by Anne Emery
“I shall have a Pils if you will be having some yourselves.”
So they ordered three Pils, and Terry thanked him for agreeing to see them. “Brennan here is a priest working now in Canada, in the city of Halifax, and Edelgard Vogt-Becker was a member of his parish. Her name in Canada was Meika Keller.”
“Yes, I have found her in the files.”
“Anything you can tell us will be appreciated,” Brennan told him.
“Vogt-Becker showed great promise in the sport of volleyball.”
Brennan’s surprise must have been evident in his face because Steiff said, “You did not know this?”
“No, Herr Steiff. This is news to me, but then everything we’ve been hearing about her is news to us.”
“I see.”
“I know she was a highly regarded professor of physics.”
“An intelligent girl. She did very well in her studies.”
“And I know from meeting her in Halifax that she had a great interest in music.”
“That is correct. That is in her files as well. But it was her talent for sport that marked her for future success in the DDR. And that was what enabled her to go to West Berlin in 1974. Permission was rarely given, as I’m sure you have heard. But the state was putting resources into volleyball for women. There was an East German team in the Olympics in Canada in 1976. They did not do all that well. Better in 1980. But I am getting ahead of things. There was a volleyball tournament in West Berlin in 1974, and Vogt-Becker was an assistant coach. So, she was to go with the team. Here is a photograph taken of her before she left.”
Steiff reached into his pocket and took out an envelope. He extracted a small black-and-white photo of Edelgard, head only, stamped June 23, 1973. Her fair hair was pulled back to reveal a pretty, strong-featured face. There could not have been more of a contrast between the face of this young, vital woman and the death mask that haunted Brennan’s nights. Not surprisingly, she had not smiled for the official state photographer. She had a scar over her left eyebrow. The scar she claimed had resulted from her fall at the checkpoint as she dodged the bullets from the border guard.
“But she had another job to do as well,” Steiff said. “Someone from the West — one of the Western democracies, I mean — had offered to provide sensitive information to the East German Ministry of Defence. Because Vogt-Becker was such a loyal citizen, and such a helper to the authorities from time to time, she was given the assignment of receiving the information and bringing it back to the East, where it would be passed on to the headquarters of the ministry, in Strausberg, outside Berlin.”
Another confirmation that the woman he had known and admired in Halifax had been a loyal citizen and helper to the authorities in the totalitarian East German state.
“I have the impression that this information is disconcerting to you, Father Burke.”
“There’s no denying it, Herr Steiff. I hardly know where to begin with my questions. Well, first of all, one name has come up. Do the records show anything about a man named Rolf Antonio Baumann?”
“Of course. He was her husband.”
“Ah.”
“Perhaps a great romantic love or perhaps something more practical. Married couples were eligible to get apartments, loans of money. The DDR promoted marriage and children with almost the same zeal as does the Roman Catholic Church!”
Brennan laughed and said, “I had no idea we were on the same side.”
“Here is a photograph.” Steiff produced a picture of a young man with a long narrow face, thick dark hair, and dark eyes. He stared straight at the camera, unsmiling. The photo had the appearance of a mug shot.
“So, yes, this was the husband. And, in the end, the hostage.”
“Oh, God. What now?”
“I see you are a man with a conscience, Father Burke. These revelations disturb you.”
“I don’t like what I’m hearing, but I’ve come a long way to hear it.”
“Right. Of course, when she defected, when she did not return to the East, her husband was held in custody as a hostage. As an incentive for her to come home. But she never did.”
“How . . . how long was he held hostage?”
Steiff raised his eyebrows and took a sip of his beer, then said, “How long did she stay away?”
“Jesus,” Terry muttered.
Brennan said, with trepidation, “Where was he held?”
“In prison.”
“God help him. Please don’t tell me they kept him in prison from 1974 to the collapse of the East German state in 1990.”
“No. But only because he did not survive that long. Conditions were harsh. He died in 1982.”
And she had entered his name in the Book of the Names of the Dead in, when was it? In 1993. Had she just learned of his death then, or was it her first opportunity to write in his name, because she had only recently joined the Church? And was she the one who had crossed out his name? Almost certainly, given the relationship between the two. But why? Brennan didn’t know, but he did come to one conclusion: if she had died by suicide, it was highly unlikely that she did it because of Rolf’s death. She had known since 1993 or maybe much longer. However she dealt with that in the privacy of her own conscience, it was almost certainly something more recent that accounted for her death.
“Baumann and Vogt-Becker relocated to Berlin after their marriage, but the Baumann family lived at this address here in Leipzig. It is one of the Plattenbauten — concrete slab buildings — constructed during the DDR era.” Steiff took a small notebook out of his jacket pocket, wrote on a page, tore it out, and gave it to Brennan. The address was Strasse des 18 Oktober. “But I do not have up-to-date information about how many of them, if any, are still in that place. His sister, perhaps. She never married.” Steiff looked at his papers again and said, “I have her daughter’s address as well.”
“Baumann’s sister’s daughter.”
“No. I apologize for my lack of precision. I meant the daughter of Edelgard Vogt-Becker.”
“Edelgard’s daughter?” There was another one? Something else Brennan was hearing for the first time. He said, “So, she had another child.”
“What do you mean another child? There was only one child of the marriage.”
“There must be some mistake, then. Her daughter, Helga, died before Edelgard could get her out of Germany.”
“Why do you say that, Father Burke?”
“Well, what we know is that she brought the little girl with her across the border into West Berlin, the plan being to emigrate from there to — at the time, I think the plan was to go to the United States. And there is some suggestion that she handed the child over to . . . to someone she met in West Berlin, but the child was ill and then . . .”
Steiff was looking at Brennan with something akin to pity. “You say you know this. How do you know it?”
Brennan didn’t bother to reply, didn’t admit that this was another part of the legend around Meika Keller that had just been blasted to smithereens.
“You’re telling us Helga is alive,” Brennan muttered.
“That’s what I’m telling you, yes.”
“Do you have any information about her?”
“Why don’t you go and see for yourself? I can give you her address in Berlin.”
“Oh!” Brennan was still reeling from the news that she was alive; now he might actually meet her? He could not begin to imagine the conversation.
“She is in the northeastern part of the city. Marzahn.” Steiff wrote the address down and handed the page to Brennan. “It is another of the Plattenbauten. Socialist slab housing.”
Brennan sat across the table from Steiff in the richly decorated Auerbach’s Keller, holding the addresses of the dead woman’s in-laws and of the daughter who had not died after escaping East Berlin with her mother in 1974. He pondered
the events surrounding Edelgard’s escape — or, more accurately, her defection. Willy Horst Lehmann said that Edelgard had met with the man who had the secrets — secrets, Brennan now knew, about the nukes kept in the province of New Brunswick — and that she then went into a post office, came out without the papers, and that was the last Willy had seen of her. Brennan said to Steiff now, “Erich Jäger may have told you that we contacted a man named Willy in Berlin.”
“Yes.”
“We were not entirely convinced by his description of what happened, or his role in it.”
“Permit me to guess. He claimed to be a hero of the resistance, ostensibly working for the Stasi but really risking his life to usher people into freedom in the West. Am I correct?”
“You are. That’s the story he peddles about himself.”
“He is not the only one who now denies being a tool of the secret police. According to the file, he had some explaining to do after she got away from him. This was very important, sensitive information she was to bring back across the border, information about the capabilities of certain segments of the NATO forces. She had been instructed to bring the material back and hand it personally to a particular individual in East Berlin. Instead, she took it into a post office in West Berlin and left it with some contact she had arranged on her own. Very insecure. She put important information, and important persons, at risk.”
Terry chimed in then, “Not very good tradecraft for a pack of spies.”
“Spies! Nobody was Kim Philby here! They were low-level persons, she a girl who provided the occasional bit of information to the Stasi about her friends and acquaintances in order to stay on the right side of the authorities. Her courier from the post office, who knows? And the man from the West, again we don’t know. A low-level cypher clerk? A little man with a grudge to settle? Not someone from MI6 or the CIA!
“So,” Steiff continued, “the envelope eventually arrived. Who knows how many eyes may have looked it over on its way to the DDR Ministry of Defence? As for Vogt-Becker, she somehow managed to disappear.”
“Lehmann claims he saw her come out of the post office without the envelope. And, he says, he merely walked away after that. Let her go.”
“So ein Misthaufen!”
Brennan had to laugh; it meant “What a pile of crap!”
“Lehmann lost sight of her,” Steiff said. “He failed in his duties. She was clever enough to get away. Our information now is that the person who gave the secret documents also helped her to defect to the West. Which does not seem to make sense. Whose side was this man on? Giving important information about his country’s armed forces to the Eastern bloc, but also assisting an East bloc defector to get to the West. Whatever the case, it seems she was able to obtain papers that got her into the United States or Canada. There must have been a couple of name changes, because the record ends when she leaves this country.”
Steiff rose from his seat and said, “I have no way of knowing of course whether the NATO countries ever became aware of this breach of security. That becomes more likely with time, now that Germany is united and the entire country is an ally of the West. I would not want to be that man, the man who passed the information over, never knowing whether or when the authorities in his country might be tipped off about what he did.”
Images of the park bench confession came to Brennan’s mind, the guilt and fear of the man who had made his painful admissions.
“I suspect,” Steiff said now, “that the file is never closed on treason!”
Brennan and Terry expressed their gratitude to Manfred Peter Steiff, paid the bill, and walked out into the Mädler Passage.
“Jesus,” Terry said, “yer man Steiff certainly gave us enough to stew about. That whole story about the daughter, Helga, dying. Imagine a mother making that up about her own little kid.”
“Between him and Willy Lehmann, they’ve cut the heart out of everything I thought I had known about Meika Keller.”
“I wonder whether the mystery figure who passed the secrets and smuggled her out of Germany was ever unmasked as a traitor. Or whether he is still alive.” Terry eyed Brennan as they walked along, wondering no doubt whether what they had just heard had any relation to what Father Burke had heard in that park in Berlin. “You don’t have to be an old Air Force veteran like me to know that an offence like that would never be forgiven. Or forgotten. This must be a dirty cloud hanging over his head every time he walks out his front door in the morning.”
“And for twenty-two years, the man, whoever he is, has known that Meika Keller knows about it. Knew about it. That may be how she managed to get to the West, pressured him into procuring a false passport or something, helping her emigrate. I wonder if he thought of her as a shadow that still followed him everywhere he went.”
“Blackmailing him, maybe, Brennan?”
“Maybe not, but the threat of blackmail would always have been there.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.”
“And he had something on her as well. He knew she did not make a hero’s escape from East Berlin. She was in fact a Stasi snitch, very much in favour with the regime for the services she had rendered unto it.”
“True enough, Terry.” Conversations on this subject always made Brennan uneasy. “How do we know we wouldn’t have done the same things if we had lived here during those times? After all, hundreds of thousands of people ended up being unofficial informers, not employed by the state but passing over information about their fellow citizens. We would all like to think we wouldn’t have gone along with that, we wouldn’t have collaborated with the Stasi. Or with the Gestapo. But think of the terror people lived with. Would any one of us be so terrified that we would weaken and go along to keep ourselves or our families safe?”
“I hear you. It’s easy for us to look back and say we’d be above it all. We wouldn’t tattle on our friends. We wouldn’t sneak the last crust of bread into our own mouths instead of giving it to our children. But for those who had to live with those horrors day after day?”
“You never know, I suppose, until you live it.”
Brennan stopped to light up a smoke. He looked around him and marvelled at how beautiful the city was at night, the great city that had once been home to Edelgard Vogt-Becker. “Maybe that’s how things stood for twenty-two years, each of them, she and her contact, having dangerous or shameful information about the other. Each of them petrified that the other would talk.”
“Exactly. We’re still no further ahead about that postcard, though, are we, Bren? Who sent her a deceptively mild message on the back of a card that depicted the headquarters of the Stasi?”
“Maybe somebody she turned in to the secret police, someone she informed on. But why then did she dash over here with a cover story about going to the opera in Austria? It doesn’t make sense, Terry.”
“And she met her death in Canada, not here.”
“Right.”
“Was it Canada she arrived in directly from Germany, Bren, do you know? Or did she make her way through some other countries first?”
“As far as I know she came to Canada. Toronto, I think it was, and then on to Halifax.”
“And there’s a member of the Canadian Army charged with her murder. Now, what are you going to do? Call the Halifax Police tip line?”
Brennan shuddered. It was bred into the Burkes down through centuries of conflict with colonial powers that a Burke did not inform on anyone, ever, to the police. But the police hadn’t a clue about the history of what had really happened here, that a veteran of the Second World War had handed over highly sensitive military information to the East German regime and that Meika Keller was the go-between. Brennan had to tread carefully; he could not disclose anything to his brother, let alone the police, that might reflect back on the airman’s confession.
“One thing is indisputable,” he sai
d. “Alban MacNair had a row with Meika hours before she died. Did that have something to do with all this, with the trip we’re assuming she took here to Germany?” Not likely, given what he had heard in Berlin. And of course MacNair was not of World War II vintage. Brennan was leaning towards the idea that there was something personal behind the quarrel Meika had with the Army officer. “Nothing I’ve heard suggests that MacNair left the province of Nova Scotia in the weeks before Meika Keller’s death. Maybe,” he said lightly, “it was a lover’s tiff between the two of them.”
Terry was eyeing him with the skepticism Brennan might have expected. “You know more about this than you can tell me. I can appreciate that, Father. But are you being a bit fanciful now?”
“What I can tell you in all honesty, my son, is that I am no further ahead about what or who caused the woman’s death than I was before I left Halifax. I can also reiterate to you that I am virtually certain that the man we encountered in Berlin is not the killer.”
Terry searched his brother’s face for any sign that Brennan was dissembling; he appeared satisfied that he was not.
“Bear with me now, Terry. I keep coming back to this question: what if the postcard wasn’t something menacing at all, but a note from somebody who had shared some experience with Meika? And the Stasi had a particular significance for the two of them, something they both survived. Well, the secret police had significance of course for every man, woman, and child in East Germany.”
“And every sniffer dog.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“But, Bren, I’d find that card menacing. No two ways about it. The headquarters —torture chambers, no doubt — of the secret police. And Fried Habler told you that people can now go in and see the files the Stasi had on them. That would frighten the hell out of me, if I had something to hide. Yet, when this person reconnected with Meika, she flew over to see him. Or her. Let’s go with ‘him’ for now. But what about the reference to talent — ‘I wish I had your talent’?”
“Perhaps the words meant exactly what they said, or perhaps they meant something else, something understood by the sender of the card and by Meika herself.”
