Stasi Child

by David Young

  Silke’s mother ushered the two detectives into the lounge. Müller was impressed as she took in the decor. The woman’s daywear might have been dirty, but her apartment was spotless – and full of the latest gadgets. A telephone, television, expensive-looking parquet flooring and a tasteful range of fitted wood-veneer cupboards and bookshelves. It was how Müller imagined a flat in West Berlin might be furnished.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Frau Eisenberg. ‘How does a family whose husband has been arrested by the Stasi afford something like this?’

  ‘It is a lovely flat,’ said Müller, swallowing her curiosity, ‘but it’s no concern of mine. Shall we sit?’ She gestured to the beige corduroy sofa. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tilsner in the kitchen, riffling through cupboards and drawers.

  Eisenberg kept darting glances towards Müller’s deputy. ‘Does he have authorisation for that? For going through my things?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about Unterleutnant Tilsner,’ said Müller. ‘The fact we’re from the Kripo is the only authorisation we need, Frau Eisenberg.’ Then Müller turned more conciliatory, and laid her hand on top of Eisenberg’s. ‘We simply need to find out as much as we can about Silke. You see, a girl has been found.’ Müller studied the woman’s face, watching for her reactions. There was apprehension, perhaps fear – but no real surprise.

  ‘Really?’

  Müller nodded, but kept her hand clasped to Eisenberg’s. ‘But it may not be good news, I’m afraid.’ This was the bit Müller hated: telling a parent that the police believed their child was dead. ‘A girl’s body has been found.’

  Eisenberg stared at her in apparent disbelief. At the same time, Müller was aware of Tilsner now having moved out of the kitchen and the lounge, and towards the bedrooms. She didn’t think Frau Eisenberg, in her distressed state, had noticed.

  ‘We’re not sure it’s Silke. For your sake, I hope it’s not. But we need you to look at a photograph to see if it is her. Can you do that for me?’

  Marietta Eisenberg looked crushed. Her husband in some unknown Stasi jail. And now her daughter, having been missing for months, was possibly dead. ‘Where was the girl’s body discovered?’

  ‘In the Hauptstadt. In Mitte.’

  ‘The Hauptstadt?’ asked Eisenberg. ‘In the East?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘But –’ The words died in Eisenberg’s mouth.

  ‘But what, Citizen Eisenberg? Is there something you want to tell me?’

  ‘N-n-no. I . . . I . . . it’s just –’

  ‘What?’

  Frau Eisenberg held her head in her hands and stared at the floor. ‘Nothing,’ she mumbled. ‘Nothing.’

  Müller started to pull the photograph of the girl from her pocket, when she heard a shout from inside the flat.

  ‘Boss!’ screamed Tilsner. ‘Come here, now.’

  Müller jumped up from the sofa and hurried in the direction of her deputy’s voice. It was obviously a girl’s bedroom. Pink everywhere. With posters of western rock groups and pop stars on the wall. Müller recognised Mick Jagger with his pouting lips, David Bowie with his orange hair. On another wall, Free German Youth and Pioneer certificates and posters, from earlier years when Silke’s aspirations had apparently followed the party diktats for model socialist children.

  Tilsner was at the girl’s bed, the drawer of the bedside cabinet open. He held a letter in his hand. ‘The mother should have hidden this a bit better. Putting it in the girl’s own drawer probably wasn’t the most sensible move.’ He passed the letter, envelope and enclosed instant-camera photo over to Müller. Müller looked at the photo first. It was colour, something hard to come by in the Republic. But what was interesting was it was a self-shot photo of Silke in front of the main entrance of the KaDeWe department store in West Berlin. She looked at the western postmark on the envelope. From just three days earlier – after the murdered girl’s body had been found. She raised her eyes to Tilsner’s.

  ‘So she’s in the West. And alive. Our body by the Wall is not Silke Eisenberg.’

  ‘No, boss. Not unless someone else posted it after she was killed. And while that’s possible, it seems unlikely. So we’re no further on.’

  They heard sobbing behind them, and both turned. Standing there in the doorway, Marietta Eisenberg looked both upset and alarmed. As well she might, thought Müller. Her daughter may not be dead, but she was guilty of Republikflucht. And if Marietta Eisenberg had helped her daughter to flee to West Berlin, then it wouldn’t merely be her husband enjoying the hospitality of a Stasi jail.

  8

  Day Five.

  Prenzlauer Berg, East Berlin.

  Gottfried Müller knew that he was breaking a promise to his wife, but justified it by reminding himself that she’d broken an even more important pledge: her marriage vows.

  Each of Gottfried’s strides up Schönhauser Allee was more like a stamp of frustration. He could have caught the U-bahn but he needed the air and the anonymity of the street, rather than being glowered at by some matron across an underground train carriage.

  Gottfried could feel his glasses slipping down his nose as he strode on. He pushed them back into place, and then waited at the red pedestrian Ampelmann sign outside Dimitroffstrasse U-bahn station; Wartburgs, Trabants and Ladas poured more of their fumes into the choking night-time smog. Since he’d come back from Rügen everything had been a hundred times worse than before he went. At first he’d been quite keen on the idea of a few months by the Baltic coast in the reform school. That was until he’d actually seen the conditions. But even there, he’d felt calmer, as though he could actually make a difference, even if it was just a question of trying to cheer up the children and show them some kindness.

  Gottfried decided to walk up Pappelallee – it would be quieter. He needed to calm down before he reached the church. Saturday’s argument with Karin still rankled. That she’d chosen to stay out all night rankled even more. He could tell she was lying, so he in turn felt no guilt coming here now. All previous bets were off.

  With his head bowed, he almost failed to spot an elderly woman weaving her way through the patches of snow on the pavement. She stumbled, and he reached out to hold her and prevent her falling, thinking how frail and light she felt – and realising that the left arm of her coat was empty, just fabric hanging down limply. The woman nodded her thanks and carried on her way, but Gottfried stopped a moment. It was a timely reminder there were people worse off than him. He watched the woman’s back as she shuffled off, the coat arm flapping as she went. Was she too old for a prosthesis? Or was it her badge of honour? Older citizens with missing limbs from war wounds or bombing injuries had been a common sight when he was growing up in Berlin. That and the huge number of angry single women who’d fly off the handle at the slightest schoolboy provocation. Women widowed and aged before their time by the ravages of war.

  He glanced at his watch, pulled his coat up around his neck and speeded up his strides. If possible, he wanted to be a few minutes early for the meeting. Pastor Grosinski might be able to offer some useful advice on how to avoid the collapse of a marriage. Although perhaps he and Karin would just be better off letting nature take its course.

  Approaching the entrance to the church, Gottfried stopped again for a moment. He tilted his head back slowly, letting his eyes pan upwards, admiring the building’s red-brick solidity and the green patina of its copper steeple, disappearing through the smog haze into the moonlit sky. It appeared to have survived the war’s bombs and bullets better than the old woman he’d almost bumped into.

  As he walked up the steps to the church’s front door, some fractional movement or flash in the corner of his eye made him turn and peer up at one of the windows in an apartment block across the road. There was a man in the shadows, holding something. Watching from the second floor. His face looked remarkably like that bastard Tilsner, Karin’s deputy. The man moved away from the window. Gottfried wondered for ju
st an instant whether he should run across the road to the apartment and confront him. But then he shook his head, turned and entered the church. It almost certainly wasn’t Tilsner, just someone who looked a little like him from a distance. I need to pull myself out of this – I’m becoming obsessed.

  9

  Day Six.

  Plänterwald, East Berlin.

  Müller pulled the collar of her overcoat up around her ears, and then wrapped one lapel inside the other to try to keep out the cold. The brisk walk from Plänterwald S-bahn station had temporarily increased her internal body heat, but now – waiting by the unmanned ticket office of the Kulturpark – the icy morning air seemed to be eating into her bones. Although Jäger had said he wanted to meet somewhere quiet, she hadn’t quite expected it would be the Republic’s only amusement park: closed for the winter, empty and covered in snow. The day, time and venue had been in a typewritten sealed note on Ministry for State Security official paper, delivered to her in person at Marx-Engels-Platz by a motorcycle messenger. That was strange enough in itself, but disturbingly Jäger had also asked her to make sure she wasn’t followed. On the S-bahn, she’d thought for a moment that a man in builders’ overalls had been doing just that. He’d got on at Marx-Engels-Platz, in the same carriage, and although she’d tried not to look at him, she got the impression that he was occasionally checking on her. But Müller was the only passenger to alight at Plänterwald, and she chided herself for her paranoia.

  She hitched up her coat sleeve and glanced at her watch. Five past ten: he was five minutes late already. She pulled the sleeve back, dug her hands deep into her coat pockets and then turned, scanning the approaches to the park. No one – not a soul. Not even the sound of birdsong to disturb the near silence.

  Then a clang of metal, from where she hadn’t expected, the entrance to the park itself, and there was Jäger, in casual clothes but carrying a briefcase, accompanied by a man she didn’t recognise, wearing the uniform of the VEB – the state-owned enterprise that ran the park.

  ‘Sorry I’m a little late, Oberleutnant. The caretaker, Comrade Köhler here, isn’t used to visitors at this time of year, and I had to go and track him down. He’s going to take us somewhere private for our meeting.’ Müller gave a small nod, as the caretaker gestured to her and Jäger to follow him through the turnstiles.

  As they entered the park, Jäger’s eyes met hers. ‘You look frozen stiff, Comrade Oberleutnant.’ He patted the front of his sheepskin jacket. ‘This is what you need for weather like this.’ Then he pinched the sleeve of Müller’s grey-green overcoat, rubbing it between his finger and thumb. ‘Not a People’s Police overcoat.’

  Müller laughed. ‘I wish I could afford one, Comrade Oberstleutnant. I expect the salary of police first lieutenant is slightly lower that that of a Ministry for State Security lieutenant colonel.’

  Jäger smiled a knowing smile. Not everything was equal in this socialist state of workers and peasants, thought Müller, but it was still a fairer world than on the other side of the anti-fascist barrier. She could tell that from Gottfried’s infernal western news programmes and their never-ending reports of strikes and workers’ disaffection.

  The snow here, on the outskirts of the Hauptstadt, hadn’t melted into a muddy morass of sludge like that next to the Eisenbergs’ apartment block in Friedrichshain. With colder temperatures overnight, their footsteps crunched along the path, making enough noise almost for a whole column of People’s Army soldiers, even though there were just the three of them.

  As they turned a corner, Jäger pointed to the swan boats lined up on the banks of the lake, out of action for the winter. ‘Have you been here at the height of the season, Oberleutnant Müller? My children love it.’

  ‘I don’t have children, Oberstleutnant. And no, I haven’t.’ The admission was accompanied by a sharp stab of regret, and then the sudden memory of the murdered girl, lying dead in St Elisabeth’s cemetery. That girl wouldn’t be coming to sample the rides of the Kulturpark anytime soon either.

  They lapsed into silence for the rest of their walk behind the caretaker, Jäger appearing embarrassed by the exchange. Müller saw they were heading towards the park’s iconic Ferris wheel. When they reached it, the caretaker took a set of keys from his pocket and opened the control room.

  ‘We’re going to get a free ride,’ said Jäger. ‘I hope you’ve a good head for heights.’ Müller nodded. She wasn’t going to admit that she hadn’t. ‘Not to mention a sterner stomach than the other day at the cemetery.’ Although his teasing was gentle, Müller felt her cheeks flush at the reminder.

  The electric motor hummed into action as Köhler started up the mechanism, the groaning grind of un-oiled metal slowly replacing the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. Müller counted six cabins go past, before Jäger held up his hand for Köhler to bring the ride to a stop. The cabin selected by Jäger swung gently on its hinges as he opened the safety bar and stood to one side to let her in. They sat down opposite one another; Müller felt her stomach lurch as Köhler released the brake. As the giant wheel slowly began to turn, Müller watched the Stasi officer run his fingers along each edge of the cabin, then peer under each bench seat.

  Jäger raised his head to look straight into her eyes. ‘This is my usual meeting spot for quiet talks,’ he explained, ‘and so our agents have checked it over already. But you can never be too careful, and what we have to discuss is quite . . . sensitive, shall we say.’

  Müller nodded, hunching down into her coat as the cabin climbed and the temperature dropped. She risked a glance out at the city, and instantly felt queasy. She shouldn’t. She was a mountain girl. Well, if the hills of the Thuringian Forest could really be called mountains. The mountain girl who’d never had a head for heights. Who’d been a promising winter sports athlete at school, until . . .

  She stopped the thought. Tried to pull herself together, and focus on Jäger, who seemed oblivious to her fear.

  ‘The full autopsy report has some interesting findings, things I didn’t want to discuss in front of Tilsner and Schmidt – at least not until I’ve gone over them with you.’ He drew out a folder from his briefcase, and then rose to join Müller on her bench. The cabin rocked with the sudden movement, and Müller kept her eyes to the floor to avoid reminding herself how high they were. She knew that under her gloves her knuckles would be turning white as she gripped the end of the wooden seat ever tighter. They seemed to have reached the apex of the wheel now. Its forward motion had stopped, and the cabin settled into a gentle swing from the wind and the residual energy of Jäger’s decision to play musical chairs several hundred feet above ground. Was he deliberately trying to unnerve her?

  Jäger had clearly noticed her look of terror. ‘Are you alright, Comrade Oberleutnant? Perhaps this location wasn’t such a good idea. I must admit, I usually come here in the summer months. I didn’t realise it would be so windy.’

  Müller breathed in deeply. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she lied, her stomach feeling as though it was about to drop out of the bottom of her body.

  The Stasi lieutenant colonel nodded, and opened the folder. ‘The pathologist, Professor Feuerstein, has come to some startling and slightly awkward conclusions.’ He turned a couple of pages. Müller found herself once more wanting to avert her eyes from the photograph of the girl’s mutilated face, but that was the page Jäger had settled on. ‘You see the smooth, almost shiny, melted appearance of the skin here, right at the side of where much of the face has been torn away?’ Müller squinted at the photo, and to the section Jäger was tracing with his finger. ‘It’s the result of coming into contact with a strong acid. In this case sulphuric acid, from a car battery.’

  Müller frowned. ‘She’d been in some sort of accident, then? Or are you saying this was done deliberately?’

  ‘Feuerstein doesn’t comment on that. To be honest, he doesn’t have to. He believes the skin came into contact with the acid post mortem.’

  ‘So,
deliberate? To hide her identity after she’d been killed?’

  ‘Almost certainly, I would think.’ Jäger nodded.

  ‘And what about the injuries to the rest of her face? Were they caused by a dog, as you were saying at the cemetery?’

  Jäger shook his head, and gave a slow sigh. ‘No. You can probably guess. Her face was deliberately ripped apart, after acid was thrown onto it. And her teeth were pulled out, one by one, with iron pliers.’ Müller gave a small gasp and raised her hand to her mouth. ‘Feuerstein found rust residue on her gums.’

  ‘That poor girl. So whoever it was tortured her first?’

  Jäger again moved his head slowly from side to side. ‘No. The teeth were again pulled out post mortem.’

  ‘Someone has gone to great lengths to prevent identification of the body.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Jäger. ‘And that is going to make your job exceedingly difficult. Because that is exactly what you, Tilsner and Schmidt need to do. Find out who this girl was. That’s what I want you concentrate on. And we need to be careful not to publicly challenge the official version of how she met her demise.’

  ‘But clearly, Comrade Oberstleutnant, you cannot still believe that she was shot by western guards as she was trying to escape to the East?’

  Jäger said nothing for a moment, so that all that filled the silence was the screeching of the cabin, as it gently swayed backwards and forwards. Like the screams of a girl, thought Müller.

  ‘That is still the official account of her death,’ Jäger said finally, a flat note in his voice. He reached into his inside pocket and drew out an envelope, ‘This authority for your missing person’s search may help you.’ He pulled out the sheet of paper and showed it to Müller.

  She frowned. ‘I don’t need the approval of the Ministry for State Security for a missing person’s search.’ And why, if Jäger didn’t want them to be tracking down the girl’s killer or killers, was he so keen that the body should be identified at all? Surely the Stasi would be better off drawing a line under everything?