by Alex Cugia
“Screw you!” Thomas retorted. “Goddamn it, Bettina, you’re ruining my life and you act as if this is of no concern at all to you. As if it just happened of itself. As if you had nothing to do with it. You talk about ‘duty’ as if that excuses all this, as if that gives you a right to make me a spy for this shitty country against my own.”
Bettina unfolded her arms, passed her open right hand over her eyes and then down across her mouth, stared up for a moment at the ceiling and then back, hard, at Thomas. Her face turned livid in a flash of anger, her nostrils flared and her mouth tightened as she breathed in hard, and Thomas dropped his gaze, unable to meet the force of her fury.
“You were the one doing something illegal. You were the one acting criminally. You seem to have forgotten that black-market currency trading is a serious crime. You were facing a good period in jail for that alone. And if we’d shown a connection with Romer’s wider activities, tied you in with his drug dealing for example, you’d have been ten years older at least, fifteen or twenty maybe, before you saw the West again. What would that have done to your life, your career, your reputation?”
She paused to take a drink of water from the tumbler on the desk but Thomas was unable to say anything. “You knew very well what you were up to. You were the one funding those heroin deaths. Think about that. You killed my friend by funding the gun that shot him. Think about that. You believe you have a God-given right, because you’re from the West, to take advantage of these poor idiots from the East, right? And you blame me for doing my duty. Your interest was in nothing but your own selfish needs, what you could get out of it, what you could get away with, just how much you could make stealing from others. You weren't a student funding his studies through harmless misdemeanours - you were nothing but a squalid little thief and your activities helped to kill people, to destroy them and their families. Think about that.” She paused for breath.
“But I didn't mean any harm. I didn't. Those deaths would have happened anyway. They weren't my fault.” said Thomas. He’d tried to sound assertive but faced with Bettina’s now blazing blue eyes had merely felt defensive and even ashamed, his tone plaintive.
“By your black market antics, selling DMs at an Ost Mark rate high above the official one, you were stealing money from the country. That was money coming from our people's pockets to line yours, Thomas. You’re a thief, Thomas, nothing but a shitty little thief. You were stealing from people who already had very little, who were a lot poorer than you, even as a student. Was that moral? You were funding criminals, facilitating those heroin deaths, the murder of my friend. Not your fault, you say, can't blame me!" she laughed harshly. "Didn't mean any harm!" She shook her head about in parody. "Given the consequences, is that something to feel proud of? Go on, tell me what a big man it makes you feel now. They're dead, Thomas, dead.” She turned her head suddenly away from him, looked down and away and put her hand over her face.
There was silence and Thomas could think of no adequate response. Bettina was breathing heavily. Despite himself, he was impressed with her fury and the strength behind it and now starting to feel ashamed. She turned sharply round again.
“You haven’t changed a tiny bit. Now you’re out of prison, you’re the same arrogant, egocentric, selfish Westerner you were when I first met you. And to think I even tried convincing Dieter to let you go. Where you are now, you’ve no one but yourself to blame. Step out of line again and, trust me, you’ll see how bad it can really get.”
Bettina turned abruptly and stared out of the window again, leaving Thomas dumbfounded, his emotions in turmoil. He noticed that her eyes were glistening and in a moment she she scrunched them hard and wiped them with a handkerchief. Now truly ashamed, he sat on the chair and for a long time neither of them spoke. She stared out of the window.
“Look. Ummm, maybe, I guess, umm, maybe I overreacted a bit. It’s just, it’s just that I ... , I ... ”
“I know. It’s not a great position to be in. That I understand. But you’ve made the right choice. Dieter would have let you rot in jail.”
Thomas could think of nothing more to say.
"I know you still feel sore about what’s happened." she continued. "I don’t like it much either but it’s where we are. We can’t change that. We’re going to be together a great deal - we can either fight each other all the time or work out a way of engaging professionally. Even if we can't again become friends maybe we can at least work together civilly.” She started to stretch out her hand then dropped it and for a period looked at him.
Eventually he nodded slightly, saying nothing, then sighed. “Maybe. OK. Maybe.”
“What do you want to discuss?” he asked.
“Let’s go over the information we’d like you to get from Stephan. And from anyone else there who might be helpful.” She handed him a sheet of paper with a list of questions. “You need to memorise these - not by rote but to be clear about what you have to find out. Leave these papers behind when you go. And I have to remind you again not to give the slightest hint of what you’re doing. Dieter has told you what will happen if anyone discovers what you're up to. And it will happen, believe me, Dieter is someone who keeps his word. You have to understand that.”
They talked for nearly an hour, some of it role playing with Bettina as Stephan, which Thomas had disliked and handled mostly in a surly manner. Towards the end Dieter came in. “It’s in both our interests that you succeed.” he said. “The better you help us the quicker you’ll be left to get on with your own life." He smiled and handed Thomas a stylish and expensive looking black leather briefcase with, Thomas was touched to see, the initials ‘T W’ discreetly blocked in gold on the front. "And as you’re going to the hub of West German commerce I thought it might be good for you to look the part of a rising young banker.” Inside was a return ticket on the morning flight to Frankfurt from Berlin’s Tegel airport in exactly a week's time, together with the essential letter of exit authorisation.
*
Thomas left the meeting with Bettina depressed and with his emotions in a turmoil. He hadn’t particularly liked or trusted Mark but it was indirectly through him that he’d got killed. Next week he had to spy on his best friend, Stephan. He’d thought at the restaurant with Bettina that things would develop, that they were going somewhere together, that life was beginning to smile on him, but now this. Suddenly everything had changed and he’d become a puppet controlled by others. By the time he’d reached his building back in West Berlin his mood had darkened again further and he started to trudge up stairs, thinking furiously and again pitying himself, seeing himself as a victim unjustly dealt with.
“Such a bitch!” he thought. “Leading me on, getting me to take her to dinner in a smart restaurant and then setting me up like this to be caught. How could they do this to me? All I’ve done is go out to earn the money I needed for living, using my brains rather than sitting around moaning. Ridiculous to say I was stealing from them, like she said. Fucking idle peasants in this shitty country and she’s the worst. And she's a lying hypocrite, just like I told her.”
Suddenly he stopped and listened. There were familiar voices on his floor above and, newly energised, his despair forgotten he rushed upwards, leaping two or three steps at a time, to the group lying around outside his apartment door.
Hurling himself on Kai he tried to lift him and whirl him round in joy.
“Kai! You’re here! You did it! You’ve made it!”
He broke off at Kai’s yelp of pain and looked down. “But what’s happened to your foot?”
“I sprained it. Badly. But yes, we’re here. We’re here! We’re in West Berlin! We got out! How about letting us in and making us some food? We’ve been here for hours and we’re starving.”
Thomas embraced Ulrike and Bernhard excitedly, opened the door and led them to the kitchen.
“How did it go? God, I’m so excited you made it. Look, here’s the bathroom and here’s some towels – Ulrike, have a shower and get
cleaned up and then you two can do the same. Kai, tell me how you got on. I want to know everything.” He began making coffee.
“Well, we caught the train, just like you said.” Kai went over the whole story reaching the climax just as Bernhard returned washed and changed into clean clothes. There was absolute silence in the room.
“So there we were, about to be run over and with nowhere to go. The train was roaring towards us. I was in a panic. At least Ulrike was safe, out of the way.” he said, caressing her short, recently bleached blonde hair. “Then I saw Bernhard pull out the gun and start shooting. I thought he was crazy – you can’t stop a train like that. Was he trying to kill the driver for some reason? But when I heard the emergency brake come on I realized what he was doing.”
“I guess we have Frau Schwinewitz to thank after all." Kai went on. "Without her gun, the train would have run us over. But it was Bernhard that saved our lives. The driver jumped down from the cab, waving around a torch, and then collapsed on his knees, thinking he'd hit us, I guess. That's when Ulrike squeezed past to the front, crying like crazy, throwing up because she was terrified about what she'd find and as he was talking to her we got up from beside the rails and Bernhard tapped him on the shoulder. The guy nearly had a heart attack, spun round and Bernhard said "Hey, we need a ride to the West. Didn't have time to buy tickets but could you take us anyway?"
Everyone laughed. Bernhard grinned, thinking back on the man’s face, remembering that the driver had seemed more relieved that they were alive than scared of what they might do.
Kai sipped his coffee and took a bite of his cheese omelette. “Mmmm, Affen Titten geilen, man.”
“The driver, Franz his name was, was a nice guy.” Bernhard said. “We got in the cab with him and when we explained our story, he was really friendly. He kept on saying ‘Just you wait until I tell my wife!’ He told us his wife’s friends teased her because of his boring job. ‘They’ll all be jealous as hell!’ he said. It was his last shift so he insisted in taking us to Leinestraße and bringing us back to his place to get some sleep. We didn’t want to wake you up in the middle of the night, so that’s what we did. And his wife was a nurse so she strapped up Kai’s ankle. They wanted to take him to the hospital but we couldn’t risk that, him having to give all his details.”
“From what I hear, Stasi agents are in West Berlin all the time.” Kai added. “And with the Frau Schwinewitz thing it’s going to be too risky to stay here so we need to leave very soon. Bernhard’s going to Munich tomorrow to his cousin. Ulrike and I are still deciding where to go, maybe to Cologne for a bit as we’ve both got relatives there. And I wondered, Thomas, you going to the East as often as you do, if I give you the keys could you pick some things up from the flat, bring them over here. I’d really like my cowboy boots if you could get those and I know there’s some things that Ulrike wasn't able to bring with her which she'd really like if you could manage that.”
Chapter 13
Monday October 2 1989
THOMAS came through immigration to the Frankfurt Airport international arrivals area and glanced around the waiting crowd. Some waiting there were eager with anticipation, children sitting aloft on shoulders and waving excitedly at real or imagined grandparents or shouting at fathers back from business trips. A thin, elderly woman with loose, straggly grey hair hanging well past her shoulders stood slightly apart, starting forward every time a young man appeared but then falling back again, her shoulders drooping. Others stood waiting, bored, their duty done by being there and careless as to whether their visitors arrived or not. He’d let his mother know his arrival time but he wasn’t surprised not to see any sign of her. No doubt she was still harbouring some unknown grudge or other against him. For a moment the thought saddened him.
He took the subway, exiting at Taunusanlage. It was a clear day, warm and bright with slight, scudding clouds, although it was already well into autumn. He was very early and decided to walk the long way round, through the park and past the Mövenpick ice cream café.
Among the drug addicts shivering in the sun and the homeless soaking up the warmth until it was time for the soup kitchens to open he was surprised to see some clean but shabbily dressed young people. One of them, a man of about twenty, was holding up a placard with the request: “Refugee from East Germany – please help.” Disturbed, Thomas rummaged through his pocket and dropped a 2DM coin into the cap in front of the man. It bothered him that this might now be the fate of Kai and Ulrike. Frankfurt was particularly expensive as a German city but any city, Cologne for instance, was going to be expensive compared with West Berlin and vastly more so than East Berlin. He’d asked Kai how much money he’d got but Kai had simply said in his casual, careless style “Oh, plenty, man! More than enough.” which Thomas was certain was untrue.
He entered the Deutsche Bank building and stood for a while gazing round at the interior. He knew the twin towers well from the street but had never before been inside. Everything from the unpolished granite floor to the small fountain and pond was in typical Deutsche Bank style, understated but denoting power. People in suits were hurrying around, criss-crossing the lobby and constantly entering or leaving the elevators positioned at the sides.
Thomas glanced at his watch and approached the reception desk, disdained the stiff smile offered, and asked for Stephan. Moments later, as he was standing looking idly at the lifts, waiting for Stephan to emerge from one of them, he felt himself enveloped in a bear hug from behind and lifted slightly before a beaming Stephan released him.
“One of the perks!” he said, pointing back across the entrance hall. “Express lifts from the Board floors reserved for the privileged few. That's me now. Left hoi polloi behind, I have! It’s great to see you again, though. It must be at least a year since you first promised to visit here. Great night at the opera, though. How's Bettina? Still beating you up!" He laughed and punched Thomas lightly on the shoulder. "Come on, let’s look around before we have lunch.”
The various floors appeared identical to Thomas, differing only in the particular modern artist chosen to decorate the walls of each. Thomas’s knowledge of the modern art world was hazy but he recognised some of the paintings from his visits to Kassel’s documenta and was impressed with works on the executive floor where Stephan worked. He looked closely at an installation set in an alcove. "Ah, Joseph Beuys. Now that he's dead I guess it's politically OK to bring him in to this temple to capitalism. Or maybe it's an ironic comment on where the bank's business funding ends up. What do you think, Stephan?"
“Nothing to do with the beauty of art!” Stephan laughed. “It’s purely utilitarian. Someone getting out of the lift and seeing a Gerhard Richter knows he’s on the wrong floor – he’d better get out of there fast and back to his own grubby area with Damien Hirsts on view!”
Leaving the lift on the first floor they walked along the suspended path which overlooked the main entrance and led towards the cafeteria. Below him Thomas could see the revolving doors and the hanging sculpture made of myriad crystal rods.
“This is one of the best things about working here.” said Stephan, taking in the whole place with a proprietorial wave of his arm. “They call it the cafeteria but it’s really a high level restaurant with its own kitchens run by a really great chef. None of this fast food rubbish for us! It’s probably the most important place in the whole bank. It’s where careers are made or lost.”
“Of the cooks or the staff?” asked Thomas as they sat down by a window overlooking the trees and the park and Stephan poured each of them a glass of Riesling.
“Cooks don’t have careers, they have jobs. If you come here make sure you use your lunchtimes efficiently. It’s one of the best ways to get to know people and to exchange information and it’s information that’s our lifeblood. For me it’s easy – people know I can’t say much about what I do because it’s mostly reserved information, confidential, but everyone tells me what they’re up to, maybe hoping I’ll pass it on to Herren.
It’s fascinating, really interesting.”
They were silent for a while as they ate. Thomas glanced round and listened to the hubbub and clatter, open eyed and somewhat astonished at what he took to be the casual sophistication of the diners. “It’s like my first day at secondary school! All these people. Everything so new and unfamiliar. I feel a bit overawed, like I was twelve again.”
“Well, at least you can keep secrets.” Stephan looked at him, smiling slightly.
Thomas was startled, thinking that Stephan had learned of his Stasi role. A sense of sudden shame and embarrassment welled up as he thought again about having to spy on his best friend. He reddened.
“I’ve got to hand it to you. Nobody ever found out about me and Suzie Bausch after you caught us that day in the sports pavilion.”
Thomas laughed, relaxing. “Yeah, that was hard not dropping hints, what with her being the headmaster’s daughter and her reputation for being so prim and untouchable. You were lucky it was me – you were at it so hard that I doubt even Bausch himself could have separated you.”
“That was a great summer. What were we, fifteen I think. First times for each of us. She might have seemed prim but, well, believe me ... ” He sighed. “My ma was best friends with Susie’s and they’d have killed me if they’d known what was going on. She went to Mainz in September and we lost touch. I wonder where she is now. God, those were the days.”
He sat up, reached into his briefcase and handed Thomas a sheet of paper.
“OK, business first. Here’s your interview schedule. Today you’ll be meeting people from corporate finance. The first two work together in the German top corporate team, mainly following the Daimler conglomerate companies. Be wary of Hans Paris, the MD, who’s a shark. He’ll probably try to intimidate you to see how you react under pressure. Give him back as good as he gives, particularly if he’s rude – he just loves arrogant arseholes. The other three are from the international team: Herbert Sheidt heads Italy, and you’ll have a great time with him, I’m certain. The last two are technocrats. Likely to ask you theoretical questions on DCFs or IRRs, that kind of thing.”
