The Ghost of Checkpoint Charlie

The Man at the Border

Klaus Richter stood in the shadow of a tobacco shop on Friedrichstraße, watching the lights of Checkpoint Charlie bleed across wet pavement. November rain fell in sheets, turning East Berlin into a smear of gray concrete and yellow streetlamps. His collar was up, his hands buried in the pockets of a wool coat that smelled of cigarettes and damp wool. In his right pocket, his fingers traced the edge of a photograph. The checkpoint stretched before him like a stage set for a play about the end of the world. Soviet flags hung limp in the rain. American MPs stood under their floodlights on the western side, hands near their holsters. Between them: the white line painted across the cobblestones. The border. The crack in the earth where ideology split and the world divided into us and them. Klaus had crossed this line seventeen times in five years. Always at night. Always with papers that said he was someone else. Tonight he was Werner Hoffmann, cultural attaché, traveling to West Berlin for a symposium on postwar literature. The passport in his breast pocket was perfect—the Stasi forgers were the best in the world. But the photograph in his right pocket wasn't for the Americans. It was for a man named Dieter Vogel, who sold cheese in a shop on Kantstraße, who had a daughter studying medicine at Humboldt University, and who had been passing information to the West for eleven months. The rain intensified. Klaus checked his watch—a Russian Pobeda that gained two minutes a day—and began walking. His handler, Major Kessler, had briefed him in a room without windows. "Vogel thinks he's clever," Kessler had said, laying out surveillance photographs like tarot cards. "He uses dead drops. Changes his route. But he has a weakness." "The daughter," Klaus had said. Kessler smiled, which never reached his eyes. "The daughter." He tapped a photo of a young woman with dark hair and her father's narrow chin. "Margarete Vogel. Twenty-two years old. Top of her class. She doesn't know what her father does. But she will, if he doesn't cooperate." Klaus had taken the photograph. He'd taken the assignment. He'd done this work for seven years, since he was twenty-five, since the Wall went up and the escape attempts began and the West started recruiting people like Vogel—ordinary men with access, with grievances, with family in the other half of a severed city. He'd believed, once, that he was protecting something. The revolution. The workers' state. The future that Marx promised and the Party was building, one brick at a time. Now he believed in following orders. The American MP barely glanced at his papers. "Business or pleasure?" "Business," Klaus said in passable English. "Always business." The guard stamped his passport and waved him through. Just like that, he was in another world. West Berlin glittered like a cruel joke—neon signs advertising Coca-Cola and Marlboros, shop windows full of goods that didn't exist across the wall, cars that weren't Trabants. The rain here looked the same, but everything else was brighter, louder, more. He found Vogel's shop on Kantstraße at half-past nine. The cheese shop was closed, lights off, but Klaus could see a faint glow from the apartment above. He waited across the street, smoking a cigarette that tasted like ash and adrenaline. At ten o'clock, Vogel emerged from a side door, wearing a hat against the rain. He was fifty-something, soft around the middle, with the careful walk of a man who knew he was being watched. Klaus followed at a distance. Vogel went to a café near the Kurfürstendamm. He ordered coffee and sat by the window, hands wrapped around the cup like it could warm something deep inside him. Klaus watched from across the street, wondering what made a man do this. Money? Ideology? Revenge for some slight? Or just the simple, human desire to choose something for himself in a world that allowed so few choices? After twenty minutes, Vogel left. Klaus followed him through rain-slick streets, past bombed-out buildings that hadn't been rebuilt, reminders that this city's division began with fire falling from the sky. Vogel walked to the Tiergarten, into the darkness between trees, and stopped at a bench. Klaus stepped from the shadows. "Herr Vogel." The man spun, eyes wide. "Who—" "My name doesn't matter." Klaus held up the photograph of Margarete. "But hers does." Vogel's face collapsed. In the dim park light, he looked ancient. "No. Please." "You've been careless," Klaus said, keeping his voice flat, professional. "We know about the dead drops. We know about your contact at the American consulate. We've known for months." "Then why—" Vogel's voice broke. "Why now?" "Because now we want something from you." Klaus lowered the photograph. "Your contact gave you something two weeks ago. Information. We want it back. And we want the name of everyone you've passed it to." Vogel shook his head, rain streaming down his face. "If I do that, I'm finished. They'll never trust me again." "If you don't," Klaus said, "your daughter will know what you are. The university will know. And when she's expelled, when she loses her future, she'll know whose fault it is." The threat hung between them like smoke.