“Well, now you know the official version. But you may be interested in the report I’ve seen by the border guard. He was thoroughly debriefed and his account seems credible.”
“What does the guard say?” I didn’t want to ask, but it was expected of me. My thoughts were on Sanderling, her initial reluctance to come home, how she’d worried she wouldn’t fit in, that she’d miss the luxuries of living in the West. Despite all that, she’d been willing to return to the East.
Holger turned to flick his cigarette out over the ice. “Seems Sanderling changed her mind about coming home. When it came down to it, she lost her bottle. Your capable operative Sanderling was shot trying to escape to the West.”
43
Building 74
Conference room
We continued the debrief in the conference room. Holger began to ask questions about Sanderling, which made me feel uncomfortable, even though I knew he was merely establishing the facts so he could write up the protocol. The inferences and insinuations would happen further up the chain—whatever had actually happened on the border, the narrative was already being established, and it was obvious to me that Sanderling’s career would be over.
“Why did the BGS set off a flare?” asked Holger as I was nearing the end of my account.
“As far as I could tell, it was spontaneous, a response learnt in training,” I shrugged. “Incident at border; release flare.”
“Could the flare have been set off to guide Sanderling back to the West?”
I had to think about that. Had Sanderling already been shot by then? I wasn’t sure. In my memory, the rifle shot and the flare had happened simultaneously. But one thing I was certain about, there had been no contact between Sanderling and the West German border police. There had been no opportunity to get in touch with them before we arrived at the border. And that’s what I told Holger.
“The Alouette II helicopter,” Holger changed tack. “Did that arrive as a result of the flare, or because of a radio message?”
“I don’t know. I was concentrating on the BGS officer standing near me, he was right next to the ditch that marked the border and was talking to me, trying to get me to cross back to the West.”
“But he didn’t speak to Sanderling?” Holger looked up from his notes long enough to see me shake my head then checked his wristwatch. “Why don’t we go for some lunch?”
Lunch, in Holger’s book, seemed to start with another cigarette on the banks of the Oder-Spree Canal.
“You want to think about the sequence of events again?” he asked once he’d got his cigarette going.
“Holger, I’m tired. My back aches, my ribs stick into my lungs whenever I breathe in too deeply and my head feels like it’s been field-stripped and reassembled in the wrong order. Just tell me what you want.”
“The border guard discharged his rifle twice. The first shot was fired into the air as a warning. That happened at approximately the same time the flare was set off. Just before flare goes out, our man fires again. Aims for Sanderling’s legs, but somehow hits her below the shoulder. She’s on the ground, in shock, and is recovered by a Border Scout who brings her to the Company Headquarters in Vacha.” He pulled on his cigarette, giving me a moment to think about what he was saying. “See if you can’t remember that second shot, it’d be easier for all of us if you do. That way I’ll be able to put it on file and tie a nice, pretty ribbon around the whole thing.”
And I did remember. Holger was right that there were two shots. Perhaps. The more I thought about it, the more I tried to picture events in my mind, the murkier it all became. No other word for it: murky. Vague shapes in my memory. Outlines of people moving, no perspective or sense of time.
“Let’s get some food, then you can go and see the doc again. But before we go in, I’m going to tell you what to say to the tape machine this afternoon.”
Food was pork goulash in an empty canteen, but I didn’t have much appetite. Holger finished off my bowl for me.
“Am I in isolation?” I asked, looking around the empty tables. Holger didn’t answer, he was slurping my stew.
I watched him finish the dish then get up for some Rote Grütze. He brought me some of the red jelly and I found it easier to swallow than the rich stew.
“Come on,” Holger was looking at his watch again. “let’s finish off your debrief—I promised the doc I wouldn’t keep you too long.”
It was a different doctor this time. A big guy, forearms as wide as my thighs. Instead of a white lab coat, he wore a leather butcher’s apron over a white shirt and uniform trousers.
“Over here,” he ordered, pointing to the examination table with a clipboard.
We did the same stuff as yesterday, torch shining in my eyes, asking me what my birthday was, poking thumbs into my skull to see if there were any soft bits—usual drill.
“Vomiting, tiredness, nausea?” he asked staring at the form on his clipboard.
When I told him I had all of the above, he transferred his attention back to me.
“Problems with memory?”
“Most of yesterday is unclear. A couple of hours are completely gone.”
He scrawled something on his form, then asked me whether there was anything else I wanted to complain about. I didn’t bother answering. The bruising on my chest and legs, the blood in my eye were all obvious. But the doctor merely stared into the middle distance, tapping the clipboard against his leg.
“Right, follow me.”
So I followed him through a door into a smaller room crammed with bulky equipment.
“On that bench, head there.” He positioned my head under a heavy piece of machinery, then pressed a button and went behind a screen.
“OK, wait outside,” he said after the box of tricks had hummed and clanked a bit. I could hear grinding noises.
I went back into the consultation room and waited on the chair for a moment or two before curiosity got the better of me—time for a short walk around the curtain that divided the surgery in half.
Sanderling was still lying there, attached to tubes and drips. Her eyes were open, but the pupils were slack, she wasn’t seeing anything. I picked up the chart hanging at the end of the bed, but didn’t understand much, so put it back and went to her side, bending down to take a closer look at her. Her arm and shoulder were hidden beneath some kind of cage that arched over her chest beneath the sheets.
“Sanderling?” I whispered.
The eyes widened a little, the pupils contracting and expanding, trying to get a fix on me.
“You OK?” It’s just one of those things you say. You have to ask, even though you know it’s a stupid question.
“Dorn?” Sanderling murmured the cover name she knew me by. “HV A watching … Men in the car. In Bonn, HV A …”
“What do you-”
“HV A operation, Bru … Bruno.” Sanderling gripped my hand, her eyes trying to focus on my face.
“Comrade!” Behind me, the doctor’s voice glinted with displeasure. “I asked you to wait, not to harass the patient!”
He held the curtain open, and I took the hint and went back to my chair. I listened out, trying to work out what the doctor was doing behind the curtain, but no sounds came other than the tap-tap-tap of clipboard against leather apron.
With a rustle of fabric, the doctor appeared again. He marched straight past me and back into the equipment room, where the machine was still grinding away.
44
Building 74
Sick bay
It was another twenty minutes before the doctor appeared again, time enough to ponder over Sanderling’s garbled message. The records at the end of her bed said she was on morphine, she must be totally out of it. Anything she said couldn’t be treated as credible.
My own mind was bumping along in a low gear, too. Best thing I could do was to wait until I was feeling better, by which time Sanderling should be off the morphine. Perhaps I’d get a chance to talk to her then.
I was busy congratul
ating myself on my moment of clarity and the resultant plan when the doctor came out of his cubby hole. He had an x-ray with him, and before speaking to me he sat down at his desk, filed the radiograph away in a folder and wrote up a few notes. When he finally turned to me, his swivel chair creaking in protest at the sudden movement.
“You’re very lucky, Comrade,” he told me. “Plenty of rest, take the paracetamol and seek further advice in a few days if you’re still suffering from headaches, nausea or amnesia.”
Effectively dismissed, I found my way back to the common area where we’d eaten. Holger was sitting on a brown corduroy couch, reading a stack of carbon copy sheets and smoking.
“The new Stefan Heym manuscript—a good read, but it’ll never be published,” he said when I came in. “How’s the patient?”
“You should know the patient’s always the last to be told. The doctor didn’t say so in so many words, but I think the prognosis is good. A full life with just a bit of a headache and a hint of a limp.”
“That’s good news. He told me to go easy on you, can’t have you collapsing under interrogation. Anyway, no rush—the brass still haven’t got their collective knickers untwisted yet, it’ll probably take them a while.”
After another brief session in front of the tape recorder, reciting the authorised version of two shots from the East and a flare from the West, I retired to my room, exhausted by the minor exertions of the day. Holger was pleased to be relieved of his babysitting duties and cheerfully gave me a half bottle of vodka and my near-namesake’s manuscript to read.
“That’ll keep you out of mischief,” he smiled. “But don’t let anyone see it—you’d land us in trouble.”
The lights in the room were bright, but I wrapped a handkerchief around my hand and unscrewed a couple of the hot bulbs, leaving the last one in, it gave off a pleasant glow. I sat in the easy chair, with the sheaf of papers on my lap and by the third sentence I could only agree with Holger that this book would never see the light of day.
The narrative consisted of nothing more than malicious agitation. Heym had composed a deliberately politically divisive text, slandering the great achievements of our state and the unwavering support of the fraternal socialist countries and by doing so, he confirmed himself as a hostile-ideological multiplier.
But the story of how a small part of Thuringia around the town of Schwarzenberg had remained unliberated in 1945—using the opportunity to set up its own Trotskyist structures—was actually quite interesting.
A good read or not, my headache worsened after just ten minutes. For most of the day I’d had a distracting throb between the temples which I’d managed to keep in check with paracetamol, but now it was all about continuous drum rolls behind the forehead. I put the manuscript face-down in a drawer and took a few more tablets.
Then I sat in the half-darkness, my mind returning to Sanderling.
Did morphine make you hallucinate, or just sleepy? How seriously could I take her words? Even if I took what she’d said at face value, she’d only told me that yet another tentacle of our organisation was involved. HV A, the foreign intelligence wing, modelled on the KGB’s First Chief Directorate—proudly independent, almost powerful enough to be beyond the reach of the great spider, General Mielke, who sat at the centre of all our webs.
It didn’t fill me with joy—in my experience nothing positive ever came from interference by HV A. They could never do wrong, and they used every trick in the Stasi playbook to defend their reputation, no matter what the cost to other departments or the organisation as a whole.
But I wasn’t particularly worried, I even closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep. Looking back, benefiting from hindsight, I put my relaxed attitude down to the knock on the head I’d received from the goons down in Saalfeld. I obviously wasn’t thinking straight.
45
Building 74
Reim’s room
“Reim, are you awake?”
If someone is lying on their bed with their head under the pillow, they’re either asleep or want to let everyone know that they wish they were still asleep.
I pulled my head out and tried to glare at Holger, but he was too busy waving a dispatch to pay any attention.
“Word from Major Kühn, I’ve got the go-ahead to debrief you on your stay in Saalfeld,” he announced, waving the flimsy again, just in case I’d missed the significance.
“And that gets you excited because …?”
But Holger was now in the doorway, waiting for me to get up and to get dressed.
“We could do a quick run-through before breakfast, yes?” he asked, disappearing from sight.
I rubbed my eyes, reached for the bottle of paracetamol and ignored the new shivers of pain that ran the whole way down one leg.
Holger was waiting for me in the conference room on the top floor. He’d thoughtfully brought a cup of mint tea for me, but I reached past it and grabbed his coffee. I took a sip, my stomach didn’t complain.
Standing next to the reel to reel, Holger checked I was ready. I gave him the nod and watched as he depressed the record button. A little red bulb flickered into life and the two big wheels began to whirl.
“Yesterday we covered events up to the point when you crossed the border between the West Germany state of Hessen and District Suhl in the German Democratic Republic. Can you now report on events between being brought through the border defences by a Border Scout and arriving here at Building 74.”
So I gave it to him. All that I could remember, which was actually more than I’d expected. Things were definitely on the up: I had memory of pretty much everything up until Holger’s arrival at the hunting lodge on the edge of Saalfeld. After that, I was a little vague.
We took it slowly, Holger writing notes as I talked. When I’d finished, he stood up, turned off the tape recorder and suggested a cigarette break.
This time I accepted a nail when Holger offered. I took the first inhalation slow and shallow, even though my blood was screaming for a dose of nicotine. I held the smoke in my mouth, waiting for my stomach to revolt, but everything remained calm down there. Another puff. This time holding it in before expelling it into the frigid air.
“This is bloody good,” I told Holger, who was grinning again. “Tell me, why so keen to debrief me about Saalfeld?”
“What happened in West Germany, you were just a bystander. You didn’t kill Bruno, nor did Sanderling or anyone else on her team.” Holger tapped his cigarette, watching the tip flare in the grey light of the winter’s morning. “Saalfeld, on the other hand, somebody must have thought you were responsible, or at least knew something. Somebody was interested in what you did or what you saw around the time of Bruno’s death. And that makes me interested in that somebody.”
He had a point. Why else had I been held in Saalfeld if not to find out what I knew? “So you’re wondering who was responsible for keeping me at the hunting lodge?”
“Aren’t you? Don’t you want to know why you were being held?” Holger used his cigarette to jab the air between us. “And before you ask: no, I don’t know who or why, either. Not yet. I wasn’t told when I came to get you and all I know is that your boss and my boss had an argument and then I was sent to find you. Break the speed limit if it got me there faster, your chief said. So that’s what I did.”
It was colder today, the frost made my eyeballs smart, and I could feel the hairs in my nose turn crinkly. The tips of the fingers of my hand holding the cigarette were cold enough to hurt, but I didn’t mind—it helped take my mind off my ribs and the new aches in my left leg.
“Here, look at this.” Holger pulled the dispatch from his pocket, the same piece of paper he’d been waving at me first thing this morning. “My orders are to spring this on you later, see how you react. You ask me, the bigwigs have got too much time on their hands. I mean, who thinks up tripe like this?”
I put the cigarette in my mouth and took the flimsy, unfolding it so I could read it. There were just two pa
ragraphs: the first authorised Holger to debrief me on events taking place after approximately 0700 hours on Thursday 29th December 1983; the second paragraph was a basic summary of the test results from the packet of burgers that had been analysed by OTS at the local MfS administration in Gera. Bruno’s last meal.
It said the first two burgers in the pack contained over four grammes of thallium salts.
“Thallium? That one of our tricks?” I asked.
“Who knows? Sounds more like something the Friends would get up to. But whoever it was, you were right about Bruno being poisoned.”
We smoked our cigarettes in silence while I thought about thallium. I didn’t know anything about that poison but going by the state of Bruno’s corpse, it wasn’t a pretty way to go. Poor Bruno, he hadn’t deserved that.
“I asked the doc, he said it’s very hard to trace thallium in the body if you don’t know what you’re looking for. The symptoms of thallium poisoning match plenty of other conditions which makes it hard to diagnose. Anyway, I’m freezing my legs off out here,” said Holger after he’d finished his smoke. He turned to walk the couple of paces back to the door of the forestry house.
“Holger, wait. Thanks for the heads up on that.” I nodded at the sheet of paper still in his hand.
“It’s in both our interests to get this cleared up.” Holger lifted his shoulders in a shrug barely visible inside his padded jacket. “It’s only a couple of weeks since you persuaded Kühn that I wasn’t responsible for Bruno’s arrest. Now it’s my turn to make sure you don’t get into shit for Bruno being killed on your watch. One hand washes the other.”
“Cheers, mate.”
Holger had made it sound all very matter of fact, but I was glad it was him doing the debriefing. A less sympathetic interrogator could make the failure of my Bonn mission look deliberate, but Holger was there for me, just like he’d been there for me so often in the past. He’d been a friend even when it had been dangerous to be seen in my company. He’d taken risks when I’d asked him to. Not many people do that, not in our game.
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