Heike had withdrawn, offended, muttering something about how ridiculous that was. Phil had touched her thigh, but she had stiffened and he had removed his hand.
Then she had made her breakthrough.
‘Of course, she didn’t say anything about not telling you things she knows nothing about,’ he had said.
Heike turned to face him. ‘Like what?’
‘Like a strange man in a pub back in England asking me to look out for a mole.’
‘What’s a mole?’ Phil had used the German word, Maulwurf.
‘It’s spy slang for an agent who burrows into an enemy country’s intelligence agency or government. Kim Philby was a famous one, but there were others in Britain. I don’t know about West Germany.’
‘That’s exciting!’ said Heike, touching him. ‘Have you found this mole?’
‘No. I was told not to ask Grams directly. I hoped that it would become clear through her stories.’
‘And has it?’
‘Not really. Maybe Grams will find something out tomorrow, in East Berlin.’
‘But you won’t be there.’
Phil hadn’t answered her. Just before he had walked off into the night, she had asked him if there was any way he could stay in Berlin instead of flying back to London. She wanted to see him again.
He had smiled. ‘Maybe. Do you have a phone here?’
She had given him the number, resolving to ensure someone stayed at the squat for the next couple of days to be there to take a message if he called.
‘I might call you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I have a little idea.’
Chapter 48
Phil struggled to wake up the following morning. Emma was quiet at breakfast in the Hotel Bristol. She asked cursorily whether he had had a good time last night. She was thoughtful; she seemed anxious, scared even. And well she should.
Her fear made Phil feel happier with the decision he had taken on his way back to the Bristol the night before, although that decision made it more difficult to say goodbye. He went upstairs to his room to pack; he stuffed the clothes he had originally brought with him into his rucksack and rolled the new clothes they had bought together in Paris into a couple of laundry bags for Emma to add to her luggage. Her plan was that he should check out and take a taxi for the airport, and then she would set out for a day trip to East Berlin to meet Kay, returning to the Hotel Bristol that evening.
Phil had a different plan.
They stood together in the lobby, Emma having paid Phil’s room bill.
‘Thank you so much for coming with me, Philip,’ she said, her face stern, her tone matter-of-fact, despite her words. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She hesitated. ‘You saved my life. I shall miss you.’
‘I shall miss you too, Grams,’ Phil repeated, somewhat lamely.
Then her reserve crumbled, and she threw herself at him, burying her head in his chest. He put his arms around her.
After a little while she stepped back. ‘All right. Have a good trip back. And give my love to your mother and your sister. Oh, and your father.’ This with a smile.
‘Bye, Grams.’
Phil turned and left the hotel. Emma had got the doorman to procure a taxi, and it was waiting for him.
‘Tegel?’ asked the driver.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Phil. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Where is a good place I can store this rucksack for the day?’
‘Zoo Station has left luggage.’
Zoo Station was only a couple of minutes away. The taxi driver waited while Phil dumped his rucksack, and then took him eastwards to Friedrichstrasse and the Wall.
The Wall actually ran west to east at this point, Friedrichstrasse bisecting it south to north. Checkpoint Charlie was the crossing place for foreigners entering East Berlin; it was situated between the American sector and the southern edge of Mitte, the former city centre around Unter den Linden, which was now in the Russian sector. On the Allied side, the checkpoint comprised a hut, some sandbags and two signs: one declaring ‘Allied Checkpoint’ and another announcing ‘You are leaving the American sector’ in English and then repeated in Russian, French and German. An American military policeman waved Phil through.
He walked past a red-and-white-striped barrier and over the narrow strip of no-man’s-land to the more extensive obstacles on the other side. Watchtowers overlooked a large shed where the border formalities took much longer. An East German border guard in a forbidding grey-green uniform took Phil’s passport. The guard checked him for guns, ammunition and printed papers; the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide had warned him of this, and so Phil had reluctantly left the book with his rucksack at the station, having memorized all it had to say about East Berlin. He was required to change six Deutschmarks fifty for a similar number of flimsier East German marks. The five-mark note he received bore a picture of some sixteenth-century preacher in a floppy hat: not very communist, although on the back a combine harvester did its stuff for agrarian productivity. Tourists were supposed to spend all their currency during the day – it could not be exchanged on return to the West.
Phil then spent forty minutes hanging around the northern, East German section of Friedrichstrasse, waiting for Emma and avoiding the occasional suspicious glance from the border guards. If someone was watching him more discreetly, he couldn’t tell.
Eventually he saw her tall figure marching along the street towards him. She hailed a taxi, and Phil moved quickly. The taxi was tiny, with no rear doors, so as Emma climbed in over the passenger seat, Phil bundled in after her.
‘Philip!’ she said.
‘That’s me,’ said Phil, grinning.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she demanded.
‘I couldn’t let you do this by yourself,’ Phil said.
‘But I expressly forbade you from coming with me. It’s not safe, Philip!’
‘I know. That’s why I’m here, Grams. I can help. You know I can help.’
‘But I don’t want you to!’ said Emma, genuinely angry now. ‘I insist you get out of this taxi.’
‘No,’ said Phil. ‘I’m with you on this, Grams. Wherever it takes you.’ He smiled. ‘You’d have done the same when you were my age. You can’t deny it.’
‘Excuse me, comrades,’ said the driver in German. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘One moment,’ said Emma. She looked at Phil. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. She smiled back at him, reluctantly at first, but then resorted to a full beam of relief. ‘Prenzlauer Berg,’ she said to the driver. ‘And take us along Unter den Linden.’
The taxi was tiny, with an engine that sounded like a lawnmower. The driver was large and spoke with the by-now recognizable Berliner accent.
‘Is this car made of plastic?’ Phil said, tapping the roof. It was very different from the Mercedes in which he had arrived at Checkpoint Charlie. The little vehicle was, however, identical to almost every other car on the road.
In a couple of minutes they turned right on to a grand, broad street of old imperial buildings interspersed with more modern structures. And a dual line of small trees running down its centre – lindens, no doubt. Above and a little to the left rose a tall needle with a large ball two-thirds of the way up. A TV tower, Phil remembered from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide.
‘That’s the Stabi,’ Emma said, pointing to an imposing grey stone facade, through whose arches Phil could just see a courtyard with a fountain.
Phil looked around eagerly. He had never been in a communist country before. Some things were different: the modern, dreary blocks, the tiny cars, the TV tower watching over everything as if monitoring the movements of the East Berliners below. But the people appeared pretty much the same, although very few wore jeans. And, frankly, a lot of the modern architecture in West Berlin was pretty dire too.
‘It’s not that different to West Berlin,’ Phil said.
‘It’s very different from Berlin in 1939, believe me,’ said Emma. ‘Then there were giant red
swastika flags hanging from the buildings, and men in uniform marching everywhere. And no trees.’
‘No trees?’
‘Hitler tore them down to build the S-Bahn.’
That explained why the new lindens were so small.
They passed through a large square, Alexanderplatz, which had become the centre of East Berlin. A group of workers in hard hats beamed down on them with unbridled joy from a massive poster. The address Emma had given the driver turned out to be a five-storey block of flats, built since the war, opposite a row of older tenement buildings that had survived the bombing and the Red Army.
A column of buzzers guarded the door to the building.
Emma hesitated. ‘I don’t want you to listen to this.’
‘Too late,’ Phil said.
‘I will have to talk about things I have kept from you up till now. Things which will be dangerous for you to know.’ Emma paused, relief at his presence mixing with worry for her grandson. ‘She might not even let us in.’
‘Then we’ll think of another way to talk to her.’
‘All right.’ Emma pressed the buzzer.
‘Hallo?’
‘Oh, hello, Kay,’ Emma replied in English. ‘It’s Emma. Can I come in?’
‘Emma Meeke?’
‘Yes.’
There was silence, or rather a hum of static. It seemed to go on forever, but Emma waited. Whether to let these strangers from the West in was a difficult decision for a former agent of the Stasi.
Phil checked the short street for watchers; it seemed to him to be empty now their taxi had driven off. You could still see the tall needle of the TV tower from Prenzlauer Berg. There was a distinct smell of cabbage in the air.
He realized that he would have no chance of spotting professional surveillance in a strange city.
‘I’ve come a long way,’ Emma said.
‘OK,’ said the voice. ‘Come on up. Fourth floor. Apartment twenty-seven.’
Chapter 49
Kay’s apartment turned out to be the third floor, but then Kay was American, Phil remembered.
Number 27 was opened by a tall, striking woman with silver hair cut short above her ears. She was wearing a necklace of heavy green stones and large hooped earrings. She didn’t look happy to see Emma.
‘Hello, Kay,’ Emma said. ‘Can I come in?’
Kay hesitated, and then let them into the small apartment, which had a dreary view over the tenements opposite. The bookshelves were groaning with titles, mostly in German. A large black-and-white framed photograph of skyscrapers dominated one wall. Chicago, presumably. But that was the only hint that one of the occupants was American, not East German.
‘You are lucky that my husband isn’t here,’ she said. ‘He’s just left for lunch with some of his old colleagues from the Stasi.’
‘I assume he’s retired?’ Emma said, as if discussing a bank manager.
‘Oh, yes. But you know what they say? Once a secret policeman, always a secret policeman.’ Her accent was American, but with a certain clipped Germanic tinge.
It seemed to Phil that Kay wasn’t exactly being friendly. He remembered what Herr Pöpel had said about the reputation of her husband: Not a nice man, but by no means the worst. And Emma was trusting his wife?
‘And you?’ said Emma, taking a seat on a brown sofa. ‘Have you retired?’
Kay permitted herself a wry smile. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘But you were still working when we met in Brussels in 1965?’
Phil tried not to show surprise; he hadn’t realized Emma had met Kay since the war. One of those pieces of information Emma had omitted to tell him that were now coming out. He anticipated more.
‘Only a little. Helping my husband, who was a commercial attaché at the East German Embassy. I was a diplomatic wife then. A bit like you.’
‘I heard you were also stationed in Budapest? Kurt Lohmüller told me he met you there a few years ago.’
‘Yes, he did,’ said Kay. ‘How is Kurt?’
It seemed to Phil that Kay’s ignorance of Kurt’s fate was genuine, but then presumably Kay was an experienced and skilful liar.
As was his grandmother, it turned out. ‘He’s quite frail at the moment,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure he has long to live.’
‘That’s a shame. I liked him,’ said Kay in her first sign of unbending.
‘It’s good to see you, Kay,’ said Emma.
Kay gave a quick smile but didn’t repeat the sentiment.
‘Why are you here?’ she said. ‘You know I will have to report your visit? I doubt it will reflect well on me.’
‘Oh, yes. I am sorry, Kay. I’m here to talk to you about Lothar. Do you know where he is?’
‘Lothar? But he’s dead.’
That’s what Phil thought too.
Emma frowned. ‘But you told me in Brussels that you had seen him. On an operation in Geneva a few years before. Must have been the early sixties. You said he was an art dealer operating under an assumed name.’
‘Ah, yes, I did, didn’t I? But I was mistaken.’
‘How could you be mistaken about that?’
‘Easily. This man looked a lot like Lothar, or what you might expect Lothar to look like in his sixties. We learned later it wasn’t him. It was just an Austrian art dealer.’
‘I don’t believe you, Kay.’
Kay shrugged. It was a shrug that said: I don’t care what you believe. I may be lying to you, but so what?
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Lothar recently,’ said Emma. ‘And about Hugh.’
Kay listened.
‘It makes no sense at all that the British government would have killed Hugh, even if they suspected him of being a spy. That’s just not the way they behave. They might have arrested him, or they might have tried to turn him, or they might simply have watched him, but they wouldn’t have executed him.’
‘How can you know?’ Kay asked.
‘I was a senior diplomat’s wife. Over the years I have met people I can ask. I asked them, not specifying Hugh of course. And they all said the same thing. The British didn’t kill spies on their own territory. They didn’t kill Hugh.’
Kay didn’t reply.
‘Which means Lothar did,’ said Emma. ‘Or if not Lothar, then someone working for him. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Lothar didn’t kill Hugh,’ Kay said. ‘I am one hundred per cent certain.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Like you, I have had contact with people in Lothar’s line of business over the years. And they have confirmed that Lothar didn’t kill Hugh.’
Phil could see Emma trying to contain her frustration.
‘You and I were good friends, Kay,’ Emma said. ‘Back in 1939. You were my one reliable ally when everyone else was letting me down. I know you were as upset as I was about the Russians’ pact with the Nazis. I know how fond you were of Hugh. What happened back then was wrong.’
Kay listened impassively.
‘I don’t have long to live,’ Emma said.
‘I guess none of us do,’ said Kay.
‘No, I mean I have very little time to live.’ Emma tapped her forehead. ‘There’s something growing in here, and it’s going to kill me. But before it does, I want to see Lothar. Confront him with what he did to Hugh. I need to do this before I die.’
So that was what all this was about, thought Phil. But as a plan it did rather rely on Lothar still being alive, and as far as he could tell, that wasn’t the case.
Kay and Emma stared at each other. They both had equally intense brown eyes. Something was passing between them, Phil thought. Not just memories of fleeting meetings in pre-war Europe, but their lives since. What had been important to them then. What was important to them now.
Then Kay raised her index finger slowly. She moved it in front of her lips in a shush signal.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Emma. But I really can’t help you. Lothar is dead.’
Emma kept quie
t.
‘But it is good to see you. Let’s have some coffee, and you can tell me what you have been up to. Philip, can you help me?’
Phil followed Kay through to the kitchen, where she prepared a metal pot of coffee and stuck it on the stove. ‘Can you get the cups, please, Philip?’ she said, pointing to a cupboard.
Then she picked up a notepad on the kitchen counter, and a pen. Holding a finger to her lips, she began scribbling as they waited for the coffee to brew, its gentle gurgling hiding the scratch of pen on paper. Phil read over her shoulder as she scrawled left-handed, with spiky, backward sloping letters.
This apartment is almost certainly bugged.
Lothar is alive. He didn’t go back to Moscow in 1938. He escaped to Switzerland. The KGB found him in the 1960s under the name Werner Strobl. I was sent to Geneva to track him down. I think the KGB intended to kill him. I met him. He got scared and disappeared again before the KGB could get to him.
For a long time I never believed he killed Hugh, or rather I believed his denial. But you must be right. Hugh was a threat. He knew who Lothar was and also some of the other people the KGB had recruited, probably including Philby and Maclean. Lothar didn’t want Hugh to tell MI5 this. There is no other explanation. It’s obvious. I just refused to believe it.
Lothar killed Hugh.
Chapter 50
The coffee pot emitted a triumphant final gurgle, and Kay poured out three cups, asking Phil to take them through to the living room. She handed the notepad with her scribblings to Emma.
As Emma read, Kay spoke.
‘I apologize for the lousy quality of the coffee. It’s never been very good here, but it’s gotten a lot worse in the last year or two. They call this Kaffee-Mix. I dread to think what it’s mixed with; it’s only fifty per cent genuine. Think of it as an experience.’
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