The Jewish Candidate

by David Crossland

  There was a pause at the other end. “I’m not hearing them, Frank. Listen, this is good work, but at this point Ben believes …”

  “… what do you believe, Martin?”

  “… Ben and I believe that we need a lot more coverage of the Islamist threat. That should be our focus. And whether Gutman still has a hope in hell. Frankly, we’d like to put the Nazi stuff on the back burner for the time being.”

  “But we’re making progress, Martin! We’re getting closer! If we ease off now we’ll lose it!”

  “Sorry, Frank. The focus has got to be Islamists now.”

  “I had a deal with Beedham. Clinch the scoop, keep my job, remember? You were in the room, Martin. If I’m being pulled off the story, where does that leave me?”

  “I really don’t know, Frank. Take it up with Ben. All I know is that news is news. You’ve got an Islamist terror campaign going on over there, you’re the correspondent on the ground, we need you to cover it. End of story.”

  Boxers was empty, apart from a couple of red-faced regulars playing cards in the corner. Carver lost count of the beers. Moni kept placing fresh ones on his mat. They weren’t working, but he didn’t feel like stopping her. A hint of Rive Gauche caught his nostrils.

  “Frank?”

  Ludmilla sat down next to him and ordered a glass of wine. “Are you OK?”

  He looked at her. “Where did you rush off to? Not into breakfast, are you?”

  “I’m sorry I left. I enjoyed myself. Very much. It’s just …”

  “It’s OK, Ludmilla, no need for explanations. It was fun.”

  “No, I needed to think, Frank. So I thought. I wanted to see you again. I want to get to know you. So I’m here, you see?”

  She put her hand on his arm.

  “I really liked your story on the FNP and the money, Frank. I read it on the website. This money, it’s part of something big, isn’t it? It must be.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Carver.

  “You will investigate further? See where the money went? This must be very bad for the party? You wrote it would pay big fine.”

  “Might get it banned,” said Carver. “But my paper’s losing interest. Ever since the church bombings, they just want stories about Islamists. I don’t even blame them. They’re right! It’s the only obvious angle.” He ordered another beer. “But after everything that’s happened, it’s got personal. I just can’t focus on anything else. Tietjen standing there in Wewelsburg and Stralsund. That South African getting chased to his death by a lynch mob. Me getting punched and knifed. I mean, it’s disgusting. It makes me want to do something, you know? It can’t go on. In this of all countries. And Tietjen’s bloody poll ratings, have you seen them? He’s still going to make it into parliament!”

  “Frank, is there anything I can do to help? I want to help you.”

  She stared at him with her large, brown eyes. “I hate them as much as you. More, maybe. I’m Jewish.”

  “Oh?”

  “My grandparents and my aunt and uncle, they were murdered in Sobibor. In forty-three. My other uncle fought in the Warsaw Uprising. He was killed. “My mother was baby. When they were caught, in apartment, SS man pulled her out of her mother’s hands and gave her to a neighbour who wasn’t Jewish. That was humanity, in those days. My mother’s sister was three. She went into gas.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s not so long ago,” she said. “My mother doesn’t like me being in Germany. I told her I met a man. A good man. Who was fighting Nazis. I told her I would help him.”

  He put his arm around her and kissed her. He felt her tears on his cheek.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Berlin, Friday, August 31

  Carver didn’t know if it was Moscow rules or Hohenschönhausen rules, but it was pretty old-fashioned. The large brown stamped envelope in his letterbox had no sender marked on it. It was thick. At first he was reluctant to open it. Then he remembered Wischnewski. He took a knife, gingerly cut it open and peered inside. No wires. When he held it upside down, a copy of the previous day’s Neues Deutschland fell out. He unfolded it. A postcard showing the Reichstag was hidden inside. On the back was written in printed letters: “Tonight.”

  Carver put the postcard in his kitchen sink and burnt it, as instructed.

  Ludmilla walked in, wearing his dressing gown. “What’s that smoke? What are you doing?”

  “Following the instructions of an old spy.”

  Before Carver left Wischnewski’s flat, the Stasi man gave him the name and address of a place where he would provide him with information if and when he got any. The standard meeting time would always be 7.45 p.m. He would send him a note when he wanted to meet. Carver agreed, a little bemused. Wischnewski had a healthy distrust of phones.

  “An old spy?” Ludmilla asked.

  “After I got attacked, I asked a former Stasi officer I know to watch my back,” he explained. “He wants to meet me. In a bloody cemetery, would you believe it? Tonight. As if Starbucks wouldn’t do. Seems old habits die hard.”

  “Is that safe? What cemetery?”

  “The place where Bertolt Brecht is buried. Chausseestrasse. After dark.”

  “Are you going alone?”

  “You bet. If I show up with anyone else he will vanish into the bushes.”

  She walked over him and embraced him. “Be very careful.” The feeling of her body against his made him hard again.

  Carver left his flat and walked along the jeweller’s shops, fashion boutiques and cafes of Kurfürstendamm, western Berlin’s most famous boulevard, occasionally looking round. He didn’t notice anyone, but he wasn’t versed in the arts of detecting discreet surveillance. He turned left into a less salubrious area of sex shops and burger bars and reached Bahnhof Zoo. Once West Berlin’s main hub, it was now relegated to a local train station, and resented its decline. This grimy, half-deserted terminus used to be a gateway to liberty, via transit trains that hurtled through East German territory – without stopping, of course.

  Bahnhof Zoo’s decline mirrored that of the western part of the city since unification. Neglected, out-of-date, uncool. Carver stepped on an S-Bahn local train. The doors slid shut. He looked around to check for Russian hitmen or neo-Nazis. When he had counted eight possibles, he gave up and smiled to himself. At Tiergarten station, a couple of Romani musicians got in and performed Sinatra’s “My Way” with an accordion and a trumpet. He gave them two euros. The sight of the entire carriage wincing was worth it. He got out at Friedrichstrasse station, ran down the steps and took a taxi to Alexanderplatz. From there, he took a tram to Oranienburger Strasse, where young Easyjet tourists were out in force, thronging bars and restaurants. In the early 1990s, this part of eastern Berlin was trendy because of its run-down, earthy charm, with weeds growing out of the dilapidated turn-of-the-century facades and rickety tables and chairs placed on the cracked pavements. Visitors flocked here to catch the unique atmosphere of a city savouring its new freedom with a vengeance. But now, inevitably, those facades had been refurbished and were looking clean and smooth. The grungy, fly-by-night cafes had been replaced by upmarket yuppie cocktail joints with comfortable leather sofas. As Carver walked past, he was glad to have seen this place just after the Wall came down. He suspected then that its peculiar appeal would be transient, and he was right. But the city still had plenty of other edgy, up-and-coming districts where people could revel in the rough urban chic that Berlin had made its trademark.

  He decided he had done his best to shake off any pursuer and turned right down Chausseestrasse, past a line of ugly grey apartment buildings. The meeting place was in Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, one of Berlin’s most famous cemeteries. He stepped through the entrance into a high-walled island of calm. There was just enough light under the gloom of the thick trees to make out that this graveyard had been a battlefield in the Soviet advance on Berlin. Many of the headstones and elegant, pillared tombs were chipped by gunfire.

  The place
was empty, as far as he could tell, apart from a black cat slinking between the graves. Wischnewski told him to make for the statue of Martin Luther. He would be waiting in front of a large grey mausoleum next to it, the tomb of a family named Stargardt.

  The cemetery was large and criss-crossed with narrow paths, and Carver got lost, heading the wrong way down an avenue lined with beech trees. He arrived at the meeting place three minutes late.

  There was Luther, looking stern as ever and clutching his bible. The Stargardt tomb, behind the statue, looked like a bunker. Its side was pockmarked by hundreds of holes from bullets and grenade splinters. Judging by the intensity of the fire that had been directed at it, the tomb had been used as a refuge in the final days of the war – Red Army soldiers, maybe, sheltering from German guns on their advance to the Reich chancellery a mile away. Or SS troops making a last stand. It was fast getting dark now. Wischnewski was nowhere to be seen. Carver sighed. Was he a stickler for punctuality? Probably. Would he have to go home and wait for another copy of Neues Deutschland? He began pacing up and down in front of the tomb. The cat sidled up to him and rubbed against his legs, purring. He knelt down to stroke it. It flinched and darted off. Carver looked round but saw nothing. It had been 15 minutes now. Wischnewski wasn’t going to show up. He was about to leave when something caught his eye. One of the two leaves of the black, cast iron door to the tomb wasn’t completely closed. He stepped over the low iron chain surrounding the mausoleum and pushed at the door. The leaf gave way with a loud scrape. Carver stared inside. The outlines of two coffins emerged in the darkness. He got out his mobile phone and pushed a button to light up the screen. His adrenalin surged. There was a figure on the floor between the coffins, its head towards the far wall. He stepped into the tomb. The air smelt of mould and shit. He squeezed himself around the side of a coffin and knelt down. By the blue light from his phone, he could see that the back of the head had been smashed in so hard that a chunk of skull was protruding amid the mass of torn skin and blood. Clenching his jaw, Carver lay down on his side, crouched down between the coffins and lowered his head until he was inches away from the face. He lit up his phone screen. Wischnewski’s face stared back at him, a look of terror in his wide-open eyes. Carver pulled away, banging his head against a coffin. His grabbed the dusty lid to steady himself and stood up. His heart pounded. There was a noise outside. A footstep on the gravel. Just one step, then nothing. He was certain of it. He strained his ears and took deep, silent breaths. A tram screeched past in the distance. He crept back to the door and peered out. It was raining. He stepped out and made for the path. Something tripped him and sent him crashing to the ground. He turned and braced himself for an attack, but saw nothing, apart from angry clouds racing across the sky, lit orange by the lights of the city. He saw what had felled him – the low chain surrounding the mausoleum. He got to his feet and hurried along the path. After a minute, he passed a line of tall tombs he hadn’t noticed on his way in. He was lost again. He stopped and heard a footstep behind him. Somewhere to his left, he heard the whine of a stopping tram. Chausseestrasse. He darted off the path towards the noise, trampled over wreaths and an ivy-covered grave and hurled himself through a hedge of bushes. There was a violent rustling behind him. He ran on, clambered across another tomb and squeezed himself between two headstones. Finally he reached a clearing and saw the lights of the street. The wrought-iron gate was just 20 metres away. His heart sank. It was shut. He slammed into it but it was padlocked. He looked around but saw nothing moving in the darkness. The light in the caretaker’s hut was off. He spotted a plastic rubbish bin by the wall, climbed onto it, grabbed the top of the wall, leapt and pulled himself up with all his strength, expecting a hand to grab his ankle at any moment. He swung round and lowered himself onto the street, jumping the last metre and falling to the ground in front of a young couple. The girl screamed and said something in Italian. They rushed past. Carver got to his feet. In the streetlight he saw that his right sleeve was covered in Wischnewski’s blood. He scanned the wall and the entrance. There was no one to be seen. There was nothing for it. He had to call the police. He crossed the street and sat by the well-lit tram stop, shaking and waiting for the siren. He had led a man to his death.

  Carver spent the rest of the evening being interviewed by police, first at the scene of the murder and then at the labyrinthine police station in Kruppstrasse. He told them about his suspicion that he was being hounded by neo-Nazis after writing a negative story about them, and how Wischnewski had agreed to help him. But he kept quiet about his investigation into a plot to kill Gutman. He and Renner had no evidence of that yet. And after the Nuremberg grenade attack and all the terrorist threats, the police were well aware that the candidate was at risk.

  At 1 a.m., he signed his statement and was free to go. “In future, come to us if you have been attacked, Herr Carver,” said the senior detective who was the last to interview him. “There is no need to involve former agents of the Stasi.”

  The taxi dropped him off at Ludmilla’s flat. She didn’t answer the buzzer. He called her mobile. “It’s me. Can I come up?”

  He vaulted up the stairs two at a time. She waited at her door in a silk dressing gown. He pushed past her and slammed the door shut. “Frank! What’s going on? Are you OK?”

  They stood in her hall. He grabbed her by the shoulders. She looked scared.

  “Ludmilla.” He stared into her eyes, pausing to catch his breath. “Did you tell anyone about where I was going tonight?”

  “No! Frank, no! What …”

  “The man I was due to meet is dead. Someone killed him before I got there. Smashed his head in. Ludmilla, I’ve got to know, did you breathe a word of this to anyone?”

  She shook herself free of him. “NO, Frank! I would never do that! What do you think of me?”

  “Then someone must have followed him. But … that’s hard to believe.” He turned and opened the door.

  “Wait, Frank! You must be in danger! Stay here! Don’t you trust me? Frank!”

  He stopped on the stairs and looked at her.

  “Frank, what is going on? Please!”

  He said nothing. After a few seconds, he turned away and hurried down.

  Berlin, SPD Party Headquarters

  Gutman tore up the fourth draft of the keynote speech that was to relaunch his campaign. Becker was out of suggestions, and gazed down at Wilhelmstrasse, lost in thought. The candidate looked across the desk at Heise and spotted the first hint of resignation in the old campaigner’s face. Heise was a pillar. If Heise started doubting his chances, he was in trouble.

  He slammed both fists on the desk. “NO! We’ve come too far to let a bunch of Jihadists take this away from us, Bruno. Don’t you give up on me!”

  “It’s the momentum of the fall, that’s what’s getting to me,” said Heise.

  Gutman’s party trailed Chancellor Müller’s conservatives by seven points, and the FNP, unbelievably, was holding its ground at 10 percent. Hermann von Tietjen, though discredited by Wewelsburg, did a skilful job milking the public panic following the church bombs, and scored points with his anti-Muslim rhetoric. “We need an uprising of upstanding Germans against the scourge of Islam. We owe it to our children,” he said in a party political broadcast transmitted on national television that evening, interspersed with scenes showing unfeasibly blond children running along a beach, putting their hand up in a classroom and playing football. “We need a crusade against the terrorists hiding in our society, fed and educated at the German taxpayer’s expense.”

  Chancellor Müller, alarmed at Tietjen’s continued popularity, had shifted to the right herself, announcing a radical package of anti-terrorism laws that included requiring all mosques to install CCTV cameras, and calling on the Muslim community to “start cooperating more effectively with authorities to identify potential terrorists.” She even declared that “mosques should not be built higher than churches in our cities.”

  To Gutman’s
outrage, Müller stooped to expressing her concern for his safety, a hypocritical ploy to make herself look caring, strong and authoritative, and him seem vulnerable and foreign. The subtext of her message was: Do Germans really want someone like Gutman as their leader? Surely the country needed a safe pair of hands at a time of crisis. Not someone who had become a source of danger to the Fatherland.

  “Müller’s been doing everything right for a change, maybe that’s because it’s so damned easy for her now,” said Heise. “You’re now seen as both weak and dangerous. It’s not good, Rudi. Not good at all.”

  Gutman was due to hold his next keynote speech in the market square of his constituency Bonn, the former capital. It was billed as his last chance to turn public opinion around.

  Finding the right balance was almost impossible. He had to make strong comments on the Revengers of Allah, but couldn’t allow it to drown out his political message. How could he convince the public that he wasn’t a threat to their safety? The country was close to panic. The church attacks had even sparked calls for a ban on the publication of opinion poll results, lest the Revengers of Allah be provoked by any increase in support for Gutman. Heise rubbed the bags under his eyes. His face was even redder than usual.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” said Gutman. “You’re heading for a heart attack, you know.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try and wait till after the polling stations close.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” They grinned at each other. “I don’t think it matters much what I say anymore,” said Gutman. “The main thing is that I go out there and don’t look like a loser. Let’s hope some huge skeleton topples out of Müller’s cupboard.”

  “You know it won’t,” Heise sighed.

  Carver’s apartment

  Carver woke with jump. He dreamt there was someone in the room watching him. His legs ached with adrenalin. He checked his alarm clock. It was 3.30 a.m. He had lain down in his clothes and only been asleep for half an hour. The picture of Wischnewski’s dead eyes kept flashing into his mind. He realised that a noise had woken him. A dull, low crunch. It wasn’t in the dream. He strained his ears. A floorboard creaked downstairs. He grabbed his mobile phone, swung off the bed and crept out onto the landing. A lone car drove down the street. As it passed, its headlights pierced the darkness of the apartment, slowly travelling across the high ceiling of the staircase and down the wall. He followed the path of the light and froze. The beam reached the head of a masked man standing at the foot of the stairs. The steel blade of a knife glinted in his gloved hand. A second man appeared. They stood motionless for a split second, staring up at him. Then they came crashing up the stairs. Carver leapt into his bedroom. The terrace was the only escape route. He slammed the door, locked it and hauled a chest of drawers in front of it. The plywood started shuddering from kicks. He tore open the terrace door, climbed over a railing and stepped onto the steep gable roof of the next building. The red tiles were wet under his socked feet. Scrambling forward with his legs on either side of the ridge, he reached the end of one roof, then stepped onto another. His only option was to find a skylight or an exit further on. A loud smash and a scraping came from his bedroom. As he crouched down, he lost his footing. His chest heaved with panic. He flailed around with his hands and feet but the grimy tiles were too slippery to hold and he found himself tumbling towards the edge. His legs slipped into the void. He grasped at the metal guttering with both hands and cried out. He dangled off the edge. The cars looked tiny on the street seven floors down. The rim of the gutter cut into his palms. He thrashed around with his legs and strained with all his might to haul himself back up. But his muscles gave way. The sinews were stretched so taut he felt they were about to snap. His toe made contact with a ledge to his right. Mustering up all his courage, he slid his right hand along the guttering. The metal groaned and shook. His foot found the ledge and he put some of his weight on it. His fingers were getting numb. He moved further to the right. Both his feet were on the ledge now. It was about five inches wide. His hands were still clasped to the gutter. His back was arched and aching. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths.