, Willi, wouldn't it? Then you'd know perhaps how I felt when you killed your mother.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Oh, but you would find this file very interesting. She summarizes you very well, and I really think it's quite clear how much she admires you and is even attracted to you, too, and—”

  The ceiling exploded with light, an entire plane of white fluorescent tubes burning with operating room brightness. I ducked, shielding my eyes.

  “Will!” shouted Alecia.

  She'd hit all the switches by the front door and was bolting out. In an instant I saw Heinrich—gray and wrinkly—fumbling with his cigarette and the file and the gun. I dug my foot into glass, bounded over George. Hurled myself after my dear Alecia. As I reached the door, I heard a snap, a sharp explosion. Heinrich fired his gun, and I flinched, expecting to feel the dull thud of a bullet slam and burrow into me. Instead my hopes were dashed as the piece of death went racing past and slammed into a wall. So Heinrich, aged and missing the eye I'd shot, wasn't the marksman he'd been when he'd shot Joe. I darted around the corner. Alecia was halfway down the hall, holding out her hand. The elevator. She'd struck the button, found the elevator still on this floor. And now she stood, desperately begging me to run to the shelter of this little chamber. Yes, we could probably jam it between floors. Yes, we could probably hit the fire button, use the phone to call for help.

  But I stopped.

  Safety was just up there in the elevator and perhaps in the arms of Alecia. But I was so tired. I'd been running for thirty years and I couldn't run anymore. I had to stop, face Heinrich, deal literally head-on with my Berlin past. And so I threw myself up against the hall wall. I heard Heinrich, his charging feet crunching over glass. I listened to him race after me, and I clenched my fist. I knew he was expecting me to be down the hall by now, perhaps in the elevator or the stairwell or in an office. Someplace where he might trap us. He hadn't thought at all that I'd be right around the corner. His expression of gross miscalculation told me that much, that eye and even the black patch rising up with the lines of his brow in astonishment. I hurled my fist forward, stuffed my bound knuckles into his soft stomach. The gun went off. A desperate attempt. But a failed one, sending another bullet to another harmless end. I punched him and knocked the old man right off his feet. Threw him back, ripping the gun from his hand. My file that he somehow still clutched went flying.

  And within the split of an instant he was on the floor and I was atop him, straddling him, my knees pinning his arms down, and my two hands pressing the gun to his chest. When he'd hurled me through the air in that Berlin ruin, I'd been just a boy, weak in comparison to his manly strength. But now I was about the same age as he'd been then. Only I was much stronger than this worn, heaving, breathless body beneath me. I could blast him inside out. For Anton. For Joe. And, yes, for my own mother. I positioned the gun over his heart. In just one second I could—

  “Will, no!” screamed Alecia, rushing up behind me.

  “Get away!” I ordered.

  “Don't!” she begged. “Please, Will, don't!”

  “Stay back!”

  I was staring into the face of a ghostly devil, and just the sight of him sent me back to my Vaterland. Jerked me back faster than even the La-Z-Boy and Alecia's chants. Here was proof that the past had existed and died just as I'd so recently revealed. And for Heinrich's part in it, for all those I'd loved who'd been killed, I would grant him a grisly death.

  “This is from all of them!” I said.

  But as I went to squeeze the trigger, the body trapped beneath me began to shake. At first I thought he was panicking, that he couldn't catch his breath. Then I thought he was having a heart attack.

  “Will, no!” shouted Alecia from behind.

  I realized he was laughing. Heinrich was staring up at me and death and once again he couldn't have been more amused. Chuckling just like back then when he'd revealed that Mother was his mistress.

  “Don't… don't worry,” he struggled to say through thick, perverse amusement. “He won't do it.”

  A fury of blood swelled my heart. “Just watch!”

  He looked right up at me. Stared right up and smiled and shook his head. It scared me, this eerie confidence of his.

  “Oh, no, you won't.” As if declaring trump, Heinrich offered a devilish grin, and said, “You can't kill me, Willichen, because… because I'm your father.”

  Nothing could have disarmed my fury more quickly or thoroughly. Father? This eel? It couldn't be!

  “What? No! No, Joe was my father!” I shouted.

  He stared up at me, pixieish amusement stretching his old wrinkle-lined face. “Wherever did you get that notion? Your mother? Joe?”

  My mind flashed to our little bar. To my huddling, eavesdropping on Joe and Mother. I'd overheard what they'd said, witnessed my mother's bitterness. But, dear God, I'd never actually been told the precise words.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…” Heinrich gazed up at me, glanced over at Alecia. “Mein Gott, this is like confessing on one's deathbed.” He took a deep breath. “I mean, I knew your mother and Joe long before the war.”

  My head swooned. Hadn't Joe seemed to recognize Heinrich as we spied him and his two thugs outside the bar? Yes, and my memory echoed Joe's voice later when he'd held the gun at Heinrich in that pit of death and said how it was like old times. It hadn't made any sense back then. Neither had Heinrich's words about how they were about to finish things at last. But it all did now, giving horrible credence to Heinrich's present story.

  “Ja, ja, ja. We three were almost inseparable during Joe's first visit to Berlin. That was just when the Nazis were starting to come on strong, just before I signed up. And those were the last wild days of Berlin. Oh, Gott, I think we must have hit every bar and cabaret in town. We drank so much—every night, you see—and… and…”

  I couldn't believe this. My mind, my body was shutting down, and I started backing off him. No, this couldn't be!

  “Well,” continued Heinrich, “finally Joe took me aside and told me how much he wanted her. I mean, cousin or not, Joe could barely contain that youthful American physique of his. I smiled when he told me, for I'd seen it all along. He didn't know, though, that I also thought Eva was the mos
t beautiful creature I'd—”

  I whipped the back of my left hand across his foul mouth, ripped his bottom lip, brought a trickle of red from his mouth. He was lying! I knew it!

  Heinrich dabbed his tongue, licked at his own blood. “Believe me, it's true. Joe begged me to take them somewhere—a hotel, a bordello. Anywhere.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, but yes. So I took them to some awful little place and got a room. But Joe kept on drinking and drinking—he was quite nervous, after all—and the first thing he did was go into the bathroom and pass out!” Heinrich grinned. “I'd been about to leave, but then I helped Eva undress and get into bed. And then, well, let me tell you, I slipped in with her, and even though she was almost as drunk as Joe, she was more wonderful than I could have ever imagined.”

  “That's not true!”

  “Of course it is. I had her. I spent half the night with her—I'll never forget our first time together.”

  “No!”

  “Of course that's true. How else do you think it all started between us?” He added, “But then… then somehow Eva's grandfather found out where she was. He came over that morning and discovered Eva and Joe in bed—obviously after I'd left Joe had woken up and crawled in with her. Who knows if they actually even did anything—he was so drunk I don't think they could have—but, oh, Gott, her grandfather was so furious. He beat Joe and threw him on the first train, then kicked Eva out for good. That's when Dieter took her in.”

  “You're lying!”

  I threw the pistol to the side, grabbed Heinrich by the collar and started shaking him. He was not going to take the last wonderful thing from my life, and I whipped his skinny neck from side to side. His patch twisted and slid off. A thick, hideous scar and an eyeless mound of flesh stared up at me.

  “You're not my father!”

  I banged his head against the linoleum, smashed it down over and over again. I had to beat him to death, crush this horrible person and his ugly lies! Heinrich cried out and writhed, but I was much stronger and determined. I beat him against the floor, then wrapped my fingers around his neck and squeezed, feeling dry flesh worm in my hands.