The Helsinki Pact

by Alex Cugia

  “I have two important projects, one for each of you.” Dieter re-lit a half-smoked cigar. He moved to the window and opening it waved his hand about to clear the smoke. “Let’s start with you, Bettina.” He stared into the street for a minute or more, his hands on the sill, not moving, then turned back into the room.

  “As you'll know, the Stasi was one of the few organisations in the country permitted to hold foreign currency. Each regional head office was provided with the funds it needed direct from the central bank. A detailed reference note was then sent to head office for updating information records.”

  Bettina nodded. Although she had never been involved in the funding side, she was aware of the financial autonomy of the regional offices.

  “On 31 December, Gerd Henkel, the Treasurer of the Dresden operation, requested currency valued at around ten million Ost marks. The majority was in Ost marks, a portion in Deutsche marks and the remainder in French francs. It was sent from Berlin a week later, this Monday past, and apparently deposited as usual in the special custody vault within the local branch of the bank. Three days later Henkel informed us that when he next checked there was no trace of the currency in that vault.”

  He inhaled deeply, then let out a thick plume of smoke. Thomas coughed as the cloud hit him and, admiration and horror mixing, tried to imagine how Dieter's lungs must have felt.

  “Who signed the documentation for receipt?” Bettina asked.

  “As is customary, an officer of the central bank and the director of the branch. For security reasons the agents escorting the van are not let into the special vault. Funds of this kind are taken by them to the outer vault, checked there, and then moved into the special vault by a bank employee under the close watch and control of the director or someone nominated by him.”

  “Could it have been stolen afterwards? Who else besides the director is aware of the security measures protecting the vault? And how do these work anyway? Who has keys, for instance?”

  “There were no signs of burglary. Apart from Henkel, half a dozen people have limited access, meaning they can execute written orders on the account. But Henkel, the Treasurer of the Dresden operation, Modrow nominally, of course, Roehrberg, his Deputy Spitze, and possibly one other have unlimited access ...”

  “Unlimited … ?” Bettina interjected.

  “I'm waiting to learn the exact security details but I understand that these four, possibly five, each have a set of keys and separately know different parts of the combination. The entry keys are all the same and so anyone with a set can get as far as the outer vault. However, to enter the special vault itself two separate combination locks need to be opened and this then needs two of that highest level group to attend the opening.”

  “Or for one person to learn a second combination element from another … ?”

  “Yes, that's probably true. There could be collusion or pressure, threats perhaps. As far as I know, however, although the combination part is sophisticated so that any two parts will work together to open the lock there's no record of which parts are used on any one occasion.”

  Thomas and Bettina remained silent, watching as Dieter stretched out his legs and puffed on his cigar.

  “There are several possibilities. Two people might have acted together or just one, as we considered. It's unlikely, but there might even have been further collusion quite outside any of the inner circle. Perhaps the money was never even deposited in the first place. However, that's not very likely, I think, as it has to be checked and signed for by senior officials. The security measures to enter the bank are not particularly sophisticated, especially for someone working for the organization. The special vault itself really is supposed to another matter. But perhaps the security there is not as good as we thought.”

  “Any suspicions?”

  “No. The only thing which I find improbable is that an ordinary bank officer would try to steal money from the Stasi. If he wanted to steal money he could have found easier and less dangerous clients to steal from.”

  “So you think it’s an inside job?”

  “Yes. That’s the reason I’ve been charged with the investigation. I want you to go down and find out what happened, Bettina. You know your way around Dresden, and hopefully the fact that you’re a young, attractive girl with, they’ll imagine, very little experience will disarm them, maybe make them overconfident that they're getting away with it. This also depends on how you decide to play it, Bettina.”

  He gave her a sideways glance. Thomas felt suddenly nervous at the thought of Bettina getting friendly with dangerous men.

  “If you find out something, don’t take any action, but report direct to me, and to me alone. You have to be extremely careful. Whoever stole the money could be acting with others, even people really high up in the organisation. This file contains all the documentation I have. You will leave immediately and return within a week. Don’t forget, we have very little time left before we lose our jurisdiction completely, before chaos ensues. That’s probably what the criminals are counting on. Once we become a single nation and every last trace of the Stasi disappears, it will become almost impossible for anyone to find out exactly what happened or trace the culprits.”

  “Thomas, your role will be twofold. You will travel with Bettina to Dresden. She will be acting in the open and her mission could be very dangerous. You will be her shadow and follow her whenever and wherever possible. No one knows you within the organisation and so provided you don't acknowledge her in public no one will realise your role as protector. That could be very useful." He again drew deeply on his cigar and waved away the cloud of smoke round his head. "And I’ve heard very complimentary remarks about your growing ability to handle a gun.”

  Bettina looked the other way, a little embarrassed.

  “Now, to the second matter. I want you, Thomas, to find out everything you can about an organisation called Phoenix Securities. There seems to be someting of a focus on Dresden though I'm unclear about details. Phoenix is promoting loans and a number of our informers all over the country have been contacted. It’s very strange. Western banks don’t use untrained personnel and are very selective about who they grant loans to. This company isn’t properly registered, seems to promise loans to anyone who wants them, and uses unskilled staff, all of it local. I’m pretty sure it’s a pyramid scheme. I want to avoid having thousands of people here deprived of their savings.”

  Thomas wasn’t quite sure he’d understood. He knew the principle of pyramid schemes, scams where the pyramid base needed to grow constantly larger to meet commission obligations further up the chain. But what Dieter was telling him didn't make sense. “But you said these people offer loans, not take people's savings. They’re the only ones who have something to lose if things collapse, surely?”

  “Maybe. That’s what I don’t understand. I’m certain there’s some kind of currency fraud going on but I’m unclear about the mechanism. Maybe they’re promoting loans in Ost marks which will be repaid in DMs once unity happens. Maybe their interest rates are exorbitant. It’s impossible to tell since to our knowledge they still haven’t yet completed a single transaction. They seem only to be getting things ready, but their network is expanding very rapidly. We've had over fifty reports in the last week. Word is spreading fast. We're getting reports from even the tiniest towns, even from a few villages.”

  “Are there any charges you could stick on them?”

  “Not yet, not until we find out exactly what they are up to − and that’s what I need you to do. They’re based in Frankfurt, which is why I thought you were well placed to look into it. I also thought it could be to your advantage should the BND find out about you in the future. If there is effectively some element of fraud, they might be interested, assuming unification happens. Maybe your friend Stephan can help you out too?”

  “I’ll try calling him. He’s travelling often in the East now, helping set up Deutsche Bank’s branch network.”

  “Well, he
can surely be of help anyway. I’m sure he travels back and forth, and maybe he can find something out through his connections. Act as if one of your Eastern friends had asked you about it. He’s met Bettina, right?” He glanced through the file, handing it over to Thomas after a brief moment.

  The phone started ringing. Dieter sighed. “Call me up as soon as you have discovered something. And don’t talk to anyone else … no one but me, not even to my superiors.”

  He picked up the receiver and waved them out of the room.

  Chapter 20

  Sunday January 14 1990

  IT was late morning and Bettina was driving her Trabant at full tilt to Dresden. Running at close to the speed limit of sixty-two miles per hour, the engine was raging and juddering as if it would fall off any moment. The road, like most East German roads, was made of prefabricated concrete slabs and as the car raced and leaped down it the rhythmic clunking of the wheels hitting the ends of the slabs turned the vehicle into an ominous metronome. This had droned on for over an hour, as the landscape changed from sparse forest to rolling countryside and back again.

  Thomas, unused to Bettina’s exuberant driving and to the unfamiliar road surface, had passed the first part of the journey anxiously expecting the Trabant to roll into the ditch on a corner or to break an axle with one jar too many. The steady thud of the wheels eventually relaxed him, his nervous grip on the door handle relaxed, and he passed into a comatose state, his mind wandering here and there erratically but always returning to Bettina and whether he’d ever be able to be with her as he wanted. He was drowsily enjoying an increasingly passionate and loving embrace with her when she raised her head from his lap and he found himself staring at Frau Schwinewitz smiling grotesquely up at him. A particularly severe bump jolted him fully awake and to banish the vision he scrabbled for something to say, anything to bring him back to reality.

  “Bettina, what are you going to do if unification really happens? Any plans? Will you travel, perhaps? Are you worried at all?”

  They travelled at least a further kilometre without response and Thomas thought at first she hadn’t heard.

  “Of course I'm fucking worried! Yes! Yes, I've been thinking about it a great deal, about lots of things. Like Dieter, I'm pretty sure now that unification's likely. So I'm worried about how I'll manage for money. Between the museum job and my Stasi stipend I was OK, just. But with unification they'll both go. It's the victors that write history, isn't that what they say, and the version we give in the museum won't suit the West."

  They were both silent as the car thumped monotonously over the slabs.

  “But I'm more worried about how we’re going to manage when we’re dragged into joining a country that’s so different from ours. People keep saying how good it will be but that's bullshit, self deluding bullshit. Prices will rise. We’ll be the poor relations. Things are difficult here but at least people have jobs and houses and get enough to eat. I just don’t like the way the West is saying that what matters is buying, buying, buying things, buying things all the time, supermarkets with tins of this and packets of that. That’s not what life should be about. You're not a proper citizen unless you spend money all the time it seems.”

  “Oh, come on, Bettina. I live in the West and it’s not like that at all. That’s just more lies from the Party to keep people from trying to leave. You’ve been brainwashed. Sure, we make more money in the West than people do here but we have choices. You have none.”

  “What the hell has choice got to do with anything worthwhile, with living? Choice! That's a capitalist marketing slogan. I don’t want to be able to choose between 57 different kinds of baked beans. Who the hell wants to eat rubbishy food anyway? You talk about the Party and the Stasi controlling people’s lives but I’ll tell you this, in the West it’s big business that controls people's lives and the people have been so mesmerised by this fucking choice you say is so good, this buying of stuff all the time, that they just lie down and let big business piss all over them and then they say, Oh, thank you, sir, thank you very much sir, please piss on me a bit more, sir. They don't have lives any more, they're just drones. Give me the honesty of a socialist approach any time even if we sometimes do have problems with supplies.”

  Right on cue the engine coughed and died and Bettina steered the slowing car on to the verge. She sat for a moment leaning forward, her hands covering her face then threw open the door, pulled hard on the bonnet release, marched to the front and with a noisy clatter hauled the bonnet up and jammed it on the support. Thomas struggled out of the car to join her.

  “Do you know about engines?" He shook his head. "No, I thought not! Well, just get the hell out of it. Piss off! Go away!”

  Thomas scurried back to the passenger seat thinking that Bettina was probably quite capable of pulling the engine off its mounting and hurling at him if he got in her way. He sat watching her through the half moon of the opened bonnet, her mouth working and her face scowling as she explored the engine components. Finally she reached down, apparently wriggling some hidden pipe back into place, slammed the bonnet down, returned to her seat and turned the key. The starter groaned, turning the engine ineffectually until it suddenly coughed, died, caught again, roared into life, and died, the starter motor now groaning slower, and slower, then giving up completely.

  “Aaaaarghhh. These bastard batteries that can never hold a charge.”

  She caught Thomas’s eye and laughed. “They’re from the West.” she lied. “We had a choice!”

  “Out!” she shouted and with Thomas behind and Bettina pushing on the frame of the open driver’s door they got the Trabant rolling until she scrambled in, threw the car into gear and shuddered it into life, hiding Thomas in a pall of blue, oily smoke as he staggered up to where she was now waiting, racing the engine, and slumped into his seat, almost tumbling out again as she bumped off the verge and roared away, high-revving without a glance behind her, making an obscene gesture out of the window to the angry scream of a horn from a now sharply swerving Zil, and showing not the slightest hint of contrition that Thomas could see. He stared at her, his emotions flickering between horror and admiration, and settled himself deeply into his seat.

  Several kilometres passed. Thomas experimented silently with several phrases but said nothing.

  The soporific thunk of the mobile metronome continued.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about things.” Her tone was quieter, more relaxed, as if taming the engine and giving the finger to a Zil-driving apparatchik had put her in a better mood.

  “If unification comes about then they're going to push for Berlin becoming the new capital of a united Germany. That’s going to mean prices going up. That's not just food and clothing but particularly rents. Dieter thinks they’re going to increase dramatically, get more in line with levels in the West. My rent agreement is just about up and so if they increase rents like we think they might I'm going to be out on the street, particularly if I have no job. Maybe Dieter will be able to pull a few string for me though, perhaps get it renewed on good terms.”

  She was silent. He looked sideways at her, wondering if there was more than a professional interest behind Dieter’s concern and her apparent reliance on him. They spent a lot of time together and he could see she found him attractive, despite the differences in their positions and the age gap which clearly existed.

  “Dieter seems to worry a lot about you. Looks after you, I suppose. What about, umm, his wife? Ummm, he is married, I suppose. Man like that. Or, or, ummm, has he a girlfriend? Maybe.”

  He turned and stared out of the window, wondering again at why he so often ended up wrong-footed, why she had this capacity to turn him into a babbling schoolboy unable to handle his feelings.

  The sparse forests came and went.

  “Where are we going to stay in Dresden? At your family’s place? Are your brother and mother both there now? Oh, no, I remember, your mother moved, didn’t she? But you still have it, don’t you? I think you
said you had an aunt living there. How big is it? Is it in the centre or ... ”

  “You don't even wait for my answers! I've known Dieter for a long time. I won't give you details but I was kind of forced into working with him and I really resented that. But what I've learned is that he's got integrity and he's loyal but also that he's stubborn and awkward although he comes out right more often than not. I think he'd like to be more sociable but people don't really understand him well enough and he won't compromise, even for the Party, if he thinks something's wrong. He's made enemies but he doesn't seem to care about that. I guess that's why he's not as senior as he could be.”

  Again there was silence for several minutes, broken only by the rhythmic drumming of the wheels on the slabs.

  “You said your brother was living between Dresden and Berlin. If you want we could stop by for a little while. What does he do?”

  “No, I’d rather not stop. He does nothing much." She laughed shortly. "Sits around in his room most of the day. I'll see him another time.”

  She grinned suddenly, glanced across and patted his leg with her hand, then left it lying there for a few beats of the wheels. “And no, Dieter and me, we're not lovers! I’ve learned the hard way to make a distinction between work and my personal life, Thomas. It might have been different if we hadn't been working together, although I guess if we hadn't then I wouldn't have got to know him as well as I do. But mixing the two leads to all sorts of complications and I made that mistake shortly after I was recruited. Not with Dieter though – I was furious with him at that time – but there was another young guy working closely with Dieter, we got thrown together a lot, he was sympathetic and, well, things happened. You saw him. Hanno.”

  She spoke quietly after another short silence. “Until I found out what he was really like.”

  He glanced over but it was clear there would nothing more. “And Dresden?" he asked. "Any ideas about lodgings?”