He wondered where Operation Apiary would take him next. Somewhere interesting, he hoped. He would be given a carefully constructed identity and a background that would make him a prime target for foreign operatives. His impending arrival would be leaked through various back channels and double agents. If the other side didn’t take the bait, he would enjoy a nice vacation in a city he might not otherwise have gotten to visit before moving on to the next job. Eventually the other side would catch on to the scheme and they’d have to try something else.
He’d been telling the truth when he told Petra—or Anna—he’d been to Berlin before. The previous time had been a decade earlier as part of Operation Stopwatch, building a tunnel into the Russian sector so they could tap into the Red Army’s communications. A mole had revealed the presence of the tunnel to the Russians before it was even finished, although it was years before MI5 and the CIA found out. All part of the game. It wasn’t often like chess, as many claimed. Opposing pieces were rarely removed from the board as the ones this morning had been, and they were mere pawns. It was more like the game of Reversi, where opposing players were surrounded and forced to change allegiances until one side controlled the entire board.
He’d been on the verge of retiring when he was asked to join Operation Apiary. They needed men of a certain age, and he fit the bill. Once his role had been explained, how could he refuse? The benefits were obvious—and they paid him, to boot.
He got dressed, washed his face and combed his hair before going downstairs to have breakfast. He found a seat at a table next to one occupied by a pretty young woman who was by herself. She glanced at him, then returned to her muesli and yoghurt. That was the way the world normally worked. What sensible young woman would be interested in an old guy like him?
HOUSE OF A THOUSAND EYES
BY KATIA LIEF
Berlin, August 1961
Conrad slipped his rifle off his shoulder and took aim the moment he heard the thud. Across the road from where he guarded the border, a woman had stumbled rather dramatically. He blinked away perspiration dripping into his eyes from beneath his helmet and saw that the woman appeared to be in her thirties. She was loaded down with shopping bags, and something seemed to have fallen from one of them. A knot of garlic shed its papery skin as it bounced along the cracked pavement, settling just short of the snake of barbed wire separating east from west.
The slope of the woman’s cheekbones stirred something in Conrad, and for a moment he imagined touching her skin, its softness, even its taste. He thought fleetingly of Emilie. How long since he’d seen her? Swallowing the aching regret of her loss, he consulted his watch. It was nearly quitting time, and he was getting hungry. He reshouldered his rifle. He was about to fetch the garlic and toss it back to her when Hans, a fellow guard, beat him to it.
The woman was just out of sight when the explosion ripped Hans from the ground. Conrad rushed to his side along with Axel, his oldest friend and also a guard. As the smoke cleared, it was obvious that Hans was dead. The back of his head was crushed, threads of blood spinning lacework on the arid ground. His blue eyes, frozen, stared at nothing.
A siren wailed into the cacophony of panicked voices. Fellow East Berliners watched the scene through the dusty windows of apartments whose view had been radically transformed from open street to barbed wire. Conrad scanned the length of the street for any trace of the woman. Somehow, she had vanished into the havoc.
The next day, vultures appeared. The first three reporters came on foot, with notebooks, and the fourth on a rusty blue bicycle with a camera strapped across his back. Conrad refused an inner pull of jealousy; he’d had a bicycle as a child but it was stolen by the son of a neighbor who had been a Nazi. Conrad’s parents hadn’t dared complain. Axel would have remembered the bike, as he himself had borrowed it on occasion when they were boys. The friends glanced at each other now and in silent agreement refused to show any sort of response to the predators on the other side of the border. Hans had died a martyr for socialism, and if they couldn’t figure that out themselves, it was their loss.
“Officer!” The reporter slid off the bike and uncapped his camera. “Give us a wave.”
Conrad walked the border without changing his gait or even looking at the young man, who appeared to be twenty-one or -two, not much older than himself. He had to realize there was no way Conrad could reply. If he did, his commander would give him a severe talking-to; but worse, his own conscience would destroy him.
They hurled their questions like stones.
“How did it feel seeing your comrade die?”
“Has the bomber been identified?”
“Why did she do it? In your opinion. Why?”
“What will happen to her now?”
And then a ripple of laughter passed among the Westies. Journalists loved interpreting the German Democratic Republic for the benefit of the rest of the world, though what they came up with was predictable, generally something about Soviet imperialism, hypocrisy, tyranny.
Conrad ignored them. He had been raised well, and was proud of his work guarding the border. The two halves of Germany were too philosophically opposed to coexist. For the GDR to thrive, the capitalists needed to be kept out. As for the question of East Berliners being kept in, his father, a schoolteacher of some local renown, had explained that the resources of a new nation were vulnerable, and it was intolerable to continue allowing people to live in the east and work in the west, reaping the benefits of socialism while enriching themselves on filthy capitalism. “The soullessness of greed,” his father had called this kind of dual citizenship in a broken Germany. Still, Conrad was as surprised as any when the coils of wire appeared overnight, the root of a wall that enforced new rules of nonemigration. Within days, though, he was used to the idea and signed on as a guard while a permanent wall was gradually constructed.
“Give us something,” a reporter shouted. “Anything. A smile.”
Conrad marched steadily along his route. It wasn’t his problem if they’d missed the garlic bomb yesterday, if today their cameras were hungry for some sustenance. It wouldn’t come from him.
When finally his relief appeared, he handed over his rifle, and saluted. He noted with some disappointment that Axel, with whom he often shared an after-work beer, was still on duty. Conrad started for home.
“I saw you admiring the reporter’s bike.” Herr Muller, an older man his sister, Gabi, had briefly dated, pulled to a stop on his own gleaming black bicycle. He patted the handlebars. “Want to take her for a spin?”
“It’s a beauty. Where did you get it?”
“Bought it from a colleague last year.” Conrad tried and failed to recall what it was that Herr Muller did for a living. ”I’m thinking of getting rid of it. It takes up too much room in my apartment, and I never ride it.”
“You’re riding it now.”
“Thought if I took her out, it would help me decide.”
“And has it?”
Herr Muller shrugged, and suddenly Conrad remembered why his sister had broken up with him. It wasn’t his relative age, but his inability to settle on anything, anything at all.
“Go on, try her out, I don’t mind.”
Conrad took her around the block, twice, waving to Herr Muller each time he passed. He enjoyed the sensation of gliding. It was exhilarating. He decided he wanted the bike.