by David Thomas
‘Then you may have a long wait. Who can say what the truth ever is?’
We sat in silence for a minute or two and I looked back out of the window until I felt able to start the conversation again. ‘There’s something I don’t quite get. We keep talking about the Stasi like they’re still around. But the Wall came down more than twenty years ago. Who are these people?’
Haller sighed as he collected his thoughts. ‘They are … OK, you have heard, I am sure of Odessa, the organization for former SS officers? Like in the movie, The Odessa Files …’
‘Yes.’
‘Well there are similar organizations for ex-Stasi personnel. They have names like the Insider Committee, or – and this is a kind of sick joke – the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man. In part they are social groups. Men get together and talk about the old days. They tell each other how Germany is going to the dogs, things like that. In part, also, they are political campaigns. These guys want the world to see how great the old communist state was. Many of them still dream that they can make it come back.’
‘Like Nazis trying to bring back the Reich …’
‘Exactly. And also, to be frank, some of these organizations are criminal gangs. They carry out extortion, robbery, acts of violence, just like any other gang.’
So there were East German gangs. Well, that made sense. Weiss had a tough, criminal air about him. ‘And you think one of these gangs is after me?’
‘No, I think that if anyone is after you, it may be one of them. We cannot be sure.’
‘But these guys must all be getting on a bit. I mean, even someone who’d been in their early twenties when the Wall came down would be mid-forties now, and most of them would be older than that.’
Haller crossed an intersection, turning his head from side to side and checking his rear-view mirror as he answered, ‘Sure. However, there are always new recruits – young men who can’t get regular jobs, who want to be part of something, to throw their weight around. There is something we call Ostalgie, which means nostalgia for the East. People forget the bad things: the oppression, the informants, the secret police, the shortages of everything. All they remember is that they had jobs and homes, and everything like schools and healthcare provided for them without having to pay. It’s not hard to persuade such people that you are trying to bring these good things back, even if all you want to bring back is your power.’
Haller was leaning forward now, looking over the steering wheel at the buildings on either side of the street. ‘Excellent!’ he said, with a snappy nod of the head, pulling the car over to the side of the road. ‘So now we arrive. Please remember, I will talk for us both. You stay out of my way.’
‘If you say so …’
‘Ja, I do.’ Haller unclipped his safety belt. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. Then he paused with his hand hovering just above the door handle. He looked at me: ‘Oh, and one other thing … Those Stasi men you think were following you yesterday …’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re not following us today. I was checking all the way.’ Haller grinned. ‘Or they don’t want to be seen, at any rate …’
33
The city was filled with buildings painted in a palette of pale earth tones: sand, ochre, pale dove grey, sage green and dusty brown, with just the occasional flash of a pale dusty pink or blue. Heike Schmidt lived in an old, buttery-yellow apartment house, four storeys tall. The front door was painted a deep claret and opened, unlocked, onto a hall floored in drab grey-green linoleum. Two rows of metal post boxes were set into the wall to the left of the entrance. Haller scanned the nametags beneath each box and said, ‘Top floor. Up we go …’
There was no lift. We made our way up a wooden staircase to the third floor. Haller led the way along the landing till he came to a door. He gave it two sharp raps. The door opened a fraction and I could see a sliver of a thin, brown-eyed female face.
‘Fräulein Schmidt?’
‘Yes?’
Haller held up an ID card in a leather holder. He switched to German: ‘May we come in, please?’
A few seconds went by and then I heard the rattle of a chain and the door opened.
‘Come in,’ said Heike Schmidt.
She can’t have been more than a few months older than Mariana, but her face had an exhausted, grey-skinned pallor and the eyes which observed us with nervy defensiveness were lined and sunken. It wasn’t so different from the way Mariana had looked that day at York Magistrate’s Court, and it made me question for the first time whether that air of devastation and defeat, which had seemed so unlike her, had in fact been the true representation of Mariana’s inner self. Perhaps the only difference was that Heike Schmidt had never been able to construct a lovely shell around her with which to fool the world. The two women certainly looked like casualties of the same psychological assault.
Lost in thought, I was only half-aware of a voice saying, ‘My name is Haller, this is my colleague from England, Mr Crookham.’
‘Crookham …?’
I realized Heike Schmidt was looking at me, expecting an answer. ‘Er, yes …’ I replied. I assumed I was allowed to speak when directly spoken to. Haller did not attempt to stop me, so I continued, hoping that my fumbling German made some kind of sense: ‘You spoke to my brother a few weeks ago, Andrew Crookham.’
Big mistake. Heike Schmidt stiffened. ‘Oh … I …’ she stammered. We’d only got a few feet inside her door. Any second now she was going to shove us back out again.
‘Fräulein Schmidt, we need your help in connection with a serious crime,’ said Haller.
‘I do not understand. Are you police?’
‘No, we are not.’
She frowned: ‘But the woman I spoke to, from your office, she …’
‘She did not say we were the police, I can assure you of that,’ Haller interrupted. ‘I am a private investigator. I am fully licensed and above board.’
Heike Schmidt pursed her lips. She pulled back her bony shoulders and as she stood as tall as she could I realized how intimidating Haller and I must have seemed as we towered over her. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I can’t talk to you.’
Haller attempted to adopt a more ingratiating tone. ‘Please do not be alarmed Miss Schmidt, we just want to ask you a few questions. You are not in any trouble.’
‘I will be, if I answer your questions. Please go … Now!’
Haller turned back to the door, but I stayed where I was. ‘Come on,’ he said to me. ‘You heard Fräulein Schmidt. We must go.’
I took a deep breath, slowly exhaled and as Haller insisted, ‘Come on!’ I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. I held it out to Schmidt and looked her in the eye, desperately trying to make some kind of connection.
‘Miss Schmidt … Do you recognize the girl in this picture?’
She said nothing. But she kept looking at Mariana and I saw her blink a couple of times, as though she were fighting back tears.
‘She is now my wife,’ I said. Haller had stopped quite still and was saying nothing now. ‘I don’t know what her name was when you knew her,’ I went on, ‘but she’s called Mariana Crookham now. And she is in very serious trouble.’
‘In England?’ Schmidt asked.
‘Yes.’
She chewed her lip, curiosity fighting against fear. Curiosity won: ‘What kind of trouble?’
‘She’s accused of murder. And I’m trying to prove her innocence. Was she your friend … when you were little girls?’
Heike Schmidt gave a fractional, barely perceptible nod of her head.
‘Please …’ I implored. ‘I’m sure that I can help her, if only I can find out what happened to her when she was young.’
Schmidt’s eyes widened as the fear took charge. ‘No … no … not that …’
‘Please.’
‘I can’t. They will … It’s impossible.’
‘Is there anything, anything at all you can tell
us. About her father, perhaps?’
‘Her father?’ The words were cackled, almost drowned, in nervous, panicky laughter. ‘There was no father. The place where we met, it wasn’t that school. It was an orphanage.’
34
We spent an hour or so in a nearby cafe while Haller’s staff tracked down the address of an old state-run children’s home near the Grundschule Rudower. Then we set off to find it. I’d always imagined Berlin as a dark, claustrophobic, crowded city, crushed beneath the weight of its history. But as we drove back the way we had come and then headed out into the south-eastern suburbs, much of it was remarkably open. The long, straight roads lined with low-density office and retail developments reminded me of the casual, land-grabbing sprawl of so many American cities.
‘Didn’t I tell you that Berlin was decimated?’ said Haller. ‘In 1939 there were almost four and a half million people in Berlin; by 1945, less than three million. All through the fifties people were walking across from East Berlin to West, then flying out of the city to the Federal Republic. That’s why the commies had to build their Wall. They were running out of people. Even now, it still feels a little empty. Do you know in Paris there are twenty thousand people per square kilometre? In Berlin, just four thousand.’
I grinned. ‘You seem to have all the facts at your fingertips!’
‘Well, facts are my business. Also, I never had a proper education, so now I always want to learn more and more. I love information – like your brother, the journalist, maybe. Was he the same?’
‘Yeah, I’m just discovering the lengths he would go to to get to the bottom of a story. Maybe that’s what killed him …’
‘Hmm …’ murmured Haller as he switched lanes, deftly slipping from one line of traffic to another.
‘What is it?’
‘I think you should learn from his mistakes.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you are like your brother in this way, you are always chasing after a story that is in your head. First you try to find this other person who might have killed your brother, a person that no one believes in but you. Then you decide, no, I accept it was my wife who did this, but she must have a reason. Then you decide what that reason is: her father was in the Stasi and he did terrible things to her, so you try to prove that. But because you start with this story, like a theory you want to prove, you look at the world through a pair of blinkers. You see a man on the train – he must be Stasi also. Another man catches your eye at the Adlon … ach so, more Stasi, sent by your wife’s father, surveilling you. However, what is the first thing that we discover for sure? That your Mariana lived in an orphanage. There was no father in her life. So now, what do we do with your theory?’
‘I see what you mean.’
‘My advice is, don’t think about stories, or theories. Concentrate on facts. OK, so now we are getting close.’
We had driven south through the city. By a mixture of dead reckoning and surreptitious glances at Haller’s satnav I reckoned we were back within a couple of kilometres of his office. The area was dotted with low-rise housing blocks, strung out through the kind of open space that looks far better on planner’s sketches than it ever does in reality. The blocks that faced onto the main roads had shops, bars and cafes on their ground floors. The buildings were interspersed by fields given over to allotments, stripped bare of their plants by the winter, and building sites guarded by chain-link fencing. At one vacant, apparently neglected lot a large poster mounted on a billboard showed a model of the development that might one day be standing there. A florid, prosperous-looking man in late middle age was standing behind the model, looking down on it approvingly. At the bottom of the poster was a company name: Tretow Immobilien GmbH.
The voice from the satnav said, ‘Sie haben Ihr Ziel erreicht.’
We’d arrived. Haller brought the car to a halt and looked at the sign.
‘Thanks a lot, guys,’ he muttered. ‘I guess they don’t need orphanages any more.’
I got out and looked through the fence at the expanse of frosty, barren ground where Mariana had spent her childhood. After the speed with which we’d got to Heike Schmidt and found the name of the orphanage, I’d been lulled into assuming that we’d turn up, find a gloomy, doom-ridden old building and somehow all the questions about Mariana’s past would magically be answered. But all we had now was an emptiness, an absence. It was almost as though the old forces that had once ruled here were covering their tracks, removing the evidence of what they had done. I remembered seeing news reports, soon after the Wall came down, about how Stasi officers had desperately shredded all the documents that could reveal the full extent of their crimes. The orphanage, it seemed, had been shredded as well.
‘Cheer up,’ said Haller. ‘Investigations are not supposed to be easy. Otherwise anyone could do them. However, we can still find out what happened here. All we need are witnesses. Come.’
He drove a little further down the road until we came to a line of shops. There he made his way from one store to another, talking to any customers or staff who looked old enough to have remembered the orphanage. Finally, he struck lucky. We’d gone into a butcher’s, past a placard on the pavement that consisted of a cheery pig holding a blackboard on which were written the bargains of the day. Inside, a small elderly woman was inspecting the sausages arrayed in a chiller cabinet with sharp, magpie eyes. ‘Ha!’ she snorted, after Haller had enquired about the orphanage and its inhabitants. ‘You want Old Fredi. He was the ABV round here.’
‘So where will I find this Fredi?’
‘Is it past midday?’
Haller consulted his watch. ‘Yes, just.’
‘Then he will be at the Kneipe with all his cronies, like he always is, getting drunk and talking about the good old days.’
‘How will I recognize him?’
‘Just ask the barman. He will show you. Everyone knows Old Fredi. They may not like him. But they know him …’
Haller thanked the old woman. As we left the store I asked, ‘What’s an ABV?’
‘Abschnittsbevollmächtigter,’ Haller replied, laughing at the look of bafflement that crossed my face at the tongue-twisting word. ‘It means, literally, someone who has power of attorney over a district. In practice, that ABV was a man officially appointed by the state to observe the people in an area and report antisocial behaviour.’
‘Like an official snoop?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But I thought the Stasi had hundreds of thousands of people snooping for them unofficially.’
‘Yes, they did. But for the Stasi, there was never too much information.’
‘OK … and a Kneipe?’
‘It’s the Berlin term for a bar …’ Haller nodded his head at the door into which he was heading. ‘Like this one.’
35
The French modernist architect Le Corbusier described a house as a machine for living. Well, this Kneipe was a machine for drinking. It had almost no decoration, no homely touches, no attempt whatever to create a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere. It was simply a space with a bar down one side of the room covered in fake wood laminate and provided with a series of pumps for draught beer. A couple of high round tables stood in the middle of the room, ringed by wooden stools. Lower, rectangular tables were placed round the remaining walls. The barman gestured at one of the tables, where three men were sitting. ‘Over there. The one in the brown sweater.’
I had expected a decrepit old geezer. In fact, Old Fredi turned out to be a tough, gnarled, shaven-headed man, who exuded an air of resentful tension like emotional BO.
Haller pulled up a chair, sat down at the table and motioned to me to do the same. Then he put a 100-euro note on the table, slid it towards Old Fredi and said, ‘Can I buy you fellows another drink?’
Fredi looked at him with glowering suspicion: ‘Who’s buying?’
‘Does it matter?’ Haller asked. ‘I’m not a cop, this is nothing official, I was just told you could help
me with a business enquiry.’
‘Who’s the boyfriend?’
‘A business associate.’
I said nothing. From the moment we had stepped into the bar every word had been spoken in German. It was taking my full concentration just to follow what Haller was saying and make sense of the Berliners’ strong accents.
Fredi reached out and slid the note towards himself before shoving it in a trouser pocket. ‘Three more litres of beer, and six double schnapps,’ he said. ‘And some pretzels.’
‘And potato chips,’ said one of the other men at the table.
I saw Haller glance in my direction. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said.
‘Beer for me too,’ Haller said.
I got the round in while Haller began making desultory conversation with Fredi and his drinking pals. It took a few seconds to distribute all the glasses and snacks. Fredi took a good long drink from his beer stein and wiped the foam off his lips. Then he picked up his first glass of schnapps and downed it in one.
When the empty glass had been slammed back down on the table Haller spoke: ‘Tell me about the orphanage.’
‘What orphanage?’ Fredi replied, smirking as though he’d just said something spectacularly clever.
‘The one round the corner,’ said Haller.
‘Oh, that orphanage. It was a building, filled with children … who didn’t have their mummies and daddies, boo-hoo!’
Fredi basked in the supportive laughter of his pals, drank some more, then looked up at Haller and asked, ‘What else do you want to know?’
‘I want to know what happened there that was so bad a woman would not want to talk about it more than twenty years later.’
The men stopped laughing. Fredi narrowed his eyes and said, ‘No, you do not want to know.’
Haller looked right back at him. ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ He placed two more notes on the table. I tried to banish the thought that they’d soon be appearing on my bill.