Another Kind of Country (38 page)

The general nodded. The Walther pistol would go unnoticed in the pocket of his greatcoat. ‘No need for guns,’ he said.

‘None whatever.’ Except for my Makarov, Dieter thought:
the best-laid plans
. . .

Miller was scared but elated. He had the sense that he was in the presence of some defining moment in the life of this embattled, fucked-up country. He sensed that across East Germany men and women would be watching clocks, checking weapons, holding their breath. Something was about to happen and though neither Reder nor Dieter had offered anything more concrete than ‘soon’, Miller was certain now that whatever was going to happen would do so in the next few days.

‘Lunch!’ Rosa, deliberately breezy, broke the tension. ‘We need to eat.’

‘Five o’clock,’ Dieter reminded them. ‘We leave for Normannenstrasse at five.’

Dover pulled the door open as far as the chain would allow. He saw Redgrave outside, said, ‘Fuck,’ closed
the door again.

He left it closed. It was Dover’s idea of a joke.

He waited until Redgrave tapped urgently on the door – twice, a third time – before he unloosed the chain and opened the door. Redgrave’s face was white with anger.

‘Leaving me standing like that – anyone might see me.’ Redgrave stepped past Dover, surveyed the American’s new bolt-hole. The one-room flat in Marzahn was like any other worker’s flat in East Berlin.

‘I don’t want to see you,’ Dover said. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

Redgrave took his time, took stock of the flat. A kitchenette area with a two-ring cooker, a table and two kitchen chairs, a sofa that opened out into a bed.
It wasn’t fair, the way the Yanks could source and pay for god knows how many places on both sides of the Wall
.

‘You should have told me,’ Redgrave said. He pulled out one of the chairs, sat at the small table. ‘I’m going with you.’

‘Told you
what
? Going
where
?’

‘You know what and you know where.’ Redgrave pushed with a dainty finger at the empty greasy container of currywurst on the table. ‘Your housekeeping skills leave something to be desired.’

‘Fuck the housekeeping skills.’ But for all his bluster, Dover couldn’t conceal his dismay.
Redgrave knew
. Once in a while the lame-duck Brits actually managed to find out something; it was Dover’s bad luck that somehow they’d found out – or been told of – his plan to liberate a truckload of files from Normannenstrasse that very night.

‘OK,’ Dover said.

‘OK, what?’

‘You can tag along, just don’t get in my way.’

‘You know perfectly
well that it’s not my habit to get in anybody’s way.’ Redgrave sniffed. ‘I ought to be offended by the mere suggestion of such behaviour.’

Dover allowed himself a smile. Redgrave sometimes sounded like a goddamn poof but he could take care of himself.

Radio music came from the adjoining flat: loud, sentimental
Schlagermusik
. Redgrave cocked his head, listening.

‘It’s no problem.’ Dover shook his head. ‘Just a middle-aged factory hand feeling sorry for himself ’cos he hasn’t been laid for too long.’

‘Your neighbour has seen you?’

‘What does it matter? When I leave here, I’m not coming back again.’

Next door the music got louder.

‘And when do we leave?’

‘About six. I have to pick up some transport.’ Dover looked sharply at Redgrave. ‘How did you get here?’

‘I crossed at Bornholmerstrasse and caught a bus. The guards were edgy – lots of shouting and pushing.’

‘This whole country is edgy,’ Dover said. ‘The old guard are being knocked down like ninepins – not that changing the faces in the Politburo is going to change much. This pinko shithole of a country is going down the pan in the not so distant future.’

‘How elegantly you put it.’

‘In our business,’ Dover said, ‘it’s not elegance that counts but results.’

‘Quite.’ Redgrave poked the greasy food container to the furthest edge of the little table. Best not to irritate Dover; it was important to get his hands on those Stasi files and he needed the American for that.

‘Results,’ Dover said again, ‘that’s the name of our game.’

‘So we leave at six.’ It’s only three o’clock, Redgrave was thinking; three
hours in
this
.

‘Pretty grim, Redgrave, putting up with this set-up for a few hours, isn’t it?’ Dover gave a dry laugh. ‘We’ll go pick up our wheels and then head for the Alamo – we’re expected there at eight p.m.’

‘We’re expected?’

‘We sure are,’ Dover said. ‘At eight o’clock my reliable and well-paid Stasi associate will be rolling out the red carpet for old Herbert Dover – all the way to the secrets of Block Five of Normannenstrasse.’

They were sitting in the kitchen in Pankow – edgy, silent, coats folded on their laps – when the phone rang. They looked at one another, startled.

The phone went on ringing.

General Reder picked it up. He held the phone to his ear, waited silently.

‘Wolfgang?’ The voice on the line sounded breathy, hurried.

Reder knew the name for an occasional alias of Dieter’s. Without speaking he handed the phone to Dieter.

‘Yes?’ Dieter glanced at the plastic-cased clock on the kitchen wall: seven minutes to five.

‘Wolfgang?’

‘Yes.’ The wheezing voice of Klaus Kneesestrecker.
What the hell was the fellow phoning at this late hour for?

‘A small problem about the collection, I’m afraid.’

‘Go on.’

‘The goods won’t be ready as planned.’ Kneesestrecker paused, gulped in air. ‘But you can have them an hour later.’

‘That’s not convenient.’ Dieter felt the eyes of Reder, Miller and Rosa upon him, saw the concern on their faces, wondering, puzzling. ‘And it’s not what
we agreed.’

‘I’m sorry, Wolfgang, but you’ll have to collect them an hour later than planned.’

In his mind’s eye Dieter could see the blubbery face, the blubbery neck pushed into the Stasi NCO’s tunic; he could see the small eyes blinking, calculating the odds.
Fuck
.

‘OK, one hour later.’

‘Yes. About twenty minutes, you said?’

‘Twenty-five, thirty, at most.’

‘OK,
bis dann
.’

‘There’d better be no fuck-ups,’ Dieter said.

There was no reply. Dieter heard static on the line. He put the phone down, looked at the others.

‘You heard that,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Pick-up is at seven.’

‘You think it’s still OK?’ Rosa couldn’t quite quell the tremor in her voice.

General Reder smiled. ‘I’ve learned to accept Dieter’s word – if he says it’s OK, then it’s OK.’

‘We have an hour to kill,’ Dieter said.

The good life
. Quartermaster Klaus Kneesestrecker felt he’d at last grasped it as he replaced the phone on Claudia’s bedside locker.

He hauled himself, puffing, a little more upright against the mound of pillows on the double bed. He’d ordered Claudia to wait in the kitchen while he made his phone call – ‘an important, confidential call’. He could almost see the greed reflected in her pale blue eyes: perfume, scented soaps, Western shampoos on their way to nourish her generous body.

The telephone exchange with the so-called ‘Wolfgang’ unnerved him. ‘Wolfgang’ indeed: Klaus could smell Moscow off the fellow at a hundred paces. High-handed, the
cold Russian eyes even colder when he smiled – or tried to – and offered you two hundred US dollars to ‘leave the door to Block Five’s cellar ajar for just a few minutes’. In the brief and unexpected exchange at the railway station
Stehcafe
Klaus had been tempted to ask for more but something in the icy eyes had silenced him.

Still, he’d shown ‘Wolfgang’ on the phone. What else could he do when Claudia had called to say her husband –
why had she left the fucker’s trousers and shoes with dirty socks balled inside on display in the bedroom?
– was detained at work and she’d be free at four for an hour or so.

‘Claudia!’ he called.

Odd
. Block 5 and its basement seemed the city’s most sought-after destination this evening. Still, shouldn’t be any traffic jam in the basement. ‘Wolfgang’ was due at seven, should be gone by seven thirty at the latest, plenty of time before that thug with the birthmark turned up at eight. Klaus couldn’t figure the fellow – he might be a Berliner but there was a whiff of the West about him. And he paid more, twice as much as ‘Wolfgang’.

A cloud of perfume wafted towards him. The bed sank as Claudia climbed aboard. Her hands worked, lifting him. He felt her mouth on him.

Oh.

It was almost half an hour since they’d left General Reder’s house but they’d covered not much more than a mile. In twenty minutes they’d hardly moved, stuck in a short line of traffic outside Pankow Rathaus – so short that they could see the traffic police at the checkpoint. Less than a hundred metres, less than twenty vehicles in the line.

‘They’re searching everything
with a fine-tooth comb,’ Dieter said. ‘Look.’

All of them could see the driver at the head of the queue standing beside his Trabant: a young man, long-haired, in dark overalls, his face pale under the street lights. He had his hands in the air while he was patted down by a Vopo; another Vopo, rifle at the ready, stood close by.

‘Something’s up.’ General Reder was in the front seat beside Dieter.

Dieter looked back at Rosa and Miller.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Just remember that we’re on our way to a family dinner.’

And you’ve probably taken the precaution of booking all four of us into some restaurant, Miller thought. The last weeks seemed to him like a crash course in the ways and means of a half-legal underworld. Stuff happened, explanations were not offered, as in the four-door Volvo saloon they were travelling in. When Miller and Rosa had looked questioningly at the unfamiliar car waiting for them in the yard of the house in Pankow, Dieter’s only comment had been simply, ‘We need something that can’t be traced to us.’ The key to the car was in Dieter’s hand. The Volvo was the chosen car of the Party elite; questioning the occupants of one could be bad for your health.

‘I’ll do the talking at the checkpoint.’ General Reder sounded hoarser than usual; the others could hear the gulping noises as he sucked on a lozenge.

‘It might not be necessary, Papa.’ Rosa leaned forward between the front seats, her hand on Miller’s knee. ‘Look!’

In the lights of the checkpoint they could see the driver of the Trabant drop his arms, try to protect himself from the swinging fists of the Vopo. The second Vopo joined in. They saw him raise his weapon, saw the rifle stock move through the light, saw it connect with the Trabi driver’s head. For a second the driver was erect, motionless; they watched the blood
spout above his ear, saw him crumple to the ground, out of sight.

The Trabant was pushed to the side of the road. A whistle shrilled, the queue of vehicles crawled forward. Heads turned, quickly, fearfully, to snatch a glimpse of the victim being flung into the police van. And heads turned quickly away – the last thing anybody wanted was eye contact with one of the Vopos.

‘Poor bastard.’ Miller was surprised to hear his own voice.

‘Still feel this is your kind of country, Patrick?’ Dieter caught Miller’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

Miller said nothing. He felt Rosa’s hand on his, her thigh warm against his own.

‘Right now he has no country, remember?’ General Reder’s voice was low. ‘That’s why we’re doing this, to make sure he can get himself a passport.’

The general’s face was worn, waxy, in the light from the dashboard. His wrist looked small, stick-like, when he raised it to look at his watch.

‘I hope we don’t run into problems,’ he said. ‘It’s almost six thirty.’

‘Fucking checkpoint.’ Herbert Dover checked his watch. It was 7.30. ‘We’re late.’

‘We should have left earlier,’ Redgrave said. ‘Schonefeld is a long way out.’

‘Gee, I’m glad you told me that.’ Dover was thinking exactly the same thought but he wasn’t about to let Redgrave know that. ‘But Schonefeld was where the van was stashed.’

Redgrave held his tongue, looked at the line of traffic ahead. There was nothing to be gained by antagonizing the American.

The line
of cars inched forward.

Dover
checked his watch again. Two minutes had passed. He figured they were ten, maybe fifteen, minutes from Normannenstrasse. Kneesestrecker wouldn’t be going anywhere; the fat slob was on until 4 a.m.

‘Our friend in the back,’ Redgrave nodded towards the rear of the van, ‘his papers will hold up at the checkpoint?’

In the cabin of the van Dover stared at Redgrave. ‘What d’you think?’
I’m heading for Stasi HQ to liberate a van-load of files and my paperwork is going to let me down?

‘Just checking,’ Redgrave said.

‘Plumber’s mate,’ Dover said. ‘And I’m the plumber, returning from an urgent job at Schonefeld airfield.’ Like Redgrave and the man in the rear of the van, propped among plumber’s tools, Dover was wearing overalls. ‘Trouble with you,’ he told Redgrave, ‘is you worry too much.’

‘Only sometimes,’ Redgrave said.
Only when I’m on a job with a self-confessed killer with a sideline in attempted rape
.

At the checkpoint another car was released, waved forward. Another look at the watch: three minutes had passed. Once more the line of cars moved forward; only three ahead of them now. Under the street lights the cars gleamed like giant beetles, steam rising from their bonnets, smoke belching from their exhaust pipes. An armed Vopo stood guard; a pair of traffic policemen stooped at the car windows, stood upright to scrutinize ID cards under the light.

‘What d’you think they’re looking for?’ Redgrave tried to keep the concern out of his voice.

‘Any kind of future.’ Dover’s chuckle was dry, mirthless. ‘And this fucking country hasn’t got one.’ He looked at Redgrave, wondered for a moment how this stuffed-shirt Brit ever got mixed up in this business.

Dover put the car into gear, edged the van forward. He could see the faces of the traffic cops now, young guys, but tiredness etched on their faces.