The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘I want an entry stamp, too. I’ll give you the date later.’

  ‘Five hundred…’

  ‘Same as the last time then.’

  ‘Five hundred down and five hundred when I finish.’

  ‘Since when did your rates double?’

  ‘Like I told you, Herr Kappa, passports are the window into people’s lives. I looked into this one and it seemed…cluttered to me.’

  ‘Cluttered or sparse, it shouldn’t affect your work.’

  ‘That’s the deal, Herr Kappa.’

  The Snow Leopard took his uniform out of the boot and changed in the car. He went back to the Schönhauser Allee and headed north under the pillars of the S-bahn. He kept going and passed under the Pankow S-bahn, where he turned right and, as he pushed on, began to come out of the urban sprawl through Buchholz. Just before Schöner-linde he had to show his papers at a police post and was saluted and allowed through without even a glance into the back seat. He drove through the small village and headed north again through Schönwalde and into the pine forest beyond. A fine snow began to fall just as he turned off the road to Wandlitz and by the time he reached the guardhouse to the Wandlitz Forest Settlement, the idyllic lakeside village reserved for the ruling élite, he was swearing out loud. The snow was going to slow everything down. The guard cracked his heels together and saluted.

  ‘To see General Stiller,’ said the Snow Leopard.

  ‘Herr Major,’ said the guard, and raised the barrier.

  He drove through the settlement to the corner reserved for the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, and parked up outside the villa belonging to General Lothar Stiller. The wind was blowing hard, buffeting against the buildings, needling the fine crystals of snow into the still sensitive side of his face. He’d think afterwards whether he’d heard anything, or if it had just been the thump of the wind on the edge of the villa.

  He did hear something as he walked up the path to the front door, the snow swirling, feinting left and right, on the steps up to the porch. It was the door knocking against the latch. He pushed it open with a thick gloved finger and stepped into the dark carpeted hall.

  Light came from a crack under a door to the left. It opened on to the remains of a party – three shot glasses for schnapps and vodka and larger glasses laced with the scum of beer foam. There was nobody in the room, but a tie lay on the back of one of the chairs. He skirted the furniture and headed for the general’s bedroom.

  He didn’t see him at first. There was only a bedside lamp on and a bad sulphurous smell in the room. He turned on the main light. General Stiller was naked and kneeling in the corner of the room, hunched over an armchair on the back of which his light blue uniform was neatly laid out. There was a large, dark red stain over the pocket of the jacket which was working its way up to the medal ribbons on the chest. The white shirt next to it was flecked with blood. The bad smell was from the streak of diarrhoea down the general’s hamstrings and spattered over his calves.

  The Snow Leopard held a hand over his mouth and inspected the body. Stiller had been shot at point-blank range in the back of the neck. He knelt by his side. The exit wound was huge, an appalling mash of skin and bone and an ugly black hole where the nose should have been. The eyes seemed to be staring agog, as if amazed at seeing what had been a good-looking face sprayed over the back of the chair.

  The Snow Leopard reached under the chair and came up with a ball of lacy underwear. He stood and took in the room. Four strides and he was in the bathroom. He pulled back the plastic curtain to the bath. She was lying face-down, peroxide blonde hair, black at the roots and now horribly reddened. She wore a black suspender belt and black stockings.

  Back in the bedroom he flung back the covers. Something heavy hit the floor. The gun. A Walther PPK, no suppressor. He held it in his gloved hand, went back to the living room, opened the door opposite the curtained window of the front room. The girl’s clothes were on the back of the chair. The bed had seen some action, all the covers hung off the end like a thick tongue and there was a large stain on the bottom sheet. He checked the rest of the house. Empty. The back door was open. The wind had eased up and the snow was now falling thickly. No tracks.

  He picked up the phone and thought for a full minute of his options. He had to be careful. They always said that the phones in the Wandlitz Forest Settlement weren’t tapped but anybody would be mad to believe that, given the ubiquity of the Stasi, and he should know.

  Half of the money he had on him was due to a Russian, the KGB General Oleg Yakubovsky, and he would really have liked to call him and ask his opinion at this moment but that risked pointing a finger. There was no possibility of just driving away as he was logged in at the guardhouse. He knew he only had one option but it was worth fidgeting around his head just in case he miraculously came up with an alternative. But there was none. It had to be General Johannes Rieff, Head of Special Investigations.

  Rieff’s voice was thick with sleep.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Major Kurt Schneider.’

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘From the Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Five thirty, sir.’

  ‘I’m not used to being disturbed for another two hours.’

  ‘There’s been an incident at the Wandlitz Forest Settlement. General Stiller has been shot and there’s a dead girl in the bath who…is not his wife.’

  ‘Frau Stiller hasn’t been a girl for a long time, Herr Major.’

  ‘The girl has been shot too…in the back of the neck.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘I came to see General Stiller.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s quite normal at five in the morning, is it?’

  ‘We frequently meet before office hours to discuss internal business.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, as if that was one of the world’s most unlikely events. ‘I’ll be with you in an hour. Stay there, Major. Do not touch anything.’

  Schneider put the phone down, sniffed the gun in his other hand. It smelled of oil, as if it had not been fired. He checked the magazine. Full. He tossed the gun back on to the bedclothes.

  He inspected the ashtray in the middle of the table in the living room. Three cigar butts, one badly chewed, six cigarettes, three with brown filter, three with white, all six with lipstick, different colours. Two women. Three men. The women not drinking. He went to the kitchen. Two champagne saucers by the sink, both with lipstick, an empty plate with the faint smell of fish. One bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the bin. The girls came out for a talk, see how they were going to play it.

  He opened the fridge. Three tins of Beluga caviar, Russian. Two bottles of Veuve Clicquot and one of Krug. One bottle of lemon vodka encrusted with ice in the freezer.

  He went back into the spare bedroom where he found the girl’s clothes, his brain just beginning to motor now. He swept a hand under the bed, lifted the covers. The handbag. He emptied it on to the stained bottom sheet. One passport. Russian, in the name of Olga Shumilov, her blonde hair perfect in the photo. He put everything back, threw the bag under the covers, suddenly remembered the original business and all the money in his coat.

  He took the blocks of money out of the lining, stuffed them in the pockets and went to the car. He fitted the three packets under the front passenger seat and went back up the snow-covered path. Heavy flakes landed on his shoulders, he felt their delicate touch on his forehead.

  He found a clean ashtray in the kitchen, began some serious smoking and light-headed thinking. The money, minus his twenty thousand Deutschmark tip and sixty thousand for Russian expenses, was to be split evenly between Stiller and Yakubovsky, who was waiting for him in the KGB compound in Karlshorst. The way the scam worked, as far as he’d been able to discover, was that Yakubovsky procured the diamonds, which arrived by diplomatic bag from Moscow. Stiller had set up a number of buyers, including whoever was the owner of the Frau Schenk
Sex Kino chain. Not Frau Schenk, was all he knew. Schneider himself was just one of the sad old leg men who worked as an aide to Stiller and his Stasi friends, and who were occasionally on the end of a hard-currency bonus.

  He was trying to work out why he thought this was a KGB job, even though the Russians had the tendency to shoot the other way round, through the face taking away the back of the head. He also couldn’t quite square the girl being there. It was an inside job, of that he was sure, and deep inside, because admission to the Wandlitz Forest Settlement was very selective. Only the East German leader, Secretary General Walter Ulbricht, and his central committee members, plus top armed forces men and highups in the Stasi, or MfS as they saw themselves.

  Stiller was not short of friends or enemies. There would be little sobbing over his grave. Certainly the handkerchief of the chief of the MfS, General Mielke, would not find its way up to his eyes at the funeral. General Mielke only tolerated Stiller because of the man’s special relationship with Ulbricht, and his status as Ulbricht’s head of personal security. Mielke and Stiller had the same interests, venality and power, which were competitive rather than complementary. Even so, it was unlikely that Mielke would take him out of the game, and certainly not so ostentatiously, unless…back to the Russians. Perhaps the Russians had styled the execution and left one of their operatives as a decoy. This was pure paranoid thinking, of the type that could only possibly raise its head in East Berlin and it didn’t come close to answering the fundamental question, which was: What had Stiller done wrong? He really had to speak to Yakubovsky about this, and preferably this morning.

  Schneider’s mind spiralled in and out from the incident without getting any closer to its meaning. All he knew, as a pair of headlights swept the front of the house, was that a death of this magnitude was going to see large forces manoeuvring for position and creating massive problems for him.

  He let Rieff into the dark hall. The general, a heavy, dark man of about the same height as Schneider, stamped the snow off his boots. It was already ankle-deep out there. Rieff stared at the sole-patterned clods of snow on the mat and stripped off his brown gloves and peaked cap, preparing himself. He brought a strong smell of hair tonic with him.

  ‘Do I know you, Major?’ he asked, jutting his jaw, crushing his greying eyebrows together.

  ‘I think you would have remembered,’ said Schneider, clicking the hall light on.

  ‘Ah, yes, your face,’ he said, peering or wincing at him. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘Laboratory accident, sir…in Tomsk.’

  ‘I remember you now. Somebody told me about your face. Sorry…but you’re not the only Schneider. Where’s General Stiller?’

  Schneider led the way, stepped back at the door. Rieff swore at the stink, slapped his thigh with his gloves.

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘Bathroom on your right, sir.’

  ‘Probably shot her first,’ he said, his voice echoing from the tiled room.

  ‘General Stiller’s gun is on the floor over there, sir. It hasn’t been fired.’

  ‘I thought I told you not to touch anything.’

  ‘I came across it before I called you, sir.’

  Rieff came back into the living room.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’

  Schneider faltered.

  ‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Major. I didn’t really expect you to stand about with your thumb up your arse until I arrived.’

  ‘Olga Shumilov.’

  ‘Good,’ said Rieff, slapping his hand with his gloves. ‘And what were you and General Stiller up to?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Simple question. What were you up to? And don’t give me any shit about work. The general’s work habits were minimal.’

  ‘That’s all I can do, sir. That’s all we discussed. They were minimal because he was an excellent delegator, sir.’

  ‘Goodness me, Major,’ said Rieff, sarcastically. ‘Well, I’ll let you think about that one and you can answer it in your own time.’

  ‘I don’t have to think about it, sir.’

  ‘What would I find if I searched your car, Major?’

  ‘A spare tyre and a jack, sir.’

  ‘And this villa? What would we find in here? A piece of rolled-up Russian art? An icon? A nice little triptych? A handful of diamonds?’

  Schneider was grateful for his burnt face, the mask of impenetrable plasticated skin which had no expression or feeling, other than it itched when he sweated. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets.

  ‘Perhaps General Rieff has privileged knowledge about General Stiller’s affairs…’

  ‘I have extensive knowledge about his privileged affairs, Major,’ said Rieff. ‘What was in the fridge?’

  ‘Material suitable for the refreshment and entertainment of Russian officers, sir.’

  ‘Material?’ snorted Rieff. ‘He taught you well, Major.’

  ‘He’s my senior officer, sir. I’m stunned to see him in this state.’

  ‘I’m surprised there weren’t two girls in the bath…and a boy in the bed.’

  This was true. There’d been some scenes. Schneider had heard and kept himself away from them.

  ‘I hope I did the right thing in calling you, sir. It had occurred to me that this was sufficiently serious for General Mielke to be contacted.’

  ‘I’m taking care of this, Major,’ said Rieff severely. ‘Where are you going now? I’ll want to talk to you.’

  ‘Back to the office, sir. I might be lucky to get there in time in this weather.’

  ‘You don’t fool me, Major,’ said Rieff brutally. ‘I’ve seen men who’ve met flame-throwers.’

  Schneider, unsettled by the observation, didn’t bother trying to correct him. He gave his salute and left.

  His Citroën crawled through the heavy snow, back through the dark villages buried in silence. Snow-piled cars with two black fans scraped from their windscreens crumpled towards him, a swirl of moths in their headlights. He couldn’t see out of the back window. Inside he felt muffled, suffocated. He opened the window a crack and breathed in icy air. This was a disaster, a complicated disaster. Rieff was going to brick his balls. Clack! He was no longer protected by the thick, rusting hulk of Stiller’s corruption and that was the end of finance for his extra-curricular activities. A thousand marks for the American colonel’s passport, that left nineteen thousand marks and then what? Unless. He could give Yakubovsky his half and keep Stiller’s. Tempting, but insanely dangerous. His face didn’t need the addition of a black, torn hole like Stiller’s. He resealed the window, lit a capitalist cigarette.

  The thump of the windscreen wipers lulled him. The warm, smoke-filled cocoon of the car was a comfort. He came into the centre of town. The snow-filled vacant lots, the crumbling buildings re-mortared white, the shells of deserted houses with their steps and window ledges stacked thick with pristine snow, all looked nearly presentable. How democratic snow was. Even the Wall, that raised scar across the face of the city, could look friendly in the snow. Icing on the cake. The death strip tucked up under a blanket. The watchtowers Christmassy. He slewed the car into the Karl Marx Allee and joined the serious morning traffic of farting lines of two-stroke Trabants and Wartburgs, their black exhausts blasting and splattering the snow, already sludging up to pavement level. He eased through Friedrichshain into Lichtenberg and took a left before the Magdelenstrasse U-bahn into Ruschestrasse. He took one of the privileged parking spots outside the massive grey block of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. The only sign that this was the Stasi HQ was the number of Volkspolizei outside and the aerials and masts on the roof. The building itself was called the Oscar Ziethon Krankenhaus Polyklinik, which Schneider thought made it the largest mental institution in the world. Thirty-eight buildings, three thousand offices and more than thirty thousand people working in them. It was a town in a single block, a monument to paranoia.

  He went through the steel doors, flashing salute
s left and right, and went straight up to his office. He stripped off his coat and gloves, refused his secretary’s grey coffee and called Yakubovsky on the internal phone. They agreed to meet on the HVA floor, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklä – rung, Main Administration Reconnaissance or Foreign Espionage and Counter-espionage Service.

  Yakubovsky’s eyebrows came before him. Schneider wondered why a man prepared to shave his face clean every morning couldn’t see the necessity of hacking back the brambles of his eyebrows. They saw each other and the Russian nodded and turned his grey back, which was wide enough to be tarmacked rather than clothed. Yakubovsky puffed on a thick white cigarette, from which he was constantly spitting flakes of black shag from his tongue. They began a slow walk. Yakubovsky’s fat, slack as a brown bear’s, shuddered under his uniform. Schneider delivered his news. Yakubovsky smoked, spat, turned his mouth down.

  ‘The money?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s in the car.’

  ‘All of it?’

  Tempted again, but no.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Come to Karlshorst, five o’clock.’

  ‘General Rieff is in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Rieff.’

  Yakubovsky sped away suddenly, leaving Schneider jostled in the corridor.

  At 4.15 p.m. it was dark. The snow had stopped. Schneider cleared his car windows front and back. He drove home first to see if Rieff was having him tailed. He parked up and stripped his DM19,500 from one of the packages. He drove a slow circuit of the blocks of flats before coming back on to the Karl Marx Allee and heading east down the Frankfurter Allee. He turned right into Friedrichsfelde, past the white expanse of the Tierpark, under the S-bahn bridge and then left into Köpenicker Allee. The KGB headquarters was in the old St Antonius Hospital building on Neuwiederstrasse. His ID card was taken into the guardhouse. A call was made.

  He parked where he was told, pulled the packets of money out from under the seat. An orderly came out to meet him and took him up to the third floor, through an office he knew already and into a living room beyond, which he didn’t. Yakubovsky sat upright in a straightbacked leather chair, next to a fire burning in the grate. He was smoking the last inch or so of a cigar. Schneider thought about the ashtray in Stiller’s villa. It made him nervous but he told himself that anybody could smoke cigars.