“I suppose that’s good for us this time around,” Erika came up with after a while. “They know what they’re doing, and they’re probably better resourced than us. We’ll just have to deal with any consequences when they happen.”
“She also confirmed the historic links between the far-right and the Stasi.”
“Interesting. I suppose we’d better inform the Ministry.” Erika got up and poured herself some tea.
“There’s something else?” Erika sat down again.
“I saw Dmitri. I told him about Evelyn, and he gave me a few ideas.”
Erika was watching me over the rim of her cup, waiting for me to continue.
“He thinks we should be aiming higher, that we should get Evelyn to do more than gather evidence to prosecute individuals. He thinks she could get useful information, maybe even enough to smash the fascist movement.”
Now that I was saying it out loud it sounded obvious, but Erika didn’t respond—she had her cup held up to her lips, but wasn’t drinking. She was thinking.
“We have clear instructions to brief Evelyn only for gathering evidence for prosecution-”
“And Dmitri also suggested that if we get anything useful from Evelyn we shouldn’t just pass it upstairs. He reckons we should be distributing it to local groups: Round Tables, Works Councils, local police and Border Police companies …”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do. Because right now we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare—the fascists, the nationalists, the skins, it’s getting worse. Taken together it’s probably a greater threat than the economic crisis. And what Dmitri got me thinking about is that we have a choice. For once we hold the levers: we can give the intelligence to the Ministry and the politicians and the government, or we give it to the grassroots. If Evelyn does her job we could get enough to smash the far-right. If we give it to the central institutions then the politicians will take the credit. They’ll turn it into a convincing argument for a strong centralised government here in Berlin.”
Erika put her cup down. “And going by their recent behaviour they’ll be using that argument to defeat the referendum on devolving power to the Round Tables.”
Karo
We did it—we agreed to hold a mega-demo on Friday afternoon, at rush hour. There was going to be a massive mobilisation over the next two days. I knew we could make it happen: nearly every squat in East Berlin had a representative at this meeting, and we were going to end early so that we could get moving, talk to absolutely everyone we knew. By the end of tonight everyone in the squatting scene would know about the plan. We’d put the word out to Leipzig, Dresden, Rostock, Erfurt and Jena: it was going to be big. No, it was going to be mega.
Martin
After talking to Erika I put a brief summary of my ideas on the agenda sheet for tomorrow morning’s meeting and went back to my office. It had been a long day and I was feeling tired, but I wanted to make a start on preparing Evelyn’s briefing. I sat at my desk but I wasn’t taking any information in. I decided to take the paperwork home.
It was a good move—I felt better as soon as I left the office. The sky was clouding over, and the day was cooling rapidly. Walking in the fresh air was bringing my grey cells up to operating speed, and I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going, just letting my feet do the navigation. Before I was properly aware of it, I was climbing the stairs in my tenement, opening the door to my flat.
I decided to go through the case summaries first, get some perspective on what had been going on, see if it gave me any clues as to what we should get Evelyn to watch out for. Dmitri’s suggestion had been simple: gain intelligence that could be used by networks and organisations all over the country, help them to shut down fascist activities in their area.
But what kind of intelligence? I’d already been over most of these files once or twice before, and if there were any clues in there then I should have found it by now.
But I hadn’t found anything useful, nor had Laura, Erika or Nik. Nor, presumably had K1. Perhaps I should just give all the files to Evelyn, she’d probably be more able than I to ferret out any useful bits.
It was slow, boring work, and I took frequent breaks—standing up, stretching, making coffee, going to the toilet—but I kept at it, hour after hour.
At about eight o’clock I looked through my notes for the thousandth time, wondering how to rationalise them, group things together so that they’d still make sense tomorrow. But it was useless. I gave up and took Evelyn’s file over to my armchair, leaving the rest on the kitchen table.
I was much more familiar with Evelyn’s file, having worked extensively on it last autumn. We’d pieced together her Stasi career, but it had been well hidden, not recorded in the usual archives at the Normannenstrasse complex. We still didn’t know who else had been on the Stasi task force that Evelyn had led until a few months ago. Evelyn had steadfastly refused to answer any questions on operational processes so we were still very much in the dark. We had codenames but had found no records in the old Stasi files—presumably these codenames had been assigned after the end of 1989 when parts of the Stasi went underground.
Nor had we been able to comprehensively track Evelyn’s activities over the years. There was still an unexplained period in 1988. After the Luxemburg Affair she had dropped out of sight here in East Berlin and resurfaced a few months later in Moscow. Her time in Moscow was a closed book—even Dmitri was unable or unwilling to shed any light on it.
Too many riddles, too few answers.
Thinking about Evelyn’s association with Moscow made me think of Dmitri again—I hadn’t yet looked at the file he’d given me. I got out of my chair and made my way over to the kitchen table where I’d stacked all the files, searching through them until I found the yellowish cardboard folder.
Which was when the phone rang.
“Martin, you asked me to chase up those reports that Lieutenant Steinline was meant to be bringing around.” It was Grit—she was still in the office. “I’ve just had a phone call—comrade Lieutenant Steinlein was taken to hospital last night—he’s been badly beaten by skinheads.”
Steinlein. The officer in charge of the raid on the fascist house yesterday. A uniformed police officer beaten up by skins.
A revenge attack.
Shaken by the news I returned to my armchair in the living room. I still had Dmitri’s file in my hand. I glanced over the Russian text but it made no sense to me, my eyes merely focussing on the few German words and names there: Дрезден, Котвус and the like, but I had no idea what it all meant. I’d have to give it to Klaus to use his Russian skills on.
I thumbed back to the front. A loose sheet had been inserted, noticeably different from the others: this was the first copy from a typewriter, not the indistinct blue of the carbons in the rest of the file. Intrigued, I scanned the Cyrillic script, wondering whether I could decipher any of it. A few words in the first paragraph looked familiar:
Ул. Вытпинг 122, 1134 Берлин-Лихтенберг
The address of the fascist house in Lichtenberg! Cursing myself for not paying more attention at school I started at the top of the sheet, attempting to understand what was typed there. But beyond the Cyrillic rendering of some of the names we already had there was not much I could understand.
Shutting the file again I considered what this meant. Dmitri had let me ramble on in his office about the operation with Evelyn, he’d told me to my face that he knew nothing about our fascist problem. And then he’d given me a document about the Weitlingstrasse house.
It wasn’t an oversight, it wasn’t a mistake—Dmitri didn’t make a move without first considering all the angles. So he was trying to tell me something, something he couldn’t say to me in his office or on the phone. But what?
Day 11
Thursday 24th March 1994
Jena: There were violent scenes last night after football club Dynamo Dresden played away at Carl Zeiss Jen
a. In a related incident, the Junge Gemeinde Jena, which is active in several anti-fascist and refugee support initiatives, was subjected to a sustained attack by hooligans associated with Dynamo. Lieutenant Walther of the VPD Jena stated that negative-hostile groupings had been successfully dispersed following police operations.
Martin
Little good had come of the telephone since it had been installed a couple of years ago. In the old days I had dreamed of having my own telephone connection, of no longer having to queue at the phone box down the road, no longer relying on friendly neighbours to take a message and leave it on the notepad hanging from my front door. But the reality was that the phone—installed when I began working at RS—was a means of summoning me to work, a way to wake me from slumber, and on not a few occasions, from hangover-induced near-death status.
Today it was an early-morning call.
With the first whirr of the bell I started into wakefulness. My reading material had long slipped out of my hands, loose sheets had sailed over the floor. By the second ring I’d worked out where I was, and with the third long ring I was out of my chair and on my way into the hall.
“Grobe,” I said into the receiver, my voice still encrusted with sleep.
“Martin, it’s me. Now I do hope I haven’t woken you, but I suspect I may have, I am sorry, dear Martin.”
Evelyn. Not the first time she had woken me with a telephone call, but how had she managed to get access to a phone in the prison?
“I thought you might like to meet up again before I start my little adventure. I don’t have much time, so shall we say one hour from now?” She gave me an address in Hellersdorf and rang off before I could argue.
It was a few moments before my brain engaged. I was splashing water on my face in the kitchen sink before I realised that Evelyn was no longer on remand. Somehow she had been released, even without my signature on the necessary forms. I looked at my reflection in the little shaving mirror that I kept next to the soap dish and the Fit washing up liquid. The usual grey, stubbly face looked back. No surprise to be seen on that face. Evelyn, for all her adroitness, had definitely lost her power to shock me.
It wasn’t until I reached the S-Bahn station at Nöldnerplatz that I looked at my watch. It was just getting light, and that alone should have told me: not yet six o’clock. Once past the shunting yards at Lichtenberg station the train line runs between allotments, parks and back gardens, the only industrial intrusion a hot-water distributor pipe. The train itself was fairly empty, most people travelling the other way. I changed onto the U-Bahn at Wuhletal, not having to wait long before the train climbed up out of the tunnel. Sitting down on the blue plastic seat I looked out of the window as we dived underground for a short while, screeching around a curve then emerging into a cutting before the next station. Above the banks the sun was spearing light beneath the grey clouds drooping in the sky, glinting windows reflected the steel light down into the cutting.
Getting off at Paul-Verner-Strasse, I walked down the main road for a while before checking my map and turning off onto a service road lined by dusty Trabants and a few Ladas and Wartburgs. Reaching a door—one just like all the other doors in all the other concrete-slab flats—I pushed it open and entered the hallway. Ignoring both the ranks of letterboxes in the hall, and the dented steel door of the lift, I climbed the narrow stairs, feet clattering up the terrazzo steps.
On the first floor I knocked at a flat, a confident double tap, followed by two singles. The door was bright yellow, punctuated by a peep-hole in the dead centre, handle and modern lock on the side. A grey cardboard square was pasted next to the doorbell, the inked name faded to illegibility.
The door opened silently on well-oiled hinges, and a silhouette ushered me in. Evelyn. Through the frosted glass of the lobby door behind her I saw the suggestion of a second figure flitting past. But when I went through, the room beyond was empty. A closed door was next to the kitchen-niche in the corner. I went straight over to the smudged windows, checking the main road I had just left. An Ikarus bus started up, its dark orange paintwork shaded further by dirt, the bendy belly concertinaing as it pulled out of the bus-stop, shuddering across the concrete-roadway. Dark, heavy fumes lay in its wake over the grey surface. No-one was in sight, no-one had got off the bus, and the wide road was now empty of moving vehicles. Rain began to spot the glass.
Turning back to face Evelyn I could see she was in the kitchen, boiling water for tea. She hadn’t said anything, and I kept my peace, waiting until she was ready to talk. In the meantime I looked around the room. Sparsely but adequately furnished; the sofa deep, doubling up as a bed. The arm chairs matching the beige and brown of both sofa and thin carpet but clashing nastily with the mint-green diamond patterned wallpaper. Orange curtains, pulled back beside the windows, contributed to the impression that the place was furnished with left-overs, that no-one had ever lived here. Opposite the kitchen stood a wall-unit, no knick-knacks ornamenting the shelves, the cabinet doors ajar, showing equally empty insides.
Evelyn brought a couple of cups over to the low glass coffee-table, placing them next to a box of West German chocolates, then went back to the kitchen to fetch the tea-pot. She still hadn’t said a word, and this, rather than any nervous tic or twitch, any fidgety movement in Evelyn’s manner, told me just how uneasy she was feeling. Normally so ebullient, Evelyn wooed her conversational partners; a black widow of an operative, she graciously drew you into her scrupulously laid web. She seated herself in one of the armchairs, leaning back comfortably, crossing her legs.
“Are you OK?” I asked her as I sat down opposite her, on the sofa.
“How sweet! Yes, dear Martin, I’m fine.” She laughed, a tinkling, false laugh.
I poured out the tea, and leaned over the table to hand her a cup. She took it with a smile, and sat back again, carefully sipping her drink.
I didn’t ask whether she was ready, I didn’t ask why she’d asked—told—me to come here. The answers were obvious: yes, she was ready, she had the support of her ex-Stasi colleagues, and the less I knew about that, the more comfortable I would feel. And she’d asked me to come here to show me, once again, that she wasn’t dependent on me for anything, not even to sign the forms to get her out of jail.
But since I was here I decided to make use of my time.
“We didn’t get to talk about your mission yesterday.” I ignored the face she was pulling. “The Ministry requests that you gather evidence for the purpose of prosecuting individuals associated with groups using the premises Weitlingstrasse 122, with specific reference to any persons of cadre status.”
I paused to sip my tea, Evelyn’s face was pointed towards the kitchen, looking deliberately bored. She took out a packet of cigarettes—Russian, the same brand that Dmitri smoked—and carefully lit one. She offered me the pack, but I waved it away.
“Oh Martin, still trying to give up? You know it only makes you crotchety-”
“But my colleagues and I are particularly interested in background intelligence,” I spoke over her, determined to say my piece. Evelyn had stiffened, her eyes focussed on mine. I finally had her full attention. “We don’t just want to know whether and how materials are being smuggled into the GDR, we want intelligence on the groups’ background, their make-up, movements. We want patterning data, connections, interests and influences by and on other groups. And we want to know more about the geographic spread. If you can tell us who we need to be concentrating on, here in Berlin and throughout the Republic-”
“Martin! This is why you’re so dear to me—you’re always good for a surprise! I should have recruited you years ago, if only so that you could have learned the lingo,” she said archly. “But I understand, I know what you’re talking about.”
She leaned forward, smoke leaking from her mouth as she spoke, a low whisper: “But tell me, darling, why should I give you this information. Do you think you’re the only game in town?”
“Your network?” I found that
I too was speaking in a low voice, not whispering; whispers carry too easily, a murmur, letting the words get lost in the carpet and the curtains.
Evelyn glanced at the closed door, then brought her cup up to her lips, buying time to think.
“And you have the files for me? The police reports?”
I drew the summary reports, the ones I had taken home with me last night, out of my briefcase, laying them on the coffee table.
“Thank you, Martin.” Evelyn put her cup down, and pushed the box of chocolates over to me. “Here, would you call that a fair swap? Some friends gave them to me, a get-out-of-jail present. But you know what? I just don’t have any appetite right now. You take them.”
She mashed her cigarette into the glass ashtray and picked up the files. She spread them out on the table, checking the reference numbers.
“Nothing from October 1987 then?” She didn’t even pause to see what effect her question would have on me. “Might be wise to let that one drop. Some bigwig in the scene doesn’t want that particular can of worms being opened up.”
With that she picked up the files and stood up. She reached the door next to the kitchen niche and turned, looking me in the eyes, a gaze somewhere between disappointment and apology.
“My network, as you call it, will be watching out for me, they’ll be in contact with me, providing me with backup. I shall owe my safety, my life to them. What can you offer? What do you have to bargain with?”
The door had opened, as if by itself, but a figure was standing there, dark blue suit, white shirt, no tie. It wasn’t so much the suit that I noticed, nor even the man himself, but the way he stood. Knees slightly bent, feet barely in contact with the floor. Shoulders wide, curved forward, his arms slightly bent at the elbows, hands half closed, held just below his stomach.
Thoughts Are Free Page 14
