Spy of Red and Blue

VIII

Brandenburg Gate had once been the border between East and West Germany before reunification. The line had been guarded by the Americans, then the British, then finally no one at all. Yet, tonight, the footlights illuminated the sculptures atop it just like it always had, as if nothing had ever changed. This was a landmark that would survive to the end of time, a time long after humans or anything else.

The little police boxes he had remembered from his early years in the city were gone now. He remembered, also, that in the early days, people had needed a permit to cross the border of each occupation zone. That was how he had come Berlin, actually: asking for a permit from the garrison in Hanover. The officer seemed to have known him.

Connections again, most likely Donovan's.

"I'm here to apply for a travel permit."

"What is your purpose of travel?"

Outside, a few men were clearing rubble with a swastika buried in the middle.

"To see family."

He gave him the documents. The officer stamped them, almost a little too quickly, and handed them back to him with a permission slip attached.

"Have a good trip, Mr. Ulbricht."

Hans Ulbricht was his name. Frederick Kindler had died in a fire. He had crossed over to Berlin, this time with a permit from the Americans he had picked up in Dresden. The city was still broken. He saw a few children huddled in the shadows and gave them a can of Spam the Americans had given him. They looked at him gratefully, as the Americans guards stood in the distance. Blue-eyed, blond-haired children. In another time and place, they would be at home, listening to the radio with not a care in the world. Yet, here they were, barely eking out an existence in the streets.

"Your documents, please."

They asked him, in a room, why he spoke English. He said that he had learned English at school. A likely explanation. He never said that he had been to America. He was Hans Ulbricht, resistance fighter. He had memorized the manifesto cover to cover. No, he was not a Nazi spy; weren't his documents right here? After all, could the Nazi fake the documents that well?

No they couldn't, the officer agreed.

Hans knew the procedure already, could see it begin slowly unfolding in his head. A car would come flying down the street. A brief stop, which the Stasi couldn't see since the bulbs of the rear headlights had been removed.

He checked his watch. Three minutes.

He had settled in crappy apartment not far from here when he had first arrived in Berlin, the building the OSS put him up in. Through some more bureaucratic maneuvering, it had been determined that his (fake) father had died and left the house to him in his last will and testament. He spent those early days in a room with a table, carving linoleum and painstakingly printing pamphlets and posters for the communist cause. He learned Russian, mulling over the dictionary slowly, then went back to printing the pamphlets, the red pain staining his hands. He printed faces of Lenin and Stalin, faces of the communist heroes in red and black ink. Then Russian again.

He handed off the pamphlets on the street, waving them at the broken people and uncomprehending children. An officer came up and told him he couldn't hand out pamphlets. He said that he understood, then went back to handing them out after a few days. Someone must have intervened, because the officer didn't come up to him again.

One minute.

He got food at the black market at Alexanderplatz. The police came every few days. Beggars, harlots, businessmen, and children were all bargaining in that place of putrid dust. Besides his house was a brothel, where men went in at all hours and paid a pittance. He never did. Eva would never forgive him.