CHAPTER TEN
Nach Osten (Part 1)
What frustrated Bond the most was that, as he suspected, the whole thing could have been dealt with through a single phone call.
The envelope contained a single square of paper with a pencil-marked note. It gave an address and a time and a date ⸺ six in the evening, the next day, in Leipzig, in East Germany.
It was a two-hour drive from Berlin, depending on traffic, but it required passports and the appropriate stamps and visas.
Bond as Melvin P. Neydermeier was approved almost immediately for a three-day visa. He wondered if Pushkin had arranged for that to happen. Bond also arranged for the rental of a green-colored Opel Olympia Rekord.
East Germany, or The DDR, was born in 1949. Most of its border was sealed off in the spring of 1952, to prevent the steady outflow of refugees, and thus staunch the hemorrhaging of talent, education and skills. Barbed wire at first, much of the border was hardened over time, and patrolled by well-armed Grenzpolizei, with orders to shoot to kill anyone who was crossing without permission.
From inside his rental car, Bond showed his Neydermeier passport first to the American soldier at Checkpoint A, then he was admitted into East Germany as far as Checkpoint B, where he was ushered out of the Opel and into the checkpoint building.
Merciless lighting inside the checkpoint hut emphasized the merciless nature of the guard's station. Even the chairs looked uninviting.
The Grepo at the counter held out a hand for Bond's passport. He riffed through it. "Wie viel Geld haben Sei?
In reply, Bond pulled out his money and laid it on the counter. The Grepo made a note on a file, counted the money, made a second note, and then endorsed his papers. "Haben Sei eine Kamera oder ein Transistorradio?"
"Only the radio in the car," he responded in German. Around him, the small hut seemed busy, mostly with tourists who mostly spoke nearly-no German. The guards in turn spoke nearly-no any other language.
The Grepo stamped his passport with great vigor, and then bade Bond to go on his way.
His passport was checked again before he got into the car, on the logic that somewhere between the hut and the car he had somehow managed to counterfeit it. It was fine.
A soldier swung up the red-and-white striped barrier, Bond pulled forward, and he passed into East Germany.
The drive to Leipzig was through a landscape that was, in turns, a pastoral scene that would make Bond think of the landscape paintings of Gainsborough and Marlow, although of a subject dotted with bomb craters and the ruined hulks of buildings and the flat pads where factories used to stand.
Leipzig itself had been a trade and mercantile town since before time began, lying at the confluence of the White Elster, Pleiße and Parthe rivers, and straddling the Via Regia and the Via Imperii. It was once an important center of learning, although the 20th century and the Second World War had greatly diminished that. It had undergone aryanisation, the horrors of Kristallnacht and the Jewish expulsion, then the genocide. Of the 11,000 Jews living in Leipzig in 1933, by war's end only fifty-three survived.
Both Leipzig and neighboring Dresden were carpet-bombed by the Allies. Unlike Dresden, the bombs deposited on Leipzig were conventional, resulting in a patchwork pattern of destruction, unlike the firestorm that engulfed Dresden. Losses were nevertheless extensive.
Ten years later, Leipzig was still struggling with rebuilding, not aided by the fiscal policies of its Soviet masters, which agreed that if no one could share the wealth, then the least they could do was share the poverty. When the Russians took control of East Germany, they scoured it clean of anything useful. Under the guise of reparations, much of its industrial base was picked up, sawed off, disassembled, hacked up, packed up, and removed, bolt by bolt and brick by brick, to the Soviet Union. A flood of material exited East Germany, severely damaging its ability to rebuild.
Bond found Leipzig depressing. It was part Medieval fairytale world, with Renaissance-style buildings dating from the 16th century, grand baroque-period trading houses and palaces, and numerous pseudo-Gothic buildings put up at the turn of the century. The rest of it was Soviet architecture at its most cheerless and stark, built amid the detritus of the war.
The address that Bond wanted was in the suburb of Markkleeberg, an industrial zone just outside of Leipzig and on the River Pleiße. It too had suffered under the Allied bombings, but didn't have the initial charm of Leipzig prior to that. It seemed to consist almost entirely of warehouses and equipment shops, surrounded by farms and pastures.
The address proved to be an auto mechanic's shop, Kreuzmacher Auto-werks, in a cramped three-bay building that occupied the first floor of a three-story apartment complex. The middens of auto repair were carefully stacked outside the building on a spot of dead land between the building's wall and the street.
Bond parked his rental Opel just off from the corner. The three bays were unlit and dark and crowded ⸺ a black Mercedes in the first bay was receiving all of the attention of the work crew, a grey-green Wartburg was up on a lift in the second bay, and the third bay was a repository of miscellaneous parts, spare tires, radiators, hoses like snakes, gutted car frames, dismembered doors and windshields, and hoods stacked like toast on a toasting rack. Benches were crowded against the wall, covered in a variety of tools. More were pinned to the wall.
As Bond exited the Opel, one of the workers turned and raised his hands in a Viking greeting. "Anglichanin! Privetstvuyu!"
It was Pushkin, in grey overalls. His face lit up in what appeared to be genuine delight. "Herr Neydermeier, you made it!"
It took a second for Pushkin's false name to click back into place. "Herr Aristarkhov. Please, let's shout for the whole world to hear, shall we?"
Pushkin laughed at that and gestured him inside. "You worry too much, Anglichanin." He spoke in German.
"Quite the opposite," replied Bond, also in German, "I don't worry enough." He noticed that the three other workers in coveralls ⸺ a father and his two sons ⸺ were focused on the Mercedes' engine with such intensity that they seemed to not have noticed his noisy arrival.
Pushkin indicated the auto shop with the pride of an owner. "Kreuzmachers have been working on German car engines since Karl Benz invented the first car."
"I think that was Henry Ford."
"Bah," Pushkin replied. "Capitalist lies. There were Kreuzmachers on the assembly line at Mannheim and it was a Kruezmacher who designed the first high-compression-ratio piston for the Heightclimber Zeppelins of the Great War. Kruezmachers have maintained the Mercedes Benzes of the Romanovs and the Hapsburgs and the Sultans of Persia and the royalty of Italy. Their reputation is beyond reproach."
"And now they own all this," replied Bond with a broad gesture that took in the dark and dirty three-bay auto shop.
"Don't let its appearance fool you, Herr Neydermeier. These men are loving craftsmen, very talented. Masters. Here, I will show you."
He turned and rapped on the roof of the Mercedes. "Horst. Take your boys and get coffee or something." He punctuated this with a flourish of Ostmarks.
The eldest of the three ⸺ Horst, Bond assumed ⸺ collected the bills and wordlessly led his two sons out of the repair bay. Bond noted how they conspicuously avoided eye contact with the Russian.
Pushkin watched their departure with paternal pride. "To have a son that loves you as they love him, eh? That would be something."
"Fantastic."
Pushkin indicated the Mercedes Benz. "It's for Kronsteen," he said, switching flawlessly to English.
"You're going to give him a car? Doesn't he already have one?
Again, Pushkin laughed. He was in a good mood. "Not like this. Come here."