Vashek showed me the book. He insisted that the last line was significant. Before he spoke, he put a record on the stereo to muffle our conversation.
He whispered, "With Dean's death my life in fear began," he said and then suddenly stopped.
In the background, the music played dully. Vashek's voice dropped as he spoke of the Czech secret police and an alliance with the East German Stasi and their desire to eliminate Dean Reed because Dean Reed was trouble.
"Dean said too much. He called the officials 'Mafia'. He had many friends among the prostitutes here. Many were informants," Vashek said. Glancing over his shoulder, he added with a meaningful stare, "One of the girls was called Ophelia," he added, and looked at me to make sure I understood he was referring to Dean's death - a murder in his view - by drowning.
Still, well before his death, Dean was finally allowed to perform in Prague again; he sang "Give Peace a Chance" and 4000 people rose to their feet.
"The popularity, doesn't it bother you?" Dean's Czech engineer had asked.
"I need it," Dean would say. "I can't live without it. It is a drug."
There seemed to be no way forward. The more informants I talked to, the more the mystery jammed up against itself: Wiebke described a massively moody man whose adrenalin rushes left him too drained to turn on a light switch; Victor thought Dean was a man of profound political naivete and great glamour; and Vaclav Nectar saw him as a brilliant performer and loved him, even though he had somehow ruined Nectar's life. Dictators gave him medals; stunt men, kudos; women adored him; no one could or would really talk about his death.
I had been following his ghost for months by now. Who killed Dean Reed? Who was he? A true believer? An American rock star supplying opium for the socialist masses? Our spy, the best mole America ever had? Theirs?
The Berlin Wall was still up and even when you got to the other side, it was a police state, ruled by the Stasi, a fortress of paranoia. Information about Dean Reed was very hard to come by. I was at a dead end.
East Berlin was a city of dead ends: the Wall that kept people in; the badly drawn map on the greasy visa issued at Checkpoint Charlie, which marked forbidden territory; the midnight curfew for tourists; the worthless money which you could not export; the East Germans, noses pressed against the glass at the hard currency Intershop in the Grand Hotel, gazing at leather coats they could not buy from countries they could not visit; doormen who barred the way to hotels; the official reports of Dean's death which yielded nothing much at all except the German obsession with bureaucratic detail; the lonely house where Dean Reed had lived next to the lake where he died.
It snowed the day that we, Leslie Woodhead and I, finally went back to Schmockwitz, to the house on the wrong side of the Wall, at the end of a country road next to a frozen lake. Victor Grossman was with us; he had agreed to translate. It was March, 1988, four months since we had first come.
The wind howled around the Alexanderplatz as we drove out of Berlin towards Schmockwitz. The earflaps of his Russian hat pulled down over his ears, Victor Grossman sat in the front seat next to Leslie and recited the directions for Schmockwitz. In his lap, Victor held a bag with a couple of avocados that I had brought him. Leslie pretended not to have been down the road the previous November.
As we left the city behind, the snow fell harder. A thick mist came up and the low-lying suburban buildings turned into an endless gray blur. The dismal little East German cars slid and skidded on the highway: none had chains or snow tires. Hairdryers on wheels, Leslie called them The Trabants. I said they were like mobile sardine cans. We passed the time making up names for the Trabis, laughing nervously, not paying attention to the fact that Victor Grossman might have been offended by our jokes. This was his country, his country's cars.
The village of Schmockwitz was shut tight for winter. The pub was boarded up. At the end of the long, bleak road was the Reed house, with the carved R on a post.
We parked and, as we walked down the path to the front door, I could see the lake, gray and forbidding. Every time she looked out the window, I thought, Renate must have seen the lake where Dean died. On the doorstep were two pairs of rubber boots caked with mud. I wondered if they had been used the day Dean's body was dragged from the lake.
The house seemed silent. It had been the object of so much effort for so long that I sometimes dreamed about it. Suddenly, a light flashed on inside, the door opened, and Renate stepped out, smiled, and kissed Victor's cheek.
In black leather pants and a white silk shirt, Renate stood in the doorway and greeted us, smiling. She had an anxious, beautiful face and dark eyes. Renate gazed directly at you, kept you in her gaze, made you the center of her attention. She had that peculiar talent that people said Jackie Onassis had.
"Please," said Renate and opened the door wide and tilted her head in welcome.
"Thank you," I said, and gave her some chocolates.
"Thank you," she replied.
In the hall, Renate took my wet boots away and gave me furry slippers. A good hausfrau, I thought. Renate smiled; she knew what I was thinking. Still standing in the vestibule, she lit a cigarette. Her hand shook as she forced a lighter into life. But she grinned with unexpected good humor; she had a wry grasp of the situation, and I liked her instantly.
Victor, who had removed his own boots, was already in the sitting room. On a table in front of a tan corduroy sectional were blue and white cups, a coffeepot, the inevitable cake, and a plate of little chocolates.
"De'cor is Biedermeier Cowboy," Renate announced winningly.
The house was full of stuff: a carved dining-room suite, a cuckoo clock, a sofa, chairs, a big fireplace with a television set, video cassettes, plants, copper jugs filled with flowers, a miniature set of fire tongs, and a shovel. Over the fireplace hung Dean's guitar, and there were horse things - bridles, bits - props from a movie. In a picture in a fancy frame on the mantel, Dean and Renate kissed for the cameras. Beside it was a brass carriage clock, with an inscription from Dean to Renate that read, "I love you more every hour."
On the floor lay a dark brown animal skin, probably a bear, I thought; it seemed to have a bear's head. I had seen a video clip of Dean near that fireplace, holding his guitar, speaking to the camera:
"This guitar, this Martin guitar, which I took with me when I left, has been in the jungles with me in Brazil and Bangladesh, and this buckle [points to his belt buckle] are the only two things that I've kept for the twenty years since I left America. They have traveled throughout the world with me day by day, they know my life."
"Please, sit down." Renate gestured towards the sofa.
I sat down and fell out of the slippers, then I ate some cake. Leslie sat near Renate and listened intently.
Renate spoke German and Victor translated, although sometimes she slipped into English. She seemed fragile and sad and vulnerable. The big dark eyes locked mine into a tremulous gaze. My God, it must have been lonely down the end of that road with only her boy, Sasha, for comfort.
Like all teenagers, Sasha, who was fifteen, seemed to be perpetually in motion. Ill at ease, but handsome and polite, he shook our hands, kissed his mother, and hurried away to meet his friends, his long, skinny legs encased in black leather pants that gave him the look of a big bird.
"He is a good man. He is my little man," said Renate. "You would like to see the house?
It was a shrine. On a table were Dean's spurs from Chile. A saddle was tossed over the stair railing. On a wall, an American flag hung upside down; it was the flag Dean had washed in public in Santiago to protest the Vietnam War, the flag he said he had washed of the blood of the Vietnamese. It was hung upside down as an ironic comment on America.
We followed Renate up a flight of stairs, where she opened the door to Dean's study. I walked in and thought: the inner sanctum. You could almost smell him in here.
Through the window was a view of the lake and the woods beyond. On the wall were pictures and quotations from Fidel Castro and Jimmy Breslin. On the desk was his portable Olivetti typewriter and, under the glass top, snapshots. One was familiar.
"Oleg Smirnoff," I said.
"You know Oleg?" Renate smiled.
She was pleased because Oleg had been such a good translator for Dean. Dean said Oleg could do it almost better than he could. (I thought of Oleg's hatred of Germany, where, he said, the people say hello to the dogs but not to you.) Renate was happy that we knew Oleg.
Back downstairs in the living room, we exchanged pleasantries about Mrs. Brown and Phil Everly. I told her about Nikolai Pastoukhov and his tale of Dean's first trip to Moscow, when he sang all night in the private train that belonged to Deputy Premier Tikhonov.
Lost in reverie, Renate clasped her hands and perhaps imagined her handsome husband singing in the train that sped through the Tolstoyan night as if it were a scene from a Russian novel she'd read as a schoolgirl.
"So what is it exactly that we are here to talk about?" Renate asked.
The small talk was over, the cake eaten. Renate wanted to know what we wanted. Leslie talked about the drama-documentary that he wanted to make. He said that he liked to think of Costa Gavras's Missing as a model. Renate said it was among her favorite films. This was a good sign. She poured more coffee.
Leslie took charge and he was convincing.
"We want to work with you," he said. "To be absolutely candid, you are Dean's widow. You own the rights to his music. We need you."
Renate inquired politely about editorial control over the script. Could she see a script when one was ready? she asked.
"I really would like to," he said, "but I am forbidden to do so by Parliamentary law."
I had no idea if this was true, but it sounded convincing and I was impressed.
Renate nodded and she poured out white Hungarian wine into dainty Hock glasses with thin green stems.
Renate Blume was born in Dresden. She must have been a child during the firebombing that reduced the city to rubble, but she did not talk of such things. She was reserved and well bred. Her father had been an aviation engineer. Her brother was a mathematician. It had been expected of Renate that she would be a doctor. She wanted to dance, but her parents forbade it. "We are scientists in this family who do not fool around with such stuff," they said.