Despite my hangover, the lingering memory of Evelyn’s voice made the whole day seem a little brighter.
07:13
Now that I was on my feet and had a litre of tap water inside me I decided to keep moving. A painkiller, swigged down with strong coffee and I began to feel like I could possibly function again. As the throbbing in my head eased, a feeling of disquiet grew in my belly. I was excited about Annette, and all the promise, the possibilities and hopes that she represented, but suddenly there was Evelyn on the scene again. Evelyn belonged to another time, a very different time: the old days.
By now I was back in my bedroom. I picked out my trousers from the heap of clothes in the corner, held them up and sniffed the crotch. They’ll do for another day at least. Pulling them on, I did them up, then looked at myself in the mirror. Grey skin, large pores. Bags under the eyes. I pulled in my paunch, trying to persuade myself that I looked OK for my age, and stood there, studying the reflection. Then I let my shoulders drop, and my tummy sag, pushing my hands into my pockets. My left hand crumpled some paper. Rough, scratchy. Soviet paper. I pulled out the envelope that Nik had given me, and ripped it open. It was empty. Pushing my forefinger in, I poked around. No, completely empty. Squeezing it open, I peered inside. There was faint writing in there, lightly written with a soft pencil. I tore the envelope and folded it out to read the words: Tue. 17.00h Woltersdorf Lock.
Was all this really necessary? I had no idea, but I wasn’t exactly reassured by the thought that a KGB captain clearly felt a need for such discreet messages. Would I meet him? Again, no idea. I decided that was a question that could wait a bit longer, at least until I was feeling a bit more human. For now it was enough to get to the office.
It was a cold, clear morning, golden sunshine feeling its way uncertainly over the rooftops, leaving the deep streets in damp shade. I walked unsteadily, meandering along the pavement. Stopping only at the baker’s to fill my shopping bag with bread rolls, I made my way to the offices.
The stairs nearly finished me off, and I stood on the landing for a moment, getting my breath back before opening the door and going in. Bärbel was already at her desk, and she gave me a slight nod. I wasn’t sure whether to say anything about what had happened at the potluck, and decided it might be simpler to keep quiet. Bärbel seemed to see things the same way—by the time I’d pondered this minor problem of social etiquette, standing in the middle of the front office, she had inserted several pieces of paper and carbon sheets into her typewriter and had begun pecking away. More than anything else, the hammering of the keys drove me into my office. I shut the door, knowing I’d only have a few minutes of peace before the others came in for the morning meeting, and I sat down with a heavy sigh. Feet up on the desk, move some paperwork out of the way: the report on Maier’s death, due at the Ministry this afternoon, and currently minus any references to both the British major’s curious comments and the police report from Saxony.
I tossed the papers back onto the desk just as Erika and Laura came in, talking about the demo on Saturday. Klaus followed, thankfully without a cigar, holding instead a cucumber in one hand and a stack of plates clutched to his chest. Bärbel brought up the rear, holding a pot of coffee.
“You look like you’ve been up all night! Was it that Wessi?” Erika’s opening shot.
I didn’t bother to reply, just groaned, and carefully moved my feet off the desk and onto the floor. The others didn’t comment, Klaus just clattered the plates onto my desk, placing the cucumber on top before going to his usual chair in the corner, Bärbel was already sitting, pencil poised over paper, and Laura deposited a tub of Marella margarine and a jar of home-made lentil spread before moving a chair fussily into position and sitting down, back as straight as a Prussian general’s. They all sat there, staring expectantly at me.
“What?”
“It’s your turn to facilitate,” Klaus helped me out. “But if you don’t feel up to it then I can do it.” He didn’t smile, just chewed on one corner of his moustache while looking at Laura’s chair leg.
I nodded while rummaging around in my drawer for another painkiller, then swallowed the pill. I put my bag of bread rolls on the table, and there was a moment of minor chaos as everyone scrambled for a plate and a roll. Everyone except me, I didn’t feel hungry.
“Right, so what’s on the agenda today?” Klaus asked.
“I could do with a second opinion on this Fascist case I’m working on,” Erika mumbled around a mouthful of bread and cucumber.
“Nothing new from me,”—Laura.
“More on Maier, and I wanted to ask you about this report I have to pass on to the Minister today,” I contributed. “Oh, and I should tell you about Major Tom too.”
We started with my points, and I described my visit to Westberlin. My colleagues were suitably amused by my account, perhaps I even did an impression of the British major for them, despite the hangover.
“Did the Englishman not give you any more hints?” Klaus wanted to know.
“No, and I’m not even sure it was meant particularly seriously, either. Maybe he was just pulling my leg. Who knows?”
Nobody had any more questions, so I moved on to the Maier case. I told them that I’d completed a fuller report and was going to head off to the Mauerstrasse at midday to hand it in. I was just about to explain about the evidence that had come from the Saxon cops when Laura jumped up.
“A wasp!”
We all watched the wasp lazily checking out the corners of the office, flying in and out of the folds of the dusty net curtains. Laura was stood by the door, anxiously following the wasp’s progress. It was unexpected, seeing Laura like this—she was normally so efficient and on top of things—but now she clearly wanted nothing more than to get far away from this flying insect.
“Is that it, can I go?” she asked, eyes still fixed on the wasp.
We all murmured assent, and Bärbel and Klaus followed Laura out, while Erika climbed up on to my desk, a piece of paper in one hand and an empty coffee cup in the other.
“Can I talk to you about this case I’m working on?” she asked. “I meant to talk to you about it on Saturday, but we got sidetracked.”
“Yeah, no problem. Your place or mine?”
“Let’s go over to mine, I have all the paperwork there,” Erika leant out of the window and released the wasp from the cup. It flew off in the chill breeze as if nothing had happened.
I grabbed my coffee and we went over to Erika’s office. It was much smaller than mine, but lighter—she’d taken down the net curtains and cleaned the window.
“The police have been watching a nest of Fascists at the other end of Lichtenberg,” she began, opening a file on her desk, and flicking through the papers, looking for something.
There was nothing new about Nazis in Lichtenberg, the GDR had always had problems with Fascists and neo-Nazis, but until 1989 the Party simply pretended they didn’t exist, going so far as to persecute anti-fascist groups that tried to do something about the problem. Now the Fascists were taking advantage of the freedoms we’d fought for in order to spread their poison.
“They opened up a squat last year, and first of all it was used as a base for the usual stuff—getting pissed, listening to violent music, going out and beating up foreigners. But then, six months ago something changed. Things seemed to have quietened down. No more late nights, no more blood on the pavement outside. Men in suits are going in and out, rather than just young lads in bomber jackets and para-boots.”
She showed me a photo, big men with shaved skulls in wide, shiny suits, bull necks showing the edges of prison tattoos over collars.
“The police got someone to talk. He said there’s a proper office there now, with a telephone and even a fax machine. There’s boxes and boxes of propaganda, piled high, everywhere in the squat. Leaflets, newspapers, Westgerman flags. And this.”
She pushed another photograph towards me. Large placards were piled up on a wooden pallet, maybe a
few hundred of them. In bold letters, black, red and gold, they read Wir sind ein Volk! We are one people—the battle cry of those who wanted unification with Westgermany—just one word different from our motto: Wir sind das Volk!, but so different in meaning, aspirations and politics.
“So where’s all this coming from?” I asked Erika.
“We don’t know, and that’s why the police asked us to get involved. It certainly looks like a political-ideological diversion: they think there are links with the Westgerman Republikaner, and possibly the West-CDU.”
The Reps were a Westgerman far right party, the CDU on the other hand was a mainstream centre-right party, represented in both East and West. They had held power in Westgermany under Chancellor Kohl—at least until he failed to persuade us to join his free-market paradise, at which point he was unceremoniously voted out of office by the Westgerman voters.
“They’ve seen some of the Rep big shots visit the squat. As for the West-CDU, no concrete evidence so far, I think it’s just based on those rumours of co-operation between the Reps and the CDU during the Autumn Revolution.”
We know that the Reps came over in force during the first stages of our revolution, back in autumn ’89, distributing Westgerman flags and placards, trying to get the public mood to swing in favour of unification. We were almost certain that the campaign had been paid for by the Westgerman CDU. Now it looked like they could be preparing a second attempt at counter-revolution.
“So what do you need me for?”
“Just wanted to check in with you. You see, the police don’t know whether it’s money or the materials that are being brought into the country, so they’ve given the customs authorities the registration numbers of all known Fascists’ vehicles, West and East, and they’ll be checked on the borders. They’re looking at the bank accounts of East-Fascists for any suspicious transfers from the West.”
I nodded, and sighed. “Sounds like the kind of thing they used to do to us, doesn’t it?”
Erika nodded too. “But back then they didn’t do that to the Fascists, which may be why we’re having such a problem with them now.”
I considered what Erika had told me. It all seemed sensible, legal, and considering the stakes, proportionate.
“Sounds OK to me. Could it be one for the 96-15 debate?”
“Yeah,” she replied, “that’s what I was thinking. I just wanted to get a second opinion on it—might be a useful example, provided we embargo it until we get results.”
Paragraph 96, section 15 of the 1990 Constitution allows the government to set up a counter-espionage service—my own outfit, the Republikschutz was just a stop-gap, crewed by amateurs. One of the many national discussions we were having was whether we should have a professional intelligence service. People were justifiably sceptical of the need for any kind of secret service—to many people they were just an excuse for macho, militaristic games of James Bond, and I couldn’t disagree. For the time being the RS had only an accountability and advisory role, and no actual police powers to investigate, arrest or prosecute anyone. Whatever the nation decided to do, this case was a perfect example of how real the threat of foreign interference was. If this Fascist squat really was part of a bigger scheme to undermine the revolution, financed by the West, then a competent foreign intelligence body could have given us earlier notice that something was up, and it would have been able to trace the money trail inside Westgermany.
“Thanks, Martin.”
“No problem. Thanks for working on this, it doesn’t look like fun,” I smiled encouragingly at Erika, who pulled a face at me.
Back in my office I went over to the filing cabinet to pull out the case that I was working on before I was sent down to West Silesia—the speculation in housing stock that I had told Annette about. I’d hardly opened it when the phone rang. It was the Minister’s secretary. I was expecting her to send me on some wild goose chase, maybe to the French garrison in Tegel in Westberlin. But instead she wanted to send me to Ruschestrasse—the old Stasi headquarters—to fetch some files. She said they’d be waiting for me, all I had to do was pick them up from the porter. Files for Maier and Fremdiswalde, she said.
I put the phone down without saying goodbye, I wasn’t happy about being asked to play messenger boy. I’d had the feeling right from the start that the Minister was playing games with me, power games. That’s not the way it was meant to work any more. I sat there for a moment, feeling peeved, then picked up the phone again.
A couple of minutes later I had the latest from Schadowski, the police officer in charge of the Murder Investigation Commission in Dresden. They’d found evidence of a struggle near the site where the body had been discovered, along with two pairs of footprints leading there, but only one set going away again. Even though it had never been considered a serious possibility, suicide was now firmly crossed off the list. Schadowski had also attempted to interview some senior WSB members, trying to establish Maier’s movements in the days before he was murdered, but he’d been warned off. The policeman had sounded resigned at this development, as if familiar with the situation from a time not too long past.
The news I had just received from Schadowski didn’t help improve my mood, and I picked up my Maier report and banged my way out of the office. Once outside though, the cool, fresh air eased my thick head, and I had calmed down by the time I had walked as far as the concrete tower blocks which start just this side of the Frankfurter Allee. I crossed the Allee at the traffic lights by the underground station and started up the slight incline of Ruschestrasse, going past the faded graffito Freedom for my files! I showed the guard my RS pass, and went into the large courtyard of the old Stasi headquarters. Concrete towe blocks surrounded the whole complex, making it impossible to see in from the outside. Opposite me was the main building where Erich Mielke, the general in charge of the Stasi, had once had his offices. I headed over the yard and went in, asking the porter if a package was waiting for me.
“Here you are, Comrade Oberleutnant, ready and waiting for you,” was the answer.
I took the large, grey envelope she held out to me, and signed the receipt that had been thrust over the counter.
I didn’t look at the envelope until I was in the underground. It was standard A4, not particularly fat, and most interestingly, not even sealed. To me that was as good as an invitation.
I pulled out the files. Maier’s first: not much in there, the F 16 and F 22 index cards that I’d already seen copies of, and a few sheets of paper listing his career at the Stasi, starting in 1964, informing on his fellow recruits in a Border Troops regiment. It looked like he stayed in touch with the Stasi once he’d finished his military service, reporting on colleagues all the way through his work life: starting in a factory, candidature of the Party, full Party membership, conferences. All the people he’d reported on were of course hidden behind codenames, but there were a fair few of them. It was neither particularly interesting, nor particularly unusual. There were tens of thousands of these ordinary IMs, everyday informants for the Stasi, watching everyday people do everyday things. There were no citations or medals mentioned, no particular rewards or criticisms, all very middle of the road.
We were pulling in to Alexanderplatz station now, and I got off with everyone else and changed on to the underground line to Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse. I flicked through Fremdiswalde’s file while the train squealed around the tight curves, making flashes of light scratch across the inside of my still tender skull. Again, nothing interesting—he was known under the codename WERTHER and was listed as an offender, not an IM, and the details matched those the police had given me.
I put all the papers back in the envelope, and put that in my bag, next to the report I’d written for the Minister. Maybe the answer to Maier’s death wasn’t in the past. Perhaps it was a straightforward murder, a criminal action, rather than a political one. If that were the case then there was no job for me or the rest of RS here—only for the police.
11:34
I got off at the final stop, and walked up the Mauerstrasse to the Ministry, right at the far end. A sand-beige coloured Wartburg Kombi was parked opposite with a couple of goons sat in it. They looked bored, as if they’d been waiting a while—probably chauffeuring some Bonze around, poor sods. I ignored their stares and went into the Ministry and up to the first floor. This time I wasn’t kept waiting, but ushered straight in to see the Minister.
“Ah! Martin!” The Minister rose, shaking my hand, and gesturing over to the armchairs grouped around a coffee table.
I made my way over to the informal seating cluster while the Minister pressed a button on his desk and ordered coffee to be brought. He joined me, slowly lowering himself into the chair with a sigh.
“Martin, I wanted to apologise for my behaviour last Wednesday. You wouldn’t believe how busy it is round here at the moment—ah! The coffee! Yes, just put it down there please—right, where were we? Yes, I’ve got the Round Table breathing down my neck about the Maier death, demanding I come to their meetings at all hours of the day and night, asking awkward questions, making demands. As if I haven’t got enough on my plate! I told them: ‘As Minister of the Interior I am responsible for security matters, and my forces are investigating the case.’ But why, they ask me, are RS involved?” He paused, and looked at me meaningfully.
“But why are we involved?” I asked straight back.
Stealing the Future Page 11