Authors: David Thomas
‘Anyway, said Janice, ‘this Mrs König had seen the story and wanted to find out what had happened to Mariana. I asked her why she didn’t just call you directly and she said she didn’t have the number, which sounded a bit fishy …’
‘No, that’s possible. Mariana hadn’t spoken to her mother for years. They’d had a big falling-out. I’ve never even met her myself.’
‘Oh,’ said Janice, and I could almost hear her filing the information away for further use. ‘Well, she left a number. Would you like me to give it to you?’
‘Might as well,’ I said, trying not to betray my excitement. No point in giving Janice even more good gossip material.
I took the number, called it and heard a brisk, female, ‘
Hallo?
’ on the other end of the line.
‘
Frau König, er … ich bin Peter Crookham, der …
’ Shit! What was the word for husband? Got it … ‘
der Ehemann von Mariana.’
There was an excited, ‘Ah!’ down the line, followed by a quickfire blast of German that made me realize just how limited my grasp of the language really was. ‘
Sprechen Sie Englisch?
’ I asked.
‘Little bit,
ja
…’
As slowly and clearly as I could, I tried to explain Mariana’s situation, that she was awaiting trial in a secure hospital, not wanting any communication with me or anyone else.
‘But maybe I can write, yes?’
‘Yes, of course.’ I gave her the address and then added, ‘But do not expect her to reply … Now, Frau König, may I ask you something?’
‘Sorry, I am not understanding.’
‘May I ask you some questions?’
‘Why questions?’ Her voice suddenly sounded suspicious, or was that just anxiety I could detect? Perhaps it was just a conditioned reflex. For anyone who had lived in East Germany, with secret police and informers everywhere, the idea of being questioned must have been pretty scary.
‘It’s nothing, really … I was just curious about Mariana …’
‘What is, “curious”?’
‘Er …’ I wracked my brain for the right word: ‘Ah –
neugerig
?’
‘
Ach so, ja
. OK …’
‘Right, well I wondered if you could tell me when and where Mariana was born and … I know this sounds crazy … er,
verrückt
… but when she was born, what was her name? Because there is no Mariana Slavik listed anywhere.’
Now the anxiety in her voice changed to a fearful anger: ‘Why you ask this questions? What you want for know?’
‘I’m just trying to find out about Mariana’s life and her family – your family. Her father, for example …’
‘No! Not to be talking about the father of Mariana! I must say nothing. You must say nothing … nothing!’
‘But Frau König, if I could just find out …’
But it was no good. Bettina König had hung up on me. I tried to call back twice more but there was no reply. I gave it an hour, waiting until I was by the departure gate, then tried again. The number was now unobtainable.
Mariana refused to speak to me. Her mother would not answer any questions. But the intensity of Bettina König’s reaction told me plenty. She was hiding something about the father and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that he was the key to the whole thing. I imagined a man who could give his wife and daughter new identities, while making himself disappear. Was this also the man who had sent Weiss to England to steal Andy’s computer? I wondered whether he had been responsible for the trauma that had been buried like an unexploded bomb, deep in Mariana’s subconscious.
Something had happened in her childhood days in East Berlin, that was for sure: something that was still important more than twenty years later. There were no answers to any of those questions: not yet. But just being able to ask them gave me something to work with: something to take to Berlin.
29
As I walked down the long corridors at Berlin-Schönefeld Airport that led to the arrivals area the notion came into my head that Mariana might be waiting there to greet me. It was crazy, of course. I knew perfectly well that she was locked up in a secure unit several hundred miles to the west. But still the image of her persisted and I actually felt a pang of disappointment when I came through the swing doors and did not see her standing amidst the small knot of people waiting to greet the Gatwick plane.
Not far away, though, there was a small cafe, and my eye suddenly caught a flash of blonde hair. It belonged to a young woman who was bent over a laptop so that her face was almost entirely hidden. Once again, my rational mind was aware that she could not possibly be Mariana, and yet I had to walk a little closer and get a proper look to make sure. And once again the disappointment, when it came, caused a sharp burst of physical pain. It struck me that this was liable to happen constantly in Berlin, a city filled with Aryan blondes, but in a way this unwanted shock therapy was a help. It focused my attention and gave me one more element of motivation. The whole purpose of being here, after all, was to make that pain go away for good.
A man was sitting at the table behind the blonde, directly in my line of sight as I was looking at her. He was quite small, slightly built and, judging by his silver hair and well-worn face, in his late fifties at least, possibly older. He was wearing a brown pinstriped suit in an old-fashioned double-breasted cut, with a beige shirt and nondescript tie. The formality of his clothing made him stand out from the casually dressed air passengers and their families all around him. Perhaps that was why I noticed him so clearly. I made my way out of the terminal, along the covered path that led to the train station, glad to be out of the snow that was falling on this corner of Germany just as it had on North Yorkshire.
I was halfway to the station when I thought I saw the man from the airport behind me. I turned my head to check and, sure enough, there he was, now wearing a grey loden coat over his suit and making his way at a gentle pace, pulling a small wheeled suitcase behind him. The thought entered my head that I was being followed. It was absurd. There were plenty of other people making precisely the same walk: why should this one, grey-haired man be any different? Still, I started walking a little faster and it was with some relief that when I got to the ticket machine and cast furtive glances around me I could see no sign of him.
Ten minutes later, I was sitting on a double-decker commuter train to central Berlin. About a minute after it pulled out of Schönefeld, I saw the man a third time as he came towards me, dragging his case with some difficulty down the aisle of the carriage. As he walked by, as wrinkled and scrawny as a Rolling Stone, I found myself tensing up, my armpits prickling, but he didn’t even glance in my direction before heading upstairs. I muttered under my breath, ‘Calm down, for Christ’s sake.’ If I was going to get jumpy every time anyone happened to get on the same train as me, I’d be a wreck by the time I left Berlin.
I checked into my bland, soulless, but perfectly functional hotel room around five in the afternoon. My mood had improved as I had started to rough out a plan of action. And item number one was: get a little help.
Thank God for iPhones and Google. It only took one search to bring up a mass of responses to ‘detective agency berlin’. The first few numbers I called didn’t do the kind of work I needed, were fully booked or simply charged too much for their services. The next place had a website with a glossy corporate façade, but it was obvious within a few minutes of stilted conversation that the man who had answered the phone constituted the entire corporation. That wasn’t too encouraging, and nor was his response to something I said as I was trying to explain my quest.
‘I think my wife’s father may possibly have been involved in some kind of criminal activity in East Berlin,’ I said. There was a disapproving grunt in my ear. Ignoring it, I continued, ‘Something that caused him to fake her identity papers. Maybe he faked his papers too, in order to escape justice.’
‘Not possible!’ said the man. His voice was heavily accented, his English about as good as my German. ‘In the DDR was very little crime. All major crime – all of it! – was solved.’
He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. Dear God, I thought, he sounds like one of the Stasi himself.
‘Er, right … I must have got that wrong, then. Sorry to have bothered you,’ I said and hung up.
My hopes of finding anyone to help me were beginning to fade when I dialled the next number: a place called Xenon Detektivbüro.
‘You must speak to our director, Mr Haller,’ said the girl who took my call. ‘He speaks excellent English.’
‘Even better than yours?’ Good grief, that was the first even vaguely flirtatious remark I’d made to anyone in ages. Signs of life, perhaps?
She gave the sort of giggle that brightens any middle-aged man’s day. ‘Oh yes, much better! I put you through now.’
I’d only just begun to explain my reasons for coming to Berlin when Haller interrupted me: ‘Of course! Mr Crookham, of course! My apologies, I should have recognized your name. I have heard a little about the tragic circumstances of your brother’s death. It has received some attention in the media here. So … you were saying about your wife …’
I ran through a brief account of what had happened and my reasons for coming to Berlin.
‘You say you think she had a false birth certificate?’ Haller asked.
‘Yes. I have a copy of it with me, but my brother did not find a matching certificate in the records here in Berlin.’
‘And you are sure she was born and spent her early life in East Berlin, or in any case East Germany, not West?’
‘Yes … why?’
‘Well, there is only one way that anyone from East Germany could have obtained false documents, and that is through the Stasi.’
So Andy had been right.
‘You mean her father was in the Stasi?’
‘Sure, it is possible. Many, many people were in the Stasi.’
‘I think I just spoke to one of them,’ I said and described my conversation with the previous detective.
Haller laughed, ‘Yes, that sounds like Stasi. You know, many detectives here in Berlin, in fact I would say the majority, are ex-Stasi. This kind of work is all they know and they are very, very good at it. However, luckily for me, since they are my competitors, most of them are also very, very bad at business. It goes against their nature. Many of them still believe, even now, that communism was the true way. I have one working in my team. I will ask him what he thinks about your father-in-law.’
‘So you will take the case?’
‘Of course!’ said Haller. ‘I would be delighted. So, you are in Berlin now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Excellent. May I suggest we meet for a drink when I have finished my duties here? Shall we say 18.30?’
‘That sounds fine. Where shall we meet?’
‘The Hotel Adlon. Our most famous hotel, right by the Brandenburg Gate, just a few hundred metres from the Reichstag: what could be a better place for your first rendezvous in Berlin? I will meet you in the lobby bar.’
Only after I had ended the call did it strike me that Haller had described Mariana’s father as my father-in-law. As strange as it may seem – perhaps because I’d never met or had any sort of contact with him – that had never struck me before. The man whose story I was trying to uncover, whose actions might explain what had turned his daughter into a killer, was one of my relatives. We were family.
30
The Adlon was a grand hotel in the classic style, just as Haller had promised, right in the heart of the city. Haller himself was sitting on one of the high chairs by the bar, upholstered in café-au-lait leather. He got to his feet to shake my hand. He was at least as tall as me, but more solidly built, though there was no hint of a gut beneath his pale-blue shirt, tucked into belted black trousers. He had sandy hair, just starting to thin at the temples, blue eyes, a strong chin and a hearty laugh. He couldn’t have been more stereotypically German if he’d tried.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? They have proper English Earl Grey here. Or perhaps a glass of beer?’ he asked.
‘A beer sounds good.’
Haller called the barman over and gave a series of fast, incisive orders, specifying precisely which beer he wanted and how it should be served. Then he turned his attention back in my direction and said, ‘Come with me a moment. There is something I would like to show you.’
He led me through the hotel and out onto Parisier Platz towards a simple, almost block-like façade of sand-coloured limestone, punctuated by vertical strips of plain, unadorned windows, like frames on an old-fashioned roll of film. Something about it rang a bell: I’d seen it before but couldn’t recall when or where. Still, my memory lapse was surely forgivable. It certainly didn’t look like anything much.
Haller must have read the scepticism on my face because he laughed and said, ‘Not so impressed, huh? OK, let’s go in. Maybe you will change your mind.’
We went through an equally nondescript entrance into an anonymous office-block reception area, and then my jaw fell open in wonder as I gasped, ‘Bloody hell,’ at the sight in front of me. For beyond the reception the building opened up into a rectangular, glass-roofed central atrium, much deeper than it was wide. Above it stretched a glass roof, supported by a dizzying whirl of metal struts. It became lower and narrower as it reached the far end of the building, creating a kind of tunnel effect. To the left and right the long side-walls were clad in what looked like very flat, toffee-coloured wood, almost like a veneer. A geometric grid of interior windows looking out onto the atrium echoed the stark simplicity of the façade. But that was where any vague link with architectural normality stopped.
Directly opposite where we stood, the entire far end of the atrium was filled with an extraordinary, brooding structure, like a great open cavern made from twisting, swirling metal. From its mouth emerged a glittering glass canopy which covered the entire lower third of the atrium. It was as though something utterly alien had taken up residence inside an apparently normal, human environment and it was, at one and the same time, spectacularly beautiful and distinctly menacing.