‘If you mean that we have informed that section of society we believe may be at risk then yes. But that doesn’t mean we send officers out to lock their doors and windows for them,’ Peters replied.
There was a smile of sadistic satisfaction on her rival’s face. Now she really did feel sorry for Peters.
At the very edge of the journalists, photographers and cameras Heike spotted a very large, overweight woman with straight, lank greasy hair. The woman bulged out of a tight white T-shirt which she was stretched almost to snapping point over a black shirt. There in the middle of it was the Christopher icon.
Just ahead of the woman stood Sigmund Schawboski, or as Peters referred to him ‘the laughing Cavalier’. He had been on the crime beat at ‘WAMS’ at least ten years before Heike but then went over to the other side lured by a larger salary and a pension for life. The rewards of the state sector were visible on his corpulent frame.
Schawboski was frantically trying to catch Peters’ attention while moving his ample frame in front of the equally gargantuan woman in the T-shirt. She was not to be silenced or screened off however. The woman stood up and exclaimed:
‘Leave him alone! Leave him alone so that he can do God’s work!’
The entire press corps turned its attention away from the table to the enormous woman near the wall bellowing out her defence of ‘Christopher.’ Schawboski made a move to try and calm her but she flailed out at him, screeching now, protesting that she would not be silenced. The press officer was eventually knocked aside by a wave of news crews and snappers elbowing each other to get to the woman who said she was from ‘Mothers Against Paedophiles.’ As they bunched around her in a huddle listening now to her tale of personal woe, her nightmare upbringing and the years of abuse she endured at the hands of her father and his friends, Heike spotted Peters rising from the table while Stannheim whispered words of re-assurance into the ear of the minister. The only thing audible (which her colleagues appeared en masse to have missed in their rush towards the screeching woman) from the table was the minister’s last words to the Kottbusser Strasse murder squad’s boss: ‘This has been a fucking disaster.’
Heike made a diagonal rush across the room to capture Peters before he disappeared through the back exit.
‘Martin, Martin, don’t run off.’
Peters looked over his shoulder like quarry checking on where his hunters where.
‘Any questions please direct them at Herr Schawboski, Heike. I’ve had enough of his.’
She sprinted towards him heading Peters off at the door and blocked his path.
‘Look, I’ve something to show you that I don’t want to share with the rest of them in here. Something from ‘Christopher”.’
He was tempted to tell her the team no longer needed her now that they had a probable ID.
‘Martin I’ll be in Anna’s at about 8. No one goes in there except for you lot.’
Peters said nothing but instead gave her that acquiescent and generous smile which told her they had an arrangement., that she always thought gave him a boyish sensibility.
As he escaped through the exit Heike could still hear the mantra of the woman from Mothers Against Paedophiles blaring out: ‘Leave him alone! Leave him to do God’s work!’ All the while Heike kept repeating the headline for this Sunday’s edition over and over in her head: ‘This has been a fucking disaster.’
Twenty Three
Even on the U-Bahn it was impossible to escape the all encroaching intrusiveness of television. Many of the underground trains were now fitted with mini-flat screens blaring out news casts every few minutes in between the bombardment of advertising that no longer made travel on public transport such a pleasure for Martin Peters. Today it could have been not just irritating for him but potentially dangerous to use the system. So to avoid the glare of the travelling public who would no doubt see him over and over again as the networks broadcast the first ‘Christopher’ press conference, he took a taxi across town instead.
Inside the back of the pale white cab, on route once more to the beginning of the west end, Peters looked down at the image of the man conjured up from the memory of Oskar Beer. Staring back at him was the spectral outline of a harshly sculpted, severely handsome face with wing mirror shaped cheekbones, a forehead that jutted out a little too far beyond eye sockets and short, sharply clipped head of spiky dark hair. There was something comic-book about the photo-fit Beer had helped to construct from his imagination; something too perfect; as if the ageing pervert had shaped this picture from the recesses of wet dreamland. All he needed was a peaked leather cap, Peters thought to himself as he slipped the photo-copy back into an envelope and glanced up to the front of the cab.
The driver had lowered the window slightly and the wind started to twirl and twist the two decorations dangling down in front of the wheel: a Hertha Berlin mini-pennant and a St. Christopher’s’ medal suspended on the end of fine blue rope. Another hanger and flogger, were taxi drivers the same the world over?
‘Did you put up that thing in honour of Christopher?’ Peters asked.
His driver was a rotund bald man incongruously dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt and white body warmer. The driver reached into the glove department and produced a .38 snub nose special wedged awkwardly inside a table tennis racket sleeve.
‘Of course! Using this on creeps like that would not be good enough for them. What our friend Christopher is doing is quite right. He should be left alone to do God’s work,’ the cabbie said on the approach towards Berlin Zoo station.
Peters knew there was no cause for panic, the driver had probably listened to the press conference on the radio, judging by the tiredness etched under his eyes he had probably been working in the cab all day. His anonymity was safe for now at least. Nor had he any wish to engage in an argument about the rights and wrongs of Christopher’s crusade.
‘Just drop me at the Europa Centre, please,’ he called out curtly signalling the premature end of their conversation. After paying the driver and warning him that he shouldn’t poke guns at his passengers, even when they were disguised as table tennis rackets, Peters alighted and made his way past the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial to the 20 storey building directly behind it.
It was once the post-war modernist show piece of West Berlin with its gleaming glass frontage and the three pointed star, a show-off symbol to the east, the sky-scraping foil to the television tower constructed on the other of the Wall and an alluring enticement to those trapped inside the DDR.
During the Cold War as well as the various companies’ Berlin HQs, the now abandoned ice rink, the first Irish pub in Berlin, the raucous cabaret, it was home to a number of non-descript, semi-anonymous offices that were used by MI6 and their American counterparts who could quite literally keep an eye on the beasty easties eastwards behind the Brandenburg Gate. Peters remembered an awkward afternoon of drinking and eating inside a conference 18 floors up, the verdant splendour of the Tiergarten laid out below, which had been called to absorb and analyse an important snippet of information passed to him during a strange encounter in East Berlin just days earlier. Peters would never forget that meeting nor the man who had originally singled him out in the ‘capital of the DDR.’
As he took the lift up to the 17th, Peters only now realised how much he had been stung and humiliated by the indignation and the patronisation of his hosts one floor above back in the first half of 1989. Ascending again inside the centre he recalled that it had been St. Patrick’s Day and down below in Moore’s Irish pub the all-day party was still in full swing. What would the revellers down there have made of the fact that right above their heads were some of the top Brit spooks gathered anywhere all in one place. They had come to hear Peters’ briefing of his supposedly chance meeting with a Soviet army intelligence officer who had delivered a piece of stunning news to his young British military counterpart.
Peters had been in Alexanpderplatz a fortnight earlier posing as a British tourist in town with his f
amily (a woman and child of one year borrowed from a fellow officer based out at Spandau) for a bit of sighting seeing. The ‘couple’ were shopping in the Zentrum store, East Berlin’s premier shopping centre, out for a bargain while Peters picked up a message from a source he had nurtured inside the NVA. He had been instructed to lift up a model of the Soyuz rocket Sigmund Jahn had travelled with his Soviet comrades into space, located on a shelf of the toy department. The specific box would be marked with red line nicked finely onto its right-hand side.
Just as Peters lifted up the one he had meant to buy he felt a hand on his shoulder, male, sweaty, firm and instantly thought that he and his ‘wife’ would very soon be enjoying the hospitality of the Stasi at Hohenshoenhausen prison. But instead he heard a whisper in Russian, the language he had mastered at Sandhurst along with German: ‘I wouldn’t advise it Tavarich. The Stasi have been watching your man. Whatever is in that rocket is next to useless because they probably put it there.’
The man whose guiding hand on that late winter afternoon in the year before the Turn had saved Peters from arrest and interrogation was Major Arkady Gavrilov. Sixteen years later the GRU intelligence officer stood facing Peters once more, ushering him into the office he now rented in West Berlin’s former inner temple of capitalism.
‘Please tell me you have resigned from the force and have come to finally work for me Martin,’ Gavrilov bellowed as he shook Peters hand vigorously and gestured for him to sit down on a brown two seater leather sofa at the side of his open plan office.
Not much had changed about Gavrilov’s appearance since that first day Peters came across him. But for a few flecks of grey just above each of his ears his hair was still curly, tightly trimmed and jet black, combined always into a neat side parting; he maintained a tightly honed physique despite being a squat and smallish man now surely in his mid-fifties. Instead of the old shiny brown and grey suits Gavrilov sported a pair of perfectly ironed chinos and a salmon pink shirt. The Russian pointed up towards the roof above them.
‘They should have erected a memorial up there to commemorate the stupidity of your masters.’
‘Well I would exempt the army from that one Arkady. It was a civilian call and they didn’t believe a word you told me.’
What should have been Peters’ finest hour almost finished him inside military intelligence. For what Arkady Gavrilov relayed to Peters, first while travelling on the S-Bahn out to Ernst Thalmann Park and later still while posing as pilgrims at the Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park, created panic and suspicion amongst MI6 station in Berlin. Even to the extent that Peters was subjected to several days later of gruelling mental interrogation back at Spandau.
Gavrilov had come with a warning that the British should heed. The ‘old goats’ as Arkady referred to the geriatrics that ran the DDR, were contemplating an armed response to growing dissent and an increasing leakage of people though the Iron Curtain. Later that year, sometime around the DDR’s 40th birthday party, Gavrilov warned, there would be a showdown between people and party. The Soviets had done their homework among the flowering dissident groups and realised the thirst for change was unquenchable. The only thing that stood in the people’s way was the self-appointed representatives of the people. Which either meant bloodbath or surrender. Arkady did however have one piece of good news which he wanted Peters to pass on directly to his bosses and chiefs in the west. The Red Army itself, never mind Gorbachev, had no wish to prop these old bastards up. They wouldn’t lift a single Kalashnikov to help them.
‘It’s just as well it all worked out the way we hoped it would although that was by sheer luck and accident Martin,’ Gavrilov said as he stood up and went to the water cooler to fill up two transparent plastic cartons.
Peters took a sip on Gavrilov’s return.
‘They were almost laughing at me during that de-briefing. They had brought over some top notch experts from universities in England, you know, people with a spook past who worked in analysis for the security services. These guys with their plummy accents and their flawless Russian and German, who were just playing guessing games. Most of them had never been out of Cambridge or Oxford in their lives and there they were telling me I was talking through my arsehole. That you were playing some kind of double-game of bluff. Well at least we managed to get our man from the NVA out in time before the firing squads got him. I’ll always be grateful for that even if our lot weren’t buying what you were telling them.’
The Russian reclined in the sofa, put his hands behind his head and surveyed all that was now his around him. Peters noticed that almost the entire workplace was comprised of slender young women in tight trousers and dark T-shirts sashaying around the office carrying files, getting into whispering huddles, studiously poring over computer screens or making phone calls without causing a distracting din. One or two of them on passing smiled at Gavrilov and seemed startled to see Peters sitting beside him. It was then that Peters noticed the bank of television screens at the far end of Gavrilov’s domain.
‘Well anyway Martin Berlin has been good to both of us. We each put our craft to good use when it all collapsed.’
‘As you predicted it would Arkady.’
‘As I predicted it would and no one listened before it was almost too late. I used to catch spies for a living. That’s how we came across you and your NVA contact. We even knew about your earlier defecting General the year before the Turn but kept that quiet from our old “friends”.’
‘I’m relieved you did,’ Peters said loudly.
‘Martin you see adultery is just like treason and the adulterer is just like the enemy agent. All you need to do is find the trace, uncover the clue, feed your gut suspicion and the hunt begins. Unlike the Cold War this type of hunting is very lucrative.’
Arkady Gavrilov ran one of Berlin’s most talked about private detective agencies, which specialised not only in tracking down cheating husbands and even the odd wife but also pilfering employees and industrial spies. The ex-GRU officer, whose English and German was as fluent as Peters’ Russian, preyed on and profited from the eternal paranoia of man. ‘Dark Corner’ received regular glowing praise in both the broadsheet and tabloid press, which was not unconnected to their work for a number of investigative journalists based in Berlin.
‘So why are you here? I suppose it’s to do with that business about the serial killer everybody has fallen in love with.’
Gavrilov was as good as sensing desperation as he was fear.
‘Yes that and I want to open up a second front as well,’ Peters said.
‘Which one do you want to start with then Martin?’
Peters took out the photo-fit from the album, showed it to Gavrilov, explained ‘Christopher’s’ military history and the targets of his campaign. When he finished Gavrilov didn’t appear as daunted as Peters had expected him to be.
‘If you want to find someone you will find them. I’ll start with the archives, get one of the girls to hit the libraries and the on-line filing systems. There’s bound to be a picture of that guy somewhere in one of the old DDR publications.’
‘What makes you so sure of that Arkady?’
‘Because as you said he must have been some kind of local hero back then. We even gave him a special sword for his efforts. Knowing our old “friends” I would suggest the old goats couldn’t resist making a star of this boy. Think about it – handsome, fit, brave, dedicated to the cause of Actual Existing Socialism – an ideal icon. I’ll bet he is buried somewhere in “Nueues Deutschland” or “GDR Review” showing off a chest full of medals.’
‘Don’t you think he probably knows that,’ Peters tried to dampen Gavrilov’s optimism.
‘Of course he has but do you think he cares? In the end most serial killers want to be caught and I’d guess our friend is no different. Anyway, once we have a name you will get your man. The trouble with being a comrade, of being part of the collective is that it’s harder to hide.’
What would Gavrilov ma
ke of Peters’ ‘second front’? When he would be asked to start hunting a fellow countryman?
‘The second thing I want to ask you Arkady is closer to home, for you at least.’
Gavrilov was re-filling his glass, Peters noticed there was none of the usual copious amounts of vodka on tap unlike the old times when they got together again after the Wall came down and they were still both in uniform.
‘Go on Martin. Shoot.’
‘Avi Yanaev.’
‘What about him?’ Gavrilov’s tone had suddenly darkened.
‘I want to know all there is about him. I think he has something to do with two headless corpses turning up on the Havel shore.’
‘Shit I read about that,’ Gavrilov whistled, ‘a nasty business.’
‘And a message to someone Arkady.’
‘The message translates as “don’t fuck with us” Martin. My compatriots, especially those in the import/expert business, don’t believe in doing it subtle.’
‘I want to find out why. Why go to that extreme.’
It wasn’t just Gavrilov’s tone that was darkening, his pallor seemed to lose its glow, the smile on his face retreated into a studious scowl.
‘He is a weird guy Martin who never leaves a trail. Owns a lot of property....’
‘And a six story knocking shop, a different kink on every floor,’ Peters interjected repeating Blucher’s description of it.
The Russian was shaking his head dismissively: ‘No, No, No Martin. You’ve got it all wrong. The property and the prossies aren’t the real source of his wealth. It’s something bigger and more dangerous. Well that’s what they say back home in Moscow.’
The Swinging Detective Page 13