“Martin, I was talking to a friend about dinner—as if it has anything to do with you!”
How sure was I that I’d heard her right? And even if I had, she could have been talking about anyone—it didn’t have to be me. I stood there looking at Bärbel, she’d just shrugged and turned her back on me, shifting files around her desk. The more I thought about it, the more uncertain I became. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was misjudging everything at the moment, I should probably just leave it, after all, maybe I was just being paranoid.
I went into my office and phoned the director at the power plant. “Do you know who was negotiating the power-line deal with the Westgermans?” I asked him.
“Oh, didn’t I mention it? Until last week that would have been Hans Maier, you know, the guy who was found dead in the mine.”
14:12
Here I was again, for the second day running: Rummelsburg prison. I checked in at the guardhouse by the gate, and was asked to wait. After a few minutes a prison officer marched up to me.
“I’m to take the Comrade Captain to the director’s office,” he reported to me, as if he were talking about someone who wasn’t present.
Before I had a chance to reply, he did a smart about turn, and headed back the way he’d come. I followed him across to the red brick administration block, up some steps into the hall, then up more steps to the first floor. He knocked on the door of the office, and we entered.
“I regret to inform you, Comrade Captain, that Accused 264721 was found dead in his cell an hour ago,” said the director without looking up. He was a tall man, wearing civilian clothes and a narrow, clipped moustache. He didn’t bother rising from his chair to greet me, merely extended a hand over the paperwork he was still perusing.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey,” he added distractedly.
“How was he killed?”
“Not killed, Comrade Captain. Suicide. Now if you’ll excuse me–”
“I want to see his body.”
Finally the director looked up at me, a faintly surprised and indignant look.
“Very well, if you wish.” He gestured at the guard to take me away, and we left without another word.
The guard and I headed back into the main body of the prison, through a gate in the fence that ran across the centre of the site, then past the huge three storey cell blocks and some modern concrete buildings, under a mesh of steam and heating pipes. Finally we came to a more human sized red-brick house, with a low concrete wing added to the right of it. A plaque by the entrance marked it as Haus 8, Prison Hospital Wing. The basement served as a basic morgue, Fremdiswalde lying on a steel table. His left knee was still noticeably swollen under his trouser leg, and some fresh bruising could be seen around his right eye and cheek. He was wearing only the standard issue blue nylon jogging trousers and socks, and two long, parallel welts could be seen running diagonally across his left breast.
“How did this happen?” I asked the nervous orderly, although the answer was obvious to anyone looking at the body. Tongue protruding from blue lips, red marks around the neck, eyes bulging and bloodshot.
“He was found just over an hour ago, when they came to take his breakfast tray away. He’d hung himself from the bars, using his tracksuit top.”
I stared at the orderly until he turned away, taking a form from the desk behind him. It was the custody record. An entry had been made late last night advising that force had been used to subdue Accused 264721. That was it, nothing else.
“Tell the director that I want a report on Fremdiswalde’s death, on my desk by tomorrow morning,” I snapped at the guard, and marched out of the hospital wing, letting him follow me for a change.
I stood at the tram-stop in the rain. Water was leaking through my shoes, but in my anger and agitation at Chris’s death I hardly noticed the dampness. I hadn’t expected this. Chris had been frightened yesterday, but I hadn’t taken him seriously. If I’d listened to him, maybe I could have done something, got him out of there. He’d still be alive.
I turned my back on the biting wind blowing down the Hauptstrasse, hunching my shoulders against the cold and burrowing my hands deeper into my jacket pockets. The fingers of my right hand closed around a thick wad of papers, and I pulled them out. That cop had handed them to me on Tuesday, during the raid. I unrolled the bundle, and looked at the first page. It was Chris Fremdiswalde’s Stasi files. I’d seen them before, there wasn’t anything useful in there. Except, perhaps there were more than the few pages I’d already seen. The first page listed Fremdiswalde as an IM working for the Stasi, not just someone with a criminal record—that too was different from the version of the files I’d seen.
I shuffled through the pages, rain spotting the paper, wind ruffling the edges. What I read didn’t make too much sense to me, wrapped up in Stasi jargon, codenames for groups, handlers and operational processes. But from what I understood, Fremdiswalde had been recruited when he was lifted for stealing at school—they’d signed him up when he was still a kid, under the codename WERTHER. The Stasi seemed to have had him reporting on youth subculture groups until late 1988, when he was given the new codename FELD and used in operations against individual targets, his handler named as IMF MILCHMÄDCHEN. That was Maier.
So Maier had been handling Fremdiswalde. That was a turn up for the books, although on consideration it wasn’t too much of a surprise considering the close contact between the two men. Reading between the lines I could see that Maier was also in charge of several other IMs—the name TRAKTOR came up a lot in that last period, and it seemed odd: from what I’d seen, codenames of IMs were usually proper nouns, mostly first-names, but just like FELD, this TRAKTOR was a thing, not a person’s name. I looked through again, checking the references to TRAKTOR. The first time he was mentioned there was a note added by hand in the margin: DÄ GOTTFRIED. Meaning Decknamenänderung—the codename had been changed from GOTTFRIED. I’d seen the old codename before, I’d noticed it because GOTTFRIED was Bishop Forck’s first name—until recently the protestant bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg. That particular codename had cropped up several times in the file the Stasi had kept on me. Maybe I needed to pull the file on GOTTFRIED/TRAKTOR, see how significant he or she was.
At that point the tram rattled up, and I got on. I folded up Chris’s papers, and wiped away the condensation on the window to see outside. It had stopped raining, and the grey cloud was lifting. My eyes drifted down from the sky to the road running either side of the tram tracks. To our right I noticed a Trabant spluttering along next to us. I was too high up to see who was inside, but I didn’t like the way the car was keeping pace with the tram. It looked like the watchers had picked up my scent again. I thought fast: the next stop was Rummelsburg S‑Bahn station, if I got off there then I’d have two choices—get on a train, or just go through the station to the other side. The tram stopped and I climbed down the steps, crossing the road behind the little grey car, passing between the row of workshops and huts that lined the entrance to the station. I didn’t look back, but I could hear the tram move off. The cyclical whining of the Trabant’s engine remained at a constant pitch, telling me that the car was still stationary, watching my movements. In the station I turned round the corner, ignoring the steps that lead up to the platform, continuing instead through the tunnel towards the Nöldnerstrasse exit on the far side. A moment’s hesitation as a train rumbled in overhead, and then I ran out on to the street and turned right. I’d intended to hide round the back of the church further up the road, but as soon as I made it out of the station I could see that it was too far away. A scrubby patch of grass and several mature trees were right next to the station, I quickly slid behind the damp trunk of a chestnut.
A moment later I hear footsteps and panting. Peeking round the bole of my tree I could see a small, bald man run out of the station. He leant forward, hands supported on his thighs, taking a few deep breaths before going to the phone box. He spoke for a few moments, in which time the
Trabant whined up, having taken the long way round by the road. It splashed up next to the phone box, and the small man got in, the car starting up and going past me as I edged around the broad tree to stay out of sight.
The Trabant would be cruising around, looking for me, so I thought it might be better to avoid going directly to my flat. I got the bus to Lichtenberg station, before changing on to the underground for one stop, as far as Magdalenenstrasse. I walked into the old Stasi complex and entered the main building. I asked the porter for the GOTTFRIED, TRAKTOR and FELD files, and as he went away I walked into the reading room to wait for him there. After about five minutes he returned.
“I’m sorry, Comrade Captain, the FELD overview has been signed out to the Ministry, and I can’t find any files for TRAKTOR or GOTTFRIED.”
“Are there no library copies in the registry?” I asked, but the porter shook his head.
“If you could tell us which departments and district they were registered in then I could have the F 77 lists checked, but it might take a few weeks.”
“No need.”
I left the Stasi headquarters. FELD’s background files would presumably be the same as the ones I had in my pocket, Chris’s personal copy that had been found during the raid on the Thaeri squat. Far more interesting was the fact that the library copies of the GOTTFRIED/TRAKTOR overview files were missing. The library copies of files should never leave the archives—that way they couldn’t be misplaced or lost, and there would always be a copy of a file available. Had they been shredded in the last days of the Stasi, or removed more recently?
Maybe if I looked at the references to GOTTFRIED in my own Stasi files I could work out who it was? Copies of my Stasi files were at home, so that should be my next stop.
15:19
I walked straight back towards my flat, keeping half an eye open for anyone following me. The only vehicles I saw were on the Frankfurter Allee, and there were very few people on the streets. A couple of babushkas carrying shopping bags, a few kids on the way home from school, if I was still being followed then they were too good for me to spot.
I was halfway home when I heard the door to a tenement block open just as I went past. I glanced into the hallway, and there stood Laura, ushering me in. A quick look up and down the street: empty. I went in, the heavy door swinging shut behind me.
“Martin, they’re waiting for you—some plainclothes cops came to the office asking for you, they went away and now they’re sitting in a car outside the offices. They said you sexually assaulted a girl. During the raid on the squat,” Laura glared at me, accusing me, waiting for an answer.
“What-” I started, but was cut off by her.
“Well? Did you?”
“Shit! Shit-shit-shit!” I hit the wall with the palm of my hand. Laura took a step back, but her face stayed hard. Things were moving much faster than I’d expected. “Laura—now this is important. When they came to the office, where was everyone, how did they react?”
“Martin, what does that matter? We want you to come to a meeting, tell us what happened. And we want to know the name of the young woman so that we can talk to her too-”
“For fuck’s sake!” I was almost shouting, “this is a fucking set-up! Do you really think I’d assault someone? Do you? Come on, it’s classic Stasi tactics! Did those cops show any ID? Or did you just take their word for it?”
“You know what? I’m not interested in your excuses, come with me and we’ll talk it through—you need to tell us what happened during the raid.”
I could just shove Laura out of the way, keep moving, keep following the lead I’d found. But instead I tried to swallow my anger—I needed my colleagues, and I needed Laura to believe that I hadn’t done anything wrong—it mattered to me what my colleagues thought of me. Another deep breath, pushing down my sense of urgency. I tried to get through to Laura again.
“Look, Laura: Chris—Fremdiswalde—he’s dead. They killed him,” I looked into Laura’s shocked face and pushed on. “And as for that assault story, it’s classic Stasi attrition tactics. Text book. You know how it works! I’m being followed, they’ve been in my flat trying to mess with my head, all those phone calls—and now this. They’re trying to make me doubt my own sanity! They’re turning you against me, isolating me. We’ve seen all of this too many times!” I was getting agitated again, yet another deep breath, trying to calm down. “Those men that came—they’re involved in the Maier case, they’re probably not even cops. What did they look like, remember the old days when they used to follow us? They looked like that didn’t they? They had that look, didn’t they? Laura?”
Laura nodded hesitantly, her arms crossed in front of her. She took another step back, and her eyes flicked upwards, away from my face. She wasn’t happy. I’d taken control of the conversation, was putting her under pressure. And she was shocked at the news of Chris’s death.
“So, come with me, we’re going to meet somewhere away from the office, then you can explain it all, and we’ll work out what to do. Together.” She wasn’t really taking in the information I’d given her, she was still trying to steer me back to the accusation of assault.
“Laura, I can’t. They’re on the lookout for me, and they probably followed you here. There’s not much time, wehaven’t got much time. They know I’m on to them, they’ll be cleaning up, covering their traces. I think that’s why they killed Chris. Laura, I need your help: I can’t do this by myself. Tell me, what was everyone doing when those men came to the office?”
Laura bit her lip, thinking, wondering whether to give me the benefit of the doubt. I could see the thoughts as they went through her mind—the serious accusation competing with the picture she had of me, the trust she had in me. I could imagine her thinking about the Stasi, not wanting to admit that there may still be people doing this kind of thing.
“And this, whatever it is you’re doing right now, it’s really urgent?” she asked.
I nodded.
“And when you’ve sorted this out then you’ll answer our questions about the accusation?”
I swallowed the indignation that was welling up—how they could still play us off against one another! I nodded, agreeing to what she wanted.
“I was in the front office doing some photocopying—they talked to me first–”
“So where was Bärbel? Why didn’t they talk to her first?”
“Well, the photocopier is right by the front door, no, that’s it: Bärbel went to the toilet just as they came in.”
“What—did she get up when she saw them coming?”
“Really, Martin! Does it matt–”
“Yes! Come on, tell me!”
Laura hesitated, her eyes closed, concentrating.
“A moment after, yes. The door to the stairwell was open, she must have seen them coming up the stairs.”
“And the others?”
“They came out of their offices just as the cops went. I think they heard our voices, realised something was up.”
“How did they react?”
“Shocked, I think. Well, Erika sat down and Klaus looked grim.”
“And Bärbel, when she came back from the toilet?”
“I didn’t say anything to her, but she must have overheard what I said to the others. She just sat down at her desk and carried on typing.”
I paced up and down the tenement hallway, trying to process the information, fitting it in, slotting it this way and that like a jigsaw piece.
“Laura, get back to the office—have you got your personal Stasi files there? Really it’s mine I need, but they’re at home. So get your–”
“No they’re not—you photocopied them at the office, then left them in the copier. I put them on your desk and watched how over time you piled more and more paperwork on top of them.”
“You are a star! Great—get them for me. Get your own too, ask Erika and Klaus for theirs. Look through for someone called either GOTTFRIED or TRAKTOR. They’re both the same person, and we ne
ed to work out who it is. Then meet me on the Grosser Bunkerberg in the Friedrichshain park, at half past six. Bring the other two, but not Bärbel—don’t tell her anything. Make sure to watch out for any tails. And call my daughter—tell her to get in touch with Annette. I need to meet Annette on the spooky bridge at eight. Katrin will know what I mean. But make sure to tell her it’s important—that I need her help.”
She nodded: “And where are you going now?”
“I’m going to the police headquarters,” I told her.
16:30
The police Präsidium in Eastberlin is on the Keibelstrasse near Alexanderplatz, and going there was a bit of a gamble. I couldn’t be sure that the men who had come for me weren’t actually cops, but even if they were I suspected they wouldn’t have put out an alert for me just yet. And who would expect me to head straight into the lion’s den? Nevertheless I felt nervous as I crossed the Alexanderplatz after leaving the U-Bahn station. There were always police officers here, hanging around, keeping an eye on the tourists and the punks. They didn’t take any notice of me as I went to the payphone at the edge of the square. It was a Glasnost phone—no booth, just a payphone with a rain hood over it, anybody could overhear my conversation if they wanted to. But that was fine by me—I wasn’t planning on saying anything. I put a couple of 20 Pfennig coins in, watching as two red lights lit up on the payphone, then dialled the number for the KGB headquarters in Karlshorst.
“Da,” came the voice at the other end.
I didn’t answer, just kept an eye on my watch. 10 seconds, then hang up. Redial, hang up after 30 seconds. I’d done the same from a payphone near Ostkreuz before I got the S‑Bahn up to Alex. I’d laughed at Dmitri when he told me the procedure, just the other day; but he now knew that I needed to see him urgently. A crash meeting.
No problems getting into the police headquarters, show my pass at the gatehouse, cross the yard and into the equipment house. Down the steps to the basement and show my requisition papers to the cop in charge of handing out uniforms.
Stealing the Future Page 19