Spandau Phoenix

“Or nothing.”

Hauer sighed deeply. “I’d really like to know why you came to Berlin. Three years now. You must have wanted some kind of reconciliation … or answers, or something.”

Hans stiffened. “So why are you asking the questions?”

Hauer looked hard into Hans’s eyes. “All right,” he said softly. “We’ll wait until you’re ready.”

Before Hans could reply, Hauer vanished into the darkness. Even the glow of his cigar had disappeared. Hans stood still for some moments; then, shaking his head angrily, he hurried into the shadows and resumed his patrol.

Time passed quickly now, the silence broken only by an occasional siren or the roar of a jet from the British military airport at Gatow. With the snow soaking into his uniform, Hans walked faster to take his mind off the cold. He hoped he would be lucky enough to get home before his wife, Ilse, left for work. Sometimes after a particularly rough night shift, she would cook him a breakfast of Weisswurst and buns, even if she was in a hurry.

He checked his watch. Almost 6:00 A.M. It would be dawn soon. He felt better as the end of his shift neared. What he really wanted was to get out of the weather for a while and have a smoke. A mountain of shattered concrete near the rear of the lot looked as though it might afford good shelter, so he made for it. The nearest soldier was Russian, but he stood at least thirty meters from the pile. Hans slipped through a narrow opening when the sentry wasn’t looking.

He found himself in a comfortable little nook that shielded him completely from the wind. He wiped off a slab of concrete, sat down, and warmed his face by breathing into his cupped gloves. Nestled in this dark burrow, he was invisible to the patrolling soldiers, yet he still commanded a surprisingly wide view of the prison grounds. The snow had finally stopped, and even the wind had fallen off a bit. In the predawn silence, the demolished prison looked like pictures of bombed-out Dresden he had seen as a schoolboy: motionless sentries standing tall against bleak destruction, watching over nothing.

Hans took out his cigarettes. He was trying to quit, but he still carried a pack whenever he went into a potentially stressful situation. Just the knowledge that he could light up sometimes calmed his nerves. But not tonight. Removing one glove with his teeth, he fumbled in his jacket for matches. He leaned as far away as he could from the opening to his little cave, scraped a match across the striking pad, then cupped it in his palm to conceal the light. He held it to his cigarette, drawing deeply. His shivering hand made the job difficult, but he soon steadied it and was rewarded with a jagged rush of smoke.

As the match flame neared his fingers, a glint of white flashed against the blackness of the chamber. When he flicked the match away, the glimmer vanished. Probably only a bit of snow, he thought. But boredom made him curious. Gauging the risk of discovery by the Russian, he lit a second match. There. Near the floor of his cubbyhole he could see the object clearly now—not glass but paper—a small wad stuck to a long narrow brick. He hunched over and held the match nearer.

In the close light he could see that rather than being stuck to the brick as he had first thought, the paper actually protruded from the brick itself. He grasped the folded wad and tugged it gently from its receptacle. The paper made a dry, scraping sound. Hans inserted his index finger into the brick. He couldn’t feel the bottom. The second match died. He lit another. Quickly spreading open the crinkled wad of onion-skin, he surveyed his find in the flickering light. It seemed to be a personal document of some sort, a will or a diary perhaps, hand-printed in heavy blocked letters. In the dying matchlight Hans read as rapidly as he could:

This is the testament of Prisoner #7. I am the last now, and I know that I shall never be granted the freedom that I—more than any of those released before me—deserve. Death is the only freedom I will know. I hear His black wings beating about me! While my child lives I cannot speak, but here I shall write. I only pray that I can be coherent. Between the drugs, the questions, the promises and the threats, I sometimes wonder if I am not already mad. I only hope that long after these events cease to have immediate consequences in our insane world, someone will find these words and learn the obscene truth, not only of Himmler, Heydrich, and the rest, but of England—of those who would have sold her honor and ultimately her existence for—

The crunch of boot heels on snow jolted Hans back to reality. Someone was coming! Jerking his head to the aperture in the bricks, he closed his hand on the searing match and peered out into an alien world.

Dawn had come. In its unforgiving light, Hans saw a Russian soldier less than ten meters from his hiding place, moving slowly forward with his AK-47 extended. The flare of the third match had drawn him. “Fool!” Hans cursed himself. He jammed the sheaf of paper into his boot, then he stepped boldly out of the niche and strode toward the advancing soldier.

“Halt!” cried the Russian, emphasizing the command with a jerk of his Kalashnikov.

“Versailles,” Hans countered in the steadiest voice he could muster.

His calm delivery of the password took the Russian aback. “What are you doing in there, Polizei?” asked the soldier in passable German.

“Smoke,” Hans replied, extending the pack. “Having a smoke out of the wind.” He waved his sector map in a wide arc as if to take in the wind itself.

“No wind,” the Russian stated flatly, never taking his eyes from Hans’s face.

It was true. Sometime during the last few minutes the wind had died. “Smoke, comrade,” Hans repeated. “Versailles! Smoke, tovarich!”

He continued to proffer the pack, but the soldier only cocked his head toward his red-patched collar and spoke quietly. Hans caught his breath when he spied the small transmitter clipped to the sentry’s belt. The Russians were in radio contact! In seconds the soldier’s zealous comrades would come running. Hans felt a hot wave of panic. A surprisingly strong aversion to letting the Russians discover the papers gripped him. He cursed himself for not leaving them in the little cave rather than stuffing them into his boot like a naive shoplifter. He had almost reached the point of blind flight when a shrill whistle pierced the air in staccato bursts.

Chaos erupted all over the compound. The long, anxious night of surveillance had strained everyone’s nerves to the breaking point, and the whistle blast, like a hair trigger, catapulted every man into the almost sexual release of physical action. Contrary to orders, every soldier and policeman on the lot abandoned his post to converge on the alarm. The Russian whipped his head toward the noise, then back to Hans. Shouted commands echoed across the prison yard, rebounding through the broken canyons.

“Versailles!” Hans shouted. “Versailles, Comrade! Let’s go!”

The Russian seemed confused. He lowered his rifle a little, wavering. “Versailles,” he murmured. He looked hard at Hans for a moment more; then he broke and ran.

Rooted to the earth, Hans exhaled slowly. He felt cold sweat pouring across his temples. With quivering hands, he pocketed his cigarettes, then carefully refolded his sector map, realizing as he did so that the paper he held was not his sector map at all, but the first page of the papers he had found in the hollow brick. Like a fool he had been waving under the Russian’s nose the very thing he wanted to conceal! Thank God that idiot didn’t check it, he thought. He pressed the page deep into his left boot, pulled his trouser legs down around his feet, and sprinted toward the sound of confusion.

In the brief moments it took Hans to respond to the whistle, a routine police matter had escalated into a potentially explosive confrontation. Near the blasted prison gate, five Soviet soldiers stood in a tight circle around two fortyish men wearing frayed business suits. They pointed their AK-47s menacingly, while nearby their commander argued vehemently with Erhard Weiss. The Russian was insisting that the trespassers be taken to an East German police station for interrogation.

Weiss was doing his best to calm the shouting Russian, but he was obviously out of his depth. Captain Hauer was nowhere in sight, and while the other policemen stood behind Weiss looking resolute, Hans knew that their Walthers would be no match for the Soviet assault weapons if it came to a showdown.

The sergeants of the NATO detachments kept their men well clear of the argument. They knew political dynamite when they saw it. While the Soviets kept their rifles leveled at the wide-eyed captives—who looked as if they might collapse from shock at any moment—the Russian “sergeant” bellowed louder and louder in broken German, trying to bully the tenacious Weiss into giving up “his” prisoners. To his credit, Weiss stood firm. He refused to allow any action to be taken until Captain Hauer had been apprised of the situation.

Hans stepped forward, hoping to interject some moderation into the dispute. Yet before he could speak, a black BMW screeched up to the curb and Captain Hauer vaulted from its rear door.

“What the hell is this?” he shouted.

The screaming Russian immediately redirected his tirade at Hauer, but the German brusquely raised his hand, breaking the flood of words like a wave against a rock.

“Weiss!” he barked.

“Sir!”

“Explain.”

Weiss was so relieved to have the responsibility of the prisoners lifted from his shoulders that his words tumbled over themselves. “Captain, five minutes ago I saw two men moving suspiciously inside the perimeter. They must have slipped in somewhere between Willi and me. I flashed my light on them and shouted, ‘Halt!’ but they were startled and ran. They charged straight into one of the Russians, and before I could even blow my whistle, every Russian on the lot had surrounded them.”

“Radios,” Hauer muttered.

“Captain!” the Soviet “sergeant” bellowed. “These men are prisoners of the Soviet government! Any attempt to interfere—”

Without a word, Hauer strode past the Russian and into the deadly circle of automatic weapons. He began a rapid, professional interrogation of the prisoners, speaking quietly in German.

The black American sergeant whistled low. “That cop’s got balls,” he observed, loudly enough for all to hear. One of his men giggled nervously.

The terrified civilians were elated to be questioned by a fellow countryman. In less than a minute, Hauer extracted the relevant information from them, and his men relaxed considerably during the exchange. It revealed a familiar situation—distasteful perhaps, but thankfully routine. Even the Russians holding the Kalashnikovs seemed to have picked up on Captain Hauer’s casual manner. He patted the smaller of the two trespassers on the shoulder, then slipped out of the circle. A few of the rifles dropped noticeably as he stepped up to the Russian officer.

“They’re quite harmless, Comrade,” he explained. “A couple of homos, that’s all.”

Misunderstanding the slang, the Russian continued to scowl at Hauer. “What is their explanation?” he demanded stiffly.

“They’re homosexuals, Sergeant. Queers, Schwüle … golden boys, I think you call them. Looking for a temporary love nest, that’s all. They’re all over Berlin.”

“No matter!” the Russian snapped, grasping Hauer’s meaning at last. “They have trespassed on Soviet territory, and they must be interrogated at our headquarters in East Berlin.” He motioned to his men. The rifles jerked back up instantly. He barked an order and started marching toward the parking area.

Hauer had no time to consult his superiors as to legalities, but he knew that allowing Russian soldiers to drag two of his fellow countrymen into the DDR without any semblance of a trial was something no West Berliner with an ounce of pride would do without a fight. Glancing around, he tried to gauge the sympathies of the NATO squads. The Americans looked as if they might be with him, but Hauer knew he couldn’t rely on that if it came to a fight. Force would probably be counterproductive in any case, he thought; it usually was. He’d have to try a different tack.

Five steps carried him to the departing Russian. He grasped the burly man by his tunic and spun him around. “Listen, Sergeant,” he whispered forcefully, “or Major or Colonel or whatever the hell you are. These men have committed no serious offense and they certainly pose no threat to the security of this site. I suggest we search them, then book them into one of our stations just like anybody else. That way we keep the press out of it, understand? Pravda? Izvestia? If you want to make an international incident out of this, you’re quite welcome to do it, but you take full responsibility. Am I clear?”

The Russian understood well enough, and for a moment he considered Hauer’s suggestion. But the situation was not so simple now. He had gone too far to back down in front of his men. Ignoring Hauer, he turned to his squad.

“These men are suspected enemies of the Soviet Union! They will remain in Soviet custody until the objective of their mission has been determined! Corporal, put them aboard our bus!”

Furious but outgunned, Hauer thought quickly. He had dealt with Russian officers for more than twenty-five years, and all his experience had taught him one lesson: the communist system, inefficient as it was, had grown proficient at breeding one thing out of its citizens—individual initiative. This Russian had to be reminded that his actions could have serious international implications. With two fingers Hauer removed his Walther from its holster and handed it to an astonished Weiss with a theatrical flourish. Again, the Soviet riflemen paused uncertainly, their eyes riveted on the unpredictable policeman.

“We have a stalemate, Comrade!” Hauer declared loudly. “You wish to keep these men in Soviet custody? Very well! You now stand on the only plot of Russian soil in West Berlin—an accident of history that will soon be rectified, I think. You may keep the prisoners here for as long as you wish—”