Authors: David Thomas
‘The DZ Bank building, by Frank Gehry!’ I said, with the delight of a quiz contestant getting the right answer.
‘I thought you would like to see it, being an architect,’ said Haller. ‘However, there was another reason that I brought you here. This is a good image for you, a sort of metaphor, perhaps, for Berlin itself. On the outside, the city is like this building. It is very orderly – very German. The tourists are all quite safe as they visit all our sights, or take a walk in the Tiergarten. The government sits in all its fine new buildings, all of them very light, very airy, to symbolize the new, safe, peaceful Germany. However, there is always, at the heart of this place, something else that is dark, strange and powerful. This is a city that has seen too much, suffered too much. Did you know that in the last two weeks of Hitler’s life, when the city was under attack from the Russians, at least 300,000 people died, soldiers and civilians? That is like one hundred 9/11 disasters. After that, when the Red Army came, countless thousands of women were raped. Mothers and daughters alike were violated: two generations emotionally scarred for life. Thousands of them gave birth to their Russian rapists’ children. And then the pain of the communist years, the Wall cutting one part of the city off from the rest … I guess what I am saying is that this city is like a person who has been attacked and abused and now has to live with too much pain inside them. On the outside, they may seem normal. On the inside …’ Haller shrugged. Then he smiled, ‘OK, now you must have your beer. You have had to listen to me make crazy speeches … I think you need it!’
We walked back to the bar. The beer was cold and delicious, the central heating warm, and the other customers at the bar or settling down at tables looked sleek and prosperous. It seemed crazy to be talking about murder and suffering in such surroundings, but that, I supposed, had been Haller’s point.
‘Those things you said about Berlin …’
Haller grimaced, self-mockingly. ‘Ach, pay no attention. It is what you might call, I think, a pet theory.’
‘Well, it made sense to me. In fact, it really made me think about Mariana. Everything you said about the normal exterior, and the hidden pain inside, is true about her, too. I never knew before, but it’s becoming more obvious every day. And I think she suffered too, just like the city. I suppose you could say she’s a true daughter of Berlin.’
‘Whereas I am an adopted son …’
He started telling me about his life, how he’d worked as a cop in Hamburg before quitting the force and coming to Berlin, Germany’s frontier town, the place where new money could be made.
‘Hold on,’ I interrupted. I leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice: ‘There’s a man over there, three tables away. He keeps looking at me …’
It wasn’t the man in the brown suit this time, but a completely different individual. He was much younger, wearing designer shades and a white shirt. He lit a cigarette, displaying an expensive-looking watch and a heavy gold bracelet on strong, tanned wrists.
Haller checked him out and laughed. ‘Maybe you have made a friend for the night! This is Berlin. Anything can happen!’
I fell back in my chair, laughing along with him to cover my embarrassment. ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s just … I keep thinking someone’s following me. There was a man at the airport and on my train. Now this … I feel like the Stasi’s after me, or something.’
‘Twenty-five years ago, maybe,’ said Haller. ‘Not now. And in any case, if you were being followed by anyone who had ever been a Stasi officer, you would not know it. They were the world champions of surveillance. They had a system that made it possible to follow people even when they changed everything about their appearance: clothes, hair, beard, glasses, skin … no matter how good a disguise might be, the Stasi could see through it.’
‘How?’
‘They assembled scientists, doctors, anthropologists, zoologists, experts of every kind, to study the specific markers that make us individuals. The way we walk, the posture of the body, the shapes of eyes, ears, noses, lips … everything that is unique to an individual. Stasi officers were trained to apply three of these markers to anyone they had to follow. This enabled them to pick the target up no matter how they were dressed, or how many people were surrounding them.’
‘Like biometric ID systems …’
‘Yes, but planted in a human memory instead of a computer.’
‘That’s scarily impressive …’
‘Sure,’ Haller agreed. ‘The Stasi were very good at their jobs. You know, they held police in the West in total contempt. They thought we were soft, decadent, no good at our jobs. Maybe they were right …’ He smiled to himself: ‘In Germany we call our foreign intelligence agency the Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND for short. It is like your MI6. They used to have an office in Munich above a flower shop. The final training exercise for Stasi officers was to look at a picture of a BND agent, get into West Germany, travel to Munich and then pick up their selected agent as he or she left the flower shop and follow them without being spotted. The proof of how good they were is that no one in the West had any idea of this until the Wall came down and ex-Stasi officers told them what they had been doing.’
‘So they wouldn’t have any trouble following an English architect …’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well then, let’s get a couple more beers and I’ll try to relax and tell you why I am here …’
31
For the next half hour or so we went through the case in much greater detail than the sketchy outline I’d given over the phone: my experiences in the week since the murder and my brother’s research into Mariana’s background. I gave Haller my documents and he took notes of his own, interrupting me from time to time to ask sharp, pertinent questions. He had a tough, forensic intelligence that reminded me of DCI Yeats back in York. The first time he ventured an opinion of his own was when I told him about my encounter with Mr Weiss outside the churchyard.
‘You say his manner was polite?’
‘Yes. I felt as though he was threatening me, but the way he did it was very civil, if that makes any sense.’
‘Well, that does not sound to me like a former Stasi officer. Secret police, like criminals, see no reason to be polite. Quite the opposite, I should say. For them the pleasure is in making the threat as openly and violently as possible. They enjoy the fear and humiliation they see in your eyes. Perhaps he has changed to fit in with the new realities. The intelligent ones can do that.’
‘So … do you think I’m crazy?’ I asked.
Haller gave me an amused, quizzical look: ‘I’m sorry. Why would I think that you are crazy?’
‘Well, everyone else I’ve talked to about this has acted like I’m making it all up; connecting things that are just coincidences; adding two and two to make five … or actually, more like fifty.’
Now his expression turned more serious. ‘No, I do not think you are crazy. I am not sure that you are drawing the correct conclusions from your experiences. However, I do not doubt that something serious is happening here.’
‘So what are we going to do now?’
‘We? I do not think that there is a “we”. You agree my terms, which start with a basic charge of 1,500 euros per day. And then my team and I start researching through archives, interviewing witnesses and preparing our report. In the meantime, you might as well return home.’
‘No. I’d rather come with you. I think I can help.’
‘With due respect, Mr Crookham, you are an architect. I would not tell you how to construct a building.’
‘Maybe, but if you were my client, paying my bills, then you would certainly be welcome to visit the building site and I would anticipate regular meetings to discuss the progress of the build and go over any minor problems, alterations and so forth. Of course, I would insist that you wore a hard hat when you came on site. But that is because building sites are dangerous places and kill many more people, I would guess, than private detective work ever does.’
Haller looked at me with a fixed, impenetrable expression on his face. For a moment I thought I might have pushed him too far. I braced myself for a curt, German farewell and an end to our business relationship. Instead, he nodded: ‘All right, then, I concede that you may have specialist knowledge, so to speak, about your wife that may be useful. And, yes, you are paying the bill. But I must make one thing clear … You may be the client, but when we are working, I am in charge and unless there is a very good reason for you to say anything, I do the talking. Agreed?’
‘Yes.’
Haller looked at me, weighing me up. ‘I have to say this once again, Mr Crookham. I would far prefer it if you went home and left me to get on with my job. I say this for your own good.’
‘Thank you, but I’m staying in Berlin.’
‘And that is the principal reason why I am prepared to let you come with me. If you insist on remaining in this city, then I want to know exactly where you are.’ Haller sighed and shook his head as if to let me know that he was acting against his own better judgement, then said: ‘Ah well … I suppose we have a deal.’
We shook hands and agreed to meet at his office the following morning. I made my way back to my hotel, walking through the streets, enjoying the bright lights, the frosty air and the crunch of snow beneath my feet, feeling a nice, mellow beer-buzz. I stopped off for a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine at a little place by the hotel, so by the time I got back to my room I was hardly drunk, but I wasn’t stone-cold sober, either.
So maybe that explained why I stared so determinedly at the paperback beside my bed, squinting a little at the way it was lying on the table. It didn’t look odd in any way to the normal eye: just a book, on a table, at a very slight diagonal angle to the line of the table and the bed.
Except I’d left it straight, parallel with that line, because that’s what I do. It’s the architect in me, lining everything up. But maybe it was just the booze playing tricks with my memory. Or maybe I’d knocked it out of line at some point.
It had to be that. The alternative was that someone had been in my room. And this wasn’t the kind of hotel where they turn down your bed in the evening and leave a chocolate on the pillow.
I’d spent all day jumping at shadows, imagining people were following me. I wasn’t going to lie awake at night fretting about intruders. I brushed my teeth, collapsed into bed, turned out the light and was asleep by ten.
That night I dreamed I was in a florist’s shop. I was trying to buy a bouquet for Mariana, but whenever I tried to pick out some flowers I couldn’t see them properly any more, or tell the assistant what I wanted. And when I reached for my money, it had gone. I started panicking. I wanted to get out of the shop. But when I got to the door I was hit by a terrible sensation of terror. There was something outside the shop, something dangerous. It wanted to kill me. There was nothing I could do to stop it. And what was even worse, I had no idea at all what it was.
BERLIN: 1988
Hans-Peter Tretow couldn’t allow them to talk. That was the one rule that could never be broken. No comparing notes, no complaints, and above all not one single world to anyone outside the group.
‘Have I not made this plain?’ Tretow said, as though he were personally disappointed, even hurt by their failure to obey him. He looked at the two underlings standing opposite him in the small basement room.
‘Yes, sir,’ the pair replied in unison.
‘Did I not warn you, again and again, that I would take action if you disobeyed me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And yet you ignored everything I had told you. You defied me. You talked …’
‘It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t do anything wrong,’ said the taller, tougher, more wiry one of the pair. His name was Friedrichs, and though he lacked all education, his eyes possessed a shrewd, calculating intelligence that Tretow felt obliged to respect.
‘Is that true?’ Tretow said, turning to Friedrichs’ companion, Müller.
‘No, sir … I mean yes … I don’t know.’
Müller was both a physical and emotional weakling, Tretow concluded: no threat. Friedrichs was the one he had to deal with first, get him out of the way. Tretow knew how he planned to do it, but finding the precise moment would not be easy. He played for time.
‘Make up your mind!’ he shouted at Müller, intending to intimidate. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Friedrichs stepped in, speaking when his friend could not. ‘He was upset by what happened at the weekend … you know, in Potsdam. I could see it, so I went to have a word with him, tell him everything was all right. That’s all.’
‘Impossible! I was told about this conversation. That means words must have been overheard. Either that, or one of you spoke to someone else and they in turn passed the message on. Well, is that it? Is that what happened?’
Müller looked at him with pleading eyes. ‘No … I swear … I, I—’
Friedrichs went to reassure Müller, briefly turning his back. That was the opportunity Tretow had been waiting for. He picked up a length of old-fashioned lead water-pipe, taken from a junk-filled storage cupboard, and swung it with all his strength at Friedrichs’ head.
Friedrichs shouted out in pain and surprise, but even though his head began to bleed profusely, he did not go down. It took several more blows, delivered with all Tretow’s strength, to render him unconscious. The cramped underground chamber echoed to the pounding of the metal pipe against Friedrichs’ skull and the arms he threw up in a desperate attempt to ward off the blows, Tretow’s own rasping breaths and the panicked shouts of alarm from Müller cowering in the far corner. Tretow had never previously considered what hard, physical labour the act of taking a human life might involve. By the time he turned to Müller, his chest was heaving, his arm and wrist ached and he had broken into a muck sweat that made the pipe feel as slippery and evasive as an eel in his hand. Yet Müller seemed to accept his fate quite passively and there was a grim, labouring relentlessness to the beating Tretow gave him.
Finally, the job was done. Both bodies lay immobile on the floor. Tretow did not, however, intend to take any chances. He placed a cushion over both faces for long enough to ensure that even if the pipe had not killed them, asphyxiation certainly would. Then he collapsed, exhausted, onto the basement floor, sitting on the bare concrete with his back up against a wall. As he contemplated his new-found status as a murderer, he felt neither triumph nor guilt. It was more that he had been faced with a grim but necessary task that he had completed without unnecessary fuss or emotion.