The Berlin Crossing (29 page)

‘I’m a cook in the hospital, sir,’ she added.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Fuchs said. ‘We are not here.’

The woman got off the bed to close her door when they stepped out into the hall.
I
don’t want to know you’re here
.

Fuchs paused outside the last door, Baumeister breathing heavily beside him. The hallway was still unlit; already the cracks
of light under the other two doors had disappeared. So, he said to himself, she is here or she is not here.
And I’m not even sure why I’m here
. But his nose had that familiar twitch.

He turned to Baumeister.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘Wait for me outside.’

Baumeister made as if to protest, then thought better of it. He nodded and waddled his way out of the flat.

Fuchs opened the door quickly, and switched on the light.

She had short blond hair and big bluish eyes. Fuchs couldn’t see anything else: she had the blankets pulled up tight against
her chin. He flashed his Stasi card, flung the question at her.

‘Your name?’

She told him.

‘Where do you work?’

There was more of the same, a volley of short questions with
short answers. She kept the big blue eyes focused on Fuchs and, the blanket pressed almost to her mouth. Fuchs saw the fear
in the big eyes, wondered how to corner it. There was more than fear in the beautiful face on the pillow, an edge of resistance.

‘You went out tonight, Frau Ritter?’

‘For a spin, sir. I went out cycling.’

‘What time did you come back?’

‘A while ago, sir, I was sleeping . . .’

She was lying, holding something back.

She doesn’t know how much or how little I know. Let her go on not knowing
.

‘Go back to sleep,’ he said.

He switched the light off, closed the door, left her lying there, staring into the darkness. She heard his voice again, reedy
and whiny, and then the door of the flat was pulled shut.

Her body was trembling. It had been trembling all the time the questions had been coming, the strange yellow eyes boring into
her. She’d been half ready for them, she’d heard the doors opening, her flatmates’ voices. The noise of the keys had alerted
her, just as she’d come in the back door. She’d been leaning her bicycle against the staircase when she’d heard it, the jangling
sound of metal on stone, low voices outside the front door. Her own fear told her that whatever it was,
whoever
it was, coming for her. She’d almost given herself away, the bike slipping against the wall with a grating, scraping noise.
But she’d made it, up the stairs, quietly into the flat, her bedroom door closing behind her soundlessly.
Lucky
. And maybe it wasn’t her they’d been searching for.
They
. She was sure the other voice had been Baumeister’s. Agatha would tell her, Baumeister was often in the printing works.

She could hear sounds from the other rooms. The girls would want to talk, questions swirling in the cigarette smoke in the
kitchen. She wondered if
he
was asleep yet; she’d have to get another blanket to him somehow, the nights were cold now, even chillier under the ground.

She got out of bed, took her coat off, took the dark beret from under her pillow. She moved quickly now, undressing, getting
into her pyjamas, preparing herself to share in the questioning, the wondering
what was that all about?

She knew she was being watched all next day. She could feel those yellow eyes boring into the back of her neck as she bent
over her drawing board, following her to the canteen, to the lavatory, wherever she moved in the Institute of Cartography.

But when she dared to turn round, there was no one there. She
knew
there was nobody there. And yet.

It was hard to explain, even to herself: to feel constantly watched and yet so utterly abandoned.

Baumeister stood a moment beside her during his customary morning tour of the Institute. It was even more chilling when he
moved away without saying a word, without contriving to touch her on some pretext. It was the first time this had ever happened.
Frau Krug looked across the room at her, her look inscrutable.

She was leaving the building after work when Johannes Vos fell into step beside her, breathing heavily. She slowed down as
they walked together across the car park towards the bicycle shelter.

‘Will you come tonight, Petra? Gladden the heart of this old wreck?’

She half turned to look at him. A perverse rosy sheen seemed to cling to Johannes’ parchmenty skin.

‘You should be at home, Johannes,’ she said quietly.

‘Don’t.’ He touched her arm. ‘You’ll come and play for me tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. We’ll have
reibekuchen
and apple sauce.’

Johannes turned away towards his car, an old grey Lada that shone as if it were new. He’d told her once that he was going
to leave it to her and she’d blushed, told him not to be silly. ‘Who else would I leave it to?’ he’d said. ‘Since my wife
died you’re the only one who comes here.’ She hadn’t known what to say, just tucked the violin under her jaw and started into
Mozart.

The Lada was ahead of her as she exited the car park on her bicycle. She swung left, heading towards home. She ached for him,
longed to go in the opposite direction, to the cell in the ground, but she couldn’t risk it. Not today, with the invisible
eyes following her. Even the church was out of bounds: Pastor Bruck didn’t deserve any further involvement.

The apartment was empty when she got home. She tidied up, getting rid of the traces of the night before. It had been a long
night, whispers, giggles, even laughter to hide the fear, the Stasi ID actually brandished in their apartment. Two saucers
full of crushed cigarette butts told how long the night had been.

When she was finished in the kitchen, she lay, fully dressed, under the quilt on her bed. Her exhaustion wasn’t the kind that
brought sleep. She stared at the white ceiling but it was his face she saw, the dark hair, the strong jaw, stubbly now, unshaven.
Until a few days ago she had not known of the existence of Roland Feldmann; now, it seemed, her world revolved around him.

Darkness seeped into the room. She got up and for a moment she watched, through the window, the darkening world outside. Involuntarily
she trembled. Her flatmates were still not back, the apartment seemed empty, cheerless. She reminded herself once more that
she couldn’t risk going to the garden shed.
And he
needs a blanket, the nights are cold now
. She closed the curtains, drew on her coat, picked up the violin. She’d eat
reibekuchen
with Johannes Vos and play for him. Maybe her playing would, somehow, ease the pain of his knowing that the cancers inside
him were slowly but inexorably killing him. Maybe, just maybe, the music would ease the loneliness of Johannes Vos. And of
herself.

The sound of the twig snapping under his foot was like a gunshot, like the sharp explosion of noise back in the flat in Prenzlauer
Berg. He paused in mid-stride, willing himself into stillness, listening to the sounds of the wood. Darkness was falling on
the trees, bare branches etched starkly against the darkening sky. He sniffed the air: woodsmoke from some unseen chimney
beyond the trees, beyond the allotments.

He’d gone as far as he dared from the shed, moving deeper among the trees, away from the road. He’d stumbled on to a dirt
track and had to scurry back into the undergrowth when he’d heard someone coming. He’d watched, hardly daring to breathe,
as a fat figure in winter coat and boots passed within yards of his hiding place, humming to himself.

The coat reminded him of how cold he felt. The old coat that Pastor Bruck had handed to him from Martha’s wardrobe was a threadbare
thing. It wasn’t much of a blanket either but he’d found a length of old carpet in one of the abandoned sheds and left it
to air, spread out over a couple of planks in the hut that had become his home. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing:
he’d wrap it round himself on the makeshift bed tonight.

Cold and hungry. Heat and food
. Things you took for granted. You only missed them when you were hiding out in a strange country, waiting for a beautiful
girl who was risking her life to help you. Still, he hoped she’d come. The bread and stringy
chicken were long eaten, the cold tea gone too.
She’d come if she could
.

When he got back to the shed, he shook out the length of carpet, in the night air. He prowled the confines of the shed, flapping
his arms to keep warm. He wrapped himself in the carpet, kept the door ajar and watched the night deepen over the broken roofs
and the leafless trees. Lights twinkled on the distant hills, now and then the headlights of a car cut their way through the
night, remote, unknown.

Once he heard the distant drone of a plane, to the west, perhaps over Berlin, and he remembered Pastor Bruck’s words, about
trouble in Cuba, about a face-off in Berlin. The drone in the sky died away.
What do I care about Cuba, about Ingham’s machinations in Berlin?
After a while he knew that she wasn’t coming, that she couldn’t come, but he went on sitting there anyway, huddled in the
length of carpet: there was nothing else he could do except go on waiting, watching the darkness.

The summons was as abrupt as usual.

‘Major Fuchs? In my office in five minutes.’

Colonel Gunter Neiber didn’t wait, ever, for his subordinates to reply when he phoned. Orders were for obeying, not for discussion.

Within a minute Fuchs was crossing the open space from Block 7, where he had his office, to the HQ Block. His uniform made
no difference here: he still had to produce his ID and wait for the sergeant on duty to get telephone clearance before he
was permitted to mount the stairs to the second floor, from where Colonel Neiber controlled his Special Investigations (Counter-Espionage,
Internal) Unit.

Fuchs’s attitude to the HQ Block was ambivalent. Like every ambitious officer he longed for a desk here, close to the centre
of power; and, like most officers, a summons here was a call he dreaded. His ear was playing up again, his headache was worse.

And Neiber left him standing in the corridor outside his office, like he always did. Neiber’s assistant, an owlish, bespectacled
fellow, told him curtly to wait before going back to his typewriter. A fucking cissy, Fuchs decided; put him in the field
and he’d be looking for his
mutti
, no chance he’d survive an ashtray against his ear.

He heard voices from the inner office, the doorknob stirred
from within. The owlish assistant looked at the door, a hint of panic on his face, and leapt to his feet as the door swung
open.

Erich Mielke, Minister of State Security, stood in the doorway, Colonel Neiber beside him.

Fuchs watched, breathless, as the two men shook hands.

‘I’ll take care of it, sir.’ Neiber’s tone had none of its usual barked arrogance.

Mielke nodded and turned away. He nodded again at the owlish lieutenant but said nothing as he stepped out into the corridor.
Fuchs was standing rigidly at attention, his gaze firmly fixed on some invisible spot on the opposite wall.

‘Major Fuchs, I think?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Mielke stepped closer. Fuchs could smell the cigarettes on his breath, mixed with a sweetish aftershave.

‘That’s an ugly-looking wound on your ear.’

‘It’s – it’s nothing, sir, nothing at all.’

‘I hope the other fellow came off worse, Major Fuchs.’

He felt the blush spreading right up past his fucking ear.

‘Yes, sir.’ It came out in a croak.

Mielke grunted then turned away.

Fuchs was still standing to attention, still studying his point on the corridor wall, when he heard Neiber’s voice.

‘Come on, Fuchs, we haven’t got all day!’ The colonel was again his commanding self.

Fuchs followed the colonel into his office. He had no doubt that his name had come up between Neiber and Mielke; he was certain,
too, that Mielke would by now have read his report of the incident in Prenzlauer Berg.

Neiber motioned for him to sit.

‘A disgrace,’ Neiber said without preamble. ‘One of our officers assaulted by a foreigner in this very city! And then the
bastard
gets away! What kind of officer permits this to happen?’

Neiber had chosen to remain on his feet, perhaps the better to hurl his fury down at his subordinate. Fuchs couldn’t meet
the colonel’s furious glare and found himself studying Neiber’s substantial uniformed midriff.

‘We have an emergency on our hands, on our doorstep. The Americans have backed down in Cuba but Berlin has not seen so many
of their tanks since the war. And right here in our midst we have some fucking British agent running loose because you let
him go!’ Colonel Neiber paused in his tirade. His great stomach seemed to swell before Fuchs’s yellow eyes. ‘Well, what have
you to say for yourself?’

‘He took me unawares, sir—’

‘Unawares! You are an officer of the
Staatssicherheit
, Fuchs, you are not there to be taken
unafuckingwares!
’

‘I am following a line of inquiry, sir.’ Before his eyes the belly expanded, seemed to drop, then moved away.

‘Tell me.’

At least the fat fucker is in his chair, behind his desk
.

Fuchs told him.

Neiber stared across the desk at him. The colonel’s head was bald; the entire shiny crown of his head seemed to move as his
thin eyebrows went up.

‘A priest in Bad Saarow,’ he said sceptically, ‘a trainee mapmaker who wishes to be a violinist – this is your line of inquiry?’

‘I just have a feeling, sir. Some things fit. And Bad Saarow . . .’ He paused, uncertain.

‘Bad Saarow, what?’

‘The Cartography Institute, sir, maybe . . .’

‘Maps.’ Neiber was thoughtful, fingering his jowls. ‘We still don’t know what this fellow Weber was trying to hand over to
the British?’