Excerpt from The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Martin said nothing.

"Good. So, first come to dinner. See Peter. You want to see your old friend Schell? Of course. See anybody you like. Well, maybe not Ulbricht. Nobody sees him. Except Frau Ulbricht." He smiled, an easy joke, patching things over. "But there's a right time." He moved his hand to Martin's chest, a faint pat. "Let me arrange things."

The room faced the back, away from Karl-Marx-Allee, but was high enough to have a view over a neighboring roof. Not a cell. He'd left the door unlocked, opening it once to prove he could. Then opened the window, not minding the damp air, taking it in with deep breaths. No one outside the door, no bells to call him to the dining hall, no lights-out. His own room, open to the air.

On the desk the management had left a bottle of Hungarian Tokay, wrapped in colored plastic, with a welcome card from the German Academy of Sciences, a VIP gesture. Then why this clutching in his stomach? Brought in quietly through the back door, not even a hello to Schell, Kurt arranging things. Not Sabine. This dinner, awkward even before it happened, wouldn't have been her idea. Kurt wanted to watch, the careful greeting, the forced small talk, forced just because he was there watching, his family now. Peter a good socialist boy. But why shouldn't he be? Isn't it what they all had wanted once? Still, this dread. Trust me.

He put the overnight bag on the bed and started unpacking. Not much more than a change and a Dopp kit. My tailor will fit you in. He hung his jacket on the curtain rod in the shower to steam out the wrinkles later. Peter's first look at him. Sabine's. What would she see? He stopped in front of the mirror, hands on the washbasin. Someone else looking back. The same high forehead, what Sabine said she'd noticed first "to hold all the brains," but the hair all gray now, and thinning. Prison skin, haggard, not puffy or slack, but worn, like his eyes, the sheen gone, set deeper than before, as if they were receding, tired of seeing. Ten years of his life and all of them visible here, in the creases. And she? A matron in a broad skirt? A fleshy line along the chin? No, she'd be the same, the only way he could imagine her. The same eyes, the same secret place at the back of her neck. And for a second, he wanted the impossible, to be as they had been, young, shiny, just the two of them. Except it had never been just them. There had been the secrets, the handlers, the close calls, Sabine knowing what to do, cool and excited at the same time, getting away with it.

He went back over to the window. No sun, but no rain either, the cloudy Berlin sky. He could go out, he realized, just open the door and go. A walk if he felt like it. He expected to be stopped in the lobby, but the man at the door merely nodded, a working man's version of a tipped hat. He crossed the plaza, then paused in front of the Kino. He wanted to walk and walk. Why not go all the way to Frankfurter Tor, see the whole street? There was a snap in the air. Berliner Luft, just like the song. He felt his face begin to move, an involuntary smile. Because he was walking.

This time he took in the ground-floor shops of the apartment blocks—a bookstore, a salon, even, improbably, a travel agency. Where could anybody go? State resorts on the Baltic, dormitory hotels. There were no posters in any of the windows, no sales signs. Or customers, the sidewalks mostly empty—an old man with a string bag, a mother pushing a pram. A showcase with an air of disappointment about it now, some promise not kept. He could imagine the architectural schematics, with trees and sidewalk cafés and open-shirted workers and their wives in sundresses bustling into the stores, everybody glowing with pride in the new buildings. You could still feel some of this ambition, just in the scale of the street, but the people in the drawings had gone. No one now but him and a lone window shopper over by the Buchhandlung.

Excerpted from The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon. Copyright © 2022 by Joseph Kanon. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.