The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  In 1992, the surviving Stasi files had been declassified by a reunited Germany. In 2000, Washington returned another swathe of such files seized in 1989 by their own delighted operatives in the East as the Wall came down. That the CIA had carefully perused and copied these before their return was in no doubt. Postreunification, there were also persistent rumours that the infamous Rosewood file, said to contain even more high-level names of GDR spies, informants and sympathizers and even more potential embarrassment for the former West Germany, would be returned by the Americans at any time.

  So Klaus Heinrich was a godsend for the West. If Klaus Heinrich did not exist, Ackermann said, he would have had to be invented.

  Delaney, despite his increasing intoxication and the huge plates of old-fashioned Germanic peasant fare littering the tables, had managed to take notes for most of the evening. Zynep watched in amusement as this process became more and more laboured, and Delaney’s notebook more and more stained with wine and sauerbraten sauce and beer.

  “Shall I act as stenographer for a while, Frank?” she said.

  “Never!” Ackermann roared. “A good journalist is always able to see to his own precious notebook. Never!”

  As midnight approached, and the crowds in the restaurant began to thin, logic and memory were in short supply at Delaney’s table. Only Zynep appeared to be thinking clearly and her interest in proceedings was peripheral.

  “The autopsy report, Gunter,” Delaney said eventually. “We must have it.”

  “Yours? You don’t look so good.”

  “Heinrich’s, of course.” They didn’t bother to explain any of this to Zynep. Ackermann looked suddenly alert, every so slightly sobered.

  “An intriguing proposition, my dear Francis,” he said.

  “Easily done, for a man of your skills and experience.”

  “Exactly so. Obtaining such confidential medical and police documents is my specialty. As you know.”

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  “I shall have it for you within hours or days, my friend. We shall peruse it together. You may then call your editors on my satellite phone as we dodge bullets.” “Exactly.”

  “And your job, my friend Francis Delaney, I have decided, is to now follow up your foolish theory about former BKA President Ulrich Mueller. Your incessant, how shall I say, your incessant references to this matter have piqued, if this is the correct English word, my interest.”

  “I’m so pleased you see the wisdom of this,” Delaney said drunkenly.

  “This prospect is also of interest to me because it would involve a visit by yourself to Mareike Fischer, a lovely young undercover drugs officer employed by Berlin’s esteemed Landeskriminalamt police. The lovely Mareike is Herr Mueller’s niece, perhaps his only surviving relative, or so they say. His poor departed sister’s little girl. Now a member of the Berlin drugs squad. Police work runs in that family, clearly. However, the police niece in question is, if I may say, one of the loveliest undercover drugs officers in the LKA or even in all of Germandom. She is also said to be a nymphomaniac. My apologies for this characterization, Zynep. I know this only from secondary sources, of course. I know her only slightly and professionally. I know her by reputation, one might say.”

  Zynep was still able to smile after a long evening of watching two journalists get drunk.

  “This sounds intriguing,” Delaney said. “It has taken you all night to tell me about this part of the plan.”

  “It has taken you all night to convince me it is an angle worth pursuing.” “It’s the beer. It must be.”

  “As Chief Political Editor of Die Welt, I hereby assign you to meet with this young police officer and ask her straight out why her Uncle Ulrich resigned just before retirement, minutes before retirement. The fact that you have intrigued me with such questions tonight, Francis, does not mean however that I think Mareike Fischer’s answer will lead us anywhere in the Klaus Heinrich matter. It will, perhaps however, stop you from harassing me about this angle any further. And it may well get you laid. Something I highly recommend to visitors while in Berlin. Where is my mobile phone? I shall call her immediately to set up an appointment with the world-famous Delaney. She is probably out consorting with biker gangs and drug dealers as we speak. She loves her work. She loves it so much she forgets who she really is sometimes, or so I am told.”

  “An excellent plan, Gunter.”

  “Which part of it exactly?” Delaney smiled at Zynep, instead of answering. Ackermann’s chin had suddenly sagged toward his chest. A barely audible snore escaped his lips.

  “Time to move the Die Welt political desk out of here, Zynep,” Delaney said. “Some heavy lifting involved. I’ll help you.”

  “Thank you, Frank,” Zynep said, still, apparently, neither bored nor angry.

  By the end of a very long evening, therefore, they all had their assignments. Ackermann, among other things, to obtain the Heinrich autopsy report—no easy task. Delaney to seek out Mueller’s niece, a task that Ackermann apparently still dismissed as a useless waste of time except for the possibility of gratuitous sex. Zynep to get the very large and unwieldy Die Welt editor into a taxi and safely home in his extremely intoxicated state.

  Another cream-coloured Mercedes taxi let Delaney off at the entrance to the InterContinental. He had had to endure no anti-Turkish diatribes on the way back from the restaurant, however. His driver this time was content simply to drive silently through the rain-slicked streets of Berlin and listen to waltzes on the car radio.

  A hotel doorman in a black raincoat came out from under the glass pyramid, proffering a large umbrella. Delaney suddenly decided that he was too drunk and too full of conspiracy theories to go immediately up to his room. He took the umbrella and told the doorman he would walk for a while instead.

  “Take great care,” the doorman said, clearly disapproving of such a plan. “It is night. Avoid walking by the zoo.”

  Delaney walked the other way down Budapester Strasse, in the direction of the Reichstag. He hoped the walking time would allow him to begin to sort out what he had gathered from a night full of talk. The cold spring rain might also sober him up.

  He could understand why Germans, and Europeans in general—whether pedophiles or not— flocked to the sunny beaches of Thailand in their thousands. In March, Berlin was damp, chilly, grey. The contrast with the bougainvillea-scented humidity and the blue-yellow heat of Thailand could not be more complete. Delaney thought of the scene 9,000 kilometres away at the Metropole Hotel in Phuket, where the night-time doormen would be dressed in short-sleeved shirts and sandals, wiping sweat from their brows, not cold northern rain.

  Eventually, more or less consciously, Delaney came into Potsdamer Platz, the very centre of the new Berlin and, some would say, the heart of the new Europe. Delaney had been there many times, before and after Berlin was a divided city, and it was as emblematic now as it was then.

  Before 1989, Potsdamer Platz was a Cold War wasteland, bisected by the Wall, doomed to a heavy political fate. Abandoned tramlines wound across it to abruptly meet the cold graffiti-covered concrete that split Berlin. Weeds grew from cracks in what was one of the last undeveloped major open spaces in a major European city. Bombed-out buildings from the Second World War had been bulldozed so as to give East German border guards a clear line of fire in case anyone was foolish enough to choose this desolate point from which to make a bid for freedom.

  The Cold War symbolism continued deep underground. The S-Bahn trainline remained open, briefly passing under East German territory on the way from one part of West Berlin to another. Potsdamer Platz became the best known of the socalled S-Bahn “ghost stations,” sealed off from the outside world and patrolled by armed guards. Trains raced straight through, never stopping.

  Now, all was transformed. From a symbol of Cold War nothingness, Potsdamer Platz had become a boom city’s beating heart. Th
e real estate, now breathtakingly valuable, had been divvied up fast in the years post-1989. The world’s corporate and industrial titans had competed for attention with grandiose building projects. Delaney stood, as he always did on such visits, marvelling at and dwarfed by the excesses of the Sony Center and the towering Daimler-Benz headquarters. Rock music thumped in a dozen stylish bars. Tourists and locals jostled in and out of shops and cineplexes.

  It was a very good place, in fact, to think about Klaus Heinrich and Stasi and Cold War and Thailand and sudden tsunami waves and disaster victims and identities hidden, lost or found. Everything in a place like, on a night like this, was a good story, a front-page story, all at the same time.

  Delaney closed his InterContinetal hotel umbrella and let the cold spring rain wash over his face. Alcohol and confusion coursed through his brain. Under the lurid lime green and violet lights of the new Berlin, he tried, without success, to gather his spinning thoughts.

  Chapter 12

  Delaney, of course, slept very late the next morning in his giant hotel bed. The window shades were models of German efficiency and right until he slowly parted them just before noon the room remained tomb-black. He peered out, monstrously hung over, though the pale grey square of European light into the courtyard below and bitterly regretted, as always, the excesses of the night before.

  He shuffled around for a time, sipping water, watching CNN, deciding against a restorative minibar beer. The message light on his telephone was flashing. Amazingly, it was a voicemail from Ackermann, older and far drunker the night before than Delaney, but already behind his desk at the newspaper.

  “Ah, Francis, of course you are asleep, still,” Ackermann’s voice thundered from the depths of the hotel messaging system. “Of course, of course, my delicate flower. I, on the other hand, was able to spring into action as usual at the very edge of dawn, the crack, perhaps you say in English. Newspapers do not get produced by those who remain late in bed, in case you have forgotten. Nor do criminals get arrested. The lovely Mareike has already been made aware of your request to discuss something important with her. I used my world-famous powers of persuasion to good effect. She can see you this evening at her flat in the fashionably seedy Friedrichshain neighbourhood. I will email you the address and telephone number because I would suppose you are too ill to use pen and paper just at the moment as you stand there in your pajamas feeling sorry for yourself and trying not to vomit. Am I correct? But she will see you; I have done what I promised. I will now, as I have nothing else to do here at the newspaper in an election year, attempt to persuade someone to let us look at the Heinrich autopsy report. We shall speak later, my friend. And bring Viagra for your meeting with Inspector Mareike Fischer. That is my advice.”

  Delaney called Ackermann right back. “You amaze me, Gunter,” he said.

  “That is what young Zynep said to me late last night as well, after the adventures that followed our return to her flat,” Ackermann said.

  “So Mareike is willing to see me . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “She an ex-girlfriend or something?”

  “She is everybody’s ex-girlfriend, Francis. Most of LKA Berlin, a good random sample of media stars, others. She is that type.”

  “Does she know what I want to talk about?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Pull yourself together, my friend. This may break the case, as they say in the TV shows. Or it may show you are simply a hopeless paranoid.”

  Delaney ordered room-service coffee. Food would have to wait until after his recovery. His email inbox was brimming with news, none terribly good, some very bad indeed.

  From Rawson, the following:

  Francis, it always really worries me when you go to ground like this. It worries all of us here. It’s not really fair of you to share bits of information about something like the Klaus Heinrich thing and then go to ground, is it? Please get in contact as soon as possible to discuss. And how is Germany by the way? Our Thai friends have always been very helpful to us here at CSIS when we have some questions for them about people’s movements. We note your departure from Bangkok airport a couple of nights ago. Presumably you have some pressing reason now to be in Germany? Can you let me know what hotel you are at to save us all a lot of further fussing around? Thanks and bests.

  Delaney would reply to that later.

  From Jonah Smith in Phuket, some quite bad news about bugging devices in his room at the Bay Hotel. Smith, too, it seemed, had been drinking to excess. His email sounded angry, somewhat desperate. There was also an element of fear in the text. Delaney replied to that one right away, using various phrases intended to soothe:

  . . . You’ll have to just keep on being careful, Delaney wrote . . . Don’t panic just yet. . . . The longer your list of potential enemies is, the more interesting the story actually becomes. Right? We’re starting to develop a good little list of possible enemies now . . .

  From Tim Bishop, a workmanlike colleague’s note:

  Hey Frank, just FYI, back home in Paris now. Thought I couldn’t justify hanging around out in Phuket any longer. Got some good shots of little Charlotte Stokke’s funeral ceremony before I left. Standing by here if you need me for anything.

  And from Kate Hunter of the RCMP, this message, workmanlike in a different way:

  Dear Francis. I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot of things since our last phone conversation, or phone argument or whatever you want to call it. I think it would be good for us to stop all this now. It’s already gone on far too long as it is, this situation, don’t you think? It’s not good for either of us anymore. Bye. Kate. Sorry to do this in an email.

  Delaney was not sure there would be much use replying to that one at all.

  Investigative journalist Francis Delaney was, therefore, in a somewhat end-of-the-world mood when he rang Mareike Fischer’s doorbell that evening. He had sobered up, cleaned himself up, but a dark mood hung over him like a stubborn North Europe rain cloud. It was an appropriate mood in which to meet the most undercover member of Berlin’s Landeskriminalamt undercover drug squad.

  Inspector Fischer had worked so far undercover for so long that she now forgot, as Ackermann suggested, who she really was. Her apartment was in a rundown third-storey walk-up right on SimonDach-Strasse, the cacophonous main drag in a hodgepodge area of bars, restaurants, makeshift galleries, punk squatters and Turks. It was a place where police did not generally make themselves known.

  The first thing any drug dealer or anybody else would notice about Mareike Fischer was her fantastical fairy-tale mane of flaming red hair. If she had been wearing it loose, it would surely have cascaded to the middle of her back. When Delaney arrived, it had been gathered into a giant pony-tail that was struggling to break its bonds.

  She was almost exactly Delaney’s height, and buxom, broad-shouldered, fit, tanned, alert. She was wearing a grey NYPD T-shirt and black jeans, both items clearly meant for someone far, far smaller. A diamond stud glittered in her right nostril. She locked eyes on Delaney’s eyes after opening the door and did not let go. Her apartment smelled of incense.

  “Gunter’s favourite Canadian,” she said.

  “Frank Delaney.”

  “A solid Canadian name. Good and solid. Come in good, solid Gunter Canadian.”

  The apartment was crammed, utterly, with big old pieces of wooden furniture and overstuffed upholstered sofas and armchairs. Books were piled on shelves and on the floor. Magazines, rolled-up posters, potted plants, flowers in various vases. A collection of masks hung on a wall—from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Venice carnival.

  A small, expensive Teac stereo was playing Miles Davis very low. And a holstered Sig Sauer 9millimetre pistol sat on a sideboard. Mareike saw him looking at it.

  “You like guns? That is standard LKA issue, the Sig nine millimetre.” “Not ve
ry undercover,” he said.

  “I usually put it away when I have guests. Certain ones. Or I wear it under my shirt.”

  She waited for Delaney to comment on how hard that would be to accomplish, at least today. “You didn’t put it away for me,” he said.

  “Gunter tells me you are a man of the world. To be trusted. Calm when around guns or under fire in Afghanistan and other places. Why put the gun away for you? I am a cop lady. You know this. Bang, bang, shoot, shoot. Another bad guy gone to heaven.”

  They sat side by side in a very sixties red velour sofa. She pushed aside some magazines and placed a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and two small glasses on the heavy wooden coffee table. Delaney noted a small mirror with white dust and a singleedged razor blade on it among the debris on the table. She saw him looking at that too.

  “Props. For my druggie act,” she said. “Yes?”

  “Realistic,” he said.

  “You’re a user? Coke?” she said.

  “No comment,” he said.

  “Reporter man,” she said.

  “And you? A user?”

  “Only professionally,” she said. Her smile, when it broke open, completely illuminated her face.

  The vodka helped extinguish the last of Delaney’s hangover. It lubricated, as it was invented to do, any potentially tricky conversation between strangers. Delaney wanted to get right to the point, to pump Mareike for information and then get out of the apartment without getting drunk on vodka or stoned on cocaine or into some kind of complicated sexual snarl. But he circled the issues for a while, for form’s sake. And because vodka in the early evening in an end-of-the-world Berlin apartment with a pretty red-haired woman actually suited his mood.

  She told neighbourhood stories and some police stories. He told reporter stories and Gunter Ackermann stories. They drank and told stories and eventually Mareike signalled that smalltalk was to end—a policewoman after all.