Baltic Approach

by Max Hertzberg

  The motorway divides near Wittstock, one arm heading up to Rostock, the other funnelling Westerners towards Hamburg via Border Crossing Point Zarrentin.

  Right at the middle of the junction, a high, square tower draped with mirrored windows and cameras keeps an eye on traffic, making sure the Volkswagens, Mercedes and BMWs don’t go the wrong way.

  As we drew near, I looked over my shoulder at the back seat, about to tell Merkur to get out of sight, but he was fast asleep, a patterned fleece blanket drawn up to his chin.

  Merkur snored so sweetly that I didn’t wake him until after Güstrow. When I reached an arm between the front seats to poke him, his snoring turned to grunts and smacking of lips.

  I gave him five minutes, then angled the rear view mirror so I could see what he was doing. He was sitting up, staring out of the window at fields blue with snow drifted against fences and gates. I reached into the bag in the passenger footwell and pulled out a thermos flask.

  “Here, this’ll wake you up,” I told him as I passed it over. He grunted again, but I heard him unscrew the top and pour out some coffee. “I could do with a cup when you’re done.”

  He slurped away and I counted down the kilometres until he poured more coffee into the cup and passed it to me.

  “I want to get in and out of Rostock as quickly and as painlessly as possible,” I told him between sips. “And it’s about time you told me exactly what we’re looking for.” I drained the cup and held it out for Merkur to take. “There’s no-one else here, just us two in this car. Nobody listening in—even if somebody thought to plant a bug, it couldn’t pick up anything over the noise of this engine.” It was true, even though I was keeping within the speed limit, averaging just over 90 kilometres per hour, the pounding of the motor made even conversation difficult.

  When there was still no reply from the back seat, I risked a look over my shoulder. Merkur was fiddling with a slim hardback volume with a yellow cover. I squinted in the mirror, trying to see what he was doing. He turned the book over, I got a good view of it, but the writing wasn’t clear, even accounting for the fact that I was looking at a mirror image. Then I realised: it was a book of Russian fairy tales, just like the one Source Bruno had been reading on the train during his journey back to Bonn a few weeks earlier—perhaps even the same book.

  I checked the road ahead before glancing over my shoulder again, Merkur was using the blade of a penknife to prise a tiny roll of paper from the gap between the spine and the pages. He succeeded in drawing it out, unrolled it and passed it through the seats. Surveying my mirrors for official looking vehicles, I slowed down a little and took the slip of paper from him.

  It was smaller than a postage stamp, fine paper that wouldn’t take up much room when folded or rolled. Opening it up, I saw it was printed with rows of random letters, each one about a millimetre high.

  “A cipher?” I asked.

  “Arno brought it back with him.” Merkur’s voice was scratchy from sleep. “He cached certain material relating to your double agent, and I believe that piece of paper will tell us where to find it.”

  In my surprise, I took my foot off the accelerator. “Bruno was over here collecting evidence against an officer of the MfS?”

  “Keep going, don’t stop!” Merkur snapped. I put my foot down again and passed the encrypted message back.

  “Let me get this straight—while he was pretending to defect, your Arno Seiffert was actually spying?”

  “You want this evidence as much as I do. Let’s find it so we can return to Berlin—in and out, just as you said.”

  I wasn’t happy. Every time Merkur changed his story, I had to rethink everything, decide whether and how much I could trust whatever it was he’d just revealed.

  So Bruno hadn’t come here to offer us his services, he’d actually been doing something else. When I’d been assigned his case last December, I’d read and re-read his file, then I’d spoken to field operatives who’d had operational contact with him, but there was nothing to suggest he’d been more than what he’d claimed to be: a defector. There was no mention, in the file or the interviews, that he’d ever been to Rostock—that fact alone was enough to put everything I knew about him in doubt.

  “What exactly was Seiffert doing in Rostock?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, he never had a chance to tell me. But if I know Arno, he was gathering the material as insurance.”

  If Bruno was interested in Sachse then that would explain why he’d been to Rostock. Perhaps he’d found the material he was looking for, the kind he didn’t want to carry around with him, never mind take back over the border to the West. “You think his cache is in Rostock, in this boathouse?”

  “Probably not. All I know is that the key to this cipher is in Rostock.”

  “Why didn’t he take it home with him? Send it by post? Why not use the standard DEIN STAR substitution table?”

  “He hid a one-time pad in the boathouse, he said the evidence he’d cached was too important for it to fall into the wrong hands, that’s why he didn’t post the material or the one-time pad back to Bonn. Presumably he planned to come back and get it.”

  A blue sign was coming up: Dummerstorf. Only a few more minutes until our exit, Rostock Süd. If we found whatever Bruno had hidden in the boathouse, could I trust Merkur to surrender it to me?

  Perhaps not, but I had an advantage: we were in my country. If he made a break for it, I could stop him. And if I couldn’t stop him personally, there were nearly a hundred thousand colleagues who would be more than happy to do so.

  57

  Rostock Mühlendamm

  Unsurprisingly, the lock on the river Warnow was frozen solid. But it didn’t look like it ever saw much use, even in warmer seasons—the iron bands holding the ancient planking together was itself laminated with rust and age. Icicles dangled from the gates, showing where water would normally rush through the cracks and gaps.

  I slowed down once we’d crossed the lock bridge, looking for somewhere to leave the car. The lido Lütten had told us about lay off to the left—a couple of lonely buildings, a few harassed trees and an exposed expanse of snow where the sunbathing happened in summer. The whole complex had an air of dereliction about it, even more than usual for our corner of the world.

  I pulled up beneath some scrubby trees. On the other side of the road, a track down the side of a shuttered pub led to the river, the path compacted into ice by all the boots that had gone that way since it had last snowed.

  Other than the occasional car heading into the centre of the city, there were no signs of life, human or otherwise.

  I opened the door to the back seat and let Merkur out. He pulled his hat further over his ears, and breathed in the cold air.

  “Ready for this?” I asked, but he had already set off down the track beyond the trunks of a few mature trees, pausing at the footbridge to an islet.

  I caught up with him there, he was eyeing the bridge sceptically. It was a rickety affair, the planks mismatched and uneven, but at least it had a couple of solid looking rails.

  “At least we won’t get wet if it collapses,” I offered.

  “Might break a leg on the ice instead.”

  The bridge spanned the thirty or forty metres of frozen water between bank and islet, which boasted a crop of jerry-built shacks, all of the same school as the bridge: mismatched timber and rough carpentry. At least the huts’ bright falun-red paint matched the rusted corrugated iron roofs. They were cantilevered out over the water, rot-laced fringes a mere handspan above the ice.

  Off to the right, far beyond the river and shy behind trees, the squat tower of the Nikolai church showed just how close we were to the centre of town.

  Merkur took off a glove and opened his coat, pulling a compass out of his inside pocket, the black plastic kind they make in Freiberg, normally used by the army and kids doing pre-military training with the GST. He clapped up the lid and squinted through the sight at the church tower.

&n
bsp; “5300 mils,” he announced, turning the rose and reading off the bearing. “Give or take.”

  “If you know the direction, why did we need to ask Lütten for help to find this place?”

  “Didn’t know which church Arno meant. I tried to work it out that first time I shook off Lütten, but do you know how many churches there are in the whole of Rostock? I couldn’t afford to attract any attention, wandering around, taking sightings with a compass.” Merkur put the instrument away and set off across the bridge with an air of satisfaction, kicking snow and ice over the edge as he went.

  I took another look at the surroundings before I followed. All quiet: no anglers, no crazy ice-bathers. Just the noise and movement from the road.

  On the other side of the bridge, Merkur stopped, looking around in bewilderment. I saw the problem as soon as I caught up with him—not only did the boathouses stretch along one side of the islet, they covered the other shore, too. There were far too many of them to search.

  A path formed the backbone of the island, winding around wooden fences and gates, leading to ever more boathouses and Datscheks. I walked a few paces to a bend where the path took a sharp left.

  “I can see at least forty buildings here, and there’s more beyond that corner,” I told Merkur. He’d been doing the arithmetic too, and was now rubbing his head, his fleece shapka wobbling with each stroke. “Come on, you must have a better description than a boathouse with a bearing taken on a church spire? Did Bruno not mention anything else?”

  But Merkur was still thinking. I lit a cigarette and handed it to him, hoping it would kick his grey cells into gear. He took the coffin nail and I spiked another for myself.

  We stood there for a while, looking for all the world like we had nothing better to do. It’s the kind of thing that makes me fretful.

  “Have you got that book?” I demanded.

  “What book?” Merkur was looking around at the rickety fences and wind-slanted boathouses, probably wondering what the chances were that he could just guess which of them Bruno had chosen as a hidey-hole.

  “The yellow book of fairy tales, the one Seiffert gave you.”

  He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the book, astonishment written all over his coupon. “How do you know he gave it me?”

  I pulled my right glove off and opened the book, my cold fingers fumbling as I tried to turn each page.

  “What was that bearing again, the one you checked on the compass?”

  “5300 mils.”

  On the military compass that Merkur had used, 5300 mils is marked as 53, it makes the thing easier to use. Now I flipped through the book, hoping for a page 53. But the stories ran out on page 51. After that came the index and the flyleaf. If you were determined to find page 53 then you’d have to make do with the endpaper, pasted to the flimsy cardboard that made up the cover.

  Someone had doodled on it, looked like a child had done a drawing of a bridge with a soft pencil. I turned the book around—now it was a drawing of a monster’s head, mouth gaping, showing uneven teeth. Whatever it was, it was in the rough form of a letter C, clumsy patterns that were perhaps meant to be squares dotted the sides.

  Or, turn it around again and it was an approximate but recognisable representation of the small island we were on. A squiggle at the bottom right-hand corner showed the rickety footbridge we’d just crossed.

  “Have a look at this.” I turned the book so that the drawing was orientated the way we were standing. It didn’t take Merkur long to work it out.

  Looking around again, with more purpose this time, I decided the blocks were merely indicative of the many buildings here, they didn’t map to the spatial reality of what I could see.

  “That just confirms we’re in the right place, it doesn’t get us any further,” said Merkur, brow crinkling under his fleece hat. He went back to brooding, but I was still hopeful about the drawing—after all, we didn’t have anything else to go on.

  “What about these,” I wondered, pointing out a clump of smudges. “Most of the shapes are rectangles, or what could have been rectangles if they’d been drawn more carefully. But these are circles, three of them, they’re the only shapes that are shaded in.”

  Merkur took the book and looked more carefully. The endpaper was crinkled, the pencil marks smeared where they crossed a crease, so it took some goodwill to interpret those blots as three circles. But Merkur wasn’t prepared to find enough of that goodwill to go along with my theory.

  Rather than argue, I took the book and followed the path to the first sharp curve, keeping an eye out for anything that could be symbolised by three circles.

  A block was marked next to the circles, not on the edge of the island, but in the middle. It corresponded to a building in real life, slightly larger than the others, and using that as a reference point, it didn’t take me long to find the heap of rubble under the bed of snow—a low pile, dumped on a strip of unclaimed land between two adjoining properties. I knelt down to brush away the snow, noting the friable strands of brown grass wedged between the clay slates, the broken tiles and the bricks made of slag and sand-lime.

  I didn’t have to call Merkur, his curiosity had already brought him along the path, and now he stood by my side, a smile easing his face.

  58

  Rostock Mühlendamm

  There was only enough room for one person in the narrow gap between the fences, so we took turns sifting the broken debris. We worked slowly, lifting every single piece of waste and deposited it gently on a pile behind us.

  “Any idea what we’re looking for?” I asked the next time we swapped places, trying to rub warmth back into my fingers.

  “A small container—film cartridge, matchbox, something like that. I’d say the one-time pad is probably about the same size as the cipher I showed you.”

  We worked for another fifteen minutes or so, swapping places when our hands became clumsy with cold. The excitement had worn off and more mundane matters were crowding in on me. Like a full bladder.

  I walked along the line of buildings and gardens, trying each gate until I found one that was open. Beyond the fence stood a small but well maintained one-room bungalow. But of more interest right now was the outside privy, a rustic affair with a heart cut in the door.

  It took a moment or two to find the key, hanging on a proud nail under the eaves at the side of the outhouse, then I let myself in. It was too cold to get comfortable, and I was almost finished when my meditations were interrupted by a shout:

  “Halt!”

  I pulled up my trousers and ran to the gate. Peering between the slats, I could see two men standing by the stacks of rubble, their dark dederon jackets, beige trousers and leather gloves told me all I needed to know—they were from the same company as me.

  “Is tüddelig worn!” said one, shaking his head. The other, more inclined to action than commentary, was clambering over the unstable piles. As I watched, he disappeared into the opening between the fences, heading for the water. The commentator, still muttering to himself, decided he should follow.

  I didn’t wait to see what happened next, I slid through the gate and ran down the path, towards the footbridge.

  “He’s going over the ice!” The goons were still shouting, but I didn’t stop. I’d reached the bridge now, was slowing down to cross the slippery planks. Once off the far end, I picked up speed, ignoring the complaints from my bruised knee and twisted ankle.

  A Wartburg stood at the top of the track, a quick glance through the window told me what I’d already suspected: a two-way radio set hung below the dashboard. I took out my clasp knife and stabbed the wall of the tire and, as an afterthought, reached over the roof to bend the aerial. With a sharp click, it snapped off near the socket.

  “Halt!” I looked back down the track, towards the river, both of the colleagues were starting up the slope, no more than thirty metres away.

  I dashed over the road, got the car door open, key into the ignition, foot pumping the
pedal.

  “Start you bastard, just start!” I shouted at the dashboard, jiggling the choke in and out, trying to find the sweet spot that would make the engine fire. It caught, blue smoke puffing up outside the rear window. I put my foot down a couple more times to get the petrol flowing and released the clutch—I was on my way, accelerating towards the centre of Rostock, leaving the two goons in the middle of the road.

  I took the first left, not waiting for an opening in the traffic, but pulling out in front of an oncoming Skoda. Past a bus garage, then another left, hoping to get down to the river. Gasworks to the left, the clump and clatter of railway wagons behind a corrugated fence to the right. The road gave up, leaving only a sandy track with slicks of icy snow and potholes big enough to swallow a Trabant. I could see the river behind a row of trees.

  I got out of the car to check, leaving the engine running, and wandered down to the water. I couldn’t see the island from there, it was hidden by more shanty-boathouses on this side of the river.

  Back at the car, I unfolded the map of Rostock to confirm I was in the right place.

  If Merkur had actually made it across the ice and not fallen through a duck hole, he’d pitch up somewhere near here. And unless he wanted to climb that steel fence and cross the railway marshalling yard then he should be arriving up that path at any moment …

  I got into the Shiguli and did a three point turn, sloughing up snow and sand until I was pointing back the way I’d come, then leaned over to open the passenger door.

  Merkur was limping up the path, minus one shoe, but with a childlike grin on his lined face.

  59

  Rostock

  I revved the engine to encourage Merkur to move a bit faster, and when he got in, I threw the map of Rostock at him and told him to find us a route out of town. He was still wearing a smirk of the kind I’d last seen on a gingerbread horse, seemingly unbothered by his foot, now blue with cold. He carefully draped his sodden sock over the air vent on the dashboard before unfolding the map.