George parked near the embankment, not far from the looming beehive of the National Theatre, and walked along to the Charles Bridge. He could have driven over the next bridge and parked on the left bank, but it was a bright cool evening and he wanted to take some time to reflect. Further up, the river made the rushing sound of a waterfall as it tumbled over the weir in long streams of feathery white. Below him the water lapped and sucked against the worn stone pilings. Halfway across George stopped and leant on the railing. From here he could see the back of the building where he was due to meet Liebl. George knew the café and it was far enough off the beaten track to be a quiet retreat. Tourists going to and from the castle stayed on the bridge, and there were few residents living in the immediate vicinity. Trade would be generally restricted to a small group of regulars, who, early in the evening, would still be working or on their way home. This, George presumed, was the reason Liebl had selected the place.
The phone had rung at nine in the morning, and, somehow, George hadn’t been surprised to hear the familiar voice wheezing through the receiver. These messages had once been so much a part of his life that it seemed normal, as if the silence of the previous years had merely been a longer pause than usual. He was driving into Prague, Liebl had said, in order to see George, and he would say no more, except to name the time and place. That too, was as usual.
George had been certain, from the moment he picked up the phone, that what Liebl was after had something to do with the pictures, but none of the scenarios he outlined in his mind seemed satisfactory. Oddly enough, that period of his life, recent as it was, already seemed over and done with, ancient history. This was mostly because of the debacle in Hamburg. Afterwards they had decided that the whole enterprise was too dangerous to continue. For George the event had been earth-shattering, a trauma.
‘I understand,’ Valentin said. ‘But there was nothing to be done. It was them or us.’
To George’s surprise, both of his partners treated his distress with a kind of respect, almost as if they were humouring the nervousness of a raw recruit unexpectedly precipitated into a gun battle. They had disposed of the bodies without telling him where, but although Valentin maintained that they would never be found, the men’s faces floated through his dreams from time to time. Somehow, putting a stop to the treadmill of thieving and smuggling seemed like a kind of expiation which gave him relief. His partners had agreed. Victor had enough money to begin winding up his motor business in Russia and complete the process of getting out. In any case, as he said, if he could keep the sums he had to pay out for protection he’d be a rich man, even in the West. The rest of the hoard could stay where it was. Valentin merely shrugged, his fertile mind already occupied with the prospects of the new and legitimate enterprise George had proposed. George had insisted on getting out of Germany and basing themselves in Prague, the nearest convenient location, because he assumed that, sooner or later, the Georgians’ accomplices would work out what had happened and come looking. Nevertheless, after more than a year during which there had been no sign of trouble, he had begun to forget about the trail which must have connected the beheading in Smichov with the objects he had sold in Berlin. But it had always been there at the back of his mind. Liebl’s reappearance was an unpleasant shock, but one which he had somehow been expecting, like a rotting corpse bobbing up from the depths of a lake.
As usual, Valentin seemed unaffected by the dread which had begun to churn inside George from the moment he heard Liebl’s voice. In the end, he said coolly, all they could do was to hear what the man had to say. They had decided that George would go alone to the meeting. After all there was no point in letting Liebl know any more than he needed to about them. Valentin would come and find him afterwards.
He looked at his watch. He was now several minutes late, as he had intended, and he walked quickly on to the first flight of stairs off the bridge, which led on to Na Kampé. This was a short street lined with hotels and bars, ending in a postage-stamp park bordering the river. A long black limousine was parked immediately outside the door of the café. It was empty except for the driver, one tattooed arm crooked through the open window, blond hair cut close to his pink scalp. George guessed that this must be Liebl’s vehicle, and he let his gaze rest on the driver’s face, waiting for some sign of interest or recognition, but the man’s only reaction was to give him an impassive glance before turning his head away.
The L-shaped interior of the café was a few steps down from street level, and the lighting gave it the impression of being dappled in shadow. It was too early for a crowd and Liebl was sitting by himself at one of the rectangular tables in the short base of the L. Another shaven-headed blond wearing a T-shirt, and built like a wrestler, was sitting a couple of tables away, between Liebl and the door. Ignoring him, George threaded his way between the tables and sat down on the bench opposite Liebl. The surface in front of the fat man was already covered in food and drink. The menu here contained the staple items to be found all over the country, pork, duck, beef, spinach, beetroot, cabbage, and dumplings made of potatoes or flour, the sort of bland, solid food which could see a farmer through the day. George had been reared on the German equivalent of these dishes and now he found the local cuisine boring and unappetising, but Liebl was chomping his way through the potato dumplings like someone in the middle of a banquet. He lifted his head and grunted an acknowledgement when George sat down, then raised his finger in a signal. The waiter, a skinny boy wearing an apron, arrived almost immediately, but George waved the menu away and told him to bring vodka. Liebl gave a muffled chuckle.
‘To drink without eating is unhealthy,’ he said.
George didn’t bother to reply.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
Liebl smiled. There was a ring of grease round his mouth and a little trickle of brown sauce on his chin. George looked away, only now remembering what a messy eater he had been. Around his plate there was a scattering of crumbled bread, a little pile of sticky bones was growing on a napkin in front of him, and there were splashes of sauce and beer on the surface of the table.
‘I want to save your life,’ Liebl announced. ‘You’re dealing with savages. Don’t be fooled by their suits and ties. These people would enjoy cutting your head off.’
He knew about the killing in Smichov, George thought. This was what he had suspected all along. Liebl turning up out of the blue would have been just too much of a coincidence.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ George said.
Liebl lifted his glass and sucked down a half-litre of beer in one long fluent swallow. He lowered it, rapped it on the table to call the waiter, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He pointed to the empty glass with his stubby finger, belched delicately, then turned his attention to George.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said.
George listened, his face impassive, but with a sinking feeling in his stomach, accompanied by a hot flush of rage at his own stupidity. What a fool he’d been to go to this man. The story Liebl told him sounded credible, but knowing him of old, George was certain that it was a concoction, made up of the truth, mingled with lies which it would be difficult or impossible to detect, and all of it would be intended to move him in one direction or the other.
A short while ago, Liebl said, an old friend had come to see him in Berlin. This was Zviad Abuladze, formerly a KGB officer, who also happened to be a Georgian. He was now a powerful and well connected businessman with interests in the security industry and links to several large corporations.
George knew exactly what that meant. The former KGB man, like many of his intelligence colleagues, would be a gang leader on a large scale, the ruthless and violent instrument of warring entrepreneurs. Over the last decade, as the large corporations jostled to repossess the resources of the Union, few of them could have survived or flourished without the services of the gangsters.
His friend, Liebl continued, had heard a disturbing rumour. Various pictures, and other valuable objects, looted from private houses, museums and churches in Georgia, were up for sale in the West. Such things had happened before and there was a continual stream of objects marching westwards from Russia and the former republics, but these appeared to come from the same source. Ownership was a difficult matter, and most of the pictures couldn’t easily be authenticated in any case, but it was clear where they had come from. A number of other pictures and works of art had disappeared at the same time and were still unaccounted for. The Georgians guessed that the pictures they had seen on the market were only part of a hoard of loot. This was the cultural heritage of the fledgling state, they believed, and it could ill afford to lose its cultural artefacts, symbols of an ancient identity. This was the real issue. In normal circumstances these people had much more serious business to pursue than a few lost pictures, but the theft was the equivalent of stealing their souls, an extension of what the Russians had done to them for so many years.
‘You can imagine,’ Liebl said, ‘what a terrible dilemma I faced.’
He pushed his plate aside and stared seriously at George.
The man had come to him because they were old acquaintances, and they were, so to speak, in the same business. His request for information was also, in some sense, a commission to locate the hoard that he was certain existed, hidden somewhere in the territory of the former Union. By chance, Liebl continued, he was aware that a minor masterpiece had come into his friend Gunther’s hands. So what was he to tell Abuladze?
‘What did you tell him?’ George asked.
‘We made a deal. I offered to recover the goods. At a price, of course.’ He paused, swigged at his beer, put it down and wiped his mouth. ‘I’ll make the same deal with you. Put the stuff in my hands and we’ll share the profits. I’m talking about millions of marks.’
George shrugged.
‘I had a few pictures. I sold them to Gunther. That’s it. I can’t help you. I wish I could.’
Liebl chuckled appreciatively.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Think it over. You should talk about it with your Russian friends. But there is the problem of time. People talk and these rumours get around. I am not the only one now trying to find these things. The bees are searching for the honey. I hear they sent you a little message.’
Still smiling, he drew his finger across his throat. George stared back, focusing on the moist slits of Liebl’s eyes.
‘Was that you?’
Liebl shook his head.
‘You know I don’t work like that. But what you should know now is that the vultures are circling. You don’t have much time.’
Valentin was waiting on the bridge. He fell into step beside George, and they walked across, meandering through the crowd of tourists, like two friends out for a stroll. Ahead of them the red sun, bisected by the cathedral spires, had begun to cast long shadows over the river.
‘He knows everything,’ George said.
Being with Valentin after such a meeting restored his equilibrium. When it came to these matters his cousin had a core of confidence which always surprised and sometimes delighted George. For instance, after the night of the Romanian’s beheading, he had dealt with the police with an impressive calm, showing them round the factory, explaining the processes and offering them theories about the murder. They had been suspicious, of course, but both George and Valentin had several witnesses to the fact that they were miles away at the time of the killing. In any case, the authorities had recently come across several cases of the same kind of violence, all stemming from the criminal activities of the gangs that were pouring in from the East, and the dead man was a Romanian, a fact which made anything possible. On the other hand, it was no part of their business to harass respectable foreign investors unnecessarily, especially those who, like George and Valentin, had begun by establishing friendly relations with the local police, offering generous rates for part-time security work, and contributing gifts of spare parts and tyres when the occasion arose. By the end of the day the crime had gone down as one more unexplained event in the chain of mayhem inspired by the mafia from the East. All this was due to Valentin’s self assurance, and it was clear that he wasn’t yet prepared to take Liebl as seriously as George did.
‘Maybe he’s bluffing.’
George shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. What I think is that Liebl knows what we’ve got and his story about making a deal with Abuladze is exactly true. So I think in Hamburg it was Liebl who sent the Georgians, maybe Abuladze gave him a team to work with. If a gang had sent them the rest of their people would have come looking for them, and maybe they’d have been all over us for the last year. I think Liebl worked out what happened and wrote them off. Since then he’s been waiting. Somehow he kept the Georgians off our backs, or he didn’t tell them where and who we were. When his men didn’t come back he understood that we wouldn’t be easy to take, and he didn’t want us killed before he got his hands on the treasure. So he’s been playing cat and mouse with us. But maybe he’s tired of waiting or his bosses have told him to end the game.’
Liebl had denied that the break-in and the decapitation of the gypsy mechanic had been his work, but George was certain now that it was all part of a strategy designed to get the result he wanted.
‘Liebl moves like a chess player,’ he told Valentin. ‘While you’re worrying about protecting your queen he’ll take a few pawns and then you’ll suddenly find yourself fighting to avoid checkmate, but by then it will be too late.’
This was more or less what had happened when he had been Liebl’s reluctant protégé. George had worked with him for a year, and, although he had become accustomed to the security chief’s waddling incursions into his routine and his interminable questions, he had felt a distinct sensation of relief when Liebl announced that he was being transferred to the university. His mood changed, however, when he heard that he was also being transferred at the same time.
‘The university?’ George had asked incredulously. ‘I’m not a professor.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Liebl chuckled. ‘They have canteens there, too.’
‘Why me?’ George asked him. ‘You already have people there.’
He was, in any case, struggling with a feeling of surprise. Liebl’s job at the factory had been concerned with black market infractions, petty thievery and hooliganism. At the university there would be issues of ideology, public relations and espionage. Liebl must have pulled some strings to get the job. Even odder was the fact that they were allowing him to take a petty informant whose only contribution had been to relay a few items of routine gossip.
Liebl grinned at him.
‘You’re more important than you know,’ he said. ‘The university is full of comrades from fraternal socialist countries. We have to keep an eye on them, make sure that they stay fraternal. Vietnamese, Mozambicans, Angolans, Cubans, they’re all here. But it’s not like the old days. We bring them here, give them scholarships, educate them, and their response is distrust. They stay together, read banned books, write to their newspapers complaining about their treatment here, and now they even have meetings from which whites are excluded. We have to protect them, but we can’t do that if we don’t know what’s happening.’ He paused, as if to let the significance of what he was saying sink in. ‘It should be easy for a man of your colour to speak with them, and, of course, you’re one of us.’
From that moment George saw that there would be no point in arguing, but he made the attempt anyway.
‘I can’t do that,’ he told Liebl. ‘I want to stay here. I’m sure they’ll keep me here if I tell them I want to stay.’
‘If you do,’ Liebl replied immediately, ‘we’ll bring you up in front of the conflict commission. You’ll be on your way to some hole in the countryside in a couple of days. If you’re lucky. They might want to arrest you.’ The conflict commission decided the scale of punishments a worker could suffer for petty theft, as well as resolving disputes, but in particularly difficult cases they could call in the police, and if the security officials recommended it, they certainly would. Liebl paused for the threat to sink in. ‘You don’t want to be arrested.’
At this point George gave up his objections. As it turned out, the task wasn’t difficult. Once he appeared on the campus African and Asian students came to him, their curiosity piqued by his colour and his air of being at home in the city. They invited him to parties, asked for his help with translating and studying German texts, and harassed him for assistance in meeting and chatting with the women. George’s English and French improved rapidly, and in a short while he was part of the social circle in which the students moved. To his surprise what he had to tell Liebl was not remarkably different from the sort of tittle tattle to which he had been accustomed at the factory. Some students brought in dope, which they smoked amongst themselves. Others smuggled in books and magazines, which soon disappeared. Most of them brought items which pleased the women they pursued; makeup, underwear, sweaters and skirts, scarves and cheap jewellery. The politics they discussed were intricate arguments about what was happening in their home countries, but they avoided talking about internal German matters. This was largely because they had very little interest in the personalities and events which featured in the environment around them. The incidents which caused a series of meetings and heated discussions were to do with the insults and beatings which were occurring with an increasing regularity when students strayed into the wrong areas of the city, or got into disputes with drunken youths.
George reported all this to Liebl without any sense that his information offered a serious risk to anyone. Liebl seemed pleased, and George noted that with his promotion his manner had become more dignified, echoing that of the academics among whom he was moving. At formal ceremonies and major guest lectures he stood at the back of the hall, flanked by plainclothes men he directed here and there with the air of a man engaged in important affairs of state.
It was several months before Liebl showed his true colours. By then George had persuaded himself that the security man was merely a fragment of the bureaucracy with which he had grown up, annoying, perhaps, and ruthless on occasion, but meaning no harm except to the fools and villains who asked for it.
As a result, when he walked into the café near the Friedrichstrasse station, on the evening of their first conversation about Silke, he felt no apprehension about what was to come.
‘There is someone I want you to meet,’ Liebl said.
‘Who is it?’ George asked. He looked around automatically. ‘Are they coming here?’
‘No. No. Nothing like that. I’m talking about Professor Elsner. Silke Elsner.’
George had heard the name, of course. She was one of the youngish, high-profile professors teaching in the departments of language and literature. Only about forty years old, but she was a recognised expert on Brecht who had acted as a consultant to the Berliner Ensemble. This had given her a platform of official approval which, it was said, she had used to tread a dangerously radical path. She had written famously about Günter Grass, walking a tightrope between admiration for his writing and condemnation of his anti-Communism. Her essays on authors published in the West, like Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf, were eagerly read and discussed, and she had even championed the satirist Volker Braun. The authorities had drawn a line at her interest in Solzhenitsyn, and in the last few years she had been forbidden permission to attend conferences abroad, even in countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. At the same time her reputation protected her in the university, and her work continued to be published without interference.
‘Professor Elsner?’ George was genuinely startled. He had nothing in common with the woman and he couldn’t imagine what they would have to say to each other. ‘Why?’
Liebl gestured in resignation.
‘She left her husband a little while ago. Now we have no one close to her. We need to know as much as we can about what she’s doing.’ He leant forward. ‘The truth is that the state puts a high value on intellectuals like her right now. We don’t want to lose her.’
That meant her husband had been Stasi’s conduit to Elsner’s private thoughts.
‘What can I do with a woman like that? Why should she talk to me?’
Liebl grinned, his face creasing in folds of moist fat.
‘Don’t worry. All we want is for you to be part of her circle. We’ll tell you what to say.’
All George had to do was to tell Elsner that he wanted her help. He was to follow this by saying that he was a fervent admirer of her work, and that he would love nothing more than to enter the university, but his race and his rebellious attitude had probably made the local authorities regard him as politically unreliable. Refusing to give up, he had worked his way into the job in the canteen in the hope of proving himself and becoming a student in her department.
‘These intellectuals,’ Liebl said, ‘imagine that they are closer to the people than the people’s own representatives. When she hears this from a black man who has served his time in the army and works in the canteens she’ll embrace you with open arms.’
George understood now that the story was meant to trigger Elsner’s empathy with rebellious underdogs and excite her guilt about the country’s behaviour to racial minorities. As the icing on the cake she would get the opportunity to become the patron of a genuine proletarian outcast who would be her intellectual disciple and protégé.
‘No liberal intellectual could want more,’ Liebl said. ‘She’ll probably write a book about you.’
‘And you’ll ban it,’ George told him.
He doubted, in any case, that Elsner would be so easy to deceive.
‘Don’t look so stubborn,’ Liebl’s tone was light, but he was watching George narrowly. ‘No one will harm her, and if we know she’s not going to do anything unpatriotic we can leave her free to do whatever work she wants.’
Later on, in the midst of his depression about Silke and what he’d done to her, George knew that he had never believed Liebl’s assurances, and looking back, it was hard to explain, even to himself, why he had tamely agreed to do what had been asked of him. It was as if he had walked in his sleep into a tunnel from which there was no way back. All he could do was to go forward, hoping that one day he would see a light.
Once he had agreed, however, George felt a rising excitement about meeting and getting close to the famous intellectual. The story that Liebl had given him wasn’t altogether fanciful, because he’d always had a sneaking desire to be, like the father Katya had told him about, a man who knew the world, and could win the respect of distinguished people. He had no intention of doing anything to hurt the professor, and it was possible that meeting her might open new doors for him. He prepared himself carefully, reading a couple of her essays and some of Brecht’s plays. All this took a week, but he imagined himself dying with embarrassment if she exposed him with a few easy questions. In the meantime he made the acquaintance of Gisela, a skinny and intense woman from Meissen, who studied in Elsner’s department. He had actually seen the professor walking past him with a couple of colleagues, and if he’d been so minded he could have gone up and spoken to her, but by now he was anxious to get it right, and seeing her, he averted his eyes and hurried past. He had confessed his interest in Elsner and his desire to meet her to Gisela, and within a fortnight she invited him to a private reading of one of Volker Braun’s satires. The book had been published, but the print run was so small that hardly anyone at the university had got hold of it, so this was an eagerly awaited event. ‘Not that I’m a supporter of his,’ Gisela said, ‘but everyone’s talking about it.’
Afterwards there was a party at which the more senior members of the staff were present. Gisela pointed out some of the well-known personalities to George, and soon enough she led him to where Professor Elsner was standing, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
She was a tall woman, only a few centimetres shorter than George, with a muscular, wiry body and a sweep of black hair which fell over her forehead. She shook his hand firmly, smiled broadly, then turned her head as if about to return to the conversation which Gisela had interrupted, but George stood his ground and hurriedly asked if he might speak with her for one moment. She frowned, then smiled again, a hint of resignation in her expression.
Within the next week he had visited her twice in her office. When he told her about his training as a boxer her eyes lit up, and she invited him to join her in jogging before breakfast. She too had been an athlete, and she tried to maintain her training, merely to keep fit, but recently she had lost the partner with whom she jogged. In the following weeks they ran together, and later on, walked for hours round the park in Pankow where she lived. George had begun talking to her about his imaginary studies, but in a short time he was telling her about his life and the experiences he had gone through. He was interested in English, he told her, at which she smiled knowingly. English studies had become the opium of the progressive young, she told him, even in the East. He almost pointed out that he was only about ten years younger, but he stopped himself in time, some instinct telling him that it was her sense of his youthfulness which drew her to him. Instead, he replied that his reasons were personal, and began telling her about his father. At this moment they were sitting on a bench beside an avenue in the Schlosspark, from where it was just possible to see the crucifixes which towered over the church nearby. As she listened her body seemed to grow softer, her weight shifting slightly towards him along the bench, and she put her hand on his arm, her forehead creased in an expression of concern.
The week after that, she travelled to Leipzig where she was due to lecture on Brecht. She was away for nearly a week, and George started to wonder whether she would have found a new protégé or whether, immersed in her routine, she would think that she had given him enough of her time. But the opposite was true. On her return she sent him a note asking him to dinner at her apartment in Pankow, and that night they made love for the first time.
During the act Silke was soft and passionate, clinging to him with every ounce of her strength and raking his back and shoulders with her fingernails so badly that he felt the sting for days as the cuts healed. Afterwards she sat naked on the side of the bed and talked about herself. She was a Berliner, born in the aftermath of the war. Her father had died soon after. Strangely, at this point, she laughed. Like many of that generation, she said, there was a little mystery about the dates of her birth and her father’s death. It wasn’t the same, she continued, but she understood how George must feel about his divided parentage. She crossed her arms over her breasts and looked down at him, her features shadowed and enigmatic in the twilight bedroom. Her husband, she told him, had been another professor, a distinguished sociologist, who had received permission to attend a conference in Austria six months ago. He had never returned, and she had heard nothing. In any case, as a senior academic she was officially classified as Geheimnisträger, someone who knew state secrets, and it was forbidden to communicate with a defector, but it was common knowledge that he was now on the staff of the Sorbonne. He had always been fascinated by Paris, but his defection made her life more difficult than it had been. Everything she did might be under scrutiny. Perhaps, she said, George should be careful about being in her company, because it might create more problems for him.
‘I didn’t mean this to happen,’ she said. George curled his fingers round the soft flesh behind her knee and pulled her towards him, but she resisted for a moment, finishing her sentence. ‘But now it has it would be wise to be discreet and silent. Do you understand?’
She stared into his eyes, pressing her hand down on his chest to keep him pinned down, until he nodded his head in acquiescence.
‘Of course.’
Suddenly inspiration struck him. He threw the sheet aside and holding his penis, he waggled it at her. ‘Schultüte!’ he called out. In his mind was the present he had received like all little children in the republic received on their first day at school, a cone filled with sweets and tiny presents, and hearing the word, Silke gasped with laughter, then giggling uncontrollably threw herself on him.
After a couple of months George had more or less forgotten his anxiety about Liebl, along with his guilt about deceiving Silke. She knew, he reasoned, that she would be under surveillance and she was safe enough, because as far as he could tell she was not engaged in subversive activities of any sort. For instance, when, urged by Liebl, he showed her a copy of the banned magazine Sputnik, she merely looked at it and handed it back to him, with the comment that it was hardly literature. There was nothing to report, he told Liebl, secretly amused at the thought of so much official effort being expended for so little reason.
In later years, he sometimes woke in the night, sweating, groaning and berating himself for having been so naïve.
‘I admire her,’ he told Liebl recklessly. ‘She believes in the ideals of the republic, and she’s more brilliant than anyone I ever met.’
This was true. In the time he had known Silke he felt that he had learnt more than he ever had during his entire life. She talked about politics and culture in a way that he’d never heard, not grumbling about the shops or the size of her apartment. Instead she talked about time, and beauty and ugliness, and the work of her friends who were artists and writers. The only woman to whom he had ever listened with comparable attention was his mother, and sometimes, lying in bed with Silke, he thought he was feeling something of the sweet warmth he had known as a small child.
‘I’m sure you’re right about her brilliance,’ Liebl said dryly, ‘but I don’t know anything about ideals.’
The end when it came was even worse for being unexpected. George turned up at Silke’s apartment as he often did when he knew that she wasn’t otherwise engaged. She opened the door, but instead of smiling or embracing him, she led the way, stern-faced, into the room where she usually sat at her desk, writing or reading in the pool of light cast by the lamp in front of her.
Sometimes he used to wake and find the bed empty, and looking in through the doorway he would see her profile, set and calm as she turned the pages of the book she was holding. Hearing him behind her, she would turn and smile.
On this occasion, however, the books and papers which usually littered her desk lay scattered on the floor, as if she had swept them away in one violent motion. In their place were several rows of photographs, laid out under the light as if she had been examining them carefully one by one. At first, looking at the shapes, George couldn’t work out what they represented, then he realised that they were pictures of himself and Silke. Some of them were fuzzy and blurred, others sharp and clear, the difference, he assumed, was in the amount of light that was available. A few had been taken out of doors, and although they had never risked any intimate gestures in public, the camera had caught them touching or gazing into each other’s eyes with a warmth that spoke volumes. The bulk of the photos had been taken indoors, in Silke’s bedroom by a hidden camera, he supposed. Some had been taken at his small apartment, the furniture around them clearly recognisable. All of them were harshly outlined, the naked flesh giving the postures in which they were entwined an obscenity which startled him. In that moment he was, above all, surprised to see how it looked, Silke sprawled in front of him, his semen spurting on her skin, his buttocks poised, her mouth open in what looked like a scream. The photographs were dirty, ugly, with none of the charm or beauty of the experiences they depicted. All the camera registered was what they had done.
George, without knowing what he was saying, began to stammer something.
‘Don’t bother to lie,’ Silke said sharply. ‘Your friends told me. This was why they sent you. You’ve done your job.’ She took a rapid intake of ragged breath. ‘I don’t blame you. Better men have done worse. But you don’t know what you’ve done.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ George told her. His brain felt numb, and he couldn’t look at her for fear of seeing the revulsion he knew would be in her eyes.
‘I don’t care,’ she replied. ‘I just wanted you to see these. Now go. Never speak to me again. Go.’
George’s head roared, swelling with pain as if it was about to burst. He went straight to Liebl’s office at the university. He had never been there before, neither of them wanting to be seen together. But now George climbed the stairs, rendered oblivious to consequence by the grief and anger tearing at his insides. It was already late in the evening and the place of the receptionist had been taken by two uniformed guards lolling in the outer office. George ignored them, and without knocking, opened the door of Liebl’s sanctum. On his way up the stairs he hadn’t known what he would do. In his mind was an image of himself punching Liebl to the ground and kicking his soft flesh until it gave way under his feet, but when he entered and saw the man sitting behind the desk, he hesitated.
‘I’ve been expecting you,’ Liebl said. He waved away the guard who had followed George in. ‘Sit down.’
George ignored the invitation. Instead he leant on the desk, thrusting his face out towards Liebl.
‘Why?’ he asked. He couldn’t trust himself to say more because he could feel his voice rising, and with another word, he knew, he would begin to shout, and then perhaps he would throw himself across the space between them.
‘Sit down and I’ll tell you,’ Liebl said. ‘I didn’t make this choice. Understand that. I followed orders, just like you.’
‘Don’t say that to me,’ George told him.
‘Okay. Sit down and listen to me.’
George sat down, but he still leant forward on the desk, his eyes fixed on Liebl as if his limbs were locked into position, incapable of moving any further.
‘She was about to leave. Her plan was to go through Yugoslavia. Those swine send people like her on to the West without thinking twice. From there she was going to join the professor in Paris. She already had a contract to publish three of her books in the West, translated into English and French and any other language that would bring a profit. We knew about this a long time ago.’ He paused. ‘Politics. We couldn’t arrest her, because our bosses wanted her to stay here. They don’t like it when the heroes of our culture skip. No one cares if some mechanic from Saxony goes over the Wall, but Professor Elsner.’ He spread his hands. ‘Arrest her and the Wessis would have bought her out. We’d have asked for a couple of million deutschmarks and they’d have paid it. She knew also that if Yugoslavia failed she had that option. Certain people didn’t want that scandal to happen.’
Everyone knew that the government sold political prisoners for a price – 50,000 deutschmarks for a teacher, 200,000 for a doctor. Elsner would have fetched ten times the amount, but that would have been a clear defeat for Stasi public relations.
Liebl leant back in his chair, watching George as if gauging the effect of his words.
‘I don’t believe you!’ George said furiously. ‘Lies are your business.’
Liebl picked up a thin cardboard file lying in front of him and handed it to George. There were two documents in it. They were photocopies, but the print was clear and George had no difficulty making them out. The first was a contract from a publisher with an address in Frankfurt. He recognised the signature immediately. The second, a single sheet of paper, was unsigned, but reading it, he knew who had written the letter. This was Silke, writing to her lover, the professor who had defected. In the letter she promised undying love and talked of her eagerness to rejoin him. From the first sentence George recognised her turn of phrase and even some of the words she used. They were the same endearments she had used with him.
‘You wrote this yourself,’ George said, throwing it back across the desk.
‘Where do you think those papers came from?’ Liebl asked him seriously. ‘Do you imagine she left them lying around in her apartment?’
George guessed it all now. Once Liebl’s bosses had got wind of the contract they had used the photographs to win over Silke’s professor.
‘We needed something,’ Liebl said, ‘that would open his mouth, and we needed an argument to persuade her. She will stay. She wasn’t totally corrupted.’
The defector, George assumed, had rejected her after seeing the photographs. Remembering the impression they had made on him he didn’t find that hard to imagine. He couldn’t guess what methods Liebl’s colleagues had used in persuading Silke to stay, but he supposed that they had used the threat of wider exposure and playing on her sense of shame and guilt.
‘Don’t blame us alone,’ Liebl continued. ‘She lied to you. One morning you would have woken up and found your training partner gone without a word. In the West she would have been drinking champagne and driving around in furs without one thought of you.’
George didn’t believe that. He wondered whether she had been trying to warn him on that first night, but the idea increased his misery.
‘I’m telling you this, because I want you to remember that we’re walking the same road, working for socialism. There was no betrayal. It was she who planned to betray us to the gang of cosmopolitan intellectuals.’
That was the end of it, but it was months before George could bring himself to reply to Liebl’s enquiries. The fat man didn’t bother to issue any threats or promises. Later on, George understood that Liebl knew he could afford to be patient, and like a fat spider he simply waited for his victim’s rage to cool down. George caught glimpses of Elsner from time to time, but he never tried to speak to her. Over the next year he acquired a rapidly changing string of girlfriends, moving from Heike to Grete to Elke to Marianne to Birgit to Regine and Renate, before finally settling on Radka. In that time he had succeeded in expelling from his mind the image of Silke’s face, set and grim, her light green eyes piercing him like arrows of contempt. He hadn’t even heard her name for almost all that time when he bumped into Gisela in the courtyard of the Gethsemanekirche on the night the Wall came down.
‘Have you heard about Elsner?’ she asked. Her voice was innocent of intent.
‘What about her?’
‘She drowned. She went swimming in Rügen, and disappeared. They thought maybe she’d got away to Sweden, then they found her body.’
He barely had time to register his shock before a surge of the crowd carried her away. The next thing he knew he was marching along the Schönhauser Allee sandwiched in between Radka and Renate. The next time he saw Liebl, waddling along the Friedrichstrasse, a bulging briefcase in his hand, his appearance that of a man in flight, he told him without greeting or preamble that he ought to kill him.
Liebl had merely smiled his fat man’s smile.
‘You won’t do that,’ he said, before turning away.
It had been twelve years ago, but George felt the rage rising in him again as he thought about the way that Liebl had smiled the same smile while he sat watching him spraying food over the table. By the time he finished telling Valentin as much of the story as he could bear to repeat, the sun had disappeared. Behind them the river seemed to be chuckling softly.
‘Fuck him,’ Valentin said. ‘We make no deals with this pig.’
‘So what do we do now? Sooner or later they’ll find it. Or they’ll get to us somehow.’
Valentin clasped his hands together. He gave a grunt of impatience. George recognised his mood. Valentin hated the stasis of indecision. Stuck at a crossroads he would always choose, rather than sit around trying to figure out the puzzle.
‘First thing,’ he said, ‘if they’re looking for Victor’s treasure it’s only a matter of time before they find it.’
George shrugged.
‘That’s not our problem. We put all that behind us.’
Valentin looked at him sharply.
‘This is different.’ He used an American expression with a touch of pride: ‘We’re in a new ball game. They’ll get to us sooner or later, but I don’t care about that. We’re Victor’s partners, we can’t leave him to fight this battle alone.’
Seeing the glitter in Valentin’s eyes, George remembered his cousin talking about the feelings he shared with Victor about their experience as soldiers. Perhaps he should have listened more carefully.
‘What can we do?’
Valentin grinned.
‘Plenty. We can help Victor move the treasure and hide it somewhere else in another country. In Russia too many people know of it. I’ll speak with Victor tonight. Then we do it. Afterwards we think about what to do with these animals. If they come, we’ll be ready.’