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Last Train from Berlin
By W. T. Tyler Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1994 W. T. Tyler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-11633-8
CHAPTER 1
A GENTLEMAN IN PLACE
THE WIND MOVED to the northwest during the night, blown in by a cold front roaring down from Canada. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Young Kevin Corkery shivered, trying to bring himself awake as George Skaff drove down the parkway toward Key Bridge. The passing cars still had their lights on. Below the overcast a dark scud raced across the Potomac where ice had formed along the lee shore and the channel was whipped to an ugly chop. Georgetown was a medieval cathedral town against the sky.
"People walk out all the time," Skaff said. "Get fed up and walk out the door with just the clothes on their back. Half the time they don't know they're doing it, don't know where they're going, who they are." He was a small man with thin gray hair, wearing a gray suit and a gray topcoat.
"The nervous-breakdown types, you mean. I talked to his wife last night. No clothes were missing, just what he was wearing."
The FBI sedan was feverishly warm. Corkery could smell toothpaste. He imagined Skaff belonged to that class of people who get out of bed fully awake, fully dressed, and freshly shaven, briefcase in hand, stepping out to resume their lives at that precise half second when sleep suspended it. Such people never dreamed, never lived in hesitation or in doubt, and never understood those who did. With his small gray head, respectful voice, and coaxing manners, he might have been a tax accountant.
"On the other hand, he could have been called out on something," Skaff said, "working some special Agency operation, and your people wouldn't say a word."
"I don't think so. That's not what they say." Corkery brought a cigarette from his pocket but changed his mind. The FBI sedan was scrupulously clean, smelling of new upholstery.
"It's never what they say. I never listen to what your people say. Right now all Langley's worried about is the press getting hold of it."
"Maybe."
Skaff laughed. "Not maybe, son. I've been at it too long."
A pair of empty tour buses and a service station tow truck rumbled ahead along M Street, deserted on a Sunday morning. Skaff turned off and drove down the steep hill toward the Potomac. On K Street beneath the underpass three patrol cars, a medivac unit, and a white van from the D.C. medical examiner's office were drawn to the curb. A policeman stood in the street, waving an occasional vehicle by. A pair of yellow and black trestles barred access to the rubble of a vacant lot between two buildings; three policemen were searching the vacant lot, heads down. Skaff crossed the potholed street to a blue-and-white police car, Corkery at his heels, still trembling with the cold. His body was behaving as it did during those final moments before an eight-hundred-meter race at the University of Pennsylvania when it no longer mattered whether you won or lost, just that you not make a complete fool of yourself before 1,500 people at Franklin Field. He hadn't seen a dead man for eight years, not since they'd fished a dead Italian out of the drink off the south coast of Sicily. He'd been lost overboard from a water taxi three nights before after drunkenly celebrating a wedding at a seaside restaurant. A garland of sodden, kelp-entangled flowers was still around his neck that bright Mediterranean morning when the boatswain from the USS Peurifoy gigged him with a boathook.
A patrolman sat behind the wheel of the patrol car, door closed, monitoring the radio dispatcher as he filled out a report. Corkery didn't hear the first words as he cranked down the window. The corpse had been discovered by an early-morning jogger. His weimaraner had found it and the jogger hailed a cruising police car. They'd expected to find a derelict, dead of exposure, but found the body of a well-dressed man in his fifties.
" ... homicide maybe, they're not sure. No ID on him but they just found something in the empty building over there. Tyrone's checking it out. Could be his." An empty dump truck rumbled overhead, chains and tailgate clanging; static erupted from the radio. Corkery leaned closer. "Caucasian male, gray hair, five eight or nine maybe, a hundred and eighty pounds. That sound like anything?"
"The height's wrong," Corkery said. Skaff didn't turn. A policeman came to the patrol car on the opposite side. "Tyrone's asking where the hell the FBI's at."
"That's me," Skaff said. Corkery followed him across the rubble and over the yellow ribbons closing off the rear of the lot where Tyrone stood with two patrolmen. The medical examiner knelt by a body lying at the base of the brick wall of a partially demolished building.
"Guthrie said you were looking for someone," Tyrone said, his breath billowing out like steam from a locomotive. "We think maybe we got a name now." He looked at Corkery and nodded. Skaff didn't introduce them. His long gaunt face was red with the cold. Beneath the cuffs of blue mackinaw and his gloves, his wrists showed, girdled by cuffs of thermal underwear. The wind whipped up again, roaring between the two buildings.
The corpse lay half covered by a coroner's body cloth, curled in a fetal position, hands at the knees. Corkery squatted down. The face was ashen, the bloodless lips drawn across the teeth in a grimace, as white as the seam of an old surgical scar; clots of blood had dried in the nostrils. The gray hair was thick and coarse. The left cheekbone was discolored; an ugly bruise as large as a hoofprint circled the swollen chin. The wind snatched the cloth free. His shoes were missing. Corkery caught the body cloth and folded it back against the dead man's shoulders. The open eyes stared past him, a chilling look as vast as the winter sea.
"It's not him," he said.
Skaff took off his right glove and reached forward to turn back the jacket lapel. "Frozen."
The medical examiner squatted at the waist of the corpse. His steel-rimmed spectacles had slipped down his nose and his gray hat was pulled down over his pinched ears to keep the wind from taking it. He was heavy in the hips; his blue overcoat had worked itself up about his midriff. "Watch your feet."
"Sorry." Skaff stepped back. "How long?"
"Not sure yet." The medical examiner stood up and moved to the other side of the body.
"Stiff as a post," Tyrone said. "Froze to the ground even."
Corkery held the lowered body cloth as the medical examiner peeled the blood-stiff shirt from the stomach, cracking it like cardboard. Despite the cold he could smell something bloody, raw, and fetid and turned his head. The thick nails and sausage fingers at his knees were those of a man who might have worked with his hands. In the gray eyes, he sensed the dead man's final thought, one of an infinite sorrow and shame.
"Homicide?" he asked. The medical examiner nodded.
"Hard to tell right off," Tyrone said, standing above him. "Get him thawed out first."
"Get him thawed out good enough, maybe he'll tell you himself," a policeman said.
"What do you think, Doc?" Tyrone asked.
The medical examiner closed the bloody shirt and drew the jacket over it. "Knife wound, I'd say. Kidneys. Homicide, probably. Maybe a dump job, killed someplace else. Tossed over from up there." His eyes traveled to the overpass above him where a policeman was searching the coping. "But I doubt it. Nothing tells me he fell very far." He lifted the corpse's right wrist and took a plastic bag from his case.
"You said you had a name," Corkery said.
"Yeah. Ulrich," Tyrone said. "Canadian, it looks like. We found a wallet back there, just inside that window yonder. No money, just a couple of driver's licenses, some credit cards. Looks like the body was stripped, coat and shoes both."
The medical examiner worked a plastic bag over the corpse's right hand.
"Two driver's licenses?" Skaff said.
"Yeah, two. One from Ontario, one from someplace else." Tyrone turned to the policeman holding a manila envelope. "Where was it, where they got all that snow?"
"Quebec."
"Yeah, Quebec. Only this ain't it." Hunching his shoulders, Tyrone shivered and moved his feet. "Hell on tourists, this goddamned town. Every Saturday night." He turned to Skaff, still trembling. "Who'd you say you was looking for?"
"I didn't," Skaff said. "Just someone who wandered off Friday night. What was in his pockets?"
Face numb, Corkery was conscious again of the stinging cold. Tyrone's words seemed carved from it, formed from his thick smoking breath like particles broken out by a steam hammer.
"Nothing much in his pockets, just a tobacco tin and a postcard." Tyrone took the manila envelope from the policeman and handed it to Skaff, who put on his bifocals and took out the two driver's licenses.
"You've got two different dates of birth here." Skaff handed the two licenses to Tyrone and removed a small yellow tobacco tin. ERINMORE FLAKE read the inscription on the lid. "British, I think." He opened the tin. A small flat key clung to the bottom of the lid. He held it out. "Did you see this?"
"Yeah, magnetized," Tyrone said. "Maybe a locker key."
Skaff fingered the tobacco. "What is it, Colombian red? That's your generation, isn't it, son?" he said to Corkery without lifting his head. "If it's not crack, coke, or PCP, it's got to be grass, isn't that what folks say these days?" He poked through the tobacco and replaced the lid. "Pipe tobacco, looks like." He drew out the wallet, took off one glove, and sorted through the contents. A slip of paper fluttered to the ground; Corkery retrieved it before the wind caught it. It was a French five-franc note, torn irregularly in two. The tear bisected the serial numbers and the Banque de France legend. "What do you make of this?" Skaff said.
"I didn't see it," Tyrone said. "What is it?"
"A French bank note, torn in two. Odd. What do you think?" He passed it to Corkery. "Seen anything like it recently?" He brought out the postcard, glanced at it, and turned it over. The postcard was a view of the Washington Monument, unaddressed. "Could be a tourist. Maybe our lab should take a look at this stuff."
"I thought you said he wasn't the fellow," Tyrone said. "You birds can't make up your minds, can you?" He shivered and stamped his feet again. "Goddamn duck weather, better out in a blind somewheres. You ready to take him in?" he called to the medical examiner. "My ass is freezing."
"Just about." Two orderlies had joined him with a stretcher on which lay a folded blue blanket. "I'm freezing too."
Tyrone looked at the stooping, turnip-shaped figure. "I don't wonder, Doc. You got more to freeze. You know what they say down in the country. Butter spreads but lard's hard. Don't bend over too far, we'll never get you stood up again."
"How long could a body lie here and no one see it?" Corkery asked, moving aside as they lifted the corpse to the stretcher. The medical examiner stood up, red-faced and winded, his glasses misted. "Hard to say."
"All weekend, maybe," Tyrone said. "They're demolating that building over yonder, so if he was here Friday, some of the workmen would have seen him sure enough."
"It had some rags throwed over it," one policeman said.
Corkery turned. "What kind of rags?"
"Just old rags."
"Wipers' rags," Tyrone said, "junkman's rags, old folks' rags, like what you see rambling down the streets these days pushing an A and P cart ahead of it. You hardly don't know what it is, neither, old folks, young folks, grandma, grandpa, black or white, you can't tell. They all look the same. Cold don't know the difference neither." He moved toward the gutted brick building and stopped outside the sashless window where a few dirty rags lay. "Covered him with those right there." Corkery bent down. "I wouldn't root around, son. Get you a quick case of the herpes." Tyrone stepped through the window.
Corkery followed him, then Skaff. "So someone took his coat and shoes afterward," Corkery said. "Then covered him, is that what you're saying?"
"That's what I figure. He wasn't wearing a topcoat. Same fellow must have took his shoes. Wouldn't look like a fellow would come all the way down from Canada to see the sights barefoot, would it, George? Not unless he was an Eskimo. Better have your lab check that out too."
The broken concrete floor inside was littered with jackhammer rubble; a battered gray compressor stood just inside the door. In the far corner were scattered a few cardboard mats, smashed produce crates, sardine tins, and the ashes of a recent fire. The corner stank of urine and excrement.
"A kind of neighborhood hostel, you could say," Tyrone said, his voice loud out of the wind. "Real friendly-like."
"Someone found him, already dead," Corkery said.
"I'd say so. Stripped off his coat and shoes. Probably before he was froze up."
"Sure about that, are you?" Skaff said.
"Goddamn right. You ever try to skin a pair of pants off a froze-up dead man?"
"Never had to try. How come you'd know about that?"
"Korea," Tyrone said. "Coming back from Chosen in '50, forty degrees below zero. When I got to Hungnam, I was wearing five pairs of britches. Don't ask me where I got them neither. Seventeen years old, scared dumb, didn't know, didn't care."
They went back out into the cold. A cream-and-blue van from a Washington television station was drawn up on the street next to the patrol car. Two men huddled at the window talking to the driver and another policeman; one carried a shoulder camera. The medical examiner's van and the medivac unit were gone. "Maybe someone's called in, reported him missing," Tyrone said. "We'll get out a missing persons." A patrolman left the group on K Street and came back across the windswept lot toward them. The TV film crew wanted to talk to someone.
"Nothing to say," Tyrone told him. "Not me anyway, not now." He looked at his watch. "Let George talk to him." He winked at Corkery. "Anyway, I got to get along home."
"Still got wife problems, have you?" Skaff said.
Tyrone smiled, a long appreciative smile that took everyone in. "All night long. You ever hear the one about the naked jogger?"
The wind roared in again. Corkery looked skyward, the world familiar once more — a Pennsylvania morning under the December scud off the mountains; snow weather, deer weather, holiday weather, Corkery standing at the oil drum outside the highway department equipment sheds where he worked during his high school summers, back from the University of Pennsylvania for Christmas break, listening to Abe Runyon, Orville Crawford, and Charley Fargo talk about dogs, deer, grouse, quail, women, the Steelers, engineering division incompetence, poor supervision, and rotten maintenance. Their familiar landscape, like Tyrone's, never changed, thank God.
* * *
THEY STOPPED FOR COFFEE at a café on M Street and drove back across Key Bridge. The wind had died down and the overcast was low over the Virginia hills and the gorge of the Potomac as they climbed the parkway. Remembering something Dudley's wife had told him the previous afternoon, Corkery was leafing through his pocket notebook. "She told me she couldn't find his diary. She wasn't sure what that meant."
"Odd, one of your people keeping a diary."
"More of a journal, she said."
"What's the difference?"
"I don't know. More intellectual, I suppose. Thoughts and ideas maybe."
"Would you call him an intellectual?" Skaff asked.
"Dudley? I don't know. Not after thirty years in harness, I suppose. Who is?" The missing Agency officer was three years removed from the clandestine service and planned to retire that winter, a decision he'd been quick to share with any number of colleagues he'd seen in the corridors at Langley that autumn. He'd also made the same decision five times during the past three years, but each time postponed it, which made him a bit of a bore. "Would you?"
"Call him an intellectual? Never met one myself," Skaff said dryly.
"Not in my business."
"Confusing." Corkery slipped the notebook in his pocket.
"Sometimes you'd rather be confused. That's what I tell my new people. Better than thinking you already have the answers."
"Think so?"
"Like being scared. Being scared helps, keeps you on your toes. End up seven hundred miles off in the middle of the Baltic if you're not, tanks bingo, crew in the drink."
"You were air force?"
"Used to be. SAC — B-47s. Navigator."
"I'll be damned."
"That's what I used to say every time I woke up. What the hell am I doing way up here? Those aren't Grandma's bedsheets hanging on the line down there, it's the Arctic Circle. So sometimes being confused helps, keeps you on the right azimuth. Not air force, were your?"
"No, navy. I wonder who the poor bastard is." Overhead a jet thundered unseen through the murk, following the river toward National Airport.
"Ulrich? Tourist, probably, someone just in town, maybe got lost. Probably nothing. Another weekend homicide." They passed through the gate. May through September the surrounding woods were a forest of Robin Hood green, but now the trees were bare except for the oaks; copper leaves hung from the limbs like rotting fruit. The parking lots were nearly empty. Through the trees the flanks of the huge building were as dull as chalk cliffs. Skaff stopped at the main entrance.
"I'll let you know what Tyrone turns up," he said. "Call me if you get anything. I'll be home after twelve."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Last Train from Berlin by W. T. Tyler. Copyright © 1994 W. T. Tyler. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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