A Few Words for the Dead
Page 8
I looked out of the window at the wide no man’s land between the two walls and marvelled at the absurdity of it all. A line drawn in the sand for the last twenty years, was there no idiocy the human race was incapable of? From here I could see into the half of the city I had just left behind. I imagined Engel over there fretting. I wondered how often Robie had done the same, staring out at the safety he had temporarily abandoned.
I spent an hour searching the apartment but could have probably done it in less. It was as empty of character as a hotel room. There were a few tins and packets of dried food in the kitchen, enough plates, glasses and cups to handle two people, and no more.
In the bedroom I found a battered paperback novel stuffed under the mattress and I found that almost heartbreaking. It was nothing important, a cheap thriller, but the fact that it was in English had made Lucas consider it worth hiding from view. It was a sign of the everyday paranoia he must have had to live through and it put my little Wood Green world into sharp perspective.
I checked all the drawers and any other obvious hiding places I could think of, behind sofa cushions, under rugs. The place was empty, there was nothing helpful here.
Glad to be able to leave, I did so quickly, again deeply aware that a hand might fall on my shoulder at any moment as I descended to the ground floor and back onto the street.
Next was to contact the network, or at least, one member of it. Engel and I had discussed at length who to choose. The decision had balanced reliability against importance. A number of the network held light government positions and these were discounted right away. These were people whose safety relied on keeping their contact with the West minimal, it was hardly fair to roll up on their doorstep asking for a bed for the night. Put simply: I needed the least important member of the network, someone who was as far from GDR scrutiny as possible.
I crossed over the road and looked around for a public call box. At the end of the street a couple of policemen were making their slow way towards me, whiling away their shift in the empty streets. The emptiness of the street had felt comforting earlier; now I felt exposed by it. It was getting late, and I was the only other person in sight. Would they want to check my papers? If so, would they want to know why I was wandering around at such an hour? I adopted a slight lilt, affecting a moderate drunkenness.
The key to playing a drunk is simple enough but most people get it wrong. A sober man playacting, exaggerates the movements, plays up to the false alcohol in his system. Whereas a drunk man spends most of his time pretending to be sober, holding his limbs as straight as possible, walking rigid and heavy, refusing to give in to the booze that rages around his system. A true piece of theatre lies in the middle ground. I looked directly at the policemen, nodding at them in the sort of earnest manner I thought a wandering drunk would affect, hopeful – as indeed I was – of not getting questioned.
‘Go home,’ one of them said, ‘sleep it off.’
I nodded and waved, allowing myself a little stumble with the extra movement but returning immediately to the imaginary tram tracks on the pavement before me, grinding forward with concentration and conviction.
I turned a corner and let the act drop, rubbing at my face nervously and shivering both at the freezing air and the fear that had threatened to take me over.
At the end of the street, the wall stood, shining in the constant glare of the lights that surrounded it. A few feet away was a public telephone. I might have wished for somewhere a little less brightly lit, but the last thing I wanted to do was spend longer out here than necessary. The next time I chanced upon company, they might not be as easily fobbed off.
I stepped under the hood of the call box, pulled out some change and called the number created by combining the charges of the first couple of items on the false receipt in my pocket. Unsurprisingly, the phone rang for a while. I imagined the woman on the other end, slowly rising up from sleep, no doubt panicked by the sound of a phone in the night. Perhaps she would stare at it for a while, wondering what news the person on the other end might bring.
I looked around. The lights of the wall above me had the reverse effect of making the further end of the street seem all the darker. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite dispel the thought of the two policeman I’d seen earlier. I imagined them having turned around, now heading towards me out of the darkness.
The phone answered, the tremulous voice of my contact crackling over the line. ‘Who is this? Do you know what time this is?’
‘I’m afraid I do. I’m a friend of your uncle and I need somewhere to stay. He told me you’d be happy to take in a clean guest.’ This was prearranged code, an emergency message explaining that I was in trouble and needed protection. Unsurprisingly, the message wasn’t well received. This was the sort of thing an officer cleared with his agents on the understanding on all sides that it was unlikely to happen. Now it had, and I imagined she was trying to get her head around it. There was a long pause. I imagine she was debating whether to put the phone down. She would have known that there was no easy way out of the situation. Anyone giving her that message must also know her address.
Finally she said. ‘Come,’ and the phone went dead.
The contact’s name was Alexandra Hoss, and she was an actress. Her work had taken her all over the country. Her reputation and – a point that may have rankled – her looks had made her a regular attendee at many highbrow functions. People tell a beautiful face far too many things they shouldn’t. Her career was, by all accounts, on the slide. Most of her work was now on the stage of the Brecht theatre and her film appearances few and far between. She no longer got the same invites – and indecent proposals – she once had.
She lived in an apartment an affordable distance off the Unter den Linden and I made my way towards it, having memorised the route earlier. Over the River Spree and past the State Opera House, I moved as quickly as I could without drawing too much attention to myself. At one point I made a show of walking up the entrance steps of an apartment block, jangling my keys, as another policeman walked by. He didn’t so much as glance in my direction and, once he was out of sight, I backtracked and continued on my way.
Alexandra’s apartment was part of a block that had probably once been desirable. Now the sheen had faded, the stone blackened and the fixtures grown tatty. She buzzed me in through the main door and I took the steps to the fourth floor rather than use the central cage elevator, as the idea of making so much noise in the quiet building set my nerves off.
‘You should not be here,’ she said as she opened the door to me, turning her back and walking off into the apartment, leaving me to follow on behind.
‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not be.’
The apartment matched the rest of the building, expensive furniture a couple of years beyond the point at which it should have been replaced, framed posters of her movies and theatre appearances gathering dust on top of their thick veneer of nostalgia. The carpet was a light cream colour, turned beige from the smoke of cigarettes.
Hoss herself had taken up a hunched position on a large sofa, her legs pulled up beneath her chin, silk pyjamas glistening in the light of discreet lamps. Dyed-blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail to reveal an unhappy face, worry lines she’d hard earned deepening as she tried to resist chewing at the cuticles on a perfectly manicured hand. She resorted to tapping her teeth with the nail of her index finger, a nervous tic I felt guilty to have caused.
‘Where is Robert?’ she asked. This was Robie’s cover. Robert Frick, a suitably European-sounding name that he worked under on this side of the wall.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘You don’t know?’ Her voice crept towards hysteria. ‘He’s missing?’
I nodded.
‘Then he’s probably been caught!’ She got to her feet, running out of momentum halfway out of the room, convinced she should run but unsure, now she’d set off, as to where.
‘If he has, he certainly wouldn’t reveal you, you’re safe,’ I said. I wished I sounded more convincing.
‘How can you possibly know that?’ she asked.
‘Because I’ve known him for years,’ I told her, ‘and I trust him. He’s also a good friend. That’s why I’m here. To find him. To help him if he needs it.’
She didn’t quite relax but I could tell she wanted to. When presented with two options: panic or calm, most people want to choose calm; they just have to be given enough of a reason to do so. I kept trying to find her one.
‘You know how good Robert is,’ I told her. ‘He’s a professional, and it’s entirely possible that he’s on the trail of something. We know he was following up some leads, he might just have had to keep his head down for a while. We shouldn’t worry yet.’
‘You are obviously worried or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘I’m here because I was sent,’ I told her. ‘Our people like to boss us around. It makes them feel important.’
‘I know people like that,’ she admitted. ‘They make you work just because they can.’
‘Precisely. Robert was looking into something on his own time, our employers don’t like that sort of thing, so they throw me at him. But I know him and I’m just here to see whether I can be of any use. But I can’t go wandering around the streets of East Berlin without somewhere to sleep, can I? Robert told me you were the most reliable of his friends so I came to you.’ Now I was throwing flattery into the mix, shameless.
It worked. She offered a half smile and sat down again, this time on a rigid-looking armchair. I imagined she was the sort of woman who often found reasons to flit between the furniture, like an actor on a theatre set, shifting location with every damn line.
‘I like working with him,’ she said. ‘He’s a kind man.’
‘He is,’ I agreed, wondering quite how much Robie’s influence had affected her. No doubt she was besotted with him, like everyone he came into contact with. ‘So can I stay for a short while? I promise I’ll be gone as soon as possible. Just a day, maybe two, so that I can look into things.’
She nodded. ‘Of course. Robert would want me to look after a friend.’
‘He would. How was he when you last saw him?’
She shrugged. ‘The same.’ Having given her automatic answer she then thought for a moment. ‘Actually, no, he was excited. Normally he is very calm, gentle. He pays attention but nothing you say can ever really surprise him… not that I have had much to tell him for a long time. But that day he was full of energy, he was…’ she clearly couldn’t think of a better word than the first that had occurred to her, ‘…excited.’
‘Did he give you any clue as to why?’
‘He was talking about the soldier,’ she said. ‘You know the one? He went mad and shot some people.’
‘I know the one.’
‘I thought it was a strange thing to be excited about, it was so horrible, but Robert must have had his reasons, he wasn’t someone who took pleasure in unpleasant things.’
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘he wasn’t. Did he give you any idea what he was doing about it? Anyone else he was talking to?’ He shouldn’t have done, an officer really shouldn’t discuss anything with their agents other than the material the agents bring to them but I didn’t know how closely Robie stuck to protocol. Given his advantage, the desire everyone had to please him, he may well have grown sloppy about certain aspects of his work.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was doing anything about it. What could he do? The subject just came up, everyone was talking about it.’
‘Did you know the soldier?’
‘No, he was only a lieutenant.’
The implicit snobbery was so natural she didn’t even realise it was there, as if it was quite normal to dismiss someone because of their rank. That’s the life of a movie star for you, even one on the downward escalator of her career.
‘It’s probably not important,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I might have a drink?’ Really I just wanted to change the subject and get her back on innocuous ground for a while. Not that I was opposed to something to settle my nerves.
‘Gin?’ she asked. ‘Or vodka?’
‘Vodka’s fine,’ I said. She paused for a moment, then realised I didn’t know where she kept her liquor so could hardly help myself. She shuffled over to a cabinet in the corner and poured herself a gin and me a vodka. She stared at them for a moment, trying to remember what it was they might lack, then took both drinks out of the room and into the kitchen where I heard her ferret around in the freezer for some ice. She returned, still looking at the drinks.
‘That one’s yours,’ she said, passing it to me.
‘Thank you,’ I took a sip and was grateful to note we paid her well enough to afford decent spirits. I drank it quickly. I wasn’t tired – though I hoped the vodka would help – but I didn’t want to talk to Alexandra Hoss any more for now. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to get some sleep.’
‘Of course.’ She still hadn’t touched her drink but she used it to point out of the room. ‘Right across the hall, spare room, bathroom’s next door.’
There was nowhere obvious to place my glass so I took it with me into her kitchen, rinsed it under the tap and upended it onto the draining board.
I walked back through the lounge. Alexandra had drained her drink in my absence. I wondered about that – in my experience it was an alcoholic’s habit, they always hide the act of drinking. I supposed it hardly mattered, this wasn’t my network, and Alexandra Hoss was not my responsibility.
She walked behind me as I left the room, gesturing again towards the spare bedroom door and vanishing off into her own room without another word.
The spare bedroom was a forgotten room. Even the sheets had dust on them. On the wall was a picture of Alexandra taken, at a rough guess, at the age she’d been when she’d last entered the room. It was a cheesecake shot of the sort that pretended it was better than calendar fare simply because it didn’t contain tyres. She was lying back on a stone bench, surrounded by moss-covered statuary. Several cherubs were as unmoved as I by the sight of her. It seemed strange to sleep beneath a life-size photograph of your host’s exposed genitalia but I would do my best.
The bed was an improvement on the one at Frau Schwarz’s but I was still too wired to sleep and I lay there staring at the window, waiting for the light of dawn to break.
Just as I thought I might drift off, I became aware of the sound of talking from Alexandra’s bedroom. Was there someone else in the apartment?
I slid out of bed and moved to the door. Wary of making a noise I slowly pressed down the handle and was relieved it opened silently. It was pitch black in the hallway but for a faint light from beneath her door. I tiptoed across to it and pressed my ear to her door. She was speaking quietly, and there was no audible reply so I decided she must either be losing her mind – a possibility I struggled to entirely dismiss – or, more likely, was talking on the phone.
‘I’ll do whatever I can,’ she said. ‘You know that. I just wish you were here. You’d be more comfortable here.’
A pause.
‘I know, I know… but surely it would have been all right. He’s a friend after all.’
Another pause.
‘You know I don’t mind the risk… I’m sure, if he’s friend he’d also…’
How tempting it was simply to burst in and say ‘For God’s sake, just pass me the phone and let me talk to him.’
‘All right, all right, I won’t say anything. You know you can trust me. Wait…’
She shifted in bed and I stepped back, trying to decide whether it might, after all, be worthwhile brazening it out if she discovered my eavesdropping. Then she sat back down, the bed springs creaking, and I heard the sound of her cigarette lighter.
‘I promised, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’ The smell of cigarette smoke crept underneath the door. ‘Yes, of course, as much as I can…’
So, I had discovered two things. Firstly, she was in contact with Lucas. This made life much easier, especially as she was clearly planning on meeting him. Secondly, given her little performance when I’d arrived, so shocked at the news of Robie’s disappearance, she was a better actress than the current state of her career suggested.
Tomorrow I would follow her and see where she led me.
I moved over to the window and looked out. It was snowing again, adding to the layers I had walked through earlier, deepening and building up in drifts. In the middle of the street an old woman was dancing, spiralling around in the falling snow. I was reminded of the young girl Engel and I had seen outside Grauber’s apartment. These Berliners do so love the snow, I thought, watching her spin and spin. Her head was upturned towards me, its sagging face pulled into a grin of joy. Suddenly she stopped and stared at me. The room was dark, there was no way she could be aware I was watching. I kept telling myself that as she stared directly at me. After a moment she hooked her index fingers into the corners of her mouth and pulled her face into a distorted mask, like a rude schoolchild pulling faces behind a teacher’s back. Face distended, she hopped up and down on the spot, as if throwing the insult up at me. I continued to stare, trying to find reason and logic in her behaviour and coming up short. Finally she fell back into the road and lay still. I was just accepting that I would have to go down there and make sure she was all right when she slowly got to her feet, hands pressed to her left hip as if in pain. She looked around, seemingly confused to find herself there, and then limped away into the darkness.
SEVENTEEN
I had little choice but to sit by the window and wait for the new day. I couldn’t risk Alexandra leaving the apartment without me. Of course, the sleep I had been so uninterested in earlier seemed far more attractive by the time the distant floodlights of the Wall were replaced by the encroaching dawn. Eventually I left the room in search of coffee and the opportunity to keep moving.