"The day that anybody in this joint is afraid of the police!"
Carter shrugged off the odd feeling the staring woman had given him and leaned forward again, lowering his voice. "Okay, now Hessling."
The Indian sighed. "He's an enigma, Nick. You hear stories, but nothing concrete. He's slimy as hell, and has got his fingers in everything, but only he knows what. He's a loner. Probably got two, three hundred people under his thumb, but not a single one of them knows who the other one is."
"How can I get a line on him, particularly his deals with the East and anybody in the States?"
Erhanee thought for a moment, his narrow, handsome face screwed into rapt concentration, and then he smiled. "Voigt."
"Voigt who?"
"Hans-Otto Voigt. Anything shady or dirty that Hessling doesn't own or have his fingers in, Voigt does. They're the two powers around here. It's been almost war for years, but both of them are so powerful it's remained a standoff, if anybody knows more about Hessling than the police, it's probably Voigt. Call it the underworld form of industrial espionage."
"How can I get to this Voigt?"
"Pretty tough. He's semiretired, only handles the big deals. His son, Erich, takes care of the day-to-day business. The old man has a castle out on an island in the Havel. He hardly ever leaves it unless he goes south for the sun."
"See what you can set up for me."
"I'll try, but it might be rough. Got anything to use as bait?"
"I might have," Carter replied, checking his watch.
Vintner had said to call him in about two hours for the Hessling police file. It had been two and a half hours.
"Wait here a minute. I've got to make a phone call." He stopped by the bar and asked where the public pay phone was located.
"Up the stairs, by the desk," the barman replied, waving a hand toward the door where the frightened woman had disappeared.
Halfway up the stairs, he met her. She stood, arms folded beneath her bosom, feet planted wide apart. Even though the fear on her face was stronger than before, she was obviously blocking his path.
"What do you want?"
"To use the telephone, Fräulein Klammer."
"How do you know my name?"
"One of your girls told me."
"I know all the police on the Ku'Damm. You are not police."
"You are SSD."
"Nein."
"Why did you ask my name?"
"Curiosity."
"Liar," she hissed, and moved around him down the stairs.
Carter merely shrugged and moved on up the stairs to the phone.
"State Security."
"Chief Inspector Vintner, bitte."
"One moment, please." There was a brief pause and she was back. "Go ahead, mein Herr."
"Vintner."
"Carter. Were you able to get the file on Hessling?"
"Yes, but I doubt it will do you much good."
"How so?"
"He's dead. We got a call about an hour ago."
Eight
Dieter Klauswitz dined in the large, rustically decorated dining room of the Metropol. He had meant to return immediately to his room but found himself instead wandering out onto Friedrich Strasse.
He would walk off the huge meal before returning to his room and attempting sleep.
To his right he saw the wall, eerily illuminated by sodium-vapor lights. It gave him an odd feeling. He had lived years in West Berlin, but this was the first time he had ever been in the Eastern sector.
Someone had once said, "If you want to find out what Berlin was like before the war, go visit the East."
It was true.
The pace was not as frantic, there were fewer cars and people on the streets, and everywhere were uniformed Vopos who seemed to watch every moving thing.
At the Unter den Linden, Klauswitz stopped and lit a cigarette. To his right, at the end of the two-hundred-foot-wide boulevard, was the Brandenburg Gate. He had never seen it up close, let alone from this side of the wall.
In its own way, the huge structure was a symbol of both the old and the new Germany. Klauswitz toyed with the idea of strolling down beneath the tall linden trees and taking one last, closer look. Then, out of the comer of his eye, to the left just south of the Unter den Linden, he saw the building.
It was formidable, a thick-walled, narrow-windowed fortress over four hundred feet long. It was the Soviet embassy.
Klauswitz retraced his steps back to the Metropol.
"From there he walked back to the hotel. He had one drink in the bar, a brandy, and went on up to his room."
Colonel Volatoy Balenkov nodded, his broad face impassive as he listened to the young lieutenant report on the movements of the American, David Klein.
"You got the passport from the concierge at the Metropol?"
"Ja, Herr Colonel. The experts have cleared it."
"Authentic?"
"Perfectly, Herr Colonel."
"Damn!" The colonel slammed the desk with one hand and stood. At the window he stared up Friedrich Strasse to the Metropol.
What a mess, he thought. Should he gamble that Oskar Hessling had told the truth?
Absently, his fingers ran over the ribbons above his left breast pocket on his gray tunic. The medals were impressive. Hero of the Soviet Union, the red and yellow Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the maroon and pink for the capture of Berlin.
The list went on and on, and anyone who could read them would see that Volatoy Balenkov had had a distinguished military career.
But that wouldn't mean a thing in Moscow if he arrested an American businessman and had nothing to charge him with but the accusation of a West German criminal.
"What would you do, Lieutenant?"
The Stasis lieutenant's face came up sharply from the papers in his hands. It was not like a Russian, let alone a Russian colonel, to ask the opinion of an East German lieutenant.
"Based on the fact that Herr Hessling has never given us wrong information, I would hold him for questioning if nothing else." Balenkov sighed and returned to his desk. "You have a point, Lieutenant. The trouble is… with Herr Oskar Hessling dead, we don't know what we are to arrest Klein for, or what to do with him if he is Klauswitz."
This was only partially true. Balenkov's suspicious, quick mind had been piecing together possibilities all day. For the past two hours he had been going over the files that their informant in the West German police had provided.
That same informant had told them of the day's chaotic events in the West, and less than fifteen minutes before, he had phoned over the news of Hessling's heart attack.
Now Balenkov lifted the Klauswitz file again. His eye scanned down it and, as it had so many times in the last hour, went right to the man's accomplishments before he had become a criminal.
He was a marksman, an expert in the rifle half of the biathlon. If David Klein were indeed Dieter Klauswitz, they may very well have their hands on a bombshell, the man who had attempted the assassination of the American. Stephan Conway.
Balenkov's thought processes had already gone one step further. If Oskar Hessling knew about this, he had probably set it up. Also, if he were betraying his shooter, he had something much more far-reaching — and much more profitable — on his mind.
The problem was, what the hell was it?
"The evidence has been placed in the hotel room?"
"Ja, Herr Colonel."
Balenkov rubbed his eyes until they were watery, and then looked up at the younger man.
"Arrest him."
Police inspector Klaus Reimer was a man who respected orders and authority. When word came from Horst Vintner and his own superior to answer all of Nick Carter's questions and cooperate with him, Reimer didn't question it.