Brandenburg (61 page)

‘Tell me what I should expect in here.’

Harland took the file and flipped through the pages, moistening his index finger as he went. Then he turned it round with his finger pressing down on a page. ‘It seems that your brother was recruited as an IM specifically for the purpose of watching you. I’m sorry, Rudi. I didn’t want you to see this.’

Rosenharte began to read the account of a meeting with Konrad that had taken place in Bautzen. His handler was an officer named Lange, and it seemed they met every six weeks or so at various safe houses in the Dresden area. Rosenharte counted notes on twenty-two secret meetings. He knew that he had to read it all now. There was no possibility of leaving this until later, or skimming it as he would the other material.

The first pages included observations about Konrad - his diligence, nimbleness of mind and generally helpful demeanour. After his experience in Bautzen, the Stasi had high hopes of making him an important source, not only on his brother. There were members of the intelligentsia that they wished to target; creative types, hostile negative elements, decadent subversives that they wanted to know more about. In order to make certain of Konrad’s cooperation they regularly implied that he could be sent back to prison and they offered medical help and dentistry as incentives, though it seemed these never materialized.

Konrad had told them about a long walk they had taken together in the hills. Rosenharte remembered the conversation as though it were yesterday because they had come close to falling out about religion and the unworkability of socialism. Konrad was agnostic, Rudi a lazy atheist. Konrad was a convinced socialist; Rudi was a sceptic. The account of the conversation, however, presented an entirely different picture. Konrad had evidently allowed Lange to draw him out on his brother’s inner convictions, and these Konrad had portrayed as a polar opposite of his actual sentiments. Where Rudi had been doubtful about the likely success of a socialist state, he was reported as being cautiously optimistic. When he asserted that he would have nothing to do with the Party, Konrad had surmised that he was lacking in confidence, having failed the state so catastrophically during his foreign service. He pretended not to know about the business in Brussels, but his handler filled in the details and concluded that Rudi Rosenharte was discreet about his time in the Stasi.

As he read on, Rosenharte began to smile. According to a reluctantly disloyal Konrad, he, Rudi, was guilt-ridden, politically naïve, mean with his money, depressed, self-absorbed, selfish, and had difficulty in forming permanent relationships with women, most of which were the opposite of Rosenharte’s actual characteristics. Here and there were grains of truthful observation and reports of incidents that had taken place, but the total picture was false. He let the file slip to the table and summoned the image of Konrad in the late spring of that year sitting in a rickety chair, watching his sons playing in the hay meadow. He remembered his expression as being curiously detached at the time. And when he’d asked if there was something the matter, he had turned to him with the odd look that seemed to suggest Rudi’s trespass. Now he understood: that gentle mind was planning each step of his brother’s protection - a lonely course which required sacrifice and patience and was plotted alongside his own oblique defiance of the state.

Harland waited for him to speak.

‘He used them,’ said Rosenharte. ‘He told them a whole pack of lies about me. He made fools of them and helped protect me.’ He paused. ‘It’s a tragedy that he did not live to see all this tonight. He would have been amazed and a very shrewd interpreter of what has happened.’

Harland nodded. ‘I know there’s always a diminishing return with the third cognac, but I think you’re going to need it.’

Rosenharte wondered at the tension around Harland’s eyes. Surely tonight of all nights a British spy could relax. But he seemed on edge and distracted. He asked why.

‘Everything’s changed. I may lose the deal I set up with the Russian. Five hours ago it looked pretty sweet, but then this happened and, well, it seems that the Americans are going to step in with their money and gather up everything I was working to get hold of.’

‘Does it matter? After all, you achieved the arrest of Abu Jamal. You got Konrad’s family out. And without your strange friend, Cuth Avocet, I would never have managed to release Ulrike and Kurt.’

Harland pursed his lips. ‘You’re right. But my pride is offended. I wanted to pull it off. Still, when history takes over we all have to stand aside.’

He signalled for another round. When it came he said: ‘My instructions from London specifically require me not to tell you the thing that I believe you ought to know.’ He stopped, swirled the brandy in front of his nose and glanced out of the window. ‘However, while watching you go through that file and seeing you read about yourself and Konrad, it struck me that tonight I also have a duty to the truth.’ There was another agonized pause during which he took a cigarette from Rosenharte. ‘In our line of work, things necessarily remain hidden. Deception and subterfuge are allowed to stand as the truth; the lie becomes the record, if you like. On this occasion, I don’t want that to happen.’

Rosenharte shrugged. He was suddenly exhausted. He needed time to himself.

Then Harland said, ‘Annalise Schering never died. There was no suicide.’

Rosenharte felt himself stiffen. He slammed down his glass, almost breaking it, and looked away. ‘No! She was dead. I saw her.’

‘But you didn’t
touch
her.’ He paused. ‘You left immediately. We had people in the apartment. The moment you went in there we arranged for the doorbell to go and the phone to ring. You saw our little tableau with Annalise in the ice-cold bath and panicked, just as we hoped you would.’

‘Why? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘She wasn’t up to dealing with you. She wasn’t sharp enough and she wanted out. We didn’t know how you’d react. When you didn’t immediately tell your people that she was dead and that you had in effect failed, we knew we could use you. We got the police involved and put a deal to you. Then we made sure they got rid of you by using the second Annalise to feed some bad stuff back to the Stasi about your drinking and your lack of discretion as an agent. I think they did a pretty good job on you. Well, you already know that.’

Rosenharte was still dumbfounded. ‘But the risk! I might have told the Stasi at any time.’

‘There was no risk whatsoever. The only person who was exposed was you. The longer the operation went on, the more important Annalise Schering became to us, the Stasi and of course the Russians. You’ve got to remember it was the only method of telling your side what we actually intended without them putting it through the usual filters of suspicion.
Because
she was a traitor they trusted her.’

He opened his hands to invite reaction. Rosenharte shook his head and said nothing.

‘You have every right to be angry about this,’ said Harland, pushing the tip of his cigarette around the ashtray. ‘I know how much that little stunt affected your life, but then . . . but then you have to appreciate that to us you were just another communist spy, a Romeo sent to the West to steal our secrets and threaten our security.’ He paused and revolved the watch on his wrist. Rosenharte had never seen him so unsettled. ‘Look on the bright side, Rudi; at least you have no death on your conscience. The real Annalise Schering has grown plump and happy and is living in the English shires with three teenage children.’

Rosenharte shook his head. He could have sprung his own shock on Harland by telling him how Ulrike and the second Annalise had bonded and worked together in the cause of peace for so long. But that was their secret and it wouldn’t serve any purpose to reveal that a young Stasi translator had seen through MI6’s great subterfuge. He rose from the table and threw back his brandy. ‘That was another time - an age ago.’ He stretched and then stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Right now, Mr Harland, I need some sleep.’

‘You’re not angry?’

‘In some ways, yes. But remember I was able to leave the Stasi and devote my life to the study of art. Where would I be now without your spy games?’

On Saturday 11 November, some thirty-six hours after the Wall fell, Rosenharte got up early in the hotel, showered and dressed with more than usual care, putting on a tie and the trousers of a dark-grey suit that he’d bought with Ulrike the day before on the Kurfurstendamm. Then he sat at the desk overlooking the Tiergarten, made some calls and read the notes he’d made while on the phone to Leszek Grycko late the previous evening. After about an hour Ulrike came in from the adjoining bedroom, still wearing the hotel bathrobe.

‘How’re you feeling?’ he asked.

‘Not great. It’s unnatural to sleep for twelve hours.’

‘You’ve woken from a long hibernation,’ he said and touched the faint crease made on her cheek by the pillow. ‘We all have.’ He paused and gazed at her. ‘You know the problem with a love like this?’

‘No.’

‘It renders me speechless. I can’t begin to express what I feel.’

‘You’re doing just fine,’ she said, nuzzling him. ‘Just fine. Have you talked to Kurt?’

‘Yes, he says he’ll have the cast on for five or six weeks. The ribs are going to have to heal themselves. He’ll be out tomorrow or the next day.’

‘And Else?’

‘They’ll all be here by early evening.’

‘Explain this to me,’ she said, pointing at the crude family tree he had made while she slept.

He placed his finger by the name of Dr Michal Kusimiak. ‘This is my father. He was a graduate of the Cieszyn Business School and a protégé of a man named Dr L. Fabanczyk. He left the school in thirty-six and went to teach politics at the University of Krakow where he became a committed Marxist. There he met my mother, Urszula Solanka, who was a nineteen-year-old student of literature. They were married almost immediately and on 5 July 1938 she gave birth to me and Konrad. We were named Ryszard and Konstantyn after our grandfathers.

‘Come the war my parents went into hiding at the Kusimiak family estates near the city of Bochia. They were hunted down. My father was summarily executed on 7 November at the age of thirty-one; Urszula was sent to Ravensbrück then Auschwitz. We were taken to Lodz, then very soon afterwards to the von Huths at Schloss Clausnitz. We were there by the first Christmas of the war. The only things we had from our previous life were the first letters of our names. That apparently was common practice and allowed some of the stolen children to be traced after the war.’

He moved his finger to the name Luiza Solanka. ‘This is my mother’s older sister. She married a man named Grycko at the age of eighteen and had one son, Franciscek, who was born in 1930. She and her husband both perished in the camps, but their boy somehow survived and emerged at the end of the war, a hardened adult aged about fifteen. This was the man who died in my arms in Trieste.’

‘Your first cousin!’

He shuddered. ‘That’s one of the things that I can’t really absorb. The fact that he came so close to telling me all this.’ He paused and remembered the man on Molo IV in Trieste and his own disgust. ‘After university and military service Franciscek joined the Polish Foreign Intelligence Service. He rose quickly and in due course began to make representations through his government and the Red Cross about the lost Kusimiak children. But it was useless. You see, about two hundred thousand Polish children were kidnapped in the Germanization programme. Only thirty thousand were ever found and returned to their natural parents. By the time Grycko got into any position of influence the child tracing operation in Heidelberg had long been terminated. It seems that Franciscek couldn’t let go of this thing, and when he retired from the service because of ill health he devoted all his energies to tracking us. It was he who made the breakthrough by finding a contact in Schwarzmeer’s office. When he died, his son Leszek seemed to have inherited the cause. He was the man who followed me to Leipzig that day when we first met, and then he went all the way out to Konrad’s home.’

‘The Russian said he was in the service too. Is that right?’

‘He’s a technical officer with little field experience.’

She rose from the arm of his chair, yawned luxuriously and went to fill her cup from the pot on the room-service trolley. ‘Who told you he had a contact in Schwarzmeer’s office?’

‘The Russian.’

‘Both the Gryckos were certainly well uinformed. For one to find you in Trieste and the other to run you to ground in Leipzig indicates a huge amount of advanced knowledge.’

‘I see what you mean, but I guess the Stasi were always watching me and Konrad, so it was just a matter of tapping into that source of information.’

She returned to him and kissed the top of his head. ‘How odd this must feel to you - seeing a life that was yours but that you haven’t lived.’

‘You could argue that if we hadn’t been taken by the Nazis there would be no life at all. We might have died with the others in the camps.’ He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from her.

‘You have to give that up, what with my bronchitis and your advanced age.’ She smiled impishly and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Still, I suppose you won’t have to go through the usual pain of becoming fifty because you did that last year.’

‘I’m sticking to my old birthday,’ he said testily. ‘Look, shouldn’t you be getting ready? Harland will be here soon.’

‘Are you nervous?’ she said, leaving him for the bathroom.

‘Yes . . . and no. I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I
should
feel.’

She hesitated by the door. ‘Kusimiak - I like that sound. It’s vaguely Russian or Cossack. Will you change your name?’

‘I have no idea.’ Then he said: ‘Probably not. I owe something to the Rosenhartes, and actually I like being German. I feel German and I don’t want to be anything else.’

It was a glorious autumn day, brilliant and animated with joy in every quarter of the free enclave of West Berlin. Upwards of a million came from the East that morning to receive their welcome money from the West German government and to spend it on clothes, books and every sort of cheap appliance. It was striking to Rosenharte how much food was bought that day, particularly
Südfrüchte
- the bananas and oranges and mangos that were commonplace in the West and so rare in the GDR. The rush of joy of the first hours had now been replaced by huge questions and a sense of unbridgeable inequality. It was not that the Easterners wanted to reverse the events of the last two days, but seeing the wealth of the West and the goods in the stores for themselves was a different order of experience to watching them illicitly on West German TV from behind the impenetrable barrier of the Berlin Wall.