We left the Hilton and walked toward the Kaiser Wilhelm church.
“When was the last time you were in the East Sector?” Cooky asked.
“Years ago. Before the wall went up.”
“How did you go through?”
I tried to remember. “I think I was slightly tight. I recall a couple of girls from Minneapolis who were staying at the Hilton. They were with me. We just caught a cab and sailed through the Brandenburg Gate. No trouble.”
Cooky looked over his shoulder. “Things have changed. Now we foreigners go through Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse. It could take an hour or so to get through, depending on whether the Vopos liked their dinner. You have your passport?”
I nodded.
“There used to be eighty official ways to get into East Berlin,” Cooky said. “Now there are eight. We need a car.”
“Any ideas?” I said, and looked over my shoulder.
“Rent one. There’s a place called Day and Night on Brandenburgische Strasse.”
We caught a cab and told the driver to take us to Brandenburgische Strasse, which was about three minutes away. We picked out a new Mercedes 220. I showed my driver’s license.
“How long will you have use for the car?” the man asked.
“Two or three days.”
“A two-hundred-Mark deposit will be sufficient.”
I gave him the money, signed the rental agreement, and put the carnet de passage and other papers into the glove compartment. I got behind the wheel, pumped the brakes to see if they worked, and started the engine. Cooky got in and slammed his door.
“Sounds tinny,” he said.
“They don’t make them the way they used to.”
“They never did.”
I turned left out of the Tag und Nacht garage and headed for Friedrichstrasse. You can usually ignore the speed limit in Berlin, but I kept to a modest forty to fifty kilometers per hour. The car handled well, but it wasn’t especially eager. It was just a machine designed to get you there and back with a minimum of discomfort. I turned left onto Friedrichstrasse.
“What’s the form?” I asked Cooky.
“Get your passport out; a GI will want to look at it.”
I drove on and stopped when a bored-looking soldier standing in front of a white hut waved me down. He glanced at our passports and then handed us a mimeographed sheet, which warned against carrying any non-American persons in the car, admonished me to obey all traffic regulations because “East Berlin officials are sensitive about their prerogatives,” and cautioned us about engaging in unnecessary conversation with East Berliners.
“What if I have to ask where the john is?” Cooky said.
“You can pee in your pants, mister, for all I care. Just fill this out first.”
It was a form requesting the time we could be expected back at the checkpoint. I put down midnight.
“Anything else?”
“That’s all, buddy. Just be nice to the krauts.”
A West German policeman nearer the crossing yawned and waved us on and I zigzagged the car through a series of white pole barriers and parked it. After that it wasn’t much worse than having a tooth pulled. There was the currency declaration. We lied about that. Then there was the passport inspection. There was nobody else in the line, and the Volkspolizei seemed to have nothing better to do.
“You are a businessman,” he said, thumbing through my passport.
“Yes.”
“What type of business?”
“A restaurant.”
He read some more about me and then slipped the passport through a slot behind him, where somebody else got the chance to find out how tall I was and how heavy and what color my hair and eyes were and what countries I might have visited in the past few years.
Cooky was next. “Herr Cook Baker?” the Vopo asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that not a strange name?”
“One gets a comment or two.”
“You are a public-relations man?”
“Yes.”
The Vopo nodded thoughtfully. “Just what is a public-relations man, Herr Baker?”
“We deal in controlled revelation,” Cooky said.
The Vopo frowned. He was a short, wiry man with a foxy face and eyebrows that needed combing. “You are a propagandist?”
“Only for inanimate objects — soap, underarm deodorant shaving lotions. Just the essentials. No government work.”
The sharp-faced German read some more about Cooky and decided that his passport didn’t need to travel through the slot. He got mine back, shot his cuffs, and prepared for the operation. First the stamp was inked twice on the pad, then it was examined, and then it was applied to the passport with a firm yet flashy bang. The Vopo admired his work briefly and then gave us back the passports after a cursory glance at the car’s papers. We got into the Mercedes and drove up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, about a half-mile away.
I drove slowly. East Berlin was even more drab than I had remembered it, the traffic was spotty, and the pedestrians walked as if they had to and not because they were out for a late-evening stroll. Their faces were stolid and they didn’t seem to smile much, even when talking to one another; but, then, I couldn’t recall many metropolitan boulevards these days where the pedestrians are noted for their cheerful faces.
“What happens if we don’t get back by midnight?” I asked Cooky.
“Nothing. They probably marked our passports somehow so that if we don’t show up and somebody else tries to use them they can spot it. But that form we signed about when we thought we’d come back is just routine. Nobody cares how long you stay over.”
We turned right on Unter den Linden. “Go through Marx-Engels Platza, straight ahead till you hit Stalinallee or whatever the hell they call it now — Karl Marx Allee — and I’ll show you where to turn left. I think.”
“Sounds as if you’ve been here before,” I said.
“No. I asked the bellhop at the Hilton. Bellhops know everything. He said it’s a dump.”
“It would fit in with the rest of the evening.”
“How much do you know about the whole thing?”
I lighted a cigarette. “Nothing firsthand. Just from hearsay. I saw Weatherby today and he said he would take me to Padillo, who is in some kind of jam. After Weatherby I ran into Maas, the mystery man, who claims that Padillo is being suckered — that he’s up for trade for two defectors from the National Security Agency. For five thousand dollars Maas says he can get Padillo out of East Berlin through a tunnel. He seemed to think Padillo would buy the idea. He wanted half in advance, but I said no deal and then called you for the cash. That’s it, except Burmser and his assistant with the big, white smile.”
“One thing,” Cooky said.
“What?”
“Mass is giving you a deal if he’s got a tunnel.”
“How’s that?”
“Rooms on this side close enough to the wall to make a break are just about nonexistent. But the West Berliners, across the wall, are charging up to twenty-five hundred bucks just for a room to run to so you won’t get shot after you jump over.”
“There are people who will make a buck whatever the graft — fire, pestilence, famine or war.” The apartments we were passing were the ones that had been thrown up in a hurry in 1948. Their plaster or stucco exteriors were flaking off, exposing the red brick underneath. The brick looked like angry red sores. The balconies sagged and clung halfheartedly to the buildings.