Europe at Midnight (25 page)

“Absolutely!” Müller cried. “They think about security, they think about cementing grilles across the main connections with the rest of Dresden, they think about installing alarm systems. But nobody worries about what will happen when the tunnels deteriorate or become blocked.”

“Or collapse,” said Eleanor.

“Incredible,” Leo murmured, shaking his head. “Incredible.”

“You said they’ve closed off the sewers from the rest of Dresden?” Eleanor asked.

“And the authorities in the Aldtstadt have closed off the sewers from them,” Müller said. “They’re terrified there’ll be some kind of invasion coming out under our feet.”

“And you’re not?”

Müller laughed again. “They would get lost.”

“So what happened?” Leo asked. “They said, ‘Would you be so kind as to send us a sewer engineer?’“

Müller drank some tea. “Well, I don’t really know. My boss just came into my office one day and said he had a job for me but I mustn’t tell anybody about it.”

“So you went and told Intelligence,” Leo said.

“That was afterwards. And they came to visit me, not the other way round.”

Leo nodded. “So you weren’t told what the job was?”

“I was just told to take whatever I needed to survey a collapsed sewer and to stand on a certain street corner at a certain time.”

Leo smiled. “And that happens to you a lot, does it?”

Müller looked at us. “Am I in some sort of trouble? Because if I am you bastards can leave right now.”

“We’re only trying to reconstruct what happened, Herr Müller,” Leo said smoothly. “You’re not in any trouble, and nor are you ever likely to be.”

Müller didn’t seem wholly convinced, but he appeared to have made a decision to carry on anyway. “It doesn’t happen to me very much, no,” he said, answering Leo’s question with exaggerated seriousness. “I thought then it might be something to do with the Neustadt.”

“And that didn’t worry you?”

Müller snorted. “I don’t know where you people are from, but most people round here would give their right arms to have a look behind those walls. We’ve been sitting here for twenty-some years, not knowing what was going on in there.”

“You have a certain spirit of adventure then, Herr Müller,” said Leo. “I can’t think of many people who would voluntarily allow themselves to be taken into the Neustadt.”

“What is it like in there, out of interest?” I asked.

Müller shook his head. “I don’t know, and that’s the truth.”

“That’s rather disappointing, isn’t it?” Eleanor said.

“I went and stood where I was told, when I was told to stand there,” Müller said in a voice which suggested that he was getting rather tired of this questioning. “A car pulled up and two men got out.”

“What kind of car?” asked Leo.

“A BMW. A piece of shit; I never saw such a badly-maintained car.”

“And the two men. What were they like?”

“Young. Tall. They wore long coats, like the ones you see in Westerns sometimes. They were very polite and very efficient. They asked me if I was Müller, I said yes. They asked me to come with them, and I said all right. Then they said it was very regrettable but they’d have to blindfold me for some time. They said I’d probably guessed why that was necessary, and I said yes. It was all very... like we were sharing a joke, you know? Like they had a job to do and so did I and I was just going along with it. Nothing sinister.”

“A car stops, two young men get out, blindfold you and take you away, and that’s not sinister?” Leo said.

“You weren’t there,” Müller said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Clearly.” Leo positively radiated good humour. “So, you’re sitting in the car with a blindfold on. Please continue.”

Müller glared at the Coureur as if annoyed at how much bonhomie the man was able to muster. “We drove for quite a long time. Then we stopped. I heard some kind of machinery outside, a heavy rattling sort of sound. Then we drove for a while longer. Then we stopped and they helped me out of the car and into a building.” He drank some more tea. “They led me down some stairs, then down another flight. Then they took the blindfold off and I was standing in a cellar, and in front of me was a hole cut in the floor.”

Leo was nodding as if this merely coincided with what he had already heard. “Perhaps I might stop you a moment, Herr Müller,” he said, “and recap. You were driven blindfold into Dresden-Neustadt, and taken into a cellar where a hole was cut in the floor.”

“That’s what I said,” Müller told him with the air of a man whose patience was gradually running out.

“So you’re standing there in this cellar... somewhere in the Neustadt, with the two young men who brought you,” Leo said doggedly, the perfect image of a bureaucratic timeserver.

“Well, obviously there were other people,” Müller said testily.

“Why obviously?” asked Leo.

Müller waved a hand in the air. “The two men from the car were just thugs. What would they know about sewers?” He was almost shouting by now, and Leo settled back in his chair.

Müller leaned forward across the table. “I’ve been through all this before,” he said in a dangerous tone of voice.

Leo smiled and closed his eyes and shook his head. “Herr Müller, Herr Müller.” He opened his eyes and beamed at the German. “I know this is disturbing for you, but you probably don’t know that the BfV is completely compartmentalised. It’s such a grind, isn’t it, George?”

Recognising my cue, I nodded. “A grind.”

“The right hand is doing one thing,” Leo went on, “and the left hand is doing something else. And half the time the right hand is left to catch up all on its own. Are you familiar with this?”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Müller said to Leo. “I think you’re nothing to do with the BfV. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not BfV.”

Leo gave Müller his sad half-smile and shook his head again. He took out his wallet and put a laminated identification card on the table. “There’s a telephone number on the other side,” he said. “Feel free to use it. Ask for extension 2037.”

For a moment, Müller seemed undecided whether or not to call Leo’s bluff. Then he glared at him, grabbed the card, and went out into the hall to the telephone.

“Is this going to be embarrassing?” Eleanor asked quietly.

“Patience,” Leo said. “Patience.”

We heard Müller speaking on the phone, then a silence as he listened. Then he spoke again. Then there was more silence. Then they heard him hang up, and he came back into the living room.

“All right,” he said, sitting down at the table again and looking at us. “All right.” When nobody else said anything, he said, “You can’t blame me for making sure.”

Leo smiled.

“I’ve been over-run with Intelligence types and police people and military people since I got back,” Müller said, becoming more and more desperate to defend himself. “You can’t blame me for wanting to make sure who you are, can you?”

Leo said, “Tell us about the letter, Herr Müller.”

The effect was incredible. Müller sagged back in his chair as if he had been struck on the forehead with a hammer. His eyes unfocussed, and I thought for a moment that he was going to faint.

Leo was instantly back into his role as a plodding bureaucrat. “You’ll understand that no blame appends to you, Herr Müller,” he said, as if something more unspeakable than blame might be appended to Müller. “But our information is that you brought a communication out of the Republic on the behalf of one of its citizens.” He looked at Müller, licked his lips, and blinked. “Is our information correct?”

“Who told you about this?” Müller snapped, coming out of his trance. “I never said a word to anybody.”

“You posted the letter, though,” Leo observed. “You might never have said anything, but the person who received the letter might not have been quite so careful, do you agree?”

As I watched, Müller seem to shrink in his chair. He was shaking his head and muttering to himself.

“There were others there, yes,” he said finally, grudgingly. “An engineer – of sorts, a Russian, and some administrative types in suits.”

A
ND THERE HAD
been this quiet old man, a grey-haired gaffer in a crumpled ill-fitting suit and glasses, who was wandering around the cellar and poking at the mortar between the bricks and generally ignoring what was going on around him. Müller thought he was behaving like some bizarre kind of industrial archaeologist, but Müller had his own problems.

It was clear that the Neustadters’ paranoia meant that they wouldn’t do anything so simple as letting him pull up a manhole cover in a street and go down into the sewers, because that would mean he might get a look at the Neustadt. So they had looked at their old sewer maps from the days before the polity set itself up, located a cellar, and simply dug a hole into the nearest sewer.

This was, however, not the nearest sewer to the collapse, and after climbing down a ladder into what turned out to be a minor branch he had to walk some distance before he reached the main sewer, and another distance before he reached the branch where the collapse had taken place.

He was attended in these wanderings by the two blond boys who had brought him into the polity, the tunnel engineer – who rapidly demonstrated that he knew nothing about tunnel construction – and the administrative types, their suits protected by rubber overtrousers and boots. Oh, and the archaeologist, who really seemed more interested in the tunnels themselves than in any collapse.

“He didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Müller recalled, “but when he did they were strange questions, not what you’d expect. He speculated about what kind of clay had been used to make the brick lining of the older branches. He had some bizarre theory about spray-cement tunnel lining. I got the impression that he slightly embarrassed the others.”

Müller and his entourage progressed along the tunnels towards the collapse. As they got closer and closer, the levels of sewage became higher and higher, and personnel started to drop out.

The administrative types were the first. One by one they got left behind, defeated by the smell and the depth of raw human sewage that they were wading through. The engineer – because, Müller presumed, it was his job – soldiered on, as did the blond boys. As did the archaeologist, always ten metres or so behind, always taking a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and poking at the tunnel wall with some tool or another and voicing an opinion about how old it was or how badly it had been made.

When the shit was hip-deep, the engineer gave up. He managed to mutter a few words of apology to Müller before withdrawing. As he sloshed back towards drier regions, Müller heard him vomiting.

The sewage was up to Müller’s waist when one of the blond boys had to turn back, and shortly afterward the other one decided that enough was enough as well.

Which left Müller and the archaeologist– who had finally caught up because almost everyone else was walking along unwillingly – wading waist-deep through raw sewage.

“How far do you think a man’s voice will carry in a tunnel like this?” the archaeologist asked.

“Quite a distance,” Müller said. “It’d surprise you.”

“I thought so,” said the archaeologist, pointing the beam of his torch at the tunnel wall. “It’s the acoustic properties of this brick, you see?”

“Can’t say I’ve noticed,” Müller said, ploughing on.

“But you have!” The archaeologist was of a jolly disposition, despite the fact that human turds were bumping against his waist and drifting away. “You’ve noticed that your voice carries a long way down here.”

Müller really only wanted to get this job done and finished with, and he just said, “Mm.”

“For instance,” the Archaeologist said as they approached the point where tonnes of rubble had cascaded down out of the tunnel roof, “how far do you think my voice would carry if I spoke like this?”

“Oh,” Müller said, shining his torch on the monumental slope of rubble before him, “a fair way, I suppose.”

“And like this?” said the archaeologist in a murmur.

“Hardly at all,” Müller said, still engrossed in the tunnel problem. He was trying to work out how many people, how much materiel, it would need to fix this problem.

“All right then,” the archaeologist said in the same low murmur, “I’d be obliged if you could post this for me when you get outside then.” And he held out an envelope.

Müller was not an idiot. He looked at the envelope and thought of all the trouble he could get into with the Neustadt authorities. He thought about entrapment, and show trials, and a member of the Dresden Sanitation Department standing in a courtroom looking intolerably stupid.

“It’s for my brother, who didn’t have the good fortune to be with me when the Republic was set up,” the archaeologist said. “He doesn’t know if I’m dead or alive.”

And Müller looked into the archaeologist’s eyes. And then he did the only illegal thing he had ever done in his whole life.

“H
E WAS VERY
clever,” he told us. “When I came out of the sewer I was covered in shit. Nobody was very keen to search me. They had the back of the car covered in plastic sheeting when they took me back to the Aldstadt, and all the windows were wound down. It was freezing.”

“And you just did it?” Leo said with a hint of admiration in his voice. “You took this letter from a complete stranger, and you posted it?”

“Look, friend,” Müller said tiredly, “I don’t care what polity he came from. He was a German, just like us, and he asked me for a favour.”

“But you could have got into all kinds of trouble,” Leo said. “You must have known that. It could have been some kind of trick.”

“I knew it wasn’t, all right? I knew.”

“Did he ask anything else of you?” Leo said. “Any other little favours from a fellow German?”

Müller shook his head. “He just gave me the letter and walked away, back down the tunnel. Left me to do my job.” He looked Leo in the eye. “He trusted me.”

Leo crossed his arms. “And it’s obvious that he chose wisely, Herr Müller. Because you never mentioned any of this to our colleagues when they interviewed you.”

“He asked me not to say anything. He said we could both get in a lot of trouble.” A smile twitched up one corner of Müller’s mouth. “And your colleagues never asked.”