Exit Day: Brexit; An Assassin Stalks the Prime Minister

by David Laws

  “You’re an academic, a distinguished historian with a commission to write a scholarly tome from a top publisher in this country, and you’re off to Germany to search out new archival material.”

  “That’s Kameraden country. Enemy territory.” He sighed. At least it meant she accepted his idea that hunting down traces of Tresham’s time at the Stasi secret training school could provide valuable evidence.

  “Still safer than here. Tresham’s a dangerous adversary. He’ll use all the powers of the state to bite off the slightest danger to himself.” Patronella continued to fill in the details of her brief. Alexander Stock had a distinguished backlist of work: Peter the Great, Bismarck and de Gaulle, all genuine biographies, and now he had an advance from the second biggest publisher in the UK for his present project. From the briefcase came a letter on headed notepaper requesting co-operation from the relevant authorities…

  “Hang on!” Harry objected. “He’s for real, right, and he isn’t going to be best pleased when he finds out I’ve been charging around Germany impersonating him... playing fast and loose with his reputation.”

  “No problem. Stock’s compliant. We’ve used him before.”

  But Harry wasn’t in the mood for compliance. “Before I do anything,” he said, “I want another interview with that lecturer Gifford. There’s a whole lot of extra background to come from him. Like what they did over there before being sent here. How, where, what…”

  She was shaking her head, wagging a finger, lips pursed. “Absolutely not. Told you before, I’m not having you jeopardise my best source. And besides, he’s being watched. You could get his neck wrung.”

  “So I’m being sent blind into the lion’s den.”

  “Not quite. Here’s your travel tickets, documents, introduction to Frau Johanna Hartmann. We’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at seven, chaperone you to Heathrow for the early flight. You’ve got until then to sort out your partner.”

  When he walked into Blackthorpe Grange he was ready with a litany of soothing words and phrases of reassurance… then he stopped.

  The place was empty. He began to fear the worst: he ran up the stairs calling her name, then yelling, “Stefan, where are you?” The bedrooms were as empty as downstairs. No sign of her or the boy. Could they have been taken by the men staking out her Barton cottage? He looked around carefully for a note or a telltale sign, but the place was in apple-pie order – her latest idiomatic acquisition – with no evidence of a struggle.

  He ran out into the garden and did a circle of the grounds. Nothing. But then there was a rustle among the trees at the back of the rose garden, and a voice broke the painful silence: “Up here.”

  With a start, he walked over to a massive oak and peered up. There she was, sitting in the fork on the main trunk, so high up it made him dizzy to look.

  “What the hell are you doing?” His anxiety turned to anger. “Bloody silly trick. You gave me a bad fright. Thought the nasties had got you.”

  “Oh, them!” she called dismissively. “They’ve gone. Mary’s given me the all-clear. We can go back—”

  “No!” He was adamant. “It’s still not safe. Just get down from there. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  When she was down, swinging about like a damned orangutan, he thought, she appeared breathless and jaunty. He noticed she was wearing jungle camouflage trousers.

  “What’s this?” he said, pointing.

  “Charity shop in Bury.”

  “You’ve been back? And where’s the boy?”

  “At the tutor’s place.”

  Harry was still peeved and a shade headmasterly. “Is this the right example for a mother to set a son?”

  “I doubt he’d notice,” she said.

  It was true. Stefan was definitely an odd fish. Even his mother admitted it. Harry had racked his brains to find a way to engage with the boy, had even thought of aviation. Offered him a trip up in the Tiger Moth. But no, Stefan was not interested in the sensation of flight, only in the theory of creating lift and the mechanics of navigation – never Harry’s strong suit.

  They returned to the house in silence. He had been overwhelmed on the journey home by a sense of duty – or his perceived lack of it. His father’s voice was in his head, as clearly as if the man were actually speaking: A man’s first duty is to his family, to protect and cherish them. All else is secondary.

  Would his father have agreed to leave his partner unprotected? Harry had struggled with the problem all the way home, feeling he was failing to live up to the required standard of behaviour for a partner.

  And now this!

  Unaccountably, Erika was not in the least distressed or, it seemed, concerned about his forthcoming absence. Entirely relaxed, bubbling over with her ability to climb. He thought then that she was a little crazy, and when she caught sight of the exquisitely carved trinket box he had bought her as a gift from the antique shop in The Strand her mood changed dramatically.

  She pushed the box away. “Hate it,” she said, “sends shivers through me. No, no, take it away.”

  He was confused, mystified, a little hurt. “But why? What’s the matter with it?”

  No answer. She was striding round the garden again with an expression that would turn a Viking to stone, and when he caught up with her he insisted on an explanation.

  “Reminds me of my father,” she said. “Hateful old bastard. Kept all his secrets in a box like that.”

  “So?”

  “He kept it from me. I was forbidden to touch it. Just another of his many ways of humiliating me, keeping me at arm’s length, belittling me, keeping me out of the family…”

  She was off again, striding away like an Olympic walker. Harry sighed and slowed. She was, he reflected once again, a woman of many moods and constant surprises.

  Chapter 35

  Thursday 21st March 2019; 8 days to go

  It had been a long journey by plane and train, but when Harry stepped down from his carriage at the Leipzig terminal any feeling of fatigue vanished from his mind. Instead, he was eager with anticipation and a sense of intrigue. This was the city where it all began. This was the place that threw off the yoke of a suffocating Communist dictatorship before all the others. He held a street map in his hand, ready to explore. How did they do it? What was different about the people here that had given them a courage that perhaps stuttered elsewhere? A city of grit and resolve, he decided, as he left the Hauptbahnhof and joined the crowds crossing the wide boulevard along which dashed an unceasing procession of clanging trams. He walked the streets, following a route directly into the historic centre, anxious to see for himself the key monuments in the city’s passage to freedom in 1989. Along the way he marvelled at the Renaissance beauty of the old city hall and smiled at the cafe culture of shoppers and strollers in the market square. He vowed before the day was out he’d make time for a special trip to the Arabischen, the oldest coffee shop in Europe. It was tempting to view the sights – But you’re not a tourist, he told himself, and headed smartly to the Nikolaikirche where the prayers and candles of a succession of peaceful protests grew into an unstoppable rebellion.

  He stared at the wide-open cobbled space around the church and the confusion of criss-crossing bikes and strollers, and took in the enticing aroma of fish emanating from the pavement cafes, wondering how this looked back in ’89, jam-packed with a heaving crowd. Then he moved past the vast ornamental terracotta entrance and into the church, immediately surprised by the bright light of the interior – big windows, white pews, white columns, palm leaves on the high ceiling.

  Then, inevitably, he moved back out into the street and made tracks for the big highway leading to the most infamous building of the city. The round-fronted Runde Ecke had been turned into a museum, but back in the days of Stasi rule it was the headquarters of the city’s secret police, dubbed ‘the Crooked Corner’ by r
ebellious crowds in ’89.

  This, he was acutely aware, was where the chase first began, the day Erika stole the Blue List. Clearly, as Patronella had told him in London, the Runde Ecke was the place to begin searching for incriminating evidence to entrap Tresham. He wondered how genuinely she had embraced his enthusiasm for this trip, knowing a large part of the decision was down to her urgent desire to get him out of the country.

  Nevertheless he had to acknowledge the thoroughness of her preparations. “Oh, how the Germans love their bureaucracy,” she’d told him. “They’re mind-bogglingly in awe of official-looking pieces of paper.” Consequently Harry had been equipped with an envelope full of documents: a business card with all his bogus details, a letter of introduction from the University of London detailing accreditation and a reference to his project that the real bursar certainly knew nothing about, and even a large red folding wallet containing an international press card. This last, she emphasised, was to be used only if all else failed. It was likely to attract the sort of attention they all hoped to avoid.

  Harry approached the five steps up to the Runde Ecke entrance, visualising the chaotic scenes of the tempestuous, clamouring crowd that had come this way to occupy the place back in ’89. He wasn’t simply entering a museum; he was treading in the footsteps of Erika’s own personal history. Walking through the entrance, he clocked the harsh blue-veined marbled steps and balustrades, turning left and clutching the big door handle. At this, he couldn’t repress a shiver of trepidation. Doorknobs existed only on the outside, he knew; once inside, only the Stasi could let you out. He knew that today such a thing wouldn’t happen, but still experienced a moment’s claustrophobia.

  He forced himself on, intent on getting a firm grip on the facts of the GDR police system. Eight hundred Stasi officers had worked in this place, carrying out spying operations against the city’s population of three hundred thousand. He stared at the tools of their trade: displays of covert cameras used by police to see, at one hundred metres distant, what a suspect might be reading. And then he almost cried out in laughter at an absurd display of tawny wigs, builder’s helmets and false beards used by the spies themselves. Such crazy disguises seemed to mock the deadly purpose of Stasi repression. There was also a drill for working the edge-notched card system for indexing the millions of personal files and, in the next cubicle, disturbing evidence – sealed jars, lint and scissors – of how body odours were collected for the Stasi sniffer dogs.

  Harry wrinkled his nose. It all seemed unreal, even frightening, that life-and-death decisions on the fate of so many citizens had been decided in what was now a dusty archive. Perhaps the hole-in-the-wall atmosphere was a metaphor for the essential grubbiness of the whole sickening regime.

  A young couple with a baby were in the next hall, feeding their child while exclaiming at a huge pulping machine that seemed to fill the exhibition space. Harry instantly imagined the raucous, grinding, chewing machine in action. Its monstrous metal mouth and sheer size were graphic testimony to the blind panic of the final days of the regime as the Stasi tried to turn into vast blobs of slurry 189 kilometres of files resulting from forty years of surveillance. The aim: to keep their shoddy activities from the public view.

  Around another corner Harry found what he later decided was the key exhibit: a case showing several shiny brown metal cylinders with caps that could be sealed by screwing into a steel ring. He asked the attendant what they were. “Crabs,” the man said, and Harry noticed his name tag: Herbert.

  The Crab, Herbert explained, was a waterproof device for storing important documents. These were turned into microfiche, to be hidden underwater in readiness for war – or revolt – with the intention that they could be retrieved and reactivated at some future date. A sharp whiff of resin came to Harry, and the electric light reflected from the smooth brown surface. But what might they look like after years underwater? He didn’t know it then – but he was soon to find out.

  He made his way to the exit, shaking his head in disgust. To think, Tresham, Corbishley, Gifford and even his old friend Toby had been part of this! Harry had always been mystified by the Germans. His mother hated them. She said they’d spent the last hundred years trying to destroy her family, ticking them off on her fingers: Harry’s great-grandfather on the Somme, his grandfather shot down over the Ruhr, a great-uncle killed in the desert, and his own father a victim of the post-war years. His childhood had been spent with these losses all around him, in photographs, in graveyards and on war memorials. It had informed his decision to study in Leipzig, not in anger, more in curiosity. He sought not to avenge but to understand. He came for enlightenment, insight and explanation, yet it wasn’t simply an intellectual exercise. There was an accounting to be completed and unfinished business to be attended to.

  At two in the afternoon he crossed the road and entered a modern building to keep an appointment with the curator of the museum, rising four floors in a smooth and silent lift. The place was in stark contrast to the ’50s ambience and decor of the Runde Ecke. Here carpeted corridors opened out into tiny bays containing water fountains and coffee machines. Picture windows gave a spectacular view of the city skyline. Modern office furniture could be seen behind acres of glass partition. His meeting was with Frau Johanna Hartmann, the new German-American curator. She was not what he expected: early forties, glossy black hair, smart business suit, perfect American English and exuding a slick, professional approach. She had a history of PR work in film studios in Los Angeles and knew all about contracts, publishing and manuscripts. Posing as Alexander Stock, he was going to have to step carefully around the subject to convince this woman.

  “So, Mr Stock, what’s your approach to this subject? You’re aware, of course, of all the authors who’ve gone before you on this…” And she reeled off a list of names. Then she pointed out the obvious absurdity of chasing lost GDR archives. How could he ignore the existing paper mountain? The Gauck Commission had been ploughing through several miles of IM files since the day the regime fell, and another group of computer experts had spent years trying to put together tons of paper torn up by a panic-stricken Stasi in the final hours of their power.

  Harry, determined not to be thrown by her scepticism, launched into his pitch. His purpose was to recover the lost archive of the regime – and here he was talking about the highest policy documents of the politburo, the ones they invoked special measures to protect and keep for posterity. These documents, he told her, were way up and away in importance from informer material. They were archival gold, the ultimate documentary treasure, a historical necessity, secreted away for posterity.

  Harry leaned forward in a well-rehearsed gesture of sincerity. He wanted to study, analyse and evaluate, he said. He was sure the work would bring added interest and kudos for the museum.

  “I think first you need to find this archive,” she said.

  He cheered inwardly. It was the key point and he had not needed to state it.

  More smiles, more flattery, more appeals for co-operation. Of course, he knew she would shrug and declare her ignorance; she had only been appointed six months earlier and had spent the previous twenty years in America. Once they had surmounted that hurdle it was a short hop to calling up old Herbert, her long-serving expert from the museum, the man Harry had clocked that morning at the display of Crabs.

  Herbert was more his line of country: sixties, sleepy grey eyes and brown pullover. Behind the mask, however, was a brain that was still sharp. “You don’t really expect me to lead you straight to the hidden archive, surely? That was a high state secret. Nobody knew.”

  Harry had a long history of teasing out secrets from reluctant witnesses. Charm, flattery, walking round the subject. He got Herbert to talk about what he did know: the technique of storing valuable documents underwater and the special Stasi department at Leipzig that had been allotted the task.

  “Your only hope,” Herbert said, “is to
find survivors from that department and ask them… but most don’t want to talk, most want just to forget.” He wriggled in his seat before adding, “For most of us back then, it was best not to know. You didn’t ask. Kept your eyes down and your nose clean.”

  Location? “All I can suggest is that most of them seemed to come from the training school.”

  At last, Harry had his clue: the Stasi academy for interrogators. Plus the spies. And where was this?

  “No idea. Sometimes I helped load the vans, that’s all. Those people were tight-lipped. Never said anything.”

  “What about the vehicles? Any clues there?”

  Herbert shook his head, looking into the distance in an effort of recall. “Nothing. Just the usual stuff. Only thing that stuck in my mind was the apples.”

  “Apples?”

  “Unusual… but one of them had a box of apples in his truck. I remember because of the label on the box. Appel-Engelhardt, and Engelhardt, you see, is my grandmother’s name.”

  Harry was looking intense, mumbling to himself. “Apples…”

  “Not much help,” Herbert said apologetically.

  “An apple farm,” Harry said. “So the box could have been local produce bought close to where the driver was located, don’t you think?”

  “Appel-Engelhardt,” repeated Frau Hartmann, who’d been silent during this exchange. Now she was tapping the name into her keyboard. He’d noticed her perfume earlier and finally managed to put a name to it: jasmine. “Maybe we’ll get a location if they’re still around,” she said. “Ah, yes, here we are… Appel-Engelhardt is located in the village of Kriebswalde.”

  “Kriebswalde?” echoed Herbert. “Isn’t that where old Walter comes from?”

  “Walter?”

  “Our curator in wigs and moustaches.”