A Patriot in Berlin

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘German. But I also took a course in Russian and the History of Art.’

  ‘And Women’s Studies.’

  ‘Yes. And after Harvard I spent a year in Berlin.’

  ‘That was where you met Diederich?’

  ‘I met Stefi through Sophie who was then married to Paul Meissner. I was living in West Berlin, doing research on the Bauhaus. A magazine in New York asked me to write a piece on an East Berlin painter – I can’t even remember his name. He was part of a group of dissidents around Paul and Sophie.’

  ‘Diederich was part of the group?’

  ‘He was on the fringe. I remember him, but not well. Paul was the leader. He was a wonderful person. Brave and gentle and charismatic and incredibly kind to me.’

  ‘Were you in love with him?’

  Francesca laughed. ‘God, no. Paul was an Evangelical pastor and married to Sophie. They had two kids. He was chaplain to the students at the university and so the Stasi gave him a really tough time. He was harassed in every imaginable way and his own church gave him only lukewarm support. It was crazy to let me visit them so often: it was really compromising, in those days, to be seen with a foreigner, particularly an American. But I got hooked on the atmosphere in that flat. They were so brave and cheerful and kind of … pure. I never knew anything like it, either before or since.’

  Serotkin was silent.

  ‘Then my year came to an end. I went back to the United States. And later I heard that Paul had had a severe nervous breakdown. The marriage broke up. Sophie married Stefi.’ She shrugged. ‘And here we are.’

  Serotkin’s expression had become sombre. ‘It was a cardinal error of the regime to fail to appreciate the cultural value of religious belief.’

  Francesca was puzzled. ‘Are you religious, Andrei?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I am an atheist. And you?’

  ‘My grandparents were Irish Catholics, but my parents didn’t practise and I wasn’t even baptized.’

  ‘So you are an atheist?’

  ‘More of an agnostic, I guess. I don’t know how you can know.’

  ‘I am an atheist,’ Serotkin said again, ‘because if a God was even a possibility …’ He stopped.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then men and women would not be free. They would be his playthings, his children, his slaves.’

  By now, they were eating their dessert – Francesca a crème brûlée that she only allowed herself as consolation for her earlier ordeal. She was feeling a little woozy: she had noticed Serotkin, after his initial glass of Schnapps, had left her to drink most of the wine. She tried to pull herself together enough to steer the conversation away from the gloomy subjects of religion and politics to something more appropriate to a date with a handsome man.

  ‘Now tell me about you,’ she said to Serotkin.

  ‘You already know most of what there is to know.’

  ‘I know you’re an art historian who works for the Ministry of Culture in Moscow; that you have got a son and that you’re separated from your wife.’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘My father was a soldier. He fought in World War Two.’

  ‘And you were in the army?’

  ‘Yes. It’s obligatory.’

  ‘Which is where you learned unarmed combat?’

  ‘I was in a parachute regiment.’

  ‘And you’ve kept yourself in shape.’

  He shrugged. ‘Once you learn these things, you never forget them.’

  ‘Like riding a bicycle.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And …’ She wanted to ask if he had a girlfriend but did not quite dare. ‘And are you happy?’ she asked.

  He darted a look at her, almost of anger. ‘There is not much to be happy about in Russia just now.’

  ‘Is it really true that people are starving?’

  ‘Not starving, no. But they have trouble finding food.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Even my parents.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘She is younger. It is worst for the old.’

  Francesca shook her head. ‘It’s unbelievable. A superpower that can’t even feed its own people. I’m surprised they don’t string up all the Communists on the nearest lamp posts.’

  ‘It is not …’ he started, then bit back his words. ‘There are not enough lamp posts.’

  ‘I guess there aren’t. But all the same, it must make you mad.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘And want to do something about it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And here you are, stuck in Berlin, with a hysterical American. Poor Andrei.’

  ‘You are not hysterical. I am impressed by how calm you have been.’

  ‘I might have been less calm if it had actually happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So if I’m calm, it’s thanks to you.’

  ‘Anyone would have done it.’

  ‘So you keep saying. But I’m not so sure.’

  ‘You have such assaults in America, I believe.’

  ‘Sure. Nowhere’s safe.’

  ‘It will not serve the feminists’ cause if, once again, women need men for their protection.’

  ‘There’s always mace.’

  ‘Mace?’

  ‘You know. Canisters of gas that you keep in your purse. They’re sometimes more effective than men.’

  ‘But you don’t need it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you have your friend.’

  ‘Duncan? Sure. But he’s in New York and I’m in Boston and anyway …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s not quite the type to go in for macho heroics.’

  ‘Which may be the reason why you love him. A new man for the new woman.’

  ‘Do I love him?’

  Serotkin looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. I assumed …’

  ‘Sure. Well, I guess I did love him, at least I thought I loved him, but real love would survive a long separation, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not an expert on love.’

  ‘You must know something about it.’

  ‘Yes. Real love would survive a long separation.’

  ‘It wouldn’t depend on time or place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or nationality?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, since I no longer feel it, I guess I never really loved Duncan.’

  ‘It is over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As she said this, Francesca did not feel that she was betraying Duncan or misleading Serotkin. Quite the contrary: it was only as she spoke that she realized that what she was saying had been true. It was over. Neither she nor Duncan had as yet admitted it, either to themselves or to one another: there had been calls twice a week – dreary, affectionate, long-drawn-out conversations over the transatlantic lines – with each exchanging bits of news that were of little interest to the other, and expressing encouragement and affection that was no more than routine. There was, perhaps, a trace of deception in the way she now suggested to Andrei that she had been free of any kind of commitment over the past four months, but it seemed no different to the kind of deception that resulted from applying mascara to her eyelashes or dabbing on Amarige to make her body smell nice. She did not want to give the impression that men drove bumper to bumper into her heart or into her bed.

  ‘And you?’ she asked Serotkin: it seemed that she had the right to ask him now.

  ‘I am not in love,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to be in love?’

  ‘I have been very busy.’

  ‘We’ve all been busy.’

  ‘Not just with the exhibition. There are other things.’

  ‘Your mysterious absences … Stefi thought you must have a mistress.’

  Serotkin shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘So where do you go?�
�

  ‘I visit colleagues.’

  ‘In Germany?’

  ‘Yes. And Switzerland. After all, when Excursus is over, you will go back to America, but my future is not assured.’

  ‘Won’t you have your job at the Ministry?’

  ‘It was a Party job. The Party is now suspended.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I’m sure, if you wanted to, particularly if Excursus is a success, you could get some sort of teaching post in America.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Unless you prefer import-export.’

  Serotkin looked puzzled.

  Francesca laughed. ‘Julius thought you were running some kind of business on the side shipping fax machines and video recorders back to Russia.’

  He frowned. ‘Some of us are reduced to that.’

  ‘He wasn’t serious,’ she said quietly.

  Serotkin looked sorrowfully into her eyes, as if rebuking her for saying something that was not true.

  She blushed. ‘I didn’t think it was true.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He did not seem grateful.

  ‘But I had my suspicions about the mistress.’

  ‘That is more plausible,’ he said acidly. ‘Americans regard love as a form of recreation.’

  Francesca recoiled at the bitter tone with which he said this. ‘That’s a little unfair.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘How much experience do you have of Americans in love?’

  ‘I am judging from the cinema.’

  ‘Movies are more about sex than love.’

  ‘Sex, then, is a recreation. The hero and heroine go to bed together before the end of the first reel.’

  Francesca looked down, afraid that what he said might be true. ‘Happiness is so often elusive. Americans want to snatch it while they can in case they wake up the next morning and find it gone.’

  ‘Happiness lies in more than a satisfactory one-night stand.’

  ‘Sure. It lies in love.’

  ‘Yes, in love. But not just in sexual love.’

  ‘What other love is there?’ It was a stupid question, and she regretted asking it before the words were out of her mouth.

  ‘There is love of one’s parents and one’s children …’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And one’s country.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I have never known anyone die for a woman,’ said Serotkin, ‘but I have known several who have been happy to die for their country.’

  ‘And kill for their country,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Of course,’ said Serotkin. ‘If you are prepared to die, you must be prepared to kill. To kill, and worse …’

  They said nothing as they drove back through the Grünewald. It was not a hostile silence; quite the contrary, Francesca felt that the intimacy that had been fortuitously forced upon them that morning had been confirmed by the evening spent together. However, it was an intimacy of a kind that she had never previously encountered, and that therefore left her somewhat baffled. In the United States, after a date, the traffic signals usually shone green or red or perhaps amber. With Andrei, it was as if there was some technical malfunction. All the lights were flashing on and off at the same time. Using a cruder but well-worn metaphor, Francesca felt as if she had hooked a fish as she had intended, but had then been dragged off balance into the water as the fish tried to escape downstream. Andrei was drawn to her: she could tell from the way he behaved in her presence; but for some reason she could not fathom, he was doing his utmost to resist her attraction, considerate at one moment, almost angry at another. Why would a man who wanted a woman deliver a diatribe against sex on the first date? They were both adult and uncommitted; both alone in a foreign city. They had known one another for six months. Why should what seemed proper to her seem depraved to him?

  Francesca thought that when it came to the point Andrei’s actions would belie his words. She so longed for him to embrace her that she almost wished for a return of the morning’s assault to give her the excuse once again to sob on his shoulder. He smoked in the car, his strong, untipped cigarettes, and as he exhaled she took a certain pleasure in drawing into her lungs the same smoke that had been in the deepest recesses of his body. This intimacy was better than none. She would rather he had laid his hand on her leg, the leg he had seen naked that morning. But he did not even stretch out and take hold of her hand. Why? Was he being high-minded? Did he desire her but feel that it would be wrong to take advantage of her vulnerable condition? She felt now that she had loved him for much longer than she had supposed, just as she now realized that her affair with Duncan had ended some time ago; but while she could present this second revelation as a retrospective truth, and would tell Duncan in due course, she could hardly confess to the first until Serotkin had owned up to his own feelings for her. Then she could draw in the line and lift him out in a net.

  Even as they stopped the car in the park beneath their building, she thought it might happen that night; that their yearning would be too strong to allow either of them to go to their separate flats. She thought of the conventional tactic of asking him up for a drink or a cup of coffee, but after what he had said about Hollywood morals, it seemed impossible. They reached the lobby. They entered the lift together. Serotkin pushed first the button for the fourth floor, then the button for the ninth. Francesca stood close to him and, when the door opened, turned her face towards his.

  Serotkin clasped her hand. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight.’ She turned to go, then remembered that she should at least be polite. ‘Thank you, Andrei.’

  He smiled. ‘I thank you.’

  ‘You should have let me pay my share.’

  ‘Please. I am a Russian.’ The automatic door started to close; his foot went forward to stop it. ‘By the way, do you play squash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall we play a game together?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘It will be safer than jogging.’

  He removed his foot. The door closed. Francesca went to her flat. She was embarrassed to remember how she had straightened the bedspread. She sat down on the bed and called Duncan. She did not tell him about the assault but said as kindly as she could that their relationship was over. Duncan listened, and said little in reply, but his few words were enough to get across that he not only agreed but was also relieved that she had come to this decision.

  TEN

  The investigation into the murders in the Dubrowstrasse had made little progress by the spring of 1993, despite the efforts of the detectives Kessler and Dorn. Other cases had intervened, some of which remained unsolved, but it was only when it came to the Maslyukovs that Kessler, who for twenty years had said that he knew everything that went on in West Berlin ‘before it happened’, for the first time in his life felt at a loss. He had established what he had suspected from the first – that the couple were Russians, a married couple, Grigori and Vera Maslyukov, nominally art dealers, in practice receivers of stolen goods: a ‘fence’ between those who smuggled icons out of Russia and the more reputable dealers and collectors in the West.

  Kessler’s contacts in the Russian underworld in Berlin told him that Maslyukov was a KGB agent; but in Kessler’s experience, every Russian émigré regarded every other Russian émigré as a KGB agent. Their suspicions meant nothing at all. The idea that Maslyukov had been an active agent, or even a ‘sleeper’, seemed far-fetched.

  More probably, Kessler’s first supposition was correct: the Maslyukovs were casualties in a war between different factions of Berlin’s Russian mafia. The icons had gone, undoubtedly stolen by whoever had killed Maslyukov and had tortured his wife. That hardly pointed to the CIA or the West German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution), the BfV.

  Kessler’s best hope lay in a tip-off from among the Russians living in Berlin. But so much had changed since the breach of the Wall. Illegal immigrants were floo
ding into the city. New gangs had taken over from the old ones. There had been gun battles in the streets of Kreuzberg: Russians had been shot dead in a restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm. He asked for names but his usual informants knew nothing about the new networks of Georgians and Azerbaijanis, and were clearly too prudent to ask.

  Dusting down the furniture in the Dubrowstrasse had produced no fingerprints. The murderers had worn gloves. The shreds of tobacco on the floor by the feet of the tortured woman were almost the only clue. Analysis showed that they were from Bulgarian cigarettes made for the Soviet market – BTs. Before the fall of the Communists, they had been sold in East Berlin: now, they were hard to find. Dorn had spoken to scores of tobacconists, finding a few who still stocked them; he had even identified a number of regular buyers, but none had the profile of a killer or a thief. If the murderer lived in Berlin, they had yet to find him, and as month followed month with no progress, Kessler fell back on a second hypothesis: the cigarettes had not been purchased in Berlin at all, but had been brought by the murderers from the Soviet Union itself.

  It then became a matter of checking arrivals and departures at East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport, and border crossings at Frankfurt-on-Oder, both by road and rail – a tedious task that used manpower and time. Kessler’s superior, Kommissar Rohrbeck, became irritated. He could hardly deny him resources – a murder was a murder; but like Dorn he could not summon up much outrage about the death of a couple of Russian crooks.

  Nor could Kessler. Indeed, the more he learned about the Maslyukovs, the less he liked them. Their files showed how little they paid the smugglers and how much they charged their Western clients. The mark-up on the icons was several thousand per cent. It was also clear that their declared income, upon which they paid their taxes, was a small fraction of their profits. Their account at the Berliner Bank had only DM 32,000. The rest of their assets were probably in Liechtenstein or Switzerland. There were references on the hard disk of their Nixdorf computer to the existence of such accounts, but no files or documents that identified them were found.

  However, it was not the tax evasion that led Kessler to dislike the Maslyukovs but the image he formed from the evidence of those who had had dealings with them; not their friends, because they did not seem to have had any friends, but other dealers, in particular a middle-aged German woman, Katerina von Duse, who had a gallery off the Kurfürstendamm. ‘I tell you,’ she told Kessler in an almost hysterical voice, ‘these Maslyukovs were the very lowest sort, quite pitiless. I am not at all surprised that they have been killed.’