15th January 1971, East Berlin.
The Snow Leopard stood three feet back from his living-room window and looked down from his fourth-floor apartment on to the empty packed snow and ice between the five concrete blocks which constituted his part of the not-so-new development on the Karl Marx Allee. He was smoking a Marlboro cigarette in a cupped hand and watching, and waiting, and thinking that life had become all about numbers – three feet, four floors, five blocks, all surrounded by nothingness, white, white zero snow. No cars. No people. No movement.
The two apartment blocks immediately opposite were completely unlit, not a square of light to be seen, not even the hint of someone stretching in a half-dark room, preparing for another all-night surveillance of nobody. The sky above was a muffled grey. The noise level was close to what city people knew as silence. The Snow Leopard’s wife snored quietly in the bedroom, her door open, always open. He cocked his head as one of his two daughters squeaked in her sleep, but then his face went back to the window, his hand back up to his mouth, and there was the unmistakable taste of export America.
He went into the kitchen, dowsed the butt and threw it in the bin. He shrugged into his heaviest coat. It was minus twelve degrees outside, with more Russian snow due during the day. He put his hand to the radiator. Still working – glad they weren’t on the tenth floor where the heating probably wasn’t and State plumbers as rare as Omaha steak around here. He reviewed the situation one last time. Quiet. Two a.m. His time of night. His type of weather. He crammed a brimmed hat on to his head, picked up his uniform, which was protected by brown paper, and left the apartment, taking the stairs down to the garage.
He put his uniform in the boot and got into his black Citroën. He drove slowly over the ice-packed roads until he reached the cleared Karl Marx Allee, which had been the Stalin Allee, until Uncle Joe had been Khrushchevified, and then Brezhneved. He turned left, heading into the centre of town and the Wall. There was no traffic but he checked the rear view constantly. No tail. At Alexanderplatz he turned left on to Grunerstrasse, crossed the River Spree and parked up in Reinhold-Huhnstrasse. He took a brisk walk into an unmarked building, flicked a pass at two guards, who nodded without looking, and dropped down two flights of stairs into the basement. He went through a series of swept and swabbed tunnels until he reached a a door which he unlocked. This door, which he relocked, gave on to a small hallway and in four short steps he was walking southwards down Friedrichstrasse on the West side of the Wall.
He walked quickly and crossed the street at the Kochstrasse U-bahn. A hundred metres later he paid ten Deutschmarks to a swarthy, moustachioed man in a glass cubicle under a neon sign which read Frau Schenk Sex Kino. He entered through a large heavy leather flap and stood at the back, unable to see and unable to work out what was happening on the dark screen. Only the soundtrack told him that several people were approaching ultimate satisfaction with customary and prolonged ecstasy while the camera locked itself unerringly on their biological detail. Porn, he thought, the desecration of sex.
He reached the side wall of the cinema and walked slowly down to the front and another door, which let him into a passage lit by a single red bulb. A ginger-haired man, the same width as the passage, stood at the far end with his hands in front of his groin. Close to, the Snow Leopard could see that the man had the eyelashes of a pig. He handed over another ten marks and opened his coat. The man patted him down, squeezed his pockets.
‘Number three is free,’ he said.
The Snow Leopard went into number three cubicle and closed the door. There was a binful of used tissues and some wishful graffiti on the walls. Beyond the tinted glass panel there was a girl kneeling on the floor with her face turned sideways, cheek to the ground, eyes closed, tongue roving her lips and her behind as high up in the air as it would go. She was fingering herself. He turned his back on the scene, checked his watch and tapped on the plywood wall. No answer. He tapped out his code again and this time received the correct reply. He took a roll of paper, a coded message, from the cuff of his coat and pushed it halfway through a hole drilled in the wall. It was removed from the other side. He waited. Nothing came back. A few minutes later the next-door cubicle was vacated.
He waited more minutes, his back to the glass panel, until there was a polite knock on the door. They always knocked, just in case. He followed another man down a passage, which curved to the right past other cubicles. The man opened a door to the left and waved the Snow Leopard through. The lighting returned to neon normal in this part of the building.
‘Second on the left,’ said the man, to the back of his head.
He went into the office. A man with a substantial belly stood up on the other side of a desk. They shook hands and the man offered coffee, which he accepted. The Snow Leopard laid a small white sachet on the sports page, which the man had been reading. The man set the coffee down, picked up the sachet, closed his newspaper and laid out a piece of dark blue velvet. He emptied the sachet on to it. He inspected the diamonds visually first, divided them up and then weighed them on a set of scales he had on top of the safe in the corner of the room.
‘Three hundred thousand,’ he said.
‘Dollars?’ asked the Snow Leopard, and the man laughed.
‘Are you OK for cigarettes, Kurt?’ he said, showing how seriously he took the attempt at negotiation.
‘I’ve got plenty.’
‘Did you bring any of those Cuban cigars with you this time?’
‘What are we celebrating?’
‘Nothing, Kurt, nothing.’
‘That’s why I didn’t bring any.’
‘Next time.’
‘Only if it’s dollars, not Deutschmarks.’
‘You’re getting to be a capitalist.’
‘Who? Me?’
The man laughed again, asked him to turn his back. The Snow Leopard sipped his good, strong, real coffee down to the grounds and turned to find six blocks of money on the desk. He put them into the lining of his coat.
‘Which way out?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go back through there like I did the last time.’
‘Left, right, keep going until you get to a door and that’ll put you into the Kochstrasse U-bahn.’
‘Why couldn’t I come in that way?’
‘That way we don’t get the twenty Deutschmarks entrance fee from you.’
‘Capitalists,’ said the Snow Leopard, shaking his head.
The man boomed another laugh.
The Snow Leopard got back into his Citroën on the East side of the Wall. He headed north through the old Jewish quarter of Prenzlauer Berg on the Schönhauser Allee. He took a right after the Jewish cemetery and, as the street narrowed, went up on to the pavement and parked under the arch of the ersterhof of a huge and decrepit Mietskasern in Wörtherstrasse. He waited with the engine running and then rolled into the first courtyard of the old nineteenth-century rental barracks, the terrible fortress-like forerunners to the kind of place he was now living in himself. He parked up and crossed the courtyard to the hinterhof, the back building, which never saw any sunlight. It was silent. The place was deserted, the living spaces totally uninhabitable, the damp, at this time of year, frozen on the walls. Chunks of plaster and concrete lay scattered across the stairs and landings. He knocked on the metal door of an apartment on the third floor. Feet approached from the other side. He took a full-face ski hat out of his pocket and pulled it over his head.
‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin,’ said a voice.
‘Mein Herz ist schwer,’ he replied.
The door opened. He stepped into the heat.
‘Do we have to have such depressing lines from Goethe?’
‘I’ll be changing to Brecht next week.’
‘Another cheerful soul.’
‘What can I do for you, Herr Kappa?’
The Snow Leopard took off his coat, laid it on the chair and removed an American passport in the name of Colonel Peter Taylor from the lining. Amongst its pages was a loose passport-size photograph.
‘You know the deal. Take the old one off, put the new one on.’
The man, late thirties with bland, unnoticeable, dark features opened the passport, leafed through it with the familiarity of a border guard, which was what he had been fifteen years before. The nine years he’d spent in prison as a member of a five-man ring who’d been caught smuggling people to the West had not dulled his attention to detail, but rather sharpened it to a professional level.
‘This is genuine,’ said the man, looking up out of the corner of his head.
‘It is.’
‘I’ll need forty-eight hours.’
‘I want an entry stamp, too. I’ll give you the date later.’
‘Five hundred…’
‘Same as the last time then.’
‘Five hundred down and five hundred when I finish.’
‘Since when did your rates double?’
‘Like I told you, Herr Kappa, passports are the window into people’s lives. I looked into this one and it seemed…cluttered to me.’
‘Cluttered or sparse, it shouldn’t affect your work.’
‘That’s the deal, Herr Kappa.’
The Snow Leopard took his uniform out of the boot and changed in the car. He went back to the Schönhauser Allee and headed north under the pillars of the S-bahn. He kept going and passed under the Pankow S-bahn, where he turned right and, as he pushed on, began to come out of the urban sprawl through Buchholz. Just before Schöner-linde he had to show his papers at a police post and was saluted and allowed through without even a glance into the back seat. He drove through the small village and headed north again through Schönwalde and into the pine forest beyond. A fine snow began to fall just as he turned off the road to Wandlitz and by the time he reached the guardhouse to the Wandlitz Forest Settlement, the idyllic lakeside village reserved for the ruling élite, he was swearing out loud. The snow was going to slow everything down. The guard cracked his heels together and saluted.
‘To see General Stiller,’ said the Snow Leopard.
‘Herr Major,’ said the guard, and raised the barrier.
He drove through the settlement to the corner reserved for the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, and parked up outside the villa belonging to General Lothar Stiller. The wind was blowing hard, buffeting against the buildings, needling the fine crystals of snow into the still sensitive side of his face. He’d think afterwards whether he’d heard anything, or if it had just been the thump of the wind on the edge of the villa.
He did hear something as he walked up the path to the front door, the snow swirling, feinting left and right, on the steps up to the porch. It was the door knocking against the latch. He pushed it open with a thick gloved finger and stepped into the dark carpeted hall.
Light came from a crack under a door to the left. It opened on to the remains of a party – three shot glasses for schnapps and vodka and larger glasses laced with the scum of beer foam. There was nobody in the room, but a tie lay on the back of one of the chairs. He skirted the furniture and headed for the general’s bedroom.
He didn’t see him at first. There was only a bedside lamp on and a bad sulphurous smell in the room. He turned on the main light. General Stiller was naked and kneeling in the corner of the room, hunched over an armchair on the back of which his light blue uniform was neatly laid out. There was a large, dark red stain over the pocket of the jacket which was working its way up to the medal ribbons on the chest. The white shirt next to it was flecked with blood. The bad smell was from the streak of diarrhoea down the general’s hamstrings and spattered over his calves.
The Snow Leopard held a hand over his mouth and inspected the body. Stiller had been shot at point-blank range in the back of the neck. He knelt by his side. The exit wound was huge, an appalling mash of skin and bone and an ugly black hole where the nose should have been. The eyes seemed to be staring agog, as if amazed at seeing what had been a good-looking face sprayed over the back of the chair.
The Snow Leopard reached under the chair and came up with a ball of lacy underwear. He stood and took in the room. Four strides and he was in the bathroom. He pulled back the plastic curtain to the bath. She was lying face-down, peroxide blonde hair, black at the roots and now horribly reddened. She wore a black suspender belt and black stockings.
Back in the bedroom he flung back the covers. Something heavy hit the floor. The gun. A Walther PPK, no suppressor. He held it in his gloved hand, went back to the living room, opened the door opposite the curtained window of the front room. The girl’s clothes were on the back of the chair. The bed had seen some action, all the covers hung off the end like a thick tongue and there was a large stain on the bottom sheet. He checked the rest of the house. Empty. The back door was open. The wind had eased up and the snow was now falling thickly. No tracks.
He picked up the phone and thought for a full minute of his options. He had to be careful. They always said that the phones in the Wandlitz Forest Settlement weren’t tapped but anybody would be mad to believe that, given the ubiquity of the Stasi, and he should know.
Half of the money he had on him was due to a Russian, the KGB General Oleg Yakubovsky, and he would really have liked to call him and ask his opinion at this moment but that risked pointing a finger. There was no possibility of just driving away as he was logged in at the guardhouse. He knew he only had one option but it was worth fidgeting around his head just in case he miraculously came up with an alternative. But there was none. It had to be General Johannes Rieff, Head of Special Investigations.
Rieff’s voice was thick with sleep.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘Major Kurt Schneider.’
‘Do I know you?’
‘From the Arbeitsgruppe Ausländer.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Five thirty, sir.’
‘I’m not used to being disturbed for another two hours.’
‘There’s been an incident at the Wandlitz Forest Settlement. General Stiller has been shot and there’s a dead girl in the bath who…is not his wife.’
‘Frau Stiller hasn’t been a girl for a long time, Herr Major.’
‘The girl has been shot too…in the back of the neck.’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘I came to see General Stiller.’
‘Yes, and that’s quite normal at five in the morning, is it?’
‘We frequently meet before office hours to discuss internal business.’
‘I see,’ he said, as if that was one of the world’s most unlikely events. ‘I’ll be with you in an hour. Stay there, Major. Do not touch anything.’
Schneider put the phone down, sniffed the gun in his other hand. It smelled of oil, as if it had not been fired. He checked the magazine. Full. He tossed the gun back on to the bedclothes.
He inspected the ashtray in the middle of the table in the living room. Three cigar butts, one badly chewed, six cigarettes, three with brown filter, three with white, all six with lipstick, different colours. Two women. Three men. The women not drinking. He went to the kitchen. Two champagne saucers by the sink, both with lipstick, an empty plate with the faint smell of fish. One bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the bin. The girls came out for a talk, see how they were going to play it.
He opened the fridge. Three tins of Beluga caviar, Russian. Two bottles of Veuve Clicquot and one of Krug. One bottle of lemon vodka encrusted with ice in the freezer.
He went back into the spare bedroom where he found the girl’s clothes, his brain just beginning to motor now. He swept a hand under the bed, lifted the covers. The handbag. He emptied it on to the stained bottom sheet. One passport. Russian, in the name of Olga Shumilov, her blonde hair perfect in the photo. He put everything back, threw the bag under the covers, suddenly remembered the original business and all the money in his coat.
He took the blocks of money out of the lining, stuffed them in the pockets and went to the car. He fitted the three packets under the front passenger seat and went back up the snow-covered path. Heavy flakes landed on his shoulders, he felt their delicate touch on his forehead.
He found a clean ashtray in the kitchen, began some serious smoking and light-headed thinking. The money, minus his twenty thousand Deutschmark tip and sixty thousand for Russian expenses, was to be split evenly between Stiller and Yakubovsky, who was waiting for him in the KGB compound in Karlshorst. The way the scam worked, as far as he’d been able to discover, was that Yakubovsky procured the diamonds, which arrived by diplomatic bag from Moscow. Stiller had set up a number of buyers, including whoever was the owner of the Frau Schenk Sex Kino chain. Not Frau Schenk, was all he knew. Schneider himself was just one of the sad old leg men who worked as an aide to Stiller and his Stasi friends, and who were occasionally on the end of a hard-currency bonus.
He was trying to work out why he thought this was a KGB job, even though the Russians had the tendency to shoot the other way round, through the face taking away the back of the head. He also couldn’t quite square the girl being there. It was an inside job, of that he was sure, and deep inside, because admission to the Wandlitz Forest Settlement was very selective. Only the East German leader, Secretary General Walter Ulbricht, and his central committee members, plus top armed forces men and highups in the Stasi, or MfS as they saw themselves.
Stiller was not short of friends or enemies. There would be little sobbing over his grave. Certainly the handkerchief of the chief of the MfS, General Mielke, would not find its way up to his eyes at the funeral. General Mielke only tolerated Stiller because of the man’s special relationship with Ulbricht, and his status as Ulbricht’s head of personal security. Mielke and Stiller had the same interests, venality and power, which were competitive rather than complementary. Even so, it was unlikely that Mielke would take him out of the game, and certainly not so ostentatiously, unless…back to the Russians. Perhaps the Russians had styled the execution and left one of their operatives as a decoy. This was pure paranoid thinking, of the type that could only possibly raise its head in East Berlin and it didn’t come close to answering the fundamental question, which was: What had Stiller done wrong? He really had to speak to Yakubovsky about this, and preferably this morning.
Schneider’s mind spiralled in and out from the incident without getting any closer to its meaning. All he knew, as a pair of headlights swept the front of the house, was that a death of this magnitude was going to see large forces manoeuvring for position and creating massive problems for him.
He let Rieff into the dark hall. The general, a heavy, dark man of about the same height as Schneider, stamped the snow off his boots. It was already ankle-deep out there. Rieff stared at the sole-patterned clods of snow on the mat and stripped off his brown gloves and peaked cap, preparing himself. He brought a strong smell of hair tonic with him.
‘Do I know you, Major?’ he asked, jutting his jaw, crushing his greying eyebrows together.
‘I think you would have remembered,’ said Schneider, clicking the hall light on.
‘Ah, yes, your face,’ he said, peering or wincing at him. ‘How did that happen?’
‘Laboratory accident, sir…in Tomsk.’
‘I remember you now. Somebody told me about your face. Sorry…but you’re not the only Schneider. Where’s General Stiller?’
Schneider led the way, stepped back at the door. Rieff swore at the stink, slapped his thigh with his gloves.
‘The girl?’
‘Bathroom on your right, sir.’
‘Probably shot her first,’ he said, his voice echoing from the tiled room.
‘General Stiller’s gun is on the floor over there, sir. It hasn’t been fired.’
‘I thought I told you not to touch anything.’
‘I came across it before I called you, sir.’
Rieff came back into the living room.
‘Who’s the girl?’
Schneider faltered.
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Major. I didn’t really expect you to stand about with your thumb up your arse until I arrived.’
‘Olga Shumilov.’
‘Good,’ said Rieff, slapping his hand with his gloves. ‘And what were you and General Stiller up to?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘Simple question. What were you up to? And don’t give me any shit about work. The general’s work habits were minimal.’
‘That’s all I can do, sir. That’s all we discussed. They were minimal because he was an excellent delegator, sir.’
‘Goodness me, Major,’ said Rieff, sarcastically. ‘Well, I’ll let you think about that one and you can answer it in your own time.’
‘I don’t have to think about it, sir.’
‘What would I find if I searched your car, Major?’
‘A spare tyre and a jack, sir.’
‘And this villa? What would we find in here? A piece of rolled-up Russian art? An icon? A nice little triptych? A handful of diamonds?’
Schneider was grateful for his burnt face, the mask of impenetrable plasticated skin which had no expression or feeling, other than it itched when he sweated. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets.
‘Perhaps General Rieff has privileged knowledge about General Stiller’s affairs…’
‘I have extensive knowledge about his privileged affairs, Major,’ said Rieff. ‘What was in the fridge?’
‘Material suitable for the refreshment and entertainment of Russian officers, sir.’
‘Material?’ snorted Rieff. ‘He taught you well, Major.’
‘He’s my senior officer, sir. I’m stunned to see him in this state.’
‘I’m surprised there weren’t two girls in the bath…and a boy in the bed.’
This was true. There’d been some scenes. Schneider had heard and kept himself away from them.
‘I hope I did the right thing in calling you, sir. It had occurred to me that this was sufficiently serious for General Mielke to be contacted.’
‘I’m taking care of this, Major,’ said Rieff severely. ‘Where are you going now? I’ll want to talk to you.’
‘Back to the office, sir. I might be lucky to get there in time in this weather.’
‘You don’t fool me, Major,’ said Rieff brutally. ‘I’ve seen men who’ve met flame-throwers.’
Schneider, unsettled by the observation, didn’t bother trying to correct him. He gave his salute and left.
His Citroën crawled through the heavy snow, back through the dark villages buried in silence. Snow-piled cars with two black fans scraped from their windscreens crumpled towards him, a swirl of moths in their headlights. He couldn’t see out of the back window. Inside he felt muffled, suffocated. He opened the window a crack and breathed in icy air. This was a disaster, a complicated disaster. Rieff was going to brick his balls. Clack! He was no longer protected by the thick, rusting hulk of Stiller’s corruption and that was the end of finance for his extra-curricular activities. A thousand marks for the American colonel’s passport, that left nineteen thousand marks and then what? Unless. He could give Yakubovsky his half and keep Stiller’s. Tempting, but insanely dangerous. His face didn’t need the addition of a black, torn hole like Stiller’s. He resealed the window, lit a capitalist cigarette.
The thump of the windscreen wipers lulled him. The warm, smoke-filled cocoon of the car was a comfort. He came into the centre of town. The snow-filled vacant lots, the crumbling buildings re-mortared white, the shells of deserted houses with their steps and window ledges stacked thick with pristine snow, all looked nearly presentable. How democratic snow was. Even the Wall, that raised scar across the face of the city, could look friendly in the snow. Icing on the cake. The death strip tucked up under a blanket. The watchtowers Christmassy. He slewed the car into the Karl Marx Allee and joined the serious morning traffic of farting lines of two-stroke Trabants and Wartburgs, their black exhausts blasting and splattering the snow, already sludging up to pavement level. He eased through Friedrichshain into Lichtenberg and took a left before the Magdelenstrasse U-bahn into Ruschestrasse. He took one of the privileged parking spots outside the massive grey block of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. The only sign that this was the Stasi HQ was the number of Volkspolizei outside and the aerials and masts on the roof. The building itself was called the Oscar Ziethon Krankenhaus Polyklinik, which Schneider thought made it the largest mental institution in the world. Thirty-eight buildings, three thousand offices and more than thirty thousand people working in them. It was a town in a single block, a monument to paranoia.
He went through the steel doors, flashing salutes left and right, and went straight up to his office. He stripped off his coat and gloves, refused his secretary’s grey coffee and called Yakubovsky on the internal phone. They agreed to meet on the HVA floor, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklä – rung, Main Administration Reconnaissance or Foreign Espionage and Counter-espionage Service.
Yakubovsky’s eyebrows came before him. Schneider wondered why a man prepared to shave his face clean every morning couldn’t see the necessity of hacking back the brambles of his eyebrows. They saw each other and the Russian nodded and turned his grey back, which was wide enough to be tarmacked rather than clothed. Yakubovsky puffed on a thick white cigarette, from which he was constantly spitting flakes of black shag from his tongue. They began a slow walk. Yakubovsky’s fat, slack as a brown bear’s, shuddered under his uniform. Schneider delivered his news. Yakubovsky smoked, spat, turned his mouth down.
‘The money?’ he asked.
‘All of it?’
Tempted again, but no.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Come to Karlshorst, five o’clock.’
‘General Rieff is in charge of the investigation.’
‘Don’t worry about Rieff.’
Yakubovsky sped away suddenly, leaving Schneider jostled in the corridor.
At 4.15 p.m. it was dark. The snow had stopped. Schneider cleared his car windows front and back. He drove home first to see if Rieff was having him tailed. He parked up and stripped his DM19,500 from one of the packages. He drove a slow circuit of the blocks of flats before coming back on to the Karl Marx Allee and heading east down the Frankfurter Allee. He turned right into Friedrichsfelde, past the white expanse of the Tierpark, under the S-bahn bridge and then left into Köpenicker Allee. The KGB headquarters was in the old St Antonius Hospital building on Neuwiederstrasse. His ID card was taken into the guardhouse. A call was made.
He parked where he was told, pulled the packets of money out from under the seat. An orderly came out to meet him and took him up to the third floor, through an office he knew already and into a living room beyond, which he didn’t. Yakubovsky sat upright in a straightbacked leather chair, next to a fire burning in the grate. He was smoking the last inch or so of a cigar. Schneider thought about the ashtray in Stiller’s villa. It made him nervous but he told himself that anybody could smoke cigars.
The orderly appeared, carrying a tray on which there was a steel bucket of ice with a bottle of vodka stuck in it. Alongside was a plate of pickled herring and black bread, two shot glasses and a fresh pack of cigarettes with Cyrillic script over them. The orderly backed out, as if Yakubovsky was a man to keep an eye on.
The Russian crushed out his cigar. The end was soggy and chewed up. Schneider twitched under his coat. He handed over the packets of money.
‘Don’t let me keep you from your guests,’ said Schneider. ‘I’ve already taken my twenty thousand marks. There’s two hundred and eighty thousand left.’
‘You’re my guest,’ he said. ‘And you’d better take some more. There’s not going to be anything for some time.’
He fished out a sheaf of notes from the lucky dip, which Schneider slipped into his pocket. Thick. Fifty thousand marks at least.
‘Take off your coat. We need vodka.’
They tossed off three shots quickly, the vodka freezing cold, viscous and lemony. Schneider tried to loosen his neck off, his shirt collar chafing his scarred flesh. Yakubovsky threw pickled herring down his throat as if he was a performing elephant seal.
‘Stiller is dead,’ he said, which was no progress at all, but baldly stated the facts and filled the muffled silence in the room. The fire cracked off a spark up the chimney. More vodka. The good side of Schneider’s face felt smacked. Black bread revolved in Yakubovsky’s mouth like tights in a washing machine.
‘Do you know who did it, sir?’ asked Schneider, his voice sounding like someone else’s in the room. ‘And what was the Shumilov girl doing there? She was one of your agents, wasn’t she?’
Yakubovsky tore open the pack of cigarettes like a savage and got one going.
‘This is a delicate situation,’ he said. ‘A political situation.’
‘Forgive me for being forward, sir, but you were there last night, weren’t you?’ said Schneider, the vodka steaming him open. ‘Who else was there? That should throw…’
‘I can understand your nervousness, Major. You probably feel exposed…out in the open,’ said Yakubovsky from under his dark and threatening eyebrows. ‘I was there, with General Mielke, if that satisfies your curiosity. We left at midnight. Stiller was shot about five hours later.’
‘And the girls?’
‘The girls arrived as we were leaving. They came with Horst Jäger.’
‘The Olympic javelin thrower? What the hell was he doing there?’
‘I understand he has quite a javelin in his trousers,’ said Yakubovsky, eyebrows off the leash. ‘And he doesn’t mind throwing it about…or who’s watching.’
‘So who was the other girl?’
‘Not one of ours, a girlfriend of Jäger’s.’
‘So when did Jäger and his girlfriend leave?’
‘Four o’clock, according to the guardhouse.’
‘Why was Olga Shumilov killed?’
‘Because she happened to be there, I suspect.’
‘And why was she there?’
‘Probably to make sure that Stiller didn’t go home,’ said Yakubovsky. ‘And under the circumstances, Major, I don’t think you need to know the answers to any more of your questions. I’ve already told you that this is a political, not an intelligence, matter and that should indicate that any greater knowledge could bring its own pressures. Have some herring.’
They drank some more, finished the food. The Russian signalled the end of the evening by holding up Schneider’s coat for him to get into. As he shrugged it up on to his shoulders Yakubovsky spoke quietly into his ear.
‘We won’t be seeing each other again on the same footing as before, you understand. Should anything happen to you, I will not be able to help. It would be inadvisable to use my name.’
The half-bottle of vodka prevented Schneider’s fear from reaching the ends of his nerves which meant that the hair on the back of his neck stayed smooth as a seal’s.
‘Can I ask how strong General Rieff is in this matter, sir?’
‘He is very well positioned. Look at his career before he became Head of Special Investigations.’
‘And is he well-intentioned towards either of us?’
‘No, Herr Major, he is not,’ said Yakubovsky. ‘He is of the ascetic school. A hair-shirt man.’
Outside an icy wind had got up and in the short walk to the car it effectively flayed his coat off him. He sat at the steering wheel, tearful, panting with the alcohol in his system. He stuck gloved thumbs into his eyes to stem the tears and force some concentration into his brain.
Yakubovsky was telling him that this was a KGB job and that the hidden agenda was political and, hard as it was to believe, bigger than himself. A Moscow directive, but aimed at what? And leaving Rieff so powerful.
Nothing came to him.
He started the car, drove back to the main gate and out on to Neuwiederstrasse. The sloppy suspension and his drunkenness threw him about the cockpit as if he was on a rollicking fair ride. He stopped on Köpenickerstrasse, pulled into the kerb near one of the still visible storm drains. He was gritting his teeth and hammering the steering wheel with rage and frustration. He took out the wad of Deutschmarks, felt their newness, sniffed their ink. New money. Real money. But too much of it if you were in the unexpected position he’d just found himself. He added his own tip to the bundle of notes, opened the door and threw the lot down the storm drain. Now he would even have a problem getting that passport back.
He drove home, parked up in the garage underneath the apartment block. He locked the car door, staggered to the stairs and walked into the sudden flare from a pair of headlights. Two men approached from the darkness behind, their shoes gritty against the cement.
‘Major Kurt Schneider?’
‘Yes,’ he said, licking his lips.
‘We’d like you to come with us for a…little word.’