East Berlin, February,1983
I recognised my contact at about nine o'clock in the night, and it was already dark. She was smoking a long cigarrette in a corner of the bar, and drinking a Martini. A slow tune was played on the piano.
-Melissa?-I asked.
-Talk lower, Spaniard- said she in a whispering.
-But this bar is sure, isn't it?
-Yes, and the tune is wonderfull- she replied, smiling.
At quarter to ten she led me to a dark, dirty room on the first floor of the bar and paid the waitress. She kissed me in the chin and said goodnight with her beautiful, addictive smile. I saw her going out of the bar alone, and she saw me watching her. Our looks crossed and she got in again. When she finally went out of my room it was half past one at night...
I thought I was in love with her until next morning, when a thin man with a strong Irish accent knocked at my door and said:
-Melissa is dead. At nine o'clock I'll be with my car in front of this dirty pub- and he was gone.
I was trying to assimilate what the Irish man said and hurried up. I was dazed and confused at how fast a romance can start and how fast it can end too.
At nine I found a black car at the door and I got into it. The man said:
-I'm your new contact, you can call me Peter. Yesterday a woman found Melissa -my heart sank when I heard the name- dead with a shot between her eyes. There will not be any funeral but you can buy flowers, if you want, her family will be so pleased. No, I'm joking, we don't know anything about her family, probably she's not even called Melissa, I think she was a Soviet spy. But well, who are you?
I got on very well with Peter, and after this mission in Russia we kept in contact, until he sadly died in the early nineties. But that's another story, what I really want to tell you is how I investigated the death of the woman who died wearing a dark dress, the woman I was in love with, the woman who got my child in her...
Written by Tarik Martin
