“Well, the duty officer that night must have got confused. Made assumptions. And he decided it might be a matter for RS. Presumably you were on call that night? So you got sent down. Unfortunate mistake. But you have that report I asked for, thank you. And the files from Ruschestrasse?”
I handed over the grey envelope and the file with my report in. He put my report on the table then absent-mindedly flicked the open flap of the envelope while I sipped my coffee. Too hot, I blew gently on it, trying to cool it down.
“Strictly speaking, that’s the end of your involvement now, but since you’ve been dragged into this sad business already, I thought you might want to take part in a little jaunt tomorrow. As an observer, if you will. We’re going to tie it all up in the morning.” He leaned forward conspiratorially, then, in a loud whisper: “We’ve identified the murderer, here in Berlin. A lovers’ tiff, apparently.”
The Minister leaned back again, and gave another sigh. Satisfied.
“Tomorrow morning at 0600 hours you’re to report to Volkspolizeidirektion 52—that’s Marchlewskistrasse police station to you and me. Ask for Hauptmann Weber. You’ll be there at the arrest, you’ll be my eyes and ears. Make sure there are no loose ends, we want it all done and dusted. No mistakes,” again he gave me that odd look.
I was surprised: the murderer must have been identified in the last few minutes—Schadowski hadn’t told me that they were so close to having a firm suspect when I spoke to him just an hour ago.
“Officially you’ll be there in your accountability status, make sure things are done according to the book, considering how sensitive the situation is with the WSB right now.
“Right,” he continued brusquely, before I had a chance to ask any questions. “The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is the national debate on the inner-German border.” He stared up at the corner of the ceiling, elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers. “The Central Round Table and the Volkskammer are scheduling the national debate, getting all the materials together for people to think about and discuss, the usual. The Ministry for Foreign Trade is dealing with customs and trade, the Ministry for Family and Social Affairs is dealing with the social questions, and we need to come up with a summary of the security aspects of the border and the Berlin Wall. I’d like you to take that on, come up with a structure for the report, and a quick overview of positive and negative impacts. Make a start on collecting data and statistics, see which way the evidence is pointing. You can liaise directly with the Round Table Committee for Internal Affairs, but keep me posted.
“And finally…” the Minister got up and moved over to his desk, rifling through some papers in a tray. He grunted, and came back, holding a form out to me. “Here you are, this is for you.”
I took the paper, turning it round so that I could read it. It was a confirmation of my promotion to the rank of captain, signed this morning by the Minister.
“Hauptmann Grobe!” The Minister said, with an oily voice. Until that moment I’d never been sure what was meant by ‘oily voice’—but this was definitely oily. A tone of voice that called hair pomade to mind: slick, greasy, and shiny.
“We decided that your new roles necessitated a higher rank. Take the paperwork along to the secretariat and they’ll issue you with a new pass, and a chit for the extra pips for your dress uniform.”
The promotion to captain didn’t really mean anything to me personally, except for the increase in pay and pension entitlements. In fact it was rather embarrassing. I’d never worn my dress uniform, and I had no intention of changing that particular habit. Apart from that, my promotion meant that I now held the senior rank in the office—until now we had all been at the same level, and that had suited our way of working. But there were other messages here, too many to keep track of. I wasn’t keeping up—I needed to find a quiet corner and have a think, but the Minister kept on talking.
“Why don’t you organise a little party? Celebrate with your colleagues, I’m sure we’ll be able to pick up the tab.”
The Minister had stayed on his feet, and he held out his hand for me to take. I got up, swapped my promotion confirmation to my left hand, and proffered the right one.
“And remember, the rank of captain is a very real privilege—and privileges bring responsibilities,” the Minister peered at me over his wire glasses, in a way that he probably thought was significant. “Let me know when it happens, your party, and I’ll do my best to come along,” he said, as he steered me to the door. “Congratulations, again!”
I was standing back in the corridor, and the Minister had disappeared behind his closed door.
12:57
Straight back to the office to try and clear some of the backlog that had been piling up since last Thursday, not to mention this new task that the Minister had given me. Strictly speaking, I ought to wait before starting work on it—we’d sort out who was doing it at tomorrow’s morning meeting. Nevertheless I started looking through the paperwork I’d been given—I liked this kind of thing, it felt worthwhile. A series of structured debates were to be organised throughout the country, information materials provided—available at town halls and community centres, summaries printed in newspapers—all to encourage people to think about the various aspects of the question, ‘what should we do about the Wall?’ The results from neighbourhood meetings would be fed up through the Round Table system, and using that, the Volkskammer would work out one or more questions for the referendum, to be held sometime in spring. It was a lot of work, and it was essential that the information materials were clearly written, and above all, fair to all sides of the argument. I didn’t object to the task being given to us, quite the contrary, but it really didn’t fall within our remit. However, since we didn’t have a particularly clear remit we often got saddled with the tasks nobody else in the Ministry wanted.
I went out to the front office and added a note to the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, then came back into my room, pulling the file on housing speculation out of the pile of papers breeding on my desk. Opening it up and flicking through the pages I found I couldn’t concentrate. My mind kept returning to the Minister—his behaviour really niggled. I sat back with a sigh, and tried to put my finger on what was bothering me. First of all, Wednesday, he seemed pissed off that I’d been to see Maier’s body in West Silesia, and he clearly wasn’t comfortable with me working the case: “No need to prioritise it,” he’d said. Not exactly warning me off, but nervous, trying to divert me with lots of extra duties—the liaison with the Russians and the British, which he’d somehow hastily organised, making sure my time was taken up for most of Thursday and Friday. Now more work, this report on the Wall—thinking about it again, it struck me that the Minister had said “I want you to take it on,” using the singular du, not the plural ihr. He hadn’t asked me to bring it back to RS2 for us to decide who should work on it, he wanted me to get tied up with the research and report. But what about the arrest tomorrow, and the promotion? I guess the promotion was meant as a carrot, behave myself and I’ll do all right. By ordering me to be present at the arrest, he could show me that everything was being taken care of. In his words: all done and dusted.
The person that was to be arrested tomorrow morning is here in Berlin, according to the Minister. I had no idea who it was, the Minister hadn’t seen fit to let me in on that particular secret. That brought another train of thought to mind—the West Silesian crisis had been brewing for months now, and had serious implications for the Republic. Yet, as far as I knew, no-one from any of the RS units had been involved in keeping an eye on things, despite the fact that this falls exactly within our remit. Here we were, scuttling around, checking out minor criminal cases, such as unscrupulous Westerners trying to cash in on our naïvety, when the elephant in the room is that the West Silesian League were about to bankrupt the whole country.
I considered what had been happening in West Silesia, the unexpected rise of the West Silesian League, coming from nowhere, somehow well resourced, able to produce
good quality leaflets and posters and get them widely distributed. The apparent ease with which they succeeded in gaining autonomy from Saxony, setting up their own Land in a very short space of time. Then suddenly there was talk of secession from the GDR itself, joining the Westgermans under article 23 of their constitution. An agreement had been signed with Westgermany to allow the transit of goods between Westgermany and West Silesia, without any inspection by our customs officers. And we were hearing rumours of military hardware and even military forces being brought from Westgermany into Silesia. Now there was Maier’s death, and the Minister was unhappy about me having any involvement in the investigation.
Back to the Minister, no matter what I was thinking about, my mind always returned to Benno Hartmann. If I was right, that he was gently warning me off the Maier case—then why? And even if I was wrong, why hadn’t he assigned either us or our colleagues to look at the West Silesian crisis? Even if he hadn’t done so before, now would be the time—Maier’s death was sensitive.
The only conclusion I could come up with was that the Minister knew it was being taken care of by someone else. But who? We didn’t have any other central organ responsible for security—the Criminal Police departments were all focussing on local and regional criminality, and the Stasi had been disbanded over three and a half years ago. Was there a new, secret security operation that I hadn’t heard about? That hardly seemed plausible.
My thoughts were interrupted by the shrill demands of the phone.
“Grobe,” I said into the receiver.
No response. They didn’t hang up, there was just no-one saying anything. I could hear the faint rumble of traffic in the background, but no voice, not even breathing.
“Hello, hello! Can you hear me?”
Now they hung up. Just a soft click, then the dialling tone. If it was important then they’d phone back. A mental shrug, and I got up to make some coffee. Enough thinking, time to get down to some work.
19:45
It’s a wonderful thing about being in love that you seem to glow. It’s not like I’d fallen in love with Annette or anything, certainly not yet. But I had a second date with her, and so far I was enjoying her company. It felt good. She’d made a very positive impression on me, and I hoped I had done so on her too. In fact, I hadn’t felt this positive about a relationship since Katrin’s mother. I suppose Evelyn had always been there, a vague and unconfirmed possibility floating on the horizon, static charge deflecting the light around the idea of her. But she’d been gone for a long time too.
When I met Annette at Friedrichstrasse station, and we walked along the Spree, arm in arm, we had that lovers’ glow around us. I could tell because people smiled at us as we went past. This is Berlin, people never smile. But there they were, basking in our luminescence. We weren’t the only ones glowing—on the other side of the road a couple were stood in a doorway, locked in a kiss; on our side of the road a man stopped in front of us, his arms widespread, forming a roadblock. I was puzzled by this for a moment, until a woman sped past us, riding her bike on the pavement, head down, legs pumping, pretending to show determination to mow down the obstruction. With a squeal of brakes she stopped, and man, woman and bike collapsed into a heap of giggles. An older woman went past, holding a toddler by the hand. The kid was shooting pigeons with his forefinger, cocking back his thumb before each blast.
“Leave them alone Mario, the pigeons are our comrades too!”
Annette and I grinned at each other.
“That’s what I like about this place—even the birds are your equals!” She joked.
“The state and every citizen has the duty to protect the natural environment as the foundation of life for present and future generations.”
Annette just looked at me as if I’d gone mad.
“It’s in our constitution. Saving the pigeons is the constitutional duty of all citizens of the GDR. Visitors too,” I joked.
“Ah, a lawyer as well, I see! And I suppose you know which paragraph and section it is?”
I did, but I also didn’t want to appear too geeky, so I just gave her a hug, which somehow turned into a kiss. It was just a brief one, lips touching, then moving away, shocked by the electricity discharged between us. We looked at each other in surprise and delight, still in each others’ arms, until I got embarrassed and moved away slightly. Annette took the hint, and we carried on walking, but this time holding hands. We’d reached the Monbijou bridge, and the setting sun was glinting off the Bode Museum. It was a bright evening, and the autumn leaves on the trees in the park were glowing pink in the dying light.
“Have we got any plans for this evening?” I asked.
I had some ideas of my own, but I thought that Annette would have too, so it felt like a good idea to check in with her. She smiled, the toothy grin that made me laugh.
“Yes, you’ll love this, Martin, a bit of cutting edge multimedia entertainment.”
“What’s multimedia?” I asked. I must have looked sceptical because she laughed at me, grabbing my hand and running through the park.
“Come on, we can get the tram from here—where’s the stop?”
We got to the tram stop, and she looked around, unsure which side of the road to stand on.
“Where are we going?”
“Prenzlauer Allee.”
The number 71 rolled in, headed for Heinersdorf, and we jumped on. I stamped tickets for both of us and we sat down as the orange Tatra shuddered and keened over the points into the Rosenthaler Strasse. We were sat near the back, and we could see people getting on and off. In silly voices Annette made up conversations for the other passengers we could see, trying to make her words match the movement of their lips. She wasn’t saying anything particularly funny, but the childishness of it, and the excitement from our brief kiss gave us an enjoyable levity. I felt like I was sitting in a bubble of light, even though outside the tram windows the town was turning dark, the street lights were winking on and the tram itself was ill lit by underpowered and dirty bulbs.
As the Immanuel Church loomed out of the dusk Annette jumped up.
“This is our stop, here we go!”
We jumped down from the tram, and went into one of the side streets.
“How was your day?” she asked, “I’m sorry, I should have asked hours ago, but I was so pleased to see you that I forgot my manners!”
“Crazy. Really weird. And stressful.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Annette sounded concerned, but had slowed down, and was peering at each house in turn, trying to find the numbers in the dusk.
“Something rotten in the State of West Silesia,” I murmured.
Annette had found what she was looking for, and I’m not sure she heard me. She was heaving open the heavy door, before ushering me into the hallway and up the stairs. It was a normal house, grey-brown rendering, grey-brown lino on the stairs, and the ubiquitous smell of floor polish, brown coal and cabbage. We stopped on the second floor, a note pinned to the frame of the door: Event in the cellar! Back down the stairs we went, looking for the steps down to the cellar: a stunted door, cowering beneath the staircase. It was wedged open, and we could hear distorted music coming from below.
We made our way down the steps, feeling our way with our heels in the darkness. The steps felt gritty underfoot, as did the floor of the cellar when we got there. Heads bent to avoid the pipes crossing the low ceiling we stumbled through the grey darkness—there wasn’t much light here, the flicker of a film projector showing us the way. We sat at the back of a small crowd, on cushions on the floor. Before us Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was playing against the side of the cellar, and in front of that a young man, wearing dark clothes and sunglasses sat on a beer crate, hunched over a guitar. His long dark hair obscured his face and fingers as he plucked the strings, his feet were stretched out, and before them an array of pedals. As I watched, his right foot darted out, and tapped a pedal, then again just a few seconds later. The reverberating guitar chord wa
s joined by another one an octave lower, and both stretched on while Lang’s fantasy world was built up on the wall behind.
The chords continued reverberating, joined by another one whenever the foot tapped a pedal. Without warning, a scratchy voice, a Saxon accent, began talking slowly. The measured, reverent tones suggested poetry, and it took me a couple of lines before I recognised it through his mangled vowels: Dante’s Inferno. I shared a quick look with Annette, who was biting her fingers in an effort not to giggle, and we returned our full concentration to the performer.
I couldn’t tell you how long it went on for—Dante’s words had a lulling effect, and the music wasn’t actually that bad, drawing me in, taking my mind off the events of the day.
“The contrast of the decayed context with the superior cultural experience provides a dramatic frame of reference suited to…” began Annette as soon as we’d escaped. One of her silly voices, Saxon this time, same as the performer.
We laughed, and I pointed out that the interchangeability of both nouns and adjectives made her assessment as meaningful as a speech by the Party leadership on May day.
“A bit experimental for my taste, but, I don’t know, there was a sense of preparation, practice and ability that won my respect,” was my contribution, said in a low voice, for I knew I was talking bollocks, and there were still quite a few people about. It embarrassed me to think that these strangers might overhear.
This made Annette laugh again, and she told me that it was I who was taking it all too seriously.
“What was that place anyway?” I wanted to know.
“Oh one of those squats. An Ossi one, which is why the culture was so good!”
“Do you know many squatters?”
“Yeah, used to live in a squat myself, in Kreuzberg. Ancient history, but I still know a few people in the scene. I know some of the squatters who came over in ’90, down in Friedrichshain, and through them I’ve met a few of the squatters up here in Prenzlauer Berg too.”
Stealing the Future Page 12