Secrets of state, p.1
Secrets of State, page 1
SECRETS OF STATE
Peter Driscoll
Silvertail Books ♦ London
For Beverley and Natushka,
in memory of Spiro
Author’s Note
For the purposes of this story I have transplanted the geographical feature known as Lykostoma, or the Wolf’s Mouth, some eighty miles to the north-west of where it actually stands at the entrance to the Vale of Tempe in the province of Thessaly. Otherwise I have tampered as little as possible with the topography of Greece.
PROLOGUE
BERLIN, 1988
Through the windows, Garvey watched the phantom stations flitting by.
They were dim, eerie caverns, appearing and vanishing at intervals along the dark U-Bahn tunnels, deserted except for occasional border guards patrolling their empty platforms. Grey uniforms matching the raw concrete of the walls. Places without colour, fluorescent lamps high up in the ceilings shedding just enough light to catch their names by. Stadion der Weltjugend. Nordbahnhof. Oranienburger Tor. Not that the names mattered. The train trundled through the disused stations as though they weren’t real places at all, nothing more than subterranean landmarks, the signposts of a vanished city.
None of this will ever change, Garvey thought.
This side of the Wall the train made only one stop, at Friedrichstrasse. When it slowed down and he stood up to get out, he was relieved to see a dozen other people doing the same. As the sliding doors hissed open and he stepped out on the platform he saw more of them spilling from the other coaches. He was surprised at how many there were this early on a Sunday, but now he recognized them as West Berliners going in to spend the day with their relatives. Frail, elderly men carrying gift-wrapped parcels from Wertheim’s and KaDeWe, spry old ladies in camel-hair coats and Sunday hats, clutching bunches of flowers. A few younger couples. Hardly any kids. It was a city of old people.
Glad to be among them anyway, Garvey kept to the middle of the crowd as they surged across the platform, past the Intershop counter and down a series of gloomy tunnels into a brightly lit immigration hall. Here they split up to attach themselves to the queues from earlier trains, shuffling slowly forward to the rows of passport windows.
To set the thing up, Garvey had gone in and out on Friday through Checkpoint Charlie, the only other crossing open to foreigners: a long, intimidating walk from the Allied control post across the empty stretch of no man’s land, exposed under the watchtowers. This was less like a frontier post even if the procedure was the same: a one-day tourist visa, few formalities, no awkwardness as long as you acted meek enough. You also had to use the same route to enter and leave. Garvey had timed the journey both sides of the Wall and knew that this was the quickest way out.
The officer who inspected his passport was the usual gimlet-eyed type, glancing several times down at the photograph and then up at his face with the same special stare they all had, making everyone feel singled out for scrutiny. Garvey returned his look squarely. The passport was all right, the man called Gideon had assured him. The passport was a hundred per cent kosher, Gideon had said, using what he supposed was the right jargon for dealing with someone like Garvey, but there’d been no way of being sure about that until now.
The officer made a note of the document’s number, scribbled it on a visa slip and rubber-stamped it. He took the five-mark visa fee, put the slip between the pages of the passport and thrust it back under the glass.
‘Vielen dank,’ Garvey said politely. He got no reply.
The way out led through a heavy, one-way door that hissed shut behind him on hydraulic hinges. A kind of finality about that sound, a reminder that it was too late to change your mind. Garvey had no luggage and was waved past the customs benches where the West Berliners were having their bags and parcels examined. Up a flight of stairs, he queued again at the kiosk to change the obligatory twenty-five marks into East German currency. Finally he was through, stepping out of the station, pausing for a moment, breathing a preliminary sigh of relief before he turned north along the Friedrichstrasse.
It was a cold bright December morning, with a biting east wind that came straight at him as he rounded the corner into Unter den Linden. He was in plenty of time and glad of the chance to walk, easing his anxiety by staying on the move. He hunched against the wind, digging his hands deep into the pockets of his shapeless quilted anorak. The blue jeans, the anorak and the scuffed running-shoes gave him a drab, anonymous look among the scattered Sunday pedestrians. He was a big man, powerfully built if not especially tall, but there was nothing about him that looked out of place, nothing that was memorable except, perhaps, a perpetual wariness about his pale blue eyes, a suggestion of latent hostility behind them.
The American was waiting where they’d arranged, in the ground-floor café of the Berlin-Palast Hotel. The place was three-quarters empty and he was on his own at a table facing the street entrance, an empty coffee cup in front of him. In his army greens he looked very young and not half as sure of himself as he had been yesterday. He sprang nervously to his feet as soon as he saw Garvey arrive.
‘Sit down,’ Garvey said, sliding on to the opposite bench. At least the boy hadn’t lost his nerve: the canvas grip was on the floor beside him, but as soon as he’d resumed his seat he began nudging it away from him with his foot, as though he couldn’t wait to get rid of it.
‘You get on all right?’ asked Garvey.
‘No problem. But listen, I have to go—’
‘Just shut up and sit still,’ Garvey said quietly.
A waiter approached and Garvey ordered coffee for both of them. He lit a cigarette and glanced around the café. They were used to tourists in here and nobody was taking any notice of the two of them, but it would look strange if they parted so soon after meeting.
The young soldier had lapsed into an unhappy silence. He was a Spec 4 technician with the American Forces Network, a smart-arse kid Garvey had picked out in a bar near the US headquarters over in Dahlem. Buying expensive drinks to impress a pair of tourist girls he had latched on to. Bragging about the nearly new BMW he had bought, even talking openly about all the money he was making shifting black-market Westmarks out of the East for would-be émigrés. Nothing to it, as long as you had the right contacts; Allied servicemen were free to come and go through Checkpoint Charlie, the Comrades prohibited under the Four-Power Agreement from searching them or their vehicles. A stupid prick, Garvey had thought, but the best he could find at short notice. Not averse to taking two thousand marks for an hour’s work, but worried about it all the same.
The coffee arrived. When the waiter had left, Garvey glanced down at the canvas bag for the first time, checking that its tough zip fastenings were still secured by the Squire padlock he had put on it. He leaned forward and picked up the bag, testing its weight, moving it closer to his own side of the table. From a pocket of his anorak he drew out a copy of the Berlin street plan and placed it on the table, lifting one corner of it to show the edges of the hundred-mark notes tucked between the folds.
‘The second thousand. Go to the toilet and count it if you want.’
‘That’s OK. I’ll take your word for it. Thanks.’
The soldier slipped the map under the overcoat that lay beside him. He stirred sugar into his coffee and gulped at it. Garvey said: ‘As soon as you leave here you go straight back through Charlie, all right?’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t be hanging around.’ Emboldened a little, the kid said: ‘Listen. I better tell you. I can’t do anything like this for you again.’
‘I didn’t say I would ask you again.’
‘I never brought anything in here before, you know? I, like, when you wouldn’t say what it was, I figured maybe it was dope. Dope is way out of my line.’
‘You don’t want to know what it is. Just forget all about it.’
The soldier insisted on explaining. ‘I got a nice comfortable thing going there with the currency, you know? No risk really. I don’t want to screw up. I don’t have to mess with any dope or anything.’ Garvey said nothing. The kid drained his coffee cup and asked awkwardly: ‘Is it OK if I go now? I really should go.’
‘Yes.’
‘No hard feelings? About not doing it again, I mean?’
‘I said forget about it, for Christ’s sake!’
The soldier rose swiftly and gathered up his coat and the map. He seemed about to offer his hand, but then thought better of it. He looked at Garvey and shook his head in wonder. ‘Shifting stuff like that into this place. Jesus! Rather you than me. Take care anyway.’
Then he was gone, hurrying gratefully to the door, heading for his BMW and the sanctuary across the Wall.
Garvey took his time finishing his coffee, ordered another cup and smoked a second cigarette. At half-past eleven he paid his bill, picked up the bag and left the café.
There were more people about now. A queue had formed for tickets to the State Opera, and coachloads of Czech tourists were being disgorged into Marx-Engels-Platz. The tiny, elegant old Marienkirche, utterly dwarfed by the bullying height of the adjacent television tower, was ringing its bells in a forlorn appeal to Sunday worshippers. Dutifully obeying every pedestrian light, Garvey continued his journey.
Nothing will ever change here, he thought again.
Ever since he had moved into the apartment Dr Jurgen Iglauer had been trying to stay clear of Frau Treps. This morning, on what he hoped would be his last day there, he came face to face with her just as he was leaving the building.
He knew her only by sight, as the Hausmeisterin of the apartment block at 29 Karl-Marx-Allee. Unavoidably he had passed her several times on his way in and out, and she had responded to his polite greetings guardedly but without open suspicion. There was something to be said for the anonymity of these tower blocks, where even next-door neighbours seemed hardly to know each other. But today, of all days, she chose to confront him.
‘Excuse me . . .’
She was blocking his path to the front door as he stepped out of the lift. Wernher Zahn had warned him about Frau Treps; she was not only the caretaker appointed by the district housing committee but also a Party member and an inveterate busybody. A dark dumpy woman in her mid-forties, she was dressed as usual in a headscarf and a shapeless blue coverall.
‘I was just coming up to see you. You are the man staying in six-E, aren’t you?’
Der Mann, she said. There were no gentlemen or ladies in the vocabulary of the Party.
‘That’s correct,’ Dr Iglauer said cautiously. ‘Herr Zahn’s flat.’
‘But Zahn himself appears to be absent.’
‘He’s on holiday. He’s gone to Czechoslovakia.’
‘Then what, may I ask, are you doing in his apartment?’
‘We are friends. He offered me the use of his place. I’m visiting from the country.’
Frau Treps was incredulous. ‘He offered you . . .? But he sought no permission for this arrangement. In any case, it’s forbidden for anyone but authorized tenants to inhabit these apartments.’
‘I’m hardly inhabiting it,’ said Iglauer reasonably. ‘I’ve been staying as his guest.’
‘Where do you say you’re from?’
‘I am Dr Jurgen Iglauer, from Friedland, near Neubrandenburg.’ No point in trying to lie; he wouldn’t put it past her to demand proof of his identity. No sense, either, in giving any ground. A man in the right will stand on his dignity. ‘I do not see why I should discuss this with you in a public lobby, Frau Treps. I have an appointment to keep. Call to see me later, if you wish.’
‘Just a minute, Herr Doktor.’ Frau Treps’s solid bulk was still in his way. ‘The fact of the matter is that it’s quite irregular for you to be staying here. These are not tourist apartments. The State provides hotels for visitors to the city.’
‘The State also provides me with a pension,’ Iglauer said drily, ‘but not a large enough one to pay a hotel bill. If Herr Zahn has overlooked some regulation of yours, I suggest you take the matter up with him when he returns.’
The Hausmeisterin squinted at him suspiciously. Was she wondering whether he had some other reason for avoiding a hotel? Whether he had deliberately secluded himself here, away from official scrutiny, among the concrete warrens of residential Berlin?
She said with grim satisfaction: ‘Yes, I will take it up with him. And in the meantime I must ask you to leave.’
‘What?’
‘I cannot take responsibility for an occupant who has no permission to be here. Please vacate the apartment by this evening, Herr Doktor. Otherwise it must become a matter for the Volkspolizei.’
‘Frau Treps . . .’
But she gave him no chance to reply, turning away and marching off with her shoulders squared towards her own lair down the corridor. ‘Bitch!’ he called after her, but not quite loudly enough for her to hear.
Recollecting himself, glancing at his watch, he hurried to the front door. Outside, a cold wind was beating down the endless canyon of Karl-Marx-Allee, making him shiver even under his coat of imitation sheepskin. He felt a bit shaky; the encounter had taken more out of him than he’d realized. That was what age did to you; it made you frightened. It placed you at the mercy of a fat bullying cow who had only to mention the word ‘police’ to put a chill around your heart.
Well, damn her anyway. Her generation often seemed like foreigners to him. It was the way they had grown up; it was the indoctrination of the Volksschulen and the Party that had cut off any shared sense of history. She would know that he was of an age to have served in the war, but there was no respect due to him for that, no tribute to be expected for what he had lost: his youth swallowed up by the army and the POW camps, his wife and child killed in the bombing of Dresden. They had sanitized the past. Mention of the war was only an opportunity to crow over their liberation from fascism at the hands of the glorious Red Army. No thought for the millions like him who had merely done their duty, who had served their country honourably.
Yes, it was all a long time ago, as his stoical old comrade Wernher Zahn would point out whenever they met and reminisced; but the war had misshaped the rest of their lives, and for Iglauer it was impossible not to be bitter. No matter that he had tried to fit into their system; what they remembered was that he had once been an officer of the Abwehr. No use arguing that he had never been a Nazi, when what counted was that he refused to be a communist. Thirty years without promotion from the rank of legal assistant in an obscure provincial town—for what? Early retirement, and no permission to emigrate. The idea of getting out at the end had seemed the only thing that kept him going, and even that dream they had managed to kill.
Until last month. Until the chance reading of a magazine article, and a look at the accompanying photograph, had brought a rush of astonishment. It had been in one of the copies of Der Spiegel that his sister sometimes sent him clandestinely from Hamburg. At first he couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept the coincidence that connected these fresh tidings to events of so long ago, already clouded in his memory. He looked at the photograph and he saw the face of a man across a table in a rural army barracks in wartime Greece, a man dressed in peasant’s rags, frightened and yet self-possessed, bargaining for his life. A surmise grew into a certainty, and all at once Iglauer knew he had a weapon in his hands, something of his own to bargain with.
Tramping towards the city centre, he took comfort from the thought that his expulsion from the flat was not the disaster it might have been two or three days ago. The flat had served its purpose, courtesy of Wernher Zahn who had handed him the keys and gone on his holiday without asking questions. Guessing something, but knowing better than to ask. The flat had allowed him to drop out of sight without disappearing exactly, to put his plans into action without the risk of being traced. He had been an intelligence officer himself once; he knew how to go about these things. Yet he knew also that the Staatssicherheitspolizei, the secret police, always kept up an interest in anyone who had tried to leave the country, and that his absence from Friedland might already have been noticed. He could only hope or pray—yes, why not pray?—that there had been no hitch in the arrangements, that the Englishman had brought the papers with him.
He came to the Alexanderplatz and stopped, lingering at its north-east corner. He had known it before the war when it was a real place, a crossroads at the heart of old Berlin, not the windswept concrete plain it was now. If you wanted anonymity, though, you could hardly do better than join the swarms of ant-like pedestrians who hurried across it. Many were heading for the Weihnachtensmarkt, the traditional Christmas fair which had opened two days ago to the east of the square, bringing some much-needed cheer to the antiseptic drabness of the city.
Iglauer spotted the Englishman from a long way off, appearing from between the concrete piers under the S-Bahn line, walking across the square towards him. Only now did he allow himself a thrill of anticipation. The man entered the pedestrian tunnel on the far side of Grunerstrasse and emerged a minute later only thirty metres away. He was dressed as before in colourless outdoor clothes, but this time he carried a small brown bag. He came on towards Iglauer, approaching just close enough to be sure he had been seen. A swift exchange of looks, no sign of recognition, and then he turned sharply away and headed down the street. Iglauer followed.
Keep ten metres behind me, the Englishman had instructed him. Give no indication that we are together until I show you that it’s safe, he had said, in that laconic, almost indifferent tone of his. Iglauer was gratified at how quickly the British had responded to his approach, at how eager that other voice on the telephone had sounded, but somehow he hadn’t quite got the measure of this man. He had known only a few Englishmen; around one in particular, the man who’d interrogated him after his capture in 1944, he had formed his notions of the officer-gentleman stereotype. This one was of a rougher cut; he seemed hard and cold, vaguely resentful and not given to wasting words or offering friendly reassurance. But he was shrewd and appeared to know exactly what he was doing. It had taken only one brief meeting—sharing a table by apparent accident for a few minutes on Friday in the cafeteria of the Schloss Kopernick—to establish contact and work out the details.
