Günther Dorch wasn’t answering the phone, so when Bo Enberg said he was at home and would be happy to see Sara, she headed off to Gävle instead. Her satnav said it would take one hour and forty-seven minutes, but Sara did it in an hour and a half. It was stupid, but she wasn’t thinking about the time it took. She just didn’t want to be overtaken, which meant she had to put her foot down.
Enberg lived at 2 Lilla Brunnsgatan in an incredibly charming and picturesque little wooden house in a neighbourhood filled with similar cottages. Apparently this was what had survived the great fire of 1869 in the town. Perhaps that was why there was an air of calm and assurance in the area, a feeling that no misfortunes could befall you here.
Sara knocked on the door even though there was a doorbell. Knocking felt more fitting, somehow, more dignified. Enberg opened up almost immediately. He was a strikingly short man, with the kind of exaggerated upright posture that many short men had, completely bald, clean-shaven with small, rimless glasses. Sara couldn’t stop herself from noticing a lot of hair in his ears. He wore a pale blue shirt neatly tucked into a pair of beige chinos, and a belt with a large buckle at the waist. On his feet were a pair of clogs.
‘Sara Nowak. Hello.’
‘Bo Enberg. Come in.’
Enberg led her into the kitchen of the small house where they sat down at the table. A woman in her seventies with purple hair, wearing heavy mascara, set a pot of coffee down on the table.
‘My wife, Annica,’ said Enberg. The woman nodded, turned and left them alone.
‘So how can I be of assistance to the police?’ said Bo Enberg, smiling.
‘Tell me about your relationship with Jürgen Stiller.’
‘Who?’
‘Jürgen Stiller. A priest in Torpa in Östergötland. A Stasi agent code named Koch. The same priest who provided you with the birth certificate that made you Bo Enberg.’
Enberg’s gaze wandered.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said at last.
‘Last week you transferred a hundred thousand kronor to Jürgen Stiller, as did several other people he was blackmailing. And on Friday morning he was murdered – perhaps by one of you.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘Stiller? Yes. So you knew him?’
‘An old acquaintance. I had considered asking him to marry me and Annica, but then . . . it didn’t work out that way.’
‘Why did you give him a hundred grand?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘We’ve verified the payment.’
‘It was a donation. To his church. I think church buildings are both beautiful and culturally significant,’ said Enberg, puffing out his chest.
‘So you donated one hundred thousand kronor to a church that’s more than five hundred kilometres away?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many other churches have you given money to?’ Sara took a sip of her coffee and looked at him calmly.
‘Er . . . Just that one so far. But the church in Oslättfors is a strong candidate.’
‘Come on! Stiller was blackmailing you because he knew your new identities. That you were actually Gerlach, Kremp, Rau and Werner. And that you did things you’d rather didn’t become known.’
‘That’s not true. You’ve got completely the wrong idea about the course of events.’
‘Does your wife know your true identity?’
Bo Enberg stared at Sara, taken by surprise.
‘Surely you’re not going to say anything?’
‘Don’t know. Tell me more about yourself. I don’t hear an accent, but surely you’re all Germans – at least, you men.’
‘Yes – I thought it was idiotic to change my name and get a Swedish identity but speak with a German accent. So I practised hard. I even consulted a speech therapist to get my pronunciation right. And I’ve lived here for almost fifty years now.’
‘Who was who amongst you? Axt, Messer and Faust?’
‘I was Messer. I don’t actually know the others. It was supposed to be secret so that we couldn’t snitch on anyone else.’
‘What did you do?’
Enberg looked at her uncomprehendingly.
‘That was worth a hundred grand to keep quiet about,’ Sara clarified.
‘Nothing! But being associated with Baader-Meinhof and Siegfried Hausner and Holger Meins isn’t desirable today. It’s the victors who write history, and it was the other side that won. In their eyes, we were terrorists – a danger to society.’
‘But you robbed banks and carried out other operations too.’
‘Yes, it was mad, to be honest. You completely lost perspective. We really did discuss kidnapping ministers, triggering an armed coup, awakening the working masses.’ Enberg snorted. ‘I guess we all knew that we didn’t have the working classes with us. But if we had said that aloud there would have been a trial.’
Sara looked at him quizzically. He chuckled to himself and shook his head.
‘You know we had trials, right? Internally. To try our orthodoxy. “Criticism and self-criticism”, it was called. You had to confess your petty bourgeois inclinations and revisionist tendencies and criticise those of others. Several of us reported ourselves for deviations and demanded punishment.’
‘And you were involved in all of this?’
‘Yes. You end up a little . . . it can be hard to slow down.’
‘What were Kremp and Rau like?’
‘Kremp was the ideologue. Rau was the steam engine, the one who drove things forward. Violent. He wanted to provoke the police state into showing its true face. But I don’t know, maybe he was just projecting his own inner chaos onto society. He was pretty paranoid too – never appeared in pictures. But he was the one who maintained contact with our friends and got us our money.’
‘Which friends? East Germany? The Stasi?’ said Sara. The retired academic nodded. ‘Are you proud of those friends? Of what they did to their citizens?’
Enberg was silent for a long time, then he removed his glasses and buried his face in his hands.
‘We did so many stupid things . . . It – it was . . . awful. Inconceivable. It was as if we were hypnotised. Stefan droned on and Otto agitated. Anyone who hesitated in the slightest was told off, threatened. They said they would get rid of anyone who betrayed them. We . . . A couple of times they carried out mock executions.’
‘Of someone in the group?’
‘Yes. For the sake of discipline.’
‘Of you?’
Enberg looked at Sara for a long time before answering.
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘They put a noose around my neck and put me on a stool. They even filmed me when I broke down and forced me to watch the tape over and over.’
He put a hand to his throat, as if he could still feel the noose.
‘Was Marita involved?’
‘Oh yes. She added fuel to the fire, played us off against each other.’
‘And Stiller issued you all with new identities?’
‘At first it was merely out of practical necessity, to ensure we weren’t deported. But later on it felt pretty great, as if no one could get to you. Having a secret life was like a superpower. Especially when the other Germans were deported after the embassy drama and we flew under the radar. But the new identities needed refining, so we got jobs, started studying, made new friends, perhaps found love, and eventually the new identities took over. I must say that I never think of myself as Hans Gerlach any longer. I am Bo Enberg. My political engagement gave me the chance to create the person I wanted to be. A better person.’
‘After you helped to kidnap and murder innocent people.’
Before Sara set off home, she Googled Dorch again and realised that he hadn’t worked for Saab building cars – he had worked for the armaments manufacturing part. Rather different – especially as the individual in question had been part of a terrorist cell.
She continued trying to reach Dorch while driving and as she was passing Uppsala she got an answer. The two towers of the cathedral across the plain appeared on the horizon at the very moment he picked up.
‘Dorch.’
‘Sara Nowak. I called you a while back in connection with your past as an East German refugee. And you told me that your family had been punished after a spy had passed on information about you.’
‘Yes, it was awful. But I don’t want to discuss it.’
Dorch hadn’t managed to lose his accent.
‘It’s just that someone you know has been murdered, and there’s cause to believe that the murderer comes from your former circles.’
‘Who?’ said Dorch, surprised.
‘Jürgen Stiller.’
‘Don’t know him.’
‘Yet you transferred one hundred thousand kronor to him.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘The bank.’
Everyone was driving so slowly today, Sara thought to herself. Instead of constantly changing lanes, she decided to stay in the outside lane.
‘If I transferred money to anyone, then that’s my private business,’ said Dorch. ‘Who knows, perhaps I made a mistake. Wrote the wrong numbers.’
‘Who were you? Axt or Faust?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
His reply came a little too quickly, as if he had decided to deny everything without any further thought. And there was only one explanation for that: he knew exactly what Sara was talking about. Now she knew how dogs who had caught a scent must feel. The focus, the drive. She had to continue.
‘Bo Enberg told me everything,’ she said. ‘Well, Hans Gerlach, as you knew him. About everything your little terrorist cell did.’
‘I’ve never been in a terrorist cell. I don’t even know what one is.’
‘You managed to deceive both the authorities and your employer. Saab would never have hired you if they had known the truth. But an anti-communist who fled oppression was fine. Did you spy on your employer?’
‘I’ve got nothing to do with espionage or terrorism, and I’m going to hang up now.’
‘Your real name is Rau or Kremp. If you don’t confess, I can simply ask the German police for photos of you.’
Bloody hell. She was doing one hundred and sixty kilometres an hour. She had become completely absorbed by the call. Sara slowed down while Dorch switched gears.
‘But where is this all coming from?’ he said with irritation in his voice. ‘Listen to me, if you’ve found old papers depicting me as a former terrorist supported by the DDR, then you should remember that disinformation was the biggest feature of the Cold War. The DDR spread false information about everyone who managed to escape the dictatorship. So use some judgement and consider the fact that spreading rumours like that can ruin people’s lives.’
‘Were you Axt or Faust?’
‘I was nothing.’
‘Your life may be in danger. The person who killed Stiller may be after the rest of you too.’
‘No one is after me. Goodbye.’
Dorch hung up.