Another Kind of Country (24 page)

A flash of ID cards, words too low to be overheard.

To Miller it was like a mime show. The newcomers pointing, first to the prisoner, then to the Polski Fiat, doors still open, engine idling. The older Vopo shook his head, the driver of the car raised his voice.

‘You will do as I say, understood?’ Even in German, Miller knew that voice. The fellow turned slowly and Miller saw him: no pinstriped suit now, just the ubiquitous grey windcheater zipped across the paunch, but that round, ruddy face with its thin ginger moustache was imprinted on Miller’s brain. ‘Now get out of here!’

The two Vopos hurried away into the darkness.

Miller shivered, quelled the gasp in his throat.

He felt Rosa tremble in his arms, push back against him.
Surely she couldn’t know Redgrave?

The prisoner was on his feet, wiping his face with a coloured handkerchief. There was blood under his nose, a swelling over his left eye.

‘I just got unlucky.’
In English
. An
American accent. ‘We threw a few stones, yelled a few slogans.’ The twangy words clear in the night. ‘The others got away OK, I tripped over a fucking dog. Like I said, I was just unlucky, or those fucks would never have caught me.’

‘You told them nothing?’ Those clipped tones that sounded as if made for command.

‘What do
you
think?’

‘Course he told them nothing.’ The driver’s voice. American, even more of a drawl. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here before the cavalry come charging over the hill.’ For a moment, when he limped in front of the car, he was clearly visible in the headlights: lean, almost stringy; a high forehead that furrowed back into a skull that was almost hairless. And when the fellow turned his head, the spreading birthmark behind his ear glowed like dark blood in the light.

The car doors slammed.

Miller felt Rosa’s body slacken against his own as the Polski Fiat pulled away.

Rosa turned to him, buried her face in his chest. He held her close, waited until the trembling stopped, until her body felt calm against his.

‘You know him, don’t you – Redgrave?’

‘Is that his name?’ She leaned back in his arms, looking into his face. ‘Redgrave? The bald one with the birthmark?’

For a moment he didn’t get it.

‘You know the American with no hair?’

‘He had a ponytail when I,’ her voice cracked, ‘when I met him. But I’d know him anywhere, that birthmark, that murdering voice.’ He had to strain to hear her words. ‘His name is Herbert Dover,’ she said. ‘A murderer.’

The night seemed to darken, grow colder.

‘Tell
me,’ he said.

In the darkened doorway, clinging to him, she told him about Chile.

October 1989

East Berlin

In his nine years
in East Berlin, Miller had rarely asked for a meeting. He couldn’t quite recall exactly why he had sought the meetings, just that he had done so twice in his first year, unsure of his ground, uncertain as to his role behind the Wall.

You won’t forget
this
reason, he told himself the morning after Rosa spilled out the story of her flight out of Chile. In his mind he saw the ponytailed assassin, heard the scream of jets overhead as a government was toppled and a president died in a smoking palace. Through a teenage girl’s eyes he saw her father’s colleague murdered in cold blood, saw the ponytail swing, watched someone called Dieter blast both knees of the man who called himself Herbert Dover.

‘I’ll never forget that name.’ Her body shivering against his in the darkness. ‘He said wherever Dieter was, he’d find him – kill him.’

Time enough to ask who Dieter was.

Ponytail aka Herbert Dover was a killer.

And what on earth was city gent Warwick Redgrave doing in the company of a killer? Redgrave minus pinstripes, masquerading in a proletarian windcheater on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall? Apparently giving orders to a couple of Vopos?

He’d slept hardly at all. Rosa had
insisted on taking the S-Bahn home alone, insisted she was OK, the general’s batman would meet every train at Pankow, don’t worry. How could you not worry? He’d given up even trying to sleep, sat beside the window overlooking the sleeping city, saw only the jeep careering through the streets of Santiago, felt her mother’s blood leaking away on the stained brown seat. Saw the unmarked hole in the ground, the father of the twins with the spade in his hands.

He made coffee, shaved, checked his briefcase. He didn’t taste the coffee, didn’t know what he was checking in his briefcase.

Miller walked to work. He hoped the morning streets would revive him, get him through the day. Get him through the coming night and yet another day at the office.

On Universitätsstrasse he stopped to tie his lace. He propped his briefcase on the window sill beside curving bars, stooped to tie the errant lace. He took his time at it, felt pedestrians move around him, the swish of overcoats, the pad of hurrying feet. He made a show of flexing his shoulders in his coat when he straightened, tugged hurriedly at the lapels. A man on his way to the office. He took hold of the briefcase, swung it beside him as he went on his way.

He didn’t look back at the red-and-black cigarette packet he’d wedged against the bottom of the window, behind the elegant, curving bars.

It took thirty-six hours for Redgrave to respond.

Hartheim sent for him that afternoon.

‘Come,’ Frau Siedel’s metallic voice said after he knocked. The blond head raised, the blue eyes taking him in, the head bent again, fingers flying over the typewriter keys. Nobody important, the bent head said.

She finished the
page, drew it from the machine, took time to study it before again looking up at Miller.

‘The Director is expecting you.’ Frau Siedel was busy again, rolling a new sheet into the typewriter. ‘You may go in.’

He was unprepared for Hartheim’s fulsome welcome.

‘Herr Miller!’ The Director was on his feet, chair pushed back, hand outstretched. ‘Good of you to come – I know how busy you are.’

‘Thank you, Herr Direktor.’ Miller sat, waited, knew what this was about: he’d given Frau Siedel a memo about Whitacre’s inquiry.

Hartheim took his time getting to it. First there had to be a review of the jubilee parade, Honecker’s speech (‘Inspiring!’), Gorbachev’s contribution (‘So supportive!’). Hartheim leaned back in his chair, rested his laced-together fingers on his ample stomach, beamed generously as he reviewed the weekend celebrations. In the pauses for breath Miller nodded, said, ‘
Ja
,’ nodded again.

‘Forty years, forty years!’ The Director shook his head, patted his stomach. ‘Imagine! This will show them!’

‘And a hundred years,’ Miller said.

‘One hundred years?’

‘The Wall,’ Miller said. ‘Herr Honecker told us the Wall will last for one hundred years.’

‘Ah,
ja
, the Wall.’ But Miller wondered if he’d gone too far, Hartheim was eyeing him warily. ‘Yes, one hundred years.’

Hartheim settled himself in his seat, reached for a piece of paper on his otherwise empty desk. Miller recognized his own brief memo.

‘So we’ve had an inquiry about rights in many of our publications?’

‘More than half of the entire list, Herr Direktor.’ Miller opened
his hands, helpless in the face of such nonsense.

‘How very strange.’ Pudgy fingers stroking the dog-chewed knuckle stub. ‘Why would anybody make such an inquiry?’

‘No idea.’
Look dumbfounded
. ‘No idea, Herr Direktor.’

‘Extraordinary.’ More caressing of the finger stub. ‘And what exactly did this fellow, Whitacre, have to say?’

As if you haven’t listened to the tape of the phone call
. ‘That he wished to buy rights in all of our nonfiction and reference titles.’

‘And you told him?’

‘I was astonished.’ Miller shrugged, hoped he looked puzzled. ‘Well, I told him I’d speak to you, Herr Direktor.’

‘Still, a strange offer. I wonder what prompted all this?’

Miller smiled. ‘England is a strange country, Herr Direktor.’

‘Kings and queens!’ A laugh like a bark. ‘Don’t these people know that history has marched on!’ The great stomach jellied with Hartheim’s rumble of laughter. Miller watched, fascinated, the shirt straining over the expanding flesh, the white vest flashing between the button gaps. The stub of the missing finger nestling in the other hand.

‘Herr Miller, you must forgive me making fun of your country.’

‘Herr Direktor, this is my country now.’

‘Truly?’

‘Truly.’ Miller thought: yes, truly.

‘One more thing, Herr Miller. Why d’you think this publisher, Whitacre, contacted you and not the publishers themselves next door?’

‘I suppose because I replied to the original letter.’

‘Yes, the original letter.’ Hartheim looked at his watch. ‘Well, I’ll deal with the matter now, Herr Miller. Thank you.’

Miller said thank you, rose to leave.

He was at
the door when he heard Hartheim clearing his throat.

‘You asked for a publishing agreement in the registry, Herr Miller.’

‘Yes, Herr Direktor, the contract for the basic dictionary that Whitacre originally asked for.’

Hartheim said nothing.

‘I just wondered – after the phone call – I thought I might as well take a look at the contract.’
Lame, so lame
.

‘And?’ Hartheim’s gaze stony.

‘A perfectly ordinary contract, Herr Direktor.’

‘What else did you expect?’

‘Nothing, Herr Direktor. It was foolish of me, wasting time like that.’

Hartheim stared at him for a long moment. ‘Thank you, Herr Miller.’

Miller said thank you.

He didn’t trust himself even to look at Frau Siedel as he passed through the outer office.

Back in his own office he could hear his heart racing, pounding. He sat at his desk, hunched, tensed. It took a while for his pounding heart to slow, for his breath to come easier. He stood at the window, looking out over Berlin.

Was it really his city?

Was this, as he had told Hartheim, really his country?

Next morning the tension was palpable. In the streets on the way to work, in the office.

Late-night West German TV news bulletins had carried no pictures of the astonishing sequence of events in Leipzig last night. Maybe, Miller thought, Western cameras had been forbidden for the by now usual Monday-night show of prayers and candlelight
protest in St Katherine’s. It didn’t matter: pictures of previous demonstrations in Leipzig let you know what was going on. Watching the black-and-white images at midnight in his flat, Miller had a sense of the GDR, in cities and towns across the darkened land, looking in amazement at itself – at a version of itself that was strange and new. And just a little bit frightening in its strangeness and newness.

Over fifty thousand people, the reporter’s voice told them, had marched in the streets of night-time Leipzig, candles alight, a murmur of expectation rising from the huge crowd. The awe in the voice of the reporter as he told of what had
not
happened: the soldiers facing the marchers had not fired. Instead of gunfire, something different had crackled in the darkness: a long breath held, a hint of hope, the forbidden apple dangling within reach.
Reisefreiheit
: the freedom to travel.

A hundred years, Honecker had said, the Wall would last for a hundred years.

The guns silent in Leipzig, the streets wreathed in candlelight and smiles.

In the Secretariat for Socialist Correctness in Publishing no word was spoken of the previous night’s events – or non-events. The pair of porters in reception said nothing about it; neither did Frau Siedel. Nor did the balding fellow who stood at the neighbouring urinal midway through the morning. But in the bleak faces, in the studied silence of omission, even in the hiss of piss in the urinal, Miller could clearly hear the astonishment of an entire country.

He tried to concentrate on routine correspondence. Watched the street from his window. Wondered what it would be like to kiss that wide mouth, feel that firm body crushed against his own. Heard Redgrave silence the Vopo. Saw the birthmark like a stain on the night. You’ll go mad, he told himself.

Hartheim summoned
him before lunch.

The Director came straight to the point. ‘I want you to prepare a promotional catalogue of certain titles that have international appeal. Our colleagues next door are preparing a new catalogue in German but we feel that our English edition should be an original offering,’ Hartheim’s version of a smile, ‘and who better than yourself to compile it?’ The Director moved two typed pages across the desk to Miller. ‘We’ve been planning this initiative for some time, it’s part of our celebration of forty years of our socialist state.’

Miller glanced quickly at the list of books.

‘How much d’you want on each book?’ He tried to keep the surprise out of his voice.
Whitacre’s offer hadn’t been a shot in the dark
.

‘Nothing lengthy. A brief description, a word on the target market, a few bullet points on the strengths of each book.’ You could be a capitalist anywhere, Miller thought, lining up your wares, setting out your spiel. ‘The usual,’ Hartheim said.

‘There are,’ Miller ran his finger down the list, ‘about forty books here. How much time have I?’

‘As soon as possible – shall we say a couple of days?’

‘So it’s urgent?’

Hartheim shifted on his chair. ‘Do you need more than two days?’

‘Two days is fine.’
The Wall will last one hundred years
.

‘
Good
.’
We have about a year, General Reder said
.

Hartheim was pushing his chair back; the meeting was over.

‘Thank you, Herr Direktor.’

‘Thank you, Herr Miller.’

Not a word about Whitacre’s offer, Miller thought. Not a hint about the doctored contracts.

Maybe General
Reder had got it wrong. The idea was hardly credible but maybe the GDR didn’t have a year.

At Checkpoint Charlie the border guards were edgy. They seemed in two minds, as if they were trying to be unusually courteous while at the same time applying extra vigilance to their inspection of bags and documents. There was no sign of Heinz-Peter; Miller wondered if guards from further afield had been brought in to possible flashpoints in Berlin.