by David Thomas
And then Karin Martz showed us what to me was the most appalling torture of all, the purest distillation of East German evil.
It began with another steel door and another cell. Two buckets, one somewhat deeper than the other, were suspended on chains from the ceiling, directly above one another, about a metre apart. Three wooden rails ran horizontally across the cell, one above the other, just behind the buckets. Two more rails were arranged a few centimetres above the ground, one behind the other.
‘Can anyone guess the purpose of this unusual arrangement?’ asked Martz.
‘Did it have something to do with water, perhaps?’ asked one of the party.
‘Yes,’ Martz agreed. ‘Something to do with water.’
‘Perhaps the prisoners were forced to drink from the buckets … like animals,’ another suggested.
‘They were treated worse than any animal,’ said Martz, matter-of-factly. ‘So, can anyone tell me?’
We stood there dumbly, unable to come up with any better ideas. Perhaps that was just as well.
‘It worked as follows,’ Martz said. ‘The prisoners were taken behind the rails, then bent double, between the top two rails, and secured so that they could not move. Their face was directly above the lower bucket, which was filled with water. They therefore had to hold their head out in front of them, or their face would drop into the bucket and they would drown. But this meant that the top of their head was directly underneath a hole in the bottom of the other bucket, which was also filled with water. So the water would drip down onto them – the famous Chinese water torture. At first this would just be a little irritating. But as time went on, hour after hour, each drop became an agony. Their body would be screaming for relief from the strain of being bent over. All they would know was pure, all-consuming pain. And the only movement of any kind available to them would be the blessed relief of lowering their head … in which case they would drown.’
One of the women in the group started crying. ‘Please,’ she begged her husband, ‘take me away from here. I can’t stand any more of this.’
He put a protective arm round her, ‘Of course, my dear,’ he murmured. ‘Right away. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.’
Then he glared at Martz and almost shouted, ‘Look what you’ve done to her! How can you force us to see this brutality … this inhumanity? Shame on you!’
The rest of us stood in an embarrassed silence, shocked by the accusation, but unable to do anything to counter it. Finally, when the couple had made their way out of the corridor, towards the steps that would lead back to the normal, safe world of twenty-first-century Berlin, I broke the silence. Being British, of course, the first thing I did was apologize.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to Martz. ‘I’m sure we all know that it’s not your fault … I mean, you did not intend to upset that poor woman.’
Martz looked at me with a strange, quizzical half-smile on her face. ‘Are you sure? In truth, I am happier when this place does that to people. It shows that they understand what it really means. It is the people who can walk through this hellhole without being touched, and then go away to have beer and pizzas without a second thought … they are the ones I despise.’
The tour continued for a little while longer: more corridors, more cells, more misery. As we finally left the U-boat and stepped back out into the open air, a voice piped up, ‘Please excuse me for asking, Frau Martz, but how do you live with all this? I shall never forget this day. How do you forget five years?’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘When I go to sleep, I still have nightmares. Sometimes my husband has to wake me, just to silence my screaming. In my apartment there are no curtains on the windows, no doors anywhere except the front door and the lavatory. This is quite common, you know, among former prisoners. We have to have light. We cannot bear to be closed in. We have to live every day with what was done to us, and what makes it worse is that the men who abused us have never been punished in any way. So the only thing we can do is to work here, as guides to our own misery. It is an act of remembering. We want people to understand what was done here. We want them to be vigilant so that it can never be done again.’
And so the tour came to an end. The other members of the group said goodbye to Karin Martz, each trying to find the right words to convey their gratitude for the tour and their sympathy for what she had endured. I hung back till they had all dispersed and said, ‘Frau Martz, may I ask you one last question?’
She smiled: ‘Of course: what would you like to know?’
‘Well, my wife is German, born here in the East. I think her parents may have been here, some time in the eighties. It seems likely they were arrested as political prisoners in Berlin, so I imagine they came here. I know it sounds crazy, but I don’t know their names, not what they were called then, anyway. Her mother is now called Bettina König. My wife is called Mariana. She was Mariana Slavik before we were married.’
Martz sighed, ‘I am sorry, Herr Crookham, but I cannot help you. There were so many of us, over so many years. And of course you do not know these people’s names, for we had no names. We were crossed out, erased. To be honest, even now it is sometimes all I can do to remember who I am, or even to accept that I exist as a human being. So your wife really has no parents. She is a child of the nameless, a child of numbers …’
As I walked back through the gates of Hohenshönhausen I hoped to God that Karin Martz was wrong. I flagged down a cab and gave the driver the address of Haller’s office. When I got there, I hoped, the ghost of Bettina König would be replaced by the truth about a real, flesh-and-blood woman.
39
Haller was dead.
Just before five o’clock I pressed on the buzzer outside the front door of his office building, expecting to hear Kamile’s ever-cheerful greeting, only to be met by total silence. Two more rings later a sobbing, barely comprehensible voice told me the office was closed and only relented after I explained who I was and why I was there.
A Kamile I hardly recognized met me on the second floor. Her eyes were puffy and red, her cheeks streaked with mascara-stained tears, her nose sniffling.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, as if the answer wasn’t blindingly obvious. And then, without waiting for a reply, ‘What’s the matter?’
That’s when she told me about Haller. As we went into the office, where a couple more of the agency’s staff were trying to answer a clamour of phones through their own tears and stunned disbelief, she explained what had happened. ‘He was coming back from the meeting on the A9, the autobahn. He’d called me … It must have been just a few minutes earlier … He was sounding very cheerful. He wanted me to tell you that he had some fantastic information.’
‘Did he say what it was? Anything at all about Frau König?’
‘No … He doesn’t like …’ Kamile stopped and with a conscious effort corrected herself … ‘Didn’t like discussing anything important on a cellphone. He had intercepted too many calls himself. He knew how easy it was. That is probably why he did not call you.’
‘So then what happened?’
‘It seems he … he smashed into the back of a truck. The police say he must have lost control. He was going quite fast, about two hundred kilometres an hour. But that was how Haller always drove. He had been trained as a police driver himself, so he knew what he was doing.’
‘Do the police know what happened – why he lost control?’
‘I don’t think so. From what I could understand, the road conditions were not dangerous, there was not too much traffic on the road … and where it happened, the road was straight.’
‘And he wasn’t drunk or anything?’
Kamile looked shocked. ‘Mr Haller would never, ever drive when he was drunk. He was a good man …’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just … there has to be an explanation.’
‘The police will investigate and they will find out,’ Kamile said, pulling herself together. ‘Exc
use me for one moment, please …’
She went away to help a colleague who’d been waving at her frantically. I was left trying to come to terms with the shock of another sudden, totally unexpected death. In all my life, I’d never known anyone die violently. Now it had happened twice in a week. It made me feel as though I was bringing death with me wherever I went, like the carrier of a fatal virus.
The phone on the reception desk had started ringing again. Kamile looked at it for a moment, then turned back to what she was doing, evidently believing it to be the more important priority. Eventually the voicemail must have cut in because the phone fell silent. Seconds later, it started again and was once more ignored.
I was about to leave, trying to find the right moment to say goodbye to Kamile. The phone started trilling a third time. There was something insistent about it that made me feel as though this was the same person trying again and again to get through, rather than a random series of callers. No one else was going to pick it up, so maybe I should, if only to take a message.
‘Hello?’ I said, sounding very English, not thinking to use the German, ‘Hallo.’
‘Mr Crookham? Am I speaking to Peter Crookham?’
It was a woman’s voice, German, but clearly very comfortable speaking in English.
‘Yes,’ I replied, a little hesitantly, wondering how on earth she could possibly have known it was me.
‘Good … Now, please listen to me very carefully. My name is Gerber. I am an agent of the federal government. You are in great danger. At all costs, do not leave the Xenon Detektivbüro office. One of my colleagues will come and escort you from the building. Go with him. He will make sure you are safe.’
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘We have reason to believe that Herr Haller’s death was not an accident. You too may now be a target. Please, stay precisely where you are.’
The line went dead. I was left standing beside the desk as Kamile came back to the reception area and asked, ‘Did you answer the telephone? Who was calling, please?’
‘It was for me,’ I said. ‘A woman … she said that Mr Haller’s death was not an accident …’
Kamile gasped and held her hands to her mouth.
‘She also said I was in danger.’
She lowered her hands. ‘How is this possible?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘I think so, yes – I don’t know. She said I had to stay here. Someone would be coming here, to escort me to safety.’
‘But what does she mean? Who would want to … to kill Herr Haller? He was such a kind man … And you – I don’t understand.’
She looked as though she were about to faint.
‘Here, sit down,’ I said, guiding her to her chair behind the reception desk. I’ll get you a glass of water.’
‘No, thank you … it’s all right. I will be fine. What are you going to do?’
‘I want to get a look at the street, see if there’s anyone out there waiting for me. Where is the nearest window?’
‘There,’ Kamile said, pointing at an office door. ‘In the meeting room.’
I walked across to the door. It led into a room in which half-a-dozen chairs were arranged round a long table with a grey laminate top. At the right-hand end of the table a projector was suspended from the ceiling, facing a whiteboard on the wall to my left. Beyond the table two windows were covered with slatted fabric blinds. I went round to one of the windows, opened the blinds a fraction and peered out.
The street outside looked completely normal. I tried to remember whether any of the cars parked across the way had not been there when I arrived. There was a pale-blue Ford Mondeo that I couldn’t recall seeing before. From where I stood it was impossible to see if there was anyone in it. A few people were walking up and down the road: a mother with her two small children; a couple of teenagers, too busy smooching to pay any attention to the world around them; a stocky, red-faced man in a bulging hoodie. None of them looked as if they were about to kill me. But that probably wasn’t the kind of thing you advertised.
Behind me I heard the sound of a door buzzing and the click as it was opened. Two voices spoke, one male, the other female, the words indistinct. Then Kamile appeared at the door to the meeting room.
‘There is a man here for you,’ she said.
I nodded in acknowledgement. I walked out of the meeting room, into the reception area.
And there, not ten feet away from me, was Mr Weiss.
40
He looked exactly the same as he had done at the funeral. His coat was as immaculate now as it had been then. His blond hair was entirely unruffled. Only his tie had changed: a dark red replacing the black of mourning.
His hand reached inside his jacket. Cursing myself for being such a gullible fool, I waited for the gun that would blow me away.
Instead Weiss got out an identity card and held it up, facing me. In the few seconds I had to examine it, I couldn’t make out the name of the agency for which he worked – even by German standards the words were unusually unintelligible – but the eagle logo of the German state and horizontal black, red and yellow stripes of its flag were plain enough.
‘I work with Agent Gerber,’ he said. ‘I have been asked to apologize to you for any alarm she may have caused, but also to assure you that the danger you face is very real. Please come with me. Immediately.’
For a moment more I stood there, dumb and indecisive. Then Kamile sniffed back her tears and said, ‘You should go. But wait one second …’
Weiss grimaced impatiently, itching to be off, while Kamile darted behind her reception desk, rummaged in a drawer and then handed me a business card. ‘If you need to call me about Haller,’ she said. ‘Or if you need help.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the card and shoving it in a trouser pocket.
‘Now we go,’ Weiss snapped, and I followed him out of the office. When we reached the landing he ignored the lift, but opened a side-door onto the emergency staircase.
‘Go up!’ he hissed in a harsh, urgent whisper. ‘Fast! I will follow you.’
I started running up the stairs in front of me. As I rounded a corner between one flight and the next I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Weiss behind me. He was looking back down the stairwell and this time he did have a gun in his hand. For the first time, the seriousness of my situation became real to me. Weiss wasn’t fooling. He really thought there would be someone after us. And if he was armed, the chances were that they would be, too. I felt the skin on my back prickle in horrible anticipation of the bullets that might soon be ripping into me.
He glanced back up at me and gestured angrily upwards: ‘Don’t stop!’
I ran again, sprinting up the stairs with frantic urgency. At the top of the stairwell there was a fire door. I slammed the metal bar down and felt a blast of icy air as it opened onto a walkway that ran along a narrow strip of flat roof, the tiles dropping away sharply on either side. The building was shaped like a hollow square with a courtyard in the middle, as were those on either side. We were on the side of the square nearest to the road.
Down below, three men ran into the courtyard. One of them looked up, caught sight of us and pointed upwards. The middle of the trio barked orders and the first man ran towards the ground-floor entrance of the building we’d been in, while the other two ran back out of the courtyard into the street.
‘Scheisse!’ Weiss swore as he glared down at the courtyard then started speaking rapidly in short, decisive sentences, his German too fast for me to be able to translate. I realized he had to be wearing some kind of earpiece communications device. He ran past me and dashed out across the slippery, ice-encrusted walkway, beckoning me to follow.
We were heading towards the scaffolding-covered building next door to Haller’s office. From the roof I could see that it had been weatherproofed, with plastic sheeting rising up the full height of the front and rear elevations and over the roo
f between them. There was just enough open space, though, for us to be able to duck under the plastic. Beyond us stretched another walkway and we made our way along it, heads bent and shoulders hunched beneath the plastic covering. The roof was bare of its tiles, leaving an open wooden ribcage of joists with nothing between them but air. Down below, the floors and ceilings had been stripped away, with only a few paths of loose planking left over the beams and floor joists to allow the builders to get around.
I tried not to look down at the dizzying, vertiginous drop, telling myself that I had spent my whole working life walking round half-finished buildings. This wasn’t any different.
Weiss seemed indifferent to his surroundings, moving at a brisk, simian trot, his gun held out ahead of him, occasionally glancing round to check on my progress or peering over the edge of the roof to look out for any threat below. Somewhere down below us a light had been rigged, casting a spectral glow around the interior of the building and throwing grotesque, elongated shadows of our bodies across the plastic above our heads.
We reached the door at the far end of the roof that led to this building’s emergency stairs. It was unlocked, and opened at Weiss’s push. The stairwell itself seemed untouched by the renovations, with walls and steps of chipped and flaking painted concrete and a bare steel handrail. He started running downstairs, two or even three steps at a time, at a worryingly ankle-twisting, neck-breaking pace, then stopped on a small landing opposite a door onto one of the vacant floors and craned his head forward, listening for sounds of pursuit like a hunting dog sniffing the wind. There were none, so down we went again, grabbing the handrail for dear life as we leapt the last half-dozen steps and swung round, barely touching the ground, to race down the one below.