A Darker State

by David Young

  ‘The gunshot wound obviously puts things in a different light too,’ said Fenstermacher.

  ‘But you say the body was already showing signs of asphyxiation, even before the shooting?’

  Fenstermacher nodded.

  ‘So he must have been shot in the water, while probably already struggling – and failing – to survive.’

  ‘Someone obviously wanted to make absolutely sure he didn’t,’ said Fenstermacher. ‘It’s a wide river. It flows into the Oder and then to the Ostsee. I think it’s just luck the body got caught on that mud bank. There’s a bend in the river there. Otherwise the boy could have got all the way to Eisenhüttenstadt, Frankfurt – or even out to sea.’

  The clock-like ticking of the indicators began again as Fenstermacher turned off the road, following Tilsner in the Lada into Guben’s police office car park. She manoeuvred into the parking space next to Tilsner and switched off the engine. They didn’t immediately climb out though. Müller had a couple more questions.

  ‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘that you said the body had been in the water a maximum of twenty-four hours. Your best guess was a few hours at most. It could have travelled a long, long way downstream in that time. Perhaps we need to be concentrating the search much further south.’

  Fenstermacher sighed. ‘Look, I can’t say anything for definite until the autopsy. Once I’ve sectioned the lungs I might have a better idea. And I don’t really like entering the realms of speculation. But –’ Fenstermacher paused, stroking the steering wheel again with her calloused hands – ‘we pathologists tend to be conservative, err on the side of caution when we’re giving you visual findings from the first look at a body. It’s a bit like a very rough sketch, and then we fill in the details later. I was giving you the uppermost parameters of length of immersion. We could – for example – look at it the other way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Müller, frowning.

  ‘What if we looked at the lowermost parameters. How few hours the body could have possibly been in the water, given what I observed.’

  Müller felt a lightness in her chest.

  ‘Go on,’ she prompted.

  ‘Well, the answer would be very different. The least amount of time that body could have been immersed – based on what I saw just now – is probably round about half an hour . . . just thirty minutes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Müller. ‘So whoever we’re looking for . . .’

  ‘Could be very close to here, Major, they could be very close indeed.’

  28

  The previous month (September 1976)

  Leipzig

  The next night I have to wait even longer before I see him. I assume he isn’t coming and finish the one drink I’ve been trying to make last as long as possible. Then I head for the door.

  He walks in just as I’m about to go out, and we nearly collide with each other. There’s a wild look in his eyes, and I can immediately smell the alcohol on his breath.

  ‘You’re not leaving, are you?’ he whines. I keep on walking. Play hard to get sometimes, the agents said, it keeps them interested. ‘Please,’ he shouts, running after me. ‘Come and have a drink with me.’

  He tries to grab me, but I recoil. ‘You already stink of drink,’ I say. ‘You shouldn’t have any more. And I need to get back.’ This last bit is a lie. I have nothing to go back to, except prison if I fail. The agents weren’t satisfied with the pictures of kissing. They need him to be photographed in flagrante, in a position where there can be no doubts. But with the amount of alcohol it smells like he’s consumed, I bet he won’t be able to perform – so my night, and his money, would be wasted. He might not be willing to pay again.

  ‘Come to the room, then, please.’ I see him look quickly round the bar. He’s wondering if anyone has seen our little exchange. When he’s satisfied no one is paying any attention, he pushes me into a shadowy corner and then takes my hand, rubbing it against the front of his trousers. I can feel he’s already hardening. Perhaps I’ve misjudged things. Maybe he’s just recently downed a schnapps or something, but isn’t yet too drunk.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘But I don’t want to end up just talking. I don’t want to waste my time.’

  ‘Feel me,’ he whispers urgently. ‘You won’t be wasting your time, I promise.’

  *

  In the room, he immediately pounces on me, trying to get my clothes off.

  ‘Easy,’ I say. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world.’

  ‘I thought you said you had to get home?’ He’s kneeling on the floor, unbuckling my belt.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  I close my eyes. For a moment, I feel ashamed. I’m trapping this man – ruining him – even though I quite like him. My brain is torn between enjoying this and calculating the best angle to be standing in to make sure the photos being taken at this very moment show his full face. Soon, though, the pleasure centres of my brain take over.

  *

  We’re in a new position. I hear him behind me, taking a long sniff of something. Then he’s holding a small red-wine coloured bottle under my nose too – I pull away at first, worried what it is, repelled by the vile smell that’s like old sweaty socks.

  ‘Try it. It smells horrible, but it’s harmless. And it makes you feel great.’

  I don’t really want to, but I don’t want to annoy him. I need to keep him onside as photo after photo is taken secretly, automatically, by cameras the agents have hidden away. Or maybe they’re in the next room and have drilled tiny holes in the walls. I have no idea.

  I relent and take a long sniff. I nearly gag and retch from the disgusting smell, but then I feel the rush, an incredible horniness, and I understand now why there’s a white lightning bolt on the label of the squat, miniature bottle.

  I start to enjoy it. Even though, all the while, I know the Stasi are taking their photographs.

  That last thought nags at me, and a new feeling starts to well up. I think of my father. How I’ve let him down. How he used to ruffle my hair. How we used to try to fish by hand in the lakes. And I begin to feel terribly ashamed.

  29

  October 1976

  Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, Bezirk Cottbus

  Gathering in the small room at the People’s Police station with Tilsner and Schmidt at her side felt like old times to Müller. The conversation in the car with Fenstermacher had been useful. Yes, there was no certainty the body had been in the water for less than an hour. Hopefully more precision might come at the afternoon post-mortem. But it made sense for the time being to start the search in and around Guben. It was a centre of population. Someone might have heard the shooting, unless, as Müller suspected, a silencer was used.

  The local police had pinned a series of maps to  the noticeboard on the office wall. Alongside were photographs of Dominik Nadel – living and dead; the best image they had of the unidentified body found that morning by the riverbank, and also – spaced some way apart, as they couldn’t be sure he was caught up in any of this – a portrait photograph of Jonas Schmidt’s son. She could only guess at the torment her Kriminaltechniker was going through, seeing a photograph of his only son in these circumstances.

  She was happy to let Schwarz question the local officers.

  ‘Do we know anything about the currents and flow of the river, here in the town and where the body was found?’ He pointed to the bend in the river, where the body had washed up.

  ‘Well, it’s obviously not at its fastest flowing at the moment,’ said the local Vopo captain. ‘That would be in the spring, after the snow melts. But summer’s over, it’s starting to rain more. There’s plenty of water in there. How fast it’s actually flowing, I’ve no idea.’

  ‘We could drop something off one of the bridges, perhaps?’ suggested Schmidt. ‘Maybe a piece of wood. Or even a fake body – something of similar size and density. I should be able to mock something up. Then time how long it takes to get from position “A” to position “
B”.’

  ‘Good idea, Jonas,’ said Müller. ‘Get onto it straight away.’ Keeping him busy would take his mind off his son. She thought for a moment. ‘Could there be some sort of scientific laboratory around here?’

  ‘We’d have heard about it, surely?’ said the captain. ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’ prompted Müller.

  ‘Unless it’s on the Polish side of the river. In Gubin rather than Guben. I can liaise with our Polish colleagues if you like.’

  ‘Good idea. Please get onto that.’

  ‘OK,’ said Schwarz. ‘But what if it’s somewhere anonymous?’. Are there any old industrial areas or disused buildings, any hidden basements that could be used?’

  The uniform captain held his hands up in the air as though in surrender. ‘There must be tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands. There was a lot of heavy fighting here towards the end of the war when the Red Army was advancing. The Nazis deliberately destroyed a lot of buildings and infrastructure, but some of it was only partially destroyed. And it could equally be somewhere in plain sight.’

  Fenstermacher, at the back of the room, cleared her throat. ‘If I could just interrupt a second, I think you might be getting a little carried away with the idea of the body entering the water somewhere near Guben. I was only giving an estimate. I would counsel that some of this ought to wait until I’ve performed the autopsy.’

  Müller nodded. ‘You’re right, of course. But there are still some things we can start investigating now. Comrade Hauptmann Schwarz, could you and the captain here organise a uniform team to go house to house, showing people the photos of Dominik, Markus and the face from the body today?’

  ‘Isn’t that going to alarm people?’ said the captain, frowning.

  Before she answered, Müller looked around the room to make sure Schmidt had left to begin his task. She was relieved to see that he had. ‘They have every right to be alarmed. This is a worrying situation. At least one youth is still missing – he’s the son of one of ours, and time may be running out for him.’

  30

  The next day

  Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost

  In the end Fenstermacher’s autopsy was disappointing – at least to Müller – in that it didn’t really provide any of the clarity she’d hoped for. The pathologist – whom Müller felt had opened up in their one-to-one conversation in the car – seemed to be back to her grumpiest self, and insisted that the parameters she’d already given for the duration of immersion were the ones borne out by a more detailed examination of the body. In other words, the minimum time the body had been in the water was thirty minutes. The maximum, twenty-four hours. It was a yawning window, which translated into tens, perhaps hundreds of kilometres difference in how far the body could have travelled. Nevertheless, Fenstermacher had implied she was leaning towards a shorter period, so Müller hoped the efforts they were making in Guben and neighbouring Gubin wouldn’t be wasted.

  Once she’d set the teams to work locally, she radioed Keibelstrasse to alert other police districts further upstream: Forst, Görlitz, and even right down to the Czechoslovak border near Zittau, though the further away, the more unlikely. Then – satisfied she’d put as much in train as possible to try to follow the new lead – she retreated to the Hauptstadt for a long-overdue reunion with Emil, the twins and Helga. The seriousness of the new development – another murder – lifted some of her guilt, but she still felt the weight of the shame of, in effect, abandoning her children, the children she’d yearned for for so long.

  Her hopes for some quality time with them, though, were shattered almost as soon as she was through the apartment door. Metzger had got in touch again. He wanted to meet urgently. At the steelworks, in Eisenhüttenstadt.

  *

  The man looked even more nervous – even more harried – than before, if that were possible. And his mood darkened further when he saw Müller hadn’t come alone.

  ‘I said this had to be another discreet meeting. I meant you, Comrade Major, on your own.’

  ‘Anything you can say to me, you can say to my deputy, Hauptmann Werner Tilsner. He’s equally trustworthy.’ Tilsner extended his hand, but the West German minister declined to take it, and instead shooed them inside a low, corrugated-iron building. Müller and Tilsner had had trouble finding it. Number 1 Work Street – the main entrance for the EKO complex – was easy enough to find. No one in Eisenhüttenstadt could miss it. Just follow the chimney smoke in a straight line down Hütte’s main shopping street. But this part of the works was round the back, fenced off, and dated – Müller assumed – from when the plant was first built at the beginning of the fifties. It hadn’t aged well in the subsequent quarter century.

  The shed Metzger took them into was in semi-darkness. It seemed to add to his sombre mood.

  ‘I didn’t tell you the whole truth before,’ he said, sitting down on a rusted metal pipe, holding his head in his hands. ‘There wasn’t just one youth in Leipzig.’

  Müller could see the man was tormented by having to reveal this news, but for her – and evidently for Tilsner too, judging by the way she’d seen him roll his eyes even in the dim light of the shed – this was no revelation, and hardly relevant either.

  ‘So?’ said Tilsner.

  ‘There was another, who I had a deeper relationship with.’

  ‘A deeper relationship?’ Tilsner’s repetition of the phrase seemed to drip with sexual innuendo. But Metzger ignored him and carried on with his story.

  ‘I fell in love with this second youth, even though I was paying him. In the end he refused payment. He said he loved me too.’

  Tilsner snorted. Müller gently shook her head and silently mouthed: ‘No, Werner.’ She didn’t want her deputy’s prejudices encouraging Metzger to clam up. Perhaps he had something useful to say, after all. She did have some sympathy for Tilsner’s cynicism though. It was an age-old story – a lonely man thinking he’d fallen in love with a prostitute. A prostitute who was probably playing him.

  ‘We were seeing each other virtually every night. He seemed troubled.’

  ‘Did he give you a name?’ asked Müller.

  ‘Yes,’ said the politician. ‘Tobias. Tobias Scherer.’

  Müller felt a sense of disappointment. Although she hadn’t wanted to think of Markus Schmidt prostituting himself, at least if it had been Jonas’s son they would have had a more recent sighting.

  ‘Troubled in what way?’ asked Tilsner.

  ‘Well, I’d noticed after the first couple of our meetings the lad had tried to talk more about what was going on at the trade fair, particularly about the steel price, contract negotiations, who the potential buyers were, that sort of thing. At first I wasn’t suspicious about this. We were on the fringes of the trade fair. I’d already told him I was involved in the steel industry. It just seemed part of normal conversation.’

  This time it was Tilsner’s turn to shake his head. Müller knew what he was thinking. Why would a common prostitute have any interest in the steel market? Metzger seemed to have been incredibly naive.

  The West German politician kept his eyes downcast, staring fixedly at the floor, strewn as it was with rusted bolts and other random pieces of old metal.

  ‘But things changed after seeing him – every night – for a week or so.’

  ‘A week!’ exclaimed Tilsner. ‘How much money was this costing you?’

  ‘I told you,’ the man continued, bitterly, ‘I was lonely. Trapped in an unhappy marriage. Anyway, as I say, after about a week things changed. His questions started to become much more specific. I began to suspect that this was some sort of honey trap. At the same time, we were becoming more affectionate towards each other. I think there was love there – on both our parts – it wasn’t just a financial exchange. So I was confused. I didn’t initially let on that I’d realised he was using me, or trying to use me, trying to pump me for information. But eventually it started to become so obvious I had to say something. He broke down in
tears. He was an absolute wreck. Clearly there was some terrible secret he couldn’t tell me. I comforted him as best I could.’

  ‘I bet you did,’ said Tilsner. This time, Müller didn’t admonish him. She was as fed up with the man’s whining as Tilsner, and was continuing to wonder how relevant this was to her investigation.

  ‘Please carry on, Herr Metzger,’ she said.

  ‘Well, as I say, I comforted him. Told him I loved him. That – if necessary – I would help him escape to the West, to live with me. Perhaps I wasn’t being entirely truthful at that point. It wouldn’t do for me to be seen to leave my wife and children. I’m sure you can understand that.

  ‘But up to a point I was being honest. If I could have helped him to escape somehow – and with my being a politician that would be easier for me than some others – then I could have set him up in a flat in Bonn. We could have had some sort of a life together, some of the time at least. I think that was the tipping point. He started to talk. To explain what had happened to him. He’d been caught up in some drugs sting. Caught red-handed by the Stasi with amphetamines. But framed, he said.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tilsner, throwing down one of the old metal bolts he’d been using like a worry bead. It hit the floor of the shed and then bounced off it with a crack like a bullet ricochet. ‘That old chestnut. Framed. It’s amazing how many drug dealers have been framed. In fact, I would hazard a guess that there aren’t any actual drug dealers in the Republic.’

  ‘I can understand your scepticism, officer. I’m just telling you the truth. I’m just trying to help you, and I hope that you will try to help me in return.’