Berlin Centre

by Max Hertzberg

  As I came round the privacy curtain I could see into the next cubicle. A woman was lying there.

  Sleeping, drugged or in a coma? Couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you that it was Sanderling.

  “Herr Doktor?” I asked the medic, who was still busy with his notes. “The comrade here, will she be OK?”

  The doctor glanced up, saw that I was looking at Sanderling and jumped out of his chair. He yanked the curtain shut and shooed me out of the surgery, closing the door behind me.

  I leant on the wall of the corridor, wondering about the doctor’s reaction. It didn’t have to mean anything, I decided. Quite apart from patient confidentiality, the Firm was so obsessed with secrecy that I was sometimes surprised they didn’t make us come to work blindfolded.

  I headed down the hallway, opening doors as I went. The third door on the left was a bedroom, it looked available: nobody’s tat lying around, bed was made. I decided it was good enough for me.

  The next morning, the first thing I thought of was a cigarette. Pleased with that—it must have meant I was feeling better, I fished out the pack of Semper cigarettes that Holger had given me, fed one between my lips and lit up.

  Bad mistake.

  I didn’t have anything left to vomit up, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. When I’d finished dry-retching and I’d caught my breath, hand held to my complaining ribs, I looked for the cigarette. It was on the floor, still lit, quietly burning a hole in the brown lino.

  I picked it up and pinched it out, then pulled a small rug over the burn mark.

  My stomach was still grinding away and my mouth felt like the National People’s Army had been testing chemical weapons in there. I needed to sort myself out.

  Holger found me in the corridor, trying to remember where the bathroom was.

  “Reim—thought you’d escaped again!”

  I wasn’t in a joking mood, so I left him in the hall and banged into the bathroom, sluicing my mouth out with water before locking myself in a toilet cubicle. But Holger had obviously forgotten his manners.

  “You fit enough for breakfast?” he asked through the door.

  I didn’t bother answering, not verbally. I thought the sound of breaking wind and splashing in the pan would be an adequate response.

  “When you’ve finished here, come and get some breakfast, then we’ll have a chat,” he continued, his voice echoing around the tiled room.

  “A chat? It’ll be a bit more than that, won’t it?” I flushed and came out of the cubicle, heading for the washbasin. “Who’s doing the honours?”

  “I am.”

  I laughed and my head began to spin. A fortnight ago, I’d been asking Holger about the last time he’d seen Bruno, now it was my turn to answer the questions.

  41

  Building 74

  Reim’s room

  I still had a banging headache, and that little exchange with Holger hadn’t helped any, so when I got back to my room, I popped another three paracetamol, swallowing them dry. It was only then that I noticed the fresh suit laid out on the bed. One of my own, Holger must have brought it.

  The blue suit from the West had gone, whether to be binned or taken for some kind of forensic examination, I couldn’t say. The contents of the suit’s pockets were piled on the bedside table, minus the West German identification papers and money. But what I was really after was my hip flask.

  I gave it a shake—a drop or two left. I opened the cap and tipped the flask to my lips. The Doppelkorn burned as it trickled down my throat, but it straightened my back and sharpened my eyes. I put the flask back on the table, admiring the way my hands were no longer shaking.

  After that, climbing into the suit Holger had brought was the work of a minute or two. It was a brown number with light blue pinstripes, bought for me by my wife a few years before she left. The shirt was a lighter brown, another present from the wife, given to me at a different time, one I was also happy to forget.

  I didn’t feel too bad, despite all the stretching and hopping around on one leg that dressing entails. That counted as progress and I was tempted to try another cigarette to celebrate. But good sense won out and I left the packet where it was on the bedside table, wondering how I’d react to the sight of breakfast.

  The sitting room was empty, and the plates of food on the sideboard looked like half of Berlin Centre had marched through, helping themselves to provisions as they went.

  I decided to start small, putting a couple of Filinchen crispbreads on a plate, a scrape of margarine and a dollop of plum purée on the side.

  Sitting at the table, I looked at my breakfast. Usually, I couldn’t stand the sight of Filinchen, but right now it felt like the right thing to eat. I tried a mouthful, chewing the dry crumbs carefully before swallowing. My stomach growled, but in my book that didn’t count as a complaint, so I pasted some of the marge and plum spread over the top of the next cracker and tried again.

  It was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted, and I wolfed down the rest of the crispbread then sat back, waiting for any late reactions. None came.

  It was while I was sitting there, quietly listening to my body, that I realised the paracetamol had kicked in and my headache was now just a dull throb somewhere over the eyes. Perfectly manageable. But now I was no longer concentrating on my head, I was more aware of the bruising that was beginning to show up on my legs and chest. Not pleasant, but nothing I’ve not had before.

  I went back to the buffet, poked the congealed scrambled eggs and felt the cold coffee pot. I left them where they were and took a couple of slices of grey bread, wondering whether to risk any of the cold cuts, but deciding to stick with the plum purée, this time also dabbing some ersatz honey on the side of my plate.

  I poured myself a cup of sweet mint tea and took the whole lot back to my table.

  “Mint tea? We’re not at GST camp,” said Holger from the door, implying I was a schoolkid at pre-military training.

  “Be nice, I’m a sick man,” I grumped into my luke-warm drink.

  “Yeah, you’re not exactly looking top.” Holger sat himself opposite me and watched me cram my breakfast in. “Listen, a heads-up about how this is going to work. I’m to debrief you about your trip to Bonn. As you’ll have guessed, the whole thing is a mess and the brass are still arguing about how to share out the blame.”

  I nodded. I knew better than anyone else just what a mess the Bruno case had turned into, and I had the concussion and the broken ribs to prove it.

  “I’ve never seen it this bad,” Holger continued. “If it gets any worse, Mielke’s going to have to step in and bang some heads together.” General Mielke, the Big Boss of us all, Minister for State Security and, in our imaginations, somewhere on the scale between omniscient, omnipotent god and poison dwarf.

  “Who’s in the fight?” I asked, wondering whether to get another slice of Filinchen.

  “Who isn’t? Biggest schlamassel ever. My lot in HA II are saying it’s their baby since we were meant to be running Bruno and our operatives were the ones keeping tabs on him in Bonn. Your pals in ZAIG are saying they took over co-ordination after Bruno got arrested. If that’s not enough, the locals at District Administration Suhl want a slice of the action, even though they know they haven’t got a leg to stand on.

  “I’m the compromise. I do the first debriefing because I’m already familiar with the case and I’m from II. It’s a bit of an olive branch effort.”

  I sipped my mint tea and thought about Sanderling, asleep or half-dead in the sick bay. It would be nice to know which. “Operative Sanderling, she said she’s with your lot? What’s she doing here?”

  Holger went to the sideboard and poured himself some coffee. He took a sip and pulled a face, but brought the cup back anyway.

  “She was shot. But she’ll be OK. She’ll stay here until she’s in a fit state to be debriefed.”

  “Shot? Who shot her?” I’d heard only one shot that night on the border. Yesterday—it wa
s only yesterday morning when it had happened yet it felt like a week ago.

  “Who shot her?” Holger frowned in warning. “The West Germans shot her. Who else?”

  But that shot, I could remember it clearly: it came from somewhere to my left. It came from our side. It wasn’t the West German border police who had shot Sanderling.

  42

  Building 74

  Conference room

  Holger didn’t push me too hard during the debrief, instead he gave me lots of breaks and mint tea. That’s not to say he wasn’t thorough—he managed to pick up on a few things I hadn’t noticed during the mission.

  For an hour I described my trip to Bonn and the journey back to the GDR while he sat in silence. He raised his hand when I got to the bit where the Border Scout took me through the gate in the fences, telling me he didn’t need to know about that—whatever happened once I’d re-entered the territory of the GDR was out of bounds for the moment.

  “Don’t want to step on any toes, not until the brass have sorted themselves out,” he said. “I’ll give you a pen and paper this afternoon so you can write up that part of your statement.”

  After fetching another cup of sweet mint tea for me, he asked me to repeat the whole story and this time he made notes as we went along. So, once again, I started with the packet of duty-free Marlboro confiscated by the customs officer and ended with the final words from the West German border policeman somewhere in the greenery south of Vacha.

  Only the hiss of the reel to reel tape and the creak of the rafters disturbed the silence while Holger read through his notes. We were sitting in some kind of conference room on the top floor of the forestry house, pictures of skiffs and lakes adorned the walls, wickerwork lampshades hung from the collar beams that ran across the roof space. Rustic tables had been pushed together and padded chairs placed around the edge. Holger and I sat at one corner, our cups either side of the microphone that was positioned between us.

  “I’m wondering whether the opposition had awareness,” said Holger after a short silence, his pen hovering over the part of his notes which covered the train journey. “Someone on the train? Anyone taking an unwarranted interest?”

  I thought back to the outward leg of my trip to the West. I’d been vigilant, keeping an eye out, that’s just how it is your first time in the operational area—you’re nervous, your training kicks in. Plus, I’ve been getting some practice in spotting and losing tails over the last few months. Still, I’d not noticed anything or anyone on the train.

  “Only contact was with an old couple in my compartment. They were from Cottbus, said they were going to a wedding. I didn’t regard them as suspicious, although they started to get friendly once we’d crossed the border, so I moved to another carriage when we pulled into Brunswick.”

  “You felt you had to move?” Holger looked up from his notes.

  “Old folk. You know how they are, need someone to blether at so they don’t feel so lonely.”

  “OK. Nothing else? No other contact, no eyes on the train?”

  But Holger’s pen had already moved on, was now pointing at the paragraph covering my hour’s stay in Cologne. “Your dry-cleaning moves before making contact with the informant seem elaborate. Any reason?”

  “Caution. My first time in West Germany, wanted to make sure I did things by the book.”

  “Still rather elaborate,” Holger insisted.

  I sucked my teeth. What did he want me to say? “I did what I thought was right at the time.”

  “Any possibles, any hunches that made you go beyond the call?”

  “None. It was difficult terrain, so I went the extra mile. No other reason.”

  “When you made first contact, was there anyone interesting in the bar? Any curious citizens following you down to the boat?”

  “It was cold, it was damp. It wasn’t the kind of night West German security would be hanging around in doorways—they’re too used to comfort for that. Anyway, once on the river, we were out of sight. I told you about the fog.”

  “And your contacts, the guy in the bar and Sanderling: they used the correct passphrases?”

  But Holger knew they had, I’d already told him. He turned the sheet, started reading about Sanderling and my arrival at the empty shopfront in Meckenheim.

  “Any contact with Sanderling’s observation team?”

  “We weren’t introduced if that’s what you mean. Anyway, I only saw one of them, the other was off shift.”

  “Of course.” Holger pressed his lips together, pulled a folder towards him and flicked through until he settled on a typewritten report. “This is the record of the debriefing of both members of the observation team. Funny thing is, it says here that there was a change of shift while you were in Bruno’s flat. So you actually met both of them, didn’t you? When you came back from having a look at Bruno, it was a different observer sitting in the shop window.”

  I thought about it for a bit. Perhaps there had been a change. If that were the case then yes, I should have noticed—it’s my job to observe that kind of detail. But I’d been distracted—Bruno’s body and all that, not to mention wondering about the other watchers parked in the road.

  “You decided to take up operational contact with Subject Bruno. Was that part of the agreed operational plan?”

  “Not as such. The operational plan was drawn up on the basis that Bruno would still be in custody. There was zero expectation that he’d be released. Given the change in operational parameters, the difficult nature of seeking further orders from Berlin Centre due to our location in the operational area and the urgency arising from the nature of the development, I decided to exceed the established rules of operational conduct and adjust operational-tactical measures-”

  “Yes, OK. I’m just flagging it up. I’d have done the same,” Holger interrupted. What the tape didn’t pick up were his grimaces every time I said operational. He shared my allergy to the O-word—it was used far too often in the formal language of our Ministry.

  “The two men in the car on Bruno’s street. Any further observations?”

  “Sanderling informed me she’d had the plates checked, that it was registered in the name of a local civilian. She suggested the occupants were likely to be members of a West German police agency, possibly Bruno’s employer, the Federal Crime Agency. I personally observed that the registration plates were local to Bonn, and the two men were dressed in typical Western clothing.”

  “Do you agree with the assessment that Sanderling made at the time? Were they police?”

  “Age and fitness levels were compatible with active membership of the security organs. But that’s, at best, merely indicative.”

  Holger raised an eyebrow in question, and I nodded: Yes they looked like police. Another exchange that didn’t make it onto the audio tape.

  “I’m gasping for a cigarette,” said Holger, even though we could no longer see the decorative fishing nets through the dense cigarette smoke hanging in the air. “Let’s have a break.”

  Holger took me downstairs, gave me a coat and we left the building through the back door. Steps glazed with frost took us past a lifebuoy and a selection of boathooks, down to a jetty at the edge of the Oder-Spree Canal. Ice panned at the banks, but the fairway had been cleared by coal barges coming up from Poland. The wind came from the east, gnawing at our padded jackets. I turned my back on it, but the view was the same. Pine forest broken only by water and the compound behind us.

  “Sanderling,” Holger began, but paused to blow into his hands. He rubbed them, then stuffed them into the pockets of his jacket. “What can you tell me about her.”

  I was still facing down the canal, watching the wind push the frozen brash against the sides where it melded with the cracked ice already there. There were no birds in the trees, no fish jumping. The only movement, the only sounds came from the ice, it cracked and moaned, sending shivers of sound through the thin air.

  “How is Sanderling?”

 
“They operated on her arm yesterday afternoon, the doc was talking about some new procedure: osteosynthesis, something like that—they’re using screws to hold the bone together.”

  The cold air hurt my ribs, but I breathed as deeply as I could. “She struck me as a capable operative,” I told him, keeping my voice and face neutral. “She did what was needed, and she did it with expertise. Nothing else to report.”

  “Did you see what happened at the border?”

  Holger was lighting a cigarette, and I could feel the pull of it. I wanted to reach over, take it from his fingers, put it to my own lips and breathe in the smoke. But my stomach cramped at the thought of it. I’d have to wait a bit longer.

  “Sanderling was some distance away from me, like I told you,” I said, knowing he was wondering whether a personal, off the record account would differ from the official version he’d received in the conference room. “She was out of sight when I heard the shot.”

  “The bullet hit her at the top of the humerus. Went straight through—it’s still somewhere in the undergrowth, or embedded in a tree trunk. Either way, it hasn’t been found, which makes it difficult to tell whether it came from an Eastern or Western firearm. The G1 rifle used by the BGS has the same calibre as our KM-72, so no help there. Practically all we have to go on is the fact that the entry wound is at the back, she was shot from behind.”

  “So if she was heading East, towards the gate in the fence …”

  “Then the bullet came from the West,” Holger finished the sentence. “A clear case of deliberate provocation by the class-enemy.”

  There was silence between us for a while, allowing the cracking of the ice, Holger’s heavy sucks on his cigarette, the reluctant whisper of the trees in the wind to intrude on our conversation. Holger watched me while he puffed on his nail, his free hand still warm in his jacket pocket.