Authors: David Thomas
Now further tasks presented themselves. The two bodies would have to be disposed of. First, however, he needed to extract the maximum possible benefit from what he had just done. It was important that no one else should stray as Friedrichs and Müller had done.
32
TUESDAY
I woke early to find a text on my mobile. ‘My office 08.30 Haller’. A hot shower finished with a blast of cold water and followed by a couple of strong cups of coffee at breakfast dealt with the residual effects of last night’s drinks. When I stepped outside and scanned the pavements on either side of the road I could see no trace of anyone following me amidst the scurrying crowds of winter-coated Berliners, some keeping their hands warm round their own cardboard cups of takeaway cappuccino.
So much for my paranoid delusions.
I got a cab out to Haller’s office, which was above a coffee shop, deep in the heart of what had been East Berlin. To the right, the neighbouring building was covered in scaffolding and plastic sheets, and the full width of the pavement was filled with stacked, snow-topped rolls of loft insulation. To the left stood an apartment block, its façade pockmarked with gaps in the rendering through which bare brick could be seen like knees behind the holes in a pair of jeans. I walked past a rich warm waft of coffee-scented air to the front entrance, pressed the buzzer marked ‘Xenon Detektivbüro’ and heard the same cheerful voice that had greeted me on the phone less than twenty-four hours earlier. ‘Come on up, Mr Crookham. There is a lift. We are on the third floor.’
Less than a minute later, I was looking at the voice’s owner, a smiling young woman with lively brown eyes set in a Middle Eastern-looking face. I was just introducing myself when Haller appeared.
‘Aha!’ he exclaimed, giving me a vigorous handshake. ‘So you have met our beautiful Kamile. I must warn you, Mr Crookham, you should be very careful. Kamile comes from a very traditional Turkish family. If you dishonour her in any way, they will take a terrible revenge. Or, even worse, make you marry her.’
Kamile gave the polite laugh of a dutiful employee who has heard the same line a thousand times before. Then Haller got down to business: ‘OK, so we must go to our first appointment. Mariana’s schoolfriend, Heike Schmidt, is expecting us at her apartment.’
‘You set that up very quickly.’
‘I charge a lot of money. However, I try always to earn it.’
For all his command of English, Haller had an odd habit of always saying ‘however’, each syllable clearly separated, when a simple ‘but’ would have done. We left the office. Outside, Haller cast a disparaging eye to either side. ‘This is not the most salubrious location, however it is very cheap. And one thing I learned very early in this business was that it does not always pay to have fancy offices. Clients think it means you are spending all your money on rent, when you should be spending it solving cases.’
He walked me over to a new 5 Series BMW: fast cars, presumably, counted as a legitimate crime-fighting expense.
‘I was talking to a colleague last night, the one who was in the Stasi, about your situation,’ he said, getting in.
‘And you trust him?’
‘Sure.’ There was a surge of power as the car purred into the road. ‘We’ve worked together for five years now and he has never let me down. He pointed out to me that it was perfectly possible for Stasi-trained operatives to allow themselves to be spotted, in a deliberate way, to make the person they were tailing feel uneasy and paranoid.’
I shivered uneasily. ‘Well, if that’s what they wanted, they succeeded.’
‘Yes, I am afraid that this is something at which the Stasi were specialists. There is a word in German,
Zersetzung
. I do not know how you would say it in English exactly; however, it means the total, ah … obliteration of a person’s inner being.’
‘You mean like, “soul-destroying”?’
‘Yes. However, to the Stasi this was not just a phrase. It was also one of the principal aims of their work: the literal destruction of a human soul. The aim was to do this so as to be able to take complete control of the subject.’
‘Is that what they’re trying to do with me?’
I looked out of the window, trying to imagine the bland streets outside as they must have been a quarter of a century earlier, when the Stasi watched everything, monitored everyone and hung over every aspect of East German life like a poisoned fog.
‘We do not know for sure that anyone is trying to do anything,’ said Haller. ‘However, if they are, I would guess that what they want to do is scare you and make you decide you would be better off going back home. And I have to say, maybe they are right …’
I turned my face away from the passing street scene, back towards Haller. ‘No, I’m not backing down. I can’t.’
He sighed. ‘Your presence is complicating matters, you know that?’
‘Maybe. But I’ve had enough people telling me not to get involved. I don’t have the choice. I’m in it now and I’m not stopping till I find out the truth.’
‘Then you may have a long wait. Who can say what the truth ever is?’
We sat in silence for a minute or two and I looked back out of the window until I felt able to start the conversation again. ‘There’s something I don’t quite get. We keep talking about the Stasi like they’re still around. But the Wall came down more than twenty years ago. Who are these people?’
Haller sighed as he collected his thoughts. ‘They are … OK, you have heard, I am sure of Odessa, the organization for former SS officers? Like in the movie,
The Odessa Files
…’
‘Yes.’
‘Well there are similar organizations for ex-Stasi personnel. They have names like the Insider Committee, or – and this is a kind of sick joke – the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man. In part they are social groups. Men get together and talk about the old days. They tell each other how Germany is going to the dogs, things like that. In part, also, they are political campaigns. These guys want the world to see how great the old communist state was. Many of them still dream that they can make it come back.’
‘Like Nazis trying to bring back the Reich …’
‘Exactly. And also, to be frank, some of these organizations are criminal gangs. They carry out extortion, robbery, acts of violence, just like any other gang.’
So there were East German gangs. Well, that made sense. Weiss had a tough, criminal air about him. ‘And you think one of these gangs is after me?’
‘No, I think that
if
anyone is after you, it
may
be one of them. We cannot be sure.’
‘But these guys must all be getting on a bit. I mean, even someone who’d been in their early twenties when the Wall came down would be mid-forties now, and most of them would be older than that.’
Haller crossed an intersection, turning his head from side to side and checking his rear-view mirror as he answered, ‘Sure. However, there are always new recruits – young men who can’t get regular jobs, who want to be part of something, to throw their weight around. There is something we call
Ostalgie
, which means nostalgia for the East. People forget the bad things: the oppression, the informants, the secret police, the shortages of everything. All they remember is that they had jobs and homes, and everything like schools and healthcare provided for them without having to pay. It’s not hard to persuade such people that you are trying to bring these good things back, even if all you want to bring back is your power.’
Haller was leaning forward now, looking over the steering wheel at the buildings on either side of the street. ‘Excellent!’ he said, with a snappy nod of the head, pulling the car over to the side of the road. ‘So now we arrive. Please remember, I will talk for us both. You stay out of my way.’
‘If you say so …’
‘
Ja
, I do.’ Haller unclipped his safety belt. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. Then he paused with his hand hovering just above the door handle. He looked at me: ‘Oh, and one other thing … Those Stasi men you think were following you yesterday …’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re not following us today. I was checking all the way.’ Haller grinned. ‘Or they don’t want to be seen, at any rate …’
33
The city was filled with buildings painted in a palette of pale earth tones: sand, ochre, pale dove grey, sage green and dusty brown, with just the occasional flash of a pale dusty pink or blue. Heike Schmidt lived in an old, buttery-yellow apartment house, four storeys tall. The front door was painted a deep claret and opened, unlocked, onto a hall floored in drab grey-green linoleum. Two rows of metal post boxes were set into the wall to the left of the entrance. Haller scanned the nametags beneath each box and said, ‘Top floor. Up we go …’
There was no lift. We made our way up a wooden staircase to the third floor. Haller led the way along the landing till he came to a door. He gave it two sharp raps. The door opened a fraction and I could see a sliver of a thin, brown-eyed female face.
‘Fräulein Schmidt?’
‘Yes?’
Haller held up an ID card in a leather holder. He switched to German: ‘May we come in, please?’
A few seconds went by and then I heard the rattle of a chain and the door opened.
‘Come in,’ said Heike Schmidt.
She can’t have been more than a few months older than Mariana, but her face had an exhausted, grey-skinned pallor and the eyes which observed us with nervy defensiveness were lined and sunken. It wasn’t so different from the way Mariana had looked that day at York Magistrate’s Court, and it made me question for the first time whether that air of devastation and defeat, which had seemed so unlike her, had in fact been the true representation of Mariana’s inner self. Perhaps the only difference was that Heike Schmidt had never been able to construct a lovely shell around her with which to fool the world. The two women certainly looked like casualties of the same psychological assault.
Lost in thought, I was only half-aware of a voice saying, ‘My name is Haller, this is my colleague from England, Mr Crookham.’
‘Crookham …?’
I realized Heike Schmidt was looking at me, expecting an answer. ‘Er, yes …’ I replied. I assumed I was allowed to speak when directly spoken to. Haller did not attempt to stop me, so I continued, hoping that my fumbling German made some kind of sense: ‘You spoke to my brother a few weeks ago, Andrew Crookham.’
Big mistake. Heike Schmidt stiffened. ‘Oh … I …’ she stammered. We’d only got a few feet inside her door. Any second now she was going to shove us back out again.
‘Fräulein Schmidt, we need your help in connection with a serious crime,’ said Haller.
‘I do not understand. Are you police?’
‘No, we are not.’
She frowned: ‘But the woman I spoke to, from your office, she …’
‘She did not say we were the police, I can assure you of that,’ Haller interrupted. ‘I am a private investigator. I am fully licensed and above board.’
Heike Schmidt pursed her lips. She pulled back her bony shoulders and as she stood as tall as she could I realized how intimidating Haller and I must have seemed as we towered over her. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I can’t talk to you.’
Haller attempted to adopt a more ingratiating tone. ‘Please do not be alarmed Miss Schmidt, we just want to ask you a few questions. You are not in any trouble.’
‘I will be, if I answer your questions. Please go … Now!’
Haller turned back to the door, but I stayed where I was. ‘Come on,’ he said to me. ‘You heard Fräulein Schmidt. We must go.’
I took a deep breath, slowly exhaled and as Haller insisted, ‘Come on!’ I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. I held it out to Schmidt and looked her in the eye, desperately trying to make some kind of connection.
‘Miss Schmidt … Do you recognize the girl in this picture?’
She said nothing. But she kept looking at Mariana and I saw her blink a couple of times, as though she were fighting back tears.
‘She is now my wife,’ I said. Haller had stopped quite still and was saying nothing now. ‘I don’t know what her name was when you knew her,’ I went on, ‘but she’s called Mariana Crookham now. And she is in very serious trouble.’
‘In England?’ Schmidt asked.
‘Yes.’
She chewed her lip, curiosity fighting against fear. Curiosity won: ‘What kind of trouble?’
‘She’s accused of murder. And I’m trying to prove her innocence. Was she your friend … when you were little girls?’
Heike Schmidt gave a fractional, barely perceptible nod of her head.
‘Please …’ I implored. ‘I’m sure that I can help her, if only I can find out what happened to her when she was young.’
Schmidt’s eyes widened as the fear took charge. ‘No … no … not that …’
‘Please.’
‘I can’t. They will … It’s impossible.’
‘Is there anything, anything at all you can tell us. About her father, perhaps?’
‘Her father?’ The words were cackled, almost drowned, in nervous, panicky laughter. ‘There was no father. The place where we met, it wasn’t that school. It was an orphanage.’
34
We spent an hour or so in a nearby cafe while Haller’s staff tracked down the address of an old state-run children’s home near the Grundschule Rudower. Then we set off to find it. I’d always imagined Berlin as a dark, claustrophobic, crowded city, crushed beneath the weight of its history. But as we drove back the way we had come and then headed out into the south-eastern suburbs, much of it was remarkably open. The long, straight roads lined with low-density office and retail developments reminded me of the casual, land-grabbing sprawl of so many American cities.
‘Didn’t I tell you that Berlin was decimated?’ said Haller. ‘In 1939 there were almost four and a half million people in Berlin; by 1945, less than three million. All through the fifties people were walking across from East Berlin to West, then flying out of the city to the Federal Republic. That’s why the commies had to build their Wall. They were running out of people. Even now, it still feels a little empty. Do you know in Paris there are twenty thousand people per square kilometre? In Berlin, just four thousand.’