The Linden Tree

by Hester Rowan

  I fell silent. There was nothing more I dared say. My ingenuous attempts to lie my way out of trouble had only served to get me in deeper and deeper.

  Schildow was smiling grimly to himself. He turned Elisabeth’s bag inside out, ripped the flimsy lining, and having satisfied himself that it contained nothing more, threw it aside and picked up my lipstick again. I watched with uneasy disbelief as he took a penknife from his pocket, scooped out the remains of the lipstick, smeared it messily and impatiently on a sheet of paper, and then began to force the case apart as though looking for a hidden note.

  A knock came on the inner door. The head of a younger man, with a high-domed forehead and a neat moustache, made a deferential appearance. ‘Excuse me, Comrade Schildow –’

  ‘What is it?’ Schildow growled. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Comrade, but this really is urgent. I’ve just had a report that the Schönhausen trouble has blown up again –’

  Schildow swore and threw down my lipstick and his knife. He pressed a button on his desk and my blond escort came in from the corridor.

  ‘Put Comrade Lorenz in a room by herself until I am free again, Ullstein,’ Schildow ordered. He pushed himself up heavily from his desk, then caught sight of some smears of lipstick on his hands and transferred them angrily to his handkerchief. ‘That’ll take some explaining to his wife,’ I thought with bleak satisfaction, but Schildow had the last word.

  He smiled at me without any warmth. ‘I may be occupied for some little while, Comrade, but I suggest that you can usefully spend the time by reconsidering the information you have given me. It will be so much easier for you if you agree to co-operate. So, I shall look forward to continuing our conversation later.’

  He jerked his head dismissively at Ullstein, who made a grab for my upper arm and marched me out of the room. I tried to pull my arm away, but his only reaction was to hold me more tightly as he pushed me ahead of him down the long corridor. I had to bite my lower lip hard to prevent myself from crying out and giving him the satisfaction of knowing how much he was hurting me.

  We met one or two people in the corridor, but they all seemed to avert their eyes and melt away at our approach. All except one big man who came steadily on to meet us. My eyes were so filmed with tears of pain that I couldn’t at first see him clearly, but there seemed to be something familiar about him.

  I blinked. My vision cleared. ‘Ku – Comrade Braun!’ I cried.

  He looked at me, his eyes dark and cold, and for a terrifyingly long moment I thought that his friendship had been false. He turned his head to Ullstein. ‘Has Comrade Schildow finished with this girl?’ he demanded.

  ‘Hardly begun, I should say,’ Ullstein replied with sadistic pleasure, but he relaxed his grip a little. ‘Something else has cropped up, though, so I’m taking her to cool off until he can question her again.’

  Kurt nodded, his lips compressed with anger. Then, ‘You little fool,’ he snarled at me. ‘I do my best to help you, thinking that you’re a genuine compassionate case, and then you go carrying messages to the West and getting yourself into trouble like this!’

  I hung my head, to prevent Ullstein from seeing the relief on my face. Of course, Kurt was having to act his way through this situation too, and making a very convincing job of it. I listened with increasing hope as he bargained, outwardly casual, with Ullstein.

  ‘You can put her in that empty office next to mine, if you like.’

  ‘I was going to take her down to the detention rooms.’

  ‘Why bother to go all that way? I know there’s a key to that office, it’s in the door.’

  Ullstein frowned. ‘The window isn’t barred.’

  ‘My dear man!’ Kurt scoffed. ‘We’re on the tenth floor – she’s hardly likely to escape that way!’

  ‘It wasn’t escape I was thinking of.’

  I felt a sudden rush of nausea. Dear heaven, was my situation so bad that he seriously expected me to consider jumping to my death in preference to submitting to further questions?

  Kurt spoke a little less harshly. ‘I don’t think we need worry about that. Come on, then.’

  He led the way, down one corridor and into another, and opened the door of a small bare room. As he motioned me inside, I tried to resume my part and restore my credibility.

  ‘But Comrade Braun, please can’t you help me? They say my grandmother is dead and I am not allowed to go to the West today. And now they are questioning me about messages, but I took none and I certainly didn’t bring any back!’

  He shrugged, officially pompous. ‘Comrade Schildow may, of course, find that there are no grounds for his suspicion.’

  Ullstein gave a nasty laugh. ‘That’s what you hope, Braun! You were her escort over to the West, and you’ll be in dead trouble if he does find any proof that she was carrying information about her father. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes then! Oh, and I’ll keep the key to this room, thank you – she’s my responsibility now.’

  He slammed and locked the door, and their voices receded. I slid down the wall to a sitting position and rested my head on my knees. I was shivering, despite the growing warmth of the day. All the euphoria I had felt at the sight of Kurt had evaporated. A lot of good it would do me to be locked in the room next to his if the blond man insisted on holding the key!

  Well, I was done for now. Schildow had at first been so obsessed with the idea that Elisabeth was passing information between her father and the West that he hadn’t stopped to consider the fact that I might not be Elisabeth at all. But he would come to it, there was no doubt about that.

  Sooner or later, he would discover that the switch had been made. And I was fairly certain, now, that I knew why it had been made. Elisabeth must have been carrying information of some kind that was too complicated to be passed on in a brief twenty-minute visit. That was why Nicolas had wanted her to stay for longer and why the switch was necessary.

  So Schildow wasn’t really barking up the wrong tree. His suspicions about Elisabeth were probably correct.

  But Elisabeth herself was safe. She was down on the other side of the Wall. I was the one who was stuck up the tree, with no access to the Wall and with Ullstein guarding me until Schildow returned.

  And it was Nicolas who was responsible for putting me here …

  I gave way to the only luxury the room offered: the opportunity to abandon myself to despair in complete privacy.

  Almost immediately, it seemed, I heard the key turn in the lock.

  I started up in alarm. Was Schildow ready for me so soon? Oh God, I wasn’t prepared for questioning yet!

  Or – almost worse – was it Ullstein coming back for a little private amusement? There was one object in the room, a broken chair and I seized and lifted it, ready to defend myself against him.

  The door opened quietly. Kurt Braun slipped into the room, his finger to his lips.

  I put the chair down. ‘Kurt –’ I stammered. ‘But how …?’

  He smiled. The feigned coldness and anger had gone from his eyes; they were warm and friendly. ‘You didn’t really imagine that I’d desert you, did you? I had a second key … Come on now, let’s get you out of here.’

  He motioned me to silence and held the door slightly ajar, listening. Then he seized my hand and pulled me into the corridor, paused to re-lock the door and pocket the key, and then ran with me towards a pair of fire doors and on to a concrete stairway.

  I didn’t need to be told to hurry, but anxiety made me stumble on the stairs. Kurt put a steadying arm round me and guided me down and round and down and dizzyingly round and seven more floors down to ground level, and at least partial freedom.

  He had a car parked close to the stairway doors at the back of the building, an East German Wartburg.

  ‘Bless you, Kurt,’ I said fervently, looking back at the grim building as he accelerated away. ‘I was absolutely terrified – Schildow was just on the point of finding out that I’m not Elisa
beth, but then he was called away. And it was a marvellous coincidence that you appeared just as Ullstein was going to lock me up!’

  He looked half-amused, half-hurt. ‘Hardly a coincidence,’ he protested. ‘As soon as I got the message this morning that I wasn’t to take you to the West, I made it my business to find out what was going on. Then I created a sizeable diversion to keep Schildow busy, and then I made a point of being in the right place at the right time.’

  ‘For which I’m more grateful than I can say. But Kurt – what is going on? Is Elisabeth’s grandmother really dead?’

  ‘I have no reason to think so. No, I’m sure it was just an excuse to pick Elisabeth up. The point is that they’re still convinced that you are Elisabeth, and that means that you’ve put up a wonderful performance. I could hardly believe that they hadn’t caught you out already – if they had, they would have been on to me too. I’m deeply indebted to you for your courage.’

  I shuddered. ‘Don’t! I’ve been so near to discovery so many times – I don’t think I could have kept up the story a moment longer.’

  ‘What worries me, though,’ he said, frowning, ‘is that someone must have tipped them off that Elisabeth might be carrying messages from or to her father. There must have been a deliberate leak of some kind, because no one has ever had anything against Elisabeth herself. She would never have been granted the permit to cross to the West if anyone had any doubts about her. In fact, she was such a loyal member of the East German Communist Party that she left home a couple of years ago because her father objected to her political activities. So why, suddenly, do they pick her up and suggest that she’s carrying messages for him?’

  ‘And is she?’ I asked.

  He shook his head, refusing to discuss the matter. ‘What do you know about Elisabeth’s father?’ he parried.

  ‘Very little. Nicolas told me that her father is a doctor and that he’s been in a mental hospital for over a year. He said that there had been some kind of family row before her father’s illness, but that Elisabeth had visited him a couple of times in hospital. In the circumstances, I wouldn’t have thought that the East German government would worry about any messages he might want to send to anyone.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kurt impatiently. ‘So why should anyone want to stir things? I could have sworn that this whole operation was watertight, but someone, somewhere, has not only ruined it but put you at a terrible risk. And I’m determined to find out who it was, though that will be difficult – I was the only person who knew about it on this side.’

  I turned in my seat to stare at him. ‘You mean – someone in the West tipped them off?’

  I thought rapidly. Nicolas’s boss would know about the operation, of course, but it seemed unlikely that he would betray it. Then there was George, who had been so bashful about the East German undies he had bought for me, and by now – I glanced at Elisabeth’s watch and saw that it was nearly noon – would surely have raised an alarm because I hadn’t come through from Elisabeth’s grandmother’s house into his cellar. No, I refused to believe that it could be George.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Is it?’

  I folded my arms round my body, trying to suppress a shiver. ‘Does Nicolas know yet that I was picked up?’ I asked.

  Kurt shrugged. ‘I don’t know what Allen knows. I don’t even know where he is. I sent a message through to my contacts in the West immediately I heard you’d been picked up, asking them to tell him to get in touch with me. But I heard nothing from him before we left.’

  Desolation touched my heart with a cold finger. Without consciously formulating the thought, I had taken it for granted that Kurt would now be driving me to a rendezvous with Nicolas. I knew that once I was with Nicolas, whichever side of the Wall we were on, everything would be all right.

  But if Kurt didn’t even know where Nicolas was …

  ‘I think,’ I said hesitantly, ‘that he may be here, in East Berlin.’

  Kurt stopped the car. ‘Do you know exactly where?’ he demanded. ‘This is no time for worrying about security, my dear – if you know where he is, for goodness’ sake tell me and I’ll take you there.’

  ‘I only wish I knew! All I’m certain of is that he said he wouldn’t be able to meet me when I got back to Elisabeth’s grandmother’s house, because he had some business somewhere else. I’m just guessing that it was in East Berlin.’

  Kurt sighed, pushed the engine into gear and accelerated away. ‘Where are we going, then?’ I faltered.

  ‘That’s the problem,’ he said grimly. ‘You have no hope of getting through the Wall without a permit, so the best thing I can do is to get you out of Berlin and into the East German countryside. There’s a popular tourist area in the Harz Mountains where you’ll never be noticed among the other visitors. It’s not far from the border with West Germany, and it may be possible to smuggle you across somehow. Anyway, it’s the best plan I can think of for the moment. Now that you’ve escaped from State custody, you can’t stay in East Berlin, that’s for sure.’

  ‘The Harz?’ I tried to conjure up an image of the map of Germany, uncertainly locating the region to the west of Berlin. ‘But – it must be at least a hundred miles away!’

  ‘Yes, I can’t possibly take you there. I must get back to my office as soon as possible, ready to deny all knowledge of your disappearance. Ah, that reminds me –’

  We had been driving for some yards along the tree-lined embankment of a narrow river. Now Kurt fumbled in his pocket, drew out a key and tossed it through the open window of the car. It twisted in the air, glittering in the sunlight, before falling with a plop into the thick green water.

  ‘There,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘No one knew I had it, and now that spare key’s at the bottom of the Spree. As I was saying, I can’t take you to the Harz myself, but I know someone who probably will. And once you’re there, you must please wait in patience until help arrives. It may be several days, I’m afraid.’

  Several days.

  If only I could discuss it with Nicolas! I hated the idea of lingering in another part of East Germany without his knowledge and approval.

  ‘You will go on trying to contact Nicolas, won’t you?’ I begged. ‘You’ll tell him where I am and what I’m doing, so that he can come and fetch me?’

  ‘Of course. But if I can’t reach him, I’ll come myself. Please don’t worry. I promised to look after you, remember?’

  I tried to suppress my qualms. Kurt had already proved himself a magnificently trustworthy friend, even to the extent of risking his own job.

  And more than his job.

  Heaven and earth, how much more selfish could I get! Kurt was an East German government official, secretly working for the West. If Schildow suspected Elisabeth, as he did, then Kurt himself must be under grave suspicion. They’d be bound to accuse him of duplicity in my escape.

  And yet, not content with releasing me from detention, he was planning to go to endless trouble to get me safely over the border into West Germany. I hated to think what punishment they would hand out to him if he were caught – and yet here I was, complaining because he had no magic carpet to whirl me to freedom!

  ‘But Kurt,’ I cried impulsively, ‘what about you? How will you ever talk your way out of this? Will you be all right?’

  His mouth twisted in a wry smile. ‘Oh, I shall just take things as they come. In my profession, danger is an occupational hazard.’

  Yours – and Nicolas’s too, I thought wretchedly.

  The car slowed, then stopped at traffic lights. We had crossed the river. To our right, about three hundred yards away across a wasteland that had been cleared of buildings, snaked the grim grey line of the Wall. Patrols of armed border guards were thick on the ground here and I flinched as one of them stared for a moment at our stationary car.

  Considering that I now had no identity card, and that as soon as my disappearance from the locked room was discovered I should be
urgently wanted by the Volkspolizei, the East German police, I felt alarmingly well-qualified for honorary membership of that same dangerous profession.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Wall had jinxed back out of sight, we had left the armed guards behind us in the border zone, the river had become a lake. Ahead lay a park, and over the tops of some of even the tallest trees I could see the head and shoulders of a massive statue.

  ‘The Soviet War Memorial,’ said Kurt. ‘It’s one of the big showpieces of East Berlin, and a lot of foreign visitors go there. That’s why we’re going.’

  He drew up in a large car park which was already half-filled with tourist coaches. Some of them were sight-seeing double-decker buses from West Berlin and I looked at them longingly.

  ‘It’s no use, my dear,’ Kurt said with firm patience. ‘Everyone on board has a special pass for the journey through the checkpoint – you might as well give yourself up to the nearest Vopo as try to hitch a lift in one of those. But one of the West German coach drivers is a contact of mine – ah, there he is. Wait here, please. They’re used to visitors so no one will bother you.’

  I sat in the car while Kurt went to talk to a roly-poly man who was leaning in the sun against the front of his coach, chewing a sandwich. There were no grey-uniformed Vopos in evidence at all, but a number of Russian soldiers in peaked caps, green tunics and breeches and knee-length boots.

  I hunched down in my seat and watched with gnawing anxiety as Kurt negotiated with the coach driver. He was trying to appear casual. Although I knew that he needed urgently to get back to his office, he returned to the car at a stroll. Only his voice betrayed his relief.

  ‘Yes, he’ll do it! I can’t introduce you because we don’t want to make ourselves conspicuous, but his name is Willy Hendricks, and he speaks English. I’ve told him your real name and explained that you’re holidaying in East Germany with a friend, but that you’ve become separated and your friend has all your luggage and documents. Willy has some spare seats and he’s agreed to take you as far as Marberg, a town in the Harz. He can’t possibly take you across the border, but I’ve told him that Marberg was the next stop on your tour and that your friend will be meeting you there. That’s where I’ll come for you, if I can’t get in touch with Allen.’