by Henry Porter
‘Here he is,’ said Macy Harp, nudging Robert Harland with his elbow. ‘Bang on schedule like the bleeding Berlin Express.’
They both moved back from the doorway that led onto one of the heavy iron walkways running along outside the disused warehouse. This huge nineteenth-century complex lay at a right angle to Molo IV. They were about 200 yards from Rosenharte, who was moving away from them. Harland trained his binoculars on Rosenharte and reflected that both he and his quarry had much to lose if this went wrong. He had only been British Secret Intelligence Service station chief in Berlin for a year, and he was still on probation. This operation was one hell of a risk to take when he knew that most of the senior people at Century House regarded him as a field man without the necessary reserves of prudence. They couldn’t deny he always got results but these were attributed to flair and boldness, two characteristics less favoured in M16 than either the public or the intelligence service imagined. The head of the European desk had given him a certain amount of support together with Macy Harp - the best odd-job man and, when required, all-round creator of mayhem that the service had to offer - but Harland knew as well as anyone that many in Century House were actively hoping for the operation to fail. Harebrained, wild, impetuous - those would be the words murmured by his superiors across the lunch table at the Travellers Club - and his career would effectively be over.
He shook himself and concentrated on Rosenharte. He was every bit the specimen that the Stasi had deployed in Brussels all those years ago. At the time of the Schering operation his fake passport had put him at thirty-two, which would make him about forty-seven now. He had looked after himself: he was tanned, still slim and there wasn’t a trace of grey in the sandy hair. But he betrayed a certain edginess and Harland could see he was moving without enthusiasm to the rendezvous point, glancing back and to his side every few paces. ‘How many Stasi have we got?’ he asked quietly.
Harp’s habitually cheerful face squinted into a notebook. ‘About a dozen. Our Italian friends think there are more, as many as twenty, but that’s based on the crossings from Yugoslavia over the last forty-eight hours, not on observation in Trieste.’
‘And what do we make of the character with the straw hat?’
‘At first we thought he was Stasi because we’ve seen him a couple of times. Jamie Jay took a look at him this morning, followed him to a fleapit hotel in the New Port.’
‘But how does he manage to be here ten minutes before Rosenharte?’
Macy Harp withdrew one of a ration of five cigarettes from a slender silver case and lit up. ‘It’s simple. He saw Rosenharte out here when he did his recce this morning, realized he had started off on the same route this evening and decided to get here ahead of him.’
‘Right,’ said Harland doubtfully. ‘But what the hell’s he doing here?’
‘Steady on, old chap. All will be revealed soon enough.’
‘Where’s Cuth?’
‘Having a drink over there on the seafront. He can see everything from where he is. The Italians have taken pictures, so we’ve got a complete gallery back at his place.’
‘He’s too far away. Get him nearer.’ Harland couldn’t help showing his irritation.
Harp turned to him. ‘Come on, Bobby, we’re all doing this for the love of it - and you. Jay’s taken leave to help out and Cuth Avocet’s given up a week on the Tweed.’
‘It’s an official operation.’
‘I know, I know. Still, you can’t deny that the Office hasn’t exactly given you all the support you need.’
Harland said nothing. Was it that obvious?
‘Ah, I’ve got Jay,’ said Harp a few moments later. ‘He’s lurking in one of the ruined sheds in the centre of the pier. You see him?’
‘Right . . . look, I appreciate you giving your time, Macy, but I want you to understand that this does have the chief’s blessing. It’s very important. Could save a lot of lives.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Bobby,’ said Harp amenably. He looked around and sniffed the air. ‘Christ, this place smells. What the hell was stored in here?’
‘Hides. Uncured leather, I imagine.’
Harp looked around. ‘You know the port machinery was entirely powered by water? Every crane, pulley, lift was powered by compressed water. Hydrodynamic power. Bloody amazing what they got up to in the nineteenth century.’
‘Yes,’ said Harland without interest. ‘Are we certain Rosenharte didn’t make any calls from his hotel phone once he had found the note?’
‘Can’t be sure,’ said Harp. ‘We know the place is crawling with Stasi and they’re likely to have set up a way of communicating with him without us knowing. The hotel is not the easiest place to watch.’
‘I bloody well hope they don’t think we’re here. The idea is that it’s just Annalise. If they get any hint of us we’re finished.’
Harp nodded. ‘Tell me about chummy down there. How come he’s going to meet a woman he knows is dead?’
‘Because the Stasi have forced him.’
‘But why didn’t he tell them she was dead?’
‘Because he couldn’t - not back in 1974 and especially not now. Suffice to say we put him in—’
‘An impossible position. I see that, but how - the girl’s death? Was he compromised? Has he been working for you?’
Harland remained motionless behind his binoculars.
‘There’s something I’m not getting,’ said Harp.
‘That’s right, Macy.’ He wasn’t about to tell him everything, and anyway it was far too complicated.
Harp nodded. He knew better than to press the point. ‘Christ, I’m not sure how long I can take this smell.’
Rosenharte caught sight of the man with the straw hat issuing from a ruined building on his right and coming down the pier towards him. Rosenharte slowed, then stopped and pressed the little button on the side of the device taped to his chest. The man was weaving like a drunk. As he got closer Rosenharte was able to get a measure of him. The little round beer paunch and poorly cut suit jacket unambiguously announced a citizen of the German Democratic Republic. His gaze was fixed on Rosenharte and there was little doubt that he was making straight for him.
For a few seconds he expected some kind of violence, but then the man seemed to stumble, clutched at his thorax and cursed before brushing off the hat and rushing the few feet to where Rosenharte was standing. At the last moment he tried to dodge out of his path, but the man lunged to the right, snatched at his shirt and gripped it with such force that Rosenharte instinctively lashed out. The man looked aghast, and only then did Rosenharte understand that the face below him was contorted with pain and fear. He kept putting one hand to his throat and was searching wildly about him. A part of Rosenharte registered disgust at his breath and the foam that had gathered at the corners of his mouth, but he gripped him by the shoulders and told him in German to be still and he would try and find him some help. As he said it, he took in a lined brow beaded with sweat, two indentations on the nose where a pair of spectacles habitually rested, a filthy, frayed shirt collar and a day’s growth of stubble. He shook him, looked into his eyes - there was no malevolence in the expression, merely panic - and told him again that he must help himself by calming down. He tried his halting Italian, but reverted to German and lowered his voice.
In Dresden he had once seen a man’s eye poked out with an umbrella. People stood around as the blood gushed from the socket and the young man went into shock. A woman knelt down and held him and he calmed down almost immediately. So Rosenharte touched the man on the cheek and held him gently. This seemed to work for a little while, but then his eyes began to stare and his body shook with a series of convulsions that forced them both towards the edge of the quay. They staggered in a drunken waltz for a few seconds, kicking up swirls of dust and snapping the dried weeds around them, until the man suddenly collapsed into his arms and pushed him against a large iron mooring bollard.
Now some words came from hi
m. ‘Rye . . . Ryszard . . . Rye . . . Kusimiak.’ Rosenharte’s backside came down involuntarily on the shiny warm surface of the bollard.
‘Be still, for God’s sake, or . . .’ At that moment he lost his footing and found he had no purchase to stop the momentum of the other man. For a second he was suspended over the water, then he toppled from the bollard. Falling the four or five feet, he was certain he saw the man’s hand reach to his pocket before he dropped forward and rolled down the quay wall into the water like a weighted sack.
More angry than shocked, Rosenharte surfaced and struck out to a chain that was hanging down from the top of the quay. He grabbed it, placed both feet against the barnacle-encrusted stone and began to haul himself up, pulling the chain through his hands. As he cleared the water line he heard a voice and looked up to see a man holding out his hand. He was yelling something in Italian. Rosenharte wrapped the slimy chain around one hand and took a few more steps, but at this point his angle to the quay made it impossible for him to proceed further. He moved to the left, then swung back in the opposite direction and reached out to grab hold of the Italian’s hand. A few desperate moments of scrambling ensued before he was kneeling on the quay, hacking the seawater from his throat.
He wiped his eyes and looked up. Around them stood a semi-circle of teenage boys with fishing rods. Rosenharte gazed into a broad young face and a pair of intelligent blue eyes and nodded to show he was okay. The man put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You’re okay; just stay there for a bit.’ Rosenharte knew this was no Italian.
Then one of the boys caught sight of the body in the water and started shouting. All five stripped off and dived in, apparently unconcerned about what they might find. One unceremoniously yanked the man’s head up by the hair while the others shoaled round and pushed the body towards the chain.
‘Perhaps it’s better that I speak German,’ hissed the man after he’d instructed the boys in Italian to loop the chain under the body’s arms and tie a knot.
It was the last thing Rosenharte wanted. He shook his head furiously, put his hand in his shirt and ripped the wire from his chest.
The man showed little surprise. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t work after that soaking.’
‘Who are you?’
‘A friend of Annalise.’ The man was looking back up the pier at the people who had materialized from nowhere.
‘You’re English?’ said Rosenharte.
He nodded. ‘Is he one of your people?’ he asked, pointing to the water.
‘My people? No.’
‘Look, we’re about to be joined by the police.’ The Englishman gestured with his chin. Rosenharte turned to see a navy-blue Alfa Romeo threading its way through the scrap iron. ‘Be at the Ristorante Grand Canale by nine thirty. Take a table outside, on the canal pontoon. Just make it seem as though you happened on the restaurant by chance. You got that?’ He punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Good fellow - everything will be okay.’
Rosenharte had seen the restaurant on the canal and thought that it looked expensive. He was about to protest, when one of the boys shouted at them to take up the slack on the chain and begin hauling the body out of the water. They both looked over the quay to see that it had snagged on a protruding stone. At that moment two policemen jogged from their car to help pull the man over the edge. The Englishman knelt down and began rhythmically pumping at the man’s back. Water began to dribble from the mouth but when the cough he was hoping for didn’t come, he rolled the man over, felt his pulse and listened to his chest. His hands moved expertly around the body, at one point slipping inside his jacket. Then he took hold of the nose and chin and pushed the head back slightly. No sooner had he touched the man’s lips with his own than he recoiled, wiping his mouth furiously on his shirt and spitting on the ground. One of the policemen attempted to take over, but the Englishman pulled him back saying there was something wrong. ‘Attenzione, Signore, non e buono.’
A sense of contagion swept the boys who had just clambered out of the water and they all began to back away from the body. Rosenharte looked down with a candid lack of emotion at first but then bafflement and shock hit him. He wondered what the sudden extinction of this ordinary human being meant for him. Things like this didn’t just happen.
From the warehouse, Robert Harland watched the police car with Rosenharte inside disappear through the Old Port gates, followed by the ambulance carrying the body, and considered whether his operation was compromised. He too was certain that the struggle with the man on the pier and the death were significant. He turned to Cuth Avocet - the gaunt figure known throughout British SIS as the Bird - who had slipped up a back stairway to join them in the dusk of the old leather store. ‘What the hell was that about?’ he asked.
‘Search me,’ said the Bird. ‘I guess we’ll know a bit more when Jamie reports back.’
‘At least he was in position,’ Harp said.
‘Point taken,’ said Harland. He looked out over the water. ‘We’d better get back to the van and start preparing the watch on the restaurant.’
‘The fellow’s hardly going to feel like meat and two veg after someone’s just tried to do him in,’ said the Bird lazily.
‘It didn’t look as though he was trying to kill him,’ said Harland. ‘I watched the whole thing. At the end Rosenharte was trying to help him. Let’s be going.’
The Bird put out an arm. ‘Perhaps you should wait for the area to clear first. There’s a couple of bogies down there.’ He pointed to two men who’d materialized from beneath them and were making for the dock gates.
‘That makes . . .’
‘Fourteen,’ said Harp.
‘So now we know what we’re up against,’ said Harland.
Half an hour later, Harland sat in the back of the black Volkswagen van with Jamie Jay, sorting through the contents of the black leather wallet that was still swollen from immersion in the Adriatic. Harland held up an identity card to the light and read out the name Franciscek Grycko. ‘What’s a bloody Pole doing here? The Stasi and the Polish spooks are barely on speaking terms. Normannenstrasse wouldn’t involve them in something like this. They’re considered far too insecure.’
Jay read one of the business cards, which had fallen out in a little wad. ‘It says Grycko is a sales representative of a shoe business - International Quality Shoes, Wroclaw.’
‘Shoe business!’ said Harland contemptuously.
‘There’s no business like . . .’ Seeing Harland’s face Jay stifled the joke.
‘It’s a pity you didn’t get his passport,’ Harland said.
Jay looked offended. ‘You try kissing a dead shoe salesman with vomit in his mouth and see how long you can stand feeling him up at the same time. As things are, I probably established some kind of record out there.’
‘You think they knew each other?’
Jay shook his head. ‘Rosenharte said the man had an attack of some sort - practically fell into his arms foaming at the mouth.’
‘We saw it from the warehouse. I got the impression he was just trying to speak to him. What about the taste you mentioned? You think it was poison?’
Jay wrinkled his nose. ‘Dunno. I feel okay.’
‘Good. So who’s monitoring his phone at the hotel?’
‘Cuth has gone to take over from Jessie.’
‘Christ, I hope Jessie’s changed by now.’
‘Of course. She’ll look just the part. Rosenharte’s going to fall in love all over again.’
‘We don’t need him to. All that matters is that the Stasi believe she really is Annalise.’ Harland noticed the doubt in Jay’s eyes. ‘What?’ he demanded.
‘Well, there’s so much that is out of our control.’
‘It’s an intelligence operation, for Pete’s sake, Jamie, not a bloody garden party.’
‘Well, we’ve done our best with the letters and Jessie, but in the end it all depends on Rosenharte’s reaction.’
‘Right,’ said Harland. ‘If for o
ne moment he looks like he doesn’t recognize her, or gives the slightest hint she isn’t Annalise, he’s lost and might as well defect tonight. He won’t last a minute under Schwarzmeer’s interrogation.’
‘Schwarzmeer?’
‘Yes, Brigadier-General Julius Schwarzmeer, director of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung.’ He paused and looked at Jay’s eager face. ‘Sorry, I forget that you’re rather rusty on all this. Still, it’s good of you to give your time like this.’
‘The HVA is the foreign arm of the Stasi - a subsection, right?’
‘Yes, they’re in the same building in Normannenstrasse and the HVA has officers in all the Stasi regional headquarters.’
‘The same people, then?’
‘The HVA are better trained, better paid and allowed to travel to the West. The ordinary Stasi officer has to make do with the occasional holiday in Bulgaria.’
‘And the purpose of all this? I mean, I get the immediate aim, but what’s the bigger picture?’
‘If it comes off, you’ll see. It may even help in your patch.’
‘With all respect I very much doubt Oman is going to benefit from this.’
‘You’d be surprised. Shake the sand out of your boots, Jamie. There’s a lot to connect the problems in your part of the world with the Stasi. That’s what this operation is about. That’s why I have the chief’s blessing and why the Joint Intelligence Committee so eagerly await the results of our efforts here tonight.’ He stopped. ‘Look, I’d better be getting along. I want to give the wallet to the Italians and I’m interested to hear what they’ve got to say about Rosenharte’s state of mind after that business out on the pier.’
They climbed out the back of the van together. It was almost dark by now. Harland noticed that huge thunderclouds had formed and trapped the heat in the city. The last light from the west touched their summits and gave each a rosy peak.