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.
Schneider cared for her. He’d tried to push himself beyond just caring but it required taking her with him, and she was an unwilling traveller. In fact, she didn’t like physical travel either. She’d hated leaving Moscow to come to this halved, tormented city. She was envious of his trips back there, even if they were for shudderingly dull conferences and hair-raising debriefs with KGB seniors. He brought back caviar, which he thought she might consider killing for, yes, that was a passion – fish eggs, roe. He should have taken some from Stiller’s fridge but that would have given Rieff another stick to beat him with. He suddenly felt exhausted, almost too tired to undress. He wanted to just lie down, scratch a cover over himself, some leaves perhaps, hibernate, dissolve for a season and wake up in spring.
It was late. Schneider’s body craved more sleep. The covers weighed a hundred kilos. Leaving the warm sheets was like struggling out of the arms of a woman, but not Elena. She wasn’t the type. She was already up, giving the girls their breakfast. They never made love in the mornings. He couldn’t bear her looking over his shoulder to make sure the girls weren’t at the door. She couldn’t bear…all that mess, as she put it.
In his office twenty-four hours of paper had built up on his desk. Twenty-four hours of endless reports on what this foreigner had drunk in which bar, who that diplomat had lunched with at what restaurant, what that businessman had said to which girl and what they had done together…sometimes with photographs. Nothing surprised him, except that any work was done by these people at all. They were either drinking, eating or fucking. He leafed through, reading the summaries only, his eyelids heavy. At 11.00 a.m. he was summoned to a meeting in the HVA Dept XX, which handled dissidents and was overseen by the KGB General Yakubovsky. He put a call through to the general, hoping for a corridor chat, but he wasn’t in.
The meeting was opposite a colonel, who informed him that another deal had been concluded. The sale of two East German politicals had been agreed and there was to be a handover on the Gleinicke Bridge on Sunday at midnight. Schneider would be the driver. This surprised him. It meant that his under-investigation status was not yet common knowledge. Rieff had put him back into the sea.
After work he passed by the Volkspark Friedrichshain and picked up from his dead-letter drop. The note was short. A British intelligence agent posing as a British Steel delegate, codenamed Rudolph, would meet him in the usual place, a deserted Mietskasern in Knaackestrasse in the Prenzlauer Berg district at 10.00 p.m.
Schneider performed his family duties and went out into the cold night to catch a bus to the Alexanderplatz and then a U-bahn to Dimitroffstrasse. From there it was a short walk to the Mietskasern. He passed under the arches and crossed the courtyards of the massive boarded-up complex and went up the staircase of the Dreiterhof to the fourth floor. He went to a room above the arch and waited. He was half an hour early. He was always early.
He took the full-face ski hat out of his pocket and fitted it on to his head. He didn’t pull it down because the wool itched against his scarred flesh. Twenty-five minutes of refrigerated silence passed and he saw the British SIS agent arrive. He rolled down the ski mask. The footsteps came up to the top floor and approached. He stopped them with his introduction and received the right password back. He clicked on a torch for the SIS man, who had always been annoyed by his codename and especially at this time of year. They went to a table, stood over it and Schneider produced cigarettes which they lit up. Rudolph looked very young for this kind of business, not even thirty. He had the feeling of an undergraduate about him – dissolute, uncaring, loose – a very bad combination for a spy, thought Schneider.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Rudolph, staring fixedly at the ski mask.
‘Apart from the ones outlined in my note, you mean?’
‘You asked about Cleopatra. How’s that relevant?’
‘That’s what I want to know,’ said Schneider. ‘I’ve got somebody standing on my neck. I said I’d find out about Cleopatra for him.’
‘My funding comes from extra-curricular work I do for General Stiller…’
‘Ulbricht’s head of personal security…the one who got shot yesterday with a girl.’
‘Olga Shumilov…KGB. I didn’t know what to make of it. Still don’t. I had to call General Rieff.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Well, the last time I bumped into him was years ago and he was running the HVA Dept X, which is Disinformation and Active Measures. I don’t know where he went from there,’ said Schneider, ‘but now he’s operating under the umbrella of the Ninth Main Directorate, which is the Stasi’s investigative arm.’
‘That sounds a very Kafkaesque department.’
‘General Rieff is putting me through the wringer. So far only my fingers have gone through. A little bit of pain to see if there is anything more to come out. I don’t want him to feed me all the way through…’
Rudolph sniggered.
‘Sorry…’ he said. ‘Just an image…that’s all.’
‘You should try it. A quick twelve hours in the U-boat in Hohenschönhausen would further your education.’
‘Carry on…sorry.’
‘He mentioned Cleopatra, asked me who she was. In return for staying off my back, I said I’d get him some information.’
‘Well, now…Cleopatra,’ said Rudolph, preparing himself, ‘you might find this surreal.’
‘It’s all surreal,’ said Schneider.
‘This, even more so. Cleopatra is an American idea. She recruits senior KGB officers. She pays them for intelligence. That intelligence is then circulated around the SIS, CIA and the BND. Between the British, American and German intelligence agencies we try and work out from the disinformation the KGB seniors supply and the real information we’re getting from our reliable agents…a picture.’
‘My God.’
‘It’s what it’s come to. Nobody knows what’s real any more, so we examine and qualify untruth to get closer to the truth.’
‘I don’t know whether I can get Rieff to believe that. He’s old school, you know.’
‘They’re all old school on this side of the curtain. That’s why everything stays the same. You’ve got flat-earthers in charge.’
‘Thanks for that, Rudolph,’ said Schneider. ‘What did Stiller have to do with Cleopatra?’
‘His name was put forward for recruitment by General Yakubovsky. Stiller was the only German on the list.’
‘And the only one to get shot,’ said Schneider, and they lapsed into silence.
‘Do you want London’s theory?’ asked Rudolph.
‘Might as well, seeing as we’re here.’
‘Yakubovsky wanted to get rid of Stiller.’
‘Doesn’t make sense. Yakubovsky’s making money out of Stiller’s contacts in the West.’
‘What if he’s been told by Moscow that Stiller’s got to go? All his commercial concerns go out the window. Oleg’s job is on the line.’
‘Why would Moscow want to get rid of Stiller?’
‘You said he was Secretary General Walter Ulbricht’s personal security man.’
‘You said that.’
‘Wouldn’t that suggest they’re trying to weaken Ulbricht?’ he said. ‘They take Stiller out of the game. He’s corrupt and deserves to go. If Ulbricht cries foul, Moscow shows him he was on the take, not just for money but intelligence as well. Ulbricht has to swallow his bitter little pill.’
‘Brezhnev thinks he’s too full of himself. So full that he thinks he doesn’t have to pay attention to Moscow any more. He’s getting to be a loose cannon…and then there’s all that stuff with Willi Brandt.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Ulbricht hates him. You remember Erfurt, March last year. Willi got a big reception. Crowds cheering him outside his hotel window. Biggest crowds ever in East Germany for a pol. And if you don’t know Ulbricht, we do. A CIA man said to me the other day: “That guy Walt’s got a personality cult following…of one.”’
‘We all want to be loved…even communists.’
‘Well, it’s made Ulbricht a difficult customer to handle. Brezhnev doesn’t want the West riled up, what with the Chinese and their H-bomb in the east. And if he wants to keep the whole communist edifice in place he has to make it look as if he’s moving, when in fact he’s still on the same old treadmill. Hence détente. Given Ulbricht’s antipathy to Brandt, Moscow doesn’t think his contribution to any negotiations is going to be positive. Ergo they want to give Walter his cards and find someone who will toe the line and be less of a maverick.’
‘That makes sense, Rudolph,’ said Schneider, surprised that the boy had it in him.
‘Well, there’s as much truth potential in it as anything else, I suppose.’
‘Another thing…’ said Schneider. ‘The money. I need money.’
‘Don’t we all,’ said Rudolph, still dazzled by the brilliance of his analysis.
‘To get Varlamov out, Rudolph.’
‘Oh, yes, sorry, I’d forgotten about him.’
‘I’ll need help too. The kind of help that’s not going to compromise me.’
‘OK. First of all, the money. London have assured me that they’re going to deliver your money with a one hundred per cent guarantee of anonymity. They also said you can spill it about Cleopatra. She’s a closed operation. I think that should keep you snug with General Rieff, by the sound of it.’
‘Or it might just increase his already very suspicious mind,’ said Schneider. ‘He accused me of being a double today.’
‘The way the money is going to come to you, I have been assured, will make you cast iron with Rieff, with Mielke, with Yakubovsky, and with Lord Leonid Brezhnev himself, too.’