by Richard Wake
“Did anybody ever threaten you? Rough you up? Warn you off a certain street or area?”
“That's the thing — no,” he said. “We even had these two guys who I thought were kind of looking out for us — not overtly, but just, well, they knew who we were, and they gave us our space. I wasn't there every day, but when I was — like I said, they just gave me my space.”
I asked him if one of the two looked like a dick with ears, and if the other one had the thickest, most luxurious head of coal-black hair that he had ever seen, and Braun nodded enthusiastically and said, “How did you know?”
I wasn't going to tell him, not that I had the chance. Because that's when the door opened.
36
Before all of that unbelievable day had happened — before the trip to the apartment in Friedrichshain, and the discovery of the second body, and the visits to Normannenstrasse and Hohenschonhausen — I had made a date with Elke. It wasn't exactly a date, just a chance for a conversation. And if the timing was bad, it was also good, mostly because the last thing I wanted to do was go back to Keibelstraße and have to witness Kleinschmidt in full flower, waving his arms and crapping all over me to whoever he could find, starting with Greiner and working his way on down. I was fairly confident that if someone with a push broom happened out of the stairwell, he would get 15 minutes from Kleinschmidt, in full throat, about what an idiot that Peter Ritter was.
As far as the murder investigation was concerned, it was obvious what I needed to do — look deeper into the black market. Just how I was going to do it was another matter entirely because I really wanted to do it on my own. I could go into Greiner and tell him everything, but all that would accomplish would be the handing over to Kleinschmidt of all of the information and sending me back to my little office, if not even farther away. I was surprised at how much I wanted it. I wanted to solve it, I wanted the credit for solving it, and I wasn't sure which one I wanted more. I also wasn't sure if it mattered. But Greiner had already cut me adrift, and that was fine. And if I kept my distance, I wasn’t sure it mattered how much Kleinschmidt waved his arms. This was going to be mine, alone.
But I also needed to talk to Elke. The thing in the Konsum had ended so badly, and I still wasn't sure why, and I wanted to understand. I didn't love her — it wasn't that — but I did value her opinion, for some reason. And if it was going to end, that was fine. I just didn't want her to walk away, thinking I was a shithead.
She was home when I rang the bell. Her sister-in-law and one of the kids — the younger one, Greta — were reading a book in the living room. The older Greta was nowhere to be seen. There was no embrace, no peck on the cheek, nothing when Elke answered the door. She just grabbed a sweater and said, “Let's walk.”
As it turned out, we weren't five minutes from Schonhausen Palace, where my father-in-law worked. It was surrounded by parkland, and by a cement wall that kept the citizens from enjoying the green space. And then I saw the sign — Majakowskiring — and the puzzle finally fit together, the puzzle that for me had been Pankow. That was the other entrance to the privileged ring where Kitty lived. Her house was maybe 10 minutes away, but I had always approached it from the opposite direction. I had never come out the other way. I had never known the schloss — and Elke's apartment — were all so close together.
“Wow,” I said. “Funny thing.” And then, to make conversation — the tension between Elke and me was real, even if I didn't understand it — I explained my limitations with the geography of the neighborhood. And, well, let's just say she didn't think it was as funny as I did.
We ended up sitting along the wall, leaning against the cement.
“I like to do this sometimes,” she said. She patted the wall. “I like to remind myself of the barriers they build in this country — barriers to freedom, to beauty, to the only damn parklands in the area.”
I felt like reminding her that I had nothing to do with building the cement wall — that if it were up to me, we would be frolicking in a meadow somewhere. But I didn't know what to say and chose silence.
“You know, this wall wasn't always here,” Elke said. “During the war, right after the war, you could play all you wanted.”
She stopped.
“My mother said she could see us playing from the bedroom window, but I never believed her.”
She stopped again.
“I was eight,” Elke said. “The Russians came in. There was some fighting, but nothing like some neighborhoods. All of our buildings — really for a couple of blocks around, which was about the size of my world back then — were untouched. So it was just soldiers.
“One day, there was banging on the door. We were all home — me, my brother, my mother. Two Russian soldiers came in. They really didn't say anything, at least not that I remembered. I've thought back on it a million times, but I don't really remember any words. It was just like it was understood. My mother went into the bedroom, and one of the soldiers followed her, and they closed the door, and the other soldier played with us in the living room. I had a set of jacks and a little rubber ball — it was like my prized possession — and the soldier played with us. After a few minutes, the bedroom door opened and the one soldier came out and the other one went in. And the second soldier — he was carrying his helmet — he gave it to Werner, and Werner put it on his head and marched around the room. Then he let me try it on, and I marched around the room. And then the other soldier came out, and they left. And the only other thing I remember is that my mother didn't make us dinner that night. Me and Werner, we just ate bread.”
We were sitting next to each other. I reached out for Elke's hand. She pulled it away, and not slowly.
“To this day, my mother sleeps in that same room. The same bed. Different sheets, but that's it. I think even the pillows might be the same. Same room, same bed, every night. Husband dead for about 20 years, apartment too full for living, and there's my mother. Same room, same bed, every night. She gets up and gets excited like a schoolgirl when she hears a rumor of oranges in the stores, and she waits for hours, and she rationalizes the disappointment if there are no oranges when it is her turn, or if they are under the counter. You know, just out of reach for an old woman. And she rationalizes it. She says, 'Ah, next time.'“
When she started the story, she was sad. By the end, her eyes were just so indescribably intense.
“Well, I can't do that,” Elke said. “I can't live that life. I just can't. And I'm not mad at you — I'm really not. But you are a part of this, all of this. And… and… and I just can't.”
She left me sitting against the cement wall.
37
Back at my apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, I hadn’t made it to the front door when old Mrs. Meisner began yelling my name. She trailed me up the steps, her short little legs bouncing like short little pistons in a tired old engine. It was a lot of work for her, and she was out of breath. In her right hand was an envelope. There was nothing written on the outside.
“From who?” I said.
“Big black car. Big black trench coat.”
“Thank you, I think.”
She nodded and turned, the short little pistons now working the easier half of her journey. The old girl wasn’t much for conversation, which was fine with me most days, and especially that day.
The note inside the envelope said, “Wandlitz, 6 p.m.” And below it was a set of driving directions. It would be easy enough for me to find, about 20 miles north, maybe 25 — so that wasn’t the issue. For me, a long day was just going to get longer, but that wasn’t it, either. What bugged me was, well, why did Karl Grimm want to see me at his house?
I was going to need maybe 45 minutes, but I gave myself an hour to be sure. Traffic was fine as I made my way out of Prenzlauer Berg, and it was pretty much non-existent after Pankow. The city gave way to the country pretty quickly. Twenty miles isn’t far but, maybe halfway there, it did seem like a different place entirely.
Kleinschmidt had once ribbe
d me, back when Kitty and I were still married, about Wandlitz. He asked, specifically, “So how does Ulbricht take his coffee?” Whoever was standing around and listening to him laughed enough that Ulbricht jokes became Kleinschmidt’s staple for a little while. He clearly wasn’t worried about a Stasi informant on the murder squad.
So it became, “How does Ulbricht like his steaks cooked?” And, “Does Ulbricht’s swimsuit favor his figure?” And, “Do you call him Walter now? Or… Wally?” The Wally line got enough of a laugh that, for weeks afterward, everybody in the squad called me Wally when they needed something. Only Greiner held out.
Anyway, between all of the jokes, it was Kleinschmidt who told the history of Wandlitz. How he knew, I had no idea — the man just knew things. He said that after the workers’ riots in 1953, and after whatever did or didn’t happen in Hungary in 1956, the big shits, as he called them, became a little concerned that their precious neighborhood along Majakowskiring was just a little too close to the citizenry for comfort. So they built Wandlitz, a new idyll for the biggest names on the Central Committee — far enough removed from the people to be safe but close enough to Mitte to be there in a half hour if they broke all of the speed limits. Anyway, it was finished in 1960. That’s when Karl Grimm moved, and Kitty and the asshole Norbert took his old house.
As I approached the property — at least, I thought I was approaching the property, based on the directions in the note — signs sprang up from the roadside. Every few hundred feet, a variation on a theme was presented in bold letters, black and red for the occasional emphasis on a plain white background: “ATTENTION. APPROACHING RESTRICTED AREA.”
The last bit of road was, likely in its previous incarnation, just a dirt track through the forest. By the summer of 1961, though, you could see where the trees on either side had been bulldozed to widen the path into something much more substantial. It was wide enough for two tanks to drive side by side, just for a hypothetical that might not have been so hypothetical at all. As for the paving job, I doubted the runways at Tegel were any smoother.
Suddenly, I came upon a guard shack and a gate. We were still in the forest, but I could see a fence, maybe four feet tall, that went in and out of the trees. There were a couple of signs at intervals along the fence: WILDLIFE RESEARCH AREA.
I pulled up and gave my name to the guard — I think he was wearing a Stasi uniform. He checked a clipboard and told me, “You’re expected in the F-Club at 6 p.m. Drive to the next gate.” About three minutes later, I was at another guard house, this one with a taller green wall. There were no signs about wildlife. The Stasi kid checked his clipboard and handed me a cardboard pass that, he warned me, “must be in your possession at all times.” Then he proceeded to offer me directions to something called the Functionaries’ Clubhouse, which didn’t seem too complicated.
“The F-Club,” the Stasi kid said. “It’s big — you can’t miss it. You’re to be in the restaurant part of the building.”
Seeing as how I was a few minutes early, though, I chose to get lost on purpose so as to take a little tour of Big Shit City — Kleinschmidt called it that, too. It was, to be honest, a little bit of a disappointment. The houses were arranged on quiet little streets, and they were fine — certainly nicer than 99 percent of the houses in the country. But I liked Majakowskiring better. It had character. The houses there were older and quirkier. It was a real neighborhood. And so was this, I guess — there were two kids kicking a football in front of one house, and two girls jumping rope in the driveway of another. It just lacked, like I said, character. There was more property around the houses in Wandlitz, though not a lot more, and I had no doubt that the woods were teeming with protective Stasi rifles, and I guess that was the purpose. I mean, I knew that was the purpose.
Driving around for five minutes, I was ready to put on my pathetic lost loser face if a guard of some kind stopped me — but I didn’t end up needing it. I saw plenty of gardeners, and people delivering things, and like that, but I didn’t see any more security. Then again, I probably hadn’t managed to venture onto Ulbricht’s street. I had to think that Wally had some extra security around his place.
From what I could see, there were no street names. The houses all had numbers on the side, and that was it. The highest number I saw was 21 and, all in all, it probably wasn’t 25 houses all together — certainly not 30. This was not a place for all of the Central Committee, only the biggest of the big — like my former father-in-law.
I got myself turned around properly and was parked in front of the F-Club at 5:55. As I got out of the car, a man, a woman, and a teenaged girl walked into the building ahead of me. It wasn’t Ulbricht, but I was pretty sure it was Honecker. Even I kind of chuckled at the thought of Kleinschmidt asking me if I called him Erich. Or maybe Ricky.
38
The F-Club was a big place, kind of a one-stop shopping-entertainment venue for the Central Committee. It looked like, in addition to the restaurant, there was a store of some kind to the far left, and a movie theater to the right, and what looked like a passageway to more things out back. I took 30 seconds and followed the passageway, and I was right. There was a swimming pool back there, and beyond that were tennis courts and playing fields of some nondescript sort. The pool was big, and there were changing cabanas and what looked like a bar off to one side. The pool itself was surrounded by lounge chairs and what appeared to be fake palm trees. I mean, they couldn’t have been real — could they?
Walking back toward the restaurant, I watched the Honeckers from a distance. They were in the midst of a scene playing out that we had all witnessed a hundred times on the streets of Berlin: the girl putting on a sweet face, and snuggling a little closer to the old man, and folding her hands as if praying, and the father putting on his helpless-father face and reaching into his pocket to give her some money. Except the father was Honecker, and the money he gave her was paper and not a couple of coins, and the shop that the girl skipped away to visit was likely not the kind of establishment where they kept the tomatoes hidden in a drawer underneath the sales counter.
There was a place to check-in at the restaurant, and the man in charge walked me halfway across the room to a small table. Grimm was already there.
“At least you’re on time,” he said.
“When have I not been?”
“Small victories.”
“I’ll leave if you want.”
“Sit,” Grimm said. And I did.
Looking around, I eyed the food more than the people. A waiter walked by with a salad that contained two kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, and what looked like strips of red and green peppers. At the table to our right, a communal fruit bowl had been brought out for dessert — strawberries, blueberries, orange sections, and whole bananas along the rim.
“Stop gawking,” Grimm said. He had been watching me.
“But the bananas—”
“Stop,” he said. “We don’t gawk.”
“Okay, but is that…” I signaled to our left with a flick of my eyes.
“Yes, it is.”
The girl had joined her parents at the table, which was three tables from ours. She had purchased a pink scarf that she was showing her mother. Honecker had pulled out his reading glasses and was looking at a menu, entirely uninterested in what his money had just been spent on.
A waiter came by.
“Just coffee,” Grimm said.
“And a fruit bowl,” I said.
The waiter looked at Grimm.
“Just two coffees,” he said.
For what it was worth, the Central Committee coffee was just… coffee. Nothing special. Nothing different. And after I had taken a second sip, my all-business ex-father-in-law got down to it.
“You have the information? Yes?”
“Yes,” I said, beginning the story. I started to stretch it out a little bit and then figured, why bother? After the business with the fruit bowl, I figured that even if I could make it a three-hour tale, I still wasn’t
going to get a meal out of my visit. So I went pretty quickly through the facts: my second night of following the quite bald Martin Strassmann, the visit to the same place in Friedrichshain, the assignation in the car, the return of Strassman’s friend to the bar, or whatever it was, me following him to his apartment building, and then me obtaining his name from the house book just that morning.
“Name and address?”
I said them.
“Now say again.”
I repeated them.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” Grimm said. And with that, he leaned over to the chair next to his, reached into a briefcase, and pulled out a file folder that he opened on the table in front of him.
I looked at that, and then I looked over at the half-empty fruit bowl, and then I looked over at Mrs. Honecker trying on the daughter’s new scarf and appearing to beg her husband for his opinion. Although I couldn’t hear him from that distance, my buddy Erich appeared to reply with an unsmiling grunt.
Then I looked back at Grimm, who was staring at me.
“You’re dismissed,” he said.
I stared back, determined not to break eye contact. My determination might have lasted five seconds.
“That’s it?” I said. “I drove 20 miles for that? No questions? No new instructions? Just a name and an address? I mean, couldn’t we have done this on the phone?”
At which point, Karl Grimm looked at me as if he had never seen a stupider person in his life.
“The phone?” he said. “You’re joking, right? What are you, mad? The phone? Jesus.”
And then I really was dismissed. On the way out, my exit time was noted on the first Stasi clipboard, and then the second Stasi clipboard, and my pass was collected and filed in a drawer as I watched through my car window. Going through the gate, I looked to the left and right. I saw neither wildlife nor research. I did see someone wearing fatigues and carrying a rifle, though.
