The Moment by Douglas Kennedy

repeatedly tried to kick it in. The walls had been so oversprayed with graffiti that none of the slogans were legible. The building was next to a little grocery store— ein Lebensmittelgeschäft— that looked like it was gunning for a health code violation, as the fruit and vegetables on display had mold growing on them. There was a diminutive middle-aged Turkish man behind the counter (or, at least, I presumed he was Turkish) making a sandwich for a customer while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. Beyond this, at the end of the street, beyond a small park, loomed The Wall. From this distance I could see the tops of what looked like large Soviet-style apartment buildings only several hundred yards on the other side of this international barrier. That was the other thing about Kreuzberg. Its eastern frontiers completely abutted The Wall. It was everywhere you turned.
I pushed the bell marked Fitzsimons-Ross. No response. I pushed it again and waited thirty seconds. I pushed it a third time. Now, finally, a low buzz indicated that entrance through the front door was possible. I went inside. The entrance hall was cavernous and cold. As I stepped inside and the door closed behind me, I could see my breath fog up in front of me. The first thing that caught my attention was the walls. They were unpainted masonry, chipped and porous, and not exactly inspiring structural confidence. There was a cluster of battered postboxes next to a stairwell. The tiled floor beneath my feet followed the general theme of architectural detrition. The only illumination was a single fluorescent tube.
I headed up the stairs. On the first floor was a single door with a dollar sign crudely painted across its portals and a huge red x crisscrossing it all and the words Kapitalismus ist Scheisse! dabbed next to it. On the next floor the door was covered in barbed wire, with a small aperture made to access the lock and the door handle. Either the owner was sending a “Do Not Enter” signal to the outside world or he was a sadomasochist who liked to gamble with the possibility of torn flesh every time he entered his apartment. Either way I was relieved this wasn’t the portal to the Fitzsimons-Ross residence.
That was on the following floor. As I reached it I saw that its door was the same style of door as the others, only this one had been whitewashed in a way that allowed its old brown finish to underscore the artfully swabbed white paint. I could hear something loud and baroque—a Brandenburg Concerto?— emanating from within. I banged heavily on the door. It opened. I put my head inside and smelled the distinctive, medicinal aroma of paint. I was in a huge room. As with the front door the walls here were also whitewashed—the wide brushstrokes clearly visible everywhere. There were large industrial spotlights focused on all four walls. There were two oversized canvases: moody geometric studies of color—bright ultramarine blues shading into azure, cobalt, navy hues—adorning two walls. On the farthest wall, a good forty feet away, was a long table full of paints, splattered drop cloths and several canvases in varying states of development. But what struck me most forcibly about this vast atelier-style room—besides the evident talent of the painting on the wall—was its orderliness. Yes, it was a rough-hewn space—the floorboards bare and unsanded, the galley kitchen near the studio area this side of basic. The only furniture was a zinc café table, a couple of plain bentwood chairs, and a broken-down sofa over which had been thrown a white linen cloth. There was meager heat here—the space so large that it was, no doubt, prohibitively expensive to keep warm. Despite its austerity I took to it immediately. The artist in residence here was serious about his work and hadn’t given in to La Bohème squalor.
“So you let yourself in.”
The voice—that BBC intonation, raised to a loud bark over the blaring Bach—came from a staircase in a