The weather across Germany was clear but very cold, a lot of snow as piled up along the autobahns where traffic ran with headlights n at speeds of eighty and ninety miles per hour. He concentrated on his driving. Ever since Montreal Stephanie had fallen strangely silent, and had put a distance between them again as she had after the incident on the train in Chicago. It was fear, he supposed. And disgust with what they had done. She had killed and so had he. What did that make them? How different from the KGB were they in the last analysis?
By ten they had reached the city of Nurnberg where they turned south on the E6, sometimes passing through vast federal parklands, at other times passing quaint little villages and the matrix of welllaid-out farms, the land beginning to rise up toward the Alps at the foot of which lay the city of Munich, headquarters of the BND-the German Secret Service. He’d been here before, often, liaising with the Germans during his tenure in Berlin. But it wasn’t like coming to a familiar place for him this time. Everything had changed. He had changed.
They entered Munich from the north about eleven-thirty in the morning, driving along Schwabing’s busy leopoldstrasse lined with boutiques, restaurants, galleries, bars, and artists cellars, traffic extremely heavy, the twin towers of Munich’s landmark, the Frauenkirche rising up into the clear blue sky. Following the broad, poplarlined boulevard, he went the rest of the way into the city center, passing a big parking ramp near the ornately designed Hauptbahnhof, one of the largest train stations in Europe.
Coming back around the block, he entered the ramp, got his ticket from the machine and drove down to the lowest level, parking the Mercedes in a dark corner.
“Now what?” Stephanie asked, her voice flat. McAllister looked at her. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to do this.”
“You’re going ahead with it then?”
“Yes.”
She started to shake, and she grabbed his arm. “It’s over, David. leave it be. Please. For my sake.”
“Then they’ll have won.”
“So what?” she screeched, her face screwed up in a grimace of fear and anger. “You can’t go back to the Soviet Union. They’ll kill you for sure.”
“I must,” McAllister said. “Can’t you see that, my darling? I have no choice.”
“But you do! David, you’ve broken both networks. leave it be!”
“No.”
They took a cab to a small hotel just around the corner from the parking ramp, registering under their real names and surrendering their passports for the morning’s police check. They were both very red, neither of them had gotten much rest during the transAtlantic flight.
When the bellman left them, McAllister placed the chain on the door, then pulled the bed covers back, mussed up the pillows as if they had been slept on, and in the bathroom crumpled up a couple of the towels and threw them on the floor.
Stephanie stood in the middle of the room watching him, her arms across her chest as she hugged herself to keep from shivering. He unpacked their bags, scattering their clothing throughout the room, hanging some in the closet, laying some over the chairs, leaving hers on the floor. Next he placed their toiletries in the bathroom, squeezing a little toothpaste in the sink and dirtying a couple of the glasses.
“Is there anything that you’re going to need over the next few days?” He asked when he was finished. What do you mean?”
“We’re leaving everything behind.”
She looked around the room and shrugged. “My purse.”
“Get it and let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“Schwabing,” he said.
Schwabing was the artist’s quarter of Munich, much like New York’s Greenwich Village and London’s Soho. After leaving the hotel, they retrieved the Mercedes and had spent the next few hours shopping various department stores, purchasing a few articles of clothing, toiletry items, and a pair of cheap nylon suitcases into which they fed their things after first removing the price tags and store labels. leopoldstrasse, the main boulevard they had used this noon, was now alive with the early evening traffic when McAllister parked the car on a side street and he and Stephanie walked back up to a small, dy-looking nightclub in the middle of the block. It was barely six o’clock, yet already the place was more than half filled, the atmospheredense with smoke, a young long-haired man sitting on a small raised platform playing a Bruce Springsteen hit on his guitar. No one seemed to be listening to him-the hum of conversation was loud. McAllister found them a small table at the rear, and when their drinks came he got up. “Stay here, I’ll be right back,” he said.
Stephanie looked up at him but said nothing, and he turned and went to the bar where he sat down with his drink, placing a hundred-dollar bill in front of him.
It took the bartender less than a minute to come over to him, 1 glancing first at the money then at McAllister.
“I need an artist,” McAllister said in German. “The town is filled with them, mein Herr,” the barman said. He was a big, rough-hewn man with a beet-red complexion.
“This one would have to be special. Someone very good. Someone most of all discreet.”
Again the bartender eyed the money. “You are on the run?”
“Perhaps,” McAllister said. “You need papers, is that it?” McAllister nodded.
The bartender grinned. “Where’re you sitting?” McAllister motioned toward the back. The barman deftly slipped the hundred-dollar bill off the bar and pocketed it.
“I’ll send him back.”
“What’s his name?”
“I never asked,” the bartender said, and he moved away. McAllister went back to Stephanie and sat down. Her eyes were wide, but she was no longer shivering.
“Are you all right?” She nodded.
“Someone is coming over to talk to us. No matter what happens, don’t say anything.”
Again she nodded.
McAllister wanted to do something for her, something to make it easier. But there was nothing to be done. Not now.
Five minutes later a very old rat-faced man with bottlethick glasses that made his eyes seem huge and naked, a liter stein of beer in his hand, came over and sat down. When he grinned they could see thatmost of his teeth were missing. Everything about him seemed ancient and grubby except for his hands, the fingers of which were long and delicate, the nails well cared for. They were the hands of an artist.
“What sort of trouble are you in, then?” he asked. “You don’t want to know, my friend,” McAllister replied easily. “We need a pair of passports.”
The old man looked appraisingly at McAllister and then at Stephanie. He nodded. “Do you have the originals?”
“Blanks.”
“That’ll be easy then. Photographs?”
“No. And we’ll need to change our appearances, or at least I will.”
“No problem. My studio is just around the corner.”
“One more thing,” McAllister said. “I’ll need some visa stamps in my passport. A lot of them.”
“The well-used look,” the old man said understanding. “For what countries?”
“I’ll leave that up to you, except for one. The most current one.”
“Yes, for what country?”
“The Soviet Union.”
The old man sat back in his chair, his eyes narrowed. He shook is head. “That’s the tough one,” he said. “It’ll cost you.”