by Henry Porter
‘She was well known among dissidents at the time, although, naturally, no one knew her name. She was quite young then – in her thirties – but she had a reputation among those who were held by the Stasi for unusual cruelty. She came from the Stasi College of Law. Yes, they believed in doing everything legally! Mila Daus rose fast and became a leading expert in Zersetzung, which translates as “decomposition”. They destroyed people’s psychology – what the Party called “hostile and negative aspects of a person’s dispositions and beliefs” – and they did it from the inside of their mind. They gas-lighted them, smashed their dreams and hopes, their faith, their love, their loyalties. The Stasi tunnelled into a person’s soul and hollowed out their being over months and months – maybe years – of twelve-hour interrogations, sleep deprivation, isolation and physical abuse. They turned people’s loved ones and friends against them and spread false rumours about infidelities and their sexuality – sometimes even about paedophilia and bestiality, can you believe? Hundreds of thousands of human spirits were broken in that place, in Hohenschönhausen, and when they were let out, they were shunned.’ She reached for her cigarettes. ‘I will smoke in here, against my own rules!’ she said, breaking off the filter and shaking her head. She lit up, puffed without inhaling. ‘No one was punished for the assault on the psychology of an entire nation. They got away with it.
‘Mila Daus was the worst of them all. She was very beautiful – of an athletic build – and she was highly intelligent. Such blessings, but such profound evil! She could do what she wanted because she got around her bosses. They all wanted to sleep with her, you see. But she had no time for such frivolity. Her life was devoted to the destruction of men and women who defied the State by such crimes as applying for a travel visa, not joining the Party, making a joke about the Party leaders. She kept a close eye on every case and had an incredible memory for the detail of each person’s life. She had a taste for data, and they said that she kept her own files. When a person was broken, she would come to watch the wreckage of a human being in their final interrogations. Sometimes she would recommend another year of punishment to watch as it registered in their faces. She rejoiced in destroying people.’ Ulrike took a last drag and stubbed out the cigarette vehemently. ‘Mila Daus was the person Bobby saw in Berlin, on the thirtieth-anniversary weekend.’
‘What on earth was she doing there? It was surely the last place for a former Stasi officer?’
‘I have to give you some more background. Remember, I told you my husband Rudi was murdered when we returned from Spain.’ He nodded. ‘He was an art historian, a very good one, and we had been to the Prado to view all the paintings that he had studied but never seen. I was pregnant with my son – the handsome man you saw. They attacked our VW camper van as we drove through the Pyrenees. The van crashed and Rudi was killed instantly. I was injured and it looked like I might lose our baby, but I was saved by a farmer and his wife. We were in a deserted part of the mountains – I was lucky the woman knew what she was doing.’
‘Yes, you told me the story a while back.’
‘Did I go into the aftermath?’
‘You said Bobby created a new identity for you and found a place for you and your baby in Berlin.’
‘Bobby also tracked down the man who killed Rudi and, before that, his twin brother in Hohenschönhausen.’
‘I remember your phrase. You said he settled the account.’
‘Yes, Bobby and a man named Cuth Avocet found the three killers and made sure they wouldn’t come after me and Rudi’s baby. Zank died; the other two were incapacitated. I never asked what that meant, but there was never any trouble from them again. That is what settling the account meant.’
‘I met Avocet in London a few days ago.’
‘Bobby loved him, but of course he’s a very dangerous individual, as I expect you saw. They freed me from Hohenschönhausen and later they made sure me and my baby were safe. For that I was very grateful and, in due course, I fell in love with Bobby.’ She looked away, suddenly overcome with grief.
‘Please! If this upsets you . . .’
‘I must continue, because this business is not finished. Bobby is dead before his time.’ She clasped her hands in anguish. ‘I know he would have willed himself to live to see the exhibition, despite the cancer. He would have loved watching people look at the paintings he worked so hard on. He was so looking forward to it, though of course he never admitted that to me.’
‘And Mila Daus?’ prompted Samson gently.
‘Mila Daus organised and inspired the murder of my first husband, and now she has killed my second husband. That’s who Mila Daus is.’
‘Before he died, Bobby wrote “Berlin Blue” as well as his message of love for you on the sketchbook, so he knew it was her.’
‘Did he? I didn’t know her code name.’ She smiled. ‘But then we didn’t know her real name for a long time. Mila Daus was known only as der Teufel von Hohenschönhausen – the devil of Hohenschönhausen, or a much ruder word that you probably know, die Fotze.’ Samson nodded, he did – cunt. ‘But Bobby knew her face because for eighteen months he had searched for her and he’d got hold of several photographs of her from the Stasi archive, but these were group shots and she wasn’t identified on the back. As I say, she was strikingly beautiful, and people recognised her and he established her involvement in the planning of Rudi’s murder. And of course, anyone who had been in Hohenschönhausen knew who she was, but the name eluded him.’
‘Why didn’t you know her name?’
‘She was very clever – she altered the Stasi records so that Mila Daus was described as a social worker. Can you believe that? According to her file, her responsibilities were to help pregnant women who were held by the Stasi and liaise with families of prisoners, giving them psychological support. Investigators overlooked her for a time and, when they finally suspected that her role was much more important, she had vanished – to America, where she married a very, very wealthy man named Heini Muller, a third-generation German, owner of an engineering company. She dry-cleaned her backstory and created a whole new life for herself. But she didn’t sit back and live off Muller’s money. Not Mila Daus! She went to business school, got herself an MBA and created her own data company. Evidently, she understood what was happening in technology in the nineties and the importance of people’s personal information, a lesson she learned in the Stasi. Muller died, leaving a lot of money. His family disputed the will, but she won the court case, and then her career really began to take off because she was very rich as well as being a shrewd investor and businesswoman. She married twice more. The second husband died. His name was Mobius. The third husband is a foot doctor – a podiatrist, I believe it is called. His name is Dr John Gaspar, Italian and German parentage.’
‘Who is Jonathan Mobius?’
‘Her stepson, I believe. Bobby told me she had an affair with the boy, though he’s twenty years younger than her.’
‘What was she doing in Berlin that weekend?’
‘Can you believe it? One of her companies sponsored some kind of an event to do with anniversary of the fall of the Wall. She owns a German company and they gave money and entertained their clients at the Adlon Hotel.’
‘Surely, she might have been recognised a hundred times over that weekend when so many dissidents were celebrating?’
‘In the Adlon? I don’t think so. Those people have probably never been to such a place. Mila was safe, except Bobby saw her, because he was meeting an old source from the East and he wanted to give the man a good dinner. The man was his best agent.’
‘I thought you were.’
‘No, we worked together for a very short time and he didn’t even know my name. I called myself Kafka – very pretentious.’ She smiled at the memory and poured herself another whisky. ‘It helps talking and getting a little bit drunk with you here, Samson. Thank you for coming.’
‘Yes, I do – really!’ She patted his knee, then sat back and toyed with her necklace. ‘Bobby might have forgotten all about Mila Daus, but the man with him knew of her reputation and took photographs with his phone. He checked with the people who had seen her in the prison all those years ago and they all made a positive identification, Bobby showed them to me and of course I knew immediately. Der Teufel von Hohenschönhausen. That was the woman who told me that she would enjoy breaking me and requested Colonel Zank to place me in the U-boat. This was the underground prison, part of the old Nazi building, and it’s where Bobby and Rudi found me, although I cannot remember much of that part.’
‘Do you have those photographs taken in 2019?’
‘Of course. Do you want to see them now?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
She got up and went to detach her phone from a charger. She came back with glasses on the end of her nose, swiping through the album on her phone.
‘You had a long day today,’ said Samson.
‘You’re fishing, Samson.’
‘I suppose I am – yes.’
‘The CIA were here – a stern individual called Toombs. And that man from SIS that Bobby called the Tick, but I can’t remember what his real name is. You know – the man who was shot a little bit in the street outside the club.’
‘A little bit shot – that was Nyman.’
‘What does it mean – Tick?’
‘A tick is an insect that clings to you and sucks your blood.’
‘That makes sense. He insinuated his way into the meeting by telling the CIA that I would not see them without him, which was untrue. When they’d gone, Mr Toombs returned without him. I wanted to be helpful because Denis is so ill and to put that poison in Congress and risk so many lives was a disgusting thing to do. But I didn’t tell them anything about Mila Daus because I felt we should know what was in the book before we did that and I knew you would find it.’ She handed him the phone. ‘This is Mila Daus.’
Samson took the phone. He saw a woman in a dark trouser suit surrounded by four men. She was holding a drink in her left hand and wore a shoulder bag on her right side. The men were gesticulating, laughing, seemingly trying to impress. Her face was still beautiful, though her lips were thin and unexpressive. In the five frames, which he guessed were taken over a period of a minute, her countenance did not vary in the least. She looked towards the camera in the penultimate picture – focused, interested, alert to the possibility of being photographed – but in the last she turned away to show a well-proportioned head and face in profile. In this one, the body language and position of the men relative to her revealed who owned the power in the room. Beyond her group, there were several round tables with guests – mostly men – standing by their seats, waiting for Mila Daus to take hers, no doubt. Two waiters were in the process of closing the double doors to the private party. His clandestine skill had not deserted Harland’s agent: he had done well to get off so many clear shots in such a short time and without changing his position.
‘She has hardly changed,’ said Ulrike. ‘She’s carrying one or two extra kilos around her stomach and hips and her hair is darker, but she is the same woman that I saw in the interrogation room. She didn’t bother to alter her appearance to come to Berlin thirty years later. Such arrogance!’
‘Why did Bobby think she took that risk?’
‘He could only find one answer to that question.’
‘She was seeing her handler from Moscow,’ said Samson.
Ulrike nodded slowly. ‘She’s much too powerful to have a handler but, yes, Bobby thought she was talking to someone. The anniversary was possibly used by the Russians to meet up and see some old faces. Quite an irony, but it would delight them after the humiliation of 9 November 1989. Some sort of closure, perhaps. That’s why she took the risk.’ She picked up the book. ‘May I?’
‘It’s yours now, Ulrike.’
‘No, Bobby would have liked you to have it: his legacy to you, Samson,’ she said with a very slight smile. ‘Shall we look at it together? Why don’t you bring your computer over here and we can research the names together?’
‘That’s going to take some time,’ he said.
‘“I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.”’ She sang the line and glanced at him a little ruefully, as if she really knew she’d had too much to drink. ‘Bob Dylan – “Mr Tambourine” Man. Bobby loved his namesake’s music – we’re going to use him in the service. It’s for our generation, of course,’ she explained. ‘Come over. I want to see what my husband was hiding from me.’
‘It’s a network – Mila Daus’s network. All the people in the Berlin Blue Network,’ he said.
Chapter 23
The Sargasso Sea
Luka drove Anastasia and Naji across the Bulgarian border to Sofia, where they took a plane to Warsaw then to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and just missed a connecting flight to Tallinn. At Naji’s insistence, they kept their distance during the day, but now faced a night in Vilnius airport hotel together before catching the early flight the next day. He had barely spoken to her in the preceding twenty hours and showed no sign of doing so now. When he wasn’t looking into the distance, he had his head in his phone and sat with his legs crossed, one foot jigging. He’d removed himself in the way he did as a boy in the camp on Lesbos where she first came across him. When she’d asked him about his parents, or pointed out the impracticality of his plan to walk across Europe to Germany, he simply shut down.
It was late and the hotel restaurant was closed. She insisted that he needed to eat and went to the bar, where the barman assembled a scratch meal of starters, breads, smoked eel and salmon, which Naji delighted in. She wasn’t going to ask him anything, but as she handed him the Diet Coke she’d brought with her glass of wine from the bar, she said, ‘I want you to know something, Naj. Me and Samson, we think you’re the best. We love you like family. You’re very, very special to us. You know that, don’t you?’
He looked up, tugged the ring pull and grinned awkwardly.
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I know how you feel. I just wanted to make sure that you knew we felt the same way.’ She smiled. ‘In my line of work, I realise life would be a lot easier for everyone if we took our courage in both hands and said the things that we all need to say but don’t know how.’
He nodded. ‘It is the same for me, Anastasia. Of course.’ Then the foot started jigging again and he took rapid sips of Coke. ‘I like eels. They come from the Sargasso Sea, which spins like a black hole, though it isn’t like a black hole because nothing disappears there except eels. That’s where they go to mate and die. Did you know that?’
‘I did. I know two other things about the Sargasso Sea,’ she said. ‘It has very clear water and it spins clockwise.’
‘Not if you are an eel. If you’re an eel, it spins counter-clockwise.’ He caught her puzzled expression and shook his head in exasperation. He took a piece of paper from his backpack and drew a clockwise arrow. ‘Hold the paper above your head against the light. Now you are the eel.’
‘Right, it’s counter-clockwise,’ she said. ‘I knew that!’
He shook his head. ‘You did not.’
She smiled. ‘How do you know about eels?’
‘Ifkar catches eels. He tells me about them. We eat them together. We like to go to catch fish together. It is the activity that I like best in my life to go fishing with my friend and Moon.’
‘He’s a good friend.’
‘Best friend – we saved each other’s life.’ He brought his phone up to his face. Evidently, the conversation was over.
She watched him closely for a few moments, some understanding beginning to dawn. She might have asked the question then, but her own phone sprang into life with a ca
ll from Jim Tulliver, who she had been trying to reach between flights. ‘How is he?’ she asked, getting up to walk away.
‘You talked to the doctor?’
‘I’ve had coverage problems and I’ve been on planes.’
‘They won’t tell me everything, but I know the guy well enough now and he said Denis is not progressing as they would hope.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I think there’re some heart issues and maybe something neurological. I don’t know. I think you should speak with him as soon as—’
‘I will. Have you seen Denis?’
‘Yeah, he looks pretty good, though he’s still in a coma. Talk to the doc. I told him you were in a different time zone. Where are you, by the way?’
‘The Baltic. What about Denis’s business?’
‘All good, no problems that I can see. You know the FBI were really pissed that you skipped the country like that. I mean, really pissed. Reiner called me.’
‘Yeah . . . They’re in Europe. I had Reiner calling the hotel in Athens.’ That seemed a long time ago.
‘And your fan club has been in touch. Warren Speight wants to talk urgently and Marty Reid says he has information. They’ve both been trying to reach you. Reid is on the phone all the time, wanting to know what you’re doing, where you are.’
‘I’m not really interested in Reid. Speight, what did he want?’
‘They’re making some move in Congress. I’ll try to find out more. I’ll talk to the aide again and to Shera Ricard’s people. They’ll know if something is afoot.’
‘Am I hearing this right? Are they thinking of pursuing the investigation of Denis when he’s in a coma, for Christ’s sake?’