His whole body alert, his eyes raced over the footprints into what had been a tidy room. Through the door, drawers upturned on the floor and papers everywhere. Kresse hadn’t had to go far: Uwe stored the newest and less important documents in the filing cabinet beneath his desk.
Kresse sat on the bed, scowling into the telephone. A file in his hand. He wouldn’t have had time to read it, just a postcard or two. “At the zoo. The giraffe compound,” in his whining, bitter, disgusting voice. Then: “I have reddish hair, but anyway I’ll recognise you.”
Uwe retreated. The sound of the receiver being replaced and more drawers opening and Kresse humming “How will you ever forgive me?”
“Herr Uwe!”
His neighbour stood behind him, a burly ex-fruiterer with pink cheeks and teddy-bear eyes. “I heard a hideous noise. I thought maybe I should come in, but it sounds like a friend.”
In the bedroom the humming had stopped.
Next to the door was a shelf. He found his service revolver behind a row of books. “I think I know who it is, Herr Hölderlin. I’ll deal with it,” and swiftly reached up and retrieved the silencer from the boar’s throat.
The footprints petered out in a pair of black ankle boots white with salt. Kresse stood against the far wall, his gun levelled at Uwe’s chest. “Where’s this to, boss?” and jerked his thumb at the door behind him, anonymous and reinforced with steel.
“I’ve been thinking, Kresse. We’ll cut a deal.”
“I’m not that stupid, boss.” He watched Uwe closely with his poisonous eyes. “Unlock it.”
“Fifty-fifty – if you do the work.”
“Unlock it, boss.”
Their two guns pointed at each other. It seemed incredible they could have been colleagues. Swords and shields in the same battle.
“I’ll need a key,” decided Uwe.
“Then, get it,” twitched the uneven, pantomime moustache. A Groucho Marx nose wouldn’t have looked odd on him, but for the gun.
Still covering Kresse, Uwe dug his left hand into his pocket. “How are we going to do this?” He felt like giggling. “I know,” and without raising his voice: “Herr Hölderlin?”
An intense silence was broken by the sound of feet dragging themselves into the room. “Herr Uwe?”
Uwe sensed his neighbour’s eyes rolling between them, back and forth, like balls of brown wool trailing fear between two paws.
Kresse’s gaze fell on the whisperer, who contracted away, and flicked back to Uwe, jetting venom. “Who the fuck are you?”
Uwe, his gun trained on Kresse’s chest, held out the key. “Could you kindly open that door, Herr Hölderlin?”
The key was plucked from his hand. He was conscious of the burly figure going round the back of him and edging to the door and the grating of metal on metal. And so he waited, one arm out, watching the other man, the barrel of each gun mimicking their stare like the dark unclosing eyeball of a fish.
“It’s open,” came the tremulous voice and the teddy-bear face swivelled as if it had never seen two men pointing guns at each other in a basement room with socks and papers and muddy footprints all around.
Suddenly, Uwe threw his revolver onto the bed. “I mean it, Kresse. Fifty-fifty, as long as you do the work.”
Kresse grinned vindictively. “Get in there. You too, whatever your name is.” And went on grinning at the wall, the stone racks, the files stacked there. “Where is it?” looking about.
“What?”
“One of these is mine.”
Uwe went over and took a file out. He went further along the wall and took out another. But Kresse still stood there, making his calculations. “All these files, boss . . .” his voice tinkling, his gaze no longer insulting.
Then in a move so unhurried and effortless that Kresse didn’t comprehend until too late, Uwe put his hand to the wall and like someone tugging the night behind him he pulled across a shuttered metal door and locked it.
They could hardly hear the banging and crashing in the hallway. “I don’t think it will last long,” handing Hölderlin the revolver. “But perhaps you might wait until I get back.”
“It will be my pleasure to do this, Herr Uwe. As always.”
Alone in the precious cellar, Kresse could scream until he was blue in the face.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“MY COLLEAGUE – WHAT HE was planning, it was insufferable.” Uwe turned his tired eyes to the giraffes. The female took the calf’s tail between her lips and licked it and rested her head on its rump and butted gently with her horns. “It went over the limit. Really, it went over the limit.”
Peter waited for him to say more, not drawing breath. But he seemed far away, on the scorched savannah, the sun fizzing through the thorn trees.
“Not too near the rail!” A mother calling to her child brought Uwe prowling back.
“Look,” removing the magazine from his coat pocket and unrolling it. Tucked between advertisements for harness straps and depth sounders, a postcard. “This was in your file.”
A giraffe photographed in Hamburg zoo. And Peter, as soon as he saw it, understood the reason. He turned the postcard over. Postmarked April 7, 1983. Addressed to “Snjólaug” at the department of psychiatry, KarlMarx University.
Peter stared at the two crimson stamps, his handwriting legible but changed beyond recognition. “Dearest Snowleg, How will you ever forgive me? I must see you again. I love you, Peter. PS This reminds me of you.”
“How come you have this?”
“I was one of her case officers.”
In the year his wife absconded to the West, Morneweg had recruited Uwe. Where once he worked for the “prevention, disclosure and combating of underground political activity”, today Uwe sold bread-machines. In 1982, Morneweg empowered him to set up a unit whose task was to gather smell-samples of those critical of the regime. Over the following months he was sensible of a deepening in the old man’s regard for his work. He was promoted and, because of his excellent English, Morneweg used him on occasion to check the accuracy of certain transcripts. In March 1983, Morneweg asked Uwe to sit in on his interrogation of a young woman suspected of plotting an escape to the West with an Englishman.
“I can keep this?”
“Of course. It’s yours.”
Peter tucked it into his pocket. Who was this man? Was he going to lead him up the garden path? Uwe had given him a postcard, but was he now going to say, “I don’t want money myself – however, for another five thousand Marks I can introduce you to someone who may have seen her four years ago”?
“Tell me – what did you do to her? What did you actually do? Did you hurt her?”
“Did I hurt her?” The question took Uwe by surprise. “No, I didn’t hurt her.”
Peter saw the surprise and having expected to be shaken down he felt a wave of relief. A memory of Malory on the shelf next to L.A. Woman and a fox-cheeked girl stirred in his memory. “Listen, you’re very kind to have come here, to bring the file . . .” A wooden stall, water boiling in a mug, and beyond the tangerine curtain the names being called – “Leadley, Liptrot, Hithersay, Tweed . . .” He wanted to go as far as he could. “You see,” expelling the words in the way he used to say Sum, “I did something really terrible and it’s been haunting me.”
“Yes, I know,” said Uwe. “We heard everything.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s stop playing word games,” raising his red-rimmed eyes and looking Peter full in the face. “We’ve all been fucked around long enough. If we’re going to talk, let’s talk.”
Peter was really frightened now. Clearly, something much worse had happened. He lowered his leg from the rail and pulled himself to his full height, feeling a hideous stab in his spine. “I really need to know who you are and why you’re here and what you’ve got – and then we can talk. I’ve had a pretty long day.”
“Have you? I’ve had a pretty long day myself.”
The keeper s
tarted feeding: from the rail they could see him throwing branches from a barrow. Peter watched the giraffes eating with a sliding chew.
“I take it,” came the voice, measured again, “that you did not go on to great things on the boards?”
“No, I’m a doctor. Actually, I’m a German doctor,” and was conscious of Uwe looking at him with a little more interest. “I always hated the theatre.”
“Me too.” With strained jollity, Uwe said: “I didn’t see your show, Herr Doktor, but I sent a couple of people along – including my colleague Kresse, who had been trying to stop it. Kresse maintained you were four prats from Hamburg who were going to put on a ludicrous theatrical performance. But Morneweg – that was our boss – overruled him. ‘They may be something later in life.’
“Well, Kresse reported back that in the whole history of stage management he had never seen anything so incompetent. He referred to you in the department as the Pantyhose Four. The music was disgraceful, too. And I tell you, Herr Doktor, he didn’t like you any more when you ripped out our camera in the Schreber garden. You see, because of her brother the hut was already bugged. You remember – just outside on the lawn – der Gnom?”
His mind switched away. It was blasted clear of some things – loyalty, pride, patriotism – but others poured back to fill the mother-sized hole. He thought of Morneweg whom he had served with filial obedience, almost until the end. He thought of Kresse, hurtling his ginger head against the walls of his basement cage. “I don’t want your money,” he said. “But I thought if there’s something I can do to stop Kresse finding her, if not for your sake then for hers . . .”
He tapped the padded envelope. “I’m sorry I was late – I was having a quick look at these files. Before you see them, it’s important you understand the context.”
There was no reason Peter should have remembered this, but he had arrived in Leipzig in 1983 not long after the West Germans had done something to make the East Germans look foolish. “You never saw such a mess. They had a dead body and they pulled it through the minefield, and what could we do? You’re bound to shoot – and when we got to it, it had no stomach. The episode was humiliating. We wanted our own back.”
This was why Uwe had reacted with alacrity when Renate telephoned from the Astoria. “She asked: Did I know of someone – a young woman – planning to escape that night with a group of actors from Hamburg? I had an idea who she was talking about. I said, ‘Let her in. I’ll get authority for this. Meanwhile, we can set it up. While they’re at dinner, we can organise things.’ We didn’t have long, but I thought we had a chance here of seriously embarrassing someone, in this case the West Germans and the English.
“I was about to speak to Morneweg when Kresse came in. He had been on her trail since that morning – in fact since I went with him to the Schreber garden. I said to him, ‘This is your chance, Kresse. Take your dog down to the station. Get the cameras. Let that wicker basket go to opposite the last carriage. You’re in charge of the detail that will arrest her.’ We might have had a marvellous – not a propaganda victory, but a humiliation victory. But even as we were putting it in motion you threw your spanner in our wheel.
“My first thought – when I heard how you’d behaved in the hotel – was: Could it be a blind? I said to myself: Maybe she’s going to go off miserable and then turn up on the platform. She’s going to walk to the end of the train, kiss you goodbye and vanish. Brief Encounter all over again. And if she had tried to escape, we were primed. I don’t know to this day how serious she was about getting into that basket. Probably she was. Anyway, I had to assume she was, which is why I brought her in. But if she had got into that basket – that would have been the end of her, and her brother too. We’d have rounded the whole lot up, father, grandmother – you as well.
“Instead of which all we get is this girl, who didn’t seem like someone who wanted to turn the state upside down.”
Between the metal cranes and mansard roof floated thinning packs of cumulus clouds. Uwe sniffed. The sun had brought out a whiff of giraffe droppings and urine-soaked hay. It reminded Uwe of the smell of Morneweg’s Wartburg and his first sight of the woman outside the Astoria, the doorman bundling her into the car and Morneweg catching up behind. He remembered how she kept looking round at the entrance. How she was still staring through the back window when the car lurched off, its tyres honing away in the sludge.
“I said to her – this was in the car: ‘If you will implicate this English student in his escape plan we will lift him at the station.’ She didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. I repeated what Renate had overheard. ‘I want to go in your dressing-up box. I will fold myself so small you will hardly recognise me. I can’t spend one more night in this country.’ At this, she laughed. She said we had got it wrong. It was a lover’s joke. But Morneweg was sitting next to her and he was adamant. Because of what happened with his wife, it was his philosophy that everyone was running away. She might be ‘a mother of the underground’. She might be working for Workers of Peace. Or in league with her brother. And if she wasn’t a hostile negative force, a term we used, maybe she was an indigent. Whoever she was, we couldn’t let her get away. Since I was already involved in her case, he wanted me to be there at the interrogation.”
Peter put out a hand to the rail. His knuckles were like stems that had been lopped off. “Who was she? You did find out, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you mind me putting it to you like this? Would you tell me as thoroughly as you can what happened?” He was willing to get down on his knees for any last gritty hurtful detail with which to sandpaper his conscience. “I’m not afraid.”
Uwe touched – for reassurance – the large envelope, tapping his fingers on the printed words “Guggenheim & Berberich – bread-machines” as if to slow down and make more deliberate his thoughts. And decided that he did want to help this man who insisted on hearing everything. It was comforting to talk to someone who would register his words: it would stop him thinking of a hollow hand clawing for a morsel of air. A quick look through the file and the case had come back to him. He hadn’t thought of it in 19 years, but his memory was infectious. Since he had started remembering, he remembered more.
In no time they reach the Runde Ecke. Wordlessly, Uwe guides her across a frozen quadrangle. The snow falling in dark grains. A police car with its bonnet up, a rack of bicycles, dirty icicles hanging from the gutters in jagged free-fall.
He punches his number into a security box, shoves her up some steps and along a corridor to have her fingerprints taken. The policewoman – blue trouser and jacket uniform, short hair dyed red, bat ears – squirts ink into a mirrored glass. She seizes the girl’s right hand and rocks her little finger in the ink. Then takes her into a bright-lit room with a basin and a pail in the corner. There is hardly any ventilation.
“I watched her on and off through the night – and other nights too. I see your point, Herr Doktor. I remember her sponging herself in the early hours. Lovely to look at – except for that burnmark. But you must see many naked people in your profession . . . For me – as I said – this was no degenerate. This was a classic situation, a girl in despair. We can use this, I thought. We’ll pick her up, we’ll put her back together, we’ll tell her, ‘Darling, they’re not worth anything. They’re not worth horse-piss. Who would join one of these bastards? Join us. Get your own back.’ I’ve seen it happen a lot. They scream their heads off, and after a while they’re turned very simply. Some take two minutes, some two hours. But most give up in the end, there’s only one way to go. Well, with this one it wasn’t quite as easy as we’d hoped. By the next morning I know that she’s not like the others.”
She stands before him in Morneweg’s office. She has slept in the clothes she wore to the theatre, plus she has on a police-issue woollen pullover, olive green and on the back “MFS”. Lipstick and mascara smears on the collar of her shirt.
Uwe sweeps her slowl
y with his eyes and remembers a dark hair on a sheet and immediately files the thought away. “Please,” he says politely, indicating a chair in front of the larger desk.
She walks hesitantly across the grey carpet tiles and sits. Shadow of a lace curtain on the wall. A flag: “Germany – One Fatherland”. On the desk an embossed-leather-framed photograph of a teenage boy standing on a yacht’s deck. Morneweg’s son. There is a folder, two glass jars, a book, a key, two telephones, a tape recorder.
“My colleague will be here very shortly.”
Through a second door, half open, the drift of a male voice conferring with someone. Morneweg comes in, closes the door and goes behind his desk. Loose tan suit. Pink shirt. Thick black-framed glasses. An old man with round child-eyes taking her in.
He starts the tape recorder. “Your name?”
She gives it and he stops the machine, spooling back the tape. A hissing fills the room and over it her voice, composed and clear: “Marla Hedwig Berking.”
He smiles and starts the tape again. “What is your date of birth?”
“February 17, 1960.”
“You are twenty-three.”
The machine is a grey-ribbed Uran with a green light like a spirit-level that snakes back and forth as they speak.
Assuming an expression of great solicitude, Morneweg adjusts the microphone and leans forward.
“To begin with,” Uwe tells Peter, “it’s small talk. When did she finish her studies, what music did she like to listen to, what did she think of the theatre?”
“This incident last night. Tell me in your own words what you think happened.”
“I was invited.”
“You were advised it was a formal dinner.”
“Not by him.” The machine snuffles up her answer.
“By the doorman,” Morneweg reminds her.
“I’d had a drink. But I was invited.”
After a silence, he says: “Would you accept that terrorism has to be countered?”
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