Understand the enemy target and learn the details. His vice, her favoured newspaper, his shoe size, her brand of toothpaste.
The chosen were taught how to submerge into the thought process of their targets, to identify their weaknesses and to understand their psycho-dramas. The trick was never to plunge in so deep that sympathy was evoked. Never think of a weeping housewife ordered to spy on her son as anything but a useful cypher. Trainees were warned of the dangers of transference.
‘Get to know their smell,’ said one instructor, a nasty piece of work if ever there was one. ‘Where they drink, when they make love, where their children go to school.’
He played them a film, a grainy, flickering set of images, of a young mother being reduced to a wreck because her bicycle tyres were constantly flat. She never knew if it was bad luck or, as was the case, that she was being harassed for having subscribed to a banned newspaper.
‘Very simple,’ said the bully. ‘Very simple.’
Petr never shared any of this work with his parents. Once or twice, he thought his father might be on the verge of asking questions but his mother, who had a sixth sense, managed to head him off. In that way, his parents remained innocent of the techniques employed for infiltration, monitoring and manipulation of those the authorities targeted. Or the methods required to exfiltrate political dissidents who had escaped to the West, only to be returned home and squeezed dry.
At twenty, he became a junior sales representative for Potio Pharma’s Western Europe division, then a senior manager based in Paris, a position which meant he could exploit Czechoslovakia’s need for hard foreign currency and, as important, for industrial intelligence at which he became expert at harvesting. Assured of his status, as much as it was possible to be in the current regime, he married Eva and had the children.
He thought of his mother’s toothless smile and her unremitting fervour. ‘The trouble with your mother,’ Eva had once said (it had been a good day) ‘is that she feels guilty for surviving the camps. Turning fanatic is her way of dealing with it.’ Being older than him, Eva considered herself wiser. She was, too, in some respects. ‘If we sacrifice everything we care about for a political system and expect others to do so too,’ she warned him, ‘then we will become like the Nazis.’
The Velvet Revolution happened in 1989 and the communist regime was disbanded and discredited. His parents were long dead, obstinate in their beliefs to the last. Very soon after that Petr was made CEO of Potio Pharma, in which capacity he was currently in Berlin.
He checked his tie in the mirror and brushed his hair back.
He was always mildly surprised that he didn’t look any different.
Mother? Eva? What would you think now of your son and husband, the good Party man, now full-throated capitalist?
Outside the hotel, the cold was intense, and the wind was a devil which fought its way down Petr’s collar and percolated through the layers he was wearing.
He ordered the doorman to hail a taxi. Sitting back thankfully in its warmth, he reflected on the fault lines of this newly united city. The Wall had been hacked to pieces and bits of it were being kept as a souvenir in biscuit tins all over the globe and a divided Germany married itself. Ossiland and Wessiland were declared man and wife.
A romantic union… but not without problems. Technically, the East German Communist regime was finished but, as Petr well knew from his own country, it wasn’t. Like a murdered corpse, it left traces of its DNA all over the place and, as in Prague, there were lingering anger, tension and resentments to deal with.
‘There has been no proper analysis,’ Petr wrote in his report to the board of Potio Pharma, ‘of how the intensity, the anxiety, and the unreality of a dream-come-true could destabilize even the most practical of people and the Germans are very practical.’
He was in Berlin on a reconnaissance designed to test the links between the new Czech Republic and potential trading partners. The reception, to which he had been bidden, was the brainchild of a group of East German industrial barons keen to lure Western businesses to set up factories in the East. Whereupon, with their abundant supply of workers, rock-bottom wages and cheap real estate, they would proceed to happily undercut their Western competitors.
Not everyone approved. ‘The East will be the workbench of the West’, one bitter ex-party leader had been reported as saying. In return, the Wessi would try to milk, or to steal (whichever was the easiest) any intelligence they could lay their hands on about the Russians.
But it was all hands to the deck for the business of re-orchestrating Europe. The cultural attachés, including the British, had cooked up a programme of activities, which were to include a trip to a bakery, a motorcycle factory and tonight’s reception. As ever, he reflected with amusement, it was a stew of competing interests and ideologies but he was not complaining.
The taxi slowed in the bunched traffic around Alexanderplatz. From what he could see, the square was rammed with the younger generation of Berliners. Restaurants and buildings blazed with light and naphtha flares ringed the ugly Fernsehturm, or TV tower.
Not for the first time, he acknowledged that the all-encompassing grey of the Prague of his upbringing was hefted into his psyche. Even though he knew Western Europe reasonably well, and liked to think he understood how it worked, the prodigality of its lighting bothered him.
A hefty percentage of the punters in the square were drunk or drugged. Mostly in a good-natured way but, as he well knew, some of these people would be poor, and if they were Ossis, possibly resentful and, perhaps, disapproving of the Wessis’ affluence, which made them dangerous.
Beer and sausage booths were doing a roaring trade. A group of singers with electric guitars belted out torch songs. They were having trouble with the power supply and the accompaniment was intermittent. No one seemed bothered. The new order had arrived and they were going at it with music and booze.
When the history was written, it would be revealed how each side had spent a percentage of the national budget on people and machines with the aim of outwitting the other – and, in the GDR, the Stasi developed into the most efficient surveillance organization ever known.
During the last days of the GDR, the Stasi tried to destroy their mountains of files and paperwork recording the decades of surveillance. The joke ran that for the most efficient surveillance system in the world, they hadn’t been very efficient. Left behind was a paper mountain, from which rose (as Petr well knew) a miasma of spite, vengeance and repression.
In the new democratic dawn, these had to be investigated and teams of ‘Puzzle Women’ patrolled long tables on which were arranged thousands and thousands of paper fragments from which they were bidden to construct a new story of Germany from the old ones.
My wife thinks bourgeois thoughts.
I suspect my neighbour of listening to forbidden broadcasts on enemy radio.
Citizen B met a known dissident in Jűdenstrasse.
State snooping, and its findings, was pretty much the same in any country.
The reception was being held on the first floor of a concrete office building in a street close to the site of the former American Chancery in the Mitte district. The heating had been turned up to tropical levels, which resulted in thirsty guests doggedly getting drunk. The room was too large for the number of guests and devoid of comfort. Except for a couple of framed photos of combine harvesters in fields of suspiciously gold corn, the walls were bare. Marooned on the swirly patterned carpet were small groups who did not give an impression that they were enjoying themselves.
Petr was given a guest list but, before he could acquaint himself with its contents, he was waylaid.
‘Hallo.’ A tall, rangy woman in a navy-blue dress with white trimming who he took to be an embassy wife accosted Petr with the confidence of the English landed classes. ‘I’m Sonia.’
‘Petr Kobes.’
‘Not German, I think.’
‘Czech.’
Her expression
radiated good humour and drunkenness. ‘English. And I was just wondering if I had transgressed very much in a previous life to find myself in this building which is beyond depressing.’ She lowered her tone. ‘Do you think there are ex-Stasi here?’
‘Without a doubt,’ he replied, attempting to calculate if the disingenuousness was genuine or not.
‘Someone told my husband that when the Stasi headquarters were taken over, they found an international supermarket stuffed with goodies. And those terrible files on everyone, of course. Plus, a whole floor furnished with the most expensive furniture.’
‘Yes, I heard that too.’ Petr managed to glance down at the list in his hand and nearly dropped it. A name had leapt up at him.
An unusual combination of French Christian name and English surname. Laure Carlyle.
He prided himself that he was a man who knew how to control his emotions but, at this moment, he could barely speak. ‘Would you excuse me?’
Sonia shrugged. ‘I’ve frightened you. Well, good luck with Berlin. It’s… it’s not Paris.’ She peered closer at him. ‘Oh dear, you look shell-shocked.’
He did not reply because he was literally not capable.
CHAPTER 15
THERE SHE WAS, ONLY A FEW FEET AWAY.
Even though a decade had passed, it was hard to put into words what had happened to him then. Or describe what had taken place in his heart and mind.
By his reckoning, she would now be thirty or so and that seemed from his vantage point at the other end of the room to be about right. Her hair was the same chestnut flecked with auburn but cut differently and she was thinner. It was her skin, luminous and almost transparent, which give him the final clue. That had not changed.
Engrossed in conversation with an old ex-Stasi bully, she had not noticed him and, light-headed and alarmingly? stupidly? elated, he allowed himself a few extra seconds to gaze on her.
The hand holding his glass felt unsteady and, to give himself a breathing space, he turned away.
Mistake: one of the British diplomats pounced. By now, Petr’s English was fluent and, tiresome though it was, he engaged in the social fray.
‘It must be fascinating to be here to witness the new Germany taking shape.’
Either the diplomat was an unhappy man or he did not understand his profession. There was a marked hesitation before he replied: ‘yes and no’.
Wrong man and wrong job, thought Petr, a predicament for which he had little sympathy.
He could not prevent himself looking past the diplomat’s shoulder to where Laure was. ‘Adjustment is always the challenge,’ he offered.
‘A shambles if you want my opinion,’ was the reply.
‘Isn’t “shambles” a little strong?’ Petr said. ‘The East Germans are being practical. Trade and manufacture stand a better chance of making things work than governments.’
The diplomat stared down at his glass. ‘Barking, half of them. The party die-hards suffer from Mauer im Kopf. You know… the Wall in the Head.’
Detaching himself from the disaffected diplomat, he began a slow, but inevitable, progress towards Laure, the magnetic pole to which he was drawn.
A stocky man in a dark, formal suit with swept-back fair hair touched her on the elbow and drew her aside. Public school? Oxbridge? Almost certainly doctrinaire about the freedoms enjoyed by the West? They conferred in low voices. Glancing up, she caught sight of Petr and, for a fraction of a second, her eyes widened.
What would she see? Obviously, not the thirty-six-year-old husband and father of two young children of a decade ago. He was aware that middle age was slackening his features, bulking his waistline and greying his hair at the temples. Anxiety and the tricky business of keeping on top of political changes must also have taken a toll.
The slight stiffening of Laure’s shoulders at his approach told him that she had been waiting. She broke off her conversation. ‘Petr. A long time.’ She swung into action. ‘David, this Petr Kobes who used to be my boss in Prague. Petr, this David Brotton who is currently my boss at the British Embassy.’ Her lips twitched. ‘Bosses, meet each other.’
Close to, Petr saw that she had become truly beautiful. The younger Laure had been fresh, tousled and bohemian and wore ill-advised low-cut tops and tight jeans. Now, thinner and with shadows in her eyes, she had been completed and was something else. More mysterious, less open. He glanced down at her left hand. No ring.
David Brotton, the boss, was clearly experienced at this sort of encounter. He proffered a clean, square hand. ‘How do you do?’ He glanced at Laure. ‘What sort of boss?’
‘I was an au pair for Petr and his family. We lived in Paris and in Prague,’ replied Laure.
More likely than not, this was information with which David Brotton was already familiar. All three of them in this conversation knew that Laure’s history would have been turned inside out and hung out to dry before she obtained work in anything like a British Embassy.
‘And very welcome she was, too. She was a life-saver when my wife became ill and ended up staying to help us much longer than we had originally agreed.’
He kept his gaze steady. The odds were that Laure and Brotton were both spooks, or on the edge of that world. The British MI6, and most other countries, embedded spies in the embassies.
‘She’s a life-saver here too,’ said David Brotton gallantly. ‘The best cultural attaché I’ve ever had.’
A couple of girls were circulating with trays of drinks. They were dressed in tight black dresses and frilly aprons and were being masterminded by a man in a shiny suit. Laure accepted a drink from one of them. ‘Those dresses look uncomfortable,’ she said.
‘I think our hosts wanted their Western guests to feel at home.’
David Brotton laughed. ‘And we do.’ He glanced at them both. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’
Left alone, Petr and Laure took their time to begin. Eventually, she drank a mouthful of the passable gin and tonic and said, ‘Bonjour, Petr.’
‘“The best cultural attaché I’ve ever had”?’
‘You wouldn’t believe,’ she said, composed and professional, only her eyes betraying any emotion.
As ever, they spoke in French.
‘What are you doing in Berlin?’
‘I’m here at the invitation of my friend Herman Ludz. He is working for a big pharma firm in which I have an interest.’
Laure glanced in the direction of a chunky balding man, wearing a purple tie, surrounded by acolytes. ‘Ex-Stasi,’ she said. ‘But you’ll know that.’ She allowed a second to elapse. ‘I wouldn’t expect anything other.’
‘We all have histories,’ he replied.
She acknowledged the point with a nod. ‘Isn’t it odd how history is not concerned with justice? Many of the ex-Stasi have got themselves very good jobs. Marketing. Insurance.’
‘Is that so very odd? Those jobs need organized people. And administrators. Who else? They’re lucky to have a trained cadre to step in.’
‘You always were a practical person.’ She sounded very dry.
‘Should I take that as a compliment?’
‘Take it how you wish but I expect it’s how you manage to live with yourself.’
He had not expected a direct challenge, or the underlying aggression, quite so soon. ‘I expect it is.’
Laure appeared to recollect her manners. ‘And Eva? And the children?’
‘Eva’s dead.’
He could never say it easily. Contained in the words were guilt and rage for the marriage which had promised so much. Suddenly, he felt he could not bear to be in this room, at this reception. Or, at this point in his life.
‘Dead…?’ Shock made her stutter.
‘Soon after you went back home.’
The cool manner cracked. ‘My God, the poor children. I’m so sorry. So sorry.’
He had schooled himself to be matter-of-fact. ‘The children suffered. Of course. But they’re grown now. Jan is training to be a lawyer in Pragu
e and Maria is at university in Paris.’
‘Do you have a photo?’
Petr took his wallet out of his pocket and flipped it open to show a photo of his son and daughter.
‘Curious isn’t it? At one time, I was familiar with their every breath. Now, I wouldn’t recognize them. But they are good-looking.’ She touched their faces with a fingertip. ‘Are you living in Berlin?’
There it was: the innocent, polite question which was almost certainly being asked all over the room. The technique was to release just so much information and nothing more. ‘I’m here on business. Then back to Prague.’
Ploughing grimly on with her job, the waitress with the reddest lipstick and lowest neckline nudged Petr’s elbow with a tray of drinks. Laure declined but Petr helped himself to a fresh one.
‘It’s a coincidence that we’ve met.’ He was wrong. There had been an inevitability about meeting Laure. There had to be. ‘Perhaps we could have a drink?’
She was now in possession of herself. ‘What on earth would make you think that I wish to see you?’
‘The past.’
‘No.’
Flat. Non-negotiable. ‘I was… fond of you, Laure. It was, as you must admit, an impossible situation.’
‘Whatever you may think, there’s nothing to connect us any longer.’
‘But there is,’ he said.
He had caught her off guard and, for a second, there was a glimpse of the young Laure who had enchanted him. ‘There isn’t, Petr. But I will grieve for Eva. She did not have it easy and I’m glad to know the children are thriving.’
He searched the beautiful but, as he now saw, haunted face, and regretted the loss of its openness. ‘It is the past.’
‘It will never be the past,’ she replied with a ferocity that took him aback.
‘So, no forgiveness for either of us?’
Laure pulled herself back into her embassy persona. ‘Does forgiveness matter? It would make it easier for you perhaps. As for me, a psychotherapist or a priest would advise me that to forgive is the best thing for mental health. Let alone the spirit.’ She looked away. ‘For all sorts of reasons, I had a go at it. But I can’t.’
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 17