Authors: Michael E. Rose
“Three people?” Delaney said. “That wasn't our deal. Impossible. I'm a simple reporter from Montreal and I can't afford to take three people to Zur letzten Instanz.”
“You most certainly can. And you shall. The prices are modest. And she is very, very beautiful,”
Ackermann said. “Young, as well. Far too young for someone like me.”
“What's she doing with someone like you, Gunter?”
“It is of course my reputation as a sexual athlete.”
“Of course.”
Delaney knew he would have to pace his drinking carefully that afternoon and evening if he was to get any work done at all. There was much to discuss with Ackermann but, as always, such discussion could not take place without vast quantities of alcohol. And as a young woman was now to join them for dinner, most of the work would have to be done before her arrival.
No meeting with Ackermann could begin without a detailed joint recollection of their experience together in the sand dunes of Mazar i Sharif. Delaney ordered two more Krombachers, and the reminiscences began. Ackermann always asked Delaney to repeat the parts about any of his, Ackermann's, particularly heroic and selfless efforts to aid and protect journalistic colleagues in general and Delaney in particular from U.S. friendly fire and the Taliban.
“And tell me Francis once again how I lent you my precious satellite phone,” Ackermann said. “At great personal cost and putting my own career with
Die Welt
in grave danger. Satellite telephone charges being what they are.”
“You were a hero, Gunter,” Delaney said. “Even the
Time
magazine guy didn't do as much.”
“Precisely. Exactly so,” Ackermann said. He shook Delaney's hand gravely.
“Under fire,” Ackermann said. “You and me together.”
“Exactly,” Delaney said.
“And now you want Ackermann's help again. As always. You cannot live without Ackermann, is this not factual?”
“I can't live without you, Gunter. Impossible.”
“You are it seems to me onto another very nice little story, Francis my friend.”
“I would say.”
“It has, as we reporter types so much like to say, all of the elements, am I correct Francis?”
“It does.”
“But what you do with it, that is the question, as always. Am I correct in this, Francis?”
“Correct. As always.”
“Well, I can tell you that anything to do with Klaus Heinrich, anything that has not been reported one million times before, is of course front-page news, surely. Here in Germany and quite possibly around the world.” “Quite possibly.”
“If it has not been reported before.”
“I don't think this has been, Gunter. Really I don't. Heinrich not dying in Bonn in 2001 but in Phuket, Thailand in 2004? I don't see that anywhere.”
“Nor do I, my friend. Nor do I.”
“So,” Delaney said. “The question is why. Why fake the death?”
“It's a very Cold War sort of question, in my view,” Ackermann said.
“Meaning? We're talking about 2001 or 2004.
Not 1961 or '64.”
“You have to remember, Francis, what it was like after the Wall came down. It was the most amazing thing; they were the most amazing times imaginable. Suddenly, or it seemed so sudden even though we all in retrospect could claim to have seen it coming, a regime that controlled every aspect of every person's life, simply collapsed. Suddenly a wall that people regularly died trying to cross was broken open and a whole country seemed to pour over into the West, and with them came all of their stories and tragedies. And all of the Stasi stories, all the stuff about surveillance and informants and spies and counter spies and moles and tapped telephones and people thrown in jail just for saying the wrong thing on the street. Suddenly all of that came flooding over the Wall into West Germany like a tsunami in 1989 and into 1990 and beyond that into reunification. We are all in a way still trying to digest all of those stories and make them a part of Germany, not just of East Germany. Do you see what I mean, Francis? So there are very probably still bits and pieces left to, how to say in English, integrate. You seem to have picked up one of those pieces, with this Heinrich story. Possibly.” “In Thailand.”
“Why not? Do these stories always have to end in Berlin or Moscow or Washington?”
“All right, but I've thought this through a hundred times and I still don't understand it. Heinrich was what you've called a super spy. He was a big success story for the West. He worked for years undercover in East Berlin and he sent back a lot of good information. OK. Then the Wall comes down and his cover is blown . . .”
“No, Francis, not really blown. It's just that he didn't need his cover anymore. The game was over. No cover needed.”
“Are you sure? I'm thinking the Stasi guys would have been very, very pissed off with Heinrich after 1989. They would have wanted to take him out.”
“Why? Too late. And Stasi, essentially, dissolved along with the Wall.”
“What about the true believers? Revenge. People want revenge long after big things have happened, Gunter.”
“Maybe. Maybe. But the West, on this side, they would have been aware of that. They would have given Heinrich good security along with his nice little retirement job and his cabin in the hills outside Bonn. And in any case, Francis, nobody murdered Heinrich. He apparently died in a house fire. In his pajamas, probably.”
“No he didn't. He died in the tsunami in Thailand.”
“What I'm saying is, nobody tried to murder him in Germany. I don't think so. Either he died in the fire, which we now see quite possibly didn't happen at all, or he died in the big wave in Thailand last Christmas. Even the Stasi true believers can't manufacture a tsunami wave, Francis. They were good at putting listening devices inside transistor radios, but not natural disasters.”
They sat silently together for a moment, drinking beer. Ackermann lit another cigarette.
“So a faked death,” Delaney said eventually.
“Quite possibly.”
“What else could it be?”
“That is not the essential question for me, Francis. The question for me in this story is the following: who benefits from such a faked death?”
“Exactly.”
“Heinrich? Not so much. He has his little life arranged in the new Germany. People come to interview him occasionally. He gets his picture taken. He probably gets laid any time he wants, like a rock star. Why fake your death and move to smelly Thailand.”
“So not his idea.”
“Thank you.”
“Whose idea?”
“Ah, now you want me to do everything. For only one litre of somewhat inferior-quality single malt whisky. But then, in a crucial election year for Germany, with the government in trouble, the chief political editor of
Die Welt
has nothing but time to while away the hours helping old friends after a long day's work.”
They drank beer. Ackermann smoked. In the far back corner of the bar, a group of six drunken British boys noisily sang football songs and clinked glasses. The bartender and a couple of burly bar patrons glared at them and muttered darkly, but the visitors took no notice whatsoever.
“Those fucking no-frills airlines are bringing hundreds of such scoundrels into my city every day, Francis,” Ackermann said. “It is a tragedy. I will soon have nowhere cheap and quiet left to drink.”
They drank, pondering this small tragedy together.
“So whose idea, Gunter?” Delaney said eventually.
“You are relentless, my friend. The night is young. It is not even night time yet, officially.”
“Stasi fakes the Heinrich death, kidnaps him, to interrogate him?”
“Brings him to Thailand, sets him up nicely there and lets him live happily ever after? No. And what would Stasi want to know from him anyway? Even if Stasi was still operating at that point in history, which it was not.”
“Any number of things.”
“Such as?”
“Names of other agents, maybe? Other moles working in the East?”
“So what? They get some names, who cares? The Cold War is over.”
“Revenge.”
“We've tried that theory.”
“Money?”
“What money?”
“Bank accounts? Secret stashes of money Heinrich knows about?”
“This is not a spy novel, Francis. We do not do secret bank accounts anymore. The Swiss have been co-opted by the money-laundering investigators. There is a war on terror going on, apparently.”
“What were the theories at the time, then, Gunter?”
“Oh, like you, some people thought Stasi, revenge, assassination, spy novel stuff. But our man died in a fire. It is there in the official, detailed, stamped, notarized and framed autopsy report, everything the careful Germans are famous for. I was on the news desk when the story was going on in 2001. I knew it well. Everybody covered it. Press conferences every day for weeks, it seemed. Case closed.”
“Did no one even think at the time Stasi could have started the fire?”
“Yes, of course. But the fire marshals said accident. And Stasi was
kaput
. I keep telling you this.”
“I thought Stasi were good at that sort of thing. Clever little murders, for example.”
“Before. Before. But yes, OK, Francis. OK. Let's imagine Stasi did start the fire. Then we come around again to the fact that the man died in Thailand, not Germany.”
“Nothing at all seemed strange at the time?”
“No. Eventually not. But we were all more interested in the 9/11 attacks anyway at that point. Heinrich, or Stasi, or whoever you are suspicious of, chose the wrong time to light his little stove if he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Those planes smashing into the World Trade Center were competing with him for the front page. It was tough to get any German story on the front page of the paper in those weeks. I remember. Even when the Bundeskriminalamt chief resigned it was still a struggle in that period.” “The BKA chief?”
“Oh, that was another local story people were excited about when al-Qaeda was acting up. The president of the federal police resigned suddenly a couple of weeks after the 9/11 unpleasantness, and after the Heinrich fire thing, and even then it was a battle to get anyone to take notice. Ulrich Mueller. The BKA's big man. Nice career. Suddenly
kaput
.
Good story.”
“Why did he resign?” Delaney asked.
“Oh, at first some of the more paranoid among us thought it might have to do with the Heinrich fire, maybe. Before everyone ruled out assassination, we thought he had to resign maybe because of a lapse in security at Heinrich's house. Or something. But it was not that. Trust me. I was on the news desk at the time.”
“So what happened with Mueller?”
“Never clear. We think maybe he just ran afoul of the Interior Minister, or something like this. He fell from grace. Police politics. There was talk about moving BKA headquarters from Weisbaden to Berlin, for example, at that point. The rank and file BKA officers over there didn't like that at all; there was some very bad press. Maybe it was that. Maybe Mueller just got tired of being a policeman. His wife committed suicide, of course.” “Gunter, for God's sake.”
“What? So what? Wives commit suicide all the time. Some of mine certainly threatened to do so over the years. What's this got to do with Heinrich anyway?”
“The head of the BKA police suddenly resigns at the same time as Heinrich dies or is supposed to have died. The man's wife commits suicide.”
“What's the connection?” Ackermann said.
“Exactly,” Delaney said. “What is the connection?”
“No connection.”
“How do you know?”
“I was on the news desk at the time.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Your psychotherapy is not going well at all, Francis. You are aggressive, paranoid. It is sad.”
“Humour me.”
“There was a big car accident on the
autobahn
around then, too, Francis. Trucks and cars, dozens of vehicles involved, horrible, many killed. A famous German road accident. Perhaps this had something to do with Heinrich's house fire. We must investigate this together. Maybe the BKA chief was driving the lead car; maybe it was all his fault. In his anger and confusion he sets fire to Heinrich's cabin. This is good. Because, let's see, Mueller's wife is Heinrich's secret lover. That's it. Yes. So she kills herself. Mueller suddenly resigns after an illustrious police career. That could be it. So sad. There is the connection we need.”
They agreed to disagree for the moment. And Delaney knew he had better get something to eat before he drank anymore. He knew it was time to contemplate and analyze and imagine a little, before absorbing any further information and coming to any conclusions as to ways forward. Ackermann was already looking a little the worse for wear, and Delaney wanted him to be able to function for some time yet.