by David Laws
Walter was summoned from his wigs, gumshields, make-up bottles and combs, an old man who insisted on wearing a green pork-pie hat inside the offices and the museum. “A Stasi place in Kriebswalde?” He rubbed a bulbous nose, then shook his head. “Not that I know of… though there was that spooky place up on the hill…”
Silence. Expectant expressions.
“The old house and the grounds,” he suggested. “Surrounded by barbed wire, never saw anyone go in or out, like they only emerged at night. Someone must have been in there, though – lights at the windows of a winter’s evening. And strange noises in the night.”
“Who were they?”
A shrug.
“Noticeboards? Nameplates?”
“Just KEEP OUT.”
“It must have had a name.”
Herbert screwed up his face in an effort at recall. “Ah, Schloss Speldorf, that was it.”
Harry clicked a triumphant finger. “Schloss Speldorf – got you!” he said.
You couldn’t miss it: an imposing neo-Baroque mansion on the road between the city and the Schauder River, putting the rest of the district into the shade. An essay in opulent ornament, stucco and marble, a structure built for some long-forgotten steel magnate to show off his wealth.
Hardly the sort of place you’d associate with the people’s police, Harry thought as he bounded up the steps and entered through an outer set of doors, up three more steps and through a second set.
There he found himself in a huge lobby dominated by an enormous octagonal table. It was made of dark oak with carvings of lions on the legs epitomising, he thought, the solidity of a foregone age.
The place was occupied by a firm of tax accountants; not a service that had been especially useful before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Harry presented his credentials as an academic researching buildings of special architectural and historical significance. He was lucky. The bosses were away and he managed to persuade a young clerk to show him around. They’d get a credit, he said, when his work was published.
They toured the rooms, he declaiming vocally and in a state of high excitement at the patterned ceiling, the oak panels and the stained-glass windows in the Art Nouveau style of the late nineteenth century.
Inwardly, he had another agenda. They’d done themselves proud, these engineers of Stasi oppression, luxuriating in a manner unknown to the ordinary citizens of their impoverished republic. Despite that, there seemed to be no reminders of the period. No old masters or pictures on the walls, no graffiti in the kitchens, no old slogans, signposts or even a single padded cell.
Harry was getting desperate. He remembered visiting Wanborough Manor, on the Hog’s Back at Guildford, the school for Britain’s secret agents in the war, and again there were few reminders of its heroic forebears.
Finally, however, in a basement room, he came across a photograph hanging on a wall showing a strangely posed and formal group of people. A particularly serious bunch with not a hint of a smile anywhere.
“That old thing?” the clerk said with a hint of exasperation. “Been meaning to get rid of it for some time.”
Harry studied the setting, the background and the faces of the group. Their clothes said ’70s, their expressions told of suppressed eagerness. When he thought about it, he remembered seeing a similar group photograph on a wall in Red Nina’s Fortress in Farringdon Road, but he had been too distracted at the time to take much notice. He looked again at this German group. It reminded him of his old class photo at the end of term. Surely, this was an echo from the Stasi days; the class of ’77, or some such?
“Recognise any of these?” he asked.
“Lord, no. History from way back. From another age.”
“Know who they were? What they were doing here?”
“No idea.”
And that proved to be the only artefact of any significance that he could find at the villa, throwing Harry back on the old journalist’s reflex: when stumped, ask your taxi driver.
And if that didn’t work, call in at the local pub.
The Brauhaus Schiller had a steep sloping roof, a veranda sporting a luxuriant display of geranium window boxes encased in chocolate-brown woodwork, and stacks of logs cut with exactitude into a uniform size ready for the next snowstorm. There were shutters on the ground floor shielded by bushy gardens. In a corner near the main bar stood a sparkling white tile heater decorated with colourful dolls, and beyond this a paved courtyard with heavy pine tables and chairs.
It was a boisterous place, and Harry took Bernie, his taxi driver for the day, in to help him mix socially. They ordered Radeberger beers and potato soup. He was so hungry he almost went for the top item on the menu board – calf’s head and lobster – but decided instead to play safe with leberwurst and sauerkraut. This was brought to them by a girl with a braid hairstyle and wearing a dirndl dress. She smiled and said something, but her words were carried away on a wall of sound. Singing voices – lots of voices – plus an accordion. Perhaps it was karaoke night. Perhaps it was always like this. I Salute You, the first song went, then Hey Baby (If You’ll Be My Girl). Traditional Oktoberfest songs, the cabbie explained in a cupped shout to Harry’s left ear.
After he’d finished eating, he left the main bar and found the stammtisch – the only quiet room, and strictly reserved for the locals. Perish the intruder who stole an allocated space! However, tonight they were all singing and he had the place to himself. He looked hopefully around the walls but there were no photographs of po-faced groups. Instead, a variety of local scenes: a church, cows grazing in a pasture, a castle, a river valley.
On his second tankard – before he became too befuddled to know what he was doing – Harry approached reception and broached the subject of the Stasi training school. He asked if they knew of anyone who would remember official activity up at the old mansion.
What did he expect? Helpful smiles? Dour rejection? He didn’t get either. The friendly atmosphere didn’t change, but he still got nowhere. Shaken heads. No one remembered. A similar blank for cabbie Bernie.
Then, because he couldn’t think of anything better, Harry scribbled a note which said, Seeking former Stasi officers and helpers for talk about old times. English academic research, anonymity guaranteed.
A move of some desperation, he told himself, as he pinned the note to a wall below another local scene, this time of a gnarled old fisherman sitting by a river. Was the appeal likely to bring them out of the woodwork? Perhaps some retiree with time on his hands and a loose tongue would be willing to talk about the Stasi and its many mysteries and elusive secrets. After all, that was why Harry had chosen to study in Leipzig, why he had frequented the bars of East Berlin to pick up an old trail among the former officers of the state. He had failed back then – perhaps because of his youth – and success this time would indeed be sweet, and might just open up for him a window on a family conundrum he had been pursuing for years. Not for good copy. For himself. A deep-down personal thing.
He looked again at his note next to the fisherman painting, and that was when he had another idea. An active local photographer snapping picture-postcard scenes of the locality; such a man might just be a possible source.
The photographer’s name, Gustav Vogler, was on the frame. So was his telephone number.
Vogler turned out to be a small man with glasses and a bald patch so large he looked hairless from the back. He’d been around cameras for years and had spent a lifetime taking snaps of babies, families, brides on their wedding days, dogs, cats and sundry household pets. When he wasn’t being paid for it, he took photographs of the district: old houses, churches, architectural curiosities, sunsets, aged characters at the inn and fisherman on the river. The sort of man who had the most intimate knowledge of the district and its history.
Harry asked for a studio shot of himself – required for the inside cover of a book he was writin
g, he said, and not entirely an invention – before engaging the man in conversation about local history, managing to slip in an inquiry about the old training school without being too obvious.
Or so he thought.
Vogler laughed. “I heard you’d been inquiring about the place. Up at the inn.”
“True,” Harry said, continuing his pose as a student of aged buildings. “And the thought occurred, did you take any pictures up there, when it was a going concern?”
Vogler was canny. That much was obvious. This was going to be a cat-and-mouse conversation. Harry played the part of a relaxed and apparently affluent customer. No pictures up at the school, Vogler said, it was all too secret, but then, after a while, he might just have taken a few. Harry recalled seeing a class of ’77 on a wall at the old building, and the style and the frame looked remarkably familiar to the ones in the studio. Vogler recalled that one day the school’s photographic equipment had malfunctioned and he’d been called in at short notice to fill a gap. After that, he “kinda got the job; knowing the right person helped”. Of course, he had been ordered to hand over all the film because this had been a secret establishment.
Harry seemed not to have heard. Talked about himself, his role as a writer and researcher, and his present subject and how any archival or photographic evidence would be highly prized. Worth a great deal, in fact. Hundreds for a search, thousands for the right picture.
Vogler took him to an outhouse at the back of the studio. He had made duplicates, he admitted, even though it was forbidden and he would have been in serious trouble had he been caught. “Saw it as possible scrapbook material for the future, a nice set of nostalgic photos. Might be a glossy coffee-table book one day when the political climate changes. This is a small town. I need to exploit every opportunity.”
Harry was viewing a backlist of class photos with the help of a projector. It was indexed by year. At the end of every intake, a formal pose. Records for bureaucrats, Harry supposed. He studied the faces and peered closely at the captions, kept separately, ready to be printed in small capital letters across the bottom of each photograph: just one initial and the family name. He was guessing and working backwards from the late ’80s and he had a list of English names in his head. The most prominent: McIntosh, Corbishley, Gifford and, of course, Tresham.
He was back almost to the ’70s and ready to give up. No familiar names, no familiar faces. But he had expended too much effort to acknowledge failure. He began scrolling forwards again towards the mid ’80s, and something had him stop at 1984. They all looked so young, these eager converts to the GDR; some still at university, most early twenties. How would they have changed in more than thirty years? Less hair, wrinkles, spectacles? His attention focused on a figure in the back row, third from the left. He looked closer and squinted in concentration. Could that be a port-wine birthmark on the man’s forehead? Just like Tresham’s familiar birthmark, now quite pronounced with a receding hairline? He glanced down to find the caption – but no, the name was C. Portus.
He stared and thought, and somewhere at the back of his brain a little cog was turning.
“Found what you’re looking for?” inquired Vogler.
Portus. Where had Harry heard that name before? He sat upright. Now he remembered. It was one of the names he had glimpsed in the series of passports he had discovered in Red Nina’s desk. He pinched his nose and all the names gradually emerged from the back recesses of his memory: Winter, Dressing and Portus.
“I’ll have this one,” he said, indicating 1984.
Chapter 36
8 days to go
How convenient that Harry was away. Erika sat in her eyrie seat at Blackthorpe Grange, looking out across the fields, sweeping the landscape for intruders or threats, expecting to see him at any moment.
That Harry was in Germany, leaving her free to make her preparations, was a great boon. She wondered who had arranged this great good fortune. It meant Fischer could come to the house to make his ‘special delivery’ without having to indulge in the risky business of meeting at some neutral place for a handover. Momentarily, she wondered what Harry was doing right at that moment and was glad he was out of danger and well away from Fischer and the Kameraden.
Fischer! She expected him to arrive at any moment, and sighed at the dilemma he represented. It had torn at her for days. This would be his second visit and still her feelings about him were ambiguous. She wondered once again, for the hundredth time, if her agreement was the right decision. Could she trust him? He had betrayed her before. She knew this was the most important decision of her life; the welfare and future of her son were dependent upon it. She knew how ruthless the Kameraden could be. Would they keep their promises?
As if to reassure herself, she riffled through the paperwork again. She knew they could forge such things, but the letters, passports and official documents seemed utterly convincing. If she said no to this, would she live the rest of her life in regret?
Her eyes swept the road, the driveway and the fields, eager to spot his approach, as the suspicion grew inside her that she had been used back then, and was being used once more. And could she again recreate the spell of conviction, the determination and skill, fighting down her doubts? She had allowed herself to believe, back then, on a day like today when the sun was shining. She recalled it with great clarity: that day, standing on the steps, looking up, shielding her eyes, listening to the sound of harpsichord, viola and piano from the upper floors of the university music school.
“I’ve got an audition with Max Kramer at eleven o’clock,” she’d told the porter, seated in his tiny office just inside the front door. A lie, of course, but he told her the room number just the same. As if she didn’t know.
On the way up she repeated to herself the slogans and inviolable texts Fischer had drilled into her, and when she crept silently into the rehearsal room, Kramer, a tall, black-suited figure hunched over the keyboard of a baby grand, appeared oblivious to her presence. She recognised Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 3. She also recognised the verve and distinction of the performance from a man who had once been a leading musician of the DDR and now enjoyed countrywide fame. He looked up vaguely in her direction but carried on as if she were a ghost.
Erika, the ghost, remembering this critical moment so many years later, squirmed at the thought of targeting such a masterful talent. She remembered putting down her case, opening the lid and withdrawing the viola, placing it on the top of the piano, the formalities of an audition maintained. Then came the tape player, accompanied by a selection of Rachmaninov concertos and similar composers – Scriabin and Brahms. She selected Concerto No. 3, inserted it into the player, placed this on the top of the piano, pressed play and turned the volume up to maximum.
Immediately Kramer stopped playing with a crashing of angry chords. His arms went aloft, his eyes blazed, but the tape player carried on.
“Outrageous!” he shouted. “Who let you in? What do you want?”
“I’ve come for an audition,” she said.
“Damn you! Couldn’t you wait? And put that ridiculous thing away.”
Her voice hardened. “I’ve also come to see a traitor,” she said. “An enemy of the people.”
He jerked up, startled.
“Max Kramer, the man who, ever since the Wall fell, has continuously and contemptuously defamed the regime that nurtured his talent. Encouraged students to ridicule its achievements. Poisoned minds against it on TV. Used his name and reputation to foment political trouble for those who held and continue to hold the true faith.”
Kramer’s lip curled. “Who the devil are you? Some avenging creature crawled out of the woodwork from the disgraceful past?”
“I am the bringer of justice and retribution.”
Kramer snorted. “What arrogant tosh! Who taught you to parrot such nonsense?”
The mocking tone eradicated doubt and b
anished the merest hesitation. He had ridiculed her words. Sneered at her prepared speech. Made her fatally furious at his rejection. “I believe,” she told him, “that even a traitor should know the reason for his sentence.”
“Get out of here—”
She had the gun up fast and shot him between the eyes.
Close quarters, no mistakes.
Double tap to make sure.
The tape, she hoped, would mask the sound of the gunshots and the discordant jumble of notes as Kramer’s head crashed face down on to the bloodied keyboard.
All these painful years later, she closed her eyes at the memory of it. Screwed up her face in disgust and shame. Even shed a tear.
And at that moment, missed the slight figure with the scarred face slipping easily over her garden wall with a pouch containing the seeds of yet another destruction.
Chapter 37
Friday 22nd March 2019; 7 days to go
Once more Harry entered the Brauhaus Schiller, this time feeling buoyed by his success. He’d just sent a cryptic email to Patronella about his possession of a certain photograph, the fact that it provided the evidence they sought and the different family name with which Tresham had graduated from the class of ’84. He assumed she would now be checking out the family histories of Winter, Dressing and Portus, if indeed they existed at all. As he pushed open the door, he wondered if this should be the occasion for a celebration-and-farewell drink. Was it time to go home, or should he delay his return to the UK, given the spook’s sensitivity on this point?
The singers had gone and the innkeeper leaned confidentially across the bar. “Someone wishes to speak with you…”
Harry turned to follow the direction of the man’s pointed finger and his gaze fell upon an aged figure seated alone in a quiet corner. A lived-in face, a grey stubble of short hair, a tiny beard.
“He read your note.”