Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  ‘No problem, my friend. Where is letter?’

  ‘I have to write that now. Can we go to your room?’

  When he handed it to him ten minutes later, he said: ‘This is private - not for Vladimir’s eyes. Okay? But I do want to talk to your Russian friend. Can you arrange that for this evening? I will be at the same bar within the next hour.’

  Idris agreed. Then Rosenharte hugged him and wished him Godspeed, both of which struck him as strange gestures as he left the hostel.

  Instead of returning to the cab, he jogged the few blocks to his street. The rain was slanting in his face, but when he got there he took his time to creep along a wall to see if the Stasi were outside his building. They weren’t.

  On the table, just inside the front door, lay a postcard addressed to Herr Lotha Frankel in childish block capitals: ‘I hope this finds you well. I saw Ruth yesterday, but everything is all right with her now. I thought you would be pleased to know this. With kind regards, Sarah.’ From this he understood that Ulrike had experienced some kind of temporary trouble, but was now free of it and needed to see him. The card had been posted two days before, on 27 September, in Halle. She was taking no chances.

  In his apartment he tore up the card, burnt it and flushed the ash down the lavatory. He emptied his suitcase but thought better of packing it again and went to wash his face and brush his teeth. Mindful of the problems Konrad had in jail, he had lately become obsessive about his teeth.

  It was too early for the nighthawks at Die Krypta. Instead the place was packed with groups of middle-aged men. Rosenharte sat alone at the bar, gathering the strands of his predicament together, and occasionally eavesdropping on their conversation about the rush to the border. To a man they agreed that young people fleeing to the West were workshy and incapable of the productivity levels achieved by an older generation of good, hard-working Germans.

  He drank three beers and began to despair of the Russian coming. He also decided that the man in the group of five, right next to him, who wore a blue corduroy cap and who’d uttered the most vitriol about the scenes at the station, was taking too much interest in him for comfort’s sake. He sank the last beer, nodded to the group, said goodnight and left by the main entrance.

  The rain had been replaced by a thin drizzle that shrouded the city in mist. The beams of the spotlights intended to pick up what architecture remained of Dresden’s eighteenth-century glory ended in blunted shafts. He pulled up his collar and set off gloomily in the direction of his home, hoping that a second drenching would not ruin his new coat.

  On evenings like this, the ghost of the city as it had been before that night in February 1945 was always alive in his mind. The sense that beneath the hasty repairs carried out after the war and the open spaces made necessary by the annihilation of whole quarters, of which nothing but ash and dust remained, there was a city plan, a kind of subterranean blueprint of Dresden waiting to rise again. It was the gracious city painted by Bernardo Bellotto, Dresden’s Canaletto, who’d left an exact record of the eighteenth-century elevations, presciently setting down everything for the people who would need it after the firestorm.

  Sometimes he didn’t know whether these were his original thoughts or Konrad’s. They had shared walks through Dresden together and speculated without any particular emotion where their natural mother had been when she was atomized in the inferno: a hotel perhaps, the local headquarters of the Nazi party or at the reception for high-born fascists that had been the pretext for her journey to Dresden.

  It was Konrad who had told him the story of the phantom mason who could be heard at the dead of night, working patiently to restore the lost edifice of the Frauenkirche.

  Rosenharte now stopped in his tracks to listen for the chisel clinking on sandstone, but then he became aware of another sound - the dying echo of footsteps that had come to a halt some way behind him. He moved off, but abruptly changed direction to double back along a cobbled street towards the Zwinger and passed between the Hofkirche and the old palace of the Saxon kings. He saw the man once in silhouette: he was wearing a cap and a raincoat tied tightly at the waist. Maybe it was the character from the bar who had shown so much interest in him. He wasn’t about to make it easier for him and sprinted alongside the Zwinger complex to the end of the building where he had often sat in the cafe looking across to the opera. There he retreated to the shadows and waited, half his mind fleeing to the art behind the walls behind him, while the rest of him considered how best to knock his pursuer down and disappear into the cover of shrubs and trees beyond the buildings of the Zwinger.

  He heard the footsteps slow to a walk, then saw the shadow move into the space in front of the cafe. The man turned; Rosenharte leapt forward, brandishing an unwieldy metal pole, which he had snatched up from an umbrella stand. He felt silly and he had no idea what to do, but there was no going back now. The man turned, crouched and cupped his hands, then grabbed the arm descending on him, ducked to Rosenharte’s right and pulled the arm into his chest. The pole clattered onto the stone with a dull ring. He had moved with such impeccable speed and timing that only when Rosenharte’s face was an inch or two from the ground and his arm was being forced back excruciatingly, did he understand that he had attacked Vladimir.

  The Russian let him go and Rosenharte fell towards the stone.

  ‘You are fortunate, Doktor. I omitted the disabling part of that move - the knee to the groin.’

  Rosenharte got up and apologized.

  ‘And the Stasi trained you in this?’ Vladimir asked in disbelief.

  ‘There were some basic courses.’ He stopped. ‘I don’t remember telling you that I was in the Stasi.’

  ‘You didn’t. I had to find that out for myself. Come. Let’s get out of this rain.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to the bar? I was there for all of two hours.’

  ‘Your bar is full of people from Bautznerstrasse. The Stasi drink there, Rosenharte. I would have thought you knew that. We can’t be seen there with you.’

  ‘No wonder one of them recognized me.’

  ‘Yes, he’s probably been part of the surveillance detail on your case. Let’s get to the car. It’s over by the Catholic church. My colleagues are waiting.’

  As before, they drove to Angelikastrasse and went to the brightly lit cellar. They all sat down round a table; a bottle of vodka was produced with some shot glasses. Rosenharte shook his head and asked for coffee instead, explaining that he had been ill.

  ‘Okay,’ said Vladimir. ‘This is what I have to say. I have done research on you, my friend, and have found interesting facets to you. Some of these you would not want us to know about. That’s natural. But you should understand I’m aware of your background - your Nazi parentage, your history with the Stasi and some interesting contacts you made on behalf of the MfS in Brussels. We shall leave these matters aside for the moment, but I suspect that they are relevant in the complete picture. What we need to concentrate on now is the immediate situation. I want you to be utterly frank with me, Rudi. Time presses. I have demands on me.’

  Rosenharte drew breath, then lit a cigarette and offered the pack round the table. ‘You know the only thing that matters to me is my brother,’ he said. ‘When I’ve got him out, you can have everything.’

  ‘We would like to hear it now.’

  ‘But you haven’t helped me yet. I saw him at the beginning of the week. I managed that without your help.’

  ‘Yes, after your interview with Erich Mielke and Schwarzmeer in the Stasi headquarters.’

  ‘You’re well informed, so you’ll know that I did this myself. I didn’t need your help.’

  ‘We gave you the addresses in Leipzig.’

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t say which address Abu Jamal would be using. I had to find that out for myself. What I need to hear from you is how you’re going to persuade them to let Konrad go. You offer me nothing in this respect.’

  Vladimir cleared his throat and withdrew an envelope fr
om his inside pocket and placed it on the table. ‘This letter was written by your brother to you the day after you saw him. We arranged that. I tried to deliver it before now, but we could not find you. No one has read it.’

  Rosenharte reached out, but Vladimir’s hand remained on the envelope. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t let you have this until you begin to tell us what has been going on.’ His eyes were not without sympathy, but there was also a pale, immovable resolve in his expression.

  Rosenharte glanced at the other two men. ‘You’re asking me to sign my own execution order. You might as well tie the blindfold.’

  ‘No,’ said Vladimir calmly. ‘Nothing of what is said in here will go to your authorities. The KGB simply wants to know the truth of the situation so that we can take appropriate action. Why don’t you begin by telling us about your arrangements with the British and Americans?’

  ‘Let me read the letter and I will talk to you alone,’ he said.

  Vladimir nodded and slid the letter across the table. ‘We will give you some time with this,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’ All three left the cellar.

  Rosenharte opened the letter and saw that Konrad had filled two sides with his precise, unadorned hand. The letter was dated to the previous Wednesday and at the top he had written in capitals, Hohenschönhausen.

  My dear Rudi,

  I will be amazed if this finds you, yet since I have nothing to lose by putting down my thoughts and sending my good wishes to you, dear brother, I sit here in these wretched circumstances and write. The sight of you heartened me, though during the last few days I have become convinced that I am nearing the end of my life and that I should, as the doctors say, put my affairs in order and make my peace with the world. Because there is no one you could call a doctor in this godforsaken place, I say it to myself: your time approaches; your struggle is over.

  It sounds melodramatic, doesn’t it? I can hear you now chiding me, yet the truth is that I do not look forward now, except to think of my sons’ future and Else’s happiness, both of which I know to be close to your own dear heart, Rudi. In the event of my no longer being here to look after them, I know that you will nourish them with your love and your care. This makes me more easily resigned to my situation than I would otherwise be. You are my dearly beloved twin brother and my companion in life, and now you will become my substitute, more than equal to the task of bringing up Florian and Christoph. This knowledge gives me strength.

  I know that you are doing everything in your power to free me, and that being such an optimist you are convinced that you can pull it off. Maybe you will, in which case you will have performed a miracle and we will celebrate. But, Rudi, do not risk your own freedom in this enterprise; do not jeopardize Else and the boys. I beg you to make certain of their safety before you do anything more.

  I close now by sending my love and inexpressible gratitude for the comradeship of the last fifty years. Not a day has gone by when you have not been in my thoughts; not a night has passed in places such as this when the memories of our times together have not preserved me in the darkness. Send my love to my beautiful Else, kiss her for me and hug the boys as if they were yours. You are now the channel for my love, Rudi.

  Your ever loving brother, Konrad.

  Rosenharte folded the letter deliberately along the two creases and replaced it in the unaddressed envelope, then brushed an angry tear from the corner of his eye. He reached for the bottle of vodka automatically and poured two glasses full, which he threw to the back of his throat. This letter was not the Konrad he knew. Though the handwriting and the slightly old-fashioned way of expressing himself on paper were certainly familiar, he didn’t recognize the tone of resignation. In a few weeks the Stasi bastards had reached inside him and shrivelled his life force.

  He stared at the table and the envelope and repeated the words he had shouted out in the hospital corridor as he was ushered out. ‘Hold on, Konnie. Hold on.’

  18

  A Deal with the Russian

  Vladimir entered with a knock, an oddly courteous gesture, given they were in the KGB’s cellars. He placed a notepad on the table and slipped off his watch, which he then aligned with the notepad.

  ‘So, we have much to discuss,’ he said. He peered at the face of the watch then glanced up with a brisk, down-turned smile.

  ‘Can you smuggle a letter in, as well as out?’ asked Rosenharte.

  ‘Maybe, but not for a few days.’

  ‘Then I’ll write before I go from here tonight and leave it with you.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Before I speak of the other matters, I need to outline the problem with Konrad for you. Then I’ll ask what you may be able to do to help me. After that I will tell you all I know about this affair.’ He was nervous and prayed to God that he had not mistaken Vladimir’s intentions. The tale he was about to tell the Russian was certainly enough to earn him a bullet in the back of the head. But he reasoned that without Vladimir’s help there would be little hope of releasing Konrad. There was no option but to take one of the greatest risks of his life.

  He inhaled deeply and began the story of how Konrad had been arrested when the second letter arrived from Annalise Schering and how the Stasi’s repeated promises to release Konrad had been broken on the advice, he believed, of Colonel Zank. He described the deal he’d done with the British and Americans, but said that he now believed that they would not succeed on their own in getting Konrad out. They would need passes and equipment, which they wouldn’t be able to get. The KGB, on the other hand, might be able to acquire the necessary release forms and vehicle passes. Rosenharte would give them to the British and the British would never be any the wiser.

  ‘I can see why you were picked by the Stasi,’ said Vladimir. ‘Underneath it all, you have a very devious mind, though you don’t allow the world to see it. You’re perfect spy material, Dr Rosenharte: a loss to the profession.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe there is a way we could help, but you have to make it worth my while.’

  Rosenharte gave him a detailed outline of the Anglo-American operation to trace Abu Jamal and Misha, and showed how it was being done under the cover of leaking information from a highly placed source in Nato. He gave no clues whatsoever to the identity of their British source in Leipzig, but he did tell him the nature of the information he had passed to the Main Directorate for Foreign Intelligence and its importance in the future penetration of Nato communication networks. He knew that Vladimir would be able to piece together the history of Annalise Schering, so he told him about the way the West had used her as a truth channel in the seventies and eighties. At this the Russian cocked one eyebrow - the only sign of surprise he permitted himself as Rosenharte spoke. For the most part he probed and wrote notes in a fluent Cyrillic script, which Rosenharte surmised contained elements of shorthand.

  At length, when the ashtray was full and the bottle half empty, Vladimir, now slouching in his chair, flipped through the pages impatiently, looking for other points. ‘The operation against the Stasi is clever,’ he said, ‘because it preys on their sense of technological inferiority. Did the idea of tempting the Stasi with this bait while retrieving information about the MfS relationship with Jamal come from the SIS chief in Berlin, Robert Harland?’

  Rosenharte nodded.

  ‘Someone we must watch,’ said Vladimir. ‘On the other hand, the man you have to watch is Colonel Zank. He’s the one who stands between Robert Harland and success, and the one who stands in the way of your brother’s freedom. Perhaps he senses that it is the only way the Stasi can retain some hold on you.’ He pondered the notes for several minutes and repeatedly nodded to himself.

  ‘You’re running against three clocks attached to detonators.’ He picked up and handled his watch. ‘You don’t know how much time you have on each one before detonation occurs. The first clock is your brother’s failing health. The second is the security of the informant in Leipzig; a source handing secrets like this over to the We
st won’t last long in the GDR. The source is already dangerously exposed because you’re the main conduit and you are exposed. The third and last clock is the one ticking away in the Stasi headquarters. It’s only a matter of time before you’re under arrest and being questioned by Zank about the computer program. You won’t be free for very long, Rosenharte.’

  ‘The only clock that matters is my brother’s failing health. Once he’s free, we can all leave the country and to hell with espionage.’

  ‘Yes, I understand your focus on this, but you will appreciate my surprise that you are attempting to get three of the world’s major intelligence agencies involved in the release of a prisoner held by a fourth agency. It is an unusual situation to say the least and it cannot be comfortable for you. Perhaps you’re beginning to show the strain.’

  Rosenharte shook his head. ‘I had flu, that was all. I’m fine. I’m going to see this through.’

  ‘You may say that now, but one mistake . . . well, you know the risks. And those risks are to some extent mine too.’

  Rosenharte nodded and said that it was all a question of timing.

  ‘But what about the Leipzig connection?’ the Russian asked. ‘You say you want to leave immediately, but surely you bear some responsibility for this person?’

  ‘Of course, but I’m morally obliged to look after my brother and his family first.’

  ‘Yes, but it would be regrettable if the information this person apparently possesses does not reach the West.’