Stasi Wolf

by David Young

  Müller leafed through the pages, the smell of the musty paper mingling with the scent of whatever perfume she’d used as a teenager. The aroma was familiar. Brands of cosmetics in the Republic barely changed from year to year. Casino de Luxe, it smelt like: an almost too-flowery scent of roses, with something vaguely unpleasant and sweet behind it.

  It didn’t take her long to find the entry she wanted from the second of November, 1951. She glanced down it: Wy did the soljers take Johanas away? Muti wil not tel me. All she torks about is Sara. She is a wich. Müller wasn’t sure whether to laugh at the atrocious spelling and sibling jealousy behind the words, or cry about the truth of the loss of her best friend and feeling of alienation from her family. The slow creak of the stairs instead forced her to hurriedly shut the diary away and lock the drawer.

  Face to face, Müller could see in her mother her sister Sara in thirty years’ time. Like Sara, Rosamund Müller’s smile in greeting for her elder daughter seemed thin and insincere. Müller approached her as though to pull her into a hug, but the middle-aged woman, with the same reddy-brown curly hair as her younger daughter – thanks no doubt to the hairdresser’s or her own dye bottle – pulled back, and folded her arms over her fulsome chest.

  ‘It would have been nice to have had some warning, Karin.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to let you down again. It’s another murder . . . well, missing persons inquiry. I thought it would be worse to announce that I was coming, and then let you down if I had to cancel.’

  Rosamund shrugged, then sniffed the air suspiciously. ‘What’s that smell? It seems familiar.’

  ‘My old perfume. From when I was last living here. I was just testing a bottle I found.’ The small lie came easily.

  Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I suppose you’ll be wanting lunch. You could help Sara with the preparations, you know.’

  Müller nodded. ‘I’ll be down in a moment.’

  Rosamund turned as though to retreat down the stairs.

  ‘Mutti. Don’t go just yet. Come and sit on the bed. I wanted a chat.’

  Her mother eyed her suspiciously, but they sat next to each other, and the bed responded to being disturbed by sending plumes of dust particles into the air that then slowly fell through the shafts of sunlight like miniature snowflakes.

  ‘I was thinking about when I was little, on the journey here.’

  ‘What about it? You were a difficult child. Never made many friends. Always fussy about your food. Always jealous of Sara.’

  ‘You sound as though you hated me.’

  ‘You reap what you sow, Karin. You reap what you sow.’ Then her face softened, and she laid her wrinkled, liver-spotted hand on Müller’s bare forearm. ‘Sorry. That was nasty. It’s just I was upset when you didn’t thank me for the birthday card or present, or come back for Christmas. You didn’t even write.’

  Müller in turn laid her own hand on top of her mother’s, smoothing out the bulging veins. She’d tried to ignore her birthday as much as possible, but it was still wrong of her not to respond to her mother. ‘I’m sorry. I should have. Work was even more of a nightmare. And I was having problems with Gottfried.’

  ‘Oh. I hope it wasn’t anything serious?’

  Müller didn’t say anything. The silence told her mother enough.

  ‘You’re still together, I hope?’

  The detective shook her head and – to her surprise – found herself fighting back tears. She’d thought she was over it. In her mind, she was. But some deeper tie to her former husband still pulled at her. She wiped at her eyes. Her mother got out a handkerchief and handed it to her. That first letter he’d sent from the Federal Republic had been the only letter, and the only piece of actual handwriting was his signature. It troubled her. Maybe others had been intercepted. But, at the end of the day, they were now a divorced couple – why should he write?

  ‘Was that what you wanted to talk to me about?’

  Müller shook her head again, still not trusting herself to speak.

  ‘What was it then, Katzi?’

  Müller clutched her mother’s hand more tightly. ‘I like it when you call me Katzi. It’s what you always used to call me when I was little, before –’

  ‘– before your sister was born?’

  Müller nodded, and then breathed in slowly. ‘There are a couple of things I was thinking about on the journey down that I wanted to discuss with you.’ She saw a shadow of worry cross her mother’s face. ‘The first was about Johannes.’

  ‘Johannes?’ asked her mother in confusion. At the same time, her face relaxed slightly – as though she’d been expecting an altogether more difficult subject to be raised.

  ‘The son of the owners of the Pension Edelweiss. The former owners.’ Müller couldn’t disguise the bitterness in her words.

  Rosamund’s expression changed as she remembered. ‘He was a strange boy. Why he befriended a five-year-old when he was at least six years older than you, I’ll never understand.’

  ‘He was a nice boy. We were a good team. But I’ve never understood why the government took over the Edelweiss – and lots of other hotels here – and handed them to the state tourist authority. And why our little business survived.’

  ‘That was thanks to your father. He’d been through a lot under the Nazis, during the war. It wasn’t a pleasant time to be a communist. But he stayed loyal to the Party, to the socialist cause, despite the difficulties it caused.’ Rosamund Müller paused, staring vacantly above her daughter’s head.

  ‘And?’

  Her mother shivered slightly, despite the cloying warmth of the cramped room. ‘And he made a lot of friends. Important friends in the Party. He helped them, they helped him. But Johannes’s parents . . .’

  ‘Weren’t Party members?’

  Rosamund shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps not, I never saw them at any meetings. But worse than that, they were racketeers, profiteers, keeping money for themselves that should have been shared with the state. We’ve never been a rich country, Karin, and we certainly weren’t then. The war was not long over. Some people here in the village just carried on like fascist imperialists.’ She drew her hand away from her daughter’s, and straightened her back. The upright communist convincing herself of her integrity.

  ‘But they didn’t have to relocate everyone, surely?’

  Her mother gave a weary sigh. ‘Sometimes difficult choices must be made for the greater good. You should know that, working for the People’s Police.’

  They lapsed into silence, sitting uncomfortably now side by side, the brief flash of intimacy and warmth forgotten.

  ‘It wasn’t fair, though,’ Müller said after a few moments. ‘He was my best friend. And he was taken away. You were never sympathetic about it, even though you knew how upset I was. And you say it was odd for me to befriend an awkward boy a few years older than myself. But perhaps there was a reason.’ She held her mother’s gaze for a moment. ‘Perhaps it was because I never really fitted in here.’ She gestured round the tiny room. ‘Perhaps you didn’t do enough to make me feel loved.’

  Müller’s mother had now removed her hand from her daughter’s arm, and stared hard at her in return. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say, Karin. And it’s not true. We did our best for you. You know that. It wasn’t always easy. As I said, you were a difficult child.’

  Rosamund Müller’s hands were now clasped tightly in her lap. Müller looked into her eyes – there was something almost fearful, cowed about them. Not the image of her mother – a strong-willed, stubborn matriarch – that Müller was used to. Rosamund Müller dropped her gaze. She dropped her voice, almost to a whisper. ‘You said there were two things you wanted to talk about. What was the other?’

  On the journey, and in the X-ray department of Ha-Neu hospital, Müller’s resolve had been clear. She would confront her mother. Confront her about her constant feeling throughout her childhood of being treated differently to her brother and s
ister. Confront her about that visit by the elegant woman with the fine facial features – whose near double she’d seen in the hospital. The woman who’d stared so hard at her when she – a child of just five years of age – had opened the guest house front door, thinking she was helping her mother by welcoming a paying guest. Only to have her mother shout and scream at her when the woman called out her name, then bundle her inside, before an angry exchange of words with the visitor on the doorstep.

  But it had to be done. She let out a long, slow sigh, cleared her throat, and then clasped her mother’s hand to hers again.

  ‘The other thing I wanted to talk about was what happened shortly after Johannes was taken away. When that woman visited.’

  Rosamund Müller’s lips pursed together, her eyes narrowed. ‘What woman? I don’t know what you mean.’ She freed her hand from Müller’s and made as if to stand. Müller placed hers on her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Down the years, I’ve tried to talk about it several times,’ said Müller, surprised at the coldness and anger in her own voice. ‘The way you reacted, shouting at me, yanking me away from the door. You’d never have treated Sara or Roland like that. I’ve always felt I was treated differently. I need you to explain why. I need to understand.’

  Rosamund threw her daughter’s hand off and stood, making towards the bedroom door. ‘I said I never want to talk about it, Karin. And I meant it.’

  Müller dodged round the older woman, blocking the doorway with her body, her voice rising in frustration. ‘I want to know. I need to know.’ She gripped her mother’s shoulder tightly, watching the other woman wince. So tightly she could feel her pulse. ‘I deserve to know.’

  Rosamund pulled her head back a fraction, shocked by the venom and desperation in her daughter’s words. Then Müller felt the older woman’s rigid, upright posture suddenly slump in defeat.

  Her mother slowly prised her daughter’s fingers away one by one, then took Müller’s hand in her own.

  ‘I never wanted it to come to this. Whatever you may think about how badly you feel I treated you, I’ve always tried to show you love, Karin. I really have.’ She exhaled so slowly it sounded as though she was emptying every breath from her wheezing, rattling lungs. ‘But perhaps it’s time. Time to show you something that I never really wanted to show you. Come with me.’

  *

  Müller’s parents’ bedroom – much as her own – had changed little since her childhood. Her father’s side of the bed, even though he no longer slept in it, was still overlooked by a wall emblazoned with an array of medals and certificates for various good communist deeds, and loyal work for the Citizens’ Committee.

  Since her husband’s death some five years earlier, Rosamund Müller clearly hadn’t rearranged any of the furniture or sleeping arrangements. She still slept on the far side of the double bed. Müller knew her papa had needed to be nearest the door, especially in his last years when the prostate cancer rampaged and spread through his ailing body. And it was to the far side Rosamund now went, watched closely by Müller. Her mother reached under the bedside table for a hidden key, then opened the top locked drawer and brought out a small, rusty tin box. She thrust it towards Müller, her eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘Here,’ she said, her voice shrill and quivering with emotion. ‘I never meant to treat you any differently to your brother or sister. I tried not to. But if I did, I’m sorry. This box contains the reason. It’s yours. Take it.’

  Müller reached out and grasped the object, then loosened her grip with one hand, and examined the rust stains on her fingertips.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it? I thought that was what you wanted? To know everything?’ There was a bitter edge to her mother’s voice. The sort of nastiness that Sara had never been shown.

  Müller held the box in one hand and began prising the lid off with her other, watching her fingers tremble – partly from the strain of trying to free the fused-on metal, partly from the fear of what she would find.

  All of a sudden, the lid came away, sending rust particles into the air. Müller breathed in the tang of metal, felt tingles up her back and neck from the sound – much like her reaction to chalk scraping on a blackboard at school.

  ‘I haven’t opened it for years,’ admitted her mother. ‘I haven’t wanted to. I kept it for you. For this day. For this day that I hoped would never come.’

  Müller still said nothing, but stared at the tin’s contents. There wasn’t much. A sepia-tinted, dog-eared black-and-white photo and a piece of folded, yellowing paper. She picked out the photograph first. It showed a young girl – very young, early teens – in a dirty, loose white overall. Cradling a tiny infant, wrapped in a shawl. The girl’s eyes were trained on the baby, her expression full of love.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Müller, aware of her own voice crackling with emotion. But in her heart, already knowing the answer.

  ‘That’s your natural mother,’ sobbed Rosamund. ‘It’s the only photo I have. With you, just a few hours after you were born.’

  26

  July 1975

  Halle-Neustadt

  The revelations in Oberhof hung heavily over Müller for the rest of the weekend. Soon after the discovery made in her mother’s tin box, the detective had stormed out of the guest house, unable or unwilling to build bridges with the two women who she’d thought for nearly three decades were her mother and sister.

  Throughout the drive back, thoughts raced through her head. Who and where was her real mother? Was it the woman who visited the guest house all those years ago and tried to talk to her? Despite Rosamund Müller giving up some of her secrets, she hadn’t been willing – or able – to enlighten Müller on that point. And who and where was her real father? Where had her former best friend Johannes and his family been taken? Were they even still alive?

  She felt used. Dirty. Betrayed. And lost. Most of all she felt her whole identity – what she thought of as herself – had been undermined. The emotions made her throat tighten. Tears – perhaps even a breakdown – felt just one misguided comment away.

  Yet as she swung the Wartburg left into yet another of Ha-Neu’s nameless streets, at the entrance to Residential Area Six, she was also filled with a new sense of determination. She had been parted from her natural mother soon after birth, and hadn’t seen her since, not until the photograph shown to her in Oberhof. Now, more than ever, Oberleutnant Karin Müller was determined to do her job: to solve the case of baby Maddelena Salzmann and her poor, dead, twin brother Karsten – and return Maddelena to her parents, dead or alive. They had to learn their baby’s fate. The not knowing was so unfair, so destructive.

  Her resolve did not stop there. She was determined to track down her real mother, whatever the consequences. She was equally certain she would do everything in her power to find her natural father. Perhaps she should have pressed Rosamund Müller further. But the old woman had seemed too upset and angry. Müller had felt the same emotions – leaving what she had thought of as her family home as soon as possible.

  *

  As Müller entered the police apartment, she immediately sensed that something had changed. Something was out of place. It felt somehow emptier. She realised as soon as she went past the bathroom. There was only one set of washing, shaving and tooth-brushing equipment there. Someone had left. She checked Schmidt and Vogel’s room. Schmidt’s bed was messily unmade as usual, snack wrappers discarded on the bedside table. But Vogel’s bed was stripped, and his case had disappeared. It must be as she had feared. With the murder element having being ruled out of the inquiry, their People’s Police bosses had taken the opportunity to cut back her staffing levels. She wondered if it had been at the insistence of their Stasi ‘liaison’ officer – Janowitz – whose main role seemed to be to obstruct the inquiry and work towards getting it mothballed. If it was Janowitz, he seemed to have had some success. Unterleutnant Martin Vogel – the gentle, student-like detective from the Harz mountains – had been transferred.
That only left one fully-fledged Kripo officer on the team: herself. It just wouldn’t be enough.

  *

  Her fears were confirmed as soon as she arrived in the incident room. Eschler handed her a note, from Vogel. She tore it open angrily and began to read.

  Dear Karin/Comrade Oberleutnant Müller

  Many apologies for dropping you in it like this, without having a chance to talk face to face. I’m very sorry to have had to leave an inquiry before it’s complete, and I very much hope that – despite this – you, Schmidt, Eschler and the team will bring things to a successful conclusion and that baby Maddelena will be found safe and well. It’s been one of the more harrowing inquiries I’ve been involved with, but it was a pleasure being able to work with you again.

  I have, however, been offered Hauptmann Baumann’s old job back in Wernigerode. The guy they got in to replace him didn’t work out, and for me – as you’ll appreciate – it’s a big step up. So I couldn’t say no. Not that I would have wanted to – or even would have been allowed to!

  Anyway, apologies again. Many thanks for having me on your team, and I hope that – one day – our paths will cross again.

  Until then, Warmest Greetings

  Martin (Unterleutnant Vogel)

  Müller stuffed the note in her pocket and then looked at Eschler with what she hoped wasn’t too defeated an expression.

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll cope,’ smiled Eschler, seemingly unperturbed. ‘And we’ve set up a new inquiry room specifically for chasing that handwriting lead. It’s downstairs in part of the fire station that wasn’t being used. The Stasi have given us some manpower to check through everything, and there’s someone else down there who wants to see you.’