The Company of Strangers (39 page)

‘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.

‘It’s in the car.’

‘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.