Berlin Centre

by Max Hertzberg

  With a clatter of carriage doors and the tramp of heavy feet, passport control and customs entered my part of the train. I could hear compartment doors scraping open, the polite but stern greeting from the customs officers: Guten Tag, Zollverwaltung der DDR, echoing down the corridor.

  Passport control were already hauling the door to my compartment open. The corporal I’d interviewed just the day before stepped in. The other passengers, a couple of pensioners from our side, visibly shrank at the sight at him. They held out their blue passports, the statistics forms folded up inside.

  Without even a glance at me, the corporal opened up the briefcase hanging in front of his chest to make a flat surface to hold the passports open on. His eyes darted between faces and passport photos, noting the shape of mouth, nose, eyebrows, cheekbones then spending more time on the ear than any of the other facial features. Satisfied with the biometrics, the corporal, in the same stern tone as before, asked the purpose of the veterans’ journey.

  “Our granddaughter’s wedding,” the old lady mumbled, looking down. Her husband took her hand and flicked quick glances at the corporal.

  The rubber exit stamp was pressed down on the passports and, with a salute, the corporal handed them back.

  It was my turn to be checked. I looked into the corporal’s eyes, but saw no flicker of recognition. He followed the same procedure as with the old couple, carefully checking my West German passport and my East German exit visa, but didn’t bother asking the purpose of my journey.

  With a salute and a cursory “Hope you enjoyed your stay in the German Democratic Republic,” the corporal was gone.

  After a brief visit by the customs officer, who threw an uninterested look into the couple’s luggage but ignored me, silence descended in the compartment. There was no murmur of conversation, just the restless shuffle of nervous movements.

  I remained in my seat, watching the platform through the window. I felt the judder as train doors slammed shut, and a moment later, the station emptied of life. With a jerk, the locomotive pulled us out of Marienborn, under the inspection bridge and over the level crossing, gaining speed as it entered a corridor of high fences.

  Six kilometres later we passed beneath another inspection bridge then the fences abruptly ended. We had reached the West.

  I could see the reflection of the old couple in the window, I saw their eyes fall away from the scenery outside, the old man stood up and fetched his bag from the luggage rack, pulled out a wrap of sandwiches and a couple of apples. Another movement yielded a flask.

  “Cup of coffee, young man?” enquired the old lady, holding out a steaming plastic cup.

  I shook my head. My ears picked up the bustle and hum of conversation—even the odd laugh—from up and down the carriage as the passengers collectively began to breathe again.

  We reached Helmstedt a few minutes later and the West German BGS and Customs boarded. Customs took my luggage apart, not that there was much in there for them to look at: some Western clothes and underwear, all from C&A or H&M with a few Karstadt and Horten labels on show for the sake of variety, along with shaving tackle and other toiletries. A sheaf of business papers, impenetrable to all but the most financially-gifted, and an introductory letter beneath a convincingly faked letterhead from the Federal Ministry of Intra-German relations complemented my fake West German identity documents and provided a reason for the ostensible trip to the East.

  The papers were ignored but the customs officer was gleefully smug when he came across a half-smoked packet of untaxed Marlboro, bought from the Intershop.

  I listened to his lecture on how duty-free purchases from over there supported the Ostzone, that the proceeds from the sales paid for the inhumane and murderous border we’d just passed through. I set my face to politely neutral and pretended to listen carefully as he told me I should really be given an on-the-spot fine for smuggling, but that he’d let me off this time.

  After a further minute of desultory searching, the customs officer withdrew, and it was my turn to begin breathing again. The Marlboro had been a deliberate plant, I’d been told the West Germans generally paid more attention to working-age travellers who’d been in the East, and an innocuous packet of coffin nails for customs to confiscate and smoke themselves was far less conspicuous than being completely clean.

  The pensioners had watched the set piece with interest, and now the old man piped up: “Sometimes take their job too seriously, don’t they?”

  I came up with some inconsequential reply and moved to another compartment at the next stop. Didn’t need a pair of old gasbags rabbiting on for the rest of my journey.

  25

  West Germany

  Cologne

  It was already dark by the time we neared Cologne. The train crawled across the heavy steel bridge that spans the Rhine and slipped to an untidy halt next to a statue of one of the Hohenzollerns on a horse. I bent low to see the tips of the floodlit cathedral towers through the window. It was the first time I’d been to West Germany, and maybe that was why I was seeing revisionist symbolism everywhere, starting with these two great edifices: the monumental bridge, dedicated to the Kaiser’s family, and the lofty Gothic pile built for a dead religion.

  I’d done my preparations well, checked the training films back at the Centre, examined photographs of the station and maps of the city, so when we finally pulled up at the platform, I didn’t need to stop to read signs or ask the way, but headed down the steps and under the tracks to the main station entrance. Despite the late hour, the concourse, all glass and red-brick was alive with travellers and porters, a queue waited patiently outside the late-opening post-office, gangs of teenagers gathered by the left-luggage lockers to drink weak beer and harass homeless drunks who were rolling out their blankets for the night.

  Outside, a police car waited in the taxi ranks and rafts of travellers, lit by a neon advertisement for Kölsch beer, waded across the busy square. My confident step broke for a moment as I paused to appreciate the cathedral I’d just been mentally criticising—the intricate tracing of its towers reached high above the station’s grimy glass canopy.

  A jolt in the back as a man in a trilby and grey overcoat pushed past and I was on the move again, heading for the steps to the tunnel where the trams run. On the platform, I looked around—there were simply too many people here, too many lines serving the station, it was practically impossible to spot any tails. Rather than waste time watching the ebb and flow of the crowds, I took the first tram that arrived, getting off a few stops later, at Poststrasse.

  There were far fewer people at that station, and after a couple more trams had gone by, I was the only person left. I boarded the next service and remained standing near the entrance. As the doors began to concertina shut, I squeezed through, back onto the platform, turning to watch as the tram pulled away. I was alone again, just how I like it.

  Satisfied with progress, I changed to the opposite platform, catching the next tram to Neumarkt before changing onto a line that ran above ground. One stop later, I left the tram again.

  I was now at the edge of Cologne’s night life, and without looking around, I dived into the alleyways that lead down to the Rhine, past brightly lit raucous bars and drunken guests who were still imbibing a late Christmas spirit. I turned into a tight lane, finding a doorway to tuck myself into as I watched the way I’d just come. After a couple of minutes I was satisfied I had no shadows and, still in the shelter of the doorway, I changed my hat and turned my reversible jacket inside out to show a darker colour.

  Further down the alley, I found an open gate that took me into the back yard of a pub. Keeping my head down, and deliberately swaying a little from side to side, as if I’d been on the beer all night, I went through the back door and into the bar, threading my way through lines of drinkers, arms hooked together, already practising carnival songs. Out the front door, I darted into another ginnel that beckoned from the other side of the street.

  This time, when I fou
nd the back door to a bar I had to dodge around a wide barman shouting at me in the incomprehensible sing-song local dialect. I ducked below his outstretched arms, and zig-zagged through the bar, ignoring the curses and names he threw at me.

  Back on the lane outside, I had no clear idea where I was, but I headed in a straight line for a few hundred metres, then took a left, down to the river. Sooner or later, I’d hit the banks of the Rhine, from there I’d go downstream, back towards the railway bridge where I’d find a bar on a back alley. That was the rendezvous point with one of our informants.

  A middle-aged man was having difficulty balancing on his tall stool. His top button was undone, the grey tie dangling in a puddle of beer on the bar. With a copy of the local tabloid newspaper, Express, by his side and a small glass of beer in front of him, he fitted the description I had for my contact.

  Pushing my way through the crowd, I sidled close enough to read the date on the masthead of the newspaper. It was from the day before, the 27th of December 1983.

  “Yesterday’s news is always more interesting,” I told the owner.

  He turned to look at me, revealing a wide chest and wider belly stretching his shirt. His hair and moustache were slicked back with oil, and a long, thin cigar was stuck into an even longer and thinner face. “You wanna buy it?” he asked in high German tinted with soft Rhenish.

  “I’ve only got Dutch Guilder,” I gave him the second part of the pass phrase.

  We were interrupted by the bartender who put a narrow glass of beer in front of me. I looked at it, the beer was light with hardly any head and the glass only held enough for a couple of gulps.

  “Wells do gleisch berappe? Ov leever hingerdren?” the barman asked in the sing-song accent of the city. He held a carpenters pencil in one hand and a beermat in the other.

  I had no idea what he was saying and could do nothing better than gawp at him.

  “Gleisch,” said my contact, pushing a five Mark coin over the counter. “Hä bezahle doch gleisch, un isch met.”

  The barman took the money and slapped a few coins of change down before going back to draw more beer.

  “I don’t like Beatrix, it’s high time she abdicated,” said my contact, using high German again. “That’s what you needed to hear, no? So now we’re both satisfied that we’re in good company you can finish your beer and we’ll get going.”

  26

  West Germany

  Cologne

  We headed along the bank of the Rhine, passing several landing stages occupied by Köln-Düsseldorfer river cruisers, finally reaching a jetty opposite a large white church, its high tower shrouded in scaffolding. My contact opened a gate to let us onto the pier.

  I waited while he locked up, then followed him down to a small launch at the end of a landing stage. The boat was made of fibreglass, colour unknown and unknowable in the shadows. I can tell you it was small, just four metres or so in length, similar in size and shape to the Anka angling dinghies so popular at home. A medium-sized outboard motor hung off the transom.

  “Get the lines,” my contact instructed as he juggled with the choke and pulled the starter cord.

  We zipped around the berthed tourist boats and onto the misty river, keeping to the left bank until we’d passed under a bridge. There was still traffic on the water, long lines of barges pushed by tugs with deep fog-horns and deeper draughts that dragged us close as we skirted their sterns.

  The gurgle of water lapping on hulls and the beating of engines came at us from all sides, acoustic shrapnel splintering the fog. Our navigation lights were unlit, even though visibility was near-zero on the river, but my contact seemed to know what he was doing. he pulled the rudder hard and we listed heavily as the bow veered towards the far bank.

  I clamped both hands on the gunwale, startled by the heavy pitch as we nudged through the wake of a push tug, its three white navigation lights high above us. Within another minute we were in calmer waters, nearing a quay below a suspension bridge, the lights of the convoys out of sight beyond a spit of land that sheltered the harbour entrance.

  “Up the stairs. A grey Renault is waiting for you,” my contact said, using the engine to hold us against a flight of concrete steps that led to the promenade above.

  I stepped off the boat, and without another word, the launch scurried astern, back into the dank night. The eddies it left behind were soon swept downstream in the relentless current of the Rhine.

  The steps were damp and slippery with slime, the handrail scaled with rust. I paused as I came level with the road at the top of the embankment. As promised, a grey Renault 30 waited, but in the shadow of the bridge, it was impossible to tell whether anyone was behind the wheel. A brief look around, no-one was loitering, so I climbed the last few steps and crept warily towards the car.

  There was a driver behind the wheel and she wound down the window as I came close.

  “Cold this time of year,” she said, her voice hard on the frost-bitten air.

  “I dislike hot summers,” I replied.

  “Let’s hope spring comes soon.”

  I walked around to the passenger side and got in. “I don’t know who makes these exchanges up, but they never sound anything but stupid,” I said as I slid the seat back a couple of notches to give myself some leg room.

  “I’m to take you to Bonn,” the driver said, turning the ignition and ignoring my attempt at small-talk. “I’ll brief you on the way.”

  “Any new developments?”

  “Source Bruno was released this morning,” she replied. “Right now, he’s watching television at home.”

  We were soon on the motorway, heading south. Traffic was light, and my driver made the most of the empty Autobahn, zipping between lorries and fast night-time drivers.

  “Far as we can tell, he’s under house-arrest,” the driver told me. Sanderling was the codename she was using. “There’s a car parked outside his flat with two men in civilian clothing. They took up position before he arrived home and the car hasn’t moved since, although the watchers have changed shift twice.”

  “Police?”

  “We think so. The car is registered to a civilian address, but that doesn’t mean much.”

  Bruno had been brought by car in the mid-morning when Sanderling and her crew had observed him enter his apartment block. His transport had left once he’d entered the building, leaving behind the other car with the watchers. Since then, Bruno hadn’t left the building.

  There had been no reports in the media, and no news from other sources we keep in the various security and police agencies of West Germany. It wasn’t Sanderling’s job to interpret the information she was gathering, but she was clearly puzzled by the Bruno situation.

  “Any other watchers? Other vehicles, observation from nearby positions?”

  “We’re working on it. We have our own stationary observation diagonally opposite Bruno’s building. It’s an empty shop with a good view of his flat. So far we’ve seen no interaction between the two watchers in the car and any other persons. Our guess is there are no other observation points, just the vehicle.”

  I waited while Sanderling curved around the motorway junction Bonn-Nord, then told her what I wanted:

  “I need you to arrange a diversion—I want to speak to Bruno.”

  27

  West Germany

  Bonn

  We drove through Bonn, the motorway first arcing high over railway tracks and industrial estates then ploughing through a housing estate and finally entering the forest. Ten minutes later we entered Meckenheim on the trunk road.

  “Federal Crime Agency is that way, best to avoid that neighbourhood if you can. Too many eyes,” Sanderling said, pointing off to the right. “Bruno’s residence is just to the south of here.”

  We took a few left turns, the roads growing quiet and residential. Tangles of streets were lined with modern blocks of flats and small shops. Off to the side, small, self-build houses were set in winter-bare gardens.

>   We pulled up at the side of the road, and Sanderling took me down a narrow service alley, between skips and large wheely bins. She knocked softly on a back door, then used a key to let herself in, holding the door open for me to follow.

  The room beyond was dark, and remained that way until Sanderling had shut the door. She tapped a switch and light flooded the empty store-room. That was when I got my first proper sight of her. She looked West German—at ease in her tailored power shoulders and coiffed blonde hair. She was tall, almost as tall as me—which isn’t saying much, but gives you an idea of what I’m talking about—and thin: her face was so sharp she could have opened letters with her cheekbones.

  Without a word, she took me through another couple of doors and into the empty shopfront. The only light was from the streetlamps, leaching through the layer of whitewash that had been smeared over the tall windows. Abandoned shelves stood around, and a broken office chair kneeled against the wall.

  A diminutive goon sat by one of the windows, his eyes trained on gaps in the whitewash.

  “Anything new?” Sanderling asked him.

  Without allowing his eyes to stray from the window, the small man held out his notebook and shook his head.

  My contact looked at the jottings and gave the notebook back, then beckoned me over to another part of the window.

  “Bruno lives in the building opposite, first floor, right hand side.” She stepped aside to give me access to a flaw in the whitewash. Through the gap I could see a modern concrete building, each floor set back further than the one below, giving each storey enough space for a stepped balcony. “The observation vehicle is down there, on the bend, facing the other way. And that service road, over there,” she pointed out an alley two buildings further on from Bruno’s flat, “it leads to the back entrance of the flats. There’s a fire door in the basement of Bruno’s building, no lock, it’s operated by a push-bar and can’t be opened from outside.”