Chapter 4
It was a clammy-hot July day in Berlin. Even the I staid Germans paraded the length of the Kurdamm I in their shirt sleeves during short lunch hours that I provided at least a breezy respite from their hot offices. But there was no air of relief, no lunch break gaiety about the sombre American Sergeant who trekked slowly down the right side of the colorful avenue of shops and cafes. Every face in the crowd received a curiously pleading look from the young GI, as if to ask, "Is it you ... are you the contact with there Reds, the one i who can take me to Erika, tell me what heinous espionage I must commit against my own country to save her young life?"
"Have you a match, please?"
Joe jerked his head around in the direction of the voice. It had come from one of the tables at a sidewalk cafe to his right.
"Good Gosh! Eri ... Oh, I'm sorry," he fumbled an apology after a double take.
The voice had come from a leggy blonde beauty sitting alone against the little fence that separated the tables from the sidewalk. A pensive, questioning smile lit her provocatively full lips. In her left hand she held a cigarette to them, while the right twirled at the stem of a big goblet of Berliner Weissbier. Her figure was small busted yet projecting, the legs with that bathing beauty suppleness and shape of Erika's, the short dress used to optimum advantage.
Yet the physical similarity could have been coincidental. What really threw Joe was the dress she wore-the very same clinging white sheath, the sleeveless decollete creation he had bought Erika at the PX just three days before.
"You like to sit down with Hildegard?" she smiled the question pertly, made-up eyes flickering with intense interest as she patted the seat beside her. "Please to come around and sit with Hildegard. Maybe we make date and go to my place ... yes?"
"I ... uh, yeah ... sure," Joe fell in quick with the B-girl cover, then walked around the little fence.
"We make just like you be looking for nice girl," she explained in a low voice, accepting the light he offered and covering her mouth cautiously. "And me? I look nice ... yes? Like many beautiful German girl who make afternoon pleasure with American GI."
"Where's Erika?" Joe asked immediately, letting his arm hide his mouth as he reached up to remove his cap. "I do nothing until...."
"Impetuous," she remarked with a sly smile that befitted the setting. "I am only little piece of metal in very big machinery. You pay for the drink and we walk up to Charlie."
"Checkpoint Charlie?" he questioned with alarm, then quickly glanced around to see if he had been overheard. "I mean ... just walk through the place ... right into the East Sector?"
"Is no problem," the girl shrugged, her skirt easing down to the dimpled knees as she stood up. "I have a camera for you to put around the neck ... it's in my purse. No sweat to get through if you look like regular tourist. Many GI walk through each day."
Joe's body was drenched with perspiration, the khaki uniform stuck to his skin when he stopped to show his ID card to the MP at Checkpoint Charlie. As a Security Clerk with better than top secret clearance he was actually forbidden to go into East Berlin even as a tourist, but the ID card did not reveal his unit, and Joe managed to play his part well when the MP asked: "You stationed in Berlin, Sergeant?"
"No ... USAREUR Finance Office in Heidelberg ... just doing a little sightseeing."
"Gotchoor leave papers?"
"On orders ... auditing the books on QM purchases. Left my papers with the Transportation Office to clear me on the duty train back to Frankfurt."
"Okay, Sergeant," the MP was apparently satisfied as he gave a smirking look of approval toward the blonde. "Don't get into any arguments or unnecessary conversations. And watch that camera ... no pictures of Russian troops or the East German Vopos."
"Right. Thanks, Mac."
Joe wiped his wet forehead. He felt dizzy. The walk through the narrow gate in the Red wall seemed interminable until at last two Vopos in their "guardhouse green" uniforms waved them through without so much as a glance at the proffered documents.
"We go down Friedrichstrasse here, up to Unter den Linden," Hildegard instructed carefully. "There will be a sedan waiting to take us to Commde Gherkov."
Joe's memory flipped into gear-the man in the back seat of the Mercedes last night. There had been a tinge of recognition even then about the outline of his cave-man features. Now he knew. He had seen the identification poster in the CSS file. He was Alexandrei Gherkov, most vicious and hated of all the KGB agents in Berlin.
Fifteen minutes later the chauffer-driven ZIL limousine, which had been waiting for them on the United den Linden, came to a stop. There was a brief exchange of words between the driver and another man, a sound of metal scraping cement, a very short drive through an area which echoed hollowly with the sound of the cumbersome engine, then they stopped again.
"We can now take this off," Hildegard's voice spoke for the first time since they had entered the car.
In spite of the circumstances, the feel of her soft hands removing the blindfold was a pleasant sensation. As soon as it was off, Joe found himself looking into a sneering row of perfectly shaped teeth. The chauffer was the same man he'd seen last night, the man who had gouged the pistol in his side outside the Pension Dorfstadt. Had he killed the old hotelkeeper?
"This way," Hildegard directed tersely, the flirty smile and wigglesome walk gone now, "Anatovich will be right behind us."
Joe blinked his eyes and pulled at the collar of his stuffy shirt. They were inside an enclosed storage area or warehouse. Slits of hot sunshine shafted through rows of skylights the whole length of the block long building, which was sparsely occupied by trucks and cars of every conceivable make, mostly American and West German. Some were exact replicas of U.S. Army and Air Force staff cars and jeeps, right down to detailed unit designations on their bumpers.
"Where ... where the hell are we?" Joe asked intuitively, vying against their footsteps that reverberated through the dank emptiness of the mas sive enclosure. "Will I ... see Erika?"
"You will see Commde Gherkov," Anatovich's voice rung out harshly for the first time, and he nudged Joe toward a small door at the side of the building.
"Just a goddam minute!" Joe blew, turning to face the long silent Anatovich. "I want to see Erika. What the hell have you done ... Owww! Owww!"
Joe had no more than pivoted around in his fit of ill advised anger, than the bulky Russian had locked both arms in a vice-like grip from behind and tightened up hard.
"Son of a bitch! You lousy goddam bastard!" Joe grunted, trying to struggle out.
"Ughaa ... ughaa," Anatovich gave out with an animal sneer, squeezing harder, tightening on Joe's arms until the pain seared through his shoulder sockets and he thought his arms would come off.
"You ... you try this!" Joe managed to grunt, letting the lower half of his body sag forward.
The Russian tried to pull up Joe's suddenly relaxed torso, but was caught by surprise. Using his buttocks as a battering ram, Joe slammed back his body toward the assailant's groin.
The surprised Russian let out a whelping scream as Joe smashed against his tender privates, "Gooska! Gooska!"
Joe reeled around and aimed a right to his jaw. But it was like hitting steel. His pained knuckles glanced off and the Russian's wiry features went from a pained grimace to a vengeful snarl. Saliva drooled from his big lips, the straight row of pearly falsies became dislodged and extruded out bestially from his puffed mouth.
Joe tried to come through with a left. But that was all he remembered, Anatovich had reared back against the wall to dodge Joe's blow, and come up with his clod of a foot to his head. There was a bright shaft of excuciatingly tormentive light, a bolt of sharp lightning that whammed through his whole cranium.
And then it was black-a dull, aching darkness that blotted out all else.
"Drink it all," a thick voice penetrated the cobwebs Joe tried to look through. "It settles a bad stomach and has certain soothing effects on the common headache as well."
Joe gulped the brown liquid quickly, immediately recognizing the taste of one of the aromatic and intoxicating bitters so popular in Europe for an alcoholic stomach-a kind of Teuto-Gallic Hadacol which provided the excuse of medication for the lush with a queasy gut.
Joe worked his eyes again, and Alexandrei Gherkov's Neanderthal countenance blurred fuzzily, then came into slow focus. The big KGB man was seated behind an elaborately fancy, late-model desk. Joe turned around painfully, putting his hand to his bruised and beaten forehead which still throbbed with the memory of the cleat-footed chauffer, only to stare directly into his snarling face. He went dizzy again, but righted himself and took in a fleeting glance at the ultra-modern office which seemed so out of place in the midst of the dank and dirty warehouse.
"We have been good to you this time, Sergeant Guthrie," Gherkov spoke in his virile harshness as he rummaged through the top drawer of his fancy desk. "The next time you become difficult, your beloved Erika will also suffer."
Gherkov let the threat sink in a moment while he took a small man's wrist watch from the drawer and eyed it carefully, turning the timepiece around and around in his big hands like a jeweler checking out a repair job. Joe tried to occupy his mind with something neutral, some foolish distraction to blot out the jabbing ache in his head and the seeming hopelessness of his anguish. He looked again around the meticulously spotless office, then his nose picked up the distinctive smell he'd noticed just before Anatovich had temporarily clobbered him. It was an acrid dankness, a mixture of mud and oil, a familiar scent that took him back ... back to the docks along the St. Lawrence where he played as a kid. The warehouse must be along a river. That was it! He was in a warehouse along the River Spree, the main commercial water artery to the beleaguered city....
"I have a present for you, Sergeant Guthrie," Gherkov smiled unfittingly, pushing the wrist watch across the desk.
Joe fingered the timepiece nervously, paying little attention to it. He was observing the incongruity presented by the close-up of the hulking Gherkov as he leaned over the desk, his big-jowled face leering at Joe. The hated Secret Police official had beady little eyes inset like small lighten caverns beneath giant overgrowths of jet eyebrows, an under sized, purposeful mouth, and boxed-in ears like a retired pug. These tricks nature had played on him, formed a marked misalliance with the impeccably tailored, double breasted executive suit he wore.
"Where's Erika?" Joe asked suddenly, still fingering the watch abstractly.
"Your beloved Erika is quite safe ... for the present," Gherkov made his threat clear, "and she will remain that way just as long as you follow my instructions with complete devotion. Otherwise ... you will both be dead heroes."
Joe clenched his fists, gritted his teeth, straining against deep seated impulse to strike out at the primitive ugliness of the Russian's vile face. This was no place, no situation for a man of action.
"What do you want?" Joe demanded tensely.
"Do you like the watch?" Gherkov checked his protest.
"The watch? What...." Joe stopped as he realized he was still holding it.
"We are not amateurs at this game, Sergeant," the wily Russian continued, smiling craftily as he observed Joe's curiosity over the watch. "There is a concealed minicamera in that innocent appearing watch you have ... manufactured in West Germany incidentally ... and you will simply wear it on your left wrist in place of the one you now have."
"But I can't...."
"Please, Sergeant," Gherkov cut him off with an eerie calmness. "We are quite conversant with your cryptographic machines and have the task completely organized for you. As each card comes from the decoding machine it falls, I believe, into a trough directly in front of you. Correct?"
"Yes."
"And there is a metal bar about half an inch high and four inches away from the card?"
"Something like that," Joe tried to sound unimpressed while actually dismayed at the telling accuracy of their knowledge and precision of the planning.
Three and eight-seventeeths of an inch to be exact," Gherkov beamed proudly as he referred to a diagram on his desk. "And if you rest your wrist against this bar, directly in front of the message, it will put in the lens of the concealed camera within the range which the focus has been pre-set."
"But the Security Officer's right there...."
"Silence, stupid American!" Gherkov shouted him down, rising from his desk. 'The Security Officer will notice nothing. You merely lay your arm along the machine's shelf against the bar. You activate the camera while appearing to merely drum the fingers of your right hand idly on your left wrist."
"I want to see Erika," Joe switched the subject angrily, gripping the arms of his chair again.
"You will see your beloved Erika when you bring us the first roll of exposed film tonight," Gherkov raised his voice impatiently. "In fact if you have done your job well you may be able to take her back with you ... since, of course, our possession of your first films will be sufficient to assure your continued cooperation."
"How do I know she's here? How do I know you haven't killed her already?" It was Joe's turn to be demanding as he stood up to bank his fist on the desk. "Sure ... you've got me in a real sweet little bind ... but I've got you too. Without me you don't get the transmission pictures. And you want those badly, Mr. Gherkov ... real bad. You've worked months on this thing ... got it planned right down to the end. And I'm the only guy who can do your dirty work. You've got a lot invested in me ... and if I don't produce ... you're out cold
"Your wife has very beautiful hands, Sergeant ... nice, delicate fingers...." Gherkov leered crazily, like a man with a digital fetish.
"Hands? Fingers? What the hell is...."
"I make a proposition, Sergeant Guthrie," Gherkov laughed with a deranged chuckle, pulling out a small switchblade knife. "I will have the young lady brought down so you may see her. But there must be a price for this extra service. You will be tied to that chair while Anatovich clips off her little finger at the first joint!"
"Good God! No!"
"Huhhuh ... he-huh!" the chauffer broke his long silence with a ghoulish laugh, then leaned over to swat Joe's bruised forehead from behind.
The pain was like his raw wound had been whammed with a clawhammer, amplifying the searing ache that coursed constantly through his tensed brain. The surge of instinct to strike back brought him up out of the chair.
Anatovich's wild guffaw echoed through the sparsely furnished office and he brought out a Russian .9mm pistol.
"Nyet, Anatovich! Nyet!" Gherkov barked an order at his scowling stooge. "Sergeant Guthrie's all right. Just a bit unsettled now. Perhaps it would be best to provide him with some proof of the young girl's safekeeping. Go get Frau Ganzl!"
The gangling driver showed his teeth again, then walked out the door. Gherkov withdrew a pistol from beneath his coat and leveled it at Joe. There was absolute silence. Joe tried to think ... Frau Ganzl? The name had an unpleasant reference somewhere.
And then she entered the room! Joe pulled back in shock, his face contorting into a grimace of fearful surprise. And he puzzled about the name no more.
The woman who entered was a blaspheme to the word female. She weighed close to three hundred pounds. Her monstrous breasts pushed out and down at the dirty sack of a dress she wore, showing cleavage larger than the circus fat lady's naked buttocks and looking every bit as vile. Her hair was straggly long and unkept. Her mouth purple and palsied with a perpetual scowl disfigured into it. The eyes large and filled with diseased veins. The nose bulbous and chancred.
Joe remembered the name now ... Ganzl ... Ilse Ganzl, the legendary Mistress of the pre-war Berlin Black Masses. The terribly disfigured halfwitch, who had been sought all over Germany after the War, and was now apparently assigned to do a share of the Russian's dirtiest work. Joe knew now she was no myth, no legend that began as a tall tale in some barrooms or in the fertile mind of some over-imaginative chronicler of Nazi atrocities. Use Ganzl existed in the flesh, a mammoth mutation of a woman, so cursed with hate and vengefulness over her own malformation, that to inflict and debauch the blessedly normal was her very reason for existence.
"Frau Ganzl!" Gherkov spoke firmly, folding his hands and grinning contentedly at the reaction from Joe, "Sergeant Guthrie would like some proof that his beloved is in good hands ... that you are ... taking care of her."
The last phrase, slanted as it was with a sardonic leer, sickened Joe to the pit of his pelvic guts. The Satanic Mistress of mayhem and murder was also an avowed homosexual, a "butch" lesbian of the most violent form. And this was the woman assigned to "protect" the beautiful and desirable young Erika.
"Don't despair, Sergeant Guthrie," Gherkov tried to sound soothing but wore a pornographic grin. "Frau Ganzl is a most obedient servant of our rightful cause. She will give vent to neither her physical nor sexual obsessions without approval. Needless to say, your conduct will determine her behavior toward Fraulein Erika."
"How ... how do I know you have her?" Joe was hesitant in his demand this time and tried to look away from the human bitch.
"Nice ... blonde girl. I be goot mit her ... ja!" Frau Ganzl slobbered in a saliva filled mumble of gibberishly accented English, then plunged a gnarled hand down the gelatinous mass of flesh between her breasts. "Here ... you see dis? You know vat is dis?"
Joe's stomach began to reel and pitch. A retching spasm began in the base of his throat, but could only produce a convusively dry vomit. The gargoyle of a woman had pulled out a pair of sheer pink panty briefs from the naked folds of her Sapphic breasts. They were the ones he had bought for Erika at the little lingerie shop on the Kurdamm, the ones he liked to see her wear when they were alone in the room, to watch her walk around in with nothing else on, and revel in the exciting way they brought out the budding sensuality of her fantastic young body.
"Nice ... very nice girl ... nice body," the beast drooled with a provocative sweep of her hamlike arms to indicate Erika's soft curves and ripe hips. "You got real nice vooman, Mr. 'Merincan ... I like ... very much."
The monstress licked her lips rapaciously, fondled the panty briefs with a possessive glee, then stuffed them back between her immense mounds languorously, as if to savor every crush of their dainty suggestiveness against her fat blobs of flesh.
"Show ... show me how to work the camera," Joe asked, rubbing at his tortured and sickened forehead.