Blood Relative (27 page)

‘And what did you conclude, then, from your re-enactment?’

‘That the police account of the killing made sense.’

‘To you maybe,’ I replied. ‘But then, I get the feeling you know a great deal that I don’t about my wife. So why don’t you tell me the truth … all of it? And if you do, I won’t go straight to the British Embassy and tell them exactly what an agent of the German government has been getting up to on UK soil. And then you won’t have a major diplomatic shitstorm to worry about. Does that sound like a fair deal to you?’

Weiss gave me another one of his appraising looks. ‘You know, Mr Crookham, you are an interesting man. After the first times I saw you, I thought to myself, “He is a big man, physically, but he is soft. He is not a fighter.” Now I see you throw yourself from a window, ten metres from the ground because you have already calculated that the fall is safe, and plan your escape accordingly. I hear you making threats against me and your voice is different. I believe that you mean it. You would do what you say. I had wondered what the daughter of Rainer Wahrmann, with his blood in her veins, would see in a man such as you. I think now I understand …’

‘Well, that’s very flattering of you, Mr Weiss. But I asked you a question: does it sound like a deal?’

Weiss grimaced again and sat back in his seat, his jaw clenched and his face ashen. With his good hand he gestured to me to hand him the first-aid box. He rested it on his lap, rummaged through it and pulled out a small blister pack that held two large white pills. He popped the blisters and swallowed the pills before sinking back into the seat.

Only then did he look at me again and say, ‘
Ja
, we have a deal.’

42

‘Stop the car,’ Weiss said. ‘I need to make a call, in private.’

The Mercedes pulled up and Weiss got out, closing the car door behind him. I watched him pacing up and down on the pavement outside. Judging by the looks on his face and the tension in his clenched left fist he seemed to be having a hard time getting his point across, but evidently he got his way in the end, concluding the conversation with a decisive nod of the head.

As Weiss got back in his seat, the driver leaned his head back and spoke over his right shoulder: ‘Where to, boss?’

‘Potsdam. Templiner See,’ Weiss replied.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Gerber asked. ‘They need to be prepared, both of them. Otherwise it’s not fair…’

‘No, if we are going to do it, better to do it right away.’

‘But what about you? You should see a doctor.’

‘I’m OK. Let’s just get this over and done with. Go to Templiner See. It is time Mr Crookham met Rainer Wahrmann.’

Weiss looked out of the window, but I doubt he was seeing any of the city we were passing through in the gathering dark of a winter late afternoon. His mind was elsewhere. I wanted to ask him about Wahrmann, the father-in-law whom I had never met, whose existence itself had been a mystery to me, but I hardly knew where to begin. Thankfully, Weiss saved me the trouble.

‘What did your wife tell you about her father? How they parted, I mean …’

‘She said he’d left home when she was a kid. He never even bothered to keep in touch with her, all the time she was growing up.’

‘It wasn’t exactly like that. It was not the father who left. His daughter Mariana and his wife were taken from him – I was the agent who arranged the transfer. They were moved to a place of safety. He was forbidden any contact with them. To this day he knows nothing about his daughter’s life. He has no idea, therefore, of her current situation. The separation was total.’

I thought of the things Wahrmann must have done to be denied any contact at all with his family.

‘What kind of a sick bastard is he?’ I asked

‘Not what you think, maybe,’ Weiss replied. ‘But Rainer Wahrmann is certainly a most unusual man. In his time he has been a spy, a criminal and a traitor in the eyes of his country. At the time of your wife’s birth he was in prison, sentenced to three years in jail.’

‘For what?’

‘A crime, naturally. His particular offence, however, was unusual. He was found guilty of telling a joke.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Back in the late 1970s, Rainer Wahrmann was a student, a very brilliant one of whom great things were expected, working on his doctorate in economics at Humboldt University. For two hundred years this has been the leading university of Berlin, but when the city was divided it was in the East. It became the place where the country’s elite students were sent, chosen both for their aptitude and for their allegiance to the SED – the ruling communist party.’

‘So Wahrmann was a communist?’

‘At that time, yes. Any ambitious young man was obliged to be, and he was very ambitious, a veritable golden boy: handsome, an academic prodigy, just married to a beautiful young wife. But one night he went to a party at another student’s apartment. He had too much to drink and he told a joke about Erich Honecker, the leader of the country. That is how it was: the East Germans had jokes about Honecker, like the Russians had jokes about Khrushchev and Brezhnev … I mean, they were actually the same jokes, just with the names changed.’

‘What was the joke?’

‘You want to hear it?’

‘If it put my father-in-law in jail, yes.’

Weiss paused, like any other amateur trying to remember a joke, his ultra-competent mask momentarily disturbed.

‘OK,’ he began, ‘so Honecker is riding in his limousine through the countryside, way out in the sticks. Suddenly a pig wanders out into the road. Bam! The car hits the pig and kills it, instantly. The driver does not know what to do, so he asks Honecker, “Do you want me to drive on, sir?” Honecker says, “No, you’d better go to the nearest farmhouse and offer to pay damages for their pig.” So the driver goes off to pay the damages. Fifteeen minutes go by … thirty … an hour, and still he has not returned. Finally, the driver comes back. He is walking unsteadily, singing a song. He has obviously been drinking. In his arms he carries a huge pile of gifts and packages: loaves of bread, fresh vegetables, jars of pickle, cuts of meat – everything farmers can provide. Honecker cannot believe what he is seeing. He asks the driver, “What happened?” The driver says, “I don’t know. All I said to them was: I have Honecker in my car and I have killed the pig.”’

I did my best to summon a polite laugh. ‘That’s it?’

Weiss did not appear to be upset by the absence of hilarity on my part. ‘Yes. Wahrmann told the joke, someone reported him to the Stasi and he was jailed for conspiracy to undermine the state.’

‘How can telling a joke be a conspiracy?’

‘Very simple. For you to tell a joke, someone has to tell it to you first. Then you must pass it on to other people. Therefore it is a conspiracy. Therefore, also, Wahrmann was a conspirator against the state, a subversive. The official term at that time was
Diversant.
In English, that means “saboteur”.’

‘That’s madness!’

‘The whole system was madness. Is that not obvious to you yet?’

I thought of the trivial irritations of my own society’s mania for health and safety, political correctness and the requirement to spout acceptable platitudes that no one really believed. Then I considered an entire system in which those niggling absurdities were magnified a thousandfold; in which truth and honesty were abolished by law; where the slightest deviation could lead to imprisonment and torture. That had been the world of Rainer Wahrmann.

‘Where did they send him?’ I asked.

‘First to Hohenschönhausen for interrogation, then to a jail called Bautzen, in Lower Saxony, near the Czech border. The inmates called it The Yellow Misery, because it was made from yellow bricks. But you were at Hohenschönhausen this afternoon, yes?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Bautzen was worse.’

I tried to imagine how a pampered young student, a golden boy accustomed to privilege and entitlement, would cope with the U-boat, and struggled to imagine something even more degrading. Wray had talked about multigenerational trauma being passed on from parent to child. Mariana’s father must have been traumatized all right. I could only imagine the hurt that she had inherited from him.

‘My God … and he was there for three years?’

‘No, just a little more than a year,’ said Weiss.

‘How come they let him out?’

‘A senior party official came to Wahrmann’s cell. He told him that while he was in prison his wife had given birth to a baby – his baby. Then he offered him a deal. There was a big international youth congress taking place in Leipzig with representatives from the youth movements of all the communist bloc countries, plus sympathizers from the West. The regime wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness and humanity of its justice system …’

I gasped: ‘That’s grotesque.’

Weiss just looked at me. He did not need to repeat himself: the whole system was grotesque.

‘So what was the deal?’

‘Simple. All Wahrmann had to do was go to the congress and give a speech describing the error of his ways and expressing the thanks he felt to the system for showing him where he had gone wrong. This had ensured that he would never make the same mistake again.’

It was like something out of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
: a real-life Winston Smith proclaiming his love for Big Brother. ‘You mean, he was told to thank the people who had arrested him and, I presume, tortured him, and then sent him to prison for a conspiracy that had never even existed?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what did he do?’

‘He took the deal. He made his speech – very brilliantly, by the way, I have read it – and went back home to his wife and baby.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then the golden boy became golden again. He was the living proof that the party was capable of redemption and forgiveness. He wrote a thesis on “The Superior Efficiency of Resource Allocation in Socialist Command Economies” that was published on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It put him on the fast track. He was given a job in the personal office of the finance minister, writing speeches and position papers. Still in his twenties, he was attending international trade negotiations, bilateral meetings with both communist and Western governments, always singing the praises of the communist system.’

‘How could he?’ I asked, to myself as much as anyone else.

Weiss carried on regardless: ‘Rainer Wahrmann was a star. Official newspapers here carried his articles. Socialist parties in Western Europe used his economic reports as proof that the average worker in the East was far better off than those in the West. But what they did not know was that everything he wrote was a lie. It was all just propaganda. In truth the East German economy, along with all the Soviet-style economies, was a wreck. Wahrmann knew it, but he chose to lie anyway.’

My sympathy and pity for Wahrmann’s position was rapidly disappearing, replaced by anger at the totality of his betrayal of principle. ‘You’re telling me that Mariana’s dad knew exactly how bad the system was, how it abused the people it controlled. And still he lied for it? What a scumbag!’

Weiss looked at me with something approaching disdain. ‘Oh, so you would be different, huh? You would say, “No, I don’t want to see my wife and daughter. I don’t want to go back home. I don’t want to give them a better life, in a nicer apartment. I would rather stay in jail.” Is that your position?’

‘No, of course not, but …’

‘But what? That was the deal. Wahrmann took it. Think of your precious Mariana and what was best for her. Now answer me: do you think he did the right thing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do. He did the only thing he could do. Or at least, the only thing that any ordinary man would do. But now let me ask you another question. Do you think your wife is an ordinary woman?’

That was a much easier question to answer. ‘No. Not remotely.’

‘Well, neither is her father. He’s smarter than any guy I’ve ever met. He knew exactly what he was doing. But no one else did. Rainer Wahrmann fooled them all.’

Before I could ask what he meant, Weiss turned away and looked out of the window again. We seemed to have left the city and for the past few minutes had been taking a dual carriageway through heavily wooded countryside or parkland.

‘Not too much further,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes, maybe, fifteen at the most. And then, I hope, your search will be at an end.’

43

We arrived at Wahrmann’s house – a smart lakeside villa, built in an early modernist style – at around a quarter past six. Wahrmann must have profited from his life of crime and spying because it had all the trademarks of a rich man’s residence: the heavy, impenetrable gates; the speakerphone box by the entrance; the crunching gravel of the drive past perfectly trimmed hedges up to the impeccable white façade. I wondered who would greet us at the door: a butler, perhaps, or maybe a pretty young trophy wife?

Instead we were met by a nurse in a uniform as immaculate as the house itself. She looked at us sternly, gave a nod of recognition to Weiss and then let us in.

‘Do not be too long,’ she said to Weiss, walking with him across the hall. ‘I meant what I said. He is tired. He cannot concentrate for very long.’

‘Did you tell him?’ Weiss asked.

‘He knows this is his daughter’s husband, yes,’ the nurse said. ‘But that is all.’ Then her voice changed and her cool professionalism gave way to a note of genuine, affectionate concern for her patient. I wasn’t sure whether she was addressing Weiss or me when she said, ‘Please, be very careful. He has suffered a very great deal in his life. He should not have to suffer now.’

I had no idea what to expect. From the moment I decided to go to Berlin I had been preparing little speeches in my head for the time I’d come face to face with Mariana’s father, whoever he might be. I had always known that he had deserted her, but beyond that my picture of him had been in a constant state of flux. Haller had reminded me not to jump to the assumption that her father had been the source of all Mariana’s problems, but what was I supposed to think instead? To judge by Weiss’s description, Rainer Wahrmann was a brilliant but completely unscrupulous survivor. But the nurse was describing an invalid victim of tragic circumstances.