by Henry Porter
After two hours, with first light beginning to show in the east, the plane circled three times then landed on a runway at a military base somewhere in the south of the GDR. They taxied past the humps of fortified aircraft hangars where men in overalls could be seen moving about beneath naked lights.
Two Ladas and a military truck awaited them, but only Biermeier and three officers got off the plane with Rosenharte. Then the Antonov, emitting a good deal of black exhaust from its starboard engine, turned and prepared to take off again, he assumed for Berlin-Schönefeld, where Annalise’s material would be examined.
Now back on German soil, the Stasi had become a degree more officious and, as they walked to the cars, the largest of the men took hold of his upper arm. Rosenharte shook himself free and spun round. ‘Understand this: I am not your prisoner!’ Biermeier nodded to the man, who dropped back a couple of paces, but Rosenharte knew that this didn’t bode well. In their eyes he was more suspect than helper.
He had to reverse that.
They set off through what he knew must be a restricted zone. On several occasions the empty road swung by large compounds of apartment blocks and stores that had been flung down in the great beech forests to accommodate the Russian military, massive buildings quite out of character with their surroundings. About forty-five minutes on, as the road began to climb, they reached a gateway and two men appeared from a hut behind some bushes. After checking their credentials and scanning the faces in the cars, they opened the gates. A long drive led to a clearing in the woods where there were four well-tended, single-storey summerhouses, all with verandas. The model for these was the Russian dacha, though there was a defended, sinister air about them. All the windows and doors were fitted with grilles. Despite the rustic setting, the place had somehow been impregnated with the Stasi’s dismal paranoia.
He was led to the furthest house and down some steps to a basement, which was so soundly built that it might have served as a bomb shelter. He was shown to a large room with a bed, table, chairs and a glass bowl in which there rested a solitary apple. The light came in through four horizontal windows along the ceiling. ‘You will remain here until they call for you,’ said Biermeier. ‘Everything you need is here and food will be brought to you.’
‘I have commitments in Dresden tomorrow,’ Rosenharte said.
Biermeier regarded him as though he were a child. ‘The only commitments you have are to the state, Herr Doktor.’
For three days Rosenharte saw no one apart from the men who brought his meals and escorted him for a daily turn in the grounds. When he asked for something to read, he was given two old copies of Neues Deutschland and Wochenpost, and a translation of stories by Jack London. It took all his self-discipline to avoid worrying. He told himself that he was being held while Annalise’s material was assessed and they decided whether to proceed further. But he also understood they would be checking on every detail concerning Annalise’s position at Nato, her life in Canada and her present circumstances in Brussels. He could be expected to know little of this, but they would look for inconsistencies between what they’d discovered and his account. He went over and over everything that Harland and the American had told him, praying at the same time that they had given Annalise’s new life convincing depth. A single error, the slightest hint of incongruity or a sense that Annalise’s existence was just too two-dimensional to be real, and he would be done for.
The glimpse of life in the West - the first since he’d left Brussels - had sharpened his outrage at the way the Stasi had incarcerated him but also his fear of what they could do with him and Konrad. The brilliance of the Italian day accentuated the German night. He wished Harland and his American friend could have one day of his experience, sweating in a noiseless white cell, schooling himself in answers to an interrogation that he could only hope to predict, knowing that if things went wrong, he would be destroyed. Westerners would never understand the reality of the Stasi’s power and their dogged, almost surreal pursuit of the ordinary man.
By the morning of the third day - Thursday 14 September he noted - he was ready to start kicking up a fuss in the belief that too much compliance indicated some kind of guilt. When the man brought him breakfast, he demanded to see someone in authority and told him that this was a shameful way to treat a person who was seeking only to serve his country. He returned a couple of hours later, picked up the tray and silently indicated that Rosenharte should follow him.
It was no more than a hundred yards to the first house, and the moment after Rosenharte reached the top of the steps from the basement and took in the day, he saw a figure on the veranda, lounging in wading boots that had been rolled down to his shins. The face was hidden in shadow, but he knew it belonged to Schwarzmeer.
‘How do you like our little retreat, Dr Rosenharte?’ he called out as Rosenharte approached. ‘A lover’s paradise, no? It’s a tragedy that Miss Schering could not be here with you. There are some splendid walks through the forests.’
He reached the veranda and looked up. ‘Why are you holding me prisoner, General?’
‘You know the drill, we have to make certain checks. I could not allow you to wander around Dresden with all that knowledge.’
‘I don’t have any knowledge. I took delivery of a package, that’s all. I don’t know what it contains.’ He noticed two of the bodyguard detail lurking in the house. Biermeier was nowhere to be seen.
‘But you know who gave it to you and where she works and what she does. That is knowledge of a very interesting kind to the spies that seek to destroy our country.’ He pushed himself out of the wicker chair and gazed down a path cut through the beeches to a lake. ‘Perfect conditions for angling,’ he said with a sigh, then rubbed his hip. ‘It’s good for the soul to spend time out here, eh? In nature, among the trees with nothing but the fish to try your patience.’ Rosenharte recalled that Schwarzmeer fondly viewed himself as a countryman who wanted only a good hearth, a plate of meat and a stein or two; a hayseed who was ill-at-ease in the big city and mistrusted its ways. It was all fantasy. He was the son of a clerk and a milliner. For generations the Schwarzmeers had died with Berlin’s soot in their lungs.
He had changed little since the seventies, when Rosenharte had twice encountered the then Stasi Lieutenant Colonel before leaving for Brussels. He had the same equable presence: the lips slightly parted ready to laugh; the eyes that smiled with comprehension; and the ingratiating manner which was all the more nauseating for his insistence that he was the sort of man who could only speak his mind. This, he insisted, was the reason that he would never rise higher in the Ministerium. But he had, having been promoted to the top post in the HVA on the retirement of the great spymaster Dieter Fuchs three years before.
He had put on weight around his middle; his neck had thickened and his cheeks had filled, making his eyes more hooded at the corners. Yet his face was essentially unchanged: he had the same waxy pallor, well-shaped nose and full, almost sensuous lips. Back in the seventies, someone had told him that he looked like a Roman Caesar, which evidently pleased Schwarzmeer because he constantly drew attention to the similarity, with archly self-deprecating remarks about his weight in middle age. On drawing near, Rosenharte had immediately noticed the General’s most distinctive feature - the forehead that bulged above his eyebrows. It reminded him of Schwarzmeer’s prodigious powers of calculation.
‘You made love to the English woman, Doktor?’ he said, stamping his right foot on the wooden decking, apparently to stop his hip from hurting.
‘Is that any of your business?’
‘Everything is my business. That is my motto. Everything is Schwarzmeer’s business. Did you make love to her? Did she taste the fire of your passion?’
Rosenharte shrugged and looked away.
‘And yet she let you go so easily enough the first time. Your performance cannot have been so good then.’ Schwarzmeer chuckled to himself.
‘I cannot say.’
‘Come, Comrade D
oktor. I have some people that wish to meet you.’
Rosenharte climbed the four wooden steps to the decking and entered a gloomy interior. Three men in suits and a starchy blonde woman in her early forties were seated at an olive-green table. Schwarzmeer gestured to another wicker chair in front of the table, taking one to the side himself and resting his leg on a little stool. There he began idly examining a hunting hat that bristled with fishing flies. ‘So, Rosenharte, you will tell my colleagues what you found in Trieste?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What you saw. What you found. Don’t be a fool now.’
‘I found Annalise Schering and we dined together, as Biermeier will tell you.’
‘Yes, Colonel Biermeier,’ said Schwarzmeer.
‘She told me that she was willing to hand over certain information about some new computer systems used in Nato. Communication systems, I think. She didn’t tell me what these were because she said I wouldn’t understand.’
‘You say you found her.’ It was the woman, whose hands were nipping at the file in front of her. ‘That’s not true, is it? Unless you have failed to tell us something, you had no instructions to go to that restaurant by the canal. Only to go out on the pier?’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
‘Then she found you?’ said the man next to her, a clerkish individual with receding hair brushed forward. ‘Are you suggesting that in all Trieste she happened upon the right restaurant?’
‘No. I made a point of asking the hotel staff if they could recommend somewhere. Annalise knew where I was staying and I realized that she would check with them to find out where I was that evening. I told them to tell anyone who asked for me.’ It was a poor lie because the Stasi could easily check his story.
‘That seems a rather vague way of making an important contact. Why didn’t you stay in the hotel?’
‘To tell you the truth I was rather shocked by that man dying. I decided to have a drink or two and get some air.’
‘Yes, we wondered about the man. We didn’t find out who he was because the authorities in Trieste did not release any information about him. A man dies in the port and not one Italian policeman can say who he is. There is no record of his death. No inquest. Nothing. Does that not strike you as strange? Perhaps he didn’t really die. Perhaps he passed you information about the meeting place and was miraculously revived in the ambulance.’
Rosenharte lifted his shoulders and opened his hands. ‘He was having some kind of convulsion when he approached me on the quay. He said nothing that I understood. I assumed he was one of your people.’
‘But we have it that he mentioned a name to you.’
‘That’s true, but I can’t remember it exactly - Kusimack; Kusi-something.’
‘And he said this word before he entered the water.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you would then explain why the microphone picked up nothing. In fact no sounds were heard from the scuffle, which suggests that you hadn’t switched it on.’
‘That’s not true. In fact I switched it on as I went up the pier, even though Biermeier told me to do so only when I saw Annalise.’ The four of them consulted each other with nods and a murmur or two.
‘It’s interesting, is it not, that you were required to meet Annalise Schering on the pier but that at no time was she actually present there? None of our officers saw her enter or leave the dockyard that day. How do you explain that?’
Rosenharte inwardly cursed himself for not thinking of an answer to this obvious question. ‘She told me she was aware of the surveillance from the start; it nearly scared her off completely.’
‘That doesn’t seem very convincing,’ said a man who hadn’t spoken before.
‘Look, I can’t comment on these things,’ said Rosenharte. ‘I’m not part of your world. All I know is that I made contact as you required and I brought back a package, which you were not expecting. So, by any standards the operation was a success. Have you examined the material? Is it helpful?’
‘Of course we have,’ said Schwarzmeer. ‘But that’s not our concern here.’
He realized that this was at least a tacit admission of their interest. ‘Then what is?’ he asked calmly.
‘To find out if you are in league with the forces that wish to disrupt the security of the state.’
He shook his head incredulously. ‘You compelled me to make the journey against my will, saying that it would be bad for my brother if I refused. I did what you told me. I saw this woman again. I had relations with her. I did all this because you asked me. Yet now you hold me here against my will and accuse me of treasonable activities. This was not my plan. It was yours.’ The expressions in front of him remained unmoved.
‘Tell us about Schering,’ said Schwarzmeer. ‘It’s some time since we were in contact with her.’
‘She told me that she had worked for you at Nato until ’85. You must know much more about her than I do. I only saw her for twelve hours. And she was pretty drunk for much of that time.’
Schwarzmeer did not respond. There was a silence in the room. The light had shifted and he could see the people in front of him better. Collectively they presented a study of his country’s blank, heartless interior.
‘She also told me about the gardener who was arrested and the security checks at Nato that made her work for you difficult.’
‘This is something that puzzles us,’ said the man who had made most of the running so far. ‘If she was worried about being discovered, why return to Nato headquarters? Or put it the other way round, if she had left in a hurry, why did Nato not suspect that she was the source, and at the very least refuse to employ her in such a sensitive position? You must see it doesn’t make any sense.’
‘These things are not my area. I was suspicious about her letter - I said so at the time. I told you to have nothing to do with it, but you went ahead. Now you expect me to vouch for Annalise’s good motives towards the state. That’s not my responsibility, surely? And it isn’t just that you make me answer for her; now my loyalty to the state is called into question. If you felt I was unreliable, why send me to Trieste?’
‘Don’t get heated,’ said Schwarzmeer. ‘Did she say anything about the reason for contacting us, apart from seeing you again?’
‘She is passionate about the cause for peace, to the point that she is a bore on the subject. She has made certain requests.’
‘What are they?’
‘She wants to make contact with the peace groups in Leipzig and Berlin - confidentially of course - in exchange for handing over the material.’
‘That will be easily arranged,’ said Schwarzmeer. ‘We will have our own people represent them.’
‘She says that she wants to do it through me. She trusts me.’ He wanted to provide himself with more cover for his trips to Leipzig but he regretted saying this as soon as it was out. Schwarzmeer’s eyes darted to the table.
‘And yet in 1974,’ he said, ‘she refused to deal with you any longer because you were a security risk. What has occurred to change her mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rosenharte.
‘So this is another thing that doesn’t make sense,’ said the lead inquisitor. ‘There are too many inconsistencies in this story of yours for us to believe you.’
‘It’s not my story!’ he was almost shouting. ‘That’s the point. I refuse to be put in a position where I’m defending Annalise Schering’s story to you. If you don’t trust her motives, don’t deal with her. It’s as simple as that. Ignore what she gave you. Believe me, if you weren’t holding my brother I’d have had nothing to do with this operation.’ He got up and walked around. He could tell that they were surprised, but what did it matter if they saw he was agitated? He stopped in his tracks, turned to them and shook his head silently, then looked out of the window. The midday light was diffused through the forest, drenching and flattening the forms. One or two leaves had turned brown. Autumn was not far away.
&nbs
p; ‘Sit down,’ said Schwarzmeer, ‘and we’ll complete our interview.’
‘Why should I? Why should I continue? The more you insist I answer for Annalise Schering, the more responsibility I shall have to bear when things go wrong. Better that I cut my losses now. I know you will lock me up - you’ve already done that. What do I have to lose?’
‘Sit down and stop being such a damned hysteric,’ said Schwarzmeer quietly.
Rosenharte returned to the chair. ‘I have never shown anything but loyalty to the state. All I want is to be treated with respect.’ Again he saw that look pass through their faces, patronizing and at the same time brutal - the expression of people used to absolute power.
‘It’s not true,’ started the woman. Rosenharte fixed her with a look. It was remarkable how women like her consciously expunged all traces of sexuality and softness from their appearance. ‘It’s not true that you are always loyal to the German Democratic Republic. We have reports of your criticism of the Secretary of the Dresden Party.’ She looked down at a piece of paper. ‘You were heard to say in response to his speech at the May Day celebrations that it was pious drivel. A donkey could make a better speech, was what you said.’
Rosenharte smiled. ‘I deal with words, with the exact meaning of words. That’s what scholarship is about, accuracy and the weighing of evidence. Comrade Kresler’s speech was vapid, empty rhetoric. What we want from our leaders is truth and inspiration. What we get in Dresden is food queues and broken trains.’
