by Anne Emery
“I had to be really careful how I handled it. Couldn’t just walk away from him or tell him to eff off, because he’d use it against me whenever I came up for promotion.”
“Right. So . . . what did he do?”
“He had obviously been listening to Wardroom gossip about me, if he thought I would . . . let’s just say he had the wrong idea about me.”
“And? What did he do? Or try to do?”
“He accused me of behaving inappropriately.”
He accused her? “Really. In what way?”
“He said I’d been flirting with, or coming on to — or however he put it — one of our men here, the commander of one of our ships. I won’t name the man, and I hadn’t been flirting with him. Rendell got it into his head that I was some kind of home wrecker, and he would not stand for that sort of behaviour on his watch! It was bullshit. Me and this man, we were friendly, that was all. In fact, I was just as friendly with his wife as I was with him. His wife was great fun, and we used to joke around together. Rendell was way off base, making an accusation like that. He’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, bit of a prude. I was offended by the accusation, and on the spur of the moment, I made the complaint about him and his inappropriate slander against me. When I cooled off, I wished I hadn’t bothered to make a report. It’s the kind of thing that happens, and you just let it roll off your back. Which I should have done.” She folded her arms and gave Monty a tight little smile. “So, there you have it. Not much there to blacken his character, if that’s what you were hoping to do!”
Not much indeed. He thanked Lieutenant Borowitz, apologized for taking up her time, and stood when she rose to leave. He went back to the counter and ordered a bagful of chickenburgers for the family, and drove around the Bedford Basin to the centre of the city. What had he gained from that encounter? Only more evidence that Commodore Hubert Rendell was a straight arrow. He expected those under his command to live up to the same standards. But what, Monty wondered, what might he do if someone close to him fell below those standards? What if he thought there was a home wrecker operating on his own patch?
Chapter XIX
Brennan
“I’m thinking the answer to all this lies in Germany.” Brennan was on the phone to his brother Terry after another night haunted by Meika Keller. It wasn’t that Brennan was hearing voices from the grave, not even Meika Keller’s. What he was seeing, over and over, was her blanched face, her lightless eyes staring up at him from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. And it was driving him to go to whatever lengths he had to in order to assuage his guilt, to solve the question of her death.
“The postcard,” Terry said.
“Right. Patrick filled you in. Meika got that card and then, only a few days later, she took off for Europe. Now I hear from Fried Habler that she didn’t show up two nights in a row for a Mozart opera in Vienna, yet her husband told Fried that she had enjoyed the opera.”
“And? Why do I get the feeling you’ve a scheme in the works?”
“Long association with me makes you suspicious. Rightly so. But it’s hard not to see significance in a homemade postcard showing the headquarters of the secret state police, and an unplanned trip right after she gets it.”
“But if it was a threat of some kind, why would she drop everything and head over there?”
“On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. But we don’t know what might have been going on beneath the surface. Back in 1974 she made her escape at a checkpoint, and she was shot at.”
“They fired on everybody who tried to flee, didn’t they? But I have an idea. And don’t make me regret this, Bren! If you think there was something from her East German past that came back to haunt her, something or someone, there’s a guy I could talk to over there.”
“Oh?”
“Old Air Force buddy of mine. Fella by the name of Russ. We flew together during my time in the service. Now he’s stationed in Germany. I see him once in a while when I have a layover. I’m flying to Zurich tomorrow night. That doesn’t give you much time for planning. My next flight to Frankfurt is Monday of next week. Russ is still at the old U.S. embassy in Bonn. With the move of the capital from Bonn to Berlin, the U.S. has two operations going, one still in Bonn, the other in Berlin. The German Ministry of Defence is in Bonn and so is Russ. Coincidence? You don’t have to be James Bond to suspect a military intelligence angle to his assignment.”
“And he’ll talk to you?”
“Maybe, as long as we don’t tag-team him. If he’s going to say anything, it will be to me. Two of us will make him twitchy.”
“Understandably.”
“So, if you’re thinking of a road trip, or a sky trip, or a space trip for the pair of us, you’ll have to keep yourself entertained in a beer garden or a cathedral while I meet with him. Now obviously he’s not going to know anything specific about Meika Keller. Or Edelgard Whoever-she-was. But he may be able to tell me where to look for information. General info about people who escaped or, well, I don’t know what. But I can try.”
Brennan was anxious to get over to Germany, anxious to try to unearth the origins of the Stasi postcard. He would be more than happy to get a flight for tomorrow night and meet up with Terry this week. But the coming week was his school’s March break, so the later timing would be good. And he thought it would be more practical — more politic — to coordinate his excursion with Bishop Cronin’s trip to Toronto for meetings with the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. He would be leaving this weekend and would be away for several days. With Cronin out of the way when Brennan left town, the only person he had to provide with notice was his beloved pastor, Monsignor Michael O’Flaherty.
“Father Drohan and I will cover for you, lad,” O’Flaherty assured him. “Sure, it’s only an extension of your pastoral duties.”
“God love you, Michael.”
And then Brennan thought of Fried Habler again. Was there any bit of information he could offer to an amateur spy going over to the newly unified Germany in search of clues to a mysterious death in Halifax? Stated that way, it seemed unlikely that Habler could assist. But Brennan had never been to the eastern, formerly walled-off, part of Germany, so even the most basic information would be helpful. He called Habler and received a cordial invitation to drop by the house. So, Brennan stopped in at the Clyde Street Liquor Store and got a six pack, three German and three Irish, and knocked on the door of the little shingled house up the street.
“Welcome, Brennan, welcome! And God bless you for thinking of a singer all alone in his house with a parched throat! This is exactly what the conductor ordered.”
Brennan went inside and they cracked open their choice of cans, Habler’s Irish and Brennan’s German, and Habler poured them into steins. They chatted about an upcoming opera recital by the music students at Dalhousie University.
Then Brennan said, “I have an excursion planned.”
“Oh? Where are you going?”
“Berlin.”
“Oh!”
“I know I may regret it. I know I may come away no wiser than I am now — and I admit wisdom is not my strong suit these days — but that postcard suggests a German angle to this whole affair. And if that is the case, I want to know what that angle is. Of course, I’m not daft enough to believe the answer will fall into my lap, but I won’t rest until I’ve at least made the effort.”
Habler was sitting back, nodding his head. Nodding in agreement? Or in an effort to humour a man with a barmy scheme that would almost certainly go kaput?
“What do you think, Fried?”
“Brennan, I don’t know what to say. I understand completely your suspicion that the card is significant. A card showing the headquarters of the Stasi! The secret police who spied on everyone and kept millions of records! You may be interested to hear that the old records have been preserved, or many of them anyway. Back in 1989, during the dying days of the Eas
t German regime, some women in the city of Erfurt noticed dark smoke coming from the Stasi building in that city. The women knew the place was heated with gas, which makes white smoke. They concluded that the Stasi were burning papers in there. So, a bunch of citizens got together and occupied the building to prevent destruction of any more records. The military prosecutor was called in, and it all ended up with committees being formed, buildings being occupied in other cities, including Berlin, and records being preserved. After reunification, the government created the BStU, the Stasi Records Agency, and the position of Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. Four years ago, the files were opened to the public, and the Records Agency administers this process. So, people can see what the former government kept on file about them.” Habler leaned forward with an amused look on his face. “That is not even to mention the samples they kept of people’s sweat and body odours! Ah, I see that makes you — what is the word? Not sleazy . . .”
“Queasy may be the word you’re searching for, Fried, and you are absolutely correct. What kind of world are we living in when government authorities . . .”
Habler was shaking his head. “You have no idea what things were like, Brennan. Here, we both need another beer.” He got up, refilled the glasses, and handed one to his guest. “There were files on some six million people, over one-third of the population of East Germany. Brennan, you may be amused to hear what they are doing now. There was much shredding of records as you might imagine. And here is an example of our famed German efficiency! Bags of shredded documents are being painstakingly reassembled! This will take years, as there are thousands of these bags, and tens of millions of pages.”
“My God. You couldn’t make this stuff up. And if you did . . .”
“Nobody would believe you.”
“Hard not to see a message of some kind in the choice of building on the card. Have you any idea, Fried, why someone would send a message like this to Meika Keller?”
“I have no idea at all. I’m sorry.”
“I suspect I won’t know any more after travelling to Berlin than I do now, but I feel compelled to make the effort.”
“Well, if you do go, I know a family that has a small hotel. It’s in the Alexanderplatz part of the city, which was of course formerly in East Berlin. Not far from the BStU office building, as a matter of fact, which is on Karl Liebknecht Strasse. This is not the Stasi headquarters itself, of course; the old headquarters block is where the actual records are kept in the archive. If you wish to see that frightening complex of buildings, you would take the U-Bahn, the underground train, to Magdalenenstrasse station. The hotel is the Gasthaus Pfeiffer. Shall I write all of that out for you?”
“No, just say it all again. I’ll remember.” So Habler repeated the information, and Brennan thanked him.
They talked about travel and history, and then Brennan brought the conversation back — rather abruptly, he knew — to the death of Meika Keller.
“The night she died . . . you weren’t home that night when the phone rang, were you, Fried?”
“I was!”
“There’s no harm in admitting you were out. The police are hardly going to be looking at you for the killing. And neither am I!”
“I can think of someone who would like to blame me. Well, I don’t mean to make him sound unscroob— no, what is the word? A man who will do anything to achieve his goal.”
“Unscrupulous?”
“That is the word.”
“Who do you have in mind?”
“I am talking about the lawyer, Monty Collins. He would be happy to find another suspect, someone else besides this man MacNair. But I know Mr. Collins is not unscrupulous. Still, if it is believed that I was out and yet I told the police I was in . . .”
“It would look as if you had something to hide.”
“Yes, it would. But I was here at home. I really was.”
“So, how did you miss the telephone jingle-jangling beside your head while you were in bed?”
“I . . . was afraid it was my wife.”
“But the timing of the call, it was around midnight. Would your wife be calling at five in the morning, German time?”
“She was in Toronto.” There was a shamefaced look about him now.
“What is it, Fried? Why did you not want to speak to your wife? Maybe you weren’t the only one reclining in your bed when the phone started clanging in your ears?”
“No, no! I was not in bed.”
“Go on.”
Habler sighed, polished off his beer, and put the stein on the coffee table. “I was not the only man that night who did not want a call from a wife. I was out at the Split Crow. Do you know that bar? I learned the history of it when I was there. Sailors have been drinking in that place for more than two hundred years. It may have started out in a different location, but I do know this: it was originally named the Spread Eagle, named after the double eagle symbol from Germany. And people looked at the image and began calling it the Split Crow! I met up with a group of people and drank rum with them, and it turned into a crazy party. And, well, I invited them all back here. And there were a couple of women . . . So, if I picked up the phone and my wife heard the voices . . .”
“Does your wife tend to doubt you?”
“Well, no, not usually. But if she found out I lied to the police? I am often away from home and she makes jokes about opera ‘divas’ and fans and all of that, but she is not entirely joking. She knows I work very closely with beautiful and talented women. And then this. With the . . . ladies. And the sailors and . . .”
“Sailors? Let’s back up here, Fried. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“Yes, all right. I was in the Split Crow. I had been passing by and heard music, rock music being played, and I felt tempted to go in for a drink and for some company. Some entertainment. And the place was crowded, no seat for me at a table, so I stood at the bar and ordered a drink. I heard someone speaking Dutch, which I understand, so I turned around and saw a group at a table. There were a couple of girls there and, I realized, some sailors from the Netherlands. There was a Dutch Navy ship in the harbour, visiting for official business of some kind. NATO or whatever it might have been. So, the sailors were drinking with the girls, who gave me the impression they were, well, prostitutes. And the men were telling jokes that went over the girls’ heads because they could not understand the language. So, I joined in and translated but just made up most of the translations in what I thought was a humorous way. The sailors obviously thought so, too, because they invited me to join them. We all had some drinks and then, feeling grand about myself, I invited everyone back here to my house where I would be the host of the party. And the Dutchmen brought bottles of liquor, and the girls came with them. Someone had a red kerchief and put it around one of my lights, and there were jokes about this being Amsterdam jurisdiction so everything was tolerated. And all this foolishness. I launched into the score of Così Fan Tutte. You know what that means.”
Brennan did. The title of the opera meant “Thus do they all” or “They’re all like that,” “they” meaning women.
“So, I did a very opera buffa version of some of the selections and then I began composing and . . .” Habler stopped speaking and appeared to be a bit flustered.
“And? Is something the matter, Fried?”
“No, no, it’s just that there was something about composing. Did someone say Edelgard herself — Meika — had been composing?”
“What?”
“No, it was Mr. Collins. I remember now. When he was here, he asked if there had been some composing going on, and he meant Meika, but I thought at first he knew about the night of drunkenness here that night, and . . .”
“Meika composing?”
“No, never mind. It was something Mr. Collins had heard, but I don’t know any more. Anyway, as I was telling you, I began compo
sing magnificent operatic works on the spot. Correction: make that schlock. I grabbed one of the girls by the hand and made up an aria about her. I think I called it ‘Lady of the Fleet,’ or maybe it was ‘Beauty Below the Decks,’ or something. And there were some off-colour lines, terrible schmaltzy melodies, and bad, bad vocalizing on my part. I was in fact bellowing like a fourth-rate opera wannabe type of person. I pity my poor neighbours if they could hear me! My guests were nearly losing control of themselves, they were laughing so much. I made a complete fool of myself. I was a drunken, pathetic buffoon.
“One of the sailors took one of the women into the other bedroom here. I myself would have been too drunk to perform as a man in a bedroom! I don’t know if you have ever been in that embarrassing situation yourself, Father Burke!”
“Don’t ask!”
“Right, so unable to do anything else, not that I would — my dear wife need not fear on that score —”
“Right. But still and all, to tell the police —”
“I was not about to tell the police what really went on here that night! Or get the Dutch sailors or the women in trouble. So that is why I claimed I was home drinking all alone and then passing out and sleeping all through that outrageous night.”
“Still, being unmasked as a bit of a buffoon beats being suspected of murder, now, Fried.”
“But I am not suspected!”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“But, Brennan, if the politzei are suspicious of me, I will certainly admit making a jackass of myself. And being unable to misbehave with the women!”
Chapter XX
Brennan
Terry Burke departed New York for Frankfurt the night of Monday, March 11, and took a connecting flight to Bonn. The following night, Brennan flew from Halifax to London and got a connecting flight in the morning from Heathrow to Berlin. He arrived in time to get settled in the Gasthaus Pfeiffer. He was exhausted from the long flight over the Atlantic; he had never been able to sleep on a plane. So he lay down on his hotel bed and debated whether to sleep or go out. It was raining quite heavily, so that offered an incentive to lose part of the day sleeping. He awoke refreshed, had a quick shower and a sandwich, and he made it to the late-afternoon Mass at Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral. The hotel and the cathedral were located in what had been, for over forty years, East Berlin. The plan was for Terry to see his pal in Bonn, then fly to Berlin, and meet Brennan at the church.