The Company of Strangers (42 page)

‘The agent was in the process of arranging a defection of a man whose specialized knowledge would give us a more complete understanding of ICBM deployment in the Soviet Union. Now a number of things have happened which have made the agent’s life awkward. We need to give him temporary support until he can get this defector out. After that he can disappear back into his cover and rebuild his system.’

‘Support? What sort of…?’

‘Operational support.’

She looked at the faces of the men around her. They looked back.

‘I’m admin,’ she said, quoting Jim Wallis back to them.

‘At the moment,’ said Speke.

‘I was trained as an agent back in 1944. My active service was less than one week and, as Jim knows, that wasn’t entirely successful.’

‘But it wasn’t your fault, Andrea,’ said Wallis. ‘The whole operation was a cock-up from the start.’

‘But surely you can find someone with a bit more experience than me. I mean, Cold War espionage is…’

‘Not so different,’ said Cardew, ‘the Americans still don’t tell us what they’re doing and the West German BND have
their own agenda. A week’s training in Lisbon back in 1944 will stand you in very good stead.’

‘The point is,’ said Wallis, ‘our man doesn’t want anybody with experience. He doesn’t want anyone with a track record in post-war espionage. He wants someone, as he puts it, with a clean bill of health.’

‘Then there must be someone in training. I mean, it’s ridiculous to send a bean counter on operations.’

The men looked at each other as if this might well be the case.

‘It’s the fact that you’ve just started here from a ready-made background that’s decided us,’ said Cardew. ‘There’s nobody in training at the moment who we could get into East Germany as easily as you.’

‘East Germany?’

‘You have a very particular background,’ said Speke. ‘We’ve spoken to the head of the maths department in Cambridge and it seems that there would be some point in you paying a visit to a Professor Günther Spiegel, who is a senior lecturer at Humboldt University in East Berlin. An invitation is in the process of being arranged for you.’

‘In the process sounds as if…’

‘There’s a certain amount of urgency,’ said Speke.

‘It sounds as if you’re not giving me any choice in the matter.’

‘You
could
refuse,’ said Speke.

‘And we would lose a very valuable defector,’ said Wallis. ‘And possibly an agent, too.’

Silence while they let the weight of that press on her conscience.

‘This Gunther Spiegel,’ she said, after a lengthy pause, ‘is he one of us?’

The men leaned back, the pressure subsided.

‘No, no, he’s a maths professor. He’s your ticket in and out, that’s all.’

‘And what am I expected to do?’

‘Do as you’re asked. Think on your feet,’ said Speke.

‘Who is the defector and am I supposed to be involved in helping with that?’

‘You will be told who the defector is in due course, and yes, you will be expected to assist.’

‘And who do I do this for?’

‘Contact will be made.’

‘How will I know the contact?’

Speke nodded at Cardew and the two men left the room. Wallis tore a piece of paper off a pad and put it on his knee.

‘He will ask you this question,’ he said, writing.

He handed her the paper. It said: ‘Where do the three white leopards sit?’

‘And what would be your reply?’

She wrote: ‘Under the juniper tree,’ and handed it back.

‘I knew we could rely on you,’ he said, and lit the paper, threw it in the metal bin.

‘Does he have a codename?’

Wallis leaned over, put his lips to her ear and whispered:

‘The Snow Leopard.’

15th January 1971, East Berlin.

The first hint that the Snow Leopard had that this might not be a civilized little chat was when one of the men asked for his car keys. Schneider was put in the back of their car with the other man and they drove in convoy out of the estate and on to the Karl Marx Allee. The second hint came when they didn’t go to the Stasi HQ but headed north of Lichtenberg, to the Hohenschönhausen Interrogation Centre where the meat wagons used to arrive bringing food for the massive Nazi kitchens during the war but now emptied out live, suspicious flesh for questioning in the dark cellars known as the U-boat.

His name was logged at the front desk and the contents of his pockets and wrist watch were put into a buff envelope, which one of the men took, along with Schneider’s coat, to a room down the corridor. There they asked him to strip down to his underpants and take off his shoes. The clothes and shoes were added to the coat and taken away. The remaining man told him to put his hands up the wall and spread his legs. A man in a white coat appeared and searched him thoroughly – hair, ears, armpits, genitals and the final indignity of the greased, gloved finger in the rectum. He was taken back out into the corridor and downstairs to the cellars. Behind a soundproofed door he entered a sodium-lit cavern of freezing cold and hellish noise. Loudspeakers relayed endless torture sessions of men screaming and screaming, until it seemed impossible that
their larynxes could take any more. They put him in a cell with no furniture whose concrete floor was scattered with shards of ice. They locked the door and left him in total darkness. A few minutes later a light of surgical brightness came on and after half an hour he did what he’d heard other inmates of the Hohenschönhausen used to do. He knelt on the floor, made fists of his hands in front of him and rested his head on top of them. He disappeared into his thoughts. He was well aware of Stasi methods. They were not beaters and bludgeoners. They played the long game, the slow, psychologically destructive game. After a while he moved beyond these thoughts into a region where nothing happened, where the physical being was suspended, senseless, like a bat in daytime.

He heard the key in the door and stood to attention, face screwed up in agony under the light. They took him back up to the room where he’d been searched. He asked for a cigarette. They ignored him, sat him on a chair and left him with the door open. He waited for the psychological point to be made and after a few minutes his wife and two daughters filed past in the corridor.

‘Kurt?’ said his wife, confused.

‘
Vatti
,’ said the girls.

They were moved on. He was taken back down to the cell with the knowledge that his wife and daughters were being questioned and the apartment searched. Still calm. They knew nothing and he’d always made sure there was nothing in the apartment. No spy paraphernalia, no illegal currency, no documents. Thank God he’d dropped off the American passport on the way up to Wandlitz.

It was probably past midnight when they came for him again. They took him into an interrogation room. Two chairs, no table, a panel of mirrored glass on one wall and maybe an audience beyond. They stood him in the middle of the room and started the questions, endless questions,
repeated endlessly, which, whatever tangent they appeared to come in on, always ended up probing the same nexus. His relationship with Stiller, Stiller’s activities in West Berlin, Stiller’s interest in the Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.

It was a softening up process and Schneider allowed himself to be softened. He let his head loll and jerk up as if out of sleep. He paid out confusing lines, let them pick up on them and truss him up with them later. He constantly asked for things – cigarettes, coffee, water, the toilet. They circled him, drove the questions into him from all angles, worked his brain over like a piece of dough. His knees buckled after six hours standing and they forced him to stand in ‘the statue’ – leaning against the wall, arms outstretched, weight supported by the fingertips. The pain was quite quickly excruciating. Answering the questions became almost impossible, just barely audible words between grunts of agony.

After three hours alternating between standing to attention and ‘the statue’ he didn’t have to pretend so hard. One of the interrogators disappeared for some minutes and then brought back his shirt and trousers. They told him to dress and then marched him down corridors and up stairs until they reached an unmarked door, which they shouldered through. He was left in an office with a desk and two chairs. He sat in one of the chairs and instantly fell asleep.

He came to with his face being lightly batted by a pair of thick brown gloves. He focused on General Rieff, sitting on the edge of the desk, performing this task of light dusting.

‘There’s some coffee for you on the side, Major,’ he said.

Rieff was going to have to do a lot better than this to break him down.

The general threw him a packet of Marlboros and held out a light.

‘There’s a bread roll there, too, some butter, cheese.’

‘You’re killing me with kindness, General. What do I have to do?’

‘If you want to, you could start by telling me why you killed General Stiller and Olga Shumilov.’

Schneider sat back, crossed his legs, drew on his cigarette.

‘Even you know that’s not true, General Rieff.’

‘Do I? We’ve had an autopsy done. You might care to read the report. Time of death should interest you.’

Schneider took the paper, ran his eyes down it.

‘Between five and six in the morning,’ he said. ‘That’s very convenient.’

Schneider helped himself to coffee, broke the roll, buttered it, added a slice of cheese. He chewed his way through it, taking his time, showing that Rieff’s scare tactics weren’t working.

‘Where’s the gun, General Rieff? There’s no gun.’

‘On the contrary, we’ve found General Stiller’s Walther PPK on the floor with two bullets missing from the magazine. You might like to read the ballistics report.’

‘It might make predictable reading.’

‘The good thing about a life sentence in a labour camp, Major, is that it’s never as long as the original life would have been. Yours would probably be all over in a matter of fifteen years.’

‘Rather than breaking down the bag man, General Rieff, I should have thought your time would be better spent pursuing General Stiller’s real murderers. You must know by now who was in that villa…’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Major,’ roared Rieff. ‘If you’re going to persist with that kind of attitude I’ll send you back downstairs, and for a little more than ten hours this time. A week should see you right. You’ll have a brain like calf’s-foot jelly by the end of that.’

Schneider drank the coffee down, cleared his mouth of bread and cheese, poured himself another. He picked up his still smoking cigarette and returned to his seat.

‘I can’t think what there is for me to tell you that you don’t know already. I imagine you were on the receiving end of some of General Stiller’s generosity, yourself. You know that he was operating beyond the limits of a general’s pay. You know that he was venal and depraved. I can supply the unsavoury detail, some of it titillating in its salaciousness, but I’m not sure how that will advance your cause.’

This seemed to strike Rieff as true, because he suddenly had the look of the bull surveying the shattered china shop, wondering what he was doing with all this porcelain crunching underfoot.

‘What were you doing for General Stiller in West Berlin?’

‘I was running errands for him,’ said Schneider. ‘That’s what I was, General Rieff, and you know it, an errand boy. I’m not proud of it but I was given no choice in the matter.’

‘What were these errands?’

‘From the questions you asked me in the villa you know this already. Diamonds. Art. Icons. Selling them to the West.’

‘So who was running the Russian end of this operation?’

‘That I can’t tell you.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘If I did, General Rieff, and you acted on it, how long do you think I would last?’

‘Was it General Yakubovsky?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ said Schneider. ‘But that should be enough for you, shouldn’t it?’

Rieff nodded, walked once around the table.

‘Did you ever make contact with foreign agents?’

‘I work for the Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer. It’s my job to
deal with foreigners, following them, checking their contacts…’

‘I mean, on behalf of General Stiller.’

‘This was only ever about hard currency, General Rieff,’ said Schneider. ‘It was never treachery.’

‘Ninety per cent of spies betray their countries for money.’

‘I’m sure it’s not as simple as that,’ said Schneider.

‘Have you ever heard of a foreign agent codenamed Cleopatra?’

‘No. Which agency is she with?’

‘The British Secret Intelligence Service.’

‘In West Berlin?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is she relevant?’ asked Schneider.

Rieff didn’t answer. He walked around his desk and slumped in his chair, thinking. Here was a man caged by his own paranoia, determined to know everything about everybody, and when he didn’t know something it ate into him. He didn’t know who Cleopatra was, or how she was relevant.

‘You think that Stiller was contacting an agent called Cleopatra and selling intelligence to the West?’ asked Schneider.

‘Yes, I do, and I think you were making that contact. You were his creature, Major Schneider.’

‘I have never contacted any agency on his behalf. I did what I was told to do – picking up for him. And
you
know that once you’ve been asked to do something like that you can refuse, but your future will look bleak. I did what Stiller asked and if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be here, but there would be someone else in my place, you can be sure of that.’

‘Until I’ve cleared up this business you’re not going to do anything for anybody,’ said Rieff.

‘I’d like to remind you, General, that I
did
call you when I found Stiller’s body and you should know from the guardhouse that I did that within ten minutes of arriving at the Wandlitz Forest Settlement. The incident was also sufficiently serious for General Mielke to be informed, but I left that for you to do.’

Schneider thought it a point worth reiterating.

‘That’s why I’m going to release you, Major. I’m not going to let you travel to the West any more and I’m keeping your car for the moment, but you’re free to go.’

‘Free? You think I can do my job properly under these circumstances? If you’re going to send me out under twenty-four-hour surveillance I might as well stay in here.’

‘If that’s what you want…I’ll get the guards to take you back down,’ said Rieff. ‘If not, the rest of your clothes are behind you.’

No, he didn’t want to go back downstairs. Fresh air.
Berliner Luft.
That was what he needed. He dressed in his unstitched clothes, the shoes parted from their uppers, his coat with the lining stuffed in the pocket, the buff envelope in the other. He stood in the middle of the room, putting his watch back on, thinking up a negotiating stance.

‘A car will take you back to your apartment,’ said Rieff.

‘If I can get you information on Cleopatra, will you give me freedom of movement?’ asked Schneider. ‘I can find out. I have the contacts who can find out, but I’m not going to compromise my network doing it.’

‘I won’t let you out of East Berlin, if that’s what you’re after.’

‘I just don’t want people on my back.’

‘I’ll give you forty-eight hours without surveillance, then you report back to me.’

The car dropped him off outside his apartment block. It was six in the evening. He flapped up to his apartment in
his ruined shoes, found his keys in the bottom of the buff envelope. His wife was sitting with the girls, playing cards in the living room. He kicked off his shoes, took the rush of his two daughters into his arms, clasped the tiny ribcages under their woollen cardigans, kissed the tight smooth cheeks of the ones who loved his own ruined face without question. He put them down. Elena, his Russian wife, sent them to their room. They sat at the table with coffee and brandy and smoked at each other, while he talked her through the surface of his problem with Rieff. He asked her if they’d been treated badly and they hadn’t, just made to wait around before being taken back to the apartment. He asked if the apartment had been searched. She handed him a Polaroid of one section of the living room. Polaroids which would enable them to put the apartment back as they’d found it.

‘They must have dropped this,’ she said.

‘I suppose they could have wrecked the place if they’d wanted to.’

Elena, who seemed to have some natural understanding of these kind of events, went into the kitchen and made supper. She was always calm, not through any innate serenity, but more out of an acceptance of the workings of the State. Schneider, cleaned up and dressed, sat at his desk and wrote out a coded note. They ate supper as a family and the girls went to bed. At 10.00 p.m. he went out. Elena didn’t ask for any explanations. She never asked him questions. She was watching women’s volleyball on the television.

Schneider walked up to the Karl Marx Allee, past the Sportshalle where the volleyball his wife was watching was being played. He went into the Strausberger Platz U-bahn station and back out again. He turned right down Lichten-berger Strasse heading for the Volkspark Friedrichshain.
Rieff had been as good as his word. He was clean. He hovered in Leninplatz around the new statue of the great man, taking a last look around him to be sure. The nineteen metre statue, backed by red granite blocks, looked ahead, smiling benevolently on the grim city. He cut across the square into the dark, snow-covered park, made his dead-letter drop and walked back home.

Elena was already asleep. She slept with the bedroom door open, even now, in case the girls needed her. He watched her calm face as she slept, a woman at peace, an unquestioning person. He wondered if there was a part of herself that he didn’t know about, that she was living her life for, because he only ever saw her engaged if she was with him or the children. She could watch television until the screen went blank. It didn’t matter what. Secretary General Ulbricht boring a trade delegation, the four-man bobsleigh team, Brezhnev overseeing the weaponry of the Soviet Union in Red Square,
skilaufen.
She was never bored, but also never took any greater interest than what appeared on the screen. She didn’t read newspapers or books. She used television to fill in time between engaging with those that mattered to her.