The Company of Strangers (44 page)

‘You’re the expert,’ she said. ‘You’re the spy.’

‘Everybody’s a spy,’ he said. ‘We all have our secrets.’

‘But…but you’re the professional.’

‘Unpaid. Remember. That’s why you’re here.’

‘Ah, yes, the business,’ she said, relieved. ‘I have your money. Twenty thousand Deutschmarks.’

‘You’d know me by my voice now, wouldn’t you?’ he asked. ‘You listen carefully.’

‘I don’t know how you’ve arrived at that conclusion.’

‘They say a child will always recognize its mother’s voice.’

‘But I’m not your child,’ she said, something shaking inside her or rather outside, as if there was an earth tremor, something completely strange. ‘Can we have the light on now, please?’

‘Would the same apply to a lover?’ he asked, ignoring her. ‘Between lovers?’

‘It’s not the same, is it? It’s not a blood tie.’

‘Have you ever been in love?’

‘I haven’t risked coming here to discuss that with a total stranger.’

‘Of course. Not to talk about those kind of secrets…but other ones…duller ones.’

Silence again.

He pulled off his mask, flattened it on the table.

‘Would
you
answer the same question from someone you didn’t know?’ she asked.

‘I might.’

‘Have you ever been in love?’

‘Only once.’

‘Who with?’ she asked, her heart undecided about its next beat.

‘You…crazy.’

She coughed against the sudden knot in her throat. Her cigarette wavered in the dark.

‘Now do you know me?’ he asked.

No answer.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and after another long silence, ‘I’m not sure I know myself.’

‘We’ve changed…’ he said, almost blasé, distant, ‘that’s normal. Isn’t that completely normal? I’m not as I used to be either.’

He recognized his own coldness and reached over, found her hand.

‘Let me see your face,’ she said.

‘I’ve only half a face you’ll remember.’

‘Just show me.’

‘The good news or bad news?’

‘Where I come from, we always ask for the bad news first.’

He turned his head to the right, switched on the torch and held it at table height so that he looked ghostly, ghastly, horrific.

‘That’s the worst news,’ he said.

He turned his head to show the other profile, and there was Karl Voss, almost as she’d first known him. She put her fingertips to his face, touched the bones which were still prominent, still vulnerable under the tight skin.

‘That’s the slightly better news,’ he said. ‘A Russian flame-thrower grilled the other side.’

‘They told me you’d been shot in the Plötzensee Prison.’

‘A lot of us were,’ he said. ‘I was in a line up but they were firing blanks that day. Scaring us to death.’

‘Rose said you were involved in the July Plot.’

‘I was. I was their man in Lisbon.’

‘How did you survive that?’

‘I happened to be interrogated by a man called SS Colonel Bruno Weiss who, although he was a very nasty piece of work – I think they hanged him in ‘46 – was someone I knew from my days in the
Wolfsschanze.
I had a particular connection with him there.’

He stopped, because she was looking at him, transfixed, tears rolling silently down her face.

‘It
is
me,’ he said. ‘I
am
here.’

‘Can
you
believe it?’

‘No. I’m trying not to think about it.’

‘I’d forgotten you.’

‘Had you? That wouldn’t surprise me. I imagine you were told something, a few lines, I don’t know, maybe only several words. Voss has been shot. They were wrong, that’s all.’

‘This is what Rose told me, he said: “We’ve had news of Voss, by the way. Not good. Our sources tell us that he was shot at dawn in Plötzensee Prison last Friday with seven others.” That’s what he said. Those were his words.’

‘I never liked Rose but he did happen to tell you the truth. Perfect intelligence. It was a Friday. Yes. And there were eight of us. We were shot too…but only shot at.’

‘That lie has…’

‘It wasn’t a lie…only an untruth. I doubt he knew and if he did, he probably thought it would make life easier for you. You were young. You could recover.’

‘No,’ she said, quickly. ‘It made it hard, incredibly hard. If I’d known you were somewhere, even if I couldn’t see you, there would still be possibilities. That word “never” would not have got stuck in my vocabulary.’

‘You’re angry.’

‘Because I thought this could never happen, I’ve never considered it. If I had, anger is not what I would have expected. I’d have thought that we’d flood back into each other’s arms, like they do in films, but it’s twenty-seven years, isn’t it, Karl? It’s the nature of frost that after time it becomes permafrost. It doesn’t thaw out in ten minutes, and definitely not in this climate.’

‘It
is
cold,’ he said. ‘And you’re right. I never had to live with the loss. That would have been hard.’

Silence again.

‘It’s warmer when it snows,’ he said, and she knew he was thinking.

‘Then let’s talk,’ she said. ‘Tell me about that particular connection to Bruno Weiss.’

Silence while he finished the cigarette, rubbed his thighs up and down, went back to that black trunk with the white stencilled address in the furthest recess of his memory.

‘I planted a bomb for him, which killed a great man,’ he said. ‘Fritz Todt. A
great
man and
I
killed him. I didn’t know that I was killing him, but I did and afterwards I entered the world of SS Colonel Bruno Weiss and, what’s more, I accepted it. I didn’t just keep my mouth shut. I went a step further and planted a lie for him. He sort of returned the favour some time later by trying to help me get Julius out of the
Kessel
at Stalingrad but…it was too late.’

‘But he got you off the hook after the July Plot.’

‘Off the hook, yes,’ he said, thinking about the irony of that. ‘He chose to believe me, that was all. There were others, who I knew were innocent, whom he chose not to believe and he tortured them and executed them. But me…he didn’t exactly let me go. I ended up reduced to the ranks on the East Front. But even there, you know, this appalling luck pursued me and within a few months the shortage of officers was such that I was back in a captain’s uniform. Some of my men said I was “blessed”, as if that could possibly be the right word for being allowed to continue in that hell.’

‘That depends on what you believe.’

‘Yes,’ he said, almost aggressive. ‘What do I believe in?’

‘Perhaps, like me, you’d begun to think there’s nothing beyond the door into the dark.’

‘That’s true. I certainly didn’t want to see behind that door. Not then. I can’t think why. There was every reason. Being embraced by the dark should have been a relief.’

‘And the Russian flame-thrower?’

‘I’d like to tell you that was purification by fire, but I think it was just simple luck again. We were retreating, every day we were retreating in front of that Russian onslaught. We were on the outskirts of Berlin. I was pushing a car out of a mudhole so that my men could get a piece of artillery through and, as I grunted against the back window, I came face to face with General Weidling, who was an old friend of my father’s. He recognized me but couldn’t place me. We had one of those absurd chats, where a world war seems to stop for a few minutes, and he tried to think where he’d seen me before but I’d already changed my name by then. It had been easy enough in the confusion, amongst all that death and destruction, to pick up some ID tags. My men knew my history, they even came to me with Captain Kurt Schneider’s documents one
day, found them on a body in a shell crater. They knew it would be hard for me if later the Russians traced me back to the Abwehr. Military intelligence. Spying. It never looks good. So I told Weidling I was Kurt Schneider but, as with Bruno Weiss, Weidling and I had made some strange connection and he asked me how well I knew Berlin. I’d lived there all my life before going to Heidelberg so I knew it very well. He ordered me to take him to the Führer’s bunker, which I did, and when I got him back in one piece he made me a member of his staff. My men couldn’t believe it.

‘It helped being on Weidling’s staff but I wasn’t out of the war. Occasionally the fighting caught up with our constantly mobile HQ – it was all street to street, house to house with the Russians. Terrible fighting. Terrible loss of life. And one day some of the original Kurt Schneider’s luck caught up with me and I got my leg stuck under some rubble after a tank blasted a hole in a house wall. A Russian cleaned out the room with a flame-thrower. I was left for dead and picked up only after the fighting had more or less stopped.

‘When the Russians found out I’d been on Weidling’s staff I was given some medical treatment and eventually flown to Moscow on a planeload of loot. They did some rough repair work on my face and I was taken to a prison camp north of the city called Krasnogorsk 24/III. Weidling was being interrogated in Moscow and one day the NKVD came to see me when they heard that I’d been in the Führer’s bunker with him near the end. I told them everything I’d seen, which wasn’t much, waiting at the bottom of the stairs while Weidling delivered the latest atrocious news…but I embellished. Then I mentioned I’d studied physics at Heidelberg University and I slipped in Otto Hahn’s name, and that was it – anything to get out of that camp.

‘They interviewed me, sent me to some technical centre in Moscow and then out to Tomsk, where I was a lab assistant in a research laboratory for twelve years, until 1960. I married and, maybe because of my father-in-law’s contacts, I was offered a place at the M-P school, which was the Soviet Intelligence Academy in Moscow. I leapt at it, because they said it would get me back to Germany. They gave me a Berlin posting in ‘64, so here I am – Major Kurt Schneider, Ministry for State Security, Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer – I monitor foreign visitors to East Berlin.
Wilkommen nach Ost Berlin.
’

‘You’re married.’

‘With two daughters. And you?’

‘I was married. I got married straight after I was told that you’d been shot. I had to. I thought I had to at the time.’

‘Yes, of course. Any children?’

She stared into the table. The wood was stained with rings from mugs and glasses, creating a series of Venn diagrams. Connections. Overlaps. Differences. She opened her bag and took out a photograph of Julião. She slid it across the rough surface. He tilted it towards himself. Frowned.

‘My God,’ he said.

‘I called him Julião.’

‘But that’s extraordinary,’ he said, flicking the corner of the photograph, until finally he took the torch to it and inspected the face minutely.

She fought it back down several times – the instinct to lie, to dissemble, still strong, even in front of the one person who she could and should tell.

‘The Portuguese and their
fado,’
she said. ‘Do you remember that?’

‘We heard some that night we went walking in the Bairro Alto.’

‘It seems we’re destined to live our lives in minutes and hours, instead of years and decades. My life’s been two weeks long, where everything that has happened to me is as a result of that short fortnight and its endless repercussions.’

He flicked the torch up at her, to see if her face said more than her words.

‘Why do you think he looks like Julius?’ she said.

He stood up, paced the room, snatched at the cigarettes and lit two up, gave one to her in passing.

‘I can’t think,’ he said. ‘I can’t think. Don’t talk. I can’t hear. I can’t speak.’

Her hands trembled the cigarette to her lips. Her lips trembled the cigarette back into her fingers. She laid it on the edge of the table, interrupted his pacing, grabbed the lapels of his coat.

‘Where is he?’ he asked. ‘Just tell me where he is, so that I can imagine him there.’

She was suddenly aware of how cold it was in the room. Standing close to, they were immersed in each other’s breath. The air was freezing in her mouth and nostrils, chill in her lungs, ice around her temples.

‘He’s dead, Karl. He was shot and killed out on patrol in Guiné in Africa in 1968. He was a soldier…like Julius.’

For a moment he looked as if he’d breathed in pure frost, it stiffened him, froze his guts and weighed him down. He slumped on to the cement blocks, his head hanging from his shoulders, as if suddenly broken. He took her limp hand and put it to his good cheek, shook his head against it, not so cold now.

‘No wonder you don’t know yourself,’ he said.

‘And you?’

‘Living my son’s life in fifteen seconds…it’s not the same. Losing a child after a lifetime, that’s an unbearable thing.’

‘Like your parents did,’ she said, automatically because she’d thought that years ago, too.

‘Yes,’ he said, and stared into the concrete floor.

His head came up slowly. His eyes fixed on a thick crack in the plaster of the wall. He followed it up to the ceiling, where it parted into two thinner cracks, which eventually merged into nothingness.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘I’m thinking.’

‘You haven’t stopped thinking since you shone that torch in my face.’

‘Now I’m thinking what I was trying not to think earlier.’

‘And failed.’

‘Yes, I failed…I’ve been wondering why Jim Wallis would send
you
to contact me.’

‘Did Jim recruit you?’ she asked, a feint, a diversion.

‘
I
recruited
him
,’ said Schneider. ‘He came over to East Berlin on a trade delegation, soon after I got here. He was fat and bald, but I could still see that schoolboy’s face of his staring out. He was travelling under some name or other, but I knew it was him. I had him picked up, grilled him, had him with his claws stuck in the ceiling. Then I personally drove him back to the delegation and told him who I was. I proved it to him as well…using your names. Anne Ashworth, Andrea Aspinall. I’d already decided that the only way I could make myself feel better about what I’d become – this Stasi officer who spies on foreigners – was to work against the system from the inside, use my position to get defectors out and point the finger at East German undercovers in the West. I said I’d work for him on condition that he was the only person to know about me and that there would never be any link between me and British Intelligence. Complete anonymity. No money to be allocated to me so that I could never be traced. But
he’s clever, Jim, because he remembered that there
was
a link. The original link. You.