13
Tuesday,
August 18, 1970
1963-64
The call from the State Criminal Office came
while he was in the shower. The desk clerk took the message and relayed it to
him. Dr. Wilner was to see Kriminalkommissar Stracke again at his convenience,
but the sooner the better.
After breakfast he hailed a
taxi outside the hotel and asked to be taken to the Hölderlinplatz without
giving a specific address. The driver dropped him at the first corner of the
square.
He was again greeted by
Fräulein Bothe, the same secretary as the day before, but on this morning she
was wearing the shortest miniskirt Miki had yet seen. She didnt quite have the
body for it; her thighs and calves were slightly on the thick side. But, Miki
asked himself rhetorically, who am I to criticize womens bodies when I am
married to Brigitte? And Fräulein Bothe looked good enough.
The Herr Kriminalkommissar
will see you now, Herr Wilner, she said, and opened the door of the inner
office for him. He passed through it, and she closed it behind him.
The inspector stood up behind
his desk and, as Miki approached it, reached out his hand to him. Good
morning, Doctor Wilner, he said as they shook hand. How are you?
You know better than I do,
Miki said with a little laugh.
Yes, in a way. Please sit
down. As they both sat, he went on, I am very glad to tell you that the
charges against you have been found, as we expected, completely groundless.
Can you elaborate, Herr
Kommissar?
Of course. First of all, our
handwriting expert has determined that the signature on the threatening letter
is not yours, and one of our colleagues in Hamburg, after examining your
typewriter with your kind permission, has also determined that it is not the
one on which the letter was typed.
I told you that.
Yes, of course, but we have
to do our work. Second, the Bulgarian Petrov has admitted under questioning
that it was not you who hired him to kill Hemme, but a woman, who he said was
young and pretty, and who told him that, in case he was caught, he should tell
the police that he had been hired by Michael Wilner, and that would get him
clear. He was surprised when that didnt work. We believe that he was set up to
be caught.
Is there any information
about who the woman might be?
Not really. His description
of her doesnt match anyone that we have any knowledge about, but we know that
the last place where he was imprisoned is Israel, so we believe that there is a
connection there.
The Mossad?
Possibly.
Wheels began to whirr in
Mikis mind.
This is very interesting,
he said. About a week and a half ago, a pretty young woman from Israel came to
visit me, claiming to be my daughter from a
well, a fling that I had when I
lived there as a very young man, a boy really. By an amazing coincidence, a few
days later I met with a teacher that I had in those days, and she clarified
that this young woman could not possibly be my daughter. In fact, if this
business here in Stuttgart hadnt come up, I would be in Israel right now,
investigating the matter. Now it has become even more interesting.
Do you have any leads? the
inspector asked, evidently intrigued.
Yes, Miki said, deciding
not to elaborate for the moment.
And would you like to go on
with your investigation?
Of course. As soon as
possible.
You realize, Doctor Wilner,
that you may be in some sort of dangerous situation. There seems to be a plot
designed to harm you.
Yes, I know that. Since my
book came out, I am not very well liked in certain high-ranking circles in
Israel.
We would like it if you did
some snooping on your own, the inspector said conspiratorially. But we would
have to find some way of protecting you. I will hand this matter over to my
colleague, Kriminalkommissar Hagemann, our liaison with Interpol. I hope that
by this afternoon we will have something worked out. If you dont mind, then,
please stay in Stuttgart. I assume you havent checked out of your hotel yet.
No, of course not.
Would you mind staying there
until we contact you?
Its fine. But I have an
errand to run.
Thats no problem. If
necessary, we will leave a message for you. And thank you, Dr. Wilner. I am
looking forward to our cooperation.
Thank you for your help,
Herr Kommissar.
Would you like to be driven
back to the hotel?
No, thanks. I know my way
back, so I will walk, or take a streetcar, or a taxi.
* * *
While Miki Wilner saw Kennedys West Berlin speech on
television, he was in Berlin on the night it was midday in Texas when
Kennedy was shot dead, and he joined the throng of Berliners that gathered to
mourn the man who had declared himself to be one of them, at the very place
where he had done so.
The summer tour of Kiss
Me, Kate had been a striking critical success, but not a commercial one,
since the ticket prices had to be kept low in order to attract an audience that
was unfamiliar with American musicals on stage. In order to recoup the tours
losses, the company, which was a partnership of the four principal actors,
settled down in the autumn for a long run at a commercial theater on the
Kurfürstendamm. With Brigitte now, in effect, living in Berlin, Miki spent as
much time there as he could.
He had arranged to write a
series of articles about Berlin: about the wall, and about the state of mind of
West Berliners, ordinary and prominent, whom he managed to interview. Among the
prominent were Willy Brandt, who thanked him for his article of five months
before; Otto Rosenberg, the Gypsy leader who had survived Auschwitz; and the
film producer Artur Brauner, a Polish Jew who survived the war in the Soviet
Union, and who was making a name for himself by producing Westerns based on the
novels of Karl May, and mystery and horror films based on the works of various
writers, mostly British.
Miki was, by this time, not
surprised that Brauners first words to him were, So youre Brigitte Wilners
husband! In the course of his conversation, in a mixture of German and
Yiddish, Brauner went on to tell Miki that he always had parts for beautiful
young actresses, that he had given Senta Berger and Sabine Sinjen their start,
and he had also hired Romy Schneider, Karin Dor, Elke Sommer
And would
Brigitte be interested? I dont know, Miki said. We keep our professional
lives separate. All right, said Brauner, I will ask her directly. She
will probably have you talk to Hetty Goldschmidt, Miki said. In that case,
Brauner joked, I had better keep my hand on my wallet.
After the assassination Miki
wrote, in quick succession, three articles about Kennedys legacy, dealing
respectively with the New Frontier (including the Peace Corps), civil rights,
and Vietnam. Shortly thereafter the Auschwitz trials got under way in
Frankfurt, and he began to cover them sporadically, interspersed with his work
in Berlin, and specifically when higher-ranking officers such as Lucas, Scherpe
and Schlange were being tried. His first trip was by interzone train, but the
journey was so slow, uncomfortable and tiring that he switched to flying.
Before long, the round trips by Lufthansa between Tempelhof and Frankfurt were
like a routine commute to him.
* * *
He ended up walking the entire two kilometers
or so back to the Unger, but with interruptions. He had noticed in his previous
rides between the hotel and the State Criminal Office that the Linden Museum,
said to be one of Europes great ethnological museums, was approximately
halfway. He had never been there, and since had a little time, he decided to
make a short visit.
He limited himself to two
departments, North American Indians and the Islamic Orient, in keeping with his
main journalistic interests. He was a fairly frequent visitor to the Hamburg
Ethnology Museum the director, Hans Fischer, was an acquaintance of his so
that not much of what he saw was unfamiliar to him, but the visit was a
pleasant distraction.
After about three quarters of
an hour he felt hungry. He resumed his walk, stopped for a quick lunch at a
snack bar, and went back to the hotel.
As he approached the desk in
order to pick up his key, he asked the clerk where he might find a photocopy
machine.
Do you mean Xerox? the
clerk asked.
Yes, of course, Miki said.
We have one in the office.
Id be glad to make you some copies.
But its twenty pages, and I
need two copies.
No problem, Doctor Wilner.
Just give me ten minutes, please. I suppose that what you have here is an
article.
Yes, as a matter of fact.
Well, its an honor to be of
help to a distinguished journalist like you, Doctor Wilner.
He went up to his room to get
the essay and brought it down to give to the clerk for copying. With the copies
made, he went back to his room and left them there while he put the original
back in the briefcase.
Briefcase in hand, he took a
taxi to the Klett building, asked the driver to wait while he went upstairs and
handed the typescript to Paeschkes secretary who turned out to be a
plain-looking but pleasant woman close to fifty, with a round face and red hair
and went back to the hotel.
There was no message for him.
He went back to his room to wait, taking his copy of the Stuttgarter
Nachrichten with him. He had already read the news pages and opinion
articles over lunch, and there was not much of interest in sports on a Tuesday,
so that he turned to the entertainment section. He saw that Fellinis Satyricon,
which had opened in March but had closed in Hamburg before he and Brigitte had
a chance to see it, could still be seen in Stuttgart. He decided tentatively
that if, depending on the afternoons developments, he felt like seeing a film
in the evening, this would be the one.
* * *
Miki did not find out that Artur Brauner had asked
Brigitte to test for a part in one of his films, or that she had agreed, until
early in the spring, when her run as Lois Lane ended and she told him that she
would not be getting the film part, so that it was time for them to return to
Hamburg. It was to be a coproduction with a French company, Brauner had told
her, and the French had insisted on one of their own for the part. But Brauner
in turn had insisted that Brigitte give him another chance, and Brigitte had
agreed.
Are you sure you want to
work in the kind of film that Brauner makes? Miki asked her, unable to
suppress a disapproving tone.
No, Im not sure, Brigitte
answered peevishly, but do I ask you whether you want to cover such-and-such a
subject? For example, that you did not want to cover the Eichmann trial but the
Auschwitz trial was okay?
But I explained it to you,
Miki said. Dont you remember?
Yes, of course, I remember.
But you volunteered the information; I didnt question your judgment. I was
glad that you went to Cannes with me, not to Jerusalem, but if you had made a
different choice I wouldnt have questioned it.
Touché, Miki said.
Hetty thinks that working
for Brauner couldnt possibly harm my career, and it might help it, not to
mention that the money is good.
Speaking of good money,
Miki said, I got an invitation from Merkur to weave my articles about
America and about Kennedy together into a long essay that I will probably call The
Kennedy Age. Paeschke, the editor, complimented my writing style, and they
pay well. Not by your standards, of course
Congratulations, Brigitte
cut him off. The growing disparity between her income and his was something
that, as he well knew, she did not like to be brought up, and for him to do so
now was a faux pas that he regretted. I like your writing style too,
she went on, ever since that first letter you sent me from Israel. I reread it
occasionally when were apart.
She had mentioned, a number
of years before, the fact that she had kept his letters from Israel, but now it
was
how long? Thirteen years! Why think of money when such a wonderful,
enduring love was theirs!
Brigitte had not told him
what part Artur Brauner had offered her, nor, in all likelihood, would she do
so unless he asked, which of course he would not do. But he suspected that it
might have been a Western, in which she would probably have been the beautiful
white woman desired by desperadoes or threatened by savages or both. Starting
in the preceding year, a continual series of German-made Westerns filmed in
Italy or Yugoslavia had been appearing in cinemas, most of them based on the
novels of Karl May, and a good many of them produced by Brauner.
On the closing night of Kiss
Me, Kate, Miki made a point of seeing the show again, and found his wife,
alias Lois Lane, as fresh and exciting as ever. When she sang True to You,
Darling, in My Fashion, though it was in German, the memory of the night at
the Plaza Hotel filled his whole being.
* * *
It was mid-afternoon when his telephone rang. A seemingly
young woman, who identified herself as the secretary of Kriminalkommissar
Hagemann, asked him to come to the State Criminal Office as soon as possible.
The woman who courteously
ushered him into Hagemanns office, evidently the one who had called him, was
indeed young, not as pretty as Fräulein Bothe but attractive in a modest,
old-fashioned way, as though the sixties had passed her by. She wore her
light-brown hair in a ponytail, a freshly ironed white blouse and a skirt whose
hem was about ten centimeters below the knee.
Good day, Doctor Wilner,
the inspector a burly, sandy-haired man with a bushy mustache, looking almost
English said after shaking hands. Let me get right to business, if its all
right with you.
Its fine with me, Herr
Kommissar.
Here is our plan, then. The day
after tomorrow it will be announced that you have been arrested. You will go to
Israel, but disguised and under an assumed name. We will provide you with
lets see
a wig, a beard, and dark glasses, which you will need anyway in
Israel. We have found that when someone is well known, it doesnt take much to
achieve a disguise.
I know. I am married to
someone well known, who travels incognito all the time.
Of course. We will also
provide you with a passport, and a drivers license in case you need to rent a
car, but no other document. No credit card, so that you will have to get
travelers checks once you have your new passport, but make sure you use them
up. Or else get cash, preferably US dollars. What would you like your name to
be?
Etzel Andergast, Miki
blurted out without thinking. The inspector looked up at him, seeming
nonplussed. Miki wondered if Hagemann, who was a fairly young man, was familiar
with Wassermanns novels. He doubted it.
All right, Herr Andergast.
You will be a German tourist, and you speak no Hebrew, only German and English,
or possibly French. Your birth date will be your actual one, but your
birthplace will be Stuttgart, and your residence will be at a fictitious
Stuttgart address. We should have everything ready for you to leave the day
after tomorrow. When would you like to come back?
Let me see
I have an
engagement a week from today, on the twenty-fifth, so I would like to be back
at home on the twenty-fourth, Monday, just as I was originally going to do.
Kriminalkommissar Hagemann
looked at some papers on his desk. So you were, he said. And via Zurich
that should work. You will need to make a stopover there for debriefing and for
you to change identities again. As soon as we hear from the Swiss, we will
announce that you had been cleared and released the day before, and had
traveled to Zurich on personal business. Now, as regards time, this leaves you
Friday, Saturday, Sunday three whole days in Israel, and it means you will
have follow your leads with great speed. But then a mission like this, unless
its carried out by professionals with unlimited time, works best when its
done fast, before the leads evaporate.
I understand that. Ive done
a little bit of investigative journalism.
We know. What will happen on
your return is that when you land in Zurich, a policeman will make contact with
you. He will pretend to arrest you and take you the airport police station, and
there you will be debriefed and become Michael Wilner again. Then you can fly
back to Hamburg, perhaps a little later than originally scheduled. There will
be no need for you to come back here; we will contact you if its necessary. Is
all that clear?
I think so.
Do you have any questions?
Well, the false beard: how
will it be attached?
Its a material that sticks
to the skin, like a Hansaplast, but can be pulled off with a little tug, if,
for example, you need to shave or to reveal your identity in private to anyone
while you are undercover. It only hurts a little bit, for a split second. But
you dont need to take it off, for example, when you take a shower. When you
come back on Thursday, you will get more detailed instructions.
What about the time between
now and Thursday?
We will need to do some work
this afternoon, to fit the beard and wig and take photographs. We also need
your signature as Etzel Andergast. But, if you would like, you can take the
night train back to Hamburg to spend the day with your gracious wife, and
especially to explain to her what will be going on, confidentially of course,
and not telling her any more than is absolutely necessary. Tomorrow night you
can take the train back to Stuttgart, and you will be met at the station. I
will be there myself.
* * *
Following their return to Hamburg, Miki continued his
periodic round trips to Frankfurt, but by train once more. By leaving home at
seven in the morning, he could catch a train that would get him to Frankfurt
shortly after noon, in time for that days afternoon session of the trial,
which was held in the audience hall of the Römer. It was almost next door to
where he and Brigitte were married.
Brigitte
learned that, while she was in Berlin, Hetty had negotiated a contract for her
with ZDF, the recently formed second television network, to act in a series of vaguely
related short films (one of which was based on a story by Balzac) to be shot at
the NDR studio. The series was to run under the collective title The
Thirty-Year-Old Woman, which happened to be the title of the Balzac story.
Filming would begin in August, but preproduction work would go on
intermittently through the spring and summer.
Mikis work on the Kennedy
essay was also intermittent. It turned out to be no simple matter of cutting
and pasting his articles. There was much duplication among them, since he could
not expect the reader of one necessarily to have read the previous ones, but in
the essay the duplication had to be eliminated. It also took some mental effort
to shift his focus between the atrocities that he heard described at the trial
and that triggered his own wartime memories and the achievements of John F.
Kennedy. The only link was the potential for atrocities that the Vietnam
conflict held, and he chose not to dwell on that.
He did, however, write a
concluding section discussing Lyndon B. Johnsons potential as the steward of
the Kennedy legacy. Judging from the progress on the Civil Rights Bill, which
was passed by the House of Representatives and sent to the Senate, he thought
that the prospects were favorable on the domestic front. But Johnson lacked any
experience in foreign affairs comparable to Kennedys, and it seemed unlikely
that he would know how to handle an international crisis as deftly as Kennedy
had dealt with Khrushchev over Cuba and Berlin, or that he would be able to
maintain Kennedys risky intervention in Vietnam without sliding into war.
He finished the first draft
of the essay just as the debate in the Senate was beginning. A few days after
he had sent the typescript off to Stuttgart, he sent an addendum that explained
to German readers the peculiar American parliamentary procedure known as filibuster.
Shortly after the essay was
published, American students began to protest against their countrys military
involvement in Vietnam. At Die Zeit, analysis of the conduct of American
international policy was the exclusive preserve of the Countess, but young
peoples movements were in Mikis domain, and he wrote an article wondering if
sentiment against a potential war in Vietnam might drain energy from the
campaign for civil rights, or if the two movements might coalesce as he
hoped into a broad, global drive for
peace and human rights. Now, such a movement would be something worth writing
about.
* * *
The clerk at the Unger had no objection to Mikis leaving
his bag behind the desk until it was time for him to board the night train for
the return to Hamburg.
He walked to the station to
check the timetable. Once he determined which train he would take and booked a sleeping-car
compartment from Frankfurt to Hamburg, he called Brigitte from a public
telephone to tell her of his arrival time (he would take a taxi home, he said,
since it would be quite early in the morning) and to reassure her that
everything was all right. Brigitte listened almost in silence and asked no
questions. During one pause she said, I love you, and at the end, Till
tomorrow, my treasure.
After a leisurely dinner, for
which he had the Swabian specialty called Geschmälzte Maultaschen ravioli
filled with sausage meat and spinach, fried with onions and served with potato
salad, washed down this time with red wine at the same friendly tavern as the
previous evening, he still had over three hours to kill before the train. A
perfect length of time for seeing Satyricon. From what he had read about
it, it also seemed that it would be the perfect film for the surrealistic
situation that he now found himself in.
And so it proved to be. There
was even an actress, playing a prostitute, who was remarkably reminiscent of
Ora. Her fully exposed breasts were just what he would have imagined Oras to
be, had he allowed himself to mentally undress the young woman whom he had
believed to be his daughter.
Before boarding his train he
bought the current copy of Der Spiegel, which he read on the way to
Frankfurt. But once he was settled on his berth at the Frankfurt station, the
bizarre images from the film took hold of his mind, and he welcomed them.
* * *
During the summer of 1964 Mikis trips to Frankfurt became
less frequent. The questioning of the witnesses and the evasive answering of
the accused were becoming repetitious, and he no longer felt the need to be
present at most sessions. Other matters were claiming his journalistic
attention.
The United States Senate
finally passed the Civil Rights Bill after a twelve-week filibuster, and a few
weeks later Johnson signed it. Things were finally looking up for civil rights
in the country that proclaimed itself the champion of democracy. But in the
meantime two young Jewish men who had gone to Mississippi to help Negroes
register to vote, and a Negro who worked with them, went missing, with foul
play suspected. Miki wrote an article about the contradiction between
theory and reality in America.
On the day that their bodies
were found, it was reported that two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin
were attacked by the navy of North Vietnam. Massive American retaliation
followed. Miki found that his fears about Johnsons inability to keep the United
States out of war as he was promising to do in his campaign against Goldwater
might be justified.
But when he wrote about the
murdered civil-rights activists he once again mentioned Vietnam only obliquely,
relating the two student movements, and wondering if the antiwar campaign might
claim victims of its own.
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