A Patriot in Berlin

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘That is what we were hoping to elicit from Dr McDermott …’

  ‘Do you think she was an accomplice?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Have I ever suggested any such thing?’

  ‘Clearly, if the same person suggested the exhibition and the OZF warehouse, that person becomes the prime suspect, at least as an accomplice.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘You told us earlier today that the idea of the exhibition was first put to you by Dr McDermott.’

  ‘As I recall …’

  ‘It was not my idea, Stefi,’ said Francesca. ‘It was either Günter’s or it was yours.’

  Diederich looked puzzled. ‘No, Francesca. You came to us, don’t you remember? You came to supper here and suggested an exhibition of modern Russian art …’

  ‘That’s not true, Stefi.’

  ‘That’s certainly how I remember it, and Günter confirms it. Don’t you remember? He was here too. And of course Sophie was here. You remember, don’t you, Sophie? It was Francesca’s idea.’

  Stefan Diederich turned to look at his wife, but Sophie did not meet his eyes. She was now sitting like a sack on the sofa, her head slumped over her bosom. There were damp patches where her tears had fallen on the front of her dungarees.

  ‘Sophie,’ Diederich repeated slowly like a teacher talking to a child. ‘Tell them what you remember. Francesca came to us, after ten years, to tell us that she was now a specialist in Russian experimental art, and that it would be wonderful if I could use my influence as the regional Minister of Culture to put on an exhibition that she could organize …’

  Now Sophie looked up. ‘What … did … you do to … Paul?’ she asked between her sobs.

  Diederich faltered, for the first time uncertain. ‘To Paul? What has Paul to do with this?’

  ‘To destroy him … that was why you said you loved me. You were under orders … and Günter brought him … and he saw … and he fled … and I did not even know …’

  ‘Sophie! What are you saying? Have you seen Paul? What has he told you?’

  ‘I saw Paul,’ said Francesca. ‘He told me. You worked for the Stasi. You seduced Sophie as part of their campaign …’

  ‘But this is absurd,’ said Stefan, turning to the three other visitors as if to appeal to them. But again he faltered. The actor had forgotten his lines.

  ‘The important point at the moment,’ said Kessler to Sophie, ‘is to establish precisely who first had the idea for the Excursus exhibition.’

  Sophie sniffed. ‘It was him. It was Stefi, not Francesca. He invited her over. It was all his idea.’

  A look of shock, and then of pain, came onto the face of Stefan Diederich. ‘Sophie! How can you lie like that? I am your husband.’

  ‘Paul was my husband,’ shouted Sophie, ‘and I helped to destroy him, and you cannot say that anyone lies because you do not know truth from falsehood, Stefi, you don’t, you don’t …’

  ‘Sophie …’ He spoke hoarsely, and looked at her with an expression of genuine anguish.

  She faced away and suddenly Stefan Diederich appeared to pull himself together. He turned to Kessler and said: ‘Her mind has clearly been poisoned against me by Dr McDermott. You have only to talk to Westarp. I shall call him and tell him to come over. He will confirm everything I have said.’ Stefan Diederich went towards his study.

  ‘I should like to ask some further questions,’ said Kessler.

  ‘Of course. Let me just call Westarp. I won’t be a moment.’ Stefan Diederich went into his study.

  Kessler turned to Francesca. ‘Dr McDermott. You will appreciate the urgency of the situation we are in. You know Orlov better than anyone else in Berlin. Can you remember anything … anything at all that he might have said at any time at all that would suggest where he has taken the paintings?’

  Francesca pondered, then shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Did he give you an address or a telephone number where he could be contacted in Moscow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And before he left,’ said Kessler, watching Francesca closely, ‘did you make any arrangement to meet with or speak to Orlov again?’

  Francesca hesitated. She looked at the photograph of Vera Maslyukov which she still held in her hand. She opened her mouth to answer; but before she did, the sound of a shot came from the study.

  Dorn ran to the door and looked in. ‘Shit.’ He looked back at Kessler. ‘Better call an ambulance, chief. The minister’s blown a hole through his head.’

  Half an hour before midnight, a conference call from the office of the Federal Chancellor in Bonn was put through to Kommissar Rohrbeck in Berlin. Present were Inspectors Hasenclever, Allerding and Kessler, and two men from the BfV, one of them Grohmann. First Rohrbeck spoke. He reported that the stolen works of art had not been found. It was now clear that the robbery had been planned and executed by a Russian called Andrei Orlov, posing as an art historian, Andrei Serotkin. He had suborned former members of the Stasi to assist him, among them the Prussian Minister of Culture Stefan Diederich.

  ‘Diederich is dead?’ The speaker had not introduced himself but the voice was unmistakably that of the Chancellor himself.

  ‘Yes. He committed suicide.’

  ‘It seems unbelievable that I was not warned that Diederich might be a traitor.’

  Grohmann leaned forward. ‘It was known that he might have collaborated with the Stasi but nothing could be proved. His file had disappeared from the Ruschestrasse.’

  ‘And no one suspected that he had been working for the KGB?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the other two – Westarp and Riesler?’

  ‘They are in custody,’ said Rohrbeck, ‘and have been questioned. It is difficult to make out how much either knew of what Orlov planned to do. It is our judgement that neither knows the whereabouts of the stolen works of art.’

  ‘And what do we know about Orlov?’

  ‘Formerly an officer in the KGB,’ said Grohmann, ‘apparently dismissed after the coup. His father-in-law, Ivan Keminski, was at one time a top official in the Secretariat of the Central Committee. It is possible that the robbery is to raise funds for the Party now that it is no longer paid for by the state.’

  A jumble of voices now came from the console as the Chancellor and his advisors conferred. Then, ‘Kommissar Rohrbeck?’

  ‘Herr Bundeskanzler?’

  ‘Our decision rests on your answer to three questions. The first: can you recover the paintings before midnight tonight without paying the ransom?’

  Rohrbeck did not hesitate. ‘No.’

  ‘The second: is it your view that if the ransom is not paid, the works of art will be destroyed?’

  Rohrbeck looked at Kessler. Kessler nodded. Rohrbeck said: ‘Yes.’

  ‘The third question: is it your view that, if the ransom is paid, the works of art will be returned?’

  This time Kessler looked less certain, but again he nodded.

  ‘We think so, yes,’ said Rohrbeck.

  Once again, the sound of a subdued discussion came from the console. Then, ‘Herr Kommissar Rohrbeck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The view taken here is that we have no choice. We shall instruct the Bundesbank to pay the ransom. But no word of this must ever reach the outside world.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Rohrbeck. Then he added, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘You did your best. But please remain on hand. We will inform you as soon as there is any word from Raskolnikov.’

  The five men waited in the Kommissar’s office: not all of them were needed, but none wanted to go home. Hasenclever went off to telephone Frankfurt from his office, dragging a police specialist on banking fraud out of his bed to question him on whether money paid into numbered bank accounts could be traced and subsequently recovered. The answers he received brought him back to Rohrbeck’s office in a pessimistic frame of mind.

  At dawn, Kessler made one of many trips down to th
e coffee machine on the floor below, returning with five cups on a tray. At seven, the new shift arrived; at eight thirty, the clerical workers, and at nine the first trolley with fresh coffee and buns. By then Grohmann and Allerding were both sleeping, slumped on their chairs.

  Every now and then Rohrbeck’s telephone would ring, or other officers would look through the door to bring different matters to the Kommissar’s attention. Rohrbeck curtly dismissed them and gave orders that only a call from the Chancellery was to be put through.

  At twenty to ten, the telephone rang. Rohrbeck snatched it up, then switched on the speaker. It was Bonn. Raskolnikov had made contact. A fax stated that five vans containing the Excursus works of art were parked in the railway sidings at Tucheim, fifty miles north of Berlin.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The postponement of the opening of the Excursus exhibition meant that neither President von Weizsäcker nor the American ambassador was able to attend. The reason given was the technical difficulties of hanging so many works of art in so short a space of time. There were some rumours of more serious complications, and even a story in the Berlin Morgenpost linking the delay to the bankruptcy of the Omni Zartfracht company, ending with a speculation that some of the paintings had been mislaid for a short period of time.

  This was immediately denied by the Excursus organizing committee and the Prussian Ministry of Culture, but it gave rise all the same to enquiries from other papers, and Francesca McDermott had to take some difficult calls from museum directors around the world. At one point, MOMA in New York requested the immediate return of their works, a demand that was only withdrawn after reassurances from the American Embassy in Bonn.

  Despite the absence of the President of Germany and the Ambassador of the United States, the opening of the Excursus exhibition was a glittering occasion. The official ceremony, for political reasons, was in East Berlin, under the cupola in Schinkel’s Old Museum. The Christian Democrat Minister President of the provincial government made a moving speech about the tragic death of his Minister of Culture, Stefan Diederich, killed when confronting an intruder in his flat. It enabled him to make several political points at the expense of the Social Democrats, and call for a change in Germany’s liberal asylum laws that had led to an unprecedented influx of criminals posing as refugees.

  Sophie Diederich was not present: she was in a clinic recovering from the shock of her husband’s violent death. Dr Kemmelkampf had been summoned to Bonn. Dr Serotkin had been unable to get back from Moscow, and Günter Westarp was also absent, thought to be suffering from some kind of nervous exhaustion caused by the stress of mounting such a major exhibition. As a result, Francesca McDermott became the sole representative of the organizing committee and as such joint hostess with the Minister President’s wife at the reception given after the official opening at the Old Museum on 13 July, and at the rather more exclusive lunch the next day at the New National Gallery in West Berlin for lenders, curators and diplomats. Only the French cultural attaché was unable to attend because it was his country’s national holiday, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

  Despite all the horrors to which she had been subjected the week before, Francesca rose to the occasion. The show was stupendous: to see the work of so many great artists assembled from all over the world, to ‘bathe in the form and colour of their inspired vision’ (words from her introduction to the catalogue), and to receive, at the same time, the effusive praise of the world’s most distinguished curators and critics who, a year before, would not have known her name; and (though this was only a minor consideration) to be able to wear for the first time some of the more elegant clothes that she had brought from Boston – all this was a good antidote to the discovery that her lover, Andrei Serotkin, was a murderer and her friend Stefan Diederich a Stasi spy.

  Kessler, Dorn and the Russian detective, Gerasimov, were all present at the opening of Excursus at the Old Museum, and also at the lunch at the New National Gallery the next day. After the earlier débâcle which had cost the German exchequer one hundred million dollars, the governments at both national and provincial level had insisted upon unprecedented levels of security. The three detectives were wearing suits; they mingled with the guests. The two Germans, to Francesca, were unmistakably policemen: no one could possibly suppose that they had anything to do with art. Both looked uncomfortable in these surroundings and so Francesca went to talk to them in an attempt to put them at their ease.

  ‘Well, Inspector,’ she said to Kessler. ‘What do you think of the exhibition?’

  Kessler looked embarrassed. ‘I was never one for modern art.’

  ‘If I had a hundred million dollars …’ began Dorn.

  ‘You don’t,’ said Kessler, ‘and you won’t even have a job if you don’t keep quiet.’

  Francesca, who had been questioned half a dozen times by Kessler while hanging the Excursus exhibition, had become fond of the middle-aged Berlin inspector and his sergeant, Dorn. She knew that they knew, or at least suspected, that she could have told them more about Orlov, alias Serotkin, and she felt grateful that they showed no rancour. She had followed their investigation, and knew what little progress they had made. No prints had been found on the vans found at Tucheim; no admissions gained from Westarp or Riesler, or from suspects among former members of the Stasi’s Dzerzhinski brigade; and no word from Interpol about any Burton, Lauch, Grauber, Jeanneret or Serotkin.

  ‘Any news from Russia?’ Francesca now asked Kessler.

  ‘They deny the existence of Serotkin.’

  ‘And Orlov?’

  ‘They say the evidence is insufficient to extradite him. A number of witnesses attest that he never left Moscow.’

  ‘Do you still think that the paintings were hidden in a Russian base?’

  ‘Yes. Almost certainly at Waldheim, a kilometre from Tucheim. But the Russians have refused us access and its senior officers have been sent home.’

  ‘But not the detective,’ said Francesca, nodding towards Gerasimov on the other side of the room.

  ‘No, he’s still here. He’ll hang on until his allowance runs out.’

  To Francesca, Nikolai Gerasimov seemed even more out of place than the two German policemen. She had taken against him from the first moment she had seen him in Kessler’s car. He had thick, fleshy lips and a pockmarked face but clearly thought he was irresistible to women. On the pretext that he was protecting the security of the works of art from Russian collections, he had loitered round the galleries during the hanging, his eyes always on Francesca, never on the paintings. He followed her wherever she went, and one evening even had the audacity to ask her out to dinner. Francesca had said she was much too busy. ‘Perhaps after the opening?’ he had asked, to which she had replied with all the disdain she could muster: ‘Perhaps.’

  She should have said no. The possibility of a date some time in the future had encouraged him to pester her. He had followed her from gallery to gallery, watching her every movement with lecherous eyes, popping up at odd moments to offer to lift a painting, move a ladder or drive her home in his hired car. Francesca recognized that the revulsion she felt towards Gerasimov might have had something to do with her confused feelings about that other Russian, Andrei Serotkin. Gerasimov’s vulgarity made her wonder whether she had not been mistaken about the nobility of Serotkin. Was it possible that he had only seduced her to involve her in his plot? That seemed unlikely because she had always thought that it was she who had seduced him. But it was possible, as Sophie had suggested, that Andrei had hired the Turks to pretend to rape her, simply so that he could present himself in a heroic role. ‘How convenient, when you think of it,’ she had said to Francesca, ‘that he happened to be running past at the time! I tell you, Francesca, if he was once in the KGB, then he would be capable of anything. They are trained to seduce American women!’

  Sophie had said this the morning after Stefi’s suicide when she was still in a state of shock, and might have been unconsciously lookin
g for a scapegoat upon which to vent her mixture of grief and rage. Francesca was there, in her kitchen, in the flat on the Wedekindstrasse, and it was Francesca who had been the bringer of the bad news that had set off the chain of events ending in Stefi’s death.

  When Stefi had asked heir to back up his lie about who had first suggested the exhibition, Sophie had impetuously told the truth. Why? Because she had realized, on the spur of the moment, that if he could lie so easily about something as big as that, then he could have lied about everything else; and suddenly the whole mystery of why Paul had never come home from the clinic was solved. The monstrous thought that all Stefi’s loving words and gestures over the past decade had been simply to comply with a Stasi controller’s command made her want to kill him, and at that moment, in front of Kessler, telling the truth was an easy and obvious way to take revenge. Stefi’s eyes – the look of real anguish that had appeared as though through two holes in his mask – had confounded her. Perhaps he had loved her after all? She had been about to rise and follow him into his study when she had heard the shot. Now she would never know.

  It was for this reason, a perfectly understandable reason, that over breakfast the next morning Sophie had not only told this story, but had done her best to persuade Francesca that Andrei Serotkin, too, had been insincere. ‘It was the system. There were so many lies, and lies within lies, that it was quite impossible for any of them to be sincere.’

  Francesca had agreed. It seemed prudent to seem to accept that she had been used. But, from the moment she had regained consciousness in the OZF warehouse, her swollen wrists and ankles in great pain, her body aching in every joint, the memory foremost in her mind was not the dead look in the eyes of the Chechen, but Andrei Orlov’s smile.

  She had realized at once that if she was still living it was because Andrei had spared her life, and intuitively she understood all that this implied. He had spared her because he loved her, and because he loved her he would spare the paintings too. That was why she had been able to assure Kessler that Orlov would keep his side of the bargain.