WHEELER,
The Courier
BOOK One by tim strube
Frankfurt, 1983. The Cold War is being waged. Daniel Wheeler sells forged alloy wheels for an American firm, drives a van with a false floor, and runs the same ten kilometres along the Main every morning, noticing things he was never taught to notice. He left Frankfurt at eleven, in February 1966, asleep on his father's shoulder, with a suitcase and no explanation. His father died in Ohio without giving one.
Then a receiving slip arrives that he did not sign for, and a man in a brown back room behind a bookshop asks him what he is prepared to carry.
The practice has no name and keeps no clients. Its asset is a call book that has never lied, its method is real commerce, and its trade is wheels and paper in equal measure.
The letters, ledgers and files that a state on the other side of the wire would rather did not exist in the West, are carried one crossing at a time, against receipt. Schneider founded it. Ute Brenner keeps the books. Wheeler, it turns out, was born to it.
From a customs shed at Wartha to a Kassel attic that should have been pulped, from a Prague kitchen where a freight forwarder's daybook records a betrayal in 1965 to a Vienna café in the rain where a grey door stays closed, Wheeler learns what his father was, who sold the route he ran, and why a man called Voss has read every page about him.
By the time the wall comes down, Wheeler will need everything he learned here. But that is the next book. This one ends with two cups on a table, a packet of coffee with its seal unbroken, and an appointment, undated, in a hand sixty years old.
Consignment, awaited.
Find this Cold War story on Amazon.
Tim Strube, Author
Tim Strube grew up in Cold War Germany and saw some of the other side of it for himself, travelling into several Eastern Bloc countries while the Wall still stood and the borders were stroong.
He moved to the United States, where his working life began in the same trade as his protagonist: selling wheels. His career runs from the automotive parts business through years with an omnidirectional wheel manufacturing company, selling precision wheels to industry around the world. Catalogues, certificates, freight manifests, trade fairs, the quiet paperwork of genuine commerce.
The Courier was written from the inside of both worlds: the divided Europe he grew up in, and the counters, receiving docks, and documents that decide what crosses a border.
He now lives in Australia, where he runs to clear his head and develop his stories and keeps his possessions to what he can account for.
The Courier is his first novel, and Book One of the Wheeler Trilogy. Book Two, The Broker, is coming.
