The Arms Maker of Berlin (40 page)

The investigative summary, while brief, was larded with acronyms, code names, and arcane bureaucratic references that Nat could have spent weeks deciphering. But the gist of it was clear enough. Due to a security breach within the Stasi, the granddaughter’s report of the pending denunciation of the “prominent businessman” had been leaked to West German intelligence. As a result, the fatal accident that occurred one week later had been deemed “suspicious.”

As of November 9, 1989, the investigation was still active. But that was the day the Wall came down, throwing the Stasi into chaos. Meaning no one had ever followed up. Except Berta, of course. She apparently had her suspicions from the beginning, to judge from the Hans Koldow report filed against her that September. Then, a year ago, she had come in to see her own file. It was right about the time she “went off the deep end,” according to her university colleagues, and began her downward spiral of destructively obsessive behavior.

Now he knew why. Not because she had been outed by Bauer, or figured her future was doomed. Nothing that selfish. It was instead because she had learned that her own loose lips had led directly to her grandmother’s death and that Bauer himself may have helped arrange it.

It explained why she had spoken with such passion about the power of love. Nat had scoffed, foolishly so, when she later claimed she was speaking of her Oma. He had also made some crack about how her grandmother must have been her “guardian against the Stasi.” No wonder Berta had cooled so quickly.

So, yes, it was love that drove her, but also shame, grief, and a burning desire for vengeance and atonement—even after her reputation was in ruins and her bank account was empty.

In the back of the folder, agency officials had listed the names of everyone who had viewed this file to date.

Berta was the second visitor. She had come in May 2006. Nat was the fourth.

The first, only a few weeks before Berta, was a lawyer with an address on the Ku-Damm—probably the Bauer henchman who had dug up the dirt and passed it along to the Free University. He, too, hadn’t been entitled to see the material, meaning that Bauer had pulled strings just as Nat had done.

It was the third visitor’s identity that provided Nat with his most pleasant surprise.

Liesl Hartz had come here only about a month after Berta. Like most Germans who visited the Stasi files, she had been curious to find out which neighbors and friends had been spying on her all those years. It was her address that was remarkable, so much so that it raised the hair on Nat’s arms. After the Wall came down she must have moved back to the west side of the city. Perhaps she did it to be near the place where she grew up, because her apartment was in Dahlem, on a street Nat was familiar with. It was only blocks from the Krumme Lanke U-Bahn stop. No wonder he had sensed such a strange presence that day with Berta. Except Liesl was no mere spirit. She lived and breathed, and her home was his next destination.

A
S HE KNOCKED
at the door, Nat wondered how many times Liesl must have heard that sound and feared the worst. Not only had she endured two of history’s most oppressive and intrusive regimes, but she had dared to defy them and, somehow, had survived.

Yet when Liesl Hartz opened her door, she did not bother with a security chain or even a precautionary glance through a peephole. She simply threw it open and looked straight into his face. Her voice was neither harsh nor challenging. Nor was it timid or cowed.

“Good afternoon. Whom do you wish to see?”

“Liesl Hartz. Or, as I expect you were once known, Liesl Folkerts.”

Her eyes betrayed a flash of surprise, and she stepped back from the threshold.

“Oh, my,” she said, raising a hand to her neck. “No one has spoken my maiden name for quite some time, and I’m not sure I like the idea of anyone knowing it. Who are you, and how did you find me?”

“I’m an American historian, Dr. Nathaniel Turnbull. But I hope you’ll call me Nat. And, well, I found you, at least indirectly, through the granddaughter of the woman who was once your best friend.”

“You must mean Berta Heinkel, Hannelore’s favorite. The one who did her in, poor child, quite unwittingly.”

“Oh, she knows, I’m afraid. In fact, she seems to have spent the better part of the past year trying to make up for it. It has practically ruined her.”

Liesl shook her head. Then her expression took on an air of suspicion.

“I was just about to invite you in. But I would feel more comfortable about it if you could first indulge me by answering one more question.”

“Certainly.”

“Are you here on behalf of Kurt Bauer?” She placed a hand on the doorknob, as if preparing to shut the door.

“Definitely not. If he knew I was here, he’d probably be doing everything in his power to stop me. Because I’ve come to ask you about the war years, and the White Rose, and everything else that happened then.”

She exhaled in apparent relief.

“Then I had better make some coffee. You’re going to be here for quite a while.”

She showed Nat to a couch in the parlor. The furniture was clean but threadbare, and the walls were unadorned except for a few simple prints. Her television set was a small black-and-white model, ancient, but her bookcases were full. A tea table was piled high with newspapers and magazines. The place bore all the earmarks of someone who had little money for luxuries yet had never stopped feeding an active mind.

She carried in a wooden tray with a coffee thermos and two plain white mugs.

“Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk, thank you.”

“I’m afraid this coffee may be the only item of any real value that I can offer,” she said. “I have my impressions, of course, and my memories. But I have none of the sort of items that historians usually think of as proof, at least where Kurt Bauer is concerned, even though I have never had any doubt since the end of the war as to what really happened. Hannelore also knew, but she, too, had nothing you would ever call proof. It’s why neither of us was ever bold enough to come forward. Until, well … I suppose you must already know of how Hannelore died? Or was killed, rather.”

“Yes, I read the report. But I wouldn’t worry any longer about not having any proof against Bauer.” He handed her a copy of Gollner’s interrogation transcript. “Take a few minutes to read this.”

Liesl slipped on a pair of glasses, and for most of the next half hour the only sound in the room was of the traffic, whisking by out front. Her eyes glistened a few times, and she paused often to shake her head, slowly and dolefully. Twice she sighed loudly and put down the papers, as if struggling to maintain her composure. But she never once shed a tear. Too much hard-earned endurance for that, Nat supposed.

As Nat watched her, it occurred to him why this case had fascinated him so much, even apart from the personal connections, and why it would probably continue to absorb him for months to come, or longer. It wasn’t just the opportunity for a world-class “gotcha” in exposing Bauer, or even the higher motive of helping Holland and playing a small role in a twist of global history. It was more that this cast of players—Bauer and Berta, Gordon and Sabine, Liesl and Hannelore—perfectly encapsulated his life’s work. The six of them
were
his curriculum, Modern Germany made flesh, in all its macabre and tragic grandeur.

Liesl put down the transcript with a final sigh. Dry-eyed, she handed it back.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ve made copies.”

“Thank you. But tell me, if you have this, what could you possibly need from me?”

“Well, one thing I’d like to know is how the hell you got away from Plotzensee Prison without anyone finding out you’d survived?”

She smiled.

“That was Hannelore’s trick. The bombs blew open her cell, of course, and I happened to be standing in a hallway at the time. I had just been released. Gollner himself had come to sign the discharge papers, which were still in my hand. One of the walls collapsed, and everything was pretty crazy, pretty frightening. Somehow I ended up outside, half in shock, and that’s when she saw me. She took me by the arm and we ran. And that might have been it, except Hannelore had the presence of mind to place my release papers in that poor girl’s hand, the one who was already half-buried in the fallen bricks. Another prisoner, I suppose. No one has ever known her name, because when the authorities found her they logged her death under my name.”

“Gollner must have realized the mistake.”

“I’m certain he did. He knew my face, and he would have seen hers. But he would have been glad to keep it a secret.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because of what he had just told me, inside the prison, while I waited for him to sign my papers. He told me all about what Kurt had done. His idea of a joke on Kurt, I suppose. I gather he was feeling ill-treated by his superiors as the result of all the pressure being applied by Kurt’s father. Telling me about Kurt’s betrayal was his only way of getting back at the Bauers. And when he heard later that Kurt thought the dead girl was me, it must have made him even happier.”

“Where did you go from there?”

“We tried my house first. But by then my family had been killed, that very morning. So we went across town, to some friends of Hannelore’s in Prenzlauer Berg. We barely survived all the bombings during the next few months, and then we barely survived the Russians. I was raped by a soldier in the Red Army. Hardly unusual, as you must know. Hannelore was a far better survivor. She killed one of them with a pair of scissors. She was also better than me at surviving the Worker’s Paradise, at least for a while. She was quite the firebrand at first. Then they put her in prison for two years, and she was never quite as vocal afterward. Nor was I. After a while I no longer had much spirit for dissent.”

“Weren’t you ever tempted to contact Bauer, or confront him in some way?”

“Hannelore and I always talked about that. In private, of course. We drafted several letters to the press, laying out our case. And I found out his phone number, the one to his home. But we never mailed the letters, and I never called.”

“Why not?”

“Only two things could have happened, and neither was satisfactory. Without proof, the West would have seen it as another trumped-up Communist attempt to smear a good capitalist. There were quite a few of those, you know, complete with forgeries. In some ways that would only have made him stronger, an object of pity.”

“Maybe.”

“Yes, maybe. Meaning maybe we could have succeeded. But then we realized what that would have meant. Hannelore and I would have been celebrated as heroes of the Worker’s Paradise. Sturdy tools in the hands of our new enemy. The very people who were making others spy on us would have been richly rewarded. Besides, part of me simply never wanted to relive those days. Those horrible executions. Discovering that my true love had betrayed us. Then learning that my entire family had been blown to pieces. All in one terrible day. Those sorts of memories don’t bear much stirring up. Even after Hannelore and I were both married, with new names to hide behind, we never said much about our days in the White Rose. Although I gather that toward the end Hannelore told some of her stories to Berta. Maybe that’s what finally inspired the girl to try and take down Bauer.”

“How often did you see Berta?”

“Only once or twice. And on both occasions Hannelore introduced me simply as Mrs. Hartz, because Berta had already heard so many wartime tales of the heroic Liesl Folkerts. Even then Hannelore suspected the girl was reporting on her. Out of love, she said, which I could never understand. All I saw in Berta was a frightening little Communist, and Hannelore knew I felt that way. So there is no way she would have ever told Berta who I really was.”

“I guess you weren’t very surprised to read in your Stasi file that Berta had informed on you as well.”

“Not at all. Although it made me want to look up Berta’s file as an informer, which I was entitled to do as one of her ‘victims.’ That’s when I found out how Hannelore had been killed. It made me furious at the girl, of course. Her stupidity had cost me my best friend. But it also made me realize that she, too, was a victim of the state. Besides, she was only a girl.”

“Kurt Bauer was only a boy.”

“But his motives were wealth and self-preservation, and he was nearly eighteen. Berta was three years younger, a far more vulnerable age, and she had been indoctrinated from birth. And as perverse as it sounds, I really do believe she was acting out of love, just as Hannelore said. Surely in your profession you can see the difference between them.”

“What are your feelings about her now?”

“There is still anger, of course. But there is also pity. I have heard through others that she has lost everything. She has paid a far greater price than Kurt ever did. And I would guess that what torments her most is the loss of her Oma.”

” ‘Torment’ is exactly the word, and I’m hoping I can help her. I’d like to share these materials with her, if it’s all right with you. I may even let her help me prepare an article for publication. She did show me the way to your door, in a sense. I can’t say her motives were always admirable, and definitely not her methods, but I wouldn’t have succeeded without her.”

“You must do as you see fit. But I am told she no longer has a home. Do you even know where to reach her?”

“I’m pretty sure I will quite soon. Bauer, too. Which brings me to my last question. Are you busy this coming Monday?”

O
N
S
UNDAY NIGHT
, just as Nat was putting the finishing touches on his arrangements for the following morning, he telephoned Holland. The agent was at home, and sounded a little tipsy.

“Still celebrating?” Nat asked.

“Why not? You gave us plenty to celebrate.”

“You’ll also be happy to know I’ve completed my expense report. I’ll fax it tonight if you’ll give me a number.”

“I hope you took me up on that offer of a nice dinner in Bern.”

“Didn’t have time, as it turned out. Had to head straight to Berlin.”

“Berlin? What on earth for?” He sounded a little edgy.