by Anne Emery
“So, she left the church with an envelope in her bag. Then what happened?”
“Then she was supposed to return to the bridge, the Bösebrücke, and cross back into the East and take the envelope to certain parties who were waiting for it.”
“Can you tell us who she was supposed to deliver it to?”
“Official persons, that’s all I will say.”
“What did she look like back then? I’m trying to picture the scene.” That was Terry. Good thinking on his part, trying to determine whether Willy had really seen her. If Lehmann was put out by the question, he didn’t let on, just launched into a description of Edelgard as she had been twenty-two years before. And the description matched closely enough to the woman Brennan had known that he was confident they were talking about the same person.
“What happened after the funeral?”
“She walked to the post office which was a few blocks from the church, and she went inside. She came out a few minutes after that. Without the envelope.”
“What did she do? Mail it, drop it in a box?” Terry laughed as he said it.
“I cannot imagine that she would have done that! The post office officials would have seen the address in the DDR, so they would have opened it. And if it contained sensitive information for the East, it would have been turned over to the authorities there in the West. She may have had a contact waiting for her in the post office. Good place to pass an envelope from one hand to another without raising suspicions! All I know is that she emerged from the post office without the envelope.”
“Then?”
“And then I walked away. I turned a blind eye to where she went after. If she did not return as she was supposed to, I would tell my superiors that I was distracted by an emergency and lost sight of Miss Vogt-Becker.”
“You let her stay in the West, if that’s what she had it in mind to do.”
“That is correct.”
So much for the story that Edelgard Vogt-Becker, a.k.a. Meika Keller, had escaped from East Berlin in a hail of gunfire.
Chapter XXIII
Brennan
First thing Friday morning, Brennan and Terry went to see the famed Checkpoint Charlie, the Allied sentry post at the edge of the wall in the American sector of Berlin, the scene of a tense sixteen-hour standoff between American and Soviet tanks and so many other momentous events of the Cold War. From there, they walked west to Niederkirchnerstrasse, where they’d made arrangements to meet up again with the man known to them only as Jäger. Jäger had suggested this spot, where they could view one of the remaining portions of die Mauer. The wall. It was about three and a half metres high, with a large pipe running along the top of it. Jäger was there waiting, and he explained that this was a late 1970s modification of the earlier construction. Much of the concrete was covered with graffiti now. Brennan lit up a cigarette, offered one to Jäger, and lit that for him, too.
“Did you find Lehmann at the Geggie bar?”
“We did,” Terry said.
“And was he able to provide you with any information?”
“He told us a story. Here’s what he said, and you can tell us what you make of it.” He recounted the version of events relayed by Willy and waited for Jäger’s critique.
“Willy Horst Lehmann no more turned a blind eye to refugees from the East than I would turn a blind eye to, well, that lovely Fräulein walking along the wall there.” They turned to see an attractive young woman passing by in a stylish black hat and coat. Jäger took a deep drag of his cigarette and expelled the smoke. “Er hat keine Eier in der Hose.” Brennan had to laugh; the phrase meant “He has no eggs in his trousers.” Jäger continued on the theme. “He does not have the balls to play a double game. Anyone who did that was risking torture and death; Willy was not up to that standard. His work for the Stasi was to spy on those few East German citizens who had been allowed to go to the West, temporarily, for some permissible reason. If it looked as if the person was going to try to defect to the West, Willy was to either corral the person back across the border or report all the details to the Stasi. If your friend vanished from sight, it was because she outwitted him. It was a failure on his part. I can just see him now, facing the prospect of facing his superiors. Nun ist die Kacke am Dampfen!” The shit is steaming now.
Brennan spoke up then. “And if our friend crossed the border from East to West with permission . . .”
“Yes?”
“That meant she was in favour with the East German authorities.”
“Absolutely. Otherwise she would never have been allowed to cross over. Whatever she was going to do in the West, it was with the blessing, or at the instigation, of those in power in the Soviet sector.”
Brennan and his brother exchanged a look. The image they had of Meika Keller, the former Edelgard Vogt-Becker, was crumbling bit by bit like, well, like die Berliner Mauer itself.
“I made some inquiries after our meeting yesterday, and I was given the name of a man in Leipzig. I am told that he works fourteen hours a day going through the old Stasi records. His name is Manfred Peter Steiff. I will be doing some business there next week, and I could speak to him if you wish. In case there is any more useful information about Edelgard Vogt-Becker of Leipzig.”
“Sure, Mr. Jäger,” Terry said. “Thanks.”
“Steiff may be willing to search through the indexes and see what is there. She existed,” Jäger said, smiling, “so there will be a record of her. This is Germany, after all! Even records that were shredded in the days of the collapse of the old regime are being painstakingly reassembled.” He inhaled one last breath of nicotine, then threw his cigarette onto the pavement, crushed it with his shoe, and then bent over and picked it up. He took it to a trash bin on the side of the street. Brennan made a mental note to do the same.
“Gentlemen, I must leave you now. I wish you the best for your search.”
The Burkes expressed their thanks and watched as their Berlin contact walked away along the remnant of the wall that had exemplified, and caused, so much grief in his country.
Now the brothers had somebody else they wanted to track down: the mysterious taxi driver who, with a lone passenger in his back seat, had followed Brennan and Terry through the dimly lit streets of nighttime Berlin.
“God go with you, Father.”
“Thank you, Brother.”
So, Brennan made some inquiries and found out where the Freundlich Taxi company had its stand, close to the Schönhauser Allee railway station. In civilian dress, he caught a bus to the station in the Prenzlauer Berg area of the city. He found the taxi stand easily enough and walked into the shabby little building with the company name above the door. He waited until the dispatcher looked up and noted his presence. In German, he said to the man, “Excuse me. I was a passenger in one of your cars last night, and I think I dropped a little gold pendant I bought for my daughter. It was loose in my pocket and I’ve been unable to find it. I’m thinking perhaps it slipped out and fell on the floor or between the cushions of the seats, I really don’t know. All I know is that I was in cab number seventeen. If you could call that cab for me, I would be most grateful, and I am in no hurry at all.”
The man at the desk said, “There is nothing to say you lost this item of jewellery in one of our cabs; you may have lost it elsewhere.” Unstated but obvious was “since you are obviously a careless man.”
Brennan smiled the smile of one who has been careless before and doubtlessly will be again. “It’s worth a try, if you would be so kind.”
So, the man put a call out to number seventeen, and Brennan thanked him and said he’d wait outside. About twenty minutes passed before the cab pulled in. As soon as Brennan saw it, he turned so his face would not be visible to the driver. When the car drew even with him, he opened the passenger side back door and got in. The driver looked in the rear-view mirror, and the recognition was i
nstant. The man lowered his head so they were no longer facing each other via the mirror.
There was no point in pussyfooting around. Brennan said, “I am here for some information, and I will be happy to compensate you for your time and assistance.”
“I have no information.”
“How do you know that, when I haven’t asked my question yet? Here it is: you had a passenger last night and you were stopped on Karl Marx Allee and then on Singer Strasse at eight twenty-five. I want to know who that passenger was, and why you and he were following me and the man I was with.”
“I do not ask my passengers why they are going here or there, doing this or that. I drive them where they ask me to go, and they get out and pay the fare and goodbye.”
“The man must have come up with some kind of story. He had you creeping along and then stopping at the side of the street. And then when my friend starting walking in your direction, your passenger instructed you to reverse and get away from there. You must have asked him why he was acting so strangely.”
“I don’t know.”
At that point, Brennan put on a B-movie act and opened his wallet, revealing a wad of Deutsche Mark notes inside, from blue-violet tens to blue-green twenties to brown-yellow fifties. He said, “It is important to me to know who has been following me.”
The driver’s eyes were on the money, but all he said was “I don’t know who the man was. He did not give me a name.”
That had the ring of truth. Whatever the man’s motive, it was not a noble one, and he would hardly have revealed his identity to the cab driver. “What were his instructions to you?” This time, Brennan pulled two twenty-Mark notes from his wallet and held them in his hand. Again, the driver’s eyes followed the money.
“He asked me to take him to Alexanderplatz and park down the block from the hotel called Gasthaus Pfeiffer and wait for two men to come out. It was more than forty minutes before y— the men came out. The meter was running all this time of course, but he was not concerned about that. I demanded payment for my time up to that point, and he paid without argument. He told me to stay back until the men were almost out of sight and then to move forward while he kept them in view. And that is how it went, creeping ahead, pulling over, turning into side streets. He did not tell me where he thought the men were going, just to keep following and stay out of sight. That is all.”
Brennan said, “Thank you,” and handed him the bank notes. The driver eyed the door in the obvious hope that Brennan would get out and leave him in peace, but Brennan had not finished. “What did the man look like?” Another note made its way halfway out of the wallet.
“Big. Rather old, I think, but it was dark. And he had a wool hat pulled down over his forehead and his ears. I cannot do any better in describing him.”
“Was he German?”
“You know, it was strange. He spoke German to me but badly.”
“So not a German then?”
“That’s what was odd. His German was bad in a way that sounded as if he wanted it to sound bad, as if he was trying to pass as a foreigner.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, speaking with a strong accent so I would think he was English or something like that.”
“English, that’s how he sounded? From England or . . .”
“From England, yes. But only pretending. I have had English people in my cab and this man did not pull it off successfully. And now I must return to work.”
“One more bit of information. Do you know where he is staying?”
“He did not call me to come to his . . . any place. He came to the taxi stand.”
“If I were a taxi driver and a passenger put me in a strange situation like that, I would be curious. Worried even. I might try to do some more following, to see where he went.”
Once again, Brennan pulled some banknotes from his wallet. His conscience pricked him at that point, using the man’s obvious need for additional income for Brennan’s own needs. But the show must go on.
“I saw him walk down Pieterbraunstrasse and turn and stop. That is a dead-end street, and I did not see him come out from there again. There are hotels in Pieterbraunstrasse. Three of them. He may have been staying in one of them. I do not know.”
“Very well. Thank you.” Brennan gave him a ten and got out of the car. It pulled away even faster than it had the night before.
Brennan briefed Terry on the conversation when he returned to their hotel room.
“So, what do you think, Bren? It’s a German who’s been tailing us? Or is it a Brit?”
“Can’t imagine what interest an Englishman would have in us.”
“Unless we were in, say, Belfast or Derry in an entirely different context. But not here in Berlin surely. So, it looks as if we have a German spy to contend with.”
“And the fellow tried to ham it up in order to sound if he was an Ausländer, a foreigner. Well, we’ve all heard people putting on accents of one kind or another. Somebody trying to sound like an English toff.”
“Or walk into a bar in the United States of America on Saint Patrick’s Day and hear the excruciating efforts to imitate our native speech, begob and begorrah!”
“Gives me a thirst for a dhrop of the craythur, so it does.”
“Sure, we’ll have time for a drop but not until we have completed our mission, a mission for which we have had no training.”
“To unmask a spy in post-Communist East Berlin.”
“So, Brennan, how does a citizen of this country know we’re here, and why is he tailing us? Who knows we’re here? Who tipped off a local and hired him to spy on us? I’m sure we can leave out anyone on my end. Nobody in New York knows anything about the imbroglio in Halifax, and our efforts to straighten it out. So, how many of your acquaintances in Halifax are in the know about your mission here?”
“It’s not exactly classified information. Michael O’Flaherty knows about it, of course. And there’d have been no way he could avoid telling Mrs. Kelly. So, a well-known fact around the church. I told Fried Habler. Word could certainly get around.”
Chapter XXIV
Brennan
It was just past eleven o’clock in the morning when the brothers selected their watching post at the dead end of Pieterbraunstrasse. They stood in the shadows of a tall, featureless office block, a space that afforded them a view of the three small hotels that fronted on the street. According to the Freundlich taxi driver, the man who hired him was likely staying in one of those hotels. There was a small, grassy park at the top of Pieterbraunstrasse.
“Don’t you feel a right gobshite, Brennan?”
“I do, Ter, but what else can we do but lurk in the shadows and see if our spy emerges into the light?”
“And us playing at being spies ourselves.”
“Right.”
By the time they’d been in place for half an hour, they were feeling the chill of the clear mid-March day, and the boredom was weighing heavily on them both. And of course they had no idea when, or even if, their man would come out of the hotel. Or return to it if he was elsewhere. Terry offered to make a run for snacks and cold drinks, and Brennan saw no reason not to let him go even though he would want any confrontation to involve the two of them against the one dubious individual whose motives they intended to uncover. But when Terry came back, he hadn’t missed a thing. A few tourists had come and gone but not the target of their investigation.
“It’s nearly noon, Brennan. He may have checked out already.”
“He may have. Let’s eat.”
They ate their snacks, consumed their beverages, and Brennan had a smoke. The time dragged on. Another hour passed. Terry expressed his restlessness again. “Maybe he had lunch in the hotel and went down for a nap, exhausted from the stress of all the spying he did yesterday and last night. Or he’s out somewhere for the day and won’t be back until dark. The
pair of us will fall asleep on our feet, or we’ll freeze our bollocks off, before he comes in or goes out.”
“I know, I know. This is probably a complete waste of time, time that we’ll never get back again, but it’s the only lead we have. There’s no plan B, so if —”
Brennan’s attention was caught by a middle-aged woman and a man coming out of the hotel farthest from them. The man reached over and took the handle of her suitcase and began walking down the street with a bag in each hand. “No, not our man. There’s nothing off about his gait; he’s walking perfectly.” A taxi drove up, and the couple got in. The car reversed and headed off. Brennan turned away and started to speak again when Terry’s gaze sharpened.
He spoke in a low voice. “Bren, look.”
Brennan returned his attention to the same hotel and saw a white-haired man come out, pulling a wheeled bag behind him. He looked at his watch and peered down the street where the taxi had just driven away.
“Our man had glasses on him,” Brennan whispered.
“Yeah, he had a hat and glasses, but he was stout like that, the fellow we saw walking in the afternoon. And — look at that, the way he’s walking. It’s him.”
The man had started off in the direction of the busier streets.
“He’s got his bag. Looks as if he’s going to the airport. May be planning to hail a taxi. It’s now or never, Brennan.”
“Let’s go.”
They took off at a clip and did not slow down until they were a few feet behind their target, Brennan on the left, Terry on the right.
Brennan reached out for the handle of the suitcase, then realized the man would think he was being robbed and he might shout for the police. So, he walked up beside him and said to him in German, “Keep walking to the end of this street and turn into that little park on the left.” The man whipped around and looked at him, and the recognition was instant. “That’s right. This is no street mugging. You’re going to answer our questions.”