The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

  Phil was severely tempted to tell Heike all about Emma’s flirtation with communism, and he couldn’t for the life of him see what harm it would do. But he had promised.

  ‘I think she thought Russia was just as bad,’ he said. ‘She saw through Stalin.’ Eventually.

  ‘I liked her,’ Heike said. ‘She is really smart, isn’t she? You can almost see her brain fizzing.’

  ‘I know.’ Phil laughed. ‘She certainly keeps me on my toes.’

  ‘Are you going to East Berlin?’

  ‘She is. I’m going home tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’ Heike’s eyes betrayed disappointment. But also something else.

  Desire.

  ‘Yes,’ said Phil. ‘That is a shame.’

  * * *

  Heike was staying in a friend’s squat close by. Apparently Kreuzberg was full of squats. Phil had never seen a squat before, and yes, he would like to see Heike’s friend’s place.

  It was the ground floor of what had once been a workshop of some kind, perhaps even a print shop. The walls were covered in graffiti, the windows draped with makeshift curtains of blankets and even newspaper.

  The interior design was open-plan: sleeping bags on the floor. After briefly introducing Phil to a couple of long-haired guys sharing a joint, Heike took him through to a small room at the back of the space in which lay two mattresses. On one of them, a pretty dark-haired girl was reading a book by the light of an Anglepoise lamp resting on the floor.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, giving Phil a friendly smile, and without another word, she gathered up her book and left them.

  ‘That was nice of her,’ said Phil.

  ‘She’s a nice girl,’ said Heike.

  Then she reached up and kissed him.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Heike flicked the edge of the blanket that acted as a curtain and watched the English boy’s silhouette as it disappeared down the pavement. She couldn’t help smiling to herself when she saw him take a little skip.

  Naked, she lit a cigarette and sat on the mattress.

  She never liked doing this kind of stuff. In many ways this had been so much better than the last time she had slept with an Englishman – a forty-five-year-old married RAF officer who turned out to have a well-suppressed fetish for blonde German women, the SS and whips. That had been deeply unpleasant.

  Yet in some ways this had been harder. In her job, it was better not to become emotionally involved. That had been dead easy with the RAF officer. But it was difficult to seduce someone like Phil without opening up something of yourself, without becoming emotionally involved. She had known it would be his first time, and it was. He was overenthusiastic, but he had a certain natural talent. Heike grinned to herself.

  He hadn’t told her very much, at least not at first. Nothing about Annecy at all. It wasn’t even clear whether Phil and his grandmother had come across the dead bodies of Marko and Kurt Lohmüller. The KGB didn’t know what had happened. They assumed that there had been some kind of shootout between Lohmüller and Marko, although how Marko had managed to get himself into that situation with a target in his seventies was beyond Heike. That guy really had been incompetent.

  His replacement as Heike’s boss, Rozhkov, was older and tougher. Heike was happier with that; she knew where she was with men like him. She knew she shouldn’t care, but she hoped that Phil wouldn’t end up dead like Marko. She had no doubt that Rozhkov would order his killing if necessary; she just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

  And she liked the sound of Phil’s grandmother. A woman who had understood that, with capitalism broken and Fascism on the rampage in Europe, communism was the only way to go. Heike had been telling the truth about her grandfather dying in Dachau; she had hoped to tempt Phil into opening up about his grandmother. It had nearly worked, she was sure.

  Her grandfather was really why she was doing all this, lying on her back for the cause. Her father had clung to his own father’s beliefs during the war, and afterwards, in the Russian sector of Berlin. Her mother was convinced that the West had rejected solidarity with the poor and the working classes, and that that would eventually destroy them. Heike was seeing a lot more of the West than her parents had ever done, and although she found some of the wealth and the good things seductive, she knew those were only available for the rich. She was glad she lived on the right side of the Wall: the side where the people took priority over the rich and powerful.

  It was her cause, her family’s cause, her country’s cause, and she would continue to do what was necessary for it.

  She had a report to make, and it couldn’t wait. She made a quick phone call: unlike a real squat, this building still had a phone line. She pulled on some clothes and let herself out into the dark street, searching for a passing cab to take her to Rozhkov’s apartment.

  She had something to report. Finally, she had broken down Phil’s defences. After the sex, she had playfully talked about Phil’s grandmother spying again, and whether she was going to East Berlin to meet an agent, but Phil had steadfastly refused to rise to the bait. He had explained that he had promised Emma that he wouldn’t repeat any of what she had told him about her time as a spy to Heike. He was feeling bad about what he had already said.

  Heike had withdrawn, offended, muttering something about how ridiculous that was. Phil had touched her thigh, but she had stiffened and he had removed his hand.

  Then she had made her breakthrough.

  ‘Of course, she didn’t say anything about not telling you things she knows nothing about,’ he had said.

  Heike turned to face him. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a strange man in a pub back in England asking me to look out for a mole.’

  ‘What’s a mole?’ Phil had used the German word, Maulwurf.

  ‘It’s spy slang for an agent who burrows into an enemy country’s intelligence agency or government. Kim Philby was a famous one, but there were others in Britain. I don’t know about West Germany.’

  ‘That’s exciting!’ said Heike, touching him. ‘Have you found this mole?’

  ‘No. I was told not to ask Grams directly. I hoped that it would become clear through her stories.’

  ‘And has it?’

  ‘Not really. Maybe Grams will find something out tomorrow, in East Berlin.’

  ‘But you won’t be there.’

  Phil hadn’t answered her. Just before he had walked off into the night, she had asked him if there was any way he could stay in Berlin instead of flying back to London. She wanted to see him again.

  He had smiled. ‘Maybe. Do you have a phone here?’

  She had given him the number, resolving to ensure someone stayed at the squat for the next couple of days to be there to take a message if he called.

  ‘I might call you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I have a little idea.’

  Forty-Eight

  Phil struggled to wake up the following morning. Emma was quiet at breakfast in the Hotel Bristol. She asked cursorily whether he had had a good time last night. She was thoughtful; she seemed anxious, scared even. And well she should.

  Her fear made Phil feel happier with the decision he had taken on his way back to the Bristol the night before, although that decision made it more difficult to say goodbye. He went upstairs to his room to pack; he stuffed the clothes he had originally brought with him into his rucksack and rolled the new clothes they had bought together in Paris into a couple of laundry bags for Emma to add to her luggage. Her plan was that he should check out and take a taxi for the airport, and then she would set out for a day trip to East Berlin to meet Kay, returning to the Hotel Bristol that evening.

  Phil had a different plan.

  They stood together in the lobby, Emma having paid Phil’s room bill.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming with me, Philip,’ she said, her face stern, her tone matter-of-fact, despite her words. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She hesitated. ‘You saved my life. I shall miss you.�
��

  ‘I shall miss you too, Grams,’ Phil repeated, somewhat lamely.

  Then her reserve crumbled, and she threw herself at him, burying her head in his chest. He put his arms around her.

  After a little while she stepped back. ‘All right. Have a good trip back. And give my love to your mother and your sister. Oh, and your father.’ This with a smile.

  ‘Bye, Grams.’

  Phil turned and left the hotel. Emma had got the doorman to procure a taxi, and it was waiting for him.

  ‘Tegel?’ asked the driver.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Phil. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Where is a good place I can store this rucksack for the day?’

  ‘Zoo Station has left luggage.’

  Zoo Station was only a couple of minutes away. The taxi driver waited while Phil dumped his rucksack, and then took him eastwards to Friedrichstrasse and the Wall.

  The Wall actually ran west to east at this point, Friedrichstrasse bisecting it south to north. Checkpoint Charlie was the crossing place for foreigners entering East Berlin; it was situated between the American sector and the southern edge of Mitte, the former city centre around Unter den Linden, which was now in the Russian sector. On the Allied side, the checkpoint comprised a hut, some sandbags and two signs: one declaring ‘Allied Checkpoint’ and another announcing ‘You are leaving the American sector’ in English and then repeated in Russian, French and German. An American military policeman waved Phil through.

  He walked past a red-and-white-striped barrier and over the narrow strip of no-man’s-land to the more extensive obstacles on the other side. Watchtowers overlooked a large shed where the border formalities took much longer. An East German border guard in a forbidding grey-green uniform took Phil’s passport. The guard checked him for guns, ammunition and printed papers; the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide had warned him of this, and so Phil had reluctantly left the book with his rucksack at the station, having memorized all it had to say about East Berlin. He was required to change six Deutschmarks fifty for a similar number of flimsier East German marks. The five-mark note he received bore a picture of some sixteenth-century preacher in a floppy hat: not very communist, although on the back a combine harvester did its stuff for agrarian productivity. Tourists were supposed to spend all their currency during the day – it could not be exchanged on return to the West.

  Phil then spent forty minutes hanging around the northern, East German section of Friedrichstrasse, waiting for Emma and avoiding the occasional suspicious glance from the border guards. If someone was watching him more discreetly, he couldn’t tell.

  Eventually he saw her tall figure marching along the street towards him. She hailed a taxi, and Phil moved quickly. The taxi was tiny, with no rear doors, so as Emma climbed in over the passenger seat, Phil bundled in after her.

  ‘Philip!’ she said.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Phil, grinning.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she demanded.

  ‘I couldn’t let you do this by yourself,’ Phil said.

  ‘But I expressly forbade you from coming with me. It’s not safe, Philip!’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’m here, Grams. I can help. You know I can help.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to!’ said Emma, genuinely angry now. ‘I insist you get out of this taxi.’

  ‘No,’ said Phil. ‘I’m with you on this, Grams. Wherever it takes you.’ He smiled. ‘You’d have done the same when you were my age. You can’t deny it.’

  ‘Excuse me, comrades,’ said the driver in German. ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘One moment,’ said Emma. She looked at Phil. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. She smiled back at him, reluctantly at first, but then resorted to a full beam of relief. ‘Prenzlauer Berg,’ she said to the driver. ‘And take us along Unter den Linden.’

  The taxi was tiny, with an engine that sounded like a lawnmower. The driver was large and spoke with the by-now recognizable Berliner accent.

  ‘Is this car made of plastic?’ Phil said, tapping the roof. It was very different from the Mercedes in which he had arrived at Checkpoint Charlie. The little vehicle was, however, identical to almost every other car on the road.

  In a couple of minutes they turned right on to a grand, broad street of old imperial buildings interspersed with more modern structures. And a dual line of small trees running down its centre – lindens, no doubt. Above and a little to the left rose a tall needle with a large ball two-thirds of the way up. A TV tower, Phil remembered from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide.

  ‘That’s the Stabi,’ Emma said, pointing to an imposing grey stone facade, through whose arches Phil could just see a courtyard with a fountain.

  Phil looked around eagerly. He had never been in a communist country before. Some things were different: the modern, dreary blocks, the tiny cars, the TV tower watching over everything as if monitoring the movements of the East Berliners below. But the people appeared pretty much the same, although very few wore jeans. And, frankly, a lot of the modern architecture in West Berlin was pretty dire too.

  ‘It’s not that different to West Berlin,’ Phil said.

  ‘It’s very different from Berlin in 1939, believe me,’ said Emma. ‘Then there were giant red swastika flags hanging from the buildings, and men in uniform marching everywhere. And no trees.’

  ‘No trees?’

  ‘Hitler tore them down to build the S-Bahn.’

  That explained why the new lindens were so small.

  They passed through a large square, Alexanderplatz, which had become the centre of East Berlin. A group of workers in hard hats beamed down on them with unbridled joy from a massive poster. The address Emma had given the driver turned out to be a five-storey block of flats, built since the war, opposite a row of older tenement buildings that had survived the bombing and the Red Army.

  A column of buzzers guarded the door to the building.

  Emma hesitated. ‘I don’t want you to listen to this.’

  ‘Too late,’ Phil said.

  ‘I will have to talk about things I have kept from you up till now. Things which will be dangerous for you to know.’ Emma paused, relief at his presence mixing with worry for her grandson. ‘She might not even let us in.’

  ‘Then we’ll think of another way to talk to her.’

  ‘All right.’ Emma pressed the buzzer.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Oh, hello, Kay,’ Emma replied in English. ‘It’s Emma. Can I come in?’

  ‘Emma Meeke?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was silence, or rather a hum of static. It seemed to go on forever, but Emma waited. Whether to let these strangers from the West in was a difficult decision for a former agent of the Stasi.

  Phil checked the short street for watchers; it seemed to him to be empty now their taxi had driven off. You could still see the tall needle of the TV tower from Prenzlauer Berg. There was a distinct smell of cabbage in the air.

  He realized that he would have no chance of spotting professional surveillance in a strange city.

  ‘I’ve come a long way,’ Emma said.

  ‘OK,’ said the voice. ‘Come on up. Fourth floor. Apartment twenty-seven.’

  Forty-Nine

  Kay’s apartment turned out to be the third floor, but then Kay was American, Phil remembered.

  Number 27 was opened by a tall, striking woman with silver hair cut short above her ears. She was wearing a necklace of heavy green stones and large hooped earrings. She didn’t look happy to see Emma.

  ‘Hello, Kay,’ Emma said. ‘Can I come in?’

  Kay hesitated, and then let them into the small apartment, which had a dreary view over the tenements opposite. The bookshelves were groaning with titles, mostly in German. A large black-and-white framed photograph of skyscrapers dominated one wall. Chicago, presumably. But that was the only hint that one of the occupants was American, not East German.

  ‘You are lucky that my husband isn’t here,’ she said. �
�He’s just left for lunch with some of his old colleagues from the Stasi.’

  ‘I assume he’s retired?’ Emma said, as if discussing a bank manager.

  ‘Oh, yes. But you know what they say? Once a secret policeman, always a secret policeman.’ Her accent was American, but with a certain clipped Germanic tinge.

  It seemed to Phil that Kay wasn’t exactly being friendly. He remembered what Herr Pöpel had said about the reputation of her husband: Not a nice man, but by no means the worst. And Emma was trusting his wife?

  ‘And you?’ said Emma, taking a seat on a brown sofa. ‘Have you retired?’

  Kay permitted herself a wry smile. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘But you were still working when we met in Brussels in 1965?’

  Phil tried not to show surprise; he hadn’t realized Emma had met Kay since the war. One of those pieces of information Emma had omitted to tell him that were now coming out. He anticipated more.

  ‘Only a little. Helping my husband, who was a commercial attaché at the East German Embassy. I was a diplomatic wife then. A bit like you.’

  ‘I heard you were also stationed in Budapest? Kurt Lohmüller told me he met you there a few years ago.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ said Kay. ‘How is Kurt?’

  It seemed to Phil that Kay’s ignorance of Kurt’s fate was genuine, but then presumably Kay was an experienced and skilful liar.

  As was his grandmother, it turned out. ‘He’s quite frail at the moment,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure he has long to live.’

  ‘That’s a shame. I liked him,’ said Kay in her first sign of unbending.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Kay,’ said Emma.

  Kay gave a quick smile but didn’t repeat the sentiment.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she said. ‘You know I will have to report your visit? I doubt it will reflect well on me.’