The porter led him through the exit doors to a queue of taxis. She followed at a discreet distance. The porter signaled a taxi driver and loaded the suitcase into the trunk. When Weatherly tipped the porter, the man smiled and touched the brim of his hat, an effusive display of emotion for a German, she thought. Weatherly got into the back of the cab. A few seconds later, the car merged with traffic and headed toward the nearby city center. She returned to the terminal and made a phone call.
Anna watched him discreetly for three days, getting a sense of his rhythms and schedule. Each morning, Weatherly entered the breakfast room in the hotel at seven thirty on the dot, poured a cup of coffee—black—and had a light meal of bread and jam, with a slice of cheese on the side. After eating, he returned to his room for fifteen minutes, then descended to the lobby, picked up an English-language newspaper from the front desk, and asked the doorman to hail a cab.
She didn’t know where he went during the daytime—that was for others to worry about. He returned to the hotel at around six, and had a couple of drinks in the hotel bar before going out to a nearby restaurant for supper. After that, he retired to his room.
Starting with the second morning, she allowed Weatherly to notice her. She was a legitimate guest of the establishment, after all, and she wanted him to gradually become aware of her presence. That day she arranged to leave the breakfast room just as he was arriving. As they passed each other, she glanced at him with casual interest. The next morning she greeted him with a dazzling smile as he was leaving, as if she remembered him from before. She wanted him to carry the moment in the back of his mind as he went about his business that day.
She spent the morning window-shopping on Kurfürstendamm and had lunch at an outdoor café, treating herself to a glass of Riesling. She could see, in the distance, the Mercedes Benz star logo atop the new Europa-Center near the entrance to the zoo and, closer and to the left, the damaged spire of the Gedächtniskirche, which the locals called “the hollow tooth.” A new bell tower had been constructed beside it a few years ago, but the ruins remained as a war memorial, even though the city seemed determined to ignore the past.
Anna had been in West Berlin for nearly a year, after proving herself in Moscow. She started out in Volgograd—known as Stalingrad until Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program—entertaining her father’s guests. At first that simply meant bringing them drinks or plates of cold meats and cheeses. One of his colleagues noticed the way men responded to her and asked if she would be willing to go farther. When she did, and was amply rewarded for her efforts, she knew she’d found her calling. Between assignments, she became fluent in German and English, thereby increasing her value.
She enjoyed the relative freedom of living in this surreal city, where people partied as if there would be no tomorrow. Everything was bigger, brighter, and louder here, as if to deny the blighted scar that ran through it and the darkness beyond. The city was an island of Western culture a hundred and fifty kilometers from the rest of the free world. One of her targets had likened it to a head walking around without a body. Every way out of West Berlin passed through hostile territory. Every flight—French, British, and American airlines only; German airlines weren’t allowed access to their own former capital—used one of three narrow corridors through East German airspace.
City walls were usually built to keep the outsiders at bay, but here the outsiders had built a wall to prevent their people from getting into the city. The mayor called it the Wall of Shame, but people in the GDR referred to it as the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall. She had gone to see it once, but had never returned. The guard towers and barbed wire reminded her that she wasn’t truly free here, and the closer she got to the eastern zone, the stronger the feeling that everyone was up to something. Spies spying on other spies who were in turn spying on them. This city was the Cold War in a test tube, and she had a part to play in it.
She finished her wine, paid her bill and returned to the hotel. Back in her room, she took a long, hot bath—a decadent Western luxury she had grown to appreciate—anointing herself with oils and perfumes. This evening, she would meet Weatherly officially for the first time, in the hotel bar. Generally, one encounter was all it took, but he wasn’t scheduled to leave for several days, so she had time to defeat any defenses he might attempt to erect. In the end, they always surrendered. She hadn’t failed yet.
She waited in the lobby, pretending to be engaged in a conversation on a pay phone near the bar. This time, she wasn’t trying to hide from Weatherly—she wanted him to notice her. When she saw him approaching, she dropped her lipstick. The clatter of the metallic tube on the marble floor made him look in her direction. She picked up the lipstick and continued her make-believe conversation.
Anna waited until he found a place at the bar and ordered his first drink—two was his limit—before strolling in. American jazz played in the background. She was prepared to wait if there were no open stools around him, but she was in luck. While seating herself, she got close enough to allow her perfume to waft toward him. She ordered an old fashioned in her best Hochdeutsch, which was tinged with a Bavarian accent, not that she’d expect an American to notice.
In the mirror behind the bar, she saw Weatherly glance at her. She touched her hair and smoothed the bodice of her dress. Then she fumbled in her purse, pulled out a packet of cigarettes, shook one out and placed it between her lips. She continued rifling through the bag, pulling out cosmetics, change, and other bric-a-brac, strewing them on the bar in front of her. After several seconds she sighed, tossed everything back into the purse and pushed it away. She made a show of looking around before touching him gently on the arm. She smiled when he looked at her. “Entschuldigen Sie, bitte. Haben Sie Feuer?” she asked.
Weatherly furrowed his brow. “I, uh, sorry?”
“Oh, English,” she said. “Never mind. I was asking for a light, but I’m sure the bartender—”
“No, wait. Allow me,” he said. He plunged his hands into his pants pocket and came up with a gold lighter.
She inhaled deeply after he flicked the flame to life, and blew a cloud of smoke into the already hazy room. “Thank you,” she said, and turned back to her drink. She took a sip, staring straight ahead, waiting for him to make the next move.
“I saw tanks in the streets today,” he said.
Sometimes men wanted to talk about the strangest things, she mused. She took a measured sip from her glass and said, “This is your first time in Berlin?”
He signaled for his second martini. “No,” he said. “It’s been a number of years, though.”
“Business?” she asked. “Let me guess. You’re a banker.”
He laughed. “No!”
“Politician?”
He shook his head. “You’ll never get it. I’m an engineer. Don Weatherly.”
She shook his extended hand and crinkled her nose, a gesture that most men seemed to find appealing. “You drive trains? Into the Bahnhof Zoo?”
Another chuckle. “Not that kind of engineer. I design things before they’re built.”
“Like a—how do they say? Architekt?”
“Sort of,” he said. “They design buildings. I do just about everything else. Bridges, roads, things like that. Pretty boring stuff.”
She nodded. Weatherly’s dossier said that he worked for a company in Virginia. According to her handlers, he was in Berlin overseeing the construction of tunnels under the wall to assist defectors and to create spy stations. “Have you seen our great architectural achievement?” When he frowned, she said, “Our wall?”