by Henry Porter
‘Look at me, Rudi, and clear your mind.’
She parted her legs to straddle his thighs. ‘This is different, isn’t it?’ she whispered and he nodded in reply. At some point she moved forward a little and let her head drop to his shoulders. Then he lifted her on to him.
27
Flight
Rosenharte woke with a start, aware that someone was in the room. A man was calling Ulrike’s name and fumbling his way to her bed in the dark. He lifted his head from the pillow, cursing that he hadn’t made Ulrike leave the night before. Then she stirred and sat bolt upright.
‘Who . . . ? What do you want?’ she hissed back.
‘You must leave,’ said the voice. ‘Raus, raus. You have to get up and leave if you don’t want us all shot.’
She climbed over Rosenharte, taking a sheet with her, and approached the outline of the man.
‘Who’s with you?’ the voice demanded. ‘Have you got someone there? For Christ’s sake, we haven’t time for this.’ Rosenharte was struggling to process what he was hearing because he was now sure that Biermeier was in the room. But instead of arresting them, he was warning them of an impending danger. The light came on. Biermeier was standing in the middle of the room in a trenchcoat streaked with rain. ‘Couldn’t you wait?’ he said when he saw Rosenharte. ‘Look, if he’s found here, we’ll all be shot. Come on, girl, get your damned clothes on.’
‘Tell me what’s happened,’ said Ulrike, calmly picking up her jeans.
‘The Arab’s gone. Zank has been found unconscious in the safe house by the park. He was drugged and tied up. He’s still out of it, but when he comes round all hell will break loose. We’re in the shit, unless you get your pretty little arse out of Leipzig and go into hiding.’
‘What was he doing at the villa?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know, but the fact that he was there and someone tied up and drugged him means that he’s made discoveries that we never thought he would.’ He picked up her shirt and threw it at her. ‘That’s enough talk. You’ve got to get out of here. Make for the border and don’t get caught.’ He turned to the bed. ‘Rosenharte, you too. You got your sister-in-law out, now you leave the GDR and make sure Ulrike goes with you.’
He began to protest about Konrad.
‘Forget your damned brother. You must go.’ He was tearing round the room, throwing any article of clothing he could find at them. His knobbly face was white with fear and there was no doubt that he had been drinking. He stopped as if noticing the gun in his hand for the first time. ‘If I had any sense I’d put a bullet in your head now. That way I’d know you couldn’t talk. But I’m giving you this chance because you’re with Ulrike.’ He moved to the door and spoke directly to her. ‘There’s no surveillance outside, but there will be soon. Leave by the window at the back where I came in. If I don’t see you leave in five minutes, I will come back and kill you both.’
He vanished into the dark of the passageway. A couple of seconds later they heard him pulling open the window in the sitting room. Ulrike started to stuff a rucksack with her possessions, while Rosenharte went to retrieve his coat and pullover from the sitting-room floor.
‘The car’s at Kurt’s place,’ he called out.
‘That’s good. There can be no danger of them following us from here. Go to the kitchen, put as much food as you can find in the shopping bag. Pasta, eggs, oil, candles - anything. We’ll need it if we’re going to stay hidden.’
He tipped the cardboard box where she kept most of her provisions into a big red and white striped canvas bag and added a skillet, a larger pan, torch, cups, knives, a loaf of bread that was on the side table and all the alcohol he could find.
Ulrike appeared in the kitchen carrying the sheets from her bed and placed them in a plastic bowl. While the taps ran she went to fetch the ashtray and glasses from the sitting room. Rosenharte understood that she was eliminating all trace of his being there. She glanced round her sitting room one more time before she turned the lights off, heaved the rucksack through the window and jumped down into the garden. Rosenharte followed with the bag. Then she turned round, wiped the mud Biermeier had left on the windowsill with the cuff of her jacket, and pressed the window shut.
Not far from the house they came to an opening onto the road that ran parallel to her street. She told Rosenharte to wait while she fetched the car, took the keys from him, put her hood up and left him with the bags in the cover of some laurel bushes. He lit a cigarette and began to consider the implications of Biermeier’s appearance in the apartment. Clearly Biermeier was involved with Ulrike in passing the intelligence about Abu Jamal to the West. His presence right from the start of this affair meant that he had not merely sanctioned it but was one of the prime movers. Rosenharte thought back to the hotel in Trieste and realized that while checking the microphone and transmitter he had sabotaged it. That’s why no one had heard the Pole blurt out the name in the last moments of his life. It was broken before he even entered the sea because Biermeier had thought Rosenharte would give everything away in the first encounter with Annalise’s substitute.
How much more of the last few weeks could be explained by his involvement? Was he working with the British? How did the two Poles fit in? Was he going it alone, or was Schwarzmeer involved as well?
In the centre of this mystery was Ulrike. Even in the most tender and open moments of their lovemaking the night before, he understood she was still holding back. At one moment she’d looked into his eyes with the strangest dread, as though she’d seen the precipice they were walking towards but could not - or would not - warn him. Now he understood why Biermeier’s man had been outside her home and how she knew that the gallery in Dresden had been squared about his absences. Biermeier had clearly told her about the arrangement with the head of the gallery before it was overturned by Zank. This meant that she was privy to the smallest details of the operation, and that argued for a very close involvement indeed.
He could now see the pattern of Zank’s suspicions. Everywhere Biermeier went Zank followed, checking on the hotel in Trieste, accompanying him to the meeting with Mielke in Normannenstrasse, tracking his movements in Leipzig. He remembered the world-weary look that Biermeier had risked at Normannenstrasse, then the next morning his barely concealed disgust as they left the Hohenschönhausen compound. Perhaps some kind of struggle was going on in the Stasi between the forces of crude decency as represented by Biermeier, and Zank’s unwavering zealotry. He knew from his own time that a few officers retained an honour of sorts and did not regard the oath of allegiance to the Ministry of State Security as a holy text. Biermeier, though an oaf capable of palming someone else’s money, might be one of the few who, when confronted with the evil of Abu Jamal’s plans, decided to do something about it. Whatever he felt personally about the man, he couldn’t help but admire his courage and his planning. Yet the fact was that Biermeier and Ulrike had used him and Konrad ruthlessly. If Zank really began to see all the connections, it would put Konrad in terrible danger.
He waited nearly three quarters of an hour under the dripping laurels and was beginning to wonder whether she would return, when the little beige Wartburg trundled into the opening with its wipers working furiously.
She flung open the passenger door and yelled, ‘I had to get your stuff from Kurt’s apartment. It took for ever to wake him.’ He slung their bags in the back and climbed in.
‘Where’re we going?’ she asked.
‘Got a map?’
She pulled an old dog-eared fold-out from beneath the driving seat and handed it to him. The scale was too small to find the farmhouse, but he had a pretty good sense of where it was. ‘Go south-west. Take minor roads.’
‘Are you sure this place is going to be safe?’
‘Nowhere is safe, but if we keep moving and have reasonable luck we should be all right.’ He examined her, and decided to wait until they got out of Leipzig to ask her the questions he so desperately needed answered. He pulled his
radio from his bag to listen to the news on a West German station. The Leipzig demonstration was the lead item, yet the explanation of why the army had not been used against the marchers was very confused. One report had Egon Krenz flying into the city, while another cited a renegade officer from the people’s army who had refused to order his troops to shoot. The GDR had, it seemed, decided to make a virtue of the restraint, when it was clear that neither their own troops nor the Russians were prepared to fire on unarmed civilians attending prayers for peace.
They listened to the rest of the news from a world that seemed very far away. A man named David Dinkins was favourite to become the first black mayor of New York; the killing of military bandsmen by the IRA in England two weeks before was said to presage a new rash of attacks; and the Soviet news agency Tass reported that UFOs had been seen hovering over Russian soil for the third time that month.
‘So now we know where Gorbachev comes from,’ Ulrike said. Her eyes left the road for a second. ‘I guess you want an explanation?’
‘Don’t bother,’ he said sharply, ‘unless you’re going to tell me the truth about everything.’
‘I couldn’t tell you about Biermeier before. It would’ve been too dangerous for him.’
‘For him, yes. But what about my brother? You didn’t think that you had an obligation to keep me informed about everything so I could make my own decisions?’
‘What good would that have done? You would’ve reacted differently to Biermeier if you’d known his involvement with me. Zank would have spotted it in your eyes. As it was, you were hostile and contemptuous of him. That was what we needed.’
‘How long has this been going on, this private operation to expose the Stasi’s use of Abu Jamal? Was it Biermeier’s idea?’
She nodded. ‘Nearly two years now - for as long as he’s had medical treatment in Leipzig. Biermeier got me the job. He had put someone close to Misha and he needed someone next to Abu Jamal.’
‘Biermeier set you up as Abu Jamal’s mistress in Leipzig?’
‘Pretty much, though what I told you last night was true. He’s incapable of physical love. There’s no desire for anything except destruction. He wants to leave his mark on the world by causing many, many deaths. The Party had no idea what he was doing - the extent of what he and Misha planned, although it was the Party’s machinery, their money, their inspiration, that enabled him. Biermeier wrote one memorandum to Schwarzmeer and got nowhere. He was told it wasn’t his business and that he was exaggerating the extent of the Arab’s ambitions. So he decided to get evidence that no one could doubt by spying on Misha and Abu Jamal. At first he had no idea of sending this information to the West - you know Biermeier; he’d rather cut off his hand than help the capitalists. When he got the evidence he fed it into the information chain and managed to make it seem as though someone else was making the allegations. He’s very shrewd. That’s why he’s lasted so long. But still nothing happened. There was no response whatsoever. That was in the spring. So he - no, we - decided that there was only one way of stopping the Arab. In May we began to plan how we could do that.’
‘What was the point of Misha’s use of Abu Jamal? Why did the GDR want to cause this devastation and chaos? No other communist state has planned anything like this.’
‘That’s an interesting question. I thought about it a lot because, well, I’m socialist and I couldn’t understand why a socialist regime could get involved with such a man. In the end I came to the conclusion that it has something to do with our technological inferiority, a certainty that the West is leaping ahead and we’re being left behind. The kind of operations the Arab put in place would certainly have caused a grave crisis, particularly as the attacks were planned so closely together. Oddly enough I think it betrays a sense of panic in the leadership.’
‘Maybe. When did you think of using me?’
‘Later. Early June.’ She offered her mouth to him to take a puff of his cigarette. He held it up to her and she exhaled, then began to cough.
‘You should have someone look at your chest. It doesn’t sound great.’
‘I told you: it’s the pollution. Anyway, we wanted someone who could visit Leipzig legitimately. Biermeier did some research after I suggested you and discovered you had a very interesting past.’
‘You mean he went into my Stasi files?’
‘He didn’t manage to pull all of them. Just the one that said you had been in the HVA. The rest are in some ultra-secret section. We wondered why that was.’
Rosenharte flicked the cigarette out of the window. ‘So you must have known about Konrad; you knew I had a brother they’d imprisoned once before?’
She shook her head. ‘Only when he was arrested.’
He laughed bitterly and looked away. ‘You lied to me about that, too. You said the first you had heard of him was when someone wondered if the filmmaker Konrad Rosenharte was my brother. You told me a deliberate lie. What vanity!’
‘Vanity?’
‘Yes, my vanity! Here was I thinking that you had chosen me because you liked the look of me. Actually, I’m glad that that wasn’t true because it would make me feel doubly bad about Konnie.’
Her hands tightened round the wheel. ‘Rudi, I want you to know that I’m truly sorry. I wish I could do something to change what’s happened. I feel very, very bad about it.’
Rosenharte wasn’t listening. He saw his brother’s drained, lifeless features in the hospital wing at Hohenschönhausen - the image that had imprinted itself on his mind as he looked back when he left the room. There were just four days before they would enter the prison with Vladimir’s fake documentation, and for the thousandth time he prayed Konnie would hang on till then.
Ulrike knew what he was thinking. ‘I’ll do anything I can to help you now,’ she said.
In the cold light of day he knew that he could not trust her with the plan. Now that they were on the run, with Zank not far behind, the less she knew the better. He couldn’t risk her falling into Zank’s hands with that knowledge. He changed the subject. ‘The two Poles - where do they fit in?’
‘We didn’t know who they were. The man in Trieste very nearly spoiled all our plans. We couldn’t work it out.’
‘You saw the second man, the tall one outside that cafe. Had you ever seen him before?’
‘No, never.’
‘Did you know he was Polish then?’
‘No, I just wondered who was showing such interest in you. And then you denied all knowledge of him.’
There was only one other solution that Rosenharte could think of. The Poles were somehow connected to Vladimir. Though Vladimir insisted he knew nothing of the operation in Trieste, Rosenharte was now inclined to disbelieve him. The more he thought about Vladimir, the more bizarre his motives seemed. The little homily he’d delivered on the cooperation between East and West on terrorism didn’t quite explain why the KGB had looked the other way as the West had taken Abu Jamal. All he appeared to be concerned about was knowing the details of the plan so he could report them to his superiors. A wild idea suddenly occurred to him.
‘Is Biermeier working for the KGB?’
She looked genuinely startled. ‘He doesn’t like the Russians any more than the Americans. His father was killed by them in the defence of Berlin.’
‘And you’re sure he’s told you everything?’
‘Yes. The whole point, the whole brilliance of Biermeier’s plan was to get the West to do all the dirty work for him. There would be no need to involve the Russians.’
They had travelled about twenty miles under the wide Saxony sky and had passed several military trucks going in the same direction, but now there was almost no traffic on the road. The flat, featureless countryside seemed already resigned to winter. About thirty miles from Leipzig they filled up with petrol and bought a couple of cups of black coffee from a man with a drooping gallic moustache who, seeing their Leipzig number plate, was curious to hear news from the city. No, Ulrike replied: with
all the rumours of violence they had kept well away from the demonstrations. The man congratulated them for their good sense. There were too many troublemakers in the country and it would be a good thing if they were all put on trains and sent out of the GDR.
‘The old solution,’ said Rosenharte, without the man noticing the edge in his voice.
He took the wheel and after criss-crossing the countryside and trying several tracks, they found a turning which he thought looked promising because recent tyre ruts had been left by a large truck. He pushed the Wartburg gingerly into an area of scrub, birch trees and wild cherry. Several rabbits shot across their path and Ulrike cried out when she saw the white hindquarters of a deer flash in the undergrowth. The track ahead of them rose gradually to a hillock surrounded by trees. They swung right, then left, and glimpsed part of a wooden roof, at which point he pulled up and turned the car round so that it faced the direction they had just come. They got out and approached the top of the mound through the trees, stopping to listen several times before reaching a plateau of dead grass in front of a farmhouse. A wooden fence enclosed this space, and at the southern end there was a rusty iron gate, hanging into the yard on one hinge. By the tyre marks and flattened grass they saw that several vehicles had been there. Rosenharte turned through three quarters of a circle to look at the roads leading to the farmhouse. They came from four directions, one from a large beech forest that bordered the estate to the south-west. The important point was that each route was hidden from the others. If they kept watch, they would stand a very good chance of escape were they to be cornered there.
