‘Just in case, General, just in case,’ he muttered barely under his breath.
Just as he was about to pay the bill Peters saw a familiar figure passing by, bent over slightly, his hand clutching the top buttons of a fawn raincoat as the rain began to hammer down, as if this gesture would somehow shield the sole pedestrian in the street from this sudden deluge.
Peters rushed to the counter, slapped a 20 euro note down on the bar top and went outside to follow the crouched over figure walking ahead back into the Germany village.
As ‘Stock’ struggled to force the lock of his building’s door open with his key Peters called out behind him in English: ‘Don’t make a move comrade General. Go inside, go up the stairs and let yourself in. I’ll be close by.’
‘Stock’ stood static for a few seconds and then glanced over his shoulder to see a younger well-dressed man getting soaking wet and pointing a gun at him.
‘Very well. Come in,’ he grumbled.
Once up inside his apartment ‘Stock’ took off his mack and flung it over a brown leather arm chair by the wall of the living room, and then lumbered toward double glass doors that looked onto a series of allotments leading down to the river and slid them open.
He wants witnesses, Peters realised. Very well General. Very well.
The General leaned over a wooden balcony directly above a mini car park below, his back still to Peters, searching for signs of human life.
‘Why are you pointing that thing at me Captain Peters?’
Instantly Peters remembered what Streich had told him in Treptower Park.
‘Insurance, dear General. Insurance. To ensure you give me an audience.’
‘It’s as well I recognised your voice. If you hadn’t spoke and I had turned around I would have thought you were one of the old network who’d come to track me down and finally exact their revenge.’
‘Don’t be stupid General. No one’s bothered about you over in the east any more - except me of course. I’m the only one likely to put a bullet in your back for your sins.’
‘Stock’ turned around to face Peters narrowing his eyes to get used to the Englishman’s unfamiliar appearance.
‘I suppose the most famous and hated detective in Germany has to go about these days in a disguise.’
‘Now we’re talking General. Why don’t you come in sit down, pour me something strong and we can chat about how all this began? Because I assume that it all started with you.’
Peters settled into a single chair to the side of the living room door all the time training his black Tokarev’ pistol on the man he had once saved from a firing squad. Despite all the years of exile and self-concealment, of having to adopt a new persona and stick with it even long after the Wall came down, General Thomas Weber retained his handsome looks, that slicked back mane of now silvered hair, those drilling blue eyes, the slightly pursed lips and a face almost entirely free of wrinkle and line. Peters watched as Weber went over to a tasteful teak sideboard, opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of 12-year-old Bushmills which he filled neat into two heavy crystal glasses. As the General brought over Peters’ drink the Englishman raised his hand in polite protest.
‘I’ll permit you to go into the kitchen General and get us a little water. The distillers in Bushmills once told me that you need some H20 to make the whiskey expand and release the flavour. If you make a run for it out the door I’ll do what your old comrades never got a chance to do and empty this magazine into your back,’ Peters warned him waving the ‘Tokarev’ about in the General’s direction.
Weber returned a few seconds later with a small plastic jar and poured a couple of drops of water into Peters’ glass.
‘A 12-year-old! I’m impressed!’ Peters said sipping the whiskey.
‘If you remember I got a taste for it in your officers’ mess in Spandau during those early debriefings. You’ve to remember Captain Peters that where I came from a 12-year-old Scotch malt was nectar from the Gods.’
‘Where you came from! That is why I’m confused General. Totally and utterly confused,’ Peters interrupted deliberately failing to correct Weber’s geographical mistake.
The General said nothing in reply and sat sprawled over the leather three seater sipping at his neat Bushmills.
Peters went on: ‘You gave us everything we wanted and more. You betrayed your comrades, your army, your state. You fled knowing that if they ever caught up with you they’d most certainly take revenge. And yet it was you General, it was you who guided Streich to his targets. Streich who would have thought nothing of putting one in behind your ear if given the order. I once asked myself what was it that clicked in Streich’s head. Now I have to ask you exactly the same question.’
Weber threw back the whiskey in one blasphemous gulp, slammed the glass down and sighed wearily.
‘It builds up in you. Constantly. The betrayals. The dislocation. The sense of uselessness. Once the whole thing fell apart, especially after that. Strange, isn’t it but when it was all over only then did I start to get nostalgic for the old place. The sights, the sounds, even that weird smell that used to hang in your nostrils in east Berlin. I missed my old friends. Or rather I was curious about what had become of their lives. Of course it was strictly ‘verboten’ for me to contact any of them, even if they wanted to speak to me again, even if they would rather see me dead. But in the years after the Turn, when I watched the evening news, read “Der Spiegel” or “Die Zeit”, listened to the radio about their daily humiliations, about the way their lives had been turned upside down I felt, and I know this sounds absurd, well, guilt. As if I had something to do with it. The way their entire lives had all been exposed as a sham.’
Peters scanned the room and noted that the years of exile had been good to General Thomas Weber: the framed photographs of him and some friends on a fishing boat proudly holding up their catch somewhere out in the Med’; the paintings of the red brick roofs and whitewashed walls of Andalusia hung on the wall; the flat screen television and DVD player; the African spear and shield above the TV; the expensive red and black throw around the sofa he was reclining on which judging by its intricate mosaic patterns had been bought somewhere in the Islamic world. He compared it all to the grim frugality of that other old ex NVA soldier who had also colluded with Streich back in his Pankow mausoleum grimly waiting for nothing more now than death.
And at least Angi’s father had expected some kind of sanction for helping Streich, Peters recalled. Weber had the arrogant bearing of a man who knew he was beyond that.
‘So why Streich? Why go to a man who would kill you on the spot if he was sitting here right now?’ Peters demanded.
‘It wasn’t an instant decision Captain Peters. It built up inside me over a couple of years.’
‘Exactly when?’ Peters inquired impatiently.
‘It started during a trip to Cologne one Easter a few years ago. I was in the city to visit some old acquaintances, contacts from the BND who helped me re-settle in the west after you Brits had done with me. I happened to be in a bar waiting for one of them down in the Alstadt. I had time to kill and started to read the local paper. And there staring out at me from the front page was a face I recognised immediately.’
‘Oskar Beer?’
‘No! He was still then Wolfgang Schulz. The man I had identified to a DDR court back in ‘85 as the driver who crashed into Petra Sharner’s car. Schulze had just been sentenced for the sexual molestation of a young boy whose parents were friends of his. The man whom my own government freed within a year as part of that revolting “skin trade” with the west. The paper’s report emphasized how Schulz had betrayed his neighbours and breached their trust. I was furious that this shit was getting away with it again. He received an 18-month sentence and then probation. There was an outcry in Bonn where it happened.’
‘Schulz was getting away with it for a second time. That first time in the DDR. That is what finally broke my will to stay. An old comrade with connections hig
h up in the party whispered to me that the man I had helped put away had slipped out of the state and home to the west for the price of a few million D-marks. Now I find out he’s running east this time, eluding justice, real justice in the west.’
‘And then he decided to run away again and become Oskar Beer?’
‘You’ve got to remember that I was a bit of a secret celebrity among the western spooks Captain. I had many old friends in the service, plenty of them who had contacts all over the place. It wasn’t difficult finding out what had happened to Schulz after he was freed. Or that he had changed his name by deed poll to Oskar Beer. I kept an unhealthy interest in our friend right up until he moved back to the scene of his original crime and thought he could dissolve into the new united melting pot. In a way that was the tipping point. His guile in going back to Berlin really got to me. I suppose it was this arrogance that killed him in the end.’
‘So how did you get to Streich?’
The General ran his hand through the weight of his grey mane and threw his head back in a haughty gesture.
‘I was taking a risk, yes but I knew about the network, the old comrades association. I got a few of their numbers, left contacts and waited. I waited for five months before they relayed my message to Streich.’
Peters was conscious that his hold on the ‘Tokarev’ was lessening, his fingers and palms were now sapping with sweat. He gripped the butt plates and pointed the weapon directly at the General signalling for him to continue.
‘I knew Streich and I knew what he was capable of. Although the messages I sent were anonymous I also knew that the second he would see me Streich would recognise the traitor, the face once quietly distributed across the organs of the old state when my absence was first spotted in the year before the Turn. So I couldn’t take any chances. I arranged for him to meet in a public place, somewhere I would be confident he wouldn’t try anything in case he still harboured hatred against an enemy of Socialism like me.’
‘Where then? A railway station? An airport? Tegel? Schonefeld?’
A reptilian smile broke out over Weber’s face, sly, all knowing, semi-covert.
‘In the spot where it all began Captain Peters. I arranged to see him in the very place where I followed Schulz almost every single day for a couple of weeks. The “Boyz R Us” sex shop near the Sauvigny Platz. We met just the once. Face to face. Whispering underneath the soundtrack of grunting and groaning from those awful video booths. I told Streich that Schulz would be in there soon. That he was now called Oskar Beer and often frequented this place.’
‘And what after that?’
‘The rest you know. Beer’s secret then unravelled along with the rest of his chums. And Streich’s hit list grew from one to many,’ Weber shook his shoulders, reached for the Bushmills bottle and filled his glass again.
‘What did Streich say to you?’
The General threw back another shot of the golden liquid in one go, smacked his lips and lay back again in the chair.
‘He said he understood why I was there. He said that I had finally atoned. It was the last thing he ever said to me. I never saw him again after that. I knew I had done my duty.’
Weber paused before continuing.
‘I didn’t realise what Streich was up to until I read that Beer was found strung up behind his own kitchen door and that it was all connected to ‘Christopher’s Wrath.’ That was a neat trick of Streich’s. He singled out the others first, scared the shit out of Beer so much that that bastard topped himself. Then all was clear. All was clear.’
Suddenly, Weber looked drained as if something inside him had suddenly expired.
‘And you never thought of contacting me even while we were chasing our tails all around Berlin after this killer?’ Peters replaying in his mind the exact moment when he regained consciousness inside the lock-up at Ostkreuz, Bauer lying beside him gasping for air, his sergeant’s life waning away.
‘Like seventy millions others I was caught up in it all. We cheered him on. I cheered him on,’ Weber’s reply was relayed in a whisper.
Peters left the old man to this thoughts, finally taking the pistol away from him and shot up from his chair moving towards the balcony with a view onto the Lorraine town on the opposite river bank. He admitted to himself that he had brought the gun along for more than simple insurance and shuddered at the idea that he had even considered using it on this double-traitor.
Replaying his journey to the village there and then he had chosen a stop back along the rail line he travelled earlier; to the closest point where Germany faced France, at Kleinsbittersdorf with its bridge over into the French Grossbittersdorf. He had no more use for the pistol-souvenir in his hand. He would ditch it in the Saar and finally put that last campaign in the Gulf far behind him because now Peter knew: he longer wanted to be a prisoner of his wars gone by.
When he returned to the living room, Peters realised he hadn’t heard Weber putting on the television and the DVD player. As Peters got ready to leave, saying nothing more to his former agent, he noticed that the General was now oblivious to his presence, transfixed instead to the screen in front of him. Weber was using a remote control to unwind a short film of a man being cut to pieces with a sword.
Epilogue
Upton Park, East London, 15th March 2006
Seconds after the Bolton keeper’s own goal that gave West Ham the lead the ageing skinhead strained his neck up out from the upturned collar of his blue Harrington jacket to reveal two black crossed hammers tattooed around the skin covering his jugular vein. He punched the air, leapt on top of his plastic claret and blue seat, and tried to conduct the rest of the Bobby Moore Stand to join him in his euphoric celebrations. After dropping down back onto the concrete floor he went over to try to bear hug Peters who took a few diffident steps back to avoid the skin’s embrace.
It was the accent that first convinced Peters he might be in danger here on the very spot where his father Kurt used to take him on Saturdays in the early 70s when as a boy he marvelled at the skills of Clyde Best or the in-box poaching opportunism of Alan Taylor. From the moment the skinhead opened his mouth to strike up a conversation Peters instantly recognised the Belfast accent.
When they did lightly hug in celebration over the first goal of the FA Cup Quarter Final Replay, Peters touched both pockets of his neighbour’s Harrington feeling for the bulge of a gun or the outline of a blade. But there was nothing there that felt lethal being concealed in his coat to suggest that this over-enthusiastic Irons’ fan from across the Irish Sea was here on a mission of revenge.
Just before the search the Skinhead had gently kicked his ox blood Doctor Marten shoes up against Peters’ own and said, ‘Snap!’ As he scanned Peters up and down, the Skin noticed that this man who was around his own age also wore the ‘uniform’ of their old teenage sub-cult: claret Fred Perry jumper, button-down blue Ben Sherman, the light blue jeans and the red DMs. Even the bottle blonde hair Peters had used to attempt to conceal his identity as Germany’s most famous cop had been cropped down with a number 2 razor.
‘Rich men with a mid-life crisis grab a Ferrari and a younger blonde, all us plebs get are DMs and Harringtons for ours!,’ the skin said in that same unmistakable glass-grinding accent from the city that had changed everything for Peters.
Through the rest of the cup tie Peters did his best to ignore his neighbour firstly by scrolling through the text messages both from Stannheim in Berlin and Heike now in San Sebastian.
‘Hey mystery man. Where are you? I’m here sending you big kisses on one of the loveliest beaches in the world. Meeting some friends of those lads who were found in the Havel a while ago. Wish you were?. Lol! xxxHeike.’
Stannheim’s text almost give him as much hope as Heike’s had done.
‘Enjoy London and hope your Hammers win tonight. Paul sends his regards and is listening in to game on radio. At home ahead of Rehab. He cannot thank you enough and nor can I. Your commander always…M’
&nbs
p; Throughout the rest of the second half and into extra time Peters remembered his father sitting with him in their usual seats close to the touchline and in particular that one afternoon when Leeds United came calling. Kurt Peters had cursed and seethed every time the monkey noises rose up from the away end when Best got onto the ball before turning to his son and whispering to Martin, ‘That bastard Hitler was going to make Leeds his new capital if he had won the Battle of Britain. Now I know why!’
Kurt never missed an opportunity to have a go at the Fuhrer for driving him into exile…even while at Upton Park, Peters thought just as Marlon Harewood put the Hammers back in the lead on the 96th minute prompting his Belfast ‘neighbour’ this time to shoot out of his chair and stating pogoing in celebration.
When the Bobby Moore Stand eventually settled down again Peters noticed that the Skinhead had a holdall with the club’s crest on it wedged in between his feet. Perhaps he had not been security conscious enough by thinking that a quick stealthy frisk of the man’s Harrington would do the job. He had been too quick to dismiss this Belfast West Ham supporter as nothing more than an excited fan from afar on his one and only trip in a season to their beloved East End home.
He wondered what was in the bag as his paranoia began to return. Was there a weapon in there? Would the skin follow him out of the ground, pressing himself close enough to Peters to blade him or stick a syringe full of poison into his limbs or arse? He had read about how the UVF had tried to kill one of its members held inside Crumlin Road jail who had turned Supergrass by lacing custard served up to the traitor in the prison canteen that had been laced with a toxin stolen from an aircraft factory. The informer-inmate only survived because the toxic substance turned the custard into a green slime like sludge which he immediately sent back to the kitchen. That was the mid 80s, Peters thought, surely in this new century any terrorist group out for a silent assassination would have access to far better concealed lethal poisons! He decided he would stay put until the stand emptied as the jubilant crowds of Irons filed out, until his ‘friend’ in the next seat left.
The Swinging Detective Page 35