The Wind and the Rain

by Martin O'Brien

  The drizzle of the last few days has receded and the sun is blazing down on the big junction where our hotel is situated. Huge signs advertising Mercedes-Benz, Graetz Radio and the Kranzler Cafe shimmer as they hug facades in the sunshine. People are milling about and in homage to the weather the local men are eschewing coats and young women are wearing miniskirts and summer dresses. The weekend traffic is bustling and the pavement cafes appear to be doing a fine trade.

  Since I left Ljubljana, I have seen places that I realistically never expected to clap eyes on at my age. The canals of Venice, the lakes of Savoy, the grand buildings of Munich. In some ways I am very lucky but in other ways I wonder if this is a life I should be leading. I feel like an otherworldly presence. A girl on the periphery of living in these places but outside of it as though I’m looking at postcards.

  Hearing about Nuri and her travails has upset me tremendously. I can’t shake off the feeling that I’m masquerading as a...what? I don’t even know how to describe what I do. Following obese old men around German cities and then organising car crashes with innocent postmen. Is this what my parents wanted for me?

  Guilt builds inside of me but I have to push it away. I am not the one who should feel guilty. Gunari is right; describing traumatic events paints only a veneer of reality. It’s when you take the time to process what drives a man to order the rape of a teenage girl based purely on her ethnicity that you understand the enormity of the power a single person can indiscriminately wield.

  I can see why Gunari holds his faith so dear. One man may hold immense power but in comparison to God it is nothing. Gunari believes he is on a mission from God which provides him with his strength. But, what of Janko? I don’t think I have ever heard him speak of God during my time with the two men.

  He has a sense of right and wrong as rigid as Gunari. Could it be that humans have an underlying moral code that doesn’t require a belief in a deity? If so, what causes some people to break that code?

  I don’t have the answers and I am hungry so I make an executive decision to have a shower and meet the guys for some breakfast. It is refreshing to take my clothes off since I have been wearing them for over twenty-four hours.

  The shower blasts out water which feels divine splashing against my body. I steadily raise the temperature to a level which almost burns my face off. A quick dry off and I throw on faded black jeans and a black t shirt. I skip down the stairs three at a time and enter the quiet hotel restaurant. Photos of bustling Berlin before the Second World War line the far wall.

  I’m too late for breakfast, Gunari tells me, which I can only answer with a long, low wail. They are both sipping coffees and they seem to be under the mistaken impression that my lack of breakfast is amusing. I pour a coffee and hope it will stave off my impending death from starvation.

  “What’s the plan for today?” I ask, the coffee is actually very tasty which makes a change from my experience of Germany. The Germans could benefit from hiring some Italian baristi to help them with their coffee issues.

  “Today, Schatzi,” Janko replies, “We will investigate our link that you helped us discover. I will be doing some research on Michael Schwarzer. His name hasn’t rung any bells for me, nor for Gunari,” Janko looks towards Gunari who continues:

  “We have an address so we should be able to obtain some rudimentary basics but it may take a while to discover who he is. I will be organising what we need once we know who we are dealing with,”

  “What do you need me to do?” I ask.

  “We need you to visit his address and find out about his place,” Janko says, “Tie your hair up like the Berliner girls and buy some sunglasses. You can get as close to his door as possible. It’s not the end of the world if he sees you, I’m sure you can think of an excuse if he does.” Janko hands me a stack of Deutschmarks with a wink.

  “OK, no problem,” I say.

  “Maybe buy yourself some food on the way if you’re hungry too,” Janko says and both men laugh. I simply shake my head at these two daft men, “Will you be alright travelling around the city on your own?”

  “Of course I will. I’m more concerned about you two clowns getting lost on the U-Bahn,” They chuckle again and I make my excuses and leave the hotel.

  Outside, it is even warmer than I expected. Summer has arrived, make no mistake. The smell of hot German sausage hits me straight away and I see not five metres away a girl selling bratwurst in bread. In all my life, I have never wanted to eat a sausage so much. I hand over 4 marks and within two minutes I devour the bratwurst. It’s not as good as the čevapčiči I would occasionally gobble down back home but it is certainly filled a hole.

  I contemplate buying another sausage as I wander across the road to the Kurfürstendamm U-Bahn station. I catch sight in the distance of a tall, ruined church at the end of the road. The roof has been blown apart, presumably in the war. It reminds me of something from Krull which my parents took me to see at the cinema for my sixteenth birthday. I’m hoping the Beast and his slayers don’t start coming out of the entrance and hunting me down. That would ruin a lovely day.

  I spot a newspaper kiosk outside the U-Bahn station and buy a city map which includes the transport system in this divided city. I open the map and notice that some of the stations pass through East Berlin. I ask the shopkeeper if I can travel through these stops but he tells me they are Geisterbahnhöfe, or ghost stations. Unless I misheard him completely with my rudimentary German.

  It takes about half an hour and two transfers to end up at Moritzplatz station. The dirty yellow trains are quiet at this hour on a Saturday morning. I see the sign for Moritzplatz and I am one of a handful of people still on the train. Due to the Berlin Wall, the line ends here.

  Schwarzer lives a block away from Moritzplatz itself, a diamond shaped plaza beyond nondescriptness. Faded grass in the centre of the roundabout surrounded by scrubland and fenced-off construction sites with no actual construction taking place. His apartment is on Sebastianstraße which if my map reading skills are up to scratch should be a couple of streets away off Prinzenstraße.

  There is a lack of people around, I check my Casio watch which informs me it is eleven in the morning. It’s a Saturday so people won’t be at school or work. Everyone must be having a sleep in. I head along Prinzenstraße and almost immediately I am confronted in the distance with the Berlin Wall. A thrill rushes through me at seeing the Wall. One of those things that we were taught about at school and here it is in front of me. The visual representation of the barrier between East and West.

  The schools in Ljubljana were not very ideological and the teachers struggled to provide coherent answers as to why it had been built. I could sense the dryness as the teachers stated that the wall was there to protect the East Germans from Western aggression. It seemed pretty clear even as a schoolgirl, that it was there to prevent East Germans leaving.

  It sounds strange but as I approach the wall it doesn’t seem as big as I was expecting. I assumed it would be twenty metres high blocking out the sunlight but it is barely three or four metres tall. There is a checkpoint too but I can’t see any guards. Presumably the West German guards aren’t fighting off folk from trying to enter the DDR.

  I walk towards the wall and realise the buildings on Sebastianstraße actually face the wall. I am searching for number eighty-seven so I turn right before I head through the checkpoint and accidentally end up in East Germany. I locate number eighty-seven which is a corner building and was probably quite a grand apartment building before the wall was constructed literally five metres away. That must have put a real dampener on the value of the building.

  The graffiti-covered wall curves away from the building down the bisecting road, which according to the sign next to me is called Luckauer Straße. I contemplate taking a Polaroid of the building but decide against it; instead I amble casually over to the main door. I examine the names on the intercom and I spot “8 - Schwarzer, M.A.”. Found you, Mr Schwarzer!

 
I ponder waiting around to see if anyone leaves but the streets remain deserted barring the odd Berliner Pilsner truck passing by. Janko told me about how sometimes the best place to hide is in a crowd, telling me that people sometimes struggle to see the forest for the trees.

  The thought struck me that if I do gain access to the building I am going to stand out a mile. A tanned, dark haired foreign girl walking around a quiet, rundown Berlin suburb. I decide to head back to the hotel so I walk back towards the checkpoint taking out my camera to photograph parts of the wall so anyone who does see me will think I’m a curious tourist and not a mad, Gypsy avenger.

  As I set off down the street, a blond-haired man of around forty or fifty years old is walking the opposite way. As we pass each other he glares at me so I hold his gaze. I need to break this habit of out-staring people. We nearly end up turning round as both of us are determined to maintain the stare-off. Finally I stop performing my convincing owl impression, breaking the gaze and carry on walking down the street. At the end of the road, I turn around and see the blond-haired man entering number eighty-seven. He doesn’t look around but walks straight in. What a strange man. There is a distinct possibility that I have been engaged in eyeball activities with Schwarzer.

  I consult my map again and work out it is about six or seven kilometres back to the hotel so I decide to walk it. Summer is almost here and the feel of the warm sun on my skin is tremendous. I arrive back at the Moritzplatz roundabout, check my map which advises that if I follow Oranienstraße it should take me to Checkpoint Charlie, the famous border crossing.

  Oranienstraße is yet another unremarkable tree-lined road which helps me gather my thoughts. I wonder what Janko and Gunari’s plan will involve as we still don’t know what the relevance of the codes are. Janko believes they are daily codes but at this point we don’t know if Tremmick calls up Schwarzer or the other way around. Or there could be another middleman that they both liaise with.

  It takes about a quarter of an hour to reach the checkpoint and in all honesty it’s not radically different to the Prinzenstraße checkpoint. How different was I expecting it to be? At the end of the day it’s a checkpoint. It’s unlikely hordes of East Berliners will be trying to pass through on a weekend lunchtime.

  In the foreground I see the ‘You are now leaving the American Sector’ sign and behind that the ‘ALLIED CHECKPOINT’ sign with the American, French and British flags that I have seen on television before. In the background is a large white watchtower. I can see the East German guards walking around holding firearms.

  It is a reminder of the power of borders. If one girl tries crossing that border without consent that guard up there will be obliged to shoot her. It is quite scary to contemplate the authority over life and death that a young lad in a watchtower holds. How would a twenty-three year old man deal with returning to his wife and young daughter knowing he had to shoot a desperate person in the head simply for trying to move from one part of their city to another? Do the people who give these orders feel anything for the poor kids who have to carry them out?

  For the remainder of my journey back to the hotel I struggle to remove these thoughts from my brain. The arbitrary nature of holding a human life in your hands. I’m not naive and I know that is why we are here. To find Albert Tremmick and kill him. I keep walking and push the thought that I may need to murder this man out of my head.

  It’s now eight in the evening and it is still very warm outside but Gunari takes us inside a French bistro on Kurfürstendammm, or Ku’damm as I am hearing locals and Janko call it. Luckily it is air-conditioned inside but the interior is a bit grimy and dim for my tastes. Janko orders a bottle of wine from the menu while Gunari and I investigate the menu.

  “So, Ana. How was your day out?” Janko asks after the waiter has handed over the wine and provided us with three glasses.

  “His house has a view of the Wall ten metres away. He is flat number eight, which looking at the numbers is on the top floor. It’s a very quiet neighbourhood.”

  “What about police?” Janko asks, looking out of the window thoughtfully, “Or even border troops,”

  “There is a checkpoint a couple of minutes away, I didn’t see any guards but I’m guessing they are there very close by,”

  “This probably rules out a snatch, eh Gunari?” Janko says.

  “Yes, I would agree,” Gunari replies. Both men look dreamily in concentration. I can almost see the cogs turning inside their brains.

  “So, who is he?” I ask, breaking the reverie.

  “Not who we were expecting Ana, that’s for sure, “ Janko says, “We thought he may be military of some description or at least an explicit link with the armed forces. But it wasn’t the case,”

  “No?” I can tell Janko is enjoying this moment of disclosure as he always does, the big drama queen.

  “No, firstly we checked the land registry as we thought it may be social housing considering its location. It turns out that the apartment is owned by a private medical company called Internationale Medizinische Forschungsgruppe, or IMFG. A very vague title meaning International Medical Research Group.

  “They are a Swiss company. Probably because of that I barely managed to find any filings about them. They have a German subsidiary which lists Michael Schwarzer as the Chief Executive and Paul Beckermann as secretary. Again, I couldn’t find anything that actually describes what they do. The only thing I noted was a linked director with a farm machinery company called Karl Mengele & Sons - the man’s name is Horst Beckermann”

  “Paul’s elusive brother,” I say.

  “Indeed, but it also turns out that the house on Sebastianstraße is not Schwarzer’s registered address.”

  “Oh, no?” I say, once again wilfully bearing Janko’s dramatic pauses.

  “Oh, no indeed, he lives with his wife in a lovely apartment overlooking a park not too far from here in Schöneberg. Three children too, from a previous wife but they don’t live in West Germany, they are in America.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I had a chat with the man who runs the bakery below his apartment, very talkative man. I told him I was an old friend visiting from Hamburg. He said Schwarzer went through a very messy divorce due to him having an affair with his secretary. Who he then married as he is such an honourable man.”

  “He sounds very charming,” I say.

  “The problem is we don’t know the connection between them all. Did Beckermann know Tremmick during the war. Or maybe in Argentina?” Gunari says.

  “What about the codes, what do you believe they are for?”

  “There was only one envelope from Beckermann, so he wasn’t posting anything to Tremmick. I would hazard a guess that he also receives a letter from Tremmick too each month. Again, I would guess that Beckermann will call up each day and state the word that matches the code.”

  “That does seem likely,” I say, “So what is our plan?”

  “Tremmick is probably aware that people will be on his tail,” Janko says, “I think we should pay the apartment a visit tomorrow and hopefully meet this Michael Schwarzer,”

  Graduation Day

  Sunday, 4 May 1986

  It’s another bright day in Berlin, the sun is bouncing off the Ku’damm pavements outside the hotel. Yesterday’s sausage seller is nowhere to be seen but it doesn’t matter, I can’t eat today. Nervous energy is beginning to build. It’s not only me either. I can see Gunari is anxious too, he couldn’t keep still in the hotel and now we are outside on the street he is pacing around.

  Janko is the only one of us keeping his cool. Or at least the pretence of cool. Both men know that they can’t afford to mess this up or Tremmick may evade justice forever. The news of the artwork discovery at Christmas means he will already be on his guard.

  Gunari has a big rucksack, I daren’t ask what is inside there. Janko carries a briefcase while I only have my polaroid camera slung around my neck.

  “Are we ready?” Janko asks us
both. Neither of us speak but simply nod, “Let’s go then, lead the way Ana,”

  I retrace yesterday’s trip, taking us on the U-bahn to Moritzplatz. Despite it being the underground train, most of the journey is on raised rails above the roads. West Berlin passes in a blur of tidy apartment blocks and new-build offices.

  By the time we reach Moritzplatz, the sun has almost disappeared. The sky is the colour of dirty dishwater and a soft drizzle almost imperceptibly lands on my arms. It is still disagreeably warm and very muggy now. It is nearly eleven o’clock when we reach Eighty-Seven Sebastianstraße. The men check the door and within seconds Gunari has managed to open it.

  We head up the stairs towards the top floor and I seem to be the only one making noises on the steps. Gunari prowls, his feet as soft as a tiger on the hunt. Janko also makes little noise, probably due to his Parisian loafers. We reach the top floor. I eyeball the door on the left - Flat Seven. According to the information outside this is where Frau Zaimoğlu lives, I hope she is a deaf old Turkish lady who minds her own business.

  To our right is the door to Flat Eight. I point to it and both men nod their assent. They both stand with their backs to the wall next to the door.

  I creep to the door and I still haven’t finalised what story I intend to use. I knock hard three times. I hear a noise and a lock turn, my stomach drops to my feet. The door opens and a handsome blond man of about fifty fills the frame. It is the same man I had the staring contest with yesterday which unsettles me.

  “Yes?” he says. His voice is gruff. It’s pretty much how I sound when I wake up.

  “Hello, good morning,” I say, my voice faltering. Initially, my plan was to stutter a bit however I aren’t putting this on.

  “What do you want?” he says, in a direct but not aggressive manner.

  “I was looking for Mrs Zaimoğlu’s house, I’m her niece,” his face turns from cautiously polite to disgust now he thinks that I’m Turkish.