We followed him down the corridor, past our bedrooms, and into a room lined with closets on one side and a series of dressing tables on the other.
A tall blond woman with a lantern jaw and pale skin was arranging some articles on one of the dressing tables, which had a row of frosted bulbs around its mirror. “This is Frau Koepler,” said Wolgemuth. She turned, nodded, and went back to her arranging. “Frau Koepler is in charge of this section.”
Wolgemuth opened one of the closets. “Here we have uniforms of every description. The ones located in this closet are a complete range of sizes of those worn by the Volkspolizei. Complete with boots, hats, shirts — the lot.” He closed that door and opened the next. “These are military — American, British, French and West German. Also East German — which the Vopos are switching to shortly, I understand. Next police uniforms — Berlin variety. And here are dresses for women — made in New York, London, Berlin, Chicago, Hamburg, Paris, Rome: the labels are authentic, as are the materials. Coats, undergarments, shoes — a complete wardrobe. Next are men’s furnishings — civilian variety. Off-the-peg suits from the Fankfurt Kaufhof, from Chicago and Los Angeles and Kansas City and New York. Also from London, Paris, Marseilles, East Berlin, Leipzig and Moscow — almost anywhere. Hats and shoes, button-down shirts and wide-spread collars. Three-button suits, double-breasted, dinner jackets, and so forth.”
I was impressed and said so. Wolgemuth grinned proudly. “If we have time, Herr McCorkle, I would like to show you our reproduction facilities.”
“He means his forged-document shop,” Padillo said. “I took a look at it earlier. It’s good. Maybe the best.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.
“I’m ready,” Frau Koepler said.
“Good. Which of you will volunteer first?” Wolgemuth asked.
“Go ahead,” I said to Padillo.
He sat down in the chair before the dressing table and Frau Koepler draped a sheetlike affair around him — the kind that barbers use. She studied his face in the mirror and then covered his hair with a rubber cap that fitted down over his sideburns and neck. She murmured to herself, cocked her head this way and that, and then selected some soft wax. “Our nose is straight and thin,” she said; “we will broaden it slightly, flaring the nostrils just so.” Her hands flew deftly around Padillo’s face. She patted and probed and shaped and molded. When she was through, he had a new nose. I would still have recognized him, but his features were altered.
“Our eyes are brown and our hair is black. We will soon have brown hair, but we shall also have brown eyebrows.” She picked up a tube and rubbed some of its contents into Padillo’s eyebrows. They became brown — or dirty blond. “Now the mouth: it is one of the most important features of the face. May I see our teeth?”
Padillo leered at her.
“They are very white and contrast nicely with our rather olive complexion. We will stain them ever so slightly, giving them a strong yellowish look — like a nice old horse.” She squeezed some paste onto a toothbrush that she had taken from a clear-plastic container and handed the brush to Padillo. “Let’s brush our teeth now carefully. It will wear off in a few days.” He brushed. “Now for the shape of our mouth and cheeks,” she went on. “We will balloon them slightly.” She inserted some flesh-colored sponge rubber into her mouth. “Bite down. Now open. Now here and here. Now bite down. Now open. You see we have a slightly pendulous lower lip now, rounder cheeks, and we have become a mouth breather. It is always slightly open, as if we were suffering from a slight respiratory ailment. We will also lighten our complexion and give it some of the heavy drinker’s veins.”
Frau Koepler opened a small white pot, dipped her fingers into a grayish paste, and began to work the paste into Padillo’s face. His skin took on a yeasty, almost unhealthy look, as if he had spent too much time in a hospital — or a bar. Just below the sideburns she fitted a small adhesive-backed stencil; then she dabbed at it with a stick wrapped in cotton, which she had dipped into a small bottle of liquid. She let the liquid dry and peeled off the stencil. Padillo’s capillary veins had burst into a curlicue profusion of purples and reds. She did the same to the other side of his face and then began similar work on his nose. “Not too much here,” she said; “we have been friends with good schnapps for let us say — oh — fifteen years. A half-bottle a day perhaps.” She peeled off the stencil and the tip of Padillo’s nose glowed merrily. She whisked off the rubber head cover, reached into a bottom drawer, and produced a hair piece, which she fitted carefully to his head. Instead of a thick, gray-flecked crew cut he had a thin crop of dirty-blond hair, parted carefully on the right. Pink scalp gleamed through near the beginning of the hairline.
She examined her work critically. “Perhaps a small blemish on the chin — a pimple from a sour stomach.” She reached into a small box — the size of the ones that aspirin comes in — and applied her forefinger to Padillo’s chin. He had a pimple. He also had an unhealthy, puffy face; a drinker’s complexion; thinning hair; and a yellow-toothed mouth that never quite closed. He stood up. “Slump,” she ordered. “A man of our appearance avoids military bearing whenever possible.”
Padillo slumped and shuffled up and down the room.
“The perfect-thirty-year man,” I said.
“Think I could pass muster, Sergeant?” Padillo had even changed his voice to a White House drawl.
“Well, you’re not pretty — but you’re different.”
“If we had more time... but...” Frau Koepler brushed off the chair and shrugged.
“Next,” I said, and sat down. She did a similar job on me, except that I grew tanner but unhealthier looking. She also gave me a neat, well-clipped mustache. New circles grew under my eyes, and they seemed to form deeper sockets than were there before. A slight but livid scar appeared over my right eye. “It is like a picture,” Frau Koepler explained. “The eye goes to the upper left-hand corner of a face automatically. That is where we put the scar. The mind registers the scar, scans the rest of the face, and runs into the mustache. Again the unexpected because the previous owner had no scar or mustache. Simple?”
“You’re very good,” I said.
“The best,” Wolgemuth said, and beamed some more. “We did not have to do so much work on the other two because they are known only by pictures. But they will pass. Now, then, we must have the pictures taken for your ID cards.”
We said good-bye to Frau Koepler. The last time I saw her she was seated at the dressing table, staring into the the mirror and stroking her lantern jaw reflectively.
After the pictures were taken we had lunch with Wolgemuth. Padillo and I chewed carefuly because of the spongy rubber doodads that Frau Koepler had clamped in our mouths. They weren’t too much trouble — no worse than the first set of false teeth. They didn’t slip and slide around, but they felt strange and foreign. We found that drinking was much easier, and Wolgemuth thoughtfully supplied some excellent wine.
“You know, Herr McCorkle, I have been trying to get Mike here to come to work with us for a long time. He’s really one of the best in this rather difficult profession.”
“He’s got a job,” I said. “Between trips, that is.”
“Yes, the café in Bonn. That has been a really excellent cover. But I’m afraid that it’s completely exposed now — blown.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Padillo said. “After this they wouldn’t even send me down to the corner for coffee. That’s the way I want it.”
“You’re still a young man, Mike,” Wolgemuth said. “You’ve got the experience, the firsthand knowledge, the languages.”