Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  So that was why I never got to the war tribunal.

  Leica was not cut out to be an East German agent. File closed. File placed in the archives. A completely inconsequential case file which only a paranoid system would have bothered to keep at all, and which I could have forgotten, had it not been for the fact that the pen had been wielded by Oscar. That wasn’t the name used. That was the name I knew him by. When Oscar had written to Lieutenant Colonel Helmut Schadenfelt, he signed himself Karl Heinrich Müller. First he was Lieutenant, then Captain and finally Major in the HVA, reporting directly to Schadenfelt and Misha Wolf. I had known as soon as I saw the photograph and immediately remembered the first trip Oscar and I had taken together. We had gone to cover the communists’ rally in the bullfighting arena in Valladolid where Carillo was to make a speech, and I had translated Oscar’s questions for him and our ostensible friendship had begun. He had never been a great writer – neither as a journalist nor in his reports to his ultimate masters in the Stasi – but he had been my friend for 20 years and all the time he had been playing with his cards face down.

  There wasn’t much on me. It didn’t take long to read, even with my German, but I think I sat for another hour just staring into space, not really thinking, as if my surroundings no longer existed. My thoughts went round and round in circles. Oscar. Karl Heinrich Müller. Amelia. Maria Luisa. And a photograph showing a young woman together with German terrorists somewhere in Denmark, a photograph Oscar had seen and which somehow had become a catalyst.

  I felt horribly nauseous and went to find a toilet where I threw up violently and painfully. I splashed water on my face and sat on another toilet and smoked a cigarette. Then I went back to the reception and asked for Herr Weber. He appeared 15 minutes later, with his briefcase in his hand and several of his infamous folders under his other arm.

  “Yes, Herr Lime? How can I be of service?”

  “Can I see the file on Karl Heinrich Müller?”

  Herr Weber studied me with his intelligent, friendly eyes.

  “You look rather pale, Herr Lime. Do you need a doctor?”

  “A drink and the file on Karl Heinrich Müller.”

  “I can’t help with the drink, but if you would be so kind as to return to your seat, I’ll see what I can do about Karl Heinrich.”

  I had a throbbing headache and my hands were trembling. I only had to wait for another 15 minutes. A younger woman was weeping silently. A stream of tears poured down her cheeks, as she seemed to read the same sentence over and over again. But no one took any notice of her. In the Stasi’s reading room everyone minded their own business. You were all alone with information you had wanted, but which you would perhaps rather have done without when you got it.

  Herr Weber placed a couple of sheets of paper and a photograph on my table.

  “Thank you. That was quick,” I said.

  “There isn’t much. His file was one of those shredded when they tried to remove the evidence just after die Wende. The Ministry’s largest shredders were on overdrive. We are trying to reconstruct some of the documents, but it will take years. Perhaps a never-ending job.”

  “OK.”

  Herr Weber hesitated.

  “Others have benefited from talking with a handler. Most of them live where they’ve always lived. Some will talk. Others won’t.”

  “Thank you, Herr Weber.”

  “Not at all, Herr Lime. Not at all.”

  He was right. There was hardly any information about Oscar. Just that Karl Heinrich Müller was put on the service’s permanent staff in 1967, when he was recruited via the border troops where he was doing his military service. He had been an unofficial Stasi informer ever since he was 14. As a 19-year-old he had been smuggled to West Germany with a new identity and life story. He had worked as a journalist on several small magazines partially financed by the GDR or Moscow. There was a photograph attached to the documents. It showed a young, clean-shaven Oscar wearing the Vopo’s ugly uniform. He has a crew cut and is looking straight at the camera with his unwavering eyes. Part of the Wall can be seen in the background. I read it all through twice, but there was no mention of his ever having left the service. All it said was that his last rank was that of Major and that he was recommended for the Order of Lenin for exemplary and long-standing service. The recommendation for an Order of Lenin had been made in October 1989 in conjunction with the GDR’s 40th anniversary. A month before the Berlin Wall came down. Hadn’t these people had any idea what was about to hit them?

  I felt like throwing up again, but I wrote the name Schadenfelt and the number of my file in my notebook and just left the documents on the table. They could burn them for all I cared. The reading room’s dust and my despair at the nature of betrayal made me nauseous. I had to get out.

  Herr Weber was standing in reception.

  “Goodbye, Herr Lime,” he said. “Will we be seeing you again?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, I shall deposit your file as read and closed.”

  “Read at least,” I said.

  “Undoubtedly it will never be closed for those involved, but for us it is one more file which can be put away with the others. One more piece of grief that can go back to the archives.”

  “Goodbye, Herr Weber. Say hello to the monkeys from me.”

  He chuckled.

  “With pleasure. I often visit my old friends when people get too much for me. God be with you.”

  It was a relief to get out into the fresh air. I zipped up my leather jacket and walked aimlessly through the wet streets of Berlin, letting the rain wash me clean. I don’t know how long or where I walked, but suddenly I recognised the wide expanse of Alexanderplatz, with the statue of Karl Marx and Engels sitting all alone in the middle of the paved area in the shadow of the television tower. By now it was evening and dark, and the lights played in the puddles. My hair was soaked, but it had stopped raining. I looked around and spotted a bar. It was a stylish café. I went into the toilets and dried my face and combed my hair, and then went and ordered a coffee and double schnapps. I sat by myself at a corner table. There weren’t many other customers in the café which was ugly and had cold lighting, horrible plastic tables and a mock steel counter. It made me long for Madrid and a proper café with loud, familiar Spanish sounds, heavy hams hanging from the ceiling and the smell of garlic and wine. A clean well-lighted place.

  I finished my schnapps, ordered another double and asked if I could borrow a telephone book. The bartender slung it across to me without a word and I looked up Schadenfelt. There were only three called Helmut. One of them lived on Karl Marx Allee. It led straight down to Alexanderplatz so I decided I might just as well start there. I drained my schnapps, drank my coffee and left with my head spinning. Alcohol was rough on an empty stomach.

  The housing blocks were arranged in East European-style rows of concrete, but the entrance looked freshly painted and well kept. There was an intercom. Helmut Schadenfelt lived on the ninth floor. I pressed his bell. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. I waited, and after about ten minutes the street door opened and an elderly, well-dressed woman slipped out and I slipped in with a courteous greeting. She glanced at me, but then walked off.

  The lift smelled of boiled cabbage and fresh paint. Schadenfelt’s door was brown like all the others. I rang the bell a couple of times, but nothing happened. I put my ear to the door, but I couldn’t hear any sound inside. I didn’t know if I had come to the right Schadenfelt, but I had an intuitive feeling that I had.

  I waited for just over an hour. Every time I heard someone on the stairs, I pretended that I was either on my way up or on my way down. The old East Berliners had grown up in a paranoid system and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before they rang the police about a dubious individual seen loitering on the stairs.

  Then he arrived. He came out of the lift. He was a stout, red-faced man of about 60, wearing a pair of wide braces to hold his trousers up over his large beer gut.
He had powerful shoulders and hands and a drinker’s thin little legs, and he was drunk. He managed, with some difficulty, to put the key in the lock, and as the door swung inwards I stepped forward into the light and said in German.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Schadenfelt? Have you got a moment?”

  He turned round and swayed, but his eyes were amazingly alert even though they were swimming.

  “Fuck off, foreigner!” he said in English, and started to close the door.

  I took another step forward and jammed the outstretched, rigid first and middle fingers of my right hand into his solar plexus and up under his ribs, and all the blood drained from his face as he doubled up. I grabbed his shirt and pushed him backwards into the flat, and once we were inside I put my foot behind his and thrust him against the wall. I gave him a sharp right to the jaw and held onto him as he slid down the wall and then lay motionless, but I checked that he had a pulse in his throat. I looked out into the landing. There was no one in sight. It had all been over in a few seconds.

  Helmut Schadenfelt’s flat was quite spacious. It had a living room and three other rooms. He had obviously stayed in the flat that the Party and the Stasi had provided for him. The kitchen was cluttered with dirty dishes, the rumpled bedclothes smelled of unwashed man, and two of the rooms were empty, as if he had pawned or sold the furniture. The place was littered with empty schnapps bottles. The only thing that seemed cared for was a photograph of a younger version of Helmut in full Stasi uniform. He was being presented with a medal by Markus Wolf. Oscar was standing behind them, also in full uniform. I looked at the date and inscription. “For faithful service, 16 April 1985.”

  So Oscar had sneaked back now and then to strut the Stasi’s prohibited zones wearing his smart uniform.

  I smashed the picture on the edge of an ugly, brown tiled table, prized the photograph out from behind the broken glass of the frame, and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket.

  I heard Schadenfelt groaning out in the corridor. When I got to him he had raised himself onto one knee. He was drunk, but he was also a large man, and I wasn’t taking any chances so I kicked him in the side and he collapsed again, and then I took hold of his Adam’s apple and squeezed and spoke in English, as he had sworn at me in that language.

  “Helmut, my friend. It’s only information I’m after, nothing else. If I keep on doing this you’re going to die. If you promise to behave, I’ll let go, and then we can have schnapps together. Blink if you understand what I’m saying.”

  He blinked and I let go of his throat and let him finish coughing and belching before I got him onto an ugly green sofa next to a table covered with overflowing ashtrays and dirty glasses.

  “Schnapps, in the kitchen,” he said hoarsely. His eyes were scared, but not scared enough.

  “Now we’re not going to try anything, are we Lieutenant Colonel?”

  “Schnapps,” he said.

  I went and found a bottle in the fridge and when I came back in he hadn’t moved, but sat rubbing his jaw and his Adam’s apple. I passed him the bottle and he took a swig and held it out towards me, but the surroundings had taken away my appetite for drink.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” he said. “I haven’t got any money.”

  “I want to talk about Karl Heinrich.”

  “Fuck off,” he said, and I struck him on the temple with the edge of my hand. I didn’t follow the stroke through, but he toppled off the sofa onto the floor. I kicked his knee and he screamed.

  “I’m in a very bad mood, Lieutenant Colonel. As a matter of fact, my life’s just been shattered yet again. So I’m feeling really ratty. Pissed off. Karl Heinrich?”

  “Who are you?” he said, and crawled back onto the sofa again. He was tougher than he looked. I removed the bottle when he reached out for it.

  “Who are you?” he repeated.

  “Peter Lime.”

  He started laughing, but stopped because it hurt. He reached out for the bottle again.

  “Peter Lime. You could just have said.”

  He spoke in Danish. He had a heavy accent, but the words came easily and were grammatically correct.

  “How come you speak Danish?”

  “Danish, English, Russian, German. It was my job. It was my job for 40 years. But tell me, how’s Oscar?”

  I looked at him, and he held up his hands defensively.

  “Easy, easy, Peter!” he said. “I’m finished. I’m an old man. I surrender. I know about your karate. Let’s have a schnapps, then we can talk. I know you like a schnapps. I know everything about you. You’re Karl Heinrich’s best friend. He loves you like his own brother.”

  He started laughing and, to make him stop, I passed him the bottle. He took a long swig and he began to speak. It was as though he needed to talk with someone. As if he had just been waiting for me.

  “Peter Lime. Looking at me now, you can’t understand. Power, influence, the feeling of being and doing something crucial. Of making a difference. Of building the first socialist state on German soil. Of thwarting the capitalists’ intentions. But mostly it was the operation. Running agents, the most exciting game in the world. Don’t see me the way I look now. This is what losers look like, and we lost the war. Without blood, but we lost it. But I was there when we were major players. We had 90,000 employees in the Ministry. We had 200,000 informers and there were over 5,000 of us in the HVA, the cream of the Ministry under the great Wolf. We were the most successful espionage network in the world. We knew everything that was going on in Bonn, in Copenhagen, in London, in the Vatican. We were a fucking success and I’m proud to have been part of it.”

  “But you lost, as you say yourself.”

  “We lost, but if you want an apology from me, you can forget it. I believed in socialism and I still believe in socialism.”

  He took another swig and I could see the anxiety evaporating from his eyes, so I got ready to put him back in his place with force. I was both angry and despairing and part of me wished he would make a move so I would have an outlet for my aggression.

  “What about Karl Heinrich? Did he believe too?”

  The stout man leant forward and found a cigarette amongst the filth on the table, lit it and leant back on the sofa again.

  “He was born into the faith. His father was held in captivity by the Soviets and when he returned in 1948 he was a communist. Karl was born in 1950, the year after NATO was formed and West Germany became a nation. It was a betrayal. Karl Heinrich received the faith at the breast. Only a socialist German state could prevent the return of fascism. I recruited Karl Heinrich when he was 14 and already chairman of his school’s Freie Deutsche Jugend group. He made the pledge of loyalty that he would never betray his country or talk about his work for MfS. And he’s kept his word.”

  “Then what?” I asked simply.

  “He was good and we were confident of the strength of his ideology, so we sent him across to the other side with a new identity. We already had two agents in Frankfurt, a couple who were the right age to have a son like Karl Heinrich, so he became Oscar. We moved them to Hamburg and the rest is history, as the saying goes. He was one of our best. I had the honour of being his mentor. I’m proud of that. He grew to be like a son to me. He never wavered. That’s all there is.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Not quite.”

  “Was meinst du?”

  “What did Oscar do?” I asked.

  “Work in the field. It doesn’t matter.”

  He scowled and turned his head away, so I stepped towards him and hit him twice on the face with the flat of my hand. I didn’t want him to forget his fear. He had to be more frightened of me than of the promise he had once made not to talk. He tried to protect himself, but he was just a drunk old man. A punch-drunk remnant of the cold war, and he didn’t stand a chance. I took the bottle from him and kept it in my hand.

  “I asked you what Oscar did, Helmut,” I said.

  He held up his hands in front of his face again
.

  “Recruited agents, influenced public opinion.”

  “A Danish woman by the name of Lola, for instance.”

  The colour drained from his face. He wasn’t a good liar, even though he had been a servant in the land of lies.

  “That name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  He had expected me to hit him with my right hand again, but I jabbed him hard on the nose with a short, straight left and he rocked backwards on the sofa, blood trickling slowly from one nostril.

  “I warned you, Helmut. I’m in a bad mood. You were his handler right from 1964. I mentioned a Danish woman called Lola.”

  “OK, Lime. OK. No more. Don’t hit me any more. Just give me the bottle …”

  “Lola,” I said.

  “She was one of his best agents. She came on in bed like men want it and in a way that makes them talk. Karl Heinrich recruited her. I took her over.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not a good arrangement to have a man overseeing his wife.”

  I must have looked completely dumbfounded, because he laughed scornfully. His laughter turned into a coughing fit. Once he had got over it, he continued.