‘Yes, Heike Numann.’
‘What’s she done now?’
‘Not what she’s done more what’s she knows. Our Heike has weapons-grade info on what happened to our two headless horsemen.’
The boss leaned closer into Peters to make sure what he was about to hear.
‘Our decapitated duo were Basque terrorists seeking to buy surface-to-air missiles that could shoot down planes. Charter jets to be precise. Hardware that could scare off the tourists from the Costas and smash the Spanish economy. Problem was the deal went wrong, a Russian got whacked and then the Ivans went ballistic. Angry enough to chop the heads of the two Basques.’
‘And who the hell is leaking all this stuff to her?’
‘I can’t be sure sir. Possibly our friend from the BND, maybe some other spook. Whoever it is our Heike is way ahead of the game, ahead of us even.’
Stannheim rubbed out the cigarette he was smoking which made a grinding noise in the ashtray before lighting up a second.
‘Be very very careful of Fest, Martin.’
‘What makes you think it might have been Fest who gave Heike her scoop?’
‘I’m not linking Fest to Heike,’ Stannheim said a little too defensively for Peters.
‘I didn’t suggest you were. It’s just that everywhere I turn Fest keeps appearing. Do you know why that is? ‘
‘Because he wants to know everything,’ Stannheim bit back sharply.
‘Well this inquiry is none of his business while I’m the SIO,’ Peters responded.
The old man switched the subject back from ‘Christopher’ and onto the Russians.
‘The last thing we need in Berlin now is a shooting match between the Ivan Mafia and ETA. I just hope the Basques understood the message loud and clear. I’ll bet you my pension those two heads were sent through the post back to Spain. If this other nightmare ever ends I’m thinking of sending you down there. I’d like to know what our Spanish colleagues know about all of this.’
‘Maybe Yanaev was working for Madrid,’ Peters suggested.
‘Anything is possible in the world you came to us from,’ Stannheim agreed before adding.
‘So what did you trade for info on Yanaev and the Basques?’ he was looking at Peters slyly.
‘The name of the man we seek.’
Stannheim looked like he was going to explode but attempted to avoid detonation by bending over and burying his head in his hands, an old tactic Peters was well used to. After a few seconds of deep heavy breaths Stannheim reclined back in his seat, sunk another Korn and said.
‘You are taking one hell of a gamble Martin. If our man is still at large by Sunday and she publishes it every nutter in Berlin will be coming forward saying he is Spartacus. And Streich, meantime, might just decide to disappear for good.’
Peters tried to stay firm: ‘I don’t believe Streich intends to disappear at all. Why would he given all the publicity he obviously enjoys! I repeat - I’m convinced he wants to bring all this to a close. That’s why I need to go home. Besides the name’s going to leak out. What we got out of Heike was priceless in exchange. It was a good trade, sir.’
‘That’s your opinion!’ Stannheim snapped.
The old man’s favourite detective rose from his seat and threw a ten euro bill onto the table. Stannheim in turn rolled the note up and lobbed it back at Peters, which he then dropped back onto the table. As the Englishman left the bar, carefully avoiding a drunken, distraught Riedel, he wondered if this was what marriage was like.
Outside the pub he thanked the heavens for the rain, pulling up the hood of his Duffel and hailing a cab to take him back to Heer Strasse. Passing the station Peters saw that despite his admonitions the Berlin public were still in thrall of ‘Christopher’s’ wrath. The Mothers Against Paedophile camp had swelled to four new tents that were pinned down against the exterior wall of the station. Crudely drawn banners on white canvas which pledged open support for the killer were strung between the tents and the ledges of Kottbuser Strasse window sills. One enormous woman with scrunched up bleached-blonde hair wearing a T-shirt with the ‘St. Christopher’ icon printed on it defied the freezing Baltic rain to give an interview on the steps of Peters’ HQ. He closed his eyes and yearned to be home soon.
On the journey west his attempts to snooze in the back of the taxi were constantly interrupted by the bleep-bleep of messages on his mobile. The first was from the widow Schuster inviting him over to Westfalisch Strasse for a mid-week drink.
‘You’ve been ignoring me u naughty boy!’ she added in her second text which Peters decline
d to reply to realising he was already in ‘trouble’ with her.
Next came a rare text from Karen advising him to shave off the beard otherwise she wouldn’t turn up at ‘Taceles’ on Friday night. Peters didn’t recall that he had even made any arrangements to see her this week.
The final one came from Angi who informed Peters that she had gone to see her father and would try to jog his memory and see if he recalled one Hans-Joachim Streich. Peters spooled through his contact list until he found Lothar Blucher’s number.
‘Hello Lothar. It seems you are not so well informed as you like to make it,’ Peters teased down the line.
He could hear the glug-glug, clink clink of his informer still enjoying the Berlin Polizei’s largesse. Blucher then blew his familiar snort of contempt before replying.
‘I see you found Briegel before our boy made him into a TV and Internet star.’
‘I wasn’t talking about Briegel or our friend “Christopher”, Lothar. I’m talking about our other friends from the east. There was a tiny bit of detail you conveniently happened to leave out about why our headless horsemen washed up on the Havel shore.’
Blucher’s straight-forward, determined response both surprised and pleased Peters.
‘You are an impossible man to track down at the minute. I sent a message to you via Fraulein Nummann because no one in your station seemed to know where you were.’
So it had been Blucher and not Fest who had found out about ETA and the missile deal that never was. Peters was instantly filled with gratitude that Heike was still on side.
‘Then I apologise profusely Lothar. You are, after all, remarkably well informed. It’s just a pity you didn’t tell me first.’
‘Does it matter? I knew she would rush over to tell you. I can’t do things like that by myself of course. Discretion’s the name of the game. By the way I think she is still in love with you. Poor girl does she know you are a swinger?’
‘How’s Anika by the way, any news?’ Peters retorted.
There was a chuckle down the line.
‘If you think that’s going to rile me then you are even stupider than you look. We should both celebrate her departure. It’s costing me far less now that she’s gone, which is good news for the bean counters of the Berlin Polizei as well.’
‘Your sense of civic duty is admirable Lothar. Just don’t be putting any rent boys on our tab.’
‘Anything else or can I return to my aperitivo?’ Blucher said impatiently, ignoring Peters’ last remark.
‘You have one on me Lothar and the good taxpayers of Stuttgart and Munich. I’ve got to keep this line open,’ Peters said before pressing ‘red’ to end the call.
Before pulling up on the side road adjacent to the Heer Strasse S-Bahn Peters got the cabbie to stop near the traffic island where implausibly stood a small Lebanese owned restaurant. He bought a bottle of Chateau Musar and some falafels and got back into the taxi, Peters then asked to be driven around the streets running behind his apartment block for about 15 minutes until he was sure no one was waiting to pounce on him with a camera or notebook.
Once in the flat he switched off as many lights on as possible to ensure anyone watching from below knew he was still not in. Peters cooked up the mobile with his charger and made a make-shift bed for the night on his couch. He decided to keep the television set off and sat in silence wolfing down
the falafels.
Bauer lived alone but had a family from his first wife, Peters recalled. In what way would they be remembering the former Vopoo whom Peters had saw and heard drawing his last breath?Would they be fishing out the few remaining faded colour photographs of Bauer in the old days before the Turn? Or had they already junked the happier memories and momentos whenBauer was a loving husband, a dedicated father as well as a loyal servant of a state gone by? Our would Bauer suffer the same fate as the country he once served and be dissolved in the acid of time and forgetting?
Mid way through his red wine Peters got up and went across to a book shelf on the far wall that contained several thick photo albums. He plucked down two from either end, one a series of childhood and teenage snaps, the other from his first couple of tours of duty with his regiment.
Opening the first at random he came across a faded colour picture of a Christmas long ago, a lanky ten-year-old shivering in the snow down in their garden wearing his first ever West Ham kit, one studded boot balanced on an orange ball, his father behind him wrapped up against the elements in the kind of fur lined jacket bookmakers and 1970s soccer managers used to wear. The picture must have been from the very early part of that same decade when the pop stars and the people inhabited different planets, the rising stars of Glam in their sartorial sci-fi silvers of oranges and blues while the masses were still fading to grey in freezing fog, the 3-day week, strikers huddled around braziers to keep warm as the nation shivered in power cuts, all in the drab dull blur of Britain in decline.
He thought about Hans Joachim-Streich’s own early teen years back then. The state that nurtured him and whom he served to the end had entered what was possibly its only optimistic decade, with the Wall now a permanent feature and all the faces penned behind the barrier turned away from it towards their own internal lives, of old Eric’s construction programmes piercing the sky, of the ‘friends’ from Moscow Centre preparing the first German to go beyond it to soar into the cosmos. It suddenly dawned on Peters that had his father not chosen to flee to England when the Wehrmacht marched into the Sudetenland he could have ended up after the war was over in the Soviet controlled zone and he, like his son later, could have lived a life very much like the one that had shaped Hans Joachim-Streich.
His father was even then an old man in Peters’ eyes when that photograph had been taken, greying around the temples, the hairline receding, the steel-wool mane at the back left to drop just below the ears as if in some kind of existential protest.
He had been in his early forties when he fathered Peters to a woman he had been promising and failing to marry for just over a decade. For his father had already lived ‘another’ life elsewhere and so chose to glide through his second one with an attitude of passive, discrete contempt. British suburban banality never ceased to bore Peters’ father even if he was eternally (but only of course ever in private) grateful to England for giving him refuge.
Despite his gratitude to the place of exile he bitterly resented his son’s decision eight years after this picture was taken to apply to Sandhurst once his German and Russian A ‘Levels were over. For Kurt Peters had dreamed instead of a son with a place at Oxford, a law degree, then a top post with a leading City firm, a country pile and a legion of nanny-nurtured grandchildren to visit.
Why had he defied his old boy and joined the army? His father’s very own nature contained the answer to that question. Because Peters senior revelled in being the contrarian whether at work, pub, union meeting or even at Upton Park. He turned on the revered and defended the put down. He recoiled at what he saw as the fake camaraderie of consensus. He rebelled eventually against the rebellion itself.
Peters found what he had been looking for in a series of other photographs ranging from 1978 to 1980. They started with his DIY Punk phase, the ripped up school blazer, the chain-mail arrangement of safety pins down one of the arms, the red armband on the other, the dog collar around the neck, the spiked hair defying gravity with the aid of starch and the home made tartan trousers tucked into DM boots. The next photo towards the end of the following year witnessed a radical make-over. All from the Punk image but for the DM boots had gone. In its place were drainpipe stay-press trousers held up with red braces over a white Fred Perry T-shirt, red bomber jacket with the furry tartan interior liner, a claret and blue striped scarf knotted around the throat where the dog collar once was, hair cropped tightly. Several pictures further on, taken just before his A Level exams, and his image had altered once more, pared down now to a basic uniform of claret and blue shirt, straight blue jeans, chunky heeled trainers and a wedged foppish haircut – now the rebel without a sub-cult. Because he had simply got sick of the poseurs and band-wagon jumpers. Enlisting in the army, shocking his parents and peers alike, was the final act in his revolution against revolution, his private counter-attack on the teenage rampage.
Later, flicking through the second album and the pictures of his Sandhurst class and those first tours of duty Peters started to imagine the flight paths of his own career and that of Streich’s far beyond behind the wall shooting off in parallel directions. For they had both risen rapidly through the ranks of their chosen units. Peters in a regiment that specialised in covert surveillance and undercover operations; Streich in Special Forces where contact meant kill or be killed. While Streich had been taught to hunt down and physically dispatch the class enemy, Peters was destined for ‘humanint’, the eyes and ears first in the secret war against the IRA and its off-shoots, and much later the interpreter, the recruiter, and the link to allies and foes on the other side of the Cold War’s most infamous divide. Only once had Peters been asked deliberately to stand in harm’s way when he and the unit he commanded ended the life of the Ulster loyalist assassin Appolonia Winston.
Forty Four
‘3.45’
The digits on the top right of the tiny screen reminded Peters of his school, of the time when the last bell clanged in the classroom and the day was finally over. Only this was A.M when he should have been lying on the side of his bed fast asleep.
Its noise jolted Peters out his semi-sleep state and off the sofa where he had been lying. He rolled onto the painted wooden floorboards to break the fall and found himself directly beside where the handy had been charging all night.
‘Withheld Number’.
He punched the green button and for some inexplicable reason said his last name, a common German trait on the phone that he had always found pointlessly formal. The voice down the other line had the same clipped, commanding tone as before.
‘Speak in Braille. Only in Braille. I do not like these things,’ Streich said.
Peters rubbed the grit from his eyes as he tried to compose himself.
‘I know who you are,’ he said and immediately felt ridiculous.
‘Go to the window!’
Peters did as he was ordered, wrenching back the slide door leading to the little balcony overlooking the main road below and the S-Bahn station on the other side.
‘Now open your ears as well as your eyes,’ the killer said as if he was a teacher beating out a rhythmic message to a subservient classroom.
‘Ok. I am,’ Peters replied realising how craven he was sounding.
‘Can you hear it? Can you hear anything?’
Outside the night was still, no clatter yet from the trains, just a distant faint hum of traffic from somewhere way to the back of Heer Strasse, too early for birdsong, too cold for late night revellers to return by foot from the west end. The only noise that was audibly close was a metallic ringing sound coming from the yellow public phone box down below parallel to the bicycle lane and the line of green, yellow and brown recycling bins by the footpath.
‘Can you hear it?’ Streich asked, Peters detecting irritation in the voice.
‘Yes. I hear it.’
‘Then go! We will not be needing these things to communicate again,’ at that Streich’s mobile phone went dead.
Peters searched frantica
lly around the room for these trousers, a woollen cardigan and a pair of trainers which he put on without bothering to find his socks. When dressed he looked about for a piece of paper and a pencil and then dashed out of the door unsure if he had slammed it and by doing so could have probably lock himself out until the concierge on the ground floor woke some time at after 6.
Down in the street the temperature felt as if it had plummeted by several degrees in twenty seconds. He shivered at the entrance of the apartment block and stared at the yellow painted plastic and glass booth. Peters was relieved to hear that it was still ringing.
The black receiver felt heavy and cool when he picked it up and spoke.
‘Feeling more comfortable Streich?’
‘I thought I told you to speak in Braille. If you can’t I can put this phone down and talk to someone else.’
‘I don’t think you’re going to do that.’ Peters said.
‘Don’t push your luck Captain.’
‘You’ve been riding yours for far too long.’ Peters had regained some composure.
‘We can have this debate some other time. The priority is that we meet, don’t you agree?’
Peters scoured around to see if anyone was passing or taking notice of the unusual sight of a man making a phone call about 4 o’clock in the morning. When he was sure he was still alone Peters answered.
‘Yes. I agree.’
‘Very well. Let’s work out then how to do that,’ Streich broke off for a few seconds before continuing.
The Swinging Detective Page 29