Another Kind of Country (30 page)

And there was Patrick.
Where
was Patrick?

He’d be thinking of her, looking out of his window at Berlin, in a country he’d been told to spy on. A country that, like her, he’d learned to love.

A country that Herbert Dover was plotting to bring down.

You’re still alive. She said the words aloud:
Noch lebst du
. Fuck Dover.
You never knew
.

‘So,’ Krug said, ‘you deal with me or with General Erich Mielke himself, your choice.’

A window on either side of the Zil was half lowered but the air inside the car stank with the odour of five male bodies and the dampness of winter clothing. General Krug had moved to sit up front beside Martin; Patrick Miller sat behind Krug, alongside Baister and the other Stasi.

‘Make your
mind up, I haven’t all day.’ Krug had removed his cap; Miller could see the stamp of the cap band furrowed deep into the general’s wide forehead. ‘So what have you done with Frau Rossman?’

Miller saw Baister exchange a glance with the other man, saw the fear in both faces.

‘We were told to take her away just for a little while,’ Baister swallowed, ‘that we’d be taking her back to the institute in no time at all.’

And nobody would question a Stasi pick-up, Miller thought.

‘So?’ Krug’s eyes narrowed above the seat back, the furrow in his forehead deepening to an angry red.

‘He kept her there, ordered us to leave.’ Baister’s voice a whisper.

‘He?’

‘We were told to call him Herr Wander.’ Baister was staring past Krug’s shoulder, at the open space beyond the half-open window. ‘Honest, that’s all we know.’

‘We didn’t arrange it.’ The other Stasi had found his voice. He hurried on, scrambling for forgiveness, for safety. ‘He tied her to the bed . . .’ He stopped, twisted his uniform cap in his hands. ‘We told Herr Wander that wasn’t the deal but he wouldn’t listen . . .’

Miller was only half-listening.
He tied her to the bed.
He lunged across Baister in the rear seat, grabbed at the other man’s coat. ‘Where is she? What have you done to her?’

Baister pushed him back, Krug’s hands pulled him off.

‘Calm down.’ Krug was looking at Miller. ‘We’ll get her. Remember where we are.’

Miller looked
at Krug, at the pair of frightened Stasi beside him. At the Stasi buildings around them, looming in the dull afternoon light. He nodded at Krug, said nothing.

‘Where is she now?’ Krug asked.

‘It’s a place we sometimes use,’ Baister said, ‘about thirty kilometres east, an old farmhouse, nobody’s lived there since the war.’

‘Where the fuck is it?’

‘They call it Dunkelfeld.’ The dark field.

‘I know it,’ the driver said. ‘We did some manoeuvres around there when I joined up.’ He made a face. ‘It’s a fucking awful place, General.’

‘Another thing,’ Krug said, ‘who ordered you to do this?’

‘Major Reimann, sir.’ Baister’s voice eager now. ‘He ordered us, we had no choice, General.’

Krug held his gaze until Baister looked down at his hands.

‘How much?’ Krug asked.

‘Five hundred.’

‘Marks?’

‘Dollars, sir.’

‘Give me the money.’

Krug took the roll of green notes, stared at the thick wad.
Dollars, so the Americans were probably in on it. But did this kidnapping have anything to do with the group? With their fears? With Rosa Rossman’s father’s secret meeting in Dresden?

‘Please, General, let’s get going!’

Krug heard Miller’s anxious words as if through a screen, his mind still engaged with his own subterfuge, the group’s secret – and dangerous – plans to save their country.

‘I know,’ Krug said, ‘I know.’

His attention was caught by a noise, a kind of low hum that seemed to come first from the main block and then, as Krug looked round, from all the other blocks.

‘What’s
going on?’ he said. You didn’t expect noise from the Stasi HQ. Normannenstrasse kept its noises to itself, hugged the screams to its bowels. And why, Krug wondered, were small knots of Stasi, twos and threes, coming out of the buildings, gathering on doorsteps, cigarette tips glowing in the gloom, the hum of low conversation carrying into the Zil?

‘You.’ Krug glared at the second Stasi.

‘Corporal Zimmerman, sir.’

‘Go and find out what’s going on.’

They watched the Stasi cross the concourse, edging between parked vehicles, to the small group gathered at the entrance to Block 9. And they watched him hurry back, a look of astonishment on his face. Zimmerman didn’t speak until he was again inside the car.

‘It’s General Mielke, sir,’ he said to Krug.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s resigned, sir.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what they told me, General. The Central Committee has accepted General Mielke’s resignation as head of the Stasi.’

Astonishment on the Stasi face, in the Stasi voice. General Erich Mielke, who had controlled the fate of every citizen of the GDR, no longer held in his hands the power of life or death. Mielke was gone, resigned.

In other words, they sacked him
. And we’re all at risk, Krug told himself. All of us, north and south, Reder at the airbase in Dresden with his group.

‘General Krug, please!’

He looked at Miller, turned his attention to Baister. ‘This Herr Wander that you left Frau Rossman with, is he German?’

‘He speaks like a German, sir, but I don’t think so.’ Baister hesitated; offering opinions could be fatal. ‘It’s hard to tell, sir, but he could be American.’

Was Mielke’s
removal part of the American plot?

Krug turned to Martin. ‘You sure you can find this Dunkelfeld place?’

‘I’m sure, General, it’s not the kind of place you forget easily.’

‘Both of you,’ Krug said to the Stasi, ‘get out and not a word to anybody about any of this, understood?’ Both men nodded. ‘And especially not to this Major Reimann, just tell him you did as you were ordered and left the woman with Wander.’ Again, heads nodded. ‘I’ll deal with both of you later.’ A last stare, a last reddening of the furrow across the wide forehead. ‘People like you are not fit to serve our country – now get out.’

They mumbled, ‘Thank you, sir.’ The car door opened, a blast of cold air, the door slammed, the two men scurried off.

Krug looked back at Miller.

‘We’ll get her,’ he said. He tried to keep the edge of fear out of his voice.

Krug nodded to Martin and the big Zil headed for the eastern edge of the city.

It was faint at first, the noise of the car. It came closer, louder, penetrating the stone walls of the farmhouse and the wooden walls of the room, ghosting into the darkness that enveloped her.

She was cold, her wrists sore from useless tugging against her bonds. Her left eye was half closed from Dover’s fist.

She could hear the car clanking closer over the uneven ground. The engine cut. Doors opening, slamming. Voices, indistinct. More than one voice. Dover had brought company.

Well, they wouldn’t have an easy way with her. She could bite, she could spit.

Footsteps. Voices.

She heard her
name, twitched on the hard mattress, dared to hope.

Her name was called again, fists pounded on the metal door.

‘In here!’ Her voice broken, croaky. ‘I’m in here!’

‘Forget the fucking door, it’s made of steel.’ She didn’t recognize the voice but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t be Dover.

‘I’m here, in here! Hurry, please!’ Hope lifting her voice but tearful now, daring to hope, allowing the tears.

‘Kick the fucking wall down!’ Anger in the voice, but authority too, a voice used to command.

She heard footsteps recede, screamed for them to come back.

‘All together now!’

Something ramming at the wooden walls, once, twice, three times. The wall cracking, splintering. More shouting, the wall giving way, falling in, a huge length of rusted metal crashing after it, and torchlight found her and she screamed again.

‘It’s Patrick, Rosa.’

Another torch, the beam turned on Patrick’s face now, a pair of uniforms beside him.

‘It’s OK, Rosa, it’s OK.’ The torch pointed at the uniforms, Patrick’s voice soothing. ‘They’re friends, Rosa, they’re friends.’

One of the uniforms cut the cords that bound her. She folded her arms across her breasts and began to whimper.

Patrick lifted her, folded his coat around her, whispered to her, kissed her hair, her forehead.

‘You’re safe now,’ she heard him say, ‘that’s all that matters.’

‘We’ll get her to the hospital.’ The voice was strange but the words kind, soothing.

She felt herself carried through the cold to the car, felt Patrick settle her on the wide back seat. He sat beside her, cradled her head in his lap. Doors slammed again, the car moved off. She pushed her head against Patrick’s midriff, sucked in the smell of him, the strength of him.

‘We have you
now,
I
have you,’ he was whispering. ‘You’re safe.’

And she was. She heard the spade clanging against stone where that unknown peasant put her mother in the ground and she knew the grave was not hers. Patrick was hers, her life was still hers. And the land beyond the car – that land was hers.

‘You’ll have to stop the car,’ she said.

She saw the question in Patrick’s face.

‘I need to pee,’ she said. ‘Now.’

After the phone call there was silence in the basement planning room at Dresden airbase. Thirteen men looked at one another, at the low ceiling, the fluorescent lighting, the wall map of the GDR studded with pins of red and white and blue and yellow. Some of them sucked on cigarettes, on pencil tops. They chewed over the words they had exchanged throughout the afternoon and evening; looked back at the long road that had brought them together here, the months of hesitant planning, of trust and distrust, that had brought them to this pass.

The phone call to Hans Reder had shown them that, willingly or not, they stood at a crossroads. When Reder had put the phone down, he’d said simply, ‘The Politburo has fired Mielke.’

His words filled the basement, hung beneath the low ceiling, shaded the map, moved the pins. The news impregnated the cigarettes and pens and pencils they sucked on and nobody was sure if they liked the new taste, if it was sweet or sour. What was certain was that it was different.

It was Reder who broke the silence.

‘It’s make-your-mind-up time, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘We either go on or we stop now.’

The others
looked at the small man who was their acknowledged leader. It was Reder – the oldest among them – who had first put out feelers over a year ago. And it was Reder who had taken the risk of exposing himself, of showing his lack of faith in their country’s leadership. Over the course of a year Reder had approached these individuals of varied ages and backgrounds, stationed throughout East Germany. He’d done his homework, studied the personnel files in HQ. Above all, he’d relied on his own judgement of men he’d personally encountered during his long military service. Sometimes Reder made his approach during an official inspection of his target’s barracks; sometimes the approach was made on training courses in Berlin or further afield. He tried to cover all the bases – infantry, artillery, air power, navy, intelligence. What Reder looked for in each member of his chosen, secret group was sound military judgement coupled with coolness under pressure. And he gave his trust to nobody who did not share his own commitment to the ideals of the GDR, ideals which were no longer being honoured. Only Reder would have stuck his neck out, gambling against betrayal. And for that leap of faith he was their unelected but accepted leader. Hans Reder was also the only one among them who was retired. He could summon neither divisions nor tanks, neither planes nor ships. In a real sense, the ability to act was not his.

‘The question is this: is the Stasi about to change?’ The others looked at Rexin, saw the half-smile on his face. He was the youngster of the group, the commander of the base where they were gathered.

‘We’ll take that as a rhetorical question.’ General Filmer from Erfurt was unsmiling as he spoke.

They batted it back and forth for no more than a few minutes. Mielke’s departure changed nothing or, at best, not much. They’d talked it through and thought it through for long enough. The country was falling apart; the scavengers were waiting, within and without, to rip it asunder and swallow it whole or in pieces.

Reder looked
at Dieter Jessen.

‘This will change nothing for Gorbachev,’ Dieter said. ‘You heard him yourselves – Moscow no longer decides the fate of Germany or other socialist states. The Soviet army in the GDR will not interfere.’

‘But,’ Filmer was lighting yet another cigarette, ‘how can we be sure that Mielke’s departure will not affect Gorbachev’s attitude?’

‘I think,’ Reder said, ‘that we can rely on Dieter’s assessment of the situation in Moscow.’ All of them knew that for almost two decades Dieter Jessen had worked at the heart of the KGB in Moscow, not only surviving but prospering through changes of leadership. For Reder, the connection was more intimate: it was Dieter who had first told Hans Reder and his wife of the remarkable teenager he had spirited to safety from the bombed ruins of Santiago.

‘And Warsaw?’ Reder asked.

All eyes turned to General Michal Jablonska of the Polish Army. Every man among them was aware of the deep underlying hatred nurtured in Polish hearts towards Germans and Germany.

Jablonska was a thin, humourless soldier with wiry blond hair and a famously short temper.

‘I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘You have nothing to fear from Poland.’

‘So.’ Reder looked around the table at this circle of men who had decided to trust one another with their lives. The men looked strained, unkempt; tunics hung open or were draped on the backs of chairs; the tabletop was buried beneath paper, cigarette packets, cups and saucers, overflowing ash-trays. The men and the place hardly looked like the cradle of a movement that planned nothing less than the overthrow of a government, the restoration of a truly socialist state that recognized that there was no socialism without a people. And yet Reder could see beyond the apparent disarray. War was never neat and tidy – and neither were the men who made war.