Brandenburg (7 page)

‘We did. She came back with a message delivered the same way. Kafka wanted a German, someone with good cover who could travel to Leipzig as often as they liked without raising suspicion. Then a senior member of our outfit remembered you and we did some research and found that everything fitted perfectly.’

Rosenharte did not hide his bafflement. ‘Why did he remember me?’

‘He was in Brussels in 1974.’

‘You recalled that you had something on me and thought you could force me to do this?’

‘No,’ said Harland. ‘We are not going to force you. We need you to be committed because you
want
to be. In exchange we will do as you ask as regards your brother and his family.’

‘I need to think about this, but first I want to know how this person will make contact.’

‘We must have a decision by morning. If you’re not going to do this, we’ll have to make certain arrangements in order to protect you and your story. To answer your question about the contact, there are procedures for you to follow in a specified order. I cannot tell you these until I know that you’re coming on board.’

Rosenharte nodded. ‘I’ll take some rest now.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Harland. ‘We’ll make ourselves scarce until about seven - does that suit you?’

Rosenharte slept little. By dawn he understood that cooperation was the only way, because at least it offered some hope of freeing Konrad and slightly better odds of bringing Else and the two children to the West. He had to do it, even though Harland’s operation seemed vague and a little crude. He had no expectation of success, but by the time he had tried and failed to make contact with this person in Leipzig, Else, the boys and - with much luck - Konrad would be in the West.

At six thirty he gave Harland his decision. By seven he and Anna had played their role for the benefit of the young man who brought them breakfast, which they consumed like a married couple, saying little.

He returned to the room to find Harland and the American bent over coffee and a basket of pastries.

He did not return their greeting but instead lit a cigarette and launched into the thing he had been turning in his mind. ‘When the real Annalise died you decided to keep her alive. I can easily imagine that was an extensive operation. Why? What purpose did it serve?’

Harland picked the crumbs from his chinos. ‘She transferred to Nato in the early part of 1975 to the Department of Defence Policy and Planning, where she was mostly involved in the translation of documents and preparation of papers for summits.’

‘And some you fed to the Stasi through a new controller?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact a man named Kurt Segler, a gardener at Nato headquarters. It proved a very reliable arrangement.’

‘But the Stasi are not fools. They’d have suspected something when the substitute Annalise gave them false information.’

‘That was the whole point.’ He stopped and gave Rosenharte an oddly apologetic look, indicating the seriousness of the secret. ‘It never was false information. We used her as a truth channel.’

Rosenharte understood the function of a truth channel immediately but Harland went ahead and explained it anyway. ‘Everything she predicted did in fact take place. She was the most accurate source they had ever had. You see, we needed a way of telling the Russians what our actual intentions were. We knew that if they trusted Annalise as a spy, we could feed them stuff that was unambiguous about the Western position.’

Rosenharte’s attention had wandered during Harland’s exegesis to a black and white bird that was calling from the corner of a roof opposite the hotel. The American had followed his gaze. ‘Are you a birder, Dr Rosenharte?’

‘A birder? Ah, yes, I like to know what I’m seeing. Birds were a passion of ours when my brother and I were boys. I was just reminding myself that Trieste is on one of the major migration routes for nightingales in the spring. Did you know that?’

‘What’s that bird over there?’

‘In German it is called a
Mittelmeersteinschmätzer.
’

They both laughed.

‘In Latin it is
Oenanthe hispanica
. A wheatear is I believe its name in English. It has its own call but sometimes it imitates the song of other species.’

‘Can you still imitate a song?’ asked the American. ‘Because that is what we need you to do when you get back into East Germany. Or have you been out of the business too long?’

Rosenharte nodded slowly. ‘I have no other option if I am to get my brother’s family out. You should understand that that is all I care about. So, yes, I will sing the tune of another bird.’ In that moment Konrad came to his mind and he thought how this encounter would benefit from his brother’s gift of witty encapsulation. It was after all a very bizarre situation.

‘But you look concerned.’

He got up and poured himself some coffee from the breakfast flask - even lukewarm it was unlike anything in the GDR - and stirred a lump of unrefined sugar into the liquid. ‘You bring me here to dine with a woman who has been dead for a decade and a half; I’m given fake love-bites by her substitute. You inform me that the entire operation was originally set up not to deceive my side, but to tell us the truth. You ask me to meet a source in Leipzig whom you have never met and cannot vouch for. Now I find myself talking metaphorically about bird calls. I was thinking that life doesn’t get much stranger than this.’ He stopped and examined each of them in turn. ‘And I was asking myself if I need to be insane to put my trust in you.’

Harland nodded sympathetically but Rosenharte saw his eyes hadn’t lost their purpose. ‘For instance,’ he continued, ‘on the truth channel everyone knows that the Stasi does not simply accept what it’s given. They make tasks for their agents to gain specific intelligence. They wanted me to test Annalise in that way during the autumn of 1974, just before she died.’

‘You’re right,’ said Harland. ‘Similar demands were made on Annalise’s substitute and in the spring of ’75 we orchestrated appropriate responses which seemed to satisfy the Stasi. It was a collaborative effort, involving several nations.’

‘Then I should know what other information she gave them.’

‘In outline, yes, but let’s face it this isn’t exactly pillow talk. You wouldn’t have spent the night discussing these things. But I’ll give one or two examples of the way we used her. During the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks, cables, handwritten notes and letters between heads of Nato states, even one from Reagan, were leaked. On 15 March 1985 when Chernenko died she supplied them with documents and telegrams between the US government and Nato and the agenda of meetings between defence ministers held by the new British Secretary General Lord Carrington. That was her last job for us. But this had been going on for a long time. Back in December 1979, for instance, an exchange between Jimmy Carter and the Secretary General of Nato concerning the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was made available so the other side knew that the West’s protestations were deeply felt and that they would act if there were any further territorial incursions. But all this only worked because they
believed
she was their spy.’

Rosenharte leaned forward and asked: ‘In ’75, how did you explain her disappearance? One moment she was working for the Commission, the next she was in Nato handing over secrets to a gardener. It doesn’t seem a very natural progression.’

‘After the suicide, we had to work very hard,’ said Harland. ‘When Annalise Schering went off the radar screen we put it about that she had suffered some personal loss and a suspected breakdown. A few months went by and she eventually resigned from the Commission to take the job at Nato. She was, as you know, a fairly solitary person and had few friends. Her mother was dead by then and she had no other family. The Belgian authorities were helpful because at that time Brussels was full of Stasi Romeos trying to bed every bloody secretary in town. What worked for us was that the only East German agent who knew her was you. There had not been time for them to do the usual background checks and place other agents around her. That all happened later, when she went to Nato, where - incidentally - it was explained that her collapse had been brought about by a thyroid imbalance and an unsuitable affair. You were that unsuitable affair. She told her new controller that she had lost her heart to you, but that you drank too much and were therefore a security risk. They were impressed by her sense of mission and the self-sacrifice entailed in dropping you.’ He stopped and looked Rosenharte in the eye. ‘It was all very neat . . . though . . . I do appreciate it was painful for you.’

‘Indeed,’ said Rosenharte, not letting them see his anger. Just after he had left Annalise’s apartment on that dreary evening, he was picked by the Belgian police. Two days of interrogation followed, at the end of which they told him he was to be charged for the murder of Annalise Schering. They said he had faked her suicide by forcing her to take an overdose of sleeping pills and then cutting her wrists as she lay asleep. Evidence of her blood was found in the bedroom, which they said supported the theory that she had been placed in the bath after she was drugged and had become unconscious. It would be difficult to contest in court, particularly as they’d show that Rosenharte was a Stasi agent who’d been trying to make Annalise Schering work for East Germany. He was reminded by a senior police officer that Belgium had not yet abolished the death penalty and that at the very least he would face a minimum of twenty years in jail. Then two British spies and a Belgian intelligence officer came to the police station cell and put a proposition to him. He would be released without charge, as long as he remained in Brussels and filed regular reports of his contact with Annalise. Thereafter they would provide the pretext for his return to East Germany. If for one moment they suspected that he had told the truth to the Stasi they would release tapes proving his cooperation with the West, including pictures of his taking what appeared to be an envelope containing money. He had no choice. For the first three months of 1975 he maintained the fiction of his affair with Annalise in his messages to the East, all recorded on the mid-section of a conventional Frank Sinatra music cassette and then sent to an address in Berlin.

He looked at Harland squinting through the smoke of his cigarette. ‘I have always wondered what your side said about me to the Stasi through the substitute Annalise. They would have nothing to do with me when I got back to Normannenstrasse.’

Harland coughed awkwardly. ‘I’m afraid there may have been some allegations of a sexual nature, it being well understood by us at the time that the Stasi had a horror of that kind of deviance in its own ranks. But of course I was not directly involved.’

Rosenharte had always suspected this but again decided to keep his anger to himself. ‘When did the arrangement with the replacement finish?’

‘When the woman became pregnant by her real husband. We couldn’t have her meeting her controller with a bump. He’d want too many explanations. The thing had come to a natural end. Security measures were increased in Nato headquarters, with several people being investigated and questioned. When the gardener was arrested, Annalise sent word to the Stasi that she risked being exposed and could not continue. Soon afterwards it was put about that she had left to marry a Canadian businessman. End of story.’

‘When was this?’

‘Late spring, 1985.’

‘And in all that time, you like to think that they did not take photographs of her? What if they took pictures last night? All they have to do is compare the two.’

‘We hope they did.’ Harland looked at Griswald and grinned. ‘She worked for us in Nato. She was the second Annalise. She came out of retirement for this job. As far as they’re concerned, it
is
Annalise. That’s why I believe you’ll be safe for long as it’s necessary. Then we will get you out.’

Rosenharte got up, walked to the window and looked down into the street, which was now beginning to fill with people. It was Sunday 10 September and church bells were tolling across the city. He was suddenly taken by the colour and animation of Italian life again. Bar umbrellas were being erected, flowers watered and pavements being swept outside one or two stores by trim, fastidious women. Immediately below them was a fruit stall where baskets of produce were laid in a perfectly balanced pattern. It seemed to him that no decision was made about the centre of Trieste without someone first asking what effect it would have on the appearance of the city. He watched a few people making their way to early morning mass and brought to mind a black and white film written by Billy Wilder,
Menschen am Sonntag
- People on Sunday. Konnie had found a rare print and shown it to him on a projector that kept breaking down. While he fiddled with the machine, he gave a commentary on the film, a brilliant discourse on the way the little masterpiece from the time of Weimar captured the unknowability of each person. ‘Cinema doesn’t have to be explicit,’ he had said. ‘It can let a mystery hang in the air and each person makes of it what he or she will, according to their character.’ Dear, brave Konnie. He had to get him out soon.

‘So,’ said Harland, trying to gain his attention.

Rosenharte turned.

‘You know,’ continued the American, ‘you guys are screwed in the East. The economy is in meltdown, the young people are all leaving, nothing works, the factories are forty years behind the West. Everything’s up the Swanee.’

‘The Swanee?’

‘
Kaput
.
Alles ist kaput
.’

‘Is the West any better? Until last year you had a President who only made decisions when he had consulted his wife’s astrologer. We read about these things in the East, you know. And what about last year, when every economy in the West nearly failed because of the greed of investors on Wall Street?’

‘You can’t compare that with what’s going in your country,’ returned the American amiably. ‘Literally nothing works in East Germany. There’s no food, the transport system is shit, the manufacturing base is thirty years out of date. Every time someone has a new idea it goes before a dozen committees before it can be implemented. And when things break down all the effort is put into investigating possible sabotage rather than fixing the problem. Sabotage is the alibi of every dud factory manager. But the Party bosses care not one jot about this because they have all the comfort and luxury goods they need. Way off in the hidden compounds, the Party hierarchy have every luxury and all the best medical treatment. We know what’s going on, Rosenharte. Nothing works unless you’re a Party boss.’