by Alex Gerlis
‘And the fourth one?’
‘Konrad Hartmann, otherwise known as Martin Page: he lived alone in Kent. His wife had died some years previously, and their daughter died when she was quite young. Konrad Hartmann was found dead in his house the day after Meier was run over. Neighbours telephoned the police to say they’d heard a gunshot during the night. Hartmann was found dead on his bed, a revolver in his hand. It is being treated as a case of suicide.’
‘Was there a note or anything?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘This all sounds very professional: textbook, I would say. No-one suspects anything about any of them?’
‘Not as far as I can tell from the police reports. Suicide is always unsatisfactory, and the hit and run is still subject to investigation. But from a police point of view none of these deaths seem very much out of the ordinary. Of course if looked at together and with a connection established between all four men – yes, absolutely, very suspicious indeed. But as isolated cases, no.’
‘And your contact in the police, surely he is now aware? What are you going to do about him?’’
People were beginning to queue to leave the boat now, and a crew member pushed in front of them to tie a rope to its mooring. Edgar leaned closer to Viktor.
‘Lothar Meier had typed his report in January 1970 and was clearly waiting to send it to his lawyer. After the meeting in Birmingham that March he wrote in pencil on the reverse of the final sheet of the letter. Special Branch filed the letter as ‘Christopher Vale/Lothar Meier/Nazis.’ I suspect my contact did not read that, or didn’t have the time or the inclination to attach much importance to the whole letter. He saw the name Lothar Meir, which he’d been looking for, and contacted me. He probably skimmed through the whole document but, knowing him, I suspect he’d have dismissed whatever he read as the words of a crank. He certainly didn’t seem to be terribly exercised about the whole business when we met. Don’t get me wrong Viktor, he was pleased to have found it, but he has more important things to worry about. He is glad he’s done me a favour because I now owe him one. You know how it is.’
The boat had now docked at Schwedenplatz and the two men disembarked together, walking silently for a while through the 1st District.
‘What do we do now?’
Viktor did not reply at first, deep in thought and appearing not to have heard Edgar. When he began to speak he held Edgar by the elbow for a while. ‘Unlike so many of our colleagues, we saw what the Nazis were like at first hand, didn’t we? We both operated behind enemy lines during the war, didn’t we? And it was the same enemy. How many people who are still alive can say that? The Cold War between us… that has not been without its tensions and its dangers but, compared to what we know and we what saw, it has not been the same. I thought we would never encounter such evil again.’
Viktor gave such emphasis to the word ‘evil’ that he almost shouted it out, causing a couple passing them by to turn round.
‘And my job in the Soviet Union, all those years interrogating Nazis, well I felt I was confronting evil then. But as the years went on I came to believe that within a few years there’d be no Nazis left, certainly not those still committed to their cause. And now, here we are. We need to expose the ones remaining, Edgar. We need to think what to do.’
They entered St Stephen’s Cathedral and slowly walked round the church, eventually settling in an unoccupied pew close to the pulpit.
‘Are you religious Edgar?’
The Englishman vigorously shook his head, shocked the Russian could suspect him of being so. Viktor gestured toward the ornately decorated pulpit.
‘Just before I was summoned back to Moscow in May ’45, I visited this place a few times with Irma. I know it’s not quite the kind of place a senior NKVD officer should be seen in, but it was somewhere we could get away from the tension in the city. And although Irma’s a good Communist, she is nonetheless interested in religious buildings.’
Viktor stopped, folded his arms and gazed up at the pulpit. ‘You see those animals carved into the pulpit – around the handrail, apparently crawling up it?’ They’re lizards and toads. They’re meant to symbolise evil, climbing up the pulpit to attack the preacher. And there at the top, can you see? It’s a dog fighting them off, protecting the preacher. The dog represents good.’
Viktor continued to stare at the pulpit. ‘Was life as simple in medieval England as it is on this pulpit, Edgar? It certainly was in Russia. A man stood in a church and told people what was good and what was bad: they did not question what they were told, and lived their lives accordingly. I often wonder what life would be like if we still lived like that today.’
Chapter 18
Düsseldorf, West Germany
August 1976
She was questioned by two men, and at first she’d found it hard to distinguish between them, especially in the over-lit windowless room and with so little sleep and her nerves stretched to breaking point. Both looked to be in their forties, though possibly younger. Both were tall and skinny and wore glasses, and both had fair hair cut in a severe military fashion. They didn’t play the ‘bad cop, good cop’ game either, which she’d been told to expect.
But after a while she found she could tell the difference. The one who called himself Franz seemed to have a cold and spoke so quietly that at times she had to lean across the table to catch what he was saying. The other one, Konrad, had a hint of a Bavarian accent and seemed bored, as if he had more important people to interrogate. But whenever she tossed back her head and ran her fingers through her long blonde hair and smiled, looking directly at them, Konrad was the one who responded, looking her up and down, sometimes even smiling in return – though not in a pleasant way.
They were in the basement of a police station in Düsseldorf where she’d been taken after being arrested three days previously. Franz and Konrad had turned up the day after her arrest and, as far as she could gather, they weren’t police. Her guess was that they were the security service, the BfV, which she didn’t need telling was ominous.
‘Sabine, you were observed entering an apartment in Ratinger Strasse in the Altstadt district on no less than eighteen occasions over the past two months: that is almost once every three days. From that apartment last Thursday, two men and one woman were observed leaving at six thirty in the morning and departing on motorbikes. Two hours later, the industrialist Heinrich Albrecht was shot dead as he left his car after arriving at his office in Wuppertal. The gunmen escaped on motorbikes. The registration plate on at least one of those bikes corresponds to the plate on one of the bikes that had sped away from Ratinger Strasse two hours earlier.’
Silence: silence for quite a long while. Franz and Konrad seemed to like silence.
‘I have told you already: I was nowhere near Altstadt last Thursday, nor Wuppertal for that matter. You know I have an alibi. I had an appointment at the University Hospital on Moorenstrasse at eight forty-five that morning, minutes after Albrecht was shot. You can’t get from Wuppertal to Düsseldorf in fifteen minutes.’
‘You may well smirk, but I can tell you that this is no joke for you. Tell me, Sabine, what do you think of the shooting of Heinrich Albrecht?’
‘I don’t have an opinion.’
‘Really?’ It was Franz speaking, and she had to lean close to hear him. ‘A prominent and respectable industrialist, a family man, a stalwart of his local church…’
‘And a Nazi.’
‘He served as a soldier in the war. There was conscription Sabine.’
‘He helped run the ghetto in Lublin, and is rumoured to have been involved in the nearby Nazi death camp at Majdanek. Maybe one of the few people who survived it was seeking revenge…’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said, how do you know this – about Lublin? You seem to know a lot about Herr Albrecht.’
‘I read it in the newspapers. There was a lot about him after he was shot. But if my a
libi stands up, why are you holding me?’
‘What were you doing in the flat?’
‘It was the kind of place where lots of people come and go. Altstadt is like that, you should visit it sometime. Very Bohemian, I’m sure you’d fit in nicely. There was a guy there whom I was seeing, it was very informal.’
‘What does “seeing” mean?’
‘We slept together. Do you want me to explain that?’
‘His name?’
‘Christian.’
‘Christian what?’
‘I don’t know, I never asked.’
‘You mean,’ said Franz, sounding genuinely perplexed, ‘you slept with this person and never asked his surname?’
‘I didn’t need to. Surnames don’t turn me on.’
‘How old is Christian?’
‘Nineteen, maybe twenty…’
‘And you’re how old?’
‘Twenty six. Why do you look so shocked?’
‘We will finish playing games now perhaps. We accept your alibi: we know you were indeed at the University Hospital at the time you said last Thursday morning. But that doesn’t mean that matters aren’t serious. We know for instance that your name is not really Sabine Falkenberg. That is a false identity you have been using for at least the last six years, which is a serious criminal offence. We know that your real name is Ute von Morsbach and you are from Augsburg, where your family still live, not that you have much to do with them.’
Franz took over, his voice a bit louder now. ‘I see you’re no longer smiling. We know that Ute von Morsbach was a student at the Free University in West Berlin from 1967, and was active in the early days of the Red Army Faction, as a supporter at the very least. Sometime in 1970 Ute von Morsbach disappeared, but our sources indicate that you remained active in the Red Army Faction. It is likely that since the arrest of Baader and the rest of that criminal gang in 1972 you have been less active, who knows. But once we spotted you as such a frequent visitor to the apartment in Ratinger Strasse, we investigated you. We discovered that Sabine Falkenberg had been living in Aachen since 1970, but moved to Düsseldorf a year ago. We even managed to get your fingerprints, which of course showed us that Sabine Falkenberg and Ute von Morsbach are one and the same person.’
‘So,’ said Konrad, standing up and beginning to pace the room, a lawyer addressing a court, ‘Ute von Morsbach was a member of the Red Army Faction. Sabine Falkenberg is Ute von Morsbach. Sabine Falkenberg was a very frequent visitor to the apartment where the gang that murdered Heinrich Albrecht was based. Therefore we have ample grounds to charge you with being part of the conspiracy to murder Herr Albrecht.’
‘And with using a false identity,’ added Franz.
‘Both very serious offences.’ Both Franz and Konrad were standing now and gathering their papers.
‘We’ll leave you to think about your situation,’ said Konrad. ‘But if you are found guilty of these offences, I would be surprised if you served less than ten years in prison.’
From the doorway Franz turned round to address her, speaking as if something had just occurred to him. ‘Of course, if you were to co-operate then we’d just charge you with the false identity offence. I’m sure if you were to plead guilty to that, the state prosecutor would recommend a suspended sentence. Think about it, eh?’
***
They gave her the weekend to think about it. By sometime on the Saturday Sabine’s bravado had been severely dented. In fact, by the Saturday evening – she assumed it was the evening, she couldn’t be sure – she stopped thinking of herself as Sabine Falkenberg and began to think of herself as Ute von Morsbach again. She even found she missed her family and when she thought of them she began to cry. She cried the whole of the following day, and asked to speak to the men who’d been questioning her, but the police just told her they’d be back ‘after the weekend’ and she thought of Franz and Konrad being with their families and that made her miss hers even more.
Franz and Konrad had hardly sat down on the Monday morning when Ute – as she now insisted they call her – began to speak. Ute didn’t stop speaking for the rest of the morning, other than to listen to the occasional question.
She had indeed been involved with the Red Army Faction, she told them. But she wanted to make one thing clear: other than one incident back in 1972 – in which no-one was killed, thankfully – she had not taken part in any ‘actions’, as she described them.
They pressed her about the ‘incident.’ Could they assure her, she asked, that she wouldn’t be charged in connection with it, if she told them?
Almost certainly, replied Konrad.
So she told them: the bombing of the British army base at Rheindahlen in Mönchengladbach in the May of 1972. She’d made sure no-one was killed by it. But she had an accomplice and she wanted to tell them all about the accomplice. She thought they’d be very interested in this accomplice.
She told them how the Red Army Faction had found out about a Werner Pohl – no, she didn’t know how. She was just told what she needed to know.
They had found out that he was a very wealthy businessman who might be sympathetic to the Red Army Faction. Very little was known about him, other than that he had an apartment in Aachen and spent a few days there each month. She was instructed to move to Aachen as soon as she could and to befriend him, which happened in April 1970. His apartment was in Jesuitenstrasse, near the cathedral, and when she’d checked it out she discovered it had been rented by him for a couple of years, so she believed he was who he said he was.
Werner Pohl turned out indeed to be very wealthy, and very well disposed to the Red Army Faction. He was certainly well read on Marx and Lenin, often quoting them. She found some of his political views odd though.
What did she mean by that?
Well he didn’t seem to like Jews very much, but then he was from an older generation she supposed.
How old?
Forties, she replied. She never found out exactly how old, just as she never found out many things about him. Anyway, Werner Pohl gave the Red Army Faction hundreds of thousands of Deutschmarks, though none of it came through her. He also made suggestions about targets for the Red Army Faction and urged her to pass these ideas on. And he got hold of detonators for them. But all of this came at a price, she said, pausing for a while as she sobbed. He was a cruel man. As broadminded as she was about sex, and as much as she realised that what she was doing helped the revolutionary struggle against fascism, and so was justified, sometimes she found his cruelty too much.
What kind of cruelty, Franz and Konrad both wanted to know?
Sexual cruelty: he was a sadist. He got pleasure from inflicting pain on her. In fact, unless he was able to hurt her he didn’t seem to be able to become aroused or satisfy himself.
Please be more specific, said Konrad.
Ute, as they were now calling her, was reluctant to elaborate, but Konrad insisted. He hit her, sometimes very hard she told them– in fact, usually very hard. And he’d tie her up, very tightly. Sometimes he’d put his hands around her neck while they were having sex and occasionally she’d black out. He liked to drip hot wax on her body, and towards the end of their relationship he brought along a strange instrument, like a very long fork, and he’d used it to scratch her body and it was agonising.
The Red Army Faction had wanted to find out more about Werner Pohl: where he went when he wasn’t in Aachen, whether Werner Pohl was his real name, where his money came from… but he was elusive. She never managed to get any of this information from him and the Red Army Faction never managed to follow him from Aachen to wherever he went, though they tried on a number of occasions. In the end they decided not to push it, as long as he was coming up with the money. They’d told her to be very circumspect about what she told Werner about the organisation but, looking back on it, she probably told him more than she should have done.
Then he disappeared. June 1972. There had been a spate of bombings in the May, including the one
she carried out in Mönchengladbach – he’d driven her to and from the place, by the way. Come to think of it, he’d even suggested the British army base as a target. Then in the first two weeks of June Baader, Raspe, Meins, Ensslin, Meinhoff and Müller had all been arrested, and she thinks that frightened him. It certainly frightened her. She didn’t see him again after that: he disappeared, and she stayed in Aachen. The Red Army Faction was in turmoil and her contact with them was quite limited, but the instructions she had were to stay there in case he got in touch.
He never did. She completed her Masters and had occasional contact with her family, enough for them to keep her in funds and to believe she wanted to be alone so she could find herself, which was very much in vogue at the time.
In 1975 she decided to move to Düsseldorf. Some comrades from the Red Army Faction were in Altstadt and she made contact with them. She was not very active, more of a messenger than anything else. In truth, she was having second thoughts about the whole business and doubted that imperialism was about to be overthrown, but she stayed involved because she thought she may as well… and then there was the trial going on at Stammheim, and Ulrike Meinhof’s so-called suicide in May and…
They pushed her about the apartment in Ratinger Strasse: did she know what they were planning? No, she said. She knew they were planning something, but she didn’t know what. She mainly went to the apartment because of Christian: he was a wonderful lover, the best she’d ever had, so gentle, he was able to… was Christian involved in the shooting of Heinrich Albrecht? Franz had asked that question. Konrad looked annoyed that Franz had interrupted her.
Yes, Christian was probably involved, she admitted. But he was very easily led.
And the others?
Hard to say, there were so many people in and out of the apartment, but the woman would probably have been Ulrike – she didn’t know her surname, but obviously not to be confused with Meinhof. And as for the man, well that must have been Horst. Horst was always playing with guns – and motorbikes.
