by David Young
Instead of a restaurant meal or a drink in a bar, Emil Wollenburg had suggested a visit to the natural swimming lake – the Heidesee – so Müller stopped by the flat in Residential Complex Six to get her swimsuit on the way. It was a short drive from there to the lake on the outskirts of Halle Nietleben.
She had mixed feelings about the date. Emil was visiting the Kaufhalle after his hospital stint to buy a picnic, and Müller could certainly do with eating something. She’d skipped lunch, and her only nutritional intake since breakfast had been a couple of biscuits with her mid-morning coffee. The thought of a possible evening swim – if it was still warm enough – certainly held appeal. What she was less sure about were her feelings towards Emil Wollenburg. It almost seemed too convenient, too coincidental that he’d been sent on a temporary attachment to the main hospital in Halle itself, while she’d been despatched to the current case in Halle-Neustadt. Müller was suspicious on two counts: one, that he seemed overeager. The second reason was the same one that always struck her about Tilsner. Was she being watched? By the Stasi? And was Emil Wollenburg – like, she assumed, Werner Tilsner – some form of Stasi employee, official or unofficial?
She saw him before he saw her, leaning against his car in an open-necked shirt, muscles taut against the material. Emil Wollenburg set something off inside her, which was why she knew she had to be even more wary. His smile was warm and welcoming. She wasn’t sure if she should move in and kiss him, at least on the cheek. In the end, they both settled on another handshake – thankfully his lacked the bone-crushing grip of the professor from earlier in the day.
‘I was wondering if you’d stood me up,’ he laughed.
Müller felt herself blushing like a teenager, even though she was only a few minutes late, and felt angry with herself for it. ‘Sorry. Busy day. And I thought I might as well get my swimming costume . . . just in case.’
‘Ah. My turn to apologise. I’d only planned on having the picnic,’ said Emil, his eyes gesturing to the basket he was carrying. ‘So I haven’t got my trunks. I won’t be joining you.’
Müller shrugged and smiled. She wouldn’t have objected to him adopting Freikörperkultur – and going without. Then she chastised herself for the thought. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, aloud.
‘We could take a rowing boat, though? The hire place is still open.’
The last time Müller had been rowed by a man in a boat it had been on the Weisser See, in the northern outskirts of the Hauptstadt. In the depths of winter. By Stasi lieutenant colonel Klaus Jäger. That had been an almost surreal experience, like most of Jäger’s meetings. To do it again – this time just for fun and on a sunny summer evening – was much more appealing.
*
Whether it was because of the wine, or the soporific summer heat, Müller found herself letting Emil Wollenburg do most of the talking. She was concentrating less on his words and more on the way his rather attractive, hard-edged jaw and mouth formed them.
His move to Halle did seem to have been a total, and happy, coincidence. And it had, after all, simply been luck that they had bumped into each other in the corridors of the Charité. At least, that was what the doctor maintained, and Müller realised her guard was down. When Emil leaned in for a kiss, Müller held back for a moment. Did she even need a man in her life? Was it just an added complication when this case, in this strange city of identikit apartments, was already getting her down? But at the same time, she didn’t want to reach her thirtieth birthday alone and bitter. Gottfried was in the past now. She wished him well, she hoped he was happy in his new life in the West. But she deserved some happiness too. Emil Wollenburg seemed the sort of man who could provide it.
*
Emil’s flat was right in the centre of Halle old town, overlooking the Handel monument and the market place. The Republic’s shining new concrete tower blocks hadn’t reached here, and although Müller accepted them as progress, acknowledged the way they could open new lives and opportunities to citizens, there was something so right about these old, historic German buildings.
As she stood at Emil’s window admiring them, she felt him come up behind her, the tickle of warm breath on her neck, the smell now more of the wine they’d drunk than the spicy food they’d eaten. They’d shared one bottle of Sekt, then opened another, and she was now warmly tipsy. He wrapped his powerful arms around her, and she let herself fall against him, and felt his desire and need.
*
It was their first date, but going to bed together felt perfectly natural. Nothing like her sordid romps with Tilsner from a few months earlier, which she had soon regretted. This, she knew, she wouldn’t regret. At first, they were just kissing. Kissing and talking. About nonsense most of the time, although he listened attentively when she told him about her visit to Oberhof, the alienation she’d always felt from her family, and her discovering the truth on her most recent trip back home to the Thuringian forest.
‘It must be difficult,’ he whispered, holding her tightly on top of the bedcovers.
‘What must be?’ Müller replied, momentarily confused by the alcohol haze.
‘Becoming an orphan. That’s in effect what’s happened. Your father’s dead – and now you discover he was never your father after all. And now all your fears that you didn’t belong, that there was something different about you, they’ve been realised.’
Müller was silent for a moment. She thought of the young girl in the photograph and the baby wrapped in a shawl. The girl that was her mother. The baby that was her. Was that girl alive somewhere? And if so, where? And what about her father? She knew with the timing of her conception – right at the end of the war – there was a chance he could be from one of the liberating forces, not German at all.
‘You’ve gone quiet,’ said Emil, stroking her cheek. She held his hand a moment, and then kissed it.
*
When the time came, he paused, and asked if he should wear a condom.
She shook her head. Not trusting herself to speak, to explain why. Just his asking the question grabbed at her heart and brought back the memories of Pawlitzki, the memories of her aborted twins, the memories of Gottfried’s unnecessary condom packet hidden on top of the wardrobe. Unnecessary, if indeed they were meant for her, because every gynaecologist she’d ever seen, every second opinion she’d sought, had come back with the same answer. After what had happened at the police college, it was impossible for her to conceive a child. So she’d never discovered what the condoms were about, and now she never would. She didn’t really care.
Müller just knew she was ready. Ready for Emil Wollenburg to enter her. Ready to love again.
30
Two months later
September 1975
It felt like old times. She and Tilsner chasing down a new lead – a lead that was taking them back to the place she regarded as home, even more so after the revelations from her adoptive mother in Oberhof. Tilsner driving her in an unmarked People’s Police Wartburg along a motorway towards Berlin as rain slanted down. They could hardly see anything through the mist of spray thrown up by a procession of trucks ferrying goods to and from the Hauptstadt.
It felt like old times, but things were very different for Müller. The investigation in Halle-Neustadt had slowed to a crawl, which was why this new information taking them back north had given her fresh hope. The initial impetus of Schmidt’s discovery of the crossword clue, the input from the handwriting professor, all had dissipated, and instead an air of gloom and despondency hung over the incident room. Maddelena was still missing, her abductor still at large. The only hope of a breakthrough was in the hands of the Stasi team which Tilsner had been overseeing: the team cross-checking the handwriting samples gathered by the various Pioneer groups and other volunteers. The handful of people they’d found who wrote their capital ‘E’s in a similar way to those found in the newspaper that Karsten’s body had been wrapped in had all proved to be dead ends: citizens with copper-bottomed alib
is, or pensioners with no links to young babies, or any motivation to steal them.
Müller glanced across at Tilsner. He saw her looking, turned and smiled. Then his eyes were back on the road. She’d known – ever since the night they’d shared in the Harz – that there was no future between her and Tilsner. Even if he was prepared to put his marriage at risk, trample all over the feelings of his wife and children, she wasn’t going to help him. In any case, Müller was in a new relationship. One that nurtured her, made her feel warm inside. Just picturing Emil now – his square jaw line not unlike Tilsner’s, but a decade or so younger – sent a charge of something akin to electricity through her body. That was what had changed. Even though the police inquiry was going nowhere, it had helped to bring her and Emil together through the happy accident of both being sent on job attachments to the Halle area at the same time.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Tilsner.
‘Nothing much,’ Müller lied. ‘Just wondering why they were so happy to let us both go off to Berlin to check out this new lead. When Reiniger sent you down from the Hauptstadt, I thought it was under strict instructions that you could only do a desk job, overseeing the cross-checks of handwriting samples?’
‘They didn’t really need a detective for that. Anyway, I feel awkward working with the Stasi.’ He grinned at her and pulled the sleeve of his jacket up slightly, his other hand still on the wheel. Despite the gloom outside, the expensive watch on his wrist still sparkled.
‘You don’t have to try to convince me, Werner. I enjoy working with you, wherever your affiliations really lie.’ As she said this, she tried to eyeball him, but he just smirked and turned his head back to the road.
Müller had tried to persuade Reiniger and the Halle People’s Police to let her take Schmidt with them too. Something seemed to be troubling the forensic officer, and she’d thought a trip back to Berlin might help. But when she’d asked Schmidt about it, he simply brushed it off as a little family trouble: the sort of thing you always get with teenage boys of a certain age. It was another reminder to Müller of the problems families faced day to day. Another reminder that was itself a punch in the gut. Because whatever future she and Emil had together, she knew it wouldn’t involve children.
‘Scheisse!’ exclaimed Tilsner over the roar of the Wartburg’s motor, wiping his handkerchief across the steamed-up inside of the window. ‘I thought September was still supposed to be summer. This reminds me of that day we set off for the Harz.’ Müller got a rag out of the car’s glove compartment and helped to remove the condensation caused by the unseasonably cold and wet weather.
Their return to the Hauptstadt was thanks to some builders working in the area surrounding the new Palace of the Republic – the shining new seat of government for the country’s leaders, which was due to open in a few months’ time. One of the things they’d found was a bus ticket from Halle-Neustadt dating from 1967. By itself, that was nothing remarkable, and nothing to bother the criminal division of the People’s Police about. The reason Kripo detective Oberleutnant Karin Müller and her deputy Unterleutnant Werner Tilsner had been called to the scene was what was found next to the bus ticket, in the cellar of an old war-damaged building which was being demolished as part of the Palace of the Republic project. Side by side, their finger bones arranged to give the impression they were clutching each other, the complete skeletons of two tiny babies.
31
Eight years earlier
September 1967, East Berlin
When I hand the list of names to Hansi I feel slightly disloyal. To my gender. To women who could have been mothers. That thing – that beautiful state – that I have always wanted. That I had once, but which was taken away. In fact not once, but twice. That’s what I don’t understand. When women like myself yearn so strongly that it hurts, that it takes over our whole lives, how can others throw life away? But still, I feel disloyal.
Hansi smiles at me, looking at my handwritten list almost lovingly. I wish he’d look at me that way more often. ‘You’ve done well, Franzi.’ He strokes my hair, a bit like you might do to a dog. ‘You seem to be happy there. It’s all coming together again.’
I smile at him. But inside I want to cry. I hate every day there. It’s like a factory. A death factory. The instruments of death are the forceps and curette I hand each day to Doctor Rothstein, which he wields with such precision and devastation.
32
Eight years later
September 1975
That was how Müller and Tilsner found them. Their finger bones entwined. This hadn’t happened by accident, thought Müller. She felt a chill go through her. There was something about this place, something she recognised despite the demolition and rebuilding work. And now two identical baby skeletons, under a taped-off canvas tent, side by side. They’d been left deliberately, to allow Müller to see them in situ, because of the Halle-Neustadt bus ticket – the potential link to her case.
But there was something else, here near Marx-Engels-Platz, near the site of her old Kripo office, that she found familiar. Almost a sense of déjà vu. And then it came to her in a rush, and she found the nausea and bile welling up, something tight in her stomach. No, deeper. In her womb. The images crowded in on her again. Pawlitzki, his mangled face, his foul breath, his thrusting, and where it had ended up. It had ended up here. In the illegal abortion clinic operated by the quack doctor, Rothstein. It had been her only option, once she’d decided she didn’t want a rapist’s babies. Abortions hadn’t been legalised in the Republic until three years ago, and then only until twelve weeks. In any case, she’d decided much, much later. The only option had been Rothstein’s so-called clinic, in reality this cellar, under a bombed-out building which had now been demolished to make way for a shiny new Palace of the Republic.
‘Are you OK, Karin?’ whispered Tilsner. For once, there was genuine concern in his voice. She realised she’d just been standing there, staring. Willing herself not to vomit. It was the second time this week she’d felt ill: the first time she thought she’d caught a bug. This time . . .
She shook her head, neck and upper back, to try to rid herself of the memories. ‘Yes, yes. Sorry, I was miles away. It’s such a desperate sight, isn’t it?’ She turned to the forensic officer who’d been assigned the case. He was young, fresh-faced, looked newly out of college. ‘Do we know how old they are? How long they’ve been there?’
‘Well, we didn’t want to disturb the remains until you got here, Comrade Oberleutnant. But we took some samples away for analysis. My estimate is that they date from approximately the same time as the bus ticket found near them.’
‘So, 1967? Eight years ago?’
‘Approximately, yes.’ The Kriminaltechniker nodded his shock of curly brown hair.
It was something of a relief for Müller. For a horrible moment she’d thought they might be her babies. Her aborted twins. Dumped, or rather, arranged in some bizarre pattern. She knew it wouldn’t be the case – it would have been too much of a coincidence – and her own visit here had been at least two years before the bodies of these infants had been dumped. But the thought that Rothstein and his team had carried on working here made her skin crawl.
‘You know what this place was, Comrade Kriminaltechniker?’
‘Well . . . up to a point,’ said the young forensic officer. ‘It was some sort of part-demolished building, damaged by wartime bombing.’
‘Yes, but that’s not all,’ said Müller. ‘It was also an illegal back-street abortion clinic.’
‘Scheisse,’ said Tilsner. ‘You’re sure about that?’
She watched her deputy look her straight in the eyes, her own watering now, as she fought back tears. Realisation slowly dawned on Tilsner’s face. ‘Sorry, Karin,’ he silently mouthed. Quickly, he asked the forensic officer the question he knew she didn’t want to pose.
‘So these are aborted babies, then? Therefore it’s not going to be anything to do with our Halle-Neustadt in
quiry. And more than that, it’s not really anything of concern for the Kriminalpolizei?’
But even before Tilsner reached the end of his question, Müller could see the young Kriminaltechniker shaking his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We’ve checked with the pathologist. That’s why we brought you up from Ha-Neu.’ He crouched down, pointing at the one of the babies’ skulls. ‘See here, on the top of the head, the fontanelle. It’s the soft tissue part that only ossifies later in childhood, although here it’s rotted away leaving this cavity. We can tell from the size of the fontanelles. These babies hadn’t been aborted. When they died, or were killed, they were three months old.’
*
Müller had hoped to chew over the case with Tilsner during an evening drink, but after his hospital stay he seemed full of a renewed sense of family values and had returned instead to his family apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. So, after a quick debrief in Müller’s Keibelstrasse office, they went their separate ways, Müller returning to the Schönhauser Allee flat.
The forensic officer would check the bus ticket and even the babies’ skeletons for the fingerprints of whoever had dumped the children, but Müller was certain the latter would yield nothing. She had higher hopes for the bus ticket: Müller knew from her training that prints could last on paper for several decades if they were not exposed to moisture. Unfortunately, a cellar in the throes of demolition would not be the ideal environment for their preservation. But the date, and the skeletons, gave them something to go on. Müller had already phoned Wiedemann – who’d sounded surprisingly helpful given his apparent closeness to Malkus and Janowitz – and instructed him to scour the files in Halle-Neustadt and Halle city to try to find a report of missing babies from the relevant period. They would also have to check out Doctor Rothstein. One possibility was that as well as disposing of unwanted foetuses, Rothstein was involved in something altogether more sinister: the disposal of unwanted babies. It was a train of thought Müller didn’t want to follow too far, and she would make sure she delegated any interviewing of him to Tilsner, or another officer. She didn’t want any further reminders of her visit to his ‘clinic’.