Postmark Berlin

by Anne Emery

  “The plot thickens,” Brennan said when Terry was at his side again. “Did you get a look at him? Was he alone or was there a passenger?”

  “Passenger in the back seat, but all I saw was the shape of a man. Didn’t catch any details, unfortunately. Well, no details of the cabbie or his passenger, but I was able to see that it was a Freundlich Taxi car, and he had the number seventeen in his windshield. Information I can use later when I hire a Freundlich taxi on a pretext.”

  “Or when I do. Ich spreche Deutsch, after all.”

  “I imagine many of the taxi drivers here have some English.”

  “Roma locuta est; causa finite est.”

  “I may not know any German beyond Noch ein Bier, bitte, Fräulein, but you can’t fool an old altar boy with that famous bit of Latin. Rome has spoken; the case is closed. Very well, Father. I defer to a higher power.”

  “And rightly so. But for now, our mission is to get to the Geggie bar and meet our man Willy.”

  * * *

  They found their way to Schiffbauerdamm, which was a long street running alongside the river Spree. And there was the Geggie. They went inside. It wasn’t half bad as a pub. The wallpaper was tartan, and there were portraits of Robbie Burns, William Wallace, and Robert the Bruce on the walls and a set of bagpipes hanging over the bar. But the place wasn’t overly tatty, and it had a fine selection of whiskies and German beers. And Guinness on tap as well. Terry and Brennan ordered pints of stout and glasses of whisky from a lovely young dark-haired woman and stood at the bar surveying the room for their target. No sign of a large Teutonic man in Scottish headgear, but they would wait and hope that the man was working his regular shift. Jäger said he worked six nights a week, so there was hope. And it wasn’t long before their man emerged from a room behind the long mahogany bar and began pouring beer from the taps. And, bless him, he was instantly recognizable with a red-and-green tartan tam on his big blond head. When the beer had settled, he hoisted his tray and carried the eight large steins to a table at the back of the room. Back there were microphone stands and an assortment of musical instruments propped up on shelves or hanging on hooks on the wall, including a couple of bodhrans, tin whistles, and a mandolin.

  Then came the bad news. One of the barmen walked over to the performance area and made an announcement. Brennan translated the news for Terry. “I am sorry to announce to you that the Auld Reekie Rockers, the band for this evening, will not be coming.” There were groans and protests throughout the crowd. “We are told that they have been detained at Heathrow Airport for reasons nobody has explained, and they will not be here. But we will play for you many recordings of Irish and Scottish music. So, drink up and enjoy your evening.” He raised an imaginary glass and toasted the crowd, “Prost und sláinte!”

  Nobody was more despondent than Willy in the tam, and Brennan was alarmed to hear him say to the young woman behind the bar, “What a shitty night for me! I worked the early shift precisely so I could stop working and sit and listen to the band; now they are not coming!” He looked at his watch.

  Brennan thought fast; he didn’t want to lose his quarry because of a lack of musical entertainment. He looked to his brother and translated what he had just heard from Willy. Then, “You’ve always been the barroom bon vivant of the family. Get up off your arse and earn your pint of porter. Tell him a tale. Make something up to keep him here.”

  “Thy will be done, Father.”

  Terry caught the eye of the young one at the bar, leaned over, and tried to communicate with her by way of sign language. He pointed to himself and the stage area, and the barmaid laughed and said, “I speak English.” So, Terry repeated his story, and the young woman’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

  “Really,” Terry assured him. “And my brother, too,” he said, pointing his glass at Brennan.

  Terry got up, walked to the end of the room, and took one of the tin whistles down off the wall. He grabbed a napkin off a table and gave the instrument a thorough wipe — Burkean fastidiousness coming through — and tested it for tuning. He put it back and tried another, repeated the process, and was obviously satisfied. He had the attention of everyone in the room.

  “Guten Abend, everyone. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of my German,” he said in a conveniently acquired northside Dublin accent. “My name is Terry Burke. I can’t possibly replace the band you were hoping to hear, but I can play a few tunes for yez, if you’d like.” And he played a few jigs and reels on the whistle. The punters were delighted, Brennan saw, Willy Horst Lehmann among them, and they demanded more. Lehmann poured himself a beer and plunked himself down at a table, with several people he obviously knew, and turned his attention to Terry’s performance.

  “Now I’ll sing yez a song that’s well loved in Ireland, though I think it came originally from Scotland. My wife, Heather, from Inverness insists that it’s all about her!” He did a lovely rendition of “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go,” with its lines about the bloomin’ heather. A young woman at Lehmann’s table asked if he would sing it again, so she and her man could dance. Terry obliged them, and several couples got up and waltzed.

  “I need to sit and wet my throat now,” he said after the song, “but my brother will be happy to take over. Amn’t I right, Brennan?”

  Lehmann and his companions offered Terry a seat at their table, introduced themselves, and ordered a round. Good. The Burkes wanted Lehmann on the batter and loosened up. Brennan tapped a finger on one of the bodhrans and announced that he would be singing “Foggy Dew.”

  Terry got up and whispered in his ear, “Are you going to say Huns or change the words?”

  “Feck, I don’t know.” He’d heard a more sensitive version of the song in which Britannia’s Huns became Britannia’s sons. But he wasn’t one for softening lyrics or passages of literature. Or Scripture, for that matter. He would go with the original. Taking the bodhran in his hands, he beat the rhythm to the old song about Ireland’s 1916 Rising against the British Empire and sang it as if Britannia’s Huns had just sailed in through the Dublin fog the week before. He, too, was treated to enthusiastic applause. After a sappy rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” Brennan insinuated himself at the table with his brother and the betammed Willy, and he listened as Terry boasted about the fact that the checkpoint scenes in the great 1965 film The Spy Who Came In from the Cold were filmed in a cobblestoned square in Dublin across from his favourite bar. Terry ordered a round and then went on to recount blood-curdling tales of the bold IRA in Ireland and Terry’s own, not entirely fictional, role in the Troubles some years before. He was the family seanchaí — storyteller — and he had a rapt audience in the Geggie bar, Berlin. Most of the audience seemed to understand, so Brennan concluded that they had enough English to follow along; either that, or they were doing a good job of bluffing. Terry wound up with some colourful fictions about Heather, his fictional wife from the Highlands.

  Once the Burke brothers were in like Flynn with the crowd at the table, and after they had rebuffed the barmaid’s offer of payment for their melodic services, it was time to get their intelligence source on track and quietened down. Brennan gave Terry the eye. “Get to work” was the message. How was he going to introduce the subject of Meika Keller if this visit to the Geggie was just a happy coincidence? Brennan was confident that his brother was up to the job, and he hoped the rising level of alcohol in Willy’s blood would do the rest.

  After some inconsequential chatting about Germany, Terry said, “You know, Willy, my brother here is not very happy with me.”

  “Not happy?” The big, blond Scotophile glanced at Brennan. “Why?”

  “Because we are supposed to be in Leipzig now. Brennan is a priest. Father Burke. Though you might not know it to look at him now!” Terry pointed to Brennan’s stein of beer, and Willy gave a little laugh.

  Brennan said, “It’s so good. How can I resist?” He had decided early in the evening
not to speak any German; you learn much more from people if you don’t let on how much you already know.

  “So,” Terry improvised, “Brennan called me in Dublin and said he wanted to take a trip over from Canada to Leipzig. And not for a happy occasion, I’m sorry to say. One of the people in his parish died. She was originally from Leipzig; she left there many years ago and married a Canadian. Her family in Canada know very little — well, they know nothing at all — about whatever members of her family might still be here in Germany. The woman died in what we will call mysterious circumstances. Nobody knows whether it was an accident or . . . something else!”

  Terry had succeeded in capturing Willy’s interest, and then he strayed a bit from the main narrative. “I jumped at the chance to come over here and meet my brother, so I flew in to Berlin and we met here. And we will be going to Leipzig. But call me an old Gael, I guess. Whenever I see a bar with a Guinness sign or a notice that there is going to be Irish or Scottish music, I can’t help myself; I just have to come in and have a pint. Or two. And a wee dram of Scotch. If there’s a session on — music, that is — all the better. And if there’s no music, well, as you’ve seen, I’ll make my own!”

  “And that’s a good thing,” Willy said, his words a bit slurred. “Your music was excellent!”

  “Thank you. And I’ll also tell you that this is not the first bar I have been in today. I was surprised to find that there are several Irish bars here, as well as this wee bit of Scotland.”

  “Oh, yes. I can tell you all of them. And one can hear Irish and Scottish music very often.”

  “Great. So, what are the names of some of the others? I’ve been to Finnegan’s.”

  Father Burke butted in then. “Terry. The craic is mighty in this bar and in the others, too, I’m sure. And I appreciate being able to raise a jar or two with you. But we have to get to Leipzig and try to find Edelgard’s family and give them the sad news.”

  “I know, I know, Brennan. I understand.”

  “And maybe if we are able to track them down, they’ll be able to tell us whether they know anything about her that might, well, explain her death.”

  “But how could they know that if they haven’t seen her for years, Brennan?”

  “Now we don’t know that for sure. She had a trip to Germany not long ago. Why would she not have visited some family members while she was here? And if she did, maybe they know if something was troubling her, something that might have caused her to . . . to take her own life.” Brennan turned his attention to Willy then, as if he had momentarily forgotten him. “I’m sorry to bring this kind of unhappiness to the table here, Willy. It’s just that it’s on my mind. Edelgard was a wonderful woman. She and I had some lovely conversations about music at my church, and for her to die so suddenly . . .”

  “This woman Edelgard. She was from Leipzig, you say?”

  “Yes. Edelgard Vogt-Becker. Unfortunately, we don’t know any more than that about her past life here in Germany.” But Willy did, if Jäger’s information was correct. “We may have to start with the telephone directory once we get to Leipzig.”

  “I know something about Edelgard Vogt-Becker,” Willy said, leaning towards the Burkes and speaking in a quiet voice.

  “Really!” Brennan said. “Are you from Leipzig?”

  “No, I have lived all my life here in Berlin. But sometimes when people came from the East, I . . . Let me tell you something confidential.” His voice was even softer now, a slurred baritone. “I played what you might call a double game here in the days of the Democratic Republic.” In other words, the undemocratic republic of East Germany.

  Terry, for his part, played to perfection the role of a mind-boggled tourist. “We have to hear this!”

  Willy took a big gulp of beer and said, “I led the authorities of the DDR — in English for you, the GDR — to believe I was working for them, even though I was living in the French sector of the city. What they never knew was that I was using my skills to assist the West.”

  “A dangerous game you were playing!” said a breathless Terry.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What kind of work were you doing?”

  “My official role was to meet or to watch those who crossed into West Berlin, to make sure they returned to the East when their time was up or their task completed. And of course I was required to carry out this work to the best of my ability. But sometimes I found ways to help a person stay over longer. Or I could arrange for them to get some ‘welcome money,’ some extra Deutsche Marks; people coming to the West were restricted in how much currency they were permitted to bring with them.”

  “It’s great that you were able to help people in that way.”

  “I did what I could. Of course, I was living in the West with the permission of the DDR authorities because I was working for them. Undercover, naturally. But being in the West meant I had contacts with important persons who were grateful for information I was able to provide about important officials in the East.”

  “It’s a wonder you weren’t caught and thrown into prison!”

  “Oh, yes, I lived in fear.”

  “So what years were you doing this work?”

  “Long time. From the late 1960s all through the 1970s.”

  “We know Edelgard crossed over in 1974.”

  “Yes, it would have been in one of the years around then.”

  “And you knew of her? Did you meet her?”

  “I did. She was one of many, but I remember her.”

  Brennan thought of another name then. “How about Rolf Antonio Baumann?”

  “Who is Baumann?” Lehmann asked.

  “Just another name that came up in this. Sorry to interrupt, Willy. Please tell us what you remember about Edelgard.”

  “Edelgard, yes. She came over, and I turned a blind eye when she did not go back.”

  “Did not go back to the East.”

  “No wonder,” Terry said. “She would have been shot at! Again!”

  “Shot?”

  “Well, they fired at her. Just missed her. She barely got out alive.”

  Willy stared at Terry, then said, “When was this shooting?”

  What was this, Brennan wondered. How did this fellow miss the shooting? But of course he may not have literally watched every person who came over. He couldn’t be at every possible crossing point.

  Terry replied to his question. “I’m talking about her escape across the border, when she was fired on by the guards.”

  Willy was shaking his head by this time. “There were no bullets flying when she came across the border. The only time she would have been shot at was if they caught her after she failed to return!”

  Wait a minute, what was going on here? Brennan got into the conversation. “She escaped, she was able to evade the gunfire, she fell and hurt herself but kept running. This we know. Then, after that, when did you come into contact with her?”

  “There were no shots fired. Why would there be? She had permission to cross over. She was to meet someone, receive information from him, and take it back to the East. I was supposed to make sure she returned.”

  “She crossed with permission?” She had not in fact escaped? Is that what they were hearing? “How would she have received permission?”

  “I told you. She was to cross over at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, the most northerly of the crossings in the city, to meet someone from the West. From America, I believe, even though where she crossed would bring her into the French sector. She was to get certain information from this man, important secret information, and bring it back to the DDR.”

  Brennan avoided looking at his brother. To Willy, he said, “And did she get the information?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was very good at my work! I knew where the mee
ting place was, in a church over in the Wedding district of the city. I waited there and I followed her after she met with him. The contact took place during a funeral at the church. The man who died was a well-known musician, so it would be crowded, not just a family event, and it would not look out of place to have strangers there. I was instructed to go to the churchyard to wait and follow her when she came out. When she appeared, she was carrying an envelope. She stopped to put it in her bag. It was a large envelope and did not fit in, so it stuck up out of the top of the bag. She walked away. And I followed.”

  “Who was this man from the West that she met?”

  Willy put his hands up in a do not ask me gesture. “I cannot say.”

  Could not or would not? Perhaps this was an instance of the legend-building that Herr Jäger had described as part of Willy Horst Lehmann’s character; Willy was making it sound as if he knew who this mystery man was, when in fact perhaps he hadn’t a clue.

  “All right,” Brennan said. “Now, about the child.”

  “Child?”

  “Was her daughter with her at the church?”

  Willy looked momentarily confused. Then he said, as if to himself, “That must be what she did.”

  “What?”

  “She must have handed the child over to her contact.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Is it not obvious? I did not see her until she was coming out of the funeral, so I did not see a child. But if she arrived with a child and left without one, that must mean she had a plan for the American to take over the sheltering of the daughter. She would have wanted the girl to be safe for the new life in the West. And, I suppose, safe while she completed her assignment.”

  Brennan tried to picture the young mother handing over her little girl to someone after crossing the border. When did she see her again? How much time did Meika have with Helga? Brennan knew the child had survived the crossing into West Berlin but died before the two of them could make it out of Germany for North America.