Another Kind of Country (28 page)

The smell of animal dung, the sickly smell of silage.

‘Where are we? What’s going on?’ She knew she was shouting, felt the damp leakage in her underpants. ‘I am General Reder’s daughter!’

The stinging back-hander across the face brought her to her senses.
Don’t give the bastards the satisfaction. And you
are
the general’s daughter
.

‘No more,’ the one in the passenger seat said. She met his eyes, all blue shallows, told herself not to tremble.

They swung off the road, moved slowly along a rutted lane. The complex of farm buildings on the left was dilapidated, deserted. A pathway ran through knee-high weeds to an open space between barns. People had lived here once: a rusted harrow lay in one corner, the broken cutting shaft of an old plough in another. Now it seemed that even the birds shunned the place.

The Stasi got out, motioned for her to follow. One of the men looked at his watch.

‘He’s late,’ she
heard him say.

Don’t ask. Whoever he is, you’ll know soon enough. Or too soon
.

‘You can piss there.’ It was the first time the driver had opened his mouth.

‘What? Here?’

‘Suit yourself.’ The driver lit a cigarette, grinned at her through a mouthful of smoke.

The men watched her as she got down on her hunkers, pulled down her underpants.

She stared at them as she pissed, felt a small triumph as they looked away.

More than piss had bled into this abandoned earth. She wondered why the iron implements were left abandoned, unsalvaged. Some places kept within them the memory of pain, the aftertaste of evil. The Red Army would have come this way, raping and killing on their way to Berlin.

‘What the fuck is keeping him?’ The driver was edgy, as though he, too, wished to be gone from the lingering smell of evil.

She got to her feet, went on looking straight at them as she fixed her clothing.
You can look, you can hear, but you can’t even begin to guess the joy I shared last night with Patrick
.

They heard it then, the coughing sound of a car coming through the flat, untenanted landscape.

‘It must be him.’ The driver trod on the cigarette end, ground it viciously into the dead earth.

The car came closer, gears changed, a metallic cry in the silent day. She waited, her heart thumping. Her heart sinking, watching the car nose towards them between the roofless buildings. She recognized the Polski Fiat, knew that shaven head even behind the dust-caked windscreen.

The car door opened,
slammed shut and he stood facing her – as close as when, long ago, Dieter had shattered both his kneecaps and left him bleeding in the courtyard in Santiago.

‘Well, well!’ Dover grinned. ‘If it isn’t the little lady herself, all the way from Santiago, Chile.’ He moved closer to her, looked her up and down, whistled. ‘And just look how you’ve filled out!’

She felt his hand on her face, flinched.

Dover winked.

His hand dropped to her breast. She swung her hand at him but he caught her wrist, twisted her arm suddenly and flung her to the ground.

Dover looked down at her, smiled. ‘Manners, lady, manners!’

She felt the toe of his shoe on her knee, pushing her skirt up her thigh. Rosa half sat, reached with both hands for his ankle but he stepped away with surprising nimbleness.

‘You should have let Dieter kill me back then.’ He stood over her. ‘But I’m glad you didn’t, lady, as you and me are going to get to know each other a lot better in the very near future.’ Dover smacked his lips, winked.

Her fingers scrabbled in the earth and she flung a handful of muddy earth at him. Dover swore, stepped back, rubbing his eyes with the back of his fingers. She saw the fury building in him.

‘If you touch me,’ Rosa said, ‘General Reder will kill you.’

‘That old dinosaur,’ Dover said, ‘couldn’t kill a half-cooked hamburger.’ He guffawed at his own wit. ‘Anyway, where is the dear old general?’

In Leipzig, Rosa thought, and not due back until tomorrow.

‘He’ll find you,’ she said, ‘and he’ll kill you.’

‘Enough.’ Dover turned to the two Stasi. ‘Get her inside.’

They seized her, dragged her through
an open doorway. Inside the wrecked building a secure windowless room had been built: wooden walls and a plank door which Dover opened with a key on a steel ring that jangled with many keys. He flipped a switch and the room flooded with light from the overhead fluorescent tubes. The room held everything necessary for a short stay in a safe house: a table, two chairs, a small refrigerator, a two-ring electric hob.

In the corner stood a single bed with an undressed striped mattress and some folded grey blankets.

‘Put her down there.’ Miller pointed at the bed.

She struggled but the Stasi pinned her to the mattress. Dover reached for her right wrist, forced her arm up and she felt the cable cut into her skin as he tied her wrist tightly to the iron bedstead.

She gathered the spit in her mouth and spat into his face.

Dover’s hand swung, slapped her hard across the face. ‘More bonus points, baby,’ he said. He forced her other arm backwards, tied it to the other side of the bed.

Dover stood back from the bed, nodded down at her.

Then she felt his fingers behind her knee and she swung her body violently, lashing out with her legs.

Dover laughed again. The older of the two Stasi coughed. Dover looked at him.

‘You have something to say?’

‘They’ve seen us. This,’ he looked at Rosa, at Dover, ‘this isn’t part of our agreement.’

‘Get out of here.’ Dover dug in his pocket, produced a thick wad of notes – from the bed Rosa could see it was a roll of dollars – and handed it to the Stasi.

‘But they’ve seen us!’ The other Stasi sounded frightened. ‘They know what we look like!’

‘Bullshit,’ Dover said. ‘Everybody in this sick fuck of a country is too scared to look at
guys like you.’

‘Call my father! He’ll forgive you if you help me—’ Another blow to the face from Dover cut her off.

‘Now get out of here,’ he told the Stasi officers, ‘and give the little lady and myself some much-needed privacy.’

‘Call my father!’

Dover punched her in the stomach and she gagged with pain.

When she got her breath back,
gasping for air, she was alone with Dover.

October 1989

East Berlin

The red Trabi’s eastbound journey
out of the city had not gone unnoticed. General Leon Krug noticed it. He noticed it because his own driver had to brake and swerve to avoid the oncoming car which had pulled out around a pair of workmen on bicycles.

The driver swore. So did Krug, flung against the armrest in the back of the Zil.

Krug grabbed at the armrest, threw an angry glance at the speeding car: two men in front, a woman in the back. Just a glimpse, the car disappearing behind them, Krug’s driver pulling out into the road with apologies.

Just a glimpse, but enough for General Leon Krug to recognize both the driver and the woman in the back. What was the daughter of General Hans Reder doing in the back of an unmarked car driven by a Stasi sergeant who, even by Sicherheitsdienst standards, was a known thug? And why today? Today of all days?

Krug knew that retired general Hans Reder had let it be known that today he was visiting a few old comrades in Leipzig. Krug knew that this was a lie, the kind of lie you told to protect those closest to you. And Krug also knew that a couple of ‘old comrades’ would happily swear that Hans Reder had indeed spent that day reminiscing with them in Leipzig.
Another lie, one known to Krug because he and Hans Reder had together arranged the cover for General Reder’s clandestine rendezvous.

So why was Rosa Rossman being taken out of the city today by a Stasi sergeant who was certainly not privy to their plans? Coincidence? Neither General Reder nor Krug himself had climbed to the peak of the GDR military hierarchy by believing in coincidence. When you caught the whiff of danger, you had to trust in your nose.

As the car pushed on into the city, Krug rapidly turned his options over in his mind. Phoning Reder at the military airport base outside Dresden
might
be secure – the airbase commander was a trusted member of their group – but you never knew who might be listening in. It was too risky, could draw attention to the presence of the other senior officers from the southern battalions at Erfurt, Halle, Karl-Marx Stadt, even Leipzig itself – not to mention their visitor from Moscow.

No, they’d come too far to have their plans jeopardized by a rash phone call. They were too close to success – or to a bullet in the back of the head.

Rosa Rossman was too close to something unpleasant. Leon Krug had known her almost from the moment she’d arrived in the GDR with the small band of refugees who’d been delivered from Pinochet’s coup in Chile. He’d watched her become part of Hans Reder’s family, had seen how the Reder household had bloomed under her wide smile. A childless couple had found a new way of living, so had an orphan from a plundered country.
We’ve done wrong things in the GDR
, Krug thought,
but sometimes we did save lives
.
Dreams come true
. Krug almost laughed aloud. The GDR was going through a nightmare. If Reder and himself and the rest of their small group did not succeed, then their country would
perish in that nightmare.

‘Martin?’

‘General?’ The driver caught General Krug’s eye in the rearview mirror.

‘That driver who almost put us into the ditch – you got a look at him?’

‘Yes, sir. Stasi sergeant.’

‘Name?’

‘Baister, sir – I think.’

It was enough for General Krug. Martin had been his driver for over a decade, turning down promotion to sergeant to do so.

‘Then Normannenstrasse, Martin.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Driver and general exchanged a rear-view-mirror glance. They didn’t say much, these two, but they could read each other’s mind. Neither man relished a visit to the Stasi HQ but they both knew that some things couldn’t be avoided. And Martin knew that General Leon Krug wasn’t the kind of officer to report a subordinate for some driving misdemeanour.

‘And afterwards, General, we’re still going to the barracks?’

Krug nodded to the mirror. The northern officers – from Schwerin, Rostock, Greifswald – would be waiting for him, anxious, like himself, to know the news from Moscow and Hungary, maybe from Poland.

‘This won’t take long, Martin,’ he said, as they swung into the Normannenstrasse complex.

A dozen tall buildings surrounded them. Hundreds of windows stared down at them.

General Leon Krug settled his cap firmly, smoothed his military leather coat. You are a general of the National Volksarmee, he reminded himself, and your rank carries weight here too, in this corrupt heart of our socialist country. All the same, he’d be glad to be done here. A quick word with
this lout – Baister, Martin had called him – find out what’s happening with Rosa Rossman, probably some simple explanation, and he’d be on his way.

Martin held the door for him and Krug stepped into the heart of the Stasi world.

The reception area of the Stasi HQ wasn’t the sort of place where you expected to find a citizen, concerned or otherwise, attempting to conduct inquiries with one of the uniformed male receptionists. And yet the tall, dark-haired fellow facing one of the porters across the desk seemed not to have been dragged or pushed into Normannenstrasse. He was about Krug’s own height, about six feet, brown eyes, hair thinning. And Krug could tell, stepping to the desk, that the fellow was not bothering to conceal his irritation with the way both porters snapped to attention in Krug’s presence.

‘
Guten Tag, Herr General
.’ A duetted greeting for Krug who saluted brusquely.

‘
Entschuldigung
.’ The ‘Excuse me’ polite but Krug sensed an edge of impatience, even anger, in the other man’s voice. ‘
Eine Frage
—’ Whatever the caller’s question or inquiry was, neither porter was interested in dealing with it.

‘One moment.’ The porter who spoke, the shorter, stouter one, cast a withering look at the caller. ‘You have no business here.’ He addressed Krug directly. ‘How can we be of service, General?’

Leon Krug was intrigued; only a very unusual kind of citizen would voluntarily enter these premises. And he liked the fellow’s protest, however politely expressed, at being so pointedly ignored. When Krug looked more closely at the man standing beside him, he could see the strain in the pale face, the tiny drops of sweat on the receding hairline.

‘This gentleman needs your
assistance first,’ Krug said.

The two porters exchanged a glance.

‘We’ve already told him,’ the short one said, ‘that we cannot help him.’

‘Please, if you could just ask the . . .’ stumbling for words, ‘the officer of the day if there is any information about the lady – please.’

‘We have no information.’ Hostility in the porter’s words, in his face. ‘Make inquiries at the police station.’

‘They told me to ask here.’

And you had the courage or foolhardiness to do so.
General Leon Krug looked with closer interest at this citizen with a briefcase, this citizen who was prepared to trade words with the guardians at the gate of the Stasi stronghold.

‘I am General Krug of the National Volksarmee,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what this is all about.’

‘A friend of mine was asked to leave her class this morning by two members of the security services, General.’ Words swallowed the drops of sweat sliding past his ear. ‘I’m just trying to find out where she’s being held.’

‘Her
class
? What class?’

‘At the university, General, the Institute of English Studies.’

It was Krug’s turn to experience a pang of dismay.

‘And your friend’s name?’

‘Frau Rossman – Frau Rosa Rossman.’ Krug felt himself being measured. ‘Frau Rossman is the daughter of General Hans Reder.’

‘And your name?’

‘Patrick Miller, General.’